Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (42 page)

Given the success of this type of razzmatazz, the value of stressing education did not go unremarked by members of the show community. Some simply commented on various world and current events in their own entertainments: Planché’s
The New Planet; or, Harlequin out of Place
, his Christmas pantomime of 1847, revolved around the recent discovery of the planet Neptune: Neptune descends to earth and makes solemn
visits to many ‘educational’ spots, including the Colosseum in Regent’s Park, the Egyptian Hall and the Polytechnic, where the ‘lecturers’ sing of new scientific and technological discoveries, such as the telegraph, ending with a tableau of Shakespeare, Wellington and Britannia.
³⁰
But other entertainers dedicated themselves more seriously to highlighting the educational sides to their shows. Mme Tussaud printed ‘a general outline of the history of each character’, which would ‘not only greatly increase the pleasure to be derived from a mere view of the Figure, but [would] also convey to the minds of young Persons much biographical knowledge - a branch of education universally allowed to be of the highest importance’.
³¹
For an extra 6
d.
Robert Barker had, with his earliest panoramas, provided booklets that had outlines of the pictures, then summaries of the history and geography of the regions shown. And panoramas were sometimes regarded as tedious precisely because of their educational reputation. Charles Lamb painted a sad picture of a poor schoolmaster who in his holidays had ‘some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him…that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr Bartley’s Orrerry, to the Panopticon’.
³²
Dickens tried to make his example sound more enticing, promoting a moving panorama of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers as ‘a picture three miles long,
*
which occupies two hours in its passage…It is an easy means of travelling, night and day, without any inconvenience from climate, steamboat company, or fatigue.’
³³

The Mississippi panorama was gigantic, but its success may have come from a new element: it had, for the first time, a narrator - the artist himself, who stood beside the panorama and lectured on his voyage as the view unrolled. Soon narrators were regularly employed to provide historical and geographical information as the audience watched. Other panoramas straining for educational content incorporated images of engineering works into their scenes - engineering was always educational - and this made a success of ‘A Trip from Primrose Hill, via the London and North Western and Chester and Holyhead Railways to Holyhead’, which included depictions of railway bridges and the industrial sights of Wolverhampton and Coventry. Some panoramas added music: the
cyclorama showing Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755 was unfurled ‘to the sound of congenial music’,
³⁴
although how Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in a version for organ, and extracts from operas that included
Don Giovanni
,
Masaniello
and
Mose` in Egitto
were ‘congenial’ with the devastation wrought by an earthquake was left unexplored. Panoramas of the Holy Land were accompanied by ‘Grand Sacred Vocal Music by the Great Masters’ at St George’s Gallery, and by ‘Hebrew Melodies’ at the Egyptian Hall. Sheet music was sold to link up with the panorama of the moment - after the Mississippi panorama’s success, it was possible to buy what in today’s terms would be understood to be the official tiein, a piano score of ‘Mississippi Waltzes, Played during the Moving of Banvard’s Three Mile Picture of the Mississippi River’. There were more opportunistic offerings, too: ‘Nelly was a Lady (Down on the Mississippi)’, ‘I was raised in Mississippi’ and ‘By de Mississippi Ribber’ (
sic
) all appeared within two years of the panorama. Other panoramas produced similar pieces for home entertainment from sheet-music publishers with an eye for the topic of the moment. There was ‘The Pyramid Galop’, ‘The Niagara Falls Galop’, ‘The Lago Maggiore Galop’, even ‘The Holborn Viaduct Galop’ - not to mention polkas, mazurkas and schottisches.
³⁵

While this was music to be played at home,
en famille
, musical accompaniments to the panoramas themselves were a way to circumvent another problem: the attitude towards theatre in its various forms as it developed over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For some, theatre had always been an abomination. But for most people through the previous centuries theatre had simply been an upper-class pastime. Now, as it became more accessible to the middle and working classes, those presenting theatrical entertainments needed to find a way of not entirely losing the great mass of the bourgeoisie who were, from the end of the eighteenth century, turning ever more to evangelical values. In the evangelicals’ view, the theatre was a place of falsehood, where the credulous were duped by illusions and deceit. Theatre, like novels, was too much concerned with the passions, and too little with morality; both genres fed the imagination, which if anything needed to be quelled. The Nonconformist
Evangelical Magazine
published a ‘Spiritual Barometer’ which went from +70 (‘Glory; dismission from the body’) to 0 (‘Indifference’) and then down through -30 (‘The theatre, Vauxhall, Ranelagh, &c’), to -40 (‘private prayer totally neglected…’), -50 (‘parties of pleasure on the Lord’s day, masquerades; drunkenness; adultery; pro
faneness; lewd songs’), and finally -70 (‘Death, perdition’).
³⁶
It should be remembered, warned the
Christian Observer
in 1815, that ‘The last age in France was characterized by the number of profligate novels, and behold the consequences in the total corruption of the present.’
³⁷
This was a perfectly mainstream view:
The Times
warned in 1809 that ‘The stage has proved, and will ever prove, subversive of the order, peace, and purity of morals, and consequently, of Christianity itself.’
³⁸

Thus a range of entertainments was carefully staged in neutral surroundings that enabled those to whom theatre was barred still to partake of some of the associated pleasures. In 1838 the Adelphi Theatre had a troupe of dancing ‘Bayade`res’, who also performed at the Egyptian Hall ‘at the solicitation of many Families and Individuals who are not in the habit of visiting Theatres’. This was fairly overt. Thiodon’s Grand Original Mechanical and Picturesque Theatre of Arts in Spring Gardens was more circumspect, promising that ‘The Entertainments offered at this Theatre are quite distinct from that of a Theatrical Description, and on this Account, together with its surprising Ingenuity, and harmless Tendency, is peculiarly calculated to attract the Notice and Support of those, whose Religious Tenets forbid their Participation in Amusements of a more marked and decisive Character.’ The Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street was suitably innocuously named, and from 1850 held ‘one-man entertainments’ which were in fact if not in name play-readings. Sometimes the neutral locale was not necessary, and a playbill that promoted a lavish spectacle as educational was all that was necessary. Astley’s Amphitheatre staged a version of St George and the Dragon in which, it was promised, the dragon’s ‘Mechanism and Automatous Serpentine Movements [were] so ably calculated and put into play, as to stamp the Action-Scene with the character of TRUTH throughout its progress, and thereby constitution the principal merit of the whole Performance.’
³⁹

Even more than mechanical animals, real animals were educational - no evangelical could ‘behold the works of Nature without [also] admiring Nature’s God’, while the scientifically minded were reassured to be told that the descriptions in the guidebook supplied by the most famous turn-of-the-century menagerie, in Exeter Change, were ‘chiefly extracted from the works of Buffon and Goldsmith’. Yet even in such a respectable environment the link with theatre was there for those who wanted to see it: Exeter Change’s elephant, Chunee, was loaned out to appear in a Covent Garden pantomime in 1811, and when she was killed in 1826

(by a firing squad, after running amok on her daily walk down the Strand and killing her keeper) Sadler’s Wells quickly staged a production of
Chuneelah; or, The Death of the Elephant at Exeter ‘Change.
So, for those who found the Exeter Change too much the showplace, in 1828 the Royal Zoological Society opened a menagerie in Regent’s Park in a form that was more calculated to appeal to supporters of ‘rational recreation’. For the first time animals were housed more or less in a manner that imitated their original habitats (except for the llamas, who for some reason were housed in a Gothic pavilion). At first, entrance was restricted to those who could obtain a letter of introduction from a member of the RZS, and even then admission was 1
s.
From 1847 those worries about the working classes and how they were spending their leisure that were to surface in so many different areas of life - in the planning of the Great Exhibition, in the parliamentary select committee looking into museum access for the working classes, in concern about lack of open spaces for healthy games-playing - brought a change of policy. The RZS’s new director believed strongly in the power of rational recreation to
educate and ‘improve’ the working classes, and admission was consequently lowered to 6
d.
on Mondays and holidays, creating an entirely new audience for the zoo.

In many ways the zoo was the end of a much-loved but by now almost extinct species of leisure, the pleasure garden. London had been famous for its pleasure gardens for much of the eighteenth century. Vauxhall Gardens, the best known, had opened just after the Restoration, under the name Spring Gardens (or Faux, or Fox, Hall Gardens). Pepys had visited in 1667, and put his finger on the attractions: ‘It is very pleasant and cheap going thither, for a man may go to spend what he will, or nothing, all as one - but to hear the nightingale and other birds, and here fiddles, and there a harp…and here laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty divertising [
sic
]. Among others, there were two pretty women alone…’
⁴⁰
That, in sum, was what people enjoyed for the next 150 years: pleasant walks in beautiful grounds, for only a small fee, music, and - for the men - women. Over time the entertainments became more elaborate, moving inexorably from simple rural pleasures to the presentation of spectacle. In 1728 Jonathan Tyers bought the lease, and it was under his direction that paintings by Francis Hayman and Hogarth, and a bust of Handel as Apollo by Roubilliac, were commissioned, and that dances, ridottos, masquerades and balls were held.

by drawing up a curtain is shewn a most beautiful landscape in perspective of a fine hilly country with a miller’s house and a water mill, all illuminated by concealed lights; but the principal object that strikes the eye is a cascade or water fall. The exact appearance of water is seen flowing down a declivity, and turning the weel [
sic
] of the mill, it rises up in a foam at the bottom, and then glides aways. This moving picture attended with the noise of the cascade has a very pleasing and surprising effect on both the eye and ear.
⁴²

This was not a panorama, despite the use of the words ‘moving picture’: it was a three-dimensional representation, with the noise produced by
strips of tin that were dropped with a clatter, and the water effect achieved via the shimmering of dozens of lamps.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, admission was 1
s.
, and Vauxhall was drawing 1,000 people a night in a summer season that lasted somewhat over three months. In 1749 the rehearsal for Handel’s
Music for the Royal Fireworks
had an audience of 12,000;
*
simply because the Duke of Cumberland was planning to attend, another evening, in 1781, saw the presence of ‘more than eleven thousand persons’ according to the management of the Gardens, who estimated they had served food to 7,000 of them.
⁴³
Food and drink were a large part of the business of Vauxhall, and they were notorious for their extortionate expense: in 1796 a plate of ham cost 2
s.
, a slice of bread 1
d.
- at a time when an entire loaf could be bought for that in the shops - and a single biscuit was the same price.
⁴⁴
By 1817 things had reached the height of absurdity, when a plate of lettuce cost 18
d.
But gradually, as Vauxhall fell in people’s estimations, so did the prices; by 1833 ham was ‘only’ 1
s.
, while a plate of salad plus ‘the use of the cruet’ was now 6
d.
less than it had been fifteen years before.
⁴⁵
The prices had dropped, but the hoped-for surge in popularity did not follow. Vauxhall was no longer the fashion, and it was forced to compete with the other entertainments of the town on their terms.

The proprietors were aware they had an advantage in the Gardens’ size, and they began to stage extravaganzas to compete with the theatres. With space for huge crowd scenes, with the sky above for fireworks, and, as a supreme advantage, with the River Thames for ‘naumachia’, or re-creations of naval engagements, Vauxhall held on to some of its many visitors for a while. In 1827 Prince Pückler-Muskau attended an evening performance of its Battle of Waterloo re-creation (this was the one the Duke of Wellington also attended):

An open part of the garden surrounded by ancient chestnut trees serves as the stage. Between four of these trees a ‘tribune’ had been erected with benches for twelve hundred or so people which was at least 40 feet high…The moon shone brightly and showed between two gigantic trees a great red curtain, painted with the combined arms of Great Britain.

After a moment’s silence, a cannon shot thundered through the wood and at the same time the fine military music of the
2nd Regiment of Guards rang out in the distance…Out of the wood advanced the French Guards with the bearded Sapeurs at their head. They formed themselves into ranks and Napoleon, on his white horse and in his grey overcoat, accompanied by several marshals, rode past them
en revue.
From a thousand throats echoed ‘
Vive l’Empereur!
’ The emperor touched his hat and went off at a gallop, while the troops bivouacked in closely packed groups, and marched off. Soon afterwards Wellington appeared with his general staff, all very good copies of the originals. He harangued his troops and slowly rode off. The great original himself was in the audience and laughed loudly at his representation.

Now the fight begins with skirmishes; then whole columns rush at each other and attack with the bayonet, while the French cuirassiers charge the Scottish squares. Since there were about a thousand men and two hundred horses in the action, and no lack of gunpowder, at moments it was just like a real engagement. The thick smoke of a real fire enveloped the combatants who, for a time, could be seen only by the lightning flash of the artillery, whilst the foreground was occupied by the dead and dying. As the smoke cleared away Houguemont was seen in flames, surrounded by the English as victors and the French as prisoners, and in the distance was Napoleon on horseback, with his carriage and four horses behind him, fleeing across the stage. Wellington the victor was greeted under the roar of the cannon with shouts of ‘Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!’
⁴⁶