Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  By late 1846 Cook had decided to branch out. He wrote a Hand Book of a Trip to Scotland, along the same lines as his earlier brochure, and arranged to sell the 800-mile round trip for 1 guinea - 93 per cent cheaper than the price for a similar tour in 1800. The 500 tickets went quickly. The first trip had teething troubles - he had not factored in time for rest stops, a tea stop in Preston was without tea, at Fleetwood the food arrived, but there was not enough of it - but these were partly compensated for by the enthusiasm with which the excursionists were greeted: there was a gun salute and a band at Glasgow, more bands again in Edinburgh, and a musical evening was staged to welcome ‘English pleasure-money…to the heart of the Highlands’.67 Cook, however, quickly remedied the early deficiencies, and soon he was managing trips to the Lake District, to Blackpool, to the Isle of Man, even to Belfast, where he conveyed 1,200 tourists. By 1860 he had carried over 50,000 excursionists to Scotland, and he was celebrated locally for bringing extraordinary prosperity to the region. Some of this prosperity came more directly than through tourist income. On his first visit to Iona, Cook had been so shocked by the poverty of the region that he began to solicit donations from his tourists, giving impassioned speeches to each group when they reached this island stop. By 1861 he had raised enough to purchase twenty-four fishing-boats for the community (one was named the Thomas Cook), as well as nets, tackle and books for the village school.68 In 1853 he also took thousands of people to Dublin as part of an attempt to bring income into the city after the Famine.69 But these charitable excursions only helped his business. Within a very short time, he was transporting his excursionists to France, then to Switzerland.*

  Excursion travel opened up the world to many more of the middle classes; it also changed the way the world received travellers. Cook negotiated every detail with his foreign hosts: now inns that had a picturesque appearance but less picturesque bedbugs were no longer acceptable. Cook demanded running water, tea and general hygiene for his excursionists, or he would not return. Many hotels advertised that they had a table d’hôte dinner at four or five o’clock - much later than Europeans as a whole tended to eat - to suit the English. In Chamonix there was even a Hotel de Londres et d’Angleterre.71 In 1906 a traveller looking back to the 1880s wrote that excursion travel had brought to ‘foreign places’ those ‘cardinal British institutions - tea, tubs, sanitary appliances, lawn tennis, and churches’.72

  Back in Britain, lodgings were changing under the impetus of the railways and excursion travel. The first railway hotel had been built in 1839. This was a station hotel, sited directly next door to Euston station by the railway company, to ease early-morning or late-night travel. In some ways it was simply a development of the inns which had acted as starting and end points for stagecoach travel. By the 1840s, however, the railway companies were buying or building hotels as destinations for travellers along their routes. In 1850 Oban, in Scotland, had ‘a few’ beds for visitors. In 1861 the Great Western Railway began to build its own hotel there. More and more - hotels and visitors - followed the arrival of the railways automatically. By the 1890s, Oban had fifteen fully-fledged hotels, as well as temperance hotels and ‘numerous’ lodging houses.73 In 1913 there were ninety-two hotels in Great Britain owned by the railways.74

  Cook was aided in his promotion of foreign travel by men like Albert Smith. Smith was the first impresario of the Alps. In 1851 he had climbed Mont Blanc, or so he said, and on his return he hired the Egyptian Hall (see p. 264) to put on an illustrated entertainment about the ascent. This entertainment - featuring a cardboard chalet, two chamois (it is unclear whether they were real or cardboard), ‘several’ St Bernard dogs and water lilies floating in a tub to represent the scenery - was so successful that he continued to present it for nine years, adding new bits all the time. (He was even invited to re-create it privately for the Prince of Wales, and then later for the Queen.) Switzerland became the fashion. ‘The Mont Blanc Quadrille’ and ‘Les Echos du Mont Blanc’ appeared as sheet music; children bought the Game of Mont Blanc to play at home.75

  Yet, however popular Smith’s lectures were, however educational Cook’s tours, there were many who were appalled by mass tourism. In his essay ‘Of Kings’ Treasures’ in Sesame and Lilies, John Ruskin - who was all for humanity as long as it was kept a long way away from him - stormed:

  The French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race-courses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars…[There is no] foreign city in which the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair old streets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels…The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear garden, which you set yourself to climb and slide down again with ‘shrieks of delight’.*

  This hysterical dislike, verging on fear, was not peculiar to him alone. The Revd Francis Kilvert in humble Christian charity declared that British tourists were ‘noxious animals…vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome’, while the novelist Charles Lever feared that Cook was bringing to Europe ‘everything that is low-bred, vulgar and ridiculous’.

  That was only the beginning. The Pall Mall Gazette was passionately against Cook’s travellers, seeing them as doing that fatal thing, attempting to educate themselves out of their class. The tourist showed his ‘ignorance, stupidity, and incapacity for enjoyment with the utmost naiveté’, thinking ‘the grand attraction is that he can qualify himself cheaply and quickly for talking glibly about places and things, familiarity with which he fancies confers some kind of distinction’. Others referred to ‘Cook’s Hordes’, or ‘Cook’s Vandals’ - ‘low’ and ‘vulgar’ people, ‘an irregular procession of incongruities’.77

  The level of vitriol is fascinating. It was not as if Cook were bringing parties of hard-drinking navvies or indigent street-sweepers to the boulevards of Paris. The working classes could not afford these trips, and they could not take enough time off work even had they had the money. Working-class excursionists were content with day trips to a beauty spot, or the seaside. Cook’s tours to Europe were made up of doctors, of schoolmasters, of clergymen, lawyers, prosperous merchants and their wives and daughters. Cook himself was under no illusion about how his groups were viewed. He recorded having met a woman in Scotland who suggested to him that ‘places of interest should be excluded from the gaze of the common people, and…kept only for the interest of the “select” of society’. But, he wrote, ‘it is too late in this day of progress to talk such exclusive nonsense; God’s earth, with all its fullness and beauty, is for the people; and railroads and steamboats are the result of the common light of science, and are for the people also.’78

  This was the battleground: exclusivity vs access. The railways had introduced a new phenomenon, the day-tripper. In the 1820s it had taken six hours to get from London to Brighton, at a cost of 12s.; by 1835, 117,000 visitors a year were travelling that way, but they were staying in the town, and spending money in the town - at twelve hours for the round trip, they could hardly do otherwise. In 1841 the Brightonto-London railway line was opened, with high fares designed to preserve a ‘superior traffic’. But then a new chairman - Rowland Hill, of Post Office fame - slashed prices, promoting excursion trains at traditional working-class holiday times, such as Easter, Whitsun, August race week and, especially, Sundays.79 By 1850, 73,000 passengers arrived at the Brighton railway station in one week, and in 1862, on Easter Monday, 132,000 arrived in one day, on a trip that took only two hours from London.80 Now the town’s residents and shopkeepers tried to persuade the railway company to raise its day-return fares, so as to ‘improve’ the class of people venturing down to the seaside. Day-trippers, they warned, brought no money into the town - apart from what was spent on drink. They carried their own food, they didn’t shop, but just walked by the sea; few even went to the Chain Pier (opened in 1823 and one of th
e first pleasure piers), where the right kind of visitors paid their admission, listened to the band, and took a select walk among select people.*82

  The seaside population was used to being select. The seaside had been the haunt of the royal and the socially aspirant for a century. For much of the population over the previous centuries, sea bathing had been an aberration. When Brighton was the most supremely fashionable place to be, basking in the patronage of the Prince Regent from his first visits in the 1780s to his death in 1830, the season ran from October to March. Clearly no one was expecting to swim then. Instead, the recommended exercise for health was ‘taking the air’, either in a ‘carriage outing’ or by promenading along the front. But sea bathing for health was gradually taking hold. When Smollett went sea bathing in Nice in the 1760s, his English doctor warned him that it would kill him. He was slightly old-fashioned (and Smollett was in very poor health), for at almost the same time George III was encouraged to bathe at Weymouth, for the sake of his health. (A band followed him out to sea in a bathing machine to play ‘God Save the King’ as he swam.) As late as 1814 Jane Austen had the (old-fashioned, and resolutely hypochondriac) Mr Woodhouse declare that ‘the sea is very rarely of use to any body, I am sure it almost killed me once’. If one must go to the seaside, he thought, the best thing was to find a place where one could get ‘lodgings…quite a way from the sea’.83 For even then, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, sea bathing was a novelty - although it was becoming a good commercial proposition, replacing the earlier upper-class health craze, the spa.

  Bath was the model that every spa aspired to - or, when it became unfashionable, that every spa reacted against. The springs at Bath had been considered medicinal for over a hundred years: Charles II had brought Catherine of Braganza to Bath in the hope that the waters would promote fertility; his brother James repeated the pattern with Mary of Modena. Queen Anne went there looking for a cure for her gout and dropsy. One had to be ill or unhappy to ‘take the waters’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ‘bathing’ consisted of sitting in a coarse smock in tubs of heated chalybeate, or iron-rich, spring waters. By the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this had been modified, and now drinking a glass or two of the waters was said to produce the same results. As this could be done while fully clothed, and in a social setting, it was a far more attractive proposition. But what made Bath successful was not that its waters were more potent than other chalybeate springs. It was instead that from the eighteenth century canny entrepreneurs (including John Palmer, pp. 128-9) had arranged for the judicious building of public and private spaces, to create an environment in which the pleasures of aristocratic social life could be enjoyed while the medicinal water-drinking was undertaken. This building boom was facilitated by concurrent new transport links. There was the Avon Navigation scheme between Bristol and Bath, which saw the first barge navigate the river in 1727, and, more to the point for the fashionable, which brought Princess Amelia from Bristol to Bath in 1728. By 1740, two daily passenger boats augmented the stagecoach service, which between 1740 and 1777 averaged from 32 to 46 coaches a week along the new turnpike road; by 1800, there were 147 weekly runs scheduled, and the travel time to London had dropped from 36 hours in 1750 to just over 10 in 1790.84

  Between 1660 and 1750, the population of Bath rose from 1,500 to 6,000 permanent residents; by 1801 there were 33,000 permanent residents, and as early as 1750 another 12,000 visitors crowded into the town during the season.85* A leisure town needed visitors, of course, but it also needed a support system to service them. By 1744 there were 120 licensed chairmen to carry visitors about Bath in the then-fashionable sedan chairs; by 1800 there were 340.86 Inns, shops and coffee houses needed staff to do the heavy work such as carrying coals and water, and mucking out stables, as well as serving staff. The luxury-goods trades needed tailors, seamstresses, jewellers, leather tanners and others to produce their goods, as well as those whose job it was to sell them. The extent of these luxury trades in Bath can be seen from the apprentice records. Within the small permanent population of the 1720s and 1730s there was just one single apprentice who signed his indentures to a cabinet-maker in those decades; fourteen did so between 1741 and 1760. In the same years, the number of apprentice jewellers went from one to six. There were no lacemaker or milliners’ apprentices at all in the earlier period, but eleven were indentured in the latter.87 Between 1724 and 1769 the most common apprenticeships were in shoemaking, carpentry, tailoring, barbering, wig-making, baking, grocery and provisioning, chandlery and similar trades: the service industries. They were there to provide for the visitors, whose business was consumption: consumption of the waters, consumption of entertainment, of leisure, of shopping. Milsom Street, the main fashionable shopping street, supplied ‘the real or imaginary wants’ of everyone, wrote Pierce Egan.88 Many shops either started in these spa towns or quickly established branches there. Marshall and Snelgrove, the London draper, opened its second branch in Scarborough, then moved on to a third in Harrogate. Messrs Clark and Debenham, also of London, bought an interest in a shop in Cheltenham, and then opened on their own in Harrogate by 1844. James Jolly, of ‘Jolly’s of Bath’ fame, had opened his shop year round in Milsom Street by 1838. He too saw the retail importance of spa towns, extending shortly thereafter to Margate.89

  By the early nineteenth century, Bath was double the size it had been in the sixteenth century, and it was, apart from London, the town with the largest commercial entertainment market in the UK. It had the Pump Room, where the waters were dispensed and the elite gently socialized, and it had three assembly rooms, a theatre, and an unknown number of libraries and reading rooms, coffee houses and shops. Its first pleasure gardens were created in 1709. These were a form of entertainment enjoyed throughout the century, providing the middle and upper classes with a place to meet, listen to music and walk in pleasant surroundings, while the working classes could attend too, in unsegregated pleasure. The most famous pleasure gardens in Bath, Spring Gardens, opened in the 1730s, and by the 1760s it routinely staged public and private breakfasts, teas, evening events, concerts and fireworks. Admission was 2s. 6d. for the season, and for that one could walk through the gardens, admiring the artificial cascade and listening to the orchestra. By the 1790s, as private entertainment began to supersede public pleasure (see below), Spring Gardens found itself in a death struggle against strong competition. It joined forces with Grosvenor Gardens, which had added the enticements of a bowling green, archery competitions, a maze, fishponds and pleasure boats. In 1801 Sydney Gardens trumped them both by adding a grotto, winter opening times, horse riding and illuminated walks - and, as a knockout blow, the Prince of Wales had attended a concerts there.90 (For more on pleasure gardens, see pp. 276-81.)

  Concerts had become an important part of Bath life (for concert life in general, see Chapter 9). In 1704 there had been only ‘half a dozen’ musicians in the town, on temporary contracts with private entrepreneurs and paid by the week; then the Pump Room engaged musicians to play for the season both during the morning promenade at the Pump Room, and in the evenings at the assembly rooms. By 1766 William Herschel had become the organist at the Octagon Chapel, and he soon had so many private pupils among the visitors and residents that more than twenty private concerts a year were necessary to display their abilities - augmented by yet more professional musicians.91* Herschel’s concerts were rivalled by those of Thomas Linley and his eight musical children. Linley ran the concerts at the New Assembly Rooms from 1766, and made a point of featuring, in particular, his daughter Elizabeth - a soprano of surpassing beauty - until her marriage to the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan ended her public performances. Her fame was rivalled by her brother Thomas, a promising composer, who had produced twenty violin concertos, an oratorio, several sonatas and a comic opera by the time of his early death in a boating accident aged twenty-two.

  But the main entertainments of the spas were for the moment the public entertainments
, the subscriptions balls and assemblies. These were sponsored either by the civic authorities or by the owners of private assembly rooms, and a seasonal subscription cost enough to exclude all but the ‘select’. While the promoters made a nice profit, for much of the eighteenth century a polite fiction was maintained that the subscription was merely a token payment, rather than a fee for a commercial service. The Original Bath Guide of 1811 listed a typical week’s entertainment for the visitor during the season: on Mondays there was a dress ball, Tuesdays a card assembly, Wednesdays a concert, and Thursdays a fancy-ball. In general, the visitor paid for a series of balls or entertainments. The dress-ball or fancy-ball subscription cost 14s. for a man on his own, or 26s. for a man who could then escort two women to twenty-eight dress balls. These began at seven, and ended ‘precisely at eleven, even in the middle of a dance’. Concerts cost 51/2 guineas for tickets to nine concerts, giving entry to one man and two women, or £4 10s. for two tickets for nine concerts, ‘including two choral nights’. Just as with the entertainment, the card assemblies were on a subscription basis, with men paying 1 guinea for the season, and women 5s. for access to the card rooms when one evening a week it was ladies’ night.92

  With the end of the French wars, however, and the revival of travel to the Continent for the wealthy, Bath began to run into trouble. By 1815 the public balls were attracting fewer than 400 ‘residents and visitors’, and the order of those words was important. The residential aspect of Bath was now replacing the seasonal influx. The fashionable were beginning to turn their backs on public leisure, preferring to enjoy their entertainment in private, where they would not have to mix with the newly arriving middle classes. As early as 1779, The New Prose Bath Guide had worried that ‘the Upper Town [or fashionable] inhabitants seem to have…a strong tendency to withdraw themselves’, while in 1830 another observer dated this phenomenon even earlier, suggesting that it was from the 1760s that ‘Late dinners began, by little and little, to interfere with the regular early attendance at the Upper and Lower Rooms: and fatal “at homes” on the ball nights, to prevent that attendance altogether…Taste and fashion…chose for solace and display, the private rather than the public arena.’93 The fashion, from the 1790s, for visitors to take a house rather than simply lodgings added to the opportunities to entertain at home. Bath had become a place where the ‘genteel’ resided elegantly, and probably rather inexpensively. In Persuasion, the Eliot family move to Bath because Sir Walter ‘might there be important at comparatively little expense’.94 By the early nineteenth century the aristocratic level of society was no longer pouring into Bath for a few months at a time, but instead the prosperous middle classes were making it their home. When the Lower Assembly Rooms burned down in 1820, rather than a similar place of public amusement being put up on the site, a scientific and literary institution was built there instead. A decade later, the fashionable shops remained open all year, instead of only in the winter season - a further sign of how the residents had become the primary consumers in the town. But while they were prosperous, they were not necessarily expecting to pass their time in a round of frivolous leisure, as they thought the upper classes whom they had replaced had done: in 1833 the Bath races were reduced from three days to two.95 In a similar shift, the updated version of The Original Bath Guide of 1811, which was published sometime around 1870, had no information at all about balls and only the briefest mention of concerts, and the list of Pump Room activities was replaced by a list of parks. The guide contained pages on schools, on hospitals and on churches - on the civic structure required by residents, not visitors.96 ‘Rational recreation’ had taken over from what many now regarded as frivolous idleness.