Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

miniaturists.

*Thomas Cubitt (1788—1855) was the son of a carpenter. From small projects, his work expanded to encompass building housing on the Duke of Bedford’s land in Bloomsbury, moving on to develop over 8 hectares for Earl Grosvenor in what ultimately became Belgravia, the most fashionable district of London; he also developed much of Pimlico, and more than 100 hectares south of the river, in Clapham. He came to the attention of Prince Albert when Osborne House, the royal family’s home on the Isle of Wight, was to be rebuilt, although neither man can have imagined the family connection being sustained nearly two centuries later, when Albert’s great-great-great-great-grandson, Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, married Cubitt’s descendant Camilla Parker Bowles.

*Lyon Playfair is almost as exhausting to contemplate as Cole: a chemist—the discoverer of nitro-prussides, a new class of salts—he was later Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh University, Postmaster General, an MP, and Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, interspersed with membership of the Royal Commission on Sanitation, advising on the ventilation of Buckingham Palace (his report was thought too alarming to be shown to Parliament), investigating the Famine in Ireland, producing research for the Geological Survey, advising on the promotion of technical education, sitting on the Royal Commission on cattle plague, and heading the commission inquiring into the civil service that finally replaced patronage with competitive examinations.

*Hats throughout the century attracted a range of gimmicks, mostly attempts to keep the head cool while still wearing the de-rigueur heavy felt-fur or silk and plush hats. Among many ideas patented were the ‘Bonafide Ventilating Hat’ (1849), a hat with an air-flow ventilator, or one with movable shutters (1880s), and the ‘Neoteric Ventilating Hat’ (1851), which had a woven frame of manila grass or willow. Another group of patents involved pads to keep the hat away from the head, improving ventilation while also preventing the fabric from becoming soiled by contact with the wearer’s hair oil: the ‘Gutta Percha Hat’ (1848) with rubber lining, which protected against both rain and perspiration; the ‘Aeolian Hat’ (1853), with an air pocket (‘In this way a completely encircling air chamber is formed to embrace the head, and making an easy pleasant fit and also preventing the natural grease from the hair penetrating to the exterior of the hat’); and the ‘Corrugated Ventilating Hat Antimacassar Pad’ (1863).²⁶

*Mahogany had first been imported from Central America in the 1720s, and Sir Robert Walpole immediately had seats for his commodes made from this new luxury material.³⁵

*It has been suggested that this lack of pricing was one of the reasons so many exhibits focused on technical ingenuity. If the main selling point of an object was that it was half the price that was usually charged, there was no point in showing it, without a price, at the Crystal Palace.

*For more on Layard, see p. 199.

†Navvies (from ‘navigators’) were originally the labourers who built the canals. By the 1850s, ‘navvy’ was shorthand for a labourer on the railways in particular. Navvies had a well-earned reputation for ferocious violence and drunkenness.

*The Early English Text Society’s founder, Frederick Furnivall (1825—1910), would have been thrilled. He was closely involved with adult education, teaching evening classes at the Working Men’s College when it opened in London in 1854.

*During the twenty-four weeks of the Exhibition, 1,092,337 bottles of soda water, lemonade and ginger beer were sold.

*Cassell went on to become the publisher of Cassell’s Magazine and Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, plus many other journals (see p. 157), as well as the first British edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. However he lacked business instincts, and his company was soon taken over by others, although his skills as a publishing entrepreneur were highly regarded, and the house of Cassell’s in various guises has survived into the twenty-first century.

*It was clear from the price that he was aiming at a working-class mass market: the Illustrated London News, which featured the Exhibition heavily in its pictures all summer long, sold for 6d. an issue.

†Only 200 words were given to the Exhibition itself, and it suggested that four hours would be plenty for the visitor to ‘do’ the fair.

*For more on advertising, see pp. 130—37; for W. H. Smith and newspaper distribution, pp. 145—6; for W. H. Smith and railway bookstalls, pp. 191—2.

       2 ‘A Nation of Shopkeepers’: The Eighteenth-Century Shop

      NEW SHOPS, BIGGER SHOPS, more heavily stocked shops, speciality sellers, brightly lit windows, fixed prices instead of bargaining, advertisements everywhere—it seemed that the nineteenth century brought nothing but change to how people had shopped for centuries. Yet all these things, and many more, arrived not in the nineteenth century, but in the eighteenth. Shops and shopping had long been undergoing a permanent revolution when the Victorian age had just begun. Dr Johnson had understood this by the 1750s. Shopping was no longer an action rooted in necessity, he wrote, but was now a pastime, a leisure activity: ‘He that had resolved to buy no more, feels his constancy subdued…He is attracted by rarity, seduced by example and inflamed by competition.’¹ Johnson was talking about fashionable shops in fashionable parts of London. But the daily purchases by the lesser folk were fuelled by the same desires, and it was their mass purchasing power that drove the century-long explosion of shop development.

      Much of what we know today about shops in the eighteenth century comes either from the higher strata of life or is sketchy at best. It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that the extent and development of shops across the country has been badly underestimated, owing in the main to poor survival of records. For example, as late as 1822—3 Pigot’s London and Provincial New Commercial Directory listed no shopkeepers of any sort in Manchester. The obvious reaction, of course, is that this simply could not have been true; but the scale of the directory’s oversight was made clear by the historian Roger Scola, who identified 400 small food shops in the city in the 1810s alone—and that takes into account neither the many many more shops for which no evidence has survived, nor any shops that sold non-food items, which were outside the terms of his survey.² Furthermore, it is becoming clearer that, just as the number of shops has been underestimated, so too has the sophistication of retail systems been equally misunderstood. In fact the number of shops, the type of shops, and the quantity and quality of goods stocked, as well as the methods used to sell them, all began to develop in the eighteenth century.

Until recently it has been suggested that Britain had about 50,000 shops in the eighteenth century, but, as two recent historians have written, that number has long been accepted not because there was any concrete evidence to back it up, but merely because of a