Judith Flanders

Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain


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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.

      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