Spaces of Consumption

Stobart, Jon; Hann, Andrew; Morgan, Victoria L.

doi:10.4324/9780203608128

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Alongside Berry, Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann, Victoria Morgan and Claire Walsh have all established the importance of sociability to the act of browsing, defining it as a leisure experience and a platform for public display. 25 Through the act of visiting the urban shop space, consumers could not only interact with the product but also participated in public social interaction and cultural exchange. Stobart, Han and Morgan's work has pointed out how the built urban environment and the social dynamics of the town were shaped by the use of shops for both consumption and leisure.…”

Section: Consumption and Browsingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Stobart, Han and Morgan's work has pointed out how the built urban environment and the social dynamics of the town were shaped by the use of shops for both consumption and leisure. 26 Claire Walsh has produced a significant body of work, primarily focusing on the visual and sociable experience of shopping. She has highlighted the importance of the early 18th-century shopping galleries or exchanges, such as the New Exchange, crediting them for the increased expectation of cultural display and spectacle as part of the shopping experience.…”

Section: Consumption and Browsingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…60 Stobart, Han and Morgan, for example, have demonstrated through their work on the account books of Thomas Dickenson that over 30 per cent of the purchases made at his grocer's shop were made by servants, revealing nuances in how people throughout society utilised the senses in shopping. 61 The 18th-century consumer was faced with a myriad of sensory experience when they took it upon themselves to go shopping. Foul odours and raucous calls epitomised some retail areas, while luxurious textures and delicious smells filled others.…”

Section: The Senses Beyond the Urban Shopmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in 18th‐Century England

Dyer

2014

History Compass

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Interest in the senses has blossomed over the last decade, leading to numerous explorations of touch, smell, sound, taste and sight throughout history. Increasingly, historians are considering how this sensory methodology can enrich other fields of historical study. This article explores the potential for sensory history to open new avenues of thought in the field of urban consumption history. Focusing on the period of the so called 'consumer revolution', this article promotes a reassessment of shopping in 18th-century English towns. This intersection of consumption history and sensory history encourages us to rethink numerous aspects of the process of shopping in the 18th century, including browsing, gender, urban space and agency. This article begins by assessing the current state of scholarship in these two branches of historical enquiry, before considering how their juncture impacts research moving forward.An edition of the 'Weekly Entertainer', published in 1819, contained a story in which the narrator described the various motivations of women who went shopping in fashionable, urban shopping venues. He associated these motivations to shop with three particular impulses: necessity, idleness and to kill time. He went on to describe the experience of witnessing women going about the task of shopping:He who has the misfortune to accompany them in their shopping circle through the west end of town, must make up his mind to long waiting, and to seeing a thousand articles displayed, handled, looked at, commented upon, and returned to their drawers and shelves. 1 There are three important points to be taken from this account of shopping, which have informed and guided recent developments in both consumption and sensory history. 2 The first point is that shopping was a process rather than an act. It was a cultural phenomenon in which people participated, both out of desire and necessity. 3 Secondly, that the study of the history of retail and consumption should consider not only the fashionable and the novel but also the mundane needs of day-to-day existence. 4 Lastly, that sensory engagement with products through a process of browsing was integral to these various purposes. 5 This article brings together advances in two active and ongoing areas of research, exploring the intersection between consumption history and sensory history in the context of 18th-century England. Mark Smith has described the 18th century as a time when 'the senses informed the emergence of social classes, race and gender conventions, industrialisation, urbanisation, colonialism, imperialism [and] nationalism'. 6 Meanwhile, consumption historians have contentiously termed the period a 'consumer revolution'. 7 Importantly, this article draws upon the juncture between these two inf luential and significant areas of study, arguing that the inter-sensory skillset acquired through handling, smelling and viewing goods must necessitate a reassessment of the browsing process. This article will firstly tackle the gradually maturing work of sensory ...

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Section: Consumption and Browsingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Consumption and Browsingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Senses Beyond the Urban Shopmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in 18th‐Century England

Dyer

2014

History Compass

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“…53 It was closely linked with improvements to the physical environment, making shopping streets polite promenades where browsing and display -seeing and being seen -went hand-in-hand. 54 In Chester, the fashionable rows were being described by early nineteenth-century commentators as 'convenient for a quiet lounge to ladies and others engaged in shopping', whilst engravings showed well-dressed couples promenading the shop-lined walkways. 55 Yet such polite and leisurely shopping was disrupted by other, competing uses of the urban street.…”

Section: Shopping Practices: a Long Term Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

The Landscape of Consumption

Furnée¹,

Lesger²

2014

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In Britain, the second half of the nineteenth century has long been associated with the emergence of mass markets and mass consumption. From traditionalist perspectives, growth in demand was fuelled by demographic growth and rising real wages, whilst increasingly efficient production and transport systems eased the supply of goods-making them cheaper and far more readily available. Working people could afford to indulge themselves and mark their growing respectability as never before, and the middle classes redefined their consumption practices to distance themselves from their social inferiors. 1 Retailing systems both responded to and helped to drive forward these changes. Indeed, retail historians in the 1950s and 1960s identified what they saw as a retail revolution taking place in the later nineteenth century. 2 This comprised a range of new retail formats and practices, with multiples and department stores pioneering the use of advertising, fixed prices, ticketing and cash sales, window displays, and so on. More recently, there have been attempts to uncouple retail revolution from ideas of mass retailing and mass consumption. In the 1980s, McKendrick saw the birth of a consumer society in eighteenth-century Britain and thus challenged the direction of causality linking consumer and industrial growth. More recently, a number of retail historians have highlighted the spread of 'modern' retail techniques in the eighteenth century and earlier. 3 Retail revolution is now placed anywhere from the earlymodern period onwards. What is missing in many of these studies, however, is a consideration of how shops functioned and interrelated (with other urban activities) in spatial terms. Recent work by 2 Cox, Walsh and Stobart has begun to uncover some of the complexities of shops and shopping in the long eighteenth century. 4 However, there has been little attempt to consider how provincial shopping streets, shops and the practices of shopping changed over the longue durée. That is the purpose of this paper: to explore the changing landscape of shopping in English provincial towns from around 1650 to 1850. Taking such a broad perspective inevitably means losing some detail, but it brings real advantages, most notably in terms of assessing key continuities and changes in the spaces and practices of shopping. Shops and streets in early modern market towns Shops were a common feature of medieval towns, but they grew significantly in number through the early modern period. A typical market town might contain a group of craftsmenretailers (shoemakers, tailors and the like), together with a few mercers and drapers, perhaps with a grocer or ironmonger as well. The streets of larger towns were crowded with a growing number of shops. In the late sixteenth century, Norwich already had 111 tailors, 60 grocers, 51 shoemakers, 36 butchers, 23 bakers, 18 mercers and drapers, 13 barbers, 10 haberdashers, 8 cutlers, 7 apothecaries, 5 fishmongers, 4 goldsmiths, 3 stationers and 2 ironmongers together serving a population of perhaps 12,0...

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“…6 But as Stobart comments, 'it is all too easy to take a Whiggish view of the shop as modern and progressive, developing to inevitably eclipse traditional forms of retailing such as markets, fairs and pedlars'. 7 Despite the Muis' dismissal of markets as unimportant in supplying the needs of workers by the late eighteenth century, preferring instead to emphasize the role of backstreet and village shops, 8 other historians have stressed the continuing complementarity of different retail types into the nineteenth century and beyond. 9 Some 40 years ago, Alexander in a pioneering study of early nineteenthcentury retailing argued that markets occupied a central position in distribution and not just for working-class families.…”

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confidence: 99%

Supplying the masses: retailing and town governance in Macclesfield, Stockport and Birkenhead, 1780–1860

Mitchell

2011

Urban History

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Rapidly growing industrial towns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often had to find new ways of ensuring that their populations were supplied with the necessities of life. This was likely to involve a significant role for public markets. These might be controlled by the town's governing body or might be in private hands. Macclesfield, Stockport and Birkenhead all grew rapidly in this period, but each had very different forms of governance. The article explores the impact of town governance on the town markets, and on the evolution of retailing more generally in each place.

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Spaces of Consumption

Cited by 11 publications

References 1 publication

Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in 18th‐Century England

Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in 18th‐Century England

The Landscape of Consumption

Supplying the masses: retailing and town governance in Macclesfield, Stockport and Birkenhead, 1780–1860

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