4 - The expansion of Britain

Summary

In June 1829, a remarkable essay appeared in the Edinburgh Review. Entitled ‘Signs of the Times’ it prophesied, in an unusually energetic and compelling style, the crisis facing an industrializing – indeed mechanizing – society. Urban experience was in the ascendant and responding to an increasingly complex, rapidly expanding social machine. Exploring the ways in which traditionally constituted modes of inward reflection, such as religion, were fragmenting under the pressure of speculative and journalistic over-production, the essay feared that even ‘literature’ had been re-organized by the ‘Genius of Mechanism.’ Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Signs of the Times’ has long been regarded as a seminal work for appreciating the onset of the urban, industrial, and intellectual expansion that characterized the distinctive tensions organizing Victorian culture. It needs also to be seen as part of a wider challenge: how should one see, understand, and record the vast material expansion that was being experienced? One answer came in the form of the compendious Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations, the catalogue which preserved for posterity the contents and layout of the great Crystal Palace in South Kensington in 1851. The three volumes might be seen as the triple-decker novel to end all triple-deckers, nothing less than a vast map of mid-Victorian ‘things’ and the machinery that produced them.