British Children’s Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850-1914 (Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children’s Literature) by Jane Suzanne Carroll

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‘Remarkable and perplexing items’: Children 
and the Great Exhibition
Between 1 May and 15 October 1851, the lost property desk in the police station 
at the Prince’s Gate, Hyde Park, took in a remarkable number of items. On 14 
January 1852, Superintendent Nicholas Pearce compiled a list of items which 
remained unclaimed. The ‘List of Articles and Money Found in the Exhibition, 
Hyde Park, Remaining Unclaimed in Possession of the Police’ includes
purses (41), keys (285), handkerchiefs silk & cotton (78) and handkerchiefs, 
white (719), parasols (363), umbrellas (72), petticoats (2), bustles (2), eye 
glasses, various (17), opera glasses (2), camp stools (3), bracelets, various (213), 
spectacles (43), catalogues (87), brooches (500), shawls (43), lockets (22), 
penknives (16), pencil cases, ivory fasteners for shawls (10), studs (12), watch 
ornaments (30), shoes and boots (4 ½ pair), silk and other bags (60), silk neck 
ties (131), sticks and canes (97), capes (13), pairs of gloves (101), pockets and 
reticules (76), veils, various sorts (150), thimbles (2), pins (25), bustles (2), 
carpenters rulers (2), clock pendulums (2), tea caddy (1), bayonet (1), toothpick 
(1). (National Archives, Kew, MEPOL 2/106)
These items were lost by people attending the Great Exhibition of the Works of 
Industry of All Nations. These forgotten objects were handed in by well-meaning 
members of the public or gathered by Exhibition staff at the end of each day and 
brought to the police station at the Prince’s gate. There, the items were logged 
and stored, waiting to be reclaimed by their owners.
Pearce’s lost property records offer a counterpoint to the Official Catalogue 
of the Great Exhibition. Inside the Crystal Palace, thousands of items from 
all over the world were carefully selected for display, considered, discussed, 
examined closely by members of the public and the Exhibition jury alike. In 
the police station, a few yards away, a no less miscellaneous collection of items 
had been forgotten, overlooked and abandoned. The distance of a few yards is

all that seems to separate the three prize-winning brooches exhibited by Messrs 
Ellis & Son of Exeter and the five hundred brooches kept in a box under the 
desk in the police station. The Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the 
Works of Industry of All Nations singles out the brooches for special attention 
as they ‘exhibit a great amount of taste, combined with much sensible utility’ 
(1851: 133). They are rendered valuable because of the expensive materials they 
are made from, and because of their uniqueness and beauty. Pearce’s records pay 
no attention to the appearance, value or aesthetic quality of any of the found 
items, reducing them to a mass of unremarkable items.
These unremarkable items can, nevertheless, provide remarkable insights into 
the experience of the average visitor to the Crystal Palace. While the Catalogue 
shows us what was held up as special and valuable, the lost property records 
reveal what was ordinary and quotidian. These reveal that while visitors to the 
Great Exhibition of the World’s Industry came to look at displays of objects, they 
also brought a huge number of objects with them. Some of these items – like 
keys, thimbles and gloves – are small and slip easily from pockets and fingers. 
Others – like bustles and petticoats – seem rather more difficult to mislay and 
raise questions, and eyebrows, about the ways women were using the new, 
flushing, toilet facilities at the Exhibition. The lost items give us some sense of 
how people engaged with the Exhibition: they brought opera glasses and eye 
glasses so they could inspect the exhibits more closely, they brought in baskets 
of food to avoid paying the extortionate prices for refreshments and carried 
camp-stools so they could sit down when they got tired. When the heat inside 
the building became unbearable, they stripped off overcoats and capes, gloves 
and shawls. Faced, entranced, with the marvellous objects on display – tiny silk 
flowers and enormous blocks of coal, wine jars and stuffed animals, a model of 
the human body that expanded from dwarf to colossus at the touch of a button, 
a tiny steam engine that fit inside a walnut shell – ordinary possessions, it seems, 
could be easily forgotten.
Pearce’s lost property records also bear the imprint of people who have been 
forgotten and overlooked in discussions of the Great Exhibition and its impact 
on Victorian culture. Specifically, Pearce’s records reveal the presence of children 
within the Palace. Among the hundreds of items that remained unclaimed were 
two children’s bonnets, and Pearce’s records also include letters concerning 
children who found items and who wanted to claim them for themselves. On 22 
May 1851, twelve-year-old William Dixon of Cumberland Street in Brompton 
found a music holder and a silver and brass part of a French horn. On 27 
January 1852, his father, William Dixon, wrote to the commissioner of the Great

British Children’s Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850-1914 (Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children’s Literature) by Jane Suzanne Carroll