Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

The final method of purchasing goods in rural areas, and in many urban ones, was via hawkers and pedlars. Most areas were well served by these ‘Scotch drapers’ and ‘Manchester men’, whose regular circuits covered most of Britain. These were not the simple men with packs of modern imagining, and they were not selling solely to the poor. The Society of Travelling Scotchmen in Shrewsbury in 1785 had capital of more than £20,000; even the small Bridgnorth society had capital investment of £5,000.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Scotch draper carried a pack ‘four feet in length and two or more in depth’,

(#litres_trial_promo) and it closely resembled the clown car at the circus, pouring out an endless variety of more goods than logic said it could possibly hold: silks, cotton, calico, linen, hosiery, lace, and ready-made-up women’s clothes—petticoats, handkerchiefs, chemises and still more. In 1781 the Revd James Woodforde wrote in his diary that he had bought, from a man ‘with a cart with Linens, Cottons, Lace &c.…some cotton 6 Yrds for a morning gown for myself at 2s. 6d. per yard, pd. 0.15.0 Some chintz for a gown for Nancy 5 yds and

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I pd. 1.14.0…Nancy also bought a Linen Handkerchief &c. of him. Mrs How bought a silk handkerchief of him also.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Throughout the nineteenth century, street sellers continued to appear in towns, especially in more suburban areas, carrying more heavy goods than today seems feasible. In his 1851 survey of the working poor, Henry Mayhew listed men who sold ‘Door-mats, baskets and “duffer’s” packs, wood pails, brushes, brooms, clothes-props, clothes-lines and string, and grid-irons, Dutch-ovens, skewers and fore-shovels’ carried across their shoulders.

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Yet these itinerants, as with their equivalent traders in the markets and fairs, were swimming against the tide. As early as the 1730s, Parliament had received more than a hundred petitions from shopkeepers, claiming that pedlars were taking away their livelihood. The pedlars had the manufacturers on their side: they told Parliament that ‘the Quantity of goods bought and disposed of by them was considerably more extensive than had been generally conceived,…great Quantities of goods of almost every description being vended in detail’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1785, when Parliament proposed a bill to forbid itinerant traders, manufacturers and wholesale dealers in Liverpool, the ‘Linen Committee, Silk Manufacturers and Callico [sic] Printers of Glasgow’ all protested that without itinerant traders ‘great Quantities of British Manufactures’ would remain unsold—in rural areas naturally, but also in the newly industrial heartlands, where mill towns and factories had vast numbers of employees, but, as yet, no fixed retail network.

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That was to change in the coming years.

* (#ulink_86af485f-3350-5a70-8547-a734854a09c4)These did not include bakeries, because the price of bread was controlled by the assizes. Nor did they include many retailers who also produced their own goods. For example, tailors often had a shop, but would have thought of themselves as producers, not retailers. That this 141,700 was a conservative estimate for the number of shops can be seen from various pre-modern court records. As early as 1422, in the town of Ely (with a population of fewer than 4,000), one court session alone had cases that involved 3 bakers, 12 butchers, 37 brewers, 73 ale-sellers, 11 fishmongers and 2 vintners: 138 retailers of one kind or another—and these were only the ones involved in court cases.

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* (#ulink_aa4c12e7-d7dc-55f3-a417-c5dfa6dc516b)And meagre meant meagre for many. One surviving shopkeeper’s ledger recording the transactions in a back-street shop in Sheffield in the 1840s shows an average of between two and five customers a day.

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† (#ulink_aa4c12e7-d7dc-55f3-a417-c5dfa6dc516b)In an age when water came from the same rivers that served as sewers, small beer was the standard drink for people of all ages, including children. In traditional beer-making the mash was used three times. Each successive batch of beer was weaker than the one before, as fermentation declined owing to the reduced quantities of sugar in the mash. The third batch, called small beer, had virtually no alcoholic content at all.

* (#ulink_3844e7bd-6298-5317-a60d-b235e604ee07)Laundry blue was a lump of dye used to counteract the yellowing effects of soaps and keep white items white.

* (#ulink_d08aea35-ccd0-5e3c-83ec-e81aae0b644f)In the eighteenth century toys were small items of little intrinsic value, usually decorative ornaments, knick-knacks, or trinkets, for adults rather than children. Until late in the century, children’s toys had been distinguished by referring to them as ‘playing toys’. Toymakers were categorized by the metal they worked in: gold and silver toy manufacturers produced buttons, watch chains, inkstands, snuffboxes for men and vinaigrettes for women, decoratives scissors and candle-snuffers; tortoiseshell toy manufacturers made combs, buttons and decorative boxes; steel toy manufacturers generally made cheaper versions of many of the same goods as gold or silver toymakers, as well as the small hooks that were used to pin jewellery or flowers on to clothes or hats. Birmingham was the acknowledged centre of toy manufacture, with nearly 20,000 people in the trade in the city and its environs by the middle of the eighteenth century; over 80 per cent of them were in some way involved in exporting their goods abroad.

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* (#ulink_ce94f070-77be-5178-9d3a-8e1917aa9e29)Trade cards were common before the development of newspapers created a new vehicle for advertising. They were given to customers in the shop, receipts or bills were written out on them, they were attached to price lists, handed out in the street, or posted to customers at home.

* (#ulink_f7419346-c22b-5e41-850d-36b3ceedb712)As a source of sugar, the island of Grenada was highly valuable. The British had won it from the French in 1762, during the Seven Years War; the French regained control in 1779 and held the prize until 1783, when the island was returned to the British for the rest of its colonial history.

* (#ulink_2be395b8-aea2-5128-b721-83eda036560c)Although it would surely have appalled her, Larpent was precisely articulating the pattern that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels later noted in The German Ideology: ‘The satisfaction of the first need…leads to new needs.’

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* (#ulink_548eb798-c0f2-5cc6-9f00-a3f1bd797288)The idea of tea as a luxury persisted—this particular tax was not lifted until 1964.

* (#ulink_9cf7822b-0469-5525-8027-33b6bff68074)This compares interestingly with coffee: in 1821 coffee consumption was less than 1 pound per head per year; in 1909 it was 0.71 pounds, while cocoa consumption was at 1.2 pounds per head per annum. Holland, by comparison, consumed 18 pounds of coffee per head per year.

* (#ulink_c63bf625-eab2-5003-82f6-de1cefa068bc)In 1787 Wedgwood produced a range of medallions promoting the abolition of slavery. They were blue on yellow jasper, with the motto ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Men wore them as pins or buttons, or had them set on snuffbox lids; women as brooches or hairpins.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is good to know that Wedgwood, whose fortune in many ways was predicated directly from the import of sugar from the West Indian plantations, contributed his mite to the destruction of slavery. Slavery and abolition is a subject that fits all too well into a book on commodity, but it is one that I have, regretfully, had to leave out.

* (#ulink_c63bf625-eab2-5003-82f6-de1cefa068bc)This combination created more than grocery empires: in the 1650s there were 50 sugar refineries in Britain; by 1800 there were 150. These refineries, because of the processing method used, caught fire easily. High insurance premiums made some refiners club together to create their own insurance groups. One of these became the Phoenix Assurance Co. in 1782.

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† (#ulink_1338e486-2515-5888-a076-afa30b039443)The expression, still used, if slightly old-fashioned, ‘I wouldn’t have X if it were given away free with a pound of tea’ comes from offers like these, which continued throughout the nineteenth century.

* (#ulink_d3686ac1-873a-50e8-b881-5a8486827e2f)Confusingly, in the early eighteenth century Bohea was the best grade of black tea; by the time Gye was advertising, ‘Bohea’ was used for the last, inferior, crop of the season.

* (#ulink_27814f8a-8e99-5177-9f23-f55fbad71b45)Slops were the leavings in a teacup—the dregs, and any stray tea leaves. They were traditionally emptied into a slop bowl, about the same size as the cup, before a second cup of tea was poured. This letter of Watts’s pre-dates the Oxford English Dictionary’s first cited use of the word by more than half a century.

† (#ulink_27814f8a-8e99-5177-9f23-f55fbad71b45)Some specialization seems to us today more outré than most: in 1772, women began to bleach their hands with arsenic; Wedgwood immediately began to promote his black basalt teapots by saying that the colour would make the hand holding the pot seem even whiter.

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* (#ulink_2741012f-2b2f-5a24-96eb-c910aea37d34)There had been pottery works for a couple of centuries in Burslem and four neighbouring villages: Tunstall, Hanley, Stoke and Longton. As they grew, they were collectively known as the Five Towns, and now make up Stoke-on-Trent. (Fenton is sometimes included, in which case they became, of course, the Six Towns.)

† (#ulink_19c37c0d-91ab-508f-8f44-ddeeb7feacbb)Wedgwood’s spelling remained individual; I will refrain from noting each non-standard spelling, unless the meaning is unclear.

* (#ulink_83cfff15-01c5-59fe-af12-0428e0664da0)Bentley’s have unfortunately not survived—perhaps the reason why all the innovation is attributed to Wedgwood.

* (#ulink_731990de-ecf5-5851-88d4-07852ae3f7e3)Sir William Hamilton was minister plenipotentiary to the court of Spain in Naples. A famous collector, he commissioned the enormously influential Les Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines (4 vols., dated 1766—7, but published 1767—76), which spread the neoclassical style across Europe. A year after publication of the first volume Wedgwood had named his new pottery works ‘Etruria’, after the Etruscans, and on the opening day he had thrown six black basalt ‘first-day vases’ based on engravings from the book.

† (#ulink_c145277e-e616-59e6-8e0f-281194014d1a)This service was for the Chesmenski Palace, built on La Grenouillie`re, or the Frog Marsh. Hence the pieces were decorated with frogs, and the entire service is commonly referred to as ‘the frog service’. Some of it is on display today at the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

* (#ulink_61ae6ac3-6735-51b8-915e-4efe906dd9e1)One incidental feature of the Bath showroom was that the managers, William and Ann Ward, were the parents of Ann Radcliffe, the Gothic novelist and author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Ann Ward was the niece of Thomas Bentley, and Ann Radcliffe had grown up as a close friend of Wedgwood’s daughter Susannah, known to posterity as the mother of Charles Darwin.

* (#ulink_834dca53-4b0b-5131-8c4c-ceaf46a52eaf)The government had many reasons to approve these trusts, apart from general improvement to trade: after 1745 it was suggested that the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, had managed to get as far as Derby during his unsuccessful attempt to regain the throne for the Stuarts in part because the poor quality of the roads meant that troops could not be dispatched quickly enough.

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* (#ulink_26b20c33-bcf1-5ce4-b831-2426e844e8ce)Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731—1802) was a doctor by profession and a natural philosopher by inclination. He lived in Lichfield, and was an active member of several provincial scientific societies, including the Botanical Society, the Derby Philosophical Society and the Lunar Society. The latter included among its members the manufacturer Matthew Boulton, his partner James Watt and the scientist Joseph Priestley, as well as Wedgwood and Bentley. Darwin was interested both intellectually and financially in the connection between technology and industry, producing plans for a ‘horizontal windmill’ to grind pigment for Wedgwood’s factory, as well as recommending to Wedgwood the acquisition of Boulton and Watt’s steam engine. He was considered expert enough in technical matters to be called as a witness, along with Watt, in one of the many disputes involving the patents of the cotton manufacturer Richard Arkwright’s carding and spinning machines.

* (#ulink_3ac99e5d-a502-5307-86d0-dd3320322839)‘Parsley’ was after a parsley-patterned calico he designed early in his career.

* (#ulink_9221cbd3-f223-5bda-b923-326ef8bc4e86)Duffers were people who sold bad-quality goods cheaply, pretending that they had been stolen or smuggled in order to explain their low prices. Dutch ovens were small brick or cast-iron stoves on legs, which were heated by charcoal.

3 The Ladies’ (and Gents’) Paradise: The Nineteenth-Century Shop (#ulink_5091e8b2-1508-5ac1-9653-92d72f27f265)

GROCERS HAD ORIGINALLY BEEN wholesalers, those who bought ‘in gross’; then they became luxury retailers, purveyors of imported delicacies from abroad—tea, coffee, sugar, spices, dried fruits, ‘Italian goods’. As these foods became less expensive, and more readily available to the population at large, the function and trade of the grocer changed. For some time, various food retailers stuck to the old names that indicated high levels of specialization—a grocer was expected to sell the items listed above; a provision dealer to sell butter, cheese, eggs and bacon; then there were flour dealers, butter men, cheese factors and so on. But it appears that the reality, from early in the nineteenth century, was less rigidly structured than the job titles implied: grocers also sold butter, bacon, hams and herrings, oilmen sold cheese, even a butter man might sell pig meat. One flour dealer at the turn of the nineteenth century kept records that reflected this variety: 44 per cent of his spending was on his core trade, the purchase of flour and meal; 18.5 per cent went on butter and cheese, 6.5 per cent on tea, 11 per cent on sugar, while the remaining 20 per cent went on a wide variety of goods: potatoes, bacon, salt, raisins, currants, coffee, treacle, spices, pepper, mustard, rice, sweets, soap, starch, candles, tobacco and snuff. This was not at all unusual: by 1846 the Grocers’ Weekly Circular and Price List, a trade publication, listed butter, cheese, eggs, pork—all items that, officially, grocers did not sell.

(#litres_trial_promo) Now a grocer was someone who needed to have certain trade skills that other provisioners did not have—he had to know how to blend tea, roast coffee beans, mix herbs and spices, cure bacon, clean dried fruit, and cut sugar.* (#ulink_3ced3af5-b26d-586f-9e48-fe74fa508e38)

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For the most part, the staple diet of the working classes and much of the lower middle classes in the mid nineteenth-century consisted of bread or potatoes, a little bit of butter, cheese or bacon, tea with sugar, and a bit of salt. The eighteenth century had shown forward-looking retailers that profits could be made by selling in quantity to the mass market at a small mark-up. The improvements to transport and the consequent development of wholesalers and distribution centres, and the concentration of population in urban centres, soon made the idea of selling a small range of stock items—bought in bulk, for low prices—both practical and astonishingly profitable.