This attention to price is an indication that the level of competition was fierce: increased urbanization and improved transport meant that by the second half of the eighteenth century many of merely moderate income had access to a large number of shops selling the same kind of goods. No one could now expect their goods to sell simply because they were the only products available. Early historians of consumerism suggested that fixed-price retailing appeared with the creation of department stores in the mid nineteenth century: that William Whiteley, the ‘Universal Provider’ (see p. 114), changed the face of shopping by offering lower prices in exchange for fixed prices, instead of haggling, and cash instead of credit. Yet even the most cursory look at the advertisements of the eighteenth century reveals that many of these nineteenth-century ‘innovations’ were in place in the eighteenth century: newspapers were filled to the brim with advertisements that promised low prices for goods ‘charged at ready money prices’—that is, sold for cash. John Hildyard, a York bookseller, advertised ‘several libraries and parcels of books…[to be] sold cheap, for ready money only’. John Davenport and Co. by 1751 was advertising that wallpaper ‘such as is sold by the upholsterer &c. for 3d. or 31/2d. per yard, we sell for 21/2d. and all other sorts in proportion. The price is printed at the end of each piece without abatement [that is, without discounts] and sold for ready money’.29
Nor were the shopkeepers willing to wait for passing trade to come into their expensively fitted-up shops. There is a circular dating from 1778 which is the oldest known example of a shopkeeper soliciting custom by sending a regular client information about his wares. However, the style of the circular, which contains no explanation of its function, suggests that customers would have seen these types of mailing before. It is therefore likely that this chance survival is a remnant of earlier examples that have not been preserved. By the end of the decade, in any case, such items were commonplace: Smith, Nash, Kemble and Travers, ‘wholesalers and retailers’, in 1779 sent out a circular warning their customers that ‘unfortunately we have just received information of the loss of Grenada…which has caused an advance in Raw sugar*… Refined sugars are very scarce and dear, but will be more Plenty [sic] in a Month or six Weeks, and hope cheaper…We shall be glad to see you in Town if it suits your convenience, but if otherwise, shall endeavour to execute any Orders you may favour us with, on the same terms and with equal Attention.’30
This increase in the price of sugar was a cause of anxiety by 1779. Sugar had, for centuries past, been unaffordable for almost everyone. Honey was used by those who had the space and time to cultivate bees; sugar-beet production would not become a practical reality until the nineteenth century. The population for the most part did without sweeteners. Sugar was, in the strictest sense of the word, a luxury—something that provided enjoyment or comfort in addition to what were accounted the necessaries of life. It was a thing that was desirable, but not indispensable. In 1780 Jeremy Bentham, the Utilitarian philosopher, wrote, ‘Necessaries come always before luxuries.’31 But what was a necessity and what was a luxury was more fluid and less absolute than Bentham allowed. In the dedication to Discourses on Art in 1778, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy, wrote, ‘The regular progress of cultivated life is from necessaries to accommodations, from accommodations to ornaments.’32 At almost exactly the same date, Anna Larpent, the wife of the Chief Inspector of Plays for the Lord Chamberlain, wrote in her diary, ‘I must acquire thought in spending money. An elegant Oeconomy, a proper frugality[;] do nothing from mere spirit of imitation. Every thing with order, nothing giddily—there are: absolute necessities; necessary luxuries.’33 Necessary luxuries: surely a new concept.*
The president of the Royal Academy and a bourgeois housewife were agreed: necessities were no longer only basic food and shelter, those essentials that kept a person alive and able to function. And a couple of decades later, during the French Revolution, the sans-culottes of Paris showed that this attitude was not solely a middle-class development. In the desperate winter of 1792—3 the starving French workers rioted, demanding what they referred to as ‘goods of prime necessity’. These they carefully listed: soap, candles, sugar and coffee—goods their grandparents would have considered unimaginable luxuries. The more prosperous murmured disapprovingly that the rioters had not attacked bakeries, where they would have found bread, for centuries the staple food of Europe. Instead they attacked groceries.35 What subsistence was, what was ‘necessary’, had altered for ever.
Part of this elision from luxury to necessity came from the rapid increase in the quantity of goods taxed in the eighteenth century. Numerous wars and the expansion of government saw duties quadruple. A partial list of goods that were taxed in the 1770s includes paper, newspapers, windows, horses, dogs, wagons, leather, printed silk and linen, starch, soap and candles (even soap and candles made from fat from one’s own animals), salt, hops, barley for beer, cider, perry, wine, spirits, tea,* coffee, sugar, molasses, spices and chocolate.36 These were all, therefore, to a degree seen as luxuries, at least by the government. The people who were consuming these items, not unnaturally, felt differently. Luxuries such as soap, candles, salt and tea were in reality by this time clearly necessities to many. It is therefore easy to see how other taxed goods quickly took on a similar aura, and also became assimilated as necessities.
The first advertisement for tea that has survived appeared in the 23—30 September 1658 issue of Mercurius Politicus, the official, governmentapproved political periodical. It notified readers that ‘That Excellent, and by all Physicians approved, China Drink, called by the Chineaus [Chinese], Tcha, by other Nations Tay alias Tee, is sold at the Sultanesshead, a Cophee-house in Sweetings Rents by the Royal Exchange, London.’ That same year, Garraway’s coffee house in Exchange Alley also advertised tea, which it promised would cure, among other things, headache, stone, gravel, dropsy, ‘liptitude distillations’, scurvy, sleepiness, loss of memory, looseness of the guts, ‘heavy dreams’ and colic. Moreover, when ‘Taken with Virgin’s Honey instead of Sugar, tea cleanses the Kidneys and Ureters, and with Milk and water it prevents Consumption.’37
It may be that this tea was being sold as a dry leaf, to take away and brew up at home, as medicine—the claims made for it resemble the advertisements for patent medicines over the next two centuries. But from 1660, when the commodity was first taken notice of by the Excise, the tax was levied on the brewed item: the initial tax was 8d. per gallon—the seller had to make the tea in bulk, have the excisemen check it, and then sell it. From 1689, however, the government moved to a tax on the dry leaf, which kept prices high, but did not require an exciseman in every coffee house.38 From 1664 the East India Company began