FIGURE 1 William Giller, after William Simson, A Camaldolese Monk Shewing the Relics in the Sacristy of His Convent at Rome, mezzotint on paper, issued by the AUL circa 1838, British Museum. Author’s photograph.
Art Unions and the Changing Face of Victorian Gambling
Cordelia Smith
In 1828, the final prize draws of the British state lottery were held. Earlier in the century, lotteries had been declared by the government of the day to be “pernicious, and . . . unproductive.”1 They were a force for evil: bound to ruin their participants, morally and financially, and opposed to economic productivity and commercial prosperity. It was assumed that their primarily working-class participants would ruin themselves by repeated gambling in an attempt to win back money that they could ill afford to lose. Out of this world of irresponsible working-class gamblers and moral panic, the art union movement emerged. Unusually in the history of British lottery gambling, the art unions attracted an overwhelmingly middle-class audience. This middle-class audience was responsible—however inadvertently and obliquely—for blurring the moral opposition between art and gambling. In the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lottery gambling, the largely “respectable” audience that the art unions attracted marked a shift in Britain’s gambling culture. An observation about the late twentieth-century National Lottery in Britain might well have been written of the art unions: “Traditional middle-class dislike of gambling has been overcome in this state-sanctioned activity, which further assuages uneasy consciences with the reminder of the ‘good causes’ that benefit from participation.”2
The degree to which the major art unions became an acceptable and accepted part of British cultural life, despite their lottery element, was due in no small part to the extent to which they undermined traditional assumptions about lottery gambling and the kinds of people who took part in it. Lotteries’ distinction from other kinds of gambling also helped to confound more general assumptions about and objections to, for instance, the gender of the gambler and the locations in which gambling took place. It is significant that lottery gambling is by its nature more restricted than, say, gambling on a roulette wheel or a card game: there is little opportunity to engage in the kind of continuous, uncontrolled spending that those other forms of gambling allow. Similarly, lottery gambling involves few of the “situational influences” that encourage continued participation in other types of types of gambling.3 In a casino or at the racetrack, the gambler is influenced by such factors as the presence of food and drink, lighting, and other gamblers. Yet, crucially for the art unions, most of these factors are absent from lottery gambling. A lottery is a peculiarly domestic form of gambling.4 Participants have no need to be in a particular place or to interact with or even be aware of the existence of other gamblers. A lottery has little of the inherent seductive glamour of the casino or the racetrack or the excitement of their immediate financial gains and losses.5
The art unions’ entanglement in the world of lotteries, gambling legislation, and nineteenth-century art market speculation was largely accidental. The art union movement aimed to bring art to the masses and to inject money into the British art market. Despite their obscurity today, the art unions were little short of a phenomenon, spreading from Germany (where they were known as Kunstvereine) and France in the 1820s to Britain, the United States, and much of the rest of the Anglophone world in the 1830s and 1840s. In Britain, on which this chapter concentrates, they flourished for a little over a century, with the last art unions still in operation as late as the 1940s.6 Simply put, an art union was a lottery in which the prize was a work of art. In reality, there was scope for tremendous variation within this concept; the main distinctions within the movement are set out below. Despite this variety, the art unions’ overarching aims were at root educational and philanthropic. The movement was united by these objects, as well as by the common feature of a prize draw, which was shared by all art unions. In exchange for an annual membership fee, subscribers to an art union were guaranteed entry in its lottery draw. Prizes were either works of art chosen in advance by the organizing committee or the right to select a work worth a specified amount of money from a particular exhibition or gallery. Ownership of, rather than just access to, art was of especial importance: the art unions sought to allow “those who, although possessed of taste, [were] not wealthy” to own works that they could not otherwise have afforded.7
Over the course of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the art unions underwent numerous changes in their organizational structures and in the kinds of people who ran them, as well as those who took part as subscribers. These changes and developments permit the identification of three distinct types of art union, which arose in broadly chronological succession: major art unions, local art unions, and charity art unions. This chapter concentrates only on the major art unions and the local art unions, from the 1830s until the end of the nineteenth century. Major art unions were established beginning in the mid-1830s, while local art unions came to prominence starting around 1860. Charity art unions—which aimed to raise money for good causes—developed in the closing years of the nineteenth century. They came to particular prominence during World War I and therefore fall outside the chronological scope of this chapter.8
Major art unions were large-scale organizations, generally based in large towns and cities, such as London, Birmingham, and Manchester, and often had many thousands of members. Their ambitions were national and even international: the Art Union of London (AUL), for example, had subscribers from as far away as New York, Bombay, and Nova Scotia.9 Other major art unions were less successful in attracting an international audience, but the Royal Birmingham and Midland Counties Art Union (RBMC), for example, had honorary provincial secretaries and subscribers throughout Britain.10
The annual subscription rates of major art unions were high: generally a guinea. As the nineteenth century progressed and cheaper local art unions came to prominence, some major art unions, such as the Liverpool Art Union in 1859, lowered their annual subscription rates to keep pace with their cheaper competitors and encourage new members.11 During the first twenty years of the art union movement, however, the relatively expensive membership fee, together with consistently high subscriber numbers, allowed the major art unions to accumulate substantial prize funds, with individual prizes often worth several hundred pounds. In her study of the AUL, Lyndel Saunders King suggests that to spare a guinea for a year’s membership, a family would have required an income of £250–300 per annum.12 For a clerk, a laborer, or even a gallery attendant at the AUL’s annual exhibition, the yearly subscription fee for a major art union would have equated to around a week’s wages.13 This put major art union membership out of the reach of the poorest members of society, although it was precisely those poor whom the AUL and other art unions had originally aimed to reach.
The local art unions came to prominence in the wake of the 1846 Art Unions Act, which sought to clarify the legal position of the art union movement (until the act was passed, the art unions were technically illegal private lotteries). At first glance, the local art unions appear to have been a smaller-scale version of the major art unions. Indeed, this is broadly how they were regarded during the nineteenth century. The 1845 report of the Select Committee on Art Unions described all “the other [major and local] Art Unions of England” as “differ[ing] little from that of [the Art Union of] London in their objects or constitution.”14 In reality, the objects and constitutions of this second kind of art union were frequently sufficiently divergent from those of the major art unions to mark them out as a distinct strand within the art union movement, however.
Local art unions were altogether more modest in their ambitions than the major art unions, with much lower subscription rates (frequently of one shilling); top prizes with a value of around ten or fifteen pounds; and a body of subscribers drawn primarily from the immediate vicinity of the town in which the art union was based. They were generally organized in conjunction with the exhibition of a local art society and fell under the auspices of that society rather than existing as independent organizations, as did the major art unions. They did not aim to equal either the longevity or the broad reach of the major art unions. They were, rather, important expressions of mid-Victorian civic pride. Instead of seeking to improve the lot of the nation’s artists, the local art unions sought to promote the work of artists from one particular town or city.
The art union movement originated as part of a much wider, radical project to bring education and self-improvement to the masses, in the form of public libraries, mechanics’ institutes, government-run schools of design, and public museums. The major art unions went to great lengths to maintain their activities throughout the year and not just to focus on the prize draw. As part of this endeavor, it was common practice for major art unions to distribute an exclusive engraving to their members in exchange for the annual subscription fee. This was predominantly intended as a way of ensuring that even those subscribers who failed to win anything in the lottery prize draw were able to own a piece of art, albeit in reproduction. It was also a way of engaging with the contemporary art world and an opportunity for the art unions to put their money where their mouths were by patronizing living artists and offering financial support to the British art market.
Additionally, the practice of distributing prints went some way towards negating the accusations of gambling that were leveled at the art unions throughout the nineteenth century, by presenting art union membership as a safe investment. Every subscriber was guaranteed a return for his or her money: “There is the certainty of the engraving and only the chance of the [prize] picture,” as George Godwin, a founder of the AUL, pointed out to the 1845 Select Committee on Art Unions.15 As the RBMC noted in 1844, “It will be kept in mind that the prints being much above the value of the amount subscribed, the chance of obtaining a prize is an additional premium to the Subscriber.”16
To extend the range of people who might gain access to the supposed moral and social benefits of art, some major art unions, such as the AUL, also held exhibitions of their prizes.17 The AUL was unusual in opening its prize exhibition to the general public free of charge.18 For the first two weeks, admission was for AUL members and their guests only, but the final week of the exhibition was open to all.19 This proved hugely popular, and the press reported with some surprise that this experiment had passed off successfully, noting particularly “a large influx of visitors of the middle class.”20 This policy of admission offered a clear statement of the managing committee’s commitment to extending access to art as widely as possible and was innovative at a time when moves to establish public galleries and museums in Britain were in their infancy.
LOTTERY GAMBLING AND THE ART UNIONS
The art union movement traced its origins to several interwoven factors, including the German Kunstvereine, the 1835–36 Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures, and increasing efforts to extend the reach of the visual arts in Britain, as suggested above, but also a rich history of British lottery gambling. Despite the wide range of influences on the foundation of the early major art unions, the lottery element soon attracted controversy, and that shaped official responses to the art union movement for much of the nineteenth century.
The first officially approved British lottery occurred in 1569, with a royal warrant rather than at the government’s instigation; nevertheless, it established the form that was taken by later state lotteries. Its purpose was to raise money, as a proclamation announced, “towardes the reparation of the havens [i.e., harbors] and strength of the Realme, and towards such other publique good workes.”21 This lottery marked the start of the use of lotteries as an official means of raising money for the state at times when revenue gained by ordinary taxation was insufficient to meet the Treasury’s needs. The state lotteries of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were interest lotteries.22 The original investment was guaranteed to be returned to the participant after a specified period of time—sometimes having accumulated a prearranged rate of interest, sometimes not—with the incentive to invest increased by the chance, decided by lot, of winning a higher interest rate.23
By the late 1760s, interest lotteries had largely been replaced by more “conventional prize lotteries.”24 With the move away from interest lotteries, which had required a significant amount of money to invest, there emerged the stereotype of the soon-to-be-destitute working-class gambler, as participation was opened up to increasingly large numbers of people.25 This shift was prompted mainly by the government’s desire to increase the lotteries’ potential for generating profit, by increasing both the number of potential participants and the opportunities during the sale of tickets at which profit might be made.26
The Treasury did not have carte blanche to announce a lottery as and when it pleased; a new act of Parliament was required for each year’s series of draws. There were further restrictions on the number of draws that could take place in any one year and on the number and value of prizes that could be offered. These limitations on the government’s lotteries continued even during the so-called lottery mania of the eighteenth century and highlight a persistent unease among those in power about lotteries as a means of raising revenue. Such reservations became increasingly prominent after the turn of the nineteenth century, when a perceived increase in the number of working-class lottery gamblers led to existing gambling legislation being tightened. This was in part a reaction to the belief that “servants, children, and unwary persons” were at risk of succumbing to the temptation of lottery gambling.27 Despite the restrictions inherent in lottery gambling mentioned earlier, the suggestion was made that unlucky working-class gamblers would ultimately turn to crime in their efforts to recoup their small but significant financial losses. In 1802, an act was passed that was designed “to suppress certain games and lotteries not authorised by law.”28 This was prompted by the apparent increase in the number of illegal private lotteries, particularly, one egregious case in which a great many people were said to have been cheated.29 The passage of the 1802 Gaming Act hinted at a growing discomfort among those in government about the continuation of the state lotteries. This was given fuller expression six years later, in the inquiries of the 1808 Select Committee on the Laws Relating to Lotteries.30 The publication of the committee’s report marked a sea change in the government’s position on lottery gambling. Whatever financial benefits lotteries might once have brought to the Treasury, by the early nineteenth century their moral impact had become of overwhelming significance.
That the moral influence of the lottery was negative was beyond question even before the select committee sat: its task was “to enquire how far the Evils attending Lotteries have been remedied by the Laws passed respecting the same; and to report . . . upon such further Measures as may be necessary for the Remedy thereof.”31 It is notable that the lottery’s “Evils and Calamities” were assumed to be attendant only on “the lower classes of Society”: “whether successful or unfortunate, [they] are, generally speaking, either immediately or ultimately tempted to their ruin; and there is scarcely any condition of life so destitute and abandoned, that its distresses have not been aggravated by this allurement to Gaming, held forth by the State.”32
It is here that the relative oddity of the art unions becomes apparent: not only were their participants middle class, but the art unions also undermined the idea that lottery gambling was a waste of money, by providing engravings to subscribers and injecting money into the British art market. These were lotteries that saw their participants’ money put to productive use rather than wastefully frittered away. This combination of factors diluted the supposed moral opposition between art and gambling. The art unions offered a low-risk form of carefully prescribed lottery gambling to a middle-class audience. Out of the financial reach of supposedly vulnerable and feckless working-class gamblers, the art unions unwittingly effected a significant shift in British gambling culture. This cultivation of a middle-class audience was arguably as great a change as the movement away from primarily aristocratic investment to working-class participation in lotteries that had occurred in the mid-eighteenth century.33
GAMBLING ON THE ART MARKET
As already suggested, the major art unions were assiduous in ensuring that their subscribers received direct and tangible returns for their “investment” in membership. Art unions of all types succeeded in removing or at least minimizing the appearance of risk with great deftness and were therefore better able to deflect charges of encouraging gambling. For the major art unions in the 1830s and early 1840s, it was a simple matter of ensuring the appearance of legality in the face of existing lottery laws. The presentation of annual engravings acted as a very obvious return for the annual membership fee, turning subscription into, on one level, an entirely straightforward exchange of money for a print: the claim was made that subscribers simply paid their guinea membership fee for a print that was worth a guinea.34
With their relatively low subscription fees, the local art unions generally lacked the financial resources to provide their members with annual engravings. Nonetheless, they still offered a clear return for subscribers’ money, albeit in a more oblique fashion. Because of the relatively narrow circle of subscribers and artists within which the local art unions operated, subscription money was distributed among a correspondingly small group of local artists or went towards a local art school or museum. This meant that the ultimate destination of their membership fees would have remained apparent to local art unions’ subscribers. Whether the fees supported the work of an individual local artist or funded a museum or gallery, there remained a direct connection between the subscription fee and a concrete outcome that it had enabled. Rather than representing a loss of money to a lottery gamble, the art union system retained an element of what Arjun Appadurai calls “reciprocal sacrifice.”35 Both the subscriber and the art union were each required to surrender something of value to the other: a painting, a print, or access to an exhibition; or the cost of the year’s subscription.
The art unions also reflected an increasingly widespread acceptance of art as a sphere of investment or financial speculation, as well as a potential source of wealth. The contemporary art market was perceived as an unusually productive and financially secure facet of the nineteenth-century marketplace.36 The tangible nature of a painting, drawing, or sculpture increased the perception of art as a “safe” investment and minimized the extent to which the investor appeared to be betting on the movement of the market, even in cases where this was the explicit intention.37 In an economy that was anxious to eliminate idle or unproductive capital, purchasing art was viewed as a particularly productive way to spend money, whether that money belonged to an individual or an art union. Writing in 1839 of the collection of Benjamin Godfrey Windus, the Art-Union offered the following view:38
[H]e who spends a part of his fortune in works of art, has the knowledge that he contributes to his country’s glory, and the welfare and prosperity of her most meritorious citizens;—he has the continual enjoyment of objects fitted to produce it, and, at the same time, a certainty that his descendents will not suffer because he has had the indulgence of his tastes. Whenever a well selected stock of modern pictures have been sold, they have brought a larger sum than was originally paid for them . . . ; and . . . in some instances a single work has sold for as many guineas as it originally cost shillings. There are higher and better feelings which stimulate collectors of paintings and drawings; but this point should not be lost sight of.39
The Art-Union’s coverage of Windus’s collecting practices reveals the different status of art market speculation compared to, for instance, stock market speculation. Whatever the collector’s ultimate plans for his collection, for as long as the pictures were in his possession he had, as the Art-Union put it, “the indulgence of his tastes” and “the continual enjoyment of [those] objects.” The works of art retained other kinds of value—cultural, aesthetic, spiritual—even while their owner waited on favorable movements in the art market to exploit their financial value. The possibility of financial gain was subsumed by the fact that a painting continued to exist as an object to be experienced and enjoyed.
In the 1830s and 1840s, the AUL had fiercely resisted the idea that its subscribers might make a financial profit from its prize draws,40 and attempts to exploit the system met with public denouncement.41 This was partly due to the art unions’ wish to distance themselves from accusations of gambling or the perception that their subscribers were motivated by financial gain rather than a love of art. By the 1870s, however, the AUL’s annual reports had come to reveal a very different attitude. The ideological emphasis on the spiritual and social benefits of art of the AUL’s early years had given way to a more pragmatic acceptance of the possibility of small-scale art market speculation as an acceptable motivation for art union membership: “A simple small picture,” such as might be won in an art union, “may exhibit, in its degree, as much truth, beauty, and artistic knowledge as a large canvas. Apart from these considerations, too, it is undeniable that a picture judiciously bought is a valuable investment, and will at any time realize its cost.”42 The 1870 report went on to cite the case of an anonymous AUL prizewinner “of 20l. [who] purchased a marine subject at the Old Water-colour Gallery”: “Since then he has accumulated with great judgement a collection of drawings which may be valued at between 5,000l. and 6,000l.”43 Collecting art with a view to increasing the value of the works is here, in the 1870s, implicitly encouraged. The prizewinner’s “great judgement” is clearly related to the financial value of the collection he has amassed rather than its artistic merits; the subjects and artists of the drawings in his collection are left unmentioned.
This shift in attitude on the part of the AUL’s managing committee was largely determined by the changing nature of the British art world in the years after the art union movement’s inception. Once public galleries and museums had begun to be established not just in London but throughout Britain, the major art unions’ original aims became less urgent, as the AUL acknowledged in relation to its 1869 exhibition of prizes: “The works selected by the prizeholders of last year were, as usual, exhibited in the Gallery of the Institute of Painters in Water-colours, and large numbers visited the rooms; although from the greatly increased numbers of exhibitions open to the public in the present day, our gallery does not attract the throng of visitors which, in former times, on the evenings when it was open, made Suffolk-street well nigh impassable.”44 The changing nature of the late nineteenth-century art world meant that the AUL had little choice but to embrace the likelihood of some kind of speculation or financial motivation among its subscribers. By 1870, its founding aims and ambitions were in many respects out of date. In openly acknowledging that its subscribers might make a profit from art union prize pictures or from collections that were inspired by an art union prize, the AUL was able to ensure its continuing relevance in a very different cultural environment from the one in which it had originated. Such art market speculation attracted little of the controversy that had surrounded the art unions’ lottery draws earlier in the century.
However much the AUL had resisted the possibility of overt financial motivation among its subscribers in its early years, it (like other major art unions) was arguably involved in its own, more ambiguous kind of art market speculation, particularly in relation to the annual prints. The role of annual engravings in deflecting charges of gambling rested on the claim that they had a market value equal to or greater than the guinea membership fee. In the case of the AUL, at least, there was no way that this claim could readily be substantiated. The engravings were produced exclusively for the AUL each year and were therefore not available for sale on the open market before they were issued to subscribers. Other major art unions tended to buy directly from printsellers the copyright to existing but as-yet-unpublished plates. As a result of the prints’ supposed value of a guinea, there was little incentive for anyone to try to buy an AUL engraving on its own once it had been issued: the more sensible approach would have been to purchase art union membership and receive the engraving for free, as well as a chance in the lottery draw. The opportunities for the prints’ value to be tested on the open market were therefore extremely limited.
The AUL’s choice of print depended on a speculative assessment of the financial value, as well as the aesthetic worth, of the images that it selected to be engraved. The AUL’s managing committee risked undermining its assertion that art union membership was at root a straightforward exchange if its judgment about the value of the annual engraving was perceived to be inaccurate. The committee’s assessment of the financial value of the annual engravings did more than just counter accusations of gambling, however. The monetary value that was ascribed to the prints also acted as an implicit guarantee of their artistic value and cultural worth.45 The indication of the financial value of the annual engravings allowed subscribers to know that they had received a work of art that gave them “value for money” insofar as it established a fair exchange for their membership fees.46
In principle, distributing prints worth a guinea should have been relatively straightforward; in practice, however, this apparently simple aim presented a host of problems for the AUL in particular. Originally, the AUL had intended to select the subject of that year’s engraving from among the prize pictures from the previous year. The hope was that prizewinners would be encouraged to select a “picture of sufficient importance” to do the art union justice, while exercising judgment, seeking advice, and educating themselves in the process.47 This idea reflected the AUL’s didactic principles and the importance of the active participation of its members. It encapsulated many of the AUL’s founding aims, but it was fraught with problems surrounding both the aesthetic and the financial value of the engravings, as well as the logistics of printing and distributing them.
One of the most persistent criticisms leveled at the AUL was that in publishing reproductions in such large numbers—anything up to fifteen thousand in the art union’s more successful years—it was fundamentally cheapening art in its broadest sense. The technology that allowed a print to be issued in an edition of many thousands was relatively new: the process of engraving on a steel plate had not been developed successfully until the 1820s, prior to which copper plates had allowed for editions of only a few hundred at most.48 Debates about the status of reproductions of original artworks are beyond the scope of this chapter, but suffice to say that the AUL intended its prints to be works of art in themselves rather than simply records of other works.
The greatest threat to the AUL’s plan to distribute to its members financially and aesthetically valuable prints was a lack of time. The logistics of selecting a suitable painting from among the prizes, securing the services of an engraver, having the painting reproduced, and distributing it to members in the furthest reaches of the empire proved almost impossible to manage. In the AUL’s first few years, the engravings were delivered to subscribers only after long delays. When they finally did arrive, despite being the work of well-respected engravers, observers not only remarked on their lateness but also raised questions about their quality. Punch had much fun at the expense of the AUL’s prints, as the following extract acidly suggests:
The subscribers of the Art-Union [of London] were surprised last week with the distribution of a print which has been due we cannot tell how long. Many could scarcely believe their eyes; others sent it back as a mistake. . . . We have taken the trouble to look at the print twice, and must say . . . it is just as bad as any of the prints that have preceded it. We could trace a great deal that was unfinished—as if the engraving had been done in too great a hurry. . . . We are sorry to see such a fine Society hastening its own ruin. We are loth to condemn, but it must be recollected we have proofs of the very blackest dye before us.49
The first print that reached the AUL’s subscribers was William Giller’s mezzotint after William Simson’s A Camaldolese Monk Shewing the Relics in the Sacristy of His Convent at Rome (fig. 1). As intended, the original painting was a prize that had been selected by a winner in the AUL’s 1837 lottery draw. That winner, however, was Benjamin Bond Cabbell, a member of the AUL’s managing committee, and an Oxford-educated barrister and member of Parliament: hardly the disadvantaged, self-educated subscriber that the art union had originally aimed to attract. Furthermore, Cabbell added a staggering £132 10s. of his own money to his prize of £25 to buy the picture. (To put that figure in context, an Anglican parson received a stipend of around £140 a year.)50 The reason the AUL’s committee settled on Simson’s painting as the subject for the first engraving is not recorded, but the person who chose it and its high financial value must surely have been significant factors.
FIGURE 1 William Giller, after William Simson, A Camaldolese Monk Shewing the Relics in the Sacristy of His Convent at Rome, mezzotint on paper, issued by the AUL circa 1838, British Museum. Author’s photograph.
However unenthusiastic the press’s critical reaction to the prints, they were evidently a popular and successful aspect of AUL membership. The AUL continued to issue annual engravings to its subscribers until it ceased operation in 1912, adopting new printing technologies such as chromolithographs and Goupil gravures to keep pace with changing expectations about and the increasing availability of reproduced images. By the mid-1840s, the AUL had abandoned its attempts to choose a picture, commission, and distribute a print in under a year and instead selected images for reproduction several years in advance. This alleviated many of the time pressures incumbent on the engraver and in many cases resulted in images that were far more detailed and carefully executed than the earliest prints had been. Engravings such as C. W. Sharpe’s Life at the Seaside (fig. 2), which was issued to the AUL’s subscribers in 1859, are truly impressive examples of mid-nineteenth-century printmaking. Irrespective of the artistic merits of the annual engravings, however, the guarantee of subscribers receiving a print in exchange for their membership fee secured the idea that the art unions provided something more than a simple lottery gamble. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the major art unions had established themselves as a legitimate cultural activity, whose lottery element was merely one facet of their activities.
FIGURE 2 C. W. Sharpe, after William Powell Frith, Life at the Seaside, steel engraving on paper, issued by the AUL in 1859, British Museum. Author’s photograph.
The prevalence of local art unions during the last third of the nineteenth century paints a revealing picture of the increasingly prominent (and largely uncontroversial) place of small-scale lottery gambling within British cultural life. If the major art unions had succeeded in establishing themselves as a legitimate economic and cultural activity during the 1830s and 1840s, the local art unions secured the movement’s place in the British art world. By the final third of the nineteenth century, when the local art unions came to prominence, participation in an art union lottery draw was firmly established as a routine aspect of many cultural activities in Britain. The early major art unions’ ambitions of encouraging “high art” had largely dissipated by the time the local art unions emerged, and the movement became increasingly associated with entertainment and recreation rather than the high-minded didacticism that had motivated the founders of, for instance, the AUL. Although the most common price was a shilling, local art union membership could cost as little as a single penny.51 Along with these lower subscription prices, the local art unions saw a slight downward shift in the social class of art union members. While the local art unions continued to be organized and patronized by prominent figures from the local community, just as the major art unions had been, their subscribers were largely lower-middle and middle class.52
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, both major and local art unions had ceased to attract the kind of widespread press attention that had surrounded the major art unions earlier in the century. In part, this was a reflection of the changing social status of art union organizers and participants.53 Crucially, however, it also reveals the extent to which the 1846 Art Unions Act had crystallized the distinction between these and other (illegal) lotteries. No longer the subject of media or legal scrutiny, local art unions were free to exploit the public’s appetite for low-risk, small-scale lottery gambling. As with the early major art unions, the absence of cash prizes in the local art unions decreased the appearance of subscribers’ financial motivation and emphasized entertainment and education above monetary gain: this was gambling for fun, not profit.
The wholesale acceptance of local art unions as an acceptable and legitimate aspect of cultural activities is strikingly demonstrated by the Alexandra Palace Art Union (APAU). First opened in 1873, on Queen Victoria’s fifty-fourth birthday, the Alexandra Palace was intended to be a new “Palace of the People” for north London, fit to rival Joseph Paxton’s relocated Crystal Palace in the south of the city. The new palace would be a place of recreation, education, and entertainment, situated in many acres of attractive, landscaped parkland and surrounded by newly built suburban villas.54
In March 1874, it was proposed that one-fifth of the revenue from sales of Alexandra Palace season tickets should be devoted to the purchase of paintings, drawings, and sculptures. These works would then be distributed in an art union prize draw. There would be no explicit subscription to this art union, however. Rather, every season ticket holder would automatically become an art union member and be entered in the draw. To purchase a season ticket was also to purchase art union membership, whether the ticket holder wanted it or not.55
The cost of membership of the APAU was much higher than most local art unions—an adult’s season ticket cost a guinea, while a child’s cost half that.56 Just as the major art unions’ distribution of annual engravings served to negate accusations of gambling, so too did the incidental nature of subscription to the APAU place it firmly in the realm of legitimate expenditure. The purchaser of an Alexandra Palace season ticket gained yearlong access to the edifying attractions of the park and palace. The excitement of the gamble and the chance of winning a loosely “artistic” prize were presumably secondary for most season ticket holders. Indeed, some season ticket purchasers might not have realized that they were buying art union membership.
The way in which the APAU acquired its subscribers was highly unusual. Nonetheless, the fact that season ticket holders were automatically included in a lottery gamble, whether they wanted to be or not, does not seem to have troubled either the press or the Board of Trade, under whose jurisdiction the art unions fell.57 The only objections to the APAU that were recorded in the board’s minutes relate to its commercial aspect and its apparent function as “an inducement for persons to take Season Tickets.”58 Private profit, not the inducement to gamble, was the greatest concern. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the local art unions had succeeded in cementing the idea—engendered by the major art unions—of a morally neutral lottery. The local art unions had become so ubiquitous an aspect of British cultural life that their status as lotteries largely disappeared from public perception.
The increasing toleration of the local art unions and of small-scale lottery gambling that emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century was a far cry from the views that had been expressed by the 1866 Select Committee on Art Union Laws. The select committee’s report asserted that almost all art unions other than the AUL and the Art Union of Glasgow did little more than encourage gambling.59 Had that truly been the case, it seems highly unlikely that an institution such as the Alexandra Palace—which sought to establish itself as a source of education, entertainment, and edification for all classes of society and all ages of visitor—would have organized an art union in the first place or that otherwise respectable visitors would have allowed their children to hold tickets in their own names for such a lottery.60 Yet so they did, and in large numbers.
Although the APAU’s method of subscription was unusual, its involvement of children in art union gambling was not. The involvement of children and women in the art union movement corresponded to the rise of the local art unions, beginning around 1860. Children’s involvement was likely rendered uncontroversial by the didactic purpose of the art union prize draw. Had art unions offered cash prizes, for example, the gambling element would arguably have been more obvious, and the likelihood of children’s involvement would presumably have been reduced. The APAU was part of the Alexandra Palace’s didactic project; as such, children’s involvement in that, as in other art unions, could be understood as an activity that was more closely related to education and cultural refinement than to gambling and financial risk.
In 1891, the first prize in the Derby Art Union, a local art union, was won by Miss Edith Hannah Haslam, described by the Derby Mercury as “the Mayor’s little daughter.”61 Her appearance is revealing of shifting attitudes towards the art unions’ perceived status as lotteries, as well as changing attitudes towards lottery gambling more generally. That such a prominent figure in the life of the city should have allowed his young daughter to participate in the art union under her own name, rather than that of either of her parents, is a clear demonstration of the changing status of small-scale lottery gambling within British cultural life that had occurred after the 1830s and 1840s. It also reveals the increasingly nuanced understanding of certain kinds of lottery gambling that had emerged by the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This increasing toleration of lottery gambling within certain prescribed limits was in no small part due to the ubiquity and success of the art unions.
These changing attitudes, together with the proliferation of local art unions, tie in with much wider art union participation in terms of age, gender, and to a certain degree, class. The exact extent of that participation is impossible to chart, however, because of the extremely limited amount of surviving evidence of local art union subscribers. The evidence that does survive in newspaper reports and in the Board of Trade’s files does not suggest that the relatively cheap subscription rate of around a shilling resulted in significant working-class involvement. Despite the movement’s longevity and widespread popularity, the art unions’ didactic and philanthropic ambitions remained unfulfilled. The AUL’s aim of offering art to all classes of society—including “those who, although possessed of taste, are not wealthy”—was never achieved.62 As we have seen, early ambitions of bringing art to a working-class audience were hampered by the major art unions’ subscription costs. While the cheaper local art unions might have offered an opportunity for broader membership, their close association with the middle-class world of art societies, provincial galleries, and rational recreation largely prevented this.
In many respects, the story of the art union movement is one of failure: failure truly to bring art to the masses, and failure to encourage or engage with critically lauded works of “high art.” Instead, they trod a middling path, almost wholly ignored by the art establishment after the 1840s and making only a limited effort to encourage working-class participation after midcentury. Yet while the art unions had sought to reinvigorate and revolutionize the British art market, their most lasting—and unexpected—impact was on the country’s gambling legislation and on popular attitudes towards lottery gambling. The passage of the 1846 Art Unions Act was a clear statement that the moral benefits of art outweighed the deleterious impact of gambling. Although the necessity of amending existing lottery legislation had been acknowledged in Parliament as early as the 1860s, not until the 1932–33 Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting and the 1934 Lotteries and Betting Act did the possibility of morally acceptable lottery gambling that was not an art union become enshrined in British law.63 The widespread popularity of the art union movement throughout the nineteenth century demonstrated clearly that there was a respectable middle-class market for small-scale lottery gambling. Concurrently, the major art unions’ involvement in art market speculation, as part of their production of annual engravings, served to underline the moral and categorical ambiguity surrounding investment, speculation, and gambling in the art world.
The art union movement was more than just a curiosity of the mid-Victorian art world. The art unions influenced the shape of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century gambling legislation and contributed to widespread perceptions that small-scale lottery gambling could be not just morally acceptable but a force for good. The “good causes” that are supported by revenue from the present National Lottery in Britain are central to removing it “from the arena of gambling proper.”64 The founders of the first major art unions could scarcely have imagined how far-reaching and multifaceted the influence of the art union movement would turn out to be.
1. “Second Report from the Committee on the Laws Relating to Lotteries,” Parliamentary Papers, 1808, p. 11.
2. Gerda Reith, Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 99.
3. Mark Clapson, A Bit of a Flutter: Popular Gambling and English Society, c. 1823–1961 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 187.
4. Emma Casey, Women, Pleasure and the Gambling Experience (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 7.
5. Clapson, Bit of a Flutter, 187.
6. “Exeter Art Union,” Art Unions (Code No. 2), 1943–47, Board of Trade and Successors, Companies Department, Correspondence and Papers, National Archives (UK), BT 58/355.
7. “The Art-Union of London,” Art-Union 1 (1839): 20.
8. An article about the charity art unions is currently in preparation by the present author.
9. “Art-Union of London,” Art-Union 7 (1845): 133.
10. A list “of the Towns in which the Society has Agencies established” was sent to the committee of the RBMC in the 1840s; the list included, among others, London, Bristol, Dublin, Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, Portsmouth, King’s Lynn, and Hastings. Birmingham City Archives, RBMC leaflets 1842–49, 520432. Identifying subscribers to art unions other than the AUL is nearly impossible: many art unions did not maintain records, and little has survived of those that were kept.
11. Roger Smith, “The Art Union Movement in England c.1835–1866” (doctoral thesis, University of Birmingham, 1980), 100.
12. Lyndel Saunders King, The Industrialization of Taste: Victorian England and the Art Union of London (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 43.
13. Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City, 1840–1870 (London: Phoenix, 2005), 378; AUL Minutes, II, British Library, Add. MSS 38866.
14. “Report from the Select Committee on Art Unions,” Parliamentary Papers, 1845, VII.1, p. iv.
15. Ibid., 21.
16. RBMC, “Report of the Managing Committee” (Birmingham, 1844), 4.
17. The Edinburgh-based major art union, the Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts (APFA), also opened its exhibition to anyone who applied for admission. This exhibition was open only on the day of the prize draw, however, and in practice its visitors appear to have been confined to the APFA’s members and their associates. “Report from the Select Committee on Art Unions,” 70.
18. The AUL’s first exhibition in 1839 was open only to members, however. AUL Minutes, I, British Library, Add. MSS 38865.
19. AUL Minutes, II, British Library, Add. MSS 38866.
20. “Varieties: Art-Union Prizes Exhibition,” Art-Union 5 (1843): 249.
21. Quoted in John Ashton, The History of Gambling in England (London: Duckworth, 1898), 223.
22. Roger Munting, An Economic and Social History of Gambling in Britain and the USA (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 56.
23. C. L’Estrange Ewen, Lotteries and Sweepstakes (London: Heath Cranton, 1932), 129; John Ashton, A History of English Lotteries (London: Leadenhall Press, 1893), 49.
24. Munting, Economic and Social History, 56.
25. Ewen, Lotteries and Sweepstakes, 246–49.
26. Ibid., 246.
27. “Report of the Select Committee on Lotteries,” Parliamentary Papers, 1808, p. i.
28. “An Act to Suppress Certain Games and Lotteries Not Authorised by Law,” 1802 (known as the 1802 Gaming Act), 42 Geo. 3 c. 119, s.2.
29. Ewen, Lotteries and Sweepstakes, 287.
30. “Select Committee on Lotteries.”
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 11–12.
33. Reith, Age of Chance, 71.
34. See, for instance, “Art-Unions: Their Legality or Illegality?” Art-Union 5 (1843): 87.
35. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4.
36. See, for example, “Visits to Private Galleries: The Collection of B. G. Windus, Esq., at Tottenham Green,” Art-Union 1 (1839): 49.
37. Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 40–44.
38. Despite the name, The Art-Union: A Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts had no formal links to the art union movement. The magazine changed its name to the Art-Journal in 1849, possibly to avoid this confusion. It was a consistently staunch supporter of the art union movement, however.
39. “Collection of B. G. Windus.”
40. It was partly on this ground that the AUL argued its case for allowing winners to select their own prize pictures when the Board of Trade sought to alter this system in 1848. Winners who were given paintings that were not to their taste were supposed to be more likely to sell them than if they had selected the prizes themselves. “Memorial of the Art Union of London requesting that the Board of Trade abandons its proposed alterations . . . ,” 1848, Board of Trade, General In-Letters and Files, 1037–2413, National Archives (UK), BT 1/469/26.
41. See, for instance, Athenaeum 16, September 7 (1844): 814.
42. AUL Annual Report, 1870, p. 5.
43. Ibid., 5–6.
44. Ibid., 5.
45. The relationship between financial cost and broader notions of value here is understood in terms of the work of Karl Marx and Georg Simmel. See Karl Marx, Capital, ed. David McLellan, abridged ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004).
46. Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities,” 4–5.
47. AUL Minutes, II, British Library, Add. MSS 38866.
48. Hilary Beck, ed., Victorian Engravings (London: Victoria and Albert Publications, 1975), 19.
49. “A Genuine ‘Doo,’” Punch 7 (1848): 91.
50. Picard, Victorian London, 379.
51. Various documents concerning establishment of local art unions, Board of Trade and Successors, Companies Department, Correspondence and Papers, National Archives (UK), BT 58/9; “Manchester School of Art, As to establishment of Art Union . . . ,” 1884, Board of Trade and Successors, Railway Department, Correspondence and Papers, National Archives (UK), BT 22/33/12.
52. In describing local art union subscribers as lower-middle class, I follow Geoffrey Crossick’s definition of the term in “The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain: A Discussion,” in The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914, ed. Geoffrey Crossick (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 11–60.
53. The charity art unions, which were generally organized and run by aristocratic and upper-middle-class society women, saw a corresponding increase in the amount of media attention that they garnered.
54. Morning Chronicle, November 11, 1858, p. 3.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. “Earls Court Art Union (formerly Alexandra Palace Art Union),” 1906, Board of Trade, Finance Department, Registered Files (F Series), National Archives (UK), BT 15/53.
58. Ibid.
59. “Report from the Select Committee on Art Union Laws,” Parliamentary Papers, 1866, VII.1, p. iv.
60. Francis Fuller, Description of the Alexandra Park Tontine and Art Unions (London: Alfred Boot, 1870), 15.
61. “Derby Corporation Art Gallery Art Union. Prize Drawing,” Derby Mercury, January 14, 1891, p. 5.
62. “The Art-Union of London,” Art-Union 1 (1839): 20.
63. “An Act to amend the law with respect to betting on tracks where sporting events take place . . . ; [and] to amend the law with respect to lotteries and certain prize competitions; and for purposes connected with the matters aforesaid,” 1934, 24 and 25 Geo. 5 c. 58.
64. Reith, Age of Chance, 103.
