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

of dozens—of children’s books describing the fair, such as The Crystal Palace: A Little Book for Little Boys, and Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great Exhibition (which devoted a remarkable amount of space to the Exhibition’s finances, taking an entire page to list ticket prices, and even calculating how much money had been made by the time the book went to press in early June—£137,697 13s., the author estimated), and Fireside Facts from the Great Exhibition (which appears to have lifted material wholesale from Little Henry’s Holiday). These were followed by books of educational intent, or instant reminiscence, appearing within months: Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851; What I Saw in London, or, Men and Things in the Great Metropolis; Frolick & Fun, or What Was Seen and Done in London in 1851; Glimpses and Gatherings during a voyage and visit to London and the Great Exhibition in the summer of 1851; and many many more.

New forms of advertising also appeared. W. H. Smith, a newspaper distributor, had rented a bookstall at the London and North-Western Railway’s Euston station in 1848. In the year of the Great Exhibition he obtained a monopoly of all the London and North-Western’s station bookstalls and he also began to rent out space for advertisements on the platforms, which, with the hordes of visitors pouring through the stations heading for Hyde Park, began to seem like a paying proposition.* Soon everyone was advertising individual products through references to the Exhibition. Samuel Brothers’ flyer was headed ‘The Great Exhibition in London, High Art! High Success!! and High Principle!!!’, with, underneath, a list of items of ready-made clothing and their prices, together with an image of the brothers’ shopfront, cropped in tightly to make it look like a display case at the fair.⁷⁴

      The visitors to London were presented with the obvious commercial link between the goods on display at the Great Exhibition and those on display in shop windows. But they were also presented with another link—between the Great Exhibition as a fair, a source of entertainment, and the shows of London. It was not as though there was no other form of entertainment in London, for both rich and poor, for those looking for education and for those out only for amusement. London always had entertainment (see Chapter 7), but in the summer of 1851 it particularly revolved around the Great Exhibition. The Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park made sure that its new buildings would be ready in time for the influx of visitors, and highlighted the just finished outdoor tank for its hippopotamus, and two new aviaries. (Attendance soared to a record 677,000 that year.) James Wyld, an MP and map-seller, bought a ten-year lease on the plot of land in the centre of Leicester Square, where he built a rotunda, eighty-five feet in diameter, with a sixty-foot globe on top. A series of staircases led the visitor up to platforms from which illustrations of various geographic phenomena could be viewed—volcanoes, ice floes and so on. The Polytechnic Institute advertised a series of lectures on ‘all the MOST INTERESTING DEPOSITS at the GREAT EXHIBITION’.⁷⁵

      Theatre did not lag behind in shows that were linked to the Great Exhibition. James Robinson Planché, playwright and creator of theatrical extravaganzas (see pp. 308—9), merged the two most popular shows of the summer, the Exhibition itself and Wyld’s Great Globe, to produce Mr Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (in Leicester Square). A Cosmographical, Visionary Extravaganza, and Dramatic Review, in One Act and Four Quarters. Mr Buckstone was in fact the real-life manager of the Haymarket Theatre, where Mr Buckstone’s Voyage was being produced; to add further layers of interleaved fantasy and reality, the opening scenes were set, according to the published script, ‘[In] FRONT OF THE THEATRE ROYAL, HAYMARKET’. The audience then watched as ‘Mr Buckstone determines to Circumnavigate the Globe, and gives his reasons for so doing’, as the scene shifted to the ‘Foot of the Staircase in Wyld’s Model of the Earth, Leicester Square. Mr Buckstone, as a preparatory step to a Voyage round the Globe, visits the Model to obtain an insight into the subject and—sleeps upon it.’ The viewers then followed the dreaming Mr Buckstone around the world, where he saw many marvellous sights, including ‘The “Ripon” steamer, with the Grenadiers on board, on her passage to Malta,

      saluted by a French brig’, various battles, ‘A GRAND ORIENTAL SPECTACLE’, which introduced a ballet, a ‘WISE ELEPHANT OF THE EAST’, ‘Chinese Magicians’, and an ‘Interview with the Esquimaux from Cumberland Straits and the Adelaide Gallery’, ending with a cheery scene of a ‘violent “Struggle for Gold” by the Theatres in general. Awful Catastrophe. End of Mr Buckstone’s Golden Dream’.⁷⁶

      With this kind of competition, it was not hard to imagine that the shilling visitors might find better things to spend their money on than a teetotal, didactic piece of rational recreation. But, instead of the Illustrated London News’s picture of desolation, to the fair there came hundreds of thousands of the ‘respectable’ working classes—members of Sundayschool groups, of orderly church and chapel groups, of self-improvement clubs, of Mechanics’ Institutes; master craftsmen and artisans and their families—endless streams of all those who could afford to pay the 10s. or so that a ‘shilling day’ visit entailed (1s. admission, a travel bill of 5s. or more, accommodation at 2s., plus the cost of food for the duration of the trip). Attendance on shilling days averaged between 45,000 and 60,000 people; by the end of the summer, 100,000 were passing through the gates daily. In total, 6 million visitors came to the Crystal Palace; as many as 5 million may have come by train, with 1 million of them on excursion fares. Thomas Cook arranged for the transport of 165,000 excursionists, or nearly 3 per cent of the total, including one single excursion train carrying 3,000 children.⁷⁷

      And the fears of the upper classes remained only that—fears. The crowds were in fact orderly, respectful, well-behaved—all that could have been hoped for, but was not remotely expected. The Times was forced to eat its words, and after three days acknowledged that, instead of being ‘King Mob’, the shilling admissions were well dressed and orderly members of society, and a credit to the burgeoning nation of commerce.⁷⁸ The volatile mob had become the sedate consumer. The age of the machine had brought with it the triumph of the masses—and the mass market.

*Richard Steele had started the Tatler in 1709, and it came out three times a week until the beginning of 1711. A single sheet, at first it contained news items, but gradually each number comprised a single long essay, which might be a gentle satire of the social world, or a reflection on the values of the day, mildly attacking the venery and hypocrisy of politics and society. Addison contributed his first essay on 20 May 1709, and in all wrote almost fifty papers, plus another twenty together with Steele.

*A very partial round-up of coffee houses that served as meeting points for clubs in London would include Jonathan’s Coffee House, Exchange Alley, which formed the basis of the stock market, and Lloyd’s Coffee House, Lombard Street, where shipping and insurance brokers met, produced news sheets, then a shipping list (the first in 1734), then a register (in 1760), and finally turned into the insurer Lloyd’s. Politics was discussed by Tories at the Cocoa Tree, by Whigs at Arthur’s. Booksellers met at the Chapter Coffee House, Paternoster Row; actors at Will’s, Wright’s or the Bedford, all in Covent Garden, while the Orange, in the Haymarket, was more specialized, and for dancing masters and opera singers. Old Slaughter’s, in St Martin’s Lane, was the haunt of painters, while the Rainbow, in the same street, and Garraway’s in Exchange Alley, not only had artists’ clubs, but also mounted exhibitions of prints.⁵

†An eighteenth-century idiom for ‘in order’.

*And the members soon struck lucky: among their earliest