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

get their ‘island’ site (a site that occupied an entire block, bounded by streets on four sides: the retailer’s dream). It was a daunting prospect—a pub, a dairy, a barber’s, a coffee house, a carpet-layer, a costume manufacturer, two milliners (one wholesale, one retail), a music publisher, a musical-instrument shop, a palmist, a hairdresser, the British headquarters of the New Columbia Gramophone Co., a brothel, a private house, a wholesale lace merchant, a building containing several Polish tailors, a sweet shop, the offices of Doan’s Backache Pills, Savory’s cigarette factory, a wholesale blouse-maker, a wine merchant’s storage cellar, a soda-water manufacturer, a jeweller, a baby-linen manufacturer, a wallpaper merchant, an estate agent, two solicitors and a chapel—but they did it.¹⁰³ Others were similarly placed: Peter Robinson, which had opened in 1833, had bought the two adjoining premises in 1854; in 1856 and 1858 two more were bought; in 1860 the final shop, which gave a block of six shops, was acquired. Marshall and Snelgrove had opened as Marshall and Wilson in 1837; just short of forty years later, in 1876, it added the final shop to its, by now, seven shops to complete its own ‘island’.¹⁰⁴*

      These shops, like Whiteley’s of Paddington, saw themselves as ‘Universal Providers’. It was William Whiteley himself who had coined the phrase. He had started as a draper in 1855, and he followed the same path as we have already seen with Kendal, Milne and Bainbridge’s: first he opened a drapery, then he expanded to add the goods that might be desired at the same time: ribbons, lace, fancy goods, gloves, jewellery, parasols. By the 1870s he had expanded literally, into the shop next door, and figuratively, into the services market: Whiteley’s included an estate agent, a hairdresser, a tea room and a furniture showroom on the Wylie and Lockhead model. What really set him apart, though, was his talent for self-publicity. For example, in 1865 one of his employees, John Barker, a department manager, was earning £300 a year; Whiteley promised to double his salary if Barker doubled his turnover. He did, and by 1870 Barker asked to be taken into partnership. Whiteley refused, but promised him a salary of £1,000—more than had ever been paid to a draper; more even than the income of many upper-middle-class professionals. Barker declined it, left Whiteley’s and started his own department store in Kensington (which closed last year, in 2005).¹⁰⁶ Whiteley, however, more than made up for the loss of his valued employee by ensuring that all the newspapers reported the huge salary Barker had been offered. In the 1870s Whiteley also revived the eighteenth-century custom of the puff, sending the Bayswater Chronicle letters ostensibly written by women who shopped at his store.

      A completely different route was taken by some other monster shops. Many furniture shops were content to remain furniture shops: Waring and Gillow was proud to announce that it was the ‘largest furnishing emporium in the world’, but it had no interest in developing other departments; Heal’s, in Tottenham Court Road, had picked up the modern department stores’ methods of display, but it stuck with furnishings. Even the huge Peter Robinson shop, which employed nearly 2,000 workers across 100 departments, sold nothing but ladies’ clothes.¹⁰⁷ Arthur Liberty, although ultimately diversifying, began by dealing in only a narrow range of merchandise. Liberty had first worked at Farmer and Roger’s, a shawl warehouse in Regent Street. In 1862 an international exhibition held in Kensington showed William Morris wallpaper for the first time, next to the first exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts to appear in Europe. (Commodore Perry had sailed into Yedo Bay nine years before, and the first commercial treaty between Japan and Britain had been signed only in 1858.) After the exhibition closed, Farmer and Roger bought some of the displays and set up an Oriental Warehouse in the shop next to their own, with Arthur Liberty as its junior salesman. The Oriental Warehouse became a meeting place for a ‘bohemian’ set that included the painters Whistler and Rossetti and the actress Ellen Terry—the forerunners of the Aesthetic Movement. As John Barker had done, Liberty asked to be taken into partnership. As with Barker, he was refused, and he too left to start up his own business. (But unlike Whiteley, whose name survives in some form of retailing to this day, Farmer and Roger’s went under, while Liberty’s continues to flourish.)

Liberty at first specialized in fabrics; in less than a year he had added Japanese goods, as well as fans, wallpapers, fabrics, screens, lacquerware and other exotica from the Far East more generally.* Soon he was arranging for manufacturers to print English fabrics using Japanese techniques and Japanese-y colours, which he dubbed ‘Art Colours’, but which quickly became known to everyone else as ‘Liberty Colours’. Queen’s magazine had earlier described them: ‘There are tints that call to mind French and English mustards, sage-greens, willow-greens, greens that look like curry, and greens that are remarkable on lichen-coloured walls, and also among marshy vegetation.’ More memorably, W. S. Gilbert satirized both the fabrics and those who admired them in Patience, the operetta he wrote with Arthur Sullivan, in 1881: its protagonist, Bunthorne, is

      A Japanese young man,

A blue-and-white young man, Francesca di Rimini, miminy-piminy Je ne sais quoi young man! A pallid and thin young man, A haggard and lank young man, A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery* Foot-in-the-grave young man!

Patience mocked the whole Aesthetic Movement: Bunthorne was an obvious parody of Whistler, while Grosvenor, his rival, was Oscar Wilde.† Yet Liberty’s, at the heart of that movement, relished its connection to the parodists Gilbert and Sullivan too, and found it financially rewarding: Liberty’s fabrics were used in the production of Patience, and credited in the programme beside advertisements for Liberty’s ‘artistic silks’. When the play moved to the newly built Savoy Theatre, Liberty’s decorated a room to receive the Prince of Wales for the opening. The store continued to be linked to Gilbert and Sullivan’s works, sending someone to Japan to research clothes and materials before the shop’s designers began work on the costumes and sets for The Mikado in 1885.

      Notwithstanding this interest, Liberty did not neglect his primary business: by 1880 his Regent Street shop had seven departments; in 1883 he bought another shop on the same side of Regent Street, one shop away from his first; he acquired the upper floor of the property in the middle and joined the two by a staircase known as the ‘Camel’s Back’. Soon he acquired the downstairs of the middle building too, and ultimately he occupied five shops in a row, maintaining the disparate nature of the façades until Regent Street was redeveloped in the 1920s. Although he never went in for ‘universality’ on Whiteley’s scale, by that time he had an Eastern Bazaar basement, which sold Japanese and Chinese antiques, porcelain, bronzes, lacquerware, metalware, brass trays, dolls, fans and other knick-knacks, screens and ‘decorative furnishing objects’. There was an Arab Tea Room, and a Curio Department that sold armour, swords, daggers, ivory carvings, bronzes and ‘antique metalwork suitable for the decoration of halls’. There were also service departments, including a Paper Hanging studio and a Decoration Studio. From 1884 a Costume Department sold dresses designed by Arthur Liberty and made up from his fabrics. Now both a house and its owner could be entirely ‘done’ by Liberty.¹¹⁰ Liberty had created a space where—in a very modern fashion—one could acquire a lifestyle.

      Yet the idea of the department store as sweeping all before it is a triumph of hype over reality. In 1880 the British department store seemed to have reached its apogee, while other countries were racing ahead: in France, Germany and the United States art colleges taught professional display and design courses for shopfitters. In America, Macy’s, Wanamaker’s and Marshall Field had stormed ahead in terms of size, display, advertising and organizational structure, while Britain had retreated to older systems, with the floorwalker once more becoming a power—the Draper’s Record in 1888 noted with distaste that Parisian stores let women walk around unescorted. Anything might happen, was the underlying suggestion: men might make advances to female