Tradition and Innovation in English Retailing, 1700 to 1850: Narratives of Consumption by Ian Mitchell (review)

For the academic reader seeking an overview of eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century retailing in England, this book provides a very good coverage of distribution and consumption activity in this period. This is a very readable book with an engaging style.

Mitchell is clear about his objectives: “the central thrust of this book’s argument is to reinstate the middle decades of the nineteenth century as a key watershed in the history of retailing” (p. 11). Ultimately, for him this book is not about change—although he acknowledges aspects of retailing and consumer society were changing in the years covered by this book—rather, “this book tells the story of English provincial retailing in the period immediately up to the retail revolution of the later nineteenth century and the contemporaneous appearance of the first real mass consumer society” (p. 11). In this, the author sets himself something of a task. This is not the story of relentless retail change as depicted in Jeffery’s milestone work (Retail Trading in Britain, 1954). Mitchell is keen to depict a retail environment where there are stirrings of innovation but where such innovations are adopted slowly and change is erratic.

To achieve these ends, Mitchell divides the book into three parts with three chapters to each part. Part one considers retailing in the period c.1700–1820. Here is presented a picture of tradition: fairs and markets, traditional shopkeepers in their regulated urban environment, itinerant retailers and those shopkeepers who provided a service to their immediate neighborhood. Part two considers change associated with consumer society: the influence of fashion and its associated themes of luxury and novelty. Part three returns to a narrative approach by considering the period c.1820–1850. In this final section, modernity does begin to influence the story through changes to retailing and the development of such retail operations as market halls. Mitchell adopts this structure with an expressed purpose. His “dual focus on retailing and consumption” seeks to avoid a history where shopkeepers “have no need to take account of shoppers” and consumers “never engage in the actual business of making purchases” (p. 180). It is a point well made.

The book is supported by both a good use of the literature available on retailing history for this period as well as the constructive use of archival material. The book contains nearly a dozen illustrations, which are spread throughout the book. This provides a very helpful visual representation of the retail outlets referred to in the text. However, surprisingly there are only two tables for the whole book: retail occupations for a selection of English urban areas in the 1790s, and the survival rates of Chester retail businesses between 1783 and 1797. While the construction of tables might run counter to one of the central tenets of the book, namely that change was erratic in this period and therefore not easily expressed in tabular form, it would have been helpful to see data that do appear in the text represented in tables. Chapters 8 and 9 “include parts of two articles that have already appeared in print” (p. xv).

The author has imbued this book with a confidence that only a book “40 years in the making” (p. xv) can possess. Mitchell is not willing to be constrained by definitions and theory. There is pragmatism in his approach. When it comes to fashion, the reader is told, “‘fashion’ can have many meanings and connotations.” Here it means “the sort of styles that a typical retailer would advertise as ‘fashionable’” and any woman or man “would not feel ashamed to wear in company” (p. 98). He seeks to reflect reality. His interpretation is clearly based on traditional historical methods of analysis. As to theory, “models derived from the social sciences, and especially those derived from cultural theory, need to be used with extreme caution” (p. 180). For Mitchell, “it...