Humorous Asides

 

Humorous Article
 I'm going to see the Exhibition for a shilling. London, Disley, Printer, Arthur-street, Oxford-street [1851]

KSRL: DK 18 Aa:77

 
A street ballad trading on the general enthusiasm for the Exhibition. The writer's "eleven millions strong" was not so extreme a figure: there was in fact a total of six million visitors during the season. He reflects the danger of pickpockets in "Sew up your trouser's pocket, Tom / Some people make mistakes!" and in the midst of his jocular exaggerations, sums up the mood of the moment with

Come to the Exhibition
Sweet Catherine with me,
And for a bob a piece my love,
Such funny things we'll see.

(a "bob" is a shilling)
Comic of the visitors

Richard Doyle: An overland journey to the Great Exhibition, showing a few extra articles and visitors. London, Chapman and Hall, [1851].

KSRL: Children 2606
John Bull leads the 109"-long procession to the Crystal Palace (could that be Giuseppe Verdi immediately behind him-in the year of "Rigoletto"?). First the cosmopolitan music; then the French contingent with their tree of Liberty; the musical-particularly operatic-Italians; athletic and musical Scots; a Spaniard bearing cigars; a German band, and devotees of tankard and tobacco pipe; Liberty leading two African slaves, followed by a group of U.S. Southerners carrying an enormous cat of five tails; the whole completed by the animals symbolic of the major countries: the American eagle; the British lion, arm-in-arm with the French cockerel and the Prussian eagle; the Russian bear, arm-in-arm with the Turkish lion and the Austrian double-headed eagle; the Indian elephant, with three unidentified companions, and finally the unicorn, Scottish consort to the British lion. There is no text appended to The Overland Journey, but there is clearly a great deal of subtext!

Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank: The World's Show. 1851: or, the adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and family, who came up to London to "enjoy themselves," and to see the Great Exhibition. London, David Bogue [1851] KSRL: C6775

 

"The opening of the Great Hive of the World, May 1, 1851, or the Industrial Exhibition of All Nations." A farcical account of provincial visitors to London, written by Henry Mayhew, one of the founders of Punch, the weekly humorous paper, and later the author of the great pioneering survey, London Labour and the London Poor: the condition and earnings of those that will work, cannot work, and will not work (1861). Cruikshank adds cartoons of traffic jams on the way to the Exhibition ("Pray go back! All the Roads leading to the Exhibition are Blocked Up!"), opera boxes at Her Majesty's Theatre given over to sleeping accommodation for visitors, the crowds on the first "shilling day," and the final dispersion of all the exhibits at the end of the season.
Humorous account

Oliver Ormerod, 1811-1879: O Ful, Tru, un Pertikler Okeaawnt o bwoth wat aw seed un wat aw yerd, we gooin too Th' Greyt Eggshibishun, e Lundun, an a greyt deyle of Hinfurmashun besoide . . . be O Felley from Rachde. Thurd Edishun.

Rachde [1856]

KSRL: Presented to the Library in honor of Edwyna Gilbert

A humorous account of a visit to the Great Exhibition. Ormerod wrote under the pseudonym "O Felley from Rachde" (as on the title-page) or "A Rachde Felley" (in the frontispiece and on the front board), both of them dialect versions of "A Rochdale Fellow." Indeed, the whole book is written in the Rochdale, Lancashire, dialect, which is really much easier to understand than first appears-it is heavily obscured by Ormerod's method of phonetic rendering.

Beyond his intent to amuse, Ormerod is recording a dialect of a specific place and time, and appends a "Dikshunayre" of words like kowd = cold (phonetic spelling for the local pronunciation), brass = money (slang, used widely in the north of England), and feffnecute = hypocrite (feffnecute apparently not existing outside this dialect).

 

The title of the book (translated from the Rochdalian) is "A full, true and particular account of both what I saw and what I heard when going to the Great Exhibition, in London, and a great deal of information besides.

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