The Wise and Their Works: The Legacy of the Great Exhibition of 1851

The Royal Commission of 1851 was set up to organise The Great Exhibition of 1851. Its inception it was to be an international trade exhibition founded by Prince Albert, an exhibition on an unparalleled scale. Its enormous success enabled the Royal Commission to finance today’s Albertopolis – that is the area between Kensington Gardens and South Kensington station, containing the V&A Museum, the Natural History Museum, the many academic institutions like Imperial College, the Royal College of Music, the Royal College of Arts and the Albert Hall. In fact, the prodigious success of the Exhibition continues to finance graduates and academic research.

1851 celebrates the 175th anniversary of the Exhibition in 2026. The men who inspired the Exhibition itself – men like Henry Cole, Sir Robert Peel and above all Prince Albert himself were at the hub of this extraordinary combination of manufacturing, commercial skill and political vision which made Victorian Britain an unparalleled success story.

These men were idealists who genuinely believed that free trade would make the world not only a freer place but one in which their own ideas of decency and parliamentary democracy would be spread: the human race would be at peace, as prosperity spread there would be an improvement in living standards of the poor nations and warfare would be consigned to history.

But – and here is the crux – so many of the values promoted in these relatively early days of global capitalism are now under scrutiny. There are those who question the oral validity of the whole enterprise – then a progressive, liberal dream.

Wilson’s two most successful recent books have been The Victorian Age and his biography of Prince Albert. He says that after publishing these two books, for which he did massive research, he wishes to address what he terms the ‘unfinished business’. What ultimately was the value of the progressive dream of the Victorians and where has it left us today?