Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (39 page)

Devouring distance at the rate of fifteen leagues an hour, the steam engine, that powerful stage manager, throws the switches, changes the décor, and shifts the point of view every moment; in quick succession it presents the astonished traveller with happy scenes, sad scenes, burlesque interludes, brilliant fireworks, all visions that disappear as soon as they are seen; it sets in motion nature clad in all its light and dark costumes, showing us skeletons and lovers, clouds and rays of light, happy vistas and sombre views, nuptials, baptisms, and cemeteries.
¹²⁹

This was, to all intents and purposes, a description of that epitome of Victorian entertainment, the panorama. Travel was now a show.

*
Wakes were originally the celebrations of the feast day of a particular saint, usually the parish church’s patron saint, but they had long become local holidays, with village sports, dancing and other communal pastimes taking place on the saint’s day and for several days afterwards.

*
By the 1840s some paid holidays were expected, more by clerks in offices than by factory workers. In
A Christmas Carol
, Scrooge tells his clerk, Bob Cratchit, who receives only one day’s holiday a year, that paying him for that one day is

‘not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you’d think yourself ill-used, I’ll be bound?…And yet…you don’t think
me
ill-used, when I pay a day’s wages for no work.’

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

‘A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!’
⁷

*
For a table of holidays observed by many civil-service offices in the eighteenth century, see Appendix 3, p. 498.

*
For changing tastes and values over the years, it is worth noting that, according to the website of the National Trust, which now owns it, Belton is ‘one of the finest examples of Restoration country-house architecture’, with ‘stunning interiors’ and ‘exceptional plasterwork and wood-carvings’.

*
The tip was a not insignificant part of the tour: those lower down the social scale were conducted by lesser servants, and the tip was in keeping with their status; the more elite visitors were shown around by the housekeeper, and were expected to tip lavishly. Mrs Home ferried visitors around Warwick Castle for nearly fifty years, and when she died in 1834 the ‘privilege of showing the castle’ had enabled her to accumulate £30,000.
²²

*
The catalogue was not of the entire house, but of the paintings and
objets d’art
that made up Walpole’s famous art collection, which was sold by his heirs to Catherine the Great - one of the three great collections she acquired that today form the nucleus of the Hermitage Museum.

*
The Lakes were not the only place where this regatta-like air pervaded a beauty spot. In Maria Edgeworth’s novel
Ennui
(1809) Lord Glenthorn travels to the Lakes of Killarney, where he finds ‘such blowing of horns, such boating, such seeing of prospects, such prosing of guides, all telling us what to admire’.
⁴³

†
Much of Macpherson’s life and work is open to diametrically opposed interpretations. I will do my best to look only at the results of the publication of his Ossian poems, rather than exploring what they were, or how they came to be.

*
This commodification of the restless Romantic rebel happened repeatedly, and with breathtaking speed. Goethe’s
Sorrows of Young Werther
, one of the defining texts of the melancholy artistic temperament, was translated into English in 1779, and eagerly embraced by would-be rebels. But they did not pine after married women and commit suicide, as Goethe’s hero Werther had done in the novel. Instead, some bought blue coats and yellow breeches, to dress like him; while others bought tea sets decorated with scenes from the novel, or engravings, or china figurines of the characters; or they went to theatrical versions; or to tableaux of the denouement at Vauxhall Gardens or at Mrs Salmon’s Historical Waxworks, where they could see a waxwork scene of Charlotte mourning over Werther’s grave. The cult of Byron a few decades later mirrored this closely, when instead of writing, young would-be poets took to wearing their hair brushed back in long curls, and their shirt collars turned down.
The Art of Tying the Cravat
in 1828 had a plate which showed how to create ‘the cravat a` la Byron’.
⁴⁹

*
Later she looks through her Claude glass at the man she has decided to marry: ‘I’ll throw a Gilpin tint over him…Yes, he’s gorgeously glowing. I must not view him with the other lights, for a husband should not be either glaringly gloomy, or frigidly frozen…’

*
Rhodium, a reddish metal of the platinum group, had been discovered in 1803. According to an advertisement in
The Times
for Doughty’s Perpetual Ruby Pen, which used rhodium in its nibs, ‘The nibs of this perfect and permanent Pen are…[made from] materials which are neither corroded by ink nor worn by uses.’ The pens were priced at 2 guineas, which gives some indication of the income-level of Dr Kitchiner’s readers.
⁶²

*
It was this excursion, which travelled on a Monday, that I earlier suggested may have been a late appearance of ‘St Monday’.

*
This involved a slightly steeper learning curve than Scotland. On his first trip he had failed to arrange for a translator, although he spoke neither French nor German. Four sisters who were on the trip spoke both, and his constant cry was, ‘Where are the ladies who know French and German? Forward, please - and say what this man is jabbering about.’
⁷⁰

*
Ruskin wasn’t agitated only by tourists defacing the Alps. He also complained of ‘the stupid herd of modern tourists [who] let themselves be emptied, like coals from a sack, at Windermere’.
⁷⁶

*
A seaside pier was, initially, simply a way of getting steamer passengers from the boat to the shore. In 1814 the first big pier opened at Ryde, on the Isle of Wight; before it was built, passengers had been carried by porters from the beach to the boat and back again. Soon piers were viewed as a logical extension of the promenade, and opened to those who were taking the air or exercise, for a fee. It was only when the railways became a permanent feature, and therefore the piers’ primary function vanished, that they became instead places of entertainment.
⁸¹

*
The period that the ‘season’ encompassed altered over time. In the early part of the eighteenth century there were two seasons, spring and autumn; from mid-century the autumn season of one year began to extend until it reached the opening of the next spring season. By 1780 there was just one season, lasting from September to May.

*
This was not, of course, his claim to fame. Herschel (1738-1822) had been a military bandsman in Hanover, and to avoid impressment had fled to England, where first he led the band of the Durham militia. After he settled in Bath his hobbies, astronomy and instrument building, were permitted to come to the fore, especially after 1781, when he became the first person in the modern age to discover a planet, Uranus. In 1782 his increasing astronomical reputation produced a pension from George III, in return for which he left Bath for Windsor, to be on call should a member of the royal family care to examine the skies under his supervision.

*
This audience participation took forms that today seem barely conceivable: orangesellers threw their wares and caught coins in exchange; whores promenaded through the permanently lighted auditorium looking for customers; even the respectable middle classes sitting quietly in their boxes were not segregated from the hubbub all about them. They had come to be seen and to see their friends, and sometimes they had more contact with the rest of the audience than they might have wished.
Lloyd’s Evening Post
in 1776 reported that ‘A fellow who sat on the sixth row of the Upper Gallery threw a Keg (which he had brought full of liquor into the House) over the Gallery front. It fell upon a lady’s head, who sat in that part of the Pit which was railed into the Boxes, but the Lady’s hair being dress’d in high
ton
, the artificial mountain luckily prevented the mischief that otherwise might have been occasioned.’ By comparison, Boswell’s story of entertaining ‘the audience prodigiously by imitating the lowing of a cow…I was so successful in this boyish frolic that the universal cry of the galleries was “
Encore
the cow!
Encore
the cow!”’ seems charmingly innocuous.
¹⁰²

*
It was also a lasting success: in 1775 Garrick was still using it to draw in the crowds. That year the character of Venus was portrayed by a rising young actress named Sarah Siddons, while her Cupid was a four-year-old Thomas Dibdin, the son of the composer, and later to be a playwright and theatrical manager in his own right.

*
The hunting expedition had a history that was in many ways representative of the entire Shakespeare industry. In 1709 the poet laureate, Nicholas Rowe, recounted how Shakespeare had once been arrested for poaching deer in Charlecote Park. The revelation that Charlecote had not, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had a park only saw the story transposed to Fulbrook, a nearby estate. Scott included this legend in
Kenilworth
, and it thereafter became fact. Apart from anything else, it meant that those wishing to follow in Shakespeare’s footsteps could visit a charming Tudor mansion rather than a dreary inn-cum-butcher’s shop.
¹¹⁰

*
And, one assumes, the local inhabitants.

*
The Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, sponsored by the MP Samuel Plimsoll, required a line - soon known as the Plimsoll line - to be painted on the hull of all ships, to show at what point they would officially become overloaded. The shoes, which appeared at almost the same date, had a line of rubber running around the canvas, which gave them their topical nickname.

S
EEING THE COUNTRYSIDE
from a train window, observing it as if it were a panorama unrolling its scenic views in front of the traveller, was a strange inversion: panoramas were expected to show the world to those who could
not
travel - a sort of static newsreel, they brought to the exhibition halls of Britain a world of ‘foreignness’. Yet these panoramas had to jostle for space among a kaleidoscope of entertainments and amusements.
¹
It is all too easy, looking back, to think that the entertainments that have survived into our own times - theatre, music, books - were previously the only entertainments, or at least the dominant forces, or at the very very least the only ones that were enjoyed by the middle classes. Some genres have vanished entirely, others have been relegated to amusements for children. But the world of shows was a varied and complex one.

In 1844 James Robinson Plancheé’s Christmas extravaganza - this one called
The Drama at Home
- had a ‘Grand Anomalous Procession of the London Exhibitions’, in which the ‘Puff’ asks ‘The Drama’, ‘Will you receive the London Exhibitions?’ She replies, ‘Yes, for I’m told there are such sights to see / The town has scarcely time to think of me.’ The stage directions then instruct: ‘Enter in procession, and preceded by Banner-bearers and Boardmen, the Ojibbeway [
sic
] Indians, General Tom Thumb, the Centrifugal Railway [a sort of proto-rollercoaster currently on display]…the Industrious Fleas, Diver and Diving Bell, and the Chinese Collection.’
²
This list was a random sampling of the current year’s hits, but every year had a continually changing panorama of entertainment that unrolled before the eyes of each city’s inhabitants. The
technology of the nineteenth century had brought new examples, new varieties, but the range of possibilities had been growing over the previous half-century. In
Evelina
, Fanny Burney’s novel of 1778, the characters found time to visit seven pleasure gardens, a fireworks display, an auction, a ‘ridotto’ (a public assembly with music and dancing), three coffee houses or taverns, two spas, five theatres, including the opera and a puppet theatre, and Cox’s Museum.

Cox’s was one of many entertainments that involved automata and displays of mechanical ingenuity. This particular display was very much the province of the upper classes, if only because of the admission charge of 10
s.
6
d.
- more than anyone had ever charged, or would charge for the next hundred years. Cox, a jeweller by trade, specialized in mechanical items, as did many others, but his were highly decorative, which was much less common. They included a peacock that spread its tail every hour, a swan that ‘swam’ across a mirror made to look like a pond, and a pineapple that opened to display inside a nest of singing birds.
³

The love of clockwork mechanisms and automata led very naturally to a desire to set their various movements into a narrative context, to give them their own ‘story’ and, therefore, a sort of function. One of the most popular of the eighteenth-century shows was Philippe de Loutherbourg’s ‘Eidophusikon’.
*
It was also one of the most influential, changing the nature of many shows that followed. De Loutherbourg, born in Germany, had travelled first to Paris, where he was so highly regarded as a painter that membership of the Académie Royale was conferred upon him while he was still three years below the minimum age. He then arrived in London and, despite acceptance by the Royal Academy, went to work for Garrick at Drury Lane. While he was a good painter, as a stage designer and technician he was revolutionary. He was one of the first to integrate theatrical lighting and special effects with the backdrops,
creating atmosphere as well as images. He then used automata and innovative techniques to create remarkable spectacles which made his theatrical productions admired as much for their own sake as for the plays that were performed in front of them: in the 1770s his productions had ships sailing across the back of the stage, or forming naval regattas, or even, in Sheridan’s
The Critic
, fighting the Armada battle.
The Wonders of Derbyshire
was barely a play: it was more of an excuse to display his twelve sets, created from sketches he had produced in the Lake District.
⁴
Before his arrival, stage lighting had been standard, set by a formula that was the same for every production. This one-size-fits-all approach had kept lighting entirely apart from set design. De Loutherbourg merged the two, using a variety of different lights to display different elements of his scenery at different times, experimenting with coloured silks, diffusers and indirect lighting to create novel effects. Now a scene could take place in a fog that was created by light, rather than painted on to a back flat; another scene could display a sunset, or the rising moon, or a fire.

De Loutherbourg was not content to work only in the theatre, however, and the Eidophusikon was his masterwork. This was opened in 1782 in his own house in Lisle Street, in a purpose-built theatre that accommodated 130 people (at 5
s.
a head) in front of a box stage of the type usually used for marionettes. A series of scenes was programmed, showing the ‘Various Imitations of natural Phenomena, represented by Moving Pictures’. The effects were created by many layered elements. A painted back flat with cut-out wings on either side was the basis on which everything else was built; then clouds, the moon or sun and other ephemeral background elements were painted in opaque colours on backing linen and wound across the back flat at varying speeds. Cardboard and three-dimensional wooden models, decreasing in size to create a sense of perspective, were set on a sea- or landscape modelled in clay, or carved out of wood, again sized to suggest a vanishing perspective and painted to match the lighting of each scene: sunlit scenes had brighter colours in front, while objects in the background were painted in darker versions of the same colour, to suggest the hazy distance. Both the models and the land- or seascapes were manipulated by a crank that moved them at varying speeds - the front models moved more quickly, while the rear ones were slower, to imply a greater travelling distance - the lighting was modulated in each scene by stained-glass filters or by
fabrics to produce the effects of light and colour playing across the scene. All these ideas were incorporated together for the first time, to produce a scenic effect that looked not like a painting of nature, but like nature itself.

De Loutherbourg also turned his mind to sound effects, which had rarely been attempted. He produced thunder via a copper sheet, rain and hail by yet another crank, which manipulated containers that held seeds, peas, shells or other objects carefully evaluated for their individual noises. He even had a drumhead with the skin stretched so tightly over it that, when rubbed, it produced the sounds of ‘souls in torment’, which was ideal for his famous finale, a tableau of Milton’s ‘Satan and his troops with the Raising of Pandaemonium’. This scene, set in a mountain valley, showed the interior of a temple whose colonnades of writhing snakes were consumed by flames while, from the adjacent burning lake, emerged Moloch and Beelzebub, accompanied by demons, to an accompaniment of lightning and thunder.

This was a revelation to a world accustomed to unmoving stage pictures, and, as well as producing a fashionable entertainment that heavily influenced the development of other types of show, these new scenic effects also transformed theatrical practice. By 1820 Edmund Kean’s
King Lear
was advertised as having ‘A Land Storm. After the manner of
Loutherbourg’s Eidophusicon
[
sic
]’. One viewer reported that ‘Overhead were revolving prismatic coloured transparencies, to emit a continually changing supernatural tint, and to add to the unearthly character of the scene. King Lear would one instant appear a beautiful pea-green, and the next sky-blue, and, in the event of a momentary cessation of the rotary motion of the magic lantern, his head would be purple and his legs Dutch-pink.’ The
Drury Lane Journal
was rather more economical, simply noting, ‘King Lear revived with entirely new scenes, particularly the storm scene…lighted by a new process from the top of the stage. Very successful.’
⁵

After a few years in his home, de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon was transported by his assistant to the Exeter Change, where many other entertainments regularly found a home. As we saw, the Change had begun life as a bazaar, but very soon the first floor was used exclusively to show a rotating display of exhibitions. The Eidophusikon continued to show many of the favourite old scenes, and it also incorporated new ones, especially of topical events such as the wreck of the
Halsewell
,
an East India trading ship, which had occurred only weeks before the exhibition opened. Yet the move to Exeter Change signalled a shift in audience, and perception. The Greek name for the show and the high admission charge, as well as the exclusivity of a private theatre, had given a magic-lantern show an air of artistry. At the Exeter Change, appearing alongside a menagerie, waxworks, automata and musical instruments, by the end of the 1790s the Eidophusikon had become just another amusement-arcade show: at one performance Count Boruwlaski, a dwarf who exhibited himself, accompanied de Loutherbourg’s scenes of Miltonic grandeur with guitar music; at other times George Saville Carey performed ‘Comic Songs, Readings and Imitations…of many characters of the past and present age’, or ‘the Sieur Comus’ displayed ‘his astonishing performance on Cards, Caskets, Rings, Watches, Medals, Sympathetick Clocks, and many Magical Deceptions’. (However, it is true that one series had ‘Master Hummell singing’, and the foremost historian of Victorian shows and entertainments has suggested that this was the composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who at the time was studying in London with Clementi.)

Exeter Change may have signalled the descent of the Eidophusikon, but the location of shows was not necessarily a defining factor in how the exhibit itself was viewed. Displays of ‘natives’ from various far-away countries were often held in taverns - in 1772 two Mohawks were to be seen in the Sun tavern, the Strand, while the same year two ‘esquimaux’ were at Little Castle Street, Oxford Market (although there had been Inuit in Britain for more than 250 years: the first three had settled in Bristol as early as 1501). For the most part, though, the popular way to learn about foreign customs or episodes in history was at waxworks exhibitions. Mrs Salmon’s was the most famous in the eighteenth century. A handbill described her wares:

The Royal Off Spring: Or, the Maid’s Tragedy Represented in Wax Work, with many Moving Figures and these Histories Following. King Charles the First upon the Fatal Scaffold, attended by Dr Juxon the Bishop of London, and the Lieutenant of the Tower, with the Executioner and Guards waiting upon our Royal Martyr. The Royal Seraglio, or the Life and Death of Mahomet the Third, with the Death of Ireniae Princess of Persia, and the fair Sultaness Urania. The Overthrow of Queen Voaditia [Boudicca] and the Tragical Death of her two Princely Daughters…Margaret Countess of Heningbergh, Lying on a Bed of State, with
her Three hundred and Sixty-Five Children, all born at one Birth, and baptized by the Names of Johns and Elizabeths, occasioned by the rash Wish of a poor beggar woman…Old Mother Shipton
*
…All richly dress’d and composed with so much variety of Invention, that it is wonderfully Diverting to all Lovers of Art and Ingenuity.

By the time Boswell visited, in 1763, there were representations of royal christenings and a ‘Cherokee king with his two chiefs, in their Country Dress, and Habiliments’, as well as Antony and Cleopatra surrounded by their children.

Mme Tussaud, who in Paris had made death masks of many of the decapitated aristocrats fresh from the guillotine, and then of the revolutionaries Marat and Robespierre as well, arrived in England in 1802 and toured with her own waxworks for nearly thirty years before setting up in the Baker Street Bazaar in 1835. Her ‘Adjoining Room’ (not yet dubbed the Chamber of Horrors) had death masks, the blade and lunette from the guillotine, and several bloodstained relics. By 1844 her exhibition was famous enough for Planché to memorialize her:

To see you in clover, comes Mme Tussaud,
Your model in wax-work she wishes to shew,
The King of the French and Fieschi the traitor
Commissioner Lin and the Great Agitator,
†
Kings, Princes and Ministers, all of them go,
To sit for their portraits to Mme Tussaud.
⁷

Another form of show also presented itself as a way of seeing the world: the architectural model. Such models were designed to show visitors famous sights, to allow them to travel the world without travelling, or to see re-creations of times past - such as Solomon’s Temple, or the Holy Sepulchre. Some of these models were notable for being constructed out of strange materials, be it paper, playing cards or beef bones carved by French prisoners of war - one model was even made
from ‘Baccopipe Clay’. But many more were straightforwardly obsessive attempts to reproduce places of interest. In James Street a 5 metre square model of Paris boasted that it had 50,000 individual houses; another of the same city claimed that it was reproduced at a scale of about 1:750. Then there were models of the Alps, of Rome, or of Venice. Others were more local, depicting Lord Burleigh’s house at Chiswick, or the city of Bath, or the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford. Most of these displays were temporary, exciting transitory interest (and admission fees) and then vanishing. The only permanent exhibition in eighteenth-century London was the Classical Exhibition, in Pall Mall, which was built of cork and reproduced places mentioned in Greek and Roman literature. (However, in 1785 ‘Vesuvius’ set fire to the rest of the display, and this model vanished too, this time literally in a puff of smoke.)