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

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СКАЧАТЬ sold a ton and a half of ‘lump’ butter, 50 cases of ‘roll’ butter, a ton of bacon, a ton and a half of ham, half a ton of cheese, and 16,000 eggs.*¹⁴

      Once these huge shops reached a certain level, there were two main ways of expanding: the shops could begin to stock an ever-wider range of goods, while the services for customers were also enlarged; or the goods and services could remain as they were, while the number of customers was increased nationally by opening ever-more branches. The first decision led, essentially, to shops becoming department stores, the second to remaining as multiples. Multiples were designed to serve the working classes, and it was judged that essential goods at the lowest prices were what would entice these customers in, while convenience of location and long opening hours were necessary for this market. Department stores catered to the middle classes, with enough cash and enough leisure that price was less important than high levels of service and a wide variety of stock.

      The development of department stores in the second half of the nineteenth century was not as sudden, or as radical, as has sometimes been assumed. Instead, two types of older retail style developed and converged to create what seemed like an entirely new phenomenon. The first development was the arrival of new middle-class haberdasheries and drapery shops, larger in size than they had ever been before, and utilizing new technologies such as plate glass for the windows, gas lighting both inside and out, and more (see below, p. 100). The second was the expansion of working-class purchasing power and the concurrent creation of a ready-to-wear market that was encouraging the development of mass-production methods.

It has been said that ready-to-wear clothes were not available in any bulk until the 1860s.¹⁵ For the middle classes in a general way that was so, but even here the evidence must be treated with caution: in 1790 The Times carried an advertisement for Ham’s Muslin and Linen Warehouse, on the Strand, which was selling ready-made dresses.*¹⁶ It was estimated that no one earning less than £300 a year could afford to buy The Times regularly—this was not an advertisement for the working-class purchaser.† Other mentions of ready-made clothes that were probably for the middle classes can be found throughout the eighteenth century: as early as the 1730s, Mary and Ann Hogarth, sisters to the painter, had a shop where, their trade card promised, ‘Fashionable Ready Made Frocks’ could be bought.¹⁷ In the 1750s in Bath, John Evill advertised that he sold ready-made waistcoats, breeches, gowns, petticoats, stays, cloaks and bonnets.¹⁸ A little book, A Visit to the Bazaar (1818), that was more than half an advertisement for the Soho Bazaar, portrayed a middleaged woman buying a ‘beautiful crape dress’, which she asked to have delivered immediately as ‘I am going out to a ball this evening, and shall want to put it on.’¹⁹

      Apart from these rare middle-class sightings, the working classes and the lower middle classes, especially the more prosperous, had been wearing ready-made clothes in various forms for years. Less exclusive tailors and mercers often had a sideline as ‘slop sellers’, stocking cheap ready-made clothing. Men’s shirts had been some of the earliest readymade clothes: the garments were of a standard shape, and they were more or less permanently covered by waistcoats and jackets and therefore size and fit were less important than for outerwear. Ready-made shirts had originally been produced for sailors and for manual labourers; then the working classes more widely began to buy them. The next stage in the more general availability of ready-to-wear clothes was the production of uniforms, which were worn by soldiers and sailors, as we would expect today, and also by charity- and other schoolchildren, by servants in livery, by railway workers, by postmen and other low-grade civilservice workers, and by the inhabitants of workhouses and prisons. Sundry small wars had kept the armed-forces market buoyant for a century past, but the beginning of the French wars sharply increased the need for uniforms. With this, and with the working classes buying more ready-to-wear items, came a wider move from skilled tailors creating a garment in its entirety, to vast warehouses farming out jobs to smaller workshops, who in turn hired cheap pieceworkers to produce slops at home—the foundation of the mass-production system that would develop in the nineteenth century.²⁰

      By the beginning of the nineteenth century many of the working and lower-middle classes bought their clothes (either new or secondhand), both at the cheaper end of the retail market and at weekly or regular fairs, and this increased throughout the century. A large number of police reports throughout the period dealt with the matter of stolen clothes, which showed how strong the secondhand market was: there is no point stealing something that has no resale value. In good times workers bought new suits or dresses; when work disappeared they pawned or sold the items to tide them over. Clothes were not just pleasurable frivolities, but an investment, a protection against hard times. New fashion items could be acquired for relatively little outlay—well within the means of a servant or other member of the working classes paid in cash. In 1871 Daniel Kirwan, an American journalist in London, visited the Rag Fair, held every Sunday morning in Petticoat Lane in the East End. He was told by one customer:

      I had no other togs but them as I was wearing, and they were so wore out I was ashamed to be seen in ‘em. So…I said to myself, ‘Blest if I don’t go over to the Fair…and moult the mouldys, and buy a tidy suit to wear…’ I had made up my mind to do the thing to rights while I was about it, and while I had the money in my pocket. I moulted to my very shirt and socks. I gave seven and six for a light suit, and half a dollar for a pot hat, and eighteen pence for a sky blue neckerchief, and likewise bought a shirt with an ironed front to it, and afore I came away I put ‘em all on…and here I was, all a toff, up’ards and down’ards.²¹

      Kirwan was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the market, with its

hundreds upon hundreds of pairs of trousers—trousers that have been worn by young men of fashion, trousers without a wrinkle or just newly scoured, trousers taken from the reeking hot limbs of navies [navvies], and pot boys, trousers…from spruce young shop boys, trousers that have been worn by criminals hung at Newgate, by patients in fever hospitals; waistcoats that were the pride of fast young brokers in the city, waistcoats flashy enough to have been worn by the Marquis of Hastings at a racecourse, or the Count D’Orsay at a literary assemblage;…thousands of spencers, highlows,* fustian jackets, some greasy, some unsoiled, shooting coats, short coats and cutaways; coats for the jockey and the dog fighter, for the peer and the pugilist, pilot jackets and sou-westers, drawers and stockings…²²

Fashion was something that everyone could now afford, at least sometimes, and at least for part of their wardrobe. George Augustus Sala, a journalist,† noted the dedication with which, in particular, clerks and other low-income lower-middle-class young men followed the trends:

      These are the customers you see at a glance, whom the resplendent wares in the hosiers’ shops attract…These are the dashing young parties who purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson braces, the kaleidoscopic shirtstuds, the shirts embroidered with dahlias, deaths’ heads, racehorses, sun-flowers, and ballet-girls; the horseshoe, fox-head, pewter-pot-and-crossed-pipes, willow-pattern-plate, and knife-and-fork pins. These are the glasses of city fashion, and the mould of city form, for whom the legions of fourteen, of fifteen, of sixteen, and of seventeen shilling trousers, all unrivalled, patented, and warranted, are made.СКАЧАТЬ