Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (16 page)

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. The Royal London Bazaar advertised in the
World of Fashion
in 1830, ‘You may purchase any of the thousand and one varieties of fancy and useful articles, or you may lounge and spend an agreeable hour either in the promenades or in the exhibitions that are wholly without parallel to the known world.’
⁸⁴
For shopping was, and had long been, a branch of entertainment. The Pantheon, in Oxford Street, a concert-hall-cum-social rendezvous, had been built in 1772 as competition to the pleasure gardens. (For pleasure gardens, see pp. 276—8.) By 1834 it had become a combination picture gallery and bazaar—that is, a place where stallholders rented space from a central landlord.
*

Bazaars had developed out of clusters of shopkeepers who had rented space in large converted buildings in the eighteenth century. Exeter Change, in the Strand, was the model.
†
In the eighteenth century the ground floor had been filled by two rows of forty-eight stalls, initially rented mostly to haberdashers and milliners. These were soon superseded by toyshops selling bric-a`-brac—china, cutlery, lacquerware, purses, fans, luxury fabrics such as muslins, silks and brocades, watches and snuff boxes. Above this, on the first floor, was a changing series of exhibitions, ranging from Mrs Mill’s Waxwork Show, to displays of architectural models, ‘an electrifying machine’, a Cremona violin, ‘a fine group of heads drawn with a red-hot poker’, and Indian bows and
arrows. From the 1770s the entertainment side of the Exchange began to predominate, with live entertainments of songs and recitations, puppets, and finally—for which the Exchange was ultimately most famous—a menagerie.
⁸⁶
(For more on shows in general, see Chapter 7; for the menagerie, see p. 275.)

As the Exeter Change turned into a show, other bazaars were developing in ways which would turn them into department stores. The Pantheon itself, as described by Sala in 1859, had a ‘Hampton-court-like maze of stalls, laden with pretty gimcracks, toys, and
papier mâché
trifles for the table, dolls and childrens’ [
sic
] dresses, wax flowers and Berlin and crotchet [
sic
] work, prints, and polkas, and women’s wares of all sorts’.
⁸⁷
This was a typical pattern: the Soho Bazaar, which had been set up in the 1810s, had several rooms with counter space ‘let on moderate terms to females who can bring forward sufficient testimonies of their moral respectability’.
*
They paid 3
d.
a day for each foot of counter space they rented, and space could be taken by the day only, which required little or no capital. The Bazaar specialized in ‘light goods, works of art, and female ingenuity in general’, which meant more or less what was being sold at the Exeter Change and the Pantheon: jewellery, watches, linen, hats, lace, work baskets, ‘fancy work’, artificial flowers, ‘toys’, musical instruments and sheet music, prints, books, birds, china, and so on.
⁸⁸
The Manchester Bazaar had started up on a similar pattern: its initial advertisement in 1821 offered ‘to secure to the Public the choicest and most fashionable Articles in every branch of Art and Manufacture, at a reasonable rate’.
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In 1836 three stallholders bought the company; in 1862 two of them, Thomas Kendal and James Milne, bought out the third and the shop became the draper’s Kendal, Milne (although locals knew it as ‘The Bazaar’ long after). In 1872 the old building was knocked down and the new one emerged, triumphantly, as that thing of the hour—a department store.

Zola wrote the ultimate novel of the department store,
Au Bonheur des Dames
(in its English translation,
The Ladies’ Paradise
).
†
In it, Baudu,
who runs a small drapery shop across the road from the ‘Ladies’ Paradise’, sees the link between the bazaar and the coming behemoth. He is incredulous (and afraid): ‘Had anyone heard of such a thing? A ladies’ shop that sold everything—that made it a bazaar!’ Baudu sneers that the staff, ‘a fine bunch, a load of popinjays…handled everything as though they were in a railway station, treating the goods and customers like parcels’.
⁹⁰
(It is significant that poor, left-behind Baudu mentions the railways: Boucicaut opened the Bon Marché at exactly the time when Baron Haussmann was carrying out Napoleon III’s plans for a new Paris, driving through enormous boulevards that linked the railway stations on the peripheries to the centre of the city. Now trams took the suburban shopper in from the edge of town, down the new boulevards, and straight to the new
grands magasins.
)
⁹¹

Apart from the size, the range and quantities of goods being sold and the sheer abundance of
things
—all of which had so appalled Baudu—service was one of the major changes that customers had to come to terms with. The old system in luxury shops, or shops that served the prosperous more generally, was known as ‘shopping through’. The customer was met at the door, preferably by the main floorwalker or by the owner himself (the customer could accurately judge her status by the status of the person who came to meet her). The customer stated what goods she desired; the main floorwalker called over a subordinate, who took her to the right counter, seated her, and called over the shop assistant who specialized in those particular goods. When the customer had made her selection (or not), the shop assistant called over another floorwalker, who escorted her to the next area she wished to visit. If the goods she had purchased at the first counter were small and were to be taken with her rather than delivered later, the floorwalker carried the packages. This was repeated as long as necessary, until the departing customer was escorted out, the floorwalker carrying her purchases out to her carriage.
*

This took place in small shops naturally—there were possibly only one or two people to serve the customers anyway. But there were also
shops that were not yet quite department stores, but were, nonetheless, ‘monster’ shops. As early as 1799 Glovers of Southampton was advertising ‘Ware-Rooms’ that were organized into separate departments with a range of stock that would have qualified it as a department store had the name existed: it sold plate, jewellery and musical instruments (including organs ‘fit for Churches, Chapels or houses’, pianos, harpsichords, harps, clarinets and flutes), as well as an odd mixture of telescopes, microscopes and spectacles, blunderbusses, oyster knives, umbrellas, razors, watches and clocks.
⁹²
By the 1820s drapers’ shops in London might employ as many as thirty people; in 1839 several shops in Manchester had turnover exceeding £1 million.
⁹³
Bainbridge’s of Newcastle, founded in 1837, was, like its Manchester counterpart that was to become Kendal, Milne, a draper’s shop that understood that buying one thing—a dress, say—led to other purchases: gloves, stockings, ribbons and lace. Bainbridge’s referred to these goods as ‘novelties’, and began to stock them early. From trimming for a dress it was a small step to trimming for upholstery, or curtains, which led to rugs, then to soft furnishings, then to furniture and so on. The growth was organic, and it is therefore hard to put a finger on the moment—there—when the department store arrived. By mid-century, however, enough monster shops were in operation that they seemed to have existed for ever.

Department stores were, by definition, middle class. The multiples showed how stores selling the basics—food, tobacco, newspapers—had expanded by increasing the number of their outlets while maintaining their extremely narrow range of stock. This was necessary: where one bought these basics was predicated on convenience. If the quality met an expected standard and the price remained competitive, no one would choose one store over another. For drapery items, for home furnishings, for fashion, customers went to the shop that sold what they wanted: the range of goods and the quality of the goods was now of primary importance, while convenience and location became secondary. When a shopkeeper concentrated on price and location, he was concentrating on customers with little time or money; when another shopkeeper chose to stress the depth and quality of his stock, he was expecting to receive customers who were both cash- and time-rich. Thus department stores stressed the quantity and quality of the goods they stocked, their wide variety, and the level of expertise of their staff in both acquiring these
goods and selling them, as well as the design and layout of their shops. One indication of the kind of clientele desired was the proportionately large number of department stores that were to be found in spa and resort towns. Jolly’s of Bath hoped to draw the more upmarket elements of the town, advertising itself as a ‘Parisian Depot’. Beale’s of Bournemouth had opened first as a fancy-goods shop in 1881, when Bournemouth still felt that cheap-day-return excursionists were bringing nothing of economic value to the town (for more on excursion travel and resorts, see pp. 111, 230, 241—44). Beale’s turned its back on these visitors, resolutely stocking just the expensive lines, and soon opening a Liberty’s franchise, for the clothing of choice of not only the wealthy, but the eccentrically wealthy (for more on Liberty’s, see below, pp. 115—17). In general, the south coast had a plethora of department stores—among others, in Brighton, Margate, Plymouth, Torquay, Southsea and Worthing.
⁹⁴
All saw their role not simply as retailer, but as a participant in the attractions of the resort.