Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
Judith Flanders

A delightful and fascinating social history of Victorians at leisure, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of nineteenth-century men and women, from the author of the bestselling ‘The Victorian House’.Imagine a world where only one in five people owns a book, where just one in ten has a knife or a fork – a world where five people out of every six do not own a cup to hold a hot drink. That was what England was like in the early eighteenth century. Yet by the close of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had brought with it not just factories, railways, mines and machines but also fashion, travel, leisure and pleasure.Leisure became an industry – a cornucopia of excitement for the masses – and it was spread by newspapers, advertising, promotions and publicity – all of which were eighteenth-century creations. It was Josiah Wedgwood and his colleagues who invented money-back guarantees, free delivery and celebrity endorsements. New technology such as the railways brought audiences to ever-more-elaborate extravaganzas, whether it was theatrical spectaculars with breathtaking pyrotechnics and hundreds of extras – ‘hippodramas' recreating the battle of Waterloo – or the Great Exhibition itself, proudly displaying 'the products of all quarters of the globe' under twenty-two acres of the sparkling 'Crystal Palace'.In ‘Consuming Passions’, the bestselling author of ‘The Victorian House’ explores this dramatic revolution in science, technology and industry – and how a world of thrilling sensation, lavish spectacle and unimaginable theatricality was born.

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 (#u1a11de78-e933-560a-a26f-ee93566c1494)

Title Page (#u40b09e95-341d-53a3-b546-61785b708118)

Dedication (#u5470dd29-c3e5-5781-a02d-efc67de51253)

Epigraph (#u225ee15a-c0f8-562f-b735-3e15a9aa7acb)

Preface (#u9de6d368-216e-5251-8fe9-44014fcb811d)

1 From Arcadia to Arcade: The Great Exhibition (#uacedb901-1bb2-55b1-90d1-1287769c5b41)

2 ‘A Nation of Shopkeepers’: The Eighteenth-Century Shop (#u0131ccf3-58f9-590f-935b-8570c5fd89bd)

3 The Ladies’ (and Gents’) Paradise: The Nineteenth-Century Shop (#uf1b1eaf0-39ba-547e-9ec9-fc066251734e)

4 Read All About It: Buying the News (#u68929b1a-f072-54e2-ae23-101aeebf4cc4)

5 Penny a Line: Books and the Reading Public (#litres_trial_promo)

6 To Travel Hopefully: Holidays and Tourism (#litres_trial_promo)

7 The Greatest Shows on Earth? (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Penny Plain, Tuppence Coloured: The Theatrical Spectacular (#litres_trial_promo)

9 Going for a Song: The Music Market (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Going, Going: Art and the Market (#litres_trial_promo)

11 Sporting Life (#litres_trial_promo)

12 Visions of Sugar Plums: A Christmas Coda (#litres_trial_promo)