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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ ‘really and truly’ such a person as Queen Fashion, I think her Majesty could not do better than select this splendid and spacious apartment for the holding of her levees and councils…

      The Ready-made Clothing department is undoubtedly the most spacious ever before witnessed; and on my asking whether so much room were absolutely necessary I was informed that the business could not be carried on with any less space…⁴⁹

      This kind of cod-educational prose, designed to mimic magazines like the Penny Weekly and others that were read as much for selfimprovement as for entertainment, was in marked contrast to the style of other ready-made-clothing retailers, whose advertising was for the less upwardly earnest. A tailor in Chelsea advertised his shop in 1880 in a mixture of cockney, theatre and sporting slang:

Pay a visit to C. Greenburg, the noted working men’s tailor, well known by everybody to be the only genuine clothing manufacturer in Chelsea for flash toggery. The above champion builder begs to thank his customers for their liberal support, and wishes to put them awake to the fact that he has dabbed his fins [put his hands] on a nobby swag of stuff [high-class bag of goods] for his ready brass, consisting of cords, moleskins, doeskin plushes, velveteens, box cloths, pilots, tweeds, &c.…A pair of ikey cords, cut slap up with the artful dodge and fakement [trimming] down the sides, from 10 bob. Proper cut togs, lick all comers, for pleasure or business wear, turned out up to the knocker [in fashion, stylishly], from a quid. A pair of kerseymere or fancy doeskin or any other skin kicksies [trousers], any colour, cut peg top, half tights, or to drop down over the trotters [feet], from 10 and a tanner to 25 bob, fit to toe it with any swell. Lavenders [perhaps gaiters or spats], built spanky, with a double fakement down the sides, and artful buttons at the bottom, any price you name, straight. Fancy sleeve vest, cut very saucy, tight cut round the scrag [neck] or made to flash the dicky [show the shirt front], from 9 bob. A discount made to prize fighters, shop lifters, quill drivers [clerks], counter jumpers, bruisers, snobs, scavengers, sparrow starvers [dung-sweepers], and lardy dardy blades on the high fly [foppish swells on a spree]…⁵⁰*

Unlike Moses and Son, Greenburg was appealing to the flash Harrys, the music-hall loungers, the street-smart spivs.* Yet Moses and Son’s market of upwardly mobile clerks was huge: in 1855 it was estimated that the firm was spending £10,000 a year on advertising (compared to the furniture shop Heal and Son’s, which spent £6,000, or Nichol’s—later Harvey Nichol’s—which had a budget of £4,500).⁵³

      These figures show how important the retail trade had become to the economy. This was recognized at the time: good, elegant, modern shops were seen as an indicator of national prosperity, of plenty, and of general civilization. Good shops were modern shops: many books of the period made this assumption automatically. Tallis’s Street View in 1837 praised the completion of Nash’s new Regent Street: ‘The buildings of this noble street chiefly consist of palace-like shops, in whose broad, shewy windows are displayed articles of the most splendid description, such as the neighbouring world of wealth and fashion are daily in want of.’ Even the sweep of Oxford Circus was approved for being ‘as elegant in form as useful in application’.⁵⁴ (It was ‘useful’ because carriages could turn easily around its broad curves.) Lincoln in the 1840s was commended for ‘several splendid shops, equal to anything of the kind to be found in far larger towns’, but condemned for its ‘unsightly masses of old buildings which disfigure the principal streets [which, it was hoped, would soon] be supplanted by erections unique with those which modern enterprize has produced’. Chester was similarly approved a decade later for the conversion of its shops ‘filled with plate-glass, and with all the brilliancy of the most modern art and taste’.⁵⁵

      Stores were developing at the rate they were for a number of reasons: increased demand, new goods from new markets abroad, mass production. But one more immediate reason stands out: it was easier for people to get to and from the shops that held the goods they desired. It is hard to remember just how small most cities were, even in the nineteenth century, well after urbanization had created cities larger than had ever before been known. Central London in the 1830s was 6.5 kilometres across, north to south, and 10 kilometres east to west—its 2 million inhabitants were never more than an hour’s walk from the beginnings of more rural countryside. Manchester and Salford taken together were only 1.5 kilometres north to south, and the same east to west. Those who lived in the suburbs walked in to work if they could not afford their own carriage (and most could not), but would not think of coming into the centre specifically to shop. They bought locally, and from itinerant sellers. From the 1760s some of the outer suburbs of London, like Islington or Kensington, had stagecoach services; by 1825 there were 418 routes across London, making 1,190 journeys to the City every day. Their destination shows that these were primarily used to transport people to and from work. It was the omnibus, arriving from Paris in 1829, that made the shopping journey a possibility for many. Within a decade, there were 620 omnibuses and 225 short-stagecoaches licensed in London.

      Omnibuses were not cheap to operate—each bus had a driver and a conductor, and was pulled by two horses. To run an omnibus 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, required a complement of 11 horses per bus. A horse cost £20 and the omnibus itself £100, so the start-up fixed capital cost was already £320. Then operating costs included feed, at 15s. per horse per week (or £429 per bus per year); and the costs of stabling, veterinarian bills and shoeing, as well as the maintenance and repair costs for the bus. There was a tax of 3d. per mile per passenger, which on an average route mounted up to 15s. per day, or over £270 a year. The wages of the driver and conductor were another £60 a year each; and, furthermore, many routes from the suburbs were along turnpike roads where tolls were still charged. The original omnibus design had had space for just fifteen passengers in the interior, with another three outside passengers beside the driver. The seemingly extortionate 1s. single fare to the suburbs, or the half-price 6d. fare in the centre of town, no longer looks so unreasonable. Not unreasonable, but affordable only by the prosperous middle classes.

In 1842 the mileage tax was halved (then reduced to 1d. in 1855, ¹/₂d. in 1866 and abolished entirely in 1870), and, more importantly, was now levied on the vehicle itself rather than on the number of passengers it could carry. It therefore made sense to reconfigure the buses so that they could carry more people. A ‘knifeboard’ seat was installed on the roof—a single long bench down the length of the bus, with the men (always men, as the roof was reached by a ladder that was hostile to skirts and petticoats) facing out to the sides, sitting back to back. This increased capacity to 25, and in turn fares were reduced to 3d., or sometimes even 1d. for a short ‘city’ stage as it was known.* Soon the ladders were replaced by a winding spiral stair, and the knifeboard seats with ‘garden’ seats (the kind of two-by-two backed benches that continue to be used on much public transport today), plate-glass windows were installed downstairs, and the bus was ready to take on its new role as a conveyance for the middle-class female shopper.⁵⁶

      Provincial towns and cities differed from London only in size. Otherwise the love of new shops and the means of access to them were all much the same. To get to the shops, similar solutions were adopted to suit the locale: Manchester had a single omnibus in 1835; by 1840 Engels noted that there was one at least every half-hour running from the suburban villas to the centre; by 1850 there were sixty-four services along the main routes. Birmingham had omnibuses running from suburbs like New Hall and Edgbaston in 1834; within the decade Small Heath and Sparkbrook were linked into the system. Glasgow was different from the now increasingly common pattern of a work-dominated centre and suburban housing. Here СКАЧАТЬ