Shopping for Pleasure

Women in the Making of London's West End

Erika Rappaport

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400843534
• Thema: History
• Thema: British History

In Shopping for Pleasure, Erika Rappaport reconstructs London's Victorian and Edwardian West End as an entertainment and retail center. In this neighborhood of stately homes, royal palaces, and spacious parks and squares, a dramatic transformation unfolded that ultimately changed the meaning of femininity and the lives of women, shaping their experience of modernity. Rappaport illuminates the various forces of the period that encouraged and discouraged women's enjoyment of public life and particularly shows how shopping came to be seen as the quintessential leisure activity for middle- and upper-class women. Through extensive histories of department stores, women's magazines, clubs, teashops, restaurants, and the theater as interwoven sites of consumption, Shopping for Pleasure uncovers how a new female urban culture emerged before and after the turn of the twentieth century.Moving beyond the question of whether shopping promoted or limited women's freedom, the author draws on diverse sources to explore how business practices, legal decisions, and cultural changes affected women in the market. In particular, she focuses on how and why stores presented themselves as pleasurable, secure places for the urban woman, in some cases defining themselves as instrumental to civic improvement and women's emancipation. Rappaport also considers such influences as merchandizing strategies, credit policies, changes in public transportation, feminism, and the financial balance of power within the home. Shopping for Pleasure is thus both a social and cultural history of the West End, but on a broader scale it reveals the essential interplay between the rise of consumer society, the birth of modern femininity, and the making of contemporary London.

• CHAPTER ONE •

“The Halls of Temptation”: The Universal Provider and the Pleasures of Suburbia

ON GUY FAWKES DAY in 1876 an angry mob of retailers staged a charivari in the fashionable shopping promenade of Westbourne Grove in Bayswater. Their demonstration targeted William Whiteley, a linen draper who was rapidly ex-panding his shop into what would become London’s first department store. Ac-cording to the local newspaper, the recent addition of a meat and greengrocery department had made Mr. Whiteley “exceedingly distasteful” to the “provision dealers in the district.” Bayswater’s traders expressed their discontent through traditional forms of popular protest, using the neighborhood’s streets as the venue for a raucous procession. The festivities began around noon as

a grotesque and noisy cortege entered the thoroughfare [Westbourne Grove]. At its head was a vehicle, in which a gigantic Guy was propped up . . . vested in the conventional frock coat of a draper. . . . Conspicuous on the figure was a label with the words “Live and Let Live.” ... In one hand of the figure a piece of beef bore the label “5 1/2 d.” and in the other was a handkerchief, with the ticket “2 1/2 d. all-linen.”¹

Dressed in the customary blue frocks of their trade and making “hideous” noises by banging cleavers against marrowbones, Bayswater’s butchers finally disposed of Whiteley’s effigy in a bonfire in nearby Portobello Road.

This spectacle involving one of England’s most well known entrepreneurs, a noisy band of butchers, and the ostensibly neutral voice of the local newspaper editor provides a point of departure for an investigation of the commercial culture of the Victorian West End. This affair introduces many of the protagonists and the arenas—the department store, the shopping street, and the newspaper—that occupy a central place in this history. Finally, the charivari and the themes that emerge in its telling begin to reveal the social, cultural, and emotional world of London’s trading classes.

The appearance of a charivari—or “rough music,” as it was known in En-gland—in late-Victorian suburban London is both striking and illuminating. In early-modern Europe, similar parades of boisterous young men mocked individu-als who had in some way or other offended local morality. These events enforced community norms by censoring both public and private behaviors. Incidents of sexual misconduct, especially those involving women displaying aggressive or in-dependent actions, frequently brought on this collective response. Female scolds, wife beaters, or couples in apparently mismatched unions might be chastised in this way. These protests might also be directed at any individual who, as E. P. Thompson described it, rode “rough-shod over local custom.”² On Guy Fawkes Day, in particular, various “political, industrial or private grievances” could be settled through this elaborate form of street theater.³ According to Robert Storch, Victorian Guy Fawkes demonstrations commonly targeted “unscrupulous trades-men.”⁴ One contemporary believed, moreover, that butchers were particularly fond of celebrating the holiday by parading a local villain through the town.⁵ The meaning of charivari and Guy Fawkes Day celebrations thus varied considerably. However, in suburban London in 1876 this holiday allowed a community of trad-ers to vent their anxieties about an individual and the “modern” changes that he represented. Bayswater’s unhappy retailers castigated William Whiteley for altering economic and gender norms, for reshaping the public and private spheres.

There is no question that Londoners regarded Whiteley as a renegade retailer. Between the 1860s and 1880s, Whiteley created a new persona as he built a new type of shop. He became known as the “Universal Provider”—a merchant who claimed to sell anything to anybody. By combining dissimilar goods in one busi-ness and offering cut-price goods for cash only, Whiteley had strayed far from the norms of the small independent shopkeeper.⁶ Bayswater’s traders perceived these innovations as a threat to their livelihood and their way of life. In a spirited letter titled “Wholesale Butchery in Bayswater” that was printed in the local paper, one of Whiteley’s victims complained that he had watched a “startling succession of feats in the art of shutting up your neighbour’s shop and driving him elsewhere, but this last daring and audacious feat—this vending of meat and greens as well as silk and satins—overtops them all.”⁷ As both this letter and Whiteley’s effigy made clear, specialized shopkeepers believed that the move from dress goods to provisions was too great a leap. This promiscuous mingling of food and clothing bore little resemblance to more traditional organizations of craft production and distribution and seemed to spell the demise of the independent specialized trader. Although craft guilds had long since disappeared in England, the vestiges of trade-oriented identities and cultures lurked in popular memory and could be retrieved in times of economic and social crisis.⁸ As late as the 1870s, small mer-chants could thus be horrified, if also amused, by the image of Whiteley with beef in one hand and linen in the other.

One should not, however, hastily conclude that Whiteley’s effigy simply ex-pressed an older trading community’s rejection of newer forms of retailing. This assumption fits the diagnosis that a conservative or “backward” business culture contributed to the decline of the late-Victorian economy.⁹ However, to cast these merchants as conservatives repudiating modernity is a simplistic reading of both the local and national economies. Many of Bayswater’s traders were relative new-comers to the area and some were engaged in what were construed as modern trading practices. The charivari appeared in late-Victorian London at a moment when large-scale retailing and rapid urbanization became identified with shifting class and gender norms.

Bayswater’s butchers picked up their cleavers and marrow bones to express their sense of insecurity in this competitive and fluctuating environment. They drewon older modes of social protest to regulate but not halt these changes. As we will see, they also invented new methods of protest that characterized mass retailing as dangerously reshaping bourgeois femininity. Traders who opposed Whiteley and the transformations he represented frequently avoided direct attacks such as the charivari and chose instead to charge Whiteley with the moral crime of un-leashing uncontrollable female passions. It is no wonder, then, that he would become the subject of a charivari, a protest that could conveniently punish either a sexual or economic miscreant.

Between the 1860s and 1880s, the Universal Provider and the shopping district in an around Westbourne Grove symbolized the mass culture and economy that were becoming visible throughout the West End of London. During those years, transformations in retailing, catering, entertainment, publishing, and transportation produced public spaces that were identified with a new type of mass public. Large hotels and theaters, restaurants and department stores grew by selling di-verse commodities and services to a clientele that could not be easily categorized. This mass market was not a synonym for either a working-class or a bourgeois public. Rather, it implied heterogeneity.

As Mary Poovey has explained, by the 1860s new technologies of representation along with material innovations “brought groups that had rarely mixed into physical proximity with each other and represented them as belonging to the same, increasingly undifferentiated whole.”¹⁰ Although society was also perceived as segregated by class, in certain locations it appeared as a mass aggregate. While Poovey emphasized how novel methods of quantification and social investigation represented this aggregate, others have observed that public transportation also constituted society in this way. In his work on public amenities in New York City, William Taylor pointed out that with the expansion of mass transit “the public” came to be perceived as a “mobile and embodied mass.”¹¹ Taylor observed that in America the railway helped transform the political public into an embodied mass. This public was conceptualized as a mass market made up of, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch perceived it, “parcels” not unlike other goods circulating in the economy.¹²

There were in fact several competing notions of “the public” and “the masses” in mid- and late-Victorian London.¹³ These constructs were both gendered and varied in meaning as particular groups attempted to legitimize their understanding of politics, urban space, and economic activities. At times the public was conceived as a male and political entity, but it equally could become a feminine body of consumers. While few understood how it would act, where it belonged, and what it wanted, virtually all agreed that the consuming public was primarily, if not wholly, a feminine entity. Between the 1860s and 1914, the shopping public also looked like a mobile crowd, a group of traveling suburban and provincial women who were defined by their presence outside of the domestic sphere. The mass press, large shops, and crowded shopping streets of the Victorian West End made this public manifest. Yet such entities could not have existed independent of the idea of this feminine public. The shopping public and London’s commercial spaces were quite simply mutually constitutive. Throughout this book we will see many individuals and groups attempting to understand, perceive, and define the shopping public. This study traces how the emergence of this public was born at the intersection of social, economic, and cultural contests over new forms of retail-ing, communication, and urban space.

The shopping public was an integral part of urban and economic change in the late-nineteenth century, yet its feminine and amorphous nature challenged bourgeois gender ideology, which had long characterized public spaces and the more abstract public sphere as masculine. Not surprisingly, the implications of a female consuming crowd were fiercely contested. Shopkeepers, shoppers, social reformers, government officials, feminists, and journalists debated several related questions. To what extent did the presence of this crowd in London’s streets spell social collapse or improvement? What type of pleasure did the city legitimately offer this public? What was the relationship between shopping, conceived as the public face of consumption, and what was perceived as the private sphere of the family and the self? Though the participants in and the terms of this discussion would shift over the course of the next fifty years, these questions would never entirely disappear. The attempt to find answers produced new social identities based upon notions of pleasure and consumption. Consumer practices such as shopping thus fashioned identities by disrupting and reconstituting social catego-ries and their perceived relationship to public and private spaces.¹⁴

This chapter will explore these issues by focusing on particular individuals in a relatively bounded setting. No two stores or neighborhoods were identical, espe-cially in a city as large and diverse as London. Still, the Victorians singled out Bayswater and its largest proprietor, William Whiteley, as pivotal to their city’s history. After the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Bayswater became a thriving shopping district that rivaled more established West End centers.¹⁵ Such western suburbs provided ideal conditions for the emergence of a new type of retailing and a new kind of shopping crowd. Though physically peripheral, subur-ban Bayswater was in many respects central to the creation of a new West End.

The shopkeepers, visitors, and writers who lived in and traveled to Victorian Bayswater would have agreed with Michel Foucault when he wrote, “The anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space.”¹⁶ During the second half of the nineteenth century, a rapidly altering urban landscape was profoundly influencing these traders’ economic security and their social identities. Rowdy street demon-strators, politicians, shopkeepers, residents, and journalists both objected to and produced new spaces of consumption and consuming publics. The confrontations and solutions that appeared in this London suburb resonated throughout the city and across urban Britain.

“YOUNG LONDON”: THE MAKING OF A SUBURBAN SHOPPING CENTER

“Westbourne-Grove . . . [is] one of the most extraordinary thoroughfares in Young London,” wrote the well-known journalist and man-about-town George Augustus Sala in 1879. Twenty years earlier, Sala had published the extremely popular Twice round the Clocks or The Hours of the Day and Night in London (1859), an excavation of the social and commercial life of the mid-Victorian metropolis. In the late seventies, he was still fascinated with London’s commercial culture, but he now turned his roving eye away from central London toward the city’s newest western suburbs, or “Young London.” Sala’s exegesis of modernity began in “Westbourne-Grove and Thereabouts,” a street he described as the “center of a new, prosperous, and refined district.” Although Bayswater was situated at the northwest corner of the West End, Sala placed it at the heart of a new consumer-oriented city. He described it as the lustrous and affluent symbol of the powerful England that had appeared since the defeat of Napoleon and the crowning of Queen Victoria (fig. 2).

Figure 2. Bayswater in 1863. Cassel's Map of London, 1863 (courtesy of the Guildhall Library, Corporation of London).

The shops that lined Westbourne Grove were central to Sala’s reading of mod-ern suburbia. He portrayed the Grove as “full of emporiums for the supply of almost every conceivable human want and wish; and all ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction : “To Walk Alone in London”
• Chapter One : “The Halls of Temptation”: The Universal Provider and the Pleasures of Suburbia
• Chapter Two : The Trials of Consumption: Marriage, Law, and Women’s Credit
• Chapter Three : “Resting Places for Women Wayfarers”: Feminism and the Comforts of the Public Sphere
• Chapter Four : Metropolitan Journeys: Shopping, Traveling, and Reading the West End
• Chapter Five : “A New Era of Shopping”: An American Department Store in Edwardian London
• Chapter Six : Acts of Consumption: Musical Comedy and the Desire of Exchange
• Epilogue
• The Politics of Plate Glass
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index