'Behind great glass windows
all absolutely one can think of
is neatly, attractively displayed, and in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy'

Oxford Circus circa 1890. Already the heart of London's main shopping district, women of the late nineteenth century travelling 'into town' would have been familiar with the transport links to and from this key comercial district. Today Oxford Circus is, frankly, a mere shadow of its former self. 

'Those previously no-go areas had been invaded and subdued: Bond Street, the Strand, the City had all been colonised by shops and therefore by women shoppers'

'I am afraid Mrs James is filling Carrie's head with a lot of nonsense about dress'

A young Kaiser Wilhelm II and his family lend their name to a US advertising campaign. On a personal level, the Kaiser disliked department stores and the new consumerism. But he realised that they captured the spirit of the global outlook and added to the glory of the German Empire and were, therefore, worth cultivating. 

Before the Cathedrals of Consumption

How did the rise of the modern department store in London alter gender relations?

From the 1860s to the start of the Edwardian period, London witnessed the development and growth of department stores, which in turn had a major impact on gender relations. Today, it is the large, purpose-built structures like Selfridges (opened in 1909) that capture the modern imagination and yet these ‘cathedrals of consumption’ were late arrivals and certainly were far less controversial as a consumer space by the early 1900s than they had been in the previous 30 years.

It was during this period that many historians, such as Erika Rappaport and Judith Walkowitz, have charted the rise of London’s main shopping areas and their role as a space of female conspicuous consumption. They have constructed their arguments by examining masculine criticisms (although they also explore a number of early feminist attacks) surrounding the female shopper.

But while those like Rappaport and Walkowitz have focussed their gaze on this feminisation of late-Victorian London’s shopping zones, they have often spent less time scrutinising the impact of the department store and consumerism on masculine identity. Indeed, the male consumer often feels like a missing voice in their exploration of gender relations and the department store.

This essay will briefly explore the rise of the department store and the unease that it created. We will highlight the woman’s journey into the city and her ability to window shop and enter the world of the department store. Our attention will also focus on the arguments expounded by commentators at the time and the historical interpretation of them. Space constricts us from a full and comprehensive analysis of masculine identity and the department store. We will, however, debate a number of salient points, using sources often overlooked by historians, such as fictional accounts written at the time.

The essay will move on to compare and contrast (as far as the sources will allow), the rise of the department store in London with that of the German experience. By doing so, we will illustrate that the gender dynamics and debates surrounding department stores in the late-Victorian period were not unique to England. However, we shall see that a German case study also offers up a number of different issues for our consideration.

Finally, the essay will conclude that the department store in London was a major emancipating force for women. It allowed them, through the process of shopping to gain access to public realms they had previously been dissuaded from entering. The act of travelling to the department stores also allowed women (from across the class spectrum) to become urban explorers and to map their own version of London. In short, the department store facilitated a woman’s ability to dictate the terms and conditions of the overall shopping experience in London by the height of the Edwardian era.


New horizons
Department stores did not, obviously, appear overnight and historians have had some degree of difficulty in pinpointing the time frame in which they emerged, although most agree this occurred from the 1850s to 1870s. Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain argue that department stores can be identified ‘by their level of capitalisation, diversity of merchandise, methods of selling, and structure and styles of management.’1

It is important to note, however, that some historians have disputed this consensus and have pointed to earlier examples of ‘prototype’ department stores catering to the shopping flâneuse with theatrical window displays. Pamela Horn, for example, argues that London’s wealthier shopping zones had, as far back as the eighteenth century, made use of window displays to fire the imagination of prospective patrons, particularly female customers. Sophie von la Roche, for example, having perused London’s fashionable shops during the 1780s wrote: ‘Behind great glass windows all absolutely one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, and in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy.’2

For London, a major step towards the beginning of the department store came with the construction of the Soho Bazaar in 1816. This bazaar gave traders the opportunity to conduct business in a covered, clean and well-ordered environment. It spawned a number of imitators, including the Pantheon (established in 1834), which sold products for women, children’s toys, books, sheet music and fancy goods.3

A few years beforehand, in fashionable Bath, James Jolly had set up the Paris Depot (which soon renamed the Bath Emporium). It also sold drapery and bazaar goods. By 1851 the emporium employed 16 male and 42 female staff and was well on the way to becoming a department store.4 Renamed Jolly’s, it grew to take over properties to its right and left. By the late Victorian era, it had taken up a large slice of the high street, eventually becoming Bath’s premier department store. Crossick and Jaumain, and the economic historian Pasdermadjian, contend that it was this form of piecemeal expansionism – taking over nearby buildings and knocking through walls to increase the shopping space – that was the norm in this period.

In 1852, while Jolly’s was still an emporium, Bon Marché of Paris had started trading using business methods that were, in the words Pasdermadjian, ‘absolutely opposed to the current practises of the dry goods trade of the time.’5 Its manager, Aristide Boucicaut, did away with bargaining and used set prices instead. He also strove to ensure that all customers received equal treatment and made entrance into his shop free. Importantly, there was no obligation to buy and his shop operated the practise of returns and refunds.

It was fast-paced stuff for the time and by 1863, Boucicaut’s partner considered the business too risky. Selling his shares to his colleague, he left with the parting words: ‘I prefer to leave you to continue your experiments alone.’6

But the experiments worked and it was not long before more budding Parisian department stores opened, including Printemps in 1865 and Samaritaine in 1869. In the USA department stores were also on the rise, including Macy, Wanamaker, and Marshall Field. In London, the department stores were also starting to take firmer shape in the 1870s, including John Barker, Lewis’s, Liberty’s, Harrods, Debenham & Freebody, Swan & Edgar’s, and Whiteley’s. Following the trading pattern established by Boucicaut, they also allowed shoppers to browse good quality stock, which they sold at low prices and without the pressure to buy.

Trading in the suburban and staunchly middle-class London district of Bayswater, Whiteley’s led the pack. The store began as a haberdashery in 1863 and was fortunate enough to have the new Metropolitan Underground Railway nearby. Later on, more underground stations opened in the vicinity, making Bayswater – interlaced with omnibus routes and well serviced by cabs – easily and safely accessible for female customers.

On a wider level, it is worth noting that London as a whole was becoming more accessible with every passing year. The scale of the development was staggeringly fast. For example, London’s first overland railway opened in 1838, running from the Bricklayer’s Arms to Greenwich; by 1880 there were 350 stations in and around the metropolis.7

Back in Bayswater, Whiteley’s launched services in 1872 that went well beyond those expected of a drapers, including the opening of a refreshment room – for which a licence to sell alcohol was refused. The application had caused consternation with local publicans and restaurateurs (who obviously felt threatened by the possible competition) and moralists, who argued that Whiteley’s female shoppers would become, in the words of Rappaport, ‘shopper-turned-prostitute[s]’8 Despite this setback, Whiteley’s went from strength to strength. It did, however, suffer from a number of serious arson attacks – a problem that plagued other department stores. The worst fire occurred in 1887 when Whiteley’s store in Bayswater had burnt to the ground, leading to its relocation to Westborne Grove.9

In the new store, Whiteley’s introduced cutting-edge technology and novel methods of display and trade. The introduction of catalogues, for example, was a major development and allowed customers to order their goods from the comfort of their own home. Those who indulged in catalogue shopping were often from the upper echelons of society: Queen Victoria’s household, for example, had no qualms in mail ordering from Whiteley’s.10 As Whiteley’s and the other London department stores grew, women were afforded a greater opportunity to travel into town to take advantage of the considerable consumer benefits they had to offer.


Out and about
As time went by, the department stores dedicated more and more time to creating spectacular displays to attract greater numbers of women consumers. Female purchasing power was vital to success and the department stores strove hard to secure their custom and to maintain their loyalty.

Walkowitz has suggested that lurking behind these developments was the threat of patriarchal control. By the 1880s, she states that department store had become a ‘controlled fantasy world’ – an effort to distract women from the reality of their constrained freedom in society.11 Other historians have also asked whether the department store was a form of gilded cage. Crossick and Jaumain quote Tiersten, who they paraphrase in asking: ‘Was shopping just an ersatz public domain that actually served to exclude women from the “real” public sphere?’12

But gilded cage or not, the department store certainly gave women cause to enter the West End and other suburban shopping districts, creating, according to Walkowitz, a ‘contested terrain’13 between genders in the city during the 1870s and 1880s. Their notions of patriarchal supremacy unsettled, men often considered women heading into the city to possess ‘fast’ morals. Rappaport concurs, writing: ‘Observers were struck by the suburban woman’s migrations because when she stepped into the city streets, she threatened her own reputation and her family’s social position.’14

There were times, according to Rappaport and Walkowitz, when middle- and upper-class men made overt attempts to claw back women’s freedom to enter the city, using fears for their safety as an excuse to do this. In the 1880s, for example, London witnessed a number of riots, protest marches and, of course, the gruesome Whitechapel murders (1888). It is argued that these disturbances led to the patriarchy demanding women halt their shopping excursions into the city. Certainly, there was enormous concern about female security when out shopping during the timeframe of the Whitechapel murders. Most women were warned off from travelling into the city.

But considering the speed and ease with which women returned to department store shopping once the hysteria died down, one could justifiably argue that this method of masculine control had a minimal impact.

Perhaps the greatest and most realistic threat to female safety came from the ‘male pest’. Walkowitz stresses that it was their behaviour that made the West End and other shopping zones in 1880s London ‘notorious areas for harassment of women’.15 However, women were quick to learn – helped along with advice given in consumer magazines – how to easily disregard the threat posed by the ‘male pest’ and to get on with mapping London. To some historians, this increasingly confident feminine presence in the city was a civilising force. Judith Flanders contends that shops and women brought order to London’s masculine streets. ‘Those previously no-go areas had been invaded and subdued: Bond Street, the Strand, the City had all been colonised by shops and therefore by women shoppers,” she wrote.16

On a more mundane level, some male commentators keen to control women’s freedom to shop often criticised women who made use of public transport to enter the city as and when they liked. At times the criticisms were light-hearted. Flanders cites Trollope’s 1875 work The Way We Live Now, which records how the upper class Hetta Carbury ‘trusted herself all alone to the mysteries of the Marylebone underground railway, and emerged with accuracy at King’s Cross’.17

On other occasions the criticisms were more savage. Rappaport cites an article in an 1881 edition of The Saturday Review and records how the author of the piece ‘lambasted female omnibus riders who were “going-a-shopping” in the middle of the day…[and] the writer wondered, “who are they, these women, where do they come from? Have they husbands?”’18 Perhaps we can go some way to answering these questions by delving into a key set of diaries from the time.

Henrietta Thornhill was orphaned as a baby when her parents were killed in the Indian Mutiny during the late 1850s. Living with her wealthy grandmother in Lambeth from the 1860s into the 1870s, she was deeply religious and the bulk of her extensive diaries detail her church life and the services that she had attended. But importantly, for our examination of gender and the department stores, she also noted down her shopping patterns. Henrietta displayed – if we accept the views of Rappaport and Walkowitz – a distinct lack concern about male pests or, indeed, masculine censorship when out and about.

Henrietta would travel into London with her friends, or by herself, and was at ease in using multiple forms of transport to help her reach the shopping zones. Her most usual shopping destination in the city was a large drapery store at Waterloo House and the Army and Navy Stores*. On Friday, 14 January, 1876, she wrote: ‘Mrs Halsted and I had a shopping excursion. We trained & omnibussed & cabbed it to the stores.’ 19 A few weeks later Henrietta was out and about again, despite the inclement weather. ‘Mrs Halsted and I went off to Victoria shopping [in the] stores,’ she wrote, adding: ‘We had a time of it.’20

*Founded in 1872, the Army and Navy Stores Co-operative on Victoria Street was open only to officers and NCOs (plus their families, including widows and orphans), diplomats and high-ranking foreign officials. Initially an emporium/warehouse, it was soon operating along the lines of a grand department store. A similar development occurred in Germany with the creation of Warenhaus für deutsche in Beamte for state employees.

In early June 1876, Henrietta went on a major shopping trip by herself. She was prepared to walk, observe and seek out a bargain, although on this occasion she was unsuccessful. She wrote: ‘I went out about 11.30… Walked up Regent Street. Walked to the end of the shops. Came down St James’ Park to Victoria. In fact walked to Vauxhall…could not find what I wanted.’21

Only once in the diaries do we find Henrietta contemplating an awareness of her and her friends’ independence in the eyes of moralists. On 10 May, 1879 she visited Whiteley’s. What concerned her was not going to the department store – she fails to even mention if she made any purchases – but the time at which she went. Henrietta wrote: ‘I went out shopping at Whiteley’s this morning. We are all very independent the way one goes out at odd times.’22 But before we make too much of this point, it is worth noting that this question being ‘very independent’ appears more as a mental footnote rather than a major issue. At no other point in her diaries had Henrietta considered this topic.


The chance to browse
Window shopping was seen in some quarters as evidence of virtues becoming bankrupt; the female shopper, many male critics asserted, would find the vast array of goods on offer too tempting to resist, especially when framed in a theatrical setting. In underlining the spectacle, Crossick and Jaumain cite a ‘London observer’ from the turn of the century. The observer wrote: ‘Pass through the lamp and glass department [and] it reminds one somehow of a scene in a pantomime, for there are numerous lights though it is noonday, and the flood of colour is rich and dazzling’.23

Feminists of the age also attacked this ‘rich and dazzling’ world, believing the cause of women’s liberty was being stymied by the distraction of the department stores’ window displays and the acts of conspicuous consumption that went on within them. Erika Rappaport cites Violet Grenville’s 1880 article ‘Shopping-Windows’ to highlight this form of criticism. Grenville saw department stores as sirens of consumerism, luring women to wreck themselves within: ‘Come and be dressed…Come and put off your own individuality and put on the livery of your master, the despot of civilisation – Fashion’.24 It appears we are returning to the gilded cage argument…

But the above arguments, which suggest women shoppers lacked independent will or were easily distracted by the baubles of consumerism, often forgets that the department store was free to enter with no pressure to buy. For many women the primary interest was simply to browse and experience sensation and fun of manoeuvring freely within the new and exciting consumer zones. Shopping was often a secondary consideration and there were many occasions when it was enough for the flâneuse to simply examine the goods on sale without making a purchase, just as Henrietta Thornhill had done in the summer of 1876.

But if female shoppers were not slaves to the act of purchasing, were they indentured to the thrill of the shopping experience? Crossick and Jaumain remind us of Lisa Tiersten’s use of the term palpeuses rather than flâneuses.25 The concept of the palpeuse links shopping directly to bodily excitement – the increase in heartbeat and adrenaline. Interestingly, many male critics of female shoppers made this connection during the late Victorian period. Clarence Rook, in an article for the Lady’s Pictorial in the mid-1880s, bluntly wrote: ‘And now, as to shopping. Does not the very sound of the word make your mouths water, and the young blood rush into your cheeks, and make your eyes brighter, and I know you would like to rush up stairs and “put on your things” and “go shopping!”’26

The French, however, were more overt in making the link between shopping, sensuality and sexuality. Window shopping was often called lčche vitrine, which Robert Tamilia tells us, carries the implication ‘that consumers would literally “lick” the display cases or plate glass’.27


Where men fear to tread
Having explored the department store and the flâneuse, we should also examine how men reacted to the department store as a location where they too could shop and browse.

It is notable that while men were prepared to shop with their wives during this era, they were often reluctant to enter the department store on their own as a solitary consumer. Those like G A Sala, a flâneur extraordinaire, ‘constructed their “masculine” identities through their admiration of English productive skill, by ogling female shoppers, and by delineating between female shopping and male lounging,’ wrote Rappaport.28 The concept of feminised consumerism filled Sala with ‘horror’ and he ‘dreaded’ the thought of paying for goods with money.29

Fears of being publicly emasculated by the act of shopping were well publicised in this era, especially during the Christmas shopping season. Christopher Hosgood tells us that it was this time of year when men were seen to ‘become beasts of burden, cruelly loaded down with their wife’s purchases, and pathetic hangers-on ready to do their wife’s bidding’.30 There was also concern that feminised consumerism was intertwined with decadence and homosexuality. An article in Queen on 2 April, 1892, stated: ‘Men shop to only get the things they want. Even the effeminate masher-creature does not do quite as much of this as the ordinary woman, while the manly man does not do it at all.’31

But perhaps highlighting the strident or venomous articles distracts us from exploring the more generally-held and tempered male viewpoint.

One classic example from the male perspective from this era is to be found in George and Weedon Grossmith’s fiction The Diary of a Nobody. The main protagonist, the Charles Pooter (a city clerk), is an incorrigible ‘stick in the mud’ and believes himself a worthy gentleman. An arch traditionalist, Pooter finds himself almost cast adrift in a world of rapid change and new consumerism. Often his greatest resentment is saved for his wife’s modern friend and part-time flâneuse, Mrs James.

On one occasion he writes: ‘Carrie and Mrs James went off shopping, and had not returned when I came back from the office. Judging from the subsequent conversation, I am afraid Mrs James is filling Carrie’s head with a lot of nonsense about dress’.32 Underlying his resentment is the ease that his wife and friend have acquired the skills to obtain the best results shopping in zones.

In the meantime, Pooter remains unwilling to buy ready-to-wear goods from the department store and sticks to ordering his suits from the pattern book of a shoddy independent trader. Believing he had chosen a smart and conservative suit, he received to his ‘horror’ a ‘flash-looking’ outfit instead. ‘There was a lot of green with bright yellow-coloured stripes,’ Pooter wrote, adding: ‘I tried on the coat, and was annoyed to find Carrie giggling.’33 Had Pooter taken the sensible step of entering, browsing and buying in London’s new department stores and shopping zones – as his wife was able to do – Pooter’s fashion disaster and financial loss would have been avoided.


A German comparison
Having examined the British department store’s development and effect on gender it will be useful to compare and contrast London’s experience to that of Berlin’s in the same era. How did the citizens of Germany adapt to this new consumer phenomenon? Were there similar male fears voiced about the flâneuse? Or were their other more pressing concerns?

Georg Wertheim had opened the first large German department store in Stralsund in 1876. Within the next ten years most of the other major players had also started trading – Leonhard Tietz in 1879, Rudolph Karstadt in 1881, Oskar Tietz in 1882 and Thomas Althoff in 1885.34

To begin with, German department stores – like their British brethren – had developed from smaller shops. Although department stores were established a little later in the era, 35 during the 1880s and 1890s their numbers mushroomed.36 Wertheim opened Berlin’s first major department store on Rosenthaler Straβe in 1885 and more soon followed. The later development of department stores in Berlin had the advantage of being purpose-built and placed in prime shopping locations.

As the department stores made headway, the usual masculine attacks on female shoppers surfaced. For some, department stores were at the forefront of eroding culture and individualism. Looking back on the era from the 1920s, Oswald Spengler highlighted the late nineteenth century as the winter of Western society. Materialism, consumerism and the worship of Mammon dominated ‘megalopolitan’ life and led to an ‘existence without inner form’.37

Others believed department stores led to temptation and, in turn, to a second Fall of Eve. In 1905, E Suchsland wrote: ‘These great bazaars and chain stores lure the customer into buying and stealing those masses of goods which are so enticingly arranged; they have made many a vain and over-dressed woman a thief.’38

Shoplifting by middle- and upper-class women was blamed upon a weak female psychology, which suited department store owners who were keen to avoid prosecuting and garnering bad publicity. Lower-class women caught shoplifting were simply viewed as thieves. There were no qualms of taking these women to court.

German department stores faced a barrage of other complaints and obstacles, including a voracious opposition from small shopkeepers, local authorities, and from the ruling and wealthy middle classes, the Bildungsbürgertum, who were initially suspicious of the new consumerism. While this pattern was reflected in Britain, it was not long before members of the Royal family plucked up the courage to visit Whiteley’s.39

 In Germany, however, the Bildungsbürgertum of the big cities initially considered it almost beneath themselves to even be seen as a patron of a department store. Coles cites anecdotal evidence of well-to-do-ladies informing assistants in the Hermann Tietz store in Munich (opened in 1889) that they were shopping only for their servants. The purchases they made had to be packed in ‘ordinary, anonymous, brown paper bags rather than those bearing the company motif’.40

Despite the fears and concerns, there were many commentators in Germany who considered the theatre of the department store’s displays to be a good thing: they were a means to project solid bourgeois taste, fashion and aesthetics into the minds and homes of the new middle- and white collar-classes. The liberal Paul Gühre, state Crossick and Jaumain, ‘argued that department store displays would raise public taste and teach people how to organise objects aesthetically’.41

Also offsetting the moans of moralists were those keen to see Berlin secure its status as a world city – a Weltstadt. Although a staunch traditionalist, Kaiser Wilhelm II led the charge for Berlin’s aggrandisement. He demanded that Germany’s Imperial capital should strive to surpass Paris on the world’s stage. Indeed, he once wrote: ‘The glory of Paris robs the Berliners of their sleep.’42

Although these new ‘cathedrals of consumption’ captured the Weltstadt zeitgeist, it was the female shopper that made them work. For many in Berlin, particularly the Press, catering for the female shopper by using theatrical displays and a gorgeous presentation of goods was now part and parcel of the new German haut monde. Peter Fritsche highlights this by quoting an article by Leo Colze.

In 1905, Colze recorded his memory of strolling down Tauentzienstrasse. He wrote: ‘A sea of light stretches out before us. To the right and left, one show window after another displays luxuries for ladies and gentlemen alike…Ahead on Wittenbergplatz, magical lights, rare delicacies, silk, gold, brocade, bronzes, ostrich feathers, show windows that are more like jewellery cases: the new department store.’43

So then, after an initial anxiety, it seems that Germany and Berliners were soon at ease with cosmopolitan upper- and middle-class woman shopping in the department stores (fears of temptation and shoplifting aside). Greater and more persistent disquiet was voiced about the infiltration of the white collar- and working-classes into the shopping zones of Berlin.

In exploring these ‘camouflaged classes’ Coles cites Stresseman, who wrote: ‘The elegant wives from west Berlin or from Charlottenberg are to be found in the crowds, just as the wives of the artisans or workers from North and the East, who at all times when they attend Wertheim put on their best clothes.’44 Thus the less wealthy were ‘dressing up’. Was this an effort to dupe the department stores into giving them a service similar to the one offered to the upper classes? Certainly some of the larger and more elegant Berlin department stores treated their customers according to their perceived class. Coles wrote: ‘Managers issued strict guidelines as to how, when and where customers from different social classes should be addressed.’45

Or should we read this ‘dressing up’ as servile deference to the department stores’ desire for customers to become part of their theatrical world – for the actors to all become facsimile Bildungsbürgertum. On a wider scale, this ‘dressing to impress’ was seen by many as a positive force, regardless of whether the perceived hoi polloi were taking advantage of the department stores or visa versa. Peter Fritzche cites a report by the Morgenpost from the early 1900s, which postulated upon the increase in white collar- and working-class men wearing suits when out and about. ‘Their suits are not always the best or the newest,’ the paper said, ‘but they clearly indicate the desire to elevate oneself above the quotidian by appearing neat and clean.’46


A force for emancipation
Having explored the long and sometimes bitter development of gender dynamics during the rise of the department store, we have clearly seen that the new feminised consumerism (as demanded by women and supplied by the department stores) worked as a force for increased freedom. Often overlooked, public transport was vital in women securing their freedom to map and shop in London. Without the omnibuses, cabs, trains, and an underground system, the feminisation of the urban shopping zones would have been stymied indeed.

Henrietta Thornhill’s diaries have shown us that Rappaport and Walkowitz may have ‘over-egged’ many of their arguments. The reality of travelling into the city may not have been fraught with masculine censure or danger as they contend. However, we must admit that the Thornhill diaries only offer one voice among millions.

By comparing London’s department stores with Berlin’s we have seen that many of the issues discussed were not unique to England. The German middle and upper classes were certainly wary of their development and of women shopping within them. However, the growth of large city department stores in Berlin was heralded as evidence of the capital’s growth into a proud Weltstadt to rival London and Paris. In this sense it was easier for women to negotiate the right to shop and browse. Meanwhile, greater unease was voiced over the class of person entering the city’s shopping zones and department stores. 

All together, we have seen that London’s department store owners went to great pains – even weathering fierce criticism and arson attacks – to give women what they wanted. The department store was not a gilded cage. Women, with their ability to map and browse London, could pursue bargains, compare prices and spend their money when and where they liked. It was the thrill and theatricality of browsing rather than purchasing that was central to the late-Victorian woman’s shopping experience. The department store’s job was to convince women, helped by the ever-increasing use of advertising, to make purchases. Any department store that failed to cater for the female customer would soon find itself struggling and certainly unable to rely on men as their core market in this era.

British men, as we have seen, were either unwilling or unable to shop in these cathedrals of consumption until well into the 1890s and Edwardian period. Rather than a blunt and somewhat basic misogyny, as suggested by Rappaport and Walkowitz, perhaps the masculine inability to negotiate the department store and make use of its advantages lies at the heart of male criticisms and unease. There may well have also been an underlying jealousy too. Looking at the evidence we safely say that in a London department store the customer was queen.

References

1) Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939 (Ashgate, 1999), p.9

2) Pamela Horn, Behind the Counter (Sutton, 2006), p.xx

3) Ibid, p.98

4) Ibid,p.99

5) H.Pasdermadjian, The Department Store: its origins, evolution and economics (Newman, 1954), p.3

6) Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, p.9

7) A. Clayton, Decadent London (Historical Publications, 2005), p.25

8) Erika D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (PrincetonUniversity, 2001), p.32

9) Clayton, Decadent London, p.25

10) L. C. B. Seaman, Life in Victorian London (Batsford, 1973), p.97

11) Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (Virago Book, 1998), p.48

12) Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, p.33

13) Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p.10

14) Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, p.23

15) Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p.50

16) Judith Flanders, The Victorian House (Harper, 2004), p.359

17) Ibid, p.366

18) Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, p.123

19) Henrietta Thornhill’s diary entry for 14/01/1876, Lambeth archives, IV/81/13

20) Henrietta Thornhill’s diary entry for 22/01/1876, Lambeth archives, IV/81/13

21) Henrietta Thornhill’s diary entry for  06/06/1876, Lambeth archives, IV/81/13

22) Henrietta Thornhill’s diary entry for 10/05/1879, Lambeth archives, IV/81/16

23) Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, p.27

24) Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, p.121

25) Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, p.26

26) Christopher P. Hosgood, ‘“Doing the shops” at Christmas: women, men and the department store in England, c. 1880-1914’, in Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, p.97

27) Robert Tamilia, The Wonderful World of the Department Store in Historical Perspective, University of Quebec, http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/charm/dept.store.pdf (21/12/06)

28) Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, p.199

29) Ibid, p.199

30) Hosgood, ‘“Doing the shops” at Christmas: women, men and the department store in England, c. 1880-1914’, p.104

31) Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, p.128

32) Grossmith, George & Weedon, The Diary of a Nobody first published in Punch, 1888-1889 (Wordsworth Classics, 1994), p.69

33) Ibid, p.153

34) Tim Coles, ‘Department stores as retail innovations in Germany: a historical-geographical perspective on the period 1870 to 1914’, in Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, p.73

35) Katheleen James, ‘From Messel to Mendelsohn: German Department store architecture in defence of urban and economic change’, in Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, p.258

36) Coles, ‘Department stores as retail innovations in Germany: a historical-geographical perspective on the period 1870 to 1914’, p.73

37) Hamilton Buckley, Jerome, The Triumph of Time: A study in the Victorian concepts of Time,History and Decadence (Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), p83

38) Uwe Spiekermann, ‘Theft and thieves in German department stores, 1895-1930: a discourse on morality, crime and gender’, in Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, p.140

39) Seaman, Life in Victorian London (Batsford, 1973), p.97

40) Coles, ‘Department stores as retail innovations in Germany: a historical-geographical perspective on the period 1870 to 1914’, p.78

41) Crossick and Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, p.30

42) G. Masur, Imperial Berlin (Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1971), p.126

43) P. Fritzche, ReadingBerlin: 1900 (Harvard University Press, 1998), p.148

44) Coles, ‘Department stores as retail innovations in Germany: a historical-geographical perspective on the period 1870 to 1914’, p.79

45) Ibid, p.80

46) Fritzche, ReadingBerlin: 1900, p.162

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