The
Crystal Palace
Foundation

By Yvonne Ffrench

Here is the story of The Great Exhibition, told by a writer who is expert at re­creating a period and whose delightful sense of humour finds full scope in this great Nineteenth-Century subject.

As a pacific gesture, after the storms of 1848, the Prince Consort's idea of holding a Great Industrial Exhibition of All Nations was something entirely new. It had to be fought inch by inch across the level sward of Hyde Park, through the lobbie of Westminster and in the Industrial entres of the country. It became symbolic with PROGRESS, or synonymous with RUIN, which ever way one might choose to see it. Its early path bristIed with obstacles; there was the opposition, the rage of Colonel Sibthorp and the matter of Elms. Once the project nearly foundered, only to be rescued by Mr. Paxton and his airy miracle in prefabrication, the Crystal Palace.

The Exhibition survived, surpassed all hopes, became a milestone in his­tory. By now it has become a date - a Centenary.

Miss Ffrench, who has had access to many original and official documents hitherto unused, makes us see the Exhibition in all its stages; its genesis, its development and its triumphant fulfilment.

But, as we should expect from the author of NEWS FROM THE PAST, MRS. SIDDONS, OUIDA and MRS. GASKELL, she does far more than this: she shows us that England in which the absurd still mingled divertingly with the sublime, its atmosphere charged with industrialism, pregnant with change; where prudent enquiry walked hand in hand with revolutionary invention, faith with scepticism; in which Free Trade was a living faith and the Exhibition its visible witness.

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297 pages. Hardback 31 illustrations