The Nation Entertained

Abstract

The sixty years after 1850 saw a flourishing of museums, art galleries, public libraries, of temperance cafés and of halls for ‘improving’ public meetings. There were opportunities for healthy recreation like swimming or cycling or for spectating at football matches and race meetings. Yet, in spite of all of these attractions, the public house remained central to the social life of the mass of the population. In 1852 G. R. Porter declared that ‘no person above the rank of a labouring man or artisan, would venture to go into a public house to purchase anything to drink’, but in this at any rate the example of the middle class was rejected by the working class.

The cheap press, with its ubiquitous correspondents and historians of all contemporary ranks and occurrences in the body politic, has transformed the severely domesticated Briton of both sexes, of all ages, who belonged to a bygone generation, into an eager, actively enquiring, socially omniscient citizen of the world, ever on the outlook for new excitements, habitally demanding social pleasure in fresh forms.

T. H. S. Escott, Social Transformations of the Victorian Age (1897).