Pandaemonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers

by Humphrey Jennings

Those who live in towns should carefully remember this, for their own sakes, for their wives’ sakes, for their children’s sakes. Never lose an opportunity of seeing something beautiful. Beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament; welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank for it Him, the fountain of all loveliness, and drink it in, simply and earnestly, with all your eyes;

however, because the machine when tried went a bit and stuck; and I did not find out the impediment till I had dreamt over it properly, which I consider the best mode of resolving difficulties of a particular kind,

For many days before the ‘shilling people’ were admitted to the building, the great topic of conversation was the probable behaviour of the people. Would they come sober? will they destroy the things? will they want to cut their initials, or scratch their names on the panes of the glass lighthouses? But they have surpassed in decorum the hopes of their well-wishers. The fact is, the Great Exhibition is to them more of a school than a show. The working-man has often little book-learning, but of such knowledge as constitutes the education of life – viz., the understanding of human motives, and the acquisition of power over natural forces, so as to render them subservient to human happiness – of such knowledge as this, we repeat, the working-man has generally a greater share than those who are said to belong to the ‘superior classes’.

Went again to the Exhibition; the crowd tremendous; at the time I entered 97,000 persons were in the building: in the course of the day nearly 110,000 – one hundred and ten thousand! Vulgar, ignorant, country people: many dirty women with their infants were sitting on the seats giving suck with their breasts uncovered, beneath the lovely female figures of the sculptor. Oh! how I wished I had the power to petrify the living,

In the opposite direction to that in which the wind was insensibly wafting the balloon, lay the leviathan Metropolis, with a dense canopy of smoke hanging over it, and reminding one of the fog of vapour that is often seen steaming up from the fields at early morning. It was impossible to tell where the monster city began or ended, for the buildings stretched not only to the horizon on either side, but far away into the distance, where, owing to the coming shades of evening and the dense fumes from the million chimneys, the town seemed to blend into the sky, so that there was no distinguishing earth from heaven.