3. The Great Exhibition of 1851

Chosen by:
Dr Alan Dilnot,
School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts

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 / by Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank. (London : David Bogue, [1851]) [with copy 2, London : George Newbold, 1851]

The Monash University Library collection is especially rich in illustrated books from the nineteenth century. In 1989 the Library selected from this material to mount an exhibition which gave a detailed view of the range and development of book illustration in that period, covering innovations in colour-printing, steel-engraving and stereotyping, and which showed the use made of illustrations in educational and scientific books as well as in books designed primarily for entertainment.

Some of the greatest artists of the period – William Blake, J. M. W. Turner, Samuel Palmer, J. E. Millais, D. G. Rossetti and Daniel Maclise, for example – illustrated books, although they are usually better remembered nowadays for artistic projects on a grander scale. Other artists, such as John Leech, Richard Doyle and Hablot K. Browne (“Phiz”), made book- and magazine-illustration their main occupation. Such artists took a special pleasure in capturing topical occurrences or hitting off fashionable obsessions, and this meant that there was often an element of caricature in their productions. Usually an artist would work in collaboration with the writer of the letter-press who would suggest subjects for illustration, but the illustrator normally had considerable latitude when representing the subject.

The item on display, 1851: or, The Adventures of Mr. & Mrs Sandboys and Family, is an excellent example of collaboration between illustrator and author. The artist, George Cruikshank (1792-1878), was the son of Isaac Cruikshank and the brother of Robert Cruikshank, both of them also book illustrators. George grew up in the satirical tradition of Rowlandson and Gillray and by 1851 had a prodigious output behind him, including the illustrations to Dickens’s Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist, as well as two series of his own, The Bottle (1847) and The Drunkard’s Children (1848), Hogarthian “progresses” picturing the evils of alcohol. Cruikshank delighted in the grotesque, and in 1851 “The First Shilling Day” and “Some of the Drolleries of the Great Exhibition” show this aspect of his work. However, his mastery of his medium is seen to the full in the two illustrations selected for display here, the Frontispiece, “All the World Going to See the Great Exhibition of 1851”, and the paired plates “London Crammed and Manchester Deserted”. In the latter the notices pasted up on the shops are largely Cruikshank’s own invention.

The author of the book, Henry Mayhew (1812-1887), turned his hand to fiction, plays and travel books as well as to journalism. He was one of the founders of Punch in 1841, but his most famous work is the series London Labour and the London Poor which he commenced in 1849, a pioneering sociological survey of the lower levels of London society, concentrating on those such as prostitutes, petty criminals and con-men who lived outside the law. Mayhew acquired his material at first-hand by interviewing those who would normally be given a wide berth by the respectable classes. In 1851, written more or less at the same time as the London Labour, he utilises some of this material when Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys, innocents from the provinces, become easy prey for London tricksters. Mayhew’s awareness of London’s underclass gives an added bite to his treatment of the theme of the Great Exhibition. At the Crystal Palace London was presenting to the world a show of itself as the home of all that was progressive, ingenious and modern. Mayhew joins in the celebration but reminds his readers of what is lurking just round the corner. As such, 1851 forms a much better historical record of the Great Exhibition than any official brochure could give.