Discussion Post: The Yellow Face

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Yellow Face, and the chosen topic is The Crystal Palace and The Great Exhibition.

A few facts:

🔮 The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, or The Great Exhibition, was an international exhibition that took place in Hyde Park in London, from 1st May to 11th October 1851. [Wikipedia]

🔮 It was the first exhibition of its kind: the first international exhibition of manufactured products. [vam.ac.uk] It was the first in a series of World's Fair exhibitions of culture and industry that became popular in the 19th century. [Wikipedia]

🔮 For reasons of price and logistics, the exhibition was housed in a building made mostly from glass—this was nicknamed the Crystal Palace. It was designed by Joseph Paxton, and provided nearly 800,000 square feet of exhibition space. [victorianworkshop.co.uk]

🔮 Six million people—equivalent to a third of the entire population of Britain at the time—visited the Great Exhibition. The average daily attendance was 42,831 with a peak attendance of 109,915 on 7th October. [Wikipedia]

🔮 The exhibits were split between works of art such as sculptures, paintings, furniture and cloth; and also a vast amount of technological inventions from the time, totalling over 100,000 exhibits. [victorianworkshop.co.uk]

🔮 Britain, as host, occupied half the display space inside, with exhibits from the home country and the Empire. [bl.uk]

Just a few of the exhibits: a massive hydraulic press, a steam-hammer ‘that could with equal accuracy forge the main bearing of a steamship or gently crack an egg’, a ‘sportsman’s knife’ with eighty blades from Sheffield, an upstairs gallery ‘walled with stained glass through which the sun streamed in technicolour’, an expanding hearse [so, so curious about that], the Koh-i-Noor diamond, an ‘allegorical’ statue of a Greek Slave,’ in white marble, housed in her own little red velvet tent, wearing nothing but a small piece of chain’ [from the US, of course. We British don’t go in for That Sort of Thing]. And stuffed kittens.

🔮 When the Great Exhibition closed it had made a large profit of almost £200,000, which would be worth about £12,000,000 (12 million pounds) today. The money was used to purchase land beside the site of the exhibition in Kensington on which was built the Natural History Museum, The Imperial College, The Science Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum. [victorianworkshop.co.uk]

🔮 After the exhibition, the Crystal Palace was rebuilt in an enlarged form on Penge Common, at the top of Penge Peak next to Sydenham Hill, an affluent south London suburb of large villas. Various concerts, exhibitions, festivals and shows were held there. In the Crystal Palace’s grounds there was the Italian Garden and fountains, the Great Maze, the English Landscape Garden, and in the park there were ‘33 life-sized models of the (then) newly discovered dinosaurs and other extinct animals’.

🔮 The Crystal Palace stood in Penge from 1854 until its destruction by fire in 1936. [Wikipedia]



Some useful resources:

A day at The Great Exhibition An 11:30 minute video on the Victoria and Albert Museum website.

The Great Exhibition on the Victoria and Albert Museum website.

Great Exhibition Fact File victorianworkshop.co.uk

The Great Exhibition by Liza Picard, on the British Library website: bl.uk (Really recommend this one. Full of interesting information and Ms. Picard is well-versed in the ways of snark.)

The Crystal Palace Wikipedia



Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.

Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.

Comments

[thesmallhobbit.livejournal.com]

The popularity of the Great Exhibition is a testimony to the curiosity of the Victorians. And their desire for first hand knowledge. We may still have the former, but I wonder we've lost some of the latter.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

I'm so grateful we now have the internet - all that information easily available to everyone. (Even when we didn't have the internet at home, I could use library computers.) But field trips are always a positive thing too ^^

[laurose8.livejournal.com]

Well, I do like in this story Holmes being the one to be carried away by a theory, and Watson being the one to say 'go slow'. I did wonder if Holmes had recently had a case incurring a revenant husband, and was struck by the resemblance.

Grant Munro is a winner all right; and I love his trees are always neighbourly kinds of things.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

I think you're probably right that Holmes is making a connection with other cases - either consciously or unconsciously.

And that is a great line ^_^