Judith Flanders

Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain


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and reduced service in exchange for cash sales, fixed prices, some goods only in large quantities, others with an extra discount for bulk. It was, perhaps new to them although, as we have seen, none of these notions was innovatory. Soon mail order was added to the list of services, together with expanded ranges: wine, tobacco, baby linen, books, boots and shoes, coal, carpets, drapery, milk and butter, meat, pianos, even surgical instruments—the Civil Service Co-operative Society and the Army and Navy were now a long way from the working-class aims of the originators of the movement, and were heading instead towards the department stores (see below, pp. 110ff.). Those groups formally connected to the CWS stayed true to their origins, selling only groceries, fresh meat, and in some places drapery, tailoring and shoes and clogs.

      Despite the financial structure that linked the co-ops to their middleclass brethren, the range of goods available in the co-op shops themselves more closely resembled that in the multiple stores (which today would be called chain stores) that were appearing at a rapid rate in urban centres at the same time. Co-ops and multiples were similar in that they both aimed at the working-class customer; they both relied on their size to achieve price reductions; they both sold a narrow range of goods, primarily food; they sold at fixed prices; they accepted only cash; they reached their customers by branding their outlets with a central name; and they provided a bare minimum of services to keep costs down. They were different, however, in an equally basic way. Co-ops were decentralized groups that shared services, fixed their own prices and shared their profits via membership dividends based on purchases. By contrast, the aim of multiples, first, last and always, was to make profits for their owners.9 There was no attempt to share the wealth, or form a better society.

      The main growth of multiples came in the later part of the nineteenth century, but preliminary stirrings had been there for some time. Williams of Manchester, a typical early example, was created after a Mrs Williams married a miner; she had previously owned a grocery in Didsbury, a prosperous suburb of Manchester. In 1865 she took a double-fronted shop there; in 1888 she opened another shop in Cheadle; in 1891 yet another, this time in West Didsbury; within thirty years Williams of Manchester had five branches, all in prosperous, middle-class suburbs. Eventually it expanded to thirty.10 Similar in pattern if not in scale was Thomas Lipton. He was born in Glasgow in 1850, the son of an Irish labourer and his wife, who had emigrated during the Famine. At eighteen he joined his parents in the small grocery shop they then ran; with some savings and a year’s pay he opened a second shop. By 1880 he had twelve shops in Glasgow, with a turnover of £200,000. His first shop in England was opened the following year, and by 1889 he had 30 shops and a turnover of £1.5 million.11 Less than a decade later, there were 242 shops in Britain, and a smattering of overseas outlets.12

      Once these huge shops reached a certain level, there were two main ways of expanding: the shops could begin to stock an ever-wider range of goods, while the services for customers were also enlarged; or the goods and services could remain as they were, while the number of customers was increased nationally by opening ever-more branches. The first decision led, essentially, to shops becoming department stores, the second to remaining as multiples. Multiples were designed to serve the working classes, and it was judged that essential goods at the lowest prices were what would entice these customers in, while convenience of location and long opening hours were necessary for this market. Department stores catered to the middle classes, with enough cash and enough leisure that price was less important than high levels of service and a wide variety of stock.

      The development of department stores in the second half of the nineteenth century was not as sudden, or as radical, as has sometimes been assumed. Instead, two types of older retail style developed and converged to create what seemed like an entirely new phenomenon. The first development was the arrival of new middle-class haberdasheries and drapery shops, larger in size than they had ever been before, and utilizing new technologies such as plate glass for the windows, gas lighting both inside and out, and more (see below, p. 100). The second was the expansion of working-class purchasing power and the concurrent creation of a ready-to-wear market that was encouraging the development of mass-production methods.

      Apart from these rare middle-class sightings, the working classes and the lower middle classes, especially the more prosperous, had been wearing ready-made clothes in various forms for years. Less exclusive tailors and mercers often had a sideline as ‘slop sellers’, stocking cheap ready-made clothing. Men’s shirts had been some of the earliest readymade clothes: the garments were of a standard shape, and they were more or less permanently covered by waistcoats and jackets and therefore size and fit were less important than for outerwear. Ready-made shirts had originally been produced for sailors and for manual labourers; then the working classes more widely began to buy them. The next stage in the more general availability of ready-to-wear clothes was the production of uniforms, which were worn by soldiers and sailors, as we would expect today, and also by charity- and other schoolchildren, by servants in livery, by railway workers, by postmen and other low-grade civilservice workers, and by the inhabitants of workhouses and prisons. Sundry small wars had kept the armed-forces market buoyant for a century past, but the beginning of the French wars sharply increased the need for uniforms. With this, and with the working