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

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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_b290cd75-e82a-5a1d-8c55-4776ef1de1fc">*This appeared in a small book that was published as an advertisement for the Bazaar, so the respectability of the females should perhaps be understood as a selling tool.

†Zola’s main source was the Bon Marché in Paris, founded 1852 by a retail revolutionary, Aristide Boucicaut. But Boucicaut’s revolutionary ideas—low margins; fast turnover; fixed, ticketed prices; browsing encouraged; the right of exchange or refund; free deliveries—were all, as we have seen, less than revolutionary to nineteenth-century Britain. The argument about who was first, however, is bootless: the department store arrived piecemeal, and early avatars—the Ville de Paris (1844) and the Grands Magasins du Louvre (1855) in Paris; A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace (1848), Lord and Taylor, Arnold, Constable and Co. and Macy’s (1850s) in New York; as well as the shops I discuss in this chapter—all contributed.

*In some shops outside London an extremely grand customer expected to remain seated in her carriage while everything was brought out to her for examination. By the nineteenth century in London, this was clearly no longer practicable.

*Wylie and Lockhead in Glasgow had the first lift, in 1855. The Glasgow Herald reported it as a ‘very ingenious hoisting apparatus worked by a neat steam engine, which is intended not only to lift up bales from the Wagon entrance to the upper parts of the building, but to elevate those ladies and gentlemen to the galleries to whom the climbing of successive stairs might be attended with fatigue and annoyance. Parties who are old, fat, feeble, short winded, or simply lazy, or who desire a bit of fun, have only to place themselves on an enclosed platform or flooring when they are elevated by a gentle and pleasing process to a height exceeding that of a country steeple.’⁹⁵

†The old way of taking cash had been for a shop assistant to write out an order, then a floorwalker went with both the order and the payment to the cash department, and waited while a receipt was issued, and brought it back together with any change. As customer numbers—and the amount of floor space to be covered by the floorwalker—increased, this became too cumbersome. In the 1880s a pneumatic tube system was devised: the shop assistant put the money and the order in a capsule, put it in the tube, and it was rushed along to the cash department by vacuum pressure; a receipt and the change were returned in the same way. The method had made something of a comeback, particularly in large superstores: the wholesalers Costco, some Tesco supermarkets and even Ikea empty their tills and send the cash in plastic capsules along exactly these types of pneumatic tube.

*Wylie and Lockhead remained pioneers: later they were the first in the country to promote art-nouveau furniture.

†A great boon to women, in particular: one early twentieth-century feminist remembered in her childhood being told by her mother that before department stores and coffee shops like the ABC and Lyons Corner House freed women to spend hours out of the house, ‘Either ladies didn’t go out or ladies didn’t go’.⁹⁷

‡Many shops worked hard to get elusive males through the door: Harrod’s advertised a ‘Gent’s Club Room…furnished in the style of the Georgian period’, Whiteley’s men’s hairdresser offered a daily shave for those paying an annual subscription.⁹⁸

*No connection to Lewis’s Bon Marché: both were linking themselves to Boucicaut’s Parisian store; Lewis even borrowed the French shop’s stripes for his advertising and packaging.¹⁰⁰

*Such attempts to expand were not always successful: in the Mile End Road ‘Messrs Wickham, circa 1910, wanted an emporium. Messrs Spiegelhalter, one infers, wouldn’t sell out. Messrs Wickham, one infers further, pressed on regardless, thereby putting their Baroque tower badly out of centre. Messrs Spiegelhalter (“The East End Jewellers”) remain [in 1966]: two stuccoed storeys surrounded on both sides by giant columns a` la Selfridges. The result is one of the best visual jokes in London.’¹⁰⁵

*This interest in the Far East was catered to by others, just not as successfully, or perhaps as single-mindedly. Zola’s department-store proprietor had set up ‘a small bargain table’ of shop-soiled gewgaws: ‘now it was overflowing with old bronzes, old ivories, old lacquer and had a turnover of fifteen thousand francs a year. He scoured the whole of the Far East, getting travellers to rummage for him in palaces and temples.’¹⁰⁸

*The ‘blue-and-white young man’ is a reference to the Chinese porcelain beloved by the Aesthetic Movement. The Grosvenor Gallery was also linked to the Aesthetic Movement: in 1877 its first show included work by Burne-Jones, Whistler, Alma-Tadema and others. It was run by Joseph Comyns Carr, an art critic, and C. E. Hallé, the son of the founder of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester (see pp. 369—72).

†Bunthorne’s Aesthetic dress was designed by Georges Pilotelle, whose history was more colourful than the subdued fabrics he used: he had fled France in 1875 after being found guilty of the murder of an unspecified number of people he had taken hostage, most probably during the Commune. His political inclinations were made plain in his collection of relics of the Revolutionary martyr Marat, which was said to be ‘the most complete and valuable existing’.¹⁰⁹

       4 Read All About It:Buying the News

      THE CREATION of the earliest newspapers was a by-product of an event that occurred owing to ‘something of a legislative accident’, a governmental absence of mind.¹ Government censorship of printed material had collapsed during the Civil War and the Interregnum, but the return of Charles II in 1660, and the Licensing Act of 1662, had reasserted control over the content of all books, pamphlets and other publications, requiring prior consent for each and every publication, and, further, restricting the printing trade to a mere twenty approved printers. In 1695 the act lapsed, with no replacement bill in sight. With it went parliamentary control of the printers and prior consent for printed material. The situation that is now in place more or less began then: anyone could print anything without first gaining legislative permission, although the laws of blasphemy, sedition and libel controlled, postpublication, what could be published.

      Within weeks of the disappearance of prior censorship, an unlisted printer set up in Bristol; more soon appeared in other cities. Only six years later, in 1701, what may have been the first newspaper in Britain was published: the Norwich Post. The first London paper was not far behind, appearing in 1702. By 1709 there were 19 papers in London alone, between them putting out 55 editions a week; by 1760 there had been at least 150 papers over the intervening 58 years, many of which had survived very briefly. Enough had survived that 35 provincial papers had by that date a combined circulation СКАЧАТЬ