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

for reading. In Charles Kingsley’s novel Yeast, which began to appear in Fraser’s Magazine in 1848, the gamekeeper says, ‘Did you ever do a good day’s farm-work in your life? If you had, man or boy, you wouldn’t have been game for much reading when you got home; you’d do just what these poor fellows do, - tumble into bed at eight o’clock, hardly waiting to take your clothes off, knowing that you must turn up again at five o’clock the next morning to get a breakfast of bread, and, perhaps, a dab of the squire’s dripping, and then back to work again; and so on, day after day, sir, week after week, year after year.’⁵⁴ (For more on working hours and holidays, see pp. 209-10.) Thus for many the one day on which they had adequate leisure and energy to read was Sunday. And what many chose to read were the newspapers. For them, there was a range of papers which combined short, lurid police-court stories, murder trials and other gore with sensation fiction and a few news snippets.

      In 1829 there were seven London morning papers, selling 28,000 copies each on average, while six evening papers sold 11,000 copies each; by 1832 there were a further 130 provincial papers, of which sixty-one had circulations above 1,000, and two above 4,000.⁵⁵ Most of these sales, especially in London, were made by the radical press. The Sunday papers in London sold 110,000 copies each week, and there were ten radical Sunday papers to every conservative one. There were some more potentially mainstream papers - the Observer (established 1791) and the Sunday Times (1822) were both newspapers with a middleclass readership; the News of the World (1843) and the Weekly Times (1847) were also ‘respectable’, although radical in political content. But those that sold most to the working classes were the Weekly Dispatch (1801), Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (1842) and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper (1850; for more on Reynolds’s part publications, see Chapter 5), which were ‘distinguished chiefly by the violence and even brutality of their tone’.⁵⁶ Those papers with the goriest crime and most sensational sensations were those that were the most successful: Lloyd’s, for example, contained in one issue ‘The Emperor Napoleon on Assassination. Fearful stabbing case through jealousy. Terrible scene at an execution. Cannibalism at Liverpool. The Great Seizure of Indecent Prints. A man roasted to death. A cruel husband and an adulterous wife.’⁵⁷ In 1886, over half of the space in Lloyd’s was given over to crime or scandal. Then there were ‘specials’, editions produced for particular events, such as the execution of a particularly notorious murderer.⁵⁸ A summary of Reynolds’s, Lloyd’s and the Weekly Times shows they were all much of a muchness: except in times of national or international trauma (the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War), home and foreign news rarely took up more than 20 per cent of the non-advertising text, while ‘sensational’ coverage might get as much as 50 per cent of the space. During the Crimean War, Reynolds’s gave 30 per cent of its space to coverage, Lloyd’s 32.5 per cent, while the Weekly Times gave a grudging 23.5 per cent. After the war was over, however, Lloyd’s did its best to cater to its market by giving less than 1 per cent of its entire coverage in 1858 to foreign news; even then, it was trumped by the Weekly Times, which found space for just three-quarters of 1 per cent.⁵⁹ As the century wore on, less and less space was given to news of any sort, while sensation took over.

      The Town, which started in 1837, was similar, but it was unstamped, and therefore cost only 2d., instead of the 6d. that those newspapers which paid tax were forced to charge. Being unstamped, it could not legally carry any news, including any references to politics. But even without news its low price brought it a readership at the bottom end of the middle classes, as can be seen from the large proportion of articles promoting a reduction in working hours, or its several series on different types of workplace, which discussed particularly the head clerks aiming itself at a readership of junior clerks with ambitions. It also published numerous accounts of ‘Sketches of courtezans’, ‘Brothels and Brothelkeepers’, ‘Cigar shops and pretty women’, and articles on ‘free and easies’ (the precursors to music hall; see pp. 372-4), as well as carrying advertisements for books with titles like Venus’s Album, or, Rosebuds of Love, which sounds like pornography, but was advertised as a collection of ‘the best double-entendre, flash, and comic songs’.⁶⁰

      For a couple of decades early in the nineteenth century there was a demand for newspapers that were more concerned with gossip and scandal: John Bull (1820), Paul Pry (1830/31), the Satirist (1831) and the New Satirist (1841), and the Crim.-Con. Gazette (1840).* Some of these had started off as political journals: John Bull was Tory, the Satirist an interesting mix of anti-Chartist, anti-abolition, pro-parliamentaryreform, pro-O’Connell views. But ultimately they were - or became - little more than organs of vituperation, as with John Bull’s abuse of that ‘elderly smug Cockney, William Hazlitt, alias Bill Pimple, alias the Great Shabberon [a mean, shabby person]…an old weather-beaten, pimplesnouted gin-smelling man, like a Pimlico tailor, with ink-dyed hands, a corrugated forehead, and a spiritous nose’. The Satirist and the Age were even worse - they had swiftly degenerated into blackmail sheets: ‘If a Reader of the Satirist will furnish us with evidence of the “publication” on the part of the “Gin-and-water Curate residing in the neighbourhood of Dorset-square”, we will make the reverend tipler [sic] repeat it.’ The paper then either received information from disgruntled or vindictive readers, for which it (sometimes) paid, or the person written about got in touch with the editor, and a pay-off guaranteed the rapid insertion of a paragraph countering the original claims.⁶²

      By the 1840s these frankly vicious papers had more or less run their course, and had either closed or turned respectable. Instead Reynolds’s, Lloyd’s and the News of the World took over their readerships. There were also, from the 1840s, new penny papers for unskilled workers: the Penny Times, which appears, from its pictures, to have expected an audience who read only with difficulty, and centred around episodes of murder, abduction, rape and other violent crimes, and Bell’s Penny Dispatch, and Sporting and Police Gazette, and Newspaper of Romance, and Penny Sunday Chronicle (all one title), which had ‘thrilling tales’ every week. These tales took off, and as politics - particularly radical politics - became less of a selling point on the collapse of the Chartist movement, more and more papers joined in: Clark’s Weekly Dispatch ran ‘A Ghost Story’ in 1841, Bell’s began a serial ‘The Green Man’ in 1842, and in 1843 Lloyd’s Penny Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette had ‘The Waltz of Death’ by C. G. Ainsworth, with a gory illustration on the front page.*⁶³ (This paper was made up entirely of fiction and police reports, so it didn’t need to be stamped - hence its 1d. price, compared to the 7d. charged by the Sunday Times.) The journalist Henry Vizetelly, looking back at the end of the century, remembered these ‘lengthy and exciting stories, telling how rich and poor babies were wickedly changed in their perambulators by conniving nursemaids, how long-lost wills miraculously turned up in the nick of time’. The characters were always of a type: ‘The villains were generally of high birth and repulsive presence; the lowly personages were always of ravishing beauty and unsullied virtue. Innocence and loveliness in a gingham gown were perpetually pursued by vice and debauchery in varnished boots and spotless gloves. Life was surrounded by mystery; detectives were ever on the watch, and the most astonishing pitfalls and mantraps were concealed in the path of the unwary and of the innocent.’⁶⁴ These tales all had illustrations in keeping with the Gothic sensibilities of their stories. The British Quarterly Review in 1859 warned its readers that

      with few exceptions…[such stories were] of a violent or sinister character. There