Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  5Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, pp. 146-7.

  6Ibid., pp. 64-5.

  7Charles Dickens, The Christmas Books, vol. 1: A Christmas Carol and The Chimes (1843, 1844), ed. Michael Slater (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 53.

  8Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 61.

  9St Monday and working days a year: Hans-Joachim Voth, ‘Work and the Sirens of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Marina Bianchi, ed., The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice (London, Routledge, 1998), pp. 146-7. Fairs: Mark Judd, “‘The oddest combination of town and country”: Popular Culture and the London Fairs, 1800-60’, in James Walvin and J. K. Walton, eds., Leisure in Britain, 1780-1939 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 15.

  10Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 64.

  11Gregory Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1976), p. 16.

  12Shop times and ‘we never closed at all’: Winstanley, Shopkeeper’s World, pp. 57-8; except Liberty’s: Adburgham, Liberty’s, p. 36, and Harrod’s: Sean Callery, Harrods Knightsbridge: The Story of Society’s Favourite Store (London, Ebury, 1991), p. 41.

  13Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 143.

  14J. R. Taylor, Government, Legal, and General Saturday Half-Holiday . . . Report of the Great Public Meeting, held in the Guildhall of the City of London, on the 15th of August, 1855 . . . (London, V. & R. Stevens and G. S. Norton, 1857), p. 12.

  15Cited in Altick, Shows of London, p. 471.

  16Cited in Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 62.

  17Cited in W. G. Hoskins, Devon (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1972), p. 152.

  18Colley, Britons, p. 172.

  19Cited in Tinniswood, Country House Visiting, p. 67.

  20Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), ed. Vivien Jones (rev. ed., Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2003), pp. 231-2.

  21Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys, Passages from the Diaries of Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys, of Herwick House, Oxon, 1756-1808, ed. Emily J. Climenson (London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1899), p. 18.

  22Ousby, Englishman’s England, p. 61.

  23Cited in ibid., pp. 50, 57.

  24Lybbe Powys, Diaries, p. 167.

  25John Byng, Viscount Torrington, The Torrington Diaries, ed. C. Bruyn Andrews (London, Methuen, 1970), vol. 2, p. 204.

  26Cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 219.

  27Cited in Tinniswood, Country House Visiting, pp. 93-4.

  28Lybbe Powys, Diaries, p. 7.

  29Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 303.

  30Lybbe Powys, Diaries, pp. 165, 168.

  31Cited in Ousby, Englishman’s England, pp. 63-4.

  32Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), ed. Norman Page (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 137.

  33Cost of travel, Brendon, Thomas Cook, p. 14. Income for journeymen: Elizabeth Waterman Gilboy, ‘Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution’, in R. M. Hartwell, ed., The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England (London, Methuen, 1967), p. 131.

  34Lake District in 1630s: A Short Survey of England, cited in Ousby, Englishman’s England, p. 100. Defoe: cited in Norman Nicholson, The Lakers: The Adventures of the First Tourists (London, Robert Hale, 1955), p. 24. Scotland: Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, cited in Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989), p. 1; Johnson, A Journey to the Western Isles, p. 60.

  35Thomas Amory, The Life and Opinions of John Buncle Esquire (1756), ed. Ernest A. Baker (London, George Routledge and Sons, 1904), p. 76.

  36The Works of the Right Honorable Edward Burke, vol. 1 (London, John C. Nimmo, 1887), part 4, section 7, p. 216.

  37William Gilpin, An Essay on Prints, containing remarks upon the principles of picturesque beauty (2nd ed., London, J. Robson, 1768), p. 2.

  38Cited in Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800 (Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1989), p. vii.

  39Austen, Northanger Abbey, p. 81.

  40Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 476.

  41James Plumptre, The Lakers: A Comic Opera (London, W. Clarke, 1798), p. 2.

  42Cited in Ousby, Englishman’s England, pp. 111, 117.

  43Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, p. 251.

  44Kathryn Temple, Scandal Nation: Law and Authorship in Britain, 1750-1832 (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 74-5.

  45Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker (1771), ed. James L. Thorson (New York, W. W. Norton, 1983), p. 230.

  46All cited in Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999) p. 107.

  47Altick, Shows of London, p. 237.

  48Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (New York, Dover, 1990), p. 257.

  49Byron: St Clair, Reading Nation, pp. 333-4.

  50Stana Nenadic, ‘Romanticism and the Urge to Consume in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, in Berg and Clifford, Consumers and Luxury, p. 215.

  51Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 457.

  52Court Magazine, July-December 1832, passim.

  53Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 85.

  54Ibid., pp. 51, 65, 71-2.

  55Official Catalogue, vol. 2, classes 12 and 15, entry 15, p. 486.

  56Cited in Moir, Discovery of Britain, p. 143.

  57Plumptre, The Lakers, pp. 19, 58.

  58Ibid., pp. 6, 12, 16.

  59Official Catalogue, vol. 2, ‘Advertiser’, p. 23.

  60Andrews, Search for the Picturesque, pp. 67, 74-5.

  61Cited in Cooper, ‘George Nicholson’, in Isaacs and McKay, Mighty Engine, p. 51.

  62The Times, 8 March 1827, p. 4. I am grateful to Keith Ramsey for this reference, and to Michael Hargreave Mawson for further information on rhodium.

  63Cited in Anthony and Pip Burton, The Green Bag Travellers: Britain’s First Tourists (London, André Deutsch, 1978), p. 25.

  64It is Andrews, in Search for the Picturesque, p. 11, who notices the change from Latin to English, but he gives a different interpretation for the reason behind it.

  65Parliamentary Papers, Select Committee on Public Houses, 1853-4.

  66Brendon, Thomas Cook, pp. 33, 36-7; Cook, A Hand Book, pp. 7ff.

  67Brendon, Thomas Cook, pp. 39-40.

  68Ibid, p. 50.

  69Ibid., p. 64.

  70Ibid., p. 65.

  71Jim Ring, How the English Made the Alps (London, John Murray, 2000), p. 53.

  72Frederic Harrison, Memories and Thoughts: Men - Books - Cities - Art (London, Macmillan, 1906), p. 240.

  73Christopher Smout, ‘Tours in the Scottish Highlands from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, Northern Scotland, 5, 2 (1983), pp. 114-15.

  74Simmons, The Victorian Railway, p. 41.

  75Ring, How the English Made the Alps, pp. 46-7.

  76John Ruskin, ‘On the Old Road’, in The Works of John Ruskin (London, George Allen, Library Edition, 1887-1912), vol. 34, p. 140.

  77All cited in Brendon, Thomas Cook, pp. 81, 89, 90.

  78Cook, Excursionist magazine, 6 June 1864.

  79Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 162.

  80James Walvin, Leisure and Society, 1830-1950 (London, Longman, 1978), p. 19.

  81John Hannavy, The English Seaside in Victorian and Edwardian Times (Princes Risborough, Shire, 2003), p. 9.

  82John Lowerson and John Myerscough, Time to Spare in Victorian England (Hassocks, Harvester, 1977), p. 33.

  83Jane Austen, Emma (1815), ed. Fiona Stafford (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2003), pp. 97, 101.

  84Graham Davis and Penny Bonsall, Bath: A New History (Keele, Keele University Press, 1996), pp. 29, 40.

  85Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 31; Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford, Clar
endon Press, 1985), pp. 23-4.

  86Davis and Bonsall, Bath, pp. 53-5.

  87Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 35.

  88Pierce Egan, Walks through Bath (Bath, Meyler and Sons, 1819), pp. 68-9.

  89Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, pp. 45-6.

  90Trevor Fawcett, Bath Entertain’d: Amusements, Recreations and Gambling at the 18th-Century Spa (Bath, Ruton, 1998), pp. 57-9.

  91Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, pp. 23-4.

  92The Original Bath Guide, Considerably Enlarged and Improved (Bath, J. Savage and Meyler and Son, 1811), pp. 103-4, 111.

  93Cited in Peter Borsay, The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700-2000: Towns, Heritage and History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 27.

  94Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818), ed. Gillian Beer (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1998), p. 15.

  95Davis and Bonsall, Bath, pp. 81, 72-3.

  96[W.T.], The Express and Herald Original Bath Guide, Historical and Descriptive (Bath, William Lewis, Express and County Herald, [1870?]), passim.

  97Hembry, British Spas from 1815, pp. 1-2.

  98Ibid., pp. 10-11, 33-4.

  99Ibid., p. 16.

  100Cited in P. M. Horsley, ‘George Keate and the Voltaire-Shakespeare Controversy’, Comparative Literature Studies, 16 (1945), p. 7.

  101Cited in Ousby, Englishman’s England, p. 32.

  102Lloyd’s Evening Post in Ian McIntyre, Garrick (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999), p. 548; Boswell cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 326-7.

  103Cited in McIntyre, Garrick, p. 351.

  104[George Colman], Man and Wife; or, The Shakespeare Jubilee (Dublin, for A. Leathley, S. Powell, P. and W. Wilson, et al., 1770), pp. 6-7.

  105From her obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1815, p. 284.

  106This description has been taken from Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (London, Michael Joseph, 1964), p. 284.

  107Samuel Foote, cited in ibid., p. 285.

  108Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee, pp. 274-5.

  109Byng, Torrington Diaries, vol. 1, p. 224.

  110For the facts and also their interpretation, Ousby, Englishman’s England, p. 28.

  111Ibid., p. 36.

  112Ibid., pp. 38-9.

  113Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, pp. 85, 160.

  114[Pardon], The London Conductor, pp. 53-4, 56.

  115Smout, ‘Tours in the Scottish Highlands’, Northern Scotland, 5, 2 (1983), p. 107; Sir Walter Scott, ‘The Lord of the Isles’, appendix K, in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott (Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1857), vol. 5, p. 325.

  116Smout, ‘Tours in the Scottish Highlands’, Northern Scotland, 5, 2 (1983), p. 112.

  117Walvin, Leisure and Society, pp. 22-3.

  118Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 162.

  119Avril Lansdell, Seaside Fashions 1860-1939: A Study of Clothes Worn in or beside the Sea (Princes Risborough, Shire, 1990), pp. 16-17.

  120Cited in Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 125.

  121Lansdell, Seaside Fashions, pp. 5-6.

  122Ibid., pp. 15, 19.

  123Ibid., pp. 19, 24-5, 27, 29-30; Phillis Cunnington and Alan Mansfield, English Costumes for Sports and Outdoor Recreation: From the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries (London, Adam & Charles Black 1969), pp. 264-6.

  124Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, p. 116.

  125Hannavy, The English Seaside, pp. 9-10.

  126I am indebted for this concept, as well as for the material that follows in the next six paragraphs, to Richard Roberts, ‘The Corporation as Impresario: The Municipal Provision of Entertainment in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, in Walvin and Walton, Leisure in Britain, pp. 136-57.

  127Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, p. 64.

  128Ibid., pp. 56, 64.

  129Cited in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, p. 61.

  7: The Greatest Shows on Earth?

  1It is impossible to write about the shows of London without bringing in Richard Altick’s seminal The Shows of London at every turn. I must therefore stress my debt to Altick here, and simply indicate my areas of heaviest reliance: for architectural models, pp. 113-15; art exhibitions, p. 409; automata, pp. 60, 69, 357-8; de Loutherbourg, pp. 119-25; dioramas, pp. 163-5; ethnographic shows, pp. 45-6; Charles Mathews, pp. 222-4; Napoleon, pp. 222, 238-40, 396; panoramas, pp. 129, 136-7, 167, 176-7, 199, 203-4, 208-9, 410; photography, pp. 376-8; science exhibitions, pp. 81, 84-5, 371-2; sightseeing, pp. 434-7; toys, pp. 232-3; waxworks, p. 51; zoos and menageries, pp. 307-15, 317-18. For the evangelical response to shows and theatres, pp. 207, 228-9. Where citations in this chapter are not directly credited, these pages are the source.

  2James Robinson Plancheé, The Drama at Home; or, An Evening with Puff (London, S. G. Fairbrother, 1844), p. 20.

  3Burney, Evelina, p. 85.

  4Andrews, Search for the Picturesque, p. 30.

  5Terence Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas (London, Society for Theatre Research, 1978), p. 84.

  6Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (11 vols., London, Bell & Hyman, 1970-83), vol. 7, p. 333.

  7Planché, The Drama at Home, p. 20.

  8James Fenimore Cooper, England. With Sketches of Society in the Metropolis (London, Richard Bentley, 1837), vol. 2, pp. 47-8.

  9This table is drawn from figures cited in Altick, Shows of London, pp. 454, 467.

  10Tinniswood, Country House Visiting, p. 132.

  11Ibid., p. 130.

  12Prince Pückler-Müskau, Pückler’s Progress: The Adventures of Prince Pückler-Muskau in England, Wales and Ireland, as told in letters to his former wife, 1826-9, tr. Flora Brennan (London, Collins, 1987), pp. 133, 137.

  13From ‘the new turnpike’ to the Lancaster assize: Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (London, Yale University Press, 1998), p. 252. The Bridgewater Canal, silver plating and iron smelting: Uglow, Lunar Men, p. 139-41; Lybbe Powys, Diaries, pp. 20, 65, 126.

  14Trevor Fawcett, The Rise of English Provincial Art: Artists, Patrons, and Institutions outside London, 1800-1830 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 156.

  15William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, in Wordsworth’s Poetical Works, ed. William Knight (London, Macmillan & Co., 1896), vol. 3, VII, pp. 230-59.

  16Fawcett, Rise of English Provincial Art, pp. 153-4.

  17Puückler-Muskau, Pückler’s Progress, p. 129.

  18Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and their Museums (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 67-8.

  19Playbill cited in Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 133.

  20Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 217-18, 221.

  21Petipa cited in Roland John Wiley, Tchaikovsky’s Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 183.

  22Sybil Rosenfeld, ‘The Grieve Family’, in [S. Rosenfeld, ed.], Anatomy of an Illusion: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Scene Design: Lectures of the Fourth International Congress on Theatre Research (Amsterdam, International Federation for Theatre Research, 1969), p. 42.

  23R. Derek Wood, ‘The Diorama in Great Britain in the 1820s’, History of Photography, 17, 3, passim.

  24Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, p. 145.

  25Burney, Evelina, p. 122.

  26Brendon, Thomas Cook, p. 20.

  27William Thackeray, The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family (1853-5), ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 209.

  28R. Davenport-Hines, ‘William Palmer’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  29Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible (London, Arrow, 2004), pp. 29-31.

  30James Robinson
Planché, The New Planet; or, Harlequinade Out of Place (London, S. G. Fairbrother, 1847), passim.

  31Cited by Undine Concannon in ‘Anna Maria Tussaud’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  32[Charles Lamb], ‘The Old and the New Schoolmaster’, London Magazine, 3 (1821), p. 495.

  33Cited in Meisel, Realizations, p. 63.

  34[Pardon], The London Conductor, pp. 46-7.

  35All these pieces of sheet music can be found in the British Library.

  36Cited in Altick, English Common Reader, p. 114.

  37Cited in Francis E. Mineka, The Dissidence of Dissent: The Monthly Repository, 1806-1838 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1944), p. 57.

  38The Times, 23 September 1809.

  39Cited in A. H. Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1968), p. 104.

  40Pepys, Diary, vol. 8, p. 240.

  41A Description of Vauxhall Gardens. Being a proper companion and guide for all who visit that place (London, 1762), pp. 9, 32.

  42Ibid., p. 9.

  43‘Descriptions of Southwark, Lambeth, Newington &c.’, [1796], in the collection made by Henry Jacob Burn and held at the British Library as ‘Vauxhall Gardens: A Collection of tickets, bills of performances, pamphlets, MS notes, engravings and extracts and cuttings from books and periodicals relating to Vauxhall Gardens, originally made by Jacob Henry Burn’. It is worth noting that substantial portions of this 1796 pamphlet are lifted wholesale from the anonymous A Description of Vauxhall Gardens of 1762 cited above.

  44Ibid., p. 23.

  45W. S. Scott, Green Retreats: The Story of Vauxhall Gardens, 1661-1859 (London, Odhams Press, 1955), p. 86.

  46Pückler-Muskau, Pückler’s Progress, pp. 128-9.

  47Cited in Scott, Green Retreats, p. 95.

  48Mollie Sands, The Eighteenth-Century Pleasure Gardens of Marylebone, 1737-1777 (London, Society for Theatre Research, 1987), p. 94.

  49Burney, Evelina, p. 471.

  50T. J. Edelstein, Vauxhall Gardens (New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, 1983), p. 15.

  51Burney, Evelina, pp. 209-10.

  52Most of these spas, with descriptions, appear in Edelstein, Vauxhall Gardens, passim.

  53Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, ‘a new edition much enlarged and corrected’ by J. Charles Cox (London, Methuen and Co., 1903), pp. 200-201.