Cruikshank, George, Engraver. Opening of the Great Industrial Exhibition of all nations, by her most gracious majesty Queen Victoria and his royal highness Prince Albert, on the 1st of May 1851 / taken on the spot by George Cruikshank. London: Published by David Bogue, 86 Fleet Street, 1851, June 29. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/93507156/.
The Great Exhibition helps to provide important context for the study of many commonly taught nineteenth century novels, like Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Dickens’s Great Expectations. In Jane Eyre, for example, white femininity is defined through comparisons to racial and ethnic others (like Bertha Mason or the women of “the Grand Turk’s seraglio”) in the text. In viewing this image, students can observe how the Great Exhibition was used to display Britain’s imperial power; Queen Victoria is at the center of the image, and in the margins of the image, audiences can see the representation of places like Persia, India, and Turkey.
This is from the LoC website:
“Print shows an interior view of the Crystal Palace during the Great Industrial Exhibition, with Queen Victoria and the royal family at center, the Archbishop to the left, and many spectators gathered in the wings of the gallery.”
The Great Exhibition was held in 1851 in Hyde Park, London. The Crystal Palace, a glass structure constructed specifically for the event, was the site of the exhibition. The Great Exhibition was an early example of a world’s fair, a type of event that was popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Great Exhibition was meant to display Britain’s imperial power; one half of the exhibition showcased Britain and the other half displayed other contributors as well as British dominions and colonies, framing those colonies as “exotic” and “undeveloped,” and thus in need of British control and development (London Museum). As Audrey Jaffe writes, “The implication being not only that England was, effectively, half the world but also that the rest of the world existed chiefly to supply England with raw materials” (Jaffe 2012). The Great Exhibition was visited by millions of people, including writers like Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, and Charles Dickens.
- What do you notice first about this illustration?
- What is in the center of this image? Why?
- What do you notice about the people attending the Great Exhibition? Why did the artist emphasize this?
- What is “on display” at the Great Exhibition?
- If you look closely, you can see places like India, Persia, Turkey, and Greece. What role do these places play in this exhibition?
Common Core State Standards
RI.9-10.7: Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person's life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.
- Students can analyze the representation of the Great Exhibition by examining this image alongside other accounts of the event or memorabilia from the event.
RI.11-12.7: Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem.
- Students can evaluate the Great Exhibition with nineteenth century novels (Jane Eyre, for example) in order to discuss how these texts define Britishness.
Introduce students to the Great Exhibition by having a group discussion where students first view this image, remark on what they first notice, and then decide what questions they want to learn more about. Then, put students into small groups and have them look at other images showing different perspectives of the same event; some groups might focus on the telescopic images (linked below) as well as some of the images about the France, India, China, and Tunisia exhibits featured on the London Museum’s website. Finally, introduce students to some of the decorative arts and printed ephemera from the event. Have students learn about some of the objects featured at the Great Exhibition; encourage them to ask where their object came from, how it became part of the event, and what it might have been intended to represent. Ultimately, what students should discuss is how this event was used to define British identity and to stage the power and control of the British empire.
- This image participates in the British Empire’s justification of imperialism. There is a potential for challenge from parents/guardians who do not want their students to learn about colonialism, imperialism, or the history of racism in England.
Links to resources for approaching those topics
- This view of the Western Nave from the Crystal Palace gives a more realistic image from 1851. This may be preferred to a hand drawing as it is more realistic.
- This is a political cartoon that shows American superiority and similar attitudes in the Great Exhibition of 1851. This could be an alternative as it concentrates on the American attitude of the time period.
- Complementary sources: “Illustrated Scene from the Great Exhibition”; Lane’s Telescopic View of the Great Exhibition and Crystal Palace.
- Alternative source: Linen map of the world, from the India and Colonial Exhibition, 1886.
- Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom is a great resource. It is mostly aimed toward postsecondary education, but it can still be used by secondary teachers.
- Teaching British Histories of Race, Migration, and Empire (crowd-sourced resource through the Institute of Historical Research).
- Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass culture and the imagination 1830–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Briefel, Aviva. “On the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Accessed December 21, 2024. https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=aviva-briefel-on-the-1886-colonial-and-indian-exhibition.
- Chauhan, Arundhati, and Barua, Chandrica. “Performing Art, Displaying Culture: Artisan Exhibits in Colonial Exhibitions.” MapAcademy. Accessed December 21, 2024. https://mapacademy.io/performing-art-displaying-culture-artisan-exhibits-in-colonial-exhibitions/
- “What Was the Great Exhibition of 1851?” London Museum. Accessed December 21, 2024. https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/what-was-great-exhibition-1851/.
- Jaffe, Audrey. “On the Great Exhibition.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, 2012. Accessed December 21, 2024. https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=audrey-jaffe-on-the-great-exhibition.
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