‘Their Shops are Dens, the Buyer is their Prey’-
John Dryden, The Medall. A Satyre Against Sedition (1682), 12.
Retail spaces were nothing new, but with the influx of new wares during the early modern period their prominence grew and stalls gave way to permeant retail shops. By 1759 the Excise Office recorded 141,700 shops in London, a figure excluding stalls at markets and fairs, wholesale outlets, and various other premises.[1]
The growth of tradesmen in the retail sectors was clearly evident. The English genealogist, engraver and statistician, Gregory King surmised in 1688 that there were 40,000 shopkeeping families in England and Wales.[2] Having so many shopkeepers was contentious. Thomas Wilson in his Discourse upon Usury (1572) wrote that retailers were seen as no better than ‘hacksters, or chapmen of choyce, who retaying small wares, are not able to better their own estate but wyth falsehode, lying and perjurye’.[3] Conversely, Dives Pragmaticus wrote in 1563 about the value of retail, declaring that, ‘Now truly for to bye and truly to sell, Is a good thyng’ and ‘both God and man, in it doeth delyght’.[4] These views emphasise the difference of opinion dependent on an individual’s occupation, Wilson was a lawyer and Pragmaticus a merchant. Regardless of polarising opinions, the retail shop continued to grow in popularity.
The trade card depicts the interior of Christopher Gibson's upholstery shop in St Paul's Churchyard, London. Public Domain.
It has been suggested that British retailing institutions and practices remained relatively unchanged from the medieval period to the mid-nineteenth century, particularly outside London.[5] However, Nancy Cox has argued against the perceived view that the retail sector was slow to adapt to a changing world.[6] It shifted throughout the early modern period and by the eighteenth century, in Colchester for example, many new high street shops were being purposefully built with bow-fronted windows that could be illuminated at night to further promote their wares.[7] Nowhere was the value placed upon retail shops more apparent than in London. London’s shopping galleries were distinct and frequented by the social elite. London developed five of these, the Royal Exchange, Westminster Hall, the New Exchange, the Middle Exchange, and the Exeter Exchange. These galleries housed shops smaller than their street-front counterparts, but they also stocked many items which could not be obtained elsewhere, and the prestige attached to the buildings they were housed in added to their respectability.[8]
Throughout the eighteenth century, retail expanded along with the size of shops, their level of sophistication, interior decoration, and the understanding that there was profit to be made in attentive service.[9] Retail shops also opened a new avenue for the middling sort of women to find employment; during the period 1775 to 1787 alone, the Royal Exchange Assurance figures show an excess of 15,000 women shopkeepers.[10]
By the nineteenth century, retail shopping was a popular pastime. Potentially the world’s first department store arrived just before the turn of the century in 1796, in the form of Harding, Howell & Co’s Grand Fashionable Magazine at 89 Pall Mall in St James’s, London and paved the way for stores we know today.
Harding, Howell & Co., a contender for the title of first department store in the world. Public Domain.
Prior to Covid-19, 59% of people would visit a retail shop at least once a week, ‘with more than a quarter (27%) of people buying items on the high street at least 2-3 times a week’.[11] These figures fell but are growing again. Despite the popularity of online shopping and fluctuations in the industry, the retail shop, in some way shape or form, is probably here to stay, at least for a while yet.
References and Resources:
J. Benson and L. Ugolini (eds.), A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing (2003)
N. Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing 1550-1820 (2000)
H. Mui, and L. H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-century England (1989)
T. S. William, The Inland Trade: Studies in Internal Trade in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1976)
J. B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 1850-1950 (1954)
S. D’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester: Independence, Social Relations and the Community Broker’ in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800 (1994)
M. R Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and Family in England 1680-1780 (1996)
D. Pragmaticus, A booke in Englysh metre, of the great marchaunt man called Dives Pragmaticus (1563)
John Dryden, The Medall. A Satyre Against Sedition (1682)
Gregory King's estimate of population and wealth, England and Wales, 1688: https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/king.htm
The UK High Street in 2022 (readersdigest.co.uk)
[1] M. R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and Family in England 1680-1780 (1996), 268, n.15.
[2] Gregory King's estimate of population and wealth, England and Wales, 1688: https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/king.htm
[3] T. S. William, The Inland Trade: Studies in Internal Trade in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1976), 50.
[4] D. Pragmaticus, A booke in Englysh metre, of the great marchaunt man called Dives Pragmaticus (1563).
[5] J. Benson and L. Ugolini (eds.), A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing (2003), 1.
[6] N. Cox, The Complete Tradesman A Study of Retailing 1550-1820 (2000), 223.
[7] S. D’Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester: Independence, Social Relations and the Community Broker’ in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800 (1994), 183.
[8] C. Walsh, ‘Social Meaning and Social Space in the Shopping Galleries of Early Modern London’ in Benson and Ugolini (eds.), A Nation of Shopkeepers, 46-48.
[9] Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 93.
[10] S. Mendelson and P. Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (1998), 333; Hunt, The Middling Sort, 125-126, 132-133.
 | A guest post by
|