The Crystal Palace: The Diary of Lily Hicks, London 1850-1851 by Frances Mary Hendry
Noteworthy Exhibition, Noteworthy Book
In continuation of “Girls Week” I want to recommend The
Crystal Palace by Frances Mary Hendry. When I first learned about the “Crystal
Palace” in one of my gardening books, I was fascinated. The Crystal Palace was a huge glass structure
held together with cast iron, built for The Great Exhibition of 1851. This World’s Fair exhibition hall was a
temporary building. It had 293,000 panes of glass and took 2,000 men eight months
to complete. It was a conservatory on steroids! Over 6,000,000 people visited
it! And what’s even more mind-blowing is the fact that this grand glass structure
was only on display for six months before it was disassembled and relocated at
the end of the fair, only to burn to the ground in later years.
I was intrigued and I wanted to
know more. I looked for books about it, but one of the few books I could find that
didn’t seem daunting was this Scholastic kids’ book, The Crystal Palace: The Diary of Lily Hicks, London 1850-1851. Well I bought it and what I got was a “two-fer”—two
for the price of one. This book chronicled not only the building of The Crystal
Palace, but also the life of a fourteen-year-old housemaid in mid-nineteenth
century London. I found it charming and revealing. In this novel, Lily becomes a housemaid in
the home of Joseph Paxton, the man who designed The Crystal Palace. Lily learns the great building was fabricated to present the newest products of the
capitalist economy, accompanied by exotic displays, fauna and flora. When Lily later gets to see it
inside, she compares it to being
inside a diamond or a fairy palace.
As Lily tracks the progress of the magnificent building, she
also deals with the social hierarchy of London society and her role and responsibilities as a member of the household staff. We learn about her
other reality, her own poor family living in the slums. On the one hand this
book gives a glimpse into the opulent world of the well-to-do, and then flips and
shows us the restricted and sometimes tragic world of the lower class. Naturally, since it’s geared toward the
younger crowd, it’s a quick and easy read. But it’s also surprisingly enjoyable
and informative. Don’t pass it up.
Fun Fact: Souvenirs of The Great Exhibition included pictures
of Prince Albert and The Crystal Palace. Visitors could buy gloves with maps printed
on them so they could wear them and find their way around the exhibition. There were also mugs with pictures, tin candy containers, soap boxes, and more.
Happy reading,
Annette
Comments
then that I love fairy tailes, all of them. And i enjoyed
Hans Christian Anderson's Biography book.