Novelty fair: British visual culture between Chartism and the Great Exhibition

Novelty fair examines mid-nineteenth-century people, things and places generally understood to be discrete and unrelated: urban fairs and the Great Exhibition, daguerreotypes and ballads, satirical shilling books and government-backed design reform, blackface performers and middle-class paterfamilias. A range of new and neglected sources, drawn mainly from popular culture are used to inform the discussion. The pivotal years between Chartism and the Great Exhibition emerge as far more contes...