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

sometimes £50) a night:

      the first, the only one in the world, or that ever existed…In a neighbouring closet is placed a cylinder by which I communicate the celestial fire to the bed-chamber, that fluid which animates and vivifies all, and those cherishing vapours and Oriental perfumes, which I convey thither by means of tubes of glass. The celestial bed rests on six massy and transparent columns; coverings of purple, and curtains of celestial blue surround it, and the bed-clothes are perfumed with the most costly essences of Arabia: it is exactly similar to those that adorn the palaces in Persia, and to that of the favourite sultana in the seraglio of the Grand Turk.⁴²

      In addition, the advertisements promised, ‘In the celestial bed no feather is employed…springy hair mattresses are used…[having] procured at vast expense, the tails of English stallions, which when twisted, baked and then untwisted and properly prepared, is [sic] elastic to the highest degree.⁴³ And if a celestial bed and the tails of English stallions between them couldn’t cure the problem, then clearly nothing would.

      It was on the basis of this kind of relentless advertising that newspapers achieved the financial stability that, in the nineteenth century, enabled expansion into ever-growing markets. Very quickly with the new century, circulations skyrocketed beyond anything that had been achieved before. In exactly the same pattern we have seen already, the increase in the number of newspapers and the increase in the number of people who read them were brought about by developments in technology, in this case in printing and papermaking; by developments in transport, for the papers’ dissemination; and by the recognition among newspaper proprietors that attention to the vast working-class market could reap equivalently vast rewards.

      Before any of this could happen, that vast working-class market, or at least a substantial part of it, needed to be able to read. The figures we have for literacy in the population before the end of the nineteenth century are not terribly reliable - for the most part they come from surveys of signatures on marriage registers, the assumption being that if one could sign one’s name, one could both read and write. In fact many who could sign their names could not read, and then a further number who could read could not write. The evangelical writer and educator Hannah More was one of many who thought that it was essential for the working classes to be able to read the Scriptures, but that writing would cause the lower classes to become discontented with their place in the world. At a bare minimum, however, it is estimated that in 1500 only 10 per cent of all men could sign their names, and just 1 per cent of women. By 1750 these figures had risen to 60 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women.⁴⁴ Several things went to make this change: urbanization was one, with increased literacy being necessary for a city life; the growth in the numbers of shops and other small trades was another, for it was impossible to sell on credit without being able to write. (It has been suggested that in London and Middlesex perhaps as many as 92 per cent of tradesmen were literate as early as 1730, while even in rural East Anglia the figure approached 70 per cent.)⁴⁵ Self-improvement and a desire for education to promote oneself into the ranks of petty traders were great promoters of literacy: Thomas Dyche’s A Guide to the English Tongue went through thirty-three editions, selling over a quarter of a million copies, in less than fifteen years between 1733 and 1747 (and these figures come from the one printer whose records have survived).*⁴⁷ There were numerous other books aimed at the lower middle-class autodidact: G. Bird’s Practical Scrivener (1733), and Joseph Champion’s Practical Arithmetick (1733), or even James Dodson’s Antilogarithmic Canon (1740).⁴⁸ An educational framework had also been established for those who wanted to set up in business: by the 1770s and 1780s there were eight schools with a commercial curriculum in Derby alone (which had a population of only 10,000), while Aris’s Birmingham Gazette contained advertisements for schools in Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire and Shropshire with the same sort of syllabus - 70 per cent offered writing; slightly fewer than 60 per cent arithmetic; 40 per cent bookkeeping and accounting; and 30 per cent further mathematics.⁴⁹

      Religion was another precipitating factor in the surge in literacy. At the end of the eighteenth century, evangelicalism began its century-long rise, mainly spurred by Anglicans, who soon joined with the Nonconformists to create a nationwide movement whose influence was felt far outside the walls of church and chapel. (For my purposes, I refer generically - and to some degree technically incorrectly - to ‘evangelicalism’ as it affected society at large, rather than as a form of religious organization.) Evangelical stress on activism and good works led to a societywide ethos of reform, philanthropy and ‘improvement’, and much was precipitated by the crusading leaders of the movement - William Wilberforce and the abolition of slavery; Lord Shaftesbury and the Factory Act, as well as numberless voluntary societies, philanthropic organizations and Sunday schools.

      By 1800, about 75 per cent of men could read, which opened up opportunities and, to some, increased anxiety. Hannah More, horrified by the threat of atheism as displayed both in the French Revolution and in pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1792), began to produce tracts, ballads and moral stories for what in 1795 became the Cheap Repository Tract Society. Subsidized by several evangelical societies, these pamphlets were printed to look like the ‘old trash’ their supporters so despised, and priced similarly, at ¹/₂d. or 1d. In the first six months of 1795, 600,000 copies were sold, and by the end of the year that had mounted to 2 million.⁵⁰

      This was a precursor to a new trend in educating the masses. In 1801, only 13.8 per cent of all working-class children attended Sunday school regularly.⁵¹ But after the advent of the French Revolution promoted fears of a similar revolution in Britain, and again after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, education was seen as a way of socializing the workers, bringing them into the evangelical fold, teaching them to accept their station in life and contribute to the bourgeois civic structure. Adam Smith had seen this - without the evangelical slant - in 1776: ‘An instructed and intelligent people…are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.’⁵² In 1833 the government set aside public funds for education for the first time, and, although its intervention produced very little in comparison to the work of the evangelicals, this was representative of the spirit of the times; by 1851, 75.4 per cent of working-class children attended Sunday school. These Sunday schools, the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church of England (established 1814), and its non-sectarian counterpart, the British and Foreign School Society, as well as charity schools, tract societies, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1831), the Mechanics’ Institutes, the Methodist reading rooms and many other similar groups and societies all contributed to the creation of a literate working class. Between 1800 and 1830 the sales of stamped newspapers had nearly doubled, from 16 million copies to 30 million copies, while the population had risen only by half, from 10.5 million to 16 million.⁵³

      What the working classes read, however, was not necessarily what their social superiors thought was good for them. Working hours were long: most shops were open from seven or eight in the morning until ten or eleven at night, while those shopkeepers who were located in streets with a busy nightlife - near theatres, or pubs - expected to stay open until midnight. Artisans and skilled labourers worked equally long hours, while factory shifts could last sixteen hours. These hours were gradually lessened over the century, and from the 1860s increasing numbers of workers had half-days on Saturdays as a holiday (except for the shopkeepers, who worked their longest hours on Saturdays, from seven until midnight). For most workers, however, through much of the century, the expectation was that they would leave home every morning while it was still dark, and return in time only to eat before falling