Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  The Diorama, near Regent’s Park, opened in 1823,* and within a very short period of time dioramas could be found around the country. In 1825 the annual fair at Bristol advertised a diorama ‘for a short time in a spacious building purposely erected in St James’s Church Yards…with a turning saloon as at the Regent’s Park, London’. In the same year, further dioramas opened in Liverpool and in Manchester.23 These last two were possibly licensed by the patent-holder (the one at Bristol almost certainly was not), but very swiftly a diorama simply came to mean a trompe-l’œil picture that was altered by dramatic lighting; within a decade the word was used in advertisements to mean any panoramic view.

  The most popular dioramas and panoramas were topical, and it became a race to ‘capture’ a big event before the competition. The Battle of Navarino, fought on 20 October 1827, was recreated in a panorama the following month. When the Houses of Parliament burned down on 16 October 1834, one panorama of the fire was painted and open to the public a week later; a second one appeared only six weeks after that, and within two months of the fire the Cosmorama Rooms in Regent Street advertised a diorama of a ‘Grand Tableaux, of the Interiors of the Houses of Lords & Commons, As They Appeared Previous to Their Destruction

  by Fire, with a Correct Moonlight View, of the Exteriors…from the River Thames, And a Splendid Representation of the Conflagration with Dioramic & Mechanical Effect. Also a View of the Ruins, as Visited by their Majesties.’

  News events and catastrophes were popular in various genres. In 1820 Géricault’s 1819 painting of dead and dying shipwreck survivors, The Raft of the Medusa, was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, to great success. (For more on art exhibitions, see Chapter 10.) It was followed shortly by a panorama entitled ‘Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Wreck of the Medusa French Frigate and the Fatal Raft’, which was shown first in Edinburgh, and then in Dublin when Géricault’s painting was exhibited there.* Dublin spurned the painting for the panorama, however: admission charges for the painting had to be dropped from 1s. 8d. to 10d., and even then few visitors bothered to attend, while the Marine Peristrephic Panorama packed them in three times a day.

  Another type of novelty appeared in 1834, when the Baker Street Bazaar advertised its ‘Padorama’: just under 1,000 square metres of that technological marvel, the railway. The image depicted was ‘the most interesting parts of the country traversed by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway…[Mechanical scale-models of the] Locomotive Engines [will run in front of the panorama and]…give a more correct idea of the mode of transit on this great work of art and science than can be conveyed by any description, however elaborate. Every one of our juvenile friends ought in particular to see it, as it is very instructive for youth.’† The Baker Street Bazaar, in its passion for instruction, was not breaking new ground. The hero in Evelina in 1778 had condemned Cox’s Museum because, although the mechanical ability behind the displays was remarkable, ‘I am sorry it is turned to no better account; but its purport is so frivolous, so very remote from all aim at instruction or utility, that the sight of so fine a shew only leaves a regret on the mind, that so much work, and so much ingenuity, should not be better bestowed.’25 Many agreed with this desire for ‘instruction or utility’, and a great many shows therefore slanted their promotion away from the presentation of spectacle.

  One way of making entertainments acceptable to the more seriousminded was to claim a scientific basis for them, as did Dr Katterfelto, who lectured at Spring Gardens, in the same place as Cox’s. (Spring Gardens was where Admiralty Arch, in London, has since been built, but a small pedestrian turning carries the name still.) Dr Katterfelto, advertising himself as ‘the greatest philosopher in this kingdom since Sir Isaac Newton’, lectured on ‘mathematics, optics, magnetism, electricity, chemistry, pneumatics, hydraulics, hydrostatics’, as well as, more mysteriously, ‘proetics’, ‘stynacraphy’ and ‘caprimancy’. Despite the latter subjects, his lectures were not entirely bogus. He exhibited a solar microscope, although he could not resist claiming the invention as his own (in fact an early model had been presented to the Royal Society over forty years before), or selling Dr Bato’s Remedy to destroy the ‘insects’ that could be seen through it. Other lecturers presented ‘Philosophical Recreations’, which were in reality conjuring tricks, or optical illusions, or performances of mind-reading; there were even demonstrations of ‘Philosophical Fireworks’, which were fireworks displays that were prefaced by short lectures on chemistry, or the history of gunpowder. Magic lanterns, which otherwise would be classed as entertainment, were educational if they explained ‘all the Phenomena of the heavenly bodies, and give the most interesting and comprehensive View of the sublime works of the Creator’.

  Some of these lectures were of real technological import: in 1804 an enterprise that was to change the entire nation was presented as an entertainment at the Lyceum Theatre, when Friedrich Albert Winsor gave lectures on the power of gas to illuminate. In 1808 Richard Trevithick, the engineer who produced the first steam locomotive, attempted to publicize his new locomotive, the Catch-me-who-can, by staging a ‘Steam Circus’ in front of what is now Euston station and giving rides to passers-by.26 At the Egyptian Hall in 1824 ‘The Egg in Labour’, which sounded like a magic act, was in fact a ‘steam egg-hatchery’, or incubator for chicks: ‘Cantelo’s Patent Hydro-Incubator…Chickens Always Hatching! Machines and Chickens Constantly on Sale!’ They were also constantly on view - between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. visitors could watch the chicks hatch, and examine bottles that held specimens of chickens at various stages in their development.

  In 1832 the Adelaide Gallery - or, to give it its formal title, the National Gallery of Practical Science, Blending Instruction with Amusement - opened in the Lowther Arcade, a passage off the Strand that was well known for shopping and other entertainment. In 1839 it was the first place to display a photograph, illegally to begin with, but then with the permission of Louis Daguerre, who licensed a photographer to set up a studio on the premises. This was so popular that in 1844 he expanded into the next-door building. In 1847 he had a second branch in Regent’s Park, tellingly at the Colosseum, which housed panoramas, and by the mid-1850s his ‘Temple of Photography’ was established on Regent Street, the home of upper-class shopping, making the perfect link between education, technology and entertainment.

  Photographs could be taken away and studied at leisure.* This was another way of taking entertainment and taming it, moving it from the street into the home and therefore domesticating it. Many children’s toys followed this pattern, being based on public entertainments, but enjoyed safely away from the crowds. The Panorama of Europe: A New Game appeared in 1815, and had a map of Europe on which various routes had to be traced out. Other toys relied on public entertainments that were less educational, less satisfactory to the more serious, evangelical middle classes in particular. But by domesticating the public element, and disguising its origins with references to other, more educational, shows, the toys became welcome in many homes where theatre and magic displays were frowned on. A Geographical Panorama was not actually a panorama at all, but a toy theatre; another toy theatre claimed its educational credentials by calling itself a diorama. Home ‘panoramas’ were really magic-lantern versions of images taken from current panoramas, but they were even better, because ‘by the magical power of this little instrument, [they are] brought in all their reality and beauty, to our own homes and firesides’, said the Art-Journal. The privatization of the show was important in the success of these toys.

  Separate lectures in new locations away from the shows and exhibition halls were similarly aimed at those who were inclined to distrust ‘entertainment’ alone. One of the founders of the Adelaide Gallery helped to set up the Polytechnic Institution, which was dedicated to the encouragement of invention and technology, and the education of the working classes. Yet soon after it opened in 1838, its educational and scientific demonstrations and lectures had been diluted and were in practice already indisti
nguishable from the entertainments of the town - ‘Dissolving Views’ were dioramas by another name, and its science lectures were equally reliant on popular entertainment. Yet the Polytechnic’s reputation for rational recreation kept it secure. In Thackeray’s 1853-5 novel The Newcomes (with its careful subtitle, ‘Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family’), Lady Newcome says that when her children are home from school, ‘I send them to the Polytechnic with Professor Hickson, who kindly explains to them some of the marvels of science and the wonders of machinery. I send them to the picture galleries and the British Museum. I go with them myself to the delightful lectures at the [Royal] Institution in Albemarle Street. I do not desire that they should attend theatrical exhibitions.’27* But they would really be attending ‘theatrical exhibitions’ in all but name. John Henry Pepper, ‘chemical professor to the establishment’ from 1848, lectured on chemical reactions by using as an example the case of Dr William Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner.† He was soon even more famous as the creator of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, a theatrical effect that produced the illusion of ghostly transparent figures moving onstage. In 1862 he staged a Christmas Eve production of Dickens’s ‘The Haunted Man’ in a lecture hall at the Polytechnic. A student at his desk was suddenly transfixed by the vision of a glowing skeleton which appeared and disappeared before the audience’s amazed eyes. Pepper had planned this as a prelude to a lecture on optics, but the tumultuous applause persuaded him to keep the ‘ghost’ a theatrical secret, and Pepper’s Ghost drew a quarter of a million visitors to the Polytechnic in the next fifteen months, as well as making spectral appearances in theatres across the country, suitably licensed by Pepper.29

  Given the success of this type of razzmatazz, the value of stressing education did not go unremarked by members of the show community. Some simply commented on various world and current events in their own entertainments: Planché’s The New Planet; or, Harlequin out of Place, his Christmas pantomime of 1847, revolved around the recent discovery of the planet Neptune: Neptune descends to earth and makes solemn visits to many ‘educational’ spots, including the Colosseum in Regent’s Park, the Egyptian Hall and the Polytechnic, where the ‘lecturers’ sing of new scientific and technological discoveries, such as the telegraph, ending with a tableau of Shakespeare, Wellington and Britannia.30 But other entertainers dedicated themselves more seriously to highlighting the educational sides to their shows. Mme Tussaud printed ‘a general outline of the history of each character’, which would ‘not only greatly increase the pleasure to be derived from a mere view of the Figure, but [would] also convey to the minds of young Persons much biographical knowledge - a branch of education universally allowed to be of the highest importance’.31 For an extra 6d. Robert Barker had, with his earliest panoramas, provided booklets that had outlines of the pictures, then summaries of the history and geography of the regions shown. And panoramas were sometimes regarded as tedious precisely because of their educational reputation. Charles Lamb painted a sad picture of a poor schoolmaster who in his holidays had ‘some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him…that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr Bartley’s Orrerry, to the Panopticon’.32 Dickens tried to make his example sound more enticing, promoting a moving panorama of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers as ‘a picture three miles long,* which occupies two hours in its passage…It is an easy means of travelling, night and day, without any inconvenience from climate, steamboat company, or fatigue.’33

  The Mississippi panorama was gigantic, but its success may have come from a new element: it had, for the first time, a narrator - the artist himself, who stood beside the panorama and lectured on his voyage as the view unrolled. Soon narrators were regularly employed to provide historical and geographical information as the audience watched. Other panoramas straining for educational content incorporated images of engineering works into their scenes - engineering was always educational - and this made a success of ‘A Trip from Primrose Hill, via the London and North Western and Chester and Holyhead Railways to Holyhead’, which included depictions of railway bridges and the industrial sights of Wolverhampton and Coventry. Some panoramas added music: the cyclorama showing Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755 was unfurled ‘to the sound of congenial music’,34 although how Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in a version for organ, and extracts from operas that included Don Giovanni, Masaniello and Mose` in Egitto were ‘congenial’ with the devastation wrought by an earthquake was left unexplored. Panoramas of the Holy Land were accompanied by ‘Grand Sacred Vocal Music by the Great Masters’ at St George’s Gallery, and by ‘Hebrew Melodies’ at the Egyptian Hall. Sheet music was sold to link up with the panorama of the moment - after the Mississippi panorama’s success, it was possible to buy what in today’s terms would be understood to be the official tiein, a piano score of ‘Mississippi Waltzes, Played during the Moving of Banvard’s Three Mile Picture of the Mississippi River’. There were more opportunistic offerings, too: ‘Nelly was a Lady (Down on the Mississippi)’, ‘I was raised in Mississippi’ and ‘By de Mississippi Ribber’ (sic) all appeared within two years of the panorama. Other panoramas produced similar pieces for home entertainment from sheet-music publishers with an eye for the topic of the moment. There was ‘The Pyramid Galop’, ‘The Niagara Falls Galop’, ‘The Lago Maggiore Galop’, even ‘The Holborn Viaduct Galop’ - not to mention polkas, mazurkas and schottisches.35

  While this was music to be played at home, en famille, musical accompaniments to the panoramas themselves were a way to circumvent another problem: the attitude towards theatre in its various forms as it developed over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For some, theatre had always been an abomination. But for most people through the previous centuries theatre had simply been an upper-class pastime. Now, as it became more accessible to the middle and working classes, those presenting theatrical entertainments needed to find a way of not entirely losing the great mass of the bourgeoisie who were, from the end of the eighteenth century, turning ever more to evangelical values. In the evangelicals’ view, the theatre was a place of falsehood, where the credulous were duped by illusions and deceit. Theatre, like novels, was too much concerned with the passions, and too little with morality; both genres fed the imagination, which if anything needed to be quelled. The Nonconformist Evangelical Magazine published a ‘Spiritual Barometer’ which went from +70 (‘Glory; dismission from the body’) to 0 (‘Indifference’) and then down through -30 (‘The theatre, Vauxhall, Ranelagh, &c’), to -40 (‘private prayer totally neglected…’), -50 (‘parties of pleasure on the Lord’s day, masquerades; drunkenness; adultery; profaneness; lewd songs’), and finally -70 (‘Death, perdition’).36 It should be remembered, warned the Christian Observer in 1815, that ‘The last age in France was characterized by the number of profligate novels, and behold the consequences in the total corruption of the present.’37 This was a perfectly mainstream view: The Times warned in 1809 that ‘The stage has proved, and will ever prove, subversive of the order, peace, and purity of morals, and consequently, of Christianity itself.’38

  Thus a range of entertainments was carefully staged in neutral surroundings that enabled those to whom theatre was barred still to partake of some of the associated pleasures. In 1838 the Adelphi Theatre had a troupe of dancing ‘Bayade`res’, who also performed at the Egyptian Hall ‘at the solicitation of many Families and Individuals who are not in the habit of visiting Theatres’. This was fairly overt. Thiodon’s Grand Original Mechanical and Picturesque Theatre of Arts in Spring Gardens was more circumspect, promising that ‘The Entertainments offered at this Theatre are quite distinct from that of a Theatrical Description, and on this Account, together with its surprising Ingenuity, and harmless Tendency, is peculiarly calculated to attract the Notice and Support of those, whose Religious Tenets forbid their Participation in Amusements of a more marked and decisive Character.’ The Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street was suitably innocuously named, and from 1850 held ‘one-man entertainments’ w
hich were in fact if not in name play-readings. Sometimes the neutral locale was not necessary, and a playbill that promoted a lavish spectacle as educational was all that was necessary. Astley’s Amphitheatre staged a version of St George and the Dragon in which, it was promised, the dragon’s ‘Mechanism and Automatous Serpentine Movements [were] so ably calculated and put into play, as to stamp the Action-Scene with the character of TRUTH throughout its progress, and thereby constitution the principal merit of the whole Performance.’39

  Even more than mechanical animals, real animals were educational - no evangelical could ‘behold the works of Nature without [also] admiring Nature’s God’, while the scientifically minded were reassured to be told that the descriptions in the guidebook supplied by the most famous turn-of-the-century menagerie, in Exeter Change, were ‘chiefly extracted from the works of Buffon and Goldsmith’. Yet even in such a respectable environment the link with theatre was there for those who wanted to see it: Exeter Change’s elephant, Chunee, was loaned out to appear in a Covent Garden pantomime in 1811, and when she was killed in 1826