Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (40 page)

These educational models gave viewers the sight of great buildings, past or present, across the globe (or at least across Europe). Many people also visited their own great buildings and monuments nearer at hand, for sightseeing and exhibitions and shows were tightly linked together. In 1711 Addison had visited Westminster Abbey, and ‘in the poetical Quarter, I found there were Poets who had no Monuments, and Monuments which had no Poets.’ The general gloominess of the place, its air of shabbiness, was, he thought, not altogether out of keeping with the intimations of mortality that were appropriate to tombs and memorials. This was soon to change, and by the middle of the eighteenth century there had been an active campaign to clean the place up, with the monument to Shakespeare by the sculptor Scheemakers being erected in 1741. By 1760 the name ‘Poets’ Corner’ was in use, and Westminster Abbey had become just one of the many tourist sights that visitors were now expected to see. By 1801 there was an entrance fee charged (and worshippers at services were asked to leave promptly, to make sure no one got a free look around). Different areas were blocked off, and charged for separately, so that to see the whole Abbey cost nearly 4
s.
In 1835 a visitor described the church as ‘a labyrinth of wooden partitions, doors, screens, railings and corners…It seemed as if all these nooks and swallows’ nests were contrived merely to increase the number of showmen and key-bearers who lurk in them.’ It was not until the mid-1840s that Poets’ Corner was freely opened, and even then other parts of the building retained an entrance fee (albeit much reduced).

St Paul’s, previously barely on the tourist itinerary, was given a boost
into the big leagues when Lord Nelson was buried there in 1805. (Westminster Abbey, annoyed at the competition, commissioned a wax model of the dead hero.) As with the Abbey, there was a general low-level controversy over admission charges, and, again as with the Abbey, various parts of the building were off-limits without extra payments: 2
s.
6
d.
to go up to the dome, 1
s.
to see Nelson’s tomb. James Fenimore Cooper reported that his party’s guide finished her tour by reciting, ‘By the rules of the church I am entitled to only twopence for showing you this, and we are strictly prohibited from asking any more, but gentlefolks commonly give me a shilling.’
⁸

Sightseeing in general, and in London in particular, for the middle and lower classes was given an enormous boost by the Great Exhibition. A comparative table of attendance for some of the London entertainments shows the growth through the period:
⁹

Hampton Court, now on the South Western Railway’s line from London, could be reached very quickly, and for very little money, by Londoners on a day out. Before 1838 the palace had been shown in the same way that country houses were: those who knew enough to ask were taken around by a housekeeper, who expected a tip for her trouble. A few hundred people a year had visited. In 1839, after free admission was put into place, with no housekeeper and no regimented tours, 115,971 made the journey.
¹⁰
Yet it was more than historical places, or churches, that drew the crowds. Technology, or just novelty, made many things worth a visit. In 1841 the Armoury at the Tower of London was reopened after a terrible fire. It was not the new Armoury that was on display, but instead, for 6
d.
, a view of the fire damage together with a trip to the specially erected marquees that were selling ‘various specimens saved
from the ruins, showing the effects of fire on the different metals, and other substances destroyed by it’. For an additional 6
d.
one could leave with some fire-damaged flints from a gun; larger items, or ones more badly burned, were available for £1. Nearly 2,500 visitors a week descended on the site over the next two months.
¹¹

Another site of devastation that drew the crowds was the Thames Tunnel. The tunnel was an engineering marvel, the first ever to be constructed under a navigable river. Work had begun in 1825, and up to 700 visitors paid 1
s.
each to watch the progress. But in 1827 the river broke through the tunnel walls and flooded a tower at the entrance. Within a month of the accident, the German traveller Prince Pückler-Muskau was one of the sightseers who went down to the riverbed in an early version of a diving bell and, ‘for half an hour, watched the stopping of the breach with sacks of clay’.
¹²
By 1828 the investors had got cold feet, and work stopped and the tunnelling shield was bricked up, but a mirror was installed at the entrance so that visitors could continue to examine the work as far as it had got. In 1836 tunnelling began once more, and advertisements in the entertainment columns of the newspapers notified the public that visitors could walk down to where the navvies were excavating at Rotherhithe. In 1843 the tunnel was finished, and 2 million people paid the penny toll for the novelty of walking underneath a river, while hucksters sold refreshments, engravings, cardboard cut-outs and other representations of the tunnel, including paper panoramas and a cosmorama (see below).

Industrial sites and new technology more generally were also considered to be well worth a visit, and were very much part of any sightseeing trip. One traveller listed touring ‘the new turnpike road, the Leeds cloth hall, the new locks on the Leeds to Liverpool canal at Bingley’ and poor children winding silk; another a cotton printing factory; a third ‘the Preston and Liverpool docks, a paper factory, a coal pit, a picture gallery, a china auction, an army exercise and the opening of the Lancaster assizes’. Other visitors recommended the Bridgewater Canal and mines, silver-plating works in Sheffield, and iron-smelting at Rotherham. Mrs Lybbe Powys visited the carpet factory at Axminster, which she judged ‘indeed well worth the while’, as well as a china factory in Worcester and a coalfield in Westerton, in the Midlands, where ‘many ladies even venture down the pits to see the entire manner of it’.
¹³

Mrs Lybbe Powys did not herself descend down the mine: that was

too much for her. For many like her, the desire to see the huge possibilities in the world could be met in a variety of ways. For those who could not travel to see the sights, theatres were popular for their representations of famous places, or topical events (see p. 338), and they also satisfied the desire for travel on a more informal basis. The comedian Charles Mathews became famous for monologues which he called ‘At Homes’. These were so successful that he performed a new one every year from 1824 for a decade. His first one was ‘A Trip to America’, and in it he told stories, anecdotes, jokes and sang songs to give the flavour of his voyage; another was ‘Country Cousins and the Sights of London’, encompassing word pictures of St Paul’s, the Royal Academy exhibition, Westminster Abbey and a panorama of the North Pole.
*

It was hardly surprising that a panorama was evoked by Mathews as an essential tourist sight, since panoramas were to become one of the
most popular entertainments of the century. In
The Prelude
Wordsworth slipped naturally into the vocabulary of the shows, evoking a panorama, as well as a show that appeared to be similar to the Eidophusikon, and even architectural models:

At leisure, then, I viewed, from day to day,
The spectacles within doors, - birds and beasts
Of every nature, and strange plants convened
From every clime; and, next, those sights that ape
The absolute presence of reality,
Expressing, as in mirror, sea and land,
And what earth is, and what she has to shew.
I do not here allude to subtlest craft,
By means refined attaining purest ends,
But imitations, fondly made in plain
Confession of man’s weakness and his loves.
Whether the Painter, whose ambitious skill
Submits to nothing less than taking in
A whole horizon’s circuit, do with power,
Like that of angels or commissioned spirits,
Fix us upon some lofty pinnacle,
Or in a ship on waters, with a world
Of life, and life-like mockery beneath,
Above, behind, far stretching and before;
Or more mechanic artist represent
By scale exact, in model, wood or clay,
From blended colours also borrowing help,
Some miniature of famous spots or things, -
St Peter’s Church; or, more aspiring aim,
In microscopic vision, Rome herself;
Or, haply, some choice rural haunt, - the Falls
Of Tivoli; and, high upon that steep,
The Sibyl’s mouldering Temple! every tree,
Villa, or cottage, lurking among rocks
Throughout the landscape; tuft, stone scratch minute -
All that the traveller sees when he is there.
¹⁵

When Wordsworth wrote this, between 1799 and 1805, he was, in theory, looking back to 1791. But in that year only the first, the original, panorama was in existence. This was the brainchild of Robert Barker, an Irishman living in Edinburgh, who, as a ‘portrait painter and teacher of perspective’, developed the old tradition of long views of cities and landscapes, which easily went back to Wenceslaus Hollar in the seven-
teenth century. His improvement was to work out how to curve the lines of a perspective drawing to minimize the distortion created by showing a 360-degree painting - Wordsworth’s ‘whole horizon’s circuit’. That was clever. His genius came in recognizing the commercial application of his technique. His first panorama, a 360-degree view of the hills above Edinburgh, was displayed to great acclaim locally. He and his son, Henry Aston Barker, who had done much of the actual painting, then travelled to the mecca of showmen, London. First they set up a temporary exhibition of their original panorama, but popular acclaim was so great that in 1793 they opened a purpose-built exhibition space just off Leicester Square, which they called the Panorama, and where two panoramas could be mounted at once over two floors. The panoramas were lit from above, and guard rails kept audiences at the correct distance to create the appropriate
trompe-l’œil
effects. The stairs were in the middle of the floor, so that the two images entirely encircled the viewers, drawing them into this new world.

From the 1800s, panoramas became popular across the country, despite the necessity of purpose-built rotundas to achieve the perfect circumstances for a
trompe-l’œil
effect. In 1802 Barker opened a rotunda in Birmingham, and a second one was built there in 1817, but even in more temporary accommodations the excitement of the form was enough to override the lack of perfect verisimilitude that occurred outside the controlled conditions of the rotundas. In 1816 Lillyman’s Hotel in Liverpool managed to show a panorama of the battles of Ligny and Waterloo without a rotunda, and others followed this example: in no time at all there were panorama showings in Leeds, Norwich, Exeter, even in smaller towns such as Teignmouth.
¹⁶

Soon Henry Aston Barker was travelling the world to record new views - Constantinople, Paris, Mont Blanc, the Alps, Vienna, Pompeii, Florence, Milan, Lake Maggiore, Messina, Lisbon, Badajoz - he even went to Niagara Falls. Sometimes the resulting panoramas were just views of famous cities or majestic scenery; others depended for their success on their depictions of historical or contemporary events. After Napoleon’s first abdication, in 1814, Barker went to Elba to sketch the Emperor for a panorama; in 1815 he went to Waterloo to see the battlefield, and he interviewed veterans for further details. His resulting Waterloo panorama was particularly successful: it was said to have earned him £10,000.

This was only one contribution to the craze for all things Napoleonic
after 1815, and for many years afterwards. The Duke of Wellington himself visited Barker’s Waterloo panorama, and approved it. The Duke was an assiduous visitor to exhibitions, an enthusiast of every kind of entertainment, many of which included his own impersonators. He even posed for a portrait standing in front of Napoleon’s wax effigy at Mme Tussaud’s. (Mme Tussaud’s was a favourite of his - he asked for special notification if any new exhibits were added to the ‘Adjoining Room’.) He also attended J. H. Amherst’s
The Battle of Waterloo
at Astley’s Amphitheatre, the second most successful ‘hippodrama’ ever staged. (For more on Astley and the hippodrama, as well as his Napoleon plays, see pp. 313ff.) When the Duke was present at a reconstruction of the Battle of Waterloo at Vauxhall Gardens (see below), he was said to have ‘laughed heartily at his representative’.
¹⁷
Indeed, for such a grim-visaged man, he seems to have laughed heartily quite frequently. Tom Thumb’s impersonation of Napoleon at the Egyptian Hall also amused him, especially when the mini-emperor told him that during the show, ‘I was thinking of the loss of the battle of Waterloo.’

The Egyptian Hall had a history of successful displays linked to the Emperor. William Bullock, a jeweller-turned-traveller-turned-showman, had opened a small museum in Liverpool in the 1790s, showing his collection of curiosities, natural-history specimens, and weapons and armour. In 1809 he moved to London, setting up his newly named London Museum in Piccadilly in 1812. He continued to add to his collections in what became known as the Egyptian Hall, from its dramatic façade, mounting a display of Roman objects and, soon, Napoleonic memorabilia.
*
In 1816 Bullock bought Napoleon’s travelling carriage, in which the Emperor had ridden to Waterloo: the original coachman was part of the display, as were two of Napoleon’s horses, his camp bed, and the contents of his travelling case, which included ‘close on a hundred pieces…nearly all in solid gold, two leather bottles, one of rum and the other of fine old Malaga, a million francs-worth of diamonds and a cake of Windsor soap’.
†
Nearly a quarter of a million
visitors queued to see Bullock’s hoard, and even more when he travelled around Britain with it. With the proceeds - said to be £35,000 - he opened a ‘Museum Napoleon, or Collection of Productions of the Fine Arts executed for and connected with the History of the ex-Emperor of the French, collected at Considerable Expence [
sic
] from the Louvre and Other Places &c.’