Inside the glass conservatory

Text 1: The Conservatory by the River, by Augusta Fenwick

An original diary written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

March 14th. Papa took me today to see the great conservatory that is rising beside the river, and I have not yet recovered my breath. From the end of the road it looked like nothing so much as a skeleton: rib upon rib of iron, curving up out of the mud and meeting high overhead, with the grey sky showing through every gap. Men crawled along the ribs like flies upon the bones of some enormous beast.

Close to, the noise was dreadful. Hammers rang on every side; a steam engine coughed and wheezed beside the gate; carts of glass, packed in straw, groaned in through the mud one after another, each pane wrapped as tenderly as an infant. Papa says there will be three hundred thousand of them. I tried to imagine so many windows and could not.

Then the foreman, a cheerful red-faced man, led us into the finished end, where the glazing is complete, and I stood still and stared. It was like walking into the inside of a soap bubble. The light came down from every direction at once, clean and white and shivering, and the iron, which outside had seemed so heavy and black, was here as slender as the stems of flowers. Two young palms, newly planted, lifted their fans towards the roof as if they could not believe their good fortune. Even the sparrows that had got in seemed astonished, and flew up and down the length of it, chattering.

Papa says it is the marvel of the age. Mrs Harcourt says it will fall down in the first strong wind.

I think I do not care which of them is right. I have stood inside the sky, and nobody can take that from me.

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