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

control abetted this urge to price the price-less: many press articles speculated on the value of goods when describing them—it seemed to be a reflex response to the display. As Walter Benjamin later commented, ‘The world exhibitions erected the universe of commodities.’⁴⁷

      For the first few weeks of the Great Exhibition, these price-less goods were examined by the prosperous alone. Albert had been insistent that the working class should be able to attend, that it was this group who would benefit in particular. The prices of admission, however, were set at exorbitant levels. Season tickets were £3 3s. for men, £2 2s. for women, and only season-ticket holders could go on the first day; second- and third-day tickets cost £1 each, while day tickets for the rest of the first month were 5s. each. It was not until 26 May, nearly a full month after the opening, that for the first time ‘shilling days’ came into force, with the following Friday reduced even further, to 6d. But on Saturdays—most workers’ half-day off—the price was pushed back up, to 2s. 6d. Many exhibitors wanted this exclusivity extended even further, with shilling days postponed until July—or never. They feared that the middle and upper classes who had thronged the aisles in the first weeks would disappear, not to be seen again, if they were forced to share their viewing space with the lower orders. But Prince Albert and Cole prevailed, and shilling days from the end of May remained.

As the end of the month approached, the big question of the day became, what would happen when the admission charge was lowered to let the working classes in? The gulf between the comfortable middle classes and even the respectable working classes was enormous. In the previous three-quarters of a century the middle class had become increasingly fearful of their social and economic inferiors, a situation brought about by the great political upheavals of the time. The Gordon Riots of 1780, the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the agitations that surrounded the Reform Act of 1832, and the Chartist riots; the failed harvests of the ‘hungry forties’; and, only three years in the past, the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848: all had merged to form a nebulous image of the great mass of workers biding their time, waiting to turn into ‘King Mob’. This was how The Times referred to the working class on 2 May, the day after the opening of the Great Exhibition—the day referred to by Queen Victoria as ‘the greatest day in our history, the most beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle ever seen, and the triumph of my beloved Albert’.⁴⁸ The Times was not so confident. Surely these bogeymen would overrun the grounds, given half a chance? Mayhew despaired of those like The Times who were stoking fear: ‘For many days before the “shilling people” were admitted to the building, the great topic of conversation was the probable behaviour of the people. Would they come sober? will they destroy things? will they want to cut their initials, or scratch their names on the panes of the glass lighthouses?’⁴⁹ Punch, in ‘Open House at the Crystal Palace’, also (unusually) championed the workers at the expense of the middle classes, setting up ‘Young Mob’ as ‘the better-behaved son of a wild and ignorant father’: ‘Am I not seen with my wife and children wondering at MR. LAYARD’s Nineveh Marbles [in the British Museum]*- wondering quietly, and I will add, if you please, reverently? Have I, in fact, chipped the nose of any statue? Have I wrenched the little finger from any mummy? Have I pocketed a single medal?’⁵⁰ Even those who did not fear that riot and mayhem would arrive with the workers thought that financial ruin certainly would. The Illustrated London News warned that ‘the gay, glancing, fluttering tide of bonnets and ribbons, and silks, and satins, and velvets’, would vanish, with ‘the blank…filled up by no adequate substitute of meaner, or coarser, or more commonplace material’.⁵¹ These publications were more interested in their thesis than in giving the shilling days a chance: this particular piece was published after only the third shilling day.

It is worth pausing for a moment at the admission charge of 1s. At this price, and with the less expensive catalogue, the Popular Guide, priced at 2d., only the upper levels of the working class—the artisans, the master craftsmen, the clerks (who for the most part would have identified themselves with the lower middle classes)—could possibly have afforded to visit the grounds without financial assistance. For most of the rest of the working classes, having 1s. to spend on a day’s leisure was unimaginable—and even that price was only for those who lived in walking distance: for the others, transport, accommodation and food would push the day’s expenditure to one or two weeks’ entire earnings. But the mass of workers was so mysterious to their economic superiors that it was as though the 1s. charge would unleash not just factory operatives and manual labourers, but also the feared ‘navvies’† who were building the railroads and, even worse, the masses of the unemployed and the unemployable, wild hordes of them sweeping across the plains of Hyde Park. The Times warned that ‘Summer excursion trains will bring the artisans and mechanics of the north in upon London like an inundation.’⁵² The Duke of Wellington thought that at least 15,000 men—he meant soldiers—would be needed to keep order. Members of the Exhibition commission met with the directors of the railway companies to arrange that reduced excursion fares would be restricted to benefit-club subscribers and those belonging to working-class self-improvement clubs such as the Mechanics’ Institutes (see below). (However, the agreement did not hold: by February the London and North-Western Railway and the Midland Railway companies had both agreed to supply excursion fares to non-club members, but they took care not to publicize this change—at least at first.)⁵³ This arrangement, while it stood, had the effect of pushing those who had not previously belonged to such a group into one, in order to be able to have access to railway tickets at affordable prices.

      In fact the numbers already belonging to some form of club, whether it was a social group, a benefit club, a sick club or an educational or self-improvement group, were enormously high. Friendly societies or benefit clubs were among the most common clubs for workers. Matthew Boulton, a manufacturer, factory-owner and partner with James Watt in the improvement and manufacturing of the early steam engine, was one of the first to see the value to an employer in setting up an insurance club. From the early 1770s his employees received benefits on illness, accident or death, having made contributions as a percentage of their earnings—from ¹/₂d. a week for those earning 2s. 6d. to 4d. for those earning £1. When they were ill they received payments in inverse proportion to their contributions, so that those earning the least received the most financial assistance—about four-fifths of their weekly wage for those employees with the lowest incomes. But if the illness or incapacity stemmed from ‘drunkenness, debauchery, quarrelling or fighting’, part of the first ten days’ payment was withheld. Boulton as well as his workers benefited from this scheme: by having some financial support in hard times, fewer ill or injured workers ended up being supported ‘on the parish’, which kept the poor rate down, and Boulton’s workers were more likely to stay with him, because if they moved on they would lose the benefit of the contributions they had already paid in.⁵⁴

      Even without the participation of enlightened employers, mutualsupport clubs were becoming common. The 1793 Friendly Societies Act enabled clubs to raise ‘separate funds for the mutual relief and maintenance of the…members in sickness, old age and infirmity’.⁵⁵ One estimate suggests that in 1801 there were at the very least 7,200 friendly societies in England and Wales, which together numbered about 648,000 members. In London at least 40 per cent of the working population belonged to a friendly society, while in some new industrial regions the figure was even higher: in Oldham, Lancashire, 50 per cent of all adult males belonged to one of the fifteen societies flourishing there. In Scotland there were nearly 400 friendly societies by 1800. Ireland