We Two: Victoria and Albert (50 page)

Word of the wonders of the exhibition spread like wildfire, and the new railways made London accessible as never before. Newspapers all over the world had pictures and articles and firsthand reports. Friends wrote to friends, either urging them to come or begging for a bed. William Makepeace Thackeray published a long and sentimental poem. It ended:

The cartoonists for the magazine
Punch
had five months of superb material, foreign and homegrown. London theaters closed for want of clients, and the streets of Manchester and other great industrial towns were reported, with patriotic hyperbole, to be empty.

The exhibition had something for everyone, and everyone was invited. One of the organizing committee’s strokes of genius was to institute a price system that differed from day to day. For wealthy families there were season tickets for three guineas and a pound. Some days a day ticket cost five shillings, some days, one shilling. On a few days, entry was free. If you could not afford the price of admission, it was fun just to go to Hyde Park, which had become the people’s park. For free you could walk around the magnificent new gardens, make fun of the foreigners, admire the flags of the nations fluttering atop the great pavilion, ooh and aah when suddenly the 12,000 fountains sprang into the air circulating 120,000 gallons of water, scrutinize the prince’s model working-class home (improbably complete with piped water, water closet, kitchenette, and separate rooms for the children), and watch the fireworks at night.

Inside the Crystal Palace, there was far too much to see in a single day. A young toff who had never worked in his life could tour a suspiciously clean, quiet, and spacious working cotton mill or a replica lead mine, minus the toxic dust. Art lovers who had never ventured across the seas saw replicas of some of the world’s greatest statues as well as original works commissioned
for the event, such as the controversial statue of a bare-breasted Amazon on horseback. (Queen Victoria really liked it.) Men of business could see what their competitors in France and the United States had to offer. Housewives could examine silks from India and China, printed cottons from Egypt and France, carpets, wallpapers, furniture, pianos, indoor plants, pump organs, doorknobs, and a delirious array of knickknacks. There were inventions of all kinds: electric telegraphs, coffee roasters, clocks, musical instruments, fire engines, locomotives, a steam-powered sugar cane crushing machine, and the handgun with a revolving cylinder recently perfected by Samuel Colt. There were geological samples and botanical specimens, a stuffed dodo, a stuffed elephant complete with howdah, the ivory throne of the Rajah of Travancore, and dinosaur models reconstructed from fossil remains. At times the vast central transept became an arena, variously featuring a circus, a military band, or an orchestra.

As the
Punch
cartoonists pointed out, the exhibition brought together illiterate farm workers in smocks, smart young men about town, and neatly starched bank clerks. The sheer size of the building and the number of visitors encouraged a certain degree of social license. Young ladies happily lost sight of their mamas in the crowd and met up with young gentlemen in Messrs. Schweppes’s refreshment rooms. Wives abandoned their husbands to the tender mercies of the Irish help and met friends for lunch at the exhibition. Middle-class parents from the provinces turned up at the Crystal Palace with all the children and a bag of sandwiches. Working-class families on a spree tasted ice cream and Jell-O for the first time and were not sure they liked them. Tradesmen abandoned their normal line of work and turned to catering for the tourists.

During its five and a half months, 6.2 million tickets were sold to the Great Exhibition, an unprecedented number given that the entire population of Great Britain at the time was about 20 million. On a single day in July, 72,000 people poured through the doors, all seeking entertainment and illumination, all needing bathroom facilities and transportation. The vast catalog was a best seller. Between the ticket booths, the shop, and the cafes, over a half million pounds changed hands. At the end, when all the bills had been paid, the organizing committee found itself with a profit of 186,000 pounds and decided to use it for the purchase of seventy acres in Kensington. On this site in due time would rise the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Victorians called it Albertopolis.

The political classes throughout Europe in 1851 were amazed by the
Great Exhibition in London. Here was liberal democracy in action. The massive crowds were calm, orderly, and patient, though only fifty policemen, armed with wooden clubs, stood by to keep the peace. It seemed that no one made a scene, no one got trampled, no one was arrested, no one was assassinated, no one threw stones. Thunder and lightning did not smash the great glass house into smithereens. Sparrow droppings did not land on the buttered buns. The Koh-i-Noor diamond, which the Queen put on show in the British section, was returned to her without incident. And the building was pulled down as swiftly as it was put up, carted off to the then outer London suburb of Sydenham, reassembled, and made even bigger. How extraordinary!

The exhibition did not draw everyone’s praise. The political theorists Karl Marx and Thomas Carlyle, who agreed on very little else, were among the few middle-class men who turned their noses up at this capitalist extravaganza. English cabinet ministers and many members of parliament visited the exhibition, as did courtiers who needed the royal favor, but by and large the aristocracy and landed gentry held off. People who habitually traveled abroad did not need to see copies of Greek sculptures or stuffed elephants. Great landowners had no use for pipe organs and no interest in baroque telegraph machines or barometers made of leeches. For the Tories in parliament, the Great Exhibition was one more reason to dislike the prince consort.

By definition, the Crystal Palace was not an exclusive venue. Even on a five-shilling day, the exhibition was the most atrocious crush, and one could never be certain whom one might bump into. If beer was not served in the refreshment rooms, neither was wine, and warm lemonade and stale ham sandwiches were not everyone’s treat. If the Queen cared to look like a little middle-class frump and hobnob with the unwashed, that was entirely her own affair. If the prince cared to spend his life working on committees with ill-bred upstarts like Henry Cole and Thomas Cubitt, let him. Even as the ties binding the ordinary British man and woman to the royal family were strengthened, the isolation of the Queen and the prince and their family from the English aristocracy also deepened.

WHEN THE GREAT
Exhibition closed, Prince Albert was intensely relieved but too tired and sad to feel triumphant. He had recently and unexpectedly lost his two closest English friends: his private secretary George Anson, only thirty-nine, and Sir Robert Peel. Anson, Albert told Victoria, was “almost
like a brother,” Peel “a second father.” The frantic months of activity that preceded the opening of the exhibition left Albert so “weak and fagged” that he could barely eat or sleep. He was never the same man again.

His work for the exhibition brought Prince Albert into daily communication with some of the most brilliant and entrepreneurial Englishmen of his day men he could respect, compete with, and learn from—men like himself. He was never happier than in the society of scientists, artists, musicians, and intellectuals. But these were men called plain Mr. X or Professor Y. Most were middle class, some were common, and they did not own homes in May-fair or country estates in Hampshire. They did not appear at levees, and the Queen could never invite their wives to tea. When the prince met such men, they backed out of his presence and stood while he sat. Albert could preside over such men and make speeches to them, he could consult them, he could tour factories and gardens and bridges with them, he could persuade his wife to give them knighthoods or even peerages. But he could not make them his friends, or so he believed, because at heart he was a conventional man who never wholly shook off the provincial attitudes of his father’s small, impoverished German court.

William Hartington Cavendish, the seventh Duke of Devonshire, could have taught the prince some lessons in English upper-class social mores, had the prince cared to know the duke. The bachelor duke was the immensely rich scion of one of England’s greatest families, a man of great culture, few words, and shy charm. Careless of gossip, he could take the gardener’s boy Joseph Paxton as his lifelong friend and companion, help Paxton to fame and fortune, and still be welcome in every home in England, except Osborne. Devonshire was rare but not unique. In English clubs, on English hunting fields, in English committees, it was slowly becoming possible for a nobleman like Lord Palmerston and a middle-class gentleman like William Nightingale to establish companionable relationships. Their wives and sisters and daughters might even be allowed to exchange visits.

But in Germany such relationships continued to be social apostasy, and Albert was a royalist conservative with liberal tendencies, never a radical. Protocol and etiquette were the scaffolding that supported the Prince of Coburg’s ego.

…

EVER DID PRINCE ALBERT ENJOY AS MUCH POPULARITY WITH ORDINARY
British citizens as on October 15, 1851, when the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations closed. But the mob is ever inconstant, as Albert and his friend Stockmar liked to remind each other at sententious intervals, and the prince’s fall from grace was rapid. By November 1853, he was the most distrusted man in England, and the rumor around London was that he and the Queen would soon be committed to the Tower. England was eager to go to war with Russia, and the Queen’s husband was widely considered to be the tsar’s friend or even his agent. Prince Albert’s German birth and odd accent, his foreign friends, his internationalism, all of which had been handsomely showcased at the Great Exhibition, were now viewed by press and public alike as prima facie evidence of treason.

The nation had suddenly woken up to the power the prince was wielding behind the scenes. Could it be, editors asked rhetorically, that Queen Victoria was a mere puppet, manipulated by her husband to serve the interests of foreign powers? Radicals and reactionaries alike took to pontificating in parliament on the dangers that “King Albert” posed to the nation.

To accuse the Queen’s husband of treason was a vicious libel, yet the critics had seized upon a fact that needed to be brought to public attention. Queen Victoria had withdrawn into domesticity and was becoming more and more depressed and self-absorbed with each successive pregnancy. She was trying hard to conform to the role of “kleines Fräuchen” her husband allotted her, and took a backseat in state affairs. She frankly admitted this to her uncle Leopold in an 1852 letter: “Albert grows daily fonder and fonder
of politics and business, and is so wonderfully
fit
for both—such perspicacity and such
courage
—and I grow daily to dislike both more and more. We women are not
made
for governing—and if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine occupations; but there are times which force one to take
interest
in them
mal gré bon gré
[whether one likes it or not] and
I
do of course,
intensely
.” It is distressing to the modern ear to find the great Queen Victoria dutifully parroting her husband’s patriarchal platitudes, but King Leopold was no doubt delighted.