Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  White, Cynthia L., Women’s Magazines, 1693-1968 (London, Michael Joseph, 1970)

  Wilensky, Harold L., ‘The Professionalization of Everyone?’, American Journal of Sociology, 70 (1964), 137-58

  Wilk, R., ‘Consumer Goods as a Dialogue about Development’, Culture and History, 7 (1990), 79-100

  Williamson, Geoffrey, Wheels within Wheels: The Story of the Starleys of Coventry (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1966)

  Wilmot, Sarah, ’The Business of Improvement’: Agriculture and Scientific Culture in Britain, c.1770-c.1870 (Bristol, Historical Geography Research Series, no. 24, 1990)

  Wilson, A. E., Christmas Pantomime: The Story of an English Institution (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1934)

  Wilson, Elizabeth, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London, Virago, 1991)

  Wilson, R. G., Gentlemen Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700-1830 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1971)

  Wilton, Andrew, and Ilaria Bignamini, eds., The Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the 18th Century (London, Tate, 1996)

  Wind, E., ‘The Revolution of History Painting’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2 (1938-9), 116-27

  Winstanley, Michael J., The Shopkeeper’s World, 1830-1914 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1983)

  Wise, Sarah, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (London, Jonathan Cape, 2004)

  Wolff, Janet, and John Seed, eds., The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988)

  Womack, Peter, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989)

  Woodforde, John, The Story of the Bicycle (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970)

  Woodmansee, Martha, The Author, Art and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York, Columbia University Press, 1994)

  ——, ‘The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the “Author”’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 17, 4 (1984), 425-48

  ——, and Peter Jaszi, eds., The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991)

  Wright, Gwendolyn, ed., The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology, Studies in the History of Art, 47, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers 27 (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1996)

  Yanni, Carla, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

  Zachs, William, The First John Murray and the Late 18th-Century Book Trade (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998)

  Zionkowski, Linda, ‘Territorial Disputes in the Republic of Letters: Canon Formation and the Literary Profession’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 31 (1990), 3-22

  Ziter, Edward, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003)

  NOTES

  Preface

  1Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775), ed. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984), p. 48.

  2James Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary: 1867-1953 (London, Unwin, 1959), pp. 277-8.

  3Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), ed. David Womersley (Harmondsworth, Allen Lane, 1994), vol. 2, ch. 31, p. 174.

  1: From Arcadia to Arcade: The Great Exhibition

  1This was from a speech given at the Mansion House, 21 March 1850 and reported in The Times, 22 March 1850, p. 5, col. b.

  2Marie Mulvey Roberts, ‘Pleasures Engendered by Gender: Homosociality and the Club’, in Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts, eds., Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996), p. 48.

  3Joseph Addison, The Spectators, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. 1, p. 34.

  4Pat Rogers, ‘Joseph Addison’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

  5John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, HarperCollins, 1997), p. 35.

  6Addison, The Spectators, Spectator 9, p. 42.

  7Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 89.

  8Ibid., pp. 67-8.

  9The information on the formation of the RSA, and its finances, comes from Derek Hudson and Kenneth W. Luckhurst, The Royal Society of Arts, 1754-1954 (London, John Murray, 1954), pp. 6-11, 41.

  10R. Campbell, The London Tradesman, being a compendious view of all the trades, professions, arts, both liberal and mechanic, now practised in the cities of London and Westminster (London, T. Gardner, 1747), pp. 103, 110, 108, 106.

  11Sarah Lowengard, ‘Colours and colour making in the eighteenth century’, in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 104-5.

  12Cited in Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (London, Yale University Press, 1999), p. 12.

  13Toys described in George Buday, The History of the Christmas Card (London, Spring Books, 1964), pp. 7-8.

  14Auerbach, The Great Exhibition, pp. 70, 57, 65.

  15Cited in ibid., p. 64.

  16P. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 28-9.

  17From the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue (London, Spicer Bros., 1851), contents pages.

  18William Felkin, The Exhibition in 1851, of the Products and Industry of All Nations. Its Probable Influence upon Labour and Commerce (London, Arthur Hall, Virtue, 1851), pp. 5, 8.

  19Horace Greeley, Glances at Europe: In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, &c., during the Summer of 1851, including notices of the Great Exhibition, or World’s Fair (New York, Dewitt & Davenport, 1851), p. 22.

  20Cited in Auerbach, The Great Exhibition, p. 108.

  21The episode, and interpretation, are highlighted in ibid., p. 96.

  22Blotters, letter-openers, perspective view and cigar boxes: John Johnson Collection of Ephemera, Bodleian Library, JJ Great Exhibition Artefacts 3, 4. Handkerchief: ibid., JJ Printed Fabrics, 1. Gloves: Sarah Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned: Registered Designs for Clothing, their Makers and Wearers, 1839-1900 (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 20.

  23John Johnson Collection, JJ Tea & Coffee 2.

  24Official Catalogue, vol. 2, section 11, Cotton, entry 51.

  25Knives and cutlery from Official Catalogue, vol. 2, section 21, entry 690. Vase described in Auerbach, The Great Exhibition, pp. 112-13.

  26Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned, pp. 106-7.

  27The anti-concussion hat: Patrick Beaver, The Crystal Palace: A Portrait of Victorian Enterprise (2nd ed., London, Phillimore, 1986), p. 51. Yachting clothes and doctor’s suit: Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, 1800-1914: Where, and in What Manner the Well-Dressed Englishwoman Bought her Clothes (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 92. ‘Duplexa’ coat: Official Catalogue, vol. 2, section 20, entry 69.

  28Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 92.

  29Auerbach, The Great Exhibition, p. 110; Beaver, The Crystal Palace, p. 52.

  30Official Catalogue, vol. 2, sections 10 and 26, entries 468, 477a, 484, 496. Smyth and Roberts’s piano, Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (rev. ed., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 28.

  31Official Catalogue, vol. 2, section 10, entries 480, 487.

  32Illustrated London News, 14 June 1851, p. 570.

  33Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank, 1851: or, The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to ‘Enjoy Themselves’, and to See the Great Exhibition (London, George Newbold, [1851]), p. 1.

  34Cited in Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Sp
ectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford, Cal., Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 29. The original source is unclear, as there is a confusion in the footnote.

  35Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989; p/b 1992), pp. 68-9.

  36Ibid., p. 70.

  37Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (London, Routledge, 1988), p. 25.

  38Neil McKendrick, ‘The Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, Europa, 1982), p. 26.

  39Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, p. 25.

  40George Colman and David Garrick, The Clandestine Marriage, in William Jones, Jones’s British Theatre (Dublin, John Chambers, 1795), vol. 9, p. 40.

  41Peter Mathias, The Transformation of England: Essays in the Economic and Social History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, Methuen, 1979), p. 162.

  42Punch, 30 October 1880, p. 194.

  43Cited in Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York, Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 26.

  44Cited in Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 274.

  45Cited in ibid., p. 275.

  46‘Helix’ [W. B. Adams], ‘The Industrial Exhibition of 1851’, Westminster Review, April 1850, p. 97.

  47Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London, Verso, 1983), p. 166.

  48The Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence between the Years 1837 and 1861, ed. Arthur Christopher Benson and Viscount Esher (London, John Murray, 1908), vol. 2, p. 317.

  49Cited in Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, p. 31.

  50Punch, 1851, p. 43.

  51Illustrated London News, 31 May 1851, p. 501.

  52The Times, 2 May 1851, p. 5, col. a.

  53Auerbach, The Great Exhibition, p. 138.

  54Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730-1810 (London, Faber, 2002), p. 216.

  55Statutes at Large, XVI, 388-94, cited in Clark, British Clubs and Societies, p. 351.

  56Ibid., pp. 350-51.

  57Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 205.

  58Ibid., p. 202.

  59Cited in John Seed, ‘Commerce and the Liberal Arts: The Political Economy of Art in Manchester, 1775-1860’, in Janet Wolff and John Seed, eds., The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 69.

  60H. Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780-c.1880 (London, Croom Helm, 1980), p. 101.

  61Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway (London, Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 272.

  62Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999), p. 114.

  63Auerbach, The Great Exhibition, p. 139.

  64Cited in Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London, Secker & Warburg, 1991), p. 58.

  65Ibid., p. 57.

  66Ibid., p. 63.

  67Cited in Auerbach, The Great Exhibition, p. 136.

  68Ibid., pp. 141-2.

  69Mayhew, 1851, p. 15.

  70Simmons, The Victorian Railway, p. 275; Philip S. Bagwell, The Transport Revolution (2nd ed., London, Routledge, 1988), p. 116.

  71Auerbach, The Great Exhibition, p. 135.

  72Ibid., p. 142.

  73[George Frederick Pardon], The London Conductor; Being a Guide for Visitors to the Great Industrial Exhibition . . . (London, John Cassell, 1851; reprint, Kilkenny, Boethius, 1984), n.p.

  74Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860-1914 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 132-3.

  75Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press, 1978), pp. 462, 464-5, 426.

  76James Robinson Planché, The Extravaganzas of J. R. Planché, Esq., Somerset Herald, 1825-1871, ed. T. F. Dillon Croker and Stephen Tucker (5 vols., London, Samuel French, 1879). Mr Buckstone appears in vol. 5, pp. 5-34.

  77Brendon, Thomas Cook, p. 57.

  78The Times, 29 May 1851, p. 8, col. a.

  2: ‘A Nation of Shopkeepers’: The Eighteenth-century Shop

  1Idler, 56 (12 May 1759), in Samuel Johnson, Idler and Adventurer, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 2 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1963), p. 175.

  2Cited in Michael J. Winstanley, The Shopkeeper’s World, 1830-1914 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 12-13.

  3Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England (London, Routledge, 1989), p. 5.

  4Nancy Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing, 1550-1820 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000), p. 39.

  5Ibid., p. 42.

  6Ibid., pp. 36, 45, 44; Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, pp. 108-10.

  7Winstanley, Shopkeeper’s World, p. 15.

  8Cox, Complete Tradesman, pp. 77-9, 98.

  9Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, p. 47.

  10Ibid., p. 47.

  11Cox, Complete Tradesman, pp. 89-90.

  12Ibid., p. 129.

  13Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, pp. 207-8.

  14Cox, Complete Tradesman, p. 121.

  15Cited in Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, p. 225.

  16Robin Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, 1730-1795 (London, Macmillan, 1992), p. 213.

  17Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 64.

  18Neil McKendrick, ‘The Commercialization of Fashion’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 68.

  19Cited in Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, p. 14.

  20Cited in Cox, Complete Tradesman, pp. 110-12.

  21Ibid., p. 94.

  22Cited in ibid., pp. 90-92.

  23Cited in McKendrick, ‘The Commercialization of Fashion’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 85.

  24Claire Walsh, ‘The Newness of the Department Store: A View from the Eighteenth Century’, in Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Story, 1850-1939 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999), p. 49.

  25Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, pp. 120-21.

  26Brenda J. Scragg, ‘James Lackington’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  27Cited in Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, pp. 17-18.

  28Cited in Kenneth Quickenden, ‘Boulton and Fothergill Silver: Business Plans and Miscalculations’, Art History, 3, 3 (September 1980), p. 284.

  29Hildyard, Leeds Mercury, 5 March 1751; Davenport and Co., ibid., 14 May 1751. Both cited in Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, pp. 231, 232-3.

  30Cited in ibid., pp. 14-15.

  31Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London, T. Payne and Son, 1789), xviii. §17 note.

  32Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. Edmund Gosse (London, Kegan, Paul, Trench & Co., 1884), p. i.

  33‘A Methodized Journal, 1773-1786’, Huntington Library, HM31201, p. 60, cited in Elizabeth Eger, ‘Luxury, Industry and Charity: Bluestocking Culture Displayed’, in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 202n.

  34Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1976), p. 48.

  35Colin Jones and Rebecca Spang, ‘Sans-culottes, sans café, sans tabac: Shifting Realms of Necessity and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France’, in Berg and Clifford, Consumers and Luxury, p. 38.

  36William J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640-1845 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 40,
1-2, 10.

  37Both advertisements cited in Denys Forrest, Tea for the British: The Social and Economic History of a Famous Trade (London, Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 23.

  38Ibid., pp. 33-4.

  39Ibid., p. 54.

  40Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, pp. 250-51.

  41McKendrick, ‘The Consumer Revolution’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of Consumer Society, p. 29; James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800 (New York, New York University Press, 1997), pp. 25, 30; and Peter Mathias, Retailing Revolution: A History of Multiple Retailing in the Food Trades based upon the Allied Suppliers Group of Companies (London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1967), p. 24.

  42Cox, Complete Tradesman, pp. 204-5; Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, p. 148.

  43Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, p. 174.

  44Ashworth, Customs and Excise, p. 47; Walvin, Fruits of Empire, p. 119.

  45Walvin, Fruits of Empire, pp. 119-120.

  46Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 412.

  47Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, pp. 256-9.

  48Ibid., pp. 262-72.

  49Ibid., pp. 273-5.

  50Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, p. 25.

  51Walvin, Fruits of Empire, p. 27.

  52Cited in Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 96.

  53Ibid., p. 219.

  54Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, pp. 10-14.

  55Cited in ibid., p. 87.

  56Cited in Neil McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 141.

  57Cited in Neil McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood: An Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur in Salesmanship and Marketing Techniques’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 12, 3 (1960), p. 415.

  58Ibid., pp. 414-15.

  59Cited in Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, p. 206.

  60Cited in McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 112.

  61Cited in Brian Dolan, Josiah Wedgwood: Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment (London, HarperCollins, 2004), p. 267.

  62McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 121.

  63Cited in Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 201.