Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  By the 1850s most Midland and industrial northern towns had some form of music hall, even if the buildings were not yet as elaborate as in London. In Manchester in the early 1850s 25,000 millhands divided their favours among three large saloons and beer halls, where they could watch programmes not dissimilar to much early music hall: ‘singing in character, dancing of various kinds, clog and grotesque dancing, juggling and tumbling’. The price of entrance was the purchase of a 2d. refreshment ticket. By 1866 there were three or four specially built halls, and many smaller ones which had licences for drink, if not for professional singing and dancing. In Liverpool by this date there were no halls that had been purpose-built, but 33 pubs held up to 100 customers each, and, while 70 per cent of them still relied on the amateur free and easies for entertainment, 30 per cent were hiring professional entertainers.79

  By the 1860s the Alhambra, with a capacity of 3,500, had opened in London; the Oxford Music Hall seated 1,200. There were over thirty of these large halls in London, including Wilton’s, Weston’s Music Hall, Holborn (1857), the South London Palace (1860), the London Pavilion, the Bedford, Camden Town, and Deacon’s, Clerkenwell (all 1861), and Collins’, Islington (1862).80 There were also at least 300 more purpose-built halls in the provinces, and in the 1870s nearly 400 halls that had some sort of formal, professional form of entertainment.81

  By the 1870s there was yet another shift to the shape of an evening at the halls. The supper tables were pushed aside, now only taking up half the floor space, while a theatre pit was built over the remainder. The old-fashioned group singing with the audience, the glees and catches, was finally phased out, and instead headliners and serios (singers who performed comic songs in mock-serious form) - professionals all - appeared. A proscenium arch was added around the stage, to further indicate the division between the audience and the professionals. The halls were becoming in form, if not entirely in content, theatres, with a static audience who were no longer expected to socialize with each other in groups, or to join in the performance, but only to be entertained as individuals, segregated by the price of their tickets.82

  The professionalization of the performers was also complete: they were rarely local, but did their turns at several halls each night, on prearranged circuits, both in London and in the provinces. The first agency for music-hall artistes had opened in 1858. Vacancies were advertised in the theatrical newspapers, which were beginning to emerge. The first, the Era, had originally been a trade journal for the licensed victuallers’ trade. It was not unnatural that the brewers who had financial interests in taverns and saloons should also choose to include information for performers in their trade paper. Then the performers took over the content completely, and it became a theatre paper only. In 1856 the Magnet, devoted solely to music hall, began publication in Leeds, and in 1859 the Entr’acte followed.* In 1865 the Music Hall Provident Society was founded, to act as a pension and benefit society for musichall employees.83

  The 1870s were a turning point for music hall. In the previous ten years the cost of setting up of a hall in London had reached nearly £10,000 on average, and more for a particularly large or lavish establishment. Morton had spent £40,000 on the Canterbury as early as 1854, and with a partner another £35,000 on the Oxford in 1861.84 Many proprietors could no longer rely on their takings to fund the huge and costly architectural changes, but had to sell shares to brewers, or form themselves into syndicates. In 1864 the Alhambra had been funded by a limited-liability company, and in 1893 the London Syndicate was formed, with three large West End halls; soon Edward Moss, Oswald Stoll, Frank Allen and Richard Thornton were all building regional chains of halls, moving quickly across the country.85* The turns they could finance were now more elaborate and sensational - and were also more standardized. In many ways, by the time music hall had reached this period it had virtually become ‘variety’, a more homogenous, more refined, less raucous style of performance, which was better suited to suburban audiences.

  What these audiences loved was that an image of the upper-class world was being conveyed to the workers, in the same way that film would convey an image of the life of the rich to those suffering through the Depression. In 1890 Percy Fitzgerald commented that ‘The East Ender has created his idea from a gentleman or “gent” of which he has had glimpses at the “bars” and finds it in perfection at his music-hall. At the music-hall everything is tinselled over, and we find a kind of racy, gin-borne affection to be the mode; everyone being “dear boy” or a “pal”…a suggestion of perpetual dress suit, with deep side pockets, in which the hands are ever plunged.’86 The descendant of the ‘gent’ was the ‘lion comique’, the leading comic singer, who performed ‘swell’ songs such as ‘Champagne Charlie’ (1866) by George Leybourne. Leybourne, who performed under the sobriquet ‘the Original Champagne Charlie’, ‘flaunted the broad check suits, the puce jackets, widely striped trousers and lurid vests of his so-called swells’.87 The song, and the persona, celebrated the things that cash could bring - flashy clothes, flashy women and, of course, plenty of champagne to splash around. Leybourne was appearing at the Canterbury when this song became a hit, and for an astonishing £1,500 a year he was contractually obliged to dress as a ‘swell’ offstage as well as on, driving around in a carriage, very publicly drinking champagne that had been specially provided by a wine merchant.88 As with the ‘young Werther’ outfits of the Romantics a hundred years before, now the ‘Champagne Charlie’ hat was popular among lower-middle-class young men, who idolized their hero and his glamorous life.

  Then the ‘masher’ took over from the ‘swell’. Younger, even more gaudily dressed, many of the stage mashers were in fact male impersonators, the most famous of whom was perhaps Vesta Tilley. On a tour of America, she noted that ‘the dudes of Broadway were intrigued with my costume, a pearl grey frock coat suit and silk hat and a vest of delicately flowered silk - one of the dozens which I had bought at the sale of the effects of the late Marquis of Anglesey. Grey frock coats and fancy vests became very popular in New York.’89 One night when she forgot her cufflinks, she tied her cuffs together with black ribbons: there was a stampede in the direction of the ribbon counters, and haberdashers began to sell cufflinks made to look like her improvisation.

  Although the songs of the music halls, and the personalities of the singers, were the highlights for many, much of the success of music hall came from its variety of genres. In 1896 the first moving picture was shown at the Regent Street Polytechnic. So successful was it that it was quickly transferred to the Empire Music Hall, Leicester Square, where it ran for eighteen months. But as yet it was only an interlude in music hall’s domination. The programme at the Empire consisted of an overture, Tyrolean singers and dancers, a ballet, a trio, some Russian dancers, Cinquevalli (a famous juggler), the films - which were four in number: the arrival of the Paris express; a practical joke played on a governess; the collapse of a wall; and boating in the Mediterranean - followed by acrobats, a singer, a performance of Faust lasting an hour, and a pair of ‘eccentrics’. Such a mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture under one roof was not to disappear until the twentieth century.

  * * *

  *Britton was not small himself, but sold ‘small coal’, which was either charcoal or small pieces of coal, also known as slack.

  *St Cecilia, the mythical inventor of the organ, is the patron saint of music, and by the sixteenth century many societies celebrated the day of her martyrdom in musical form with St Cecilia’s Day concerts and specially commissioned odes.

  *She later married Joah Bates, one of the organizers of the Handel Centennial, and it was rumoured that she had brought a dowry of £7,000 into the marriage, earned in just four years on the professional circuit.

  *Charles Burney’s life was a good example of the broad range of tasks expected of the professional musician. In 1749 he became organist of St Dionis Backchurch in Fenchurch Street, London, which gave him an income of £30 a year, as well as access to pupils for priva
te tuition. He also performed at concerts held at the King’s Arms tavern. As a composer, he published intermittently until the 1760s, especially songs for the stage. Illness forced him to move to King’s Lynn, where he became organist of St Margaret’s in 1751, again with the opportunity of obtaining private pupils. In the meantime he was writing A General History of Music (4 vols., 1776-89), the first part of which appeared in 1771 as The Present State of Music in France and Italy. To find the time for this work he had to write in his carriage as he was driven from one pupil to the next: he saw his first pupil at seven in the morning. It has been estimated that these various tasks provided him with an income of between £30 and £100 a month in the London season.20

  *A benefit was a concert or a theatrical performance where the receipts for the evening were given to a particular performer. Many professional singers had benefits regularly, usually staged or promoted in some way by their supporters.

  †The action is the mechanism by which the movements of the pianist in striking the keys are transmitted to the hammers which hit the strings to produce the notes. The escapement is the mechanism that causes the hammer to fall back into the rest position immediately after striking the string; thus on Zumpe’s piano the hammer continued to rest against the string, damping the sound, until the key was released.

  *Jan Ladislav Dussek was the first concert pianist to turn the piano sideways to the audience. He was known as ‘le beau Dussek’, and it has been suggested that he thought his profile was his best feature.

  *Stodart’s first upright had kept the long stringing of the grand piano, with the case curving in at the treble end. He suggested that bookshelves might nicely fill the gap.

  *An ophicleide is a wind instrument with a U-shaped brass tube with keys, similar to a bass version of the keyed bugle or cornet; a serpent is another deep-toned bass instrument, made of leather-covered wood, about 3.5 metres long, and with three U-shaped turns. Once almost vanished, it has reappeared with the emergence of period-instrument groups.

  *By 1882 the mix of open-air dancing, pantomime and melodrama had come to seem old-fashioned, and the tavern was sold to General Booth, to become the headquarters of the Salvation Army. A massive tent was erected over the open-air stage for religious revival meetings. The entire building was demolished in 1899.

  *The Magnet survived until 1926, but the Entr’acte had a rather bumpier ride, opening and folding three times in the first thirteen years. Once established, it lasted until 1907.

  *The Stoll Moss group, only recently amalgamated with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Theatre company, was a descendant of two of these chains.

  10

  Going, Going: Art and the Market

  IN 1764 DR JOHNSON SET UP a literary club, to meet at the Turk’s Head tavern, in Gerrard Street. Soon members included the artist Joshua Reynolds, the writer Oliver Goldsmith, the historian Edward Gibbon, the naturalist Joseph Banks, the musicologists Charles Burney and John Hawkins, the political economist Adam Smith, the politicians Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, and the men of the theatre David Garrick, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and George Colman.

  Part - much - of their renown rests on their achievements. Some, however, is the result of their mutual support system, their ‘clubbability’ (a word coined by Johnson). They wrote about each other’s work, they reviewed each other’s plays, they promoted each other’s books; Johnson wrote the dedication to Burney’s History of Music; Boswell dedicated his Life of Johnson to Reynolds. And Reynolds gave to posterity the faces of his fellow club members, in nearly two dozen portraits. These portraits in turn were engraved, printed, sold and displayed, disseminating the fame of Reynolds’s friends, and of Reynolds himself, far and wide.

  That decade, the 1760s, marked an astonishing new phase in the history of the art market in Britain: the first national academy was founded; the first annual art exhibitions were held; the first serious competition with European art markets was mounted - and the first real alternative to aristocratic patronage was stirring. Until this point, art in Britain had been a private matter. There were no royal palaces open to the public; there were no churches where great paintings could regularly be seen by any congregant. Artists who wanted the public to see their work used their own studios: Hogarth showed his Harlot’s Progress and Mariage à la Mode at home in the Piazza, Covent Garden, in 1730-32, and later in his Leicester Square house. In 1749 and again in 1751 Canaletto took advertisements in the newspapers to notify potential buyers that his work was on display at his lodgings in Golden Square.1 Angelica Kauffmann had her studio on Suffolk Street, ‘one [room] in which I paint, the other where I set up my finished paintings as is here the custom…The people come into the house to sit - to visit me - or to see my work.’2

  Sometimes the houses of the great were open to the ‘respectable’ public, but more often a painting was enjoyed only by its owner and his family and friends. Their own first exposure to art may have been in the houses of their social equals, but for many it was on the Grand Tour that great art was first studied. The tour was commonly the province of young men of money and birth, sent to Europe to imbibe a classical education. There were plenty, naturally, who simply imbibed, but there were others who saw Italy, in particular, as the place to ‘not only improve my taste, but my judgement, by the fine originals I expect to see there’, as Lord Nuneham wrote in 1755.3

  Many of these men expected, and were expected by their families at home, to bring back spoils, either antiquities or old masters: the 1st Marquis of Rockingham instructed his son to buy antique statues for the rebuilding of Wentworth Woodhouse (although he actually ended up with copies); William Weddell, of the Dilettanti club, sent back nineteen cases of classical sculptures for Newby Hall in Yorkshire, while William Locke purchased Claude’s St Ursula.4 Others commissioned paintings from artists who lived very nicely off this up-market tourist trail: Pompeo Batoni had a profitable sideline in portraits of British tourists, painting over 150, while Canaletto produced ‘several hundred’ paintings of Venice specifically for the British market.

  The Dilettanti had been formed in 1734, a club for connoisseurship, for which the primary qualification for membership was to have made the Grand Tour. (Horace Walpole said that ‘the nominal qualification for membership is having been in Italy, and the real one, [is] being drunk’.)5 In the late 1740s there were discussions among its members about setting up an academy, but nothing came of it. In 1755 they met once more with a group of artists - including Hayman, Reynolds and Roubilliac - to discuss an academy, but the artists and the Dilettanti had different aims. The artists hoped for financial support; the Dilettanti wanted a stable of craftsmen to produce work under their direction, and, the artists ‘finding that they were to be allowed no share in the government of the academy…the negotiations ended.’6 For many Dilettanti, the concepts behind the art were what was important, while the artists, for the most part, they considered to be mechanics, tradesmen. They were useful to have in one’s entourage, to produce images on request, but it was the theory of aesthetics and a knowledge of the classics, rather than mere technical ability, that was valued. The Earl of Shaftesbury gave instructions to the painters he commissioned concerning the structure of the composition, what symbols should be used, and how. Richard Payne Knight, one of the Dilettanti, although he admired Reynolds greatly, admired him as an artisan: he thought that the artist’s lack of classical education meant he was incapable of judging art himself.

  The idea of patronage and of the superiority of the patron over ‘his’ artist was not confined to painting. When Pope had first read his translation of Homer to an audience, the Earl of Halifax ‘in four or five places…stopped me very civilly, and with a speech each time much of the same kind: “I beg your pardon, Mr Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me. Be so good as to mark the place and consider it a little at your leisure. I’m sure you can give it a better turn.” ’ As Pope told the story, he later reread the passages ex
actly as they had been before, while giving Halifax to understand that they had been amended following his advice. Each time Halifax said approvingly how much better he now thought them. In Pope, the neoclassical courtier, one can see the beginning of the change that would flower in the Romantic movement of the following generation, when the artist promoted himself, and was accepted, as a creator of originality and imagination, rather than a servant producing work to order, as a carpenter makes chairs.* But while Pope was certain that he, the artist, was superior to his patron, in the middle of the century this was still a vexed question. He returned to this theme more than two decades later, in 1741, when he and Dr Arbuthnot produced The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus. Scriblerus, their fictional hack, spends his entire inheritance on a ‘Roman shield’ which, once it is cleaned, is clearly only a broken candle sconce. Scriblerus sells it on to Dr Woodward, who ‘incrust[s] it with new Rust’ and ‘exhibit[s] [it] to the great Contentation of the learned’.8

  Reynolds, in the Universal Chronicle in 1759, was equally vehement regarding the ignorance of the ‘learned’, and no more polite: ‘To those who are resolved to be criticks in spite of nature, and at the same time have no great disposition to much reading and study, I would recommend to them to assume the character of connoisseur…The remembrance of a few names of painters, with their general characters, with a few rules…which they may pick up among the painters, will go a great way towards making a very notable connoisseur.’9 That both Pope and Reynolds - neither of them a rebel; both of them criticized in their lifetimes for their flattery and even servility to the great - were willing to attack some of the wealthiest and most influential men in the art world this overtly might indicate that the day of the connoisseur was waning.