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

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Название Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
Автор произведения Judith Flanders
Жанр Историческая литература
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Издательство Историческая литература
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isbn 9780007347629



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

      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

      Cook came