References
- See J. Benson and L. Ugolini, ‘Introduction: Historians and the Nation of Shopkeepers’, in J. Benson and L. Ugolini eds, A Nation of Shopkeepers: Retailing in Britain, 1550–2000 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 11–14; and B. Reay, Microhistories, Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 260–62.
- J. Styles, The Dress of the People. Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2007 ), p. 29.
- See, for example, Styles, The Dress of the People; and B. Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain 1660–1800 (Oxford: Pasold Research Fund and Oxford University Press, 1991).
- See also B. Reay, Rural Englands, Labouring Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 ), particularly chapter 2, pp. 22–48, which highlights the fluid nature of work, both rural and industrial, undertaken by ‘rural’ workers and the mixed nature and influences on rural settlements.
- See G. E. Mingay ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. VI, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 696–98 and 1092–94 for Herefordshire. See J. Burnett, A History of the Cost of Living (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1969), pp. 250–51; and E. Hopkins, Birmingham: The First Manufacturing Town in the World, 1760–1840 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989), p. 152, for general wages. 7–9s equalled 35–45p, 30–40s equalled £1.50–£2.00, 24s equalled £1.20, in decimal currency. Further decimal conversions include 1d=½p, 3d=1p, 10d=4p, 12d or 1s=5p, 3s=15p, 5s=25p, 10s=50p, 20s=£1. For a conversion table for pre-decimal English money, see www.pierre-marteau.com/currency/coins/engl-01.html [accessed 30/06/09].
- Women frequently bought or were given fabric, through channels such as the Old Poor Law or charitable bequests, which could then be made up within the home or by local dressmakers. See A. Toplis, ‘The Non-élite Consumer and “Wearing Apparel” in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, 1800–1850’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wolverhampton, 2008), pp. 65–68.
- Styles, The Dress of the People, p. 164.
- See A. Buck, ‘The Countryman’s Smock’, Folk Life, i (1963 ), pp. 18–19, for a discussion about the origin of the ‘frock’. My thanks to Professor Tim Hitchcock for highlighting the usage of the term ‘smock frock’ in the Old Bailey records. The term appears during the 1770s, first in 1774, with a more common usage in the 1780s and thereafter. See www.oldbaileyonline.org [accessed 15/07/08].
- W. Cobbett, Rural Rides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, first published 1830), p. 41.
- Buck, ‘The Countryman’s Smock’, p. 23; and R. Worth, ‘Rural Working-Class Dress, 1850–1900: A Peculiarly English Tradition?’, in C. Breward, B. Conekin and C. Cox eds, The Englishness of English Dress (Oxford: Berg, 2002), p. 109. The first documented ready-made smock from Gurteen’s of Haverhill was from 1819, costing 9s 3d, later than some examples found in Worcestershire. See S. Payne, The Gurteen’s of Haverhill, Two Hundred Years of Suffolk Textiles (Cambridge: Woodhead- Faulkner, 1984), p. 22.
- In the Workwoman’s Guide, smocks ‘cost from 9s. to 18s. each, the price depending on the quantity and quality of the work put in’. Cited Buck, ‘The Countryman’s Smock’, pp. 19–22.
- Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 4 September 1806.
- Hereford Journal, 19 February 1812.
- Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 11 April 1816.
- See S. Levitt, ‘Cheap Mass-Produced Men’s Clothing in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries’, Textile History, xxii, no. 2 (1991 ), p. 179. Also P. Pickering, ‘Class Without Words; Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’, Past and Present, cxii (1986), pp. 144–62; and F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London: Penguin, 1987, first published 1845), pp. 102–03.
- S. King, ‘Reclothing the English Poor, 1750–1840’, Textile History, xxxiii, no. 1 (2002), pp. 37–47; Toplis, ‘The Non-élite Consumer’, chapter 4.
- Toplis, ‘The Non-élite Consumer’, pp. 147–48.
- Toplis, ‘The Non-élite Consumer’, chapter 5.
- See S. King and A. Tomkins eds, The Poor in England 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), for other strategies to help make ends meet, for example, neighbourly support and pawning, see pp. 1, 14–19.
- H. C. Mui and L. H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth Century England (London: Routledge, 1989 ), appendix 2, pp. 298–99.
- J. Stobart, ‘Leisure and Shopping in the Small Towns of Georgian England, A Regional Approach’, Journal of Urban History, xxxi, no. 4 (2005 ), p. 495.
- B. Gwilliam, Old Worcester: People and Places (Bromsgrove: Halfshire Books, 1993)i p. 69.
- Gwilliam, Old Worcester, p. 132.
- J. Stobart and A. Hann, ‘Retailing Revolution in the Eighteenth Century? Evidence from North-west England’, Business History, xlvi, no. 2 (2004 ), p. 190.
- T. Bridges and C. Mundy, Worcester, A Pictorial History (Chichester: Phillimore, 1996 ), pl. 132.
- Bridges and Mundy, Worcester, pp. xxxi–ii. Salesmen, ready-made clothing retailers and clothes’ dealers were terms that were used for those retailers associated with low-status, cheap, functional clothing. Some were also manufacturers, as well as dealing in second-hand clothing, often taking goods in exchange to facilitate transactions. See B. Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce, The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 57.
- Worcestershire General and Commercial Directory for 1820 (Worcester: S. Lewis, 1820); Pigot and Co.’s . . . for Worcestershire . . . 1828 and 1835 (London: James Pigot and Co.); Guide and Directory to the City and Suburbs of Worcester for 1837 . . . (Worcester: T. Stratford, 1837).
- Worcestershire Record Office, Richard Sanders, Bills and Receipts, 2193/77 iv, 3 February 1837.
- See T. Fawcett, ‘Bath’s Georgian Warehouses’, Costume, xxvi (1992 ), pp. 32–39.
- Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 2 February 1837.
- Worcestershire Record Office, Richard Sanders, Bills and Receipts, 2193/77 iv, 8 May 1837.
- D. Alexander, Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution (London: The Athlone Press, University of London, 1970), pp. 214–17.
- Worcestershire Record Office, Richard Sanders, Bills and Receipts, 2193/77 iv, 3 February 1837.
- W. Ablett, Reminiscences of an Old Draper (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1876), p. 94.
- My thanks to Dr Ian Toplis for dating the building from the photograph for me.
- ‘Non-élite’ is used as a general term to describe the working population for this article. Parishes were often divided along binary social lines, those who contributed to parish rates and those who did not, the elite and the non-élite. It also avoids the pitfalls in seeking to define working class and middle class during a period when this was not yet a classification generally used by contemporaries. See Toplis, ‘The Non-élite Consumer’, pp. 10–15. Also H. R. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 ), particularly pp. 29, 109–10.
- These included ‘Armstrong & Phillips, Manufacturers of Woollen Cords, Fustians &c., 12 George Street, Manchester’; ‘William Anthony, 16 Bread Street, Manchester’; ‘Charles Cross, Fustian, Calico &c., Manufacturer and Printer, 24 High Street, Manchester’, ‘Charles Stephens & Co., Stanley Mills, Gloucestershire’. See Worcestershire Record Office, Richard Sanders, Papers, 2193/77 iv, bills 1836 and 1837. Stanley Mills were located in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and Stephens was noted as having depôts in Manchester and Scotland. See J. de L. Mann, The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1640 to 1880 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 224.
- Richard Sanders was listed as a salesman in Pigot’s Directory (1828 ). During the 1830s he was variously listed as a draper, tailor and silk mercer. John Hawkes Sander was listed as a salesman and clothes dealer in Hayward’s Directory of the City and Borough of Worcester (Worcester: R. Haywood, 1840).
- His clothing warehouse was noted on his printed billhead, see Worcestershire Record Office, Billhead for Richard Sanders, 2193/77 iv, 3 February 1837.
- Worcestershire Record Office, Worcestershire Census, 1841.
- Worcester Record Office, Worcester, Parish of St Nicholas, Receipts, Accounts and Financial Papers relating to the Churchwardens, Overseers and Officials, 3696/9, Bills from John Sanders, 10 June 1778 and 22 November 1778. The Worcester Royal Directory (Worcester: J. Grundy, 1790).
- By the mid-nineteenth century, Mingay notes that Herefordshire had the greatest number of gentry estates (£1,000–10, 000 per annum) in England, along with Shropshire and Oxfordshire. Mingay, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, p. 839.
- For example, the Three Choirs Music Festival provided a social focus, with additional traders visiting the city for its duration, see Hereford Journal, 31 August 1825, for hairdressers from Worcester, Gloucester and London employed by a resident hairdresser, Bosely, for the Festival.
- G. Roberts, The Shaping of Modern Hereford (Almeley: Logaston, 2001), pp. 105, 133.
- See Pigot and Co.’s, Royal National and Commercial Directory and Topography of . . . Herefordshire . . . Worcestershire, 1842 (London: James Pigot and Co., 1842).
- Pigot and Co.’s, National and Commercial Directory and Topography . . . for Herefordshire, 1822 (London: James Pigot and Co., 1822), p. 72.
- N. Cox, The Complete Tradesman, A Study of Retailing, 1550–1820 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 67–70.
- For example, Peter Williams was noted as a salesman when he was sued for £29 10s 4d by John Garnett, a banker from Hereford in 1812. Herefordshire Record Office, Hereford City Quarter Session Papers, Mayors Court, 24 February 1812[?].
- Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 24 April 1817, 6 November 1817, 29 October 1818, 21 January 1819, 21 October 1819, each a different auction. The sales of surplus army goods advertised in the Worcester Journal sold approximately 240,000 items of various clothing.
- Hereford Journal, 15 April 1818.
- Hereford Journal, 15 March 1820
- Hereford Journal, 8 May 1839.
- Hereford Journal, 15 April 1840. Whitlock notes the growth of cheap shops targeted at the non-genteel shopper in London from the 1830s. Hallmarks included aggressive advertising, plate glass windows, garish displays and low-priced lead items to entice shoppers. They were criticized for crossing the line between good business and fraud, and promoting dishonest retailing. T. C. Whitlock, Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 218–19.
- Hereford Journal, 2 December 1840.
- Hereford Journal, 19 May 1841.
- For example, Herefordshire Record Office, St Peter’s, Hereford, Overseers’ Accounts, 1827–48, AR77/19, 4 December 1828, ‘Bosworth for cloaths [sic] for James Morgan, 7/6’.
- Hereford Journal, 29 September 1841.
- Hereford Journal, 29 March 1843.
- P. Sharpe, ‘“Cheapness and Economy”: Manufacturing and Retailing Ready-made Clothing in London and Essex, 1830–50’, Textile History, xxvi, no. 2 (1995), pp. 203–13, for a history of Hyams. She notes that they had a retail shop in Bristol by 1845.
- S. Chapman, ‘The Innovating Entrepreneurs in the British Ready-made Clothing Industry’, Textile History, xxiv, no. 1 (1993 ), pp. 14–22, for Moses.
- Chapman, ‘The Innovating Entrepreneurs’, p. 19.
- Hereford Journal, 12 April 1843.
- Captain Nicholas Patershall was listed under the section for ‘Gentry, Nobility and Clergy’, in the directories of the period, with a house in St Owen Street in the 1830s, moving to Milk Lane and Offa Street in the 1840s and 1850. Herefordshire Record Office, Bills of Captain Patershall, F60/564, Bill from S. Bullen, 1835, ‘A Black Cloth Waistcoat complete’, 16s, F60/26, Bill from John Gardiner, 1825, ‘Two fashionable waistcoats complete’, £1 16s, and F60/511, Bill from John Gardiner, 1834, ‘A Rich Figured Silk Waistcoat with a roll collar’, £1 10s.
- Hereford Journal, 19 April 1843.
- Hereford Journal, 26 April 1843.
- Sharpe, ‘“Cheapness and Economy”’, p. 211.
- Hereford Journal, 17 May 1843. See also Whitlock, Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture, p. 73, who notes contemporary alarm about large cheap drapery establishments underselling goods and threatening the business of an entire neighbourhood, from the late 1830s to 1850s.
- Hereford Journal, 19 July 1843. By 1851, Evans had settled with his family in the High Street, Cheltenham, noted as a draper in the 1851 census. See 1851 Census.
- Hereford Journal, 14 August 1844 and 20 November 1844.
- Hereford Journal, 18 October 1848.
- John Jones, a tailor, advertised that he was moving ‘next door but one to Green Dragon . . .’ in Broad Street in the Hereford Journal, 6 June 1825. In 1845, he was selling a quantity of hay and noted that for 25 years he had been tailoring for the ‘Hay trades and will still endeavour to continue’, Hereford Journal, 9 April 1845. John Jones was listed in Hunt & Co.’s Commercial Directory; for the Cities of Gloucester, Hereford, and Worcester . . . (London: E. Hunt & Co., 1847), as a clothes dealer, and his appeal to hay trade agricultural workers would seem to indicate that he too was primarily concerned with supplying rural workers.
- Hereford Journal, 6 December 1848.
- Hereford Journal, 28 March 1849.
- Hereford Journal, 12 September 1849.
- For example, see B. Lemire, The Business of Everyday LifeiGender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 133, who writes about ‘thousands of clothes dealers scattered through the urban landscape’. The main exception to this is C. Fowler, ‘Robert Mansbridge, a Rural Tailor and his Customers 1811–15 ’, Textile History, xxviii, no. 1 (1997), pp. 29–38.
- F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor. A History of the Labouring Classes in England with Parochial Reports, ed. by A. G. L. Rogers (London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd, 1928, first published 1797), p. 108.
- Worcestershire . . . Directory for 1820 (Lewis); Bentley’s History and Guide and Alphabetical and Classified Directory of Worcester . . ., Evesham . . ., Dudley . . ., Stourbridge . . ., and Bentley’s History, Gazetteer, Directory and Statistics of Worcestershire, 3 vols (Birmingham: Bull & Turner, 1840–42 ); Directory and Gazetteer of Herefordshire (Birmingham: Lascelles & Co., 1851).
- Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, particularly pp. 47 and 135–40.
- Worcestershire Record Office, Parish of Ombersley, 3572/16, bill to overseers 1828. Population figure from Bentley’s History and Guide, 1840–42.
- Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 5 April 1810.
- Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 21 November 1816.
- Hereford Journal, 16 March 1814.
- Hereford Journal, 30 April 1828.
- Hereford Museum, smock frock, accession number 392P, printed cotton wedding dress, c. 1834, accession no. 1048.
- Herefordshire Record Office, Herefordshire Census, 1841. ‘Plain Sewing’ listed as an occupation for women living ‘Above Eign’ [Gate].
- Hereford Journal, 19 April 1843.
- See Mingay, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, pp. 696–98 and 1092–94.
- Hereford Journal, 12 April 1843.
- See Worcestershire Record Office, Powick Parish Records, 3802/10, Bill from S. Burden [salesman] to the Overseers of Powick, 18 November 1818. There are over 170 items of clothing noted, a third of which are smock frocks or jackets, with no coats mentioned.
- M. J. Winstanley, The Shopkeeper’s World, 1830–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 10.
- For example, see Edward Jones, ‘Clothing Establishment’, in Hereford Journal, 29 March 1843; also Edward Meates, Worcester, previously a draper, a ‘Ready-Made Clothes and Smock Frock Warehouse’, Worcestershire Record Office, Ombersley Parish Accounts, 3572/16, bill to overseers, 8 December 1832.
- Fowler, ‘Robert Mansbridge’, p. 31.
- See S. Chapman, ‘The “Revolution” in the Manufacture of Ready-made Clothing 1840–1860’, London Journal, xxix, no. 1 (2004), p. 49.
- See B. Lemire, ‘Second Hand Beaux and “red armed belles”; Conflict and the Creation of Fashion in England, circa 1660–1800’, Continuity and Change, xv, no. 3 (2000), pp. 391–412; also Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life, pp. 120–21.