Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  And the fears of the upper classes remained only that—fears. The crowds were in fact orderly, respectful, well-behaved—all that could have been hoped for, but was not remotely expected. The Times was forced to eat its words, and after three days acknowledged that, instead of being ‘King Mob’, the shilling admissions were well dressed and orderly members of society, and a credit to the burgeoning nation of commerce.78 The volatile mob had become the sedate consumer. The age of the machine had brought with it the triumph of the masses—and the mass market.

  * * *

  *Richard Steele had started the Tatler in 1709, and it came out three times a week until the beginning of 1711. A single sheet, at first it contained news items, but gradually each number comprised a single long essay, which might be a gentle satire of the social world, or a reflection on the values of the day, mildly attacking the venery and hypocrisy of politics and society. Addison contributed his first essay on 20 May 1709, and in all wrote almost fifty papers, plus another twenty together with Steele.

  *A very partial round-up of coffee houses that served as meeting points for clubs in London would include Jonathan’s Coffee House, Exchange Alley, which formed the basis of the stock market, and Lloyd’s Coffee House, Lombard Street, where shipping and insurance brokers met, produced news sheets, then a shipping list (the first in 1734), then a register (in 1760), and finally turned into the insurer Lloyd’s. Politics was discussed by Tories at the Cocoa Tree, by Whigs at Arthur’s. Booksellers met at the Chapter Coffee House, Paternoster Row; actors at Will’s, Wright’s or the Bedford, all in Covent Garden, while the Orange, in the Haymarket, was more specialized, and for dancing masters and opera singers. Old Slaughter’s, in St Martin’s Lane, was the haunt of painters, while the Rainbow, in the same street, and Garraway’s in Exchange Alley, not only had artists’ clubs, but also mounted exhibitions of prints.5

  †An eighteenth-century idiom for ‘in order’.

  *And the members soon struck lucky: among their earliest prizewinners was the adolescent Richard Cosway, who later became one of London’s most fashionable miniaturists.

  *Thomas Cubitt (1788—1855) was the son of a carpenter. From small projects, his work expanded to encompass building housing on the Duke of Bedford’s land in Bloomsbury, moving on to develop over 8 hectares for Earl Grosvenor in what ultimately became Belgravia, the most fashionable district of London; he also developed much of Pimlico, and more than 100 hectares south of the river, in Clapham. He came to the attention of Prince Albert when Osborne House, the royal family’s home on the Isle of Wight, was to be rebuilt, although neither man can have imagined the family connection being sustained nearly two centuries later, when Albert’s great-great-great-great-grandson, Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, married Cubitt’s descendant Camilla Parker Bowles.

  *Lyon Playfair is almost as exhausting to contemplate as Cole: a chemist—the discoverer of nitro-prussides, a new class of salts—he was later Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh University, Postmaster General, an MP, and Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, interspersed with membership of the Royal Commission on Sanitation, advising on the ventilation of Buckingham Palace (his report was thought too alarming to be shown to Parliament), investigating the Famine in Ireland, producing research for the Geological Survey, advising on the promotion of technical education, sitting on the Royal Commission on cattle plague, and heading the commission inquiring into the civil service that finally replaced patronage with competitive examinations.

  *Hats throughout the century attracted a range of gimmicks, mostly attempts to keep the head cool while still wearing the de-rigueur heavy felt-fur or silk and plush hats. Among many ideas patented were the ‘Bonafide Ventilating Hat’ (1849), a hat with an air-flow ventilator, or one with movable shutters (1880s), and the ‘Neoteric Ventilating Hat’ (1851), which had a woven frame of manila grass or willow. Another group of patents involved pads to keep the hat away from the head, improving ventilation while also preventing the fabric from becoming soiled by contact with the wearer’s hair oil: the ‘Gutta Percha Hat’ (1848) with rubber lining, which protected against both rain and perspiration; the ‘Aeolian Hat’ (1853), with an air pocket (‘In this way a completely encircling air chamber is formed to embrace the head, and making an easy pleasant fit and also preventing the natural grease from the hair penetrating to the exterior of the hat’); and the ‘Corrugated Ventilating Hat Antimacassar Pad’ (1863).26

  *Mahogany had first been imported from Central America in the 1720s, and Sir Robert Walpole immediately had seats for his commodes made from this new luxury material.35

  *It has been suggested that this lack of pricing was one of the reasons so many exhibits focused on technical ingenuity. If the main selling point of an object was that it was half the price that was usually charged, there was no point in showing it, without a price, at the Crystal Palace.

  *For more on Layard, see p. 199.

  †Navvies (from ‘navigators’) were originally the labourers who built the canals. By the 1850s, ‘navvy’ was shorthand for a labourer on the railways in particular. Navvies had a well-earned reputation for ferocious violence and drunkenness.

  *The Early English Text Society’s founder, Frederick Furnivall (1825—1910), would have been thrilled. He was closely involved with adult education, teaching evening classes at the Working Men’s College when it opened in London in 1854.

  *During the twenty-four weeks of the Exhibition, 1,092,337 bottles of soda water, lemonade and ginger beer were sold.

  *Cassell went on to become the publisher of Cassell’s Magazine and Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, plus many other journals (see p. 157), as well as the first British edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. However he lacked business instincts, and his company was soon taken over by others, although his skills as a publishing entrepreneur were highly regarded, and the house of Cassell’s in various guises has survived into the twenty-first century.

  *It was clear from the price that he was aiming at a working-class mass market: the Illustrated London News, which featured the Exhibition heavily in its pictures all summer long, sold for 6d. an issue.

  †Only 200 words were given to the Exhibition itself, and it suggested that four hours would be plenty for the visitor to ‘do’ the fair.

  *For more on advertising, see pp. 130—37; for W. H. Smith and newspaper distribution, pp. 145—6; for W. H. Smith and railway bookstalls, pp. 191—2.

  2

  ‘A Nation of Shopkeepers’:

  The Eighteenth-Century Shop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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