Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  The development of Scotland as a tourists’ paradise followed substantially the same path: from barren wilderness, through curiosity, to the Romantic notions of sublime grandeur. After the 1715 and 1745 rebellions, it became politically expedient for the government to bring the outer districts of Scotland into the mainstream, to dilute their regional self-sufficiency with a greater sense of belonging to the nation as a whole. Roads were improved, the better to move troops around should that again prove necessary, and also incidentally opening up the country to the interested traveller. But visitors were primarily attracted to Scotland by literary associations that could not have been foreseen. James Macpherson, literary forger (or not), did more, perhaps, to lure visitors to Scotland than anyone had ever done.†

  Macpherson, born in 1736 in the Highlands, had in 1760 produced Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language, to modest antiquarian interest. Then, between 1762 and 1765, he published what he claimed were his translations of genuine epic verse. Whether Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem was truly an epic by Ossian, the son of the mythical Finn, dating from an unspecified, misty Celtic past, and translated by Macpherson from oral or written sources, or whether he had edited a more heterogeneous collection to form a coherent whole, supplying his own links as necessary, or whether he had simply made everything up, was (and still is) a matter for heated debate. But for the purposes of the creation of a Scottish tourist industry, what mattered was that the Ossian poems were wildly successful, creating a Romantic vision of Scotland’s past that spread like wildfire in Britain and across Europe: in 1802 Napoleon commissioned a painting of Ossian and his Warriors Receiving the Dead Heroes of the French Army; by 1806 Ossian was ‘almost proverbial in Germany for everything that is wild, romantic, melancholy, pathetic and sublime’ - Goethe, Schiller, Mme de Staeël, Schubert and Brahms were admirers, as was Thomas Jefferson in America.44 Ossian was everywhere, and every place in Scotland that could claim the remotest connection with the poems was suffused with his glow: in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), Jery feels ‘an enthusiastic pleasure when I survey the brown heath that Ossian was wont to tread’. (This was the same brown heath that fifteen years before had been dismissed as ‘dismal’ and ‘gloomy’.) Jery’s Uncle Matt agrees: ‘Every thing here is romantic beyond imagination.’45 Because the poems were not strong on specifics, tourists could visit the isle of Rhum and assure themselves it was ‘often mentioned in the Poems of Oscian [sic], by the name of Tongorma’, even though Ossian just said Tongorma is ‘probably’ ‘one’ of the Hebrides. Likewise Thomas Gray assured himself that Ben More ‘looks down on the tomb of Fingal’, despite there being no assurance at all of any such thing in the poems themselves. Even humble oyster shells could be looked on as romantic objects, as they were ‘so much signalized in the Poems of Oscian’.46

  The idea of travel as an end in itself, rather than travelling to go somewhere, was part of a much larger experience, and most of it involved spending money. Travel, and what the places to which one travelled represented, had been neatly packaged, and the experience could be purchased, on location or at home. If one could not manage a trip to Scotland to tread in the footsteps of Ossian, then there were any number of shows that could take its place. William Bullock’s London Museum at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly (see p. 264) had a model of Fingal’s Cave. There were two theatrical productions at Sadler’s Wells alone that had Fingal as their subject: a pantomime in 1805 and, in 1810, an ‘aquadrama’ called The Spectre Knight, both featuring the water effects for which the theatre was renowned.47 For those outside London, or those who did not attend theatre, the Board of Trustees for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures in Scotland made collections of Scottish, Irish and Welsh songs, or at least a tidied-up approximation thereof, for publication. The secretary to the Board commissioned famous Scottish writers such as Burns and Scott to write words to traditional melodies, and then further commissioned famous composers - including Beethoven (who was paid £400) and Haydn (£300), as well as Hummel, Pleyel and Kozeluch - to write new arrangements of the melodies for pianoforte, with violin and cello obligato.48 For the concert hall, there was Mendelssohn’s Hebridean Overture (also known as Fingal’s Cave), and his Scottish Symphony, both inspired by a trip to Scotland in 1829. ‘Tour’ music - music which portrayed the travels of a Romantic wanderer on his travels - was extremely popular. As well as Mendelssohn, Beethoven produced his Ruins of Athens, and Schubert his Wanderer Fantasy. Liszt made a speciality of the genre: his Années de pèlerinage appeared in three sections called ‘years’, and covered a typical Romantic itinerary - Italy and Switzerland in general, and more particularly the scenery loved by the Romantics, such as mountains (‘Valée d’Obermann’) and dark woods (‘Aux cypre`s de la Villa d’Este’).*

  There was a strong market for books describing travels, too: in the 1760s there were just seven books on tours of Scotland; by the 1820s there were fifty-three.50 Engravings also brought the foreign into the domestic sphere. By 1752, Six Select Views in the North of England was available for 1 guinea, including for the first time topographical views of Windermere, Derwentwater and Ullswater; by the 1760s there were two series of the Lakes, engraved by Thomas Smith of Derby; Joseph Farington’s Views of the Lakes appeared in 1789, and in 1792 one could also purchase aquatints of the same scenery.51 In 1832, over a six-month period, Court Magazine included pieces on one aspect or another of Scottish tourist life in each of its six issues, including ‘A Pleasure Party in the Highlands’, ‘The Widow’s Summer Evening. A Scotch Ballad’ and ‘Deer Stalking in the Highlands’, as well as ‘Landscape Illustrations of the Prose and Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott’, which were issued every two weeks for an extra 2s. 6d.52

  Clothes were very much part of the travel experience. ‘Scotch Warehouses’ began to sell tweeds, shepherd’s check fabrics, and Shetland knits. The Royal Scotch Warehouse in London produced a trade card (unfortunately undated, but probably after 1854), describing itself as ‘Scott Adie, Maison Speciale pour la vente des Etoffes et des Chaâles Ecossais, 115, Regent Street, Au coin de Vigo Street’.53 This was Scotland not simply for the Londoner, but for the visitor to London: tourism at two removes. By 1840 newly revived - or invented - clan tartans were being sold in Manchester at Kendal, Milne, a full two years before Queen Victoria’s first trip to Scotland, often said to be the start of the tartan craze. If she did not begin the craze for all things Scottish, however, she brought it immense exposure: after she had acquired Balmoral, she travelled in a tartan-upholstered barouche, her sons were inserted into kilts at every opportunity, Balmoral was decorated with thistleembroidered curtains, while Albert produced their own ‘Balmoral’ tartan. Tartan-fever was a fashion everyone could enjoy, because it did not necessarily require a lot of money. At one end of the scale one could spend less than a shilling on tartan ribbons, or tartan edging for petticoats; at the other the Royal Scotch Jeweller in Regent Street was happy to supply ‘national signs and emblems’ worked in jewels.54 At the Great Exhibition, James Locke offered ‘Scotch tweeds for deer-stalking, riding, and walking; and for summer and warm climates. Cheviot wool tweeds, for shooting and country wear; specimens of the wool of which they are made in its various stages of manufacture. Regulation tartans, as worn by the Scotch Highland regiments. Scotch mauds [checked blankets or rugs], for riding and travelling. Ladies’ clan-tartan shawls. Scotch linsey woolseys, for the sea-side.’55 Scottish gear was no longer solely for Scotland, or the Scots, but designed for and sold to the stay-at-home.

  For the travellers themselves, there were many additional items that were declared absolutely necessary, which had to be purchased before any trip could commence. Perhaps the most essential piece of equipment for tourists in search of the picturesque was a Claude glass, recommended by Thomas West in his Guide. This was a hinged case containing a convex piece of glass, about ten centimetres in diameter, placed over black foil to form a mirror. Viewer
s turned their backs on the landscape they wanted to admire and viewed it instead in the mirror; the glass made the details less distinct, evened out the colours, and thus made a real view into a picturesque one that more closely resembled the landscapes of the neoclassical painter Claude Lorrain. By purchasing glasses with different coloured foil backings, travellers could see what the landscape would have looked like had they been there at different seasons, or at different times of day: no one had any longer to get up early to see the dawn, and difficult winter travel could be replaced by a piece of blue foil. The Revd Joseph Plumptre (the author of A Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey through some parts of Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland, and home by the Lakes and some parts of Wales (1799), and not to be confused with the Revd James, the comic playwright) thought the traveller should carry a full complement of coloured glasses for best results: ‘Though the objects were distant yet they were so large as to be seen with effect in the Gray. The Claude Lorrain gave it a most pleasing moonlight. But seen through the dark red or rather orange it was tremendous, and its burning glow called to mind that day “in which the Heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and being on fire shall be dissolved”.’56

  His namesake the Revd James Plumptre found these short cuts irresistibly comic. In The Lakers, Miss Beccabunga Veronica, a formidable traveller, goes into ecstasies over the rapidly altering view: ‘Where’s my Claude-Lorrain? I must throw a Gilpin tint over these magic scenes of beauty. (Looks through the glass.) How gorgeously glowing! Now for the darker. (Looks through the glass.) How gloomily glaring! Now the blue. (Pretends to shiver with fright). How frigidly frozen!’* Then she moves her companions around: ‘Sir Charles, pray come and stand by me for the trunk of an old tree in the foreground. And I beg, Mr Botanist, you and Lydia and Speedwell will form yourselves into a picturesque group.’57

  But it was more than picturesqueness that the tourist was after. Travellers journeyed encumbered by endless items that were to improve their minds on the way. Miss Beccabunga Veronica tells her servant to ‘bring my drawing-box instantaneously. I would not lose my sketches and manuscript of my tour for the world’; then he is to ‘take my glasses and my drawing-book and my fishing-stool’, and another trip is needed for her ‘botany-box’ of specimens.58 Plumptre’s joking was very close to reality at times. The first thing that the well-equipped traveller required was the new type of guidebook, which gave travellers advice rather than recounting, as Gilpin and his coevals had done, the author’s own experiences of travel. By 1851 such books were plentiful. The Great Exhibition catalogue carried advertisements for half a dozen from one publisher alone, at prices ranging from 1s. to 10s. 6d.59 Once the guidebook had been acquired, it told the travellers what else they needed. In 1779 Joseph Plumptre, on his tour of the Highlands and the north of England, walked 1,774.25 miles precisely - as he knew, because he carried a pedometer, as well as a Claude glass, sketchbooks, notebooks, a watercolour paint set, pens and pencils, a telescope, a barometer, maps, and tour books by Dr Johnson, Thomas Pennant ‘and others’, as well as a copy of Cowper’s Poems.60 He was not particularly unusual. In 1813 The Cambrian Traveller’s Guide suggested taking ‘a change or two of linen or stockings, a small compass, a prospecting glass, Hull’s Pocket Flora, a portable press for drying plants, this interleaved Guide, a drinking horn’, and something to eat.61 (The ‘interleaved’ guide was a guidebook with blank pages for travellers to write down their own impressions, opposite the expert’s description. Then there were traveller’s notebooks which were printed up like account books, with headed columns for places seen, dates, times and the tourists’ observations.) Dr William Kitchiner, in The Traveller’s Oracle (1827), went even further. He recommended that one travel with:

  A portable Case of Instruments for Drawing

  A Sketch and a Note-Book

  Paper, Ink, - and Pins, Needles, and Thread

  A Ruby or Rhodium Pen*

  Pencils

  A folding one Foot Rule

  The railways made travel cheaper, easier and more accessible to many, but even so, many felt loaded down by the equipment that was advertised. This Punch cartoon of 1852 mocks the overburdened holiday artist in the newly tourist-friendly Scotland. The waterproof in the second panel is interesting, because it was only with the Crimean War, the year after this cartoon appeared, that the wearing of waterproofs became widespread.

  A Hunting Watch with Seconds

  A Mariner’s Compass

  A Thermometer

  A Barometer for measuring heights

  A One Foot Achromatic Telescope

  Dr Kitchiner’s Invisible Opera Glass or Traveller’s Vade Mecum

  A Night Lamp

  A Tinder Box

  A Traveller’s knife

  Galoshes

  For the Table, Your own Knife, and Fork and Spoon will be no small comfort

  A Welch Wig is a cheap and comfortable Travelling Cap

  No matter what the Weather or the Season, never go a journey without an Umbrella (the stick of which may contain a Telescope or a Sword) and a Great Coat.

  He also advised taking, in case of illness, Dr Kitchiner’s Peristaltic Persuaders (probably laxatives), a lancet, so that the traveller was never under the necessity of using one that might previously have ‘been used in bleeding a person afflicted with an Infectious Disease’, and, to prevent further illness, leather sheets for damp beds.63

  It would have been impossible to imagine, when this list was published in 1827, that a mere four years later no one would ever have to travel with their own leather sheets again. The change came, as it did for so many things, with the railways. Travel had, if slowly, been opening up to a wider class of people for some time. Gilpin’s original edition of his Observations on the River Wye, published in 1782, had been dotted with Latin epigrams; by the time a second edition appeared, in 1789, these had all been translated - a sign that the less educated were buying his books, and travelling about the country.64 But it was not until 1830, when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway began to operate, that real change came. Within two weeks of the first scheduled passenger trains, a group of sightseers was carried from Liverpool to the Sankey Viaduct (see p. 32). By 1831 an arrangement had been made to carry 150 members of the Bennett Street Sunday School from Manchester to Liverpool and back again. The age of excursion travel had begun, with trips to a church bazaar, to the seaside, to the races. The trains carried groups of any sort to whatever type of entertainment they wanted. There were no moral values pinned on to the idea of excursion travel: anyone could do it.

  Thomas Cook, a temperance campaigner in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, has become the by-word for excursion travel, but he was not the first to organize it - just the first to realize how truly enormous the market was. Initially Cook organized excursions not for profit, but as a way of amusing people while removing them from the temptations of drink. He arranged transport for a large number of people - the exact number is disputed, but it was around 500 - to travel from Leicester to Loughborough, at a cost of 1s., or 1/2d. per mile, for a temperance fête. The price included a return ticket, a lunch of bread and ham, a band, a temperance rally, and local dignitaries making speeches.* After this first, successful, expedition, he moved to Leicester, and set up as a retailer of many parts: he continued to publish temperance magazines while working as a bookseller, selling stationery, running a register office for servants and lodgings, and producing an almanac that listed temperance hotels nationwide. In 1843 he took a Sunday-school group to Derby during Leicester’s race week, so that the children would not be exposed to pernicious influences (this was a recurring concern: in the late 1840s he arranged for 3,000 children to travel to Birmingham to remove them from the proximity of race week in Leicester). Temperance and excursions were by now firmly linked. Chatsworth had been open to the public for the best part of a century, but in the 1840s it closed on Sundays, as many public places were being forced to do at the behest of Sabbatarian campaigners. The imme
diate rise in the number of people in the local pubs was noticeable, and ‘general disturbances’ were also reported. The Duke of Devonshire therefore reopened the house, and from then on, said Joseph Paxton - the Duke’s agent as well as the designer of the Crystal Palace - ‘there has been no difficulty about the public-house nuisance on Sunday in our district.’65

  Cook’s first excursion undertaken for profit rather than for temperance was to Liverpool from Leicester, Nottingham and Derby, taking in Caernarfon and Snowdonia, in the summer of 1845, and with it he established the system he and other excursion agents were to find so profitable. He negotiated with the four railways whose lines his itinerary covered, and the steamer to Wales, agreeing a fare of 14s. return for first-class and 10s. for second-class passengers - most likely taking 5 per cent of that as his own commission. He then travelled the entire route so that he could publish a pamphlet that gave prospective customers enticing details of the itinerary and the places of interest alongside, with hints for the novice traveller. This aroused so much interest that within three weeks he was able to schedule a second tour along the same route. Cook was the guide as well as the agent: he went with his passengers all the way, organizing and giving advice to neophytes.66