The Great Exhibition

It was Albert's idea.

"Prince" Albert that is, of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the consort of England's monarch, Queen Victoria, who wrote in her journal, "If only I could make him king!" (“Queen Victoria’s Letters,” Episode 1). And yet, in a very tangible way, she did. In 1851, the Queen placed Prince Albert in charge of the "Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations," a monumentous attempt to curate exemplare of the fruits of the Industrial Revolution from all corners--or, at least as many possible--of the British Empire.

The Great Exhibition Catalogue

The Great Exhibition was as thoroughly documented as it was curated. The resulting four-volume Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851 comprises over 1000 pages of descriptive entries for each exhibitor. Organizers separated the exhibits and the resulting catalog into classes by either country of origin (for exhibits originating from outside the United Kingdom) or raw material (for exhibits originating from within the United Kingdom).

Because the present project supports a doctoral dissertation on the material culture of writing in the Victorian era, its scope encompasses only those five classes that catalog exhibits of objects specifically related to writing, such as stationery, desks, writing boxes, inkstands, ink bottles, and writing instruments. Thus, the top level of the taxonomy of present TEI encoding captures only the introductions to the five classes that contain relevant exhibits, specifically:

• Class 17: Paper

• Class 23: Metal

• Class 24: Glass

• Class 26: Furniture

• Class 29: Small Wares

The Great Exhibition Catalogue further divides each class into subclasses; for example, Class 17: Paper contains a subclass specifically for stationery and another specifically for objects related to the printing industry. Because the present work focuses on the material culture of writing in the context of an author's embodied act of creating text, objects in the printing subclass will not be included.

Future Work

Future work will entail adding encoded items for each of the writing-specific objects exhibited.

Works Cited

“Queen Victoria’s Letters: A Monarch Unveiled—Episode 1.” Uploaded by Videosculptor, 28 Apr. 2016. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7--sZ_kH0pI.