Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

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Glass was still expensive—both owing to the cost of the glass itself and also because of the glass tax, which was not abolished until 1851. Plate-glass technology made possible larger and larger window panes, which continued to astonish. An American visitor in the early 1830s said that in Regent Street ‘many of the bow windows are glazed with panes 24 by 36 inches, 30 by 45, &c. There is a fur shop having a window on each side of the door, the centre pane in each window measuring nine feet by five.’ The furrier told him that the centre panes had cost him 50 guineas each.

(#litres_trial_promo) This seems a perhaps pardonable exaggeration. Francis Place had set up a tailor’s shop in 1801, and ‘I put in a new front as elegant as the place would permit, each of the panes of glass cost me three pounds, and two in the door, four pounds each.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Even allowing for a rise in prices, and the substantial difference in grandeur between Place’s small shop and a Regent Street ‘emporium’, the 50 guineas still sounds like a tall tale. However much it cost, the dazzling plate glass was matched and abetted by developments in lighting: glass and gas together radically changed the look of shops.

The insides of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century shops had been no less splendid—especially, but not uniquely, in the luxurygoods trades. Many historians have suggested that until the arrival of the department stores the displays in shops were minimal, that everything was kept in boxes, and only grudgingly drawn out piece by piece, with no sense of theatrical display. This cannot have been further from the truth. This misapprehension was set in train by the Victorians themselves, who saw—or wanted to see—what was taking place around them as something unprecedented. Charles Manby Smith, a journalist, described a plate-polisher’s shop in about 1810 as ‘a dim, dusty-looking house of some thirty feet frontage…which you might pass a hundred times, so unpretentious was its aspect, without noticing its existence’. He then took the reader on a tour of the shop’s development, as it was renovated by its next incumbent, when it ‘displayed…a handsome set of new shutters, surmounted by a Corinthian cornice, and a new private door, splendid in imitative walnut and shining varnish. When the shutters came down on Monday morning, they disclosed a handsome mahogany sash, the two lower rows of panes guarded by a stout trelliswork of brass-wire, resting upon a single plate of brass.’ Sometime before Manby Smith wrote this in 1857 the shop was pulled down to widen the road, at which point it was rebuilt ‘seventy feet high, with a huge semicircular façade, superb in pillars, pilasters, and carved cornices, fronting one of the most imposing approaches to the very centre of the city’.

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This may very well have happened to that precise building, but, more to the point, this is what Manby Smith understood to be happening everywhere. To heighten the contrast between past and present, to show how wonderful the mid-century shops were, he needed to believe that the shops of the past had been truly negligible. The trouble was, they simply weren’t as insubstantial as he suggested. Visitors to London, who did not have his vested interest in a dull, dark past to hold up against a dazzling, gaslit present, were perhaps more reliable. In 1786 the German diarist Sophie von la Roche went window shopping in London, and was suitably impressed. She visited John Boydell’s print shop (for more on Boydell, see pp. 388—91):

Here again I was struck by the excellent arrangement and system which the love of gain and national good taste have combined in producing, particularly in the elegant dressing of large shopwindows, not merely in order to ornament the streets and lure purchasers, but to make known the thousands of inventions and ideas, and spread good taste about, for the excellent pavements made for pedestrians enable crowds of people to stop and inspect the new exhibits.

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She liked improving things, like prints, but she liked less sober-minded shops too, like the one which had a ‘cunning device for showing women’s materials. Whether they are silks, chintzes, or muslins, they hang down in folds behind the fine high windows so that the effect of this or that material, as it would be in the ordinary folds of a woman’s dress, can be studied. Amongst the muslins all colours are on view, and so one can judge how the frock would look in company with its fellows.’

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The lighting was as essential as the windows, and had been even before piped gas arrived. Francis Place had used ‘five large Argand lamps* (#ulink_a839c1a8-c17e-5a61-8d37-717961f137f6) in the shop besides the candles to make the windows and every part of it as nearly equally light as possible’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Johanna Schopenhauer, visiting London in 1803, admired ‘the brilliant displays of precious silverware, the beautiful draperies of muslin…behind large plate-glass windows, the fairy-tale glitter of the crystal shops’.† (#ulink_86b7f793-7388-54c6-bf53-80ea962d3e85)

(#litres_trial_promo) That she and Sophie von la Roche both admired hanging fabrics would have won the heart of the ‘old draper’, the pseudonymous author of a series in The Warehousemen and Drapers’ Trade Journal. He recalled his early days in the trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when ‘we made a very large and flaring show of goods upon every possible occasion, piling stacks up outside the door…and at times we even had a length of stuff let down from the top storey window to the bottom, so as to attract notice and attention’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Contrary to Manby Smith’s and many later historian’s view of the period, the ‘old draper’ knew that presentation was of the essence. He told how, when he first set up on his own, he rented a big shop, which he could not afford to stock properly. So he devised a variety of ruses. He displayed great rolls of ‘silks’ where only the top layer was an expensive silk, bulked out underneath by cheap fabric he had painted

to match. He stocked his drawers at the front, putting parcels stuffed with paper in behind, so that when the drawers were opened they appeared reassuringly full to his customers. Without this he would not have been able to persuade his suppliers that he was financially stable and creditworthy, nor would his customers have been willing to shop somewhere they thought too scantily stocked, and therefore unlikely to carry what they wanted: display was vital.

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London had two very distinct streets, or rather sets of streets, which had been dedicated to shopping from the eighteenth century. The first ran from Mile End in the East End to Parliament Street in the West End, taking in Whitechapel, Leadenhall Street, Cornhill, Cheapside, St Paul’s Churchyard (famous for books and, later, haberdashery), Ludgate Street, Fleet Street, the Strand and Charing Cross. The other linked chain of streets also began in the eastern end of London, at Shoreditch, and ran westward, taking in Bishopsgate Street, Threadneedle Street, Cheapside, Newgate Street, Holborn, Broad Street, St Giles and Oxford Street.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the eighteenth century, the former streets had the more elegant shops, and were considered to be more fashionable. In 1807 Robert Southey, in the guise of a foreign visitor, described how

When I reached Cheapside the crowd completely astonished me. On each side of the way were two uninterrupted streams of people, one going east, the other west. At first I thought some extraordinary occasion must have collected such a concourse; but I soon perceived it was only the usual course of business…If possible I was still more astonished at the opulence and splendour of the shops, drapers, stationers…silversmiths, booksellers, print-sellers…one close to another, without intermission, a shop to every house, street after street, and mile after mile; the articles themselves so beautiful, and beautifully arranged.

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Gradually over the century the fashionable shoppers moved west and north. One of the clearest markers of this westward shift was when the draper’s Shoolbred, Cook and Co., which had been in St Paul’s Churchyard, moved in 1817 to Tottenham Court Road, which was rapidly gaining a reputation as a middle-class shopping street.* (#ulink_4299fae4-e33c-5607-b97a-d47671d658e7) By that year, Johnstone’s London Commercial Guide listed the following in Oxford Street: 3 linen drapers, 10 straw-hat manufactories [in this context, a manufactory was a place that sold the goods it made in its workrooms on the premises], 6 bonnet warehouses [meaning simply large shops], 5 woollen drapers, 5 lace warehouses, 3 plumassiers [feather merchants, for hat feathers], 24 boot- and shoe-makers, 17 hosiers and glovers, 4 silk mercers, 1 silk weaver, 4 furriers, 12 haberdashers and hosiers, 1 ribbon warehouse, 1 muslin and shawl warehouse, 2 silk and satin dyers, 2 drapers and tailors, 1 India-muslin warehouse, 3 fancy trimmings and fringe manufactories, 1 button manufactory, 2 pressers and dyers, 5 perfumers, 1 patent-thread manufactory, 1 tailor, 3 stay and corset warehouses, 1 stocking warehouse, 1 ready-made linen [that is, underwear] warehouse, and 4 umbrella manufactories.

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London was the forerunner, but other towns and cities were coming up hard behind. The developments in London were copied first in the more up-market spa towns, such as Bath (for more on spas, see pp. 231—6), then in the larger cities: Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. Finally the newer industrial cities followed. The Enabling Act of 1813 had made it possible for businessmen to buy land, develop it, and then make a return by selling long leases to shopkeepers. The act had been passed in order to allow the creation of Regent Street, but many took advantage of the unexpected opportunity to develop other areas in the same way: Dale Street in Liverpool and Market Street in Manchester were both developed for better retail premises, and widened, in the 1820s;* (#ulink_cc3aecae-5c29-507d-886b-3ab85118ea5f) in the 1830s it was the turn of Grey Street in Newcastle. London then developed further shopping areas: New Oxford Street in the 1840s, Victoria in the 1850s, and Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road in the 1870s and 1880s. The spirit of emulation then stirred Leeds, Glasgow and Cardiff to follow suit, while Joseph Chamberlain planned Birmingham’s Corporation Street to be ‘the retail shop of the whole of the Midland counties of England’.

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Thus the physical development of shops was one of almost constant change from the eighteenth century onward. Likewise, to match the myth of the dirty, dark, barely stocked eighteenth-century shop, there was also the myth that shopping before the arrival of the department store was a purpose-driven, end-result-based activity: shoppers went in for a specific item, asked for it, had it handed to them, and immediately left—with absolutely no browsing. There is some evidence that in some places, some of the time, some customers expected to behave in this way. In Fenwick’s of Newcastle, as late as 1902, when the owner’s sons came back from training in Paris, they advertised what they thought of as new ways of shopping in the Newcastle Journal, encouraging customers to come in to browse: ‘Assistants are not allowed to speak to visitors. Walk round today, don’t buy. There is time for that another day.’

(#litres_trial_promo)* (#ulink_8a9a8bb8-80d5-56b3-b989-f0a4dc8fe4b7) Gordon Selfridge, that arch-myth-maker (see pp. 117—22), was keen to promote the novelty of the idea (mostly so that he could claim to have invented it). He told anyone who would listen that when he had been looking around other shops, planning his own, he was approached by a floorwalker, who asked him what he wanted. Selfridge replied that he was just looking, and was told, ‘ ‘Op it,’ and escorted to the door.

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Unfortunately for Selfridge and his charming story, there is a long history of browsing—in manuals for shopkeepers, in novels and plays, and in advertisements. As early as 1726, Daniel Defoe in his Complete Tradesman warned shopkeepers that ‘ladies…divert themselves in going from one mercer’s shop to another, to look upon their fine silks, and to rattle and banter the journeymen and shopkeepers, and have not so much as the least occasion, much less intention, to buy anything.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Wedgwood, as we have seen, frequently changed his displays so that customers would come back regularly to look; he also found it worthwhile to display commissions for the royal family and for Catherine the Great, which no one could buy even had they wanted to—he was actively courting browsers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Johanna Schopenhauer described ‘going into at least twenty shops, having a thousand things shown to us which we do not wish to buy, in fact turning the whole shop upside down and, in the end, perhaps leaving without purchasing anything’,

(#litres_trial_promo) while in Maria Edgeworth’s 1809 novel Ennui the Earl of Glenthorn describes going to watchmakers’ shops ‘for a lounge…to pass an idle hour’.

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This was not the case only in luxury shops in London. Fanny Burney’s novel The Wanderer (1814) portrays a heroine with a mysterious past who works in a millinery shop in a small market town:

The ladies whose practice it was to frequent the shop, thought the time and trouble of its mistress, and her assistants, amply paid by the honour of their presence; and though they tried on hats and caps, till they put them out of shape; examined and tossed about the choicest goods…still their consciences were at ease…if, after two or three hours of lounging, rummaging, fault-finding and chaffering, they purchased a yard or two of ribbon.

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(Burney clearly felt strongly about this. Her unperformed play The Witlings also revolved around women who spent their time in a milliner’s shop without buying anything.)

(#litres_trial_promo) Yet, while Burney was indignant, many shopkeepers knew it was good business. The Royal London Bazaar advertised in the World of Fashion in 1830, ‘You may purchase any of the thousand and one varieties of fancy and useful articles, or you may lounge and spend an agreeable hour either in the promenades or in the exhibitions that are wholly without parallel to the known world.’

(#litres_trial_promo) For shopping was, and had long been, a branch of entertainment. The Pantheon, in Oxford Street, a concert-hall-cum-social rendezvous, had been built in 1772 as competition to the pleasure gardens. (For pleasure gardens, see pp. 276—8.) By 1834 it had become a combination picture gallery and bazaar—that is, a place where stallholders rented space from a central landlord.* (#ulink_08dcc4c1-e4ab-52a8-a955-ef6d23e34b39)

Bazaars had developed out of clusters of shopkeepers who had rented space in large converted buildings in the eighteenth century. Exeter Change, in the Strand, was the model.† (#ulink_67ec3fd4-d666-5643-8615-f90cbc76624c) In the eighteenth century the ground floor had been filled by two rows of forty-eight stalls, initially rented mostly to haberdashers and milliners. These were soon superseded by toyshops selling bric-a`-brac—china, cutlery, lacquerware, purses, fans, luxury fabrics such as muslins, silks and brocades, watches and snuff boxes. Above this, on the first floor, was a changing series of exhibitions, ranging from Mrs Mill’s Waxwork Show, to displays of architectural models, ‘an electrifying machine’, a Cremona violin, ‘a fine group of heads drawn with a red-hot poker’, and Indian bows and arrows. From the 1770s the entertainment side of the Exchange began to predominate, with live entertainments of songs and recitations, puppets, and finally—for which the Exchange was ultimately most famous—a menagerie.

(#litres_trial_promo) (For more on shows in general, see Chapter 7; for the menagerie, see p. 275.)

As the Exeter Change turned into a show, other bazaars were developing in ways which would turn them into department stores. The Pantheon itself, as described by Sala in 1859, had a ‘Hampton-court-like maze of stalls, laden with pretty gimcracks, toys, and papier mâché trifles for the table, dolls and childrens’ [sic] dresses, wax flowers and Berlin and crotchet [sic] work, prints, and polkas, and women’s wares of all sorts’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This was a typical pattern: the Soho Bazaar, which had been set up in the 1810s, had several rooms with counter space ‘let on moderate terms to females who can bring forward sufficient testimonies of their moral respectability’.* (#ulink_49f93a06-5542-572d-86f0-639e7abb3ec9) They paid 3d. a day for each foot of counter space they rented, and space could be taken by the day only, which required little or no capital. The Bazaar specialized in ‘light goods, works of art, and female ingenuity in general’, which meant more or less what was being sold at the Exeter Change and the Pantheon: jewellery, watches, linen, hats, lace, work baskets, ‘fancy work’, artificial flowers, ‘toys’, musical instruments and sheet music, prints, books, birds, china, and so on.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Manchester Bazaar had started up on a similar pattern: its initial advertisement in 1821 offered ‘to secure to the Public the choicest and most fashionable Articles in every branch of Art and Manufacture, at a reasonable rate’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1836 three stallholders bought the company; in 1862 two of them, Thomas Kendal and James Milne, bought out the third and the shop became the draper’s Kendal, Milne (although locals knew it as ‘The Bazaar’ long after). In 1872 the old building was knocked down and the new one emerged, triumphantly, as that thing of the hour—a department store.

Zola wrote the ultimate novel of the department store, Au Bonheur des Dames (in its English translation, The Ladies’ Paradise).† (#ulink_e6bb8715-fe22-5055-bde1-542b0308d5ae) In it, Baudu, who runs a small drapery shop across the road from the ‘Ladies’ Paradise’, sees the link between the bazaar and the coming behemoth. He is incredulous (and afraid): ‘Had anyone heard of such a thing? A ladies’ shop that sold everything—that made it a bazaar!’ Baudu sneers that the staff, ‘a fine bunch, a load of popinjays…handled everything as though they were in a railway station, treating the goods and customers like parcels’.

(#litres_trial_promo) (It is significant that poor, left-behind Baudu mentions the railways: Boucicaut opened the Bon Marché at exactly the time when Baron Haussmann was carrying out Napoleon III’s plans for a new Paris, driving through enormous boulevards that linked the railway stations on the peripheries to the centre of the city. Now trams took the suburban shopper in from the edge of town, down the new boulevards, and straight to the new grands magasins.)

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Apart from the size, the range and quantities of goods being sold and the sheer abundance of things—all of which had so appalled Baudu—service was one of the major changes that customers had to come to terms with. The old system in luxury shops, or shops that served the prosperous more generally, was known as ‘shopping through’. The customer was met at the door, preferably by the main floorwalker or by the owner himself (the customer could accurately judge her status by the status of the person who came to meet her). The customer stated what goods she desired; the main floorwalker called over a subordinate, who took her to the right counter, seated her, and called over the shop assistant who specialized in those particular goods. When the customer had made her selection (or not), the shop assistant called over another floorwalker, who escorted her to the next area she wished to visit. If the goods she had purchased at the first counter were small and were to be taken with her rather than delivered later, the floorwalker carried the packages. This was repeated as long as necessary, until the departing customer was escorted out, the floorwalker carrying her purchases out to her carriage.* (#ulink_45e01571-064e-59ba-aed7-4e33fa0396d9)

This took place in small shops naturally—there were possibly only one or two people to serve the customers anyway. But there were also shops that were not yet quite department stores, but were, nonetheless, ‘monster’ shops. As early as 1799 Glovers of Southampton was advertising ‘Ware-Rooms’ that were organized into separate departments with a range of stock that would have qualified it as a department store had the name existed: it sold plate, jewellery and musical instruments (including organs ‘fit for Churches, Chapels or houses’, pianos, harpsichords, harps, clarinets and flutes), as well as an odd mixture of telescopes, microscopes and spectacles, blunderbusses, oyster knives, umbrellas, razors, watches and clocks.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the 1820s drapers’ shops in London might employ as many as thirty people; in 1839 several shops in Manchester had turnover exceeding £1 million.