A History of Britain 13. Victoria and her Sisters (1 of 29)

A History of Britain

Spring 1851.
The word "Victorian" enters the English language and a very small woman enters a very big building.
She's four foot eleven, yet somehow she fills it.
The moment, so pregnant for the future, seems holy.
Victoria is herself flooded with religious awe.
One felt filled with devotion, more so than by any service I have ever heard.
Neither she nor anyone else has ever seen anything like this building before, a greenhouse the size of a palace, with the difference that this is, from the beginning, a people's palace.
A popular magazine calls it the Crystal Palace.

Its grandest spaces are filled not with courtiers and flunkeys, but steam pumps and locomotives, a huge showcase for Britain's industrial empire.
Just three years before, in 1848, Europe had been torn apart by revolutions.
The government had feared the same would happen here.
As it turned out, other countries had war and revolution, we had the Great Exhibition.
Other countries had barricades, we had the cheerful queue for the turnstiles.
In an era haunted by fears of overpopulation, this was one of the greatest mass movements of people in all of European history.
Six million came to see the show of shows.