The enduring image of mid-Victorian style is a sombre drawing room with red flock wallpaper, heavy curtains and table covers trimmed with braids and fringes, thickly upholstered seating, and ornaments and knick-knacks jostling on the mantelpiece, on tables and on display shelves. In fact the clutter gathered gradually after 1850, but it was well established by the 1860s.

Mid-Victorian style is often dismissed as lack of style. Certainly it had no single vision, but embraced many visions with eclectic enthusiasm. Yet the numerous unrelated elements making up its cluttered effect were deliberately put together and the result was a recognisable look. It expressed what the newly rich chose to buy, and was the first style to reflect the taste of the broad middle band of society, not its small upper set.

These consumers could find out about the latest available goods from retail shops, from numerous catalogues, and from the series of trade fairs held in British cities in the late 1840s. None of these fairs neared the scope of The Great Exhibition of 1851, which opened the mid-Victorian years on a high note of excitement about design and production.

Antique Collector Magazine

A Design Spectacular

The grandly named ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ was the brainchild of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and Henry Cole, President of the Royal Society of Arts. Its aim was no less grand: ‘To present a true test and living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived.’

And so it did. All that technical skill and inventiveness could produce was gathered into a massive display in London’s Hyde Park, housed in a specially built glass and metal giant designed by Joseph Paxton and named by the magazine Punch the Crystal Palace. There were 14,000exhibitors, half from foreign countries and half from Britain and its colonies. The exhibits ranged from agricultural implements to toys, printing presses to textiles, and sculpture to the glass fountain in the centre of the 1500 ft (457 m) long building. There were fire engines and coffee services, furniture and cast-iron fireplaces, clocks and church vessels. Ingenuity knew no bounds: an extravagant forerunner of the Swiss army knife had more than 80 blades and instruments, and a rubberised cape could be inflated by pocket-sized bellows to become a canoe.

The main focus of the exhibition was manufacturing — and Britain was clearly seen to be at the forefront. Between May r and October II, 6 million visitors saw the exhibition, many of them Britons revelling in the confident view it gave of their country.

Novelty above all

The exhibits were endlessly talked about and discussed in print, and in the long term were to influence design, manufacture and fashion throughout the nation. And yet the great show did not capture the style of its age. The closest it came was in its zest for novelty.

There were some novelties that were ingenious without being gimmicks, for example the screw mechanism on adjustable piano stools and extendible tables. Many contributors, however, anxious for their exhibits to be noticed, took design to startling lengths. Manufacturers keen to show that industrial techniques could equal, even outdo, the traditional skills of craftsmen, piled ornament onto everything — cutlery, furniture, glassware, carpets — with little attention to proportion. Such exhibits were not typical of the goods generally on sale.

Paradoxically, craftsmen working against the tide of industrialization pushed ornament even further towards excess in an attempt to go beyond what mass production could achieve. For example, the Warwick firms of furniture- makers William Cookes and James Morris Willcox made for the exhibition massive sideboards that dripped with deeply carved, naturalistic sculptures of dead game, allegorical figures and scrollwork.

There were also some imaginative attempts to press new materials to old uses. Shellac (secreted by Asian beetles) and gutta-percha (a rubbery resin from South-east Asia) were moulded into inkstands and picture frames to compete with carved wood and papier-maché. The new materials had great appeal to the Victorians, but would not come into their own until there were telephones and gramophone records to make use of them.

The Great Exhibition was not universally acclaimed as a triumph: ‘tons upon tons of unutterable rubbish’ was the verdict given by William Morris — who was soon to succeed with his own concept of design. Mid-Victorian design was at a crossroads. Thrust into a new era by technology, it was not yet bold enough to develop new forms to suit the technology. For the time being it fumbled in the basket of styles that had been recycled for the last 500 years.

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