Personal hygiene routines continued to diverge. Even where homes had a fixed bath with hot water, bathing was still a long way from the daily shower. By their own count, the middle-class citizens of Sheffield only ran a bath sixty-two times a year – for the entire household. Schoolteachers preached cleanliness, but by the 1920s half the schools in France still did not have a washroom, and most teachers were waiting for running water to arrive at their own home. For many, cleanliness was a communal ritual, in school showers, the local river, or in municipal pools built to celebrate the joy of water as a shared, social democratic good. In Helsinki, men and women paddled around naked in the city’s swimming bath, on alternating days. In Europe as in Asia, public baths were spaces of sociability and gossip as well as private cleanliness. Given the labour involved in preparing a hot bath for those without piped water – that is, the majority – bathing routines varied considerably. Some took a weekly bath on Saturdays, others washed at the sink every night. Some kids shared the tub, others did not, with Mother emptying the bath and boiling fresh water, for one bath after another. One woman, born in 1897, recalled growing up in a family of eight in Bradford. Her father was a railway engineer. They had a ‘good sized bathroom’ with a ‘large zinc bath’, but the water had to be boiled on a gas stove in the kitchen. She and her three older sisters had their bath once a week, on Saturday afternoon. Her two brothers went to the swimming baths instead: ‘they got showers regularly you see. So we managed fairly well.’ 47
GOING SHOPPING
Beijing, the new capital of the Republic of China (1911–28), was a city bustling with shops and entertainments. In overthrowing the Qing dynasty, the 1911 revolution snuffed the life out of the markets that had catered for the court, its princes and eunuchs. A hotchpotch of shopping spaces emerged. Along the periphery, temple markets survived. At Wangfuijing in the south-east, where many foreigners lived, department stores opened their doors. But it was in the south-west where the biggest market of all emerged: Tianqiao, ‘the Bridge of Heaven’ (see Plate 23). The new Republican rulers were keen to clean up the Inner City. The transport network was expanded. Tianqiao was lucky. It became the end of the trolley-bus line. Roads were widened, marshes filled in. Within a generation, the once-swampy village resort had grown into a lively hub for anyone looking for a bargain and a bit of fun. Visitors to Tianqiao market could choose between three hundred shops. One quarter sold silks and fabrics, another second-hand clothes. Seven shops specialized in foreign manufactured goods, one in Western suits. There were 116 snack dealers competing for hungry customers, alongside 37 restaurants. There was barely any need the market did not cater for. It had photostudios, grocers, drug dens and a brothel. While shopping, visitors were able to watch acrobats, singers and magicians. In 1918, a state-of-the-art leisure complex was added, the South City Amusement Park, open from eleven to eleven, where, for 30 cents, students and the middle classes could go bowling and roller skating or enjoy the theatre and dance halls; a ‘foreign meal’ at one of the restaurants cost extra. Tianqiao was a happening place for poor and better-off alike. The hero in Lao She’s famous novel Rickshaw Boy (1936) found it impossible to leave the city, such was Tianqiao’s magnetic pull.48
Republican Beijing fits awkwardly into the conventional story of the ‘modern city’. On the one hand, it exhibited certain trends that can be seen as emblematic of mass consumption. On the other, large department stores were accompanied, even outflanked, by an equally dynamic sector of small shops and stalls. Here prices were not fixed but negotiable, arrived at through haggling or cheating. Shops were known as ‘tiger booths’: the retailer was the tiger, the customer the prey. Tianqiao’s South City, similarly, had a touch of Coney Island, but in the main market it was troupes of actors and acrobats who dominated street and stage. Yet these were no longer ‘traditional’ either. Laozi, or lotus singers, had shed their provincial origins and become commercial entertainers, professionally organized, with stage names and newspaper rankings. Far from being the preserve of primitive customs, Tianqiao was a vibrant source of novelties, including female performers and fake wrestling. Street entertainment and a large-scale leisure park developed side by side.
In West as well as East, the century after the 1820s witnessed a revolution in shopping. People had shopped since ancient times,49 but this period saw a shift in gear. Shopping became a popular leisure activity – an end in itself as well as a means to acquire goods – and people talked of ‘shoppers’. Shops proliferated, boosted by urban growth and a rise in real wages, which was especially pronounced in Europe and the Americas from the 1860s. This story has often been told via the rise of department stores epitomized by the Bon Marché, founded in Paris in 1852. Paris, in the phrase of the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, was the capital of the nineteenth century, the epitome of bourgeois modernity at its peak. For Werner Sombart, department stores were the children of modern capitalism.50 As late as the 1960s, this point of view had a certain intuitive logic to it, as department stores continued to expand their market share. Since then the tables have turned: the giants have been in crisis, squeezed by discounters and a renaissance of street markets. Beijing, therefore, is a good point of entry into the world of shopping because it broadens our view from the outset to take in the many different types of retail spaces and practices that expanded alongside each other. In Europe and America, as in Beijing, modernity came in all shapes and sizes. Innovation, in short, must not be confused with size and concentration. This does not mean we can ignore the department store – far from it. Rather, we must place it next to the pedlar, the market hall and the co-operative shop, which were all equally creative responses to the growing demands of urban populations.
Historical opinion about the department store has diverged sharply. A generation ago, historians presented it as the apex of the shift from court to mass consumption. The Bon Marché and its ilk wrought a social and psychological revolution, inflaming new desires and eliminating human interaction. ‘The numbed hypnosis induced by these places,’ one historian wrote, ‘is a form of sociability as typical of modern mass consumption as the sociability of the salon was typical of prerevolutionary upper-class consumption.’51 The department store, in this view, catapulted people previously accustomed to having nothing into a world of desire. This is too strong. As we have seen, the early modern period was not a pre-consumerist dark age.
More recent writers have been gradualists. The department store, they stress, did not ring in a new era. Virtually all its innovations can be traced back in time. To see and be seen was already a feature of the shopping galleries in seventeenth-century Antwerp, Paris and London. How these galleries aroused first a desire for goods and then sexual desire was already made fun of by Pierre Corneille in his 1632 comedy La Galerie du palais. Around this time, the bazaars in Istanbul counted more than 10,000 shops and stalls.52 In the eighteenth century customers already browsed and compared goods and prices, while shopkeepers used mirrors, skylights and displays to create a seductive atmosphere. By 1800, many grocers displayed their tea and other articles with fixed prices on counters and shelves and used trade cards for advertising. In Newcastle, the draper Bainbridge showed fixed prices on its fabrics as early as the 1830s, to take the anxiety out of shopping. It was drapers, too, who switched to a business model of high turnover and low mark-up, opening ‘emporia’, magasins de nouveautés and ‘monster shops’ with large showrooms where several hundred sales assistants offered quality goods at wholesale prices for ready cash. Smoother and more transparent plate glass began to turn high streets into fantasias in the 1840s. Rather than a radical break, from this perspective the department store appears the culmination of a long-drawn-out evolution in retailing.53
Nonetheless, contemporaries in the late nineteenth century did experience the department store as a sign of a new society. Its forgotten antecedents did not make their sensation any less intense. What the department store did was to bring together various innovations under one enormous gl
ass roof supported by a massive iron frame. The biggest stores imposed themselves on the urban landscape like civic buildings and royal palaces. A. T. Stewart in New York City was the ‘Marble Palace’ (1846). In 1906 the Bon Marché covered 53,000 square metres (see Plate 19). Glass plate created a virtually continuous shopwindow from pavement to roof. Some buildings were architectural set pieces, like the art nouveau Innovation in Brussels, designed by Victor Horta in 1901 or Paris’s Printemps by René Binèt (1907). Stores were often technological pioneers. Marshall Field’s introduced electric lights in 1882. Muir and Mirrielees was the first building in Moscow with an elevator (1908). At Corvin’s in Budapest, the elevator was such an attraction that the store decided to charge visitors to ride it.54
Department stores were self-conscious global institutions in ways not seen before, working in tandem with those other forces of globalization at the time: the world exhibition, the steamship, the postal service and migration. The 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the Exposition Universelle in Paris 1867 and later exhibitions displayed the products of the world in a way that blurred the lines between culture and commodity. Stores, in turn, were likened to museums. Here people could behold the world as a collection of goods, carefully displayed under glass. William Whiteley saw his West London store as the Great Exhibition’s direct successor, bringing goods from across the world within the reach of every shopper.55 In Berlin, Tietz put a 4.5-metre globe on top of its store on Leipziger Straße, lit from the inside at night. Department stores were a global family, held together by transnational flows of capital, knowledge and taste. The Bon Marché inspired namesakes in Brixton and Liverpool. In 1912, Harrods opened a branch on Buenos Aires’ exclusive Calle Florida. As well as moving outwards from European cities, these flows operated sideways, drawing on home-grown enterprise. Gath and Chaves’ store in Buenos Aires was the result of a partnership between the creole Lorenzo Chaves and Alfredo Gath, a British migrant. Ma Ying, who established the four-storey Sincere Company in Shanghai in 1917, had first been impressed by fixed prices and customer service in Anthony Hordern’s shopping palace in Sydney.56
Global ambition was on show in the range of goods on offer. London’s Whiteleys christened itself the ‘Universal Provider’. Stores concentrated on clothing, furniture and fabrics, but the range of goods and services was impressive nonetheless. Harrod’s Catalogue of 1895 offered everything from Cambric Knickers (‘trimmed Deep-Muslin Frill, Button-hole Edge, handmade’ or slightly cheaper machine-made kinds), kettles and cuckoo clocks, to Japanese-lacquer toilet cabinets, a lady fortune teller (‘in Gypsy Costume’, two hours for £2 2s), all the way to funerals, with coffins and gravestones in a range of materials, hearses, mourning carriages and a number of attendants and coachmen depending on one’s budget.57 Selfridges introduced a children’s floor and a children’s day. At the department store, it was possible to shop from cradle to grave.
The key to success was flow – flow of people and of goods. Cheap prices demanded large, rapid turnover, and this fundamentally changed the atmosphere inside the store as well as its relationship to the urban environment outside. In comparison to early modern shops, the department store was an extrovert. Instead of creating an exclusive, semi-private space for elite customers, it reached out into the city to grab the masses and pull them in. In the 1890s, large shop-windows became a stage for a new profession of window dressers to live out ever more ambitious fantasies. At Marshall Field’s in Chicago, Arthur Fraser turned the entire shopfront into a seventeenth-century manor house. Provincial stores tried their hands at wire battleships and models of St Paul’s made out of handkerchiefs. Selfridges lit its store from 8 p.m. until midnight to attract nocturnal window-shoppers. Shops added covered arcades that extended their displays into the street. It was hard to tell where commercial space ended and public space began.
Once inside, the pull continued. At Harrod’s, a ‘moving staircase’ started rolling in 1898, transporting up to 4,000 customers per hour.58 Conveyer belts transported merchandise. Messages flew through pneumatic tubes. Rapid turnover ruled. ‘Sales’ had existed for a century or more. The department store turned them into seasonal rituals. Muir and Mirrielees held sales on gloves in March, perfume in April and carpets in August. All stores had ‘white weeks’, mostly in January, as well as ‘special price’ or ‘95-pfennig’ weeks. During sales, customers could quadruple, to 70,000 a day in the Bon Marché. Stores turned over stock six times a year. Sales-mania excited cartoonists, moral reformers and shoppers alike. ‘Sale’ was, as the Prejudiced Guide to London Shops put it in 1906:
[the] magic word that stocks our wardrobes, deletes our purses, disorganizes our routine, fascinates us, repels us, delights us, disappoints us twice a year regularly in London . . . The ethics of sales are so disturbing, one time so morally and clearly good, the next minute so conspicuously disappointing and bad, that no woman, I believe, is quite settled in her mind regarding them.59
It was the birth of total shopping. Department stores held concerts, installed picture galleries and libraries, and provided tea and smoking rooms. Openings and promotional weeks turned shop floors into magical stage sets. No one captured the atmosphere more vividly than Émile Zola, who devoted a good twenty pages to the exhibition of white in his Au Bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), published in 1883 after meticulous research in the real Bon Marché. ‘There was nothing but white, all the white goods from every department, an orgy of white, a white star whose radiance was blinding at first.’ In the gallery of haberdashery and hosiery, ‘white edifices were displayed made of pearl buttons, together with huge constructions of white socks, and a whole hall covered with white swansdown.’ In the central gallery, bright light illuminated white silks and ribbons. ‘The staircases were decked with white draperies . . . running the whole length of the banisters and encircling the halls right up to the second floor.’ The ‘ascending whiteness appeared to take wing, merging together and disappearing like a flight of swans. The whiteness then fell back again from the domes in a rain of eiderdown, a sheet of huge snowflakes.’ In the main hall, over the silk counter:
there was the miracle, the altar of this cult of white – a tent made of white curtains hanging down from the glass roof. Muslins, gauzes, and guipures [large-patterned decorative lace] flowed in light ripples, while richly embroidered tulles and lengths of oriental silk and silver lamé served as a background to this gigantic decoration, which was evocative both of the tabernacle and of the bedroom. It looked like a great white bed, its virginal whiteness waiting . . . for the white princess . . . who would one day come . . . in her white bridal veil. ‘Oh! It’s fantastic!’ the ladies kept repeating. ‘Amazing!’
In the perfume department, the salesmen had made a display of white china pots and white glass phials, with a silver fountain in the centre and a shepherdess standing in a harvest of flowers. But the crush of customers was greatest in the lace department, ‘the crowning glory of the great display of white’, where ‘the most delicate and costly whites’ were on display. ‘The temptation was acute; mad desires were driving all the women crazy.’60
Zola’s novel, the most successful of the emerging genre of the department-store novel, mixed social observation with moral anxiety. In Zola’s store, a dream world of virginal innocence (the white bed, the shepherdess) collides with animalistic lust. He described women ‘pale with desire’ and with an ‘irresistible desire to throw themselves’ into silks and velvets, ‘and be lost’. The department store replaced the satanic mill, a microcosm of social evil. Mouret, the fictional head of The Ladies’ Paradise, is the successor to the pitiless factory-owner in earlier Victorian novels. ‘When he [had] extracted his fortune and his pleasure from them [the women], he would throw them on the rubbish heap.’ Zola describes the store as a ruthless ‘machine’ designed to seduce and conquer women. During sales, the ‘current’ of the store grew into an ‘ocean’ that took everyone and everything with it.61
The Ladies’ Paradise is
a brilliant catalogue of contemporary fears. One was that these ‘cathedrals of commerce’ were displacing the true Church, with the worship of goods leading away from the worship of Christ. Small retailers and conservatives worried that the big stores were destroying family shops and, with them, social balance and national strength; one shopkeeper in Zola’s novel throws himself in front of an omnibus in despair. Department stores, critics charged, deprived millions of shopkeepers of their daily bread. Society would be split in two: a small group of businessmen and an army of consumers. Family, religion and morality, all would be destroyed. Into the 1890s, many shop assistants lived in and were not allowed to marry – love was bad for business, Zola noted. On the other hand, sex sells, and the press was full of claims that stores attracted prostitutes or hired good-looking male assistants to seduce the weaker sex. The Swedish novel by Sigfrid Siwertz Det stora varuhuset (1926) opens with a sex scene in the bedding department; Swedes were always one step ahead. Everywhere, the department store was in the crossfire. In Spain, shopping was blamed for the decadence of a once-great empire.62 In Germany, Jewish-owned chains were seen as sapping the strength of a rising empire.
In reality, department stores took only a small slice of the retail trade. They created new work for specialist crafts, and they pulled more shoppers into city centres, as some small shopkeepers learnt to appreciate. Nonetheless, these fears drew strength from several important trends: the growing visibility of women in urban life; the impact of urbanization on religious devotion; and a more aggressive nationalism. Some prophesied that sexual and national crisis would be the result. In eighteenth-century London, ‘macaronis’ – foppish men with a love for Italian song and feathered hats – had been derided for weakening the nation;63 it was such effeminate traits among the American colonials that British troops mocked in the original version of ‘Yankee Doodle’ during the Seven Years War, before the song would be given its patriotic makeover by the new republic.
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