Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  64Cited in Cox, Complete Tradesman, pp. 109-10.

  65Cited in McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 125.

  66Cited in Dolan, Josiah Wedgwood, p. 216.

  67McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 130-31.

  68Ibid., p. 126.

  69Cited in ibid., p. 118.

  70Cited in Una des Fontaines, ‘Wedgwood’s London Showrooms’, Proceedings of the Wedgwood Society, 8 (1970), p. 197.

  71Simeon Shaw, A History of the Staffordshire Potteries and the Rise and Progress of the Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain (Hanley, [n.p.], 1829), p. 124.

  72Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, p. 21.

  73Ibid., p. 48.

  74The information in this paragraph is derived from Bagwell, Transport Revolution, pp. 23-6.

  75Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, pp. 46-7.

  76Bagwell, Transport Revolution, pp. 29-30.

  77The information in these two paragraphs is from Bagwell, Transport Revolution, pp. 31-7 and 45, except the information about Kirkby Stephen, which is in Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, p. 12.

  78Bagwell, Transport Revolution, p. 45.

  79Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [1776], Glasgow, [no publisher], 1805), vol. I, pp. 25, 202.

  80Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660-1770 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 22.

  81Bagwell, Transport Revolution, pp. 1-4.

  82Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (London, Evelyn, Adams & Mackay, 1968), pp. 15-16.

  83Cited in Uglow, Lunar Men, pp. 142-3.

  84Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, pp. 50, 52, 55, 58.

  85These two paragraphs are based on Stanley Chapman, The Early Factory Masters: The Transition to the Factory System in the Midland Textile Industry (London, Gregg Revivals, 1992), pp. 85-91.

  86Roger Scola, Feeding the Victorian City: The Food Supply of Manchester, 1770-1870, ed. W. A. Armstrong and Pauline Scola (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 202-4.

  87Christina Fowler, ‘Changes in Provincial Retail Practice during the Eighteenth Century, with Particular Reference to Central-Southern England,’ in Nicholas Alexander and Gary Akehurst, eds., The Emergence of Modern Retailing, 1750-1950 (London, Frank Cass, 1999), p. 41.

  88Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, p. 76.

  89McKendrick, ‘The Commercialization of Fashion’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 88.

  90James Woodforde, The Diary of a Country Parson, 1740-1803 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1924-31), vol. 1, p. 332.

  91Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London, Woodfall, 1851), vol. I, p. 27.

  92Cited in Dorothy Davis, A History of Shopping (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 245.

  93Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain 1660-1800 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 136.

  3: The Ladies’ (and Gents’) Paradise: The Nineteenth-century Shop

  1Scola, Feeding the Victorian City, pp. 206-8.

  2Ralph Hancock, ‘Sugar’, in Alan Davidson, ed., The Penguin Companion to Food (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2002), pp. 917-21.

  3James B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 1850-1950: A Study of Trends in Retailing with Special Reference to the Development of Co-operative, Multiple Shop and Department Store Methods of Trading (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1954), p. 2.

  4Alexander and Akehurst, The Emergence of Modern Retailing, pp. 16-20.

  5Cited in Arnold Bonner, British Cooperation: The History, Principles, and Organisation of the British Co-operative Movement (rev. ed., Manchester, Cooperative Union, 1970), pp. 22-3.

  6The information in the previous three paragraphs comes from Bonner, British Co-operation, pp. 28, 44, 45, 49-51, 51-2, 73, 103-4.

  7Julia Hood and B. S. Yamey, ‘The Middle-Class Co-operative Retailing Societies in London, 1864-1900’, Oxford Economic Papers, 9 (1957), p. 311.

  8Ibid.

  9Winstanley, Shopkeeper’s World, pp. 36-7.

  10Mathias, Retailing Revolution, p. 36.

  11Ibid., pp. 96-7.

  12Francis Goodall, ‘Marketing Consumer Products before 1914: Rowntrees and Elect Cocoa’, in R. P. T. Davenport-Hines, ed., Markets and Bagmen: Studies in the History of Marketing and British Industrial Performance, 1830-1939 (Aldershot, Gower, 1986), p. 19.

  13Mathias, Retailing Revolution, p. 48.

  14Ibid., pp. 45-6.

  15Said by me among others. This is the peril of thinking that the middle classes represented everyman (and woman).

  16Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, p. 238.

  17Ibid., p. 239.

  18Stanley Chapman, ‘The Innovating Entrepreneurs in the British Ready-Made Clothing Industry’, Textile History, 24, 1 (1993), p. 5.

  19A Visit to the Bazaar (London, J. Harris, 1818), pp. 72-3.

  20Katrina Honeyman, Well Suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry, 1850-1990 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 10-11.

  21Daniel Kirwan, Palace and Hovel, or, Phases of London Life (Hartford, Conn., Belknap & Bliss, 1871), p. 91; cited in Breward, Hidden Consumer, p. 125.

  22Kirwan, Palace and Hovel, p. 140; cited in Breward, Hidden Consumer, p. 123.

  23George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock; or, the Hours of the Day and Night in London (London, Houlston & Wright, 1859), pp. 83-6.

  24Official Catalogue, vol. 2, section 3, sub-section 20, entry 135a, p. 585.

  25Norah Waugh, The Cut of Men’s Clothes, 1600-1900 (New York, Theatre Arts Books, 1964), p. 131.

  26Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 123.

  27Honeyman, Well Suited, p. 15.

  28Ibid., pp. 12-14.

  29Ibid., pp. 21-2.

  30Don Bissell, The First Conglomerate: 45 Years of the Singer Sewing Machine Company (Brunswick, Me., Audenreed, 1999), pp. 21, 25.

  31Ibid., pp. 26-7.

  32Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned, p. 15.

  33Honeyman, Well Suited, p. 14.

  34Sarah Levitt, ‘Manchester Mackintoshes: A History of the Rubberized Garment Trade in Manchester’, Textile History, 17, 1 (1986), pp. 51-2.

  35Chapman, ‘The Innovating Entrepreneurs’, Textile History, 24, 1 (1993), p. 10.

  36Thomas Hancock, Personal narrative of the original and progress of the caoutchouc or india rubber manufacture in England ([no publisher or place of publication], 1857), p. 55; cited in Levitt, ‘Manchester Mackintoshes’, Textile History, 17, 1 (1986), p. 52.

  37Cited in ibid., p. 53.

  38George Augustus Sala, Gaslight and Daylight, with Some London Scenes they Shine Upon (London, Chapman & Hall, 1859), p. 59.

  39Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned, p. 53.

  40Cited in G. B. Sutton, ‘The Marketing of Ready Made Footwear in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of the Firm of C. & J. Clark’, Business History, 6, 2 (1964), pp. 94-5.

  41Penelope Byrde, The Male Image: Men’s Fashion in Britain, 1300-1970 (London, B. T. Batsford, 1979), p. 200.

  42Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, p. 240.

  43Byrde, Male Image, pp. 200-201; Sutton, ‘The Marketing of Ready Made Footwear’, Business History, 6, 2 (1964), p. 96.

  44Sutton, ‘The Marketing of Ready Made Footwear’, Business History, 6, 2 (1964), pp. 96-7.

  45Alison Gernsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey (New York, Dover, 1981), p. 38.

  46Chapman, ‘The Innovating Entrepreneurs’, Textile History, 24, 1 (1993), pp. 16-17.

  47All in the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  48Cited in Altick, Shows of London, p. 221.

  49Cited in Chapman, ‘The Innovating Entrepreneurs’, Textile History, 24, 1 (1993), pp. 19-20.

  50Cited in Breward, Hidd
en Consumer, p. 158.

  51Cited in ibid., p. 156.

  52Ibid., p. 125.

  53Terry Nevett, ‘Advertising and Editorial Integrity in the Nineteenth Century’, in Michael Harris and Alan Lee, eds., The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries (London, Associated Universities Presses, 1986), pp. 151-2.

  54Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 12.

  55Cited in David Alexander, Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution (London, Athlone Press, 1970), p. 10.

  56I owe the omnibus information in the three preceding paragraphs to Derek H. Aldcroft and Michael J. Freeman, Transport in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 135, 139-40.

  57Ibid., pp. 143-4, 153-5.

  58Bagwell, Transport Revolution, pp. 140-41.

  59Aldcroft and Freeman, Transport in the Industrial Revolution, pp. 144-5.

  60Bagwell, Transport Revolution, p. 123.

  61Cited in Cox, Complete Tradesman, p. 96.

  62Grant Thorburn, Men and Manners in Britain (New York, [no publisher], 1834), pp. 35-6, cited in Altick, Shows of London, p. 226.

  63Francis Place, The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771-1854), ed. Mary Thale (London, Cambridge University Press, 1972), vol. 2, p. 123.

  64Charles Manby Smith, The Little World of London; or, Pictures in Little of London Life (London, Arthur Hall, Virtue, and Co., 1857), pp. 19-24.

  65Sophie von la Roche, Sophie in London, 1786, being the Diary of Sophie v. la Roche, tr. Clare Williams (London, Jonathan Cape, 1933), pp. 237-9.

  66Ibid., p. 87.

  67Place, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 123.

  68Cited in Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption, p. 55.

  69[W. H. Ablett, ed.], Reminiscences of an Old Draper (London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1876), p. 18.

  70Ibid., pp. 201-2.

  71The two sets of streets are named in Picture of London, 1803, cited in McKendrick, ‘The Commercialization of Fashion’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 78.

  72Robert Southey, Letters from England (1807), ed. Jack Simmons (London, Cresset Press, 1951), pp. 49-50.

  73Listed in Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 14.

  74Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845), tr. and ed. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford, Cal., Stanford University Press, 1968), p. 56.

  75Michael Winstanley, ‘Temples of Commerce: Revolutions in Shopping and Banking’, in Philip Waller, ed., The English Urban Landscape (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 154.

  76Cited in Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 207.

  77Ibid.

  78Bill Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (London, Leicester University Press, 1995), p. 75.

  79Cited in Cox, Complete Tradesman, pp. 142-3.

  80Cited in Walsh, ‘The Newness of the Department Store’, in Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption, p. 58.

  81Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui (1800; 1809), ed. Marilyn Butler (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992), p. 147.

  82Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (1814), ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack and Peter Sabor (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 426.

  83Frances Burney, Evelina, or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance in the World (1778), ed. Margaret Anne Doody (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1994), p. 456, n. 48.

  84Cited in Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 18.

  85Ibid., p. 22.

  86Altick, Shows of London, pp. 38-9.

  87Sala, Twice Round the Clock, p. 175.

  88A Visit to the Bazaar, pp. 3-5.

  89Cited in Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 19.

  90Emil Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise) (1883), tr. and ed. Robin Buss (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001), p. 23.

  91Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa, Berg, 1986), p. 188.

  92Fowler, ‘Changes in Provincial Retail Practice’, in Alexander and Akehurst, The Emergence of Modern Retailing, p. 50.

  93Gareth Shaw, ‘The Evolution and Impact of Large-Scale Retailing in Britain’, in John Benson and Gareth Shaw, eds., The Evolution of Retail Systems, c.1800-1914 (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1992), p. 138.

  94Lancaster, The Department Store, pp. 48-50.

  95Ibid., pp. 34-6.

  96Ibid., p. 51.

  97Cited in Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 82.

  98Brent Shannon, ‘ReFashioning Men: Fashion, Masculinity, and the Cultivation of the Male Consumer in Britain, 1860-1914’, in Victorian Studies, 46, 4 (2004), p. 611.

  99Asa Briggs, Friends of the People: The Centenary History of Lewis’s (London, B. T. Batsford, 1956), pp. 28-9, 38, 43, except the information about the Two-shilling Tea, which appears in Forrest, Tea for the British, pp. 175-6.

  100Briggs, Friends of the People, p. 37.

  101K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846-1886 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 352; Winstanley, ‘Temples of Commerce’, in Waller, The English Urban Landscape, p. 164.

  102Briggs, Friends of the People, p. 77.

  103Listed in Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 278.

  104Shaw, ‘The Evolution and Impact of Large-Scale Retailing in Britain’, in Benson and Shaw, Retailing Industry, p. 239.

  105Ian Nairn, Nairn’s London (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966), pp. 165-6.

  106Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, pp. 152-3.

  107Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, p. 150.

  108Zola, Au Bonheur des dames, pp. 407-8.

  109The information on the murders is to be found in Robert and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (London, Heinemann, 2006), p. 382; the evaluation of Pilotelle’s Marat collection is from the preface of Ernest Balfour Bax, Jean-Paul Marat: The People’s Friend, which can be found on the Marxists Internet Archive, at www.marxists.org/archive/bax/1900/marat/preface.htm.

  110All from Alison Adburgham, Liberty’s: A Biography of a Shop (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1975), pp. 12-17, 21-2, 30-31, 35-45.

  111Lancaster, The Department Store, pp. 55-6.

  1121900 figures: Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, p. 29. 1910 figures: Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, ‘The World of the Department Store: Distribution, Culture and Social Change’, in Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption, p. 5. The conclusion is, however, my own.

  113Gordon Honeycombe, Selfridges: Seventy-five Years: The Story of the Store, 1909-1984 (London, Park Lane Press, 1984), pp. 22-4.

  114[Ablett], Reminiscences of an Old Draper, pp. 30ff.

  115Honeycombe, Selfridges, pp. 25-6.

  116This paragraph relies on Lancaster, The Department Store, pp. 72, 75, except the information about the Selfridge’s livery, from Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 274.

  117Cited in Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, pp. 155, 158-9.

  118Honeycombe, Selfridges, pp. 13-14.

  119Mathias, Retailing Revolution, pp. 100-101, 108.

  120Honeycombe, Selfridges, p. 12; Lancaster, The Department Store, p. 72.

  121Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, p. 157.

  122Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, p. 276.

  4: Read All About It: Buying the News

  1John Brewer is the author of the phrase ‘legislative accident’, Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 131.

  2Clark, British Clubs and Societies, p. 40; Roy Porter, ‘Material Pleasure in the Consumer Society’, in Porter and Roberts, Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, p. 24; Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, p. 129.

  3Porter and Roberts, Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, p. 24.

  4French, English, Scottish and Welsh (English-language) newspapers: Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707
-1837 (London, Pimlico, 1994), pp. 41, 220; Ireland: Richard Cargill Cole, Irish Booksellers and English Writers, 1740-1800 (London, Mansell, 1986), pp. 15-17; Welshlanguage newspaper: John Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 16.

  5Diana Dixon, ‘Newspapers in Huntingdonshire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Peter Isaac and Barry McKay, eds., The Mighty Engine: The Printing Press and its Impact (Winchester, St Paul’s Bibliographies, 2000), pp. 143-4; Northampton Mercury, 31 May 1720.

  6Bob Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004), pp. 114-15.

  7James Raven, ‘The Book Trades’, in Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England ([Leicester?], Leicester University Press, 1982), p. 24.

  8Cited in William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 309-11.

  9T. R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain: A History (London, Heinemann, 1982), p. 51.

  10Altick, English Common Reader, p. 323.

  11Clark, British Clubs and Societies, p. 69.

  12Cited in Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 183-4.

  13Nevett, Advertising in Britain, p. 51.

  14R. Bradley, The Virtue and Use of Coffee . . . (London, 1772), cited in Walvin, Fruits of Empire, p. 37.

  15Nevett, Advertising in Britain, p. 51.

  16Cited in Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 133-4.

  17Jeremy Greenwood, Newspapers and the Post Office, 1635-1834 ([no place of publication], Postal History Society, 1971), unpaginated.

  18Howard Robinson, Britain’s Post Office: A History of Development from the Beginnings to the Present Day (London, Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 65.

  19Bagwell, Transport Revolution, p. 40.

  20Robinson, Britain’s Post Office, pp. 102, 104-6, 114.

  21Bagwell, Transport Revolution, p. 41.

  22Robinson, Britain’s Post Office, p. 121.

  23Feather, Provincial Book Trade, p. 48.

  24Colley, Britons, p. 220.

  25Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street, pp. 96, 100.

  26Feather, Provincial Book Trade, p. 17.

  27la Roche, Sophie in London, pp. 95-100.

  28Neil McKendrick, ‘George Packwood and the Commercialization of Shaving’, in McKendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 176-7.