Transitive spaces: Mid-Victorian anxiety in the face of change

Situated between the Chartist Rebellion of 1848 and the Second Reform Act in 1867, the 1850s traditionally have been viewed as an era of social and cultural peace. The Great Exhibition's declared intended goal of unity---between the world's countries and all classes of British subjects---enhances our contemporary stance that the 1850s were a relatively peaceful period in British history. And yet, the Great Exhibition, apart from its proposed and publicized goal of worldwide harmony was not a place in which the classes of Britain and the people of the world could mingle freely with one another.;While viewed by many as an unrevolutionary period in Victorian history, the years immediately following the Great Exhibition and the mid- to late-1850s were still affected by the cultural, social, and technological changes inspired by the Chartist Rebellion and the Great Exhibition. In the 1850s and through the early 1860s, writers and speakers from Prince Albert to journalists referred to their own era as "the age of transition" or the "age of rapid change." In fact, the Great Exhibition and other non-governmental spaces prominent in popular literature and nonfiction texts of the 1850s are what I call "transitive spaces." They are locations that enhance or illuminate society's potential for social and physical change and ones in which upheaval is met head on and underlined. These sites are sources, demonstrations, and confrontations of mid-Victorian defined anxiety, especially since they are closed-off systems in their own right even though they overlap with the world outside of their borders. The mid-Victorian period with its emphasis on globalization and its cultural apprehension surrounding the potential results of rapid social change allows for these locations to abound.