"The sublime of the bazaar": A moment in the making of a consumer culture in mid-nineteenth century England

Journal of Social History

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2006, Pages

  Gurney, Peter J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33846351611     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2007.0016     Document Type: Review

References (166)

1. See R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: a radical Victorian (New York, 1960), 264.
2. Harriet Martineau, The History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace, 1816-1846 Vol.II (London, 1850), 674-5.
3. Harriet Martineau, "The Crystal Palace," Westminster Review 62 (October 1854), 548.
4. There is a huge literature on the sublime but George Landow, The aesthetic and critical theories of John Ruskin (Princeton, 1971), is useful.
5. Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT, 1999);
6. John Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud, 1999);
7. Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: new interdisciplinary essays (Manchester, 2001);
8. Peter Hoffenberg, An empire on display: English, Indian, and Australian exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, 2001);
9. James Buzard, Joseph Childers and Eileen Gillooly, (eds), Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (Charlottesville, 2006).
10. See Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (London, 1990), 714.
11. Prentice observed that the opening of the bazaar "created an interest scarcely inferior to that which was felt at a later and happier period at the opening of the Crystal Palace, in Hyde Park." History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, Vol. II (London, 1853), 327.
12. G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London, 1913), 129.
13. For a review of the literature on consumption and middle-class formation see Lisa Tiersten, "Redefining Consumer Culture: Recent Literature on Consumption and the Bourgeoisie in Western Europe," Radical History Review, 57 (1993): 116-59.
14. There is an insightful discussion of the meanings of 'consumer culture" in Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge, 1997), 24-32.
15. Carole Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990);
16. Margaret Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and Their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1984);
17. Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978).
18. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England (London, 1983);
19. Lorna Weatherhill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760 (London, 1988);
20. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter. Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 1998).
21. W. H. Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850-1914 (London, 1981);
22. Christopher Brewer, The Hidden Consumer. Masculinities, fashion and city life 1860-1914 (Manchester, 1999);
23. Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: women in the making of London's West End (Princeton, 2000).
24. John Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain 1880-1980 (London, 1994);
25. Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in late Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 1996);
26. Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (Cambridge, 2003).
27. Margot Finn, The character of credit: personal debt in English culture, 1740-1914 (Cambridge, 2003), 17.
28. Peter N. Stearns, "Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization," Journal of Modern History, 69/1 (March 1997): 103.
29. Norman McCord's, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838-1846 (London, 1958) was a useful corrective to earlier enthusiastic histories of the League but approached the organisation as a fairly ineffective political pressure group rather than a cultural movement.
30. Anthony Howe's meticulous Cobdenite study, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford, 1997)
31. and Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrrell's, The People's Bread. A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (London, 2000) enlarge our understanding considerably but do not assess the League as a form of consumer organizing.
32. Note also the pioneering work of C. R. Fay, The Corn Laws and Social England (Cambridge, 1932);
33. and Norman Longmate's accessible study, The Breadstealers. The Fight against the Com Laws, 1838-1846 (London, 1984), which contains some useful material on the culture of the League.
34. Patrick Joyce, Democratic subjects. The self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994), 128-9;
35. Dror Wahrman, Imagining the 'Middle Class': The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780-1840 (Cambridge, 1995), 268-72.
36. For the 'cultural turn' see Lynn Hunt (ed.), The new cultural history: essays (Berkeley, 1989);
37. Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds.), Beyond the cultural turn: new directions in the study of society and culture (Berkeley, 1999).
38. The absence of a study of the language of the League is noted by Howe in Free Trade and Liberal England, 32.
39. On the consumer politics of the abolition movement see Clare Midgley, "Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism and the Domestic Base of British Anti-Slavery Culture," Slavery and Abolition, 17/3 (1996): 137-62;
40. Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties. Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833 (Stanford, 2000).
41. F. K. Prochaska, "Charity Bazaars in Nineteenth Century England," Journal of British Studies, 16/2 (Spring 1977):62-84;
42. Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford, 1980).
43. See also S. J. D. Green, "The Death of Pew Rents, the Rise of Bazaars, and the End of the Traditional Political Economy of Voluntary Religious Organizations: the Case of the West Riding of Yorkshire, c. 1870-1914," Northern History, 27 (1991): 198-235.
44. See Toshio Kusamitsu, "Great Exhibitions before 1851," History Workshop Journal, 29 (1980): 70-89.
45. For a modern update by an academic economist see John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar. A Natural History of Markets (New York, 2002) who stresses that bazaars or markets are always embedded within particular political and social contexts.
46. On this theme see also Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Markets in Historical Contexts. Ideas and Politics in the Modern World (Cambridge, 2004).
47. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright, 107, wrongly dated 1843.
48. The Times, 4 February 1842, 5.
49. See Longmate, The Breadstealers, 197-8;
50. Simon Morgan, "Domestic Economy and Political Agitation: Women and the Anti-Corn Law League, 1839-46," in Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds.), Women in British Politics, 1760-1860.
51. The Power of the Petticoat (London, 2000), 123-5.
52. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, Vol II, 328-9.
53. The Art Union, 1 July 1845, 211.
54. Tropes of space and light also marked descriptions of the Great Exhibition as Marshall Berman notes in his influential study, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1982), 237-8.
55. The League Guide to London and Free-Traders' Hand-Book of the Metropolis; prepared for the use of visitors to the Great Bazaar (London, 1845).
56. National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 7, 5; no. 8, 1;
57. Longmate, The Breadstealers, 199-207.
58. National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 2, 1-2.
59. Ibid., 5; no. 7, 1.
60. Ibid., no. 3, 2.
61. Ibid., 7-8.
62. The Art Union, 1 July 1845, 209.
63. Ibid.
64. Douglas Jerrold's Shilling Magazine, June 1845, 518.
65. National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 16, 1;
66. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, Vol II, 337.
67. Illustrated London News, 17 May 1845, 309.
68. The Times, 9 May 1845, 6.
69. The Art Union, 1 July 1845, 218.
70. For a much later example of an attempt to forge such a link see Lawrence Glickman, "'Make Lisle the Style': The Politics of Fashion in the Japanese Silk Boycott, 1937-1940," Journal of Social History, 38 (Spring 2005): 573-608.
71. National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 16, 7.
72. On gigantism see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England. Advertising and Spectack, 1851-1914 (London, 1991), 48-9.
73. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, Vol II, 330-1.
74. Douglas Jerrold's Shilling Magazine, June 1845, 516-17.
75. On Jerrold's commitment to the panacea of free trade see Michael Slater, Douglas Jerrold: a life, 1803-1857 (London, 2001).
76. See Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London, 1996);
77. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986).
78. Two prints by Cruikshank capture this particularly well: "A Swallow at Christmas," which appeared in The Comic Almanack, December 1841;
79. and "The dispersion of the works of all nations from the Great Exhibition of 1851," which can be found in Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank, 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family (London, 1851).
80. Marx's classic formulation of commodity fetishism is in Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (1867: Middlesex, 1976), 163-77.
81. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, Vol. I, 386.
82. Women's participation in the bazaar is discussed in Alex Tyrell, " 'Woman's Mission' and Pressure Group Politics (1825-1860)," Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 63/1 (1980): 194-230;
83. Morgan, "Domestic Economy and Political Agitation," 126-9. See also note 20 above.
84. Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping 1800-1914 (London, 1964), 18-21.
85. Stena Nenadic, "Middle-Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1720-1840," Post and Present, 145 (1994): 145, 153;
86. "Romanticism and the urge to consume in the first half of the nineteenth century," in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury. Consumer culture in Europe 1650-1850 (Manchester, 1999), 212;
87. Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (Oxford, 1990), 100-4.
88. More generally, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and women of the English middle class 1780-1850 (London, 1987), 357-87.
89. K. Theodore Happen, The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846-1886 (Oxford, 1998), 336.
90. See also Ralph Dutton, The Victorian Home: Some Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Taste and Manners (London, 1954), 145;
91. Thad Logan, The Victorian parlour: a cultural history (Cambridge, 2001).
92. Quoted in The Times, 26 September 1844, 8. Note also the humorous song, "Going Out a Shopping - Happy Moments" (London, 1850).
93. G. R. Porter, The Progress of the Nation, in its various Social and Economical Relations (1836; London, 1851), 522.
94. Note also Lucy Brown, The Board of Trade and the Free Trade Movement, 1830-1842 (Oxford, 1958).
95. Morgan, "Domestic Economy and Political Agitation," 116.
96. For women and the social see Denise Riley, Am I that name?: Feminism and the category of "women" in history (Basingstoke, 1988);
97. Mary Poovey, Making a social body: British cultural formation, 1830-1864 (Chicago, 1995);
98. Eileen Janes Yeo, The contest for social science: relations and representations of gender and class (London, 1996).
99. National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 15, 7-8.
100. The bazaar inspired a great deal of poetry, including a commemorative verse by William Gardner, A Rythmical Notice of the Anti-Corn-Law League Bazaar held at Covent Garden Theatre (London, 1845).
101. This subject deserves fuller investigation though there are some useful leads in Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire. Design and Society 1750-1980 (London, 1986), 105, 118-9.
102. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, Vol II, 340-41.
103. The Economist was established in 1843 by James Wilson, a keen supporter of the League, which gave the journal vital financial help in its early phase. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 184;
104. Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Pursuit of Reason. The 'Economist' 1843-1993 (London, 1993).
105. For a full discussion see my article, " 'Rejoicing in potatoes': the politics of consumption in England in 1842," forthcoming.
106. Gaskell's complaints about consumer culture are discussed by Ellen Rosenman, "More Stories about Clothing and Furniture: Realism and Bad Commodities," in Christine Krueger (ed.), The Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Athens, Ohio 2002), 47-54.
107. The Struggle, 91, 1843, 2.
108. In The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987), Simon Schama, for example, observed how Dutch merchants in the seventeenth century attempted to reconcile Calvinist discipline with domestic material extravagance.
109. Note also Jan de Vries, "Between purchasing power and the world of goods: understanding the household economy in early modem Europe," in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993).
110. Palmerston also thought Bright a humbug, as Asa Briggs noted in, Victorian People. A Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1851-67 (1954; London, 1965), 208, 212.
111. Evidence of Bright's parsimony can be found in R. A. J. Walling (ed.), The Diaries of John Bright. With a Foreword by Philip Bright (London, 1930), 229-30.
112. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright, 173-4.
113. For Bright's temperance connections and his changing drinking habits see Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815-1872 (1971; Keele, 1994), 165; 282-3.
114. However, compare William Ashworth's wine-cellar and the extravagances of one of the Fielden brothers: Rhodes Boyson, The Ashworth cotton enterprise: the rise and fall of a family firm (Oxford, 1970);
115. Brian Law, Fieldens of Todmorden. A nineteenth century business dynasty (Littleborough, 1995).
116. The Times, 4 February 1842, 5.
117. Ibid., 29 May 1845, 6.
118. Stearns, "Stages of Consumerism," 116.
119. The Times, 29 May 1845, 6
120. William Grampp, The Manchester School of Economics (Stanford, 1960), 5-11.
121. See Pickering and Tyrell, The People's Bread, 210.
122. On the importance of support from dissenting communities in Wales see Ryland Wallace, "Wales and the Anti-Corn Law League," Welsh History Review, 13 (1986): 8-9.
123. Michael Turner emphasizes divisions within the elite over the policy of laissez faire in, "Before the Manchester School," History, 79/2 (1994): 216-41.
124. See also his article, "'The Bonaparte of Free Trade": Peronnet Thompson," Historical Journal, 41/4 (1998): 1011-34.
125. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1937) Vol. II, 155.
126. Smith, however, also regarded consumption as morally frivolous; see Joyce Appleby, "Consumption in early modern social thought," in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods, 168-9.
127. An alternative reading is proposed by Neil De Marchi, "Adam Smith's accommodation of 'altogether endless" desires," in Berg and Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury, 18-36.
128. Boyd Hilton, The age of atonement: the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1795-1865 (Oxford, 1988), 118;
129. Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty. An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834 (Cambridge, 1996), 367-8.
130. Marx refuted the vulgar underconsumptionist theory of crisis in Capitol Vol. II, chapter 20.
131. As Mark Blaug has observed, in Principles of Political Economy (1817), Ricardo conceived the economy, "as descending smoothly into the stationary state without any hitch from a failure of effective demand."
132. Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (1962; Cambridge, 1985), 129.
133. Ibid., 294-327;
134. Sandra Peart, The Economics of W. S. Jevons (London, 1996).
135. See Philip Mirowski, "Macroeconomic instability and the 'natural' processes in early neoclassical economics," Journal of Economic History, 44/2 (June 1984), 436;
136. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts. El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, 2001), 222-3.
137. In The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (1919; London, 1927), 26, the Bolshevik intellectual, Nikolai Bukharin, linked the marginal revolution to changes in the structure of late-nineteenth century capitalism, suggesting that; "Consumption is the basis of the entire life of the rentiers and the 'psychology of pure consumption' imparts to this life its specific style. The consuming rentier is concerned only with riding mounts, with expensive rugs, fragrant cigars, the wine of Tokay."
138. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890; London, 1961), 84.
139. See also David Reisman, The Economics of Alfred Marshall (London, 1986).
140. Regenia Gagnia underestimates the continuing importance of moral imperatives among professional economists in The Insatiability of Human Wants (Chicago, 2000).
141. Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London, 1861), i-xv.
142. See Erika Rappaport, " 'The Halls of Temptation': Gender, Politics and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London," Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996): 58-83.
143. Including Michael Winstanley, The Shopkeepers World, 1830-1914 (Manchester, 1983);
144. Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain (eds.), Cathedrals of consumption: the European department store, 1850-1939 (Aldershot, 1998);
145. Finn, The Character of Credit, 280-1.
146. Raymond Williams, Keywords. A vocabulary of culture and society (London, 1983), 79.
147. See, for example, R. M. Massey, A Letter to the Gas Consumers of the City of London (London, 1851). Middle-class consumers defended themselves against monopoly by means of bodies such as the London Gas Consumers' Association in the 1870s and the Water Consumers' Defence League in the 1880s.
148. For these organizations see The Times, 21 August 1872, 3; 27 October 1873, 6; 20 December 1883, 6; 4 January 1884, 12.
149. Note also Martin Daunton, "The Material Politics of Natural Monopoly: Consuming Gas in Victorian Britain," in Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (eds.), The Politics of Consumption. Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford, 2001);
150. Frank Trentmann and Vanessa Taylor, "From Users to Consumers: Water Politics in Nineteenth-Century London," in Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford, 2006).
151. Charles Babbage, The Exposition of 1851; or, Views of the Industry, the Science, and the Government of England (London, 2nd. ed., 1851), vi, 10 (his emphasis). Note also the remarks on 42, 73.
152. Ibid., 45, 81, 129.
153. See also Peter Hoffenberg, "Equipoise and its discontents: voices of dissent during the international exhibitions," in Martin Hewitt (ed.), An Age of Equipoise ? Reassessing Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot, 2000), 43-9.
154. Wolfram Kaiser, "Cultural Transfer of Free Trade at the World Exhibitions, 1851-1862," Journal of Modern History, 77, 3 (September 2005): 563-590.
155. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 17-72;
156. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London, 1989), 83-6.
157. Briggs, Victorian People, 29;
158. Anna Gambles, Protection and Politics: Conservative economic discourse, 1815-1852 (London, 1999). The League was revived briefly during the general election campaign of 1852.
159. In a diary entry for 1843 cited in Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright, 57. Note how Bright used both the old and new designation here suggesting ambivalence. In a letter to his sister-in-law Margaret (ibid., 73), Bright also denounced the aristocracy for squeezing "all they can out of the mass of consumers."
160. Derek Walcott's phrase cited by Miriam Bailin, "The New Victorians," in Krueger (ed.), The Functions of Victorian Culture, 43.
161. Porter, The Progress of the Nation, preface to the second edition (1847), xix.
162. Ibid., 523.
163. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright, 60.
164. H.W. Bellows, The Moral Significance of the Crystal Palace (New York, 1853), 17-18.
165. See Catherine Hall, Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830-1867 (Oxford, 2002).
166. The global impact of the religion of free trade is assessed in Mike Davis's compelling study, Late Victorian Holocausts. El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.