Читать книгу Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain - Judith Flanders - Страница 8

NEW SHOPS, BIGGER SHOPS, more heavily stocked shops, speciality sellers, brightly lit windows, fixed prices instead of bargaining, advertisements everywhere—it seemed that the nineteenth century brought nothing but change to how people had shopped for centuries. Yet all these things, and many more, arrived not in the nineteenth century, but in the eighteenth. Shops and shopping had long been undergoing a permanent revolution when the Victorian age had just begun. Dr Johnson had understood this by the 1750s. Shopping was no longer an action rooted in necessity, he wrote, but was now a pastime, a leisure activity: ‘He that had resolved to buy no more, feels his constancy subdued…He is attracted by rarity, seduced by example and inflamed by competition.’¹ Johnson was talking about fashionable shops in fashionable parts of London. But the daily purchases by the lesser folk were fuelled by the same desires, and it was their mass purchasing power that drove the century-long explosion of shop development.

Much of what we know today about shops in the eighteenth century comes either from the higher strata of life or is sketchy at best. It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that the extent and development of shops across the country has been badly underestimated, owing in the main to poor survival of records. For example, as late as 1822—3 Pigot’s London and Provincial New Commercial Directory listed no shopkeepers of any sort in Manchester. The obvious reaction, of course, is that this simply could not have been true; but the scale of the directory’s oversight was made clear by the historian Roger Scola, who identified 400 small food shops in the city in the 1810s alone—and that takes into account neither the many many more shops for which no evidence has survived, nor any shops that sold non-food items, which were outside the terms of his survey.² Furthermore, it is becoming clearer that, just as the number of shops has been underestimated, so too has the sophistication of retail systems been equally misunderstood. In fact the number of shops, the type of shops, and the quantity and quality of goods stocked, as well as the methods used to sell them, all began to develop in the eighteenth century.

Until recently it has been suggested that Britain had about 50,000 shops in the eighteenth century, but, as two recent historians have written, that number has long been accepted not because there was any concrete evidence to back it up, but merely because of a lack of evidence to the contrary.³ Basically, when trade directories and censuses began to appear in the early 1800s they showed few shops; by the 1850s there were large numbers, so many have assumed a gradually rising curve. Instead, it is now looking more likely that there was a fall in the number of shops in the late 1790s and early 1800s, and that the sharp rise in the next decades was a rebound from a temporary dip, not a stately rising progression.⁴ During the Seven Years War (1756—63) the government had considered imposing a tax on shops, and the Excise conducted a survey in order to calculate possible revenue. It identified 141,700 shops in England and Wales with a base income high enough to permit taxation.* This is probably as close as we are ever going to get to an accurate number. If we assume that the survey was, if anything, underreporting the number of shops of moderate income, and ignoring entirely the smaller shops, it still gives a ratio of 1 shop per 43.3 people throughout the country.

Most of the shops in the survey, however, were located in the more prosperous south, with far fewer shops per head of population north of a line drawn from Lincolnshire to Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire and through to Somerset. South of this line there were 97,890

shops listed by the Excise, in a population of just over 3 million people, or slightly over 34 people per shop. In the remainder of the country each shop served approximately 63.5 people. (It is salutary to compare these numbers to the retail-crazy twentieth century: two hundred years later, in 1950, there was one shop for every 92 people in the country.) According to the 1797 parish returns in London, there was on average 1 shop for ever 21.6 people in the City and Westminster. In fact, while in the first half of the nineteenth century the population grew by 18.2 per cent, the number of shops soared, so far as we can tell, by a dizzying, and almost impossible-seeming, 183.4 per cent—ten times the rate of population growth.⁶ This happened before industrialization, before mass urbanization. These figures suggest that it was precisely this retail explosion that created the Industrial Revolution, supply being driven by demand, rather than the more traditional, but less commonsensical, idea that the creation—the supply of goods—came first, and the desire for them followed on afterwards.

In general, it appears unlikely that many people, in England at any rate, were more than a few miles away—a dozen or so at most—from a shop. Most communities, even the most rural, had nearby market towns to which at least some members of the community travelled weekly or fortnightly. Agricultural workers, except in the north of the

country, were by the eighteenth century paid mostly in cash, rather than in kind—through food, lodgings, and clothing—as they had been in earlier times. They therefore had money to buy goods, and, equally importantly, the need to do so: they no longer could rely on partpayment either in food or in land to grow or raise their own. For the most part, their wages were ‘long pay’, that is, paid irregularly, and sometimes for an entire season at once, in arrears. That meant that they needed a local shop, with a shopkeeper who knew both them and their employer, in order to be able to obtain credit until the wage bill was paid.

One of the changes that has affected the way we look at shop numbers is the size of towns. Many towns, even quite major ones, were by our standards almost unbelievably small—Derby in its pre-industrial phase

was possibly no more than 500 paces wide. With this kind of size, it mattered little how many shops there were in each town, since all could be reached in a few minutes—there was no need for neighbourhood shops in the more modern sense. What mattered instead was what each shop stocked. The smallest, most basic shops were known as back-street shops. They were the cheapest to stock, required little capital, no training or apprenticeship, and were often set up and run either as a second source of income by the wife of a labourer or as the only way of earning a meagre living by a newly impoverished widow.* In their crudest form, these shops were the front room of a house. Before windows were routinely glazed, the shopkeeper stood at the window and served customers through the hatch. Sometimes the window hatch was enlarged, and sometimes a flap leading from the window down to the pavement was added, to create a small selling area. While London shops began to get glazed windows from the later seventeenth century, many shops in the provinces were still unglazed well into the nineteenth century—a picture of East Street in Chichester in 1815 shows a butcher’s display through an unglazed window hatch. In 1827 an onlooker’s description of Newcastle upon Tyne noted that many shops had just replaced their shutters with glass.⁸ These back-street shops stocked the minimum number of goods. They sold candles, bread, small beer,† and maybe needles, cotton and other small household items.⁹ Some might have small hardware goods, or tobacco, and, later in the century, tea, when it replaced small beer as the drink for all ages. Most of the goods were sold wrapped up in paper in minute quantities, a day’s supply of tea or sugar at a time. The customers were often nearly as poor as the shopkeeper, and could not afford to buy in bulk at better prices.

The next level of retailing was the village shop. The front room was once again given over to retailing, but now the customers were expected to come into the shop area. William Wood of Didsbury, who also owned the Ring o’Bells inn, sold bacon, ‘wheat and barley flour, meal, berm [probably barm, a fermenting agent, used instead of yeast], bread, manchets [small loaves of good-quality wheat bread], tea, coffee, sugar, treacle, currants, raisins, figs, salt, pepper, cloves, mustard, rice, candles, soap, starch, blue’.* This was a fairly standard range for most small grocers. In addition, Wood sold some fresh food: ‘potatoes, apples, plums, peas, butter, cheese, sometimes eggs, sometimes milk’, as well as the much less common ‘beef, veal, mutton, lamb and pork’, and ‘tobacco, snuff, and pipes’.¹⁰ This lack of specialization was found everywhere. In Newport, Shropshire, in the middle of the eighteenth century a shopkeeper sold sugar, tobacco, rum and spirits, which he kept in a warehouse space behind his store; the store itself was stocked with small ironmongery goods, ‘cartbrushes, wire and cord’, and a range of things ‘in ye Pedlars Trade’ and ‘in the Milleners way’. In his inventory he kept another lot of sugar, spices and more ironmongery listed separately; possibly these were goods to be parcelled up and sold through the window in smaller quantities.¹¹

These shopkeepers often had three distinct sets of customers: the poor, who bought through the window; the more prosperous, who came into the shop (or sent their servants); and sometimes the wealthy, whom they visited at home. Thomas Turner, a Sussex shopkeeper who supplied some of the needs of the Duke of Newcastle’s household when it was resident in Sussex, was summoned to the house by the Duke’s steward when he was ready to place an order. The prosperous but non-aristocratic were often waited on in this way too: Turner also called at the houses of ‘a substantial tenant farmer’ and of Mr French, a landowner.¹² Shopkeepers at this level tended to supply goods in bulk to those who owned back-street shops—it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that separate wholesalers began to emerge, as distinct from large retailers. Many shopkeepers expected to order in whatever was needed for their more prosperous customers, while not stocking these items regularly. A wholesale/retail grocer in a good-sized seaport town in Scotland in the early part of the nineteenth century listed the items that had come through his shop over the course of one year. Tea and sugar were the main items, followed by cheese and butter. Then came various spices—nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cassia, cayenne and pepper—followed by currants, raisins and nuts; ham; liquorice; rice; oranges and lemons. It is likely that most of the spices and everything else apart from the tea, sugar, cheese and butter were special orders—the nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cassia and currants appeared only once in his inventory, while the cayenne, raisins, pepper and nuts appeared just twice, with the raisins listed in December, significantly near the new year festivities and Twelfth Night celebrations. Even the rice was noted only three times. He recorded one order of ‘aquavita’, again in December, and two orders for wine. And, while yellow laundry soap made regular appearances, pearl ash (also for laundry) was bought less often, and starch, blue and soda each only once.¹³

Shopping, for both the prosperous middle classes and the wealthy who lived outside London, was neither entirely local nor entirely London-based. In the first half of the eighteenth century the Purefoy family in Shalstone, Buckinghamshire, bought their wine, sugar, coffee and tea from London, while most of their other groceries came from Brackley, their local market town. But they clearly did not feel restricted to those two places: they bought mushrooms from Deddington; their razors were sharpened in Oxford; their blankets were supplied from Witney; and they bought goods from a clockmaker in Bicester, and more from another one in Helmdon. Their clothes came from London (millinery, mercery and drapery), but Russian leather for a pair of boots was ordered in Buckinghamshire, ‘blew Cloath’ came from Brackley, while various tailors in Brackley, Tingwick, and Chipping Norton made up their clothes.¹⁴ This pattern of diffuse purchasing was the norm. An advertisement in the Leeds Mercury in 1769 can stand as representative for many similar ones: it promised that ‘All orders from Gentlemen and tradesmen in the country will be punctually observed.’¹⁵ So many advertisements actively solicited country orders, that these were clearly a large part of any shopkeeper’s business.

By the 1770s this kind of—to use a modern term - mail-order business was common throughout England. Midlands manufacturers had long been sending out price lists; now they were also sending illustrated pattern books, for shopkeepers both at home and abroad. In 1773 Josiah Wedgwood was thinking of producing a catalogue in French, to accompany sample boxes of earthenware; by 1787 he had had the catalogue printed in English and French, and then in German and Dutch, and demand was such that it had gone through five editions.¹⁶ Manufacturers in various decorative metal trades—buckle-makers, candlestickmakers, ‘toy’ manufacturers*—produced illustrated pattern books with goods designed to suit the taste of each particular market. Many manufacturers found it good business to continue to produce old-fashioned lines for export.¹⁸ For example, in the Netherlands the rococo style was popular long after neoclassicism had become all the rage in England. When Wedgwood’s revolutionary earthenware, creamware (see below, p. 63), swept coloured ware and ‘greengrocery’-shaped novelty items off the shelves, from 1766, his partner Thomas Bentley shipped the old lines to the West Indies, where they remained popular. Even at home, shopkeepers took up the catalogue with enthusiasm: it enabled them to have a wide range of goods available without forcing them to invest too much in stock that might not sell. In 1770 Jackson’s Habit-Warehouse boasted that it had many fancy-dress costumes in stock, and it further had ‘a book of several hundred prints coloured, which contains the dresses of every nation’, which were available to order.¹⁹

New consumer products made readily available by post or carrier, brought to market by improved transport (see pp. 70—74), advertised and thus made more widely known by a greater range and wider distribution of newspapers (pp. 124ff.): all of this encouraged greater expectations, and even local shops began to have, as a matter of course, higher stock levels, especially in areas serving large populations. In London, Mrs Holt’s Italian Warehouse had a tradecard illustrated with a picture by Hogarth (see p. 50).²⁰

Greater stock meant that more thought had to go into the display of these goods. For those selling through the window, nothing was required in the way of shopfitting, but, once customers began to come into the shop, the room had to be more than a place where goods were stored. The transformation from storage to selling space began to appear early

in the eighteenth century, and an example can be seen in the probate records. In 1719 Thomas Horne, a shopkeeper in Arundel, died; 150 items of stock (drapery and haberdashery) were listed in the inventory made for probate, but there were no goods listed for the use or comfort of his customers. His widow, Susan Horne, who carried on the business, died fifteen years later, in 1734; the inventory then included eight mirrors, counters, shelves and boxes, all illuminated by new sash windows.²¹

By the middle of the eighteenth century, especially in London, and especially in the luxury-goods trades, the decoration of shops developed swiftly. These shops were a big advance on what had been the norm half a century before. Daniel Defoe was contemptuous of those shopkeepers who wanted ‘to paint and gild’ their shop to make it ‘fine and gay’: ‘Never was such painting and gilding, such sashings and looking-glasses among the shopkeepers as there is now,’ he fretted. He also reported a pastrycook who in 1710 spent an astonishing £300 on sash windows, tiles ‘finely painted in forest-work and figures’, mirrors, a fireplace, candlesticks, a glass lantern, and twenty-five sconces, as well as decoration that involved painting, gilding and carving, and cost another £55.²²

The pastrycook was not an isolated individual. The booksellers Lackington Allen and Co. had a trade card that promised ‘the finest shop in the world being 140 feet in front’, with fourteen windows on to the street, and ‘Lounging Rooms’.²³ Trade cards showed idealized images, of how shopkeepers wanted their shops to be seen, not necessarily what they were like in reality.* But, at the same time, they cannot have been entire fictions, even if the number of windows was increased a bit, or the perspective from which the interior was drawn was low, in order to make the shop seem bigger. Inventories backed up the impression of luxury that the trade cards worked so hard to project. Many listed mirrors, glass display cases, mouldings on the ceilings, gilt cornices, glass for windows to the street, for display, for internal lighting, screens and skylights—the possibilities seemed endless. Furniture was also abundant: the customer expected to sit while he or she was being waited on, and stools and even upholstered chairs appear regularly in inventories. So do other items that were chosen to suggest that the prosperous customer,

now visiting a shop rather than being called upon by the shopkeeper, was still in some way at home, even if it was not his or her home—there were mirrors, pictures, sconces, curtains, tables, lamps.²⁴

By the middle of the eighteenth century successful shops were no longer single rooms, but had expanded either upstairs or by breaking through party walls to take over several ground-floor rooms laterally. In 1774 Wedgwood took a showroom in Greek Street, Soho, at Portland House, the ‘grandest and largest house in the street’, with a seventeenmetre frontage. It had at one point belonged to a surgeon, whose dissecting room ran the full width of the house. (It was tactfully renamed the ‘Great Room’.) Not content with that, Wedgwood immediately began to plan an extension by adding a gallery, linked to the ground floor by a dramatic staircase.²⁵ In 1794 the bookseller James Lackington moved his shop into a mansion in Finsbury Square, which he named the Temple of the Muses. Inside there was a large circular counter from which to serve customers in a magnificent room—a room so large that, after the first day of trading, as a publicity stunt, a coach and horses were driven right the way around the counter.

Despite such grandeur, Lackington had made his fortune in the mass market. Over the entrance to the Temple of the Muses he had painted, ‘Cheapest Bookseller in the World’, and on his carriage the motto ‘Small profits do great things’ reminded passers-by of the source of his wealth.²⁶ The Industrial Revolution had not yet brought about mass-production techniques—they were to come in the nineteenth century—but there was among some manufacturers the beginning of a very clear idea of the potential of the mass market. Matthew Boulton—originally a steel toy manufacturer, later one of the earliest and most successful proponents of the factory system and, in general, one of the leading innovators and entrepreneurs in an age that was rife with them—grasped the idea of the mass market eagerly. When his London agent suggested that he ought to look more at the upper-class market, he responded, ‘We think it of far more consequence to supply the People than the Nobility only; and though you speak contemptuously of Hawkers, Pedlars and those who supply Petty shops, yet we must own that we think they will do more towards supporting a great Manufactory, than all the Lords in the Nation.’²⁷ He returned to this theme frequently: ‘I understand my own interest too well to load any articles of my Manufactory with too extravagant a profit, as I rather choose to make great quantities with small profits, than small quantities with large profits.’²⁸

This attention to price is an indication that the level of competition was fierce: increased urbanization and improved transport meant that by the second half of the eighteenth century many of merely moderate income had access to a large number of shops selling the same kind of goods. No one could now expect their goods to sell simply because they were the only products available. Early historians of consumerism suggested that fixed-price retailing appeared with the creation of department stores in the mid nineteenth century: that William Whiteley, the ‘Universal Provider’ (see p. 114), changed the face of shopping by offering lower prices in exchange for fixed prices, instead of haggling, and cash instead of credit. Yet even the most cursory look at the advertisements of the eighteenth century reveals that many of these nineteenth-century ‘innovations’ were in place in the eighteenth century: newspapers were filled to the brim with advertisements that promised low prices for goods ‘charged at ready money prices’—that is, sold for cash. John Hildyard, a York bookseller, advertised ‘several libraries and parcels of books…[to be] sold cheap, for ready money only’. John Davenport and Co. by 1751 was advertising that wallpaper ‘such as is sold by the upholsterer &c. for 3d. or 3¹/₂d. per yard, we sell for 2¹/₂d. and all other sorts in proportion. The price is printed at the end of each piece without abatement [that is, without discounts] and sold for ready money’.²⁹

Nor were the shopkeepers willing to wait for passing trade to come into their expensively fitted-up shops. There is a circular dating from 1778 which is the oldest known example of a shopkeeper soliciting custom by sending a regular client information about his wares. However, the style of the circular, which contains no explanation of its function, suggests that customers would have seen these types of mailing before. It is therefore likely that this chance survival is a remnant of earlier examples that have not been preserved. By the end of the decade, in any case, such items were commonplace: Smith, Nash, Kemble and Travers, ‘wholesalers and retailers’, in 1779 sent out a circular warning their customers that ‘unfortunately we have just received information of the loss of Grenada…which has caused an advance in Raw sugar*… Refined sugars are very scarce and dear, but will be more Plenty [sic] in a Month or six Weeks, and hope cheaper…We shall be glad to see you in Town if it suits your convenience, but if otherwise, shall endeavour to execute any Orders you may favour us with, on the same terms and with equal Attention.’³⁰

This increase in the price of sugar was a cause of anxiety by 1779. Sugar had, for centuries past, been unaffordable for almost everyone. Honey was used by those who had the space and time to cultivate bees; sugar-beet production would not become a practical reality until the nineteenth century. The population for the most part did without sweeteners. Sugar was, in the strictest sense of the word, a luxury—something that provided enjoyment or comfort in addition to what were accounted the necessaries of life. It was a thing that was desirable, but not indispensable. In 1780 Jeremy Bentham, the Utilitarian philosopher, wrote, ‘Necessaries come always before luxuries.’³¹ But what was a necessity and what was a luxury was more fluid and less absolute than Bentham allowed. In the dedication to Discourses on Art in 1778, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy, wrote, ‘The regular progress of cultivated life is from necessaries to accommodations, from accommodations to ornaments.’³² At almost exactly the same date, Anna Larpent, the wife of the Chief Inspector of Plays for the Lord Chamberlain, wrote in her diary, ‘I must acquire thought in spending money. An elegant Oeconomy, a proper frugality[;] do nothing from mere spirit of imitation. Every thing with order, nothing giddily—there are: absolute necessities; necessary luxuries.’³³ Necessary luxuries: surely a new concept.*

The president of the Royal Academy and a bourgeois housewife were agreed: necessities were no longer only basic food and shelter, those essentials that kept a person alive and able to function. And a couple of decades later, during the French Revolution, the sans-culottes of Paris showed that this attitude was not solely a middle-class development. In the desperate winter of 1792—3 the starving French workers rioted, demanding what they referred to as ‘goods of prime necessity’. These they carefully listed: soap, candles, sugar and coffee—goods their grandparents would have considered unimaginable luxuries. The more prosperous murmured disapprovingly that the rioters had not attacked bakeries, where they would have found bread, for centuries the staple food of Europe. Instead they attacked groceries.³⁵ What subsistence was, what was ‘necessary’, had altered for ever.

Part of this elision from luxury to necessity came from the rapid increase in the quantity of goods taxed in the eighteenth century. Numerous wars and the expansion of government saw duties quadruple. A partial list of goods that were taxed in the 1770s includes paper, newspapers, windows, horses, dogs, wagons, leather, printed silk and linen, starch, soap and candles (even soap and candles made from fat from one’s own animals), salt, hops, barley for beer, cider, perry, wine, spirits, tea,* coffee, sugar, molasses, spices and chocolate.³⁶ These were all, therefore, to a degree seen as luxuries, at least by the government. The people who were consuming these items, not unnaturally, felt differently. Luxuries such as soap, candles, salt and tea were in reality by this time clearly necessities to many. It is therefore easy to see how other taxed goods quickly took on a similar aura, and also became assimilated as necessities.

The first advertisement for tea that has survived appeared in the 23—30 September 1658 issue of Mercurius Politicus, the official, governmentapproved political periodical. It notified readers that ‘That Excellent, and by all Physicians approved, China Drink, called by the Chineaus [Chinese], Tcha, by other Nations Tay alias Tee, is sold at the Sultanesshead, a Cophee-house in Sweetings Rents by the Royal Exchange, London.’ That same year, Garraway’s coffee house in Exchange Alley also advertised tea, which it promised would cure, among other things, headache, stone, gravel, dropsy, ‘liptitude distillations’, scurvy, sleepiness, loss of memory, looseness of the guts, ‘heavy dreams’ and colic. Moreover, when ‘Taken with Virgin’s Honey instead of Sugar, tea cleanses the Kidneys and Ureters, and with Milk and water it prevents Consumption.’³⁷

It may be that this tea was being sold as a dry leaf, to take away and brew up at home, as medicine—the claims made for it resemble the advertisements for patent medicines over the next two centuries. But from 1660, when the commodity was first taken notice of by the Excise, the tax was levied on the brewed item: the initial tax was 8d. per gallon—the seller had to make the tea in bulk, have the excisemen check it, and then sell it. From 1689, however, the government moved to a tax on the dry leaf, which kept prices high, but did not require an exciseman in every coffee house.³⁸ From 1664 the East India Company began to import the commodity, but in such small quantities—only 100 pounds to begin with—that it is probable that it was being shipped in for those East India Company employees who had acquired a taste for the drink abroad.

From this small base, consumption rose at astonishing rates. In 1741 Britain imported less than 800,000 pounds a year; by 1746—50 annual home consumption had reached more than 2.5 million pounds. Very swiftly, tea had become a drink that even the working class could afford, at least sometimes. By mid-century the lowest grades cost between 8 and 10s. a pound (the highest grades reached £1 16s.). There were advertisements recommending a certain leaf because it was ‘strong, and will endure the Change of Water three or four times’—that is, the thrifty housewife could reuse the leaves and still get—brown liquid? By 1748 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw so many of his flock spending money on tea that he wrote the minatory A Letter to a Friend Concerning TEA, while the philanthropist Jonas Hanway warned of the perils of tea and gin in an almost interchangeable vocabulary.³⁹

The consumption of tea was very quickly limited only by the high levels of tax. In 1795, during the French wars, tax was raised to a rate of 20 per cent; in 1801 it was 50 per cent for tea costing more than 2s. 6d. a pound, 20 per cent for cheaper leaves; two years later the expensive blends were taxed at 95 per cent, and the nominally cheaper ones at 60 per cent; finally, by 1820, the tax was an eye-watering 100 per cent of the price for all teas costing over 2s. per pound.⁴⁰ Even this was not enough to slow the seemingly insatiable demand. Between 1785 and 1800 the population increased by 14 per cent, while tea consumption went up by 97.7 per cent. In 1800 the East India Company’s imports stood at 21 million pounds a year; by 1820, 30 million pounds of tea a year were consumed in the United Kingdom; in 1850 it was 44.5 million pounds, or 1.5 pounds of tea for every man, woman and child in the country each year. Still the numbers went on rising—to 3.42 pounds a head in 1866, and 6.3 pounds in 1909.⁴¹* Given the amount of smuggling that went on to get around the enormous tax burden, this was one of the earliest indications that the market was not, as economists had thought, a fixed object, but was instead infinitely expandable. As desirable goods appeared, the demand—and the market—would increase.

In the early eighteenth century, for the most part tea was sold by grocers. (Grocers were then at the luxury end of the market.) Then other luxury traders began to carry this new luxury good: china dealers, haberdashers, milliners. Mr Rose, a bookseller in Norwich, sold tea in 1707; Frances Bennett, a Bath draper, did the same in 1744, as did Cornelius Goldberg, a Birmingham toyman, in 1751. But now specialist tea dealers were appearing in large towns. By 1784 there were 32,754 licensed tea dealers, or 1 tea dealer for every 234 customers. Less than a decade later the number had risen by 60 per cent which, with the rise in population, meant that every 150 people were served by a single tea dealer. Even now, though, many tea retailers were performing multiple tasks: as late as 1803 there was Jones’s Druggist and Tea Dealer in Birmingham, and Thirsk had Jo. Napier, Milliner and Tea Dealer, in 1804. But this was no longer because tea was a luxury, but because it was a necessity. Once the masses began to drink tea, it had become readily available in all kinds of shops, from the grandest of grocers in London to the back-street shops set up on £10 capital.⁴² Even the poorest areas of the East End of London had shops selling tea—the notorious Ratcliff Highway had one, as did Wapping Wall. Another, on the ‘foulsome Butcher Row’, was a testament to the product’s popularity: however impoverished its clientele, at one point the shop held 119 pounds of tea in stock.⁴³

Part of the reason that the consumption of tea soared so dramatically was that it was inextricably interwoven with another commodity: sugar. Both had arrived at roughly the same time in Britain, one from India, one from the West Indies. The development of cane sugar in the West Indian plantations had made many British fortunes, through the possibility of sales at dramatically reduced prices.* In 1660, about 1,000 hogsheads of sugar were consumed in Britain; by 1730 that had risen a hundredfold, to 100,000 hogsheads. By the mid-1770s, sugar imports were valued at £3.3 million. Sugar and tea were now no longer luxuries: they were national characteristics. Consumption was running at 20 pounds of sugar per person per year; and up to 10 per cent of all money spent on food and drink went on sugar and tea.⁴⁵*

Tea had not conquered the market on its intrinsic worth alone. From the late eighteenth century it was heavily advertised, using a range of new methods to entice customers. Many advertisements centred on competitive pricing: one merchant was ‘determined to sell teas at such low prices…as the public have a right to expect’, another, heroically, aimed ‘at profits only sufficient to defray expenses, wholesale and retail’. Many claimed to be selling tea more cheaply than anywhere else; others advertised reduced prices for bulk purchases. Many supposedly nineteenthand even twentieth-century innovations were happily tried out by these eighteenth-century tradesmen: some used the ‘loss-leader’, selling sugar at below-cost prices with the purchase of full-price tea; others gave the chance of good fortune with a lottery ticket free on purchase of a pound of tea;† some offered customers ‘a new treatise on tea’, available, not by coincidence, with the purchase of tea; still others advertised money-back guarantees if customers were dissatisfied; some promised to match wholesale prices, or even undercut them⁴⁷—and none of these advertisements suggested that these were new ways of selling.

One shopkeeper who embraced these methods enthusiastically was Edward Eagleton, of the Tea Warehouse in Cheapside. In the Leeds Mercury in 1786 he advertised reduced prices, fixed prices for cash, mail-order sales, and money-back guarantees; he offered to post samples, or customers could come into his Tea Warehouse to taste the goods. In other advertisements he promoted his prices, which were, he claimed, 1s. per pound lower than anyone else’s. He sold entire chests of East India Company tea to small shopowners with only a 1 per cent mark-up. His most innovative move, however, was an arrangement with ‘outlets’ (it is unclear whether he meant shops or simply agents) in twenty-seven towns: he supplied them with packets of tea marked with his own sign, the Grasshopper, and advertised in local newspapers ‘fresh…teas…from Eagleton and Company…London…wholesale and retail…selling from ten to twenty per cent cheaper than [are now] sold…and carriage saved…[The tea is] packed and marked with the sign of the Grasshopper’, with a money-back guarantee and the motto ‘Taste, try, compare and judge’.⁴⁸

All of these sales techniques had been tried before, but Eagleton was one of the first to bring them together. The next to take up the retail challenge was a man who had originally been a printer in a firm that produced lottery tickets. When Frederick Gye himself won £30,000 in a lottery, he set himself up as a tea dealer and quickly became one of the most important in the trade, mostly by dint of advertisements. Instead of advertising his tea, he advertised himself as an indissoluble part of his product. First and foremost, he promoted the sale of his packaged tea, which, he promised, would save the ‘Tea Trade from the opprobrium attached to it by the late disclosures of adulteration’, promising not to ‘buy nor sell Bohea tea*…so commonly used to adulterate better sorts’. (With this he was in fact blurring the line between blending tea—a legitimate job, and a highly skilled one—and adulterating it, and so attacking other dealers. Attack ads were one of his specialities.) The brand was now all-important: he promised that every order over a quarter of a pound would be sent in a sealed package with a wrapper carrying an engraving of his shop; the quality of the tea, its price and a seal were stamped on it. He used some of Eagleton’s other methods as well: free carriage within ten miles of London for cash sales, and agents ‘in every principal town in England’—by 1819, four months after his shop opened, he advertised that he had 100 agents; seven months after that he claimed to have 500. Other dealers resented this newcomer, and advertised in return, using his methods, and thus by the early nineteenth century advertisements in local papers, country agents, and prepacked, branded, pre-priced tea were commonplaces.⁴⁹

When tea became fashionable, in the early eighteenth century, it naturally became necessary to have the right accoutrements to brew it in and from which to drink it. We have seen that as late as the 1690s hot-drink utensils were rarely to be found domestically, while by 1725 most prosperous households had some.⁵⁰ In the early part of the century porcelain had been imported from China, before local production stepped in to capture the market with equipment better suited to British rather than Chinese tea-drinking habits. In China, tea was brewed in a kettle, then cooled before drinking; in Britain, it was brewed in a teapot and poured out while still hot. Therefore the British teapot shape was adapted not from a Chinese tea kettle, but from a wine flask, with a handle added so that the tea could be poured before it was cooled; equally, handles on cups were useful for hot tea.⁵¹ Further, the British drank their tea sweetened, and with milk, so both a sugar bowl and a milk jug needed to be designed, along with a new size of spoon—the teaspoon—and a saucer on which to place the wet spoon, creating by the eighteenth century a British tea set that was considerably different from its Chinese ancestor.

Many manufacturers rushed to fill the void. In 1757 James Watt, soon to be known as the inventor of the steam engine, was working as ‘Mathematical Instrument Maker to the University’ in Glasgow. Despite living a fairly straitened life, he wrote to his father asking him to send ‘¹/₂ Doz afternoon China tea cups a stone teapot not too small a sugar Box & Slop Bowl as soon as possible’.⁵² The use of such precise terms is fascinating—a relatively poor man, Watt still specified ‘afternoon’ cups, as distinct, one assumes, from breakfast china, and a stoneware teapot, not an earthenware or porcelain one; also, the sugar and slop bowls* were not to be omitted. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Josiah Wedgwood had such an immediate success when he produced his Queensware in 1765.†

It is almost impossible for us to realize today what a sensation china was when it first appeared. Before the eighteenth century, the rich in

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Britain used silver and pewter; moderately prosperous households used pewter or, sometimes, early forms of earthenware; the poor used wood. European porcelain factories were set up under royal patronage after the secret of hard-paste porcelain was discovered by Meissen in 1709. The hard-paste porcelain from China, however, remained highly prized. The Dutch, who at that time held the monopoly on trade with the Chinese, sent drawings of their pewter and stoneware utensils for the Chinese to copy in porcelain: in this way the goods that arrived in Europe were at once startlingly new in material and reassuringly familiar in shape. A few factories began to produce soft-paste porcelain in Britain—Bow, Derby, Pomona, and Longton Hall in Staffordshire—but the cost of production was staggering: before any work could be carried out, for example, the clay had to be weathered for nearly three years. Without a beneficent monarch to pay the bills, these works had little chance of survival: Longton Hall was bankrupt by 1760, Bow in 1763.⁵⁴

While this was bad news for porcelain manufacturers, it opened up the earthenware market to the manufacturer with an eye to the market. No one would have picked Josiah Wedgwood as that man of destiny at his birth: the twelfth child of a cadet branch of a family of potters in Burslem,* he started in the general trade, as one of dozens of earthenware potters selling to the local retailers at the cheap end of the market. Earthenware was porous, and chipped and broke easily; stoneware, fired at higher temperatures, was a slightly better product, having a shiny, non-porous surface, but it was still fragile. By the 1760s, however, Wedgwood had produced his first technical breakthrough, which moved him from a local to a national market: creamware, an earthenware that could withstand sudden temperature changes without shattering, had a richly glazed surface, and was still relatively inexpensive. It also had a purer colour than had ever been achieved except with porcelain, and its worth was quickly recognized: in 1765 Queen Charlotte ordered a creamware tea set from him. The technical breakthrough was essential, and through his life Wedgwood continued to work at new methods and processes. Even when he was not the inventor himself, he always recognized important advances and quickly made use of them. In 1750 a mezzotint engraver had developed a way of using transfer printing on earthenware, to decorate it to look like hand-painted porcelain. Wedgwood swooped, and soon creamware was carrying black, rust or purple images of flowers, birds, garlands, genre scenes, classical groups, even Masonic emblems and designs to commemorate people and events—the King and Queen, Frederick the Great, Pitt, Wesley and John Wilkes were all immortalized in earthenware.

These advances would have occurred sooner or later, with or without Wedgwood; it was how he parlayed his successes into an empire that marked out Wedgwood—and his unfairly overlooked partner Thomas Bentley—as unique. Wedgwood saw the route ahead the minute the royal tea set had been ordered. He immediately renamed his creamware Queensware, and asked for the right to call himself ‘Potter to Her Majesty’. He wrote to Bentley:

The demand for this said Creamcolour, Alias Queen’s Ware, Alias Ivory, still increases. It is really amazing how rapidly the use of it has spread allmost† over the whole Globe, how universally it is liked. How much of this general use, & estimation, is owing to the mode of its introduction—& how much to its real utility and beauty? are questions in which we may be a good deal interested for the government of our future Conduct…For instance, if a Royal, or Noble introduction be as necessary for the sale of an Article of Luxury, as real Elegance & beauty, then the Manufacturer, if he consults his own interest will bestow as much pains, & expence too, if necessary, in gaining the former of these advantages, as he would in bestowing the latter.⁵⁵

In 1770 Wedgwood wrote, as always, to Bentley:

Wo^d you advertise the next season as the silk mercers in Pell mell do,—Or deliver cards at the houses of the Nobility & Gentry, & in the City,—Get leave to make a shew of his Majesty’s Service for a month, & ornament the Dessert with Ornamental Ewers, flower baskets & Vases—Or have an Auction at Cobbs room of Statues, Bassreliefs, Pictures, Tripods, Candelabrias, Lamps, Potpouris, Superb Ewers, Cisterns, Tablets Etruscan, Porphirys & other Articles not yet expos’d to sale. Make a great route of advertising this Auction, & at the same time mention our rooms in Newport St—& have another Auction in the full season at Bath of such things as we now have on hand, just sprinkled over with a few new articles to give them an air of novelty to any of our customers who may see them there,—Or will you trust to a new disposition of the Rooms with the new articles we shall have to put into them & a few modest puffs in the Papers from some of our friends such as I am told there has been one lately in Lloyd’s Chronicle.⁵⁶

Barely pausing for breath, he had suggested in just a few lines many of the major new selling techniques of the century: advertising in the press—by paid advertisements, by auction announcements and by getting friends to insert ‘puff ‘ pieces; delivering trade cards to customers and potential customers; various forms of exhibition—by displaying a service he had made for the King, with its concommitant ‘royal’ publicity, and more conventionally by auction and in his showrooms; highlighting new goods to attract the fashionable; and redesigning his showrooms, again to attract the fashionable by novelty. And this is a single letter from the hundreds that poured out over the decades.*

Wedgwood understood the benefits of publicity in all its varied forms. His most tried and trusted method was to get nobility (if royalty were not available) to promote his wares for him. In 1776 he had some new bas-relief vases to sell. He fired off yet another missive to Bentley: ‘Sir William Hambleton,* our very good Friend is in Town—Suppose you shew him some of the Vases, & a few other Connoisieurs not only to have their advice, but to have the advantage of their puffing them off against the next Spring, as they will, by being consulted, and flatter’d agreeably, as you know how, consider themselves as a sort of parties in the affair, & act accordingly.’⁵⁷ To make sure of success, before the vases went on sale Wedgwood and Bentley had private viewings for Mrs Chetwynd (their conduit to Queen Charlotte), the dukes of Northumberland and Marlborough, the earls of Stamford and Dartmouth, Lords Bessborough, Percy, Clanbrazil, Carlisle and Torrington, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn and, by comparison, the rather humble-sounding MP Mr Harbord Harbord (who was, however, later to become the 1st Baron Suffield).⁵⁸

‘Fashion,’ as Wedgwood recognized, ‘is infinitely superior to merit in many respects…It is plain from a thousand instances that if you have a favourite child you wish the public to fondle & take notice of, you have only to make a choice of proper sponcers. If you are lucky in them no matter what the brat is, black, brown or fair, its fortune is made.’⁵⁹ And with his ‘sponcers’ Wedgwood started at the top, believing that the greatest in the land would influence the lesser: ‘Few ladies, you know, dare venture at anything out of the common stile ‘till authoris’d by their betters—by the Ladies of superior spirit who set the ton.’⁶⁰ Queen Charlotte had started him on his way with Queensware; after a queen, who but an empress? In 1770 Catherine the Great had commissioned a Queensware service decorated with wheat husks. Three years later came a greater challenge: she wanted a service for state occasions: a 680-piece dinner service and a 264-piece dessert service, plus tureens, salvers, fruit baskets, ‘glaciers’ (ice-cream bowls) etc. to accompany them.† Each piece was to have on it an image of an actual country house, or a park or garden, or a palace, or even industrial ‘sights’ such as the Plymouth docks or the Bridgewater Canal. The cost was fantastic—not for the manufacture, but for an artist to be sent around the country to make drawings, and then for the 1,200 drawings to be worked up so they could be transferred to the dishes. But Wedgwood was a born publicist, and he had planned a coup de théâtre—he would show the entire service before it was shipped off to Russia, and, whatever he had lost on the manufacture, ‘it would bring an immense number of people of fashion into our Rooms—would fully complete our notoriety to the whole Island, & help us greatly, no doubt, in the sale of our goods, both useful & ornamental. It would confirm the consequence we have attain’d, & increase it, by showing that we are employ’d in a much higher scale than other Manufacturers.’⁶¹ His one anxiety was that some of his noble patrons would be offended that their houses were not included, or were put ‘upon a small piece, or not flattering it sufficiently’. To make the event even more exclusive, admission to the showroom would be by ticket. It was all a great success, with the King and Queen of Sweden paying a special visit, as well as Queen Charlotte, Prince Ernst of Mecklenberg, and hordes of the aristocracy. No one was aggrieved to find their great houses represented on some of the smaller dishes; on the contrary they came time and again to point their lasting fame out to friends.⁶²

The difference between Wedgwood and earlier craftsmen who had relied on the nobility and gentry for their livings was that, as far as Wedgwood and Bentley were concerned, the nobility were a means to an end:

The Great People have had these Vases in their Palaces long enough for them to be seen and admired by the Middling Class of People, which Class we know are vastly, I had almost said, infinitely superior, in number to the great, and though a great price was, I believe, at first necessary to make the vases esteemed Ornament for Palaces, that reason no longer exists. Their character is established and the middling People would probably buy quantities of them at a reduced price.⁶³

Once that principle was established, it was not surprising that Wedgwood thought he could sell anything to anyone. In the 1780s his works could not keep up with the retail demand, and he bought in ware that other manufacturers had been unable to sell. He slapped a higher price on it, together with his name, and everything was snatched off the shelves in a fashionable frenzy. It was the ultimate marketing triumph: to sell goods no one else could shift—and at a higher price.

Wedgwood used every possible route to reach the ‘middling People’. There had long been a reluctance for luxury trades in general to advertise in the newspapers, because there was no control over how their advertisements would appear: auctions—of houses, pictures or just household goods—cockfights, draper’s shops, patent medicines, bug-killers, carefully worded advertisements for the ‘removal of obstructions’ (abortifacients), all appeared pell-mell, one after the other, in column after column. The newspapers, meanwhile, were doing their best to make advertisers believe that their pages were the haunts of none but the very finest manufacturers and retailers. In 1757 the Liverpool Chronicle, in its first edition, suggested,

It is not many years since it was thought mean and disreputable, in any tradesmen of worth and credit, to advertise the sales of his commodities in a public Newspaper, but as those apprehensions were founded only on custom, and not on reason, it is become now fashionable for very eminent tradesmen to publish their business, and the peculiar goods wherein they deal, in the News Papers, by way of Advertisement; nor can any one make appear what disgrace there can be in this, for do not the great trading corporations apprize the public of their sales in the public News Papers?⁶⁴

Naturally, the newspapers would say that: they had a vested interest in advertisers believing them. But many manufacturers could not be swayed. For years Wedgwood and Bentley preferred to use ‘puffs’, articles ostensibly written by the newspaper’s own journalists, but in reality supplied to it by the subject of the piece or his friends. Wedgwood complained to Bentley, ‘There is a most famous puff for Boulton & Fothergill in the St James’s Chronicle of the 9th & for Mr Cox likewise, How the Author could have the assurance to leave us out I cannot conceive. Pray get another article in the next paper to complete the Triumvirate.’⁶⁵

Wedgwood constantly came up with new marketing and publicity ploys. When he was given permission to copy the early-first-century Barberini vase, recently acquired by the Duchess of Portland (and more commonly known today as the Portland Vase), he took orders for a small run of expensive reproductions, promising his customers that if the results were not satisfactory the purchasers would not be required to pay. This was a good marketing ploy, rather than an attack of nerves—the Great Publicist was saying, ‘The original is almost unreproducible; when I create a good reproduction, therefore, it makes me a great manufacturer, and the vases more valuable.’ This was one small example of his endless marketing ingenuity. He also sent his London agent to collect outstanding payments while carrying new samples, to show rich but dilatory customers what they could have once they had paid up. He made perfectly standard goods seem like limited lines: he warned that his ‘serpent handled antique vases’ should not ‘be seen till the others are all sold, & then raise the price of them 1/ each’; then he countermanded that—instead of just making the price higher, the London showroom should raise the price even further, and ‘never mind their being thought dear, [but] do not keep them open in the rooms, shew them only to the People of Fashion’.⁶⁶ He pioneered inertia selling, by sending parcels of his goods—some worth as much as £70—to aristocratic families across Europe, spending £20,000 (altogether the equivalent of several million today), and following up each parcel with a request for payment or the return of the goods. Within a couple of years he had received payment from all but three families.⁶⁷ He was an endless fountain of ideas—boxes of samples for distance orders; special terms for a first order; French-, German-, Italian- and Dutch-speaking clerks to deal with export correspondence. By 1777 he had travelling salesmen, and by 1790 he had drawn up a ‘Travellers’ Book’ for them, complete with rules of behaviour and commercial systems.⁶⁸ He foresaw selfservice, telling his London staff to put the inferior pieces ‘in one of the best places of your lower Shop, where people can come at them, & serve themselves’.⁶⁹ He had trade cards printed up saying that Wedgwood ‘delivers his goods safe and carriage free…as he sells for ready money only’: he offered free London delivery for goods paid in cash, and promised those outside London that if their orders arrived damaged he would pay for the replacements. Some of this was genuine; much more was perception. The middle classes could buy his goods only for ready money, although the upper classes still received long credit. He had advertised as a novelty that his customers were ‘at liberty to return the whole, or any part of the goods they order (paying the carriage back) if they do not find them agreeable to their wishes’, but most customers had routinely returned goods to their suppliers if they didn’t like them, and they complained vociferously if things arrived broken. Still, the advertisements stood, and drew in new customers by their perceived innovation.

Wedgwood’s showrooms, too, were something new. Small producer/retailers had combined workshops and selling areas, but it was unusual for a manufacturer of Wedgwood’s size to sell directly to the public. He opened a London showroom in 1768, and he had showrooms in Bath from 1772, and Dublin from 1773.* He saw his showrooms as places of exciting novelty and display, where dinner services were laid out on tables, and

a much greater variety of setts of vases should decorate the Walls, and both these articles may, every few days, be so alter’d, revers’d & transform’d as to render the whole a new scene, even to the same Company, every time they shall bring their friends to visit us.

I need not tell you the many good effects this must produce, when business & amusement can be made to go hand in hand. Every new show, Exhibition or rarity soon grows stale in London, & is no longer regarded, after the first sight, unless utility, or some such variety as I have hinted at above continues to recommend it to their notice…⁷⁰

But perhaps Wedgwood’s most astute move had nothing to do with selling goods at all. When Wedgwood first set up in business in Burslem, there were three ways for him to send his goods to market: by road for twenty miles, then along the River Weaver to Liverpool; by road for forty miles, to Bridgnorth, then by the River Severn to Bristol; or by road for forty miles, then via the River Trent to Hull. To get one ton of goods from Burslem to the Weaver cost 18s.; from Burslem to the Trent, 34s. Whatever route was chosen, the goods had to make the initial journey by road—and a ‘road’ in the eighteenth century was not what we would call a road. The main road out of Burslem was in such poor condition that it was permanently impassable to wheeled vehicles of any kind; everything had to be carried in and out by packhorse. This was not an unusual state for roads across the country. A contemporary described the road from Knutsford, in Cheshire, to Newcastle under Lyme: ‘In general [it was] a paved causeway, as narrow as can be conceived, and cut into perpetual holes, some of them two feet deep measured on the level…and wherever the country is the least sandy, the pavement [that is, the road surface] is discontinued, and the ruts and holes most execrable.’⁷¹ And that was a good road: the road between Newcastle and Burslem was worse, partly because until 1720 the freeholders of Burslem had been entitled to dig clay from any unenclosed land, which included the main roads. In the early nineteenth century much of this had still not been filled in.⁷² John Ogilby, in his The Traveller’s Guide, or, a Most Exact Description of the Roads of England (1711), had called Burslem one of the most inaccessible places in England. It was hardly surprising that nearly 30 per cent of Wedgwood’s goods were broken in transit.

Wedgwood, as so often, was apparently lucky in being in the right place at the right time. When the novelist and critic Tobias Smollett first travelled to England from Scotland, in 1739, there were no wagons on the roads anywhere between Edinburgh and Newcastle upon Tyne, because there were no roads that were good enough. The roads across the islands were in such a terrible state because their maintenance was still governed by the Highways Act of 1555. This act gave control over the roads to each individual parish, but it did not give parishes the right to levy a rate on residents to pay for professional survey or repair. Instead, those whose land was valued above £50 were required to lend a horse or an ox and a wagon for four days annually, while those householders whose land was rated at a lesser level were required to give four days’ labour on the roads a year, unpaid, to be supervised by an unpaid surveyor. It was unrealistic to expect good work or good materials from those supplying them unrecompensed, and now there was the added unfairness that these locally maintained roads were increasingly used for trans-parish transport between towns and cities. The matter of unpaid labour and co-opted transport was not addressed until the Highways Act of 1835, when finally parishes were permitted to use local rates to pay for professional surveyors and paid labourers. In the meantime, turnpike trusts were created, often formed by groups of manufacturers and local merchants who would most benefit from better-maintained roads. From 1706 individual Turnpike Acts were granted by Parliament: in exchange for improvements and maintenance on the roads for a period of (initially) twenty-one years, each trust could set up toll gates and charge for road usage. The tolls in turn were used to pay for the surveyor, treasurer, clerk and labourers to build the road. Between 1750 and 1800, more than 1,600 trusts were formed;* by the mid-1830s, 1,116 turnpike trusts in England and Wales supervised 22,000 miles of roads, out of a total of 126,770 miles of parish highways. Turnpikes now made up nearly 20 per cent of the road system of England and Wales.⁷⁴

From the 1740s, Wedgwood had been at the forefront of a successful campaign by a group of Staffordshire merchants and manufacturers to upgrade the roads into the Potteries; in 1766 alone, six Turnpike Acts affecting the Five Towns were approved by Parliament.⁷⁵ The most immediate result of the spread of turnpikes for these businessmen, however, was not only the improvement to the roads—although now, it was true, goods could actually be transported to and from Burslem by wagon—but the speed with which journeys could be made. From the 1750s to the 1830s journey times between major cities fell by 80 per cent; from the 1770s to the 1830s they were halved. An advertisement in 1754 boasted that ‘However incredible it may appear this coach will actually arrive in London four days after leaving Manchester’; a mere six years later the same distance took three days; by 1784 the time was down to two days. This improvement was not confined to a single road. The trip from Edinburgh to London had been impossible to undertake by carriage along the entire route in 1739; by the mid-1750s the whole route could be covered in a carriage, taking ten days in summer and twelve in winter; in 1836 a stagecoach travelled the route in 45¹/₂ hours.⁷⁶ In 1820 for the first time in history it became possible for a person to go faster than a man on a single horse.

Travel had become easier; it had it become speedier; now it was more readily available as well. As the journey times fell, so the number of stagecoaches increased: in 1780 there were approximately 20 stagecoaches leaving Birmingham daily; by 1815 there were over 100; in 1835 the number had risen to 350. Ten major urban centres—Birmingham, Bristol, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow and Edinburgh—saw an eightfold increase in stagecoach services in the forty-six years from 1790 to 1836. Even small towns such as Kirkby Stephen, a market town in Westmorland, had regular and plentiful carrier services: from Kirkby Stephen one could travel on scheduled stagecoach services to Newcastle, Stockton, Barnard Castle, Lancaster, Kendal (and from there on to London), Sedbergh and Kirkby Lonsdale. And, apart from the London carriers, eight other carriers travelled regularly from Kirkby Stephen to different parts of England.

Technological developments to stagecoaches also fuelled improved journey times. The coaches were built lower to the ground, so they could be driven more quickly with less fear of being overturned. The invention of the elliptical spring (by the wonderfully named Obadiah Elliot) in 1804 made it possible for carriages to be hung from springs, which made the coaches cheaper to manufacture, enabled them to travel at greater speed and more comfortably—and the increased stability made it possible to have ‘outsides’, or seats on the roof, without the passengers being tossed overboard. Together with bigger carriages, this meant that by the 1830s stagecoaches carried double the number of passengers they had in 1790. Fifteen times as many people were travelling as had forty years before, in a service that had grown in the number of scheduled routes, and the number of coaches on those routes, by 800 per cent.⁷⁷

It was not merely passenger numbers: the quantity of goods transported by road also increased. In 1823 London had over 700 carriers, twice as many as it had had thirty years before; Exeter had three times as many in 1831 as it had had in 1792, while Sheffield had nearly four times as many; in Birmingham the number soared fivefold in the same period. Overall, across the country, there was a 131 per cent growth in carrier services, which sounds substantial. But, compared to an urban population growth of 120 per cent, it becomes apparent that the number of carriers was barely keeping up with overall growth.⁷⁸ The main reason for this lack of expansion was the development of the canal system.

Adam Smith had recognized the importance of transport to the economy, but, while he paid lip service to roads, he was mainly concerned with the benefits brought by water transportation. In 1776, in the middle of this revolution in transport, he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, that ‘by means of water-carriage, a more extensive market is opened to every sort of industry than what land-carriage alone can afford it, so it is upon the sea-coast, and along the banks of navigable rivers, that industry of every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself.’ He returned to this, stressing that ‘Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that account the greatest of all improvements.’⁷⁹ But he was somewhat behind the times in his concentration on rivers. It is true that at the beginning of the eighteenth century most work had been concerned with improving the navigability of rivers. In 1720 the Mersey and Irwell Navigation System had opened; the Weaver Navigation carried traffic from 1720, and improvements to the Wear went on from 1716 to 1759. Yet, despite increasing the extent of the navigable inland waterways of Britain from just over 1,100 kilometres in 1660 to more than 1,800 kilometres in 1720s,⁸⁰ this was always going to be a solution limited by geography: the newly industrialized Midlands were over 400 feet above sea level, and in the west the River Severn fluctuated from having a depth of only 16 inches of water in good weather to rising 18 feet in five hours in bad, while in 1796 it remained completely impassable for all but two months of the year. Canals were the logical way forward. Two projects led the way. From 1754 the Liverpool Corporation oversaw the building of the Sankey Brook Navigation system—an entirely new canal along an entirely new route, rather than following an old riverbed. Then in 1757 the Duke of Bridgewater inherited an estate, in Worsley, in Lancashire, and planned immediately to build a canal to link his new coalfields with the urban centres of Manchester and Liverpool. The first ten miles of the Bridgewater Canal were in operation by 1761, and the price of coal in Manchester immediately fell from 7d. to 3¹/₂d. per hundredweight.⁸¹ In 1766 James Brindley, the engineer behind the Bridgewater Canal, began work on the Trent and Mersey Canal, which when finished in 1777 linked the Trent near Burton to the Mersey in Lancashire, making the entire breadth of the country from Hull to Liverpool navigable. The canal was 151 kilometres long (225 if you count the bit where it joined the Birmingham Canal and the Severn), and had along its length 75 locks, 5 tunnels, 5 major aqueducts and 155 minor ones—a feat of engineering that ushered in the great age of canal building. By 1830 there were nearly 5,000 kilometres of canals in England and Wales.⁸²

Wedgwood and his friends had been enthusiasts from the beginning: Erasmus Darwin had been involved in promoting the Grand Trunk Canal, which was to link the Trent and the Mersey (1766—77) and the Birmingham Canal (opened 1771), and he and Wedgwood saw the very practical benefits to being able to convey the Potteries’ output to the ports of Liverpool and Hull.* Darwin had calculated that the cost of shipping the clay and flint used in Wedgwood’s works would drop from 15s. per ton to 8s. per ton once the canal opened, while the freight charges for the finished earthenware moving in the opposite direction would be 12s. instead of the present 28s. per ton. (In fact, when the Trent and Mersey Canal was completed, freight prices dropped from 10d. to ¹/₂d. per ton per mile.)⁸⁴ Under Wedgwood’s watchful eye, the Trent and Mersey had been carefully planned to pass through land he had purchased for his new factory, which in turn was being designed to make loading and unloading from the as yet non-existent canal into the as yet non-existent factory both economical and convenient.

Wedgwood, of course, was not the only manufacturer to benefit in this way. Many of the new factory owners were as successful as they were because they understood that technology and trade went hand in hand. Joseph Wilkes, the child of a Leicestershire farmer, set up as a cheese factor in Burton upon Trent. In 1763 he went into partnership with a Birmingham banker named Sampson Lloyd (whose bank is now known as Lloyds TSB, keeping his name alive into the twenty-first century), buying a lease on nineteen miles of the Trent Navigation; from this he gradually invested in canals, turnpikes (and later railroads), until in 1783 he bought the entire parish of Measham, where he set up a pithead to mine coal, a brickworks, a corn mill, a barge-building company and

Wedgwood and Darwin did not, however, confine their canal fever to commerce alone. When fossils were uncovered during the building of the Trent and Mersey, Wedgwood collected them and shared them with Darwin: ‘I will in return,’ he promised, ‘send you some mineral observations of exactly the same value (weighed nicely) for I must inform you I mean to gain full as much knowledge, from you who can spare it so well, as I return you in exchange.⁸³

a cotton mill. A bigger cotton mill was opened in 1802, which he ran together with several banks in the Burton area.

One final example of these multidisciplinary industrialists was Robert ‘Parsley’ Peel,* a ‘mechanical genius’, who was influenced by Lloyd and his partner to set up a cotton mill in Burton upon Trent in the early 1780s, melding two new pieces of innovation and technology: his factory used the new Arkwright cotton-spinning frames, and was located where the Trent and Mersey Canal could handily convey raw materials and finished goods to and from the works. By 1790 his son Robert had ‘capital overflowing in his hands’, and bought property, including estates from the Marquis of Bath and a parish near Tamworth, which was to be a base to launch his political career. Even though politics was more on his mind than cotton, Tamworth was on the Trent and Mersey too, and soon Peel and his partners owned spinning mills, calico-printing and bleaching works. By the end of the eighteenth century they controlled 20 mills in Lancashire and the Midlands and had 15,000 employees, and Peel, the son of the semi-literate Parsley Peel, was Sir Robert, and considered himself entirely a gentleman, while Parsley’s grandson ultimately became prime minister.⁸⁵

Yet it is important to remember that while this modernization—of production, distribution and retailing—was developing at a furious rate, it was not occurring in splendid isolation, but running in tandem with an older system of retail networks. For much of the time the two coexisted quite happily. For those living outside major urban areas—and for many within city limits—there were four ways of buying goods. The first, which remains today and therefore is the one we regard as primary, was the shop. As we have seen, even people in rural areas had regular if not continuous access to shops. But this did not mean that they bought nothing the rest of the time. The most frequent and convenient way of purchasing goods was at daily, weekly, monthly or seasonal markets. From the late eighteenth century, butchers, fruit vendors and greengrocers were the main retailers in markets—corn, flour, cheese, bread and other staples were no longer sold this way, but had moved either into fixed wholesale premises (such as corn halls and cloth halls) or to back-street shops and other fixed retail premises. In 1772 in Manchester there were 30 grocers and tea dealers, 3 provision dealers (including cheesemongers and butter, bacon and ham dealers) and 16 flour and corn dealers appearing in the directories listing retail outlets; by 1800 their numbers had risen to 134 grocers and tea dealers, 11 provision dealers, and 262 flour and corn dealers.⁸⁶

While the markets, usually run and operated by local inhabitants, were—just—holding on to the perishable food sales, fairs, which were run for the most part by outsiders, were evolving. Before the eighteenth century an annual fair was for wholesale merchants to conduct business, whether it was in cloth, corn, horses or agricultural material such as feed, animals or machinery. By the 1720s cloth halls and corn halls had appeared—fixed public buildings where trading could go on year round.⁸⁷ This trend, from temporary to permanent, from street to shop, continued throughout the century, as fairs lost all their wholesale side, except in a few cases for animals and some food. Instead, the fairs became more and more the haunt of entertainers, pedlars, shows and exhibitions. (For more on fairs in the nineteenth century, see pp. 282—5.)

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 £5,000.⁸⁸ The Scotch draper carried a pack ‘four feet in length and two or more in depth’,⁸⁹ 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 ¹/₂ I pd. 1.14.0…Nancy also bought a Linen Handkerchief &c. of him. Mrs How bought a silk handkerchief of him also.’⁹⁰ 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.⁹¹*

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’.⁹² 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.⁹³

That was to change in the coming years.

*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.⁵

*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.⁷

†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.

*Laundry blue was a lump of dye used to counteract the yellowing effects of soaps and keep white items white.

*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.¹⁷

*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.

*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.

*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.’³⁴

*The idea of tea as a luxury persisted—this particular tax was not lifted until 1964.

*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.

*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.⁴⁴ 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.

*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 1782.⁴⁶

†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.

*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.

*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.

†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.⁵³

*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.)

†Wedgwood’s spelling remained individual; I will refrain from noting each non-standard spelling, unless the meaning is unclear.

*Bentley’s have unfortunately not survived—perhaps the reason why all the innovation is attributed to Wedgwood.

*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.

†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.

*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.

*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.⁷³

*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.

*‘Parsley’ was after a parsley-patterned calico he designed early in his career.

*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.