Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (11 page)

From the 1740s, Wedgwood had been at the forefront of a successful campaign by a group of Staffordshire merchants and manufacturers to upgrade the roads into the Potteries; in 1766 alone, six Turnpike Acts affecting the Five Towns were approved by Parliament.
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The most immediate result of the spread of turnpikes for these businessmen, however, was not only the improvement to the roads—although now, it was true, goods could actually be transported to and from Burslem by wagon—but the speed with which journeys could be made. From the 1750s to the 1830s journey times between major cities fell by 80 per cent; from the 1770s to the 1830s they were halved. An advertisement in 1754 boasted that ‘However incredible it may appear this coach will actually arrive in London four days after leaving Manchester’; a mere six years later the same distance took three days; by 1784 the time was down to two days. This improvement was not confined to a single road. The trip from Edinburgh to London had been impossible to undertake by carriage along the entire route in 1739; by the mid-1750s the whole route could be covered in a carriage, taking ten days in summer and twelve in winter; in 1836 a stagecoach travelled the route in 45
¹
/
₂
hours.
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In 1820 for the first time in history it became possible for a person to go faster than a man on a single horse.

Travel had become easier; it had it become speedier; now it was more readily available as well. As the journey times fell, so the number of stagecoaches increased: in 1780 there were approximately 20 stagecoaches leaving Birmingham daily; by 1815 there were over 100; in 1835 the number had risen to 350. Ten major urban centres—Birmingham, Bristol, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow and Edinburgh—saw an eightfold increase in stagecoach
services in the forty-six years from 1790 to 1836. Even small towns such as Kirkby Stephen, a market town in Westmorland, had regular and plentiful carrier services: from Kirkby Stephen one could travel on scheduled stagecoach services to Newcastle, Stockton, Barnard Castle, Lancaster, Kendal (and from there on to London), Sedbergh and Kirkby Lonsdale. And, apart from the London carriers, eight other carriers travelled regularly from Kirkby Stephen to different parts of England.

Technological developments to stagecoaches also fuelled improved journey times. The coaches were built lower to the ground, so they could be driven more quickly with less fear of being overturned. The invention of the elliptical spring (by the wonderfully named Obadiah Elliot) in 1804 made it possible for carriages to be hung from springs, which made the coaches cheaper to manufacture, enabled them to travel at greater speed and more comfortably—and the increased stability made it possible to have ‘outsides’, or seats on the roof, without the passengers being tossed overboard. Together with bigger carriages, this meant that by the 1830s stagecoaches carried double the number of passengers they had in 1790. Fifteen times as many people were travelling as had forty years before, in a service that had grown in the number of scheduled routes, and the number of coaches on those routes, by 800 per cent.
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It was not merely passenger numbers: the quantity of goods transported by road also increased. In 1823 London had over 700 carriers, twice as many as it had had thirty years before; Exeter had three times as many in 1831 as it had had in 1792, while Sheffield had nearly four times as many; in Birmingham the number soared fivefold in the same period. Overall, across the country, there was a 131 per cent growth in carrier services, which sounds substantial. But, compared to an urban population growth of 120 per cent, it becomes apparent that the number of carriers was barely keeping up with overall growth.
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The main reason for this lack of expansion was the development of the canal system.

Adam Smith had recognized the importance of transport to the economy, but, while he paid lip service to roads, he was mainly concerned with the benefits brought by water transportation. In 1776, in the middle of this revolution in transport, he wrote in
The Wealth of Nations
, that ‘by means of water-carriage, a more extensive market is opened to every sort of industry than what land-carriage alone can afford it, so it is upon the sea-coast, and along the banks of navigable rivers, that industry of
every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself.’ He returned to this, stressing that ‘Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that account the greatest of all improvements.’
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But he was somewhat behind the times in his concentration on rivers. It is true that at the beginning of the eighteenth century most work had been concerned with improving the navigability of rivers. In 1720 the Mersey and Irwell Navigation System had opened; the Weaver Navigation carried traffic from 1720, and improvements to the Wear went on from 1716 to 1759. Yet, despite increasing the extent of the navigable inland waterways of Britain from just over 1,100 kilometres in 1660 to more than 1,800 kilometres in 1720s,
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this was always going to be a solution limited by geography: the newly industrialized Midlands were over 400 feet above sea level, and in the west the River Severn fluctuated from having a depth of only 16 inches of water in good weather to rising 18 feet in five hours in bad, while in 1796 it remained completely impassable for all but two months of the year. Canals were the logical way forward. Two projects led the way. From 1754 the Liverpool Corporation oversaw the building of the Sankey Brook Navigation system—an entirely new canal along an entirely new route, rather than following an old riverbed. Then in 1757 the Duke of Bridgewater inherited an estate, in Worsley, in Lancashire, and planned immediately to build a canal to link his new coalfields with the urban centres of Manchester and Liverpool. The first ten miles of the Bridgewater Canal were in operation by 1761, and the price of coal in Manchester immediately fell from 7
d.
to 3
¹
/
₂
d.
per hundredweight.
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In 1766 James Brindley, the engineer behind the Bridgewater Canal, began work on the Trent and Mersey Canal, which when finished in 1777 linked the Trent near Burton to the Mersey in Lancashire, making the entire breadth of the country from Hull to Liverpool navigable. The canal was 151 kilometres long (225 if you count the bit where it joined the Birmingham Canal and the Severn), and had along its length 75 locks, 5 tunnels, 5 major aqueducts and 155 minor ones—a feat of engineering that ushered in the great age of canal building. By 1830 there were nearly 5,000 kilometres of canals in England and Wales.
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Wedgwood and his friends had been enthusiasts from the beginning: Erasmus Darwin had been involved in promoting the Grand Trunk
Canal, which was to link the Trent and the Mersey (1766—77) and the Birmingham Canal (opened 1771), and he and Wedgwood saw the very practical benefits to being able to convey the Potteries’ output to the ports of Liverpool and Hull.
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Darwin had calculated that the cost of shipping the clay and flint used in Wedgwood’s works would drop from 15
s.
per ton to 8
s.
per ton once the canal opened, while the freight charges for the finished earthenware moving in the opposite direction would be 12
s.
instead of the present 28
s.
per ton. (In fact, when the Trent and Mersey Canal was completed, freight prices dropped from 10
d.
to
¹
/
₂
d.
per ton per mile.)
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Under Wedgwood’s watchful eye, the Trent and Mersey had been carefully planned to pass through land he had purchased for his new factory, which in turn was being designed to make loading and unloading from the as yet non-existent canal into the as yet non-existent factory both economical and convenient.

Wedgwood, of course, was not the only manufacturer to benefit in this way. Many of the new factory owners were as successful as they were because they understood that technology and trade went hand in hand. Joseph Wilkes, the child of a Leicestershire farmer, set up as a cheese factor in Burton upon Trent. In 1763 he went into partnership with a Birmingham banker named Sampson Lloyd (whose bank is now known as Lloyds TSB, keeping his name alive into the twenty-first century), buying a lease on nineteen miles of the Trent Navigation; from this he gradually invested in canals, turnpikes (and later railroads), until in 1783 he bought the entire parish of Measham, where he set up a pithead to mine coal, a brickworks, a corn mill, a barge-building company and

Wedgwood and Darwin did not, however, confine their canal fever to commerce alone. When fossils were uncovered during the building of the Trent and Mersey, Wedgwood collected them and shared them with Darwin: ‘I will in return,’ he promised, ‘send you some mineral observations of exactly the same value (weighed nicely) for I must inform you I mean to gain
full as much
knowledge, from you who can spare it so well, as I return you in exchange.
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a cotton mill. A bigger cotton mill was opened in 1802, which he ran together with several banks in the Burton area.

One final example of these multidisciplinary industrialists was Robert ‘Parsley’ Peel,
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a ‘mechanical genius’, who was influenced by Lloyd and his partner to set up a cotton mill in Burton upon Trent in the early 1780s, melding two new pieces of innovation and technology: his factory used the new Arkwright cotton-spinning frames, and was located where the Trent and Mersey Canal could handily convey raw materials and finished goods to and from the works. By 1790 his son Robert had ‘capital overflowing in his hands’, and bought property, including estates from the Marquis of Bath and a parish near Tamworth, which was to be a base to launch his political career. Even though politics was more on his mind than cotton, Tamworth was on the Trent and Mersey too, and soon Peel and his partners owned spinning mills, calico-printing and bleaching works. By the end of the eighteenth century they controlled 20 mills in Lancashire and the Midlands and had 15,000 employees, and Peel, the son of the semi-literate Parsley Peel, was Sir Robert, and considered himself entirely a gentleman, while Parsley’s grandson ultimately became prime minister.
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Yet it is important to remember that while this modernization—of production, distribution and retailing—was developing at a furious rate, it was not occurring in splendid isolation, but running in tandem with an older system of retail networks. For much of the time the two coexisted quite happily. For those living outside major urban areas—and for many within city limits—there were four ways of buying goods. The first, which remains today and therefore is the one we regard as primary, was the shop. As we have seen, even people in rural areas had regular if not continuous access to shops. But this did not mean that they bought nothing the rest of the time. The most frequent and convenient way of purchasing goods was at daily, weekly, monthly or seasonal markets. From the late eighteenth century, butchers, fruit vendors and greengrocers were the main retailers in markets—corn, flour, cheese, bread and other staples were no longer sold this way, but had moved either into fixed wholesale premises (such as corn halls and cloth halls) or to back-street shops and other fixed retail premises. In 1772 in
Manchester there were 30 grocers and tea dealers, 3 provision dealers (including cheesemongers and butter, bacon and ham dealers) and 16 flour and corn dealers appearing in the directories listing retail outlets; by 1800 their numbers had risen to 134 grocers and tea dealers, 11 provision dealers, and 262 flour and corn dealers.
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While the markets, usually run and operated by local inhabitants, were—just—holding on to the perishable food sales, fairs, which were run for the most part by outsiders, were evolving. Before the eighteenth century an annual fair was for wholesale merchants to conduct business, whether it was in cloth, corn, horses or agricultural material such as feed, animals or machinery. By the 1720s cloth halls and corn halls had appeared—fixed public buildings where trading could go on year round.
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This trend, from temporary to permanent, from street to shop, continued throughout the century, as fairs lost all their wholesale side, except in a few cases for animals and some food. Instead, the fairs became more and more the haunt of entertainers, pedlars, shows and exhibitions. (For more on fairs in the nineteenth century, see pp. 282—5.)

The final method of purchasing goods in rural areas, and in many urban ones, was via hawkers and pedlars. Most areas were well served by these ‘Scotch drapers’ and ‘Manchester men’, whose regular circuits covered most of Britain. These were not the simple men with packs of modern imagining, and they were not selling solely to the poor. The Society of Travelling Scotchmen in Shrewsbury in 1785 had capital of more than £20,000; even the small Bridgnorth society had capital investment of £5,000.
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The Scotch draper carried a pack ‘four feet in length and two or more in depth’,
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and it closely resembled the clown car at the circus, pouring out an endless variety of more goods than logic said it could possibly hold: silks, cotton, calico, linen, hosiery, lace, and ready-made-up women’s clothes—petticoats, handkerchiefs, chemises and still more. In 1781 the Revd James Woodforde wrote in his diary that he had bought, from a man ‘with a cart with Linens, Cottons, Lace &c.…some cotton 6 Yrds for a morning gown for myself at 2
s.
6
d.
per yard, pd. 0.15.0 Some chintz for a gown for Nancy 5 yds and
¹
/
₂
I pd. 1.14.0…Nancy also bought a Linen Handkerchief &c. of him. Mrs How bought a silk handkerchief of him also.’
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Throughout the nineteenth century, street sellers continued to appear in towns, especially in more suburban areas, carrying more heavy goods than today seems feasible. In his 1851 survey of the working poor, Henry Mayhew listed
men who sold ‘Door-mats, baskets and “duffer’s” packs, wood pails, brushes, brooms, clothes-props, clothes-lines and string, and grid-irons, Dutch-ovens, skewers and fore-shovels’ carried across their shoulders.
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*