Exhibiting Empire in Nineteenth Century Liverpool

“Our Most Beautiful Mechanical Contrivances”

A digital archive

This online resource contains digitised items relating to the history of art, manufacturing, British imperialism, and exhibition culture in nineteenth century Liverpool

Funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, it provides free access to collections material which directly relates to the history of Liverpool John Moores University and its antecedent colleges. This material is currently housed in Liverpool Record Office. A selection is reproduced here to facilitate learning and access, and to preserve materials of historical significance.

Specifically, this collection documents the existence of four public exhibitions or ‘fairs’, hosted by Liverpool Mechanics’ Institution (a forerunner of LJMU) between 1840 and 1861. These exhibitions are likely unfamiliar to audiences today, yet they constituted a significant and formative moment in the development of LJMU as a civically minded institution.

In this collection you can find evidence of the objects displayed and the souvenirs sold. This included paintings, sculptures, and engravings by artists of historical and local significance, as well as anthropological and ethnographical specimens, tools, machinery, and the apparatus of industry.

These exhibitions were intended to showcase the best of Liverpool’s artistic and manufacturing capabilities during the mid-nineteenth century. They also reveal evidence of an institution and of a town favourably disposed to British imperialist objectives at a time when Liverpool was being lauded as the ‘Second City of Empire’.