Beyond the boundary of the shop: Retail advertising spaces in Eighteenth-Century Provincial England

Cultures of Selling: Perspectives on Consumption and Society since 1700

Volumn , Issue , 2018, Pages 59-79

  Morgan, Victoria ^a  

^a Institute for Clean Growth and Future Mobility   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 85084406939     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (46)

1. Jeffrey's 1954 conclusion that the retail trades had been tied to forms and practices that had altered little until 1850, and Davis' emphasis on the extent of change in the nineteenth century, have until recently influenced much work on retail, with the consequent neglect of eighteenth-century developments. J.B. Jeffreys, Retail Trading in Britain 1850-1950 (Cambridge, 1954)
2. D. Davies, A History of Shopping (London, 1966)
3. Jeffrey's 1954 conclusion that the retail trades had been tied to forms and practices that had altered little until 1850, and Davis' emphasis on the extent of change in the nineteenth century, have until recently influenced much work on retail, with the consequent neglect of eighteenth-century developments. J.B. Jeffreys, Retail Trading in Britain 1850-1950 (Cambridge, 1954); D. Davies, A History of Shopping (London, 1966); C. Walsh, 'The newness of the department store: a view from the eighteenth century', in G. Crossick and S. Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store 1850-1939 (Aldershot, 1999), 46-71.
4. Fowler asserts that most of the significant changes of the eighteenth century had taken place by 1780, while Mui and Mui argue that the tempo of change increased throughout the century. C. Fowler, 'Changes in provincial retail practice during the eighteenth century, with particular reference to central-southern England', Business History, 40, 1998, 37-54
5. H.-C. Mui and L. Mui, Shops and Shop Keeping in Eighteenth-century England (London, 1989).
6. D. Collins, 'Primitive or not? Fixed shop retailing before the industrial revolution', Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 31, 1993, 1; Fowler, 'Changes in provincial retail practice during the eighteenth century'
7. N. Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing 1550-1820 (Aldershot, 2000)
8. Walsh, 'The newness of the department store', 4671.
9. H. Berry, 'Polite consumption: shopping in eighteenth-century England', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12, 2002, 375-94
10. E. Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women's Fiction in England 1790-1820 (Cambridge, 1995)
11. P.D. Glennie and N.J. Thrift, 'Modern consumption: theorising commodities and consumers', Environment and Planning A: Society and Space, 11, 1993, 603-606
12. P.D. Glennie and N.J. Thrift, 'Consumers, identities and consumption space in early-modern England', Environment and Planning A: Society and Space, 28, 1996, 25-45
13. E. Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997).
14. P.D. Glennie and N.J. Thrift, 'Modernity, urbanism and modern consumption', Environment and Planning A: Society and Space, 10, 1992, 423-43.
15. C. Walsh, 'The advertising and marketing of consumer goods', in C. Wischermann and E. Shore, eds., Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives (Aldershot, 2000), 79-95
16. J. Stobart and A. Hann, 'Sites of consumption: The display of goods in provincial shops in eighteenth-century England', Cultural and Social History, 2, 2, 2005, 165-87.
17. Walsh, "The advertising and marketing of consumer goods', 79-95.
18. The history of advertising in Britain remains largely unresearched, writes R. Church, 'Advertising consumer goods', Economic History Review, LUI, 4, 2000, 621. Mckendrick has considered the principles of advertising of eighteenth century manufacturers and Mui and Mui and Cox have considered evidence of new sales techniques. N. Mckendrick, 'George Packwood and the commercialisation of shaving: the art of eighteenth century advertising', in N. Mckendrick, J. Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (London, 1982), 146-96; Mui and Mui, Shops and Shop Keeping in Eighteenth-century England; Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 102-110.
19. It is this unity between mental and material space in the production of space that Lefebvre highlights. H. Lefebvre, 77ie Production of Space (Oxford, 1991), 6, 12, 413.
20. A. Dyer, 'Midlands', in P. Clark, ed., Cambridge Urban History (Cambridge, 2000), vol. 2, 101.
21. P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660-1770 (Oxford, 1989); Morgan, 'Producing consumer space in eighteenth-century England', 110-49.
22. P.J. Corfield, 'Walking the city streets: the urban odyssey in eighteenth-century England', Journal of Urban History, 16, 2, 1995, 132-74.
23. Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 46-7. The Coventry traders John Brooke (stationer), William Snell (mercer) and Samuel Tissell (clothier and later an innkeeper) all produced trade tokens into the eighteenth century. Coventry Record Office (CRO), Persons Index, Persons/1/2/1794, Persons/19/1144 and Persons/20/406.
24. C. Clair, A History of European Printing (London, 1976), 312.
25. M. Beaven, 'Warwickshire provincial newspapers in the early 1750s', Journal of the Warwickshire Local History Society, IX, 1, 1993, 12-34.
26. T.R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain: A History (London, 1982), 19.
27. Beaven, 'Warwickshire provincial newspapers', 12-34.
28. Church, 'Advertising consumer goods', 628.
29. For a discussion of representations of space see Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39.
30. Swinney's Birmingham and Stafford Chronicle and Piercy's Coventry Gazette, 3 December 1778.
31. See, for example, the advertisements of Thomas Ewbank, chemist and druggist and J. Ratheram, clock and watchmaker, in Jopson's Coventry Mercury, 31 December 1787.
32. Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 127-39.
33. This polite tone is found also in London advertisements. Walsh, "The advertising and marketing of consumer goods', 83.
34. G. Eliot, Middlemarch (London, 1994, first published 1872), 98.
35. This term is adopted by J. Stobart, 'In search of a leisure hierarchy: English spa towns and their place in the eighteenth-Century urban system', in P. Borsay, G. Hirschfleder and R-E. Mohrmann, eds., New Directions in Urban History (New York, 2000), 20.
36. Jopson's Coventry Mercury, 31 December 1787. The same text was used without change from the date given on the advertisement until December.
37. Piercy's Coventry Gazette, 27 June 1778.
38. Jopson's Coventry Mercury, 19 February 1759.
39. Piercy's Coventry Gazette, 25 April 1778.
40. Jopson's Coventry Mercury, 31 December 1787.
41. Piercy's Coventry Gazette, 17 January 1778.
42. P. Borsay, 'The London Connection', London Journal, 19, 1, 1994, 24.
43. Ogborn, for example, refers to the rational mind as promoted by Enlightenment as the 'hallmark of modernity'. M. Ogbom, Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies 16801780 (London, 1998), 3. Towns could be closely linked with the Enlightenment, being (in part) civilised, public, rational and secular places, and in this sense, modern. Of course, this is a partial view, as considered in P. Borsay, 'Bath an Enlightenment city?', in Borsay, Hirschfleder and Mohrmann, eds., New Directions in Urban History, 1.
44. Soja, for example, notes that urbanisation is a summative metaphor for the spatalisation of modernity. E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies (London, 1989).
45. This terminology is taken from Lefebvre, Production of Space. Gregory defines abstract space as being one-step removed from the world it represents, commodified, and the product of capitalist exchange. D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford, 1994), 401.
46. This draws on ideas of 'time-space distanciation', which may be understood as processes that revolutionise the objective qualities of space and time, and the possibilities for interaction with things that are absent in time and space. See D. Gregory, 'Time-space distanciation', in R.J. Johnston, ed., Dictionary of Human Geography (Oxford, 1991), 628.