Culture

_{Over 6 million visitors flocked to the Great Exhibition. © Getty Images}

With 6 millions visitors attending the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London was a hotbed of cultural events in the summer of 1851.

At the Surrey Zoological Gardens, the bands of the Royal Artillery, the Life Guards and the Coldstream Guards played Meyerbeer and Bellini in M. Jullien’s Monster Concerts.

Theatre-goers had a bonanza. The great actor William Charles Macready gave his last performance in Macbeth. The newspapers reported that, from 2 o’clock, the street outside Drury Lane was besieged by fans and patrons had to ‘reach their seats [by] an artificial road…formed by a body of policemen’.

For the lighter of heart, at the Surrey Theatre, a version of the Merry Wives of Windsor subtitled, ‘Harlequin and Sir John Falstaff and the Demon Hunter of the Enchanted Dell’ was packing them in.

At the Royal Academy summer show, the establishment was abuzz over the new young artists the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Times was appalled: ‘We cannot censure at present, as amply or as strongly as we desire to do, that strange disorder of the mind or the eyes which continues to rage with unabated absurdity among a class of juvenile artists who style themselves ‘P.R.B.’…The Council of the Academy, acting in a sprit of toleration…have now allowed these extravagances to disgrace their walls for the last three years; and though we cannot prevent men who are capable of better things, from wasting their talents on ugliness and conceit, the public may fairly require that such offensive jests should not continue to be exposed as specimens of the waywardness of those artists who have relapsed into the infancy of their profession.’

Their great defender, Ruskin, wrote twice to The Thunderer to protest these slurs.

Readers were spoilt for choice. Tennyson, the new Poet Laureate, had published ‘In Memoriam’ the previous year while Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ appeared anonymously. Those who preferred novels were awaiting Dickens’ David Copperfield in book form (it had been serialized the year before).

At Christmas his magazine, Household Words, would begin to publish Mrs Gaskell’s much-loved Cranford. Meanwhile a racier read could be found in Lavengro, George Borrow’s semi-fictionalized autobiographical tale of life among the gypsies, which was also being serialized.

For the serious-minded, Henry Mayhew, journalist and social-campaigner, issued his four-volume study London Labour and the London Poor, a magisterial cataloguing of the underside of the largest and most prosperous city on earth.

Judith Flanders