Breathless Beasts and Stuffed Savages

This chapter takes the reader deep into the nineteenth-century afterlife of the Classical construction of nature, the wild, and the primitive and civilized, foundational to Victorian ideas of progress and to the nascent sciences that claimed the study of humanity as their own. It shows how the Natural History Courts of London’s Crystal Palace presented the marvels of ethnology and natural history, and how these displays were received in the context of nineteenth-century social evolutionist thought, which was itself built upon Classical foundations such as the account of primitive man in Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Against the Courts’ taxidermic dioramas of ‘savage life’, the ethnological casts displayed to the Victorian public prompted comparative questions about the evolutionary status of the non-European Other, while the ‘primitive’ nakedness of the casts created further parallels with the idealized nudity of Greek and Roman sculpture casts, engendering destabilizing dissonance with the connotations of civilization inscribed in the Classical ideal.

From Extraordinary Success to No Considerable Results: Victorian Music Entrepreneurialism and the Crystal Palace Brass Band Competition 1860–1863

The July 1860 Crystal Palace Brass Band contest brought brass bands out of their heartlands to London in unprecedented numbers, The Times (12 July 1860, 9), lauding its success as ‘quite extraordinary’. This landmark event was repeated in three successive years, but in 1863 it was abruptly terminated, and no cogent explanation has been established for its failure. The entrepreneur organizing the contests, Enderby Jackson, later wrote in his autobiography that other business dealings prevented him from further involvement in the series. Jackson had made full use of his talents and contacts to bring these remarkable working-class musical ensembles to the emergent national attraction that was the Crystal Palace. However, Jackson's manipulation of publicity and managerial style obstruct easy analysis of the contests. Moreover, Jackson later sought to protect his legacy by conjuring a smokescreen in his memoirs to obscure the real reasons for the failure of the Crystal Palace contests after 1863. The entrepreneurial environment is never a stable one, and it should not be presumed that the accolades accorded to the opening contest would translate into its continuance on an annual basis. However, the fact that the contests were attended by many thousands of visitors each year and Jackson's assertion that they were a financial success stand in stark contrast to what is implied by their sudden end. This article demonstrates how close examination of previously unconsidered letters, surviving documentation, and other sources cast doubt on whether the contest series was ever an extraordinary success.

Alfred Russel Wallace and the Models of Amazonian “Indians” Displayed at the Crystal Palace Ethnological Exhibition

This paper discusses Alfred Russel Wallace’s Amazonian ethnography and his collaboration with Robert Latham on the models of indigenous Amazonian peoples that were placed on display at the Crystal Palace ethnological exhibition in 1854. The reception of scholars and the public to this innovative work is also considered. Wallace’s involvement in the first British ethnological exhibition of large proportions was fundamental to the dissemination of his work, which made a valuable contribution to a field of study—the ethnology of South America—that was still in its infancy in Britain, in marked contrast to Portugal, Spain, Germany and France. Wallace’s field observations of indigenous peoples were instilled in the British imagination through the handbook to the exhibition, in which Latham stressed the importance of Wallace’s descriptions to the advancement of the field of ethnology. Indeed, Wallace’s ethnographic accounts were deemed to provide an authoritative supplement to James Prichard’s preliminary and still somewhat limited ethnological map of northern South America, contributing to the creation of a more complete picture of the indigenous Amazonian peoples of Brazil.

Serenade in D Major for Orchestra

Ethel Smyth's first orchestral work, the Serenade in D Major for Orchestra, was composed in 1889 (and possibly early 1890) and was premiered at a Crystal Palace concert on 26 April 1890. The work was received well by the audience and garnered positive notices in the press. This critical edition is based on a photocopy of the autograph manuscript, now in the Royal College of Music Library, with reference also to a fair copy of the score, now in the British Library. The extensive critical notes document the changes made by the composer, as well as editorial and performance suggestions made by both the composer and August Manns, who conducted the premiere performance. The present whereabouts of Ethel Smyth's autograph score for her Serenade in D Major are unknown. The facsimile supplement presents a photocopy of the score that was made, according to the label on the cover, in August 1993, and which is now in the Royal College of Music Library. The introduction to this edition includes a biographical sketch of August Manns, conductor of the premiere performance.

The Reports by the Juries: A Finding Aid for a Publication From the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario

Produced by the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the four-volume Reports by the Juries is illustrated with 154 salted paper prints from negatives by Claude-Marie Ferrier (1811-1889) and Hugh Owen (1808-1897) and document the exhibits and the Crystal Palace building. 137 copies of the Reports were produced and distributed internationally to individuals and countries that participated in the exhibition. This presentation set, which also includes the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, the Reports to the Crown, and a presentation set of exhibition medals, belonged to Sir William Crossman (1830-1901) of the Royal Engineers. A specially designed wooden cabinet houses the set. This thesis project is divided into two parts: Part I describes the process of researching and creating the finding aid; Part II is the finding aid itself, containing ten sections addressing historical background information, photographers' biographies, photographic processes, a complete illustrated catalogue of the photographs, an analysis of the photographs, provenance, and a preliminary list of other copies of the publication in public institutions.

The Reports by the Juries: A Finding Aid for a Publication From the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario

Produced by the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the four-volume Reports by the Juries is illustrated with 154 salted paper prints from negatives by Claude-Marie Ferrier (1811-1889) and Hugh Owen (1808-1897) and document the exhibits and the Crystal Palace building. 137 copies of the Reports were produced and distributed internationally to individuals and countries that participated in the exhibition. This presentation set, which also includes the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, the Reports to the Crown, and a presentation set of exhibition medals, belonged to Sir William Crossman (1830-1901) of the Royal Engineers. A specially designed wooden cabinet houses the set. This thesis project is divided into two parts: Part I describes the process of researching and creating the finding aid; Part II is the finding aid itself, containing ten sections addressing historical background information, photographers' biographies, photographic processes, a complete illustrated catalogue of the photographs, an analysis of the photographs, provenance, and a preliminary list of other copies of the publication in public institutions.

Shape Generation of Bending-Active Braced Arches Based on Elastica Curves

The active bending concept provides a new perspective for a well-established structural type which has been used at various scales: the beam-string, consisting of a beam with an attached lower tie in tension and bracing struts balancing the forces between them. The idea goes back to the gutter beams of the Crystal Palace and has been widely used to the present for large-scale structures. When a slender beam is used, the tension in the tie induces curvature in the beam and increases the structural depth of the system; this opens new formal possibilities and results in lightweight structures at the expense of increasing their overall flexibility. Systems of this kind fall within the realm of active bending. We name them bending-active braced arches. The target shape of the system follows the tensioning process and needs to be pre-determined by means of a specific analysis, typically involving dynamic relaxation or optimization-based methods. In this paper, we propose an analytical method to generate shapes for bending-active braced arches. It assumes that each segment of the activated rod between deviators behaves as a segment of elastica; this enables the use of closed-form expressions to evaluate the shape and induced stress level in the active member. Taking advantage of this idea, it is possible to devise a procedure to carry out the shaping process in a sequential way by adequately choosing the design parameters. When alternative choices for the parameters are selected, the problem becomes non-linear and can be solved using suitable techniques. Some examples with different design constraints have been reproduced to illustrate the possibilities of the method.