Novelty fair: British visual culture between Chartism and the Great Exhibition

By Jo Briggs

Novelty fair examines mid-nineteenth-century people, things and places generally understood to be discrete and unrelated: urban fairs and the Great Exhibition, daguerreotypes and ballads, satirical shilling books and government-backed design reform, blackface performers and middle-class paterfamilias. A range of new and neglected sources, drawn mainly from popular culture are used to inform the discussion. The pivotal years between Chartism and the Great Exhibition emerge as far more contested than has previously been recognised and bourgeois forms and strategies are revealed as being under stress in a period that has been seen as a triumphant one for that class.

Novelty fair will be of special interest to historians of Chartism, cultural historians interested in the Great Exhibition and design reform and those in the field of Victorian studies, cultural studies and visual culture more generally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784996413

Jo Briggs

Jo Briggs is Assistant Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Book preview

Introduction: Time’s question

The play Novelty Fair; or, Hints for 1851, written by Albert Smith and Tom Taylor, was first performed on 21 May 1850, at almost exactly the middle of the nineteenth century.¹ Subtitled ‘an exceedingly premature, and thoroughly apropos revue’, the piece is a dense and complex layering of personifications, tableaus, musical numbers and sharp topical humour. The play burlesqued contemporary events, focusing especially on revolutions in France and public works in London, but also departed from the revue format by looking forward in time to the Great Exhibition. For anyone interested in the significant and changeful years at mid century, a period that is typically seen as leaving the age of revolution behind and ushering in an era of commodities and spectacle, this now obscure play proves insightful. Novelty Fair’s eclectic references and startling juxtapositions belie the separate scholarly treatment of the Chartist disturbances of 1848 and the Great Exhibition of 1851. Rather than a clean break between revolution and exhibition, class consciousness and consumerism, popular and didactic, risqué and respectable, the play suggests a less familiar picture of this period where these terms are interdependent and mutually defined.

Novelty Fair opens in the ‘Library of Time’ where Time is puzzling over how to interpret his present moment: are things improving or getting worse? In the play’s opening lines he states ‘Never were times so hard to comprehend: / Some say they’re bad times, and, what’s worse won’t mend; / Others declare they’re good, and don’t want mending / How, of such doubts, am I to make an ending?’² Here, Time is like a scholar trying to make sense of history, and in many ways the question Time poses sums up opposing attitudes to the mid nineteenth century. Were things worse than ever for the working classes, with industrialization and urbanization eroding traditional trades and established communities, or was this the beginning of increased prosperity for all, with consumer goods and entertainments available more cheaply and widely than ever? In order to find an answer, like a good researcher, Time consults various volumes in his library. However, they reveal a topsy-turvy world full of unexpected shifts and paradox. As a result of his research Time might well wonder whether what is anticipated in 1851 is a revolution or an exhibition, or perhaps both.

Of the years he calls forth from his volumes the first to appear is The Year One, a decrepit child, followed by Julius Cæsar, a Baron who signed the Magna Carta, and then Charles I and Cromwell. On searching out the French Revolution, personifications of the years 1792, 1830 and 1848 all rush out at once. Time turns to 1815, the personification of Peace, who directs him to the year 1851. But, rather than being rational or industrious, 1851, played by the popular comic actor Charles James Mathews, is loud and brash and takes over the play, leading the action and singing comic songs. The last scene of the play, which takes place in the interior of the Great Exhibition, comprises musical tableaus and danced set-pieces of the ‘industry’ of Spain, Italy and France. However, the ‘industry’ on display is no such thing. The industry of Spain is the fandango, of Italy, dolce far niente, and that of France the barricades, mourir pour la patrie and the dance of débardeurs and folies.

Towards the end of the first act 1851 seizes Time by the ‘forelock’ and leads the Years around the stage reversing their chronology.³ He sings a song to the tune of ‘The Good Time Coming’, a popular work with connections to the Chartist movement. The original lyrics by Charles Mackay date from 1846 and look forward to a time when ‘Right, not Might, shall be the lord’ and ‘Worth, not Birth, shall rule mankind, / and be acknowledg’d stronger’. The last line of each verse in the original cautions patience: ‘Wait a little longer’, where as this version ends its verses ‘Don’t wait any longer’ and ‘We won’t wait any longer’.⁴ In the process of attempting to resolve Time’s question about the direction of history Novelty Fair draws attention to the interaction between revolutions and the coming exhibition, the proximity of the years 1848 and 1851, and their mutually defined significance.

The following investigation acts on this suggestive insight to explore the heterogeneous nature of mid-nineteenth-century Victorian culture that Novelty Fair exemplifies. Like Novelty Fair, the chapters that follow bring together people, things and places generally understood to be discrete and unrelated: urban fairs and the Great Exhibition, daguerreotypes and ballads, satirical shilling books and government-backed design reform, blackface performers and middle-class paterfamilias, navvies and the Duke of Wellington. As a result, the years of Chartism and the Great Exhibition emerge as far more contested than has previously been recognized, questioning the accepted narrative of increasing stability.

Transgression

In Novelty Fair Time draws our attention to the interaction and confusion between high and low culture at a moment when bourgeois hegemony has typically been seen as on the rise. Indeed, the chapters that follow repeatedly reveal bourgeois forms and strategies under stress. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s book The Politics and Poetics of Transgression offers a particularly productive methodological framework for exploring this topic. The authors outline what they call an ‘economy of transgression’ across a broad chronological sweep of British culture. Their approach encompasses Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnivalesque, but also goes further. In their readings what is ‘socially peripheral’ is frequently found to be ‘symbolically central’.⁵ The ‘low-Other is despised and denied at the level of political organization and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture’.⁶ Considering the nineteenth century, the authors focus on Edwin Chadwick and the reform of sewers, the maid and dirt, with an emphasis on Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby, and finally Freud and the place of fairground and carnival themes in bourgeois neurosis. All of these texts and their associated sources continue to be central in studies of Victorian culture, but in relation to Chartism and the Great Exhibition it is more difficult to find writing that pays similar close attention to the way that high and low culture are interrelated. Focusing on ‘psychic forms, the human body, geographical space and the social order’, which Stallybrass and White identify as the ‘symbolic domains’ that order European culture, can generate a fresh approach to the mid nineteenth century.⁷ Taking the hint from Novelty Fair, the benefit of such a methodology is that it ultimately draws together themes such as revolution and consumerism, which are currently discussed separately.

Some of the reason for this separation stems from a strong, yet tacit, assumption that there is a change in popular culture that begins around the opening of the Victorian era, which is completed by around 1850 and made manifest in the Great Exhibition of 1851. By this date and with this event, the argument goes, popular culture is tamed and homogenized, with didactic and bourgeois forms and strategies of representation triumphant. This shift has been related to changing technologies of print culture, consumer habits, surveillance and industrialization.⁸ Yet as Novelty Fair and the following chapters show, such a reading of mid-nineteenth-century culture is in many ways the result of taking the triumphant rhetoric of the Great Exhibition and its success at face value. This has led to the neglect of a group of sources that offer a very different view of the late 1840s and early 1850s. As a result, subversive or alternative commentary from this period has been neglected, and, as a consequence, little mutually constitutive interaction between high and low culture has been identified.⁹

Several seminal books have fostered this state of affairs, with the dates used in their titles and chapter headings perhaps the most noticeable, if crude, indicators of this. Considering popular culture and leisure, Robert Malcolmson, in his book Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850, concludes that tough economic conditions in the second quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the ‘disintegration’ of traditional culture, with the reshaping of popular leisure a feature of the period after 1850.¹⁰ In The Shows of London Richard D. Altick ends his investigation of popular didactic exhibits with a chapter on the Great Exhibition and two chapters on the 1850s. He writes ‘During the fifties the variegated complex of popular shows … began to disintegrate. Superficially, it is true, the change was not immediately apparent … but in retrospect of more than a century it can be seen that a deep transformation was well under way … not only the structure but the whole nature and tone of London exhibitions were undergoing a revolution.’¹¹ However, as Chapter 4 explores, the relationship of the Great Exhibition to more established forms of popular entertainment was in fact vital: at the same time that the organizers of the Exhibition sought to distance the event from fairs, it comprised undeniably fair-like elements, and broadside ballads published at the time made such commonalities the focus of their satires.

Turning to considerations of Victorian print culture, Louis James chose to end his survey, Print and the People, in 1851.¹² Celina Fox, in her ground-breaking study of graphic journalism in the 1830s and 1840s sees the single-sheet print as dying out over this period to be replaced by ‘large-scale engraving concerns, high capital turnover, profits and investment. The small, independent efforts had had their day.’ By 1850, she writes, ‘the mainstream of graphic journalism catered for a family audience with good clean fun’.¹³ More recently this view has been echoed by Brian Maidment.¹⁴ Although the rise of periodicals with large circulations and middle-class readerships is clear, broadside ballads and other single-sheet caricatures and pamphlets continued to be produced. More importantly for my argument, the lines between low-class and bawdy publications and what has been depicted as the cleaner humorous works suitable for the drawing-room were often blurred. As will be seen in the chapters that follow, Punch lifted visual puns from the imagery of broadside ballads, which left open the possibility of more risqué readings than would be considered appropriate for women and children in a domestic setting. In this sense I take up Patricia Anderson’s approach from her book, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860.¹⁵ Anderson puts forward a counter-argument to Fox’s that sees print culture as a top-down imposition of bourgeois values. Anderson’s main aim is to show that print culture was a more collaborative negotiation between seller and consumer. She writes that ‘The emergence of a formative mass culture – at least in its visual forms – was not a process of wholesale repression or replacement’, and questions the existence at mid century of either a ‘dominant, and cohesive middle-class culture’ or a ‘pure oppositional working-class culture’.¹⁶ Popular culture, she argues, was ‘a varied and variable experience’.¹⁷ As has already been hinted, with a more complex understanding of the middle years of the nineteenth century, links can be found between working-class and bourgeois visual and textual forms that highlight how middle-class representational strategies – such as the panorama, daguerreotype, Punch cartoons and even the Great Exhibition itself – were constructed in hybrid and fluid ways that laid them open to stress.

Chronology and ideology

Like Novelty Fair, this book asserts the proximity of two key moments in British history: the Chartist demonstration of 10 April 1848 and the Great Exhibition of the Arts and Industry of All Nations, which opened on 1 May 1851. Not only did these events occur just a few years apart, their longer chronologies overlap. The origins of the Great Exhibition can be traced back to the highly successful exhibition held by the Society of the Arts in London in 1847, and the already well-established exhibitions at Mechanics Institutes in towns and cities typically in the north of England.¹⁸ In January 1848, Henry Cole sent a prospectus to Prince Albert outlining the Society of Art’s plan for a national exhibition, and began to solicit government backing for the scheme. Then, at a meeting in Paris in the summer of 1849, Cole and Herbert Minton, with Matthew Digby Wyatt, decided to make the planned exhibition international in scope. Thus, the Great Exhibition has a history that stretches back through the revolutions of 1848.

Equally, Chartism and the revolutions of that year threw a long shadow, much longer than the twelve months of a single year. The Chartist movement did not end (or begin) in 1848, although it suffered a heavy setback with the perceived failure of the presentation of the ‘monster petition’ to Parliament, and the arrest of many of the movement’s leaders in the months that followed. Revolutions in Europe continued to fill the columns of the periodical press across an extended period after the first outbreaks of violence in 1848. For example, in December 1851, after the Great Exhibition had closed, Louis Napoleon dissolved the National Assembly and took the title of emperor, an act that brought the Second Republic of 1848 to an end. Equally, it was in April 1849 that the title of emperor was given to King Frederick Wilhelm IV, an event that was followed by the disintegration of the German National Assembly. Realizing this simultaneity is an important step towards a more integrated view of events in the mid nineteenth century, but the fact that this chronology might need foregrounding needs some explanation. It is the result of both accident and design that Chartism and the Great Exhibition, occurring only a little over three years apart, have generated two such distinct, and on closer scrutiny even incompatible, bodies of scholarly writing. It is hardly an exaggeration to say they now sit at the centre of two distinct histories and disciplines. The stark ideological divide between these bodies of scholarship goes far deeper than the perception of emerging cultural hegemony identified by the scholars quoted previously, although this is a related issue.

In the second half of the twentieth century, it was historians interested in class with, typically, Marxist sympathies who were drawn to 1848 and had the largest impact on studies of this period, particularly during and after the politically turbulent 1960s – the decade that saw the publication of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.¹⁹ Thompson’s assertion of continuity in the political aspects of protest movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century has been debated ever since. In the later twentieth century, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the perceived failure of Chartism in 1848 was worked into a pessimistic vision of history. By contrast the Great Exhibition was initially co-opted to tell the story of a forward-looking and economically vibrant Britain. Increased interest in the Great Exhibition was sparked by the Festival of Britain that took place 100 years after its forerunner, in 1951. In this reading, Britain presiding liberally over a peaceful empire or commonwealth promotes progress and improvement for all.²⁰ This view of the Great Exhibition has now been tempered, with particular emphasis on its imperialist agenda. But more generally, the divide between ideological standpoints within the secondary literature makes talking about 1848 and 1851 together difficult, as two distinct approaches, vocabularies and frameworks exist for each.

However, from both perspectives the mid nineteenth century is seen as marking a break, encompassing both endings and beginnings. For historians of working-class politics the perceived failure of Chartism in 1848 marks the end of a tradition of English radicalism, although a far more nuanced view of the period between 1848 and 1871 has recently been given by Margot Finn in After Chartism.²¹ The Great Exhibition has been interpreted as initiating a moment of relative stability and quietude: ‘high Victorianism’ in the words of Asa Briggs, and ‘the age of equipoise’ in work of W. L. Burn.²² The Exhibition continues to be viewed as prefiguring modern and even post-modern spaces, spectacles and fetishized commodities, theories of which leave little room for class-based resistance.²³ As Louise Purbrick cogently pointed out in 2001 ‘Histories which begin by using 1851 to summarize the mid-nineteenth century cannot help but continue to diminish the significance of 1848’, and with it class and critical agency.²⁴ The decade that has followed this observation has seen important interventions with the publication of Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain by Tim Barringer, and Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture by Lara Kriegel.²⁵ Although these writers do not explicitly aim to bring 1848 and 1851 back together (both books deal with broader chronologies), they bring some of the concerns of those who more typically write about the politics of 1848 to discussions of the Great Exhibition, namely labour and the working body, which reasserts class as a central concern.²⁶

Read broadly, the different methodologies employed to investigate the politics of 1848 and the spectacle of 1851 exemplify two of the most compelling approaches to the past to emerge in the twentieth century. Pairs of opposing themes can be lined up as follows: history and culture, textual and visual, base and superstructure, structuralism and deconstruction, modernism and post-modernism, and we might also add local and global.²⁷ The risk is that a study that aspires to offer a more objective and unbiased approach to mid-nineteenth-century Britain will only superficially unite the two bodies of scholarship. The investigation that follows is shaped by current trends in the field of Victorian studies. Following a productive engagement with gender, sexuality, race and issues of identity, what has emerged since the start of the twenty-first century is an approach that foregrounds close readings. Complex interpretive and imaginative moves have provided compelling and often startling new ways to understand the Victorians and some of their most iconic cultural productions, but in the process non-textual materials are rendered textual through scholarly endeavour indebted to literary criticism, and sources transmuted and perhaps even tamed in the process. Paradoxically this has taken place under the banner of interdisciplinarity. In relation to the Great Exhibition, such an approach characterizes many contributions to the volumes of collected essays The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays and Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace, and is perhaps epitomized by Jonah Siegel’s essay ‘Display Time: Art, Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal Palace’, published in 2010.²⁸ As Kriegel has written the ‘pressures of currency … tend to redirect our concerns … from the material to the moral, and from the social to the aesthetic’.²⁹ She concludes by pointing out ‘the importance of keeping material practice and social location in mind as we look forward’.³⁰ While employing close readings of images and texts in the chapters that follow I have endeavoured to keep Time’s question of who were the winners in the battle for social and political power at mid century to the fore.

Sacred profanities

Novelty Fair shows how caricature reaches out to and combines elements from across a spectrum of cultural forms. It includes lines in ancient Greek and French, historical references and parodies of songs from the operas Les Huguenots, Somnabula and Norma. But it also references songs such as ‘Oh Susannah’ and ‘Old Dan Tucker’, typically performed in blackface, and popular tunes, such as ‘The Vicar of Bray’, ‘The King of the Cannibal Islands’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’, that were often reworked as the tunes for ballads. Many of the characters and items personified in Novelty Fair appear in the chapters that follow, which in turn clarify the play’s more obscure references: to the gent, the Casino and special constables’ truncheons. Novelty Fair relied on the audience’s familiarity not just with the latest news stories, but also with the conventions of the full range of contemporary visual satire, as exemplified in Punch’s weekly Large Cut, to communicate its riotous message. Scenes such as 1851 leading Time by the forelock around the stage followed by a parade of years, or personifications of France and Britannia quarrelling and making up, are drawn from the visual repertoire of Punch and a well-established tradition of political caricatures.

Such close relationships between different strands of culture also open the possibility that, regardless of their aims, all productions, serious or humorous, were informed or infected with an opposite intention, either explicitly or via the potential associations available to their consumers. Even in the more serious sources explored in this book, which strove towards objectivity, there is a humorous valence unintentionally or unconsciously arrived at. For example, the government report on the fake (often humorous and punning) signatures on the Chartists’ ‘monster petition’, explored in Chapter 2, or the contents chosen for the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ at the Museum of Ornamental Art, which I show to be in dialogue with humorous portrayals of the gent in Chapter 6. During the crisis of 1848, boundaries between serious and humorous, respectable and risqué, seem to have become particularly fluid. In that year any kind of certainty about the direction of history was undermined by the fast-changing nature of events: at one moment revolution in London looked almost certain, but almost simultaneously it was proved to be an empty farce. The special constables and Chartists who took events most seriously were both subject to comic portrayals, which are the subject of Chapter 3.

The reason that many revealing sources have come to be overlooked in the broader picture of Victorian popular culture is clearly related to the scholarly preoccupations outlined previously. Scholars of 1848 and of working-class history more generally, have been and remain interested in ballads and cheaper forms of entertainment (for example in his book Vision of the People Patrick Joyce discusses ballads, dialect literature, and the popular theatre as reflecting a coherent working-class consciousness³¹), but have tended to avoid the visual.