Shopgirls Read online

  Leeds Mercury, 22 March 1866:

  WANTED, a Young Lady as SALESWOMAN, who understands mantles; one with a knowledge of Millinery; also a good Second Milliner. Apply, stating terms and reference, to M’Kenzie and Wilson, Sunderland.

  Birmingham Daily Post, 29 October 1863:

  WANTED, a Respectable FEMALE SHOP ASSISTANT, must Write a good Hand and be quick at Accounts. One who has been accustomed to Business preferred. – Address, 254, Post Office, Stourbridge, stating age and salary.

  Liverpool Mercury, 15 July 1869:

  WANTED, as Milliner and Saleswoman, a Young Lady of good character and abilities. Enclose carte. – Booth Brothers, Southport.

  ‘Respectable’, ‘young’, ‘good character’, ‘knowledge’, ‘abilities’. The spin is clear: shopwork was being advertised as suitable for young women, a proper profession, a job with status. It sounded attractive; no wonder women were rushing to apply.

  Moreover, the number of jobs for women in shopwork was increasing exponentially; this was something new. The young women answering these ads in Sunderland, Stourbridge and Southport in the 1860s were unknowing pioneers. They were the first generation of women to enter into shopwork en masse, part of a new wave of female workers breaking into a world that just a decade earlier had been dominated by men. As our Glaswegian shopgirl in disguise recognised, high-street shops in mid-century Britain were largely owned, run and staffed by men, so that the experience of going shopping was quite different from what we know today.

  Take a small market town like Wisbech in the Fens, a decade earlier. According to the Post Office directory of 1853, Wisbech was ‘one of the most considerable and thriving towns in the Isle of Ely and Cambridgeshire’; it was ‘lighted with gas’ and boasted ‘an exchange hall and council rooms … a savings bank, a newspaper, cemetery for Churchmen, and another for Dissenters’. It was also home to a dedicated amateur photographer called Samuel Smith. He experimented with the new calotype photographic process, cheaper and more flexible than earlier techniques. This enabled him to photograph his home town with comparative ease and it is through his meticulous documenting of the streets and river that we can catch an accurate glimpse of what a market townscape looked like in the mid 1800s.

  Standing in the middle of the cobbled street on Cornhill in his three-piece suit, looking across into the Old Market, Smith recorded the scene.3 Since medieval times, towns across the country had been full of shops, most of them centred on the all-important marketplace that was the main source of fresh food. Some medieval shops had been simply stalls, but there had also been open-fronted townhouses and craftsmen’s workshops, each dedicated to a particular trade. Smith’s photographs reveal that in Wisbech in the 1850s the specialist trader still dominated, though by now most shops had bow-windowed fronts to show off their wares. He persuaded a handful of shopkeepers to stand still for the fifteen long minutes it took to expose his calotype; so we see figures we presume to be Mr McNeil the confectioner, Mr Foster the draper and grocer and Mr Goward the postmaster standing proud, while Mr Goode the saddler, Mr Barley the chemist, Mr Ford the ironmonger, and draper Mr Bellars are out of this particular shot.

  The terraced brick houses of the Wisbech shopkeepers conformed to the traditional ‘shop-and-house’ layout, with the shop window taking up the whole ground floor, and the upper floors and cellar serving as storerooms and family living quarters. Theirs were small, family-run businesses dealing in specialised, narrow lines of goods.

  Nelson Foster was both draper and grocer. He was a skilled professional, intimately involved in each stage of the shopkeeping process. He knew his suppliers well, he understood quality, he handled the purchasing and storing of his wares, and he monitored the accounts. Like his Wisbech neighbours the confectioner and the chemist, Nelson Foster was also involved in the actual processing of his goods; as a grocer he mixed his own spices, pickled his own chutneys, made sauces, bottled fruit, potted meats, patted butter and above all blended his own tea, tea being very profitable.

  All the shopkeepers took a close personal interest in their local customers. Intimate knowledge of customers was vital, for these were the days of credit. The retail world functioned on a flow of credit, with customers buying goods on account, shopkeepers in turn buying off the wholesalers on credit, and finally wholesalers buying off the manufacturers on credit. The whole system relied on a chain of credit. Any break in the flow, any significant non-payment of accounts, spelt danger for the whole chain. Therefore it was of vital importance to Foster to know whether his customers were in work, expecting a child, arranging their father’s funeral or travelling. Shops were centres of local gossip, but seemingly idle chit-chat was vitally important intelligence for these family businesses, for the information fed directly into the shopkeepers’ assessments of their customers’ ability to pay.4

  A few hazardous coaching-hours east of Wisbech, in Norwich, Copeman’s grocery was one of the city’s most important stores. It kept meticulous records, in beautifully handwritten Correspondence Books, of the courteous letters between the grocer and his creditors. Even customers who failed to pay promptly were dealt with politely, with Copeman’s apologetically writing that they ‘must request a remittance of the balance by return of post … waiting which we are, Yours respectfully’. After waiting six months for payment, Copeman’s was less respectful: ‘if not paid soon the balance must be pressed’. One customer clearly was never going to pay up: ‘Your word has so often been forfeited that we can place no dependence on it whatever.’5

  Traders were multi-skilled and most took on a male apprentice for three to seven years. Apprentices were taught their craft and many of these young men nursed dreams of setting up a business of their own one day. They were unpaid but given board and lodging, usually living above the shop alongside the rest of the family.6

  Wives and daughters often helped out too; these women were the original ‘shopgirls’, though their work usually went unrecorded and unpaid. In Wisbech the census of 1851 documented the following family living in Nelson Foster’s store, 26 Old Market:

  Nelson Foster, aged 28, Draper & Grocer

  Eliza Foster, aged 21 [no occupation listed]

  John Batterman, aged 25, Draper’s assistant

  John Skippon, aged 21, Grocer’s assistant

  Ellen Allen, aged 21, General servant

  The census doesn’t record whether, in between running the household of five adults and managing the maid-of-all-work, Eliza Foster had any hand in the thousands of tasks it took to run the store, from displaying the broad cloths, doeskins and caps to accounting, sewing the ready-made clothing and stock-taking – let alone serving the customers and gathering the all-important gossip. Nor does it record whether any of the neighbouring shopwives helped out, Susannah McNeil at the family confectionery business, Caroline Barley and Ann Elizabeth Baxter at the two chemists’, and Lucy Bellars at the second draper’s. The Fosters’ children, Nelson junior and Eliza junior, weren’t born for another few years.

  But what Wisbech had to offer in the 1850s paled in comparison to the exotic, extravagant variety of specialist traders in the larger towns and cities. London, the great metropolis, boasted pianoforte makers, French corset- and stay-makers, porkmen, eye-snuff manufacturers, turtle and venison dealers, emporia of novelty, gunmakers, theatrical booksellers, paper stainers and decorators to Her Majesty, slop sellers and a muffin and crumpet baker.7 In London, awnings were rolled out above shopfronts during the day, protecting passers-by and shoppers from showers, some emblazoned with the shop’s name: ‘Sibley from Oxford Street’ and the like. In the evening the streets were lit by gaslights and the shops’ own external gas lamps, tempting shoppers in even after dark. Then, at night, shutters were pulled tightly down, securing each precious glass window.

  Nevertheless, despite this cornucopia of wares, and the dedicated, professional service, many customers found the actual shopping experience unpleasant. French writer Francis Wey travelled around Britain in
1856, gathering material for his book Les Anglais Chez Eux (‘The British at Home’), and was astonished at the detached, indifferent attitude of London shopkeepers, who seemed – to him – to have no interest in making a sale. ‘I had the greatest difficulty in getting the assistant to show me more than two fingers of each glove as though displaying the entire article was beneath his dignity.’8 It was not just the sales assistants: the cashier and the shopman himself both treated Francis Wey as if he should be grateful to them, rather than thanking him as a valued customer.

  And it wasn’t just foreign visitors who were put out. Writing in 1895, high-society hostess and journalist Lady Jeune remembered what a conservative business shopping had been in her youth, where each shop had its own speciality and each trader seemed an unrivalled, eternal fixture on the shopping circuit. ‘Jones sold the best silks, Smith the best gloves, Brown the best bonnets, Madame X. was far and away the only good milliner and dressmaker, and no one had the temerity or boldness to contradict the fact or infringe on their monopoly.’9

  Lady Jeune had been brought up in Brahan Castle in the Scottish Highlands and had gone on to marry first an army colonel and then a barrister; her dinner parties were legendary, with guests including writer Thomas Hardy and scientist Mary Ward, poet Robert Browning and even the politician Joseph Chamberlain. This was a woman with few social hang-ups. Yet even Lady Jeune had found having to interact with truculent shopmen hiding their wares beneath their counter a ‘dreary affair’. She remembered being received by a solemn gentleman in black, who handed her over to a second gentleman, who handed her over to a third, who seated her and ‘in a sepulchral tone of voice uttered some magic words, such as “Silk, Mr Smith”, or “Velvet, Mr A.”’, before leaving to seek another ‘victim’. She described buying only what was needed, not being shown or offered anything extra, and leaving in a sombre mood, so that ‘with a great sense of relief the large doors closed behind one’.10

  Lady Jeune left the shop relieved; other customers in less high-class establishments, who were doubtless not as well dressed as Lady Jeune, had far worse experiences. Some shopmen were rude, haranguing or insulting customers if they bought too little or had not dared to buy anything at all after having crossed their threshold. Prices were unmarked, so assistants quoted different prices to different customers and only they knew the lowest figure that the store would accept. Haggling, known as ‘cheapening’, was still the norm in many smaller shops. And as Lady Jeune pointed out, once the purchase had been made, the customer was expected to leave immediately: no browsing allowed.

  William Ablett, in his Reminiscences of an Old Draper, confessed to having witnessed the effects such intimidating behaviour had on young customers. ‘Many a half-frightened girl have I seen go out of the shop, her purchase in her hands, the tears welling up in her eyes.’ Not only were the young ladies upset by the shopmen’s attitude, they were often also pressured into buying the wrong item. The poor shopper would leave, ‘shaking her head and saying, “I am sure I shall never like it” – some shawl or dress having been forced upon her contrary to her taste or judgement’.11

  Yet, by the early 1860s, such brusque, even bullying shopmen were out of touch with the times. The new wave of young women answering the ads for shopgirls in Southport and Stourbridge, let alone London, were poised to change the experience of shopping for ever. For mid-century Britain was a country in upheaval. The first phase of the Industrial Revolution was past, and city life and concomitantly country life were in the midst of a radical transformation. Riches from the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution flooded into cities like Liverpool, Manchester and London, bringing an enormous increase in both the amount and the variety of goods sold in the shops. Not only were exotic wares like ostrich feathers and tea, mahogany and pineapples on sale in the big cities, but mass production in British factories meant that a bewildering range of linens and wools, clocks and glassware, china and paper became readily available. The demand for these new products was undeniable: the customers themselves were getting richer, as the whole country, even poorer workers, experienced a rapid rise in real income per capita.

  Traditional shopkeepers like our Wisbech draper Nelson Foster had to keep up with these changing times. They were faced with new wholesalers, new large-scale manufacturers, new goods of differing qualities, new customer demands. To top it all, it seemed that there was now a pressing problem to worsen their headache: half a million ‘spare women’.

  On the night of 30 March 1851, the head of each household had to fill in a form, recording who exactly was sleeping in his (sometimes her) house that night. Illiterate householders were helped by the thousands of ‘census enumerators’, who roved every district. It was the second census to record all individuals in each household, but compared to the one a decade earlier, this year’s recorded people’s exact occupations in far more detail – as well as their relationships to one another. One intention was to help the government get a handle on different ‘classes’ and ‘sub-classes’ of employment, particularly as masters of a trade were asked to state how many men they employed.

  The results of this census were pored over by journalists, economists, government officials and intellectuals, all of them trying to understand better the society in which they were living. There was one extraordinary figure among them: Harriet Martineau. Martineau, who used an ear trumpet to battle the deafness she had suffered from since childhood, had supported herself as a journalist and writer for decades, ever since her father’s cloth business had failed. She had come to fame with Illustrations of Political Economy, a series of twenty-three fictional stories that explored the negative effects of industrialisation on the lives of individuals and society; typical examples included ‘The Manchester Strike’ and ‘The Loom and the Lugger’. She was described as having a masculine intellect for dealing with such subjects as politics, economics and industry. Martineau was a radical in the spirit of the Reform Movement, which had been inspired by the French Revolution and dominated public debate around the Reform Act of 1832, addressing issues of working-class autonomy and economic independence, issues that were to become profoundly relevant to our new wave of shopgirls. Now in her fifties, Martineau was focused on the controversial theme of the day, namely the Woman Question.

  What exactly the Woman Question was is difficult to pin down; it was never just one question. Early feminists both in Britain and in the United States, which Martineau visited, were debating the status of women on all fronts: legal, economic, educational, domestic. Chewing over the results of the 1851 census, Martineau wrote an article in the Edinburgh Review which she titled ‘Female Industry’. The warning it contained was stark, and immediately resonated with her readers.

  The census had revealed an unbalanced ratio of men to women, with half a million more women, specifically single women, than men. They were the ‘spare women’, who either could not hope to ‘marry and be taken care of’, or who, as widows, might not have been left provided for by their late husbands. ‘We go on talking as if it were still true that every woman is, or ought to be, supported by father, brother or husband,’ wrote Martineau, arguing that this way of thinking was outdated and the country now needed to face the facts: ‘A very large proportion of the women of England earn their own bread … more than two million are independent in their industry, are self-supporting, like men.’

  Martineau warned that ignoring these facts would lead to ‘an encroachment of pauperism at one end of the scale, and the most poisonous of vices at the other’. In other words, if society didn’t help these two million women by providing them with sufficient job opportunities, they would face poverty and prostitution, ending up in either the workhouse or the brothel. It was a call for action and it prompted journalists and social critics to suggest all manner of solutions, from shipping these ‘superfluous’ women out to the colonies, to increasing the numbers of domestic servants.12 But the person who answered Martineau’s call directly was a younger woman called Jessie Bo
ucherett, an action which was to change completely the direction of Boucherett’s life.

  Boucherett grew up in rural Lincolnshire and as a girl had been a keen rider to hounds. She was later described as ‘delicate, highly bred, with a considerable sense of humour and great courtesy’.13 Just five months after having read Martineau’s ‘Female Industry’ article, Boucherett founded the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, which suggested replacing men with women in one trade in particular: that of the shop assistant. She asked pointedly, ‘Why should bearded men be employed to sell ribbon, lace, gloves, neck-kerchiefs, and the dozen other trifles to be found in a silkmercer’s or haberdasher’s shop?’14

  Boucherett chose the headquarters of her new Society strategically. The address was 19 Langham Place, just north of Oxford Circus in London. These Langham Place offices already housed the English Woman’s Journal, run by a small circle of female activists who came to be known as the Ladies of Langham Place. Boucherett was in good company.

  She focused on the difficulties faced by unmarried women of limited means in finding the right work, wanting to free them up from being ‘useless burdens on society, as inmates of our prisons, workhouses and charitable institutions’.15 She felt that the choice of employment open to women was inadequate. The ‘three great professions’ of teaching, domestic service and needlework were so oversubscribed, Boucherett argued, that wages had been driven down ‘to a point at which it is difficult to live’.16

  So she set up the Society with two clear aims: to open up new areas of employment to women and to improve their poor standards of education, for the average length of school attendance for girls across the country was still a shockingly low two years. The Society set up the first register of employment for women, ran the first book-keeping class for women, and gave classes in shorthand, law copying and photography. And Boucherett herself superintended a commercial school ‘for girls and young women, where they may be specially trained to wait in shops’. She had them taught accounts, the practicalities of how to tie a parcel, and that elusive skill of service, namely a shoppish manner, politeness towards customers ‘and a constant self-control’.