Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  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.44 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.)45 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).*47 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).48 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.49

  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 1/2d. 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.50

  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.51 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.’52 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.53

  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.’54 (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 4,000.55 Most of these sales, especially in London, were made by the radical press. The Sunday papers in London sold 110,000 copies each week, and there were ten radical Sunday papers to every conservative one. There were some more potentially mainstream papers - the Observer (established 1791) and the Sunday Times (1822) were both newspapers with a middleclass readership; the News of the World (1843) and the Weekly Times (1847) were also ‘respectable’, although radical in political content. But those that sold most to the working classes were the Weekly Dispatch (1801), Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (1842) and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper (1850; for more on Reynolds’s part publications, see Chapter 5), which were ‘dist
inguished chiefly by the violence and even brutality of their tone’.56 Those papers with the goriest crime and most sensational sensations were those that were the most successful: Lloyd’s, for example, contained in one issue ‘The Emperor Napoleon on Assassination. Fearful stabbing case through jealousy. Terrible scene at an execution. Cannibalism at Liverpool. The Great Seizure of Indecent Prints. A man roasted to death. A cruel husband and an adulterous wife.’57 In 1886, over half of the space in Lloyd’s was given over to crime or scandal. Then there were ‘specials’, editions produced for particular events, such as the execution of a particularly notorious murderer.58 A summary of Reynolds’s, Lloyd’s and the Weekly Times shows they were all much of a muchness: except in times of national or international trauma (the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War), home and foreign news rarely took up more than 20 per cent of the non-advertising text, while ‘sensational’ coverage might get as much as 50 per cent of the space. During the Crimean War, Reynolds’s gave 30 per cent of its space to coverage, Lloyd’s 32.5 per cent, while the Weekly Times gave a grudging 23.5 per cent. After the war was over, however, Lloyd’s did its best to cater to its market by giving less than 1 per cent of its entire coverage in 1858 to foreign news; even then, it was trumped by the Weekly Times, which found space for just three-quarters of 1 per cent.59 As the century wore on, less and less space was given to news of any sort, while sensation took over.

  The Town, which started in 1837, was similar, but it was unstamped, and therefore cost only 2d., instead of the 6d. that those newspapers which paid tax were forced to charge. Being unstamped, it could not legally carry any news, including any references to politics. But even without news its low price brought it a readership at the bottom end of the middle classes, as can be seen from the large proportion of articles promoting a reduction in working hours, or its several series on different types of workplace, which discussed particularly the head clerks aiming itself at a readership of junior clerks with ambitions. It also published numerous accounts of ‘Sketches of courtezans’, ‘Brothels and Brothelkeepers’, ‘Cigar shops and pretty women’, and articles on ‘free and easies’ (the precursors to music hall; see pp. 372-4), as well as carrying advertisements for books with titles like Venus’s Album, or, Rosebuds of Love, which sounds like pornography, but was advertised as a collection of ‘the best double-entendre, flash, and comic songs’.60

  For a couple of decades early in the nineteenth century there was a demand for newspapers that were more concerned with gossip and scandal: John Bull (1820), Paul Pry (1830/31), the Satirist (1831) and the New Satirist (1841), and the Crim.-Con. Gazette (1840).* Some of these had started off as political journals: John Bull was Tory, the Satirist an interesting mix of anti-Chartist, anti-abolition, pro-parliamentaryreform, pro-O’Connell views. But ultimately they were - or became - little more than organs of vituperation, as with John Bull’s abuse of that ‘elderly smug Cockney, William Hazlitt, alias Bill Pimple, alias the Great Shabberon [a mean, shabby person]…an old weather-beaten, pimplesnouted gin-smelling man, like a Pimlico tailor, with ink-dyed hands, a corrugated forehead, and a spiritous nose’. The Satirist and the Age were even worse - they had swiftly degenerated into blackmail sheets: ‘If a Reader of the Satirist will furnish us with evidence of the “publication” on the part of the “Gin-and-water Curate residing in the neighbourhood of Dorset-square”, we will make the reverend tipler [sic] repeat it.’ The paper then either received information from disgruntled or vindictive readers, for which it (sometimes) paid, or the person written about got in touch with the editor, and a pay-off guaranteed the rapid insertion of a paragraph countering the original claims.62

  By the 1840s these frankly vicious papers had more or less run their course, and had either closed or turned respectable. Instead Reynolds’s, Lloyd’s and the News of the World took over their readerships. There were also, from the 1840s, new penny papers for unskilled workers: the Penny Times, which appears, from its pictures, to have expected an audience who read only with difficulty, and centred around episodes of murder, abduction, rape and other violent crimes, and Bell’s Penny Dispatch, and Sporting and Police Gazette, and Newspaper of Romance, and Penny Sunday Chronicle (all one title), which had ‘thrilling tales’ every week. These tales took off, and as politics - particularly radical politics - became less of a selling point on the collapse of the Chartist movement, more and more papers joined in: Clark’s Weekly Dispatch ran ‘A Ghost Story’ in 1841, Bell’s began a serial ‘The Green Man’ in 1842, and in 1843 Lloyd’s Penny Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette had ‘The Waltz of Death’ by C. G. Ainsworth, with a gory illustration on the front page.*63 (This paper was made up entirely of fiction and police reports, so it didn’t need to be stamped - hence its 1d. price, compared to the 7d. charged by the Sunday Times.) The journalist Henry Vizetelly, looking back at the end of the century, remembered these ‘lengthy and exciting stories, telling how rich and poor babies were wickedly changed in their perambulators by conniving nursemaids, how long-lost wills miraculously turned up in the nick of time’. The characters were always of a type: ‘The villains were generally of high birth and repulsive presence; the lowly personages were always of ravishing beauty and unsullied virtue. Innocence and loveliness in a gingham gown were perpetually pursued by vice and debauchery in varnished boots and spotless gloves. Life was surrounded by mystery; detectives were ever on the watch, and the most astonishing pitfalls and mantraps were concealed in the path of the unwary and of the innocent.’64 These tales all had illustrations in keeping with the Gothic sensibilities of their stories. The British Quarterly Review in 1859 warned its readers that

  with few exceptions…[such stories were] of a violent or sinister character. There is usually either a ‘deed of blood’ going forward, or preparations for it. If there be not a dishevelled villain in a slouch hat shooting a fair gentleman in lace and tassels, or a brawny savage dragging an unprotected female into a cavern by the hair of her head, we may reckon at least upon a man in a cloak watching from behind a rock, or a ‘situation’ of thrilling interest, in which the figures look as if they had been taken in a spasm, and were suddenly petrified.65

  This type of fiction was to prove lucrative for newspapers in general, and for William Frederic Tillotson in particular. He was the proprietor of the Bolton Evening News, which he established in 1867. Soon he also owned the Bolton Journal and Guardian, and then local editions of this paper (renamed the Bolton Weekly Journal), which served a number of towns in Lancashire. In 1872 he published in his Saturday paper a weekly serial called ‘Biddy MacCarthy; or, the Murder of the O’Haras’. This was not substantially different from tales published by his many colleagues, but his next move was. The following year he set up a ‘fiction bureau’, becoming a broker of fiction, or agent, buying work from authors and selling it on to other newspapers. By the early 1880s he had over sixty established authors on his books for serialized work, including Harrison Ainsworth, R. M. Ballantyne, J. M. Barrie, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Eliza Lynn Linton, Captain Marryat, Mrs Oliphant, Trollope, Charles Reade and H. G. Wells. By the 1890s he had agents working for him in the USA, in Europe and in the British colonies.66 Tillotson’s reach meant that authors’ work was seen in local papers that, without his centralized selling, would not have had a chance of acquiring the work of such successful writers. For example, in 1900 a short story by Arnold Bennett appeared simultaneously in the Queen; the Evesham Journal, the Nottingham Guardian, the Manchester Weekly Times, the Weston-super-Mare Mercury, the Cardiff Times, the Newcastle Courant, the Carlisle Journal, the Sheffield Independent and the Huddersfied Chronicle. But Tillotson’s work was not finished, and the story was then reprinted in the Aberdeen Free Press, Irish Society, the Blackburn Times, the Deal Mercury, the Birmingham News, the Batley News, the Stratford News, the Salford Chronicle, the Barnsley Independent, the Bradford Telegraph, the Tiverton Gazette, the Portsmouth Telegraph, the
Hartlepool Mail, the Sunderland Echo and the Bury Visitor.67 The financial stability of many small newspapers now depended on the quality of their fiction.

  These papers had survived despite the London - now national - papers being easier to come by than ever throughout the country. The Post Office was still carrying newspapers without charge, but as early as 1827, two years after the opening of the first railway line, a shareholder in the soon-to-be-running Stockton and Darlington Railway wrote to Francis Freeling, the secretary (or administrative head) of the Post Office, notifying him that the railway ‘coaches were going as fast as any mail in the Kingdom, with one horse and fifty passengers’. With the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, Freeling was in touch with the postmasters in both cities to suggest that they enter into discussions with the railway to carry post; and only months after the line opened, and the first commercial train ran, a contract was agreed.* Within a decade, carrying the post by train was the norm: the London to Preston postal route, which had previously taken 24 hours from post office to post office, could now be travelled in 10 hours and 46 minutes.69

  But long before this, in 1831, the Liverpool and Manchester was carrying newspapers between the two cities - without charge if the printers dropped them off at the station, and the newsagents collected them at the other end. The ‘without charge’ part didn’t last long, but the railways gave greatly reduced rates - up to half the going parcel-post rate - in return for volume and daily orders.70 A London newsagent, William Henry Smith, saw his chance. He and his brother Henry, ‘Newspaper Agents, Booksellers and Binders’, ran a business in Little Grosvenor Street that they had inherited from their father. In 1821 they opened a reading room in the Strand, stocking 150 newspapers, journals and reviews, and charging a stiff 1 guinea annual subscription. By 1826 they still had not quite found their niche, and were calling themselves ‘Stationers, Travelling-case and Pocket-book Makers, and Newsmen’. (In 1828 Henry left the business.) William understood that getting the news out first was what mattered. When daytime stagecoaches began to replace night coaches, he hired carts to collect the newspapers directly from the printers and deliver them, wrapped and addressed, to the stagecoach offices first thing in the morning. He advertised in The Times: