Erika Rappaport

“The Halls of Temptation”: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London

On Guy Fawkes Day in 1876 an angry mob of retailers staged a charivari in the fashionable shopping promenade of Westbourne Grove in Bayswater. Their demonstration targeted William Whiteley, a linen-draper rapidly expanding his shop into Londons first department store. With his recent addition of a meat and green grocery department, Mr. Whiteley “had made himself exceedingly distasteful” to the “provision dealers in the district.” This distaste turned into a raucous procession through the neighborhoods streets. Around noon, “a grotesque and noisy cortege entered the thoroughfare [Westbourne Grove]. At its head was a vehicle, in which a gigantic Guy was propped up … vested in the conventional frock coat of a draper … conspicuous on the figure was a label with the words ‘Live and Let Live’ … in one hand of the figure a piece of beef bore the label ‘5 1/2 d.’ and in the other was a handkerchief, with the ticket ‘2 1/2 d. all-linen.’” Dressed in their traditional blue frocks and making “hideous” noises by banging cleavers against marrow bones, Bayswaters butchers finally disposed of Whiteleys effigy in a bonfire in nearby Portobello Road. The English charivari, “rough music,” was a communal protest that censured both public and private behaviors. Female scolds, wife beaters, or couples united in apparently mismatched unions might all be chastised in this way. These noisy protests were also directed at any individual who, as E. P. Thompson described it, rode “rough-shod over local custom.”

The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

renters in a way that often split skilled workers from unskilled, unionized from non-unionized, and white from black. At times, these important larger points can get lost in the depth of details in Garb’s chapters, which begin with Chicago’s 1872 working-class riots against an early form of zoning and end with Chicago’s 1919 race riots. In between, Garb explores workers’ home financing, surprisingly interesting debates over sewer lines and property values, and several leading Chicagoans who helped create modern views of home-ownership: health department commissioner Oscar De Wolf, mass builder Samuel E. Gross, and settlement-house leader Mary McDowell. Garb expands what urban historians have called the “growth machine”— those interested in promoting suburban-style home ownership—to include Progressive-Era health activists, housing reformers, and sewage corporations. Modern ideas about property values are so deeply ensconced now, that one wishes for a deeper exploration of the time before segregated suburban-style home-ownership became a main version of the American dream. Students may miss Garb’s point because they will have trouble understanding that Americans have not always “conceived of their property rights as the right to a return on their investment,” nor have they always judged that investment as being dependent on a neighborhood’s racial profile, residential status, or ownership rates (202). Alternative views of housing have been so overshadowed that they require historical recovery. Garb could have investigated the Chicago real-estate professionals who literally wrote the early-twentieth century textbooks about appraising property values—although that would mean extending the end of her study past 1919, into the 1920s and 30s. There could also be further exploration of the worker’s perspective as well as the reformers’ views—although Garb does attempt this, especially in impressive close work with property-tract records. These quibbles are less of a criticism than they are an indication that Garb’s work is intriguing, important, and deserves further investigation.