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While many religious writers praised Paxton's innovative design, often likening it to a temple or the modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral, High Churchmen and Roman Catholics abhorred the design, comparing it most unfavourably to the neo‐Gothic style then in vogue for ecclesiastical and public buildings. Certain exhibits also proved controversial, none more so than Pugin's contributions to the Medieval Court, which were often seen as importing Catholic devices into the very heart of the Exhibition. This chapter centres on the religious controversies surrounding the Crystal Palace and its contents in order to show that it was a highly contested space and that protagonists across the religious spectrum endowed it with different spiritual meanings.

This chapter continue the focus on the law of correlation’s imbrication with mid-Victorian modernity, exploring its close relation to the central symbol of this new age of entrepreneurship, industry and consumerism: the Crystal Palace. It considers both the Great Exhibition and then the commercial reconstruction of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, examining how, with the expensive life-sized models of prehistoric creatures built at the latter, the demands of mid-nineteenth-century commerce gave a new impetus to the endorsement of the law of correlation, ensuring that it remained central to the new forms of print culture, and modes of visual education and entertainment that were emerging in the 1850s.

This introductory chapter explores and establishes the Sydenham Crystal Palace in relation to existing scholarship on the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Sydenham Palace combined education, entertainment and commerce, and spans both nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We resituate it as an important location within the London art world and establish the broader connections it had with rival ventures such as the South Kensington Museum and the numerous international exhibitions in the period. We set out the new possibilities for the analysis of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual and material cultures opened up by this unique venue, problematising the periodisation of art works and attitudes into discretely ‘Victorian’ and ‘Edwardian’ categories.

Chapter 4 contributes a classical focus to recent scholarship on the contested relationships between visual art and industry in Victorian culture. At the Crystal Palace, classical sculpture was not a refuge from industrial modernity, but a means of enhancing manufacture. The first part establishes the Sydenham Palace as a significant location for the design reform movement usually associated with the South Kensington Museum. It examines the roles that Palace architects Matthew Digby Wyatt and Owen Jones hoped Greek sculpture might play in reforming art manufacture, and subsequently the British economy. The second section analyses the successes and failures of the connections fostered between classical art and industry at Sydenham, focusing on the Ceramic Court and the Crystal Palace Art-Union. It concludes by analysing the changing relationship between ‘high art’, design, labour, and commerce in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement in the later nineteenth century.

This chapter first considers the ways in which human displays were made amenable to being used as opportunities for ethnological research in the early half of the nineteenth century. It then explores how displayed peoples were formally incorporated into ethnological education and practice by Robert Gordon Latham's curatorship of the court of natural history at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. It is argued that exhibited peoples were turned into ethnological specimens that became both the objects and the means of ethnological investigation among the lay public, phrenologists, physicians, anatomists, and ethnologists, and in a range of settings from institutionally backed private examinations to personal connections made at commercial performances.

Chapter 4 turns to the accumulation of goods at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was frequently understood as another theatrical manifestation of the Arabian Nights, within the ‘fairy-tale’ Crystal Palace in the heart of Britain. A new and innovative architectural form, the palace and its contents challenged the viewer’s vision, judgement, and sense of scale to such an extent that recourse was made to the language of magic in an effort to represent its unfamiliar effects. The palace and the objects it contained had apparently materialised like the stuff of dreams. Within this transformative space, the magnificence of Britain’s industrial resources became truly apparent only by way of comparison, by the jostling together of old and new, of fictional and material, and of machinery and magic. Here, an anxious meta-narrative emerged about the nature of modern production and consumption. Casting those products originating from India, China and elsewhere within a framework of magic and the Arabian Nights was, this chapter argues, a part of the rhetoric of British modernity, which made the comparison between nations and their wares more palatable by insisting that supposedly ‘inferior’ nations had employed the agency of magic. Such a narrative generated wonder both for the beautiful, often hand-crafted productions that had supposedly been wrought by magic, and of the advancements of British civilisation, which had apparently gained, through science, all the powers of Aladdin’s lamp.

Chapter 2 explores the relationship between the Victorian entertainment industry and the emergent ‘professional’ classical archaeological establishment at mid-century. It offers the first overview of the role that classical sculpture and architecture played in nineteenth-century shows of London, spanning actors posing in bodystockings, medical wax work museums, casts at Madame Tussauds, and the Regent’s Park Colosseum. It provides the first detailed assessment of the public display of classical sculpture in 1850s Britain, at the British Museum and beyond, and situates these displays within the history of classical archaeology. It features detailed discussion of 1850s archaeological engagements at the Crystal Palace, looking at polychromy and the relationship between Greek ‘originals’ and Roman ‘copies’ of sculpture. It argues that in 1850s London, ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, ‘entertainment’, and ‘education’ ought to be seen in tandem, rather than as polar opposites. It foregrounds the Crystal Palace as a prime location for exploring such connections.

Willson addresses music’s epistemological status: what kind of object of knowledge music was held to be, what material artifacts could speak for it, and in what kind of Museum. The occasion is the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, which took place at London’s Crystal Palace. The organizers sought to represent “the Present” – ordered, classified, and ranked – as the culmination of historical narratives of progress. Music was represented by its instruments, and partook of their status as objects; the Exhibition featured pianos, organs, violins, and more, as well as internal mechanisms and other component parts, as representative works of industry. Its material traces were scattered throughout Machinery, General Hardware, the Fine Arts Court, and even Manufactures from Animal and Vegetable Substances. Instruments rather than musical masterpieces were “demonstrated." Music was an ever-elusive presence; it tended to recede into the buzz of the crowd, to vanish, half-unheard, into the towering domes of the steel-and-glass cathedral. Willson argues that the “musical work” was hardly an immortal artifact, ideal type, or regulative concept, but was manifested instead in a striking multiplicity of commodified ways at this “Great Exhibition of Things.”

The introduction situates this book in the broader fields of classical reception studies, cultural history, art history, museum studies, and Victorian studies. It sets out methodological approaches to nineteenth-century understandings of the past and historical consciousness. It provides an overview of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, its directors’ ideals, guidebooks, displays, history, and protagonists. It offers a tour of the classical sculpture on display in the Greek, Roman, and Pompeian Courts.

The conclusion situates the Sydenham Palace alongside the Millennium Dome/O2 arena, comparing the criticisms of mass audiences, authenticity, and exhibitionary strategies at 2008’s Tutankhmun Exhibition to the 1850s critics at Sydenham. Museums now seem the only suitable environment for antiquities; the Crystal Palace stands as a counter narrative, an example of the wide range of mid-nineteenth-century exhibitions of and engagements with classical sculpture—and of the changing approaches to these objects throughout the Palace’s lifespan into the twentieth century.

Chapter 1 presents material that records the origins of the ideas for the Exhibition in the discussions of Prince Albert, Henry Cole, and others. It contains the original Minutes of the Royal Commission and transcripts of the public speeches that were made to promote the Exhibition amongst politicians and industrialists. Documents that attest to the objections of influential figures, the press and the general public can also be found in this chapter along with information about the construction of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park and accounts of the opening ceremony. The chapter demonstrates that, before the Exhibition could take place, an ideological battle had to be won.

This chapter examines the demonstration of the safety of electricity in public spaces. It explains that the moral panics and technical concerns about electricity necessitated its public testing in the home and on the theatrical stage, particularly in Crystal Palace and London's theatres. This chapter highlights the intimate connections between space and scientific testing and explains that the practice of electrical safety had to be seen to be believed at other social, personal, and instrumental scales for it underlay developments in physics and engineering.

The book concludes with an account of Clara Novello’s performance at the opening of the Crystal Palace at its new site at Sydenham in June 1854. A major media event, the opening ceremony climaxed with Novello singing the national anthem to great acclaim both from the listening crowds and from the national press, who praised the power, technical skill, and emotionally expressive force of her rendition. This moment, when the voice of the British female artist seemed so central to the national consciousness, forms a point from which to review the book’s major themes. Ultimately it concludes that, although there were powerful forces at work seeking to constrict women’s voices, in this period and far beyond, Novello’s performance signals the emergence by mid-century of a new, more empowering way of voicing femininity that began, gradually, to contest the most fundamental assumptions of modern patriarchy.

This Afterword consolidates and summarizes the findings revealed by the studies and analyses undergone throughout the book. It concludes that innovation is even more important in today’s globalized economy. The technological leadership of the United States is seen to be mainly influenced by institutional supports for the market in technology. The United States has been fortunate, thus far, to have its institutions be capable of adapting over time to changing circumstances in the market for technology. An example of the importance of institutional innovation in promoting technological advance is the massive growth of venture capital. We can add to this the institution of the U.S. patent system, which fostered further development of ideas and creativity, especially after such innovations were presented at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. It is this institutional edge that keeps the U.S. above other countries with technological potential such as China, India, and Brazil.

For years, the Ford Motor Company brought dramatic changes around Detroit dating back to its expansion to Highland Park in 1910 and then to Dearborn in the 1920s. Hence, local residents could see the Willow Run Bomber Plant as just another move by the company to expand west along the Michigan Central Railroad. The only physical manifestations of large-scale industrialization were the conversion of fields and orchards into steel and concrete. Ford’s relocation to Highland Park’s “Crystal Palace” and Dearborn’s River Rouge plant sparked social upheaval and economic disruption. In 1941, residents of Ypsilanti Township became anxious that the manic changes observed at Highland Park and Dearborn would soon be coming to their place. Meanwhile, local leaders saw Willow Run as the most recent manifestation of industrial suburbanization that characterized Detroit’s metropolitan area in the motor age.

Process innovations mainly benefit consumers by reducing prices of services and of new and old goods, which benefits aspiring ordinary citizens more than the privileged rich. The interchangeable parts of the American system of manufacturing (famously demonstrated at Britain’s Crystal Palace in Victorian England) reduced the costs of many goods, bringing them within the reach of the working class. Process innovations are often financed by rich venturesome consumers who buy expensive early versions of new goods. Besides lowering costs, process innovations also increase the variety, convenience, and quality of goods. Important process innovations include Fritz Haber’s inventing a way to create fertilizer from air; Henry Ford’s adaptation of the assembly line to reduce the costs of manufacturing cars; Sam Walton’s logistical, information technology and managerial innovations to reduce the costs of retailing; and Jeff Bezos’s Internet process innovations to increase the variety, convenience, and speed of delivery of retail goods.