The Complete Tradesman (The History of Retailing and Consumption) by Nancy Cox

Author:Nancy Cox [Cox, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781859281697
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-12-04T23:00:00+00:00

(e) Dealing with the socially equal: the home as a showcase

The trade card of the London linen draper, Benjamin Cole, illustrates another aspect of the complexity of serving a broad social mix. The picture displayed on the card of a shop interior, shows in the foreground a conventional shop with customers being served over the counter, while in the background a partially opened door reveals an inner room, warmed by a blazing fire in the grate. 86 Such images of shop interiors are rare, but they reinforce visually verbal images conjured up as in Turner's Diary. Some of his customers were too grand and too remote to visit his shop at all, others got no further than the shop window, but in between, there was a broad band who came into the shop, some of whom went further into the select privacy of the house. The idea that domestic space was divided into zones of increasing privacy were well understood by late seventeenth England, 87 and it is probable that the same concepts governed the way some shops were organized. Adjoining living rooms were undoubtedly only entered by esteemed customers, who were served personally by the master or mistress. By this separation, a shopkeeper was able to serve a wide social and economic range of customers from the same premises without offence, just as to this day many pubs offer different decors in the bar and in the saloon with drinks at different prices. This separation became even more important when the technological improvements and new products made available a great range of goods at prices ordinary people could afford, so that more people wished to enter the shop.

Nicholas Blundell fleshes out the visual image of Benjamin Cole's trade card. Given that Blundell was a Roman Catholic, which at times meant life in a hostile world, he may have had an unusually close relationship with his suppliers, though there is little evidence that he restricted himself to Catholic shopkeepers. Despite living in an isolated spot ill served with roads, Blundell appears to have needed little excuse to visit Liverpool. There he met and socialized with his shopkeepers, in between buying their goods; they also came out to his house.

Some of the meetings seem to have been initiated by the tradesmen concerned, and were part of the service normally offered to customers of high status. In this vein, Mrs Mary Gorsuch came over to bring a Powder Box made by her father for Mrs Blundell, but the relationship was close enough for the visitor to be invited to stay for dinner. 88 Some meetings happened at a neutral venue like the drink at the Woolpack with the haberdasher Mr Chorley when they 'discoursed about shearing and ordering of Rabet skins'. 89 Some meetings of this type followed directly from purchases at the shop premises like the day he and his friends bought some goods at Mr Cotton's and then went on with him to the Woolpack.90 The most frequent event was

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