Some of us might have thought we knew all there was to know about the Great Exhibition of 1851 – that glorious symbol and statement of Victorian optimism and the idea of progress, which to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, might have presaged ‘the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’. From its success we date not only a high-water mark of political and economic stability, in the shadow of the continental revolutions of 1848, but also the beginnings of an international movement of ideas that fuelled ‘globalization’ for at least a century. The literature on this protean event is vast. Its overall contours seem familiar. Whatever remains to be said, must surely be in the detail; surely, there is nothing more to be said.

Alas, nothing, as Professor Cantor demonstrates, could be further from the truth. From his challenging introduction onwards, we see that closure is premature. Reaching beyond the insights of Jeffrey Auerbach (1999), Peter Hoffenberg (2008) and a host of others, Cantor persuasively argues that the Exhibition must be seen not solely as a celebration of industry, but also as a confession of faith, a liturgy in glass and iron. The cruciform design of the Crystal Palace, a testament to Paxton's genius, has been likened to a ‘cathedral of science’, and in that, not merely a platform for the worship of corporate materialism, but also an inspired commentary on prophecy and scripture – a manifestation of the Tower of Babel and Belshazzar's Feast combined.

Historians of science have often positioned the Exhibition in the mapping of modernity, but in so doing, it seems, we have neglected these layers of interpretative significance. Few are as well equipped as Professor Cantor, with his knowledge of Victorian science and religion, to revisit the hundreds of sermons and tracts stimulated by the Exhibition between May and October 1851. In this largely ephemeral literature, he has discovered a rich seam of response that amounted, in many cases, to a defence of faith and the life of the spirit against the corrosive agencies of modernity and the machine.

Professor Cantor sees no single view of the Exhibition unifying the religious spectrum, but rather competing perspectives reading different messages. What High Church Anglicans saw as a national success, glorifying investment in manufacture and enterprise, evangelicals saw as the essence of ungodliness, foreshadowing the Apocalypse. Jewish leaders were supportive, as were Nonconformist Unitarians, Quakers and Congregationalists. But Catholics were extreme in their criticism, as were those Protestants who saw Catholic plots in the very objects displayed in the Medieval Court. Indeed, the Exhibition exposed a range of issues inflected by contemporary controversies surrounding biblical prophecy, natural theology, missionary zeal, global slavery, papal policy, the responsibilities of imperialism and the blessings of free trade.

All these issues Cantor elegantly summarizes in eight short chapters – first, with an outline of mid-Victorian religious life under siege, followed by a description of the Exhibition itself, and a close analysis of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and secular responses. That different religious persuasions could read different messages in the monument is compelling. If Catholic periodicals condemned the Exhibition as propaganda for English Protestantism, and as a tool of repression, how could Prince Albert's appeal to the universal blessing of ‘divine Providence’ hope to succeed?

A collective invocation of God's blessing on progress in the arts, sciences and manufactures would surely display England as ‘a county of moral and religious integrity, that would be a beacon to the rest of the world’ (p. 125). But not all read from the same sheet. For some, the famous Greek Slave in Chains, by the sculptor Hiram Power, displayed in the United States hall, was an expression of America's wish to end slavery; for others, it was an affront to public decency.

A worse fate befell overtures towards international peace. Victoria's opening speech aimed to ‘strengthen the bonds of union among the nations of the earth’ (p. 64), and this was the goal of the Fifth International Peace Congress that ran coextensively with the Exhibition from July to October. Albert hoped the Congress might usher in a generation of peace, just as the Congress of Vienna had promised in 1815. But his appeals to progress as a pathway to peace were either misconstrued as pacifism, or seen as at odds with the huge class of exhibits (Class VIII) devoted to ‘Naval Architecture, Military Engineering, Guns, Weapons, etc.’, which celebrated the inventions of Remington and Colt.

Still, the Congress gathered energy from the Exhibition, and inspired a thousand participants to see the hand of God in the conduct, if not always in the content, of an international event that managed to escape strikes, riots, epidemic disease, foreign invasion, crashing balloons and even bad weather. Beginning with an invocation by the archbishop of Canterbury, and ending with a benediction by the bishop of London, only a few religious writers, it seems, rained on the parade, by actually questioning the role of the Exhibition in the exaltation of the British Establishment. Professor Cantor is careful to acknowledge that the Exhibition had its casualties as well as its conquests, especially those whose livelihoods were fatally removed from Hyde Park, and also among those who suffered unfairly at the hands of the jurors, failing to gain orders on which they had counted.

Hopes that the Exhibition might herald the coming of a better world were soon dashed. Before the decade was out came the violent rise of the Second Empire in France (1852), the Crimean War (1854–1856), and the Indian Mutiny (1857), soon followed by the Austro-Prussian War (1866), devastating the Pax Britannica and the vision of ‘Locksley Hall’.

But this takes us beyond our compass. Professor Cantor's book joins the mainstream of research on the ‘lessons’ of the Great Exhibition, including cautionary tales of British failures, the strong performance of French and Swiss designers and German engineering (notably in armaments), and the entry of the United States on the stage of world commerce – issues which prompted William Whewell, Lyon Playfair and the Society of Arts to lead enquiries, and which later gave a permanent identity to South Kensington. Into this more familiar narrative, Professor Cantor does not venture, but rather leaves room for others to pursue the role of religion in what has been all too often cast as a secular event. The subsequent history of the Crystal Palace, transported from South Kensington to suburban Sydenham in 1852, and surviving in fading grandeur before disappearing altogether in a fire in 1936, forms a sad coda to a meta-history of hubris. For the generation of 1851, a contested history was, to paraphrase Alan Bennett, not a matter of celebration, but of consolation, just as its proper retelling needs just the kind of care that Professor Cantor gives.