It must be a thing which schoolteachers put to themselves every day, how to balance entertainment and instruction. The ability of the entertainment industry to educate has recently been called into question in relation to the latest Jurassic Park offering, by people espousing the theory that dinosaurs had feathers. The producers of this film may well have feared that audiences would experience recognition problems with feathered dinosaurs. In the mid-nineteenth century levels of high-mindedness were such that the directors of the Sydenham Crystal Palace took the risk of alienating their audience by displaying the artistic equivalent of such a beast, a polychrome plaster version of the Parthenon frieze, in which, not only all the missing parts had been filled in, but to which colours had been supplied by the modern artistic imagination.

The Crystal Palace, with which this rather brilliant book deals, was not the 1851 Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations in Hyde Park, but Paxton's building recycled, with extensive architectural modifications on London's fringe, as a sort of universal museum, or visual encyclopaedia, using plaster and other reproductive materials, rather than priceless originals. As such the Palace re-opened in 1854, much of it surviving until the fire of 1936. The book is a skilful exercise in the use of reception theory, in which, in this case, reception bears multiple connotations, including both the reception of classical sculpture by the directors of the Palace as curators, the response to it of their public and in the longer term that of a number of cultural historians. In the age before popular tourism, the public which visited the Palace was a comparatively wide one, consisting in large part of people whose social and economic circumstances would have deprived them hitherto of any chance to experience ancient statuary.

The inclusion of the ‘good-as-new’ Parthenon frieze was exceptional in its cutting-edge quality for, on the whole, as N. usefully points out, what the directors were presenting was a traditional enough view of classical sculpture. They did not disdain those Roman copies, without which, it remains true even today, no comprehensive account of Greek sculpture is possible. There was little sign at the Palace that the Elgin Marbles had toppled from their perches the works which for the three previous centuries had been deemed exemplary. An indication that other period influences from within the European spectrum were giving these supposed paragons a run for their money was in evidence in the lavishly appointed companion courts dedicated to Renaissance and Gothic art, not to mention the unique collection of casts representing the modern European schools of sculpture. N. pays little attention to these, but her concentration on the classical courts pays dividends. The inauthenticity of the Roman copies was known to the happy few, but the extent of what might have been lost in translation was not fully brought home to the world until the publication by Adolf Furtwӓngler, father of the conductor, of his Meisterwerke der griechischer Plastik in 1893. Less intoxicated than Furtwӓngler by whiffs of the authentic Greek, the directors omitted from their display exciting new discoveries from Asia Minor, but, N. claims, by honestly acknowledging the status of the Roman copies in their literature, they made a useful contribution to the debate. For those who did not read the literature, there were four different versions of the Apollo Sauroctonos in the display. Though it was nowhere stated, they had good historical justification for presenting plaster simulacra or, as was the case with the copies, simulacra of simulacra.

The layers of response are picked apart like the layers of an onion, with particular attention to such potentially risible subjects as the nudity question, and the famous bishops’ letter, which resulted in the placing of fig leaves on the genitalia of the statues. Here was a spectacular confrontation between the Platonic equation of the good and the beautiful, as represented in the minds of the artistic directors of the Palace Company by Greek sculpture, and the belief that exhibiting such things was not wholesome family entertainment. In this section N., who has a good eye for revealingly humorous anecdote, is not distracted from the task of properly analysing the directions from which the outrage may have arisen, with no premature assumption that it was all down to evangelical intolerance of sexual display.

On the one hand, as N. deduces from the rather scanty evidence of working class responses, that section of the public was not necessarily wired to receive the improving lessons intended by the directors. One diarist, perhaps a member of a male single parent family, was delighted to learn from the statues that women were ‘so smooth and soft looking, not all knobbly like boys are’. On the other, this imperviousness undermines any ideologically inspired theories about the Palace being a propaganda machine for the indoctrination of the masses by the powers that be. As one newspaper commented, ‘if ignorance is bliss, the happiest day of his life must be that spent in the Crystal Palace’. The assumption that the Palace was such a machine has been bolstered by the well-known imperialist jamborees which were held there in the twentieth century, and by the juxtaposition of European high art with ethnological tableaux of life in colonised countries. The precedent for the jamborees was set early in the Palace's history with the Peace Fête of 1856, celebrating the conclusion of the Crimean War. However, as N. tells us, the Crystal Palace was a private enterprise, not a tool of the state. Always strapped for cash, its amenities were on offer to any interest group. With a persevering attachment to her central theme, she finds scant evidence that the directors saw modern Britain as an heir to classical tradition as represented in the Greek and Roman courts. Only at the Festival of Empire in 1911 was Roman Britain represented by a reconstruction of the Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, and even this was a contribution by the City of Bath, erected outside the Palace proper.

If anything the book looks like a celebration of the benefits of free enterprise, but first and foremost it is a scholarly investigation, whose readability is prejudiced to a minor extent by an over-emphatic enunciation of the game plan, typical of the university thesis: ‘this question is further examined in Chapter 2’, ‘in Chapter 5 I explore …’, etc. Its scholarly apparatus is on the whole excellent, only let down by a pitifully inadequate index.