Novelty fair: British visual culture between Chartism and the Great Exhibition 9781784997038

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Time’s question
The ‘offensive body’: the politics of consumption in 1848
‘All that is solid melts into air’: representing the Chartist crowd in 1848
‘The Gutta Percha Staff’: between respectable and risqué satire in 1848
'All that is sacred is profaned’: balloons, fairs, ballads and the Great Exhibition
‘The Pound and the Shilling’: romance and the cash nexus at the Great Exhibition
A ‘Chamber of Horrors’: class and consumption at mid century
Conclusion: Novelty Fair, burlesquing history
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

British visual culture between Chartism and the Great Exhibition

Novelty fair: British visual culture between Chartism and the Great Exhibition will be of special interest to those in the field of Victorian studies, as well as cultural historians and historians of visual culture more generally. It engages with a range of neglected sources to offer a fresh perspective on a pivotal period in British history.

Novelty Fair British visual culture between Chartism and the Great Exhibition

Jo Briggs

First performed on 21 May 1850, the satirical play Novelty Fair; or Hints for 1851 opened at almost exactly the middle of the nineteenth century. Its plot juxtaposes 1848, Chartism and republicanism, with 1851 and the coming Great Exhibition. Using Novelty Fair as inspiration, this book brings together Victorian people, things and places typically understood to be discrete and unrelated. By juxtaposing urban fairs and the Great Exhibition, daguerreotypes and ballads, satirical shilling books and government-backed design reform, blackface performers and middle-class paterfamilias, a strikingly different picture of mid-nineteenth-century culture emerges. Rather than a clean break between revolution and exhibition, class-consciousness and consumerism, popular and didactic, risqué and respectable, these themes are revealed as interdependent and mutually defined. As a result, the years of Chartism and the Great Exhibition are shown to be far more contested than previously recognized, with bourgeois forms and strategies under stress in a period that has often been seen as a triumphant one for that class.

Novelty Fair

Novelty Fair

Jo Briggs is Assistant Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Cover image: detail from The Downfall of the Exhibition, broadsheet, published London 1851

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-7190-8964-0

Jo Briggs 9 780719 089640

Novelty fair

Novelty fair British visual culture between Chartism and the Great Exhibition

jo briggs

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Jo Briggs 2016 The right of Jo Briggs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 8964 0  hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

For Dan

Contents

List of figures viii Acknowledgementsxii Introduction: Time’s question

1

1  The ‘offensive body’: the politics of consumption in 1848 15 2 ‘All that is solid melts into air’: representing the Chartist crowd in 184839 3 ‘The Gutta Percha Staff’: between respectable and risqué satire in 184862 4 ‘All that is sacred is profaned’: balloons, fairs, ballads and the Great Exhibition87 5 ‘The Pound and the Shilling’: romance and the cash nexus at the Great Exhibition 111 6  A ‘Chamber of Horrors’: class and consumption at mid century 135  Conclusion: Novelty Fair, burlesquing history 156 Bibliography159 Index172

Figures

1.1 Henry Vizetelly after Guillaume Sulpice Chevalier (called Paul Gavarni), full-page illustration to ‘The Casino’ by Albert Smith, chiaroscuro wood engraving from Albert Smith (ed.), Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character with Illustrative Essays by Popular Writers (London: D. Bogue, 1849), opposite p. 13. (Collection of the author) 18 1.2 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, title letters to chapter 10, ‘Of the Gent at the Casinos’, wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1847), p. 64. (Collection of the author) 19 1.3 J. Rogers after Nathaniel Whittock, ‘Lowther Arcade’ (detail), engraving from Tallis’s Street Views and Pictorial Directory of England, Scotland and Ireland with a Faithful History and Description of every object of Interest by William Gaspey ([London]: J. & F. Tallis, [1847]), plate following p. 44. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 20 1.4 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, untitled wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1847), p. 35. (Collection of the author)21 1.5 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, untitled wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1847), p. 69. (Collection of the author) 26 1.6 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, ­frontispiece, wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1847), n.p. (Collection of the author) 27 2.1 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘The Chartist Procession, According to the Signatures of the Petition’, wood ­engraving from Punch, [29 April 1848], p. 175. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 42



Figures

2.2 William Edward Kilburn, inscribed verso ‘Great Chartist Meeting at Kennington / April 10 1848 / taken from nature’, daguerreotype. (Royal Collection Trust, HM Queen Elizabeth II, RCIN 2932482) 2.3 William Edward Kilburn, inscribed verso ‘Great Chartist Meeting at Kennington / April 10 1848 / taken from nature’, daguerreotype. (Royal Collection Trust, HM Queen Elizabeth II, RCIN 2932484) 2.4 Unknown wood engraver, ‘The meeting on Kennington Common – from a daguerreotype’, wood engraving from the Illustrated London News, 15 April 1848, p. 242. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 2.5 Unknown artist and wood engraver, ‘Scene at Granby Fields during the Riots, Manchester’, wood engraving from the Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842, p. 244. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 2.6 Unknown artist and wood engraver, ‘“Ice Tree”, Middle Temple’, wood engraving from the Illustrated London News, 1 March 1845, p. 141. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 3.1 Unknown wood engraver probably after a drawing by John Leech, ‘The Trafalgar Revolution’, months of March and April (unnumbered pages), wood engraving from Punch’s Almanack for 1849 (London: Punch Office, 1848), unnumbered pages. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 3.2 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘Special Constable Preparing for the Worst. – Drying his Gunpowder in the Frying-Pan’, wood engraving from Punch, 22 April 1848, p. 170. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 3.3 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘A Physical Force Chartist Arming for the Fight’, wood engraving from Punch, [2 September] 1848, p. 101. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 3.4 Unknown wood engraver probably after a drawing by John Leech, ‘Special’s Wife …’, wood engraving from Punch, 22 April 1848, p. 166. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 3.5 John Richard Jobbins, ‘Mrs. G gives her husband a little advice, and a good deal of brandy’, lithograph from John Richard Jobbins, Six Scenes in the Life of James Green Esq., a Special Constable. Sketched by a Special (London: Bogue, 1848), unnumbered page. (Yale University Library) 3.6 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘Laying Down the Law’, wood engraving from Punch, 22 April 1848, p. 172. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

ix

45 46

47

51 54

64

67

69 70

78 79

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Novelty fair

3.7 Unknown wood engraver and artist, ‘The British Tree of Liberty’, wood engraving from Punch, 3 June 1848, p. 234. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 81 4.1 Unknown artist and wood engraver, ‘Destruction of Mr. Graham’s Balloon’, wood engraving from the Illustrated London News, 21 June 1851, p. 588. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 88 4.2 Unknown artist and author, The Downfall of the Exhibition, broadsheet, published Bloomsbury, London: Paul [1851]. (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Harding Ballads Collection, Harding B 13 (26)) 97 4.3 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘The Shipwrecked Ministers Saved by the Great Exhibition Steamer’, wood engraving from Punch, 7 June 1851, p. 237. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 98 4.4 Unknown artist and author, Exhibition of All Nations! and Kendal Fair, broadsheet, place of publication and publisher unknown. (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Harding Ballads Collection, Harding B 11 (1108)) 100 4.5 Unknown artist and wood engraver, ‘The Great Exhibition Fair at Bayswater’, and ‘The May Morning of 1851, sketched from the top of the Marble Arch in Oxford Street’, wood engraving from the Lady’s Newspaper, 10 May 1851, p. 260. (© The British Library Board, Newspaper Library) 105 5.1 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘The Pound and the Shilling. “Whoever Thought of Meeting You Here?”’, wood engraving from Punch, 14 June 1851, p. 247. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 112 5.2 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Tenniel or John Leech, ‘Very Like A Whale! The French Socialist Leading the British Lion by the Nose. Dedicated to our Yankee Well-Wishers’, wood engraving from Punch, 19 April 1851, p. 159. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 117 5.3 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech (?), ‘Her Majesty, as She Appeared on the First of May, Surrounded by “Horrible Conspirators and Assassins”’, wood engraving from Punch, [10 May 1851] p. 193. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 122 5.4 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘Dinnertime at the Crystal Palace’, wood engraving from Punch, 5 July 1851, p. 16. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)127



Figures

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5.5 E. Noyce, lithographed cover from Joseph Edwards (words) and Steven Glover (music), I met her in the Crystal Halls (London: Duff and Hodgson, [1851]). (University of Reading, Special Collections) 128 5.6 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘The Morals of the Great Exhibition’, wood engraving from Punch, 7 June 1851, p. 233. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)129 6.1 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, untitled wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Idler upon Town (London: D. Bogue, 1848), p. 78. (Research Library of the Walters Art Museum) 136 6.2 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, title letter to chapter 3, ‘Of their Haunts’, wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Idler upon Town (London: D. Bogue, 1848), p. 14. (Research Library of the Walters Art Museum)137 6.3 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, untitled wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1848), p. viii. (Collection of the author)139 6.4 Unknown wood engraver and artist (possibly John Leech), ‘Rochfort Clarke’s “Sermons in Stones”’, wood engraving from Punch, 31 May 1851, p. 224. (Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art) 140 6.5 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, untitled wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1847), p. 22. (Collection of the author)143 6.6 Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘Autumnal Fashions for Ladies’, from Punch’s Almanack for 1849 (London: Punch Office, 1848), unnumbered page. (Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art) 144

Acknowledgements

This book owes a huge amount to three outstanding scholarly environments that I have been lucky enough to inhabit over the past seven years. The rich and comprehensive collection of nineteenth-century books and ­periodicals at the Yale Center for British Art, where I was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow for three years, sparked my interest in mid-nineteenth-century visual ­culture. The encouragement of Cassandra Albinson, Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester and Elisabeth Fairman was instrumental in turning a modest project on Paul Gavarni, Albert Smith and the gent into something larger and more ambitious. Adrianna Bates and David Thompson deserve special thanks for ­accommodating my frequent requests for materials in the Study Room, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to Maria Singer, Imaging and Rights Assistant, for providing numerous photographs for this book. Work on this project continued at the University of Oxford, where I was a Research Fellow at Wolfson College from 2010–11. I am thankful to Hermione Lee for selecting me to spend a productive year in such a w ­ elcoming environment. Working at the Bodleian Library I first encountered the b­ roadside ballads that are a central part of this book, and which led to a ­re-conceptualization of my approach. Most recently, the final stages of preparing a draft manuscript took place in Baltimore where the efficient library system of the Johns Hopkins University delivered books from the stacks almost to my office door, making writing and revisions easy. The book collections at the Peabody Library, under the guardianship of Paul Espinosa, and at my home institution, the Walters Art Museum, allowed me to continue my close engagement with primary sources to the very final stages of editing. My colleagues at the Walters, ­particularly in the ­curatorial department, were also great supporters of this project. Marden Nichols, former Assistant Curator of Ancient Art at the Walters, gave insightful feedback on several chapters, as did Rachel Teukolsky at Vanderbilt University, and Keren Hammerschlag at Georgetown University. Sections of Chapter 3 and Chapter 2 appeared in 2011 and 2012 r­ espectively in Victorian Studies, and in 2012 elements of Chapter 5 appeared in an essay on



Acknowledgements

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John Everett Millais’ A Huguenot in Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide. Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 were given as papers at the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) annual conference in 2012 and 2013, and I would like to thank the audiences on both occasions for their comments and questions. I am especially grateful to Lara Kriegel for selecting my paper to appear in the special issue of Victorian Studies dedicated to the 2012 NAVSA conference on the theme of ‘The Networked Nineteenth Century’, and for her response to it published there. My good friends at the Walters Art Museum helped me through the last stages of preparing my manuscript for final submission. Most of all I would like to thank Daniel Harding for tolerating two moves and many trips between Baltimore, London and Moscow.

Introduction: Time’s question

The play Novelty Fair; or, Hints for 1851, written by Albert Smith and Tom Taylor, was first performed on 21 May 1850, at almost exactly the middle of the nineteenth century.1 Subtitled ‘an exceedingly premature, and thoroughly apropos revue’, the piece is a dense and complex layering of personifications, tableaus, musical numbers and sharp topical humour. The play burlesqued contemporary events, focusing especially on revolutions in France and public works in London, but also departed from the revue format by looking forward in time to the Great Exhibition. For anyone interested in the significant and changeful years at mid century, a period that is typically seen as leaving the age of revolution behind and ushering in an era of commodities and spectacle, this now obscure play proves insightful. Novelty Fair’s eclectic references and startling juxtapositions belie the separate scholarly treatment of the Chartist disturbances of 1848 and the Great Exhibition of 1851. Rather than a clean break between revolution and exhibition, class consciousness and consumerism, popular and didactic, risqué and respectable, the play suggests a less familiar picture of this period where these terms are interdependent and mutually defined. Novelty Fair opens in the ‘Library of Time’ where Time is puzzling over how to interpret his present moment: are things improving or getting worse? In the play’s opening lines he states ‘Never were times so hard to comprehend: / Some say they’re bad times, and, what’s worse won’t mend; / Others declare they’re good, and don’t want mending / How, of such doubts, am I to make an ending?’2 Here, Time is like a scholar trying to make sense of history, and in many ways the question Time poses sums up opposing attitudes to the mid nineteenth century. Were things worse than ever for the working classes, with industrialization and urbanization eroding traditional trades and established communities, or was this the beginning of increased prosperity for all, with consumer goods and entertainments available more cheaply and widely than ever? In order to find an answer, like a good researcher, Time consults various volumes in his library. However, they reveal a topsy-turvy world full of unexpected shifts and paradox. As a result of his research Time might well

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Novelty fair

wonder whether what is anticipated in 1851 is a revolution or an exhibition, or perhaps both. Of the years he calls forth from his volumes the first to appear is The Year One, a decrepit child, followed by Julius Cæsar, a Baron who signed the Magna Carta, and then Charles I and Cromwell. On searching out the French Revolution, personifications of the years 1792, 1830 and 1848 all rush out at once. Time turns to 1815, the personification of Peace, who directs him to the year 1851. But, rather than being rational or industrious, 1851, played by the popular comic actor Charles James Mathews, is loud and brash and takes over the play, leading the action and singing comic songs. The last scene of the play, which takes place in the interior of the Great Exhibition, comprises musical tableaus and danced set-pieces of the ‘industry’ of Spain, Italy and France. However, the ‘industry’ on display is no such thing. The industry of Spain is the fandango, of Italy, dolce far niente, and that of France the barricades, mourir pour la patrie and the dance of débardeurs and folies. Towards the end of the first act 1851 seizes Time by the ‘forelock’ and leads the Years around the stage reversing their chronology.3 He sings a song to the tune of ‘The Good Time Coming’, a popular work with connections to the Chartist movement. The original lyrics by Charles Mackay date from 1846 and look forward to a time when ‘Right, not Might, shall be the lord’ and ‘Worth, not Birth, shall rule mankind, / and be acknowledg’d stronger’. The last line of each verse in the original cautions patience: ‘Wait a little longer’, where as this version ends its verses ‘Don’t wait any longer’ and ‘We won’t wait any longer’.4 In the process of attempting to resolve Time’s question about the direction of history Novelty Fair draws attention to the interaction between revolutions and the coming exhibition, the proximity of the years 1848 and 1851, and their mutually defined significance. The following investigation acts on this suggestive insight to explore the heterogeneous nature of mid-nineteenth-century Victorian culture that Novelty Fair exemplifies. Like Novelty Fair, the chapters that follow bring together people, things and places generally understood to be discrete and unrelated: urban fairs and the Great Exhibition, daguerreotypes and ballads, satirical shilling books and government-backed design reform, blackface performers and middle-class paterfamilias, navvies and the Duke of Wellington. As a result, the years of Chartism and the Great Exhibition emerge as far more contested than has previously been recognized, questioning the accepted narrative of increasing stability. Transgression In Novelty Fair Time draws our attention to the interaction and confusion between high and low culture at a moment when bourgeois hegemony has



Introduction: Time’s question

3

typically been seen as on the rise. Indeed, the chapters that follow repeatedly reveal bourgeois forms and strategies under stress. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s book The Politics and Poetics of Transgression offers a particularly productive methodological framework for exploring this topic. The authors outline what they call an ‘economy of transgression’ across a broad chronological sweep of British culture. Their approach encompasses Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnivalesque, but also goes further. In their readings what is ‘socially peripheral’ is frequently found to be ‘symbolically central’.5 The ‘low-Other is despised and denied at the level of political organization and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture’.6 Considering the nineteenth century, the authors focus on Edwin Chadwick and the reform of sewers, the maid and dirt, with an emphasis on Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby, and finally Freud and the place of fairground and carnival themes in bourgeois neurosis. All of these texts and their associated sources continue to be central in studies of Victorian culture, but in relation to Chartism and the Great Exhibition it is more difficult to find writing that pays similar close attention to the way that high and low culture are interrelated. Focusing on ‘psychic forms, the human body, geographical space and the social order’, which Stallybrass and White identify as the ‘symbolic domains’ that order European culture, can generate a fresh approach to the mid nineteenth century.7 Taking the hint from Novelty Fair, the benefit of such a methodology is that it ultimately draws together themes such as revolution and consumerism, which are currently discussed separately. Some of the reason for this separation stems from a strong, yet tacit, assumption that there is a change in popular culture that begins around the opening of the Victorian era, which is completed by around 1850 and made manifest in the Great Exhibition of 1851. By this date and with this event, the argument goes, popular culture is tamed and homogenized, with didactic and bourgeois forms and strategies of representation triumphant. This shift has been related to changing technologies of print culture, consumer habits, surveillance and industrialization.8 Yet as Novelty Fair and the following chapters show, such a reading of mid-nineteenth-century culture is in many ways the result of taking the triumphant rhetoric of the Great Exhibition and its success at face value. This has led to the neglect of a group of sources that offer a very different view of the late 1840s and early 1850s. As a result, subversive or alternative commentary from this period has been neglected, and, as a consequence, little mutually constitutive interaction between high and low culture has been identified.9 Several seminal books have fostered this state of affairs, with the dates used in their titles and chapter headings perhaps the most noticeable, if crude, indicators of this. Considering popular culture and leisure, Robert Malcolmson, in his book Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850, concludes that tough economic conditions in the second quarter of the nineteenth century

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Novelty fair

witnessed the ‘disintegration’ of traditional culture, with the reshaping of popular leisure a feature of the period after 1850.10 In The Shows of London Richard D. Altick ends his investigation of popular didactic exhibits with a chapter on the Great Exhibition and two chapters on the 1850s. He writes ‘During the fifties the variegated complex of popular shows … began to disintegrate. Superficially, it is true, the change was not immediately apparent … but in retrospect of more than a century it can be seen that a deep transformation was well under way … not only the structure but the whole nature and tone of London exhibitions were undergoing a revolution.’11 However, as Chapter 4 explores, the relationship of the Great Exhibition to more established forms of popular entertainment was in fact vital: at the same time that the organizers of the Exhibition sought to distance the event from fairs, it comprised undeniably fair-like elements, and broadside ballads published at the time made such commonalities the focus of their satires. Turning to considerations of Victorian print culture, Louis James chose to end his survey, Print and the People, in 1851.12 Celina Fox, in her ground-­breaking study of graphic journalism in the 1830s and 1840s sees the ­single-sheet print as dying out over this period to be replaced by ‘large-scale engraving concerns, high capital turnover, profits and investment. The small, independent efforts had had their day.’ By 1850, she writes, ‘the mainstream of graphic journalism catered for a family audience with good clean fun’.13 More recently this view has been echoed by Brian Maidment.14 Although the rise of periodicals with large circulations and middle-class readerships is clear, broadside ballads and other single-sheet caricatures and pamphlets continued to be produced. More importantly for my argument, the lines between low-class and bawdy publications and what has been depicted as the cleaner humorous works suitable for the drawing-room were often blurred. As will be seen in the chapters that follow, Punch lifted visual puns from the imagery of broadside ballads, which left open the possibility of more risqué readings than would be considered appropriate for women and children in a domestic setting. In this sense I take up Patricia Anderson’s approach from her book, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860.15 Anderson puts forward a counter-argument to Fox’s that sees print culture as a top-down imposition of bourgeois values. Anderson’s main aim is to show that print culture was a more collaborative negotiation between seller and consumer. She writes that ‘The emergence of a formative mass culture – at least in its visual forms – was not a process of wholesale repression or replacement’, and questions the existence at mid century of either a ‘dominant, and cohesive middle-class culture’ or a ‘pure oppositional working-class culture’.16 Popular culture, she argues, was ‘a varied and variable experience’.17 As has already been hinted, with a more complex understanding of the middle years of the nineteenth century, links can be found between working-class and bourgeois visual and textual forms that



Introduction: Time’s question

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highlight how middle-class representational strategies – such as the panorama, ­daguerreotype, Punch cartoons and even the Great Exhibition itself – were ­constructed in hybrid and fluid ways that laid them open to stress. Chronology and ideology Like Novelty Fair, this book asserts the proximity of two key moments in British history: the Chartist demonstration of 10 April 1848 and the Great Exhibition of the Arts and Industry of All Nations, which opened on 1 May 1851. Not only did these events occur just a few years apart, their longer chronologies overlap. The origins of the Great Exhibition can be traced back to the highly successful exhibition held by the Society of the Arts in London in 1847, and the already well-established exhibitions at Mechanics Institutes in towns and cities typically in the north of England.18 In January 1848, Henry Cole sent a prospectus to Prince Albert outlining the Society of Art’s plan for a national exhibition, and began to solicit government backing for the scheme. Then, at a meeting in Paris in the summer of 1849, Cole and Herbert Minton, with Matthew Digby Wyatt, decided to make the planned exhibition international in scope. Thus, the Great Exhibition has a history that stretches back through the revolutions of 1848. Equally, Chartism and the revolutions of that year threw a long shadow, much longer than the twelve months of a single year. The Chartist movement did not end (or begin) in 1848, although it suffered a heavy setback with the perceived failure of the presentation of the ‘monster petition’ to Parliament, and the arrest of many of the movement’s leaders in the months that followed. Revolutions in Europe continued to fill the columns of the periodical press across an extended period after the first outbreaks of violence in 1848. For example, in December 1851, after the Great Exhibition had closed, Louis Napoleon dissolved the National Assembly and took the title of emperor, an act that brought the Second Republic of 1848 to an end. Equally, it was in April 1849 that the title of emperor was given to King Frederick Wilhelm IV, an event that was followed by the disintegration of the German National Assembly.  Realizing this simultaneity is an important step towards a more integrated view of events in the mid nineteenth century, but the fact that this chronology might need foregrounding needs some explanation. It is the result of both accident and design that Chartism and the Great Exhibition, occurring only a little over three years apart, have generated two such distinct, and on closer scrutiny even incompatible, bodies of scholarly writing. It is hardly an exaggeration to say they now sit at the centre of two distinct histories and disciplines. The stark ideological divide between these bodies of scholarship goes far deeper than the perception of emerging cultural hegemony identified by the scholars quoted previously, although this is a related issue.

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Novelty fair

In the second half of the twentieth century, it was historians interested in class with, typically, Marxist sympathies who were drawn to 1848 and had the largest impact on studies of this period, particularly during and after the politically turbulent 1960s – the decade that saw the publication of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.19 Thompson’s assertion of continuity in the political aspects of protest movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century has been debated ever since. In the later twentieth century, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the perceived failure of Chartism in 1848 was worked into a pessimistic vision of history. By contrast the Great Exhibition was initially co-opted to tell the story of a forward-looking and economically vibrant Britain. Increased interest in the Great Exhibition was sparked by the Festival of Britain that took place 100 years after its forerunner, in 1951. In this reading, Britain presiding liberally over a peaceful empire or commonwealth promotes progress and improvement for all.20 This view of the Great Exhibition has now been tempered, with particular emphasis on its imperialist agenda. But more generally, the divide between ideological standpoints within the secondary literature makes talking about 1848 and 1851 together difficult, as two distinct approaches, vocabularies and frameworks exist for each. However, from both perspectives the mid nineteenth century is seen as marking a break, encompassing both endings and beginnings. For historians of working-class politics the perceived failure of Chartism in 1848 marks the end of a tradition of English radicalism, although a far more nuanced view of the period between 1848 and 1871 has recently been given by Margot Finn in After Chartism.21 The Great Exhibition has been interpreted as initiating a moment of relative stability and quietude: ‘high Victorianism’ in the words of Asa Briggs, and ‘the age of equipoise’ in work of W. L. Burn.22 The Exhibition continues to be viewed as prefiguring modern and even post-modern spaces, spectacles and fetishized commodities, theories of which leave little room for class-based resistance.23 As Louise Purbrick cogently pointed out in 2001 ‘Histories which begin by using 1851 to summarize the mid-nineteenth century cannot help but continue to diminish the significance of 1848’, and with it class and critical agency.24 The decade that has followed this observation has seen important interventions with the publication of Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain by Tim Barringer, and Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture by Lara Kriegel.25 Although these writers do not explicitly aim to bring 1848 and 1851 back together (both books deal with broader chronologies), they bring some of the concerns of those who more typically write about the politics of 1848 to discussions of the Great Exhibition, namely labour and the working body, which reasserts class as a central concern.26 Read broadly, the different methodologies employed to investigate the politics of 1848 and the spectacle of 1851 exemplify two of the most compelling



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approaches to the past to emerge in the twentieth century. Pairs of opposing themes can be lined up as follows: history and culture, textual and visual, base and superstructure, structuralism and deconstruction, modernism and post-modernism, and we might also add local and global.27 The risk is that a study that aspires to offer a more objective and unbiased approach to mid-­ nineteenth-century Britain will only superficially unite the two bodies of scholarship. The investigation that follows is shaped by current trends in the field of Victorian studies. Following a productive engagement with gender, sexuality, race and issues of identity, what has emerged since the start of the twenty-first century is an approach that foregrounds close readings. Complex interpretive and imaginative moves have provided compelling and often startling new ways to understand the Victorians and some of their most iconic cultural productions, but in the process non-textual materials are rendered textual through scholarly endeavour indebted to literary criticism, and sources transmuted and perhaps even tamed in the process. Paradoxically this has taken place under the banner of interdisciplinarity. In relation to the Great Exhibition, such an approach characterizes many contributions to the volumes of collected essays The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays and Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace, and is perhaps epitomized by Jonah Siegel’s essay ‘Display Time: Art, Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal Palace’, published in 2010.28 As Kriegel has written the ‘pressures of currency … tend to redirect our concerns … from the material to the moral, and from the social to the aesthetic’.29 She concludes by pointing out ‘the importance of keeping material practice and social location in mind as we look forward’.30 While employing close readings of images and texts in the chapters that follow I have endeavoured to keep Time’s question of who were the winners in the battle for social and political power at mid century to the fore. Sacred profanities Novelty Fair shows how caricature reaches out to and combines elements from across a spectrum of cultural forms. It includes lines in ancient Greek and French, historical references and parodies of songs from the operas Les Huguenots, Somnabula and Norma. But it also references songs such as ‘Oh Susannah’ and ‘Old Dan Tucker’, typically performed in blackface, and popular tunes, such as ‘The Vicar of Bray’, ‘The King of the Cannibal Islands’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’, that were often reworked as the tunes for ballads. Many of the characters and items personified in Novelty Fair appear in the chapters that follow, which in turn clarify the play’s more obscure references: to the gent, the Casino and special constables’ truncheons. Novelty Fair relied on the audience’s familiarity not just with the latest news stories, but also with the conventions of the full range of contemporary visual satire, as exemplified in

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Punch’s weekly Large Cut, to communicate its riotous message. Scenes such as 1851 leading Time by the forelock around the stage followed by a parade of years, or personifications of France and Britannia quarrelling and making up, are drawn from the visual repertoire of Punch and a well-established tradition of political caricatures. Such close relationships between different strands of culture also open the possibility that, regardless of their aims, all productions, serious or humorous, were informed or infected with an opposite intention, either explicitly or via the potential associations available to their consumers. Even in the more serious sources explored in this book, which strove towards objectivity, there is a humorous valence unintentionally or unconsciously arrived at. For example, the government report on the fake (often humorous and punning) signatures on the Chartists’ ‘monster petition’, explored in Chapter 2, or the contents chosen for the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ at the Museum of Ornamental Art, which I show to be in dialogue with humorous portrayals of the gent in Chapter 6. During the crisis of 1848, boundaries between serious and humorous, respectable and risqué, seem to have become particularly fluid. In that year any kind of certainty about the direction of history was undermined by the fast-changing nature of events: at one moment revolution in London looked almost certain, but almost simultaneously it was proved to be an empty farce. The special constables and Chartists who took events most seriously were both subject to comic portrayals, which are the subject of Chapter 3. The reason that many revealing sources have come to be overlooked in the broader picture of Victorian popular culture is clearly related to the scholarly preoccupations outlined previously. Scholars of 1848 and of working-class history more generally, have been and remain interested in ballads and cheaper forms of entertainment (for example in his book Vision of the People Patrick Joyce discusses ballads, dialect literature, and the popular theatre as reflecting a coherent working-class consciousness31), but have tended to avoid the visual. Dorothy Thompson’s and Stephen Roberts’s book, Images of Chartism, published a selection of images, but with minimal commentary.32 Notably, despite one of the two daguerreotypes of the Chartist crowd of 10 April 1848 being reproduced in James Vernon’s Politics and the People, to date they have only been used as illustrations, or side-notes in the history of photography or the Royal Collection.33 Yet visual culture can offer significant insights to historians. For example, although the demographics of those who volunteered as special constables to help the police defend order and property has been examined in detail, the widespread satirical reaction to these would-be-heroes has been ignored. The ubiquity of satires on the special must surely have tempered how the middle classes remembered the 10 April demonstration.34 Scholars of 1851, by contrast, are interested in spectacle, and therefore have been attentive to the visual. However, certain sources have been privileged



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above others.35 Broadside ballads have been ignored in favour of Dickinson’s lithographs of the Great Exhibition’s colourful displays visited by well-dressed families, or richly illustrated volumes of the Crystal Palace’s elaborate contents, which better exemplify the commodity and its display. Such sources were typically made for the middle and upper classes due to the expense associated with their production (publication was by subscription, in the case of Dickinson’s Comprehensive Lithographs of the Great Exhibition of 1851), and they tend to disguise class antagonisms. What results, to take one notable example, is that a medium made for the working classes, broadside ballads, has only featured in a very minor way in accounts of the Crystal Palace. The collections at the Bodleian Library are proof that many ballads were published on the topic of the Great Exhibition, but the ballad continues to be associated with an earlier period and seen as a traditional form (although it is no more traditional than a newspaper, such as The Times). Ballad printers, as much as other publishers, were businessmen who wished to sell their product and had specific customers in mind. They are rude and rough, both textually and aesthetically, but ballads should be privileged for the insights they provide as reading neglected visual and textual sources alongside better known ones, can, at its most productive, generate a radically unfamiliar picture of the mid nineteenth century. This book aims to provide such a viewpoint, but it must be remembered that the resulting picture is unfamiliar to us only as a result of the existing scholarship.36 It will become clear that any kind of hegemony that the defeat of Chartism and the success of the Great Exhibition appeared to hold out was rudely undercut by satire and laughter. History has silenced its echoes, but a close reading of primary source material can bring it vividly back to life. Indeed, perhaps the best or only way to bridge the very different methodologies employed in approaching 1848 and 1851 is by considering neglected sources that, in E. P. Thompson’s words, have been subject to ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.37 I would also argue that the radical and unruly inversions of these works, the way that they hold nothing sacred and place everything in flux, highlights a truth about capitalism. One of the most poetic and apocalyptic passages of the Manifesto of the Communist Party reads: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’38 In this passage Marx and Engels are not in fact describing the results of a revolution by the proletariat, but rather the economic and social conditions that result from the rise of the bourgeoisie.39 In a passage that contains an echo of the opening lines of Novelty Fair, Marshall Berman commenting on this asks ‘Where does all this leave us …? It leaves us in strange and paradoxical positions. … To say our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well.’40 Broadside ballads, popular satirical prints, bawdy plays and cheap semi-respectable humorous publications, which were ubiquitous in the mid nineteenth century, profane sacred aspects of culture. They reveal the contradictions, tensions and even the

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destructive and chaotic tendencies that are the flipside to, but also underpin, bourgeois preoccupations, such as consumption, patriarchy and respectability, as well as forms of representation such as the daguerreotype or the panorama, which on the surface seem to affirm a fixed, stable and mastering viewpoint on the world, but in fact contain inherent vice. The six chapters that follow, examining the visual culture of both 1848 and 1851, expand on this claim. Chapter 1 opens with a consideration of the gent in 1848, a figure that epitomized vulgar and potentially unruly popular consumerism. Promising to separate the respectable middle-class reader from this figure through a definition of his habits and haunts, Smith precisely locates the gent within spaces of urban leisure and consumption in London, namely the Lowther Arcade and Laurent’s Casino – a cheap public dance hall. However, at the same time these books attempt to categorize and confine the gent, the volumes’ and Smith’s liminal status as an author meant that buying these volumes risked bringing the reader down to the gent’s level, by entrancing them with vulgar and titillating consumerism. Chapter 2 considers the 10  April Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common, which occurred just over a month after Smith’s essay on the gent at the Casino was first published. I consider how, in depicting the Chartist crowd, forms typically linked with the fashioning of a stable middle-class identity, such as the daguerreotype, proved slippery. The third and last chapter on 1848 investigates satires on the middle-class special constable, who volunteered to assist the police in keeping order on 10 April. The specials were the butt of humorous barbs after it became clear that there had been an overreaction to the revolutionary threat of the Chartists. Humorous representations of the special revealed the m ­ iddle-class body as overly domesticated and profoundly un-heroic. Specifically I demonstrate how at this stressful moment Punch’s supposedly respectable cartoons came to traffic with the vulgar humour of ballads, lithographed satires and theatrical depictions of the shamed specials and their phallic, but pathetic, gutta percha truncheons. The second half of this book considers 1851. Firstly I consider the relationship between the Great Exhibition and fairs as highlighted in the texts of broadside ballads, and draw attention to the entertainments on offer beyond Hyde Park at Batty’s Hippodrome and the Great National Fair at Notting Hill. These sources reveal how from its very conception the Great Exhibition contained fair-like elements, and that the fair was therefore a central point of reference in defining that event. Showing how the fair, and by extension the market place, was of central concern highlights how cash and commerce haunted the Great Exhibition, which was supposedly an expression of bonds of unity and common interest between bourgeois and worker, Britain and foreign powers. Turning to John Leech’s famous image of class harmony at the Crystal Palace, ‘The Pound and the Shilling’, in Chapter 5 I show how touches of



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romance were introduced to disguise the cash nexus underlined in the cartoon’s caption. However, these touches threatened to recall the sexual encounters that broadside ballads alleged were a fair-like attraction at the Exhibition. The final chapter turns back to the themes raised in the first: questions of consumption and revolution, class and taste. In the aftermath of the Great Exhibition Cole set up his ‘Chamber of Horrors’ at the Museum of Ornamental Art, but like Smith’s volumes on the gent, at the same time the display sought to ensure that the ­middle-class shopper would not make vulgar aesthetic choices, they highlighted the potentially revolutionary aspects of consumerism, linked to sweated labour, class mobility and the impossibility of neutral aesthetic judgements based on objective standards. In conclusion I reflect on the points of overlap between the visual culture of 1848 and 1851. Despite the very different scholarly treatment that each year has so far received, the same tensions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms, and the same complex negotiations between respectable and unruly visual culture characterize both 1848 and 1851 and are apparent when the selection of sources is widened. Notes  1 [Albert Smith and Tom Taylor], Novelty Fair; or, Hints for 1851, an exceedingly premature, and thoroughly apropos Revue (London: Lacy, [1850]).  2 Smith and Taylor, Novelty Fair, p. 5.  3 Smith and Taylor, Novelty Fair, p. 9.  4 Charles Mackay, ‘The Good Time Coming’, in The Book of English Songs: From the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, [1851]), pp. 159–61.  5 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 19, 5.  6 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 5.  7 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 3.  8 Even Stallybrass and White suggest this, writing that attacks on the court and the monarch were ‘an obsessive source of graphic and verse satire up to the coronation of Victoria’, although several broadside ballads send up Victoria and Albert’s marital relations very crudely. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 102.  9 For authors who have begun to foreground these tensions in relation to 1851, see Peter Gurney, ‘An Appropriated Space: the Great Exhibition and the Working Class’, pp. 114–45, and Brian Maidment, ‘Entrepreneurship and the Artisans: John Cassell, the Great Exhibition and the Periodical Idea’, pp. 79–113 in Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), and Peter Gurney, ‘ “A Palace for the People”?: the Crystal Palace and Consumer Culture in Victorian England’, pp. 138–50, and Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, ‘Mayhew, the Prince, and the Poor: The Great Exhibition of Power and Dispossession’, in Buzard, Childer and Gillooly

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(eds), Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 123–37. 10 Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 171. Peter Clark ends his consideration of the English alehouse in 1830 with the introduction of the Beer Act. Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1983), p. 5. 11 Richard D. Altick, Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), p. 470. 12 Louis James, Print and the People, 1819–1851 (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1978). 13 Celina Fox, Graphic Journalism in England during the 1830s and 1840s (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), pp. 24–5. 14 See Brian Maidment, Reading Popular Prints, 1790–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), see pp. 28, 57. 15 Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 16 Anderson, The Printed Image, pp. 4, 7. 17 Anderson, The Printed Image, p. 8. 18 See Altick, The Shows of London, pp. 455–6. 19 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). 20 In the late 1970s, Brantlinger wrote that ‘The Great Exhibition of 1851 may be interpreted, as indeed it was by many Victorians, as marking the border between two ages: the past one bleak, hostile, rent with class warfare and political vituperation, and the future one hopeful, golden, ever-advancing on well-oiled wheels down “the ringing grooves of change.” ’ See Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Introduction’, in The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832–1867 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 3. 21 Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848– 1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 22 See Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), and W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (London: Unwin University Books, 1968). See also Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform. Notably the paperback edition of K. Theodore Hoppen’s The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) uses a detail of Henry Courtney Selous’s painting, The Inauguration of the Great Exhibition, on the front cover. 23 For readings of the Great Exhibition in these terms, see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), and Andrew H. Miller, ‘Spaces of Exchange: Interpreting the Great Exhibition of 1851’, in Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 50–90. 24 Louise Purbrick, ‘Introduction’, in The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 4.



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25 Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) and Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 26 Both Barringer and Kriegel argue that the working body must be reinserted into the spectacle of and reaction to the Crystal Palace. Kriegel notes that artisanal skill was celebrated at the Great Exhibition alongside and indivisible from the display of machines and glittering commodities in her longer account of design and design reform in Victorian Britain. Barringer takes the Great Exhibition as his starting point and weaves together its spectacle and the question of the working body, both at home and in imperial contexts, from 1851 to the 1870s. 27 For example, contrast the statistical approach of David Goodway in London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and the literary approach of Isobel Armstrong in Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). However, this is not quite so clear cut, as there has been significant work on Chartism, slavery and empire, but there is no material history of Chartism that is image and object focused in the same way as the scholarship on the Great Exhibition. Likewise class and the Great Exhibition is not a widely discussed issue, although Peter Gurney and Brain Maidment have taken up this theme in essay-length studies. 28 See Purbrick, The Great Exhibition of 1851, James Buzard, Joseph W. Childer and Eileen Gillooly (eds), Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2007), and Jonah Siegel, ‘Display Time: Art, Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal Palace’, Yearbook of English Studies, 40:1–2 (Spring 2010), pp. 33–60. 29 Lara Kriegel, ‘Looking Forward, Looking Backward: Response’, Victorian Studies 55:2 (Winter 2013), p. 270. 30 Kriegel, ‘Looking Forward, Looking Backward: Response’, p. 274. 31 See Patrick Joyce, ‘Kingdoms of the Mind: the Imaginary Constitution of the Social Order’, in Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 213–328. 32 See Dorothy Thompson and Stephen Roberts, Images of Chartism (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Merlin Press, 1998). See also Ian Hayward, ‘George W. M. Reynolds and “The Trafalgar Square Revolution”: Radicalism, the Carnivalesque and Popular Culture in mid-Victorian England’, Journal of Victorian Culture 7:1 (2002), pp. 23–59. Reynolds focuses on the response to the riots in Trafalgar Square that occurred in March 1848, a few weeks before the 10 April Chartist demonstration. 33 Vernon discusses this image very briefly. See James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 213, and plate 52, p. 211. 34 For an account of the special constables see Goodway, London Chartism, pp. 129–36. See also John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 112–18. 35 It is perhaps significant that even historians feel that books on the Great Exhibition should be heavily illustrated, unlike their colleagues who study Chartism. See for example Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display

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(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) or Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: Art Science and Productive Industry, A History of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (New York: Athlone Press, 2002). 36 This approach was inspired by Marshall Berman’s literary reading of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 87–129. 37 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 12. 38 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto with an introduction and notes by Gareth Stedman Jones (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 223. 39 They write the ‘bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society’. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 222. 40 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, p. 95.

1

The ‘offensive body’: the politics of consumption in 1848

‘After much diligent investigation, we find no mention made of the Gent in the writings of authors who flourished antecedent to the last ten years … He is evidently the result of a variety of our present condition of society – that constant wearing struggle to appear something more than we in reality are, which now characterizes everybody, both in their public and private phase.’1 With these words Albert Smith introduced his popular volume The Natural History of the Gent, published in 1847, one of a series of ‘Social Zoologies’, which offers a humorous description of a modern type and its homes and haunts. Yet attendant on Smith’s observation of how the gent’s new way of being is affecting the whole of society is his predicted demise. Smith’s volume concludes with the following prophetic lines: We trust the day will come … when the Gent will be an extinct species … And then this treaties may be regarded as those zoological papers are now which treat of the Dodo: and the hieroglyphics of coaches and horses, pheasants, foxes’ heads, and sporting dogs found on the huge white buttons of his wrapper, will be regarded with as much curiosity, and possibly will give rise to as much discussion and investigation as the ibises and scarabæi in the Egyptian Room of the British Museum.2

The gent as a type according to Smith is at once fixed and fluid, ubiquitous and doomed, a distinct ‘species’, whose traits nevertheless ‘characterize[s] everybody’.3 I argue that alongside figures such as the navvy, the poor Irish immigrant, the prostitute and the seamstress, the gent was at once marginal and central, acting as a lightning rod for a number of tensions that characterize the mid nineteenth century. Smith’s writings precisely define the gent as a type and locate him within the entertainment venues and shopping streets of late-1840s London. This functioned to distance the gent’s threatening vulgarity from middle-class respectability. In this sense Smith’s volume should be viewed alongside etiquette books that aimed to help the newly moneyed avoid social embarrassment as they rose socially. Although seemingly a figure of fun, because taste and class were elided in his ‘offensive body’, the gent was central

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to thinking about consumerism at this moment. The gent became a cipher for what was wrong with a society based on mass production, sweated labour, frivolous and vain spending, and uneducated buying choices. Surprisingly, consumption could even be linked to revolution through the gent’s performance of class. Smith’s fullest explorations of the gent, The Natural History of the Gent published in 1847 and the essay ‘The Casino’ published in 1848, coincided with both Chartism and revolution in Europe. Beginning with a close, reconstructive reading of ‘The Casino’ this chapter works outwards to reveal the larger themes and more serious issues that lay behind the intense interest in the gent at this moment. Too prevalent to be wished into extinction as Smith had hoped, the gent’s untutored form of consumption ultimately motivated the design reform programme of Cole and his circle at the Great Exhibition and the Museum of Ornamental Art, which display prejudicial attitudes to novel mass-produced items of the kind linked with the gent, as will be explored in the concluding chapter of this book. West Strand: locating the gent in 1848 Early in 1848 Smith identified Laurent’s Casino, adjacent to the Lowther Arcade just to the east of Trafalgar Square, as a special haunt of the gents. This public dancehall was a space of urban leisure with a specific history and associations, where social aspirations could temporarily be put into play through consumer goods and cheap entertainments. The discourse about this location in the late 1840s, which had previously been used for didactic exhibitions of practical science, prefigured questions of the relationship of the serious and the popular, vulgar and respectable, that swirled around the Great Exhibition. Smith’s taxonomy of the gent in the late 1840s was an extension of a project begun much earlier in the decade in the pages of Punch. Although aiming to amuse, the motivation to define social types has parallels in social investigation, such as Henry Mayhew’s contemporary project to document the working class in London. Such projects aimed at control and regulation, as well as description and categorization, but often how these texts aim to do their work reveals as much about the preoccupations of the describer as the subject described. This is no less true in the case of Smith’s work on the gent as urban type. Smith’s essay, ‘The Casino’, appeared in the first instalment of Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character with Illustrative Essays by Popular Writers, also edited by Smith, which appeared in late March 1848.4 Full-page chiaroscuro wood engraving by Henry Vizetelly accompanied the piece, from a drawing on the wood by the celebrated French lithographer and watercolourist, Paul Gavarni.5 The engraving depicts the gent and his female companion at Laurent’s Casino and was one of the twenty-three that eventually comprised



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the contents of the completed series (see Figure 1.1).6 Gavarni was perfectly placed to undertake this work, having produced illustrations for a series that earlier in the decade had defined Parisian types: the Physiologies. Gavarni may have known Smith’s ‘Social Zoologies’, or Smith or his publisher may have showed them to the artist, as some of the engravings for Gavarni in London seem derived from those publications. For example, Gavarni’s image of two young women with a foot-servant, which illustrates the essay ‘A Sketch from the West-End’, is probably copied from the vignette which appears on page twelve of The Natural History of ‘Stuck-Up’ People. Likewise the image of ‘The Casino’ seems to be a combination of illustrations from The Natural History of the Gent that illustrated the chapter ‘Of the Gent at the Casinos’, notably the initial vignette for this chapter on page sixty-four (see Figure 1.2).7 Gavarni’s image of Laurent’s Casino depicts two figures, one male and one female, seated on opposite sides of a table in a booth. Behind the couple, beneath one of four ‘monster chandeliers’ that lit the venue, we can make out at least five couples dancing, and a man’s top-hat is visible over the partition to the left.8 From the text we also know that the couple is drinking a ‘sherry-­ cobbler’ through straws.9 Contemporary advertising reveals a popular connection between the sherry-cobbler and Laurent’s Casino.10 Made with sherry, ice, sugar and fruit, it was, Smith writes, ‘not strong to be sure; but this is an advantage, in addition to that of the corresponding modesty of price’.11 The drinking straws form a bridge between the two figures meeting at the rim of their shared glass, suggesting flirtation or courtship. This linkage is echoed by the two additional straws that lie on the table in front of the couple, and pass from the male figure’s cane to the female figure’s posy and bare arm. Other items on the table are the man’s up-turned top-hat and cigar, which together with the woman’s bouquet and prominently displayed bracelet mark out their gendered territory on either side of the table. The phallic cane and the folds between the flowers read as sexually suggestive. The man’s slightly long, curled hair, his ring and short cane, the large buttons to his double-breasted sac coat, and his cigar are all the accessories of the gent, and would have been instantly recognizable. Smith’s essay records that gents were the ‘overwhelming class’ present at the casino.12 The Adelaide Gallery, the hall that housed Laurent’s Casino, occupied a specific yet shifting site within the array of entertainments to be had for a shilling in London. The venue had opened in 1832 as part of a new development on the site of a former slum at the end of the Strand closest to Trafalgar Square. Overseen by John Nash and completed in 1830, the building development was and is known as West Strand.13 On a triangular plot stood a neo-classical, stucco-fronted building supported internally by iron columns. The facade still stands today. The development was bordered by the Strand, William IV Street and Adelaide Street, the latter running behind the church of St Martin-in-theFields, which stood on the newly cleared Trafalgar Square. Bisecting the West

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1.1  Henry Vizetelly after Guillaume Sulpice Chevalier (called Paul Gavarni), fullpage illustration to ‘The Casino’ by Albert Smith, chiaroscuro wood engraving from Albert Smith (ed.), Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character with Illustrative Essays by Popular Writers (London: D. Bogue, 1849), opposite p. 13.



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1.2  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, title letters to chapter 10, ‘Of the Gent at the Casinos’, wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1847), p. 64.

Strand block was the Lowther Arcade, an indoor shopping street modelled on the Royal Opera and Burlington Arcades that had opened around a decade earlier and were located further west near the fashionable retail districts of Regent Street and Bond Street.14 To the west of the new development were the National Gallery (opened in 1838), the club-land of Pall Mall, Whitehall and St James’s Park beyond. To the east were the less salubrious Hungerford and Covent Garden markets and the slum of St Giles. In many ways the ­development of the West Strand was an attempt to expand bourgeois and

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1.3  J. Rogers after Nathaniel Whittock, ‘Lowther Arcade’ (detail), engraving from Tallis’s Street Views and Pictorial Directory of England, Scotland and Ireland with a Faithful History and Description of every object of Interest by William Gaspey ([London]: J. & F. Tallis, [1847]), plate following p. 44.

upper-class West End commercial traffic further east, or at least to provide a barrier between the west and east.15 By 1848, it was the gent and more broadly the lower middle class that was the urban type most associated with the West Strand. Besides the entertainments of Laurent’s Casino at the Adelaide Gallery, the development offered forms of consumption that mirrored aristocratic styles, just as its architecture recalled the look of high culture through the vocabulary of neo-classical forms (see Figure 1.3). By mid century, the Lowther Arcade had became famous for its toy and trinket shops, including Dowie’s Emporium of Novelty, Sampson’s Toy Warehouse and the Civet Cat Bazaar, in addition to milliners, confectioners and a seller of sheet music. The woman in Gavarni’s image wears a bracelet and the man a ring. Both could have been purchased at the Lowther Arcade. Indeed, Smith observed in his The Natural History of the Gent that the gent’s flashy and outrageous stock pins in the form, for example, of a girl on a swing, were only sold there (see Figure 1.4).16 An advertisement for Richard’s Repository, at No. 1 Lowther Arcade, gives a flavour of the kind of jewellery up for sale: ‘All is not Gold that Glitters, but the mosaic Gold Jewellery now sold at Richard’s Repository … so much resembles the best Gold that the difference is scarcely to be perceived.’17 This counterfeit jewellery, with its emphasis on a glittering appearance, paralleled and supported the counterfeiting of the leisured classes that took place in and around the Arcade and at the Casino.



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1.4  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, untitled wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1847), p. 35.

The fullest description of the Lowther Arcade at mid century appeared in 1853, in an essay by George Augustus Sala titled ‘Arcadia’, published in Household Words.18 Sala gives a detailed account of the ‘sham’ and ‘fancy hucksteries’, the ‘toys and gems and nick-nacks’ of the Lowther Arcade.19 His essay also gives an important insight into the kinds of people who consumed and wore these items. Sala lists ‘my pretty trademan’s daughter, my humble milliner or sempstress; even my comely cook, housemaid, or damsel of all work’ as frequenters of the arcade, and describes the men who might purchase jewellery for them there as ‘the fond youth in the astonishing coat and the alarming waistcoat:’ the gent.20 Sala’s text makes it clear that the objects available for purchase in the arcade, although cheap, were considered luxuries by their lower-middle-class consumers. Although Sala gently mocks them, he ultimately encourages their aspirations.21 In a slightly patronizing passage, he observed of the female consumers of the Lowther’s luxuries: ‘they shall revel as it pleases

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them in the eighteenpenny finery of this Arcadia; and Samuel or William walking “along with them,” or “keeping of ‘em company” in the smartest surtouts and the whitest of Berlin gloves, on the crowded steamboats, or amid the ­velvetty glades of the metropolitan parks, shall be as proud of them and of their jewels as though they were duchesses’.22 The ‘Arcadia’ outlined in Household Words is a peaceful and well-ordered land of contented consumers, free, on the surface at least, of class tensions and conflicts. However, in 1848 this blissful Arcadian future was less assured. It was clear that the venture to ‘bourgeoisify’ the West Strand had not been completely successful. In 1847 Smith wrote of the arcade: ‘It is, as it were, a frontier between the two hemispheres of London life.’23 The following year, partly due to this ‘frontier’ location, the area was the scene of violent clashes between the crowds and the police.24 On 6 March 1848, a mass meeting on income tax was taken over by Chartists, and Trafalgar Square was the scene of a violent riot. That evening the guards were turned out at Buckingham Palace, and it was another twenty-four hours before order was restored. This was the context for the creation and reception of Smith’s and Gavarni’s depiction of the Casino, published less than three weeks later. The space that housed Laurent’s Casino also had a chequered history intimately bound up with the identity of the West Strand. From 1832, the Adelaide Gallery (named, like the adjacent street, after the wife of William IV) first housed the National Gallery of Practical Science. This venture had been founded by a group of leading engineers, businessmen, and a philanthropist, and aimed ‘to promote … the adoption of whatever may be found to be comparatively superior, or relatively perfect in the arts, sciences, or manufacturers’.25 In 1834 the organization received a Royal Charter, and in 1839 Michael Faraday lectured there on electricity.26 The exhibition space was a long, narrow room with domed sky lights, and a gallery running around the sides. The display was dominated by a water tank in which innovative steam-driven boats were demonstrated in miniature, and specimens and machines lined the walls. Exhibits included an oxyhydrogen microscope (which combined a microscope with a magic lantern to project what it magnified), a Jacquard loom, a lithographic press, a cattle stomach pump, an electric eel and, perhaps most famously, Jacob Perkins’s steam gun. The programming at the National Gallery was varied, encompassing lectures on subjects such as atmospheric railways, the new science of photography (the French photographer Antoine Claudet had his daguerreotype studio on the roof), promenade concerts and dissolving views. The mixed nature of the exhibits points to the fact that National Gallery of Practical Science, as well as having didactic aims, was a commercial institution endeavouring to attract the largest number of visitors possible, in open competition with venues such as the Royal Polytechnic Institute and the other varied entertainments on offer in London to the paying public.



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As historians of science have pointed out, there was no hard line between instruction and entertainment in an era before the professionalization of science in the second half of the nineteenth century.27 However, a report in The Times revealed that even in 1843 such fluidity could be questioned when it led to inappropriate behaviour. After a visit to the National Gallery of Practical Science a reporter huffily recounted: We were somewhat surprised to witness at this place last night a series of exhibitions, we cannot say entertainments, which bear no sort of relation to science either in practice or theory, and which are certainly neither adapted to enlighten an audience nor confer much respectability on the establishment in which they were displayed … half-a-dozen of that class of persons who are not inappropriately termed ‘snobs’, inhaled the laughing-gas, and managed by the display of various antics to make themselves greater fools than nature perhaps designed them to be. This sort of exhibition may perhaps attract, and fill the pockets of the proprietor of the gallery better than an exhibition of things really and legitimately connected with science but surely it is too much to call the building in which such scenes are exhibited the ‘Gallery of Practical Science’.28

It was not the mixed displays – combining musical entertainment with air pumps and magnets – that were objectionable to the writer for The Times, so much as the social make-up of the audience and its behaviour while in attendance. The ‘snobs’ the passage describes are precisely the confusing type of urban petit bourgeois, encompassing the gent, that invoked but subverted, and even satirized, the norms of respectable behaviour, turning a supposedly didactic exhibition into an opportunity for carnivalesque display. In the event, The Times’ assessment helped to sound the death knell for the National Gallery of Practical Science, which had been in financial difficulties since 1841.29 By 1845 the institution was so debt ridden that it finally closed, and the next year Laurent’s Casino was opened in its place.30 Several of the musical acts from before the change in ownership stayed on the bill, an indication of the fluidity between the didactic and the lighthearted.31 Smith makes much humorous mileage out of the transition, but it is clear anxieties remained.32 Indeed, in these years several other institutions founded with similarly scientific and highminded aims were moving in the same direction. The Times seemed ­somewhat satisfied with Laurent’s Casino, but gave the back-handed compliment: ‘it offers on reasonable terms a most suitable kind of ­entertainment for the great bulk of the audience which generally attends there’.33 The knowing tone of this statement suggests that the reader was expected to be familiar with the low social make-up of the Casino’s patrons (the same sort of people who shopped in the Lowther Arcade and had enough disposable income to afford the one shilling entrance charge), and the assumption that this class was separate and different from the class of person reading The Times.

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Despite The Times’ lukewarm approval, in October 1848 an article in the Monthly Magazine suggests that questions were still being asked about the propriety of the public there: With the proper determination to render his [M. Laurent’s] Casino a réunion for the lovers of dancing, he was determined to banish from it all that might tend to depreciate such an establishment in the opinions of the most fastidious. The latter principle has been stringently carried out, and the result proves that under proper regulations the Casino is not only beneficial to health, but tends to give an added impetus to the more serious duties of society.34

It is unclear exactly what was causing the depreciation in the Adelaide Gallery’s reputation or who Laurent had needed to ‘banish’, but his insistence on the Casino’s encouragement of the ‘more serious duties of society’, meaning presumably industrious work, seem to reflect The Times’ earlier anxiety about the behaviour of those in attendance. In this, the author of the advertisement was echoing the text of Smith’s essay on Laurent’s Casino for Gavarni in London. Smith, however, made specific reference to the recent events of February 1848. He commented that: Individuals who are cooped up all day, on high stools or behind counters, must have some method of setting free their constrained energies. In France they despoil palaces and upset thrones, when they are out on the loose; in England, formerly they stole knockers and smashed lamps; and they also got wonderfully drunk. Now at the conclusion of a Casino programme … all these rollicking propensities are so thoroughly taken out of them, that the bed, which was formerly looked upon as a ‘slow’ refuge … is very calmly resorted to.35

Note here that Smith is discussing not the disruptiveness and potential violence of the working class, but the lower middle class, specifically those who worked as clerks on ‘high stools’ or shop assistants ‘behind counters’. Defining the gent For precision and political insight, Smith’s brief essay on the gent at Laurent’s Casino is a rich source. However, the gent had received a longer treatment and fuller definition in The Natural History of the Gent, which was published the previous year. Although Smith claims that the gent is a recently emerged type, the text for this little book was not written in 1847 and has complex origins. The gent had featured in a series of articles Smith published in Punch in 1842 under the title ‘Physiology of the London Idler’.36 These articles were clearly inspired by Louis Huart’s Physiologie du Flaneur, published in Paris the previous year, although a gent-like figure does not appear in Huart’s volume. Whereas in 1842 the gent was one among many London idlers in Smith’s articles for Punch, by 1846 he was important enough to warrant more extended treatment in Bentley’s



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Miscellany.37 In the years between 1842 and the publication of Smith’s later articles the gent had become ubiquitous in the pages of Punch and in popular culture more broadly. Smith also wrote the gent onto the London stage, where he was portrayed by the famous comic actor John Orlando Parry. By 1847 the gent had emerged as a significant type deserving of special treatment in his own volume of Smith’s ‘Social Zoologies’, alongside The Natural History of the Ballet Girl, The Natural History of ‘Stuck-Up’ People, The Natural History of the Idler upon Town and The Natural History of Flirt.38 In the first chapter of The Natural History of the Gent Smith describes three examples of the type, and through these descriptions certain common gentish characteristics emerge. All three figures are dressed in bright or loudly patterned cloths, they smoke cigars, often carry a short cane, have some shiny accessories (rings or a silver cane-top), and associate themselves with equestrian sports through their conversation or their clothes. Such characteristics are caricatured in the volume’s numerous wood-engraved illustrations. For example, in the illustration on page sixty-nine in the chapter on the gent at the casino, we see a gent dancing with a young woman (see Figure 1.5). He is dressed in boldly checked trousers, and wears a bow-like checked stock, the ends of which project horizontally from his neck. His triangular sac coat is fastened with oversized buttons, and his short cane can be seen projecting from his pocket. Several gents in similar costumes appear in the frontispiece to the volume (see Figure 1.6). Like the dancing gent, these men have longer hair, almost reaching their shoulders, and large pins can be seen sticking up at an angle from their neckties. This garb makes the gent as depicted in mid-century visual culture and literature easily recognizable. The gent’s attire exaggerates the modish male silhouette and fashionable accessories to grotesque proportions. Smith writes that the gent draws his inspiration from fashion plates aimed at the luxury consumer, but buys cheap readymade (‘ticketed’) clothes displayed in tailors’ windows.39 Smith writes that to attract the notice of a gent ‘A great coat must be a “Chesterfield,” a “Taglioni,” or a “Codrington;” a little rag of coloured silk for the neck is called a “Byron Tie;” and so on. If the things are not dignified by these terms, the Gent does not think much of them.’40 Smith continues: ‘To catch his eye alone, are the representations of men of ton put at the side of the advertisements’.41 Showing how dearly the gent wishes to believe that these commodities bring him closer to the aristocratic dandy, Smith describes the gent buying a ‘“D’Orsay blouse”’ in the belief that it has ‘been made under the Count’s own eye’.42 The gent displays these fashions at the theatre, tobacco shops, public dancehalls (‘casinos’) and ‘musical taverns’ (forerunners of the music hall), in the shopping streets of the West End, at the seaside, the horse races, on steam and rowing boats on the Thames, or on top of an omnibus. These are all places where crowds gather, and where the gent finds a potential audience for his accessorized performance

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1.5  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, untitled wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1847), p. 69.

and mimicking of aristocratic style and leisure. All could be accessed for relatively small sums, or in the case of shopping streets and arcades, free of charge. Ultimately the gent is motivated by the successful counterfeiting of class; his chief pleasure is to be mistaken for one of the fashionable swells he imitates. The prerequisite for being a gent seems to be a certain amount of disposable income (however small), no dependents and some leisure time. Reading Smith’s volume closely shows that the gent is employed in some occupation that allows him to have the evenings and Sundays free for leisure activities, or alternatively is the son of a family who has made money in trade, in which case he has more free time and money (Smith describes this type of gent both at the



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1.6  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, frontispiece, wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1847), n.p.

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seaside and abroad in France).43 But fixing his exact class is sometimes difficult. Smith writes ‘The majority of them have evidently occupations, which keep them somewhere until four or five o’clock, and so they never come out in their full force until dusk, except on holidays.’44 The gent is therefore a liminal or boundary figure, existing between the respectable and the vulgar, but with the potential to move in either direction. His behaviour draws attention to how class is performed, a potentially destabilizing gesture. By mid century the gent was one of the most recognized urban types of the day. Leech, who had done the most beside Smith to popularize this figure, placed the gent in and around the Great Exhibition in further caricatures for Punch, he can even be seen in one of Dickinson’s famous and much reproduced lithographs of the interior of the Crystal Palace, where he lounges against a display of antlers (is he a young buck or out to cuckold someone?) and, with his cane to his lips, stares at a woman and child as they pass.45 The gent finally found a place in high art, as Mary Cowling has shown, he is an arresting figure in William Powell Frith’s major panoramic oil-painting, Derby Day, of 1858: the startled young man with his hands in his pockets and disarranged clothes seen standing bereft and defrauded at centre-left next to the thimble-riggers’ table. Smith’s volume, however, represented the height of the gent’s notoriety: it appears to have run to at least six editions, the third of which was issued only a month after the volume first appeared in early April 1847. The demand to know about the gent and see him defined coincided with a decade that saw cheap consumer goods, particularly printed textiles, come within the reach of many.46 In Smith’s texts the gent is repulsive, but the figure’s popularity suggests fascination, stemming from the reassurance he provides to the middle-class reader that they are a different type of consumer, not likely to make the same mistakes. However, the very author and volumes that informed the mid-nineteenth-century reader of the gent appeared as suspect as the subject which they treated. ‘Wretched little books’: the repulsive and fascinating gent Although Smith’s volumes attempt to define the boundary between respectable and risqué purchasing, at the same time the material form of these books and their sometimes vulgar allusions brought back the question of appropriate consumption. Although Smith’s The Natural History of the Gent and other volumes in the series of ‘Social Zoologies’ might seem inoffensive, they were later collectively described by their printer, and rival publisher to Bogue, Henry Vizetelly as ‘wretched little books’.47 It is worth pausing to consider why this should be, and situate these volumes within the landscape of mid-­­nineteenthcentury publishing. The pocket-sized volumes of the ‘Social Zoologies’ series were small in format, highly portable and ideally suited to reading on the



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train or in an omnibus. They were cheaply priced at a shilling, notably the same price as entry to Laurent’s Casino, and later the lowest price of entry to the Great Exhibition. The pages are profusely illustrated with woodcuts. In format and tone they were indebted to the extensive and highly popular series of Physiologies, published in Paris. The vogue for Physiologies in that city peaked in 1841–2 when around 120 were published all with a similar format.48 These volumes were also cheap and hugely popular, and they were available in London, being sold through shops such as Delaporte’s Parisian Repository in the Burlington Arcade.49 It was perhaps this association with cheap French literature, and a series which had notably covered the lives of the working woman of Paris, that tainted Smith’s volumes. Moreover, two of the wood engravings in the volume reproduced popular erotic prints: a housemaid cleaning steps seen from behind, and a woman wearing a man’s coat and hat, ‘looking though an eye-glass at the top of a whip’.50 The Natural History of the Gent was singled out by Vizetelly as a ‘trumpery brochure’, and understanding their debt to France, there is an implied critique in the use of a French word to describe these small books.51 Smith himself was a complex and, to some, controversial figure; a former medical student, he had for a time studied in Paris before becoming a member of London’s literary bohemia. In 1841 he had co-founded Punch, although he soon left the magazine. Patrick Leary in his recent highly entertaining history of the Punch brotherhood speculates that Smith was found to be too vulgar, especially after the transfer of ownership of the magazine to the respectable printing firm of Bradbury and Evans in 1843.52 Smith was replaced by Thackeray, who never got on well with Smith.53 After his departure from Punch Smith took on numerous projects linked to popular publishing and the theatre, before finding fame in the 1850s with one-man theatricals, most notably ‘The Ascent of Mont Blanc’, which retold his adventure on that mountain against a scrolling panorama. Vizetelly gives a colourful and telling account of Smith in the years he was writing his ‘Social Zoologies:’ Albert Smith was then supposed to practice as a dentist at the dingy-­looking house he rented in Percy-street, off Tottenham Court-road, and where, in addition to a skeleton exposed in the hall, no end of trumpery bizarre nick-nacks, picked up by him chiefly during his excursions abroad, were displayed. One of the most striking of these was a small working model of a guillotine, which had the place of honour assigned to it on the mantelpiece of the stuffy back room where Albert in his French ouvrier’s blouse usually wrote his copy. In these careless days Smith’s great delight was to caper at some masked ball in the guise of a Gavarni débardeur, or a booted and bewigged French postilion, dancing energetically till daylight with some fourth rate actress of whom he had become temporarily enamoured.54

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Vizetelly recalls that the most significant reason that ‘literary men’ disliked Smith was that he often stated that ‘high art was all “rot”’ and Shakespeare ‘ludicrously overrated’.55 As late as 1862, two years after Smith’s death, Douglas Jerrold, editor of Punch, recited the following lines on Smith at the Punch table: ‘My uncle water closets makes / Malodorous of vapour / And I who scribble books for Bogue / Of course supply the paper.’56 This seems like an unnecessarily cruel overreaction to Smith’s work, but it highlights the gravity of what was at stake for the Punch staff who had to work to uphold and maintain their publication’s perceived respectability. Smith, for Vizetelly, and for others in his circle, is too French, which also could imply too revolutionary – writing under the shadow of a guillotine dressed as a worker. His leisure pursuits and tastes are too close to the gent who he caricatures and, like the gent, Smith’s slim ‘Social Zoologies’ were vulgar, cheap and commercial. Smith therefore blurred the lines he was supposedly policing, between risqué popular culture and the journalism of Punch, between the vulgar gent and the middle-class consumer who wished to become more familiar with this type, but at the same time distance themself from him. Smith would ultimately have the last word: despite his critique of the gent in the 1840s, in 1850 with Novelty Fair he made the gent the hero and centre of the action in his characterization of the coming man, the year 1851. The writer for the Leader described the costume of 1851 as consisting of a ‘puce velvet coat, black satin unmentionables, and a waistcoat and shirt of inconceivable magnificence’, ‘the delirium of a gentish imagination’.57 The morality of the gent: Carlyle and Fraser’s Magazine In the small amount of secondary literature on the gent, scholars often directly or indirectly quote from Smith in order to define the figure.58 This has resulted in a lack of critical distance and perspective on what the gent’s broader function might have been in relation to the growth in availability of cheap consumer goods and self-fashioning at mid century. It should first be recognized that the gent as a type cannot be separated from critical writing: Smith and his contemporaries define the gent through their hostility, and the gent is only known and knowable through their attacks. To understand this figure it is therefore necessary to examine not just the origin of the gent as a social type, but also the origin of the critiques against him and against social pretentions, conspicuous consumption and surface appearances more generally. Indeed, pursing this line of investigation leads away from the, albeit biting and sometimes cruel, humour of Smith’s writing, to broader and more serious social criticism and philosophy at the opening of the Victorian age, particularly in relation to literature, authorship and the figure of the sage.59 It was perhaps above all the stance of Fraser’s Magazine toward society in the 1830s that provided the conceptual basis for the critiques of snobs



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and gents later in that decade and in the 1840s, as has been mapped out by Ellen Moers in her writing on the dandy.60 Moers pinpoints 1830, the year of George IV’s death and the first year that Fraser’s Magazine was published, as the moment that the dandy, and the excesses of the Regency period more generally, began to be critiqued.61 Under the leadership of William Maginn, the publication’s first editor, Fraser’s Magazine had ‘begun to express the resentment of the ill-paid and ill-respected man of talent against the tyranny of exclusivism’.62 This was a reaction to the perceived hold over the publishing market by Henry Colburn (and his sometime partner Richard Bentley who later founded Bentley’s Miscellany), who published novels by Edward BulwerLytton, Lady Blessington and other high-society authors, which concentrated on ‘silver fork’ subjects set in aristocratic circles, and which were ‘puffed’ by Colburn through extensive advertising campaigns.63 Moers writes that it ‘was Colburn’s genius to see that a literature written about the exclusives, by the exclusives (or those who knew them well) and for the exclusives would be royally supported by those who were not but wanted desperately to become exclusives’.64 In opposition, Fraser’s Magazine ‘aired the provincial (especially Irish [Maginn was Irish] and Scotch) suspicion of foreign affectations and domestic degeneracy. It voiced, with a fresh and confident invective, the growing middle-class indignation at irresponsibility in high places’, but the magazine’s remit was also broader, including ‘sober commentary on politics, literature, philosophy (especially German thought and letters), theology and even science’.65 Maginn died in 1842, but lived long enough to contribute to the first volumes of Punch, which also contained Smith’s ‘Physiology of the London Idler’, parts of which were later republished as The Natural History of the Gent. It was in Fraser’s Magazine that Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored)’ first appeared between November 1833 and August 1834, which includes a highly significant chapter on ‘The Dandiacal Body’, which made explicit reference to Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘silver fork’ novel Pelham, as well as critiques of such novels by Fraser’s Magazine.66 It might seem strange to group Smith’s seemingly trivial writings with those of the preeminent Victorian sage, Carlyle, but these authors’ works sit within a spectrum of literature concerned with the morality of clothes and consumption more generally, especially in relation to class and masculinity. This is an invitation to take Smith’s work seriously and ask how the gent and his purchasing habits play a more significant part than has previously been recognized in mid-nineteenth-century culture. As James Eli Adams points out in relation to the dandy and the sage, seemingly oppositional figures in the definition of Victorian manhood were in a complex dialogue and even shared certain characteristics, such as the wish to be seen and recognized by society.67 The same might be said of the gent, who also wished to be noticed for his performance of class.

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For Carlyle, clothes are the means through which he can explore deep philosophical, social and moral issues, perhaps most particularly the barriers of convention that prevent honest and equal social relations between men. Smith’s volumes are not as ambitious in their moral or philosophical scope, but they look at outward appearances from the same vantage point: fashion and clothing (as well as the poses and activities that go with them) are ultimately matters of convention and sham that threaten to disrupt more honest and open social bonds. Smith’s debt to the writers of Fraser’s Magazine can be seen in The Natural History of ‘Stuck-Up’ People when, after describing an elaborate dinner party at the nouveau riche Spangle Lacquer family’s London townhouse, Smith writes that he cannot help contrasting ‘the dismal sociality … just witnessed, in spite of the pineapple and chrystallized apricots, with the kindheartedness and sparkling conversation which are never to be met with higher than a couple of plain decanters with port and sherry, and some simple English walnuts’.68 Here Smith echoes the suspicion of cosmopolitanism found in Fraser’s Magazine. Smith sometimes even adopts the tone and style of Carlyle, writing for example that ‘artificial display is dangerous to have anything to do with, and resembles a Chinese firework – very flashy and bewildering at first sight, but if kept up too long its coruscations are found to proceed only from the revolutions of a few bits of coloured transparent paper shining with borrowed light’.69 Despite its humour, the moral of The Natural History of ‘Stuck-Up’ People, from which these quotations come, is that Spangle Lacquer’s daughters are unmarriageable because, rather than saving for their dowries, he has spent his money on display and luxuries; the only wealth he will give them is what they will inherit, and this is uncertain.70 The potential tragedy, or even moral threat, of unsupported and unprotected females lurks just below the surface of Smith’s humorous prose. The weighty import given in both Carlyle’s and Smith’s writing to clothes, consumption and taste as outward signs of morals, as well as enabling the gent to be identified as a specific and undesirable style of masculinity, forms a preamble to the debates that were to accompany the Great Exhibition, and specifically to preoccupy Henry Cole in its aftermath at the Museum of Ornamental Art. This topic will be explored in the final chapter of this book. Conclusion: ‘proper recreation’ After the containment and dispersal of the planned Chartist procession to deliver a petition to Parliament on 10 April 1848, it was perceived that the lower-middle and middle classes had demonstrated their unity with the ruling classes. Those employed as linen drapers, accountants and clerks, the classes which in popular definitions tended to ‘Gentism’ and were the core of the ­lower-middle classes, were overwhelmingly inactive in the Chartist



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­movement.71 Assessing the attendees at the Casino, Smith wrote: ‘Bad ingredients there are, without doubt, in its composition – but so there are in every public assembly; and the question is, whether these objectionable particles might not be worse occupied than in listening to a capital band, sucking up the most inoffensive sherry-cobblers, or flying round and round in a polka or waltz.’72 In Smith’s eyes, despite ‘bad ingredients’, it was dancing which took the place of revolt in 1848. That idea would have been comforting to his middle-class readers, although this is a rather pessimistic reading of how popular entertainment might replace political action. Despite such reassurances, it should be emphasized that contemporaries still found the play with class that took place at Laurent’s Casino, the Lowther Arcade and other sites of popular entertainment problematic. In addition, such threats to orderly conduct, rational recreation and morality did not disappear after 1848, despite concerted efforts by the authorities. In late 1849, James Ellis, the proprietor of Laurent’s Casino, applied for a licence for music and dancing at the venue. Perhaps assuming the tactics of the Chartists, the request was supported by a petition with over a thousand signatures. However, a counter-petition was presented from ‘the vicar, curates, churchwardens, and overseers’ of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields who opposed the application ‘on the grounds that the Casino was a resort for men of bad character and women of the town, and by its allurements the seduction of young women had been carried out to a very great extent’.73 Only two votes were given in favour of the licence, and on the same day fiats of bankruptcy were filed against Ellis. A lawyer named Wilkins, who represented Ellis in court, felt that there had been a miscarriage of justice, and criticized the judge for ‘withholding proper recreation from the people;’ the press reported that ‘the court refused every other license’ put forward that day.74 There appears to have been an orchestrated campaign to suppress popular amusements in the metropolis. However, in 1851 Laurent’s Casino was still operating at the Argyll Rooms in St James’s, the admission still one shilling, the same price as one of the cheaper rates of admission to the Great Exhibition.75 The gent did not disappear after the 1840s, and other venues, most notably music halls, were added to the urban amusements of London and other cities. It might seem paradoxical to us that Smith’s book on the gent was penned by an author in a worker’s smock under the shadow of a model guillotine, since it concerns modern leisure, consumerism and class emulation, but as will be demonstrated revolution and consumption could be seen as different sides of the same coin in the 1840s and early 1850s. Smith’s satire on the gent and his and Gavarni’s depiction of Laurent’s Casino show the complex context for class and consumption at the time of revolutionary upheaval in France and elsewhere. A deeper understanding of the history of the West Strand reveals how consumerism could have a negative

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side, with drinking and dancing taking the place of science lectures, and with polkas preferred over microscopes. This is foregrounded in Novelty Fair where in the interior of the ‘Great Exhibition’ contained both marvelous inventions – the telegraph and a filter for Thames water – but also theatrical tableaus of leisure, dancing and song. As will be seen in the chapters that follow, tensions around such intermingling of the popular and the didactic were to play a significant role in the definition of the Great Exhibition and the mid nineteenth century more broadly. Notes  1 Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: David Bogue, 1847), pp.  2–3. Smith probably intends a pun here with the word ‘wearing’, since it is through readymade clothes that the gent makes his claim to be ‘something more’ than he really is.  2 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 104.  3 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, pp. 3, 104.  4 Albert Smith, as well as editing the work, was the author of eight of the essays. Other authors who contributed essays were drawn from Smith’s circle of bohemian–literary friends, and included Horace Mayhew, Shirley Brooks and Joseph Stirling Coyne. Paul Gavarni resided in London from December 1847 to November 1851.  5 Interestingly, Gavarni’s own address on his arrival in London reflected the fluid nature of class geographies in London in the late 1840s. He lodged in a court just off Fleet Street, close to David Bogue’s and the Vizetelly brothers’ shops. The court can be found listed as both Salisbury Court and Salisbury Square in documents from the time. See Peter Cunningham, Handbook for London: Past and Present (London: John Murray, 1849), pp. 721, 723, and John Tallis, Tallis’s Street Views and Pictorial Directory of England, Scotland and Ireland with a faithful History and Description of every object of Interest by William Gaspy, Esq. (London: J. and F. Tallis, 1847), p. 67. A ‘court’ implied an older, working-class space, while the designation ‘square’ was more often applied to areas with residential status and more social pretention. Gavarni found himself living between the offices of middle-class professionals, such as a surgeon and a solicitor, but also the workshops and small manufactories of a pump-maker, a dyer and a cheese-monger. All these were overshadowed by a gas works. Several times in 1848 Chartist demonstrations passed down Fleet Street within yards of Salisbury Court, and Fleet Street itself witnessed the violence that could accompany the urban crowd. See David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 114, 117. In addition the main confrontation between the crowd and the police on 10 April, the day the Chartist petition was to be presented to Parliament, took place on Blackfriars Bridge, the closest river crossing to Gavarni’s lodging.  6 Albert Smith (ed.), Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character with Illustrative Essays by Popular Writers (London: David Bogue, 1849).



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 7 See also the illustrations in Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, pp. 69, 70.  8 These light fixtures were added in the renovations to the Casino which occurred in the summer of 1847, as described in an advertisement for ‘Laurent’s Casino’ in the Theatrical Journal (November 1847), p. 378.  9 Albert Smith, ‘The Casino’ in Albert Smith (ed.), Gavarni in London, pp. 13–16, p. 15. 10 See ‘Laurent’s Casino’, Theatrical Journal (November 1847), p. 378, and ‘Laurent’s Casino’, Theatrical Journal (November 1847), p. 373. 11 Smith, ‘The Casino’, p. 15. 12 Smith, ‘The Casino’, p. 15. Smith also wrote ‘When we first heard that M. Laurent was going to start a shilling concert and dance we were much disquieted; for we knew at what a rampant pitch Gentism would arrive there.’ Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 67. 13 For an account of the administration of the West Strand development, and its attribution to Nash, see M. Veronica Stokes, ‘The Lowther Arcade in the Strand’, London Topographical Record, 23: 155 (1972 [1974]), pp. 119–28. 14 For a description and full-page illustration of the interior of the arcade, see ‘The Lowther Arcade’ in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (7 April 1832), pp. 209–10. 15 Tallis wrote, ‘The alterations made in this part of Westminster are so great, that a person who has not visited town for twelve or fourteen years would find it impossible to recognize it again. In the place of narrow dirty lanes and alleys, are now erected handsome airy streets, very conducive to the heath of the metropolis.’ John Tallis, Tallis’s London Street Views exhibiting upwards of one hundred buildings in each number, elegantly engraved on steel (London: John Tallis, 1838–40), directory, no. 81, ‘Lowther Arcade, and King William Street, Strand’, p. 3. 16 Tallis’s commercial directory contains advertisements for two jewellers in the Lowther Arcade, D. Harrison and Richard’s Repository; see no. 81, Tallis ‘Lowther Arcade, and King William Street, Strand’, in Tallis, Tallis’s London Street Views, 1 and 3. The pin with a girl swinging is illustrated on page 35 of Smith’s The Natural History of the Gent. 17 Advertisement, Tallis’s London Street Views, directory, no. 81, ‘Lowther Arcade, and King William Street, Strand’, p. 3. 18 [George Augustus Sala], ‘Arcadia’, Household Words conducted by Charles Dickens (June 1853), pp. 376–82. See also Smith, ‘Of the Lowther Arcade, viewed with respect to the Idler’, in Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Idler Upon Town, illustrated by A. Henning (London: David Bogue, 1848) pp. 71–80. 19 [Sala], ‘Arcadia’, pp. 380, 381. 20 [Sala], ‘Arcadia’, p. 381. 21 Sala professes to prefer the Lowther to the Burlington Arcade, which he pokes fun at for its preciousness: ‘Burlington … was intensely aristocratic. Boots and shoes and gloves were certainly sold; but they fitted only the most Byronically small and symmetric hands and feet; none but the finest and most odiferous leathers were employed in their confection, and none but the highest prices charged for them’, [Sala], ‘Arcadia’, p. 376.

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22 [Sala], ‘Arcadia’, p. 381. 23 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 36. 24 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 36. 25 National Gallery of Practical Science, Catalogue, 7th edition, 1834, quoted in Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), p. 377. 26 For a more detailed account of the Adelaide Gallery, see Altick, ‘Technology for the Million’, Shows of London, pp. 375–89. 27 See Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: NineteenthCentury Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 2. 28 ‘The Adelaide Gallery of Practical Science’, The Times (15 December 1843), p. 5. 29 Altick, Shows of London, p. 380. 30 Altick, Shows of London, p. 380. The proprietor was James Ellis, who also ran the Cremorne Gardens. 31 In 1852 the Adelaide Gallery became the Royal Marionette Theatre, and in 1859 an indoor rifle range. In 1862 the building was taken over by the nephews of the proprietor of Gatti’s music hall, and run by two generations of the family as a successful restaurant. See Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, ‘The Adelaide Gallery’, in Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, The Gourmet’s Guide to London (New York: Brentanos, 1914), pp. 226–34. 32 Smith, ‘The Casino’, pp. 13–15. 33 ‘The Adelaide Gallery’, The Times (16 April 1846), p. 5. 34 ‘Adelaide Gallery’, Mirror Monthly Magazine (October 1848), p. 483. 35 Smith, ‘The Casino’, p. 16. 36 For more on the relationship between Smith’s articles for Punch and The Natural History of the Idler upon Town, see Margaret A. Rose, ‘Flâneurs and Idlers: a “Panoramic” Overview’, introduction to Rose (ed.) Flaneurs and Idlers (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2007), pp. 27–45. 37 Albert Smith, ‘Popular Zoology, No. I – The Gent’, Bentley’s Miscellany, 19 (January 1846), pp. 316–22, and Albert Smith, ‘Popular Zoology, No. II – An Appendix of Gents’, Bentley’s Miscellany, 19 (January 1846), pp. 404–12. 38 Richard Bentley had published Smith’s the Physiology of Evening Parties in 1846. 39 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, pp. 16–21. 40 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 17. 41 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 16. 42 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 44. 43 See Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, pp. 84, 85. 44 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, pp. 33–4. 45 This image is titled ‘India Number 6’. See Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, from the originals painted for His Royal Highness Prince Albert, by Messrs. Nash, Haghe, and Roberts, R.A. (London: Dickinson, Brothers, 1852). 46 Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007), see especially ‘Originality and Sin: Calico, Capitalism, and the Copyright of Designs, 1839–1851’, pp. 52–85.



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47 Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back Through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and other Reminiscences (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1893), vol. 1, p. 316. 48 This is striking as around ten different publishers were behind these books. As Lauster observes ‘albeit as competitors, they were collaborating on an undeclared project – “Les Physiologies.”’ Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and its ‘Physiologies’, 1830–1850 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 290. 49 See Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century, p. 289. 50 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 22. See illustrations on p. 21 and p. 22. 51 Vizetelly, Glances Back, vol. 1, p. 316. 52 Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (London: The Trustees of the British Library, 2010), p. 19. 53 Vizetelly recalled ‘Thackeray, who had an abhorrence of things vulgar, found Smith’s mauvais goût more than he could stand.’ Vizetelly, Glances Back, p. 317. 54 Vizetelly, Glances Back, p. 315. 55 Vizetelly, Glances Back, p. 319. 56 Quoted in Leary, The Punch Brotherhood, p. 31. 57 ‘Novelty Fair at the Lyceum’, Leader (25 May 1850), p. 209. 58 The longest discussion of this figure can be found in Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: the Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See especially pp. 274–85. For discussions of this figure that draw heavily on Smith, see Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 153, and James Eli Adams, A History of Victorian Literature (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2009), p. 88. 59 In this sense I am picking up and expanding themes from James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), but transferring them into the realm of satirical and humorous representations. 60 See Ellen Moers, The Dandy: from Brummell to Beerbohm (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), see especially chapter 8, ‘England in 1830 and the Anti-Dandiacals’, pp. 167–92. Moers also discusses the Gent, see pp. 215–18. 61 Moers, The Dandy, p. 167. 62 Moers, The Dandy, p. 167. 63 Moers observes that ‘The principle ingredients in Colburn’s formula were balls, gambling scenes, social climbers, political gossip, Almack’s [an exclusive semi-­ private society ballroom], the clubs, younger sons looking for heiresses, dowagers protecting their daughters from younger sons.’ Moers, The Dandy, p. 52. 64 Moers, The Dandy, p. 52. 65 Moers, The Dandy, p. 167. 66 See Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 211. 67 See Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, especially, ‘Dandies and Prophets: Spectacles of Victorian Masculinity’, pp. 21–60.

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68 Albert Smith, The Natural History of ‘Stuck-Up’ People (London: David Bogue, 1847), p. 76. 69 Smith, The Natural History of ‘Stuck-Up’ People, p. 16. 70 See Smith, The Natural History of ‘Stuck-Up’ People, p. 38. 71 Of the 21,463 clerks and accountants in London in 1841, only 20 were declared Chartists. Of the 1,783 linen drapers, none were declared Chartists. See Goodway, ‘Table 6: Chartist Occupations’, London Chartism, p. 17. ‘Gentism’ is Smith’s term; see Smith, ‘The Casino’, p. 16. 72 Smith, ‘The Casino’, p. 16. 73 ‘Music and Dancing Licenses’, Bell’s Life (14 October 1849), p. 3. 74 See ‘Music and Dancing Licenses’, p. 3. See also ‘Metropolitan’, John Bull (15 October 1848), p. 649. 75 Laurent’s Casino was still widely advertised in the Morning Chronicle and the Era.

2

‘All that is solid melts into air’: representing the Chartist crowd in 1848

This chapter explores representations of the Chartist crowd that gathered on 10 April 1848 to deliver a petition to Parliament said to number six million signatures. The petition was in support of the six points of the People’s Charter, which, among other reforms, demanded franchise for all adult men. Petitions in favour of the Charter had been delivered to Parliament in 1839 and 1842, but in early 1848, following revolutions in Europe, among the authorities and the middle class fears were heightened and among the Chartists expectations were raised that the demonstration planned for 10 April would have some violent result. The press played an important part in fuelling and shaping these fears, but they ultimately came to nothing.1 The Chartists gathered on Kennington Common as planned, but at this point Feargus O’Connor was informed by police commissioners that the crowd would not be allowed to accompany the petition to Parliament. If they tried to reach Westminster or the City by crossing the Thames, they would be resisted. O’Connor and others made speeches, and the demonstration dispersed in a largely peaceful manner, apart from scuffles with the police on Blackfriars Bridge. At this point the revolutionary threat was seen to have receded in the capital, although disturbances continued in London and the north of England into the summer. Notably, by the time the next edition of the weekly papers, such as Punch and the Illustrated London News, were published, journalists and graphic artists were in the position of documenting both the threat of Chartism as well as the ultimate failure of both the demonstration and the petition. This led to a complex, even contradictory, set of valences in the textual and visual sources that recorded this event and its immediate aftermath. Working-class bodies had  been  conjured into existence to justify the large police presence on  the street, the recruitment of special constables, and other government actions, including ultimately the prevention of the procession marching to Westminster, but just as rapidly these bodies were seen to disappear. The Chartist crowd ­dispersed, and, in a report delivered to the House of Commons on Thursday, it was revealed that a large number of the signatures on the petition were fake.

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This chapter focuses on a handful of representations of the Chartist crowd created against this complex and mobile backdrop: signatures on the petition, two daguerreotypes taken by Edward Kilburn of the crowd gathered on Kennington Common and a wood engraving in the Illustrated London News after these photographs. These representations invoke forms of bourgeois political representation and self-fashioning: franchise, portrait photography and reportage, that is to say, the idea of the signature or vote as a politically meaningful act, the daguerreotype portrait as a medium able to capture a stable individual identity, or reportage as objective depicting of fact for the all-seeing gaze. In 1848 the working-class body was registered through these media only to be made to vanish, thus exposing potential instabilities within these still new kinds of representations. The simultaneous wish to see the Chartists as both threatening and defeated created a moment in which systems of representation linked with the middle class proved dangerously unstable: mastering modes of representation prove uncanny as the panorama took on aspects of the diorama, the daguerreotype became a haunted mirror, and all that is solid melted into air. It is to the vanishing crowd and the false signatures that this chapter first turns. Aftermath: ‘Four millions of Nobodies’ After the banners had been furled on Kennington Common, events move quickly. The petition was put in a cab and once it arrived at Parliament it was placed in the hands of the Committee on Public Petitions. When, three days later on Thursday 13 April, the Committee presented its report to the House of Commons it was found that: the number of signatures attached to it, instead of being 5,706,000 as stated by Mr. F. O’Connor, was only 1,975,496; that many of the consecutive sheets were all in the same handwriting, and names attached of distinguished individuals who could not be supposed to concur in its prayers. Amongst such occur the names of her Majesty, in one place as “Victoria Rex – April 1st,” the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and etc. There were also a variety of names altogether fictitious, such as “No Cheese,” “Pug Nose,” “Flat Nose,” etc., and other words and phrases which, though written in the form of signatures, and included in the number reported, the Committee would not hazard offending the House, and the dignity and the decency of their own proceedings, by repeating, though it might be added that they were signatures belonging to no human being.2

In this passage the ‘signatures’ fade from view under government scrutiny, as the emphasis moves from a discussion of real names signed falsely, to made-up names, to names which cannot be mentioned. Finally the report noted (as if this was the crowning moment of invalidation) ‘that of every 100,000 signatures 8,200 were those of women’.3 Perhaps most disturbing, even uncanny,



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however, is the idea that although the trace of something and written by someone, the petition contained ‘signatures belonging to no human being’. This is a particularly telling contradiction: a signature is a unique and binding mark of authorship, but here signatures are unmoored from any human referent threatening to undermine political and legal systems of representation. It was the ‘Blow up of the monster petition humbug’, as it was described in the Satirist, the revelation of the false signatures more than the failure of the demonstration to spark a revolution, that damaged the Chartist cause in 1848.4 The decision taken by the Chartist leaders not to risk violence and call off the demonstration after the authorities had banned it could be seen as a sensible step taken by responsible men who, through their good sense on this occasion, showed that they were worthy of the vote; but the discovery that the petition was flawed, and the manner in which that flaw was pointed out in the House of Commons where it would be widely reported in the weekend press, led to satires that undermined the movement and especially the reputation of O’Conner. A journalist writing for the Examiner suggested ‘divide what Mr. Feargus O’Connor says by ten, and the quotient will be an approximation’.5 But in this humour the idea of the ghostly or the uncanny returned. Under the title ‘Dreadful Mortality’ an article in Punch read: We have heard of Irish patriots promising to die upon the floor of the House of Commons, but we little expected the frightful mortality which has taken place in that patriotic cemetery within the last week. We allude to the deaths of the 3,600,000 persons who were said to have signed the Chartist Petition. They all gave up the ghost on the floor of the House of Commons, and were followed to the grave by MR. FEARGUS O’CONNOR, who was the chief mourner on the occasion. … Though they all died for the benefit of their country, yet not one of the 3,600,000 has left a name behind him.6

John Leech drew a full-page cartoon for Punch titled ‘The Chartist Procession According to the Signatures of the Petition’, which depicted the demonstration led by the Duke of Wellington, Queen Victoria, Mr Punch and Toby, with at least eight other Duke of Wellingtons following behind, along with a boy with a turned-up nose carrying a banner reading ‘PUGNOSES FOR EVER’, and a man with a hugely long nose whose banner declares ‘LONGNOSE AND EXTENTION OF THE SUFFRAGE’ (see Figure 2.1).7 The Lady’s Newspaper joked ‘the Duke of Wellington has shown his interest in the petition by signing it seventeen times!!!’, Bell’s Life gave the number as twenty.8 Some papers were more aggressive in their language, several accounts aligning the petition with dirt and filth, and diabolical processes. The humorous illustrated journal the Puppet-Show gave a list of the set of steps for creating a ‘Monster Petition’. The first step read ‘Get a half-a-dozen dirty skins of parchment, some deal tables, pens and ink, and unwashed clerks.’9 The Times

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2.1  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘The Chartist Procession, According to the Signatures of the Petition’, wood engraving from Punch, [29 April 1848], p. 175.



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depicted the factory-like labour of the clerks processing the petition as something like the last judgement, while it described the petition in similar industrial terms as of ‘ingenious manufacture’.10 Ultimately The Times joined the satirical reaction to the examination of the petition, but kept the emphasis on the Chartists’ threatened violence: The signatures have been sifted and cleaned like the mud in which gold-dust is found. The mud has been found to predominate. There never was such a mixture … The ruthless clerks have been working night and day sifting the mass of names, sorting them into male and female, probable and impossible. The task appals us … we must say that there might have been a peculiar propriety in such names as Robert Rifle, Samuel Sharpshooter, Peter Pike, Billy Blunderbuss, Simon Slug, George Gunpowder, Physical Force, or simply Vitriol, Daggers, Musket, and so forth.11

This account has it both ways: the names prove to be faked and the Chartist signatures fabrications, yet although the threatening bodies disappear the threat of violence is reemphasized in the suggested alternatives: ‘Robert Rifle’, ‘George Gunpowder’ and so on. Since the diminution of the petition was reported alongside accounts of the physical dispersal of the Chartists, the two instances of the disappearance of working-class bodies were collapsed together. As a journalist wrote in the  Examiner ‘the Monster Petition … dwindled away like the Monster Meeting’.12 Reports described the almost mysterious or miraculous disappearance of the crowd on Kennington Common, said at its height to number between 20,000 and 50,000 people. Several papers repeated the fact that ‘at two o’clock not more than 100 persons were to be seen upon the common. Many of these consisted of its usual occupants, boys playing at trap-ball and other games, and by a quarter past two a stranger to the day’s proceedings would never have guessed from the appearance of the neighbourhood that anything extraordinary had taken place.’13 The seemly inexplicable disappearance of the mainly working-class and Irish bodies forming the crowd on Kennington Common led to the ­further employment of imagery of the ghostly and the spectral. To The Times they were ‘visionary tribes of men’; O’Connor had created a ‘Frankenstein’.14 This theme was taken up in a satirical poem, titled ‘The Midnight Review (Slightly Altered from the German Original)’, published in the Puppet-Show.15 The verse was modelled on a well-known poem by the Austrian writer Joseph Christian Freiherr von Zedlitz titled Die nächtliche Heerschau (‘The Midnight Review’) that described a ghostly mustering of French troops reviewed by the spirit of Napoleon himself. The first two verses read: ‘On the Common  men  call Kennington the midnight hour is dark; / No Gent is there on business – no Gent upon a lark; / But a pale and spectral drummer paceth slowly up and

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down, / And the music of his instrument rolls sadly o’er the town. / Then straightway is the Common peopled thick with shapes of air – / The signers of the Chartists’ great petition all are there; / Four millions of Nobodies, without flesh or blood – / Their shadowy high-lows never left a foot-print on the mud.’16 Famously The Manifesto of the Communist Party opens with the words: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.’17 In early 1848 this text was published in London in German; it was not published in English until 1850, although Gareth Stedman Jones notes that in ‘Central Europe the image [of Communism as a spectre] was almost commonplace in the late 1840s’.18 The representation of the Chartist crowd as spectral mirrors this almost simultaneous imagining by Marx and Engels of unorganized opposition movements, categorized under the name of Communism, haunting Europe. Marx and Engels wished to exorcise this ghost by giving Communism a more coherent and concrete form, hence their manifesto. Although their spectre heralds the arrival of a more concrete Communist party, the spectres of Kennington Common were taken as signs of the demise of the Chartist movement. However, the false signatures themselves re-inscribed unruly and violent bodies in place of the ‘Nobodies’, and manifest a desire for real and concrete political representation. If the false signatures are taken seriously, the signees, characterized by the Illustrated London News as ‘all the blackguard street urchins of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, and Glasgow’, were in some measure able to re-inscribe the ‘restless’ working-class body at the heart of a political process that they were excluded from.19 Clearly the signers of the false names were poking fun at, and ultimately undermined, the earnest aims of the Chartists, but they also make a more serious point, satirizing the idea that working people could play a role in government when excluded from the vote. The false signatures should be read as a form of representation: evidence of authorship and the registering of an opinion that ultimately went to the heart of Westminster. Indeed, the government had to take notice of them, perhaps more than if they had been genuine, by sorting the petition signatures into real and unreal. The vividness and violence of the language employed in the press in the aftermath of this investigation shows the power of these anonymous satirists’ gestures of rebellion, which pointed up flaws in the ideal of franchise and transparent democracy. Kilburn’s daguerreotypes: contradictory media This play with appearance and disappearance, the real and the spectral in political representation feeds into the discussion of the next source treated in this chapter: William Edward Kilburn’s daguerreotypes, taken around noon on 10 April, of the crowd assembled on Kennington Common (see Figure 2.2.



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2.2  William Edward Kilburn, inscribed verso ‘Great Chartist Meeting at Kennington / April 10 1848 / taken from nature’, daguerreotype.

and Figure 2.3). The indexical quality of the daguerreotype means that these remarkable photographs captured and witnessed a moment when the outcome of the meeting was still in the balance.20 However, they received their widest circulation as the basis for a wood engraving published in the Illustrated London News after the demonstration had ended peacefully and the petition had been discredited in Parliament (see Figure 2.4). In the moment immediately after 10 April these images seemed to capture something that had never existed: the revolutionary crowd. Such a paradox points up the instabilities inherent in the daguerreotype as an indexical photographic medium and as a fragile material object. When published as reportage, daguerreotype and wood engraving worked together to invoke the fixed and mastering perspectives of the panorama, but, due to the disappearance of the Chartist crowd, the thing that the daguerreotypes appeared to capture, other less stable technologies associated with photography were invoked: namely the mutable and subjective diorama. At first glance, it would be tempting to read Kilburn’s daguerreotypes of the Chartist crowd through John Tagg’s connection of the photograph with surveillance and the power of the state.21 Yet daguerreotypes, as unique images, do not lend themselves to being collected into an institutionalized archive like later paper-based and reproducible formats, such as the carte-de-viste. No

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2.3  William Edward Kilburn, inscribed verso ‘Great Chartist Meeting at Kennington / April 10 1848 / taken from nature’, daguerreotype.

negative is involved in the production of a daguerreotype, rather the image is the negative: a metal plate, treated to become light sensitive and exposed inside a camera to record whatever is in front of the lens. Daguerreotypes are also extremely, and even uncannily, detailed. Contemporaries marvelled at the fidelity of the images, and how even under magnification the daguerreotype simply yielded yet more information while offering no trace of the human hand or clue as to how it was made. However, as well as offering a plenitude of vision, in person a daguerreotype is actually frustratingly hard to see. Its surface is mirror-like, and often only a part of the image can be clearly seen at any time. Held in the hand a daguerreotype must be tilted by the viewer to minimize its reflective qualities, and, typically small in size, they must be held close. In the first decade of photography, exposure times and the amounts of chemicals used were down to educated guess work and relied on the photographer’s knowledge and experience; the results were often variable. Due to their chemical make-up they change over time with exposure to light, so they were covered with glass and cased.22 The glass renders them yet more reflective, and they cannot be dropped. The fuzzy lines that cross from top to bottom of one of the two daguerreotypes of the Chartist meeting are the result of damage to the original



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2.4  Unknown wood engraver, ‘The meeting on Kennington Common – from a daguerreotype’, wood engraving from the Illustrated London News, 15 April 1848, p. 242.

glass covering, which cracked, exposing thin sections of the image to the air and dirt, permanently marking it (see Figure 2.3). In the 1840s the largest commercial application for daguerreotypes was not reportage but portraiture. A central medium for the self-fashioning of a growing middle-class, daguerreotypes – as noted by Geoffrey Batchen – ­participated in sentimental image making, and in familial, romantic and mourning practices.23 They were treasured private objects, meant for the gaze of a loved one, family or close friend. It is startling then, even paradoxical, that in 1848 a medium primarily associated with the private and the introspective was used to capture a very public manifestation of the Chartist crowd. This is not to imply that the daguerreotype was never used to capture subject matter beyond portraiture: buildings, topographical views, art objects and cityscapes had been photographed. However, a crowd had, it seems, never before been daguerreotyped. The following section explores Kilburn’s daguerreotypes of the Chartist crowd within the context of their reproduction as a wood engraving in the Illustrated London News. The approach taken here to the daguerreotype follows that of Stephen C. Pinson in his book Speculating Daguerre, which places the

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French photographer’s experiments with fixing images within the context of high art, theatre and theatrical technologies, such as the panorama and the diorama.24 Kilburn’s daguerreotypes of the crowd, their reproduction as wood engravings and the textual context in which they were published are all witness to how daguerreotypes functioned as both evidence and trace in the mid nineteenth century. From the earliest years of its publication, the Illustrated London News linked daguerreotype and panorama, initially through a well-publicized wood engraving, the ‘Colosseum Print’, but also more generally in its style of visual reportage. Kilburn’s photographs of the Chartist crowd were themselves influenced by the panorama and by the visual conventions for reporting industrial disputes already established by this paper. However, if more rarely, the daguerreotype had also been associated in the periodical’s pages with fleeting, even poetic, effects.25 In April 1848, it was this aspect of the daguerreotype that the simultaneous wish to capture and obscure the working-class body brought to the fore. Ultimately, as will be demonstrated, the more subjective diorama is the more pertinent parallel technology to Kilburn’s daguerreotypes of the Chartist crowd. Fixing the crowd Despite the acknowledged uniqueness of Kilburn’s daguerreotypes as perhaps the first ever photographs of a crowd, they have not yet been the subject of prolonged scrutiny.26 Probably due to Prince Albert’s intervention, and not without significance, Kilburn’s daguerreotypes are now part of the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. These photographs have become a vital part of how Chartism is pictured; one or the other (though usually not both) of the daguerreotypes have at various times illustrated history books, school text books and the cover of a book on the novel and the crowd.27 Kilburn must have exposed his plates between 11.30 a.m. and 1.15 p.m., once the two horse-drawn carriages or ‘cars’ carrying the members of the National Chartist Convention and the large petition-bale had reached the Common and while speeches were being made.28 Each photograph shows a view across a road from the same elevation. In the foreground horse-drawn vehicles and an equestrian have halted, a line of people stand against or on the fence bordering the Common, and beyond this, over a strip of empty ground, is the bulk of the crowd surrounding a carriage decorated with banners and slogans, which can just be made out (reversed) along the carriage’s side. This appears to be the car described by the Illustrated London News as carrying the delegates, but it is not altogether clear. It could also be the car containing the petition. One daguerreotype (see Figure 2.3) shows two vehicles, one closer to the viewer and one with a horizontal banner fixed between poles further away. Beyond the main mass of the crowd, another empty strip



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of ground and more people standing at the boundary line of the Common can be seen ranged in front of industrial buildings to the rear. Exposure times for daguerreotypes taken under ideal conditions had dropped to fractions of seconds by 1848, and the day was described as bright (although it rained later), which would also have aided the photographer.29 However, clearly a short amount of time did elapse during the exposure of the plates, as can be seen from the blurred flags and traces left by some members of the crowd who were in motion. That said many details, especially in the foreground, are captured with the remarkable clarity typical of the medium. Judging by the angle from which Kilburn’s photographs were taken, it appears that the camera must have been placed at an upper window.30 The assumed distance and the elevated vantage point invite the viewer to see themselves as separate from the activity on the Common, and as Kilburn took his daguerreotypes from behind the spectators who have gathered at the margins of the Common, his and our viewpoint is doubly removed from that of the Chartist crowd. The wood engraving titled ‘The meeting on Kennington Common – from a daguerreotype’ appeared in the Illustrated London News on Saturday 15 April. The text makes no reference to this image. It appears to be largely copied from only one of Kilburn’s daguerreotypes (compare Figure 2.2 and Figure  2.4). The chosen daguerreotype has a more centralized composition, in the middle is a single cart decorated with flags, whereas the other daguerreotype shows two cars. The composition, proportions and many small details of the wood engraving are so close to the daguerreotype that it appears to have been traced or transferred, perhaps using a grid, and applied to the wood block. The woman in a bonnet in the centre-foreground facing to the left is copied almost exactly from the photograph. In addition, the horse in the right-foreground of the engraving, with the rider who stands in one stirrup and faces back towards the viewer, occupies exactly the same position as the horse seen facing right harnessed to a small cart in the daguerreotype, although in the engraving the cart and its occupants are relocated to the far left. The daguerreotype process used by Kilburn did not employ Richard Beard’s reflecting camera for creating daguerreotypes without left–right reversal. This was perhaps intentional; Kilburn may have been anticipating the reversal that would occur when these photographs would be used as the basis for wood engravings. Tellingly, between exposures Kilburn moved his camera horizontally to capture a slightly different part of the scene, an initial sign that a striving towards the panoramic underlies these images. The wood engraving emphasizes the panoramic associations of the daguerreotype. The foreground has been opened up giving the impression of a greater separation of the viewer from the crowd of spectators on the road. Space has also been added between sections of the crowd so that there is more room between the spectators on the margins of the Common and those grouped around the cars, who are more obviously taking

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part in the demonstration. Although maintaining the proportions of the original daguerreotype, the result of these changes is that the foreshortening effect of the photograph is exchanged in the wood engraving for an impression of greater distance. The Common appears larger and the crowd more dense and anonymous. The wood engraving also extends the photograph slightly at the bottom, adds a horizontal band of sky to create distance between the factory chimney and the top edge of the image and, most significantly, adds a strip to the left-hand edge of the composition not seen in either of Kilburn’s daguerreotypes. Perhaps the artist who drew the sketch onto the block wished to more closely align the image with the text of the article, if it was available to him. It describes a square carriage decorated with a ‘tastefully constructed canopy’ that carried the ‘five huge bales, or bundles’ of the petition, and was parked on the south side of the Common; this is not shown in either daguerreotype.31 The added section in the wood engraving shows a small vehicle with a bale-like object within it, which might well be intended to represent the petition. The combined effect of these variations reflects the visual conventions for reportage wood engraving in the Illustrated London News. Typically, images of outdoor scenes and crowds stressed a mastering viewpoint and tended towards the panoramic. In contemporary terminology this kind of view was often referred to as the coup d’oeil, a military term for a mode of vision where understanding occurs in the same instance as seeing, allowing a commander to decide decisively how best to deploy his troops in any given situation.32 Rather than any inherent power that the daguerreotype might have had as a medium linked with surveillance, I would argue that panoramic qualities became more directly associated with these photographs through their reproduction as wood engravings. The Illustrated London News had linked the daguerreotype with the panorama from its earliest years of publication, and through both built a compelling case for the periodical’s overall philosophy of news reportage. The panorama was a popular form of entertainment, and large-scale urban panoramas, such as could be seen at the Colosseum near Regent’s Park, generally aimed for respectable middle-class and lower-middle-class audiences. Such audiences likely overlapped with the readership of the Illustrated London News. At largescale panoramas, visitors perambulated a raised platform to view a painted canvas which encompassed a sweep of 360 degrees. The edges of the canvas were concealed and lighting carefully controlled so that all sense of the actual distance of the painting from the viewer was lost. The panorama strove to create a complete and prolonged illusion of unbounded vision for the spectator.33 The fact that the illusion was shared and experienced simultaneously by many added to the effect of veracity. In its third number, the Illustrated London News announced that it would give away free to subscribers a wood engraved panorama of London from the



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top of the Duke of York Column (a 125-foot high monument located between the Mall and Pall Mall close to the southern end of Regent Street). Due to the print’s great size it was to be known as the ‘Colosseum Print’, but this was also a reference to the famous Colosseum at Regent’s Park, which since 1827 had shown a panorama of London as seen from the top of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. The Illustrated London News’s ‘Colosseum Print’ was made after a drawing pieced together from multiple daguerreotypes taken by Antoine Claudet, in a process which was recalled six years later in Kilburn’s shifting of his camera between exposures to capture two sections of Kennington Common. The ‘Colosseum Print’ was enthusiastically received, as the paper boasted by filling a full page with praise culled from the pages of its competitors.34 An endorsement from the Drogheda Argus reads ‘The picture must be correct, since it was delineated by the glorious Sun himself’, while the Ulster Times commented that the print was ‘the most accurate … picture of London we have ever seen’.35 Kilburn’s daguerreotypes were also influenced by the visual precedents in the Illustrated London News’s reportage of industrial disputes. To take one as an example, ‘Scene at Granby Fields during the riots, Manchester’ (see Figure 2.5) shows mounted figures in the foreground, a stretch of open ground, a crowd in the middle ground and a factory and a chimney behind.36 In all these elements the composition is very similar to the later daguerreotypes of the Chartist crowd. In both daguerreotype and wood engraving the juxtaposition of factory and crowd would have raised a complex set of questions about free will and determinism under industrial capitalism, such as is explored in Catherine

2.5  Unknown artist and wood engraver, ‘Scene at Granby Fields during the Riots, Manchester’, wood engraving from the Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842, p. 244.

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Gallagher’s book The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction.37 How much are working people simply the product of their environment, and how much was down to their own choices? Were revolt and social disorder the inevitable effect of the industrialization? The juxtaposition of the factory and the crowd of working bodies can also be read in relation to Hermann von Helmholtz’s universal law of the conservation of energy. In this reading both crowd and factory are reservoirs of protean energy; the question in 1848 was to what ends that energy would be channelled.38 Vitriol The inclusion of a prominent factory chimney in Kilburn’s daguerreotypes lends a pertinent gloss to the scene. At the centre of the view offered up to a seemingly mastering gaze, the factory is a marker of volatile threat. The chimney belonged to a vitriol works, established around 1796 by Richard Farmer, which must have been a familiar landmark and one difficult to ignore due to the environmental nuisance it caused.39 In 1852 in Picturesque Sketches in London, Thomas Miller noted that ‘Kennington Common is but a name for a small grassless square, surrounded with houses, and poisoned by the stench of vitriol works, and by black, open, sluggish ditches’.40 Vitriol, or oil of vitriol, is today more commonly known as sulphuric acid. In the nineteenth century it was a key product for a number of industries, including dying, bleaching, medicine and paper-making, as well as used indirectly in the manufacture of fertilizer, matches, textiles, glass and soap.41 It was also used in small quantities in the home for blacking, polishing leather and cleaning marble, as well as in recipes for medicine against fever, or, like vinegar, to give a bitter taste to food and drink.42 It was such an important substance there was almost a ‘sulphur war’ in the 1830s between Britain and the Kingdom of the Naples, and in 1843 Justus Liebig wrote ‘We may fairly judge of the commercial prosperity of a country from the amount of sulphuric acid (oil of vitriol) it consumes.’43 An index to industrial vitality, vitriol also had more violent connotations of industrial ruin. Widely available, its corrosive qualities were put to criminal use as a poison and, when thrown, a corrosive of skin and clothing. Although actual cases of vitriol being thrown seem to have been rare, as Valerie Smith has remarked, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century the violent act of vitriol throwing and its horrific results seem to have become linked with industrial disputes in particular.44 Smith cites several instances during strikes where vitriol attacks were carried out: in Glasgow, Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire in the 1820s, to which can be added another account from Cork, Ireland in 1842.45 The subject of Smith’s study, Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton, was published in 1848, and vitriol throwing found an important place in the plot during an episode that helps radicalize John Barton, and solidifies his plan to



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attack the mill-owner’s son, rather than ‘those fellow-working-men who “mun choose between vitriol and starvation”’.46 Vitriol throwing was mentioned in the Illustrated London News’s coverage of revolution in Berlin only two weeks before the publication of the wood engraving after Kilburn’s daguerreotype. The newspaper’s report states that ‘In Königs-strasse and Breiten-strasse hot water and vitriol were even used as a means of defence against the soldiers, who, with horribly insane courage and strength, struck down all in their neighbour, and destroyed property and life.’47 This account was accompanied by two wood engravings, one showing soldiers on horseback with sabres drawn charging into a crowd in front of the Royal Palace, and the other showing dead bodies being carried in front of the King and Queen who are forced to watch from a balcony. Here, what should be a mastering view for the royal party is turned into a bloody spectacle, just as the vitriol factory in Kilburn’s daguerreotypes and the wood engravings after them threatens to violently explode the middle-class reader’s mastering view of Kennington Common. Daguerreotype, diorama, crowd The location of an explosive and threatening centre in the otherwise coolly panoramic image of the Chartist crowd, like the return of the ghostly bodies through the signatures on the petition, begins to undo the fantasy of the mastering view that the Illustrated London News sought to provide to its ­middle-class readers. Despite association with the factual, the mastering, the shared and the public, as discussed above, in 1848 the daguerreotype was also aligned with the fleeting and the fugitive, and it was this unstable aspect of this bourgeois technology that the events of 1848 brought to the fore. Although the use of photography for the ‘Colosseum Print’ was widely lauded, the use of daguerreotypes as the basis for wood engravings in the Illustrated London News seems to have been rare, testament to the elaborate preparations and cumbersome apparatus that were needed to produce a satisfactory image, limiting what could be quickly captured by photography at this time. When daguerreotypes were used as sources it was usually for portraits, although they may have been used for certain elements of images, or gone unacknowledged in captions.48 The use of the daguerreotype as the basis for news reportage was rarest of all, making Kilburn’s image of the Chartist crowd exceptional.49 This must be taken into account when assessing the daguerreotype as evidence; how much did its novelty interfere with or overtake the power of photography as surveillance at this time, since photographic evidence as defined by Tagg suggests a repeatable and standardized mode of image making in the context of an institutional archive? Another rare instance of the use of a daguerreotype for news reportage in the Illustrated London News highlights the instability of the daguerreotypes

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2.6  Unknown artist and wood engraver, ‘“Ice Tree”, Middle Temple’, wood engraving from the Illustrated London News, 1 March 1845, p. 141.

as a form of evidence (see Figure 2.6). In 1845, a severe frost in late February resulted in the following chance occurrence at a fountain in the gardens of the Middle Temple, one of London’s Inns of Court. The paper reported: Upon the north side of the fountain pool stood a low tree; and, during the severe weather, the spray from the jet of water, as it fell upon the branches, became incrusted into icicles, and a kind of fairy frost-work, which had a very beautiful appearance. The phenomenon (for such it really was) attracted the notice of several persons; but, in the midst of their admiration, the tree broke down with the weight of its incrustations. Our Engraving [sic] is from a Daguerréotype



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[sic], taken for this journal … Whilst the artist was operating for a second Daguerréotype [sic], the tree fell.50

Here, photography is tasked with capturing a fleeting ‘phenomenon’. It fulfils this remit; however, the account also emphasizes that even while the photographer is on the scene the tree collapses. A daguerreotype had captured a fleeting moment, in a way that recalls Kilburn’s capturing of the Chartist crowd, which then quickly disperses. In the case of the ‘Ice Tree’ it was planned that multiple plates also be exposed. Here, rather than signalling a move towards the panoramic, they speak of fear about the reliability of the daguerreotype process – if one image fails, a second might succeed in capturing something that cannot be expected to last for long. The same logic can also be seen as informing Kilburn’s doubling up of his efforts to capture the momentary grouping of the crowd on Kennington Common. A poem, as well as reportage text, accompanied the wood engraving of the ‘Ice Tree’ in the Illustrated London News, reprinted from the Illuminated Magazine. Titled ‘Gelidis luxuriosa comis’ (‘Cool Luxurious Locks’) the poem emphasizes how the ‘Ice Tree’ ‘vanished before the warming sun’, thus the same energy that allows the image of the tree to be captured also melts and destroys it.51 But the daguerreotype is simultaneously implicated in the transaction between the ‘Ice Tree’ and the pool, memory and image. In the poem the ‘Ice Tree’ is compared to the weeping willow, which ‘Hath seem’d to look / Into its mirror for the memory / Of happy hours that have long ceas’d to be.’52 In this sense the pool is like the photograph, a mirror that captures moments that have passed away. Yet doubt is also suggested here ‘(Alas! No glass can show us what we once could see …)’.53 While holding out the possibility of seeing the past, due to the instability of the medium the memories captured by a daguerreotype could prove as fugitive as watery reflections, or the mourning ‘Ice Tree’ itself. This idea of the fugitive nature of representation associated with the daguerreotype points up how, in attempting to capture the mutable Chartist crowd, photography might once again become more strongly associated with the diorama and more fleeting and subjective modes of viewing. The diorama was formed of a semi-transparent painting which, when illuminated by carefully controlled, filtered and directed light, gave a startlingly convincing effect. The subject matter was usually gothic interiors and picturesque views. The double-effect diorama extended the illusion still further. It allowed not just for alteration in effects of light, but also the appearance and disappearance of objects. This was achieved by painting the scene on both the recto and verso of the semi-transparent curtain, which would give a different effect when lit from the front or the back. Additionally, colour theory was employed: if a red and a green area are illuminated in red light the red area will disappear while the green area will show as black, and vice versa. As Helmut and Alison Gernsheim

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write ‘In this way astonishing changes could be brought about in the picture, and figures which had not been visible in the first effect appeared one by one in the second.’54 This form of visual spectacle was invented in the early 1830s by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (probably in collaboration with Hippolyte Victor Valentin Sébron).55 Daguerre exhibited his first double-effect diorama in March 1834: the basin at Ghent, completed in collaboration with Sébron. This was followed by the long running diorama that included the gathering and dispersal of a crowd in a church interior, again completed with Sébron: ‘A midnight mass at the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont’.56 In double-effect panoramas, which were shown in London from 1838 and through the 1840s, processions could be seen to enter churches and crowds gather and then disappear.57 The association of disappearing crowds and bodies with the diorama would have emphasized the diorama-like aspects of Kilburn’s daguerreotypes of the Chartist crowd. Viewing the diorama, like viewing a cased daguerreotype, was also a more individual and private, rather than a shared and public, experience. Unlike the panorama, the audience for a full-sized diorama witnessed the performance while seated in a darkened theatre-like setting. Whereas the panorama was static and aimed at completeness, the diorama emphasized the partial and the temporary.58 Dioramic subjects were typically sensational and romantic, rather than the educational and topographical, as with the panorama.59 Sophie Thomas has characterized the former as involving ‘elements of doubling and repetition’ that ‘put the spectre into the spectacular’.60 The images that emerge from the shiny surface of the daguerreotype, conjured from the application of chemicals and vapours, resemble the phantasmagoric affects of the diorama. During the first public demonstrations of his photographic process, Daguerre showed spectators the gradual appearance of the still invisible image as it developed on the metal plate through application of fumes of mercury.61 As Stephen C. Pinson in his book Speculating Daguerre observes, due to their shiny surface ‘Daguerreotypes are also modifiable views, in that sense that the image changes in response to reflected light … As in the Diorama, Daguerre controlled the reflection of light on his daguerreotypes by strategically placing them on easels in his studio.’62 It was this visionary aspect of the daguerreotype that was emphasized with the need to see the Chartist crowd as simultaneously threatening and insubstantial, bringing into question the medium’s role as a reliable witness at a time when its foremost commercial application was to bourgeois self-fashioning. Conclusion: the crowd and the public sphere John Plotz, in his book The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics, has ­suggested that in the first half of the nineteenth century a privileged ­relationship



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existed between crowds and literary texts.63 Both literature and crowds, he argues, wrestled with the question of what constituted the public sphere, who could participate in it, who could speak for the nation, and how the social and the political might be incorporated. For Plotz, literary texts can ‘record features of the era’s crowds that no other historical sources can supply’.64 It may in fact have been images, namely Kilburn’s daguerreotypes, which had this special relationship with the Chartist crowd in 1848. However, rather than privileging the daguerreotype above other forms of representation, this chapter has shown that the daguerreotype found a specific resonance with the crowd precisely because it was enmeshed within a broad network of images and texts, which worked together to form a grid within which the photographs’ meaning was plotted; significantly, novel and established forms and strategies of bourgeois self-fashioning were adopted, satirized and subverted in representing the Chartists and the Chartists’ representation of themselves. Although the threat of revolution in England receded from view, Kilburn’s daguerreotypes have become the prime visual means by which 10 April has been remembered (something Plotz tacitly acknowledges in his choice of dust jacket, which reproduces one of Kilburn’s daguerreotypes). Taken at a moment when the outcome of the meeting was still unknown, these images are a poignant testament to the struggle for the right to vote in 1848. Notes  1 David Large writes ‘the establishment of the Second Republic [in France] certainly had profound effects in the United Kingdom. The polite world, by early March, aided by extensive and highly biased press reporting became prey to a new bogy: … the Chartists were preparing for revolution in London.’ David Large, ‘London in the Year of Revolutions, 1848’, in Stevenson (ed.), London in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), p. 182. John Stevenson concurs that ‘in 1848 one of the most pertinent features was a growing press campaign which depicted the Chartists as the likely authors of outrage and violence’. See John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1870 (New York: Longman, 1979), p. 270. See also Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia?: Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), especially pp. 123–7.  2 ‘Proceedings in Parliament’, Gentleman’s Magazine (May 1848), p. 532.  3 ‘Proceedings in Parliament’, p. 532.  4 ‘Blow up of the Monster Petition Humbug’, Satirist (16 April 1848), p. 122.  5 ‘The Monster Petition’, Examiner (15 April 1848), p. 243.  6 ‘Dreadful Mortality’, Punch (22 April 1848), p. 169.  7 Perhaps somewhat paradoxically given the Illustrated London News’ use of a daguerreotype as the basis of its depiction of the crowd on Kennington Common, Punch ­imagines that the image by Leech is what would have occurred had an

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artist relied only on textual accounts to create his reportage image, which Punch asserts is the norm for many images supposedly by ‘“artists on the spot”’ … for the  ‘illuminated journals’. ‘The Chartist Procession According to the Signatures of the Petition’, Punch [29 April 1848], p. 175. For a discussion of these names and their meaning, see Richard D. Altick, Punch: the Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State Press, 1997), p. 297.  8 ‘To the Chartist Petition, …. ’, Lady’s Newspaper (15 April 1848), p. 298; ‘The Chartist Petition’, Bell’s Life (16 April 1848), p. 7.  9 ‘How to make a “Monster” Petition’, Puppet-Show (22 April 1848), p. 41. 10 The Times, ‘Blow up of the Monster Petition Humbug’, p. 122. 11 The Times, ‘Blow up of the Monster Petition Humbug’, p. 122. 12 ‘The Monster Petition’, p. 243. 13 ‘The Chartist Conspiracy’, Lady’s Newspaper (15 April 1848), p. 301. 14 The Times quoted in ‘Blow up of the Monster Petition Humbug’, p. 122. On the significance of this literary allusion see Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 15 ‘The Midnight Review (Slightly Altered from the German Original)’, Puppet-Show (22 April 1848), p. 41. 16 ‘The Midnight Review (Slightly Altered from the German Original)’, p. 41. 17 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, with an introduction and notes by Gareth Stedman Jones (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 218. 18 The Manifesto of the Communist Party first appeared in the periodical the Red Republican, translated by Helen Macfarlane. See Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 193. See also p. 27 on the image of the ‘spectre of Communism’. 19 ‘The Chartist Demonstration’, Illustrated London News (15 April 1848), p. 239. 20 It is typically said that in the years following Chartism lost its force, and ultimately died away before British radicalism was revived by socialism in the late nineteenth century. For a discussion and revision of this view, see Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 21 See John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 22 As conservator M. Susan Barger has written ‘As daguerreotypes age, colour tarnish films develop first at the edges of the plate, then at the mat edge, and then gradually encroach over the whole image.’ M. Susan Barger, ‘Delicate and Complicated Operations: The Scientific Examination of the Daguerreotype’, in Wood (ed.), The Daguerreotype: A Sesquincentennial Celebration (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), p. 104. 23 See Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton, Architectural Press, 2004), and Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 24 See Stephen C. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L.J.M. Daguerre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 25 Although the place of the panorama and the diorama in the conception and invention of photography have been debated by historians and critics, in the decade



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after Daguerre’s announcement of his discovery of a means to fix images on a metal plate, these technologies, concerned with an all encompassing static view and momentary effects and the temporary, can be seen as two linked factors in how daguerreotypes came to be understood as both evidence and trace. For this debate see Batchen, Burning with Desire, pp. 139–43. The most thorough account of the interplay between these different visual technologies in Daguerre’s work can be found in Pinson, Speculating Daguerre. Daguerre worked on theatre sets and panoramas, as well as being the proprietor of the Diorama in the Boulevard du Temple, Paris, which also had a London branch. The diorama was also discussed alongside the daguerreotype in his pamphlet Historique et Description des Procédés du Daguerréotype et du Diorama (1839), which announced the daguerreotype process. See also Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (New York: Dover Publications, 1968). 26 The longest treatment of these photographs is Roger Taylor’s entry ‘“Sharpen the Sickle”: The Chartist meeting, 10 April 1848’, in Dimond and Taylor, Crown and Camera: the Royal Family and Photography, 1842–1910 (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 27–9. 27 See for example the dust jacket for John Plotz’s book The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). Most recently one of the pair was reproduced in the exhibition catalogue edited by Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian AvantGarde (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), figure 10, p. 25. 28 A detailed description of the procession to Kennington Common can be found in ‘The Chartist Demonstration’, pp. 239–43. 29 For a summary of the dramatic improvements made in reducing exposure times, see ‘Appendix Two: Chronology’, in Pinson, Speculating Daguerre, p. 228. 30 It has been speculated that Kilburn was standing in an upper window at the Horns Tavern. However, the angle from which the factory is seen suggests a location further west down the road towards Brixton. Notably the Horns Tavern, which stood on the south-west side of the Common, had long associations with radical meetings and figures such as Thomas Paine. The Common was also a long established site for popular meetings of political and religious dissenters, as the closest common land to Westminster. In 1852 it was landscaped as a formal park to become the present day Kennington Park, a move which likely was made in response to the use of the Common as a site for radical activities. See Stefan Szczelkun, Kennington Park: The Birthplace of People’s Democracy (London: Past Tense, South London Radical History Group, 2006). 31 ‘The Chartist Demonstration’, p. 241. 32 The concept was made popular by the Prussian soldier and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz in his book On War, which was first published in 1832. 33 Sophie Thomas writes that ‘the panorama is implicated in the panoptic fantasy’, and stresses the medium’s uncanny stillness that froze time and allowed for sustained looking. See Sophie Thomas, ‘Making Visible: The Diorama, the Double, and the Gothic Subject’, in Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 135.

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34 See ‘The Illustrated London News and the Large Engraving of London in 1842 – Opinions of the Press’, Illustrated London News (28 May 1842), p. 48. 35 ‘The Illustrated London News and the Large Engraving of London in 1842 – Opinions of the Press’, p. 48. Other developments were linking the daguerreotype and the panorama at this time. In 1845 Frederick von Martens took a daguerreotype of Paris using a clockwork mechanism and a curving light-sensitive plate that encompassed 150 degrees (an invention announced in the Illustrated London News). ‘A Giant Stride in Photography’, Illustrated London News, 171 (9 August 1845), p. 91. For a reproduction of this image, see Janet E. Buerger, French Daguerreotypes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), title page and p. 46. 36 ‘Scene at Granby Fields during the Riots, Manchester’, Illustrated London News (27 August 1842), p. 244. For another similar example see ‘Back Entrance to Messrs. Wilson’s Mill’, Illustrated London News (20 August 1842), p. 233. 37 Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). See also Joseph Bizup, ‘“One Co-operative Body”: The Rhetoric of the Factory System’, in Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 18–50. 38 The possibility is also raised of the destruction of property and profit, specifically that belonging to the middle class. The inclusion of a short terrace of semi-detached stuccoed and pedimented villas in one of the daguerreotypes, a detail preserved in the wood engraving, additionally suggests a possible threat to middle-class domestic space. These fears gain extra emphasis when we understand the use of the factory in the background of Kilburn’s image of Kennington Common. 39 ‘St Agnes Church, St Agnes Place and Kennington Park Road and Gardens’, Survey of London, 25, ‘St George’s Fields’ (The parishes of St. George the Martyr Southwark and St. Mary Newington) (1955), pp. 99–100. URL: www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=65451. Date accessed: 11 January 2013. 40 Quoted in ‘Stockwell and Kennington’, Old and New London, 6 (1878), pp. 327– 341. URL: www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45285. Date accessed: 11 January 2013. 41 See diagram ‘Sulphuric Acid, Oil of Vitriol’ in Archibald Clow and Nan L. Clow, The Chemical Revolution: A Contribution to Social Technology (London: Batchworth Press, 1952), p. 134. 42 See James Williams, The Footman’s Guide: Containing Plain Instructions for the Footman and Butler (London: Thomas Dean and Co., [1847?]), and George William Francis, The Dictionary of Practical Receipts: Containing the Arcana of Trade and Manufacture (London: D. Francis and W. Strange, 1848). 43 Archibald Clow and Nan L. Clow, ‘Vitriol in the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, 15: 1/2 (1945), pp. 54, 44. 44 Valerie Smith, ‘Fact of Fiction, the Acid Test: Gaskell, Mary Barton and Vitriol’, Gaskell Society Journal, 12 (1998), p. 42. 45 Smith, ‘Fact or Fiction, the Acid Test’, pp. 41–2. See also ‘Ireland’, Illustrated London News (13 August 1842), p. 211. 46 Smith, ‘Fact or Fiction, the Acid Test’, p. 39.



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47 ‘Revolution in Prussia’, Illustrated London News (1 April 1848), p. 214. 48 For example, a daguerreotype was used for depicting the sculpture of ‘Columbus and the Indian Girl’ by Luigi Persico in the wood engraving of the ‘Inauguration of the American President’ in 1845. ‘Inauguration of the American President’, Illustrated London News (19 April 1845), p. 243. 49 The author only knows of two other examples of daguerreotypes cited as the basis for wood engravings that depict specific news events prior to 1848. The example of the ‘Ice Tree’ is discussed here, the other example is ‘Movement of the Great Wellington Statue’, Illustrated London News (3 October 1846), p. 213. 50 ‘“Ice Tree”, Middle Temple’, Illustrated London News (1 March 1845), p. 141. 51 ‘“Ice Tree”, Middle Temple’, p. 141. 52 ‘“Ice Tree”, Middle Temple’, p. 141. 53 ‘“Ice Tree”, Middle Temple’, p. 141. 54 See Gernsheim and Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre, pp. 33–4. 55 See Gernsheim and Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre, pp. 33–4. 56 The overlap between news reportage and the diorama is clear, Daguerre created dioramas of fires, revolutions (1830), avalanches, and even a murder (‘The Black Forest: assassination of the countess of Hartzfeld and her servant in 1804’). For a complete list of Daguerre’s dioramas exhibited in Paris, see Gernsheim and Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre, pp. 182–4. 57 For a list of Daguerre’s dioramas exhibited in London, see Gernsheim and Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre, pp. 184–6. 58 As Thomas has observed ‘in the Diorama the intensity rather than the immensity of the illusion is stressed’, and whereas the panorama is ‘uncanny in relation to space’ the diorama is ‘uncanny in relation to time.’ Thomas, ‘Making Visible’, pp. 121, 128. 59 See Thomas, ‘Making Visible’, p. 135. 60 Thomas, ‘Making Visible’, pp. 116, 128. 61 Pinson comments that ‘During [Daguerre’s] first public demonstrations of the process … he emphasized the spectacular quality of the daguerreotype by showing spectators the gradual appearance of the still invisible photographed view … as it developed through exposure to the fumes of mercury.’ Pinson, Speculating Daguerre, p. 87. 62 Pinson, Speculating Daguerre, p. 87. 63 See Plotz, The Crowd. 64 Plotz, The Crowd, p. 3.

3

‘The Gutta Percha Staff’: between respectable and risqué satire in 1848

Punch saw itself, and wished to be seen, as respectable. Narratives about Victorian periodical publication, put forward in surveys of the period by Fox, Anderson and Maidment, contextualize Punch’s agenda within transformations of print culture in the mid nineteenth century. Patrick Leary has added significant detail to this picture, with his account of how the running of Punch, the weekly staff meetings at which the publication’s contents were decided, and the controls enacted by the editor and publishers, were calculated to avoid scandal and obscenity finding its way onto the journal’s pages.1 However, this process was often not straightforward. There were disagreements about what was and was not acceptable, which in the early years of publication led to the departure of Albert Smith, and in the years that followed affected who was invited to contribute. These difficulties resulted from the fact that Punch was enmeshed in a network of visual culture, both respectable and risqué, on which it relied for its currency and meaning. This environment informed both the journal’s contents and the way they were read. For Punch respectability was a desire then, rather than a given, and its contributors’ assertions of decorum should not be taken at face value. In 1848, against the backdrop of the fallout from the 10 April Chartist demonstration and ongoing arrests and plotting over the summer, Punch’s desire for respectable humour was threatened. This can be seen most clearly in the publication’s satires at the expense of the middle-class special constables who volunteered to assist to keep the peace on the day of the Kennington Common meeting. Satires at the specials’ expense were also virulent and ubiquitous in popular culture at the time. More than the trauma of revolution, the threat to Punch’s decorum stemmed from critiques, often in visual form, which brought middle-class masculinity, and masculinity in general (the Chartists too were the focus of humorous barbs), into question. At this moment there appears to have been a dangerous blurring of the boundaries between acceptable and objectionable humour in Punch, as writers and cartoonists, especially John Leech, who himself volunteered as a special, struggled to find ways to picture the failings that press coverage of the special constables pointed out.



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It is notable that the special had longevity in popular culture. Two years later, in Novelty Fair, the character of Time makes reference to the special when in the first scene the year 1848 refuses to be silent or leave the stage. Drawing a ‘constable’s truncheon’ Time tells him ‘You’d best retire – for several special reasons.’2 At which point 1848 leaves the stage and 1851 in the guise of a gent, another figure of unstable ­masculine identities, suddenly appears.3 Punch’s Almanack for 1849 At the end of 1848, as had happened every year since the paper’s founding, the writers and illustrators of Punch published their highly popular ‘Comic Almanack’ for the coming year. Alternate pages employ the familiar format of cheaply printed and widely circulated almanacs, a long established genre.4 On such broadsides predictions for the coming year were given and holidays noted, with the text typically surrounded by vignette illustrations. In 1848 Punch offered six ‘almanack’ pages giving two months each following this format. In a satire on the idea that the almanac would predict the future, Punch used its ‘Comic Almanack’ for 1849 to look back and summarize the events from the year just passed. The first four pairs of two months took up the theme of revolution. On a page titled ‘The Trafalgar Square Revolution’, the months of March and April were dedicated to ‘The Swell Mobsman’s Almanack’, which suggests how a petty-thief might best utilize the crowds that formed throughout the year to ply his craft (see Figure 3.1). The vignette illustrations that accompany this text refer to the March riot in Trafalgar Square, the 10 April Chartist demonstration and the violence which followed into the summer, culminating in the arrest and trial of Chartist leaders. The images at the top and bottom of the page humorously juxtapose special constable and Chartist. The specials were easy to recognize, even though they wore civilian dress. They carried batons, resembling those used by the police, and wore a white armband, usually depicted as tied in a knot around the upper arm. In 1848 some 80,000 men joined up as special constables, 22,000 in the City of London alone.5 Given that estimates of the crowd gathered on Kennington Common ranged from the Standard’s 9–10,000, through The Times’ 20,000 to the likely highly optimistic 250,000 of the Northern Star, this was a significant comparative figure.6 Historians have noted that specials came forward from several occupations, but the majority who joined voluntarily, rather than being pressed into service by their employers, belonged to the middle and lower middle classes.7 By showing support for the government this group helped tip the balance towards stability within London and the country more broadly in 1848.8 Despite this, the special constable of 1848 has generally been neglected by scholars in favour of the Chartists, but even a cursory survey shows that in the visual culture of 1848 the special constable was represented with great

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3.1  Unknown wood engraver probably after a drawing by John Leech, ‘The Trafalgar Revolution’, months of March and April (unnumbered pages), wood engraving from Punch’s Almanack for 1849 (London: Punch Office, 1848), unnumbered pages.



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frequency. They were not depicted as triumphant or heroic; in fact quite the opposite. Although some periodicals, such as The Times and the Morning Post, praised the special, to an extent that has not been fully appreciated, satires at the special constables’ expense were ubiquitous in 1848. The top left-hand vignette from Punch’s almanac for March and April shows a portly middle-class special in a frock coat and top hat about to go on duty. He is taking leave of a weeping female relative, perhaps his wife or daughter, who clings dramatically to his neck burying her face in his chest. The special himself does not look very bold, in fact he appears miserable. He holds his hand to his head and faces into the room rather than towards the open door, suggesting that he is not keen to leave. To the right is an older female figure in a cap and spectacles who is pouring what is probably whiskey or brandy into a glass of hot water, with the aim of bracing his nerves and warding off the cold. On a chair in the foreground is a heavy coat with the special’s baton sticking out of a pocket, while on the wall, as a sign of his loyalty, is a framed picture of the Queen. The cat curled up on the floor, in the absence of children or further family members, succinctly invokes warm and contented domesticity, in contrast to the potential dangers of the streets outside. Meanwhile, across the page to the right, a group of Chartists is also shown preparing for confrontation. The slope of the interior’s roof hints that this is a garret, a location of cheap rentals for the lower classes tucked under the eaves. We see three male figures, one of them a boy, and a fierce looking woman. Although all the figures appear serious and steadfast, they too are figures of fun. They are dressed in ‘armour’ created from domestic metalwork: pans and kettles form helmets and breastplates, while a seated man hammers at a dustbin lid, perhaps crafting a makeshift shield. The Chartists’ weapons appear to be a fencing rapier and a large ladle, although perhaps more sinister is the pistol seen on the floor. In place of the picture of the Queen a placard on the wall reads ‘To Harms Brave Britons’, the additional ‘H’ here parodying the sound of cockney speech. Despite the muscular physique of the man at the centre of the group in a short jacket and knee breeches, who may be a navvy, his heroic even classical pose is undercut by his comical headgear and the fact that the pike he leans on is formed of a long stick, perhaps a broom-handle, with a small double-pronged fork tied to the end. These satires on both the would-be combatants, the special and the Chartist, revolve around motifs of failed heroics and bankrupt chivalry. Notably, in both scenes women and the domestic sphere are held responsible for wavering masculinity. On the one hand the special is coddled by and burdened with emotional females, while the Chartist is encouraged in his hopeless quest by his wife, who provides him with outmoded weapons and armour. These two vignettes look back to and summarize many other images from across a broad spectrum of sources, including Punch’s own pages, that had reported on or satirized both special and Chartist in the aftermath of the

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10 April meeting. It is important to realize that, despite their humorous content, these satires were prompted by serious reportage articles published in periodicals such as The Times, the Standard and the Illustrated London News. Without understanding the factual reference point for any particular joke or cartoon their cultural weight and seriousness can be underestimated. But, just as significantly, these images also drew on less respectable sources: the text of broadside ballads, popular plays and cheap lithographs. The proximity of Punch’s material to these popular, risqué and even obscene forms of humorous popular culture suggests the tensions around picturing middle-class manhood, and manhood more generally, in 1848. The special and the Chartist in Punch For both specials and Chartists their struggle to appear heroic is located in the domestic sphere, a space that in the mid nineteenth century was symptomatic of separate gender roles. The kitchen and kitchen utensils figure prominently in these cartoons. Often hidden in even in the poorest houses at the back of the property, or in the basement of more prosperous dwellings, the kitchen as a space of women’s work was a place where men were never completely in control. With respect to the middle classes this is demonstrated in numerous Punch caricatures and articles that deal with lazy, thieving or disorganized servants. Turning first to the special, a cartoon by Leech from Punch shows a kitchen with the caption: ‘Special Constable Preparing for the Worst. – Drying his Gunpowder in the Frying-Pan’ (see Figure 3.2). Bending over the stove where we would expect to see a female family member or servant is a bespectacled special. The scene takes place in a well-ordered and stocked kitchen. Candlesticks and other objects are arranged symmetrically on the mantelpiece, while on the dresser behind are a range of cups and plates, and a large tureen. A toasting fork hangs to the left of the iron stove, of which we can see the grate and the tap for the hot-water tank to the right. The space is made more comfortable by the addition of a rug on the floor. It appears that much time and thought have been devoted to this room. The different sized tureens and plates might even suggest fastidious concern with the niceties of table setting and the multiplication of serving tools and utensils which characterized the Victorian era. This implies that man who owns this house sees his domestic surroundings as having a claim to his money. Perhaps he is even overly concerned with this, or under the sway of his wife? Perhaps his wife has even put him up to volunteering? The influence of women over their male partners and relatives was emphasized in a contemporary article for the Lady’s Newspaper, which warns that everyone should be prepared to deter the Chartists and would-be revolutionaries from ‘converting their preposterous notions into acts’, adding ‘it only seems



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3.2  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘Special Constable Preparing for the Worst. – Drying his Gunpowder in the Frying-Pan’, wood engraving from Punch, 22 April 1848, p. 170.

­ ecessary to hint to Englishwomen that they may favourably influence their n male relatives’ into taking action, continuing ‘We recommend, in fact, that everyone should arm himself with the powers of a special constable, in order to interfere, if necessary, with all the protection and authority with which the law can invest him. And to our fair readers we simply state that the extent to which this advice is followed will greatly depend upon them.’9

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In a full-page cartoon by Leech ‘A Physical Force Chartist Arming for the Fight’, which appeared on 2 September 1848 (see Figure 3.3), we can see how Punch’s Almanack for 1849 reappraised an earlier image. The scene is a bare room where the walls appear to be painted or plastered and cracks are appearing, the floor is bare boards and the door is simple unfinished planks. The furniture is sparse: a three legged stool and a wooden bench. The bench has fallen over on its side, for reasons that are not immediately obvious, but, along with the objects strewn on the floor, is suggestive of domestic neglect. The woman in the cartoon is plump, but her clothes are tattered in places. The fact that she is well fed suggests that the ripped clothes stem from neglect rather than poverty, by contrast her hair is dressed and covered with a cap. The man is thinner, though not clean shaven, his dress is smart. Rather than a labouring man’s clothes and rough boots, this man wears a shirt with a collar, a waistcoat and lace-up shoes. This could be his Sunday best. The woman is dressing the ‘Physical Force Chartist’ with makeshift armour pieced together from domestic items of metal work. He wears a large coal scuttle upside-down on his head as a helmet, its form recalling classical, perhaps specifically Greek, armour. A second helmet formed from a saucepan and decorated with a thin-looking feather (a quill?) sits on the shelf behind. The woman is in the act of tying a large domed plate-cover around the man’s waist using a piece of rope that passes through the cover’s handle. He shoulders an old-fashioned flintlock musket. The ball on the floor forms part of the musket’s ammunition, and other scraps suggest that cartridges may have been manufactured here. A bundle tied up and placed on the stool perhaps contains further ammunition and weapons; we see what seems to be the handle of a dagger and a pistol protruding from the makeshift bag. Notably the man also wears a sword that appears to be as long as the distance from his shoulder to the ground. The weapon is therefore out of proportion with his height, which also suggests that he is small in stature. The sword projects backwards and drags on the ground. Looking closely, it is clear that he has his leg tangled in the strap the sword hangs from. As a result the weapon now hangs between his legs and will surely trip him up if he tries to walk. Given the bareness of the room and its scanty simple furniture, the metal objects that the Chartist wears seem at odds with the couple’s small means. Are they scrap, which would explain the age of the gun, or are they stolen? Perhaps a leg of the toppled bench has been requisitioned as a makeshift baton? The man has a grim expression, but appears more ridiculous than dangerous, although his large hand, bent into the shape of a claw, could suggest an animalistic side to his nature. In this cartoon the Chartist is literally coated in the domestic sphere, and the makeshift armour that is supposed to protect him in the public realm is in fact a sign of his weakness. In addition the ‘armour’ invokes an ancient chivalry and aristocratic status the Chartist clearly lacks (his historic lack of political



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3.3  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘A Physical Force Chartist Arming for the Fight’, wood engraving from Punch, [2 September] 1848, p. 101.

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power is the very reason for his need to fight for the Six Points). In this image masculinity is subject to failure occurring across the interlinked categories of gender and class. The special in Leech’s cartoon, which appeared in Punch on 22 April 1848, has been subjected to a similar fate (see Figure 3.4). His wife has bundled him up so thoroughly against the damp night that he would be unable to swing his truncheon or take an active part in defending the nation if it were required. His body is muffled and swaddled to such an extent that it is as if he is taking the comforts of the well-upholstered Victorian interior out

3.4  Unknown wood engraver probably after a drawing by John Leech, ‘Special’s Wife …’, wood engraving from Punch, 22 April 1848, p. 166.



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of the house with him, and is therefore doubly unable to escape the domestic sphere. The cartoon also shows this quite literally, as the special’s wife follows him out to the front gate, trying to persuade him to drink some warm alcohol to protect him from the cold. The caption reads ‘Special’s Wife: “Contrary to regulations indeed! Fiddlesticks! I must insist, Frederick, upon your taking this hot brandy-and-water. I shall be having you laid up next, and not fit for anything.”’10 The hen-pecked husband is not allowed a word of protest. The joke here is that, although unlikely to catch cold, Frederick is already ‘not fit for anything’. Wives and the domestic are also emphasized in the vignettes in Punch’s Almanack for 1849, which essentially summarize and repeat the caricatures discussed previously. Here both scenes take place inside the home, although notably women are more numerous in the special’s house, especially if we include the image of the Queen on the wall. The older woman in the vignette on the left pours out brandy, while the woman in the vignette on the right, picturing the Chartists, brings an unsheathed sword. Women shape how men will appear in public, but are also responsible for their failures. In the case of the special, women are responsible for his lack of courage; he has been spoilt by an overly feminine home environment; in the case of the Chartist, he has been made to look foolish, given the trappings of nobility that only draw attention to his lower-class status. How both men are dressed for the public sphere manifests their failures at home. It is notable that the shortcomings of special and Chartist are here seen to originate in the private sphere and in failures in their relationships with women, rather than in a society that confines middle-class men to inactive desk jobs or denies certain honourable traits to the working classes.11 In the case of the physical force Chartist and Frederick the special, what they are both supposed to protect as men, the domestic, is actually protecting them. It is almost as if they have been turned inside out; weaknesses that should be kept behind closed doors are manifested very publically and visibly on the body’s surface. Truncheons, rods, rolling pins, handles and swords are common to all these images, hanging uselessly between legs or projecting stiffly from back-pockets. Phallic in form, they draw attention to the masculinity that both special and Chartist lack, but they are also risqué references in the context of Punch’s supposedly respectable pages. Although it would be easy to dismiss these cartoons as the product of Leech’s imagination and talent for observational humour, they draw on topics covered in serious news reportage as well as a surprisingly vulgar range of popular culture. I will first turn to the factual reference points for these cartoons, as understanding these highlights the currency, and even gravity, of this subject matter for contemporary readers. The following section then delves further into the links between these cartoons, ballads and items of more scurrilous humour.

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In June 1848 the following account appeared in the Examiner under the title ‘Requital of Special Service’.12 It recounts a case brought to trial involving a small boy and the noted astronomer Sir James South, a special constable, over an incident that had taken place in Notting Hill. In 1848 South was in his fifties. He had been knighted in 1830 by William IV and given a civil-list pension. The report in the Examiner reads: Sir J. South sees a young blackguard throwing stones at a troop of Her Majesty’s Horse Guards. As in duty bound as a special constable, Sir James takes the offender into custody. He is instantly mobbed … The mob insist on the liberation of the boy, and cry out to send for the mother, who, responding to the demand, appears on the scene like a savage dog let loose, flies at Sir J. South, and bites him. The boy is rescued, and the astronomer knocked about mercilessly. The boy, when put upon his defense, denied the stones, but confessed to the softer impeachment of flinging dirt at the troops … The mother denied the bite, but did not deny the rescue.13

The Times had carried the same story a few days earlier but with added details that explain the amusement that Sir James had caused. The boy was named as John Prattley, ‘a chubby-faced boy, 9 years of age’, and his mother, Harriett Prattley, was described by The Times as a ‘good-looking labouring woman’.14 South, the special, had been defeated by a little boy and his mother, although they also had many supporters on their side. The hearing was made more humorous due to the way that South conducted himself. The Examiner reported that the way he gave his evidence ‘threw a ridicule about it’.15 South gave the precise time at which the various events had occurred. The Examiner defended him, explaining that ‘it is to be remembered that he is in the habit of mathematical precision, and notes small events and circumstances with the exactness of a transit; but admitting the quizzicality of his account, we cannot see that it divested him of the right to protection in the eye of the law’.16 South’s profession as an astronomer and the training this has given him in minute observation has made him ill equipped to deal with the realities of social unrest and conflict. It is clear that Sir James had believed that his life was in danger, and that he was about to be badly beaten or stabbed to death, but seems to have not appreciated the ridicule that he was opening himself to as he confessed his inability to apprehend a nine-year-old boy. His account involved a cast of characters: the ‘tigress’ mother who he maintains had bitten him, the baker, to whose shop he takes the boy while looking for a policeman, who ‘seemed to feel great pleasure’ at his uncomfortable situation, and a woman who he assumes to be the wife of the baker, who he describes as ‘a strong, masculine woman’.17



‘The Gutta Percha Staff’: between respectable and risqué satire in 1848  73 South concluded his evidence: When I got out [of the shop] I was received with a yell that would only have done credit to a body of savages. That was exactly 17 minutes past 12 o’clock. I got to the Black Lion at 22 minutes past 12 o’clock, and there I found a policeman standing talking. I told him that whenever I wanted a policeman there never was one to be found, and that when I did find him he was standing gossiping while I might have been murdered.18

The timing of Sir James’s clash with the crowd in Notting Hill is significant. It probably occurred on 3 June, two days before the Whit Monday holiday on which several Chartist demonstrations were planned. In this heightened moment of tension, a crowd of working class people, even small boys, might suddenly appear threatening to a member of the middle class. This fear transformed the working classes into ‘a body of savages’, headed by oddly masculine or animalistic women, and armed with knives, ready to crush and violate the bourgeois body. Satires of the Chartists donning makeshift armour also had their origin in serious news reportage. Although the 10 April meeting was seen as a failure, more violent disturbances continued into the summer.19 This came to a head in the press when a number of arrests were made and several conspirators brought to trial.20 Press coverage focused on the crude weapons the police had found when the plotters were apprehended, and it was repeatedly emphasized that Chartist membership cards had been found on the person or in the homes of those involved. In August the Examiner related multiple arrests of Chartist groups throughout London, and told how ‘Upon the police proceeding to the house of Samuel Morgan, one of the men taken prisoners, [they] found the leg of a chair loaded with lead. It was about the length of a policeman’s truncheon, and so heavily laden that a violent blow on the head with it must cause death. Swords and weapons of various kinds have been found at the residences of other prisoners.’21 This story was repeated in John Bull and the Illustrated London News, and the Lady’s Newspaper carried a similar report, but added that the lead-filled chair leg ‘had a number of nails driven into the extremity’.22 This may explain why the bench in the foreground is tipped over in Leech’s ‘A Physical Force Chartist Arming for the Fight’. The Examiner further related how in Ashton-Under-Lyne a man named Healey was found to be in possession of ‘a loaded pistol, a butcher’s steel, powder, slugs, chartist Manual, shot bag, pike head, wadding purse, a slater’s pick, sharpened knife, etc’.23 It was also reported that Chartists had been planning to ‘fire houses, trains, premises or anything’, and that bullets had being cast in large numbers.24 A report in The Times stated that there had been a plan to pull up gas pipes in order to put London into ‘total darkness’.25 John Bull reported that at the house of one of the men on trial at Bow Street the police had found ‘4 bullet moulds, 4 bullets, 3 combustible balls,

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surrounded with pitch, having a fusee in the middle; some powder and a powder horn, a bottle of powder, a bayonet, a ladle for melting lead, a piece of lead, and a quantity of tow; about 50 percussion caps, some shot, and also a piece of paper written with pencil which certified that Joseph Ritchie and John Manby had been elected [Chartist] delegates.’26 Another policeman reported that when he and several others had broken up a meeting in Southwark one man, named as W. Winspear, was reported to have ‘a breast-plate of old iron, concealed under his waistcoat and shirt, and a dagger underneath where he sat’.27 In the same piece multiple further lists of ammunition and weapons were given. Black and blue, or black and green The account in satirical visual culture of the special constable that seems to owe most to the experiences of Sir James South is the lithographed pamphlet Six Scenes in the Life of James Green Esq, a Special Constable, sketched by a Special, published by David Bogue, and illustrated by John Richard Jobbins. Bogue again seems to have been operating on the boundary of respectable and risqué publishing, as with Smith’s ‘Social Zoologies’. The innuendo of this pamphlet suggests that it was not intended for a respectable, especially female, readership. Due to its liminal position in print culture Six Scenes in the Life of James Green is a significant source, as it touches on themes that reoccurred in other accounts of special constables across a range of media, both in cartoons that Punch deemed suitable for the drawing room, and more vulgar satires in the shape of ballads, comic songs and the popular theatrics of the fledging music hall. Six Scenes in the Life of James Green thus reveals the shared elements of visual culture across various productions for different classes at mid century, as well as suggesting that more risqué readings of Punch’s cartoons would have been available. Green’s first name might be an explicit reference to the astronomer James South, and here small boys also play a prominent part in the drama. Six Scenes in the Life of James Green consisted of six lithographed pages that tell the story of a day in the life of a special constable. Green is shown bidding farewell to his wife, in a scene that was mirrored in Leech’s cartoon of Frederick the special that appeared on 22 April, and is exceptionally close to the scene in the Punch’s Almanack for 1849 discussed previously.28 Many of the traits that are common to the satires on the special constable are recognizable in these lithographs. Green possesses a physique which is far from heroic, and is even grotesque. His legs, clad in checked-trousers, are thin and spindly, but his stomach is large. In several plates it appears that the buttons on his coat are under strain, throughout the day fewer and fewer are fastened and in the final plate the buttons of Green’s waistcoat are also coming undone. Green’s face too is flabby and when seen in profile, as in plate three, his jaw recedes and his nose is small. This would again suggest a lack of bravery or decision to a Victorian viewer famil-



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iar with physiological theories. In plate one Green tries to look ferocious, but simply appears overly theatrical and comic. Green’s dress has gentish elements: he wears checked trousers, tight gloves and a patterned neck tie, shiny shoes and a top hat. Green’s hair is also slightly long, recalling the gent. His physical shortcomings are particularly pronounced when he confronts a group of three workers in plate two. The workers stand almost a full head taller than Green, their feet are larger, and their loose workmen’s smocks and thick trousers make them appear larger still. With his tight clothes, gloves and considered appearance, Green is made to appear almost feminine in comparison with these men, a comparison heightened by Green’s smooth chin, and the workers facial hair and stubble. Green fares badly in his meeting with a group of small boys who mock him. In the following scene, plate four, Green is shown collaring a young boy wearing the uniform of a charity school. This action, and the outcome in which the boy is released from Green’s custody, mirrors the account cited above concerning Sir James South.29 Green seems to have deliberately chosen to seize a child who is less threatening than those who initially proposed to have a ‘lark with him’. However, this plan backfires when a crowd of young boys pursue him, throwing a dead cat, a turnip, a lump of coal and handfuls of dirt, and even what appear to be cobble stones. Green runs from what he refers to as the ‘crew of desperate ruffians’, tearing the stirrup on one leg of his smart trousers as he does so. By the time Green reaches home his clothes are ruined and he is covered in dirt, one eye covered in a patch of black. While still clutching his truncheon he recounts a fictional story of a ‘desperate struggle’ to his wife and two small children in which the police are useless (as they are in Sir James’s evidence), and alone he captured the leader of the rioters. Filthy with dirt, Green becomes blackened. This is significant as dirt was a marker of class, associated with workers, both male and female, and also through its darkening properties with racial difference. Complex interconnections between class and race have been noted by several scholars, most notably in relation to the middle-class Arthur Munby and his investigations of female coal workers, and Hannah Cullwick, the maid, his lover and later his wife. Griselda Pollock notes how the dirt, or in Munby’s words the ‘blackness’, that covers the female workers’ bodies ‘signifies difference at the point where both dirt and sexuality – alluded to as a matter of colour – are caught up in the troubled field of subjectivity, sexuality and vision in a bourgeois imagination that is white, colonial and masculine’.30 More broadly popular culture in 1848 played with these themes. Bell’s Life in London reported on 30 April that ‘The female American Serenaders will continue at Sadler’s Wells Theatre the first three days next week. During their stay there they have proved attractive, and the “Nigger Special Constable” song excited roars of laughter.’31 This presumably describes a blackface troop, perhaps also involving cross-dressing. A play was staged at

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the Olympic Theatre titled The Special in which the lead female character crossdresses as a special for romantic intrigue, further playing with the idea that the specials’ physique was wanting, or even effeminate if a woman so easily passed for one.32 The punning lyrics of The Special Constables, a comic song ‘sung with unbounded applause’, again played with gender. It describes a group of hapless specials as they go about their duties. In the character of a special the performer sang the lines: ‘Like Goddesses we really looked, for rows each an explorer, / I’m sure Brown personated Nox [knocks], and Smith another Floorer [Flora].’33 Edging towards another blackface performance, Green’s identity and his aspirations to be a hero become destabilized through his encounter with the lower classes, perhaps not coincidentally, described as ‘savages’ by Sir James South.34 Like the blackened Green, the satire on the special at the theatre show how his failures quickly pushed the figure to the margins of secure, white, middle-class male identity, and the hybrid subjectivities of cross-gender and cross-race ­performances that were a feature of the bawdy popular culture. Prosthetics Perhaps because of these traumatic slippages, satires on the special constable and the Chartist sometimes appear to wish to compensate for the loss of masculine power, but this compensation was also made the source of humour, and typically of a vulgar nature. In Six Scenes in the Life of James Green there is clearly a play on the parallel between truncheon and phallus.35 This is highlighted by the use of the word ‘rolling pin’, another kitchen implement, for truncheon that was prevalent in broadside ballads, to the extent that ‘rolling pin’ seems to have functioned as a kind of slang for truncheon. Hence the ballad The Chartist’s Flare-up on Witsun-monday reads: ‘The Constables are all sworn in, / To carry a monstrous rolling pin.’36 While the ballad New Song on the “Specials” reads: ‘The Grocer and the Baker, too, / the Snob and Undertaker, / Are going off to take the oath, / And should anyone break the peace / With a rolling pin they will go in / And fight like brave policemen.’37 This paralleling of rolling pin and truncheon is repeated in Punch cartoons by Leech as well as in Six Scenes in the Life of James Green. However, there is a hidden meaning here, as rolling pin is essentially a pun. In broadside ballads ‘rolling’ meant to have sex, therefore ‘rolling pin’ had the double meaning of penis (the ‘pin’ a man does his ‘rolling’ with). Such innuendo punctures heroic pretentions, bringing bravery down to a bathetic level and heroism to the physicality of vulgar bodily urges. It is also evidence of the hidden bawdy meanings that were open to readers of Punch conversant with the street literature and concert hall songs, as the writers and cartoonists surely were. The paralleling of truncheon and penis opens up more risqué readings of the erect and tail-like baton in Leech’s cartoon of the special drying gun powder over the kitchen stove. Similarly we



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might look again at the sword which dangled between the legs of the physical force Chartist in Leech’s full-page caricature ‘A Physical Force Chartist Arming for the Fight’, or any number of batons brandished in people’s faces or dangling in weak-wristed hands. The truncheon stands in for the maleness that the special lacks. It is held stiffly in front of Green when he confronts a group of small boys, and hangs down from his arm when he runs away from them. The phallic nature of the truncheon is underlined in the dialogue that accompanies plate one (see Figure 3.5), which reads as follows: Mrs. G. – Now my love should you meet any of those deluded Chartists, prey be merciful, you do look so revengeful this morning. Mr. G. – I know my duty as a man, and as a Special Constable, but you know what I am when I am up. Mrs. G. – Yes my love that’s the very thing, and then you’ll be pulling out that horrid Truncheon of yours

The text implies an erection, and the word ‘Truncheon’, suggestively capitalized here, is a double entendre. A similar implication can be found in the broadside ballad New Song on the “Specials”, which reads: ‘As Mrs. Bright the other night, / So snug in bed lay snoring / She dreamt there was a fearful row, / And canons they were roaring; / She gave her husband such a kick, / Saying don’t be vexed my beauty, / But as you’re a special, be a brick, / Get up and do your duty.’38 The image of Green taking leave of his wife offers an opportunity for a similar sexual reading. The handle of Green’s baton projects stiffly from his pocket at waist level and points towards his wife. Between the two parents we see a small child, probably a boy, who looks at the handle of the truncheon with wide-eyed shock and confusion in a humorous version of Freud’s primal scene. On the same level as the child’s face and the truncheon handle is a suggestive frill around the slit of a pocket in the mother’s skirt, which seems to reference female genitalia. This kind of bawdy humour and innuendo is a common feature of broadside ballads, but it can also be seen in Leech’s cartoon of the special drying his gunpowder on the kitchen stove. The special constable’s truncheon is prominently but not elegantly displayed. It projects incongruously from his back pocket, pointing directly upwards from his rear. This animal-like tail is silhouetted against the cloth that the woman holds in front of herself in a protective gesture. Her surprised expression and the way she seems about to cover the truncheon with the cloth, suggest that it should not be seen and is disturbing. The batons or rolling pins of the special, and the Chartists’ swords and chair legs, can be read as phallic compensations for and signs of frustrated ­masculinity. It is worth dwelling more deeply on how these symbols, especially the special’s truncheon, functioned in a broader context. At its most

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3.5  John Richard Jobbins, ‘Mrs. G gives her husband a little advice, and a good deal of brandy’, lithograph from John Richard Jobbins, Six Scenes in the Life of James Green Esq., a Special Constable. Sketched by a Special (London: Bogue, 1848), unnumbered page.

f­undamental level the truncheon extends and amplifies the special’s feeble strength; as Elaine Scarry notes considering tools and weapons in relation to work, pain and the body, both allow for small gestures to become magnified while the person who uses the tool or weapon does not experience an equivalent amount of fatigue in terms of either work done or the duration of that work – the wound from a truncheon would last far longer than the exertion of swinging it.39 It is therefore a potentially powerful enhancement of the special’s power and by extension his masculinity. The truncheon can perhaps be better



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understood as a kind of prosthetic. As Erin O’Connor observes in her writing on amputation and false limbs in the nineteenth-century medical culture, prosthetics complete bodies.40 However, O’Connor also points out that this newly made wholeness can never completely disguise the initial loss. She identifies the resulting body made artificially complete as split against even itself. 41 The phantom limb haunts the wearer and produces behaviours most associated with female hysteria.42 Furthermore, like the artificial limb, the baton suggests that ‘essence can be re-created through imitation, and that identity is something that can be attached’, holding out the possibility of ‘both anatomical and epistemological repair’.43 Through the addition of a prosthetic the question of masculinity is reframed to become about ‘what the body can do instead of what the body is’, and thus the special’s inadequate physique might be padded out to complete manhood through the artificial strength of the baton.44 It is interesting to note that in the Punch cartoon ‘Laying down the Law’ (see Figure 3.6) of the diminutive and clean-shaven special confronting the much larger worker, the special brandishes his truncheon, but this extends his reach

3.6  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘Laying Down the Law’, wood engraving from Punch, 22 April 1848, p. 172.

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only to the shoulder of the much larger bearded figure on the left. The shadow cast by the special on the wall behind allows the viewer to gauge this precisely. In response, the worker simply rolls up his sleeve revealing a muscular forearm while making a fist with his right hand. He does not need bodily enhancements; his strength is internalized through physical work already done. In this sense he is all weapon and completely and indivisibly masculine. O’Connor makes the further parallel between the machine, which the amputee appears to blend with through an artificial limb, and an argument for laissez-faire capitalism, in which the worker is ‘Fixed up nearly as good as new by the same system that crippled him’.45 The same might be said for the special. Desk work and the separation of spheres has emasculated and even crippled him, but acting for the state and its norms, as a special equipped with a standard issue truncheon, he is restored to wholeness and can act heroically. Conclusion: ‘We all like gutta percha when we go out on the tiles’ Putting aside for a moment its phallic connotations, the special constable’s truncheon had other connotations in 1848. The truncheon, although potentially a brutal weapon, was seen as a symbol of the greater liberty enjoyed in England, in contrast to the continent where the bayonet was used to keep order.46 The idea of the truncheon as a symbol of British freedoms motivates the Punch cartoon and accompanying text ‘The British Tree of Liberty’ (see Figure 3.7). The slightly awkward image shows a strange landscape of hills and trees that on closer inspection is made up of arms raised from buttoned uniforms clutching bundles of batons. The arm in the foreground is clearly labelled with a white band marked ‘SPECIAL’. Three similar ‘trees’ are seen in the background. A man appears to have been struck and is running away from the second most prominent one, while another man stands ready to attack with raised fists beyond. The cartoon makes reference to a key icon from the American War of Independence, the so called ‘Liberty Tree’ on Boston Common where the colonies had first defied the colonial administration over taxation. This symbol was then taken up during the French Revolution. The symbolism of the tree was a common and flexible one in the radical tradition of caricature.47 Underneath this image the caption gives the Latin name of the tree ‘Liber Libertatus Britanicus, Genus – Specialis Constabularius’. The text takes a serious tone, praising British liberty at home and abroad and is unusual among Punch’s more mocking accounts of the special. Understanding the truncheon as a symbol of British progressiveness and liberalism throws a different light onto cartoons of undersized and overly domesticated specials wielding their batons. Here a symbol of British civilization and superiority is demoted to an ironic sign of the times. However, adding another layer of more risqué meaning is the very material of the special’s truncheon. They were typically covered with gutta percha,



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3.7   Unknown wood engraver and artist, ‘The British Tree of Liberty’, wood engraving from Punch, 3 June 1848, p. 234.

and the connection made between the truncheon and this material is notable across both broadside ballads and Punch. A relatively new material in British manufacturing, early in 1848 the Art-Union had excitedly praised this wonder substance, a form of rubber taken from the sap of a Malaysian tree, that could be moulded and extruded into intricate shapes, and even woven into threads when heated.48 As Punch reported: ‘Several constables’ staffs, on the memorable Chartist-Petition-Failure, were made out of Gutta Percha’, before going on to make a battery of puns: The soluble qualities of the “best substitute for caoutchouc” seem to melt almost into a rich cream of jokes. For instance, we can imagine its being said that Gutta Percha was selected purposely to enable the constables to stick to their duty. Again, we can fancy it probable some daring humorist would hint that such a

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material naturally was chosen to enable the Chartists, by being sworn in, to prove their adhesion to the Government; or, in any case, there was a good chance of some one [sic] facetiously observing that the staff was put into their hands so that, in the event of their displaying any turbulent warmth, they would be bound down to keep the piece.49

Punch soon seemed to tire of these easy laughs, commenting the following week in a piece titled ‘Gutta Percha Again!’: we have received another joke on the above subject. A correspondent recommends all special constables and soldiers to wear boots and shoes made of Gutta percha, for, in the event of a riot in the dog-days, it will enable them better than anything else to stick to their flags [flagstones]. We declare, contributions like these are enough to make us turn Communists, for then all dullards would be obliged to share their jokes equally, instead of their being inflicted in their weighty entirety on us.50

However, still further associations were available, which again enhance the parallel of truncheon and the male member as noted above in relation to rolling pins. With the vulcanization of rubber in 1843, contraceptive caps and condoms went into manufacture.51 Gutta percha was linked to this innovation, and ballads make thinly veiled references to both. The broadside ballad Gutta Purcha [sic] Mouse begins by listing the various applications of the new material ‘With patent gutta percha teeth old ladies now are munching / Special constables are now supplied with gutta percha truncheons’, but the final verses are taken up with the story of the ‘gutta percha mouse’ of the ballad’s title.52 Although it is never made clear what exactly the mouse in reality is, for anyone with knowledge of contraceptive devices the innuendo was likely clear. The verse runs: ‘This little gutta percha mouse to a lady did belong, / Some sport [it occasioned?] as you’d find out by my song, / It would jump upon the lady’s head, and sometimes on her knee, / And sometimes the little rascal jumped where you could not see.’ The song reveals that this lady kept an ‘open house’ (meaning a brothel), and that she admitted to her visitors at a party that the mouse was ‘her plaything by night as well as day’. The song continues to describe how a gentleman caller must ‘hunt the mouse’, when the footman sees what is going on through the keyhole ‘down he went to cookey and served her just the same’. The final line of the ballad reads: ‘We all like gutta percha when we go out on the tiles.’ A similar theme is taken up in a ballad titled The Gutta Percha Mania, Or, the Snobs done Brown. The words contrast the merits of leather and gutta percha: read one way it seems to be able about shoes, but read another concerns contraception.53 Another ballad on this theme titled The Gutta Percha Staff, Or, the Adventures of a Special Constable makes the connection between the rubber covered constables’ staffs and a sheathed penis clear.54 The ballad describes how a special on the



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way to Bishop Bonner’s Fields, the site of violent clashes between Chartists and the police on 12 June (Whit Monday) 1848, is waylaid by ‘a pretty servant girl’. She tells him: ‘My master and mistress are both out / You can come and take some tea, / And then your gutta percha staff / Why you must let me see.’ The song continues ‘If I was poked about with it, / I am sure it would do me good’, the verse ends ‘He poked her here he poked her there / Until [sic] he made her laugh. / I am ready for another poke, / With your gutta percha staff.’ Once at the Fields a woman again asks to see his staff: ‘Then he quickly pulled it out, / At least so they do say, / When the women both great and small, / Began to faint away. / He says oh dear what have I done, / I think I have been to [sic] fast, / For I have made to [sic] free with / My gutta purcha staff.’ At the end of the song the staff is confiscated by the special’s landlady because he is late with the rent. Coda: 1848 What significance can we read into the possible transactions that appear to be occurring at this moment between the supposedly respectable pages of Punch and scurrilous broadside ballads? Clearly at mid century the lines between Punch and street literature were not as watertight as early biographers of the periodical liked to suggest. The year 1848 was, it seems, a particularly sensitive moment for such cross-pollination. Just as the middle-class special constable threatened by the Chartists, little boys, dirt and emasculating defeat was made vulnerable to slippage into groups perceived to be subordinate in terms of class, race and gender, a similar slippage occurred in the pages of Punch towards less respectable and acceptable humour. Boundaries in bourgeois strategies of representation were being blurred as a result of class conflict. Like the gent’s performance, as represented by Gavarni and Smith, here we find a moment of disruption in visual culture that registers a revolutionary effect, where norms are upended with surprising, even shocking, results. Via slim shilling volumes, in Vizetelly’s words ‘wretched little books’, risqué humour might end up in a middle-class pocket on the train or the omnibus. Equally, Kennington Common was haunted by disappearing revolutionaries, who left in their wake questions about the representational validity of middle-class forms and visual regimes: the signature, the daguerreotype, the panorama and wood-engraved news reportage. In 1848 revolution was avoided but, as Time asked in 1850, were things getting better, or ever worse? Issues of Punch and the Illustrated London News were discarded as so much waste paper, or bound up at the end of the year to be stored away on library shelves, Kilburn’s daguerreotypes entered the Royal Collections and left public view, Smith’s paper-bound volumes, a passing novelty, were perhaps simply left on the train or forgotten about. Time marched on, but, as will be seen, surprisingly similar disruptions can be picked up in and around the Great Exhibition of 1851.

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 1 See Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in MidVictorian London (London: The Trustees of the British Library, 2010).  2 [Albert Smith and Tom Taylor], Novelty Fair; or, Hints for 1851, an exceedingly premature, and thoroughly apropos Revue (London: Lacy, [1850]), p. 8.  3 For a discussion of cartoons of the special in relation to Millais’s 1852 painting, A Huguenot, see Jo Briggs, ‘“The Old Feelings of Men in a New Garment”: John Everett Millais’s  A Huguenot  and Masculine Audiences in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth Century Art World Wide, 11:3 (Autumn 2012) URL: www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn12/briggs-john-everett-millais-a-huguenot. Date accessed: 28 November 2013.  4 See Louis James, Print and the People, 1819–1851 (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1978), pp. 54–61.  5 See John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 112–18, and David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), for these figures see p. 130.  6 These numbers are given in David Large, ‘London in the Year of Revolutions, 1848’, in John Stevenson (ed.), London in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), p. 192.  7 See Goodway, London Chartism, p. 74.  8 Goodway writes ‘The significance of this enrolment [of special constables] . . . lies in its decisive indication that the middle classes were now prepared to ally themselves unreservedly with the ruling class against the threat of proletarian revolt.’ Goodway, London Chartism, p. 74.  9 ‘Special Constables’, Lady’s Newspaper (8 April 1848), p. 277. 10 Anonymous wood-engraver, probably after a drawing by John Leech, “Special’s Wife …,” Punch (22 April 1848), p. 166. 11 For significant discussions of the relationships between the public and private spheres in the mid nineteenth century, see Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), especially ‘Family and Society: The Rhetoric of Reconciliation in the Debate over Industrialism’, pp. 113–46, and Mary Poovey, ‘Domesticity and Class Formation: Chadwick’s 1842 “Sanitary Report”’, in Making a Social Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 115–31. 12 ‘Requital of Special Service’, Examiner (24 June 1848), p. 403. 13 ‘Requital of Special Service’, p. 403. 14 ‘Hammersmith’, The Times (21 June 1848), p. 7. 15 ‘Requital of Special Service’, p. 403. 16 ‘Requital of Special Service’, p. 403. 17 ‘Hammersmith’, The Times, p. 7. 18 ‘Hammersmith’, The Times, p. 7.



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19 See Saville, ‘Summer’, in 1848, pp. 130–65. 20 For a report of these events see ‘The Disturbances in the Metropolis’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper (11 June 1848), p. 3. 21 ‘Chartist Disturbances’, Examiner (19 August 1848), p. 537. 22 ‘Arrest of Armed Chartists in the Metropolis’, John Bull (21 August 1848), p. 536; ‘Metropolitan News: Arrest of Armed Chartists in London’, Illustrated London News (19 August 1848), p. 103; ‘News of the Week’, Lady’s Newspaper (19 August 1848), p. 142. 23 ‘Chartist Disturbances’, p. 537. 24 ‘Latest Intelligence’, Examiner (19 August 1848), p. 541. 25 ‘The Chartists and Repealers’, The Times (19 August 1848), p. 8. 26 ‘Arrest of Armed Chartists in the Metropolis’, p. 536. 27 ‘Arrest of Armed Chartists in the Metropolis’, p. 536. 28 See Leech, ‘Special’s Wife …’, p. 166. 29 In Punch’s Almanack for 1849 (London: Punch Offices, 1849) a special collars a little boy, while in the foreground a special stands with his hands in his pockets looking miserable. Several other specials can be seen in the background, idly smoking while they walk. The little boy is outnumbered to such an extent that we begin to pity him, and the specials seem ridiculous as all they are required to do is police a solitary child. 30 Griselda Pollock, ‘“With my own eyes’: Fetishism, the Labouring Body and the Colour of its Sex’, Art History, 17:3 (September 1994), p. 346. 31 ‘The Female American Serenaders’, Bell’s Life (30 April 1848), p. 2. 32 See ‘Olympic’, Theatrical Times (13 May 1848), p. 157. 33 James Bruton (music arranged by G. Godbe), The Special Constables, Comic Song, sung with unbounded applause by Mr. J.W. Sharp at the Royal Gardens Vauxhall. Also by the Author and Mr. Moody, Mr. S. Cowell and etc. at Public Dinners, Festivals etc. (London: T. E. Purday, n.d. [1848]), n.p. Underlined text appears to have been a way to indicate puns in song and jokes. 34 Perhaps offering some relief to the middle-class male viewer, the lithographed cover of Six Scenes includes a small vignette in the lower left-hand corner of an attractive barmaid in a somewhat low-cut dress handing the special a glass of a (presumably) alcoholic beverage (perhaps wine or punch) under the pub-sign of a crown. Their exchange of flirtatious glances suggests there may be at least some compensation for Green. 35 For a discussion of representations of revolutionary threat as ‘sexual threat’ in relation to the French Revolution of 1789, see Neil Hertz, ‘Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure’, Representations, 4 (Fall 1983), pp. 27–54. 36 The Chartist’s Flare-up on Witsun-monday [sic] (London: C. Paul, [1848]) (The Bodleian Library, Firth c.16 (39)). 37 New Song on the “Specials” (Liverpool: White, Rose Place, [1848]) (The Bodleian Library, Firth c.17 (154)). 38 New Song on the “Specials”. 39 See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 175.

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40 Prosthetics ‘engineered a fiction … symbolically resolving the problem of fractional men … [installing] a functional model of selfhood in place of shattered wholeness’. Erin O’Connor, ‘Fractions of Men: Engendering Amputation’ in Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 105. 41 O’Connor, ‘Fractions of Men’, p. 110. 42 O’Connor, ‘Fractions of Men’, p. 112. 43 O’Connor, ‘Fractions of Men’, pp. 121, 123. 44 O’Connor, ‘Fractions of Men’, p. 124. 45 O’Connor, ‘Fractions of Men’, p. 134. 46 This idea was picked up again in 1851 in an article titled ‘The Greatest Sceptre in the World’, which explains Mr Punch’s pride on seeing a display of ‘splendidly emblazoned and illuminated’ truncheons in the display of firearms by Parker, Field and Sons. See ‘The Greatest Sceptre in the World’, Punch (17 May 1851), p. 207. 47 For a discussion and several examples dating from 1798 and throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century, see James, Print and the People, pp. 75–80. 48 Robert Hunt, ‘The Applications of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts – Gutta Percha’, Art-Union (1 February 1848), pp. 37–40. 49 ‘Jokes Absolutely Thrown Away’, Punch ([29 April] 1848), p. 173. 50 ‘Gutta Percha Again!’ Punch (6 May 1848), p. 186. 51 Joan Perkin writes ‘The virginal cap became popular with the vulcanization of rubber in 1843’, and notes women preferred this mode of contraception, along with the sponge and the vaginal douche, because they, rather than their male partner, controlled their deployment. See Joan Perkin, Victorian Women (London: John Murray, 1993), p. 69. 52 See Gutta Purcha [sic] Mouse (London: E. Hodges, [1846–64]) (The Bodleian Library, Harding B11 (1443)). The Bodleian dates this ballad to between 1846 and 1864 but the reference to special constables dates it to 1848. The fact that there are three examples of this ballad, all seemly printed from worn blocks, suggests the popularity of the song. Two other copies of the same ballad are listed in the collections at the Bodleian (Firth b.25 (309) and Firth b.34 (130)). Another ballad with the title The Gutta Perhca [sic] Mouse is very similar but with additional verses and slight variations. See The Gutta Perhca [sic] Mouse (London: C. Paul, not dated) (The Bodleian Library, Firth c.20 (165)). 53 See The Gutta Percha Mania, Or, the Snobs done Brown (London: Birt, between 1833 and 1841) (The Bodleian Library, Harding B 11 (1441)). The Bodleian has dated this ballad to between 1833 and 1841; however, given the reference it contains to Victoria and Albert it must date from after their marriage in 1840. 54 See The Gutta Percha Staff, Or, the Adventures of the Special Constable (London: C. Paul, not dated [1848]) (The Bodleian Library, Harding B 11 (1444)).

4

‘All that is sacred is profaned’: balloons, fairs, ballads and the Great Exhibition

What looks like a ghostly emanation from a chimney in a wood engraving from the Illustrated London News (see Figure 4.1) is in fact the torn and tattered fabric of a crashed balloon. A crowd, which appears to be mostly comprised of well-to-do carriage passengers and equestrians, including a veiled Amazon to the far right, are stopped in their tracks by the sight; the deflated balloon is wrapped around a chimney and blows in the wind, while men climb up ladders to assist the aeronauts, Mr Graham and his female companion, who have tumbled out of the balloon’s basket and are now stranded on the partly demolished roof.1 The location is Arlington Street, at the north-east corner of Green Park, a fashionable area on the border of St James’s and Mayfair. On the evening of 16 June 1851 the balloon took off from Batty’s Hippodrome in Kensington: a temporary arena for feats of horsemanship and theatrical pageants constructed by William Batty, the owner of the famous Astley’s Amphitheatre.2 On route from the Hippodrome to its eventual crash site further east, the balloon narrowly avoided colliding with the central transept of the Great Exhibition. Like the wood engraving, which raises the question of what might have happened had the balloon crashed in a street crowded with horses and the middle and upper classes, reports of the balloon incident in the periodical press focused on what might have occurred had the balloon crashed into the Crystal Palace. A journalist for The Times wrote: As the balloon approached the Crystal Palace great fears were entertained for the safety of a portion of that building, and of those who were inside. The police report that at the time … there were between 35,000 and 40,000 persons in the building. … The aeronauts, seeing the fearfully dangerous position in which they were placed, let out the whole of their ballast on to the roof of the palace. At this time the grappling irons were within a few feet of the summit of the transept, and if a hold had been obtained, a vast mass of the building must have been torn away.3

In the end the balloon only destroyed flagstaffs, and the balloonists were the sole casualties (both survived their ordeal). Yet, in dramatic fashion, the

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4.1  Unknown artist and wood engraver, ‘Destruction of Mr. Graham’s Balloon’, wood engraving from the Illustrated London News, 21 June 1851, p. 588.

b­ alloon crash stirred anxieties about the threat posed to the didactic project of the exhibition by popular entertainment; Punch suggested that the police were considering banning balloon ascents near the Crystal Palace.4 How can it be that a balloon, itself so fragile, could threaten and almost destroy the Great Exhibition? Was the Exhibition itself fragile, both literally and metaphorically? The nickname for the Great Exhibition, the ‘Crystal Palace’, was derived from a phrase that appeared in Punch in July 1850.5 The moniker shows how the importance of the venture had transcended its material form: exchanging glass for far more precious crystal (whether lead glass or rock).



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But, although more valued, crystal can be more fragile than glass.6 The idea of a palace made of crystal also seems the stuff of fairytales, suggesting doubts in the run up to the event as to whether such an ambitious vision could ever exist in reality. As Talairach-Vielmas writes in her study of Victorian fairy tales: ‘Paxton’s Crystal Palace constantly fluctuates between the metaphorical and the material worlds.’7 The fact the name stuck suggests that it was able to capture some of the shared anxieties about Henry Cole’s and Prince Albert’s project. Thomas Carlyle called the Exhibition ‘this big Glass Soapbubble [sic]’.8 This image suggests, as well as fragility, the futility and hubris of the Great Exhibition project. A child blowing a bubble is a traditional vanitas motif symbolizing fleeting pleasures. A soap bubble made of glass also suggests the possibility of dangerous fracturing when the bubble bursts; although a bubble of glass would perhaps be expected to have a longer life than one of soap, it would still be highly delicate. Within Carlyle’s assessment there is perhaps also an allusion to the uncontrolled financial speculation of the railway bubble of the 1840s, and other historical financial bubbles as discussed in Charles Mackay’s widely read book Extraordinary Popular Delusions.9 The empty and puffed form of the Grahams’ balloon anticipates Carlyle’s metaphor of the Exhibition as soap bubble. Both images bring into proximity ephemeral and non-didactic entertainment and the serious and didactic Great Exhibition. On the evening of 16 June, the bubble-like Crystal Palace could therefore be threatened with destruction by a fragile silk balloon – a mirror image of itself. An explanation for this state of affairs lies in the doubts felt in the run up to the opening of the Great Exhibition on 1 May 1851. The exhibition was a previously untried experiment in international relations, coming together on a short deadline, which would focus the gaze of Britain’s collaborators, competitors and colonies. More crucially, the exact tone and behaviour of its audience was, or appeared to be, dangerously unknowable. There were dire predictions of revolution and crime, and even the threat of plague.10 Cole later recalled that ‘fear of the working classes caused most anxiety’ during the planning stage.11 Part of this anxiety resulted from the fact that the Great Exhibition both emerged from and actively defined itself against popular entertainments.12 Most problematically, as this chapter explores, the Exhibition had to define itself against more unruly forms of leisure, namely fairs. This struggle is evident in middle-class discourse on the Exhibition, and in arguments satirically put in media primarily intended for consumption by the working classes. The working-class body and its visibility are of central importance in both cases. As in 1848, the potentially disruptive working body was made to disappear, at the same time that it was placed under surveillance, in a moment that touted national, even global, unity. Just as the absence of revolution in 1848 resulted in self-congratulation in the middle-class press for the seemingly natural and inherent stability of British society, which was in fact carefully planned for and

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contrived, after the one shilling entry fee came peaceably into effect, a similar naturalization of a carefully controlled event took place, attended by similar self-congratulatory reflections. As will be elaborated below, regulations were put in place, and more covert gestures made, that ensured that what Mayhew called the ‘restless’ working classes would not be seen either in or near the Great Exhibition. Yet ballads provide a very different account, placing the unruly reproductive body at the heart of the attractions on offer in Hyde Park. However, for historical, methodological and ideological reasons scholars have ultimately tended to agree with the rhetoric of the Exhibition’s organizers and middle-class commentators that the Great Exhibition proved the peaceable and cohesiveness nature of British society in 1851. Great Exhibition as fair and ‘marketplace’ A source of anxiety registered by journalists was the news that came in the spring of 1851 that an unusually large fair, the ‘Great National Fair’, or perhaps more problematically the ‘Great Exhibition Fair’, was to be held at Bayswater to coincide with the Great Exhibition.13 In the mid nineteenth century, suburban and country fairs and rural hiring fairs were associated with drunkenness, gambling, licentiousness and the very lowest ‘restless’ classes of society. As historians have pointed out, the nature of fairs across the century was shifting and complex, but generally in the course of the nineteenth century they came under increasing scrutiny and legislation, were appropriated for more respectable purposes, and in some cases died out.14 For example two famous London fairs, Bartholomew Fair and Greenwich Fair, were last held in 1855 and 1857 respectively, having been outlawed by the city authorities. In the eyes of middle-class observers, employers and some radical journalists, fairs were typically seen as distracting workers from their jobs and tempting them into bad habits. Mayhew connected fairs with members of the street-trading classes, because they often travel to these events, on the outskirts of London and beyond, to sell their wares. Fairs were therefore an important part of the economy of the street-folk and often the worlds of street and fair overlapped. On a more abstract level Mayhew sees the fair as an extension of the restlessness that characterizes the class that he interviewed in London Labour and the London Poor, which kept them perpetually on the move, rendering them subject to suspicion and surveillance, as well as placing them beyond the bounds and out of sight of the rest of society.15 Perhaps more problematically for middle-class observers, Mayhew described fairs as having the potential to corrupt even the educated, recording how two scholars of Christ’s Hospital School ‘might have gone to college; but several visits to suburban fairs, and their accompanying scenes of debauch, gave them a penchant for a vagabond life, and they will probably never relinquish it’.16 Fairs on one level therefore represented the antithesis of what



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was planned to be a sober and didactic Great Exhibition. Yet the existence of an imagined slippage between the two reflected in the press suggests that in the run up to the opening of the Crystal Palace on 1 May 1851 the boundary between fair and exhibition was a source of anxiety. In late January 1851 construction work on the Crystal Palace was nearing completion, and attention turned to decorating the building. The Times worried: As a very large proportion of the exterior is to be covered with white calico, there appears some reason to fear that the whole may at last wear too much the aspect of a gigantic booth, the more especially as the roof is to be surmounted with a profusion of flags. The usual attributes of a fair must be skilfully [sic] handled, or the Crystal Palace may degenerate into a huge vulgarity; pretentious in dimensions, glaring and flashy in appearance, and having little about it significant of that sober, sedate, and steadfast people who have made it their house of reception for the industrial skill of the world.17

A few days later the Illustrated London News quoted this piece approvingly, calling these observations judicious.18 According to the paper the Royal Commissioners had ‘received innumerable applications from theatrical and equestrian managers, etc., for permission to erect in Hyde-park temporary theatres, circuses, shows, and booths, but the Executive Committee has positivity refused all such requests’.19 Clearly the organizing committee was keen to maintain physical distance between the exhibition and popular entertainments (the potential threat posed by runaway balloons was not foreseen). However, this prohibition on permits in the park simply led enterprising men such as William Batty, the proprietor of Astley’s and the Hippodrome, and the committee of showmen behind the ‘Great National Fair’ to take plots as near as possible to the Crystal Palace, but just beyond the limits of Hyde Park: Batty to the south at Kensington, and the Great National Fair committee to the north at Bayswater.20 This shows that the Exhibition’s sphere of influence only extended so far, although as we shall see measures were put into place that ensured that the Great National Fair would not gain much ground as a serious competitor to the Crystal Palace. Although with hindsight the threat of fairs and hawkers to the Great Exhibition project seems slight, the fact that they generated such a strong response is testament to the cultural weight that such exclusions were made to bear: what seems peripheral was in fact of central importance. High or elite culture finds its definition by contrasting itself to what is low or popular, but at the same time low culture is a source of reference or even genesis for high culture. Stallybrass and White’s refinement of Bakhtin’s view of the fair as the carnivalesque of bourgeois culture can help here.21 Alongside a fair’s pleasurable offerings, they point out the fair’s role as ‘marketplace’, and therefore its

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foundational importance in the emergence of an interconnected world market from the point of view of economic history.22 However, they observe how ‘The fair as a site of hybridization epistemologically undermined the separation of the economic from “play” ... As a result the emergent middle classes worried away at it ... striving to separate and consolidate the binaries which the fair so mischievously seemed to intermix and confuse.’23 The Great Exhibition was part of this process of separation, but it also shared many of the characteristics of the marketplace that linked it to the traditional fair, a hybridity anticipated by Novelty Fair. Indeed Stallybrass and White’s description of a ‘marketplace’ can equally be applied to the Great Exhibition. They write of the marketplace that it is: At once a bounded enclosure and a site of open commerce, it is both the imagined centre of an urban community and its structural interconnection with the network of goods, commodities, markets, sites of commerce and places of production which sustain it. A marketplace is the epitome of local identity ... and the unsettling of that identity by trade and traffic of goods from elsewhere. At the market centre of the polis we discover a commingling of categories usually kept separate and opposed: centre and periphery, inside and outside, stranger and local, commerce and festivity, high and low.

This passage sums up many of the most studied aspects of the Great Exhibition’s ideological conflicts: between nation and empire, London and the industrial north, Briton and foreign visitor, local and global. Perhaps the key point at which the Exhibition differed from the marketplace was that open commercial activity, that is buying and selling, did not take place inside the Crystal Palace. Price lists were available, but none of the goods on display were ticketed. Thus, a key factor in Stallybrass and White’s list of binaries was missing, and a crucial space was opened between the Exhibition and a marketplace/fair. Cole addressed and evaded the conceptual proximity of exhibition and fair in his introduction to the Official Catalogue. He wrote ‘Fairs, which are one sort of exhibitions of works of industry, have been established for centuries, in every part of the United Kingdom; but exhibitions resembling the present i­ nstitution, in which the race is for excellence, and direct commerce is not the primary object, have taken place only during the last century, and have been organised by individuals, or societies, independently of any Government ­assistance.’24 Here the relationship of exhibition to fair is acknowledged (a fair is ‘one sort’ of exhibition), but at the same time the exhibition is different. Unlike a fair, it is modern and untainted by buying and selling. Not ­chartered by the Crown, the exhibition is a product of unfettered public ­initiative. However, enough of the binaries held that contemporaries could see the danger that the Exhibition not be able to fully separate itself from its unruly ­equivalent, the fair. When readers of The Times or John Bull saw the headline ‘The fair at the West End’, would



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the Great Exhibition or the Great National Fair at Bayswater have first sprung to mind? Such tenuous aspects of difference were taken up and parodied in broadside ballads. Integration and segregation The question of exclusions and exclusiveness at the Great Exhibition is a vexed one, but examining the way that fair and exhibition were defined against one another invites us to look again at how the restless urban poor and even the less well-off sections of the more respectable working classes were carefully and deliberately excluded from the Crystal Palace and its environs in 1851. Although the class make-up and respectability of those in attendance was often remarked upon, this was in fact engineered through controls over time and space put in place by the Exhibition’s organizers. The sliding price-scale for admission to the Great Exhibition is well known, but perhaps more telling is the reaction to the suggestion that the Exhibition be free. In early 1851, Joseph Paxton had made an appeal in a letter to The Times that there should be free admission, but the editor, working with the commissioners, arranged to have letters stating the impracticality of such a plan appear alongside Paxton’s, and in the following days numerous letters from workmen and others were published arguing against free admission.25 Class considerations lurked behind the orchestrated response. This can be seen in the comments of one correspondent who wrote that free entry would ‘degrade [the Great Exhibition] to the level of a gratuitous show, in which everybody may indiscriminately crowd, with no other object than to pass the day or gape away a vacant hour’, effectively turning the exhibition into a fair.26 Earlier still in the planning process, Prince Albert had decided that a Central Working Classes Committee should be formed to promote working-class involvement in the Great Exhibition. However, after only one month the committee dissolved itself when the Royal Commission refused to sanction its work.27 In the end, after 26 May the cost of entry was one shilling from Monday to Thursday and five shillings on Friday and Saturday. After 9 August the price of admission on Saturday was dropped to 2s 6d. This drop, surely not accidentally, coincided with the end of the social season in London. The shooting season started a few days later, on 12 August. From a purely economic point of view, as is clear from Mayhew’s account of the finances of many of the working poor, even the lower priced one shilling admission to the Great Exhibition must have been beyond the means of many, a fact The Times admitted.28 The only day of the week that many working people had free time was Sunday when the exhibition was closed, adding another block on who would have been able to go inside. Indeed, in 1851 as a result of the religious census taken on Sunday 30 March it was discovered that many had

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also to work on Sundays.29 Some workers would have had a half holiday on a Saturday, but this was the day with the highest ticket price. The combination of closure, high rates and the typical working week would have made it difficult or impossible for many to ever go inside the Crystal Palace. In addition it is worth keeping in mind Peter Bailey’s observation that working-class participation in the emerging opportunities for rational recreation of the mid nineteenth century was always contingent on ‘certain prerequisites of conduct and appearance ... [that] reduced the eligibility of workpeople’.30 Improper attire and general demeanour would also have been grounds for exclusion. Organized excursions, such as those put on by factory owner, required good conduct and often the subscription to a fund towards the costs of a visit. Other protocols existed that controlled the area around the Exhibition building in Hyde Park and decided who should be able to profit from the event. As Chase and Levenson note, Mayhew’s interviews for London Labour and the London Poor register the optimism of street-traders in the build-up to the opening that the crowds of visitors to London were about to significantly enhance their profits. A seller of cheap commemorative medals is reported as telling Mayhew that he referred to the Great Exhibition as ‘The great eggs and bacon ... for I hope it will bring us that sort of grub.’31 In the end Mayhew reports ‘On the second Sunday in February ... the police “put down” the sale of ... Exhibition cards in the Park, as well as that of cakes, tarts, gingerbread, and such like dainties. This was a bitter disappointment to a host of street-sellers, who looked forward very sanguinely to the profits they might realise when the Great Exhibition was in full operation, and augured ill to their prospects from this interference.’32 He adds ‘I am inclined to think, that, on this occasion, the feelings of animosity entertained by the card-sellers towards the police and the authorities were even bitterer than I have described as affecting the costermongers.’33 Although the above quotation from Mayhew has often been cited, the nuance of the class dimension to the prohibition on hawking goods in the park has been missed. The complaint of the seller of gelatine cards has been quoted as evidence of how the traders were kept away from the Exhibition, however reading this quotation in context shows that traders were excluded on Sundays even before the Crystal Palace had been built.34 Mayhew reports that on a Sunday prior to the prohibition the number of traders doubled, from twenty to forty, and profits were good.35 This implies that those that came to the park on a Sunday were attracted by the opportunity to view the exterior of the building, a spectacle that could be had for free. Mayhew’s text and the evidence of objects in the collection of the Museum of London shows that the Great Exhibition seen from the outside was a popular subject for medals, gelatine cards, cheap prints, song books and stationary. The cheap souvenirs the street-traders hawked retailed for just pennies, more likely to be within the means of those on low wages. This implies that the Exhibition could be consumed even by



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people who could never have afforded to go inside. However, when the poorer classes came to the park on a Sunday the area was stripped of the noise of the street-traders, and any holiday or fair-like atmosphere suppressed. The remarks of one seller of gelatine cards show that the class-based dimension to the ban was easily detected. He told Mayhew that one Sunday after he had been barred from selling in the park, thrusting his hands into his ‘empty pockets’ he ‘went among the crowd near the Great Exhibition place to look about me. There was plenty of ladies and gentlemen ... Plenty of ’em had nice paper bags of biscuits, or cakes, that, of course, they’d bought that morning at a pastrycook’s ... Some had newspapers they was reading – about the Exhibition, I dare say – papers which was bought, and, perhaps was printed that very blessed morning; but for us to offer to earn a crust then – oh, it’s agen the law. In course it is.’36 The gelatine-card seller’s comments highlight the perceived class discrimination behind the drive to enforce observation of the Sabbath (the Christian Sunday) in the mid nineteenth century. In general these moves were opposed by radicals and free thinkers as being a means of restricting the freedoms of the working man.37 Political meetings often took place on a Sunday, or this was the day when self-improving activities could be pursued, also being forced not to work on a Sunday would, in some cases, undermine the ability of a worker to support his family.38 More specifically, in a clear double standard, the card-seller sees hypocrisy along class lines in the type of Sunday trading admissible: catering to the lower classes is banned, but the middle classes have their needs fulfilled. Trade in cheap goods and foodstuffs in the open near the exhibition is suppressed, while the middle classes are allowed to continue to buy from the ‘pastrycook’s’ shop that supplies food in ‘nice paper bags’ (pastries were synonymous with middle-class extravagance). Ballads could not be purchased in the park, but the middle classes brought their Sunday newspapers to read, printed that morning in clear contravention of the Sabbath. The treatment of the street-traders shows how the working-class body, as in 1848, was made to appear and disappear at the will of the police, the government and the members of the Royal Commission. ‘Rolling in the park so green’: broadside ballads and the Great Exhibition Broadside ballads are an almost completely underutilized set of sources in relation to the Great Exhibition. In many ways the neglect of these sources can itself be read as part of the legacy of the success of the controls discussed above. The Great Exhibition is still largely studied through images aimed at mainly middle- and upper-class audiences. Historians have tended to focus on sources such as the encyclopaedic Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue or coverage in the Illustrated London News and its special commemorative supplements that

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framed the exhibition as peaceably unifying diverse sections of British society. Perhaps the most widely reproduced images of the exhibition come from Dickinsons’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, prints after watercolours by David Roberts, Louis Haghe and Joseph Nash completed for Prince Albert, which show the exhibition filled with well-dressed individuals and families, the majority of which are middle and upper class, and clearly not workers. Leech’s ‘The Pound and the Shilling, “Whoever thought of meeting you here?”’, a full-page cartoon from Punch, has also been widely reproduced and discussed. This wood engraving also celebrates the unity of different classes at the shilling entry days: respectable, skilled workers and members of the aristocracy with military connections meet on seemingly equal footing. It is not coincidental that the more unruly popular visual culture of broadside ballads, chap books and catch-pennies has been seen as dying out around 1851. Studies of broadside ballads have tended to end at the mid nineteenth century or before, and generally emphasize the eighteenth century.39 There is a general sense in much of the secondary literature on popular print culture that broadside ballads were replaced by cheap illustrated periodicals during the 1840s; these often contained lessons on self-improvement.40 The images selected to study the Great Exhibition confirm this trend, and place the Great Exhibition at the apex of this shift. However, ballads on the theme of the Great Exhibition were popular and numerous both before the Exhibition opened and up to its close. These sources offer multiple examples of alternative, and typically oppositional, views on the event, but have so far been neglected in accounts of 1851.41 Some ballads on the subject of the Great Exhibition are statements of patriotic support for the venture and for Prince Albert, but many more take up a satirical stance. It is hard to know whether ballads satirizing the Exhibition were more popular at the time, or simply proved more interesting to collectors, but the fact that multiple printed versions of a number of them survive suggests that they were widespread. For example, at least three examples, each illustrated with a different woodcut, survive of the ballad titled Exhibition of All Nations!, printed in both London and Birmingham.42 The responses to the Great Exhibition found in these broadside ballads are complex and varied. These sources have often been read as evidence of a distinct working-class culture, but they are in fact enmeshed within a broad network of literary and visual sources with influence moving across genres. My approach heeds Roger Chartier’s advice regarding the complex interrelation between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ culture, and to ‘consider … how complex relations were developed between forms imposed … and established practices’ [my emphasis].43 The visual evidence for 1851 raises Chartier’s question whether ‘the boundaries between legitimate and disqualified culture [were] really so distinct and water-tight’.44 Ballads reacted to the latest news stories that appeared about the Exhibition in the periodical press, notably The Times, in much the same way as the satirical contents of Punch. As



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will be seen Punch used the same visual references as ballads, and also employed the ballad form in its own satires. The ballad The Downfall of the Exhibition (see Figure 4.2) responded to and satirized the debate among officials and in the press about the fate of Paxton’s

4.2  Unknown artist and author, The Downfall of the Exhibition, broadsheet, published Bloomsbury, London: Paul [1851].

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building after the closure of the Exhibition: it was proposed that the building could be converted into a Winter Garden, before it was decided to dismantle it and move it to Sydenham, South London.45 This ballad suggested alternatively that it would make ‘a stunning tripe shop’, use as a ‘cobbler’s stall’ or a ‘dust yard’ were also put forward. The Exhibition building would therefore be co-opted as a space of working-class leisure, or practical and functional utility. The woodcut at the head of this ballad depicts the Crystal Palace as a steamship in a visual pun that relies on the similarity between the arched transept of the building and a steamer’s paddle-box. That the steamer is priced one penny can be read as a further satire on the debates around admission prices. In this cartoon the Crystal Palace becomes dangerously unmoored, and takes on a form most popularly linked with day trips to South End (as in the writings of Charles Dickens and Albert Smith, and the cartoons in Punch). The same visual pun can be found in the full-page cartoon from Punch by Leech: ‘The Shipwrecked Ministers Saved by the Great Exhibition Steamer’ (see Figure 4.3). The woodcut takes a more direct approach to its visual

4.3  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘The Shipwrecked Ministers Saved by the Great Exhibition Steamer’, wood engraving from Punch, 7 June 1851, p. 237.



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­ unning, whereas the wood engraving from Punch layers on a political referp ence (the success of the Great Exhibition will rescue an otherwise impotent government), and a possible allusion to Théodore Géricault’s dramatic history painting The Raft of the ‘Medusa’ (1819). It is difficult to know if the Punch cartoon or the ballad sheet appeared first, but taken together they are evidence of a shared reference point and even perhaps a direct transfer of visual material between ballads and the periodical press. However, the ballad presents the steamer as a space of cheap, popular amusement. In contrast, the cartoon by Leech sees it as functioning as a rescue boat for the ruling classes. This raises the question of the class-specific utility of the Crystal Palace as exhibition or fair, didactic or carnivalesque. This theme is taken up in a number of ballads that compare the Exhibition to fairs. One ballad sheet provocatively foregrounds the juxtaposition of Great Exhibition and fair (see Figure 4.4). The text of Kendal Fair, which appears on the right-hand side of the sheet, describes a hiring fair for agricultural labourers and is typical of ballad descriptions of these kinds of events, emphasizing drunkenness and sexual promiscuity.46 The fifth verse of this ballad uses innuendo to imply that the ‘lasses’ are for hire in more ways than one. It reads ‘Some will hire to hedge and ditch, and some to reap and mow, / And Sally Brass she’s the lass to milk her master’s doodle do’. The ballad ends ‘So lasses when you are going home pray with the men don’t rustle, / For if they shove you in the hedge you are sure to spoil your bustle.’ The reference to the bustle, the padded back-part of a woman’s skirts, is a crude reference to anal sex, a kind of intercourse that did not risk pregnancy. The woodcut accompanying this ballad depicts flirtation and drinking; a couple kiss in the foreground, in the middleground we can just make out a man face down on the floor, and in the background are two men drinking, while rakes stacked against the haystacks suggest idleness and neglected labour.47 Across the page to the left we might be surprised to find that the Great Exhibition is described in much the same terms as Kendal Fair. The third verse of Exhibition of All Nations! reads: There’s Ned and Poll with Joe and Bet, Will drink a butt of heavy wet, [i.e. beer] And in nine months time perhaps will get Another Exhibition. And then it will be plainly seen, That they together must have been, A rolling in the park so green, To view the Exhibition.48

This depiction of the Great Exhibition as a fair, offering opportunities for drunken sexual encounters, played on the fears raised by journalists about

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4.4  Unknown artist and author, Exhibition of All Nations! and Kendal Fair, broadsheet, place of publication and publisher unknown.

the potentially blurred lines between what was planned to be a respectable high-minded exhibition and disreputable fairs. Here only a thin strip of blank page divides the two; this gap in the eyes of the press needed to be policed and widened. Strikingly, under the title ‘Ballad for Old-Fashioned Farmers on the Great Exhibition’ a poem appeared in Punch that played with this touchy subject



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to generate less risky fun. The ‘ballad’ invokes both the similarity of fair and Exhibition, and at the same time works to firmly locate fairs in a rural, pre-­industrial past.49 It is told in the first person with the narrator being the ‘old-fashioned farmer’ of the title, who, it emerges, is a protectionist and a Luddite, suspicious of foreign taste and steam power. The ballad cleverly mirrors the typical language and form of ballads, with lists of curious objects and foreigners in attendance at the Crystal Palace, and even the same strange spelling, grammar, punctuation and phrases of broadside ballads, suggesting its author was familiar with the genre. In the following extract the farmer describes the Great Exhibition in the same way ballads typically did: by listing the wonderful things to be found there; yet despite these wonders the Exhibition will do nothing to alleviate the farmer’s tough economic situation: There’s minerals, and physic, and chymical drugs, There’s tapestry, and floor-cloth, and carpets, and rugs, And there’s porcelain and crockery, so fine and so grand; But all that wun’t affoord no relief to the land. There’s wonderful statues, and fountains, and gates, Upholstery, cutlery, fenders, and grates, Kitchen-ranges and stoves for to fry, roast, and broil; But there’s nothun to make the poor Varmer’s pot boil.50

The farmer then invokes past rural fairs, in a glow of nostalgia. The farmer’s home-spun practicality contrasts with the luxuries on display in London, and he exclaims: Oh! Gie me the Fair which the World’s Fair beat brown – The Fair as was held nigh our own native town; In the old turnpike-days afore railways was know’d, Which have ruined every coachun-house by the zide of the rhooad. Oh! There was the beastices which the keeper did show; The Lion from Africa, and Lioness also, ... And the ram with six legs, and the learned pig to view, And likewise the pig-faced lady, and the pretty cockatoo. Then there was the cheese-fair, and hoss-fair as well, Accordin as you wanted to buy or to zell; Spades, bill-hooks, and rip-hooks, and all Varmer’s tools, When we was contented wi our vorevathers’ rules.51

The poem concludes: ‘At the World’s Fair, I’m told, there’s a deal I should learn, / But that for my life I can’t nohow discern; / Zo I wun’t go anigh it – no, I’d rather bide here, / A-smokun of my pipe and a-drinkun of my beer.’52 Here rural fair and ‘World’s Fair’ are brought into proximity, but ultimately the fair

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is placed at a distance, its unruly aspects confined to a more conservative and simple past. A feature of broadside ballads about the Great Exhibition, noted by the farmer’s ballad in Punch, is the fantastic and nonsensical lists of exhibits they provide. Such lists are a typical feature of ballads, but here they specifically parody catalogues and descriptions of the Exhibition’s contents found in more official publications such as the Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue. For example the ballad titled The New Exhibition, Sights and Wonders! reads ‘There will be lollipops and mutton chops, / And large Burgundy Pears, / And Ladies velvet breeches, / Double lined with curly hair’, while the ballad The Great National Exhibition of 1851 lists ‘new fashioned Pokers, Gridirons, and tongs, / Black Puddings and Sausages seven feet long, / Hairy things for the ladies to hang down their backs, / And Bustles as long as a coalheaver’s sack.’53 Bodily and even sexual imagery is conjured by the ‘hairy things’ and ‘breeches’. Oversized food stuffs also appear repeatedly: ‘There’ll be great apple dumplings as big as a barn / With large sticks of rhubarb as long as my arm.’54 Freaks, such as seventeen-headed goats and singing spiders, also feature.55 Such lists were also anticipated in the patter song of 1851 from the opening scene of Novelty Fair. To quote a few representative lines: ‘Jennies and looms, all through the rooms, / Twirlery, whirlery, buz, buz [sic], / Tweezers and tools, self-acting mules; / cottony, rotteny, fuz, fuz [sic].’56 Excess and nonsense undermined the rational goals of the exhibition but, as several critics noted, the classificatory scheme devised by Prince Albert and Lyon Playfair strained to accommodate objects as diverse as papier-mâché furniture, the giant Koh-i-noor diamond and tableaus of taxidermy kittens taking tea, as well as the items which the Illustrated London News described as of ‘nondescript ingenuity’, or ‘caprices of invention’.57 Given examples of this category included a ship cut from cork, a lamp made from a turnip and a watch containing ‘a snuffbox; an almanack; a set of toothpicks; directions for the preservation of health; and a neam for bleeding horses’.58 Ballads thus drew attention to the sometimes jarring juxtapositions inherent in even the most serious accounts of the Exhibition, but which are typical of a ‘marketplace’, as well as the threat that the spectacle of the diverse displays would tip over into the simply bizarre. The ballads capture the excesses in the Great Exhibition’s focus on the largest, newest, finest and most ornate, themes which the ballads translated into the base and the bodily. Conclusion: ‘Exhibition of Wonders’ At the apex of their subversive play with the Great Exhibition’s mission, at least two ballads appropriated the word exhibition as a euphemism, completely collapsing fair and Crystal Palace, the unruly, grotesque body, and rational, mechanical manufactures. The third verse of Exhibition of All Nations!, quoted



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above, reads ‘in nine months time perhaps will get Another Exhibition’, referring to the conceiving of a child out of wedlock. The Downfall of the Exhibition, a ballad in the form of a lament on the closing of the Great Exhibition, reads: Many a blooming maid did tustle [sic] And sold her petticoat smock and bustle, To have a peep at the chrystal [sic] glasses Under the trees fell lads and lasses, Thousands went home in queer condition To be put to bed with an Exhibition.59

The expression ‘to make an exhibition of oneself’, meaning to behave in such an ostentatious or conspicuous manner as to appear contemptible or laughable, is perhaps still familiar. The Oxford English Dictionary traces this meaning back to 1854 and Charles Dickens.60 These ballads suggest that it goes back to 1851, although with more scandalous connotations. The OED does give an older definition of the word exhibition as to show or bring forth, a meaning the word still has today. Notably these meanings can be related quite easily to the bringing forth of a child, or the ‘showing’ of a prior sexual transgression. I have not been able to find out whether this double entendre was invented in 1851 specifically in relation to the Great Exhibition, or if this was a colloquial meaning that had existed previously, but the co-option of the word for bawdy humour very pointedly undermined the Great Exhibition’s worthy aims. The use of the word exhibition, with its associations of high culture and high art, to evoke the fertile female body and its eroticism, creates plural and unfixed meanings that characterize what Bahktin has termed the grammatica jocos typical of grotesque realism.61 Ballads on the Great Exhibition emphasize warm-blooded and unruly sexual  reproduction and the fecundity of the female working body. This forms a stark contrast to the orderly industrial production of the steamdriven engines on display in the machine court, and the chaste and idealized ­sculptures on view in the nave, for example Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave. To quote from Stallybrass and White again ‘the classical statue has no openings or orifices’ unlike the ‘grotesque body’ of the carnivalesque; ‘The grotesque body is emphasized as a mobile, split, multiple self, a subject of pleasure in processes of exchange ... The classical body on the other hand keeps its distance’ displayed raised up on a base.62 It is this conception of the body that the bourgeois individual ‘finds its image and legitimation’.63 Therefore the use of the word exhibition, an event which frequently foregrounds the classical body as art object, to refer to a pregnant working body hits at bourgeois subjectivity itself, drawing  attention  to what is  excluded. This use of the word threatens to overwrite the civilizing  force of  the Great Exhibition, with orgiastic associations.

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Despite such pointed commentaries in ballad form, ultimately the view of the Great Exhibition as a unifying and cohesive event won out. It was widely repeated that the Exhibition had trumped all other forms of entertainment. The Times reported on 6 June: The fair held at Notting-hill [sic] in honor of the opening of the Great Exhibition, on an unusually extensive scale, … has not proved so successful as was anticipated. The whole of the principle perambulating exhibitions in the country, including Wombwell’s menagerie and Cooke’s circus, engaged sites and erected substantial buildings on the ground with the intention of exhibiting there for a large portion of the lengthened period of time allotted to the holding of the fair on his extraordinary occasion; … But from the absolute lack of sufficient patronage to pay a tythe of the expenses, the large establishment of wild animals was compelled to leave in a few days, followed by the equestrian company; and after lingering for a short time in hopeless prospect of better things, the whole of the erections were vacated and the fair brought to an end.64

The newspaper concluded that as well as being over ambitious ‘The surpassing attraction of the Exhibition of Wonders in Hyde-park was, no doubt, one of the causes of the failure of this fair.’65 However, this complacent conclusion masks the fact that the fair was from the beginning working against several prohibitions that severely impaired its viability. A condition of the site at Bayswater being granted to the Great National Fair committee was that there was to be no gambling, a traditional aspect of a fair’s appeal, and no Sunday opening, making it hard for workers to attend.66 Rather than examine how these restrictions might have impacted the fair’s profitability, The Times chose the more reassuring conclusion that the Great Exhibition was the more appealing attraction for the public.67 The Lady’s Newspaper had written about the fair in a more positive light. The journal observed the fair is ‘only a mile from the exhibition, and will, we have no doubt, tempt many to enjoy a pleasant walk through Kensington Gardens to visit it. There will be no lack of variety of amusements. Wild Beasts, theatricals, giants, dwalfs [sic], mermaids and other curiosities abound; swings, roundabouts, booths for provisions, and etc; stretching in long rows in different directions.’68 However, the illustrations provided for this story a few pages away tell a different story. The wood engraving ‘The Great Exhibition Fair at Bayswater’ is juxtaposed with ‘The May Morning of 1851, sketched from the top of the Marble Arch in Oxford Street’ (see Figure 4.5). The comparison is not favourable to the fair. In the latter image crowds are shown thronging the park and heading to the Crystal Palace, which dominates the skyline. The sketch of the fair on the other hand shows a rather sorry scene of half-­constructed buildings and empty space. Whereas the Great Exhibition and the attendant crowds are seen from a privileged vantage from above, lending



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4.5  Unknown artist and wood engraver, ‘The Great Exhibition Fair at Bayswater’, and ‘The May Morning of 1851, sketched from the top of the Marble Arch in Oxford Street’, wood engraving from the Lady’s Newspaper, 10 May 1851, p. 260.

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an element of the panoramic or sublime, the fair is seen from ground level, and is seemingly deserted. Such downplaying of the Exhibition’s competitors, especially in visual form, has led to their fading from view in accounts of 1851. Likewise the working bodies that occupied the margins of Hyde Park, or were excluded from the Exhibition and its vicinity, have been edited from history. Yet, as this chapter has aimed to show, the Exhibition relied on creating a space between it, lower-class entertainments, and their presumed unruly clients, to communicate and reinforce its didactic message. The success of this strategy at the time and since has led to the Great Exhibition being read in completely different frameworks, even completely different disciplines, from nineteenth-century fairs and popular entertainments more broadly. However, broadside ballads suggest an alternative way to read the Crystal Palace. As a site of exchange, vicarious consumption and leisure, the Exhibition contained fairlike elements from its very conception; this was the reason fairs and other forms of lower-class entertainment were so threatening to the event’s aspirations. The ballads made such commonalities the focus of their satires, and thereby invite us to rethink the relationship between working-class and bourgeois culture in 1851. In the process ballads become central to understanding mid-­nineteenthcentury British culture. Notes  1 Different accounts in the periodical press described Mr Graham’s companion variously as his wife or his daughter.  2 Astley’s Amphitheatre was founded by Philip Astley in 1770, the lease was purchased by William Batty in 1841. The amphitheatre was located south of the River Thames in Lambeth. It was patronized by royalty and was a fairly respectable, as well as popular, venue.  3 ‘Disastrous accident to a balloon’, The Times (17 June 1851), p. 5.  4 ‘Trifles (not) so light as air’, Punch (5 July 1851), p. 16.  5 [Douglas Jerrold], ‘A Bit of my mind: bit the eleventh. Mrs. Mouser suggests a domestic improvement as regards the Exhibition of 1851’, Punch (13 July 1850), p. 21.  6 For an interesting discussion of the symbolism of crystal in Victorian culture, particularly in John Ruskin’s The Ethics of Dust, see Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairytales and Sensation Novels (Burlington, VT and London: Ashgate, 2007). Talairach-Vielmas observes constructions of crystal at mid century were ‘typically ambiguous’, p. 92.  7 Talairach-Vielmas, Moulding the Female Body, p. 92.  8 Carlyle used this image several times in his correspondence. See Thomas Carlyle to John A. Carlyle, 5 July 1851, and to Alexander Carlyle, 10 October 1851, The Carlyle Letters Online, 2007. http://carlyleletters.org. Date accessed 13 January 2013.



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 9 Mackay’s popular book discusses the Mississippi Scheme, the South-Sea Bubble and Tulipomania. See Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003). 10 For a discussion of various fears expressed in the run up to the opening, see Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 179–84, and Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: Art Science and Productive Industry, A History of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (New York: Athlone Press, 2002), pp. 57–9. See also Alan S. Cole and Henrietta Cole (eds), Fifty Years of Public Work of Sir Henry Cole, K.C.B., Accounted for in his Deeds, Speeches and Writings (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), vol. 1, pp. 185–93. 11 Cole and Cole, Fifty Years of Public Work, vol. 1, p. 188. 12 The variety of entertainments on offer at mid century has been detailed by Richard D. Altick in his book Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978). 13 See ‘The Fair at the West End’, John Bull (7 June 1851), p. 372, and ‘The Great Exhibition Fair at Bayswater’, Lady’s Newspaper (10 May 1851), p. 265. 14 See D. A. Reid and Robert D. Storch, ‘Introduction: Persistence and Change in Nineteenth-century Popular Culture’, in Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London and Canberra: Croom Helm and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), pp. 1–19, and Alun Howkins, ‘The Taming of Whitsun: The Changing Face of a Nineteenth-century Rural Holiday’, in Yeo and Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Sussex: The Harvester Press and New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981), pp. 187–208. 15 Volume one of Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor places the streetfolk between the ‘two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanders and the ­settlers – the vagabond and the citizen – the nomadic and the civilized tribes’. Mayhew continues ‘Between these two extremes … ethnologists recognize a mediate variety, partaking of attributes of both’, p. 1. He writes that ‘During the summer and the fine months of the spring and autumn, there are, I am assured, one-third of the London street sellers – male and female – “tramping” in the country’, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2009), vol. 1, p. 462. 16 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, p. 217. 17 ‘The Crystal Palace’, The Times (30 January 1851), p. 4. 18 ‘Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851’, Illustrated London News (1 February 1851), p. 71. 19 ‘Metropolitan News’, Illustrated London News (15 March 1851), p. 213. 20 For a list of the committee members see Thomas Frost, The Old Showmen, and the Old London Fairs (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1874), p. 355. See also ‘The Fair at the West End’, The Times (6 June 1851), p. 7. 21 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, ‘The Fair, the Pig, Authorship’, in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 27–79. 22 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 30. 23 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 31.

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24 Henry Cole, ‘Introduction’, Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), pp. 1–35, p. 1. 25 For an account of this incident, see Audrey Short, ‘Workers under Glass in 1851’, Victorian Studies, 10:2 (December 1966), pp. 193–202, p. 197, and Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, p. 144. 26 ‘The Exhibition of 1851, … [letter to the editor from] a local commissioner’, The Times (25 January 1851), p. 6. 27 For a summary of this episode, see Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, p. 130. 28 Auerbach writes ‘In mid-August The Times reported not for the first time on the small number of working-class visitors who had attended. The paper inferred that, since there was no reason to believe that the exhibition was unpopular among the working classes, the price of admission must not “lie well and easily within their means.”’Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, p. 150. 29 See John Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 77. 30 Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 51. 31 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, p. 350. 32 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, p. 266. 33 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, p. 266. The Costermongers were according to Mayhew’s informant ‘nearly all’ Chartists. Mayhew believed that ‘in case of a political riot every “coster” would seize his policeman’, vol. 1, p. 20. 34 See Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, ‘Mayhew, the Prince, and the Poor: The Great Exhibition of Power and Dispossession’, in Buzard, Childers and Gillooly (eds), Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007) pp. 123–37, p. 130, and Andrew H. Miller, ‘Spaces of Exchange: Interpreting the Great Exhibition of 1851’, in Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 80. 35 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, p. 266. 36 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, p. 266. 37 For an overview of these debates at mid century, see Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday. 38 See Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, pp. 38, 58. Wigley writes that ‘Witnesses who opposed Sunday trade Bills before select committees in 1847 and 1850 were certainly Chartists’, p. 68. After its move to Sydenham the Crystal Palace was the focus of fierce controversy over Sunday openings, and the issue caused rioting in Hyde Park in 1855, see Wigley, pp. 66–8. 39 For example Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini, with Kris McAbee, Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800 (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). See also Michael Pollard (ed.), Ballads and Broadsides (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1969). Briggs writes ‘thirty years after the death of the popular broadsheet printer James Catnach, [i.e. 1871] there were still four “ballad presses”



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in active operation, dealing with contemporary sensations’, Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003), p. 122. See also Patrick Joyce, ‘The Broadside Ballad’, in Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 230–55. For London he sees the 1860s as a turning point in the popularity of ballads. 40 See for example Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of NineteenthCentury British Working Class Literature (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), p. 10, or Louis James, Print and the People, 1819–1851 (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1978). 41 Auerbach reproduces a ‘Xenophobic broadsheet’ in his chapter on ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, pp. 159–89, as an illustration of the ‘fear of foreigners’ ­prevalent in 1851. See Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, p. 180 and figure 59. Short quotes a ‘popular song’, which is probably a ballad. See Short, ‘Workers under Glass in 1851’, p. 199. See also Michael Leapman, The World for a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation (London: Review, 2002), pp. 207–10, who quotes from several popular ‘poems and songs’, a category, which although not stated or cited, refers to at least one broadside ballad. 42 Published by W. Pratt, Digbeth, Birmingham, [1851] (The Bodleian Library, Firth, c.19 (196)), with a woodcut of the exterior of the Crystal Palace; on a sheet with Kendal Fair, illustrated with a woodcut of a rural fair (publisher and place of publication unknown, [1851]) (The Bodleian Library, Harding, B 11 (1108)) (see figure 4.4); published by Ryle and Co., Bloomsbury, London, [1851], with a w ­ oodcut of a classicizing figure playing a lyre (The Bodleian Library, Firth c.19 (192)). 43 Roger Chartier, ‘Popular Culture: A Concept Revisited’, Intellectual History Newsletter, 13 (1991), p. 5. 44 Chartier, ‘Popular Culture: A Concept Revisited’, p. 6. 45 For speculation on this topic, which seems to have begun as soon as the e­ xhibition had opened, see ‘What is to Become of the Chrystal Palace?’ Illustrated London News (5 July 1851), pp. 1–2, and the full-page illustration ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Winter Garden’, Illustrated London News (12 July 1851), p. 72. This view shows horses being ridden through the interior. 46 Kendal Fair (Publisher and place of publication unknown, [1851]). Printed on a sheet with Exhibition of All Nations! (The Bodleian Library, Harding B 11 (1108)). 47 The woodcut cannot be assumed to be a representation of Kendal Fair, ­broadside ballads were renowned in the mid nineteenth century for the mismatching of verse subject-matter and wood-cut illustrations, although the ballad mentions heavy drinking and flirtation and this is also shown in the woodcut. On the mismatching of words to images in ballads, see ‘The Catnach Collection’, Punch ([29 January] 1848), p. 43. This was the first of a series of satires of broadside ballads in the periodical. 48 Exhibition of All Nations! (publisher and place of publication unknown, [1851]). Printed on a sheet with Kendal Fair (The Bodleian Library, Harding B 11 (1108)). 49 ‘Ballad for Old-Fashioned Farmers on the Great Exhibition’, Punch (24 May 1851), p. 212. 50 ‘Ballad for Old-Fashioned Farmers on the Great Exhibition’, p. 212. 51 ‘Ballad for Old-Fashioned Farmers on the Great Exhibition’, p. 212.

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52 ‘Ballad for Old-Fashioned Farmers on the Great Exhibition’, p. 212. 53 The Great National Exhibition of 1851 (Seven Dials, London: Birt, [1851]) (The Bodleian Library, Harding B 13 (33)). The New Exhibition, Sights and Wonders! (Digbeth, Birmingham: William Pratt, [1851]) (The Bodleian Library, Harding B 13 (41)). 54 The Great National Exhibition of 1851. 55 See verse three, The Great National Exhibition of 1851, and verse three, Britannia’s Exhibition, The Wonders of the World (Spitalfields, London: Taylor, [1851]) (The Bodleian Library, Harding B 13 (25)). 56 [Albert Smith and Tom Taylor]. Novelty Fair; or, Hints for 1851, an exceedingly premature, and thoroughly apropos Revue (London: Lacy, [1850]), p. 9. 57 ‘The Great Exhibition: General and Miscellaneous Models’, Exhibition Supplement to the Illustrated London News (5 July 1851), pp. 17–19, p. 17. ‘Caprices of Invention’, Exhibition Supplement to the Illustrated London News (23 August 1851), p. 254. 58 ‘The Great Exhibition: General and Miscellaneous Models’, p. 17. See also ‘Caprices of Invention’. 59 Downfall of the Exhibition (Bloomsbury, London: Paul [1851]). (The Bodleian Library, Harding B 13 (26).) 60 Oxford English Dictionary, definition for exhibition, n., Second edition, 1989; online version June 2012. www.oed.com/view/Entry/66183. Date accessed 27 August 2012. Earlier version first published in New English Dictionary, 1894. 61 On this subject, see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 10. 62 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Politics of Transgression, p. 22. 63 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Politics of Transgression, p. 22. 64 ‘The Fair at the West End’, p. 7. 65 ‘The Fair at the West End’, p. 7. 66 See ‘Metropolitan News’, Illustrated London News (12 April 1851), p. 293. 67 ‘The Fair at the West End’, p. 7. 68 ‘The Great Exhibition Fair at Bayswater’, p. 265.

5

‘The Pound and the Shilling’: romance and the cash nexus at the Great Exhibition

The fearful anticipation of 26 May 1851, the first day of the lower admission price of one shilling at the Great Exhibition, replicated the build-up to the Chartist demonstration three years previously. There were concerns about the crowd, its behaviour, potential loss of order, and the resulting opportunity for crime and violence.1 Richard Mayne, the Police Commissioner who had also been on duty on 10 April, asked for an extra one thousand officers; the Duke of Wellington, as in 1848, wanted still more men on hand.2 Again the idea of using special constables was raised, this time to be recruited from among military engineers.3 Fears were so great that many stayed away.4 Attendance was down compared to the preceding higher priced days, and compared to the numbers it would climb to in the weeks and months that followed.5 However, 26 May was peaceful and the sense of relief palpable. This anti-climax was not generally turned into humour as had been the case in 1848. Instead, the lack of violence, theft or disorder was celebrated, and those who had paid the shilling to gain entry widely praised. Particular attention was given to the way that the classes mixed, even with the Queen who visited on the morning of second shilling day. John Leech’s full-page wood engraving for Punch, published on 14 June 1851, ‘The Pound and the Shilling. “Whoever Thought of Meeting You Here?”’ is perhaps the best known visual commentary on the new shilling entry price at the Great Exhibition (see Figure 5.1). The wood engraving shows a group of workers and their families encountering an aristocratic party in a corner of the transept. They appear to regard each other with mutual respect, even admiration. However, the caption clearly signals the relation between money and access to this new world, labelling the visitors with cash sums. In this sense the image depicts class harmony, but also more uneasy economic relations, the ‘cash nexus’ in the words of Thomas Carlyle, on which it depends and that, the caption suggests, it can be reduced to. This reference to money reintroduces the idea of the marketplace into an event that aimed to promote loftier things. Anecdotal elements work to submerge this more mercenary valence with common touches of emotion, and even hints at romance. However, with the acknowledgement of the marketplace, the fair and the unruly reproductive

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5.1  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘The Pound and the Shilling. “Whoever Thought of Meeting You Here?”’ wood engraving from Punch, 14 June 1851, p. 247.



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body are also inferred. This chapter traces these associations in order to better contextualize Leech’s cartoon. ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ Every issue of Punch contained a Large Cut, a full-page cartoon whose subject was decided ‘when the cloth was removed and the dessert laid upon the table’ at the weekly Wednesday night dinner for the regular staff of writers and artists.6 At this dinner, the contents of the edition to appear the following week were discussed in a convivial, but sometimes combative, environment, with the last edition of the day’s papers at hand to ensure topicality.7 The most visually arresting part of any edition, these full-page cartoons could stand alone in the manner of older satirical images by Cruikshank or Gillray, or the large lithographed sheets by John Doyle (signed ‘H. B.’). These images lent themselves to display in booksellers’ windows, or on the walls of homes, offices and chophouses in London and beyond. The Large Cut for 14 June occupies a privileged place in studies of the Great Exhibition. As early as 1887 the cartoon was reprinted in Mr. Punch’s Victorian Era, published to celebrate the fiftieth year of Queen Victoria’s reign.8 As with many other Large Cuts, Leech’s cartoon was likely inspired by an article in The Times. In this case a piece titled ‘Great Exhibition’ published on 29 May 1851.9 It read: There is something particularly gratifying in this fraternization of the great and the humble under circumstances so unusual, and, we may add, so unexpected. No one anticipated when the price of admission had fallen to its minimum that high-born ladies would venture amidst the thronging masses, and intrust themselves to the politeness of the people. But see what one good example will effect. The Queen visited the building on Tuesday morning as usual, remaining until 11 o’clock. The most distinguished members of the nobility follow up those Royal indications of confidence and affection towards the industrial classes of the community.10

The prominent place of upper-class female visitors in ‘The Pound and the Shilling’, combined with the sense of unexpectedness conveyed in the caption ‘“Whoever thought of meeting you here?”’ as well as the ‘affection’ demonstrated, especially between the children of the different parties, echoes The Times’ assessment of the first week of shilling days. The passage in The Times also emphasizes that a shilling is the ‘minimum’ entry price to the exhibition, perhaps a veiled commentary on the rejected idea raised by Paxton that entry be free, or that the ticket price might at some point be reduced below a shilling. If this is the motive for the emphasis given to this word, at the same time as basking in the glow of ‘affection’ between the classes, The Times had decided that this unity

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must rest, like the franchise, on a monetary amount that would define those who were and were not eligible to participate.11 Here, The Times implies that while it is the ‘industrial classes’ the ‘people’ already ‘of the community’ with a shilling to spare that are welcome at the Crystal Palace, the, by inference, idle classes who could not afford the entry fee must remain unmentioned and excluded. ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ stages its encounter in a corner of the transept of the Great Exhibition, a space typically characterized in contemporary representations as a winter garden filled with plants and trees, while in the background a view opens down the nave. This space was associated with ceremony, and was located close to the private reception rooms set aside for the use of the Queen. The large pillar that sits at the angle of the transept and nave, immediately above the head of the most prominent woman in the upper-class group, marks a division between the plant-filled section of the building, occupied by the upper-class party to the right, and the nave, occupied by the party of workers to the left. In order for the engraving to be completed quickly the wood block was divided into four to be engraved, and a horizontal line can just be made out passing almost exactly between the two groups, with the head of the upper-class little girl on the join. This also accounts for the slight variation of tone between the two halves of the plate, the area to the left of this line being more heavily hatched than the area to the right. A section of one of the organs, of which there were two positioned at the east and west ends of the building, is just visible and confirms that we are looking down the length of the building. The absence of any further objects in the scene makes it impossible to locate the encounter more precisely. Since the shilling visitors were newcomers to the Great Exhibition, with the lower entry price coming into force just over three weeks after the 1 May ­opening, and main entrance was on the south side of the building, we might ­conclude that this is the direction the working-class party has entered from, to be greeted by the upper-class party that had already been enjoying the e­ xhibition at the higher entrance price, or as season-ticket holders. This ­perhaps confers the status of hosts on the upper-class party, welcoming the shilling visitors as guests. In the gallery above we see numerous other ­figures, some of whom can be identified. Mr Punch is shown most prominently, h ­ olding an eye glass in one hand, as if he has been ‘quizzing’ the group below. He stands next to a child to the right who peeps over the railing, while to the left is a worker, identified by his paper hat. On the other side of the pillar is a gesturing man in a top hat who appears to be drawing the attention of Judy, Mr Punch’s wife, who is dressed in a bonnet and cloak, to the scene in front of her. There are a total of twenty-one figures represented in the lower section of the cartoon, including the figure to the very far left, only just visible in profile behind the foreground-navvy’s elbow, and who uses an umbrella as a ­walking stick. Nine people are in the upper-class party, and twelve in the group of workers. More children belong to the ‘shilling’ group: four, as compared



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with two in the ‘pound’ group, although the two women to the far right, as well as the woman seen in profile at the centre of the upper-class group, may well be young. They appear youthful compared to the slightly plumper and taller woman near the centre who is perhaps the Marchioness of Douro, the Duke of Wellington’s daughter-in-law. It is certainly clear that this group is very wealthy: the women’s bonnets are of the latest, slightly oval, style, and are trimmed with feathers, flowers, lace and large ribbons. Two of the women, as well as the very young girl in the foreground, carry parasols, delicate luxury items. The stout umbrella just seen to the far left is perhaps an intended point of comparison. This group could be read as a mother with three grown-up daughters, and two much younger children. Therefore, although it might be tempting to read a Malthusian subtext into the image, about the growth of the working-class population, it is equally likely that Leech was matching the age of the children to the parents, and the adults in the shilling group are younger than the adults in the upper-class party. In the shilling party there are four female figures (counting what appears to be a female face – the edge of a bonnet is just visible – to the far left), or perhaps five if the baby that the woman is carrying is a girl. In the ‘pound’ party there are five. As far as the male figures are concerned, the shilling group is composed of three tradesmen (perhaps carpenters, painters or masons) in square ‘printers’ hats, one navvy in a smock and floppy striped hat, and two other men, who could perhaps be read as rural figures. The brimmed hat of the figure to the far left, which resembles a top hat with a low crown, matches that seen in an illustration to Smith’s Natural History of the Idler Upon Town depicting a visitor to London from ‘the country, whom the cattle show has brought to town’.12 The figure furthest to the right in the shilling group, seen behind the woman holding the baby, wears a more dish-like hat where the brim is a continuation of the crown. This somewhat resembles the hat of the navvy with the hoe and a clay-pipe in his mouth in Ford Madox Brown’s almost contemporary painting Work, but could also be associated with rural workers. In the pound group, from right to left we see a figure that has been identified as the Duke of Wellington, a frequent visitor to the Exhibition, a second high-ranking military man in a bicorn hat with feathers, and a man who is in civilian dress with side whiskers and a top hat, who may well be the Duke of Wellington’s son, the Marquis of Douro.13 The second military man is likely the Marquis of Anglesey, like Wellington a hero of Waterloo. He resembles Punch’s portrayal of the Marquis, seen with the Duke of Wellington, in an illustration to an article on the Exhibition’s opening day.14 The choice of two military heroes to represent the upper classes is significant. Their bravery compliments the clear physical strength of the navvy and his fellow workers. Their robustness is one of the most striking aspects of this image, and has been identified in the secondary literature as one of the most significant features of Leech’s image.

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Novelty fair Punch on ‘The Pound and the Shilling’

For historians of the Great Exhibition, Leech’s Large Cut raises several significant issues about the meaning of the event. Notably, whether a scholar discusses the image is an indicator of methodological approach. ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ is not reproduced or cited by either Thomas Richards or Andrew Miller, who discuss the Great Exhibition in relation to spectacle, with reference to the work of Foucault, Bataille, Benjamin and others. Leech’s image sits less happily beside these interpretations of the Crystal Palace; specifically it undercuts the suggestion that ‘department stores and exhibition halls created spectacles before which people adopted an attitude of solitary and passive observation’.15 In accounts of the Exhibition as spectacle, visitors are typically rendered ‘consumers’ or the ‘consuming public’.16 In ‘The Pound and the Shilling’, however, it is precisely people meeting and interpersonal connections that are stressed. Even though this image has now returned to a place of relative prominence in studies of 1851, its meaning has still proved difficult to fix. As Steve Edwards points out in his close reading of ‘The Pound and the Shilling’, the woman in a bonnet peering around her companions shoulder to the far right seems anxious, while the levity of the figure in shadow to the far left seems out of place.17 Auerbach has raised the question of exactly who is posing the question that subtitles this cartoon, and with what meaning.18 But Punch as a publication had a distinctive voice of its own, and this actively shaped how readers would have viewed Leech’s image, and provided its most immediate context.19 The Large Cut was carefully chosen by the Punch editorial team at their weekly dinner, and this and other contents were closely supervised by editor, Mark Lemon, as they swiftly came together in the days that followed.20 As William Powell Frith later commented in his biography of Leech, this process ‘helped both caricaturist and wit to take a broad view of things, as well as enabled the editor to get his team to draw well together and give uniformity of tone to all the contributions’.21 For a fuller understanding of ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ it is therefore crucial to look more generally at Punch’s commentary on class mixing at the Great Exhibition. This image must be understood within the journal’s unfolding coverage of the event, and more specifically the build-up to the first shilling day on 26 May. This was a topic that Punch had addressed explicitly in the weeks prior to the appearance of ‘The Pound and the Shilling’, most dramatically to refute a report from the New York Weekly Herald that had been reprinted in the editorial of The Times.22 The New York newspaper had reported that revolutionaries were planning to converge on London for the Exhibition. The Times relayed that the Herald believed ‘A deputation of American Socialists … with all the combustibles of Red Republicanism, Socialism, Chartism, and anti-rentism, will take the front



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rank of the agitators who are to be concentrated in London during the summer.’23 The article further stated that it had been informed on good authority that: a number of leading men in Liverpool are seriously contemplating a scheme of secession from the whole complicated machinery of the oppressive Government in London. The scheme embraces the idea of a New Republic, of which Liverpool, Lancashire, and Principality of Wales are to constitute the ‘nucleus’

while the ‘City of London contains a population of 50,000 of similar materials to the mob who stormed the Tuileries and carried off the Royal family to prison and execution’.24 In its response, The Times specifically invoked 10 April 1848, ‘when it was shown by a practical census that for every evil-minded man there were fifteen true and well disposed’.25 Punch’s Large Cut from 19 April, possibly drawn by John Tenniel, ‘Very Like A Whale! The French Socialist Leading the British Lion by the Nose. Dedicated to our Yankee Well-Wishers’ engaged specifically with this exchange (see Figure 5.2). The cartoon’s caption is taken from a line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and suggests that Punch is simply indulging the ‘Yankees’ fantastic imaginings. The image shows a lion, in the paper hat of a worker, decorated with a tricolor cockade. A smiling monkey, dressed in late eighteenth-century

5.2  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Tenniel or John Leech, ‘Very Like A Whale! The French Socialist Leading the British Lion by the Nose. Dedicated to our Yankee Well-Wishers’, wood engraving from Punch, 19 April 1851, p. 159.

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costume (perhaps specifically as Robespierre), rides on the lion’s back. The lion is being led with a chain, whose links spell out the word ‘SOCIALISM’. This chain is held by a bearded worker, smoking a pipe and wearing a smock, who shoulders a rifle and is armed with a sword. In the background the Crystal Palace appears with the French flag flying over the transept. In the middleground is a wall plastered with posters for both a socialist meeting and the opening of the Exhibition, although the latter poster covers the former. Punch’s own commentary on this image comes in the form of a crudely drawn cartoon figure that appears on the wall to the right of these posters and directly above the lion. The drawing shows Mr Punch thumbing his nose and saying, via a speech-bubble, ‘Gammon and Spinach’, an idiomatic term for nonsense. This attitude was reinforced in a short article on the second-to-last page of the same edition, titled ‘Rare News from America’, which concluded ‘This is the sort of stuff we expect to hear from America, but as we are not very likely to hear it from any other source, it does not much signify.’26 This was the context for the creation of Leech’s ‘The Pound and the Shilling’, and suggests that the main aim of the image was to refute the American newspaper’s claims, although the class unity which Leech depicts is not without its own different set of tensions. In the issue of Punch for 7 June two articles appeared on facing pages that expand on the theme of the shilling visitors. Titled ‘The Shilling Days at the Crystal Palace’ and ‘The Marvellous Shilling’, they also form the immediate context for the Large Cut of the following week: ‘The Pound and the Shilling’.27 The former article describes the first shilling day.28 Taking on the tone of more serious reportage pieces that appeared in other newspapers such as the Illustrated London News, the writer observes the lack of a crush in the streets heading to the Exhibition in the morning, and the laughter provoked by the elaborate security put in place to contain the non-existent unruly crowds: wooden barriers at the entrance and extra policemen guarding the Koh-i-noor diamond. Punch evinces patriotic pride in the good order and conduct of the crowds, observing ‘JOHN BULL has no need for barricades in any shape’.29 ‘The Marvellous Shilling’ is a more fantastical piece that wonders at the ‘fairy Shilling of 1851’, adding ‘never did benevolent fairy, with an eccentric yearning towards to aspirations of human folks, put more power into silver than the spirit of the times has conjured into a shilling piece’.30 Echoing the more serious text across the page this article also notes the ‘shrewd suspicions of the decency’ of the shilling visitors, before praising the ‘earnest’ viewing habits of this class, who, patriotically it is implied, see the ‘steel fire-places’ from Sheffield as serious rivals to the ‘Koh-i-noor of the East’.31 The article also describes the different types of shilling visitor, the ‘smock-frocked rustic’, ‘fustian jacket’, ‘a whole school of parish children’, and ‘sailors and soldiers’.32 The shilling, the article states, ‘knew its proper value’, and behaved with ‘self-respect’.33 If the main thrust of ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ is to show the unity of the British



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people and refute the Herald’s claims, the question therefore becomes how is this unity manifested, what form does this relationship take? The answer is clearly not straightforward and in fact reveals the tensions and exclusions at the Great Exhibition and within British society more broadly. ‘Economy of desire’ or ‘cash nexus’? In the secondary literature to date, the caption of Leech’s Large Cut has not received the attention it deserves. It labels and defines people with cash amounts, and the value of specific coins. The amounts mentioned in the caption are all the more striking because a pound was only the price of entrance for the second and third day that the Exhibition was open, when shilling visitors had not yet been admitted. A shilling entrance price came into effect after the initial twenty-two days the Exhibition was open, and ran from Monday to Thursday. Entry cost two shillings and six pence on Fridays and five shillings on a Saturday from that date forward. The ‘pound’ of the caption might be a shorthand means to refer to the price of a season ticket, which was three pounds and three shillings for men and two pounds and two shillings for women.34 The specific meaning behind these labels will be explored in more detail below, but at the outset they can be read as an admission that participation in the Great Exhibition was predicated on money. The reduction of social bonds to cash was a topic famously treated by Carlyle, under the heading ‘cash nexus’, just under a decade previously. Carlyle first defined the ‘cash nexus’ in his pamphlet on Chartism from 1839, and then at greater length in Past and Present, published in 1843. In the latter volume he wrote ‘“Laissez-faire”, “Supply-and-demand”, “Cash-payment for the sole nexus”, and so forth, were not, are not, and will never be, a practicable Law of Union for a Society of Men.’35 On coins specifically he writes when ‘man’s duty to man reduces itself to handing him certain metal coins, or covenanted money-wages, and then shoving him out of doors […] it is incalculable what a change has introduced itself into human affairs!’36 These sentiments are repeated throughout Past and Present.37 For Carlyle the reduction of society to these kinds of bonds and relations cannot last long, the ideologies which justify them are ‘ominous gospels’, the ‘sure, and even the swift, forerunner of great changes’.38 Yet social relations controlled by cash sums underpinned the unity of the Great Exhibition, and are foregrounded in Leech’s caption as well as other texts in Punch. This tension between human bonds reduced to cash amounts, but disguised by bonds of affection and even desire, is a central theme in ‘The Pound and the Shilling’. The longest sustained analysis of this aspect of Leech’s cartoon can be found in Steve Edwards’ essay ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge or, William Whewell’s Eye’.39 Edwards is interested in the relationship between class and gender, although his ultimate aim is to investigate the ‘picture of capitalist

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c­ ulture’ made possible within the ‘structures of middle-class spectatorship’.40 He has this to say about those at the centre of the image: If this is an image of social reconciliation at the middle of the century it is one where class dynamics are played out through a series of gendered exchanges. Many of the looks exchanged by the characters in this drama are indeterminate, but there is no mistaking the admiring glance cast over the navvy’s broad chest by the upper-class woman in the centre (he appears to return this look). The gaze of the woman in the foreground also seems fixed (or even fixated) on this figure, and … the carpenter might be looking at the woman in the foreground. An ­interchange of this kind suggests an “economy” of desire.41

This reading is echoed in Tim Barringer’s assessment of ‘The Pound and the Shilling’. He writes that the navvy is undoubtedly the ‘dominant figure’, noting that the working men keep their hats on, rather than removing them in deference to their social superiors: they are ‘self-confident’ and ‘united’, standing arm in arm.42 Like Edwards he sees these confident men engage the ‘fascinated, perhaps even desiring, gaze of the ladies’ as healthy and robust figures of manhood.43 However, Edwards goes further, identifying the ‘sexual drama that remains latent among the adults … made explicit with the children’.44 He reads the young working-class boy in the foreground as offering the upper-class girl a bunch of flowers, which she is accepting, while behind them the young boy from the upper-class party ‘takes the hands of the little carpenter and gazes into her eyes’.45 Edwards notes that ‘The patterns of desire unleashed by this image are clearly out of the ordinary’, but accounts for them with the remark that Leech’s cartoon is ‘clumsy’, yet exposes ‘the intense and convoluted effort necessary to stabilize [its] fantasy’ of class harmony.46 It is true that the children in the foreground distil the tensions in this image, but an alternative reading is that these tensions are specifically linked to the way that money and unequal economic relations haunt this image of apparent class unity, and how, in turn, signs of affection attempt to disguise this fact. The contrast between the clothes, and by extension the economic situation, of both groups is nowhere more pronounced than in the comparison of the small boy and girl in the immediate foreground of Leech’s image. Leech had already shown his interest in the stark differences between the lives of the cosseted children of the aristocracy, and children who had to work or were on the streets, in the lithographs he produced for Portraits of Children of the Mobility published in 1841.47 This volume was a parody of Portraits of the Children of the Nobility published in 1838.48 Portraits of the Children of the Nobility depicted overdressed children with their toys and pets alongside sentimental verses. The children often wear large, even ridiculously elaborate, hats, and tiny, delicate shoes. Portraits of Children of the Mobility depicts chimney sweeps in the snow, ragged children in the gutter, and other young workers. The boy in the



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patched smock in ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ who stares wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the well-dressed girl opposite him recalls the stark comparisons made in Leech’s earlier lithographs. In particular, the boy’s rough boots contrast with the girl’s tiny shoe, and his small crumpled hat with her overly large hat with ribbons. Edwards reads the little boy as presenting the well-dressed girl with a bunch of flowers, which she is accepting.49 It is perhaps more likely that, rather than the young boy presenting the little girl with flowers, the flowers might be passing in the opposite direction, although because the little girl’s hand hovers in mid-air it is difficult to be sure. It would be curious for a young working-class boy to be carrying around a bouquet, and the flowers also appear to be wrapped in paper, so likely not picked in the countryside by the boy. However, aristocratic children, especially female children, were closely linked with flowers in Portraits of the Children of the Nobility.50 It also seems possible that the boy from the upper-class party is pressing a coin into the girl’s hand, rather than simply holding it.51 He appears to hold her hand palm-up to receive the coin from his downward pointing right hand. If this is the case, although the adults face each other with a degree of comfort and implied equality, the encounter between the children implies the opposite. Between the children the flow of goods is from the richer to the poorer, a reminder of the economic disparity that typically keeps them apart, as well as what has temporarily brought them together. This seemingly innocent and sentimental, but in fact economic, exchange undercuts a narrative of mutual respect and unity between the classes, replacing it within the more mercenary context of the caption, which focuses on coins and money. Cash nexus The question of access and money had been a widely discussed topic in relation to the Great Exhibition long before the spring of 1851. Plans for the opening day, 1 May 1851, had brought discussions to a head when it was decided that the Queen would view the Exhibition privately in the morning, before season-ticket holders were admitted in the afternoon. However, the opinion was widespread that this should be an occasion when all those supporting the event, that is all season-ticket holders, should be included. The Times believed that: ‘Her Majesty’s advisers are leading their Royal Mistress to a course which will be profoundly unpopular, and without an adequate motive.’52 Punch commented ‘the Executive Council … have just done a very snobbish thing, and they had better undo it as fast as possible’.53 In response, on the 20 April, the decision was made that season-ticket holders would be allowed to attend the opening ceremony. This is the subject addressed in the Large Cut ‘Her Majesty, as She Appeared on the First of May, Surrounded by “Horrible Conspirators and Assassins”’ (see Figure 5.3).54 After the ceremony took place without disorder,

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5.3  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech (?), ‘Her Majesty, as She Appeared on the First of May, Surrounded by “Horrible Conspirators and Assassins”’, wood engraving from Punch, [10 May] 1851, p. 193.



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Punch proudly observed that ‘It was a magnificent lesson for foreigners – and especially for the Prussian princes, who cannot stir abroad without an armed escort – to see how securely and confidently a young female Sovereign and her family could walk in the closest possible contact, near enough to be touched by almost everyone, with five-and-twenty thousand people, selected from no class, and requiring only the sum of forty-two shillings as a qualification for the nearest proximity with royalty’ (my emphasis).55 In ‘Her Majesty, as She Appeared on the First of May’, upper-class women, whose bonnet-framed faces appear to hover like cherubs’ heads, surround the royal family while in the background hats and handkerchief are waved in the air and more women look down from the balcony above. The emphasis here is that it was not rank or birth that allowed entry to the Exhibition and proximity to royalty on this festive state occasion, but rather, ‘the sum of forty-two shillings’ required to purchase a season ticket. ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ appeared four issues later, and tells of the further widening of attendance, yet entry is still predicated on cash sums. The issue of when shilling visitors would be admitted was also contentious. Charles Dickens and Thomas Babington Macaulay had advocated letting visitors in for a shilling as soon as possible, perhaps as early as the opening day, but fears that this would lead to too large a crowd won out.56 In a letter to The Times Paxton had called for admission to be free, apart from one day a week that would be reserved for those preferring more exclusive access, but a response was orchestrated to appear alongside Paxton’s appeal that pointed out the danger of this course of action, as well as the ideological problem that this would create: it would have the effect of making the government responsible for the financing of the Exhibition.57 As noted previously, fears were also expressed that it would ‘degrade’ the Exhibition ‘to the level of a gratuitous show’ for the idly curious, blocking the way of those seeking more serious instruction.58 As Auerbach points out in the conclusion of his account of the setting of admission prices: ‘The shilling barrier – and the commissioners’ behaviour overall – suggests that they saw the divisions within society as between those who were “respectable” and those who were not. … The admission fee was not the result of any precise social analysis, but in all likelihood a guess based on a number of assumptions about the make-up of society.’59 The price would allow the respectable and deserving to enter, but keep out those lower down the social ladder who might prove uncomprehending or even disruptive. It is possible to speculate further about the connotations of a shilling in 1851. Very few items listed in the Illustrated London News’s advertisement pages in spring 1851 retailed for a shilling or less; cloth-bound books cost between one shilling and a shilling and six pence, sheet music was typically two shillings, and the thirty parts of The Pictorial Family Bible, comprising eighty pages, sold for a shilling each.60 In contrast the goods hawked by the street-traders as documented by Mayhew were more typically sold for pennies only, which was

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the only disposable income for many poorer Londoners.61 Ballads cost a penny, as would a cup of coffee or a boiled egg sold by a street vendor. As previously noted the entry fee to Laurent’s Casino, as well as pit access in many West End theatres and second class seats at Batty’s Hippodrome, all cost one shilling. In Novelty Fair the personification of the ‘Casino’, whose profession is given as a milliner, states that all her ‘pleasure’ ‘Must not exceed the plain domestic shilling’, while ‘Panorama’ also states that viewing him costs a shilling.62 It seems that one shilling was a price that would bring the Great Exhibition within the means of workers who attended the sometimes respectable, and sometimes risqué (in the case of public dance halls serving alcohol) entertainments found in London, and perhaps also draw them away from the latter. What these debates and concerns point out, and what the caption ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ draws attention to, is that entry to the Great Exhibition was contingent on how much money one could afford to spend. Any encounters that took place inside the Exhibition were predicated on a cash transaction, but this has generally been downplayed with the result that this premeditated dividing line between access and exclusion has been neglected, yet, at the same time, this was a highly significant factor in conditioning the Exhibition’s results. The fact that nothing was explicitly for sale inside the Crystal Palace has meant that the event has not generally been understood within a commercial or financial framework, but rather through themes such as imperialism, nationalism and commodities. However, as Patrick Brantlinger has argued, both nationalism and imperialism as facets of identity have deep links to the way a country’s finances were thought of and organized.63 Brantlinger points out ‘money is of at least equal importance with novels, newspapers, maps, museums, and statistics in reinforcing a sense of national identity’.64 Indeed, as Brantlinger and Mary Poovey show, money and its value in the nineteenth century were culturally conditioned.65 In 1851 money had only quite recently become regularized. Various monetary systems had been experimented with in Europe, especially as a result of revolutions and wars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The Bank of England, the gold and silver standard, and monetary instruments, such as cheques, bank notes and bills of exchange, were developed at this time. Concerns with an individual’s solvency and worth took a central role in the plots of mid-nineteenth-century novels. This recent linking in the scholarship of identity, literature and culture with contemporary economic theory can provide a new perspective on both ‘The Pound and the Shilling’, and depictions of the Great Exhibition more generally. The two coins referred to in the caption, the shilling and the pound, might be a reference to the silver standard in Britain, which had existed prior to, and then alongside, the gold standard until the gold standard was officially adopted in 1816. Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a ‘great re-coinage’ took place to try to address the economic instability that resulted from the years of



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conflict. The question was still a matter of debate into the Victorian era.66A pound of silver was used to mint sixty-two shillings, and thus sixty-two shillings made a pound of silver. It is notable that the shilling party appear above the word ‘pound’ and vice versa, this may be due to the reversal of the image in the printing process, when the drawing was applied to the block, but this visual and verbal exchange is suggestive. The implication in Leech’s cartoon could be that the pound and the shilling guarantee each other’s value, and that the debasement of one leads to the debasement of the other, but that together they ensure economic stability. Such exchanges and computations find clear expression in the Punch article ‘The Marvellous Shilling’, cited previously. The article read ‘Sixty shillings – sublimed into three golden sovereigns, and then transmuted into season male ticket – considered One Shilling to be inevitably One Mob; insolent, noisy, swaggering Twelve-pence. Forty Shillings – the female card – shuddered at the bare idea of that low, vulgar, riotous, destructive unit; that revolutionary leveling One Shilling.’67 The article continues, describing how, despite these prejudices, the ‘Shilling shone’ after the 26 May.68 The result defies accounting: the ‘Shilling’ is more earnest than ‘Three Sovereigns – than even Five Shilling pieces’ and ‘Not sixty shillings … could behave with better courtesy’.69 Such mutual assuring of monetary value, which is nevertheless subject to fluctuation and revision, provides the context for Leech’s ‘The Pound and the Shilling’. Economy of desire In an attempt to downplay the purely monetary speculations of the ‘cash nexus’ at the Great Exhibition, Leech introduced several anecdotal elements into his cartoon. These elements work to emphasize human interaction and shared human qualities. The fact that these overwrite a less harmonious narrative about money provides a different explanation for some of the interactions which Edwards sees as resulting from ‘class relations allegorized through sexual desire’.70 An upper-class woman flirting with a lower-class male runs completely counter to Victorian ideas of propriety, so that it is almost unthinkable that this could be the intended reading for this image. That such cross-class flirtation would be transferred to the children here is likewise difficult to square with Victorian ideals. Although the romantic elements of this image could be read the way that Edwards suggests, I would like to suggest that any implied flirtations, along with other affectionate interactions, are the result of a strained attempt to introduce a more humanistic set of relations into a scene where access is governed by money, rather than class tensions transmuted into psycho-sexual desire. Physical contact between the two groups in ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ comes in several places, and involves at least one female figure and at least one child in each case. At almost the exact centre of the composition we can just make out the gloved hand of one of the upper-class women seen in profile, who

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is reaching for the foot of a baby held by a woman from the shilling group. The eyes of the mother are cast downwards as if observing this transaction, which bridges the two groups and unites their concerns. This moment is amplified in the group of four children at the bottom of the scene where, as Edwards has noted, the most obvious moments of contact and exchange take place. Cartoons in Punch, wood engravings in the Illustrated London News, and accounts of the Exhibition in the press more generally also emphasize moments of human interaction at the Great Exhibition that draw society together in ways that transcend the economic. For example, in the Punch cartoon ‘Dinner-time at the Crystal Palace’ a group of working-class people, neatly dressed, perhaps in their Sunday clothes, are shown taking refreshment clustered around the bottom of a statue of Shakespeare inscribed ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin’, a line from the play Troilus and Cressida (see Figure 5.4). The image contains touching, even sentimental, anecdotal elements.71 Seated to the left on the step at the bottom of the statue, a little girl sleeps peacefully while still clutching a half-eaten biscuit in one hand. One of her shoes has fallen off and lies on the floor in front of her, but her arm is safely tucked through her mother’s, who sits to the right of her. Further to the right a little boy in an overly large top hat and a young girl gather around an elderly woman’s picnic basket, while she admires the baby being breast-fed to the left. Food and drink are shared between further groups to either side, while one little girl gazes up in awe at the statue. The picture reassures the viewer of the truth of Shakespeare’s observation, ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin’, that people are all like, with the same needs. The question of romance at the Great Exhibition was also taken up elsewhere in Punch and popular culture more generally. For example, the song ‘I met her in the Crystal Halls’ opens with the lines: ‘I met her in the Crystal Halls, / The treasures of the world were there; / But nought within those palace walls, / Seem’d half so beautiful and fair.’72 The lithographed cover of the sheet music depicts a lady with ringlets, in a bonnet with a flower tucked under the brim and a feather at the side, similar to the one worn by the girl in ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ (see Figure 5.5). She places a gloved hand over a balustrade, or perhaps a stair-rail, and while her gaze is coyly diverted her mantel slips down from her shoulder revealing a shapely waist. In the background is the transept of the Crystal Palace, with its enclosed tree and the Crystal Fountain. The other side of this romantic encounter at the Great Exhibition is given in a cartoon that appeared in Punch, accompanying an article titled ‘The Morals of the Great Exhibition’, which shows Mr Punch falling back with a cupid’s arrow through his chest as a pretty, well-dressed young woman passes by (see Figure 5.6).73 She is an example of Leech’s ‘pretty girls’, a type for which the artist was well known, and which were likely modelled on the artist’s wife, Annie.74 The cartoon does not relate directly to the nearby text, but can be read as an ­additional ‘moral:’ that romance might strike at the Crystal Palace.75 The Crystal Fountain can again be seen in the background. Therefore



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5.4  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘Dinner-time at the Crystal Palace’, wood engraving from Punch, 5 July 1851, p. 16.

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5.5  E. Noyce, lithographed cover from Joseph Edwards (words) and Steven Glover (music), I met her in the Crystal Halls (London: Duff and Hodgson, [1851]).



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5.6  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘The Morals of the Great Exhibition’, wood engraving from Punch, 7 June 1851, p. 233.

this scene takes place close to the spot depicted in ‘The Pound and the Shilling’, which appeared the following week. Given its size and dazzling appearance the fountain was a popular rendezvous among Great Exhibition visitors.76 The young woman in ‘The Morals of the Great Exhibition’ in profile, pose and dress (frilled shawl, and parasol), is almost identical to the figure seen second from the right in ‘The Pound and the Shilling’, suggesting that in the Large Cut she is also being presented to the viewer as an object of desire, with the fantasy of romance (though free of the psycho-sexual ­dimension that Edwards detects) temporarily taking the place of economic relations.

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Suggestions of flirtation at the Great Exhibition take up a theme that was a preoccupation of broadside ballads. As discussed previously, these ballads ­reintroduced the idea of the unruly reproductive body into a setting that had been constructed to exclude such associations. However, once more, satire in Punch registers the difficulty of policing these boundaries. An article titled ‘Things Left Behind in the Exhibition’ reads: The list of things left behind in the Exhibition would really make a very ­curious little exhibition of themselves, and we would, therefore, propose that the police may be permitted to open, for their own benefit, this extraordinary ­cabinet of c­ uriosities. The ladies, in particular, have shown a singular amount of ­forgetfulness; one, in her absence of mind, having left her petticoat in the building; and another, having gone, not leaving her bustle behind her in its usual place, but having actually allowed it to remain in the Crystal Palace. Parasols, ­victorines, cuffs, and children, have been picked up in large numbers by the police; and, indeed, there have been so many boys and girls found in the ­building, that there is some reason to doubt whether the Crystal Palace has not been selected as a convenient spot for child-dropping.77

In ballads, lost petticoats and bustles are a not so subtle sign that a sexual transgression had taken place. The disruptive effect of these traces of ­ illicit behaviour picked up by the police is registered throughout the piece: ‘Exhibition’ becomes ‘cabinet of curiosities’, the Crystal Palace a place to leave unwanted (presumably illegitimate) children. Once more the Great Exhibition, haunted by commercial concerns, draws close to a fair. Notes  1 Fears were also voiced on the grounds of religious belief, and the Great Exhibition compared to the Tower of Babel and Belshazzar’s Feast. See ‘Fears and Dangers’ in Geoffrey Cantor, Religion and the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 19–40. See also John Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 131–5.  2 See Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 147. Many of these suggestions were not followed, but 600 policemen were on duty inside the Crystal Palace on 26 and 27 May. Auerbach notes that the average number of police on duty throughout the time the exhibition was open was between 300 and 400.  3 See Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, p. 147.  4 For example, see William Powell Frith, John Leech: His Life and Work (London: Richard Bentley, 1891) vol. 1, p. 207. Frith recalled ‘I confess I shared the foolish dread that the opening would be so crowded as to be dangerous, to sight-seers; and



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I therefore declined to accompany my brother, who was braver than I; and sorry enough I was when I found that the panic had been so universal as to enable the few courageous visitors to have the show, as my brother expressed it, “all to themselves.”’ See also Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, p. 147.  5 The day with the largest attendance recorded was Tuesday 7 October with 109,915 visitors.  6 Frith, John Leech: His Life and Work, vol. 2, p. 32.  7 See Frith, John Leech: His Life and Work, vol. 2, pp. 32–3. See also Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (London: The Trustees of the British Library, 2010).  8 See Mr. Punch’s Victorian Era: An Illustrated Chronicle of Fifty Years of the Reign of Her Majesty the Queen (London: Bradbury, Agnew and Co., 1887) vol. 1, p. 115. This was one of two Full Cuts on the exhibition reprinted in a digest of the events of that year. The other being ‘Her Majesty as she appeared on the First of May, Surrounded by “Horrible Conspirators and Assassins”’, which appeared in the 10 May number.  9 See ‘The Great Exhibition’, The Times (29 May 1851), p. 8. 10 ‘The Great Exhibition’, p. 8. 11 For a discussion of the lines drawn, metaphorically and literally, between those who could and could not vote in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, see Janice Carlisle, Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 12 See Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Idler upon Town, illustrated by A. Henning (London: David Bogue, 1848), p. 7. 13 Another possibility is that the man in the bicorn hat is a footman, although this seems unlikely given the division of the scene into workers and upper classes. 14 See illustration to ‘Punch’s own report of the opening of the Great Exhibition’, Punch ([10 May] 1851), p. 191. 15 Andrew H. Miller, ‘Spaces of Exchange: Interpreting the Great Exhibition of 1851’, in Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 57. 16 See for example, Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 32–3, and Miller, Novels Behind Glass, p. 57. 17 Steve Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge or, William Whewell’s Eye’, in Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 30. 18 Auerbach writes ‘The caption can be read two ways: “Whoever thought of meeting you here,” suggesting that the social classes in Victorian England were generally segregated and that respectable society had assumed the Crystal Palace to be part of their domain; or, “Whoever thought of meeting you here,” meaning that there were places where the classes mingled, but that respectable society did not consider the Crystal Palace to be one of them. Either way, the meaning of the drawing is clear: there was substantial social mixing at the Great Exhibition.’ Since the shilling day was anticipated to be a day when those lower down the social scale would be able to

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visit the Exhibition, the latter interpretation seems unlikely. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, p. 154. 19 For a brief discussion of this image in the longer history of Punch’s representation of visitors to art exhibits, see Jamie W. Johnson, ‘The Changing Representation of the Art Public in Punch, 1841–1896’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 35:3 (Fall 2002), p. 282. 20 For an in-depth account of the evolution of this process, see Leary, The Punch Brotherhood. 21 See Frith, John Leech: His Life and Work, vol. 2, pp. 33, 34. 22 ‘[Editorial] Time draws on. Twenty days more will see the …’, The Times (10 April 1851), p. 5. 23 ‘[Editorial] Time draws on. Twenty days more will see the …’, p. 5. 24 ‘[Editorial] Time draws on. Twenty days more will see the …’, p. 5. 25 ‘[Editorial] Time draws on. Twenty days more will see the …’, p. 5. 26 ‘Rare News from America’, Punch (19 April 1851), p. 163. 27 See ‘The Shilling Days at the Crystal Palace’, Punch (7 June 1851), p. 240, and ‘The Marvellous Shilling’, Punch (7 June 1851), p. 241. 28 ‘The Shilling Days at the Crystal Palace’, p. 240. 29 ‘The Shilling Days at the Crystal Palace’, p. 240. 30 ‘The Marvellous Shilling’, p. 241. 31 ‘The Marvellous Shilling’, p. 241. 32 ‘The Marvellous Shilling’, p. 241. 33 ‘The Marvellous Shilling’, p. 241. 34 The cost of a season ticket dropped after 1 July to a pound for a woman, but this was not known at the time ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ was published on 14 June. 35 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (Rockville, MD: Serenity Publishing, 2009), p. 41. 36 Carlyle, Past and Present, p. 67. 37 See Carlyle, Past and Present, pp. 41, 143, 155 and 157. 38 Carlyle, Past and Present, p. 157. 39 Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge’, p. 35. The date of its appearance is significant, as it comes between, and attempts to productively unite, the more theoretically informed approaches to the Great Exhibition that characterized the 1990s, and the subsequent refocusing on the working body, that was to appear in the decade that followed. 40 Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge’, p. 26. Edwards’ reading of ‘The Pound and the Shilling’ hinges on the identification of Mr Punch, looking down from the gallery on the meeting between workers and aristocrats, as equivalent to the m ­ iddle-class viewing position. The middle class, Edwards suggests in ­conclusion, ‘can encompass and unite … diverse interests. Society holds together as a ­community of peace and plenty under the hegemony of those outside the image.’  Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge’, pp. 34, 47. 41 Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge’, p. 31. Edwards also calls attention to the interlinked arms of the navvy and the man in the paper hat to the left, suggesting that the ‘image constructs the carpenter as a feminized figure’, however, he also holds a child, probably a girl, by the hand. If he is a fatherly figure here, this seems



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to undo the idea that he is feminized. Gents too were often depicted arm in arm, suggesting that different masculine norms of behaviour and physical contact existed in the nineteenth century. 42 Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 5. 43 Barringer, Men at Work, p. 5. 44 Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge’, p. 33. 45 Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge’, p. 33. 46 Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge’, pp. 29, 33. 47 Percival Leigh, Portraits of Children of the Mobility Draw from Nature by J. Leech (London: Richard Bentley, 1841). 48 See Louisa Fairlie, Portraits of the Children of the Nobility, a Series of Highly Finished Engravings … from drawings by Alfred E. Chalon ... and other eminent artists (London: Longman, 1838). 49 Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge’, p. 33. 50 See poem to the honourable Frances Diana Manners Sutton, daughter of Viscount Canterbury by L. E. L., which reads ‘Her hands are filled with early flowers, the lily and the rose, / The violet, that at the foot of some old ash tree grows.’ Portraits of Children of the Nobility, n.p. 51 An interesting comparison is William Beechey’s portrait of the children of Sir Francis Ford, now in the Tate, exhibited in 1793. This shows two children, a girl and a boy, facing a pale and ragged child. The girl, with a mixture of concern and fear, holds out a coin to him. This idealized depiction, along with the portraits of children by Thomas Lawrence, clearly influenced the images in Children of the Nobility. 52 ‘[Editorial] Her Majesty’s intention …’, The Times (17 April 1851), p. 5. The references to the quotations in this paragraph were taken from Davis, The Great Exhibition, see pp. 116–19. 53 ‘“Those who live in glass-houses shouldn’t throw stones!”’, Punch (26 April 1851), p. 174. 54 Auerbach gives the publication date of this image as 3 May 1851. 55 ‘Punch’s own report of the opening of the Great Exhibition’, p. 190. 56 See Auerbach, ‘Admission Prices’, in The Great Exhibition of 1851, pp. 144–6. 57 Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, p. 144. 58 See Auerbach, quoting from The Times, 25 January 1851, p. 145. 59 Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, p. 146. 60 Mayhew notes that books sold at railway stations were typically classed as ‘light reading’ and the ‘price does not often exceed 1 s[hilling]’. Smith’s ‘Social Zoologies’, which also retailed for a shilling, would fall into this category. See Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2009), vol. 1, p. 291. 61 At coffee stalls a slice of bread and butter or cake cost half a pence, ham sandwiches sold for two pence (or sometimes one penny). See Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, pp. 184, 221. 62 [Albert Smith and Tom Taylor]. Novelty Fair; or, Hints for 1851, an exceedingly premature, and thoroughly apropos Revue (London: Lacy, [1850]), p. 23.

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63 Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), see especially ‘Debt, Fetishism, and Empire: A Postmodern Preamble’, pp. 1–47. 64 Brantlinger, Fictions of State, p. 143. On this same point, see Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 76. 65 See Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, pp. 57–60. 66 See Timothy Alborn, ‘Money’s Worth: Morality, Class and Politics’, in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 209–24. 67 ‘The Marvellous Shilling’, p. 241. 68 ‘The Marvellous Shilling’, p. 241. 69 ‘The Marvellous Shilling’, p. 241. 70 Edwards, ‘The Accumulation of Knowledge’, p. 33. 71 Auerbach reproduces this image with the caption ‘Flaunting bourgeois norms: working-class mothers nurse their children in the nave.’ I suggest a less judgemental reading of this image. See Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851, p. 155. 72 Joseph Edwards, ‘I met her in the Crystal Halls, ballad, music by Steven Glover, lithographed cover by E. Noyce’ (London: Duff and Hodgson, [1851]). 73 See ‘The Morals of the Great Exhibition’, Punch (7 June 1851), p. 233. 74 See Marion Harry Spielmann, The History of ‘Punch’ (London: Cassell, 1895), pp. 429–30. 75 Barbara Black notes that museums are places ‘where characters fall in and out of love’ in the novels Villette, Middlemarch and Maurice. See Black, ‘A Gallery of Readings: Rendezvous in the Museum’ in Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 109. 76 See ‘A Conversation at the Exhibition’, Punch (5 July 1851), p. 19, see also ‘The Front Row of the Shilling Gallery’, Punch ([28 June] 1851), pp. 10–12, vignette on p. 11. 77 ‘Things Left Behind in the Exhibition’, Punch (13 September, 1851), p. 118.

6

A ‘Chamber of Horrors’: class and consumption at mid century

Albert Smith’s Natural History of the Idler upon Town, published in 1848, contains an account of the various shops in the Lowther Arcade. Smith relates how, outside a tailor’s, the idler is ‘struck by the representation of two headless gentlemen in a hunting-coat and dressing-gown … They are placed behind a brass barrier, and have something very awful in their appearance. The legend attached to them is unknown; but they possibly represent the guillotined victims of some revolution.’1 The wood engraving that accompanies this description shows these two mannequins dressed in clothes associated with upper-class masculine leisure, but which are clearly readymade items intended for the gent; where the mannequins’ heads should be, and at roughly the same size, are rectangular signs reading ‘GENTS UNDRESS’ and ‘GENTS SPORTING’ (see Figure 6.1).2 They form a novel couple; the widespread use of mannequins in shop window displays was still relatively new in the 1840s.3 These dummies are outfitted with footwear, and gloves and a stock-pin in the case of the figure on the right. The dressing-gown recalls the fashionable female silhouette of the day, with slim arms, a waist ending in a point (accentuated by the tasselled ties of the belt) and a full skirt sweeping down to the floor. The jacket and waistcoat of the sporting costume have nipped-in waists, echoing this profile. The mannequins have a curiously lively air, bending slightly towards one another as if in conversation. The dummy on the left appears to have his hands in his pockets, an appropriately nonchalant pose given his state of deshabillé, while the dummy on the right has one foot slightly in front of the other, and the tensed position of his arms and torso suggest that he is gesturing as if to underline a point. This animation of what we know to be simply dressed mannequins adds an uncanny air to the odd couple. In this display cheap and fashionable consumer goods are fetishized, placed behind ‘a brass barrier’ and presumably also behind the plate-glass of a tailor’s window, available to be consumed visually and vicariously. However, the bodies that wear these clothes, which are otherwise so carefully arranged, are incomplete and dismembered: ‘the guillotined victims of some revolution’. Here pleasure and danger coexist. Severed heads can be found elsewhere in the book, for example in a vignette initial-letter for chapter three, which illustrates

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6.1  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, untitled wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Idler upon Town (London: D. Bogue, 1848), p. 78.

the window of Truefit the barber and wigmaker (see Figure 6.2). Headless tailors’ dummies also appear in several wood engravings in The Natural History of the Gent. Conspicuously on the title page of this volume, where a portrait of the author or hero of the book might be expected, there is an image of a disembodied, striped neck-tie, coloured blue in some editions. Once again at the neck is not a head, but a scallop-edged ticket reading ‘GENT’S NEAT 7/6’.4 Taken together the images and text raise the question of what is actually on display here: is it both consumption and revolution? Is it the realization that these two things might be inseparable which makes the headless mannequins in the Lowther Arcade so ‘very awful’?5 Smith’s texts fix the gent very precisely in specific locations, associated with particular leisure activities and patterns of consumption, which worked



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6.2  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, title letter to chapter 3, ‘Of their Haunts’, wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Idler upon Town (London: D. Bogue, 1848), p. 14.

to distance vulgar, disruptive and even revolutionary consumerism from the middle-class reader. However, the ‘othering’ of the gent could also rebound to destabilize the bourgeois body and bourgeois identity. At the same time that respectable behaviour was defined against the gent and other snobs, c­ ritiques and attacks on this figure often went to the heart of middle-class anxieties about taste, class, social stability, and even race and nationhood, through which bourgeois identity was defined. The attempts of social campaigners and design reformers to contain the problematic, even revolutionary, associations of consumption that gents, snobs and other social climbers came to embody at mid century often reveal the conflicts behind the burgeoning world of m ­ ass-­produced consumer goods. Focusing on the gent in the context of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and design reform reveals how class was a significant factor in debates over the e­ ducation

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of taste. The secondary literature on design has considered political-economy, imperialism and religion, and, if aesthetics are considered more broadly, the meaning and uses of culture itself in relation to taste.6 However, class has not featured as strongly in accounts of design reform in the mid nineteenth century as it might have. To give an example, one of the best known critiques of Henry Cole and his circle’s values, which espoused the use of only flat patterns to decorate flat surfaces, is the episode in Charles Dicken’s Hard Times when an unnamed gentleman addresses the pupils at Gradgrind’s model school on the correct way to decorate a room. Sissy Jupe, a new pupil and the child of circus performers, says that she would have a floral carpet in her house as she is ‘very fond of flowers’. This exchange has been read in the light of Kantian aesthetics as forming the central theme of the novel, where Sissy reconciles ‘both subjective and objective understanding’.7 However, Sissy’s preference for carpets covered with life-like representations of flowers, as will be seen, would have been expected from someone of her class. Reading a variety of texts, this chapter will show how matters of class and taste intersected in visual culture at several points in the years around the Great Exhibition. As in previous chapters it is satirical sources that shed new light on more serious and better studied texts on design reform. Disassembling the gent At the end of the ‘Preface’ to Smith’s The Natural History of the Gent, a gent is shown at the moment of decapitation, having his head sliced off by a giant hand wielding an equally large pair of scissors for snuffing and trimming candles (see Figure 6.3). Significantly, at this moment the gent’s defining accessories, his top hat and cane, fall from his hands now spread apart in terror, but he is unlikely to escape. Similarly, Frith’s painting Derby Day emphasizes how much of the gent’s self-image relies on items such as his watch, cravat pin and jewellery, as well as how easily he could be deprived of them. The gent’s shock, which Frith so memorably captures, is due to the fact that, as well as losing all his money at the gambling table, he has also lost the markers of his identity, and his only claims to social distinction. These component parts are also scattered throughout text and illustrations in The Natural History of the Gent. For example the ticketed neck-tie found on the title page, the boots with false mother-of-pearl buttons on page eighteen, and the fancy cravat pin in the form of a girl on a swing on page thirty-five. The gent as a type draws attention to the unsettling fact that social class as an identity was fashioned through a collection of accessories or purchases, and was a kind of performance with no stable centre. Perhaps more disruptive still, although the gent invests great significance in his accessories, because he is a follower of the latest novelties, he is equally likely to quickly discard them. Notably the gent’s accessories were the cheaper additions to the male toilette: electro-plated pins from Birmingham, ­roll-printed



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6.3  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, untitled wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1848), p. viii.

cotton shirts, novelty handkerchiefs and cravats forming the low-cost and more easily updatable elements of a man’s wardrobe. As Philippe Perrot writes, the cravat in particular allowed variations in colour and style as it was tied each day by the wearer and was ‘the only part of [male] dress subject to somewhat rapid fashion change’.8 Smith’s text on the gent underlines this point. He observed: ‘And then the stocks – what marvellous cravats they form! blue always the favourite colour – blue, with gold springs! blue, with a crimson floss-silk flower! blue Joinvilles, with rainbow ends!’9 If the stocks are ‘black and long, they are fashioned into quaint conceits: Frills of black satin down the front … and studs of jet made like buttons’; the white versions were considered too plain so ‘they have lace ends, like the stamped papers from the top of bon-bon and French plum [sic] boxes’.10 Although attacks on the gent fragment him, because he wishes to keep up with constantly changing fashion he also willingly and continually disassembles and refashions himself. Such flux runs counter to the idea of the classical and bounded bourgeois body. A cartoon that explicitly focuses on this tension appeared in the context

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6.4  Unknown wood engraver and artist (possibly John Leech), ‘Rochfort Clarke’s “Sermons in Stones”’, wood engraving from Punch [31 May] 1851, p. 224.

of Punch’s coverage of the Great Exhibition in a satire titled ‘Rochfort Clarke’s “Sermons in Stones”’ (see Figure 6.4). George Rochfort Clarke was a reformer and anti-Catholic campaigner, who in 1849 wrote a pamphlet against the use of images in churches. Punch is here satirizing the outcry voiced in an anonymous pamphlet, which it attributes to Rochfort Clarke, against the nude sculptures displayed in the nave of the Crystal Palace. The joke takes the form of a tailor’s advertisement and price list of ready-made items, which offers to ‘substitute for the extremely unbecoming garb of Nature, a large assortment of left-off wearing apparel … The stock contains every variety of costume to suit every variety of Statue’.11 The statue on the left is the Apollo Belvedere, but this icon of the classical canon has been dressed in cheap but modish clothing that recalls the sartorial preferences of the gent: checked trousers, an overly large watch chain, boots with small buttons and a stock which projects to either side of the neck. The gent’s little cane replaces the fragment of bow in Apollo’s outstretched hand. Dressed in this way, and juxtaposed with the spoof advertisement, classical sculpture becomes mannequin. The phallic wholeness of the perfect classical male form, timeless and impenetrable, is transformed into a vehicle for the latest fashions, subject to continued revision and tending to fragmentation into composite parts. Configuring an identity through consumer goods, the gent draws attention to the way that consumption could alter and unfix supposedly stable identities. Indeed, the gent is often connected in Smith’s writing with figures that blur



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and transgress fixed boundaries in a carnivalesque manner. Notably, the gent was linked with blackface minstrelsy. Smith describes the gent as kicking up his legs, dancing like ‘“Old Joe,” of Ethiopian celebrity’, and ‘singing a negro air’ walking under Piazza at Covent Garden.12 Among the entertainments on offer at Laurent’s Casino was a minstrel show, described as ‘the Ohio Brothers (a second edition of the Ethiopian Serenaders)’, and ‘The American Barlow’, probably a blackface performer.13 Although reflecting current popular culture and humour, the association of the gent and the minstrel has more profound significance. Blackface can be seen as an extension of the gent’s unfixing of the stable markers of respectable identity. Eric Lott has noted how in certain contexts white working-class audiences used blackface performances to articulate fear about their own marginal position in the American economy. More generally he describes the minstrel show as ‘an emergent social semantic figure highly responsive to the emotional demands and troubled fantasies of its audiences’.14 Seen from a bourgeois perspective, the gent’s performance of class has a similar effect. When Smith links the gent with blackface performances, the gent is paralleled with an outsider who appears to be able to be labelled ‘other’, yet in the case of blacking-up, this was only a temporary performance. As Lott asserts, through their racist performance blackface entertainers questioned the grounds of difference, at the same time as they asserted it.15 Notably blackface minstrelsy was particularly popular in the United States in the especially volatile years of the mid nineteenth century, between 1846 and 1854, a period which saw the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, labour disputes in urban centres, agitation for women’s rights, the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas– Nebraska bill.16 These were also the years when the popular focus on the gent was at its height. The gent’s spending habits also drew attention to the instabilities of certain aspects of gender. The fashionable male body, as the tailor’s dummies show, mirrored the fashionable female silhouette. Smith writes that the ‘finest specimens’ of gents ‘may be seen in the coloured “Fashions,” with which certain comically-disposed tailors adorn their windows … Observe, as the showman says, observe their fashionably-shaped hats, their Lilliputian boots, their tiny gloves.’17 This smallness is more typically associated with women’s clothes. Smith also describes a fashion-plate depicting gentish sportsmen ‘with pinched-in waists, that the shock of the first leap, or the kick of the first shot, would knock in half’.18 Across the page is a vignette of a sportsman seen from behind dressed in a checked jacket with a tiny waist and full skirt that project almost vertically from the figure’s tilted hips, again mirroring the lines of fashionable female bodies. This play with gender is revealed at its most extreme, and perhaps most shocking for nineteenth-century audiences, in Smith’s description of an encounter with a man in the West End described as a ‘Lounger’. With evident disgust Smith writes ‘Can it be credited, that we

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lately met one of these poor do-nothings in Regent Street, who, not content with the impression his general contour made upon the world, had actually dyed his moustachios, and – we write in pity and disgust – painted his cheeks!’19 This face painting recalls the theatre and blackface performances, and is the logical, if most extreme instance, of the gent’s fabricated persona. The gent is associated with further instabilities around gender when he is seen to endorse the cross-dressing of women for erotic effect. Smith describes a print that was popular with the gents: ‘It represented a young lady something between a hairdresser’s dummy and a barmaid, with a man’s coat and hat on over her dress. She was looking through an eye-glass at the top of a whip, and underneath was written “damme!”’20 Perhaps overstepping the mark of respectability, this dubious print is reproduced next to this description as a wood engraved vignette (see Figure 6.5). It shows a conventionalized type of female beauty, with large dark eyes, turning away from the viewer to show a curvaceous figure and ankles visible under her skirt. Similar gender confusion is implied in an only slightly less vulgar form in Punch’s Almanack for 1849, in a wood engraving after a drawing by Leech titled ‘Autumnal Fashions for Ladies’ (see Figure 6.6). The scene shows women on the street outside a ­tailor’s shop with a sign in the window that reads ‘Original Shop for the Lady’s Slap-up Paletot Registered’. The paletot was a type of overcoat favoured by the gents, but also worn by both sexes in the nineteenth century. The dress of the women mirrors that of the gent: checked skirts (rather than trousers) and coats with over-sized buttons. The three women in the centre who appear to have just left the shop walk arm in arm, and stare boldly about them. Several are smoking, and one carries a short cane stuck in her pocket in a manner characteristic of gents. The women are all unchaperoned, and the only male figures present appear to be servants. Here the norms of bourgeois gender relations are overturned, with women mimicking the fashions and shopping habits of the gent. Here the gent again heralds the bourgeois world turned upside-down, with the fulcrum of that turning being consumption itself. The gent’s shopping habits were also perceived as suspect, due to anti-Semitic feeling towards Jewish tailors. In Victorian London the Jewish population was linked in the popular imagination to the clothing trade, and particularly the cheaper branches of that industry. In chapter twelve of the Natural History of the Gent Smith produces a parody of tailors’ rhyming advertisements that reads ‘With contract suits they build for eager nobs, / In the most dashing style of Sunday snobs. / Coarse cloth, rude work, bad cutting, and quick wear, / With Sholomansh what other can compare?’21 The price list which follows includes ‘Pasha and taglioni wrappers, of the last horse-cloth out-for-the-day half-priceto-the-play pattern.’22 The advertisement is signed ‘SHOLOMANSH’, implying ‘Solomon’s’ rendered mockingly to recall the accents of Jewish immigrants to London. The money that the gents spend in readymade clothes shops, Smith



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6.5  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by Archibald Henning, untitled wood engraving from Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: D. Bogue, 1847), p. 22.

implies in his volume on ‘stuck-up’ people, contributes to the presence of rich Jews on the fringes of fashionable society. When the Spangle Lacquer family host an evening party Mr and Mrs Fitzmoses are the last guests to arrive – a move which they calculate to increase their importance in the eyes of the other

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6.6  Unknown wood engraver after a drawing by John Leech, ‘Autumnal Fashions for Ladies’, from Punch’s Almanack for 1849 (London: Punch Office, 1848), unnumbered page.

guests. The unlikely last name ‘Fitzmoses’ implies that the family are of Jewish origin, but have attempted to Anglicize their name with a traditional Norman prefix, ‘Fitz’. Their son is himself a high-class gent ‘having all the inclination and none of the ability to become a man about town’.23 He flirts inappropriately with the Misses Lacqeurs at a charity bazaar ‘“chaffing” the refined daughters of the west end … just as if they had been common stall-keepers at the counters of the Pantheon or Soho Bazaar’.24 Anti-Semitic prejudices here drive Smith’s attack on the gent and social climbing. ‘“Gent’s Vest”’, Smith observes, ‘is the Hebrew for “Snob’s Waistcoat.”’25 In his conclusion to The Natural History of the Gent, Smith, like contemporary design reformers, addresses the supply side of the market for consumer goods. He suggests that there should be a ‘heavy taxation of various articles in which Gents chiefly delight. In this tariff we would have blue stocks; large breast-pins; snaffle coat-studs; curled hair; collar-galled hacks; Spanish ­dancers; Cellarius waltzes; Caledonian quadrilles; lithographed beauties, plain and coloured; cheap cigars; large pattern trousers; gay under-waistcoats or “vests;” thick sticks; short canes; walking-whips; and boxes of omnibuses.’26 Smith also appeals to tailors to ‘effect some little reform’ by abolishing ‘all those little pasteboard scutcheons which point out your gaudy fabrics as “Novel”, “The Style”, “Splendid”, “The Thing”, “Parisian”, and the like. Cut their waistcoats, in charity, as if you intended them for gentlemen instead of Gents.’27 Here the humorous treatment of the gent runs parallel to the ­serious



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discussions about design reform taking place at mid century, and that the Great Exhibition and specifically Henry Cole and his circle hoped to address. As the previous discussion has shown, contemporaries saw the gent’s loud and flashy dress, his bad taste and unruly behaviour, as symptoms of deeper economic and moral problems, detecting national ruin in the oversized checks of his trousers. Although the gent was often disassembled, reduced to so many cheap accessories, he also disassembled and remade himself in line with shifts in fashion. In addition, the gent was associated with carnivalesque subversion along race and gender lines. The remainder of this chapter focuses on texts that treat the reform of design and manufactures, revealing how the gent, and his attendant disruptions, and above all the linkage of consumption and revolution, are themes that characterize the subject. Class, taste and revolution In the 1840s a belief in the disruptive effect of uneducated taste on commerce had begun to be voiced in debates over design copyright.28 If the gent was a copy of a gentlemen, what the gent consumed to fashion his performance of class was also a copy: the mosaic gold from Richard’s Repository copied the appearance of real gold, the clothes made by sweaters were named in the windows of cheap shops after French and English aristocrats suggesting that they were copied from these men, and the cheap printed textiles that made up the patterned fabrics the gent wore were likely also plagiarized and pirated.29 Kriegel notes that the ‘analogy of class’ was often applied to the piracy of patterns, the ‘first class’ and ‘patrician’ original designs becoming ‘low’, ‘common’ and ‘plebian’ when copied.30 In contrast the word ‘elegance’, with upper-class connotations, was frequently used as praise in the Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue for the Great Exhibition.31 It is noteworthy that debates on copyright coincided with Smith’s first treatment of the gent in Punch. Almost a decade later it was the coming exposure of new designs to an even larger and international public at the Great Exhibition that prompted the government to tighten copyright laws in the Design Act of August 1850.32 In that same year Charles Kingsley published the pamphlet ‘Cheap Clothes and Nasty’, a terse summary of the socio-economic message of his novel of the same year Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet. In his stinging prose Kingsley seeks to expose the human cost of cheap clothes made in the London workshops of the ‘sweated’ trade. Kingsley explicitly highlights the bad taste of the gent as a key factor in the development of the sweated system of labour, but the gent is merely the archetype of immoral buying, the practice extending through the whole of society. The result of unfair labour practices, Kingsley threatens, will be revolution and the mutilation of the bourgeois body. Kingsley’s tract opens with a definition of the ‘“honourable” trade’, where tailors are able to make a living wage, and the ‘“dishonourable” trade’, where

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the tailors are over-worked and half-starved, the prisoners of their employers.33 The latter is described as the ‘trade of show-shops and slop-shops – the plateglass palaces, where gents – and, alas! those who would be indignant at that name – buy their cheap-and-nasty clothes’.34 Echoing Smith’s introduction to The Natural History of the Gent, Kingsley sees the gentish wish for cheap and fashionable clothes as infecting all levels of society. Kinglsey writes ‘the men … who buy the clothes of these cheap shops. And who are they? Not merely the blackguard gent – the butt of Albert Smith and Punch, who flaunts at the Casinos and Cremorne Gardens in vulgar finery wrung out of the souls and bodies of the poor; […] the richest as well as the poorest imitate the example of King Ryence and the tanners of Meudon.’35 In this passage Kingsley makes reference to two instances where human bodies were turned into clothes: Ryence is the Welsh king of Arthurian legend who turned the beards of his enemies into a coat, Meudon was the tannery where the skins of those guillotined in the French Revolution were turned into leather for clothing and other uses. These examples amplify the theme running though Kingsley’s pamphlet of cannibalism and the physical diminution of the body in the face of long hours and underpaid labour. But in the reference to Meudon, consumers imitate revolutionaries, and consumption and revolution are once more brought together. With the reference to Meudon, Kingsley was likely thinking back to Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History, published in 1837. In the concluding section of chapter seven, ‘Flame Picture’, from book four, ‘The Terror’, Carlyle describes the activities at Meudon in particularly memorable terms. Again the predominant image is of cannibalism: the consumption of goods twinned with the consumption of human flesh, although the wearing of body parts is described as a special kind of cannibalism of a mocking sort.36 Collapsing fashion, manufacture and consumption, with revolution, Carlyle writes ‘History looking back over Cannibalism … will perhaps find no terrestrial Cannibalism of a sort, on the whole, so detestable. It is a manufactured, soft-feeling, quietly elegant sort; a sort per fide!’37 Carlyle’s prose was also perhaps the inspiration for Smith’s reference to revolution in the context of fashion and shop windows cited at the beginning of this chapter. Immediately before the paragraph on the tanneries at Meudon, Carlyle cites another grisly incident from the Terror where the hair from the heads of guillotined women is used to make wigs: ‘Perruques blondes’.38 This gives an additional layer of meaning to the wood engraving from Smith’s volume The Natural History of the Idler, which shows severed male and female heads in the window of Truefit’s, the wig and barber’s shop, which Smith had earlier linked with the revolution that resulted in the guillotined mannequins in the Lowther Arcade (see Figure 6.2).39 Like Carlyle, and anticipating Kingsley, the wood engravings and prose of Smith’s Natural History of the Idler create images of consumption and revolution intertwined to the extent that they are no longer able to be separated.



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These themes are also conjoined in one of Kingsley’s suggested solutions to the problem of sweated labour in the clothing trade. Kingsley urges a reorganization of the tailors’ workshops and other facilities, such as ‘kitchens, and washhouses’ to be collective and communal, with profits shared among the workers. He writes ‘The remedy must be association, co-operation, self-­sacrifice for the sake of one another. We can work together at the honourable tailor’s workshop – we can work and live together in the sweater’s den for the profit of our employers; why should we not work and live together in our own workshops, or our own homes, for our own profit?’.40 Kingsley’s radical, even revolutionary, solution to the tailors’ plight is the collectivization of manufacturing. This redistribution of ownership and profits was a potential threat to bourgeois values of free-trade and property. As with Smith’s image of the mannequins in the Lowther Arcade, or the bad elements at Laurent’s Casino, the wrong kind of consumption brings revolution. Another more palatable solution, put forward by Kingsley and others, was the education of consumers, and thus the shaping of taste took on an urgent dimension. A ‘Chamber of Horrors’ In 1851 Mayhew singled out the ‘One great good the [Great] Exhibition assuredly must do, and this is to decrease the large amount of slop or inferior productions that are flooding the country, and which, in the rage of cheapness, are palmed off as equal to the handiwork of the most dexterous operator.’41 The Exhibition, Mayhew argues, will educate consumers so that ‘the production of the unskillful artisan’ will no longer be able to compete with ‘those of the most skilful’, and quality dragged down to that of the worst kinds of production, and, by extension, the skilled independent artisan dragged down to the level of the sweatshop-worker.42 Notably, however, perhaps the most widely circulated catalogue of the Great Exhibition, the Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue, seems to have taken pains to avoid criticism of the objects it described. For example in an entry on lamps made by Messrs Salt and Lloyd of Birmingham, after mentioning the ‘too free introduction of decoration’ that had previously existed in metal work from that city, the writer states: ‘These remarks are not made with reference to the objects here engraved, but are thrown out as hints to manufacturers generally.’43 The text accompanying engravings of four embroidered waistcoats by J. W. Gabriel of London is also equivocal; perhaps thinking of the gent the author states that although embroidered waistcoats had been ‘generally discarded by persons of good taste’, in these examples ‘we see much that is truly graceful’.44 The most direct attack on the gent’s taste in the name of design reform came after the Great Exhibition closed, with the establishment of the Museum of Ornamental Art in May 1852. This was a continuation of the mission of Henry

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Cole and his cohorts, Richard Redgrave and Ralph Nicholson Wornum. Any observer familiar with the gent as defined by Smith, Leech, Thackeray and others would have been attuned to the significance of certain items included in the ‘Gallery of False Principles’ at Marlborough House (the temporary quarters of the Museum of Ornamental Art prior to its relocation to South Kensington). The room in which they were housed was known popularly as the ‘Chamber of Horrors’. This is a reference to the room at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, which cost an extra six pence to visit, and housed her display of the victims of the French Revolution, which her publicity materials claimed had been cast from actual severed heads, and the still warm body of Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub. Vulgar taste and revolutionary violence are again brought together in the naming of the ‘Gallery of False Principles’ at Marlborough House after this exhibition. Appearing as an appendix to the museum’s 1852 Catalogue of Ornamental Art, by the May 1853 edition the catalogue of the ‘Gallery of False Principles’ was moved into the first section described, before disappearing completely as the museum became established as a repository for more prestigious items, and the catalogue became more scholarly and art historical. In the 1852 catalogue, ‘Appendix C – Examples of False Principles in Decoration’, under the title ‘Garment Fabric’, an extract from ‘REDGRAVE, on Design’ was republished. In this passage the author stated: ‘The design applied to apparel must exercise a great influence over the general taste of the public; and persons who have been accustomed to consider gaudy, florid, and large ornament suitable for articles of clothing, will hardly be capable of judging correctly of what is true, beautiful, and appropriate in the ornament of the domestic utensils and furniture of their dwellings.’45 Items in this section included a cotton handkerchief and piece of mousseline-de-soie (a lightweight silk muslin) described as ‘vulgar’, a printed calico with ‘violent contrasts’ and another described as ‘coarse’ in its colour contrasts.46 Numbers 50, 51 and 52 were examples of ‘calico for shirts’, accompanied by the following observation: ‘Direct imitation of figures and animals; ballet girls, polka dancers, and, race horses in various attitudes’ (my emphasis), here is a clear and recognizable summary of the gents’ favoured pastimes.47 Numbers 53, 54, 55 and 56 showed ‘Patterns for Trowsers’ [sic] that were decorated with ‘Geometric forms totally unfit for the garment for which they are intended; interfering with the form of the wearer’.48 The introductory quotation from Redgrave elaborated ‘large and pronounced checks, however fashionable, are often in very bad taste, and interfere with the graceful arrangement of any material as drapery’.49 It will be recalled that similar large checks appear in several illustrations to the Natural History of the Gent.50 The ‘Gallery of False Principles’ contained thinly veiled judgements on a particular class of consumer; this prejudice did not go unnoticed.



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In early December 1852 Henry Morley, who is perhaps best known for his book, Palissy the Potter, which appeared in the same year, published a ­humorous short story in Household Words under the title ‘A House Full of Horrors’.51 This article has been cited many times in relation to the history of design e­ ducation at mid century, but seldom examined closely.52 The essay is a close reading of the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ and the text of the ­accompanying catalogue, and is highly revealing in relation to the interrelations of class, taste and design identified above. Morley’s text is significant as it shows how c­ ontemporaries were able to extrapolate an entire class of people from the objects on display in the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ at Marlborough House. It also draws attention to the way that attacks on the gent, a figure which I have argued was categorized at the cost of foregrounding the inherent instabilities in class identity, were also attacks on the middle class, and the not so distinct forms of self-fashioning and consumption that they practised. The reading of people from objects in the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ recalls Dickens’ short story ‘Meditations in Monmouth-Street’, and anticipates the detective fiction of the later nineteenth century.53 Morley’s ‘A House Full of Horrors’ opens as if it were a ghost story, with the protagonist, the ­respectable city-worker Mr Crumpet of Clump Lodge, Brixton, complaining that for the last five weeks he has been ‘a haunted man, molested in my peace by horrid sights, which follow one another almost without intermission’.54 The ­supernatural opening to Morley’s essay might have been suggested by the text of the catalogue itself, which in the appendix on ‘False Principles’ describes the ‘helter-skelter’ lines on a carpet as ‘like productions under the influence of ­nightmare’.55 This observation is repeated by Crumpet when ­criticizing wallpaper with perspectival elements as ‘the result is a ­nightmare’.56 It is soon revealed that the cause of these troubles is that Crumpet has ­visited the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ at Marlborough House and ‘acquired some Correct Principles of Taste’. As a result three-dimensional, ‘naturalistic’ ­ornamentation, vibrant patterns and strong colour contrasts have now became distasteful to him, although they have up until this point been happily used to furnish Clump Lodge, and were a source of domestic contentment and even pride.57 The first part of Morley’s essay dwells on dress. Morley is clearly writing with the catalogue describing the items on display in the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ to hand. Crumpet is shocked to find his trousers ‘hung up there as a horror’ and was too afraid to pull out his handkerchief, decorated with ‘a wreath of coral’, as it transgresses the code for flat ornamentation. These items correspond to numbers 53 to 56 and 58 to 60 in the catalogue.58 Crumpet attacks his best friend Mr Frippy after his conversion at Marlborough House for ‘dressing like a fiend’.59 Frippy is described as wearing ‘check trowsers [sic] of a large distinct pattern. … His waistcoat was buttoned with half a dozen studs of horses, and a large pin was stuck through the face of an opera girl who danced on the bosom of his

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shirt. On the head of the pin there was a jockey riding at full speed.’60 These clothes, as we have seen, were most closely associated with the gent. Figured shirt patterns, including those with ballet dancers, as noted above, were displayed as numbers 50 to 52. Crumpet finds many other items on display that adorn Clump Lodge, or are worn by his wife, daughter and friends. This has the effect of transforming Crumpet’s surroundings into a source of suffering. The remainder of Morley’s story concerns Crumpet’s visit to the recently married Frippy’s newly decorated house. Items from every section of the catalogue of the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ make an appearance in this dwelling: it is decorated with wallpaper depicting railway stations in perspective (number 27 in the museum catalogue), the paper in his parlour features naturalistic representations of flowers (this is a feature in several of the examples in the ‘Chamber of Horrors’), and his carpet has representations of flowers and architectural scrolls (see number 1 in the catalogue). Lamps, jugs, trays and curtain poles are also lifted directly from among the examples of false principles. On his visit Crumpet quotes directly from the catalogue of Marlborough House or paraphrases it, having ‘taken the trouble to learn by heart’ a passage by Dyce. Although humorously related by Morley, Crumpet’s judgements and pronouncements on his friend’s house have the effect of undermining his domestic peace and threatening his social ties.61 The house and its contents are so offensive to the newly informed Crumpet that he finally breaks down after finding his tea-cup is decorated on the inside with a representation of a butterfly, at which he drops his cup and saucer smashing them both, with the exclamation ‘“Horr- horr- horr- horr-ri-ble!”’, and he has to be taken home in a cab.62 It is important to note that neither Crumpet nor Frippy are gents, they do not frequent Laurent’s Casino or horse races and sporting events. Morley’s suggestion is that the ‘Chamber of Horrors’, in aiming to attack vulgar consumerism, could also threaten respectable bourgeois domesticity, and even the peaceful functioning of social relations. Although according to the ‘Gallery of False Principles’ his taste is vulgar, Morley depicts Frippy as a respectable, successful and kind man, a fact which serves to undermine the neat lines that a contemporary reader might have wished to draw between the gent and themselves. Crumpet and Frippy are both married, and are home loving and ­domestic. Morley describes Crumpet as belonging to the petit bourgeois class of clerks, he works in, and perhaps runs, a counting-house in Cheapside. Frippy is his client. They live in what were then genteel and suburban Stockwell and Brixton, south of the Thames, and travel each day by omnibus to the City to work. They are clearly patriotic, and even perhaps conservative in their politics; the approaching funeral of the Duke of Wellington is discussed and Frippy wears a ‘mourning band over his white hat’ as a sign of respect.63 Although not pretentious, Morley shows the reader that the Crumpets and Frippys are educated: Crumpet’s daughter plays the piano and frequently quotes the poetry



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of Lord Byron, and references are made to theatre and the opera (although Crumpet cannot remember the name of Hercules’s wife, suggesting that his classical e­ ducation has not been especially thorough). In this sense they are likely familiar to the readers of Household Words, as people known to the r­ eaders or as modified portraits of readers themselves. Morley points out that the dividing line between the gent’s vulgar and potentially disruptive consumerism and middle-class ­consumerism is a fine one, and ultimately untenable. The ­final word in Morley’s story is given to Frippy, who strikes a sober note, ending with the moral that ‘we must live happily in the endurance of worse daily sights than check trousers and clumsy paper-hangings’.64 Morley’s text restores the humanity to the items on display in the ‘Chamber of Horrors’, reminding the reader that taste is always someone’s taste and that design is as much to do with ­intimate encounters with everyday things behind closed doors, as institutional ­principles and government mandates. Conclusion: ‘mere novelty’ Smith and Taylor’s choice of the title Novelty Fair for a play that climaxes with the Great Exhibition is pointed. The word novelty has a double meaning. It can simply mean something new, but also refers to a toy or trinket, something insignificant. In the Journal of Design and Manufactures, edited by Cole and Redgrave, tensions over the meaning of the word novelty are often implicit, but were expressed very clearly in an article concerning ‘the multitude of new ­patterns’, published in 1849, which stated: The love of novelty, strong in most human beings, is the source of great pleasure and a considerable motive power in generating improvement. But it may have its disadvantages, and it is quite possible that, fostered by circumstances unduly, it may be pushed to an unhealthy extreme. We believe that this is the case in all kinds of manufactures at the present time. There is a morbid craving in the public mind for novelty as mere novelty, without regard for intrinsic goodness … In the spasmodic effort to obtain novelty all kinds of absurdities are committed.65

A subtle class prejudice can be detected in this passage. The author identifies novelty as a driving force, at a deep level, for economic progress and ‘improvement’ among ‘human beings’. However, in the ‘public mind’, which, by implication, is a less-informed sub-section of humanity, novelty breeds a diseased state, ‘morbid’ and ‘spasmodic’. Such a contradiction brings us back to Time’s difficulty discerning the positive or negative direction of history. Placing novelty at the centre of the economy seems, in the eyes of the writer in the Journal of Design and Manufactures, to tend in both directions simultaneously: stimulating the economy but also resulting in constant revisions and flux. This paradoxical state of affairs recalls Marx’s and Engel’s ­identification of the necessity

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of perpetual chaos in society under the bourgeoisie in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Such instability and the attendant blurring of b­ oundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms, as the preceding chapters have shown, was both implicitly and explicitly recognized in commentary at mid century, both in relation to Chartism and unrest in 1848, and the Great Exhibition of 1851. Notes  1 Henning’s image seems to be inspired by one of Leech’s original illustrations to Smith’s essays on the idler from Punch (as are others that he drew for Smith). However, this image only shows one dressed mannequin with a head, who stands next to a dress form labelled ‘Snobs own materials made up’. The head of the dress form is an empty circle on a neck. Reproduced in Margaret A. Rose, Flaneurs and Idlers (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2007), p. 332.  2 Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Idler upon Town, illustrated by A. Henning (London: David Bogue, 1848), p. 78.  3 A Frenchman named Professor Lavigne patented a design for a trunk mannequin in 1848, and mass production began soon after. Entry on mannequins, in Valerie Steele (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Clothing and Fashion, vol. 2 (Detroit: Scribner’s Sons, 2005), p. 377.  4 See Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Gent (London: David Bogue, 1847) initial-letter vignette, p. 11, which shows a shadowy headless tailor’s dummy behind a gent smoking and p. 97, which shows a scene in a tailor’s shop. See also the title page.  5 Smith, The Natural History of the Idler upon Town, p. 78.  6 See Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550–1960 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995); Tim Barringer, ‘Colonial Gothic’ in Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 243–311; Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: the British and their Possessions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). See also Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780– 1950 (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1977).  7 See Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste, who places Dickens in ‘the tradition of Addison and Hogarth’, p. 278, and Christina Lupton, ‘Walking on Flowers: The Kantian Aesthetics of “Hard Times”’, ELH, 70:1 (Spring 2003), p. 167.  8 See Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Richard Bienvenu (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 117–19, p. 117.  9 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 19. 10 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, pp. 19-20. 11 ‘Rochfort Clarke’s “Sermons in Stones”’, Punch ([31 May] 1851), p. 224. 12 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, pp. 69, 29. 13 See ‘The Adelaide Gallery’, p. 5 and ‘Royal Casino, Adelaide Gallery’, Theatrical Journal (October 1847), p. 334.



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14 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 6. 15 Lott, Love and Theft, p. 9. Paralleling the plot of Samuel Warren’s novel from 1841, Ten-Thousand-a-Year, where a weak-willed and vain young draper’s assistant inherits, through the intervention of a group of unscrupulous lawyers, the ‘ten-thousand-a-year’ of the title, Lott describes the play, O Hush! or, the Virginny Cupids, whose narrative centres on a black bootblack who wins the lottery, which brings him into conflict with his former peers. 16 See especially ‘California Gold and European Revolution: Stephen Foster and the American 1848’, Lott, Love and Theft, pp. 169–210. 17 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 12. 18 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 12. 19 Smith, The Natural History of the Idler upon Town, p. 43. Although not stated, Smith might be describing a male prostitute, as both male and female sex-workers were known to be found in this location. 20 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 22. 21 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 96. 22 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 96. 23 Albert Smith, The Natural History of ‘Stuck-Up’ People (London: David Bogue, 1847), pp. 60, 89. 24 Smith, The Natural History of ‘Stuck-up’ People, p. 89. 25 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 16. 26 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, p. 99. 27 Smith, The Natural History of the Gent, pp. 100, 101. 28 See Lara Kriegel, ‘Originality and Sin: Calico, Capitalism and the Copyright of Designs, 1839–1851’, in Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 52–85. 29 Kriegel points out a longer tradition of class confusion associated with copies: when cheap Indian cottons were introduced to Britain in the eighteenth century, maids were believed to be dressing above their station in the now rapidly cast-off clothes of their mistresses. Kriegel, Grand Designs, p. 55. 30 Kriegel, Grand Designs, p.72. 31 John Gloag, Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue: The Industry of All Nations, 1851 (New York: Dover, 1970), see pp. 16, 10, 93, 116 and other entries. 32 See Kriegel, Grand Designs, p. 84. 33 Charles Kingsley, ‘Cheap Clothes and Nasty’, in Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography, with a prefatory memoir by Thomas Hughes, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1881), p. 76. 34 Kingsley, ‘Cheap Clothes and Nasty’, p. 76. 35 Kingsley, ‘Cheap Clothes and Nasty’, pp. 95–6. 36 Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, with an introduction by John D. Rosenberg (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), p. 712. Here Carlyle is citing the French historian Abbe Montgaillard. 37 Carlyle, The French Revolution, p. 712. 38 Carlyle, The French Revolution, p. 712.

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39 See Smith, The Natural History of the Idler Upon Town, p. 78. 40 Kingsley, ‘Cheap Clothes and Nasty’, pp. 104–5. 41 Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank, 1851, or, The adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and family, who came up to London to ‘enjoy themselves’, and to see the Great Exhibition (London: David Bogue, 1851), p. 158. For a reading of Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor in relation to 1851, see Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, ‘Mayhew, the Prince, and the Poor: The Great Exhibition of Power and Dispossession’, in Buzard, Childers and Gillooly (eds), Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 123–37. 42 Mayhew and Cruikshank, 1851, or, The adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and family, quoted in Chase and Levenson, ‘Mayhew, the Prince, and the Poor’, p. 131. 43 Gloag, Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue, p. 16. For other examples relating to Birmingham, see entries on lamps by Potts, pp. 23–25 and Gray and Co., p. 210, entry on glass by Bacchus and Sons, p. 32, and entry on candelabrum and ­centre-pieces by G. R. Collis, p. 239. 44 Gloag, Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue, p. 111. 45 Department of Practical Art, ‘Appendix C – Examples of False Principles in Decoration’, in Appendix to a Catalogue of the Articles of Ornamental Art in the Museum of the Department (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1852), pp. 78–88, p. 83. This passage is presumably taken from Redgrave’s Report on Design Prepared as a Supplement to the Report of the Jury of Class XXX of the Exhibition of 1851 (1852). 46 Department of Practical Art, ‘Appendix C’, p. 84. 47 Department of Practical Art, ‘Appendix C’, p. 84. 48 Department of Practical Art, ‘Appendix C’, p. 85. 49 Department of Practical Art, ‘Appendix C’, p. 83. 50 See for example several of the gents depicted in the frontispiece, and in illustration on pp. 37, 69 and others in The Natural History of the Gent. 51 Henry Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, Household Words (4 December 1852), pp. 265–70. It should also be noted that the productions of Palissy, which were the focus of Morley’s endeavours in the years leading up to 1852, would not have passed muster at Marlborough house if the dictates on three-dimensional, naturalistic design were strictly followed. 52 For a contextualization of the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ within the history of design reform in Britain, see Suga Yasuko, ‘Designing the Morality of Consumption: “Chamber of Horrors” at the Museum of Ornamental Art, 1852–1853’, Design Issues, 20:4 (Autumn 2004), pp. 43–56, and Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste, especially part V, chapters 4 to 6, pp. 248–96. 53 Dickens’ ‘Meditations in Monmouth-Street’ first appeared in the Morning Chronicle (24 September 1836), republished in Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, ed. Dennis Walder (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 96–104. 54 Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, p. 266. 55 ‘Appendix C’, p. 80. 56 Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, p. 268.



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57 Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, p. 265. 58 Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, p. 266. ‘Appendix C’, 85. 59 Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, p. 266. 60 Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, p. 266. 61 Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, p. 267. Morley also makes reference to the expense that Crumpet would have to go to replace the items he now believes to be vulgar, suggesting that implementing the reformed design would not be financially practical for many. See Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, pp. 266, 269. 62 Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, p. 270. 63 Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, p. 266. 64 Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, p. 270. 65 ‘Review of Patterns: On the Multitude of New Patterns’, Journal of Design and Manufactures (1849), p. 4.

Conclusion: Novelty Fair, burlesquing history

Never were times so hard to comprehend: Some say they’re bad times, and, what’s worse, won’t mend; Others declare they’re good, and don’t want mending. How, of such doubts, am I to make an ending?1

This was Time’s question in 1850, and one posed at the beginning of this book as both that of the nineteenth-century middle-class Victorian onlooker and the historian looking back to the changeful mid nineteenth century. Time’s question is a sobering reminder that even though the historian might wish to characterize a given moment as pointing to one outcome or another, to those observing and attempting to make sense of events at the time no such conclusion was obvious or forthcoming. Time, however, is very much in the role of researcher in the first scene of Novelty Fair. He declares: ‘To think of Time being puzzled, though we’ve here / The Annual Register of every year.’2 Adding, ‘some of these past years, in many ways, / May throw on this the “light of other days.”’3 Time’s evidence, mustered to tell the truth about the age and answer his questions, is periodicals, bound numbers, representing a year each, in the very same way that library copies of the Illustrated London News or Punch do for us. It is this Victorian urge to characterize each year (55 BC is Julius Cæsar, AD 1215 a Baron of the Magna Carta, AD 1630 Civil War and so on) that has persisted to the extent that 1848 and 1851 are seldom considered together, but rather as separate and discrete volumes, each with their own personality. However, with the digitization of nineteenth-century sources, such as newspapers, and the a­ bility to search across titles and years it is possible to begin to build up a d ­ ifferent picture of the past that brings Time’s question, and the ambiguousness of any progressive or neat narrative of a given historical moment, to the fore. That question of whether times were ‘good’ or ‘bad’, tending to violent revolution or satisfied consumption, was particularly hard to answer in 1850, roughly two years after the Kennington Common ­demonstration and widespread revolutionary unrest in Europe, and a year and a half before the opening of the Great Exhibition. The sense of Time’s



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question’s un-answerability at this moment has proved useful and cogent in the preceding chapters. My strategy in this book has been to draw on periodicals, but also less-utilized evidence, to give a messier picture of the mid nineteenth century than has generally been presented in the scholarly literature. In its personifications and characterizations Novelty Fair predicts many of the themes that were encountered in this book; for example, the Casino, the panorama and the gent (the coming man, who characterized 1851 for Smith and Taylor). It also suggests the blurred lines between popular and didactic entertainment in the three tableaus of dancing presented in the scene set inside the Great Exhibition. 1851’s patter song reviewing the exhibits and commercial items to be found displayed at the Crystal Palace also recalls the preoccupation with consumer goods as seen in both Albert Smith’s typology of the gent and Henry Cole’s design reforms. All of this heralds the ‘Good Time Coming’, but the method by which this utopia is reached, and indeed its form, is ambiguous, as implied by the choice of melody for 1851’s song, recalling Chartism at the same time that it heralds the coming exhibition. Novelty Fair, in its diverse references to ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, also invites us to pull together strands of nineteenth-century culture that have previously been treated separately, such as fairs and the Great Exhibition, gutta percha and special constables’ truncheons, wallpaper and waxworks, broadside ballads and Punch. As a result the mid nineteenth century starts to look a little different and less familiar. Often the injection of a different set of sources has led to the questioning of the divisions between media, for example in chapter two the links between the diorama and the daguerreotype suggest that at this period photography was not necessarily linked to surveillance, but could have far more various and mutable associations. Equally Punch’s satires were clearly linked to factual news stories in The Times at the same time that they tapped into the humour of the streets. More generally these slippages can be categorized as bourgeois forms and strategies under stress, but notably that stress did not disappear in 1851, but rather continued in the interplay between revolution and consumption, romance and the cash nexus. From the vantage point suggested in this book the idea of a break in cultural or political terms occurring between class conflict in 1848 and class harmony in 1851 appears tenuous at best. The picture that emerges of cultural dynamics at mid century is closest to that outlined in the themes treated by Stallybrass and White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Notably a chapter of that book focuses on Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair, the title of which Novelty Fair may directly reference. Jonson’s play repackaged the bawdy outdoor amusements of Bartholomew Fair for a seventeenth-century theatre-going public.4 Novelty Fair enacts similar transference and transmutations. As contemporary review notes, Novelty Fair was first performed to coincide with Whitsun, a day traditionally a­ ccompanied

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by games and fairs. It therefore extended the pantomimes of Easter and Christmas to a new season, on the premise of a traditional holiday and its associated pleasures.5 However, unlike Jonson’s piece, the fair within Smith’s and Taylor’s play is not a traditional one, but rather the coming Great Exhibition of 1851. Although ultimately celebrating the Exhibition as promoting peace in its finale, Novelty Fair grounds its entertainment in nonsense and spectacle that derives its humour from the reversal of expectations. This book aims to show that over a range of Victorian visual culture similar reversals hold: in Stallybrass and White’s words the ‘socially peripheral is ... symbolically central.’6 Thus, at the centre of Novelty Fair, imbricated in a mesh of references to ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, we find a startlingly different depiction of one of the most seriously studied, even revered, events of the Victorian age. But the play shifts the centre of gravity and asks us to read the Exhibition anew in a new context: from this vantage point Novelty Fair should be added to Crystal Palace as another name for the Great Exhibition. Notes 1 [Albert Smith and Tom Taylor]. Novelty Fair; or, Hints for 1851, an exceedingly ­premature, and thoroughly apropos Revue (London: Lacy, [1850]), p. 5. 2 [Smith and Taylor], Novelty Fair, p. 5. 3 [Smith and Taylor], Novelty Fair, p. 5. The quotation here is a reference to the poem ‘The Light of Other Days’ by Thomas Moore. 4 For a summary and engagement with this subject, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), especially ‘The Fair, the Pig, Authorship’, pp. 27–79. 5 See ‘Dramatic Intelligence,’ Musical World (25 May 1850), p. 323, and ‘Novelty Fair at the Lyceum’, Leader (25 May 1850), p. 209. 6 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 5

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Index

Note: page numbers in italic refer to illustrations Adelaide Gallery 17, 20, 22, 24, 36 n. 26, 36 n. 31 Adelaide Street 17 admission prices (Great Exhibition) 33, 93, 98, 108 n. 28, 111, 113–14, 119, 121–4 Albert, Prince Consort 5, 11 n. 8, 48, 86 n. 53, 89, 93, 96, 102, 122 America 80, 116, 118, 141 Anglesey, Marquis of 115 arcades 19, 26 see also Burlington Arcade; Lowther Arcade; Royal Opera Arcade; Sala, George Augustus, ‘Arcadia’ Argyll Rooms 33 Arlington Street 87 Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue: The Industry of All Nations, 1851 95, 102, 145, 147 Art-Union 81 Astley’s Amphitheatre 87, 91, 106 n. 2 ballads 2, 4, 7–10, 66, 71, 74, 76–7, 81–3, 86 n. 52, 90, 93, 95–104, 97, 100, 106, 109 n. 47, 123, 130, 157 Downfall of the Exhibition 97–8, 97, 103 Exhibition of All Nations! and Kendal Fair 96, 99–100, 100, 102–3 Gutta Purcha [sic] Mouse 82 New Song on the “Specials” 76–7 The Chartist’s Flare-up on Witsun-monday 76 The Great National Exhibition of 1851 102 The Gutta Percha Mania, Or, the Snobs done Brown 82

The Gutta Percha Staff, Or, Adventures of a Special Constable 82–3 The New Exhibition, Sights and Wonders! 102 balloons 87–9, 88, 91 Bartholomew Fair 90, 157 Batty, William 87, 91, 106 n. 2 Batty’s Hippodrome 10, 87, 124 Bayswater 90, 91, 93, 104, 105 Beard, Richard 49 Bell’s Life 41, 75 Bentley, Richard 31, 36 n. 38 Bentley’s Miscellany 24, 31 Berlin 53 Bishop Bonner’s Fields 83 blackface performers 2, 7, 75–6, 141–2 Blackfriars Bridge 34 n. 5, 39 Blessington, Lady 31 Bogue, David 28, 30, 34 n. 5, 74 Bond Street 19 Bow Street 73 Bradbury and Evans 29 British Museum 15 Brixton 59 n. 30, 149, 150 Brown, Ford Madox 115 Buckingham Palace 22 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 31 Burlington Arcade 19, 29, 35 n. 21 bustles 99, 102, 103, 130 buttons 15, 17, 25, 74, 138, 139, 140, 142 Byron, Lord 25, 35 n. 21, 151 canes 17, 25, 28, 138, 140, 142, 144 Carlyle, Thomas 30–2, 89 ‘cash nexus’ 111, 119 The French Revolution: A History 146



Index

casino, see Laurent’s Casino Chadwick, Edwin 3 ‘Chamber of Horrors’ (Gallery of False Principles) 147–51 (Madame Tussaud’s) 148 Chartist petition of 1848 5, 8, 32, 39–44, 48, 50, 53, 81 Cheapside 150 checks 25, 26, 27, 74, 75, 78, 140, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 149, 151 Chevalier, Guillaume Sulpice, see Gavarni, Paul cigars 17, 25, 144 Civet Cat Bazaar 20 Claudet, Antoine 22, 51 Clausewitz, Carl von 59 n. 32 class, see gents and coins 119, 121, 124 Colburn, Henry 31 Cole, Henry 5, 11, 16, 32, 89, 92, 138, 145, 148, 151, 157 Covent Garden 19, 141 cravats 25, 139, 140, 144 Cremorne Gardens 36 n. 30, 146 crystal 88–9 Crystal Fountain 126 Cullwick, Hannah 3, 75 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé 56, 59 n. 25, 61 n. 56, 61 n. 57, 61 n. 61 daguerreotypes 2, 5, 8, 10, 22, 40, 44–57, 45, 46, 57 n. 7, 58 n. 22, 59 n. 25, 60 n. 35, 61 n. 48, 61 n. 49, 61 n. 61, 83, 157 dandies 25, 31 Delaporte’s Parisian Repository 29 design reform, see gents and Dickens, Charles 98, 103, 123, 149, 154 n. 53 Dickinson’s Comprehensive Lithographs of the Great Exhibition of 1851 9, 28, 36 n. 45 dioramas 40, 45, 48, 53–6, 59 n. 25, 61 n. 56, 61 n. 58, 157 Douro, Marchioness of 115 Douro, Marquis of 115 Dowie’s Emporium of Novelty 20 Drogheda Argus 51 Ellis, James 33, 36 n. 30 Engels, Friedrich, Manifesto of the Communist Party 9, 14 n. 39, 44, 152 Examiner 41, 43, 72, 73

173

Fairlie, Louisa, Portraits of the Children of the Nobility 120–1 fairs 2, 3, 4, 10, 90–3, 95, 99–101, 104–6, 105, 130, 157–8 Faraday, Michael 22 Farmer, Richard 52 fashion, see gents and France 2, 7, 8, 28, 29, 43, 117–8, 139, 145 revolutions 1, 2, 24, 30, 33, 57 n. 1, 80, 146, 148 Fraser’s Magazine 30–2 Frith, William Powell 116, 130 n. 4 Derby Day 28, 138 Gallery of False Principles, see ‘Chamber of Horrors’ Gaskell, Elizabeth 52 Gavarni, Paul 16–17, 20, 22, 29, 33, 34 n. 4, 34 n. 5 Gavarni in London 16–17, 18, 24, 33, 83 gelatine cards 94–5 gender, see gents and gents 7, 8, 10, 11, 15–34, 18, 19, 26, 27, 63, 75, 135–52, 136, 139, 140, 144, 157 class and 20, 23, 26, 28, 30, 32, 83, 137, 142, 145–51 design reform and 138, 145–51 fashion and 17, 20–1, 21, 25, 135–6, 138–41, 144, 148–50 gender and 29, 133 n. 41, 141–2, 143, 144 Laurent’s Casino and 10, 16–17, 18, 19, 22–4, 33–4 race and 141–4 sport and 15, 25, 135, 141, 148 George IV 31 Géricault, Théodore, The Raft of the ‘Medusa’ 99 gloves 22, 35 n. 21, 75, 135, 141 gold standard 124 Great National Fair 10, 90–3, 104–6, 105 Greenwich Fair 90 guillotine 29, 30, 33, 135, 146 gutta percha 10, 80–3, 157 Haghe, Louis 96 Helmholtz, Hermann von 52 Henning, Archibald 19, 21, 26, 27, 136, 137, 139, 143, 152 n. 1 House of Commons 39–41 Household Words 21, 22, 149, 151 Huart, Louis, Physiologie du Flaneur 24 Hungerford Market 19

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Hyde Park 10, 90–1, 94–5, 104, 105, 106, 108 n. 38 Illuminated Magazine 55 Illustrated London News 39, 40, 44–55, 47, 51, 54, 66, 73, 83, 87, 88, 91, 95, 102, 118, 123, 126, 156 Jerrold, Douglas 30 jewellery 17, 20–1, 21, 22, 25, 135, 138, 144–5, 149–50 Jobbins, John Richard 74, 78 Six Scenes in the Life of James Green 74–5, 76, 78, 85 n. 34 John Bull 73, 92 Jonson, Ben, Bartholomew Fair 157–8 Journal of Design and Manufactures 151 Judy (Mrs Punch) 114 Kennington Common 10, 39–53, 45, 46, 47, 59 n. 30, 60 n. 38, 62–3, 83, 156 Kensington 87, 91, 104, 148 Kilburn, William Edward 40, 44–57, 45, 46, 59 n. 30, 60 n. 38, 83 Kingsley, Charles, ‘Cheap Clothes and Nasty’ 145–7 Lady’s Newspaper 41, 66, 73, 104–6, 105 Laurent’s Casino 10, 16–7, 18, 20, 22–4, 29, 33, 35 n. 8, 124, 141, 147, 150 see also gents and Leader 30 Leech, John 28, 62, 71, 76, 117, 140, 148, 152 n. 1 ‘A Physical Force Chartist Arming for the Fight’ 68, 69, 73, 77 ‘Autumnal Fashions for Ladies’ 142, 144 ‘Dinner-time at the Crystal Palace’ 126, 127 ‘Her Majesty, as She Appeared on the First of May’ 121, 122 ‘Laying Down the Law’ 79–80, 79 Portraits of Children of the Mobility 120 ‘Special Constable Preparing for the Worst’ 66, 67, 76, 77 ‘Special’s Wife...’ 70–1, 70, 74 ‘The Chartist Procession According to the Signatures of the Petition’ 41, 42, 57 n. 7 ‘The Morals of the Exhibition’ 126–9, 129

‘The Pound and the Shilling’ 10, 96, 111–30, 112 ‘The Shipwrecked Ministers Saved by the Great Exhibition Steamer’ 98–9, 98 ‘The Trafalgar Revolution’ 63–6, 64, 71 Liebig, Justus 52 Lowther Arcade 10, 16, 19–22, 20, 23, 33, 35 n. 16, 135, 136, 146, 147 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 123 Mackay, Charles 2, 89 Maginn, William 31 Manby, John 74 mannequins 135–6, 136, 146–7, 152 n. 3 Marat, Jean-Paul 148 Marx, Karl, Manifesto of the Communist Party 9, 14 n. 39, 44, 152 Mathews, Charles James 2 Mayfair 87 Mayhew, Henry London Labour and the London Poor 16, 90, 93, 94–5, 107 n. 15, 123 The adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and family 147 Mayne, Richard 111 Middle Temple 54, 54 Miller, Thomas, Picturesque Sketches in London 52 Minton, Herbert 5 Monthly Magazine 24 Morgan, Samuel 73 Morley, Henry ‘A House Full of Horrors’ 149–51 Palissy the Potter 149 Morning Post 65 Mr. Punch’s Victorian Era 113, 131 n. 8 Munby, Arthur 3, 75 Museum of Ornamental Art 8, 11, 16, 32, 147–8 Catalogue of Ornamental Art 148–50 see also ‘Chamber of Horrors’ music halls (and musical taverns) 25, 33, 74 Napoleon Bonaparte 43 Napoleon, Louis 5 Napoleonic Wars 124 Nash, John 17, 35 n. 13 Nash, Joseph 96 National Gallery 19 National Gallery of Practical Science 22–3 New York Weekly Herald 116, 118



Index

Northern Star 63 Notting Hill 10, 73 novelty 83, 139, 151–2 Novelty Fair 1–3, 5, 7, 9, 30, 34, 63, 92, 102, 124, 151, 156–8 O’Connor, Feargus 39, 40, 41, 43 Olympic Theatre 76 Pall Mall 19, 51 panoramas 5, 10, 29, 40, 45, 48, 49–51, 56, 59 n. 25, 59 n. 33, 60 n. 35, 61 n. 58, 83, 124, 157 Parry, John Orlando 25 Paxton, Joseph 89, 93, 97, 113, 123 Perkins, Jacob 22 petticoats 103, 130 photographs, see daguerreotypes Playfair, Lyon 102 police 8, 10, 22, 34 n. 5, 39, 63, 73–6, 83, 87, 88, 94, 95, 108 n. 33, 111, 118, 130, 130 n. 2 Powers, Hiram, Greek Slave 103 Prattley, Harriet 72 Prattley, John 72 Punch 4, 5, 8, 10, 16, 29–30, 31, 62, 83, 88, 98, 156, 157 Chartists in 39, 41, 42, 57 n. 7, 66–71, 69 gents in 24–5, 28, 140, 140, 145, 146, 152 n. 1 Great Exhibition in 28, 88, 96–102, 111–30, 112, 117, 122, 127, 129, 132 n. 19, 140, 140 special constables in 66–71, 67, 70, 74, 76, 79, 79, 80–2, 81, 85 n. 29 Punch, Mr 41, 42, 86 n. 46, 112, 114, 118, 122, 126, 129, 132 n. 40 Punch’s Almanack for 1849 63–6, 64, 68, 71, 74, 85 n. 29, 142, 144 Puppet-Show 41, 43 race, see gents and see also blackface performers Redgrave, Richard 148, 151 Regent Street 19, 51, 142 Regent’s Park 50, 51 Richard’s Repository 20, 35 n. 16, 145 Ritchie, Joseph 74 Roberts, David 96 Rochfort Clarke, George 140 rolling pins 67, 71, 76, 77, 82

175

Royal Opera Arcade 19 Royal Polytechnic Institute 22 Sadler’s Wells Theatre 75 Sala, George Augustus, ‘Arcadia’ 21–2 Sampson’s Toy Warehouse 20 Satirist 41 Sébron, Hippolyte Victor Valentin 56 Shakespeare, William 30, 117, 126, 127 sheet music 20, 123, 126 sherry-cobbler 17, 18, 33 shirts 30, 68, 74, 139, 148, 150 ‘silver folk’ novels 31 silver standard 124 Smith, Albert 1, 10, 11, 29–32, 62, 98, 145 Gavarni in London 16–17, 18, 22–4, 33, 34 n. 4, 83 The Natural History of the Gent 15, 19, 20, 21, 24–30, 26, 27, 31, 33, 136, 138, 139, 140–2, 143, 144, 146, 157 The Natural History of the Idler Upon Town 25, 115, 135–6, 136, 137, 146 The Natural History of ‘Stuck-Up’ People 17, 25, 32, 143–4 ‘Social Zoologies’ 15, 17, 25, 28–30, 74, 83, 133 n. 60 see also Novelty Fair South End 98 South, Sir James 72–3, 74, 75, 76 Southwark 74 special constables 7, 8, 10, 39, 62–83, 64, 67, 70, 78, 79, 81, 111, 157 sport, see gents and Standard 63, 66 statues 103, 126, 140, 140 St Giles 19 St James’s 33, 87 St James’s Park 19 St Martin-in-the-Fields 17, 33 stocks, see cravats Stockwell 150 Strand 17, 19 see also West Strand Sunday trading 93–5, 104 Tallis, John 20, 34 n. 5, 35 n. 15, 35 n. 16 Taylor, Tom 1, 151, 157, 158 see also Novelty Fair Tenniel, John 117, 117 Thackeray, William Makepeace 29, 148 Thames 25, 34, 39, 150 Time 1–2, 7, 8, 63, 83, 151, 156

176

Novelty fair

Times, The 9, 23–4, 41, 43, 63, 65, 66, 72, 73, 87, 91, 92, 93, 96, 104, 113, 116, 117, 121, 123, 157 Trafalgar Square 13 n. 32, 16, 17, 22, 63 trousers (trowsers, unmentionables) 25, 30, 74, 75, 140, 142, 144, 145, 148, 149, 151 truncheons 7, 10, 63, 67, 70, 70, 71, 73, 75, 76–83, 78, 79, 81, 157 Tussaud’s, Madame 148 see also ‘Chamber of Horrors’ Ulster Times 51 Victoria, Queen 11 n. 8, 40–1, 42, 65, 71, 86 n. 53, 111, 113, 114, 121, 122 vitriol 43, 52–3 Vizetelly, Henry 16, 18, 28–30, 34 n. 5, 83

waistcoats 21, 30, 68, 74, 135, 144, 147, 149 wallpaper 149, 150, 157 waxworks 148, 157 Wellington, Duke of 2, 40, 41, 42, 111, 112, 114, 115, 150 West Strand 16–24, 33, 35 n. 13 Westminster 35 n. 15, 39, 44, 59 n. 30 Whitehall 19 Wilhelm VI, King Frederick 5 William IV, King 22, 72 William IV Street 17 Winspear, W. 74 Wornum, Ralph Nicholson 148 Wyatt, Matthew Digby 5 Zedlitz, Joseph Christian Freiherr von 43