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

Basically, when trade directories and censuses began to appear in the early 1800s they showed few shops; by the 1850s there were large numbers, so many have assumed a gradually rising curve. Instead, it is now looking more likely that there was a fall in the number of shops in the late 1790s and early 1800s, and that the sharp rise in the next decades was a rebound from a temporary dip, not a stately rising progression.⁴ During the Seven Years War (1756—63) the government had considered imposing a tax on shops, and the Excise conducted a survey in order to calculate possible revenue. It identified 141,700 shops in England and Wales with a base income high enough to permit taxation.* This is probably as close as we are ever going to get to an accurate number. If we assume that the survey was, if anything, underreporting the number of shops of moderate income, and ignoring entirely the smaller shops, it still gives a ratio of 1 shop per 43.3 people throughout the country.

      Most of the shops in the survey, however, were located in the more prosperous south, with far fewer shops per head of population north of a line drawn from Lincolnshire to Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire and through to Somerset. South of this line there were 97,890

      shops listed by the Excise, in a population of just over 3 million people, or slightly over 34 people per shop. In the remainder of the country each shop served approximately 63.5 people. (It is salutary to compare these numbers to the retail-crazy twentieth century: two hundred years later, in 1950, there was one shop for every 92 people in the country.) According to the 1797 parish returns in London, there was on average 1 shop for ever 21.6 people in the City and Westminster. In fact, while in the first half of the nineteenth century the population grew by 18.2 per cent, the number of shops soared, so far as we can tell, by a dizzying, and almost impossible-seeming, 183.4 per cent—ten times the rate of population growth.⁶ This happened before industrialization, before mass urbanization. These figures suggest that it was precisely this retail explosion that created the Industrial Revolution, supply being driven by demand, rather than the more traditional, but less commonsensical, idea that the creation—the supply of goods—came first, and the desire for them followed on afterwards.

      In general, it appears unlikely that many people, in England at any rate, were more than a few miles away—a dozen or so at most—from a shop. Most communities, even the most rural, had nearby market towns to which at least some members of the community travelled weekly or fortnightly. Agricultural workers, except in the north of the

      country, were by the eighteenth century paid mostly in cash, rather than in kind—through food, lodgings, and clothing—as they had been in earlier times. They therefore had money to buy goods, and, equally importantly, the need to do so: they no longer could rely on partpayment either in food or in land to grow or raise their own. For the most part, their wages were ‘long pay’, that is, paid irregularly, and sometimes for an entire season at once, in arrears. That meant that they needed a local shop, with a shopkeeper who knew both them and their employer, in order to be able to obtain credit until the wage bill was paid.

      One of the changes that has affected the way we look at shop numbers is the size of towns. Many towns, even quite major ones, were by our standards almost unbelievably small—Derby in its pre-industrial phase

was possibly no more than 500 paces wide. With this kind of size, it mattered little how many shops there were in each town, since all could be reached in a few minutes—there was no need for neighbourhood shops in the more modern sense. What mattered instead was what each shop stocked. The smallest, most basic shops were known as back-street shops. They were the cheapest to stock, required little capital, no training or apprenticeship, and were often set up and run either as a second source of income by the wife of a labourer or as the only way of earning a meagre living by a newly impoverished widow.* In their crudest form, these shops were the front room of a house. Before windows were routinely glazed, the shopkeeper stood at the window and served customers through the hatch. Sometimes the window hatch was enlarged, and sometimes a flap leading from the window down to the pavement was added, to create a small selling area. While London shops began to get glazed windows from the later seventeenth century, many shops in the provinces were still unglazed well into the nineteenth century—a picture of East Street in Chichester in 1815 shows a butcher’s display through an unglazed window hatch. In 1827 an onlooker’s description of Newcastle upon Tyne noted that many shops had just replaced their shutters with glass.⁸ These back-street shops stocked the minimum number of goods. They sold candles, bread, small beer,† and maybe needles, cotton and other small household items.⁹ Some might have small hardware goods, or tobacco, and, later in the century, tea, when it replaced small beer as the drink for all ages. Most of the goods were sold wrapped up in paper in minute quantities, a day’s supply of tea or sugar at a time. The customers were often nearly as poor as the shopkeeper, and could not afford to buy in bulk at better prices.

The next level of retailing was the village shop. The front room was once again given over to retailing, but now the customers were expected to come into the shop area. William Wood of Didsbury, who also owned the Ring o’Bells inn, sold bacon, ‘wheat and barley flour, meal, berm [probably barm, a fermenting agent, used instead of yeast], bread, manchets [small loaves of good-quality wheat bread], tea, coffee, sugar, treacle, currants, raisins, figs, salt, pepper, cloves, mustard, rice, candles, soap, starch, blue’.* This was a fairly standard range for most small grocers. In addition, Wood sold some fresh food: ‘potatoes, apples, plums, peas, butter, cheese, sometimes eggs, sometimes milk’, as well as the much less common ‘beef, veal, mutton, lamb and pork’, and ‘tobacco, snuff, and pipes’.¹⁰ This lack of specialization was found everywhere. In Newport, Shropshire, in the middle of the eighteenth century a shopkeeper sold sugar, tobacco, rum and spirits, which he kept in a warehouse space behind his store; the store itself was stocked with small ironmongery goods, ‘cartbrushes, wire and cord’, and a range of things ‘in ye Pedlars Trade’ and ‘in the Milleners way’. In his inventory he kept another lot of sugar, spices and more ironmongery listed separately; possibly these were goods to be parcelled up and sold through the window in smaller quantities.¹¹

      These shopkeepers often had three distinct sets of customers: the poor, who bought through the window; the more prosperous, who came into the shop (or sent their servants); and sometimes the wealthy, whom they visited at home. Thomas Turner, a Sussex shopkeeper who supplied some of the needs of the Duke of Newcastle’s household when it was resident in Sussex, was summoned to the house by the Duke’s steward when he was ready to place an order. The prosperous but non-aristocratic were often waited on in this way too: Turner also called at the houses of ‘a substantial tenant farmer’ and of Mr French, a landowner.¹² Shopkeepers at this level tended to supply goods in bulk to those who owned back-street shops—it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that separate wholesalers began to emerge, as distinct from large retailers. Many shopkeepers expected to order in whatever was needed for their more prosperous customers, while not stocking these items regularly. A wholesale/retail grocer in a good-sized seaport town in Scotland in the early part of the nineteenth century listed the items that had come through his shop over the course of one year. Tea and sugar were the main items, followed by cheese and butter. Then came various spices—nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cassia, cayenne and pepper—followed by currants, raisins and nuts; ham; liquorice; rice; oranges and lemons. It is likely that most of the spices and everything else apart from the tea, sugar, cheese and butter were special orders—the nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cassia and currants appeared only once in his inventory, while the cayenne, raisins, pepper and nuts appeared just twice, with the raisins listed in December, significantly near the new year festivities and Twelfth