Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders
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Название: Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
Автор: Judith Flanders
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007347629
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*Bentley’s have unfortunately not survived—perhaps the reason why all the innovation is attributed to Wedgwood.
*Sir William Hamilton was minister plenipotentiary to the court of Spain in Naples. A famous collector, he commissioned the enormously influential Les Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines (4 vols., dated 1766—7, but published 1767—76), which spread the neoclassical style across Europe. A year after publication of the first volume Wedgwood had named his new pottery works ‘Etruria’, after the Etruscans, and on the opening day he had thrown six black basalt ‘first-day vases’ based on engravings from the book.
†This service was for the Chesmenski Palace, built on La Grenouillie`re, or the Frog Marsh. Hence the pieces were decorated with frogs, and the entire service is commonly referred to as ‘the frog service’. Some of it is on display today at the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
*One incidental feature of the Bath showroom was that the managers, William and Ann Ward, were the parents of Ann Radcliffe, the Gothic novelist and author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Ann Ward was the niece of Thomas Bentley, and Ann Radcliffe had grown up as a close friend of Wedgwood’s daughter Susannah, known to posterity as the mother of Charles Darwin.
*The government had many reasons to approve these trusts, apart from general improvement to trade: after 1745 it was suggested that the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, had managed to get as far as Derby during his unsuccessful attempt to regain the throne for the Stuarts in part because the poor quality of the roads meant that troops could not be dispatched quickly enough.73
*Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731—1802) was a doctor by profession and a natural philosopher by inclination. He lived in Lichfield, and was an active member of several provincial scientific societies, including the Botanical Society, the Derby Philosophical Society and the Lunar Society. The latter included among its members the manufacturer Matthew Boulton, his partner James Watt and the scientist Joseph Priestley, as well as Wedgwood and Bentley. Darwin was interested both intellectually and financially in the connection between technology and industry, producing plans for a ‘horizontal windmill’ to grind pigment for Wedgwood’s factory, as well as recommending to Wedgwood the acquisition of Boulton and Watt’s steam engine. He was considered expert enough in technical matters to be called as a witness, along with Watt, in one of the many disputes involving the patents of the cotton manufacturer Richard Arkwright’s carding and spinning machines.
*‘Parsley’ was after a parsley-patterned calico he designed early in his career.
*Duffers were people who sold bad-quality goods cheaply, pretending that they had been stolen or smuggled in order to explain their low prices. Dutch ovens were small brick or cast-iron stoves on legs, which were heated by charcoal.
3 The Ladies’ (and Gents’) Paradise: The Nineteenth-Century Shop
GROCERS HAD ORIGINALLY BEEN wholesalers, those who bought ‘in gross’; then they became luxury retailers, purveyors of imported delicacies from abroad—tea, coffee, sugar, spices, dried fruits, ‘Italian goods’. As these foods became less expensive, and more readily available to the population at large, the function and trade of the grocer changed. For some time, various food retailers stuck to the old names that indicated high levels of specialization—a grocer was expected to sell the items listed above; a provision dealer to sell butter, cheese, eggs and bacon; then there were flour dealers, butter men, cheese factors and so on. But it appears that the reality, from early in the nineteenth century, was less rigidly structured than the job titles implied: grocers also sold butter, bacon, hams and herrings, oilmen sold cheese, even a butter man might sell pig meat. One flour dealer at the turn of the nineteenth century kept records that reflected this variety: 44 per cent of his spending was on his core trade, the purchase of flour and meal; 18.5 per cent went on butter and cheese, 6.5 per cent on tea, 11 per cent on sugar, while the remaining 20 per cent went on a wide variety of goods: potatoes, bacon, salt, raisins, currants, coffee, treacle, spices, pepper, mustard, rice, sweets, soap, starch, candles, tobacco and snuff. This was not at all unusual: by 1846 the Grocers’ Weekly Circular and Price List, a trade publication, listed butter, cheese, eggs, pork—all items that, officially, grocers did not sell.1 Now a grocer was someone who needed to have certain trade skills that other provisioners did not have—he had to know how to blend tea, roast coffee beans, mix herbs and spices, cure bacon, clean dried fruit, and cut sugar.*3
For the most part, the staple diet of the working classes and much of the lower middle classes in the mid nineteenth-century consisted of bread or potatoes, a little bit of butter, cheese or bacon, tea with sugar, and a bit of salt. The eighteenth century had shown forward-looking retailers that profits could be made by selling in quantity to the mass market at a small mark-up. The improvements to transport and the consequent development of wholesalers and distribution centres, and the concentration of population in urban centres, soon made the idea of selling a small range of stock items—bought in bulk, for low prices—both practical and astonishingly profitable.
In the early 1790s, before the French wars, wheat had cost between 48s. and 58s. a quarter; by 1795 it was 90s.; and in 1800 it was a shocking 113s.—an increase of 135 per cent in less than a decade. There was an endless succession of food riots: more than twenty between 1756 and 1818, and a dozen of those in the last two decades. There were also attempts throughout this period to find more peaceful ways of dealing with the price escalation. One solution was to turn to the social group that was so familiar—the club. Groups of consumers joined together in flour or bread societies to gain the financial clout to buy these necessities at reduced prices. Many of the societies failed, mostly from inadequate investment or size. But one of the more successful was the Birmingham Flour and Bread Company, set up in 1796 with capital of £6,000 from its members, because ‘unless some proper and effectual means are taken, the evil attending the high price of grain and the shameful adulteration of flour will continue’. By 1800 it had 1,360 shareholders (including Matthew Boulton). Others groups followed suit, using what became the standard methods: large-scale orders, paid for in cash, with discounts for bulk.4 And in the early decades of the nineteenth century there were still other groups, more idealistic in origin, set up in emulation of the principles of the socialist reformer Robert Owen. In 1827 the Brighton Co-operative Benevolent Association and the Co-operative Trading Association were formed, to collect weekly subscriptions which were to be used both to educate people in the values of cooperation, and to ‘engage in retail trade with the object of accumulating capital from its profits to eventually establish a community’ based on cooperative principles.5 William King, a doctor, was the prime mover, having already set up a Mechanics’ Institute in Brighton; he also published The Cooperator, a paper with a good circulation in the north and the Midlands, which strongly influenced the later Co-op movement.
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