The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  As cricket and soccer matches drew ever larger crowds, new games were invented and old ones modernized. Rugby football, governed since 1871 by the Rugby Union, an organization that banned professionalism within its member clubs, developed into a game which was almost as popular with the middle classes as association football was with the workers; and in South Wales, Lancashire and on the Scottish border, where it was played professionally, rugger – like soccer, a slang word that came from the universities – attracted large crowds of working-class supporters. Tennis, an adaptation of the medieval game, was patented in 1874 under the name of ‘Sphairistike’ by an army officer whose original rules were altered three years later by the Wimbledon All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club. Golf, which had been played in Scotland for centuries and since 1608 at Blackheath, where it had been introduced by James I’s Scottish courtiers, was also growing in popularity, the Royal North Devon Club having been founded in 1864 at Westward Ho and the Royal Liverpool Club at Hoylake in 1869, the year in which polo was introduced from India. Women as well as men played golf and in 1885 were considered to do so expertly enough to be admitted to the full courses from the shorter ones to which they had previously been relegated. They also, of course, played croquet, a game which had come over from France by way of Ireland and whose white hoops and coloured post could be seen on the lawn behind nearly every middle-class house.

  Inside those houses in the evenings, since inactivity was considered reprehensible, not to say immoral, all the members of the family occupied themselves in playing games or reading or in some other educational or artistic pursuit. Some would draw or paint, while others did fancy-work, rolled paper-work or embroidery; they made models in wax or pictures with shells; pressed flowers in books; painted trays; decorated bellpulls; pasted postcards and pictures from magazines onto screens; sewed dresses from the cut-out paper patterns in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. There were kaleidoscopes to play with, and stereoscopes, and zoetropes which, when quickly revolved, made pictures of animals run and jump. There were magic lanterns and folios of prints, watercolours and photographs to look at. There were jigsaws and all kinds of games to play, card games and board games, paper and pencil games, whist and loo, piquet and Pope Joan, halma, solitaire and corinthian. Above all there was patience, and there was music.

  In the houses of the richer families, professional musicians were employed to perform before the guests; but in less privileged households the entertainment had to be provided by the members of the family and their guests themselves. No self-respecting middle-class home was without a piano; few daughters were not taught to play, though far from all played tunefully; and most fathers liked to sing. The result seems often to have been the kind of party that the wife of the Rev. Archer Clive, Rector of Solihull, regretted having given one Sunday evening in 1846:

  It was not a success. There was too much bad music tonight. A little is all very well, but tonight it was the staple. The wretched Iringhams and Edwards brought their young children, to do them good as they said, not thinking of the harm to us. The Crowthers played something wrong all through the first bar, and then got up a horrid glee for two pianoforte players, one harp and four voices, which was truly dreadful for discord. I sang as badly as usual. And Archer … set off on the wrong note and kept steadily wrong all the way.7

  While young children were not often taken to musical parties, adults joined in children’s games with unremitting zest. They played blindman’s buff, hide-and-seek, hunt the thimble, come-and-sit-ye-down-by-me-love, charades, twirl the teacher, musical chairs, postman’s knock, shadow buff, my lady’s toilet and an extraordinary variety of other games whose rules – such as they were – have long since been forgotten. And when the company collapsed exhausted, there was sure to be some member of the party who could keep them entertained with a conjuring trick or a comic song or by making a tortoise from muscat raisins and their stalks, by carving a pig out of an apple, or constructing a set of vampire’s fangs from an orange peel.

  The excitement engendered at these evening parties frequently came close to hysteria, particularly at Christmas, when the party season was at its height. ‘Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man’s buffings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new years!’ wrote Dickens of one happy Christmas when his children were young. He had taken them to a party given by his friend, the actor William Charles Macready, and had performed a country dance with Mrs Macready; displayed his remarkable skill as a conjuror, producing a plum pudding from an empty saucepan and heating it up over a fire in Clarkson Stanfield’s top hat (‘without damaging the lining’), changing a box of bran into a live guinea-pig. After supper the guests had all got ‘madder than ever’ with the ‘pulling of crackers, the drinking of champagne and the making of speeches’. Then the dancing started and Dickens’s friend, John Forster, had seized Jane Carlyle round the waist and whirled her into the thick of it. ‘Oh, for the love of heaven let me go!’ she cried out. ‘You are going to dash my brains out against the folding doors!’ ‘Your brains!’ he had answered. ‘Who cares about their brains here? Let them go!’

  At Dickens’s own house on Christmas Day, as in thousands of others, the family sat round the big mahogany table in the dining-room, surrounded by the holly and ivy which covered the walls and dangled from the gas brackets; and when the naming pudding came in they would greet it by clapping, and Dickens would give his traditional toast, ‘Here’s to us all! God bless us!’ The toast would be repeated on New Year’s Eve as the church bells pealed; then one of his daughters would play the piano, and there would be dancing, and the master would lead off with the cook, jigging about and clapping his hands to make everyone join in, doing lively, encouraging pirouettes behind those who were slow to do so.8

  Nearly everyone looked forward to the Christmas festivities then, to the parties and the presents under the Christmas tree; the kissing under the mistletoe, the visit of Father Christmas; the carolers with their lanterns singing in the snow; the walk to church where, for once in the year, grown-ups pretended not to notice if the girls whispered or the boys let spiders loose across the hymnbooks in the family pew; the drives to dances in the pony-cart with straw and hot bricks piled on the floor to keep the feet warm, and hot baked potatoes held in muffs; the evenings by the Are reading books and newspapers and magazines.

  The number of these published was enormous, as were the circulation figures of the more widely-read periodicals, such as The Cornhill Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, Punch and Dickens’s Household Words. The Illustrated London News, which was founded in 1842, was soon selling 60,000 copies an issue. Sales reached 130,000 in 1851 after the paper had published drawings of Joseph Paxton’s designs for the Crystal Palace. The next year, after a special issue had been devoted to the Duke of Wellington’s funeral, sales rose to 150,000; and in 1855, partly due to the reproduction of Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Crimean War and the abolition of the newspaper tax, they rose to 200,000 copies a week. By 1863 well over 300,000 copies were being sold.9 All the Year Round, a magazine established in 1859 in which A Tale of Two Cities was serialized, also sold 300,000 copies a week.10

  The circulation of newspapers was not so high as that of these popular magazines – even after 1855 when the ‘newspaper Tax’, which had once been as high as 4d, was abolished – but there were far more newspapers published than there are today. In 1861, when its price was 3d, the circulation of The Times was rather more than 60,000. At that time The Times had no rival: the Daily News had no more than 6000, the Morning Post a mere 4500. But soon the circulation of the Daily News, which sold for a penny, overtook that of The Times; and so did that of the Daily Telegraph, while racy Sunday papers such as Lloyd’s and Reynold’s sold far more copies than any of them. Weekly newspapers sold in even greater numbers. Well over 2.2 million copies of these were sold in London; and in the provinces there were few large towns without a weekly as well as a daily paper. Some towns had several
: there were no less than seven in Cheltenham; Newcastle-on-Tyne had five as well as five dailies. There were over 100 papers serving the London suburbs.11

  The demand for religious and educational literature was almost insatiable. Religious tracts, books of sermons and religious family papers like the Christian World, Leisure Hour and Christian Herald, were all published in huge numbers. In 1864 the total circulation of monthly periodicals of a religious nature published in London was almost 2 million; and the number of religious books published each year was equally impressive. According to the Publisher’s Circular of 1870, new books on religious matters far outstripped publications on any other subject. ‘Juvenile works and tales’ came a poor second, and these included many more books of a religious nature. Books of sermons sold particularly well and many a clergyman made far more out of publishing them than he received as his stipend.

  Yet at the same time there was an equally voracious demand for books of entertainment, from romantic novels and melodramatic tales of crime to the works of Trollope, Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot. Widely read, these authors were well rewarded. Anthony Trollope was paid £3000 by the proprietors of The Cornhill Magazine for The Small House at Allington in 1864; Thackeray was given £6000 for The Virginians; in 1869 Dickens received £7500 against the profits of the first 25,000 copies of The Mystery of Edwin Drood; and George Eliot was offered £10,000 for Romola in 1862. Scores of thousands of people subscribed to Charles Edward Mudie’s ‘Select Circulating Library’ which stocked 2000 copies of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and well over 3000 copies of her Silas Marner.12

  On most afternoons in the middle of the century an immense and rowdy crowd of Londoners, porters, dockers, costermongers, pale-faced dustmen, black-faced sweeps, their wives and girlfriends, could be seen in Waterloo Road, jostling and shouting at each other around the doors of the Royal Victoria Theatre. As soon as the money-taker had taken up his post the customary wild rush for the staircase began, men jabbing and pushing at the backs in front of them, girls – several of them with babies in their arms – shrieking and clutching their bonnets. Having parted with their threepences (three-halfpence for infants) they tumbled into the gallery which held two thousand people and sat packed close together on the benches, young boys at the back drawing their knees to their chins and rolling over the massed heads below to force a place for themselves near the front. Beneath the sputtering gas jets the men took off their coats, revealing cross braces over white shirts or, here and there, an expanse of bare shoulder through a ragged vest, while the women removed their bonnets and hung them along the iron railings – or on the spiked partition boards that separated the gallery from the rest of the vast theatre – where they served as targets for the customary bits of orange peel and nutshell. The noise was so deafening that when the orchestra began playing it was impossible to hear a note of music, the puffed out cheeks of the trumpeters and the flailing drumsticks being the only indication that the overture had begun. Sooner or later a fight was sure to begin, and then everyone stood up whistling and shouting until the commotion suddenly stopped as the curtain rose to shouts of ‘Silence!’ ‘Order!’ ‘Ord-a-a-a-r!’13

  As at numerous other similar theatres in London and the provinces, melodramas were followed by farces and burlesques; and in the intervals between the pieces, while sellers of ham sandwiches, pigs’ feet and porter hawked their wares, there were dances and comic songs, Highland flings and reels, recitations, ballads, monologues, clowns, acrobats and posture artists. Indeed, the entertainment offered by such theatres had changed little in a hundred years. The number and variety of theatres, however, had greatly increased to cater for the hundreds of thousands of working men and women both in London and the provinces who, though earning less than £2 a week, would spend every other evening watching some performance or another.

  There were immense theatres like Astley’s, rebuilt in 1862, and smaller theatres where highly coloured versions of Shakespeare and plays about ancient Rome alternated with ballets, pantomimes and cabarets. There were respectable provincial theatres which featured programmes of ‘vocal entertainments’ and ‘repertoires of old and new pieces’ followed by performances featuring ‘infant geniuses’ or ‘Ethiopian marionettes’. There were also decidedly disreputable places of entertainment such as Sadler’s Wells, described by Dickens as ‘a bear garden, resounding with foul language, oaths, cat-calls, shrieks, yells, blasphemy, obscenity’; and there were ‘penny gaffs’, those upper floors of shops where disreputable entertainers took part in obscene dances or sang coarse songs and where ‘the most immoral acts’ were represented by performers, ‘rude pictures’ of whom in their ‘most humorous’ attitudes were displayed outside beneath coloured lamps. And there were numerous private theatres where stage-struck amateurs paid fees to play the parts, most of these amateurs, so Dickens said, being ‘dirty boys, low copying-clerks in attorneys’ offices, capacious headed youths from City counting-houses, Jews whose business, as lenders of fancy dress [was] a sure passport to the amateur stage, shopboys who now and then [mistook] their master’s money for their own, and a choice miscellany of idle vagabonds. The lady performers [paid] nothing for their characters, and, it is needless to add, [were] usually selected from one class of society.’14

  There were song and supper rooms of which Evans Late Joys in King Street, Covent Garden, haunt of wealthy Bohemians, was one of the best known; and there were tavern concert rooms that developed into the music-halls of which the Canterbury in Westminster Bridge Road was one of the earliest. This was opened in 1852 by Charles Morton, the ‘Father of the Halls’, who built and managed numerous similar places over a period of more than fifty years, including the Tivoli, the Palace, the Alhambra and the Empire. J. E. Ritchie, author of The Night Side of London, described a visit to the Canterbury in the 1850s:

  A well-lighted entrance attached to a public-house indicates that we have reached our destination. We proceed up a few stairs, along a passage lined with handsome engravings, to a bar. We pay 6d if we take a seat in the body of the hall, and 9d if we ascend into the gallery.

  We make our way leisurely along the floor of the hall, which is well lighted, and capable of holding 1500 people. A balcony extends round the room in the form of a horse-shoe.

  At the opposite end to that at which we enter is the platform, on which are placed a grand piano and a harmonium on which the performers play in the intervals when the previous singers have left the stage.

  The chairman sits just beneath them. It is dull work for him, but there he must sit drinking and smoking cigars from seven to twelve o’clock.

  The room is crowded, and almost every gentleman has a pipe or cigar in his mouth. Evidently the majority present are respectable mechanics or small tradesmen, with their wives and daughters and sweethearts. Now and then you see a few fast clerks and warehousemen. Everyone is smoking, and everyone has a glass before him; but the class that come here are economical, and chiefly confine themselves to pipes and porter.15

  Most of Morton’s other music-halls were as respectable as the Canterbury; but there were music-halls far less so. In these the customers came to eat and drink, to talk to the barmaids or to pick up one of the prostitutes who strolled in the promenades, rather than to watch the performances. But after the authorities had required that liquor should be served in bars outside the auditorium rather than within it, and after the tables and chairs of the earlier halls had been replaced by rows of fixed seats, music-halls became increasingly reputable and grew fast in size and numbers. By 1868 there were twenty-eight music-halls in London and 300 in the rest of the country. There were ten in Sheffield, nine in Birmingham and eight in both Manchester and Leeds.16 In the 1880s more and even larger halls were built and the older ones reconstructed and enlarged. The Tivoli Music Hall in the Strand, which was erected at a cost of £300,000, not only had a restaurant adjoining the enormous auditorium but private dining-rooms as well. The subsequent variety houses, like Edward Moss’s Lo
ndon Hippodrome opened in 1900, and the Coliseum in St Martin’s Lane, designed in 1904 for Oswald Stoll, were equally impressive. So were the theatres which Moss and Stoll and their rivals built in the provinces.17

  While music-halls and variety houses grew ever more large and sumptuous, the prices of seats did not greatly increase. At the Canterbury in the early days, the cheaper tickets cost 6d; in the 1860s at the South London Palace of Varieties in Lambeth, which could accommodate audiences of up to 4000, gallery seats were 3d, balcony and stalls is; and at the Oxford Music Hall, Tottenham Road, the price of a ticket for a good seat plus a five-course meal was 2s 6d. A generation later music-hall seats cost little more. The rewards of the performers, on the other hand, increased rapidly, though the pay of the best had never been low: Morton’s singers at the Canterbury got as much as £20 a week.18 Blondin, the tightrope performer, and the Channel swimmer, Captain Webb, who both appeared at the Alhambra, received up to £100 a performance in the 1880s; Dan Leno, the comedian, who was earning £5 a week in his early career at the Foresters’, Whitechapel, could command £100 a week at Drury Lane in performances in pantomimes, shows in which the most popular stars, like Vesta Tilley, could regularly earn £350 a week and some as much as £500. Famous actors, who could be induced to appear in playlets or excerpts at variety houses, received even more: Herbert Tree was once paid £750 a week at the Palace and Sarah Bernhardt £1000 at the Coliseum.19

  While music-halls and variety houses prospered, theatres which presented less popular productions began to attract a new kind of audience. For this the queen was to some extent responsible. At the beginning of her reign, when wishing to provide a dramatic entertainment for her guests, she had summoned various performers to Windsor. But since then she had attended the Prince of Wales’s Theatre for a performance of The Corsican Brothers, a romantic drama adapted from the French by Dion Boucicault; and this visit to a public theatre, which provoked a good deal of criticism at the time, led to many families, who would not have dreamed of entering such places a generation earlier, becoming regular theatregoers. They now found that they could with perfect propriety go to the Prince of Wales’s whose fortunes were made by Tom Robertson, an accomplished dramatist and stage-manager who insisted, as Garrick had done, that actors perform their parts in a natural way, without that declamatory, histrionic method of speaking which had been adopted in most theatres since the time of Sarah Siddons and which Charles Mathews and his wife, Madame Vestris, had vainly endeavoured to supersede at the Olympic and the Criterion. They could also go with propriety to the Haymarket to which the actor-manager, Squire Bancroft, and his wife, Marie Wilton, moved in 1879; to the Court Theatre which was co-managed by John Hare before he moved to the St James’s and in which tea and coffee were served in the interval instead of spirits; to the Criterion where Charles Wyndham became manager in 1876; to the Lyceum where Ellen Terry acted with Henry Irving, whose performances determinedly rejected any compromise with the more restrained style of acting upon which Tom Robertson insisted; and to the Savoy where the operas by Gilbert and Sullivan had restored the reputation of the musical stage.