Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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clothing and personal ornamentation. Refreshments and up-market entertain-
ments followed suit, pulling the sexes together but also allowing women a measure
of autonomy in shared pleasures. The changing social geography of the urban
middle class transformed parts of the central business district into temples of con-
sumerism, rendered increasingly secure for worshippers at the shrine as they
became more socially homogeneous and better policed. This applied to resorts,
and to historic cities like Chester, as well as to London, Manchester or Leeds, as
the shopping and entertainment catchment areas of the larger and more attrac-
tive places widened, while on the fringes of the larger cities the suburbs them-
selves were generating intermediate shopping centres and department stores of
their own.
40
Meanwhile, we still know far too little about the shopping and enter-
tainment options of lower-middle and working-class women outside the home,
although music hall’s opening out to a wider constituency of broadly defined
urban respectability included women within its generous remit, while at the same
time offering roles and modes of self-presentation to women as well as men,
whether played straight or deployed with irony or self-deprecation.
41
At the
bottom of the scale, and well into the interwar years in depressed working-class
areas like Salford, many people depended on the corner shop and skilfully
managed market trading for the overwhelming bulk of their purchases, and took
their entertainment alfresco as they found it in the market place, while what
popular consumerism there was found outlets in the ‘penny capitalists’who played
music or sold licks of ice-cream or other cheap delicacies through the back
streets.
42
The later decades of the nineteenth century brought novelties for all, but
some were much more mobile and flexible in their pursuit of a widening range
of goods and pleasures than others; and here access to the two key resources, time
and money, inextricably interlinked, remained crucial to an ability to benefit.
43
But in various ways, across a range of action-spaces, the city itself emerged as an
object of consumption and desire, in both the public and the private sphere, for
men at almost all social levels and for many middle-class women; and this applied
to the most prosaic manufacturing centres as well as to the resorts, opulent suburbs
and elite shopping areas which were beginning consciously to market their attrib-
utes in late Victorian times. These perceptions of the changing relationships
between towns and consumption need further development.
The rise of consumerism as a mass phenomenon, entailing the spread of
a general capacity and desire to choose between and enjoy an array of non-
essential goods and services, and to pick out more desirable versions of essential
John K.Walton
40
C. Young and S. Allen, ‘Retail patterns in nineteenth century Chester’, Journal of Regional and
Local Studies, (), –; J. Benson and G. Shaw, ‘Retail patterns’, in Benson and Shaw, eds.,
Evolution of Retail Systems.
41
Bratton, Music Hall.
42
J. Benson, The Penny Capitalists (Dublin, ); A. Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty
(Buckingham, ); C. Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives (Manchester, ).
43
Cross, Time and Money.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
ones or expand existing notions of what was essential, was an extension of the
competitive and hedonistic consumption enjoyed by aristocrats, gentry and the
aspiring professional and business ‘middling sort’, which had been developing in
favoured urban settings since at least the later seventeenth century, and spread
from the metropolis, the resorts and the county towns into the newly prosper-
ing manufacturing and mercantile towns of the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries. By the mid-nineteenth century the substantial middle classes
were ceasing to live ‘over the shop’ and moving out in growing numbers to
suburbs like Birmingham’s Edgbaston and Manchester’s Victoria Park, where
women devoted themselves to domestic pursuits which included the acquisition,
display and care of possessions whose aesthetic and fashionable attributes
counted for at least as much as their utility.
44
The myth of the abstemious, accu-
mulative, puritanical master manufacturer was largely just that, and Quaker mill
owners accumulated their wine cellars and art collections along with the rest,
enjoying to the full the consumer opportunities their enhanced purchasing
power provided.
45
But the commercial and professional middle class of London,
where the greatest fortunes were concentrated, took the palm.
46
Writing in the
s the French academic Hippolyte Taine commented on the eight miles of
middle-class housing between London Bridge and Hampton Court, remarking
that ‘they turn out houses as we turn out Paris fancy-goods’ and identifying this
phenomenon with the existence of ‘an opulent free-spending middle class very
different from our own’.
47
Such households needed to acquire the ‘paraphernalia
of gentility’, in J. A. Banks’ memorable phrase, to fit in with the consumer con-
ventions of their neighbours and coevals: they needed to employ the almost-
statutory three servants, to send their boys to the right schools, to have access to
horses and a carriage of appropriate standard, and to lay claim to suitable cultu-
ral capital in tangible form through the display of gardens, libraries, solid furni-
ture and pictures.
48
They needed to be able to entertain at an appropriate level,
with suitable cuisine, service and utensils for the exchange of hospitality accord-
ing to rules which could be bent but seldom broken. The voluntary organisa-
tions so characteristic of Victorian England (and afterwards), from the Literary
and Philosophical Society and the chapel to the Freemasons and Rotary, encour-
aged social mixing beyond immediate circles of family, neighbours and business
associates, enabling identities to be tried out on a wider stage but expanding the
opportunities for and potential consequences of conflict and embarrassment.
Towns and consumerism
44
Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes; R. J. Morris, Class, Sect and Party (Manchester, ); M.
Spiers, Victoria Park (Manchester, ); M. Simpson and T. H. Lloyd, eds., Middle Class Housing
in Britain (Newton Abbot, ).
45
A. C. Howe, The Cotton Masters – (Oxford, ); R. Boyson, The Ashworth Cotton
Enterprise (Oxford, ).
46
W. D. Rubinstein, Men of Property (London, ).
47
H. Taine, Notes on England, trans. Edward Hyams (London, ), p. .
48
J. A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood (London, ), ch. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
These were, above all, urban preoccupations; and for most people they entailed
conformity rather than boundary-transgressing cultural innovation.
49
It is not clear how far the ripples of such comfortable but anxious consumer-
ism reached into the mid-Victorian lower middle and upper working class: the
worlds of Charles Pooter and of Thomas Wright’s journeyman engineer.
50
Banks focuses mainly on the opulent and comfortable middle class, who set stan-
dards which were only attainable in attenuated form for their social inferiors.
The first claims on any surplus in the lower reaches of the middle class were often
directed towards services rather than goods: domestic labour to free the wife
from degrading drudgery, display the household’s command over the cheap
labour of suitably uniformed others and allow the cultivation of accomplish-
ments and domestic ceremony; laundry to display appropriate crispness and
cleanliness according to exacting presentational codes, within the family and
before the world; and education to provide the young with the social and com-
mercial skills and cultural repertoire which would sustain the family into the next
generation.
51
Even the seaside holiday, which in its respectable family incarna-
tion became a touchstone of status for mid-Victorian urban middle-class fami-
lies, and multiplied examples of a distinctive kind of consumer-oriented town
in the process, entailed expenditure on services (transport and accommodation)
at least as much as goods.
52
Among marginal members of the middle class, the
prior requirement to hire domestic help – if only a charwoman or maid of all
work – ate into disposable income for the recreational shopping and entertain-
ment which towns came to offer. Urban consumerism was driven back into the
home, especially as suburbs proliferated on and beyond the fringes of the larger
towns and work, public entertainment and specialised shopping all entailed jour-
neys into and back from the town centre.
53
This was partly a life cycle stage, and
middle-class bachelors were better customers for urban entertainment, although
at a more prosperous level the gentlemen’s club offered its own version of
serviced quasi-domesticity in homosocial enclaves where men mixed with
their peers; but the respectable family set a premium on domesticity, however
John K.Walton
49
V. Mars, ‘Ordering dinner’ (PhD thesis, University of Leicester, ); Douglas and Isherwood,
World of Goods, ch. .
50
G. Grossmith and W. Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (Gloucester, edn); T. Wright, Some
Habits and Customs of the Working Classes (; repr., London, ); and T. Wright, The Great
Unwashed (; repr., London, ).
51
P. Horn, ed., The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Domestic Servant (Dublin, ); P. Malcolmson,
English Laundresses: A Social History – (Urbana, Ill., ); J. K. Walton and A. Wilcox,
eds., Low Life and Moral Improvement in Mid-Victorian England: Liverpool through the Journalism of
Hugh Shimmin (Leicester, ), ch. (‘A bad servant manufactory’); J. R. de S. Honey, To m
Brown’s Universe (London, ).
52
Walton, English Seaside Resort, ch. .
53
H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb (Leicester, ); F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Rise of Suburbia
(Leicester, ); Jackson, Semi-Detached London; G. Stedman Jones, ‘Working-class culture and
working-class politics in London, –: notes on the remaking of a working class’, Journal
of Social History, (), –.
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rudimentary its claims to domestic comfort might look to a censorious superior
gaze.
54
The cheap German piano was becoming an emblematic consumer
durable for the urban lower middle class by the mid-Victorian years, but shop-
ping for pleasure rather than to meet narrowly defined necessities was something
which emerged at this level only with the late Victorian price fall which also
brought the mainstream urban working class into the frame.
55
The coming of a genuine ‘mass market’ for most consumer goods and services
was an urban phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Periodic surges of inflation in the mid-Victorian years eroded the gains in money
wages which were enjoyed in some skilled and supervisory male working-class
occupations at this time, and such gains tended to find their way into hedonistic
or ritualised masculine consumption on drink and associated pursuits rather than
into family budgets and the acquisition of consumer goods.
56
Rising real wages
fuelled by the falling prices of basic commodities, on the other hand, tended to
spread the benefits through the family as the increased spending power was
passed on into the housekeeping budget; and the growing importance of Co-
operative dividends in many northern and Midland settings in the late nine-
teenth century reinforced this trend.
57
Beer consumption per capita began to
decline from , and the fortnightly sixpences which might be devoted to the
concomitant rise of football as a spectator sport did not counterbalance this
trend.
58
Convenience foods took pressure off the working-class housewife in the
absence of labour-saving housework devices, just as domestic servants reduced
the workload of her ‘betters’. Fish and chips, the most obvious example, began
in the s as (mainly) a late-night treat for men returning from the pub, but
was generalising its influence as a regular family meal by Edwardian times.
59
More families began to afford new ready-made clothes (especially for men), sub-
stantial furniture and ornaments to gather dust in the front parlour, seaside hol-
idays and associated souvenirs, bicycles (if only second-hand), cheap newspapers
and books, even pianos and sheet music: a whole cornucopia of non-essential
items, some of which were themselves recent inventions, which reached out to
hitherto distant or makeshift realms of fashion, fantasy and frivolity.
60
For families whose breadwinner remained in work, falling rents and
family sizes, together with further declines in basic commodity prices, opened
Towns and consumerism
54
Taine, Notes on England, p. ; Walton and Wilcox, eds., Hugh Shimmin, ch. .
55
C. Ehrlich, The Piano, revised edn (Oxford, ); Fraser, Mass Market; G. Crossick, ed., The Lower
Middle Class in Britain, – (London, ).
56
E. H. Hunt, Regional Wage Variations in Britain, – (Oxford, ); N. Kirk, The Growth of
Working-Class Reformism in Mid-Victorian England (London, ); A. T. McCabe, ‘The standard
of living on Merseyside, –’, in S. P. Bell, ed., Victorian Lancashire (Newton Abbot, ).
57
J. K. Walton, Lancashire:A Social History – (Manchester, ), p. .
58
A. E. Dingle, ‘Drink and working-class living standards in Britain, –’, Ec.HR, nd series,
(), –; Mason, Association Football and English Society.
59
Walton, Fish and Chips.
60
Fraser, Mass Market; A. Briggs, Victorian Things (London, ).
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out purchasing power for new consumer durables in the interwar years. The
radio stands out most obviously here alongside the wider dissemination of the
bicycle and the development of new personal means of transport, as motor-
cycles and cars came within the means of some working-class people in the
s; but these innovations were part of a much wider pattern. Municipal
housing helped to boost the home-centred culture of the suburbs, extending it
to new social groups, and pressure from neighbours and municipal landlords to
maintain and make use of gardens boosted demand for tools, seeds and related
products.
61
These themes applied more generally and obviously to the middle
classes, who jealously guarded the status of their own interwar suburbs and
bought into the mythology and conventionalised vocabulary of exposed timber,
stained glass, rockeries and garden gnomes.
62
These comments about the urban working class and the mass market need
some qualification. Even in the s some working-class families had the capac-
ity to acquire substantial furniture (as in the mahogany sideboards of homes in
Manchester’s Hulme) which was decorative and satisfying as well as functional;
but part of its value lay in its availability for pawning in hard times. It was a solid,
dependable way of saving for a rainy day, and could be enjoyed more sensually
than money locked away in an untrustworthy bank.
63
Such rationales for
pawning were not usually understood by unsympathetic commentators from
outside the culture, but they persisted even as savings banks became more reli-
able and other ways of providing security became more widespread.
64
This is a
reminder that the meanings of consumer goods might extend beyond the more
obvious aspects of utility and display. The Sunday suit often had similar func-
tions as part of a weekly economic cycle of display, pawning and release which
was also a way of coping with inadequate domestic storage space.
65
When the
more general transition to the mass market got under way in the late nineteenth
century, its impact was geographically and socially skewed. The northern textile
towns, especially those of Lancashire with their high family incomes, led the way,
along with the artisan and craft workers of London; but some of the most
impressive gains in real wages around the turn of the century came in industries
such as mining, where there was less scope for augmenting the breadwinner
wage and a higher incidence of isolated communities, with fewer shopping or
commodified entertainment opportunities.
66
Here, too, housing conditions
John K.Walton
61
McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, ch. ; S. Constantine, ‘Amateur gardening and popular recreation
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Journal of Social History, (–), –; G. L.
Murfin, Popular Leisure in the Lake Counties (Manchester, ).
62
P. Oliver, I. Davis and I. Bentley, Dunroamin (London, ).
63
W. Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour of the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire (London, ); M.
Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet (Leicester, ).
64
Johnson, Saving and Spending.
65
Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet.
66
Walton, Lancashire, ch. ; C. Feinstein, ‘Variety and volatility: some aspects of the labour market
in Britain –’, in C. Holmes and A. Booth, eds., Economy and Society: European
Industrialisation and Its Social Consequences (Leicester, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
were often particularly poor, and the new influences for mass consumption gen-
erally had less scope to operate, encouraging the perpetuation of masculine con-
sumption patterns based on drink and gambling.
Not only were many families banished from their precarious hold on access
to consumer goods by trade depressions or labour disputes, illness or injury,
when ornaments and emblems of comfort and privacy had to be turned into
cash and commercial entertainment became inaccessible; not only did the
poverty cycle bite into consumer capacity when children were young; but there
were also enduring pools of the poverty of casual labour and the sweated trades,
where the struggle for survival left no room for frivolity of any sort, and stale
bread and rags were precious resources. Descriptions of domestic interiors
during the great trade depression of ; or the Cotton Famine of the early
s, which pushed so many Lancashire labouring families into temporary but
desperate poverty; or of the sufferings of articulate working men like Joseph
Gutteridge in the Coventry ribbon trades, tell this sort of story from a perspec-
tive of deep but short-term crisis.
67
But the fate of the sweated garment workers
described by Henry Mayhew in London’s East End, or of Charles Booth’s Classes
A and B nearly half a century later, or of the casual labourers of mid-Victorian
Liverpool as described in a range of poverty surveys, points to the existence of
a submerged stratum whose only hope of entry into a realm of consumer choice
was through a successful bet or raffle, or through enjoying a weekend binge
involving easily cooked chops or steak before starving through the rest of the
week, or through putting alcohol and tobacco before more ‘rational’ and accept-
able ways of ekeing out a pittance. The conditions in many houses were not such
as to encourage attempts at beautification or enhanced comfort.
68
Where stead-
ily provided domestic garment work was part of a stable family economy and
performed by experienced women who knew the value of their skills, matters
could be different and houses ‘clean and well-furnished’, with ornaments and
the occasional piano, as Clementina Black’s optimistic assessment of Liverpool
vestmakers documents for the Edwardian years; but she was only too aware of
how exceptional this was.
69
These comments remain relevant in the interwar years, especially where high
levels of unemployment or enduring casualisation prevailed. Thus the social
survey of Merseyside which was completed by Liverpool University between
and found that in a given week per cent of a sample whose income
Towns and consumerism
67
Joseph Adshead, Distress in Manchester: Evidence of the State of the Labouring Classes in (London,
); Edwin Waugh, Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine (London,
); V. Chancellor, Master and Artisan in Victorian England (New York, ), pp. –.
68
E. P. Thompson and E. Yeo, The Unknown Mayhew (London, ); D. Englander and R. O’Day,
eds., Retrieved Riches (Aldershot, ); Walton and Wilcox, eds., Hugh Shimmin; J. H. Treble,
Urban Poverty in Britain, – (London, ); J. Schmiechen, Sweated Industries and Sweated
Labor:The London Clothing Trades (Beckenham, ).
69
Clementina Black, ed., Married Women’s Work, nd edn (London, ), p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
fell below per cent of an assessed poverty line recorded no expenditure in the
‘recreation, tobacco, miscellaneous’ category, while per cent spent nothing on
clothing (in a social setting where most clothing was paid for by monthly instal-
ments from the ‘Scotch draper’), and per cent spent nothing on furniture. At
these levels, and above, diet itself was probably insufficient in content if not in
quantity. The surveyors commented that some expenditure was certainly
omitted, especially casual spending on tit-bits, betting and beer; but this was
thought to be more likely to occur at the top end of the income spectrum under
discussion. Liverpool’s cheaper shopping facilities were making consumer goods
and choices more readily available by the s and s, but many were still
excluded; and this comment would stand for many ports and older industrial
areas.
70
We need to set this evidence against George Orwell’s perception that the
basic comfort and variety afforded by cheap cinema seats, art silk stockings, fish
and chips, cheap cigarettes and other accessible items of basic consumption
helped to keep the unemployed and their poverty-stricken neighbours from
despair and unrest in the worst years of the s. The world of urban consu-
merism still excluded many of the poor and immobile in industrial villages, small
towns and slums, and it was only in the almost-full employment of the post-war
years, and then only when the eventual retreat of rationing opened out alterna-
tives to sport, leisure, alcohol and tobacco, that the outermost circles of depri-
vation and make-do-and-mend were drawn more fully into the consumer
market place.
71
The urban setting ratcheted up the pressure to present the self and build iden-
tities through the market place rather than, or as well as, through domestic crafts
and personal skills. In concentrations of population, and especially in resorts, city
centres or well-frequented thoroughfares where status was acquired through a
shared grammar of self-representation rather than being ascribed through deeper
knowledge of an individual’s antecedents and social context, purchased goods
provided a universal language while the home-made was quaint and marginal-
ised. This did not exclude such hybrid activities as the making up of patterns
through knitting or home dressmaking, of course, and additional work could be
done on purchased articles to give them an individual, personal touch, follow-
ing a long tradition of buying buttons or tassels to alter the appearance of a dress
which might in itself be a consumer durable and even an heirloom; but this had
to take place within shifting consensual idioms of the fashionable and the appro-
priate (which is not to propose a model for consumer behaviour based solely on
emulation or ‘trickle-down’).
72
Second-hand and out-of-fashion goods took
their place in the imposed ordering of the market place, and strategies for making
John K.Walton
70
D. C. Jones, ed., Merseyside (Liverpool, ), vol. , ch. .
71
G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London, ); Obelkevich and Catterall, eds., Understanding
British Society.
72
Fine and Leopold, World of Consumption, chs. and .
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the best of one’s resources were adopted in the knowledge that they were palli-
ative rather than triumphalist. This helps to explain the unwillingness of dwell-
ers in working-class neighbourhoods to admit visitors from beyond the family
into houses which did not display a suitable repertoire of furnishings and orna-
ment, and the imperative to corral visitors into an otherwise unused and highly
polished formal sitting room.
73
It was, above all, the town and its combination
of goods for sale and inescapable personal display which created, reinforced and
extended the tyranny of fashion and the market in ever-extending spirals and
concentric ripples.
Urban consumption began with the manufacture of goods. This was increas-
ingly an urban activity, as industry continued the move from the countryside
which had begun in earnest in the eighteenth century and was being pushed
harder by the mid-nineteenth century, as a result of the economies of scale
offered by carboniferous capitalism and the communications revolutions which
were based on railways, commuting, newspapers and the telegraph. The con-
sumption of news, as commodity and shared activity, was essential to urban
living.
74
The marketing and selling of goods had a much longer pedigree as spe-
cialist urban activities, but the new urban shopping spaces of the street lined with
plate-glass and display, the arcade, the covered market, the department store and
the emporium gave an extra impetus to the town as promoter of consumption.
Once the purchasing transaction had been completed, the town offered scope
for intensive sociability, in private as well as in public and in intermediate zones
regulated by subscription and invitation, and expressed through a variety of
dining and other hospitality rituals which promoted both consensual and inno-
vative consumption of goods whose identities were recreated through use and
reuse in different contexts.
75
We need now to follow the systems of provision
and consumption of goods through the urban setting, beginning with their
manufacture.
76
The women’s suffrage campaigner Teresa Billington Greig commented force-
fully before the First World War on the artificiality of dividing producer and con-
sumer interests in a society where they were necessarily complementary. Wage
labourers in manufacturing and retailing were also consumers, and in the latter
role they fell victim to all the price-cutting and adulterating devices at which
they connived as producers. Cheap goods and nasty depressed living standards,
and the worship of work rather than properly directed, life-enhancing leisure
and enjoyment cast a blight over millions of lives. Trade unionists equated
Towns and consumerism
73
R. Roberts, The Classic Slum (Manchester, ).
74
A. J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in Britain – (Beckenham, ); Lucy Brown,
Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, ); J. Kieve, The Electric Telegraph:A Social and Economic
History (Newton Abbot, ).
75
Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, ch. ; Morris, Class, Sect and Party; Mars, ‘Ordering dinner’.
76
Fine and Leopold, World of Consumption, ch. .
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consumers with the idle rich, and forgot that they too bought in the market
place. And the poorest workers got the worst of all worlds, living outside the
protection offered by strong trade unions and condemned to buy the worst and
cheapest goods. So, Greig argued, if any progress was to be made towards a more
just society and better living standards, the interests of producers and consumers
must be examined in tandem. Her premises are accepted here.
77
The exploitation of labour to produce cheap consumer goods was increasingly
an urban phenomenon, whether or not it was organised in factories. It was
already all too apparent to Mayhew in the mid-nineteenth century, as he inves-
tigated the falling living standards of the ‘dishonourable’ sweated trades in
London, where the division of labour and the competitive cutting of piece-rates
had driven the makers of a range of commodities, from clothing to furniture to
toys, into a subsistence poverty of interminable working hours geared to tyran-
nical deadlines, and alternating with spells of unemployment according to the
season and the fashion.
78
Cheap goods for mass consumption (or to meet orders
to tight timetables) presupposed this system of work, which the advent of the
sewing machine (for example) left unaffected, although the rise of the ready-
made clothing industry from the s was associated with a move to factories
in places like Leeds; and it transferred overhead costs such as rent, lighting,
heating and even some raw materials to the worker at home. No wonder this was
an enduring alternative to the factory, especially where land values were high and
the vagaries of fashion fickle. Factory work could generate more substantial and
reliable purchasing power (although, for example, cotton in Blackburn was more
secure and better paid than jam in London, at least until the s); but either
way the production of consumer goods at bare subsistence wages set limits to the
extent of a notional ‘mass market’. The ‘sweated trades’ proved even harder to
regulate than the factories, and they were still attracting the anguished attention
of legislators and social reformers in Edwardian times and beyond.
79
Domestic
manufacture organised through warehouses and layers of middlemen outlasted
the rural stereotypes of ‘proto-industrialisation’ and became a central feature of
urban labour markets, with the opportunities they provided for generating alter-
native means of subsistence in the low season, enabling workforces to be kept
together by ‘dovetailing’ and the use of local contacts to find what work there
was.
80
Among the results were fashionable items of clothing made under atro-
ciously filthy conditions, where workers had neither time nor resources to look
after their surroundings, so that workers’ pay was regularly docked when lice
were found in the finished goods they submitted to the warehouse.
81
John K.Walton
77
Greig, Consumer in Revolt, ch. .
78
Thompson and Yeo, Unknown Mayhew; G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, ).
79
Schmiechen, Sweated Industries; D. Bythell, The Sweated Trades (London, ); J. Buckman,
Immigrants and the Class Struggle (Manchester, ); Briggs, Victorian Things, pp. –.
80
Stedman Jones, Outcast London; E. Ross, Love and Toil (New York and Oxford, ).
81
Thompson and Yeo, Unknown Mayhew, pp. –.
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At the other end of the scale, and seeming to suggest that capitalist consumer-
ism did not necessary presuppose a miserable treadmill of working to survive
among those who could not aspire to the more pleasurable round of producing
to fund consumer shopping, there were the model factories and communities
established by paternalist employers in the new consumer industries of (espe-
cially) the later nineteenth century, in textiles, clothing, chocolate, tobacco or
soap manufacture. From the better-endowed of the ‘industrial colonies’ of the
early Industrial Revolution, with their baths, libraries, gardens and bedroom
inspections as celebrated by social commentators of the s, through more
architecturally ambitious mid-Victorian initiatives like Saltaire, to the ‘garden
cities’ in miniature of Port Sunlight or Bournville or New Earswick at and
beyond the turn of the century, with their facilities for sport, recreation and
‘improvement’, the consumption of some producers of consumer goods was
channelled in approved directions by conscientious employers.
82
But such places
were invariably sited on the urban fringe, at what was intended to be a safe dis-
tance from urban fleshpots as well as industrial pollution, and workers were eager
to take what they wanted from such arrangements and reject the rest. Paternalist
employers were always a conspicuous and well-documented minority, and they
seem to have succeeded in socialising only a few of their workpeople into
becoming ideal subordinate citizens and ‘rational’ consumers of homes, gardens
and approved culture.
83
Meanwhile, Port Sunlight’s W. H. Lever was promoting
the quasi-slavery of indentured labour on his palm-oil plantations, aided and
abetted by British colonial authorities, and similar arrangements prevailed in
cocoa.
84
So the quasi-subsistence economy of producers who could not afford
to be consumers was exported rather than abolished, contributing in its turn to
the cheapness in Britain of new products for the ‘mass’ market such as soap and
chocolate. This was an inconvenient economic reality which sat uneasily along-
side the cosy and comfortable cottage homes, art gallery and community centre
of Port Sunlight. In the immediate pre-war years Lever was also waging a legal
vendetta against the Co-op to oblige it to stock his products, and his concern
for his workers as consumers was not only highly selective, but also very much
on his own terms.
85
And when William Morris and his followers in the Arts and
Crafts movement made more conscientious efforts to educate workers into
making, and consumers into preferring, craftsmanship and fine materials, and
goods produced in revitalised rural surroundings, they found themselves priced
into the prosperous sectors of the market and confined to making fashion goods
Towns and consumerism
82
Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour; J. Reynolds, The Great Paternalist (London, ); W. Ashworth,
The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning (London, ); S. Pollard, The Genesis of Modern
Management (Harmondsworth, ); G. Darley, Villages of Vision (London, ).
83
P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (Brighton, ), challenged by J. King, ‘We could eat the
police’, Victorian Studies, (), –.
84
J. Walvin, Questioning Slavery (London, ), p. .
85
Gurney, Co-operative Culture, pp. –.
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