Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  As early as 1815 a small spa in Wiltshire had tacitly recognized Bath’s decline: it hoped, it advertised, to ‘vie in every desirable convenience with Cheltenham and Leamington’ - it didn’t trouble to mention Bath. Cheltenham and Leamington were, in the nineteenth century, the competition. At the height of the spas’ reign there had been at one time or another about 175 spas across the country (although not all operating at once). By 1815, with competition from both Continental travel and the seaside, smaller spas with no entertainment began to close; in the early nineteenth century only about forty remained operational.97 Cheltenham had first promoted its spa waters in the 1730s, but the spa element of the town had not flourished until George III came there to take the waters in 1788; this comparative neglect may have helped in the long term, because in the meantime it had become a prosperous market town. By the early nineteenth century both Cheltenham and Leamington had assembly rooms, hotels, baths, theatres and inns. Yet, unlike Bath, both towns had other economic activities to rely on, and other pastimes to draw visitors and residents alike. Leamington was helped by its development in the nineteenth century as a hunting town - Lord Middleton installed his hounds there in 1811, and within a year there were another four hunts in the neighbourhood. Cheltenham from 1818 had a race meeting in August which drew thousands - in 1819 as many as 20,000 spectators may have come for the races - and when the flat racing died away, a popular steeplechase event replaced it in 1844.98

  Robert Elliston, who was one of the main economic movers of Leamington as a spa, demonstrates how, by this time, the spa was a predominantly leisure-based, rather than health-based venue. Elliston, an actor and theatre manager, had started his career performing in Bath. Although he had moved successfully to London by 1804, he knew how profitable entertainment could be in towns where the main occupation was leisure. In 1817 he held the lease to the theatre in Leamington as well as having a circuit of theatres elsewhere. In 1821 he added a ballroom to his Leamington theatre, and downstairs he opened a tea room, a reading room and the rather elaborately entitled ‘County Library of Research’ (which claimed to have 12,000 volumes), as well as, behind the building, a garden with promenades. Elliston attempted to cover the leisure market in several of the places where he had theatres - he also owned the Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens Exotic Nursery in London, which had walks, a bandstand for military concerts, gala nights, fireworks and fêtes.99

  The next big change came with the first railway into Leamington, which arrived in 1844, with six trains a day between Coventry and Milverton, a small village halfway between Leamington and Warwick. In its first week of operation it carried 2,500 passengers. There was also a ‘Shakespeare Coach’ to ferry passengers onward from Milverton to Stratford.

  Stratford and Shakespeare tourism had had a long history. New Place, which Shakespeare had bought in 1597, was owned in the middle of the eighteenth century by the Revd Francis Gastrell, an irritable clergyman, who had bought the house in complete ignorance of its history. When he found himself unable to stop tourists penetrating the grounds to search for a mulberry tree Shakespeare was supposed to have planted there, he chopped down the tree; then, after a quarrel with the parish about the rates he owed, he tore down the house itself. The house was gone as a shrine, and so new irons of bardolatry were found. A workman named Thomas Sharp claimed that Gastrell had sold him the wood from the tree. He set up as a manufacturer of Shakespeare relics, and produced an endless supply of boxes, cases, drinking vessels and even furniture. In 1769 one recipient of a wooden inkstand and two small wooden heads of Shakespeare also received an affidavit: ‘I have add the pleasure of carving things of one sort or another ever since the Jubilee [see below]…and if you should be anyways dubeious as it’s not the tree, I will come upon oath that it his of the real tree’ (sic).100 Thirty years later, he was still affidaviting away (although his spelling had improved miraculously): ‘I do hereby declare, & take my solemn oath, upon the four Evangelists, in the presence of Almighty God, that I never had worked, sold, or substituted any other wood, than what came from, & was part of the said tree, as or for Mulberry-wood.’101 Attention also turned to Shakespeare’s probable birthplace, in Henley Street. In the late eighteenth century half of it was occupied by the Hart family, the descendants of Shakespeare’s sister Joan, and run as a butcher’s shop, while the other half had become an inn, the Swan and Maidenhead. The actor David Garrick, who was to do so much to promote Shakespeare-worship, said that he just knew, somehow, that the front room over the shop was the room in which Shakespeare had been born.

  Garrick had, throughout his career, worked to make theatre-going less of a rowdy entertainment in which the audience expected to contribute as much as the performers to its own amusement, and more of an art form, in which the audience was to be entertained, certainly, but also to be educated.* Part of this education process centred around Shakespeare. In 1769 Garrick was approached by the Corporation of Stratford, who hoped that he would donate a statue of Shakespeare to their new town hall. He did much better, suggesting for the just-passed bicentenary of Shakespeare’s birth a three-day jubilee festival to be held in Stratford. His proposal was very much along the lines of a public entertainment in one of the big London pleasure gardens, or a spa town: there would be balls, public breakfasts, oratorios, fireworks, a masquerade, a horse race and, as the culmination, a great pageant with Garrick at the helm - which last was, however, rained off.

  Garrick was a master of presentation. He was a shrewd investor in several newspapers, including the Public Advertiser, the St James’s Chronicle, the Morning Post and the London Packet, which guaranteed good notices for his work and made it possible for him and his friends to insert editorial puffs as well as advertisements. He was also one of the earliest users of engravings to present the image of himself he wanted the world to celebrate. (A recent biographer thinks that Garrick may have appeared in as many as 450 paintings and engravings.) He was careful always to travel with engravings of himself, which he gave away as film stars now give photographs. When he went to Paris in 1765 he sent home an urgent plea: ‘I must desire You to send me by ye first opportunity six prints from Reynolds’s picture, You may apply to ye Engraver…he will give you good ones, if he knows they are for Me.’103

  A man used to promoting himself in this way was not going to let some rain slow him down. His jubilee pageant may have been washed out, but that would not prevent it from being seen. As manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in London, he instead scheduled the pageant at the start of the new season. But Covent Garden, Drury Lane’s great rival, had a much better record as producers of spectacle, and it jumped in first, with an adaptation of a play by the French diplomat-playwright Philippe Néricault Destouches called La Fausse Agnes, which had been staged posthumously by the Comédie-Française in 1759. George Colman, Covent Garden’s manager, simply reset it in Stratford, added an old end-piece of his own called Man and Wife, a routine farce for which he wrote a prologue set in Stratford’s White Lion inn - mostly because he knew Garrick intended to do the same - and sprinkled in a handful of Stratford references, adding a Shakespeare pageant after Act I, again to copy Garrick, using scenery of Stratford itself. That Colman’s was a cynical commercial move he saw no reason to disguise. In Man and Wife he had the landlady say that everyone was ‘all as busy as bees about the jubalo’, although she confessed that she was not quite sure what it is, ‘but it is one of the finest things that ever was seen - There is the great little gentleman [i.e. Garrick, only five foot six] from London, and…eating and drinking, and processioning, and masquerading, and horse-racing, and fireworks - So gay - and as merry as the day is long.’104

  Garrick’s pageant for Stratford had been a deification of Shakespeare the author - or perhaps it was Shakespeare the man. He had planned tableaux of scenes from the plays, processions of actors dressed in character, music by Thomas Arne and Samuel Arnold (including a song entitled ‘Sweet Willy-o’), and at the end Garrick’s own ‘Ode to Shakespeare
’ was to be declaimed, but there were no actual performances of, or even recitations from, Shakespeare’s plays themselves. Yet Garrick’s motives were not cynical, as Colman’s had been. Back in London he fought Covent Garden with its own weapons - with spectacular staging and scenery. (For more on theatre as spectacle, see pp. 312ff.) His jubilee pageant opened a week after Covent Garden’s, but with a far better production. His scenery painters had produced wondrously realistic perspective views of Stratford sights, including the parish church and the yard of the White Lion inn, and the stage was filled with a dizzying succession of characters. The pageant itself lasted an hour and a half, with 115 extras. Each group of Shakespearean characters was presented as a little dramatic unit, with a banner informing the audience which play the characters were representing. (Garrick had learned from Covent Garden’s experience, where the audiences had had some trouble in telling the plays apart.) Each group mimed short scenes from major episodes in nineteen of the plays. There was no shortage of spectacle: A Midsummer Night’s Dream had sixteen children playing fairies, while Oberon and Titania were brought onstage in a carriage drawn by Cupids and Butterflies. Other characters rode onstage on horseback, and Mrs Abington - ‘the unrivalled female ornament of the British stage in Comedy’105 - was pulled on in a chariot drawn by five satyrs, while Mrs Barry, as the Tragic Muse, was in a chariot pulled by the Demon of Revenge carrying a burning sword, and accompanied by Furies, and Mars with his soldiers. Other special effects included the storm scene from King Lear, a cauldron produced by demons for Macbeth, and Cleopatra’s barge accompanied by Persian guards, Negro slaves and pages with peacock fans (as well as two pages rather mysteriously carrying umbrellas).106

  Garrick’s jubilee pageant was a runaway success, and had to be repeated over the next twenty nights.* His contemporaries saw the irony that Garrick, the promoter of theatre as a serious art form, should find such a triumph in dumbshow spectacle - or, as one wrote,

  Turned useful mirth and salutary woe

  To idle pageantry and empty shew…

  To solemn sounds see sordid scene-men stalk

  And the great Shakespeare’s vast creation - walk!107

  Dozens of other theatres and playwrights followed this success - some didn’t even trouble to wait to see if it was a success: George Saville Carey’s Shakespeare’s Jubilee had been published during the jubilee itself, and had Falstaff and the witches from Macbeth on a trip to Stratford. Other blatant thefts of Garrick included Colman (again) with Scrub’s Trip to the Jubilee, Francis Gentleman’s The Stratford Jubilee, and many more, right down to an anonymous play entitled Garrick’s Vagary: or, England Run Mad. (The author was perhaps fortunate it was anonymous. The Biographia Dramatica’s entry on this play reads, in its entirety, ‘Sad stuff indeed!’) By 1770 the concept of the jubilee pageant was so familiar that it had even filtered down to pantomime. The Harlequin’s Jubilee had a statue of the actor-manager John Rich dressed as Harlequin, surrounded in a final tableau by adoring pantomime characters.108

  After the jubilee, Stratford was even more a place of pilgrimage than it had been before. Byng visited the town in 1785, and ‘pilfer’d (in common with other collectors) from the roman pavement, at the head of Shakesperes grave-stone, a tessellated tile, which I hid in my pocket; and which I should suppose will be honor’d and admired by every spectator’. He was also shown by Mrs Hart what she described as ‘Shakespears old chair, and I have been often bid a good some of money for it, It has been carefully handed down on record by our family; but people never thought so much of it till after the jubilee, and now see what pieces they have cut from it, as well as from the old flooring of the bed room!’109 He bought a small piece of that too, about the size of ‘a tobacco stopper’, and later went back to buy a crossbar. This was The Chair That Wouldn’t Die: however many crossbars were cut off, it continued to renew itself. In 1790 it was sold for 20 guineas to a Polish princess; when Washington Irving visited twenty-five years later, it was back in place. Irving was also shown ‘the shattered stock of the very matchlock with which Shakespeare shot the deer, on his poaching exploit.* There, too, was his tobacco box…the sword also with which he played Hamlet; and the identical lanthorn with which Friar Laurence discovered Romeo and Juliet at the tomb!’ Irving drily said that he was ‘ever willing to be deceived, where the deceit is pleasant, and costs nothing’.111

  The Stratford Birthplace Committee was formed in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Henley Street house - together with its neighbours - was put up for sale. The Committee hoped to raise enough money to buy the building and preserve it for the nation. They did manage to buy it, but their method of preservation would not be recognized as such today. Soon after the successful bid, the neighbouring houses in the row were knocked down, and the actual timber of the birthplace itself was replaced, the old wood going the way of the mulberry tree, sold for souvenirs. By 1860 there was a ‘new’ birthplace on the site, showing how it would have looked if it had not gone through a couple of centuries of wear and tear, and enthusiastic preservation - and if, in fact, it had ever been the site of Shakespeare’s birth at all.112 No one much cared, because it was the business of Shakespeare that was so important, and visitors continued to pour in in ever-increasing numbers to adore at the shrine.

  It was iron, however, not poetry, that moved most of the population to what had become by the nineteenth century their favourite holiday destination: the seaside. Earlier, as we saw, the seaside had been a fashionable resort for the few. Mass transport created a new anxiety, as it turned the sea into the destination of choice for the many. Before the railways, steamers had serviced a few sea- and riverside locations. Londoners had frequently travelled down the Thames by steamer. By 1825 Gravesend was a major destination for Londoners out for a pleasant

  Sunday, and most got there by steamer; in 1835 over 670,000 passengers a year arrived in this way. The Margate Steamboat Company, at the same time, was carrying 1,000 passengers every Sunday between London and Margate.113 Even after the arrival of the railways, steamers remained a useful link: the London Conductor, a guide to London for visitors to the Great Exhibition, listed numerous connections and alternative journeys: Gravesend cost 6d. by steamer from Blackwall, whereas a third-class rail ticket was 18d. For Ramsgate the excursionist was recommended to travel by steamer rather than rail, as it was both cheaper and ‘pleasanter’.114

  Scotland also relied heavily on the steamers: sea-going paddle

  steamers were used on the firths to connect towns and villages to the big cities: when Felix Mendelssohn was in Glasgow in 1829 he saw seventy steamers, forty of which had daily sailings. In 1810, Walter Scott had been told that only ‘half a dozen persons exclusive of yourself ’ had seen Loch Coruisk.* After Scott had recorded the ‘exquisite…savage scene’ it presented in The Lord of the Isles (1815), it became a regular stop on the tourist trail, reached by scheduled steamer.115 By 1887 Baedeker recommended the weekly steamer for tourist trips to Skye, once one had ‘telegraphed the day before to the landlord of the Slighachan Hotel to

  send a guide (and ponies if required; advisable for ladies)’ to meet one at the pier.116

  The railways and the seaside, however, were soon inextricably linked. Sometimes seaside towns developed because of the railways. Morecambe became more than a small village only after the line reached it. Bournemouth had appeared on the map as a small hamlet in 1812; in 1841 there were still fewer than thirty buildings in the village in total, but once the railway extended to the town in 1870 it provoked a sudden surge, and by 1880 the population had reached 16,859.117 Other towns of some substance already, such as Skegness, later in the century actively sought the railway as a way of encouraging further development. What Brighton, in its mid-century attempts to roll back the railways, had failed to notice was that visitors of any sort created demand and, with it, prosperity in their towns. In the decade before the opening of the Brighton line the population of Brighton had been almost stagnant at about 40
,000 people. By 1851 it had grown to 65,000, and the number of lodging-house keepers had leaped from 136 to 573118 - a very visible sign that Brighton was not being overrun only by day-trippers.