The catalogue was produced during the run of The Great Exhibition at Hyde Park in 1851, with Clayton describing how it was their machinery that produced bricks for Prince Albert’s Model House. As the longish title suggests, brick making was only one of the many facets of Clayton’s list of manufactured goods. The upper cover has a topical illustration showing a happy country lass carrying a wheat sheaf and walking down a drained and therefore dry pathway. That view of a country idyll is contrasted with a disconsolate Irish ‘peasant’ seated outside his tumbledown cottage and staring into a waterlogged marsh. A somewhat obvious if misdirected reflection of the recent Irish famine as something due to fecklessness rather than poverty.