Consuming Passions Reviews

'Power to the people' by Jane Stevenson, The Observer Sunday August 13, 2006

'The pursuit of happiness' by John Carey, Sunday Times 20th August 2006

'Oh what a show' by Lawrence Norfolk, The Guardian Saturday August 26, 2006

‘Victorious Victorians!’ by A. N. Wilson, 1 September 2006, The Daily Mail

'Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain' by Jacqueline Banerjee, Contributing Editor, Victorian Web (UK) bis

'Who needs a self-lighting fairy?' by Lucy Lethbridge, 19 November 2006 The Independent. re and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

The Observer
Sunday August 13, 2006

'Power to the people.'
by Jane Stevenson

Judith Flanders' excellent study of the inventiveness of the Victorians, writes Jane Stevenson, was one of the greatest forces for the emancipation of the working classes.

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

In the 17th century it was not unusual for a poor, rural household to own no more than two or three pots, a knife apiece and a cup between them. By 1715, 90 per cent of families had a clock, and by the end of the 19th century comparable households lived in cottages filled with 'Victorian clutter'. By 1910, there was one piano for every 10 to 20 people. These and many other thought-provoking statistics may be found in Judith Flanders' formidable book on 19th-century leisure and consumption.
Her account opens with the Great Exhibition of 1851, a display of the world's wonders and perverted ingenuity on an unprecedented scale. Held first in Hyde Park and later in south London, its exhibits included corsets 'that opened instantaneously in case of emergency', begging the question of what kind of emergency the manufacturer had in mind. A patent expanding hearse perhaps had limited appeal, but the overall message was that the world was full of wonderful objects that you couldn't live without. Thus did Britain start down the slippery slope of commodity worship.
From the exhibition, Flanders turns to retail: if you longed for a liberty bodice or an Oriental teapot, where did you get one? It was the new department stores, above all, that turned middle-class women into professional consumers. Crucially, their amenities included ladies' lavatories, which allowed women a new access to public space.

By 1900, a woman could have a day out: she could go to town on a train, shop, lunch in a department store, see a matinee and have tea with a friend: the train, the shopping experience, the woman-friendly place to lunch, the matinee and even the tea were all recent innovations. The most interesting thing about Flanders' book is her ability to show the way that all these developments were interlocking and mutually supportive.

The next topic to come under her scrutiny is print. Newspapers underwent an exponential expansion (due partly to major technical breakthroughs in the speed, efficiency and cost of both paper production and printing). The shops needed to advertise their wonderful new goods and services; to advertise, you need newspapers and for newspapers, you need a reliable postal system and serviceable roads. The roads, the railways and the post were all forthcoming and they led to further innovations.

The habit of gawping at pictures and country houses is 19th century and so are excursions. The railways were initially unwilling to cater to a mass public: the 18th century assumed that if the working class had any leisure to speak of, they would either drink themselves insensible or riot. But when the enterprising Thomas Cook began to organise cheap excursions to the Great Exhibition and, subsequently, to many a lesser one, he inaugurated vast social change. The working class began to travel, day-trips became commonplace and leisure turned into an industry.

From tourism, Flanders turns to considering shows of all kinds. What impresses above all is the phantasmagoria of 19th-century entertainment; the proliferation of invention and the immense technical skill behind much of it. Some acts were wildly dangerous: Andrew Ducrow, one of the greatest trick riders of all time, could stand with one foot on either back of two galloping horses, while controlling another four. The theatre of illusion achieved effects that have never been surpassed.

Meanwhile, England became a musical nation. Public concerts became commonplace, as did domestic music-making. What Flanders makes clear is that the 19th-century British populace had a great deal of fun, but they did so in new, organised ways that generated entire industries. Someone had to make all those pianos.

The single concept that dominates Flanders' narrative is the democratisation of English culture. Eighteenth-century pleasures were exclusive. The British Museum, for example, did all it could to prevent the public getting in and, in the early part of the 19th century, the emphasis was almost entirely on keeping 'the great unwashed' out of places.

What is interesting about the 19th century is the manifest determination of ordinary people to visit galleries, exhibitions and shows of all kinds. The newspapers and rising literacy levels meant that more people knew more about what was going on and they refused to be kept out. The tension between 'exclusivity' and 'accessibility' became part of national life.

Flanders' book is a panoramic view of a society and economy transformed by retail, travel and the production of inessential goods, which produced a vast upward leap in the standard of living. While travel became increasingly important, paradoxically, the notion of domestic pleasure became more and more significant, as did all aspects of interior decoration.

The only regret raised by this excellent study is that Flanders confines her narrative to developments within Britain, though two great engines of transformation in 19th-century consumption were cotton and sugar. But even without the international dimension, the book is a major achievement.

Best in show: At the 1851 Great Exhibition

· A 'sportsman's knife' with a mother-of-pearl handle and 80 blades, on which were etched views including the Crystal Palace, Windsor Castle and a stag hunt.

· A 'patent ventilating hat' with a valve fixed to the top of the crown 'which may be opened and shut at pleasure to allow perspiration to escape'.

· A steamship couch which could be turned into a bed and, thanks to its base of cork, a life raft.

· Yachting garb with inbuilt flotation devices.

· A doctor's suit with coat, waistcoat and trousers made in one piece to prevent time wastage in the event of a night-time emergency.

· Church pews connected to a pulpit by rubber pipes so that the hard of hearing could listen to the sermon.

· An oyster-shucking machine.

· A silver nose for those missing a nose of their own.

· A bed which in the morning tilted its occupant straight into a waiting bath.

· A vase made of mutton fat and lard.

· The Illustrated London News lamented the displays of 'a tissue which nobody could wear; a carriage in which nobody could ride; a fireplace which no servant could clean if it were ever guilty of a fire; a musical instrument not fit for one in 500,000 to play; endless inventions incapable of the duties imputed to them'.

The Sunday Times
20th August 2006

'The pursuit of happiness'
by John Carey

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

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.

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.

Consuming Passions

The Guardian
Saturday August 26, 2006

'Oh what a show'
by Lawrence Norfolk

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

Consuming Passions, Judith Flanders' survey of the leisure pursuits of the Victorians, persuades Lawrence Norfolk that there was fun to be had in the 19th century after all.

The Victorians actually could contain themselves. Judith Flanders made a virtue of that ability in her second book, The Victorian House, an examination of the era's domestic gadgets, rituals and hierarchies. In her third, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, she seeks to unlock a more sprawling mystery. How did the Victorians let it all hang out?

Having fun in the 19th century, Flanders demonstrates, was intricately engaged with the era's changing economic and social rules. "In Consuming Passions I have chosen to look not at the contents of the world of leisure, but at the containers," she writes before plunging into the Great Exhibition of 1851, the biggest container of them all. In the Crystal Palace built by Paxton in Hyde Park, sets of crockery, steam engines and a 24-ton lump of coal (inter alia) attracted six million visitors, kick-started the British tourist industry and alarmed the Duke of Wellington who estimated that 15,000 soldiers would be needed to quell the rioting working classes.
Quite what sort of fun was had by the endless crocodile processing peaceably through the glass arcades remains mysterious. A stray fact dropped by Flanders gives a clue. Up until the late 17th century it was quite exceptional for an ordinary household to own, for example, a cup. People commonly counted their possessions on the fingers of both hands. Against that background, Josiah Wedgwood's 200-piece porcelain dinner services must have looked quite impressive.
Wedgwood's porcelain was developed in the 18th century, along with less tangible innovations such as sale-or-return policies, showrooms and inertia selling. The shop, Flanders convincingly argues, was a Georgian institution waiting to serve Victorian mass-consumer society. The latter was just around the corner, lacking only products and customers.

Mass-production and business models built on high volumes and low margins would, eventually, supply the masses with just about anything they might desire, from newspapers, novels and nights at the opera to upright pianos, bicycles and a seat in the grandstand to watch the Epsom Derby. Flanders does not use the phrase "accelerated history" but it seems justified. New experiences arrived, suddenly within the financial grasp of the mass of people, and were embraced in surges of pent-up desire. Bicycling, to take one example, went from being a specialist hobby to the pastime of millions in two years following a drop in prices and the introduction of the pneumatic tyre.

The spoilsports in this fun-filled free-for-all were manufacturers, owners and impresarios who clung to the old model of exclusivity and high prices. And the Duke of Wellington. The latter, when not chortling at representations of himself winning the Battle of Waterloo at Astleys Amphitheatre, led a substantial body of aristocratic and ecclesiastical opinion to the effect that workmen not actually working were a mob-in-waiting.

The "mob-in-waiting" proved itself rowdy at prize-fights but respectful in the National Gallery (opened after decades of administrative incompetence in 1838). The mass of working people were partisan at football matches, attentive to the panoramas, dioramas and quasi-scientific demonstrations beloved of the age, enthusiastic at the few public concerts and the more numerous pageants of Victorian theatre. In other words, they behaved in ways appropriate to whatever was placed before them.

The leisure pursuits of the Victorians came with instructions. Flanders tells, in amusing detail, the complicated genesis of the Football Association rules, which debate lingered longer on the question of players' pay than on the offside rule. All sorts of entertainments came packaged with a thin didactic veneer, a component we have been over-reading ever since. London theatregoers flocked in their thousands to Mazeppa for a spectacular horse-riding scene (Flanders includes a cartoon showing how the effect was produced) rather than a lesson in the dangers of youthful impetuosity. But one instruction was always implicit: novelty was good.

The idea that the Victorian era might be the ur-context of the Modernist mantra to "Make It New" seems an odd one but Flanders casually uncovers a wealth of evidence to support it and might have pushed the idea further in Consuming Passions. What is undoubted is the contemporary enthusiasm for the new institutions created to serve the new idea of leisure. The British museum seems to have functioned as if under siege, admitting only a few hundred ticket-holders each year. The South Kensington museum (now the Victoria & Albert) operated a more open policy, welcoming half a million people through its doors in its first full year.

The buildings themselves were part of the display, built as cathedrals to whatever purpose they served. Leadenhall Market's primary function was to sell meat. In an engraving reproduced by Flanders, columns rise and domes soar to giddy heights above the crowd below. The effect is magnificent, but a little deceptive: the engraver has depicted the human figures (by this reviewer's estimation) as being four feet high.

Flanders is an adept guide through the smoke and mirrors of Victorian self-publicity, only growing exasperated at some of the more self-aggrandising claims of Gordon Selfridge (who would exasperate anybody). This was an age when Edward Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox vaccine, had to share a stage with a fairground act in order to announce his discovery. Jarring collisions of the valuable and valueless come with the territory, but in the end, in Flanders's analysis, the most respected Victorian yardstick was money.

Consuming Passions marshalls a vast corpus of evidence to the effect that the mass-availability of the Victorians' new leisure and pleasure activities came at the price of their commercialisation. This was true, but the masses did not care. That music, for example, was something you did in the 18th century and something you bought in the 19th century (as sheet music, a concert ticket or an upright piano) was a paltry fact if one could muster the price.

Those prices fell and fell. A horse-drawn omnibus ticket cost a shilling but a new-fangled tram was a penny. A Raphael print was one and sixpence, and thus within the reach of all but the destitute. But what pleasure was it that people got from looking at their Raphael lithographs? Or, indeed, a 24-ton lump of coal?

Apart from a gushing Crown Princess of Greece quoted by Flanders in her preface, the leisure and pleasure-seekers of the Victorian age remain mute on the actual experience of their pleasure. Instead, Flanders mounts archaeological forays into institutions and trends, pulling the reader back and forth in her pursuit. This occasionally becomes dizzying. All "kinds of new books" are "hardly a novelty" a paragraph later, although (in the next sentence) railway timetables are a "completely new sort of publication". Likewise, the pursuit of the recherché detail or reference sometimes tips into archness: " ... the Great Agitator was of course Daniel O'Connell", remarks one footnote, without explaining who Daniel O'Connell was, or that there were two of them.

Consuming Passions sprawls, but it could hardly do otherwise. The Victorians read librettos and books, played pianos and football, collected porcelain and prints. Flanders bundles their passions into chapters on shopping, newspapers, books, tourism, theatre, music, art, sport and Christmas. These capacious rubrics sprout detours and digressions which link the production of pleasure to its wider contexts in science, industry, commerce and politics. Theatrical special-effects prompt an explanation of how limelights work and shop-window displays lead to innovations in glass manufacture.

Flanders shuttles between production processes, products and their effects on individuals, soon to be known as consumers. But private reactions to the new experiences of leisure remain elusive. Surviving documents, one presumes, are reticent on how it felt to keep dry in the rain (thanks to Charles Macintosh's waterproof coat, perfected in the 1840s) for the first time in human history, or go shopping just for fun, or stare at a huge lump of coal.

Consuming Passions tells the story of Victorian leisure and pleasure as an interrelated and intricate set of transformations: of everything from raw materials to public taste. No single book could bind so complex and vast a field within a single theory; Flanders's notion of leisure's commodification is as good as any. Consuming Passions leads its crocodile of readers on an eccentric, meandering path through the question of how the Victorians took pleasure but never quite arrives at the why. Perhaps the latter is undiscoverable. But its pursuit proves a fascinating, bewildering, marvel-crammed quest.

Lawrence Norfolk's In the Shape of a Boar is published by Orion.

Consuming Passions

The Daily Mail
1 September 2006

‘Victorious Victorians!’
by A. N. Wilson

You are holding in your hand a highly popular newspaper. Such a thing never existed before the Victorian Age.

Unless you are an extraordinarily fastidious grower of your own turnips and knitter of your own socks, you probably buy most of your clothes, foods, toys and furniture at large shops. You visit department stores. These, too, are Victorian inventions.

When you buy a book, it is possible that you go to a small private printer or buy a rare antiquarian tome, but it is more likely that you buy a mass-produced cheap book, published by a big firm and sold through a chain of popular outlets such as WHSmith – once again, you have the Victorians to thank.

The likelihood is that you think it normal to spend at least part of every year on holiday – another Victorian invention.

Perhaps your holiday involves visiting a seaside town with a pier, a winter garden and a band playing jolly music? Again, such a thing never existed in England until the Victorians.

Or you may be on an organised, popular foreign tour designed not for the aristocratic travellers of a former century but for the middle classes with a little extra money to spare? It’s thanks again to the Victorians.

Have you been to a big concert hall or a theatre lately? There were no large concert halls in Britain before the Victorian era, and nearly all the great theatres in Britain, from Glasgow and Edinburgh, through Birmingham to London’s West End, were Victorian creations.

If you like professional sport, you won’t b e surprised to learn by now that the Victorians invented this, too, drawing up the rules of Association Football, building the great cricket grounds in Manchester, Birmingham and London and establishing tennis at Wimbledon.

Finally, if you are thinking of sending or receiving Christmas cards, that is a Victorian invention, too.

Consider these things, and reflect what an enormously different life you’d have if none of these leisure activities and facilities existed. We’d be a different people, inhabiting a different world.

The Victorians at leisure have left us a legacy more enduring, in many ways, than the Victorians who invented the now defunct British Empire.

It is the glorious achievement of Judith Flanders that she has traced the origin and development of all these phenomena.

Based on a wealth of original research, her book, which is about the ways our forebears enjoyed themselves, is itself pure pleasure from beginning to end.

It begins with the Great Exhibition of 1851, that great fiesta of free trade. It was the most wonderful celebration of British ingenuity – technological, scientific, commercial.

There have been thousands of books about he economy and political power of the Victorians.

This joyous book traces the story of how, when the wealth had trickled down to the middle and lower middle classes, the Victorians spent it and enjoyed themselves.

The book explores the topics with which I began this review. One of the things I like about Flanders’s book is that, where necessary, she goes right back to the 18th century, where the story of the Industrial Revolution starts.

Napoleon scorned us as a nation of shopkeepers. Flanders traces the commercial know-how of Josiah Wedgwood in the 18th century, who saw that it wasn’t enough to produce fine china, you also had to market it. He realised that if he sold to the nobs, the middle classes would clamour for his wares, displayed in his London showrooms. He also saw the vital necessity of a good transport infrastructure – hence his support for canal-building.

In her second chapter on shops, Flanders takes up the story of retail therapy to the creation of the big department stores. She is encyclopaedic in her range, covering everything from the grandest shops to the effect on the rag trade of mass Jewish immigration.

By a similar token, she is just as happy describing the growth of classical music concerts as she is joyously celebrating the rise of the music halls in working-class districts of our cities.

This book is as packed with goodies as a rich Victorian Dundee cake. Seldom has painstaking academic research been put to better use to produce a work which is pure joy.

Every page, crammed with details, is of interest, whether she in on the football pitch or at the seaside.

Reading this book, how I longed to be back in that century before World War I, when all our troubles began!

Consuming Passions

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

Reviewed by Jacqueline Banerjee, Contributing Editor, Victorian Web (UK)

Now and then along comes a book that really opens the lid on the astonishing diversity and energy of the Victorian period. It might be something out of the way, like Ruth Cowen's new biography of Alexis Soyer, our first celebrity chef (Relish, 2006); or something apparently quite "standard," like Lionel Lambourne's wonderfully wide-ranging Victorian Painting (1999). But whatever it is, the smoggy skies of the nineteenth-century are suddenly lit up by dazzling displays of individual genius. The focus in Consuming Passions is on the growth of consumerism, with the author, Judith Flanders, often delving into the eighteenth-century background to demonstrate her thesis — the democratisation of the marketplace, not just for goods, but for all sorts of leisure pursuits. An unlikely subject, perhaps, for such illuminations. Yet here they are, aplenty.

The Great Exhibition Opens,

With her own instinct for drama, Flanders starts with Prince Albert on the dais at the Crystal Palace, at the opening of the Great Exhibition. At once the epitome and showcase of the age, the Great Exhibition overflowed with marvels. The grand ones are well known — "mechanical inventions" like railway locomotives, or major trends and ideologies in the arts, like Pugin's fabulous Medieval Court. But Flanders is more concerned with gadgetry and curiosities, such as the sportsman's knife with eighty-five blades (with etchings of Crystal Palace on them — a cutting edge "multi-view postcard"?) and a reversible jacket for morning and evening wear. Such apparently trivial items were evidence of a major economic and sociological development: the shift towards mass-consumption. It is touching to read of the surprise and relief that greeted the well-behaved crowds who flocked in as "shilling admissions." These day-trippers, coming to gawk but taking home with them a desire to possess or take advantage of what they had seen, were to be the pickers, choosers and users of a vast new range of commodities. The title of Chapter 1 is perfect: "From Arcadia to Arcade."

For all its, well, showiness, the Great Exhibition was just one factor in this development. The railways were vital to the transporting of both people and goods, and feature prominently here. Then there were those other disseminators, the newspapers and magazines with their advertisements. Fortunes could be made through these: consider the case of Thomas Holloway (not mentioned by Flanders) who invested heavily in advertising his patent medicines and became one of the wealthiest men in the country. Royal Holloway College, London, was built on this fortune. Cometh the time, cometh the man — or, rather, men. For a whole host of such entrepreneurs now burst on the scene, from shop proprietors like Arthur Liberty to the travel agent Thomas Cook, to impresarios like Albert Smith, less remembered now for the exotic extravaganzas described by Flanders, than for his working friendship with Dickens (for example, his adaptation of The Cricket on the Hearth, and his promotion of Dickens's dramatic readings). All these and many more crowd the pages of Flanders's book, combining to produce new ways for people of all classes to spend both time and money.

The process of democratisation quickly gathered pace, bringing a much greater cross-section of society into the market. London was the big winner, of course, but other parts of the country were close behind. The industrial north, for instance, not only sprouted new shopping areas, like Grey Street in Newcastle, and theatres and music halls for the local population, but suddenly found that its factories, coal-pits, canal locks and so on could be placed on a sightseeing trail. One "gentleman's daughter" put "poor children winding silk" on her itinerary (260; that such a sight was deemed picturesque goes a long way to explaining why factory reform took time). But even the factory workers had their day, or indeed their week. The seaside was now accessible to all. Again, it was touching to see that when Rowland Hill, the inventor of the Penny Post (himself an exacting boss) became chairman of the Brighton-to-London railway line, he insisted on lowering the fares to allow the working classes to use it. Elsewhere, new resorts like Bournemouth (a mere hamlet in 1812, a town with a population of nearly 17,000 by 1880) grew up entirely on the back of this new market. And again, it wasn't only in the south. Whitley Bay in Northumberland would have been another good example for Flanders, expanding from almost nothing to a thriving holiday spot once the railway arrived — enabling the Scots to come down in August when the Scottish factories closed.

But, with a "Select Bibliography" running to almost fifty pages, Flanders has more than enough material to deal with already. Her chapters on the music and art markets are fascinating, and aptly illustrated. However, many will be particularly drawn to the penultimate chapter, "Sporting Life," with its history of racing, football and cycling. The eighteenth-century origins of both racing and football are examined in some depth, perhaps more than is strictly necessary — though the history of racing, of course, beautifully illustrates the running battle between (as Flanders puts it) "exclusivity" and "access" (229). As usual, "access" won, but in this case at a particular cost — the enclosure of very large areas of common land. And as spectator sports became big business, with money pouring in not only at the gates but also through betting, drinking and other spin-offs, it became increasingly clear that the lines between democratisation and exploitation, and commercialisation and debasement, were very narrow indeed.

The last chapter itself, subtitled "A Christmas Coda," inevitably raises the same issues. In this case, the commercialisation had more widespread benefits. From the distinguished artist whose work appeared on the new Christmas cards, to the humblest hawker of mistletoe and holly, few could afford to ignore the business opportunities of this new holiday season. Yet occasionally we are reminded of a whole world where less benefits accrued: where did the exotic "foreign nuts" mentioned by Charles Manby Smith come from (488)? How much did the increased confectionery sales benefit the sugar plantations in the West Indies, mentioned in an early chapter on eighteenth-century shops, but now in decline? And wasn't some of our sugar now provided by slave labour in Cuba?

Flanders declares in her Preface that she has "chosen to look not at the contents of the world of leisure, but at the containers" (xvii), yet the contents jump out at us all the same, along with the galaxy of entrepreneurs and impresarios who promoted them. All this is a valuable corrective to the gloomy view of the period still being foisted on us at school, where most children's first encounter with it is through the plight of the chimney sweep. Still, Flanders is right in a sense. She has looked into a huge range of sources, including parliamentary reports, diaries, journals and privately printed histories (such as those of the newsagent W.H. Smith, and the National Gallery), and succeeded admirably and entertainingly in her own project. But by bringing together in one book an enormous number of facts about the Victorians' "consuming passions," she has opened a Pandora's box of issues which could now, themselves, do with a fuller airing.

Consuming Passions

The Independent.
19 November 2006
'Who needs a self-lighting fairy?'
By Lucy Lethbridge

Consuming Passions:
Leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain, by Judith Flanders

The traditional Christmas with its roast turkey, its swag-bearing Father Christmas, decorated tree, crackers, illustrated cards, presents and stockings, is of course an entirely Victorian invention. Wreaths of holly and ivy are all that remains of medieval celebrations of the Nativity, But the British took to the newly minted, old-style Germanic Yuletide festivities with gusto. By the end of the 19th century, the festival of Twelfth Night had been eclipsed by the shopping opportunities of a consuming Christmas - as more recently the ancient celebration of Halloween has been replaced by trick or treating.

In her splendid book on Victorian "leisure and pleasure", Judith Flanders devotes a whole chapter to Christmas; this is hardly surprising, for it is and was then a retailers' paradise. The key components of the "traditional" Christmas were available for purchase in all good stores and the canny entrepreneurs of 19th-century Britain seized their opportunities. Confectioner Thomas Smith, who in 1847 invented the Christmas cracker (he devised it as a novelty sweet wrapper), was, by the 1890s, selling 13 million crackers a year.

Shopping in all its forms was the central and unifying activity that underlay all other 19th-century middle-class leisure pursuits. Flanders dates the British passion for home improvement to the early 17th century, but it was the Great Exhibition of 1851, under the shining glass vaults of Paxton's Crystal Palace, that was its defining moment. With a central aisle that was known as "the nave", the Exhibition was a secular cathedral to the new era of purchase, accumulation and retail choice. Flanders begins and ends by quoting Prince Albert as he surveyed the wares displayed: "The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal and we only have to choose the best and cheapest for our purposes."

Imagine a mid-Victorian parlour, with its gas lamps, stuffed Chesterfield sofas, potted ferns, and wax fruit under glass domes and you will have some idea of the weight of sheer stuff covered by this voluminous study. The range and ingenuity of Victorian invention is staggering and Flanders particularly relishes the more eccentric examples. There is the self-expanding corset, for example, or the "patent-ventilation hat", or a doctor's suit with jacket, trousers and waistcoat sewn together to save time in the event of being called in the night.

Flanders' last book was a detailed room-by-room exploration of the Victorian house; now she has expanded her themes beyond the home: Consuming Passions covers travel, entertainment, art (or rather the beginnings of what we might call now the art market), sport, seaside holidays and, of course, the activity that underlies and facilitates all those other pursuits - shopping.

At the turn of the 19th century, shops were functional places and most people's needs were basic. Even if shops had glass windows (rare) they seldom even displayed their wares. But as the century rolled on, the average home acquired more equipment. Henry Mayhew, in his 1851 study of the London poor, observed door-to-door sellers struggling under the weight of their products: "door-mats, baskets and 'duffers' packs', wood pails, brushes, brooms, clothes-props, clothes-lines and string, and grid-irons, Dutch-ovens, skewers and fore-shovels". Fifty years later, the face of the market place had changed out of all recognition. Thomas Lipton's multiple stores were the forerunners of today's cheap supermarket chains, aimed at selling cheap and in bulk to the working class - though the middle-class soon took advantage of them too. By 1889, Lipton had 30 shops and a turnover of £1.5 million. Nash's Regent Street, the first to be designed solely as a shopping thoroughfare, was completed in 1837. The displays behind its plate-glass windows fed the aspirations which kept the wheels of retail moving at such frenetic speed. Bon Marché, opened in 1871 in Brixton, was the first custom-built department store. The retail moguls - Selfridge, Barker, Whiteley and Liberty - followed with bigger, more glittering emporia, designed to cater to every possible need, realised or unrealised.

Chemical dyes and new textile technologies speeded up the manufacture of clothes, and fashions were made available to those unable to afford dressmakers; clerks could dress like "swells" in garish tweeds bought off-the-peg. Charles Macintosh put a sheet of rubber between two layers of cloth and invented the waterproof. Foot sizes were standardised for the first time by the Quaker shoemakers C and J Clark).

The 19th-century British, as Flanders shows in exhaustive detail (her footnotes provide some of the best stories in the book), were in thrall to new technology and its wonders. New printing techniques created a market for circulating libraries and cheap fiction. Flanders suggests that among the middle-classes, consumption was often justified by the claim that taste was "moral duty"; but popular taste wasn't much interested in duty and "penny bloods", which related gory, true-life crime stories, were bestsellers. In 1828, The Last Dying Speech and Confession of William Corder (the infamous Red Barn murderer) sold 1,166,000 copies.

The pace of change was astonishing. Only two generations before the invention of the railways, the Lake District was considered bleak and inhospitable. By the mid-19th century it was on a crowded tourist trail, made lovely by the Romantics and accessible by steam technology. Only two years after the introduction of the bicycle, there were nearly 3,000 bicycles in Hyde Park at weekends.

Man-made magic could be marvelled at in diversions such as waxworks, automata and dioramas. Astley's Amphitheatre put on a lifelike display of St George and the Dragon: "The dragon's mechanism and automatous serpentine movement [were] so ably calculated and put into play, as to stamp the Action-scene with the character of TRUTH." W S Gilbert instructed that the fairies in Iolanthe, be "Self-lighting", with "electricity stored somewhere about the small of their backs". It was machine-made enchantment that made possible many of the trappings of the Victorian Christmas.

Consuming Passions covers such a vast amount of ground that reading it can sometimes feel rather like watching a fast moving conveyor belt of consumer durables which have flashed by before you have time to examine them fully. And I could have done with a little more about the humans behind the goods: the ambitious, ingenious, ruthless visionaries who caught and exploited the spirit of their age. But it is nonetheless a magnificent achievement: fascinating and prodigiously well-researched.