HarperPress £20 pp622
It’s easy to condemn consumerism, until you consider what life was like before consumerism happened. At the start of the 18th century only one in 10 people in Britain possessed a knife and fork; five out of six did not own a cup. Judith Flanders’s bulging bran-tub of a book is packed with statistics of this attention-grabbing calibre. She traces how, in the course of 200 years, things that had been luxuries, likesuch as tea and sugar, became available to everyone, and how the masses found time for fun and frivolity where before there had been want. Her range is vast, covering virtually everything people spent money and leisure on — holidays, shopping, music, fairs, theatres, peep-shows, circuses, art, books, newspapers, racing, football and, at the period’s end, the perilous thrills of cycling. Language changed to accommodate the new happiness. In 1700 “comfort” had meant spiritual succour. By the mid-19th century it meant material well-being.
There were plenty of people, Flanders shows, who wanted to stop it happening. Leisure, they insisted, should remain the prerogative of the rich. A working man at rest was idle, not leisured. The organisers of the 1851 Great Exhibition deliberately fixed entrance fees to exclude the poorer classes, on the grounds that, if they were admitted, they would become a revolutionary mob and assault the show-cases. One of those who campaigned successfully for lower ticket prices was Henry (later Sir Henry) Cole, who would be the hero of Flanders’s book if a volume so various could have one hero. Starting as a humble clerk, Cole single-handedly changed Victorian life. He wrote children’s books and invented numerous toys, including building blocks and the first children’s paint-box. He founded the Journal of Design and devised the first Christmas card. Exasperated by the exclusiveness of the British Museum, which demanded a written application and character references before admitting anyone, he founded the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) as a place for families to spend the day, with the first evermuseum refreshment room.
But even pioneers likesuch as Cole could have done little without technology. Railways were the real reformers, and Flanders shows how they altered every aspect of life. Clocks across Britain, which had previously displayed local times according to longitude, were (after stubborn resistance) synchronised to “railway time”. The Duke of Wellington had warned that trains would encourage “the lower orders to go uselessly wandering about the country”, and he was absolutely right. Rail- travel spawned excursions, day-trippers and Thomas Cook, who offered an 800-mile tour of Scotland for one guinea in 1846, and was taking tourists to Egypt by the 1860s.
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Killjoys were aghast. John Ruskin had horrified visions of the lower classes sliding down the Alps with “shrieks of delight”. The new popularity of seaside holidays created a huge demand for entertainment at the resorts, fostering, along with piers and Punch and Judy shows, Britain’s first permanent municipal orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony. Theatre was transformed, too. Trains made touring practicable, and D’Oyly Carte alone ran seven touring companies by the 1880s. In London the almost infinitely renewable audience that trains brought to the capital introduced the phenomenon of the West End run, with the same play lasting for hundreds of performances.
Before the railways, football teams across the country had played to local rules with no agreement even about the number of players. Rail travel enforced standardisation, monitored by the FA, which started up in 1863. In pre-railway racing, horses had to walk from one race to another, which sometimes took weeks. Trains changed all that. Meetings became more frequent, a nationwide betting-industry developed, and two-year-olds, which did not have the stamina for long-distance walking, could now be raced. But the railways’ greatest and most unexpected impact was on books and reading. For most people in the early 19th century, books were prohibitively expensive, and bodies likesuch as the Society for the Suppression of Vice strove to keep it that way, arguing that cheap reading matter would “pervert the public mind”. The breakthrough came in 1848 with Routledge’s enormouslyhugely successful “Railway Library”, editions. WH Smith’s station bookstalls began in the same year, the one at theirPaddington stallstocking 1,000 titles. Suddenly, cheap books were everywhere. A complete Shakespeare could be bought for a shilling.
Technology revolutionised other realms apart from travel. Sewing machines brought mass-produced shoes in standard sizes and ready-to-wear clothes within universal reach. Fashion was now something anyone could afford. In Petticoat Lane, delighted crowds decked themselves in “pea-green, orange, and rose-pink”, while, a rung up the social ladder, shoppers in the dazzling newnew department stores bought into a complete lifestyle, where even the string tying your parcels was part of a distinctive vision and colour scheme.Improved print technology sparked off a galaxy of newmagazines. At one end of the scale, penny dreadfuls carried police court news of murder, rape and violent crime, which must have brightened many a dull life. At the other, organs of self-improvement likesuch as the Penny Magazine recommended great works of art as guides to conduct. Leonardo’s The Last Supper was used to exemplify “seemly behaviour in trying circumstances”.
It seems quite possible that the same readers bought both pennyworths. For the remarkable thing about Flanders’s wonderfully rich chapters on theatres and popular spectacles is how little distinction there was between what we now think of as high and low art. This went back a long way. In the 1820s, a foreign visitor saw Kemble play Falstaff on the same playbill as a melodrama in which a newfoundland dog fought gallantly against overwhelming odds, expiring at length “in the most masterly manner, with a last wag of the tail that was really full of genius”. A performance of Macbeth, attended by Queen Victoria, was part of the same evening’s entertainment as a “lion drama” in which wild beatsbeasts roamed the stage, apparently at large but actually confined behind wire netting concealed in the scenery. Byron’s poem Mazeppa was rejigged as a sensationally popular equestrian spectacle incorporating a wild stallion and a cavalry charge, while at the Surrey Zoological Gardens you could listen to Mozart, Mendelssohn or the Beethoven symphonies in between watching the animals’ feeding-time and a firework display. The music halls inherited this eclecticism. At the Empire Leicester Square, for example, you might see, on the same evening, a ballet, a juggler, silent films and a performance of Faust. Such a mix of high and low culture under one roof was not, Flanders observes, to disappear until the 20th century.
Her own book with its kaleidoscope of subjects and itsits blend of the erudite and the ephemeral belongs to the same palace-of-varieties tradition, and is hugely enjoyable as a consequence. There is something dizzily acrobatic about the mountains of evidence she constructs, and she produces her punch lines with a conjuror’s panache. You would scarcely be surprised to see a lion slipping out of sight as you turned the page.
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