Abstract
Whether it is apocryphal or not, the story of the exact moment when it was finally decided to hold the world’s first international industrial display has become something of a legend for the Great Exhibition. Henry Cole, a significant member of the influential Society of Arts, and perhaps the key figure in the display’s conceptualization, co-ordination and realization, recalled the incident in his memoirs, playing up as he did so the moment’s dramatic tension.1 With the idea of holding a major industrial exhibition in London having been mooted already, Cole was anxious that Prince Albert, who had expressed guarded interest in the project, should come on board with the organization of the event. A visit to Buckingham Palace at the end of June 1849 was rewarded by a brief meeting with Albert, and Cole was able to pose his most pressing question: “I asked the Prince if he had considered if the Exhibition should be a National or an International Exhibition… The Prince reflected for a minute, and then said, ‘It must embrace foreign productions,’ to use his words, and added emphatically, ‘International, certainly.’”2
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Notes
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© 2009 Paul Young
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Young, P. (2009). The Great Family of Man. In: Globalization and the Great Exhibition. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594319_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594319_2
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