The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 13 January 2011
by Ian Leith
The Crystal Palace, an enormous greenhouse-like glass and cast-iron building in south London has long resided in myth. It was destroyed by fire in 1936, and lives on now in memory and in thousands of photographs taken starting when it was still under construction in the early 1850s. The Palace itself was the offspring of a smaller temporary version built for the London exhibition of 1851. Both structures represented the height of British imperial aspirations in global reach and the latest technology. The palaces were essentially world's fair exhibition halls and displayed the Empire's exploratory reach, as well as its accomplishments in arts and industry. The second building was more permanent, and lasted over eighty years despite being denigrated as ostentatious and gaudy, a mere frame of iron and glass in an age of Gothic revival. Today, if the palace had survived, it would likely have been one of the great world structures, much like the Eiffel Tower, another remnant from a later world's fair.
The Crystal Palace is part of British cultural history, but is much less known outside of Britain. This short book, published by the British Heritage, is just a piece of the Palace's history. Many thousands of photographs and stereo images were taken of the palace. This book highlights a recently-discovered cache of 47 photographs by Philip H. Delamotte, a photographer and artist who was closely associated with the palace's construction and publicity in the 1850s. The book reads like a basic overview for tourists (though there is no longer any significant remnant of the palace remaining today, features and exhibits displayed there can be found around Britain). It assumes some basic knowledge of the Crystal Palace and its place in Victorian history. Therefore, the book can comfortably focus on Delamotte and a few other key figures in the design and organization of the palace. Delamotte himself, along with Roger Fenton, was a pioneer in early photography and considered photography an art at a time when most people considered it only good for basic documentary purposes. So, half the book has short chapters that describe some of the people involved and aspects of the Crystal Palace and how it worked. The book acknowledges that there has been a lot more written elsewhere, so it keeps itself focused on the photography of the old site and, of course, on Delamotte's discovered images. The second half of the book reproduces all 47 of the discovered images. They are well-preserved and reveal a great deal of detail about the Palace and what it must have been like. The entire book, in fact, is lavishly illustrated with scores of images of the Crystal Palace, both by Delamotte and others. The text is a little less spectacular than the images, with a straighforward didactic tone. For those who don't know much about the Palace, this is an eye-opening book, but not very detailed on the history. For those familiar with the history of the Palace, the new images cast some of that history in a fresh light.