by Pamela Cox
This explosion of popular reading material affordable to working people was welcomed by some feminist and socialist thinkers, who believed that any form of reading was better than none. But what is difficult to comprehend from a twenty-first-century perspective is the anxiety on the part of more conservative thinkers around cheap reading material, sentimental fiction and bitty magazine columns. From an educated Victorian perspective, reading was a fundamentally important activity, which had the power to shape the reader’s body and soul, for good or evil. Reading was compared to eating, with Sir Francis Bacon often invoked: ‘Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested.’41 The importance of reading, its role in shaping the reader’s moral and physical being, was discussed by church leaders and philanthropists, publishing magnates and parliamentarians, Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope.
The argument followed that, just as eating bad food would lead to food-poisoning, so reading ‘bad’ literature would endanger the soul. ‘The strawberry ices of literature glow on every railway bookstall,’ warned an article called ‘What Should Women Read?’. ‘These are harmless occasional reading, but a mind glutted with them needs medicine as much as a greedy child after a surfeit of sugar plums.’42 Others had far stronger fears and criticisms, for sentimental fiction with its pat romantic endings was rarely seen as mere escapism. Romantic fantasy might breed dissatisfaction in the reader when comparing her own life to a fictional life. It might give her ideas above her station, if all the stories she reads end with the girl like her walking up the aisle into the arms of a baronet. Another concerned writer criticised popular reading material as a false representation of real life. ‘It heightens only imaginary and unattainable enjoyments, and transforms life itself into a dream, the realities of which are all made painful and disgusting.’43
But even worse than breeding internal dissatisfaction, the wrong kind of reading apparently had the power to spark an external questioning of the social order. There was fear that reading might stir up dangerous political instincts, leading directly to revolt. This was not as far-fetched as it seems: memories of the Peterloo Massacre of reformers in 1819, of Chartist uprisings and revolts against the Corn Laws of the 1830s and 1840s, all fuelled by political tracts written by pamphleteers, were still strong. There was an acute awareness of the power of the printed word.
Not just the body politic, but also the physical body was seen to be in danger. On the one hand, the distracted reading of short magazine pieces might destroy the mind’s ability to focus on weightier, longer subjects: too much snacking, no substantial meat and potatoes. On the other, sentimental romances, with their ‘imaginary and unattainable enjoyments’, might inflame the reader’s imagination, and thus her body parts, leading to early sexualisation or over-sexualisation in adolescent girls and young women.44 For shopgirls, working in a sexualised environment of public display, it was feared that such reading might inflame them even further. American physician Dr Mary Wood-Allen certainly believed so. Her impressive title was World Superintendent of the Purity Department of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the United States. Her work focused on women’s health and sexual purity, and was read by similarly minded thinkers in Britain. In 1899, she published What a Young Woman Ought to Know, a most extraordinary how-to manual, with tips and views on countless aspects of a young woman’s life, from dancing to fresh air, from the ‘sex mania’ sparked by over-passionate female friendships to the problems of ‘tight clothing on the pelvic organs’.
Dr Wood-Allen warned, ‘I would like to call your attention to the great evil of romance-reading, both in the production of premature development and in the creation of morbid mental states.’ She felt that these negative mental states led directly to negative physical states, in particular to those afflictions classed as female. She listed ‘nervousness, hysteria, and a host of maladies which largely depend on disturbed nerves’; such classic ‘women’s illnesses’ were thought to stem from the female nervous and reproductive systems. Indeed, one of the most evil physical afflictions that Dr Wood-Allen identified was masturbation. Romance reading drew ‘mental pictures which arouse the spasmodic feelings of sexual pleasure’.45 Sexual pleasure was meant to be enjoyed not solo but with one’s husband, and to remain firmly under covers in the marital bed.
Attending the music hall and the new musical comedies might not lead to a shopgirl pleasuring herself, but there was, it was believed, a real danger of her being pleasured by others in the excitable and unruly crowd, either during or after the show. By the turn of the century, music hall was at the height of its popularity; theatres up and down the country, from Glasgow’s Britannia Music Hall to Leeds’ City Varieties, seated hundreds, sometimes thousands of people each evening. Variety was the name of the game: handbills advertised lions’ ‘comiques’, escapologists such as ‘the Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’ and, most famous of all, star singer Marie Lloyd. No wonder this entertainment seemed tempting to shopgirls who worked long hours and then returned to the strictness and drabness of shop lodgings at night.
A writer on domestic life, Mrs Jeannie Loftie, recognised the temptation: ‘There are many steps between the shop and home. The pretty work-girl need not go alone.’ She might be wooed by a ‘respectable young man’ of her own class. Or a man superior in social position might take her ‘to some place of amusement where pleasure, and above all, excitement can be found!’46 And this, Mrs Loftie felt, was dangerous. For music hall crowds were rowdy; audiences were allowed to smoke, drink and eat, unlike in traditional theatres, and there was ample opportunity for getting close to your lover. On top of this, the very nature of the entertainment was spectacular, sensational and risqué. The aim was to stimulate and electrify a mixed crowd. To polite society, both the behaviour of the audiences and the entertainment itself seemed indecent and vulgar, and music hall came under sustained attack. In 1897 the London County Council launched an investigation. There is an apocryphal story that the LCC Theatres and Music Hall Committee called up Marie Lloyd to respond to the accusations of indecency. She sang them a supposedly offensive song straight, with no accompanying gestures. Next she sang the respectable drawing-room song ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’, adding ‘every possible lewd gesture, wink, and innuendo’.47 ‘It’s all in the mind,’ she is supposed to have concluded.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century a new form of theatre emerged: the musical comedy. Elements of farce, vaudeville and comic opera were mixed with a longer, sustained storyline and presented by theatre managers as a more respectable entertainment, aimed directly at this new class of urban working people. Scottish theatre critic William Archer described his fellow theatre-goers on a Saturday night as ‘young men and women who worked hard for their living at the desk or behind the counter. We were simply good, honest, respectable, kindly lower middle class lads and lasses, enjoying an entertainment exactly suited to our taste and comprehension.’48 Another theatre critic had a more nuanced take on the ‘lower middle class lads and lasses’. He was perplexed at the way they conducted themselves, noticing both the pleasures and dangers associated with their urban nightlife, as they wandered ‘alone at night from one end of London to the other, spending all their money in gadding about, on six-penny novels, on magazines, and, above all, on the theatre’.49
Shopgirls didn’t just form a part of this new audience; as in fiction, they were the heroines of the stage too. Playwrights like H.J. Dam saw the potential – ‘As many people do business at the large shops and stores, I realised the stores formed an excellent sphere to make the basis of a musical piece’ – and came up with The Shop Girl, which was staged at the Gaiety. The famous Gaiety Theatre was on Aldwych just outside the City of London, first established as the Strand Musick Hall. When The Shop Girl opened there in 1895, the show heralded a new era in musical comedy. It was less raunchy than earlier musical farces, but its plot was still romantic, as London shopgirl Bessie Brent turns out to be a million
aire’s daughter and ends up marrying her poor but respectable sweetheart Charles. And the acts and songs were still racy. It was the first show to feature the beautiful dancing corps of the Gaiety Girls and its most famous song was ‘Her golden hair was hanging down her back’. The show was a hit, a very palpable hit, to use Shakespeare’s phrase. It transferred to Broadway and was performed again and again in Britain, perpetuating a certain sexual knowingness, despite its supposed respectability, that infuriated its conservative critics.50
The outpouring of anxiety around the morality of shopgirls, from such a wide range of interest groups – conservative thinkers and feminists, philanthropists and medics, religious writers and parliamentarians – testified to a society that was trying to come to terms with a new class, the ‘kindly lower middle class lads and lasses’ that the Scottish theatre critic described. For the awareness of class, of one’s ‘station’ in life, had in no way diminished as the population grew and society changed. In the teeming cities, where servants and mistresses, grocers and clerks, lords and shopgirls now lived and worked cheek by jowl, class awareness, and particularly awareness of the fine gradations between classes, arguably increased. This in turn raised the question of where this new breed of working people would fit in, and whether they would accept the status quo, or try to change it to suit their own lives.
Some people fitted in nowhere; they fell through the cracks in society. Horace Rayner was one such man: a complex, pitiable figure, his dramatic end the byproduct of a shopgirl’s love affair. His mother was the sister of Louisa Turner, another of William Whiteley’s shopgirl mistresses. Who Horace Rayner’s father was remains a mystery. It was his ‘great secret … the curse of his life’.51 Horace Rayner claimed it was William Whiteley, suggesting that he had seduced the two Turner sisters and fathered sons by them both. Horace Rayner stated his mother had revealed the truth to him on her deathbed. By 1907, Horace Rayner was unemployed, unable to support his young family, susceptible to erratic mood swings and depression. He needed money desperately. On 24 January, after several glasses of brandy, Rayner gained entry to Whiteley’s office on Westbourne Grove. A messenger to an umbrella-maker witnessed what happened next. He saw William Whiteley come out of his office and tell his staff to ‘fetch me a policeman’. Whiteley was followed by Rayner, who apparently asked, ‘Are you going to give in?’ When Whiteley replied no, Rayner said, ‘Then you are a dead man, Mr Whiteley.’ Rayner then pulled out a revolver and shot Whiteley twice. The messenger didn’t see what happened next, for he ‘was frightened and ran behind the counter’.52 A third shot rang out and the messenger saw Mr Whiteley fall.
Horace Rayner had murdered William Whiteley. He then tried to commit suicide, shooting himself in the right eye. But he was still alive and was taken to St Mary’s Hospital, where he told the casualty surgeon, ‘I am the son of Mr William Whiteley. I have shot Mr Whiteley. I have shot myself and have made a mistake. Give me something to make me sleep away, there’s a good boy.’53
Five suffragettes hold a broken window in its frame, with Adela Pankhurst on the far left, following the chaotic ‘War on Windows’ in 1912, when over 270 shop windows were smashed.
CHAPTER 4
GRACE DARE UNDERCOVER
Grace Dare lived up to her courageous nom de plume. Going undercover to expose shopworkers’ scandalous conditions, she took the fight for their rights to the top. In fact, Grace Dare was none other than Miss Margaret Bondfield. In 1896, at the age of twenty-three, Margaret was already a seasoned shopgirl, having worked her way up from draper’s apprentice in Hove to positions in a series of high-class shops in London. She had become a secret member of the National Union of Shop Assistants, which was founded in 1891, an affiliation forbidden by her employers. She missed church on Sundays, her only day off, to attend union meetings. But she was far more than simply a secret union member. She was a spy. In 1896, she began penning a series of bold articles with the aim of stirring up the world of shopkeeping, aimed at exposing the exploitative conditions of shopwork. Margaret recalled how she would wait until her room-mates were asleep and then ‘stealthily, with the feeling of a conspirator, knowing I was committing an offence for which I could be heavily fined, I would light my half-penny dip, hiding its glare by means of a towel and set to work on my monthly article’.1
Bondfield’s fierce sense of social justice had begun at home. She was born the eleventh child of Anne and William Bondfield, but in spite of the size of their brood, they hadn’t neglected Margaret. A Somerset textile worker, William had instilled in his daughter a strong sense of the dignity of work and a belief in women’s rights. When Margaret left home to work many miles away in Sussex, she struck up an unusual and powerful acquaintance with one of her well-heeled Hove customers, Louisa Martindale. Mrs Martindale was a prominent reformer with a passion for women’s freedom. Always keen on finding practical steps forward, she held open house for local shopgirls every other Sunday. The event had in fact begun as an open house for isolated and often poorly paid governesses, offering them a chance to unwind and make friends. Martindale’s daughter, Hilda, recalls that her mother had then extended the event on alternate weeks to ‘another set of women whom she began to think were also oppressed – shop assistants’. She remembers that ‘[a]mong these came an eager, attractive and vividly alive girl of sixteen, Margaret Bondfield’. The girl was ‘not happy’ and ‘needed sympathy’ and was just as ready as the governesses ‘to talk when she found her hostess really wanted to listen’. Margaret was spellbound by Mrs Martindale, whom she later described as ‘a most vivid influence in my life, the first woman of broad culture I had met, she seemed to recognise me and make me recognise myself as a person of independent thought and action … she put me in the way of knowledge that has been of help to many score of my shop mates’.2
When Bondfield moved to London in search of better prospects, she was further primed for politics. Ever eager to improve herself, she signed up for an evening class studying the poet Robert Browning, little knowing that she would soon sign up for much more besides. One of the other members of the class belonged to the Women’s Industrial Council, an organisation newly set up by Clementina Black in 1894 to improve the lives of working women. Black was a socialist and the daughter of a Brighton solicitor. Like other members of the Council, she was critical of the philanthropy so beloved by other middle-class reformers, believing that lasting social change first required solid changes in the law. In the evening class, Margaret’s new friend persuaded her to assist the Council as an undercover agent. How exactly their discussions segued from Browning’s verse to covert operations will have to remain a mystery; Bondfield in her autobiography is simply matter-of-fact about this highly unusual conversation, one that was to change the course of her life and propel her into politics.
Mrs Gilchrist Thompson, a leading light of the Council, explained that a scheme was ‘hammered out’ whereby Margaret undertook to spend two years investigating shop conditions. At her ‘own discretion’, she was ‘to obtain engagements in various shops and to stay long enough to judge of the conditions’. She started in ‘a high-class shop (but one of the worst, as we believed)’, but ‘as her references grew shorter, she descended the scale of the shopping world’. She was thus, quite knowingly, ‘ruining her future in her own profession for the sake of the well-being and safety of girls unknown to her’.3
Margaret proved to be the perfect spy. As Grace Dare, she documented squalor and exploitation behind the counter, her assumed character reminiscent of the courageous heroines dashing across the pages of the new girls’ magazines. As well as providing first-hand evidence for a 1898 Women’s Industrial Council report, her revelations were published in the union journal, The Shop Assistant, and were also reworked by the popular Daily Chronicle newspaper in a series promising to reveal the true ‘life of shops’. The series covered everything from hiring to firing. It showed that when young women went ‘cribbing’, or job hunting, they had to be prepared for some prett
y probing scrutiny about their personal lives. In one large West End drapery house, ‘Grace’ was interviewed by two men – one of the owners and one of the buyers. They asked about her prior experience, as expected, but also interrogated her about her parents, her brother and her politics. Her height and figure clearly gave cause for concern: ‘She’s very short!’ At the end of interview, ‘Grace’ was asked, ‘What is the very lowest salary you will take?’ and told to write this down on a piece of paper as those kinds of figures, unlike the applicant’s physical attributes, were never openly discussed in store.4
Grace’s notes also record how struck she was by the contrast between customers’ attitudes in the East and West Ends. In the East End, ‘although the hours were long, the relationship of server and customer was much more human … We could help to make five shillings go as far as possible in value. We would hear all about the joys and sorrows of the family, and get glimpses of brave hearts under the most sordid exterior.’ It was a different story in the West End, where ‘very rarely were we regarded as other than the lackeys to wait upon the customers as did their domestic servants.’ Sometimes these customers were charming, ‘as only cultured people can be charming’. However, they were often blunt and imperious. Grace recalled one incident ‘when a very fine lady was extremely rude to me. I was not in a position to answer back; I just looked at her. She went as far as the door, and then came back, and said with disarming frankness: “I am bad-tempered today. I will have those stockings.”’ Grace’s astonishment was not at the woman’s rudeness, which she and others routinely encountered, ‘but at her recognition of it’.5