Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

The largest, and most widespread, self-improvement groups were the Mechanics’ Institutes. The first one was set up in 1824 in London, with 1,500 members paying 1 guinea each—clearly, a group of high-earning skilled workers and artisans. By 1850 there were 702 Institutes across the country, but by now they had mostly been taken over by the middle classes: the upper middle classes at the administrative end, and the lower middle classes—clerks and shopworkers—as members. The original expectation had been that these institutes would increase the skills and scientific and technical knowledge of manual labourers by offering access to books and pamphlets in reading rooms, and to continuing education via evening lectures. This would produce a more highly skilled and useful workforce, which would be a great benefit to employers. But fairly swiftly it was discovered that the lectures were too theoretical, and the workers found little practical incentive to attend after a long day’s work. Instead, lectures that gave some form of recreation were preferred, and were much better attended. In its initial period of worker education, from 1835 to 1842, the Manchester Athenaeum held 352 lectures, of which 173 were on the ‘physical and mental sciences’; in 1842—9, out of 394 lectures, science featured in only 81. Nationally, of 1,000 lectures held at 42 institutions in 1851, only 340 were on science, while 572 were classed as literature—although literature here had a fairly broad definition, essentially meaning anything that was not science or music. Included in the list of literature lectures were topics such as ‘the funeral rites of various nations, the habits and customs of the Eskimos, the life, death and burial of Mary, Queen of Scots, the games of Greece, the theosophy of India, the sons of Noah, and…“Are the Inhabitants of Persia, India, and China of Japhetic or Shemitic [sic] Origin?”’ There were also twenty-three lectures on Shakespeare, and over the next years many lectures gradually turned into readings from favourite authors, and sometimes simply readings of plays, which was a way of getting around the general disapproval of the theatre by many Dissenters and some Anglicans (see pp. 274—5).58

The Institutes began to hold exhibitions and social events more generally. The earliest exhibitions, held by the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute from 1837, were in the mould of the lectures on science and technical innovation—exhibitions of ‘machinery, industrial products, scientific apparatus and works of art’.59 Over the next five years, Manchester held four exhibitions, and drew over 200,000 visitors in total.60 From 1838 to 1840 the various Institutes held at least fifty exhibitions across the country. But almost immediately the emphasis altered, exactly as it had with the lectures. By 1846 the Manchester Institute was showing more than machinery, with exhibitions of paintings by Turner, Benjamin West, Landseer and Charles Eastlake. The urge for entertainment rather than education was nationwide: in 1842 the Institute in York saw working-class membership increase as excursions and social events were added to the calendar; by 1844 the Huddersfield members expected a gala, excursions, exhibitions and tea parties. Most of the other groups had moved in a similar direction, with a general leaning towards culture and recreation. And recreation included travel.

By the time of the Great Exhibition, excursion travel was already a regular feature of the landscape, even if it was the still-exciting exception rather than the run-of-the-mill norm. In 1830 the first passenger railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, had carried sightseers out to the Sankey Viaduct for 5s. (instead of the standard fare of 8s.) only two weeks after the line was opened. A few days later it took Manchester passengers to the Liverpool Charity Festival, and within a year it had made an arrangement with an entrepreneur to carry 150 members of a Sunday-school group from Manchester to Liverpool and back for 40 per cent of the regular fare. The various Mechanics’ Institutes quickly saw the benefits of organized cut-rate travel: the Manchester Institute arranged a trip to Liverpool for its members in 1833; in 1840 a group went from Leeds to York; by 1845 the Leeds-to-Hull excursion group was so large that a train with forty carriages was needed, possibly the first of the ‘monster’ trains that so captured the imagination of the Victorian public.61 (‘Monster’ was a favourite Victorian adjective, with monster trains, monster shops and monster exhibitions.) Very swiftly holiday travel took a great share of the excursion market. In 1846 Blackpool got its own railway line; four years later, up to 10,000 visitors a week were pouring into the town. Numbers continued to increase, while fares continued to tumble: in 1844 the London and South Western Railway began to run Easter excursions from Southampton to London at 7s. return; by 1850 the same trip cost 5s.62

When it came to the Great Exhibition itself, the railways initially had not been much interested in excursion business—there was a general underestimating of the numbers of the working classes who would wish to attend. As late as January 1851, less than four months before the opening, the trade magazine Herapath’s Railway and Commercial Journal was warning railway companies against recklessly increasing their rolling stock against a demand it thought could not possibly materialize.63

Thomas Cook, whose excursions to the Crystal Palace were later inextricably interwoven into his myth, actually became involved in bringing visitors to London in 1851 by accident. Though subsequently to personify the whole range of possibility that was excursion travel, Cook arrived, surprisingly, rather late in the day. He had entered the field only in 1841, when he arranged with the Midland Counties Railway to have an excursion train put at the disposal of his temperance group. By 1846 he had extended his tours beyond their initial Leicestershire borders, and was organizing excursions to Scotland. So successful were his tours that in 1850 he was thinking of expanding even further, by taking groups to the Holy Land. However, a temperance friend in London advised him against this, warning that there were ‘no railways, coaches, or even public roads’ there.64 He suggested that the USA might be better: steamers had been making regular crossings of the Atlantic from 1838, and the east coast of America was now just 121/2 days away from Liverpool. So Cook set off for Liverpool to see if he could interest the steamship companies in the same type of arrangement he had been negotiating with the railways, giving him discounted fares in exchange for guaranteed numbers. But he managed to get only as far as Derby. There he met Joseph Paxton, the architect of the Crystal Palace, and his friend John Ellis, who was attempting to stabilize the Midland Railway Company after the crooked dealings of George Hudson, ‘the Railway King’, had threatened to destroy it and several other companies. Ellis had a vested interest in increased traffic on his railway—especially since he was one of the businessmen about whom Herapath’s would shortly warn: the Midland had ordered a hundred new third-class carriages to bring working-class passengers to the Exhibition. Paxton also had financial links to the railways. From the other side, Cook approved of the educational aspects of the Great Exhibition, the idea of ‘rational recreation’ it promoted, and he was further taken by the fact that the Crystal Palace was to be ‘dry’.* (There were other aspects that pleased him equally: it was closed on Sundays, religious tracts were distributed throughout the fair, there was a Bible depot, and, at the request of Lord Shaftesbury, all the nude statues were to be respectably covered.)65

Cook came to an agreement with the Midland to bring them his excursionists for a fee that he referred to delicately as ‘several shillings’ per head, instead of his usual percentage of the fare paid. In return for this, the excursionists would get a return ticket, with accommodation in London (including ‘a substantial meat breakfast’) for another 2s. (plus an extra 1d. if they wanted their boots cleaned); if that was too expensive, accommodation at 1s. could be found in dormitories set up on ships moored at Vauxhall Bridge.66 Accommodation had been a major preoccupation for the planners. They were uncertain how many workingclass visitors would travel to the capital, but, with the fear of the mob that was pervasive, any number seemed to be a threat and was regarded as a public-order concern. A Home Office official had been asked by the Royal Commission to look into how best ‘respectable and reasonable’ lodgings in London could be provided. The Home Office was pleased to comply, because it was anxious that ‘arrangements should in themselves conduce to the maintenance of good order and regularity without the appearance of any ostensible precautions, and that they should offer such facilities as will induce the working classes to follow, for their own advantage, the course pointed out’.67

Because the success of the Exhibition was still uncertain, not much more than worrying was done by the commission. Others, however, stepped in to the breach, just as Cook and assorted excursion agents were doing despite the unenthusiastic railway companies. The main accommodation organizer became John Cassell, a temperance lecturer and the proprietor of a coffee house in Fenchurch Street. (The provision of tea and coffee was common among those involved in the temperance movement.) Cassell had been the publisher of the Teetotal Times from 1846, as well as printing other journals and pamphlets relating to radical politics, Free Trade and universal suffrage, and in 1850 his new periodical the Working Man’s Friend had been launched. With the coming of the Great Exhibition, Cassell saw a gap in the market that he could fill both to the benefit of the working man and also for the promotion of his journal: the creation of an artisan lodging-house register. He distributed (he claimed) 100,000 forms to lodging houses, had each one that responded inspected, and then charged their owners 2s. 6d. to register with him (of which 1s. 6d. was paid as the tax on advertisements). All lodging houses that wanted to be included in the register were required to conform to strict rules: lodging was 2s. for a double bed, with bootcleaning thrown in; a breakfast of tea or coffee and bread and butter had to be available, and could cost no more than 9d.; if bacon or ham or a kipper were added, then 1s. could be charged. Cassell published a general register that listed the establishments that met his requirements, and a classified register that had the lodging houses listed by religious affiliation. Either could be obtained by sending six penny stamps by post, and both advertised the Working Man’s Friend.68*

It was commercial activities of this nature that made the railways feel that perhaps there was money to be made in transporting the working classes to London for the fair. Very swiftly, they went from almost complete apathy to ruthless competition. A price war broke out between the Midland Railway and the Great Northern—at one point the battle became so overheated that a steam engine was hijacked by the opposition. In order to give its new Bradford-and-Leeds-to-London line a boost, the GNR promoted 5s. return fares. The Midland could not match that and still give Cook his ‘several shillings’. He agreed to tear up the agreement, which in the long term was very good business on his part, as long afterwards the Midland continued to give him preferential rates when other excursion agents began to set up in his territory.

Cook’s son John, aged seventeen, acted as his advance agent. He and others travelled to towns across Yorkshire and the Midlands to publicize the possibilities of travel to London and the Great Exhibition for working people. They distributed handbills, held meetings—often with a band playing outside a mill or factory on pay day, to attract a crowd—and helped to set up savings clubs for the fares and accommodation. These subscription clubs were crucial to the success of the Exhibition. Mayhew’s novel 1851 has the villagers of Buttermere paying into the ‘Travelling Association for the Great Exhibition of 1851…for months past, subscribing their pennies with the intention of having their share in that general holiday’, with the local squire acting as club treasurer.69 Other groups that came, supported by various savings methods, included parishes led by their clergymen, soldiers brought by their commanding officers, schools and Sunday schools by their teachers, and factory and mill workers by their employers. In Maldon and Braintree, the shops in both towns closed for a day to allow the entire towns’ populations to travel en masse to London. And all of them seemed to go by rail. The Great Western increased its passenger numbers by 38.3 per cent over the period; the London and South Western by 29.9 per cent; the London and Blackwall by 28.5 per cent; the South Eastern by 23.8 per cent; and the London and North-Western by 22.6 per cent. The last of these claimed that, for the duration of the fair, it had carried over three-quarters of a million passengers, and that 90,000 of these were excursionists, in 145 special excursion trains, travelling from the north for 5s. return.70

While these excursionists were evidently not rich, they brought home to the manufacturers, the industrialists, a new economic truth. It had become increasingly apparent over the previous half-century that there was as much money—if not more—to be made from large numbers of relatively low-income consumers as there was from the tiny numbers of high-earners. The concept of the mass market was taking shape, personified by the Great Exhibition. This was in some ways an oddity, since the fair itself was not a particularly good example of mass production. The 300,000 panes of glass used in the Crystal Palace were not machine made, but instead were each individually hand-blown,71 although it is true that the very nature of the building, with its innovative prefabricated sections that could be made off-site and then assembled, looked towards the future of mass production. For the moment the mass market centred around the many linked products that were appearing without the formal imprimatur of the Great Exhibition. Cassell produced The Illustrated Exhibitor, published at 2d. per part, issued weekly, which when completed made up a four-volume illustrated survey of the Exhibition, either as a souvenir of a visit or for those who had not managed to get to London.* Within a month of the first part appearing, Cassell was selling 100,000 copies, giving him a monthly turnover of nearly £3,500.72 This was only one of many works published to catch on to—and cash in on—the excitement of the fair. There were numerous guides published to coincide with the opening of the Exhibition, by anyone who chose to enter the field. Cassell himself published The London Conductor, whose subtitle made it pretty clear at whom it was aimed: Being a Guide for Visitors to the Great Industrial Exhibition, through the principal portions of the metropolis; including a brief history and description of the palaces, parks, churches; government, legal, and commercial buildings; bridges, statues, museums, hospitals, club-houses, theatres, and streets of London; and the remarkable places in its vicinity—basically, anyone arriving in London for the first time.† It cost 9d., and went through two editions almost immediately, despite not being particularly accurate. A third edition, without illustrations, came out with corrections and a reduced cover price; a fourth edition, with the pictures reinstated, was needed by September.73 (Cassell, who rarely missed a trick when it came to marketing, advertised in the first edition the forthcoming ‘Le Conducteur de Londres, prix 11/2 schelling’.)

Far more than just guidebooks found a useful commercial link to the Exhibition. There were comic stories of rustics up from the country, like the, to modern eyes, gloomily unfunny Jimmy Trebilcock; or, the Humorous Adventures of a Cornish Miner, at the Great Exhibition, What he Saw and What he didn’t See. There were political satires, using the Exhibition for parody purposes, such as Mr Goggleye’s Visit to the Exhibition of National Industry to be Held in London on the 1st of April [sic] 1851. There were dozens—if not dozens of dozens—of children’s books describing the fair, such as The Crystal Palace: A Little Book for Little Boys, and Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great Exhibition (which devoted a remarkable amount of space to the Exhibition’s finances, taking an entire page to list ticket prices, and even calculating how much money had been made by the time the book went to press in early June—£137,697 13s., the author estimated), and Fireside Facts from the Great Exhibition (which appears to have lifted material wholesale from Little Henry’s Holiday). These were followed by books of educational intent, or instant reminiscence, appearing within months: Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851; What I Saw in London, or, Men and Things in the Great Metropolis; Frolick & Fun, or What Was Seen and Done in London in 1851; Glimpses and Gatherings during a voyage and visit to London and the Great Exhibition in the summer of 1851; and many many more.

New forms of advertising also appeared. W. H. Smith, a newspaper distributor, had rented a bookstall at the London and North-Western Railway’s Euston station in 1848. In the year of the Great Exhibition he obtained a monopoly of all the London and North-Western’s station bookstalls and he also began to rent out space for advertisements on the platforms, which, with the hordes of visitors pouring through the stations heading for Hyde Park, began to seem like a paying proposition.* Soon everyone was advertising individual products through references to the Exhibition. Samuel Brothers’ flyer was headed ‘The Great Exhibition in London, High Art! High Success!! and High Principle!!!’, with, underneath, a list of items of ready-made clothing and their prices, together with an image of the brothers’ shopfront, cropped in tightly to make it look like a display case at the fair.74

The visitors to London were presented with the obvious commercial link between the goods on display at the Great Exhibition and those on display in shop windows. But they were also presented with another link—between the Great Exhibition as a fair, a source of entertainment, and the shows of London. It was not as though there was no other form of entertainment in London, for both rich and poor, for those looking for education and for those out only for amusement. London always had entertainment (see Chapter 7), but in the summer of 1851 it particularly revolved around the Great Exhibition. The Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park made sure that its new buildings would be ready in time for the influx of visitors, and highlighted the just finished outdoor tank for its hippopotamus, and two new aviaries. (Attendance soared to a record 677,000 that year.) James Wyld, an MP and map-seller, bought a ten-year lease on the plot of land in the centre of Leicester Square, where he built a rotunda, eighty-five feet in diameter, with a sixty-foot globe on top. A series of staircases led the visitor up to platforms from which illustrations of various geographic phenomena could be viewed—volcanoes, ice floes and so on. The Polytechnic Institute advertised a series of lectures on ‘all the MOST INTERESTING DEPOSITS at the GREAT EXHIBITION’.75

Theatre did not lag behind in shows that were linked to the Great Exhibition. James Robinson Planché, playwright and creator of theatrical extravaganzas (see pp. 308—9), merged the two most popular shows of the summer, the Exhibition itself and Wyld’s Great Globe, to produce Mr Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (in Leicester Square). A Cosmographical, Visionary Extravaganza, and Dramatic Review, in One Act and Four Quarters. Mr Buckstone was in fact the real-life manager of the Haymarket Theatre, where Mr Buckstone’s Voyage was being produced; to add further layers of interleaved fantasy and reality, the opening scenes were set, according to the published script, ‘[In] FRONT OF THE THEATRE ROYAL, HAYMARKET’. The audience then watched as ‘Mr Buckstone determines to Circumnavigate the Globe, and gives his reasons for so doing’, as the scene shifted to the ‘Foot of the Staircase in Wyld’s Model of the Earth, Leicester Square. Mr Buckstone, as a preparatory step to a Voyage round the Globe, visits the Model to obtain an insight into the subject and—sleeps upon it.’ The viewers then followed the dreaming Mr Buckstone around the world, where he saw many marvellous sights, including ‘The “Ripon” steamer, with the Grenadiers on board, on her passage to Malta,

saluted by a French brig’, various battles, ‘A GRAND ORIENTAL SPECTACLE’, which introduced a ballet, a ‘WISE ELEPHANT OF THE EAST’, ‘Chinese Magicians’, and an ‘Interview with the Esquimaux from Cumberland Straits and the Adelaide Gallery’, ending with a cheery scene of a ‘violent “Struggle for Gold” by the Theatres in general. Awful Catastrophe. End of Mr Buckstone’s Golden Dream’.76

With this kind of competition, it was not hard to imagine that the shilling visitors might find better things to spend their money on than a teetotal, didactic piece of rational recreation. But, instead of the Illustrated London News’s picture of desolation, to the fair there came hundreds of thousands of the ‘respectable’ working classes—members of Sundayschool groups, of orderly church and chapel groups, of self-improvement clubs, of Mechanics’ Institutes; master craftsmen and artisans and their families—endless streams of all those who could afford to pay the 10s. or so that a ‘shilling day’ visit entailed (1s. admission, a travel bill of 5s. or more, accommodation at 2s., plus the cost of food for the duration of the trip). Attendance on shilling days averaged between 45,000 and 60,000 people; by the end of the summer, 100,000 were passing through the gates daily. In total, 6 million visitors came to the Crystal Palace; as many as 5 million may have come by train, with 1 million of them on excursion fares. Thomas Cook arranged for the transport of 165,000 excursionists, or nearly 3 per cent of the total, including one single excursion train carrying 3,000 children.77

And the fears of the upper classes remained only that—fears. The crowds were in fact orderly, respectful, well-behaved—all that could have been hoped for, but was not remotely expected. The Times was forced to eat its words, and after three days acknowledged that, instead of being ‘King Mob’, the shilling admissions were well dressed and orderly members of society, and a credit to the burgeoning nation of commerce.78 The volatile mob had become the sedate consumer. The age of the machine had brought with it the triumph of the masses—and the mass market.

*Richard Steele had started the Tatler in 1709, and it came out three times a week until the beginning of 1711. A single sheet, at first it contained news items, but gradually each number comprised a single long essay, which might be a gentle satire of the social world, or a reflection on the values of the day, mildly attacking the venery and hypocrisy of politics and society. Addison contributed his first essay on 20 May 1709, and in all wrote almost fifty papers, plus another twenty together with Steele.

*A very partial round-up of coffee houses that served as meeting points for clubs in London would include Jonathan’s Coffee House, Exchange Alley, which formed the basis of the stock market, and Lloyd’s Coffee House, Lombard Street, where shipping and insurance brokers met, produced news sheets, then a shipping list (the first in 1734), then a register (in 1760), and finally turned into the insurer Lloyd’s. Politics was discussed by Tories at the Cocoa Tree, by Whigs at Arthur’s. Booksellers met at the Chapter Coffee House, Paternoster Row; actors at Will’s, Wright’s or the Bedford, all in Covent Garden, while the Orange, in the Haymarket, was more specialized, and for dancing masters and opera singers. Old Slaughter’s, in St Martin’s Lane, was the haunt of painters, while the Rainbow, in the same street, and Garraway’s in Exchange Alley, not only had artists’ clubs, but also mounted exhibitions of prints.5