Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  many irregularities…[which] cannot be prevented by a few librarians who will soon be insulted by such people, if they offer to control or contradict them…A great concourse of ordinary people will never be kept in order…If public days should be allowed, then it will be necessary for the Trustees to have the presence of a Committee of themselves attending, with at least two Justices of the Peace and the constables of the division of Bloomsbury…supported by a guard such a one as usually attends at the Play-House, and even after all this, Accidents must and will happen.44

  This was very much of a pattern with public exhibitions for the rest of the century. When the Society of Arts lent its rooms for the first exhibition of art from the Foundling Hospital, it warned that it would ‘exclude all persons whom [it] shall think improper to be admitted, such as livery servants, foot soldiers, porters, women with children, &c.’.45 As we saw on p. 382, the first show at the Royal Academy had insisted that it was necessary to charge an admission fee so that ‘improper persons’ could be kept out, and in 1807 a visitor to the summer exhibition still shuddered at ‘the Canaille…a fry of wretches who have shoaled in (after dinner!) [that is, they ate their main meal in the middle of the day, unlike the upper classes] from all the unheard of holes in the City and suburbs’.46 This was in a reference to people who had paid a shilling entrance fee.*

  There were only two art galleries in Britain that were in any real way accessible to all the public in the first part of the nineteenth century. In 1811 Sir Peter Francis Bourgeois had died and left his collection to Dulwich College, which in 1814 opened the Dulwich Gallery, the first major art gallery in London. In 1816 the 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam had bequeathed his collection to Cambridge University, the basis of the Fitzwilliam Museum. Although more accessible, both of these were still privately owned, and run by academic institutions. Neither was bringing any closer the creation of a national collection - a national gallery. Two separate ideas about the purpose of art, and therefore what a collection was for, were battling for supremacy, and it was not at all clear which would win. First there was a group - which included most of the members of the British Institution - which saw exhibitions and museums as temples of the muses, places for the elite to enjoy themselves surrounded by their social equals, with some access for those beneath them who showed promise. A second group, which was slowly gaining ground, wanted art and museums to serve a utilitarian and educational purpose. This group of reformers saw museums as places where the working classes could be educated, where they could be socialized, where they could learn how to be a middle-class-in-waiting, first by mixing on an equal footing with their social superiors, and then also by being in the same room with great art. This sense of the improving value of art remained a constant throughout the century. In 1808 John Landseer, an engraver and the father of the painter, in his preface to The Review of Publications of Art reminded his readers that the fine arts were ‘copious fountains both of commercial prosperity and public happiness’.48 Eighty years later, Ruskin was certain about the influence of art on man: ‘The first function of a Museum…is to give example of perfect order and perfect elegance, in the true sense of that test word, to the disorderly and rude populace.’49

  Then there was the utilitarians’ final argument: that access to art would improve standards of design and production in industry. In 1821 the founders of the Birmingham Society of Arts set out their stall: ‘The due cultivation of the Fine Arts is essential to the Prosperity of the Manufactures of this Town and Neighbourhood.’ This was not an idea that was specific to any one group; the Bristol Institution likewise promoted art exhibitions, because the arts ‘supply the manufacture with those tasteful models without which even the Steam-Engine with all its powers would only produce hideous forms and grotesque combinations.’50 A national gallery, moreover, would do all this, but somehow, in an intangible manner, because it was ‘national’ it would also do more. Landseer had continued that the fine arts ‘not only irrigate and enrich the fields of national opulence, but fertilize the still fairer fields - the paradise of national value’.51 The collector Sir George Beaumont agreed, and added that the goal had to be free access for any of the public to a gallery owned and run by and for the nation, because, ‘By easy access to such works of art the public taste must improve…Works of high excellence pay ample interest for the money they cost. My belief is that the “Apollo”, the “Venus”, the “Laocoön”, &c. are worth thousands a year to the country which possesses them.’52

  Others, more simply, felt that a national gallery, that art in general, was a pleasant recreation, a place of retreat from industrialization, and this was an important thread in the argument at a time when many of the working class could expect never to leave their smoky, grimy cities. Charles Kingsley wrote of how ‘the townsman may take his country-walk…and his hard-worn heart wanders out free, beyond the grim city-world of stone and iron, smoky chimneys, and roaring wheels, into the world of beautiful things’.53 All these motives drew together and became more urgent in 1823, when, after Angerstein’s death, Beaumont promised to donate the sixteen choicest paintings in his collection if the government would purchase Angerstein’s collection for the nation. As Beaumont’s collection included three Claudes, a Poussin, a Rubens and a Constable (and a Michelangelo tondo, which, unfortunately for the nascent National Gallery, Lady Beaumont bequeathed to the Royal Academy), and Angerstein’s included Raphael’s portrait of Julius II, Rembrandt’s Woman Taken in Adultery, a Sebastiano del Piombo and some more Claudes, Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, swiftly opened negotiations on behalf of the government. The collection was purchased for £57,000, with a further sum of money going to buy the lease of Angerstein’s house, in which the pictures would be shown.54

  Its trustees had fully expected that the British Museum, as the sole national museum, would soon become the ‘National Gallery’ too, and for some time it appeared that this might be the case. The government had put the new National Gallery under the control of the Treasury, to be run by a ‘Committee of Gentlemen for the Superintendence of the National Gallery in Pall Mall’. That committee, however, was made up of exactly the men who were already serving as the trustees of the British Museum, and so for some time the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum acted as if it were in charge of the Angerstein and Beaumont paintings, even though these were in Pall Mall rather than Bloomsbury. It was only in 1827, with a change of government, that two non-British Museum trustees were appointed to the Committee of Gentlemen, and the two institutions could no longer be treated as one.55*

  A similar raft of issues to those that vexed the British Museum continued to keep the new National Gallery’s trustees’ meetings ticking over nicely. Who was running the Gallery? was one question. For whom? and Why? were others. The first meeting of the trustees had referred to the ‘Royal National Gallery’, despite the fact that royalty had given no pictures, no money, not even the blanket aura of its approval by a royal charter. In 1834 a lack of space forced the Gallery to move further down the road until William Wilkins’s new National Gallery, begun in 1832, was completed on the north side of Trafalgar Square. This opened in 1838 - already short of space on its first day, since the government had seen the new building as the ideal opportunity to clear the Royal Academy out of Somerset House, which it wanted for its own offices. (The government gave up some of its hard-won space in Somerset House in 2001, and claims to be in the process of vacating the rest.)

  As part of this move to permanent quarters, a parliamentary select committee was set up in 1835 to find ‘the best means of extending a knowledge of the Arts and of the Principles of Design among the People…[and] also to inquire into the Constitution, Management, and Effects of Institutions connected with the Arts’.56 The committee was chaired by the MP William Ewart, who was closely linked to the Benthamites and other utilitarian-minded politicians. Of the fifteen members, only three plus Ewart actually managed to attend all the meetings - many members attended none.57 Th
us it was these radicals and utilitarians who ran the proceedings, and whose views were therefore to predominate. Their aims were twofold: first, to improve the taste of working classes, and by so doing, to improve the levels of design and the overall competitiveness of industry, and then ‘to look into the alleged malfeasance, corruption, and antidemocratic management of the noncommercial institutions’, unmasking the men who, as they saw it, ran the nation’s cultural institutions for their own benefits and interests, instead of for the promotion of the greater good of the majority of the population. It was, they stated, their duty to remove the ‘spirit of exclusion in this country’.58 As a result of this select committee, the British Museum was forced to open at Easter and Whitsun - the people’s holidays, and, not coincidentally, until then the days that the Museum had chosen to close for ‘cleaning’. The librarian (the British Museum’s title for its director) Sir Henry Ellis warned, somewhat hysterically, that this would open the gates to a flood of ‘sailors from the dock-yards and girls whom they might bring with them’, but the committee was adamant, and in 1837 Easter Monday saw 23,000 visitors promenading peacefully through the galleries.59

  The committee then looked at the management of the National Gallery, which in its few years of operation had not seemed to be able to make the shift from being a ‘gentleman’s collection’ to an institution that was designed to provide an education for the masses. For the first time there was a discussion of the purposes of - and the differences between - public and private collections. The keeper, William Seguier, was interviewed, and it was found that he had never been to Italy (the ne plus ultra of pictorial life); he had no plans to hang along historical lines, according to the new museological theories coming from Germany - indeed, he had never heard of such things - he had never thought of attaching a descriptive label beside each painting to tell the viewer the name of the artist; and he had no purchasing policy for further acquisitions to balance the collection. In contrast was a range of experts invited to appear by the select committee, who reported on the new ideas in Germany, Vienna and Paris. Baron von Klenze, from Munich, explained to the committee about the new ways of hanging pictures in groups according to the schools of art and their dates, rather than by subject or just aesthetic whim. He then spoke about labelling, fireproofing, heating and ‘scientifically researched lighting and colour schemes’. Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the director of the Royal Gallery in Berlin, gave similar testimony, and further suggested that, while the ‘Renaissance art from the time of Raphael’ so beloved of the British Institution and its followers ‘would form the best taste’, at the same time ‘Raphael’s fifteenth-century Italian predecessors were also necessary, as were representative works from earlier times’.60 In other words, an educational and art-historical programme needed to be established, instead of purchasing more paintings simply because they were pretty.

  The old guard fought back: in 1845 the board of trustees unilaterally took the responsibility for purchasing new works away from the keeper; they were, they felt, much better qualified. In a select committee in 1853, Lord Aberdeen, a trustee, warned once more against the purchase of ‘antiquarian and medieval pictures’ (that is, anything that pre-dated Raphael), and vehemently rejected setting up a purchase fund, which might lead to what he darkly referred to as ‘rash’ acquisitions.61 Then Charles Eastlake appeared to testify before the committee. He had been the National Gallery’s keeper for four years from 1841, but had been so constantly overruled by the trustees, and rendered as powerless as every other keeper, that he had left in despair. Now he heroically faced a total of 1,156 questions from the committee, and in answering set out a plan for the professionalization of the Gallery. This included the allocation of an annual Treasury grant for purchases, together with the appointment of a director, a keeper and an agent to scout for pictures abroad. His advice was not accepted by the trustees. But in 1854 the truly amateur nature of the board became apparent when so few trustees troubled to attend that several times meetings were cancelled for lack of a quorum. This is how Gladstone, in his position as Chancellor of the Exchequer, came to supervise the purchase of sixty-four pictures from a collection in Germany. When they arrived, three-quarters of them were of such terrible quality they could not be displayed. It was rumoured that Waagen, who had testified in 1835, was to be invited to take charge. Instead, Eastlake was appointed as the first director of the National Gallery.62

  That this was occurring in the years immediately following the Great Exhibition was natural. Attendance had risen from 397,649 in the Gallery’s first year in Trafalgar Square to 519,745 in 1850; in the year of the Great Exhibition it reached an extraordinary 1,109,364. Even after the visitors had returned home, attendance held up, at 700,000 in 1861.63 These numbers were increasingly being seen as a way of assessing the success or failure of any arts institution. Sir Henry Cole, after his labours at the Great Exhibition, had moved swiftly on to the founding of the South Kensington Museum, a museum of arts and design (now the Victoria & Albert), which opened in 1857. His ambition was similarly educational. He wanted to welcome as many of the working classes as he could, in whatever leisure hours they could find, and he was determined that his museum was going to be open for their convenience, not for the convenience of the staff. To teach consumers and producers to differentiate between good and bad design, to teach the masses the norms of ‘decent’ behaviour, one had first to get them there, and this could not be done by opening only for a few hours during the working week:

  If you wish to vanquish Drunkenness and the Devil, make God’s day of rest elevating and refreshing to the working man; don’t leave him to find his recreation in bed first, and in the public house afterwards;…give him music in which he may take his part; show him pictures of beauty on the walls of churches and chapels; [and then], as we cannot live in church or chapel all Sunday, give him his park to walk in, with music in the air; give him that cricket ground…open all museums of Science and Art after the hours of Divine service; let the working man get his refreshment there in company with his wife and children, rather than leave him to booze away from them in the Public House and Gin Palace. The Museum will certainly lead him to wisdom and gentleness, and to Heaven, whilst the latter will lead him to brutality and perditions.64

  Cole was proud that his museum had the first refreshment room in any museum, for he saw a museum as a place for a family to spend the day, and a family needed to be able to eat and drink. He said that, if the hours were right, and admission free (or at any rate low), then even having alcohol on the premises would not disturb the air of quiet industry and education. He boasted in 1860 that the total sale of alcohol in the refreshment rooms over the previous two years had averaged out at ‘two and a half drops of wine, fourteen-fifteenths of a drop of brandy, and ten and a half drops of bottled ale per capita’.65

  Certainly something was drawing the working classes to South Kensington. In 1858 the cost of gas for lighting the galleries was £780; in 1864 it had risen to more than £3,600 - not because the price of gas had shot up, but because of the increased number of hours the galleries were open in the evening. In 1865 entrance was free on Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays, and the galleries were open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. On Wednesdays, Thursday and Fridays admission was 6d., and the galleries were open from 10 a.m. to 4, 5 or 6 p.m., depending on the time of year (that is, until dusk). The art school, which was of equal importance to the museum for Cole, was open until nine every evening, so that artisans could attend lectures there after their day’s work. In the first three months of the South Kensington Museum’s life, admissions were more than 330,000, Cole boasted ‘three fold the numbers at Marble House’ - his name for the British Museum, which he despised for its exclusionary tactics.* In the first complete year, attendance reached ‘456,288 persons. It was not until 1841 after 70 years from its foundation and an expenditure of about a million of pounds sterling that the annual visitors at the British Museum reached even 319,374 persons a year,’ he crowed.67 Betw
een 1857 and 1883 the South Kensington Museum saw more than 15 million visitors pass through its galleries, over 6.5 million of whom came in the evening, which suggests that they were not of the leisured classes.

  As well as the South Kensington Museum itself, a branch was opened in the working-class suburb of Bethnal Green; by 1872 it was getting nearly a million visitors a year, although this did drop as the century progressed, by 1887 to less than half, at 409,929.† In addition, the South Kensington Museum had been planned as a ‘circulating’ museum, with one of its primary aims the lending of works from its collection to areas where art exhibitions were scarce. Between 1854 (three years before it had officially opened) and 1870 it sent ten loan exhibitions to Birmingham, seven to Leeds, eight to Liverpool, five to Manchester, eight to Nottingham and fourteen to Sheffield.68

  The provincial cities were not sitting meekly by, however, waiting for culture to drop down on them like manna from the capital. Outside London, from 1800 onward public art exhibitions were increasing, becoming more and more an integral part of the civic amenities of the cities and towns. In 1800, despite active social calendars in many cities - calendars that included lectures and theatres, concerts and dances - there had been just two art institutes in Britain: one in London and one in Dublin. It was Norwich, with its Society of Artists, that first filled this gap, with plans for annual exhibitions, the first of which was held in 1805.‡ In 1807 and 1808 Bath also had annual exhibitions (about which almost nothing is known); then in 1809 the Bath Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts was set up, under the patronage of the local gentry, and two annual exhibitions were held before the Institution faded away. That same year in Leeds the Northern Society, modelled on the British Institution, was formed, again planning an annual exhibition to be held in its Music Hall. The first one was very successful, running for two months, and although there was later a hiatus from 1812 to 1822, regular exhibitions resumed again, including two loan exhibitions of old masters. In 1825 the sales and admission charges together cleared £2,000 for the organizers and artists. By 1830 art exhibitions had been held in Birmingham, Bradford, Brighton, Bristol, Carlisle, Exeter, Gloucester, Hull, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Plymouth and Southampton; in Aberdeen, Dumfries, Edinburgh and Glasgow; and in Cork. Even small towns like Ross-on-Wye and Greenock managed exhibitions. Some of these centred around famous London artists - the Leeds exhibition in 1809 had shown two pictures by Benjamin West - but many more consisted of work by local artists, almost all of them professionals. Birmingham’s first exhibition, in 1827, had sixty-one local artists, among them drawing masters, portraitists, miniaturists, engravers and sculptors.69