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

isolation, but running in tandem with an older system of retail networks. For much of the time the two coexisted quite happily. For those living outside major urban areas—and for many within city limits—there were four ways of buying goods. The first, which remains today and therefore is the one we regard as primary, was the shop. As we have seen, even people in rural areas had regular if not continuous access to shops. But this did not mean that they bought nothing the rest of the time. The most frequent and convenient way of purchasing goods was at daily, weekly, monthly or seasonal markets. From the late eighteenth century, butchers, fruit vendors and greengrocers were the main retailers in markets—corn, flour, cheese, bread and other staples were no longer sold this way, but had moved either into fixed wholesale premises (such as corn halls and cloth halls) or to back-street shops and other fixed retail premises. In 1772 in Manchester there were 30 grocers and tea dealers, 3 provision dealers (including cheesemongers and butter, bacon and ham dealers) and 16 flour and corn dealers appearing in the directories listing retail outlets; by 1800 their numbers had risen to 134 grocers and tea dealers, 11 provision dealers, and 262 flour and corn dealers.⁸⁶

      While the markets, usually run and operated by local inhabitants, were—just—holding on to the perishable food sales, fairs, which were run for the most part by outsiders, were evolving. Before the eighteenth century an annual fair was for wholesale merchants to conduct business, whether it was in cloth, corn, horses or agricultural material such as feed, animals or machinery. By the 1720s cloth halls and corn halls had appeared—fixed public buildings where trading could go on year round.⁸⁷ This trend, from temporary to permanent, from street to shop, continued throughout the century, as fairs lost all their wholesale side, except in a few cases for animals and some food. Instead, the fairs became more and more the haunt of entertainers, pedlars, shows and exhibitions. (For more on fairs in the nineteenth century, see pp. 282—5.)

The final method of purchasing goods in rural areas, and in many urban ones, was via hawkers and pedlars. Most areas were well served by these ‘Scotch drapers’ and ‘Manchester men’, whose regular circuits covered most of Britain. These were not the simple men with packs of modern imagining, and they were not selling solely to the poor. The Society of Travelling Scotchmen in Shrewsbury in 1785 had capital of more than £20,000; even the small Bridgnorth society had capital investment of £5,000.⁸⁸ The Scotch draper carried a pack ‘four feet in length and two or more in depth’,⁸⁹ and it closely resembled the clown car at the circus, pouring out an endless variety of more goods than logic said it could possibly hold: silks, cotton, calico, linen, hosiery, lace, and ready-made-up women’s clothes—petticoats, handkerchiefs, chemises and still more. In 1781 the Revd James Woodforde wrote in his diary that he had bought, from a man ‘with a cart with Linens, Cottons, Lace &c.…some cotton 6 Yrds for a morning gown for myself at 2s. 6d. per yard, pd. 0.15.0 Some chintz for a gown for Nancy 5 yds and ¹/₂ I pd. 1.14.0…Nancy also bought a Linen Handkerchief &c. of him. Mrs How bought a silk handkerchief of him also.’⁹⁰ Throughout the nineteenth century, street sellers continued to appear in towns, especially in more suburban areas, carrying more heavy goods than today seems feasible. In his 1851 survey of the working poor, Henry Mayhew listed men who sold ‘Door-mats, baskets and “duffer’s” packs, wood pails, brushes, brooms, clothes-props, clothes-lines and string, and grid-irons, Dutch-ovens, skewers and fore-shovels’ carried across their shoulders.⁹¹*

      Yet these itinerants, as with their equivalent traders in the markets and fairs, were swimming against the tide. As early as the 1730s, Parliament had received more than a hundred petitions from shopkeepers, claiming that pedlars were taking away their livelihood. The pedlars had the manufacturers on their side: they told Parliament that ‘the Quantity of goods bought and disposed of by them was considerably more extensive than had been generally conceived,…great Quantities of goods of almost every description being vended in detail’.⁹² In 1785, when Parliament proposed a bill to forbid itinerant traders, manufacturers and wholesale dealers in Liverpool, the ‘Linen Committee, Silk Manufacturers and Callico [sic] Printers of Glasgow’ all protested that without itinerant traders ‘great Quantities of British Manufactures’ would remain unsold—in rural areas naturally, but also in the newly industrial heartlands, where mill towns and factories had vast numbers of employees, but, as yet, no fixed retail network.⁹³

      That was to change in the coming years.

*These did not include bakeries, because the price of bread was controlled by the assizes. Nor did they include many retailers who also produced their own goods. For example, tailors often had a shop, but would have thought of themselves as producers, not retailers. That this 141,700 was a conservative estimate for the number of shops can be seen from various pre-modern court records. As early as 1422, in the town of Ely (with a population of fewer than 4,000), one court session alone had cases that involved 3 bakers, 12 butchers, 37 brewers, 73 ale-sellers, 11 fishmongers and 2 vintners: 138 retailers of one kind or another—and these were only the ones involved in court cases.⁵

*And meagre meant meagre for many. One surviving shopkeeper’s ledger recording the transactions in a back-street shop in Sheffield in the 1840s shows an average of between two and five customers a day.⁷

†In an age when water came from the same rivers that served as sewers, small beer was the standard drink for people of all ages, including children. In traditional beer-making the mash was used three times. Each successive batch of beer was weaker than the one before, as fermentation declined owing to the reduced quantities of sugar in the mash. The third batch, called small beer, had virtually no alcoholic content at all.

*Laundry blue was a lump of dye used to counteract the yellowing effects of soaps and keep white items white.

*In the eighteenth century toys were small items of little intrinsic value, usually decorative ornaments, knick-knacks, or trinkets, for adults rather than children. Until late in the century, children’s toys had been distinguished by referring to them as ‘playing toys’. Toymakers were categorized by the metal they worked in: gold and silver toy manufacturers produced buttons, watch chains, inkstands, snuffboxes for men and vinaigrettes for women, decoratives scissors and candle-snuffers; tortoiseshell toy manufacturers made combs, buttons and decorative boxes; steel toy manufacturers generally made cheaper versions of many of the same goods as gold or silver toymakers, as well as the small hooks that were used to pin jewellery or flowers on to clothes or hats. Birmingham was the acknowledged centre of toy manufacture, with nearly 20,000 people in the trade in the city and its environs by the middle of the eighteenth century; over 80 per cent of them were in some way involved in exporting their goods abroad.¹⁷

*Trade cards were common before the development of newspapers created a new vehicle for advertising. They were given to customers in the shop, receipts or bills were written out on them, they were attached to price lists, handed out in the street, or posted to customers at home.

*As a source of sugar, the island