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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ steamboat service, and it was not until the 1860s that an omnibus service sprang up to reach Kelvinside. Other cities had other solutions: from the early 1870s Edinburgh and Aberdeen (and Glasgow too) had horse trams; by 1890 Liverpool had 225.⁵⁷ At the end of the 1870s there were only 321 miles of tramway in Britain, but when the switch to steam power and then electricity began in the 1880s, even towns with populations of 50,000 found it worth their while to lay down tramways. In London in 1896 the trams carried 280 million passengers, while omnibuses carried only 300,000 (a tram ticket cost 1d., and the trams ran every two to three minutes, which might have had something to do with the disparity). By 1914, the number of passenger journeys made by tram throughout the country was 74 times the population of the United Kingdom.⁵⁸

      The London figures are the more astonishing given that the capital had yet a further means of mass transportation. In 1863 the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first underground railway, opened, running from Paddington in west London to Farringdon in the City, with an extension to St Pancras in 1868. When the Metropolitan District Railway (a separate company) began to extend the Underground to Kensington and Victoria, the influx of suburban shoppers to the West End became a reality.⁵⁹ In 1864, even on the small bit of route then existing, 6.5 million journeys were taken on the Underground in six months; after the 1868 extension the journeys jumped to 15 million a year.⁶⁰

      The various way of reaching the palaces of wonder in that glassgleaming, gas-hissing West End were new; yet what people were travelling towards was not. It was simply that more of them could now reach it. The sumptuousness, the brightness, the richness—above all, the sheer up-to-dateness—of shops had been commented on by visitors for a hundred years. It was the amount of glass that most forcefully seemed to strike European travellers. A French visitor in 1728 wrote that ‘shops are surrounded with [glass], and usually the merchandise [inside the shop] is arranged behind it, which keeps the dust off, while still displaying the goods to passers-by’—clearly something he had never seen at home. The German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who kept a diary on his visits to England, also found shopfronts that ‘seem to be made entirely of glass’ worthy of remark.⁶¹

      Glass was still expensive—both owing to the cost of the glass itself and also because of the glass tax, which was not abolished until 1851. Plate-glass technology made possible larger and larger window panes, which continued to astonish. An American visitor in the early 1830s said that in Regent Street ‘many of the bow windows are glazed with panes 24 by 36 inches, 30 by 45, &c. There is a fur shop having a window on each side of the door, the centre pane in each window measuring nine feet by five.’ The furrier told him that the centre panes had cost him 50 guineas each.⁶² This seems a perhaps pardonable exaggeration. Francis Place had set up a tailor’s shop in 1801, and ‘I put in a new front as elegant as the place would permit, each of the panes of glass cost me three pounds, and two in the door, four pounds each.’⁶³ Even allowing for a rise in prices, and the substantial difference in grandeur between Place’s small shop and a Regent Street ‘emporium’, the 50 guineas still sounds like a tall tale. However much it cost, the dazzling plate glass was matched and abetted by developments in lighting: glass and gas together radically changed the look of shops.

      The insides of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century shops had been no less splendid—especially, but not uniquely, in the luxurygoods trades. Many historians have suggested that until the arrival of the department stores the displays in shops were minimal, that everything was kept in boxes, and only grudgingly drawn out piece by piece, with no sense of theatrical display. This cannot have been further from the truth. This misapprehension was set in train by the Victorians themselves, who saw—or wanted to see—what was taking place around them as something unprecedented. Charles Manby Smith, a journalist, described a plate-polisher’s shop in about 1810 as ‘a dim, dusty-looking house of some thirty feet frontage…which you might pass a hundred times, so unpretentious was its aspect, without noticing its existence’. He then took the reader on a tour of the shop’s development, as it was renovated by its next incumbent, when it ‘displayed…a handsome set of new shutters, surmounted by a Corinthian cornice, and a new private door, splendid in imitative walnut and shining varnish. When the shutters came down on Monday morning, they disclosed a handsome mahogany sash, the two lower rows of panes guarded by a stout trelliswork of brass-wire, resting upon a single plate of brass.’ Sometime before Manby Smith wrote this in 1857 the shop was pulled down to widen the road, at which point it was rebuilt ‘seventy feet high, with a huge semicircular façade, superb in pillars, pilasters, and carved cornices, fronting one of the most imposing approaches to the very centre of the city’.⁶⁴

      This may very well have happened to that precise building, but, more to the point, this is what Manby Smith understood to be happening everywhere. To heighten the contrast between past and present, to show how wonderful the mid-century shops were, he needed to believe that the shops of the past had been truly negligible. The trouble was, they simply weren’t as insubstantial as he suggested. Visitors to London, who did not have his vested interest in a dull, dark past to hold up against a dazzling, gaslit present, were perhaps more reliable. In 1786 the German diarist Sophie von la Roche went window shopping in London, and was suitably impressed. She visited John Boydell’s print shop (for more on Boydell, see pp. 388—91):

      Here again I was struck by the excellent arrangement and system which the love of gain and national good taste have combined in producing, particularly in the elegant dressing of large shopwindows, not merely in order to ornament the streets and lure purchasers, but to make known the thousands of inventions and ideas, and spread good taste about, for the excellent pavements made for pedestrians enable crowds of people to stop and inspect the new exhibits.⁶⁵

      She liked improving things, like prints, but she liked less sober-minded shops too, like the one which had a ‘cunning device for showing women’s materials. Whether they are silks, chintzes, or muslins, they hang down in folds behind the fine high windows so that the effect of this or that material, as it would be in the ordinary folds of a woman’s dress, can be studied. Amongst the muslins all colours are on view, and so one can judge how the frock would look in company with its fellows.’⁶⁶

The lighting was as essential as the windows, and had been even before piped gas arrived. Francis Place had used ‘five large Argand lamps* in the shop besides the candles to make the windows and every part of it as nearly equally light as possible’.⁶⁷ Johanna Schopenhauer, visiting London in 1803, admired ‘the brilliant displays of precious silverware, the beautiful draperies of muslin…behind large plate-glass windows, the fairy-tale glitter of the crystal shops’.†⁶⁸ That she and Sophie von la Roche both admired hanging fabrics would have won the heart of the ‘old draper’, the pseudonymous author of a series in The Warehousemen and Drapers’ Trade Journal. He recalled his early days in the trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when ‘we made a very large and flaring show of goods upon every possible occasion, piling stacks up outside the door…and at times we even had a length of stuff let down from the top storey window to the bottom, so as to attract notice and attention’.⁶⁹ Contrary to Manby Smith’s and many later historian’s view of the period, the ‘old draper’ knew that presentation was of the essence. He told how, when he first set up on his СКАЧАТЬ