A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  In spite of this the seaside as a whole was a classless place. Among the era’s well-known images is William Powell Frith’s painting Life at the Seaside, also known as Ramsgate Sands. Bought in 1854 by the Queen, to whom it must have brought back memories, it shows a predominantly upper-middle-class gathering of holidaymakers on a small stretch of beach. It gives what was probably an accurate view of their activities, though the artist has chosen to cram his figures together in a manner that suggests that ‘personal space’ was not a priority. A modern observer is surprised to see that they are fully dressed. The ladies wear crinolines and shawls, gloves and bonnets, and even a woman who is helping a child to paddle has allowed the hem of her dress to trail in the water rather than hitching it up. The men wear suits and ties – though one of them is in carpet slippers – and there is a sprinkling of top hats. Few people seem very interested in their surroundings, for several read books and papers, women do needlework and some watch an entertainer. There are the usual donkeys and sideshows.

  It is noticeable that the attitude of these people to sunburn is the opposite of ours. No one is exposing themselves to the light in order to catch the sun, and the poke bonnets of the ladies, with their wide brims, were specifically designed to keep the faces of their wearers in shadow. For a woman any blush of sunburn would have been seen as unfeminine and unbecoming, which is why the parasol was such an important piece of equipment at this time. Gloves were worn on the beach to prevent hands from discolouring. Only fishwives, or similarly rough local women, would have had complexions that were touched by the elements, and no genteel person of either sex wished to look like that.

  No one is swimming. This was not seen as part of the experience until quite late in the century, and those with a taste for salt water tended only to paddle. Sea bathing, since its introduction as a restorative treatment by the Georgians, had been carried out from ‘bathing machines’ – small wooden huts mounted on high wheels and fitted with shafts, that were towed into the sea by horses. Bathers, segregated by gender, changed into suitable costume before climbing down a set of steps into the water (these steps were sometimes covered by a canopy to protect modesty). The actual bathing consisted simply of immersing oneself a number of times with the help of an attendant. At Brighton and elsewhere, these were typically women, solidly built enough to hang on to, who stood fully clothed in the water. As the notion of actually swimming in then sea gained popularity these attendants became extinct, but the bathing machine (several are visible in Frith’s canvas) remained a ubiquitous part of the Victorian seaside until the end of the reign.

  In 1897 the cartoonist Phil May drew another picture of Ramsgate Sands. Though there are still rows of bathing machines, there have been a number of changes. The crowd is noticeably more vulgar, even in this select resort, for the seaside has become more associated with the working and lower middle classes, while those higher up the social ladder have by this time taken to holidaying abroad. There are donkeys, ice-cream vendors, pierrots, blacked-up minstrels and several portable photographic studios. The seaside is obviously still a very buttoned-up environment, for though boys have rolled up their trouser legs, their elders are fully dressed. The men are in suits and waistcoats, ties and bowler hats. Women wear corsets, tight skirts and decorated hats. Though not shown in May’s drawing, casual dress would have been represented by linen suits, white trousers, striped blazers and straw boaters (Mr Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody is proud of a straw sun-helmet he has purchased to wear on holiday). Women might well have had lightweight dresses, but they wore (according to the dictates of fashion) collars and ties and short jackets on the sands, and the young and shapely could not leave their corsets at home without losing the wasp-waisted look that was considered essential. It was in any case part of the Victorian mindset that one dressed up – not down – to go on holiday. City-dwelling day-trippers would often wear their Sunday best in order to visit the seaside. Those men able to afford it might well wear checked tweed suits and bowler (as opposed to top) hats – the standard costume of relaxation for those on fishing, walking or climbing holidays, but they would never want to look anything but smart.

  By the end of the century men and women in appropriate costumes – the latter wearing mob caps to protect their hair, and canvas shoes – would be taking bathing seriously. With the increase in public baths in towns and cities, and the rise of swimming as a sport, growing numbers of people possessed the skills to take to the sea, but given the amount of clothing that would have to be discarded it is not surprising that paddling remained far more popular.

  Without a pier, no self-respecting resort could hope to be visited. Originally they had been of stone, and served the simple function of providing a place for vessels to embark or to land goods and passengers. With the technology that had made possible the Crystal Palace, piers began to be made of iron and glass. Sometimes they were built by the very railway companies that brought the visitors and whose stations these structures often resembled. Most piers simply jutted into the sea, though the one at Weston-super-Mare was partly built on an offshore rock. They could accommodate not only sideshows but restaurants, funfairs, theatres and even ballrooms. As the coastal towns attracted a wealth of entertainments – Punch and Judy shows, acrobats, performing animals, ‘nigger minstrels’ – there developed the notion of marshalling these diversions on the pier. These thus became almost a world in themselves, and often the public was charged admission simply to walk along them. Brighton’s two piers were perhaps the best known, though the longest in the country – at Southend in Essex – was over a mile from end to end. It had, and still has, a railway to take visitors along it.

  Other traditions gradually accrued. Donkey rides were already customary by the mid-century, but the availability of gimcrack souvenirs increased noticeably from about that time. As well as the ships-in-bottles made by local sailors and hawked around the sands, there were now multitudes of mass-produced (often foreign-made) items of glass, shell or ceramic to clutter the mantelpieces of lower-middle-class households. The advent of the picture postcard in the 1890s added yet another dimension, as it became customary to send greetings, often accompanied by jocular or even scurrilous messages, to those at home. Day-trippers to resorts often sent a postcard as soon as they arrived, knowing that it would have been delivered by the time they returned home that evening.

  The boarding house became another staple of the nineteenth-century seaside. Fathers, too busy earning a living to spend weeks on the coast, could send their wives and children – or indeed their offspring in the care of a nanny – to one of these establishments, and join them at weekends. Families developed loyalties to particular resorts, hotels and boarding houses, and made a ritual of the annual holiday.

  Field and Stream

  Inland there were other types of resort. They were usually chosen for some form of curative facility, and were often within reach of pleasant scenery. Malvern in Worcestershire and Matlock or Buxton in Derbyshire enjoyed a considerable vogue for this reason, all of them having springs of pure water that were beneficial to those who suffered from the heavy, unhealthy Victorian diet. In Scotland, there was a fashion for ‘Hydros’ – large hotels built for these same purposes of cure and exercise amid beautiful landscapes, such as those at Crieff and Peebles. Several are still in business today.

  These were part of a significant increase in internal tourism that gathered momentum as the century progressed. As always, it was the revolutions in transport and communication that made this possible. Trains and boats carried visitors to most parts of the country. Bicycles could take them further into the hinterland. The hotels and other facilities that in turn grew up to cater for these crowds made it easier to visit remote regions. The greater availability of cheap illustrated guidebooks made people more aware of the history and natural wonders of the places they visited, and this in turn increased a desire to protect both landscape and buildings. A new era began, in this sense, with the founding of the Nationa
l Trust in 1895.

  Cultural Tourism

  The accessibility of culture made it possible to take holidays that were devoted not only to rest or to exercise but to improving the mind. Great industrial cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow founded major museums and art galleries to put themselves on the cultural map. These often contained significant treasures that merited a journey. There might also be important temporary spectacles: in 1857 the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition took place. It was smaller than the Great Exhibition of six years earlier, from which it took its inspiration, and its theme was not technological progress but the glories of art and design. Its 16,000 exhibits were borrowed largely from private collections, and it attracted 1.3 million visitors during the five months that it was open.

  While attending such an event is entirely understandable, some aspects of Victorian earnestness can seem distinctly eccentric from a modern perspective. This writer’s great-grandmother visited Scotland on her honeymoon in 1887. Staying in Dundee, where the couple view the ruins of the old Tay Bridge (and carry off part of the handrail as a souvenir), she relates in her diary that they ‘try to get into a rope manufactory. After a deal of trouble we succeed’, but she adds that ‘they seemed to be afraid we were spies’. Proceeding to Glasgow, she describes how she and her husband:

  jump on a tram to go out in the direction of the mills, saying to a fellow passenger ‘We would like to get into a mill’. He replied ‘Come with me’ so off we went with him to some large dye works where he had some business, introduced us to the manager & took his departure when we were taken all over the works and shewn every process of dyeing. We said we would like to see another, a weaving mill. So this manager just wrote a note to some man and gave us to take as an introduction. We were admitted at once and after waiting a few minutes were taken over the whole place.1

  Neither she nor her husband had any connection whatever with the businesses in which they showed such inquisitiveness.

  Because it took only hours to reach remote areas, the countryside became increasingly a place of recreation rather than work – a state of affairs that remains true today. Until the middle decades of the century, Britain had depended on its farmers to feed the population. The settlement of huge and far-flung agricultural regions – the prairies of Canada and the United States – and the fact that cheap grain could be shipped, swiftly and safely, from the New World meant that for the first time ever Britain could afford to rely entirely on imports. With the development of refrigeration, meat as well as cereals could be provided from beyond the oceans. Whatever the implications for British agriculture, this increasingly made the countryside a playground for cyclists, walkers and golfers. The advent of the ‘weekend’ meant that on Saturdays and Sundays, trains disgorged parties of hikers and other enthusiasts to fill the lanes and meadows with noise and movement. For many parts of rural Britain, the peaceful Sunday was becoming a thing of the past, a trend that became even more noticeable with the arrival of the motor car.

  On the Water

  Not only the roads and fields, but the rivers became a place of entertainment. The Thames, in particular, was regarded by the later Victorian decades as a scene of fashionable resort. Once again it was the railways that brought this change. For the whole of history, the Thames had been a working river, filled with barges that carried, for instance, the stone used to construct many London buildings. When the railway took away this trade, the river was left empty, and it began to be discovered by holidaymakers.

  There had already been an element of recreation about the river. Public schools such as Westminster had raced boats on it for some time, and rowing was an established sport at Oxford. The first University Boat Race had been held in 1829, and Henley Regatta – which was soon able to add ‘Royal’ to its title – began exactly ten years later. While crowds flocked to see these spectacles, there were other attractions: steamers could now bring tourists to view Hampton Court or Windsor. Canoeing and punting – especially popular from the eighties – could make hot summer Sunday afternoons more agreeable. The former was an import from Canada, the latter had developed, earlier in the century, from the flat fishing craft used in shallow water. Because they were easily propelled – by ladies as well as men – punts became a much-used conveyance, giving members of either sex the chance to look graceful and to show off their dexterity. Mishaps were common, however, especially if the pole got stuck in mud, and Punch made considerable fun of those who came to grief. The most formidable risk was of being run down by a steam launch. There were so many of these that, in some places, the Thames became as crowded as Ludgate Circus. This was the world so brilliantly captured by Jerome K. Jerome in his novel Three Men in a Boat (1889), and he spoke for generations of boating enthusiasts when he wrote that: ‘I never see a steam launch but I feel I should like to lure it into a lonely part of the river, and there . . . strangle it.’

  The riverside pubs at Bray or Sonning or a score of other places could serve as a rendezvous for trippers, fishermen or rowers. The Thames was a classless thoroughfare, as open to day-tripping East Enders as to aristocrats in their private houseboats. These latter were often as luxurious as country houses, equipped with electricity, pianos, billiard tables and a staff of servants (a number of the vessels that later became Oxford college barges began life as vessels of this sort).

  There were also places ashore that took on fashionable importance. Of these, by far the most important was the town of Maidenhead. It owed its status to the arrival there, in 1865, of the Guards Boat Club. It soon attained a prominent role in the Season, and in particular the river there, where it passed through a narrow set of gates called Boulter’s Lock, and became the only place to be seen on ‘Ascot Sunday’ – the day after the races. (Another iconic Victorian painting depicts this occasion. Boulter’s Lock, Sunday Afternoon was painted by Edward John Gregory between 1885 and 1897. It depicts the lock crowded with craft of all sizes, while both banks are thronging with spectators.) The town itself is some distance from the Thames, but the river front boasted an impressive array of hotels, mansions and private houses, many of which were rented for the very short time during the year that it was fashionable to be there. Maidenhead quickly acquired something of a reputation for raffishness, its hotels and villas favoured by upper class roués for rendezvous with mistresses (a row of dwellings opposite the Guards Club was allegedly used entirely for this). Jerome summed it up in Three Men in a Boat:

  Maidenhead itself is too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of the river swell and his overdressed female companion. It is the town of showy hotels, patronised chiefly by dudes and ballet girls. It is the witch’s kitchen from which go forth those demons of the river – steam launches. The London Journal duke always has his ‘little place’ at Maidenhead; and the heroine of the three-volume novel always dines there when she goes out on the spree with somebody else’s husband.2

  Though a certain notoriety hung about the town until the Second World War, Maidenhead was rapidly to lose its Victorian and Edwardian appeal. Most of the surviving buildings along its riverbanks are in the red-brick, Queen Anne revival style of the latter nineteenth century, attesting to the swift arrival of fashion, and its comparatively swift departure.

  Overseas

  While the countryside could provide amusement when the weather was pleasant, those in search of more reliable sunshine, or wider horizons, went abroad. The wealthy had always been able to do this, though Europe was also a destination for the genteel poor. Britain was so expensive to live in for those attempting to keep up appearances that numbers of families or individuals gave up the struggle and moved to cities or countries where their means would go further. One such place was Deauville in Normandy, a popular summer destination for English summer visitors but also home to a permanent expatriate community. Similarly Dresden, capital of the German kingdom of Saxony – the ‘Florence of the Elbe’ – had so many British residents that three English newspapers were at one time published ther
e. Other groups could be found all over Europe and beyond, merging with those fellow countrymen who travelled for health reasons in search of drier climates in which to spend the winter. It was the English who created the French Riviera. Their enthusiasm is thought to have begun with Tobias Smollett, the eighteenth-century novelist whose Travels through France and Italy (1766) was a bestseller. By the decades following the Napoleonic Wars, increasing numbers of Britons were settling in the region. One early enthusiast was Lord Brougham, who built a chateau in Cannes in 1836. By that time several resorts – Cannes, Nice, Menton – were being developed with funding from him and from his wealthy compatriots, and Cannes already boasted a boulevard des Anglais named in their honour. By 1862 there were almost 500 British families in the area, and by 1900 there were almost 100,000 visitors a year from the United Kingdom. These included even the country’s ruler, for Queen Victoria made an annual visit during the last years of her life. (The Riviera was fashionable only during winter, and not until the 1920s would summer visits be popularized by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, who could not afford to live there during the high season.) Two types of people went to this part of France: the wealthy and the sick. The climate was recommended by British doctors to those suffering from tuberculosis. It had not yet been discovered that the Alpine air of Switzerland was more favourable for this (a migration of British invalids in that direction would characterize the later part of the reign), and in the meantime a sizeable community of doctors, invalids and their relatives grew up there.