Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century England

Tammy C. Whitlock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351947565
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Whilst the actual origins of English consumer culture are a source of much debate, it is clear that the nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in retailing and consumption. Mass production of goods, improved transport facilities and more sophisticated sales techniques brought consumerism to the masses on a scale previously unimaginable. Yet with this new consumerism came new problems and challenges. Focusing on retailing in nineteenth-century Britain, this book traces the expansion of commodity culture and a mass consumer orientated market, and explores the wider social and cultural implications this had for society. Using trial records, advertisements, newspaper reports, literature, and popular ballads, it analyses the rise, criticism, and entrenchment of consumerism by looking at retail changes around the period 1800-1880 and society's responses to them. By viewing this in the context of what had gone before Professor Whitlock emphasizes the key role women played in this evolution, and argues that the dazzling new world of consumption had beginnings that predate the later English, French and American department store cultures. It also challenges the view that women were helpless consumers manipulated by merchants' use of colour, light and display into excessive purchases, or even driven by their desires into acts of theft. With its interdisciplinary approach drawing on social and economic history, gender studies, cultural studies and the history of crime, this study asks fascinating questions regarding the nature of consumer culture and how society reacts to the challenges this creates.

PART I

DESTROYING THE ‘NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS’

Chapter 1

Ready Money Only: Small Shops and New Retail Methods

What would London be without its shops? How dull to the pedestrian, on a fine Sunday in June, is the formal, Quaker-like aspect of the shuttered shops of Fleet Street and the Strand!

— ‘Shopping in London,’ 1844

Retailing Evolution in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Mrs. Moore, a shopkeeper trading haberdasheries in the fashionable London retail area of Grafton Street¹ in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century circulated an extensive handbill to advertise her new wares:

BEST ENGLISH Silk Stockings, Worsted Gaiters, & Cambric Muslin Gloves.

Plain, Tambour, and Japanned Muslins,

Cambric, Lace and Piquet Ditto,

…

Large Muslin Shawls, Linen ditto, and Veils.

A Fashionable Assortment of Hats and Bonnets.

Mourning Articles of every Description.

Ladies Tunbridge Work and Writing Boxes.

The Superior Quality of the above Goods, she trusts will obtain the Approbation of her Customers, who may rely on purchasing to peculiar Advantage having arranged her Dealings for READY MONEY ONLY.²

Moore’s handbill illustrates the growing sophistication of English retail. Aggressively touting both the variety and quality of her wares, and her competitive prices, a price structure made possible by a business based on cash transactions,³ shopkeepers like Moore represent the vanguard of English shops in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

All English shopkeepers, however, did not incorporate innovations like advertising, expensive shop fixtures, and cash-only trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Only a small sector of business people in especially competitive trades like retail clothing initiated the new methods that would become the hallmark of nineteenth-century trade.⁴ Along with these new developments in retailing methods came new settings for selling such as the arcade—a luxurious enclave protected from inclement weather with a variety of shops for the upper-class shopper. Despite the adoption of new techniques by some traders, in the eighteenth century most shopkeepers, especially in smaller towns and villages, continued to trade in traditional ways with slow turnover, a limited variety of goods, and on a credit basis. Shopping as a leisure activity remained the privilege of the few prior to the nineteenth century. Changes in English shopping in this period served as the basis for nineteenth-century consumer society, but did not affect the bulk of the selling or buying public; these innovative sales techniques were mainly limited to the upper and middling classes. The small but growing section of middling folk with their demand for better and wider varieties of consumer goods eventually propelled English consumption into a new era.⁵

The work of Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and Roy Porter among others gives ample evidence that consumer society was already firmly rooted by the 1700s.⁶ The English home market expanded throughout that century. Demand was high and the amount of goods available increasing—fueled in part by England’s growing industry. In this boom period, London reigned as England’s retail capital. Facing competition from London, provincial shops began to adopt London innovations such as those demonstrated by Moore’s advertisement.⁷ Market expansion and the concomitant shifts in English retail formed the base of nineteenth-century consumer society in England.

The emphasis on consumption as a driving economic force is a recent one in historical scholarship. Whether influenced by the impact of Britain’s recent industrial decline or the legacy of nineteenth-century classical economists, historians traditionally focused on production as the key to analyzing economic growth.⁸ In the past two decades, historians have begun to search for the origins of modern, mass consumer society in the advertisements, shop improvements, and trade developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mass consumption is distinguished by the mass production and sale of similarly styled and packaged goods, and a dissociation of a commodity from its means of production. The spendthrift attitude of consumers is also an integral part of mass consumption.⁹ Many historians agree that the engine driving this modern consumption was advertising.

More than just placards posting prices or denoting the uses of objects, advertising in a society of mass consumption emphasizes the image associated with a commodity rather than the utility of the commodity itself.¹⁰ In Britain, many historians have posited that this mass market originated in the mid-nineteenth century. A combination of economic growth providing an increase in living standards for a majority of the population and the impetus of modern advertising marks the era between the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition and the First World War as the beginning of English mass consumer culture. According to Hamish Fraser and Thomas Richards, sophisticated sales techniques like advertising dependent on association with desirable images rather than promises of low prices or quality marshaled this growth.¹¹ Others scholars pinpoint the development of the department store as the onset of the era of consumer culture. The department stores of fin de siècle England, France, and America were temples of consumption where the image of the goods exhibited reigned over their more mundane functions in luxurious displays.¹² All of these developments—the Crystal Palace Exhibition, modern advertising, and department stores—encouraged consumer culture and shopping as an increasingly time-consuming activity, especially for middle-class women.

Modern consumer culture, particularly the connection between image and goods and the participation in shopping as a major pastime, does not begin with either the Crystal Palace or the emergence of department stores, which both had their origins in earlier forms. Consumer culture did not remain stagnant between the consumer revolution of the later eighteenth century and the exhibitions, advertising, and shopping palaces of the later nineteenth century. The vanguard shops of the late eighteenth century prepared the way for the bazaars, emporiums, and finally the department stores of the nineteenth century.

Despite significant changes in eighteenth-century retail, most shop owners operated as petty shopkeepers usually assisted by a spouse and perhaps a single worker from outside the family. The luxurious, fashionable shops of London’s retail centers represented the exception to that rule. These relatively small businesses distributed the majority of English goods to consumers in the 1700s. However, the histories of such small shops are difficult to trace.¹³ Unlike later department stores, such small businesses often left little record of their existence.¹⁴ Fortunately, advertisements and trade cards, small cards with the shop’s name, address, and type of business, provide a glimpse into the world of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century retail trade.

Women and Shopkeeping in the Late 1700s and Early 1800s

An example from the eighteenth century is the shop of Mary and Ann Hogarth in London. Their beautifully illustrated trade card by their brother William Hogarth advertised their location and wares:

from the old Frock-shop the comer of the Longwalk facing the Cloysters, Removed to ye Kings Arms joyning to ye Little Britain-gate, near Long Walk. Sells ye best & most Fashionable Ready Made Frocks, suits of Fustian, Ticken & Holland, striped Dimmity & Flanel Waistcoats, blue and canvas Frocks, …white stript Dimmitys … by Wholesale or Retail, at Reasonable Rates.¹⁵

In the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries, women not only traded with their husbands, but also owned autonomous shops. Married women operated independently, single women, and widows ran retail businesses. Women also participated in retail as dressmakers. In 1826 Mrs. Tomlinson sent out a handbill to ‘the Nobility and Gentry’ to invite them to her dressmaking shop in New Bond Street, London. Running a rather large shop at which ‘first rate French and English talent is constantly employed under her supervision,’ Tomlinson sold everything from ball dresses to hats and corsets.¹⁶ This common occupation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to decline in pay and status in the course of the nineteenth.

Women participated in such trade despite the traditional common law principle of coverture transferring a married woman’s property to her husband. This trading could be accomplished by separating from the husband and hoping he did not find out about the business. Alternatively, a woman whose husband deserted her could get a protection order allowing her to trade as a femme sole. Women could also make legal pre-nuptial and post-nuptial agreements with their spouse that permitted them to carry on independent trade.¹⁷ Most common, however, especially in the eighteenth century, was the family run business with both spouses working in a partnership.

By the nineteenth century, commentators complained that women once content to serve behind the counter seemed more interested in consuming goods than selling them. In 1817 Priscilla Wakefield protested: ‘… for what tradesman would venture to burden himself with a wife, who, by her mistaken ambition of gentility, would consume all the produce of his industry ….’¹⁸ An 1845 book on how to succeed in business warned prospective retailers: ‘a gentle considerate helpmate will cheer and assist him; a vulgar, dressy, ostentatious woman will be his ruin.’¹⁹ As gentility and middle-class status became more dependent on de-emphasizing the role of women in the household as producers²⁰ and accentuating their role as consumers and displayers of goods, English society focused on women as buyers rather than sellers. In Trollope’s 1870 novel Brown, Jones and Robinson, George Robinson describes his ideal wife: ‘I love to see beauty enjoying itself gracefully. My idea of a woman is incompatible with the hard work of the world. I would fain do that myself, so that she should ever be lovely.’²¹ Although women still worked in retail trade, the era dominated by the small family run shop was disappearing.

Another change in consumer culture along with the trend away from the small, family shop was the transformation of the geography of London shopping in the late 1700s and early 1800s. London grew rapidly in the nineteenth century and with it shopping districts were bom, thrived, and fell. More traditional shopping areas like Fleet Street, the Strand and Cheapside gave way to the primacy of the West End, at least in the category of upper-class and the best of middle-class shops.²² Numerous successful retail shops trace their origins to Regent Street and Oxford Street. Peter Robinson, Debenhams, Marshall and Snelgrove, Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Swan and Edgar are just a few of the shops tracing their beginnings to the early nineteenth-century boom of the West End.²³ Most of these businesses began as drape...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: DESTROYING THE ‘NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS’
• PART II: CRIMINAL CONSUMPTION
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index