Dinner parties and the proper seating of guests were almost as important in middle-class as in upper-class society.
The regular round of formal dinner parties was very important in Cambridge [wrote the daughter of a professor]. In one house the parties were generally of twelve or fourteen people, and everybody of dinner-party status was invited strictly in turn. The guests were seated according to the Protocol, the Heads of Houses ranking by the dates of the foundation of their colleges, except that the Vice-Chancellor would come first of all. After the Masters came the Regius Professors in the order of their subjects. Divinity first; and then the other Professors according to the dates of the foundations of their chairs, and so on down all the steps of the hierarchy. It was better not to invite too many important people at the same time, or the complications became insoluble to hosts of only ordinary culture. How could they tell if Hebrew or Greek took precedence, of two professorships founded in the same year? And some of the grandees were very touchy about their rights, and their wives were even more easily offended.25
In most middle-class households about a third of their total income was spent upon food;26 and much attention was paid to the furnishing of dining-rooms, as has evidently been the case with the Veneerings’ in which ‘a great looking glass above the sideboard reflects the table and the company and the flowers and the candles and the champagne chalice’.27 Certainly Archdeacon Grantly has strong views on the importance of dining-room tables. He considers a dining-room measuring only sixteen feet by fifteen far too cramped; and when Mr Arabin suggests a round table he is horrified: round tables are the most abominable pieces of furniture ever invented. A dining-room table should be a goodly board which can be extended almost indefinitely to accommodate the requisite number of guests. It should also be almost black with perpetual polishing and shine like a looking-glass. He connects round tables with oak, and the unseemly new fashion of spreading a cloth on the table with Dissenters and calico-printers who know no better.28
When Barchester Towers was published in 1857 the elegant comfort of early Victorian rooms had given way to the fussiness and elaborate ornamentation which had become so popular and spread so fast after the Great Exhibition of 1851 had opened its doors upon an awesome display of voluptuously ornate and ingenious objects and upon interiors overwhelming in their richness. ‘Wherever you can rest there decorate,’ was the advice of John Ruskin, the champion of the Gothic revival whose influence on the decorative arts was decisive; and, in eager obedience to this doctrine, the Victorians rejected the restraint and simplicity in interior decoration that their grandparents had so much admired. Bareness was looked upon with profound disapproval; rooms were crowded with a jumble of exotically decorated furniture, ornaments, pictures, looking-glasses, screens, and bric-à-brac of every kind. Dining-room tables, frequently required to accommodate twenty-four guests, were covered with epergnes and cruets, salvers and urns, candlesticks, silver breadbaskets, bon-bon dishes and wine coolers. Plain, rose-coloured silk-lined walls were overlaid with flocked and patterned papers. Back-to-back settees stood upon the thick pile of Brussels carpets. Porcelain figures, papier-mâché boxes and cut-glass bowls were set above white marble fireplaces beside French clocks, candelabra and gilt-framed chimney glasses. On console tables stood models of Swiss chalets brought back from Lausanne and on grand pianos Benares trays, presents from sons and nephews in the Poona Horse. The embroidered handles of bell pulls hung down beside huge landscapes and seascapes, prints, silhouettes and oleographs, sepia photographs of dead relatives, and reproductions of the pictures of Sir Edwin Landseer, Frith, Mulready and Lord Leighton. Spring-upholstered chairs and sofas banished earlier, less plushy seats to the attic or the saleroom. Towards the end of the century, under the influence of the prophet of craftsmanship, William Morris, the more sophisticated Victorians sent their now unfashionable ‘Exhibition art’ to the saleroom also. Morris – whose designs for wallpaper, fabrics, carpets and furniture began a new chapter in the history of interior decoration – urged people to have nothing in their houses except those objects that they knew to be useful or believed to be beautiful; and gradually they began to take heed of his advice. For more than a generation, though, the English, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, were gripped by a passion to ‘deck and improve’ their homes with expensive furniture, pictures, ponderous mirrors, table lamps and padded chairs.29
One of the most ubiquitous pieces of middle-class Victorian furniture was the davenport, a small writing-table the prototype of which had been made for Captain Davenport by the firm of Gillow in the eighteenth century. Numerous variations on the basic form were produced; and every morning in thousands of homes all over England women could be seen sitting down at their davenports occupied in one of a weekday morning’s principal activities, in writing notes and letters, answering and issuing invitations, checking household accounts.
After the middle of the century most women used steel pens made in Birmingham with bone, cedar or ebonized handles, quill pens being favoured only by the old-fashioned – the penknives, which had formerly been essential for trimming and sharpening the quills, now usually being used for other purposes. Fountain pens came into general use in the late 1880s; and by 1895 Harrods store was offering several different types from 2s 6d to half a guinea, the Lacon fountain pen, the ‘only one with a Transparent Barrel which enables the writer to see at a glance when the ink requires to be replenished’, costing 7s gd. Ink had formerly been made at home from powdered galls mixed with camphor; but in 1832 Dr Henry Stephens, who had been supplying his friends with an excellent mixture, decided to manufacture it commercially. Soon after bottled ink had appeared in the shops, machine-made blotting paper was also available. This had been manufactured since 1859 by the nephew of John Slade, originator of ‘Slade’s Original Hand-Made Blotting’, who had recognized the possibilities in a batch of faulty writing paper which had soaked up the ink applied to it. Fine sand was, however, still used to dry ink occasionally, as it had been for centuries; and pounce was, indeed, still in use for drying ink on hand-written documents in solicitors’ offices in the 1920s.
Before the machine-made envelopes manufactured by Messrs de la Rue and Hill became popular in about 1850, letters were generally sealed by a wafer. Rowland Hill mentioned ‘the little paper bags called envelopes’ in 1839; and Mulready designed an envelope which was put on the market when adhesive stamps were introduced with the Penny Postage in 1840. But these early envelopes proved to be largely unsaleable and great numbers of them had to be destroyed.30 Soon afterwards, however, they were available in all shapes, colours and sizes – from Dark Silurian Double Thick and unglazed Turkay Mill to Azure-laid Papyrus Antiqua – and, like mourning writing paper, with five different sizes of black borders, Italian, narrow, middle, broad and extra broad.31
After luncheon, her letters all written, the lady of the house would go out to pay calls, leave cards or merely to take ‘carriage exercise’. She would return, perhaps, for afternoon tea; and in the evenings after dinner settle down to her needlework or woolwork while her husband read aloud or her daughters played the piano. Some might copy music or sketch, or model fruit in wax or press flowers into albums or make pictures with shells or look at photographs through stereoscopes or play a game of cribbage or halma. And, in the more religious houses, there would be family prayers in the evening as well as in the morning, the servants coming into the room to kneel down in front of chairs facing the wall on one side, the members of the family on the other, the master of the household, also on his knees, reading from a prayer book at a table in the middle.
On Sundays servants and family prayed together in church where they were similarly divided.
The servants wore bonnets on Sundays and went to church and sat in their own pews [an old Edwardian lady wrote, recalling her childhood in the 1850s]. There were boxed-in pews in those days where the quality sat in state and the poor people waited in church until the gentlefolk had made their way out. The men and
women of the lesser orders were separated, the men sitting on one side, the women on the other … Before oil lamps were used there were tall iron candlesticks fastened to the end of each pew.32
55 Leisure Hours
Describing the life he had known in Manchester in the 1860s, Thomas Wright, alias ‘the journeyman engineer’, recalled most vividly the excited anticipation with which people waited on Saturdays for the ringing of the one o’clock bell that signalled the end of the week’s work. They relished being able to stroll home unhurriedly to their dinner and, after dinner, having the time to smoke their pipes ‘still in a leisurely and contemplative manner unknown to them at other times’. Then they would go down to the public baths, taking their clean clothes with them to put on when they had washed, and bringing away their working clothes with them. After that, attired in cord or moleskin trousers, black coats and waistcoasts, caps ‘of somewhat sporting character’ and mufflers ‘more or less gaudy’, they would go out shopping with their wives, or stroll round the town, looking in the shop windows, ‘particularly of newsagents where illustrated papers and periodicals are displayed’, or they might go booming about the town with a factory band, parade up and down a suburban field in the uniform of the local volunteer corps, go to the greyhound races or, perhaps, go out pigeon-flying.
Pigeon-flying was a weekly sport, especially among the tattooed men in the poorer quarters of the parish [wrote Richard Church of his childhood in Battersea], costers with flat black caps and hoarse voices, chokers instead of collars and ties, and boots of a ginger-yellow. These men, scrubbed and shaved, red-faced and ‘blue-lipped’, would rattle off on their carts behind ponies and donkeys … anxiously guarding long wicker baskets out of which floated the soft sub-chorus of pigeon voices, and the fidget of crowded feathers.1
Families with young children might go to public parks. Following complaints that it was ‘scarcely in the power of the factory workmen to taste the breath of nature or to look upon its verdure’, three parks had been opened in 1847 in Manchester, the first town to have such open spaces after Birkenhead.2 Three years later a park was opened in Bradford; soon afterwards there was one in Bolton; and by the end of the century there was scarcely a town in England which had not provided one. Most towns also by then had museums and public libraries, either run by the local authorities or by private institutions, Manchester being the first large town to take advantage of the Free Libraries Act of 1850 which enabled up to a halfpenny rate to be spent on library services provided two-thirds of the ratepayers approved of the levy.
As well as museums and public libraries there were concert halls and mechanics’ institutes, literary and philosophical societies, lecture rooms and art galleries. Outings were organized by Sunday Schools, trade unions, friendly societies, and Nonconformist chapels; readings and talks with lantern slides were provided by missionary societies and mutual improvement groups; concerts were given by choral societies and amateur orchestras. There were, indeed, opportunities enough for those who wanted to improve their minds, to widen the range of their interests or to pursue an artistic or cultural inclination, to do so. And there were, as it was frequently regretted, ample opportunities for the pursuit of more raffish and self-indulgent pleasures. The author of Liverpool Life: Its Pleasures, Practices and Pastimes, which was published in 1856, found that a man wandering about the city on a Saturday night could certainly have met with a perfectly respectable gathering of artisans and middle-class families enjoying a show combining wholesome comedy with sentimental songs and monologues. But he would also have come across numerous low dance-halls and smoky taverns, places where prostitutes and ‘dollymops’ paraded up and down among the customers; concert rooms where vulgar songs were sung and more or less naked girls adopted poses plastiques; fairgrounds like the one on the corner of Lime Street and Roe Street where a ‘medical galvanist’ gave an obscene demonstration of the effects of laughing gas and where the targets in the shooting gallery included the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon III, Prince Albert and the Queen.3 The Saturday night wanderer would also have passed countless taverns and gin palaces where drinking continued for most of the night.
The number of such places in the country as a whole was enormous, particularly in poorer quarters of large towns where there were even more than the national average in 1861 of one for every 186 people in England and Wales. The amount of alcohol consumed in these places was astonishing. In 1875, ‘the most bibulous year on record’, the consumption stood at 1.3 gallons of spirits and 34.4 gallons of beer per head of the population.4 Never again were the English to drink so much. Even of wine, of which well over half a gallon was drunk per head in the early 1870s, the consumption was higher than it was to be until after the Second World War. Public drunkenness was common, particularly on such occasions as Derby Day, at other race meetings, and at such prize-fights as that celebrated contest in a Hampshire field in 1860 when thousands of spectators came by train to see Tom Sayers, the small and doughty English champion, knocked down repeatedly by the huge American John C. Heenan in a drawn fight of thirty-seven rounds that lasted over two hours. There was also much drunkenness after football matches.
Until the introduction of the Saturday half holiday in the middle of the century, football had almost been forgotten as a popular working-class game and – although condemned by most boards of governors and headmasters as a vulgar activity fit only, in the words of Samuel Butler, Headmaster of Shrewsbury School, for ‘butchers’ boys and farm labourers’ – it had been taken over and kept alive by the public schools. Under a variety of different rules, or, more often, loosely observed customs, it had been played at Charterhouse and Westminster, at Harrow and Eton, at Winchester, Shrewsbury and Rugby; and at most of these schools it was a rough and tumble game in which handling of the ball and a good deal of violent tackling and hacking were allowed. All schools, however, except Rugby, insisted that when caught the ball had to be dropped and kicked with the feet, the Rugby players alone being permitted to hold on to the ball and run with it. At the universities attempts were made from time to time to agree upon some commonly accepted set of rules by which players might be bound; but it was not until the Football Association was founded in 1863 that such regulations were drawn up, and even then not all teams chose to accept them. Blackheath School, for example, insisted upon retaining the old indulgences which had permitted the kicking of shins and the handling of the ball – as in the version of the game played at Rugby – and from their method of playing football, or soccer as it was colloquially known from 1891, the game of Rugby football developed.
Attempts were made by well-meaning gentlemen players from the public schools and universities to introduce the game under Football Association rules to the working classes in industrial areas. But these attempts met at first with little success; and when in 1871 the Old Harrovian Secretary of the Football Association established a competition for a challenge cup open to all the fifty clubs by then affiliated to the Association, only fifteen accepted, nearly all of them clubs formed by public school old boys’ societies. One or other of these clubs won the cup for the first eleven years of the competition until, in 1883, the Old Etonians were beaten by Blackburn Olympics, a team largely composed of iron foundry and cotton workers, who took the cup north to the strains of brass bands and the cheers of supporters described as ‘a northern horde’ distinguished by their ‘uncouth garb’ and ‘strong oaths’.5
By then a large number of other working-class clubs had been formed, many of them founded by church or chapel congregations. Among them were Aston Villa, Birmingham City, Bolton Wanderers, Everton, Liverpool and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Others were founded by schools, among them Queen’s Park Rangers (Droop Street School) and Leicester City (Wyggeston School); by cricket teams, as in the case of Derby County, Preston North End, Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United; or by factories and industrial firms, like Manchester United (which was formed by workers employed by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company), West
Ham United (founded by men from the Thames Iron Works) and Crewe Alexander (established by railwaymen whose meetings were held at the Alexander Hotel).6
Most of the successful teams came from the north. Between 1883 and 1915 the Football Association Cup was won only once, in 1901, by a southern team, Tottenham Hotspur; and the wide and growing popularity of the game in the northern and Midland counties led to charges being made for tickets of admission to football grounds, then to the introduction of professional players, the best of whom, however, received no more than the wages of a skilled artisan. By 1910 there were 6000 professional footballers in the country, and ever increasing numbers of football supporters. The cup final, which had been watched by no more than 17,000 in 1888, attracted a crowd of 120,000 in 1913. After the outbreak of war the next year the number of matches played that autumn and winter rapidly declined, as clubs called upon players and spectators alike to join up. By the end of 1914 some 500,000 men, about half the total number of volunteers, had enlisted through the agency of football clubs. But professional football had by then become, as it was to be again when the war was over, the principal entertainment of a large majority of the working class.
At the same time cricket, which appealed to a far wider social range, was becoming a nationally popular game as county sides developed, as the All-England and United All-England elevens toured the country, as such players as W. G. Grace – the large, bearded doctor who played for Gloucester County – became household names, and as the first visit by an Australian team in 1878 inaugurated a rivalry which was to be pursued in the continuing struggle for the Ashes, the remains of a bail burned by Australian supporters mourning their eleven’s defeat by the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1883.
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