From the 18th century onwards, music festivals were an important part of public cultural life in Britain; these proliferated as transport possibilities grew following the introduction of railway travel in the 1830s. Their appeal would continue through the century and culminated in the establishment of the Promenade Concerts or “Proms” in London (1895) and a Bayreuth-style music festival in Glastonbury, organized by the King-Arthur-besotted composer Rutland Boughton. Used originally as a platform for showcasing his own operas (Celticist inflections of a Wagnerian approach), it ran annually until 1926.

Prior to the advent of railway travel, festivals were more restricted in their appeal. A commemoration of Shakespeare was first attempted by David Garrick in 1769, commemorative Handel concerts were held in 1784 and 1785, and a festive centenary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was proposed in the Gentleman’s magazine; this involved also a projected commemorative monument to be inscribed with the Bill of Rights in pure “Saxon English”. In the new century, George III’s jubilee was celebrated in 1809, and a medieval-style tournament, inspired by Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, was held on the estate of the Earl of Eglinton in Scotland in 1839; an aristocratic folly, it portended the much later taste for historical re-enactments. Much wider in their appeal were the more-or-less spontaneous celebrations of the centenary of Robert Burns’s birth in 1859, held locally but in a great multitude of places and publicized nationwide. Around this time, “Burns Night” was becoming an annual feast day, albeit usually celebrated in diffuse form (private or small-scale convivial circles) rather than as nationwide social events.

Throughout the second half of the century, the unveiling of statues to the likes of Walter Scott or Shakespeare would call forth public festivities, banquets and the like. An important venue for leisure-time festive gatherings was the Crystal Palace in London; it was originally built for the Great Exhibition of 1852, but was also used for Handel festivals in 1857 and 1859, for the Burns centenary of that year and other mass entertainments. On the whole, however, such commemorative festivities were local or regional rather than national in their appeal. Although the Victorian cult of King Alfred was nationwide in its literary manifestations, the millennium of his birth was a more local affair (Wantage, 1849), as was the erection of a statue in his honour in Winchester (1899-1901). The portentous staving off of the Armada invasion in 1588 was marked by a statue erected at Plymouth Hoe, where the fleet had first been sighted. One centenary was passed by in remarkable silence: the 800th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings; this can probably be understood from the low cultural esteem in which the Norman conquerors were held in the (waning) Saxonist climate of the time. One literary effusion evidently timed to mark the date empathized more with the defeated Saxons than with the victorious Normans: Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866); two commemorative works dedicated to the defeated Saxon King Harold bracket the 1866 date: Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, or the last of the Saxon kings (1848) and Tennyson’s Harold (1876).

The chief mobilizer for national festivals in the closing years of the century was the monarchy, especially the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897; it was an imperial rather than national event, marked heavily by the military and ceremonial presence of the Empire’s overseas parts (and provoking the protest-commemoration, in Ireland, of the centenary of the 1798 rebellion). It was followed by her state funeral in 1901. Famously, the investiture ceremony of the future George V as Prince of Wales in 1911 was revived in a historicist way (as an “invention of tradition”) once the patriotic appeal of such royal pomp and circumstance was realized. Royal pageantry and ceremony, from which Victoria during her long widowhood had wholly withdrawn, became, under her 20th-century successors, cherished demonstrations of the “traditions” considered to be characteristic of English society: Trooping the Colour, the Opening of Parliament and minor, daily military ceremonies such as Changing the Guard.

Military fervour marked the spontaneous festivities around the relief of the Siege of Mafeking during the Boer Wars in 1900, a portent of the enormous wave of enthusiasm that would greet the declaration of war in 1914.  The 1905 “Proms” concerts in London featured a centenary celebration of the Battle of Trafalgar by way of a patriotic medley arranged by the organizer Henry Wood. His Fantasia on British sea songs has remained a fixed element in the Proms’ popular-patriotic “Last Night” programme ever since.