It also reflects the specific compression that narrative requires. Four days become a series of incidents; the experience of being inside those four days becomes a structure of problems and resolutions. The texture of what it was actually like — the boredom, the sustained fear, the moments of dark absurdity when someone complimented “William Johnson” on his servant’s attentiveness — is partly in the text and partly lost to the gap between living something and writing about it twelve years later.
## The Great Exhibition and What It Said Without Words
The 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was the largest event of its kind that had ever occurred in Britain. It drew more than six million visitors over five months, from every part of Britain and the world. The American display was prominent; the United States sent exhibits showcasing its agricultural products, its manufacturing, its arts and crafts. It was a showcase of national achievement in the idiom of Victorian progress.
The American display did not include a display about slavery. It included cotton. The cotton was grown, in the American South, by enslaved people who were absent from the display and from the Exhibition entirely — except that Ellen and William Craft walked through the Crystal Palace arm-in-arm with white British abolitionists, in view of the American exhibits, in June 1851.
Lisa Merrill, who has written about the Crafts’ presence at the Exhibition, has examined this event as a deliberate political performance. The Exhibition was attended by people who would recognize the Crafts from the abolitionist lecture circuit, from the newspaper accounts of their escape that had been reprinted in British papers, from the public discussion of the Fugitive Slave Act that their case had contributed to. Walking through the American display in interracial company, arm-in-arm rather than in the spatial arrangements that American racial convention required, was a statement.