Читать книгу Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain - Judith Flanders - Страница 9

GROCERS HAD ORIGINALLY BEEN wholesalers, those who bought ‘in gross’; then they became luxury retailers, purveyors of imported delicacies from abroad—tea, coffee, sugar, spices, dried fruits, ‘Italian goods’. As these foods became less expensive, and more readily available to the population at large, the function and trade of the grocer changed. For some time, various food retailers stuck to the old names that indicated high levels of specialization—a grocer was expected to sell the items listed above; a provision dealer to sell butter, cheese, eggs and bacon; then there were flour dealers, butter men, cheese factors and so on. But it appears that the reality, from early in the nineteenth century, was less rigidly structured than the job titles implied: grocers also sold butter, bacon, hams and herrings, oilmen sold cheese, even a butter man might sell pig meat. One flour dealer at the turn of the nineteenth century kept records that reflected this variety: 44 per cent of his spending was on his core trade, the purchase of flour and meal; 18.5 per cent went on butter and cheese, 6.5 per cent on tea, 11 per cent on sugar, while the remaining 20 per cent went on a wide variety of goods: potatoes, bacon, salt, raisins, currants, coffee, treacle, spices, pepper, mustard, rice, sweets, soap, starch, candles, tobacco and snuff. This was not at all unusual: by 1846 the Grocers’ Weekly Circular and Price List, a trade publication, listed butter, cheese, eggs, pork—all items that, officially, grocers did not sell.¹ Now a grocer was someone who needed to have certain trade skills that other provisioners did not have—he had to know how to blend tea, roast coffee beans, mix herbs and spices, cure bacon, clean dried fruit, and cut sugar.*³

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

In the early 1790s, before the French wars, wheat had cost between 48s. and 58s. a quarter; by 1795 it was 90s.; and in 1800 it was a shocking 113s.—an increase of 135 per cent in less than a decade. There was an endless succession of food riots: more than twenty between 1756 and 1818, and a dozen of those in the last two decades. There were also attempts throughout this period to find more peaceful ways of dealing with the price escalation. One solution was to turn to the social group that was so familiar—the club. Groups of consumers joined together in flour or bread societies to gain the financial clout to buy these necessities at reduced prices. Many of the societies failed, mostly from inadequate investment or size. But one of the more successful was the Birmingham Flour and Bread Company, set up in 1796 with capital of £6,000 from its members, because ‘unless some proper and effectual means are taken, the evil attending the high price of grain and the shameful adulteration of flour will continue’. By 1800 it had 1,360 shareholders (including Matthew Boulton). Others groups followed suit, using what became the standard methods: large-scale orders, paid for in cash, with discounts for bulk.⁴ And in the early decades of the nineteenth century there were still other groups, more idealistic in origin, set up in emulation of the principles of the socialist reformer Robert Owen. In 1827 the Brighton Co-operative Benevolent Association and the Co-operative Trading Association were formed, to collect weekly subscriptions which were to be used both to educate people in the values of cooperation, and to ‘engage in retail trade with the object of accumulating capital from its profits to eventually establish a community’ based on cooperative principles.⁵ William King, a doctor, was the prime mover, having already set up a Mechanics’ Institute in Brighton; he also published The Cooperator, a paper with a good circulation in the north and the Midlands, which strongly influenced the later Co-op movement.

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

In 1850 another group of men in Rochdale attempted to start a cooperative corn mill, in imitation of the Pioneers. When they failed to raise the necessary capital, they approached the Pioneers themselves, who invested some of their profits in the mill, creating the Corn Mill Society. By 1852 twenty-two different societies were dealing with the Corn Mill Society, a consumer-initiated, consumer-owned and consumer-controlled group. By 1851 there were perhaps as many as 130 societies working on the principles the Rochdale Pioneers had established, and many realized that cooperation between them was the way forward. In 1862 a conference in Oldham agreed to set up the North of England Co-operative Wholesale Agency and Depot Society; the following year it was formally registered as the North of England Cooperative Wholesale Industrial Provident Society (later thankfully shortened to the Co-operative Wholesale Society, known as the CWS), with forty-three societies owning shares. This was the start of the national cooperative movement: in 1862, branches of the Co-op were opened in Newcastle; in 1874 in London; in 1875 in Liverpool, in 1882 in Leeds, then over the next decade in Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol, Huddersfield, Longton, Northampton, Nottingham and Cardiff. Furthermore, buying depots were set up across the country, and also outside England: six were opened in Ireland in eight years; then one in New York; followed by, in Europe, Rouen, Dénia, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, Esbjerg, Gothenburg and Hamburg, and, further afield, Montreal and Sydney. As if this unstoppable march were not enough, the Co-op opened its own production sources where necessary: a dairy in Ireland from 1889; pig farms and bacon-curing in Denmark from 1900 and Ireland from 1901; even tea estates in Ceylon from 1913.⁶

By the 1860s the idea of cooperative trading had travelled far from its origins, and various middle-class groups were setting up their own versions. The first was in 1864, when some Post Office clerks in London clubbed together to buy a chest of tea at a wholesale price. They moved on to bulk purchases of coffee and sugar, and in 1865 the Post Office Supply Association was formalized; within six months, it had 700 members, and it had changed its name to the Civil Service Supply Association, whose intention was to supply ‘Officers of the Civil Service and their Friends…at the lowest possible prices’.⁷ In 1866 came the Civil Service Co-operative Society, and in 1872 the Army and Navy Cooperative Society, open to ‘officers, their widows, non-commissioned officers, petty officers, secretaries of service clubs, canteen and mess reps’, and any friends that they chose to introduce.⁸ Both claimed to be offering a new combination: low prices and reduced service in exchange for cash sales, fixed prices, some goods only in large quantities, others with an extra discount for bulk. It was, perhaps new to them although, as we have seen, none of these notions was innovatory. Soon mail order was added to the list of services, together with expanded ranges: wine, tobacco, baby linen, books, boots and shoes, coal, carpets, drapery, milk and butter, meat, pianos, even surgical instruments—the Civil Service Co-operative Society and the Army and Navy were now a long way from the working-class aims of the originators of the movement, and were heading instead towards the department stores (see below, pp. 110ff.). Those groups formally connected to the CWS stayed true to their origins, selling only groceries, fresh meat, and in some places drapery, tailoring and shoes and clogs.

Despite the financial structure that linked the co-ops to their middleclass brethren, the range of goods available in the co-op shops themselves more closely resembled that in the multiple stores (which today would be called chain stores) that were appearing at a rapid rate in urban centres at the same time. Co-ops and multiples were similar in that they both aimed at the working-class customer; they both relied on their size to achieve price reductions; they both sold a narrow range of goods, primarily food; they sold at fixed prices; they accepted only cash; they reached their customers by branding their outlets with a central name; and they provided a bare minimum of services to keep costs down. They were different, however, in an equally basic way. Co-ops were decentralized groups that shared services, fixed their own prices and shared their profits via membership dividends based on purchases. By contrast, the aim of multiples, first, last and always, was to make profits for their owners.⁹ There was no attempt to share the wealth, or form a better society.

The main growth of multiples came in the later part of the nineteenth century, but preliminary stirrings had been there for some time. Williams of Manchester, a typical early example, was created after a Mrs Williams married a miner; she had previously owned a grocery in Didsbury, a prosperous suburb of Manchester. In 1865 she took a double-fronted shop there; in 1888 she opened another shop in Cheadle; in 1891 yet another, this time in West Didsbury; within thirty years Williams of Manchester had five branches, all in prosperous, middle-class suburbs. Eventually it expanded to thirty.¹⁰ Similar in pattern if not in scale was Thomas Lipton. He was born in Glasgow in 1850, the son of an Irish labourer and his wife, who had emigrated during the Famine. At eighteen he joined his parents in the small grocery shop they then ran; with some savings and a year’s pay he opened a second shop. By 1880 he had twelve shops in Glasgow, with a turnover of £200,000. His first shop in England was opened the following year, and by 1889 he had 30 shops and a turnover of £1.5 million.¹¹ Less than a decade later, there were 242 shops in Britain, and a smattering of overseas outlets.¹²

Lipton’s shops stocked a limited range of goods—bacon, ham, butter, eggs, cheese—and thus, in order to buy cheaply from wholesalers, he needed to have a large number of shops to supply. He relied heavily on a combination of price-cutting and price promotion. He advertised his cut-rate ‘Irish produce’—ham was priced from 5d. to 7d. per pound, while elsewhere it cost between 7d. and 10d. In 1877 he famously advertised the ‘Lipton Pound Note’, which declared, ‘I promise to give on demand at any of my establishments ham, butter and eggs as given elsewhere to the value of ONE POUND stg for fifteen shillings.’ He made this financially possible—and even profitable—by rapid turnover, low profit margins and low overheads. He aimed relentlessly at the lower-class market: his shops were either in the high streets or in smaller streets of densely populated working-class neighbourhoods. He sold a strictly limited range of stock in bulk, to vast numbers of customers, from vast shops: in Paisley, a suburb of Glasgow, his shop had a horseshoe counter so large it was staffed by twelve shop assistants. His Glasgow shops alone, he boasted, daily sold a ton and a half of ‘lump’ butter, 50 cases of ‘roll’ butter, a ton of bacon, a ton and a half of ham, half a ton of cheese, and 16,000 eggs.*¹⁴

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

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

It has been said that ready-to-wear clothes were not available in any bulk until the 1860s.¹⁵ For the middle classes in a general way that was so, but even here the evidence must be treated with caution: in 1790 The Times carried an advertisement for Ham’s Muslin and Linen Warehouse, on the Strand, which was selling ready-made dresses.*¹⁶ It was estimated that no one earning less than £300 a year could afford to buy The Times regularly—this was not an advertisement for the working-class purchaser.† Other mentions of ready-made clothes that were probably for the middle classes can be found throughout the eighteenth century: as early as the 1730s, Mary and Ann Hogarth, sisters to the painter, had a shop where, their trade card promised, ‘Fashionable Ready Made Frocks’ could be bought.¹⁷ In the 1750s in Bath, John Evill advertised that he sold ready-made waistcoats, breeches, gowns, petticoats, stays, cloaks and bonnets.¹⁸ A little book, A Visit to the Bazaar (1818), that was more than half an advertisement for the Soho Bazaar, portrayed a middleaged woman buying a ‘beautiful crape dress’, which she asked to have delivered immediately as ‘I am going out to a ball this evening, and shall want to put it on.’¹⁹

Apart from these rare middle-class sightings, the working classes and the lower middle classes, especially the more prosperous, had been wearing ready-made clothes in various forms for years. Less exclusive tailors and mercers often had a sideline as ‘slop sellers’, stocking cheap ready-made clothing. Men’s shirts had been some of the earliest readymade clothes: the garments were of a standard shape, and they were more or less permanently covered by waistcoats and jackets and therefore size and fit were less important than for outerwear. Ready-made shirts had originally been produced for sailors and for manual labourers; then the working classes more widely began to buy them. The next stage in the more general availability of ready-to-wear clothes was the production of uniforms, which were worn by soldiers and sailors, as we would expect today, and also by charity- and other schoolchildren, by servants in livery, by railway workers, by postmen and other low-grade civilservice workers, and by the inhabitants of workhouses and prisons. Sundry small wars had kept the armed-forces market buoyant for a century past, but the beginning of the French wars sharply increased the need for uniforms. With this, and with the working classes buying more ready-to-wear items, came a wider move from skilled tailors creating a garment in its entirety, to vast warehouses farming out jobs to smaller workshops, who in turn hired cheap pieceworkers to produce slops at home—the foundation of the mass-production system that would develop in the nineteenth century.²⁰

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

I had no other togs but them as I was wearing, and they were so wore out I was ashamed to be seen in ‘em. So…I said to myself, ‘Blest if I don’t go over to the Fair…and moult the mouldys, and buy a tidy suit to wear…’ I had made up my mind to do the thing to rights while I was about it, and while I had the money in my pocket. I moulted to my very shirt and socks. I gave seven and six for a light suit, and half a dollar for a pot hat, and eighteen pence for a sky blue neckerchief, and likewise bought a shirt with an ironed front to it, and afore I came away I put ‘em all on…and here I was, all a toff, up’ards and down’ards.²¹

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

hundreds upon hundreds of pairs of trousers—trousers that have been worn by young men of fashion, trousers without a wrinkle or just newly scoured, trousers taken from the reeking hot limbs of navies [navvies], and pot boys, trousers…from spruce young shop boys, trousers that have been worn by criminals hung at Newgate, by patients in fever hospitals; waistcoats that were the pride of fast young brokers in the city, waistcoats flashy enough to have been worn by the Marquis of Hastings at a racecourse, or the Count D’Orsay at a literary assemblage;…thousands of spencers, highlows,* fustian jackets, some greasy, some unsoiled, shooting coats, short coats and cutaways; coats for the jockey and the dog fighter, for the peer and the pugilist, pilot jackets and sou-westers, drawers and stockings…²²

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

These are the customers you see at a glance, whom the resplendent wares in the hosiers’ shops attract…These are the dashing young parties who purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson braces, the kaleidoscopic shirtstuds, the shirts embroidered with dahlias, deaths’ heads, racehorses, sun-flowers, and ballet-girls; the horseshoe, fox-head, pewter-pot-and-crossed-pipes, willow-pattern-plate, and knife-and-fork pins. These are the glasses of city fashion, and the mould of city form, for whom the legions of fourteen, of fifteen, of sixteen, and of seventeen shilling trousers, all unrivalled, patented, and warranted, are made.²³

By the mid-century, men’s clothes in particular had becoming standard, ready-made, and were being heavily advertised. For this to have happened, items we take entirely for granted needed first to be invented. At the Great Exhibition, Charles Cattanach from Aberdeen, who listed himself as ‘Inventor’, showed an ‘apparatus for measuring the human figure, and for transferring the measure to cloth so as to produce an exact fit of garment’²⁴—or, as it is known today, a tape measure. He was one of many claiming ownership of this useful invention, which seems to have first appeared around the beginning of the century, and to have been in more general use from around 1825. Once this was available, treatises like Dr Henry Wampen’s The Mathematical Art of Cutting Garments According to the Different Formation of Men’s Bodies (1834) could be written, giving guidance on how to create clothes without an actual, specific body in front of the tailor.²⁵

For standardized sizes had not yet arrived. Men’s clothes led the way: over the century they moved away from the earlier skintight fitted breeches and jackets, towards the loose, tube-like shape of modern dress. Women’s clothes were more difficult to standardize: bodices were expected to fit so tightly to the figure that the stays underneath showed through. By the 1840s shops were advertising ‘Sewed’ dresses, but they may have been only partly finished, for the purchaser or her dressmaker to alter to fit her own measurements. Challinier of New Bond Street stocked this type of half-and-half item: ‘Muslin Bodices…can be completed for wearing in a few hours’ notice.’²⁶ Twenty years later Jay’s Warehouse was still attempting to find a way to combine the fashion for skintight bodices with a desire for ready-made clothes, coming up with a ‘self-expanding’ bodice. But the spread of women’s ready-made clothing lagged behind men’s and children’s for some time.

The move towards simplification and standardization created the possibility of major changes in the production, and in the selling, of men’s ready-made clothes. Leeds quickly became the centre of massproduced men’s clothes. It had no previous history of tailoring, and therefore no moribund guild system to limit growth; its old linen industry provided the necessary skills, networks and capital bases to new entrepreneurs, while that same industry’s collapse meant there was no bar to the shift into new production; and finally the arrival, from the 1860s, of an eastern-European Jewish population well-versed in tailoring skills and closely linked to each other by marriage and trade made possible the formation of an efficient and complex outworking system.* Perhaps most importantly, Leeds also had an established engineering industry, which meant that machinery used in other fields could be retooled for use in the production of mass tailoring.²⁸

John Barran, a retail tailor in the local high street in the late 1840s, had sold cheap ready-made clothes for men and children in exactly the pattern we have seen above. In 1856 he set up a manufacturing works; his great innovation was to develop with the engineering firm of Greenwood and Batley the first mechanical cutter, a bandsaw that could cut through several layers of cloth at once. This mass cutting machine forced Barran into further technological and organizational changes, for the bandsaw produced many more cut-out pieces than his tailors could process. So he subcontracted these out to a tailor with a workshop, who in turn passed them on to others as piecework. For the first time in the clothing industry, production was divided into two parts: cutting, via new technology, at the factory, and then a division for the sewing—outwork for the more complicated jackets and coats, while Barran’s own sewers dealt with the trousers and waistcoats, which required lesser skills. And for these workers he had equipped the works with the new sewing machines.²⁹

These machines had been developed piecemeal, by several different inventors. After the initial crude chain-stitch machine had been invented to sew army uniforms in France in 1829, most of the innovations and improvements occurred in the United States in the 1840s and ‘50s. In England, Elias Howe Jr had produced a lock-stitch machine in 1846, but, seeing little prospect of financial return, had sold the patent on. In the USA Isaac Singer had seen a similar lock-stitch machine in 1850. It was so complicated that it required special training and then some skill to operate it, and even more technological know-how to service and maintain it. In 1851 Singer’s improvements were patented: the new machine now held the needle vertically, was made of iron not wood, and had toothed gears that didn’t jam, a spring that permitted variations in the thickness of the fabric without manual adjustment, and a presser foot to hold the fabric in place, which meant the operator could use both hands to control the cloth. The new machine could also, most importantly, sew in curves as well as the straight lines, which had been all the earlier machines had managed. Now an operative could produce 900 stitches a minute, instead of the 40 stitches a quick hand-sewer could make.³⁰*

Further improvements followed, but in England any improved machines were blocked by the patent for the earlier—and much inferior—machine. Finally in 1856 Singer opened an agency in Glasgow, to avoid paying English patent fees. Barran swiftly saw how this machine would solve his problem of the imbalance between the speed with which his mechanized bandsaws cut and the appreciably longer time it took his tailors to sew. He had the machines installed in his works, linked to steam-driven shafts instead of the machines’ original foot-powered treadle.³² Soon every Leeds clothing factory was using bandsaws, steamdriven sewing machines, and steam presses and button-holing machines. By the 1880s fifteen sewing-machine-manufacturing firms had set up in the city, and even more engineering works specialized in developing new machinery for this now enormously successful trade.³³

Technology and technological innovation were changing the entire face of fashion. Waterproof coats and shoes are two examples of this revolution. Before the nineteenth century, when it rained people either stayed inside or they got wet. There was no other possibility. Oiled-silk umbrellas were carried by some, but they were at best water-resistant, not waterproof. In 1823 Charles Macintosh, a Scottish chemist, patented a fabric which had a layer of rubber sealed between two layers of cloth, creating a waterproof material. He was not the first to use rubber to make fabrics waterproof, but his method, which used cheap coal oil, was better suited to large-scale, economical manufacturing than earlier versions had been. Macintosh joined together with a cotton manufacturer, and Charles Macintosh and Co. was set up the following year in Manchester, an ideal location. The city had shipping links with South America for rubber imports; it had a gasworks, for the supply of naphtha, used in softening the rubber; it was the cotton centre of the country, producing an endless supply of material suitable for waterproofing; and, like Leeds, it was also filled with engineering firms eager to work on adapting machinery for this new industry.³⁴

At first, waterproofed material found limited numbers of customers, although Captain Parry’s expeditionary team heading to the North Pole in 1827 carried waterproof bags. The problem was that the fabric turned brittle in cold weather, sticky in hot; it didn’t breathe, and therefore caused the wearer to sweat heavily; and, even worse, the rubberizing process saturated the fabric with a smell that was said to be easily detectable across the road from the coat’s wearer. In 1843 the process of vulcanizing rubber was developed: this led to the fabric being treated with sulphur, which kept it stable whatever the weather. Further developments throughout the decade continued to produce improvements, and by the Great Exhibition Bax and Co. showed its ‘Aquascutum’ cloth, which soon afterwards the army ordered in bulk for its Crimea-bound soldiers. Others benefited too: the India Rubber Waterproof Works in east London was ideally suited to gear up production quickly. By 1844 it already had a site covering 24,000 square metres, and when war was declared it managed to produce 50,000 waterproof suits for the departing soldiers in only forty days.³⁵

Civilians were no less slow to adopt the trend. The khaki colour the army used quickly caught on: Bax and Co. was pleased that ‘the officers of the guards began to wear light drab cambric capes on their way to field exercises, and the other young men as usual following their example, our material (especially of this drab colour) began to take with the public generally, and more and more as the value of it, and its really waterproof quality, became known.’³⁶ Then the popular harlequin notion of a garment that performed two jobs at once, was adapted: in 1851 J. Smith advertised a ‘reversible waterproof Janus coat…two perfect coats in a pocket book’³⁷—a coat, a waterproof and, as an extra, so lightweight that the whole thing could be folded up and put into a pocket. This was a popular idea: an advertisement in the Manchester Post Office Directory of 1854 promised a ‘5 oz.’ coat that ‘can be carried in a coat sleeve or pocket and folded up in the space of a cigar case!’; while an 1855 directory offered a ‘pocket siphonia’,* which could be put in the said pocket, or even in a hat.³⁹

Rubber affected shoe- and boot-making as much as it had overcoats, as did standardization. Shoes went from being personally measured and made to order to being produced in standard sizes fairly early on. From 1848 C. and J. Clark advertised that its lines were available in three widths it called ‘fittings’, and in seven sizes. In 1875 the company advertising boasted:

We used to have only three fittings, the N narrow, M medium and S scotch. The narrow were seldom called for and we found that our range of fittings was not large enough to suit our customers and that…there was a demand for a fitting wider than N but not so extreme as S. We spent a great deal of pains and labour during two whole years in fixing on the best shape of soles, to cover all parts of the three kingdoms…and we flattered ourselves at having arrived as nearly at perfection as we could reasonably expect in all three points.⁴⁰

From the 1830s rubber had been used as a cheaper alternative to leather for soles, and from 1837 some boots incorporated another new rubber product—elasticated webbing—as inserts down the sides to replace laces.* Technology then raced ahead, which was welcome for shoe-making, an enormously labour-intensive task: in 1738 one shoemaster in London employed 162 people, each performing a different task.⁴² Sewing machines were in use in shoe and boot production by the 1850s; by 1858 American machines were imported to cut out soles in bulk; only a few years later, machine-sewn uppers, and soles attached by a new method of machine riveting, first appeared. By 1883 just 39 per cent of C. and J. Clark’s shoes were still hand-sewn.⁴³

The new technology changed methods of production, and it also changed what was produced. Once machines for mechanically riveting soles appeared, men’s shoes, with their heavier soles, became easier to produce. In 1863 Clark’s had had 334 men’s lines; in 1896 there were 720. In 1870 the company sold 235 types of boot for women and children; 124 types of slipper, and 36 types of shoe.† By 1883 the price of lighter footwear had been substantially reduced by the introduction of machine-welt sewing. Now there were 246 types of boot, 111 types of slipper, but 153 types of shoe; in 1896 the types of boot were reduced to 223 styles, slippers had only gone up to 144 types, but there were 353 types of shoe listed: ten times as many as twenty-five years before.⁴⁴

While these innovations in production brought new goods to market, an equally important change was occurring at the retail end of things. With mass-produced goods readily available, promotions via the kind of marketing and publicity wizardry seen in the previous century with Wedgwood became more frequent. Innovatory products filled the newly transformed shops and were being sold through the power of the emergent mass-circulation newspapers and periodicals. A leader in the field was Eleazer (later Elias) Moses (1783—1868), the son of a Jewish immigrant from Colmar. With his son Isaac (1809—84) he formed E. Moses and Son, in 1832 setting up a shop in the East End, on the Ratcliff Highway, and then moving into the City, to Aldgate. In their early days they specialized in supplying complete outfits for emigrants, a sadly large market in the hungry forties and for some time afterwards.* In 1845 Moses’s Wholesale Clothing Warehouse opened a shop around the corner from the Aldgate shop, in Minories; this increased the selling space fourfold; then the company took over neighbouring premises until the two shops had swallowed all the properties in between, and the Aldgate shop was rebuilt to give a seven-times increase on its original floor space.

Moses and Son represented many of the trends that were to emerge throughout the century: low margins, high turnover and cash sales only were the obvious, and by no means insubstantial, ones. The Book of Economy: or, How to Live Well in London on £100 per annum, by ‘A Gentleman’, said in 1832 that two suits could be bought for 13 guineas; a City tailor advertised two suits in ‘extra superfine’ wool at £13. Moses and Son, with a less prosperous clientele, arranged ‘contracts’ with its customers, whereby the purchaser agreed to take two new suits a year, at £8 for two in broadcloth, or £6 10s. for a lesser-quality fabric. This was an extraordinary price, and one Moses and Son made profitable through bulk buying and low margins. But the ‘contract’ part was a sign of Moses and Son’s innovative approach, and shows how it managed to squeeze the last drop of profit out of such small sums. When the customer returned for his second suit, he handed the first, worn-out, one back to Moses and Son, which then sold it on to the secondhand trade.⁴⁶

The company’s marketing genius was every bit as crucial as its prices: the Aldgate shop was designed to reflect the most up-to-date luxury of the expensive shops in the West End, despite prices that were often more than 60 per cent lower. The shop had a three-storey-high classical portico, four-metre display windows, mahogany fittings throughout, and gas lighting (plus royal arms above the door, for which it held no warrant). The not-so-subliminal message was that cheapness did not mean loss of quality. Soon there were branches in Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, sitting comfortably beside the new department stores. Moses and Son also produced pamphlets extolling its wares, with titles like ‘Habiliment Hall’, ‘The Pride of London’, ‘The Dressing-room Companion or Guide to the Looking Glass’, ‘The Paragon of Excellence’ and ‘The Exhibition for All Nations’.⁴⁷ Many had texts written in rumptytump jingles (probably by Isaac Moses), as, for example,

CHRISTMAS EXHIBITIONS

Once more the glad season of Christmas is here, And folks from the country in London appear, Some have come to a relative, some to a friend—To pass a few days ere the season shall end, And visit the fam’d ‘exhibitions’ of Town, Which have ever enjoy’d such a matchless renown, Some view the Museum—and others, St Paul’s—But there’s ONE ‘Exhibition’ where ev’ry one calls ‘Tis a place to which thousands with eagerness run—And that is the warehouse of MOSES and SON…⁴⁸

Others were produced in the style of magazine articles:

Having been given to understand that the Establishment of E. Moses and Son was open to the public for inspection, I thought proper to avail myself of the opportunity, and having arrived at the premises, I entered the private Waiting Hall, where a youth in livery was waiting to attend the door…

I…was much struck with the beauty and accommodation of the place…The Hall has an elegant staircase fronting the street…The principal Show Room is certainly an Exhibition. I consider that it has no equal; and if there were ‘really and truly’ such a person as Queen Fashion, I think her Majesty could not do better than select this splendid and spacious apartment for the holding of her levees and councils…

The Ready-made Clothing department is undoubtedly the most spacious ever before witnessed; and on my asking whether so much room were absolutely necessary I was informed that the business could not be carried on with any less space…⁴⁹

This kind of cod-educational prose, designed to mimic magazines like the Penny Weekly and others that were read as much for selfimprovement as for entertainment, was in marked contrast to the style of other ready-made-clothing retailers, whose advertising was for the less upwardly earnest. A tailor in Chelsea advertised his shop in 1880 in a mixture of cockney, theatre and sporting slang:

Pay a visit to C. Greenburg, the noted working men’s tailor, well known by everybody to be the only genuine clothing manufacturer in Chelsea for flash toggery. The above champion builder begs to thank his customers for their liberal support, and wishes to put them awake to the fact that he has dabbed his fins [put his hands] on a nobby swag of stuff [high-class bag of goods] for his ready brass, consisting of cords, moleskins, doeskin plushes, velveteens, box cloths, pilots, tweeds, &c.…A pair of ikey cords, cut slap up with the artful dodge and fakement [trimming] down the sides, from 10 bob. Proper cut togs, lick all comers, for pleasure or business wear, turned out up to the knocker [in fashion, stylishly], from a quid. A pair of kerseymere or fancy doeskin or any other skin kicksies [trousers], any colour, cut peg top, half tights, or to drop down over the trotters [feet], from 10 and a tanner to 25 bob, fit to toe it with any swell. Lavenders [perhaps gaiters or spats], built spanky, with a double fakement down the sides, and artful buttons at the bottom, any price you name, straight. Fancy sleeve vest, cut very saucy, tight cut round the scrag [neck] or made to flash the dicky [show the shirt front], from 9 bob. A discount made to prize fighters, shop lifters, quill drivers [clerks], counter jumpers, bruisers, snobs, scavengers, sparrow starvers [dung-sweepers], and lardy dardy blades on the high fly [foppish swells on a spree]…⁵⁰*

Unlike Moses and Son, Greenburg was appealing to the flash Harrys, the music-hall loungers, the street-smart spivs.* Yet Moses and Son’s market of upwardly mobile clerks was huge: in 1855 it was estimated that the firm was spending £10,000 a year on advertising (compared to the furniture shop Heal and Son’s, which spent £6,000, or Nichol’s—later Harvey Nichol’s—which had a budget of £4,500).⁵³

These figures show how important the retail trade had become to the economy. This was recognized at the time: good, elegant, modern shops were seen as an indicator of national prosperity, of plenty, and of general civilization. Good shops were modern shops: many books of the period made this assumption automatically. Tallis’s Street View in 1837 praised the completion of Nash’s new Regent Street: ‘The buildings of this noble street chiefly consist of palace-like shops, in whose broad, shewy windows are displayed articles of the most splendid description, such as the neighbouring world of wealth and fashion are daily in want of.’ Even the sweep of Oxford Circus was approved for being ‘as elegant in form as useful in application’.⁵⁴ (It was ‘useful’ because carriages could turn easily around its broad curves.) Lincoln in the 1840s was commended for ‘several splendid shops, equal to anything of the kind to be found in far larger towns’, but condemned for its ‘unsightly masses of old buildings which disfigure the principal streets [which, it was hoped, would soon] be supplanted by erections unique with those which modern enterprize has produced’. Chester was similarly approved a decade later for the conversion of its shops ‘filled with plate-glass, and with all the brilliancy of the most modern art and taste’.⁵⁵

Stores were developing at the rate they were for a number of reasons: increased demand, new goods from new markets abroad, mass production. But one more immediate reason stands out: it was easier for people to get to and from the shops that held the goods they desired. It is hard to remember just how small most cities were, even in the nineteenth century, well after urbanization had created cities larger than had ever before been known. Central London in the 1830s was 6.5 kilometres across, north to south, and 10 kilometres east to west—its 2 million inhabitants were never more than an hour’s walk from the beginnings of more rural countryside. Manchester and Salford taken together were only 1.5 kilometres north to south, and the same east to west. Those who lived in the suburbs walked in to work if they could not afford their own carriage (and most could not), but would not think of coming into the centre specifically to shop. They bought locally, and from itinerant sellers. From the 1760s some of the outer suburbs of London, like Islington or Kensington, had stagecoach services; by 1825 there were 418 routes across London, making 1,190 journeys to the City every day. Their destination shows that these were primarily used to transport people to and from work. It was the omnibus, arriving from Paris in 1829, that made the shopping journey a possibility for many. Within a decade, there were 620 omnibuses and 225 short-stagecoaches licensed in London.

Omnibuses were not cheap to operate—each bus had a driver and a conductor, and was pulled by two horses. To run an omnibus 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, required a complement of 11 horses per bus. A horse cost £20 and the omnibus itself £100, so the start-up fixed capital cost was already £320. Then operating costs included feed, at 15s. per horse per week (or £429 per bus per year); and the costs of stabling, veterinarian bills and shoeing, as well as the maintenance and repair costs for the bus. There was a tax of 3d. per mile per passenger, which on an average route mounted up to 15s. per day, or over £270 a year. The wages of the driver and conductor were another £60 a year each; and, furthermore, many routes from the suburbs were along turnpike roads where tolls were still charged. The original omnibus design had had space for just fifteen passengers in the interior, with another three outside passengers beside the driver. The seemingly extortionate 1s. single fare to the suburbs, or the half-price 6d. fare in the centre of town, no longer looks so unreasonable. Not unreasonable, but affordable only by the prosperous middle classes.

In 1842 the mileage tax was halved (then reduced to 1d. in 1855, ¹/₂d. in 1866 and abolished entirely in 1870), and, more importantly, was now levied on the vehicle itself rather than on the number of passengers it could carry. It therefore made sense to reconfigure the buses so that they could carry more people. A ‘knifeboard’ seat was installed on the roof—a single long bench down the length of the bus, with the men (always men, as the roof was reached by a ladder that was hostile to skirts and petticoats) facing out to the sides, sitting back to back. This increased capacity to 25, and in turn fares were reduced to 3d., or sometimes even 1d. for a short ‘city’ stage as it was known.* Soon the ladders were replaced by a winding spiral stair, and the knifeboard seats with ‘garden’ seats (the kind of two-by-two backed benches that continue to be used on much public transport today), plate-glass windows were installed downstairs, and the bus was ready to take on its new role as a conveyance for the middle-class female shopper.⁵⁶

Provincial towns and cities differed from London only in size. Otherwise the love of new shops and the means of access to them were all much the same. To get to the shops, similar solutions were adopted to suit the locale: Manchester had a single omnibus in 1835; by 1840 Engels noted that there was one at least every half-hour running from the suburban villas to the centre; by 1850 there were sixty-four services along the main routes. Birmingham had omnibuses running from suburbs like New Hall and Edgbaston in 1834; within the decade Small Heath and Sparkbrook were linked into the system. Glasgow was different from the now increasingly common pattern of a work-dominated centre and suburban housing. Here much of the population still lived in the centre of the city and commuted outwards; many used the Clyde river steamboat service, and it was not until the 1860s that an omnibus service sprang up to reach Kelvinside. Other cities had other solutions: from the early 1870s Edinburgh and Aberdeen (and Glasgow too) had horse trams; by 1890 Liverpool had 225.⁵⁷ At the end of the 1870s there were only 321 miles of tramway in Britain, but when the switch to steam power and then electricity began in the 1880s, even towns with populations of 50,000 found it worth their while to lay down tramways. In London in 1896 the trams carried 280 million passengers, while omnibuses carried only 300,000 (a tram ticket cost 1d., and the trams ran every two to three minutes, which might have had something to do with the disparity). By 1914, the number of passenger journeys made by tram throughout the country was 74 times the population of the United Kingdom.⁵⁸

The London figures are the more astonishing given that the capital had yet a further means of mass transportation. In 1863 the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first underground railway, opened, running from Paddington in west London to Farringdon in the City, with an extension to St Pancras in 1868. When the Metropolitan District Railway (a separate company) began to extend the Underground to Kensington and Victoria, the influx of suburban shoppers to the West End became a reality.⁵⁹ In 1864, even on the small bit of route then existing, 6.5 million journeys were taken on the Underground in six months; after the 1868 extension the journeys jumped to 15 million a year.⁶⁰

The various way of reaching the palaces of wonder in that glassgleaming, gas-hissing West End were new; yet what people were travelling towards was not. It was simply that more of them could now reach it. The sumptuousness, the brightness, the richness—above all, the sheer up-to-dateness—of shops had been commented on by visitors for a hundred years. It was the amount of glass that most forcefully seemed to strike European travellers. A French visitor in 1728 wrote that ‘shops are surrounded with [glass], and usually the merchandise [inside the shop] is arranged behind it, which keeps the dust off, while still displaying the goods to passers-by’—clearly something he had never seen at home. The German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who kept a diary on his visits to England, also found shopfronts that ‘seem to be made entirely of glass’ worthy of remark.⁶¹

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.⁶² 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.’⁶³ 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’.⁶⁴

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.⁶⁵

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.’⁶⁶

The lighting was as essential as the windows, and had been even before piped gas arrived. Francis Place had used ‘five large Argand lamps* in the shop besides the candles to make the windows and every part of it as nearly equally light as possible’.⁶⁷ 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’.†⁶⁸ 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’.⁶⁹ 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.⁷⁰

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.⁷¹ 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.⁷²

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.* 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.⁷³

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;* 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’.⁷⁵

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.’⁷⁶* 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.⁷⁸

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.’⁷⁹ 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’,⁸⁰ 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’.⁸¹

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.⁸²

(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.)⁸³ 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.’⁸⁴ 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.*

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.† 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.⁸⁶ (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’.⁸⁷ 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’.* 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.⁸⁸ 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’.⁸⁹ 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).† 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’.⁹⁰ (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.)⁹¹

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.*

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.⁹² 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.⁹³ Bainbridge’s of Newcastle, founded in 1837, was, like its Manchester counterpart that was to become Kendal, Milne, a draper’s shop that understood that buying one thing—a dress, say—led to other purchases: gloves, stockings, ribbons and lace. Bainbridge’s referred to these goods as ‘novelties’, and began to stock them early. From trimming for a dress it was a small step to trimming for upholstery, or curtains, which led to rugs, then to soft furnishings, then to furniture and so on. The growth was organic, and it is therefore hard to put a finger on the moment—there—when the department store arrived. By mid-century, however, enough monster shops were in operation that they seemed to have existed for ever.

Department stores were, by definition, middle class. The multiples showed how stores selling the basics—food, tobacco, newspapers—had expanded by increasing the number of their outlets while maintaining their extremely narrow range of stock. This was necessary: where one bought these basics was predicated on convenience. If the quality met an expected standard and the price remained competitive, no one would choose one store over another. For drapery items, for home furnishings, for fashion, customers went to the shop that sold what they wanted: the range of goods and the quality of the goods was now of primary importance, while convenience and location became secondary. When a shopkeeper concentrated on price and location, he was concentrating on customers with little time or money; when another shopkeeper chose to stress the depth and quality of his stock, he was expecting to receive customers who were both cash- and time-rich. Thus department stores stressed the quantity and quality of the goods they stocked, their wide variety, and the level of expertise of their staff in both acquiring these goods and selling them, as well as the design and layout of their shops. One indication of the kind of clientele desired was the proportionately large number of department stores that were to be found in spa and resort towns. Jolly’s of Bath hoped to draw the more upmarket elements of the town, advertising itself as a ‘Parisian Depot’. Beale’s of Bournemouth had opened first as a fancy-goods shop in 1881, when Bournemouth still felt that cheap-day-return excursionists were bringing nothing of economic value to the town (for more on excursion travel and resorts, see pp. 111, 230, 241—44). Beale’s turned its back on these visitors, resolutely stocking just the expensive lines, and soon opening a Liberty’s franchise, for the clothing of choice of not only the wealthy, but the eccentrically wealthy (for more on Liberty’s, see below, pp. 115—17). In general, the south coast had a plethora of department stores—among others, in Brighton, Margate, Plymouth, Torquay, Southsea and Worthing.⁹⁴ All saw their role not simply as retailer, but as a participant in the attractions of the resort.

For them, and for department stores more generally, innovation was a matter of pride, as it had been to the smaller shopkeeper. There were two kinds of innovation. The first was the kind of innovation that the customer saw—whether it was new buildings, plate-glass windows, customer lifts and escalators,* cash-registers, pneumatic tubes to dispatch orders and payments to a central cash department,† or even Wylie and Lockhead of Glasgow’s novel idea of ‘flats’, where areas were decorated as if they were individual rooms in a private house that customers could walk around to examine the goods displayed, for the first time, as though at home.*⁹⁶ The second kind of innovation was those that the customer felt rather than saw. These included new ways of organizing space, new service techniques, such as the decline and later abolition of the previously ubiquitous floorwalker; and the creation of service departments such as ladies’ lavatories,† hairdressers, reading rooms, restaurants, cleaners and laundry services, carpet-beating, interior decor, estate agents, upholsterers, banks, post offices, smoking rooms and club rooms for men,‡ even undertakers.

Some were better than others at seeing the future. David Lewis, the son of a merchant from London, was first apprenticed to a tailor and outfitter. In 1856 he set up on his own in Liverpool, a town of increasing prosperity—the Crimean War and the development of the American Midwest was bringing big business to the port. At roughly the same time, in the same street, another tailor, named Jacobs, opened his shop. In 1864 Lewis branched out into women’s clothes, then in 1874 he added shoes for women and girls; then he started selling perfumery, layettes, umbrellas and patent medicines; in 1879 he added a tobacco department; in 1880 school slates, watches, stationery, books and sheet music. (In that same year he also opened a new store in Manchester and, to advertise it, sold Lewis’s Two-shilling Tea, complete with a specially commissioned tea song, ‘Lewis’s Beautiful Tea’, more as a marketing gimmick than with any expectation of finding a market. To his astonishment, by 1883, he was selling 20,000 pounds of tea a year—and all from an attempt to promote clothes.) His neighbour Jacobs had had enough; he advertised, ‘Jacobs of Ranelagh Street find it necessary to give notice that it is not their intention to add other departments to their business of clothiers, Bootmakers, Hatters and Outfitters or to enter into any branch of business which they do not thoroughly understand.’ It is hardly necessary to tell the rest of the story: Jacobs went out of business, while Lewis became the owner of Lewis’s of Liverpool and of the Bon Marché, also in Liverpool, one of the biggest and most successful department-store entrepreneurs of the century.⁹⁹

While these department stores increased in size, swallowing up the shops around them, before the late 1870s it was rare that the shops were purpose-built: rather, they extended and extended, but from the front remained visibly separate buildings that had been knocked together. The Bon Marché in Brixton* was, in 1877, the first custom-built department store in Britain (it was said to have cost a staggering £70,000); others followed, sometimes voluntarily, often when street-widening schemes or other civic improvements meant that their original shops would have had to have been rebuilt anyway—Barker’s, Derry and Toms, and Pontings, all in Kensington, became monolithic when Kensington High Street was widened from the small country lane it had been.¹⁰¹ Lewis had with great foresight chosen the location for his Manchester shop with an extension in mind. Starting with six departments in 1877, by 1884 his premises had spread across the entire block, and rebuilding had begun once again.¹⁰²

Messrs Bourne and Hollingsworth in Oxford Street, having had somewhat less foresight, looked about them to see what property they would have to acquire to get their ‘island’ site (a site that occupied an entire block, bounded by streets on four sides: the retailer’s dream). It was a daunting prospect—a pub, a dairy, a barber’s, a coffee house, a carpet-layer, a costume manufacturer, two milliners (one wholesale, one retail), a music publisher, a musical-instrument shop, a palmist, a hairdresser, the British headquarters of the New Columbia Gramophone Co., a brothel, a private house, a wholesale lace merchant, a building containing several Polish tailors, a sweet shop, the offices of Doan’s Backache Pills, Savory’s cigarette factory, a wholesale blouse-maker, a wine merchant’s storage cellar, a soda-water manufacturer, a jeweller, a baby-linen manufacturer, a wallpaper merchant, an estate agent, two solicitors and a chapel—but they did it.¹⁰³ Others were similarly placed: Peter Robinson, which had opened in 1833, had bought the two adjoining premises in 1854; in 1856 and 1858 two more were bought; in 1860 the final shop, which gave a block of six shops, was acquired. Marshall and Snelgrove had opened as Marshall and Wilson in 1837; just short of forty years later, in 1876, it added the final shop to its, by now, seven shops to complete its own ‘island’.¹⁰⁴*

These shops, like Whiteley’s of Paddington, saw themselves as ‘Universal Providers’. It was William Whiteley himself who had coined the phrase. He had started as a draper in 1855, and he followed the same path as we have already seen with Kendal, Milne and Bainbridge’s: first he opened a drapery, then he expanded to add the goods that might be desired at the same time: ribbons, lace, fancy goods, gloves, jewellery, parasols. By the 1870s he had expanded literally, into the shop next door, and figuratively, into the services market: Whiteley’s included an estate agent, a hairdresser, a tea room and a furniture showroom on the Wylie and Lockhead model. What really set him apart, though, was his talent for self-publicity. For example, in 1865 one of his employees, John Barker, a department manager, was earning £300 a year; Whiteley promised to double his salary if Barker doubled his turnover. He did, and by 1870 Barker asked to be taken into partnership. Whiteley refused, but promised him a salary of £1,000—more than had ever been paid to a draper; more even than the income of many upper-middle-class professionals. Barker declined it, left Whiteley’s and started his own department store in Kensington (which closed last year, in 2005).¹⁰⁶ Whiteley, however, more than made up for the loss of his valued employee by ensuring that all the newspapers reported the huge salary Barker had been offered. In the 1870s Whiteley also revived the eighteenth-century custom of the puff, sending the Bayswater Chronicle letters ostensibly written by women who shopped at his store.

A completely different route was taken by some other monster shops. Many furniture shops were content to remain furniture shops: Waring and Gillow was proud to announce that it was the ‘largest furnishing emporium in the world’, but it had no interest in developing other departments; Heal’s, in Tottenham Court Road, had picked up the modern department stores’ methods of display, but it stuck with furnishings. Even the huge Peter Robinson shop, which employed nearly 2,000 workers across 100 departments, sold nothing but ladies’ clothes.¹⁰⁷ Arthur Liberty, although ultimately diversifying, began by dealing in only a narrow range of merchandise. Liberty had first worked at Farmer and Roger’s, a shawl warehouse in Regent Street. In 1862 an international exhibition held in Kensington showed William Morris wallpaper for the first time, next to the first exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts to appear in Europe. (Commodore Perry had sailed into Yedo Bay nine years before, and the first commercial treaty between Japan and Britain had been signed only in 1858.) After the exhibition closed, Farmer and Roger bought some of the displays and set up an Oriental Warehouse in the shop next to their own, with Arthur Liberty as its junior salesman. The Oriental Warehouse became a meeting place for a ‘bohemian’ set that included the painters Whistler and Rossetti and the actress Ellen Terry—the forerunners of the Aesthetic Movement. As John Barker had done, Liberty asked to be taken into partnership. As with Barker, he was refused, and he too left to start up his own business. (But unlike Whiteley, whose name survives in some form of retailing to this day, Farmer and Roger’s went under, while Liberty’s continues to flourish.)

Liberty at first specialized in fabrics; in less than a year he had added Japanese goods, as well as fans, wallpapers, fabrics, screens, lacquerware and other exotica from the Far East more generally.* Soon he was arranging for manufacturers to print English fabrics using Japanese techniques and Japanese-y colours, which he dubbed ‘Art Colours’, but which quickly became known to everyone else as ‘Liberty Colours’. Queen’s magazine had earlier described them: ‘There are tints that call to mind French and English mustards, sage-greens, willow-greens, greens that look like curry, and greens that are remarkable on lichen-coloured walls, and also among marshy vegetation.’ More memorably, W. S. Gilbert satirized both the fabrics and those who admired them in Patience, the operetta he wrote with Arthur Sullivan, in 1881: its protagonist, Bunthorne, is

A Japanese young man,

A blue-and-white young man,

Francesca di Rimini, miminy-piminy

Je ne sais quoi young man! A pallid and thin young man, A haggard and lank young man, A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery* Foot-in-the-grave young man!

Patience mocked the whole Aesthetic Movement: Bunthorne was an obvious parody of Whistler, while Grosvenor, his rival, was Oscar Wilde.† Yet Liberty’s, at the heart of that movement, relished its connection to the parodists Gilbert and Sullivan too, and found it financially rewarding: Liberty’s fabrics were used in the production of Patience, and credited in the programme beside advertisements for Liberty’s ‘artistic silks’. When the play moved to the newly built Savoy Theatre, Liberty’s decorated a room to receive the Prince of Wales for the opening. The store continued to be linked to Gilbert and Sullivan’s works, sending someone to Japan to research clothes and materials before the shop’s designers began work on the costumes and sets for The Mikado in 1885.

Notwithstanding this interest, Liberty did not neglect his primary business: by 1880 his Regent Street shop had seven departments; in 1883 he bought another shop on the same side of Regent Street, one shop away from his first; he acquired the upper floor of the property in the middle and joined the two by a staircase known as the ‘Camel’s Back’. Soon he acquired the downstairs of the middle building too, and ultimately he occupied five shops in a row, maintaining the disparate nature of the façades until Regent Street was redeveloped in the 1920s. Although he never went in for ‘universality’ on Whiteley’s scale, by that time he had an Eastern Bazaar basement, which sold Japanese and Chinese antiques, porcelain, bronzes, lacquerware, metalware, brass trays, dolls, fans and other knick-knacks, screens and ‘decorative furnishing objects’. There was an Arab Tea Room, and a Curio Department that sold armour, swords, daggers, ivory carvings, bronzes and ‘antique metalwork suitable for the decoration of halls’. There were also service departments, including a Paper Hanging studio and a Decoration Studio. From 1884 a Costume Department sold dresses designed by Arthur Liberty and made up from his fabrics. Now both a house and its owner could be entirely ‘done’ by Liberty.¹¹⁰ Liberty had created a space where—in a very modern fashion—one could acquire a lifestyle.

Yet the idea of the department store as sweeping all before it is a triumph of hype over reality. In 1880 the British department store seemed to have reached its apogee, while other countries were racing ahead: in France, Germany and the United States art colleges taught professional display and design courses for shopfitters. In America, Macy’s, Wanamaker’s and Marshall Field had stormed ahead in terms of size, display, advertising and organizational structure, while Britain had retreated to older systems, with the floorwalker once more becoming a power—the Draper’s Record in 1888 noted with distaste that Parisian stores let women walk around unescorted. Anything might happen, was the underlying suggestion: men might make advances to female shop staff, goods might be stolen, or—and this seemed to be the real fear—‘loose women’ might invade the premises.¹¹¹ The market share reflected the department stores’ backward step: in 1900 co-ops held between 6 and 7 per cent of the retail market, while department stores accounted for less than 2 per cent. By 1910 that had crept up to slightly under 3 per cent, but when the increase in population was taken into account the figures showed a fall in real terms.¹¹²

Gordon Selfridge, an American, smelt opportunity. There were not many opportunities he had missed in his life. In 1879 he had started work as a stock boy at Marshall Field in Chicago; he was promoted to travelling salesmen, then to counter clerk; by 1887, only eight years after his lowly entry, he was the shop’s retail general manager, and by 1890 he was a junior partner. His development of Marshall Field followed the now familiar pattern: he opened departments for specialist goods—shoes, children’s clothes—and then offered services like glove-cleaning, a tea room, a restaurant. His main contribution, however, was in advertising and promotion: window displays were not simply to convey information about stock to passers-by, he said, but to create desire. He announced the creation of an annual sale—and with typical bombast also announced that he had invented it.¹¹³

This was demonstrably not true. The ‘old draper’ in 1872 recounted how in his youth—probably in the 1820s—when some stock accidentally burned, his employer decided to use this as an excuse to clear the overstock that had accumulated. ‘In the first place some large yellow poster bills were struck off, headed, “Fire!!! Fire!!! Fire!!!” which informed the public that in consequence of the fire which took place on Wednesday, the 6th instant, the damaged stock, much of which was only slightly singed, would be cleared out at a great reduction, together with other surplus stock, sale to commence on Monday next.’ After closing, the staff quietly singed goods that had remained unharmed. The next morning, ‘People bought goods of every description that were at all likely to suit them…Critical old women, that under ordinary circumstances would have spent a long time…examining a pair of stockings, bought the same goods, instantly, at full prices, when slightly singed at the tops.’ By the end of the day it was found that ‘we had actually cleared off whole piles of goods that would have taken us several weeks to have sold under ordinary circumstances, while nearly all the jobbish goods bought for the occasion had been cleared out.’ He claimed that it was this fire sale that was ‘the commencement of the “selling off” system in London’.¹¹⁴ That was unlikely too, but it definitely pre-dated Selfridge’s ‘invention’ of the sale by three-quarters of a century.

Selfridge’s passion for advertising broke new ground. As with so many innovators, it was not that he did anything particularly novel, but that he took many novel ideas of the period and worked them together, increasing their force by his passion and commitment. Much of his advertising turned on the value of shopping (particularly of shopping at Marshall Field), on shopping as social good, on the benefits shopping conferred on humanity and so on. Marshall Field’s restaurant was promoted by the aspiration ‘A department store should be a social center, not merely a place for shopping.’ He was among the first to hire professional copywriters and set up an ‘institutional advertising style’, which sold Marshall Field, and shopping at Marshall Field, rather than promoting separate items. He instituted ‘free gifts’, he mounted special promotions.¹¹⁵ In 1904 Selfridge suddenly resigned, either because he had been refused a senior partnership or because when the store was incorporated in 1901 he had received what he considered to be an inadequate share allocation. Whatever the reason, by 1906 he was in London. With money from a British shopping magnate, after an abortive start he began to build: Selfridge’s was the biggest store ever to be built entirely from scratch, rather than by expansion.

Selfridge had plans for London. He brought over three colleagues from Chicago: one to control the merchandise, one to design the store and its fittings, and one to be in charge of window displays. The buyers were now subordinate to the merchandise manager. No longer were there dozens, if not hundreds, of separate little fiefdoms, each buying to suit itself, with no overall sense of the customer base; nor were buyers any longer entirely responsible for their own staff; nor did they design their own displays, laying out their merchandise as they each thought best. Everything was centralized. Even the flow of information was unified: instead of floorwalkers who led customers to the appropriate departments, based on each individual’s opinion of how best to fulfil a customer’s request, there was a central information desk. (Marshall Field had had one from early in the 1890s.) Everything was to be coordinated: carpets, wrapping paper, delivery vans, bill heads—even the string used to tie the parcels was in the same colours, with the same design. It was the embodiment of Selfridge’s credo: everything and everyone in the store were all working to fulfil a single vision—Selfridge’s own.¹¹⁶

The opening of the shop, in 1909, was planned as carefully as any theatrical premiere—in fact that was what it most closely resembled, and was clearly intended to resemble. The silk curtains that covered the windows before opening day, said the Daily Chronicle, ‘[suggested] that a wonderful play was being arranged’. When they were drawn back, they revealed a radical departure. Harrod’s and Whiteley’s both had windows stuffed brimful with as many goods as they could hold. Selfridge’s windows were completely different: they displayed unified, thematically coherent images, showing how the consumer might hope to wear a dress or live with the goods on show. The Retail Trader understood that this sense of a single vision came from the novelty of having one man solely dedicated to putting goods in the windows. Equally, it understood the theatricality that was aimed at: ‘Just as the stage manager of a new play rehearses and tries and retries and fusses until he has exactly the right lights and shades and shadows and appeals to his audience, so the merchant goes to work, analysing his line and his audience, until he hits on the right scheme that brings the public flocking to his doors.’¹¹⁷

The public flocked, all right. The shop claimed 1 million visitors in its first week, and, even if the figure needs to be divided in half to allow for pardonable exaggeration, it is a startling number. Other shops became frantic: Waring and Gillow, Swan and Edgar, Peter Robinson,

Maple’s, Shoolbred, and D. H. Evans all decided to show their new spring lines that same week; Harrod’s promoted its diamond jubilee, a mere four years early, with afternoon concerts to be given by the London Symphony and the band of the Grenadier Guards.¹¹⁸ But it wasn’t enough. The most important thing was advertising, and here Selfridge outshone the others. He was the first to use blanket coverage. He spent £36,000 on press advertising in the run-up to the opening. (Thomas Lipton, as a comparison, was spending between £50,000 and £60,000 a year on advertising—for more than 400 shops.)¹¹⁹ Selfridge commissioned thirty-two cartoons from artists and caricaturists, including Bernard Partridge, Linley Sambourne, Walter Crane, Lewis Baumer, Leonard Raven-Hill and Fred Pegram, all of whom worked for Punch (Crane was a renowned children’s illustrator in addition). The resulting 104 full-page advertisements ran for a week in 18 national newspapers.¹²⁰ Selfridge’s great insight, however, was not simply the motivating power of advertising. It was, more crucially, the weight that advertising carried with newspapers. He was the first to see that if an advertiser was paying thousands of pounds to a newspaper or periodical, and there were likely to be many thousands of pounds more to come, the newspaper would support the advertiser editorially too, if stroked the right way. Selfridge made it his business to cultivate those at the top—in particular, Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, and Ralph D. Blumenfeld, the editor of the Daily Express—as well as more humble journalists: he hired one of their own as a publicist; he gave journalists’ dinners; he staged a special, pre-opening evening with a private tour of the store; he told them they could always use the telephones in Selfridge’s, without charge.¹²¹

These novelties were matched by novelties in the shop. Again, it was not that no one had thought of such things before—shopping as entertainment had, as we have seen, a 200-year history—it was that no one had pushed them to such extremes. On the opening day, all the customers were given calendars and notebooks listing the 130 departments and emblazoned with the slogan, ‘WHY NOT SPEND THE DAY AT SELFRIDGES?’¹²² After Louis Blériot became the first person to fly the English Channel in a ‘heavier-than-air machine’, Selfridge rushed to buy the aircraft, and the day after the flight it was already on display in the store. More than 150,000 people came to see it over the next four days. He held an exhibition of the paintings that were not accepted for the Royal Academy summer show. Soon the shop had a playroom for children, decorated to look like the seaside, with real sand, a pond and a small roller coaster, and the Palm Court had a Punch and Judy show every afternoon. There was a pet shop, a rifle range, a putting green, a skating rink. But, most importantly, Selfridge knew how to convey this information to the general public: through the newspapers.

*Sugar until well into the nineteenth century was a very intractable object. Sugar was originally processed by boiling the raw cane sugar with lime water and bullock’s blood; the blood coagulated, absorbing the impurities (and with it sugar’s natural brown colour). The remaining liquid was then filtered, concentrated and poured into moulds, where it solidified. The resulting loaves were then broken up and repurified before being formed once more into conical loaves and sold. Grocers broke up the big loaves with hammers, but the smaller loaves bought by housewives still had to be cut into smaller pieces with sugar nippers. Industrial processing, happily, replaced the bullock’s blood with centrifugal force.²

*Yet bulk was not absolutely uniform, even for the multiples, and several successful chains had a curious anomaly known as the ‘Highland Trade’. As late as the 1910s Cochrane Stores in the west of Scotland were still advertising ‘Attention Highest prices given for eggs’—that is, they traded general produce for their customers’ eggs. Massey stores went further, bartering goods for eggs and also for Harris tweed. In both cases the eggs were sold in their other branches, while Massey’s uncle was a tailor and was happy to accept the tweed.¹³

*The prefix ‘ready-made’ is important, as in contemporary idiom ‘a dress’ also referred to a length of fabric that was sold to be made up into a dress later.

†A £300 income was earned only by the prosperous middle classes. Yet even this is not the entire picture. Newspapers were regularly taken by coffee houses, where they could be read for the price of a cup of coffee, or rented for 1d. an hour. Furthermore, there were often more than a dozen readers per copy of the newspaper even when they had not been ordered for public places. (See p. 126.)

*A spencer was a double-breasted overcoat without tails, well out of fashion by this time. A highlow remains a mystery: the only contemporary sources that list the ‘highlow’ say it is a boot, whereas from the context here it appears to be a jacket.

†Sala (1828—96) contributed to Dickens’s Household Words f rom 1851. At the end of the Crimean War, Dickens asked him to travel to Russia to report on the situation. In 1863 he made his name as a special correspondent covering the American Civil War for the Daily Telegraph. He also wrote ‘Echoes of the Week’, a column for the Illustrated London News, for more than twenty-five years.

*In 1822 there were seventy Jews in Leeds; by 1900 the city had, in proportion to its Gentile inhabitants, the largest Jewish population in the country, at 5 per cent of the population.²⁷

*Singer was even better at marketing than he was at inventing: he had been an actor, and he used his selling and promotional skills at first on a circuit of fairs and circuses; he then opened a showroom, a vast hall lined with machines operated by specially trained women—he wanted to show that women at home could use his machines.³¹

*A siphonia was a transient name for a waterproof coat, one of the many names that manufacturers came up with to catch the eye in advertisements. Almost exactly contemporaneously with this mention, Sala wrote of clerks in their ‘Paletôts…Ponchos, Burnouses, Sylphides, Zephyr wrappers, Chesterfields, Llamas, Pilot wrappers, Wrap-rascals, Bisuniques and a host of other garments, more or less answering the purpose of an overcoat’.³⁸

*Laces themselves had been revolutionized in 1823, when metal eyelets were patented, making it possible to wear heavier boots and lace them more tightly without tearing the leather.⁴¹

†Boots were ordinary street-wear for men, women and children, even in cities, since horse dung, alleyway slaughterhouses and overrunning cesspits were common. Given the condition of the streets, once inside the house those who could afford it expected to change into their shoes or, for women, slippers—which were not bedroom wear, but made of silk, satin or other fabrics, or even the more delicate leathers. The primary distinction between slippers and shoes was, not unnaturally, that the slipper was easily slipped on and off, and thus had no fastenings apart from ribbons. For evening wear for more prosperous women, slippers were de rigueur.

*In the 1850s they advertised a £3 10s., a £6 10s., or a 10 guinea outfit for those emigrating. The 10 guinea version comprised: 1 black dress coat, 1 black dress vest, black dress trousers; 1 frock coat, 1 fancy vest, fancy trousers; 1 fishing or shooting coat; 1 hat and 1 cloth cap; 18 shirts; 4 nightshirts; 1 pair Wellington boots, and 1 pair shoes; 6 handkerchiefs; 6 pounds Marine soap; a razor, shaving box, strop and mirror; a fork, a knife, a teaspoon and a tablespoon; a plate and a mug; a bed, a pillow, a pair of blankets, 2 pairs of sheets, 2 pillowcases; a hairbrush and comb; and a strong sea chest to contain everything.⁴⁵

*This was not a one-off: Harris’s, in Whitechapel, used similar theatre and prizefighter slang, mixed in with the vocabulary of the penny-dreadful (see pp. 174—6) and outright thievery: ‘Harris…The Champion of England, slap-up tog and out-and-out kicksies builder, nabs the chance of putting his customers awake that he has just made his escape from Canada, not forgetting to clap his mawleys [fists] on a rare does of stuff…’⁵¹

*There was a brisk East End trade in tailors’ tabs with the names of West End shops on them,⁵² probably for shops like this.

*Note that the fare ‘stage’ retained its name, and still does, from stagecoach days.

*An Argand lamp burned gas held in a reservoir, with, for the first time, an enclosed flame in a glass chimney; a mechanism allowed the flame to be raised or lowered, regulating brightness, again for the first time.

†Johanna Schopenhauer (1766—1838) was born in Prussia, the daughter of a banker and senator. She married Heinrich Schopenhauer, a merchant, in 1784 or 1785, and travelled widely with him. After his death in 1805 or 1806 she moved to Weimar, where she was the centre of a literary salon, attended by Goethe and Wieland among others. Driven by financial need, she published a number of books, including a biography, travel diaries, novels and short stories. However, her main claim to fame today is as the mother of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

*Particularly for furniture: Shoolbred started selling carpets and upholstery not long after the move; John Harris Heal, the son of the owner of a mattress-making company around the corner in Rathbone Place, opened a furniture shop less than a hundred metres away in 1840; Maple’s, an enormous furniture shop, set up next door to Shoolbred in 1842. And the tradition is maintained—Heal’s, in its early twentieth-century building, proudly takes up nearly an entire block; Maple’s closed only a couple of decades ago; and hordes of students looking for sofa-beds and futons today still head for Tottenham Court Road.

*Engels saw this redevelopment as a way of segregating the working classes from the middle classes, to keep these areas free for middle-class consumption. It is an interesting idea, but one I can only briefly mention in this footnote.⁷⁴

*There was a mocking response shortly afterwards in the advertisement placed by another shop: ‘We have fine displays of fancy goods and toys, including the new non-speaking shop assistants.’⁷⁷

*In between, it had been an opera house and then the home of the National Institute to Improve the Manufactures of the United Kingdom. Later it became a wine shop, and today, suitably, a Marks and Spencer’s store occupies the site.⁸⁵

†The Change started life where today the Strand Palace Hotel stands. When plans to widen the Strand were first mooted, in 1828, the Exeter Change moved to King’s Mews, Charing Cross, although this was no more lucky a site—today the mews is underneath the National Gallery.

*This appeared in a small book that was published as an advertisement for the Bazaar, so the respectability of the females should perhaps be understood as a selling tool.

†Zola’s main source was the Bon Marché in Paris, founded 1852 by a retail revolutionary, Aristide Boucicaut. But Boucicaut’s revolutionary ideas—low margins; fast turnover; fixed, ticketed prices; browsing encouraged; the right of exchange or refund; free deliveries—were all, as we have seen, less than revolutionary to nineteenth-century Britain. The argument about who was first, however, is bootless: the department store arrived piecemeal, and early avatars—the Ville de Paris (1844) and the Grands Magasins du Louvre (1855) in Paris; A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace (1848), Lord and Taylor, Arnold, Constable and Co. and Macy’s (1850s) in New York; as well as the shops I discuss in this chapter—all contributed.

*In some shops outside London an extremely grand customer expected to remain seated in her carriage while everything was brought out to her for examination. By the nineteenth century in London, this was clearly no longer practicable.

*Wylie and Lockhead in Glasgow had the first lift, in 1855. The Glasgow Herald reported it as a ‘very ingenious hoisting apparatus worked by a neat steam engine, which is intended not only to lift up bales from the Wagon entrance to the upper parts of the building, but to elevate those ladies and gentlemen to the galleries to whom the climbing of successive stairs might be attended with fatigue and annoyance. Parties who are old, fat, feeble, short winded, or simply lazy, or who desire a bit of fun, have only to place themselves on an enclosed platform or flooring when they are elevated by a gentle and pleasing process to a height exceeding that of a country steeple.’⁹⁵

†The old way of taking cash had been for a shop assistant to write out an order, then a floorwalker went with both the order and the payment to the cash department, and waited while a receipt was issued, and brought it back together with any change. As customer numbers—and the amount of floor space to be covered by the floorwalker—increased, this became too cumbersome. In the 1880s a pneumatic tube system was devised: the shop assistant put the money and the order in a capsule, put it in the tube, and it was rushed along to the cash department by vacuum pressure; a receipt and the change were returned in the same way. The method had made something of a comeback, particularly in large superstores: the wholesalers Costco, some Tesco supermarkets and even Ikea empty their tills and send the cash in plastic capsules along exactly these types of pneumatic tube.

*Wylie and Lockhead remained pioneers: later they were the first in the country to promote art-nouveau furniture.

†A great boon to women, in particular: one early twentieth-century feminist remembered in her childhood being told by her mother that before department stores and coffee shops like the ABC and Lyons Corner House freed women to spend hours out of the house, ‘Either ladies didn’t go out or ladies didn’t go’.⁹⁷

‡Many shops worked hard to get elusive males through the door: Harrod’s advertised a ‘Gent’s Club Room…furnished in the style of the Georgian period’, Whiteley’s men’s hairdresser offered a daily shave for those paying an annual subscription.⁹⁸

*No connection to Lewis’s Bon Marché: both were linking themselves to Boucicaut’s Parisian store; Lewis even borrowed the French shop’s stripes for his advertising and packaging.¹⁰⁰

*Such attempts to expand were not always successful: in the Mile End Road ‘Messrs Wickham, circa 1910, wanted an emporium. Messrs Spiegelhalter, one infers, wouldn’t sell out. Messrs Wickham, one infers further, pressed on regardless, thereby putting their Baroque tower badly out of centre. Messrs Spiegelhalter (“The East End Jewellers”) remain [in 1966]: two stuccoed storeys surrounded on both sides by giant columns a` la Selfridges. The result is one of the best visual jokes in London.’¹⁰⁵

*This interest in the Far East was catered to by others, just not as successfully, or perhaps as single-mindedly. Zola’s department-store proprietor had set up ‘a small bargain table’ of shop-soiled gewgaws: ‘now it was overflowing with old bronzes, old ivories, old lacquer and had a turnover of fifteen thousand francs a year. He scoured the whole of the Far East, getting travellers to rummage for him in palaces and temples.’¹⁰⁸

*The ‘blue-and-white young man’ is a reference to the Chinese porcelain beloved by the Aesthetic Movement. The Grosvenor Gallery was also linked to the Aesthetic Movement: in 1877 its first show included work by Burne-Jones, Whistler, Alma-Tadema and others. It was run by Joseph Comyns Carr, an art critic, and C. E. Hallé, the son of the founder of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester (see pp. 369—72).

†Bunthorne’s Aesthetic dress was designed by Georges Pilotelle, whose history was more colourful than the subdued fabrics he used: he had fled France in 1875 after being found guilty of the murder of an unspecified number of people he had taken hostage, most probably during the Commune. His political inclinations were made plain in his collection of relics of the Revolutionary martyr Marat, which was said to be ‘the most complete and valuable existing’.¹⁰⁹