Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

It was generally agreed by successful middle-class men of taste that the main problem for industry and manufacture in general was the lack of an equivalent level of taste in the consumer to whom the resulting goods were being sold. Rather than producing goods to suit low tastes, they saw it as their job to improve the taste of the common man. The 1847 catalogue for an exhibition held by the Society spelled out their views:

It is a universal complaint among manufacturers that the taste for good art does not exist in sufficient extent to reward them for the cost of producing superior works; that the public prefers the vulgar, the gaudy, the ugly even, to the beautiful and perfect.

We are persuaded that, if artistic manufactures are not appreciated, it is because they are not widely enough known. We believe that when works of high merit, of British origin, are brought forward they will be thoroughly appreciated and thoroughly enjoyed. We believe that this exhibition, when thrown open gratuitously to all, will tend to improve the public taste.12

Even before this catalogue appeared, Henry Cole was on board and was already a prime mover in these improving exhibitions. He had joined the society only two years before, after designing a tea service as a prize submission under the pseudonym Felix Summerly. His submission had received the ultimate accolade: a prize, the commercial manufacture of his design, and, further, the purchase of the original service by Prince Albert. Cole was one of those Victorian powerhouses who produced so much, in so many fields, that it is hard to know when he slept. After a humble beginning as one of several clerks in the Record Commission, a junior civil-service post, he fell out with his superior over his pay. Instead of resigning, he promptly exposed his department as a haven for corruption and sinecures. After a lengthy investigation, Parliament found that he was in the right and in 1838 he was reinstated in the department at a more senior level. That same year he was seconded to help Rowland Hill with the creation of what shortly would become the new penny postage system. In the 1840s Cole became even busier: he designed what was probably the first Christmas card (see pp. 483—7); he wrote guidebooks to various tourist sights, including the National Gallery, Westminster Abbey and Hampton Court; as Felix Summerly he began to design domestic wares for manufacture; he wrote children’s books which from 1841 were published as the Home Treasury and were illustrated by the leading illustrators of the day; he designed for manufacture children’s toys that included building blocks, ‘geometrically made, one-eighth of the size of real bricks; with Plans and Elevations’, a ‘Tesselated Pastime’ that was ‘formed out of Minton’s Mosaics with Book of Patterns’, and, what may have been the first paintbox for children, a ‘Colour Box for Little Painters’, which, it boasted, held ‘the ten best colours; Slabs and Brushes; Hints and Directions and Specimens of Mixed Tints’.13 In his spare moments he contributed regularly to several periodicals, carrying on his various reforming campaigns in the press and by pamphlets.

One of his campaigns was for railway reform, and it was this that moved him into the next great phase of his life. John Scott Russell, his fellow campaigner, a railway engineer and the editor of the Railway Chronicle, introduced him to the Society of Arts in 1845. By 1846 he was on the committee, and he and Russell had been asked to mount the next exhibition. Russell had earlier put up £50 ‘for a series of models and designs for useful objects calculated to improve general taste’, but not enough people had entered to permit the entries to be exhibited. Cole’s and Russell’s 1847 exhibition faced the same problem: manufacturers, fearing piracy of technique and style, did not want to have their products displayed. But Russell and Cole were determined to draw in enough entries for a good exhibition, and when they managed to attract over 20,000 visitors many manufacturers realized that the enormous potential for sales and promotion far outweighed the slight risk that industrial secrets might be stolen. The following year, instead of scratching around for entries, the Society was forced to devise rules that would limit the number of entries flooding in; this time, 70,000 people flocked to see what was new, what was different, what was interesting.

With that success under his belt, Cole moved on to his next campaign: the staging of another improving exhibition, but this time on a national scale. Albert was even less enthusiastic than he had been with Whishaw three years earlier, refusing either to become involved himself or to approach the government for any formal involvement. Cole was not daunted—Cole was never daunted. The RSA had highlighted the lack of good industrial and domestic design in the country in general, and from commercial manufacturers in particular. Now Cole became involved with a buoyant and popular campaign to promote new schools of design, to be run under government aegis, founding the Journal of Design to promote his cause. A parliamentary commission was set up, loaded with Cole-ites. By the kind of coincidence that Cole was pre-eminent in engineering, its plan—the reform of design and manufacture, and the role of the state in fostering that reform—was exactly what Cole intended his next, national, exhibition should deal with. In the meantime his 1849 RSA exhibition was even more successful than the previous two: Prince Albert agreed to present the prizes, and Queen Victoria gave sovereign approval by loaning an item for display.

For Cole’s grander plan, however, the government, in the way of governments in all places and at all times, offered merely lukewarm enthusiasm—and even that only if private sponsors could be found to guarantee that the costs would be covered. But Albert, sensing the momentum, was now ready to come on board. A Royal Commission was established, with Albert as honorary president, and Cole—never one for half measures—widened the Exhibition’s scope to include the entire world. Thomas Cubitt, the greatest speculative builder of his age, had given a rough estimate for the cost of realizing Cole’s dream: £50,000 for the building costs and £5,000 for administrative costs, with another £20,000 needed for prize money.* A Mr Fuller put up £10,000 for prizes, and the Messrs Munday committed to underwriting the project in return for a percentage of the gate money.

While many discussed the elevating aspects of art, science and education, Cole was promising the businessmen of the City that ‘some hundred thousand people [would] come flowing into London from all parts of the world by railways and steamboats to see the great exhibition’, and that businesses would feel ‘a direct and obvious benefit’ from it. The secretary to the executive committee produced a list of those who could expect to profit: the arts, agriculture, manufacture and trade, ‘whether as producers, distributors or consumers’. To win over popular opinion, advertising was actively used. The Royal Commission sent out placards reproducing a speech that the Conservative leader Lord Stanley—soon to be prime minister as the Earl of Derby—made in favour of the Exhibition, for public display. Posters were printed to put on railwaystation platforms and in trains, and the commissioners arranged for favourable pieces to appear in the papers.14 The kind of arguments that are now used routinely for the promotion of tourism as an economybooster were developed for the first time: that visitors would arrive, benefiting everyone from hotelkeepers to omnibus operators to food suppliers; that trade would be advertised both to home consumers and to audiences abroad; that, in effect, Britain would be displayed to the world as ‘the emporium of the commercial, and mistress of the entire world’, as the under-sheriff for London put it, rather more poetically than one might expect.15

Cole’s plans for the Exhibition were growing ever larger, and enthusiasm from the public bodies to whom he spoke was increasing too. He soon realized that hundreds of small investors might fund the Exhibition more lavishly, while demanding far less—or no—overall control. He bought Munday’s out for just over £5,000, and began to solicit the support of local communities across the nation. Thousands of donations began to flood in, with more than 400 groups of merchants, businessmen and industrialists gathering funds and organizing the exhibits to be sent from their own regions. Before 1849 was over, 3,000 subscribers had been signed up; another 3,000 followed less than two months later. Altogether, £522,179 was raised in this way.16

From the first, however, there was a tension over the aims of the Exhibition. There was no question that Albert saw the Exhibition as ‘a great collection of works of industry and art’, a place to demonstrate how technology had harnessed the natural world to create the Age of the Machine. With this in view, to show how man had become the master of nature, the committee elaborated an initial three-part outline of the subjects to be comprehended by the Exhibition—the raw materials of industry; the products manufactured from them; and the art used to beautify them—into a more formal thirty-section outline:

Sect. I:—Raw Materials and Produce, illustrative of the natural productions on which human industry is employed:—Classes 1 to 4

1. Mining and Quarrying, Metallurgy, and Mineral Products

2. Chemical and Pharmaceutical processes and products generally

3. Substances used as food

4. Vegetable and Animal Substances used in manufactures, implements, or for ornament

Sect. II:—Machinery for Agricultural, Manufacturing, Engineering, and other purposes and Mechanical Inventions,—illustrative of the agents which human ingenuity brings to bear upon the products of nature:—Classes 5 to 10

5. Machines for direct use, including Carriages, Railway and Naval Mechanisms

6. Manufacturing Machines and Tools

7. Mechanical, Civil Engineering, Architectural, and Building Contrivances

8. Naval Architecture, Military Engineering and Structures, Ordnance, Armour and Accoutrements

9. Agricultural and Horticultural Machines and Implements (exceptional)

10. Philosophical Instruments and Miscellaneous Contrivances, including processes depending on their use, Musical, Horological, Acoustical and Surgical Instruments.

Sect. III:—Classes 11—29.—illustrative of the result produced by the operation of human industry upon natural produce

11. Cotton

12 & 15 [sic]. Woollen and Worsted

13. Silk and Velvet

14. Flax and Hemp

16. Leather, Saddlery and Harness, Boots and Shoes, Skins, Fur and Hair

17. Paper, Printing and Bookbinding

18. Woven, Felted, and Laid Fabrics, Dyed and Printed (including Designs)

19. Tapestry, Carpets, Floor-cloths, Lace, and Embroidery

20. Articles of Clothing for immediate, personal or domestic use

21. Cutlery, Edge and Hand Tools

22. General Hardware, including Locks and Grates

23. Works in Precious Metals, Jewellery, &c.

24. Glass

25. China, Porcelain, Earthenware, &c.

26. Furniture, Upholstery, Paper Hangings, Decorative Ceilings, Papier Maché, and Japanned Goods

27. Manufactures in Mineral Substances, for Building or Decoration

28. Manufactures from Animal and Vegetable Substances, not being Woven or Felted

29. Miscellaneous Manufactures and Small Wares.

Sect. IV: Fine Arts:—Class 30

30. Sculpture, Models, and Plastic Art, Mosaics, Enamels, &c. Miscellaneous objects of interest placed in the Main Avenue of the Building, not classified.17

Others, however, saw that there was a danger in this kind of display of pure commodity—a danger that the Prince and many organizers had apparently missed. William Felkin, a hosiery and lace manufacturer, and exactly the kind of man who might have been expected to welcome commercial possibilities, was vehement. In his book The Exhibition in 1851, of the Products and Industry of All Nations. Its Probable Influence upon Labour and Commerce he said, ‘This collection of objects from all countries, is not intended to be an Emporium for masses of raw and manufactured goods. These fill the granaries and factories, the warehouses and shops of the world…This is not intended to be a place where goods are to be sold, or orders given; not a bazaar, fair, or mart of business; if so, it would be a perfect Babel. No one could possibly thread his way with comfort, through such a mazy labyrinth.’18

This was the crux: was the Great Exhibition to be a museum, an exploration of the technology that had created, and been created by, the Industrial Revolution? Or was it to be a supermarket, a display of all the goods, all the commodities, of the age? During the organizational stages the non-commercial, educational aspect seemed to be winning out.

The opening-day ceremonies were not promising to those in the audience who were interested in mercantilism rather than the social whirl. As Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, and a staunch republican, noted:

To have rendered the pageant expressive, congruous, and really a tribute to Industry, the posts of honor next the Queen’s person should have been confided on this occasion to the children of Watt, of Arkwright and their compeers (Napoleon’s real conquerors;) while instead of Grandees and Foreign Embassadors [sic], the heirs of Fitch, of Fulton, of Jacquard, of Whitney, of Daguerre, &c., with the discoverers, inventors, architects and engineers to whom the world is primarily indebted for Canals, Railroads, Steamships, Electric Telegraphs, &c., &c., should have been specially invited to swell the Royal cortege. To pass over all these, and summon instead the descendants of some dozen lucky Norman robbers…any of whom would feel insulted by a report that his father or grandfather invented the Steam Engine or Spinning Jenny, is not the fittest way to honor Industry.19

Lyon Playfair, one of the commissioners, and a confidant of Prince Albert, agreed with Greeley’s views on the virtue of trade, if not with his republican interpretation: he warned that ‘Industry, to which this country owes her success among nations, has never been raised to the rank of a profession. For her sons there are no honours, no recognized social position.’20 He was determined that the Exhibition would alter that.*

This was all part of the series of underlying arguments about the aims of the Exhibition which was still grumbling on. With the arrival of factory production and mass markets, it was no longer clear that labour in itself retained the intrinsic moral value that had previously been attributed to it. Instead, the cheerleaders for the new age saw moral worth as now residing in the creation of goods for the masses. Industriousness and thrift had long been moral values. Now value for money and goods well manufactured joined them. To provide such items for the masses was in itself virtuous, thought Cole and his friends. They were providing the requisites for living a ‘decent’, a ‘respectable’ life—a life that, as closely as possible, both in commodities and in ideals, resembled the norms of the middle-class world. Not everyone agreed in the short term. The older view, that imbued labour itself with value, continued to hold sway for many. Hard work itself could still be considered to be worth more than the products that that work created. For example, a cabinet-maker, Charles McLean, had produced a mirror and console table for the Exhibition, but his local committee had rejected them as being of insufficient quality. He appealed, and Matthew Digby Wyatt, secretary to the executive committee, overruled the original decision, because, he thought, the ‘getting up…was most spirited’—that is, the mirror and table had taken a lot of time and effort to create, and this outweighed the fact that the design and craftsmanship were of indifferent quality.21 But the new philosophy, with new values—that of supply and demand, and what the market would bear—was in the ascendant. In the eighteenth century the political economist Adam Smith had seen production as the ‘Wealth of Nations’; now the Great Exhibition saw the wealth of nations in ‘the produce of all nations’. Product was taking over from process.

The Exhibition revolved entirely around the new industrial world, the possibilities that mass production had created. But the interpretation of that new world was still open. Was the Exhibition, therefore, about the value of work, or about the end result of that work—about how something was made, or about what could be purchased? Was it an ideal version of a museum, or was it a proto-supermarket? Was it education, or was it entertainment? What was it for? And for whom?

That the Great Exhibition was, in the widest possible sense, ‘for everybody’ could not be in doubt by the spring of 1851. There were souvenirs for sale across London: an endless stream of items reproducing images of the wildly popular Crystal Palace—items such as papier-mâché blotters, letter-openers and ‘segar’ (cigar) boxes. There were mementoes of specific moments, such as ‘Lane’s Telescopic View of the Opening of the Great Exhibition’, a paper cut-out with a perspective view of the main avenue of the Crystal Palace, complete with interior fountain and one of the trees that had been preserved inside the structure (to much admiration from the public for the engineering feat involved). There were handkerchiefs printed with caricatures of the main participants, including ‘Prince Allbut’. There were even gloves with maps of London printed on the palms, so that non-English-speaking visitors could have their route to the Crystal Palace traced out for them.22 But it was far more than the souvenir market that latched on to the commercial possibilities of the Great Exhibition. There were just as many straightforwardly marketdriven tie-ins as well, such as that promoted by Mr Folkard, ‘Grocer, Tea Dealer and Italian Warehouseman’, who advertised his new ‘Celebrated Exhibition Coffee’, blended from the beans of ‘all nations’, with labels covered with images of foreigners in national dress visiting the Exhibition.23 Examples of extreme self-reflexivity included exhibitions inside the Crystal Palace which displayed images of nothing less than the Crystal Palace itself. The ‘Cotton’ section had a tablecloth ‘in the centre [of which] is a view of the “Exhibition Building”…from the official design by Paxton, with emblematic borders representing Peace and Commerce with the nations; and a procession displaying the costumes of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, en route to the Exhibition’.24

But most exhibits were more concerned to display their manufacturers’ technical ingenuity. These were not the type of industrial processes that Albert had put so much faith in. They were not about ‘Raw Materials and Produce, illustrative of the natural productions on which human industry is employed’. They were instead ‘illustrative of the agents which human ingenuity brings to bear upon the products of nature’. Even here, Albert’s interpretation of the word ‘ingenuity’ and that of the manufacturers were worlds apart. Albert’s faith in the benefits conferred by the material world was interwoven with his belief in providence, social welfare and the moral value of labour. The manufacturers were more overtly concerned to show, through their command of technological innovation, how a new ideal domesticity might be formed, what goods were available that might be acquired, or at least aspired to. A ‘sportsman’s knife’ produced by Joseph Rodgers and Sons of Sheffield had a mother-of-pearl handle and eighty blades, on which were etched views of the Crystal Palace, Osborne House, Windsor Castle, a railway bridge designed by George Stephenson, a boar hunt, a stag hunt and more. The same manufacturer also produced a 56-blade knife that was less than 2 centimetres long, a razor with a view of Arundel Castle on the blade, and cutlery with 150 blades and a clock. A vase by Waterston & Brogden showed Britannia flanked by ‘Scotia’ and ‘Hibernia’, who were in turn surrounded by four heads representing the four quarters of the globe, while under them diamonds in the shape of a rose, a thistle and a shamrock surrounded images of Britons, Romans, Saxons, Normans and

a picture of the Battle of Hastings; under these were a range of national heroes—Nelson, Wellington, Milton, Shakespeare, Newton, Watt—all crowned with laurel wreaths, while at the very bottom lurked Truth,

Prudence, Industry and Fortitude.25 Such items were not goods that anyone needed—or would even think of buying. They were advertisements for the manufacturers, which was not at all what Albert had intended.

Other exhibits concentrated on innovations (many involving clothing) that offered relief from almost unimaginable situations: a safety hat for the prevention of concussion in case of a train crash; yachting outfits that had inbuilt flotation devices; corsets that ‘opened instantaneously in case of emergency’; a ‘Patent Ventilating Hat…the principle of ventilating being to admit air through a series of channels cut in thin cork, which is fastened to the leather lining, and a valve fixed to the top of the crown, which may be opened and shut at pleasure to allow perspiration to escape’.* Some promised speed—a doctor’s suit had a coat, waistcoat and trousers made in one piece, so in a night-time emergency the doctor might leap into them without any waste of time—while others went for economy—a ‘duplexa’ jacket reversed so that it could be worn as both a morning and an evening coat.27 Yet even the most implausible-seeming gimmickry may have had some practical results. Henry Mayhew, the journalist and social reformer, dated the cage crinoline (the metal frame that supported what today are referred to as ‘hoop’ skirts) to 1851, rather than the more usual 1854—6, and at least one historian of fashion has suggested that it may have developed from a display model at the Great Exhibition.28

Further items on display that seemed primarily designed to display the manufacturers’ originality included ‘harlequin’ furniture—furniture that served more than one purpose. One of the exhibits was a couch for a steamship which could be turned into a bed at night, while the base, made of cork, acted as a life raft should the worst came to the worst. Should the worst remain only imaginary, the couch had at one end ‘a self-acting washing-stand…containing requisites for the dressing room and toilette’, while the other end enclosed ‘a patent portable watercloset’. Also on show were church pews connected to a pulpit by guttapercha (rubber) pipes, to allow the hard of hearing to listen to the sermon; an ‘expanding hearse’; a silver nose, for those missing a nose of their own; a vase made of mutton fat and lard; an oyster-shucking machine; and a bed which in the morning tilted its occupant straight into a waiting bath.29

Even items with more long-standing recognized functions were not necessarily prized primarily for those functions. Of the thirty-eight pianos in the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue to the Exhibition, most were put, logically enough, in the section ‘Philosophical, Musical, Horological and Surgical Instruments’, but two were listed under ‘Furniture, upholstery’, because their papier-mâché cases were considered more important than their sound. Even many of the pianos listed under musical instruments had gimmicks, often to do with the problem of finding space for a grand piano in an average-sized house. Some instruments were simply designated ‘semi-grand’, an acknowledgement that getting a ‘real’ grand piano into a terraced house was like squeezing a quart into a pint pot. Broadwood’s, the most prestigious manufacturer (see pp. 355, 362—3), didn’t worry about such matters—the company knew its customers, and it showed four pianos, all grand. But others, with less exalted clients, who therefore had less grand houses which did not permit equivalently grand pianos, could not be so cavalier. Pierre Erard, who listed himself as ‘Inventor, Designer and Manufacturer’, had a range of sizes to show: ‘ornamented extra-grand; extra-grand with pedal keys; small grand…grand oblique [which from the picture looks like a decorated upright piano], ornamented in the Elizabethan style…grand cottage; reduced cottage…’