Content area
Full Text
The Department Store: A Social History, by Bill Lancaster; pp. vii + 212. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1995, L12.99, $59.95, $18.95 paper.
In the last decade or so, scholars have investigated the emergence of a complex world of goods transforming early modern Britain. Whether a cause or product of this development, retail expansion was intense in the eighteenth century. During this period, English traders were thought to have some of the most up-to-date shops, display windows, and marketing techniques in Europe. Yet after the 1850s, these shops looked "backward"when compared with the large, glittering department stores reshaping the commercial landscape in France and America. The English department store has often, therefore, been pictured as a foreign innovation that arrived tardily at the end of the nineteenth century. Perhaps because of this backward" image, English historians have paid little attention to the Victorian department store, although literary critics and geographers have contributed much to our understanding of its history.
Bill Lancaster's book, the first full-length study of the English department store, attempts to fill this historiographical gap and to challenge the received picture of retail "decline." Lancaster suggests that the first department stores appeared in England at the same time that Victoria was crowned Queen. During the 1840s, "proto-department stores" such as Bainbridge's in Newcastle upon Tyne and Kendal, Milne and Faulkner in Manchester introduced fixed prices, cash trading, plate-glass and other enticing architectural flourishes into the drapery trade. Lancaster builds on...