Shopping, for both the prosperous middle classes and the wealthy who lived outside London, was neither entirely local nor entirely London-based. In the first half of the eighteenth century the Purefoy family in Shalstone, Buckinghamshire, bought their wine, sugar, coffee and tea from London, while most of their other groceries came from Brackley, their local market town. But they clearly did not feel restricted to those two places: they bought mushrooms from Deddington; their razors were sharpened in Oxford; their blankets were supplied from Witney; and they bought goods from a clockmaker in Bicester, and more from another one in Helmdon. Their clothes came from London (millinery, mercery and drapery), but Russian leather for a pair of boots was ordered in Buckinghamshire, ‘blew Cloath’ came from Brackley, while various tailors in Brackley, Tingwick, and Chipping Norton made up their clothes.14 This pattern of diffuse purchasing was the norm. An advertisement in the Leeds Mercury in 1769 can stand as representative for many similar ones: it promised that ‘All orders from Gentlemen and tradesmen in the country will be punctually observed.’15 So many advertisements actively solicited country orders, that these were clearly a large part of any shopkeeper’s business.
By the 1770s this kind of—to use a modern term - mail-order business was common throughout England. Midlands manufacturers had long been sending out price lists; now they were also sending illustrated pattern books, for shopkeepers both at home and abroad. In 1773 Josiah Wedgwood was thinking of producing a catalogue in French, to accompany sample boxes of earthenware; by 1787 he had had the catalogue printed in English and French, and then in German and Dutch, and demand was such that it had gone through five editions.16 Manufacturers in various decorative metal trades—buckle-makers, candlestickmakers, ‘toy’ manufacturers*—produced illustrated pattern books with goods designed to suit the taste of each particular market. Many manufacturers found it good business to continue to produce old-fashioned lines for export.18 For example, in the Netherlands the rococo style was popular long after neoclassicism had become all the rage in England. When Wedgwood’s revolutionary earthenware, creamware (see below, p. 63), swept coloured ware and ‘greengrocery’-shaped novelty items off the shelves, from 1766, his partner Thomas Bentley shipped the old lines to the West Indies, where they remained popular. Even at home, shopkeepers took up the catalogue with enthusiasm: it enabled them to have a wide range of goods available without forcing them to invest too much in stock that might not sell. In 1770 Jackson’s Habit-Warehouse boasted that it had many fancy-dress costumes in stock, and it further had ‘a book of several hundred prints coloured, which contains the dresses of every nation’, which were available to order.19
New consumer products made readily available by post or carrier, brought to market by improved transport (see pp. 70—74), advertised and thus made more widely known by a greater range and wider distribution of newspapers (pp. 124ff.): all of this encouraged greater expectations, and even local shops began to have, as a matter of course, higher stock levels, especially in areas serving large populations. In London, Mrs Holt’s Italian Warehouse had a tradecard illustrated with a picture by Hogarth (see p. 50).20
Greater stock meant that more thought had to go into the display of these goods. For those selling through the window, nothing was required in the way of shopfitting, but, once customers began to come into the shop, the room had to be more than a place where goods were stored. The transformation from storage to selling space began to appear early
in the eighteenth century, and an example can be seen in the probate records. In 1719 Thomas Horne, a shopkeeper in Arundel, died; 150 items of stock (drapery and haberdashery) were listed in the inventory made for probate, but there were no goods listed for the use or comfort of his customers. His widow, Susan Horne, who carried on the business, died fifteen years later, in 1734; the inventory then included eight mirrors, counters, shelves and boxes, all illuminated by new sash windows.21
By the middle of the eighteenth century, especially in London, and especially in the luxury-goods trades, the decoration of shops developed swiftly. These shops were a big advance on what had been the norm half a century before. Daniel Defoe was contemptuous of those shopkeepers who wanted ‘to paint and gild’ their shop to make it ‘fine and gay’: ‘Never was such painting and gilding, such sashings and looking-glasses among the shopkeepers as there is now,’ he fretted. He also reported a pastrycook who in 1710 spent an astonishing £300 on sash windows, tiles ‘finely painted in forest-work and figures’, mirrors, a fireplace, candlesticks, a glass lantern, and twenty-five sconces, as well as decoration that involved painting, gilding and carving, and cost another £55.22
The pastrycook was not an isolated individual. The booksellers Lackington Allen and Co. had a trade card that promised ‘the finest shop in the world being 140 feet in front’, with fourteen windows on to the street, and ‘Lounging Rooms’.23 Trade cards showed idealized images, of how shopkeepers wanted their shops to be seen, not necessarily what they were like in reality.* But, at the same time, they cannot have been entire fictions, even if the number of windows was increased a bit, or the perspective from which the interior was drawn was low, in order to make the shop seem bigger. Inventories backed up the impression of luxury that the trade cards worked so hard to project. Many listed mirrors, glass display cases, mouldings on the ceilings, gilt cornices, glass for windows to the street, for display, for internal lighting, screens and skylights—the possibilities seemed endless. Furniture was also abundant: the customer expected to sit while he or she was being waited on, and stools and even upholstered chairs appear regularly in inventories. So do other items that were chosen to suggest that the prosperous customer,
now visiting a shop rather than being called upon by the shopkeeper, was still in some way at home, even if it was not his or her home—there were mirrors, pictures, sconces, curtains, tables, lamps.24
By the middle of the eighteenth century successful shops were no longer single rooms, but had expanded either upstairs or by breaking through party walls to take over several ground-floor rooms laterally. In 1774 Wedgwood took a showroom in Greek Street, Soho, at Portland House, the ‘grandest and largest house in the street’, with a seventeenmetre frontage. It had at one point belonged to a surgeon, whose dissecting room ran the full width of the house. (It was tactfully renamed the ‘Great Room’.) Not content with that, Wedgwood immediately began to plan an extension by adding a gallery, linked to the ground floor by a dramatic staircase.25 In 1794 the bookseller James Lackington moved his shop into a mansion in Finsbury Square, which he named the Temple of the Muses. Inside there was a large circular counter from which to serve customers in a magnificent room—a room so large that, after the first day of trading, as a publicity stunt, a coach and horses were driven right the way around the counter.
Despite such grandeur, Lackington had made his fortune in the mass market. Over the entrance to the Temple of the Muses he had painted, ‘Cheapest Bookseller in the World’, and on his carriage the motto ‘Small profits do great things’ reminded passers-by of the source of his wealth.26 The Industrial Revolution had not yet brought about mass-production techniques—they were to come in the nineteenth century—but there was among some manufacturers the beginning of a very clear idea of the potential of the mass market. Matthew Boulton—originally