Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  29Ian Mitchell, ‘The Development of Urban Retailing, 1700-1815’, in Peter Clark, ed., The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1600-1800 (London, Hutchinson, 1984), pp. 261-2, 267, 271-6.

  30Barry O’Connor, ‘Sir John Hill’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  31Cited in Roy Porter, Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in English Medicine (Stroud, Tempus, 2000), p. 111.

  32Kirsten Drotner, English Children and their Magazines, 1751-1945 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988), p. 17.

  33Cited in Porter, Quacks, p. 55.

  34Cited in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Author/Publisher Relations during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford, Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1983), p. 38.

  35Cited in Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, pp. 230, 229.

  36Robinson, Britain’s Post Office, pp. 96, 122.

  37Porter, Quacks, pp. 83-4.

  38Cited in Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 37.

  39Porter, Quacks, pp. 21-2.

  40Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and the Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 (London, Reaktion, 2001), pp. 207-8.

  41Stephen Paget, John Hunter, Man of Science and Surgeon (1728-1793) (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1897), p. 165.

  42Cited in Henry Sampson, A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times (London, Chatto & Windus, 1874), pp. 411-18.

  43Cited in McKendrick, ‘George Packwood and the Commercialization of Shaving’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 150-51.

  44Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 167.

  45Cox, Complete Tradesman, p. 150.

  46William St Clair, Reading Nation, pp. 10-11.

  47Feather, Provincial Book Trade, pp. 33-4.

  48Ibid., pp. 36-7.

  49Ibid., p. 151.

  50Altick, English Common Reader, pp. 73-5.

  51T. W. Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780-1850 (London, Yale University Press, 1976), p. 44 (and also for the figure for 1851 later in the paragraph).

  52Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. II, p. 202.

  53Altick, English Common Reader, p. 330.

  54Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem (London, John W. Parker, 1851), pp. 229-30.

  55Altick, English Common Reader, p. 329; Nevett, Advertising in Britain, p. 41.

  56‘The Newspaper Press’, Quarterly Review, 150 (1880), p. 521.

  57This is a paraphrase, from J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, The Civilisation of the Crowd: Popular Culture in England, 1750-1900 (rev. ed., Stroud, Sutton, 1999), p. 133.

  58Virginia Berridge, ‘Popular Sunday Papers and mid-Victorian Society’, in George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate, eds., Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London, Constable, 1978), p. 257.

  59The analysis of the content of these three papers was tabulated in ibid., pp. 256-8.

  60Ibid., pp. 327-31.

  61Frederick Pollock, The Law of Torts (3rd ed., London, Stevens and Sons, 1892).

  62Donald J. Gray, ‘Early Victorian Scandalous Journalism: Renton Nicholson’s The Town (1837-42)’, in Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff, eds., The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1982), pp. 318-19, 322-3.

  63Graham Pollard, ‘Serial Fiction’, in John Carter, ed., New Paths in Book Collecting (reprint; Freeport, NY, Books for Libraries Press, 1967), p. 265.

  64Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back through Seventy Years (London, Kegan, Paul & Co., 1893), pp. 13, 11-12.

  65‘Cheap Literature’, British Quarterly Review, 29 (1859), pp. 333ff., cited in Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790-1860 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 102.

  66Aled Jones, ‘Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau: The Manchester Manuscripts’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 17, 1 and 2 (1984), pp. 44-6.

  67Graham Pollard, ‘Serial Fiction’, in Carter, New Paths in Book Collecting, p. 269.

  681 & 2 Vict. Cap. 98; cited in Simmons, The Victorian Railway, p. 222.

  69Ibid. pp. 220, 222.

  70Ibid., p. 117.

  71Gwen Clear, The Story of W. H. Smith and Son (London, private publication, 1949), pp. 3-4, 6, 7-8.

  72Ibid., p. 9.

  73Simmons, The Victorian Railway, p. 240.

  74Altick, English Common Reader, pp. 354-5.

  75D. C. Coleman, The British Paper Industry, 1495-1860: A Study in Industrial Growth (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 91-3.

  76Ibid., pp. 111-12, 113-17.

  77Ibid., pp. 180-81, 191-5.

  78Cynthia L. White, Women’s Magazines, 1693-1968 (London, Michael Joseph, 1970), pp. 60-61.

  79Altick, English Common Reader, p. 357.

  80White, Women’s Magazines, p. 61.

  81Obituary of John Walter, The Times, 29 July 1847, p. 7, cols. c-d.

  82The Applegarth: Nevett, Advertising in Britain, p. 40, and also Dilwyn Porter, ‘John Walter (1818-1894)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The Hoe and Lloyd’s: Drotner, English Children and their Magazines, p. 66. The Hoe and The Times: White, Women’s Magazines, p. 62.

  83Nevett, Advertising in Britain, p. 79.

  84Altick, English Common Reader, p. 356.

  85Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street, pp. 130-32.

  86Adrian Harvey, The Beginnings of a Commercial Sporting Culture in Britain, 1793-1850 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004), p. 32.

  87Tony Mason, ‘Sporting News, 1860-1914’, in Harris and Lee, The Press in English Society, p. 178.

  88Robinson, Britain’s Post Office, p. 99.

  89Harvey, Commercial Sporting Culture, p. 45.

  90Tony Mason, ‘Sporting News’, in Harris and Lee, The Press in English Society, p. 172; Tony Mason, Association Football and English Society, 1863-1915 (Brighton, Harvester, 1980), pp. 188-9.

  91Harvey, Commercial Sporting Culture, p. 46.

  92Ibid., pp. 43, 46.

  93Cited in Mason, ‘Sporting News’, in Harris and Lee, The Press in English Society, p. 171.

  94Ibid., pp. 169-72.

  95Harvey, Commercial Sporting Culture, pp. 47-8.

  96Mike Huggins, The Victorians and Sport (London, Hambledon and London, 2004), p. 150.

  97Ibid., p. 153; Mason, ‘Sporting News’, in Harris and Lee, The Press in English Society, pp. 174, 176.

  98Ibid., pp. 177-8.

  99Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man, 1830-1850: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974), p. 49.

  100Anderson, Printed Image, pp. 46-7.

  101Ibid., pp. 54-7.

  102Cited in ‘Introduction’, Andrew King and John Plunkett, eds., Popular Print Media, 1820-1900 (London, Routledge, 2004), vol. 1, p. 10.

  103Listed in Altick, English Common Reader, p. 338.

  104Anderson, Printed Image, pp. 94-5.

  105White, Women’s Magazines, p. 30.

  106Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914 (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 17, 27.

  107La Belle Assemblée, February-April 1806.

  108Ibid., January-June 1832.

  109Ibid.

  110‘March Fashions’, Punch, 1848, p. 91.

  111Loeb, Consuming Angels, p. 78.

  112Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman, eds., Victorian Women’s Magazines: An Anthology (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 159.

  113Cited in White, Women’s Magazines, p. 44.

  114Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, supplements IX, 1864; III, 1863; cited in Beetham, A Magazine of her Own?, pp. 75-8.

  115Cited in Beetham and Boardman, Victorian Women’s Magazines, p. 90.

  116Sampson, History of Advertising, p. 15.

  117Noted by the House of Commons Select Committee on Patent Medicines, 1912-14, Q3897, Q3898.

  118Berridge, ‘Popular Sunday Papers’, in Boyce et al
., Newspaper History, p. 250.

  119Cited in White, Women’s Magazines, p. 65.

  120Louis Collins, The Advertisers Guardian (and Advertisement Agents’ Guide) (London, [no publisher], 1885), p. 20.

  121Beetham, A Magazine of her Own?, pp. 96-7.

  5: Penny a Line: Books and the Reading Public

  1Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 169, 186.

  2Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey [1818]; Lady Susan; The Watsons; Sanditon, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie; intro. and notes, Claudia L. Johnson (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 26.

  3Samuel Richardson to Bishop Hildersley, 1761, John Carroll, ed., Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 341.

  4Cited in Feather, Provincial Book Trade, p. 65.

  5Frances Burney, Cecilia, or, Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 722.

  6Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (3rd ed., [no place of publication], Charles Knight, 1833), p. 315.

  7Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 131.

  8Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 137.

  9Ibid., p. 175.

  10Cited in St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 143.

  11Shakespeare: Marcus Walsh, ‘Literary Scholarship and the Life of Editing’, in Isabel Rivers, Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London, Leicester University Press, 2001), pp. 209-10. New novels: David Saunders, Authorship and Copyright (London, Routledge, 1992), p. 136. Byron: St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 194. Incomes: James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 58.

  12St Clair, Reading Nation, pp. 623-4.

  13Cited in ibid., p. 309; the figures for Godwin and Paine are found in appendix 9, pp. 600 and 623-4.

  14Figures for Fielding and the Rambler: Altick, English Common Reader, pp. 49, 50. Byron: St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 586.

  15Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 132.

  16Michael Powell and Terry Wyke, ‘Penny Capitalism in the Manchester Book Trade: The Case of James Weatherley’, in Peter Isaac and Barry McKay, eds., The Reach of Print: Making, Selling and Using Books (Winchester, St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1998), pp. 135-56, passim.

  17Paul Kaufman, Libraries and their Users: Collected Papers in Library History (London, The Library Association, 1969), pp. 116-18.

  18Louis, Fiction for the Working Man, p. 8.

  19Kaufman, Libraries and their Users, p. 44.

  20R. J. Morris, ‘Clubs, Societies and Associations’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950, vol. 3: Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 406.

  21Cited in Kaufman, Libraries and their Users, p. 36.

  22Ibid., p. 37.

  23Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 133-4.

  24Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 180.

  25Cited in Kaufman, Libraries and their Users, p. 17.

  26Ibid., pp. 210-15.

  27Phyllis Hembry, British Spas from 1815 to the Present: A Social History (London, Athlone Press, 1997), p. 4.

  28Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 177.

  29Ibid., pp. 177-8.

  30Cited in Louis, Fiction for the Working Man, p. 6.

  31‘Moral Statistics of Parishes in Westminster’, Journal of the Statistical Society, 1 (1838), p. 485.

  32St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 244.

  33Victor E. Neuburg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide, from the Beginning of Printing to the Year 1897 (London, Woburn Press, 1977), p. 172.

  34James J. Barnes, ‘Depression and Innovation in the British and American Book Trade, 1819-1939’, in Kenneth E. Carpenter, ed., Books and Society in History: Papers of the Association of College and Research Libraries Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference (New York, R. R. Bowker, 1983), p. 237.

  35Louis, Fiction for the Working Man, p. 38.

  36James J. Barnes, Free Trade in Books: A Study of the London Book Trade since 1800 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 116.

  37Listed in Anderson, Printed Image, p. 162.

  38John A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 5.

  39Robert Collison, The Story of Street Literature: Forerunner of the Popular Press (London, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1973), p. 11, p. 23.

  40Neuburg, Popular Literature, p. 26.

  41Sarah Wise, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (London, Jonathan Cape, 2004), pp. 241, 244.

  42Charles Hindley, The History of the Catnach Press, at Berwick-upon Tweed, Alnwick and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in Northumberland, and Seven Dials, London (London, Charles Hindley, 1886), pp. 65-8.

  43This is cited in ibid., p. 77, but unfortunately there is no indication of the source.

  44Ibid., pp. 52ff.

  45Angus Fraser, ‘John Thurtell’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Alsager Vian, rev. J. Gilliland, ‘William Corder’, ibid.; information on Bartholomew Fair, in Altick, Shows of London, p. 420.

  46Altick, English Common Reader, p. 288.

  47Sutherland, Victorian Novelists, p. 75.

  48Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books (2nd ed., London, George Allen & Unwin, 1965), pp. 299-300.

  49Ibid., pp. 345-7, 350, 352, 353.

  50Altick, English Common Reader, p. 200.

  51Athenaeum, 2 January 1828.

  52Cited in Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1970), p. 82.

  53For the information on Mudie’s in the previous four paragraphs, ibid., pp. 17-21, 25, 28, 39, 62.

  54Quarterly Review, 42 (1830), p. 384.

  55Passenger numbers: Bagwell Transport Revolution, pp. 95, 97; T. R. Gourvish, Railways and the British Economy, 1830-1914 (London, Macmillan, 1980), p. 26. Track mileage: Bagwell, Transport Revolution, pp. 81-2.

  56Altick, English Common Reader, p. 337.

  57Sutherland, Victorian Novelists, pp. 20-21.

  58Altick, English Common Reader, p. 290.

  59Sutherland, Victorian Novelists, pp. 32-3.

  60Ibid., pp. 30-31.

  61Simmons, The Victorian Railway, pp. 245-7.

  62Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, p. 65.

  63‘Railway Circulating Libraries’, Punch, 1849, p. 61.

  64Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, p. 89.

  65Saunders, Authorship and Copyright, p. 140.

  66Altick, English Common Reader, pp. 308-9.

  67‘Empedocles’, in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000).

  68Simmons, The Victorian Railway, p. 247.

  69This was not published until the twentieth century, however. Anthony Trollope, The New Zealander, ed. N. John Hall (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 183.

  70Brendon, Thomas Cook, p. 16.

  71I am grateful for this information to Jan Morris, who has passed it on to me from Sir Kyffin Williams, RA.

  72Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, p. 46.

  73Simmons, The Victorian Railway, pp. 345-6.

  74Thomas Cook, A Hand Book of the Trip from Leicester, Nottingham, and Derby to Liverpool and the Coast of North Wales (1845), intro. Paul Smith (London, Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1998), p. 7.

  75John Gadsby, Notes and Queries, 3 January 1885.

  76Percy Fitzgerald, The Story of ‘Bradshaw’s Guide’ (London, Field & Tuer, 1890), pp. 8, 15, 22, 29, 35.

  77Collins, Advertisers Guardian, 1885, pp. 146ff.

  78The Times, 8 October 1861, p. 6.

  79Punch, 1864, p. 217 (and Punch, never one to let a good joke go, carries the saga over two further pages).

  80Cited in Felicity A. Nussbaum, Polygamy, Pamela, and the Prerogative of Em
pire’, in Birmingham and Brewer, Consumption of Culture, p. 217.

  81Cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 634.

  82Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 508.

  83St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 233.

  84Altick, Shows of London, pp. 244-5.

  85St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 214.

  86I have drawn on Shawn Malley, ‘Shipping the Bull: Staging Assyria in the British Museum’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 26, 1 (2004), for this account, especially pp. 3-5.

  87Planché, Mr Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (in Leicester Square), in The Extravaganzas of J. R. Planché, vol. 5, p. 12.

  88Ian Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (London, Pimlico, 2002), p. 13.

  89Sir Herbert George Fordham, ’Paterson’s Roads’: Daniel Paterson, His Maps and Itineraries, 1738-1825 (London, Oxford University Press, for the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 1925), pp. 333-5.

  90Edward Mogg, Paterson’s Roads . . . (16th ed., London, Longman, Hurst, Bees, Orme, and Brown, et al., 1822).

  91Ousby, Englishman’s England, pp. 61-2; Adrian Tinniswood, A History of Country House Visiting: Five Centuries of Tourism and Taste (Oxford, Basil Blackwood and the National Trust, 1989), p. 94.

  92Cited in Ousby, Englishman’s England, pp. 12-13.

  93Audrey Cooper, ‘George Nicholson and his Cambrian Traveller’s Guide’, in Isaacs and McKay, Mighty Engine, pp. 48, 51-2.

  94Ousby, Englishman’s England, pp. 122-3.

  95Cited in Esther Moir, The Discovery of Britain: The English Tourists, 1540-1840 (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 142.

  96The Birmingham Saturday Half Holiday-Guide, with a Map (Birmingham, William Walker, [1871]), passim.

  97Huggins, Victorians and Sport, p. 157; Neil Tranter, Sport, Economy and Society in Britain, 1750-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 22.

  6: To Travel Hopefully: Holidays and Tourism

  1George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 557.

  2This society is named in Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City, 1840-1870 (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 106, but unfortunately no source is given.

  3Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 42.

  4All cited in Neil McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline’, Historical Journal, 4, 1 (1961), p. 46.