Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  All moveables of wonder, from all parts,

  Are here - Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,

  The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,

  The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,

  Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,

  The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,

  The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft

  Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,

  All out-o’-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,

  All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts

  Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats

  All jumbled up together, to compose

  A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths

  Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill,

  Are vomiting, receiving on all sides,

  Men, Women, three-years’ Children, Babes in arms.56

  As Wordsworth described it, so it was: these fairs were now almost entirely entertainment. The retail element of country fairs was dying, and in the cities it was already dead. As early as 1748 Bartholomew Fair had consisted entirely of entertainments, including a play of The Bloody Contest between Charles the Twelfth and Peter the Great, Czar of Muscovy; plays made up of snippets from chapbook stories such as The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green and The Adventures of Roderick Random and his Friend Strap; a farce (possibly performed by puppets) called The Constant Quaker, or, The Humours of Wapping; a pantomime, Harlequin’s Frolics; a waxwork show entitled The Court of the Queen of Hungary; freaks both human and animal, including ‘The Young Oronatu Savage’, a 12-foot long, 120-stone hog and a dwarf billed as ‘Maria Theresa, the Amazing Corsican Fairy’. There were fireworks, Italian sword dances, hornpipes, folk dances, puppet shows and menageries. In 1752 there were also a learned horse and a learned pig, an American dwarf, ‘the tall lady from Norfolk, and the short one from Durham’, ribbon- and breeches-sellers (the only retailers at the fair, apart from those who sold food), a Punch and Judy show, fire-eaters, rope dancers, wire dancers and conjurors. By 1825 the fair had twenty-two large-scale shows, including Wombwell’s Circus and Atkins’s Menagerie; eight shows with human ‘curiosities’ such as dwarves, giants or ‘natives’; and another five shows displaying performers with various skills, such as jugglers, tumblers, rope dancers, clowns or equestrians. Then there were secondary shows including a mare with seven feet, a learned horse, and a pig billed as ‘Toby the Swinish Philosopher’, who counted, knew the alphabet, drew up accounts, and told the time.

  Highlights were a peep show of the murder of William Weare (see p. 181) and waxworks of the royal family, Mother Shipton, an Irish giant and the acquitted murderer Abraham Thornton.* Murder had already become big business as the Sunday newspapers and the penny-bloods spread the taste for police reports and accounts of trials. They also moved crime from a local onto a national scale: in 1834, seven years after the murder, there were five panoramas or other representations of Maria Marten at the Red Barn, and a peep-show proprietor later told Mayhew, ‘There was more [money] took with [James Blomfield] Rush’s murder than there ever has been by the battle of Waterloo itself.’†59

  Retrospectively it is possible to classify each show, but in reality the various types of entertainments all merged. Peep shows, which were more or less elaborate perspective boxes, gradually took in elements from automata and, later, photography. Waxworks used clockwork mechanisms so that previously stationary ‘processions’ of figures now moved across a room or a stage. Puppets were mixed together with clockwork figures, or placed in front of panoramas. Equally, places like the Egyptian Hall, or Savile House near Leicester Square, let out exhibition space as individual rooms, so instead of visitors seeing just a panorama, or a set of waxworks, a kaleidoscope of shows passed before them:

  Serpents both of land and sea; - panoramas of all the rivers of the known world; jugglers; ventriloquists; imitators of the noises

  of animals; dioramas of the North pole, and the gold-diggings of California; somnambulists (very lucid); ladies who have cheerfully submitted to have their heads cut off nightly at sixpence per head admission; giants; dwarfs; sheep with six legs; calves born inside out; marionettes; living marionettes; lectures on Bloomerism; expositors of orrery - all of these have by turns found a home in Savile House.60

  And all could be viewed in one day.

  The shows were advertised in a similar melange, with strident messages bombarding the public daily. The press had been carrying advertisements for entertainments since the first daily newspaper appeared, and now magazines like Punch (founded 1841) and, especially, the Illustrated London News (founded 1842) also carried notices. Journalists were regaled with oyster-and-champagne suppers (courtesy of Albert Smith before his ‘Ascent of Mont Blanc’ lectures), or special viewings, or free passes for their families. Out on the streets, advertising was livelier still. The very first omnibus in 1829 had carried an advertisement for the Regent’s Park Diorama, but that was the very least of it. Carts pulling oversized models of the object to be sold had long been one of the major causes of congestion in the streets, as huge umbrellas, hats or cheeses fought it out with private carriages, hackneys, delivery carts and omnibuses. The entertainment business was not behindhand, and as so often was the case, it was a visitor to the country who recorded the extraordinary sight:

  Behold, rolling down from Oxford Street, three immense wooden pyramids - their outsides are painted all over with hieroglyphics and with monumental letters in the English language. These pyramids display faithful portraits of Isis and Osiris, of cats, storks, and of the apis; and amidst these old-curiosity shop gods, any Englishman may read an inscription, printed in letters not much longer than a yard, from which it appears that there is now on view a panorama of Egypt…This panorama shows the flux and reflux of the Nile, with its hippopotamuses and crocodiles, and a section of the Red Sea…[And] here is another monstrous shape - a mosque, with its cupola and blue and white surmounted by a crescent. The driver is a light-haired boy, with a white turban and a sooty face…The Panorama of the Nile, the Overland Route, the Colosseum, Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition of Waxworks, and other sights, are indeed wonder-works of human industry, skill, and invention; and, in every respect,

  Street advertising was common: carts with large panels advertising shops, manufacturers or, as in this 1830s cartoon, entertainment, crowded the streets, as did men with sandwich boards (the ones on the right advertising a Napoleon-themed product).

  are they superior to the usual productions of the same kind. But, for all that, they must send their advertising vans into the streets; necessity compels them to strike the gong and blow the trumpet; choice there is none. They must either advertise or perish.61

  That was what many believed.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, many forms of advertising were so ephemeral that we know only that they once existed. There were sandwich men, there were men who carried placards, or models of the item being advertised. There were also handbills, passed out on the street or, as time went on, delivered door to door. After the arrival of the penny post, handbills were mailed, just as direct mail is now. For all of these, few examples have survived.

  Bill-posters or bill-stickers were another group of whom little is known. By the nature of their displays - posters glued to the walls of buildings - survival of their handiwork from one week to the next was

  minimal. And yet they were in the forefront of advertising: posters could be stuck up on walls and fences without permission, there was no tax to pay on them, as there was on newspaper advertising and, unlike in newspapers, the advertisements were not confined to a single set column width. Dickens interviewed a man he named ‘The King of the Bill-Stickers’, who claimed his father had been ‘Engineer, Beadle, and Bill-Sticker to the Parish of St Andrews Holborn’ in 1780, which if true is as far back as this practice can be traced. By 1851, claimed ‘The King’, there were 150 stickers in London, and he estima
ted that each man could post 100 bills a day.62 This gives a total of 15,000 bills a day in London alone. If this could indeed have been the case, it is not a surprise that bill-sticking died out: the risk - pretty well the certainty - that any bill would be overstuck within days, if not hours of its being posted made it futile.

  Bill-stickers paid little if any attention to who owned the walls they stuck their bills on. By-laws and pressure on the police to monitor their activities changed the situation slightly, but it was the Great Exhibition and the railways, those two catalysts, that made the next stage in advertising possible. In 1851 the Illustrated London News carried the following advertisement:

  NOTICE TO ADVERTISERS - LONDON and NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY STATIONS. Messrs. W. H. SMITH and SON are prepared to receive Bills and Advertisements for putting on the Walls and Platforms, and in the Booking-offices of these Stations, 188 in number, including London, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham. The number of Passengers travelling over the line was about 6,000,000 in 1850, and will probably greatly exceed that number in the present year. Advertisements will be received for one or more Stations, or for the whole Line, for periods of one, three, six or twelve months.

  Persons contracting for space for hanging Advertisements, may change them not oftener than once a week. Further particulars and copies of Rules and rates of charge may be obtained from Messrs. W. H. SMITH and SON, 138 Strand, London; or at the Book Stands and of the Booking-clerks at all the Stations of the Line.63

  W. H. Smith had reinvented itself once more, becoming a new thing, an advertising agency, a broker that negotiated between the retailer with goods or services to sell and the owner of the space on which those goods or services could be promoted. By the 1870s ‘advertising contractors’ were employed to ‘purchase the rights, exclusive and absolute’ to particular spaces; these spaces were then ‘sublet’ to companies who wanted to advertise.64 The new techniques in reproducing engravings and the possibilities that would soon come for printing cheaply in colour added still more to the enticements of railway and poster advertising.

  Spectacle was now becoming the important element, and size mattered. In 1867 the Adelphi Theatre advertised its play The Dead Heart to such an extent that it used (and advertised the use of )

  10,000,000 adhesive labels…30,000 small cuts [that is, illustrations] of the guillotine scene, 5000 reams of note-paper, 110,000 business envelopes, 60,000 stamped envelopes, 2000 six-sheet cuts of the Bastile [sic] scene, 5,000,000 handbills, 1000 six-sheet posters, 500 slips, 1,000,000 cards heartshaped, 100 twentyeight sheet posters,* and 20,000 folio cards for shop windows. This was quite exclusive of newspaper wrappers and various other ingenious means of attracting attention.65

  Theatre was selling itself as the spectacle. And perhaps it was.

  * * *

  *This word was a construction of de Loutherbourg’s own, formed from the Greek for ‘natural’ and ‘form’. What it meant was less important than the grand classical sound, which imparted an aura of learning to what was, in fact, a magic-lantern show, if a technologically advanced, thrillingly beautiful and hugely influential magic-lantern show. The fondness for classical names continued with the Holuphusikon, the Eidoranion, the Panoptikon and the Aklouthorama. The panorama (‘all-seeing’) was another classical creation. Just as the ‘-gate’ ending has been appended to every political scandal since the eruption of Watergate, so in the nineteenth century the success of the panorama meant that ‘-orama’ became the standard suffix for a show that relied on perspectival or trompe-l’œil illusions: the aereorama, altchorama, cosmorama, cyclorama, diorama, kineorama, naturorama, padorama, poecilorama and physiorama all advertised their -oramaic charms.

  *Mother Shipton, a stock figure of legend for hundreds of years, has recently vanished from popular consciousness. Her origins can possibly be found in a real woman living in Yorkshire early in the sixteenth century, who was said to be a witch, or a seer, or a prophetess. A raft of prophecies attributed to her was published and treated seriously by many - including Pepys, who in 1666, after the Great Fire of London, heard a member of the royal family saying that ‘now Shipton’s prophecy was out [had come true]’.6

  †Fieschi had attempted to assassinate the emperor Louis Philippe, while Lin was a Chinese official who became famous in Britain during the Opium Wars; the Great Agitator was of course Daniel O’Connell.

  *This was its first year in Trafalgar Square; see p. 401.

  *This panorama had been produced following John Franklin’s return from his first trip to the Arctic in 1822, when he was hailed as ‘the man who ate his boots’. His Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea was published in 1823, and the audience for the panorama was promised ‘a scene of awful grandeur and sublimity beyond description - Music, Savage Dance, composed on purpose’.14

  *Bullock sold off most of his collection in 1819, but the hall continued to be a popular exhibition space, let out to artists or entrepreneurs until it was demolished in 1904.

  †It has frequently been repeated that Byron too was the owner of Napoleon’s travelling carriage. In fact he had Bullock’s carriage copied, except that he replaced the Emperor’s specially designed map chest with bookshelves and a dining table. Mme Tussaud later acquired the actual carriage and camp bed and carriage, along with another hundred odd items associated with Napoleon.

  *The ‘Battle’ Symphony was in fact premiered in Vienna with a real orchestra, but the Panharmonicon played some marches by Dussek and Pleyel on the same programme. Maelzel’s more lasting fame is as the inventor of the metronome.

  *Ballet-goers today still see a moving panorama in traditional productions of The Sleeping Beauty. The scene in which the Prince travels to find Aurora is known as the ‘panorama scene’, and Tchaikovsky’s music was commissioned specifically for (in the choreographer Petipa’s notes of the production scenario), a ‘Panorama…As the boat advances, the banks of the river change; villages, countryside, forests, mountains are seen, and finally, the castle of the sleeping beauty comes into view.’21

  *The architect of the original Diorama theatre was Auguste Pugin, father of the architect who worked on the Houses of Parliament. The building was sold in 1848. In 1853 it was turned into a Baptist chapel, which survived until the 1970s, and was then converted into a mosque. The façade of the original building survives today, with the word ‘Diorama’ appearing on the frieze. It is now the site of the Prince’s Trust charity, and its theatrical beginnings explain that building’s peculiar layout.

  *This was a particularly felicitous meshing of various forms of entertainment: the newspapers had carried accounts of the shipwreck, particularly dwelling on the episodes of murder and cannibalism; two books by survivors were quickly translated into English; a week after the opening at the Egyptian Hall the Coburg Theatre staged The Shipwreck of the Medusa, or, The Fatal Raft. A decade later the playwright William Moncrieff found that the subject still had some mileage in it, using the same title - with only an exclamation mark to distinguish it.

  †This was only one of the dozens of spin-offs that emerged from the excitement of the early passenger train. There were also commemorative coins, ceramics and pottery, printed handkerchiefs, jigsaw puzzles, peep shows and engravings, including in 1831 six aquatints, which were so popular they were expanded to a series of thirteen and reprinted the same year; they had to be reissued again in the three following years, before they were issued separately as lithographs. Ackermann, the bookseller, also produced two long aquatints, Travelling on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which also went through two editions.24

  *At mid-century they cost anything from 10s. 6d. to 1 guinea for a whole-plate portrait, although two people could be photographed together for 15s. After 1860 the price for good studio photographs dropped to about 1s., but other photographers specialized in working-class sitters for far less.

  *When Colonel Newcome asks for his son to attend some Shakespeare, Lady Newcome graciously sends the child wi
th their footman.

  †Dr Palmer (1824-56) was convicted of murdering a friend who had just won heavily at the Shrewsbury races. However, in Rugeley he had long been suspected of murdering his children (five of his six legitimate children died of convulsions; as did two of his illegitimate ones, soon after visiting him), his mother-in-law (who died two weeks after coming to live with him), his wife (after he insured her life for £13,000) and his brother, all between 1849 and 1855. The drinker’s query ‘What’s your poison?’ first appeared in popular speech during his trial.28

  *This measurement was given not only by Dickens but also in advertisements, but it has been pointed out that, if the show lasted two hours, then the scenes would have had to zip past the audience at 132 feet per minute, which seems improbable; 1,200 yards has been suggested as a less hyperbolic possibility.

  *For more on this episode, see pp. 349-50.

  *Another aspect of these gardens - concerts - will be discussed in Chapter 9.

  *Abraham Thornton (c.1793-1860) was accused of raping and murdering a woman he met at a dance in 1817. It became a case of national interest when Thornton demanded ‘ordeal by battle’, which he was entitled to by law, but which had not been used since the early seventeenth century. It was finally agreed that he did have the right (abolished in 1819), but he dropped the attempt.57

  †In 1848 Rush, a bailiff, murdered the recorder of Norwich and his son, and wounded his daughter, in a case that revolved around a disputed will. It was a popular sensation, and special excursion trains were run for spectators wishing to attend the execution, one of the last public executions outside London. Rush was a popular subject not only for peep shows but also for Staffordshire potters, who produced models of Rush, the property under dispute and of Rush’s own farm.58