Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (4 page)

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 3
s
. for men, £2 2
s
. 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 5
s
. 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 6
d
. But on Saturdays—most workers’ half-day off—the price was pushed back up, to 2
s
. 6
d
. 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.