Letter from Bernard Collinson on the Opening of the Great Exhibition

Previously unpublished eyewitness letter from engineer Thomas Bernard Collinson (1811–1883) to his mother, Amelia Collinson, written from inside the Crystal Palace on or immediately after the opening day of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1 May 1851. The letter offers a vivid account of the final preparations on 30 April, the overnight "fairy-like" transformation of the building, and the spectacle of the opening ceremony as seen from a vantage point only metres from Queen Victoria and the royal party. This deposit contains a diplomatic transcription prepared by Elonka Dunin in 2025 from photographs taken by the editor at the Caird Library & Archive, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (original manuscript CLS/48/2, Collinson Papers). Lineation, spelling, and punctuation follow the manuscript as closely as legibility permits. No facsimile images are included in this deposit. The transcript forms part of the research corpus for the Collinson encrypted-newspaper-ads decryption project (1850–1855) and supports a forthcoming article currently in preparation for Cryptologia.