Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (43 page)

Vauxhall made more and more of the firework displays as time went on. In 1823 it produced a 24-metre-high fireworks Bay of Naples with an erupting Mount Vesuvius, later there were fireworks of Fingal’s Cave, Gothic abbeys, the burning of York Minster - in fact the same subjects that were popular for panoramas. In 1833 it staged a Jubilee Centenary Week (despite the fact that it was not its centenary, or anything like it), with a portrait of the master of ceremonies, Mr Simpson, ‘in Fire Works, [which] will bow to the Company, soon as ignited’.
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Marylebone Gardens, a less fashionable pleasure garden, which covered about 30,000 square metres north of Oxford Street, had started to produce firework displays in the 1740s.
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In 1763 it had ‘an illuminated Steeple forty feet high’, and by 1772 the fireworks were the main purpose of a trip to Marylebone. ‘Signor Torre’, who had produced firework displays at
Versailles for the wedding of the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette in 1770, was under contract, and in his first season he produced ‘Transparencies of Their Majesties’, followed by depictions of Vulcan leading the Cyclops - who lit a fire and forged arrows for Cupid and Venus - and Mount Etna. Mount Etna then erupted, with glowing lava rolling down its sides.
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Instead of the great gardens - Vauxhall, Cremorne, Marylebone, Ranelagh - it was the smaller inns and taverns that called themselves pleasure gardens, or wells, that prospered into the nineteenth century. For one thing, they charged less for admission: Vauxhall had alternated between 1
s.
and 2
s.
for most of its existence, while Ranelagh, determined to keep out the middle classes, much less the working classes, charged 2
s.
6
d.
, and the Pantheon even more.
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These places did keep out the middle and working classes, but when their fashionable patrons deserted them, they were financially doomed. Marylebone Gardens charged a modest 6
d.
, but many spas combined admission and a drink of their waters for only 3
d.
, while an entire breakfast could be purchased at Islington Spa for 9
d.
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These spas were for the newly prosperous, and for the working classes. When Evelina, in Fanny Burney’s novel of 1778, went to stay with her embarrassingly lower-middle-class cousins the Branghtons, she was asked if she had enjoyed George’s, a pleasure garden in Hampstead; she was forced to admit to not having been there - or to Marylebone, or to Vauxhall Gardens, or to Don Saltero’s in Chelsea (see p. 396), or to Sadler’s Wells, St Paul’s or the Tower of London. Her cousin exclaimed, ‘Why then you might as well not have come to London for aught I see, for you’ve been no where.’
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The point was that, having been living with gentry families, her entertainment had taken place in private - or, if in public, at Ranelagh, the most exclusive of the pleasure gardens.

London had many pleasure gardens, but it also had a number of so-called spas, which were mainly for the lower middle classes and below, or for middle- and upper-class men when not accompanied by their families. These were not actually spas at all, except that they had originally been established because there was a chalybeate spring on the site. For the most part, water-drinking and health had little to do with their visitors’ enjoyment. Many London spas were in fact if not in name inns, or taverns, with a bit of a garden in which perhaps a sporting area or tea garden could be found. In Marylebone, the main pleasure garden was surrounded by satellite pleasure gardens, so called, such as the
Queen’s Head and Artichoke, which was an inn with a skittle ground, and the Jew’s Harp house, another inn, with ‘bowery tea-gardens, skittle grounds, trap-ball grounds’ and a real-tennis court (all of which were destroyed when Regent’s Park was laid out). The Bayswater tea gardens barely mentioned their waters, preferring to advertise Mrs Graham, who made an ascent in a balloon every day at five, accompanied by fireworks. Hampstead, as Evelina’s cousins knew, had many tea gardens, including Hampstead Wells and Wells Walk, which had a coffee house and a bowling green, and held concerts and dances. Kilburn Wells, near Belsize Park, also had a small spring, as closer in towards the City did Pancras Wells and Adam and Eve Tea-Gardens (both now underneath St Pancras station). This was fertile territory for springs: Islington Spa had existed from the early eighteenth century, and was not to be confused with Sadler’s Wells, now a theatre, but then a spring, as its name suggests. This spa’s abiding claim to fame was that the princesses Amelia and Catherine had visited to drink the waters there in 1733, but by the end of the century it was a tea garden in all but name. Many others were similar: spas by name, pleasure gardens in reality - Spa Fields Pantheon, London Spa, New Wells, English Grotto, Bagnigge Wells, Lord Cobham’s Head in Cold Bath Fields, St Chad’s Well, Spring Gardens. When one looks at the names of London, it is clear how many springs have been tarmacked over in the last century and a half.
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The focus thus far has been mainly on middle-class entertainment, or on entertainments that encompassed within their middle-class audience a certain number of the high-earning, industrious working classes. Many of the shows just described claimed to attract audiences from every walk of life, but there was also a set of entertainments that were the province of the working classes entirely. Many of these working-class entertainments were similar in kind to middle-class entertainments - peep shows, waxworks, music and animals. It was the attitudes behind them that made them so different. Working-class animal shows, for instance, did not worry about providing extracts from Buffon in guidebooks - they did not in fact produce guidebooks at all. Instead, these shows were part of the older fair traditions, and specialized in deformed animals, dancing animals, animals that played an instrument, or ‘learned’ animals, which tapped out the time with their paws, or hoofs, or pecked at correct letters or numbers in answer to their owners’ questions. There were ‘Industrious
Fleas’, and trained bees, and Breslaw’s birds, which, in the first half of the nineteenth century,

formed themselves into ranks like a company of soldiers; small cones of paper bearing some resemblance to grenadiers’ caps were put upon their heads, and diminutive imitations of muskets made with wood, secured under their left wings. Thus equipped, they marched to and fro several times; when a single bird was brought forward, supposed to be a deserter, and set between six of the musketeers, three in a row, who conducted him from the top to the bottom of the table, on the middle of which a small brass cannon charged with a little gunpowder had been previously placed, and the deserter was situated in the front part of the cannon; his guards then divided, three retiring on one side, and three on the other, and he was left standing by himself. Another bird was immediately produced; and a lighted match being put into one of his claws, he hopped boldly on the other to the tail of the cannon, and, applying the match to the priming, discharged the piece…The moment the explosion took place, the deserter fell down, and lay…like a dead bird; but, at the command of his tutor, he rose again; and the cages being brought, the feathered soldiers were stripped of their ornaments, and returned into them in perfect order.
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Many of these shows had no single home, but travelled around the country, or the cities, from yard to yard, inn to inn, fair to fair. The fairs were dying out in the nineteenth century, but until the 1850s they were still a major force: from 1750 to 1850 there were sixty fairs within fifteen miles of Charing Cross alone, and as late as 1843 200,000 people were said to have attended the Easter fair in Stepney, claimed by ‘Lord’ George Sanger, of Sanger’s Circus (see below), to be ‘the biggest gathering of its kind in Europe’. Some fairs which had been more rural events came to life again in the nineteenth century, in part because of improved transport links. These fairs were no longer only for locals, but instead were destinations for a much larger population intent on enjoying a day out. Greenwich Fair in the 1820s and 1830s was attended by thousands who travelled to the fair by steamer; in the 1840s even more came by the London and Greenwich Railway.
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Transport links worked both ways: visitors could attend fairs that might previously have been too far away, and showmen, conjurors, tumblers and rope dancers could all travel more easily around a wider circuit of fairs, while those who had larger
exhibits to transport - those with peep shows, panoramas, puppet shows or waxworks - could move about the country economically by train. It is notable that only after the emergence of the railways were major centres of entertainment built in the suburbs - after the Great Exhibition closed, the Crystal Palace was moved not to another central location, but to the southern suburb of Sydenham, while Alexandra Palace was built in Muswell Hill, and Sanger’s Circus had a permanent base at the Agricultural Hall in Islington.

For many years the circuses were just one element of the fairs: Wombwell’s and Atkins’s circuses were prominent at Bartholomew Fair, and both in London and in the provinces these were two of the largest circuses, together with Sanger’s. It was Lord George Sanger (and his wife, ‘Mme Pauline de Vere’, a lion-tamer) who transformed this form of livelihood from a temporary travelling show into a mass-entertainment business. By the 1850s Sanger had a permanent base in Liverpool, and in 1860 he also had a three-ring circus in Plymouth. Soon there were permanent sites in Aberdeen, Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, Dundee, Exeter, Liverpool, Manchester and Plymouth, as well as at the Agricultural Hall in Islington and in such seaside towns as Ramsgate and Margate (where his ‘Hall by the Sea’ acted as his headquarters). When Sanger’s Circus toured Europe in the 1870s it needed 46 carriages to transport 160 horses, 11 elephants, 12 camels - and 230 employees.
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Many of the fairs that prospered in the nineteenth century were held each spring, around Easter and Whitsun, when workers traditionally had holidays, while two of the largest fairs, Southwark and Bartholomew, which were held later in the year, suffered precipitous declines. At the beginning of the century Bartholomew Fair had been a byword for entertainment fairs in general. Wordsworth in
The Prelude
set his reader ‘Above the press and danger of the crowd / Upon some showman’s platform’, to see:

…chattering monkeys dangling from their poles,
And children whirling in their roundabouts;
With those that stretch the neck and strain the eyes,
And crack the voice in rivalship, the crowd
Inviting; with buffoons against buffoons
Grimacing, writhing, screaming, - him who grinds
The hurdy-gurdy, at the fiddle weaves,
Rattles the salt-box, thumps the kettle-drum,
And him who at the trumpet puffs his cheeks,
The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel,
Equestrians, tumblers, women, girls, and boys,
Blue-breeched, pink-vested, with high-towering plumes. -
All moveables of wonder, from all parts,
Are here - Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,
The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,
The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,
Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,
The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,
The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft
Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,
All out-o’-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,
All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts
Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats
All jumbled up together, to compose
A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths
Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill,
Are vomiting, receiving on all sides,
Men, Women, three-years’ Children, Babes in arms.
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As Wordsworth described it, so it was: these fairs were now almost entirely entertainment. The retail element of country fairs was dying, and in the cities it was already dead. As early as 1748 Bartholomew Fair had consisted entirely of entertainments, including a play of
The Bloody Contest between Charles the Twelfth and Peter the Great, Czar of Muscovy
; plays made up of snippets from chapbook stories such as
The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green
and
The Adventures of Roderick Random and his Friend Strap
; a farce (possibly performed by puppets) called
The Constant Quaker, or, The Humours of Wapping
; a pantomime,
Harlequin’s Frolics
; a waxwork show entitled The Court of the Queen of Hungary; freaks both human and animal, including ‘The Young Oronatu Savage’, a 12-foot long, 120-stone hog and a dwarf billed as ‘Maria Theresa, the Amazing Corsican Fairy’. There were fireworks, Italian sword dances, hornpipes, folk dances, puppet shows and menageries. In 1752 there were also a learned horse and a learned pig, an American dwarf, ‘the tall lady from Norfolk, and the short one from Durham’, ribbon- and breeches-sellers (the only retailers at the fair, apart from those who sold food), a Punch and Judy show, fire-eaters, rope dancers, wire dancers and conjurors. By 1825 the fair had twenty-two large-scale shows, including Wombwell’s Circus and Atkins’s Menagerie; eight shows with human ‘curiosities’
such as dwarves, giants or ‘natives’; and another five shows displaying performers with various skills, such as jugglers, tumblers, rope dancers, clowns or equestrians. Then there were secondary shows including a mare with seven feet, a learned horse, and a pig billed as ‘Toby the Swinish Philosopher’, who counted, knew the alphabet, drew up accounts, and told the time.

Highlights were a peep show of the murder of William Weare (see p. 181) and waxworks of the royal family, Mother Shipton, an Irish giant and the acquitted murderer Abraham Thornton.
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Murder had already become big business as the Sunday newspapers and the penny-bloods spread the taste for police reports and accounts of trials. They also moved crime from a local onto a national scale: in 1834, seven years after the murder, there were five panoramas or other representations of Maria Marten at the Red Barn, and a peep-show proprietor later told Mayhew, ‘There was more [money] took with [James Blomfield] Rush’s murder than there ever has been by the battle of Waterloo itself.’
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