“Gentlemen – the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.”
Prince Albert, Mansion House Banquet, March 21 1850
Prince Albert, Mansion House Banquet, March 21 1850Planning the Great Exhibition was not all smooth sailing, in-fact, it was anything but. When planning began in the late 1840s by the Society of Arts, headed by Prince Albert, they knew it would not be an easy thing to achieve. They also knew they would need a Royal Commission in order to make this more of a success. As a result, the society put a proposal to Queen Victoria and on January 3 1850 the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition was formed.
On March 21 1850, the first of two banquets for the Royal Commission to garner support for the Great Exhibition took place. According to Valerie Mars, “both banquets were reported at length in the press. Giving such complete accounts incorporated the greater mass of those uninvited into these great occasions, thereby encouraging wider interest in the Exhibition.”
The dinner on March 21 took place at the Mansion House in London and was hosted by the Mayor of London, Thomas Farncombe. The aim of this banquet was for the commissioners to network and promote the Great Exhibition, planned for the following year, in the hopes that they would be able to get financial backing for it. The below image from Illustrated London News helps to give a look into the Egyptian Hall at the Mansion House in the early 1840s and how this was clearly a great setting to have the banquet to gain support for the exhibition.
According to Gary Davis, “as an immediate aim Albert needed to unify public opinion in favour of the exhibition because there had, in fact, been considerable initial opposition to the project.”3 The Egyptian Hall provided the perfect setting to do this as, while surrounded by flags from all over the world, Albert and the Commission were able to push for that idea of unifying the countries through one common goal – sharing of knowledge.
While there were several speeches given in support of the exhibition throughout the evening by notable figures such as John Bird Sumner and Robert Peel, it was the speech given by Prince Albert that held the most significance.
Despite the initial opposition to the project, the banquet was attended by around 140 mayors as well as foreign representatives.4 This meant that Albert and the commissioners had a large number of people to try and persuade, and he made sure to give his thanks for their attendance in this speech:
“I must be highly gratified to see here assembled the magistrates of all the important towns of this realm, sinking all their local and possibly political differences, the representatives of the different political opinions of the country, and the representatives of the different Foreign Nations–to-day representing only one interest!”
One of the key goals of the Great Exhibition was that it would bring together nations from all across the world to put on display the works of industry, something which Albert had hoped would close the divide among countries. There is one section from this speech that highlights this, and is often the main part of the speech that gets repeated when the Great Exhibition is mentioned:
“Nobody, however, who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end, to which, indeed, all of history points – the realization of the unity of mankind.”
Throughout his speech Albert constantly referred back to the idea of all of the nations coming together to share both ideas and knowledge to help highlight the purpose of an exhibition like this. In one part of the speech he commented that “whilst formerly the greatest mental energies strove at universal knowledge and that knowledge was confined to the few, now they are directed on specialities, and in these, again, even to the minutest points: but the knowledge acquired becomes at once the property of the community at large.” 7 The passion for this idea by both Albert and the other members of the Royal Commission are immediately clear and their aims to unite the world through both invention and knowledge was incredibly significant at the time.
Albert closed his speech by acknowledging the trials that were likely to come during the planning process for the exhibition, while also emphasising once more the importance of having the support and backing of these men for the project to be able to go ahead:
“We, Her Majesty’s Commissioners, are quite alive to the innumerable difficulties we shall have to overcome in carrying out the scheme; but, having confidence in you and our own zeal and perseverance, at least, we require only your confidence in us to make us contemplate the result without any apprehension.”8
Queen Victoria wrote to her Uncle Leopold in the days following the Mansion House speech and commented that “Albert made a really beautiful speech the other day, and it has given the greatest satisfaction and done great good. He is indeed looked up to and beloved, as I could wish he should be; and the more his rare qualities of mind and heart are known, the more he will be understood and appreciated.”
This was the first time that Albert had publicly given his support for the exhibition as members of the Society of Arts had decided a couple of years previously that it was best not to have Albert’s name tied to the project incase something went wrong. However, by 1850, “their strategy had changed, and they were using the monarchy to sell the exhibition, calculating, it turns out correctly, that Britons would not refuse a plea for support from their Queen and her prince.” 10 As it happened, having Albert so publicly involved in this project proved to be very beneficial and in the following year, the Royal Commission (after facing several obstacles), successfully planned a six-month event that would go down in history.
Footnotes
The Principal Speeches and Addresses of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, (London: J. Murray, 1862) p59
Valerie Mars, North and South: Two Banquets Given to Promote the Great 1851 Exhibition, accessed in Mark McWilliams (ed by), Celebration Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, (Prospect Books, 2012) p184
Gary Day, Varieties of Victorianism: The Uses of a Past, (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1998) p45
John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition, (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999) p66
The Principal Speeches and Addresses of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, (London: J. Murray, 1862) p61
Queen Victoria to the King of the Belgians 26 March 1850, John Murray, The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume Two 1844-1853, (London: 1908) p240
Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, (Yale: Yale University Press, 1999) p60