Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  54Mark Judd, ‘The Oddest Combination of Town and Country’, in Walvin and Walton, Leisure in Britain, p. 15.

  55Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 173.

  56Wordsworth, The Prelude, VII, pp. 695-723.

  57Michael J. Turner, ‘Abraham Thornton’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  58My thanks to Jill Grey, Keith Ramsey and Sheldon Goldfarb for supplying the crucial links to this murder case.

  59All fair exhibitors listed in Judd, ‘The Oddest Combination of Town and Country’, in Walvin and Walton, Leisure in Britain, pp. 19-21; the conclusion about the concurrent spread of newspapers and increasing representation of crime is my own.

  60[G. A. Sala], ‘Leicester Square’, Household Words, 7 (1853), pp. 64-5.

  61Max Schlesinger, Saunterings in and About London, tr. Otto Wenckstein (London, Nathaniel Cook, 1853), pp. 18-20.

  62Nevett, Advertising in Britain, pp. 20-21, 53.

  63Cited in Clear, The Story of W. H. Smith, p. 14.

  64Sampson, History of Advertising, p. 27.

  65Ibid., p. 31.

  8 : Penny Plain, Tuppence Coloured: The Theatrical Spectacular

  1Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 49.

  2Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, pp. 234-5.

  3Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 119-20.

  4Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 16.

  5Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 148; J. H. Plumb, ‘The Commercialization of Leisure’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 277.

  6Fawcett, Bath Entertain’d, pp. 82-3.

  7Hembry, British Spas from 1815, p. 3.

  8Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 60-61.

  9Fawcett, Rise of English Provincial Art, p. 158.

  10Cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 385.

  11Fawcett, Rise of English Provincial Art, p. 166.

  12Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 6.

  13Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 55.

  14J. Ewing Ritchie, Here and There in London (London, W. Tweedie, 1859), p. 111-16.

  15Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, p. 49.

  16Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, p. 182.

  17Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee (1812), ed. W. J. McCormack and Kim Walker (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 98.

  18Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 62.

  19Cited in Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas, p. 188.

  20Cited in ibid., pp. 175-6.

  21Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, p. 172.

  22This figure, a conflation of Charles Booth and Walter Besant, is suggested by Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 4.

  23Ibid.

  24Ibid., p. 13.

  25Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, tr. Angela Davies (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995), p. 31.

  26Sala, Gaslight and Daylight, p. 159.

  27Cyril Rollins and R. John Witts, eds., The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in Gilbert and Sullivan Operas: A Record of Productions, 1875-1961 (London, Michael Joseph, 1962), p. 23.

  28Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, pp. 18-19.

  29Peter Thomson, ‘Henry James Byron’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  30Kean and Byron: Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 13. The remaining figures: John Pick, The West End: Mismanagement and Snobbery (Eastbourne, John Offord, 1983), p. 31.

  31Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 35.

  32Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 328-9.

  33La Belle Assemblée, almanac for 1842, p. 7.

  34Altick, Shows of London, p. 185.

  35Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, p. 40.

  36Terence Rees and David Wilmore, British Theatrical Patents (London, Society for Theatre Research, 1996), pp. 18ff.; Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 38.

  37Rees and Wilmore, British Theatrical Patents, pp. 7ff.

  38Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 1.

  39Citd in ibid., pp. 36, 18.

  40Midsummer Night’s Dream and fairytale literature: Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre: 1850-1910 (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 37-8, 36. W. S. Gilbert: cited in Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas, p. 181.

  41Pückler-Muskau, Pückler’s Progress, pp. 79-81.

  42Planché, The Extravaganzas of J. R. Planché, vol. I, p. 46.

  43Summary derived from Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 195, with additional information from Pick, The West End, p. 31.

  44Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), ed. Jeremy Tambling (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996), p. 270.

  45Rosenfeld, ‘The Grieve Family’, in [Rosenfeld, ed.], Anatomy of an Illusion, p. 40.

  46Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas, pp. 44-5, 84, 49.

  47Maureen Dillon, “Like a Glow-worm who had lost its Glow”, The Invention of the Incandescent Electric Lamp and the Development of Artificial Silk and Electric Jewellery’, Costume, 35 (2001), p. 78.

  48Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas, pp. 181-2.

  49Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, pp. 82-3.

  50Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, pp. 34-5.

  51J. C. Cross, Circusiana, or A Collection of the Most Favourite Ballets, Spectacles, Melo-drames, &c., Performed at the Royal Circus, St George’s Fields (2 vols., London, Lackington, Allen & Co., 1809), pp. 93-4.

  52Paris in Uproar, The Champ de Mars and Bagshot-Heath Camp: Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 27-8. The British Glory in Egypt and ad: Altick, Shows of London, p. 176.

  53Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 27-9.

  54The Times, 2 June 1800, p. 1, col. a.

  55I have relied heavily on A. H. Saxon’s two books, Enter Foot and Horse and The Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow and the Romantic Age of the English Circus (Hamden, Conn., Archon, 1978) for much of the information on hippodrama, except where otherwise stated. The Royal Circus advertisement: Enter Foot and Horse, pp. 39-40.

  56Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse, p. 49.

  57Ibid., pp. 45, 49.

  58Cited in ibid., pp. 83-7.

  59Ibid., pp. 89, 96.

  60Ibid., p. 90.

  61Pückler-Muskau, Pückler’s Progress, pp. 66-7.

  62Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse, p. 94.

  63Saxon, Andrew Ducrow, pp. 239-41.

  64Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, pp. 41, 50.

  65The Times, 6 November 1823, p. 1; Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse, pp. 99-100.

  66Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse, pp. 134, 137-8.

  67Meisel, Realizations, p. 218.

  68Mazeppa, in James L. Smith, ed., Victorian Melodramas: Seven English, French and American Melodramas (London, Dent, 1976), pp. 18-19.

  69Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse, p. 182.

  70Altick, Shows of London, p. 201.

  71J. Gilliland, ‘Adah Isaacs Menken’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  72All cited in Fawcett, Rise of English Provincial Art, pp. 158-9, 161-2.

  73Alfred Bunn, The Stage: Both Before and Behind the Curtain (London, Bentley, 1840), vol. 1, pp. 224-5.

  74Percy Fitzgerald, Principles of Comedy and Dramatic Effect (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1870), p. 15.

  75Cited in Meisel, Realizations, p. 115.

  76Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (London, Johnson & Co., 1811), vol. 3, pp. 350-51.

  77Meisel, Realizations, pp. 99ff, 111-12.

  78Cited in ibid., pp. 148-9, 157.

  79Henry James, Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872-1901, ed. Allan Wade (London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), p. 148.

  80Cited in Meisel, Realizations, p. 174.

  81Cited in Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, p. 20.

  82Dramatic Essays [of Leigh Hunt, W. Hazlitt, John Forster and George H. Lewes], ed. William Archer and R. W. Lowe (London, Walter Scott
, 1894-6), pp. 250-51.

  83Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, pp. 32, 57.

  84Alfred Darbyshire, The Art of the Victorian Stage, cited in Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, p. 49.

  85Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 392.

  86Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 139-40, 130-31, 134; except rhyming couplet: Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse, p. 5.

  87Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, p. 135.

  88The citations and interpretation from Richard W. Schoch, ‘Shakespeare Mad’, in Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole, eds., Victorian Shakespeare, vol. 1: Theatre, Drama and Performance (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2003), pp. 73-4, 76, 78.

  89Harley Granville-Barker, ‘Exit Planché - Enter Gilbert’, in John Drinkwater, ed., The Eighteen-Sixties: Essays by Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. 118.

  90Cited in ibid., pp. 114-15, 117.

  91Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, pp. 34-7.

  92St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 371.

  93Ibid., pp. 368-70.

  94Smith, Victorian Melodramas, p. xviii.

  95Cited in Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, pp. 2, 69.

  96Cited in Fawcett, Rise of English Provincial Art, p. 161.

  97Smith, Victorian Melodramas, p. 22.

  98Ibid., pp. 220, 239.

  99Ibid.

  100Alfred Thompson, Linda of Chamouni, or, Not Formosa, An Operatic Incongruity, in Three Scenes and a Sensation (London, n.p., n.d. [after 1869]), pp. 25-6.

  101Smith, Victorian Melodramas, pp. 157, 168, 174.

  102Cited in Richard Fawkes, Dion Boucicault: A Biography (London, Quartet, 1979), p. 71.

  103Schoch, ‘Shakespeare Mad’, in Marshall and Poole, Victorian Shakespeare, pp. 74, 76, 79.

  104Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, p. 63.

  105Fawkes, Boucicault, p. 107.

  106Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation, Or, the Spectacular, the Shocking and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, Anthem Press, 2003), p. 222.

  107Smith, Victorian Melodramas, p. xx; Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, pp. 68-9, 72.

  108Henry Morley, The Journal of a London Playgoer (2nd ed., 1891) (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1974), p. 316.

  109Diamond, Victorian Sensation, p. 225.

  110Morley, Journal of a London Playgoer, p. 258.

  111Fawkes, Boucicault, p. 123.

  112Ibid., p. 148; Diamond, Victorian Sensation, pp. 229-30.

  113[Squire and Marie Bancroft], Mr and Mrs Bancroft on and off the Stage, by themselves (4th ed., London, Richard Bentley, 1888), vol. 2, p. 308.

  114Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 1.

  115Morley, Journal of a London Playgoer, p. 111.

  116Cited in Reginald Allen, ed., The First Night Gilbert and Sullivan (London, Chappell, 1958), pp. 379-80.

  117Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, pp. 187, 186.

  118Cited in Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 8.

  119Ibid., pp. 8, 19-20.

  120Cited in Erika D. Rappaport, ‘Acts of Consumption: Musical Comedy and the Desire of Exchange’, in Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption, pp. 192-3.

  121Cited in ibid., p. 194.

  9: Going for a Song: The Music Market

  1Cited in Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, p. 5.

  2Douglas A. Reid, ‘Thomas Britton’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  3Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 123.

  4Cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 366.

  5Plumb, ‘The Commercialization of Leisure’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 279.

  6Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 32.

  7Cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 400-401.

  8William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 19.

  9McVeigh, Concert Life in London, p. 75.

  10This is cited in Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 114-15, although it is not clear from the source if that includes the number of Italian composers in Italy as well as in the rest of Europe.

  11Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 570.

  12Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, pp. 19-20.

  13Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 568.

  14Colley, Britons, p. 199.

  15Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, p. 230.

  16Cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 63.

  17Ibid., pp. 25-8.

  18Burney, Evelina, p. 116.

  19McVeigh, Concert Life in London, p. 15.

  20Ehrlich: Music Profession in Britain, p. 6.

  21Sands, Pleasure Gardens of Marylebone, pp. 25, 29.

  22Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 379; McVeigh, Concert Life in London, pp. 111-13.

  23Cited in McVeigh, Concert Life in London, pp. 47-8.

  24Burn, ‘Vauxhall Gardens’ pamphlet collection, p. 186.

  25Cited in E. D. Mackerness, A Social History of English Music (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 108.

  26Cited in Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, p. 126.

  27Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), ed. Stephen Coote (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986), p. 106.

  28Sands, Pleasure Gardens of Marylebone, pp. 57, 69.

  29McVeigh, Concert Life in London, p. 67.

  30Richard Leppert, ‘Social Order and the Domestic Consumption of Music’, in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture, 1600-1850: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, London, 1995), p. 521.

  31Cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.

  32Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos, pp. 220-21, 223.

  33Ibid., pp. 224-7, 241.

  34Ibid., pp. 227-8.

  35Weber, Rise of Musical Classics, p. 18.

  36D. W. Drummel, ‘Music Publishing’, in Nicholas Temperley, ed., Music in Britain: The Romantic Age, 1800-1914, vol. 5 of The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, gen. ed. Ian Spink (Oxford, Blackwell, 1988), p. 48.

  37Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos, p. 252.

  38Plant, English Book Trade, pp. 306-7.

  39Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos, pp. 251, 229.

  40Mackerness, Social History of English Music, p. 107.

  41Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos, pp. 252-3.

  42Ibid., p. 251.

  43Ibid., p. 235; Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 535.

  44Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos, pp. 234-5.

  45Ibid., pp. 248-50.

  46Altick, English Common Reader, p. 306.

  47Ehrlich, The Piano, p. 40.

  48Mathias, Retailing Revolution, p. 13.

  49Ehrlich, The Piano, pp. 34-6.

  50The Broadwood entries are at no. 518 in the Official Catalogue, vol. 2, section 10; William Rolfe and Sons at no. 472; a wide range of pianos can also be found in entries 464a, 467-502.

  51Ehrlich, The Piano, pp. 38-9.

  52Ibid., p. 32.

  53Ibid., p. 50.

  54All cited in ibid., p. 100. The 60-guinea piano appears to have incurred no mark-up, according to Ehrlich, but I have not been able to locate a copy of the Bethnal Green Times to verify this.

  55Davis and Bonsall, Bath, p. 95.

  56Ehrlich, The Piano, pp. 69, 71-3, 88.

  57Ehrlich, Social Emulation and Industrial Progress - the Victorian Piano (Belfast, Queen’s University, 1975), p. 7.

  58Ibid.

  59Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, p. 53.

  60Peter Clark and R. A. Houston, ‘Culture and Leisure, 1700-1840’, in Peter Clark, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 2: Culture and Leisure, 1540-1840 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 581.


  61William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (London, Croom Helm, 1975), pp. 63-4.

  62Ibid., p. 31.

  63Ibid., p. 16.

  64Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, pp. 54-5.

  65John Rosselli, ‘Louis Jullien’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, p. 60; Altick, Shows of London, p. 330.

  66Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, p. 400.

  67Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, pp. 61-2.

  68Charles Hallé, The Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé, being an autobiography, 1816-1860, with correspondence and diaries, ed. C. E. Hallé and Marie Hallé (London, Smith Elder & Co., 1896), p. 111.

  69Dave Russell, ‘Musicians in the English Provincial City: Manchester, c.1860-1914’, in Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley, eds., Music and British Culture, 1785-1914 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 238, 239-40; Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, p. 62.

  70Russell, ‘Musicians in the English Provincial City’, in Bashford and Langley, Music and British Culture, p. 236.

  71Cited in Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, p. 63.

  72Ibid., p. 62.

  73Russell, ‘Musicians in the English Provincial City’, in Bashford and Langley, Music and British Culture, p. 236.

  74Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, p. 51.

  75Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, pp. 167-8.

  76Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, pp. 55, 58.

  77Warwick Wroth, Cremorne and the Later London Gardens (London, Elliot Stock, 1907), pp. 57, 60.

  78Altick, Shows of London, p. 502.

  79Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, pp. 167-8.

  80Ibid., pp. 168-9.

  81Peter Bailey, ed., Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1986), intro, p. ix; Ehrlich, Music Profession in Britain, p. 57.

  82John Earl, ‘Building the Halls’, in Bailey, Music Hall, pp. 2-4.

  83Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 170.

  84Ibid., p. 170.

  85Bailey, Music Hall, intro, p. xi.

  86Percy Fitzgerald, Music Hall Land (London, Ward and Downey, 1890), p. 4.

  87H. Chance Newton, Idols of the Halls, being my Music-hall Memories (London, Heath Cranton, 1928), p. 59.

  88Peter Bailey, ‘George Leybourne’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  89V. de Frece [Vesta Tilley], Recollections of Vesta Tilley, Lady de Frece (London, Hutchinson and Co., 1934), p. 125.