Consuming Passions

Judith Flanders, a historian of Victorian Britain and the author of the widely read The Victorian House, turns her attention to how people of the period spent their free time. Drawing on letters, diaries, journals and novels written by nineteenth-century men and women, she reconstructs the everyday pleasures and pastimes of the age.

At the start of the eighteenth century, very few people owned a book, only a small fraction had a knife or fork, and most households lacked even a cup for a hot drink. By the century's end, industrialisation had produced far more than factories, railways, mines and machines. It had also created new possibilities for fashion, travel and leisure.

Leisure grew into a commercial enterprise aimed at ordinary people. The methods that promoted it, including newspapers, advertising, special offers and publicity, were already in use in the 1700s rather than being a later development. The potter Josiah Wedgwood and his associates are credited with introducing money-back guarantees, free delivery and endorsements from famous people.

Railways carried growing crowds to ever more lavish entertainments: theatrical productions with dazzling fireworks and hundreds of performers, 'hippodramas' that restaged the battle of Waterloo, and the Great Exhibition, which displayed goods from around the world inside a glass building known as the Crystal Palace, covering twenty-two acres. The book examines the scientific, technological and industrial changes behind this transformation and shows how a culture built on excitement, spectacle and theatre took shape.