Shopgirls (11 page)

Monsieur Eiffel had helped design the most famous department store in the world in the 1870s, the Boucicauts’ Bon Marché in Paris, creating a fantasy vision in glass and steel, openness and light. It was set out as a permanent fair, dazzling and sensuous. This was a new shopping experience, an international urban development as important as the twentieth-century out-of-town mall. For here it was all about browsing and show. It was a physical and social emporium of delights. Fixed prices were on display, you did not have to buy, and you could mingle with the other shoppers. You could be a strolling
flâneur
.

But, perhaps typically, the British didn’t simply copy the French. Instead many British stores developed their own hybrid versions of the
grands magasins
.
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Yes, Jenner designed sweeping staircases and galleries with long, flowing lines. And Harrods installed Britain’s first moving staircase, at the top of which a shop assistant stood with smelling salts and cognac in case ‘travellers’ were upset by their new experience. And yes, Arthur Lasenby Liberty created the highly fashionable Eastern Bazaar in the basement of Liberty’s, offering up a sumptuous display of decorative furnishings, fabrics and
objets d’art
, a feast for the eye that would not have looked out of place in Paris. But Liberty was set on challenging Parisian style and methods. He designed his in-house clothing range in defiance of Parisian haute couture and he built lasting relationships with English designers, many of whom were part of the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements. In this way Arthur Liberty personally fostered the decorative arts in Britain, so much so that Art Nouveau in Italy became known as the ‘Stile Liberty’.

The resistance to overseas influence was, however, far more deep-seated than concerns over which chiffon to choose and how to design a walking dress. The concept of free browsing, of shoppers mingling and gazing with abandon, revelling in sensory delights in the middle of an urban crowd of mixed classes and mixed genders, was initially seen as dangerous, a threat to bourgeois society. And anything that allowed women to extend their shopping experience – new amenities such as rest rooms, luncheon rooms, writing rooms and lavatories, for example – might further threaten a respectable lady’s morality. These innovations were challenging the fundamental purpose and ethics of shopping, posing the question as to whether shopping was a healthy, profitable activity, or an evil that was both socially dangerous and economically ruinous.

As ever, William Whiteley and his antics stood at the centre of this anxious, ongoing national debate. Whiteley had opened the first ever in-store Luncheon Room in London. Then in 1872 he applied for a licence to serve wine and beer alongside the buns and ices. He argued that this would be a convenience for the hundreds of country visitors who flocked to his store each day; he said he was simply responding to customer demand, being ‘constantly asked for a glass of wine and biscuit’.
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His application unleashed a furore. At the general licensing meeting, the magistrates sat in the Vestry Hall, Paddington, and listened patiently to both sides of the argument. The opposing barrister, Mr W. Wright, rallied an eloquent attack on Mr Whiteley. Mr Wright contended that providing wine and beer to middle- and upper-class customers was dangerous; alcohol consumption among ladies was on the rise and Whiteley should not be encouraging them. Having advanced so far, he then tried to back away from his implied criticism, claiming he had no intention ‘of questioning the respectability of Mr Whiteley or his customers’. But the aspersion had been cast; he had touched on the social assumption that virtuous ladies did not drink; alcoholic beverages were the preserve of racy, louche and immoral women.

Mr Wright then voiced his second concern. He feared that lower-class and ‘fallen’ women might dress up as respectable ladies and use Whiteley’s as ‘a place of assignation’. All in all, Mr Wright was suggesting that serving wine and beer would transform the Bayswater store into a brothel, where women would lose their grip on morality, and prostitutes, disguised as ladies, could meet their pimps and punters.

Whiteley’s department store did, in fact, already have a louche reputation, partly as a consequence of Whiteley’s own flamboyance and partly since it was located in a mixed area. With this in mind, Mr Wright’s concerns were appreciated by the chairman of the bench, who felt that providing drink to Whiteley’s customers was unnecessary; the magistrates promptly rejected the application.

But that was not the end of the story. A few months later the popular journal
The Graphic
labelled Whiteley’s lunch room a dangerous ‘importation from Paris’ since it enabled customers, specifically female shoppers, to refuel during their supposed shopping marathons. Fortified by soups, cutlets, omelettes, macaroni and fritters, they would ‘return once more to the slaughter’ and spend, spend, spend. Namely their husband’s money. ‘The afternoon’s excitement has all the attraction of a delightful dream, with a slight dash of an orgy.’
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Beneath his titillating tone, the
Graphic
journalist was articulating serious anxieties around female shoppers on several levels: reputational, sexual, moral, financial. His fears? Women’s unrestrained desires, a looseness with their husband’s purse and the seduction of a good bourgeois lady who might throw off all caution and even chastity.

The person who perfected this art of reader titillation, combining it with outraged moral condemnation – a literary tease – was Eliza Linton. She was a controversial, successful and widely read novelist and journalist. Earlier in her career she had defended women’s rights; now she turned into a most ardent opponent of the same. She condemned the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ of women like Harriet Martineau and the early women’s suffrage movement, who sought the right to vote, and she even criticised the ‘modern mother’. Her most notorious article was called ‘The Girl of the Period’, an extraordinary meditation on English womanhood. She lamented the disappearance of the fair young English girl of old, with her innate purity and dignity, ‘neither bold in bearing nor masculine in mind’, whose aim in life was to be a good wife, a tender mother, an industrious housekeeper. She condemned ‘the girl of the period’, who ‘dyes her hair and paints her face’, her sole ambition being to indulge in the extravagance of fashion. For this she needed money; thus she sought a rich husband not for love but to allow her ‘so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure’.

Linton’s article was deeply conservative, harping on the eternal theme that the newest fashions were too immodest, too revealing, too impractical, too ugly. ‘If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the mud, she raises it midway to the knee.’ If bonnets were reduced in size, hers became a mere ‘four straws and a rosebud’.
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If hair ointment became outmoded, she went to the other extreme and let her hair wander dangerously down her back. But the article was also a critique on an increasingly polarised society, where Linton saw capital becoming king and money the dominant driver. In her mind, young, well-to-do women – potentially mothers of the nation’s leaders – had set off on the wrong path.

Linton honed in on her targets in another article entitled ‘The Philosophy of Shopping’. It is a poetic rumination on shopping, which she saw as a worshipping of false gods. Linton wrote that shoppers were flirtatious coquettes, tantalisingly delaying the moment of decision-making as they flitted between competing indulgences, between different gaily tinted silks. She wrote about assiduous shopmen servicing the ladies, and the power kick a lady received when she was ‘suddenly transported to a position of supreme command, with a world of material luxury at her feet’.
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Linton used language that was implicitly sexual, the language of desire, longing, enticement, control and fulfilment. She herself was coquetting with her readers, sensuously describing the charms of an afternoon’s shopping before cruelly lambasting them, censoring both the act of shopping and women who shopped. A ‘waste of time’, ‘wholly unnecessary’, a ‘very expensive kind of amusement’, better expressed Linton’s attitude to shopping. As for the actual shoppers: ‘they have no method in their domestic management and are always at sea as to the real condition alike of their wardrobes and of their purses.’

The everyday allure of the products behind the counter was bad enough for writers such as Linton, but at sales time shoppers would completely lose control of themselves and their purses, according to the drapers and shopkeepers who profited from these snatches of consumer frenzy. Sales were not, however, a new phenomenon in the late 1800s: in
Reminiscences of an Old Draper
, William Ablett recalled how, as a teenage assistant in the mid century, he helped his master prepare for a sale of excess and damaged stock, a ‘selling off’. On the first morning a surging wave of eager customers waited outside the heavy doors while everything was unnaturally quiet within. ‘“Open the doors!” shouted my master upon entering the shop, and in poured a multitude that filled it from top to bottom in a twinkling.’ They bought goods of every description and ‘critical old women, that under ordinary circumstances would have spent a long time, in the usual course of business, examining a pair of stockings, bought the same goods, instantly, at full prices’. Even when the sale products got into a sad mess, people still bought them, ‘right and left, using but little judgement’.
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A draper writing later that century was even less complimentary, noting in his diary that ‘there is something about the crowds of women that reminds me of a farmyard’. His diary was published under the title
Hades! The Ladies!
, which aptly sums up his attitude towards his precious customers.
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Animalistic behaviour and a loss of human dignity and self-control: this is what consumer frenzy was apparently driving women to. And for a small number of shoppers, the desire for possession pushed them one step further. They stole. Yet their actions were seen not as criminal but as diseased, the disease of kleptomania. Petty theft was one of the most common women’s crimes, but now it was ‘lady shop-lifters’ who caught the public imagination. It was difficult for staff and early store detectives to challenge a well-to-do customer who looked as though she had pilfered some goods, difficult for them to switch from being deferential to being confrontational. Many stores simply sent the ladies away with a gentle ticking off.
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Nevertheless, a handful of thieving customers were not just caught red-handed but were actually taken to court, as was the case for Mary Ann Harvey. At Whiteley’s in January 1885, general manager Richard Burbridge was touring the departments when he spotted a lady looking ‘very bulky’. He followed her for a moment, then asked if she had been attended to, to which she replied yes. At this point, being the general manager and having strong suspicions, he decided to challenge the customer. What had she under her cloak? he asked. Surprisingly, she replied, ‘Velvet,’ and on further questioning, she claimed that she had lost her sales ticket. Burbridge requested her to accompany him to the office; on the way there she was seen by the attendant shop assistants to drop forty-two pocket handkerchiefs, two pairs of gloves and twenty-four and a half yards of velvet. The police were called. When Mrs Harvey appeared in court two weeks later, she was sentenced to one year and eight months’ penal servitude.
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This swirling public anxiety around the moral dangers of consumerism, voiced so eloquently by Eliza Linton among others, was heightened by the fact that those on the other side of the counter looked so desirable themselves. Shopgirls looked good. The counter assistants were young and unmarried; they had to dress smartly, with spotless cuffs and collars and carefully arranged hair. Their dress, though not ostentatious, often nodded towards the latest fashions. They cultivated an air of professional chic. There is a certain element of theatre involved in shopwork: shopgirls were out on display, in the public gaze, behind the counter for all to notice, admire, even gawp at. Antoinette R. sold gloves in her father’s shop. She was pretty and found that the gentlemen she served stared at her ‘as if she were an unseen object’.
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Shopgirls, like barmaids, actresses, music hall singers and maidservants, were objects of male fantasy. Female cloth workers had already featured in pornographic material in the eighteenth century; early nineteenth-century pornographic engravings of the lingerie trade showed women flirting with their male clients and offered voyeuristic peeks at groups of women together behind closed doors.
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Some young men pursued them with dogged zeal, gathering eagerly outside staff entrances at closing time. Other customers and hangers-on had a more direct approach. One worried woman wrote in to
Cassell’s Magazine
about her shopgirl sister who attracted a lot of attention from shopmen and gentlemen customers alike. They invited her out to plays and evening entertainments, ‘and it does seem hard to be always keeping her at home with me’.
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The letter writer succinctly summed up the dilemma of the modern shopgirl: ‘It’s a difficult thing to keep respectable in a large shop.’

As peddlers of objects of desire, young women were often explicitly hired for their looks above all other considerations. Their height, figure, perceived beauty, class and all-round manner were examined – the higher class the establishment, the taller, fairer and higher class the shopgirls needed to be. It was now even becoming acceptable for ‘young ladies of birth and education’ to stand behind the counter, as long as they had the right position in the right shop.
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In larger firms, the job specification differed not simply according to the hierarchy of the shopfloor, where saleswomen were more elegantly turned out than mere counter assistants;
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there were also differing demands from one department to the next, some more befitting these ‘professional men’s daughters’ than others. Nevertheless, if you didn’t look good you had less chance of being hired in any position – or you lost your job, like the shopgirl with the ‘awful, ugly scar on her face’ who was given notice in spite of her quiet manner and diligence when her master realised that customers preferred not to be served by her.
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