Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders
or lowered, regulating brightness, again for the first time.
†Johanna Schopenhauer (1766—1838) was born in Prussia, the daughter of a banker and senator. She married Heinrich Schopenhauer, a merchant, in 1784 or 1785, and travelled widely with him. After his death in 1805 or 1806 she moved to Weimar, where she was the centre of a literary salon, attended by Goethe and Wieland among others. Driven by financial need, she published a number of books, including a biography, travel diaries, novels and short stories. However, her main claim to fame today is as the mother of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
*Particularly for furniture: Shoolbred started selling carpets and upholstery not long after the move; John Harris Heal, the son of the owner of a mattress-making company around the corner in Rathbone Place, opened a furniture shop less than a hundred metres away in 1840; Maple’s, an enormous furniture shop, set up next door to Shoolbred in 1842. And the tradition is maintained—Heal’s, in its early twentieth-century building, proudly takes up nearly an entire block; Maple’s closed only a couple of decades ago; and hordes of students looking for sofa-beds and futons today still head for Tottenham Court Road.
*Engels saw this redevelopment as a way of segregating the working classes from the middle classes, to keep these areas free for middle-class consumption. It is an interesting idea, but one I can only briefly mention in this footnote.74
*There was a mocking response shortly afterwards in the advertisement placed by another shop: ‘We have fine displays of fancy goods and toys, including the new non-speaking shop assistants.’77
*In between, it had been an opera house and then the home of the National Institute to Improve the Manufactures of the United Kingdom. Later it became a wine shop, and today, suitably, a Marks and Spencer’s store occupies the site.85
†The Change started life where today the Strand Palace Hotel stands. When plans to widen the Strand were first mooted, in 1828, the Exeter Change moved to King’s Mews, Charing Cross, although this was no more lucky a site—today the mews is underneath the National Gallery.
*This appeared in a small book that was published as an advertisement for the Bazaar, so the respectability of the females should perhaps be understood as a selling tool.
†Zola’s main source was the Bon Marché in Paris, founded 1852 by a retail revolutionary, Aristide Boucicaut. But Boucicaut’s revolutionary ideas—low margins; fast turnover; fixed, ticketed prices; browsing encouraged; the right of exchange or refund; free deliveries—were all, as we have seen, less than revolutionary to nineteenth-century Britain. The argument about who was first, however, is bootless: the department store arrived piecemeal, and early avatars—the Ville de Paris (1844) and the Grands Magasins du Louvre (1855) in Paris; A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace (1848), Lord and Taylor, Arnold, Constable and Co. and Macy’s (1850s) in New York; as well as the shops I discuss in this chapter—all contributed.
*In some shops outside London an extremely grand customer expected to remain seated in her carriage while everything was brought out to her for examination. By the nineteenth century in London, this was clearly no longer practicable.
*Wylie and Lockhead in Glasgow had the first lift, in 1855. The Glasgow Herald reported it as a ‘very ingenious hoisting apparatus worked by a neat steam engine, which is intended not only to lift up bales from the Wagon entrance to the upper parts of the building, but to elevate those ladies and gentlemen to the galleries to whom the climbing of successive stairs might be attended with fatigue and annoyance. Parties who are old, fat, feeble, short winded, or simply lazy, or who desire a bit of fun, have only to place themselves on an enclosed platform or flooring when they are elevated by a gentle and pleasing process to a height exceeding that of a country steeple.’95
†The old way of taking cash had been for a shop assistant to write out an order, then a floorwalker went with both the order and the payment to the cash department, and waited while a receipt was issued, and brought it back together with any change. As customer numbers—and the amount of floor space to be covered by the floorwalker—increased, this became too cumbersome. In the 1880s a pneumatic tube system was devised: the shop assistant put the money and the order in a capsule, put it in the tube, and it was rushed along to the cash department by vacuum pressure; a receipt and the change were returned in the same way. The method had made something of a comeback, particularly in large superstores: the wholesalers Costco, some Tesco supermarkets and even Ikea empty their tills and send the cash in plastic capsules along exactly these types of pneumatic tube.
*Wylie and Lockhead remained pioneers: later they were the first in the country to promote art-nouveau furniture.
†A great boon to women, in particular: one early twentieth-century feminist remembered in her childhood being told by her mother that before department stores and coffee shops like the ABC and Lyons Corner House freed women to spend hours out of the house, ‘Either ladies didn’t go out or ladies didn’t go’.97
Many shops worked hard to get elusive males through the door: Harrod’s advertised a ‘Gent’s Club Room…furnished in the style of the Georgian period’, Whiteley’s men’s hairdresser offered a daily shave for those paying an annual subscription.98
*No connection to Lewis’s Bon Marché: both were linking themselves to Boucicaut’s Parisian store; Lewis even borrowed the French shop’s stripes for his advertising and packaging.100
*Such attempts to expand were not always successful: in the Mile End Road ‘Messrs Wickham, circa 1910, wanted an emporium. Messrs Spiegelhalter, one infers, wouldn’t sell out. Messrs Wickham, one infers further, pressed on regardless, thereby putting their Baroque tower badly out of centre. Messrs Spiegelhalter (“The East End Jewellers”) remain [in 1966]: two stuccoed storeys surrounded on both sides by giant columns a` la Selfridges. The result is one of the best visual jokes in London.’105
*This interest in the Far East was catered to by others, just not as successfully, or perhaps as single-mindedly. Zola’s department-store proprietor had set up ‘a small bargain table’ of shop-soiled gewgaws: ‘now it was overflowing with old bronzes, old ivories, old lacquer and had a turnover of fifteen thousand francs a year. He scoured the whole of the Far East, getting travellers to rummage for him in palaces and temples.’