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

not afford their own carriage (and most could not), but would not think of coming into the centre specifically to shop. They bought locally, and from itinerant sellers. From the 1760s some of the outer suburbs of London, like Islington or Kensington, had stagecoach services; by 1825 there were 418 routes across London, making 1,190 journeys to the City every day. Their destination shows that these were primarily used to transport people to and from work. It was the omnibus, arriving from Paris in 1829, that made the shopping journey a possibility for many. Within a decade, there were 620 omnibuses and 225 short-stagecoaches licensed in London.

      Omnibuses were not cheap to operate—each bus had a driver and a conductor, and was pulled by two horses. To run an omnibus 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, required a complement of 11 horses per bus. A horse cost £20 and the omnibus itself £100, so the start-up fixed capital cost was already £320. Then operating costs included feed, at 15s. per horse per week (or £429 per bus per year); and the costs of stabling, veterinarian bills and shoeing, as well as the maintenance and repair costs for the bus. There was a tax of 3d. per mile per passenger, which on an average route mounted up to 15s. per day, or over £270 a year. The wages of the driver and conductor were another £60 a year each; and, furthermore, many routes from the suburbs were along turnpike roads where tolls were still charged. The original omnibus design had had space for just fifteen passengers in the interior, with another three outside passengers beside the driver. The seemingly extortionate 1s. single fare to the suburbs, or the half-price 6d. fare in the centre of town, no longer looks so unreasonable. Not unreasonable, but affordable only by the prosperous middle classes.

In 1842 the mileage tax was halved (then reduced to 1d. in 1855, ¹/₂d. in 1866 and abolished entirely in 1870), and, more importantly, was now levied on the vehicle itself rather than on the number of passengers it could carry. It therefore made sense to reconfigure the buses so that they could carry more people. A ‘knifeboard’ seat was installed on the roof—a single long bench down the length of the bus, with the men (always men, as the roof was reached by a ladder that was hostile to skirts and petticoats) facing out to the sides, sitting back to back. This increased capacity to 25, and in turn fares were reduced to 3d., or sometimes even 1d. for a short ‘city’ stage as it was known.* Soon the ladders were replaced by a winding spiral stair, and the knifeboard seats with ‘garden’ seats (the kind of two-by-two backed benches that continue to be used on much public transport today), plate-glass windows were installed downstairs, and the bus was ready to take on its new role as a conveyance for the middle-class female shopper.⁵⁶

      Provincial towns and cities differed from London only in size. Otherwise the love of new shops and the means of access to them were all much the same. To get to the shops, similar solutions were adopted to suit the locale: Manchester had a single omnibus in 1835; by 1840 Engels noted that there was one at least every half-hour running from the suburban villas to the centre; by 1850 there were sixty-four services along the main routes. Birmingham had omnibuses running from suburbs like New Hall and Edgbaston in 1834; within the decade Small Heath and Sparkbrook were linked into the system. Glasgow was different from the now increasingly common pattern of a work-dominated centre and suburban housing. Here much of the population still lived in the centre of the city and commuted outwards; many used the Clyde river steamboat service, and it was not until the 1860s that an omnibus service sprang up to reach Kelvinside. Other cities had other solutions: from the early 1870s Edinburgh and Aberdeen (and Glasgow too) had horse trams; by 1890 Liverpool had 225.⁵⁷ At the end of the 1870s there were only 321 miles of tramway in Britain, but when the switch to steam power and then electricity began in the 1880s, even towns with populations of 50,000 found it worth their while to lay down tramways. In London in 1896 the trams carried 280 million passengers, while omnibuses carried only 300,000 (a tram ticket cost 1d., and the trams ran every two to three minutes, which might have had something to do with the disparity). By 1914, the number of passenger journeys made by tram throughout the country was 74 times the population of the United Kingdom.⁵⁸

      The London figures are the more astonishing given that the capital had yet a further means of mass transportation. In 1863 the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first underground railway, opened, running from Paddington in west London to Farringdon in the City, with an extension to St Pancras in 1868. When the Metropolitan District Railway (a separate company) began to extend the Underground to Kensington and Victoria, the influx of suburban shoppers to the West End became a reality.⁵⁹ In 1864, even on the small bit of route then existing, 6.5 million journeys were taken on the Underground in six months; after the 1868 extension the journeys jumped to 15 million a year.⁶⁰

      The various way of reaching the palaces of wonder in that glassgleaming, gas-hissing West End were new; yet what people were travelling towards was not. It was simply that more of them could now reach it. The sumptuousness, the brightness, the richness—above all, the sheer up-to-dateness—of shops had been commented on by visitors for a hundred years. It was the amount of glass that most forcefully seemed to strike European travellers. A French visitor in 1728 wrote that ‘shops are surrounded with [glass], and usually the merchandise [inside the shop] is arranged behind it, which keeps the dust off, while still displaying the goods to passers-by’—clearly something he had never seen at home. The German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who kept a diary on his visits to England, also found shopfronts that ‘seem to be made entirely of glass’ worthy of remark.⁶¹

      Glass was still expensive—both owing to the cost of the glass itself and also because of the glass tax, which was not abolished until 1851. Plate-glass technology made possible larger and larger window panes, which continued to astonish. An American visitor in the early 1830s said that in Regent Street ‘many of the bow windows are glazed with panes 24 by 36 inches, 30 by 45, &c. There is a fur shop having a window on each side of the door, the centre pane in each window measuring nine feet by five.’ The furrier told him that the centre panes had cost him 50 guineas each.⁶² This seems a perhaps pardonable exaggeration. Francis Place had set up a tailor’s shop in 1801, and ‘I put in a new front as elegant as the place would permit, each of the panes of glass cost me three pounds, and two in the door, four pounds each.’⁶³ Even allowing for a rise in prices, and the substantial difference in grandeur between Place’s small shop and a Regent Street ‘emporium’, the 50 guineas still sounds like a tall tale. However much it cost, the dazzling plate glass was matched and abetted by developments in lighting: glass and gas together radically changed the look of shops.

      The insides of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century shops had been no less splendid—especially, but not uniquely, in the luxurygoods trades. Many historians have suggested that until the arrival of the department stores the displays in shops were minimal, that everything was kept in boxes, and only grudgingly drawn out piece by piece, with no sense of theatrical display. This cannot have been further from the truth. This misapprehension was set in train by the Victorians themselves, who saw—or wanted to see—what was taking place around them as something unprecedented. Charles Manby Smith, a journalist, described a plate-polisher’s shop in about 1810 as ‘a dim, dusty-looking house of some thirty feet frontage…which you might pass a hundred times, so unpretentious was its aspect, without noticing its existence’. He then took the reader on a tour of the shop’s development, as it was renovated by its next incumbent, when it ‘displayed…a handsome set of new shutters, surmounted by a Corinthian cornice, and a new private door, splendid in imitative walnut and shining varnish. When the shutters came down on Monday morning, they disclosed a handsome mahogany sash, the two lower rows of panes guarded by a stout trelliswork of brass-wire, resting upon a single plate of brass.’ Sometime before Manby Smith wrote this in 1857 the shop was pulled down to widen the road, at which point it was rebuilt ‘seventy feet high, with a huge semicircular