Introduction

19th-century England had a complicated relationship with the natural world. At home, lords built their estates as remnants of a fantasised Arcadian age, while the commoners were digging coal. Overseas, colonisers believed in the forceful improvement of human and nonhuman nature, at the same time they encountered environmental impediments and cultural resistance to their enterprise. While ideas similar to that of ‘nature’ had developed in other cultural contexts (Descola 2005), only ‘nature’ became global because its paralleled the colonisation of the Earth by European nations, including England. Thus, as the British Empire played a major role in the construction of our globalised world, so did it play a significant part in the construction of what we call ‘nature’ today.

‘Nature’ is a polysemic term: it refers to a thing, a process, and a set of normative principles (Williams 1976; Hadot 2004); it is an idea shaped by both a succession of philosophical arguments and the material encounter between humans and their natural environment. In early modern England, the reinterpretation of the scriptures alongside the depletion of the forests provided the background for a redefinition of nature as a spiritual entity that nevertheless had to be subdued and managed by reason and scientific inquiry (Thomas 1983). The idea that nature had to be redeemed through the material transformation of the world permeated 19th-century English society, which regarded sceneries and natural resources as many signs of its own moral success or failure in the face of God’s grand design for humankind.

The history of the Crystal Palace, built in 1851 for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in Hyde Park and rebuilt in 1854 as a palace of entertainment and culture in Sydenham, illustrates the complex relationship the English people entertained with the natural world. While some like John Ruskin considered it nothing more than a simulacrum of nature that fostered the death of art (1854) many more regarded it as an act of providence (Cantor 2012) through which humanity could physically and morally redeem itself and thus retrieve its ‘natural’ and desirable order (Schulz 2009). Yet the Crystal Palace was a product of the mines and foundries, and thus relied on the very socio-environmental order deemed to obscure the idea of nature.

Architectural historians have traditionally examined Victorian architecture through the lens of stylistic considerations (MacLeod 1971; Watkin 1979) or in relation to the social and technological contexts from which it emerged (Giedion 1959; Pevsner 1981; Saint 2007; Dobraszczyk 2014). About the relationship between architecture, science, and the construction of nature in 19th-century Britain, Carla Yanni’s Nature’s Museum (1999) is a valuable exception. With regard to the Crystal Palace, architectural history has often focused on technological and cultural matters pertaining to its construction (Peters 1996, 2000; Addis 2006; McKean 1994, 2008; Thorne 2018), environmental control (Schoenefeldt 2008, 2011), and position within the history of glass utopias and world fairs (Hitchcock 1951; Koppelkamm 1981; Hix 1996; Picon 2017). While works in the fields of cultural and environmental history brilliantly discuss the question of nature in relation to histories of extraction in Great Britain (Williams 1990; Rudwick 2005; Mathis 2021), few architectural history have so far addressed these topics together (Ferng 2017; Bierig 2022), which is peculiar for our field, given that, on the one hand, architecture is made from resources such as sand, stone, ores, and mud that are drawn from its surroundings and that on the other hand the way these materials are organised, transformed, and assembled expresses meaning, in particular a meaning pertaining to our place within the natural world. More often, recent scholarship has focused on tracing materials from their extractive site to their destination (Moe 2020; Hutton 2020). While these the offered valuable insights into architecture’s dependence on the socio-economic organisation of natural resources, we may want, in the present article, to take this argument a step further by relating the environmental transformations that predated architectural production to the very idea of nature as expressed through architectural objects and discourses.

As underlined by philosopher of nature Pierre Hadot, writing a history of ideas often amounts to writing a history of contradictions (2004); such an endeavour does not necessarily require that one finds new sources but rather that one examines what has already been analysed in a different way. In reading architectural discourses and the material conditions of their enunciation as two parts of the same dynamic process, I aim to do just that.

1851: The Ideal Order of Nature

On May 1, 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened to the public at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in London. Designed by gardener Joseph Paxton and contractor Charles Fox, although other actors can also be credited for their part in the process (Saint 2007: 131–134), the Crystal Palace was 1,848 feet in length and 456 feet in width, covering 18 acres of ground, and was the largest building in the world at the time. Made of a 24-by-24-foot structural grid, the Crystal Palace could virtually be extended ad infinitum in every direction or at least made visitors feel like it could. Shaped like a basilica without choir or apse, it consisted of a central nave and aisles joining one end to the other, only cut in the middle by the main transept, which encompassed the large elms that were present on site prior to the construction of the Palace. In order to build big but fast, its structure was made of standardised elements (cast-iron columns and girders, wrought iron trusses, and timber for the mezzanine floors and some façade elements) which allowed the Crystal Palace to be covered in glass on the quasi-totality of its façades and roof (Hix 1996: 135–139). Commissioned for elaborating its colour scheme, the architect Owen Jones intended to ‘make [the Crystal Palace] appear higher and longer,’ thus intensifying the feeling that it was nature itself ‘harmonising with the blue sky above the transept’ (cited in McKean 1994: 33).

To many visitors, the Crystal Palace seemed to emerge from the spontaneous organisation of matter and to merge into the atmosphere, like ‘a midsummer’s night’s dream seen in the clear light of the midday’ (Bucher 1851) or something out of an Arabian nights’ tale (Armstrong 2008). But as it rose ‘swiftly and silently … [it grew] yet, with labour, as all the rest [had] been done’ (Little Henry’s Holliday 1851: 15). In many ways, the Palace exemplifies Walter Benjamin’s definition of ‘phantasmagoria’ (1999), as it obscured the very material conditions of its making, that is, the labour and economic subservience of the working class and more or less formally colonised nations. At the Crystal Palace, ‘all that is solid melts into air,’ as Marx famously said in reference to the ideological construction of the bourgeois order (1888 [1848]: 10; Sloterdijk 2005).

Thus, the fairy-tale imaginary that informed the construction of the Crystal Palace helped cement the idea that something yet unforeseen was to be realised. In an 1850 speech, as the planning of the Exhibition moved forward and as England prepared to welcome a crowd made up of people from colonised, allied, and adverse nations, Prince Albert seemed to believe in the aptness of his time and people to fulfil their self-imposed millenarian duty, that is, the redemption of the natural world and its population by means of science and industry: ‘So man is approaching a more complete fulfilment of that great and sacred mission he has to perform in the world. … [Man] has to use [his reason] to discover the laws by which the Almighty governs his creation, and, by making these laws his standard of action, to conquer nature to his use — himself a divine instrument. Science discovers the laws of power, motion, and transformation. Industry applies them to the raw matter, which the Earth yields us in abundance, but which becomes only valuable by knowledge’ (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue 1851: 4).

During the early modern period, English people’s understanding of nature shifted in concert with adjustments in society’s attitudes towards its environment. The fall of the forests left English society wanting for cultivation and wilderness alike and led it to fear scarcity as much as the threats of untamed natural forces (Thomas 1983). In line with these early-modern developments, 19th-century England saw nature as both a commodity and spiritual evidence: one to be reasonably exploited for its riches, in order to fully realise the divine plan for humankind. Printed as an introduction to the Exhibition’s catalogue, Prince Albert’s words perfectly illustrated English perspectives on nature, as, in Francis Bacon’s words, ‘it is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the glory of a King to search it out’ (1850 [1620]: 108). The Exhibition was indeed considered a religious event of the utmost importance; while some challenged the idea that the palace was a sign of the coming apocalypse, many more like Prince Albert championed it as a step towards the salvation of humankind (Cantor 2012).

Steam engines, hydraulic presses, looms, and sewing machines in this perspective were not merely considered utilitarian objects but technologies of stewardship by means of which humankind could capitalize on the natural riches with which it had been endowed by God. Three of the four sections of the Exhibition were devoted to matters of industry, described as different stages of the process of transforming nature: the first section covered raw materials in the form of ‘natural production’, the second addressed machinery and mechanical inventions as ‘agents which human ingenuity brings to bear upon the products of nature’, and the third showcased manufactures as the ‘operation of human industry upon natural produce’ (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue 1851: 23). The ‘peaceful spoils of all the Earth’ described by the Reverend John Stoughton appeared as evidence of humankind’s magnanimity towards nature, though ‘peace’ in this case was the outcome of a battle with the same nature, whose ‘obstinate resistance’ to human desires only proved the sanctity of stewardship (1851: 21). Gathered under the glass roof of the Crystal Palace, technological artefacts were rendered as a collection of divinely inspired objects made by human hands (Figure 1). Organised, categorised, and taxonomised like the plants of the world were in conservatories and botanical gardens, steam engines, hydraulic presses, looms, and sewing machines thus appeared as many specimens of a second nature. Likewise, artefacts in the art section were ‘classified according to the clime from which they come’ (16).

Figure 1

Machinery section at the Great Exhibition, 1851. © Harvard Fine Arts Library.

The Crystal Palace’s evocative potency as a progeny of greenhouse architecture encouraged a reading of the artefacts on display as natural objects. English horticulturists first built ‘hot-houses’ or ‘glass-houses’ for the growth of exotic plants in the 18th century (Koppelkamm 1981; Hix 1996). The structure of iron, wood, and glass, and the heating and ventilation systems of the Palace not only betrayed its origins in horticultural architecture but also its relation to the scientific and spiritual constructions that underpinned horticulture as a practice: the organization of nature through the classification of its specimens, and the necessity of its ‘improvement.’ Paxton had started his career as a gardener to the Duke of Devonshire, for whom he had built various facilities in which exotic fruits and plants were grown, including the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth House. The conservatory proved crucial to the development of the Crystal Palace, as it provided Paxton with a set of ready-made construction details. It was also where Paxton brought a giant water lily named Victoria regia to flower, the first horticulturalist to do so, two years prior to the Exhibition. The veins of its leaf might have been an inspiration for the Crystal Palace’s façade where it meets the transept, under which the very human Victoria regia presided at the opening of the Exhibition.

As underlined by Carla Yanni (1999) and Richard Drayton (2000), botanical gardens, conservatories, and natural history museums can be understood as the many attempts by 19th-century English people to gather and organize all the creations that they thought had been scattered at the fall of Adam and Eve. By bringing the productions of nature and of humankind along with humankind itself under one roof, the Crystal Palace was meant to achieve that task. Indeed, the British people regarded the Exhibition as the expression of a natural order, that of a ‘global family’ finally reunited (Harner 2019). Described as the ‘first peace congress of the world’, by Robert Stephenson, who claimed it would ‘probably go far towards the suppression of wars’ altogether (1851: 1), the Great Exhibition was considered a moment of religious and political communion. While Reverend Stoughton underlined the biological kinship between all the nations, invoking the ‘bond of consanguinity’ among the ‘descendants of Adam’ (1851: 124), many others emphasised the supposedly cultural and moral superiority of the British people, as the first lines of the Exhibition’s Catalog hint at: ‘It may be said without presumption, that an event like this Exhibition could not have taken place at any earlier period, and perhaps not among any other people than ourselves [due to] the friendly confidence reposed by other nations in our institutions’ (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue 1851: 1).

The supposed superiority of the British people could be justified in peculiar ways. In On the International Results of the Exhibition of 1851, Henry Cole posited that British people were biologically cosmopolitan: their blood, ‘composed of all nations’, assuredly was the mixed product of all races, hence safeguarding the British mind from ‘the follies of nationality’ (1852: 522) and freeing it from prejudice. Cole thus maintained that the British people were primed to carry out what Prince Albert considered a God-given right and duty of the British people to unite the cultural and natural worlds under the banner of Christianity: ‘We are met … to invoke the further continuance of [God’s] favour, pledging ourselves not to relax in our efforts to extend to those of our brethren who are settled in distant lands, and building up communities and states where man’s footsteps had first to be imprinted on the soil, and wild nature yet to be conquered to his use, those blessings of Christianity which form the foundation of our community and of our state’ (1862: 131–132).

Thus apparently kin but not equal, nations were construed in relation to their own ‘natural’ tendencies toward art, technological innovation, manufacturing, and/or extraction, which not all nations displayed equally in the eyes of the Exhibition’s organisers. European countries, and more specifically France and Great Britain, were considered to be endowed with all these tendencies, while most of the 32 British colonies were thought to be solely providers of raw materials, such as rubber, indigo, coal, cinnamon, sugar, gold, silver, barks, woods, and flowers. Some like India, for example, occupied an ambiguous position within the British imperial hierarchy in being deemed superior to other colonial peoples for their arts and manufacturing skills but lacking in industrial spirit and technological abilities. Colonised people were only considered instinctual beings subjected to the constancy of change, yet without history, who, like Indians, ‘venerate sciences which they know only by name, and practice arts of which they know not the principles’ (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue 1851: 857). In contrast, the British organisers imagined the British people to be endowed with entrepreneurial skills and the capacity to discover the principles of nature and master its dynamics.

Such was the narrative that justified the authority of the British people over colonised people and lands. Yet propounding the existence of such a ‘natural’ order of humankind and resources required concealing the challenges presented by a hostile environment and the unknown physical attributes of matter. While Prince Albert, Cole, and Stephenson posited in different ways that the Exhibition was evidence of a stabilisation of the natural order, the engineers who worked on the construction of the Crystal Palace had to deal with the instability of working with cast iron and glass, whose physics they had limited knowledge of (Timoshenko 1983).

The Crystal Palace was indeed an unstable structure subject to many incidents over the years until a fire in 1936 led to its final destruction. In February 1851, around 1,000 square feet of glass gave way due to what a reader of the Mining Journal identified as an electrostatic accident (The Crystal Palace 1851). At the beginning of April of the same year, just under a month from when the palace was meant to open, the wind damaged no less than 2,000 glass panes (Editorial 1851). Much has been written about the technical challenges engineers faced during the Palace’s construction in Hyde Park and reconstruction in Sydenham (Wyatt 1851; The Practical Mechanic’s Journal 1862; McKean 1994, 2008; Peters 1996, 2000; Addis 2006; Thorne 2018). Heat variations appeared to be the first threat to the Crystal Palace, as cast iron and glass, without proper assemblage, were particularly vulnerable to such variations. On one of the warmest summer days of 1851, Irish engineer Robert Mallet observed that columns were out of plumb by around two inches at each end of the building, wittily noting that in such a hazardous situation ‘ignorance was bliss’ (The Practical Mechanic’s Journal 1862: 59). Second to the preoccupations about heat variations were those pertaining to the wind, as some considered the iron and glass façade too brittle to sustain the pressure of heavy but not unusual wind gusts. Third, fire came to be a major concern, for early as 1851 the Palace had been described by engineer Richard Turner as ‘constructed for the express purpose of perishing in conflagration, if one stall should happen to catch fire’ (Wyatt 1851: 46).

The collapse of the north transept due to fire on December 31, 1866, and then the Palace’s complete obliteration by the November 30, 1936 fire proved Richard Turner’s point. During the 1854 reconstruction of the Palace in Sydenham, fireproofing had once again been overlooked, thus sealing its fate (Thorne 2018: 47). This apparent disorder of matter was a double-edged phenomenon, as it confirmed the status of British engineers as modern pioneers yet threatened to annihilate the fragile fiction of nature’s immediate mastery as it had been displayed at the Exhibition.

1854: Curative Nature

Despite these technical setbacks, the Exhibition was deemed a success. In celebrating the industrial progress of humankind, the Exhibition inspired the more reformist minds of the time to consider technology as the means of its own atonement, that is, as a way to overcome its own physical and moral failures. In this context, the transparent architecture of the Crystal Palace came to embody such a redemptive process and acted as a catalyst in the development of glass utopias (Dobraszczyk 2014).

Almost entirely covered in glass, the Crystal Palace seemed to many observers to provide an example for the development of medical facilities, in spite of the relative environmental discomfort its visitors had experienced during the Exhibition (Schoenefeldt 2008, 2011). After the Exhibition was over, an anonymous ‘medical man’ advised transforming it into ‘an exclusive resort for invalids’ with water springs and baths (A Medical Man’s Plea 1851: 14). Backed by rail companies, social and political leaders proposed erecting humbler palaces around the country to support ‘valetudinarians and others’ (Extension of the ‘Ferro-Vitreous’ Order 1852). Such projects were not only suggested by anonymous citizens but also by Paxton himself, who published his proposal for a ‘Crystal Sanitorium’ in the Illustrated London two months after the Exhibition opened. Inspired by the design of the Crystal Palace, the building would take the shape of the upper part of its transept. The sanitorium would filter the outer air and enable temperature and moisture control and thereby protect invalids from the ‘atmosphere, and its murkiness and impurity in the neighbourhood of large tows, and especially in London’. Plants would decorate the interior (unlike in the Crystal Palace) providing ‘large quantities of oxygen’: ‘Thus the air will be rendered and kept pure and exhilirating, and the tender lungs of invalids will be stimulated and fed’ (1851a: 11). Paxton subsequently suggested that the Crystal Palace be turned into a winter garden: ‘Supplied [with] the climate of Southern Italy,’ Paxton’s winter garden would be furnished with trees and plants ‘as to give great diversity of views and picturesque effects,’ and incorporate creeping plants along columns and girders. In terms of amenities, it would also provide space for walks and even for equestrian exercise and carriage drives (1851b: 9–10). Thus, instead of escaping the smog by travelling to their countryside home or dreaming of a better life, Londoners would enjoy the healthy atmosphere of the Crystal Palace, which would provide bodies and souls with the same benefits and virtues that nature dispenses.

A group of investors led by Paxton soon established the Crystal Palace Company and acquired the building for its reconstruction in Sydenham, in the south of London. The Sydenham Palace opened to the public in 1854 as a place of education and entertainment. Far from being an object independent from its context, as it is often depicted, the Sydenham Palace loomed over its surroundings, as can be seen in a photograph taken by Emile Zola, circa 1898–1899 (Figure 2). While criticised by the most conservative members of society because it would be open on Sunday, progressive Christians embraced it as a tool for improving moral and physical hygiene among workers. Its bright and seamless environment appeared to provide ‘the natural soil for the germination of moral principles’, a counter to the ‘low, filthy and debased condition’ of London’s working-class neighbourhoods, then considered to be ‘the natural source of corruption, vice and crime’ (Would Parliament Be Justified 1856: 262).

Figure 2

Emile Zola, View of the Sydenham Palace, c. 1898–99. © Harvard Fine Arts Library.

Thus framed, the Palace illustrated a common trope of 19th-century public opinion voiced by religious leaders, hygienists, and engineers alike, namely, that material improvements redeemed not only the body but the soul. Iron was considered ‘a medicine of much virtue’ and a ‘friend to humankind’ (Fairbairn 1865: 15), and glass even more so, its transparency both enabling light to reach interiors and embodying moral and spiritual improvement. Indeed, the Crystal Palace, a direct contrast to the ‘severe, dark and disheartening labour which degrades Man himself into a machine’, had been construed even before its reconstruction in Sydenham as a remedy to the dreadful environmental and social conditions of the industrial era: ‘No more suffocations in mines’, no more subjection to ‘the perpetual evil that wastes man away in foundry’ and that ‘turns youth into decrepitude, makes life only a longer disease, and almost effaces the image of God from the mind of Man’ (Croly 1851: 9).

In his 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?, Russian socialist intellectual Nikolai Chernyshevsky even used the Crystal Palace as a symbolic device for envisioning new relationships between humans and with nature through labour. In Chernyshevsky’s novel, palaces like ‘the Palace at Sydenham,’ loom on the horizon, full of ‘a great many’ living as equals in the land they adapted to their needs (2014 [1863]: 370–371). Technology is not presented as a way to scoop up ‘the peaceful spoils of all the Earth’ (Stoughton 1851: 21) but rather as part of nature’s virtuous productivity; the soil bears no mark of past injuries, nor do minds bear the memory of past sorrows. In fact, death seems to have been erased along with natural unfairness. In the palaces, transparency, lightness, and environmental qualities equal to those of nature reduce the gap between the natural and the human-made world, and ‘people grow old very late’; like plants or comestible fruits, they preserve their ‘freshness’, engaged in a way of life ‘so healthy and peaceful’ that it has the power to slow down, if not thwart, the senescence of organisms (2014 [1863] 371).

The Crystal Palace in the Black Country

The effects of the English Industrial Revolution, as historian E. A. Wrigly notes, were ‘unpredictable, and inescapable’ (2010) and generated both hopeful and pessimistic predictions of what progress might politically, materially, and morally entail. Inherently geared towards the future, the Industrial Revolution nonetheless posed the question of human origins in secular and religious terms alike. Advances in geological science along with the discovery of mineral resources, including coal and iron ores underground, ratified the reformulation of human history as part and parcel of natural dynamics (Gould 1987; Rudwick 2005). Architecture could signify this relationship, as at the London Coal Exchange Building, which was inaugurated by Prince Albert in 1849, architect James Bunstone Bunning used an ornamental repertoire reminding the visitors of coal’s fossil origin (Bierig 2022). As noted by the environmental historian Charles-François Mathis, coal compelled British people to reflect on their own history as one related to antediluvian times: great forests had disappeared and slowly turned into the fuel of British modernity. Recycling the energies of the past was not only considered practical but was also regarded as a duty, one in line with God’s will and the cyclic principles of life in nature (2021: 94–101).

The relationship between progress and deep time at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was made legible through the display of useful mineral resources such as coal, iron ore, and limestone alongside their technologies of extraction. In Sydenham, display turned into story-telling, as the gardens of the Palace featured a ‘geological theme park’ which comprised statues of ‘antediluvian monsters’ (i.e., dinosaurs) and an artificial reconstruction of geological formations (including coal seams). While Paxton is often credited with the design of this geological theme park, it might have been the product of his collaboration with geologist David Thomas Ansted (Doyle 2008). In his Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park, Samuel Phillips described this artificial formation as derived from ‘the peculiar interest attaching to its strata of coal, iron, lead, and lime, all of which have helped so largely towards the prosperity of our commercial nation’ (153). This tendency to relate mineral resources to national wealth and coal to the crystal-like fabric of modernity could not be more obvious as in George Baxter’s engraving The Crystal Palace from the Great Exhibition (Figure 3).

Figure 3

George Baxter, The Crystal Palace from the Great Exhibition, Installed at Sydenham: Sculptures of Prehistoric Creatures in the Foreground, c. 1864. © Wellcome Collection.

A celebration of material wealth and of a new sense of history, the Crystal Palace nonetheless obscured the material conditions through which wealth and historical meaning were produced. Great Britain’s industrial development had turned the land upside down, bringing soot, mineral dusts and other debris out on fields, rivers, and forests. With coal consumption having grown sixfold in the first half of the 19th century, the British economy became the first fully mineral based one in the world. England counted 1,704 colliers in 1850, though that even may be an underestimation. Masses of people moved to the cities to become industrial workers, where they encountered sinister living conditions, the factory fumes intoxicating the air they breathed and ashes covering the land. Unsold coal was burned at the pithead and flushed into the river; heaps of piled-up coal dust formed a new landscape. During floods, coal dust covered the meadows; nitrogen oxides, carbonic acid, and sulfuric acid prevented trees from growing while killing the ones that were already there. Alkalis producers, providing the raw material for glass works, filled the air with hydrochloric acid and hydrogen sulfide. Sewage, coal ashes, remains from dye works, tanneries, and distilleries susceptible of catching fire were dumped into waterways (Simmons 2001). These dreary conditions are famously described in Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Class and Friedrich Engels’s 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England: the working class lived and died in the underworld, in a landscape obscured by clouds of dust and toxic matters. Such was the conundrum: iron and glass appeared as a remedy to the undesired consequences of their own production and consumption.

The intellectuals and clergymen who praised the Crystal Palace for its curative qualities in the material and imaginary worlds alike seemed to forget the very mines and foundries that ‘degrade Man himself into a machine’ had produced its iron and glass structure. The 4,000 tons of iron used to build the original structure may have required 8,500 and 18,000 tons of coal (my estimations based on Fairbairn 1865 and Simmons 2001); the Sydenham Palace, nearing 9,600 tons of iron, more than doubled the demand. Thus, when we consider the additional resources needed to produce 3 million glass panes (Louw 1991), wooden floors, and other features, we can easily say the environmental impact of the 1851 and 1854 Palaces outpaced that of any other structure built at the time.

We cannot know where the coal came from, but most of the iron and glass used for the construction of the Crystal Palace originated in the same region, the ‘Black Country,’ a ten square-mile area west of Birmingham, which came to be known as such in the 1840s for the soot and fumes that obscured its sky and ground (Jones 2009: 22). The main foundry of Fox & Henderson, the general contractor for the construction of the Crystal Palace, located in Smethwick, supplied the light ironwork and most of the cast-iron columns and girders (the company’s office was in London, and it had a second foundry in Renfrew, Scotland, that also provided part of the ironwork for the Crystal Palace and for its reconstruction at Sydenham). The Cochrane and Jobson foundries based in Dudley provided the rest of the cast-iron columns and girders, while Chance Brothers & Co., based in Oldbury, supplied most of its glass panes.

The region perfectly exemplifies the environmental transformations that occurred in England from the early modern period to the nineteenth century and chiefly the transition from an organic to a mineral-based society. While the first inhabitants might have been attracted by good soil conditions and the quality of drinking water, the economic and industrial development of the area owed it to the presence of Carboniferous and Permian formations, ensuring significant amounts of iron and coal (Allen 1929: 28). From the 16th century onwards, the region was known for its scattered communities of smiths and miners. By 1665, ‘within ten miles of Dudley Castle’ there were ‘near 20,000 smiths of all sorts,’ for the nearby forests had provided an abundance of wood, although ‘many ironworks’ then already ‘decayed for the want of wood’ (Dudley 1854 [1665]: 7; Scrivenor 1854). Glassmakers had settled in Stourbridge by 1700 (Allen 1929: 14). With the development of new methods for producing iron and glass that allowed the use of mineral fuel, the transition from wood to coal was fully achieved by 1800.

This transition from organic to mineral energies had effects on the local environment. In his autobiography, topographer John Britton described the area as he remembered it from 1813: ‘From Birmingham to Wolverhampton, a distance of thirteen miles … part of [the country] seemed a sort of pandemonium on Earth — a region of smoke and fire filling the whole area between earth and heaven; amongst which certain figures of human shape — if shape they had — were seen occasionally to guide from one caldron of curling flame to another’ (1850: 68).

Between 1800 and 1850, the yearly output of coal in the region went from 840,000 to around 5,000,000 tons, while that of iron ores went from 60,000 tons in 1798 to 959,000 tons in 1858. The yearly production of finished iron rose to 500,000 tons around 1850, amounting to a third of British output (Allen 1929: 40–41; Hunt, 1855). Popular etchings of the area, such as those of Richard S. Chattock, convey a hellish landscape in which human figures are reduced to faint shadows in the midst of smoke (Figure 4). Coincidentally, the birth of the Black Country coincided with the establishment of the iron- and glassworks that provided the materials for the Crystal Palace: Chance Brothers & Co. established itself in the Black Country in 1824 (when it purchased the works of the British Crown Glass Company [Allen, 1929: 36]), and Fox & Henderson did so in the 1840s. Chance Brothers & Co. counted 1,200 workers in 1852 (Chance Bros & Co. 1924) while Fox & Henderson employed more than 2,000 people before its 1856 bankruptcy (see Baggs et al. 1976).

Figure 4

Richard S. Chattock, Blast Furnaces, Cradley, 1878, published in Sixteen Etchings Illustrative of Scenes in the Coal and Iron District of South Staffordshire (1878).

Industry continued to expand in the Black Country, and the dreadful environmental conditions that predated the construction of the Crystal Palace persisted beyond the 1850s. In his account of his walking tour of Birmingham in the 1860s, the American diplomat Elihu Burritt described the consequences of the region’s industrialization. The extraction of coal and ores in the first part of the 19th century had left scars underground, just under where foundries had been built. The foundations of those buildings and the nearby tenement houses were so unsteady that some had sunk ‘full eleven feet below their first level,’ i.e., below the level of the nearby canal (1868: 179). In contrast, the ‘green borderlands’ of the Country were ‘a highly-cultivated, picturesque country where Nature was in her holiday dress’ (183), not without reminding us of William Wyld’s 1852 depiction of another city, Manchester, from the heights of Kersal Moor (Figure 5).

Figure 5

William Wyld, Manchester from Kersaal Moor, 1852. © Royal Collection Trust.

Thus, the long history of the Black Country offers a nuanced picture of industrialisation in the 19th century: there was no sudden intrusion of the machine into the countryside, to reemploy Leo Marx’s expression (1964) in the English context, but an acceleration in the 19th-century of extractive practices in a region where industry had slowly and gradually developed from the early modern period onwards. Through this lens, Fox & Henderson as well as Chance Brothers Co. appear as the socio-economic heirs of the 16th-century local smiths and the late 17th-century glassmakers who had settled in the area. Likewise, the environmental history of the Black Country allows us to understand the Crystal Palace not solely as a revolutionary event (which it is in many ways) but also as the product of gradual transformations in the socio-environmental fabric of English society resulting in the conundrum that the more English subjects invoked nature, the more it disappeared before their very eyes.

Conclusion

Writing a history of an idea (and even more so that of nature) is indeed often one of contradictions. In spite of the social and environmental disorders it came to represent, the abundance of mineral resources such as iron ore, limestone, and coal convinced the English people in the 19th century that they were chosen by God to undertake his millenarian plan for humanity through ‘improvements’ upon the natural world. Coal, for example, provided heat and comfort and allowed foundries to transform iron ores and siliceous rocks into cast iron and glass. It provided the energy to transform the debris of Earth into a Crystal Palace; in some ways, it provided a symbolic remedy to the environmental and moral pollution it embodied. Like other raw materials, coal was part of the Great Exhibition: ‘In the glass and iron building … we see but the outcome and essence of the force that lies latent in that carbonised block. … it contains the summary of all virtues, the fountain of all power. Everything within reach or sight or thought pays silent homage to its beneficent attribute’ (The Exhibition and Its Building 1851).

The Exhibition made legible the relationship between the Crystal Palace and the extractive landscapes of its making. An inert piece of coal could speak of many worlds; it evoked the cosiness of one’s humble living room, the wealth of the British Empire, and antediluvian forests. At the Crystal Palace, it could appear as the virtuous means of production of every modern artefact as well as the dark stigma without which brightness could not occur in the modern world. Coal was a debris yet it bore the accumulated energy of millions of years of organic decay. The same was true of sand: British dramatist Douglass William Jerrold underlined the redemptive agency of industry in its ability to transform a seemingly vulgar material like sand into the crystal-like panes of which the Palace was made (Armstrong 2008: 6). John Claudius Loudon similarly marveled over the transformation of sand, ‘seemingly the most useless of the debris of our globe’ (1817: 17), into glass.

At the Exhibition, nature was defined in both spiritual and utilitarian terms, that is, as a moral reference and a commodity. While this construction of nature may seem paradoxical, 19th-century England considered the redemption of nature (making legible its principles) to be grounded in its organisation and exploitation (what they tended to called ‘stewardship’). Yet the physics of iron and glass made tangible the ambivalence of progress, revealing it to be an uncertain and far from instantaneous process owing to the existence of natural impediments. As noted by Antoine Picon, ‘matter often resists to who want to use it, beginning with makers and builders,’ (2021: 4), and such was the case here, despite the talent and labour of British engineers, manufacturers, and workers.

Iron is an especially recalcitrant material, as it expands, melts, buckles, and fractures but also slowly yields to molecular interactions with its surroundings. In a lecture titled ‘The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art and Policy’ delivered in Tunbridge Wells in 1858, John Ruskin proposed reconsidering the moral implications of rust. While it was and still is commonly considered a threat, he invited his audience to see rust as the beneficent agent of natura naturans: ‘The most perfect and useful state of it is that ochreous stain. … It is not a fault in the iron, but a virtue, to be so fond of getting rusted, for in that condition it fulfils its most important functions in the universe, and most kindly duties to mankind. … We may say that iron rusted is Living; but when pure or polished, dead’ (1858: 73).

To Ruskin, the inertia of ‘pure and polished’ iron communicates the illusion of permanence and thus conveys the idea of lifelessness. Rust, on the other hand, exemplifies the relationship between growth and decay as it renders change visible and legible, and with change, the cycles of nature that are necessary to life. Thus construed, rust expresses the fundamental function of iron as ‘making the ground we feed from, and nearly all the substances first needful to our existence’. Iron, a ‘fruitful and beneficent dust’ when ‘gathering itself again into the earth’ is life itself for it allows life to be (74). In light of this reasoning, we may understand Ruskin’s argument in his 1854 critique of the Sydenham Palace differently. The Palace, considered by Ruskin in opposition to those ‘low larch huts’ one could find on the grassy slopes of the Simmental (3), did not only embody the artificial manners of modern society but also the misguided rebuttal of decay, and with it, that of life that expresses and reproduces itself through nature as a process of constant change.

The Crystal Palace and the Exhibition were construed at the discursive congruence of different cycles, spiritual and material, pertaining to the redemption of humankind and the transformation of matter. The Palace posited the coexistence of geological and biblical history, monumentality and brittleness, permanence and transience, and growth without decay. Meanwhile, the extraction of mineral resources that predated the Crystal Palace hastened natural processes and only returned waste to the ground. Attempting to reconcile themselves with the principles of nature in redeeming the Earth, 19th-century Victorians aggravated their case, as they threw into the furnace more coal, limestone, and iron ores to produce new palaces of light. Premodern societies understood that nature eludes those who desire to find it (Hadot 2004), yet, at the Crystal Palace, the English people unveiled a more troublesome fact: that humans often degrade nature in their endeavour to possess it.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.