Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  10: Going, Going: Art and the Market

  1Altick, Shows of London, p. 101.

  2Cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 223.

  3Cited in Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, Alan Sutton, 1992), p. 260.

  4Ibid., p. 266.

  5Cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 256.

  6Robert Strange, An Inquiry into the Rise and Establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts (London, n.p., 1775), p. 62.

  7Saunders, Authorship and Copyright, p. 41.

  8Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 163. John Arbuthnot and Alexander Pope, The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1950), p. 105.

  9Cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 252.

  10Hudson and Luckhurst, The Royal Society of Arts, pp. 34-5, 39.

  11Sidney C. Hutchinson, The History of the Royal Academy, 1768-1968 (2nd ed., London, Robert Royce, 1968), pp. 24-6, 31, 33.

  12H. C. Marillier, Christie’s, 1766-1925 (London, Constable & Co., 1926), pp. 8, 12.

  13Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 223.

  14Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino, Cal., Huntington Library, 1959), p. 43.

  15Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 238-9.

  16Colley, Britons, pp. 206-7.

  17Cited in Hutchinson, History of the Royal Academy, pp. 37-8.

  18Ibid., p. 53.

  19Ibid.

  20Louise Lippincott, ‘Expanding on Portraiture: The Market, the Public, and the Hierarchy of Genres in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Bermingham and Brewer, The Consumption of Culture, p. 78.

  21Altick, Shows of London, p. 105.

  22Gilpin, An Essay on Prints, p. 2.

  23Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 455, 452.

  24I have relied on Sven H. A. Bruntjen, John Boydell, 1719-1804: A Study of Art Patronage and Publishing in Georgian London (New York, Garland, 1985), passim, for my account of Boydell and his gallery, except where otherwise noted.

  25Altick, Shows of London, p. 106.

  26Ibid., p. 108.

  27Lybbe Powys, Diaries, pp. 299-300.

  28Noble and Patriotic: The Beaumont Gift, 1828 (London, National Gallery, 1988), p. 8.

  29Cited in Colley, Britons, pp. 174-5.

  30Altick, Shows of London, p. 405.

  31Peter Fullerton, ‘Patronage and Pedagogy: The British Institution in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Art History, 5, 1 (1982), p. 60.

  32Cited in Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, Cornell University Press,1992), p. 75.

  33Fullerton, ‘Patronage and Pedagogy’, Art History, 5, 1 (1982), pp. 67.

  34Colley, Britons, p. 176.

  35Ibid.

  36Walpole, 14 February 1753, Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, (London, Richard Bentley, 1833), vol. III, p. 32.

  37Marjorie Caygill and Christopher Date, Building the British Museum (London, British Museum Press, 1999), p. 13.

  38Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought (London, Macmillan, 1975), pp. 9-10.

  39William Hutton, A Journey to London (2nd ed., London, n.p., 1818), pp. 112-16.

  40I have not made this up. The catalogue is reproduced in Chambers Book of Days, A Miscellany of Popular Antiquity, ed. R. Chambers (Edinburgh and London, W. & R. Chambers, [1866?]) p. 608.

  41Altick, Shows of London, p. 440.

  42Caygill and Date, Building the British Museum, pp. 15-16.

  43Altick, Shows of London, p. 429.

  44Cited in Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (London, André Deutsch, 1973), p. 26.

  45Cited in Hudson and Luckhurst, The Royal Society of Arts, pp. 34-5.

  46Cited in Altick, Shows of London, p. 406.

  47St Clair, Reading Nation, pp. 194-5.

  48Cited in Fawcett, Rise of English Provincial Art, p. 5.

  49Cited in Black, On Exhibit, p. 105.

  50Ibid., p. 3.

  51Ibid., p. 5.

  52Cited in Noble and Patriotic, p. 10.

  53Cited in Charlotte Klonk, ‘The National Gallery in London and its Public’, in Berg and Clifford, Consumers and Luxury, pp. 228-9.

  54Ibid., p. 11.

  55Janet Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain (New York, New York University Press, 1977), pp. 23-4.

  56‘Report from the Select Committee on the Arts, and their Connection with Manufacturers’, Reports, House of Commons, 1836, 19.1, 10.1.

  57Klonk, ‘The National Gallery’, in Berg and Clifford, Consumers and Luxury, p. 234.

  58Select Committee on the Arts, 108.

  59Altick, Shows of London, pp. 444-5.

  60Carol Duncan, ‘Putting the “Nation” in London’s National Gallery’, in Gwendolyn Wright, 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), pp. 108-9.

  61Charles Holmes and C. H. Collins Baker, The Making of the National Gallery, 1824-1924 (London, The National Gallery, 1924), pp. 24-5.

  62David Robertson, ‘Sir Charles Lock Eastlake’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  63Altick, Shows of London, pp. 454, 467; and Klonk, ‘The National Gallery’, in Berg and Clifford, Consumers and Luxury, p. 237.

  64Sir Henry Cole, Fifty Years of Public Work of Sir Henry Cole, accounted for in his deeds, speeches and writings ([London], Bell, 1884), vol. 2, p. 368.

  65Cited in Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London, Routledge, 1995), p. 71.

  66[Henry Cole], ‘Public Galleries and Irresponsible Boards’, Edinburgh Review, 251 ( January 1866), p. 69.

  67Cited in Black, On Exhibit, p. 101.

  68Ibid., pp. 32-3, 200.

  69Fawcett, Rise of English Provincial Art, pp. 1, 113, 168-9, 184-5.

  70Seed, “‘Commerce and the Liberal Arts”’, in Wolff and Seed, Culture of Capital, pp. 47, 65.

  71Altick, Shows of London, p. 405; Klonk, ‘The National Gallery’, in Berg and Clifford, Consumers and Luxury, p. 231.

  72Cited in Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, pp. 96-7.

  73Seed, “‘Commerce and the Liberal Arts”’, in Wolff and Seed, Culture of Capital, pp. 69-70; Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, p. 98.

  74Brendon, Thomas Cook, p. 64.

  75Cited in Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, pp. 101-4.

  76Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 202.

  77Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond (London, Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 31, 38, 50, 56, 132-4, 142.

  78Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, p. 130.

  79Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, vol. 1: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices, 1760-1960 (London, Barrie & Rockliff, 1961), pp. 30-31.

  80Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, p. 40.

  81Ibid., p. 232.

  82Cited in Fawcett, Rise of English Provincial Art, p. 151.

  83Seed, “‘Commerce and the Liberal Arts”’, in Wolff and Seed, Culture of Capital, pp. 52-4.

  84Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, p. 234.

  85Jeremy Maas, Gambart, Prince of the Victorian Art World (London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1975), pp. 22, 31, 39.

  86Ibid., pp. 38, 39.

  87Ibid., pp. 30, 99.

  88Altick, Shows of London, p. 412.

  89Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, p. 239.

  90Ibid., pp. 310-11.

  91Linda Merrill, ‘Charles Augustus Howell’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  92Punch, 21 July 1888, p. 30.

  93Juli
e F. Codell, ‘Marion Harry Spielmann and the Role of the Press in the Professionalization of Artists’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 22, 1 (1989), pp. 7-13.

  11: Sporting Life

  1Peter Gaskell, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Manufacturing Population . . . (London, John W. Parker, 1836), pp. 181, 248.

  2Samuel Bamford, The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford, ed. W. H. Chaloner (London, Frank Cass & Co., 1967), vol. 1, pp. 137ff.

  3Dennis Brailsford, A Taste for Diversions: Sport in Georgian England (Cambridge, Lutterworth Press, 1999), pp. 15ff.

  4Ibid., pp. 23, 20-21.

  5Bamford, Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 141.

  6Brailsford, A Taste for Diversions, p. 187.

  7Ibid., pp. 24-5.

  8Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 186.

  9Ibid., pp. 185, 181.

  10Brailsford, A Taste for Diversions, p. 25.

  11Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 218-19.

  12Ibid., p. 192.

  13Lybbe Powys, Diaries, pp. 24-5.

  14Ibid., pp. 134-5.

  15Cited in Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 183.

  16Ibid., pp. 303-4.

  17Roger Longrigg, The History of Horse Racing (London, Macmillan, 1972), pp. 91-2.

  18Plumb, ‘The Commercialization of Leisure’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 280-81; Harvey, Commercial Sporting Culture, p. 32.

  19Brailsford, A Taste for Diversions, p. 26.

  20Longrigg, History of Horse Racing, pp. 89-90; Brailsford, A Taste for Diversions, p. 161.

  21Harriet Ritvo, ‘Possessing Mother Nature: Genetic Capital in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property: Consumption and Culture in the 17th and 18th Centuries (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 415-16.

  22Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 218.

  23Wray Vamplew, ‘Tattersall family’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  24Ibid.

  25Except where otherwise noted, the information on the Weatherby and Tattersall dynasties comes from Mike Huggins, ‘A Tranquil Transformation: Middle-Class Racing “Revolutionaries” in Nineteenth-Century England’, in J. A. Mangan, ed., Reformers, Sport, Modernizers: Middle-Class Revolutionaries (London, Frank Cass, 2002), pp. 43-4, 45-7.

  26Brailsford, A Taste for Diversions, p. 26.

  27Ibid., p. 27.

  28Walvin, Leisure and Society, p. 24.

  29Simmons, The Victorian Railway, p. 272.

  30Wray Vamplew, The Turf: A Social and Economic History of Horse Racing (London, Allen Lane, 1976), p. 29; Simmons, The Victorian Railway, p. 273.

  31Simmons, The Victorian Railway, p. 301.

  32Ibid.

  33Vamplew, The Turf, pp. 30-31.

  34Ibid., p. 35.

  35Mike Huggins, Flat Racing and British Society, 1790-1914: A Social and Economic History (London, Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 31-2.

  36Dennis Brailsford, British Sport: A Social History (Cambridge, Lutterworth Press, 1992), p. 85.

  37Harvey, Commercial Sporting Culture, p. 20.

  38Huggins, Victorians and Sport, p. 148.

  39Huggins, Flat Racing and British Society, pp. 27-8.

  40Wray Vamplew, Pay Up and Play the Game: Professional Sport in Britain, 1875-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 55.

  41Ibid., p. 152.

  42Tranter, Sport, Economy and Society, p. 20.

  43Vamplew, The Turf, p. 38.

  44Vamplew, Pay Up and Play the Game, pp. 57-8.

  45Ibid., p. 101.

  46Ibid., pp. 56-7.

  47Huggins, Flat Racing and British Society, p. 154.

  48Cited in Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 82.

  49Cited in ibid., p. 92.

  50Ibid., pp. 93, 96.

  51Ibid., p. 93; Altick, Shows of London, p. 87.

  52Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, p. 151.

  53Ibid., p. 152.

  54Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 36.

  55Ibid., pp. 34-5.

  56John Goulstone, Football’s Secret History (Upminster, 3-2 Books, 2001), p. 27.

  57Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 151; Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control (London, Methuen, 1978), p. 147; Mason, Association Football, pp. 26-7, 48-9, 51.

  58Holt, Sport and the British, p. 150.

  59Bailey, Leisure and Class, p. 147; Brailsford, British Sport, p. 96.

  60Mason, Association Football, pp. 48-9.

  61Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, p. 362; Holt, Sport and the British, p. 152.

  62Holt, Sport and the British, p. 150.

  63Ibid., p. 31.

  64Mason, Association Football, p. 22.

  65Goulstone, Football’s Secret History, pp. 28-33.

  66Cited in ibid., pp. 47-8.

  67Holt, Sport and the British, p. 85.

  68Cited in Goulstone, Football’s Secret History, p. 48.

  69Tranter, Sport, Economy and Society, p. 15.

  70Ibid., pp. 24-5.

  71Ibid.; Mason, Association Football, pp. 15-16.

  72Huggins, Victorians and Sport, p. 63.

  73Mason, Association Football, pp. 69-72.

  74Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, p. 363.

  75Golby and Purdue, The Civilisation of the Crowd, p. 110.

  76Blackman, Janet, ‘The Development of the Retail Grocery Trade in the Nineteenth Century’, Business History, 9, 2 (1967), p. 110.

  77Cited in Mason, Association Football, p. 73.

  78Bailey, Leisure and Class, p. 150.

  79Ibid.; Huggins, Victorians and Sport, pp. 63-6.

  80Mason, Association Football, p. 74.

  81Punch, 3 November 1888, pp. 206-7; Mason, Association Football, p. 75.

  82Ibid., p. 66.

  83Ibid., pp. 34-5.

  84Ibid., p. 141; Tranter, Sport, Economy and Society, p. 17.

  85Mason, Association Football, pp. 146-7; Simmons, The Victorian Railway, p. 302.

  86Tony Collins and Wray Vamplew, ‘The Pub, the Drinks Trade and the Early Years of Modern Football’, Sports Historian, 20, 1 (2000), pp. 7-11.

  87Mason, Association Football, p. 35.

  88Ibid., pp. 39-42.

  89Cited in Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, pp. 115-16.

  90Cited in Bailey, Leisure and Class, pp. 83-4.

  91David V. Herlihy, Bicycle: The History (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 75, 147, 150; Bagwell, Transport Revolution, pp. 137-8.

  92Herlihy, Bicycle, pp. 165, 216, 246, 251.

  93John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes: 1870-1914 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 234.

  94David Rubinstein, ‘Cycling in the 1890s’, Victorian Studies, 21, 1 (1977), pp. 51, 57.

  95Simmons, The Victorian Railway, p. 305.

  96Frederick Alderson, Bicycling: A History (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1972), p. 103.

  97F. G. Aflalo, ed., The Cost of Sport (London, John Murray, 1899), pp. 326-7.

  98Alderson, Bicycling, p. 73.

  99Ibid., pp. 102-3.

  100Ibid., pp. 43-5.

  101Bagwell, Transport Revolution, p. 138.

  102Rubinstein, ‘Cycling in the 1890s’, Victorian Studies, 21, 1 (1977), p. 49.

  103Cited in Huggins, Victorians and Sport, p. 153.

  104Grant Allen, Hilda Wade: A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose (London and New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [1899]), passim. My thanks to my Victoria mailbase colleagues for their contributions to this list of ‘cycling’ stories.

  105Huggins, Victorians and Sport, p. 162.

  106Loeb, Consuming Angels, p. 43; Shannon, ‘ReFashioning Men’, Victorian Studies, 46, 4 (2004), p. 603.

  107Official Catalogue, vol. 2,
classes 12 and 15, no. 15, p. 486.

  108Cunnington and Mansfield, English Costumes for Sports, pp. 49-54.

  109Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned, p. 206.

  110Mason, Association Football, p. 32.

  111Cited in Holt, Sport and the British, p. 127.

  112Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned, p. 199.

  113Cited in Cunnington and Mansfield, English Costumes for Sports, pp. 229-30.

  114‘Pastimes for Ladies. On Three Wheels’, Woman’s World, 6 (1887), pp. 423-4, cited in Beetham and Boardman, Victorian Women’s Magazines, pp. 41-2.

  115Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, pp. 264-5.

  116Ibid., p. 203; Breward, Hidden Consumer, pp. 141-2.

  117Tranter, Sport, Economy and Society, p. 33.

  118Smout, ‘Tours in the Scottish Highlands’, Northern Scotland, 5, 2 (1983), pp. 110-11.

  119Vamplew, Pay Up and Play the Game, p. 55.

  12: Visions of Sugar Plums: A Christmas Coda

  1Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, vol. 1, ed. Andrew Lang (London, Gadshill Edition, vol. 26, Chapman and Hall, 1898), ‘Characters’, pp. 258-62.

  2J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, The Making of the Modern Christmas (rev. ed., Stroud, Sutton, 2000), p. 40.

  3Tony Bennett, John Golby and Ruth Finnegan, ‘Christmas and Ideology’, in Popular Culture: Themes and Issues, Block 1, Units 1/2: ‘Christmas: A Case Study’ (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1981), p. 19.

  4J. A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman’s Christmas: A Social History (Hassocks, Harvester, 1978), p. 80.

  5Cited in Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, Christmas Past (London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987), pp. 46-7.

  6The Amberley Papers: Letters and Diaries of Lord and Lady Amberley, ed. Bertrand and Patricia Russell (London, Hogarth Press, 1937), vol. 2, pp. 388, 426.

  7Pimlott, Englishman’s Christmas, pp. 98-9.

  8The Christmas Tree, A Present from Germany (London, Darton & Clark, 1844), pp. 1-2.

  9Illustrated London News, 27 December 1845, p. 405.

  10Ibid., Christmas Supplement, 1848, p. 409.

  11Charles Manby Smith, Curiosities of London Life, or Phases, Physiological and Social, of the Great Metropolis (London, William and Frederick G. Cash, 1853), pp. 323-5.

  12Cited in Weightman and Humphries, Christmas Past, pp. 107-9.

  13Ibid., pp. 112-13.

  14William Wallace Ffyfe, Christmas: Its Customs and Carols. With Compressed Vocal Score of Select Choral Illustrations (London, James Blackwood, [1860]), p. 22.