Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

Others had more elaborate objects to show. George Frederick Greiner had a semi-grand ‘constructed on the principle of the speaking-trumpet’; while Smyth and Roberts’s piano was ‘on the principle of the violincello’. John Brinsmead was far more worried about appearance than sound, and showed a piano whose ‘case permits the instrument to be placed in any part of the room. Embroidered device in the central panel.’ Another manufacturer enclosed his piano’s workings in plate glass instead of wood; yet another highlighted the case’s ‘paintings of mother-of-pearl on glass’. Richard Hunt meanwhile joined in the general enthusiasm for harlequin furniture. His piano was ‘a dining or drawing room table, [which] stands upon a centre block, or pedestal, and contains a pianoforte (opening with spring-bolts) on the grand principle, with a closet containing music composed by the inventor’. William Jenkins and Son had a ‘registered expanding and collapsing pianoforte for gentlemen’s yachts, the saloons of steam vessels’ ladies cabins, &c.; only 131/2 inches from front to back when collapsed’.30 Other manufacturers concentrated on the music student: Robert Allison’s piano had keys that ‘alternated in colour, to show all the scales, major and minor, according to a single rule for each mood, founded on the place of the semi-tonic interval, which renders the seven notes to be touched for an octave of each of the other eleven scales, as evident as the scale of C’; while Robert Addison showed ‘a transposing pianoforte. This piano will transpose music five semitones higher or lower than the written key.’31

Even at the time, there was a recognition that gadgetry had got out of hand: the Illustrated London News lamented the displays of ‘a tissue [fabric] which nobody could wear; a carriage in which nobody could ride; a fireplace which no servant could clean if it were ever guilty of a fire; a musical instrument not fit for one in fifty thousand to play; endless inventions incapable of the duties imputed to them’.32 This brought to the fore the question: were the exhibits designed to show the inevitable march forward to prosperity for all, or would it be more true to say that many exhibitors—and even more of the public—were seeing the Great Exhibition as an enormous advertising site?

The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, reading which was as close as many visitors would get to thinking about the purpose of the fair, claimed in its introduction to be ‘a book of reference to the philosopher, merchant and manufacturer’. Thus, in its own view, it was an educational tool—one that would give instruction to those exhibiting, and also to those many manufacturers in the same field who were not providing exhibits. The catalogue would show these people examples of the best work of their competitors, for them to strive towards. Then, for the many visitors, the catalogue would also explain the new world of technology and design, in layman’s language, to improve their taste. By this means, the customers would be led to demand more of the manufacturers, and this heightened demand for quality would in turn improve the supply.

That was the idea. Carrying it out was another matter. The planning of the exhibits, both in the catalogue and in the actual display halls, had been a mixture of overlapping responsibilities shared between the centralized and local organizations. The local committees had selected the goods to be displayed from their regions or cities, with the barest guidance, in the form of a preliminary outline, from the commission. Once the items were chosen, how they were laid out, and the organizational structure of the hall, were entirely the province of the central body. The planners had originally wanted the Exhibition to represent a schematic re-creation of their thirty-section outline, laying out the state of industrial knowledge before the visitors in map-like form, walking them through the processes by which goods were transformed from raw material, via labour, to finished products. But both because it was not the commission which was making the initial selections and because of the technical requirements of the building, nothing but lip service could ultimately be paid to this didactic aim. The local committees had not necessarily chosen exhibitions that showed each of the processes, and, even when they had, there were power sources in only one part of the north-west axis of the halls, so all the industrial machinery had to be set up there. Then it was realized that the floor of the upper galleries could not bear the weight of heavy machinery, so they became the logical place for lightweight manufactured goods. The central axis or nave, as the main walkway of the Crystal Palace became known, ended up displaying most of the consumer commodities.

The crowds were required to follow specific routes and not able to wander at will. Rather in the way that out-of-town superstores such as Ikea process their customers past high-priced goods or seasonal overstocks, the route down the nave of the Crystal Palace ensured that all visitors passed by the highly finished consumer goods—the goods that were the most superficially attractive, the most entertaining, and the least educational. While the Exhibition stressed abundance and choice—in Prince Albert’s words, ‘The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose’—in fact, the choice had been made already, by the selection committee, by the display committee, and by those guardians of public order who decreed which route the consumers were to take. The visitor had only limited choice about where to go, or what to see.

Henry Mayhew’s comic novel of the Great Exhibition, 1851: or, The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to ‘Enjoy Themselves’, and to See the Great Exhibition, opened with a paragraph describing the foreigners going round the Crystal Palace. It began, ‘The Esquimaux had just purchased his new “registered paletot” [a loose, coat-like cape] of seal-skin…The Hottentot Venus had already added to the graceful ebullitions of nature, the charms of a Parisian crinoline.’33 The humour here is of the simple ‘look-at-the-funny-natives-encountering-civilization-for-the-first-time’ type, but reading this passage today what is noticeable is Mayhew’s unconscious acceptance of the purpose of the Exhibition: the display of fashionable commodities and their subsequent acquisition by the visitors. For it was acquisition that was beginning to hold sway at the Great Exhibition. Horace Greeley had already linked acquisition specifically to an increase in moral good: ‘Not until every family shall be provided with a commodious and comfortable habitation, and that habitation amply supplied with Food and Fuel not only, but with Clothing, Furniture, Books, Maps, Charts, Globes, Musical Instruments and every other auxiliary to Moral and Intellectual growth as well as to physical comfort, can we rationally talk of excessive Production’ (my italics).34 Now it was not merely food and shelter that were considered necessities, but also education, the arts, and physical comfort more generally. Greeley saw clothes, furniture, books, maps and musical instruments all as necessities, all as ‘auxiliaries’ to ‘Moral and Intellectual growth’.

This was a culmination of a gradual process. Over the previous century and a half there had been an enormous change in the way people lived. The architect John Wood, as early as 1749, had listed a number of improvements that had taken place in domestic interiors over the previous quarter-century—improvements that were taken for granted in homes of moderate prosperity by the time he wrote. Cheap floorboards and doors had been replaced by deal and hardwoods and the bare floors covered with rugs, while mahogany and walnut furniture had replaced the previously more customary oak;* rough plasterwork was now hidden behind elegant wood panelling; stone chimney-pieces were replaced by marble, and iron fixtures by brass; while cane and rush chairs were rejected in favour of upholstered leather and embroidered ones.36 Yet even the low base of the 1720s that Wood was looking back to had already seen a big step forward to modern notions of comfort. Indeed, the word ‘comfort’ in the sense of physical and material well-being came into use only in the last third of the eighteenth century. Previously ‘comfort’ had a spiritual and emotional meaning—succour, relief or emotional support. It was in the early nineteenth century that ‘comfort’ in the modern sense became commonplace, and yet only a few decades later Horace Greeley thought it natural to list it as a necessary component of a happy life.

It is hard, in our age of material possessions, and given the stereotypical ‘overstuffed’ image of the late Victorian period, to appreciate from what a bare minimum the acquisition of possessions began. As late as the 1690s, something as basic to us as a utensil to hold a hot drink—that is, a cup—was ‘extremely rare’ even in prosperous households. A mere thirty years later, by 1725, ‘virtually all’ of these households had some.37 We don’t really have any idea of what the poorest in the seventeenth century owned—they died leaving no records. But of those who had enough goods that it was considered worth drawing up an inventory on their deaths, it is illuminating to compare one James Cushman, who died in 1648, with the poorest man listed in the inventories of Sedgley, Staffordshire, ninety years later. Cushman left, in his kitchen, ‘one small iron pott’, ‘a small scillite [skillet]’ and ‘one small brass scimer [skimmer]’. The deceased in Sedgley in 1739 owned, by contrast, a fire shovel, a coal hammer, a toasting iron, a bellows, a copper can, wooden furniture, a ‘tun dish’ or funnel, scissors, a warming pan, a brass kettle, bottles, earthenware, two iron pots, a pail, a ‘search’ or sieve, two old candlesticks, a kneading tub, two barrels, two coffers, a box, some trenchers, pewter, a brass skimmer, a brass basting spoon, an iron meat fork, a tin ‘calender’ or colander, and more.38 A similar increase in the quantity of goods can be found among those with more disposable income: in a survey of 3,000 inventories taken on the death of the head of the household in more prosperous homes, in 1675 half owned a clock; by 1715, 90 per cent of households did.39 This continuous growth in the number of possessions, this concern with the acquisition of goods for the home, was marked enough to be gently satirized in George Colman and David Garrick’s 1784 play The Clandestine Marriage, in which one character announces, ‘The chief pleasure of a country-house is to make improvements.’40

These are a few small examples of the marked increase in the number of possessions among all classes, from Garrick and Colman’s countryhouse owners down to those who, in previous ages, would have inherited a few goods, possibly acquired a few more after much struggle, or simply done without. From 1785 to 1800—a mere fifteen years—the rate of consumption of what had previously been considered luxuries and were now regarded as part of the ordinary necessities of life increased at more than twice the rate of population growth. In those fifteen years the population of England and Wales rose by 14 per cent, while over the same period the demand for candles grew by 33.8 per cent, for tobacco by 58.9 per cent and for spirits by a staggering (literally, perhaps) 79.9 per cent, while demand for tea soared by 97.7 per cent and for printed fabrics by an astonishing 141.9 per cent.41 (For more on tea, see pp. 56—61.)

By the time of the Great Exhibition it was expected that one’s quality of life—one’s standard of living—could be judged by the number of possessions one owned, the number of things one consumed. This was an entirely new way of looking at things. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for the phrase ‘standard of living’ dates from 1879. Punch, as always quick to spot a novelty, was already making fun of the idea by 1880. In a George du Maurier cartoon, an ‘Æsthetic Bridegroom’ looks at an oriental teapot, saying to his ‘Intense Bride’, ‘It is quite consummate, is it not?’ She responds rapturously, ‘It is, indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!’42 Buying goods, owning goods—even living up to goods—were now virtues. Comfort was a moral good. A hundred years after Colman and Garrick wrote of the prosperous and their country houses, the Illustrated London News carried an advertisement for a piano, the purchase of which would make the ‘home more attractive and save [the family from] more expensive and dangerous amusements’.43 The advertisement could not be more explicit: buying commercially produced goods, in this case a piano, would make one’s family life more entertaining, safer and, somehow, better. This was not simply an advertising conceit. Ford Madox Brown, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, told one of his patrons that, to be happy, ‘much depends upon getting a house and adorning of a beautiful house’.44 In 1876 the Revd William Loftie, in A Plea for Art in the House, expanded on this idea: there ‘seems to be something almost paradoxical in talking about the cultivation of taste as a moral duty…[but] if we look on the home here as the prototype for the home hereafter, we may see reasons for making it a sacred thing, beautiful and pleasant, as, indeed, we have no hesitation about making our churches’.45 The cultivation of taste had become a ‘moral duty’, with the ‘sacred’ space, the shrine, epitomized by Paxton’s Crystal Palace, which looked like a great shining box built to hold all the commodities that could ever be produced. All the manufactured items in the world seemed to be collected under its transparent lid. It resembled nothing so much as one of those glass domes that Victorians put on their mantelpieces to protect their most precious objects from dirt and dust.

Looking back, it is possible to see, from the beginning, that the tendency to understand the Great Exhibition as a collection of so many items for sale was constantly being repressed. In 1850 the Westminster Review, in one of many press reports about the forthcoming event, warned, ‘The object of the Exhibition is the display of articles intended to be exhibited, and not the transaction of commercial business; and the Commissioners can therefore give no facilities for the sale of articles, or for the transaction of business connected therewith.’ Yet even the author of this stark caution found it hard to remember, immediately adding approvingly that the Exhibition was a ‘gathering together of the commercial travellers [salesmen] of the universal world, side by side with their employers and customers, and with a showroom for their goods that ought to be such as the world has never before beheld’.46 To attempt to block such commercial thoughts and concentrate visitors’ minds on the displays’ educational qualities, the organizers forbade the listing of prices, direct advertisements of goods, or any other form of overt selling.*

But, in a way no one could have foreseen, the lack of prices made everything appear much more available. No one looked at a display and thought, ‘That is out of my reach.’ Instead, everything became acquirable in the imagination, because nothing was for sale in reality. Everything could be dreamed of. At the same time, exhibitors, who had their own agendas, became ingenious in finding ways around the price ban as the fair continued. ‘Explanatory’ notes were handed out and, just coincidentally, were printed on the back of price lists; trade cards and advertising cards were distributed widely. Others outside the commissioners’ control abetted this urge to price the price-less: many press articles speculated on the value of goods when describing them—it seemed to be a reflex response to the display. As Walter Benjamin later commented, ‘The world exhibitions erected the universe of commodities.’47

For the first few weeks of the Great Exhibition, these price-less goods were examined by the prosperous alone. Albert had been insistent that the working class should be able to attend, that it was this group who would benefit in particular. The prices of admission, however, were set at exorbitant levels. Season tickets were £3 3s. for men, £2 2s. for women, and only season-ticket holders could go on the first day; second- and third-day tickets cost £1 each, while day tickets for the rest of the first month were 5s. each. It was not until 26 May, nearly a full month after the opening, that for the first time ‘shilling days’ came into force, with the following Friday reduced even further, to 6d. But on Saturdays—most workers’ half-day off—the price was pushed back up, to 2s. 6d. Many exhibitors wanted this exclusivity extended even further, with shilling days postponed until July—or never. They feared that the middle and upper classes who had thronged the aisles in the first weeks would disappear, not to be seen again, if they were forced to share their viewing space with the lower orders. But Prince Albert and Cole prevailed, and shilling days from the end of May remained.

As the end of the month approached, the big question of the day became, what would happen when the admission charge was lowered to let the working classes in? The gulf between the comfortable middle classes and even the respectable working classes was enormous. In the previous three-quarters of a century the middle class had become increasingly fearful of their social and economic inferiors, a situation brought about by the great political upheavals of the time. The Gordon Riots of 1780, the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the agitations that surrounded the Reform Act of 1832, and the Chartist riots; the failed harvests of the ‘hungry forties’; and, only three years in the past, the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848: all had merged to form a nebulous image of the great mass of workers biding their time, waiting to turn into ‘King Mob’. This was how The Times referred to the working class on 2 May, the day after the opening of the Great Exhibition—the day referred to by Queen Victoria as ‘the greatest day in our history, the most beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle ever seen, and the triumph of my beloved Albert’.48 The Times was not so confident. Surely these bogeymen would overrun the grounds, given half a chance? Mayhew despaired of those like The Times who were stoking fear: ‘For many days before the “shilling people” were admitted to the building, the great topic of conversation was the probable behaviour of the people. Would they come sober? will they destroy things? will they want to cut their initials, or scratch their names on the panes of the glass lighthouses?’49 Punch, in ‘Open House at the Crystal Palace’, also (unusually) championed the workers at the expense of the middle classes, setting up ‘Young Mob’ as ‘the better-behaved son of a wild and ignorant father’: ‘Am I not seen with my wife and children wondering at MR. LAYARD’s Nineveh Marbles [in the British Museum]*- wondering quietly, and I will add, if you please, reverently? Have I, in fact, chipped the nose of any statue? Have I wrenched the little finger from any mummy? Have I pocketed a single medal?’50 Even those who did not fear that riot and mayhem would arrive with the workers thought that financial ruin certainly would. The Illustrated London News warned that ‘the gay, glancing, fluttering tide of bonnets and ribbons, and silks, and satins, and velvets’, would vanish, with ‘the blank…filled up by no adequate substitute of meaner, or coarser, or more commonplace material’.51 These publications were more interested in their thesis than in giving the shilling days a chance: this particular piece was published after only the third shilling day.

It is worth pausing for a moment at the admission charge of 1s. At this price, and with the less expensive catalogue, the Popular Guide, priced at 2d., only the upper levels of the working class—the artisans, the master craftsmen, the clerks (who for the most part would have identified themselves with the lower middle classes)—could possibly have afforded to visit the grounds without financial assistance. For most of the rest of the working classes, having 1s. to spend on a day’s leisure was unimaginable—and even that price was only for those who lived in walking distance: for the others, transport, accommodation and food would push the day’s expenditure to one or two weeks’ entire earnings. But the mass of workers was so mysterious to their economic superiors that it was as though the 1s. charge would unleash not just factory operatives and manual labourers, but also the feared ‘navvies’† who were building the railroads and, even worse, the masses of the unemployed and the unemployable, wild hordes of them sweeping across the plains of Hyde Park. The Times warned that ‘Summer excursion trains will bring the artisans and mechanics of the north in upon London like an inundation.’52 The Duke of Wellington thought that at least 15,000 men—he meant soldiers—would be needed to keep order. Members of the Exhibition commission met with the directors of the railway companies to arrange that reduced excursion fares would be restricted to benefit-club subscribers and those belonging to working-class self-improvement clubs such as the Mechanics’ Institutes (see below). (However, the agreement did not hold: by February the London and North-Western Railway and the Midland Railway companies had both agreed to supply excursion fares to non-club members, but they took care not to publicize this change—at least at first.)53 This arrangement, while it stood, had the effect of pushing those who had not previously belonged to such a group into one, in order to be able to have access to railway tickets at affordable prices.

In fact the numbers already belonging to some form of club, whether it was a social group, a benefit club, a sick club or an educational or self-improvement group, were enormously high. Friendly societies or benefit clubs were among the most common clubs for workers. Matthew Boulton, a manufacturer, factory-owner and partner with James Watt in the improvement and manufacturing of the early steam engine, was one of the first to see the value to an employer in setting up an insurance club. From the early 1770s his employees received benefits on illness, accident or death, having made contributions as a percentage of their earnings—from 1/2d. a week for those earning 2s. 6d. to 4d. for those earning £1. When they were ill they received payments in inverse proportion to their contributions, so that those earning the least received the most financial assistance—about four-fifths of their weekly wage for those employees with the lowest incomes. But if the illness or incapacity stemmed from ‘drunkenness, debauchery, quarrelling or fighting’, part of the first ten days’ payment was withheld. Boulton as well as his workers benefited from this scheme: by having some financial support in hard times, fewer ill or injured workers ended up being supported ‘on the parish’, which kept the poor rate down, and Boulton’s workers were more likely to stay with him, because if they moved on they would lose the benefit of the contributions they had already paid in.54

Even without the participation of enlightened employers, mutualsupport clubs were becoming common. The 1793 Friendly Societies Act enabled clubs to raise ‘separate funds for the mutual relief and maintenance of the…members in sickness, old age and infirmity’.55 One estimate suggests that in 1801 there were at the very least 7,200 friendly societies in England and Wales, which together numbered about 648,000 members. In London at least 40 per cent of the working population belonged to a friendly society, while in some new industrial regions the figure was even higher: in Oldham, Lancashire, 50 per cent of all adult males belonged to one of the fifteen societies flourishing there. In Scotland there were nearly 400 friendly societies by 1800. Ireland took longer to develop the concept: in 1800 there were only 7 societies that we know about today, but by 1831 the number had shot up to 281, with half centred in Dublin.56

Clubs that were not mainly about financial aid were also popular: working men’s libraries, groups to discuss politics or literature, or to buy books. A club in Sunderland met regularly to discuss old English ballads; the members were saving jointly towards the collected volumes of reprints of Early and Middle English texts published by the Early English Text Society. The members consisted of a cork-cutter, two woodcarvers from the docks, a watchmaker, an engine-fitter and ‘a painter of photographs’.*57