Shopgirls (10 page)

A fashionably dressed shopgirl, reading while she walks, photographed by
Punch
cartoonist Linley Sambourne.

The violets were the last straw. Years later Harriet Whiteley recalled how her husband had come home one summer’s day carrying a small bunch of flowers. She had heard enough rumours about his predilection for his own shopgirls and had written him a pleading letter, asking him to avoid public scandal and think of their four children. In private Harriet and William were already leading rather separate lives and he often travelled to the coast for the weekend instead of joining his family in their country home, Manor Farm, in Finchley, then a rural parish to the north of London. But when he dared come home with violets and unashamedly explained that they were from one of his shopgirls – ‘plucked by her own dear little fingers’ – Harriet could take it no more: ‘I couldn’t have them in the place, and I threw them away.’
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From this point onwards, Harriet and William Whiteley’s marriage of fourteen years unravelled still further. They rowed and Harriet packed up the younger children with their governess, Miss Tollputt, and left for Folkestone, where the eldest child was at school. As the outspoken newspapers helpfully reported, this sparked ‘rumours with a thousand tongues’. The next month, in August 1881, Harriet filed for judicial separation, on the grounds of adultery and cruelty.
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‘The Great Whiteley Divorce’ screamed the headlines, and over the coming months the intensive coverage of the ‘Whiteley vs. Whiteley’ scandal sold thousands of extra newspapers. When Harriet appeared in court in order to retain custody of the children, she was veiled, with a blanched face and tearful eyes. What Harriet stated in her divorce petition was the stuff of clichéd romance. Shopgirl Alice Allen, known as Daisy, had caught Whiteley’s roving eye. He had wooed her in the store, with Whiteley and Daisy often alone together in his private room – where Harriet claimed that adultery had taken place. With his family safe in the capital, Whiteley had whisked Daisy off for weekends in Tunbridge Wells and in Hastings – it was all rather blatant.

The ensuing collapse of the Whiteley marriage and the characters caught up in the saga fed the Bayswater rumour-mill. A year later the Whiteleys settled just before their divorce was to be heard in court, with Harriet receiving an alimony of £2,000 annually. A young woman – presumably Daisy – who had worked at Whiteley’s for nine years and who had been subpoenaed to give evidence for Harriet, was sacked the moment she returned to work with a note saying she should apply to the cashier for her remaining wages.

Daisy’s story chimed perfectly with the perspective of the times. The public image of the girl behind the counter was not of a demure and callow innocent. In the musical comedy
The Girl from Kay’s
, staged a few years later, Nancy, Mary, Cora, Mabel and Hilda made up the shopgirl chorus. They sang of being ‘goody, goody little girls’ who nonetheless were going to be ‘naughty, till we’re getting on for forty … we like a bit of Life!’. Flirtatious and mischievous, yet wanting to become good wives – this was a difficult balancing act within the strictures of late Victorian society. Women were depicted on the one hand as virtuous and tender ministering saints, chaste before and even within marriage, where sex was for procreation only and not an activity to be enjoyed. On the other hand was the feared, notorious figure of the prostitute and her imitators, described as oversexed, luxurious and diseased. Angels or the devil’s temptresses: the middle ground was difficult and dangerous to negotiate.

And it was onto these shifting sands that the newly independent, earning, attractively dressed young women serving behind the counter were set to tread.

As the real-life Nancys, Mabels and Hildas flooded into stores and behind the counters, they swelled the ranks of shopgirls to hundreds of thousands and formed a whole new category of working women. In the ever-growing Victorian cities, crowded and bustling, shopgirls were a highly visible new workforce. They were agents of change, both because there were so many of them and because they had working lives and leisure time unlike any who had come before.

Shopping itself was changing and the foundations of how we shop today were being laid. A monumental shift was occurring in the way retailers thought about shopping. Female customers had always been important; when shopping for their families, wives were usually the decision-makers in terms of provisioning the household and clothing their kin, even if it was the husband or at least the husband’s wage packet that was ultimately used to pay off the credit weeks or months later. But now the shopping entrepreneurs decided to elevate the female customer to new heights: she should take centre stage, for the key to commercial success lay with her.

In 1892 a large fire destroyed Jenners in Edinburgh, the oldest department store in Scotland. Founder Charles Jenner was by now an old man, but his entrepreneurial zeal remained undiminished. He chose the architect for the redesign and oversaw the project, fireproofing the building with an iron and steel frame and introducing modern electric lights, hydraulic lifts and even air-conditioning. Britain’s leading architectural photographer, Henry Bedford Lemere, took a stunning series of photos of the still-empty new interior, capturing this masterpiece of Victorian Art Nouveau.
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Diffuse sunlight from the central lightwell softly lit up ornate balustrades, Corinthian columns and swirling milk-glass electric chandeliers. The delicate high chairs in the haberdashery department were waiting for the first customers, standing tall at counters displaying lace, handkerchiefs and shawls.

The redesign was an unmitigated success. On the day of the store’s reopening, 25,000 visitors flocked to the Princes Street and South St David’s Street entrances. The façade that confronted them featured carved figures propping up columns and standing on balconies. Female figures. They were caryatids representing the countries Jenners serviced: Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Germany and America. The message was clear: women were at the core of his business. Without them, the edifice of Jenner’s store, his enterprise employing hundreds of people and the high-quality service offered to shoppers across the world would crumble.

Jenner was absolutely correct. As the middle classes had become richer over the course of the century, shopping for them had developed into a female-orientated activity, even a leisure pursuit, a status symbol of wealth as well as a functional necessity. Writer Anthony Trollope observed this in his articles on London tradesmen, describing the great firms of his day, the Marshalls and Snellgroves, the Meekings and the Whiteleys, with their largely female clientele. ‘Send a man alone out into the world to buy a pair of gloves,’ wrote Trollope, ‘and he will go to some discreet and modest glove shop from which when he has paid his 3s 6d over the counter he can walk away.’ His wife, Trollope countered, preferred one of the big stores where, as well as buying gloves, she can ‘lounge there, and talk, and be surrounded by pretty things’.
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Jeanette Marshall was one such wife from a professional family and her diaries in the 1870s and 1880s show that her weekday walk combined both exercise and shopping, visiting Lewis’s, one of the co-operatives or Liberty’s most days. It was rare that she exclaimed, ‘For a wonder, did not buy anything at Lewis’s or elsewhere!’
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Cartoonist Osbert Lancaster painted an astutely funny portrait of his great-aunt Jenny in his memoirs, comparing her intimate relationship with Whiteley’s Universal Stores to that of an abbess and her convent. She saw Whiteley’s and others as part of her domestic domain. Each of Lancaster’s female relatives had their favourites: for Great-Aunt Bessie the Army & Navy Stores ‘fulfilled all the functions of her husband’s club’, while Lancaster’s mother preferred Harvey Nichols. Lancaster wrote that it was hard to underestimate how personal the relationship was between these lady customers and the shopkeepers. Some of the shop assistants became the ladies’ confessors, ‘receiving endless confidences on the state of their health, the behaviour of their pets and the general iniquity of the Government’.

In the 1880s, Great-Aunt Jenny lived hard by Whiteley’s on Inverness Terrace, and after reading most of
The Morning Post
in the drawing room, she would pay her daily visit to the store. She witnessed each successive stage of growth and innovation, deploring each development as spelling future disaster. Nothing was too trivial to escape her attention. ‘The appearance of a new cashier in hardware or a change in the colour of the parcel tape was immediately noted and gave rise to fears for the firm’s stability.’ Great-Aunt Jenny then returned home just in time to read the Court Pages – and their daily gossip – before lunch.
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Public life was opening up for the mistresses of villas and upper-class ladies like Jeanette Marshall and Great-Aunt Jenny. Visiting and travelling around city centres had previously been a restricted, even dangerous activity for women like them. Until recently, city centres had been dominated by men’s lives: at work in factories, banks, courts; at play in men’s institutes, clubs, dining rooms and pubs, as sites of prostitution. The streets themselves were an assault on the senses. They were teeming with life and activity, with working-class men and women living, working, eating, buying and selling on the streets. Henry Mayhew was an astute social observer, journalist and co-founder of
Punch
magazine who catalogued London life in his writings on the shops of London and, most famously, in
London Labour and the London Poor
. His weighty volumes are an encyclopaedia of street sellers of all kinds, from the most elegant to the most depraved, from sellers of gelatine, ballads and china ornaments to ‘crawlers’ begging, pickpockets thieving and prostitutes soliciting.
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Often selling and entertainment went hand in hand; early photographs from the late 1870s show Caney, an ex-clown, caning chairs out on the street, and capture a little Italian boy playing a harp to collect pennies.
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Charles Dickens had it right.

This world had not disappeared when Jeanette Marshall headed out into the thronging streets; she still had to contend with street sellers, sexual harassers and beggars. But she was living through a heady period of social change and rules on being chaperoned in public places were relaxing. At the same time, increased public transport, such as the new two-horse trams, gave her greater freedom to move around the city, and better amenities allowed her to stay away from home for longer, with teashops, ladies’ kiosks and public lavatories all playing a part. For out-of-towners, special excursion tickets on railways like the Great Western made day returns into the capital feasible, leading one older lady to complain that ‘people think nothing of running up constantly to London and ladies travel alone and unattended for reasons which would, in the eyes of their grandmothers, hardly have justified a jaunt into the nearest market town’.
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There was much to run up to town for. Public spaces, attractions and entertainments were opening up everywhere. Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 was marked by the acquisition of hundreds of plots of land for public parks, such as Victoria Park in Partick, Glasgow.
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City councils and philanthropists believed that providing green space in crowded areas would improve the physical and even moral health of the working classes. But park promenading was by no means restricted to working people; parks were conceived as places where all members of society could mingle freely, enjoying the flower displays, musical entertainment on the bandstands, sports, neighbouring art galleries – and each other. After all, it was promenading in Hyde Park on Saturday afternoons that allowed Arthur Munby to observe the tall good figures of elegant milliners and shopwomen and to strike up a conversation with shopgirl Eliza Close while sheltering from poor weather. And if it was pouring with rain, then middle-class ladies only had to run indoors, where a wealth of new entertainments were on offer. Spectacle was the byword; more so than ever before, the Victorian public was being treated to a wealth of visual delights and theatrical trickery. Liverpool, London, Edinburgh and Manchester all boasted exhibitions, panoramas and dioramas where, in a small theatre, winter snow might be magically transformed into a summer meadow and rainbows would glow after thunderstorms.

Shopping entrepreneurs fed off and fed into this new hyper-visual culture, both in Britain and across the water.
The Drapers Record
trade magazine for retailers faithfully monitored advances in Paris and the United States, where pioneers like Marshall Field in Chicago and husband-and-wife team Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut in Paris were trailblazing a new consumer culture. Paris was at the forefront of modernity, ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’ as the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin later described it. From the French capital, an entirely new vision was filtering through, a revolution in display, marketing, consumption – and even ethics.