Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

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Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

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That the Great Exhibition was, in the widest possible sense, ‘for everybody’ could not be in doubt by the spring of 1851. There were souvenirs for sale across London: an endless stream of items reproducing images of the wildly popular Crystal Palace—items such as papier-mâché blotters, letter-openers and ‘segar’ (cigar) boxes. There were mementoes of specific moments, such as ‘Lane’s Telescopic View of the Opening of the Great Exhibition’, a paper cut-out with a perspective view of the main avenue of the Crystal Palace, complete with interior fountain and one of the trees that had been preserved inside the structure (to much admiration from the public for the engineering feat involved). There were handkerchiefs printed with caricatures of the main participants, including ‘Prince Allbut’. There were even gloves with maps of London printed on the palms, so that non-English-speaking visitors could have their route to the Crystal Palace traced out for them.22 But it was far more than the souvenir market that latched on to the commercial possibilities of the Great Exhibition. There were just as many straightforwardly marketdriven tie-ins as well, such as that promoted by Mr Folkard, ‘Grocer, Tea Dealer and Italian Warehouseman’, who advertised his new ‘Celebrated Exhibition Coffee’, blended from the beans of ‘all nations’, with labels covered with images of foreigners in national dress visiting the Exhibition.23 Examples of extreme self-reflexivity included exhibitions inside the Crystal Palace which displayed images of nothing less than the Crystal Palace itself. The ‘Cotton’ section had a tablecloth ‘in the centre [of which] is a view of the “Exhibition Building”…from the official design by Paxton, with emblematic borders representing Peace and Commerce with the nations; and a procession displaying the costumes of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, en route to the Exhibition’.24

But most exhibits were more concerned to display their manufacturers’ technical ingenuity. These were not the type of industrial processes that Albert had put so much faith in. They were not about ‘Raw Materials and Produce, illustrative of the natural productions on which human industry is employed’. They were instead ‘illustrative of the agents which human ingenuity brings to bear upon the products of nature’. Even here, Albert’s interpretation of the word ‘ingenuity’ and that of the manufacturers were worlds apart. Albert’s faith in the benefits conferred by the material world was interwoven with his belief in providence, social welfare and the moral value of labour. The manufacturers were more overtly concerned to show, through their command of technological innovation, how a new ideal domesticity might be formed, what goods were available that might be acquired, or at least aspired to. A ‘sportsman’s knife’ produced by Joseph Rodgers and Sons of Sheffield had a mother-of-pearl handle and eighty blades, on which were etched views of the Crystal Palace, Osborne House, Windsor Castle, a railway bridge designed by George Stephenson, a boar hunt, a stag hunt and more. The same manufacturer also produced a 56-blade knife that was less than 2 centimetres long, a razor with a view of Arundel Castle on the blade, and cutlery with 150 blades and a clock. A vase by Waterston & Brogden showed Britannia flanked by ‘Scotia’ and ‘Hibernia’, who were in turn surrounded by four heads representing the four quarters of the globe, while under them diamonds in the shape of a rose, a thistle and a shamrock surrounded images of Britons, Romans, Saxons, Normans and

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