Shopgirls (13 page)

Still, shopgirls’ own accounts told eloquently of their longing for marriage as ‘their one hope of release’, with the anguished cry of ‘marry anybody to get out of the drapery business’. It wasn’t all anguished longing, however; the excitement of flirtation played its part too. In the back workrooms, chatter was ‘chiefly concerning young men, love, courtship and marriage’, with the most animated conversations dealing with ‘Young Men’s fancies’. And the reading material they were consuming often fuelled these excitable chats.
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Penny periodicals were cheap and could be bought on the street and at railway stations. Indeed, the railway newsstand, with its link to suburban commuter travelling, became an iconic site for popular reading material. A contemporary observer described the morning commute: ‘The clerks and artisans, shopgirls, dressmakers, and milliners, who pour into London every morning by the early train have, each and every one, a choice specimen of penny fiction with which to beguile the short journey.’ The observer pointed out a working man ‘absorbed in some crumpled bit of pink-covered romance’ and the girl in the carriage sitting opposite, sucking a lozenge, reading a story called ‘Marriage a la Mode’.
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The stock plots of such pink-covered romances and penny fictions will be familiar to any Mills & Boon reader now – though more through today’s historical series than the red-hot imprints. The very first book that Gerald Musgrove Mills and Charles Boon published in 1908 was a romance, and from the beginning they produced novels in a form and at a price that was within the reach of a wide readership. Nevertheless, some early Mills & Boon didn’t fit the romance formula. Highly prolific romance writer Arthur Applin published his story
Shop Girls
under the Mills & Boon imprint, but his subtitle, ‘A Novel with Purpose’, hints at something less saccharine, less straightforward than we might expect. Indeed the central romance between respectable, business-minded Martha, a shopgirl in the hosiery department, and gentleman shopkeeper Horatio Brown is complicated, with Brown being exposed as a spy for a Whiteley-style shopping magnate and ending up in prison rather than in church. Applin describes shop conditions in the small town and in London as dystopian: shopworkers are characterised as industrial slaves, female friendships on the shopfloor are sacrificed to careerism and shopgirls have to have sex with proprietors to land a good job. Applin’s
Shop Girls
ends not with wedding bells but with the Whiteley figure being alone in the world, without love or emotion, ‘Just the man behind the counter who handed out the goods. Always that and nothing more.’ Applin delivered on his promise of a novel with a purpose: the reader closes the book with a sense of the injustices of shopwork, and the dangers of life for vulnerable shopgirls.
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This explosion of popular reading material affordable to working people was welcomed by some feminist and socialist thinkers, who believed that any form of reading was better than none. But what is difficult to comprehend from a twenty-first-century perspective is the anxiety on the part of more conservative thinkers around cheap reading material, sentimental fiction and bitty magazine columns. From an educated Victorian perspective, reading was a fundamentally important activity, which had the power to shape the reader’s body and soul, for good or evil. Reading was compared to eating, with Sir Francis Bacon often invoked: ‘Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested.’
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The importance of reading, its role in shaping the reader’s moral and physical being, was discussed by church leaders and philanthropists, publishing magnates and parliamentarians, Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope.

The argument followed that, just as eating bad food would lead to food-poisoning, so reading ‘bad’ literature would endanger the soul. ‘The strawberry ices of literature glow on every railway bookstall,’ warned an article called ‘What Should Women Read?’. ‘These are harmless occasional reading, but a mind glutted with them needs medicine as much as a greedy child after a surfeit of sugar plums.’
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Others had far stronger fears and criticisms, for sentimental fiction with its pat romantic endings was rarely seen as mere escapism. Romantic fantasy might breed dissatisfaction in the reader when comparing her own life to a fictional life. It might give her ideas above her station, if all the stories she reads end with the girl like her walking up the aisle into the arms of a baronet. Another concerned writer criticised popular reading material as a false representation of real life. ‘It heightens only imaginary and unattainable enjoyments, and transforms life itself into a dream, the realities of which are all made painful and disgusting.’
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But even worse than breeding internal dissatisfaction, the wrong kind of reading apparently had the power to spark an external questioning of the social order. There was fear that reading might stir up dangerous political instincts, leading directly to revolt. This was not as far-fetched as it seems: memories of the Peterloo Massacre of reformers in 1819, of Chartist uprisings and revolts against the Corn Laws of the 1830s and 1840s, all fuelled by political tracts written by pamphleteers, were still strong. There was an acute awareness of the power of the printed word.

Not just the body politic, but also the physical body was seen to be in danger. On the one hand, the distracted reading of short magazine pieces might destroy the mind’s ability to focus on weightier, longer subjects: too much snacking, no substantial meat and potatoes. On the other, sentimental romances, with their ‘imaginary and unattainable enjoyments’, might inflame the reader’s imagination, and thus her body parts, leading to early sexualisation or over-sexualisation in adolescent girls and young women.
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For shopgirls, working in a sexualised environment of public display, it was feared that such reading might inflame them even further. American physician Dr Mary Wood-Allen certainly believed so. Her impressive title was World Superintendent of the Purity Department of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the United States. Her work focused on women’s health and sexual purity, and was read by similarly minded thinkers in Britain. In 1899, she published
What a Young Woman Ought to Know
, a most extraordinary how-to manual, with tips and views on countless aspects of a young woman’s life, from dancing to fresh air, from the ‘sex mania’ sparked by over-passionate female friendships to the problems of ‘tight clothing on the pelvic organs’.

Dr Wood-Allen warned, ‘I would like to call your attention to the great evil of romance-reading, both in the production of premature development and in the creation of morbid mental states.’ She felt that these negative mental states led directly to negative physical states, in particular to those afflictions classed as female. She listed ‘nervousness, hysteria, and a host of maladies which largely depend on disturbed nerves’; such classic ‘women’s illnesses’ were thought to stem from the female nervous and reproductive systems. Indeed, one of the most evil physical afflictions that Dr Wood-Allen identified was masturbation. Romance reading drew ‘mental pictures which arouse the spasmodic feelings of sexual pleasure’.
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Sexual pleasure was meant to be enjoyed not solo but with one’s husband, and to remain firmly under covers in the marital bed.

Attending the music hall and the new musical comedies might not lead to a shopgirl pleasuring herself, but there was, it was believed, a real danger of her being pleasured by others in the excitable and unruly crowd, either during or after the show. By the turn of the century, music hall was at the height of its popularity; theatres up and down the country, from Glasgow’s Britannia Music Hall to Leeds’ City Varieties, seated hundreds, sometimes thousands of people each evening. Variety was the name of the game: handbills advertised lions’ ‘comiques’, escapologists such as ‘the Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’ and, most famous of all, star singer Marie Lloyd. No wonder this entertainment seemed tempting to shopgirls who worked long hours and then returned to the strictness and drabness of shop lodgings at night.

A writer on domestic life, Mrs Jeannie Loftie, recognised the temptation: ‘There are many steps between the shop and home. The pretty work-girl need not go alone.’ She might be wooed by a ‘respectable young man’ of her own class. Or a man superior in social position might take her ‘to some place of amusement where pleasure, and above all, excitement can be found!’
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And this, Mrs Loftie felt, was dangerous. For music hall crowds were rowdy; audiences were allowed to smoke, drink and eat, unlike in traditional theatres, and there was ample opportunity for getting close to your lover. On top of this, the very nature of the entertainment was spectacular, sensational and risqué. The aim was to stimulate and electrify a mixed crowd. To polite society, both the behaviour of the audiences and the entertainment itself seemed indecent and vulgar, and music hall came under sustained attack. In 1897 the London County Council launched an investigation. There is an apocryphal story that the LCC Theatres and Music Hall Committee called up Marie Lloyd to respond to the accusations of indecency. She sang them a supposedly offensive song straight, with no accompanying gestures. Next she sang the respectable drawing-room song ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’, adding ‘every possible lewd gesture, wink, and innuendo’.
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‘It’s all in the mind,’ she is supposed to have concluded.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century a new form of theatre emerged: the musical comedy. Elements of farce, vaudeville and comic opera were mixed with a longer, sustained storyline and presented by theatre managers as a more respectable entertainment, aimed directly at this new class of urban working people. Scottish theatre critic William Archer described his fellow theatre-goers on a Saturday night as ‘young men and women who worked hard for their living at the desk or behind the counter. We were simply good, honest, respectable, kindly lower middle class lads and lasses, enjoying an entertainment exactly suited to our taste and comprehension.’
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Another theatre critic had a more nuanced take on the ‘lower middle class lads and lasses’. He was perplexed at the way they conducted themselves, noticing both the pleasures and dangers associated with their urban nightlife, as they wandered ‘alone at night from one end of London to the other, spending all their money in gadding about, on six-penny novels, on magazines, and, above all, on the theatre’.
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Shopgirls didn’t just form a part of this new audience; as in fiction, they were the heroines of the stage too. Playwrights like H.J. Dam saw the potential – ‘As many people do business at the large shops and stores, I realised the stores formed an excellent sphere to make the basis of a musical piece’ – and came up with
The Shop Girl
, which was staged at the Gaiety. The famous Gaiety Theatre was on Aldwych just outside the City of London, first established as the Strand Musick Hall. When
The Shop Girl
opened there in 1895, the show heralded a new era in musical comedy. It was less raunchy than earlier musical farces, but its plot was still romantic, as London shopgirl Bessie Brent turns out to be a millionaire’s daughter and ends up marrying her poor but respectable sweetheart Charles. And the acts and songs were still racy. It was the first show to feature the beautiful dancing corps of the Gaiety Girls and its most famous song was ‘Her golden hair was hanging down her back’. The show was a hit, a very palpable hit, to use Shakespeare’s phrase. It transferred to Broadway and was performed again and again in Britain, perpetuating a certain sexual knowingness, despite its supposed respectability, that infuriated its conservative critics.
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The outpouring of anxiety around the morality of shopgirls, from such a wide range of interest groups – conservative thinkers and feminists, philanthropists and medics, religious writers and parliamentarians – testified to a society that was trying to come to terms with a new class, the ‘kindly lower middle class lads and lasses’ that the Scottish theatre critic described. For the awareness of class, of one’s ‘station’ in life, had in no way diminished as the population grew and society changed. In the teeming cities, where servants and mistresses, grocers and clerks, lords and shopgirls now lived and worked cheek by jowl, class awareness, and particularly awareness of the fine gradations between classes, arguably increased. This in turn raised the question of where this new breed of working people would fit in, and whether they would accept the status quo, or try to change it to suit their own lives.

Some people fitted in nowhere; they fell through the cracks in society. Horace Rayner was one such man: a complex, pitiable figure, his dramatic end the byproduct of a shopgirl’s love affair. His mother was the sister of Louisa Turner, another of William Whiteley’s shopgirl mistresses. Who Horace Rayner’s father was remains a mystery. It was his ‘great secret … the curse of his life’.
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Horace Rayner claimed it was William Whiteley, suggesting that he had seduced the two Turner sisters and fathered sons by them both. Horace Rayner stated his mother had revealed the truth to him on her deathbed. By 1907, Horace Rayner was unemployed, unable to support his young family, susceptible to erratic mood swings and depression. He needed money desperately. On 24 January, after several glasses of brandy, Rayner gained entry to Whiteley’s office on Westbourne Grove. A messenger to an umbrella-maker witnessed what happened next. He saw William Whiteley come out of his office and tell his staff to ‘fetch me a policeman’. Whiteley was followed by Rayner, who apparently asked, ‘Are you going to give in?’ When Whiteley replied no, Rayner said, ‘Then you are a dead man, Mr Whiteley.’ Rayner then pulled out a revolver and shot Whiteley twice. The messenger didn’t see what happened next, for he ‘was frightened and ran behind the counter’.
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A third shot rang out and the messenger saw Mr Whiteley fall.