The halls of temptation: Gender, politics, and the construction of the department store in Late Victorian London

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 58-83

  Rappaport, Erika D ^a  

^a FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84949114926     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/386096     Document Type: Article

References (123)

1. Richard S. Lambert, The Universal Provider: A Study of William Whiteley and the Rise of the London Department Store (London: George Harrap & Co., 1938).
2. For a detailed analysis of the development of Bayswater's commercial district, al so see Erika Rappaport, " The West End and Women's Pleasure: Gender and Commercial Culture in London's West End" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1993), chap. 1.
3. For a general history of shopping, see Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping: 1800-1914
4. Dorothy Davis, Fairs, Shops and Supermarkets: A History of English Shopping (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966).
5. E. P. Thompson Rough Music in Customs in Common (Harmondsworth Penguin, 1991, 519
6. D. E. Underdown The Taming of the Sco ld: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England," in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985, 116-36
7. Nat alie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), chaps. 4 and 5.
8. Robert D. Storch, " 'Please to Remember the Fifth of November': Conflict, Solidarity and Public Order in Southern England, 1815-1900," in Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England, ed. Robert D. Storch (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 74.
9. The classic work on retailing in this period remains James B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Great Britain: 1850-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).
10. Also see David Alexander, Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution (London: Athlone Press, 1970
11. John William Ferry, A History of the Department Store (New York: Macmillan, 1960
12. Hrant Pasdermadjian, The Department Store: Its Origins, Evolution, and Economics (London: Newman Books, 1954
13. David Chaney, "The Department Store as a Cultural Form, " Theory, Culture and Society 1 (1983): 22-31.
14. Among the many business histories on department stores, Michael Moss and Alison Turton, A Legend of Retailing: The House of Fraser (London: Weidenfe ld & Nicholson, 1989)
15. For a general analysis of the growth of the mass market, see Hamish Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850-1914 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1981).
16. Chris Hosgood argues i n " 'A Brave and Daring Folk': Shopkeepers and Associational Life in Victorian and Edwardian England" (Journal of Social History 26, no. 2 [Winter 1992]: 285-308)
17. Also see Geoffrey Crossick, "Shopkeepers and the State in Britain, 1870-1914, " in Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Centu ry Europe, ed. Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), pp. 239-69
18. -69, 4'The Emergence of the Lower Middle-Class in Britain: A Discussion," in The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870-1914, ed. Geoffrey Crossick (New York: St. Martin's, 1977), pp. 11-60
19. Thea Vigne and Allen Hawkins, "The Small Shopkeeper in Industrial and Market Towns, " in Crossick, ed., pp. 184-209.
20. For an exce llent assessment of the French situation, see Philip G. Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). Nord persuasively argues that we need to see shopkeeper politics as more complicat ed than simply as a response to the threat of the big shop. He suggests that department stores were targeted because they symbolized broader shifts in the urban and commercial economy.
21. For the most comprehensive account of the deve lopment and nature of this ideology, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
22. Bayswater Chronicle (November 17, 1888).
23. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 46.
24. For an extremely useful approach to the relations between gender, sexuality, and business in this period, see Peter Bailey, "Parasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype, " Gender and History 2 (Summer 1990): 148-72.
25. See also Thomas Richards, The Commo dity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990
26. Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York and London: Methuen, 1985).
27. For an overview of these changes in America, see Kathy Peiss, "Commercial Leisure and the 'Woman Question,' " in For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption, ed. Richard Butsch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 105-17.
28. F. J. Fisher, " The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in Essays in Economic History, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson (London: Edward Arnold, 1962), 2:197-207
29. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
30. On the development of the east/west division of London in the early modern period R. M. Smuts The Court and Its Neighborhood: Royal Policy and Urban Growth in the Early Stuart West End Journal of British Studies 30 April 1991 117-49
31. Lawrence Stone, "The Residential Development of the West End of L ondon in the Seventeenth Century," in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor ofj. H. Hexter, ed. Barbara Malament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1980), pp. 167-212
32. L. D. Schwartz, "Social Class and Social Geogra phy: The Middle Classes in London at the End of the Eighteenth Century," Social History 7, no. 2 (May 1982): 167-85
33. E. J. Power, "The East and West in Early Modern London, " in Wealth and Power in Tudor England: Essays Presented to S. T. Bindoff, ed. E. W. Ives, R. J. Knecht, and J. J. Scarisbrick (London: Athlone Press, 1978), pp. 167-85.
34. Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (London: Holmes & Meier, 1976
35. Hermione Hobhouse, A History of Regent Street (London: Macdonald & Jane's, in association with Queen Anne Press, 1975
36. Gareth Shaw, "The Role of Retailing in the Urban Economy, " in The Structure of Nineteenth Century Cities, ed. James H. Johnson and Colin G. Pooley (London: Croom Helm
37. P. J. Atkins, "The Spatial Configuration of Class Solidarity in London's West End , 1792-1939," Urban History Yearbook (1990): 36-65.
38. Each inner suburb followed a different pattern of development, however. See D. A. Reeder, " A Theatre of Suburbs: Some Patterns of Development in West London, 1801-1911, " in The Study of Urban History, ed. H. J. Dyos (New York: St. Martin's, 1968), pp. 253-71
39. and H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell, 2d ed. (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1966).
40. Alfred Cox, The Landlord's and Tenant's Guide (1853), quoted in Olsen, p. 164.
41. Thomas Charles Newman, Many Parts (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1935), p. 106
42. Atkins, pp. 53-55, 61.
43. See Michael Bonavia, London before I Forget (Upton-upon-Severn: Self Publishing Association, 1990), pp. 131-32.
44. On the general pattern of retail development in the West End of London, see Gareth Shaw and M. T. Wild, " Retail Patterns in the Victorian City," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 4 (1979): 278-91.
45. Lambert, p. 60.
46. Builder 21 (1863): 766-67
47. Building News 6 (1860): 593
48. Lambert, pp. 60-61.
49. Westbourne Grove in Lon don Post Office Directory (London: Frederick Kelly 1870, 605.
50. Lambert (n. 1 above), pp. 60-61
51. Adburgham, Shops and Shopping (n.l above), pp. 149-59.
52. La mbert, pp. 18-21.
53. For a discussion of the images of these shops as exhibitions in the 1850s and 1860s, see Rappaport, " The West End and Women's Pleasure" (n. 1 above), pp. 214-28.
54. Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex, " New Formations 4 (Spring 1988): 73-102, 85.
55. For an account of the array of early and mid-Victorian amusements, see Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Belknap Press, 1978).
56. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), p. 15.
57. Arjun Appadurai, ed., T he Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986
58. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984
59. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Bland & Red, 1983
60. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982).
61. For overviews of these theories, see Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987)
62. Grant McCracken, The Meaning of Things: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
63. Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), pp. 52-102
64. Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 64-66
65. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988
66. William R. Leach, " Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1920," Journal of American History 71 (September 1984): 319-24
67. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 41.
68. Rappaport, "The West End and Women's Pleasure, " pp. 282-345.
69. Henry Walker, "Whitely's Liquor License, " Bayswater Chronicle (March 23, 1872).
70. Henry Mayhew, ed., Shops and Companies of London and the Trades and Manufactories of Great Britain 1 (March-September 1865): 5, 86
71. "Shopping Without Money, " Leisure Hour (1865): 110-12
72. "Going a Shopping, " Leisure Hour (1866): 198-200
73. "The Philosophy of Shopping, " Saturday Review (October 16, 1875): 488-89
74. "Ladies Shopping, " Warehouseman and Draper's Trade Journal (July 12, 1873): 374, (January 26, 1878): 46.
75. "Paddington Licensing Meeting, " Bayswater Chronicle (March 23, 1872).
76. Robert Thorne, "Places of Refreshment in the Nineteenth-Century City, " in Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment, ed. Anthony D. King (Lo ndon Routledge
77. J. Ewing Ritchie, The Night Side of London (London: W illiam Tweedle, 1857
78. Stephen Fiske, English Photographs (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1869
79. Donald Shaw, London in the Sixties (London: Everett & Co., 1908
80. London Labour and the London Poor, ed. Peter Quennell (1862
81. Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 139-45
82. Walkowitz, pp. 50-52.
83. "Disorderly Houses in Bayswater, " Paddington Times (March 30, 1872).
84. On the social and political battles over prostitution during this period, see Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
85. Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric ofFallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 2.
86. Also see Lynda Nead, Myths o f Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988
87. Kathy Peiss, "Making Up, Making Over: Cosmetics, Consumer Culture, and Women's Identity " (paper presented at the Rutgers Center of Historical Analysis, New Brunswick, N.J., January 1992
88. Mariana Valverde, " The Love of Finery: Fashion and the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth Century Social Discourse," Victorian Studies 32 (Winter 1989): 169-88
89. Daniel A. Cohen, "The Murder of Maria Bickford: Fashion, Passion and the Birth of Consumer Culture," American Studies 31, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 5-30.
90. Arthur Sherwell, Life in West London: A Study in Contrast (London: Metheun, 1897), pp. 145-48.
91. The Girl of the Period Saturday Review March 14 1868, 339-40.
92. On the reception of this piece and the other articles Li nton wrote in the Saturday Review, see Nancy Fix Anderson, Woman against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 117-36.
93. Bayswater Chronicle (March 23, 1872).
94. Paddington Times (March 9, 1872).
95. "What will he do with It? Wine and Drapery, " Grocery News and Oil Journal (March 22, 1872), p. 121.
96. "Lunch with the Linendrapers, " Graphic (August 3, 1872), p. 98.
97. Elaine S. Abelson, "When Ladies Go A-Thieving " : Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
98. Graphic (August 3, 1872), p. 98.
99. Rappaport, "The West End and Women's Pleasure " (n. 1 above), pp. 149-210.
100. Colleen Denny, "Sir Coutts Lindsay and the Grosv enor Gallery: Exhibition Reform in Victorian England" (paper presented at the nineteenth annual meeting of the Western Conference on British Studies, Boulder, Colo., October 1992).
101. "The Philosophy of Shopping, " Saturday Review (October 16, 1875), p. 488.
102. Warehouseman and Draper's Trade Journal (March 1, 1873): 111.
103. G. A. Sala, "Young London, " Daily Telegraph (June 2, 1879
104. Modern London: The World's Metropolis, An Epitome of Results (London: Historical Publishing, 1890), pp. 194-95.
105. "More Whiteleyana! Cheap Meat!! " Bayswater Chronicle (March 10, 1877).
106. "Local Gossip, " Bayswater Chronicle (March 26, 1881).
107. Newman (n. 20 above), p. 103.
108. A. M. W. Stirling, Victorian Sidelights (London: Ernest Benn, 1954), p. 247. 81
109. Emile Zola, Ladies' Delight, trans. April Fitzylon (London: Paul Elek, 1960).
110. " 'The Bazaar,' Westbourne Grove, " Bayswater Chronicle (May 3, 1879).
111. Bayswater Chronicle (November 1, 1879).
112. "Shop Windows, " Bayswater Chronicle (April 26, 1879
113. "Christmastide in Westbourne Grove, " Bayswater Chronicle (December 15, 1877).
114. "Westbourne Grove as a Shopping Promenade, " Bayswater Chronicle (October 30, 1880).
115. "Our Local Promenade, " Bayswater Chronicle (October 28, 1882).
116. On middle-class cooperatives, see J. Hood and B. S. Yamey, " Middle-Class Cooperative Retailing Societies in London, 1864-1900," Economics of Retailing, ed. K. A. Tucker and B. S. Yamey (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 131-45
117. E. D. Wainwright, Army and Navy Stores Limited, Centenary Year (London: Army and Navy Stores, 1971
118. Alison A dburgham, Yesterday's Shopping: The Army and Navy Stores Catalogue, 1907 (Devon: David & Charles Reprints, 1969).
119. E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987
120. E. S. Turner, The Shocking Histo ry of Advertising! (New York: Dutton, 1953
121. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (n. 35 above).
122. John Clarke and Chas Critcher, T he Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985
123. John K. Walton and James Walvin, eds., Leisure in Britain, 1780-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983).