Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

(#litres_trial_promo) The cultivation of taste had become a ‘moral duty’, with the ‘sacred’ space, the shrine, epitomized by Paxton’s Crystal Palace, which looked like a great shining box built to hold all the commodities that could ever be produced. All the manufactured items in the world seemed to be collected under its transparent lid. It resembled nothing so much as one of those glass domes that Victorians put on their mantelpieces to protect their most precious objects from dirt and dust.

Looking back, it is possible to see, from the beginning, that the tendency to understand the Great Exhibition as a collection of so many items for sale was constantly being repressed. In 1850 the Westminster Review, in one of many press reports about the forthcoming event, warned, ‘The object of the Exhibition is the display of articles intended to be exhibited, and not the transaction of commercial business; and the Commissioners can therefore give no facilities for the sale of articles, or for the transaction of business connected therewith.’ Yet even the author of this stark caution found it hard to remember, immediately adding approvingly that the Exhibition was a ‘gathering together of the commercial travellers [salesmen] of the universal world, side by side with their employers and customers, and with a showroom for their goods that ought to be such as the world has never before beheld’.

(#litres_trial_promo) To attempt to block such commercial thoughts and concentrate visitors’ minds on the displays’ educational qualities, the organizers forbade the listing of prices, direct advertisements of goods, or any other form of overt selling.* (#ulink_e57869a0-4acc-5be2-b879-58a28a1b6f3e)

But, in a way no one could have foreseen, the lack of prices made everything appear much more available. No one looked at a display and thought, ‘That is out of my reach.’ Instead, everything became acquirable in the imagination, because nothing was for sale in reality. Everything could be dreamed of. At the same time, exhibitors, who had their own agendas, became ingenious in finding ways around the price ban as the fair continued. ‘Explanatory’ notes were handed out and, just coincidentally, were printed on the back of price lists; trade cards and advertising cards were distributed widely. Others outside the commissioners’ control abetted this urge to price the price-less: many press articles speculated on the value of goods when describing them—it seemed to be a reflex response to the display. As Walter Benjamin later commented, ‘The world exhibitions erected the universe of commodities.’

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For the first few weeks of the Great Exhibition, these price-less goods were examined by the prosperous alone. Albert had been insistent that the working class should be able to attend, that it was this group who would benefit in particular. The prices of admission, however, were set at exorbitant levels. Season tickets were £3 3s. for men, £2 2s. for women, and only season-ticket holders could go on the first day; second- and third-day tickets cost £1 each, while day tickets for the rest of the first month were 5s. each. It was not until 26 May, nearly a full month after the opening, that for the first time ‘shilling days’ came into force, with the following Friday reduced even further, to 6d. But on Saturdays—most workers’ half-day off—the price was pushed back up, to 2s. 6d. Many exhibitors wanted this exclusivity extended even further, with shilling days postponed until July—or never. They feared that the middle and upper classes who had thronged the aisles in the first weeks would disappear, not to be seen again, if they were forced to share their viewing space with the lower orders. But Prince Albert and Cole prevailed, and shilling days from the end of May remained.

As the end of the month approached, the big question of the day became, what would happen when the admission charge was lowered to let the working classes in? The gulf between the comfortable middle classes and even the respectable working classes was enormous. In the previous three-quarters of a century the middle class had become increasingly fearful of their social and economic inferiors, a situation brought about by the great political upheavals of the time. The Gordon Riots of 1780, the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the agitations that surrounded the Reform Act of 1832, and the Chartist riots; the failed harvests of the ‘hungry forties’; and, only three years in the past, the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848: all had merged to form a nebulous image of the great mass of workers biding their time, waiting to turn into ‘King Mob’. This was how The Times referred to the working class on 2 May, the day after the opening of the Great Exhibition—the day referred to by Queen Victoria as ‘the greatest day in our history, the most beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle ever seen, and the triumph of my beloved Albert’.

(#litres_trial_promo)The Times was not so confident. Surely these bogeymen would overrun the grounds, given half a chance? Mayhew despaired of those like The Times who were stoking fear: ‘For many days before the “shilling people” were admitted to the building, the great topic of conversation was the probable behaviour of the people. Would they come sober? will they destroy things? will they want to cut their initials, or scratch their names on the panes of the glass lighthouses?’

(#litres_trial_promo)Punch, in ‘Open House at the Crystal Palace’, also (unusually) championed the workers at the expense of the middle classes, setting up ‘Young Mob’ as ‘the better-behaved son of a wild and ignorant father’: ‘Am I not seen with my wife and children wondering at MR. LAYARD’s Nineveh Marbles [in the British Museum]* (#ulink_ac5db42d-2262-52bb-9c18-30226799b763)- wondering quietly, and I will add, if you please, reverently? Have I, in fact, chipped the nose of any statue? Have I wrenched the little finger from any mummy? Have I pocketed a single medal?’

(#litres_trial_promo) Even those who did not fear that riot and mayhem would arrive with the workers thought that financial ruin certainly would. The Illustrated London News warned that ‘the gay, glancing, fluttering tide of bonnets and ribbons, and silks, and satins, and velvets’, would vanish, with ‘the blank…filled up by no adequate substitute of meaner, or coarser, or more commonplace material’.

(#litres_trial_promo) These publications were more interested in their thesis than in giving the shilling days a chance: this particular piece was published after only the third shilling day.

It is worth pausing for a moment at the admission charge of 1s. At this price, and with the less expensive catalogue, the Popular Guide, priced at 2d., only the upper levels of the working class—the artisans, the master craftsmen, the clerks (who for the most part would have identified themselves with the lower middle classes)—could possibly have afforded to visit the grounds without financial assistance. For most of the rest of the working classes, having 1s. to spend on a day’s leisure was unimaginable—and even that price was only for those who lived in walking distance: for the others, transport, accommodation and food would push the day’s expenditure to one or two weeks’ entire earnings. But the mass of workers was so mysterious to their economic superiors that it was as though the 1s. charge would unleash not just factory operatives and manual labourers, but also the feared ‘navvies’† (#ulink_d4ae7eb5-a862-5356-a50f-a2da358b12cb) who were building the railroads and, even worse, the masses of the unemployed and the unemployable, wild hordes of them sweeping across the plains of Hyde Park. The Times warned that ‘Summer excursion trains will bring the artisans and mechanics of the north in upon London like an inundation.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The Duke of Wellington thought that at least 15,000 men—he meant soldiers—would be needed to keep order. Members of the Exhibition commission met with the directors of the railway companies to arrange that reduced excursion fares would be restricted to benefit-club subscribers and those belonging to working-class self-improvement clubs such as the Mechanics’ Institutes (see below). (However, the agreement did not hold: by February the London and North-Western Railway and the Midland Railway companies had both agreed to supply excursion fares to non-club members, but they took care not to publicize this change—at least at first.)

(#litres_trial_promo) This arrangement, while it stood, had the effect of pushing those who had not previously belonged to such a group into one, in order to be able to have access to railway tickets at affordable prices.

In fact the numbers already belonging to some form of club, whether it was a social group, a benefit club, a sick club or an educational or self-improvement group, were enormously high. Friendly societies or benefit clubs were among the most common clubs for workers. Matthew Boulton, a manufacturer, factory-owner and partner with James Watt in the improvement and manufacturing of the early steam engine, was one of the first to see the value to an employer in setting up an insurance club. From the early 1770s his employees received benefits on illness, accident or death, having made contributions as a percentage of their earnings—from

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d. a week for those earning 2s. 6d. to 4d. for those earning £1. When they were ill they received payments in inverse proportion to their contributions, so that those earning the least received the most financial assistance—about four-fifths of their weekly wage for those employees with the lowest incomes. But if the illness or incapacity stemmed from ‘drunkenness, debauchery, quarrelling or fighting’, part of the first ten days’ payment was withheld. Boulton as well as his workers benefited from this scheme: by having some financial support in hard times, fewer ill or injured workers ended up being supported ‘on the parish’, which kept the poor rate down, and Boulton’s workers were more likely to stay with him, because if they moved on they would lose the benefit of the contributions they had already paid in.

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Even without the participation of enlightened employers, mutualsupport clubs were becoming common. The 1793 Friendly Societies Act enabled clubs to raise ‘separate funds for the mutual relief and maintenance of the…members in sickness, old age and infirmity’.

(#litres_trial_promo) One estimate suggests that in 1801 there were at the very least 7,200 friendly societies in England and Wales, which together numbered about 648,000 members. In London at least 40 per cent of the working population belonged to a friendly society, while in some new industrial regions the figure was even higher: in Oldham, Lancashire, 50 per cent of all adult males belonged to one of the fifteen societies flourishing there. In Scotland there were nearly 400 friendly societies by 1800. Ireland took longer to develop the concept: in 1800 there were only 7 societies that we know about today, but by 1831 the number had shot up to 281, with half centred in Dublin.

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Clubs that were not mainly about financial aid were also popular: working men’s libraries, groups to discuss politics or literature, or to buy books. A club in Sunderland met regularly to discuss old English ballads; the members were saving jointly towards the collected volumes of reprints of Early and Middle English texts published by the Early English Text Society. The members consisted of a cork-cutter, two woodcarvers from the docks, a watchmaker, an engine-fitter and ‘a painter of photographs’.* (#ulink_1079023e-e3d3-50db-82ad-5fdabe76c6f1)

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The largest, and most widespread, self-improvement groups were the Mechanics’ Institutes. The first one was set up in 1824 in London, with 1,500 members paying 1 guinea each—clearly, a group of high-earning skilled workers and artisans. By 1850 there were 702 Institutes across the country, but by now they had mostly been taken over by the middle classes: the upper middle classes at the administrative end, and the lower middle classes—clerks and shopworkers—as members. The original expectation had been that these institutes would increase the skills and scientific and technical knowledge of manual labourers by offering access to books and pamphlets in reading rooms, and to continuing education via evening lectures. This would produce a more highly skilled and useful workforce, which would be a great benefit to employers. But fairly swiftly it was discovered that the lectures were too theoretical, and the workers found little practical incentive to attend after a long day’s work. Instead, lectures that gave some form of recreation were preferred, and were much better attended. In its initial period of worker education, from 1835 to 1842, the Manchester Athenaeum held 352 lectures, of which 173 were on the ‘physical and mental sciences’; in 1842—9, out of 394 lectures, science featured in only 81. Nationally, of 1,000 lectures held at 42 institutions in 1851, only 340 were on science, while 572 were classed as literature—although literature here had a fairly broad definition, essentially meaning anything that was not science or music. Included in the list of literature lectures were topics such as ‘the funeral rites of various nations, the habits and customs of the Eskimos, the life, death and burial of Mary, Queen of Scots, the games of Greece, the theosophy of India, the sons of Noah, and…“Are the Inhabitants of Persia, India, and China of Japhetic or Shemitic [sic] Origin?”’ There were also twenty-three lectures on Shakespeare, and over the next years many lectures gradually turned into readings from favourite authors, and sometimes simply readings of plays, which was a way of getting around the general disapproval of the theatre by many Dissenters and some Anglicans (see pp. 274—5).

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The Institutes began to hold exhibitions and social events more generally. The earliest exhibitions, held by the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute from 1837, were in the mould of the lectures on science and technical innovation—exhibitions of ‘machinery, industrial products, scientific apparatus and works of art’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Over the next five years, Manchester held four exhibitions, and drew over 200,000 visitors in total.

(#litres_trial_promo) From 1838 to 1840 the various Institutes held at least fifty exhibitions across the country. But almost immediately the emphasis altered, exactly as it had with the lectures. By 1846 the Manchester Institute was showing more than machinery, with exhibitions of paintings by Turner, Benjamin West, Landseer and Charles Eastlake. The urge for entertainment rather than education was nationwide: in 1842 the Institute in York saw working-class membership increase as excursions and social events were added to the calendar; by 1844 the Huddersfield members expected a gala, excursions, exhibitions and tea parties. Most of the other groups had moved in a similar direction, with a general leaning towards culture and recreation. And recreation included travel.

By the time of the Great Exhibition, excursion travel was already a regular feature of the landscape, even if it was the still-exciting exception rather than the run-of-the-mill norm. In 1830 the first passenger railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, had carried sightseers out to the Sankey Viaduct for 5s. (instead of the standard fare of 8s.) only two weeks after the line was opened. A few days later it took Manchester passengers to the Liverpool Charity Festival, and within a year it had made an arrangement with an entrepreneur to carry 150 members of a Sunday-school group from Manchester to Liverpool and back for 40 per cent of the regular fare. The various Mechanics’ Institutes quickly saw the benefits of organized cut-rate travel: the Manchester Institute arranged a trip to Liverpool for its members in 1833; in 1840 a group went from Leeds to York; by 1845 the Leeds-to-Hull excursion group was so large that a train with forty carriages was needed, possibly the first of the ‘monster’ trains that so captured the imagination of the Victorian public.

(#litres_trial_promo) (‘Monster’ was a favourite Victorian adjective, with monster trains, monster shops and monster exhibitions.) Very swiftly holiday travel took a great share of the excursion market. In 1846 Blackpool got its own railway line; four years later, up to 10,000 visitors a week were pouring into the town. Numbers continued to increase, while fares continued to tumble: in 1844 the London and South Western Railway began to run Easter excursions from Southampton to London at 7s. return; by 1850 the same trip cost 5s.

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When it came to the Great Exhibition itself, the railways initially had not been much interested in excursion business—there was a general underestimating of the numbers of the working classes who would wish to attend. As late as January 1851, less than four months before the opening, the trade magazine Herapath’s Railway and Commercial Journal was warning railway companies against recklessly increasing their rolling stock against a demand it thought could not possibly materialize.

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Thomas Cook, whose excursions to the Crystal Palace were later inextricably interwoven into his myth, actually became involved in bringing visitors to London in 1851 by accident. Though subsequently to personify the whole range of possibility that was excursion travel, Cook arrived, surprisingly, rather late in the day. He had entered the field only in 1841, when he arranged with the Midland Counties Railway to have an excursion train put at the disposal of his temperance group. By 1846 he had extended his tours beyond their initial Leicestershire borders, and was organizing excursions to Scotland. So successful were his tours that in 1850 he was thinking of expanding even further, by taking groups to the Holy Land. However, a temperance friend in London advised him against this, warning that there were ‘no railways, coaches, or even public roads’ there.

(#litres_trial_promo) He suggested that the USA might be better: steamers had been making regular crossings of the Atlantic from 1838, and the east coast of America was now just 12

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days away from Liverpool. So Cook set off for Liverpool to see if he could interest the steamship companies in the same type of arrangement he had been negotiating with the railways, giving him discounted fares in exchange for guaranteed numbers. But he managed to get only as far as Derby. There he met Joseph Paxton, the architect of the Crystal Palace, and his friend John Ellis, who was attempting to stabilize the Midland Railway Company after the crooked dealings of George Hudson, ‘the Railway King’, had threatened to destroy it and several other companies. Ellis had a vested interest in increased traffic on his railway—especially since he was one of the businessmen about whom Herapath’s would shortly warn: the Midland had ordered a hundred new third-class carriages to bring working-class passengers to the Exhibition. Paxton also had financial links to the railways. From the other side, Cook approved of the educational aspects of the Great Exhibition, the idea of ‘rational recreation’ it promoted, and he was further taken by the fact that the Crystal Palace was to be ‘dry’.* (#ulink_10039b89-176d-5f7c-99e9-85ed2e3885ef) (There were other aspects that pleased him equally: it was closed on Sundays, religious tracts were distributed throughout the fair, there was a Bible depot, and, at the request of Lord Shaftesbury, all the nude statues were to be respectably covered.)

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Cook came to an agreement with the Midland to bring them his excursionists for a fee that he referred to delicately as ‘several shillings’ per head, instead of his usual percentage of the fare paid. In return for this, the excursionists would get a return ticket, with accommodation in London (including ‘a substantial meat breakfast’) for another 2s. (plus an extra 1d. if they wanted their boots cleaned); if that was too expensive, accommodation at 1s. could be found in dormitories set up on ships moored at Vauxhall Bridge.

(#litres_trial_promo) Accommodation had been a major preoccupation for the planners. They were uncertain how many workingclass visitors would travel to the capital, but, with the fear of the mob that was pervasive, any number seemed to be a threat and was regarded as a public-order concern. A Home Office official had been asked by the Royal Commission to look into how best ‘respectable and reasonable’ lodgings in London could be provided. The Home Office was pleased to comply, because it was anxious that ‘arrangements should in themselves conduce to the maintenance of good order and regularity without the appearance of any ostensible precautions, and that they should offer such facilities as will induce the working classes to follow, for their own advantage, the course pointed out’.

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Because the success of the Exhibition was still uncertain, not much more than worrying was done by the commission. Others, however, stepped in to the breach, just as Cook and assorted excursion agents were doing despite the unenthusiastic railway companies. The main accommodation organizer became John Cassell, a temperance lecturer and the proprietor of a coffee house in Fenchurch Street. (The provision of tea and coffee was common among those involved in the temperance movement.) Cassell had been the publisher of the Teetotal Times from 1846, as well as printing other journals and pamphlets relating to radical politics, Free Trade and universal suffrage, and in 1850 his new periodical the Working Man’s Friend had been launched. With the coming of the Great Exhibition, Cassell saw a gap in the market that he could fill both to the benefit of the working man and also for the promotion of his journal: the creation of an artisan lodging-house register. He distributed (he claimed) 100,000 forms to lodging houses, had each one that responded inspected, and then charged their owners 2s. 6d. to register with him (of which 1s. 6d. was paid as the tax on advertisements). All lodging houses that wanted to be included in the register were required to conform to strict rules: lodging was 2s. for a double bed, with bootcleaning thrown in; a breakfast of tea or coffee and bread and butter had to be available, and could cost no more than 9d.; if bacon or ham or a kipper were added, then 1s. could be charged. Cassell published a general register that listed the establishments that met his requirements, and a classified register that had the lodging houses listed by religious affiliation. Either could be obtained by sending six penny stamps by post, and both advertised the Working Man’s Friend.

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It was commercial activities of this nature that made the railways feel that perhaps there was money to be made in transporting the working classes to London for the fair. Very swiftly, they went from almost complete apathy to ruthless competition. A price war broke out between the Midland Railway and the Great Northern—at one point the battle became so overheated that a steam engine was hijacked by the opposition. In order to give its new Bradford-and-Leeds-to-London line a boost, the GNR promoted 5s. return fares. The Midland could not match that and still give Cook his ‘several shillings’. He agreed to tear up the agreement, which in the long term was very good business on his part, as long afterwards the Midland continued to give him preferential rates when other excursion agents began to set up in his territory.

Cook’s son John, aged seventeen, acted as his advance agent. He and others travelled to towns across Yorkshire and the Midlands to publicize the possibilities of travel to London and the Great Exhibition for working people. They distributed handbills, held meetings—often with a band playing outside a mill or factory on pay day, to attract a crowd—and helped to set up savings clubs for the fares and accommodation. These subscription clubs were crucial to the success of the Exhibition. Mayhew’s novel 1851 has the villagers of Buttermere paying into the ‘Travelling Association for the Great Exhibition of 1851…for months past, subscribing their pennies with the intention of having their share in that general holiday’, with the local squire acting as club treasurer.

(#litres_trial_promo) Other groups that came, supported by various savings methods, included parishes led by their clergymen, soldiers brought by their commanding officers, schools and Sunday schools by their teachers, and factory and mill workers by their employers. In Maldon and Braintree, the shops in both towns closed for a day to allow the entire towns’ populations to travel en masse to London. And all of them seemed to go by rail. The Great Western increased its passenger numbers by 38.3 per cent over the period; the London and South Western by 29.9 per cent; the London and Blackwall by 28.5 per cent; the South Eastern by 23.8 per cent; and the London and North-Western by 22.6 per cent. The last of these claimed that, for the duration of the fair, it had carried over three-quarters of a million passengers, and that 90,000 of these were excursionists, in 145 special excursion trains, travelling from the north for 5s. return.

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While these excursionists were evidently not rich, they brought home to the manufacturers, the industrialists, a new economic truth. It had become increasingly apparent over the previous half-century that there was as much money—if not more—to be made from large numbers of relatively low-income consumers as there was from the tiny numbers of high-earners. The concept of the mass market was taking shape, personified by the Great Exhibition. This was in some ways an oddity, since the fair itself was not a particularly good example of mass production. The 300,000 panes of glass used in the Crystal Palace were not machine made, but instead were each individually hand-blown,

(#litres_trial_promo) although it is true that the very nature of the building, with its innovative prefabricated sections that could be made off-site and then assembled, looked towards the future of mass production. For the moment the mass market centred around the many linked products that were appearing without the formal imprimatur of the Great Exhibition. Cassell produced The Illustrated Exhibitor, published at 2d. per part, issued weekly, which when completed made up a four-volume illustrated survey of the Exhibition, either as a souvenir of a visit or for those who had not managed to get to London.* (#ulink_d55981d3-3f64-50e3-970a-728809670371) Within a month of the first part appearing, Cassell was selling 100,000 copies, giving him a monthly turnover of nearly £3,500.

(#litres_trial_promo) This was only one of many works published to catch on to—and cash in on—the excitement of the fair. There were numerous guides published to coincide with the opening of the Exhibition, by anyone who chose to enter the field. Cassell himself published The London Conductor, whose subtitle made it pretty clear at whom it was aimed: Being a Guide for Visitors to the Great Industrial Exhibition, through the principal portions of the metropolis; including a brief history and description of the palaces, parks, churches; government, legal, and commercial buildings; bridges, statues, museums, hospitals, club-houses, theatres, and streets of London; and the remarkable places in its vicinity—basically, anyone arriving in London for the first time.† (#ulink_1fa78645-bb1d-5499-9cd7-ff169a245d98) It cost 9d., and went through two editions almost immediately, despite not being particularly accurate. A third edition, without illustrations, came out with corrections and a reduced cover price; a fourth edition, with the pictures reinstated, was needed by September.