It was the first great international exhibition, and it came at what must have seemed an auspicious time. The Year of Revolutions was past, although in Britain, relatively free of revolutionary spirit except for Chartist manifestations, there was a good deal of concern that the Exhibition would encourage an invasion of foreigners—socialists or worse! The Railway Age was well-established, and track mileage in Britain had doubled in the five years before the Exhibition opened; without those railways it would have been impossible to assemble the exhibits—or to bring the hordes of visitors to London.
Although it was not the Prince Consort's own brainchild, the Great Exhibition found in him an indefatigable and enthusiastic advocate as it was debated and developed, and a hard-working president of the Royal Commission which planned and ran it. An excerpt from Prince Albert's speech in March 1850—at a banquet to recruit support for the Exhibition—suggests the vision of the prince and his colleagues, a theme which seems strangely familiar in 2001:
"Nobody . . . who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end, to which, indeed, all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind . . . The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; . . . thought is communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power, of lightning."
The exhibition was intended to raise the level of industrial design and of course to display production and acquire new and larger markets. It was open in Hyde Park for five months and fifteen days. Over six million visitors came to see some fourteen thousand exhibitors, of which Great Britain supplied nearly half.
Scarcely surprisingly, in this early Victorian society, there were concerns about class. Would the respectable middle classes wish to mingle with working men? Could property owners in Belgravia prevent the establishment of the Exhibition just across the street? Would London be overrun with criminals fleecing the visitors (and, horrors! foreign criminals at that)? In fact, the admission price was set high for the first month, and then dropped to one shilling: low enough to attract over six million visitors drawn from all the respectable classes.
A century and a half later it is ironic that many of the comments about London's Millennium Dome, its equipment, and its facilities—boring, expensive, ugly-had been applied to the Crystal Palace. But so far from ending in bankruptcy, the Great Exhibition of 1851 took in £506,100 (almost one-third of it surplus to expenses) and the building continued in honorable service for another eighty years.

EXHIBITION CURATED BY JAMES HELYAR
Website Design by Sarah Goodwin Thiel

THE KENNETH SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

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