Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (32 page)

W
ITH THE COMING OF
the Industrial Revolution, with increasing urbanization, with the great movement of population from the countryside to the city, with the shift from seasonal to factory work - with all these things, the nature of leisure altered. ‘Old’ leisure had revolved around community activities, performed by set groups of people at set times of year, whether it was the village men playing a ritual football game every Shrove Tuesday (for more on ‘old’ sports, and football, see p. 438) or attendance at an annual fair. Now ‘new’ leisure permitted choices of activities by individuals to suit their own preferences, whether for sport, or the pub, or more professional entertainments such as theatres, shows or music halls. George Eliot, in
Adam Bede
(1859), shook her head sorrowfully over the new times, when ‘Even idleness is eager now - eager for amusement: prone to excursion trains, art-museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels…’
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Eliot was only one of the many to see the change, but while in
Adam Bede
she mourned the new commercial leisure activities, an interesting combination of the upper classes, evangelical reformers, merchants and factory-owners (not necessarily mutually exclusive) was working towards further change in the way the lower classes spent their working - and thus their leisure - hours. There were several intertwined strands to this desire for change. The old social system stood firmly on the notion that the upper classes were defined by their lack of employment - the upper classes
were
the leisured classes. By contrast, a leisured working man was an oxymoron: a leisured working man was merely unemployed, idle. The leisure time of the cultivated was well used; the working classes
when idle were probably fomenting disorder, or even crime. It was partly for this reason that there arose a number of societies whose main aim was social control of the lower orders. Even the title of the Society for the Rescue of Boys Not Yet Convicted of Any Criminal Offence was a clear indication that all lower orders were potential law-breakers.
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The Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality had ceased its activities by the late 1790s, but was re-formed and reappeared in 1802 as the evangelically controlled Society for the Suppression of Vice, which promoted an end to Sabbath-breaking and blasphemy, as well as the suppression of ‘licentious’ books and prints, fairs, public houses and gambling - to some it seemed to want to suppress every form of commercial leisure for the working classes. In its first two years, 623 of its 678 prosecutions were for Sabbath-breaking,
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which is surely significant: the main aim was to control the one free day of the workers, the one day when they were not already under the control of someone who was socially their superior.

This was not a view promoted simply by a group of religiously guided, single-issue zealots. It was commonly accepted by the governing classes, and by employers, that idleness in the workforce damaged national prosperity: if a workman was hungry, he would work; if he had enough to eat, he would probably go to the pub. (The rich, however, aided national prosperity by their idleness: by shopping, they were promoting production.) The nature of the agricultural year had traditionally encompassed many regular fairs and wakes.
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Now these intermittent eruptions of ‘merry-making’ were maddening to factory-owners who were trying to maintain steady production. Josiah Wedgwood wrote in endless exasperation on the subject. In 1771, ‘I should have sent you some good black [vases] this week,
if it had not been Stoke Wake
’; in 1772, ‘the Men have gone madding after these Wakes’s so that we could get little done’; and, again the same year, ‘We are laying by [laying off men] for Xmass at our works. The men murmer at the thoughts of play these hard times, but they can keep wake after wake in summer.’ Nothing much changed, however, for in 1776 he was writing, ‘Our men have been at play 4 days this week, it being Burslem Wakes. I have rough’d &
smoothed them over, & promised them a long Xmass, but I know it is all in vain, for Wakes must be observed though the World was to end with them.’
⁴

A further irritation for the employer was ‘St Monday’, the facetious name for the custom of workers taking Monday off after their Saturday payday. This habit was already fading away in the eighteenth century, but in its death throes it showed remarkable tenacity. A survey of witness statements from 8,000 Old Bailey session papers from 1750 to 1800 showed that in 1750 St Monday was almost universally considered a day off; by 1800 it was, for most people, a regular working day. Yet well into the nineteenth century traces of this ‘saint’ remained: in the 1830s Thomas Cook, a stalwart of the temperance movement, organized his first tours on Mondays (see p. 225). And as late as the 1870s the eminently respectable Hartlepool Temperance Society took its members on an educational excursion to the Middlesbrough Polytechnic on a Monday.
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As well as wakes and St Monday, fairs, assize weeks and other local festivals continued to be observed by some through the first half of the nineteenth century. In Warwickshire, many employers expected their hands to stop work about five times each summer, to attend prizefights. A mine in Lancashire gave its workers two weeks’ holiday at Christmas, one at Whitsun, three to four days for the Ringley Wakes, and the same again for the Ratcliff Wakes. Others expected their employees to absent themselves for the local race week.
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(It must be remembered that all holidays were unpaid: much hardship could be suffered by the management ‘giving’ two weeks’ holiday in winter.)
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Even when the 1833 Factory Act gave workers eight half-day holidays a year, plus Christmas Day and Good Friday, many workers wanted to keep their traditional holidays, rather than conform to the set days imposed on them by Parliament. In 1840, at Henry Ashworth’s mill in Turton, in Lancashire,
the workers agreed that, as they could not afford to take two holidays in two weeks, they would rather have their traditional day of Easter Monday than Good Friday, which Parliament had nominated as the statutory day; equally, they were not accustomed to stop work on Christmas Day, and asked instead for their traditional day on New Year’s Day.
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In other regions, similar accommodations between government regulations, regional industrial requirements and local customs were made: in the Potteries, the Great Stoke Wakes was instituted as a single surrogate to encompass the many local wakes.

With the gradual habituation to national holidays, even if patchily conformed to, came the closure of fairs, increasingly seen as disruptions to the slowly standardizing calendar. From 1750 to 1850, sixty fairs within a fifteen-mile radius of Charing Cross alone were suppressed. Southwark and May Fair were both shut down in the 1760s; Bow, Brook Green, Stepney, Tothill and Edmonton fairs were ended with the passing of the Metropolitan Police Act of 1822. Bartholomew Fair went in 1854; Greenwich Fair in 1857. More than the working classes saw their leisure curtailed. The Bank of England, with a majority of middle-class employees, can stand for many offices in its contraction of holidays. In the mid eighteenth century the bank had had 47 full days of holiday a year, by 1808 this was down to 44, and by 1825 to 40. Five years later there was an enormous drop, to 18 days a year, and it took just another four years to reduce that by three-quarters: in 1834 the bank closed only on Good Friday, May Day, Christmas Day and All Saints’ Day.
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This mirrors the rise in working hours across the country. In 1750 the average number of working days each year was between 208 and 255; fifty years later that number had risen to between 306 and 323.
⁹

While working days were being increased, working hours followed a contrary path, falling steadily from the eighteenth century onward. There was an unspoken and probably barely noticed trade-off occurring: fewer hours worked daily, in exchange for more regular, more reliable working patterns. As early as the 1720s, many builders had achieved a ten-hour day; by the mid eighteenth century, most artisans in skilled handicraft trades also expected to work ‘only’ ten hours a day. The fight for further reductions, which was straightforwardly one of employees against
employers, continued in trade-defined skirmishes through the early part of the nineteenth century: in the 1830s, the printers managed to win the right to work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. - that is, ten hours’ actual work.
¹⁰
(Any time spent not working - eating breakfast or lunch - was unpaid, as holidays were.)

With the 1867 Factory and Workshops Act, a sixty-hour week was the norm, but many workers still did not achieve this, because their workplaces were not covered by the act. In a shipping office in Liverpool in the 1880s, clerks in the passenger department worked from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. in theory; in practice they often worked until ten or eleven at night. Bank clerks, considered ‘the aristocracy of the clerical profession’ ostensibly worked from 8.30 in the morning until six in the evening, but in busy periods they were expected to remain until nine or ten. The large warehouses in Manchester worked similar hours: as late as the 1900s many opened officially from 8.30 a.m. to 6 p.m., but during any busy period staff were expected to start work between 6 and 8 a.m., and go through until 9.30 p.m; on Saturdays they had a ‘short’ day of 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. - in all, working nearly eighty hours a week.
¹¹
Shops were the worst offenders: in the late nineteenth century most shops in the West End of London closed at six during the week, with a half-day on Saturday, although Liberty’s stayed open until seven on weekdays, and four on Saturdays until the early 1880s, when the shop closed at two every other Saturday. (When Arthur Liberty finally announced a regular two o’clock closing every Saturday, his staff gave him an illuminated address of thanks.) As late as 1894 Harrod’s was still open until seven o’clock two nights a week. Shops away from the fashionable areas, or shops that relied on working-class customers, expected to stay open much later on Saturdays: until midnight, or even later, was common for many types of shop - one shop assistant in a draper’s remembered that on Saturdays ‘we never closed at all’.
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One of the reasons for shops keeping such long Saturday hours was because Saturdays more generally were gradually being ceded to workers’ leisure, and workers at leisure meant workers who had time to shop. In the original Ten Hours’ Bill (passed finally in 1847) there had been a clause asking for a ‘short’ Saturday, of just eight hours. While the retail sector ignored this for some time, factories began to see its value, and by 1850 many textile mills stopped work at two on Saturday afternoons, reasoning that if early closing helped to kill off the last vestiges of
St Monday then it was well worth doing. For manufacturers who relied on steam power, a partial workforce on a Monday was as much use as none. Many trades soon followed, encouraged by groups like the Early Closing Association, set up by Sabbatarians, who wanted to eradicate Sabbath-breaking by enabling workers to shop on Saturday afternoons.
¹³
It was becoming a commonplace, not merely among those worried about Sabbath observance, that half-closing on Saturdays would improve both health and morale, and permit employees to work better the rest of the week: workers who enjoyed their leisure on a Saturday ‘would thereby become a more healthy, social, and religious people’, said one campaigner.
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Early closing was from the first specifically linked to leisure activities: in 1860 a parliamentary select committee set up to investigate ‘promoting the Healthful Recreation and Improvement of the People’ recommended that the British Museum and the National Gallery, whose hours seemed to many to be specifically designed to keep out the lower orders (see pp. 397-8), should be made to open ‘at Hours on Week Days when, by the ordinary customs of Trade, such persons are free from toil’.
¹⁵
Twenty years earlier, mill-owner Henry Ashworth not only kept to the statutory hours, he also gave his workers a week’s holiday to ‘go to Ireland or London, or Scotland, wherever the coach or steam-boat will carry them, and spend their time rationally’.
¹⁶
For him, as for many now, holidays equated to travel.

Travel had been a rarity for all but a minority throughout much of the eighteenth century. Getting around was difficult, and expensive. It was only with the arrival of maps and guidebooks, the creation of the turnpikes and the improvements to the technology of the stagecoach, discussed over the last chapters, that even many of the elite began to travel. For others, even with these developments, any sort of movement away from one’s own home was a tremendous upheaval: ‘The village of Bridford lay only nine miles south-west of Exeter by road, yet the rector tells us that when Napoleon’s invasion of England was considered to be imminent the well-to-do families of Exeter made plans for flight to Bridford as though it were another continent.’
¹⁷
Yet, as the wars of the eighteenth century closed off the Continent to those who would previously have gone on the Grand Tour, travel within Britain became more common. In 1771 Sir Watkin Williams Wynn went on a tour of north Wales - with only nine servants, and an artist to record the views.
¹⁸

Yet the idea of recreational travel was spreading, starting with the
most prosperous, and then quickly moving down the social scale. In the 1780s and 1890s John Byng referred to himself in his diaries as a ‘tourist’ (one of the earliest uses of this word), because he was making tours - that is, he was travelling in a circle, beginning and ending at the same point - visiting the great houses of England and Wales every June and July. The eighteenth century had been a great period of country-house improvement, in which the houses in general became larger and more elaborate, particularly in those public areas that were designed not solely for family use, but for status: music rooms, libraries, picture galleries, and even in the 1780s some small theatres. The picture galleries were particularly prominent, as they were designed to hold the art that had been shipped home by the Grand Tourists and now needed to be displayed, for the renown of their owners. (Or to exhibit their gullibility: Horace Walpole, always waspish, made extensive notes of his visits, such as, at Castle Howard, ‘[Painting of the] Prince of Parma and dwarf, called Correggio, certainly not’.)
¹⁹
Until the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768 and the British Institution in 1805 (see p. 393), there was no other way to see art of any quality, and for the most part the owners of these houses expected visitors: Chatsworth was formally open to the public two days a week from the 1730s, Woburn on Mondays, Fonthill daily and, by the 1780s, Blenheim daily too. In
Pride and Prejudice
(written originally before 1797) Jane Austen had Elizabeth Bennet make a ‘Northern Tour’ with her aunt and uncle, visiting ‘the celebrated beauties’ of Chatsworth and Blenheim among others, until Elizabeth became ‘tired of great houses; after going over so many, she really had no pleasure in fine carpets or satin curtains’.
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It was such grandeur that many were looking for, however: Mrs Lybbe Powys, a member of the prosperous gentry class and a formidable tourist, who kept journals of her travels, found in Castle Howard ‘the rooms in general too small, though in the wing now building there seems by the plan some fine apartments to be intended’. Furthermore, she disdained Belton House because’ ‘Tis nothing more than a good family house.’
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