The Great Exhibition

Queen Victoria opens the Great Exhibition
at Hyde Park
Public domain

There is a great deal of interesting material online about the Great Exhibition. See here, and here for good discussions. You can also listen to Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' discussion here.

There are also two good videos on YouTube.

Among the books I've consulted are Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Batsford, 1998) and Judith Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (HarperPerennial, 2007), especially chapter 1.

Is the opening of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ on 1 May 1851 the great symbolic Victorian event? Certainly this is how the queen seemed to see it in her letter to King Leopold. Palmerston:

‘a glorious day for England’.

The prayers uttered by the archbishop of Canterbury at the opening were the prayers of a successful people, whose God had multiplied blessings on them. His prayer was appropriately followed by the Hallelujah Chorus.

The Exhibition came at a useful time for the government of Lord John Russell, as it was in crisis over ecclesiastical policy and would have fallen if the Conservative Protectionists had been able to present a convincing alternative government. Disraeli saw the Exhibition as

‘a godsend to the Government ... diverting public attention from their blunders’.

But the very idea of the Exhibition was controversial. There was no national funding and Prince Albert had to seek private sponsorship. The Hyde Park site was fiercely attacked and there were complaints that Paxton’s structure was not only not high enough to enclose vast elm trees in full summer leaf but that it obstructed the riders in Rotten Row. Protectionists attacked its free trade ideology. The Ultra Tory MP Colonel Charles Sibthorp described it as

‘an industrial exhibition in the heart of fashionable Belgravia to enable foreigners to rob us of our honour’.

Many prophesied public indifference and financial failure.

Palmerston: Foreign Secretary, Liberal imperialist

Lord Palmerston engraving
Public domain

If the 1840s was Peel's decade, the following decade belonged to  Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865), Foreign Secretary in Lord John Russell’s Whig government and later Prime Minister.

Early career

Palmerston was the eldest of five children of the 3nd viscount. He inherited his peerage in 1802 at the age of seventeen, and as it was an Irish peerage, he always sat in the Commons. The family owned East Sheen in London, Broadlands in Hampshire and 10,000 acres in County Sligo. The name of the title was taken from the village of Palmerston on the family estates outside Dublin. 


Although he is always seen as a Victorian politician, intellectually and culturally he was a product of the Georgian age. He was educated first at Edinburgh University and then at St John’s College Cambridge, where he identified himself as a supporter of Pitt the Younger. In the general election of 1807 he contested Pitt's old seat, Cambridge University. He lost, but on the following day he was returned for Newport, a pocket borough on the Isle of Wight. However, he sat for the university from 1811 to 1831.


In 1809 he became secretary at war (a non cabinet post) in Spencer Perceval's Tory government. He continued to serve as secretary for war in the administrations of subsequent prime ministers, George Canning, Viscount Goderich and the duke of Wellington. But he resigned from Wellington’s government in May 1828 over its refusal to allow even moderate parliamentary reform. After twenty years of being continuously in government, he now found himself on the opposition benches. From being a Tory he became a Whig.

Sir Robert Peel: turncoat or statesman? (1)

'Sir Robert Peel', by 
William Pickersgill
Public domain

The age of Peel

The Reform Act of 1832 had given the vote to more middle-class people and enfranchised great industrial cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. In the long term this was  a hugely important potential change, but in the short term the Reform Act did not transform politics. The working classes were still disenfranchised, and the aristocracy continued to play a dominant role which only ended with the growth of mass politics at the end of the century. Most nineteenth-century prime ministers sat in the Lords. There were, however, some notable exceptions.

The dominant politician of the 1830s and 1840s was Sir Robert Peel and some historians have described the period as 'the age of Peel'.  Unlike most Victorian politicians he came from a manufacturing background. In his lifetime he became hugely controversial. His most significant achievement was to modernise the Tory party in the wake of its stunning defeat in 1832, but having built up his party, he proceeded to destroy it when he repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. 

Early career

Peel was the son of the calico printer, Sir Robert Peel, who had been made a baronet and become a member of Parliament. Peel the younger entered Parliament in 1809 as member for the Irish seat of Cashel and at a time when party divisions were hardening, he identified with the Tories. In 1812 he became Chief Secretary for Ireland and in the election of that year he acquired a new seat, Chippenham, Wiltshire. (Note: nineteenth-century politicians chopped and changed their seats with a frequency that would be unthinkable today!)

Sir Robert Peel: turncoat or statesman? (2)

Sir Robert Peel,
saviour and destroyer of his party

Peel's triumph? 

The 1840s should have been a triumphant decade for Peel. He had reformed his party after its defeat of 1832 and won the election of 1841.

There was however, a lurking problem.

1. The Conservative vote was overwhelmingly agricultural and deeply committed to agricultural protection.
2. Peel himself was increasingly in favour of free trade and his government's budgets saw a steady reduction in duties. Would the Corn Laws be next?

The Irish famine

It is usually believed that it was the Irish famine that converted Peel to free trade, but it is now clear that this simply provided him with an excuse. 

There are posts on this distressing and still controversial subject here and here. 

Scene at Skibereen, Cork, 1847

By the autumn of 1845 Ireland  was facing a great social and humanitarian catastrophe. On 15 October, Peel wrote to the Lord Lieutenant that the only practical remedy was 

‘the removal of all impediments to the import of all kinds of human food - that is the total and absolute repeal for ever of all duties on all articles of subsistence’.

But this was not the real issue. Cheaper bread was not the answer to the immediate problem. The Irish could not afford to buy any bread. The only thing that could save them was food relief on a massive scale. The Corn Laws were therefore an irrelevancy.