Judith Flanders

Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain


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Stockton, Barnard Castle, Lancaster, Kendal (and from there on to London), Sedbergh and Kirkby Lonsdale. And, apart from the London carriers, eight other carriers travelled regularly from Kirkby Stephen to different parts of England.

      Technological developments to stagecoaches also fuelled improved journey times. The coaches were built lower to the ground, so they could be driven more quickly with less fear of being overturned. The invention of the elliptical spring (by the wonderfully named Obadiah Elliot) in 1804 made it possible for carriages to be hung from springs, which made the coaches cheaper to manufacture, enabled them to travel at greater speed and more comfortably—and the increased stability made it possible to have ‘outsides’, or seats on the roof, without the passengers being tossed overboard. Together with bigger carriages, this meant that by the 1830s stagecoaches carried double the number of passengers they had in 1790. Fifteen times as many people were travelling as had forty years before, in a service that had grown in the number of scheduled routes, and the number of coaches on those routes, by 800 per cent.77

      It was not merely passenger numbers: the quantity of goods transported by road also increased. In 1823 London had over 700 carriers, twice as many as it had had thirty years before; Exeter had three times as many in 1831 as it had had in 1792, while Sheffield had nearly four times as many; in Birmingham the number soared fivefold in the same period. Overall, across the country, there was a 131 per cent growth in carrier services, which sounds substantial. But, compared to an urban population growth of 120 per cent, it becomes apparent that the number of carriers was barely keeping up with overall growth.78 The main reason for this lack of expansion was the development of the canal system.

      Adam Smith had recognized the importance of transport to the economy, but, while he paid lip service to roads, he was mainly concerned with the benefits brought by water transportation. In 1776, in the middle of this revolution in transport, he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, that ‘by means of water-carriage, a more extensive market is opened to every sort of industry than what land-carriage alone can afford it, so it is upon the sea-coast, and along the banks of navigable rivers, that industry of every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself.’ He returned to this, stressing that ‘Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that account the greatest of all improvements.’79 But he was somewhat behind the times in his concentration on rivers. It is true that at the beginning of the eighteenth century most work had been concerned with improving the navigability of rivers. In 1720 the Mersey and Irwell Navigation System had opened; the Weaver Navigation carried traffic from 1720, and improvements to the Wear went on from 1716 to 1759. Yet, despite increasing the extent of the navigable inland waterways of Britain from just over 1,100 kilometres in 1660 to more than 1,800 kilometres in 1720s,80 this was always going to be a solution limited by geography: the newly industrialized Midlands were over 400 feet above sea level, and in the west the River Severn fluctuated from having a depth of only 16 inches of water in good weather to rising 18 feet in five hours in bad, while in 1796 it remained completely impassable for all but two months of the year. Canals were the logical way forward. Two projects led the way. From 1754 the Liverpool Corporation oversaw the building of the Sankey Brook Navigation system—an entirely new canal along an entirely new route, rather than following an old riverbed. Then in 1757 the Duke of Bridgewater inherited an estate, in Worsley, in Lancashire, and planned immediately to build a canal to link his new coalfields with the urban centres of Manchester and Liverpool. The first ten miles of the Bridgewater Canal were in operation by 1761, and the price of coal in Manchester immediately fell from 7d. to 31/2d. per hundredweight.81 In 1766 James Brindley, the engineer behind the Bridgewater Canal, began work on the Trent and Mersey Canal, which when finished in 1777 linked the Trent near Burton to the Mersey in Lancashire, making the entire breadth of the country from Hull to Liverpool navigable. The canal was 151 kilometres long (225 if you count the bit where it joined the Birmingham Canal and the Severn), and had along its length 75 locks, 5 tunnels, 5 major aqueducts and 155 minor ones—a feat of engineering that ushered in the great age of canal building. By 1830 there were nearly 5,000 kilometres of canals in England and Wales.82

      Wedgwood, of course, was not the only manufacturer to benefit in this way. Many of the new factory owners were as successful as they were because they understood that technology and trade went hand in hand. Joseph Wilkes, the child of a Leicestershire farmer, set up as a cheese factor in Burton upon Trent. In 1763 he went into partnership with a Birmingham banker named Sampson Lloyd (whose bank is now known as Lloyds TSB, keeping his name alive into the twenty-first century), buying a lease on nineteen miles of the Trent Navigation; from this he gradually invested in canals, turnpikes (and later railroads), until in 1783 he bought the entire parish of Measham, where he set up a pithead to mine coal, a brickworks, a corn mill, a barge-building company and

      Wedgwood and Darwin did not, however, confine their canal fever to commerce alone. When fossils were uncovered during the building of the Trent and Mersey, Wedgwood collected them and shared them with Darwin: ‘I will in return,’ he promised, ‘send you some mineral observations of exactly the same value (weighed nicely) for I must inform you I mean to gain full as much knowledge, from you who can spare it so well, as I return you in exchange.83

      a cotton mill. A bigger cotton mill was opened in 1802, which he ran together with several banks in the Burton area.

      Yet it is important to remember that while this modernization—of production, distribution