Victorious Century by David Cannadine

Author:David Cannadine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241310380
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

EXHIBITING BRITAIN, ENCOMPASSING THE WORLD

Such was the varied condition of the United Kingdom and the British Empire at mid-century. There might be more evidence than before to support Palmerston’s optimistic depiction of Britain, at the end of his ‘Don Pacifico’ speech, as a country that was at ease with itself, and as being pre-eminent among the nations of the world. Making essentially the same point, albeit less aggressively, a Methodist factory owner and former campaigner against the Corn Laws, Absalom Watkin, observed that ‘Never have I seen clearer evidence of general well-being. Our country is, no doubt, in a most happy and prosperous state. Free trade, peace and freedom.’ Macaulay could scarcely have put it better. But this was only a partial view, contradicted by many other contemporary writers, especially Marx and Mayhew. Moreover, the economic recovery from the downturn of 1848 was by no means yet certain, and while the worst of the Great Famine in Ireland might be over, its baleful effects would be long felt. And the majority of the British population was under-nourished, under-educated and possessed only a limited acquaintance with the basic tenets of the Christian religion. This might be a version of ‘freedom’, and the British state was undoubtedly less intrusive and less authoritarian than many of its European counterparts; but such liberty clearly had its price, and the fact that so many people were deciding to leave Britain and (especially) Ireland in the hope of making a better life overseas offers another serious qualification to Palmerston’s Panglossian peroration. One such emigrant was Dickens’s fictional creation Mr Micawber, in David Copperfield. Constantly in debt, but always hoping that something might eventually ‘turn up’, he emigrated to Australia where his fortunes did indeed improve, and he became a local worthy and mayor of his town.

These paradoxes and anxieties were vividly (and in some cases unconsciously) displayed in a remarkable and original scheme that resulted in the most significant and defining (and variously understood and interpreted) occasion in the history of the United Kingdom between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The idea that eventually resulted in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations originated late in 1844 with a certain Francis Wishaw, secretary of what would soon become the Royal Society of Arts. Concerned about the inadequacies of workers’ education and British standards of design, he believed there would be great public benefit if British industrialists and manufacturers, following recent continental precedents in Berlin and Paris, could be persuaded to put their products on display; this in the hope of increasing public and consumer interest in their work and wares, and of encouraging friendly competition between them, thereby improving the overall standards of workmanship and design. But there was scarcely any support for Wishaw’s idea from the manufacturers he approached, and it was not until the matter was taken up later in the decade by Henry Cole that it gained traction and momentum. Cole

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