Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (35 page)

It would have been impossible to imagine, when this list was published in 1827, that a mere four years later no one would ever have to travel with their own leather sheets again. The change came, as it did for so many things, with the railways. Travel had, if slowly, been opening up to a wider class of people for some time. Gilpin’s original edition of his
Observations on the River Wye
, published in 1782, had been dotted with Latin epigrams; by the time a second edition appeared, in 1789, these had all been translated - a sign that the less educated were buying his books, and travelling about the country.
⁶⁴
But it was not until 1830, when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway began to operate, that real change came. Within two weeks of the first scheduled passenger trains, a group of sightseers was carried from Liverpool to the Sankey Viaduct (see p. 32). By 1831 an arrangement had been made to carry 150 members of the Bennett Street Sunday School from Manchester to Liverpool and back again. The age of excursion travel had begun, with trips to a church bazaar, to the seaside, to the races. The trains carried groups of any sort to whatever type of entertainment they wanted. There were no moral values pinned on to the idea of excursion travel: anyone could do it.

Thomas Cook, a temperance campaigner in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, has become the by-word for excursion travel, but he was not the first to organize it - just the first to realize how truly enormous the market was. Initially Cook organized excursions not for profit, but as a way of amusing people while removing them from the temptations of drink. He arranged transport for a large number of people - the exact number is disputed, but it was around 500 - to travel from Leicester to Loughborough, at a cost of 1
s.
, or
¹
/
₂
d.
per mile, for a temperance fête. The price included a return ticket, a lunch of bread and ham, a band, a temperance rally, and local dignitaries making speeches.
*
After this first, successful, expedition, he moved to Leicester, and set up as a retailer of many parts: he continued to publish temperance magazines while working as a bookseller, selling stationery, running a register office for servants and lodgings, and producing an almanac that listed temperance hotels nationwide. In 1843 he took a Sunday-school group to Derby during Leicester’s race week, so that the children would not be exposed to pernicious influences (this was a recurring concern: in the late 1840s he
arranged for 3,000 children to travel to Birmingham to remove them from the proximity of race week in Leicester). Temperance and excursions were by now firmly linked. Chatsworth had been open to the public for the best part of a century, but in the 1840s it closed on Sundays, as many public places were being forced to do at the behest of Sabbatarian campaigners. The immediate rise in the number of people in the local pubs was noticeable, and ‘general disturbances’ were also reported. The Duke of Devonshire therefore reopened the house, and from then on, said Joseph Paxton - the Duke’s agent as well as the designer of the Crystal Palace - ‘there has been no difficulty about the public-house nuisance on Sunday in our district.’
⁶⁵

Cook’s first excursion undertaken for profit rather than for temperance was to Liverpool from Leicester, Nottingham and Derby, taking in Caernarfon and Snowdonia, in the summer of 1845, and with it he established the system he and other excursion agents were to find so profitable. He negotiated with the four railways whose lines his itinerary covered, and the steamer to Wales, agreeing a fare of 14
s.
return for first-class and 10
s.
for second-class passengers - most likely taking 5 per cent of that as his own commission. He then travelled the entire route so that he could publish a pamphlet that gave prospective customers enticing details of the itinerary and the places of interest alongside, with hints for the novice traveller. This aroused so much interest that within three weeks he was able to schedule a second tour along the same route. Cook was the guide as well as the agent: he went with his passengers all the way, organizing and giving advice to neophytes.
⁶⁶

By late 1846 Cook had decided to branch out. He wrote a
Hand Book of a Trip to Scotland
, along the same lines as his earlier brochure, and arranged to sell the 800-mile round trip for 1 guinea - 93 per cent cheaper than the price for a similar tour in 1800. The 500 tickets went quickly. The first trip had teething troubles - he had not factored in time for rest stops, a tea stop in Preston was without tea, at Fleetwood the food arrived, but there was not enough of it - but these were partly compensated for by the enthusiasm with which the excursionists were greeted: there was a gun salute and a band at Glasgow, more bands again in Edinburgh, and a musical evening was staged to welcome ‘English pleasure-money…to the heart of the Highlands’.
⁶⁷
Cook, however, quickly remedied the early deficiencies, and soon he was managing trips to the Lake District, to Blackpool, to the Isle of Man, even to Belfast,
where he conveyed 1,200 tourists. By 1860 he had carried over 50,000 excursionists to Scotland, and he was celebrated locally for bringing extraordinary prosperity to the region. Some of this prosperity came more directly than through tourist income. On his first visit to Iona, Cook had been so shocked by the poverty of the region that he began to solicit donations from his tourists, giving impassioned speeches to each group when they reached this island stop. By 1861 he had raised enough to purchase twenty-four fishing-boats for the community (one was named the
Thomas Cook
), as well as nets, tackle and books for the village school.
⁶⁸
In 1853 he also took thousands of people to Dublin as part of an attempt to bring income into the city after the Famine.
⁶⁹
But these charitable excursions only helped his business. Within a very short time, he was transporting his excursionists to France, then to Switzerland.
*

Excursion travel opened up the world to many more of the middle classes; it also changed the way the world received travellers. Cook negotiated every detail with his foreign hosts: now inns that had a picturesque appearance but less picturesque bedbugs were no longer acceptable. Cook demanded running water, tea and general hygiene for his excursionists, or he would not return. Many hotels advertised that they had a table d’hôte dinner at four or five o’clock - much later than Europeans as a whole tended to eat - to suit the English. In Chamonix there was even a Hotel de Londres et d’Angleterre.
⁷¹
In 1906 a traveller looking back to the 1880s wrote that excursion travel had brought to ‘foreign places’ those ‘cardinal British institutions - tea, tubs, sanitary appliances, lawn tennis, and churches’.
⁷²

Back in Britain, lodgings were changing under the impetus of the railways and excursion travel. The first railway hotel had been built in 1839. This was a station hotel, sited directly next door to Euston station by the railway company, to ease early-morning or late-night travel. In some ways it was simply a development of the inns which had acted as starting and end points for stagecoach travel. By the 1840s, however, the railway companies were buying or building hotels as destinations for
travellers along their routes. In 1850 Oban, in Scotland, had ‘a few’ beds for visitors. In 1861 the Great Western Railway began to build its own hotel there. More and more - hotels and visitors - followed the arrival of the railways automatically. By the 1890s, Oban had fifteen fully-fledged hotels, as well as temperance hotels and ‘numerous’ lodging houses.
⁷³
In 1913 there were ninety-two hotels in Great Britain owned by the railways.
⁷⁴

Cook was aided in his promotion of foreign travel by men like Albert Smith. Smith was the first impresario of the Alps. In 1851 he had climbed Mont Blanc, or so he said, and on his return he hired the Egyptian Hall (see p. 264) to put on an illustrated entertainment about the ascent. This entertainment - featuring a cardboard chalet, two chamois (it is unclear whether they were real or cardboard), ‘several’ St Bernard dogs and water lilies floating in a tub to represent the scenery - was so successful that he continued to present it for nine years, adding new bits all the time. (He was even invited to re-create it privately for the Prince of Wales, and then later for the Queen.) Switzerland became the fashion. ‘The Mont Blanc Quadrille’ and ‘Les Echos du Mont Blanc’ appeared as sheet music; children bought the Game of Mont Blanc to play at home.
⁷⁵

Yet, however popular Smith’s lectures were, however educational Cook’s tours, there were many who were appalled by mass tourism. In his essay ‘Of Kings’ Treasures’ in
Sesame and Lilies
, John Ruskin - who was all for humanity as long as it was kept a long way away from him - stormed:

The French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race-courses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your
one
conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars…[There is no] foreign city in which the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair old streets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels…The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear garden, which you set yourself to climb and slide down again with ‘shrieks of delight’.
*

This hysterical dislike, verging on fear, was not peculiar to him alone. The Revd Francis Kilvert in humble Christian charity declared that British
tourists were ‘noxious animals…vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome’, while the novelist Charles Lever feared that Cook was bringing to Europe ‘everything that is low-bred, vulgar and ridiculous’.

That was only the beginning. The
Pall Mall Gazette
was passionately against Cook’s travellers, seeing them as doing that fatal thing, attempting to educate themselves out of their class. The tourist showed his ‘ignorance, stupidity, and incapacity for enjoyment with the utmost naiveté’, thinking ‘the grand attraction is that he can qualify himself cheaply and quickly for talking glibly about places and things, familiarity with which he fancies confers some kind of distinction’. Others referred to ‘Cook’s Hordes’, or ‘Cook’s Vandals’ - ‘low’ and ‘vulgar’ people, ‘an irregular procession of incongruities’.
⁷⁷

The level of vitriol is fascinating. It was not as if Cook were bringing parties of hard-drinking navvies or indigent street-sweepers to the boulevards of Paris. The working classes could not afford these trips, and they could not take enough time off work even had they had the money. Working-class excursionists were content with day trips to a beauty spot, or the seaside. Cook’s tours to Europe were made up of doctors, of schoolmasters, of clergymen, lawyers, prosperous merchants and their wives and daughters. Cook himself was under no illusion about how his groups were viewed. He recorded having met a woman in Scotland who suggested to him that ‘places of interest should be excluded from the gaze of the common people, and…kept only for the interest of the “select” of society’. But, he wrote, ‘it is too late in this day of progress to talk such exclusive nonsense; God’s earth, with all its fullness and beauty, is for the people; and railroads and steamboats are the result of the common light of science, and are for the people also.’
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This was the battleground: exclusivity vs access. The railways had introduced a new phenomenon, the day-tripper. In the 1820s it had taken six hours to get from London to Brighton, at a cost of 12
s.
; by 1835, 117,000 visitors a year were travelling that way, but they were staying in the town, and spending money in the town - at twelve hours for the round trip, they could hardly do otherwise. In 1841 the Brightonto-London railway line was opened, with high fares designed to preserve a ‘superior traffic’. But then a new chairman - Rowland Hill, of Post Office fame - slashed prices, promoting excursion trains at traditional working-class holiday times, such as Easter, Whitsun, August race week and, especially, Sundays.
⁷⁹
By 1850, 73,000 passengers arrived at the
Brighton railway station in one week, and in 1862, on Easter Monday, 132,000 arrived in one day, on a trip that took only two hours from London.
⁸⁰
Now the town’s residents and shopkeepers tried to persuade the railway company to raise its day-return fares, so as to ‘improve’ the class of people venturing down to the seaside. Day-trippers, they warned, brought no money into the town - apart from what was spent on drink. They carried their own food, they didn’t shop, but just walked by the sea; few even went to the Chain Pier (opened in 1823 and one of the first pleasure piers), where the right kind of visitors paid their admission, listened to the band, and took a select walk among select people.
*
⁸²

The seaside population was used to being select. The seaside had been the haunt of the royal and the socially aspirant for a century. For much of the population over the previous centuries, sea bathing had been an aberration. When Brighton was the most supremely fashionable place to be, basking in the patronage of the Prince Regent from his first visits in the 1780s to his death in 1830, the season ran from October to March. Clearly no one was expecting to swim then. Instead, the recommended exercise for health was ‘taking the air’, either in a ‘carriage outing’ or by promenading along the front. But sea bathing for health was gradually taking hold. When Smollett went sea bathing in Nice in the 1760s, his English doctor warned him that it would kill him. He was slightly old-fashioned (and Smollett was in very poor health), for at almost the same time George III was encouraged to bathe at Weymouth, for the sake of his health. (A band followed him out to sea in a bathing machine to play ‘God Save the King’ as he swam.) As late as 1814 Jane Austen had the (old-fashioned, and resolutely hypochondriac) Mr Woodhouse declare that ‘the sea is very rarely of use to any body, I am sure it almost killed me once’. If one must go to the seaside, he thought, the best thing was to find a place where one could get ‘lodgings…quite a way from the sea’.
⁸³
For even then, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, sea bathing was a novelty - although it was becoming a good
commercial proposition, replacing the earlier upper-class health craze, the spa.