Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (17 page)

For them, and for department stores more generally, innovation was a matter of pride, as it had been to the smaller shopkeeper. There were two kinds of innovation. The first was the kind of innovation that the customer
saw
—whether it was new buildings, plate-glass windows, customer lifts and escalators,
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cash-registers, pneumatic tubes to dispatch orders and payments to a central cash department,
†
or even Wylie and Lockhead of Glasgow’s novel idea of ‘flats’, where areas were decorated as if they were individual rooms in a private house that customers could
walk around to examine the goods displayed, for the first time, as though at home.
*
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The second kind of innovation was those that the customer
felt
rather than saw. These included new ways of organizing space, new service techniques, such as the decline and later abolition of the previously ubiquitous floorwalker; and the creation of service departments such as ladies’ lavatories,
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hairdressers, reading rooms, restaurants, cleaners and laundry services, carpet-beating, interior decor, estate agents, upholsterers, banks, post offices, smoking rooms and club rooms for men,
‡
even undertakers.

Some were better than others at seeing the future. David Lewis, the son of a merchant from London, was first apprenticed to a tailor and outfitter. In 1856 he set up on his own in Liverpool, a town of increasing prosperity—the Crimean War and the development of the American Midwest was bringing big business to the port. At roughly the same time, in the same street, another tailor, named Jacobs, opened his shop. In 1864 Lewis branched out into women’s clothes, then in 1874 he added shoes for women and girls; then he started selling perfumery, layettes, umbrellas and patent medicines; in 1879 he added a tobacco department; in 1880 school slates, watches, stationery, books and sheet music. (In that same year he also opened a new store in Manchester and, to advertise it, sold Lewis’s Two-shilling Tea, complete with a specially commissioned tea song, ‘Lewis’s Beautiful Tea’, more as a marketing gimmick than with any expectation of finding a market. To his astonishment, by 1883, he was selling 20,000 pounds of tea a year—and all from an attempt to promote clothes.) His neighbour Jacobs had had enough; he advertised, ‘Jacobs of Ranelagh Street find it necessary to give notice that it is not their intention to add other departments to their business of clothiers, Bootmakers, Hatters and Outfitters or to enter into any branch of business which they do not thoroughly understand.’ It is hardly necessary to tell the rest of the story: Jacobs went out of business, while Lewis became the owner of Lewis’s of Liverpool and of the
Bon Marché, also in Liverpool, one of the biggest and most successful department-store entrepreneurs of the century.
⁹⁹

While these department stores increased in size, swallowing up the shops around them, before the late 1870s it was rare that the shops were purpose-built: rather, they extended and extended, but from the front remained visibly separate buildings that had been knocked together. The Bon Marché in Brixton
*
was, in 1877, the first custom-built department store in Britain (it was said to have cost a staggering £70,000); others followed, sometimes voluntarily, often when street-widening schemes or other civic improvements meant that their original shops would have had to have been rebuilt anyway—Barker’s, Derry and Toms, and Pontings, all in Kensington, became monolithic when Kensington High Street was widened from the small country lane it had been.
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Lewis had with great foresight chosen the location for his Manchester shop with an extension in mind. Starting with six departments in 1877, by 1884 his premises had spread across the entire block, and rebuilding had begun once again.
¹⁰²

Messrs Bourne and Hollingsworth in Oxford Street, having had somewhat less foresight, looked about them to see what property they would have to acquire to get their ‘island’ site (a site that occupied an entire block, bounded by streets on four sides: the retailer’s dream). It was a daunting prospect—a pub, a dairy, a barber’s, a coffee house, a carpet-layer, a costume manufacturer, two milliners (one wholesale, one retail), a music publisher, a musical-instrument shop, a palmist, a hairdresser, the British headquarters of the New Columbia Gramophone Co., a brothel, a private house, a wholesale lace merchant, a building containing several Polish tailors, a sweet shop, the offices of Doan’s Backache Pills, Savory’s cigarette factory, a wholesale blouse-maker, a wine merchant’s storage cellar, a soda-water manufacturer, a jeweller, a baby-linen manufacturer, a wallpaper merchant, an estate agent, two solicitors and a chapel—but they did it.
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Others were similarly placed: Peter Robinson, which had opened in 1833, had bought the two adjoining premises in 1854; in 1856 and 1858 two more were bought; in 1860 the final shop, which gave a block of six shops, was acquired. Marshall and Snelgrove had opened as Marshall and Wilson in 1837; just short
of forty years later, in 1876, it added the final shop to its, by now, seven shops to complete its own ‘island’.
¹⁰⁴
*

These shops, like Whiteley’s of Paddington, saw themselves as ‘Universal Providers’. It was William Whiteley himself who had coined the phrase. He had started as a draper in 1855, and he followed the same path as we have already seen with Kendal, Milne and Bainbridge’s: first he opened a drapery, then he expanded to add the goods that might be desired at the same time: ribbons, lace, fancy goods, gloves, jewellery, parasols. By the 1870s he had expanded literally, into the shop next door, and figuratively, into the services market: Whiteley’s included an estate agent, a hairdresser, a tea room and a furniture showroom on the Wylie and Lockhead model. What really set him apart, though, was his talent for self-publicity. For example, in 1865 one of his employees, John Barker, a department manager, was earning £300 a year; Whiteley promised to double his salary if Barker doubled his turnover. He did, and by 1870 Barker asked to be taken into partnership. Whiteley refused, but promised him a salary of £1,000—more than had ever been paid to a draper; more even than the income of many upper-middle-class professionals. Barker declined it, left Whiteley’s and started his own department store in Kensington (which closed last year, in 2005).
¹⁰⁶
Whiteley, however, more than made up for the loss of his valued employee by ensuring that all the newspapers reported the huge salary Barker had been offered. In the 1870s Whiteley also revived the eighteenth-century custom of the puff, sending the
Bayswater Chronicle
letters ostensibly written by women who shopped at his store.

A completely different route was taken by some other monster shops. Many furniture shops were content to remain furniture shops: Waring and Gillow was proud to announce that it was the ‘largest furnishing emporium in the world’, but it had no interest in developing other departments; Heal’s, in Tottenham Court Road, had picked up the modern department stores’ methods of display, but it stuck with furnishings. Even the huge Peter Robinson shop, which employed nearly 2,000 workers across 100 departments, sold nothing but ladies’ clothes.
¹⁰⁷
Arthur Liberty, although ultimately diversifying, began by dealing in only a narrow range of merchandise. Liberty had first worked at Farmer and Roger’s, a shawl warehouse in Regent Street. In 1862 an international exhibition held in Kensington showed William Morris wallpaper for the first time, next to the first exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts to appear in Europe. (Commodore Perry had sailed into Yedo Bay nine years before, and the first commercial treaty between Japan and Britain had been signed only in 1858.) After the exhibition closed, Farmer and Roger bought some of the displays and set up an Oriental Warehouse in the shop next to their own, with Arthur Liberty as its junior salesman. The Oriental Warehouse became a meeting place for a ‘bohemian’ set that included the painters Whistler and Rossetti and the actress Ellen Terry—the forerunners of the Aesthetic Movement. As John Barker had done, Liberty asked to be taken into partnership. As with Barker, he was refused, and he too left to start up his own business. (But unlike Whiteley, whose name survives in some form of retailing to this day, Farmer and Roger’s went under, while Liberty’s continues to flourish.)

Liberty at first specialized in fabrics; in less than a year he had added Japanese goods, as well as fans, wallpapers, fabrics, screens, lacquerware and other exotica from the Far East more generally.
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Soon he was arranging for manufacturers to print English fabrics using Japanese techniques and Japanese-y colours, which he dubbed ‘Art Colours’, but which quickly became known to everyone else as ‘Liberty Colours’.
Queen’s
magazine had earlier described them: ‘There are tints that call to mind French and English mustards, sage-greens, willow-greens, greens that look like curry, and greens that are remarkable on lichen-coloured walls, and also among marshy vegetation.’ More memorably, W. S. Gilbert satirized both the fabrics and those who admired them in
Patience
, the operetta he wrote with Arthur Sullivan, in 1881: its protagonist, Bunthorne, is

A Japanese young man,
A blue-and-white young man,
Francesca di Rimini, miminy-piminy
Je ne sais quoi
young man!
A pallid and thin young man,
A haggard and lank young man,
A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery
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Foot-in-the-grave young man!

Patience
mocked the whole Aesthetic Movement: Bunthorne was an obvious parody of Whistler, while Grosvenor, his rival, was Oscar Wilde.
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Yet Liberty’s, at the heart of that movement, relished its connection to the parodists Gilbert and Sullivan too, and found it financially rewarding: Liberty’s fabrics were used in the production of
Patience
, and credited in the programme beside advertisements for Liberty’s ‘artistic silks’. When the play moved to the newly built Savoy Theatre, Liberty’s decorated a room to receive the Prince of Wales for the opening. The store continued to be linked to Gilbert and Sullivan’s works, sending someone to Japan to research clothes and materials before the shop’s designers began work on the costumes and sets for
The Mikado
in 1885.

Notwithstanding this interest, Liberty did not neglect his primary business: by 1880 his Regent Street shop had seven departments; in 1883 he bought another shop on the same side of Regent Street, one shop away from his first; he acquired the upper floor of the property in the middle and joined the two by a staircase known as the ‘Camel’s Back’. Soon he acquired the downstairs of the middle building too, and ultimately he occupied five shops in a row, maintaining the disparate nature of the façades until Regent Street was redeveloped in the 1920s. Although he never went in for ‘universality’ on Whiteley’s scale, by that time he had an Eastern Bazaar basement, which sold Japanese and Chinese antiques, porcelain, bronzes, lacquerware, metalware, brass trays, dolls, fans and other knick-knacks, screens and ‘decorative furnishing objects’. There was an Arab Tea Room, and a Curio Department that sold armour, swords, daggers, ivory carvings, bronzes and ‘antique metalwork suitable for the decoration of halls’. There were also service departments, including
a Paper Hanging studio and a Decoration Studio. From 1884 a Costume Department sold dresses designed by Arthur Liberty and made up from his fabrics. Now both a house and its owner could be entirely ‘done’ by Liberty.
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Liberty had created a space where—in a very modern fashion—one could acquire a lifestyle.

Yet the idea of the department store as sweeping all before it is a triumph of hype over reality. In 1880 the British department store seemed to have reached its apogee, while other countries were racing ahead: in France, Germany and the United States art colleges taught professional display and design courses for shopfitters. In America, Macy’s, Wanamaker’s and Marshall Field had stormed ahead in terms of size, display, advertising and organizational structure, while Britain had retreated to older systems, with the floorwalker once more becoming a power—the
Draper’s Record
in 1888 noted with distaste that Parisian stores let women walk around unescorted. Anything might happen, was the underlying suggestion: men might make advances to female shop staff, goods might be stolen, or—and this seemed to be the real fear—‘loose women’ might invade the premises.
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The market share reflected the department stores’ backward step: in 1900 co-ops held between 6 and 7 per cent of the retail market, while department stores accounted for less than 2 per cent. By 1910 that had crept up to slightly under 3 per cent, but when the increase in population was taken into account the figures showed a fall in real terms.
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Gordon Selfridge, an American, smelt opportunity. There were not many opportunities he had missed in his life. In 1879 he had started work as a stock boy at Marshall Field in Chicago; he was promoted to travelling salesmen, then to counter clerk; by 1887, only eight years after his lowly entry, he was the shop’s retail general manager, and by 1890 he was a junior partner. His development of Marshall Field followed the now familiar pattern: he opened departments for specialist goods—shoes, children’s clothes—and then offered services like glove-cleaning, a tea room, a restaurant. His main contribution, however, was in advertising and promotion: window displays were not simply to convey information about stock to passers-by, he said, but to create desire. He announced the creation of an annual sale—and with typical bombast also announced that he had invented it.
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This was demonstrably not true. The ‘old draper’ in 1872 recounted how in his youth—probably in the 1820s—when some stock accidentally
burned, his employer decided to use this as an excuse to clear the overstock that had accumulated. ‘In the first place some large yellow poster bills were struck off, headed, “Fire!!! Fire!!! Fire!!!” which informed the public that in consequence of the fire which took place on Wednesday, the 6th instant, the damaged stock, much of which was only slightly singed, would be cleared out at a great reduction, together with other surplus stock, sale to commence on Monday next.’ After closing, the staff quietly singed goods that had remained unharmed. The next morning, ‘People bought goods of every description that were at all likely to suit them…Critical old women, that under ordinary circumstances would have spent a long time…examining a pair of stockings, bought the same goods, instantly, at full prices, when slightly singed at the tops.’ By the end of the day it was found that ‘we had actually cleared off whole piles of goods that would have taken us several weeks to have sold under ordinary circumstances, while nearly all the jobbish goods bought for the occasion had been cleared out.’ He claimed that it was this fire sale that was ‘the commencement of the “selling off” system in London’.
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That was unlikely too, but it definitely pre-dated Selfridge’s ‘invention’ of the sale by three-quarters of a century.