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

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СКАЧАТЬ a variety of ruses. He displayed great rolls of ‘silks’ where only the top layer was an expensive silk, bulked out underneath by cheap fabric he had painted

      to match. He stocked his drawers at the front, putting parcels stuffed with paper in behind, so that when the drawers were opened they appeared reassuringly full to his customers. Without this he would not have been able to persuade his suppliers that he was financially stable and creditworthy, nor would his customers have been willing to shop somewhere they thought too scantily stocked, and therefore unlikely to carry what they wanted: display was vital.⁷⁰

      London had two very distinct streets, or rather sets of streets, which had been dedicated to shopping from the eighteenth century. The first ran from Mile End in the East End to Parliament Street in the West End, taking in Whitechapel, Leadenhall Street, Cornhill, Cheapside, St Paul’s Churchyard (famous for books and, later, haberdashery), Ludgate Street, Fleet Street, the Strand and Charing Cross. The other linked chain of streets also began in the eastern end of London, at Shoreditch, and ran westward, taking in Bishopsgate Street, Threadneedle Street, Cheapside, Newgate Street, Holborn, Broad Street, St Giles and Oxford Street.⁷¹ In the eighteenth century, the former streets had the more elegant shops, and were considered to be more fashionable. In 1807 Robert Southey, in the guise of a foreign visitor, described how

      When I reached Cheapside the crowd completely astonished me. On each side of the way were two uninterrupted streams of people, one going east, the other west. At first I thought some extraordinary occasion must have collected such a concourse; but I soon perceived it was only the usual course of business…If possible I was still more astonished at the opulence and splendour of the shops, drapers, stationers…silversmiths, booksellers, print-sellers…one close to another, without intermission, a shop to every house, street after street, and mile after mile; the articles themselves so beautiful, and beautifully arranged.⁷²

Gradually over the century the fashionable shoppers moved west and north. One of the clearest markers of this westward shift was when the draper’s Shoolbred, Cook and Co., which had been in St Paul’s Churchyard, moved in 1817 to Tottenham Court Road, which was rapidly gaining a reputation as a middle-class shopping street.* By that year, Johnstone’s London Commercial Guide listed the following in Oxford Street: 3 linen drapers, 10 straw-hat manufactories [in this context, a manufactory was a place that sold the goods it made in its workrooms on the premises], 6 bonnet warehouses [meaning simply large shops], 5 woollen drapers, 5 lace warehouses, 3 plumassiers [feather merchants, for hat feathers], 24 boot- and shoe-makers, 17 hosiers and glovers, 4 silk mercers, 1 silk weaver, 4 furriers, 12 haberdashers and hosiers, 1 ribbon warehouse, 1 muslin and shawl warehouse, 2 silk and satin dyers, 2 drapers and tailors, 1 India-muslin warehouse, 3 fancy trimmings and fringe manufactories, 1 button manufactory, 2 pressers and dyers, 5 perfumers, 1 patent-thread manufactory, 1 tailor, 3 stay and corset warehouses, 1 stocking warehouse, 1 ready-made linen [that is, underwear] warehouse, and 4 umbrella manufactories.⁷³

London was the forerunner, but other towns and cities were coming up hard behind. The developments in London were copied first in the more up-market spa towns, such as Bath (for more on spas, see pp. 231—6), then in the larger cities: Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. Finally the newer industrial cities followed. The Enabling Act of 1813 had made it possible for businessmen to buy land, develop it, and then make a return by selling long leases to shopkeepers. The act had been passed in order to allow the creation of Regent Street, but many took advantage of the unexpected opportunity to develop other areas in the same way: Dale Street in Liverpool and Market Street in Manchester were both developed for better retail premises, and widened, in the 1820s;* in the 1830s it was the turn of Grey Street in Newcastle. London then developed further shopping areas: New Oxford Street in the 1840s, Victoria in the 1850s, and Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road in the 1870s and 1880s. The spirit of emulation then stirred Leeds, Glasgow and Cardiff to follow suit, while Joseph Chamberlain planned Birmingham’s Corporation Street to be ‘the retail shop of the whole of the Midland counties of England’.⁷⁵

Thus the physical development of shops was one of almost constant change from the eighteenth century onward. Likewise, to match the myth of the dirty, dark, barely stocked eighteenth-century shop, there was also the myth that shopping before the arrival of the department store was a purpose-driven, end-result-based activity: shoppers went in for a specific item, asked for it, had it handed to them, and immediately left—with absolutely no browsing. There is some evidence that in some places, some of the time, some customers expected to behave in this way. In Fenwick’s of Newcastle, as late as 1902, when the owner’s sons came back from training in Paris, they advertised what they thought of as new ways of shopping in the Newcastle Journal, encouraging customers to come in to browse: ‘Assistants are not allowed to speak to visitors. Walk round today, don’t buy. There is time for that another day.’⁷⁶* Gordon Selfridge, that arch-myth-maker (see pp. 117—22), was keen to promote the novelty of the idea (mostly so that he could claim to have invented it). He told anyone who would listen that when he had been looking around other shops, planning his own, he was approached by a floorwalker, who asked him what he wanted. Selfridge replied that he was just looking, and was told, ‘ ‘Op it,’ and escorted to the door.⁷⁸

      Unfortunately for Selfridge and his charming story, there is a long history of browsing—in manuals for shopkeepers, in novels and plays, and in advertisements. As early as 1726, Daniel Defoe in his Complete Tradesman warned shopkeepers that ‘ladies…divert themselves in going from one mercer’s shop to another, to look upon their fine silks, and to rattle and banter the journeymen and shopkeepers, and have not so much as the least occasion, much less intention, to buy anything.’⁷⁹ Wedgwood, as we have seen, frequently changed his displays so that customers would come back regularly to look; he also found it worthwhile to display commissions for the royal family and for Catherine the Great, which no one could buy even had they wanted to—he was actively courting browsers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Johanna Schopenhauer described ‘going into at least twenty shops, having a thousand things shown to us which we do not wish to buy, in fact turning the whole shop upside down and, in the end, perhaps leaving without purchasing anything’,⁸⁰ while in Maria Edgeworth’s 1809 novel Ennui the Earl of Glenthorn describes going to watchmakers’ shops ‘for a lounge…to pass an idle hour’.⁸¹

      This was not the case only in luxury shops in London. Fanny Burney’s novel The Wanderer (1814) portrays a heroine with a mysterious past who works in a millinery shop in a small market town:

      The ladies whose practice it was to frequent the shop, thought the time and trouble of its mistress, and her assistants, amply paid by the honour of their presence; and though they tried on hats and caps, till they put them out of shape; examined and tossed about the choicest goods…still their consciences were at ease…if, after two or three hours of lounging, rummaging, fault-finding and chaffering, they purchased a yard or two of ribbon.⁸²

(Burney clearly felt strongly about this. Her unperformed play The Witlings also revolved around women who spent their time in a milliner’s shop without buying anything.)⁸³ Yet, while Burney was indignant, many shopkeepers knew it was good business. СКАЧАТЬ