Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Read online

  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 3d. 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’.89 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.

  For them, and for department stores more generally, innovation was a matter of pride, as it had been to the smaller shopkeeper. There were two kinds of innovation. The first was the kind of innovation that the customer saw—whether it was new buildings, plate-glass windows, customer lifts and escalators,* cash-registers, pneumatic tubes to dispatch orders and payments to a central cash department,† or even Wylie and Lockhead of Glasgow’s novel idea of ‘flats’, where areas were decorated as if they were individual rooms in a private house that customers could walk around to examine the goods displayed, for the first time, as though at home.*96 The second kind of innovation was those that the customer felt rather than saw. These included new ways of organizing space, new service techniques, such as the decline and later abolition of the previously ubiquitous floorwalker; and the creation of service departments such as ladies’ lavatories,† hairdressers, readin
g rooms, restaurants, cleaners and laundry services, carpet-beating, interior decor, estate agents, upholsterers, banks, post offices, smoking rooms and club rooms for men,‡ even undertakers.

  Some were better than others at seeing the future. David Lewis, the son of a merchant from London, was first apprenticed to a tailor and outfitter. In 1856 he set up on his own in Liverpool, a town of increasing prosperity—the Crimean War and the development of the American Midwest was bringing big business to the port. At roughly the same time, in the same street, another tailor, named Jacobs, opened his shop. In 1864 Lewis branched out into women’s clothes, then in 1874 he added shoes for women and girls; then he started selling perfumery, layettes, umbrellas and patent medicines; in 1879 he added a tobacco department; in 1880 school slates, watches, stationery, books and sheet music. (In that same year he also opened a new store in Manchester and, to advertise it, sold Lewis’s Two-shilling Tea, complete with a specially commissioned tea song, ‘Lewis’s Beautiful Tea’, more as a marketing gimmick than with any expectation of finding a market. To his astonishment, by 1883, he was selling 20,000 pounds of tea a year—and all from an attempt to promote clothes.) His neighbour Jacobs had had enough; he advertised, ‘Jacobs of Ranelagh Street find it necessary to give notice that it is not their intention to add other departments to their business of clothiers, Bootmakers, Hatters and Outfitters or to enter into any branch of business which they do not thoroughly understand.’ It is hardly necessary to tell the rest of the story: Jacobs went out of business, while Lewis became the owner of Lewis’s of Liverpool and of the Bon Marché, also in Liverpool, one of the biggest and most successful department-store entrepreneurs of the century.99

  While these department stores increased in size, swallowing up the shops around them, before the late 1870s it was rare that the shops were purpose-built: rather, they extended and extended, but from the front remained visibly separate buildings that had been knocked together. The Bon Marché in Brixton* was, in 1877, the first custom-built department store in Britain (it was said to have cost a staggering £70,000); others followed, sometimes voluntarily, often when street-widening schemes or other civic improvements meant that their original shops would have had to have been rebuilt anyway—Barker’s, Derry and Toms, and Pontings, all in Kensington, became monolithic when Kensington High Street was widened from the small country lane it had been.101 Lewis had with great foresight chosen the location for his Manchester shop with an extension in mind. Starting with six departments in 1877, by 1884 his premises had spread across the entire block, and rebuilding had begun once again.102

  Messrs Bourne and Hollingsworth in Oxford Street, having had somewhat less foresight, looked about them to see what property they would have to acquire to get their ‘island’ site (a site that occupied an entire block, bounded by streets on four sides: the retailer’s dream). It was a daunting prospect—a pub, a dairy, a barber’s, a coffee house, a carpet-layer, a costume manufacturer, two milliners (one wholesale, one retail), a music publisher, a musical-instrument shop, a palmist, a hairdresser, the British headquarters of the New Columbia Gramophone Co., a brothel, a private house, a wholesale lace merchant, a building containing several Polish tailors, a sweet shop, the offices of Doan’s Backache Pills, Savory’s cigarette factory, a wholesale blouse-maker, a wine merchant’s storage cellar, a soda-water manufacturer, a jeweller, a baby-linen manufacturer, a wallpaper merchant, an estate agent, two solicitors and a chapel—but they did it.103 Others were similarly placed: Peter Robinson, which had opened in 1833, had bought the two adjoining premises in 1854; in 1856 and 1858 two more were bought; in 1860 the final shop, which gave a block of six shops, was acquired. Marshall and Snelgrove had opened as Marshall and Wilson in 1837; just short of forty years later, in 1876, it added the final shop to its, by now, seven shops to complete its own ‘island’.104*

  These shops, like Whiteley’s of Paddington, saw themselves as ‘Universal Providers’. It was William Whiteley himself who had coined the phrase. He had started as a draper in 1855, and he followed the same path as we have already seen with Kendal, Milne and Bainbridge’s: first he opened a drapery, then he expanded to add the goods that might be desired at the same time: ribbons, lace, fancy goods, gloves, jewellery, parasols. By the 1870s he had expanded literally, into the shop next door, and figuratively, into the services market: Whiteley’s included an estate agent, a hairdresser, a tea room and a furniture showroom on the Wylie and Lockhead model. What really set him apart, though, was his talent for self-publicity. For example, in 1865 one of his employees, John Barker, a department manager, was earning £300 a year; Whiteley promised to double his salary if Barker doubled his turnover. He did, and by 1870 Barker asked to be taken into partnership. Whiteley refused, but promised him a salary of £1,000—more than had ever been paid to a draper; more even than the income of many upper-middle-class professionals. Barker declined it, left Whiteley’s and started his own department store in Kensington (which closed last year, in 2005).106 Whiteley, however, more than made up for the loss of his valued employee by ensuring that all the newspapers reported the huge salary Barker had been offered. In the 1870s Whiteley also revived the eighteenth-century custom of the puff, sending the Bayswater Chronicle letters ostensibly written by women who shopped at his store.

  A completely different route was taken by some other monster shops. Many furniture shops were content to remain furniture shops: Waring and Gillow was proud to announce that it was the ‘largest furnishing emporium in the world’, but it had no interest in developing other departments; Heal’s, in Tottenham Court Road, had picked up the modern department stores’ methods of display, but it stuck with furnishings. Even the huge Peter Robinson shop, which employed nearly 2,000 workers across 100 departments, sold nothing but ladies’ clothes.107 Arthur Liberty, although ultimately diversifying, began by dealing in only a narrow range of merchandise. Liberty had first worked at Farmer and Roger’s, a shawl warehouse in Regent Street. In 1862 an international exhibition held in Kensington showed William Morris wallpaper for the first time, next to the first exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts to appear in Europe. (Commodore Perry had sailed into Yedo Bay nine years before, and the first commercial treaty between Japan and Britain had been signed only in 1858.) After the exhibition closed, Farmer and Roger bought some of the displays and set up an Oriental Warehouse in the shop next to their own, with Arthur Liberty as its junior salesman. The Oriental Warehouse became a meeting place for a ‘bohemian’ set that included the painters Whistler and Rossetti and the actress Ellen Terry—the forerunners of the Aesthetic Movement. As John Barker had done, Liberty asked to be taken into partnership. As with Barker, he was refused, and he too left to start up his own business. (But unlike Whiteley, whose name survives in some form of retailing to this day, Farmer and Roger’s went under, while Liberty’s continues to flourish.)

  Liberty at first specialized in fabrics; in less than a year he had added Japanese goods, as well as fans, wallpapers, fabrics, screens, lacquerware and other exotica from the Far East more generally.* Soon he was arranging for manufacturers to print English fabrics using Japanese techniques and Japanese-y colours, which he dubbed ‘Art Colours’, but which quickly became known to everyone else as ‘Liberty Colours’. Queen’s magazine had earlier described them: ‘There are tints that call to mind French and English mustards, sage-greens, willow-greens, greens that look like curry, and greens that are remarkable on lichen-coloured walls, and also among marshy vegetation.’ More memorably, W. S. Gilbert satirized both the fabrics and those who admired them in Patience, the operetta he wrote with Arthur Sullivan, in 1881: its protagonist, Bunthorne, is

  A Japanese young man,

  A blue-and-white young man,

  Francesca di Rimini, miminy-piminy

  Je ne sais quoi young man!

  A pallid and thin young man,

  A haggard and lank young man,

  A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery*

  Foot-in-the-gr
ave young man!

  Patience mocked the whole Aesthetic Movement: Bunthorne was an obvious parody of Whistler, while Grosvenor, his rival, was Oscar Wilde.† Yet Liberty’s, at the heart of that movement, relished its connection to the parodists Gilbert and Sullivan too, and found it financially rewarding: Liberty’s fabrics were used in the production of Patience, and credited in the programme beside advertisements for Liberty’s ‘artistic silks’. When the play moved to the newly built Savoy Theatre, Liberty’s decorated a room to receive the Prince of Wales for the opening. The store continued to be linked to Gilbert and Sullivan’s works, sending someone to Japan to research clothes and materials before the shop’s designers began work on the costumes and sets for The Mikado in 1885.

  Notwithstanding this interest, Liberty did not neglect his primary business: by 1880 his Regent Street shop had seven departments; in 1883 he bought another shop on the same side of Regent Street, one shop away from his first; he acquired the upper floor of the property in the middle and joined the two by a staircase known as the ‘Camel’s Back’. Soon he acquired the downstairs of the middle building too, and ultimately he occupied five shops in a row, maintaining the disparate nature of the façades until Regent Street was redeveloped in the 1920s. Although he never went in for ‘universality’ on Whiteley’s scale, by that time he had an Eastern Bazaar basement, which sold Japanese and Chinese antiques, porcelain, bronzes, lacquerware, metalware, brass trays, dolls, fans and other knick-knacks, screens and ‘decorative furnishing objects’. There was an Arab Tea Room, and a Curio Department that sold armour, swords, daggers, ivory carvings, bronzes and ‘antique metalwork suitable for the decoration of halls’. There were also service departments, including a Paper Hanging studio and a Decoration Studio. From 1884 a Costume Department sold dresses designed by Arthur Liberty and made up from his fabrics. Now both a house and its owner could be entirely ‘done’ by Liberty.110 Liberty had created a space where—in a very modern fashion—one could acquire a lifestyle.