Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

we know about today, but by 1831 the number had shot up to 281, with half centred in Dublin.⁵⁶

Clubs that were not mainly about financial aid were also popular: working men’s libraries, groups to discuss politics or literature, or to buy books. A club in Sunderland met regularly to discuss old English ballads; the members were saving jointly towards the collected volumes of reprints of Early and Middle English texts published by the Early English Text Society. The members consisted of a cork-cutter, two woodcarvers from the docks, a watchmaker, an engine-fitter and ‘a painter of photographs’.*⁵⁷

      The largest, and most widespread, self-improvement groups were the Mechanics’ Institutes. The first one was set up in 1824 in London, with 1,500 members paying 1 guinea each—clearly, a group of high-earning skilled workers and artisans. By 1850 there were 702 Institutes across the country, but by now they had mostly been taken over by the middle classes: the upper middle classes at the administrative end, and the lower middle classes—clerks and shopworkers—as members. The original expectation had been that these institutes would increase the skills and scientific and technical knowledge of manual labourers by offering access to books and pamphlets in reading rooms, and to continuing education via evening lectures. This would produce a more highly skilled and useful workforce, which would be a great benefit to employers. But fairly swiftly it was discovered that the lectures were too theoretical, and the workers found little practical incentive to attend after a long day’s work. Instead, lectures that gave some form of recreation were preferred, and were much better attended. In its initial period of worker education, from 1835 to 1842, the Manchester Athenaeum held 352 lectures, of which 173 were on the ‘physical and mental sciences’; in 1842—9, out of 394 lectures, science featured in only 81. Nationally, of 1,000 lectures held at 42 institutions in 1851, only 340 were on science, while 572 were classed as literature—although literature here had a fairly broad definition, essentially meaning anything that was not science or music. Included in the list of literature lectures were topics such as ‘the funeral rites of various nations, the habits and customs of the Eskimos, the life, death and burial of Mary, Queen of Scots, the games of Greece, the theosophy of India, the sons of Noah, and…“Are the Inhabitants of Persia, India, and China of Japhetic or Shemitic [sic] Origin?”’ There were also twenty-three lectures on Shakespeare, and over the next years many lectures gradually turned into readings from favourite authors, and sometimes simply readings of plays, which was a way of getting around the general disapproval of the theatre by many Dissenters and some Anglicans (see pp. 274—5).⁵⁸

      The Institutes began to hold exhibitions and social events more generally. The earliest exhibitions, held by the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute from 1837, were in the mould of the lectures on science and technical innovation—exhibitions of ‘machinery, industrial products, scientific apparatus and works of art’.⁵⁹ Over the next five years, Manchester held four exhibitions, and drew over 200,000 visitors in total.⁶⁰ From 1838 to 1840 the various Institutes held at least fifty exhibitions across the country. But almost immediately the emphasis altered, exactly as it had with the lectures. By 1846 the Manchester Institute was showing more than machinery, with exhibitions of paintings by Turner, Benjamin West, Landseer and Charles Eastlake. The urge for entertainment rather than education was nationwide: in 1842 the Institute in York saw working-class membership increase as excursions and social events were added to the calendar; by 1844 the Huddersfield members expected a gala, excursions, exhibitions and tea parties. Most of the other groups had moved in a similar direction, with a general leaning towards culture and recreation. And recreation included travel.

      By the time of the Great Exhibition, excursion travel was already a regular feature of the landscape, even if it was the still-exciting exception rather than the run-of-the-mill norm. In 1830 the first passenger railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, had carried sightseers out to the Sankey Viaduct for 5s. (instead of the standard fare of 8s.) only two weeks after the line was opened. A few days later it took Manchester passengers to the Liverpool Charity Festival, and within a year it had made an arrangement with an entrepreneur to carry 150 members of a Sunday-school group from Manchester to Liverpool and back for 40 per cent of the regular fare. The various Mechanics’ Institutes quickly saw the benefits of organized cut-rate travel: the Manchester Institute arranged a trip to Liverpool for its members in 1833; in 1840 a group went from Leeds to York; by 1845 the Leeds-to-Hull excursion group was so large that a train with forty carriages was needed, possibly the first of the ‘monster’ trains that so captured the imagination of the Victorian public.⁶¹ (‘Monster’ was a favourite Victorian adjective, with monster trains, monster shops and monster exhibitions.) Very swiftly holiday travel took a great share of the excursion market. In 1846 Blackpool got its own railway line; four years later, up to 10,000 visitors a week were pouring into the town. Numbers continued to increase, while fares continued to tumble: in 1844 the London and South Western Railway began to run Easter excursions from Southampton to London at 7s. return; by 1850 the same trip cost 5s.⁶²

      When it came to the Great Exhibition itself, the railways initially had not been much interested in excursion business—there was a general underestimating of the numbers of the working classes who would wish to attend. As late as January 1851, less than four months before the opening, the trade magazine Herapath’s Railway and Commercial Journal was warning railway companies against recklessly increasing their rolling stock against a demand it thought could not possibly materialize.⁶³

Thomas Cook, whose excursions to the Crystal Palace were later inextricably interwoven into his myth, actually became involved in bringing visitors to London in 1851 by accident. Though subsequently to personify the whole range of possibility that was excursion travel, Cook arrived, surprisingly, rather late in the day. He had entered the field only in 1841, when he arranged with the Midland Counties Railway to have an excursion train put at the disposal of his temperance group. By 1846 he had extended his tours beyond their initial Leicestershire borders, and was organizing excursions to Scotland. So successful were his tours that in 1850 he was thinking of expanding even further, by taking groups to the Holy Land. However, a temperance friend in London advised him against this, warning that there were ‘no railways, coaches, or even public roads’ there.⁶⁴ He suggested that the USA might be better: steamers had been making regular crossings of the Atlantic from 1838, and the east coast of America was now just 12¹/₂ days away from Liverpool. So Cook set off for Liverpool to see if he could interest the steamship companies in the same type of arrangement he had been negotiating with the railways, giving him discounted fares in exchange for guaranteed numbers. But he managed to get only as far as Derby. There he met Joseph Paxton, the architect of the Crystal Palace, and his friend John Ellis, who was attempting to stabilize the Midland Railway Company after the crooked dealings of George Hudson, ‘the Railway King’, had threatened to destroy it and several other companies. Ellis had a vested interest in increased traffic on his railway—especially since he was one of the businessmen about whom Herapath’s would shortly warn: the Midland had ordered a hundred new third-class carriages to bring working-class passengers to the Exhibition. Paxton also had financial links to the railways. From the other side, Cook approved of the educational aspects of the Great Exhibition, the idea of ‘rational recreation’ it promoted, and he was further taken by the fact that the Crystal Palace was to be ‘dry’.* (There were other aspects that pleased him equally: it was closed on Sundays, religious tracts were distributed throughout the fair, there was a Bible depot, and, at the request of Lord Shaftesbury, all the nude statues were to be respectably covered.)⁶⁵

      Cook came