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There was so much distinction among clergymen that it is easy to forget that such people were in fact unusual, and that most were more like our own Mr. Marsham, who if he had any achievements at all, or indeed any ambitions, left no trace of them. His closest link to fame was that his great-grandfather, Robert Marsham, was the inventor of phenology, the science (if it is not too much to call it that) of the relation between climate and periodic biological events—the first buds on trees, the first cuckoo of spring, and so on. You might think that that was something people would keep track of anyway, but in fact no one had, at least not systematically, and under Marsham’s influence it became a wildly popular and highly regarded pastime around the world. In America, Thomas Jefferson was a devoted follower. Even as president he found time to note the first and last appearances of thirty-seven types of fruit and vegetables in Washington markets, and had his agent at Monticello make similar observations there to see if the dates betrayed any significant climatological differences between the two places. When modern climatologists say that apple blossoms of spring are appearing three weeks earlier than formerly, and that sort of thing, often it is Robert Marsham’s records they are using as source material. This Marsham was also one of the wealthiest landowners in East Anglia, with a big estate in the curiously named village of Stratton Strawless, near Norwich, where Thomas John Gordon Marsham was born in 1822 and passed most of his life before traveling the twelve miles or so to take up the post of rector in our village.
We know almost nothing about Thomas Marsham’s life there, but by chance we do know a great deal about the daily life of country parsons in the great age of country parsons thanks to the writings of one who lived in the nearby parish of Weston Longville, five miles across the fields to the north (and just visible from the roof of our rectory). He was the Reverend James Woodforde and he preceded Marsham by fifty years, but life wouldn’t have changed that much. Woodforde was not notably devoted or learned or gifted, but he enjoyed life and for forty-five years kept a lively diary that provides an unusually detailed insight into the life of a country clergyman. Forgotten for 120 years, the diary was rediscovered and published in condensed form in 1924 as The Diary of a Country Parson. It became an international best seller, even though it was, as one critic noted, “little more than a chronicle of gluttony.”
The amount of food placed on eighteenth-century tables was staggering, and Woodforde scarcely ever had a meal that he didn’t record lovingly and in full. Here are the items he sat down to at a typical dinner in 1784: Dover sole in lobster sauce, spring chicken, ox tongue, roast beef, soup, fillet of veal with morrells and truffles, pigeon pie, sweetbreads, green goose and peas, apricot jam, cheesecakes, stewed mushrooms, and trifle. At another meal he could choose from a platter of tench, a ham, three fowls, two roasted ducks, a neck of pork, plum pudding and plum tart, apple tart, and miscellaneous fruit and nuts, all washed down with red and white wines, beer, and cider. Nothing got in the way of a good meal. When Woodforde’s sister died, he recorded his sincere grief in his diary but also found space to note: “Dinner today a fine turkey rosted [sic].” Nor did anything much from the outside world intrude. The American War of Independence is hardly mentioned. When the Bastille fell in 1789, Woodforde noted the fact but gave more space to what he had for breakfast. Fittingly, the final entry of his diary recorded a meal.
Woodforde was a decent enough human being—he sent food to the poor from time to time and led a life of blameless virtue—but in all the years of his diaries there isn’t any indication that he ever gave a moment’s thought to the composition of a sermon or felt any particular attachment to his parishioners beyond a gladness to join them for dinner whenever the offer was extended. If he didn’t represent what was typical, he certainly represented what was possible.
As for where Mr. Marsham fit into all this, there’s simply no telling. If it was his goal in life to make as little impression as possible upon history, he achieved it gloriously. In 1851, he was twenty-nine years old and unmarried—a condition he kept for life. His housekeeper, a woman with the interestingly unusual name of Elizabeth Worm, stayed with him for some fifty years until her death in 1899, so at least she seemed to find him agreeable enough company, but whether anyone else did, or didn’t, cannot be known.
There is, however, one small, encouraging clue. On the last Sunday of March 1851, the Church of England conducted a national survey to see how many people actually attended church that day. The results were a shock. More than half the people of England and Wales had not gone to church at all, and only 20 percent had gone to an Anglican service. However ingenious they may have been at creating mathematical theorems or compiling Icelandic dictionaries, clearly clergymen were no longer anything like as important to their communities as they once had been. Happily, no sign of that was yet apparent in Mr. Marsham’s parish. The census records show that seventy-nine worshippers attended his morning service that Sunday and eighty-six came in the afternoon. That was almost 70 percent of the parishioners in his benefice—a result much, much better than the national average. Assuming that that was a typical turnout for him, then our Mr. Marsham, it appears, was a well-regarded man.
III
In the same month that the Church of England conducted its attendance survey, Britain also had its decennial census, which put the national population at a confidently precise 20,959,477. This was just 1.6 percent of the world total, but it is safe to say that nowhere was there a more rich and productive fraction. The 1.6 percent of people who were British produced half the world’s coal and iron, controlled nearly two-thirds of its shipping, and engaged in one-third of all trade. Virtually all the finished cotton in the world was produced in British mills on machines invented and built in Britain. London’s banks had more money on deposit than all the other financial centers of the world combined. London was at the heart of a huge and growing empire that would at its peak cover 11.5 million square miles and make “God Save the Queen” the national anthem for a quarter of the world’s people. Britain led the world in virtually every measurable category. It was the richest, most innovative, most accomplished nation of the age—a nation where even gardeners rose to greatness.
Suddenly, for the first time in history, there was in most people’s lives a lot of everything. Karl Marx, living in London, noted with a tone of wonder, and just a hint of helpless admiration, that it was possible to buy five hundred kinds of hammer in Britain. Everywhere was activity. Modern Londoners live in a great Victorian city; the Victorians lived through it, so to speak. In twelve years eight railway termini opened in London. The scale of disruption—the trenches, the tunnels, the muddy excavations, the congestion of wagons and other vehicles, the smoke, the din, the clutter—that came from filling the city with railways, bridges, sewers, pumping stations, power stations, subway lines, and all the rest meant that Victorian London was not just the biggest city in the world but the noisiest, foulest, muddiest, busiest, most choked and dug-over place the world had ever seen.
The 1851 census also showed that more people in Britain now lived in cities than in the countryside—the first time that this had happened anywhere in the world—and the most visible consequence of this was crowds on a scale never before experienced. People now worked en masse, traveled en masse, were schooled, imprisoned, and hospitalized en masse. When they went out to enjoy themselves, they did that en masse, and nowhere did they go with greater enthusiasm and rapture than to the Crystal Palace.
If the building itself was a marvel, the wonders within were no less so. Almost a hundred thousand objects were on display, spread among some fourteen thousand exhibits. Among the novelties were a knife with 1,851 blades, furniture carved from furniture-sized blocks of coal (for no reason other than to show that it could be done), a four-sided piano for homey quartets, a bed that became a life raft and another that automatically tipped its startled occupant into a freshly drawn bath, flying contraptions of every type (except working), instruments for bleeding, the wor
ld’s largest mirror, an enormous lump of guano from Peru, the famous Hope and Koh-i-Noor diamonds,* a model of a proposed suspension bridge linking Britain with France, and endless displays of machinery, textiles, and manufactures of every type from all over the world. The Times calculated that it would take two hundred hours to see it all.
Not all displays were equally scintillating. Newfoundland devoted the whole of its exhibition area to the history and manufacture of cod liver oil, and so became an oasis of tranquillity, much appreciated by those who sought relief from the pressing throngs. The United States’ section almost didn’t get filled at all. Congress, in a mood of parsimony, refused to extend funds, so the money had to be raised privately. Unfortunately, when the American products arrived in London it was discovered that the organizers had paid only enough to get the goods to the docks and not onward to Hyde Park. Nor evidently had any money been set aside to erect the displays and man them for five and a half months. Fortunately, the American philanthropist George Peabody, living in London, stepped in and provided $15,000 in emergency funding, rescuing the American delegation from its self-generated crisis. All this reinforced the more or less universal conviction that Americans were little more than amiable backwoodsmen not yet ready for unsupervised outings on the world stage.
So when the displays were erected it came as something of a surprise to discover that the American section was an outpost of wizardry and wonder. Nearly all the American machines did things that the world earnestly wished machines to do—stamp out nails, cut stone, mold candles—but with a neatness, dispatch, and tireless reliability that left other nations blinking. Elias Howe’s sewing machine dazzled the ladies and held out the impossible promise that one of the great drudge pastimes of domestic life could actually be made exciting and fun. Cyrus McCormick displayed a reaper that could do the work of forty men—a claim so improbably bold that almost no one believed it until the reaper was taken out to a farm in the Home Counties and shown to do all that it promised it could. Most exciting of all was Samuel Colt’s repeat-action revolver, which was not only marvelously lethal but made from interchangeable parts, a method of manufacture so distinctive that it became known as “the American system.” Only one homegrown creation could match these virtuoso qualities of novelty, utility, and machine-age precision—Paxton’s great hall itself, and that was to disappear when the show was over. For many Europeans this was the first unsettling hint that those tobacco-chewing rustics across the water were quietly creating the next industrial colossus—a transformation so improbable that most wouldn’t believe it even as it was happening.
The most popular feature at the Great Exhibition was not an exhibition at all, but rather the elegant “retiring rooms,” where visitors could relieve themselves in comfort, an offer taken up with gratitude and enthusiasm by 827,000 people—11,000 of them on a single day. Public facilities in London were woefully lacking in 1851. At the British Museum, up to 30,000 daily visitors had to share just two outside privies. At the Crystal Palace the toilets actually flushed, enchanting visitors so much that it started a vogue for installing flushing toilets at home—a development that would quickly have catastrophic consequences for London, as we shall see.
The Great Exhibition offered a social breakthrough as well as a sanitary one, for it was the first time that people of all classes were brought together and allowed to mingle in intimate proximity. Many feared that the common people—“the Great Unwashed,” as William Makepeace Thackeray had dismissively dubbed them the previous year in his novel The History of Pendennis—would prove unworthy of this trust and spoil things for their superiors. There might even be sabotage. This was, after all, just three years after the popular uprisings of 1848, which had convulsed Europe and brought down governments in Paris, Berlin, Kraków, Budapest, Vienna, Naples, Bucharest, and Zagreb.
The particular fear was that the exhibition would attract Chartists and their fellow travelers. Chartism was a popular movement named for the People’s Charter of 1837, which sought a range of political reforms—all fairly modest in retrospect—from the abolition of rotten and pocket boroughs* to the adoption of universal male suffrage. Over the space of a decade or so, Chartists presented a series of petitions to Parliament, one of them over six miles long and said to be signed by 5.7 million people. Parliament was impressed but rejected them all anyway, for the people’s own good. Universal suffrage, it was commonly agreed, was a dangerous notion—“utterly incompatible with the existence of civilization,” as the historian and member of Parliament Thomas Babington Macaulay put it.
In London, matters came to a head in 1848 when the Chartists announced a mass rally on Kennington Common, south of the Thames. The fear was that they would work themselves into a froth of indignation, swarm over Westminster Bridge, and seize Parliament. Government buildings throughout the city were fortified in readiness. Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, blocked the windows of the Foreign Office with bound volumes of the Times. At the British Museum men were stationed on the roof with a supply of bricks to rain down on the heads of anyone who tried to take the building. Cannons were placed outside the Bank of England, and employees at a range of state institutions were issued with swords and ancient, doubtfully maintained muskets, many of them at least as dangerous to their users as to anyone bold enough to step in front of them. Standing by were 170,000 special constables—mostly rich men and their servants—under the command of the doddering Duke of Wellington, now seventy-nine years old and deaf to anything less noisy than an extremely robust shout.
In the event, the rally fizzled out, partly because the Chartists’ leader, Feargus O’Connor, was beginning to behave bizarrely from an as-yet-undiagnosed case of syphilitic dementia (for which he would be committed to an asylum the following year), partly because most of the participants weren’t really revolutionaries at heart and didn’t wish to cause or be part of a lot of bloodshed, and partly because a timely downpour made retiring to a pub suddenly seem a more attractive option than storming Parliament. The Times decided that the “London mob, though neither heroic, nor poetical, nor patriotic, nor enlightened, nor clean, is a comparatively good-natured body,” and, however patronizing, that was about right.
Despite this reprieve, feelings in some quarters continued to run strong in 1851. Henry Mayhew, in his influential London Labour and the London Poor, published that year, noted that working people “almost to a man” were “red-hot proletarians, entertaining violent opinions.”
But even the most hotheaded proletarian, it seems, loved the Great Exhibition. It opened on May 1, 1851, without incident—a “beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle,” in the words of a radiant Queen Victoria, who called opening day “the greatest day in our history” and sincerely meant it. People came from every corner of the country. A woman named Mary Callinack, aged eighty-five, walked more than 250 miles from Cornwall, and so made herself famous. Altogether 6 million people attended in the five and a half months that the Great Exhibition was open. On the busiest day, October 7, almost 110,000 people were admitted. At one point, 92,000 were in the building at the same time—the largest number of people ever to be indoors in a single location to that time.
Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition’s lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes. But most people adored it, and nearly all behaved themselves. During the whole of the Great Exhibition just twenty-five people were charged with offenses—fifteen for picking pockets and ten for petty larceny. The absence of crime was even more remarkable than it sounds, for by the 1850s Hyde Park had become notoriously dangerous, particularly from dusk onward, when the risk of robbery was so great that the practice arose of crossing the park only after forming a convoy. Thanks to the crowds, for just under half a year Hyde Park was one of the safest places in London.
The Great Exhibition cleared a profi
t of £186,000, enough to buy thirty acres of land south of Hyde Park, in an area informally called Albertopolis, where were built the great museums and institutions that still dominate the neighborhood today—the Royal Albert Hall, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Royal College of Art, and the Royal College of Music, among others.
While people tried to decide what to do with it, Paxton’s mighty Crystal Palace remained standing in Hyde Park until the summer of 1852. Almost no one wanted it to go altogether, but few could agree on what should become of it. One slightly overexcited proposal was to convert it into a glass tower a thousand feet high. Eventually, the structure was moved to a new park—the Crystal Palace Park—at Sydenham in South London. Somehow in the process it became even larger; the new Crystal Palace was half as big again and employed twice the volume of glass. Because it was sited on a slope, its re-erection was much more of a challenge. Four times it collapsed. Some sixty-four hundred workers were needed to put the new building up, and it took them more than two years to do so. Seventeen of them lost their lives. Everything about the Crystal Palace that had seemed magical and blessed had oddly leaked away. It never regained its central place in the nation’s affections. In 1936, the whole thing burned down.