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
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007347629



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for a fee that he referred to delicately as ‘several shillings’ per head, instead of his usual percentage of the fare paid. In return for this, the excursionists would get a return ticket, with accommodation in London (including ‘a substantial meat breakfast’) for another 2s. (plus an extra 1d. if they wanted their boots cleaned); if that was too expensive, accommodation at 1s. could be found in dormitories set up on ships moored at Vauxhall Bridge.66 Accommodation had been a major preoccupation for the planners. They were uncertain how many workingclass visitors would travel to the capital, but, with the fear of the mob that was pervasive, any number seemed to be a threat and was regarded as a public-order concern. A Home Office official had been asked by the Royal Commission to look into how best ‘respectable and reasonable’ lodgings in London could be provided. The Home Office was pleased to comply, because it was anxious that ‘arrangements should in themselves conduce to the maintenance of good order and regularity without the appearance of any ostensible precautions, and that they should offer such facilities as will induce the working classes to follow, for their own advantage, the course pointed out’.67

      It was commercial activities of this nature that made the railways feel that perhaps there was money to be made in transporting the working classes to London for the fair. Very swiftly, they went from almost complete apathy to ruthless competition. A price war broke out between the Midland Railway and the Great Northern—at one point the battle became so overheated that a steam engine was hijacked by the opposition. In order to give its new Bradford-and-Leeds-to-London line a boost, the GNR promoted 5s. return fares. The Midland could not match that and still give Cook his ‘several shillings’. He agreed to tear up the agreement, which in the long term was very good business on his part, as long afterwards the Midland continued to give him preferential rates when other excursion agents began to set up in his territory.

      Cook’s son John, aged seventeen, acted as his advance agent. He and others travelled to towns across Yorkshire and the Midlands to publicize the possibilities of travel to London and the Great Exhibition for working people. They distributed handbills, held meetings—often with a band playing outside a mill or factory on pay day, to attract a crowd—and helped to set up savings clubs for the fares and accommodation. These subscription clubs were crucial to the success of the Exhibition. Mayhew’s novel 1851 has the villagers of Buttermere paying into the ‘Travelling Association for the Great Exhibition of 1851…for months past, subscribing their pennies with the intention of having their share in that general holiday’, with the local squire acting as club treasurer.69 Other groups that came, supported by various savings methods, included parishes led by their clergymen, soldiers brought by their commanding officers, schools and Sunday schools by their teachers, and factory and mill workers by their employers. In Maldon and Braintree, the shops in both towns closed for a day to allow the entire towns’ populations to travel en masse to London. And all of them seemed to go by rail. The Great Western increased its passenger numbers by 38.3 per cent over the period; the London and South Western by 29.9 per cent; the London and Blackwall by 28.5 per cent; the South Eastern by 23.8 per cent; and the London and North-Western by 22.6 per cent. The last of these claimed that, for the duration of the fair, it had carried over three-quarters of a million passengers, and that 90,000 of these were excursionists, in 145 special excursion trains, travelling from the north for 5s. return.70

      Far more than just guidebooks found a useful commercial link to the Exhibition. There were comic stories of rustics up from the country, like the, to modern eyes, gloomily unfunny Jimmy Trebilcock; or, the Humorous Adventures of a Cornish Miner, at the Great Exhibition, What he Saw and What he didn’t See. There were political satires, using the Exhibition for parody purposes, such as Mr Goggleye’s