Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (24 page)

The existence of these exclusively sporting papers did not mean that the regular Sunday newspapers ignored their working-class readers’ interests, and from early on sport was a major component of the workingclass Sunday paper. It was too important financially to be ignored. Even sports like pugilism, which the middle classes who owned the papers, and who wrote the articles that appeared in them, considered too violent to be acceptable, forced their way into the mainstream. A rise in circulation of 12,000 copies followed a particularly important fight reported by
Bell’s.
The other weekly general-interest papers could not ignore that. The
Era
had previously refused to cater to what it referred to in nauseated tones as ‘the depraved appetite’ that fed on fights. It suffered a disastrous dip in circulation, and rapidly inserted a regular column on pugilism, breathing a sigh of relief as its sales soared by 30 per cent. Unsurprisingly, it then followed up this column with new special pull-out supplements for big fights.
⁹⁵

The mainstream daily press was ultimately forced down a similar route. In 1816
The Times
printed just twenty-four pieces on sport over an entire year - fewer than one piece a fortnight, and the small space it did give was exclusively concerned with upper-class events: the Oxford- Cambridge Boat Race, Ascot, the Eton and Harrow cricket match (from 1880 the paper unbent enough to employ a journalist as a cricket correspondent). The
Daily Telegraph
did a little better: it gave 2 per cent of its paper over to sport, although this was rarely anything other than racing coverage. Even the
Manchester Guardian
, deep in football territory, still gave more space to amateur athletics than to professional sport. Many other local papers, however, understood the link between sport and circulation and followed the example set by the sporting papers in sponsoring events. For twenty years from the 1860s the
Newcastle Daily Chron
icle
supported rowing and sponsored challenges and cups; the
Midland Sporting News
in Birmingham offered a £70 prize for a 130-yard handicap race, ‘in order to give further encouragement to pedestrianism in the Midland district’; the
Dundee Evening Telegraph
gave the trophy for the St Andrews amateur golf championship; and the
Glasgow Evening Times
sponsored an open tournament.
⁹⁶
Before this, the
Sunday Times
had been the first general-interest national newspaper to think of sport as a major component of its coverage - by 1851 it was promoting itself as a ‘literary, dramatic and sporting’ newspaper - and it is telling that this development came in a Sunday paper. The decision to carry sports coverage or not, and then the type of sport each paper reported on, was entirely class-based. The national working-class weeklies, apart from
Bell’s
(which, as we saw, soon turned itself into a bi-weekly), barely troubled with sport, and, when they did, sport was interesting only for its potential for gambling. So
Reynolds’s
and
Lloyd’s
covered racing, pugilism and athletics - all sports where betting was an essential component. The
News of the World
gave sport a single column as late as the 1870s, and it too was interested only in racing, and then only for the possibilities it gave for gambling.
⁹⁷

Football, and professional sport more generally, had to await the creation of a new type of newspaper, designed for it alone: the Saturday football special. If Birmingham’s
Saturday Night
was not the first football paper, in 1882, it was the first that survived for any length of time. It cost
¹
/
₂
d.
, and was on the streets from 7 p.m. each Saturday, carrying four pages reporting on that day’s matches. At the beginning there was no confidence that sport alone could carry an entire newspaper, although it definitely drove the scheduling. So
Saturday Night
advertised itself as ‘spicy without being vulgar’ and contained ‘a first class serial tale, a complete novelette, humorous and spicy paragraphs, three or four columns of local chat, the results of scores of athletic events all over the Kingdom, and everything
readable
’. By 1883 Blackburn too had its own football special; by 1884 Wolverhampton had joined in; soon Derby, Glasgow, Sheffield and Manchester had their own Saturday-night specials. In 1884 the
Football Field and Sports Telegram
took the plunge and dropped everything except football, becoming the first sports-only special: it had two pages with the day’s results and match reports, and then the remaining pages analysed the previous week’s games and had gossip about players and teams, forecasts of their prospects, and so on.
By 1900 there were at least two dozen of these sport-only papers - possibly more. There was now absolutely no question that there was a market for them. When Aston Villa met Queen’s Park in the FA Cup final in 1884, copies of the
¹
/
₂
d.
special - which was produced so quickly after the end of the match that it recorded the result and nothing else - were changing hands on the street for 6
d.
⁹⁸

By this time, the working population was used to having a number of magazines and newspapers covering a range of subjects all within its financial reach. As early as 1850 there were about a hundred cheap journals published in London alone; it may be that up to 2.9 million copies of periodicals were sold weekly across the country.
⁹⁹
An early development from the penny newspapers, with the financial and organizational support of the evangelical movement, was the arrival of the educational penny magazines. One of the most successful, as well as the pacesetter, was the
Penny Magazine
, which started publishing in 1832. Its great selling point was its reliance on illustrations. From the 1820s, more expensive books such as annuals had had the new steel engravings, while cheap chapbooks and broadsides had continued to reproduce old-fashioned wood engravings (see Chapter 5). The
Mechanic’s Magazine
in 1823 appeared every Saturday for 3
d.
, with many engravings to illustrate its didactic articles on ‘new Discoveries, Inventions and Improvements’, ‘Secret Processes’ or ‘Practical Applications of Mineralogy and Chemistry’.
¹⁰⁰
The
Penny Magazine
fitted exactly in this field of selfimprovement, and because it was published under the auspices of the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge it was a third of the price. Within nine months of first publication, circulation had reached 200,000. The magazine covered a range of ‘useful’ subjects - science, geography, history, biographies of the great and good, with illustrations including diagrams of machinery, pictures of foreign countries, of animals and of famous people, and copies of great works of art. Most of the pictures were intended to inculcate patriotism (particularly the travel images), to promote self-improvement (Benjamin Franklin’s portrait showed his ‘singular powers…of self-control’) or to set models of social behaviour (a portrait of the Virgin Mary was an example of maternal devotion, the huntress Diana displayed ‘maidenly reserve’; while the Last Supper, rather gloriously, was used as an illustration of ‘seemly behaviour in trying circumstances’).
¹⁰¹

The success of the aspirational
Penny Magazine
in the mass market gave impetus to magazine publishing. These broke down into two general types: the inexpensive didactic magazine, of which more below, and the illustrated magazine. In 1842 the
Illustrated London News
began operations, followed the next year by the
Pictorial Times
, and in 1855 by the
Illustrated Times
, as well as the
Illustrated News of the World.
Previously the Sundays had used illustrations to highlight the really big, once-in-ablue- moon stories - the coronation of Queen Victoria, or a particularly ghastly crime that had caught the popular imagination - or for their serials. The
Illustrated London News
started on a completely new track, establishing itself as a news magazine that showed each and every news event in a graphic as well as a text version. It cost 3
d.
weekly, so it was aimed at the middle- rather than the working-class market. The
Pictorial Times
was careful to make a similar orientation clear to its readers: ‘In “T
HE
P
ICTORIAL
T
IMES
” crime will be chronicled, not illustrated; the assassin will not be masqueraded as a jaunty ruffian, to do a further evil upon the false sensibilities of society…’
¹⁰²
These magazines instead catered to those who would previously have gone to exhibitions of models of the battlefield of Waterloo, or panoramas illustrating Nelson’s victory (see Chapter 7). Now world events were reproduced in a form that the middle classes could enjoy at home.

The second group of magazines that rose to prominence in this period, appreciated by the same audience, and also by the aspirant lower middle classes, who might have been stretched to find 3
d.
a week, was the cheap magazines for the self-improver, along the lines of the
Penny Magazine.
There were dozens of these titles, including the
Half-Penny Magazine
, the
Christian’s Penny Magazine
, the
London Penny Journal
, the
Girl’s
(and the
Boy’s
)
Penny Magazine
, the
Penny Illustrated Paper
, the
Penny Illustrated Weekly News
, the
True Half-Penny Magazine
, the
Penny Pictorial and Family Story Paper
,
Dibdin’s Penny Trumpet
, the
Penny Comic Magazine
, the
Penny Story Teller
and the
Penny Novelist.
¹⁰³
Most of them failed, but one that didn’t was
Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper
, which first appeared in 1853, founded by our old temperance lodging-house friend from the Great Exhibition, John Cassell (see p. 35). Cassell had made several attempts at producing an inexpensive magazine for the upwardly mobile, including
John Cassell’s Library
, the
Working Man’s Friend
, the
Popular Educator
and the
Illustrated Magazine of Art.
But it was the
Illustrated Family Paper
that caught on, combining as it did the threads of both

self-improvement and illustrative material, together with the midcentury swing to the domestic and the familial.

There had been earlier attempts at producing a family magazine - a genre the Victorians took to their heart and developed in the middle of the century. They had had titles like the
Family Herald
(1842), the
Family Friend
(1848), the
Family Economist
(also 1848) and the
Home Circle
(1849). It was Cassell’s good fortune - and skill - to latch on to the moment when private domestic life had become a public commodity for sale. Soon the
Family Paper
was selling a quarter of a million copies each week. It contained the same mixture of stories, articles and illustrations that the
Penny Magazine
had produced so brilliantly. Dickens’s illustrator, Phiz, contributed, as did Cruikshank; there were newly commissioned engravings of scenes from current plays, portraits of famous people, and fashion drawings. Then, for the ‘family’ element, instead of articles on inventions, or chemistry, there were riddles, anecdotes, games and needlework, fashion reports and biography, ‘queer facts’ and ‘light verse’, as well as an enormously popular ‘Notices to Correspondents’ section, where readers could write in for advice.
¹⁰⁴

These domestic magazines marked a major shift in emphasis, for, as can be seen from their contents, they were primarily aimed at women. Previously magazines for women had been fashion magazines, rather than magazines with fashions in them. In the early eighteenth century there had been a small number of short-lived miscellanies for women, with verses, riddles, and much moralizing. The first to survive for any length of time was the
Lady’s Magazine
, which was issued monthly and contained sheet music, stories, poetry, some news, and correspondence.
¹⁰⁵
It had been followed by the
Lady’s Monthly Museum
, which merged in 1832 with the
Lady’s Magazine
, and then merged again with
La Belle Assemblée
(which had originally appeared in 1806). These were magazines for the upper classes, and
La Belle Assemblée
cost 3
s.
- about the same as a skilled artisan could expect to be paid for a day’s work.
¹⁰⁶
La Belle Assemblée
was the precursor to many fashion magazines, and it will here stand in for them all.

La Belle Assemblée
claimed to be interested in more than fashion, but that is a claim that is hard to sustain. The February 1806 issue was typical: it had illustrations of ‘her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Charlotte’ and of the Marchioness of Townshend ‘in her Court Dress’, an illustration to go with a song, seven illustrations ‘of the London Fashions’ and another
five for their Parisian equivalents, as well as four needlework patterns for readers to copy. The ten articles included three on fashion (or fashion masquerading as biography and high life), and then the entire second half of the magazine was devoted to a ‘Description of the Prints of Fashion, English and French; London Fashions for the Present Month; Parisian Fashions, for February; General Observations on Fashions and Fashionables; and Supplementary Advertisements for the Month’, with plates. The plates had ‘Explanations’ following them, describing, for example, ‘a plain muslin gown, with sleeves chequered with pink ribbands, and the gown ornaments in the front also with pink ribbands, the breasts trimmed with puckered net lace, and a pink sash, with short ends hanging behind; an Indian shawl, with Turkish embroidery; white satin shoes, and
peruke
gloves; this half dress has been considered equally simple and elegant.’
¹⁰⁷
Each month there was further guidance on sudden changes to the
modes.
One January the reader was notified, ‘Fashionable colours are
aventurine
[browny-gold], which has lost nothing of its attraction, crimson, claret-colour, bottle-green, and some dark fancy colours. Cherry-colour, geranium, azure-blue, and pale lemon-colour, are fashionable for evening dress, and for bonnets; but we must observe, that nothing is considered so elegant in evening-dress as white.’ By February there was ‘the addition of various shades of rose’, while in March came a wholesale change to ‘cinnamon, fawn,
poussiere de Paris
, claret-colour, beet-red, some shades of violet and of aventurine, rosecolour, and azure blue: the two last, and white, are predominant in evening dress’. By May aventurine was hopelessly out of fashion, and so it went on.
¹⁰⁸
Every aspect of personal presentation was given close scrutiny: hairstyles had their own section, and the reader could expect to be updated on ‘the style of
coiffures en cheveux
’, for which ‘there is now more variety…than we have seen for a considerable time. Those
a la Grecque
are still fashionable, but they are now frequently ornamented with a wreath
a la peruvienne
, composed of an intermixture of
marabouts
, and ears of gold corn. The
coiffure a la Cornelie
differs…only in the knot of hair behind being brought higher on the head.’
¹⁰⁹
(The constant recourse of fashion magazines to half-digested French was happily satirized by
Punch
: ‘Gowns should be…looped with
attachè.
Ladies moving in the highest circles are not unfrequently seen in bonnets of
rechauffé
trimmed with corduroy to match…Coup d’oeil is not much in vogue for muffs; but those made of
blasé
, are beginning to be the rage. Parasols,
to be in the highest fashion, should be of
bombazine a la récherché
, but we have noticed a few of the beautiful fabric
carte blanche.
’)
¹¹⁰