Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

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This was the crux: was the Great Exhibition to be a museum, an exploration of the technology that had created, and been created by, the Industrial Revolution? Or was it to be a supermarket, a display of all the goods, all the commodities, of the age? During the organizational stages the non-commercial, educational aspect seemed to be winning out.

The opening-day ceremonies were not promising to those in the audience who were interested in mercantilism rather than the social whirl. As Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, and a staunch republican, noted:

To have rendered the pageant expressive, congruous, and really a tribute to Industry, the posts of honor next the Queen’s person should have been confided on this occasion to the children of Watt, of Arkwright and their compeers (Napoleon’s real conquerors;) while instead of Grandees and Foreign Embassadors [sic], the heirs of Fitch, of Fulton, of Jacquard, of Whitney, of Daguerre, &c., with the discoverers, inventors, architects and engineers to whom the world is primarily indebted for Canals, Railroads, Steamships, Electric Telegraphs, &c., &c., should have been specially invited to swell the Royal cortege. To pass over all these, and summon instead the descendants of some dozen lucky Norman robbers…any of whom would feel insulted by a report that his father or grandfather invented the Steam Engine or Spinning Jenny, is not the fittest way to honor Industry.

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Lyon Playfair, one of the commissioners, and a confidant of Prince Albert, agreed with Greeley’s views on the virtue of trade, if not with his republican interpretation: he warned that ‘Industry, to which this country owes her success among nations, has never been raised to the rank of a profession. For her sons there are no honours, no recognized social position.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He was determined that the Exhibition would alter that.* (#ulink_a6f28146-a6aa-5fa2-b95f-75b47ce988db)

This was all part of the series of underlying arguments about the aims of the Exhibition which was still grumbling on. With the arrival of factory production and mass markets, it was no longer clear that labour in itself retained the intrinsic moral value that had previously been attributed to it. Instead, the cheerleaders for the new age saw moral worth as now residing in the creation of goods for the masses. Industriousness and thrift had long been moral values. Now value for money and goods well manufactured joined them. To provide such items for the masses was in itself virtuous, thought Cole and his friends. They were providing the requisites for living a ‘decent’, a ‘respectable’ life—a life that, as closely as possible, both in commodities and in ideals, resembled the norms of the middle-class world. Not everyone agreed in the short term. The older view, that imbued labour itself with value, continued to hold sway for many. Hard work itself could still be considered to be worth more than the products that that work created. For example, a cabinet-maker, Charles McLean, had produced a mirror and console table for the Exhibition, but his local committee had rejected them as being of insufficient quality. He appealed, and Matthew Digby Wyatt, secretary to the executive committee, overruled the original decision, because, he thought, the ‘getting up…was most spirited’—that is, the mirror and table had taken a lot of time and effort to create, and this outweighed the fact that the design and craftsmanship were of indifferent quality.

(#litres_trial_promo) But the new philosophy, with new values—that of supply and demand, and what the market would bear—was in the ascendant. In the eighteenth century the political economist Adam Smith had seen production as the ‘Wealth of Nations’; now the Great Exhibition saw the wealth of nations in ‘the produce of all nations’. Product was taking over from process.

The Exhibition revolved entirely around the new industrial world, the possibilities that mass production had created. But the interpretation of that new world was still open. Was the Exhibition, therefore, about the value of work, or about the end result of that work—about how something was made, or about what could be purchased? Was it an ideal version of a museum, or was it a proto-supermarket? Was it education, or was it entertainment? What was it for? And for whom?

That the Great Exhibition was, in the widest possible sense, ‘for everybody’ could not be in doubt by the spring of 1851. There were souvenirs for sale across London: an endless stream of items reproducing images of the wildly popular Crystal Palace—items such as papier-mâché blotters, letter-openers and ‘segar’ (cigar) boxes. There were mementoes of specific moments, such as ‘Lane’s Telescopic View of the Opening of the Great Exhibition’, a paper cut-out with a perspective view of the main avenue of the Crystal Palace, complete with interior fountain and one of the trees that had been preserved inside the structure (to much admiration from the public for the engineering feat involved). There were handkerchiefs printed with caricatures of the main participants, including ‘Prince Allbut’. There were even gloves with maps of London printed on the palms, so that non-English-speaking visitors could have their route to the Crystal Palace traced out for them.

(#litres_trial_promo) But it was far more than the souvenir market that latched on to the commercial possibilities of the Great Exhibition. There were just as many straightforwardly marketdriven tie-ins as well, such as that promoted by Mr Folkard, ‘Grocer, Tea Dealer and Italian Warehouseman’, who advertised his new ‘Celebrated Exhibition Coffee’, blended from the beans of ‘all nations’, with labels covered with images of foreigners in national dress visiting the Exhibition.

(#litres_trial_promo) Examples of extreme self-reflexivity included exhibitions inside the Crystal Palace which displayed images of nothing less than the Crystal Palace itself. The ‘Cotton’ section had a tablecloth ‘in the centre [of which] is a view of the “Exhibition Building”…from the official design by Paxton, with emblematic borders representing Peace and Commerce with the nations; and a procession displaying the costumes of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, en route to the Exhibition’.

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But most exhibits were more concerned to display their manufacturers’ technical ingenuity. These were not the type of industrial processes that Albert had put so much faith in. They were not about ‘Raw Materials and Produce, illustrative of the natural productions on which human industry is employed’. They were instead ‘illustrative of the agents which human ingenuity brings to bear upon the products of nature’. Even here, Albert’s interpretation of the word ‘ingenuity’ and that of the manufacturers were worlds apart. Albert’s faith in the benefits conferred by the material world was interwoven with his belief in providence, social welfare and the moral value of labour. The manufacturers were more overtly concerned to show, through their command of technological innovation, how a new ideal domesticity might be formed, what goods were available that might be acquired, or at least aspired to. A ‘sportsman’s knife’ produced by Joseph Rodgers and Sons of Sheffield had a mother-of-pearl handle and eighty blades, on which were etched views of the Crystal Palace, Osborne House, Windsor Castle, a railway bridge designed by George Stephenson, a boar hunt, a stag hunt and more. The same manufacturer also produced a 56-blade knife that was less than 2 centimetres long, a razor with a view of Arundel Castle on the blade, and cutlery with 150 blades and a clock. A vase by Waterston & Brogden showed Britannia flanked by ‘Scotia’ and ‘Hibernia’, who were in turn surrounded by four heads representing the four quarters of the globe, while under them diamonds in the shape of a rose, a thistle and a shamrock surrounded images of Britons, Romans, Saxons, Normans and

a picture of the Battle of Hastings; under these were a range of national heroes—Nelson, Wellington, Milton, Shakespeare, Newton, Watt—all crowned with laurel wreaths, while at the very bottom lurked Truth,

Prudence, Industry and Fortitude.

(#litres_trial_promo) Such items were not goods that anyone needed—or would even think of buying. They were advertisements for the manufacturers, which was not at all what Albert had intended.

Other exhibits concentrated on innovations (many involving clothing) that offered relief from almost unimaginable situations: a safety hat for the prevention of concussion in case of a train crash; yachting outfits that had inbuilt flotation devices; corsets that ‘opened instantaneously in case of emergency’; a ‘Patent Ventilating Hat…the principle of ventilating being to admit air through a series of channels cut in thin cork, which is fastened to the leather lining, and a valve fixed to the top of the crown, which may be opened and shut at pleasure to allow perspiration to escape’.* (#ulink_3b23080b-6127-503e-94b5-649654e3ff8b) Some promised speed—a doctor’s suit had a coat, waistcoat and trousers made in one piece, so in a night-time emergency the doctor might leap into them without any waste of time—while others went for economy—a ‘duplexa’ jacket reversed so that it could be worn as both a morning and an evening coat.

(#litres_trial_promo) Yet even the most implausible-seeming gimmickry may have had some practical results. Henry Mayhew, the journalist and social reformer, dated the cage crinoline (the metal frame that supported what today are referred to as ‘hoop’ skirts) to 1851, rather than the more usual 1854—6, and at least one historian of fashion has suggested that it may have developed from a display model at the Great Exhibition.

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Further items on display that seemed primarily designed to display the manufacturers’ originality included ‘harlequin’ furniture—furniture that served more than one purpose. One of the exhibits was a couch for a steamship which could be turned into a bed at night, while the base, made of cork, acted as a life raft should the worst came to the worst. Should the worst remain only imaginary, the couch had at one end ‘a self-acting washing-stand…containing requisites for the dressing room and toilette’, while the other end enclosed ‘a patent portable watercloset’. Also on show were church pews connected to a pulpit by guttapercha (rubber) pipes, to allow the hard of hearing to listen to the sermon; an ‘expanding hearse’; a silver nose, for those missing a nose of their own; a vase made of mutton fat and lard; an oyster-shucking machine; and a bed which in the morning tilted its occupant straight into a waiting bath.

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Even items with more long-standing recognized functions were not necessarily prized primarily for those functions. Of the thirty-eight pianos in the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue to the Exhibition, most were put, logically enough, in the section ‘Philosophical, Musical, Horological and Surgical Instruments’, but two were listed under ‘Furniture, upholstery’, because their papier-mâché cases were considered more important than their sound. Even many of the pianos listed under musical instruments had gimmicks, often to do with the problem of finding space for a grand piano in an average-sized house. Some instruments were simply designated ‘semi-grand’, an acknowledgement that getting a ‘real’ grand piano into a terraced house was like squeezing a quart into a pint pot. Broadwood’s, the most prestigious manufacturer (see pp. 355, 362—3), didn’t worry about such matters—the company knew its customers, and it showed four pianos, all grand. But others, with less exalted clients, who therefore had less grand houses which did not permit equivalently grand pianos, could not be so cavalier. Pierre Erard, who listed himself as ‘Inventor, Designer and Manufacturer’, had a range of sizes to show: ‘ornamented extra-grand; extra-grand with pedal keys; small grand…grand oblique [which from the picture looks like a decorated upright piano], ornamented in the Elizabethan style…grand cottage; reduced cottage…’

Others had more elaborate objects to show. George Frederick Greiner had a semi-grand ‘constructed on the principle of the speaking-trumpet’; while Smyth and Roberts’s piano was ‘on the principle of the violincello’. John Brinsmead was far more worried about appearance than sound, and showed a piano whose ‘case permits the instrument to be placed in any part of the room. Embroidered device in the central panel.’ Another manufacturer enclosed his piano’s workings in plate glass instead of wood; yet another highlighted the case’s ‘paintings of mother-of-pearl on glass’. Richard Hunt meanwhile joined in the general enthusiasm for harlequin furniture. His piano was ‘a dining or drawing room table, [which] stands upon a centre block, or pedestal, and contains a pianoforte (opening with spring-bolts) on the grand principle, with a closet containing music composed by the inventor’. William Jenkins and Son had a ‘registered expanding and collapsing pianoforte for gentlemen’s yachts, the saloons of steam vessels’ ladies cabins, &c.; only 13

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inches from front to back when collapsed’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Other manufacturers concentrated on the music student: Robert Allison’s piano had keys that ‘alternated in colour, to show all the scales, major and minor, according to a single rule for each mood, founded on the place of the semi-tonic interval, which renders the seven notes to be touched for an octave of each of the other eleven scales, as evident as the scale of C’; while Robert Addison showed ‘a transposing pianoforte. This piano will transpose music five semitones higher or lower than the written key.’

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Even at the time, there was a recognition that gadgetry had got out of hand: the Illustrated London News lamented the displays of ‘a tissue [fabric] which nobody could wear; a carriage in which nobody could ride; a fireplace which no servant could clean if it were ever guilty of a fire; a musical instrument not fit for one in fifty thousand to play; endless inventions incapable of the duties imputed to them’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This brought to the fore the question: were the exhibits designed to show the inevitable march forward to prosperity for all, or would it be more true to say that many exhibitors—and even more of the public—were seeing the Great Exhibition as an enormous advertising site?

The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, reading which was as close as many visitors would get to thinking about the purpose of the fair, claimed in its introduction to be ‘a book of reference to the philosopher, merchant and manufacturer’. Thus, in its own view, it was an educational tool—one that would give instruction to those exhibiting, and also to those many manufacturers in the same field who were not providing exhibits. The catalogue would show these people examples of the best work of their competitors, for them to strive towards. Then, for the many visitors, the catalogue would also explain the new world of technology and design, in layman’s language, to improve their taste. By this means, the customers would be led to demand more of the manufacturers, and this heightened demand for quality would in turn improve the supply.

That was the idea. Carrying it out was another matter. The planning of the exhibits, both in the catalogue and in the actual display halls, had been a mixture of overlapping responsibilities shared between the centralized and local organizations. The local committees had selected the goods to be displayed from their regions or cities, with the barest guidance, in the form of a preliminary outline, from the commission. Once the items were chosen, how they were laid out, and the organizational structure of the hall, were entirely the province of the central body. The planners had originally wanted the Exhibition to represent a schematic re-creation of their thirty-section outline, laying out the state of industrial knowledge before the visitors in map-like form, walking them through the processes by which goods were transformed from raw material, via labour, to finished products. But both because it was not the commission which was making the initial selections and because of the technical requirements of the building, nothing but lip service could ultimately be paid to this didactic aim. The local committees had not necessarily chosen exhibitions that showed each of the processes, and, even when they had, there were power sources in only one part of the north-west axis of the halls, so all the industrial machinery had to be set up there. Then it was realized that the floor of the upper galleries could not bear the weight of heavy machinery, so they became the logical place for lightweight manufactured goods. The central axis or nave, as the main walkway of the Crystal Palace became known, ended up displaying most of the consumer commodities.

The crowds were required to follow specific routes and not able to wander at will. Rather in the way that out-of-town superstores such as Ikea process their customers past high-priced goods or seasonal overstocks, the route down the nave of the Crystal Palace ensured that all visitors passed by the highly finished consumer goods—the goods that were the most superficially attractive, the most entertaining, and the least educational. While the Exhibition stressed abundance and choice—in Prince Albert’s words, ‘The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose’—in fact, the choice had been made already, by the selection committee, by the display committee, and by those guardians of public order who decreed which route the consumers were to take. The visitor had only limited choice about where to go, or what to see.

Henry Mayhew’s comic novel of the Great Exhibition, 1851: or, The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to ‘Enjoy Themselves’, and to See the Great Exhibition, opened with a paragraph describing the foreigners going round the Crystal Palace. It began, ‘The Esquimaux had just purchased his new “registered paletot” [a loose, coat-like cape] of seal-skin…The Hottentot Venus had already added to the graceful ebullitions of nature, the charms of a Parisian crinoline.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The humour here is of the simple ‘look-at-the-funny-natives-encountering-civilization-for-the-first-time’ type, but reading this passage today what is noticeable is Mayhew’s unconscious acceptance of the purpose of the Exhibition: the display of fashionable commodities and their subsequent acquisition by the visitors. For it was acquisition that was beginning to hold sway at the Great Exhibition. Horace Greeley had already linked acquisition specifically to an increase in moral good: ‘Not until every family shall be provided with a commodious and comfortable habitation, and that habitation amply supplied with Food and Fuel not only, but with Clothing, Furniture, Books, Maps, Charts, Globes, Musical Instruments and every other auxiliary to Moral and Intellectual growth as well as to physical comfort, can we rationally talk of excessive Production’ (my italics).

(#litres_trial_promo) Now it was not merely food and shelter that were considered necessities, but also education, the arts, and physical comfort more generally. Greeley saw clothes, furniture, books, maps and musical instruments all as necessities, all as ‘auxiliaries’ to ‘Moral and Intellectual growth’.

This was a culmination of a gradual process. Over the previous century and a half there had been an enormous change in the way people lived. The architect John Wood, as early as 1749, had listed a number of improvements that had taken place in domestic interiors over the previous quarter-century—improvements that were taken for granted in homes of moderate prosperity by the time he wrote. Cheap floorboards and doors had been replaced by deal and hardwoods and the bare floors covered with rugs, while mahogany and walnut furniture had replaced the previously more customary oak;* (#ulink_0021988c-047d-50d3-a6eb-7f7796d2e699) rough plasterwork was now hidden behind elegant wood panelling; stone chimney-pieces were replaced by marble, and iron fixtures by brass; while cane and rush chairs were rejected in favour of upholstered leather and embroidered ones.

(#litres_trial_promo) Yet even the low base of the 1720s that Wood was looking back to had already seen a big step forward to modern notions of comfort. Indeed, the word ‘comfort’ in the sense of physical and material well-being came into use only in the last third of the eighteenth century. Previously ‘comfort’ had a spiritual and emotional meaning—succour, relief or emotional support. It was in the early nineteenth century that ‘comfort’ in the modern sense became commonplace, and yet only a few decades later Horace Greeley thought it natural to list it as a necessary component of a happy life.

It is hard, in our age of material possessions, and given the stereotypical ‘overstuffed’ image of the late Victorian period, to appreciate from what a bare minimum the acquisition of possessions began. As late as the 1690s, something as basic to us as a utensil to hold a hot drink—that is, a cup—was ‘extremely rare’ even in prosperous households. A mere thirty years later, by 1725, ‘virtually all’ of these households had some.

(#litres_trial_promo) We don’t really have any idea of what the poorest in the seventeenth century owned—they died leaving no records. But of those who had enough goods that it was considered worth drawing up an inventory on their deaths, it is illuminating to compare one James Cushman, who died in 1648, with the poorest man listed in the inventories of Sedgley, Staffordshire, ninety years later. Cushman left, in his kitchen, ‘one small iron pott’, ‘a small scillite [skillet]’ and ‘one small brass scimer [skimmer]’. The deceased in Sedgley in 1739 owned, by contrast, a fire shovel, a coal hammer, a toasting iron, a bellows, a copper can, wooden furniture, a ‘tun dish’ or funnel, scissors, a warming pan, a brass kettle, bottles, earthenware, two iron pots, a pail, a ‘search’ or sieve, two old candlesticks, a kneading tub, two barrels, two coffers, a box, some trenchers, pewter, a brass skimmer, a brass basting spoon, an iron meat fork, a tin ‘calender’ or colander, and more.

(#litres_trial_promo) A similar increase in the quantity of goods can be found among those with more disposable income: in a survey of 3,000 inventories taken on the death of the head of the household in more prosperous homes, in 1675 half owned a clock; by 1715, 90 per cent of households did.

(#litres_trial_promo) This continuous growth in the number of possessions, this concern with the acquisition of goods for the home, was marked enough to be gently satirized in George Colman and David Garrick’s 1784 play The Clandestine Marriage, in which one character announces, ‘The chief pleasure of a country-house is to make improvements.’

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These are a few small examples of the marked increase in the number of possessions among all classes, from Garrick and Colman’s countryhouse owners down to those who, in previous ages, would have inherited a few goods, possibly acquired a few more after much struggle, or simply done without. From 1785 to 1800—a mere fifteen years—the rate of consumption of what had previously been considered luxuries and were now regarded as part of the ordinary necessities of life increased at more than twice the rate of population growth. In those fifteen years the population of England and Wales rose by 14 per cent, while over the same period the demand for candles grew by 33.8 per cent, for tobacco by 58.9 per cent and for spirits by a staggering (literally, perhaps) 79.9 per cent, while demand for tea soared by 97.7 per cent and for printed fabrics by an astonishing 141.9 per cent.

(#litres_trial_promo) (For more on tea, see pp. 56—61.)

By the time of the Great Exhibition it was expected that one’s quality of life—one’s standard of living—could be judged by the number of possessions one owned, the number of things one consumed. This was an entirely new way of looking at things. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for the phrase ‘standard of living’ dates from 1879. Punch, as always quick to spot a novelty, was already making fun of the idea by 1880. In a George du Maurier cartoon, an ‘Æsthetic Bridegroom’ looks at an oriental teapot, saying to his ‘Intense Bride’, ‘It is quite consummate, is it not?’ She responds rapturously, ‘It is, indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Buying goods, owning goods—even living up to goods—were now virtues. Comfort was a moral good. A hundred years after Colman and Garrick wrote of the prosperous and their country houses, the Illustrated London News carried an advertisement for a piano, the purchase of which would make the ‘home more attractive and save [the family from] more expensive and dangerous amusements’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The advertisement could not be more explicit: buying commercially produced goods, in this case a piano, would make one’s family life more entertaining, safer and, somehow, better. This was not simply an advertising conceit. Ford Madox Brown, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, told one of his patrons that, to be happy, ‘much depends upon getting a house and adorning of a beautiful house’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1876 the Revd William Loftie, in A Plea for Art in the House, expanded on this idea: there ‘seems to be something almost paradoxical in talking about the cultivation of taste as a moral duty…[but] if we look on the home here as the prototype for the home hereafter, we may see reasons for making it a sacred thing, beautiful and pleasant, as, indeed, we have no hesitation about making our churches’.