Disagreement with the object and dislike of the tone of the incipient agitation for preventing the concession of a Royal Charter to the Crystal Palace Company, except upon the condition of its gates being closed on Sunday—a desire to vindicate the consistency of many religious people, whose silence might be construed into sympathy with the movement—and the wish to offer a few thoughts on the impolicy, in a religious point of view, of such attacks on the pleasures of the poor:—are, in brief, the motives which have determined the printing of the following pages. The writer believes the ground traversed is firm and solid, though he is unable to beguile the journey with those flowers of rhetoric and gleams of warm fancy with which more gifted writers can brighten their course. Though inexperience in book-making and pamphleteering is no excuse for unsound conclusions, he hopes it may avail to disarm the severity of criticism. Convinced that for the advantage of true religion, as well as its professors, the ideas he has broached require to be freely, closely, and sincerely discussed, he ventures to claim for them candid and unprejudiced consideration. He hopes it is superfluous to state that he has no pecuniary interest in, nor connexion with, the project in question.

The marble halls of the British Museum might seem the natural habitat for classical sculpture, but in the nineteenth century its sombre displays were far from being the only place that people encountered antiquities. From 1854, a rival collection of classical sculpture, comprising plaster casts from major European museums and scaled down architectural features, was on show in the South London suburb of Sydenham, in the Crystal Palace which had housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. By the late 1850s, two million visitors were passing through the glass doors of the Sydenham Crystal Palace each year, more than twice as many as recorded at the British Museum. Many more people, and from a greater variety of social strata, saw the painted cast of the Parthenon frieze in Sydenham than the original in Bloomsbury. Utilizing an extensive variety of archival material, including diaries, scrapbooks and photographs, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace evokes visitor experiences at Sydenham, and examines the discussion that arose around the presentation of classical plaster casts to a mass audience. It uncovers the social, political, and aesthetic role of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture in modern Britain, assessing how classical art figured in debates over design reform, taste, beauty and morality, class and gender, and race and imperialism.

A weekly review of politics, literature, theology, and art.