Anticipation, Transformation, Accommodation: The Great Exhibition on the London Stage

Abstract

Historians and literary scholars have picked the iron bones of the Great Exhibition of 1851 nearly clean. The story of Prince Albert's involvement with the Exhibition project, the public reception of the Exhibition as recorded in the popular press, the detailed engravings of the building, the objects and visitors that filled its crystal halls, and even contemporary literary allusions to the Exhibition and its associated themes are all more or less familiar to us. Although one might legitimately ask if there is anything left to add to this already impressive collection of critical work on an equally impressive col- lection of material goods, the vast, unplumbed depths of Victorian drama remain a significant void in the critical literature on popular representations of the Great Exhibition. In the most exhaustive of bibliographies of literary invocations of the Exhibition, the contem- porary drama is not to be found. This is not to find fault with any particular critic or research method. After all, the theatre rarely finds its way into discussions of Victorian literature and culture. And there are a number of reasons why. Victorian plays tend to be cheesy in their excesses; few of the plays have ever been considered canonical; much of the material is available only in manuscript form and, in the United States at least, only on microfilm. Despite the scholarly disrepute into which Victorian drama has fallen, the current paper

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