As sports themselves developed (see Chapter 11), so did sporting books to be sold to enthusiasts. Racing had led the way, with the various racing calendars discussed on p. 151. By the 1840s, Ruff’s Guide to the Turf, compiled by Bell’s Life’s racing correspondent, was issued regularly, listing horses, races, trainers, owners and prize money - all the components for armchair as well as trackside connoisseurship. Other sports did not lag behind. John Wisden, a cricketer, had on his retirement opened a cigar shop, but in 1864 he also began to publish an annual on his first love. His friend and erstwhile business partner Frederick Lillywhite, a sports journalist and the son of a cricketer known as the ‘Nonpareil Bowler’, produced a Guide to Cricketers, a rival to Wisden, in 1848 or 1849 (it survived until 1866), and his Scores and Biographies of Celebrated Cricketers appeared in 1862. Lillywhite’s brother John’s Cricketers’ Companion appeared from 1865 to 1882,* while their cousin James Lillywhite produced Red Lillywhite, an annual that appeared from 1872 to 1900. From the 1870s until the First World War, more than a hundred books on cricket appeared; football was almost as popular, spawning about sixty titles - its own almanac, the Football Annual, had first appeared in 1868. There were over 250 books on golf, and nearly as many again on guns or shooting. The publishers of these sporting books followed the conventions of the time, producing various matched volumes in ‘libraries’: the Sportsman’s Library, the Sports Library and the Badminton Library, to name a few.97
The new worlds that were opening up through books were literal as well as figurative. Books allowed more and more of the population to become familiar with places that had previously been unknown, and now the places themselves were fast becoming accessible to the new consumer.
* * *
*The ‘History of the Gentle Craft’ was a chapbook story that was popular from the seventeenth century in various forms; a 1758 edition, attributed to Thomas Deloney, was entitled The delightful…History of the Gentle-Craft…Shewing what famous men have been Shoemakers in old time…To which is added…The Merry Pranks of the Green King of St Martins…Concluding with the Shoemakers Glory: being a…song, &c.; ‘Ready Reckoners’ were printed tables that calculated interest or tax, or other mathematical functions for traders and shopkeepers.
*In 1833 the mathematician Charles Babbage still felt the need to explain, ‘The Publisher, is a bookseller; he is, in fact, the author’s agent.’6
*Historically, a pencil could also mean a fine brush, used for delicate work; an etwee was an ornamental holder for small objects like needles or toothpicks, from the French ‘étui’, or case; sarsnet, or sarcenet, was a silk fabric, often used for linings.
*Books were regularly printed in different formats, and sold either bound or unbound, the latter to allow the purchasers to have their books bound up to suit their own taste. Thus the variations in price.
†It is worth looking here at the research William St Clair has done on the sales figures for Paine. It has been repeatedly said that ‘many hundreds of thousands’ of copies of The Rights of Man were sold, or that 200,000 were sold in the first twelve months; or that the pamphlet was available ‘in every village on the globe where the English language is spoken’. St Clair produces evidence to show that something over 20,000 copies were printed. Yet the somewhat hysterically inflated figures can be better understood when that 20,000-copy print run is contrasted to the standard print run for a political pamphlet - between 500 and 750 copies.12
*Libraries were divided according to their organizing principles. A proprietary library had a limited number of members, each of whom was required to buy a share on entry; this share could later be sold on to whomever the member chose. A subscription library had its own premises and a membership to which one had to be admitted personally; it bought, for the most part, more serious fiction and a preponderance of non-fiction. A circulating library was run from commercial premises, such as a shop or coffee house, was open to anybody on payment of a fee, and tended to stock more current books, both fiction and non-fiction.
*Barrymore and Moncrieff are playwrights about whom little is known today, but they both wrote many popular plays in the spectacular mode that was to be so successful for much of the century. For more, see pp. 314ff, 330-38.
*John Thurtell (1794-1824) was the son of a merchant, a middle-class boy gone to the bad. After probable arson, in an attempt to raise money he lured William Weare, a professional gambler, to Hertfordshire, where he shot him and cut his throat. Weare was memorialized by a play (The Gamblers), and by pamphlets, and also in the works of De Quincey, Borrow (in both Lavengro and The Romany Rye), Bulwer-Lytton, Carlyle and Dickens, as well as by the moving lines ‘His throat they cut from ear to ear, / His brains they battered in, / His name was Mr William Weare, / Wot lived in Lyon’s Inn.’
*In the eighteenth century, novels had appeared in anything from two to seven volumes, depending solely on how much the author had to say: Richardson’s endless novel Clarissa needed seven volumes, Fielding’s Amelia only four, while Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield had a modest two. Gradually novels of three, four and five volumes became the most commonly produced, and by the nineteenth century three volumes had become the standard: now authors were expected to write to fit the volumes, rather than the volumes being printed to match the length of the novel.
†As with most advertising, this fee was deliberately ambiguous. A 1-guinea subscription gave the borrower the right to take out one volume at a time; for 2 guineas, four volumes could be taken at once; 3 guineas gave eight volumes, and 5 guineas fifteen. For 10 guineas one could take thirty volumes, or for 20 guineas sixty - these subscriptions were mostly for the owners of grand country houses, or for clubs or other organizations.
*In 1855 Mudie’s bulk requirements had created a problem: he had ordered 2,500 copies of Volumes 3 and 4 of Macaulay’s History of England. Together these copies weighed 8 tons, and the publisher finally threw up his hands and said Mudie would have to arrange collection himself.
*This was a dramatic poem, a study of ‘the conflict between sensuous emotion and disciplined thought’ - not perhaps what one might immediately think of as railway reading.67
†I include this quote from the Saturday Review because the idea gives me such pleasure, but it is worth bearing in mind that this fact was reported to the Saturday Review by W. H. Smith’s itself - which may possibly have had a vested interest in being seen to be purveyors of excellence.
*The Williams family were the owners of this estate near Beaumaris on Anglesey, close to the Menai Bridge. According to local legend the head of the family at the time, Thomas Peers Williams, frequently missed his train because of his stubborn adherence to local time.71
†It was not until 1884, however, that there was any formal legislation. That year the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, attended by representatives of twentyfive countries, agreed that Greenwich would become the ‘zero’ meridian, and thus British railway time became the starting point from which all other countries took their bearings.72
‡As is so often the case, there was a later claim from another printer, who said he was the first to produce a railway timetable, a few months before Bradshaw.75 Whether or not he was correct, it was Bradshaw that became the household bible.
*Newspapers, magazines and books were all sold with their pages uncut; railway-station bookstalls usually sold special folding paperknives.
†William Combe, the satirist, in his Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, which he produced with Rowlandson’s cartoons in 1809, mocked this sort of home-grown travel writing. Dr Syntax’s travel journals were rejected by a publisher, who said, ‘We can get Tours - don’t make wry faces, / From those that never saw the places. / I know a man who has the skill / To make your Books of Tours at will; / And from his garret at Moorfields / Can see what ev’ry country yields.’81
*It was not, of course, necessary to have actually been to an exotic locale to feel that one had a vested interest. The poet Thomas
Moore wrote to Byron, suggesting that he would gift Byron Turkey for Byron’s own literary use if Byron would agree to stay away from Persia, and especially would promise not to write about ‘peris’ without further discussion. In exchange, Moore dropped a story that seemed too close to Byron’s ‘Bride of Abydos’, despite Byron’s assurances that it would not ‘trench upon your kingdom in the least’.85
*Byng came from a well-known family - his uncle was the Admiral Byng who in 1756 had sailed from Spithead to try to prevent the French from capturing Port Mahon, a mission which was to end in his death by firing squad, as Voltaire put it, ‘pour encourager les autres’ - but his travel diaries were unpublished until the twentieth century. Perhaps the only fame of his lifetime was to have had a son who was known to the Regency social world as ‘Poodle’ Byng.
*Their brother James did not publish, instead opening Lillywhite’s, a sporting-goods store that continues to flourish today.
6
To Travel Hopefully: Holidays and Tourism
WITH THE COMING OF the Industrial Revolution, with increasing urbanization, with the great movement of population from the countryside to the city, with the shift from seasonal to factory work - with all these things, the nature of leisure altered. ‘Old’ leisure had revolved around community activities, performed by set groups of people at set times of year, whether it was the village men playing a ritual football game every Shrove Tuesday (for more on ‘old’ sports, and football, see p. 438) or attendance at an annual fair. Now ‘new’ leisure permitted choices of activities by individuals to suit their own preferences, whether for sport, or the pub, or more professional entertainments such as theatres, shows or music halls. George Eliot, in Adam Bede (1859), shook her head sorrowfully over the new times, when ‘Even idleness is eager now - eager for amusement: prone to excursion trains, art-museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels…’1
Eliot was only one of the many to see the change, but while in Adam Bede she mourned the new commercial leisure activities, an interesting combination of the upper classes, evangelical reformers, merchants and factory-owners (not necessarily mutually exclusive) was working towards further change in the way the lower classes spent their working - and thus their leisure - hours. There were several intertwined strands to this desire for change. The old social system stood firmly on the notion that the upper classes were defined by their lack of employment - the upper classes were the leisured classes. By contrast, a leisured working man was an oxymoron: a leisured working man was merely unemployed, idle. The leisure time of the cultivated was well used; the working classes when idle were probably fomenting disorder, or even crime. It was partly for this reason that there arose a number of societies whose main aim was social control of the lower orders. Even the title of the Society for the Rescue of Boys Not Yet Convicted of Any Criminal Offence was a clear indication that all lower orders were potential law-breakers.2 The Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality had ceased its activities by the late 1790s, but was re-formed and reappeared in 1802 as the evangelically controlled Society for the Suppression of Vice, which promoted an end to Sabbath-breaking and blasphemy, as well as the suppression of ‘licentious’ books and prints, fairs, public houses and gambling - to some it seemed to want to suppress every form of commercial leisure for the working classes. In its first two years, 623 of its 678 prosecutions were for Sabbath-breaking,3 which is surely significant: the main aim was to control the one free day of the workers, the one day when they were not already under the control of someone who was socially their superior.
This was not a view promoted simply by a group of religiously guided, single-issue zealots. It was commonly accepted by the governing classes, and by employers, that idleness in the workforce damaged national prosperity: if a workman was hungry, he would work; if he had enough to eat, he would probably go to the pub. (The rich, however, aided national prosperity by their idleness: by shopping, they were promoting production.) The nature of the agricultural year had traditionally encompassed many regular fairs and wakes.* Now these intermittent eruptions of ‘merry-making’ were maddening to factory-owners who were trying to maintain steady production. Josiah Wedgwood wrote in endless exasperation on the subject. In 1771, ‘I should have sent you some good black [vases] this week, if it had not been Stoke Wake’; in 1772, ‘the Men have gone madding after these Wakes’s so that we could get little done’; and, again the same year, ‘We are laying by [laying off men] for Xmass at our works. The men murmer at the thoughts of play these hard times, but they can keep wake after wake in summer.’ Nothing much changed, however, for in 1776 he was writing, ‘Our men have been at play 4 days this week, it being Burslem Wakes. I have rough’d & smoothed them over, & promised them a long Xmass, but I know it is all in vain, for Wakes must be observed though the World was to end with them.’4
A further irritation for the employer was ‘St Monday’, the facetious name for the custom of workers taking Monday off after their Saturday payday. This habit was already fading away in the eighteenth century, but in its death throes it showed remarkable tenacity. A survey of witness statements from 8,000 Old Bailey session papers from 1750 to 1800 showed that in 1750 St Monday was almost universally considered a day off; by 1800 it was, for most people, a regular working day. Yet well into the nineteenth century traces of this ‘saint’ remained: in the 1830s Thomas Cook, a stalwart of the temperance movement, organized his first tours on Mondays (see p. 225). And as late as the 1870s the eminently respectable Hartlepool Temperance Society took its members on an educational excursion to the Middlesbrough Polytechnic on a Monday.5
As well as wakes and St Monday, fairs, assize weeks and other local festivals continued to be observed by some through the first half of the nineteenth century. In Warwickshire, many employers expected their hands to stop work about five times each summer, to attend prizefights. A mine in Lancashire gave its workers two weeks’ holiday at Christmas, one at Whitsun, three to four days for the Ringley Wakes, and the same again for the Ratcliff Wakes. Others expected their employees to absent themselves for the local race week.6 (It must be remembered that all holidays were unpaid: much hardship could be suffered by the management ‘giving’ two weeks’ holiday in winter.)* Even when the 1833 Factory Act gave workers eight half-day holidays a year, plus Christmas Day and Good Friday, many workers wanted to keep their traditional holidays, rather than conform to the set days imposed on them by Parliament. In 1840, at Henry Ashworth’s mill in Turton, in Lancashire, the workers agreed that, as they could not afford to take two holidays in two weeks, they would rather have their traditional day of Easter Monday than Good Friday, which Parliament had nominated as the statutory day; equally, they were not accustomed to stop work on Christmas Day, and asked instead for their traditional day on New Year’s Day.8 In other regions, similar accommodations between government regulations, regional industrial requirements and local customs were made: in the Potteries, the Great Stoke Wakes was instituted as a single surrogate to encompass the many local wakes.
With the gradual habituation to national holidays, even if patchily conformed to, came the closure of fairs, increasingly seen as disruptions to the slowly standardizing calendar. From 1750 to 1850, sixty fairs within a fifteen-mile radius of Charing Cross alone were suppressed. Southwark and May Fair were both shut down in the 1760s; Bow, Brook Green, Stepney, Tothill and Edmonton fairs were ended with the passing of the Metropolitan Police Act of 1822. Bartholomew Fair went in 1854; Greenwich Fair in 1857. More than the working classes saw their leisure curtailed. The Bank of England, with a majority of middle-class employees, can stand for many offices in its contraction of holidays. In the mid eighteenth century the bank had had 47 full days of holiday a year, by 1808 this was down to 44, and by 1825 to 40. Five years later there was an enormous drop, to 18 days a year, and it took just another four years to reduce that by three-quarters: in 1834 the bank closed only on Good Friday, May Day, Christmas Day and All
Saints’ Day.* This mirrors the rise in working hours across the country. In 1750 the average number of working days each year was between 208 and 255; fifty years later that number had risen to between 306 and 323.9
While working days were being increased, working hours followed a contrary path, falling steadily from the eighteenth century onward. There was an unspoken and probably barely noticed trade-off occurring: fewer hours worked daily, in exchange for more regular, more reliable working patterns. As early as the 1720s, many builders had achieved a ten-hour day; by the mid eighteenth century, most artisans in skilled handicraft trades also expected to work ‘only’ ten hours a day. The fight for further reductions, which was straightforwardly one of employees against employers, continued in trade-defined skirmishes through the early part of the nineteenth century: in the 1830s, the printers managed to win the right to work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. - that is, ten hours’ actual work.10 (Any time spent not working - eating breakfast or lunch - was unpaid, as holidays were.)
With the 1867 Factory and Workshops Act, a sixty-hour week was the norm, but many workers still did not achieve this, because their workplaces were not covered by the act. In a shipping office in Liverpool in the 1880s, clerks in the passenger department worked from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. in theory; in practice they often worked until ten or eleven at night. Bank clerks, considered ‘the aristocracy of the clerical profession’ ostensibly worked from 8.30 in the morning until six in the evening, but in busy periods they were expected to remain until nine or ten. The large warehouses in Manchester worked similar hours: as late as the 1900s many opened officially from 8.30 a.m. to 6 p.m., but during any busy period staff were expected to start work between 6 and 8 a.m., and go through until 9.30 p.m; on Saturdays they had a ‘short’ day of 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. - in all, working nearly eighty hours a week.11 Shops were the worst offenders: in the late nineteenth century most shops in the West End of London closed at six during the week, with a half-day on Saturday, although Liberty’s stayed open until seven on weekdays, and four on Saturdays until the early 1880s, when the shop closed at two every other Saturday. (When Arthur Liberty finally announced a regular two o’clock closing every Saturday, his staff gave him an illuminated address of thanks.) As late as 1894 Harrod’s was still open until seven o’clock two nights a week. Shops away from the fashionable areas, or shops that relied on working-class customers, expected to stay open much later on Saturdays: until midnight, or even later, was common for many types of shop - one shop assistant in a draper’s remembered that on Saturdays ‘we never closed at all’.12
Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Page 26