Culture

_{Hungarian composer Franz Liszt appeared in a performance in London. © Getty Images}

If you wanted music, there were plenty of places to find it.

Pianos were becoming slowly more affordable, though still very expensive. Cheaper music printing methods meant that sheet music was more widely available, and by 1840 some catalogues had 200,000 items in stock.

At the concert hall, Beethoven’s ‘Sinfonia (no. 9), composed for the Philharmonia Society’ (now more commonly called the Ninth Symphony) had several performances, including one at Drury Lane which was ‘coolly received’.

The audience preferred a quadrille from the opera The Huguenots, during which maroons (nautical flares) were actually fired in the theatre. Liszt himself appeared in a performance in London. For those with more populist tastes, there was the new Polytechnic in Salford, one of the very first music halls, and the Star Music Hall in Bolton also had nightly shows.

The Eagle Saloon in City Road, Islington (immortalised in the lyric ‘in and out the Eagle’ in Pop Goes the Weasel) had a purpose-built stage, and mounted comic operas, melodramas, pantomimes and concerts that might include a classical overture, operatic arias and comic songs.

Engravings were still expensive, so to see paintings the fashionable went to the Royal Academy exhibition. Turner’s ‘Dawn of Christianity’ drew a puzzled response from The Times: ‘As it is impossible to tell what this picture means, it is difficult to criticise it’.

The range of publications available was equally wide. Thackeray’s The History of Samuel Titmarsh was being serialised, and Browning’s ‘Pippa Passes’, with its famous lines ‘God’s in his heaven— / All’s right with the world!’ appeared that spring. The French historian Thiers published his History of the French Revolution at the shocking price of 50s – so it was lucky that the London Library, founded by Thomas Carlyle, opened its doors that year.

Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop began serialisation, featuring Little Nell, whose death was to traumatise the nation, and Oliver Twist appeared in a cheap edition for the first time.

Middle-class women were catered for with Countess Blessington’s Book of Beauty, and dozens of new magazines, including The Magazine of Domestic Economy and New Monthly Magazine. Punch also began its successful comic life, while the working-classes were catered to with a series of ‘Penny’ magazines, which featured fiction, ‘improving’ stories and travel articles.