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Crystal Palace
 One
Saturday night in 1976, I took Pam to see a movie called The Great Train
Robbery. It told the tale of a gold shipment destined for the Crimea
that was stolen from a moving train just outside London in 1855. The
movie was really well done, and for two hours we enjoyed this story of
Victorian England. As the credits rolled, I saw that the movie was based
on a novel by Michael Crichton. The next day I bought a copy, figuring
that as good as the movie was, the book would probably be even better.
I read and thoroughly enjoyed The Great Train Robbery. Unlike the movie
I could take my time and build an image of Victorian England for my
mind's eye to explore. As I read, a complicated world populated by
snakesmen, screwsmen, and swell mobsmen gradually grew in my head.
Occasionally I would stop reading and have a look around the place on my
own. Well into the story, a meeting takes place at the Crystal Palace,
an enormous and gloriously symmetrical three-story glass building which
once covered nineteen acres of ground in Hyde Park. I had trouble
picturing a glass building large enough to contain mature oak trees, and
when I read on and found that hawks had been kept inside the Crystal
Palace to control the sparrow population, I decided that I wanted to
know more.
The University of Delaware had an excellent library for my kind of
explorations. There I found a book about the Crystal Palace that had
pictures in it from the Illustrated London News. On a whim I looked to
see if the library had any of these old newspapers, and it did! In a
little used periodicals room, I discovered bound volumes of the
Illustrated London News dating back to 1840. I'll always remember the
thrill of that discovery, and the weeks that followed. Every evening I
returned to this quiet nook and read the weekly newspapers from 150
years ago and 3000 miles away. I became interested in the war in the
Crimea and its infamous charge of the light brigade. I watched the
changing fashions and examined with interest the ads for patent
remedies. Most of all I followed how things progressed down in Hyde
Park, where a giant building was rising to house the Great Exhibition of
the Works of Industry of all Nations.
Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, had for years been interested
in the problem of improving the application of art to the manufacturing
industries. His crowning glory was to be an immense exhibition of the
art and manufactured goods of all the nations of the world. This, the
first-ever world's fair, was to be housed in a suitable building in Hyde
Park. There was some opposition to the idea ¾ mostly from those who
decried the destruction of ancient trees to make way for the exhibition
building. Finally the News was able to published a picture of the
proposed building. It looked like a railway station surmounted by a
giant iron dome, and indignant letters started to pour in. As the
opening date for the exhibition drew near, Joseph Paxton, a man with
great experience in building greenhouses, submitted his idea for a
building constructed of iron, wood and 293,655 panes of glass. This
could contain the sacred trees and could also be easily removed when the
exhibition ended. The now desperate building committee accepted this new
proposal, and I read of the week by week rise of the Crystal Palace and
how it was filled with locomotives, statuary, artificial noses and the
vegetable productions of Scotland. Finally on May first 1851, Queen
Victoria opened the exhibition to the public and during the next five
months over six million visitors came to view the 100,000 exhibits
housed in the marvelous glass structure.
The months flew by and in 1852 the Crystal Palace was taken apart and
moved to the London suburb of Sydenham, where it was reerected on top of
a hill and continued to draw enthusiastic crowds. As the Sydenham
Crystal Palace took its place as a sight to see in London, it gradually
disappeared from the pages of the Illustrated London News. Finally in
1860 I stopped reading the newspaper and returned to the Delaware of
1976. Back home among my friends, I had a sense of having been somewhere
and of having seen something extraordinary. Shortly after that I made a
small symmetrical stained glass window depicting part of the palace.
Today this serves as my souvenir, and sometimes when I notice it at the
back of my bookshelf, I remember my first visit to the Crystal Palace
and the Great Exhibition of 1851. |
 
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Books:
The Crystal Palace, Patrick Beaver, London: Hugh Evelyn,
1970
A good introduction to the subject with lots of
pictures.
The Great Train Robbery, Michael Crichton, New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1975
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