Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

Чтение книги онлайн.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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