Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

In the early 1790s, before the French wars, wheat had cost between 48s. and 58s. a quarter; by 1795 it was 90s.; and in 1800 it was a shocking 113s.—an increase of 135 per cent in less than a decade. There was an endless succession of food riots: more than twenty between 1756 and 1818, and a dozen of those in the last two decades. There were also attempts throughout this period to find more peaceful ways of dealing with the price escalation. One solution was to turn to the social group that was so familiar—the club. Groups of consumers joined together in flour or bread societies to gain the financial clout to buy these necessities at reduced prices. Many of the societies failed, mostly from inadequate investment or size. But one of the more successful was the Birmingham Flour and Bread Company, set up in 1796 with capital of £6,000 from its members, because ‘unless some proper and effectual means are taken, the evil attending the high price of grain and the shameful adulteration of flour will continue’. By 1800 it had 1,360 shareholders (including Matthew Boulton). Others groups followed suit, using what became the standard methods: large-scale orders, paid for in cash, with discounts for bulk.

(#litres_trial_promo) And in the early decades of the nineteenth century there were still other groups, more idealistic in origin, set up in emulation of the principles of the socialist reformer Robert Owen. In 1827 the Brighton Co-operative Benevolent Association and the Co-operative Trading Association were formed, to collect weekly subscriptions which were to be used both to educate people in the values of cooperation, and to ‘engage in retail trade with the object of accumulating capital from its profits to eventually establish a community’ based on cooperative principles.

(#litres_trial_promo) William King, a doctor, was the prime mover, having already set up a Mechanics’ Institute in Brighton; he also published The Cooperator, a paper with a good circulation in the north and the Midlands, which strongly influenced the later Co-op movement.

An early Co-operative Congress met in Manchester in 1831, to establish the North-West of England United Co-operative Co., to supply a wholesale warehouse in Liverpool for the various societies’. This did not take off, but these early cooperative ventures set an example, and in the 1850s and 1860s a new generation of workers attempted to create similar societies. The town of Rochdale, in Lancashire, was the location. Rochdale had had a thriving flannel industry for centuries, but with the coming of power looms the economic life of the town was no longer so stable. The new industries of coal mining, cotton mills and machine-making were developing, but the ‘hungry forties’ and reliance in the new factories on hiring ‘outsiders’ combined to create extreme hardship locally. In 1837, 180 animals a week had been slaughtered for sale in the local market; in 1841 the number was less than 70. So in 1844 the Rochdale Pioneers was formed, a club with thirty members, set up with the intention, in the short term, of selling food and clothing at prices workers could afford; then, when it became possible, the group hoped to move on to building workers’ housing, creating their own workshops, and setting up a temperance hotel. The main difference between the Pioneers and other clubs was that profits would no longer simply be divided among the members. Now interest would be paid to each shareholder, and what remained of the profits would be distributed to members in proportion to the amount of money they had spent at the store that year: a dividend on purchases. With capital of £28, the Pioneers began trading with a stock valued at £16 11s. 11d.: 28 pounds of butter, 56 pounds of sugar, 6 hundredweight of flour, 1 sack of oatmeal, and some candles. At the end of its first year, the club’s membership had risen to seventy-four, it had increased its working capital to £181, and had made a profit of £22. The trade depression of 1847 only brought in more members: by 1848 there were 140; two years later it was 600.

In 1850 another group of men in Rochdale attempted to start a cooperative corn mill, in imitation of the Pioneers. When they failed to raise the necessary capital, they approached the Pioneers themselves, who invested some of their profits in the mill, creating the Corn Mill Society. By 1852 twenty-two different societies were dealing with the Corn Mill Society, a consumer-initiated, consumer-owned and consumer-controlled group. By 1851 there were perhaps as many as 130 societies working on the principles the Rochdale Pioneers had established, and many realized that cooperation between them was the way forward. In 1862 a conference in Oldham agreed to set up the North of England Co-operative Wholesale Agency and Depot Society; the following year it was formally registered as the North of England Cooperative Wholesale Industrial Provident Society (later thankfully shortened to the Co-operative Wholesale Society, known as the CWS), with forty-three societies owning shares. This was the start of the national cooperative movement: in 1862, branches of the Co-op were opened in Newcastle; in 1874 in London; in 1875 in Liverpool, in 1882 in Leeds, then over the next decade in Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol, Huddersfield, Longton, Northampton, Nottingham and Cardiff. Furthermore, buying depots were set up across the country, and also outside England: six were opened in Ireland in eight years; then one in New York; followed by, in Europe, Rouen, Dénia, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, Esbjerg, Gothenburg and Hamburg, and, further afield, Montreal and Sydney. As if this unstoppable march were not enough, the Co-op opened its own production sources where necessary: a dairy in Ireland from 1889; pig farms and bacon-curing in Denmark from 1900 and Ireland from 1901; even tea estates in Ceylon from 1913.

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By the 1860s the idea of cooperative trading had travelled far from its origins, and various middle-class groups were setting up their own versions. The first was in 1864, when some Post Office clerks in London clubbed together to buy a chest of tea at a wholesale price. They moved on to bulk purchases of coffee and sugar, and in 1865 the Post Office Supply Association was formalized; within six months, it had 700 members, and it had changed its name to the Civil Service Supply Association, whose intention was to supply ‘Officers of the Civil Service and their Friends…at the lowest possible prices’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1866 came the Civil Service Co-operative Society, and in 1872 the Army and Navy Cooperative Society, open to ‘officers, their widows, non-commissioned officers, petty officers, secretaries of service clubs, canteen and mess reps’, and any friends that they chose to introduce.

(#litres_trial_promo) Both claimed to be offering a new combination: low prices and reduced service in exchange for cash sales, fixed prices, some goods only in large quantities, others with an extra discount for bulk. It was, perhaps new to them although, as we have seen, none of these notions was innovatory. Soon mail order was added to the list of services, together with expanded ranges: wine, tobacco, baby linen, books, boots and shoes, coal, carpets, drapery, milk and butter, meat, pianos, even surgical instruments—the Civil Service Co-operative Society and the Army and Navy were now a long way from the working-class aims of the originators of the movement, and were heading instead towards the department stores (see below, pp. 110ff.). Those groups formally connected to the CWS stayed true to their origins, selling only groceries, fresh meat, and in some places drapery, tailoring and shoes and clogs.

Despite the financial structure that linked the co-ops to their middleclass brethren, the range of goods available in the co-op shops themselves more closely resembled that in the multiple stores (which today would be called chain stores) that were appearing at a rapid rate in urban centres at the same time. Co-ops and multiples were similar in that they both aimed at the working-class customer; they both relied on their size to achieve price reductions; they both sold a narrow range of goods, primarily food; they sold at fixed prices; they accepted only cash; they reached their customers by branding their outlets with a central name; and they provided a bare minimum of services to keep costs down. They were different, however, in an equally basic way. Co-ops were decentralized groups that shared services, fixed their own prices and shared their profits via membership dividends based on purchases. By contrast, the aim of multiples, first, last and always, was to make profits for their owners.

(#litres_trial_promo) There was no attempt to share the wealth, or form a better society.

The main growth of multiples came in the later part of the nineteenth century, but preliminary stirrings had been there for some time. Williams of Manchester, a typical early example, was created after a Mrs Williams married a miner; she had previously owned a grocery in Didsbury, a prosperous suburb of Manchester. In 1865 she took a double-fronted shop there; in 1888 she opened another shop in Cheadle; in 1891 yet another, this time in West Didsbury; within thirty years Williams of Manchester had five branches, all in prosperous, middle-class suburbs. Eventually it expanded to thirty.

(#litres_trial_promo) Similar in pattern if not in scale was Thomas Lipton. He was born in Glasgow in 1850, the son of an Irish labourer and his wife, who had emigrated during the Famine. At eighteen he joined his parents in the small grocery shop they then ran; with some savings and a year’s pay he opened a second shop. By 1880 he had twelve shops in Glasgow, with a turnover of £200,000. His first shop in England was opened the following year, and by 1889 he had 30 shops and a turnover of £1.5 million.

(#litres_trial_promo) Less than a decade later, there were 242 shops in Britain, and a smattering of overseas outlets.

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Lipton’s shops stocked a limited range of goods—bacon, ham, butter, eggs, cheese—and thus, in order to buy cheaply from wholesalers, he needed to have a large number of shops to supply. He relied heavily on a combination of price-cutting and price promotion. He advertised his cut-rate ‘Irish produce’—ham was priced from 5d. to 7d. per pound, while elsewhere it cost between 7d. and 10d. In 1877 he famously advertised the ‘Lipton Pound Note’, which declared, ‘I promise to give on demand at any of my establishments ham, butter and eggs as given elsewhere to the value of ONE POUND stg for fifteen shillings.’ He made this financially possible—and even profitable—by rapid turnover, low profit margins and low overheads. He aimed relentlessly at the lower-class market: his shops were either in the high streets or in smaller streets of densely populated working-class neighbourhoods. He sold a strictly limited range of stock in bulk, to vast numbers of customers, from vast shops: in Paisley, a suburb of Glasgow, his shop had a horseshoe counter so large it was staffed by twelve shop assistants. His Glasgow shops alone, he boasted, daily sold a ton and a half of ‘lump’ butter, 50 cases of ‘roll’ butter, a ton of bacon, a ton and a half of ham, half a ton of cheese, and 16,000 eggs.* (#ulink_f806d6d4-4718-5bb8-b161-2930576d0ea4)

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Once these huge shops reached a certain level, there were two main ways of expanding: the shops could begin to stock an ever-wider range of goods, while the services for customers were also enlarged; or the goods and services could remain as they were, while the number of customers was increased nationally by opening ever-more branches. The first decision led, essentially, to shops becoming department stores, the second to remaining as multiples. Multiples were designed to serve the working classes, and it was judged that essential goods at the lowest prices were what would entice these customers in, while convenience of location and long opening hours were necessary for this market. Department stores catered to the middle classes, with enough cash and enough leisure that price was less important than high levels of service and a wide variety of stock.

The development of department stores in the second half of the nineteenth century was not as sudden, or as radical, as has sometimes been assumed. Instead, two types of older retail style developed and converged to create what seemed like an entirely new phenomenon. The first development was the arrival of new middle-class haberdasheries and drapery shops, larger in size than they had ever been before, and utilizing new technologies such as plate glass for the windows, gas lighting both inside and out, and more (see below, p. 100). The second was the expansion of working-class purchasing power and the concurrent creation of a ready-to-wear market that was encouraging the development of mass-production methods.

It has been said that ready-to-wear clothes were not available in any bulk until the 1860s.

(#litres_trial_promo) For the middle classes in a general way that was so, but even here the evidence must be treated with caution: in 1790 The Times carried an advertisement for Ham’s Muslin and Linen Warehouse, on the Strand, which was selling ready-made dresses.* (#ulink_06ce2cd7-ed30-513c-a3e3-0fe8d04ac4cd)

(#litres_trial_promo) It was estimated that no one earning less than £300 a year could afford to buy The Times regularly—this was not an advertisement for the working-class purchaser.† (#ulink_97fd913c-fd63-57b7-95c2-033035b4f869) Other mentions of ready-made clothes that were probably for the middle classes can be found throughout the eighteenth century: as early as the 1730s, Mary and Ann Hogarth, sisters to the painter, had a shop where, their trade card promised, ‘Fashionable Ready Made Frocks’ could be bought.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the 1750s in Bath, John Evill advertised that he sold ready-made waistcoats, breeches, gowns, petticoats, stays, cloaks and bonnets.

(#litres_trial_promo) A little book, A Visit to the Bazaar (1818), that was more than half an advertisement for the Soho Bazaar, portrayed a middleaged woman buying a ‘beautiful crape dress’, which she asked to have delivered immediately as ‘I am going out to a ball this evening, and shall want to put it on.’

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Apart from these rare middle-class sightings, the working classes and the lower middle classes, especially the more prosperous, had been wearing ready-made clothes in various forms for years. Less exclusive tailors and mercers often had a sideline as ‘slop sellers’, stocking cheap ready-made clothing. Men’s shirts had been some of the earliest readymade clothes: the garments were of a standard shape, and they were more or less permanently covered by waistcoats and jackets and therefore size and fit were less important than for outerwear. Ready-made shirts had originally been produced for sailors and for manual labourers; then the working classes more widely began to buy them. The next stage in the more general availability of ready-to-wear clothes was the production of uniforms, which were worn by soldiers and sailors, as we would expect today, and also by charity- and other schoolchildren, by servants in livery, by railway workers, by postmen and other low-grade civilservice workers, and by the inhabitants of workhouses and prisons. Sundry small wars had kept the armed-forces market buoyant for a century past, but the beginning of the French wars sharply increased the need for uniforms. With this, and with the working classes buying more ready-to-wear items, came a wider move from skilled tailors creating a garment in its entirety, to vast warehouses farming out jobs to smaller workshops, who in turn hired cheap pieceworkers to produce slops at home—the foundation of the mass-production system that would develop in the nineteenth century.

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By the beginning of the nineteenth century many of the working and lower-middle classes bought their clothes (either new or secondhand), both at the cheaper end of the retail market and at weekly or regular fairs, and this increased throughout the century. A large number of police reports throughout the period dealt with the matter of stolen clothes, which showed how strong the secondhand market was: there is no point stealing something that has no resale value. In good times workers bought new suits or dresses; when work disappeared they pawned or sold the items to tide them over. Clothes were not just pleasurable frivolities, but an investment, a protection against hard times. New fashion items could be acquired for relatively little outlay—well within the means of a servant or other member of the working classes paid in cash. In 1871 Daniel Kirwan, an American journalist in London, visited the Rag Fair, held every Sunday morning in Petticoat Lane in the East End. He was told by one customer:

I had no other togs but them as I was wearing, and they were so wore out I was ashamed to be seen in ‘em. So…I said to myself, ‘Blest if I don’t go over to the Fair…and moult the mouldys, and buy a tidy suit to wear…’ I had made up my mind to do the thing to rights while I was about it, and while I had the money in my pocket. I moulted to my very shirt and socks. I gave seven and six for a light suit, and half a dollar for a pot hat, and eighteen pence for a sky blue neckerchief, and likewise bought a shirt with an ironed front to it, and afore I came away I put ‘em all on…and here I was, all a toff, up’ards and down’ards.

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Kirwan was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the market, with its

hundreds upon hundreds of pairs of trousers—trousers that have been worn by young men of fashion, trousers without a wrinkle or just newly scoured, trousers taken from the reeking hot limbs of navies [navvies], and pot boys, trousers…from spruce young shop boys, trousers that have been worn by criminals hung at Newgate, by patients in fever hospitals; waistcoats that were the pride of fast young brokers in the city, waistcoats flashy enough to have been worn by the Marquis of Hastings at a racecourse, or the Count D’Orsay at a literary assemblage;…thousands of spencers, highlows,* (#ulink_e23625ea-351f-59c0-82d0-ac8443d756fc) fustian jackets, some greasy, some unsoiled, shooting coats, short coats and cutaways; coats for the jockey and the dog fighter, for the peer and the pugilist, pilot jackets and sou-westers, drawers and stockings…

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Fashion was something that everyone could now afford, at least sometimes, and at least for part of their wardrobe. George Augustus Sala, a journalist,† (#ulink_70337d15-3cf2-57ea-855d-e557c25a3772) noted the dedication with which, in particular, clerks and other low-income lower-middle-class young men followed the trends:

These are the customers you see at a glance, whom the resplendent wares in the hosiers’ shops attract…These are the dashing young parties who purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson braces, the kaleidoscopic shirtstuds, the shirts embroidered with dahlias, deaths’ heads, racehorses, sun-flowers, and ballet-girls; the horseshoe, fox-head, pewter-pot-and-crossed-pipes, willow-pattern-plate, and knife-and-fork pins. These are the glasses of city fashion, and the mould of city form, for whom the legions of fourteen, of fifteen, of sixteen, and of seventeen shilling trousers, all unrivalled, patented, and warranted, are made.

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By the mid-century, men’s clothes in particular had becoming standard, ready-made, and were being heavily advertised. For this to have happened, items we take entirely for granted needed first to be invented. At the Great Exhibition, Charles Cattanach from Aberdeen, who listed himself as ‘Inventor’, showed an ‘apparatus for measuring the human figure, and for transferring the measure to cloth so as to produce an exact fit of garment’

(#litres_trial_promo)—or, as it is known today, a tape measure. He was one of many claiming ownership of this useful invention, which seems to have first appeared around the beginning of the century, and to have been in more general use from around 1825. Once this was available, treatises like Dr Henry Wampen’s The Mathematical Art of Cutting Garments According to the Different Formation of Men’s Bodies (1834) could be written, giving guidance on how to create clothes without an actual, specific body in front of the tailor.

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For standardized sizes had not yet arrived. Men’s clothes led the way: over the century they moved away from the earlier skintight fitted breeches and jackets, towards the loose, tube-like shape of modern dress. Women’s clothes were more difficult to standardize: bodices were expected to fit so tightly to the figure that the stays underneath showed through. By the 1840s shops were advertising ‘Sewed’ dresses, but they may have been only partly finished, for the purchaser or her dressmaker to alter to fit her own measurements. Challinier of New Bond Street stocked this type of half-and-half item: ‘Muslin Bodices…can be completed for wearing in a few hours’ notice.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Twenty years later Jay’s Warehouse was still attempting to find a way to combine the fashion for skintight bodices with a desire for ready-made clothes, coming up with a ‘self-expanding’ bodice. But the spread of women’s ready-made clothing lagged behind men’s and children’s for some time.

The move towards simplification and standardization created the possibility of major changes in the production, and in the selling, of men’s ready-made clothes. Leeds quickly became the centre of massproduced men’s clothes. It had no previous history of tailoring, and therefore no moribund guild system to limit growth; its old linen industry provided the necessary skills, networks and capital bases to new entrepreneurs, while that same industry’s collapse meant there was no bar to the shift into new production; and finally the arrival, from the 1860s, of an eastern-European Jewish population well-versed in tailoring skills and closely linked to each other by marriage and trade made possible the formation of an efficient and complex outworking system.* (#ulink_6835a899-003b-5538-82c0-9e9530014840) Perhaps most importantly, Leeds also had an established engineering industry, which meant that machinery used in other fields could be retooled for use in the production of mass tailoring.

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John Barran, a retail tailor in the local high street in the late 1840s, had sold cheap ready-made clothes for men and children in exactly the pattern we have seen above. In 1856 he set up a manufacturing works; his great innovation was to develop with the engineering firm of Greenwood and Batley the first mechanical cutter, a bandsaw that could cut through several layers of cloth at once. This mass cutting machine forced Barran into further technological and organizational changes, for the bandsaw produced many more cut-out pieces than his tailors could process. So he subcontracted these out to a tailor with a workshop, who in turn passed them on to others as piecework. For the first time in the clothing industry, production was divided into two parts: cutting, via new technology, at the factory, and then a division for the sewing—outwork for the more complicated jackets and coats, while Barran’s own sewers dealt with the trousers and waistcoats, which required lesser skills. And for these workers he had equipped the works with the new sewing machines.

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These machines had been developed piecemeal, by several different inventors. After the initial crude chain-stitch machine had been invented to sew army uniforms in France in 1829, most of the innovations and improvements occurred in the United States in the 1840s and ‘50s. In England, Elias Howe Jr had produced a lock-stitch machine in 1846, but, seeing little prospect of financial return, had sold the patent on. In the USA Isaac Singer had seen a similar lock-stitch machine in 1850. It was so complicated that it required special training and then some skill to operate it, and even more technological know-how to service and maintain it. In 1851 Singer’s improvements were patented: the new machine now held the needle vertically, was made of iron not wood, and had toothed gears that didn’t jam, a spring that permitted variations in the thickness of the fabric without manual adjustment, and a presser foot to hold the fabric in place, which meant the operator could use both hands to control the cloth. The new machine could also, most importantly, sew in curves as well as the straight lines, which had been all the earlier machines had managed. Now an operative could produce 900 stitches a minute, instead of the 40 stitches a quick hand-sewer could make.

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Further improvements followed, but in England any improved machines were blocked by the patent for the earlier—and much inferior—machine. Finally in 1856 Singer opened an agency in Glasgow, to avoid paying English patent fees. Barran swiftly saw how this machine would solve his problem of the imbalance between the speed with which his mechanized bandsaws cut and the appreciably longer time it took his tailors to sew. He had the machines installed in his works, linked to steam-driven shafts instead of the machines’ original foot-powered treadle.

(#litres_trial_promo) Soon every Leeds clothing factory was using bandsaws, steamdriven sewing machines, and steam presses and button-holing machines. By the 1880s fifteen sewing-machine-manufacturing firms had set up in the city, and even more engineering works specialized in developing new machinery for this now enormously successful trade.

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