"Enhanced by dozens of illustrations, this wide-ranging account of the Great Exhibition reveals how the extraordinary occasion was conceived, why it was such an unexpected success, what it actually meant to the millions of Britons who visited it, and what it came to mean in later generations."--BOOK JACKET.

"The book challenges the common view that the Exhibition symbolized peace, progress, prosperity, and the emergence of an industrial middle class. Auerbach suggests instead that the Great Exhibition became a cultural battlefield on which proponents of different visions of industrialization, modernization, and internationalism fought for ascendancy in the struggle for a new national identity."--BOOK JACKET.