The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display

'The Great Exhibition of 1851', held in London’s spectacular Crystal Palace, was the first world’s fair and the first industrial exhibition. It was also much more, Jeffrey Auerbach demonstrates in this book - the Great Exhibition was the single defining event for nineteenth-century Britons between the Battle of Waterloo (1815) and the Diamond Jubilee (1897). Enhanced by dozens of illustrations, this wide-ranging account of the Great Exhibition reveals for the first time how the extraordinary occasion was conceived and planned, why it was such an unexpected success, what it actually meant to the millions of Britons who visited it, and what it came to mean in later generations.