The level of interest in ‘improvement’ throughout society was reflected in the RSA’s membership. Within a few years the numbers belonging to this once clubby club had spiralled up to 2,500, mainly composed of the upper reaches of society, as evinced by a minimum subscription of 2 guineas (with a request for 3 if possible, while peers were expected to live up to their station by paying 5 guineas. Life membership was 20 guineas). The club was for the benefit of the lower orders, but they were not expected to be members. Less than a decade after William Shipley’s crusading pamphet the club’s annual income had risen to more than £4,500, and in that first decade total receipts came to more than £22,000, of which £8,496 had been spent on prizes, £3,507 on special grants, and £291 on art exhibitions. Subcommittees had been set up for agriculture, chemistry and the ‘polite arts’ (that is, drawing, modelling, etching, medallion- and cameo-making), as well as for manufacturing, technology and for matters relating to the colonies and to trade, and were distributing prizes in their own fields.
But the first run of popularity could not be sustained, and by the 1840s the Society was losing members. It was re-formed first as the Society of Arts, and then, in 1847, as the Royal Society of Arts. It began once more to mount exhibitions, this time as a money-making exercise. In 1844 Prince Albert became the club’s president, but when the secretary, Francis Whishaw, attempted to interest him in an annual exhibition, of which he would be patron, he responded in a very non-committal fashion. Whishaw ploughed ahead nonetheless, and put together a committee that included Francis Fuller, Charles W. Dilke and Robert Stephenson. Except for Henry Cole, who was yet to appear on the scene, the men who were to become the prime movers of the Great Exhibition were now all in place.
It was generally agreed by successful middle-class men of taste that the main problem for industry and manufacture in general was the lack of an equivalent level of taste in the consumer to whom the resulting goods were being sold. Rather than producing goods to suit low tastes, they saw it as their job to improve the taste of the common man. The 1847 catalogue for an exhibition held by the Society spelled out their views:
It is a universal complaint among manufacturers that the taste for good art does not exist in sufficient extent to reward them for the cost of producing superior works; that the public prefers the vulgar, the gaudy, the ugly even, to the beautiful and perfect.
We are persuaded that, if artistic manufactures are not appreciated, it is because they are not widely enough known. We believe that when works of high merit, of British origin, are brought forward they will be thoroughly appreciated and thoroughly enjoyed. We believe that this exhibition, when thrown open gratuitously to all, will tend to improve the public taste.12
Even before this catalogue appeared, Henry Cole was on board and was already a prime mover in these improving exhibitions. He had joined the society only two years before, after designing a tea service as a prize submission under the pseudonym Felix Summerly. His submission had received the ultimate accolade: a prize, the commercial manufacture of his design, and, further, the purchase of the original service by Prince Albert. Cole was one of those Victorian powerhouses who produced so much, in so many fields, that it is hard to know when he slept. After a humble beginning as one of several clerks in the Record Commission, a junior civil-service post, he fell out with his superior over his pay. Instead of resigning, he promptly exposed his department as a haven for corruption and sinecures. After a lengthy investigation, Parliament found that he was in the right and in 1838 he was reinstated in the department at a more senior level. That same year he was seconded to help Rowland Hill with the creation of what shortly would become the new penny postage system. In the 1840s Cole became even busier: he designed what was probably the first Christmas card (see pp. 483—7); he wrote guidebooks to various tourist sights, including the National Gallery, Westminster Abbey and Hampton Court; as Felix Summerly he began to design domestic wares for manufacture; he wrote children’s books which from 1841 were published as the Home Treasury and were illustrated by the leading illustrators of the day; he designed for manufacture children’s toys that included building blocks, ‘geometrically made, one-eighth of the size of real bricks; with Plans and Elevations’, a ‘Tesselated Pastime’ that was ‘formed out of Minton’s Mosaics with Book of Patterns’, and, what may have been the first paintbox for children, a ‘Colour Box for Little Painters’, which, it boasted, held ‘the ten best colours; Slabs and Brushes; Hints and Directions and Specimens of Mixed Tints’.13 In his spare moments he contributed regularly to several periodicals, carrying on his various reforming campaigns in the press and by pamphlets.
One of his campaigns was for railway reform, and it was this that moved him into the next great phase of his life. John Scott Russell, his fellow campaigner, a railway engineer and the editor of the Railway Chronicle, introduced him to the Society of Arts in 1845. By 1846 he was on the committee, and he and Russell had been asked to mount the next exhibition. Russell had earlier put up £50 ‘for a series of models and designs for useful objects calculated to improve general taste’, but not enough people had entered to permit the entries to be exhibited. Cole’s and Russell’s 1847 exhibition faced the same problem: manufacturers, fearing piracy of technique and style, did not want to have their products displayed. But Russell and Cole were determined to draw in enough entries for a good exhibition, and when they managed to attract over 20,000 visitors many manufacturers realized that the enormous potential for sales and promotion far outweighed the slight risk that industrial secrets might be stolen. The following year, instead of scratching around for entries, the Society was forced to devise rules that would limit the number of entries flooding in; this time, 70,000 people flocked to see what was new, what was different, what was interesting.
With that success under his belt, Cole moved on to his next campaign: the staging of another improving exhibition, but this time on a national scale. Albert was even less enthusiastic than he had been with Whishaw three years earlier, refusing either to become involved himself or to approach the government for any formal involvement. Cole was not daunted—Cole was never daunted. The RSA had highlighted the lack of good industrial and domestic design in the country in general, and from commercial manufacturers in particular. Now Cole became involved with a buoyant and popular campaign to promote new schools of design, to be run under government aegis, founding the Journal of Design to promote his cause. A parliamentary commission was set up, loaded with Cole-ites. By the kind of coincidence that Cole was pre-eminent in engineering, its plan—the reform of design and manufacture, and the role of the state in fostering that reform—was exactly what Cole intended his next, national, exhibition should deal with. In the meantime his 1849 RSA exhibition was even more successful than the previous two: Prince Albert agreed to present the prizes, and Queen Victoria gave sovereign approval by loaning an item for display.
For Cole’s grander plan, however, the government, in the way of governments in all places and at all times, offered merely lukewarm enthusiasm—and even that only if private sponsors could be found to guarantee that the costs would be covered. But Albert, sensing the momentum, was now ready to come on board. A Royal Commission was established, with Albert as honorary president, and Cole—never one for half measures—widened the Exhibition’s scope to include the entire world. Thomas Cubitt, the greatest speculative builder of his age, had given a rough estimate for the cost of realizing Cole’s dream: £50,000 for the building costs and £5,000 for administrative costs, with another £20,000 needed for prize money.* A Mr Fuller put up £10,000 for prizes, and the Messrs Munday committed to underwriting the project in return for a percentage of the gate money.
While