Shopping and the Senses, 1800-1970: A Sensory History of Retail and Consumption 3030903346, 9783030903343

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Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970 A Sensory History of Retail and Consumption Edited by Serena Dyer

Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970

Serena Dyer Editor

Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970 A Sensory History of Retail and Consumption

Editor Serena Dyer De Montfort University Leicester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-90334-3    ISBN 978-3-030-90335-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Writing a volume on materiality and sensorial experience during a global pandemic has been a stimulating challenge. Our perspectives of shopping, retail space and the rise of online shopping have dramatically impacted our experiences of shopping and the senses during COVID.  I am beyond grateful to my contributors for their stellar efforts amidst these challenging years. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and kind comments, as well as Emily Russell, Raghupathy Kalyanaraman and the team at Palgrave for their support of this project.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Serena Dyer 2 “To Rub the Nose in the Tea”: Smell, Taste, and the Assessment of Quality in Early Nineteenth-Century Tea Retail 17 Matthew Mauger 3 An Assault on the Senses: Cultural Representations of the Victorian Village Shop 35 Lucy A. Bailey 4 The Politics of Sitting Down: Women, Cafés and Public Toilets in Dublin 59 Stephanie Rains 5 Comfort and Safety: An Intersensorial History of Shopping Streets in Nineteenth-­Century Amsterdam and Brussels 79 Anneleen Arnout 6 The Cry of Silk: Erotomania and Fetishism in Au Bonheur des Dames101 Wendy Ligon Smith vii

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7 “Behind the Scenes of a Retail Shop”: Sensory Experiences of Living-In, c. 1880s–1920s121 Alison Moulds 8 Synergy and Dissonance of the Senses: Negotiating Fashion Through Second-Hand Dealing, Jumble Sales and Street Market Trading in 1930s East End London145 Cheryl Roberts 9 “A Seductive Weapon … a Necessary Luxury”: Shopping for ‘Designer Perfume’ During the Interwar Period169 Lucy Moyse Ferreira 10 Be My Baby: Sensory Difference and Youth Identity in British Fashion Retail, 1945–1970191 Bethan Bide Index213

Notes on Contributors

Anneleen  Arnout is Assistant Professor of History at Radbound University, The Netherlands. His first book, Streets of Splendor: Shopping Culture and Spaces in a European Capital City, was published in 2019. Lucy  A.  Bailey  is a Project Officer at the University of Kent and was previously Associate Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton. She has published articles in History of Retailing and Consumption and Midlands History. Bethan Bide  is a fashion historian and Lecturer in Design History and Cultural Theory at the University of Leeds. Her research centres around the cultural, social and business histories of fashion. She has published in Fashion Theory and The London Journal. Serena Dyer  is Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester. She is the author of Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century (2021) and editor, with Chloe Wigston Smith, of Material Literacy in Eighteenth Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (2020). Lucy  Moyse  Ferreira  is Associate Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at the University of the Arts, London. She obtained her PhD on violence in fashion during the interwar years from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Matthew  Mauger is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Queen Mary University of London. With Markman Ellis and Richard Coulton, ix

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he has published The Empire of Tea: How an Asian Leaf Conquered Britain (2016). Alison Moulds  has a DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford, and is the author of Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s (2021). Stephanie  Rains  is an associate professor at Maynooth University and works on the Irish media and cultural history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cheryl Roberts  is Lecturer in History of Art & Design at the University of Brighton and visiting tutor in the Royal College of Art/V&A Museum MA History of Design programme. Wendy Ligon Smith  is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia. Her book on Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo is forthcoming.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Repository of Arts, 101 The Strand. After Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin. Published in Repository of Arts, vol. 1, no. 1, 1809 7 Fig. 3.1 Illustration from ‘Stodge and Scumble’s Country Adventures’, The Graphic (Summer 1885). (© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library) 39 Fig. 3.2 Illustration (colour litho) by Francis Donkin Bedford for ‘Village Store’ in Lucas, E.V., The Book of Shops (Forum Books 1990, originally published by Grant Richards in 1899). Heritage Images/Getty Images 47 Fig. 3.3 Illustration by Mary Ellen Edwards for ‘The Little Purchases’ in Weatherly, F.E., Among the Daisies (Hildesheimer and Faulkner 1891). (© Mary Evans Picture Library) 51 Fig. 3.4 Illustration from The Tale of Ginger and Pickles by Beatrix Potter. (© Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd, 1909, 2002) 54 Fig. 8.1 A group of young, working-class women selecting garments that can be transformed into fashionable dresses, 1930. Caledonian Market, London. (Photographer Hans Casparius. Museum of London, no. IN7837/Museum für Film und Fernsehen)153 Fig. 10.1 Eric Lucking window display for the “Young Liberty Shop” at Liberty & Co., 1949. Westminster City Archives/Liberty Ltd. 197 Fig. 10.2 “Boutique” cover illustration. Jackie, 10 December 1966, 1. DC Thompson Archive 205 Fig. 10.3 “Around the Boutiques” column, Jackie, 15 April 1967, 22. DC Thompson Archive 207

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Serena Dyer

Shops are sensorily rich spaces. Their existence fundamentally rests upon a ubiquitous consumer need and desire for material goods, be that food, clothing, homewares, or a plethora of other products, both luxury and necessary. Those goods carry cultural capital: shoppers might purchase a new dress because it is the latest fashion, or a new perfume because the brand is perceived as exclusive. Yet those goods are also intensely material. They are bound up in a network of physical and emotional sensation. Interactions with the material world—both within and beyond commercial spaces—rest upon an intersensorial perceptual experience. How we observe the materiality of an object is shaped by how that object looks, smells, feels, sounds and, sometimes, tastes. How we interpret and process those sensations is then shaped by our own cultural and historical context. As material culture scholars have shown—although not always using sensorial terms—haptic and visual assessments of the material properties of objects are essential to object-centred methodologies (Prown 1982; Mida

S. Dyer (*) De Montfort University, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_1

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and Kim 2015). Objects are not simply abstract cultural presences, but animated and tangible entities. If our interactions with the material world are inherently sensory, then the centrality of intersensory assessment and interaction within shops is crucial. Shops are the access point, the space within which most objects are obtained. In the twenty-first century, the commercial primacy of the physical shop space has been effaced by the rise of online retail. Yet those online spaces themselves have continued to grapple with the insertion of sensory engagement within a digital space (Kim and Forsythe 2009). It is, therefore, vital to reconnect the processes and practices of historic shopping with consumers’ sensory perceptions and experiences of the objects they encounter within retail environments. The tempting aromas, curated soundscapes, and tactile textiles which fill twenty-first-century shop spaces are often framed around the generation of a positive consumer experience (Helmefalk and Hultén 2007; Spence 2021). The senses are utilised as a marketing apparatus, and a sensory landscape is explicitly composed by retail display professionals to seduce and delight consumers, and ultimately to encourage them to purchase. It is tempting to frame shops of the past through the same lens, with the sensory viewpoint providing imagined immersion into a romanticised vision of lush department stores and luxurious and aromatic tea sellers. This volume delves into and beyond the seductive idyll of consumer sensuality. Tired feet and weary workers, rotting fish, and overpowering and unpleasant scents inhabit this volume, as well as the luscious rustle of silk and the now-familiar delights of the nineteenth-century department store. Shops and the streets they were on could be smelly, noisy, unpleasant places (Cockayne 2008). The sensorial experience of shopping is not predominantly, let alone universally, positive. This volume seeks to make two connected interventions at the intersection of consumer and sensory histories. Firstly, it asserts that browsing, and the associated assessment of goods, must be framed as a sensory activity. Commercial materiality leads us to questions beyond abstract economies. While cultural capital, fashionability, and necessity shaped many consumer choices, the material properties of goods, as understood through intersensorial and somatic material knowledge, also shaped consumer decisions. Secondly, that a sensorially attentive approach to histories of retailing and consumption must go beyond the focus on the point of sale. Shops were diverse sensory environments, which impacted upon not only the transactions of commerce, but the health, bodies, and comfort of shoppers and shop workers alike. A sensory approach to a holistic history

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of shopping, the contributors to this volume show, presents an opportunity for a far more complex, rich, and diverse examination of the cultural dynamics of shopping. By placing feeling bodies back into the shops of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, it is possible to access embodied histories of how these commercial spaces functioned for and upon the people who inhabited them. Vitally, shopping, as defined in this volume, encompasses more than the simple exchange of money for goods. Extending out from transactional and economic exchange there exists a complex web of cultural and social phenomenon, as numerous historians of retail have outlined (Rappaport 2000; Stobart et  al. 2007). Shopping shapes and is shaped by politics, sociability, urban and rural space, colonialism, race, gender, and class amongst numerous other cultural features. A sensory approach to shopping reaches into those dynamics of power and practice, both within and beyond the shop floor. Crucially, this volume situates itself not just at the moment of monetary transaction, nor even within the process of browsing alone. Instead, it comprises sensory experiences of retail work, urban streets, and the bodily needs of a day’s shopping. Shopping, here, is a conceived as a broad range of activities within and between retail spaces. The bodies which sensorily experienced those spaces are not just those of consumers, but shop workers, businesspeople, government officials, and tourists. The sensory landscape of the shop extended far beyond the shop counter itself.

Sensorially Attentive Histories As sites of material evaluation, shop spaces may appear self-evidently sensory. That browsing involves touching and examining objects is not in itself revelatory. As the contributors to the volume show, however, the cultural dimensions of how that sensory information is sought, processed, received, and acted upon is complex and culturally wrought. As Mark M. Smith has rightly noted, the senses “are not universal, and not transhistorical, and can only be understood in their specific social and historical contexts” (2007a, p. 3; see also Classen 1993). How sensations are processed, thought about, and acted upon depends upon the individual’s religion, class, gender, nationality, age, cultural background, and personal experience. It is not only that an object or piece of music can fundamentally change through time, but that the mental processing of sensory responses is always subjective. As David Howes and Constance Classen

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have stated, the concept of “a period eye” or the “educated listener” have entered common parlance, but what they reflect is an acknowledgement of the cultural cognitive understanding which shapes responses to sensory stimuli (2013, p. 3). This subjective slipperiness makes sensory histories tricky to handle, yet it also contributes to why the senses have played such a vital role in fundamental debates around humanity, disability, race, social roles and status, and gender. Sensory difference has been mobilised as a tool to explain or reinforce numerous categories of human variety. Shops are key venues for this sensorial evaluation, categorisation, and logification. The historical study of the senses has largely taken two forms: histories of the senses and sensory histories; although, as Smith notes, these terms are often deployed interchangeably (Smith 2007b, p.  4). The former focuses in on a specific sense, such as touch or sight, and charts its evolution over time. Classen’s work, especially that on touch, is a particularly influential example of this type of history (1993, 2005, 2012, 2017). Sensory histories, on the other hand, tend to look to the role of the senses in “texturing the past” (Smith 2007b, p.  4). Smith’s study of the Civil War, for example, examined the “sensory totality of war” (Smith 2014b, p.  8). Indeed, the connections and dynamics between the senses are as important as the individual senses themselves in such intersensorial works. This volume is framed as a step towards a sensory history of shopping. It is interested in what happens to our understanding of histories of shopping when approached from a sensory and intersensorial perspective. For an activity which is so centred upon material evaluation, sensory histories of shopping have been relatively sparse (Smith 2012; Dyer 2014; Rappaport 2014). Indeed, the contributors to this book are primarily historians of retail and consumption, rather than specialists in the senses. However, their work demonstrates the fruitful opportunities available when the theoretical frameworks of Classen, Smith and other sensory studies scholars are applied to consumer histories. If, as Smith has claimed, sensory history is a “habit” rather than a field, then this volume demonstrates how general attention to the senses can spread beyond scholars who specialise in sensory histories (2021, pp.  1–3). Smith’s concerns around the etiolation of sensory history as a loosely defined field are, I suggest, addressed in this broader sensorially attentive work. One of the reasons behind what Smith perceives as the field’s lack of cohesion is perhaps the blurred lines between sensory and other sensorially attentive histories. Histories of the body and the emotions enjoy

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significant overlaps with sensory histories but have experienced more widespread engagement (e.g. Laqueur 1990; Reddy 2008; Boddice 2017). Twenty years ago, Roy Porter even referred the history of the body as the “historiographical dish of the day,” and that interest is still going strong (2001, p. 236). In the 2010s, the emotional qualities of material culture have received particular attention (Downes et al. 2018; Holloway 2019). Yet here we find an intriguing lacuna between the emotions ascribed to objects owned, gifted, and used, and the amorphous feelings used to assess and judge objects in commercial settings. The emotive power of objects seems to be at odds with their commercial stoicism. Yet these objects are not empty vessels awaiting the application of their purchaser’s emotions. Within the shop space they can elicit as much delight, despair, and longing as a love token. Rob Boddice and Smith have called for a “braided history of emotions and the senses,” and perhaps the body should provide a third strand here (2020). In piecing together a sensory history of shopping, this volume strives to repopulate the shops of the past with the bodies, feelings, and experiences of shoppers and shop workers. It frames shopping not as a straightforwardly procedural economic or even social act. Shopping, here, was a holistically embodied experience. Shop spaces were not the sanitised spaces conveyed in inventories and idealised trade cards. They were charged spaces, full of the emotional, sensory, and bodily experience which underpins humanity.

Shopping and the Senses This volume commences at the dawn of the nineteenth century; yet it certainly does not claim that the senses were only integrated into cultures of shopping after this date. Instead, it positions the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as sites of intersensorial tension, which broke away from an eighteenth-century past of material literacy centred on a materially attentive understanding of material goods (Dyer and Smith 2020). As Evelyn Welch has demonstrated of Italian fairs, early modern retail spaces were structured to privilege “viewing, touching, tasting and hearing” as much as they were about commercial exchange (2006, p. 46). In many ways, the senses were more fully and organically integrated into pre-modern shopping practice. The industrial changes of the nineteenth century saw the gap between producers and (middle class and elite) consumers widen (Rappaport 2014, p. 71). As systems of class, manufacture, empire, trade, and industry shifted gear, the sensory priorities of shops, shoppers, and

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shop workers underwent parallel shifts. This period is often framed as a time of retail ingenuity and innovation, from department stores to the 1960s boutique. Such spaces used sensory immersion in fresh ways. But it is important to remember that they existed alongside the markets, fairs, and itinerant traders who had plied their trades for centuries. An intersensorial approach reanimates the bodies which existed within and between all these spaces, and sheds light on the diversity of consumer experience during this lauded period of retail innovation. Prior to 1800, the senses had become part of the cultural rhetoric of selfhood and humanity. The eighteenth century has been recognised as the site of a newly sensual self. From fresh medical ideas around the nerves to the cult of sensibility, the period was host to the establishment of new ways of thinking about feeling (Tullett 2020, p. 4). “Feelings” incorporated both the senses and the emotions, and acted as an embodied marker of social status (Brewer 1997). Cultural objects which stimulated the senses, from art to literature and music, were framed through the emotive notion of sensibility. Performing the correct sensory and emotional responses to such stimuli was central to the presentation of the self. Philosophical notions of the sensory body extended into the commercial world through emergent shopping practices which centred on browsing. Helen Berry’s browse-bargain model highlighted a consumer practice centred on consumer choice, whereby the shopper would browse the wares at various shops and haggle with the shopkeepers in order to find the best deal for the best product (2002). Developments in the field of sensory history led Kate Smith to revaluate this model through a haptic lens (2012). Smith framed shopping as an intensely sensory experience, centred heavily on the hands. Touching goods, assessing their weight, quality, and suitability, became a means of building up a somatic memory of materiality. This mental index facilitated and sensorily informed consumer judgement, which was underpinned by a broad sense of material literacy (Dyer 2014; Dyer and Wigston Smith 2020). Knowing and feeling were not dichotomous poles, but interwoven and symbiotic states for eighteenth-century consumers. By the early nineteenth century, these sensory dimensions of browsing were well established and recognised in cultural representations of shopping practice. Knowledge of making and manufacture was encouraged and catered for (Smith 2014a; Dyer 2018a; Dyer and Smith 2020). The publishing entrepreneur Rudolph Ackermann’s (1764–1834) long-­ running periodical Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures,

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Fashion and Politics (1809–1828) offers a literary microcosm of urban commercial sensory practice. This publication included profiles of London’s leading shops within its early issues, accompanied by illustrative engravings showing shoppers in action. The illustration in the periodical’s very first issue depicted Ackermann’s own print shop on The Strand (Fig. 1.1). Replete with prints and artistic paraphernalia and flooded with light from the glass clerestory and domed skylight, the shop space is carefully constructed for sensual interactions. The illustrated figures of model consumers act out the shopping practices which the reader-consumer was encouraged to emulate. The bright daylight illuminates the shop’s contents, which they methodically view, leafing through the stands of prints. Other consumers reach out to touch, hold, and handle the objects on display. As Kate Smith has observed of Ackermann’s depictions of china shops, consumers are portrayed as conducting an intersensorial shopping practice centred on touch (2012, p. 3). Visual and haptic interaction with these goods is certainly privileged, and the auditory and even olfactory dimensions of the shop space are notably missing from these cultural depictions. Ackermann’s recognition of the sensorial needs of consumers was also underlined by his inclusion of fabric sample pages in his publication. Titled

Fig. 1.1  Repository of Arts, 101 The Strand. After Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin. Published in Repository of Arts, vol. 1, no. 1, 1809

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“Patterns of British Manufacture,” each of the early issues contained samples of three of four fabrics, accompanied by instructions about where they might be purchased, as well as suggestions about what they could be used to produce. If, as I have argued elsewhere, we can view Ackermann’s periodical as a locum shop counter, then the inclusion of tactile samples within its pages gestures towards the centrality of material examination within nineteenth-century consumer practice (Dyer 2018b; Wilder 2018). Periodicals like Ackermann’s, and similar nineteenth-century publications such as Henry Cole’s Journal of Design and Manufactures (1849–1852), highlight the intensely sensory lens through which shopping was viewed. The genteel environs of The Strand and the polite consumers of the Repository were, of course, only one pocket of consumers. The “retail circuits” which spread across modern and early modern Europe were toured by a more diverse clientele than the urban and fashionable consumers whom Ackermann sought to reach (Blondé et al. 2006). The history of shopping is replete with so-called revolutions, from the eighteenth through to the twenty-first century (McKendrick et  al. 1982; Hilton 2003). Yet these revolutions are often focused on the commercially powerful middling sorts or middle classes. As such, they take their cue from the ripples which consumer activity casts on the economic, manufacturing, or trade preoccupations of a particular period. A sensorial approach encourages us to look beyond the privileged histories of the economically powerful. Aristocrats and the working class alike mobilised sensory skill when shopping. The variations in sensory priorities and interpretations illuminate social status, economic, and class-based social divisions of the modern period. Some of the revolutionary moments in consumer history were fundamentally sensorial. The transition from market to supermarket in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is perhaps the most apparent (Deutsch 2010; Mack 2010). The climate-controlled, ordered, and sanitised interiors of supermarkets at once prevented sensory inspection by secreting food products in layers of plastic and engendered new types of sensory experience (Rappaport 2014, p.  87). The chilly blow of air-­ conditioned units, the gustatory blandness of processed and frozen food, and the privileging of cleanly purity over olfactory authenticity radically redefined consumers’ sensorial expectations around shopping for food. Display and visual consumption were favoured over intersensorial assessment. As Rappaport explains, supermarkets “encouraged [consumers] to fantasize about goods and their relationship to this material world” rather

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than to sensorially assess and test out products (2014, p. 87). This sensorial sanitisation signals a centring of rejuvenation, pleasure, and comfort within shop spaces, which occurred unevenly through the period this volume covers. Refuge and a form of retail sensory deprivation existed alongside stimulation and sensory strain.

Sensory Variety: Capitalism, Comfort, and Cacophony This volume aims to open up discussion around the variety of sensorial experience which bodies encountered and generated within and beyond the commercial space of the shop. On the one hand, the senses were cast as commercial tools, which were shaped and honed to understand the material “world of goods.” In some ways, the senses were a capitalist instrument, focussed on the assessment of market value and material worth. Yet sensory experience and practices within shops went beyond this commercial mechanism. Besides from the goods which these shops sold, the spaces of commerce were diverse and sensorily rich. Whether surrounded by the grand glass and velvet environs of a luxury department store or the filth and stench of a rural fish market, the sensorial experience of shopping was holistic, and spread far beyond a focussed myopic view of the objects for sale. While elite shop spaces may have been carefully constructed and controlled as—in theory—sensorially pleasant spaces, the sensory dynamics of the market stall or itinerant seller were transient and haphazardly negotiated. Individual shops also generated layered sensorial experiences. While shops were intersensorial in nature, that mingling of the senses was not immediate or consistent. Shops were often structured around stages of sensory access to goods, which were carefully controlled and stage managed by retail staff. Within elite, genteel, and middle-class shops, glass windows offered opportunities to create visual spectacle, which became increasingly artistic and fantastical as the nineteenth century proceeded (Walsh 1995; Lomax 2006). Indeed, department stores as “cathedrals of commerce” took this celebration of glass spectacle to an even greater extreme (Crossick and Jaumain 1999; Rappaport 2000). Enclosed in their glass cases, intersensorial inspection was restricted, but visual display was heightened. Such encased objects are rarefied and rendered something to marvel at, much like an exhibit in a museum. A comparison between shops

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and museums is not a new one, but the synergy is especially relevant to a discussion of sensory restriction (Classen 2007; Shimbo 2016, p.  129). On entering the shop, this visual pre-eminence often continued, as wares were piled high behind the counter. Haptics, smell, sound, and taste were gradually layered onto the sensory experience at the hand of the shop assistant, as they carefully revealed objects to the consumer, permitting them controlled intersensorial access. Activities and modes of consumption which threatened this sensory control were viewed with concern and disdain (Tickell 2018). For genteel consumers, this mingling of sensory experience was an act of intimacy with the objects they inspected. That the senses exist in a hierarchy has been broadly questioned and interrogated (Smith 2021, p. 109). While sight has widely been privileged, it is now acknowledged that any attempts to conceive of the senses as hierarchical is as subjective and fluid as any other element of their historicisation (Howes 2004, p. 10). Within shopping, different commercial spaces layered and privileged different senses in various combinations. This volume takes a broadly chronological journey through the comforts and discomforts, sights and sounds, pleasures and over-stimulation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century consumer landscapes. The chapters celebrate sensorial variety and reflect the uneven and occasionally chaotic sensory negotiation of commercial spaces throughout this period. Matthew Mauger’s chapter opens the volume with an appropriately multifaceted interrogation of the early nineteenth-century tea trade. The senses were called upon to codify and index tea’s quality and value. Crucially, Mauger reminds us of the sensory limitations of consumers. Ideas about sensory appreciation of quality were often constructed and disseminated to consumers. While the East India Company sought to market sensation, shoppers, Mauger shows, were rarely able to distinguish between the various olfactory and gustatory features of different teas. The sensory skill of retailers, quality assessors, and traders is also foregrounded here in relation to the commercial, political, and colonial facets of tea. The senses, Mauger shows, impacted taxation and foreign policy as much as the commercial practices of the shop floor. Lucy Bailey takes us away from the metropolis and seats of parliamentary power, and instead leads us into the village shops which proliferated through nineteenth-century Britain. Plagued by accusations of adulterating the goods or providing false measure, village retailers were routinely framed as incompetent and economically unproductive. Bailey examines cultural representations of the village shop in contemporary literature to

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reveal the sensory experiences of shopping in such spaces as unpleasant, cramped, and sensorially overwhelming. In doing so, she uncovers how the sensory landscape of the village shop evolved through the nineteenth century into the rural idyll of the twentieth-century British imagination. The senses, Bailey suggests, offer a significant crux upon which this shift in cultural portrayals of the village shop rest. The picturesque and quaint utopia of early twentieth-century rural nostalgia was built upon an imagined sensory experience which fundamentally contradicted earlier Victorian accounts of these pastorally framed commercial spaces. The negotiation of the discomforts of shopping also dominates in Stephanie Raines’s chapter on the introduction of tea rooms and public conveniences for women in nineteenth-century Dublin. Raines builds on Smith’s call to be attentive to the class and gender divisions in historicised sensory experience. Expectations around and opportunities for sensory relief were highly gendered in commercial urban spaces. Women were required to physically enact their respectability, and the introduction of the café into the urban retail landscape sat within a complex web of social, cultural, and sensory issues. The development of suburban living and the shopping day in town and city centres made the sensory experience of women consumers’ bodies an urgent issue. As cafés opened, the sensory immersion, offered within these spaces offered up its own gendered tensions and controversies. This holistic view of the shop as part of a broader retail landscape is continued as Anneleen Arnout invites us into the shopping streets of nineteenth-­century Amsterdam and Brussels. Looking beyond the much-­ studied commercial models of London and Paris, Arnout considers the spatial ideals of urban space as these cities grew and developed. In particular, Arnout questions the primacy of the visual spectacle of shopping, and instead highlights the intersensorial experience of the shopping street. The cultivation of an urban space devotes to shopping, Arnout suggests, required attention to the smells and sounds which shaped the city-­dweller’s experience of that space as a venue for luxury and leisurely consumption. The creation of a holistic intersensorial environment contributed to the division and demarcation of urban space. Having travelled the shopping streets of Europe, Wendy Ligon Smith’s chapter brings attention to the consumption of a particular material: silk. The sensory dimensions of this luxurious fabric are well established. The sound and feel of silk are central to how this material is differentiated from his manmade and artificial counterparts. Yet the sensuous language around

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silk also engendered connotations around the fabric’s impact upon the body. As Smith shows, silk could at once be praised for its physical health benefits, and decried for its association with fetishism, deviant eroticism, and diagnoses of mental illness. As with Raine’s chapter, the gendered nature of rhetoric around response to sensory stimuli Is apparent. Smith focuses on both Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames and the silk consumption of Richard Wagner to unpack the complex sensory nuances of this provocative and stimulating material. Zola’s fictional department store continues to provide a point of focus as we move away from the counters and public salerooms, and more into the domestic areas of the shop. Alison Moulds’ chapter examines the sensory experiences of shop staff who lived in—that is those who received food and lodging as part of their employment. Moulds unpacks the relationship between the sensory and the sanitary, whilst also considering the dynamics between bodily comfort and affective experience. By peering behind the performative display of the nineteenth-century shop as luxurious spectacle, Moulds tallies the sensory experience of the shop floor with that of the backrooms and bedrooms of shop staff. Here, we find screwed-­ down windows, cell-like rooms, and putrid air in reports on the living conditions in such spaces. Elsewhere, however, those same spaces are framed as a refuge from the sensorially overwhelming shop floor. The senses, Moulds shows, were often mobilised in debates around heath, sanitisation, and workers’ conditions. Sensory chaos and cacophony follow the reader back out onto the streets in Cheryl Roberts’ chapter on second-hand goods, street trading, and jumble sales. A far cry from the department stores of Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, Roberts’ examination of London’s East End reveals the synergy of senses required to navigate wares that were not neatly and formally displayed. These undisciplined spaces were key venues for the cross-­ class consumption of fashionable dress. Roberts deftly explains how sensorial language pervaded the rhetoric used to think about these bustling spaces, from the stink of the air to the noise of hawkers and bargaining consumers. When removed from the carefully controlled retail environment of the shop, Roberts shows, the intersensorial assessment of goods became even more vital in order to find quality bargains. Intersensorial approaches were equally important in the retail of high-­ fashion items, as Lucy Moyse Ferreira explains in relation to perfume. Ferreira shows how the encompassing definition of fashion as “an assemblage of body modifications and/or supplements” led fashion designers to

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enter the olfactory world of perfume (Eicher and Roach-Higgins 1993, p. 15). Perfumes, Ferreira describes, were both a seductive and sexualised commodity, and a necessity to distinguish the body from the unpleasant aromas of everyday life. Shopping for perfume connected the olfactory with the cultural and the bodily and, as this chapter demonstrates, necessitated an intersensorial approach to marketing. The consumption, packaging, and retail of perfume replied on more than the sense of smell. In the volume’s final chapter, Bethan Bide coalesces the diverse sensory experiences touched upon throughout the volume. The cultural rhetoric of sensory delight attached to the 1960s fashion boutique is juxtaposed with the viscerally unpleasant smells and alarming experiences of more experimental forms of fashion retail. Bide reminds us of the ways in which retailers attempted to pioneer fresh sensory shopping landscapes when faced with a newly created category of consumer: the teenager. Yet, as Bide demonstrates, the lineage of the strategies wrought by these supposed innovators can be traced to the earlier shop spaces explored in this volume. Vitally, Bide demonstrates how intersensorial stimuli in shops were fundamental to the generation of new consumer cultures and identities. Whether luxurious and enticing or uncomfortable and disquieting, the sensory landscape of the shop held significant cultural power. Collectively, these chapters display the variety and diversity of intersensorial practice and experience within the nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century shopping landscape. The dominance of online shopping, especially in a world shaped by a pandemic and economically dominated by digital technology companies, has brought new challenges (Molenaar 2013). However, even there, the development of sensory technologies is a matter of urgency (Kim and Forsythe 2009). Whether conducted in a physical shop space, via the proxy of an online storefront, or on a platform for digital goods, how those goods are received and consumed by the shopper is inherently sensory. The chapters in this volume have demonstrated that intersensorial primacy within the consumer landscape stretches beyond this functional and procedural paradigm. Repulsion, disgust, and discomfort could be part of the shopping experience alongside the conventional framing of shopping as a pleasurable and leisurely experience. Feeling and sensitive bodies moved between, through, and within commercial spaces, constantly digesting the sensory environments which surrounded them. Lucious or disconcerting, sensuous or sterile, the sensorial richness of shops saturated the commercial landscape.

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Works Cited Berry, Helen. “Polite Consumption: Shopping in Eighteenth-Century England.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 12, 2002, pp. 375–394. Blondé, Bruno, Peter Stabel, Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme (eds.). Buyers & Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006. Boddice, Rob. The History of Emotions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Boddice, Rob and Mark Smith. Emotion, Sense, Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Brewer, John. Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. London: Harper Collins, 1997. Classen, Constance. Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures. London: Routledge, 1993. Classen, Constance. (ed.) The Book of Touch. London: Routledge, 2005. Classen, Constance. “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum.” Journal of Social History, vol. 40, no. 4, 2007, pp. 895–914. Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. University of Illinois Press, 2012. Classen, Constance. The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Cockayne, Emily. Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England, 1600–1770. London: Yale University Press, 2008. Crossick, Geoffrey and Serge Jaumain (eds.). Cathedrals of Consumption: European Department Stores, 1850–1939. London: Routledge, 1999. Deutsch, Tracey. Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Downes, Stephanie, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles. Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Dyer, Serena. “Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in 18th-Century England.” History Compass, vol. 12, no. 9, 2014, pp. 694–703. Dyer, Serena. “Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys, and Learning to Shop in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” In Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700–present, edited by Megan Brandow-Faller. London: Bloomsbury, 2018a, pp. 31–45. Dyer, Serena. “Fashioning Consumers: Ackermann’s Repository of Arts and the Cultivation of the Female Consumer.” In Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain: 1690–1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Jennie Batchelor and M.  N. Powell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018b, 474–487.

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Dyer, Serena and Chloe Wigston Smith, eds. Material Literacy in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain: A Nation of Makers. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Eicher, Joanne B. and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins. “Definition and Classification of Dress.” In Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts, edited by Ruth Barnes, Joanne B. Eicher. Oxford: Berg, 1993. Helmefalk, Miralem and Bertil Hultén. “Multi-sensory congruent cues in designing retail store atmosphere: Effects on shoppers’ emotions and purchase behavior.” Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, vol. 38, 2007, pp. 1–11. Hilton, Matthew. Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Holloway, Sally. The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Howes, David. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. London: Berg, 2004. Howes, David and Constance Classen. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. London: Routledge, 2013. Kim, Jiyeon and Sandra Forsythe. “Adoption of Sensory Enabling Technology for Online Apparel Shopping.” European Journal of Marketing, vol. 43, no. 9, 2009, pp. 1101–1120. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press, 1990. Lomax, Susan. “The View from the Shop: Window Display, the Shopper and the Formulation of Theory.” In Cultures of Selling: Perspectives on Consumption and Society Since 1700, edited by John Benson and Laura Ugolini. London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 265–292. Mack, Adam. “‘Speaking of Tomatoes’: Supermarkets, The Senses, And Sexual Fantasy in Modern America.” Journal of Social History, vol. 43, no. 4, 2010, pp. 815–842. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England. London: Europa Publications, 1982. Mida, Ingrid and Alexandra Kim. The Dress Detective: A Practical Guide to Object-­ Based Research in Fashion. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Molenaar, Cor. The End of Shops: Social Buying and the Battle for the Customer. London: Routledge, 2013. Porter, Roy. “History of the Body Reconsidered.” In New Perspectives on Historical Writing, edited by Peter Burke. Cambridge: Polity, 2001, pp. 232–260. Prown, Jules David. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 17, no. 1, 1982, pp. 1–19. Rappaport, Erika D. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton University Press, 2000.

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Rappaport, Erika D. “The Senses in the Marketplace: Stimulation and Distraction, Gratification and Control.” In A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, edited by Constance Classen. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Shimbo, Akiko. Furniture-Makers and Consumers in England, 1754–1851: Design as Interaction. London: Routledge, 2016. Smith, Kate. “Sensing Design and Workmanship: The Haptic Skills of Shoppers in Eighteenth-Century London.” Journal of Design History, vol. 25, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–10. Smith, Kate. Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700–1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014a. Smith, Mark M. Sensory History. London: Bloomsbury, 2007a. Smith, Mark M. Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Touching and Tasting in History. University of California Press, 2007b. Smith, Mark M. The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014b. Smith, Mark M. A Sensory History Manifesto. Penn State University Press, 2021. Spence, Charles. Sensehacking: How to Use the Power of Your Senses for Happier, Healthier Living. London: Penguin, 2021. Stobart, Jon, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c.1680–1830. London: Routledge, 2007. Tickell, Shelley. Shoplifting in Eighteenth-Century England. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018. Tullett, William. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Walsh, Claire. “Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London.” Journal of Design History, vol. 8, no. 3, 1995, pp. 157–76. Welch, Evelyn. Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400–1600. London: Yale University Press, 2006. Wilder, Courtney. “Crossing Sensory Borders: The Fabric of British Periodicals.” The Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 51, no. 3, 2018, pp. 278–307.

CHAPTER 2

“To Rub the Nose in the Tea”: Smell, Taste, and the Assessment of Quality in Early Nineteenth-Century Tea Retail Matthew Mauger

In April 1834, soon after the conclusion of the East India Company’s quarterly tea auction, 40 samples of tea were prepared by Henry Goodhall (tea warehouse-keeper for the Company) under the superintendence of William Hunt (the Company’s Inspector of Teas in London). They were despatched for consideration by the Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India—more commonly known as the ‘India Board’ or the ‘Board of Control’—which had since 1784 imposed government oversight on most aspects of the East India Company’s affairs. One of the Commissioners, Henry Ellis, later recalled the tin boxes containing the samples, with covers ‘which contained, upon the outside a description of the contents’ in terms that included ‘Congou but middling, little on the pekoe side’, ‘Twankay but middling, brightish leaf, curled and speckled’ and ‘Hyson Skin middling good, brightish leaf’ (House of Commons 1834, 67 and 19). Officials from the Board of Control then swapped the

M. Mauger (*) Queen Mary University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_2

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covers between tins, so that ‘what was written on it could not at all lead to a knowledge of what was inside the box’. The stage was thus set for a curious experiment. Between three and six tea tasters (varying between the reports of those who were present) were ushered into the room, and set the challenge of distinguishing the samples laid out before them. Ellis’s description of their method evokes a performative and sensual appeal: I never saw tea tried before, but the process was as follows; the tasters took it into their hands and smelled it first, rubbing it up and down; in that way, I think, without exception they always distinguished the tea, and pronounced at once of what description it was. They tried it also by infusion, for we had small teapots sent us, and by that process also they always distinguished the tea without hesitation… In fact it much exceeded any anticipation I could have had. I was perfectly astonished at the accuracy with which they distinguished the teas, for I am sure, with ordinary knowledge, a person would not be able to distinguish tea by looking at it and smelling it. (House of Commons 1834, 68)

He continues: ‘the mode of trying was to rub the nose in the tea; the taster then took the tea into his hands, rubbed it and smelled it, and afterwards made the infusion.’ In this striking description, a part of the witness evidence presented in the published report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Tea Duties (13 May—10 July 1834), tea is discovered to have a sensory complexity—even in its dried state—little imagined by the non-specialist with ‘ordinary knowledge’. In the performance of artisanal connoisseurship that Ellis witnessed, tea’s identity lies in the curl and speckle of its leaf, in its wiriness, in the aroma released when rubbed in the hands of a ‘taster’ for whom actually ‘tasting’ the infusion seems an almost unnecessary— perhaps even a somewhat vulgar—afterthought. As Denise Gigante reminds us, the bodily ingestion required to stimulate taste relegated it to the lower reaches of the classical philosophical hierarchy of the senses (Gigante 2005, 3–4). Nonetheless, there is an undeniable physicality to the experts’ approach. The sensory organs have a direct contact with the tea: the leaves permeate the skin and press against the nose. For all that certain visual characteristics bear significance for the process of evaluation, it is clear that smell, touch, and (if only through its figuration as a last resort) taste—are the key empirical markers for the assessment of quality. These senses, as Gigante points out, had acquired across the long

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eighteenth century a new experiential primacy in expressing the sensitivity of human subjects to the material, sensory, and emotional landscapes through which they moved. The skin, in particular, became regarded as ‘the subjective interface by which human beings touch and taste the world of sensory reality’ (Gigante 11). So vivid is the sensory cacophony that the tasters recognise the teas ‘without hesitation’. Elsewhere in the evidence heard by the Committee, we find startling testimony of the role of sensebased categorisation and assessment at all levels of tea’s complex distribution channel: from its initial acquisition and consignment as long-distance cargo, to its evaluation and warehousing on arrival in London, to the brokerage associated with the quarterly tea auction, to its wholesale, retail, and consumption.1 We might readily imagine the premises of a typical ‘seller of fine teas’ at the turn of the nineteenth century to have been full of smells, and at least the promise of deferred tastes; and yet we conceive more clearly the visual evidence of grocers’ trade cards, notes of goods received, satirical caricatures of the tea trade, and society portraits of fashionable aristocrats at tea. As Constance Classen has argued (most recently in The Museum of the Senses (2017), but perhaps most influentially in a collaborative study with Anthony Synnott and David Howes, Aroma: A Cultural History of Smell 1994), our received understandings of the history of engagement with material culture prioritise the more tangible, more scientifically verifiable evidence of sight over the evidence of the more intimate bodily senses such as touch, smell, and taste. In this chapter, I focus on the fascinating— if unlikely—snapshot of the sensory life of the tea market in Britain, offered in the pages of the report of a Parliamentary Select Committee established to enquire into matters of taxation. It captures the trade, moreover, at a moment of transition that was to define the nineteenth-­century tea business: the ending of the East India Company’s monopoly, and the liberalisation of the trade. The statements offered by shopkeepers, warehousemen, Privy Counsellors, inspectors, brokers, and merchants provide evidence for the practical assessment of tea quality, and its importance in the sale of dried tea leaves, at a moment when the settled circumstances of tea retail in thousands of small shops across the country—contexts which had changed little for over a century—were about to experience profound upheaval. As such, they offer a tantalising glimpse of the role that sensory experience had acquired in the sale of tea since its first appearance as a regular item of grocery in London in the early eighteenth century (for detailed accounts of the emergence of tea as an item of eighteenth-­century

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grocery, see Rappaport (2017), pp. 46-50; Ellis et al. (2015), pp. 129-137; Mui and Mui (1989), pp. 171–190). Moreover, in its consideration of the question of the proposed tea duties, the Select Committee’s enquiries demonstrate that the taste buds of tea’s consumers offered their own testimony in the formulation of a national taxation policy.

Report from the Select Committee on the Tea Duties Although this chapter is not primarily interested in detailed matters of taxation, some contextual information is necessary in order to understand why sensual experience is accorded such prominence in the report. The Select Committee’s work was part of the Parliamentary response to widespread resistance within the British trade to a new approach to raising revenue on tea sales, outlined in legislation of 1833 known as the Tea Duties Act (‘An Act to provide for the Collection and Management of the Duties on Tea’, 3 & 4 Will 4, c. 101). Key among the new provisions was the cancellation of the pre-existing arrangements, originally set in place by legislation of 1745, for taxing tea consumption chiefly via an ad valorem excise duty levied at the point of sale, and the introduction of a new customs charge collected at the port of entry which varied according to the supposed quality of the tea. The cheapest black tea, imported since the early eighteenth century under the name ‘bohea’, was to be taxed at 1s. 6d. per pound, a provision ostensibly intended to keep prices low in shops frequented by the poorest consumers. The premium teas, including ‘souchong’, ‘flowery pekoe’ and the highly valued green ‘hyson’, would attract a customs rate levied at 3s. per pound. Between these, a mid-range selection including the green varieties ‘twankay’ and ‘hyson skin’ and the black teas designated ‘congou’ and ‘campoi’ was to be charged at 2s. 2d. per pound. The Select Committee was to enquire whether a single ‘fixed Rate of Duty on all descriptions of Tea’, as favoured by many in the industry, including importers and shopkeepers, might be considered more ‘expedient’. In the Chair was the Whig politician Sir Matthew White Ridley, who had particular interests in matters relating to foreign trade, and domestic industries such as soap and glass manufacture (for further biographical details see Escott (2009)). Although it is presented as a chronological series of testimonies in the form of numbered questions and answers

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spanning some 136 printed pages, the Committee’s published report observes a broad though unacknowledged pattern: those giving evidence in May (comprising roughly half of the report, and including almost all tea retailers called by the enquiry) express scepticism about the possibility of the consistent fine judgement of tea grades anticipated in the Act, whereas those giving evidence in June dismiss such concerns. By contrast, much of the evidence presented in hearings of July—the final twenty pages of the report—concerns two additional examinations of dried tea, in the service of which first the Committee, and later its Chair alone, adjourned to the East India Company’s Leadenhall Street headquarters, East India House. In many respects, the list of those called to give evidence to the Committee over the two-month period between 13 May and 10 July 1834 constitutes a roll call of significant men in the contemporary tea trade. They include John Reeves, who had until 1831 been the East India Company’s Inspector of Teas in Canton (Guangzhou); William Hunt, his counterpart in London; William Wybrow, the newly appointed Tea Inspector with the Customs; Henry Goodhall, the Company’s Tea Warehouse-keeper, with over 50 years’ service; Charles Varnham and Thomas Styan, London tea brokers; William Storrs Fry, a wholesale tea dealer, and also secretary of a committee founded in 1832 to represent the interests of the tea trade; and Edmund Antrobus, tea retailer of the Strand who liked to describe himself as ‘tea man to the King’. Whilst a metropolitan bias is evident, the Committee also hears the voices of provincial shopkeepers who have corresponded with Storrs Fry. Among the matters on which the Committee  most regularly seeks guidance, two recur consistently across the pattern of questioning. First, and perhaps most critically for the proposed taxation regime, whether it is possible to determine with confidence where any given consignment of tea might be placed in terms of the three broad categories specified in the Act. Second, if the logic of placing bohea in a category of its own is genuinely to alleviate the tax burden experienced by the poorest of tea consumers, to what extent such an assumption reflected actual patterns of retail. The detailed consideration of these questions returns repeatedly to the role of sense-based judgements in determining (on the one hand) the teas that reached the canisters on the shelves of shopkeepers across the country, and (on the other) the role of sensory judgement in the shopping habits of tea’s consumers. The sensory experience of tea is central to the business of the Select Committee because tea leaves themselves cannot bear a stamp certifying the details of their provenance or manufacture. If

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the names and categorisations used in the Act are readily applicable in the field of trade, then they need to be recognisable via a commonly agreed-­ upon, and easily acquired, sensory determination. Moreover, if the varying rates of duty are to be progressive in terms of their incidence (a clear goal stated by, among others, Henry Ellis), then these terms must also map onto the experience of shopping for tea and consumers’ own discernment of quality, character, and strength.

Marketing Sensations In 1834, John Reeves—the recently retired East India Company Inspector of Teas in China—was the only witness with extended knowledge of the conditions of tea acquisition. His evidence demonstrates that it is through sensory judgement that a variable cash crop—imbued with a local Chinese nomenclature connected with geographical origin, harvesting methodology, and cultural practice—is transformed into a product with hierarchies and values in Britain. The technical terms for tea varieties used in the British trade for over 100 years, the terms we find deployed in the Tea Duties Act, may echo distantly the names of the Chinese tea harvest; but their meaning had long been divergent. The Canton-based British tea inspector, a post introduced some forty-five years earlier, had established an element of quality control at the point of export, to ensure that the Company’s expected investments in the teas known in Britain under the names ‘hyson’, or ‘pekoe’, or ‘congou’ were duly delivered (notwithstanding the names under which they were traded in China). Reeves offers the example of the high-quality black tea known as ‘souchong’: out of 10,000 chests delivered by the Chinese merchants under that designation, ‘the tea inspector can pick out sometimes two, sometimes three… I am not aware that we ever got four chops [i.e. consignments] which had what can be considered as the real souchong flavour’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 4).2 This distinction between the leaves harvested in China as ‘souchong’ and the product recognised by the British trade under that term is summarised neatly by the Committee Chair as ‘a distinction between souchong and souchong flavour’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 12). The role of the Canton Tea Inspector can be characterised accordingly as a key interface between the Chinese tea harvest, and the sensory expectations of the British consumers whom the East India Company aimed to satisfy. On the arrival of newly imported tea-chests at the East India Company warehouses in London the evidence indicates a systematic and

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multi-­layered process of repeated inspection and evaluation that folded the imported leaves firmly within the complex descriptive languages that had emerged within the domestic tea trade. These languages drew above all on aspects of the smell and appearance of dried tea leaves. As tea warehouse-­keeper, Henry Goodhall was responsible for all recently arrived tea until its delivery to wholesalers following the quarterly Tea Sale. Goodhall describes how the quality of each consignment is initially determined by the London-­ based Company inspectors, including William Hunt. Their successive assessments determine the organisation of a tea consignment into ‘lots’ in the tea auction, assign the ‘put-up’ price of each lot, and influence the way in which the tea is described in the sales catalogue. They look over the teas, which are laid out for taring … and they put down what they considered to be the qualities of the tea, and afterwards they get an average sample from a parcel of tea, and they taste it, and put down their opinion of the qualities; and then afterwards, previous to the sale, they re-­ examine them, and revise their opinion of the qualities, which of late years have been printed in the catalogues… They take rather a deep sample from the upper part [of each chest], but they also examine the bottom part of the chest. (House of Commons 1834, pp. 26-27)

Hunt separately testifies that he judges the quality of each sample ‘first, by smelling the tea; and next, by tasting’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 14); the Committee describes this aspect of the inspector’s role as being ‘to character the tea, that is, to describe the qualities of the tea that is put up by the Company at their public sales’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 22). ‘Charactering’ tea in preparation for the London market is clearly a process both of practical discernment of quality and of documenting those determinations in written form. For much of the period of the East India Company’s monopoly of the tea market, bidding at the quarterly tea auction was limited to a number of professional tea ‘brokers’ who serviced the wholesale trade (see Mui and Mui (1963), pp. 240-241). In advance of the auction, as tea moved into the wholesale phase of its distribution channel, Goodhall describes how all chests to be included in the sale would be opened in the tea warehouse for careful sampling by these agents. A number of tea brokers appear in the list of those questioned before the Committee, including John Miller (who claims that his business was at one stage ‘the largest

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purchaser’ of tea in London), Charles Varnham (with over forty years’ experience in the trade), and William Storrs Fry (the third generation of a family brokerage business). Thomas Styan—also a broker in a family tea business of long standing—affirms the Chair’s summary of his practical multi-­sensory approach: ‘is it not your practice to use all those … processes, both smelling, feeling, looking at and tasting it?—Most assuredly’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 48). In their fine analysis of the teas, brokers typically annotated their copies of the sales catalogue with shorthand notes indicating with precision the condition and characteristics of each tea lot. This practice is acknowledged in the evidence of John Crawford, who claims to speak on behalf of British merchants of India campaigning for a liberalised tea trade. In his evidence, Crawford underscores his ‘very high opinion’ of the skills of the brokers: They have no less than twenty-five different marks of their own to discriminate the different qualities of tea. They examine every chest offered for sale out of nine millions of pounds weight. Their peculiar marks distinguish every quality. The Committee, by reading over a few of them will see at once what a degree of skill these gentlemen possess. (House of Commons 1834, p. 88)

Crawford’s description closely matches a remarkable manuscript preserved among the papers of Davison Newman grocers in the London Metropolitan Archive. Described as a list of ‘Brokers Marks & Characters’, it is apparently a crib sheet—perhaps produced to assist the grocer in interpreting the notes in a tea sales catalogue—documenting two separate annotation systems: ‘Bagshaw’s Marks’, and ‘Popplewell’s Marks’ (for additional details, see Ellis et al. (2015), pp. 123-124). The individuals in question are probably Henry Bagshaw (one of John Reeves’s predecessors as Inspector of Teas in Canton), and John Popplewell (who ran a tea brokerage in Cannon Street in the 1770s). Alongside geometric symbols representing the quality of the tea (ranging from ‘Musty & Mouldy’, to ‘Very ordinary’, ‘Good midling’, and ‘Fine’) are those defining its appearance and flavour. Thus we learn that the character B denotes a ‘Burnt flavour’, vB ‘High burnt’, and os tea with an ‘odd smell’. L represents a ‘large leaf’, y a yellow appearance, and w, d and f indicate tea which is variously ‘woody’, ‘dusty’, or ‘flaggy’. Other symbols designate a ‘Heated smell’, a ‘Bitter Face’, or a ‘Smoakey’ profile. For Crawford, described in a contemporary account as ‘an avowed enemy of the East-India Company’ (Asiatic Journal (1836), p.  221), this astonishing ability of the tea brokers to

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determine such fine distinctions contrasts with the corrupt practices of the Company’s own declared judgements: ‘I understand the officers of the Company call teas by almost any name they think proper; that their classification is an arbitrary classification’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 89). A bitter disagreement becomes evident within the report concerning not so much the sensitivity of the skills of the inspectors or brokers, but rather whether there is a tangible sensory distinction between the named tea varieties. Is there a meaningful difference between the taste of a congou tea (for example) and a campoi, that can be detected notwithstanding the particular quality of the sample being considered? The provisions of the Tea Duties Act are dependent on the existence of a distinction that can be widely recognised (at least with reasonable practice, one might imagine), and consistently determined. Yet it is by no means clear how consistently the terms can be applied in practice, especially given the notorious difficulty of representing any detailed flavour profile in words. Most of the individuals questioned during May 1834 assert that the problem rests in the boundary between the teas placed in the different taxation bands. Here, there seems to be genuine confusion among some of those examined—an uncertainty that, it seems reasonable, may be indicative of a widespread slippage within the British tea business—about whether the terms designate genuine flavour profiles, or are simply markers of quality. John Miller asserts that ‘I can decide the difference between souchong and congou; but the congou teas work into the campois, and the campois work into the souchongs, by very nice shades’ (House of Commons 1834, p.  42). ‘The fact is’, agrees Thomas Styan, that ‘we consider the finest bohea tea is sometimes better than the worst congou’ (p.  48). Charles Varnham affirms the proposition that ‘about half the congou teas put up at the last sale could not have been distinguished from bohea’ (p. 49). For William Storrs Fry, the names associated with all but the most expensive specialist teas are effectively arbitrary: ‘As a general position, I consider the difference to be not of kind but only of quality; therefore the application of the name to the description must be entirely matter of opinion’ (p. 56). It is precisely on this question that those interviewed in June 1834, who are largely supportive of the introduction of the Tea Duties Act, beg to differ. Among these witnesses, perhaps the most combative voice is that of former Borough tea dealer David Davies. The following exchange demonstrates just how far his position differs from that of Storrs Fry:

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Do you consider it easy to distinguish between Fokien bohea and inferior congou?—There may be a parcel of bohea and a parcel of congou which may approximate in value, but never in their characteristic distinctions … There is a distinguishing character by which it [bohea] can be separated from congou?—Always. Do you mean though the lower congou may be inferior in value to bohea, they may be separated?—There is no difficulty in it, and it never was considered so till now; it is quite a new light which has fallen on certain people all at once. Did you ever hear, before these new duties were laid on, any doubt expressed by any person connected with the trade as to the difficulty of distinguishing between bohea and congou?—Never; how is a dealer to sell them unless he can distinguish them? (House of Commons 1834, p. 76) Davies’s rhetorical mannerisms suggest a quite deliberate political manoeuvring. When later asked to confirm if someone connected with the tea trade might mistake bohea for congou, he exclaims: ‘Impossible. I could distinguish them blindfolded.’ He addresses Miller’s assertion of the ‘nice shades of difference’ that occlude the boundary between bohea and congou, and argues that this does not ‘have any thing to do with this question’. Challenged to account for the testimony of individuals such as Edmund Antrobus and Charles Varnham, he responds bluntly: ‘I should not believe one of them on that score.’ So distinctive does he consider the flavours of the varieties, in fact, that he asserts that any difficulty there might be in tea connoisseurship is rather to be found in distinguishing quality within a variety, rather than the variety itself (House of Commons 1834, pp. 77-79). In its final pages, the Committee’s report becomes increasingly dominated by a particular voice: that of William Wybrow, until recently the Registrar of Tea Sales at the Excise Board, but now relocated (as a consequence of the imminent arrival of the new taxation regime) to the role of Tea Inspector at the Customs. Wybrow is examined in person three times, and is twice put to a practical test of his tasting skills at East India House. Whereas Davies’s evidence can seem somewhat arrogant in its stridency, Wybrow’s quiet assurance of his remarkable skills as a tea taster is more convincing. In contrast to Davies, he pointedly refuses to engage in any personal attack on the motives or skills of named individuals in the tea trade. He claims to have ‘no difficulty whatever’ in distinguishing between ‘the whole of the teas as they are imported by the Company; boheas,

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congous, souchong, twankay, hyson, and so forth’. He goes on to give a rare description of early nineteenth-century estimations of the flavour profile of the most common black teas. On being asked to give an example of a recent occasion on which his skill in discriminating between bohea and congou had been tested, he explains: I very soon ascertained the Wo Ping flavour, the strong earthy flavour of the bohea; there is in the Fokein bohea a different flavour from the low congou; low congous have a cleaner flavour than Fokein bohea; the Fokein bohea is a coarser, it may be a more useful kind of tea perhaps, but it has not the cleanness of flavour which the low congou has. Did you distinguish that by the tasting of the tea?—By smell principally; by the smell of the leaf in this instance, without tasting, in fact; but where there is difficulty in distinguishing by leaf and the smell, tasting will always decide it. (House of Commons 1834, p. 108) Time and again, Wybrow is pressed on this skill (p. 111). ‘Were you a long time acquiring the knowledge and power of judging?’ ‘Does it require a particular habit of life to keep the palate so delicate?’ ‘Does it require constant practice?’ Examined for a third time on 7 July 1834, Wybrow asserts that considering the distinction between bohea and congou as a determination of quality is a misrepresentation: ‘the difference between Fokein bohea and congou is of a wider kind than to be included in the term quality’ (p. 128). The difference between them is manifest through the exercise of three senses: in appearance, bohea ‘has generally a large ill-­ formed leaf’ whereas congou ‘seems to have been more pliant previous to drying’; in smell, ‘there is a strong oily earthy smell attached to bohea tea, which congou has not’; and in taste ‘bohea tea has a coarser flavor and stronger, a heavier ranker flavor’ (p.  129). Wybrow’s earlier use of the term ‘clean’ in his search for words to describe congou’s appeal was clearly widespread in the tea business; Manchester wholesaler Thomas Binyon had earlier noted that congou is ‘a stronger tea, and, as we designate it, cleaner flavoured’ (p. 61). Through the ways in which tea appeals to eye, nose, tongue, and even touch, a Chinese cash crop is inserted into the contexts of British consumer life as an item of regular grocery, and as revenue for the Treasury. By replacing a straightforward ad valorem charge derived from the market determination of quality at the tea auction, in favour of a scale of duties based on varietal names, the Tea Duties Act required each tea’s sensory

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properties to be recognised, defined, and measured. As the Committee Chair remarks, ‘so long as the duty was collected ad valorem, the name given in the Company’s catalogue was of no consequence’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 30). The delicate and fluctuating flavour profiles of congou, souchong and hyson become a matter for both tea’s marketing and national fiscal policy. What is particularly striking in these accounts is the way in which through multiple and repeated phases of sensory discrimination and analysis, the tea cultivated in China under a set of local designations understood only by those with a close and immediate connection to the Canton trade, becomes relocated within a reserved vocabulary of the domestic British tea trade, a vocabulary attached to specific visual, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory characteristics of the imported leaves, a systematised discourse which is hierarchical, standardised, and based on practical experiential analysis. The evidence of the Committee Report suggests that this terminology is as unfamiliar to the end-consumer of the tea purchased in Britain’s grocery establishments as it is to the original Chinese contexts of tea’s manufacture. Nevertheless, this language deriving from tea’s sensory attributes—categorisations developed within the context of British tea wholesale and brokerage over the course of the eighteenth century—impacted directly on the varieties sold in retail premises across the country.

Shopping for Taste As the Davison Newman sheet of ‘Brokers Marks & Characters’ demonstrates, tea’s movement through its distribution channel from its wholesale into its retail phase is enabled through the formal assessment of its sensory profile, an assessment expressed in the reserved vocabulary of the East India Company sales catalogue, and the symbolic annotations of the brokers and wholesale dealers. Monkhouse Davison and Abram Newman, we might assume, procured the crib sheet of brokers’ marks in order to inform the purchases they made from the selections offered by their favoured agents. The evidence to the Select Committee demonstrates that many of the grocers who sold tea had a highly refined understanding of the sensory character of the dried leaves contained in the canisters on their shelves. Edmund Antrobus may not have been unusual among well-­ established London retailers in claiming to sample the teas coming up for sale in person at East India House: ‘I examine and taste everything myself,

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and have done so for the last 11 years.’ Antrobus seems particularly keen to emphasise his delicate palate as a connoisseur: Do you consider that slight indisposition of the state of the stomach, for instance, will effect your ability to make those distinctions [between tea varieties]?—It has a very material effect. Would port wine at night affect the taste in the morning?—Unquestionably, if too much is taken. (House of Commons 1834, pp. 28-29) David Davies’s performative incredulity at the supposed inability of experienced retailers to distinguish between varieties at the boundaries invoked in the Tea Duties Act, is itself indicative of the degree of skill claimed by the tea-retailing fraternity: ‘how is a dealer to sell them unless he can distinguish them?’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 77). The shopkeepers providing evidence to the enquiry typically represent their customers as knowing purchasers of tea, who can readily discriminate according to quality; as such, most of the grocers and tea dealers insist that their standard tea is of a mid-range quality. John Chenery, grocer of Little St Thomas Apostle (just south of Cheapside in the City of London), noted that his customers were ‘in general the lower class of people’ to whom he sold ‘good congou tea, hyson and twankay’. On being asked if he ever tried selling the cheaper bohea, he responds ‘No, I have not; I have never bought any since I have been in business, for they generally like a good strong flavoured tea; good congou tea’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 67). Antrobus gives details concerning the specific congou grades that make up the core of his business: ‘but middling’, ‘but middling, rather blackish leaf’ and ‘but middling and middling’. He also observes that ‘the poor are so very particular as to their purchasing tea’, and insists that if he tried to sell tea of a lower quality, ‘they would find it lower tea than they had been in the habit of drinking, and they would go elsewhere’ (House of Commons 1834, pp. 30–31). What becomes clear in this evidence, however, is that tea undergoes a further series of transformations as it nears the end of its distribution channel, in which early nineteenth-century tea consumers—at the moment of purchase—effectively deferred their own sensory judgement to those of retailer, wholesaler, and broker, transformations which distance the end-­ product from the terms of the British tea trade and sever the final strands of its association with the Chinese harvest. Whatever the terms may be under which John Chenery has made purchases from his wholesaler, he

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knows that his customers like a ‘good strong flavoured tea’. Thomas Binyon’s evidence is instructive on this point: You said they bought black tea, did you mean by that that they bought tea under that name at a particular price?—The public in buying tea retail at the shops very rarely know the names of the particular teas; they buy it all under the designation of black tea, and name the price. When they come to buy the tea of you, they ask for black tea at five shillings a pound, or whatever price they choose to go to, without specifying the name of any particular tea?—Yes. (House of Commons 1834, p. 58) The report also underscores that these teas were often blends produced by retailers to meet what they perceived to be the particular taste expectations of their customers, blends which often brought together black and green teas. Binyon himself sells ‘a good strong black leafed congou, mingled with twankay’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 58); Antrobus (p. 28) and Miller (p. 38) both recommend a similar mix. As tea has become naturalised as an article of common British grocery, so we see its modernity as a product blended to suit its local consumers, and sold under the regular terms of the grocery trade; for all but the most expensive varieties, quality is indicated by price alone. The names of the tea varieties inherited from the China trade were thus mostly unknown to its drinkers in 1830s Britain, and had little straightforward connection to the small tea packages that they carried home. We see a process at work here that leads in the later nineteenth century to the emergence of branded tea, and ultimately to the invention of the tea bag in the mid-twentieth century. This disconnection between the supposedly pure tea varieties of the commercial market and the product sold in shops clearly represented an opportunity for unscrupulous grocers to defraud their customers by up-­ selling cheap tea, and gambling that their purchasers might be insufficiently sensitive to the sensory distinctions to notice. Wholesale tea dealer John Miller indicates the degree of trust that a consumer thus places in a reliable tea retailer. He gives the example of a shop south of the Thames in the Borough, in which he has spotted ‘good congou tea marked in the window at 5s’; however, through his trade recognition of the ‘chop-mark’ on the tea-chests visible in the shop, he knows that this is in fact cheap bohea being passed-off as congou: ‘the same article, perhaps, might be sold at 3s. 6d., and so the public are imposed upon’:

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If the public have a good discrimination in the quality of tea, would not they soon find it out?—Poor people would soon find it out. And then, of course, they would leave the shop?—Yes. So that an imposition of that kind would not last very long?—If they found their trade fall off, they would begin to sell a better quality. (House of Commons 1834, p. 42). Miller’s anecdote reminds us that although consumers place their trust in the retailer’s fair-dealing when it comes to the sensory profiles of the teas they offer for sale, that deferral of their own judgement is temporary. The obvious point to make about the end of tea’s journey from crop to cup, is that consumers are purchasing a sensory experience: the taste of the infusion of the dried leaves. The moment of post-purchase preparation and tasting, from the cheapest bohea to the floweriest pekoe, is thus the reckoning for the entire supply chain. A customer dissatisfied with the quality of the product will take their business elsewhere. A metropolitan retailer who misunderstands or misrepresents the teas they sell will soon lose business to their competitors. For the Parliamentary Committee, understanding the behaviours of tea’s majority consumers is critical in understanding a key dispensation of the Tea Duties Act: the establishment of a reserved low-tax category for the cheapest of the teas, bohea. For the proponents of the Act, this stipulation is a progressive measure, designed to reduce the tax burden on tea’s poorest purchasers. Witness after witness to the enquiry highlights that the premise on which this provision is based—that the working poor purchase tea purely on the basis of its cost—is false. Former East India merchant and Liberal Party politician William Crawford is prepared to go further, arguing that the lower rate for bohea is designed to establish a ‘fallacy … that the scale of rated duties will benefit the poor consumer’. Crawford adverts that the Act will only ‘make the poor man’s tea cheaper to him … by inducing him to become the consumer of an article inferior in quality to that which he now uses’ (House of Commons 1834, pp. 34–36). All of the metropolitan tea retailers questioned by the enquiry specify that the poorest consumers typically buy blends containing congou, rather than bohea. The provincial grocers whose written responses are read to the enquiry by William Storrs Fry tell a similar story: Joseph Weatherall of Stockton notes that ‘the poor are not generally consumers of common bohea tea’; Messrs Constance & Matthews of Bath state that ‘the working classes usually purchase tea which at present sells at 5s. per pound, that is, good common congou, with strength’; James Veale of Barnstaple insists

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that ‘the majority of the working classes prefer a middling good tea at 4s. 8d. to 5s. 4d. rather than an inferior article at a lower price’ (House of Commons 1834, pp. 53–55). Whilst there is some acknowledgement that the poor find a ‘strong’ tea more economical because its leaves can be infused on multiple occasions, much of the evidence highlights consumer expectations of taste. On being asked to account for the preference ‘among the poor’ for the higher priced teas, Antrobus states that it is ‘because they have a better taste’ (House of Commons 1834, p.  33). Even arch-sceptic David Davies concedes that ‘Every man prefers good congou to bohea … because it is a better tea than bohea, in flavour’ (House of Commons 1834, pp. 80–81). Written evidence from a Birmingham tea dealer introduces a moral dimension to taste and consumption, claiming that only the ‘improvident poor’ purchase the cheapest tea, and they typically do so on credit; for their poverty arises from their careless disregard of the detail of their own consumption and expenditure (House of Commons 1834, p. 52). The servicing of this debt effectively locks such consumers to the offerings of the unscrupulous ‘hawkers’ who sell only the lowest grades. The careful ‘industrious’ poor, by comparison, buy smaller amounts of a better-quality tea for ready money. Attempts to lighten the tax burden for poor consumers will effectively, in the view of this correspondent, reward the idle poor and punish the hard-working. Retailers from other provincial market towns provide further insights into the circumstances which might lead to the poor prioritising taste over cost. In the view of Canterbury grocer James Ridout, ‘the lower orders are more in the habit of using a superior tea than the middling orders, and state that as tea is almost their only beverage they will have it good’. Similar evidence is offered by Somerset dealers McDowall & Trainer of Wiveliscombe. They note a circumstance of tea consumption that is easy to overlook: the ‘little tradesmen, mechanics and labourers’ who frequent their shop, on being asked whether they prefer tea at 4s or 5s per pound, answer: ‘We use neither milk nor sugar, and unless it is good we will not have it at any price’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 54). Without the additional accoutrements that would make a cheaper rougher-flavoured tea palatable, they opt for the ‘cleaner’ profile of congou. The experience of shopping for tea is unlikely to have provided opportunities for many consumers to ‘rub their nose’ in twankay or souchong, even if they knew those terms and the qualities they signified. And whilst we may readily imagine that many shopkeepers would have performed the act of sensory evaluation on the shop counter, perhaps even inviting the

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participation of their customers, Davies’s somewhat derisory characterisation is likely to be an accurate representation: ‘they cannot generally tell the difference between fine pekoe flavored tea, provided there is no flower in it, and bohea, that is, before they make an infusion of it’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 79). The skills of fine judgement exercised by inspectors, brokers and wholesalers in the earlier stages of tea’s distribution channel inserted Chinese tea leaves within a domestic British market and determined the way in which tea was retailed. The labouring majority of tea’s consumers were not connoisseurs, who might recognise the touch of a campoi leaf, the smell of good middling congou in its dried state, or the appearance of a fine hyson; but they do drink an infusion of ‘good’ tea that is typically unadulterated by the additional substances that otherwise mask its natural flavour, and accordingly have expectations of taste (and perhaps associated, less-tangible facets of the tea drinking experience such as colour and aroma) that—on this evidence—they are prepared to maintain in their shopping habits. As William Storrs Fry reminds the Committee, tea consumption may be a habit observed in households across the nation, irrespective of differences in wealth, circumstance, or fashion; yet it remains ‘an article not of necessity but of luxury, and I am quite sure its consumption depends on the continued supply of those good qualities to which we have been so long accustomed’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 52).

Notes 1. I make use of the contemporary marketing model for understanding the movement of goods from producer to consumer known as a ‘distribution channel’. I prefer this to the synonymous term ‘marketing channel’, given the common association of marketing with advertisement (which is not the overt subject of this chapter). For a detailed introductory account, see Rosenbloom (2013). In the terms of this model, we might consider the structure of eighteenth-century tea’s distribution channel to have been multi-layered, involving as it did multiple participants, including Chinese small-hold farmers and merchants; East India Company supercargoes and inspectors; tea brokers and wholesalers; grocers and ‘dealers in fine teas’. 2. Though the term has no consistent, precise meaning, testimony laid before an earlier enquiry of 1830 stated that a ‘chop’ of black tea in this

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period typically constituted 400–600 chests, and of green tea around 400 chests. Typically, all the tea in a chop was considered to be the produce of a single small-hold farm, harvested and manufactured together (see Reports (1830), p. 179).

Works Cited Asiatic Intelligence—Calcutta. The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany for British and Foreign India, China, and Australasia 21 (new series), September-­ December 1836, pp. 125–238. Classen, Constance. The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. Aroma: A Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge, 1994. Davison Newman papers. ‘Brokers Marks & Characters’. London Metropolitan Archives CLC/B/066/MS08631. Ellis, Markman, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger. Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World. London: Reaktion, 2015. Escott, Margaret. Ridley, Sir Matthew White, 3rd bt. (1778–1836), of Blagdon, Northum and 1 Grafton Street, Mdx. The History of Parliament online, 2009. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820–1832/member/ ridley-­sir-­matthew-­1778–1836. Accessed 11 August 2020. Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. House of Commons, United Kingdom. Report from the Select Committee on The Tea Duties, with Minutes of Evidence. 25 July 1834. Mui, Hoh-Cheung and Lorna H. Mui. The Commutation Act and the Tea Trade in Britain, 1784–1793. Economic History Review, vol. 16, 1963, pp. 234–253. Mui, Hoh-Cheung and Lorna H.  Mui. Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-­ century England. London: Routledge, 1989. Rappaport, Erika. A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Reports from the Select Committee of the House of Commons appointed to Enquire into the Present State of the Affairs of the East-India Company. London: J. L. Cox, 1830. Rosenbloom, Bert. Marketing Channels: A Management View. 8th ed. Mason: South-Western, 2013.

CHAPTER 3

An Assault on the Senses: Cultural Representations of the Victorian Village Shop Lucy A. Bailey

The Victorian period is widely recognised as a dynamic chapter in the history of retailing and consumption, ushering in various dramatic changes, such as an increase in mass-produced, pre-packaged and branded goods, which effectively linked manufacturer to consumer. This not only eroded the shopkeeper’s role as processor, packager and expert, but also reduced the ability of the consumer to use their senses to assess the quality of such goods. Yet savvy shopping for everyday goods still required consumers to apply various sensory skills in their interaction with the marketplace. Provisioning required them to rely on their own judgement to inspect the foodstuffs on offer, which needed to be sniffed, pinched and tasted and dialogue or negotiations entered into with the shopkeeper. A consumer’s reliance on their senses, instincts and the trust placed in their preferred shopkeepers was vitally important, as shopping could be a precarious business. By the mid-nineteenth century, widespread reporting on the adulteration of foodstuffs and accidental poisonings was a caution to all

L. A. Bailey (*) University of Kent, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_3

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consumers to be on their guard (Burnett 1966, chapter 5). Yet, as will be shown, sensory information was not only gathered when interacting with goods, it started the moment the consumer approached the shop, looked through the window or opened the door and smelt the aroma as they stepped inside. Their sensory experiences were also filtered through a uniquely individual, complex mix of conscious and subconscious influences, some of which were clearly drawn from cultural imagery. By focusing specifically on the village shop, this chapter follows the lead of others who have sought to draw rural retailing out of the shadows or to appreciate consumption and retailing as more than just an economic phenomenon, linking shopping as a sensory experience with perceptions of retailing (Bailey 2011, 2015a, 2015b; Cox 2000; Cox and Dannehl 2007; Dyer 2014; Smith 2012; Stobart 2007, 2016; Stobart and Bailey 2018). Viewed through a sensory lens, contemporary popular imagery found in literature, illustrations and paintings provides a wealth of detail on the rural shopping experience, or perceptions of it, and how both shop and shopkeeper were perceived and defined. They chart the changing popular image from predominantly negative to largely sentimental and nostalgic, sensory themes emerging as writer, artist and illustrator attempted to evoke the senses of their target audience in order to elicit an appropriate emotional response. This intersection with the history of emotions can enhance our understanding of historical material culture and helps to shed light on the literary and visual culture of a period recognised as spawning new theories about the senses (Downes et al. 2018; Classen 2019, p. 19). Exploring the senses as an emotive experience within social and historical context thereby recognises the importance of the historicised senses and complements work already done on establishing the sensory skillset of the shopper (Smith 2007; Dyer 2014). The cultural representations themselves are vivid and enlightening. They pose questions about how they were perceived by their largely urban middle-class audience and about the relative influence of prior experience, preconceptions and nostalgia on both the composer and the consumer of these constructed images.

An Unpleasant Assault on the Senses In a landmark assessment of eighteenth-century perceptions of retailing, Cox and Dannehl have highlighted the various social and moral anxieties expressed about rural retailing since the seventeenth century, which related to the perceived moral dangers of luxury and the allegedly subversive

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nature of shopping by the poor (Cox and Dannehl 2007, pp.  42–47). Such shops were deemed ‘unproductive’, ‘unromantic’ and a threat to established order (Cox and Dannehl 2007, p.  47). By the start of the Victorian period, the cultural image of the village shop and its keeper was therefore predominantly negative, reflecting contemporary attitudes towards retailing as established in the first half of the century, which suggested low moral character and a supposed role in the exploitation of the poorer members of rural society (Bailey 2015b, chapter 3). Accusations of adulteration and false weights and scales represented village shopkeepers as dishonest and allegations of high prices, a monopoly on local trade and the burden of debt suggested that they were grasping and exploitative. Criticism of poor business practices and low-quality goods also not only indicated that the rural poor were seen to have been unfairly disadvantaged or endangered, having limited access to urban markets, but labelled rural retailers as potentially ignorant and/or incompetent (Bailey 2015b, chapter 3). Moreover, rural shops were largely excluded from mainstream art and literature, seemingly dismissed as uninteresting or unromantic, the influential art critic, Ruskin, declaring such a subject as ‘unfit for pictorial representation’ (Cox and Dannehl 2007, pp.  37–39; Pointon 1977, p. 348). This negative cultural image was perpetuated within periodical literature, in both fiction and non-fiction, and it is possible to detect a sensory theme portraying the village shop as cluttered, greasy, dingy, dusty and smelly, and the shopkeeper as careless, neglectful and gossipy. Central to this was the widespread assumption that a village shop was a bastion of pre-modern retailing practices, multifarious in its trade, an omnium gatherum, which seems a fair reflection of the reality (Stobart and Bailey 2018, pp. 398–399). One of the most familiar examples is the eighteenth-­century diarist and shopkeeper, Thomas Turner, a mercer who was actually a ‘jack of all trades’ (Turner 1998, pp. xv-xvi). The original editors of his diary defined his role as ‘grocer, draper, haberdasher, hatter, clothier, druggist, ironmonger, stationer, glover, undertaker and what not’ who supplied virtually every retail item to his small Sussex community (Turner 1998, p. xv). The relatively leisurely pace of change in rural areas reflected little need to alter traditional shop practices and so changes in retailing practices were gradual, patchy and contingent (Stobart and Bailey 2018, pp. 399–400, 414). The almost universal portrayal of a general store also reflects the growth in general retailing during the nineteenth century (Alexander 1970, pp.  98–99; Stobart and Bailey 2018, pp.  339–400,

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414). A brief perusal of rural retailers’ probate inventories and shop ledgers attests to the existence of the multifarious village shop, which appears to have an evolutionary path that can be traced back to the appearance of the first village shops (Stobart and Bailey 2018, pp.  389–399). Whilst many urban shops were also generalists in the eighteenth century, they became more specialised in the nineteenth century, unlike their rural counterparts. It is therefore hardly surprising that the general nature of rural shopkeeping was a common observation, which by the end of the Victorian period had become a stereotype. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the multifarious nature of the village shop was subject to some criticism, Mary Mitford and other writers deriding the disorganisation that might arise from a jumbled shop and mocking the shopkeeper’s inability to find what is needed (Mitford 2005; Miller 1847; Hood 1880). By the 1860s, there is evidence to suggest that the general readership had a shallow familiarity with this characterisation, the author of a damning article published in the 1½d. weekly, Chambers’s Journal, hinting at the frequency with which such representations appeared within contemporary literary culture: The little huckster’s shop, the general shop, in fact the Shop, is as completely an institution of the genuine English village as the Forge, the Hall, the Parsonage, or the Church. It answers to the Oriental bazaar in being at once…the place where everything can be bought, and where, in default of other marts, everything must be bought. The shop contains all wares, from a reel of cotton to a pound of small-shot…We have most of us a superficial acquaintance with this shop. (The Village Shop 1861, p. 97)

Collectively these descriptions conjure up the old proverb, ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. Many of the readers of their work, who may have had access to a plethora of goods at urban retailers and opportunity to participate in leisurely shopping, would certainly have been able to relate to or envisage the inconvenience that relying on a village shop might cause the more discerning shopper. The appealing and well-constructed display of goods in many urban shops, the antithesis to the clutter suggested of a rural shop, was certainly an essential marketing device and linked to a shopkeeper’s reputation (Hann and Stobart 2005, p. 167). Whilst it is not difficult to envisage the cramped nature of a shop crammed with so many goods, a variety of engravings which were used to illustrate some of the periodical fiction are enlightening. The influential

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Fig. 3.1  Illustration from ‘Stodge and Scumble’s Country Adventures’, The Graphic (Summer 1885). (© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library)

and popular weekly art newspaper, The Graphic, included an illustration with their humorous short story describing an unfruitful visit to a village shop by two artists visiting the area to paint the local scenery (Fig. 3.1). The narrator, Stodge, describes how Scumble’s search of hosiery in the shop led to him declaring ‘There is nothing in this shop’, which did not match Stodge’s opinion, ‘I thought there was too much, my unlucky skull having just come into contact with a bucket hung from the roof’ (Stodge and Scumble’s Country Adventures 1885, p. 26). Clearly the clutter was more than just visually overwhelming, it was also physically hazardous; this type of interaction with shop goods was a world away from the leisurely browsing possible in modern urban stores. Instead of being a calm,

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pleasurable experience, it is portrayed as uncomfortable and frustrating, the village shop dismissed as inadequate for serving the needs of the more discerning customer. Considering the newspaper’s influence in the art world, this piece may well have been aiming to amuse those artists who regularly withdrew to the country to paint and, perhaps, to strike a chord with their own experiences of local rural shops. There is similar imagery in a story published in The Girl’s Own Paper, which describes the cramped nature of a small moorland village shop: The shop was the smallest place that could possibly be dignified by such a name…Not more than three customers could stand at a time between the counter and the door, and these were in constant danger of bringing down on them the canisters, loaves, cakes, etc., piled in the background. (Thorne 1891, p. 732)

The suggestion that customers would struggle to turn around without coming into contact with goods piled high reinforces the idea that it could be a physically uncomfortable experience. These images of disorder are a critique of the rural shopkeeper’s business practices, a condescending urban middle-class perspective on the rural shopping experience. Yet it was perfectly conceivable that both rural and urban retailers found it challenging to balance the need to keep a large range of stock with a desire to retain order (Stobart and Bailey 2018, p. 412). The derision in both fiction and non-fiction also contained a noticeable number of references to greasiness, a tangibly negative sensation used typically to describe the account book, ledger, slate, bills, papers or shop counter (The Village Shop 1878, p. 319; I Promised Father 1880, p. 2; Overton 1898, p.  481). A serial story which appeared in the shilling monthly, The Argosy, in 1866, describes the sign in the window of a village coffee shop as ‘a greasy piece of foolscap’ and particularly descriptive language is used to introduce the occupants of the village general store, Mr and Mrs Luckin and their daughter, Amelia: They are all three as fat as butter—Mr Luckin, indeed, is as fat as two or three butter-casks rolled into one…As for Mrs Luckin, she is a hogshead— she waddles—she half fills the space behind the little counter, and it is quite a sight when she lifts her globose arms, and reaching the thing down from the shelf, rests upon her globose bosom one of the green canisters. (Holbeach 1866, pp. 72–73)

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The Luckins’ size, it is suggested, is accounted for by their close proximity to the temptations of their stock, the distinction between shop and domestic space blurred by the overflow of stock in their bedroom, another reference to the cluttered shop. They are deliberately characterised as greedy, the suggestion of their plentiful diet contrasting with that of their customers who are described as ‘very poor’ (Holbeach 1866, p. 72). The spoilt Amelia, in fact, is the villainess of the story, described as ‘dull, heavy, epileptic, spiteful’ and ‘fat, foolish, cunning, hateful’ whose ‘small malignities were the terror of the village’ (Holbeach 1866, pp. 68, 158, 224). She is one of the contrived villainesses of Victorian literature, ‘who were as naughty as the heroines were virtuous’ (Casteras 1986, p.  5). Indeed, much of the literature acted as cautionary tales, reflecting the type of didactic literature typical of a magazine dedicated to religious and moral instruction. Moreover, the way in which the Luckins are described aligns with Forth’s observations on how negative stereotypes about the corpulent were complemented or even informed by fat as a material substance, ‘as if their very flesh is rotten and corrupt’ (Forth 2013, p. 137). One notably scornful article, published in Chambers’s Journal in 1861, includes a reference to the ‘massive counter, smeared with grease’, which taken together with the ‘dusty chests’ and ‘ink-stained ledger’ is clearly suggesting sloppy business practices (The Village Shop 1861, p. 97). They give a sense of the disgust which might be felt by a customer touching goods and surfaces in such a shop or breathing in the oppressive air. The references to the shop counter are particularly significant as it was a fundamentally important part of the shop, both physically and symbolically. It was a physical barrier between buyer and seller around which the shop was generally structured, a surface on which goods could be set out for sensory inspection (Fig. 3.1), the shopkeeper able to guide and control the experience (Dyer 2014, p.  698; Stobart 2013, p.  142; Walsh 1999, p. 371). Essentially, it formed the key point of exchange for goods, information and gossip, therefore the disgust which might arise from touching a dirty counter may taint the experience for the shopper (Stobart and Bailey 2018, pp. 411–412). However, as these are constructed images, it is important to be careful not to assume that they are akin to reality. Moreover, many living in rural areas may not have considered it out of the ordinary or remarkably different from the state of their own household. This links to Classen’s point about the heterogeneous nature of the sensory world of the nineteenth century, the contrast between perceived notions of primness and propriety and the everyday physicality of poverty

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(Classen 2019, p. 2). The peculiar perspective of the shopper as well as the motives of the creative agent behind the cultural image are the key to understanding the message conveyed. Equally evocative are the negative descriptions of the odour or smell of the shop, most of which imply that it is a unique mix of aromas given off by the peculiar array of goods. One of the earliest examples appears in a story published in 1840 in the fashionable Court and Lady’s Magazine. The character of ‘Mad Matthews’, while sitting waiting to be served by the villainous shopkeeper, Mrs Flint, lit his pipe and ‘sat quietly whiffing away at the “fragrant weed”, no bad antidote against the surrounding compound effluvia of cheese, candles, peppermint, and poverty’ (Domino 1840, p. 406). This striking description indicates to the reader that the odour was unpleasant enough to require an ‘antidote’. A similar suggestion is made in the fictional ‘Schoolmistress of Haven’s End’, published at the end of the century in the popular penny weekly, Leisure Hour, in which the heroine, Joan Harding, newly arrived in the village, recoils at the ‘stench of green bacon, cheese, frying fish, dirty clothes, and exhausted air [which] combined to make the atmosphere oppressive in the extreme’ (Overton 1898, p. 481). Significantly, the odour in both these examples is made up of more than just the odour of foodstuffs; the suggested stink of ‘poverty’ and ‘dirty clothes’ would have been likely to conjure images for the magazines’ readers of ‘the great unwashed’, a phrase coined in the nineteenth century (Bulwer-Lytton 1830, p. xix). They both also reflect the gendered nature of sensory stereotyping, the ‘lower sense’ of smell deemed to belong to women and easily associated with a ‘savage’ character like Mrs Flint (Classen 2019, p. 3; Domino 1840, p. 404). Gender demarcation is also seen in the portrayal of the chatter of the shop, part of the auditory experience of shopping. The male shopkeeper and his involvement in male gossip networks were considered public and respectable in nature, their discussions most often depicted as open and purposeful and therefore part of the auditory experience. This is apparent in an 1879 painting entitled ‘From Hand to Mouth: He was one of the few who would not beg’ by Thomas Faed, a social realist and successful painter of domestic genre art, which shows three men in the shop parlour through an open door, a depiction of relaxed and easy male sociability. Some writers also sought to emphasise the useful social role of the male shopkeeper, depicting him as a trusted and respected member of the community relied upon for his sound advice, good judgement and intellectual conversation (Bailey 2015b, chapter 4). Conversely, the female

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shopkeeper and female gossip were characterised as secretive, shallow, dishonest and even malicious (Bailey 2015b, chapter 4). This was undoubtedly influenced by Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 novel, The Antiquary, which depicts women in an urban shop parlour, behind a closed door, engaging in gossip and attempting to look into a letter (Scott 1816, p. 139). There is certainly evidence to suggest it contributed to a general suspicion of the integrity of the post office (Bailey 2015b, chapter 4). This characterisation of the female shopkeeper or postmistress as a harmful gossip aligns most closely with the modern definition of gossip, which is predominantly a derogatory term. Stereotypically depicted as an activity for women, the image is essentially coded as female (Kartzow 2009, p. 8). It has long been a subject in misogynist literature, women’s talk ‘stigmatized as gossip not because it differed in character from men’s, but because it was perceived as the subversive behaviour of subordinates’ (Capp 2003, p.  63). The vicious tone of some of the material is similar to the way in which contemporary press portrayed the ‘gadding’ female shopper (Smith 2012, p. 2). The final sensory theme found in literary critiques is the suggestion that the village shop was dark, dingy, dusty and neglected, thereby giving the impression of age and decay. Many examples describe the poor quality of goods visible when entering the shop or looking through the window. The Boy’s Spring Book by Thomas Miller, published in 1847, characterises the village shop as a place where everything is ‘well-seasoned, and very little that is fresh’ and goes on to describe a gargantuan list of unappealing goods on offer including: A half-quartern loaf, overhung by half a pound of candles, on both of which the effects of the hot sunshine are visible [and] two or three eggs which have been kept long enough, and made warm enough to contain little chickens. (Miller 1847, pp. 109–111)

The age of the goods is suggested to contribute to the poor quality, a common theme, which hints at the slow pace of trade in a rural area. Indeed, an established critique, dating back to at least the fifteenth century, portrays the stock as old or old fashioned (Stobart and Bailey 2018, p. 396). Some examples acted as an allegorical reference to the perceived decline of the village shop towards the end of the century. In a tale published in 1880 in The Girl’s Own Paper, a village shopkeeper’s descent into debt, impending ruin and untimely death are foreshadowed by the narrator’s

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various references to darkness, such as the ‘dark doorway’, ‘gloomy little parlour’, ‘gathering shadows’ and ‘dark little shop’ (I Promised Father 1880, pp. 2–3). Similarly, in a serialised story published at the end of the century in the shilling monthly, Macmillan’s Magazine, a rather gloomy prediction of the future of the village shop is preceded with an account of the shopkeeper’s old-fashioned business habits and a description of one of the windows as having a ‘careless, fly-blown appearance, and a nonchalant air of being uncommonly little use to anybody’ (Tallentyre 1898, p. 447). Overall, critical portrayals of the rural shopping experience were crammed with descriptive language designed to conjure vivid images to stimulate the senses of the target audience. The reader was invited to feel the grease on the counter and choke on the dust as they envisaged the poorly kept shop. It would be difficult to ascertain the fairness of the accusations, particularly as most could likely also have been applied to many urban shopkeepers. All retailers would have been attempting to balance the need to stock a range of goods, many of which were open to the elements and free to omit an odour, with a desire to retain order and cleanliness. The shopping experience, whether rural or urban, was undoubtedly an assault on the senses. Whether each customer perceived this to be unwelcome remains a matter of individual perception. These cultural representations were particularly prominent in material aimed at a middling and elite readership, the village shop condescendingly portrayed as a retailer resorted to only where absolutely necessary. Considered within the context of the prevailing rhetoric on the reliance of the rural poor on the village shop, much of this negative imagery, like that which emphasised dishonesty, was motivated by an affinity with social reform, specifically aiming to emphasise the lack of choice facing the impoverished rustic consumer. The village shop was clearly portrayed as the shop of the poor, most of the goods cited as contributing to the offensive odour being the necessities of the working class: cheese, bacon, candles and fish; even the stench of ‘poverty’ was theirs. These goods have naturally strong smells therefore their targeting for accusation seems contrived and an allusion to snobbery. After all, most village shops would have predominantly catered to the needs of the labouring class who made up the largest proportion of the rural population and had the most restricted access to urban markets. The negative cultural imagery, rooted in the earliest history of rural retailing, certainly had an impact, persisting throughout the century. Gradually, however, it was overshadowed by a swathe of more nostalgic and sentimental imagery.

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A Welcome Stimulation of the Senses Cox and Dannehl have suggested that the mid-nineteenth century marked a shift in the way that the village or provincial shop was viewed aesthetically; it was, they suggest, no longer ‘unpleasing’, which invites investigation (2007, p. 42). A significant moment came in the late Victorian period when a painting emerged entitled ‘Winter Evening: The Village Shop’ by one of the foremost painters of landscapes and rural peasant life, the naturalist George Clausen (The New English Art Club 1890, p. 284). In the absence of an image of the 1889 painting, a subsequent review of a collection of his works, published in The Academy and Literature in 1904, is somewhat revealing: He paints in the moonlight the village green or the village shop, and the scene vibrates in the senses, rousing all that emotion of the peaceful village drowsing in the wondrous shadow of the mystery of the darkness, half revealing the beautiful ghosts of the sleeping hamlet. The colour is so true, set down in such dainty harmony. It is as though some poet’s voice spoke to us. The lyric intensity of it all—and all just the simply beautiful thing we call an English village. (Macfall 1904, p. 569)

While rather hyperbolic, this not only demonstrates the prevailing association by that time of rural life with tranquillity but also seems to suggest that by the end of the century the village shop was forming as much a part of an idyllic village scene as the peasant cottage and, significantly, that it had been absorbed into mainstream landscape painting. It was part of a scene so intensely stimulating that the reviewer claimed it ‘vibrates in the senses’. The village shop had become part of the beauty of the village scene, an acceptable part of the picturesque rural landscape, and not something to be removed in order to enhance the aesthetic qualities of an image, as the landscape gardener, Humphry Repton, had done in 1816 (Repton 1816, p.  236; Cox and Dannehl 2007, p.  38). It had become visually charming. The incorporation of the village shop into the idyllic rural scene was a significant moment yet it has to be viewed in the context of an evolutionary process in the cultural history of the village shop, which appears to parallel an increasing idealisation of the countryside. The varying extent to which the social realities of the Victorian countryside were dealt with by contemporary writers and artists reflects their choice either to observe or

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to romanticise the countryside (Mingay 1989, p.  3). Increasingly sentimental imagery of rural retailing was published from the 1860s, much appearing in literature aimed at the burgeoning urban middle-class family market, which provided an alternative characterisation of the village shop, emphasising its charm as well as the kindness and benevolence of the shopkeeper. Significantly, their sheer quantity and wide dissemination by the end of the century suggest that they eroded and overshadowed the more persistent elements of negative imagery, becoming established as the prevailing image in the Edwardian period. One of the most prominent changes relates to the multifarious nature of the village shop, already developing into a stereotype but no longer so widely derided. The cluttered shop became a visual spectacle to be cherished and fondly recalled as seen in Reverend Peter Ditchfield’s 1908 book on the charm of the English village, which describes the shop as: A wondrous place wherein you can buy anything from a bootlace to a side of bacon. Sweets for children, needles and thread for the busy housewife, butter and cheese, tea and ginger-beer—endless is the assortment of goods which the village shop provides. Whiteley’s in London can scarcely rival its marvellous productiveness. (1908, p. 102)

The sheer range of goods is viewed as a commendable service to all classes of the community rather than an inconvenient muddle. The odour of the shop is similarly transformed, an example found in a book by George Dewar, a member of the gentry and editor of The Saturday Review, who suggested that the charm of the ‘true’ village shop was defined in part by the presence of certain stock giving off competing smells: dips, bootlaces, tanned gaiters, corduroys and cheese (Dewar 1913, p. 134). Gone is the negative tone which linked the smell of the shop with poverty, yet it is doubtful that the shops themselves had changed that much. An apt visual demonstration of this transformation is given by one of the illustrations in the deliberately enchanting The Book of Shops, published in 1899, which accompanies a poem characterising the ‘Village Store’ (Fig. 3.2): In the town, where each shop’s of a different kind, From one to another we fare; But in quaint little hamlets one only we find, And O what a mixture is there!

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Fig. 3.2  Illustration (colour litho) by Francis Donkin Bedford for ‘Village Store’ in Lucas, E.V., The Book of Shops (Forum Books 1990, originally published by Grant Richards in 1899). Heritage Images/Getty Images There are corduroy trousers and biscuits and pins, Mazawattee, new bonnets and lamps, There are shovels and watchchains and peaches in tins, And hymn-books and leggings and stamps. There are medicines for toothache, tobacco and bread, Quaker oats, cocoatina and nails, There are ribbons and saucepans and treacle and thread, China-ornaments, rat-traps and pails. There are buttons, Sapolio, bullseyes and balls, Coloured handkerchiefs, popguns and rakes, Pharoah’s Serpents and butter, tomatoes and shawls, Postal-orders and beehives and cakes.

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There gossip goes on to a fearful extent, Since customers shop at their ease; And everything lives in the permanent scent Of calico, bacon and cheese. (Lucas 1899, p. 23)

The appealing illustration by the artist and illustrator, Francis Donkin Bedford (1864–1954), portrays the shop, not as dusty, dingy and cluttered, but as thoroughly organised and clean and the shopkeeper as neat and respectable. This is clearly meant to be an appealing scene, the shop suggested as a place which the rural middle class might frequent and the village landscape outside indicative of a rural idyll. The only hint at negativity comes in the reference to gossip, a salutary reminder of the strength of this gendered stereotype. Yet it must be noted that there are still items hung from the ceiling, albeit above head height. As with the transformation of the odour of the shop, this indicates that it is unlikely that the shop itself changed that much in terms of the way in which items were stored or displayed, it was public perception that had changed. Other elements of the shop are also remodelled in a more appealing image, the word ‘white’ used to describe the shop counter or to suggest cleanliness, in contrast to the oft-used ‘greasy’ (E.L.A. 1889, p.  166; Tynan 1904, p.  880). The implied old-fashioned nature of the shop is declared ‘curious’, the diverse range of goods to be ‘marvellous’ and the shopkeeper a ‘genius’ who commands ‘our greatest admiration and respect’ (E.L.A. 1889, p. 166; Robinson 1895, p. 25). References to the gentle tinkle of the shop bell and the portrayal of a quiet, slow pace of rural life will also have stood in stark contrast to the cacophony of noise in the urban landscape. Like other rural imagery, the shop provided a narrower, comforting viewpoint, a respite from the ‘expanding visual field’ of the era typified by grandiose department stores, vistas and panoramas (Classen 2019, pp. 6–9). Much of the literature of this period focuses on the sensory experience of the author who recounts their own familiarity with the village shop or their recollections or memories of it. Arnold Bennett’s reminiscences, published in 1911  in English Review, which describe his move to ‘the country’ after spending his whole life in urban areas, reveal that his knowledge of the village shop was gleaned from ‘novels’, and he admitted ‘I had even ventured to describe it in fiction of my own’ (Bennett 1911, p. 217). Recalling his encounter with a rural retailer, he found the shop was apparently much as the fiction he had read describes:

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I was equally surprised and delighted to find that the village-shop of fiction was also the village-shop of fact. It was the mere truth that one could buy everything in this diminutive emporium, that the multifariousness of its odours excelled that of the odours of Cologne, and that the proprietor, who had never seen me before, instantly knew me and all about me. (1911, p. 217)

Whilst the hint of scorn is impossible to miss, it is worth noting that Bennett had a preconceived idea of a village shop based purely on its literary image and, perhaps by coincidence, suggests that this image was in fact akin to the reality as he experienced it. This highlights how cultural material played a part in shaping urban perceptions of rural village life, the constructed image unlikely to have fully reflected the reality of a diverse rural retail network. Most typically, the recalled memories take the form of childhood reminiscences, some published well into the twentieth century (Rather Merry England 1888, p. 307; Warren 1938, pp. 56, 58; Mosdell 1970, pp.  126–127). Walter Rose, recalling memories of the local shop of his childhood in the 1870s, describes the ‘particular aroma’ and how, with the characteristic opportunism of a child, he was able to taste the more tempting goods that he was sent to buy when running errands: The young assistant would furtively pass his fingers through the treacle stream as the flow diminished and so to his mouth. A finger of mine would likewise find its way into the jar before I got home. (Rose 1988, p. 52)

This is useful in demonstrating the tactile nature of a visit to the shop, often overlooked in favour of the other senses in cultural representations. These are selective recollections influenced by nostalgia but they are useful in the apparent support they lend to some of the widely held beliefs about what constituted the typical village shop and that the charm of the village shop may be rooted in childhood experiences. Dewar, in his 1913 book, claims that the constructed image of the village may well owe a great deal to childhood memories and the influence of nostalgia, the shop itself ‘the most undiscovered thing in hidden England…a mystery, a romance, clings to it which began in our childhood, and has not passed away with many childish things’ (Dewar 1913, p.  132). As the proverb suggests, ‘distance lends enchantment to the view’, the connection that our senses give us to the past recognised by Marx as a potent source of material memories (Marx in Flint 2019, p.  26). Indeed, it has been

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suggested that memory can be viewed as a sense organ in itself, as a distinct meta-sense able to bridge all other senses (Seremetakis 1994, p. 9). Certainly, one of the most noticeable elements in the depiction of the ‘charm’ of the village shop was the presence of a child or children. The Victorian era is widely considered to have been a golden age of childhood, which became a recurrent theme in genre paintings and literature aimed at middle-class families and was quite openly sentimental in its treatment of the child. Due to their inherently reassuring quality, these images of childhood innocence were wildly popular, artists like Millais gaining widespread fame. Combining this with idyllic country scenes was often conscious and contrived, artists and writers aware that ‘adult experience will destroy this Eden’ (James 1989, p. 71). The portrayal of childhood engagement with the village shop, particularly in children’s literature and genre art, typically depicted children as angelic and innocent, often gazing longingly through the shop window at the enticing display of goods. This is shown in an illustrated vignette in Fred E. Weatherly’s book Among the Daisies, which was published in the last decade of the century. ‘The Little Purchases’ has an accompanying illustration by Mary Ellen Edwards (Fig. 3.3). Here is twopence! Here’s another, In each little handy-pandy, So let us stop, for here’s the shop, Of dear old Mary Candy. How much will fourpence purchase? Let us reckon, you and I; For we’re going to have a picnic In the meadows by and by… (Weatherly 1891)

Both the text and the illustration betray the fact that this was an idealised image of a rural middle-class childhood, similar to that depicted by the popular artist and illustrator, Helen Allingham, in her 1875 painting, ‘The Young Customers’. This was not a reflection of the typical village child’s experiences as a consumer at the village shop, who was highly unlikely to have had ‘fourpence’ to spend on frivolities. More typically, they would have been running errands, as Walter Rose recalled, or just looking rather than touching or tasting. A short story published in Quiver in 1878 portrayed this more rustic type, albeit in a sentimental way:

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Fig. 3.3  Illustration by Mary Ellen Edwards for ‘The Little Purchases’ in Weatherly, F.E., Among the Daisies (Hildesheimer and Faulkner 1891). (© Mary Evans Picture Library) …half a dozen little rough heads and dirty faces appeared at the window, and bright, childish eyes were fixed longingly upon new pink and brown and white sweets, and also upon the tempting cakes and tarts displayed. (The Village Shop 1878, p. 335)

For these children, engagement with the village shop was rarely as a customer in their own right; they were largely restricted to pensive admiration of the goods within, curiosity drawing them to the shop and desire holding their attention. Yet this was not just about depicting a visual sensory

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experience, it is an implicit invitation to the reader to use memory to bridge the senses and imagine how the children envisaged touching and tasting the cakes. Some symbolic significance was invested in the shop window, which related to its function as a window on a metaphorical world of goods. The multifarious stock was a link to the outside world, to urban markets, to foreign lands and empire and so the goods displayed were a source of immense interest to the Victorian child. It was the perceived naïve simplicity of a rural child’s engagement with the village shop which, for some, rendered it so symbolically important. A writer for The Academy in 1905 criticised the vogue for sensation in children’s literature, which she felt was echoed in the type of toys found in large urban emporiums. She praises the opposing beauty of simplicity in Beatrix Potter’s books for children which she suggests was echoed in the choosing of a toy by a child at the village shop, lauding ‘that lengthy process of selection and final approbation of delight, the sudden scramble towards some small half-hidden object’ (Tennant 1905, p.  4). The author infers that the experience of a rural child, delighted in the purchase of a cheap, rustic toy, is somehow more aesthetically pleasing to the middle-class Victorian mind than the urban child’s submergence in a world of commodities which produces toys which ‘are outside the scale of their world’ (Tennant 1905, p. 4). The treatment of the village shop by various artists in the mid- to late-­ Victorian period appears to have mirrored this sentimental portrayal of the rural child, many well received by art critics, such as Erskine Nicol and Stanhope Alexander Forbes. In March 1864, for example, a painting entitled ‘Wishing’ by Charles Lidderdale (1831–1895), a young artist who had been exhibiting works at the Royal Academy and the British Institution, was appraised by the prestigious Art Journal who had earmarked it as worthy of ‘distinguishing merit’: A little girl looks wistfully at cakes in the window of a village shop, and we cannot but delight in the simple beauty, the quiet truthfulness, and the faithful execution following closely the intention, which mark this meritorious study. (British Institution 1864, p. 88)

This artwork was valued, by the reviewer at least, for its artistic merit and Lidderdale’s ability to convey a pleasingly sentimental image. As with similar literary examples, it is implicitly suggested that gazing through the window could stimulate an imaginative extension of the sensory experience.

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Concentrated in the latter half of the Victorian period such imagery reflects a cultural shift in attitudes, not only towards childhood but also the countryside and rural village life. They played a part in perpetuating the myth of a rural idyll which stemmed from a trend for critical comparisons of the urban with the rural, which is also found throughout nineteenth-­century literature (Burchardt 2002, p. 25). The countryside, and therefore what was held to represent English tradition and identity, was deemed to be threatened by the city, which, as Marsh points out, was depicted as ‘seething with a kind of venomous activity…wealthy but dehumanized’ (1982, pp. 2–3). It was, of course, a relatively simple concept to grasp and convey; aligning the countryside, essentially nature and all that is considered natural, against the city, a man-made, and therefore unnatural, industrial centre. Quaint rural imagery, which provided pleasant sensory stimulation, appealed to those feeling uneasy about the rapidly changing gas-lit urban landscape and provided a notable antithesis to the unpleasant and uncomfortable sensory overload of inner-city life suggested in paintings such as Phoebus Levin’s ‘Covent Garden Market’ (Flint 2019, pp. 28–29). This is conveyed in a late-Victorian painting entitled ‘The Village Sweet Shop’ by the realist, Ralph Hedley, another Royal Academy exhibitor. It is unusual in its depiction of the inside rather than the outside of the shop, which many artists and illustrators favoured (Society Notes from the North 1898, p. 437). Hedley’s use of light and dark in his depiction of an evening scene is striking, the gloomy interior of the shop contrasting with the illumination at the window. Whilst at first glance it appears to reflect previous characterisations of the shop as gloomy, dingy and aged, in fact the dark interior emphasises a charming scene at the window. The shopkeeper’s face, along with that of the children, is lit up by a lamp, showing one of the boys outside pointing to a plate of tempting tarts on display. The elderly retailer’s shop is neat and, far from being dusty and neglected, her goods appear to ‘shine’ in the window, adding to their appeal. However, the representation of such a modest, functional shop is another reminder that it was not the shop which had changed, it was its depiction. It is certainly the inclusion of children which makes the scene idyllic and renders the village shop ‘charming’ by association. Confirming the establishment of the sentimental portrayal of the village shop in the collective psyche was the publication in 1909 of The Tale of Ginger and Pickles by Beatrix Potter, one of her ‘original tales’ for children. Whilst a cautionary tale about credit in the retail trade, it is

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Fig. 3.4  Illustration from The Tale of Ginger and Pickles by Beatrix Potter. (© Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd, 1909, 2002)

disarmingly enchanting and about a quarter of the illustrations include the shop window (Fig. 3.4). A review of the book published in The Academy in December 1909 describes the illustrations as ‘delightful’ and suggests that ‘the charm of Miss Potter’s rambling book is its naïveté and its complete absence of the grown-up attitude’ (Reviews 1909, p. 854). By this time, whilst the village shop was not considered to be beautiful or sublime, it was certainly picturesque, charming and quaint and as such was an accepted part of the rural idyll. The humble village shop clearly had immense weight and value within late-Victorian culture. No longer universally derided as mundane, unsophisticated and unpleasant, it was increasingly cherished for its simplicity

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and charm. Nostalgic imagery, particularly the almost tangible sensory detail and the link to childhood reminiscences, provided solace, comfort and familiarity in a rapidly changing social and cultural climate for what was predominantly an urban middle-class audience. Yet what seems clear is that this was not about any marked change in the shop itself or the business practices of the shopkeeper; what is notable is that similar sensory experiences and allusions are used firstly to vilify and then to laud the village shop. So, the well-stocked rural shop could be considered cluttered or organised, smelly or aromatic, dingy or cosy depending entirely on perspective. Whether seeking to portray a positive or negative image, both writers and artists relied on the fact that their audience would have been familiar with the sensory experience of shopping, drawing on that imprinted knowledge to bring the scenes they were creating alive. Essentially, they wove the fabric of the image, using sensory cues to stimulate the emotions of the consumer, who is left to stitch the finer details by drawing on their own unique blend of prior experiences, preconceptions and nostalgia. As such a mix remains fluid throughout life, the impact is always unique and intensely personal. Significantly, whether complementary or derogatory, the imagery was predominantly depicting a contemporary scene. As such, it resonated with the audience of the moment, but it will also have played a role in influencing the perceptions, expectations and experiences of subsequent generations.

Works Cited Alexander, D. Retailing in England During the Industrial Revolution. London: The Athlone Press, 1970. Anon. ‘British Institution: Exhibition of Works by Living Artists: 1864’, Art Journal. March 1864. ———. ‘“I Promised Father”: A True Story of a Village Girl’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 2, 40–44. 2-30 October 1880. ———. ‘Rather Merry England’, All the Year Round, 42, 1009. 31 March 1888. ———. ‘Reviews: Books for Small Children: Ginger and Pickles’, The Academy, 1963. 18 December 1909. ———. ‘Society Notes from the North’, Hearth and Home, 349. 20 January 1898. ———. ‘Stodge and Scumble’s Country Adventures’, The Graphic. 27 June 1885. ———. ‘The New English Art Club’, Women’s Penny Paper, 76. 5th April 1890. ———. ‘The Village Shop’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, 398. 17 August 1861.

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———. ‘The Village Shop’, The Quiver, 13, 629. January 1878. Bailey, Lucy A. “Consumption and Status: Shopping for Clothes in a Nineteenth-­ Century Bedfordshire Gentry Household.” Midland History, vol. 36, 2011, pp. 89–114. ———. “Squire, Shopkeeper and Staple Food: The Reciprocal Relationship Between the Country House and the Village Shop in the Late Georgian period.” History of Retailing and Consumption, vol. 1, 2015a, pp. 8–27. ———. 2015b, “The Village Shop and Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century England: Cultural Representations and Lived Experience.” PhD thesis, University of Northampton. Bennett, A. “Watling Street: A Memory.” English Review, vol. 9, 1911, pp. 213–19. Bulwer-Lytton, E. Paul Clifford. London, 1830. Burchardt, J. Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change Since 1800. London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2002. Burnett, J. Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the present day. London: Nelson, 1966. Capp, B. When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Casteras, S.P. Victorian Childhood. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc, 1986. Classen, Constance. (ed.). A Cultural History of the Senses: In the Age of Empire. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Cox, Nancy. The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing 1550–1820. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Cox, Nancy and Karin Dannehl. Perceptions of Retailing in Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Dewar, G.A.B. This Realm, This England. London: Chatto & Windus, 1913. Ditchfield, P.H. The Charm of the English Village. London: B.T.Batsford, 1908. Domino. “Matthews, and the Last Days of Mrs Flint: A Domestic Sketch.” The Court and Lady’s Magazine, Monthly Critic and Museum, vol. 18, 1840, pp. 404–428. Downes, Stephanie, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles. Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Dyer, Serena. ‘Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in 18th Century England’, History Compass, vol. 12, 2014, pp. 694–703. E.L.A. ‘The Village Shop’, The Graphic, 1003, 1889. Flint, K. ‘The Social Life of the Senses’. In A Cultural History of the Senses: In the Age of Empire, edited by Constance Classen. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 25–45. Forth, Christopher E. “The Qualities of Fat: Bodies, history, and materiality”, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 18 (2), 2013, pp.135–154.

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Hann, Andrew and Jon Stobart. “Sites of Consumption: The Display of Goods in Provincial Shops in Eighteenth-Century England.” Cultural and Social History vol. 2, 2005, pp. 165–187. Holbeach, H. “Shoemakers’ Village.” Argosy, 1866. Hood, T. “Our Village by a Villager”. In The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, edited by W. M. Rossetti. A.L. Burt Company, 1880. James, L. ‘Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Literature’, 61–76. In Mingay, G.E. (ed.), The Rural Idyll. London: Routledge, 1989. Kartzow, M.B. Gossip and Gender: Othering of Speech in the Pastoral Epistles. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2009. Lucas, E.V. The Book of Shops. Chobham: Forum Books, 1899; 1990. Macfall, H. “The Art of Mr Clausen.” The Academy and Literature, vol. 1695, 1904, p. 569. Marsh, J. Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914. London: Quartet Books, 1982. Miller, T. The Boy’s Spring Book. London, 1847. Mingay, G.E. (ed.). The Rural Idyll. London: Routledge, 1989. Mitford, M.R. Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery. Elibron, 1825; 2005. Mosdell, J. ‘Ghosts of Grocery-Hutchins: Memories of a Unique Sussex Village Store of Late Victorian and Early Edwardian Times’, The Local Historian, vol. 9, 1970, pp. 126–129. Overton, E.E. ‘The Schoolmistress of Haven’s End’, The Leisure Hour, 1898. Pointon, M. ‘William Mulready’s “The Widow”: A Subject ‘Unfit for Pictorial Representation’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 119, 1977, pp. 347–351. Potter, B. The Tale of Ginger and Pickles. London: Penguin, 1909; 2002. Repton, H. Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening including some Remarks on the Grecian and Gothic Architecture. London, 1816. Robinson, M. “Lorrimer’s Licence.” Wings, vol 13, 1895. Rose, W. Good Neighbours. Bideford: Green Books, 1942; 1988. Scott, W. The Antiquary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1816; 2002. Seremetakis, N.C. (ed.), The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Smith, Kate. “Sensing Design and Workmanship: The Haptic Skills of Shoppers in Eighteenth-Century London.” Journal of Design History, vol. 25, 2012, pp. 1–10. Smith, M.M. Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. Stobart, Jon. “Food Retailers and Rural Communities: Cheshire Butchers in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Local Population Studies, vol. 79, 2007, pp. 23–37. ———. Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England, 1650–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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———. “The village shop, 1660–1760: innovation and tradition.” In Farmers, Consumers, Innovators: The World of Joan Thirsk, edited by Richard Jones and Christopher Dyer. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2016, pp. 89–102. Stobart, J., and Bailey, L. “Retail Revolution and the Village Shop, C. 1660–1860.” Economic History Review, vol. 71, 2018, pp. 393–417. Tallentyre, S.G. “Country Notes: II: The Shop.” Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 77, 1898, pp. 447–450. Tennant, P. “Children’s Literature.” The Academy: Illustrated Supplement, vol. 1753, 1905, pp. 3–6. Thorne, E. “Midst Granite Hills: The Story of a Dartmoor Holiday.” The Girl’s Own Paper, vol. 12, 1891, pp. 694–6, 708–9, 732–4, 746–7, 763. Turner, T. The Diary of a Village Shopkeeper 1754–1765. London: The Folio Society, 1998. Tynan, K. ‘Their Summer at the Cottage’, The Quiver, vol. 61, 1904, pp. 877–885. Walsh, Claire. “Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London.” In The Retailing Industry: Volume 1: Perspectives and the Early Modern Period, edited by John Benson and Gareth Shaw. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999, pp. 361–388. Warren, C. Henry. A Boy in Kent. Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1938; 1984. Weatherly, F.E. Among the Daisies. London, 1891.

CHAPTER 4

The Politics of Sitting Down: Women, Cafés and Public Toilets in Dublin Stephanie Rains

One of the less discussed but most persistent sensory experiences associated with shopping is the physical exertion it involves (for both shopper and shop assistant), and the consequently strong desire to sit down that frequently occurs at some point during the experience. This may be sitting to rest tired feet, sitting in order to have food and drink or sitting due to the sometimes even more pressing need to use a lavatory. Using the shopping, sitting and sanitary history of Dublin city centre, this chapter will explore the ways in which the expansion of shopping from an elite activity to a central aspect of middle-class culture brought with it physical challenges which were further exacerbated by the complex social and moral connotations of sitting in public for the middle-class women who made up the majority of shoppers. The experience of hunger, thirst, tiredness or the need of a lavatory is an intensely embodied aspect of the shopping experience which in various ways may engage any or all of the five senses, but to understand how these were felt, we need to follow Mark M. Smith’s call to historicise the sensory experiences involved (Smith 2007, p.  841).

S. Rains (*) Maynooth University, Kildare, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_4

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Specifically, he points to the class and gender conventions informed by sensory norms, and it is this process of convention formation in the face of sensory experience which this chapter seeks to address. It will explore the precise circumstances in which a middle-class female shopper could—or could not—act upon her sensation of tiredness or thirst without risking her gendered class position, and the new business formations such as cafés which appeared during the 1890s in order to meet those sensory needs (Smith 2008, p. 1). Sitting down to rest or eat has historically been a relatively straightforward process for most men. Indeed, the act of public sitting was a recognised part of urban middle-class male culture in the nineteenth century—the flâneur was almost as likely to be observing the people and sights of the city by sitting at the outside tables of a Parisian café as he was to be strolling the streets. Outside tables were not a feature of cities in Britain or Ireland, but a man of any class in those cities might reasonably expect to be able to sit down on a park bench, or find a public house which would serve him, in order to rest and refresh himself during long hours in the city centre. This fact is especially well-illustrated by Ireland’s most famous fictional flâneur, Leopold Bloom. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloom traverses Dublin over the course of a long day in 1904, moving freely between the public space of the streets and the semi-public spaces of pubs and cafés where he eats, drinks and rests (Joyce 1992). In many cases these establishments would also have provided some kind of lavatory facilities (albeit of an extremely basic kind), allowing men to spend long hours in public space in relative comfort. The situation for middle-class women was extremely different throughout the nineteenth century, however. Much of the debate regarding whether a female flânerie was possible at this time has in fact centred on the very different social rules obtaining to women moving through public spaces (Pollack 1988; Wolff 1990; Walkowitz, 1992; Rappaport 2000). Even the act of strolling—as opposed to purposeful walking—itself posed risks to a middle-class woman’s respectability, especially if she was alone. And if strolling was problematic, sitting was much more so. The reason for this seems to be that sitting in public (or semi-public) space is seen to imply a woman’s availability. The perils to unaccompanied women of unwanted male attention, let alone the perils of being seen as having invited it, were something nineteenth-century city-dwellers were well aware of, and about which women frequently complained at the time. If most of this attention occurred when women were walking or standing,

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then to sit was more perilous still because this immobility was apparently seen to constitute a silent invitation to interact with her. As Judith Walkowitz noted of nineteenth-century women’s experiences of being unaccompanied in public spaces, ‘…a girl had to learn to free herself of unwanted admirers. In her gestures, movements, and pace (always dignified and purposeful) she had to show that she was not available prey’ (Walkowitz 1992, p. 51). In Dublin, this would have been all the more essential for respectable women in some areas of the city centre, because just a few minutes’ walk from some of the most popular department stores was located the Monto, a semi-official red-light district of openly trading brothels and street prostitution (O’Keeffe and Ryan 2009). What this risk of unwanted attention—and the fear of provoking it—ultimately pointed towards was of course a woman’s possible sexual availability. In effect, it was the shadow thrown by the merest possibility of prostitution which produced such highly gendered social rules and expectations around the apparently uncomplicated decision to sit down, the desire to rest tired feet, assuage thirst or (perhaps most of all) relieve a full bladder. And in response to those highly gendered rules and expectations, as will be outlined below, new social and business forms were established, bringing with them new kinds of social spaces, as well as new controversies.

Suburbia, Omnibuses and Sitting Down As suburban living, public transport and department stores all developed in tandem during the mid-nineteenth century, shopping not only extended down the socio-economic ladder to middle-class women, it also changed its nature as a physical activity. It was omnibus, tram and to a lesser extent train routes from city centres which made suburban living feasible for families whose male members needed to travel into the city for business and trade but who were not rich enough to afford the considerable expense of a private carriage. It was also this public transport which enabled the first generation of suburban women to travel in large numbers into the city to shop in the rapidly growing department stores. Dublin had one of the first commuter train services in the world in the form of the line to Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) which opened in 1834, but it was the horse-drawn omnibus services which were first licenced in 1848 and soon fanned out to serve the newly settled suburbs such as Rathmines, Clontarf and Rathfarnham, which brought far more middle-class women into the city centre each day to shop.

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By the mid-1850s the city centre’s two main shopping districts— around Grafton Street on the south-side of the River Liffey and around Sackville Street and Henry Street on the north-side—were already established, and were home to department stores such as Brown, Thomas & Co., Switzer & Co., Pim Brothers & Co. and Todd, Burns & Co., which were all rapidly expanding during the 1850s to occupy larger buildings containing more ‘departments’ than the previous era of smaller, specialised shops. In 1853 McSwiney, Delany & Co. opened one of the world’s first purpose-built department stores on Sackville Street, opposite the Nelson’s Pillar monument which was also the central terminus for the city’s omnibus network. Over the rest of the century this social, economic and technological infrastructure continued to develop so that by 1901 when Dublin city and suburbs had a population of just over 381,000 people, it also had an integrated system of electrified trams which was one of the most comprehensive in the world, as well as a thriving group of city centre department stores, some of which had more than 30 departments and employed more than 100 staff (Rains 2010). The effect of these changes on the physical experience of a day’s shopping was that a middle-class woman at the end of the century might leave her house and walk to the nearest tram-stop, travel into the city squashed into a crowded carriage, then walk several miles between and around department stores before waiting for a tram back to the suburbs and finally walking from the tram to her house. As well as involving several miles of walking, the day’s shopping might take several hours between her leaving her home and returning to it, most of that time spent in the absence of acceptable places for her to sit, eat or use lavatory facilities. The sensory experience of fatigue, hunger and the discomfort of needing a lavatory therefore became increasingly central features of shopping for middle-class women. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, department stores and public transport companies worked hard to establish themselves as respectable female spaces, into which unaccompanied middle-class women could enter and spend considerable time without any risk to their safety or reputations. Department stores in particular pioneered the development of semi-public spaces which were designed and presented as places for women to see and be seen, to stroll and indeed loiter without being presumed ‘available’. In this sense a clear distinction had to be made in department stores between the commodities which were on display and available to be viewed or even touched, and the middle-class women who must remain unavailable and untouchable. The niceties of décor, staff

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appearance and behaviour, the discreet policing of shop-floors to remove ‘undesirable’ visitors as well as the shops’ advertising all worked to encode their spaces as this new kind of semi-public space in which (for almost the first time) women could spend time unaccompanied and unmolested (Rappaport 2000, p.  32). By definition however these were spaces in which customers stood and strolled—as department stores grew in physical size and numbers of ‘departments’, and became more reliant upon larger numbers of customers moving through their shop floors, the provision of chairs for customers became much rarer. So the middle-class women travelling into the city centre for a day’s shopping from the suburbs not only had to walk some distance outside in public space, she would also have to remain standing or walking inside in the semi-public space of the shops. The lack of opportunities for middle-class women to sit and rest (let alone eat or use the lavatory) even as shopping became a widespread activity for them is a small but important demonstration of the uneven spread of female access to public and semi-public spaces during the nineteenth century. While the ever-expanding department stores with their increasingly lavish architecture and busy shop-floors suggested that, by the 1860s or 1870s, women’s experience of public space was broadly similar to that of men, this was in many ways an illusion. With few, if any, opportunities to sit down, eat, drink or use the lavatory, the sensory experience of a day in the city centre was quite different for women than it was for men, in ways which were rarely spoken of but which were nevertheless a structuring force in women’s lives.

Restaurants, Coffee Houses and Café Culture in Dublin All forms of public houses and bars were of course unthinkable places for respectable middle-class women to enter, especially unaccompanied. By the 1870s there were also numerous formal restaurants operating in Dublin city centre, many of which were expensive and extremely middle-­ class spaces (Mac Con Iomaire 2013). However, the rules governing women’s presence in restaurants were complex and resulted in extremely limited access in practice. Restaurant dining-rooms—even of the most socially exclusive variety—were predominantly male spaces until at least the early twentieth century. As well as the fact that they served alcohol, one of the probable reasons for restaurants’ lack of respectability for

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women was their design—not only would women be ‘on display’ to men they did not know in a public dining-room, but many restaurants also offered private dining-rooms which posed even greater risks to a woman’s reputation. Mere proximity to such rooms would therefore have been more of a risk to their reputations than most middle-class women were prepared to consider unless accompanied by suitable male relatives such as husbands or fathers, so restaurants’ main dining-rooms did not cater to women dining alone or in single-sex groups. They were therefore not suitable locations for women who wanted to sit down and have lunch during a day’s city centre shopping, when they would be unlikely to be accompanied by male relatives. That even very middle-class restaurants were male spaces was acknowledged by the fact that some such establishments began to provide ‘ladies’ dining-rooms’ separated from the main restaurants. As early as 1876 the Burlington restaurant on St Andrews Street in Dublin—a very expensive establishment—was specifically advertising that it had ‘ladies’ dining rooms’, which presumably were intended to cater for unchaperoned female diners. The advertisements further stressed that these were staffed by waitresses, suggesting that even being served their food by male staff would have been problematic for unaccompanied women (Irish Times 8 August 1876, p. 1). Even this was apparently not quite sufficient segregation however, and by 1884 the Burlington was specifically redesigned so that the upstairs ladies’ dining room was reached by a private entrance from the street—one of the advertisements announcing this new development makes specific reference to the fact that the separate street entrance ensured that lady diners no longer had to see or be seen from the bar of the main restaurant as they entered and left (Irish Times 15 October 1884, p.  4). That the restaurant would go to such lengths to achieve this new arrangement suggests two conclusions. Firstly, that even in an establishment as unquestionably middle class as the Burlington, it was not entirely respectable for women to be seen so much as passing through the main dining-room, visible in a space where unknown men were being served alcohol with their lunch. Secondly, that by 1884 there were enough middle-class women wanting to eat in the city centre during the day that a restaurant would consider it worthwhile to change their interior design to accommodate them. The particular concerns created by unaccompanied women entering spaces which served alcohol were in theory in tune with the broader nineteenth-century concerns about alcohol, which in Ireland and elsewhere led to the Temperance Movement. One form the movement’s activities

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took was the establishment of ‘temperance cafes’, intended to offer spaces for rest and refreshment in which there would be no alcohol served. As early as 1875, the Dublin Total Abstinence Society opened the Coffee Palace on Townsend Street to provide such a space. The Coffee Palace makes an appearance in Ulysses as the location for one of Molly Bloom’s performances, and as well as concerts it regularly advertised lectures and other ‘improving’ activities alongside its regular business of serving coffee (Joyce 1992, p.  346). However, the Coffee Palace was intended as an alternative to public houses for working-class customers, rather than as a space where middle-class women might patronise during a day’s shopping. Its location on Townsend Street, where the city centre began to shade into the docklands area of Ringsend, also meant that it would not have been in a convenient location to the main shopping streets. This was confirmed when it went out of business in 1915, and in the court hearings of its bankruptcy it was suggested that ‘a great many of their working-class customers have gone to the front’ (Irish Times 13 November 1913, p. 8). In a demonstration of these finely tuned class distinctions, a more upmarket temperance café was opened in 1882 on Grafton Street itself. The X.L. Café was described a few years later as a ‘pioneer of first class temperance cafes’ and offered luncheons as well as non-alcoholic drinks—a four-­ course table d’hôte menu in 1891 was available for 2 shillings, and ‘ladies enjoy the quiet of the private room, which looks out upon Grafton Street’, while its dining-room decorated with ‘hand-painted views of Killarney upon its walls’ was claimed to seat 200 diners (Irish Times 13 December 1909, p. 10).

Cafés, Orientalism and Respectability The X.L. Café, probably because of its location on one of Dublin’s most fashionable streets and literally within sight of Brown, Thomas & Co., and Switzer’s & Co., which were two of the most upmarket department stores, was a pioneer in Dublin of that important new development of 1890s urban spaces, the café. These quintessentially fin-de-siècle spaces were both an amalgam of several older kinds of space and at the same time quite new. While different establishments offered slightly different services, the typical café of the period was centrally organised around serving tea, coffee and other non-alcoholic drinks, as well as light refreshments, luncheon and ‘high tea’ foods such as cake. They were therefore primarily day-time businesses, and specifically intended to attract middle-class women

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customers to their dining-rooms by providing bright, airy and above all else respectable spaces in which female shoppers could rest, eat and drink. These new cafés were clearly descended in part from the café culture of continental European cities such as Paris, as well as the coffee-houses of an older era in Irish and British cities, and also of the working-class temperance cafes established by movements such as the Dublin Total Abstinence Association. Yet they were also quite new in their style, service and above all perhaps in their appeal to middle-class women customers. Like traditional public houses and bars, Parisian cafes and the older Dublin coffee-­ houses were both fairly strictly male spaces—and most temperance cafes were intended as an alcohol-free alternative to working-class public houses rather than as middle-class or specifically female spaces. Cafes by contrast were always coded as middle-class female spaces—one of the first places in the city where unaccompanied women could sit down without compromising their respectability. In this respect they rapidly became a catering equivalent of the department stores themselves, as semi-public spaces which were carefully designed and rigorously managed in order to appeal to the middle-class female shopper. Their sensory experience would also have been quite unique, dominated by the chink of tea-cups, the sound of female voices and the smells of tea and coffee rather than the sounds and smells of pubs or formal restaurants, and this would have been an important part of their coding as comfortable and respectable female spaces. Cafés’ appeal was created in several ways, but what drew them all together was the mobilisation of the fashionable orientalism of the 1890s. This orientalism was typically evident in the cafés’ names, décor and the refreshments which they served. The décor of many Dublin cafés which opened during the 1890s drew heavily upon the contemporary fashion for ‘oriental’ fabrics, colours and designs which was equally evident in many fashionable homes. One of the earliest to open was the Lucan Dairy Oriental Tea Room on Lower Baggot Street in March 1894. The Irish Times reported on the tea room’s launch with a detailed and approving description of its décor, explaining that, In their endeavour to give a counterfeit presentation of a luxurious Moorish divan the proprietors have succeeded in a marked degree, and all the details are worked in with most artistic effect. The woodwork is of arabesque design, and of a pretty green colour. Moorish needlework and tapestry adorn the walls, and the floors are covered with Oriental mats. A soft, subdued light is given by pretty Moorish lamps, and the fragrant tea and rich

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Lucan cream are served up in the daintiest of porcelain. (Irish Times 21 March 1894, p. 6)

A similar aesthetic was achieved later that year at one of the most spectacular stagings of orientalism ever seen in Dublin, in the form of the Araby Bazaar. A charitable fundraiser for the Jervis Street Hospital, the bazaar (which was the basis for Joyce’s eponymous short story about, among other things, the disappointments of a consumer culture which promised the luxury and abundance of the ‘orient’) was an enormous event which attracted more than 80,000 visitors over the week that it ran at the Royal Dublin Showgrounds just outside the city centre (Rains, 2008). Featuring stalls with ‘oriental’ themes such as Ancient Egypt or Bedouin encampments, most of which were staffed by female volunteers dressed in ‘oriental’ costumes, the event’s very name evoked the sense of luxury and abundance associated with the fashionable orientalism of the time. As well as these stalls, Araby also boasted not one but two exotically themed cafés—the Shepheard’s Dining Hall (based loosely on the famous Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo) and the Café Boolak whose cultural inspiration appeared to float somewhere between Turkey and India, and was approvingly described in press reports as being, warmly draped with Indian curtains, luxuriant palms spread their graceful green leaves over the tables, on which glitter the glass and silver plate, reflecting the soft ambient light from the electric lamps shaded with delicate pinks and sea-greens…. (Irish Times 18 May 1984, p. 6)

These cafés would have been considerably cheaper to visit than a formal restaurant such as the Burlington, but nevertheless would have charged enough for tea, coffee or luncheon to be firmly reserved as middle-class spaces, something the décor was partly intended to emphasise. They could therefore be described as a ‘commercial orientalism’, in that it was a commercial equivalent to the ‘domestic orientalism’ much admired and recommended in fashionable women’s magazines and guides to home management during the 1890s (Halttunen 1989, pp.  164-5). These involved oriental hangings, decorations and ‘Turkish’ corners in drawing rooms and were also seen in the fashion for Moorish tiles, Liberty-style fabrics and of course the ubiquitous palm-trees to be found in hallways, drawing-rooms and conservatories of the era. The appeal of this fashion— aside from its very clear imperial inspirations—was largely in its co-option

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of a visual and sensory experience of abundance, luxury and indulgence, in which the middle-class suburban home became a feminised refuge from modern urban life by aping (however weakly) an oriental harem which itself existed only in the Western imagination, but nevertheless exerted a powerful influence on fin-de-siècle conceptions of luxury. The connotations of this oriental décor—and of its move from domestic to commercial spaces in cities such as Dublin—are complex with regard to women, respectability and the politics of sitting down. Part of the appeal of this mode of orientalism was in its perceived creation of spaces which reflected an exotic and decadent femininity. The connections made to Western conceptions of the harem were often quite explicit, such as when the Irish Times approvingly described the middle-class suburban girls volunteering at the Araby Bazaar as resembling the ‘closely-veiled houris of the harem’ in their costumes (Irish Times 16 May 1984, p. 6). Given the concerns about middle-class female respectability which prevented those same young women from entering a restaurant unaccompanied, let alone a public house, such cheerful references to them as ‘houris’ might seem surprising. However, photographs of the costumed volunteers at the Araby Bazaar reveal young women wearing typical fashions of the 1890s, including high-necked and long-skirted gowns, albeit elaborately trimmed with ‘oriental’ decorations. The faint suggestion of eastern mystery and exoticism, while remaining safely contained within middle-class mores and manners, seems in fact to have been one of the most important facets of fashionable fin-de-siècle orientalism’s broad appeal. This can be seen not only in the occasional addition of ‘exotic’ fabrics or trimmings to female fashion, but also in the décor of middle-class living-rooms. The fashion for ‘divan’ seating for example (as advocated in interior design advice columns and advertisements for department store furniture during the 1890s) created connotations of harem girls lounging on cushions in a state of eastern decadence while in fact creating rooms in which fashionably dressed Irish women perched on slightly low sofas, albeit sometimes draped with paisley-patterned fabrics and surrounded by potted palms. This paradox of suggested sensuality embedded within entirely respectable middle-class domestic décor was (ironically) then crucial to the development of cafés as areas of public seating and refreshment for women during the 1890s. While implications of harems and ‘oriental’ sensuality might seem the least likely way in which concerns about female respectability in public spaces might be assuaged, what those early cafés were actually doing was replicating the already ‘oriental’ domestic space of

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middle-class living-rooms in the commercial spaces of the city centre. This replication of domestic respectability in commercial spaces was achieved in several ways. The use of vaguely ‘oriental’ décor such as the Lucan Dairy’s use of ‘Moorish’ needlework and lamps, ‘oriental’ mats and ‘arabesque’ woodwork would have created a space reminiscent not so much of a middle eastern harem so much as of a fashionable suburban drawing-room, especially in terms of the sensory experience of muted lighting, soft fabrics and choice of colour palettes. The centrality of tea, coffee and ‘refreshments’ such as cake and light meals further emphasised the similarity to the hospitality of middle-class drawing-rooms which would have served similar food and drink, and would presumably have sounded and smelled very similar to those drawing-rooms as a result. These small but distinct differences from the way that more formal restaurants advertised their food worked effectively to encode cafés as a public equivalent to the safely female space of the drawing-room. This was evident in the description in a contemporary magazine article of Fitz-Henry’s Café, which was opened on Grafton Street in 1895 by two sisters, as ‘essentially a ladies’ establishment’ (Illustrograph November 1897, p.  170). One of the ways cafés would have been experienced as female-coded spaces equivalent to living-­ rooms would have been as multisensory experiences which replicated those of the respectable middle-class home. The sight and touch of ‘Turkish’ and other oriental-style fabrics, along with the padded seating of divan sofas, the smells of food and drink and (perhaps most of all) the unmistakable sounds of teaspoons stirring in china cups and cups rattling against saucers, would all have evoked the safe familiar sensations of suburban drawing-rooms to the women using them. In this respect all of these sensations worked, as David Howes and Constance Classen have argued of department store sensations, as ‘symbols of social values’, and their symbolic value can only have been intensified by the comfort and pleasure created by the physical sensations of sitting down to rest and assuaging hunger, thirst and (if the café provided such facilities) the need for the lavatory (Howes and Classen 2013, p. 136). And finally, while they were not universal, several cafés made a point of emphasising their use of waitresses rather than waiters. Their presence in the dining-rooms would have meant that female customers did not have to be served by strange men, something which had been an issue in early department stores during the mid-nineteenth century and had led to the rise of the ‘shop girl’ as one of the emblematic figures of the 1890s (Mullin 2016). The waitress would also have mirrored the presence in middle-class

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drawing-rooms of a parlourmaid to carry in tea and refreshments, and it is notable that the rapidly established norm of black-and white waitress uniforms (with lace collars and caps) were an almost exact mirror of the traditional nineteenth-century parlour-maid’s uniform. Fitz-Henry’s Café did open a proper restaurant to complement their café, but were at pains to stress that it was staffed entirely by women who were ‘an array of smartly dressed, neat, attentive, deft-handed girls, who [are] highly trained’ (Illustrograph November 1897, p. 170). All of these features combined then to create a new kind of semi-public, commercial space in city centres—one which was overwhelmingly female, middle-class and a safe space for women to sit down, rest and eat alone or in all-female groups without appearing ‘approachable’ or in any way reputationally compromised. That this new female café culture was aimed at women shoppers weary from walking around the city and the large department stores was often made clear in the descriptions and advertising. Even the Metropole Hotel (one of Dublin’s most expensive, located on Sackville Street opposite Clery’s department store), whose bars and formal restaurants would have been unacceptable spaces for unaccompanied women to enter because of the presence of men and alcohol, opened the Café Metropole during the 1890s, which was described as ‘elegantly, even luxuriously furnished, and will be a most convenient resort, being central in position, for ladies who are out shopping and require a refreshing cup of tea during the afternoon’ (Irish Times 16 December 1893, p. 6). And Fitz-Henry’s Café, located on Grafton Street in the heart of the south-side shopping area, was considered a ‘quiet, inexpensive, and yet select, resting-place, together with “the cup that cheers” while out shopping’ (Illustrograph November 1897, p. 17).

Public Lavatories, Women and Public Space The Fitz-Henry’s café on Grafton Street was noted for another service it offered alongside its refreshments and writing rooms. An article in the Illustrograph magazine about the café in 1897 explained that ‘a unique feature of “Fitz-Henry’s”, which although attached to the restaurant, is not necessarily connected with it, is the ladies’ dressing and retiring rooms. Here, for the modest fee of 2d, ladies shopping…may have the services of a personal attendant, everything of the latest in the way of toilet requisites, hot and cold waters, perfumes etc in one of the daintiest possible and prettily decorated rooms’ (Illustrograph November 1897, p.  17). The

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description of the 2d charge as ‘modest’ is a useful indicator of the social class using these fashionable new cafes. That fee was small, but would still have been an unthinkable amount for most women to have spent on the intangible (if very welcome) service of retreating from the busy shops and freshening their appearance. The Illustrograph did not mention the cafe’s provision of lavatory facilities along with its other services to tired female shoppers, but they are strongly implied by the reference to ‘hot and cold waters’. Indeed it is probable that all of the fashionable cafes aimed at women customers provided lavatories for their customers, given that it was these facilities which, along with seating, food and drink, women had previously not had access to in public spaces. If women were constrained in their ability to sit down in the public or semi-public spaces of streets and shops, their access to lavatory facilities prior to the arrival of cafés was even more limited. As suburban living and travel by public transport grew, making shopping expeditions longer and more arduous for shoppers, they were also more likely to need a lavatory while they were away from home. Yet the provision of these most basic conveniences was extremely scarce for women in Dublin until well into the twentieth century. The gender politics of lavatory provision in large urban areas was recognised by some of the earliest nineteenth-century feminist campaigners in Britain—the Ladies Sanitary Association were holding public meetings and campaigning for public toilet facilities in London by the late 1870s. These proto-feminist organisations recognised that the failure to provide lavatory facilities for women severely restricted their meaningful access to public space, and that public toilets were therefore an essential facet of women’s wider emancipation (Rappaport 2000, p. 82). Victorian sensibilities regarding discussion of such topics made that process more difficult however, and also made it more difficult to retrospectively establish what facilities really were available, under what circumstances and with what distinctions of class access. Formal restaurants may have provided some facilities for female diners, but as was discussed above, they were both very expensive and presented some difficulties of access for unaccompanied women. It also seems logical that the larger department stores would frequently have offered ladies’ lavatories, although occasional references to them in descriptions of shop design are ambiguous about whether they were for customers or for the staff who typically lived in at larger shops, in dormitories on the upper floors. Even if department stores did provide women’s toilets, they were semi-­ public rather than public spaces, which like restaurants (and then cafés

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later in the century) were only accessible to women who were members of the middle- or upper-middle class who were the expected customers of such businesses. Although department stores had developed a specific business model of encouraging browsing and window-shopping that would not necessarily involve purchases or even encounters with staff, they were rigorously encoded as middle-class spaces via their décor and expected modes of behaviour—indeed this was all the more true because of their critical need for them to remain spaces of unquestioned middle-class respectability. Not only therefore were their shop-floors discreetly but firmly policed for the ‘wrong’ kind of customer, but for the most part their lavish architecture, interior décor and visibly middle-class customers would have deterred those who could not afford to shop in them from even entering their premises—and this would also have rendered any lavatory facilities they offered off-limits to working-class or even lower-middle-­ class women. Cafés may have worked hard to create female spaces, but they were also very middle-class female spaces and available only to paying customers, so were in many ways were even more exclusive spaces than department stores. Such lack of provision was therefore deeply inhibiting to women’s freedom of movement and activity in public spaces, presumably forcing them to plan their movements carefully and limit the time spent away from home. The very reticence which led to this absence of lavatories also led to a historical silence about the experience of it—the official record has little to say on the subject, and women themselves rarely if ever referred to it publicly, so we have very few examples of the sensory and social discomfort they must have experienced. There are however one or two references to its effects. In her discussion of the long campaign to open women’s public toilets in Dublin, Maureen Flanagan cites the resistance of the city’s medical officer, Charles Cameron, who suggested instead that ‘ladies use the lavatory accommodation provided in the confectionary establishments through the city’ (Flanagan 2018, p.  153). This is echoed by James Joyce—always more attuned to bodily functions and fluids than most writers—having included a fleeting reference to women’s toilet facilities in Ulysses. As Leopold Bloom hurries past a men’s public toilet on Westmoreland Street in the centre of the city, it catches his attention and he muses to himself, ‘Ought to be places for women. Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight’ (Joyce 1992, p. 119). This was presumably based on Bloom’s (and Joyce’s) experience as a married man who was familiar with his wife’s euphemisms for visiting lavatories, but it also

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suggests that cake shops may indeed have offered unofficial toilet facilities for women who were not in a position to patronise more fashionable cafés. Many years later, in Presentation Parlour (a family memoir of the five aunts who were such an important part of her Limerick childhood in the early-twentieth century), novelist Kate O’Brien recalls her Aunt Fan’s stories of her own childhood in Kilfanane, Co. Cork, one of which concerned the dreadful fate of a girl in the village who did not use the lavatory before leaving home with her father and brothers for a long day’s excursion into Cork city. As the day wore on, her discomfort worsened, but she was unable to address the problem because, In the ‘seventies and ‘eighties of the last century, ladies, once outside their own hall doors, were assumed to be angels, and no provision whatever was made for a primary physical need—even in capital cities. So in the Irish provinces, if a modest country girl was away from her own house for a whole day, it is understandable that she could go through agonies of discomfort. She could not go wandering by herself to the upper floors of a hotel, she could not possibly ask a brother or a father what she was to do; she could only suffer and hope and despair. (O’Brien 1994, pp. 48-9)

This description is a vivid reminder both of the sensory power of the need to use a lavatory and also of the social power of gender and class conventions which mitigated against doing so. In 1907, probably the year in which a young Kate O’Brien was being told that cautionary tale by her aunt, Dublin Corporation finally took steps to provide an alternative to such agonies for women shoppers in the capital. They began construction of the first women’s public toilet, next to the base of Nelson’s Pillar on Sackville Street—in the heart of the shopping district on the north side of the River Liffey and also immediately next to the central terminus for the city’s extensive tram network. This was remarkably late for the first such convenience to be provided, by comparison to other cities. London had opened ladies’ public toilets twenty years earlier. It is also worth noting that an underground public toilet for Dublin men was already in operation just a short distance away from the proposed ladies’ facility on the same street, although it is not clear when this had first opened. Despite this, local businesses in 1907 vigorously resisted the construction of a women’s toilet, and took the Corporation to court on the grounds that it would be a ‘nuisance’ and injure their businesses. Among other complaints about it obstructing the pavement and road crossing, the businesses claimed that

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‘respectable people of both sexes would naturally shrink from frequenting a crossing in proximity to a public convenience such as this was proposed to be, and that it would attract a different class of women from those hitherto frequenting the thoroughfare…’ (Irish Times 5 September 1907, p. 3). This objection hints at multiple anxieties regarding the provision of genuinely public (as opposed to semi-public and relatively exclusive) women’s toilets. Firstly, the class concerns of the adjacent businesses were explicitly stated. The court case was taken by a group of medium-sized local businesses including the city’s best-known shoe retailer, Tyler and Sons, and McDowell’s jewellers, a prominent city business. Located only a few doors away from Clery and Co., one of the largest department stores in the city, these were therefore all businesses which relied on middle-class custom—the kind of customers who would have had easy access to both the department stores and the local cafes which probably offered lavatories—and they were explicitly anxious that a women’s public toilet would attract working-class women into the area around their business. There is also a less explicit concern visible in the objection however, one which becomes clearer when it is remembered that there was already a men’s public toilet a short distance away on the same street, one which presumably was used by working-class men. The anxieties about the toilet under construction in 1907 were therefore not only about the class implications of public toilets, but were quite specific to such a facility being available to working-class women, and may well have been understood in the court as a veiled reference to fears of prostitution in or near such a space. This is especially likely given that although the proposed lavatory was on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares and opposite many prosperous businesses including Clery & Co.’s department store, it was also only a few minutes’ walk from the Monto red-light district. The plaintiff’s zealous concern for respectability in the public space of Sackville Street was probably motivated in part by the fact that the street’s respectability was not in fact beyond reproach, and therefore needed to be carefully policed if it was to remain a middle-class commercial space. Where these anxieties about female immobility and morality were an important shadow to the design and policing of many public spaces, the businesses in a middle-class shopping area which was literally two streets away from brothels operating under unofficial but well-­ understood police protection clearly felt especially anxious. And if a woman sitting in public space in order to rest or have a meal raised moral concerns about her ‘availability’ then how much more morally hazardous

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a form of public seating were women’s lavatories? That such concerns were taken seriously was indicated by the fact that the Sackville Street businesses were successful in their 1907 court action, and Dublin Corporation was required to dismantle the nearly completed structure. Nearly a decade would pass before Dublin’s first women’s public toilet would open—alterative locations were also objected to by local businesses, one on Burgh Quay on the Liffey being rejected in 1911, the same year an anonymous female letter-writer complained to the Freeman’s Journal that ‘there are many women who come in from the country for a day’s shopping, and servants on their afternoon or evening out, to whom it is a great hardship that there is no such accommodation except in the restaurants and tea shops. The Corporation recently spent £2000 on an elaborate lavatory for men. Is it not time that the needs of women were attended to?’ (Freeman’s Journal 11 May 1911, p. 8). Eventually a facility was opened along the River Liffey on Aston Quay, and as the twentieth century wore on, several more were added. The fact that the Monto was shut down after Independence (being completely gone by 1925) meant that the eventual mid-twentieth century provision of female public toilets in Dublin city centre did not occur in the shadow of its perceived moral threats (O’Keeffe and Ryan 2009). The apparently simple desire by women travelling from suburbia for a day’s shopping in late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century Dublin to take sensory respite as they sit down, eat, drink or use a lavatory proved to be complicated by highly gendered concerns about public space and respectability. In particular, they appear to have hinged upon a moral value ascribed to precisely how a woman occupied and moved through public spaces, one which associated sitting down with approachability and approachability with availability. The ways in which women were required to physically enact their own respectability required ‘purposeful’ movement when they were unaccompanied in public spaces. In the case of women’s desire to eat and drink, moral codes surrounding alcohol further complicated their access to many establishments, even ones of impeccable middle-class status. One of the most emblematic social spaces of the fin-­ de-­siècle, the café, therefore came into being as a response to this complicated web of restrictions on middle-class women’s behaviour and movement in urban centres. As this chapter has discussed, from the 1890s on the café, serving tea, coffee and more informal meals than traditional restaurants, was created as a parallel space to that of department stores. Semi-public, strongly structured by social class and carefully constructed

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and policed as respectable female spaces, they enacted a ‘commercial orientalism’ in order to create an extension of middle-class domestic spaces and sensory experiences. The associations this created with tea tables, potted palms, fashionable upholstery and the smells, tastes and sounds of middle-class domestic spaces were therefore enough to override concerns about unaccompanied women sitting in (semi) public spaces.

Works Cited Freeman’s Journal. Letters. May 11, 1911. Illustrograph. Fitz-Henry’s Café. November, 1897. Irish Times. August 8. 1876 ———. August 28 1891. ———. Café Metropole. December 16, 1893. ———. Lucan Dairy Oriental Tea Room. March 21, 1894. ———. Alleged Obstruction by the Corporation. September 5, 1907. ———. The X.L. Café, 84 Grafton Street. December 13, 1909. ———. Dublin Coffee Palace to be Wound Up. November 13, 1913. ———. Brilliant Scenes at Ball’s Bridge. May 16, 1984. ———. Araby, Behind the Scenes at “Shepheards”. May 18, 1984. Daly, Mary. Dublin the Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History. Cork: Cork University Press, 1985. Flanagan, Maureen A. Constructing the patriarchal city: Gender and the Built Environments of London, Dublin, Toronto and Chicago, 1870s into the 1940s. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018. Halttunen, Karen. From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Personality. In Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920, edited by Simon Bronner, 157–90. New York: Norton, 1989. Howes, David and Constance Classen. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. London: Routledge, 2013. Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. Mac Con Iomaire, Mairtin. Public Dining in Dublin: The history and evolution of gastronomy and commercial dining 1700–1900. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, vol. 25, no. 2, 2013, pp. 227–246. Mullin, Katherine. Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. O’Brien, Kate. Presentation Parlour. Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1994. O’Keeffe, Tadgh, and Patrick Ryan. At the World’s End: The Lost Landscape of Monto, Dublin’s Notorious Red-light District. Landscapes, vol. 10, no. 1, 2009, pp. 21–38.

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Pollack, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. New York: Routledge, 1988. Rains, Stephanie. Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin 1850–1916. Dublin: Academic Press, 2010. ———. “Joyce’s ‘Araby’ and the Historical Araby Bazaar, 1894.” James Joyce Journal, vol. 1, 2008, pp. 17–29. Rappaport, Erika. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Smith, Mark M. “Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History.” Journal of Social History, vol. 40, no. 4, 2007, pp. 841–858. ———. Sensory History. London: Berg, 2008. Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-­ Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Wolff, Janet. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Berkley: University of California Press, 1990.

CHAPTER 5

Comfort and Safety: An Intersensorial History of Shopping Streets in Nineteenth-­Century Amsterdam and Brussels Anneleen Arnout

In the streets—the main ones at least—the bustle is irritating for both body and mind. There is the continuous threat of being overrun and crushed by big carriages, the wheelbarrows have it out for your shins and toes; […] Your elbows, ribs and knees—the things one has to shield from all the walking, driving, wheeled, carried, lifted and lowered obstacles that one encounters in the swarming Kalverstraat, for example,—your eyes, even, from the dust whizzing down as the inhabitants of the upper floors shake out their rugs,—your olfactory nerves, against the emanations of those moving hygienic tools,—your eardrums, against the humming, whirring, shouting, yelling and clattering of animate and inanimate objects. It is enough to make one drowsy. (Boom and Lesturgeon 1845, vol. 2, p. 125)

A. Arnout (*) Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_5

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This visceral account of Amsterdam’s main shopping street was published in 1845 as part of a fictional travel diary. In their two-volume book, the authors, Harm Boom and Alexander Lodewijk Lesturgeon, adopted the perspective of three provincials—a middle-aged civil servant and his nephews, visiting Amsterdam from the rural province of Drenthe—to take the measure of metropolitan life. Like in so many similar publications of the time, the authors paid specific attention to the city’s consumer spaces to highlight the contrast between urban and rural living. To take stock of the virtues and vices of both the Kalverstraat and the city, Boom and Lesturgeon continuously referenced the sensorial experiences to be had there, both pleasant and—as in the above description—unpleasant. In their descriptions, Boom and Lesturgeon played with a popular cliché. As many contemporaries viewed it, a city like Amsterdam presented something of a shock to the system, especially to those unaccustomed to urban living (e.g. Simmel 1903). Navigating an urban shopping street like the Kalverstraat in the mid-1840s, so this travel diary’s narrative implies, required bodily as well as sensorial skills. Although urban historians have long followed contemporary writers in characterizing the nineteenth-century city as an assault on all the senses (e.g. Flint 2014), it is the sense of sight that has taken prominence in scholarship about shopping. From the 1980s onwards, scholars interested in late nineteenth-century consumerism have argued that shopping institutions such as the arcade and the department store turned consumers into spectators. With their grand, eye-catching architecture, their use of (seemingly) luxurious materials, plush and exotic decors, artificial lighting, elaborate (window) displays, and advertising, nineteenth-century shopping spaces, these scholars argued, ‘commercialized vision’ (Rappaport 2014, p.  70; Williams 1983, pp.  58–107; Miller 1981, pp.  167–189; Leach 1993, pp. 15–90; Hahn 2009). As part of a larger network of visually orientated institutions, ranging from waxworks museums and cinemas to the illustrated press, urban (shopping) spaces were turned into a sight to behold. Combined, this ‘exhibitionary complex’ forged new ways of seeing and looking (Richards 1990; Friedberg 1993; Schwartz 1998). In this process, it was argued, shopping culture came to be about looking as much as it was about buying (Bowlby 1985). The emphasis on the visual results in large part from the long-standing scholarly fascination with department stores. Although these ‘cathedrals of consumption’ undeniably fascinated contemporaries more than any other shopping space (Crossick and Jaumain 1999), there was much more to

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nineteenth-century shopping than department stores alone. They shared many of their defining characteristics, including the visual culture, with other types of shopping spaces, from emporia and bazaars early on in the century, to arcades all through the century, to smaller and medium-sized shops in the high streets of the later nineteenth century (Walsh 1999; Stobart 2008, pp. 73–191; Lesger 2013; Arnout 2019). As recent studies have demonstrated, the long-standing separation between the department store, other shopping institutions and the streets that connected them is problematic (Lesger and Furnée 2014; Mitchell 2016; Arnout 2019). In practice, consumers walked from one to the other. What is more, whereas contemporary discourses about the dangers of consumerism often targeted department stores, they also often implicated the much wider area of the central business and entertainment districts (Walkowitz 1998; Sewell 2011; Prestel 2017, ch. 3; Remus 2019). This is why this chapter will turn its focus to shopping streets, rather than zooming in on specific stores. To fully understand why people in the late nineteenth century went shopping ‘en masse’, why this activity appealed to so many and why it made certain groups in society uneasy, we not only need to look beyond the department store; we also need to relinquish the visual paradigm. Although studies of nineteenth-century shopping have only rarely thematized the haptic, olfactory, gustatory and/or auditory aspects of shopping in explicit ways, a careful reading of the existing scholarship teaches us that both department stores and other shopping spaces were never just about looking. As Erika Rappaport (2014) has argued, the department store introduced an entirely new soundscape as well. Moreover, the many services department stores offered, including restrooms and restaurants, point towards the emphasis they placed on rejuvenation and bodily comfort. This is something they had in common with a lot of other shopping spaces, including arcades and regular shopping streets (Rappaport 2014; Classen 2012, pp. 191–197). In widening the sensory scope, this chapter builds on insights in the broader field of sensory history, where the ocularcentrism has become increasingly controversial. Without denying the evident importance of the ocular in modern society, an increasing number of scholars have started to complicate and reassess the role the senses of smell, hearing, touch and taste played in modern society (Corbin 1986; Kenny 2014; Boutin 2015; Mansell 2016). Building on this body of scholarship, Mark Smith (2007, pp. 126–128) has called for a more integrated ‘intersensorial’ approach,

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arguing that there is much to be gained from studying how the senses ‘worked together’ historically, ‘sometimes in complimentary fashion, sometimes in tension’. Although explicitly intersensorial histories of nineteenth-­century shopping are still few and far between, the work of Serena Dyer (2014) and Adam Mack (2010) on the eighteenth and twentieth centuries respectively demonstrates the added value of this approach. This chapter therefore offers an intersensorial analysis of the shopping streets in nineteenth-century Brussels and Amsterdam. While most scholarship still focuses on the atypical cities of London and Paris, this chapter deals with two smaller, arguably more representative, cities. With populations growing from around a hundred thousand in the early 1800s to (well) over half a million by 1900, Amsterdam and Brussels were fairly regular sized (capital) cities (Daelemans 1989, pp. 212–217; Aerts and De Rooy 2006, p. 19). Both were the main financial centres of their respective countries, and with large numbers of wealthy inhabitants, they constituted hubs of luxury production and consumption. Both cities nonetheless developed in distinctive ways. Amsterdam went through a period of political and economic stagnation in the first half of the century, whereas Brussels, as the capital of a fledgling state, rose in importance. The more conservative outlook of the Amsterdam elite early on in the century stood in stark contrast with the forward looking, enterprising liberal government of Brussels (Billen and Duvosquel 2000; Aerts and De Rooy 2006). Until the 1870s, this led to a discrepancy in the number of urban redevelopment projects that were undertaken. Both smaller and bigger interventions in the urban fabric, from the appearance of footpaths to the construction of boulevards, came about earlier in Brussels compared to Amsterdam, and whereas the Brussels municipality initiated and supported the construction of market halls and shopping arcades (Loir 2009; Arnout 2019), similar projects had a much harder time materializing in Amsterdam (Kistemaker 1984, pp. 97–138; Furnée 1997). Although each of these cities had a distinct street and shopping landscape that evolved in distinct ways, certain tendencies in development can be discerned in both places. A comparison between the two allows for testing whether developments were city-specific or part of a larger development. The first two sections of this chapter are devoted to the spatial ideals and evolving physical make-up of the Brussels and Amsterdam shopping landscapes. To reconstruct those, I have made use of city council reports, building files, newspaper reports and the business archive of the Galeries Saint-Hubert for Brussels, while building on the extensive work of Clé

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Lesger (2013) for Amsterdam. The final section zooms in on the shopping streets as they were used and felt on a more day-to-day basis. To get a sense of the sensory experience of space, I rely on newspapers and on physiologies and similar descriptions of urban life. While neither source provides direct access to ‘actual’ experiences, they do offer us some indications of the range of possible and culturally relevant experiences. Moreover, although newspapers and physiologies were produced by a specific class of people, readership of both was very high. If the experiences reflected in them were not representative for all urban dwellers, at the very least, large groups within the city used those stories to make sense of their own experiences1 (Aerts and De Rooy 2006, pp. 154–157).

Windows and Pavements It is a truth universally acknowledged that, from the late 1700s onwards, the shop window was on the rise in most European cities (Walsh 1995; Lesger and Furnée 2014). This was also the case in Amsterdam and Brussels. Shops in these cities had already been architecturally distinguishable from residential buildings in the main shopping streets before 1800, but the shop windows were still made up of smaller glass panes. As the century progressed however, the glazed surface increased quite dramatically (Lesger 2013, pp. 154–172; Arnout 2019, ch. 1, 4 and 5). Over the past few decades, scholars have provided different explanations for this development. They have, for example, pointed towards population growth; the rising standards of living; the mechanization of production; and the expansion of commercialized leisure (Trentmann 2016, ch. 4). Developments like these incited competition between shopkeepers, which, it was argued, led them to invest in larger windows that made their shops more appealing to passers-by. Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1988) more specifically argued that, in central business districts, the shift to investments in shop windows rather than luxurious interiors signalled the growing democratization of their clientele. Other scholars have interpreted the development of the shop window as part of a broader development of visual culture (Schwartz 1998). In her cultural history of touch, for example, Constance Classen (2012, pp.  178–183) argued that—in the streets of the modern city—visibility was what mattered, shaped by what she termed the ‘sensory motto of modernity’: ‘look but don’t touch’. Classen’s reading is reminiscent of Richard Sennett’s argumentation about the nineteenth-century city, in

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which the visual gained primacy. The ubiquitous use of plate glass in shop windows, Sennett (1992) contended, contributed to the separation of the senses. By enabling the visual enjoyment of goods without any further sensory interaction, ‘the tactile reality of what one’ saw was devaluated. For Sennett, the primacy of the visual not only resulted from the invention of plate glass, it was also a direct result of the Enlightenment conception of the city as a body, with people and goods flowing through it like blood through veins. In order to facilitate circulation and dismantle the political potential of the mob, Sennett (1996) argued, urbanists, architects and policymakers sought to suppress all forms of sensory contact between bodies (and objects) unconducive to circulation. Sennett’s theory is aligned with the work of Henri Lefebvre, who contended that nineteenth-century urbanism fostered a distanced form of visual engagement aimed at the functionality of movement alone. This reading of the nineteenth-century street has, in its turn, been criticized by Chris Otter. In his monograph The Victorian Eye, Otter interpreted the development of new visual technologies and new ways of seeing as an expression of British liberalism. Contrary to Lefebvre’s (1992, p.  313) reading of the nineteenth-century street, which according to Otter (2008, p. 257) was decidedly ‘monomodal’ and ‘monosensual’, he highlights the sheer variety of modes of perception that existed here. Building on Otter’s criticisms, I argue that the changes that took place in the nineteenth-century shopping street were determined by more than visual considerations alone. When we examine the shopping street as an integrated whole, it becomes clear that the investments did not just concern shop windows and shop fronts. They were also very much about the tactility of the walkway. In both Brussels and Amsterdam, the surface and the configuration of the streets became the subject of debate and investment. In 1800, sidewalks were still few and far between in Brussels. Bar a few exceptions, they were usually constructed at the expense and initiative of homeowners. By the 1820s, the main shopping streets did have sidewalks, but they were narrow, interrupted and not uniform. This started to change from the 1840s onwards, when the city looked for ways to construct them more systematically (Loir 2009, pp.  280–287; Loir and Schlesser 2021). In Amsterdam, the paved shopping streets had been lined with narrow walkways for pedestrians on the same height as the road since the seventeenth century. These walkways bordered the ‘stoep’-area, a private section of the street which owners were free to use as they pleased.2

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Shopkeepers were among the first to start viewing the fences and constructions in this part of the street as ‘obstacles’, because they impeded the smooth access to their shop windows and hampered the practice of window shopping. As a result, they disappeared gradually from the main shopping streets, before being prohibited in the 1859 building code (Lesger 2013, pp. 155–172; 228–229). Around the same time, a police regulation limited the number of activities one was allowed to carry out in the streets. The urban government also constructed heightened trottoirs and issued a recommendation that pedestrians should ‘always walk on them with the houses on the right-hand-side’ (Quoted in Lesger 2013, p. 228). Debates about the best type of surface to be used for the roads led to the first experiments with asphalt paving—not coincidentally in the Kalverstraat (Buiter 2005, pp. 145–220). In the first half of the century, the roads in Brussels were in a far worse condition than those in Amsterdam, which is why they became a priority for the then liberal city council. In 1838, city councillor Eduoard Ducpétiaux complained about the narrowness of the pavements, which could hardly accommodate one person, let alone two, such that when two pedestrians meet, it is necessary for one of them to step off it and cede the passage, and it is almost necessary to establish a special gymnastics course in order to escape the inconveniences of pedestrian circulation. (Ducpétiaux 1841, pp. 28–29)

Apart from causing uneasy and unpleasant situations, Ducpétiaux argued that the unevenly constructed pavements, as well as the trapdoors, foot scrapers, window sills, shop signs and other architectural elements that protruded onto the road, presented real dangers for the pedestrian, and suggested they should be forbidden. His plea was successful, and soon the building code came to include strict rules that regulated all potential ‘obstacles’, such as trapdoors and foot scrapers (Loir 2009, pp. 280–287; Arnout 2019, pp.  23, 70–71, 118–119). As Patrick Joyce (2003) has argued, this preoccupation with traffic was common among liberal governments at the time. Urban governments often intervened in the urban fabric to establish a ‘liberal’ environment in which goods and people could circulate freely and in which subjects would, eventually, be able to regulate themselves without further intervention. Evidently, the fact that the Kalverstraat was the first street in Amsterdam with heightened pavements and asphalt paving is no coincidence.

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Interventions to improve the flow of traffic were always made with the consumer in mind. The discovery of the pedestrian and his or her interrupted walk, as exemplified in Ducpétiaux’ report for Brussels, was therefore always part of a broader concern for the consumer in the city centre. This entanglement of urban walking and shopping would further develop itself on the Haussmannian boulevards that were constructed from the 1860s onwards (Arnout 2019, ch. 5). Clearly, then, in both Brussels and Amsterdam, the surface and configuration of the main shopping streets were the objects of much attention and investments. How should we interpret these interventions and discussions on a sensory level? It is clear that circulation was a major consideration, especially on the part of the government. It is precisely this concern that, according to Richard Sennett (1996), was accompanied by the desire to remove all forms of unnecessary sensory contact, leading to an environment of sensory deprivation—especially where the sense of touch was concerned. However, Sennett based his argument on governmental, architectural and urbanist sources, thereby ignoring the other actors involved in the production of the streets, such as home-owners, entrepreneurs, writers, journalists and urban dwellers. In the next two sections, I will argue that Sennett’s theory of sensory deprivation does not hold for the Brussels and Amsterdam shopping streets.

A New Sensorium In order to demonstrate that city councillors and entrepreneurs alike worked from a decidedly intersensorial framework that stretched beyond the desire to deprive, I will take a closer look at the construction of the Galeries Saint-Hubert. The idea for Brussels’ largest shopping arcade was first conceived in the 1830s. When the complex was finally inaugurated in 1847, it was characterized by a peculiar ownership structure. A public limited company, the Société générale des Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, owned the buildings, but the walkway was municipal property. While the arcade had largely been built on private property, most of which was owned by the Société, it also ran across the former Rue Saint-Hubert, a municipal road. To realize their project, the Société therefore had to convince the city council to let them demolish the Rue Saint-Hubert. They also needed the support of the national government to expropriate some additional buildings. Because the company had to convince both the local and national governments to give them their support, there are plenty of

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sources in which the existing ideas and ideals with regard to shopping and urban space are made explicit from the vantage point of both the investors and the city council (Arnout 2019, ch. 2). Facilitating traffic was clearly essential for both parties, but other arguments of an equally sensory nature were at play too. While the eight meters wide pavement addressed the traffic concerns, sensory regulations indicate that the Société was trying to create a space that was tailored to the consumer practices of a specific group of people. Although its décor was lavish, the appearance of the Galeries was strictly regulated—contrary to the Parisian arcades of the time. Tenants were not allowed to display signs, posters, billboards or inscriptions on their shop fronts or any other place that was visible from the walkway without preliminary approval of the Société. When the building was inaugurated, there were no awnings, window sills or other objects that protruded onto the road, and tenants were forbidden from undertaking any activities that would hamper the flow of passers-by (Regulation 1849; Lease agreement 1865). Furthermore, no goods could be displayed in front of the shops, and vendors were not allowed to call out to advertise their wares. The tenancy agreement also stipulated that tenants were not allowed to cook in rooms that gave onto the arcade, nor were they allowed to undertake any ‘smelly’ activities or keep ‘loud’ pets (Lease agreement 1865). Clearly, then, intersensorial ideals shaped both the discursive (undated Canelle lithography; undated drawing) and practical construction of this ‘ideal’ shopping street. It could, of course, be argued that the increased attention to paving and the desired elimination of unwanted sounds, smells and obstacles all contributed to an increasingly pervasive visual culture: once all of the other senses were appeased, there was far more room for the eye to be tantalized (Arnout 2019, ch. 2). At first sight, the clear desire to eliminate noises, smells and obstacles, and even the visual order, seems to confirm Sennett’s assessment of the nineteenth-century city as a sensory desert in which only the eye had some room to play. The emphasis the Société placed on the monumentality of the building, the glazed roof and the gas lighting seems to support this interpretation as well (Letter Council to Société 1847; undated expense and revenue estimate). However, a more careful reading of the sources complicates this idea. It could just as easily be argued that the emphasis on the smooth pavement, the pedestrian character and the ‘protective’ function of the glazed roof were expressions of a preference for specific forms of tactility over others.

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While it is true that the discussion about the Galeries in governmental circles revolved mostly around whether or not this new pedestrian street would be able to lessen existing traffic problems, we should nonetheless remember that there was more to the project. The Société understood that for its arcade to succeed, it had to be able to draw clientele to the shops. To do so, it had to draw in the fashionable crowd and offer them a promenading space that would surpass existing ones. The walkways in the nearby park were among the widest pedestrian zones in the city, but they did not offer any consumer seductions and, more importantly, their attractiveness was dependent on the weather. The arcade on the other hand would ‘enrich the capital with […] a promenade sheltered from the instability of the weather’ (letter Cluyseaar to Council 1844). Discussions about (proposed) arcades in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague similarly mentioned the need for a ‘covered’ walkway where the ‘fashionable’ crowd could promenade at all times, ‘sheltered in winter and autumn and cool in summer’ (quoted in Furnée 1997, p. 330). Both the design and the regulations of the Galeries (and many other arcades) were geared towards creating the ideal atmosphere of physical comfort that Classen associated with the department store; the kind of environment that facilitated the consumer practices of the ‘genteel shopper’, who shopped for leisure, not for necessities, in a way that resembled the development Jon Stobart, Andrew Hahn and Victoria Morgan (2007) have described for the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English town. The ownership structure allowed the Société to realize their ideal shopping street to a degree that this would not have been possible in regular streets, but the arcade did also function as a catalyst force stimulating similar developments elsewhere in Brussels (Arnout 2019, ch. 2). While the overall design of the Galeries, including the pavement and the lighting, was clearly symptomatic of budding ideas about the sensory organization of (shopping) streets, its construction also set a new standard for both the city council and the shopkeepers in surrounding streets. Several other examples, in both Brussels and Amsterdam, demonstrate that governments, shopkeepers and consumers alike were involved in the crafting of an environment that was tailored to facilitate certain intersensorial experiences, while limiting the possibility of others. The early demolishing of the fences and constructions on the stoep-area in the Kalverstraat, for example, illustrates that shopkeepers knew that the haptic quality of the walk up to the shop window was just as crucial as the visual appeal of the display behind the glass (Lesger 2013, pp. 155–172).

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The continued attention paid to the tactility of the experience and the emphasis placed on comfort and enjoyment urge us to move beyond the simple interpretation of sensory deprivation towards a more balanced view of an evolving sensory culture. This is not to say that city councillors, planners, architects and others responsible for designing and conceptualizing urban material space did not wish to get rid of certain sensory experiences. The investment in market halls in Brussels, for example, started from the desire to rid the elegant shopping streets of lower class market vendors and stalls, not just because they hampered traffic, but because they produced unpleasant sensory experiences unbefitting of a ‘modern’ city of international standing. Simultaneously and for similar reasons, strict regulations were issued with regard to peddling. The bodies, sights, smells and sounds these working-class figures produced were seen as disruptive of the more luxurious atmosphere of middle-class shopping streets (Arnout 2019, ch. 3; for sound, see also: Boutin 2015, ch 3). Rather than revealing the desire to reduce the sensory experience, the sources point towards the desire to remake the environment into a proper bourgeois space, where promenading middle-class shoppers were shielded from sensory interaction with working-class activities and people—on a haptic, olfactory, auditory, visual and even gustatory level—and that was expressive of a new bourgeois, sensory culture. It is no coincidence that shouting and displaying wares on the pavement were expressly forbidden in the Galeries’ internal regulations. Both activities were associated with the lower class trading practices of market vendors, who were being pushed out of the fashionable shopping street because their activities clashed with the new sensory sensibilities. Nor is it a coincidence that kitchens on the lower class upper floors were not allowed to give onto the Galeries, while the more upper class restaurants formed part of the draw of many a shopping street in both Brussels and Amsterdam.

Shopping in Practice While the prescriptive and governmental sources provide insight into the role sensory sensibilities played in the process of envisioning, planning and regulating shopping streets, they do not tell us about the lived sensory experiences. To understand how the sensory shaped the practical experience of these spaces, we might turn to reports in newspapers and physiologies. On the surface, here too the visuality of the experience stands out. Physiologists, columnists and other authors often referred to the visual

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pleasure they experienced themselves or were able to observe in others (Anonymous 1844; Hymans and Rousseau 1853; Tante Hélène 1902–1903; Christine 1911, p.  107; L’Indépendance Belge 13 October 1850, 19 June, 20 and 24 September 1897, 16 April 1910; Journal de Bruxelles 15 October 1850, 6 November 1913). The protagonist and his nephews in Boom and Lesturgeon’s fictional travel diary of Amsterdam, for example, regularly exulted in the sight of the so-called Kalverstraat miracles (1845, part one, p.  124). Attractive displays in shop windows drew them into shops and they expressed their enjoyment in looking at people in the Kalverstraat and the public in its establishments. Similarly, the interiors and exteriors of shops and eateries are often described in detail (Boom and Lesturgeon, part one, pp.  112–114, 117–122, 132–133). Contemplative descriptions of urban life in newspapers in both Brussels and Amsterdam regularly included discussions of the spectacle offered by busy shopping streets, especially at night (Algemeen Handelsblad 5 June 1898). In December 1908, an anonymous columnist who went by the nom de plume ‘Christine’ marvelled at the ‘spectacle of the Brussels streets’ in a column for Le Soir, describing the Rue Neuve as a strait through which a rippling wave of heads pushed its way and through which advanced with difficulty, zigzagging, like a boat rocking on the waves, the red carriage of a tram car. All of it bathed in a dazzling, reddish glow: the glittering plate glass windows reflected an immense light, and, from the heights of the roofs, the corners of the façades and the windows where they illuminated the signs, arc lamps thrust beams of leaden, violet, green and yellow light. (Christine 1911, p. 107)

These kinds of descriptions always follow a similar structure, in which the author adopts a flaneur’s perspective, always close, but never completely part of the crowd. They echo a well-known discourse of spectacular culture, which, perhaps more surprisingly, also pervaded more banal reports of urban life in the newspapers. Reports or reviews of new shops, cafés or restaurants in the Kalverstraat, for example, always contained detailed descriptions of their appearances, and the town news section of different newspapers regularly contained descriptions of unusual shop windows and the crowds ‘jostling’ in front of them. Especially by the end of the century, reports of fires and other unusual events often included a description of the behaviour of the crowd of onlookers (e.g. Algemeen Handelsblad 14

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May 1891, 18 February 1895 and 11 August 1906; De Telegraaf 30 January, 25 April 1894 and 20 January 1899; Nieuws van den Dag 27 April 1894). Perhaps this is merely an indication of the pervasiveness of the spectacular discourse, but the sheer amount of reports, articles and notices suggests that it must have reflected—and if not, at least, shaped— ‘reality’ beyond the page too. One could easily interpret the pervasiveness of these accounts as evidence of the supremacy of the visual, but that would not do justice to the sensory complexity of this discourse. After all, to paint the full picture, most descriptions actively invoke the very visceral and haptic feeling of being in the crowd. In Christine’s qualification of the Rue Neuve as a ‘strait’, in which people ‘push’ their way, with a tram inching forward, moving sideways as much as forward, the visual and the haptic are entirely entangled. While Christine might describe it as a sight to behold, the image only takes full effect because of the mobilization of the very tactile feeling of a crowd. Other examples abound, such as the news reports that explicitly mention onlookers jostling one another in front of unusual window displays (e.g. Algemeen Handelsblad 12 November 1859, 16 January 1894, 15 February 1928, De Telegraaf 22 September 1897, 23 November 1899; Nieuws van den Dag 12 February 1897). Or consider the report, published in De Telegraaf on 5 May 1893, about the arrest of the mayor of a provincial town. The man had apparently been walking peacefully on Dam Square in Amsterdam, but upon entering the Kalverstraat had encountered two streams of people going in opposite ways. According to the report, this had led him to start ‘spinning’, only to end up completely fazed at the opposite end of the street. Whether or not this incident actually happened, it clearly invokes more than one sense. The colourful language is intended to mobilize both the sense of sight and the more haptic feeling of a body lost in a crowd. While this is clearly an exceptional and perhaps even redoubtable story, it tells us a lot about how contemporaries looked at the sensory reality of the city. Letters to the editor published in Amsterdam newspapers reveal that some sensory experiences were nevertheless more sought after than others. In the 1850s, for example, readers complained about street organs, loud youngsters and canvassers singing ‘inappropriate’ songs. In the 1890s shopkeepers and other Amsterdammers complained about the smell and unsightliness of a pancake booth. By the end of the century, the presence of bicycles and roller-skates also led to annoyance among pedestrians, who according to these letters jumped at the ‘unnecessarily loud’ ringing of

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bells and horns, disliked the humming sound of motorcars and felt physically threatened by the speed with which other road users passed by (e.g. Algemeen Handelsblad 10 May 1896, 11 July 1906, 24 July 1907, 14 December 1909; De Telegraaf 10 July 1906, 18 February 1910; De Tijd 17 January and 7 March 1910). Though not always (explicitly), class regularly played its part. It was, for example, sometimes specified that the irritating boys on bicycles disrupting the middle-class promenade were butcher’s apprentices. The problem of class also framed discussions about the worker’s fair in the Kalverstraat on Monday afternoons. It was the shopkeepers—representing the lower middle classes—who complained about the ‘sorts of people’ that gathered there on Mondays, ‘obstruct[ing] traffic on the road and the sidewalks’, blocking access to their shops and shop windows, leading ‘respectable’ customers—‘women in particular’—to avoid coming to their shops (Algemeen Handelsblad 18 October 1893; De Telegraaf 23 November 1926). Journalists remarked on the peculiar impression this workers’ fair must have made on ‘foreigners’ visiting, those ‘sturdy’ workers in their ‘pea coats and moleskin or bombazine clothes […] talking loudly and gesticulating wildly’ (De Telegraaf 25 October 1897). Others remarked that these men sometimes harassed female shoppers, taking offence at the ‘annoying language’ they used to ‘ventilate their admiration for the female sex’ (De Telegraaf 23 November 1926). While all of these examples demonstrate the desire among middle-class readers and inhabitants to get rid of unpleasant sensory stimuli and ‘unnecessary’ interactions with those of the lower classes, the reports reveal that this socially mixed environment could also be appealing to real urbanites. In 1897, for example, a columnist for De Telegraaf expressed his attachment to the ‘peculiar’ custom of the unique sense of ‘liveliness’ the workers’ fairs gave to the Kalverstraat. He argued that despite the reservations of ‘peaceful male and female strollers’, these workers were actually harmless and well-behaved. They might have made a peculiar impression on foreigners, with ‘their slow movements, their manners ungraceful’, especially when ‘stretched out on the pavement on sunny days, spraying the paths with tobacco juice’, but they were as integral to urban life as the window displays that their ‘broad backs’ obscured from view (De Telegraaf 15 October 1897). There is a lot of sensory discourse at work in this column. The very visceral description of their ‘rough’ bodies serves to reduce the workers to a socially inferior ‘type’ distinguishable from the socially superior

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columnist and reader. At the same time, the subtle mockery of the ‘peaceful’ shoppers highlights a distinction between the savvy urbanites and the overly sensitive middle-class pedestrians not yet competent in navigating the urban environment. The foreigner, unable to interpret the scene, is contrasted with the implied inhabitants of Amsterdam already accustomed to it. All have different sensory sensibilities and skills, which determine their experience. This is just one example, but many of the descriptions of the Kalverstraat implicitly differentiate between groups on a sensory basis. As Nicolas Kenny (2014) has argued, urban dwellers in this period were far from deprived of sensory experiences. Rather, they actively used their senses to navigate the changing social and physical realities of—in this case—shopping space. While newspapers and physiologies do reveal that the governmental ideals were shared more widely among (at least) the middle classes and the petite bourgeoisie, who increasingly expected their shopping experiences to resemble said ideals, those same sources and contemporary photographs also demonstrate that the latter were never completely realized. While early engravings of the Galeries Saint-Hubert always reflected the idealized orderly environment that the Société and the city councillors had envisioned, turn of the century photographs tend to show a more cluttered and socially diverse space (undated turn of the century photograph). Of course, all of these sources present us with staged versions of urban reality, but the sheer volume and variety of sources in which this discourse appears suggest that it was more than a topos or an ironic commentary of urban life. The complaints in newspapers about unpleasant sensory stimuli are indicative of more than just the ideal shopping experience. It also lifts the veil on (part of) the lived experience in the nineteenth-century shopping street. Columnists, journalists and readers alike furthermore tended to couch their complaints and observations with descriptions of the experiences they cherished. When pedestrians complained about bicycles and cars, they expressed a sense of ownership over the street, articulating the pedestrian’s attachment to a comfortable shopping stroll with all the sensory enjoyments that came with it. These enjoyments stretched beyond the visual. They were, for example, also about the pavement one walked on, as can be gleaned from comments about the tactile and auditory pleasures to be had on asphalt paving (e.g. Algemeen Handelsblad 18 May 1874).

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The enjoyments were also about the bodies one encountered along the way. While encounters with fellow strollers were usually seen as part of a pleasant experience, encounters with others, like loud vendors, rude canvassers and speedy cyclists, fell without those bounds. And yet, this did not mean that being in the shopping streets was all about meeting similar people. The crowds in the shopping streets of Amsterdam and Brussels were anything but socially homogenous, especially at night. Governments— and their police forces—and property owners—like the Société—were often apprehensive about these crowds. Only months after the opening, the Société urged its tenants to stop the ‘exhibitions’ in their shop windows, because they led to ‘gatherings’, which presented a nuisance and were forbidden by police ordonnance (Regulation 1847). In Amsterdam as well as in Brussels, some of the main shopping streets were also streetwalker districts, which—like in other cities—caused uneasiness. At several instances, the management of the Galeries tried to get the city council to allow them to fence off the arcade in order to put a stop to the ‘foule de femmes de mauvaise foi’ soliciting men and driving away the ‘respectable’ public (letter Société to Council 1848). In 1875, they claimed that the women permitted ‘themselves to halt the passers-by and throw insults to the ladies who wish to enter our shops’. The result, they argued, was that the shops had become ‘truly inaccessible’ (letter Société to Mayor 1875). And yet, crowds did gather in the shopping streets of Amsterdam and Brussels, not just in the fashionable hours of the afternoons, but also during the evenings, when shops were still open and windows were lit. Descriptions of the evening and nightly crowds in the Kalverstraat have an even more visceral quality than those describing the afternoon public (Anonymous 1844). Multiple reports and descriptions highlight the very tactile nature of those crowds. Reports about pickpocketing in the arcade tended to highlight the density of the crowds, which facilitated the swiping of wallets and encumbered the chase by the police (L’Indépendance Belge 30 May 1849, 22 September 1849 and 18 June 1897; Journal de Bruxelles 30 May 1849, 11 August 1849, 22 September 1849, 20 February 1871 and 19 September 1849). The haptic quality of the descriptions leaves us with the impression that being in the Galeries was just as much about the sense of touch—the smooth pavement, the nearness of the other—as it was about the sense of sight. The fact that the arcade was also a notorious cruising area, where gay men made use of the density of the nightly crowds and co-opted shopping practices to make contact (Dupont 2015), serves to support this argument.

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Conclusion Without wanting to deny the centrality of visuality, it is clear that walking and shopping in the main shopping streets of Amsterdam and Brussels were just as much about the haptic quality of the space and that those streets were both envisioned and experienced in visceral, intersensorial ways. Contemporaries enjoyed smooth (and silent) paving and desired and demanded a comfortable and safe environment which would guarantee their physical integrity. The centrality of the haptic did follow from the contemporary obsession with circulation, yet it should not be interpreted as a sign of the increased sensory deprivation and the growing relevance of one sense over the other. The precise considerations coupled with investments in a visually stimulating, haptic, auditory and olfactory pleasant environment in which (middle- and upper-class) urban dwellers could stroll in comfort and safety demonstrate the emergence of a new sensory culture, which was oriented just as much on creating as on avoiding specific intersensorial experiences. As Nicolas Kenny (2014) has argued for urban space more broadly, urban dwellers mobilized their senses to navigate the shopping environment, which underwent changes on both a material level and on a social and cultural level. Shopping as an encompassing practice was about much more than ‘just looking’. The material changes and the presence of a growing number of bodies behaving in new ways required that urban dwellers adjusted their proprioceptive skills. The sources indicate that the intensity in sensorial experience did increase, and as the century progressed consumers had to learn how to position themselves within the material and embodied context of the shopping street. The evolving environment of the shopping street and the way it was ‘filled’ with people required contemporaries to relearn how to position themselves. This conclusion, in turn, might help us to understand why shopping could sometimes be (considered) so exciting and why it was sometimes controversial—even in Brussels and Amsterdam. Although the public debate in these cities never flared up quite as high as in Paris, London and Berlin, there clearly was uneasiness about the potential of a shopping street for social mixing, both in terms of gender as in terms of class. The fact that one could not entirely control who one would bump into, what one smelled, what one saw and heard, was part of the draw, but it was also part of the challenge.

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Notes 1. For this article, the key word ‘Kalverstraat’ and its historic spelling variants were used to search through the extensive collection of Amsterdam newspapers on Delpher.nl, for five sample decades (1850–1859, 1870–1879, 1890–1899, 1905–1914 and 1925–1934). Where the volume of available articles became too large, random samples were selected per decade. For Brussels, the key words ‘Galerie(s)’, ‘magasin(s)’ and ‘marché(s)’ were used to search through the digitally available liberal newspaper L’Indépendance Belge and the catholic Journal de Bruxelles. The articles collected as such were analysed with specific attention to the sensory and emotional discourses surrounding shopping. 2. The term ‘stoep’ is now used in Dutch as one of the synonyms for ‘pavement’ or ‘trottoir’. Before the 1850s, this term invariably referred to a privately owned section of the street, which the owners could use as they liked. Many of these ‘stoepen’ were filled up with all kinds of constructions, from staircases, to trapdoors, cellars and tiny workshops and so on (Lesger 2013, pp. 155–172).

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Miller, Michael B. The Bon Marché. Bourgeois Culture and the Department store. Princeton University Press, 1981. Mitchell, Ian. Tradition and Innovation in English Retailing, 1700 to 1850: Narratives of Consumption. London: Routledge, 2016. Otter, Chris. The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910. University of Chicago Press, 2008. Prestel, Joseph Ben. Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860–1910. Oxford University Press, 2017. Rappaport, Erika. “The Senses in the Marketplace. Stimulation and Distraction, Gratification and Control”. In A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, edited by Constance Classen. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 69–88. Remus, Emily. A Shoppers’ Paradise: How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown. Harvard University Press, 2019. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914. Stanford, 1990. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night. The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Schwartz, Vanessa. Spectacular Realities. Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. ———. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. Sewell, Jessica Ellen. Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and Mental Life. Berlin, 1903. Smith, Mark Michael, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Stobart, Jon. Spend, Spend, Spend: A History of Shopping. Cheltenham: History Press, 2008. Stobart, Jon, Andrew Hahn and Victoria Morgan. Spaces of consumption. Leisure and shopping in the English Town, c. 1680–1830. London: Routledge, 2007. Trentmann, Frank. Empire of Things. How We Became a World of Consumers, from the 15th Century to the 21st. London: Alan Lane, 2016. Walkowitz, Judith R. “Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London,” Representations, vol. 62, 1998, pp. 1–30. Walsh, Claire. “Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London,” Journal of Design History, vol. 8, no. 3, 1995, pp. 157–176. Walsh, Evelyn. “The Newness of the Department Store. A View from the Eighteenth Century”. In Cathedrals of Consumption: European Department Stores, 1850–1939 edited by Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain. London: Routledge 1999, pp. 46–71.

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Williams, Rosalind. Dream Worlds. Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Published Primary Sources Anonymous, Physiologie van de Kalverstraat door een Humorist. Amsterdam, 1844 Boom, Harm and Alexander Lesturgeon. Een Drentse Gemeente-assessor met Zijne Twee Neven op Reis naar Amsterdam, in ’t Voorjaar van 1843. Groningen, 1845, 2 volumes. Christine [Paul André]. Au Fil des Jours. Chronique Bruxelloises de 1908–1909. Brussels, 1911. Ducpétiaux, Eduouard. Rapport sur l’Eclairage de la Voie Publique, le Mode de Pavage, les Trottoirs et Accotemens, l’Indication des Noms de Rues et le Numérotage des Maisons. Lu dans la Séance du 12 Novembre 1838. Brussels, 1841. Hymans, Louis and Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. Le Diable à Bruxelles. Brussels: Librairie Polytechnique d’Aug. Decq, 1853. Tante Hélène. “Promenade à Travers Bruxelles,” Bruxelles Féminin, several installments in 1902–1903.

Cited Newspaper Articles Algemeen Handelsblad: 12 November 1859; 18 May 1874; 14 May 1891; 18 October 1893; 16 January 1894; 18 February 1895; 10 May 1896; 5 June 1898; 11 July; 11 August 1906; 24 July 1907; 14 December 1909; 15 February 1928. L’Indépendance Belge: 30 May; 22 September 1849; 13 October 1850; 18 June, 19 June, 20 and 24 September 1897; 16 April 1910. Journal de Bruxelles: 30 May; 11 August; 19 and 22 September 1849; 15 October 1850; 20 February 1871; 6 November 1913. Nieuws van den Dag: 27 April 1894; 12 February 1897. De Telegraaf: 5 May 1893; 30 January; 25 April 1894; 22 September; 25 October 1897; 20 January, 23 November 1899; 10 July 1906; 18 February 1910; 23 November 1926. De Tijd: 17 January and 7 March 1910.

Archival Sources Letter from Jean-Pierre Cluysenaar to City Council, 2 November 1844. In City Archives Brussels, Travaux Publics, 6208. Letter from City Council to Société, 18 February 1847. In Archives of the Galeries Saint-Hubert (Brussels), Pièces officièlles.

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Letter from Société to City Council, 25 April 1848. In Archives of the Galeries Saint-Hubert (Brussels), Assemblées générales 1846–1875. Regulation issued on 1 December 1849. In Archives of the Galeries Saint-Hubert (Brussels), Assemblées générales 1846–1875. Lease Agreement Galeries Saint-Hubert, [1865]. In City Archives Brussels, Travaux Publics, 20472. Letter from Société to Brussels Mayor, 27 September 1875. In City Archives Brussels, Police Archives, 817. Expenses and revenues estimate, “Communication entre le Marché-aux-Herbes et la Montagne-aux-Herbes- Potagères à Bruxelles au moyen de deux galeries couverts projetée par M. Cluysenaar. Devis de dépenses & de recettes. In City Archives Brussels, Travaux Publics, 6208.

Visual

sources

Lithography by Adrien Canelle, [2nd half of the nineteenth century]. In City Archives Brussels, Iconographic Collection, D2034. Undated Drawing of the Galeries Saint-Hubert [Nineteenth-Century]. In Ghent University Library, Europeana Topo Collection, BRKZ.TOPO. 1095.A.03. Undated Photograph, [ca. 1900]. In Ghent University Library, Europeana Topo Collection, BRKZ.TOPO.1095.A01

CHAPTER 6

The Cry of Silk: Erotomania and Fetishism in Au Bonheur des Dames Wendy Ligon Smith

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s fashion, silk was a contentious material. For some, it was used for health reasons but, concurrently, it was also a fabric that lent itself to fetishism, deviant eroticism, and diagnoses of mental illness. Silk had long been associated with luxury, and sumptuary laws, especially prevalent in the Medieval and Renaissance periods, made the material only available to noble classes (Killerby 2001). However, in nineteenth-century Europe, silk was made more widely accessible through the capitalistic project of democratizing luxury. ‘La démocratisation du luxe’ was the popularly touted ideology behind the larger new department stores whose silk departments presented grandiose displays of the goods ready to purchase (Bowlby 1985, pp. 68–9). Silk also began to be appreciated for more practical benefits by nineteenth-century dress reformers who considered unstructured gowns more hygienic than thick, layered and corseted dresses. Reformers promoted the use of silk because it was perceived to be more germ and dust resistant than cotton. It was also worn to alleviate the suffering from skin conditions, perhaps most famously by the German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner’s friend

W. L. Smith (*) University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_6

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Ferdinand Praeger explained that “His skin was so sensitive that he wore silk next to the body” even when he was struggling financially, and that tailors were shocked at his insistence on silk linings in his garments, since they would not have been seen (Praeger 1892, p. 252; also Finck 2004, pp. 251–252). However, these therapeutic and practical uses of silk did not preclude the wearers from simultaneously deriving pleasure from the luxurious fabric. Wagner wore bespoke silk underwear not only to ease his delicate skin, but also to stimulate his writing, which he often claimed to do in a state of arousal (Dreyfus 2010, pp. 51–52, 77; Millington 2012, p. 152). For instance, he wrote that, “It was in a state of all-consuming and lascivious arousal that held my blood and every nerve in a fevered flush as I sketched and worked out the music for Tannhäuser” (Wagner 1983, VI, p. 253). In Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise, 1883) silk is described in sensuous terms and the marketing of it described as a seduction of the consumer. Department stores, like the fictional one chronicled in Zola’s novel, filled their rooms with ostentatious displays of these silks meant to entice customers often leading to overwhelming desire (Zola 1992). In addition to scenes in Zola’s novel that describe women being overcome with longing for textiles, there are also many cases documented by French psychiatrists of women who speak of sensual urges for silk so powerful that they feel compelled to steal it. The accounts of their episodes emphasize the sensorial experiences they had in department stores, where they gazed at, smelled, and fondled the fabrics. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, conceptions of silk cravings, sickness, and criminality were often intertwined in ways similar to the French psychiatric study of hysteria as a feminine mental illness by Charcot and his colleagues at the Salpêtrière. Of course, the misogynistic practices of many of these psychiatrists cast doubt over the accuracy of the recounted experiences of their female patients. French doctors like Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, Charles Lasègue, Henri Legrand du Saulle, and Paul Dubuisson characterized kleptomania, hysteria, and ‘silk erotomania’ as feminine illnesses. Lasègue, du Saulle, and Dubuisson’s writing on kleptomania identified uterine dysfunction as a source of the problem, often attempting to make causal connections with their patients’ menstrual cycles, pregnancies, lactation, and menopause (Abelson 1989; O’Brien 1983, pp. 65–77, 68). Patricia O’Brien has examined the relationship of gender and class to the prevalent diagnosis of kleptomania in late nineteenth-­century and what it reveals about attitudes towards French

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bourgeois women and the changing behaviours around mass consumption and the shifting culture of consumerism. O’Brien helpfully argues that the works of these psychiatrists “allow us to glimpse professional interpretations of female behaviour and, less reliably, the behaviour itself” (1983, p.  65). O’Brien also suggests that the focused attention on shoplifting from the vantage point of forensic medicine was in direct response to a rise in thefts from department stores in Paris in the 1880s, and that psychiatrists were closely involved in the legal cases brought by stores against shoplifters (1983, pp.  66–67). Lasègue’s, du Saulle’s, and Dubuisson’s writings on kleptomania focused especially on the calculated allure of the department store. In this way, they sought to differentiate common theft motivated by deprivation and need from the actions of a diagnosed kleptomaniac who could be legally absolved. As Tammy Whitlock summarizes, this conception of kleptomania shifted the blame almost completely to the store and neglected the culpability of the female shopper. She was now a victim of desire, a desire purposefully created by the dream-like atmosphere of the grand stores. This emphasis on desire also shifted the focus of kleptomania from an illness associated with biology to a malady associated with more psychological factors like sexual desire. (Whitlock 1999, p. 435)

It is clear that late nineteenth-century French psychiatrists correlated department store theft with deviant feminine sexuality and/or dysfunction. Dr. Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934) classified unusually intense desire for silk as a disease when he diagnosed some Parisian women with a type of erotomania. The pathology of silk encompassed its smell and sound, in addition to its tactile qualities. De Clérambault’s patients would speak of ‘the cry of the silk’.1 After a few years of observational study, de Clérambault presented his findings in a paper entitled, ‘Passion érotique des étoffes chez la femme’ (‘Women’s Erotic Passion for Fabric’) in 1908 (Shera 2009, p. 163).2 He claimed his patients suffered from a combination of erotomania and kleptomania, as they derived autoerotic pleasure from stealing silk, rubbing it between their thighs, and pressing it onto themselves. The symptoms of these unhealthy longings for silk pervaded the senses: a desire to touch; being lured by its sound and smell; being blinded by its reflective surface. This sort of frenzied interaction with the fabric is described in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), based

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on the author’s close observational studies of women shopping in the newly opened Parisian department stores Le Bon Marché and Les Grands Magasins du Louvre. To better understand how de Clérambault’s theory of silk erotomania relates to sensorial shopping experiences, especially as it overlaps with kleptomania, we must first understand the carefully cultivated environment in which women were encountering silks at department stores where enticing them was a calculation of sensory engagement. Zola kept detailed notes about the layout of Le Bon Marché and Les Grands Magasins, the clientele and salespeople, and the strategies used to tempt customers. His notes, archived at the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, have been invaluable to scholars researching the impact of the lavishly decorated, abundantly stocked, palatial department stores on the ways consumer culture evolved in the fin-de-siècle (Miller 1981). At department stores like Le Bon Marché and Les Grands Magasins, the public was welcomed to look at, fondle, smell, and even hear or taste the goods for sale without a commitment to buy. These stores bought in bulk directly from manufacturers, ensuring that they had huge amounts of product to put on display. Ready-to-wear items were affordably priced and paid for in cash, greatly increasing the working capital of the store and making it possible to speed up the transaction process between production, buying, and selling (Miller 1981, p. 34). The large volume of sales helped facilitate the high turnover rate of goods, which kept customers interested in returning to see new merchandise (Miller 1981, p.  58). The owner of Zola’s fictional department store explains: “Everything depended on that, the capital incessantly renewed, the system of piling up goods, the cheapness which attracts, the marking in plain figures which tranquilises” (Zola [1883] 1992, p.  69). By contrast, owners of small shops who sold on credit did not have readily available capital to purchase more goods to be used specifically for the purpose of marketing displays (Miller 1981, p. 24). The space of Le Bon Marché was designed deliberately to facilitate this new concept of presenting an overwhelming abundance of goods to browsing shoppers. Architect L.A.  Boileau and engineer Gustave Eiffel used iron and glass to construct vast open spaces with large skylights to highlight spectacular displays of goods and facilitate the movement of large crowds (Miller 1981, p. 42). Based on Zola’s research, historian Michael Miller claims that 10,000 clients entered the store “on good days in the 1880s” (1981, p. 53). In the 1890s it was estimated this grew to 15,000–18,000 and was exceeded exponentially during the store’s sales days.

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The approach of Le Bon Marché, led by the Boucicaut family, was to make goods more accessible by lowering prices, but also to gain more business from middle-class clientele by making “shopping a pleasurable experience” by offering returns, deliveries, and clearly marked fixed prices. As Miller describes it: “[…] the Bon Marché set about selling not only merchandise, but consumption itself” (Miller 1981, p. 166). He then goes on to explain that the marketing devised by director Aristide Boucicaut (1810–1877) aimed to “stir unrealized appetites, provoke overpowering urges, created new states of mind” (p. 167). Miller continues: Selling consumption was a matter of seduction and showmanship, and in these Boucicaut excelled, enveloping his marketplace in an aura of fascination that turned buying into a special and irresistible occasion. Dazzling and sensuous, the Bon Marché became a permanent fair, an institution, a fantasy world, a spectacle of extraordinary proportions, so that going to the store became an event and an adventure. One came now less to purchase a particular article than simply to visit, buying in the process because it was part of the excitement, part of an experience that added another dimension to life. This ambiance in conjunction with the powerful temptation of vast, open displays, was to be the great luring feature of the Bon Marché. The new building itself was designed for this effect. (p. 167)

Entering Le Bon Marché made shoppers feel as if they were entering a spectacular fantasy where they were invited to take part. The colossal and gorgeously tempting displays described in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames were inspired by the author’s trips to Le Bon Marché and its contemporary rival store in Paris, Les Grands Magasins du Louvre. Zola wrote in his observational notes that “women are […] dazzled by the accumulation of merchandise. This is what has made the success of the grands magasins”.3 Other descriptions from visitors to Le Bon Marché also describe it as a bewitching experience. A writer for the Parisian journal L’Orphéon recounts how he felt upon leaving a concert put on within Le Bon Marché in 1886: “[…] one remains dazzled, dazed for some time while trying to recover the necessary stability to arrive at some sort of judgement” (p. 172). He takes a moment to describe the atmosphere of the store: Let us speak first of the hall. In less than an hour the store, glutted with merchandise, abandoned to a world of gnomes or genies, is rapidly transformed, as in a fairyland, into a bewitching palace, dazzling with lights, filled

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with flowers and exotic bushes whose effect is splendid. Everywhere carpets and silk tapestries from the Orient are flung and hung in abundance, forming charming salons, hallways, and retreats, all embellished by the good taste of the tapestry-workers. Immense departments earlier filled with customers, soon will serve as an altar to the cult of music… (pp. 172–73)

Boucicaut had created a spectacle that overwhelmed the senses of concert-­ goers who he hoped to turn into shoppers. Not only was the public invited in for concerts, engaging their auditory senses, they were welcomed to touch, smell and even taste the goods (once the food halls and tea shops were opened, as discussed in Raines’ chapter). This profusion of sensory activity as a sales tactic is explored by anthropologist David Howes (Howes 2005). The invitation into the hyper-sensory space begins with sight—the most obvious sense involved in shopping or browsing. Howes explains how department stores in the late 1800s utilized visual spectacle to beckon passers-by and turn them from observers into customers. With its theatrical lighting, enticing window displays and its floor after floor of entrancing merchandise […] the department store presented a fabulous spectacle of consumer plenty and accessibility. Previously goods had been kept behind counters and it was presumed that a customer would enter a shop with the purpose to buy. In the department store, by contrast, goods were largely out in the open and anyone could enter simply with the purpose of having a look. The expectation was that the display of goods in such abundance would prove so seductive that even those who were ‘just looking’ would be lured into buying, particularly given the atmosphere of pleasurable self-indulgence that prevailed. (Howes 2005, p. 284)

Sight of the goods, ‘just looking’, was the entry point to the consumer. Building on this initial contact, contemporary marketing professionals know that the more senses that are engaged, the more memorable an experience will be, creating conditions for repeat customers (Howes 2005, p. 290). A sales handbook produced in 1920 suggests practices similar to those at work in the department stores of the late nineteenth century: “If two senses could be engaged at once, for example by encouraging a customer to touch silk and at the same time ‘handling the silk in such a way as to appear to her sense of hearing by producing a sound which denotes a rich quality of material’ so much the better” (Howes and Classen 2014, p. 142). Browsing evolves into fondling, rubbing, and listening, greatly increasing the bodily engagement between customer and textile product

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as an experience that simultaneously engages multiple senses in a sort of commercialized synaesthesia. In the 1880s–1890s, when synaesthesia was being widely championed in the visual and performing arts in Europe (especially seen in the prominence of Wagnerian opera and related ideas of the gesamtkunstwerk) it was also being used in the world of sales. In Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames he often echoes this effect in his writing by associating sensorial experiences. For instance, Octave Mouret, the owner of the novel’s eponymic The Ladies’ Paradise, gazes at customers and their returned looks often transmute into the realm of touching: “he felt the amorous caress of this glance, the triumph of a woman proud of her beauty and of her art” (Zola [1883] 1992, p. 102). Similarly, sensory information is intermingled as the protagonist, young Denise newly hired to work at The Ladies’ Paradise, watches textiles being set out before a mass of customers where she can smell the cloth and feel a warmth from the store as if the building itself were breathing: And the stuffs became animated in this passionate atmosphere: the laces fluttered, drooped, and concealed the depths of the shop with a troubling air of mystery; even the lengths of cloth, thick and heavy, exhaled a tempting odour, while the cloaks threw out their folds over the dummies, which assumed a soul, and the great velvet mantle particularly, expanded, supple and warm, as if on real fleshly shoulders, with a heaving of the bosom and a trembling of the hips. But the furnace-like glow which the house exhaled came above all from the sale, the crush at the counters, that could be felt behind the walls. (Zola [1883] 1992, pp. 16–17)

Store managers hoped that by engaging the senses, the conscious, rational mind of the buyer would be short-circuited and that in being overcome by sensation—a sort of hyperesthesia—purchases would be made despite any concern for budget or frugality (Howes 2005, p. 291). Conversely, consumers logically assumed investigating a prospective purchase through smelling, touching, or hearing would bring greater knowledge about the product and therefore greater insight into its quality or value to aid in their discernment (Howes 2005, p. 288). Though shoppers sought to use sensory information to become savvier buyers, it was not uncommon for reasonability to be lost in the overwhelming atmosphere of the enormous department stores. In addition to purposefully disorienting customers with confusing layouts in attempts to encourage impulse buying, sensory experiences in the

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department store were often intentionally overstimulating. In Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, Mouret watches as a salesman drapes the silks for display, contrasting the silks—blue, grey, and yellow—drawing back to judge of the harmony of the tones. Suddenly he [Mouret] interfered: “But why are you endeavouring to please the eyes? Don’t be afraid; blind them. Look! red, green, yellow.” He had taken the pieces, throwing them together, crushing them, producing an excessively fast effect. (Zola [1883] 1992, p. 45)

Mouret encourages the blinding of his customers to impair their judgement in a sort of sensory overload. Similarly, the sheer abundance of goods on display in the vast halls of Le Bon Marché were meant to enthral and even entrance shoppers. As French forensic psychologists would argue, the resulting impaired judgement led not only to shoppers’ overindulgence but also to criminality. Zola, and French psychiatrist Paul Dubuisson (1847–1908) who studied kleptomania, commented that women started to feel in the department store the kind of attraction and passion they once felt at only at church (Dubuisson 1902, p. 42). Miller, in his examination of historical perceptions of late-nineteenth-­ century department stores’ impact on morality, names Charles Lasègue, Dr. Legrand du Saulle, and Paul Dubuisson as the leading French psychiatrists studying kleptomania in the late 1880s–1890s. All agreed, to varying degrees, that the kleptomaniacs they studied suffered from more complicated disorders. Some were hysterics, some neurasthenics, some more critically mentally ill. All wrote of department store thefts as simply an addition to traditional kleptomaniac behavior, and few devoted their analyses exclusively to the former. […] Yet what particularly struck this generation of psychiatrists was both the sheer number of kleptomaniacs arrested in department stores and the fact that so few of these were incited to steal elsewhere. (Miller 1981, pp. 39–40)

Department stores, like Le Bon Marché and Zola’s fictional Ladies’ Paradise, constructed tempting displays intended for consumers to feel an irresistible urge to buy, but they functioned, for some women, as an enticement to steal. Miller describes the cultivated atmospheres in department stores as awakening the ‘predispos[ition]’ to steal—kleptomania was understood as a disease that was activated by ‘created conditions’ (Miller

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1981, p. 202). He continues on to quote from Dubuisson’s 1902 investigation of kleptomania (Les voleuses de grands magasins): “Dubuisson wrote of seductions and cults, remarking that when it came to temptations ‘Satan could not have done better’”. In describing the incidents of theft, Legrand du Saulle mentions the role of touch in what he saw as a particularly feminine disease: Women of all sorts, drawn to these elegant surroundings by instincts native to their sex, fascinated by so many rash provocations, dazzled by the abundance of trinkets and lace, find themselves overtaken by a sudden, unpremeditated, almost savage impulse. They place a clumsy if furtive hand on a display and voilà, with one unthinking stroke, they wipe out the most respectable past, improvise as shoplifters, and render themselves criminal… (p. 202)

After being visually overstimulated, it was the incidental curious touch that could push a woman over the edge. The fixation on department store shoplifters as predominantly female is not surprising given the attitudes of French psychiatrists toward women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as evidenced by the problematic prevalence of diagnoses of hysteria and their even more troubling treatments. It is also not surprising to see that most of Le Bon Marché’s shoplifters were middle-class women, as they represented the overwhelming majority of visitors to department stores (p.  205). Merchandizing and marketing were specifically tailored to the sensibilities of middle-class women. As Zola describes: It was for woman that all the establishments were struggling in wild competition; it was woman that they were continually catching in the snare of their bargains, after bewildering her with their displays. They had awakened new desires in her flesh; they were an immense temptation, before which she succumbed fatally, yielding at first to reasonable purchases of useful articles for the household, then tempted by their coquetry, then devoured. (Zola [1883] 1992, p. 69)

Here we see Zola using language that suggests department stores’ predatory role in seeking to catch and ensnare women specifically. In addition to middle-class women comprising the targeted demographic of stores like the fictional Ladies’ Paradise, the symptoms described by shoplifters (as reported by French psychiatrists) were the same as those

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presented with other mental illnesses typically characterized as feminine— dizziness, abandoning of rational thought, sexual arousal, etc. For example, Dubuisson wrote that a “very respectable provincial lady recently arrived in Paris” went to Le Bon Marché and Les Grands Magasins du Louvre on the same day and reported: I felt myself overcome little by little by a disorder that can only be compared to that of drunkenness, with the dizziness and excitation that are peculiar to it. I saw things as if through a cloud, everything stimulated my desire and assumed, for me, an extraordinary attraction. I felt myself swept along towards them and I grabbed hold of things without any outside and superior consideration intervening to hold me back. […] It was like a monomania of possession. (Dubuisson 1902, p. 188)

This hyperesthesia—the overwhelm of her senses—is an example of the shopping experience intentionally cultivated by the department store management. Excited by the atmosphere in these stores where a copious abundance of goods on display was meant to entice and entrance, her vision became impaired (presumably from overstimulation). Then, as in Legrand du Saulle’s description, observation gave way to stroking or grabbing as visitors were permitted to touch the products. In Zola’s Ladies’ Paradise, swathes of exotic silks were set out for women to fondle as they contemplated purchasing, emphasizing and encouraging the tactile nature of shopping. Zola’s description of the silk department accentuates the sensuality of the scene. The temptation, as it builds, is a sexual one: At first stood out the light satins and tender silks, the satins à la Reine and Renaissance, with the pearly tones of spring water; light silks, transparent as crystals—Nile-green, Indian-azure, May-rose, and Danube-blue. Then came the stronger fabrics: marvellous satins, duchess silks, warm tints, rolling in great waves; and right at the bottom, as in a fountain-basin, reposed the heavy stuffs, the figured silks, the damasks, brocades, and lovely silvered silks in the midst of a deep bed of velvet of every sort—black, white, and coloured—skilfully disposed on silk and satin grounds, hollowing out with their medley of colours a still lake in which the reflex of the sky seemed to be dancing. The women, pale with desire, bent over as it to look at themselves. And before this falling cataract they all remained standing, with the secret fear of being carried away by the irruption of such luxury, and with the irresistible desire to jump in amidst it and be lost. (Zola [1883] 1992, p. 93)

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Zola uses watery metaphors akin to lovemaking to emphasize the eroticism of the display: beginning with cool, light, tender, and transparent silks; then on to the warm, ‘stronger fabrics’, the implied rhythm of rolling waves, and the ‘deep bed of velvet’; ending in the envelopment of jumping into the still lake with a final relinquishing of self. On this scene, Rachel Bowlby explains that “The ‘deep bed’ and ‘discharged waterfall’ seduce the women into their irresistible wish for a spectacular consummation” (Bowlby 1985, p. 73). In addition to commenting on this staged seduction in Zola’s fictional store, she also notes that in French consummation means both ‘consumption’ and ‘consummation’, pointing out that “shopping and sex are joined together” (p.  163). This is the atmosphere in which one of Zola’s characters finds herself as she succumbs to temptation and is caught stealing from the store. Countess de Boves, one of the regular customers at The Ladies’ Paradise, was “ravaged by a furious, irresistible passion for dress. These fits got worse, growing daily, […]” Zola [1883] 1992, p. 374). Though Zola describes Countess de Boves’ theft in sensual terms, he does not describe the physical, sexually intimate touch that de Clérambault and other contemporary psychiatrists recount in their efforts to repeatedly associate kleptomania, sexual perversion, and hysteria (Shera 2009). In her article on de Clérambault’s ‘silk erotomania’ (his study of it in female patients and his own secret obsession), Peta Allen Shera notes the similarities between de Clérambault’s and Roger Dupouy’s linking of deviant sexuality and kleptomania (pp.  165–167).4 Just as de Clérambault did, Dupouy specifically examined women who stole silk, providing the following account from one patient in his 1905 ‘De la kleptomanie’: When I can grab some silk, then I am just as if I were drunk. I tremble, although not from fear because the sordidness of what I have just done does not occur to me at all; I only think of one thing: to go into a corner where I can rustle it at my ease, which gives me voluptuous sensations even stronger than those I feel with the father of my children. (Dupouy 1905, p. 413)

Like the account from Dubuisson’s interview with the ‘very respectable provincial lady’, we find another reference to the feeling of being intoxicated. However, this woman cited by Dupouy described the erotic pleasure she derived from stealing and fondling silk for sexual gratification, a carnal pleasure had in an almost hallucinogenic state, nearly identical to the experiences recounted from the patients studied and diagnosed by de

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Clérambault. This type of erotomania is depicted in the 1996 French film ‘Le Cri de la Soie’ (The Cry of Silk) directed by Yvon Marciano and in the 1998 novel The Tiller of Waters by Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat.5 In Marciano’s film, Dr. Gabriel de Villemer, the central character based upon de Clérambault, is shown studying silk fabrics through photographs and small pleated samples.6 He meets a beautiful young seamstress after she has been arrested for stealing silk from a Parisian department store. He interviews her and studies his new patient’s obsession with the luxurious fabric before bringing her back to the scene of the crime to see if she will succumb again. After leaving her unsupervised, Dr. de Villemer finds the seamstress on the showroom floor, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, with the silk beneath her skirt, writhing in pleasure. In novel The Tiller of Waters, Barakat, summarizes de Clérambault’s theories on women with silk erotomania as the narrator finds out his mother (Athena) suffers from this condition. The narrator, named Niqula Mitri, speaks from the end of the story after both parents are dead and his love interest has fled. Niqula runs to his father’s old cloth shop for shelter during the Lebanese civil war to find it looted and half-demolished. The bombed-out textile store provokes fabric-filled, layered memories. With Proustian jumps between childhood and adolescent memories, tales from his father’s time, historic anthropology in the Middle East, and fearful wartime hallucinations, the narrator uses textiles to thematically fold together these reminiscences. Niqula remembers his father telling him, “There are women of silk … your mother … she is a woman of silk. When you’re older, you will understand” (Barakat 2001, p.  3). His mother’s American music tutor, whom the narrator has seen her kiss, comes to tell his father that this problem the woman they both love is suffering from has been written about by Dr. de Clérambault (Barakat 2001, pp. 159–61). Demonstrating Barakat’s research on de Clérambault, the music teacher describes an attack: Before she steals silk, a woman with a condition like Athena’s gets a sharp cramping in her abdomen, at once agonizing and pleasurable, and always out of her control. Her eyes become glazed with a layer of pain- it is pain and pleasure together when she sees silk, a great robe of silk, but she craves just a little piece of it. […] She doesn’t have the strength to rip silk because she hears its scream … all of these women speak about the cry of silk, and none can bear it. […] They do hear the cry of silk, its voices, when they

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finger and hold it, even when they approach it, as if they do not understand what it is, as if it is not fabric made of thread… (Barakat 2001, p. 161)

This silk erotomania permeates not only visually and haptically, but aurally as well. These senses naturally lead one to another, as Gen Doy explains in her book on drapery, when one can hear a fabric making sounds, “the stimulus to approach and touch becomes even stronger” (Doy 2002, p.  60). Just as the scene Barakat’s character recounts, de Clérambault noted his patients reported that silk seemed to cry out to them creating an irresistible desire to touch it. Silk’s sound, albeit not usually described as a cry, is audible even to those not suffering from this ‘silk erotomania’. Some shoppers would fold silk fabric onto itself to rub it, listening for a certain sound to indicate its quality. In Au Bonheur des Dames, the humble young shop girl Denise feels uncomfortable in her silk dress (the uniform for workers in the ready-­ made department) because of the sound it makes (Zola [1883] 1992, pp. 79, 122). As Zola writes, “When she went downstairs again, dressed up, uncomfortable, she looked at the shining skirt, feeling ashamed of the noisy rustling of the silk” (p.  79). As opposed to the girls in the other departments who wore wool, the silk-clad workers had scandalous reputations, affirming de Clérambault’s idea (and a not uncommon social perception) that wearing silk excites sexual desire in women (Shera 2009, p. 161). According to Shera, de Clérambault’s “principle diagnosis was that it [silk erotomania] had developed from their disenchantment with heterosexual, penetrative coitus” (2009, p.  167). Though de Clérambault insisted that inordinate desire for and pleasure from silk was a feminine illness, Barakat’s fictional male narrator (Niqula) and the composer Richard Wagner display some of these symptoms (Apter 1991, pp. 99–123, 106–107; Doy 2002; Shera 2009, p.  162). However, far from seeking their pleasure in the public space of a department store, both of these men sought silk in private. Niqula reminisces that he, like de Clérambault’s patients, would rub the fabrics and listen to them (Barakat 2001, p. 38). Hiding inside his father’s abandoned textile shop, he says that ‘spurred on by an irresistible ecstasy’ he would unfurl long swathes of cloth and strip naked before enveloping himself in them: “I would spend an entire night shrouded in each one. I would breathe in its fragrance and hear its rustle from inside; I would press it against my skin, against every part of my body” (p.  35). However, instead of deriving erotic pleasure from this

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contact, Niqula says he was attempting to ‘resuscitate’ or ‘re-read’ his past, activating dormant memories held in each textile. Wagner’s alibi for his own excessive need to have silk pressed upon his skin was to assuage the symptoms of his erysipelas.7 One of Wagner’s close friends, Ferdinand Praeger, insisted that it was the physical suffering of this skin disease that caused the composer to be infamously cantankerous and ill-tempered (1892, p. 251). Praeger defended his composer friend’s prodigious use of silk: “Wagner could not endure the touch of cotton, as it produced a shuddering sensation throughout the body that distressed him”. Praeger also recalled a London tailor who was shocked to hear Wagner’s insistence that his entire order, including the unseen elements like the sleeve linings and the back of a vest, be made of silk (1892, p. 252). All of this would seem to support the idea that Wagner’s silk obsession was a practical solution to a medical need. However, in private correspondence, Wagner took pains to sketch and describe specific details of the colours and trimmings for his commissioned silk robes, trousers, and underpants. A letter to his dressmaker reveals that Wagner was quite particular about the exact shades of his silks: “Do not confound No. 2, the dark pink, with the old violet pink, which is not what I mean, but real pink, only very dark and fiery” (Finck [1901] 2004, p. 193). In his 1901 book on Wagner, Henry Theophilus Finck suggested that even beyond aiding his skin sensitivity, Wagner’s silks and their varied colours helped to inspire his creative work ([1901] 2004, p. 194). Finck repeats a “[r]umor […] that he altered the color of his surroundings and dress in accordance with the nature of the operatic scene he was at work upon,” and then explains how unsurprising this should be: “Moreover, a psychologist would expect that a man who had an ear for delicate shades of orchestral sounds such as no mortal ever had, would be correspondingly refined and dainty in his color perceptions […]” ([1901] 2004, p. 195). This synaesthetic intimation—that one could hear colour—is central to Wagner’s conception of Gesamtkunstwerk and it is not unlike the German writer Thomas Mann’s comment that one could not “fail to notice the rustle of satin in Wagner’s work” (Millington 2012, p. 148). Though the veracity of Finck’s repeated rumour is suspect—that Wagner changed his décor and dress according to what he was writing/composing—it is true that in addition to ordering satin curtains and valences for his Munich home, he also had his walls and ceilings lined in silk and satin (Millington 2012, p. 151).

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As Wagner wrote in his autobiography, even from a young age, he was excited by fabrics.8 More specifically he said, “the more delicate costumes of my sisters that exerted a more stirring effect on my imagination: just touching these objects could cause my heart to beat wildly” (Millington 2012, p. 13). Immediately following this admission, Wagner commented that the feminine environment in which he was raised must have affected his temperament. Correspondence from 1869–1874 shows that Wagner was ordering women’s velvet cloaks and satin-bodiced dresses and undergowns for himself (Millington 2012, p. 155; Dreyfus 2010, p. 34). Wagner himself associated his silk obsession with femininity, and, to those who saw him as morally deficient, these habits were counted as evidence of mental illness (Nietzsche 2000, p. 622). Evidence suggests that his want for silk satins went far beyond its functionality, though his claims that wearing silk stimulated his creative processes does complicate the attempted differentiation between purpose, pleasure, or perversion, and any line drawn here would be somewhat artificial. Though Wagner’s eccentric commissioning of silk was conducted through private correspondence—as was typical in the era before department stores, especially for wealthy or famous clients—he was outed, much to his embarrassment, when sixteen letters to his dressmaker were published in the Neue Freie Press after being sold in 1877 (Millington 2012, pp. 148–53). Wagner was mocked for his fetishization of silk fabrics, and the music he composed while swathed in pink satins was said to incite erotic hysteria and to contribute to the moral degradation of society. Musicologist Laurence Dreyfus examines the different ways Wagner’s music and the man himself were considered to be diseased, infected with a ‘nauseating sexuality’ that would condemn him as a degenerate.9 In this era when the pathologizing of behaviours was rampant—manias and phobias at every turn—de Clérambault also called his patients degenerates. Shera traces the prevalence of this term back to the 1892 study by Max Nordau, Degeneration, where he considered degeneracy a thoroughly modern epidemic owing to the corrupting influence of urbanization, noting particularly the role of department stores (2009, p. 170). Along with women from a range of social classes, several male artists and writers— including Zola himself—were accused of being degenerate. For Wagner, as well as de Clérambault’s patients, erotic longings for silk were diagnosed as symptoms of a disease of desire. But according to de Clérambault, at least in his examination of his female patients, these intense desires did not constitute a ‘true’ fetish, but merely its shadow

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([1908] 1997, pp.  71–72). De Clérambault made a differentiation between female erotomania and male fetishism that is shot through with misogyny, as argued by scholars Emily Apter, Joan Copjec, Gen Doy, and Peta Allen Shera, but the distinction of what exactly drew the desire for silk is important. De Clérambault’s patients were not using silk to simulate the sexual pleasure of a partner, but rather for the stimulus of the silk itself. In his 1908 paper Passion érotique des étoffes chez la femme, de Clérambault claims his patients’ silk erotomania is a ‘shadow’ of fetishism, but it is not ‘the real thing’; it is not the same as male fabric fetishism ([1908] 1997, pp. 71–72). According to de Clérambault, men use fabric such as velvet or fur as a substitute for the missing lover, whereas these women use silk for physical pleasure without the visualization of it standing in for something missing. His female patients do not fantasize about anything other than the silk itself—its gleam, its touch, its sound, its smell. This, then, is not a ‘true’ fetishism because the cloth is not a representation, substitute, or symbol of someone or something as it is, for example, for Peter Stallybrass when he writes about wearing the jacket of his deceased friend: “I was inhabited by his presence, taken over. If I wore the jacket, Allon wore me. He was there […]” (Stallybrass 1993, p. 36). However, we see in the case of Wagner especially, that finding erotic stimulation in silk in a way that is not strictly a ‘true’ fetish is not confined to the female gender. The misogynistic practices and philosophies of psychiatrists at the turn of the twentieth century are well known and de Clérambault’s study of silk erotomania can be counted among them. By ordering bespoke silk garments privately through correspondence, Wagner should have been shielded from his shame. Instead, his unruly desire for silk became scandalously public like the women who were caught satisfying their longings in the department store. The atmosphere of The Ladies’ Paradise (and the stores it was based on) presented such temptation, through visual displays, alluring fragrances, intriguing sounds, and invited caresses; extremely private behaviours were happening in public. At the far end of the spectrum there were de Clérambault’s ‘silk erotomaniacs’ who could not resist silk crying out to them and took it for their own sexual pleasure. Yet even typical customers’ shopping experiences had been transformed as well. At the department store they were encouraged to interact with goods in an intimate way, engaging their senses and abandoning reason—the mind/body dualism ever-present in the marketing language of tempting customers.

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This is what Zola’s imagery recounts—the sensorial relationship to silk that entices customers and makes employees like the young, chaste, Denise, blush. In addition to the pleasure of the shoppers, there is pleasure for the reader in Zola’s lush and sensual descriptions. The painter Edgar Degas sought to amplify this sensorial pleasure for the reader when he suggested to a friend in publishing that Zola’s novel should be published with small fabric samples so that readers could touch as they read along (Doy 2002, p. 78). The reader would consume the luxurious textiles in private while fictional visitors to The Ladies’ Paradise would, tempted by ostentatious and enticing displays, synchronously begin to stroke the fabrics. Zola’s reader can imagine the sensorial effects of the fabrics as he describes the blinding reflective surfaces, the rustling sounds, and the various degrees of smoothness in the touch of the silks. Based on his own observations of Le Bon Marché and Les Grands Magasins du Louvre, Zola’s portrayal of The Ladies’ Paradise gives us a glimpse at how shopping was, in the late nineteenth century, a deliberately provocative experience, meant to appeal to women through the senses.

Notes 1. A filmed based on de Clérambault’s life is named after this phrase, Yvon Marciano, Le Cri de la Soie, 1996. 2. I use the term ‘erotomania’ or, at times, more specifically ‘silk erotomania’ following Peta Allen Shera’s etymological synthesis of de Clérambault’s phrases ‘délire du toucher’ and ‘passion de la soie’. 3. Emile Zola, Notes for Au Bonheur des dames. Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris. Manuscrits Fonds Français: NAF 10278, p.  201. Quoted in Miller 167, note 2. 4. De Clérambault was a sort of collector of mental disease—he did not seek to cure, but to collect the erotic sufferings of his patients. Elisabeth Roudinesco suggests he prioritized proving his theories through scrutinizing observation over trying to help the patient. She also discusses his ‘insane love’ for fabrics and mannequins, his blindness, and his strange suicide. Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985. Trans. Jeffery Mehlman. London: Free Association Books, 1990, 105–108. 5. ‘Le Cri de la Soie’ (‘The Cry of Silk’) directed by Yvon Marciano, written by Yvon Marciano and Jean-François Goyet (France, Belgium), 1996; Hoda Barakat. The Tiller of Waters. Trans. Marilyn Booth (Cairo, New York: The American University in Cairo Press), 2001. The novel was written in 1998 and after winning the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature (2000) for

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the ‘best contemporary novel published in Arabic (but not yet in English) [was] subsequently translated and published in an English-language edition by the AUC [American University Press] in Cairo, New  York, and London.’ See: http://www.aucpress.com/t-­nmmdescription. aspx?template=template_naguibmahfouz. 6. The samples appear to be silks by Mariano Fortuny. I have found no evidence confirming or denying that de Clérambault studied Fortuny’s silks, but the pleated samples indicative of Fortuny’s pleated Delphos gown, were not created by Fortuny until the year after de Clérambault’s first paper on the subject was published in 1908. 7. I am grateful for Dan Elphick for introducing me to this issue and to Barry Millington for further information. 8. Wagner says he ‘applied himself with great enthusiasm in the production of costumes’. Richard Wagner. My Life. Trans. Andrew Grey. Ed. Mary Whittall (Cambridge), 1983, 13–14; quoted in Ibid. 13. 9. Nietzsche used this phrase in a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, 20 Oct. 1888 Quoted from: ‘Friedrich Nietzsche. Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. (Berlin 1981), vol. III.6, 330 and vol. III.5, 458–459. See the chapter, ‘Pathologies’ in Dreyfus 117–174. See also: Thomas S. Grey. ‘Wagner the Degenerate: Fin de Siècle Cultural “Pathology” and the Anxiety of Modernism’. Nineteenth Century Studies 16 (2002), 73–92.

Works Cited Abelson, Elaine S. “The Invention of Kleptomania.” Signs, vol. 15, no. 1, 1989, pp. 123–143. Apter, Emily. Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Bowlby, Rachel. Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. New York and London: Methuen, 1985. Doy, Gen. Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002. Dreyfus, Laurence. Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2010. Dupouy, Roger. “De la kleptomanie.” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, vol. 2, 1905, pp. 404–26. Finck, Henry Theophilus. Wagner and His Works: The Critical Story of His Life with Critical Comments. Vol. II.  Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2004 facsimile of 1901 edition.

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Howes, David and Constance Classen. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Sense in Society. London: Routledge, 2014. Howes, David. “Hyperesthesia, or, the sensual logic of late capitalism.” In Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005, pp. 281–303 Killerby, Catherine Koveski. Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Miller, Michael B. The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Millington, Barry. Richard Wagner: The Sorcerer of Bayreuth. London: Thames & Hudson, 2012. O’Brien, Patricia. “The Kleptomania Diagnosis: Bourgeois Women and Theft in Late Nineteenth-Century France.” Journal of Social History, vol. 17, no. 1, 1983, pp. 65–77. Praeger, Ferdinand. Wagner as I Knew Him. London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1892. Shera, Peta Allen. “Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire: Rereading Clérambault’s Study of ‘Silk Erotomania’.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 18, no. 1, 2009, pp. 158–179. Stallybrass, Peter. “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things.” The Yale Review, vol. 81, no. 2, 1993, pp. 35–50. Wagner, Richard. Dichtungen und Schriften: Jubiläumsausgabe. ed. Dieter Borchmeyer, 10 vols. Bayreuth, 1983. Whitlock, Tammy. “Gender, Medicine, and Consumer Culture in Victorian England: Creating the Kleptomaniac.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 1999, pp. 413–437. Zola, Émile. The Ladies’ Paradise. 1883; Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

CHAPTER 7

“Behind the Scenes of a Retail Shop”: Sensory Experiences of Living-In, c. 1880s–1920s Alison Moulds

[W]ho ever thinks of trying to penetrate behind the scenes of a retail shop, and inspect the rooms where the assistants sleep or have their meals? (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, p. 490)

In 1892, the medical journal the Lancet did just that. Its “Sanitation in the Shop” inquiry exposed the deprivations and degradations faced by those working in the retail industry in Britain. The inquiry’s findings were reported across two leading articles, which ran over two issues. In evocative and, at times, sensationalist language, they framed shop-life as a public health crisis and the harbinger of “physical degeneration” among shop assistants (“Report of the Lancet: Part II” 1892, p. 602). Since the inquiry appeared without authorial attribution, its warnings seemed to emanate from the journal’s editorial voice. “Over-worked, under-paid, and under-fed during the day, the shop assistant is scarcely more fortunate at night,” the Lancet’s first article

A. Moulds (*) Independent Scholar, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_7

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lamented (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, p. 491). While detailing the physically and mentally demanding nature of retail labour, the inquiry also sought to shed light on the less visible aspects of shop-life, as the opening quotation suggests. These articles depicted the unsanitary nature of assistants’ dining-rooms and dormitories, describing how workers had to consume “foul” water and eat in rooms where the “odour of drains” pervaded, and how they were “crammed” in poorly ventilated bedrooms at night (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, pp. 490-1). Such sensory descriptions created a vibrant picture of the embodied and affective experiences of shop-life, arousing readers’ pity and disgust for the plight of retail workers. In the late nineteenth century, retail work was sometimes seen as a genteel and even glamorous occupation, one that offered the prospect of upward social mobility for working-class and lower-middle-class men and women. However, the industry’s working and living conditions were subject to increasing scrutiny and were sometimes presented as injurious to assistants’ physical, mental, and moral health. These concerns overlap and interweave in the Lancet inquiry. For much of the Victorian period, debates about reforming shop labour had centred on the long working hours. This was the focus of campaigning groups such as the Early Closing Association (formed in the early 1840s), the Shop Hours Labour League (instituted in 1881), and the National Union of Shop Assistants, which formed in 1891, when 11 shop assistants’ organisations from around the country merged. There was gradual legislative reform—the 1886 Shop Hours Act limited the number of working hours to 74 per week for under-­ 18s, with further acts passed in the 1890s. Many campaigners remained dissatisfied with the limitations of this legislation, but frustration increasingly turned to other issues as well, including the living conditions of shop workers. Under the “living-in” system, employers provided shop assistants with board and lodging (in lieu of part of their salary) either “on-site” in the shop premises or in nearby accommodation. The practice of living-in had its roots in the apprenticeship system (Departmental Committee 1908, Report, vol. 1, p. 68). While learning their trade from an established shopkeeper, teenage boys had traditionally lived with their master’s family. By the close of the nineteenth century, apprenticeships were declining in retail, but living-in continued, particularly in the drapery and grocery trades. With the expansion of consumer culture, larger stores became mass employers of men and women. In these shops, employers usually no

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longer lived on the premises, but a larger-scale (sometimes compulsory) living-­in system developed, with “an institutional form of life” (Whitaker 1973, p. 8). There were regional differences, however; while living-in was widespread in London and Wales, it was practically “unknown” in Scotland (Departmental Committee 1908, Report, vol. 1, p. 68). Scholarship on retail work in this period has traditionally focused on legislative reform, philanthropic campaigns, and the trade union movement. Within this, socio-economic historians have pointed to the privations of living-in, representing it as an extension of the demands of shop labour (Whitaker 1973, p. 9). More recently, cultural historians and literary scholars have considered how debates about living-in intertwined with anxieties about gender and sexuality (Hosgood 1999, Sanders 2006, Mullin 2016). Thus far, little sustained attention has been paid to the sensory or affective experience of living-in, however. In recent decades, there has been growing scholarly interest in “the sensory world” of the shop, as this edited collection testifies, but this has largely focused on the department store’s visual and tactile appeal to middle-class consumers (Classen 2012, p. 196). As the Lancet inquiry illustrates, however, there was also considerable debate about the sensory environments experienced by shop assistants themselves. The dormitories of shop workers can profitably be understood as one example of a “peripheral” domestic or living space (Cuming 2016, p. 1). Over the last decade, historians and literary scholars have turned their attention to non-normative or non-dominant residential settings to probe conceptions of home and identity popularised in the Victorian period. Emily Cuming, for example, challenges the “enduring cultural trope” that “interior domestic space reflects and expresses the life of its occupant” (2016, p. 6), while Jane Hamlett investigates domesticity in institutional settings through the relationship between space and material culture, to consider questions of privacy and agency (2015). Paula Hamilton’s research into the sensory landscape of domestic servants, meanwhile, reveals “shifting boundaries and understandings of privacy” and the “construction of individual subjectivities” (2017, p. 208). The constellation of issues illuminated by these scholars of the home—which coalesce around space and materiality; gender and class; privacy and autonomy—have all informed my thinking. This chapter uses the Lancet’s “Sanitation in the Shop” campaign as a lens through which to examine how the sensory experience of “living-in” in the retail industry was represented in the late nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries. Across a range of textual sources—from popular fiction and periodicals to campaigning pamphlets and parliamentary papers— the sensory deprivations and onslaughts of living-in emerged as common representational strategies. For some commentators, such as the Lancet investigators, the sanitary and the sensory intermingled, while literary texts and protest writing interrogated further how the sensory and emotional aspects of living-in were entangled. As I have intimated, campaigners often sought to arouse the pity and even revulsion of readers, hoping indignation would turn to protest. Meanwhile, those who defended the system portrayed its comforts, pleasures, and even luxuries.

Living Spaces and Material Culture The Lancet’s inquiry transported its readers from the more familiar spaces of retail (the shop floor) to unfamiliar spaces (the dining-rooms and dormitories). In doing so, it vividly described the privations of inadequate accommodation, suggesting that assistants slept in overcrowded and uncongenial rooms, lacking even basic material comforts: Shop assistants have no residence, no home, but merely a room at the top of the house—sometimes a mere attic,—where as many beds as possible are crammed in together. Here the shop assistant may throw himself wearily down and snatch a few hours’ sleep; but this bare, fireless, overcrowded room is no home to him. (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, p. 491)

This pitiable portrait of live-in accommodation evoked sensory and affective deprivations, eliciting concern for the assistant who had nothing to look at in this “bare” room and who felt no warmth or comfort in this “fireless” space. Lacking any of the typical signifiers of domesticity (at least to middle-class audiences), the room did not function as a “home.” The journal presented an even more claustrophobic image of living-in when it described how some assistants were denied a dedicated or separate space for sleeping and were instead “expected to sleep in the shop under the counter” (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, p. 491). The investigators supplemented their own observations with anecdotal evidence gathered during the course of their inquiry. The articles featured claims from a teenage apprentice that, in her former place of work, the assistants’ bedsheets were only changed once every three months. There were also allegations that one draper “screwed down” the window of the

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room in which his female shop assistants slept. This was apparently to prevent the women communicating with men outside but also restricted ventilation and thus “the room is never aired” (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, p. 491). Here, the impoverished sensory experience is a by-product or component of moral surveillance; the fastened windows function as both a deterrent and a punishment. In these descriptions of airless rooms and dirty sheets, sanitary, sensory and moral considerations are combined for sensational effect. There was something almost prurient about the Lancet’s promise to “penetrate behind the scenes” of the shop, and some readers may have turned to these intimate descriptions of shop-life (and the experiences of young shop-girls) for titillation or arousal. Within the Lancet, the “Sanitation in the Shop” inquiry formed part of a broader concern for the living conditions of the working classes and non-normative residential spaces, however. Elsewhere, for instance, the journal expressed anxiety about the privations faced by live-in domestic servants. Focusing on those based in modern flats, one piece described workers sleeping in rooms “almost in darkness,” which were “very imperfectly ventilated”—images which recall the depiction of shop assistants’ dormitories (“The Housing of Domestic Servants” 1905, p.  546). In another piece, concern was explicitly tempered with class-based expectations about living conditions, however. This earlier article reasoned that it would be “folly to think of obliterating entirely the distinctions of privilege which belong to the position of a master or a mistress” (“Servants’ Accommodation” 1892, p.  1059). By contrast, the “Sanitation in the Shop” inquiry showed less regard for employers, whom it termed “petty tradesmen,” guilty of “[i]gnorance” or “indifference” in their treatment of live-in employees (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, p. 491). This divergent attitude perhaps indicates that shop owners were less highly esteemed than the employers of domestic servants, or it may reflect the fact the articles were written by different authors with different concerns (all these pieces appeared anonymously). The Lancet inquiry was not without sympathy for shop owners, however. It conceded that there were “some large establishments where great care is taken of the assistants” and where “[t]hey are provided with many comforts, and even with some luxuries” (“Report of the Lancet: Part II” 1892, p. 602). In the cultural imagination, retail work was associated with both glamour and deprivation. This is encapsulated in Émile Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), discussed by Wendy Ligon Smith in the previous chapter. Zola’s book was immediately translated

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into English, inaugurating a vogue for shop-girl fiction in Britain (Mullin 2016, p. 130). The heroine, Denise Baudu, lives in the attic above a grand department store owned by Octave Mouret. The reader is treated to a sumptuous and riotous description of Mouret’s shop, which “blazed forth in the rays of bright sunshine,” bringing the “hubbub of a fairground” and an “orgy of colour” to the street. Particularly replete with sensory pleasures is the “oriental hall,” a “sumptuous pasha’s tent” with “beautiful burnt hue[s]” and a “strong odour” (Zola [1883] 2008, pp.  86, 88). Mouret’s strategic assault upon the senses carries a distinctly exoticised and sexualised appeal, designed to exhilarate and entice his (mostly female) customers. After being conducted through these richly sensuous settings, the reader is introduced to the shop assistants’ living space. Denise’s room is “a narrow cell,” sparsely (but not insufficiently) furnished, leading off a “convent-like corridor” (Zola [1883] 2008, p. 88). The contrast between the store’s eroticised displays and the ascetic accommodation is particularly striking. The dormitory implicitly seems to function as a tonic or cleanser, sanitising the female shop assistant after her intimate contact with the heady temptations of the shop floor. Unlike most shop-girls (who shared bedrooms), Denise has her own private space. Though meagre, this room provides a “refuge” where she can “give way to tears” after an overwhelming day on the shop floor (Zola [1883] 2008, p. 123). In delineating his concept of emotional regimes, William Reddy argues that an “emotional refuge” offers a “safe release from prevailing emotional norms” and a “relaxation of emotional effort” (2001, p. 129). For Denise, however, this partial refuge from the demanding regime of the shop is stymied by the room’s assault upon the senses. Plagued by a “terrible coldness,” the heroine has to sleep under piles of clothes and, when she does release her emotions, she must “cry under the blanket so that her face didn’t get chapped from the frost” (Zola [1883] 2008, p. 123). In this scene, the room’s sterility is once again a marked departure from the visual and tactile splendours of the shop floor, with its warmth and colour. Images of forlorn bedrooms were common in contemporary literature about retail work. Cicely Hamilton’s play Diana of Dobson’s—first performed in 1908—opens in the dormitory of a fictional suburban establishment, Dobson’s Drapery Emporium. In the stage directions, the set is described as a “bare room” with “[v]ery little furniture” and “everything plain and comfortless to the last degree.” When the titular protagonist rails against the “[g]rind and squalor and tyranny and overwork” of

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shop-­life, she expresses her disdain for the “stuffy dormitory” with its set of house rules (Hamilton [1908] 1991, pp. 35, 38, 40). As with Zola’s heroine, the dormitory functions as something of a refuge for Diana—it is both a space where she can voice her protests and one where she is constrained. The way in which shop assistants could interact with their accommodation was often regulated by their employers, as depicted in Hamilton’s play. The Lancet inquiry described how assistants were discouraged or prevented from accessing their dormitories in the evenings and on Sundays. Further, even where they could visit their rooms, they often had “no fire or furniture” to comfort them (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, p. 491). Rules and regulations for live-in employees proscribed not only when and how assistants could access their dormitories, but the extent to which they could decorate or personalise these spaces. In an article for The Economic Journal in 1899, trade union activist Margaret Bondfield shared a “typical” set of House Rules for a place of business where assistants lived-in. Aside from restrictions such as a curfew, it was mandated that “[n]o pictures, photos, &c., [were] allowed to disfigure the walls” and “[n]o flowers [were] to be put in water glasses or bottles” (Bondfield 1899, pp. 278-9). These rules imply an impoverished material culture and sensory environment, in which assistants were unable to individualise or adorn their surroundings. The effort to suppress visual and olfactory stimulations (like pictures and flowers) suggests a concern with preserving an austere environment, as though blankness connoted propriety and decoration signified disfigurement or lack of restraint. Bondfield’s article presented a series of anonymous but apparently typical case studies of shop-life and also depicted more uplifting environments. One “high-class drapery and outfitting business” in south-west London included some “dingy and overcrowded” bedrooms but others which were “well ventilated” and “made pretty and homelike by the assistants who occupy them” (Bondfield 1899, p. 279). As Hamlett explores, while the material environment of institutional spaces could be used to control, “decorative acts” presented opportunities for occupants to assert agency, and domesticity could be “a source of pleasure and even empowerment” (2015, pp.  3, 7). These affective responses are implicit in Bondfield’s description of “a middle-class drapery and outfitting business,” in which assistants had use of “a delightfully pleasant sitting-room” containing “a good piano,” newspapers, magazines, and books for those who subscribed to the library fund (Bondfield 1899, p. 282). As with the Lancet’s inquiry,

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this article suggested the standard of living accommodation for retail workers varied widely. Bondfield portrayed the visual culture of bare or decorated bedrooms, the feel of overcrowded or airy spaces, and even evoked the sounds of music being played. In doing so, she foregrounded the sensory aspects of domesticity, inviting readers to consider how far the sights, sounds, and tactility of these environments might create a home for shop workers. By the early twentieth century, living-in had attracted considerable political attention. In 1906, the Home Secretary established the Departmental Committee on the Truck Acts to investigate the operation of legislation which sought to curtail employers paying their workers in goods (“truck”) rather than wages. Living-in formed a significant part of this inquiry. Over two-and-a-half years, the Truck Committee took evidence from employers and shop workers and visited premises with staff accommodation. The Committee’s final report conceded that some rooms “lacked brightness and cheerfulness” and were even “shabby.” However, it suggested that the accommodation was of a similar quality to that which workers might find if they were living outside the shop, in lodgings. Further, it contended that “assistants are drawn from different grades” and “the difference between, say, a West End establishment and an East End establishment corresponds to differences in the homes from which the assistants come” (Departmental Committee 1908, Report, vol. 1, p. 75). The report suggested that variations in living standards replicated what assistants had experienced before or would experience elsewhere, and also elided the differences between spaces of domesticity and work. This conclusion perpetuated inequalities, ignoring the fact that, for many assistants, retail work was aspirational, an occupation which seemed to offer social mobility.

Work, Rest, and Play The system of living-in blurred the spatial and temporal boundaries between work and home or leisure. As I have shown, it entailed sleeping in close proximity to one’s place of work, and was also seen to aggravate the problem of unpaid overtime. Of course, the notion of boundaries between labour and leisure would have been unfamiliar to many workers in this period, from domestic servants and boarding school teachers to agricultural labourers. Nevertheless, ideas of “work-life balance”—as it would now be termed—were being constructed at this time. In the

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medical and cultural imagination, a lack of separation between labour and leisure or rest was presented as a threat to both health and happiness. This idea was powerfully conveyed through images of emotional and sensory claustrophobia. Some of the most sensationalist warnings came from barrister Thomas Sutherst, President of the Shop Hours Labour League, in his book Death and Disease Behind the Counter (1884). In this wide-ranging critique of the retail industry, he alleged that the “vicious system” of shop work “extinguishe[d] all the energies, both mental and physical.” As a result, young people’s “sensibilities are deadened” and “their natural development completely arrested” (Sutherst 1884, p. 17). Sutherst’s pitiable portraits of attenuated workers merged images of physical degeneration and mental or emotional ill-health. He claimed that the youth who entered retail “bids adieu to exercise, fresh air, friends, books, and all that makes life worth having” (p. 17). Once again, the material, sensory, and affective deprivations of the shop—signified through the absence of conditions or objects common to middle-class readers—were merged to create pathos. For Sutherst, retail work and living-in not only encroached upon but eroded leisure and liberty. In a particularly striking image, Sutherst characterised shop-life as being “simply from bed to work and work to bed the year round” (p. 10). This sense of claustrophobia resonated with the Lancet inquiry, which cited Sutherst’s book. Borrowing his imagery, one article complained that, for live-in workers, “[t]here is no time for reading or self-culture; it means practically life from bed to the counter and from the counter back to bed” (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, p. 491). Like Sutherst, the inquiry sought to counteract popular images of dissipated shop workers who enjoyed “vulgar” past-times. Both texts instead substituted portraits of physical and mental self-improvement, suggesting that the relentless nature of shop work and shop-life precluded such opportunities. Other campaigners engaged directly with popular perceptions of debauched shop workers. In The Counter Exposed (1896), Will Anderson recalled his time as a live-in shop assistant at a grocer’s in Kent. He recalled one miserable night where he came home to find that the teenage apprentice had “fallen down in a drunken fit, and vomited in the place where he lay” (Anderson 1896, pp.  40-1). This image highlighted the lack of domestic care for a vulnerable young man, challenging the argument made by some that living-in offered supervision and moral surveillance. What followed this incident was a night of intense “loneliness” for all the

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shop workers: “so miserable were we, we hardly trusted ourselves to speak; or speaking our voices sounded hollow and strange, as if the springs of hope and young life had dried up in our hearts” (pp. 41-2). An otherwise grotesque vignette is subverted into a haunting episode, where silence connotes the bereft feelings of the workers. Anderson was keenly aware of the moralising commentary about shop assistants and was quick to point out that it was not a lack of supervision but rather the “grinding monotony” and “continual cheerless work” that invited dissipation: “shut men out from all the refining elements of life, and they use their bodies—soul and sense—to precipitate themselves into ruin” (Anderson 1896, pp. 38-9). He used a vivid tableau of debauchery not to castigate the morality of the workers, but rather the injustices of the system, and its lack of emotional fulfilment. Although the culture of “long hours and overwork” had induced feelings of “stupor” in Anderson, he claimed that the “utter homelessness” of the above scene nevertheless “shot a pang through [his] heart” (p.  40). These sensitive descriptions ascribed humanity to shop workers, challenging class-based assumptions about their supposed lack of refinement. Anderson also discussed more typically wholesome pursuits, including the elevating role played by walking clubs, evening entertainments, and cycling. As the recurrent images of self-improvement suggest, some commentators remained troubled by how shop assistants used their free time. Despite its sympathies for retail workers, the Lancet did not necessarily advocate unfettered leisure for this group. In 1907, when the National Union of Shop Assistants resolved to abolish living-in, the journal suggested this went too far. This article announced that the system had “something to be said in its favour as well as against it.” Here, the journal called for the regulation (rather than abolition) of the system, to curtail its “sanitary defects.” This piece insisted upon the importance of “wholesome sleeping quarters and food” and called for “reasonable liberty for those who now are deprived of [it].” It added that employers should “find no sympathy” if they “curtail[ed] their [workers’] liberty to such an extent as to injure their health, or even to deprive them of reasonable enjoyment.” Yet the repetition of the caveat “reasonable” reveals the anxiety that greater freedoms would lead to licentiousness. The moralising undercurrent is apparent in the claim that the food and dormitories should be “wholesome” (not necessarily homelike or pleasurable). Moreover, the article endorsed the idea that employers should be able to extend their “supervision and control […] beyond the duration of the working day,” implying it was

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they—rather than the workers—who should determine what enjoyments might “reasonably” be undertaken (“Shop Assistants and Living In” 1907, p. 1310). The Lancet clearly oscillated in its response between the “Sanitation in the Shop” inquiry and this piece, a shift in tone which may be attributed to changes in authorship (both pieces appeared without attribution), though the journal remained under the same editor (Thomas Wakley junior). The journal’s equivocations reveal the wide-ranging implications of living-in, which was seen to combine questions of sanitation, morality, and wellbeing. Elsewhere, the journal campaigned more enthusiastically for leisure and respite for workers. In 1929, it featured correspondence from the committee of the Factory Girls’ Country Hospital Fund. This group was apparently convinced the journal would share its “sympathy with factory girls in need of a holiday.” Indeed, the letter noted the Lancet had already earned the “sincere gratitude” of the girls for its previous support. The Fund’s correspondents described the affective and sensory pleasures of a summer holiday, from “a breath of air on the hills” to “a picnic tea under the shade of the trees.” They invited readers to imagine the “bitter disappointment” facing girls who would lose a holiday without supplementary financial support (Sandwich et  al. 1929, p.  414). Once again, this piece focused on wholesome pleasures and outdoor pursuits, while evoking paternalistic images of stewardship towards grateful and buoyant young women, in an effort to arouse the attention and sympathy of potential donors. The affective and sensory pleasures of leisure time and holidays were also ubiquitous in representations of shop workers. In his novel The Odd Women (1893), George Gissing depicts the struggles of Monica Madden, who works and lives in a drapery establishment in Walworth Road, London. When she leaves “the big ugly ‘establishment’ [of the drapery shop], her heart beat cheerfully, and a smile fluttered about her lips.” Though tired and sickly, she finds her “head was better for the fresh air, and the movement” (Gissing [1893] 2008, p. 32, pp. 34-5). Being away from her place of work and her accommodation brings physical and emotional respite. In Dorothy Whipple’s High Wages (1930)—set in the 1910s—the teenage shop-girl Jane Carter is nourished by her trip to the seaside: “In the radiance and the silence, she ran on the vast expanse of hard, smooth sand, beside herself with joy.” In a moment of free indirect discourse, the narrator notes, “when you only have a holiday once in a while, what a happiness it is!” (Whipple [1930] 2016, p.  173). Both

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Monica and Jane are uplifted through being outside and exposed to new or different sensory stimulants. Away from the claustrophobic confines of the shop or the urban environment, they can breathe and move more freely, displaying embodied responses to sensory gratifications. The escapism associated with the shop worker’s holiday is the subject of H.G. Wells’ novel The Wheels of Chance (1896). Wells had direct experience of retail, having been apprenticed to the drapery trade as an adolescent, and he wrote several novels about shop-life. The Wheels of Chance follows Mr Hoopdriver, a draper’s assistant, on an eagerly anticipated cycling holiday. The narrator reflects, Only those who toil six long days out of the seven, and all the year round, save for one brief glorious fortnight or ten days in the summer time, know the exquisite sensations of the First Holiday Morning. (Wells 1896, p. 20)

These “exquisite sensations” combine acute sensory and affective pleasures. Hoopdriver is transported from “a cheerless, shutter-darkened, wrappered-up shop” to “a deep blue sky, with dazzling piles of white cloud.” He also trades his “black morning coat” to “wear the colour of [his] heart,” exchanging the uniform of retail for his “new brown cycling suit,” his “martyr legs” (the victim of long hours standing) “more than consoled by thick chequered stockings” (pp. 20-1). Hoopdriver’s temporary reprieve from shop work is conveyed through the sensory and embodied gratifications he experiences being outdoors and wearing his own clothes. For Hoopdriver, the holiday is a brief interlude of freedom from shop-­ life, a degradation which constrains his independence and undermines his masculinity. As he tells his new acquaintance Jessie Milton, despite the “respectable” exterior of the shop, “inside you are packed in dormitories like convicts, fed on bread and butter, and bullied like slaves” (Wells 1896, pp. 267-8). At the novel’s close, Hoopdriver returns to his life in the shop, but the narrator suggests that he will be sustained by reminiscing about his holiday: “To-morrow, the early rising, the dusting, and drudgery begin again—but with a difference, with wonderful memories and still more wonderful desires and ambitions” (p. 312). Wells’ later novel The History of Mr Polly (1910) was less optimistic about the emotional world of retail. Here, the eponymous protagonist feels so constrained by shop-life that he decides to burn down his place of business (also his home) and abandon his wife. As a shopkeeper, Mr Polly has more autonomy and independence

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than an assistant, but likewise feels the strain of living where he works (Wells [1910] 2005). Images of the shop worker deprived of pleasurable past-times reached their acme at the fin de siècle and the opening decades of the twentieth century, when the Truck Committee was convened. Among its witnesses was Miss Pettigrew, who ran the boot department at Moore, Taggart & Co., manufacturers and wholesale warehousemen in Glasgow. She argued that it was better for shop-girls to have “outside interests” (beyond their work) and that “being always beside your work and associated with your work, has a very depressing effect upon you.” In portraying the claustrophobic intermingling of work and leisure time, Miss Pettigrew’s rhetoric anticipated present-day discussions of work-life balance. She powerfully expressed her concerns that constant exposure to work would impinge on one’s emotional and mental health. Miss Pettigrew conceded that she had “not experienced” living-in herself, for the system was not used by her employers. Nevertheless, she claimed her comments were based on what she had “heard” and she tapped into popular discourse about the privations of shop-life (Departmental Committee 1908, Minutes of Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 340-1).

Sociability or Seclusion Leisure time and holidays represented opportunities for independence— time and space away not only from one’s work and employer, but also from one’s colleagues. As the images of overcrowded bedrooms imply, living-in often entailed being in close proximity to fellow retail workers, including the olfactory and aural disturbances of communal living. Commentators debated whether shop assistants appreciated the prospect of sociability and companionship, or whether they lacked access to the affective and sensory pleasures of solitude. Questioning the manager of Peter Robinson’s in Oxford Street, the Truck Committee asked whether live-in workers might “lose the advantages of seclusion,” since “they have no time to think.” William Alexander Sergeant, the witness, was dismissive. He claimed that shop assistants did “not want much time to think when they have been in business all day,” though he accepted they sometimes sought “fresh air.” (This concession indicates the elision between fresh air and physical health in the cultural imagination, a shorthand also evident in the above descriptions of shop workers’ holidays (see also Kiechle 2017).) The Truck Committee

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persisted, asking whether employees should have “a life with a greater freedom […] of responsibility, accompanied by seclusion.” Sergeant replied, It seems to me to be rather a new idea that seclusion would be a good thing […] It may be in some cases; there may be a few men who are fond of study and they may not have the opportunities, but as a rule they are not that sort of men at all in our trade. (Departmental Committee 1908, Minutes of Evidence, vol. 3, p. 199)

The Committee constructed solitude as a right or entitlement, but Sergeant resisted this as a peculiarly “modern” notion. Drawing on assumptions about class and gender, he implied that his working-class male employees did not seek contemplation and introspection. The fact that he associated seclusion with study indicates a narrow view of the benefits of solitude, for the Committee presented a vision of a richer and more rewarding personal life, that went beyond the rhetoric of self-­improvement and encompassed “freedom.” Just as the Lancet suggested that employers had the right to determine what enjoyments were “reasonable,” Sergeant implied that he understood what level of solitude his workers required. By contrast, critics of the living-in system portrayed the unpleasant sensations of always being in the company of others. In her evidence to the Truck Committee, Miss Pettigrew insisted she would be “very unhappy” sharing accommodation with “strange girls” and to have “no place of [her] own.” She noted that this would involve “a certain amount of restriction,” since “[i]f you are fond of reading or anything like that it might be a nuisance to somebody else” (Departmental Committee 1908, Minutes of Evidence, vol. 3, p. 341). Miss Pettigrew’s experiences of living-­ out had apparently given her greater freedoms for managing her space and leisure time, and she struggled with the idea of these simple, solitary pleasures being curtailed. The displeasures of constant association with one’s colleagues were also explored in fiction. In W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage (1915), medical student Philip Carey briefly turns to retail work when he finds himself in straitened means. For the middle-class protagonist used to his own lodgings, living-in produces feelings of frustration, disdain, and even revulsion. He soon finds “[t]he sensation of other people sleeping in the room […] inexpressibly irksome,” for he “had been used to solitude.” Thus “to be with others always, never to be by himself for an instant, was

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[…] horrible to him” (Maugham [1915] 1999, p.  517). The classed nature of Philip’s response can be better understood by reading Of Human Bondage alongside Maugham’s autobiographical reflections. In The Summing Up (1938), Maugham remarks, The lack of privacy […] in which the very poor live seems frightful to us who value it; but it does not seem so to the very poor. They hate to be alone; it gives them a sense of security to live in company. (Maugham [1938] 2001, p. 279)

Here, Maugham associates a preference for privacy with the middle classes, while insisting that the “very poor” find affective pleasure in constant companionship. Of course, many living in poverty or reduced circumstances would have had fewer experiences of solitude, but Maugham insisted that differences of temperament were ingrained in the different classes. The use of the words “sensation” and “sense” in Of Human Bondage and The Summing  Up respectively points to the way in which solitude and companionship are characterised not only as affective responses but as embodied feelings. The middle-class interlocutors of Maugham’s imagination seem to physically recoil from the sensory experience of being close to other (working-class) bodies. In High Wages, the genteel heroine Jane finds her transition from living-­in to owning her own shop emotionally rewarding. While working in Chadwick’s drapery store, she must share a “cold bedroom” with her colleague, Maggie Pye. Jane feels “revolted” watching the toilette of her less genteel colleague, whom she finds visually displeasing, “grotesque in curlers.” On her first night living-in, Jane lies in a “strange bed” listening to the “heavy and regular” breathing of this new companion. She feels the “slight, chill January wind” and is distracted by the “upward shining from the pale green lamplight” in the market-place below (Whipple [1930] 2016, pp. 22-4). Her live-in accommodation is a mix of sensory overload and deprivations, as she is assailed by the privations of the cold, bare room; the bright lights from the outside world; and the close proximity of her colleague, whose supposed coarseness is fashioned as an assault upon the senses, visual and auditory. Over the course of the story, Jane proves to be a successful businesswoman and she ascends from shop-girl to independent shop owner, a trajectory of social mobility that characterised many narratives of shop-life. When Jane stands in her own establishment, she finds herself gazing at her

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reflection, “sing[ing] loudly,” and touching the clothes she sells “with loving hands.” This response—melding visual, auditory, and haptic pleasures—situates Jane almost in the role of consumer. She asserts her proprietorship and her individuality—tellingly, the shop bears her own name. Jane reflects that the highlight of independent shopkeeping is “being alone. That’s why I’m so happy” (Whipple [1930] 2016, pp. 192–3). She also finds herself “enchanted” by the decoration of her own flat—before bed she “would switch on the light […] to look again at the ivory walls, the leaf-green paint and the curtains sprigged with magenta.” The visual and material culture of the room bring delight to the heroine and the narrator describes how she sleeps above her shop in “precious solitude” (p. 245). The gulf between living-in and living independently is communicated through Jane’s sensory and affective responses to these markedly different environments. As with Of Human Bondage, the preference for solitude seems to indicate Jane’s genteel status. This was a common refrain in literature of shop-­ life, in which the protagonists are repeatedly distinguished from their colleagues by their gentility and refinement, presumably to make them more sympathetic to middle-class readers. In The Odd Women, Monica avoids her room because of her companions’ coarsening influence: “the usual conversation in the dormitory which she shared with five other young women was so little to her taste that she wished to be asleep when the talkers came up to bed” (Gissing [1893] 2008, p. 31). A similar temperament is associated with the educated, middle-class heroine of Business as Usual (1933). This epistolary novel by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford is a romantic comedy, and thus a firm departure from Gissing’s naturalism. Despite the difference in tone, and being published forty years later, it contains some remarkably similar ideas. The protagonist, Hilary Fane, works as a typist and then in the library of a London department store, which is modelled on Selfridges. She lives out, enjoying greater independence than many other fictional shop-girls. (Selfridges did not use the living-in system, which also waned after the First World War.) Yet Hilary is repeatedly distinguished from her colleagues by her predilection for solitude over companionship. Her supervisors note she “does not make use of the canteen or other social amenities” and request that she tries “to be a bit more sociable.” Hilary rebuffs these suggestions, however, writing in her correspondence that she doesn’t “feel like company” (even when outside of work): “When you work in a firm of fifteen hundred it’s a new idea to be alone” (Oliver and Stafford [1933] 2020, pp. 80, 87, 139).

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Public Health and Consumer Anxieties Why did the plight of retail workers capture the cultural, political, and medical imagination to such an extent, and why did it resonate with middle-­class audiences? Some of the texts discussed were authored by those with direct experience of retail work—such as Bondfield, Wells, and Anderson—whose literary abilities afforded them opportunities to raise awareness of the struggles of shop assistants. The Truck Committee, as I have shown, took evidence from both retail workers and store owners, including those with differing experiences of living-in. Other writers and commentators examined here had more indirect contact with the lives of shop assistants—as customers. In 1912, the Lancet reviewed a book on Shop Slavery and Emancipation, which drew an apparently “dismal picture of the wretched state of the shop assistant under the living-in system.” The reviewer commented that this was important reading, not only for employers but for “the rest of the British people, who are all ‘shoppers’ at one time or another” (“Reviews and Notices” 1912, p. 805). This framed living-in as a topic which merited widespread attention because of the public’s close contact with the world of retail. Concern for shop workers may have stemmed from anxiety about middle-­class customers’ interactions with unhealthy or unclean working-­ class bodies. Some of the novels considered here seem to invite readers to recoil from the grotesque physicality of less genteel or “coarse” shop workers. The interplay between disgust, anxiety, and fear in these passages calls to mind David Trotter’s hypothesis that sanitary literature “sought to control anxiety by turning it back into fear” (2000, p. 50). The Lancet’s “Sanitation in the Shop” inquiry opened by characterising shop assistants as “a large class of workers with whom the public come in daily contact,” creating a picture of unavoidable intimacy. As well as imagining contact between the public and the workers, it also depicted the intermingling of assistants and produce. The articles described how workers at one chemist store had to take their meals “in the midst of drugs and half finished pills” and how assistants in provision stores had to eat leftovers that could not be sold, a practice which allegedly encouraged workers to sell stale food to customers (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, pp. 490-1). Detailing the long hours of overtime at Christmas, the inquiry also described shop assistants falling asleep amid or on top of the produce: “Coffee-bags are, it appears, especially attractive as forming cushions on which a little rest may be obtained” (“Report of the Lancet:

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Part II” 1892, p.  601). The functional or even unpalatable use of these goods by the workers contrasts sharply with images in the cultural imagination of “seductive” commodities luring middle-class shoppers (Classen 2012, p. 195). Rather than dwelling on the unsanitary effects of these bodies and objects intermingling, however, the Lancet’s inquiry largely focused its attention on the privations faced by the workers themselves, bemoaning that the assistants were “unthought of and uncared for” (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, p.  490). Moving beyond their individual experiences, it couched their ill-health in the context of degeneration, suggesting that unhealthy workers would denigrate the national stock: “something in any case must be done to prevent the physical degeneration of the million or so of men and women who in England work as shop assistants” (“Report of the Lancet: Part II” 1892, p. 602). It was especially preoccupied with how this might impact the childbearing capacity of women: Numerous witnesses testify that healthy looking girls come up from the country; but after a couple of years spent in serving behind the shop counter they become pinched and pale. Not only do they suffer, but their offspring suffer after them. (“Report of the Lancet: Part II” 1892, p. 601)

The article catalogued the conditions women retail workers faced, from menstrual issues to varicose veins. While debates about shop workers’ welfare were not limited to women, they were heavily gendered. The Lancet’s arguments suggested that the demands of modern retailing were unsuitable for women, a preconception that novels such as High Wages and Business as Usual sought to overturn, with their more triumphant depictions of successful shop-women who found (higher-class) retail work rewarding. For a medical journal such as the Lancet, this concern for shop workers was part of a broader interest in occupational and public health. The journal’s interests were varied—from the accommodation of domestic servants and the holidays of factory girls (as I have shown), to the mortality of dock labourers (“Occupational Mortality” 1924, p.  405). In the 1850s, the Lancet commissioned an in-depth inquiry into food adulteration, showing how commercial practices risked customers’ health. Sally Frampton argues that the Lancet’s then-editor, Thomas Wakley, “shrewdly spotted a way to market the Lancet as a trailblazing organ in public health innovation” (2020, p. 317). By focusing on social and sanitary issues that concerned

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the wider population, the Lancet styled itself as a source of medico-moral authority. Such topics were a chance for the medical profession to cement and showcase its expertise and the value of its interventions in public life. In doing so, the medical press also borrowed strategies common to more popular forms of writing. William Tullett has argued that, during the mid-nineteenth century, smell held an increasingly ambiguous place in medical theory, since it was deemed “subjective” and thus “epistemologically unreliable.” By contrast, he contends, the “emotive, anxiety-­ producing, qualities” were what made smell “powerful” to sanitary literature, an ideal tool for conveying “the abject state of the urban poor” (2019, pp. 768, 783, 787). The way in which the Lancet inquiry engages with the smells of living-in (from references to the “odour of drains” and “sewer air” to descriptions of unventilated and overcrowded rooms), along with other sensory aspects, bridges these discourses, however (“Report of the Lancet: Part I” 1892, pp.  490-1). “Sanitation in the Shop” illustrates the willingness of the medical community to draw on the affective and rhetorical strategies of sanitary writing, even where these did not necessarily accord with scientific thinking, to engage readers and garner support. The Lancet did not just speak to its readers as medical men  (and, in some cases, women)—it also implored them to consider their social responsibilities as consumers. In 1900, it published an item entitled “Christmas Shopping and Public Health,” which highlighted that shop assistants worked long hours over the festive period, at great risk to their health. It encouraged readers who were able to do so to shop during the day (rather than evenings) and not to leave present-buying to the “last moment.” It argued: in defence of the health and happiness of a large section of the community, we appeal to all intending purchasers to think not only of themselves and their purchases but also of the interests of those tradesmen with whom they intend to deal. It will not cost more to buy earlier in the day and somewhat sooner in the season, but it will distribute more evenly the work that has to be done in satisfying the demands of the consumer and thus will mitigate the unhappy and unhealthy strain that weighs so heavily on shop assistants at Christmas time. (“Christmas Shopping” 1900, p. 1751)

This article fashioned the idea of the ethical or conscientious consumer, encouraging readers to change their shopping habits and practices, so as

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to benefit workers and shop owners. In articles such as these, the journal spoke not only to the medical aspirations of its readers, but to their wider role and duties in social and public life. The Lancet’s interventions on the “health and happiness” of shop assistants—this “large section of the community”—thus bolstered the profession’s self-image while engaging with an issue which was garnering increasing public attention. In the cultural imagination, the supposed glamour of retail was dented and even superseded by exposés of the palpable struggles of shop-life. The sensory aspects of living-in emerged as a key cultural trope, tied not only to concerns about sanitation but also to discussions of emotional health and wellbeing. Within the debates, one detects a growing interest in some of the less tangible deprivations facing shop workers. While representations of shop-life incorporated stark images of inedible food and dirty bedsheets, they also moved beyond these more obvious tropes, to create broader pictures of workers suffering from sensory deprivations (a lack of visual stimulation, including the absence of decorations and daylight) or sensory onslaughts (including the close proximity to the feel and sounds of other bodies). To some extent, the debates challenged ideas that working-class men and women might be lacking in sensory refinements, instead showing how they were emotionally affected by such conditions. Commentators were divided, however, on how far these issues needed to be addressed and whether the sensory and affective concerns identified by middle-class interlocutors were shared by working-class shop assistants. The final report of the Truck Committee concluded that the living-in system required sanitary reform and inspection rather than wholescale abolition. Debates about living-in were inflected with (and often stymied by) classed and gendered assumptions about what lifestyle or quality of accommodation was suitable for male and female shop workers and who was best placed to determine their needs. In Shopping for Pleasure, Erika Rappaport argues that “class and gender identities were often constructed within the commercial spaces of the late-­ nineteenth-­century city” (2000, p.  12). The identities of retail workers were shaped both on the shop floor and “behind the scenes.” A shop assistant might move between the richly multi-sensory displays of the shop and an ascetic dormitory, or shift from an outwardly clean and respectable store to unhygienic and sordid accommodation. In cultural constructions and public discourse, class, gender, and occupational identities intersected. Shop assistants’ sensory and affective needs and desires were seen through

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the prism of their role in the retail industry and in relation to their gender identity and class status. Some commentators pushed for more freedoms for all shop workers, but many debates were underpinned by assumptions and prejudices about what different groups of workers required or deserved. Reforms typically favoured those who were considered most capable of independence. It was often argued that young apprentices, women, and those from the country benefitted most from the familial support and moral surveillance—even from the material and sensory frugalities—of living-in. Of course, preferences among shop workers would have varied. Some may have enjoyed the social aspect of living-in, while others may have found this claustrophobic or overwhelming. As commentators identified, the standard of living-in also varied between shops. The umbrella term “living-in” encompassed a huge spectrum of environments and experiences. While the texts discussed here touch on some of the less tangible or predictable elements of shop-life, the range of visual, haptic, olfactory, auditory, and gustatory experiences, and how these would have been felt and understood by different shop workers, is abridged. Dirty sheets, cold nights, and poorly ventilated rooms remained convenient shorthands to capture the public imagination. The differences in living standards were often only fleetingly acknowledged or elided by commentators on both sides of the debate, who presented living-in either as in desperate need of reform (social or sanitary) or as a boon to the workers and their employers. Even where literary depictions of living-in reoriented attention to the subjective experiences of shop workers, they often focused on (and elevated) the more genteel, educated, or emotionally refined shop worker at the expense of their supposedly “coarse” colleagues. Representations of shop assistants living-in reveal how sensory environments were conceived and understood in relation to ideas about age, gender, and class; physical, mental, and moral health; and the boundaries between labour and leisure. Acknowledgement  This research is a product of a large European Research Council project, “Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives,” led by Professor Sally Shuttleworth and funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme ERC Grant Agreement number 340121.

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Works Cited Anderson, Will. The Counter Exposed: An Appeal to Shop Assistants, Clerks, Warehousemen and All Others. London: Klene & Co, 1896. Bondfield, Margaret. “Conditions Under Which Shop Assistants Work.” The Economic Journal, vol. 9, June 1899, pp. 277–86. “Christmas Shopping and Public Health.” Lancet. 15 December 1900, p. 1751. Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Cuming, Emily. Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880-2020. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Departmental Committee on the Truck Acts. Report of the Truck Committee, vol. 1. London: HM Stationery Office, 1908. ———. Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Truck Committee, vol. 3. London: HM Stationery Office, 1908. Frampton, Sally. “‘A Borderland in Ethics’: Medical Journals, the Public, and the Medical Profession in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” In Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities, edited by Gowan Dawson, Bernard Lightman, Sally Shuttleworth and Jonathan R. Topham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020, pp. 311–36. Gissing, George. The Odd Women, edited by Patricia Ingham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hamilton, Cicely. Diana of Dobson’s. In New Woman Plays, edited by Linda Fitzsimmons and Viv Gardner. London: Methuen, 1991, pp. 27–77. Hamilton, Paula. “Intimate Strangers: Multisensorial Memories of Working in the Home.” In A Cultural History of Sound, Memory and the Senses, edited by Joy Damousi and Paula Hamilton. New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 194–211. Hamlett, Jane. At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hosgood, Christopher P. “‘Mercantile Monasteries’: Shops, Shop Assistants, and Shop Life in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 38, 1999: pp. 322–52. “The Housing of Domestic Servants.” Lancet. 19 August 1905, p. 546. Kiechle, Melanie A. Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Maugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage. New York: Modern Library, 1999. ———. The Summing Up. London: Vintage, 2001. Mullin, Katherine. Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. “Occupational Mortality and Industrial Unrest.” Lancet. 23 February 1924, p. 405. Oliver, Jane and Ann Stafford. Business as Usual. Bath: Handheld Press, 2020.

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Rappaport, Erika Diane. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Reddy, William. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. “Report of the Lancet Sanitary Commission on Sanitation in the Shop: Part I.” Lancet. 27 February 1892, pp. 490–2. “Report of the Lancet Sanitary Commission on Sanitation in the Shop: Part II.” Lancet. 12 March 1892, pp. 600–2. “Reviews and Notices of Books: Library Table: Shop Slavery and Emancipation.” Lancet. 23 March 1912, p. 805. Sanders, Lise Shapiro. Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880–1920. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Sandwich, Alberta et al. “Notes, Comments, and Abstracts: Holidays for Factory Girls.” Lancet. 24 August 1929, p. 414. “Servants’ Accommodation.” Lancet. 5 November 1892, p. 1059. “Shop Assistants and Living In.” Lancet. 11 May 1907, p. 1310. Sutherst, Thomas. Death and Disease Behind the Counter. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1884. Trotter, David. “The New Historicism and the Psychopathology of Everyday Modern Life.” Critical Quarterly vol. 42, 2000: pp. 36–58. Tullett, William. “Re-odorization, Disease, and Emotion in Mid-NineteenthCentury England.” The Historical Journal vol. 62, no. 3, 2019: pp. 765–88. Wells, H.G. The History of Mr Polly, edited by Simon J.  James. London: Penguin, 2005. ———. The Wheels of Chance. London: Dent, 1896. Whipple, Dorothy. High Wages. London: Persephone Books, 2016. Whitaker, Wilfred B. Victorian and Edwardian Shopworkers: The Struggle to Obtain Better Conditions and a Half-Holiday. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973. Zola, Émile. The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. by Brian Nelson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

CHAPTER 8

Synergy and Dissonance of the Senses: Negotiating Fashion Through Second-Hand Dealing, Jumble Sales and Street Market Trading in 1930s East End London Cheryl Roberts

Second-hand outlets, jumble sales and street markets, disobedient and unruly spaces of consumption, have long occupied the literary and visual panorama of everyday life. Walkowitz describes them as “messy, unhygienic […] they have been historically defended as the shopping centre[s] for the poor and culturally prized as liminal, carnivalesque places [that] were the pulsating social organism of Living London.” (Walkowitz 2012, p. 144)

London’s East End in the 1930s was brimming with these kinetic, physically interactive, non-class-stratified retail spaces. Purchasing garments through the market, wardrobe dealer, second-hand dealer or jumble sale suggests that the used clothing trade went some way towards providing access to otherwise unattainable garments for those with a limited budget.

C. Roberts (*) Royal College of Art, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_8

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Yet the buying of second-hand and low-quality clothing required negotiation, not only with fashion and with a specific trader but also with a synergy of senses. The business of fashion, in fact all consumer capitalism, engages in many of the senses, beyond the visual, to seduce the customer (Howes 2006, p. 211); yet it can also repel, disrupt and inform the practice of shopping. Extrasensory perception was integral to navigating the physical, mental and insensate sensory distractions encountered in dissident trading transactions. The London Observer commented on the markets “comfortable dirtiness […] and garlic aroma” (1928, p.  11).1 These claustrophobic and confining spaces were filled with odorous, verbal and tactile encounters that created a magnetic appeal. Mary Benedetta warned in 1936 that “you have to be very strong minded to visit Berwick Market” (1936, p. 53), yet the drive for fashionable garments propelled women with confidence into these dissident spaces to fulfil their desire for affordable style. Building on Constance Classen’s observation that “sensory perception is a cultural as well as physical act” (1997, p. 401), this chapter will explore and reflect on Howes consideration of how sensory modes are integral to the construction of a consumer decision-making framework. Although the casual observer might assume that women who patronised these synaesthetic transitory spaces of consumption were driven by practicality rather than choice, there is no clear indication that women viewed their procurement of cheap new and used dress within these undisciplined places as a process lacking in taste or mode. These arenas of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque and Turner’s liminality (Bakhtin 1993 [1941] and Turner 1979) disrupted the safety of high-street retail spaces for mass market readymade fashion yet enticed classless bargain hunters seeking a momentary encounter with multifarious senses. From the budget-driven housewife to the fashion-conscious young, working-class woman to the tourist compelled to breathe in the rich, if slightly decrepit, nostalgic air, this chapter will unravel how dealers and traders created a world of cross-­ sensory communication as women purchased “fashionable” clothing at low prices.

The Consumer and Class Vacationing The financial crash of the 1930s generated a seismic wave of poverty from the United States to Britain, which fuelled the existing severe economic problems experienced by working-class families and triggered unfamiliar

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hardship for the wealthier classes. Many, for a time, were dependent on the provision of emergency credit and had little, or no, disposable income. Yet the desire for fashionable clothing went beyond monetary downfalls. Many women were consequently more cautious about spending their precious savings and may well have chosen to purchase garments through the cheapest means. In the interwar years, the East End of London as a commercial space was frequented by the classless bargain hunter. The main shopping arena for the local working-class communities attracted the middle-­class shopper searching for quality clothing goods at cheap prices and the voyeuristic wealthy tourist “treasure hunters” drawn by intoxicating intrigue. The non-class-stratified retail spaces in London’s East End offer a helpful focus into fashion as a cross-class communicator for women in the 1930s due to the diversity of merchandise, an acquired mixed class clientele and interest in them amongst writers and social historians. As Joanne Entwistle notes, “[f]ashion thrives in a world of social mobility; a dynamic world characterized by class and political conflict, urbanisation and aesthetic innovation” (2000, p.  105). Liminal spaces of street trading disrupted conventional fashion retailing through multisensory persuasion and class vacationing by providing budget-driven consumers a “liberation from the regimes of normative practices and performance codes of mundane life because of its interstitial nature” (Shields 1991, p. 84). The street dealing space was also, as Turner writes, a socially unifying place frequented “with […] individuals—momentarily stripped of their social status” (Turner 1979, p. 131) yet bound by their desire for accessible and affordable “fashionable” clothing. The notion of “class vacationing” has been explored by Lou Taylor (2018) in relation to ideas of “adopting superficial and temporary identities” (Bettez Hanlon 2002, pp. 513–514). However, this term could also be applied when considering the cross-class communication that occurred amongst consumers, and in turn, their interactions of consumption with street dealers and traders in the markets, second-hand exchanges and jumble sales of London in the 1930s.

Locality and Locale London’s East End does not have clear boundaries yet is often defined with the River Lea at its far eastern point. Some areas may also cross the line of central London. For this inquiry, the East End of London is demarcated running from Bishopsgate to the west, Stoke Newington to the

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north, Poplar to the west and the River Thames to the south. The locale encompasses Whitechapel, Hackney, Mile End, Bethnal Green, Stepney and Aldgate. In the 1930s these inner London suburbs varied vastly. Muriel Simkin recalled living in Halidon Street, Hackney. The street was considered “a respectable working-class area”; however, Hackney was a place of sharp social contrast. There were “dirty, overcrowded slums in the streets south of the Eastern Hospital in the nearby district of Homerton, yet on the western side of Urswick Road in the streets which led to St John’s Church there were rows of handsome houses belonging to the middle-class residents.”2 In 1931, poverty as defined by Mayhew (1851), Booth (1902) and Rowntree (1941), remained rife in some areas with an average of three households living in every two dwellings (GRO 1956 [Census 1951]). By 1937, the popular press, including the London Illustrated News and the Picture Post reported on areas such as Whitechapel and Lambeth as appearing “crumpled up under the pressure of poverty” yet having “a positive quality that you will find no-where else on London” (Picture Post, Life in Lambeth 1938, p.  27). Most East End neighbourhoods that were predominantly working class were not homogeneous, yet a community of many including Irish Catholics, Scandinavians, Chinese, Polish Jewish tailors, Indian vendors, African and West Indian seamen who married local women. All lived and worked alongside each other, their financial and class position being the binding force (Heren 1973, p. 11). The importance of locality for street traders should be stressed as the East End was core to the success of this commerce and fundamental to the affordability, availability and accessibility of fashion for those on a limited budget. Commercial Road, known locally as “Fashion Street” (el-Doori, Stein 1988) because of the numerous fashion manufacturing establishments, ran through the heart of the East End community; a tributary of fashion commerce, with its neighbourhood offshoot roads accommodating work, home and leisure lives. Although, women’s working practices and home lives are not the focus of this chapter, their lifestyles—actual and aspirational, along with their demand for affordable, fashionable garments are pivotal to the transactions of stylish clothing amongst the street traders and their customers (Roberts 2019). Markets, second-hand and seconds dealers, factory sales, fabric outlets and, in addition, the national retail chains of Woolworths and Marks and Spencer were all to be found on the high street and surrounding roads of Stoke Newington and Mare Street, Hackney in the 1930s (Baker 1995, p. 96).

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Urban geographer P.G. Hall wrote that the location of clothing manufacture and retailing, in the 1930s, had two important facts. “The first is that clothing is distinctly a metropolitan trade” and second, “clothing manufacture has been localised to a high degree within certain narrowly-­ defined areas of central and inner suburban London, forming remarkably persistent industrial quarters” (Hall 1962, p.  38). It is these quarters, London’s East End, rich in human interaction and trading innovation that form the boundaries for this research.

Multisensory Persuasion Hall’s definition of geographical space is pivotal to unravelling trading and consumption relationships within London’s East End. As previously mentioned, street markets traders, second-hand dealers and street sellers were to be found on the East End high street and back roads, accessible to the cross-class fashion consumer driven by either curiosity or commodity poverty. All were exposed to a multiplicity of somaesthetic sense systems and embodied experiences. Sociologist Alex Rhys-Taylor writes of the senses and the essences of multi-culture caught in the cross-sensory experience of the East End market. He focuses on an olfactory and gustatory dialogue to explore the hybrid inner-city locale and cosmopolitan exchange (Rhys-­ Taylor 2013). Yet lives are, and were, directed by and a production of biological interactions with the world through all the primary senses enhanced by the extrasensory—intuition, vestibular and body awareness. This heterogeneity dominated the practices and interactions within street trading arenas for fashion in London’s East End in the 1930s. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Pony (1964) reflected on the body’s relationship with the external experience. He concluded that the senses are the medium through which we come to know and experience the world and as such, they are inextricably part of or being in the world (Negrin 2016). When considering the impact of the senses on retailing practices and consumption choices, the geographical and biological experiences are triggered by both human and spatial interactions. Sociologist Degen (2002) in her work on sensescapes in the city defines this as the “lived urban experience” or the “sensuous performance of place” (Degen 54) where the “boundaries between the human and non-human disintegrate and the relationship between places and bodies becomes a constant relational process” (Degen 68). Degen’s focus is on regeneration of the city; however, her consideration of the impact of sensescapes on public

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interaction of space is of much relevance here, and how the senses in fact “shape social relations” creating subtle power relations through practices and experience through the “ephemeral nature” of public life (Degen 54). Temporary exterior trading spaces disrupted not only social divide but also the power relations between seller and consumer. H.V. Morton wrote of bazaar-like environments created by awnings that would extend from market stalls to protect both trader and customer from the sun or rain (1926, p. 92), yet the canvas roofs created a dark tunnel that “caught” the occupants in the middle of the street, amidst a “jumble of material and food stalls” (Walkowitz, p. 155). Here, the trader eagerly waited in their sticky web; however, the buyer, intently focused on acquiring a fashionable bargain, was resistant to the spatial disorientation, haggling and bickering with the stallholder, leaving unscathed and with their prize (Morton, p. 92). In her Book of Touch, Classen questions the senses as cross-class communicators that are demarcated by gender (Classen 2005, p.  7). She returns to this query in her subsequent text The Deepest Sense to explain that “touch, taste and smell were, [historically], held to be the lower senses and thus were linked readily to the lower sex—women” and how “similar associations were made between taste, touch, smell and the lower classes. However, men, in particular the elite, were associated with the higher senses of sight and hearing” (Classen 2012, p.  75). Classen continues: Women, [and] their association with the senses of touch, taste, and smell reinforced the cultural link between femininity and the body, for these senses were closely tied to intimate bodily experience […] the distance senses of sight and sound, by contrast, were associated with the perception of the external, masculine world. (Classen 2012, p. 75)

Yet a blurring of these roles, class and gender, can be found played out in conversations of consumption on and within trading and shopping in the streets of London’s 1930s East End. As noted earlier, these spaces were frequented by “class vacationing” customers, with nebula gender roles and sensory exchanges to be found amongst the later discussed touting merchants or “schleppers” and their patrons. As Negrin rightly notes, “the visual and the tactile are inextricably intertwined” (2016, p. 117) and therefore cannot be separated by gender or social stereotypes. Additionally, it is the kinaesthetic sense that we have of our bodies, acquired through

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our physical engagement with the world that dominates interactions of purchasing, in particular the slippery nature of fashion.

Negotiating Fashion: Visual Appearance and Haptic Experience Seeing is believing, but feeling’s the truth. (Smith 2007, p. 93)

The interwar years, in particular the 1930s, saw transformations both in understandings of what was deemed to be “fashion” and “fashionable” and in the ways in which this was achieved. Paris is often cited as the centre of fashion during the 1930s. The city was indeed the centre of haute couture and the heart of the high-end international garment business. Associations with “Paris” or “French” fashion were definitely an aspirational source for consideration when British women would purchase a new garment. They would have admired, from a long distance, the styles from the French capital, as journalists and advertisers recognised. “Parisian” styles were promoted weekly in magazines aimed at young, working women (Cox and Mowatt 2014, p. 48) such as Mabs Weekly with its fashion column that brought “chic news” from the French capital.3 On 28 May 1932, the magazine advised “a trimming touch from Paris […] a novel fashion note from France that I feel sure English girls will want to copy” (Mabs Weekly 1932, p. 32) Mabs also ran a monthly fashion column on the latest French fashions written by the fictional “Parisienne Jacqueline” (Mabs Fashions 1930, p. 18). Ideas of “Frenchness” were also applied to high-street retail store names and dress styles in an attempt to reflect their fashionability.4 For the majority of women the understanding of exactly what a couture house was or the processes involved in the production of haute couture garments was vague, with Parisian couture out of their reach and limited to the wardrobes of the wealthy, yet this did not prevent them from becoming fashion innovators. It was self-presentation and clothing selection on personal terms that were key to the cross-class dissemination of fashion. As Muir Wood et al. (2008) summarise: Creative or innovative individuals have the influence to shape the taste consensus across society. But they do not have to be the elites […] they are just the people at different income levels, in different social classes who actively select and adopt innovations early and lead the direction of opinion among their peers. Innovativeness is an internal quality. (2008, p. 1236)

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This innovativeness abides by Niklas Luhmann’s system theory of social constructs. He observes that “what” we see turns to “how” we see it, through a “individual cerebrally synthesised processing” (Luhmann cited in Loschek 2009, p. 10). As Loschek summarises, “the essence and significance of fashion are analysed individually, above and beyond the form of clothing” (2009, p. 10). These personal evaluations of fashion, through ocular navigation and tactile interactions, are integral to the selection of garments and negotiations that occurred between trader and consumer in the streets of London in the 1930s. Shopping for fashion in the areas of street trading required mediation, not only with the street seller but also with fashion itself. Although the casual observer might assume that women who patronised the street sellers were driven by practicality rather than style, there is no clear indication that women viewed their consumption of used clothing as a process lacking in taste or mode. In fact, the opposite could be noted, as it required a discerning eye to select quality garments from a seemingly worn-out bundle of cloth. Ingrid Loschek writes that clothing is the foundation for the medium of fashion. That clothing, as form, is seen and fashion, as medium, the unseen (2009, p. 25). The idea of communicating fashion through the visual is further examined by Kawamura (2005) who defines fashion as process and clothing as product (2005, p. 1). And as Marx (1973 [1857]) quantifies, “a product becomes a real product only when it is consumed. For example, a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn” (1973 [1857], p. 25). The visual sense was embedded in the purchasing choices of the consumers. Their mastery of seeing, curiosity, knowledge and navigation were integral to the practice of selecting and acquiring potential fashion from the abundant displays and piles of clothing found on street stalls. Street traders of fashion in 1930s created a distinct retail market for women with a small disposable income. Some of these sources would not have provided the latest in fashionable styles yet would have sold clothing that could be “modernised” by women with a good level of dressmaking skills into a personal, up-to-date, self-fashioned garment. H.V.  Morton (1926) considers an example of the selective approach of a female “shopper.” He describes the shopping prowess of Miss Jones, a young, clerical assistant as she glances over a second-hand stall in Berwick Street market. “She sees a tea-gown with an authentic plainness and simplicity about it that tells her it began life in higher circles” (Morton 1926, p. 94). Such a dress would indicate to the fashion aware “Miss Jones” that the fabric was

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of a quality that could withstand further alteration, that the cut had a timeless air of fashionability and that owning such a garment would reflect well on her judgement of taste and style. The work of photographer Hans Casparius was informed by everyday life in London in the 1930s. His image (Fig.  8.1) taken in London’s

Fig. 8.1  A group of young, working-class women selecting garments that can be transformed into fashionable dresses, 1930. Caledonian Market, London. (Photographer Hans Casparius. Museum of London, no. IN7837/Museum für Film und Fernsehen)

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Caledonian Market, 1931, captures young women in the act of negotiating fashion. Casparius has caught them dishevelled in ill fitting, fur collared coats and frayed hats examining shabby second-hand dresses. The photograph reveals not only how the actuality of the garments worn and being pored over-exposes the level of social standing and poverty of the wearer, but that the women were searching for modernity on their terms. They were probably scrutinising, through a process of visual observation and haptic knowledge, how stitching could be altered, or a seam removed to create wearable garments, hopeful that the adapted dresses would also indicate their fashionability. The gazing spectator could easily misrepresent and misunderstand their shopping practices, yet Madeleine Henrey’s experience of women who shopped in the markets of the early twentieth century was that they were “geniuses with their fingers, crafting miracles of workmanship out of scanty resources” (Henrey in Classen 2005, p. 206). Cesare (2012) notes “for those, [in the 1930s], who had the skills (or knew of someone that did) […] sewing was pivotal in constructing themselves for public presentation, self-identity” and specifically to convey their fashion consciousness (2012, p. 2). In this way, many women in the 1930s created their own personal fabrications of fashion through the practice of shopping, revealing their ability to define and negotiate their own forms of identity and social status. Self-presentation and clothing selection, on personal terms, were key to cross-class dissemination of fashion. All the senses are active mediators in the selling and consuming of fashion, beyond a visual phenomenon. Soares and Elmashhara believe that “often sight […] alone [is] not sufficient to evaluate products or making purchasing decisions, as [it] omits important information such as the shape, strength, weight and consistency of a product, which can instead be communicated through physical contact” (2020, p. 60). Degen notes that “we can only make sense of the whole when combining the information of all the senses […] senses never work on their own but are framed in context and in relation to an object. They need a reference, objects which they define” (2002, p. 55). Young (1994), Classen (2012) and Negrin (2016), all write on the power of clothing in mediating our practical interactions with the world through a haptic, embodied experience that transcends the visual. Negrin writes about the observations of Iris Marion Young, who

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focuses on the sensuous pleasures clothes can provide for women that are not structured around the […] gaze but which reside in the tactility of garments. Whilst most attention has been paid to the look of female fashions and how they appear to others, there has been far less focus on the haptic qualities of clothing and how these are experienced by wearers. (Negrin 2016, p. 22)

Integral to the selection process of negotiating fashion in spaces of street trading in 1930s London was the haptic experience. The act of rummaging amongst the mounds of clothing on makeshift tables or spread on newspaper across the floor required a skilful somatosensory response to uncover reusable clothing. Shoppers in the junk stalls of Caledonian Market in the 1930s noted that, “anything valuable is usually hidden under a heavy disguise of dirt” (Benedetta 1936, p. 163) and that “there was no limit to the age and filthiness of the garments” (Benedetta 1936, p.  177). Trying to determine the quality of the garments under their soiled surface required not only a penetrating eye but also an astute sense of touch to unearth clothing that was strong enough to be “revivered, tricked, polished, teased, re-napped” and refashioned into desirable stylish clothing (Mendelsohn 2016, p. 33). Howes considers that even if visual appearance was the “primary sensory mode of consumer culture” the other senses were always important. He summarises that “the ‘right look’ must, depending on the kind of product being sold, be reinforced by the right feel, the right sense, the right sound, and the right taste” (Howes 2006, p. 11). It is this desire for the “right look” that drove women in the 1930s into the unboundaried, treacherous shopping waters of London’s East End in order to obtain fashion at an affordable price. As noted earlier, the business of fashion, in fact all consumer capitalism, engages in many of the senses to seduce the customer, yet it can also repel, disrupt and inform the practice of shopping. It is these practices; trading, buying and consuming along with sensory experiences that determine the shopper’s path through the retail choreography on “the catwalks of the underclass” (Mendelsohn 2016, p. 31).

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Disruptive Retailing: Cross-sensory Communication Place is understood as a performative expression in the sense that place making is an active dialogical process constantly reconstituted by the interrelation of bodily sensory experience, material reality and practices […] the sensescape […] the sensuous performance of place […] the lived urban experience. (Degen 2002, p. 54)

Hall’s earlier definition of geographical space is pivotal to unravelling trading and consumption relationships within London’s East End. As previously mentioned, street markets, second-hand dealers and street traders were to be found in the maze of thoroughfares, accessible to the cross-­ class fashion consumer driven by either curiosity or commodity poverty. Nast and Pile propose that our geographical experience and imagination are based upon the interplay of body, senses and place. When experiencing the city, simultaneously with a visual perception, our bodies are confronted with a plurality of noises […] smells […] and even tactile experiences […] These perceptions are not unique to the individual, or merely subjective, but shared by all of us as we experience these sensory stimuli through a common medium: a body. (Nast and Pile 1998 in Degen 2002, p. 55)

John Urry (2000) builds on the work of ecological psychologist James Gibson (1986) to explain his ideas of “affordances” that consider the individual sensory experience with place, space and objects within (Gibson 1986, p. 186.).5 These experiences are caught in the performative space— for this chapter street trading of fashion in London in the 1930s—and achieved “through the actions and experiences sensed by the bodies that participate in this space” (Degen 2002, p. 56). Considering the olfactory, auditory, vestibular and proprioceptive senses is significant in unravelling the cultural and physical dimensions associated with understanding sensory retailing interactions between street traders and consumers: Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies and political orders. They can enforce social structures or transgress them. (Classen et al. 1994)

Second-hand garment trading was widespread in working-class communities across England and also appeared for the middle and lower upper

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classes. These ranged from the reputable, more socially acceptable, second-­ hand clothing dealer who could be found through classified advertisements in high-end women’s magazines, to the less cultivated street seller. Beverly Lemire claims that second-hand apparel was only socially acceptable and widely worn before industrialisation made cheaper, ready-made garments available (1988, p. 21); however, as manufacturing technology progressed, “ready-made garments” became the mainstay of the second-­ hand clothing trade in the 1930s (Roberts 2019). The second-hand trade provided a promising platform for the enterprising hawker seeking a potential venture into new ways of producing and merchandising clothing. These “curb-side couturiers” (Mendelsohn 2016, p. 31) would display their latest collections through many outlets that included peddling, a sagging market stall table, a tarpaulin on the ground, jumble sale or, for the more discerning consumer, they would transfigure into a “wardrobe dealer” or wholesaler. Second-hand clothing deals involved complex navigations of class norms as both upper- and lower-class women relied on those in the “trade” to make and maintain a fashionable appearance (Marshik 2011, p. 72). Although purchasing garments in this way was not abhorrent to the wealthier classes, as evidenced through promotion in high end women’s fashion magazine Vogue, it was not one that was to be publicised amongst one’s peers and the dealers were discretely hidden in the back pages. Second-hand trading amongst working-class communities was approached in a far less discrete manner, such as the rag and bone man and the pawnbroker, residential dwellings and street jumble sales. Robert Roberts fleetingly mentions “an old clothes store” that was part of the makeshift high street in the 1930s (Roberts 1971, p.  16). Further evidence of street traders of second-hand clothing in 1930s East End London is to be found in oral testimony records held at the Jewish Museum, London. Peter Abrahams (n.d.) recalls his East End childhood and being raised by his grandparents in the 1930s. He describes his grandfather as both a wholesaler and retailer of second-hand clothing that he would collect through house calling and then prepare for sale, cleaning and mending garments in an adapted shed in their back yard, which he then sold in Brick Lane market.6 It could be suggested with certainty that some of these outlets, piled up with shabby clothes would not have provided women with any adaptable, fashionable dress or clothing. However, Elizabeth Roberts confirms through her extensive oral history interviews that many working-class women “took great pride in their appearance and

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augmented their home-made outfits with some interesting purchases from the second-hand [dealer]” (Roberts 1995, pp. 162–163). Yet there were some downsides to buying and rummaging amongst second-hand clothing, particularly the perennial mephitis. Visitors and shoppers in Caledonian market commented on the pungent fug that emanated from cast off garments noting that “if you can bear being in such close proximity to some of the old clothes” the market “has a glamorous spell.” A dissident enchantment that drew them back time after time. Churning the piles of clothes caused a stench “arresting enough to potentially obscure the goods from visibility” (Rhys-Taylor 2013). Classen et  al. (1994) write of the embedded power of the olfactory system and how exhalations can evoke memory and be affiliated with class. “Odours are invested with cultural values and employed by societies as a means of and model for defining and interacting with the world” (1994, p. 3). The festering smells that exhumed from used clothing triggered other sensory reactions and personal definitions. Often the musty mephitis of second-­ hand goods was associated with squalor and poverty; however in the arena of street trading, on a single street one could move from the pleasurable aroma of perfume to the mouldered odour of aged clothing, to a sweet smell of cakes, to the effluvium of putrid fish rotting and butchered flesh. This mixing of olfactory stimulus blurs the cultural and class boundaries embodied by the shopper. As Rhys-Taylor notes, “integration of the market’s diverse smells […] into everyday life of its users can also be seen to smudge the boundaries of the [class] culture embodied by regular visitors” (Rhys-Taylor 2013, p. 399). The indistinct class divides found in the realm of street trading are exemplified in the jumble sale permeated with cross-sensory communication, commodity poverty and class vacationing. Jumble sales at first appear to sit uncomfortably within structure of inner-city trading. Often associated with quasi altruistic middle-class community organisations, jumble sales are a site of consumption for further standalone study; however, the jumble sale was a common form of street retailing amongst the East End in the 1930s. In October 1938, The Picture Post published a pictorial article on life in the area of Whitechapel in London, that included photographs of “alternative” retailing outlets. One image, “The House That is a Shop,” has the accompanying caption, “many of the East End shops don’t look like shops at all.7 They’re houses that sell things.” In addition, amongst the collection of street trading photographs taken by amateur photographer John Turner in c. 1939, he captures railings dressed with discarded wardrobe contents that tumble

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forward into unsteady mounds of unruly clothing on makeshift stall tables, a parade of shoes and boots at their feet.8 In the street jumble sale, neighbours would gather their sellable possessions, and create a world of trans-­ hierarchical cultural boundaries. Yet these possessions were not unwanted or unneeded by the seller and their donors. They were vendible necessary items, offered for sale in a desperate attempt to raise much needed income. Jumble sales, however, were not restricted to those living in poverty. These were spaces that allowed for customers to experience class vacationing (Taylor 2018) and cultural omnivorousness (Wright 2016) through a removal of social perimeters. Notions of classless consumption, found in the jumble sale, street market and second-hand dealing were informed by the realm of the senses. As Rhys-Taylor shrewdly observes, “through […] senses, regular users of the market develop an embodied familiarity with a melange of sensoria and sensibilities and are provided with artefacts around which important forms of dialogue and exchange can occur” (Rhys-Taylor 2013, p.  404). Purchasing garments from the used clothing trade went some way towards providing many women with access to otherwise unattainable garments. Yet there were shifts in the production of clothing in the 1930s, which led to the growth of mass manufacturing of lightweight garments, in particular popular day dresses. These dresses, made from the developing synthetic fabrics such as rayon, were to be found both in the high-street chain stores of Marks and Spencer and C & A, and also on the stalls of street markets. These technological advancements are often cited as creating a contentious democratisation of fashion; however, they did ensure stylish, affordable fashion possibilities for women in the 1930s (Roberts 2019). The availability of desirable, cheap ready-made dresses led the entrepreneurial street trader to reconsidering their stock and repositioning themselves as makers, wholesalers and vendors of affordable mass fashion (Roberts 2019). However, they were competing with the large retail chain shops and so their selling techniques took a more belligerent, zealous approach: Auditory sensory cues through the sense of sound [and vestibular interactions] are recognised as having an evocative power which impacts on individual attitudes, emotions, moods and purchase behaviour. (Hultén 2015, p. 199)

London’s East End with its cacophony of manufacturers, tailors, dressmakers, embroiderers and traders was the long-established epicentre for

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second-hand dealing, street trading and markets. Street markets were disobedient and unruly spaces of consumption (Walkowitz 2012). London was brimming with these kinetic shopping locations, catering to every purchaser, each known for its distinctive produce. Local weekly markets were to be found on or near the East End high street, that would have provided a curious contrast of bargain goods from an array of food stalls, herbalists, book sellers, ironmongers, barbers, butchers, furriers, haberdashers and clothing retailers. Hultén considers the wide-ranging assortment of goods as “contributing to the shopping complexity, involving multiple distractors” (Hultén 2015, p. 201). These numerous deviators: crowd density, pressure to impulse buy, stall layout and atmospheric factors such as noise, lighting and weather create emotional and physical responses (2015, p. 201).. For the female consumer in the street market in 1930s London there would be additional circumstances that would contribute to the stresses of purchasing items. Those such as budget restrictions, long working hours and time pressure (Aylott and Mitchell 1998). In 1936, Benedetta noted “the noise and bustle” (1936, p. 76) and how the “crowd, the glare and the noise and confusion” contributed to an interference with a shopper’s purchasing focus (1936, p.  151). She recalls the traders “calling out.” “Men and women stand about selling strips of elastic or paper flowers or mints or buttons […] they cry out lustily, as there is so much noise already they have to shout very loud to outdo people” (Benedetta 1936, p. 75), their vociferation, “overwhelming the thoughtful mind” (1936, p. 151). This “confusion of tongues” (Mendelsohn 2016, p. 30) was exploited by the traders who created an environment of hedonistic atmospherics to seduce the quotidian customer and casual visitor into purchasing goods beyond both their need and budget through a collision of auditory episodes with fashion. The main London markets for dress in the 1930s centred around Caledonian Road, Islington, on a Friday for the “peddlers” market or “rag fair,” and Berwick Street, Soho, where a hub of traders (mostly Jewish) of stockings and ready-made dresses were to be found” (Benjamin 1930, pp.  174–183). It was noted to be “a cutting-edge retail space for mass market ready-to-wear fashion” (Walkowitz 2012, p. 145). Both markets were on the cusp of London’s East End and would have drawn both traders and customers from across the city and beyond. Berwick Street market was in the foreign quarter of Soho behind the glamorous, modern shops of Regent Street and Oxford Street. The pitches straggled into several

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Soho’s roads, including Little Pulteney Street and Rupert Street. When entering through Little Pulteney Street the shoppers would pass through an arcade of dress shops that opened up onto the main part of the market. It had a particularly bad reputation that was triggered by the ruthless sellers or “schleppers.” These market touts could be male or female, each waiting to prey on oblivious victims. Benedetta, in her guide to London’s street markets from 1936, warned women who frequented the market to be “prepared to bargain with confidence” and “to use a critical eye” (1936, p. 53), as these duplicitous traders operated through the arena of both synergy and dissonance of the senses. Quick-witted and sharp-­ sighted, the schlepper located their target, luring them into their world with charm and flattery, lulling the unsuspecting into purchasing items through seduction and vestibular discombobulation. Benedetta described the “girls” who were employed to entice women into buying from stalls as: Watching, waiting—trying to draw customers into the shops. Their make­up is crude in daylight, and they have black crimped hair, shiny with brilliantine. […] Those who go through the market a second time, on the way back from that part of the market, are subjected to a certain amount of insolence […] that is their charming little revenge on you for not visiting their shops when you went by before. (1936, pp. 56–57)

Hultén reflects on the voice as an emotional stimulus and how it impacts on individual responses. “The speed of speech and a low/loud voice are the most important factors in verbal communication in terms of forming a personal opinion about the speaker […] people prefer a soft voice to a loud one, the former making the speaker more emphatic and trustworthy” (Apple et  al. 1979  in Hultén 2015, p.  199). Hultén’s observations are clearly played out in the street market. In contrast to the raucous bellowing of the cheap jacks and hucksters, the wily schlepper singled out from the crowd their unwitting prey, drawing them in with their loquacious chatter. As Benjamin notes in her contemporary guide to shopping in London that Berwick Street was comprised of an overwhelming amount of dress “shops” and that “outside each one is a ‘tout’, and if you look in the window, you will find a hand on your arm and a persuasive voice in your ear” (1930, p. 180). Benjamin notes that there were “shops” as well as stalls in the market. These were enticing establishments that were driven by an experiential and sensory marketing approach. These disorientating spaces were fronted by

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a market stall, one that would be laden with cheap stockings and haberdashery essentials. Under the shroud of a weather resistant tarpaulin would be a chrome and glass-plated front shop, its electric lighting drawing in the shopper further until they were snared, in the web of the schlepper, “from which there appeared to be no escape except by purchase!” (Benjamin 1930, p. 180). These concealed stores were guinea gown shops that sold relatively expensive evening dresses. Guinea gowns were meant for special occasions, to wear to dance halls and were designed to keep up with the latest fashions. Each new, rather than second-hand, dress they sold cost a guinea or 21 shillings. This was, however, not a cheap price with dresses sold at under half the cost in chain stores. To encourage buyers, the proprietors created worlds of fashionable goods with an enchanting carnivalesque atmosphere that subverted the retailing structure of the high street, through Bakhtin’s notion of humour and chaos (Bakhtin 1993) and visuo-audio vestibular interactions. These synaesthetic experiences fabricated a sensory induced dizziness or vertigo of consumption. Neurologists Roberts, Bronstein and Seemungal term this sensory vertigo a “visuo-vestibular mismatch” or “space and motion discomfort” (Roberts et al. 2013, p. 8). However, for the committed consumer of budget fashion, mediating and navigating these disconcerting proprioceptive interactions was the seduction of consumption.

Conclusion The air is not so very fresh in Lambeth, but as it is the only air there is it is best to take it. (Picture Post 1938)

Street trading was historically suggested to cater for the poor, although the number of those living in poverty went down considerably between 1893 and 1930 (Benedetta 1936, p. 175). At this time street vendors, in particular market stall holders, increased which reflected the class diversion of these spaces and the blurring of social boundaries that reflected the liminal purchasing practices of the bargain hunting metropolitan shopper. The carnivalesque environments of noise, colour and congestion found in the 1930s East End of London had their own unique sense of time and space that caused individuals to feel they were part of a collectivity (Bakhtin 1993 [1941]). The stalls of Berwick Street were renowned for their selling of good quality stockings at bargain prices and for the availability of ready-made

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dresses. These stalls broke down class boundaries and attracted women from chorus girls to couture clients all looking for the perfect leg covering or stylish day dress that could be worn to both work and the mid-week dance. Period writer Benedetta discusses at length the practice of shopping for stockings by women and also those who “were dressed by Hartnell and Schiaparelli” (1936, p. 53). This rare disintegration of social hierarchies confirms the notion of “cross class communication” mentioned earlier. Class vacationing was found amongst not only the customers but also the traders. Benjamin observed that “stall holders—both men and women. Some appear to be quite well educated and refined so that you wonder how it is they are there; while others are what might be described as blowzy individuals, yet sometimes possessed of surprising knowledge of their own special line” (1930, p. 179). According to Edensor and Smith unsanctioned behaviours produce sites of unregulated “playful, performative and political practice” that are possible away from “mainstream convention and commercial banality” (2019, p.  881). Wealthy American tourist Benjamin promoted the “adventures to be had treasure hunting” in London’s markets. These exploits aroused a heightened awareness of “sensual, material, bodily unity and community” (Bakhtin 1993 [1941]) that resulted in kinaesthetic embodied experiences of perception, integral to negotiating fashion in disruptive retailing and unconventional shopping practices. González (2010) believes: “[Fashion] appears in the very dynamics of social life, independently of whether it has been cheered on by mass industry or not, independently of whether its agents behave as aesthetic consumers or simply as individuals who want to satisfy a need” (2010, p. 80). For the consumer of garments sold by street traders it was quality, determined by the visual appearance of fashionability and the haptic relationships with fabric that were forefront in their selection of goods. In addition, the navigating of a vestibular sensory overload created by the trading practices within the marginal borders of street retailing in 1930s London for mode and taste required prowess in negotiating commodity aesthetics. Seeking, searching and appreciating garments occurred through the senses.

Notes 1. “Garlic aroma” has a long history of being imputed as the smell of otherness. See Mark Jenner “Civilisation and deodorisation? Smell in early modern English culture.” In Civil histories: Essays presented to Sir Keith Thomas,

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edited by Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 127–144. William Tullett, “Grease and sweat: Race and smell in eighteenth century English culture.” Cultural and Social History, vol. 13, no. 3, 2016, pp. 307–322. Stephanie Weismann, “Sense and sensibilities: Interwar Lublin’s courtyard.” Contemporary European History, vol. 30, 2021, pp. 335–350. 2. Sussex PhotoHistory 2009. Interview with Muriel Hughes (nee Simkin). Muriel Simkins Life in Photographs. https://www.photohistory-­sussex. co.uk/SimkinMuriel.htm. Accessed 8 August 2020. 3. From 1908 Amalgamated Press created a group of targeted publications which included Home Fashions, Children’s Dress, Mabs Fashions, and the Best Way series, aimed at “a readership of waitresses, typists and shop girls.” Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street: A history of magazine publishing in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 48. 4. Shop owners would use a distanced Parisian connection, calling their stores names such as “Madame Rind,” “Madame Helene” or “Anne-Lucie” as a way to seduce the customer and to persuade them that they would provide quality and style. The Women’s Institute of Domestic Arts (WIDA) advised on “choosing a name” for a dressmaker or tailor shop. WIDA, “The dressmaker and tailor shop: Women’s opportunity,” Sewing for profit (London: White Friars Press Ltd., 1935), pp. 5–6. The selection of a French name for store was not London-centric. Names are taken from a selection of advertisements for guinea gown shops “Madame Helene” and “Anne-Lucie” in The Brighton and Hove Herald, 1928–1932, and photographs of “Madame Rind: Corsetier and Milliner,” on Mile End Road in the East End of London. Photography collection, 85/2, Jewish Museum, London. 5. James Gibson suggests that “the composition and layout of environments and objects ‘affords’ certain types of behaviour, that there is not an objective reality out there but affordances are qualities in the environment perceived relatively to the observer. Affordances are the values and meanings of our surroundings that individuals sensuously perceive.” 6. Peter Abrahams, “Life in East End and Stoke Newington in the early 1900s to 1960s papers,” Oral Testimony Archive, T 48/0002, The Jewish Museum, London. 7. Whitechapel. Picture Post. 15 October 1938. Periodical Collection. St. Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton, Brighton. Photographer unknown. 8. “Sorting out clothes. London street sellers,” c. 1939. Mary Evans Picture Library, London. Image number: 13450153.

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Works Cited Oral Histories Abrahams, Peter. n.d. Interviewer unknown. T48/0002, Life in East End and Stoke Newington in the early 1900 to 1960s papers, Oral Testimony Archive, The Jewish Museum, London. Stein, Jack. Interview by el-Doori Sarah. March 1, 1988. Audio number: 112. Oral History Collection, The Jewish Museum. London. Sussex PhotoHistory. Interview with Muriel Hughes (nee Simkin). 2009. Muriel Simkins Life in Photographs. https://www.photohistory-­sussex.co.uk/ SimkinMuriel.htm. Accessed 8 August 2020.

Periodicals The Invasion of Soho. The London Observer. April 1, 1928. British Newspaper Archive, London. Parisienne Jacqueline Plans: Easter in Paris. Mabs Fashions. April 1930. Periodical Collection. St. Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton, Brighton. A Trimming Touch from Paris. Mabs Weekly. 28 May 1932. Periodical Collection. St. Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton, Brighton. Whitechapel. Picture Post. 15 October 1938. Periodical Collection. St. Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton, Brighton. Life in Lambeth. Picture Post. 31 December 1938. Periodical Collection. St. Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton, Brighton. The Brighton and Hove Herald. 1928–1932. Brighton and Hove History Centre, The Keep, Brighton.

Census Records General Register Office. 1956. Census 1951, England and Wales. London: HMSO.

Secondary Sources Aylott, Russell, and Mitchell, Vincent Wayne. “An exploratory study of grocery shopping stressors.” International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, vol. 26 no. 9, 1998, pp. 362–373. Baker, T.F.T. A history of the county of Middlesex: Volume 10, Hackney. London: Victoria County History, 1995. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his world. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993 [1941, 1965].

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CHAPTER 9

“A Seductive Weapon … a Necessary Luxury”: Shopping for ‘Designer Perfume’ During the Interwar Period Lucy Moyse Ferreira

Considered the ‘golden era’ of perfume (Irvine 1996, p. 92), the interwar years represent a turning point in the history of perfumery. During this period, the beauty industry was increasingly commercialised, and the production of makeup, perfume, and other beauty items soared to a mass scale. From 1914 to 1929, the American perfume and cosmetic market, for example, rose by 700% (Caldwell 1989, p. 259), and exports of French perfume tripled from 1915 to 1925 (Wilson 1926, p. 49). Although the 1929 financial crash affected couture, like many other industries, couturier-­ perfumers were able to flourish, “thanks to the diversification of their products and the way publicity for their clothes also boosted perfume sales” (Irvine 1996, p.  114). Furthermore, whilst beauty products had previously been connected with actresses and prostitutes, during this period they became accepted, celebrated, and depended upon by everyday

L. Moyse Ferreira (*) London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_9

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women. This, of course, entailed shopping for perfume, which became a profoundly sensory experience, and retail environments increasingly engaged their customers’ various senses in order to secure sales of this intimate and culturally loaded product. Fashion designers were quick to participate in this new phenomenon. Before 1919, very few fashion designers had produced a perfume, yet by 1939, only a small minority of leading designers had not. As American Vogue declared in 1925, “the great dressmakers are now creating perfumes, for this is a complicated era when a fragrance as well as a frock must suit a woman’s individuality” (p. 67). Can fragrance truly be considered as fashion, as Vogue suggested? Joanne B.  Eicher and Mary-Ellen Roach-­ Higgins have classified dress as including everything that affects or modifies the body, including sight, sound, and smell. To them, dress is “a comprehensive term to identify both direct body changes and items added to the body … an assemblage of body modifications and/or supplements” (1993, p. 15). Therefore, as The Sunday Express confirmed in 1927, “the taste for perfumes is an essential part of fashion’ (p.  3). Furthermore, Vogue later went as far as to suggest that not only were designers beginning to participate within the olfactory realm, but their main occupation allowed them to excel at it: “who should understand the requirements of beauty better than a great couturier, whose sense of blending … is so highly developed?” (1928, p. 104). This shift in the perception of perfume reflected a shift in sensory history itself—fashion designers, previously largely occupied in the highly regarded realm of sight, were now extending their practice to the sense of smell, which traditionally had not been afforded cultural consideration. Through an examination of fragrances released by the couturières Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, this chapter will explore the concept of “designer perfume” that emerged during the interwar period. Within the context of the 1920s and 1930s, in which women began to enjoy an increasingly liberated lifestyle, both Chanel and Schiaparelli responded to the changes in society and culture that modernity instigated, which lead to two distinct approaches towards femininity. For Chanel, her streamlined silhouettes prioritised movement, enabling women to maximise their modern lifestyles, incorporating references from sportswear and menswear. She championed modest materials such as jersey, which not only enhanced mobility and comfort, but also placed these previously strictly utilitarian materials into a luxurious context. Together, this built a sense of understated yet thoroughly modern and elegant femininity. Schiaparelli,

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on the other hand, launched her career with trompe-l’oeil sweaters, and took on a more spectacular approach, directly conceiving her fashion design as artistic expression, using elements of play, fantasy, eroticism, and surrealism. This chapter will explore the way in which each designer produced perfumes that reflected and extended their respective notions of femininity, and engaged with contemporaneous art and modernity. Through doing so, this chapter analyses each designer’s engagement with the senses of sight, touch, and smell through their perfume outputs. From packaging enticing the eye, to tactile bottles seducing the hand, as well as fragrant notes delighting the nose, the perfumes served to both represent Chanel’s and Schiaparelli’s brands in a nuanced way, and appeal to customers, whether existing boutique regulars, or those swayed within the competition of a bustling department store. While these ventures brought with them undeniable financial gain, the success of Chanel’s and Schiaparelli’s “designer” perfumes was far from limited to their economic benefits, and they offer new insights into Chanel’s and Schiaparelli’s practice, and approaches towards the senses themselves. This chapter will demonstrate, therefore, the deep cultural significance that can be gleaned from the sensory world of perfume.

Designer Perfumes and Their Packaging In 1922, British Vogue declared that “beautiful perfumes must be imprisoned in beautiful jars” (p. 5), suggesting that the way in which perfume is packaged is as important as, and a reflection of, the fragrance within. In a retail environment, sight is the first sense appealed to in shopping for perfume, before a consumer is able to smell it. Sight has also been connected to modernity: Freud, Darwin, and others have argued that “the sense of smell ha[s] been left behind and that of sight has[s] taken priority” (Classen et al. 1994, p. 4), suggesting that within modernity, those who value smell above sight lag behind society. As a result, “smell has been ‘silenced’ in modernity,” as being opposed to the “modern, linear worldview, with its emphasis on privacy, discrete divisions, and superficial interactions” (Classen et al. 1994, pp. 4–5). How, then, does perfume function within this context? During the same year, American Vogue likened perfume to art, describing it as ornaments made by artists (“Aids to Beauty...”, 1922, p. 62). Perceiving perfume in relation to art brings it in line with sight, and modernity itself, which prized sight above all other senses. Indeed, Susan Irvine (1996, p. 106) has commented that “if perfume was

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ever going to be a big part of modern culture, it … ha[d] to dissociate itself from the obscure world of smell and latch onto the visual arts.” Therefore, marketing techniques for perfume—a product which is inherently based upon smell—necessitated an interplay with hierarchies of the senses. As such, this chapter will first consider perfume through the sense of sight, initially  exploring Chanel’s and Schiaparelli’s olfactory output through their bottles. In doing so, it will place their perfume in relation to their contemporary artistic contexts, and explore the connections with modernity that unfurl as a result. Paul Poiret was the first couturier to establish a cosmetics and fragrance firm, having launched his first perfume in 1911. He began practices now integral to “designer” perfume, such as placing emphasis on packaging as the visual representation of a scent, which he approached artistically (Irvine 1996, p. 105). Fundamentally, he ensured that a piece of couture clothing, however expensive, well cut or beautiful, was no longer complete by itself. For the full experience, clothes demanded a mist of corresponding, couture—or “designer”—perfume. Chanel followed with her first fragrance, No. 5, in 1921, leading to regular releases over the interwar period.1 Several other fashion designers, including Worth, Lanvin, and Patou, launched fragrances soon afterwards. Schiaparelli produced her first fragrance, S, in 1928, following the success of her first fashion collection in 1927. Both Chanel and Schiaparelli went on to regularly release new fragrances over the interwar period. Chanel’s bottle design was consistent throughout her perfume range.2 The cool, calculated lines are perfectly geometrical, their hardness giving way only slightly at the rounded corners. In 1924, they acquired the sharp right angles and weighty stopper that they remain known for today. They appeared to be a stark change to the “novelty and fantasy” (Vogue 1923, p.  75) that earlier perfume bottles had been characterised by, such as Poiret’s tower-shaped Le Minaret (1913) and Le Fruit Défendu (1914) in the form of an apple. However, within 1910s catalogues, bottles appear closer in style to Chanel’s square lines than Poiret’s overwrought creations. And while the glassmaker Lalique had produced many of the aforementioned fanciful bottles, he had already produced more understated examples as early as 1903. Rather than being a dramatic change, No. 5 and subsequent releases took part within an overall, gradual movement towards simpler and arguably more modern designs. The perfume’s bottle alignment with other, everyday products, such as pharmacy items, which presented it as a necessity rather than a whimsical extravagance. The straight,

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simple lines are utilitarian, bringing the natural qualities of the glass material to the fore. Sight leads into touch, the straight lines leading into a smooth, hard, and cold tactility. Schiaparelli’s later debut perfume bottle was similarly functional. Despite her more avant-garde fashion designs, it was comprised of a similarly square shape to Chanel’s bottles, and the angularity of its stopper was highlighted by the right angles used to construct its title-letter, S. A following trio of scents released in 1934 maintained this basic design, with vertical lines leaning inwards, creating a trapezium. Both designers, by the time of their respective fragrance releases, had already achieved international presences as luxury-defining couturières. Why, then, were their perfumes packaged so innocuously? A 1924 Chanel catalogue explained that the term “luxury perfume … has lost much of its value,” claiming it was “abused” by bringing “an air of prestige to … dubious product[s] … to sway a naïve public” (Mazzeo 2010, p. 212). It argued that as Chanel’s perfumes were “created exclusively for connoisseurs,” there was no need to dress them in “the customary artifices” (Mazzeo 2010, pp. 211–212). The deliberate simplicity of Chanel’s—and later Schiaparelli’s—bottles therefore deliberately created a sense of honest luxury, with no need to hide behind misleading packaging. Pierre  Bourdieu’s theoretical approaches towards taste (1979) and art (1995) help to illuminate the underlying rationale for these decisions. He attested that a “work of art does not exist as a symbolic object endowed with value unless it is known and recognized … by spectators endowed with the aesthetic disposition and competence necessary to know it and recognize it as such” (1992, p.  229). In selecting a Chanel or early Schiaparelli fragrance, then, despite its seeming modesty, the customer is flattered by the perceived ability to recognise “true” luxury, much like a nineteenth-century dandy, whose immaculate elegance and opulence was only perceptible to those who were equally as finely tuned to such subtleties. The deliberate pairing back of these perfume bottles therefore served to highlight their status as luxury items, and to showcase the quality of the fragrance within. However, while the restraint of Chanel’s bottles was matched by their monochrome boxes, simply constructed of thin cardboard, Schiaparelli’s 1934 releases were presented within chunky cubes disguised as cork, designed by Jean-Michel Frank. The cork lent the packaging an illusionist edge and appealed to the senses further by indicating a sense of material tactility. This approach was to be developed further with her Shocking

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perfume in 1937. Shocking’s title was an accurate description of its bottle: fun, brazen, and sexy, taking the form of a naked female torso. An overflowing, organic bunch of flowers served as the stopper, as if the fragrance’s vitality could not be contained within the fleshy bottle. Chanel’s contours continued to be cool, crisp, and restrained, and Shocking’s undulating, feminine curves seemingly defied them. Designed by the Surrealist artist Leonor Fini, the bottle was based on Mae West’s body, supposedly inspired by the dummy Schiaparelli used to design her film costumes. Around the same time, mannequin torsos also frequently appeared in the work of Surrealist artists such as Hans Bellmer (c.1934–1938), Roland Penrose (1937), and Marcel Jean (1937). Mannequins oscillate upon the boundary between the real and the unreal, living and un-living, and subsequently serve as a simulacrum with an uncanny quality. This interplay has been related to beauty—particularly in an olfactory form—by several writers. During the nineteenth century, Baudelaire likened a rotting carcass to the future image of his “decomposed love!” (1857, p.  62). He described it as “like a lustful woman,” and included sensory imagery: while he acknowledged “putrescence,” (1857, p.  60) he also set the encounter on a “sweet, summer morn” (1857, p. 58). Bataille, in 1929, also found decomposition and sexuality hidden behind beauty, which he too connected to smell, such as the “fetid odor of mortality” (1929, p. 12). To him, the apparent elegance of a flower masks its inner sordidness, and he perceived even the most elegant examples as being spoiled by their hairy sexual organs. Shocking’s bottle, which similarly featured flowers, also plays upon these boundaries. It was based on the figure of a real, vivacious, and living woman. Yet reproducing her form using a cold, un-­ living man-made material, and moreover, multiplying it through mass production, renders her body to be frozen and artificial. This is enhanced by the clear vitrine placed over it, to complete the packaging, as if the torso was an object to be putrefied, observed, or experimented upon. Chanel also took inspiration from the pharmaceutical realm, and her bottles were close in design to medicine bottles sold at the time. Furthermore, between the wars, pharmacy products were listed adjacent to fragrances within shop catalogues, demonstrating a perceived link between the two categories. Chanel’s perfume, therefore, could serve as a “prescription” of perfume for the fashions of the day, reflecting the increasingly common appearance of perfume as an essential element of the toilette routine. For example, Vogue pointed out that it was no longer restricted to the upper classes, for by 1924 even “the grocer’s boy’s girl

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want[ed] perfume for Christmas” (1938, p.  28). Furthermore, the demands of modern life, such as sport’s increasing popularity amongst women, created new needs for perfume. Some manufacturers used this to their advantage, and Coty claimed that “animated movement gives … perfume unforeseen contrasts which surprise and delight” (Stamelman 2006, p.  240). While perfume remained a luxury, as perpetuated by Chanel’s consciously understated packaging, modernity rendered it to be an increasing necessity, and by 1936, Michel Arbaud declared that it was a woman’s “duty to be perfumed” (Stamelman 2006, p. 240). This element of necessity, albeit a very luxurious one, as opposed to Schiaparelli’s fragmented, fetishistic surreality, accorded with the prevailing taste for minimalism and constructivism of the day. The year 1921 had seen both her debut fragrance release and the definition of Constructivism, by members of the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (Foster et  al. 2004, p.  196). Furthermore, the maxims offered by such figures as Le Corbusier apply equally well to Chanel’s bottles as to modern art and architecture. For example, he stated that “primary forms are beautiful forms because they are clearly legible … geometric forms satisfy … our eyes” (1924, p. 85). In each case, an aura of restraint and sensitivity is created, especially relevant given its release only three years following the First World War. Chanel’s modernist values offered a wholeness, clarity, precision, and construction, as a means of recovery, and progression away from, the social, political, and economic trauma that the war entailed. While Chanel’s minimalism can be related to advancement and modernity, Schiaparelli’s 1938 perfume release, Sleeping, had alternative significations. With a bottle in the form of a lighted taper and cone-shaped extinguisher, it was disguised as a candlestick, an object that, while still in use, was distinctly old-fashioned. This homage, when the market had moved on to electric alternatives, serves as an act of defiance towards modern technological and capitalist progress, recalling Walter Benjamin’s notion of profane illumination (Bataille 1929). Furthermore, the pseudo trompe-l’oeil bottle manipulated the senses of its beholder and user. Not only was it fashioned to appear as something it was not, but the object it mimicked, a candlestick, strongly connects to the sense of sight. A candle’s flame provides illumination, which can be read in terms of practical lighting, as well as in terms of sight’s relationship with advancing knowledge and modernity. Yet this initial appearance was a deception, as the perfume was of course, at its essence, firmly connected to the murkier, less tangible sense of scent. Finally, its very title, Sleeping, also related to the unbound

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unconscious, which was central to Surrealism’s aims and a means of liberation in the looming threat of fascism (Breton 1969), once more connecting Schiaparelli to the group. While Chanel’s and Schiaparelli’s bottles were initially comparable, then, during the 1930s Schiaparelli’s bottles increasingly placed her within the Surrealist world. Both drew on aspects of luxury and everyday objects, though they each had different messages in doing so. For Chanel, it was a way to engage with the contemporary context that the bottles were placed into, and to present ideals of wholeness, advancement, and construction as a means of moving forward from the aftermath of the First World War. For Schiaparelli, as her designs reached closer and closer to the outbreak of the Second World War, she engaged with Surrealists (even employing Leonor Fini as a bottle designer, in addition to her separate couture collaborations with Salvador Dali) and used many of the tropes used by the movement a means of resistance and liberation.

The Sensory Experience The scents contained within the bottles themselves enhanced Chanel’s and Schiaparelli’s respective approaches to perfume, and can be exemplified through Chanel’s No. 5 and Schiaparelli’s Shocking, connecting to their respective senses of functional and flamboyant femininity. In terms of ingredients, the two fragrances are surprisingly similar. Each is dominated by floral notes—the very ingredients that so closely bind the beauty of perfume with Baudelairean sex and death. Furthermore, at the beginning of the century, single note scents, such as rose and violet, were deemed within society to be the most respectable, while jasmine in particular was regarded as openly sexual. Yet jasmine is a prominent note in the multi-­ noted Shocking and No. 5, in their top and middle notes respectively. While perfume became increasingly less stigmatized after 1918, alongside cosmetics’ newfound acceptance, it was liberating to be able to wear scents that had only recently been connected with dubious virtues. This sexual overtone is present in the very essence of scent. Florals, despite being one of the most innocuous perfume ingredients, take their smell “from the sexual secretions of flowers, produced to attract animals for … cross-pollination … formulated as mimics of the animals’ … sex pheromones” (Stamelman 2006, p.  300). Such a truth is paraded by Schiaparelli’s packaging, particularly Shocking, yet underplayed by Chanel’s. Furthermore, the implicit violence of Shocking’s bottle, in the

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shape of a limbless torso, is reflected by many of the manufacturing processes behind perfume: the necessary motions of crushing and distilling, for example, if removed from the act of creating perfume, would have alarming connotations. This combination of sex and violence is exploited by Schiaparelli, while in Chanel’s case, it is concealed behind seemingly transparent, clean bottles. The blank, abstract nature of Chanel’s packaging, while promoting subtle luxury, also reflects another aspect of the fragrance within. A significant feature of No. 5, for example, is its abstract nature in smell as well as packaging: whilst worn, it is difficult to define precisely which notes the scent consists of. In 1931, Chanel reportedly explained that this was quite deliberate: “[T]he perfume which many women use … is not mysterious … I don’t want a woman to smell like a rose” (Mazzeo 2010, p. 104). It wasn’t until 1912 that the first truly multi-floral scent, Houbigant’s Quelques Fleurs, appeared, and the phenomenon remained relatively unexplored until Chanel. Her packaging reflects this abstract, and thereby modern, smell. Similarly, its indefinable quality added to the mystery and absence already invoked by her packaging. Furthermore, Chanel’s debut fragrance was the first to use aldehydes in a significant quantity (Irvine, p. 108). They enhanced its abstract nature by lending an artificial, clean, sparkling—and, owing to their new usage, irrefutably modern—edge. While Schiaparelli also featured aldehydes in her perfumes, including Shocking, by this point it was no longer unusual to feature aldehydes in any quantity. While both designers therefore used similar ingredients, their compositions led to different effects. While Chanel’s fragrance was clean and abstract, Schiaparelli’s was more pungent, having been described in 1935 and 1937 respectively as “a bit too heady for my taste” (The New Yorker, p. 65) and “thrilling” (Vogue, 1937, p. 28). The latter article also referred to a Chanel scent as being “wholly distinguished for the clever woman” (p. 46). Despite their similar ingredients, then, the final fragrance and packaging of Chanel’s perfume was perceived as being refined, concealing any baser instincts inherent in perfume. While Schiaparelli’s earlier forays had started off on this note, she increasingly followed a more explicit and provocative approach. In many ways, these differences fall into the categories of conscious, and subconscious. While they both contain animalistic base notes, some with distinctly faecal odours, and the top-notes that cover them are themselves taken from floral sex organs designed to attract animals, Chanel presented these ingredients in a clear form of her own brand of modest, essential, and necessary

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luxury. In containing more primal urges in this way, Chanel’s perfume performs what Freud (1908) referred to as “sublimation”—the conversion of impulsive desire into socially acceptable behaviour. While Schiaparelli’s bottles—and expensive ingredients—were equally luxurious, distinct alarm also lay behind their whimsicality, and they did not contain bodily associations, but rather, celebrated them. Her perfumes instead relate to the unconscious, one’s darkest, most personal desires, unbound by society’s norms. This connects to the overarching surrealist need for escape and liberation from the war, to be carried out through the subconscious and its desires. The vehicle through which this could be achieved was shock: only by jolting society from its rigorous restrictions, and bourgeois mentalities, could it be set free into a new mode of existence, halting the grave international political situation. Chanel, however, had released her fragrances a decade beforehand: recovering from, rather than advancing towards, war. Engaging with the prevalent artistic context of this time—with constructivist, minimalist, and modernist aesthetics—was sensible, sensitive, and encouraging. The restraint of her bottles did not deny its exclusivity or luxury; by fitting in with less expensive brands, they exuded a quieter, more knowing sense of luxury, discernible only to those available to it. As her fragrances—and their worldly context—developed, Schiaparelli increasingly moved away from this aesthetic, towards an altogether more flamboyant one. Its instantly capturing effects served to jolt and provoke society in the same vein as Surrealism. Chanel provided order and calamity to smell, the sense that had previously been conceived as savage, and unconstrained, finally allowing it a position within modernity. Schiaparelli’s later deconstruction proposed smell as the most surreal of all senses. While it had caught up with modernity, even neat packaging could not contain its dissipation into the atmosphere, an essential process in order for a fragrance to perform its most essential objective: to be smelt.

The Boutiques Perfume envelops its wearer in a cushion of scent, which simultaneously permeates the space around them. According to Simmel (1908), this creates an “atmosphere” that is the most intimate part of a person. Similarly, within a retail environment, perfume products also have an important role to play in terms of creating an atmosphere, and representing their brand. They are tangibly present, where they can be seen and touched, and they

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can also be sprayed and smelt, physically permeating the space. They combine multiple senses in order to make an impression upon shoppers, and also surreptitiously infiltrate the paths of anybody nearby or passing. During the early 1920s, Chanel’s fragrances were sold on an exclusive basis at her boutiques, in Paris, Deauville, Biarritz, and Cannes. Within them, fragrance enhanced the shopping experience, for she atomized No. 5 in her fitting rooms, presenting it as an essential part of the Chanel dressing process. The sense of smell therefore became an integral aspect in the consumption experience, and was as important within the process of shopping for womenswear or accessories as it was in shopping for perfume itself. When clients enquired about the scent that they could detect within the fitting rooms, Chanel initially claimed that it had been produced only as a gift to favoured clients, but that if the enquiring client believed it had commercial potential, she would sell it (De la Haye 1997, p. 37). Patrons were therefore led to depend upon—and be rewarded by—their sense of smell whilst shopping. With smell “typically represented as subjective and private” (Classen and Howes 2013), that Chanel pre-empted a reaction within her clients demonstrates smell’s ability to “transmit and receive ideas”, despite having previously been classified as a “so-called lower sense”, as Classen and Howes (2013) have elaborated. Patrons were deliberately led to believe, then, that they shared style, knowledge, and respect, with the couturière herself, socially positioning themselves in line with Chanel through a judgement of taste (Bourdieu 1979) ascertained by exercising their sense of smell whilst shopping. In turn, Chanel worked equally hard to present herself within her clients’ habitus, projecting herself as a lady of leisure, rather than a hardworking business owner. This was cultivated as early as 1921, when Sem (Georges Goursat) produced a cartoon, in which a seamstress attended to a client’s gown, while Chanel reclined in the background, barely acknowledging the busy activity that was taking place before her. The action all took place within an outline of a Chanel perfume bottle. Not only did it show that the silhouette of the bottle design alone was already recognisable, but it suggested that all of the activities associated with Chanel’s couture business were irrefutably bound up with, and represented by, her scent. This elevated the sense of smell above others, such as touch, which were associated with manual work that the couturière distanced herself from, once more manoeuvring the hierarchies of the senses. Correspondingly, Chanel deliberately avoided being seen in public spaces within her own shops (Madsen 2015, p. 126). According to The

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New Yorker in 1931, she “remain[ed] inviolably invisible” (p. 26). This absence deepened the gap within which mythology surrounding Chanel and her perfumes built up. The mysterious qualities of perfume itself (especially in Chanel’s deliberately abstract concoctions) enhance such a phenomenon. It is deeply personal—and supposedly personal to Chanel herself, as her creation—yet she could not be found. One can smell perfume long before and after its wearer has (dis)appeared, so spraying it suggested that Chanel has only vanished momentarily. Therefore, while she made effort for her perfume to appear clean, practical, and quietly, knowingly luxurious, it simultaneously took on a ghostly, absent aura. Such absence also prevailed at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, 1925. Its pavilion dedicated to perfume asserted that fragrance played a valuable part within wartime recovery. Furthermore, the exhibition catalogue directly related perfume to art and modernity, declaring “perfume is essentially a modern art” (1925, p. 73) and that “the condition of its existence” is “always to make something new” (Madsen 2015, p.  126). It further emphasised the modernity of perfume by discussing “the discoveries of chemists” which “have opened unknown horizons, the synthetic perfumes with aldehydes…” (Madsen, p.  126). Whilst not strictly true,3 this wording presented perfume as an utterly current element of modern life, advancing French industry in general. Chanel’s perfumes were not present, which created an air of distinction between her products, and the mass-produced examples on display. Yet the exhibition ultimately confirmed perfume’s valid role within modernity, which Chanel’s marketing firmly accorded with. Like Chanel, Schiaparelli’s first four forays into perfume were also sold on a limited basis to couture clients. However, in 1931, she opened a separate boutique, Schiap, within her Paris atelier, selling ready-made clothing and accessories at more accessible prices than her main collections. By the late 1930s, her perfumes took centre stage here, housed within a specifically designed, gold, oversized birdcage, designed by Jean-­ Michel Frank. Positioned by the windows, perfumes were the first thing customers saw, or were lured by. This important placement qualified them to represent Schiaparelli herself. Indeed, perfume takes on a more eternal quality than ephemeral, seasonal fashions: unlike a fashion collection, which is usually sold for months at most, perfumes often remain in production for decades.4 The set-up of the cage was a reminder of this permanence. Model birds were scattered at the top, and the perfume bottles were suspended between

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the bars. Ironically, with the large cage door left open, the “birds” were free to escape, while the perfume remained trapped indefinitely. This suggested that once applied, the perfumes would cling to one’s skin for a long period of time, becoming part of them. In this way, perfume envelops and veils the body, both masking and mingling with its natural scents. The cage becomes a useful metaphor of such an experience—it contains, traps, masks, and exposes, due to the gaps between its wires. During the 1920s, women were newly exposed: more flesh was on display due to rising hemlines, yet this could be carefully veiled and combated by mask-like makeup. Within the 1930s, however, a streamlined and disciplined body was honed through diet, exercise, and supportive, shaping—and constrictive—underwear garments. The aesthetics of femininity, at the time, then, demanded a careful balance of veiling, unveiling, liberating, and constricting certain aspects of the body, which is explored by both the wearing of perfume and its cage-like metaphor. The first International Exhibition of Surrealism, 1938, also featured a birdcage, upon the head of André Masson’s Mannequin with Bird Cage. It was one of twelve mannequins at the show, each dressed by a different artist. Many elements corresponded with Schiaparelli’s example: Masson also left his cage door open, incorporated birds, and suggested freedom by including fish swimming through the bars. Furthermore, the inclusion of a pansy—although brutally stuffed in the mannequin’s mouth—evoked a sensual, olfactory aspect. Not all of the evoked scents were pleasant, however: whilst birds did appear, they were stuffed underneath the mannequin’s armpits, evoking sweat; as if her skin was not smooth, cold, and un-living, but rather a living woman whose sweat confirms her vitality. These contrasts evoke the abject qualities of perfume compositions themselves, which can include, for example, faecal as well as floral notes. Mahon has asserted that Masson’s mannequin spoke “not to an orderly, masculine rationalism but a disorderly, abject femininity” (2005, p. 47). This disassociated it with the masculine decisions that Surrealist artists felt had caused the First World War (Breton 1969). The particular form of femininity constructed by Schiaparelli’s perfumes, and the spaces she erected around them, actively engaged with this manner of thinking, in contrast to Chanel’s orderliness. Whilst the Surrealist exhibition “freed” mannequins from retail windows, Schiaparelli installed them within her own boutique windows— though not in a whole state. One late 1930s window display featured two Shocking bottles either side of a dressmaker’s dummy, which echoed their

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shape. Interplay between the real and the unreal emerged: on the one hand, the two perfume bottles were real, and available for consumption, whereas the dummy merely served display purposes. Yet the bottle was also based on the real measurements of the living actress Mae West, closely connecting it to reality. A stylised heart shape placed upon the dummy augmented these juxtapositions, being in the correct location of a human heart, and emphasising its un-living status as a result. Altogether, the uncanny was invoked. This enhanced the inherent uncanny quality of the mannequin as a double of the human body. Schiaparelli’s display heightened the deathly associations of the uncanny, placing dead flowers around the dummy’s neck, disturbingly replacing its head, in contrast to the vivacious versions that adorned the physical perfume bottles. The display, then, worked to reveal and expose the underlying simulations of fashion, embodying Walter Benjamin’s comment that “fashion was never anything but the parody of the gaily decked-out corpse” (Buck-­ Morss 1991, p.  101). The incorporation of Chanel’s perfume into her boutique also invoked a ghostly aura, using the sense of smell as her primary selling tool. However, this was generated through her distinct, cultivated absence, and initial false denial that her perfumes were even a commodity, as opposed to the visceral visions placed strategically by Schiaparelli within her window, so that they were unavoidably present to her customers, very much depending on their sense of sight. These approaches engaged with values promoted at respective contemporary exhibitionary spaces. While Chanel’s absence at the 1925 Exposition continued the mystery promoted in her shops, the exhibition revealed that, at this point, perfume could rightly be associated with modernity and advancement, now able to compete with the previously dominant sense of sight. Conversely, Schiaparelli increasingly engaged with the Surrealist movement, through both her visual displays and bottles (as well as collaborations), combating the masculine, rational, and politically fraught bourgeois world with an undeniably feminine “Other.”

The Perfumeries Within their own boutiques and advertisements, Chanel and Schiaparelli were able to assert a carefully concocted image, and mode of presentation. However, how did the experience, and subsequently perception, of perfume alter when placed in the busy environment of a department store, intermingled with of other brands? In the earlier interwar years, Harrods,

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in London, displayed a plethora of perfume bottles inside, on top of, and behind, glass counters. A sprinkling of chairs suggested a slow shopping pace: in 1925, British Vogue advised: “to the modern woman the choice of a perfume is not the whim of a moment but a matter for serious consideration” (p. 67). Nevertheless, there was a vast, largely un-separated array: separate brand counters were not installed until after the Second World War. The selection could potentially be overwhelming, particularly when also dealing with an enthusiastic sales assistant, trained to “entice.” Indeed, period manuals for salespeople describe selling as a seductive drama, aiming to attain interest from a consumer and follow it through to a sale. For example, William Walsh (1927, p. 9) wrote: “of late … ‘selling’ has taken on another meaning. We are learning to recognize that nearly all human relations involve gaining attention, arousing interest, using persuasion. These are fundamental terms understood in the world of salesmanship…”. Altogether, this could lead to sensory overwhelm for consumers: navigating a busy retail environment, taking in crowded product displays and persistently persuasive salespeople. On the other hand, towards the end of the interwar period, the Galeries Lafayette perfume department  in Paris offered a different scene. Here, products were more explicitly labelled and were divided into accessible brand groups. Although the shop did not sell Schiaparelli’s perfumes, it played a pioneering role in widening the availability of Chanel’s perfumes. Its owner, Théophile Bader, instigated Chanel’s partnership with the Wertheimers in 1923, in a bid to increase production to levels that could meet the anticipated demands of his department store. Subsequently, it received much attention within in-house publications. Within a department store perfumery, such as in Harrods and Galeries Lafayette, bottles have to fight considerably harder to woo their consumer. Here, not only do they represent merely one offering out of many, but they are also stripped somewhat of the aura that shrouds them within an atelier, the heart of a designer, represented explicitly by Schiaparelli’s avant-garde displays, and implicitly by Chanel’s ambient spraying of fragrance within her boutiques. From the initial rise to prominence of department stores during the late nineteenth century, their retail environments have been sexualised and rendered distinctly feminine by writers, as explored in Wendy Ligon Smith’s chapter in this volume. Such concepts persisted in 1930, when Julien Duvivier produced a popular film adaptation of Zola’s 1883  novel,  Au Bonheur des Dames. Many commentators linked these

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qualities to hysteria, a connection which had been suggested since the birth of the department store. For example, Le Figaro remarked in 1881 that “the creation of these grand bazaars has given birth to new passions in the moral order as in the pathological … it is a new style of neurosis!” (p. 1). Such ideas of seduction, to the extent of neurosis, continued to be perpetuated during the interwar period. In 1924, Vogue described perfume departments as “temptation counter[s],” which provide “an adventure” and “a thrill,” making “the[ir] psychological effect … just as important as their physiological effect” (p. 75). Not only do Vogue’s words evoke strong sensory feelings conjured by the process of shopping for perfume in particular, with an increasing heart rate and sense of anticipation, but they also highlight smell’s ability to transcend the physiological, and also speak to the psychological, indicating the sense of smell’s unique and important qualities, and confirming its cultural value. This idea prevailed as late as 1939, when Joan Crawford played a predatory perfume-counter saleswoman in George Cukor’s film, The Women. According to Jean Baudrillard, selling is eroticised by definition. “By virtue of advertising,” he has asserted, “the product exposes itself to our view and invites us to handle it; it is, in fact, eroticised … because the purchase itself … is transformed into a scenario of a complicated dance, flirtation, prostitution” (1968, p.  172). This scenario applies especially well to the phenomenon of shopping for perfume. The thoughtfully designed packaging, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, initially lures a customer, and this is further impounded by persuasive sales techniques, which were eroticised within contemporary commentary (Walsh 1927; Pitkin 1932). Shopping for perfume within a department store—the only way to access designer versions outside their exclusive ateliers—was part of a deeply modern experience: being able to shop for various essential goods under one roof. By definition, perfume’s important place within them (as illustrated by the large departments dedicated to it, such as in Harrods and Galeries Lafayette), renders it an inherent part of this process, and it is presented as a luxuriously necessary element of modern life. Yet while necessary, and modern, it was also perceived as feminine and sexual, to the extent of having psychological effects. While the particular form of femininity presented by Chanel’s perfumes responded to the modern convenience of being able to purchase perfume along with other goods, Schiaparelli’s convulsive femininity responded to its sexualised and psychological perception.

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A Seductive Weapon, a Necessary Luxury Infiltrating her dressing spaces with perfume, and aligning her bottles to quotidian, pharmaceutical bottles, Chanel presented her perfume as an integral necessity for a woman. Yet these understatements were not a result of modesty, but of a knowing satisfaction that her perfumes were exclusive and inherently luxurious—emphasized by initially limiting availability to within her own boutiques and later advertising them only quietly and simply. There was no need to exaggerate or contaminate this. Schiaparelli’s perfumes were equally luxurious, using similar, prestigious ingredients, and her first release was presented in line with Chanel’s understated ideals. However, she increasingly progressed into an overtly sensual approach. This was reflected both by her playful, figurative bottles and by the spaces that she cultivated for perfume within her boutiques. While Chanel had initially denied having even produced a commercial fragrance, Schiaparelli ensured that her fragrances were the first thing to confront customers upon entering her Schiap boutique. Through perfume, each couturière presented her own unique construction of femininity. Simone de Beauvoir (1949, p. 175) described the contradictions inherent in femininity, explaining that women are expected to be simultaneously “smooth, hard, changeless,” and “carnal.” Such words are poignant in terms of Chanel and Schiaparelli. Physically, Chanel’s bottles were smooth, hard, and changeless, altering only minimally since their original design, and, whilst Chanel retained creative control, remained universal across her varieties. In contrast, Schiaparelli’s creations were irrefutably carnal, representing and responding to the bodily urges that define humanity. Therefore, together they represent the duality of femininity. In addition, each designer engaged with their wider context through their perfumes. Chanel’s restrained minimalism, while it belied a certain arrogance, was also sensitive to the aftermath of the First World War. Furthermore, by engaging with modernism and modernity, she was able to project values of advancement, rebuilding, and wholeness. While Schiaparelli’s first 1928 perfume responded to this, through its packaging, presentation, and representation, from 1934 onwards she increasingly engaged with Surrealism, actively construing some of its tropes, such as shock, sleep, and desire. Her perfume’s recession, both to earlier more traditional times and to the subconscious, was a means to escape from the inevitability of the encroaching war.

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In contrast, Chanel’s efforts appear to represent overly conscious concealment. Nevertheless, by 1 April 1938, on the brink of another world war, a Chanel fragrance advertisement asked: “are you the type to carry it off … with your most fragile evening dress … As disturbing as springtime, [it] evokes equally disturbing emotions in … men.” Disturbing is a curious word to describe springtime. The connotations of vulnerability, disturbance, and sexual attraction suggest that Chanel’s well-constructed veneer was beginning to fall in the threat of another war, coming full circle back into alignment with Schiaparelli. This has an air of inevitability that relates to the very essence of fragrance itself, which had important visceral connotations, in both its ingredients and its effects upon application. In 1925, Vogue wrote that “perfumes, to the sophisticated modern, can say ordinary things better than we can say them with our tongues, besides being able to express other profundities that we wouldn’t dream of uttering, even if we knew that they dwelt deep down within us” (pp.  84–85). Vogue specifically emphasised that despite western modernity typically being associated with the “higher” senses of sight and hearing, the sense of smell was a deep and rich way to communicate, and could even express one’s subconscious desires, whether voluntary or not. It suggested that, far from being an inferior sense, it can bring additional value and significant cultural communication. Whether restrained by Chanel, or exaggerated by Schiaparelli, their perfume was by no means purely profit- and publicity-seeking. Instead, in Vogue’s words, perfume became the “aura” in which “you live, move, think, and fascinate” (p. 85), responding not only to the humanity of its wearer, but also to that of its wider interwar context. Shopping for, and wearing, perfume was a multi-sensory experience, which did not dissipate after the initial purchase or spray of fragrance, but lingered with a multi-­ layered trail of scent and connotations. Furthermore, ventures into the olfactory realm allowed Schiaparelli and Chanel to construct distinct visions of femininity. They respectively correspond to, and build upon, terms that Michel Arbaud used in 1936 to describe the very function of perfume within interwar life: a “seductive weapon” to attract romantic partners, and simultaneously a “necessary luxury” to counter the odours that came with modern activities (Stamelman 2006, p. 240). In doing so, he argued that perfume could transform the banal into the sublime, which speaks of the sense of smell’s ability to transport and communicate in ways that transcend sight and sound.

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Notes 1. This made Chanel the third notable fashion designer to turn her attention to fragrances. Maurice Babani was the second. Grasse, Marie-Christine; de Feydeau, Elisabeth; Ghozland, Freddy; L’un des sens, Le Parfum au XXème siècle (Toulouse: Éditions Milan, 2001). Several other fashion designers, including Worth, Lanvin, and Patou, launched fragrances soon afterwards. 2. At least until 1924, when the Wertheimers, independently of Chanel, began to release certain scents with their own bottle, such as Ivoire. 3. Such chemicals had been discovered some time before, although they were not popularly used in perfume until the 1920s. 4. Including Chanel’s No. 5, which is still sold today, while Schiaparelli’s Shocking was still available by the 1960s.

Works Cited “Aids to Beauty go Clothed in Glory,” American Vogue. 1 January 1922. Bataille, Georges. “The Language of Flowers,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985 [1929]. Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil, translated by James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1857]. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Translated by James Benedict. London and New York: Verso, 1996 [1968]. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1979]. ———. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (translated by Susan Emanuel). California: Stanford University Press, 1995 [1992]. ‘Bouquet of Perfumes,’ Vogue Beauty Book, 14 April, 1937. British Vogue, February 1922 Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Caldwell, Helen M. “1920–1929: The Decade of the French Mystique in the American Perfume Market.” Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Historical Research in Marketing and Marketing Thought. Michigan: Michigan State University, 1989. Classen, Constance, and Howes, David. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Classen, Constance; Howes, David; and Synnott, Anthony (eds.). Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge, 1994.

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De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated and edited by Parshley, H. M. London: Jonathan Cape, 1956 [1949]. De la Haye, Amy. Chanel: The Couturière at Work. London: V & A Museum, 1997. Eicher, Joanne B. and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins. “Definition and Classification of Dress.” In Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts, edited by Ruth Barnes, Joanne B. Eicher. Oxford: Berg, 1993. Foster, H.; Krauss, R.; Bois, Y-A; Buchloh, B. Art Since 1900. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. Freud, Sigmund. “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” [1908] in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 9. Edited by James Strachey. London: Random House (Vintage Classics), 2001. Grasse, Marie-Christine; de Feydeau, Elisabeth; Ghozland, Freddy. L’un des sens, Le Parfum au XXème siècle. Toulouse: Éditions Milan, 2001. Irvine, Susan. Perfume: The Creation and Allure of Classic Fragrances. London: Aurum, 1996. Le Corbusier. Toward an Architecture. Translated by Goodman, John. London: Frances Lincoln, 2008 [1924]. Madsen, Axel. Chanel: A Woman of Her Own. New York: Henry Holt & Company Inc, 2015. Mahon, Alyce. Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. Mazzeo, Tilar. The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World’s Most Famous Perfume. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. “On Her Dressing Table.” British Vogue. 28 November 1928. ———.” British Vogue, early March 1923. Parfums de Chanel. Catalogue, 1924, Chanel Archive. Paris Settings for French Fragrance.” British Vogue, late January 1925. Pitkin, Walter. The Consumer: His Nature and His Changing Habits. New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1932. Simmel, Georg. 1908. Cited by Largey, G. P., and Watson, D. R., “The Sociology of Odors”. In Dress and Identity, edited by Roach-Higgins, Mary Ellen, Joanne B. Eicher and Kim K. P. Johnson. New York: Fairchild, 1995. Stamelmann, Richard. Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin: A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present. New York: Rizzoli, 2006. “The Beauty Business,” British Vogue, Beauty Book Special Edition, 24 August 1938. The New Yorker, 7 September 1935. “The Perfume of the Couture,” American Vogue, 15 November 1925.

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The Sunday Express, quoted in Worth advertisement, British Vogue, late July 1927. Walsh, William T. Salesmanship Simplified: a Short Cut to Success. Chicago: Opportunity Publishing, 1927. Wilson, M.  L. “Why “France” and “Perfume” are Synonymous.” Printer’s Ink, 13 May 1926.

CHAPTER 10

Be My Baby: Sensory Difference and Youth Identity in British Fashion Retail, 1945–1970 Bethan Bide

My mum moved to London from South Wales in the dying days of the Swinging Sixties. Prepared by a long-term subscription to Honey magazine, she was ready to take advantage of the city’s gigs, clubs and, of course, its internationally renowned fashion boutiques. Some of the items she purchased still survive in her attic, including a shirt from Biba that cost a substantial part of her pay check. Although she professes she shopped for pleasure and leisure, her strongest memories of boutique retail revolve around sensory experiences that were not necessarily pleasant, including the experience of buying this shirt in Biba’s dark and sensorially disorientating Kensington Church Street store. Yet even the most viscerally unpleasant of these memories—the stale stench of old dog in an overcrowded shop on a wet day as a result of the fashion for vintage afghan coats—conjure a nostalgic fondness, and it is clear she considers them proof that she lived an authentic experience of 1960s youth culture. If, as Christopher Breward has professed, it is not just consumption but an acutely pleasurable form that lies at the heart of the archetype of the

B. Bide (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_10

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Swinging Sixties, then the relationship between the challenging, disorientating and unpleasant sensory experiences offered by many of the most successful fashion boutiques of the era and our understanding of what constitutes youthful pleasurable consumption demands further attention (Breward 2006, p.  8). This chapter addresses two key questions to our understanding of the period: firstly, how radical experimentation in retail sensory stimuli fostered consumer identity and loyalty amongst young shoppers, and secondly, how this focus on sensory experience built upon, rather than invented, the development of distinctive spaces for youth cultures in British fashion retail. The chapter challenges the idea that 1960s fashion boutiques were necessarily pioneers by positioning them within a longer history of sensory youth retail. By tracing the importance of sensory difference back to the emergence of specialist spaces for teenagers in department stores in the mid-1940s, this chapter confronts the elitism present in histories of youth culture that privilege “the vanguard rather than mainstream consumer culture” (Capuzzo 2012, p. 617). The timeline presented in this chapter illuminates how the circulation of discourses concerning what types of experience and sensory stimuli constituted pleasurable consumption in relation to teenage and youth fashion retail shaped the development of distinctive postwar youth cultures in Britain. Moreover, it explores how conscious methods to translate these encompassing sensory experiences into words and images in magazines permitted the sense of cultural belonging and authenticity that they evoked to reach and ensnare much broader consumer groups than would ever be able to visit the Kings Road or Carnaby Street (Smith 2007, p. 131). In order to begin to make sense of the evolving relationship between disorientating and even unpleasant sensory retail experience and pleasurable consumption, it is necessary to recognize that senses—and our reactions to sensory stimuli—are socially situated (Smith 2007, p.  4). As chapters by Bailey, Raines, Ferreira and others in this volume show, there is a long history of retailers using sensory stimuli to persuade shoppers to frequent their establishments and make purchases. As Smith discusses in her chapter, the development of the department store in the late nineteenth century further increased the need for retailers to actively stimulate sensory engagement within the retail space. In order to counter the passifying effects that fixed prices and the open arrangement of goods had on their customers, department stores developed increasingly spectacular retail displays to build consumer relationships by creating moments of

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interaction between the shopper and the retail space (Corrigan 1997; Scott and Walker 2010). However, trying to create sensory engagement in order to mould consumer behaviour to a desired pattern is not a straightforward process, in particular due to the multi-layered relationship between social interactions and identity creation (Lancaster 1995, p.  164). To further complicate issues in the mid-twentieth century, the association between the retail space and pleasurable consumption was disrupted by the Second World War, as British fashion retailers faced severe stock shortages and shabby, damaged infrastructure. Yet, for all the challenges of the immediate postwar era, there was also a development that offered exciting opportunities for selling new types of fashion goods in enormous numbers: the growth of the teenage consumer. This new demographic wanted retail spaces that were unlike those in which their parents shopped, ones that felt like entirely different environments that belonged solely to them (Bide 2021). This chapter traces how this was achieved from the mid-1940s onwards through the experimental use of lighting and music to create distinctive sensory experiences in teenage fashion departments. Using store promotional materials, discussions about retail spaces in teenage magazines and the retail trade journal Display, it explores how the boundaries of pleasurable consumption were tested in the pursuit of sensory difference and excitement by British retailers. Finally, it asks how disseminating these sensory experiences through print culture helped establish broad identification with postwar youth cultures. Taking a sensory approach to the development of youth retail spaces provides a deeper understanding of the impact that retail spaces had on identity formation. As Lucien Febvre noted, how the world is sensed through a person’s physical body shapes their thoughts, and as such the creation of intense sensory difference in retail spaces is closely connected to identification with an idea of a youth culture that is distinct from that of their parents (Classen 2012, p. 200). However, identifying and interpreting sensory experiences and responses within historical materials is fraught with challenges due to the highly intuitive nature of the sensory and the difficulty for historians of extracting information about sensory experience from the language and visual materials it is bound up within (Widdis 2020). For example, although many photographic images of 1960s fashion boutiques look rather conventional to modern eyes, verbal, written and artistic depictions of their sensory impact on consumers reveal

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how they were perceived as innovative, and even shocking, at the time. This highlights the importance of resisting the temptation to “trust” in the primacy of sight, or to interpret visual materials through a contemporary lens (Smith 2007, p. 129). Conscious of these challenges, this chapter focuses on what historical sources can tell us about the processes by which fashion retailers sought to manipulate sensory experience, what motivated this and how these interventions shaped collective consumer identities. These are important questions to ask due to the centrality of the sensory to cultural values, practices and expression (Howes 2004, p. xi) and the heightened power of the sensory as a tool to resist or replicate social values within retail spaces due to their role as sites in which people are empowered to actively negotiate their relationship with consumer society (Miles 2010, p. 184). As Nigel Thrift (2008) argues, in order to understand why people are attracted to goods, it is necessary to consider how retailers and marketers manipulate material surfaces in order to generate imaginative engagement with the commodities they aim to sell in a way that stimulates both individual and communal aesthetic pleasure, creating shared experiences between groups of people. As such, understanding what is considered to be a desirable or pleasurable sensory experience and how this changes over time and place can greatly illuminate our understanding of how young people in the postwar period asserted their dissatisfaction with prevailing social norms using the tools provided to them by a consumer society, where identity is negotiated within continuous processes of self-creation through the consumption of new, fashionable goods and experiences (Slater 1997, p. 10).

The Importance of Sensory Difference to the Teenage Consumer Although the New York Times had considerable basis for claiming in 1945 that “Teenagers are an American invention,” looking closely at the significance of the sensory in fashion retail indicates that postwar British youth culture evolved quite distinctly from its American counterpart, in response to a more localized set of cultural forces (Savage 2008, p. 462). While the term “teenager” originated with market researchers in the mid-1940s, the idea of the “teenage” had been around long before this in relation to American fashion retailing, where “teen” sizes had been marketed in fashion departments since the mid 1930s (Osgerby 1997, p.  33; Schrum

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2011, p. 144). Although the interwar period similarly saw the formation of specific youth cultures in Britain, in the form of both an emerging “teen-aged” consumer and group identity amongst young people, it was not until after the Second World War that the British teenager was really taken seriously as a distinctive consumer group and cultural force (Flowler 2008, p. 115; Hennessey 2007, pp. 491–2). The rise of ready-to-wear fashions in the middle decades of the twentieth century was a significant factor in the growth of teenage fashion consumption. Relatively inexpensive ready-to-wear clothes offered an opportunity for young people to experiment more freely with changing styles. Furthermore, ready-to-wear clothes often used standardized sizing, giving customers greater autonomy as they no longer required a sales assistant to help them navigate the varying sizes of different fashion brands. This led to the widespread adoption of “self-selection” (or self-service) retailing, which encouraged consumers to develop their own sartorial identities and to shop with friends as a leisure activity (Schrum 2011, p.  136). It also meant that retailers were no longer able to rely on the influence exerted by salespeople on the shop floor to persuade customers to make a purchase, making the design of retail space more important than ever (Sandgren 2009). Yet the innovations made by department stores and multiple retailers as they developed distinct retail spaces and strategies for selling to this emerging consumer group in the late 1940s and early 1950s are broadly overlooked in histories of postwar youth culture and consumption. Instead, these overwhelmingly focus on the emergence of the fashion boutique in the mid-1960s, connecting the development of these spaces to nineteenth-­ century arcades or the prêt-a-porter concerns of couture houses (Pimlott 2007, p. 1). The sidelining of department stores in this story is indicative of a broader cultural snobbery towards these retail spaces. However, the sensory design of these new physically separate departments for female youth fashions and the role they played in developing sensory retail methodologies merit further attention. As newly created spaces, teenage, or Junior Miss, fashion departments functioned as a crucial testing ground for implementing modern interior design ideas in a retail environment, minimizing the risk of upsetting existing customers with unwelcome changes. This led to clear distinctions between new teenage departments and the rest of the store they sat within. At many stores, including London’s D.H. Evans, the layout of the Junior Miss department was conspicuously less formal than the store’s

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womenswear department, and haphazardly arranged clothes racks were interspersed with tables and chairs to encourage visitors to linger (Display Design & Presentation 1948, p.  23). The considerable effort expended towards creating this distinctive aesthetic reflected emerging market research that suggested young people desired retail spaces in which they felt comfortable and autonomous, and that it was worth investing in the creation of these spaces because this youthful demographic was particularly susceptible to make purchasing decisions as a result of publicity and promotion (Display 1947, p. 35). The ability to manipulate sensory experience was a crucial tool for department stores in creating a sense of difference between their teenage departments and the rest of the store. Lighting proved a key means to achieve this and there was widespread interest in understanding how young consumers might respond differently to lighting conditions than their older counterparts. In 1948, following research suggesting that fluorescent lighting could be used to influence the customer into making a purchase, the merchandise director of Bentalls department store experimented with the use of colour in their fashion departments. He concluded that coloured lighting had a positive effect on customer experience and sales, but more significantly, that adult and teenage consumers responded differently. While soft pink lighting tones were particularly effective in the womenswear department, as they flattered customer’s complexions, brighter colours such as greens and eggshell blues were more popular in the Junior Miss department (Display Design & Presentation 1949a). Elsewhere, more radical experiments in lighting were used to transform the sensory experience of retail spaces in order to disrupt customers’ expectations. When designing the new “Young Liberty” fashion department at Liberty & Co., Hulme Chadwick used lighting to render the famous interior of the Arts and Crafts department store unrecognizable. The store’s dark-wood panelling was first covered with white pained panels and mirrors, then lit by stark halogen strip lighting. This visually and conceptually separated the Young Liberty department from the softly lit spaces with exposed wood beams and richly patterned rugs for which the store was renowned. Many teenage departments also experimented with the use of music to create a youthful atmosphere. Liberty & Co. treated customers to live jazz music in order to create an informal but exciting setting more akin to a club than a shop, while other retailers installed record players (Display Design & Presentation 1949b, p.  23). But these types of interventions

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were expensive and resource intensive at a time when access to materials was limited by postwar shortages. Therefore, in order to distinguish themselves as spaces, teenage departments combined these techniques with experimental, “make do and mend” interior and display design. Rather than resort to using display mannequins with outdated makeup and hairstyles, many teenage departments presented their mannequins without heads or used mannequins crafted from chicken wire (Fig. 10.1). When combined with the trend for “found” display props—ranging from bomb debris to foliage foraged from local parks—this resulted in the creation of surreal and uncanny retail displays that challenged viewers’ expectations. Furthermore, this aesthetic evoked and replayed the implausible scenes of the Blitz, when bombing created strange, fragmented and disorientating landscapes. Just as artists and writers of the 1940s responded to these wartime landscapes through the creation of surrealist work (Mellor 2011), so display designers too drew on these sensorially disorientating reference points in order to challenge consumers’ levels of visual comfort, helping to

Fig. 10.1  Eric Lucking window display for the “Young Liberty Shop” at Liberty & Co., 1949. Westminster City Archives/Liberty Ltd.

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further emphasize the sensory novelty and strangeness of experiments in lighting and sound (Bide 2018). By the mid-1950s, many of the more experimental DIY retail display trends had subsided as postwar austerity gave way to an era when ready-­ made mannequins and display props were more accessible. While the idea of a distinct space to sell clothes to teenagers persisted in department stores, these spaces became less distinctive due to the broader adoption of some of the techniques they had pioneered across retail design and the widespread use of mass-produced display props that could be customized by colour, but little else (Display 1958, p. 5). The increasing homogeneity of display props reduced the capacity for displays to surprise or disorientate consumers. In comparison with the uncanny sensory encounters shoppers had experienced when passing by the surreal fashion displays of the 1940s, there was little opportunity to provoke imaginative discomfort when arranging components that were so reassuringly familiar. However, young consumer’s desire for sensory difference in retail spaces had not diminished. Furthermore, teenagers were increasingly affluent, making it more important than ever to cater to the considerable spending power of this demographic (Abrams 1959, p.  9). This raised significant questions for retailers about how they could continue to evolve the design of the sensory retail space in order to maintain the interest of a fast-changing set of young consumers as new teens aged in to this rather fleeting category and young adults cycled out, whilst continuing to foster the strong associations between youth identity and retail spaces that had been developed through promotional events and in-store “clubs” (Bide 2021). By the mid-1960s, department stores and multiple retailers turned to young people themselves to drive these ideas. Young display designers were recruited directly from art schools and technical colleges (Display 1967a, p. 32). These recruits were given freer rein to innovate than many of their more experienced counterparts, reversing the trend towards visual consistency that had dominated retail display design for much of the 1940s and 1950s with the aim of creating a sense of difference. This sentiment is encapsulated by the display manager at Marshall & Snelgrove in Birmingham whose only instruction to assistants creating a series of widows promoting their teenage department, the 21 Shop, was that their efforts should be “of a different type” from the store’s usual style (Display 1968, p.  30). But these efforts were not enough to keep a competitive

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advantage in the youth market when compared with the innovative designs utilized by a new type of retailer—the fashion boutique.

Fashion Boutiques and the Boundaries of Sensory Pleasure Boutiques’ success in creating distinctive retail spaces can be explained through their willingness to develop the sensory innovations of the Junior Miss department in radical new directions, pushing the boundaries of pleasurable consumption further than many of their competitors. As early as 1965, boutiques were exploring how customers responded to visual discomfort through the uncanny manipulation of display mannequins, such as covering mannequins’ heads and hands in different coloured felts in the windows of John Stephen’s His Clothes boutique on Carnaby Street. Although the effect was rather sinister, the display provoked curiosity in passers-by, an emotion triggered by extreme visual difference (Display 1965a, p.  29). The freedom boutiques offered for display designers to push boundaries in this way further exacerbated problems for their more established competitors as it attracted talented young designers to leave their jobs at department stores as a result of a relative “lack of creative elbow room” (Display 1967b, pp. 22–24). As part of this boundary-pushing agenda, designers working in boutiques refocused their efforts away from the purely visual in order to create distinction through a multi-sensory retail experience. This trend followed a growing interest amongst retailers in scientific studies, consciously drawing on work into the relationship between sensory organs, object perception and the potential for sensory manipulation of object perception to trigger emotions (Vernon 1967, pp. 22–24). The relative creative freedom and inexpensive DIY display cultures of boutiques made them ideal testing grounds for experiments into the most effective ways to evoke desire and emotion in customers through sensory manipulation. Once again, this was achieved by pushing the boundaries of pleasurable consumption. As the trade press highlighted, excitement could be stimulated by unfamiliar, and even uncomfortable, environments, such as the “cave-like” design of Amber boutique in Liverpool where shoppers were asked to request a record to be played loudly over the store’s PA system as they descended into the claustrophobic “coat cavern” (Display 1967b, p. 22). This type of retail experience was memorable and generated valuable word-of-mouth

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publicity precisely because it was intensely individual and different. By sowing a little disorientation and confusion, retailers provoked curiosity, intrigue and hype. Technological innovations further enabled retailers to play with customers’ sensory perceptions by introducing unfamiliar materials to retail spaces. By harnessing material innovations as consumer spectacle, retailers used new technologies to capture consumer’s imaginations, making space for consumers to be emotionally engaged and “moved” through having their understanding of sensory norms repositioned (Thrift 2008). This explains the popularity of new materials in display design, such as the enthusiastic uptake of new metallized films that created inexpensive coloured lighting (Display 1965b, p. 8). But many of the most successful sensory manipulations were achieved through much more basic methods of manipulating light and sound to create sensory stimulation or deprivation. Cutting down the amount of light entering a store through its windows was an extremely low-cost, and therefore highly popular, way for boutiques to create sensory deprivation. This method was particularly effective at creating a novel and surprising atmosphere within the store because the extent of the impact changed with the seasons and weather conditions, depending on the light levels outside. In the mid-1960s, Biba’s Abingdon Road shop used a mixture of signage and curtains made from varying weights of material to control the amount of light entering through the store’s large glass windows (Hulanicki and Pel 2014, p. 45). When Biba moved to a larger premises on Kensington Church Street in 1966, they took this principal with them, painting over the windows with a large black-and-gold Biba logo (Hulanicki and Pel 2014, p. 75). This not only prevented natural light entering the store, but also created a barrier to window shopping by leaving only small areas of unpainted glass for passers-­by to try and peer through, meaning that curious shoppers would need to enter the store in order to see what was for sale. The creation of visual barriers and sensory deprivation by covering windows in this way was widely copied by other boutiques such as Carnaby Street’s Kids in Gear (Lichfield Archive 1967), even though this technique contributed to a physically uncomfortable environment inside the store during the summer due to its heating effect—which even led to one window at Biba exploding on a particularly sunny day (Hulanicki and Pel 2014, p. 75). Once their eyes had adjusted to the gloom within the darkened store, shoppers were often confronted with further disorientating lighting

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effects. These were particularly sensorially shocking in small spaces, such as the Carnaby Street boutique that installed strips of flashing lightbulbs circling an entire room, running up the walls from the floor and onto the ceiling (British Pathé 1970). While these lighting effects made it almost impossible to get a visual sense of the true colour or texture of fabrics, they did replicate the experience of being in a nightclub, arguably showing off garments designed to be worn in that environment to the best effect. Although it can be argued whether this was a primary or even intended motivation, a clear commercial rationale developed for certain boutiques. The dark lighting conditions in the Lady Jane boutique on Carnaby Street were particularly effective for showing off the reflective qualities of mirrored and metallic embellishments in low lighting conditions, giving shoppers an understanding of the overall visual effect their potential purchases would have on a night out (Barnes 1967). Dark and disorientating lighting approaches broke many of the established rules of retail design, which assumed customers wanted the optimal sensory space for inspecting items for purchase and, by this logic, that retail spaces should be well lit, with room for customers to closely interrogate the material quality of the goods for sale. However, sensory deprivation enabled 1960s boutiques to mask the fact that many of their wares were not of a particularly high quality—a result of the proliferation of new types of man-made fibres and the drive for efficiency in an increasingly international ready-to-wear manufacturing industry (Paris 2010). Innovative sensory techniques offered an opportunity to invert the traditional sensory relationship between the consumer and the materiality of the objects in the store. Instead of providing optimal conditions for consumers to interrogate the material qualities of goods, retailers could benefit by creating sensory environments that obscured and distorted customer perceptions of material goods. In doing so, these retailers both anticipated and contributed to a wider cultural shift that prioritized novelty, the cultural cachet and broader aspirational consumer experience over the very attributes of the item being purchased. Novel sensory experiences further enabled boutiques to create a sense of exclusivity surrounding their retail spaces. The embodied and situated nature of the sensory means that sensory experiences are framed by dominant social and cultural values and power relations, and as such sensory experience can be designed to attract certain groups whilst also excluding others with less cultural capital (Degen et al. 2017). Because the design of boutiques varied so greatly from other retail spaces, they could be

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extremely disorientating and alienating to consumers who were not used to shopping in them. The sense of imposter syndrome this could elicit is captured by a story from Jackie magazine in 1967, in which Sally, a newly arrived teen from Preston, went boutique shopping in order to transform herself into an in-scene Londoner: Saturday morning went to Biba’s, this vast dimly-lit boutique in Kensington. Julie Christie and Brigitte Bardot shop here. All the dresses are displayed on Victorian coat racks and old wardrobes and you have to search round frantically for an assistant because it seems that half the time they’re in the dressing rooms trying on things themselves. Can’t tell them apart from the customers. (Jackie 1967a, pp. 6–7)

Sally’s story captures a sense that persevering through the confusion and difficulty of boutique shopping was an important ritual, necessary in order to transcend to a level of urban belonging personified here by celebrity actresses and singers. Retailers responded to this sentiment by designing spaces that were purposefully confusing and difficult to use through techniques ranging from placing items high up, making them hard to reach, to creating confusion about what goods were actually for sale by presenting displays in which the props and merchandise were indistinguishable (British Pathé 1967; Display 1965c, p. 62). Many made a feature of small and unpleasant spaces, such as using an old coal cellar as a mixed gender changing room. Not only did the small space, shared by both men and women, leave little room for privacy as customers squeezed past each other for access to mirrors, but the vaulted ceiling left taller customers hunched over and the rising damp, evidenced by images of blistering plaster, must have left the space unpleasantly cold and smelly (British Pathé 1966). These disorienting effects were sometimes compounded by temporal confusion. Décor, lighting and display props were used to bring together the past and the present by mixing antique props and shop fittings with contemporary fashion design and music in a way that simultaneously evoked cutting-edge counter culture while evoking memories of your grandmother’s house. The way boutiques distorted and disturbed consumer expectation of what shopping should feel like is characteristic of heterotopic spaces (Johnson 2013). Conceiving of boutiques as heterotopic helps explain how these seemingly exclusionary spaces simultaneously transformed the conventions and power dynamics of consumer society. Their intense and

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often contradictory sensory stimuli prompted shoppers to contest existing social categories, and, through exploration of a different kind of retail space, imagine a different kind of consumer society. Thus those customers able to endure and navigate the sensory challenges and barriers presented by the boutique were rewarded with the confidence of knowing they were part of a new youth culture that redefined social norms in retail environments and beyond.

Beyond the Boutique: Disseminating Youth Identity Through Sensory References The sensory extremes of boutique retail spaces created a powerful impression on visitors, leaving strong sensory memories with shoppers who only visited them rarely. They were also manifested in photographs, film, print and the written word, enabling the idea of the boutique to evoke sensory reactions in wider populations beyond their regular clientele. In this way, extreme sensory difference was an important business strategy for boutique retailers who relied on mail order to sustain their businesses, enabling people who did not live near London or another major city to buy themselves a material connection to a relatively limited urban retail experience (Gilbert 2006, p.  117). This can be seen in the mail order catalogues produced by businesses such as Biba, which used underexposed sepia photographs of models, staged in shadowy rooms, in order to replicate the décor and dark atmosphere of its retail spaces. The lighting of these images obscured the materiality of the garments for sale, allowing mail order customers to experience a taste of the sensory deprivation of the physical retail space (Biba 1969). The extreme sensory experiences offered by some boutiques were also useful frames of reference for more conventional retail spaces, including the teenage departments within department stores. By 1966, Honey magazine, a publication for teen-aged girls launched in 1960, had developed a line of Honey “boutiques,” operating as stores-within-stores in nearly 50 shops throughout the United Kingdom (Ashmore 2006, p.  61). These were publicized through a regular magazine feature titled “Boutique News from Room 113,” which drew on sensory tropes about boutique spaces in their description of music and “artistic” atmospheres (Honey 1968, p. 62). This served to imbue these rather pedestrian retail spaces with credibility in the eyes of their young readers by creating an artificial

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distance between the Honey boutique and the conventions it shared with department store teenage fashion departments. While Honey focused on building its retail business, Jackie magazine, founded in 1964, used written and illustrated descriptions of boutiques to help create a sense of community and belonging amongst its readers. Through cartoons and editorials, Jackie showed a visual and verbal language that evoked the sensory experience of boutique shopping for readers throughout the country. In the same manner as mail order catalogues, Jackie promised its readers that they could still be a part of this youth movement even if they could not physically access it. In doing so, Jackie built a particularly loyal readership and came to dominate teenage magazine sales throughout the 1970s (McRobbie 1991). In turn, Jackie’s written and illustrated depictions of boutiques cemented the idea that disorientating, confusing and unpleasant sensory retail experiences were a formative part of youth culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, confirming Angela McRobbie’s assertion that teenage magazines should be more widely recognized as “powerful ideological forces” (McRobbie 1991, p. 83) (Fig. 10.2). Jackie’s most explicit sensory references came it is regular column “Around the Boutiques,” which first appeared in March 1966. These columns give an indication of young consumers’ growing sensory awareness about retail spaces over the last years of the decade. The earliest iterations of “Around the Boutiques” focused on detailed descriptions of interior design and the style of clothes stocked, suggesting that the majority of the magazine’s readership were not yet be familiar with the visual tropes of the boutique (Jackie 1966, p. 19). But, as time went on, the columns began to focus on the more intangible sensory qualities of the retail spaces, paying particular attention to audio-visual stimuli, noting how busy spaces were and even commenting on the atmosphere evoked by the personalities of sales assistants: At lunch time, the tiny boutique, with its aspidistras, bamboo rails and Victorian phonograph, is packed out with girls […] There’s always coffee on the go, all the latest hits on the record player, and a friendly word from Susan. (Jackie 1967b, p. 22)

In doing so, Jackie drew on the language employed by fashionable directories detailing the London scene, such as “Get Dressed: A Useful Guide to London’s Boutiques” (Bultitude 1966) and “Gear Guide” (Johnson

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Fig. 10.2  “Boutique” cover illustration. Jackie, 10 December 1966, 1. DC Thompson Archive

1967), as well as a growing public knowledge of the extreme sense of sensory difference offered by these retail spaces. By 1969, the content of “Around the Boutiques” suggests that readers had developed a stronger sensory understanding of boutique spaces, allowing its writers to evoke the boutique through brief descriptions of certain colours and textures, as well as coded terms like “casual” and “dramatic” (Jackie 1969a, p. 19). In order to maintain interest in the originality of these spaces, the writers made sure to highlight a few of the more exotic décor features in each column, such as a mobile “consisting of dozens of cardboard eyes” (Jackie 1969b, p. 25), a ceiling covered in “trays from apple crates” (Jackie 1969c, p. 22), and another which “looks like shimmering metal, covered in 14

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packets of ordinary cooking foil” (Jackie 1969d, p. 19). In paying particular attention to creative DIY projects and praising boutiques with “paintbrush happy” owners who changed the décor frequently, the magazine created an inclusive understanding of the visual tricks of these spaces whilst simultaneously encouraging readers to think of sensory change as exciting and dynamic, rather than disorientating (Jackie 1969e, p. 19). Jackie helped its readers overcome their sense of impostor syndrome by creating associations between certain types of sensory stimuli and experiences described as desirable and fashionable. Readers were encouraged to see unfamiliar spaces as stimulating rather than intimidating through gentle written metaphors and the use of soft, abstract illustrations (Jackie 1969f, p. 8). These illustrations never attempted to faithfully recreate the design of the shop space itself. Instead, they developed something of a symbolic language that would have been reassuringly recognizable to regular readers, like using a floating record player to symbolize a shop where music was atmospherically important, or adding a cloud of hearts and flower shapes for somewhere with particularly friendly sales staff (Fig. 10.3). In order to understand the impact of Jackie’s “Around the Boutiques” columns, it is important to note that experiences that occupy imaginary spaces become very real for those doing the imagining (Wood 2005, p. 12). Although these fantastical columns presented a romanticized and embellished ideal of the boutiques they featured, their descriptions evoked sensory experiences in the imaginations of their readers, with real-world consequences for the way they consumed fashion. Sensory description in “Around the Boutiques” helped Jackie readers situate themselves within the sensory cultures of boutiques and in turn, develop a sense of belonging and identification with the authenticity of youth experience that these spaces conveyed. The strength of this, and its consumer impact, is evidenced in the mail order instructions that accompanied these columns. Although the illustrations never showed the garments in enough detail for readers to glean their cut or fabric, readers could purchase them by tearing out the page and sending it with a postal order and personal details to the featured boutique. Readers who did so cannot have been sure of either the quality or the exact design of product they were going to receive in return, highlighting that these mail order consumers attached more importance to their ability to buy into the sensory environment of the boutique and the youth culture to which it belonged than to the materiality of the product purchased.

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Fig. 10.3  “Around the Boutiques” column, Jackie, 15 April 1967, 22. DC Thompson Archive

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Conclusion The boutique culture of the Swinging Sixties, characterized not just by new fashions but by broader consumer and cultural trends, undoubtedly changed how and why we shop in a way that continues to impact our understanding of pleasurable consumption today. However, this chapter demonstrates the significant lineage of these trends—both in the sensory techniques employed and in the broader identity-driven youth cultural connections they aimed to foster. As early as the mid-1940s, retailers began to experiment with sensory stimuli in order to create distinctive spaces for young people to shop so as to drive consumption of new types of inexpensive fashion products to an increasingly affluent young demographic. Specialist teenage fashion departments during this period trialled ideas about how lighting, sound and visually confusing and uncomfortable displays could be used to stimulate sensory difference, and through this create group identity amongst young consumers. Because of their sensory difference, these spaces became formative for young people navigating their transition into adulthood. By the 1960s a new type of retailer—the fashion boutique—pushed the sensorial boundaries of pleasurable consumption even further. The sensory bricolage of the boutique created spaces in which strong and distinct youth cultures were formed through ambiguity, imagination and a shared knowledge and understanding of the seemingly disorientating and discombobulating sensory experiences provided by these heterotopic spaces. This knowledge was widely disseminated through a proliferation of sensory description in visual and print cultures, simultaneously helping diverse audiences of young people navigate these uncomfortably unfamiliar spaces and embedding the boutique in national mythologies about postwar British youth cultures. Understanding that sensory stimuli were experienced both in-person and in-print provides insight into how the relatively short-lived, small-scale and geographically limited phenomenon of the 1960s fashion boutique developed such an outsized cultural legacy (Gilbert 2006, p. 117). By acknowledging the sensory methodologies and motivations shared by the postwar Junior Miss department and the boutiques of the Kings Road and Carnaby Street, this chapter breaks down some of the nostalgic mythologies about the boutique. In so doing, it enriches our understanding of the business strategies of retailers and helps explain why boutique aesthetics and sales techniques were widely replicated by department

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stores and multiple retailers well after the heyday of boutique retail (Ashmore 2006, p.  70). Perhaps most importantly, it forces us to look again at our conceptions of what counts as pleasurable consumption. By both re-examining a sensory approach to youth fashion retail and investigating its mutually reinforced motivations and role in broader cultural shifts, this chapter furthers our understanding of how integral shared sensory experiences are for processes of identity formation in a consumer society—even if deafening, blinding or smelling a bit of damp dog.

Works Cited Abrams, Mark. The Teenage Consumer. London: London Press Exchange, 1959. Ashmore, Sonia. “‘I think they’re all mad’: Shopping in Swinging London.” In Swinging Sixties, edited by Christopher Breward, David Gilbert and Jenny Lister. London: V & A, 2006, pp. 58–77. Barnes, Owen. Photograph of Michelle Desange trying on a chain mail dress in the Lady Jane boutique, Carnaby Street, November 1967. https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-­photo/michelle-­desange-­tries-­on-­a-­chain-­mail-­dress-­ while-­shopping-­news-­photo/592226008. Accessed 20 February 2021. Biba. Catalogue, October 1969. Yorkshire Fashion Archive. Bide, Bethan. “More than window dressing: visual merchandising and austerity in London’s West End, 1945–50.” Business History, vol. 60, no. 7, 2018, pp. 983–1003. ———. “The Fashion City and the Suburb: How Bentalls of Kingston Upon Thames Helped Rebuild Cultures of Fashionable Consumption in London after the Second World War.” The London Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, 2021, pp. 47–65. Breward, Christopher. “Introduction.” In Swinging Sixties, edited by Christopher Breward, David Gilbert and Jenny Lister. London: V & A, 2006, pp. 8–21. British Pathé. 1966. Mixed Boutique, 2007.28. https://www.britishpathe.com/ video/mixed-­boutique. Accessed 24 January 2021. ———. 1967. Swinging Britain Neg, 421.03. https://www.britishpathe.com/ video/swinging-­britain-­neg. Accessed 24 January 2021. ———. 1970. The Mini Skirt, 3329.03. https://www.britishpathe.com/video/ the-­mini-­skirt. Accessed 24 January 2021. Bultitude, Millicent. Get Dressed: A Useful Guide to London’s Boutiques. London: The Garnstone Press, 1966. Capuzzo, Paolo. “Youth and Consumption.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, edited by Frank Trentmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 601–624.

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Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Corrigan, Peter. The Sociology of Consumption. London: Sage, 1997. Degen, Monica, Lewis, Camilla, Swenson, Astrid & Ward, Isobel. The Changing Feel of Smithfield: exploring sensory identities and temporal flows. London: Brunel University, 2017. Display. 1947. Survey by the American Institute of Student Opinion. Display, September. ———. 1958. Advert for Hindsgaul Display Mannequins. Display, January. ———. 1965a. And all that…. Display, May. ———. 1965b. Advert for Johnson & Bloy Ltd. Metalised Films. Display, January. ———. 1965c. Reflections. Display, October. ———. 1967a. Are the display staff from our Art Schools and Technical Colleges a dead loss? Display, January. ———. 1967b. The Case for Courage. Display, February. ———. 1968. Staff Work at Marshall & Snelgrove, Birmingham. Display, March. Display Design & Presentation. 1948. Swan & Edgars “Young Set.” Display Design & Presentation, August. ———. 1949a. Colour Influences the Customer. Display Design & Presentation, February. ———. 1949b. Young Liberty. Display Design & Presentation, September. Flowler, David. Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c.1920–c.1970. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Gilbert, David. “Out of London.” In Swinging Sixties, edited by Christopher Breward, David Gilbert and Jenny Lister. London: V & A, 2006, pp. 102–117. Hennessey, Peter. Having it so good: Britain in the Fifties. London: Penguin, 2007. Honey. “Boutique news from room 113.” Honey, February 1968. Howes, David. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2004. Hulanicki, Barbara and Pel, Martin. The Biba Years: 1963–1975. London: V & A, 2014. Jackie. “Around the Boutiques: Double or Quits.” Jackie, August 27, 1966. ———. 1967a. “Sally’s Scene.” Jackie, January 14. ———. 1967b. “Groovy Gear for Girls.” Jackie, January 14. ———. 1969a. “Go Vest.” Jackie, March 29. ———. 1969b. “Where they make clockwork cufflinks.” Jackie, April 19. ———. 1969c. “It’s the Number to Dial for Fashion.” Jackie, March 16. ———. 1969d. “Gather Round for Guildford Goodies.” Jackie, July 19. ———. 1969e. “Cool Clobber for Colchester Girls.” Jackie, November 29. ———. 1969f. “Marvey Gear—Get it at the Vets!” Jackie, June 17. Johnson, David. Gear Guide: Hip-pocket Guide to Britain’s Swinging Carnaby Street Fashion Scene. London: Atlas Publishing, 1967.

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Johnson, Peter. “The Geographies of Heterotopia.” Geography Compass, vol. 7, no. 11, 2013, pp. 790–803. Lancaster, Bill. The Department Store: A Social History. London: Leicester University Press, 1995. Lichfield Archive. Photograph of shoppers on Carnaby Street, 24th October 1967. https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-­photo/shoppers-­on-­carnaby-­ street-­in-­soho-­west-­london-­24th-­october-­news-­photo/82217710. Accessed 3 March 2021. McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture: from “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen”. London: Macmillan, 1991. Mellor, Leo. Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Miles, Steve. Spaces for Consumption. London: Sage, 2010. Osgerby, Bill. Youth in Britain Since 1945—Making Contemporary Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Paris, Ivan. “Fashion as a System: Changes in Demand as the Basis for the Establishment of the Italian Fashion System (1960–1970).” Enterprise & Society, vol. 11, no. 3, 2010, pp. 524–559. Pimlott, Mark. “The boutique and the mass market.” In Boutiques and Other Retail Spaces: The Architecture of Seduction, edited by David Vernet and Leontine de Wit. Routledge: New York, 2007, pp. 1–15. Sandgren, Fredrik. “From ‘peculiar stores’ to ‘a new way of thinking’: Discussions on self-service in Swedish trade journals, 1935–1955.” Business History, vol. 51, no. 5, 2009, pp. 734–753. Schrum, Kelly. “‘Oh the Bliss’: Fashion and Teenage Girls.” In The Girls’ History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century, edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell and Leslie Paris. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011, pp. 135–159. Scott, Peter, and James Walker. “Advertising, Promotion, and Interwar British Department Stores.” The Economic History Review, vol. 63, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1105–1128. Savage, Jon. Teenage: The Creation of Youth: 1875–1945. London: Pimlico, 2008. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture & Modernity. Oxford: Polity, 1997. Smith, Mark. Sensory History. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Thrift, Nigel. “The Material Practices of Glamour.” Journal of Cultural Economy, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, pp. 9–23. Vernon, Ian. “Psychology and Display 2: Perception.” Display, April, 1967. Widdis, Emma. “The Challenges of Sensory History.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 21, no. 1, 2020, pp. 199–201. Wood, Michael. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Index1

A Advertising, see Marketing B Boddice, Rob, 5 Bodies, 2–6, 9, 11–13, 79, 81, 84, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 102, 113, 114, 116, 130, 135, 137, 138, 140, 149, 150, 156, 170, 174, 181, 182, 193 Browsing, 2, 3, 6, 39, 72, 104, 106 Brussels, 11, 12, 79–95 C Cafés, see Restaurants Cities, 11, 53, 59–70, 72–75, 80, 82–89, 91, 93–95, 140, 149, 151, 156, 160, 191, 203

Class, 3, 5, 11, 44, 46, 60, 65, 71, 73–75, 83, 92, 95, 102, 115, 123, 134, 137, 140, 141, 147, 148, 150, 151, 156–159, 162, 163 Classen, Constance, 3, 4, 10, 19, 36, 41, 42, 48, 69, 81, 83, 88, 106, 123, 138, 146, 150, 154, 156, 158, 171, 179, 193 Coffee, 40, 65–67, 69, 75, 204 Comfort, 2, 9–13, 55, 60, 69, 79–95, 124, 125, 127, 170, 197 Consumer choice, 2, 6 experience, 2, 6, 201 judgement, 6 knowledge, 2

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0

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INDEX

D Department stores, 2, 6, 9, 12, 48, 61–63, 65, 66, 68–72, 74, 75, 80, 81, 88, 101–104, 106–110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 123, 126, 136, 171, 182–184, 192, 195, 196, 198, 199, 203, 204, 208 Domestic, 12, 20, 23, 28, 33, 41, 42, 67–69, 76, 123, 125, 128, 129, 138 Dress, 1, 12, 13, 33, 66–68, 82, 101, 111, 113–115, 145–163, 170–174, 180, 182, 186, 187n1, 191–209 second-hand, 154, 162 Dublin, 11, 59–76

H Hands, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 18, 21, 88, 109, 136, 161, 171, 182, 183, 199 Health, 2, 12, 101, 121, 122, 129, 130, 133, 137–141 Howes, David, 3, 10, 19, 69, 106, 107, 146, 155, 179, 194

E East India Company, 10, 17, 19, 21–24, 28, 33 Emotions of delight, 2, 5, 13, 52, 136, 175 of disgust, 13, 41, 122, 137 Eroticism, 12, 101, 111, 171 Exoticism, 68

M Marketing, 2, 13, 22–28, 33, 38, 63, 64, 70, 80, 102, 104–106, 109, 116, 161, 172, 180, 184, 185 Markets bazaars, 38, 67, 81, 150, 184 fairs, 6 Mental health, 133

F Fashion, see Dress G Gender, 3, 4, 11, 42, 60, 71, 73, 95, 102, 116, 123, 134, 140, 141, 150, 202 Government, 3, 17, 82, 85, 86, 88, 94 House of Commons, 17, 18, 22–33

L Lavatories, 59, 60, 62, 63, 69–76 London, 7, 11, 12, 17, 19, 21–24, 28, 29, 46, 71, 73, 82, 95, 114, 123, 131, 136, 145–163, 191, 195, 203, 204 Luxury, 1, 9, 11, 33, 36, 67, 68, 82, 101, 110, 124, 125, 169–186

N Nostalgia, 11, 36, 49, 55 O Olfactory, see Smell Orientalism, 65–70, 76 P Paris, 11, 12, 66, 82, 95, 103–105, 110, 151, 179, 180 Perfume, 1, 12, 13, 70, 158, 169–186

 INDEX 

Q Quality, 5, 6, 10, 12, 19, 20, 22–27, 29–33, 35, 43, 45, 50, 88, 94, 95, 103, 106, 107, 113, 128, 139, 140, 147, 148, 151–153, 155, 162, 163, 164n4, 164n5, 173, 174, 177, 180–182, 184, 201, 204, 206 assessment of, 17–33 R Rappaport, Erika, 3–5, 8, 9, 20, 60, 63, 71, 80, 81, 140 Respectability, 11, 60, 63, 65–70, 72, 74, 75 Restaurants, 11, 59–76, 81, 89, 90 Retailers hawkers, 12, 32, 157 shopkeepers, 6, 19–21, 29, 32, 35–38, 40–44, 46, 48, 53, 55, 83, 85, 88, 91, 92, 122, 132 S Seduction, see Sensuality Senses historicising the, 36 as methodology, 195 and temptation, 110 Sensuality, 2, 68, 88, 102, 105, 109–111, 161, 162, 184 and silk, 110 Shopping and convenience, 11 districts, 62, 73 and gender, 3, 95

215

Shops boutique, 6, 13, 171, 178–182, 185, 191–193, 195, 199–206, 208, 209 online, 2 shop interiors, 53 village, 10, 11, 35–55 Shop staff, 12 living-in, 12 Skin, 18–20, 101, 102, 113, 114, 181 Smell odour, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 107, 122, 126, 139, 156, 158 stench, 9, 42, 44, 158, 191 Smith, Mark M., 3–6, 36, 59, 60, 81, 151, 192, 194 Sound cacophony, 9–13, 19, 48, 159 music, 128 Spectacle, 9, 11, 12, 46, 90, 105, 106, 200 Stimulation, 9, 45–55, 116, 127, 200 over stimulation, 10, 110 Stobart, Jon, 3, 36–38, 40, 41, 43, 81, 88 Streets, 2, 3, 11, 12, 60, 61, 64, 65, 71, 73, 74, 79–95, 126, 145–163 T Taste, 1, 10, 17–34, 49, 76, 81, 104, 106, 136, 146, 150–153, 155, 163, 170, 173, 175, 177, 179, 203 good taste, 104, 106 Tea Tea Duties Act, 20, 22, 25, 27, 29, 31 tea rooms, 11, 66 varieties of, 22, 25, 29, 30

216 

INDEX

Toilets, 59–76 Touch, 4, 7, 18, 19, 27, 33, 69, 81, 83, 86, 94, 103, 106, 109–111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 141, 150, 151, 155, 171, 173, 179 and silk, 106, 117 Trade, 5, 6, 8, 10, 19–24, 26, 28–31, 37, 38, 43, 53, 61, 122, 123, 127, 132, 134, 145, 149, 157, 159, 193, 199 Tullett, William, 6, 139 U Urban space, 11, 65, 87, 95

W Wagner, Richard, 12, 101, 102, 113–116, 118n8 Walking, 60, 62, 63, 70, 79, 86, 91, 95, 130 Y Youth, 129, 191–209 Z Zola, Émile, 12, 102–105, 107–111, 113, 115, 117, 125–127