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

no one had thought of such things before—shopping as entertainment had, as we have seen, a 200-year history—it was that no one had pushed them to such extremes. On the opening day, all the customers were given calendars and notebooks listing the 130 departments and emblazoned with the slogan, ‘WHY NOT SPEND THE DAY AT SELFRIDGES?’¹²² After Louis Blériot became the first person to fly the English Channel in a ‘heavier-than-air machine’, Selfridge rushed to buy the aircraft, and the day after the flight it was already on display in the store. More than 150,000 people came to see it over the next four days. He held an exhibition of the paintings that were not accepted for the Royal Academy summer show. Soon the shop had a playroom for children, decorated to look like the seaside, with real sand, a pond and a small roller coaster, and the Palm Court had a Punch and Judy show every afternoon. There was a pet shop, a rifle range, a putting green, a skating rink. But, most importantly, Selfridge knew how to convey this information to the general public: through the newspapers.

*Sugar until well into the nineteenth century was a very intractable object. Sugar was originally processed by boiling the raw cane sugar with lime water and bullock’s blood; the blood coagulated, absorbing the impurities (and with it sugar’s natural brown colour). The remaining liquid was then filtered, concentrated and poured into moulds, where it solidified. The resulting loaves were then broken up and repurified before being formed once more into conical loaves and sold. Grocers broke up the big loaves with hammers, but the smaller loaves bought by housewives still had to be cut into smaller pieces with sugar nippers. Industrial processing, happily, replaced the bullock’s blood with centrifugal force.²

*Yet bulk was not absolutely uniform, even for the multiples, and several successful chains had a curious anomaly known as the ‘Highland Trade’. As late as the 1910s Cochrane Stores in the west of Scotland were still advertising ‘Attention Highest prices given for eggs’—that is, they traded general produce for their customers’ eggs. Massey stores went further, bartering goods for eggs and also for Harris tweed. In both cases the eggs were sold in their other branches, while Massey’s uncle was a tailor and was happy to accept the tweed.¹³

*The prefix ‘ready-made’ is important, as in contemporary idiom ‘a dress’ also referred to a length of fabric that was sold to be made up into a dress later.

†A £300 income was earned only by the prosperous middle classes. Yet even this is not the entire picture. Newspapers were regularly taken by coffee houses, where they could be read for the price of a cup of coffee, or rented for 1d. an hour. Furthermore, there were often more than a dozen readers per copy of the newspaper even when they had not been ordered for public places. (See p. 126.)

*A spencer was a double-breasted overcoat without tails, well out of fashion by this time. A highlow remains a mystery: the only contemporary sources that list the ‘highlow’ say it is a boot, whereas from the context here it appears to be a jacket.

†Sala (1828—96) contributed to Dickens’s Household Words f rom 1851. At the end of the Crimean War, Dickens asked him to travel to Russia to report on the situation. In 1863 he made his name as a special correspondent covering the American Civil War for the Daily Telegraph. He also wrote ‘Echoes of the Week’, a column for the Illustrated London News, for more than twenty-five years.

*In 1822 there were seventy Jews in Leeds; by 1900 the city had, in proportion to its Gentile inhabitants, the largest Jewish population in the country, at 5 per cent of the population.²⁷

*Singer was even better at marketing than he was at inventing: he had been an actor, and he used his selling and promotional skills at first on a circuit of fairs and circuses; he then opened a showroom, a vast hall lined with machines operated by specially trained women—he wanted to show that women at home could use his machines.³¹

*A siphonia was a transient name for a waterproof coat, one of the many names that manufacturers came up with to catch the eye in advertisements. Almost exactly contemporaneously with this mention, Sala wrote of clerks in their ‘Paletôts…Ponchos, Burnouses, Sylphides, Zephyr wrappers, Chesterfields, Llamas, Pilot wrappers, Wrap-rascals, Bisuniques and a host of other garments, more or less answering the purpose of an overcoat’.³⁸

*Laces themselves had been revolutionized in 1823, when metal eyelets were patented, making it possible to wear heavier boots and lace them more tightly without tearing the leather.⁴¹

†Boots were ordinary street-wear for men, women and children, even in cities, since horse dung, alleyway slaughterhouses and overrunning cesspits were common. Given the condition of the streets, once inside the house those who could afford it expected to change into their shoes or, for women, slippers—which were not bedroom wear, but made of silk, satin or other fabrics, or even the more delicate leathers. The primary distinction between slippers and shoes was, not unnaturally, that the slipper was easily slipped on and off, and thus had no fastenings apart from ribbons. For evening wear for more prosperous women, slippers were de rigueur.

*In the 1850s they advertised a £3 10s., a £6 10s., or a 10 guinea outfit for those emigrating. The 10 guinea version comprised: 1 black dress coat, 1 black dress vest, black dress trousers; 1 frock coat, 1 fancy vest, fancy trousers; 1 fishing or shooting coat; 1 hat and 1 cloth cap; 18 shirts; 4 nightshirts; 1 pair Wellington boots, and 1 pair shoes; 6 handkerchiefs; 6 pounds Marine soap; a razor, shaving box, strop and mirror; a fork, a knife, a teaspoon and a tablespoon; a plate and a mug; a bed, a pillow, a pair of blankets, 2 pairs of sheets, 2 pillowcases; a hairbrush and comb; and a strong sea chest to contain everything.⁴⁵

*This was not a one-off: Harris’s, in Whitechapel, used similar theatre and prizefighter slang, mixed in with the vocabulary of the penny-dreadful (see pp. 174—6) and outright thievery: ‘Harris…The Champion of England, slap-up tog and out-and-out kicksies builder, nabs the chance of putting his customers awake that he has just made his escape from Canada, not forgetting to clap his mawleys [fists] on a rare does of stuff…’⁵¹

*There was a brisk East End trade in tailors’ tabs with the names of West End shops on them,⁵² probably for shops like this.

*Note that the fare ‘stage’ retained its name, and still does, from stagecoach days.

*An Argand lamp burned gas held in a reservoir,