The Threat Of Evolution

Abstract

The ebullience of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was soon shattered, as confidence in material progress and in England’s international preeminence was increasingly called into doubt as there appeared troubling indications that the wealth and power on display were not widely accessible. In 1849 Henry Mayhew’s accounts of poverty in London had begun to appear in the Morning Chronicle, uncovering the underside of that seemingly prosperous city, and further exposés dominated the press in following decades. The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny raised fundamental questions about the benefits of the Empire; and the financial decline coinciding with the American Civil War suggested that England’s hegemony was also declining. Benjamin Disraeli’s 1845 warning about the growing separation between classes spurred intensified concern abut the suffering of the lowest class.