Saffron Walden Town Library

Introduction

The Great exhibition of 1851 was a defining moment in Victorian Society. It brought together every important type and process of manufacture then known, at a time when life was being transformed by the Industrial Revolution. The idea of progress, coupled with the growth of wealth and prosperity through manufacture and innovation captured the popular imagination of mid-Victorian Britain.

The Town Library is lucky to possess good copies of many of Exhibition, or produced afterwards as a celebratory record of the event. The Collection also includes Reports of the Commissioners for the Exhibition, and some scrapbooks of ephemeral material collected at the Exhibition itself.

Contents

The Building
Hunt's Handbook to the Official Catalogues
Official descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue
Kitson, Thompson and Hewitson's Locomotive Tank Engine
Waiting for Queen Victoria, and The Inauguration
France and Tunis
Turkey and India
The Foreign Nave and The Transept
Moving Machinery and the Closing Ceremony