Why not give women the vote?

Not all women wanted the vote. Queen Victoria who felt quite capable of ruling an empire and yet opposed women’s suffrage referring to it as ‘this mad, wicked folly’. [1] Many women campaigners, such as Octavia Hill, were convinced that reforms in civil and social rights were of greater moment than political enfranchisement. Most national and regional newspapers, especially The Times were hostile to the women’s suffrage campaign especially after militant action began although this did encourage newspapers to print stories about the suffragettes, providing them with the ‘oxygen’ of publicity. There was a deep-seated fear of change particularly sharing power with women who had never been seen as men’s equals. Opposition to women’s suffrage was frequently instinctively hostile and blatantly prejudiced but much of it was also carefully considered and cogently argued. Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian period, it was deep-rooted and influential, organised and vocal and the ‘antis’ came from across the social and political spectrum and involved women as well as men.

For those who accepted the notion of ‘separate spheres’, and many still did in the 1880s, the role played by men was different (and should be different) from that played by women. [2] While the masculine public sphere was for men, the feminine domestic sphere was for women. [3] Bax went so far as to deny that any oppression of women had occurred at all:

The whole modern women’s movement is based, in a measure, at least, on an assumption which is absolutely unfounded -- to wit, that man has systematically oppressed woman in the past, that the natural tendency of evil-minded man is always to oppress women, or, to put in another way, that woman is the victim of man’s egotism.....[4]

Before the 1872 Ballot Act, voting was ‘open’, a public statement on the hustings and violence and harassment was common. [5] Many men believed that women as ‘the weaker sex’ would not be able to cope with the ‘hurly-burly’ of elections and should be kept out of the political arena. Their strength lay within the family providing support, inspiration and raising children. If the vote was given to women, it might cause political disagreements with their husbands and consequently accelerate the break-up of the family. In short, women were a civilising element in society. Forcing women into a public, political role would detract from their femininity or, as William Gladstone put it in 1892, ‘trespass upon their delicacy, their purity, their refinement, the elevation of their whole nature’. [6] Goldwin Smith, in a letter published in The Times, wrote that women’s real object was ‘nothing less than a sexual revolution…deposing the head of the family, forcing women into male employments, and breaking down…every barrier which Nature or custom has established.’ [7]

The ‘different biology and psychology’ argument was a widely held that women tended to be temperamental and prone to outbursts of emotion so how could such beings be trusted with the franchise? The militant tactics of the WSPU after 1905 reinforced this viewpoint. Anti-suffragists held a number of assumptions about female psychology and physiology. It was argued that women were physically and mentally weaker than men. They were more emotional, unable to grasp abstract questions and slow to make up their minds and that it would be a highly undesirable product of women’s suffrage if women came to shape policy. This was frequently reinforced by their lack of education and it was difficult for many people to believe that women were as capable as men of making intelligent choices as voters. For those who had to conserve their limited energies for the vital and debilitating business of childbearing, politics would simply be too great a strain. The medical profession in general supported these views with scientific authority despite being largely ignorant about female physiology in this period. Sir Almroth Wright, an eminent if eccentric medical practitioner, expressed this view, most notoriously, in the letter published in The Times in 1912 at the height of the suffragette violence that was reprinted the following year. [8] He attacked the suffragettes as frustrated spinsters venting their bitterness on men but he also claimed that women in general were prone to hysteria that made them inadequate to receive the vote. His attack on ‘militants’ as a justification for denying the vote to women was echoed by others. For instance, Harold Owen, wrote:

The fact, then, that Suffragism has been supported by the vehemence and disorderliness of a few woman is no commendation whatever of the vote being granted as an act of grace. Their earnestness is counter-balanced by the orderly earnestness of women who do not want woman to be enfranchised....[9]

This delicacy of nature and also of physique unfitted women formed the key, traditional military role of the citizen. It was claimed, ‘The voter, in giving a vote pledges himself to uphold the consequences of his vote at all costs ... women are physically incapable of this pledge.’ [10] Male suffrage was justified by the fact that men could be called upon to risk their lives for their country, a sacrifice that women would not be asked to make and as a result, did not deserve full citizenship. Some opponents of women’s suffrage pointed out that the maintenance of the British Empire required a large army and because women did not contribute to the defence of Empire, they should not have the vote. Lord Curzon, an ardent anti-suffragist and former Viceroy of India told Glasgow audiences in 1912 that, if women received the vote, the sub-continent would be lost to the Empire.

The logic of their case was that women could properly be entrusted with municipal affairs, while imperial matters were outside their ‘sphere’; but the two doctrines did not combine very happily together. They [the anti-suffragists] had some trouble with their own members, particularly with the imposing array of Peers who were their vice-presidents, since these gentlemen objected just as strongly to the presence of women on borough councils as anywhere else (outside the home); and the spectacle of their troubles was a constantly recurring delight to their opponents... [11]

A further variant was the idea that, since women could not physically enforce the laws they made, men might simply refuse to accept them leading to a breakdown in law and order.

There were also fears about the practical results of enfranchising women. If adult suffrage were granted, there would be about 1.5 million more women voters than men. Government would reflect female views and as women were ‘less virile’ than men were it would result in Britain and the Empire being weakened. To concede even a limited vote would lead eventually to complete suffrage and a female majority that might well push anti-male policies. The eminent jurist A. V. Dicey warned that since women constituted the majority of voters they would be in a position to force Parliament into adopting policies opposed by the male minority.[12] There were also concerns that women would use their new political power to improve their position in the labour force or that they would neglect their domestic duties.

Some opponents of women’s suffrage suggested that the majority of women did not want the vote or at least, did not care whether they had it. This claim was plausible despite the suffragists’ best efforts to disprove it. The Anti-Suffrage League argued that the vote was overvalued. Even though some men had the vote, there was still plenty of poverty, unemployment and low wages. They maintained that it must not be assumed that female suffrage would solve all the problems of women. This view was reinforced by the argument that women themselves did not really want the vote. Suffragists, they claimed, were an unrepresentative and small, if vocal minority and their campaign for ‘their own emancipation’ was watched by most women with what in 1892 Asquith, who had long opposed women’s suffrage, called ‘languid and imperturbable indifference’. [13] Two further and somewhat contradictory arguments were put forward. There was the argument that women were already represented in Parliament by the men in their family. In addition, women already exercised some control over political decision making since leading politicians listened to the views of their wives, mothers and other female acquaintances. Also, since women were incapable of making decisions and would do what the men in the family told them to do, if they had the vote it would lead to some men, in effect, having several votes more than others.

Above all, the anti-suffragists drew strength from the fact that their membership was not exclusively male. Anti-democratic and hostile to the labour and feminist movements of their day which they saw as a threat to marriage and motherhood, they were ridiculed as absurd by supporters of the parliamentary vote for women. Many women, including some who enjoyed a prominent public role such as Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale and at one time Beatrice Webb, refused to support women’s suffrage although they were often enthusiastic about local government and the need for social action by women to improve the conditions of the poor. For them, involvement in local government was a ‘proper channel’ for ‘womanly’ influence and involved action in areas such as education and the Poor Law, areas of ‘home concerns’ or the upkeep of towns or ‘civic housekeeping’. Mary Ward called women’s civic duties the ‘enlarged housekeeping of the nation’ arguing that their domestic skills were need not just in the private sphere but in the public sphere as well. Bush suggests that the anti-suffrage women leaders were divided into three loose and overlapping groupings, the maternal reformers, the women writers and the imperialist ladies.[14] Although there was a diversity of view, most of the leading women drew their enthusiasm from deeply rooted convictions about womanhood, the nation and empire. It was almost universally assumed that differences between the sexes were natural, and that any major departure from women’s role as wives and mothers would bring social chaos to Britain and the Empire. [15] Their anti-suffragism was social rather than political and reflected the continuing development of their role as women in improving nation and empire. Theirs was a view of citizenship that saw women’s mission as essential to the proper development of the country and in that benign moral vision, the parliamentary vote had no place.

Many of the anti-suffragist arguments represented self-serving pleas by the traditional male elite anxious to preserve its position and authority. On the other hand, there is a danger in dismissing the entire anti-suffragist case simply because today we take it for granted that women should have the vote. From the view of the main women’s middle- and upper-class non-political organisations the anti-suffragist claims were far from absurd and reflected mainstream female opinion on desirable gender roles and on women’s positive role in national life. [16] Large women’s organisations such as the Mothers’ Union were not suffrage organisations and even the Women’s Co-operative Guild with 30,000 members did not adopt women’s suffrage until 1900. Anti-suffragist ballots to test public opinion on women’s suffrage suggested that those opposed to votes for women outnumbered suffragists by two to one. [17] Historians need to explain when and why certain parts of the anti-suffragist case lost their force. In the 1870s and 1880s, it is not obvious that most women were enthusiastic about the vote. Suffrage societies were small pressure groups until well into the first decade of the twentieth century and shared similar beliefs with anti-suffragists about their social mission to strengthen the family both at home and in the empire through their participation in social activism.

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[1] Queen Victoria to Sir Theodore Martin, 29 May 1870, cit, ibid, Rover. Constance, Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics, 1866-1914, p. 34.

[2] Hart, Heber L., Women’s Suffrage and National Danger: A Plea for the Ascendency of Man, (Alexander and Shepheard), 1889, pp. 89-188..

[3] Delap, Lucy, and Heilmann, Ann, (eds.), Anti-feminism in Edwardian literature, 6 Vols. (Thoemmes Continuum), 2006, Heilmann, Ann, and Sanders, Valerie, ‘The rebel, the lady and the ‘anti’: Femininity, anti-feminism, and the Victorian woman writer’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 29, (2006), pp. 289-300.

[4] Bax, E. Belfont, The Fraud of Feminism, , (Grant Richards Ltd.), 1913, pp. 173-174.

[5] Kinzer, Bruce, The Ballot Question in Nineteenth-Century English Politics, (Garland), 1982.

[6] Gladstone to Samuel Smith MP, 11 April 1892, Matthew, H. C. G., (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, Vol. 13, 1892-1896, (Oxford University Press), 1994, p. 19.

[7] The Times, 26 May 1896.

[8] Wright, A. E., ‘Militant Hysteria’, The Times, 28 March 1912, reprinted in Wright, Sir Almroth E, The Unexpurgated Case against Woman Suffrage, (Constable and Company Ltd.), 1913, pp. 77-86

[9] Owen, Harold, Woman Adrift. The Menace of Suffragism, (Stanley Paul), 1912, pp. 138-139.

[10] NUWSS, Anti-Suffrage Arguments, (Templar Printing Works), 1913, a poster.

[11] Ibid, Strachey, Ray, The Cause, 1928, pp. 319-320.

[12] Dicey, A. V., Letters to a Friend on Votes for Women, (John Murray), 1909, pp. 69-70.

[13] Hansard, House of Commons, Debates, 27 April 1892, Vol. 3, c1510.

[14] Bush, Julia, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power, (Leicester University Press), 2000, pp. 170-192.

[15] Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain, (Oxford University Press), 2007, pp. 23-139.

[16] Ibid, p. 4.

[17] Ibid, p. 5, results were summarised in The Anti-Suffrage Handbook, (National Press Agency), 1912.

Nineteenth century social history

Those of you who follow my blogs on nineteenth century British social history might like to know that modified and more recent versions of the blogs are available as a series of Kindle books.  They have been published in two formats . As five single volumes:

• Economy, Population and Transport
• Work, Health and Poverty
• Education, Crime and Leisure
• Class
• Religion and Government

Or as a single volume: Society under Pressure: Britain 1830-1914.  In addition, a supplementary volume Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain 1830-1918 has also been published in both print and Kindle versions.

All of these volumes are available at the click of a mouse from Amazon sites in the UK, Europe and North America and are now also available in India. 

Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1830-1918

JUST PUBLISHED

 

In 1830, women of all classes were repressed in a male-dominated society. By 1918, largely through their own struggles, they had seized control over most areas of their lives. Some of these sought access to the public sphere in education, the professions and central and local government. Others aimed to improve women’s legal and economic status within marriage. Married women’s property rights, divorce, custody of children, domestic violence as well as prostitution were all significant areas in which feminists campaigned for changes in the male-oriented status of the law and the differing moral standards to which wives and husbands were expected to conform. The long campaign for women's suffrage by suffragists and after 1903 suffragettes and the effects of World War 1 culminated in some women getting the vote in 1918 and a decade later women achieved the vote on the same terms as men. Yet, despite these advances for many largely working-class women, the tyranny of multiple pregnancies, poorly paid work and limited access to the means of personal improvement remained. This book explores the ways in which women's status in society developed and changed during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century by looking at the nature of and challenges to women's place in a masculine world, the character of work and how women achieved political and legal rights.

This innovative study is available from: http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Work-Politics-Britain-1830-1918/dp/146644908X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336837483&sr=1-2

Other suppliers of leisure

There was much self-made leisure, whether communal or associational on the one hand or personal and family based on the other.  In its communal or associational forms it was a major means of supply of leisure for the middle-class urban culture, typically in the form of subscription concerts and libraries and of clubs, for example, for chess.  In Bradford in 1900, for example, there were 30 choral societies, 20 brass bands, an amateur orchestra, six concertina bands and a team of hand-bell ringers.  In Rochdale, and elsewhere, the churches and chapels were crucial suppliers of leisure up to 1914 with their young men’s and ladies’ classes, their debating societies and numerous other activities.    Much leisure within the family relied on commercial sources of supply, of games, pianos, books and a huge array of hobbies.  In music and hobbies in particular, there was considerable activity in working-class homes: by 1910 there was one piano for every fifteen people, far more than the middle-classes could absorb. 

Voluntary bodies and philanthropists were key agents in the supply of leisure for others.  They were less single-minded than the state, but as with the latter the supply of leisure fell into two groups, a negative controlling one and a positive supply one.  Into the first group fell organisations such as the Vice Society (1802), the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824), the Lord’s Day Observance Society (1831), numerous temperance and teetotal societies and the National Council for Public Morals (1911).  The second group included philanthropists and employers who funded parks, libraries, brass bands and football clubs, the Mechanics’ Institutes, the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Association, the Girls’ Friendly Society (1874) and the Boys’ Brigade (1883).  What united these two approaches was a concern to direct and mould other people’s leisure by control of some sort over its supply.

The hope of weaning people away from bad habits by the provision of respectable alternatives initially became important during the 1830s.  The solution was ‘rational recreation’, quiet and elevating pursuits, modelled on the best contemporary middle-class practice.  As a result, not only would the bad habits themselves disappear or at least diminish, but in the process people, largely men of good will from different classes would meet fraternally and come to understand each other’s point of view.  The amount of leisure provided was enormous.  Parks, libraries and similar institutions were frequently the outcome of philanthropy.  In Glasgow, for example, where ratepayers on three occasions in the second half of the century refused to fund a public library, Stephen Mitchell, a tobacco magnate, left £70,000 for a library that opened in 1877.  In Manchester, T. C. Horsfall raised the funds for an Art Museum opened in 1884.  Bristol acquired a municipally owned museum, library and art gallery between 1895 and 1905, all through private funding.  Much church and chapel activity was organised from above for people deemed to be in need.  Of these, the most important were the young.  The real problem arose when they left Sunday Schools and it was partly to keep a hold on these children that William Smith established the Boys’ Brigade in Glasgow in 1883.  Thereafter uniformed youth movements, particularly for boys, attracted a high proportion of the youth population.    The Boys’ Brigade had its denominational rivals and from 1908 faced serious competition from the Boy Scouts.  By 1914, between a quarter and a third of the available youth population was enrolled in a youth movement.

Lenton’s Boys’ Brigade, Nottinghamshire, c1900

The provision of leisure probably served females less well than males, doubtless in part because the former were thought to pose less of a problem.  The Girls’ Friendly Society, formed in 1874, was predominantly rural and Anglican in outlook and many of its members were young domestic servants.  Two further organisations came into being to meet their needs as they grew older: the Mothers’ Union founded in 1885 expanded to 7,000 branches by 1911 and the Women’s Institutes begun in 1915.

Finally, leisure was supplied on a commercial basis.  Commercialised entertainment played an increasingly significant role in the supply of leisure between 1830 and 1914.  In 1830, it was provided largely for the middle-classes but diffused itself into the working-classes by the 1870s and to the masses by 1914. There was a shift in the nineteenth century from the patron-client relationship that characterised the employment of professionals in cricket and music in 1800 to an employment relationship more akin to that of the industrial world.  This was in part because of the seasonal nature of much of such employment, but also because of the lack of control over entry to leisure jobs. The numbers employed were growing, certainly after 1870.  Between 1871 and 1911, the population of England and Wales rose on average by 0.8% per year and the number employed in the arts and entertainment by 4.7% per year.  The number of actors and actresses peaked in 1911 at over 19,000, having quadrupled in the previous thirty years.

In nearly every section of the leisure industries there were attempts to raise the status of entertainers.  The outcome was the achievement of stardom for the select few while the rank and file had to be content with wages at roughly semi-skilled level.  The best actors and actresses were already getting £150 per week in the 1830s.  In 1890, at least ten jockeys were earning £5,000 per season and the better professional cricketers were earning £275 per year.  Between 1906 and 1914, the wages of performing musicians doubled reaching £200 per year.  The best professional footballers could not earn high wages: the Football Association set the maximum wages at £208 per year and only a minority got that amount.  On the whole, however, complaints about wages and conditions of service within the entertainment and sports world were muted.  The lure of acceptance as a profession, the hope of stardom for the individual and the sense that to be in entertainment was unlike any other job, for the most part curtailed any open conflict.

The importance of leisure in giving people a sense of national and social identity is matched by a greater significance placed on leisure in people’s individual life-choices and priorities.  Leisure preference is normally assumed to have been a feature of pre-industrial society and could not survive the greater emphasis on consumerism of an industrialised society.  Between 1830 and 1914, as hours of leisure grew longer, leisure activities took on a more central role in people’s lives.  It is not surprising that ‘rational recreationalists’ wanted to ‘control’ what people, and especially the working-classes, did in their spare time.  They were successful, to a degree, in mitigating the worst excesses of pre-industrial leisure with its potential violence and cruelty.  Yet the persistence of large-scale spectating, especially of football and horse-racing showed the limits of that success.  Alcohol and gambling remained key working-class leisure activities and, despite increased controls by the state, continued to play a major part in defining working-class consciousness throughout this period.  Leisure was in 1914, as it had been in 1830, largely male-dominated and escapist.

Leisure and the state

Leisure activities were made available in four main ways and as a result provided employment in leisure.  First, the state, whether at local or national level, both created a legal framework and acted as a direct supplier. In the first half of the nineteenth century, its main concern was to control supply, chiefly by licensing, but later its role was more positive and it became a direct supplier of such facilities as parks, libraries and playing fields.  This interpretation provides little to explain the motives for its intervention in the supply of leisure other than dividing its activities into two separate spheres, negative control and positive supply.  One such motive was prestige that entailed support for both the production of high culture in the present and the preservation of the high culture of the past.  By the 1830s, state aid was necessary to maintain or at least subsidise museums throughout the country and from the 1860s governments drew back from subsidising high culture.  Public funding required more justification than had the royal patronage that dominated support for culture in the first half of the nineteenth century.  The public could not be denied right of access.  In 1810, admission to the British Museum was made free and unlimited with dramatic impact on the number of visitors: in 1824-1825, this stood at 128,000 rising to 230,000 in 1835 and 826,000 by 1846. These figures lead into the second motive that governed state supply of leisure, a concern for public order and social harmony.
It is, however, easy to exaggerate the amount of state supply.  The typical pattern was not for the government of the day to take an initiative, but for a pressure group within Parliament to be appeased by the appointment of a select committee.  The outcome tended to be permissive legislation that local authorities could implement if they wished.  Central government provided a legal framework within which museums or libraries could be built and run out of the rates but it was as concerned to protect ratepayers as to encourage the provision of a facility.  Not surprisingly, buildings were often slow to appear on the ground.  Until 1914, libraries stemmed more from philanthropy than from rates and even at that date were within reach of only 60% of the population.  The same was true of museums and parks.  Local authorities played an increasingly important role and shared the same motives as central government: a concern for prestige, in this case in relation to other local authorities and a worry about social order.    But they added to them a more compelling motive, a desire for prosperity.  Seaside resorts led the way after 1875, investing in sea defences, promenades, piers, golf courses and concert halls in an attempt to improve their attractiveness to potential visitors.
A major element in the state’s supply of leisure was its concern to control and monitor the use of space.  The home, as a private space, was beyond its physical reach.  However, licensing of retail outlets for the sale of alcohol was the state’s major intervention in the leisure market and was intended to preserve public order and provide some means of monitoring the leisure of the poorer sections of society.   Public parks, museums and libraries were supported precisely because they were public, open to scrutiny and controlled by bye-laws.  The space provided by theatre, music hall and cinema was potentially more dangerous, but the power or threat of licensing of both building and activity made them relatively acceptable.    The censorship of both plays and films ensured that public entertainment adhered to acceptable moral and political values.  Fire regulations, for example those imposed on music halls in 1878, not only reduced the dangers of fire, but drove many of the smaller, less salubrious halls out of business.  In the cinema, the industry formally established its own form of censorship in 1912 with the British Board of Film Censors.    In horse-racing, by contrast, the government banned off-course betting in the Street Betting Act of 1906.    It was, however, leisure that took place outside these spaces that posed the threat; streets, rivers, canals and privately owned rural areas were spaces where there was almost constant feuding between the state and the people.

Holidays, pubs and popular culture

The seaside holiday may be a dubious contender for inclusion in urban popular culture for it represented escape from the city.  But the manner of that escape suggests that urban popular culture was transposed to the coast.  The history of the seaside holiday was not something initiated by the middle-classes and imitated by the working-classes.    Escape to the sea by workers preceded the coming of the railway.  The major increase in demand, however, came only in the late- nineteenth century and it was only then that the seaside holiday became a recognisable part of urban popular culture though there were regional variations.  The week at the seaside that many working-class Lancastrians had come to enjoy by the 1880s was unique; elsewhere the day trip was the norm.  The expansion of demand can be seen in the increasing number of visitors to Blackpool in season: it rose from 1 million in 1883 to two million ten years later and to 4 million in 1914.,

Crystal Palace, c1905

Spectating at professional sport was already common by 1850 and to some extent what happened after was a switch from one sport to another.  Rowing ceased to be a major spectator sport and amateur athletics could never claim the crowds of the professional pedestrianism that it replaced.  Football, on the other hand, attracted numbers that rose from the late-nineteenth century to 1914 and beyond.,   The average football cup tie attendance rose from 6,000 in 1888-1889 to 12,000 in 1895-1896 and to over 20,000 in the first round in 1903.  In 1908-1909, in the English First Division 6 million people watched matches, with an average crowd size of 16,000.  It was, of course, dominantly a male pastime and it was regionally concentrated in the Lowlands of Scotland, northern and Midland England and to a lesser extent London.

The pub had close ties to this commercialised aspect of urban popular culture.  It was itself a commercial undertaking, increasingly under the control of the major brewers.  It was the main location of what was by far the largest single item of leisure expenditure, alcohol.  Despite this, the pub also managed to be the main organising centre for the self-generating culture.  Publicans were often sponsors of activities that they viewed simply with an eye to profit and some of the activities were on a large scale.  In addition, the pub offered a space for socialising and clubs of all kinds met in pubs.  The community generated by the pub expressed itself in the annual outing.  Above all, within the pub men could take part in a range of competitive activities: darts, draughts, bowls and card playing and gambling of all kinds. 

Members of Bedale Brass Band, c1900, Bedale Museum

This participant competitiveness was indeed a key feature of urban popular culture and its significance is grossly underplayed in those accounts that focus exclusively on music hall, cinema and spectating generally.  As communications improved many of these competitions became regional and national.  Brass bands, for example, were competitive from their beginnings on a significant scale in the 1840s. 

The urban popular culture focused on the home and the street offered different kinds of satisfaction to a different part of the population.    The dominant masculinity of the world of participant competition had its parallel in an equally dominantly female world.  Most working-class women were confined, for their leisure as for their work, to the home and the street and there is increasing evidence from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that they created their own separate female culture there.  It remains to be established when such a culture can first be identified and when it began to wither away, but there is enough to suggest that it existed as a key component of the ‘traditional working-class culture’ from 1870 to 1950.  Whether it can be called leisure culture is dubious: it was essentially a female network of support based on the separation of male and female world after marriage.  The distinction between the three dimensions of urban popular leisure culture has value to the extent that it identifies different and mutually exclusive worlds of leisure.  Popular urban leisure was to a considerable degree fractured along lines of gender.

Developing urban popular culture

Urban popular culture in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries developed three important dimensions. First, it was a mass culture that permeated across communities. There were activities that people paid to attend as spectators, audience or readers. This included theatres, circuses and fairs and later in the century, music halls, professional football, horseracing, the popular press, seaside excursions and cinemas. [1] This was a commercial leisure in which the size of crowds with consequent financial returns was important to pay the stars and professionals. Secondly, people generated leisure activities within their own communities. There might be some commercial or voluntary input in providing facilities but activities were of and for the people. The pub played a pivotal role and was the location for much more than the consumption of alcohol. The activities included brass bands, mass choirs, flower shows and the allotments that provided the basis for them, fishing and pigeon fancying. Competitiveness was one of the hallmarks of this type of culture: pub against pub, club against club; stars and professionals were absent; there was little formal separation of performers and spectators; and, the participants were mainly adult males.

London recreations - tea gardens, Cruikshank, George

Finally, for women the focus was not on activities, but on space, in particular the space of the home and the street. Women’s leisure was not seen as leisure but something that accompanied work. In its more social aspect, in the street, its most typical form was chatting, was not distinguished from other forms of talk and was a culture heavily based on a sense of neighbourhood.

After 1830, a print culture developed that complemented and eventually superseded the existing oral popular culture. Events were advertised in print and news was conveyed in print. The expanding newspaper press of the eighteenth century had reached a largely middle-class audience primarily because of cost, but during the first half of the nineteenth century, a new literate popular culture emerged grounded in the radical and often ‘unstamped’ press and in the growth of melodramatic ‘penny dreadfuls’. It is difficult to establish an accurate profile of the readership of this expanding quantity of print by age, gender and class. Men, until after 1870, had a higher rate of literacy than women and they may have had easier access to literature. They were probably the main readers of the popular Sunday newspapers that by 1850 were read by one adult in twenty; for Sunday was much more a day of leisure for men than women. [2] Sporting literature was a genre of popular literature, and with its emphasis on ‘manly’ sports, also reached a dominantly male audience. Similarly, participation in and spectating of commercialised sports was largely, though not exclusively, male. Horseracing was immensely popular despite attempts to control its spread by law.

After 1850, figures for attendance become more reliable and their general trend is upwards. Music hall was the first new form of entertainment to make its mark. [3] Charles Morton’s opening of the Canterbury Hall in Lambeth in 1851 was to gain him immediate and retrospective attention, but there were important precedents in the saloon theatres that had flourished since the 1830s and in the ‘music halls’ that already existed in the larger provincial towns.

Weston’s Music Hall, c1880

What is striking about the 1850s and 1860s was the multiplicity of forms in which people could experience what was eventually to become standardised as ‘music hall’. The focus on songs has distracted attention from the range of entertainment on offer in the halls; dance, acrobatics, mime drama and clowning as well as the occasional associated facility a museum, art gallery or zoo, were part of the ‘variety’ of the halls from the beginning. The emergence of music halls that were architecturally similar to theatres came relatively late during the second great wave of music hall building in the late 1880s and 1890s when chains of ownership were becoming common. It was in the 1890s, too, that there was a partially successful attempt to win middle-class audiences. Cinema can be seen as superseding music hall as the most popular form of mass entertainment, but there was a long period of overlap. Music hall was indeed the commercial cinema’s first home. From 1906, onwards, however, cinemas acquired their own homes, some 4,000 of them by 1914. [4] Until 1934 we can only guess at the number of admissions but an average of 7 or 8 million a week seems plausible in the years immediately before 1914 or 400 million admissions a year.

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[1] See, Russell, Dave, ‘Popular entertainment, 1776-1895’, in ibid, Donohue, Joseph, (ed.), The Cambridge history of British theatre: Vol. 2, 1660 to 1895, pp. 369-387.

[2] See, Kamper, D. S., ‘Popular Sunday newspapers, respectability and working-class culture in late Victorian Britain’, in Huggins, Mike, and Mangan, James Anthony, (eds.), Disreputable pleasures: less virtuous Victorians at play, (Cass), 2004, pp. 83-102, and ‘Popular Sunday newspapers, class, and the struggle for respectability in late Victorian Britain’, Hewitt, Martin, (ed.), Unrespectable recreations, (Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies), 2001, pp. 81-94.

[3] On music generally, see, Russell, Dave, Popular Music in England 1840-1914: A Social History, (Manchester University Press), 1987, 2^nd ed., 1997. Bratton, J. S., (ed.), Music hall: performance and style, (Open University Press), 1986, Till, Nicholas, ‘“First-Class Evening Entertainments”: Spectacle and Social Control in a Mid-Victorian Music Hall’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 20, (2004), pp. 3-18, Scott, Derek B., ‘Music and social class in Victorian London’, Urban History, Vol. 29, (2002), pp. 60-73, and Kift, Dagmar, The Victorian music hall: culture, class and conflict, (Cambridge University Press), 1996.

[4] Much of the research on early cinema is in the form of studies of particular localities or entrepreneurs but see, Hiley, Nicholas, ‘“Nothing more than a ‘craze’”: cinema building in Britain from 1909 to 1914’, in Higson, Andrew, (ed.), Young and innocent? The cinema in Britain, 1896-1930, (University of Exeter Press), 2002, pp. 111-127, and McKernan, Luke, ‘A fury for seeing: Cinema, audience and leisure in London in 1913’, Early Popular Visual Culture, Vol. 6, (2008), pp. 271-280.

Artisan leisure culture

Artisan leisure culture was based on a particular type of work and its rise and decline paralleled that of the artisans. In the first half of the nineteenth century it flourished, but as the artisans themselves became more absorbed into the structure of capitalist industry they began to lose the characteristic feature of their culture: independence. Independence in the workplace was paralleled in the leisure culture where it took the form of a rejection of any patronage from above. Artisans made their own goods and also made their own culture. If the workplace was one factor leading to independence, masculinity and age were others; this was a leisure culture of adult males. Women were admitted rarely and then only on sufferance and the young apprentices, who had once had a culture of their own, were now firmly subordinated. In Birmingham, artisans formed debating societies and clubs and attended the theatre. [1] The friendly societies and the trade union both had their strongest roots among the artisans, and they were instinctively radical in their politics. But it was not an expansive culture and had no missionary zeal to spread its way of life more widely. By 1850, the heavy drinking artisan culture became isolated to certain trades and regions. A more respectable, even family-based, culture began to replace it. In perception the artisan was now becoming the ‘labour aristocrat’, a respectable, hard-working member of society who took his pleasures seriously. In Edinburgh, the clubs that artisans joined for horticulture, golf and bowling and their participation in the patriotic Volunteer Force, suggested a new conformity to the values and norms of middle-classes. These clubs, however, retained their own independence. Insofar as artisan culture became more respectable, it was a respectability generated from within the class and for the class, not one imposed from outside. [2]

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[1] See Money, J., Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760-1800, (Manchester University Press), 1977, pp. 80-120, Tholfsen, T. R., ‘The artisan and the culture of early Victorian Birmingham’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, Vol. 4, (1954), pp. 146-166.

[2] Beaven, Brad, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-class Men in Britain, 1850-1945, (Manchester University Press), 2005, pp. 16-124.

Middle-class urban culture?

By contrast, urban middle-class culture, in its origins, was distinctively provincial. Until 1800, it was a culture that was more obviously urban than middle-class, expressing many of the values of the urban gentry, who themselves, may be considered as part of the leisure class and its aristocratic way of life. It was inherently social rather than intellectual. Its existence can be documented from figures of theatre building: only ten purpose-built theatres were erected in the larger provincial towns between 1736 and 1760 but more than a hundred were built between the 1760s and the 1840s. [1] The music festivals in the provinces are another indicator. In London it was not until the 1830s that the patronage and market for classical music passed from the aristocracy to the upper middle-classes; the provinces can be said to have led the way. [2] The new culture was visible too in the classical style of its architecture and in the design of squares and boulevards that were emphatically the territory of the aristocracy. For this culture was unashamedly exclusive.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the intellectual dimension of this urban culture became more pronounced. So also did its masculinity. [3] Like-minded men turned typically to the club or society as a forum within which they pursued their interests. If this culture is projected forward into the second quarter of the nineteenth century, its leaders can be seen turning away from a provincial pursuit of high culture towards a direct concern with the social and political problems of their own towns: they formed statistical societies and diffused useful knowledge. They became a culture anxious to influence the ways of life of the working-classes from their narrow but powerful middle-class bridgehead and were increasingly concerned with the supply of leisure to others than with the enjoyment of it themselves.

The emergence of this male, intellectual, socially concerned and distinctly middle-class urban culture marked part of the wider challenge to the lack of seriousness and the frivolity of the urban gentry. The interlocking impact of evangelicalism, the French Revolution and British radicalism posed a threat to the essence of eighteenth century urban culture: its urbanity, its stress on manners and behaviour as opposed to feeling. The shock waves were to be felt far into the nineteenth century in two particular forms. First, particular activities, theatre-going for example, or novel reading or cards or even cricket, now had to be scrutinised to see if they served any purpose that God, rather than Society, would approve. Many such activities ceased to be ‘respectable’. Secondly, the sociability that had been so highly prized in the eighteenth century ceased to be a virtue. The attraction of a life lived in public within a defined and exclusive society gave way to an emphasis on domesticity. The effect, undoubtedly, was to shift the emphasis of middle-class urban culture away from sociability towards domesticity, and away from frank enjoyment of leisure towards a more calculating performance of duty, towards a ‘rational’ view of recreation.

This ‘call to seriousness’ began to be relaxed after the middle of the nineteenth century. In the 1860s and 1870s the press and pulpit endlessly discussed the legitimacy of this or that activity and of leisure in general. The official view was that the purpose of leisure was to re-create a person for the more serious business of life, work. Recreation was only necessary for those who worked and was justified not for its own sake but for its ulterior purpose of re-creating men for work. Under this umbrella, however, more and more activities became legitimate and were doubtless enjoyed for their own sake. It was in physical activity, however, that the change was greatest. Sport conjured up images of an aristocratic style of life and gambling, or the corrupt seediness of pub-based prize fighting. Middle-class urban culture, especially the public schools, was able from 1850 to transform the nature and image of sport. Sport encouraged qualities of leadership; it took boys’ minds off sex was the best training for war. [4] As rules were drawn up and enforced, sport became increasingly an analogy for middle-class male life: a competitive struggle within agreed parameters. The middle-classes not only imposed a new ideology on sport; they were also in the period up to 1914 the chief beneficiaries of the expansion of facilities. There can be little dissent from the view that up to 1914:

...the sporting revolution belonged, in the main, to the middle-classes in their leafy suburbs. [5]

Middle-class urban leisure culture, then, was a shifting entity. An eighteenth century urban pursuit of pleasure turned in the nineteenth century to an anxious scrutiny of the legitimacy of particular pursuits and to a corresponding emphasis on domesticity rather than sociability. Gradually there was a relaxation, but it occurred within the safe boundaries of school and suburb. Indeed the most obvious and continuing thrust of the culture was towards social exclusivity. Within the wide middle-class boundary, lines to demarcate status were carefully drawn and upper and lower middle-classes would never meet in leisure. What they had in common was an attitude to leisure and a view of its social function: in leisure people could meet others of similar social status in environments, whether public or private, that were in accordance with the canons of respectability of the day.

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[1] See, Garlick, Görel, ‘Theatre outside London’, and Schoch, Richard W., ‘Theatre and mid-Victorian society’, in Donohue, Joseph, (ed.), The Cambridge history of British theatre: Vol. 2, 1660 to 1895, (Cambridge University Press), 2004, pp. 165-182, 331-351.

[2] Dale, Catherine, ‘The Provincial Musical Festival in Nineteenth-century England: A Case Study of Bridlington’, in Cowgill, Rachel, and Holman, Peter, (eds.), Music in the British provinces, 1690-1914, (Ashgate), 2007), pp. 325-348, and Sprittles, Joseph, ‘Leeds musical festivals’, The Thoresby Miscellany, Vol. 13, (Thoresby Society), 1959-63, pp. 200-270, provide good case studies.

[3] Danahay, Martin A., Gender at work in Victorian culture: literature, art and masculinity, (Ashgate), 2005.

[4] Lowerson, John, Sport and the English middle classes, 1870-1914, (Manchester University Press), 1993, Huggins, Mike, ‘Second-class citizens? English middle-class culture and sport, 1850-1910: a reconsideration’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 17, (2000), pp. 1-35, and Lowerson, John, ‘Sport and British Middle-Class Culture: Some Issues of Representation and Identity before 1940’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 21, (2004), pp. 34-49.

[5] Meller, H. E., Leisure and the Changing City 1870-1914, (Routledge), 1976, p. 236.

A leisured class?

How did people spend their leisure time? Leisure time can be seen as free time, time in which the individual is relieved from the pressures of work and other obligations, the choice of how to spend leisure time can be seen as distinctly personal. However, some would argue that to some extent it is not a personal choice and so is not in any positive sense leisure, but merely adherence to social custom or obligation. Choice is constrained by material circumstances and by the availability of facilities, but within those constraints on this argument, there is nothing to stop the chimney sweep fox-hunting or the peer attending the music hall. It is the beauty of leisure that it enabled individuals to escape from the pressures that otherwise circumscribed their lives.

This idealist approach to the study of leisure may recommend itself to philosophers, but to historians it has rarely seemed to accord with reality. Many have suggested that the key analytical tool for the study of leisure is the distinction between the rough and respectable. The implication of this distinction is that the respectable of all classes had more in common with each other than they did with the rough members of their own class. This distinction is, as we have already seen, is a simplistic one and may beg more questions than it answers. With some activities, of course, there is no difficulty but with many other activities, going to the theatre for example, there may be some disagreement about whether it is rough or respectable. The rough/respectable division is in fact an extraordinarily crude tool for the description of social reality; the fact that contemporaries made the distinction is, of course, of interest, but in adopting it themselves historians have confused the history of moral fears with the history of lived experience.

Gustave Dore, The Epsom Derby- Arrival of the Well-to-Do

The latter can best be approached through a culturalist analysis. Leisure activities did not float freely above the world of work and daily life; on the contrary, they were intimately related to and derived from that world. Boundaries of class, of gender, of age and of geography were therefore likely to be reproduced in leisure. Leisure activities may themselves have reinforced or shifted those boundaries and not merely passively reflected them. The issue, therefore, is not one of leisure per se but of different leisure cultures that were not hermetically sealed against each other but overlapped and influenced each other. Nor were any of these cultures ever static; they were constantly changing, both in themselves and in relation to other cultures.

The phrase ‘the leisured or leisure classes’ can be traced back to the 1840s and may well have existed earlier. In 1868, Anthony Trollope was confident that England possessed:

...the largest and wealthiest leisure class that any country, ancient or modern, ever boasted. [1]

At the end of the century Thorstein Veblen subjected them to the most trenchant analysis they would ever received in his 1899 The Theory of the Leisure Class.[2] He argued:

The fundamental reason for the development of a leisure class was that only in conspicuous leisure and in conspicuous consumption could the wealthy achieve the status they sought. [3]

The critical word here is ‘conspicuous’. Leisure for the leisure class was not something carried on in private; its function, to establish status, demanded that it be seen both by fellow members of the class and by an envious or admiring excluded public. Since the function of that display was so fundamental to its social position, it is difficult to determine whether there was any separation of work and leisure within the class. Since by definition, though with some qualifications that will come later, they did not work in any sense in which the rest of the population would understand work, it followed that their duties and obligations in life lay in a highly ritualised leisure whose demands they often bemoaned.

The leisure class existed at the level of the nation and of the provinces. At the national level it could be most readily observed in the London Season and until the 1880s, this was as much a political as a social occasion. In the circumscribed political world of the nineteenth century the numbers involved were relatively small, perhaps 500 families compared to the 4,000 families who participated in the more purely social London Season of the late nineteenth century. Until then entry to London ‘Society’ was carefully guarded and its social functions were mostly private. Thereafter, it became easier to but one’s way into ‘Society’. [4] This reflected a change in the nature of the leisure class. It became less easy to identify a class whose members manifestly did not work; by contrast, public attention began to focus on the plutocracy whose male members worked, but so successfully that they could spend their fortunes in their leisure. The London Season formed one clearly demarcated phase in the annual life of the leisure class; the remainder of the year was centred on the country houses in a mixture of activities some of which were thoroughly exclusive while others entailed a carefully calculated patronage of more popular occasions. [5] Shooting was the most exclusive of sports while foxhunting was, in ideology at least, open to peer and peasant. In the late nineteenth century, as in London Society, the plutocracy began to supplant the aristocracy as its leaders.

From the mid-eighteenth century the London Season had its provincial counterparts. There existed in the larger provincial towns, perhaps particularly in southern England the ‘urban gentry’ who in a modest way provided the lower echelons of the leisure class. After 1830, such people living on income from capital tended to gravitate towards the spas and more select seaside resorts. They were disproportionately female and old. In contrast to the national leisure class, there was neither firm structure to their year nor any flamboyance in their leisure. They maintained their status by careful observance of the formalities that helped to distinguish them from those who had to work for a living. In the later nineteenth century a new category, the retired, began to fuse with this older, modest, provincial leisure class, to form a substantial proportion of the population of the southern and coastal towns in which they congregated.

Such people had little in common with the national leisure class, and it may be questioned whether they should be included within the leisure class at all. It was luxury and its overt enjoyment, not modest affluence, which characterised the leisure class in its higher reaches. One mark of that luxury was the role accorded to women. Within the leisure class it was always legitimate for a man to have certain duties that were scarcely distinguishable from work, like running an estate. Indeed by 1870, it became possible for them to be more obviously part of the world of work and most obviously in the City of London. Women, however, apart from duties as hostesses, had to be kept rigidly separate from any money-making activity. Other social classes might emulate or aspire to the luxury of the leisure class. Even as far down the social ladder as the upper working-class, it was a mark of status that a woman should have no employment; clearly, however, such women did not fall within the leisure class. What could not be prevented was the copying of the manners and dress of the leisure class by those without the means to sustain the life-style.

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[1] Trollope, A., (ed.), British Sports and Pastimes, (Virtue & Co.), 1868, p. 18.

[2] Tilman, Rick, Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891-1963: Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Perspectives, (Princeton University Press), 1992, is a good critique of Veblen’s ideas.

[3] Cunningham, H., ‘Leisure and culture’, in ibid, Thompson, F. M. L., (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950, Vol. 2, p. 290.

[4] On this see Pullar, Philippa, Gilded Butterflies: The Rise and Fall of the London Season, (Hamish Hamilton), 1978, and Davidoff, L., The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season, (Taylor & Francis), 1973.

[5] Mandler, Peter, The fall and rise of the stately home, (Yale University Press), 1997, Sykes, Christopher Simon, The big house: the story of a country house and its family, (HarperCollins), 2004, Gardiner, Juliet, The Edwardian country house, (Channel 4 Books), 2002, and Wilson, Richard, and Mackley, Alan, Creating paradise: the building of the English country house 1660-1880, (Hambledon), 2000.

Reforming or re-forming leisure?

There was a strong impression among some contemporaries that the attempt to abolish certain pastimes had done more harm than good because it had resulted in the working-classes being left with very few outlets for leisure, other than those of a debased kind. Drunkenness, violence and fornication, it was claimed, were on the increase. This alarm that moral standards were declining combined with the fear that the social stability of the country was being undermined. The MP, Robert Slaney, argued that it was the duty of those governing the working-classes to provide suitable alternative recreations for those people who otherwise ‘will fly to demagogues and dangerous causes.’ [1] By the 1830s, there was a growing sense among reforming and Evangelical groups that, though the working-classes seemed to have an inbuilt disposition towards spending any free time they had in sexual excesses, gambling and drinking. The middle and upper-classes were not entirely free from blame or responsibility for this situation.

There were several reasons for this feeling of guilt. Urbanisation and enclosures, it was argued, had resulted in a loss of public open spaces and footpaths and hence restricted the scope of working-class leisure time activities. As a result they were driven from comparatively healthy outdoor pastimes towards the numerous temptations offered by drinking houses. It was not until the opening of the Birkenhead and Manchester parks in the 1840s that serious consideration was given to setting up places of amusement within the parks themselves for the playing of games and sports. [2] It was not until the 1850s and 1860s and in some places the 1870s, that municipal parks were established in most provincial towns and cities. Nearly all the places of cultural improvement from which the working-classes could benefit -- art galleries, botanical gardens, libraries and museums -- were denied to them, either because they could not afford the subscriptions or entrance fees or because they were, if not positively excluded, at least not welcomed. Both the Museums Act of 1845 and the Public Libraries Act of 1850 [3] gave local authorities permission to build museums and libraries out of public funds. By 1860, however, only 28 library authorities had been set up. The lower classes had been influenced and harmed by the lax manners and moral of their social superiors. It was the duty of the rich, Hannah More and others argued, to set a wholesome example to the poorer classes through their own behaviour and this was not being done.

The early Victorians were genuinely concerned and bewildered about how leisure time should be used. For one thing leisure was often associated with idleness, so while it was recognised that spare time could bring benefits it was also acknowledged that it had its dangers. In a society where the gospel of work was so deeply ingrained and its virtues so vigorously extolled, it was perhaps inevitable that leisure time should be regarded with suspicion. Leisure requires time. Though there are problems in trying to assess working hours historians agree that there was an extension of hours in the early nineteenth century. [4] Factories imposed a twelve or thirteen hour day as opposed to the ten-hour norm of pre-industrial society. The factory movement may be seen as sanctioned and motivated by a desire to return to the norm, an achievement symbolically if not actually achieved in the Ten Hours Act of 1847.

Coalminers, whose hours in the eighteenth century were relatively short, six to eight hours a day, were by 1842 nearly all working a twelve hour day with only short breaks for refreshment. Agricultural workers too suffered an increase in hours in the 1830s. In mining, agriculture, domestic service and the ‘dishonourable’ sections of the artisan trades and in all domestic work, the eighteenth century norm had been breached and hours were longer.

After 1850, the campaign for the nine-hour day started in the building trade, but success was limited until the economic boom of the early 1870s when most organised trades were able to breakthrough to a 54 hour week and by and large were able to maintain than position in the subsequent depression. The campaign for the eight-hour day was even longer in gestation than that for the nine-hour day. Despite all the pressure mounted in the 1890s and beyond, reduction in hours was insignificant on a national scale until 1919 and 1920 when seven million workers obtained reductions. Collective bargaining was unquestionably the chief means by which hours of work were reduced. Parliamentary action was of marginal importance by comparison. In the nineteenth century, it was never used overtly to control the hours of adult males. The key breakthroughs were achieved without parliamentary aid and acts, such as those in 1874 (reducing the hours of factory textile workers to 56 and a half), 1902 (a further reduction of one hour a week for factory workers) and 1909 (restricting underground work in the coalmines to eight hours), had only a marginal effects on the overall national statistics. [5]

If some regularity had been introduced to the working week by 1900, can the same be said for the working year? There had been a sharp decline in the number of holidays that were recognised and observed since the seventeenth century. They continued to be observed, with some regional variation, around Christmas or New Year, at Easter and Whitsuntide, at the local fair, feast or wake, and to some extent on such national days as the 5 November and Shrove Tuesday. They were not yet holidays with pay but their existence established a precedent that others later could follow. It was in the areas where holidays were measured by the day that the Bank Holidays Acts of 1871 and 1875 were of most significance. [6] They were not the first legislative recognition of holidays, which was included in the Factory Act 1833 but they were the first in which the state’s intervention was widely recognised and applauded. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employers increasing conceded holidays to their workforce. Brunner Mond, Lever Bros., the Gas Light and Coke Company, the London and North-Western Railway Company and the Royal Dockyards had done so by the 1890s. In 1897, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants negotiated one-week’s paid holiday after five years service. Other unionised workers, in coal and iron, for example, were putting forward similar claims before 1914.

The hours of work for the working-classes are relatively easy to establish in comparison to those of the middle-classes. There are no national statistics and only the most scattered and perhaps unrepresentative data. Three trends may be distinguished. First, within the professions and the civil service hours were relatively short and imprecise until late in the nineteenth century, perhaps six hours a day. In the private sector, clerks worked rather longer hours, generally 40 hours per week in five days. Secondly, among businessmen, the days of long hours occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century and by 1900 they too began to internalise the 9 to 5 norm. Finally, at the lower end of the middle-classes, amongst shopworkers, hours were notoriously long and remained so. After over fifty years of effort to curtail hours, a House of Lords Select Committee in 1901 could only confirm that many shops were working 80 or 90 hours a week. Pressure from the Shop-Assistants Twelve Hours’ Labour League, founded in 1881, and from the Early Closing Association did result in some improvement but the shift towards a legislative solution was only very partially successful. The 1911 Act did, however, enact a half-day holiday. As far as annual holidays were concerned the middle-class workers undoubtedly had the advantage and in 1875 the Civil Service Inquiry Commission indicated that clerks working for insurance companies, solicitors, banks, railway companies and the civil service were at getting at least two week’s holiday a year. They had achieved this some seventy-five years before the bulk of manual workers.

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[1] See, Richards, Paul, ‘R. A. Slaney, the industrial town, and early Victorian social policy’, Social History, Vol. 4, (1979), pp. 85-101.

[2] See, for example, Elliott, Paul, ‘The Derby Arboretum (1840): the first specially designed municipal public park in Britain’, Midland History, Vol. 26, (2001), pp. 144-176, Taylor, A., ‘‘Commons-stealers, land-grabbers and jerry-builders’: space, popular radicalism and the politics of public access in London, 1848-80’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 40, (1995), pp. 383-407, and MacGill, Lynn, ‘The emergence of public parks in Keighley, West Yorkshire, 1887-93: leisure, pleasure or reform?’, Garden History, Vol. 35, (2007), pp. 146-159.

[3] On libraries, see, Hewitt, Martin, ‘Extending the public library 1850–1930’, in Black, Alistair, and Hoare, Peter, (eds.), The Cambridge history of libraries in Britain and Ireland: Vol. 3: 1850-2000, (Cambridge University Press), 2006, pp. 72-81, Peatling, Gary K., ‘Public libraries and national identity in Britain, 1850-1919’, Library History, Vol. 20, (2004), pp. 33-47, Johnman, W. A. P., and Kendall, H., ‘A Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Condition and Workings of Free Libraries of Various Towns in England (1869)’, Library History, Vol. 17, (2001), pp. 223-238, Fletcher, J., ‘Public libraries, legislation and educational provision in nineteenth-century England’, Journal of Educational Administration & History, Vol. 28, (1996), pp. 97-113, and Sturges, Paul, ‘The public library and its readers 1850-1900’, Library History, Vol. 12, (1996), pp. 183-200.

[4] Hopkins, E., ‘Working hours and the conditions during the Industrial Revolution: a re-appraisal’, Economic History Review, 2^nd ser., Vol. 35, (1982), pp. 52-66.

[5] Johnson, Paul A., and Zaidi, Asghar, ‘Work over the life course’, in ibid, Crafts, Nicholas F. R., Gazeley, Ian, and Newell, Andrew, (eds.), Work and pay in twentieth-century Britain, pp. 98-116.

[6] See, Smart, Eynon, ‘Bank holidays...and much else’, History Today, Vol. 21, (12), (1971), pp. 870-876.

Popular culture: Case Study 3: The ‘opium eaters’

The importance and impact of drug taking across social boundaries in the nineteenth century has only recently become a subject of serious historical study. [1] Opium or opiate compounds were used widely in the first half of the nineteenth century and, though the main features of addiction and withdrawal had been known since the 1750s, most doctors still thought of opium not as dangerous or threatening but central to effective medicine. Until Pharmacy Act 1868 opium was on open sale and could be bought in any grocer’s or druggist’s shop. Regular ‘opium eaters’ were accepted in their communities and rarely the subject of medical attention. They were certainly not seen as ‘sick’, deviant or diseased as they were to be by 1900. Lack of access to orthodox medical care, the suspicion of the medical profession and positive hostility to professional medical treatment ensured the position opium held in popular culture as a major form of self-medication. [2] Society generally used opium for sleeplessness, headache or depression and these shaded imperceptibly into non-medical or ‘recreational’ uses.

Opium consumption was particularly high in the Fens in the nineteenth century and, according to an analysis made in 1862, more opium was sold in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Manchester than in other parts of the country. The Fens were an unhealthy, marshy area where medical assistance, especially for the poor, was severely limited and where many of the working-classes were prone to ague, rheumatism and neuralgia. The habit was limited to the low-lying areas centring on the Isle of Ely and south Lincolnshire. [3] The largest consumers were the labourers who came from the outlying fens rather than village or town dwellers.

Opium smokers in the East End of London: Illustrated London News, 1 August 1874

Why was opium of such importance in the Fens? There was a tradition of self-medication with opium being used to treat both people and animals. The introduction of new methods of exploiting the land resulted in declining standards of child care and an increasing in the doping of young babies with opiates: infant mortality in Wisbech was 206 per thousand in the 1850s, higher than urban centres like Sheffield. Doping young babies was essential as women could be away from home for long periods of time working on the itinerant ‘gangs’ that became a more source of employment after 1830. Opiates may have been used to dispose of unwanted children, though this was not peculiar to the Fens. Opium could be used as an escape from the perceived reduction of status for the agricultural labourer that resulted from enclosure and drainage. Certainly use for euphoric purposes was not uncommon in the Fens. Dr Rayleigh Vicars wrote in the 1890s:

...their colourless lives are temporarily brightened by the passing dreamland vision afforded them by the baneful poppy.[4]

It is very difficult to estimate the effect opiate use had in the Fens though there may be a connection between it and the high general death rate. In the 1850s, it stood at 22 per thousand in southern Lincolnshire, a figure as high as the environmentally less agreeable industrial areas of Huddersfield and Keighley in Yorkshire.

Reaction to opium eating in the fens, with its population apparently able to control and moderate its consumption was markedly different from the concern expressed about the urban problem. The ‘stimulant’ use of drugs by the urban working-classes was perceived as a threat to public order in a way that did not apply in the Fens. This is indicative of the way in which views of opiate use were coloured by the social and class setting. The use of opium for child doping was attacked in the 1830s. Behind this was a desire to remould popular culture into a more acceptable form and a critique of the basic pattern of child rearing by the working-classes. Using opium as a scapegoat led to criticism of its use being diverted away from the realities of the urban environment to the individual failings of working mothers. The uses of opium by adults and for children in the rest of society went unremarked or were viewed more tolerantly. The writings of Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both frequent users, attracted a great deal of attention after 1830 and by drawing attention to the habit may have led to a gradual change towards a harsher, more restrictive attitude. [5]

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[1] See in particular Berridge, V., and Edwards, G., Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth Century England, (Yale University Press), 1987, revised ed., (Free Association), 1999, and Foxcroft, Louise, The making of addiction: the ‘use and abuse’ of opium in nineteenth-century Britain, (Ashgate), 2007.

[2] Milligan, Barry, ‘The opium den in Victorian London’, in Gilman, Sander L., and Zhou, Xun, (eds.), Smoke: a global history of smoking, (Reaktion), 2004, pp. 118-125.

[3] High opium consumption may have characterised areas like this: there is evidence, for instance, of similar practices among the poor in the Romney Marshes in Kent. See, Beveridge, Valerie, ‘Opium in the Fens in Nineteenth-century England’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 34, (1979), pp. 293-313.

[4] Vicars, G. Rayleigh, `Laudanum drinking in Lincolnshire’, St George’s Hospital Gazette, Vol. 1, (1893), p. 24.

[5] See, Morrison, Robert, ‘Opium-eaters and magazine wars: De Quincey and Coleridge in 1821’, Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 30, (1997), pp. 27-40.

Popular Culture: Case Study 2: Temperance

In the early-nineteenth century ale, wine and spirits were cheap and consumed in large quantities. [1] With the dangers of disease from untreated water it was natural for town-dwellers to rely increasingly on alcohol and on water that had been boiled with tea and coffee. People did not believe that local water would ever be safe to drink, as Chadwick’s inspectors found out from London slum-dwellers in the 1840s. The scarcity of drinking water even created the profession of water-carrier. There were alternatives to alcohol: milk, though this was considered a dangerous drink even when fresh; soda-water was not made commercially until 1790 and ginger-beer was not sold in London until 1822. Tea [2] had become a virtual necessity among the working-classes by 1830 and per capital coffee consumption increased faster than tea between 1820 and 1850. [3] But alcohol was more than just a thirst-quencher; it was thought to impart physical stamina, extra energy and confidence. Agricultural labourers, for example, believed that it was impossible to get in the harvest without their ‘harvest beer’. Alcohol was regarded as a painkiller: it assisted dentists and surgeons before the use of anaesthetics, quietened babies and gave protection against infection. It also relieved psychological strain, moderating the sense of social isolation and gloom, and enhanced festivity; drinking places provided a focus for the community. [4]

Before 1800, drinking was not rigidly segregated by rank. Squires, for instance, often drank with their social inferiors. However, by 1830 a measure of social segregation had developed and by 1860 no respectable urban Englishman entered an ordinary public house. [5] Private, as opposed to public, drinking was becoming the mark of respectability. Drinking was also a predominantly male preserve and encouraged men to enjoy better living standards than their wives. On paydays drinking houses were often besieged by wives anxious to get money to feed and clothe their children before it was drunk away.

The drinks trade comprised a large complex of different interests. [6] Of particular importance was the powerful landed interest that helps to explain the regional variations in support for the temperance movement. The barley crop was most important to farmers and without the distillers’ demands for poor-quality grain, lighting lands in Scotland and Ireland might not have been cultivated. Politically the drinks trade drew its prestige from the reliance government placed on drink taxes for national revenue. Attitudes to alcohol were deeply ingrained in British society. Abandoning drinking was, for the working-classes, more than simply not going to public houses. It isolated workers from much popular culture and from a whole complex of recreational activities.

The Reformation Societies that emerged in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were enthusiastic about temperance but the main platform of their movement was the suppression of vice. The temperance movement that emerged in the 1830s differed from them in its concentration on the single issue of spirits, their belief in total abstinence and their repudiation until after 1850 of legislative support. [7] The anti-spirits movement that developed in the 1830s was not a planned movement, at least initially and arose independently at the same time in different places. Why did it develop? It was one of several attempts to propagate a middle-class style of life and arose at a time when drunkenness was already becoming unfashionable. Sobriety received the support of influential groups. Medical opinion, since the 1790s, had increasingly attacked its physical and psychological effects. Evangelicals saw excessive drinking as a sin. Radicals attacked alcohol for its effects on the standard of living of the working-classes and coffee trades wished to popularise their product. The movement would not have made such an impact in the 1830s without the techniques of agitation and mass persuasion used by evangelical humanitarians, especially the anti-slavery campaign. Though any clear link between industrialisation and temperance is difficult to establish, the earliest anti-spirits societies originated in textile manufacturing areas in Ulster and Glasgow and spread to England though the textile centres of Preston, Leeds and Bradford. Some employers welcomed the more reliable workforce that temperance encouraged. Money not spent on drink could, of course, be spent on home-produced goods and some industrialists welcomed the movement as a means of accelerating economic growth and educating people on where to spend their wages.

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, a debate within the temperance movement raged between those whose attack was focused on spirits while advocating moderation elsewhere and those who believed in total abstinence. But while these approaches gained support among those sections of the working population for whom respectability was an objective, the appeal of temperance and abstinence from alcohol was of more limited appeal for the poor, for whom it still provided temporary escape. [8] Representing the ideals of self-control and self-denial, the temperance movement epitomised middle-class Victorian values. Its values were shaped by the Evangelical movement that was concerned with salvation and the Utilitarian movement that was concerned with efficiency and valued self-control and self-denial. Joseph Kidd, a late-Victorian journalist for the Contemporary Review wrote:

To be able to rule self and transmit to children an organisation (society) accustomed to self-restraint and moderation in all things is one of the chief delights and aspirations to the moral nature of a true man. [9]

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[1] Burnett, John, Liquid pleasures: a social history of drinks in modern Britain, (Routledge), 1999, provides an excellent overview.

[2] Fromer, Julie E., A necessary luxury: tea in Victorian England, (Ohio University Press), 2008, and the broader Griffiths, John, Tea: the drink that changed the world, (André Deutsch), 2007.

[3] Bramah, Edward, Tea and coffee: a modern view of three hundred years of tradition, (Hutchinson), 1972.

[4] Holt, Mack P., (ed.), Alcohol: a social and cultural history, (Berg), 2006 provides an overview.

[5] Jennings, Paul, The local: a history of the English pub, (Tempus), 2007, Haydon, Peter, The English pub: a history, (Hale), 1994, and Kneale, James, ‘‘A problem of supervision’: moral geographies of the nineteenth-century British public house’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 25, (1999), pp. 333-348.

[6] Gourvish, T. R., and Wilson, R. G., The British brewing industry, 1830-1980, (Cambridge University Press), 1994.

[7] Greenaway, J. R., Drink and British politics since 1830: a study in policy-making, (Palgrave Macmillan), 2003, and Nicholls, James, The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drinks Question in England, (Manchester University Press), 2009

[8] Ibid, Harrison, B., Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815-1872, and ibid, Lambert, W. R., Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales, provide the best analysis on the issue of temperance and take the story forward into the second half of the nineteenth century.

[9] Kidd, Joseph, ‘Temperance and Its Boundaries,’ Contemporary Review, Vol. 34, (1879), p. 353.