High Victorian design - Dr. Nikolaus Pevsner

'Thirst
for information, faith in commerce and industry, inventiveness and
technical daring, energy and tenacity, and a tendency to mix up religion
with visible success - all these qualities have to be remembered as one
embarks on a conducted tour of some of the exhibits of 1851.'

The
Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace was opened by Queen
Victoria and would attract more than six million visitors. Writing one
hundred years later, Nikolaus Pevsner makes a brilliant survey of what
the Exhibition - 'the final flourish of a century of great commercial
expansion' - offered to posterity as the hallmarks of High Victorian
Design; also as windows into the mentality of mid-nineteenth-century
England.