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

by Christopher Hibbert

  Bargaining over prices gradually died out as fixed-price sales became more general. It seems that the first shop to have adopted the new practice was Flint and Palmer’s on London Bridge which opened its doors at eight o’clock one morning in the middle of the century to reveal all the variety of goods they sold with price tags.

  Not much time was allowed for bargaining, a price being fixed for everything and, compared with other houses, cheap [wrote Robert Owen, the social reformer who worked there as a boy]. If any demur was made or much hesitation, the article asked for was withdrawn, and as the shop was generally full from morning till late in the evening, another customer was attended to.9

  The firm’s customers were at first astonished by this new practice but when it became evident that Mr Palmer was fair and consistent in his prices, it became so popular that the shop was crowded until eleven o’clock at night and other shops began to follow suit. One of them was that of James Lackington, whose bookshop, ‘The Temple of the Muses’ in Finsbury Square, was one of the sights of London. On the top of the building was a dome with a high pole from which flew a flag when Mr Lackington was in residence. In the middle of the shop was a huge circular counter around which, it was said, a coach and six could be driven, so large were the premises. A wide staircase led to the ‘lounging-rooms’ and the first of a series of galleries with bookshelves. The books got shabbier and cheaper as the customers ascended, the ‘neat’ copies being in the lower galleries, the ‘damaged’ in the upper.

  In the seventeenth century books were offered for sale unbound, the loose sheets lying on shelves and tables, and the title pages hanging on posts outside, so that the purchaser could choose the style and colour of the binding, having his entire library, if he wished, bound in green and gold-blocked calf. If he was not sure that he wanted to commit himself to buying a particular book by asking the bookseller to bind it for him, he could read the loose sheets in the shop, sitting at one of the reading desks in the window, or he could take them home and read them there before making up his mind. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, books were sold ready bound and in 1780 James Lackington decided to mark ‘plainly in every book, facing the title, the lowest price’ that he would take for it, making no exception, ‘not even to nobility’. He also resolved to ‘give no person whatever any credit’.

  I was determined to make this resolution from various motives [he wrote in his memoirs]. I had observed that when credit was given, most bills were not paid within six months, some not within a twelve-month and some not within two years … When I communicated my ideas on this subject to some of my acquaintances I was much laughed at and ridiculed. It was thought I might as well attempt to re-build the Tower of Babel as to establish a large business without giving credit.10

  Soon afterwards, however, cash sales at fixed prices were so common in all shops that an assistant who had become a highly skilled and fluent haggler or ‘chafferer’ in the markets of the East End of London found his talents wasted in a draper’s shop in the City.11 ‘The method of business of having only one price was just then coming into fashion,’ one such assistant explained, referring to the early years of the nineteenth century, ‘and all the best houses had adopted it, many of them preferring to let customers go away unserved rather than break through the rule.’12 By the 1850s bargaining was virtually unknown in this kind of shop: a visiting Frenchman observed that if an attempt was made to negotiate a price lower than that asked, the shop assistant ‘thinks at first that you have misunderstood him but when he understands what you are driving at, he stiffens visibly like a man of honour to whom one has made a shady proposal’.13 Even so, it was still considered rather vulgar in many of the better shops to put price labels on goods for sale; and this did not become a general practice until the advent of the department store on the lines of the Bayswater emporium of William Whiteley who had so many different items for sale in the 1870s that he styled himself ‘The Universal Provider’, offering to supply ‘anything from a pin to an elephant at short notice’.14

  The assistants at Whiteley’s, many of whom lived on the premises, worked from seven o’clock in the morning until eleven at night. And at all times they were expected to keep a sharp eye open for shoplifters, for whom nineteenth-century dresses might well have been designed: one shoplifter at Whiteley’s was caught hiding under her clothes forty-two silk handkerchiefs, two pairs of gloves, several lengths of ribbon and over twenty-four yards of velvet.15

  Robert Owen remembered how at Flint and Palmer’s he and his companions sometimes did not finish their work of tidying the unsold goods on the counters and rolling up the lengths of material until two o’clock in the morning, and then they had scarcely enough energy left to pull themselves up the banisters to the attic where they slept for five hours until their daily round began again.16 Owen, who had had previous experience in a draper’s shop in Northamptonshire, was paid £25 a year, but others of his fellow shop assistants received much less than that. And in some establishments the staff did not even have beds to go to, being provided instead with hammocks which were slung over the counters when the last customers had departed or on truckle beds which were pushed out of sight when it was time to open the shutters for business again.

  Working conditions for shop assistants, did not much improve during the nineteenth century. In the north they were now more likely to live at home, and to work for rather shorter hours than they had been in the past. But in the south hours remained long, shops frequently not closing until ten o’clock at night on weekdays and midnight on Saturdays. In 1883 a working day of seventeen hours was still quite common. It remained so for adults well into the next century, though by then the Shop Hours Act of 1886 had prevented shopkeepers from keeping assistants under eighteen at work for more than seventy-four hours a week.17

  In most shops, assistants – nearly all male until the end of the century – were still required to live in; and in many of the higher class houses the juniors had to work for two or three years, being provided with no more than their board and lodging while they were learning the trade.

  When Owen left London for Manchester in the 1780s, various streets in the capital had already become fashionable shopping centres. Among them was Bond Street where shop-gazing was as popular then as it is now, and where many of the shopkeepers let off their upper rooms as lodgings to well-to-do bachelors. But it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that a street was designed purely as a shopping street; one of the earliest of these was Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury which was designed as a shopping centre by Thomas Cubitt in 1822. There were by then, however, several shopping arcades, the earliest of which, Royal Opera Arcade, was built by John Nash and G. S. Repton at the back of the Haymarket Opera House in 1816–18. This was soon followed by Burlington Arcade, Piccadilly, which was designed in 1819 by Samuel Ware for Lord George Cavendish of Burlington House with the original intention of preventing passers-by throwing oyster-shells and other rubbish into his garden. It soon became a highly fashionable shopping centre, the rooms above the small, smart shops being rented by prostitutes for the entertainment of their richer customers.

  The shops of the West End seemed a world apart from the dingy chandlers’ shops to the east. Here not only candles and links were sold but all manner of goods from soap and sand to coal and cats’ meat. Market women came for breakfast, maidservants for packets of sand; many were treated to a dram of gin to warm them or induce them to return; farthings were not despised as payment and when credit was denied, a shift, apron or cap was left until the money due was paid.18 This kind of shop lasted well into the nineteenth century.

  Then comes a shop where they sell cats’ meat, coal, cow-heels, wood and tripe [wrote Francis Place of one establishment in Lock’s Fields in about 1830]. And ever and anon a load of coals comes in and black clouds of dust arise as they are emptied into the shop, settling on the cow-heels and the tripe, and the pillars of pudding. Yet these they eat all up, and as one of the
m once remarked, ‘the dust does instead of pepper.’19

  Many of these shops were in cellars which also served as premises for cobblers, for scrap-metal merchants, for the owners of ‘green shops’ that sold roots and firewood, and as milk cellars where women, who had collected milk from nearby farms, left it to stand so that they could skim off the cream before watering the rest and carrying it away on their rounds. Some cellars served as cowsheds; and as late as the 1880s, before ‘railway milk’ drove them out of business, there were still about 700 licensed cow-houses in London. But whether from a London cow-house or a farm in the suburbs the milk was often in a disgusting state by the time it reached the customer.

  The produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, it was [in the jaundiced opinion of the testy Tobias Smollett] lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to the foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot and tobacco quids from foot-passengers, overflowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s sake, the spewings of infants who have slabbered in the tin measure which is thrown back in that condition among the milk for the benefit of the next customer; and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable title of milk-maid.20

  Dealers in old clothes also traded from cellars, seldom coming forth in the world, as Dickens observed, ‘except in the dusk and coolness of the evening’ when they could be seen sitting in chairs, smoking their pipes and watching their children play in the gutter. ‘Their countenances bear a thoughtful and dirty cast, certain indications of their love of traffic; and their habitations are distinguished by that disregard of outward appearance, and neglect of personal comfort, so common among people who are constantly immersed in profound speculation, and deeply engaged in sedentary pursuits.’21

  Although Dickens supposed in the 1830s that Monmouth Street, one of London’s second-hand clothes markets, would continue to be as it had been for a century, the burial place of fashions until there were no more fashions to bury, by the 1860s it had become an old boot and shoe market where most of the cobbling was done with brown paper and blacking. Houndsditch, however, remained an old clothes market throughout the nineteenth century and visitors to it were advised ‘to leave their watches and valuables at home and not to take offence at a little “Bishopsgate banter” ‘.

  While old clothes shops tended to congregate in particular areas, rag and bottle shops could be found everywhere. In these far more was offered for sale and far more was bought by their owners than the rags and bottles from which they got their name. One offered the highest prices for ‘wax and sperm pieces, old copper, brass, pewter etc., lead, iron, zinc, steel, etc., old horse hair mattresses, waste paper, old books, all kinds of coloured rags, bones, phials, broken flint glass, wearing apparel, furniture and timber’. The description of Mr Krook’s shop in Bleak House could have been applied to dozens of others:

  In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill, at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another, was the inscription, BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought, and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the window, were quantities of dirty bottles: blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes, outside the door, labelled ‘Law Books, all at gd.’22

  Unsavoury as he made Krook’s shop appear, Dickens spared his readers a description of the sickening stench that emanated in such places from the rags and ‘kitchen stuff and from sacks full of bones that were scattered about the floor. Their owners, however, seemed quite unconscious of the foulness of the atmosphere in which they lived. One of them, ‘in speaking of the many deaths among his family, could not conjecture to what cause it could be owing’.23

  As well as rag and bottle shops there were cookshops in the poorer quarters of all large towns. In the seventeenth century cookshops had been frequented by men of Pepys’s class. They had generally been cheaper than taverns which charged prices comparable with those of the King’s Head, Charing Cross – where a meal at the host’s table cost 2s 6d and one at the second table is – and they were much cheaper than Chatelin’s, the French eating-house in Covent Garden, where dinner might cost as much as 6s 8d. Pepys himself often had a meal in a cookshop, sometimes took its dishes home or hired the cook for a party.24 But a century later cookshops were the common resort of the poor. Boswell once saw Samuel Johnson in Clifton’s eating-house in Butcher Row and was ‘surprised to perceive him’ in such a place, since the mode of dining, or rather being fed, at [these] houses in London, is well known to be particularly unsocial as there is no ordinary, or united company, but each person has his own mess, and is under no obligation to hold any intercourse with any one’. Taverns were consequently much more to Johnson’s taste. He sometimes ate at home, but as he informed Mr and Mrs Thrale, ‘a general anarchy’ prevailed in his kitchen, and the roasting there was ‘not magnificent’, for they had no jack.

  ‘No jack! Why how do they manage without?’

  ‘Small joints, I believe, they manage with a string, and larger are done at the tavern. I have some thoughts (with a profound gravity) of buying a jack, because I think a jack is some credit to a house.’

  ‘Well, but you’ll have a spit, too?’

  ‘Why, sir, no. That would be superflous, for we shall never use it; and if a jack is seen a spit will be presumed.’

  When he did dine at home, as he usually did on a Sunday, Johnson therefore preferred to rely upon food provided by the cookshop rather than his own kitchen. ‘I generally have a meat pye on Sunday,’ he told Boswell. ‘It is baked at a public oven, which is very properly allowed, because one man can attend it; and thus the advantage is obtained of not keeping servants from church to dress dinners.’ In fact when Boswell dined with Johnson one Sunday, expecting ‘some strange, uncouth ill-drest dish’, he had not only meat pie but ‘a very good soup, a boiled leg of lamb and spinach and a rice pudding’.

  In 1773, though, there were few cookshops which a man with Johnson’s well-developed taste for good food would have cared to patronize. They catered for people who could afford to spend a few pennies only and who were prepared to eat what was offered them in sheets of old paper either at the counter or in the streets outside. Nevertheless, for hungry young men prepared to spend as much as 7d there were cookshops that did provide at least a satisfying if not an elegant meal, such as the one enjoyed by Defoe’s two thieves in Rosemary Lane where they had ‘three pennyworth of boiled beef, two pennyworth of pudding, a penry brick as they called it or loaf, and a whole pint of strong beer [with] a mess of beef broth into the bargain’.25

  47 Pedlars and Markets

  Those disinclined to go to a cookshop had their wants supplied by the street traders who hawked all kinds of food about from morning till night. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the streets of London and other large cities were the regular market-place of itinerant vendors as they had been for centuries past. Merchandise of almost every description was carried and ‘cried’ along lanes, down alleys and into courts, so that the din of the vendors’ voices, competing for attention and custom, was an integral part of town life and often astonished country visitors. All kinds of food were offered: ‘Buy my fat chickens!’; ‘Buy my flounders!’; ‘Twelve pence a peck, oysters!’; ‘Sixpence a pound fair cherries!’; ‘Crab! Crab! Any Crab!’; ‘Hot baked wardens!’; Lemons and Oranges, fresh and fair!’

  Many of the cries were chanted in a loud, repetitive sing-song with the emphasis on the appropriate word: ‘Buy my ropes of hard onions!’; ‘Delicate cucumbers!’; ‘Buy a dish of great eels!’ Vendors kept strictly to the wa
res in which they specialized, wet, dry or shellfish, poultry, game or cheeses, vegetables, fruit or flowers. There were sellers of pea soup and pickled whelks, of sheep’s trotters and baked potatoes, of ham sandwiches and ginger beer, of curds and whey and rice, of pastry, gingerbread and watercress, of muffins, boiled puddings and spiced wine. And along with the vendors of food came the hawkers of cigars and walking-sticks, spectacles and dolls, cutlery, goldfish, dogs and shells, whips and crackers, ballad sheets and shirt buttons, wash leathers and rat poison, all crying their wares, singing their songs, making their progress known by trumpet calls like the newspaper men, or ringing bells as the muffin men did, or rattling pots and coins on their trays. Then came the men offering services or trying to tempt domestic servants to let them have, in exchange for a knicknack, a rabbit skin which they could dispose of to a felt-hat maker or the remains of a joint of meat which they could take to a cookshop: ‘Any kitchen stuff have you maids?’; ‘Maids, any cunny skins?’; ‘Old chairs to mend!’; ‘Knives or scissors to grind!’; ‘Sweep! Chimney sweep!’; ‘Wood to cleave!’; ‘Brass pots to mend!’; ‘Corns to pick!’; ‘Dust O! Dust O! Dust O! Dust oy-eh!’

  The dustmen went by in their hooded caps with leather flaps hanging down behind their necks, leading a horse and box-cart, stopping outside the houses where there was ash and rubbish to collect, filling their buckets from the dustbins, emptying their loads into the carts, then trundling them away to the dustyard where men, women and children would be hard at work on the mountainous heaps of rubbish, the women in black bonnets, their dirty cotton dresses tucked up behind them, banging their iron sieves against their leather aprons, separating the ‘brieze’ from the ‘soil’ – the ‘brieze’ or coarse, cindery dust being despatched to the brickfields, the finer ‘soil’ being sold as manure. Broken bricks, old books, kettles, rags, bones and oyster-shells all found their appropriate market.