Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  But the shop was not necessarily a space of moral danger. In Emma (1816), Jane Austen has Harriet Smith take shelter from the rain in a draper’s, where she meets the respectable Mr Martin, with no hint of threat or corruption. In real life, middleas well as working-class women walked the streets unaccompanied.64 By the end of the century, the atmosphere had changed. As female emancipation and professional employment gathered pace, unchaperoned middle-class women became a lightning rod for wider fears. The department store seemed to unleash the passionate beast in otherwise respectable ladies. Often it was women with a purse full of money who were caught shoplifting, like Zola’s Madame de Boves, who was in the grip of a ‘neurosis’ caused by ‘her unsatisfied desire for luxury when confronted by the enormous, violent temptation of the big stores’.65 The lust for things erupted from deep within the female body. Many kleptomaniacs, according to criminologists, were menstruating women.

  Lurking behind these sexual anxieties were fears about the loss of self-control and individuality. The department store simultaneously repelled and attracted, because it seemed to hold within it a new mass society. One contemporary likened it to an ocean liner where classes were temporarily thrown together.66 Writing in 1900, the German sociologist Georg Simmel highlighted two complementary processes. One concerned the effect of money and metropolis on an individual’s relation to objects. The harmony between things and humans was torn asunder. In the metropolis, according to Simmel, relations with objects had become false and superficial. Fashion, novelties and promotions accelerated and diversified to win attention. ‘The broadening of consumption,’ Simmel wrote, ‘is dependent upon the growth of objective culture, since the more objective and impersonal an object is the better it is suited to more people.’ Things lost their personal touch. Formerly individual works of art, they were now interchangeable mass products. The second process concerned the relation between individuals and social groups. Metropolitan life estranged people from their community and class. In earlier periods, it was said that ‘city air makes you free,’ but freedom now was a costly illusion. People might be free to move and shop. But, Simmel argued, they were really a ‘grey’ mass. Valued as customers, they were devalued as individuals. Shop assistants no longer distinguished between a decorated officer and a lowly soldier, between a simple student and Herr Professor Dr Simmel; they were all treated alike, as long as they had money to spend. In the modern city, the ‘decolouring’ of objects and individuals went hand in hand.67

  This dehumanizing portrait of the modern shopper reached a new melancholic depth in the 1930s in the work of the German philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin. Benjamin took his own life on 10 October 1940 at the French border with Spain, rather than face deportation to Nazi Germany. He left behind a legendary archive of fragmented scraps and thoughts on nineteenth-century Paris that has entranced critics ever since, the so-called ‘Arcades Project’. Benjamin mixed Marx with Proust and added a dash of Freud. Reality was not what it seemed. A dream had fallen over Europe in the nineteenth century. This was why capitalism had not, and would not, die a natural death. To wake up his contemporaries, Benjamin set himself the role of historical therapist, interpreting the advance of ‘dream-time’ (Zeit-traum) in nineteenth-century Paris.68

  Unlike Max Weber, Benjamin did not believe modernity had disenchanted the world. Quite the opposite: shops, novelties and advertisements were the new gods. The shopping arcades of the 1820s–’40s were collective ‘dream houses’,69 passageways into the past; Benjamin likened them to ‘caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe’.70 With their shops and promenades, these covered arcades provided the habitat of a new type: the flâneur. Strolling the city without aim or purpose, the flâneur was like a walking camera, creating an album of private impressions from the scenes of public life. The crowd was his home. Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 1860s flushed him out. Grand boulevards encouraged crowds to move along in a regular flow. This left the department store as a rare, surviving haunt for meandering. But here, Benjamin stressed, freedom was further compromised by uniformity and surveillance. In the department store, ‘for the first time in history . . . consumers begin to consider themselves as a mass.’71 Whether he liked it or not, the flâneur was himself on display.

  These pessimistic readings have cast a long shadow over the twentieth century. They need to be placed in their historical context. For all their brilliance, they tell us more about the theorist than about the reality of shopping in the late nineteenth century. Benjamin was writing with the Nazis at his back. For him, there was a straight line from the department store to Adolf Hitler. Totalitarian states picked up ‘the mass’ as their model: ‘the Volksgemeinschaft [racial community] . . . aims to root out from single individuals everything that stands in the way of their wholesale fusion into a mass of consumers.’72 But in 1900 there were no Nazis. For many contemporaries, shopping did not automatically lead to mass conformity and moral decay. Zola, after all, ended The Ladies’ Paradise by marrying off Denise, the shop assistant, to Mouret, the owner – a master stroke of social reconciliation, which united community and commerce, morals and Mammon, the virtuous petit-bourgeoisie and the nouveau riche. In real life, many defended shopping for opening up public spaces to women. Shopping did not have to be frivolous, the Lady Guide Association preached when it began organizing tours in London in 1888. With rest stops at museums and public sights, shopping trips made women more rational consumers and taught civic duty and imperial pride. For Gordon Selfridge, who opened his store on Oxford Street in 1909, shopping combined recreation with emancipation; he supported women’s suffrage.73

  Defenders of the big stores were more vocal in liberal England than on the continent, but even there, where small retailers were more numerous and better organized, it is easy to exaggerate the opp sition. Special taxes on department stores were only temporarily levied in Germany, Hungary and a couple of American states, but they were tiny and ineffective, little more than 1 per cent of turnover. Some contemporaries looked to the department store for cultural uplift. Entering one of these temples of merchandise was ‘an act of joy, pleasure, a celebration’, one German observer mused in 1907. At last, even the ‘simple people’ had a chance to share in this ‘abundance and all this beauty, without spending a penny’, and gain ‘a sense of beauty and inner happiness more generally’.74 Modernist artists celebrated the hedonism of the new woman. In Child of the Big City, a 1914 Russian film by Yevgeni Bauer, the pretty, orphaned seamstress Mania is mesmerized by the department store and becomes a vamp, milking her admirers to fund a life of tango, bars and glamour. The corruption of innocent girls by the big city was a set piece of literature, but Bauer turned the moral convention on its head. Mania is the heroine, not the victim. In the end, it is Victor, one of her rich admirers, who is driven to suicide, unable to let go of his bourgeois fantasy of her as an object of desire and to recognize her for the real woman she is.75

  The uniformity of ‘mass society’ has been exaggerated, in part because the department store has been idealized as typically bourgeois and metropolitan. In fact, stores differed in size, customer base and shopping practices. Most were a far cry from the palatial Bon Marché. In Imperial Germany, the stores Wertheim, Tietz and Karstadt started in Stralsund, Gera and Wismar, towns with fewer than 30,000 souls. Twenty-five of these provincial stores would have fit into the Bon Marché. In Britain, many stores were knocked together from neighbouring buildings. If the Bon Marché catered for the bourgeoisie, other stores were less exclusive. Working families with greater disposable income were a growing customer base and one reason for the take-off of urban stores in the late nineteenth century. When the Wertheim brothers opened their first branch in Berlin, it was a cheap bazaar (Billigbazar) in the working-class district of Kreuzberg, and even after moving into the more prestigious Leipziger Straße in 1897 it continued to depend on working-class customers and
commuters. Dufayel catered for similar groups on the outskirts of Paris. Many stores struggled to live down their early associations with cheap, shoddy goods. Respectable ladies, it was said, would ask staff to wrap up articles in brown-paper bags to pretend that they were shopping for their servants. It is impossible to give a social breakdown of shoppers, but one department store in the Rhineland did keep a register of its delivery service, classifying its customers by profession. Together, artisans, pensioners and blue- and white-collar workers made up one third. Most people did not leave the stores laden with packages. The average sales price was less than a Mark – a worker earned 60 Marks a month on average.76

  Men went shopping, too. Harrod’s offered one hundred different kinds of briar pipes for the discerning gent. Department stores advertised ready-made suits for every season and included self-measurement forms in their catalogues. Lewis’s in Liverpool had started as a menswear store. In the 1890s, men got their own New Look: an athletic outfit, complete with fitted jackets, padded shoulders and corsets to accentuate a narrow waistline. The first magazine dedicated to the fashion-conscious man was launched in 1898. It was called simply Fashion. Far from seeing the rise of grey uniformity, these years brought a gradual liberation from the identical three-piece suit. Sportswear and leisure clothes took off. At the same time, the growth of office work made fashion a legitimate investment in career development. An up-to-date suit announced a man of ambition. ‘Tailor your way to opportunity,’ Royal Tailors urged American men.77 Other bits of male fashion developed bottom-up, as tailors incorporated stylistic elements from dandies and the music-hall.78

  Nor were women simply passive prey. At Selfridges, they made up half the private investors. The knowledgeable shopper could rely on a growing literature of guidebooks with advice on how to determine quality, secure a good price and avoid being taking advantage of. One early Lady’s Shopping Manual warned, ‘three fourths of the male assistants in the trade know nothing of the goods which it is their business to exhibit. Their object too frequently is to sell by any means.’79 Department stores did most of their business in cash, but in smaller and specialist stores credit survived. Legally, a wife lacked economic independence, but the ‘law of necessities’ gave her the right to pledge her husband’s credit for ‘necessary’ goods – and what was ‘necessary’ depended on social rank and convention. A fashionable hat might be a luxury for a washerwoman but a necessity for a merchant’s wife. By pretending to be more than they were, some women ran up a long list of credit that they had no intention of repaying. For retailers, it was a nightmare, since courts ruled that traders could not recover ‘unnecessary’ debts incurred without a husband’s consent.80 In addition to glitz and magic, therefore, a good deal of shopping involved a cat-and-mouse game between retailer and customer, each side trying to escape being cheated by the other.

  Music-hall song celebrated shopping as free entertainment for honeymooners:

  Chorus: Shopping’s a pastime simply sublime,

  Nothing to spend but a real good time,

  Examining every pretty thing that the shopmen politely display.

  ‘That looks neat! Awf’lly nice! Simply sweet!

  ‘What’s the price? Thank you, we’ll call another day.’81

  Actually, there were all sorts of obstacles to browsing, let alone being a flâneur. Many stores employed shopwalkers and doormen to stop so-called palpeuses and ‘tabbies’ – people who loved to touch but did not buy. When Gordon Selfridge checked out his London competitors, he was told to ‘move on’ when he answered that he had come just to look around. There were obstacles to buying, too. In German stores, each department, however small, had its own cashier. Customers had to wait in line and pay before proceeding to another section. Retailers, meanwhile, complained that German shoppers were helpless and lacked the independence of their French counterparts.82

  Glass cabinets and displays created a new intimacy between consumers and goods. ‘Perhaps more than any other medium,’ one historian has written, ‘glass democratized desire even as it democratized access to goods.’83 This did not mean, however, that human relations vanished from the shop floor. Shop assistants were taught to be polite and neutral and to suppress any character trait that might cause offence: no loud make-up, silly laughs, or personal remarks. Still, provincial stores knew it was vital to build up a loyal customer base. In Buffalo, New York, a city with half a million inhabitants, Mr Gibson, the store manager, would stand in his morning coat at the entrance of Adam, Meldrum and Anderson and greet female customers by name. In the toy department, assistants made sure to know the names of their next generation of customers. Stores worked hard to counter the image of a dehumanizing monster and threw themselves into the life of the community, organizing war veterans’ parades and teaching housewives how to roast a suckling pig.84

  It is easily forgotten that department stores also did business in other parts of the world, for example Egypt, with its rich mix of religions, customs and languages. There, sales clerks carried notebooks to record preferences and build up personal relationships with customers. Veiled Muslim women had to be addressed differently to Jewish or Christian customers. In Cairo, Orosdi-Back employed Muslim salespeople as well as Greeks, Italians, French, Russians, English, Spanish and Sephardi Jews. The Egyptian feminist nationalist Huda Sha’arawi recalled her early trips to the shops around 1900. She loved going to the department stores in Alexandria. Her eunuch did not. Every planned trip threw the household into:

  heated debate for days. They looked upon me as if I were about to violate the religious law or commit some other crime . . . They insisted . . . I must be accompanied by Said Agha [the eunuch] and my maids . . . When I entered Chalon, the staff and clientele were visibly taken aback by this veiled apparition and her retinue. In the lead Said Agha stared into the surrounding faces, silently warning them to look the other way . . . The eunuch proceeded straight to the store manager and brusquely demanded the place for the harem. We were led to the department for women’s apparel, behind a pair of screens hastily erected to obscure me from view.85

  Huda Sha’arawi was not to be a mass consumer, on display. But even though she was segregated behind screens, shopping gave her a sense of empowerment. ‘Not only was there a wide range of goods to choose from but there was money to be saved through wise spending.’ She persuaded her mother to join her and eventually was allowed to shop on her own.

  What the telegraph did for communication, the department store and mail order did for shopping: they compressed time and space. Of course, the countryside had never been a commercial desert. Sombart recognized the revolutionary role of pedlars, long accused of seducing the farmer’s wife with fashionable things she had not even known existed.86 By the middle of the nineteenth century, most farmers in North America and Europe were part of a cash nexus, buying and selling in the market. Nor was this limited to the more developed Western regions of Europe. In Russia, serfs were breaking out of self-sufficiency and began buying and selling goods at weekly markets and nearby fairs in the 1820s, a generation before their emancipation in 1861. Items for sale included tobacco, linen cloth, wine, mustard and honey, as well as coffins. When the serf Avdot’ia Yefremov died in Voshchazhnikovo in 1836, she left behind a wardrobe that included five coloured dresses, three French headscarves in pink, blue and black, two nightshirts with cotton sleeves, a coat with sable trim and winter stockings. In addition to several rings and earrings, she also owned a pearl necklace. Then, there were the possessions she had brought with her in her dowry, including three tablecloths, one cotton blanket, a napkin, one feather bed, a pair of green curtains, several towels (one trimmed with lace and ribbon), and two samovars (one copper, the other iron). A neighbouring serf owned a silver coffee pot and a forty-piece silver tea set.87

  In general, there were two conveyor belts for new tastes and products: the country fair and war. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Illinois state fair had stalls selling fine watches, sporting g
oods, wigs and perfumes. Farmers returned from the Civil War with a taste for ready-made clothes and other novelties.88 The department-store catalogue turned such currents into a torrent. By 1900, Eaton’s in Toronto, for example, sent out 1.3 million copies of its 200-page catalogue, or one for every fifth Canadian.89 The city came to the log house.

  Karl Marx observed that the entire economic history of society was summed up in the changing relation between town and country.90 He was mainly concerned with the division of labour, but the flow of consumer goods and tastes was just as important. The cultural boundaries between city and country were increasingly porous. Harrod’s maintained a postal service that stretched from Argentina to Zanzibar. Moscow’s Muir and Mirrielees delivered across the Russian empire from Poland to Vladivostok, as long as items were worth 50 roubles or more. In 1894, the Bon Marché distributed 1.5 million catalogues, half to the provinces, another 15 per cent abroad. It sent packages worth 40 million francs a year to provincial towns and villages.91 Pieces of urban fashion and comfort could be had thousands of miles away from the metropole. When Anton Chekhov was recovering from tuberculosis in Yalta in the late 1890s, he continued to get his hats, detachable collars, curtains and stoves from Muir and Mirrielees.92

  American writers, preoccupied with the melting pot, have emphasized the role of the department store in fusing a new national identity. Globally, however, such unifying forces were counterbalanced by social and ethnic distinctions. The department store cultivated a transnational style that gave national elites a chance to demonstrate their modernity and distance themselves from ‘traditional’, ‘lower’ social and ethnic groups. Paris and London were the centre of this fashion network. In São Paulo, the daughters of coffee barons bought their French dresses at the Mappin store, before retiring at five o’clock to its salon for English tea. Cairo’s Au Petit Louvre – a marble palace with Louis XVI-style columns set up by the Chemla brothers from Tunis – sold the newest hats from Paris and boasted its own French milliner and corset maker. Street sellers and haggling were disdained as something for indigenous people and peasants.93