The City: Pop Art and Brutal Architecture

Abstract

Conceived amid Victorian confidence and prosperity, the Great Exhibition of 1851 expressed an international vision in striving ‘to present a true test and living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived … and a new starting point, from which all nations will be able to direct their future exertions’.1 It expressed the high aspiration of a society experiencing an outpouring of cultural achievement in such mid nineteenth-century works as Dickens’s Great Expectations (1851) and Bleak House (1852–3), Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems (1852), Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling (1851), Thackeray’s Pendennis (1850), Macaulay’s History of England (1849), Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851–3), and Wordsworth’s posthumous The Prelude (1850). Its grand purpose was well expressed in the exceptional monument by which the exhibition became identified, the building known as the Crystal Palace; looking back a hundred years later, Arthur Bryant still found meaning in its reflection of the glorious Victorian world: The Great Exhibition of 1851 was held in an atmosphere of great national happiness. The Exhibition itself — for it was the treat of the year and one immensely enjoyed by all classes — contributed much to that happiness. Yet it was not merely the cause of a feeling of social well-being: it was the symptom of it…. Still, it is pleasant, despite the tragic aftermath of all those sanguine assumptions, to look back across the century that has enclosed our own troubled and our fathers’ untroubled lives and revisualize the spirit and form of 1851. There was Victorian England — early Victorian England on the threshold of mid-Victorian England — dreaming of a world for ever at peace and making an image of its dreams and of human achievement, as it saw it, in a palace of glass. What an England it was!2