Paraphernalia! Victorian Objects

Helen Kingstone, Kate Lister, Helen Kingstone, Kate Lister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351172820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Victorian era is famous for the collecting, hording, and displaying of things; for the mass production and consumption of things; for the invention, distribution and sale of things; for those who had things, and those who did not. For many people, the Victorian period is intrinsically associated with paraphernalia.

This collection of essays explores the Victorians through their materiality, and asks how objects were part of being Victorian; which objects defined them, represented them, were uniquely theirs; and how reading the Victorians, through their possessions, can deepen our understanding of Victorian culture. Miscellaneous and often auxiliary, paraphernalia becomes the 'disjecta' of everyday life, deemed neither valuable enough for museums nor symbolic enough for purely literary study. This interdisciplinary collection looks at the historical, cultural and literary debris that makes up the background of Victorian life: Valentine's cards, fish tanks, sugar plums, china ornaments, hair ribbons, dresses and more. Contributors also, however, consider how we use Victorian objects to construct the Victorian today; museum spaces, the relation of Victorian text to object, and our reading – or gazing at – Victorian advertisements out of context on searchable online databases.

Responding to thing theory and modern scholarship on Victorian material culture, this book addresses five key concerns of Victorian materiality: collecting; defining class in the home; objects becoming things; objects to texts; objects in circulation through print culture.

Part I
‘A Magic Cave’

Collecting Objects

1 The Bazaars of London’s West End in the Nineteenth Century

Rohan McWilliam

…the best exhibitions in this modern Babylon of ours are those which cost nothing, and amongst these gratuitous shows none are more attractive, varied and fascinating than the shops.

Henry Mayhew¹

The Poetics of the Bazaar

In Letters from England (1807), the poet and social critic Robert Southey (employing the unlikely Spanish alias of Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella) described his walk home in London from Charing Cross down the Strand:

It took me through a place called Exeter Change, which is precisely a Bazar [sic], a sort of street under cover, or large long room, with a row of shops on either hand, and a thoroughfare between them; the shops being furnished with such articles as might tempt an idler, or remind a passenger of his wants – walking-sticks, implements for shaving, knives, scissors, watch-chains, purses, etc.

Southey was also intrigued by the menagerie upstairs and by the spectacle of ‘a pair of shoes in one window floating in a vessel of water, to show that they were water-proof.’ In what seems to have been an impulse buy, he purchased a ‘travelling caissette’ [sic], a useful collection of shaving and writing material for a gentleman of leisure.²

The Oxford English Dictionary holds this to be the first use of the term ‘bazaar’ in English (in the sense of ‘a fancy fair in imitation of the Eastern bazaar’). Exeter Change, which Southey visited, was really an arcade but the word ‘bazaar’ was coming into more frequent use in the early nineteenth century to describe an innovation in shopping.³ Less than a decade after Southey, at least sixteen London shops, mostly dotted around the West End, described themselves (or a section of their interior) as a ‘bazaar’.⁴ These seems to have been emporia featuring stalls with an assortment of different objects on display, as opposed to speciality shops which dealt in one group of items. Bazaars became dream worlds of consumption. Where the customer would formerly have been served by one shop assistant, there was now the possibility of different assistants to serve multiple kinds of need. The bazaar therefore prefigured both the department store and the shopping mall.

This study examines three West End bazaars: the Soho Bazaar, the Pantheon on Oxford Street, and the Lowther Bazaar on the Strand. As we will see, they offered contrasting examples of the bazaar, a term seldom deployed in a strict way at the time. Arcades could be described as ‘bazaars’ (as Southey did); sometimes a speciality shop could be described in that way. A bazaar is defined here as a building which contains rows of stalls under one roof offering diverse kinds of goods. This contrasts with an arcade which is usually made up of a series of speciality shops in a private street under a glass roof.⁵

Charles Knight defined bazaars as a ‘mingled assemblage of sundry wares rather than wares of one kind’.⁶ They offered mostly non-essential fancy goods and aroused desire. Tammy Whitlock argues that bazaars were innovative in placing such fancy goods centre stage in shops rather than on the periphery.⁷ This was why it was significant that London’s West End developed a number of bazaars. Their cultural work assisted in the creation of the West End as a pleasure district.

The stores described here were commercial bazaars. They contrast with charity bazaars and fetes which became ubiquitous opportunities for fundraising in the nineteenth century and which continue to serve as opportunities for community building. Both commercial and charity bazaars seem to have begun in the years between 1813 and 1816.⁸ The commercial bazaar may have proved particularly attractive to female shoppers as it invoked a device that middle-class women were employing for fundraising and philanthropy.

The mid-nineteenth century is usually thought to have enjoyed a retail revolution with the coming of the department store.⁹ Department stores offered vital landmarks for the middle classes in nineteenth-century cities around the globe: palaces of consumption where the purchase of prestige goods was only one part of the experience. Shopping for non-essential goods became a matter of lifestyle and entertainment: big stores were places to meet and to be seen. Department stores allowed women access to the big city, offering a safe and respectable environment where it was also possible to find refreshments and ladies’ lavatories.¹⁰

But histories of consumerism now show that the department store did not come from nowhere. It had its roots in the exchanges of Elizabethan and Stuart London (Exeter Change on the Strand, which Southey visited, was built in 1673). These extended luxury shopping beyond the aristocracy to the middling sort.¹¹ In the early nineteenth century, the experience of middle-class shopping changed. The manufacture, storage, and display of goods came to require different spaces, requiring innovations in retail. Bartering was rejected in favour of cash and clear, non-negotiable prices. This was the moment that saw the creation of arcades and bazaars with their stylish forms of consumerism.

What the commercial bazaar represented was the spectacle of nineteenth-century abundance – at least for the middle classes. This was a world from which the working classes were excluded except as shop assistants and as manufacturers of the products sold. A reformatory school, for example, set ‘outcast boys’ to work making ‘fancy boxes’ for sale at the Soho Bazaar.¹² The nineteenth century produced a profusion of ‘things’: objects reeking of conspicuous consumption that described a lifestyle.¹³ Identities could be created through artefacts intended to adorn the home. We need, in particular, to reclaim the world of the nineteenth-century mantelpiece with its objets d’art, curiosities, knick-knacks, ornately decorated Chinoiserie, and (later) photographs of loved ones.¹⁴

Bazaars and arcades made objects into forms of performance. One of the reasons the West End developed as a pleasure district was because its shops offered goods and experiences that were more various than could be obtained closer to home, were of guaranteed quality, and were displayed in sumptuous surroundings. As London grew, West End shops not only served those who lived close by but people from the suburbs and out of town. Displays in the West End came to possess forms of theatricality that gained from their proximity to actual theatres and museums. They also anticipated events like the Great Exhibition. Henry Mayhew grasped this dimension to London shops as a whole:

Without doubt, the shops of London are by far the most attractive exhibition to that enlightened class denominated in newspapers advertisements ‘Visitors from the country’. You may take them to a picture-gallery, and they will stare with all the vacancy of ennui; induce them to visit a flower show, and they will be bored; go with them to a play or a pantomime, and they will return but half-amused. But turn them loose, so to speak, amongst the shops, and they will find an endless source of pleasure which seems never to weary, but presents one ever-changing kaleidoscope of fancy and amusement.¹⁵

These last terms – ‘kaleidoscope’, ‘fancy’, and ‘amusement’ – express some of the appeal of the bazaar idea in the nineteenth century.

The bazaar was a device for promoting mass retail and commercial society. It stood for the celebration of commodities but also conferred an identity on consumers. The bazaar assumed a shopper who had time to browse and was open to curiosity and distraction. It was distinctive as a form of retail as it brought goods closer to the customer, making them more available for inspection and comparison without the shop assistant necessarily intervening (until the moment of purchase). Shop assistants could reinforce the identities of those who came to buy: their deference and politeness suggested shoppers were people of discernment, able to appreciate quality goods; alternatively, they could view customers with suspicion, trying to spot potential shoplifters. Well before the coming of the department store, bazaars and arcades created new worlds of female shopping. Shop assistants were also often female, creating a space that contrasted with the masculine sites of shopping and recreation.¹⁶ Significantly, bazaars also sold toys and thus became open to children, offering them a fantasy space and point of entry into the world of the big city. Part of the cultural work of the bazaar was to entwine consumption and enchantment.

There were many bazaars in central London after 1800, evidence of the format becoming popular in the late Georgian period. The Pantechnicon on Belgrave Square sold large furniture, carriages, and piano fortes. Baker Street had a bazaar whose highlights included a ‘Padorama’, simulating the experience of a railway journey for a public still not used to this new technological innovation (it was also the original home of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks).¹⁷ In addition to the Pantheon, Oxford Street had the Queen’s Bazaar (which employed a diorama to pull in customers) while a bazaar was in Portman Square to its immediate north. The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly recreated itself as a bazaar in 1831. Twenty years later, the Prince of Wales’s Bazaar opened on Regent Street. Charity bazaars proved a vehicle for elite women both to organize and to show off arts and crafts. In the Spring of 1845, the Anti-Corn Law League took over the Co...