‘Of all the decades to be young in, a wise man would choose the 1850s’ concludes G.M. Young in his Portrait of An Age. His choice is understandable. Historians and contemporaries have long viewed the middle years of the century as a ‘plateau of peace and prosperity’, an ‘age of equipoise’ and domestic accord. There is little consensus on the factors that fostered the relative quiescence that is best labelled ‘social stability’ and rancorous debate on the contribution of the Great Exhibition of 1851 to this mid Victorian unity.