The World in Glass Cases:

The Crystal Palace in Victorian Print Culture

Curated by Joe Diemer | Robertson Davies Library, October 2025-March 2026

Two weeks after the Great Exhibition opened in London in May of 1851, a contributor to The Times summarized its effects on visitors, writing: “we want to place everything we can lay our hands on under glass cases, and to stare our fill.”¹ In fact, both the Exhibition’s six million visitors and the objects that filled their vision were enclosed in glass: namely, the glass walls and ceiling of architect Joseph Paxton's 990,000 square-foot Crystal Palace, which transformed Hyde Park into a colossal display case from May to October of 1851. During that time, exhibitors from around the world brought raw materials, machinery, manufactured goods, and works of art to London for inclusion in the Exhibition. These objects were assembled into a global display which strove, in chief organizer Prince Albert’s words, to inspire “peace, love, and ready assistance, not only between individuals, but between the nations of the earth.”²

This dream of transparent international solidarity and liberal exchange feels utopian in a moment of when intergovernmental cooperation seems increasingly difficult. However, in the same way that contemporary political rhetoric strives to obscure efforts at decolonization and self-determination by Indigenous groups from Turtle Island to Palestine, Albert’s rosy picture of the Crystal Palace conceals the imperial logic that dictated which individuals and nations were worthy of “peace, love, and ready assistance,” and which were suitable only to be gawked at.

After the Exhibition closed, the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham, where it hosted a series of explicitly imperial exhibitions and fairs. Each of these events took the 1851 Exhibition as a reference point, and each treated the promotion of empire—via a voyeuristic fascination with the bodies and practices of colonized subjects—as an opportunity to shore up faltering claims to British superiority.³ Through these attempts to consolidate imperial power, the Palace retained its status as display case for empire until its destruction by fire in 1936.

Drawing from the Ruari McLean Collection at the Robertson Davies library, The World in Glass Cases critically revisits the 1851 Exhibition’s vision of the glass display case as a transparent, open, and neutral space. Bringing together an assortment of print objects published before, during, and after the event, this exhibition seeks to examine how people, objects, and nations were exhibited within the Crystal Palace as well as how the Crystal Palace was exhibited within Victorian print. As you peruse these (virtual) glass cases, I invite you to meditate on the mechanisms of curation and exhibition on display. What are the cultural values reflected by these necessarily partial representations of the Crystal Palace and its contents? And what are the curatorial values reflected by the transparent barriers that group some print objects together while keeping others apart?

Please note that the broad range of materials included in this exhibition may include historical materials that contain offensive language or negative stereotypes.