Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
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The Times complained that leisure now meant planning, and organization, which made holidays ‘work, and…tiring work…It entails a perpetual attention to time, and all the anxieties and irritations of that responsibility.’78 Punch could not have agreed more heartily, publishing a squib that could still describe today’s frazzled excursionist:
THE WONDERS OF MODERN TRAVEL.
THE STATION.
Wonder if the porter understood what I said to him about the luggage.
Wonder if I shall see him again.
Wonder if I shall know him when I do see him again.
Wonder if I gave my writing-case to the porter, or left it in the cab.
Wonder where I take my ticket.
Wonder in which pocket I put my gold.
Wonder where I got that bad half-crown which the clerk won’t take.
Wonder if that’s another that I’ve just put down.
Wonder where the porter is who took my luggage.
Wonder where my luggage is.
Wonder again whether I gave my writing-case to the porter, or left if in the cab.
Wonder which is my train.
Wonder if the guard knows anything about that porter with the writing-case.
Wonder if it will be ‘all right’ as the guard says it will be…
THE JOURNEY.
Wonder if my change is all right.
Wonder for the second time in which pocket I put my gold.
Wonder if I gave the cabman a sovereign for a shilling.
Wonder if that was the reason why he grumbled less than usual and drove off rapidly.
Wonder if any one objects to smoking.
Wonder that nobody does.
Wonder where I put my lights.
Wonder whether I put them in my writing-case.
Wonder for the third time whether I gave my writing-case to the porter or left it in the cab.
Wonder if anybody in the carriage has got any lights.
Wonder that nobody has.
Wonder when we can get some.
Wonder if there’s anything in the paper.
Wonder why they don’t cut it.*
Wonder if I put my knife in my writing-case.
Wonder for the fourth time whether I gave, &c.
Wonder if I can cut the paper with my ticket.
Wonder where I put my ticket.
Wonder where I could have put my ticket.
Wonder where the deuce I put my ticket.79
Railways had created new connections to literature, both practical and imaginative; but travel and books had had far older connections too. In the eighteenth century much of travel was undertaken from the comfort of one’s own armchair. Travel writing was enormously popular - the more exotic the better. ‘Africa’, noted Horace Walpole in 1744, ‘is indeed coming into fashion.’80 Half a century later that remained true: Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, published in 1799, went through four editions in its first year. Even more successful had been the various accounts of the voyages of Captain Cook. These made up some of the volumes most frequently borrowed from libraries, but it was not Cook alone who wrote them, although he produced four volumes. Such was the interest that the Admiralty paid John Hawkesworth £6,000 - more than was earned by almost any author of the time - to write an official account. (This was not a good move: he was a writer, not an explorer, and the results were considered laughable.)† Another account was published by Canon John Douglas. The botanist on the expedition published his version, and his son produced another; there was a pamphlet, A Catalogue of the Different Specimens of Cloth collected in the Three voyages of Cook; and even Cook’s alcoholic gunner’s mate sold his story to a chapbook publisher.82 Travel and commerce had merged. Apart from the books published, Omai, the Tahitian who had come back to England with Cook on his second voyage, was painted by Joshua Reynolds; then engravings of the painting made by Francesco Bartolozzi, (the most fashionable engraver of the day - so fashionable that the Royal Academy made an exception to its ‘no engravers’ rule, and he was a full member from the start) were immensely popular and sold widely in print shops.
With the French wars at the end of the century came a further rash of travel books, as military men fought abroad and then, on their return home, produced their accounts of foreign parts. With the peace of 1815, the Continent was easily accessible for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, and many rushed abroad. As late as 1800, travellers to Greece had been forced to rely on George Wheler’s Description of a Journey into Greece, which had first been published in 1682; by 1820, they could choose from more than two dozen new books.83 The cross-fertilization that had occurred between books and engravings in the case of Cook and Omai only developed: in 1821 Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a strongman who had performed at Sadler’s Wells as the ‘Patagonian Sampson’ (he was actually from Padua), travelled to Egypt to conduct excavations at both Abu Simbel and the Valley of the Kings. He returned with his plunder, and, as well as exhibiting scarabs, papyruses, statues, a scale model of the pyramids, a ‘Room of Beauties’ with representations of the pharaohs and gods, and galleries of drawings, he also wrote a book, his Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia; and of a Journey to the Coast of the Red Sea.84*
Austen Henry Layard was neither a military man nor a strongman, but a solicitor. He had been planning to go to Ceylon to practise, but instead in the early 1840s he was paid an advance of £200 from a publisher, which enabled him to travel through Syria, Palestine and Persia, and write about his travels. Once in the Near East he was asked by Stratford Canning, then serving as ambassador to Constantinople, to produce a report on a border dispute between Turkey and Persia, using Layard’s persona as a writer in search of material to cover what was, in effect, spying. As this was successful, in 1845 he was supplied with funds to excavate near Mosul, which was thought to be the site of Nineveh (in fact it turned out to be Nimrud). Canning wrote to the newly created archaeologist reminding him that ‘his professed occupation will be that of a traveller, fond of antiquities, of picturesque scenery, and the manner peculiar to Asia’.
When the excavations were completed, in 1847, Layard took the advice he was given on all sides. The Oriental Secretary at Constantinople told him, ‘Write a whopper with lots of plates…fish up old legends and anecdotes, and if you can by any means humbug people into the belief that you have established any points in the Bible, you are a made man.’ Even his aunt chipped in: ‘In this reading age a good book makes a man’s fortune here more certainly than by any other means.’ John Murray, the publisher who had advanced him £200, agreed to pay the nearly £4,000 that would be necessary to produce engravings, if Layard agreed to write not a scholarly account, but a breathless adventure story. His Nineveh and its Remains fitted the bill perfectly, especially with its subtitle, ‘With an account of a visit to the Chaldean Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-worshippers…’ Murray sold 8,000 copies in 1849 alone, and another 12,000 in the following three years.86
Murray was one of those who led the way in travel publishing, and accounts of foreign adventures continued to sell in their thousands. But, at the same time, a new kind of book for travel was also appearing. These new books presupposed not dramatic events in exotic locales that readers were happy to read about in the comfort of their home circle, but instead that readers would be visiting the places described, and needed some preliminary advice. Murray was in the forefront here too. In 1854 the playwright and deviser of extravaganzas James Robinson Planché had one of his characters enter holding
All Murray’s Handbooks…
Germany, North and South, France, Holland, Spain,
Switzerland, up the Rhine, and back again,
Italy, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, Greece…87
These guidebooks, even to places that only a generation before had seemed unimaginably exotic, had by the 1870s been domesticated. When the Franco-
Prussian War cut English travellers off from their nowfamiliar travels to Europe (see Cook’s tours, pp. 226-8), an avalanche of books appeared as a substitute. Leslie Stephen’s The Playground of Europe, John Tyndall’s Hours of Exercise in the Alps and Edward Whymper’s Scrambles amongst the Alps were all published in 1871, and they notably had similarly tame titles, making the ascent of a glacier seem no more exotic than a day spent walking on the South Downs.
Such guidebooks, though selling better than ever, did have some precedents. In the seventeenth century, local maps had generally shown each county as a separate entity; the towns, villages and natural features were drawn in some detail, but the roads that led into and out of the region were often ignored altogether, or shown only in the most rudimentary form. These were maps designed for the people who lived in the region.88 By the 1770s Daniel Paterson had developed and published a very different type of map. Paterson was an army officer (he ended up with a sinecure as the Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, although there is no indication that he ever went there), and in 1766 he published A Scale of Distances of the Principal Cities and Towns of England. Giving in all 4,560 distances in Measured Miles. This was followed in 1771 by A New and Accurate Description of all the Direct and Principal Cross Roads in Great Britain, or, as it became known, Paterson’s Roads - a series of strip maps showing how best to get from one place to another, designed specifically for travellers who wanted to get from Point A to Point B. So the first entry, for Abergavenny, reads:
ABERGAVENNY,
Monm TU. Angel, Greyhound
146 - by Ragland, 141
141 - by Tregare, 121
Cross, 350, 486.
Here, in shorthand, the traveller is given all the information needed: Abergavenny is in Monmouthshire, it has a market on Tuesdays, and post horses for the traveller can be found at the Angel and the Greyhound inns. The town has two main roads in, via Ragland and Tregare, which are respectively 146 and 141 miles from London. These roads can themselves be looked up on pages 141 and 121, while the cross roads running through Abergavenny appear on pages 350 and 486. There was obviously a great demand for this type of information; the first edition went through thirteen editions, the second edition eight; by 1811 the fifteenth edition was in print, and Paterson’s Roads continued to sell right into the railway age, with a nineteenth edition in 1832.89
Paterson’s Roads also gave information on different sights along the route, and it is interesting to compare the entry on Stonehenge with the entry for a small manor house nearby. ‘STONE HENGE’, the traveller was informed briefly, ‘is a stupendous pile of stones, supposed to have been a temple of the Druids; and is considered as one of the most remarkable remains of antiquity in the kingdom.’ So much for Stonehenge. Nearby, Wilbury Park, belonging to ‘Sir A. C. St Loo Mallet…is a comfortable family mansion, consisting of a centre, with two corresponding wings: the building is of stone, and was erected in the reign of Queen Anne; it is advantageously situated in an extensive well-planted park, whose sylvan beauties form a striking contrast with the bare and open downs around, of which it once formed a part.’90 This negligible although clearly pretty house received more than double the space allotted to Stonehenge. Yet, remarkably, Paterson had got his emphasis exactly right. Country-house visiting had been the privilege of the mobile upper classes for a century; it was now filtering down to the more prosperous middle classes, who were expecting to learn about the new things they were seeing. They were less interested in ancient history, more concerned with acquiring taste, worldliness, familiarity with the objects that had previously been the province of the rich, and therefore publications were created to meet this demand. (For more on country-house visiting, see pp. 212-15.) Previously, in the eighteenth century, studies of houses had been concerned principally to describe the generations of the family that owned the house, and only tangentially the house itself; sometimes there was a description of the house, but this was not the purpose of the book. By the middle of the century a few books, such as the 1753 publication A Description of the House and Gardens…at Stow [sic], had begun to appear. These did describe to visitors what they were seeing. The Stowe book was extremely successful, going through twenty-two editions in the next sixty years at a cost of 6d. for the guide alone, 1s. if a map was included, or 5s. for a bound edition which also had a series of engravings. It was unsurprising, therefore, that others followed. By the end of the century there were about fifteen or twenty great houses on the tourist trail that had enough visitors who wanted education to warrant catalogues of the contents of the houses and gardens - among them Houghton Hall, Holkham Hall, Stowe, Blenheim Palace and Wilton House.91
From these catalogues, it was but a short step to a descriptive guidebook. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first known use of the word ‘guide-book’, to mean a book used by a traveller, to 1814, but the phenomenon may well have appeared slightly earlier. John Byng, 5th Viscount Torrington, who kept diaries of his travels over nearly fifteen years, had by the end of the eighteenth century seen that ‘Tour writing is the very rage of the times.’* At the beginning of the nineteenth century Robert Southey also noted this development: ‘Wherever you go, printed information is to be found concerning every thing which deserves a stranger’s notice.’92 By 1810 there was even a guide to Wales, a country that had previously been considered to be a featureless wilderness. The Cambrian Traveller’s Guide also covered the Marcher counties, and up as far as Birmingham, and it aimed for completeness, for the most studious of travellers: it had twelve indexes, including indexes to geographical features such as ‘districts, islets, promontories, peninsulas, vales, valleys, dingles, passes, roads, sands, plains, parks, moors, downs, fields, forests, woods, marches’; physical features such as ‘mountains, hills, rocks, cliffs, caverns, caves and clefts’ as well as water elements - ‘fountains, rivers, estuaries, waterfalls, lakes, wells, bogs, aqueducts, creeks, bays, havens, ports, harbours, moats, ferries’ - built-up areas including ‘cities, towns, villages, hamlets, solitary inns and houses, bridges’; architectural elements, whether they were ‘castles, forts, encampments, walls’ or ‘palaces, mansions, gentlemen’s seats, villas’, abbeys, churches or ruins; ‘Tumuli, Carneddau or tombs, Cromlechs or monuments, pillars, Druid circles’; mines and potteries; and other miscellaneous man-made objects. (The indexes to the second edition were briefer, but contained the following enticing entries: ‘Nails for the shoes in ascending mountains, described; Peasants, diet of; Story, a marvellous; Wreckers, their cruelties; Circumstance, a remarkable one’.) The book did not include a map, although it suggested the best one to buy - for 7s. 6d., in addition to the 7s. 6d. charged for the book.93
Similarly, the Lake District had been ‘discovered’ in the late eighteenth century (see pp. 215-8), and a deluge of guidebooks followed. The poet Thomas Gray and the antiquary Thomas West had been the leaders in this field. Gray had travelled through the region in the late 1760s, and in 1775 he published his journal from this time, which popularized both the area and certain spots for which he had a particular affection. In 1778 West laid out these sights and a few others in guidebook form, as West’s Guide to the Lakes, with each sight marked as a ‘station’: visitors were told where to stop and what to bypass, as well as what to think at each stop. Each station was highly specific. At Windermere, ‘Near the isthmus of the ferry point, observe two small oak trees that inclose the road, these will guide you to this celebrated station. Behind the tree on the western side ascend to the top of the nearest rock, and from thence in two views command all the beauties of this magnificent lake.’ By 1799 a small summer house had been built there, with a window designed precisely to encompass this view.94 A tourist at the time dutifully recorded that ‘We remarked most of the stations described in West’s Tour to the Lakes, a book we had constantly in our hands.’95 Most tourists seemed to feel the same way: by 1812 the book had been through ten editions.
By the time of the Great Exhibition, guidebooks had become standardized: boo
ks like Knight’s Excursion Companion told the regular railroad traveller about the joys of a seaside town and its environs, or the history of the area, or the sights that could be seen from the train en route. The Birmingham Saturday Half Holiday-Guide, one of dozens of books helping the newly liberated clerk and his family amuse themselves on a Saturday, was an encyclopedia of leisure consumption. There was railway information on page 1, then thirty-five pages of walks, sightseeing trips and towns within half a day’s distance of Birmingham; a section on the ‘Natural history of the District’ was followed by five pages on recreational sports - boating, bathing, fishing and cricket. The advertisements covered all the possibilities for the new day-trippers. They were enticed to purchase further publications, such as Saturday Afternoon Rambles Round London, and at the same time the Midland Railway also promoted its ‘Tourist Tickets’, valid for a month for destinations such as ‘Scarboro’, Windermere, Buxton and others ‘as per particulars in the Tourist Programme, which may be had at Midland Receiving Offices and Stations’. Other advertisements alerted the hungry traveller to cookshops and dining rooms in the vicinity, while E. & F. Bostock, ‘Family boot and shoe warehouse’, was happy to make sure that ramblers were properly shod. The Birmingham India Rubber Company, ‘Manufacturers of VULCANIZED WATERPROOF COATS and CAPES for Walking, Riding, Driving, Hunting, Fishing, &c. CARTRIDGE BAGS, GAME BAGS, FISHING BAGS, COURIER BAGS, TRAVELLING BAGS, HAVERSACKS &C. FISHING STOCKINGS AND BOOTS, SHOOTING BOOTS AND LEGGINGS’, was one of many advertisers venturing into an entirely new field of commodity: sport.96