If the exhibition was open to all nations, the results were confidently expected to demonstrate British superiority. The global dominance that Britain had achieved not by rapine or conquest but by virtue and hard work \u2013 steam-engines and cotton-spinning machines were held up by the novelist Thackeray as \u201ctrophies of her bloodless wars\u201d.<\/p>\n The country in which the Crystal Palace was built in 1851 was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland \u2013 as it had been since 1801, when the Union with Ireland was inaugurated, and would be until the partition of Ireland after the First World War. The great social and economic changes of the Industrial Revolution had bonded Wales, Scotland and England more firmly together \u2013 south Wales, lowland Scotland and the north of England, in particular, had all become more urban and industrial in character, more liberal in politics, and more nonconformist in religion.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Nationalism was not a potent force in any of these areas. But Ireland had been an exception in all these respects even earlier in the century, and by 1851 had become even more so. Hit by the holocaust of the Irish famine in the late 1840s, its population would dwindle over the rest of the century as emigrants poured out of the country. Between 1841 and 1901 Britain\u2019s population grew from 26.7\u202fmillion to 41.5 million; Ireland\u2019s dropped from 8.2 million to 4.5 million.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n While living standards were rising in the second half of the 19th century for most of the population, these rises were distributed unequally \u2013 probably more unequally than at any other point in British history. The top half of one per cent of the population accounted for 25 per cent of the nation\u2019s income. In comparison, the same share is earned by the top 10 per cent today. Wealth was distributed still more unequally. There was a class of super-rich, known as the \u201cUpper Ten Thousand\u201d, comprised mainly of landowners and bankers. Three-quarters of the population would have been employed in manual working-class occupations, most of the rest as shopkeepers and clerks.\u00a0<\/p>\n Opportunities for social mobility were severely limited and living conditions for most remained cramped and unhealthy. As a result, it was not only the Irish who emigrated \u2013 emigration from all parts of the British Isles escalated steeply over this half-century, especially to the United States, Canada and Australia.\u00a0<\/p>\n However, Britain was very far from a nation in decline in this period. Its share of world manufacturing output held up remarkably well, at just under a fifth of the total in 1900, practically where it had been in 1860. The advent of universal, free and compulsory education in the 1870s and 1880s meant that literacy became nearly total by the end of the century.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite extensions of the franchise in 1867 and 1884, however, not even all adult males were entitled to vote, and some adult males had more votes than others. The United Kingdom in this period was in many respects \u201cfree\u201d but still unequal.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> That complacent picture doesn\u2019t capture the sheer exuberant messiness of the Crystal Palace, or the full range of excitements through which it prefigures the modern life that we live today. Though responsibility for the Great Exhibition was vested in a Royal Commission crammed with the great and the good, and led by the Prince Consort, a free press kept up a loud and rowdy running commentary, and every segment of a diverse and disputatious public opinion \u2013 including the large majority who were formally excluded from political representation \u2013 offered up its own views. When after three weeks of more exclusive viewing by the \u201crespectable\u201d public the Crystal Palace was opened to \u201cshilling tickets\u201d on 26\u202fMay, the floodgates were opened and six million people poured through them in the next four months.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In fact, the Great Exhibition gave a decisive push to physical mobility \u2013 travel to it has been called \u201cthe largest movement of population ever to have taken place in Britain\u201d \u2013 and it can be said to have kick-started the entire apparatus of the modern tourist industry: the railway journey, the package holiday, the hotel (or at least the B&B), and the restaurant were all to be transformed from elite into popular experiences. Thomas Cook alone brought 165,000 people to the Crystal Palace from the Midlands on cheap excursion trains.<\/p>\n To orient these strangers, street signs of the modern type had to be invented. To comfort them, public lavatories were for the first time installed. London, which had been used to dominating national attention in the 18th century but had had to share the spotlight with the great cities of the north in the early 19th, once again became the nation\u2019s cynosure. In the following years, it increased its share of the national population and began to resume a stature that it has never since lost.<\/p>\n What had the masses come to see, and what did they make of it? Undoubtedly they were awed by the great machines and demonstrations of power. They would also have been aware of the formidable police presence \u2013 anything from 200 to 600 policemen. On the other hand, they had a huge variety of sights to choose from \u2013 there were 100,000 exhibits \u2013 and could gravitate freely to those that pleased or intrigued them. These were often trinkets and gadgets on a human scale that people could relate to, could imagine in their homes, consumer goods of paper and glass, new styles of furniture, brands of toothpaste and soap.<\/p>\n A visit to the Crystal Palace was not supposed to be a shopping expedition. Exhibitors weren\u2019t allowed to display prices or sell over the counter. But supply and demand could not be so easily kept apart. Brochures, posters, trade cards and price sheets proliferated. Outside the Crystal Palace, the rest of London did its best to capitalise on the visitors. Historians now think that the modern age of advertising was opened by the Great Exhibition \u2013 the primitive shop signs, handbills and small-print newspaper adverts of the 18th century were gradually transformed by a panoply of new technologies, leading to the billboard, the illustrated display advertisement, the department-store window. Among the visitors in 1851 was a 20-year-old draper\u2019s apprentice from Yorkshire, William Whiteley, who was inspired to move his theatre of operations to London and who in the 1860s expanded his draper\u2019s shop in Westbourne Grove into Britain\u2019s first department store, Whiteley\u2019s, the Universal Provider.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n These surging crowds and their clamour for goods and thrills drew snooty criticisms of vulgarity, and we have long been familiar with comments such as John Ruskin\u2019s \u2013 he called the Palace \u201ca cucumber-frame between two chimneys\u201d \u2013 and William Morris\u2019s \u2013 he called it \u201cwonderfully ugly\u201d. The likes of Ruskin and Morris were offended because the Palace\u2019s projectors had portrayed it as a chance to refine popular tastes, whereas they saw only crowd-pleasing cheapness.<\/p>\n Thanks to the railway, visiting the Crystal Palace was not only a national but an international phenomenon. Rail connections between Paris and London had been completed just prior to 1851 and in the year of the Exhibition the numbers of travellers between France and England nearly doubled to 260,000. The international nature of the exhibits gave visitors a powerful sense of a newly wide world \u2013 and, with steam facilitating travel both by land and by sea, a shrinking world.<\/p>\n The British empire<\/a> was literally at the centre of the Crystal Palace, with an Indian Court filled with fine materials and finished goods meant explicitly to strengthen trade between metropole and empire. These were hardly trophies of bloodless wars. But there was a strong streak of idealism present, an idealism that did see free trade between equals as the civilised substitute for war. Exhibits from America drew special attention to an \u00a0emerging power, now seen less as rebellious offspring, more as a potential trading partner. Sensationally, the Americans\u2019 McCormick reaping machine beat its British rivals in a competition, harvesting 20 acres of corn in a day.<\/p>\n Visitors of 1851 got a glimpse of what we call globalisation. The telegraph was on display \u2013 used to communicate from one end of the giant structure to the other \u2013 and contemporaries were well aware of its potential use for global communications, talking of a forthcoming \u201cnetwork of wires\u201d and a \u201cnever-ceasing interchange of news\u201d.<\/p>\n In about 20 years, that network would span continents; in about 50 years, it would span the world \u2013 and, since the telegraph like the telephone or the computer is an electronic device, working at speeds pretty much equivalent to the speed of the Internet today.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n We are now also better aware that the Crystal Palace had an afterlife, reconstructed on a new site in south London \u2013 and serving for another 80 years as the \u201cPalace of the People\u201d, responsible among other things for inaugurating the dinosaur craze (the life-size models are among the few fragments of the Victorian period to survive on the site) and for pioneering a dizzying range of commercial entertainments from high-wire acts to aeronautical displays. Even if we confine ourselves to the year 1851, Crystal Palace works happily as a pivot on which swings a door opening to the modernity we enjoy today.<\/p>\n What we can see more clearly now than they could then was that the generally optimistic hopes of projectors and visitors, while realised to an extraordinary extent, also cast darker shadows \u2013 the 100,000 exhibits have multiplied a hundred thousand-fold in our consumer society, for ill as well as for good; the 500 police have multiplied too; internationalism and the shrinking globe did not betoken world peace; and just imagine the carbon footprint left by all those machines\u2026<\/p>\n Food consumption per person per week (1860s):\u00a010.9 pounds of bread, 3.9 pounds\u00a0of potatoes, 0.9\u202fpounds of meat, 1.4 pints of milk<\/p>\n Alcohol consumption\u00a0per person per year (1870s): 1.5\u202fgallon\u00a0of spirits, 34 gallons of beer\u00a0<\/p>\n Life expectancy at birth (1860s): Liverpool, 30 years; Manchester, 31\u202fyears; London,\u00a038 years; Cardiff,\u00a041 years; Portsmouth,\u00a042 years<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> 1854 \u2013 The Crimean War begins<\/strong>. Despite the high hopes expressed at the Crystal Palace, the second half of the century was not a period of unbroken peace. The Crimean War<\/a> pitted Britain and France against Russian expansion into the Ottoman Empire. It lasted two years, left contemporaries with a big bill and an inquest into military disorganisation, and bequeathed to posterity Florence Nightingale<\/a>, the Charge of the Light Brigade<\/a> (at the Battle of Balaclava) and, indeed, the balaclava (the headwarmers knitted for British troops to guard against cold Russian nights).<\/p>\n 1857 \u2013 The \u201cIndian Mutiny\u201d.<\/strong> Only a mutiny, of course, from the British point of view \u2013 now more frequently called a \u201cRebellion\u201d. Sepoys \u2013 locally recruited soldiers \u2013 protested against conditions in the East India Company\u2019s army. A direct result was the end of East India Company<\/a> rule and the incorporation of India into the formal empire.<\/p>\n 1865 \u2013 The \u201cGovernor Eyre Controversy\u201d.<\/strong> Jamaican Governor EJ Eyre brutally suppressed another rebellion \u2013 the Morant Bay rising<\/a> by black Jamaicans protesting against economic conditions and their lack of rights \u2013 killing hundreds and summarily executing one of the leaders, GW Gordon. The ensuing controversy polarised educated opinion in Britain \u2013 was Eyre a hero or lawbreaker? \u2013 much as the Vietnam War<\/a> polarised America in\u00a0the 1960s.<\/p>\n 1867 \u2013 The Second Reform Act<\/strong>. Although this act gave the vote to only about a third of adult males in England and Wales, it marked the point at which the United Kingdom began to think of itself as a democracy. But it also underscored the inequitable treatment of Ireland, where fewer than a sixth of adult males got the vote in a separate act.<\/p>\n 1869 \u2013 Origins of Women\u2019s Suffrage<\/a>.<\/strong> Often overlooked in the shadow of the Second Reform Act, a reform of the municipal franchise in 1869 gave the vote in local elections to unmarried women who were heads of households. This betokened a growing role for women in social and political affairs below the parliamentary level.<\/p>\n 1889 \u2013 The London Dock Strike<\/strong>. Although the Trades Union Congress can be dated back to 1868, the London Dock Strike brought trade unionism into the centre of public life for the first time, largely because it demonstrated that \u201cordinary\u201d workers could strike as well \u2013 not only skilled workers seeking to protect their trade privileges.<\/p>\n 1896 \u2013 Origins of the tabloid press.<\/strong> The Harmsworth brothers (later Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere) founded the Daily Mail<\/em>, the first of a new breed of cheap and cheerful newspapers. It cost a halfpenny \u2013 half the cost of the standard cheap newspaper \u2013 and specialised in shorter human-interest stories and a vigorously populist editorial tone.<\/p>\n 1899 \u2013 The Boer War breaks out.<\/strong> The decades of \u201cpeace\u201d since the Crimean War had been marred by repeated colonial wars; however these had required little British manpower. This colonial\u00a0war \u2013 against Dutch settlers in southern Africa\u00a0\u2013 required a serious mobilisation and, like the Crimean War, it left behind a bitter taste in\u00a0human and financial costs, and concerns about Britain\u2019s war fighting capacity.<\/p>\n Read next:\u00a01916:\u00a0<\/strong>The Long March to Modernity<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n1851 in context<\/h4>\n
With its share of world manufacturing rocketing, Britain was a nation of growth, and yet extreme poverty was driving thousands to emigrate\u00a0<\/h6>\n
Messy and modern<\/h3>\n
Kick-starting modern tourism<\/h3>\n
Crowd-pleasing cheapness?<\/h3>\n
Palace of the people<\/h3>\n
History facts: 1850\u20131899<\/h4>\n
Key years: other important events in the second half of the 19th century<\/h3>\n
More turning points in British history<\/h4>\n
![\""Part\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2019\/07\/TP-Images-with-overlay19-c02fec4.jpg?quality=45&resize=556,556"\" "\\"\"Part\\"\/")
<\/div><\/div> <\/div> <\/section>