Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

By the King’s royal Patent, And Sold by J. NEWBERY, at the Bible and Sun in St Paul’s Church-Yard.

1 Dr James’s Powders for Fevers, the Small-Pox, Measles, Colds, &c., 2s. 6d.

2 Dr Hoope’s Female Pills, 1s.

3 Mr Greenough’s Tincture for Teeth, 1s.

4 Ditto for the Tooth-Ach [sic], 1s.

5 Stomachic Lozenges for the Heart-burn, Cholic, Indigestion, &c, 1s. 6d.

6 The Balsam of Health or (as it is by some called) the Balsam of Life, 1s. 6d.

7 The Original Daffy’s Elixir, 1s. 3d.

8 Dr Anderson’s Scots Pills, 1s.

9 The Original British Oil, 1s.

10 The Alternative Pills, which are a safe, and certain Cure for the King’s Evil, and all Scrophulous Complaints, 5s. the Box, containing 40 Doses. - See a Dissertation on these Disorders sold at the Place above-mentioned. Price 6d.

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Those newspaper proprietors who did not own a medicine could still help to sell one: ‘Dr Benjamin Godfrey’s Cordiall’ was advertised in the Leeds Mercury in 1751, and ‘for the convenience of those who live in the country, it will be brought by the men who deliver the News to any place within the reach of this paper’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even for those without a newspaper, or its distribution services, the new Post Office could provide similar business facilities: ‘The True Spirit of Scurvy-Grass’ was advertised for sale

By the new ingenious Way of the Penny-Post, any Person may send for it, from any part of the City or Suburbs, writing plain directions where to send it to them: if for half a dozen Glasses, they will be brought as safe, as if fetch’t by themselves, and as cheap as one. But who sends this way, must put a Penny in the Letter (besides Six Pence for each Glass) to pay the carriage back; for no body can think the profit great: therefore a Penny must be sent for every Parcel. None need fear their Money, in sending by the Penny-Post, for things of considerable value, are daily sent with safety by it, security being given for the Messengers. There are Houses appointed in all parts of the Town, to take in the Penny-Post Letters.* (#litres_trial_promo)

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It was these advertisements that led, over the next century, to the formation of some of the great drug companies, for there was not much of a line to be drawn between patent medicines and ‘real’ medicines, between quacks and doctors. In the eighteenth century the University of Edinburgh’s Pharmacopoeia listed ‘spider’s webs, Spanish fly, pigeon’s blood, hoofs of elks, eggs of ants, spawn of frogs, dung of horse, pig and peacock, human skulls and mummies’ as valid ingredients for medical remedies.

(#litres_trial_promo) Dr Robert James patented an antimonial powder which one historian of medicine thinks probably hastened the death of both Oliver Goldsmith and Laurence Sterne ‘among others’, while many more promoted things like ‘medicinal chocolate’, or teething necklaces, or indigestion powders.

(#litres_trial_promo) A Rowlandson cartoon of 1789 shows the draper Isaac Swainson, who owned the rights to Velno’s Vegetable Syrup, being attacked by apothecaries and surgeons - not because Velno’s harmed people, or because it didn’t work, but because Swainson was taking business that they thought was rightfully theirs. (He claimed sales of 20,000 bottles a year, bringing him an income of £5,000.)

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It was hard to see the difference between these men and John Hunter, the famous surgeon and anatomist, who in 1984 wrote to Edward Jenner, the pioneer of smallpox inoculation: ‘Dear Jenner, - I ampuffing off your tartar as the tartar of all tartars, and have given it to several physicians to make trial, but have had no account yet of the success. Had you not better let a bookseller have it to sell, as Glass of Oxford did his magnesia? Let it be called Jenner’s Tartar Emetic, or anybody’s else that you please. If that mode will do, I will speak to some, viz., Newberry, &c. [to distribute it].’

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But while Hunter and Jenner are today considered to have been pioneers of medical science, Dr James Graham was a quack in any period, and he used newspapers and their advertising potential to its full. Born in 1745 in Edinburgh, he was a qualified doctor; by 1775 he had set up in Pall Mall and was advertising that, as a specialist in eye and ear problems, he had ‘cured or relieved 281; refused as incurable on their first Application, 317; after a short Trial (by desire) found incurable 47; dismissed for Neglect, &c. 57; country, foreign, and other Patients, events unknown, 381’. Perhaps the honesty of admitting he cured only a quarter of those who applied to him was a legacy of his training. But by 1779 he had opened the Temple of Health, and between 1778 and 1781 he was a regular advertiser in the Morning Herald, promoting himself and, more particularly, the ‘Temple’ with its ‘Celestial Bed’:

To their Excellencies the Foreign Ambassadors, to the Nobility, Gentry, and to Persons of Learning and of Taste.

THE CELESTIAL BRILLIANCY of the Medico-Electrical Apparatus in all the apartments of the Temple, will be exhibited By Dr GRAHAM himself Who will have the honour of explaining the true Nature and Effects of Electricity, Air, Music, and Magnetism when applied to the Human Body…Previous to the display of the Electrical Fire, the Doctor will delicately touch upon the CELESTIAL BEDS which are soon to be opened in the Temple of Hymen, in Pall Mall, for the propagation of Beings, rational and far stronger and more beautiful in mental as well as in bodily Endowments, than the present puny, feeble and nonsensical race of Christians…

Admittance to the Temple was 5s., while pamphlets outlining the cures that had already taken place could be bought for a mere 3d. At his lectures, ‘Vestina, the Rosy Goddess of Health’, stood by in attendance, helping ‘at the display of the Celestial Meteors, and of that sacred Vital Fire over which she watches, and whose application in the cure of diseases, she daily has the honour of directing’. (One of Graham’s unwitting claims on posterity was that ‘Vestina’ was none other than the soon-to-be Emma Hamilton, wife to Sir William Hamilton and mistress to Lord Nelson.) Infertile couples hoping to conceive were recommended Graham’s Treatise on Health (for 10s. 6d.), which gave advice on hygiene, on singing (which ‘softens the mind of a happy couple, makes them all love, all harmony’), and on ‘drinking of the divine balm, which for the benefit of the human race, I have concocted with my own hand, and which, however, costs only a guinea a bottle’.

If cleanliness, song and the divine balm all failed, then it was on to the Celestial Bed, which was available for rent at £100 (or sometimes £50) a night:

the first, the only one in the world, or that ever existed…In a neighbouring closet is placed a cylinder by which I communicate the celestial fire to the bed-chamber, that fluid which animates and vivifies all, and those cherishing vapours and Oriental perfumes, which I convey thither by means of tubes of glass. The celestial bed rests on six massy and transparent columns; coverings of purple, and curtains of celestial blue surround it, and the bed-clothes are perfumed with the most costly essences of Arabia: it is exactly similar to those that adorn the palaces in Persia, and to that of the favourite sultana in the seraglio of the Grand Turk.

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In addition, the advertisements promised, ‘In the celestial bed no feather is employed…springy hair mattresses are used…[having] procured at vast expense, the tails of English stallions, which when twisted, baked and then untwisted and properly prepared, is [sic] elastic to the highest degree.

(#litres_trial_promo) And if a celestial bed and the tails of English stallions between them couldn’t cure the problem, then clearly nothing would.

It was on the basis of this kind of relentless advertising that newspapers achieved the financial stability that, in the nineteenth century, enabled expansion into ever-growing markets. Very quickly with the new century, circulations skyrocketed beyond anything that had been achieved before. In exactly the same pattern we have seen already, the increase in the number of newspapers and the increase in the number of people who read them were brought about by developments in technology, in this case in printing and papermaking; by developments in transport, for the papers’ dissemination; and by the recognition among newspaper proprietors that attention to the vast working-class market could reap equivalently vast rewards.

Before any of this could happen, that vast working-class market, or at least a substantial part of it, needed to be able to read. The figures we have for literacy in the population before the end of the nineteenth century are not terribly reliable - for the most part they come from surveys of signatures on marriage registers, the assumption being that if one could sign one’s name, one could both read and write. In fact many who could sign their names could not read, and then a further number who could read could not write. The evangelical writer and educator Hannah More was one of many who thought that it was essential for the working classes to be able to read the Scriptures, but that writing would cause the lower classes to become discontented with their place in the world. At a bare minimum, however, it is estimated that in 1500 only 10 per cent of all men could sign their names, and just 1 per cent of women. By 1750 these figures had risen to 60 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women.

(#litres_trial_promo) Several things went to make this change: urbanization was one, with increased literacy being necessary for a city life; the growth in the numbers of shops and other small trades was another, for it was impossible to sell on credit without being able to write. (It has been suggested that in London and Middlesex perhaps as many as 92 per cent of tradesmen were literate as early as 1730, while even in rural East Anglia the figure approached 70 per cent.)

(#litres_trial_promo) Self-improvement and a desire for education to promote oneself into the ranks of petty traders were great promoters of literacy: Thomas Dyche’s A Guide to the English Tongue went through thirty-three editions, selling over a quarter of a million copies, in less than fifteen years between 1733 and 1747 (and these figures come from the one printer whose records have survived).* (#litres_trial_promo)

(#litres_trial_promo) There were numerous other books aimed at the lower middle-class autodidact: G. Bird’s Practical Scrivener (1733), and Joseph Champion’s Practical Arithmetick (1733), or even James Dodson’s Antilogarithmic Canon (1740).

(#litres_trial_promo) An educational framework had also been established for those who wanted to set up in business: by the 1770s and 1780s there were eight schools with a commercial curriculum in Derby alone (which had a population of only 10,000), while Aris’s Birmingham Gazette contained advertisements for schools in Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire and Shropshire with the same sort of syllabus - 70 per cent offered writing; slightly fewer than 60 per cent arithmetic; 40 per cent bookkeeping and accounting; and 30 per cent further mathematics.

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Religion was another precipitating factor in the surge in literacy. At the end of the eighteenth century, evangelicalism began its century-long rise, mainly spurred by Anglicans, who soon joined with the Nonconformists to create a nationwide movement whose influence was felt far outside the walls of church and chapel. (For my purposes, I refer generically - and to some degree technically incorrectly - to ‘evangelicalism’ as it affected society at large, rather than as a form of religious organization.) Evangelical stress on activism and good works led to a societywide ethos of reform, philanthropy and ‘improvement’, and much was precipitated by the crusading leaders of the movement - William Wilberforce and the abolition of slavery; Lord Shaftesbury and the Factory Act, as well as numberless voluntary societies, philanthropic organizations and Sunday schools.

By 1800, about 75 per cent of men could read, which opened up opportunities and, to some, increased anxiety. Hannah More, horrified by the threat of atheism as displayed both in the French Revolution and in pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1792), began to produce tracts, ballads and moral stories for what in 1795 became the Cheap Repository Tract Society. Subsidized by several evangelical societies, these pamphlets were printed to look like the ‘old trash’ their supporters so despised, and priced similarly, at

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d. or 1d. In the first six months of 1795, 600,000 copies were sold, and by the end of the year that had mounted to 2 million.

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This was a precursor to a new trend in educating the masses. In 1801, only 13.8 per cent of all working-class children attended Sunday school regularly.

(#litres_trial_promo) But after the advent of the French Revolution promoted fears of a similar revolution in Britain, and again after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, education was seen as a way of socializing the workers, bringing them into the evangelical fold, teaching them to accept their station in life and contribute to the bourgeois civic structure. Adam Smith had seen this - without the evangelical slant - in 1776: ‘An instructed and intelligent people…are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1833 the government set aside public funds for education for the first time, and, although its intervention produced very little in comparison to the work of the evangelicals, this was representative of the spirit of the times; by 1851, 75.4 per cent of working-class children attended Sunday school. These Sunday schools, the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church of England (established 1814), and its non-sectarian counterpart, the British and Foreign School Society, as well as charity schools, tract societies, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1831), the Mechanics’ Institutes, the Methodist reading rooms and many other similar groups and societies all contributed to the creation of a literate working class. Between 1800 and 1830 the sales of stamped newspapers had nearly doubled, from 16 million copies to 30 million copies, while the population had risen only by half, from 10.5 million to 16 million.

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What the working classes read, however, was not necessarily what their social superiors thought was good for them. Working hours were long: most shops were open from seven or eight in the morning until ten or eleven at night, while those shopkeepers who were located in streets with a busy nightlife - near theatres, or pubs - expected to stay open until midnight. Artisans and skilled labourers worked equally long hours, while factory shifts could last sixteen hours. These hours were gradually lessened over the century, and from the 1860s increasing numbers of workers had half-days on Saturdays as a holiday (except for the shopkeepers, who worked their longest hours on Saturdays, from seven until midnight). For most workers, however, through much of the century, the expectation was that they would leave home every morning while it was still dark, and return in time only to eat before falling into bed once more, six days a week. Those working in the countryside, even in the old agricultural occupations, also had little time or energy for reading. In Charles Kingsley’s novel Yeast, which began to appear in Fraser’s Magazine in 1848, the gamekeeper says, ‘Did you ever do a good day’s farm-work in your life? If you had, man or boy, you wouldn’t have been game for much reading when you got home; you’d do just what these poor fellows do, - tumble into bed at eight o’clock, hardly waiting to take your clothes off, knowing that you must turn up again at five o’clock the next morning to get a breakfast of bread, and, perhaps, a dab of the squire’s dripping, and then back to work again; and so on, day after day, sir, week after week, year after year.’

(#litres_trial_promo) (For more on working hours and holidays, see pp. 209-10.) Thus for many the one day on which they had adequate leisure and energy to read was Sunday. And what many chose to read were the newspapers. For them, there was a range of papers which combined short, lurid police-court stories, murder trials and other gore with sensation fiction and a few news snippets.

In 1829 there were seven London morning papers, selling 28,000 copies each on average, while six evening papers sold 11,000 copies each; by 1832 there were a further 130 provincial papers, of which sixty-one had circulations above 1,000, and two above 4,000.