Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (33 page)

The system of visiting was informal and the rules unwritten, but there were rules all the same, and those who could afford the time and expense
implicit in country-house visiting knew how to go about it. The hopeful visitors arrived, and either sent in a servant or went personally to hand in a card and ask if they could see over the house. As long as they looked respectable the answer was usually yes, and they were then escorted around by a servant, often the housekeeper, who expected a tip at the end.
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It was quite common to view the entire house: the traveller Arthur Young (who was mainly interested in ‘husbandry; but it would have been great stupidity to pass very near a celebrated house without viewing it’) said that at Wentworth Castle Lady Strafford ‘retired from her apartment’ so that he could see it; on another trip he admired ‘lady
Townshend’s
dressing-room…[which] is furnished with prints, stuck with much taste on green [wall]paper’.
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Mrs Lybbe Powys also thought it a matter of course that she should visit the owner’s private rooms at Fonthill, where ‘Mrs Beckford’s dressing-room has in it numbers of superb and elegant nick-nacks’; she apparently even toured the attics, as she made approving comments about the fireplaces there.
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But, with the increase in the number of visitors, this informal system was coming under strain. Byng wrote of a trip to Wroxton Abbey, ‘I prevail’d upon my party to drive down to it; when unluckily for us Ld G—was just arrived from London, and denied us admittance. Very rude this…Let him either forbid his place entirely; open it allways [
sic
]; or else fix a day of admission: but, for shame, don’t refuse travellers, who may have come 20 miles out of their way for a sight of the place.’
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The Earl of Stafford took the first course, refusing access to his fine collection of paintings to any except ‘persons of the first rank’.
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Gradually, as ‘persons of the first rank’ became the minority of visitors, Byng’s suggestion of more regulation - of fixing a day of admission, or setting down rules for admittance - came to be adopted by many. Horace Walpole began to admit visitors to Strawberry Hill, his house in Twickenham, by ticket as early as 1784. The would-be visitor applied in writing to Walpole in advance, and waited for a letter back which gave the name of the visitor, the date of the visit, and the number of people in the party. This was to be handed to the housekeeper as a token for
entry, but not before the visitor had read the ‘rules for admission to see my House’ which were printed on the letter:

Mr Walpole is very ready to oblige any curious persons with the sight of his house and collection; but as it is situated so near to London and in so populous a neighbourhood, and as he refuses a ticket to nobody that sends for one, it is but reasonable that such persons as send, should comply with the rules he has been obliged to lay down for showing it.

Any person, sending a day or two before, may have a ticket for four persons for a certain day…If more than four persons come with a ticket, the housekeeper has positive orders to admit none of them…

As Mr Walpole has given offence by sometimes enlarging the number of four, and refusing that latitude to others, he flatters himself that for the future nobody will take it ill that he strictly confines the number; as whoever desires him to break his rule, does in effect expect him to disoblige others, which is what nobody has a right to desire him…If any person does not make use of the ticket, Mr Walpole hopes he shall have notice; otherwise he is prevented from obliging others on that day, and thence is put to great inconvenience.
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This kind of professionalization was noticeable in every aspect of country-house visiting. As we have seen (p. 202), from the mid eighteenth century some houses had begun to provide catalogues of their contents. Mrs Lybbe Powys went to Houghton Hall, the home of Sir Robert Walpole’s descendants, in 1756, and promised to bring home ‘a catalogue
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as I’ve taken the pains to copy a written one the late Lord [Orford, i.e. Walpole] gave to [her friend] Mr Jackson’.
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At Houghton, catalogues were thus not generally available, and not for sale to visitors, but given as gifts to friends of a similar rank. Yet these places also expected visitors who were much more humble: Ozias Humphry, later a celebrated miniaturist, but in 1764 simply a hopeful on his way to London, made visits to Hagley Hall, the Leasowes (famous for its gardens), Stratford-upon-Avon (for Shakespearian tourism, see pp. 236-41), Blenheim, Windsor, and Pope’s villa in Twickenham, among others.
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He was not alone; more and more tourists were about, and many of
the landowners made arrangements to encourage them. In 1776 Mrs Lybbe Powys stayed at an inn near Stourton specifically built ‘by Mr Hoare for the company that comes to see his place’. That same year she noted that 2,324 visitors had been to Wilton House that year, which she thought very few.
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Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, so near to London, did not need to provide lodgings, and he did not achieve Wilton’s visitor numbers, but, given the house’s tiny size, that he received nearly 300 ‘customers’ a year, as he tellingly called them, was impressive. Many of these visitors were no longer solely of the gentry class, or at least they were no longer cognoscenti. By the end of the century Walpole was complaining that ‘A party arrived…a man and three women in ridingdresses, and they rode post [that is as fast as they could] through the apartments - I could not hurry before them fast enough…They come, ask what such a room is called…write it down, admire a lobster or a cabbage in a market-piece [still life], dispute whether the last room was green or purple, and then hurry to the inn for fear the fish should be overdressed.’
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From there it was not far to Dickens’s portrayal of the legal clerk Guppy and his friend in
Bleak House
(1852-3), visiting Lord Dedlock’s house in Leicestershire: ‘As is usually the case with people who go over houses, Mr Guppy and his friend are dead beat before they have well begun. They straggle about in wrong places, look at wrong things, don’t care for the right things, gape when more rooms are opened, exhibit profound depression of spirits, and are clearly knocked up…’
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The difference between these two descriptions was that the great houses were now receiving most of their visitors from the middle and working classes: visiting - travel and tourism - had changed immeasurably in the half-century between Walpole and Dickens. At the beginning of the period, in the late eighteenth century, travel was expensive. In 1800 a trip from London to Scotland cost £14, when a prosperous journeyman earned about £30 or £40 a year.
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Such a person could not afford to travel for pleasure. And if he had been able to, the next question was, was it worth it? In earlier centuries the answer would have been short and sweet: not really. In the 1630s the Lake District was described as ‘a solitary wilderness…[with] nothing but hideous, hanging Hills’ or, as Defoe saw it on his tour through Great Britain in the 1720s, ‘a country eminent only for being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even in Wales itself ’. Scotland was no better. One visitor in 1754 said the countryside round Inverness
was ‘of a dismal, gloomy Brown, drawing upon a dirty Purple; and most of all disagreeable, when the Heath is in Bloom’. In 1775 Dr Johnson could not have agreed more, finding that ‘An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility.’
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But, by the time Johnson pronounced, his view had become decidedly old-fashioned. Opinion was slowly moving from the conviction that natural wilderness was barbarous, through to a view that it was still barbarous, but it was also interesting, if not beautiful. Thomas Amory’s fictional traveller John Buncle, twenty years before Johnson, had thought that the Lakes had a ‘gloomy and tremendous air’, but added that this ‘strikes the mind with a horror that has something pleasing in it’.
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This fondness for the ‘terrible’ was in 1757 given an imprimatur with Edmund Burke’s
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
, which explored the idea that nature in its terrible rawness and vastness was rewarding, producing in the viewer ‘a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror’.
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One of the writers who did most to popularize this shift was the Revd William Gilpin (1724-1804), who in 1768 published an
Essay on Prints
, in which he set out ‘the Principles of picturesque Beauty’. Picturesqueness, he wrote in an unhelpfully circular fashion, was ‘a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture’.
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While this may not have been very enlightening, he also toured much of the country and published a series of volumes that identified for his readers a ‘new object of pursuit’, the picturesque. In 1786 his
Observations on Cumberland and Westmorland relative chiefly to picturesque beauty
appeared, and in 1789 he got around to the Scottish Highlands. These books had enormous influence. What produced picturesqueness, according to Gilpin, could be straightforwardly learned. There was a fixed set of rules, with which either nature conformed - in which case it was admirable in the literal sense - or it did not, in which case it was of lesser value. Addison, in the
Spectator
, had begun to move towards this attitude years before: ‘We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art.’
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Now Gilpin codified this, which enabled his followers to turn nature into a commodity that could be valued by comparing how closely it adhered to the rules. The very word ‘landscape’, which in the seventeenth century had meant a picture of the countryside, by the end of the eighteenth had come to mean the countryside itself, as though its primary function was for it to be viewed.
In
Northanger Abbey
(begun in 1798) Jane Austen gently laughed at Gilpin’s followers and their passion for rules over personal observation: the naive Catherine Morland, who had previously thought the countryside around Bath very pretty, went for a walk with her new friends the Tilneys. Henry Tilney ‘talked of fore-grounds, distances, and second distances - side-screens and perspectives - lights and shades; - and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar, that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape.’ Henry was absolutely ‘delighted with her progress’.
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Wales, previously an inaccessible wilderness, now had good roads. Earlier generations had not credited its countryside as being worthy of interest: the neoclassical model admired new, well-built houses and formal gardens that imposed order and restraint on untidy, unruly nature. But the fashionable graveyard school of poets, with their reflections on the transitory nature of life, met happily with the vogue for Gothic romances to popularize ruins, in particular, as the ultimate travel accessory. Tintern Abbey became the most famous ruin in the country. In 1766 the
London Magazine
carried advertisements for Llangollen, promising it was in a ‘Romantic Country’ with ‘the most ravishing prospects possible to be conceived’. By the end of the century Wales had become such a magnet for tourists in search of the picturesque that one visitor suggested that the road from Hay-on-Wye to Carmarthen had more gentlemen’s carriages on it than did the roads around London.
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Cost restricted this hunt for the picturesque to gentlemen and their families, although soon there were complaints about the numbers travelling because it was fashionable to do so, rather than from any real interest. In 1798 James Plumptre, yet another literary clergyman, wrote a comic opera,
The Lakers
, in which ‘Sir Incurious Harry’ is ‘so passionately fond of travelling, and the lakes, that he drives post through the country every year, with his carriage windows up, and never gets out but to eat, drink, and sleep’. Another character, Sir Charles Portinscale, arrives in the Lake District and, as his first action, goes to ‘call at Crosthwaite’s, and see the list’ - that is, as with the circulating libraries of the spa towns, he goes to check the register to see who else of social consequence is in the area.
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There were certain to be acquaintances, for the Lakes were now big business. Peter Crosthwaite was a former naval commander who kept the register of visitors, acted as a guide to tourists,
and from 1783 kept a museum in Keswick. He also produced and sold maps with West’s ‘stations’ marked on them, but by this time visitors wanted more entertainment than the views from ‘stations’ alone could produce, and this was supplied on the Lakes themselves. There was regular boat hire - if the visitors were ‘gentlemen’, on Ullswater they could even hire the Earl of Surrey’s boat, which had eight rowers, French horns, and twelve brass cannon, which were fired in order to set off the famous echo. A guidebook in 1819 warned visitors against being short-changed: ‘It is necessary to see that the full charge of gunpowder is put in, and properly rammed down; otherwise, much of the sublime effect…will be lost.’ Robert Southey mocked, ‘When one buys an echo, who would be content for the sake of saving eighteen pence, to put up with second best instead of ordering at once the super-extra-doublesuperfine?’
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The development of Scotland as a tourists’ paradise followed substantially the same path: from barren wilderness, through curiosity, to the Romantic notions of sublime grandeur. After the 1715 and 1745 rebellions, it became politically expedient for the government to bring the outer districts of Scotland into the mainstream, to dilute their regional self-sufficiency with a greater sense of belonging to the nation as a whole. Roads were improved, the better to move troops around should that again prove necessary, and also incidentally opening up the country to the interested traveller. But visitors were primarily attracted to Scotland by literary associations that could not have been foreseen. James Macpherson, literary forger (or not), did more, perhaps, to lure visitors to Scotland than anyone had ever done.
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