Judith Flanders

Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain


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       2 ‘A Nation of Shopkeepers’: The Eighteenth-Century Shop

      NEW SHOPS, BIGGER SHOPS, more heavily stocked shops, speciality sellers, brightly lit windows, fixed prices instead of bargaining, advertisements everywhere—it seemed that the nineteenth century brought nothing but change to how people had shopped for centuries. Yet all these things, and many more, arrived not in the nineteenth century, but in the eighteenth. Shops and shopping had long been undergoing a permanent revolution when the Victorian age had just begun. Dr Johnson had understood this by the 1750s. Shopping was no longer an action rooted in necessity, he wrote, but was now a pastime, a leisure activity: ‘He that had resolved to buy no more, feels his constancy subdued…He is attracted by rarity, seduced by example and inflamed by competition.’1 Johnson was talking about fashionable shops in fashionable parts of London. But the daily purchases by the lesser folk were fuelled by the same desires, and it was their mass purchasing power that drove the century-long explosion of shop development.

      Much of what we know today about shops in the eighteenth century comes either from the higher strata of life or is sketchy at best. It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that the extent and development of shops across the country has been badly underestimated, owing in the main to poor survival of records. For example, as late as 1822—3 Pigot’s London and Provincial New Commercial Directory listed no shopkeepers of any sort in Manchester. The obvious reaction, of course, is that this simply could not have been true; but the scale of the directory’s oversight was made clear by the historian Roger Scola, who identified 400 small food shops in the city in the 1810s alone—and that takes into account neither the many many more shops for which no evidence has survived, nor any shops that sold non-food items, which were outside the terms of his survey.2 Furthermore, it is becoming clearer that, just as the number of shops has been underestimated, so too has the sophistication of retail systems been equally misunderstood. In fact the number of shops, the type of shops, and the quantity and quality of goods stocked, as well as the methods used to sell them, all began to develop in the eighteenth century.