Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

It was generally agreed by successful middle-class men of taste that the main problem for industry and manufacture in general was the lack of an equivalent level of taste in the consumer to whom the resulting goods were being sold. Rather than producing goods to suit low tastes, they saw it as their job to improve the taste of the common man. The 1847 catalogue for an exhibition held by the Society spelled out their views:

It is a universal complaint among manufacturers that the taste for good art does not exist in sufficient extent to reward them for the cost of producing superior works; that the public prefers the vulgar, the gaudy, the ugly even, to the beautiful and perfect.

We are persuaded that, if artistic manufactures are not appreciated, it is because they are not widely enough known. We believe that when works of high merit, of British origin, are brought forward they will be thoroughly appreciated and thoroughly enjoyed. We believe that this exhibition, when thrown open gratuitously to all, will tend to improve the public taste.

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Even before this catalogue appeared, Henry Cole was on board and was already a prime mover in these improving exhibitions. He had joined the society only two years before, after designing a tea service as a prize submission under the pseudonym Felix Summerly. His submission had received the ultimate accolade: a prize, the commercial manufacture of his design, and, further, the purchase of the original service by Prince Albert. Cole was one of those Victorian powerhouses who produced so much, in so many fields, that it is hard to know when he slept. After a humble beginning as one of several clerks in the Record Commission, a junior civil-service post, he fell out with his superior over his pay. Instead of resigning, he promptly exposed his department as a haven for corruption and sinecures. After a lengthy investigation, Parliament found that he was in the right and in 1838 he was reinstated in the department at a more senior level. That same year he was seconded to help Rowland Hill with the creation of what shortly would become the new penny postage system. In the 1840s Cole became even busier: he designed what was probably the first Christmas card (see pp. 483—7); he wrote guidebooks to various tourist sights, including the National Gallery, Westminster Abbey and Hampton Court; as Felix Summerly he began to design domestic wares for manufacture; he wrote children’s books which from 1841 were published as the Home Treasury and were illustrated by the leading illustrators of the day; he designed for manufacture children’s toys that included building blocks, ‘geometrically made, one-eighth of the size of real bricks; with Plans and Elevations’, a ‘Tesselated Pastime’ that was ‘formed out of Minton’s Mosaics with Book of Patterns’, and, what may have been the first paintbox for children, a ‘Colour Box for Little Painters’, which, it boasted, held ‘the ten best colours; Slabs and Brushes; Hints and Directions and Specimens of Mixed Tints’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In his spare moments he contributed regularly to several periodicals, carrying on his various reforming campaigns in the press and by pamphlets.

One of his campaigns was for railway reform, and it was this that moved him into the next great phase of his life. John Scott Russell, his fellow campaigner, a railway engineer and the editor of the Railway Chronicle, introduced him to the Society of Arts in 1845. By 1846 he was on the committee, and he and Russell had been asked to mount the next exhibition. Russell had earlier put up £50 ‘for a series of models and designs for useful objects calculated to improve general taste’, but not enough people had entered to permit the entries to be exhibited. Cole’s and Russell’s 1847 exhibition faced the same problem: manufacturers, fearing piracy of technique and style, did not want to have their products displayed. But Russell and Cole were determined to draw in enough entries for a good exhibition, and when they managed to attract over 20,000 visitors many manufacturers realized that the enormous potential for sales and promotion far outweighed the slight risk that industrial secrets might be stolen. The following year, instead of scratching around for entries, the Society was forced to devise rules that would limit the number of entries flooding in; this time, 70,000 people flocked to see what was new, what was different, what was interesting.

With that success under his belt, Cole moved on to his next campaign: the staging of another improving exhibition, but this time on a national scale. Albert was even less enthusiastic than he had been with Whishaw three years earlier, refusing either to become involved himself or to approach the government for any formal involvement. Cole was not daunted—Cole was never daunted. The RSA had highlighted the lack of good industrial and domestic design in the country in general, and from commercial manufacturers in particular. Now Cole became involved with a buoyant and popular campaign to promote new schools of design, to be run under government aegis, founding the Journal of Design to promote his cause. A parliamentary commission was set up, loaded with Cole-ites. By the kind of coincidence that Cole was pre-eminent in engineering, its plan—the reform of design and manufacture, and the role of the state in fostering that reform—was exactly what Cole intended his next, national, exhibition should deal with. In the meantime his 1849 RSA exhibition was even more successful than the previous two: Prince Albert agreed to present the prizes, and Queen Victoria gave sovereign approval by loaning an item for display.

For Cole’s grander plan, however, the government, in the way of governments in all places and at all times, offered merely lukewarm enthusiasm—and even that only if private sponsors could be found to guarantee that the costs would be covered. But Albert, sensing the momentum, was now ready to come on board. A Royal Commission was established, with Albert as honorary president, and Cole—never one for half measures—widened the Exhibition’s scope to include the entire world. Thomas Cubitt, the greatest speculative builder of his age, had given a rough estimate for the cost of realizing Cole’s dream: £50,000 for the building costs and £5,000 for administrative costs, with another £20,000 needed for prize money.* (#ulink_38a5c99f-45ee-5ed6-99d5-152a2a6764ea) A Mr Fuller put up £10,000 for prizes, and the Messrs Munday committed to underwriting the project in return for a percentage of the gate money.

While many discussed the elevating aspects of art, science and education, Cole was promising the businessmen of the City that ‘some hundred thousand people [would] come flowing into London from all parts of the world by railways and steamboats to see the great exhibition’, and that businesses would feel ‘a direct and obvious benefit’ from it. The secretary to the executive committee produced a list of those who could expect to profit: the arts, agriculture, manufacture and trade, ‘whether as producers, distributors or consumers’. To win over popular opinion, advertising was actively used. The Royal Commission sent out placards reproducing a speech that the Conservative leader Lord Stanley—soon to be prime minister as the Earl of Derby—made in favour of the Exhibition, for public display. Posters were printed to put on railwaystation platforms and in trains, and the commissioners arranged for favourable pieces to appear in the papers.

(#litres_trial_promo) The kind of arguments that are now used routinely for the promotion of tourism as an economybooster were developed for the first time: that visitors would arrive, benefiting everyone from hotelkeepers to omnibus operators to food suppliers; that trade would be advertised both to home consumers and to audiences abroad; that, in effect, Britain would be displayed to the world as ‘the emporium of the commercial, and mistress of the entire world’, as the under-sheriff for London put it, rather more poetically than one might expect.

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Cole’s plans for the Exhibition were growing ever larger, and enthusiasm from the public bodies to whom he spoke was increasing too. He soon realized that hundreds of small investors might fund the Exhibition more lavishly, while demanding far less—or no—overall control. He bought Munday’s out for just over £5,000, and began to solicit the support of local communities across the nation. Thousands of donations began to flood in, with more than 400 groups of merchants, businessmen and industrialists gathering funds and organizing the exhibits to be sent from their own regions. Before 1849 was over, 3,000 subscribers had been signed up; another 3,000 followed less than two months later. Altogether, £522,179 was raised in this way.

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From the first, however, there was a tension over the aims of the Exhibition. There was no question that Albert saw the Exhibition as ‘a great collection of works of industry and art’, a place to demonstrate how technology had harnessed the natural world to create the Age of the Machine. With this in view, to show how man had become the master of nature, the committee elaborated an initial three-part outline of the subjects to be comprehended by the Exhibition—the raw materials of industry; the products manufactured from them; and the art used to beautify them—into a more formal thirty-section outline:

Sect. I:—Raw Materials and Produce, illustrative of the natural productions on which human industry is employed:—Classes 1 to 4

1. Mining and Quarrying, Metallurgy, and Mineral Products

2. Chemical and Pharmaceutical processes and products generally

3. Substances used as food

4. Vegetable and Animal Substances used in manufactures, implements, or for ornament

Sect. II:—Machinery for Agricultural, Manufacturing, Engineering, and other purposes and Mechanical Inventions,—illustrative of the agents which human ingenuity brings to bear upon the products of nature:—Classes 5 to 10

5. Machines for direct use, including Carriages, Railway and Naval Mechanisms

6. Manufacturing Machines and Tools

7. Mechanical, Civil Engineering, Architectural, and Building Contrivances

8. Naval Architecture, Military Engineering and Structures, Ordnance, Armour and Accoutrements

9. Agricultural and Horticultural Machines and Implements (exceptional)

10. Philosophical Instruments and Miscellaneous Contrivances, including processes depending on their use, Musical, Horological, Acoustical and Surgical Instruments.

Sect. III:—Classes 11—29.—illustrative of the result produced by the operation of human industry upon natural produce

11. Cotton

12 & 15 [sic]. Woollen and Worsted

13. Silk and Velvet

14. Flax and Hemp

16. Leather, Saddlery and Harness, Boots and Shoes, Skins, Fur and Hair

17. Paper, Printing and Bookbinding

18. Woven, Felted, and Laid Fabrics, Dyed and Printed (including Designs)

19. Tapestry, Carpets, Floor-cloths, Lace, and Embroidery

20. Articles of Clothing for immediate, personal or domestic use

21. Cutlery, Edge and Hand Tools

22. General Hardware, including Locks and Grates

23. Works in Precious Metals, Jewellery, &c.

24. Glass

25. China, Porcelain, Earthenware, &c.

26. Furniture, Upholstery, Paper Hangings, Decorative Ceilings, Papier Maché, and Japanned Goods

27. Manufactures in Mineral Substances, for Building or Decoration

28. Manufactures from Animal and Vegetable Substances, not being Woven or Felted

29. Miscellaneous Manufactures and Small Wares.

Sect. IV: Fine Arts:—Class 30

30. Sculpture, Models, and Plastic Art, Mosaics, Enamels, &c. Miscellaneous objects of interest placed in the Main Avenue of the Building, not classified.

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Others, however, saw that there was a danger in this kind of display of pure commodity—a danger that the Prince and many organizers had apparently missed. William Felkin, a hosiery and lace manufacturer, and exactly the kind of man who might have been expected to welcome commercial possibilities, was vehement. In his book The Exhibition in 1851, of the Products and Industry of All Nations. Its Probable Influence upon Labour and Commerce he said, ‘This collection of objects from all countries, is not intended to be an Emporium for masses of raw and manufactured goods. These fill the granaries and factories, the warehouses and shops of the world…This is not intended to be a place where goods are to be sold, or orders given; not a bazaar, fair, or mart of business; if so, it would be a perfect Babel. No one could possibly thread his way with comfort, through such a mazy labyrinth.’