The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  In 1764 there were ‘great riots at Ranelagh among those beings, the footmen’, according to the Earl of Malmesbury’s mother; ‘and there was fighting with drawn swords, for some hours.’ Riots broke out again two days later with increased violence. But already the custom of vails collecting had been abandoned in many houses; and by 1771 it was said not to be suffered ‘in any genteel familes’. In 1778 Lord Hutchinson found that it was ‘laid down almost everywhere’; and ten years later, although one or two large households still maintained the practice – and continued to do so well into the nineteenth century – it had elsewhere quite died out, an example, so Hannah More declared, of what could be done by the example of ‘the Great’.50

  Hannah More, however, still had occasion to complain of another imposition, the practice whereby guests were expected to place money for playing-cards beneath candlesticks for the butler or the groom of the chamber. Her contemporaries also complained of the impositions levied both by porters who required tips to open gates or doors – and who were always ready to inform the close-fisted that their masters were not at home – and by housekeepers, butlers and others who charged such large fees for showing people round their master’s houses that Dr John Shebbeare said as much money was laid out upon visiting houses as was spent on building them. Agreeing with Shebbeare, Horace Walpole once protested that he would have to marry his housekeeper at Strawberry Hill if only to recoup the fortune the house had cost him.

  Country houses were customarily opened to any respectable visitors who called and asked permission to enter. When Elizabeth Bennet visits Pemberley in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, she is immediately admitted to the hall on applying to see the place; the housekeeper comes to take her round and, after being shown ‘all of the house that was open to general inspection’, she takes leave of the housekeeper, ‘a respectable-looking, elderly woman’, and is consigned to the gardener at the hall door.51 Similarly, on his tour of England in 1810–11, Louis Simond, the indefatigable American sightseer, found no difficulty in gaining admittance to the country houses he passed on his travels. At Hatfield ‘there was some doubt whether’ he should be allowed in ‘as the Duke of Clarence was expected on a visit, the Marquess of Salisbury being already come to receive his noble visitor, and the whole house in the full tide of preparation. But the servants, good souls [were] very unwilling to disappoint strangers and [he] saw all.’52

  Elsewhere Simond found the servants only too willing to admit him because of the fees and tips they were anxious to exact. ‘The domestics of these noble houses,’ he commented, ‘are generally as obsequious as innkeepers, and for the same motives.’ At Chatsworth he was soon surrounded by ‘porters, footmen and gardeners’; and at Blenheim, so he recorded,

  We were first conducted to a small house on the left, containing a humble appendage to the glory of the Marlboroughs, viz. a cabinet or gallery of old china; and were made to undergo the sight of a whole series of dishes and teapots, mostly very coarse, rude, and ugly. The guardian of these treasures is, very properly, a female. Whether she perceived our unworthiness, I do not know, but there seemed to be a sort of tacit agreement between us to dispatch the business as quickly as possible. Having paid our fees, we drove on … [and were soon] overtaken by a gardener, who came after us au grand galop, mounted on an ass, to direct our admiration to particular spots (all tame enough), and get his 2s 6d. On the limits of his jurisdiction, the park, he delivered us over to another cicerone, an old servant who descanted on the architecture. He committed us to the charge of another domestic, our fifth guide (a great division of labour), who opened to us a small theatre, used formerly by the family and their friends. A sixth man took us round the pleasure-grounds.

  The seventh guide was a coxcomb of an upper servant, who hurried us through the house. The fees of all our different guides amounted to nineteen shillings. The annual income of the Duke of Marlborough is estimated at L. 70,000. There are eighty house-servants; one hundred out of doors, of whom thirty are for the pleasure-grounds.53

  In some houses, for example at Canons, it was understood that the fees would be handed over to the owner for the maintenance of the fabric and the defraying of household expenses; but in most the servants pocketed the money themselves and thus added considerable amounts to their income. In her will the old housekeeper at Warwick Castle left the younger members of the family, to whom she was devoted, no less than £20,000 which she was said to have collected over many years from visitors to their home.54

  Although savings on the scale of the Warwick Castle housekeeper were highly exceptional if not unique, many upper servants were able to save part of their earnings. Lower servants, however, were hard put to it to do so; and ‘we must remember’, as the Edinburgh Review advised its readers in 1862, ‘that the [class of domestic servants as a whole] does not consist of butlers at £50 a year or lady’s-maids with about the same pay in money or gifts’:

  We must include a million and more of general servants, housemaids, middle-class cooks and nurserymaids, whose wages lie between £18 and £8 a year … Of the 400,000 maids-of-all-work few have more than £10 a year and many have no more than £8. It is absurd to talk of their laying by money … How much can the housemaid lay by of her £10, £12 or £15 a year, or the middle-class cook out of her £12, £15 or £18? Some persons who lecture them on improvidence assume that out of £15 they might lay by £10, and so on; but any sensible housewife will say at once that this is absurd. The plainest and most economical style of dress, respectable enough for a middle-class kitchen, cannot, we are assured, be provided for less than £6 in the country and £7 in town. Then, is the maidservant never to do a kind thing to her own family or anybody else – never to pay postage – never to buy a book or anything that is not wearable? …

  ‘The number of old servants who are paupers in workhouses is immense …’ we learn from Prince Albert’s address to the Servants’ Provident Society on 16 May 1849. How can the position of the domestic servant ever be elevated if the career ends in the workhouse? …55

  In the years immediately following the appearance of this article, the wages of servants did improve slightly as alternative work in factories and shops, particularly for women, became more plentiful. In the first (1861) edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management wages of £710s to £11 (with tea, sugar and beer) were recommended for general servants, £12 to £26 for cooks and £25 for valets. In the 1888 edition these figures were increased to as much as £16 for general servants, to a minimum of £16 for cooks and of £35 for valets. At the same time the total number of domestic servants in England and Wales was growing year by year as increasing numbers of middle-class families felt able to afford them. It was estimated in the 1850s that a man with £500 a year ought to be able to afford three servants, and that one with £1000 should be able to employ six. At that time there were some 850,000 men and women employed in domestic service in England and Wales, about 575,000 of them female general servants. By 1871 the total number had increased to over 1,300,000, and general maidservants to over 780,000. The numbers continued to increase between 1871 and 1911 but by then the growth was slower than that of the population as a whole, while the proportion of young girls entering domestic service was falling sharply.56

  For those who remained in service as general maidservants life continued to be hard. They still commonly worked far longer hours than women in factories, and when the factories were silent they had to work on. They were still kept in uniform, in black dresses in the afternoons with white aprons and caps; they were still often required to share a room or even a bed with another maid if there was a second servant in the household; they were still provided with books of prayers which instructed them to seek divine help in bearing rebukes with patience and in preserving them from idleness and ‘wasting the time which is another’s’; and they still slept beneath framed biblical texts bearing some such injunction as that from Ephesians: ‘Servants be obedient to them that are your masters according to
the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart.’57

  46 Shops and Shopping

  Walking down ‘lively’ Oxford Street in 1786, Sophie von la Roche was deeply impressed by the splendid shops on either side, their façades brightly lit by oil lamps, their doors open until ten o’clock at night. She passed a watchmaker’s, then a shop selling fans and silk, then one for china and glass. She thought the spirit booths were ‘particularly tempting’, with their crystal flasks of every shape and form, each one with a light behind ‘which makes all the different coloured spirits sparkle’. Just as alluring were the confectioners and fruiterers, ‘where, behind the handsome glass windows, pyramids of pineapples, figs, grapes, oranges and all manner of fruits’ were on show. Most of all she admired a stall with Argand lamps ‘situated in a corner house and forming a really dazzling spectacle. Every variety of lamp, crystal, lacquer and metal ones, silver and brass in every possible shade’. Even the butchers’ shops struck her as being ‘deliriously clean’. There was ‘no blood anywhere, no dirt: the shop walls and doors were all spruce, balance and weights brightly polished’.1

  Behind the great glass windows of London’s shops, Sophie von la Roche wrote in another enthusiastic passage, ‘absolutely everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, in such abundance of choice as to make one greedy’:

  Now large slipper and shoe-shops for anything from adults down to dolls, can be seen; now fashion-articles or silver or brass shops, boots, guns, glasses, the confectioner’s goodies, the pewterer’s wares, fans, etc…. There is a cunning devise for showing women’s materials. They hang down in folds behind the fine, high windows so that the effect of this or that material, as it would be in a woman’s dress, can be studied.2

  Had she turned down Charles Street from Oxford Street and gone through Soho Square into Greek Street, Sophie von la Roche would have come to the magnificent showrooms of Josiah Wedgwood who had moved here from Great Newport Street in 1774. In these rooms Wedgwood’s wares were displayed in cabinets along the walls and on large tables, laid out as though a dinner party were about to be given. Salesmen discreetly moved about between the columns that rose from the polished floor to the plastered ceiling; and on stands against the walls sets of vases were arranged in patterns which every few days were ‘so alter’d, revers’d and transform’d as to render the whole a new scene’. It was Wedgwood’s declared aim ‘to amuse and divert, please, astonish, nay, even to ravish the Ladies’.3

  In their attempts to attract customers shopkeepers in the West End were replacing small panes of bottle-glass with larger plate-glass windows, through which their goods could more clearly be seen, encroaching upon pavements with bow-windows, painting and gilding their fronts and fitting up the insides of their shops with ‘fine shelves, shutters, boxes, glass doors, sashes and the like’. Yet even in London such smart and well-lit shops were still rare, and in provincial cities almost unknown. The size of a shop window rarely permitted an inviting display of goods. A single straw hat, a phial of cordial or a pair of boots unsually indicated what kind of merchandise was to be found within.

  Most shopkeepers still lived above or behind their shops which were dark and poky; many sold their goods through open windows, as their predecessors had done for centuries past; some had no more than a shed leaning against the wall of a house and serving both as shop and home for the poor tradesman.

  There had been a time in the recent past when the shopping streets had been bedecked with painted signboards and models which advertised a shop’s existence and, since houses were not yet numbered, helped customers and porters to find them. The first tradesmen’s signs, introduced by the Romans, had been bas-reliefs in stone. These had given way to emblems, usually of wood, painted or carved and fixed above the door; and these, in turn, to those heavy, creaking boards which, seeming to vie with each other for attention, were so striking a feature of the streets of large cities. They hung out at right angles to the street on heavy wrought-iron brackets, and grew bigger and bigger in size until they almost completely blocked off sun and air from some narrow streets and were a hazard in all. They frequently fell down ‘to the great danger and injury of the inhabitants’; and occasionally brought with them the whole front of the building to which they were attached. One that tumbled into Bird Lane in London, with a roar of collapsing bricks and masonry, killed four people who happened unluckily to be passing beneath it.

  The earliest signs and models were quite simple and were intended to indicate the trade of the shopkeeper whose premises they advertised – three hats or a beaver for a hatter, three golden balls for a goldsmith, walnuts for cabinet-makers, mulberries for silk merchants, leopards for skinners, civet cats for perfumers, Adam and Eve for fruiterers, a dog and a bear for an inn where animal baiting was offered as supplementary entertainment. But the presence of a particular shop beneath its distinctive sign was never to be guaranteed. Premises were sold or re-let, new owners or tenants came in, yet the signs stayed where they were. Addison claimed he had seen the sign of a goat outside a perfumer’s, a king’s head above a sword cutler’s, a boot above a cook-shop and a cobbler living under a roasted pig. Many signboards were extremely complicated, for when a tradesman bought an existing business he often incorporated the sign of that business, whose customers he hoped to retain, with his own. Also, when apprentices set up their own businesses they frequently used their former masters’ devices and combined them with others of their own invention. Moreover, since certain streets were known for the particular trades practised there, it became essential to make variations in the signs and symbols used by the individual tradesmen. Shared premises, too, led to further variations and to the necessity of the pairing of devices when one sign had to serve for two tradesmen occupied in quite different trades. This explains some of the more incongruously paired tradesmen’s signboards such as the Bull and Bedpost, the Three Nuns and Hare, the Whale and Gate and the Goat and Compasses (sometimes supposed to be a corruption of God Encompasseth Us).

  Despite their inconvenience and the dangers they posed for the public, it was not until 1762 that an Act was passed forbidding hanging signboards in the City of London and Westminster. From that year signs had to be fixed flat to the wall of the building, an order that heralded the advent of the modern shop-front fascia. Tavern-keepers, however, seem to have defied the law with impunity; and so did certain other tradesmen. But by 1800 signboards had almost completely given way to shop fascias, often with gilded and carved lettering. By then, too, numbering of shops and houses had been introduced: an act of 1765 had required the Court of Common Council to affix name tablets to the corners of each street, square and lane; three years later only twelve streets had been so named, but by 1770 only a quarter of London’s streets did not have name plates and in the rest both numbers and trade signs were displayed.4

  The number of shops in London, and in the country as a whole, was extraordinary. In his History and Survey of London, William Maitland suggested that in 1732 almost a quarter of all houses in the capital were either shops or taverns selling food or drink, and this estimate did not take into account all the shops of other kinds. Some of these establishments would scarcely have been recognized as shops, since no taxes or rates were levied upon those who sold goods from their houses; and there were many who took advantage of this to become occasional tradesmen, dealing in any merchandise they were able to make or buy. Yet the proportion of full-time shopkeepers to the population of the capital as a whole was certainly very high, and remained so as long as it was customary for provincial shopkeepers to cometo London shops for their supplies.5 By 1800 there were over 150 shops in Oxford Street alone.6

  England was, indeed, as Adam Smith observed before Napoleon, ‘a nation of shopkeepers’. And most of these shopkeepers dealt in as wide a variety of foods and household goods as Thomas Turner, the mid-eighteenth-century Sussex village shopkeeper who was a grocer as well as a draper, a hatter and haberdasher as well as an underta
ker, who sold drugs as well as ironmongery, gloves as well as stationery, and who also dealt in hops and wheat.

  Shops such as Turner’s were, and for many years remained, an essential part of working-class life. Their owners were prepared to sell their stock in the smallest quantities, supplying essential items on credit and sometimes making handsome profits from the interest that accrued.7 The poor were well advised to keep on good terms with them, for shopping could be a tricky business, involving haggling over the price and possible disagreements about the coins or paper money offered. Counterfeit money abounded. So did silver coins which constant use had worn thin or clipping had damaged; and a shopkeeper offered a handful of these was likely to put them on the scales and, if they failed the test, to ask the customer for more to make up the weight. Bank notes were less troublesome; but every year one or other of the private banks that issued them went bankrupt, while the notes of even the most prosperous banks were accepted only locally. As for counterfeit money, Defoe said that ‘if you went but to buy a pair of gloves or stockings or any trifle at a shop, you went with bad money in one hand and good money in the other, proffering first the bad coins to get them off if possible, and then the good if the other was rejected’.8