Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  A Portuguese person called Howell

  Who lays on his lies with a trowel

  Should he give over lying,

  ‘Twill be when he’s dying

  For living is lying with Howell.

  Howell’s career is interesting because in many ways it resembled Pond’s, except that now the factotum was at the service of the artist, not the collector. Howell began as he meant to go on. He had fled England before he was twenty because of a mysterious involvement in the Orsini conspiracy to assassinate Napoleon III. He claimed to have spent the next decade diving for treasure off the coast of Portugal and living in Morocco as a sheikh - or sometimes it was in Rome as the Portuguese ambassador. Whatever the case, in 1865 the sheikh-ambassador returned to London, to the rather less glamorous locale of his aunt’s villa in Brixton, until he became Ruskin’s secretary. Despite his ability to produce wonderful reproductions of Ruskin’s drawings - or perhaps because of it - that ended unhappily. Then he helped Rossetti in a slightly unusual undertaking for a dealer. Rossetti’s wife, Lizzie Siddal, had died in 1862 of a laudanum overdose, and Rossetti, overwrought and guilt-stricken, put the manuscript copy of his new poems in her coffin to be buried with her. By 1869 he was ready to publish them, and Howell arranged for their exhumation. He also worked for Whistler, helping him make prints of his etchings, and acting as his secretary during his suit for libel against Ruskin in 1879. He dealt in Japanese prints and the newly fashionable blue-and-white porcelain from China, he negotiated sales for a number of artists, including Watts, Sandys and Burne-Jones. He may in between projects have turned his hand to blackmail, and it is thought that by the end of his life the ‘Rossettis’ he sold would not always have been recognized as such by their notional creator.91 Apart from his sidelines in blackmail and forgery, Howell had taken on many of the attributes of the modern dealer more completely than many of the more respectable had done. No longer an agent of a patron, nor a shopkeeper, Howell served no one except himself: a businessman.

  As with the agent, so with the artist: from craftsman to Romantic genius was a long, hard haul, as we have seen. From genius to social equal of the patron was a much smaller step. Punch, as so often, spotted the trend quickly. (There were always lots of cartoons about artists in Punch; after all, most cartoonists either were or aspired to be one.) In 1888 ‘Studies in Evolution. - The Artist’ (see next page) showed the ‘Old Style’ artist, a bearded, pipe-smoking bohemian chatting up the barmaid of the Pig and Whistle, next to a sign that advertised a goose club, a free and easy, and a harmonic meeting - sure signs of lower-middle- or working-class status every one. The ‘New Style’ artist, by contrast, was shown as a handsome, well-dressed, moustachioed gentleman kissing the hand of an elegant woman ‘At Her Grace’s Garden Party’.92

  The full professionalization of the art market was perhaps epitomized by Marion Harry Spielmann (1858-1948). He was not an artist, nor was he a dealer, but from 1887 to 1904 he edited the Magazine of Art, and he was an art critic for half a dozen more magazines and newspapers.

  The main thread running through his writings was not the artists’ skill. Instead he was concerned that artists were trained properly, that they were supported by professional bodies, and that they learned how to benefit from advertising and the increasingly lucrative market. In 1886 his article ‘The Costs of Painting a Picture’ treated art like any other business; other articles looked at the economic aspects of production, at the print market and photography, and at copyright of the artist’s work. What interested him was not art, and not commerce, but the place where the two met. To promote the artist as a professional, he stressed over and over that the artist was a hard-working businessman. When he praised the Newlyn school of plein-air painters, he did not analyse their pictures, or discuss their technique, but commended them for living ‘a life of economy undisturbed by modern Bohemianism’. Another artist was presented as a model for others to follow because of his ‘pleasant, gentlemanly tone’.

  Spielmann recognized that ‘patronage has gone from the Church and taken refuge with the middle-class collector and the advertising tradesman. The transition is fairly complete: from the Cathedral to the Stock Exchange; from Godliness to cleanliness; from the altar and the cabinet to candles, screws and soap.’93 He was referring here to John

  Everett Millais’s painting of his grandson. Entitled Bubbles, it had been purchased by A. and F. Pears to advertise their soap. It was used for decades, and may be one of the most famous advertising images of all times.

  In 1894 the artists William Nicholson and James Ferrier Pryde joined together under the name the Beggarstaff Brothers. They called themselves (and were seen as) artists, producing highly innovative, influential designs, with clean, clear outlines, flat colours and stark lettering. That they were advertising Rowntree’s Elect Cocoa and Kassama Corn Flour was beside the point. Artists were no longer expected to starve in garrets; they were professional men.

  The transformation of the art market into a market pure and simple was complete.

  * * *

  *One present-day writer has suggested that the question of the attribution of Shakespeare’s works continues endlessly because Shakespeare fits in with none of our ideas of authorship, which are an entirely Romantic construct. Shakespeare wrote for money, he invested that money with care, and he was apparently concerned more about that money than about the afterlife of his plays via corrupt or pirated texts. Not only that, but he used others’ work as the basis for his own, directly countering our notions of genius, which, in its Romantic guise, is indivisible from originality.7

  *The signatories included the portraitists/history painters Nathaniel Dance, Benjamin West and Angelica Kauffmann, the landscape painter Richard Wilson, the sculptor Joseph Wilton, the engraver Francesco Bartolozzi, and the painter and engraver Francis Hayman, but not Joshua Reynolds.

  *By 1879, when Sir Frederic Leighton was first made president of the Royal Academy, attendance at the annual exhibition was over 400,000, 115,000 catalogues were sold, and profits for that year alone were more than £20,000.19

  *It is not hard to connect the popularity of these history paintings with the success of panoramas of current events in the next decade. (See pp. 267-8.)

  *Smirke was also the father of the architects Sir Robert and Sydney Smirke, who built much of the British Museum: Robert started on the east wing, and produced the King’s Library; Sydney completed many of Robert’s plans after his death, and designed the great round Reading Room.

  *She also shrewdly notes, ‘The British Institution helped to forge a set of cultural assumptions that remain enormously influential today: namely, the quite extraordinary idea that even if an art object comes from abroad, and even if it remains securely in private ownership, as long as it resides in a country house it must somehow belong to the nation and enhance it…The fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women today are willing to accept that privately owned country houses and their contents are part of Britain’s national heritage is one more proof of how successfully the British elite reconstructed its cultural image in an age of revolutions.’35

  *At the beginning of the century a retired senior commander in the navy with ‘a reasonable but not extravagant income for members of the upper- or upper-middle-class’ received a pension of £5 a week, while Hazlitt briefly married a widow with £300 a year, or just under £6 a week, which financially transformed his life. Letitia Landon, ‘one of the most famous and prolific authors of the later romantic period’, had an income of £120 a year, or less than £2 10s. a week.47 Thus a 1s. admission charge guaranteed that these visitors were all not only middle class, they were from the prosperous middle classes and above.

  *They were in theory separated at this point, except that nothing was set down in writing; it took another thirty years before the Treasury could bring itself to formalize what had happened.

  *It would not be too strong to say that Cole hated the British Museum and all it stood for. In 1859 a parli
amentary select committee was appointed to look into the ‘Hopeless confusion, valuable collections being wholly hidden from the public, and great portions of others in danger of being destroyed by damp and neglect’ at the British Museum. Cole did not neglect to quote this in an article he wrote for the Edinburgh Review, nor, he added on his own, should the ‘air of sleepy slatternly shabbiness’ which he thought made its trustees entirely unfit to run their museum be overlooked.66

  †But still, more than the 1990s, which saw an average of 236,000 at the Bethnal Green site.

  ‡Liverpool had had two art exhibitions in the 1780s, but until the Liverpool Academy was formed in 1810, and the Liverpool Institution in 1814, exhibitions did not become a regular feature.

  *Sir John was the second aristocrat, after the Duke of Bridgewater in 1797, to open his collection to the public, from 1818, and he was also one of the founders of the British Institution, together with the Marquis of Stafford.71

  *Talbotypes were produced by the first widely used photographic process in which multiple copies of the same image could be printed on sensitized paper; daguerreotypes, which had appeared two years earlier, were unique images, fixed on to a coppered plate, with no possibility of duplication.

  11

  Sporting Life

  IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, many looked backwards to an ideal, to a vision of the real, rural England that was rapidly vanishing. In 1836 Peter Gaskell, in his Artisans and Machinery: The Moral and Physical Condition of the Manufacturing Population, described ‘the days of quoit and cricket-playing - wakes - May-day revels - Christmas firesides, and a host of other memorabilia, now ranked but as things that were’, but which no longer existed in the new industrial world, where instead the working man now expected to find his amusement in ‘the pursuit of debasing pleasures…viz. in the beer-shop, the gin-vault, or the political club’.1

  Had happy, apple-cheeked rustics truly spent misty summer afternoons tossing quoits? Had such a time ever really existed? Only in part. Sport had, for many rural communities, been a ritual event, specific sports taking place on specific days in the year, and requiring the participation of specific sections of the community. Samuel Bamford, a radical weaver, remembered the community festivities of his Lancashire childhood at the turn of the century. Although he had lived in a town of some 3,000 people, many traditional events were still marked in the old ways. On Easter Wednesday the young women, both those who were just married and those still courting, dressed up in their best clothes and promenaded out with their men; then all went to the pub, where there was dancing for all and prizefights for the men. At wakes week at the end of August, each parish or hamlet in the area decorated a special rush cart. The women dressed up once more, everyone went to church, then to a dance, and there were again fights for the men.2 Thus tradition contained the violence, turning it into an annual ritual.

  Many of the sports that were in decline by the end of the eighteenth century would be seen by future generations as cruel beyond imagining. Cock-throwing, which took place on Shrove Tuesday, Good Friday, Easter Monday or Whitsun, depending on the village, was still occurring at the end of the century; bull-baiting took place at some fairs - every Monday and Thursday at Hockley Hole until the 1750s, for example - and even frequently under the patronage of the church: in Staffordshire, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels was firmly linked to bull-baiting, bear-baiting, dogfighting and cockfighting into the nineteenth century. The Sabbatarians who protested against bull-baiting did so not because it was cruel, but because it took place on Sundays.3

  Gradually, with the increase in urbanization, sports began to be class-oriented, rather than community oriented. Shooting became a pastime of the moneyed. By the mid eighteenth century the new game laws and increasing enclosure (see pp. 436-7) meant that access to what had previously been common land was all but barred to the working classes. In 1751 a prosecution for poaching took into account as an exacerbating factor the fact that the defendant was ‘not the son and heir of an esquire or a person of higher degree’. The difference in attitudes to cockfighting and dogfighting show this class separation. Dogfights were for the working class, and were improvised, impromptu affairs. Cockfighting, in contrast, drew many of the upper classes, and was highly formalized, with rules laid down, and model agreements for the participants printed in the Racing Calendar every year. The fights were often scheduled to take place during race week in towns, and the towns might even have permanent cockpits. There was little opposition to cockfighting, whereas dogfighting was more frequently condemned.4

  It was condemned not on the grounds of cruelty - that came later - but because it promoted ‘lawlessness’, unruliness. Such working-class sports drew large crowds, which appeared threatening to onlookers. Sometimes working-class sports were suppressed for what today seems almost no reason at all. Bamford reported that the bowling green next to the church was dug up, to stop the locals playing, ‘chiefly, it was said, because the late steward under the [local landowners] could not, when he resorted to the place, overawe, or keep the rustic frequenters in such respectful bounds as he wished to do’.5 Possibly - although it must be borne in mind that Bamford had a highly politicized view. (In fact his reforming vigour had twice seen him arrested for treason. He was once acquitted and once, unjustly, after the Peterloo Massacre, convicted.) The core difference between gentry- and middle-class leisure pastimes and those of the working classes was that, by the nineteenth century, many if not most of the leisure activities of the prosperous had moved away from the areas where the social classes might mingle, to take place in private spaces - in zoos, in pleasure gardens, in circulating libraries, in art galleries and museums - all of which excluded many of the working classes by charging admission. One of the few places where the classes still met and mixed was at the racecourse, but even here - especially here - great changes were under way.

  In the seventeenth century, most horse races were what were known as ‘matches’ - that is, they were races run between two horses, head to head. For the most part, the horses were ridden by their owners, and if there was a trainer it was the horse’s groom. The purpose of the race was the wagers placed by the owners and their friends. Racing was a betting sport for the most part, not a spectator sport. Newmarket was the single exception to this. Nominally, it was the centre of racing, an aristocratic redoubt established by James I, who had spent £20,000 setting it up. By 1718, according to the listing in Muir’s The Old New-Markitt Calendar (sic), only two owners were not aristocrats.6 As yet there were no general rules, no overall government of the sport, no central hub for the racing year. By the 1770s Newmarket had more racing than anywhere else: three weeks in the spring, one week in July, another three in the autumn. Yet, because of its exclusivity, its separation from the rest of the world of racing, it remained old-fashioned: much of the racing there even as late as the mid eighteenth century was between two horses; there was little provision for spectators, as the owners and their friends were expected to follow on horseback or in carriages; the course was not fixed, but was marked out on the heath by stakes, which were often rearranged.7

  Newmarket saw huge sums poured into racing - in the 1730s, up to 30 per cent of all the money going through the sport probably passed through Newmarket, and by 1750 it may have been as much as 50 per cent.8 In the 1770s some races were run for prizes that reached 300 guineas, and up to 1,000 guineas was not unknown. Yet its very exclusivity worked against it, and it was in the county towns that racing changed and developed. Racing was ultimately an expression of urban development, not rural. Towns had the adjuncts that were necessary for the sport - the stables, saddlers and blacksmiths - as well as the facilities for the spectators - food, drink, accommodation and entertainment. Racing was a great enhancement to a town’s economic prosperity, and the development of municipal interest in racing began early. In 1708 the Corporation of the city of York donated £15 annually ‘towards a plate to encourage and bring about a horse-race…and to invite the gentry
to run their horses for the same’, and the following year a collection was made for the purchase of five further plates. That year there were three days of racing in York; by 1712 there were five days, by 1713 six; and in 1721 the King’s Gold Cup was run every year, worth 100 guineas, together with the Ladies’ Gold Cup with a 6-guinea purse and a silver cup worth £20.9 York had become the most prominent race meeting of the northern circuit, and there were dozens of meetings that were pressing hard behind in terms of quality and quantity: in Yorkshire alone there was also racing in Beverley and Doncaster, and across the country a further 109 towns had race meets.

  The money that came with racing was there for everyone to see, and race meetings had quickly become essential for a town’s leisure development. During race week, the working-class residents were catered to with stands selling refreshments, as well as fair-like entertainments, such as sideshows and strolling players, and a number of other local sports and their associated gambling - ‘cudgel play’ in the swathe of country from the Cotswolds down as far as Devon, wrestling in the north and the West Country, cockfighting pretty well everywhere.10 There was money to be earned from this working-class market, but for the moment far more came from providing services to the gentry. The local innkeepers understood how closely entwined racing was with their own financial well-being, and acted to promote the events in their areas from the first. In Yarmouth at the beginning of the eighteenth century a group of innand tavern-keepers jointly leased land from the Corporation to build a racecourse; in Yorkshire other innkeepers saw acting as clerks of the course as part of their business. In some places, to enter the race, the horse had to be stabled at the inn that was putting up the prize money; in others, refreshment stands were allocated on the basis of the amount of prize money the stallholders had put up.11