Indulging in panoramic views provided from the camera obscura of his
Outlook Tower, Patrick Geddes famously conceived of a macrocosmic outlook on Edinburgh’s regional planning:
How can anyone understand this world, not to mention improve it, if he cannot even see it accurately to start with? We must re-educate our eyes so that we can first of all be in more ef fective visual contact with external reality […] every inhabitant from child to patriarch should strive to know what his region contains, not only its wealth of natural resources, scenic beauty, and heritage of culture but the opposite picture as well. (Boardman, 1944: 177–84)
Less familiar is the fact that he also waxed sociological in a microcosmic observation made about the 1886 Edinburgh Industrial Exhibition of which he remarked ‘there can be no better standpoint for an intelligent survey of modern progress than that af forded by an international exhibition’ (Geddes, 1887: 1). Flanked on all sides by model villages, marquees and artificially constructed halls of a sometimes colonial, occasionally imperial and very often architecturally temporary and crude inclination, the layout of industrial, international and civic exhibitions in Glasgow and Edinburgh by the end of the nineteenth century seemed to be somewhat of a contrast with Geddes’ maxims of what town planners now brand ‘regional survey’. Indeed, by the arrival of the 1911 Scottish Exhibition, Geddes’ promises of progressive inspection and subtle sociological introspection appeared more contradictory still. With Scottish exhibitions of this period becoming fast accustomed to exhibiting their locus as a ‘Second City of Empire’, boasting immense displays of industrial prowess and engendering nationalism, there
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is an interesting and unexamined juncture arrived at here in contrasting Geddes’ viewpoints on the micro and the macro.
Building upon this contradictory notion of space, in this chapter it will be argued that it was consumerism of a ‘Celtic’ not an ‘international’ inclination that utilised the vagaries of Scottish and Irish exhibitions from 1853 to 1911 as a vehicle to stimulate economic and civic advancement in both countries. A particular focus will be placed upon Scottish and Irish expositions from 1853 to 1911 in order that the Celtic inclination of these spatial representations be made distinct from notions of ‘modernity’ and ‘spectacle’ noted at the turn of the century by Georg Simmel and Charles Baudelaire concerning continental European international exhibitions.
Interestingly, Geddes’ contemporaries were even less complimentary about the sociological merits of exhibitions. The Saturday Review dubbed
the 1886 exhibition as indistinct from other ‘organised hypocrisies’ of the same ilk which, without advertisement, ‘the sole reason of being of such places’ (Geddes, 1887: 13) would come to be regarded as culturally inert and without civilising ef fects. Whilst it is a testament to advertising prow- ess, this statement suggests that individual attendees’ yearnings for ‘self improvement’, by then a Victorian soundbite, prevailed over any wider establishment of a sense of civic identity in tune with consumer culture in Victorian Edinburgh. It is no secret that both Dublin and Edinburgh bore witness to f lourishing arts and crafts industries between the late 1880s and 1900s. Such increased artistic productivity, combined with increasing literary output made these enterprises part and parcel of the Celtic Revival period which has been long labelled a project of ‘cultural nationalism’ and imperial aloofness. That said, fifty years prior to the Revival, British jour- nalistic accounts of Dublin’s exhibition were decidedly sceptical of the exhibition being in ‘national’ interests. The Illustrated London Magazine
would inveigh against Dublin’s 1853 exhibition, painting it as a wasteful enterprise, contingent upon baf f ling polarities and illusions of guile:
A strange subject for contemplation […] a gigantic anomaly in a land long celebrated for its paradoxes […] within hearing distance of the hammers of the Great Exposition of Industry, there was not a single soul in all that vast assembly which entertained a hope of being able to live by labour in his native land! (Harnett, 1853: 43)
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To add to cynicism over the cultural and consumerist viability of exhibi- tions, there is a perspective of fered in the scant comparative contemporary ref lections on Victorian Scottish and Irish exhibitions which considered these ‘organised hypocrisies’ feeble attempts to trump the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851’s legacy, if not each other. Stephanie Rains’ recent study
Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin 1850–1916 (2008) deftly
agues that following on from the 1853 Exhibition, Dublin’s emergent urban middle classes were poised to become prime movers of consumer devel- opment throughout the city. By physically and economically donning the accoutrements of commodity and materialist progress in a city unhindered by the legacy of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, Dublin’s urban middle classes attending the 1853 exhibition enabled its primary inf luence to be inter- preted in terms of ‘patterns of consumption’ as opposed to ‘self-conscious attempt[s] to stage Ireland’s supposed recovery from the devastation of the Famine’ (Rains, 2008: 489).
Part of the denigration of late nineteenth-century exhibitions as valid sources for socio-economic and socio-historical study in the academy could well emanate from the side-lining of Victorian Scottish and Irish advertis- ing history and consumer studies as uncomfortably unexplored aspects. Advertising and consumer culture are too frequently nudged under the umbrellas of ‘cultural studies’ or ‘heritage studies’ without being cred- ited for their distinct Irish or Scottish socio-historical value. In terms of exhibitions occurring in Scotland and Ireland from the 1850s until respec- tive Scottish and Irish Gaelic Revival periods at the turn of the century, archives in Glasgow, Belfast, Edinburgh and Dublin are replete with exhi- bition catalogues, advertising, photo albums, entry tickets and other valu- able ephemera.1 Given that there is no drought of material to make Celtic connections, what then binds Scottish and Irish exhibitions with socio- historical study, Victorian consumerist enterprise and Geddes’ seemingly illusory sense of modern civic development? What makes cultural analyses
1 Including the collections of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh Central Library, Mitchell Library Glasgow, Special Collections at the University of Glasgow, the National Library of Ireland and the Linen Hall Library, Belfast.
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of Victorian exhibitions worthy of consideration in the context of evolving Celtic identities? Further, must exhibitions in Scotland and Ireland from the Victorian period be considered ‘esteemed’ testaments to empire to risk trespassing on the territory of revered socio-historical and critical studies? Although Queen Victoria patronised exhibitions in the Second Cities of empire, a number of factors would suggest that there is an advantage in exhibiting cultural nationalism in terms of its consumerist edge. Moreover, the study of consumerism and commodity culture acts enables a stronger understanding of Scottish and Irish politically nationalist aspirations. These factors include Ireland’s complex colonial status throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century; Ireland’s lack of industrial development when compared with Scotland’s immense industrial powers and Scotland’s first Home Rule Party, conveniently established under Gladstone in the 1880s when Ireland’s Home Rule bills were being discussed in Westminster.2 If the comparisons and similarities between isolated nationalist develop- ments in Ireland and Scotland are worthy of contemplation, then so too ought to be the countries’ respective tackling of national consumer cul- ture and economic development as exhibited in major expositions. Celtic consumerism was, I will argue, covertly challenged and at times blatantly encouraged in Scottish and Irish exhibitions ostensibly promoting other identities – namely international, industrial, artistic and civic – from 1853 to 1911. A discussion of the origins of mobilised mass consumerism dating from 1853 will provide some background as to the identities on of fer at local fairs in Ireland in the wake of the 1853 exhibition. As Patrick Geddes maintained in the 1890s, moving from micro to macro circumspection of urban and greater national development bodes well for sociological and socio-historic survey. Apparently, town planners and economic special- ists have shied away from venturing to make similar cultural conclusions about the consumerism evidenced in chronological accounts of Ireland and
2 The link between an 1886 split in the Liberal Party over Irish Home Rule and the establishment of Scotland’s Home Rule Party is examined in more detail in Addison, R. (2002), ‘Corporate Images, 1886: Advertising at the International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art’, in Addison, R., Beavan, I., Holmes, H., and Thomson, E. (eds), Images and Advertising, Merchiston Publishing, Edinburgh, pp. 23–46.
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Scotland’s major exhibitions. This is an especially curious omission to make in studies of what was a monumental era of exhibiting progress in Great Britain making the exhibition, as we know it, a fundamental constituent of Western cultural history.