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

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СКАЧАТЬ the Birmingham Canal and the Severn), and had along its length 75 locks, 5 tunnels, 5 major aqueducts and 155 minor ones—a feat of engineering that ushered in the great age of canal building. By 1830 there were nearly 5,000 kilometres of canals in England and Wales.⁸²

Wedgwood and his friends had been enthusiasts from the beginning: Erasmus Darwin had been involved in promoting the Grand Trunk Canal, which was to link the Trent and the Mersey (1766—77) and the Birmingham Canal (opened 1771), and he and Wedgwood saw the very practical benefits to being able to convey the Potteries’ output to the ports of Liverpool and Hull.* Darwin had calculated that the cost of shipping the clay and flint used in Wedgwood’s works would drop from 15s. per ton to 8s. per ton once the canal opened, while the freight charges for the finished earthenware moving in the opposite direction would be 12s. instead of the present 28s. per ton. (In fact, when the Trent and Mersey Canal was completed, freight prices dropped from 10d. to ¹/₂d. per ton per mile.)⁸⁴ Under Wedgwood’s watchful eye, the Trent and Mersey had been carefully planned to pass through land he had purchased for his new factory, which in turn was being designed to make loading and unloading from the as yet non-existent canal into the as yet non-existent factory both economical and convenient.

      Wedgwood, of course, was not the only manufacturer to benefit in this way. Many of the new factory owners were as successful as they were because they understood that technology and trade went hand in hand. Joseph Wilkes, the child of a Leicestershire farmer, set up as a cheese factor in Burton upon Trent. In 1763 he went into partnership with a Birmingham banker named Sampson Lloyd (whose bank is now known as Lloyds TSB, keeping his name alive into the twenty-first century), buying a lease on nineteen miles of the Trent Navigation; from this he gradually invested in canals, turnpikes (and later railroads), until in 1783 he bought the entire parish of Measham, where he set up a pithead to mine coal, a brickworks, a corn mill, a barge-building company and

      Wedgwood and Darwin did not, however, confine their canal fever to commerce alone. When fossils were uncovered during the building of the Trent and Mersey, Wedgwood collected them and shared them with Darwin: ‘I will in return,’ he promised, ‘send you some mineral observations of exactly the same value (weighed nicely) for I must inform you I mean to gain full as much knowledge, from you who can spare it so well, as I return you in exchange.⁸³

      a cotton mill. A bigger cotton mill was opened in 1802, which he ran together with several banks in the Burton area.

One final example of these multidisciplinary industrialists was Robert ‘Parsley’ Peel,* a ‘mechanical genius’, who was influenced by Lloyd and his partner to set up a cotton mill in Burton upon Trent in the early 1780s, melding two new pieces of innovation and technology: his factory used the new Arkwright cotton-spinning frames, and was located where the Trent and Mersey Canal could handily convey raw materials and finished goods to and from the works. By 1790 his son Robert had ‘capital overflowing in his hands’, and bought property, including estates from the Marquis of Bath and a parish near Tamworth, which was to be a base to launch his political career. Even though politics was more on his mind than cotton, Tamworth was on the Trent and Mersey too, and soon Peel and his partners owned spinning mills, calico-printing and bleaching works. By the end of the eighteenth century they controlled 20 mills in Lancashire and the Midlands and had 15,000 employees, and Peel, the son of the semi-literate Parsley Peel, was Sir Robert, and considered himself entirely a gentleman, while Parsley’s grandson ultimately became prime minister.⁸⁵

      Yet it is important to remember that while this modernization—of production, distribution and retailing—was developing at a furious rate, it was not occurring in splendid isolation, but running in tandem with an older system of retail networks. For much of the time the two coexisted quite happily. For those living outside major urban areas—and for many within city limits—there were four ways of buying goods. The first, which remains today and therefore is the one we regard as primary, was the shop. As we have seen, even people in rural areas had regular if not continuous access to shops. But this did not mean that they bought nothing the rest of the time. The most frequent and convenient way of purchasing goods was at daily, weekly, monthly or seasonal markets. From the late eighteenth century, butchers, fruit vendors and greengrocers were the main retailers in markets—corn, flour, cheese, bread and other staples were no longer sold this way, but had moved either into fixed wholesale premises (such as corn halls and cloth halls) or to back-street shops and other fixed retail premises. In 1772 in Manchester there were 30 grocers and tea dealers, 3 provision dealers (including cheesemongers and butter, bacon and ham dealers) and 16 flour and corn dealers appearing in the directories listing retail outlets; by 1800 their numbers had risen to 134 grocers and tea dealers, 11 provision dealers, and 262 flour and corn dealers.⁸⁶

      While the markets, usually run and operated by local inhabitants, were—just—holding on to the perishable food sales, fairs, which were run for the most part by outsiders, were evolving. Before the eighteenth century an annual fair was for wholesale merchants to conduct business, whether it was in cloth, corn, horses or agricultural material such as feed, animals or machinery. By the 1720s cloth halls and corn halls had appeared—fixed public buildings where trading could go on year round.⁸⁷ This trend, from temporary to permanent, from street to shop, continued throughout the century, as fairs lost all their wholesale side, except in a few cases for animals and some food. Instead, the fairs became more and more the haunt of entertainers, pedlars, shows and exhibitions. (For more on fairs in the nineteenth century, see pp. 282—5.)

The final method of purchasing goods in rural areas, and in many urban ones, was via hawkers and pedlars. Most areas were well served by these ‘Scotch drapers’ and ‘Manchester men’, whose regular circuits covered most of Britain. These were not the simple men with packs of modern imagining, and they were not selling solely to the poor. The Society of Travelling Scotchmen in Shrewsbury in 1785 had capital of more than £20,000; even the small Bridgnorth society had capital investment of £5,000.⁸⁸ The Scotch draper carried a pack ‘four feet in length and two or more in depth’,⁸⁹ and it closely resembled the clown car at the circus, pouring out an endless variety of more goods than logic said it could possibly hold: silks, cotton, calico, linen, hosiery, lace, and ready-made-up women’s clothes—petticoats, handkerchiefs, chemises and still more. In 1781 the Revd James Woodforde wrote in his diary that he had bought, from a man ‘with a cart with Linens, Cottons, Lace &c.…some cotton 6 Yrds for a morning gown for myself at 2s. 6d. per yard, pd. 0.15.0 Some chintz for a gown for Nancy 5 yds and ¹/₂ I pd. 1.14.0…Nancy also bought a Linen Handkerchief &c. of him. Mrs How bought a silk handkerchief of him also.’⁹⁰ Throughout the nineteenth century, street sellers continued to appear in towns, especially in more suburban areas, carrying more heavy goods than today seems feasible. In his 1851 survey of the working poor, Henry Mayhew listed men who sold ‘Door-mats, baskets and “duffer’s” packs, wood pails, brushes, brooms, clothes-props, clothes-lines and string, and grid-irons, Dutch-ovens, skewers and fore-shovels’ carried across their shoulders.⁹¹*

      Yet these itinerants, as with their equivalent traders in the markets and fairs, were swimming against the tide. As early as the 1730s, Parliament had received more than a hundred petitions from shopkeepers, claiming that pedlars were taking away their livelihood. The pedlars had the manufacturers СКАЧАТЬ