Breaking the chains or recreating the prison?

The decades between 1790 and 1830 saw an outpouring of creative energies in British culture that was and probably remains unique. In literature, art and political theory the values of the eighteenth century grounded in principles of rationalism and realism were challenged by the emotions and naturalism of the Romantics. This ‘breaking of the chains’ with tradition and accepted values was initially seen as radical even revolutionary. Poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge and later Shelley and Byron questioned the nature of existing social structures and literary values. Their project, in many senses a joint one, was to break free from what they perceived as the constraints of Augustan writing and move the boundaries of literature away from the sterile and limiting agenda of ‘polite’ literature towards a freeing of the spirit through symbiosis with the natural world and its undefiled and pure features. Through this process they believed that man could ‘find himself’[1].

If this was their objective, then it was a short-lived one. Those bright, young things of the 1790s had become figures of the Establishment by the late 1830s or, in the case of Shelley, Byron and Keats had succumbed early to water, fire and disease. There is much in the lives of the Romantic poets that is reminiscent of the response of many to the challenge of the 1960s when the Establishment was assailed from all sides, seemed likely to crumble and yet survived buoyed up precisely by those who had been amongst its most ardent critics: the Hippies of the 1960s became the merchant bankers and venture capitalists of the 1980s and 1990s. The aim of this paper is to try and explain the context in which Wordsworth and his fellow poets wrote and why their original project was ultimately to fail. It was not so much a case of breaking free as a reconstruction of the prison of traditionalism. The ‘angry young men’ irrevocably became conservatives in old age.

‘Breaking free’

Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote, in his most infamous work The Social Contract in the early 1760s that, “Man is born free and yet everywhere he is in chains.” The meaning of this seemingly simple sentence is at the heart of the Romantic dilemma and has been a cause of much misunderstanding about the precise nature of the Romantic agenda. Rousseau was writing in a Europe in which the Enlightenment was at its height; in fact he was one of its prominent luminaries. In Europe the Enlightenment project was a self-conscious assault on the principles of Absolutism in which the rights of the individual were subsumed within the authority of the State. Its aim was to raise the level of political awareness by pointing to the inadequacies of existing political systems and suggesting that more democratic alternatives were necessary. In this, the Enlightenment marked an important ‘breaking free’ from the constraints of existing social and political structures. For those who espoused this perspective the American Revolution between 1775 and 1783 and the French Revolution after 1789 were beacons marking the end of the old order, the Ancien Regime: what William Blake called “the witness against the Beast”.

Yet there was much in English life and thought that was simply a continuation of the earlier eighteenth century. Continuity was as much a part of life between 1790 and 1830 as was change. Beau Brummel, the favourite of the Prince Regent in the early nineteenth century, would have found little difficulty in adapting himself to the age of Beau Nash who dominated the life and manners of Bath a century earlier; the patrons of Henry Holland to the architecture of William Kent and the classicist Palladians, or Francis Jeffrey to the world of Addison, Swift and Pope. But there were changes of thought and attitude after 1790 that were both crucial and fundamental and it is clear that they were intimately connected to the political and social changes of the period.

The loss of the American colonies in 1783 was a shock to national pride and within a decade Britain was embarked on a war with France that was to last for the next twenty-two years. Both the American and French wars began as wars of ideas -- the case of the former according to the recently published and contentious work of Jonathan Clark as a war of religion between the Dissenting Americans and the Anglican British; for the latter as a war between constitutional monarchy and republican dictatorship[2]. Both led to political values being questioned and defended with new determination and clarity. Political discourse became fundamental, as they had not done since the 1730s, with the assertion of radicalism on the one hand and the defence of conservatism on the other. England came under the influence not only of foreign revolutionary ideas but the rapid growth of population, urbanisation, trade dislocations and widespread ‘distress’ led to increased social misery. This bred discontent and potentially revolt creating among the governing classes a mixture of fear, misgivings and social conscience, what I will refer to as a sense of ‘revolutionary paranoia’. This was a problem of such magnitude that no contemporaries fully understood it or had an adequate solution for it. There were few writers of the period who were not touched by it for the seriousness of the problem burnt itself into the minds of all who thought about it.

Demands for parliamentary reform emerged in the 1770s and 1780s and thought they were influenced by events in America and France, they were primarily a ‘home-grown’ product. These demands meant different things to different people. It might mean the end of royal patronage, or the increase in the number of country gentlemen in Parliament; or the abolition of rotten boroughs where very small numbers of electors had the right to vote and bribery was rife; or it might mean votes for all adult men. But there was always the underlying idea that it would end the corruption and inefficiencies of government revealed during the American war. The reformers were themselves divided and many were cured of their desire for change by the onset of the French Revolution. ‘Breaking free’ had its limits. Radicalism, though its origins were in the seventeenth century, received a fillip from the revolutionary activities in France. Thomas Paine attacked all established institutions and his Rights of Man became essential reading for any self-respecting radical and the Jacobinism it spawned became a considerable force in the 1790s. Radicalism also included those Dissenters and Roman Catholics (the latter chiefly in Ireland) who demanded the end of religious discrimination; and socialists like Thomas Spence and Robert Owen who called for the end of either land-ownership or capitalism or both. William Cobbett sought by means of parliamentary democracy to save the individuality of workers and farmer labourers threatened by the three-fold Leviathan of government, enclosures and capitalism. Despite pressure, sometimes almost intolerable, the governing classes held and specific radical achievements in this period were few though it did produce a growing working-class consciousness and an atmosphere favourable to the broadly middle-class reforms of the 1820s and the Reform Act of 1832.

Equally in reaction to the social problems of the time, a great ‘seriousness’ swept over an important part of the nation, a deep concern for morality, an acute sense of guilt and sin, on both a personal and national level. This resulted in a re-examination of personal and social morality and was accompanied by an urgent sense of the need for a return to religion. The Evangelicals made a deep imprint on the thought of this period and much of what we today call ‘Victorian values’ have their origin before 1830. Evangelicals for the most part rejected the principles of individualism that underlay radical thought and were thus opposed to parliamentary reform. They feared any attack on the social order but wished to replace the selfish instincts that underlay ‘laissez-faire’ principles by a new code of social morality based on a more personal Christianity.

Demands for social cohesion and a new view of the nature of society were closely linked to a new sense of the importance of history and of organic growth. Eighteenth century rationalists had found it easy to dismiss the whole historical process as falling into a simplistic three-fold pattern: the classical age of Greece and Rome followed by medieval darkness and superstition culminating in the triumph of Enlightenment. David Hume pointed the way to the study of the past for its own sake and to see it as an organic process[3]. This was a route followed in monumental style by Edward Gibbon in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published in 1776. Edmund Burke provided the philosophical accompaniment in his Reflections on the Revolution in France and Sir Walter Scott supplied the romantic nostalgia through his many historical novels. History was, however, used as a mode of political argument to buttress the radical and conservative cases and it is not surprising that England did not produce a first-class historian between Hume and Gibbon in the 1760s and 1770s and Macaulay, Carlyle and Stubbs in the 1840s and 1850s. The study of History perhaps flourishes best in more settled times than those between 1790 and 1830.

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[1] This paper was written in the summer of 1999 and revisited in 2007.

[2] See J.C.D. Clark The Language of Liberty 1660-1832, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[3] David Hume The History of England, first published in 1753.

The supply of leisure

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. Secondly, there was much self-made leisure, whether this is thought of as communal or associational on the one hand or personal and family based on the other. Thirdly, voluntary bodies and philanthropists were key agents in the supply of leisure for others. Finally, leisure was supplied on a commercial basis. These neat categories are, however, susceptible to fragmentation. Sheet music, for example, supplied on a commercial basis, provided a necessary resource for much individual and communal self-made leisure.

The state

The state had always been concerned with the supply of leisure. In the early part of this period 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 has some validity but it provides little to help unravel 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. At the national level this 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 it was recognised that 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 1824-5 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, which a local authority could implement if it 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 much concerned to protect the ratepayer as to encourage the provision of a facility. Not surprisingly, buildings were often slow to appear on the ground. Up to 1914 libraries stemmed much more from philanthropy than from rates and even at that date were within reach of only 60 per cent 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. The 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. The pub was much less safe and hardly at all to be recommended. 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 stepped in to ban 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.

Self-made leisure

In self-made leisure the separation between supply and demand becomes artificial. The more self-made it was, the more local or domestic it was likely to be, and therefore the harder it is to find information about it. 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 bans, an amateur orchestra, six concertina bands and a team of hand-bell ringers. In Rochdale, and doubtless 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. At the family and individual level reliable information is even harder to come by. 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 came to be considerable degree of 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 philanthropy

Voluntary bodies and philanthropists were less single-minded than the state, but as with the latter it is both tempting and misleading to divide their activities in the supply of leisure into two groups, a negative controlling one and a positive supply one. Into the first group would fall such organisations 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 might include 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). Such a division obscures the factor uniting the two: 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 counter-attractions came to the fore in the 1830s. ‘Rational recreation’ offered the solution and quiet and elevating pursuits, modelled on the best contemporary middle-class practice, were recommended and offered. 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 under these auspices was enormous. Parks, libraries and similar institutions were frequently the outcome of philanthropy. In Glasgow, for example, were 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 benefactions. Much church and chapel activity should probably come under this head, rather than in the self-made category, for it 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. 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, were to attract 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.

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.

Commercial supply of leisure

Commercialised entertainment played a larger and larger 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 cent per year and the number employed in the arts and entertainment by 4.7 per cent 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.

Conclusions

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 so 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 remained in 1914, as it was in 1830, largely male-dominated and escapist.