Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (15 page)

Omnibuses were not cheap to operate—each bus had a driver and a conductor, and was pulled by two horses. To run an omnibus 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, required a complement of 11 horses per bus. A horse cost £20 and the omnibus itself £100, so the start-up fixed capital cost was already £320. Then operating costs included feed, at 15
s.
per horse per week (or £429 per bus per year); and the costs of stabling, veterinarian bills and shoeing, as well as the maintenance and repair costs for the bus. There was a tax of 3
d.
per mile per passenger, which on an average route mounted up to 15
s.
per day, or over £270 a year. The wages of the driver and conductor were another £60 a year each; and, furthermore, many routes from the suburbs were along turnpike roads where tolls were still charged. The original omnibus design had had space for just fifteen passengers in the interior, with another three outside passengers beside the driver. The seemingly extortionate 1
s.
single fare to the suburbs, or the half-price 6
d.
fare in the centre of town, no longer looks so unreasonable. Not unreasonable, but affordable only by the prosperous middle classes.

In 1842 the mileage tax was halved (then reduced to 1
d.
in 1855,
¹
/
₂
d.
in 1866 and abolished entirely in 1870), and, more importantly, was now levied on the vehicle itself rather than on the number of passengers it could carry. It therefore made sense to reconfigure the buses so that they could carry more people. A ‘knifeboard’ seat was installed on the roof—a single long bench down the length of the bus, with the men (always men, as the roof was reached by a ladder that was hostile to skirts and petticoats) facing out to the sides, sitting back to back. This increased capacity to 25, and in turn fares were reduced to 3
d.
, or
sometimes even 1
d.
for a short ‘city’ stage as it was known.
*
Soon the ladders were replaced by a winding spiral stair, and the knifeboard seats with ‘garden’ seats (the kind of two-by-two backed benches that continue to be used on much public transport today), plate-glass windows were installed downstairs, and the bus was ready to take on its new role as a conveyance for the middle-class female shopper.
⁵⁶

Provincial towns and cities differed from London only in size. Otherwise the love of new shops and the means of access to them were all much the same. To get to the shops, similar solutions were adopted to suit the locale: Manchester had a single omnibus in 1835; by 1840 Engels noted that there was one at least every half-hour running from the suburban villas to the centre; by 1850 there were sixty-four services along the main routes. Birmingham had omnibuses running from suburbs like New Hall and Edgbaston in 1834; within the decade Small Heath and Sparkbrook were linked into the system. Glasgow was different from the now increasingly common pattern of a work-dominated centre and suburban housing. Here much of the population still lived in the centre of the city and commuted outwards; many used the Clyde river steamboat service, and it was not until the 1860s that an omnibus service sprang up to reach Kelvinside. Other cities had other solutions: from the early 1870s Edinburgh and Aberdeen (and Glasgow too) had horse trams; by 1890 Liverpool had 225.
⁵⁷
At the end of the 1870s there were only 321 miles of tramway in Britain, but when the switch to steam power and then electricity began in the 1880s, even towns with populations of 50,000 found it worth their while to lay down tramways. In London in 1896 the trams carried 280 million passengers, while omnibuses carried only 300,000 (a tram ticket cost 1
d.
, and the trams ran every two to three minutes, which might have had something to do with the disparity). By 1914, the number of passenger journeys made by tram throughout the country was 74 times the population of the United Kingdom.
⁵⁸

The London figures are the more astonishing given that the capital had yet a further means of mass transportation. In 1863 the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first underground railway, opened, running from Paddington in west London to Farringdon in the City, with an extension to St Pancras in 1868. When the Metropolitan District Railway (a separate
company) began to extend the Underground to Kensington and Victoria, the influx of suburban shoppers to the West End became a reality.
⁵⁹
In 1864, even on the small bit of route then existing, 6.5 million journeys were taken on the Underground in six months; after the 1868 extension the journeys jumped to 15 million a year.
⁶⁰

The various way of reaching the palaces of wonder in that glassgleaming, gas-hissing West End were new; yet what people were travelling towards was not. It was simply that more of them could now reach it. The sumptuousness, the brightness, the richness—above all, the sheer up-to-dateness—of shops had been commented on by visitors for a hundred years. It was the amount of glass that most forcefully seemed to strike European travellers. A French visitor in 1728 wrote that ‘shops are surrounded with [glass], and usually the merchandise [inside the shop] is arranged behind it, which keeps the dust off, while still displaying the goods to passers-by’—clearly something he had never seen at home. The German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who kept a diary on his visits to England, also found shopfronts that ‘seem to be made entirely of glass’ worthy of remark.
⁶¹

Glass was still expensive—both owing to the cost of the glass itself and also because of the glass tax, which was not abolished until 1851. Plate-glass technology made possible larger and larger window panes, which continued to astonish. An American visitor in the early 1830s said that in Regent Street ‘many of the bow windows are glazed with panes 24 by 36 inches, 30 by 45, &c. There is a fur shop having a window on each side of the door, the centre pane in each window measuring nine feet by five.’ The furrier told him that the centre panes had cost him 50 guineas each.
⁶²
This seems a perhaps pardonable exaggeration. Francis Place had set up a tailor’s shop in 1801, and ‘I put in a new front as elegant as the place would permit, each of the panes of glass cost me three pounds, and two in the door, four pounds each.’
⁶³
Even allowing for a rise in prices, and the substantial difference in grandeur between Place’s small shop and a Regent Street ‘emporium’, the 50 guineas still sounds like a tall tale. However much it cost, the dazzling plate glass was matched and abetted by developments in lighting: glass and gas together radically changed the look of shops.

The insides of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century shops had been no less splendid—especially, but not uniquely, in the luxurygoods trades. Many historians have suggested that until the arrival of the
department stores the displays in shops were minimal, that everything was kept in boxes, and only grudgingly drawn out piece by piece, with no sense of theatrical display. This cannot have been further from the truth. This misapprehension was set in train by the Victorians themselves, who saw—or wanted to see—what was taking place around them as something unprecedented. Charles Manby Smith, a journalist, described a plate-polisher’s shop in about 1810 as ‘a dim, dusty-looking house of some thirty feet frontage…which you might pass a hundred times, so unpretentious was its aspect, without noticing its existence’. He then took the reader on a tour of the shop’s development, as it was renovated by its next incumbent, when it ‘displayed…a handsome set of new shutters, surmounted by a Corinthian cornice, and a new private door, splendid in imitative walnut and shining varnish. When the shutters came down on Monday morning, they disclosed a handsome mahogany sash, the two lower rows of panes guarded by a stout trelliswork of brass-wire, resting upon a single plate of brass.’ Sometime before Manby Smith wrote this in 1857 the shop was pulled down to widen the road, at which point it was rebuilt ‘seventy feet high, with a huge semicircular façade, superb in pillars, pilasters, and carved cornices, fronting one of the most imposing approaches to the very centre of the city’.
⁶⁴

This may very well have happened to that precise building, but, more to the point, this is what Manby Smith understood to be happening everywhere. To heighten the contrast between past and present, to show how wonderful the mid-century shops were, he needed to believe that the shops of the past had been truly negligible. The trouble was, they simply weren’t as insubstantial as he suggested. Visitors to London, who did not have his vested interest in a dull, dark past to hold up against a dazzling, gaslit present, were perhaps more reliable. In 1786 the German diarist Sophie von la Roche went window shopping in London, and was suitably impressed. She visited John Boydell’s print shop (for more on Boydell, see pp. 388—91):

Here again I was struck by the excellent arrangement and system which the love of gain and national good taste have combined in producing, particularly in the elegant dressing of large shopwindows, not merely in order to ornament the streets and lure purchasers, but to make known the thousands of inventions and ideas, and spread good taste about, for the excellent pavements
made for pedestrians enable crowds of people to stop and inspect the new exhibits.
⁶⁵

She liked improving things, like prints, but she liked less sober-minded shops too, like the one which had a ‘cunning device for showing women’s materials. Whether they are silks, chintzes, or muslins, they hang down in folds behind the fine high windows so that the effect of this or that material, as it would be in the ordinary folds of a woman’s dress, can be studied. Amongst the muslins all colours are on view, and so one can judge how the frock would look in company with its fellows.’
⁶⁶

The lighting was as essential as the windows, and had been even before piped gas arrived. Francis Place had used ‘five large Argand lamps
*
in the shop besides the candles to make the windows and every part of it as nearly equally light as possible’.
⁶⁷
Johanna Schopenhauer, visiting London in 1803, admired ‘the brilliant displays of precious silverware, the beautiful draperies of muslin…behind large plate-glass windows, the fairy-tale glitter of the crystal shops’.
†
⁶⁸
That she and Sophie von la Roche both admired hanging fabrics would have won the heart of the ‘old draper’, the pseudonymous author of a series in
The Warehousemen and Drapers’ Trade Journal.
He recalled his early days in the trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when ‘we made a very large and flaring show of goods upon every possible occasion, piling stacks up outside the door…and at times we even had a length of stuff let down from the top storey window to the bottom, so as to attract notice and attention’.
⁶⁹
Contrary to Manby Smith’s and many later historian’s view of the period, the ‘old draper’ knew that presentation was of the essence. He told how, when he first set up on his own, he rented a big shop, which he could not afford to stock properly. So he devised a variety of ruses. He displayed great rolls of ‘silks’ where only the top layer was an expensive silk, bulked out underneath by cheap fabric he had painted

to match. He stocked his drawers at the front, putting parcels stuffed with paper in behind, so that when the drawers were opened they appeared reassuringly full to his customers. Without this he would not have been
able to persuade his suppliers that he was financially stable and creditworthy, nor would his customers have been willing to shop somewhere they thought too scantily stocked, and therefore unlikely to carry what they wanted: display was vital.
⁷⁰

London had two very distinct streets, or rather sets of streets, which had been dedicated to shopping from the eighteenth century. The first ran from Mile End in the East End to Parliament Street in the West End, taking in Whitechapel, Leadenhall Street, Cornhill, Cheapside, St Paul’s Churchyard (famous for books and, later, haberdashery), Ludgate Street, Fleet Street, the Strand and Charing Cross. The other linked chain of streets also began in the eastern end of London, at Shoreditch, and ran westward, taking in Bishopsgate Street, Threadneedle Street, Cheapside, Newgate Street, Holborn, Broad Street, St Giles and Oxford Street.
⁷¹
In the eighteenth century, the former streets had the more elegant shops, and were considered to be more fashionable. In 1807 Robert Southey, in the guise of a foreign visitor, described how

When I reached Cheapside the crowd completely astonished me. On each side of the way were two uninterrupted streams of people, one going east, the other west. At first I thought some extraordinary occasion must have collected such a concourse; but I soon perceived it was only the usual course of business…If possible I was still more astonished at the opulence and splendour of the shops, drapers, stationers…silversmiths, booksellers, print-sellers…one close to another, without intermission, a shop to every house, street after street, and mile after mile; the articles themselves so beautiful, and beautifully arranged.
⁷²

Gradually over the century the fashionable shoppers moved west and north. One of the clearest markers of this westward shift was when the draper’s Shoolbred, Cook and Co., which had been in St Paul’s Churchyard, moved in 1817 to Tottenham Court Road, which was rapidly gaining a reputation as a middle-class shopping street.
*
By that year,
Johnstone’s London Commercial Guide
listed the following in Oxford
Street: 3 linen drapers, 10 straw-hat manufactories [in this context, a manufactory was a place that sold the goods it made in its workrooms on the premises], 6 bonnet warehouses [meaning simply large shops], 5 woollen drapers, 5 lace warehouses, 3 plumassiers [feather merchants, for hat feathers], 24 boot- and shoe-makers, 17 hosiers and glovers, 4 silk mercers, 1 silk weaver, 4 furriers, 12 haberdashers and hosiers, 1 ribbon warehouse, 1 muslin and shawl warehouse, 2 silk and satin dyers, 2 drapers and tailors, 1 India-muslin warehouse, 3 fancy trimmings and fringe manufactories, 1 button manufactory, 2 pressers and dyers, 5 perfumers, 1 patent-thread manufactory, 1 tailor, 3 stay and corset warehouses, 1 stocking warehouse, 1 ready-made linen [that is, underwear] warehouse, and 4 umbrella manufactories.
⁷³