1
âBackmewsyâ Beauty: Agnes Headman and AimĂ©e Lloyd
In February 1858, Mrs. Agnes Headman of 24 Savile Row died, leaving behind her a profitable London-based business as a âHair Restorer and Advisor to Ladies on the State of their Hair.â Headman (c.1808â1858) had developed a following of West End customers who patronized her hair dyeing services, but also purchased manufactures like âRejuvenescent Hair Creamâ and âBotanic Hair Wash and Curling Fluid,â which she produced in her backroom laboratory. Through services and goods, Headman promised to enhance female clientsâ natural beauty, all the while maintaining discretion about their patronage of her West End location.1
Just around the corner on Glasshouse Street, another female trader worked to produce one of Londonâs best-selling and enigmatic grooming products marketed to men, a waterless shaving cream known as âEuxesis.â In contrast to Agnes Headmanâs independent venture, AimĂ©e Lloyd (b. 1828) labored as part of a family unit and contributed to the Lloydsâs household economy. When her husband proved abusive and indolent, she found herself âwholly destituteâ in both the economic and personal sense. She subsequently turned to profits from âEuxesisâ for her survival. Her efforts did not go unnoticed; before long, celebrated London wholesaler Robert Hovenden (1830â1908) attempted to procure the secret formula for âEuxesis.â When Lloyd refused, she and Hovenden embarked on a protracted legal battle over the shaving cream, which she eventually won with the support of character witnesses from the local business community. Euxesis continued to be produced into the twentieth century, although Lloyd herself disappears from the historical record.2
Despite their differences, Agnes Headman and AimĂ©e Lloydâs experiences suggest those of a handful of beauty businesswomen who lived and worked in Londonâs West End in the mid-nineteenth century. Their stories highlight shared elements that periodically featured in small-scale beauty enterprises, both male- and female-owned. They speak to the presence of small-scale ventures in modest âbackmewsyâ spaces, contiguous to more successful luxury beauty âemporiumsâ located on Londonâs leading commercial corridors like Bond Street. They also demonstrate the ways that tradersâ linkages to family networks could both engender and work against their commercial enterprise. Alternatively, traders could depend upon particular commercial actors, specifically agents and wholesalers, to help substantiate their local reputation. Indeed, Headman, Lloyd, and other small-scale entrepreneurs operated in broader occupational networks of retail and manufacturing perfumers, hairdressers, and âbeauty advisors.â These communities could function as a site of belonging, but also as a mechanism of exclusion for traders who transgressed conventional social mores, as we will explore further in Chapter 2. Finally, the cases of Headman and Lloyd provide examples of mid-century beauty marketing campaigns in popular print periodicals, revealing the ways that elaborate, increasingly expensive forms of self-promotion came to be dominated by more successful, oftentimes male counterparts.
As part of Londonâs small contingent of mid-nineteenth-century beauty businesses, womenâs enterprises contributed to the foundations of Britainâs modern commercial beauty industry, alongside those of increasingly elaborate, typically male-owned firms. Clustered in Londonâs West End, menâs and womenâs shops were scattered along Mayfair and St. Jamesâs stately commercial thoroughfares and the more contested terrain of its plebeian neighbors to the east, St. James Westminster and St. Anneâs Soho. Hierarchies of space operated in these contiguous spaces and shaped the material conditions of the West End perfumery and hairdressing market. In the West End, male and female vendors capitalized on a burgeoning Victorian beauty culture to consolidate a new luxury trade for elite and middle-class consumers.
Charting the stories of Agnes Headman and AimĂ©e Lloydâand their personal and economic connections to family-in-law, business rivals, and occupational communitiesâis an exercise in complicating standard stories about entrepreneurial success. By moving away from the lauding of singular achievements of industry leaders, we craft alternative entrepreneurial narratives that repopulate the commercial landscapes of West End enterprise. Traders operating at the center and on the margins of Londonâs beauty business were part of a dense spatial concentration of mid- and small-sized firms, in a dynamic business environment engendered by their close proximity.3 Headman and Lloyd were just two of a number of traders populating the West End beauty trades, and yet their stories offer general insights into economic challenges and resourcefulness, interleaved with moments of love and violence. They also allow us to observe the complex nature of Londonâs mid-century urban geography and its inhabitants, how gender operated âon the ground,â and the interconnections between urban networks and business practices, all as they unfolded in a discreet commercial milieu. Ultimately, male and female beauty tradersâ spatial concentration in the West End and along the borders of St. James Westminster and St. Anneâs Soho contributed to a commercial atmosphere that was not only dynamic and creative but also competitive.4 Regardless of merchantsâ class or gender, their intense concentration in this geographic and economic atmosphere engendered what economist Alfred Marshall characterized as âa continuous interplay between competition and cooperation,â in this case in the beauty market.5 This included the âbackmewsyâ operations of more humble beauty providers; an exploration of them moves them from the peripheries of scholarly considerations of Victorian enterprise to center stage as representative entrepreneurs in a metropolitan commercial environment out of which successful individual ventures emerged.6 In other words, small-scale entrepreneursâincluding some womenâwere important players in Victorian Londonâs beauty business. Their presence contributed to later successes of Londonâs professionalizing perfumers and hairdressers on national and global stages.
Building a British Beauty Business
Agnes Headman and AimĂ©e Lloyd were part of a compact network of mid-century traders who discreetly enhanced Londonersâ appearance. Until the late nineteenth century, however, there was no formal, capitalist âbeauty industryâ in London and especially not one catering exclusively to female clientele.7 Through the eighteenth century, Londonâs commercial scene featured a notable perfumery trade based on skill and craftsmanship that serviced men and women of the cityâs prosperous classes.8 Along with hairdressers and wig makers, these traders proffered the requisite items for elite eighteenth-century consumers to meet late-century trends: perfume, paint, powder, and towering perukes (Plate 1). Elite patronage reflected not only expanding urban markets in commodities but also new cultural and aesthetic associations relating to whiteness and British identity. Kim Hall argues that the early years of European colonization generatedâand depended onâa new set of cultural connotations around a racialized hierarchy of lightness over darkness. The subsequent idealization of fairness imbued male and female beauty with symbolic functions related to moral purity as well as social and ethnic hegemony.9 These powerful new connotations expanded public interest in beautification beyond the elite and urban consuming classes. For example, early modern medical and domestic recipe books reveal that middling men and women practiced what Edith Snook terms âbeautifying physic.â Early modern women engaged in home production, eschewing the overt âpaintsâ targeted by anti-cosmetic satires in favor of cleansing washes, unguents, and complexion creams that âwere manifestly a component of medical practice.â10
By the nineteenth century, London traders continued to offer consumers, primarily elite men, grooming tools and services necessary for communicating the civilized status of a fashionable public figure.11 Meanwhile, new conceptions of bourgeois femininity consolidated linkages between physical beauty and womenâs moral purity.12 Emerging evangelical domestic ideology prescribed an idealized femininity, in which a womanâs physical appearance conveyed âthe seasons of a womanâs lifeâ or her connections to the natural world.13 This transformed the nature and appearance of womenâs self-fashioning, when, by the mid-century, a domesticated white femininity defined by authenticity and artlessness emerged as the desirable form for a bourgeois wife. Pamphlets and didactic health literature deplored female cosmetic use as a sign of womenâs duplicitous and immoral inner character.14 Middle-class womenâs magazines, new cultural forms flourishing in the 1850s and 1860s, also reinforced the rejection of artifice in lieu of honesty about oneâs physical beauty.15 Middle-class authors and critics derided beauty consumption as a habit of the debauched aristocratic classes, whose artifice mirrored their doubtful moral character.16
At the same time, the promotion of natural beauty foregrounded the importance of an attractive physical appearance as a marker of mental and bodily health. Public censure subsequently could not dissuade Victorian men and women from engaging in discreet practices of bodily self-fashioning...