At Home - Bill Bryson [13]
But even the most hotheaded proletarian, it seems, loved the Great Exhibition. It opened on May 1, 1851, without incident—a “beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle,” in the words of a radiant Queen Victoria, who called opening day “the greatest day in our history” and sincerely meant it. People came from every corner of the country. A woman named Mary Callinack, aged eighty-five, walked more than 250 miles from Cornwall, and so made herself famous. Altogether 6 million people attended in the five and a half months that the Great Exhibition was open. On the busiest day, October 7, almost 110,000 people were admitted. At one point, 92,000 were in the building at the same time—the largest number of people ever to be indoors in a single location to that time.
Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition’s lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes. But most people adored it, and nearly all behaved themselves. During the whole of the Great Exhibition just twenty-five people were charged with offenses—fifteen for picking pockets and ten for petty larceny. The absence of crime was even more remarkable than it sounds, for by the 1850s Hyde Park had become notoriously dangerous, particularly from dusk onward, when the risk of robbery was so great that the practice arose of crossing the park only after forming a convoy. Thanks to the crowds, for just under half a year Hyde Park was one of the safest places in London.
The Great Exhibition cleared a profit of £186,000, enough to buy thirty acres of land south of Hyde Park, in an area informally called Albertopolis, where were built the great museums and institutions that still dominate the neighborhood today—the Royal Albert Hall, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Royal College of Art, and the Royal College of Music, among others.
While people tried to decide what to do with it, Paxton’s mighty Crystal Palace remained standing in Hyde Park until the summer of 1852. Almost no one wanted it to go altogether, but few could agree on what should become of it. One slightly overexcited proposal was to convert it into a glass tower a thousand feet high. Eventually, the structure was moved to a new park—the Crystal Palace Park—at Sydenham in South London. Somehow in the process it became even larger; the new Crystal Palace was half as big again and employed twice the volume of glass. Because it was sited on a slope, its re-erection was much more of a challenge. Four times it collapsed. Some sixty-four hundred workers were needed to put the new building up, and it took them more than two years to do so. Seventeen of them lost their lives. Everything about the Crystal Palace that had seemed magical and blessed had oddly leaked away. It never regained its central place in the nation’s affections. In 1936, the whole thing burned down.
Prince Albert died ten years after the Great Exhibition, and the great Gothic spaceship known as the Albert Memorial was built just west of where the Crystal Palace had stood, at a whopping cost of £120,000, or about half as much again as the Crystal Palace itself had cost. There today Albert sits enthroned under an enormous gilded canopy. On his lap he holds a book: the catalog of the Great Exhibition. All that remains of the original Crystal Palace itself is a pair of large decorative wrought-iron gates that once guarded the ticket checkpoint at the entrance to Paxton’s exhibition hall and now, unnoticed, mark a small stretch of boundary between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.
The golden age of the country clergy ended abruptly, too. The 1870s saw the onset of a savage agricultural depression, which hit landowners and all on whom their prosperity