Shopgirls Read online

  Cartoonist Osbert Lancaster painted an astutely funny portrait of his great-aunt Jenny in his memoirs, comparing her intimate relationship with Whiteley’s Universal Stores to that of an abbess and her convent. She saw Whiteley’s and others as part of her domestic domain. Each of Lancaster’s female relatives had their favourites: for Great-Aunt Bessie the Army & Navy Stores ‘fulfilled all the functions of her husband’s club’, while Lancaster’s mother preferred Harvey Nichols. Lancaster wrote that it was hard to underestimate how personal the relationship was between these lady customers and the shopkeepers. Some of the shop assistants became the ladies’ confessors, ‘receiving endless confidences on the state of their health, the behaviour of their pets and the general iniquity of the Government’.

  In the 1880s, Great-Aunt Jenny lived hard by Whiteley’s on Inverness Terrace, and after reading most of The Morning Post in the drawing room, she would pay her daily visit to the store. She witnessed each successive stage of growth and innovation, deploring each development as spelling future disaster. Nothing was too trivial to escape her attention. ‘The appearance of a new cashier in hardware or a change in the colour of the parcel tape was immediately noted and gave rise to fears for the firm’s stability.’ Great-Aunt Jenny then returned home just in time to read the Court Pages – and their daily gossip – before lunch.6

  Public life was opening up for the mistresses of villas and upper-class ladies like Jeanette Marshall and Great-Aunt Jenny. Visiting and travelling around city centres had previously been a restricted, even dangerous activity for women like them. Until recently, city centres had been dominated by men’s lives: at work in factories, banks, courts; at play in men’s institutes, clubs, dining rooms and pubs, as sites of prostitution. The streets themselves were an assault on the senses. They were teeming with life and activity, with working-class men and women living, working, eating, buying and selling on the streets. Henry Mayhew was an astute social observer, journalist and co-founder of Punch magazine who catalogued London life in his writings on the shops of London and, most famously, in London Labour and the London Poor. His weighty volumes are an encyclopaedia of street sellers of all kinds, from the most elegant to the most depraved, from sellers of gelatine, ballads and china ornaments to ‘crawlers’ begging, pickpockets thieving and prostitutes soliciting.7 Often selling and entertainment went hand in hand; early photographs from the late 1870s show Caney, an ex-clown, caning chairs out on the street, and capture a little Italian boy playing a harp to collect pennies.8 Charles Dickens had it right.

  This world had not disappeared when Jeanette Marshall headed out into the thronging streets; she still had to contend with street sellers, sexual harassers and beggars. But she was living through a heady period of social change and rules on being chaperoned in public places were relaxing. At the same time, increased public transport, such as the new two-horse trams, gave her greater freedom to move around the city, and better amenities allowed her to stay away from home for longer, with teashops, ladies’ kiosks and public lavatories all playing a part. For out-of-towners, special excursion tickets on railways like the Great Western made day returns into the capital feasible, leading one older lady to complain that ‘people think nothing of running up constantly to London and ladies travel alone and unattended for reasons which would, in the eyes of their grandmothers, hardly have justified a jaunt into the nearest market town’.9

  There was much to run up to town for. Public spaces, attractions and entertainments were opening up everywhere. Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 was marked by the acquisition of hundreds of plots of land for public parks, such as Victoria Park in Partick, Glasgow.10 City councils and philanthropists believed that providing green space in crowded areas would improve the physical and even moral health of the working classes. But park promenading was by no means restricted to working people; parks were conceived as places where all members of society could mingle freely, enjoying the flower displays, musical entertainment on the bandstands, sports, neighbouring art galleries – and each other. After all, it was promenading in Hyde Park on Saturday afternoons that allowed Arthur Munby to observe the tall good figures of elegant milliners and shopwomen and to strike up a conversation with shopgirl Eliza Close while sheltering from poor weather. And if it was pouring with rain, then middle-class ladies only had to run indoors, where a wealth of new entertainments were on offer. Spectacle was the byword; more so than ever before, the Victorian public was being treated to a wealth of visual delights and theatrical trickery. Liverpool, London, Edinburgh and Manchester all boasted exhibitions, panoramas and dioramas where, in a small theatre, winter snow might be magically transformed into a summer meadow and rainbows would glow after thunderstorms.

  Shopping entrepreneurs fed off and fed into this new hyper-visual culture, both in Britain and across the water. The Drapers Record trade magazine for retailers faithfully monitored advances in Paris and the United States, where pioneers like Marshall Field in Chicago and husband-and-wife team Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut in Paris were trailblazing a new consumer culture. Paris was at the forefront of modernity, ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’ as the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin later described it. From the French capital, an entirely new vision was filtering through, a revolution in display, marketing, consumption – and even ethics.

  Monsieur Eiffel had helped design the most famous department store in the world in the 1870s, the Boucicauts’ Bon Marché in Paris, creating a fantasy vision in glass and steel, openness and light. It was set out as a permanent fair, dazzling and sensuous. This was a new shopping experience, an international urban development as important as the twentieth-century out-of-town mall. For here it was all about browsing and show. It was a physical and social emporium of delights. Fixed prices were on display, you did not have to buy, and you could mingle with the other shoppers. You could be a strolling flâneur.

  But, perhaps typically, the British didn’t simply copy the French. Instead many British stores developed their own hybrid versions of the grands magasins.11 Yes, Jenner designed sweeping staircases and galleries with long, flowing lines. And Harrods installed Britain’s first moving staircase, at the top of which a shop assistant stood with smelling salts and cognac in case ‘travellers’ were upset by their new experience. And yes, Arthur Lasenby Liberty created the highly fashionable Eastern Bazaar in the basement of Liberty’s, offering up a sumptuous display of decorative furnishings, fabrics and objets d’art, a feast for the eye that would not have looked out of place in Paris. But Liberty was set on challenging Parisian style and methods. He designed his in-house clothing range in defiance of Parisian haute couture and he built lasting relationships with English designers, many of whom were part of the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements. In this way Arthur Liberty personally fostered the decorative arts in Britain, so much so that Art Nouveau in Italy became known as the ‘Stile Liberty’.

  The resistance to overseas influence was, however, far more deep-seated than concerns over which chiffon to choose and how to design a walking dress. The concept of free browsing, of shoppers mingling and gazing with abandon, revelling in sensory delights in the middle of an urban crowd of mixed classes and mixed genders, was initially seen as dangerous, a threat to bourgeois society. And anything that allowed women to extend their shopping experience – new amenities such as rest rooms, luncheon rooms, writing rooms and lavatories, for example – might further threaten a respectable lady’s morality. These innovations were challenging the fundamental purpose and ethics of shopping, posing the question as to whether shopping was a healthy, profitable activity, or an evil that was both socially dangerous and economically ruinous.

  As ever, William Whiteley and his antics stood at the centre of this anxious, ongoing national debate. Whiteley had opened the first ever in-store Luncheon Room in London. Then in 1872 he applied for a licence to serve wine and beer alongside the buns and ices. He argued that this would be a convenience for the hundreds o
f country visitors who flocked to his store each day; he said he was simply responding to customer demand, being ‘constantly asked for a glass of wine and biscuit’.12

  His application unleashed a furore. At the general licensing meeting, the magistrates sat in the Vestry Hall, Paddington, and listened patiently to both sides of the argument. The opposing barrister, Mr W. Wright, rallied an eloquent attack on Mr Whiteley. Mr Wright contended that providing wine and beer to middle- and upper-class customers was dangerous; alcohol consumption among ladies was on the rise and Whiteley should not be encouraging them. Having advanced so far, he then tried to back away from his implied criticism, claiming he had no intention ‘of questioning the respectability of Mr Whiteley or his customers’. But the aspersion had been cast; he had touched on the social assumption that virtuous ladies did not drink; alcoholic beverages were the preserve of racy, louche and immoral women.

  Mr Wright then voiced his second concern. He feared that lower-class and ‘fallen’ women might dress up as respectable ladies and use Whiteley’s as ‘a place of assignation’. All in all, Mr Wright was suggesting that serving wine and beer would transform the Bayswater store into a brothel, where women would lose their grip on morality, and prostitutes, disguised as ladies, could meet their pimps and punters.

  Whiteley’s department store did, in fact, already have a louche reputation, partly as a consequence of Whiteley’s own flamboyance and partly since it was located in a mixed area. With this in mind, Mr Wright’s concerns were appreciated by the chairman of the bench, who felt that providing drink to Whiteley’s customers was unnecessary; the magistrates promptly rejected the application.

  But that was not the end of the story. A few months later the popular journal The Graphic labelled Whiteley’s lunch room a dangerous ‘importation from Paris’ since it enabled customers, specifically female shoppers, to refuel during their supposed shopping marathons. Fortified by soups, cutlets, omelettes, macaroni and fritters, they would ‘return once more to the slaughter’ and spend, spend, spend. Namely their husband’s money. ‘The afternoon’s excitement has all the attraction of a delightful dream, with a slight dash of an orgy.’13

  Beneath his titillating tone, the Graphic journalist was articulating serious anxieties around female shoppers on several levels: reputational, sexual, moral, financial. His fears? Women’s unrestrained desires, a looseness with their husband’s purse and the seduction of a good bourgeois lady who might throw off all caution and even chastity.

  The person who perfected this art of reader titillation, combining it with outraged moral condemnation – a literary tease – was Eliza Linton. She was a controversial, successful and widely read novelist and journalist. Earlier in her career she had defended women’s rights; now she turned into a most ardent opponent of the same. She condemned the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ of women like Harriet Martineau and the early women’s suffrage movement, who sought the right to vote, and she even criticised the ‘modern mother’. Her most notorious article was called ‘The Girl of the Period’, an extraordinary meditation on English womanhood. She lamented the disappearance of the fair young English girl of old, with her innate purity and dignity, ‘neither bold in bearing nor masculine in mind’, whose aim in life was to be a good wife, a tender mother, an industrious housekeeper. She condemned ‘the girl of the period’, who ‘dyes her hair and paints her face’, her sole ambition being to indulge in the extravagance of fashion. For this she needed money; thus she sought a rich husband not for love but to allow her ‘so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure’.

  Linton’s article was deeply conservative, harping on the eternal theme that the newest fashions were too immodest, too revealing, too impractical, too ugly. ‘If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the mud, she raises it midway to the knee.’ If bonnets were reduced in size, hers became a mere ‘four straws and a rosebud’.14 If hair ointment became outmoded, she went to the other extreme and let her hair wander dangerously down her back. But the article was also a critique on an increasingly polarised society, where Linton saw capital becoming king and money the dominant driver. In her mind, young, well-to-do women – potentially mothers of the nation’s leaders – had set off on the wrong path.

  Linton honed in on her targets in another article entitled ‘The Philosophy of Shopping’. It is a poetic rumination on shopping, which she saw as a worshipping of false gods. Linton wrote that shoppers were flirtatious coquettes, tantalisingly delaying the moment of decision-making as they flitted between competing indulgences, between different gaily tinted silks. She wrote about assiduous shopmen servicing the ladies, and the power kick a lady received when she was ‘suddenly transported to a position of supreme command, with a world of material luxury at her feet’.15 Linton used language that was implicitly sexual, the language of desire, longing, enticement, control and fulfilment. She herself was coquetting with her readers, sensuously describing the charms of an afternoon’s shopping before cruelly lambasting them, censoring both the act of shopping and women who shopped. A ‘waste of time’, ‘wholly unnecessary’, a ‘very expensive kind of amusement’, better expressed Linton’s attitude to shopping. As for the actual shoppers: ‘they have no method in their domestic management and are always at sea as to the real condition alike of their wardrobes and of their purses.’

  The everyday allure of the products behind the counter was bad enough for writers such as Linton, but at sales time shoppers would completely lose control of themselves and their purses, according to the drapers and shopkeepers who profited from these snatches of consumer frenzy. Sales were not, however, a new phenomenon in the late 1800s: in Reminiscences of an Old Draper, William Ablett recalled how, as a teenage assistant in the mid century, he helped his master prepare for a sale of excess and damaged stock, a ‘selling off’. On the first morning a surging wave of eager customers waited outside the heavy doors while everything was unnaturally quiet within. ‘“Open the doors!” shouted my master upon entering the shop, and in poured a multitude that filled it from top to bottom in a twinkling.’ They bought goods of every description and ‘critical old women, that under ordinary circumstances would have spent a long time, in the usual course of business, examining a pair of stockings, bought the same goods, instantly, at full prices’. Even when the sale products got into a sad mess, people still bought them, ‘right and left, using but little judgement’.16 A draper writing later that century was even less complimentary, noting in his diary that ‘there is something about the crowds of women that reminds me of a farmyard’. His diary was published under the title Hades! The Ladies!, which aptly sums up his attitude towards his precious customers.17

  Animalistic behaviour and a loss of human dignity and self-control: this is what consumer frenzy was apparently driving women to. And for a small number of shoppers, the desire for possession pushed them one step further. They stole. Yet their actions were seen not as criminal but as diseased, the disease of kleptomania. Petty theft was one of the most common women’s crimes, but now it was ‘lady shop-lifters’ who caught the public imagination. It was difficult for staff and early store detectives to challenge a well-to-do customer who looked as though she had pilfered some goods, difficult for them to switch from being deferential to being confrontational. Many stores simply sent the ladies away with a gentle ticking off.18

  Nevertheless, a handful of thieving customers were not just caught red-handed but were actually taken to court, as was the case for Mary Ann Harvey. At Whiteley’s in January 1885, general manager Richard Burbridge was touring the departments when he spotted a lady looking ‘very bulky’. He followed her for a moment, then asked if she had been attended to, to which she replied yes. At this point, being the general manager and having strong suspicions, he decided to challenge the customer. What had she under her cloak? he asked. Surprisingly, she replied, ‘Velvet,’ and on further questioning, she claimed that she had lost her sales ticket. Burbridge requested her to accompany him to the office; on the way the
re she was seen by the attendant shop assistants to drop forty-two pocket handkerchiefs, two pairs of gloves and twenty-four and a half yards of velvet. The police were called. When Mrs Harvey appeared in court two weeks later, she was sentenced to one year and eight months’ penal servitude.19

  This swirling public anxiety around the moral dangers of consumerism, voiced so eloquently by Eliza Linton among others, was heightened by the fact that those on the other side of the counter looked so desirable themselves. Shopgirls looked good. The counter assistants were young and unmarried; they had to dress smartly, with spotless cuffs and collars and carefully arranged hair. Their dress, though not ostentatious, often nodded towards the latest fashions. They cultivated an air of professional chic. There is a certain element of theatre involved in shopwork: shopgirls were out on display, in the public gaze, behind the counter for all to notice, admire, even gawp at. Antoinette R. sold gloves in her father’s shop. She was pretty and found that the gentlemen she served stared at her ‘as if she were an unseen object’.20