The Great Exhibition

Extracts

This page contains many of the quotations from the programme. It can be printed out as a guide for students watching the programme, or copied into a word processor or other application to provide an additional resource. Time codes refer to the points in the programme where the quotations appear.

1.20

Illustrated London News
6 July 1850

1.35

The Times
25 June 1850

... The whole of Hyde Park and, we will venture to predict, the whole of Kensington Gardens, will be turned into a bivouac of all the vagabonds of London so long as the Exhibition shall continue.

1.52

Punch
October 1850

2.09

Illustrated London News
3 May 1851

2.44

The Sun
1 May 1851

The principal throughfares, and more especially the Strand and Holborn, presented a particularly gay spectacle, for the omnibuses ... were all decked with the gayest flowers, the drivers and conductors also being gaudily attired in gold lace and other ornaments ... The roads leading to Hyde Park were rendered almost impassable ... It is scarcely necessary to mention that signs of a general holiday were everywhere shown, by the closing of shops and the hanging out of flags, of all nations, from the windows.

3.20

Illustrated London News
1 May 1851

3.28

Morning Chronicle
2 May 1851

... amid organ peal and trumpet flourish, and the echoing vollies of artillery, Queen Victoria, from her throne in her Crystal Palace, announced that

THE EXHIBITION IS NOW OPEN!

4.01

The Times
2 May 1851

... the Temple of the Industry of the World, an edifice as unexampled in its magnitude and materials as for the purpose to which it is applied and the collection it displays, will render yesterday for ever memorable as a great epoch in the progress of civilisation.

4.32

Punch
May 1851

What is it but a shed of glass,
With idiots flocking under?
Outside I happened once to pass,
And thought it no such wonder!

4.45

Illustrated London News
25 October 1851

4.54

Morning Post
5 May 1851

Spinning machinery of many kinds occupies a large space ... Steam engines are seen at work in different quarters ... Pumps for raising immense volumes of water make a conspicuous display; working models of coal and copper mines, models exhibiting the application of steam power for all conceivable purposes - printing machines, new plans of railway propulsion, churns for butter, and mills for grinding chocolate, filters and seawater fresheners; nearly every interesting mechanical process that was capable of being exhibited, from the propelling of a ship to the manufacture of needles, may be seen in operation.

5.40

The Times
15 May 1851

England has greatly changed. Her genius is mechanism, her master spirit the civil engineer, her tendencies to relieve labour from its drudgery, and delegate to iron, to steam, and to the other powers of the inanimate world as much as possible of the burden of toil. If you doubt this go and look at the great department of machinery in the Crystal Palace; watch that vast collection of interesting objects, every portion of which lightens immeasurably the burden of life and releases hundreds of hands from the most irksome forms of industry.

6.34

The Times
22 May 1851

... It is not merely to witness the triumphs of our industry, but the still more solid and durable progress of our constitutional and social organisation, that we have called all the world around us. We are the normal school of nations and are bound, for our own sake as well as theirs, to keep the machine that we are exhibiting in good working order.

7.25

The Standard
27 May 1851

... we were under the impression that the managers must have received some secret information of an inroad of democrats and revolutionists ... and that the time was at hand when our ancient institutions were to be swept away before the mighty torrent of republicanism ... which the shilling fee was to let loose upon us.

8.10

Punch
June 1851

Uncle. 'So, you've been to the Crystal Palace - have you Gus?'

Gus. 'Yes, Uncle.'

Uncle. 'Well, now, I'll give you a sixpence if you tell me what you admired most in that Temple of Industry?'

Gus (unhesitatingly). 'Veal and 'am pies, and the ginger beer. Give us the sixpence.'