Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (62 page)

That this was occurring in the years immediately following the Great Exhibition was natural. Attendance had risen from 397,649 in the Gallery’s first year in Trafalgar Square to 519,745 in 1850; in the year of the Great Exhibition it reached an extraordinary 1,109,364. Even after the visitors had returned home, attendance held up, at 700,000 in 1861.
⁶³
These numbers were increasingly being seen as a way of assessing the success or failure of any arts institution. Sir Henry Cole, after his labours at the Great Exhibition, had moved swiftly on to the founding of the South Kensington Museum, a museum of arts and design (now the Victoria & Albert), which opened in 1857. His ambition was similarly educational. He wanted to welcome as many of the working classes as he could, in whatever leisure hours they could find, and he was determined that his museum was going to be open for their convenience, not for the convenience of the staff. To teach consumers and producers to differentiate between good and bad design, to teach the masses the norms of ‘decent’ behaviour, one had first to get them there, and this
could not be done by opening only for a few hours during the working week:

If you wish to vanquish Drunkenness and the Devil, make God’s day of rest elevating and refreshing to the working man; don’t leave him to find his recreation in bed first, and in the public house afterwards;…give him music in which he may take his part; show him pictures of beauty on the walls of churches and chapels; [and then], as we cannot live in church or chapel all Sunday, give him his park to walk in, with music in the air; give him that cricket ground…open all museums of Science and Art after the hours of Divine service; let the working man get his refreshment there in company with his wife and children, rather than leave him to booze away from them in the Public House and Gin Palace. The Museum will certainly lead him to wisdom and gentleness, and to Heaven, whilst the latter will lead him to brutality and perditions.
⁶⁴

Cole was proud that his museum had the first refreshment room in any museum, for he saw a museum as a place for a family to spend the day, and a family needed to be able to eat and drink. He said that, if the hours were right, and admission free (or at any rate low), then even having alcohol on the premises would not disturb the air of quiet industry and education. He boasted in 1860 that the total sale of alcohol in the refreshment rooms over the previous two years had averaged out at ‘two and a half drops of wine, fourteen-fifteenths of a drop of brandy, and ten and a half drops of bottled ale per capita’.
⁶⁵

Certainly something was drawing the working classes to South Kensington. In 1858 the cost of gas for lighting the galleries was £780; in 1864 it had risen to more than £3,600 - not because the price of gas had shot up, but because of the increased number of hours the galleries were open in the evening. In 1865 entrance was free on Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays, and the galleries were open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. On Wednesdays, Thursday and Fridays admission was 6
d.
, and the galleries were open from 10 a.m. to 4, 5 or 6 p.m., depending on the time of year (that is, until dusk). The art school, which was of equal importance to the museum for Cole, was open until nine every evening, so that artisans could attend lectures there after their day’s work. In the first three months of the South Kensington Museum’s life, admissions were more than 330,000, Cole boasted ‘three fold the numbers at Marble House’ - his name for the British Museum, which he despised for its
exclusionary tactics.
*
In the first complete year, attendance reached ‘456,288 persons. It was not until 1841 after 70 years from its foundation and an expenditure of about a million of pounds sterling that the annual visitors at the British Museum reached even 319,374 persons a year,’ he crowed.
⁶⁷
Between 1857 and 1883 the South Kensington Museum saw more than 15 million visitors pass through its galleries, over 6.5 million of whom came in the evening, which suggests that they were not of the leisured classes.

As well as the South Kensington Museum itself, a branch was opened in the working-class suburb of Bethnal Green; by 1872 it was getting nearly a million visitors a year, although this did drop as the century progressed, by 1887 to less than half, at 409,929.
†
In addition, the South Kensington Museum had been planned as a ‘circulating’ museum, with one of its primary aims the lending of works from its collection to areas where art exhibitions were scarce. Between 1854 (three years before it had officially opened) and 1870 it sent ten loan exhibitions to Birmingham, seven to Leeds, eight to Liverpool, five to Manchester, eight to Nottingham and fourteen to Sheffield.
⁶⁸

The provincial cities were not sitting meekly by, however, waiting for culture to drop down on them like manna from the capital. Outside London, from 1800 onward public art exhibitions were increasing, becoming more and more an integral part of the civic amenities of the cities and towns. In 1800, despite active social calendars in many cities - calendars that included lectures and theatres, concerts and dances - there had been just two art institutes in Britain: one in London and one in Dublin. It was Norwich, with its Society of Artists, that first filled this gap, with plans for annual exhibitions, the first of which was held in 1805.
‡
In 1807 and 1808 Bath also had annual exhibitions (about which almost nothing is known); then in 1809 the Bath Institution for
Promoting the Fine Arts was set up, under the patronage of the local gentry, and two annual exhibitions were held before the Institution faded away. That same year in Leeds the Northern Society, modelled on the British Institution, was formed, again planning an annual exhibition to be held in its Music Hall. The first one was very successful, running for two months, and although there was later a hiatus from 1812 to 1822, regular exhibitions resumed again, including two loan exhibitions of old masters. In 1825 the sales and admission charges together cleared £2,000 for the organizers and artists. By 1830 art exhibitions had been held in Birmingham, Bradford, Brighton, Bristol, Carlisle, Exeter, Gloucester, Hull, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Plymouth and Southampton; in Aberdeen, Dumfries, Edinburgh and Glasgow; and in Cork. Even small towns like Ross-on-Wye and Greenock managed exhibitions. Some of these centred around famous London artists - the Leeds exhibition in 1809 had shown two pictures by Benjamin West - but many more consisted of work by local artists, almost all of them professionals. Birmingham’s first exhibition, in 1827, had sixty-one local artists, among them drawing masters, portraitists, miniaturists, engravers and sculptors.
⁶⁹

Manchester was a good example of the way in which artistic life in a large industrial city developed. Over the eighteenth century, the prerequisites fell into place: Manchester had a good-sized mercantile community, with leisure time and disposable income; it had good roads and - later - rail links; the professional middle classes and the roads together combined to produce local prosperity, which led to a wide variety of shops and services. And thus concerts were followed by two theatres, a library, and a literary and philosophical society. In 1772 there was one printseller in the local directory, and one artist, a ‘Miniature-painter, and Musick-maker’. By the end of the century there were a couple of local collectors, but no public artistic displays were held. Then in 1823 the Royal Manchester Institution was formed, initially by a group of artists who wanted to show their art regularly, although it was quickly taken over by the professional middle classes to be run as a cultural institution.
⁷⁰
Now the gentry were no longer assuming leadership automatically; more, in this case they actively refused it. Sir John Leicester, the last of the landed class still to live in Manchester, and an early collector of contemporary British art, solicited the support of several aristocrats who themselves bought British art: the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of
Egremont, Robert Peel.
*
None of them was interested in supporting the Institution, as the chairman wrote in exasperation: ‘Would you believe it? that tho’ Mr Peel purchases Paintings of the Old Masters at very high Prices and that his immense fortune, his Fathers and his Uncles, were all acquired by cotton spinning at Manchester, and altho’ they have had at least 40 guineas worth of
compliments
paid them by their Friends, upon this occasion, yet not one of them have had the good sense to support us.’
⁷²

The cholera epidemic of 1832 changed the focus of the Institution somewhat, as did the furore around the Reform Bill of 1832, and the subsequent development of the Chartist movement: now education and reform seemed more important than a leisured environment for the middle classes, and culture was linked to education and improvement, both in exhibitions and in newspapers and magazines. From 1832 the
Penny Magazine
, promoted by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, stressed self-education and, to help supply what every working man should know, printed engravings of famous paintings. The Mechanics’ Institute from 1837 began to mount exhibitions, of scientific displays and new machinery as well as paintings loaned by local owners. The Royal Manchester Institution began to worry about its perceived middle-class exclusivity. In 1845 its annual exhibition stayed open on Saturdays in the evenings, and charged 6
d.
instead of the standard 1
s.
; in 1847, in the year of the Ten-Hour Factory Act, admission was further reduced to 2
d.
for the final two weeks of the exhibition: 11,000 people attended. By 1849 the entire final month was given over to 2
d.
admissions.
⁷³

By this time, Manchester had a Natural History Society, a Botanical Society, a Statistical Society, a Medical Society and a Geological Society, for the most part run by the new professional classes. After the success of the Institution’s shows in the 1840s, a group of local worthies began to plan their own fine-arts exhibition. Thomas Fairbairn, the chairman, was a Unitarian who saw art as a moral force for good (he was also a remarkably prescient collector, buying Holman Hunt’s
The Awakening Conscience
among other works). He was a commissioner for the Great Exhibition, helping to raise £60,000 to send as Manchester’s contribution. In 1857 the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, the largest fine-arts

exhibition ever to be held in Britain, opened its doors. Attendance was low. The commissioners approached Thomas Cook, and he advertised ‘Moonlight Trips’ to bring workers from Newcastle, so that all could ‘feast in the glorious noon day of Art’s finest representations and richest treasures’. Ultimately Cook transported about 26,000 tourists from the north and east, but this was the least of it.
⁷⁴
The public’s imagination had been captured, and up to 1.5 million visitors poured through the doors. Many employers now arranged for their workers to visit, as they had for the Great Exhibition. Sir Titus Salt brought 2,500 employees from Salt and Co. textile works (which had been designed, incidentally, by William Fairbairn, Thomas Fairbairn’s father). The
Art Treasures Examiner
, a special weekly journal published during the run of the exhibition, saw them arrive,

all dressed in their Sunday best…in three special trains…The fine brass band belonging to the establishment accompanied the first two trains, and the Saltaire drum-and-fife band the last…They were accompanied by their generous employer, Mr Titus Salt, who paid all the expenses connected with the trip, and remained with his interested charges during the time they were in the palace. The 2,500 partook of dinner in the large refreshment tent adjoining the second-class room.
⁷⁵

That 1.5 million people thought it worth travelling to see a collection of paintings marked a very pronounced shift, from even a hundred years
before. Two things had happened over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to make art a natural leisure activity for many in the population: the arrival of so many works of art from Europe, latterly driven by political upheaval, and the creation of an internal print market, through the development of retail networks and technological innovation. These two things were not isolated, but fed off each other. When the French Revolution brought a large number of European collections on to the market, and the end of the French wars even more, many rich men seized the opportunities to buy paintings and sculpture. Dealers sold at auction, and dealers sold privately, on commission. And even before that, in the half-century between 1720 and 1770, around half a million prints had been imported from Italy, France and Holland, priming a market where even those at the low end of the middle class could afford to buy prints now and again.
⁷⁶

Arthur Pond (
c.
1701-1758) was an example of an old-fashioned eighteenth-century print dealer. Originally he produced engravings after drawings he owned, or drawings that were owned by his patrons. From that he moved on to commission others to engrave works for him, producing first a series of Italian landscapes, and later Roman antiquities, Dutch landscapes and a second series of Italian landscapes. These were sold in sets of four uniform prints for 5
s.
, which were published at three-month intervals. The uniformity made them suitable for framing, and they could even be hand-coloured first. Despite the success of these prints, and the increase in the size of the print market, from 1745 onward only about 12 per cent of Pond’s income came from this part of his business. The rest was earned in the way artists had always earned money in the past, via patronage. For much of his life Pond worked as a drawing master to upper-class women, who would in turn introduce him to others, who might commission portraits from him. At the same time he acted as agent and general factotum to their husbands, supervising the reception of pictures sent from abroad, cleaning them, arranging for them to be framed; Pond also painted his patron’s families, attended auctions as his representative, and copied old masters.
⁷⁷
The value placed on these services by society can perhaps best be seen in Oliver Goldsmith’s
Vicar of Wakefield
, when a relative of the eponymous vicar