Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Page 20
The mainstream daily press was ultimately forced down a similar route. In 1816 The Times printed just twenty-four pieces on sport over an entire year - fewer than one piece a fortnight, and the small space it did give was exclusively concerned with upper-class events: the Oxford- Cambridge Boat Race, Ascot, the Eton and Harrow cricket match (from 1880 the paper unbent enough to employ a journalist as a cricket correspondent). The Daily Telegraph did a little better: it gave 2 per cent of its paper over to sport, although this was rarely anything other than racing coverage. Even the Manchester Guardian, deep in football territory, still gave more space to amateur athletics than to professional sport. Many other local papers, however, understood the link between sport and circulation and followed the example set by the sporting papers in sponsoring events. For twenty years from the 1860s the Newcastle Daily Chronicle supported rowing and sponsored challenges and cups; the Midland Sporting News in Birmingham offered a £70 prize for a 130-yard handicap race, ‘in order to give further encouragement to pedestrianism in the Midland district’; the Dundee Evening Telegraph gave the trophy for the St Andrews amateur golf championship; and the Glasgow Evening Times sponsored an open tournament.96 Before this, the Sunday Times had been the first general-interest national newspaper to think of sport as a major component of its coverage - by 1851 it was promoting itself as a ‘literary, dramatic and sporting’ newspaper - and it is telling that this development came in a Sunday paper. The decision to carry sports coverage or not, and then the type of sport each paper reported on, was entirely class-based. The national working-class weeklies, apart from Bell’s (which, as we saw, soon turned itself into a bi-weekly), barely troubled with sport, and, when they did, sport was interesting only for its potential for gambling. So Reynolds’s and Lloyd’s covered racing, pugilism and athletics - all sports where betting was an essential component. The News of the World gave sport a single column as late as the 1870s, and it too was interested only in racing, and then only for the possibilities it gave for gambling.97
Football, and professional sport more generally, had to await the creation of a new type of newspaper, designed for it alone: the Saturday football special. If Birmingham’s Saturday Night was not the first football paper, in 1882, it was the first that survived for any length of time. It cost 1/2d., and was on the streets from 7 p.m. each Saturday, carrying four pages reporting on that day’s matches. At the beginning there was no confidence that sport alone could carry an entire newspaper, although it definitely drove the scheduling. So Saturday Night advertised itself as ‘spicy without being vulgar’ and contained ‘a first class serial tale, a complete novelette, humorous and spicy paragraphs, three or four columns of local chat, the results of scores of athletic events all over the Kingdom, and everything readable’. By 1883 Blackburn too had its own football special; by 1884 Wolverhampton had joined in; soon Derby, Glasgow, Sheffield and Manchester had their own Saturday-night specials. In 1884 the Football Field and Sports Telegram took the plunge and dropped everything except football, becoming the first sports-only special: it had two pages with the day’s results and match reports, and then the remaining pages analysed the previous week’s games and had gossip about players and teams, forecasts of their prospects, and so on. By 1900 there were at least two dozen of these sport-only papers - possibly more. There was now absolutely no question that there was a market for them. When Aston Villa met Queen’s Park in the FA Cup final in 1884, copies of the 1/2d. special - which was produced so quickly after the end of the match that it recorded the result and nothing else - were changing hands on the street for 6d.98
By this time, the working population was used to having a number of magazines and newspapers covering a range of subjects all within its financial reach. As early as 1850 there were about a hundred cheap journals published in London alone; it may be that up to 2.9 million copies of periodicals were sold weekly across the country.99 An early development from the penny newspapers, with the financial and organizational support of the evangelical movement, was the arrival of the educational penny magazines. One of the most successful, as well as the pacesetter, was the Penny Magazine, which started publishing in 1832. Its great selling point was its reliance on illustrations. From the 1820s, more expensive books such as annuals had had the new steel engravings, while cheap chapbooks and broadsides had continued to reproduce old-fashioned wood engravings (see Chapter 5). The Mechanic’s Magazine in 1823 appeared every Saturday for 3d., with many engravings to illustrate its didactic articles on ‘new Discoveries, Inventions and Improvements’, ‘Secret Processes’ or ‘Practical Applications of Mineralogy and Chemistry’.100 The Penny Magazine fitted exactly in this field of selfimprovement, and because it was published under the auspices of the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge it was a third of the price. Within nine months of first publication, circulation had reached 200,000. The magazine covered a range of ‘useful’ subjects - science, geography, history, biographies of the great and good, with illustrations including diagrams of machinery, pictures of foreign countries, of animals and of famous people, and copies of great works of art. Most of the pictures were intended to inculcate patriotism (particularly the travel images), to promote self-improvement (Benjamin Franklin’s portrait showed his ‘singular powers…of self-control’) or to set models of social behaviour (a portrait of the Virgin Mary was an example of maternal devotion, the huntress Diana displayed ‘maidenly reserve’; while the Last Supper, rather gloriously, was used as an illustration of ‘seemly behaviour in trying circumstances’).101
The success of the aspirational Penny Magazine in the mass market gave impetus to magazine publishing. These broke down into two general types: the inexpensive didactic magazine, of which more below, and the illustrated magazine. In 1842 the Illustrated London News began operations, followed the next year by the Pictorial Times, and in 1855 by the Illustrated Times, as well as the Illustrated News of the World. Previously the Sundays had used illustrations to highlight the really big, once-in-ablue- moon stories - the coronation of Queen Victoria, or a particularly ghastly crime that had caught the popular imagination - or for their serials. The Illustrated London News started on a completely new track, establishing itself as a news magazine that showed each and every news event in a graphic as well as a text version. It cost 3d. weekly, so it was aimed at the middle- rather than the working-class market. The Pictorial Times was careful to make a similar orientation clear to its readers: ‘In “THE PICTORIAL TIMES” crime will be chronicled, not illustrated; the assassin will not be masqueraded as a jaunty ruffian, to do a further evil upon the false sensibilities of society…’102 These magazines instead catered to those who would previously have gone to exhibitions of models of the battlefield of Waterloo, or panoramas illustrating Nelson’s victory (see Chapter 7). Now world events were reproduced in a form that the middle classes could enjoy at home.
The second group of magazines that rose to prominence in this period, appreciated by the same audience, and also by the aspirant lower middle classes, who might have been stretched to find 3d. a week, was the cheap magazines for the self-improver, along the lines of the Penny Magazine. There were dozens of these titles, including the Half-Penny Magazine, the Christian’s Penny Magazine, the London Penny Journal, the Girl’s (and the Boy’s) Penny Magazine, the Penny Illustrated Paper, the Penny Illustrated Weekly News, the True Half-Penny Magazine, the Penny Pictorial and Family Story Paper, Dibdin’s Penny Trumpet, the Penny Comic Magazine, the Penny Story Teller and the Penny Novelist.103 Most of them failed, but one that didn’t was Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, which first appeared in 1853, founded by our old temperance lodging-house friend from the Great Exhibition, John Cassell (see p. 35). Cassell had made several attempts at producing an inexpensive magazine for the upwardly mobile, including John Cassell’s Library, the Working Man’s Friend, the Popular Educator and the Illustrated Magazine of Art. But it was the Illustrated Family Paper that caught on, combining as it did the threads of both
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self-improvement and illustrative material, together with the midcentury swing to the domestic and the familial.
There had been earlier attempts at producing a family magazine - a genre the Victorians took to their heart and developed in the middle of the century. They had had titles like the Family Herald (1842), the Family Friend (1848), the Family Economist (also 1848) and the Home Circle (1849). It was Cassell’s good fortune - and skill - to latch on to the moment when private domestic life had become a public commodity for sale. Soon the Family Paper was selling a quarter of a million copies each week. It contained the same mixture of stories, articles and illustrations that the Penny Magazine had produced so brilliantly. Dickens’s illustrator, Phiz, contributed, as did Cruikshank; there were newly commissioned engravings of scenes from current plays, portraits of famous people, and fashion drawings. Then, for the ‘family’ element, instead of articles on inventions, or chemistry, there were riddles, anecdotes, games and needlework, fashion reports and biography, ‘queer facts’ and ‘light verse’, as well as an enormously popular ‘Notices to Correspondents’ section, where readers could write in for advice.104
These domestic magazines marked a major shift in emphasis, for, as can be seen from their contents, they were primarily aimed at women. Previously magazines for women had been fashion magazines, rather than magazines with fashions in them. In the early eighteenth century there had been a small number of short-lived miscellanies for women, with verses, riddles, and much moralizing. The first to survive for any length of time was the Lady’s Magazine, which was issued monthly and contained sheet music, stories, poetry, some news, and correspondence.105 It had been followed by the Lady’s Monthly Museum, which merged in 1832 with the Lady’s Magazine, and then merged again with La Belle Assemblée (which had originally appeared in 1806). These were magazines for the upper classes, and La Belle Assemblée cost 3s. - about the same as a skilled artisan could expect to be paid for a day’s work.106 La Belle Assemblée was the precursor to many fashion magazines, and it will here stand in for them all.
La Belle Assemblée claimed to be interested in more than fashion, but that is a claim that is hard to sustain. The February 1806 issue was typical: it had illustrations of ‘her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Charlotte’ and of the Marchioness of Townshend ‘in her Court Dress’, an illustration to go with a song, seven illustrations ‘of the London Fashions’ and another five for their Parisian equivalents, as well as four needlework patterns for readers to copy. The ten articles included three on fashion (or fashion masquerading as biography and high life), and then the entire second half of the magazine was devoted to a ‘Description of the Prints of Fashion, English and French; London Fashions for the Present Month; Parisian Fashions, for February; General Observations on Fashions and Fashionables; and Supplementary Advertisements for the Month’, with plates. The plates had ‘Explanations’ following them, describing, for example, ‘a plain muslin gown, with sleeves chequered with pink ribbands, and the gown ornaments in the front also with pink ribbands, the breasts trimmed with puckered net lace, and a pink sash, with short ends hanging behind; an Indian shawl, with Turkish embroidery; white satin shoes, and peruke gloves; this half dress has been considered equally simple and elegant.’107 Each month there was further guidance on sudden changes to the modes. One January the reader was notified, ‘Fashionable colours are aventurine [browny-gold], which has lost nothing of its attraction, crimson, claret-colour, bottle-green, and some dark fancy colours. Cherry-colour, geranium, azure-blue, and pale lemon-colour, are fashionable for evening dress, and for bonnets; but we must observe, that nothing is considered so elegant in evening-dress as white.’ By February there was ‘the addition of various shades of rose’, while in March came a wholesale change to ‘cinnamon, fawn, poussiere de Paris, claret-colour, beet-red, some shades of violet and of aventurine, rosecolour, and azure blue: the two last, and white, are predominant in evening dress’. By May aventurine was hopelessly out of fashion, and so it went on.108 Every aspect of personal presentation was given close scrutiny: hairstyles had their own section, and the reader could expect to be updated on ‘the style of coiffures en cheveux’, for which ‘there is now more variety…than we have seen for a considerable time. Those a la Grecque are still fashionable, but they are now frequently ornamented with a wreath a la peruvienne, composed of an intermixture of marabouts, and ears of gold corn. The coiffure a la Cornelie differs…only in the knot of hair behind being brought higher on the head.’109 (The constant recourse of fashion magazines to half-digested French was happily satirized by Punch: ‘Gowns should be…looped with attachè. Ladies moving in the highest circles are not unfrequently seen in bonnets of rechauffé trimmed with corduroy to match…Coup d’oeil is not much in vogue for muffs; but those made of blasé, are beginning to be the rage. Parasols, to be in the highest fashion, should be of bombazine a la récherché, but we have noticed a few of the beautiful fabric carte blanche.’)110
That these magazines were in the selling business was clear. There were few advertisements in La Belle Assemblée itself, but instead there was a regularly issued ‘Monthly Compendium of Literary, Fashionable, and Domestic Advertisements; Forming the commercial and Supplementary Part of La Belle Assemblee’. This was promoted to retailers as a more enduring form of advertising than magazines that were thrown away after a month.* But the commercial value of the market had not yet been fully understood: by 1846 there were only four magazines solely devoted to women, while forty-eight women’s magazines were founded between 1880 and 1900 alone.111 By this time their commercial value was entirely clear to their proprietors. Queen’s magazine (1861-1967) had such demand for small ads that in 1868 it had spun off Exchange and Mart to cope with the volume - a magazine that dispensed with expensive editorial material, and was instead made up entirely of advertisements (and successful enough that, with a few title changes, it continues today, albeit online). The Lady (1885), another magazine that has survived until today (with a few gaps and reorganizations), has done so precisely because its finances are - and always were - based on personal ads.112
These were all upper-class magazines. It was the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine that created a new form: a middle-class family magazine that used elements of the upper-class fashion magazine to produce something that was, for the first time, aimed specifically at the middle-class woman of the family. Samuel Beeton, its editor, declared, ‘We took the field in the belief that there was room for a cheap serial combining practical utility, instruction and amusement.’ He saw it as an instrument of public education, to ‘teach women to work much and spend little’ and to practise ‘wholesome thrift as will disinduce us to spend our time or money without an adequate return either in gain or enjoyment’. It presented itself to its intended market as ‘a fund of practical information and advice tending to promote habits of industry and usefulness, without which no home can be rendered virtuous or happy’.113 Initially it cost 2d., although this was shortly raised to 6d. - a sixth of the price of La Belle Assemblée - which became the standard price for women’s magazines for the next few decades. It also had special issues, for which the price was raised again, but it was careful to promise value for money:
NOTICE, The SHILLING EDITION comprises, besides the content of the magazine, an 8-page Supplement containing illustrations of the CHEMISE RUSSE, New Stitches in Pont Russe, Six engravings of the Newest and most Fashionable Mode of Making Dresses, Hanging Sleeve, Muslin Fichu, Young Lady’s Coiffure, Work-Basket Cover, Braiding Patterns, Parasol Cover in Venetian Embroidery, Knitted Square for Counterpanes, Braided Slipper, etc, with full d[i]rections for working and making the same. Also a Fashion Plate of large size and a Photograph of the late Prince Consort.
Now it was presenting itself in a very interesting way, showing what it claimed to be the newest and most fashionable upper-class modes, and yet at the same time telling its middle-class audience that these goods were within their reach, via paper patterns and the new
home sewing machines, which made ‘dressing in accordance with the latest fashions…easy and not too expensive’. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine ran a whole series of articles on sewing machines, and in other issues it gave away paper patterns that showed how to make ‘the original articles furnished by the first Parisian houses’.114 Such paper patterns were used to promote numerous women’s magazines for the rest of the century. Pearson’s Home Notes in 1895 reminded consumers that ‘The price of Dressmaking at Home [another Pearson magazine] is only 1d. a month, an absurdly low rate when it is remembered that…it contains every month a paper pattern of a new and fashionable garment.’115
This derisory cover price of 1d. at the end of the century shows how the finances of magazines had altered. They were no longer reliant on circulation: it was advertising that made money. The cover price was merely a token contribution, as the Gentlewoman was happy to admit: ‘Advertisements are indispensable because every copy costs the proprietors nearly double the price for which it is sold.’ Nevertheless, magazines told their readers that they should be pleased to see so many advertisements, which now might take up half the available space, as they gave ‘a useful directory for ladies’. By the 1870s The Times carried approximately 2,500 advertisements in each issue, at an average fee of 8s. per ad, clearing a healthy £1,000 a day; the Telegraph had fewer advertisements, about 1,500 an issue, and as the second-ranking newspaper it charged less, but they still brought in about £500 a day.116 The penny weeklies, no matter that their readers often earned less in a day than The Times charged in advertising fees, also relied heavily on revenue from advertisements. At mid-century, Reynolds’s and Lloyd’s gave about 11 or 12 per cent of their content over to advertisements; by 1870, Reynolds’s was still at about 14 per cent, while ads in Lloyd’s had soared to nearly 25 per cent of the overall content. There were two reasons for this: Reynolds’s radical past still weighed against it with advertisers, and furthermore it gave space to products that other newspapers would not touch - in the 1850s and 1860s over half of the space it sold was for patent medicines that promoted the ‘removal of female obstructions’, or ‘spermatorrhoea’ - that is, abortifacients.117 Lloyd’s, considered to have a more respectable readership, had more advertisements than any other penny paper; even though it charged more, it was still forced to turn away advertisers for lack of space. By 1886, nearly 37 per cent of its content was entirely devoted to advertisements.118