Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (8 page)

New consumer products made readily available by post or carrier, brought to market by improved transport (see pp. 70—74), advertised and thus made more widely known by a greater range and wider distribution of newspapers (pp. 124ff.): all of this encouraged greater expectations, and even local shops began to have, as a matter of course, higher stock levels, especially in areas serving large populations. In London, Mrs Holt’s Italian Warehouse had a tradecard illustrated with a picture by Hogarth (see p. 50).
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Greater stock meant that more thought had to go into the display of these goods. For those selling through the window, nothing was required in the way of shopfitting, but, once customers began to come into the shop, the room had to be more than a place where goods were stored. The transformation from storage to selling space began to appear early

in the eighteenth century, and an example can be seen in the probate records. In 1719 Thomas Horne, a shopkeeper in Arundel, died; 150 items of stock (drapery and haberdashery) were listed in the inventory made for probate, but there were no goods listed for the use or comfort of his customers. His widow, Susan Horne, who carried on the business, died fifteen years later, in 1734; the inventory then included eight mirrors, counters, shelves and boxes, all illuminated by new sash windows.
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By the middle of the eighteenth century, especially in London, and especially in the luxury-goods trades, the decoration of shops developed swiftly. These shops were a big advance on what had been the norm half a century before. Daniel Defoe was contemptuous of those shopkeepers who wanted ‘to paint and gild’ their shop to make it ‘fine and gay’: ‘Never was such painting and gilding, such sashings and looking-glasses among the shopkeepers as there is now,’ he fretted. He also reported a pastrycook who in 1710 spent an astonishing £300 on sash windows, tiles ‘finely painted in forest-work and figures’, mirrors, a fireplace, candlesticks, a glass lantern, and twenty-five sconces, as well as decoration that involved painting, gilding and carving, and cost another £55.
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The pastrycook was not an isolated individual. The booksellers Lackington Allen and Co. had a trade card that promised ‘the finest shop in the world being 140 feet in front’, with fourteen windows on to the street, and ‘Lounging Rooms’.
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Trade cards showed idealized images, of how shopkeepers wanted their shops to be seen, not necessarily what they were like in reality.
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But, at the same time, they cannot have been entire fictions, even if the number of windows was increased a bit, or the perspective from which the interior was drawn was low, in order to make the shop seem bigger. Inventories backed up the impression of luxury that the trade cards worked so hard to project. Many listed mirrors, glass display cases, mouldings on the ceilings, gilt cornices, glass for windows to the street, for display, for internal lighting, screens and skylights—the possibilities seemed endless. Furniture was also abundant: the customer expected to sit while he or she was being waited on, and stools and even upholstered chairs appear regularly in inventories. So do other items that were chosen to suggest that the prosperous customer,

now visiting a shop rather than being called upon by the shopkeeper, was still in some way at home, even if it was not his or her home—there were mirrors, pictures, sconces, curtains, tables, lamps.
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By the middle of the eighteenth century successful shops were no longer single rooms, but had expanded either upstairs or by breaking through party walls to take over several ground-floor rooms laterally. In 1774 Wedgwood took a showroom in Greek Street, Soho, at Portland House, the ‘grandest and largest house in the street’, with a seventeenmetre frontage. It had at one point belonged to a surgeon, whose dissecting room ran the full width of the house. (It was tactfully renamed the ‘Great Room’.) Not content with that, Wedgwood immediately began to plan an extension by adding a gallery, linked to the ground floor by a dramatic staircase.
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In 1794 the bookseller James Lackington moved his shop into a mansion in Finsbury Square, which he named the Temple of the Muses. Inside there was a large circular counter from which to serve customers in a magnificent room—a room so large that, after the first day of trading, as a publicity stunt, a coach and horses were driven right the way around the counter.

Despite such grandeur, Lackington had made his fortune in the mass market. Over the entrance to the Temple of the Muses he had painted, ‘Cheapest Bookseller in the World’, and on his carriage the motto ‘Small profits do great things’ reminded passers-by of the source of his wealth.
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The Industrial Revolution had not yet brought about mass-production techniques—they were to come in the nineteenth century—but there was among some manufacturers the beginning of a very clear idea of the potential of the mass market. Matthew Boulton—originally a steel toy manufacturer, later one of the earliest and most successful proponents of the factory system and, in general, one of the leading innovators and entrepreneurs in an age that was rife with them—grasped the idea of the mass market eagerly. When his London agent suggested that he ought to look more at the upper-class market, he responded, ‘We think it of far more consequence to supply the People than the Nobility only; and though you speak contemptuously of Hawkers, Pedlars and those who supply
Petty shops
, yet we must own that we think they will do more towards supporting a great Manufactory, than all the Lords in the Nation.’
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He returned to this theme frequently: ‘I understand my own interest too well to load any articles of my Manufactory with too extravagant a profit, as I rather choose to make great
quantities with small profits, than small quantities with large profits.’
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This attention to price is an indication that the level of competition was fierce: increased urbanization and improved transport meant that by the second half of the eighteenth century many of merely moderate income had access to a large number of shops selling the same kind of goods. No one could now expect their goods to sell simply because they were the only products available. Early historians of consumerism suggested that fixed-price retailing appeared with the creation of department stores in the mid nineteenth century: that William Whiteley, the ‘Universal Provider’ (see p. 114), changed the face of shopping by offering lower prices in exchange for fixed prices, instead of haggling, and cash instead of credit. Yet even the most cursory look at the advertisements of the eighteenth century reveals that many of these nineteenth-century ‘innovations’ were in place in the eighteenth century: newspapers were filled to the brim with advertisements that promised low prices for goods ‘charged at ready money prices’—that is, sold for cash. John Hildyard, a York bookseller, advertised ‘several libraries and parcels of books…[to be] sold cheap, for ready money only’. John Davenport and Co. by 1751 was advertising that wallpaper ‘such as is sold by the upholsterer &c. for 3
d.
or 3
¹
/
₂
d.
per yard, we sell for 2
¹
/
₂
d.
and all other sorts in proportion. The price is printed at the end of each piece without abatement [that is, without discounts] and sold for ready money’.
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Nor were the shopkeepers willing to wait for passing trade to come into their expensively fitted-up shops. There is a circular dating from 1778 which is the oldest known example of a shopkeeper soliciting custom by sending a regular client information about his wares. However, the style of the circular, which contains no explanation of its function, suggests that customers would have seen these types of mailing before. It is therefore likely that this chance survival is a remnant of earlier examples that have not been preserved. By the end of the decade, in any case, such items were commonplace: Smith, Nash, Kemble and Travers, ‘wholesalers and retailers’, in 1779 sent out a circular warning their customers that ‘unfortunately we have just received information of the loss of Grenada…which has caused an advance in Raw sugar
*
…
Refined sugars are very scarce and dear, but will be more Plenty [
sic
] in a Month or six Weeks, and hope cheaper…We shall be glad to see you in Town if it suits your convenience, but if otherwise, shall endeavour to execute any Orders you may favour us with, on the same terms and with equal Attention.’
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This increase in the price of sugar was a cause of anxiety by 1779. Sugar had, for centuries past, been unaffordable for almost everyone. Honey was used by those who had the space and time to cultivate bees; sugar-beet production would not become a practical reality until the nineteenth century. The population for the most part did without sweeteners. Sugar was, in the strictest sense of the word, a luxury—something that provided enjoyment or comfort in addition to what were accounted the necessaries of life. It was a thing that was desirable, but not indispensable. In 1780 Jeremy Bentham, the Utilitarian philosopher, wrote, ‘Necessaries come always before luxuries.’
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But what was a necessity and what was a luxury was more fluid and less absolute than Bentham allowed. In the dedication to
Discourses on Art
in 1778, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy, wrote, ‘The regular progress of cultivated life is from necessaries to accommodations, from accommodations to ornaments.’
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At almost exactly the same date, Anna Larpent, the wife of the Chief Inspector of Plays for the Lord Chamberlain, wrote in her diary, ‘I must acquire thought in spending money. An elegant Oeconomy, a proper frugality[;] do nothing from mere spirit of imitation. Every thing with order, nothing giddily—there are: absolute necessities; necessary luxuries.’
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Necessary luxuries: surely a new concept.
*

The president of the Royal Academy and a bourgeois housewife were agreed: necessities were no longer only basic food and shelter, those essentials that kept a person alive and able to function. And a couple of decades later, during the French Revolution, the sans-culottes of Paris showed that this attitude was not solely a middle-class development. In the desperate winter of 1792—3 the starving French workers rioted, demanding what they referred to as ‘goods of prime necessity’. These they carefully listed: soap, candles, sugar and coffee—goods their grandparents would have considered unimaginable luxuries. The more
prosperous murmured disapprovingly that the rioters had not attacked bakeries, where they would have found bread, for centuries the staple food of Europe. Instead they attacked groceries.
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What subsistence was, what was ‘necessary’, had altered for ever.

Part of this elision from luxury to necessity came from the rapid increase in the quantity of goods taxed in the eighteenth century. Numerous wars and the expansion of government saw duties quadruple. A partial list of goods that were taxed in the 1770s includes paper, newspapers, windows, horses, dogs, wagons, leather, printed silk and linen, starch, soap and candles (even soap and candles made from fat from one’s own animals), salt, hops, barley for beer, cider, perry, wine, spirits, tea,
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coffee, sugar, molasses, spices and chocolate.
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These were all, therefore, to a degree seen as luxuries, at least by the government. The people who were consuming these items, not unnaturally, felt differently. Luxuries such as soap, candles, salt and tea were in reality by this time clearly necessities to many. It is therefore easy to see how other taxed goods quickly took on a similar aura, and also became assimilated as necessities.

The first advertisement for tea that has survived appeared in the 23—30 September 1658 issue of
Mercurius Politicus
, the official, governmentapproved political periodical. It notified readers that ‘That Excellent, and by all Physicians approved,
China
Drink, called by the
Chineaus
[Chinese],
Tcha
, by other Nations
Tay alias Tee
, is sold at the
Sultanesshead
, a
Cophee-house
in
Sweetings
Rents by the Royal Exchange,
London
.’ That same year, Garraway’s coffee house in Exchange Alley also advertised tea, which it promised would cure, among other things, headache, stone, gravel, dropsy, ‘liptitude distillations’, scurvy, sleepiness, loss of memory, looseness of the guts, ‘heavy dreams’ and colic. Moreover, when ‘Taken with Virgin’s Honey instead of Sugar, tea cleanses the Kidneys and Ureters, and with
Milk
and water it prevents Consumption.’
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It may be that this tea was being sold as a dry leaf, to take away and brew up at home, as medicine—the claims made for it resemble the advertisements for patent medicines over the next two centuries. But from 1660, when the commodity was first taken notice of by the Excise, the tax was levied on the
brewed
item: the initial tax was 8
d.
per gallon—the seller had to make the tea in bulk, have the excisemen check it,
and then sell it. From 1689, however, the government moved to a tax on the dry leaf, which kept prices high, but did not require an exciseman in every coffee house.
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From 1664 the East India Company began to import the commodity, but in such small quantities—only 100 pounds to begin with—that it is probable that it was being shipped in for those East India Company employees who had acquired a taste for the drink abroad.

From this small base, consumption rose at astonishing rates. In 1741 Britain imported less than 800,000 pounds a year; by 1746—50 annual home consumption had reached more than 2.5 million pounds. Very swiftly, tea had become a drink that even the working class could afford, at least sometimes. By mid-century the lowest grades cost between 8 and 10
s.
a pound (the highest grades reached £1 16
s.
). There were advertisements recommending a certain leaf because it was ‘strong, and will endure the Change of Water three or four times’—that is, the thrifty housewife could reuse the leaves and still get—brown liquid? By 1748 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw so many of his flock spending money on tea that he wrote the minatory
A Letter to a Friend Concerning TEA
, while the philanthropist Jonas Hanway warned of the perils of tea and gin in an almost interchangeable vocabulary.
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