Wyld's Great Globe - Attraction

Attraction

The globe was immediately popular; Wyld was a skilful self-promoter and the influx of visitors to London for the Great Exhibition helped in no small part. Figures from the Royal Commissioners showed that admittances to public exhibitions surged in 1851, with some attractions having almost a tenfold increase in visitors; during the five and half months it was open, the Great Exhibition was visited by more than 6 million people. In the first few weeks of the Globe's operation it was seen by an array of "distinguished personages", including Prince Albert (to whom Wyld had dedicated the project), Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington, the Austrian Ambassador and the King of Belgium.

Visitor numbers for the first two years are not recorded, but around 1.2 million visitors were estimated to have been admitted in 1853 (about 400,000 of these were let in for free). A guide to the attractions of London published to complement the Great Exhibition, Tallis's Illustrated London; in Commemoration of the Great Exhibition of All Nations in 1851. Forming a Complete Guide to The British Metropolis and its Environs by John Tallis included an entry for Wyld's Globe complete with an illustration – a magnanimous gesture on Tallis' part considering that he was one of Wyld's competitors – and most reviews of the Great Globe were complimentary. In 1851, only the Crystal Palace received more visitors. Wyld's Globe was said to be a "admirable pendant to the Great Exhibition". The globe was open from 10am to 10pm every day. Admission cost one shilling, but on Thursdays and Saturdays this rose to two shillings and sixpence. School parties were admitted for half price.

Wyld produced a book to accompany the exhibition: Notes to Accompany Mr. Wyld's Model of the Earth, Leicester Square, a didactic tome which imparted the wealth of Wyld's geographic and historical knowledge while extolling the virtues of London, Britain, and the Empire and which doubled up as a sales catalogue for Wyld's maps at every opportunity.

With the end of the Great Exhibition, Wyld faced a drop in visitor numbers; in an attempt to maintain the popularity of the attraction, he began to expand his half-hourly lectures on the Earth to include popular themes of the day. Although the Globe was still turning a profit, Wyld proposed divesting himself of the enterprise, by selling the land and building to the "Cosmos Institute" which would add further buildings alongside the Globe to create a national geographic and ethnological museum on the site. Wyld offered to sell the building and land (figures of £20,000–£25,000 were reported as the asking price in The Observer), and to raise the capital for the purchase and the proposed additional building work the Institute issued 50,000 shares of £1. Plans were drawn up by the architect Stephen Geary for the new additions and for the enhancements to the Globe itself; the Institute calculated that the attraction would turn a profit of £4,000 per annum. The issue of the ownership of the land and Wyld's right to sell was a stumbling block though, and the scheme eventually came to nothing despite a bill proposed in Parliament to establish the Institute's title to the land, and the support of "a number of noble, learned, and reverend names" among them several bishops, the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, the archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard, and the hydrographer Sir Francis Beaufort.

In 1853, Wyld arranged with the prospector John Calvert to exhibit a collection of gold nuggets and precious stones discovered in Australia. The "gold" was later discovered to be gilded lead casts. Wyld started a court case against Calvert claiming that he had been deceived, but Calvert told the jury that Wyld had always known that the genuine nuggets would not be displayed, had overseen the preparation of the casts and had even planned to drum up ticket sales with an elaborate publicity campaign based around a faked robbery, a charge that Wyld vehemently denied, stating that "no one but one who had been the associate of convicts for fifteen years would have ventured to suggest such a question" (a none-too-subtle reference to Calvert's time spent in Australia). The jury in the case was unable to reach a verdict, and while opinions differed on whether Wyld had been duped, it was clear that with topical exhibitions he had found a way to reinvigorate the attraction.

Wyld put on exhibitions on any subject that was in the public eye; among the most successful were an "Oriental Museum" which recreated scenes from life in Turkey, Armenia and Albania with dressed rooms and life-size models (and curiously also featured a model of Stonehenge), and a room dedicated to the Crimean War which featured dioramas by the theatrical scene painter Charles Marshall, and later a scale raised-relief map of Sevastopol featuring model armies which was updated daily to show the troop movements. When a large collection of captured Russian weaponry and uniforms was added in 1855 this exhibit attracted greater attention and was visited by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Among the more outlandish attractions were an Arctic exhibition featuring stuffed polar bears alongside a "living native of the Arctic regions", and the "Earthmen", a pair of pygmies from a tribe of Southern Africa that according to one hyperbolic advertisement "burrowed under the earth ... subsisting on insects and reptiles", but more reasonably were said to shelter in caves and hollows. Lectures on the exhibits and current events such as the Crimean War or the construction of the Panama Canal were held at regular intervals and "guides to knowledge" were positioned in the various galleries to assist and inform the visiting public.