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Victorian and Edwardian Interiors

Dualities of Function: Archaeological Approaches to the Study of Movement and Space within the late‒Victorian Department Store

Dualités de fonction: pour une approche archéologique de l’étude du mouvement et de l’espace dans les grands magasins à la fin de l’ère victorienne
Kate Morris

Résumés

Les grands magasins, dans la seconde moitié du dix-neuvième siècle, constituent des espaces aux identités fonctionnelles multiples. Les détaillants avaient pour but de maximiser les ventes potentielles en combinant des vitrines innovantes, une architecture modernisée et une organisation pensée pour mieux guider la circulation des clients, afin d’accroître les opportunités de vente. Dans ces vastes magasins, où les chiffres de ventes étaient les seuls indicateurs de succès, les vendeurs avaient pour consigne de ne « jamais laisser sortir une dame sans achat ». Les clientes, en revanche, avaient tendance à voir les grands magasins comme des espaces de détente, suffisamment respectables pour pouvoir s’y rendre sans être chaperonnées. Cette dualité de fonction, l’intérieur des grands magasins existant simultanément comme terrain de vente et espace de détente, semble avoir provoqué des tensions entre les vendeurs et la clientèle. S’appuyant sur une vaste recherche examinant les archéologies spatiales des intérieurs commerciaux au dix-huitième siècle, cette étude aborde le grand magasin comme un prolongement des petits commerces et de leurs pratiques antérieures, tissant des liens entre les parloirs privés et pseudo-domestiques des boutiques géorgiennes avec les aires de restauration des grands magasins. Cet article démontre que la création de divisions intérieures permettait de séparer les espaces de vente et de détente, apaisant ainsi les conflits entre vendeurs et clients, et démontrant que, comme autrefois, le propriétaire du magasin se comportait en hôte et en égal dans sa relation au client.

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Introduction

  • 1  ‘General Licensing Meetings’, Morning Advertiser, 19 March 1872, 6.
  • 2  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Hearth and Home, 3 March 1892, 502‒03.
  • 3  For all his claims never to pay for advertisement (Adburgham 156), Whiteley appears to have been a (...)

1On 18th March 1872, William Whiteley, the self‒styled ‘Universal Provider’, caused a stir by applying for a liquor license for his Bayswater department store.1 Ostensibly at the request of his customers, Whiteley aimed to serve wine to the ladies who frequented his store. Though the license was ultimately denied, supposedly so as not to encourage drinking amongst the respectable women who visited, Whiteley and his customers apparently had their way in the end, by suggesting ladies might purchase a bottle at his wine department, and bring it to the refreshment room for their own ‘delectation’.2 Whiteley caused many furores throughout his controversial career. However, the caricature he appears to have created for himself, as an almost maverick figure who cared little for social mores and only for the comfort and convenience of his customers, belies his shrewdness in identifying that the burgeoning market of middle‒class women’s leisure could be combined with the world of retail.3

  • 4  See Hosgood, for a discussion of the experience and working conditions of live‒in shopworkers, and (...)

2A workplace and, sometimes, home for employees,4 the late‒Victorian department store was also a centre for retail and marketing innovation, and a rare public arena which catered specifically to Victorian women (Crossick and Jaumain 98‒99). Exotic visual displays and an attentive staff, ready to usher customers through the convoluted interiors, created an experience which was designed to seduce women into spending too much money (Abelson 47‒48; Laermans 92). For women, the department store represented one of the few public spaces respectable enough to be visited without an escort (Crossick and Jaumain 99). At once salesroom and leisure space, the department store interior may have been a space in which competing interests caused tension in the relationships engendered within. Focusing primarily on the London high street, this article considers the department store from the perspective of the customer and the retailer, whose symbiotic, and sometimes oppositional use of space can be seen in department store interiors. Drawing on the strong base of research into the use of space and movement in eighteenth-century retailers, which have highlighted how subdivided interiors both reflected and created the customer-shopkeeper relationship, this article considers how a similar archaeological approach may provide an access point for the analysis of the space and movement in the late-Victorian department store.

Spatial Archaeologies of the Eighteenth-Century Shop

3Spatial archaeologies of the retail interior focus on the experience of the retail environment, and the relationship between sales assistant and customer. The design and demarcation of the retail space may be planned in order to increase sales, and displays may be used to entice customers and influence the emotionality of the consumer (Abelson 47). Beyond that though, the design of space influences the interactions between shopworker and customer, defining the boundaries and form of relationships. This approach has been illustrated effectively in archaeologies of eighteenth-century retail interiors, which have highlighted the importance of controlled movement, shifting demarcations of public and domestic, and the interpersonal relationships between shopkeeper and customer, to the experience of shopping.

4Like later department stores, retail spaces in this period formed part of the polite leisure activities which defined elite interaction with urban spaces (Stobart 1998, 5). Shops were furnished beautifully, with seasonal displays which encouraged repeated visits, and which often included rails of draped fabrics or displays set up to show how products would look together (Stobart et al. 131‒32). In some cases, this involved tableau displays meant to showcase furnishings and furniture suites within a domestic setting (Stobart et al. 128). All of this highlights the muddy place retail interiors held between public and private space (Jenkins and Stobart 56).

5Eighteenth-century shops were most often located within the home of the shopkeeper, converted to include a showroom at the front, and backroom for entertaining privileged clientele, while the domestic and the personal entertaining rooms were located upstairs (Jenkins and Stobart 62). Retail spaces were often subdivided, with display areas which allowed patrons to browse and examine the goods, and backrooms, which allowed shopkeepers to bring elite customers into a pseudo-private space, where they could both upsell and network (Jenkins and Stobart 55‒56). Tea could be served in a backroom or parlour, mimicking polite visiting practices, before customers browsed showrooms decorated in fashionable domestic styles (Berry 386‒87). While the counter acted as the seat of business interactions, layered levels of access to increasingly private or domestic areas were provided based on the relationship with the shopkeeper, or the perceived status of the customer (Jenkins and Stobart 64‒65, 68). Often, particularly in the world of polite consumption, the social class and background of both retailer and customer were similar, and the boundaries of customer and friend could blur as relationships developed and business became mixed with leisure (Jenkins and Stobart 62, 66).

6This use of space, movement, and the shifting demarcations of public and private, formed part of the theatrics of sales (Stobart et al. 112). The use of space in shops in the eighteenth century also allowed for the building of anticipation in regard to the presentation of goods. Showrooms displayed goods which all shoppers could view, but which shopworkers controlled access to, bringing them to the counter, to allow customers to handle and examine (Jenkins and Stobart 58). Access to backrooms and to more choice materials may have increased this anticipation and enhanced the customers’ impression that they were in fact highly regarded associates and friends, being allowed access to good deals on high quality products. Where other shopworkers were employed, the owner may busy themself in the back, to be called when customers needed an answer to a specific query (Stobart et al. 111). This built the reputation of the owner as a knowledgeable authority on the goods on display, and increased the feeling that the customer had been given a boon in the form of time and expertise (Stobart et al. 130). Movement between public and private spaces was mediated by the shop owner, and at their discretion, but fundamentally represented a relationship between peers which was, at least superficially, valued by both sides. The separation of space within, and movement around, the eighteenth-century shop facilitated this relationship by reflecting known cultural schemas around elite domestic visiting, which would have been familiar to both parties.

7What archaeological analyses of space and movement in these retailers have added is an understanding of the way relationships between shopworker and customer both influenced, and were influenced by, the subdivision of interior retail space. Retailers aimed to cultivate a particular relationship, in order to increase their reputation as both experts in their field and respected members of genteel society, and in doing so, curated their customers’ experience of their shop in a way which emphasised their membership of both groups (Hann and Stobart 186). In this way, archaeological analyses of retail interiors have shown that the complexity of the customer-retailer relationship may have been reflected in the use of space within stores. While late-Victorian department stores have been the subject of much analysis, due mainly to their importance in the evolution of the modern retail sector and the expansion of consumerism in the twentieth century, the impact of spatial layout on the individuals who worked and shopped within them has been a largely unexplored topic. The rest of this article seeks to apply these ideas to the high-end department store, and to explore how a spatial approach may allow an analysis of the curation of movement and demarcation of use-spaces within them.

The Emergence of the Department Store

8Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, department stores have been considered a revolution in the retail sector, offering copious choice, modernised displays, and fixed prices (Stobart 2017, 810). While there remains a question over whether the department store model can be considered a revolution in retailing, or, more likely, was the result of a slow process of diversification and modernisation which began in the eighteenth century, the high-end department store of the late-Victorian period, was in Stobart’s words a ‘phenomenon’ (2017, 811). Taking up prime locations in the heart of urban centres, department stores formed part of the fabric of the British high street from the 1850s. The range of goods offered by department stores varied, with some expanding into diverse markets such as grocery, homeware, textiles and stationery, and others remaining specialised, focusing on goods such as clothing or, even more narrowly, into event wear such as mourning clothing. The potential market, particularly for clothing, was large—for a time, Regent Street alone supported four large-scale mourning warehouses (Crossick and Jaumain 68).

9Department stores offered the beginnings of what could be considered the contemporary retail sector. Technological innovations, such as the invention of the sewing machine, and in-house dressmaking departments meant that for the first time fitted, ready-to-wear fashion was available on the same day (Adburgham 126), while the expansion and improvement of the rail network allowed high-end stores to offer at-home delivery and fitting services (Crossick and Jaumain 12). However, it was arguably the experience of visiting which made individual department stores famous.

  • 5  Drawing the description in Émile Zola’s 1883 novel, Au bonheur des dames, of a shop as ‘la cathédr (...)
  • 6  ‘Spinnings in Town’ (Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 January 1890, 23) makes reference to t (...)

10Nineteenth-century department stores have been described as ‘cathedrals of consumption’5 (Crossick and Jaumain). This reflects not only the fetishistic worship of consumer goods, which has been a focus of Marxist critique of late nineteenth-century capitalist culture, but also the grand scale of department store interiors and displays. Often these department stores made innovative use of light, in the form of large plate glass windows, gas lighting systems and skylights (Parker 359). Window displays were important in drawing in customers from the street, particularly in an increasingly crowded high street (Laermans 91; Leach 323), and could provide a draw in and of themselves, attracting perpetual crowds which could hinder access to the building.6 In-store displays were designed to be eye-catching, making use of both new aniline dyes, which made brightly coloured fabrics more accessible (Vetesse Forster and Christie 1), and innovations in colour theory (Leach 323). Innovative use of light, through the use of skylights and light-wells, as well as electric lighting, mirrored earlier shopping arcades, thus creating dramatic shafts of light which emphasised the beauty of the displays (Porter Benson 18‒19; Parker 359).

11Much like the examples discussed in eighteenth-century stores, multiple products might be displayed in tableaus, as if in the buyers’ home, or with an exotic backdrop, taking advantage of the fashion for foreign goods (Laermans 91). Glass display cases worked to evoke similar feelings, drawing on the museum displays and exhibitions which showcased objects from across the Empire (Parker 364). High-end department stores were also experimenting in ways of better showcasing their goods, for example, in the use of models and mannequins made up with full outfits (Adburgham 202), as discussed in this article from the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1868:

  • 7  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 September 1868, 45.

I observed a very excellent and new arrangement at Messrs. Jay’s. Life-size models are arranged with all the new styles of low bodices and ornaments, so that a lady can see in a moment if a ball-dress trimming is becoming or not. The models are beautifully made, and the full effect of an evening dress given. I consider this a great help in choosing ball-dress trimmings.7

  • 8  Abelson discusses the creation of desire in consumers in depth in a North American context.

12All of this innovative and spectacular display functioned to trigger desire in shoppers, to create an appetite for the beauty of the products on display, which was difficult to ignore (Abelson 74),8 serving to blur the line between ‘need’ and ‘want’, and encouraging customers to ‘equat[e] satisfaction with survival’ (Debord 17). However, while spectacular displays may have been successful in enticing the leisure class in, converting footfall into sales was where the profit lay.

Department Stores and the Curation of Movement

  • 9  ‘Shop Regulations’, Funny Folks, 12 April 1879, 115.

13The sheer scale of many department stores meant that for many retailers personal oversight of sales was impossible, and sales assistants were under increasing pressure to justify their employment through profits (Hosgood 334‒35). Where, traditionally, retailers had kept a tight grip on sales, serving customers from stores which backed on to their own houses (Jenkins and Stobart 55), department stores were too large to be overseen by a single owner. Sales assistants and other employees, numbering in some large retailers into the hundreds, would be judged solely on their sales figures, and watched by the shopwalkers to ensure they never ‘suffer[ed] a lady to depart without making a purchase’.9 Sales assistants in this period had few rights, often subject to arbitrary fines and dismissals from overzealous shopwalkers and owners, particularly if they failed to sell (Hosgood 333‒35).

  • 10  ‘Clerks, Assistants &c. Wanted’, Leeds Mercury, 19 July 1878.
  • 11  ‘Clerks, Assistants &c. Wanted’, Leeds Mercury, 19 July 1878.
  • 12  See, for example, ‘The Standing Evil’, The Girls Own Paper, 25 September 1880, 612; Pick‒Me‒Up, 1 (...)
  • 13  ‘People, Places and Things’, Hearth and Home, 29 December 1892, 6, 170.

14Jobs in department stores seem to have been largely mixed-gender, and many department stores employed both men and women. In some cases, gender was specified in job adverts. For example, George Bland, recruiting for the County Mantle Rooms at York in 1878, was seeking both a ‘young lady’ and a ‘young man’ to work at the fancy counter.10 Others, however, used specifically gender-neutral language, for example, William Davies and Co., searching for ‘a thoroughly competent person’ to work as a dressmaker,11 and within periodicals, both men and women are regularly depicted as sales assistants.12 In general, shopwalkers and other staff with more managerial roles tended to be men. However, this was not an absolute rule, and this gendered split appears to have been lessening towards the end of the nineteenth century. One article from 1892 discusses the increase in women shopwalkers, and their popularity amongst customers, ‘who do not always care about confronting a man’.13

  • 14  ‘Before and Behind the Counter’, The Girls’ Own Paper, 10 November 1888, 87.
  • 15  ‘The Standing Evil’, The Girls’ Own Paper, 25 September 1880, 612.

15The department store was a space of leisure for many women, offering a respectable place they could frequent and meet without the need for an escort (Crossick and Jaumain 99). For sales assistants, this presented a problem: how to deal with ladies with ‘nothing to do and too much time to do it in’.14 While some articles cautioned women that the effect of their time wasting may be the ‘employée being severely reprimanded’,15 others gave space for the (often male) writers to complain about the comportment of bored ladies in department stores:

  • 16  ‘Before and Behind the Counter’, The Girls’ Own Paper, 10 November 1888, 87.

One lady who sat not far off had such piles of silks and velvets and books of patterns before her, that I naturally came to the conclusion her bill would presently amount to forty pounds at least . . . ‘I don’t think,’ she said at last, ‘I shall make up my mind to-day.’ She then expressed a desire to purchase a yard or two of ribbon, . . . half an hour after this I saw the lady languidly gathering herself away from that counter, which was heaped with drawers and boxes, having failed to match her ribbon. She no doubt went away to another shop, and had another pale-faced lassie to pull the shelves and piles to pieces in order to amuse her.16

  • 17  ‘The Pleasures of Shopping’, Punch, 2 May 1868, 195. There appears to be an interesting gendered a (...)
  • 18  ‘The Chair She Wanted’, The Big Budget, 2 October 1897, 7.
  • 19  ‘Mr Pips his Diary’, Punch, 18 August 1849. ‘Mr Pips his Diary’ was a regular satirical column in (...)

16This focus on pressurised selling in some cases led to sales staff being caricatured as pushy and demanding. Customers’ movement around stores was tightly controlled, with shopwalkers available to greet ladies at the door, and steer them towards the appropriate counter. This provided opportunity to engage in upselling and also to steer customers past the best displays. Navigating the department store, particularly large-scale department stores, was difficult without assistance. One gentleman, John Strong, described the ordeal of trying to purchase coat-buttons from a large department store, while being poorly directed to multiple counters, ‘through several gilded corridors, then up one pair of stairs and down another’.17 Often store interiors contained complex subdivided areas which forced customers through several departments, allowing staff the opportunity to point out further purchases which might coordinate well. Ladies were generally seated at a counter, with goods brought out by sales assistants for perusal. While movement around the store was facilitated, solo browsing was not generally encouraged, and in many stores, shopwalkers got the reputation of being ‘ever-present and over-pleasant’,18 always on hand to coerce women into visiting yet another counter. In an article from Punch, Mr Pips laments taking his wife for a walk in Regent Street, as she is persuaded to purchase a never-ending array of robes, collars, shawls, ribbons and stockings, before they are ‘bowed out of the Shop with Congees by the smirking Shopwalker, rubbing his hands and grinning, obsequious as could be’19. Both shop workers and customers were able to recognise the figure of the obsequiously polite, but determinedly pushy, sales assistant found in music hall performer Dan Leno’s song The Shopwalker (Radcliffe 42).

  • 20  Hosgood (323) discusses the liminality of shopworkers’ status, as neither members of the working- (...)
  • 21  Eg. Funny Folks, 6 March 1875; Pick-Me-Up, 3 November 1900; The Girls’ Own Paper, 10 November 1888 (...)

17While assistants and shopwalkers acted as guides to the products which were on display, much as in earlier periods, there was, however, a different power dynamic at work in the department store. While the eighteenth-century shopkeeper presented himself as a peer with specialist knowledge, department store sales workers were rarely of a similar status to their customers. Though largely members of the lower middle class, low wages, long hours, and poor conditions meant that assistants could not access many of the cultural shibboleths which their wealthy customers would know.20 Much of the mocking of the shopwalker takes the form of jibes at his attempts to ‘put on airs’, reflecting contemporary stereotypes of the lower-middle class as grasping social climbers (Hosgood 232). Throughout the period, satirical characters are compared to shopwalkers, with their ‘unmeaning smiles’ and flourishing gestures, emphasising their ‘severe gentility’.21 While some shopwalkers were apparently likely to attempt to match the behaviour of their wealthy customers, many were not able to without appearing pretentious. Assistants lower in the store hierarchy were more often compared to servants (Hosgood 332), running around while their mistress was seated, waiting to be served. This class differential fundamentally changed the character of the control of movement in department stores. Where being moved between spaces in eighteenth-century shops reflected privileged access to pseudo-private spaces, mirroring elite domestic hosting, the control of movement around a department store appears to have felt like more of an imposition—a sales technique meant to wring as much money out of customers as possible.

18The dual tension here, which is commonly seen in popular culture and satire, may be the result of these competing goals. Sales assistants, under pressure from managerial staff, must be forceful, in order to ensure they were not reprimanded, while women customers were keen to make the most of the respectable leisure space department stores provided. Resolution of this tension may have been found through the separation and demarcation of space within the department store, creating specialised leisure spaces which were outside the sales floor.

Refreshment Rooms and Leisure Spaces

  • 22  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 October 1869, 216.
  • 23  ‘Flittings in February’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 March 1875, 147.
  • 24  Under her pseudonym, The Silkworm, which she used for her regular column ‘Spinnings in Town’ in En (...)

19Finding refreshments may have been a tense affair for Victorian ladies. While pre-1850, women could comfortably go shopping in between breakfast at around 10am and dinner between 3 and 5pm, a shift towards earlier breakfasts, later dinners, and more distant shopping locations, accessible through the rail network, meant that a trip into the city began to become an all-day excursion (Thorne 129). Travelling to go shopping, often in the nearest city, alone or with female friends, may have meant trying to find somewhere appropriate to eat. Facilities for women were not common, and ‘London [was] singularly destitute of comfortable and respectable places where a lady may dine alone at a moderate price’.22 While Adburgham (231) describes it as inconceivable that a lady would visit a restaurant without an escort, women writers at the time seem to refer more to anxiety rather than social prohibition. Going into a restaurant alone was only for the ‘enviably strong-minded’.23 Travelling alone, or only in the company of other women or children, may not have been a familiar experience for many lady shoppers. Restaurants and clubs could be predominantly masculine spaces, where women may not be sure of their welcome. Matilda Browne24 frequently discussed the issues facing women wanting to lunch in London. In an article in 1872, Browne warned how women may be wary of unexpected costs, whether a particular restaurant was friendly towards lone female diners, or whether an establishment was respectable to visit alone:

  • 25  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 January 1872, 42.

She has not the courage to enter a large restaurant alone, for two reasons—first, that she is totally ignorant of the charges, and is therefore afraid of spending too much money; secondly, she does not know if ladies do lunch or dine in that particular locale.25

  • 26  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 January 1872, 42.
  • 27  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 January 1872, 43.

20Browne also lightly chides husbands, presumably more well-versed in assessing dining locations, for not letting women know ‘where they can go alone or with their children to enjoy a good, comfortable, early dinner’.26 Espousing the delights of a particular Fleet Street restaurant, Browne notes the presence of ladies’ lavatories, and staff ‘ready to assist mamma in washing the children’s hands and faces’, as well as ladies-only dining-saloons where ‘there is nothing to make the most timid woman nervous.’27 While the department store was the ladies’ domain, dining out was not, and dining in spaces that were heavily dominated by men appears to have been an anxious experience for some women.

  • 28  The Freemason’s Chronicle, 17 June 1876, 389.
  • 29  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 January 1890, 23.
  • 30  ‘Current Fashions in London’, Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 May 1890, 5.
  • 31  Morning Advertiser, 19 March 1872, 6.
  • 32  The Sketch, 25 October 1893, 698.

21From the 1870s onwards, however, refreshment areas were increasingly being included in department store design. Whiteley’s refreshment room opened in 1872 (Rappaport 66), located on the ground floor, within the boot and shoe department.28 Refreshment rooms serving food from 10am until close were opened in Peter Robinson’s,29 while customers at Debenham and Freebody had ‘the advantage of lunching, dining, or teaing’ in the in-store restaurant.30 These refreshment rooms seem to have been well outfitted, offering not only tea and coffee, but full cooked meals, for solo diners or groups, throughout the day. Retailers were keen to market these refreshment rooms as solely for the comfort of customers. Whiteley emphasised, in his application for a liquor license, that he was merely responding to customer’s requests, and aimed to ‘furnish them with what they required’.31 Peter Robinson’s refreshment room was started ‘as a convenience to customers and not as a source of revenue for himself’.32 This choice of wording is interesting, as it seems to create a contrast between the refreshment room and the salesfloor.

  • 33  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Hearth and Home, 3 March 1892, 502.
  • 34  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Hearth and Home, 3 March 1892, 503.
  • 35  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Hearth and Home, 3 March 1892, 502.
  • 36  ‘Shopping at Peter Robinson’s, Oxford Street’, Hearth and Home, 28 January 1892, 341; ‘Where to Lu (...)
  • 37  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 Jan 1890, 23.

22The department store refreshment room appears to have been designed specifically to appeal to women shoppers. Debenham and Freebody’s restaurant was furnished with Chippendale, decorated with ‘pretty water colour drawings’ and had tablecloths of the ‘daintiest of damask’.33 Many were primarily staffed with waitresses rather than waiters, and had musical entertainment in the form of ladies string groups (Adburgham 232). The prices could be trusted to be reasonable as ‘none of these large firms car[ed] to make much if any profit out of this particular department’.34 Refreshment departments in large stores might include several different rooms, catering to different needs. Whiteley’s restaurant contained two large dining rooms, one offering buffet fare, and the other offering table service and full hot meals.35 Joints of meat, soup and sandwiches, as well as tea, coffee, pastries and cake were offered at both Debenham and Freebody’s and Peter Robinson’s,36 and the refreshment departments were also often adjoined by cloakrooms or washrooms, ‘where a dishevelled toilette [could] be put straight’.37

  • 38  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Home and Hearth, 3 March 1892, 502.
  • 39  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Home and Hearth, 3 March 1892, 502.

23Another notable feature of the department store refreshment room was its physical separation from the retail space. While in 1876, Whiteley’s tearoom was located within the boot department, by 1892, the restaurant took up its own three-room department on Westbourne Grove, with a separate tearoom.38 Other refreshment rooms, such as Debenham and Freebody’s and Robinson’s, were located on the first floor of the stores, above the main showrooms.39 This separation created a deliberate demarcation between the salesfloor and the leisure space—a space which retailers such as Whiteley and Robinson appear to have emphasised as being outside the domain of retail, an area purely for the convenience of the consumer, where profit took a backseat to pleasure.

  • 40  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 January 1890, 23.

24These refreshment rooms served multiple functions, beneficial to both customer and retailer. The department store was a familiar space, where women felt confident that they not only understood the social rules of the space, but which was also effectively a ‘female’ space. Women could expect that there would be facilities for them, and that there was little chance of being chastised for entering an unrespectable establishment. Internal refreshment rooms also meant that ladies need not interrupt their shopping to find lunch or risk ‘exposure to bad weather’.40 This, of course, served retailers well. Customers who strayed into the high street may find their eyes drawn by another shop window or decide not to make a purchase at all. Placing refreshment rooms upstairs within department stores, would force ladies to return back through the sales floor when they wished to leave, leaving opportunity for them to be engaged by shopwalkers and sales staff again. However, this distance from the retail space appears to also have been considered useful to women.

  • 41  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 January 1890, 22.
  • 42  ‘At Messers. Schoolbred’s’, Hearth and Home, 6 October 1892, 691.

25‘Ball dresses are not things to be chosen in a hurry’, Matilda Browne wrote in 1890.41 The refreshment room allowed women to step away from sales staff, to reflect and consider before spending more money than they intended. The late-Victorian department store offered more choice than ever before, in a setting designed to dazzle and entice, with sales assistants instructed not to let customers leave without purchasing something. The refreshment rooms offered a place to retire to, physically separate from the retail floor, to mull over purchases relieving the tension which may have been created between assistant and customer. A woman who had ’worn out the patience of the attendants’ through her ‘vagaries’42 could step away to the refreshment rooms to consider her purchases, leaving sales staff free to serve another customer.

26In this way the separation of spatial areas, devoted to retail and to leisure, acts to mediate the occasionally fraught relationship between staff and customer. These refreshment areas were generally credited to the retail owner as spaces provided specifically to host the customer, for her comfort and convenience. In a sense, this highlights both the differences between the eighteenth-century retail interior and the late-Victorian department store, and the continuation of the importance of the relationship between retail owner and customer.

Conclusion and Future Work

27The late-Victorian department store was a ‘phenomenon’ (Stobart 2017, 811) not only because of its scale, but also its innovation, using display and floorplan to entice women shoppers through the door, as well as to curate their movement through the space. This guiding of movement, from door to counter, department to department, under the guise of service and help, maximised the time spent in the company of sales assistants, and minimised the ability for women to feel able to leave without purchasing something. Where in earlier periods, sales may be handled, or at least overseen, by the retail owner, in the large department stores, selling was largely delegated to assistants, who were not necessarily considered peers in terms of status. For many women, shopping had a dual purpose, as a necessity for acquiring the goods needed and as a leisure activity. This left sales staff under pressure both to sell and to serve, while the difference in perceived status between floor staff and customer meant that staff were caricatured as either overly pretentious or beleaguered.

28In high-end stores, the peer-to-peer relationship remained between customer and retail owner. The use of the owner’s name in the branding of many stores meant that customers still associated the convenience, quality and comfort of many stores with that owner, rather than with the staff that worked the sales floor. The retailer was distanced from the pursuit of profits, hosting or ‘providing’, rather than selling. The refreshment room was not an innovation, so much as a continuation of the polite leisure experience of shopping, with its roots in eighteenth-century shops and early Victorian arcades and bazaars. Its physical separation from the retail space, and its presence as a place devoted purely to leisure, relieved some of the tension which may have been felt on the salesfloor, as well as offering women a largely female-only space in which to take children, meet friends and socialise.

29This paper has largely considered how an analysis of use-spaces, such as those examined in the study of the eighteenth-century retail interiors, may be beneficial in understanding the use of, and movement through, the interior spaces of the late-Victorian department store, as well as how that may reflect and impact the social relationships between customer and assistant, and customer and owner. This has drawn primarily from accounts written in contemporary periodicals, and has focused on high-end stores in London. The relationships engendered in smaller scale provincial stores, which may not have been able to so effectively demarcate space, as well as those in which retailers still took part in active day to day selling, may have looked markedly different. A more systematic analysis of access and use-space within stores may allow for a more detailed exploration of this, and of the experience of the workers who were living and working on site, carving out a domestic interior within the workplace.

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Notes

1  ‘General Licensing Meetings’, Morning Advertiser, 19 March 1872, 6.

2  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Hearth and Home, 3 March 1892, 502‒03.

3  For all his claims never to pay for advertisement (Adburgham 156), Whiteley appears to have been a shameless self‒promoter, always happy to see his name in print (eg. ‘The Universal Provider’, Truth, 26 June 1879, 805‒807; ‘Mr William Whiteley’, Illustrated London, 1893, 82‒84). For discussion of Whiteley’s controversial career, see Rappaport (58‒83) and Adburgham (150‒59).

4  See Hosgood, for a discussion of the experience and working conditions of live‒in shopworkers, and Cessford, for an archaeological analysis of the material culture from the domestic areas of the Robert Sayle department store.

5  Drawing the description in Émile Zola’s 1883 novel, Au bonheur des dames, of a shop as ‘la cathédrale du commerce moderne’.

6  ‘Spinnings in Town’ (Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 January 1890, 23) makes reference to the difficulty in pushing through the crowds assembled outside Peter Robinson’s.

7  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 September 1868, 45.

8  Abelson discusses the creation of desire in consumers in depth in a North American context.

9  ‘Shop Regulations’, Funny Folks, 12 April 1879, 115.

10  ‘Clerks, Assistants &c. Wanted’, Leeds Mercury, 19 July 1878.

11  ‘Clerks, Assistants &c. Wanted’, Leeds Mercury, 19 July 1878.

12  See, for example, ‘The Standing Evil’, The Girls Own Paper, 25 September 1880, 612; Pick‒Me‒Up, 1 December 1888, 104.

13  ‘People, Places and Things’, Hearth and Home, 29 December 1892, 6, 170.

14  ‘Before and Behind the Counter’, The Girls’ Own Paper, 10 November 1888, 87.

15  ‘The Standing Evil’, The Girls’ Own Paper, 25 September 1880, 612.

16  ‘Before and Behind the Counter’, The Girls’ Own Paper, 10 November 1888, 87.

17  ‘The Pleasures of Shopping’, Punch, 2 May 1868, 195. There appears to be an interesting gendered aspect to the experience of department store shopping depicted in periodicals and satire. While women are more often depicted as suffering overzealous sales attempts, men seem to more often be ignored, being either brushed off, like John Strong, by sales staff, left to stand at counters rather than being offered a seat, or being forced to wait while women are served.

18  ‘The Chair She Wanted’, The Big Budget, 2 October 1897, 7.

19  ‘Mr Pips his Diary’, Punch, 18 August 1849. ‘Mr Pips his Diary’ was a regular satirical column in Punch.

20  Hosgood (323) discusses the liminality of shopworkers’ status, as neither members of the working- or middle-class.

21  Eg. Funny Folks, 6 March 1875; Pick-Me-Up, 3 November 1900; The Girls’ Own Paper, 10 November 1888, 87.

22  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 October 1869, 216.

23  ‘Flittings in February’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 March 1875, 147.

24  Under her pseudonym, The Silkworm, which she used for her regular column ‘Spinnings in Town’ in Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. Browne also used the pseudonym, Myra, in Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion (Beetham 23).

25  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 January 1872, 42.

26  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 January 1872, 42.

27  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 January 1872, 43.

28  The Freemason’s Chronicle, 17 June 1876, 389.

29  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 January 1890, 23.

30  ‘Current Fashions in London’, Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 May 1890, 5.

31  Morning Advertiser, 19 March 1872, 6.

32  The Sketch, 25 October 1893, 698.

33  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Hearth and Home, 3 March 1892, 502.

34  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Hearth and Home, 3 March 1892, 503.

35  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Hearth and Home, 3 March 1892, 502.

36  ‘Shopping at Peter Robinson’s, Oxford Street’, Hearth and Home, 28 January 1892, 341; ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Hearth and Home, 3 March 1892, 502.

37  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 Jan 1890, 23.

38  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Home and Hearth, 3 March 1892, 502.

39  ‘Where to Lunch when Shopping’, Home and Hearth, 3 March 1892, 502.

40  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 January 1890, 23.

41  ‘Spinnings in Town’, Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, 1 January 1890, 22.

42  ‘At Messers. Schoolbred’s’, Hearth and Home, 6 October 1892, 691.

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Kate Morris, « Dualities of Function: Archaeological Approaches to the Study of Movement and Space within the late‒Victorian Department Store »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 97 Printemps | 2023, mis en ligne le 21 mars 2023, consulté le 23 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/12906 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.12906

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Kate Morris

Kate Morris is a third year PhD student in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. Their thesis is titled ‘Archaeologies of Bereavement: The use of objects in grief and mourning, 1850-1914AD’, and focuses on the affective and mnemonic properties of objects used during grieving in the late-nineteenth century. Their wider research interests are focused on urban social culture, consumerism and social class in the UK in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and they currently organise and run the Research Forums in the archaeology department at York. Alongside their PhD, they work as a specialist academic tutor for autistic university students and are interested in improving inclusivity and accessibility in higher education teaching.
Kate Morris est doctorante en 3e année au département d’archéologie de l’Université de York. Sa thèse est intitulée ‘Archaeologies of Bereavement: The use of objects in grief and mourning, 1850-1914 AD’, et elle porte sur les propriétés affectives et mnémoniques des objets utilisés pendant le deuil à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle. Ses recherches s’intéressent de manière plus large à la culture sociale urbaine, au consumérisme et aux classes sociales dans le Royaume-Uni des dix-neuvième et vingtième siècles. Elle organise et dirige actuellement les Forums de la Recherche au Département d’Archéologie à York. En parallèle de son doctorat, elle travaille comme tutrice académique spécialisée auprès d’étudiants autistes et elle est impliquée dans l’amélioration de l’inclusivité et de l’accessibilité de l’enseignement supérieur.

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