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Sound of Body: Music, Sports and Health in Victorian Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jennifer R. Sheppard
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Abstract

This article explores ways in which music intersected with the growth of sports in Victorian Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Although there have been valuable studies of music and sports recently, their main emphasis has been on popular music and contemporary sporting events; a study of the period when playing and watching sports began to acquire its present-day shape has yet to be undertaken. This article moves towards that by examining connections between music and sports through broader social and cultural developments, in particular new ideas about morality, health and physical fitness. It situates commentaries about the healthfulness of music in relation to nineteenth-century discourses about sport, in addition to contextualizing notions of singing and health in the increasing professionalization of Victorian medicine. Finally, this article extends and relocates early twentieth-century encapsulations of singing as physical exercise in the context of concern over degeneration in national fitness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 140 , Issue 2 , 2015 , pp. 343 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 R. Peggio, ‘Rambling Reflections: Cricket and Music’, Musical Standard, 12 (1899), 37–8 (p. 37). This was not the first time ‘R. Peggio’ had used cricket to make a point about music. See his ‘Rambling Reflections’, Musical Standard, 8 (1897), 131–2.

2 R. Peggio, ‘Rambling Reflections: Cricket and Music’ (1899), 37.

3 Anthony Bateman, Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolising the Nation, Destabilising Empire (Farnham, 2009), 23–31. R. Peggio's article also anticipates the kinds of comparison between cricket and music that Neville Cardus would occasionally make in the twentieth century, writing for the Manchester Guardian. Ibid., 95–120, and Jeffrey Hill, Sport, Leisure and Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2002), 47.

4 There are, of course, good reasons for the concentration on popular music and modern sport culture; there are also exceptions within most of these studies: Sporting Sounds: Relationships between Sport and Music, ed. Anthony Bateman and John Bale (London, 2009), contains a few chapters on art music and sports, and Ken McLeod's We are the Champions: The Politics of Sports and Popular Music (Farnham and Burlington, 2011) provides a brief historical overview. Nonetheless, McLeod is concerned only with popular music, and the same is true of David Rowe, Popular Cultures: Rock Music, Sport and the Politics of Pleasure (London, 1995). A recent special issue of Sport and Society comprises a valuable and balanced mix of contemporary and more historically situated studies; see ‘Sport, Music, Identities’, ed. Anthony Bateman, special issue, Sport and Society, 17/3 (2014).

5 Steven W. Pope, Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination, 1876–1926 (New York and Oxford, 1997), 62–3.

6 ‘The Influence of Singing on Health’, Musical Standard, 17 (1879), 360.

7 Sophia Marquise A. Ciccolina, Deep Breathing: As a Means of Promoting the Art of Song, and of Curing Weaknesses and Affections of the Throat and Lungs, Especially Consumption, trans. Edgar S. Werner (New York, 1883).

8 ‘Deep Breathing’, Tonic Sol-fa Reporter (1 July 1884), 310–11 (p. 310).

9 Ibid., 311. Though the Tonic Sol-fa Reporter did not mention it, this passage actually appears as an appendix to the book. It did not refer to Ciccolina's own practices, but rather to those of an American doctor, Harriet Larkin. Larkin, apparently, was inspired by Ciccolina's book to run her own lung gymnastics classes from a kind of sanatorium; the appendix serves the purpose of a testimonial.

10 Ibid.

11 Richard Browne, Medicina musica; or a Mechanical Essay on the Effects of Singing Music, and Dancing on Human Bodies (London, 1729).

12 Sidney Ochs, A History of Nerve Functions: From Animal Spirits to Molecular Mechanisms (Cambridge, 2004). See also Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (New York and London, 2012), 16–17.

13 See, for example, Catherine Dale, Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot, 2003), 9–10.

14 Charles Edward McGuire, Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa Movement (Cambridge, 2009), 3.

15 Ibid., 6.

16 Joseph Proudman, ‘Religious Song: Its Power and Importance’, Tonic Sol-fa Reporter (1 June 1877), 119–21.

17 Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, 1978), 19.

18 Kingsley reputedly carried an axe with him when he made his inspection rounds: if a house was insufficiently ventilated, he simply chopped holes in its walls. Pamela Gilbert, Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England (Albany, NY, 2008), 86.

19 Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 1.

20 Dominic Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Woodbridge, 2010), 89.

21 Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, 21.

22 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public Schools: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Ideology (Cambridge, 1981).

23 Ibid., 23–9.

24 James Maurice Wilson, Morality in Public School and its Relation to Religion (London, 1882), 19, quoted in Mangan, Athleticism, 190.

25 Mangan, Athleticism, 128–32.

26 Hill, Sport, Leisure and Culture, 53–4.

27 For example, Charles John Vaughan and George Edward Lynch Cotton, headmasters of Harrow and Marlborough respectively, were far more active than Arnold in organizing and promoting sports and athletic games in the public schools. See Mangan, Athleticism, 22–34.

28 The connections between sports and morality, and between public schools and character, retain considerable currency in present-day Britain, despite all evidence to the contrary, as can be seen in two relatively recent articles from The Guardian. The first, written by sports blogger David Hopps during the riots of August 2011, lamented the decline of cricket in school: if only kids still played the game in school, the wanton destruction caused by young rioters clearly lacking the ‘sense of moral compass’ gained from playing cricket would have been prevented. The other was an explanation by political commentator Anthony Seldon of what state schools can learn from the public schools about ‘character building’. David Hopps, ‘Boisterous Birmingham Crowd Given Reasons to Roar’, The Guardian, 10 August 2011, 3 (<http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/aug/10/england-india-edgbaston-riots>, accessed 10 August 2011); Anthony Seldon, ‘Toby Young Has a Point’, The Guardian, 3 September 2011, 43 (<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/public-schools-toby-young>, accessed 3 September 2011).

29 Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge, 1985), 129.

30 Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure, 100.

31 Ibid., 86, 112.

32 Ibid., 177.

33 Ibid., 122–3.

34 W. E. Shipton, Report of the British Conference of Young Men's Christian Associations (London, 1859), 22–3, quoted in Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure, 124.

35 W. E. Shipton, Quarterly Messenger of the Young Men's Christian Association, November 1869, 486, quoted ibid.

36 Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure, 176–7.

37 Kathleen McCrone, Sport and the Physical Emancipation of Women, 1870–1914 (London, 1988), 101–3.

38 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford, 2010), 36–40.

39 Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 1–2.

40 Horace Mann, ‘Singing and Health’, Tonic Sol-fa Reporter (1 September 1884), 344.

41 Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, 10.

42 Gilbert, Cholera and Nation, 23.

43 Ibid., 29, 43–7.

44 Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, 25.

45 Mary Wilson Carpenter, Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England (Santa Barbara, CA, 2010), 5.

46 Ibid.

47 Gilbert, Cholera and Nation, 6–7.

48 See, for example, ‘Health in Singing’, Musical Herald, 594 (1 September 1897), 287.

49 Henry Campbell, Respiratory Exercises in the Treatment of Disease: Notably of the Heart, Lungs, Nervous and Digestive Systems (London, 1898), 123.

50 Ibid., 123–4.

51 Ibid., 169.

52 Ibid., 170.

53 Ibid., 186–7.

54 Arthur Lewis Hoper-Dixon, The Art of Breathing as Applied to Physical Development, with Respiratory Exercises for Both Children and Adults (London, 1895).

55 ‘A Lady’, ‘Woman's Realm: Her Ways and Wants’, The Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald, 27 January 1900; ‘A Light of Other Days’, Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin), 22 August 1899; ‘Gossip of the Week’, Nottinghamshire Guardian, 26 August 1899.

56 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (London, 1859).

57 Richard Holt, ‘The Amateur Body and the Middle-Class Man: Work, Health and Style in Victorian Britain’, Sport in History, 26 (2006), 352–69 (p. 355).

58 John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes: 1870–1914 (Manchester, 1993), 72–5. See also Mangan, Athleticism, 122–40; McCrone, Sport and the Physical Emancipation of Women, 21–58; Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford, 1989), 76–86.

59 Holt, ‘The Amateur Body and the Middle-Class Man’, 362.

60 Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 78.

61 Ibid., 72.

62 ‘An Afternoon at the Wheel Club: The Musical Ride’, The Graphic (London), 1395 (22 August 1896); Elizabeth Wilson, Love Game: A History of Tennis from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon (London, 2014), 15.

63 Michael Heller, ‘Sport, Bureaucracies and London Clerks 1880–1939’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 25 (2008), 579–614; Joyce Kay, ‘“Maintaining the Traditions of British Sport”? The Private Sports Club in the Twentieth Century’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 30 (2013), 1655–69. Richard Holt has also noted that personal improvement was the equivalent of ‘the ethic of effort and merit which ruled the brave new world of middle-class business’ (‘The Amateur Body and the Middle-Class Man’, 356). It was also the case, however, that sports clubs, as well as non-sport leisure clubs and associations, were initiated from within working-class communities for purposes other than those articulated within the discourses of rational recreation or moral improvement. Diversion and release from work pressures, and providing sense of local identity, for example, are some alternative uses attached to such enterprises. Hill, Sport, Leisure and Culture, 130–45.

64 James Gregory, ‘Hills, Arnold Frank (1857–1927)’, Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopedia, ed. Jack S. Blocker, David M. Fahey and Ian R. Tyrell (Santa Barbara, CA, 2003), 293–4. Hills was also a vegetarian, yet another Victorian development that was part of the growth in food reform and physical culture, as shown by Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 31–2.

65 Holt, Sport and the British, 138.

66 Bateman, Cricket, Literature and Culture, 110–11.

67 Stoddart was captain of both England's cricket team and its rugby team, for which he (and his teammates) were sometimes given compensation. The practice of paying ‘amateurs’ was occasionally known but seldom made public: shamateurism, as it was labelled, had a hugely detrimental impact on the ideal of amateurism. Tony Collins, Rugby's Great Split: Class, Culture and the Origins of Rugby League Football (2nd edn, London, 2006), 58. See also Wray Vamplew, Pay Up and Play the Game: Professional Sport in Britain, 1875–1914 (Cambridge, 1988), 199–203.

68 Dominic Malcolm, Globalising Cricket: Englishness, Empire and Identity (London and New York, 2013), 17–19.

69 Holt, Sport and the British, 143.

70 James Kennaway, Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease (Farnham, 2012), and Trower, Senses of Vibration.

71 Trower, Senses of Vibration, 3–4.

72 Ibid., 8–9.

73 Agnes Savill, Music, Health and Character (London, 1923), 147.

74 See, for example, ‘Swift Camilla Scours the Plain’, John Bull, 2875 (15 January 1876), 42; ‘Irish Association Football’, Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, 373 (1891), 157; ‘The Editor to his Friends’, Chums, 197 (1896), 684; and ‘The Brown Owl’, Atalanta (1 May 1897), 484.

75 Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 13–14.

76 ‘A Suffering Music Teacher’, ‘Correspondence: “Athleticism Rampant”: To the Editor of “Musical News”’, Musical News, 11 (12 September 1896), 230–1 (p. 231). See also ‘The National Review: Trades Ridden Down by the “Bike”’, Review of Reviews (November 1896), 446; this article reported an estimated 50% fall in music sales.

77 ‘Argus’, ‘Music Trade in Northern England’, Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, 24 (1901), 358.

78 ‘Causes of the Celtic Choral Collapse’, Musical Herald, 656 (1 November 1902), 330.

79 Holt, Sport and the British, 87. See also J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (London, 1986).

80 Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, 6.

81 According to Zweiniger-Bargielowska, social Darwinism took time to become common currency and eugenicist hype ballooned during the heated public scandal over the purported drop in men who could meet the physical requirements for military recruitment during the Boer War. Managing the Body, 64–5.

82 ‘Athletics and Musicians’, Musical Standard, 4 (1895), 267.

83 Kennaway, Bad Vibrations, 63.

84 Ibid., 64.

85 Ibid., 68.

86 Ibid., 87.

87 James Cantlie, Physical Efficiency: A Review of the Deleterious Effects of Town Life upon the Population of Britain, with Suggestions for their Arrest (London, 1906), 139–40.

88 Ibid., 141.

89 Cantlie, Physical Efficiency, 185.

90 Ibid., 185–6.

91 ‘The Languishing Londoner’, Funny Folks, 533 (14 February 1885), 54; ‘The Degeneration of Londoners’, Fun, 1032 (18 February 1885), 71; ‘The Death-Dealing Metropolis! – Harrowing Examples of Cantlie-ism’, Fun, 1070 (11 November 1885), 210.

92 ‘Singing for Health’, Musical Herald, 702 (1 September 1906), 288.

93 Lylie Pragnell, ‘The Voice in Relation to Health’, Westminster Review, 170 (August 1908), 220–2.

94 See Gareth Williams, ‘Samson in Senghennydd: Rough Music and Rough Play in Wales 1880–1914’, International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 5 (2009), 83–99.

95 Dave Russell has done some work in this area. See his Popular Music in England 1840–1914: A Social History (rev. edn, Manchester, 1997), 205–48. Both The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History, ed. Trevor Herbert (Oxford, 2000), and Trevor Herbert and Helen Barlow, Music and the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2013), offer some insight into and commentary on implied contributions to physical and moral well-being that brass bands offered participants, as well as establishing numerous contexts for understanding the increasing prominence of brass bands in British culture in the decades around the turn of the century.