Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (58 page)

By the 1860s the Alhambra, with a capacity of 3,500, had opened in London; the Oxford Music Hall seated 1,200. There were over thirty of these large halls in London, including Wilton’s, Weston’s Music Hall, Holborn (1857), the South London Palace (1860), the London Pavilion, the Bedford, Camden Town, and Deacon’s, Clerkenwell (all 1861), and Collins’, Islington (1862).
⁸⁰
There were also at least 300
more purpose-built halls in the provinces, and in the 1870s nearly 400 halls that had some sort of formal, professional form of entertainment.
⁸¹

By the 1870s there was yet another shift to the shape of an evening at the halls. The supper tables were pushed aside, now only taking up half the floor space, while a theatre pit was built over the remainder. The old-fashioned group singing with the audience, the glees and catches, was finally phased out, and instead headliners and serios (singers who performed comic songs in mock-serious form) - professionals all - appeared. A proscenium arch was added around the stage, to further indicate the division between the audience and the professionals. The halls were becoming in form, if not entirely in content, theatres, with a static audience who were no longer expected to socialize with each other in groups, or to join in the performance, but only to be entertained as individuals, segregated by the price of their tickets.
⁸²

The professionalization of the performers was also complete: they were rarely local, but did their turns at several halls each night, on prearranged circuits, both in London and in the provinces. The first agency for music-hall artistes had opened in 1858. Vacancies were advertised in the theatrical newspapers, which were beginning to emerge. The first, the
Era
, had originally been a trade journal for the licensed victuallers’ trade. It was not unnatural that the brewers who had financial interests in taverns and saloons should also choose to include information for performers in their trade paper. Then the performers took over the content completely, and it became a theatre paper only. In 1856 the
Magnet
, devoted solely to music hall, began publication in Leeds, and in 1859 the
Entr’acte
followed.
*
In 1865 the Music Hall Provident Society was founded, to act as a pension and benefit society for musichall employees.
⁸³

The 1870s were a turning point for music hall. In the previous ten years the cost of setting up of a hall in London had reached nearly £10,000 on average, and more for a particularly large or lavish establishment. Morton had spent £40,000 on the Canterbury as early as 1854, and with a partner another £35,000 on the Oxford in 1861.
⁸⁴
Many proprietors could no longer rely on their takings to fund the huge and costly architectural changes, but had to sell shares to brewers, or form themselves into syndicates. In 1864 the Alhambra had been funded by
a limited-liability company, and in 1893 the London Syndicate was formed, with three large West End halls; soon Edward Moss, Oswald Stoll, Frank Allen and Richard Thornton were all building regional chains of halls, moving quickly across the country.
⁸⁵
*
The turns they could finance were now more elaborate and sensational - and were also more standardized. In many ways, by the time music hall had reached this period it had virtually become ‘variety’, a more homogenous, more refined, less raucous style of performance, which was better suited to suburban audiences.

What these audiences loved was that an image of the upper-class world was being conveyed to the workers, in the same way that film would convey an image of the life of the rich to those suffering through the Depression. In 1890 Percy Fitzgerald commented that ‘The East Ender has created his idea from a gentleman or “gent” of which he has had glimpses at the “bars” and finds it in perfection at his music-hall. At the music-hall everything is tinselled over, and we find a kind of racy, gin-borne affection to be the mode; everyone being “dear boy” or a “pal”…a suggestion of perpetual dress suit, with deep side pockets, in which the hands are ever plunged.’
⁸⁶
The descendant of the ‘gent’ was the ‘lion comique’, the leading comic singer, who performed ‘swell’ songs such as ‘Champagne Charlie’ (1866) by George Leybourne. Leybourne, who performed under the sobriquet ‘the Original Champagne Charlie’, ‘flaunted the broad check suits, the puce jackets, widely striped trousers and lurid vests of his so-called swells’.
⁸⁷
The song, and the persona, celebrated the things that cash could bring - flashy clothes, flashy women and, of course, plenty of champagne to splash around. Leybourne was appearing at the Canterbury when this song became a hit, and for an astonishing £1,500 a year he was contractually obliged to dress as a ‘swell’ offstage as well as on, driving around in a carriage, very publicly drinking champagne that had been specially provided by a wine merchant.
⁸⁸
As with the ‘young Werther’ outfits of the Romantics a hundred years before, now the ‘Champagne Charlie’ hat was popular among lower-middle-class young men, who idolized their hero and his glamorous life.

Then the ‘masher’ took over from the ‘swell’. Younger, even more gaudily dressed, many of the stage mashers were in fact male impersonators,
the most famous of whom was perhaps Vesta Tilley. On a tour of America, she noted that ‘the dudes of Broadway were intrigued with my costume, a pearl grey frock coat suit and silk hat and a vest of delicately flowered silk - one of the dozens which I had bought at the sale of the effects of the late Marquis of Anglesey. Grey frock coats and fancy vests became very popular in New York.’
⁸⁹
One night when she forgot her cufflinks, she tied her cuffs together with black ribbons: there was a stampede in the direction of the ribbon counters, and haberdashers began to sell cufflinks made to look like her improvisation.

Although the songs of the music halls, and the personalities of the singers, were the highlights for many, much of the success of music hall came from its variety of genres. In 1896 the first moving picture was shown at the Regent Street Polytechnic. So successful was it that it was quickly transferred to the Empire Music Hall, Leicester Square, where it ran for eighteen months. But as yet it was only an interlude in music hall’s domination. The programme at the Empire consisted of an overture, Tyrolean singers and dancers, a ballet, a trio, some Russian dancers, Cinquevalli (a famous juggler), the films - which were four in number: the arrival of the Paris express; a practical joke played on a governess; the collapse of a wall; and boating in the Mediterranean - followed by acrobats, a singer, a performance of
Faust
lasting an hour, and a pair of ‘eccentrics’. Such a mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture under one roof was not to disappear until the twentieth century.

*
Britton was not small himself, but sold ‘small coal’, which was either charcoal or small pieces of coal, also known as slack.

*
St Cecilia, the mythical inventor of the organ, is the patron saint of music, and by the sixteenth century many societies celebrated the day of her martyrdom in musical form with St Cecilia’s Day concerts and specially commissioned odes.

*
She later married Joah Bates, one of the organizers of the Handel Centennial, and it was rumoured that she had brought a dowry of £7,000 into the marriage, earned in just four years on the professional circuit.

*
Charles Burney’s life was a good example of the broad range of tasks expected of the professional musician. In 1749 he became organist of St Dionis Backchurch in Fenchurch Street, London, which gave him an income of £30 a year, as well as access to pupils for private tuition. He also performed at concerts held at the King’s Arms tavern. As a composer, he published intermittently until the 1760s, especially songs for the stage. Illness forced him to move to King’s Lynn, where he became organist of St Margaret’s in 1751, again with the opportunity of obtaining private pupils. In the meantime he was writing
A General History of Music
(4 vols., 1776-89), the first part of which appeared in 1771 as
The Present State of Music in France and Italy.
To find the time for this work he had to write in his carriage as he was driven from one pupil to the next: he saw his first pupil at seven in the morning. It has been estimated that these various tasks provided him with an income of between £30 and £100 a month in the London season.
²⁰

*
A benefit was a concert or a theatrical performance where the receipts for the evening were given to a particular performer. Many professional singers had benefits regularly, usually staged or promoted in some way by their supporters.

†
The action is the mechanism by which the movements of the pianist in striking the keys are transmitted to the hammers which hit the strings to produce the notes. The escapement is the mechanism that causes the hammer to fall back into the rest position immediately after striking the string; thus on Zumpe’s piano the hammer continued to rest against the string, damping the sound, until the key was released.

*
Jan Ladislav Dussek was the first concert pianist to turn the piano sideways to the audience. He was known as ‘le beau Dussek’, and it has been suggested that he thought his profile was his best feature.

*
Stodart’s first upright had kept the long stringing of the grand piano, with the case curving in at the treble end. He suggested that bookshelves might nicely fill the gap.

*
An ophicleide is a wind instrument with a U-shaped brass tube with keys, similar to a bass version of the keyed bugle or cornet; a serpent is another deep-toned bass instrument, made of leather-covered wood, about 3.5 metres long, and with three U-shaped turns. Once almost vanished, it has reappeared with the emergence of period-instrument groups.

*
By 1882 the mix of open-air dancing, pantomime and melodrama had come to seem old-fashioned, and the tavern was sold to General Booth, to become the headquarters of the Salvation Army. A massive tent was erected over the open-air stage for religious revival meetings. The entire building was demolished in 1899.

*
The
Magnet
survived until 1926, but the
Entr’acte
had a rather bumpier ride, opening and folding three times in the first thirteen years. Once established, it lasted until 1907.

*
The Stoll Moss group, only recently amalgamated with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Theatre company, was a descendant of two of these chains.

I
N
1764 D
R
J
OHNSON SET UP
a literary club, to meet at the Turk’s Head tavern, in Gerrard Street. Soon members included the artist Joshua Reynolds, the writer Oliver Goldsmith, the historian Edward Gibbon, the naturalist Joseph Banks, the musicologists Charles Burney and John Hawkins, the political economist Adam Smith, the politicians Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, and the men of the theatre David Garrick, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and George Colman.

Part - much - of their renown rests on their achievements. Some, however, is the result of their mutual support system, their ‘clubbability’ (a word coined by Johnson). They wrote about each other’s work, they reviewed each other’s plays, they promoted each other’s books; Johnson wrote the dedication to Burney’s
History of Music
; Boswell dedicated his
Life of Johnson
to Reynolds. And Reynolds gave to posterity the faces of his fellow club members, in nearly two dozen portraits. These portraits in turn were engraved, printed, sold and displayed, disseminating the fame of Reynolds’s friends, and of Reynolds himself, far and wide.

That decade, the 1760s, marked an astonishing new phase in the history of the art market in Britain: the first national academy was founded; the first annual art exhibitions were held; the first serious competition with European art markets was mounted - and the first real alternative to aristocratic patronage was stirring. Until this point, art in Britain had been a private matter. There were no royal palaces open to the public; there were no churches where great paintings could regularly be seen by any congregant. Artists who wanted the public to see their work used their own studios: Hogarth showed his
Harlot’s Progress
and
Mariage à la Mode
at home in the Piazza, Covent Garden, in 1730-32, and later in his Leicester Square house. In 1749 and again in 1751 Canaletto took advertisements in the newspapers to notify potential buyers that his work was on display at his lodgings in Golden Square.
¹
Angelica Kauffmann had her studio on Suffolk Street, ‘one [room] in which I paint, the other where I set up my finished paintings as is here the custom…The people come into the house to sit - to visit me - or to see my work.’
²

Sometimes the houses of the great were open to the ‘respectable’ public, but more often a painting was enjoyed only by its owner and his family and friends. Their own first exposure to art may have been in the houses of their social equals, but for many it was on the Grand Tour that great art was first studied. The tour was commonly the province of young men of money and birth, sent to Europe to imbibe a classical education. There were plenty, naturally, who simply imbibed, but there were others who saw Italy, in particular, as the place to ‘not only improve my taste, but my judgement, by the fine originals I expect to see there’, as Lord Nuneham wrote in 1755.
³

Many of these men expected, and were expected by their families at home, to bring back spoils, either antiquities or old masters: the 1st Marquis of Rockingham instructed his son to buy antique statues for the rebuilding of Wentworth Woodhouse (although he actually ended up with copies); William Weddell, of the Dilettanti club, sent back nineteen cases of classical sculptures for Newby Hall in Yorkshire, while William Locke purchased Claude’s
St Ursula.
⁴
Others commissioned paintings from artists who lived very nicely off this up-market tourist trail: Pompeo Batoni had a profitable sideline in portraits of British tourists, painting over 150, while Canaletto produced ‘several hundred’ paintings of Venice specifically for the British market.

The Dilettanti had been formed in 1734, a club for connoisseurship, for which the primary qualification for membership was to have made the Grand Tour. (Horace Walpole said that ‘the nominal qualification for membership is having been in Italy, and the real one, [is] being drunk’.)
⁵
In the late 1740s there were discussions among its members about setting up an academy, but nothing came of it. In 1755 they met once more with a group of artists - including Hayman, Reynolds and Roubilliac - to discuss an academy, but the artists and the Dilettanti had different aims. The artists hoped for financial support; the Dilettanti
wanted a stable of craftsmen to produce work under their direction, and, the artists ‘finding that they were to be allowed no share in the government of the academy…the negotiations ended.’
⁶
For many Dilettanti, the concepts behind the art were what was important, while the artists, for the most part, they considered to be mechanics, tradesmen. They were useful to have in one’s entourage, to produce images on request, but it was the theory of aesthetics and a knowledge of the classics, rather than mere technical ability, that was valued. The Earl of Shaftesbury gave instructions to the painters he commissioned concerning the structure of the composition, what symbols should be used, and how. Richard Payne Knight, one of the Dilettanti, although he admired Reynolds greatly, admired him as an artisan: he thought that the artist’s lack of classical education meant he was incapable of judging art himself.

The idea of patronage and of the superiority of the patron over ‘his’ artist was not confined to painting. When Pope had first read his translation of Homer to an audience, the Earl of Halifax ‘in four or five places…stopped me very civilly, and with a speech each time much of the same kind: “I beg your pardon, Mr Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me. Be so good as to mark the place and consider it a little at your leisure. I’m sure you can give it a better turn.” ’ As Pope told the story, he later reread the passages exactly as they had been before, while giving Halifax to understand that they had been amended following his advice. Each time Halifax said approvingly how much better he now thought them. In Pope, the neoclassical courtier, one can see the beginning of the change that would flower in the Romantic movement of the following generation, when the artist promoted himself, and was accepted, as a creator of originality and imagination, rather than a servant producing work to order, as a carpenter makes chairs.
*
But while Pope was certain that he, the artist, was superior to his patron, in the middle of the century this was still a vexed question. He returned to this theme more than two decades later, in 1741, when he and Dr Arbuthnot produced
The Memoirs
of the Extraordinary Life
,
Works
,
and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus.
Scriblerus, their fictional hack, spends his entire inheritance on a ‘Roman shield’ which, once it is cleaned, is clearly only a broken candle sconce. Scriblerus sells it on to Dr Woodward, who ‘incrust[s] it with new Rust’ and ‘exhibit[s] [it] to the great Contentation of the learned’.
⁸

Reynolds, in the
Universal Chronicle
in 1759, was equally vehement regarding the ignorance of the ‘learned’, and no more polite: ‘To those who are resolved to be criticks in spite of nature, and at the same time have no great disposition to much reading and study, I would recommend to them to assume the character of connoisseur…The remembrance of a few names of painters, with their general characters, with a few rules…which they may pick up among the painters, will go a great way towards making a very notable connoisseur.’
⁹
That both Pope and Reynolds - neither of them a rebel; both of them criticized in their lifetimes for their flattery and even servility to the great - were willing to attack some of the wealthiest and most influential men in the art world this overtly might indicate that the day of the connoisseur was waning.

While the Dilettanti and their descendants were to rule for some time to come, another part of the art world was developing - one that in the next century would become economically and socially dominant. Public art exhibitions had begun with an act of charity, when Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital, built in 1742, received a portrait of Captain Coram from Hogarth as a gift on its foundation. Within five years, fifteen of Hogarth’s friends had also donated works of their own, and by 1760 the Foundling Hospital collection included paintings by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Ramsay and Benjamin West. In 1759 they planned an annual exhibition, and the Society of Arts (see pp. 6ff.) agreed to let them use its rooms in the Strand. This was to be the first ever public exhibition of paintings in Britain.

The Society had insisted that the exhibition have no admission charge, but 6,582 catalogues were sold, at 6
d.
each, suggesting that as many as 15,000 or 20,000 people may have attended. However, some of the artists, including Reynolds, felt that more could be achieved with an admission charge, and they formed a breakaway group to exhibit at James Cocks’s auction rooms in Spring Street the following year. Notwithstanding a 1
s.
admission charge, they sold over 13,000 catalogues, and in their best year they claimed nearly 23,000 visitors. They
called themselves the Society of Artists of Great Britain (and later the Incorporated Society of Artists), while the Free Society of Artists was those who continued to show at the Strand.
¹⁰

In 1768 the architect William Chambers, who had seen with dismay the squabbling and the factionalism between the two groups, went to George III with a petition, signed by twenty-two of the Incorporated Artists, asking for a royal charter to set up a school of art, to be funded by an annual exhibition.
*
Chambers was the obvious man to head the delegation, as he had been in charge of architectural work at Kew for Princess Augusta, and had also been the architectural tutor to George III himself when he was still the Prince of Wales. By December of the same year, everything was arranged: Reynolds had been, reluctantly and to his surprise, persuaded first to attend a meeting of the petitioners, then to become the nascent Royal Academy’s first president. (He did get a knighthood out of it, so it probably ultimately seemed worthwhile.) The Royal Academy school was to be free to promising students, their tuition to be paid for out of the proceeds of the annual exhibition, as were mooted prizes and scholarships to study abroad. By the end of the first year, seventy-seven students were already enrolled, including among the first intake Thomas Banks, Richard Cosway and John Flaxman.
¹¹

Until 1779 the annual exhibition was held every year in Pall Mall, in what had been Dalton’s Print Warehouse but was then occupied by the auctioneer James Christie. There was, at this stage, nowhere except auction rooms and shops for the public display of art. The line between exhibition and sale was blurred anyway - the art at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition was, after all, for sale, and many auctioneers and dealers charged for pre-auction viewings. Christie was not an art specialist. In 1767 he had held, to choose randomly, sales of ‘The real genuine Household Furniture, China, Linnen [
sic
], a gold repeating Watch by
Tompion
, a plain ditto, 2 Brilliant Rings, and other effects, of a Gentleman, retired into the country…’ and also of works by Italian, French and Flemish painters, consigned from abroad.
¹²
In this he was not alone. Other auctioneers sold paintings with catalogue entries that read ‘A landscape Italian’ or ‘A scene with peasants’, with no other description,
no artist’s name, or date.
¹³
Auctions were auctions; selling was selling; art was a commodity like any other.

This was what the Royal Academy now worked very hard to disguise. That art should be openly linked to commerce was not desirable at all. Art as commerce lowered the occupation - now designated a ‘profession’, or ‘calling’ - of the artist, reaffirming his hated position as a craftsman. If art, instead of being a trade, was a moral good, worthy of study for the improvement it worked on the beholder, then the artist was in a position of strength, as an instructor and preceptor even to the upper classes. Many of the prominent painters of the day came from distinctly humble backgrounds - Hogarth’s father had been a schoolmaster, and the painter’s sisters ran a shop; Benjamin West’s father was an innkeeper, Gainsborough’s a publican, Wilton’s a plasterer - although some came from more elevated backgrounds. Reynolds, while his father had been ‘only’ a schoolmaster, boasted two uncles who were fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and a grandfather who had been prebendary of Exeter.

Reynolds understood that, for the taint of ‘artisan’, of ‘mechanic’, to be removed from the role of the painter, those who influenced opinion would have to be convinced that artists had as much learning and taste as the people who bought the pictures. He worked for this in two ways. In 1771 he established the annual Royal Academy dinner, which placed artists and connoisseurs together in a social setting, with the artists acting as the hosts. (It was held with some emphasis on 23 April, St George’s Day, celebrating the patron saint of England, and it continues to this day.) His second chosen battleground was a series of lectures. He gave the first at the opening of the Royal Academy, and it was published in 1778 as
A Discourse, Delivered at the Opening of the Royal Academy
, to be followed by another fourteen discourses between 1769 and 1790. Publication was crucial, taking the skirmish into the enemy’s own territory, proving that theory was not the exclusive province of the connoisseur. Reynolds made sure to present a copy to each member of the Academy, and also to each member of his club. (Johnson and Goldsmith had both at separate times confessed - boasted? - that they knew nothing of art: they admired Reynolds not for his painterly skills, but for his personal charm and his literary abilities.) The first seven discourses were republished in a single volume in 1778, and then in Italian, French and German editions, further ramming home the point that the president of
the Royal Academy - and by extension its members - was part of the civilized community of the Grand Tourists.