Few British songs are as well known as “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside”. For many listeners it only takes a few bars to conjure up hazy images of striped deckchairs and dripping ice-cream cones, strolling along the prom (prom prom) and brass bands playing (tiddley- om-pom-pom). Of course a real day beside the seaside can be a rather different affair, as visitors pick sand out of their sandwiches or huddle together for warmth under a slate-grey sky. Yet both the myth and the reality are comparatively recent inventions.
“I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” is an Edwardian music hall song, and the first verse offers a window into an era that transformed whole stretches of sleepy coastline into the nation’s playground. “Everyone delights to spend their summer’s holiday down beside the side of the silvery sea,” it explains, but if you’re an ordinary Smith or Brown “at business up in town”, a trip to the seaside is a special annual treat:”‘You save up all the money you can ’til summer comes around, then away you go, to a spot you know, where the cockle shells are found.” The rapid spread of the railways and the introduction of paid holidays meant that 19th-century resorts were becoming crammed with clerks and factory workers dipping their toes into a previously exclusive world of leisure. Many of the features that now seem central to coastal resorts were a response to their tastes, from fish and chips (previously an urban speciality) to the iron piers that stretched out in ever larger and more elaborate forms, as if each resort was poking its tongue out at its neighbours. Yet as Lee Jackson shows in this engaging account of Victorian mass entertainment, when Smith or Brown had some time off they didn’t have to go as far as the seaside to enjoy themselves.
In London they could visit Vauxhall Gardens, where the variety acts might include a tightrope walker who performed while wearing a cap fitted with fireworks, or a man “whose unrivalled MUSIC on his CHIN has drawn forth such great astonishment and delight”. Alternatively they could take a trip to Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, rebuilt in 1854 on a new site at Sydenham, where the attractions ranged from a tropical winter garden (a sign read “Visitors are requested not to tease the parrots”) to a fountain installed by the perfume manufacturers Rimmel, which flowed with a liquid advertised as “far superior to Eau de Cologne … a reviving perfume, a pleasant Dentifrice, and a powerful Disinfectant. If they wanted a whiff of something sexier, they could spend the evening in a music hall enjoying songs with naughtily suggestive titles such as “I’ve Got Something for You, My Love” or “Pulling My Rhubarb Out”.
As Jackson acknowledges, some of this is “well-trodden historical territory”, and his book includes a number of overlaps with earlier accounts such as Judith Flanders’s Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, with both authors pointing out that most Victorian men who swam in the sea did so naked. (Jackson describes women viewing “nude bathers, gazing through opera glasses and telescopes, which should have been trained on distant shipping”.) What’s new in Jackson’s book falls into two areas. The first is some fascinating background on the rise of London’s gin palaces, which created panic in middle-class observers when they noticed that the gaudy decor of these working-class venues – all shiny plate glass and flaring gas jets – was hard to distinguish from their own favourite West End shops.
The second original element is Jackson’s response to the metropolitan bias in many earlier histories. He discusses mass entertainment from other cities, such as the “Transvaal” shooting range installed in Liverpool’s Eastham Pleasure Gardens in 1900, featuring Boer figures “who flipped over when hit to reveal a white flag of surrender”. And he has a chapter on football, which developed as a professional sport in the north of England only after the 1874 Factory Act guaranteed textile workers a half-holiday on Saturdays, thereby inventing the modern weekend as a time when they could watch other people play for a living. While some anecdotes of Victorian football might make a modern fan’s jaw drop, such as the team of “Sheffield Zulus” who turned up for one match in blackface and carrying “genuine war trophies”, others might make them feel strangely at home. Before the end of Victoria’s reign, players were already “accused of being pampered, overpaid … and far too famous for their own good”, while fans were said to watch games with “malignant anxiety” and “ungenerous one-sided enthusiasm”.
One problem with our image of the Victorians, Jackson explains, is that we tend to think of them as they appear in old photographs of the time, frozen and unsmiling, whereas if we added movement and a soundtrack we would see them in a very different light. For a more accurate image we should probably picture them visiting the Greater Britain Exhibition at Earls Court in 1899, where the attractions included a 300ft-high Great Wheel, and a ride known as the Great Canadian Water Chute, which enabled visitors to “indulge in the British pastime of shouting”. Or we could read a list of ideas that one manager of Alexandra Palace jotted down to get more punters through the turnstiles: “A Rabbit Warren. An Alligator Pond” … “Get paintings by Princesses” … “Find out about Water Shoes to float people across lake” … “Big collection of Chimpanzees”. Such examples suggest that Queen Victoria’s miserable “We are not amused” (which she almost certainly never said) was the exact opposite of how most of her subjects really lived.
• Palaces of Pleasure is published by Yale (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
