"The book challenges the common view that the Exhibition symbolized peace, progress, prosperity, and the emergence of an industrial middle class. Auerbach suggests instead that the Great Exhibition became a cultural battlefield on which proponents of different visions of industrialization, modernization, and internationalism fought for ascendancy in the struggle for a new national identity."--BOOK JACKET.

The Great Exhibition, 1851: A Sourcebook is the first anthology of its kind. It presents a comprehensive array of carefully selected primary documents, sourced from the period before, during and after the Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. Drawing on contemporary newspapers and periodicals, the archives of the Royal Commission, diaries, journals, celebratory poems and essays, many of these documents are reproduced in their entirety, and in the same place, for the first time. The book provides an unparalleled resource for teachers and students of the Exhibition and a starting point for researchers new to the subject. Subdivided into six chapters - Origins and organisation, Display, Nation, empire and ethnicity, Gender, Class and Afterlives - it represents the current scholarly debates about the Exhibition, orientating readers with helpful, critically informed, introductions. What was the Great Exhibition and what did it mean? Readers of The Great Exhibition, 1851: A Sourcebook will take great pleasure in finding out.

"Roger Fenton (1819-1869) was England's most celebrated photographer during the 1850s, the young medium's most glorious moment. After studying law and painting, Fenton took up the camera in 1851 and immediately began to produce highly original images. During a decade of work he mastered every photographic genre he attempted: architectural photography, landscape, portraiture, still life, reportage, and tableau vivant." "This volume presents ninety of Fenton's finest photographs, exactingly reproduced. Six leading scholars have contributed nine illustrated essays that address every aspect of Fenton's career, as well as a comprehensive, documented chronology."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume covers one of the most influential buildings of the 19th century. Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace was the first public building to omit references to the past. Amid the historicist debates and battle of the styles of mid-19th-century Britain, Paxton's design was rational and straightforward.