Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (31 page)

From these catalogues, it was but a short step to a descriptive guidebook. The
Oxford English Dictionary
dates the first known use of the word ‘guide-book’, to mean a book used by a traveller, to 1814, but the phenomenon may well have appeared slightly earlier. John Byng, 5th Viscount Torrington, who kept diaries of his travels over nearly fifteen years, had by the end of the eighteenth century seen that ‘Tour writing is the very rage of the times.’
*
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Robert Southey also noted this development: ‘Wherever you go, printed information is to be found concerning every thing which deserves a stranger’s notice.’
⁹²
By 1810 there was even a guide to Wales, a country that had previously been considered to be a featureless wilderness.
The Cambrian Traveller’s Guide
also covered the Marcher counties, and up as far as Birmingham, and it aimed for completeness, for the most studious of travellers: it had twelve indexes, including indexes to geographical features such as ‘districts, islets, promontories, peninsulas, vales, valleys, dingles, passes, roads, sands, plains, parks, moors, downs, fields, forests, woods, marches’; physical features such as ‘mountains, hills, rocks, cliffs, caverns, caves and clefts’ as well as water elements - ‘fountains, rivers, estuaries, waterfalls, lakes, wells, bogs, aqueducts, creeks, bays, havens, ports, harbours, moats, ferries’ - built-up areas including ‘cities, towns, villages, hamlets, solitary inns and houses, bridges’; architectural elements, whether they were ‘castles, forts, encampments, walls’ or ‘palaces, mansions, gentlemen’s seats, villas’, abbeys, churches or ruins; ‘Tumuli, Carneddau or tombs, Cromlechs or monuments, pillars, Druid circles’; mines and potteries; and other miscellaneous man-made objects. (The indexes to the second edition were briefer, but contained the following enticing entries: ‘Nails for the shoes in ascending mountains, described; Peasants, diet of; Story, a marvellous; Wreckers, their cruelties; Circumstance, a remarkable one’.) The book did not include a map,
although it suggested the best one to buy - for 7
s.
6
d.
, in addition to the 7
s.
6
d.
charged for the book.
⁹³

Similarly, the Lake District had been ‘discovered’ in the late eighteenth century (see pp. 215-8), and a deluge of guidebooks followed. The poet Thomas Gray and the antiquary Thomas West had been the leaders in this field. Gray had travelled through the region in the late 1760s, and in 1775 he published his journal from this time, which popularized both the area and certain spots for which he had a particular affection. In 1778 West laid out these sights and a few others in guidebook form, as
West’s Guide to the Lakes
, with each sight marked as a ‘station’: visitors were told where to stop and what to bypass, as well as what to think at each stop. Each station was highly specific. At Windermere, ‘Near the isthmus of the ferry point, observe two small oak trees that inclose the road, these will guide you to this celebrated station. Behind the tree on the western side ascend to the top of the nearest rock, and from thence in two views command all the beauties of this magnificent lake.’ By 1799 a small summer house had been built there, with a window designed precisely to encompass this view.
⁹⁴
A tourist at the time dutifully recorded that ‘We remarked most of the stations described in West’s
Tour to the Lakes
, a book we had constantly in our hands.’
⁹⁵
Most tourists seemed to feel the same way: by 1812 the book had been through ten editions.

By the time of the Great Exhibition, guidebooks had become standardized: books like
Knight’s Excursion Companion
told the regular railroad traveller about the joys of a seaside town and its environs, or the history of the area, or the sights that could be seen from the train en route.
The Birmingham Saturday Half Holiday-Guide
, one of dozens of books helping the newly liberated clerk and his family amuse themselves on a Saturday, was an encyclopedia of leisure consumption. There was railway information on page 1, then thirty-five pages of walks, sightseeing trips and towns within half a day’s distance of Birmingham; a section on the ‘Natural history of the District’ was followed by five pages on recreational sports - boating, bathing, fishing and cricket. The advertisements covered all the possibilities for the new day-trippers. They were enticed to purchase further publications, such as
Saturday Afternoon Rambles Round London
, and at the same time the Midland Railway also promoted its ‘Tourist Tickets’, valid for a month for destinations such as ‘Scarboro’, Windermere, Buxton and others ‘as per particulars in the
Tourist Programme
, which may be had at Midland Receiving Offices and Stations’. Other advertisements alerted the hungry traveller to cookshops and dining rooms in the vicinity, while E. & F. Bostock, ‘Family boot and shoe warehouse’, was happy to make sure that ramblers were properly shod. The Birmingham India Rubber Company, ‘Manufacturers of VULCANIZED WATERPROOF COATS and CAPES for Walking, Riding, Driving, Hunting, Fishing, &c. CARTRIDGE BAGS, GAME BAGS, FISHING BAGS, COURIER BAGS, TRAVELLING BAGS, HAVERSACKS &C. FISHING STOCKINGS AND BOOTS, SHOOTING BOOTS AND LEGGINGS’, was one of many advertisers venturing into an entirely new field of commodity: sport.
⁹⁶

As sports themselves developed (see Chapter 11), so did sporting books to be sold to enthusiasts. Racing had led the way, with the various racing calendars discussed on p. 151. By the 1840s,
Ruff’s Guide to the Turf
, compiled by
Bell’s Life
’s racing correspondent, was issued regularly, listing horses, races, trainers, owners and prize money - all the components for armchair as well as trackside connoisseurship. Other sports did not lag behind. John Wisden, a cricketer, had on his retirement opened a cigar shop, but in 1864 he also began to publish an annual on his first love. His friend and erstwhile business partner Frederick Lillywhite, a sports journalist and the son of a cricketer known as the ‘Nonpareil Bowler’, produced a
Guide to Cricketers
, a rival to
Wisden
, in 1848 or 1849 (it survived until 1866), and his
Scores and Biographies of Celebrated Cricketers
appeared in 1862. Lillywhite’s brother John’s
Cricketers’ Companion
appeared from 1865 to 1882,
*
while their cousin James Lillywhite produced
Red Lillywhite
, an annual that appeared from 1872 to 1900. From the 1870s until the First World War, more than a hundred books on cricket appeared; football was almost as popular, spawning about sixty titles - its own almanac, the
Football Annual
, had first appeared in 1868. There were over 250 books on golf, and nearly as many again on guns or shooting. The publishers of these sporting books followed the conventions of the time, producing various matched volumes in ‘libraries’: the Sportsman’s Library, the Sports Library and the Badminton Library, to name a few.
⁹⁷

The new worlds that were opening up through books were literal as well as figurative. Books allowed more and more of the population to
become familiar with places that had previously been unknown, and now the places themselves were fast becoming accessible to the new consumer.

*
The ‘History of the Gentle Craft’ was a chapbook story that was popular from the seventeenth century in various forms; a 1758 edition, attributed to Thomas Deloney, was entitled
The delightful…History of the Gentle-Craft…Shewing what famous men have been Shoemakers in old time…To which is added…The Merry Pranks of the Green King of St Martins…Concluding with the Shoemakers Glory: being a…song, &c.
; ‘Ready Reckoners’ were printed tables that calculated interest or tax, or other mathematical functions for traders and shopkeepers.

*
In 1833 the mathematician Charles Babbage still felt the need to explain, ‘The Publisher, is a bookseller; he is, in fact, the author’s agent.’
⁶

*
Historically, a pencil could also mean a fine brush, used for delicate work; an etwee was an ornamental holder for small objects like needles or toothpicks, from the French ‘étui’, or case; sarsnet, or sarcenet, was a silk fabric, often used for linings.

*
Books were regularly printed in different formats, and sold either bound or unbound, the latter to allow the purchasers to have their books bound up to suit their own taste. Thus the variations in price.

†
It is worth looking here at the research William St Clair has done on the sales figures for Paine. It has been repeatedly said that ‘many hundreds of thousands’ of copies of
The Rights of Man
were sold, or that 200,000 were sold in the first twelve months; or that the pamphlet was available ‘in every village on the globe where the English language is spoken’. St Clair produces evidence to show that something over 20,000 copies were printed. Yet the somewhat hysterically inflated figures can be better understood when that 20,000-copy print run is contrasted to the standard print run for a political pamphlet - between 500 and 750 copies.
¹²

*
Libraries were divided according to their organizing principles. A proprietary library had a limited number of members, each of whom was required to buy a share on entry; this share could later be sold on to whomever the member chose. A subscription library had its own premises and a membership to which one had to be admitted personally; it bought, for the most part, more serious fiction and a preponderance of non-fiction. A circulating library was run from commercial premises, such as a shop or coffee house, was open to anybody on payment of a fee, and tended to stock more current books, both fiction and non-fiction.

*
Barrymore and Moncrieff are playwrights about whom little is known today, but they both wrote many popular plays in the spectacular mode that was to be so successful for much of the century. For more, see pp. 314ff, 330-38.

*
John Thurtell (1794-1824) was the son of a merchant, a middle-class boy gone to the bad. After probable arson, in an attempt to raise money he lured William Weare, a professional gambler, to Hertfordshire, where he shot him and cut his throat. Weare was memorialized by a play (
The Gamblers
), and by pamphlets, and also in the works of De Quincey, Borrow (in both
Lavengro
and
The Romany Rye
), Bulwer-Lytton, Carlyle and Dickens, as well as by the moving lines ‘His throat they cut from ear to ear, / His brains they battered in, / His name was Mr William Weare, / Wot lived in Lyon’s Inn.’

*
In the eighteenth century, novels had appeared in anything from two to seven volumes, depending solely on how much the author had to say: Richardson’s endless novel
Clarissa
needed seven volumes, Fielding’s
Amelia
only four, while Oliver Goldsmith’s
The Vicar of Wakefield
had a modest two. Gradually novels of three, four and five volumes became the most commonly produced, and by the nineteenth century three volumes had become the standard: now authors were expected to write to fit the volumes, rather than the volumes being printed to match the length of the novel.

†
As with most advertising, this fee was deliberately ambiguous. A 1-guinea subscription gave the borrower the right to take out one volume at a time; for 2 guineas, four volumes could be taken at once; 3 guineas gave eight volumes, and 5 guineas fifteen. For 10 guineas one could take thirty volumes, or for 20 guineas sixty - these subscriptions were mostly for the owners of grand country houses, or for clubs or other organizations.

*
In 1855 Mudie’s bulk requirements had created a problem: he had ordered 2,500 copies of Volumes 3 and 4 of Macaulay’s
History of England.
Together these copies weighed 8 tons, and the publisher finally threw up his hands and said Mudie would have to arrange collection himself.

*
This was a dramatic poem, a study of ‘the conflict between sensuous emotion and disciplined thought’ - not perhaps what one might immediately think of as railway reading.
⁶⁷

†
I include this quote from the
Saturday Review
because the idea gives me such pleasure, but it is worth bearing in mind that this fact was reported to the
Saturday Review
by W. H. Smith’s itself - which may possibly have had a vested interest in being seen to be purveyors of excellence.

*
The Williams family were the owners of this estate near Beaumaris on Anglesey, close to the Menai Bridge. According to local legend the head of the family at the time, Thomas Peers Williams, frequently missed his train because of his stubborn adherence to local time.
⁷¹

†
It was not until 1884, however, that there was any formal legislation. That year the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, attended by representatives of twentyfive countries, agreed that Greenwich would become the ‘zero’ meridian, and thus British railway time became the starting point from which all other countries took their bearings.
⁷²

‡
As is so often the case, there was a later claim from another printer, who said
he
was the first to produce a railway timetable, a few months before Bradshaw.
⁷⁵
Whether or not he was correct, it was
Bradshaw
that became the household bible.

*
Newspapers, magazines and books were all sold with their pages uncut; railway-station bookstalls usually sold special folding paperknives.

†
William Combe, the satirist, in his
Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque
, which he produced with Rowlandson’s cartoons in 1809, mocked this sort of home-grown travel writing. Dr Syntax’s travel journals were rejected by a publisher, who said, ‘We can get Tours - don’t make wry faces, / From those that never saw the places. / I know a man who has the skill / To make your Books of Tours at will; / And from his garret at Moorfields / Can see what ev’ry country yields.’
⁸¹

*
It was not, of course, necessary to have actually
been
to an exotic locale to feel that one had a vested interest. The poet Thomas Moore wrote to Byron, suggesting that he would gift Byron Turkey for Byron’s own literary use if Byron would agree to stay away from Persia, and especially would promise not to write about ‘peris’ without further discussion. In exchange, Moore dropped a story that seemed too close to Byron’s ‘Bride of Abydos’, despite Byron’s assurances that it would not ‘trench upon your kingdom in the least’.
⁸⁵

*
Byng came from a well-known family - his uncle was the Admiral Byng who in 1756 had sailed from Spithead to try to prevent the French from capturing Port Mahon, a mission which was to end in his death by firing squad, as Voltaire put it, ‘
pour encourager les autres
’ - but his travel diaries were unpublished until the twentieth century. Perhaps the only fame of his lifetime was to have had a son who was known to the Regency social world as ‘Poodle’ Byng.

*
Their brother James did not publish, instead opening Lillywhite’s, a sporting-goods store that continues to flourish today.