


Diagram of a slave ship

Shopping for fabric

Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'

Textiles from India

Beethoven's sketches

Exhibition of a rhino and zebra

Deciphering the Rosetta Stone

Battle of Waterloo letter

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Peterloo Massacre

Cartoon of a street accident

Shampooing Surgeon

Description of London

Execution of a 12 year old boy

Diary entry on 'The Pillory'

Invention of photography

1832 Reform Act

Tolpuddle Martyrs

Early Chartist meeting notes

Dickens, Oliver Twist

The People's Charter

Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby

Poster for Living Mermaid

The Railways

First postage stamp

Coal mining

Popular entertainments

Engels: factory conditions

Freak show: What is it?

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

The Communist Manifesto

Chartist William Cuffay

The Great Exhibition

Sketch for the Crystal Palace

Woman's magazine

Poverty and the workhouse

London Zoo

Cookery for the poor
Human Exhibition

Mary Seacole

Ship building

Britain's Indian empire

Nightingale, Notes on Nursing

Victorian fashion

Florence Nightingale letter

Coal mining

Mrs Beeton - Lady's maid

Mrs Beeton

Mrs Beeton's Turkey

A Hulk (prison ship)

Underground trains

Alice in Wonderland

Letter from Charles Darwin

City slums

Opening of the Suez Canal

Music Hall

Street sellers

Freakshow posters

Invention of the telephone

Illusionists and conjurers

The textile industry

Victorian farming

Magic show

Circus poster

Victoria's Indian servant

Match Girls Strike

Jack the Ripper murders

Daily shopping

An Asian MP in Parliament

Gladstone: Irish Home Rule

Oscar Wilde on trial

Nightingale Nurse diary

Factory accidents

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
The Great Exhibition of 1851, was intended to showcase the wonders of manufacturing and industry from around the modern world. It was housed in the Crystal Palace, a giant, intricate structure of iron and glass displaying over 100,000 objects. The palace was designed by gardener and architect Joseph Paxton. A copy of Paxton’s original sketch for the building is shown here – it was famously scribbled down on a piece of pink blotting paper while he attended a Midland Railway board meeting.
More than 2,000 men contributed to the construction of the site, which stood grandly in London's Hyde Park. Paxton's ingenious machines allowed 80 men to fix more than 18,000 panes of sheet glass in a week. More than 1,000 iron columns supported 2,224 trellis girders, 4,000 tonnes of iron, and 30 miles of guttering. The flooring was of boards set just over one centimetre apart, so that machines could sweep the dust through the spaces at the end of each day. In practice, the trailing skirts of the women visitors did the job perfectly.
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