Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  (by a firing squad, after running amok on her daily walk down the Strand and killing her keeper) Sadler’s Wells quickly staged a production of Chuneelah; or, The Death of the Elephant at Exeter ‘Change. So, for those who found the Exeter Change too much the showplace, in 1828 the Royal Zoological Society opened a menagerie in Regent’s Park in a form that was more calculated to appeal to supporters of ‘rational recreation’. For the first time animals were housed more or less in a manner that imitated their original habitats (except for the llamas, who for some reason were housed in a Gothic pavilion). At first, entrance was restricted to those who could obtain a letter of introduction from a member of the RZS, and even then admission was 1s. From 1847 those worries about the working classes and how they were spending their leisure that were to surface in so many different areas of life - in the planning of the Great Exhibition, in the parliamentary select committee looking into museum access for the working classes, in concern about lack of open spaces for healthy games-playing - brought a change of policy. The RZS’s new director believed strongly in the power of rational recreation to educate and ‘improve’ the working classes, and admission was consequently lowered to 6d. on Mondays and holidays, creating an entirely new audience for the zoo.

  In many ways the zoo was the end of a much-loved but by now almost extinct species of leisure, the pleasure garden. London had been famous for its pleasure gardens for much of the eighteenth century. Vauxhall Gardens, the best known, had opened just after the Restoration, under the name Spring Gardens (or Faux, or Fox, Hall Gardens). Pepys had visited in 1667, and put his finger on the attractions: ‘It is very pleasant and cheap going thither, for a man may go to spend what he will, or nothing, all as one - but to hear the nightingale and other birds, and here fiddles, and there a harp…and here laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty divertising [sic]. Among others, there were two pretty women alone…’40 That, in sum, was what people enjoyed for the next 150 years: pleasant walks in beautiful grounds, for only a small fee, music, and - for the men - women. Over time the entertainments became more elaborate, moving inexorably from simple rural pleasures to the presentation of spectacle. In 1728 Jonathan Tyers bought the lease, and it was under his direction that paintings by Francis Hayman and Hogarth, and a bust of Handel as Apollo by Roubilliac, were commissioned, and that dances, ridottos, masquerades and balls were held.

  By the 1760s buildings were dotted about the grounds, designed in an eclectic range of fashionable styles - ‘a noble Turkish Tent’, a Gothic pavilion with a ‘painting in the Chinese taste, representing Vulcan catching Mars and Venus in a net’,41 a neoclassical rotunda with supper boxes, a Gothic obelisk. Every night at nine o’clock the crowd was entertained by the Cascade, where

  by drawing up a curtain is shewn a most beautiful landscape in perspective of a fine hilly country with a miller’s house and a water mill, all illuminated by concealed lights; but the principal object that strikes the eye is a cascade or water fall. The exact appearance of water is seen flowing down a declivity, and turning the weel [sic] of the mill, it rises up in a foam at the bottom, and then glides aways. This moving picture attended with the noise of the cascade has a very pleasing and surprising effect on both the eye and ear.42

  This was not a panorama, despite the use of the words ‘moving picture’: it was a three-dimensional representation, with the noise produced by strips of tin that were dropped with a clatter, and the water effect achieved via the shimmering of dozens of lamps.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, admission was 1s., and Vauxhall was drawing 1,000 people a night in a summer season that lasted somewhat over three months. In 1749 the rehearsal for Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks had an audience of 12,000;* simply because the Duke of Cumberland was planning to attend, another evening, in 1781, saw the presence of ‘more than eleven thousand persons’ according to the management of the Gardens, who estimated they had served food to 7,000 of them.43 Food and drink were a large part of the business of Vauxhall, and they were notorious for their extortionate expense: in 1796 a plate of ham cost 2s., a slice of bread 1d. - at a time when an entire loaf could be bought for that in the shops - and a single biscuit was the same price.44 By 1817 things had reached the height of absurdity, when a plate of lettuce cost 18d. But gradually, as Vauxhall fell in people’s estimations, so did the prices; by 1833 ham was ‘only’ 1s., while a plate of salad plus ‘the use of the cruet’ was now 6d. less than it had been fifteen years before.45 The prices had dropped, but the hoped-for surge in popularity did not follow. Vauxhall was no longer the fashion, and it was forced to compete with the other entertainments of the town on their terms.

  The proprietors were aware they had an advantage in the Gardens’ size, and they began to stage extravaganzas to compete with the theatres. With space for huge crowd scenes, with the sky above for fireworks, and, as a supreme advantage, with the River Thames for ‘naumachia’, or re-creations of naval engagements, Vauxhall held on to some of its many visitors for a while. In 1827 Prince Pückler-Muskau attended an evening performance of its Battle of Waterloo re-creation (this was the one the Duke of Wellington also attended):

  An open part of the garden surrounded by ancient chestnut trees serves as the stage. Between four of these trees a ‘tribune’ had been erected with benches for twelve hundred or so people which was at least 40 feet high…The moon shone brightly and showed between two gigantic trees a great red curtain, painted with the combined arms of Great Britain.

  After a moment’s silence, a cannon shot thundered through the wood and at the same time the fine military music of the 2nd Regiment of Guards rang out in the distance…Out of the wood advanced the French Guards with the bearded Sapeurs at their head. They formed themselves into ranks and Napoleon, on his white horse and in his grey overcoat, accompanied by several marshals, rode past them en revue. From a thousand throats echoed ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ The emperor touched his hat and went off at a gallop, while the troops bivouacked in closely packed groups, and marched off. Soon afterwards Wellington appeared with his general staff, all very good copies of the originals. He harangued his troops and slowly rode off. The great original himself was in the audience and laughed loudly at his representation.

  Now the fight begins with skirmishes; then whole columns rush at each other and attack with the bayonet, while the French cuirassiers charge the Scottish squares. Since there were about a thousand men and two hundred horses in the action, and no lack of gunpowder, at moments it was just like a real engagement. The thick smoke of a real fire enveloped the combatants who, for a time, could be seen only by the lightning flash of the artillery, whilst the foreground was occupied by the dead and dying. As the smoke cleared away Houguemont was seen in flames, surrounded by the English as victors and the French as prisoners, and in the distance was Napoleon on horseback, with his carriage and four horses behind him, fleeing across the stage. Wellington the victor was greeted under the roar of the cannon with shouts of ‘Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!’46

  Vauxhall made more and more of the firework displays as time went on. In 1823 it produced a 24-metre-high fireworks Bay of Naples with an erupting Mount Vesuvius, later there were fireworks of Fingal’s Cave, Gothic abbeys, the burning of York Minster - in fact the same subjects that were popular for panoramas. In 1833 it staged a Jubilee Centenary Week (despite the fact that it was not its centenary, or anything like it), with a portrait of the master of ceremonies, Mr Simpson, ‘in Fire Works, [which] will bow to the Company, soon as ignited’.47 Marylebone Gardens, a less fashionable pleasure garden, which covered about 30,000 square metres north of Oxford Street, had started to produce firework displays in the 1740s.* In 1763 it had ‘an illuminated Steeple forty feet high’, and by 1772 the fireworks were the main purpose of a trip to Marylebone. ‘Signor Torre’, who had produced firework displays at Versailles for the wedding of the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette in 1770, was under contract, and in his first season he produced ‘Transparencies of T
heir Majesties’, followed by depictions of Vulcan leading the Cyclops - who lit a fire and forged arrows for Cupid and Venus - and Mount Etna. Mount Etna then erupted, with glowing lava rolling down its sides.48

  Instead of the great gardens - Vauxhall, Cremorne, Marylebone, Ranelagh - it was the smaller inns and taverns that called themselves pleasure gardens, or wells, that prospered into the nineteenth century. For one thing, they charged less for admission: Vauxhall had alternated between 1s. and 2s. for most of its existence, while Ranelagh, determined to keep out the middle classes, much less the working classes, charged 2s. 6d., and the Pantheon even more.49 These places did keep out the middle and working classes, but when their fashionable patrons deserted them, they were financially doomed. Marylebone Gardens charged a modest 6d., but many spas combined admission and a drink of their waters for only 3d., while an entire breakfast could be purchased at Islington Spa for 9d.50 These spas were for the newly prosperous, and for the working classes. When Evelina, in Fanny Burney’s novel of 1778, went to stay with her embarrassingly lower-middle-class cousins the Branghtons, she was asked if she had enjoyed George’s, a pleasure garden in Hampstead; she was forced to admit to not having been there - or to Marylebone, or to Vauxhall Gardens, or to Don Saltero’s in Chelsea (see p. 396), or to Sadler’s Wells, St Paul’s or the Tower of London. Her cousin exclaimed, ‘Why then you might as well not have come to London for aught I see, for you’ve been no where.’51 The point was that, having been living with gentry families, her entertainment had taken place in private - or, if in public, at Ranelagh, the most exclusive of the pleasure gardens.

  London had many pleasure gardens, but it also had a number of so-called spas, which were mainly for the lower middle classes and below, or for middle- and upper-class men when not accompanied by their families. These were not actually spas at all, except that they had originally been established because there was a chalybeate spring on the site. For the most part, water-drinking and health had little to do with their visitors’ enjoyment. Many London spas were in fact if not in name inns, or taverns, with a bit of a garden in which perhaps a sporting area or tea garden could be found. In Marylebone, the main pleasure garden was surrounded by satellite pleasure gardens, so called, such as the Queen’s Head and Artichoke, which was an inn with a skittle ground, and the Jew’s Harp house, another inn, with ‘bowery tea-gardens, skittle grounds, trap-ball grounds’ and a real-tennis court (all of which were destroyed when Regent’s Park was laid out). The Bayswater tea gardens barely mentioned their waters, preferring to advertise Mrs Graham, who made an ascent in a balloon every day at five, accompanied by fireworks. Hampstead, as Evelina’s cousins knew, had many tea gardens, including Hampstead Wells and Wells Walk, which had a coffee house and a bowling green, and held concerts and dances. Kilburn Wells, near Belsize Park, also had a small spring, as closer in towards the City did Pancras Wells and Adam and Eve Tea-Gardens (both now underneath St Pancras station). This was fertile territory for springs: Islington Spa had existed from the early eighteenth century, and was not to be confused with Sadler’s Wells, now a theatre, but then a spring, as its name suggests. This spa’s abiding claim to fame was that the princesses Amelia and Catherine had visited to drink the waters there in 1733, but by the end of the century it was a tea garden in all but name. Many others were similar: spas by name, pleasure gardens in reality - Spa Fields Pantheon, London Spa, New Wells, English Grotto, Bagnigge Wells, Lord Cobham’s Head in Cold Bath Fields, St Chad’s Well, Spring Gardens. When one looks at the names of London, it is clear how many springs have been tarmacked over in the last century and a half.52

  The focus thus far has been mainly on middle-class entertainment, or on entertainments that encompassed within their middle-class audience a certain number of the high-earning, industrious working classes. Many of the shows just described claimed to attract audiences from every walk of life, but there was also a set of entertainments that were the province of the working classes entirely. Many of these working-class entertainments were similar in kind to middle-class entertainments - peep shows, waxworks, music and animals. It was the attitudes behind them that made them so different. Working-class animal shows, for instance, did not worry about providing extracts from Buffon in guidebooks - they did not in fact produce guidebooks at all. Instead, these shows were part of the older fair traditions, and specialized in deformed animals, dancing animals, animals that played an instrument, or ‘learned’ animals, which tapped out the time with their paws, or hoofs, or pecked at correct letters or numbers in answer to their owners’ questions. There were ‘Industrious Fleas’, and trained bees, and Breslaw’s birds, which, in the first half of the nineteenth century,

  formed themselves into ranks like a company of soldiers; small cones of paper bearing some resemblance to grenadiers’ caps were put upon their heads, and diminutive imitations of muskets made with wood, secured under their left wings. Thus equipped, they marched to and fro several times; when a single bird was brought forward, supposed to be a deserter, and set between six of the musketeers, three in a row, who conducted him from the top to the bottom of the table, on the middle of which a small brass cannon charged with a little gunpowder had been previously placed, and the deserter was situated in the front part of the cannon; his guards then divided, three retiring on one side, and three on the other, and he was left standing by himself. Another bird was immediately produced; and a lighted match being put into one of his claws, he hopped boldly on the other to the tail of the cannon, and, applying the match to the priming, discharged the piece…The moment the explosion took place, the deserter fell down, and lay…like a dead bird; but, at the command of his tutor, he rose again; and the cages being brought, the feathered soldiers were stripped of their ornaments, and returned into them in perfect order.53

  Many of these shows had no single home, but travelled around the country, or the cities, from yard to yard, inn to inn, fair to fair. The fairs were dying out in the nineteenth century, but until the 1850s they were still a major force: from 1750 to 1850 there were sixty fairs within fifteen miles of Charing Cross alone, and as late as 1843 200,000 people were said to have attended the Easter fair in Stepney, claimed by ‘Lord’ George Sanger, of Sanger’s Circus (see below), to be ‘the biggest gathering of its kind in Europe’. Some fairs which had been more rural events came to life again in the nineteenth century, in part because of improved transport links. These fairs were no longer only for locals, but instead were destinations for a much larger population intent on enjoying a day out. Greenwich Fair in the 1820s and 1830s was attended by thousands who travelled to the fair by steamer; in the 1840s even more came by the London and Greenwich Railway.54 Transport links worked both ways: visitors could attend fairs that might previously have been too far away, and showmen, conjurors, tumblers and rope dancers could all travel more easily around a wider circuit of fairs, while those who had larger exhibits to transport - those with peep shows, panoramas, puppet shows or waxworks - could move about the country economically by train. It is notable that only after the emergence of the railways were major centres of entertainment built in the suburbs - after the Great Exhibition closed, the Crystal Palace was moved not to another central location, but to the southern suburb of Sydenham, while Alexandra Palace was built in Muswell Hill, and Sanger’s Circus had a permanent base at the Agricultural Hall in Islington.

  For many years the circuses were just one element of the fairs: Wombwell’s and Atkins’s circuses were prominent at Bartholomew Fair, and both in London and in the provinces these were two of the largest circuses, together with Sanger’s. It was Lord George Sanger (and his wife, ‘Mme Pauline de Vere’, a lion-tamer) who transformed this form of livelihood from a temporary travelling show into a mass-entertainment business. By the 1850s Sanger had a permanent base in Liverpool, and in 1860 he also had a three-ring circus in Plymouth. Soon there were permanent sites in Aberdeen, Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, Dundee, Exeter, Liverpool, Manchester and Plymouth, as well as at
the Agricultural Hall in Islington and in such seaside towns as Ramsgate and Margate (where his ‘Hall by the Sea’ acted as his headquarters). When Sanger’s Circus toured Europe in the 1870s it needed 46 carriages to transport 160 horses, 11 elephants, 12 camels - and 230 employees.55

  Many of the fairs that prospered in the nineteenth century were held each spring, around Easter and Whitsun, when workers traditionally had holidays, while two of the largest fairs, Southwark and Bartholomew, which were held later in the year, suffered precipitous declines. At the beginning of the century Bartholomew Fair had been a byword for entertainment fairs in general. Wordsworth in The Prelude set his reader ‘Above the press and danger of the crowd / Upon some showman’s platform’, to see:

  …chattering monkeys dangling from their poles,

  And children whirling in their roundabouts;

  With those that stretch the neck and strain the eyes,

  And crack the voice in rivalship, the crowd

  Inviting; with buffoons against buffoons

  Grimacing, writhing, screaming, - him who grinds

  The hurdy-gurdy, at the fiddle weaves,

  Rattles the salt-box, thumps the kettle-drum,

  And him who at the trumpet puffs his cheeks,

  The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel,

  Equestrians, tumblers, women, girls, and boys,

  Blue-breeched, pink-vested, with high-towering plumes. -