Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Read online

  CONSUMING PASSIONS

  Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

  JUDITH FLANDERS

  London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

  For Andy

  1945—2006

  Wee but mighty

  From the reviews of Consuming Passions:

  ‘Over the course of the nineteenth century, a whole new world opened up to an ever-growing section of the population—a world of retail choice, of travel for pleasure, of cultural and sporting diversion. It is a world explored with much wit and insight by Judith Flanders…The subject is a large one. Flanders, however, is excellent at showing the processes by which this general transformation was achieved…The themes that lie behind the narrative are interesting, and are well drawn out, but it is the details of the story that engage and entertain. They abound on every page…It’s a rich mix’

  MATTHEW STURGIS, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A panoramic view of a society and economy transformed by retail, travel and the production of inessential goods…This excellent study…is a major achievement’

  JANE STEVENSON, Observer

  ‘An absorbing Gladstone bag of a book, from which curious items spill out in delightful profusion, some familiar, some very strange indeed…Flanders always leavens her statistics with descriptions and illustrations which bring her material vividly to life…[An] absorbing and scholarly study of the inexorable rise of consumerism’

  Literary Review

  ‘Tlluminating…This excellent historical account is written with the sort of gusto that characterizes Cole, Wedgwood and the other heroes of Flanders’s book’

  TLS

  ‘A deeply satisfying exploration of how the Victorians pursued their leisure time…Bursting with original research and statistics, it gives a panoramic view of Victorians at play’

  Country Life

  ‘A fascinating look at the birth of leisure. The joy is in the details…Flanders has a real flair for humanising facts by grounding them in contemporary voices. If only all social history could be relayed with this much vitality’

  Easy Living

  ‘Not only a scholarly compendium of facts about the way the Victorians spent their money, but also my favourite bedside reading of 2006’

  JAN MORRIS, Books of the Year, Observer

  ‘Full of fascinating nuggets, this book puts our modern obsession with buying stuff firmly into context’

  Time Out

  ‘A highly accessible [book] which moves seamlessly from one facet of the commercialisation of leisure to the next…The text is rich in reference to contemporary sources, as it is in fascinating detail…[Narrated] with admirable skill and an engaging enthusiasm’

  BBC History magazine

  ‘An authoritative book, to be dipped into with pleasure’

  The Tablet

  ‘Richly detailed…An impressive achievement, authoritative, serious and ambitious’

  The Times

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  1 From Arcadia to Arcade: The Great Exhibition

  2 ‘A Nation of Shopkeepers’: The Eighteenth-Century Shop

  3 The Ladies’ (and Gents’) Paradise: The Nineteenth-Century Shop

  4 Read All About It: Buying the News

  5 Penny a Line: Books and the Reading Public

  6 To Travel Hopefully: Holidays and Tourism

  7 The Greatest Shows on Earth?

  8 Penny Plain, Tuppence Coloured: The Theatrical Spectacular

  9 Going for a Song: The Music Market

  10 Going, Going: Art and the Market

  11 Sporting Life

  12 Visions of Sugar Plums: A Christmas Coda

  Appendices

  APPENDIX 1 Currency

  APPENDIX 2 Department stores (and other large shops) and their opening dates

  APPENDIX 3 Holidays ‘kept at the Exchequer, Stamp-Office, Excise-Office, Custom-House, Bank, East-India, and South-Sea House’

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  By the same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  In 1775, after a trip to Scotland, Dr Johnson wrote, ‘The true state of every nation is the state of common life…The great mass of nations is neither rich nor gay: they whose aggregate constitutes the people, are found in the streets, and the villages, in the shops and farms; and from them collectively considered, must the measure of general prosperity be taken.’1 This seems to be such an unremarkable thought that to us it is scarcely worth saying. But before the nineteenth century it was a radical idea that prosperity, much less the true state of the nation, could be assessed by measuring the quantity and quality of the possessions of the nation’s inhabitants. The idea of a quantifiable ‘standard of living’ was as yet in embryo. By the time of the first ever World’s Fair, the Great Exhibition, held in London only seventy-six years later, the idea that one’s quality of life could be judged by the number of things one owned or consumed had come to be seen as natural: the consumer society had been born.

  One of the ways of measuring the standard of living was by measuring possessions, but possessions did not necessarily have to be expensive or exclusive in order to be valuable to their owners. Dr Johnson’s equation of the state of the nation with the state of common life and the ‘measure of general prosperity’ came towards the start of the era of innovation which today we refer to as the Industrial Revolution, an era that finished towards the end of the nineteenth century, just as the phrase ‘standard of living’ came into general use. The Industrial Revolution calls to mind images of raw power, of steam engines, of coal and iron. But the first, and for much of the next century the most lucrative and technologically advanced, industry spawned by what we know as that revolution was the manufacturing of textiles—all that iron and steel, to create fashionable fabrics, pretty ribbons, lace and other fripperies that could in many cases be bought for a few pennies.

  The Industrial Revolution saw not only the transformation of independent workshops into mammoth factories; it also saw the transformation of small shops into magnificent department stores. The period was one of increased buying and selling generally, and more particularly an increase in the quantity and quality of shops. The expansion of these new stores was frequently driven by new entrepreneurs, who generated previously unimaginable ways to stock them with new goods, new ways of displaying goods—plate-glass windows, gas lighting—and new ways of selling goods—money-back guarantees, advertising, discounts. By the end of the nineteenth century the Crown Princess of Greece was writing to her mother, ‘We spent I don’t know how many hours at Maple & Liberty! I screamed at the things to Tino’s horror, but they were too lovely! No, these shops I go mad in them! I would be ruined if I lived here longer!—Divine shops!!’2 Not only were there ‘divine shops’, but new technologies in transport, from stagecoaches to canals to railways, brought the novelty of newspapers to tens of thousands more people, who could now read about what was available and what could be bought, encouraging them to acquire—or hope to acquire—more and more things.

  But what the Industrial Revolution, and the new technologies that both drove it and were driven by it, produced was not just things—it was choice. Many items that had been undreamt of luxuries to the grandparents, or even the parents, of the children of the Industrial Revolution became conven
iences; less than a generation later they were no longer even conveniences: they had become necessities. Living without sugar, without tea, without cotton, glass or cutlery became unimaginable to much of Britain’s population. Over the course of the nineteenth century, mass production of goods, improved distribution of those goods by new and faster forms of transport, promotion by advertising in newspapers and magazines, and new methods of retailing all combined to produce a seemingly endless stream of things that could be acquired by the consumer. It was not expensive rarities that created the new middleclass world of plenty and ease: it was the small comforts of hot, sweet drinks, or cheap and cheerful clothes—perhaps ultimately better symbols of the new world than all the machinery and technical ingenuity that made these items possible. As Gibbon noted in 1781, ‘The plenty of glass and linen has diffused more real comforts among the modern nations of Europe, than the senators of Rome could derive from all the refinements of pompous or sensual luxury.’3

  But the consumer revolution was not only a matter of things. Commercial entertainment—the selling of leisure and pleasure—was also now accessible to the masses, creating myriad business opportunities. Theatre, opera, music-making; pleasure gardens and fairs; newspapers, magazines, books; holidays and tourism, seaside outings and excursion travel; spectator sports such as racing and football—in the nineteenth century these became available to many, who could increasingly afford to pay for their entertainment. No longer was the pub or the annual or monthly fair the prime venue for leisure. The age of mass entertainment had arrived, and the unruly crowd—avidly, enthusiastically—had become eager customers.

  In Consuming Passions I have chosen to look not at the contents of the world of leisure, but at the containers: not at the literary merits (or otherwise) of books, newspapers and magazines, but at the availability of reading material; not at the subject matter of plays, but at staging and the technological development of theatrical presentation—at lighting, special effects and spectacle; at football and racing not as sporting competitions, but as paying spectator events.

  Of course commercial leisure has always existed, in some form or another, but the masses previously had minimal access to much of it. The Industrial Revolution is often represented as having created a new world of commerce and commercialism; of factory routine, endless grind, and dark, Satanic mills. It did that. But it also brought colour, light and entertainment. This new world is the one I want to visit.

  1

  From Arcadia to Arcade:

  The Great Exhibition

  THE 1ST OF MAY 1851. Prince Albert is on the dais, welcoming the throng to the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Joseph Paxton’s extraordinary Crystal Palace, as it has swiftly been nicknamed, throws off sparks of light in the bright sunshine. The choir sings the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from the Messiah. It seems that all the doubt, turmoil and trouble of the previous decades has at last been overcome: machinery, technology and science are in the ascendant, and will set the world free. Britain, the world’s first industrial society, will lead the way into a glorious future, which can be seen, all mapped out, in the courts and aisles of the Crystal Palace.

  The building itself is a triumph of technology: Paxton’s great innovation has been to design perhaps the world’s first—and definitely the world’s largest—prefabricated building, using in his cast-iron and glass structure principles previously applied only to engineering projects. The Crystal Palace, deep in Hyde Park, is a cathedral to the glories of industry, in which power and steam are deified: a twenty-four-ton lump of coal greets visitors at the entrance, a precursor to the steam engines, hydraulicpowered machinery, locomotives, looms, spinning machines, steam hammers and more inside.

  Earlier that year The Times had reported a speech given by the Prince, in which he had held out an enticing vision of the future: ‘The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention…The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and the cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are intrusted to the stimulus of competition and capital.’1 Others had less exalted ideas. Albert and his supporters and encouragers were concerned with the benefits, both moral and industrial, that were to be found in commercial endeavour, but, in the brave new world of free trade and capitalism, many more were content simply to enjoy, or profit from, the results of those endeavours. The Great Exhibition gave many their first taste of the mass market, a thrilling peek into a future of plenty and consumption. For the Great Exhibition brought with it more than merely machinery. It brought things—tens of thousands of things, things piled high in the aisles of the Crystal Palace; things representing the hundreds of thousands more things that were now being manufactured and could be purchased.

  The organizers of the Great Exhibition had not meant it to be this way. The origins of the event could be found in many converging trends, but the one that was the most distinctive, the most British, was the club. The Goncourt brothers, those nineteenth-century Parisian novelists and diarists, mocked the national fondness for this institution: if two Englishmen were washed up on a desert island, they said, the first thing they would do would be to form a club.2 Certainly, by the eighteenth century, clubs were seen as an integral part of the civilizing process in Britain. Joseph Addison, laying down the rules of urbane as well as urban living in the Spectator, wrote, ‘Man is said to be a Sociable Animal, and, as an Instance of it, we may observe, that we take all Occasions and Pretences of forming our selves into those little Nocturnal Assemblies, which are commonly known by the Name of Clubs.’*3

  Initially informal, sociable outings (the noun probably developed from the verb, from the custom of clubbing together to pay for dinners

  After the closure of the Tatler, Addison and Steele founded the Spectator, which has been called ‘one of the most triumphant literary projects of the age’.4 It was published daily for the next twenty-two months, and transformed periodical writing in England. Addison wrote the first number, introducing the ‘Spectator’ himself—a wry observer of the foibles of polite life—who together with his friends formed a club whose members included the Whig merchant Sir Andrew Freeport, the elderly ladies’ man Will Honeycomb, and, ultimately the most famous, the country squire Sir Roger de Coverley.

  and drinks), clubs gradually through the eighteenth century developed into a fairly constant form: they were on the whole private groups of men (almost always men), who met on a regular if not necessarily frequent basis, mostly in public places such as coffee houses, taverns, inns or pubs, where their meetings were given point by a focus on one specific aim, whether it was recreation, sociability, education, politics, or a shared profession.*

  Soon these clubs expanded further into daily life. Addison wrote approvingly once more: ‘When [men] are thus combined for their own Improvement, or for the Good of others, or at least to relax themselves from the Business of the Day…there may be something very useful in these little Institutions and Establishments.’6 By the mid eighteenth century there were possibly as many as 20,000 men meeting every night in London alone in some form of organized group. And it was not just London that had convivial meeting groups: by the early eighteenth century most provincial towns had a range of clubs, whether county societies, military groups, antiquarian or philosophical societies, or simple social clubs. Bristol, with a population of 50,000 in the 1750s, had bell-ringing, clergy, county, floral, political, musical, ‘Ancient Britons’, Masonic and charitable groups. Norwich, with 36,000 people, had bell-ringing, floral and clergy groups, as well as nine Masonic lodges, a natural-history society, a music society, uncounted sociable clubs, and nearly fifty benefit societies. Oxford had a ‘catch’ club—for ‘all true lovers of good fun, good humour and good music’—Irish clubs, Welsh clubs, a poetry and philosophical club, a bell-ringing club, an antiquarian society, and a number of Masonic lodges, dining clu
bs and social clubs—including the Eternal Club, the Jelly Bag Society, and the Town Smarts, whose members appeared in ‘white stockings, silver buckles, [with] chitterlings [shirt frills] flying, and hair in kidney’†—as well as the more common benefit, political, social, sporting, naturalhistory and college clubs. Even Northampton, with a population of only 5,000, managed a floral club, a Masonic lodge and a philosophical society.7 Though most of Scotland had barely any clubs, Glasgow and Aberdeen had a few, while Edinburgh had more than twenty with an occupational or other aim—religious, social, political, musical, antiquarian—and several that were purely social, like the Easy Club (founded in 1712) for ‘mutual improvement in conversation that [members] may be more adapted for fellowship with the politer part of mankind’.8 It was this thirst for self-improvement that motivated many club-goers.

  By the end of the eighteenth century a change had taken place in some clubs. They became more tightly organized, with more rules, more organizers; they began to link themselves to other clubs with similar interests, for a less localized, more national sense of themselves; and many began to look at questions of social cohesion and discipline. Now it was not simply members whose behaviour was to be regulated by the rules of the organization: those members wanted in turn to regulate the behaviour of others. Charitable bodies, religious and civilreform societies all were set up in the coming years. A number of causes can be attributed to this shift: a series of bad harvests that led to hunger in the country, an influx of jobless immigrants into the cities, and fears of civil unrest; the beginning of the French wars after the fall of the Bastille in 1789; the continued rapid urbanization of society, which brought like-minded men into close proximity with each other, and also with those who were less blessed by worldly goods; the rise of Methodism and Dissenting faiths—all these forces joined together to produce a group of men who thought reform was desirable, and possible.