Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (18 page)

Selfridge’s passion for advertising broke new ground. As with so many innovators, it was not that he did anything particularly novel, but that he took many novel ideas of the period and worked them together, increasing their force by his passion and commitment. Much of his advertising turned on the value of shopping (particularly of shopping at Marshall Field), on shopping as social good, on the benefits shopping conferred on humanity and so on. Marshall Field’s restaurant was promoted by the aspiration ‘A department store should be a social center, not merely a place for shopping.’ He was among the first to hire professional copywriters and set up an ‘institutional advertising style’, which sold Marshall Field, and shopping at Marshall Field, rather than promoting separate items. He instituted ‘free gifts’, he mounted special promotions.
¹¹⁵
In 1904 Selfridge suddenly resigned, either because he had been refused a senior partnership or because when the store was incorporated in 1901 he had received what he considered to be an inadequate share allocation. Whatever the reason, by 1906 he was in London. With money from a British shopping magnate, after an abortive start he began to build: Selfridge’s was the biggest store ever to be built entirely from scratch, rather than by expansion.

Selfridge had plans for London. He brought over three colleagues from Chicago: one to control the merchandise, one to design the store and its fittings, and one to be in charge of window displays. The buyers were now subordinate to the merchandise manager. No longer were there dozens, if not hundreds, of separate little fiefdoms, each buying to suit itself, with no overall sense of the customer base; nor were buyers any longer entirely responsible for their own staff; nor did they design their own displays, laying out their merchandise as they each thought best. Everything was centralized. Even the flow of information was unified: instead of floorwalkers who led customers to the appropriate departments, based on each individual’s opinion of how best to fulfil a customer’s request, there was a central information desk. (Marshall Field had had one from early in the 1890s.) Everything was to be coordinated: carpets, wrapping paper, delivery vans, bill heads—even the string used to tie the parcels was in the same colours, with the same design. It was the embodiment of Selfridge’s credo: everything and everyone in the store were all working to fulfil a single vision—Selfridge’s own.
¹¹⁶

The opening of the shop, in 1909, was planned as carefully as any theatrical premiere—in fact that was what it most closely resembled, and was clearly intended to resemble. The silk curtains that covered the windows before opening day, said the
Daily Chronicle
, ‘[suggested] that a wonderful play was being arranged’. When they were drawn back, they revealed a radical departure. Harrod’s and Whiteley’s both had windows stuffed brimful with as many goods as they could hold. Selfridge’s windows were completely different: they displayed unified, thematically coherent images, showing how the consumer might hope to wear a dress or live with the goods on show. The
Retail Trader
understood that this sense of a single vision came from the novelty of having one man solely dedicated to putting goods in the windows. Equally, it understood the theatricality that was aimed at: ‘Just as the stage manager of a new play rehearses and tries and retries and fusses until he has exactly the right lights and shades and shadows and appeals to his audience, so the merchant goes to work, analysing his line and his audience, until he hits on the right scheme that brings the public flocking to his doors.’
¹¹⁷

The public flocked, all right. The shop claimed 1 million visitors in its first week, and, even if the figure needs to be divided in half to allow for pardonable exaggeration, it is a startling number. Other shops became frantic: Waring and Gillow, Swan and Edgar, Peter Robinson,

Maple’s, Shoolbred, and D. H. Evans all decided to show their new spring lines that same week; Harrod’s promoted its diamond jubilee, a mere four years early, with afternoon concerts to be given by the London
Symphony and the band of the Grenadier Guards.
¹¹⁸
But it wasn’t enough. The most important thing was advertising, and here Selfridge outshone the others. He was the first to use blanket coverage. He spent £36,000 on press advertising in the run-up to the opening. (Thomas Lipton, as a comparison, was spending between £50,000 and £60,000 a year on advertising—for more than 400 shops.)
¹¹⁹
Selfridge commissioned thirty-two cartoons from artists and caricaturists, including Bernard Partridge, Linley Sambourne, Walter Crane, Lewis Baumer, Leonard Raven-Hill and Fred Pegram, all of whom worked for
Punch
(Crane was a renowned children’s illustrator in addition). The resulting 104 full-page advertisements ran for a week in 18 national newspapers.
¹²⁰
Selfridge’s great insight, however, was not simply the motivating power of advertising. It was, more crucially, the weight that advertising carried with newspapers. He was the first to see that if an advertiser was paying thousands of pounds to a newspaper or periodical, and there were likely to be many thousands of pounds more to come, the newspaper would support the advertiser editorially too, if stroked the right way. Selfridge made it his business to cultivate those at the top—in particular, Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the
Daily Mail
, and Ralph D. Blumenfeld, the editor of the
Daily Express
—as well as more humble journalists: he hired one of their own as a publicist; he gave journalists’ dinners; he staged a special, pre-opening evening with a private tour of the store; he told them they could always use the telephones in Selfridge’s, without charge.
¹²¹

These novelties were matched by novelties in the shop. Again, it was not that no one had thought of such things before—shopping as entertainment had, as we have seen, a 200-year history—it was that no one had pushed them to such extremes. On the opening day, all the customers were given calendars and notebooks listing the 130 departments and emblazoned with the slogan, ‘WHY NOT SPEND THE DAY AT SELFRIDGES?’
¹²²
After Louis Blériot became the first person to fly the English Channel in a ‘heavier-than-air machine’, Selfridge rushed to buy the aircraft, and the day after the flight it was already on display in the store. More than 150,000 people came to see it over the next four days. He held an exhibition of the paintings that were not accepted for the Royal Academy summer show. Soon the shop had a playroom for children, decorated to look like the seaside, with real sand, a pond and a small roller coaster, and the Palm Court had a Punch and Judy show
every afternoon. There was a pet shop, a rifle range, a putting green, a skating rink. But, most importantly, Selfridge knew how to convey this information to the general public: through the newspapers.

*
Sugar until well into the nineteenth century was a very intractable object. Sugar was originally processed by boiling the raw cane sugar with lime water and bullock’s blood; the blood coagulated, absorbing the impurities (and with it sugar’s natural brown colour). The remaining liquid was then filtered, concentrated and poured into moulds, where it solidified. The resulting loaves were then broken up and repurified before being formed once more into conical loaves and sold. Grocers broke up the big loaves with hammers, but the smaller loaves bought by housewives still had to be cut into smaller pieces with sugar nippers. Industrial processing, happily, replaced the bullock’s blood with centrifugal force.
²

*
Yet bulk was not absolutely uniform, even for the multiples, and several successful chains had a curious anomaly known as the ‘Highland Trade’. As late as the 1910s Cochrane Stores in the west of Scotland were still advertising ‘Attention Highest prices given for eggs’—that is, they traded general produce for their customers’ eggs. Massey stores went further, bartering goods for eggs and also for Harris tweed. In both cases the eggs were sold in their other branches, while Massey’s uncle was a tailor and was happy to accept the tweed.
¹³

*
The prefix ‘ready-made’ is important, as in contemporary idiom ‘a dress’ also referred to a length of fabric that was sold to be made up into a dress later.

†
A £300 income was earned only by the prosperous middle classes. Yet even this is not the entire picture. Newspapers were regularly taken by coffee houses, where they could be read for the price of a cup of coffee, or rented for 1
d.
an hour. Furthermore, there were often more than a dozen readers per copy of the newspaper even when they had not been ordered for public places. (See p. 126.)

*
A spencer was a double-breasted overcoat without tails, well out of fashion by this time. A highlow remains a mystery: the only contemporary sources that list the ‘highlow’ say it is a boot, whereas from the context here it appears to be a jacket.

†
Sala (1828—96) contributed to Dickens’s
Household Words
f rom 1851. At the end of the Crimean War, Dickens asked him to travel to Russia to report on the situation. In 1863 he made his name as a special correspondent covering the American Civil War for the
Daily Telegraph.
He also wrote ‘Echoes of the Week’, a column for the
Illustrated London News
, for more than twenty-five years.

*
In 1822 there were seventy Jews in Leeds; by 1900 the city had, in proportion to its Gentile inhabitants, the largest Jewish population in the country, at 5 per cent of the population.
²⁷

*
Singer was even better at marketing than he was at inventing: he had been an actor, and he used his selling and promotional skills at first on a circuit of fairs and circuses; he then opened a showroom, a vast hall lined with machines operated by specially trained women—he wanted to show that women at home could use his machines.
³¹

*
A siphonia was a transient name for a waterproof coat, one of the many names that manufacturers came up with to catch the eye in advertisements. Almost exactly contemporaneously with this mention, Sala wrote of clerks in their ‘Paletôts…Ponchos, Burnouses, Sylphides, Zephyr wrappers, Chesterfields, Llamas, Pilot wrappers, Wrap-rascals, Bisuniques and a host of other garments, more or less answering the purpose of an overcoat’.
³⁸

*
Laces themselves had been revolutionized in 1823, when metal eyelets were patented, making it possible to wear heavier boots and lace them more tightly without tearing the leather.
⁴¹

†
Boots were ordinary street-wear for men, women and children, even in cities, since horse dung, alleyway slaughterhouses and overrunning cesspits were common. Given the condition of the streets, once inside the house those who could afford it expected to change into their shoes or, for women, slippers—which were not bedroom wear, but made of silk, satin or other fabrics, or even the more delicate leathers. The primary distinction between slippers and shoes was, not unnaturally, that the slipper was easily slipped on and off, and thus had no fastenings apart from ribbons. For evening wear for more prosperous women, slippers were de rigueur.

*
In the 1850s they advertised a £3 10
s.
, a £6 10
s.
, or a 10 guinea outfit for those emigrating. The 10 guinea version comprised: 1 black dress coat, 1 black dress vest, black dress trousers; 1 frock coat, 1 fancy vest, fancy trousers; 1 fishing or shooting coat; 1 hat and 1 cloth cap; 18 shirts; 4 nightshirts; 1 pair Wellington boots, and 1 pair shoes; 6 handkerchiefs; 6 pounds Marine soap; a razor, shaving box, strop and mirror; a fork, a knife, a teaspoon and a tablespoon; a plate and a mug; a bed, a pillow, a pair of blankets, 2 pairs of sheets, 2 pillowcases; a hairbrush and comb; and a strong sea chest to contain everything.
⁴⁵

*
This was not a one-off: Harris’s, in Whitechapel, used similar theatre and prizefighter slang, mixed in with the vocabulary of the penny-dreadful (see pp. 174—6) and outright thievery: ‘Harris…The Champion of England, slap-up tog and out-and-out kicksies builder, nabs the chance of putting his customers awake that he has just made his escape from Canada, not forgetting to clap his mawleys [fists] on a rare does of stuff…’
⁵¹

*
There was a brisk East End trade in tailors’ tabs with the names of West End shops on them,
⁵²
probably for shops like this.

*
Note that the fare ‘stage’ retained its name, and still does, from stagecoach days.

*
An Argand lamp burned gas held in a reservoir, with, for the first time, an enclosed flame in a glass chimney; a mechanism allowed the flame to be raised or lowered, regulating brightness, again for the first time.

†
Johanna Schopenhauer (1766—1838) was born in Prussia, the daughter of a banker and senator. She married Heinrich Schopenhauer, a merchant, in 1784 or 1785, and travelled widely with him. After his death in 1805 or 1806 she moved to Weimar, where she was the centre of a literary salon, attended by Goethe and Wieland among others. Driven by financial need, she published a number of books, including a biography, travel diaries, novels and short stories. However, her main claim to fame today is as the mother of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

*
Particularly for furniture: Shoolbred started selling carpets and upholstery not long after the move; John Harris Heal, the son of the owner of a mattress-making company around the corner in Rathbone Place, opened a furniture shop less than a hundred metres away in 1840; Maple’s, an enormous furniture shop, set up next door to Shoolbred in 1842. And the tradition is maintained—Heal’s, in its early twentieth-century building, proudly takes up nearly an entire block; Maple’s closed only a couple of decades ago; and hordes of students looking for sofa-beds and futons today still head for Tottenham Court Road.

*
Engels saw this redevelopment as a way of segregating the working classes from the middle classes, to keep these areas free for middle-class consumption. It is an interesting idea, but one I can only briefly mention in this footnote.
⁷⁴

*
There was a mocking response shortly afterwards in the advertisement placed by another shop: ‘We have fine displays of fancy goods and toys, including the new non-speaking shop assistants.’
⁷⁷

*
In between, it had been an opera house and then the home of the National Institute to Improve the Manufactures of the United Kingdom. Later it became a wine shop, and today, suitably, a Marks and Spencer’s store occupies the site.
⁸⁵

†
The Change started life where today the Strand Palace Hotel stands. When plans to widen the Strand were first mooted, in 1828, the Exeter Change moved to King’s Mews, Charing Cross, although this was no more lucky a site—today the mews is underneath the National Gallery.

*
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