Shopping and the Senses, 1800-1970

Serena Dyer
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Shopping and the Senses,
1800–1970
A Sensory History of
Retail and Consumption

Edited by
Serena Dyer
Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970
 Serena Dyer
Editor

Shopping and the

Senses, 1800–1970
A Sensory History of Retail and Consumption
Editor
Serena Dyer
De Montfort University
Leicester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-90334-3    ISBN 978-3-030-90335-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0

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 Acknowledgements

Writing a volume on materiality and sensorial experience during a global

pandemic has been a stimulating challenge. Our perspectives of shopping,
retail space and the rise of online shopping have dramatically impacted our
experiences of shopping and the senses during COVID. I am beyond
grateful to my contributors for their stellar efforts amidst these challeng-
ing years. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their
insightful and kind comments, as well as Emily Russell, Raghupathy
Kalyanaraman and the team at Palgrave for their support of this project.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Serena Dyer

2 “To Rub the Nose in the Tea”: Smell, Taste, and the
Assessment of Quality in Early Nineteenth-Century Tea
Retail 17
Matthew Mauger

3 An Assault on the Senses: Cultural Representations of

the Victorian Village Shop 35
Lucy A. Bailey

4 The Politics of Sitting Down: Women, Cafés and Public

Toilets in Dublin 59
Stephanie Rains

5 Comfort and Safety: An Intersensorial History of

Shopping Streets in Nineteenth-­Century Amsterdam
and Brussels 79
Anneleen Arnout

6 The Cry of Silk: Erotomania and Fetishism in

Au Bonheur des Dames101
Wendy Ligon Smith

vii
viii Contents

7 “Behind the Scenes of a Retail Shop”: Sensory

Experiences of Living-In, c. 1880s–1920s121
Alison Moulds

8 Synergy and Dissonance of the Senses: Negotiating

Fashion Through Second-Hand Dealing, Jumble Sales
and Street Market Trading in 1930s East End London145
Cheryl Roberts

9 “A Seductive Weapon … a Necessary Luxury”: Shopping

for ‘Designer Perfume’ During the Interwar Period169
Lucy Moyse Ferreira

10 Be My Baby: Sensory Difference and Youth Identity in

British Fashion Retail, 1945–1970191
Bethan Bide

Index213
 Notes on Contributors

Anneleen Arnout is Assistant Professor of History at Radbound

University, The Netherlands. His first book, Streets of Splendor: Shopping
Culture and Spaces in a European Capital City, was published in 2019.
Lucy A. Bailey is a Project Officer at the University of Kent and was
previously Associate Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton.
She has published articles in History of Retailing and Consumption and
Midlands History.
Bethan Bide is a fashion historian and Lecturer in Design History and
Cultural Theory at the University of Leeds. Her research centres around
the cultural, social and business histories of fashion. She has published in
Fashion Theory and The London Journal.
Serena Dyer is Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture at De
Montfort University, Leicester. She is the author of Material Lives: Women
Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century (2021) and editor, with
Chloe Wigston Smith, of Material Literacy in Eighteenth Century
Britain: A Nation of Makers (2020).
Lucy Moyse Ferreira is Associate Lecturer in Cultural and Historical
Studies at the University of the Arts, London. She obtained her PhD on
violence in fashion during the interwar years from the Courtauld
Institute of Art.
Matthew Mauger is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Queen
Mary University of London. With Markman Ellis and Richard Coulton,

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

he has published The Empire of Tea: How an Asian Leaf Conquered

Britain (2016).
Alison Moulds has a DPhil in English Literature from the University of
Oxford, and is the author of Medical Identities and Print Culture,
1830s–1910s (2021).
Stephanie Rains is an associate professor at Maynooth University and
works on the Irish media and cultural history in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries.
Cheryl Roberts is Lecturer in History of Art & Design at the University
of Brighton and visiting tutor in the Royal College of Art/V&A Museum
MA History of Design programme.
Wendy Ligon Smith is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia.
Her book on Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo is forthcoming.
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Repository of Arts, 101 The Strand. After Thomas

Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin. Published in Repository of
Arts, vol. 1, no. 1, 1809 7
Fig. 3.1 Illustration from ‘Stodge and Scumble’s Country Adventures’,
The Graphic (Summer 1885). (© Illustrated London News
Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library) 39
Fig. 3.2 Illustration (colour litho) by Francis Donkin Bedford for
‘Village Store’ in Lucas, E.V., The Book of Shops (Forum Books
1990, originally published by Grant Richards in 1899).
Heritage Images/Getty Images 47
Fig. 3.3 Illustration by Mary Ellen Edwards for ‘The Little Purchases’
in Weatherly, F.E., Among the Daisies (Hildesheimer and
Faulkner 1891). (© Mary Evans Picture Library) 51
Fig. 3.4 Illustration from The Tale of Ginger and Pickles by Beatrix
Potter. (© Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd, 1909, 2002) 54
Fig. 8.1 A group of young, working-class women selecting garments
that can be transformed into fashionable dresses, 1930.
Caledonian Market, London. (Photographer Hans Casparius.
Museum of London, no. IN7837/Museum für Film und
Fernsehen)153
Fig. 10.1 Eric Lucking window display for the “Young Liberty Shop” at
Liberty & Co., 1949. Westminster City Archives/Liberty Ltd. 197
Fig. 10.2 “Boutique” cover illustration. Jackie, 10 December 1966, 1.
DC Thompson Archive 205
Fig. 10.3 “Around the Boutiques” column, Jackie, 15 April 1967, 22.
DC Thompson Archive 207

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Serena Dyer

Shops are sensorily rich spaces. Their existence fundamentally rests upon a
ubiquitous consumer need and desire for material goods, be that food,
clothing, homewares, or a plethora of other products, both luxury and
necessary. Those goods carry cultural capital: shoppers might purchase a
new dress because it is the latest fashion, or a new perfume because the
brand is perceived as exclusive. Yet those goods are also intensely material.
They are bound up in a network of physical and emotional sensation.
Interactions with the material world—both within and beyond commer-
cial spaces—rest upon an intersensorial perceptual experience. How we
observe the materiality of an object is shaped by how that object looks,
smells, feels, sounds and, sometimes, tastes. How we interpret and process
those sensations is then shaped by our own cultural and historical context.
As material culture scholars have shown—although not always using sen-
sorial terms—haptic and visual assessments of the material properties of
objects are essential to object-centred methodologies (Prown 1982; Mida

S. Dyer (*)
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
e-mail: serena.dyer@dmu.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_1
2 S. DYER

and Kim 2015). Objects are not simply abstract cultural presences, but
animated and tangible entities. If our interactions with the material world
are inherently sensory, then the centrality of intersensory assessment and
interaction within shops is crucial. Shops are the access point, the space
within which most objects are obtained. In the twenty-first century, the
commercial primacy of the physical shop space has been effaced by the rise
of online retail. Yet those online spaces themselves have continued to
grapple with the insertion of sensory engagement within a digital space
(Kim and Forsythe 2009). It is, therefore, vital to reconnect the processes
and practices of historic shopping with consumers’ sensory perceptions
and experiences of the objects they encounter within retail environments.
The tempting aromas, curated soundscapes, and tactile textiles which
fill twenty-first-century shop spaces are often framed around the genera-
tion of a positive consumer experience (Helmefalk and Hultén 2007;
Spence 2021). The senses are utilised as a marketing apparatus, and a
sensory landscape is explicitly composed by retail display professionals to
seduce and delight consumers, and ultimately to encourage them to pur-
chase. It is tempting to frame shops of the past through the same lens,
with the sensory viewpoint providing imagined immersion into a roman-
ticised vision of lush department stores and luxurious and aromatic tea
sellers. This volume delves into and beyond the seductive idyll of con-
sumer sensuality. Tired feet and weary workers, rotting fish, and overpow-
ering and unpleasant scents inhabit this volume, as well as the luscious
rustle of silk and the now-familiar delights of the nineteenth-century
department store. Shops and the streets they were on could be smelly,
noisy, unpleasant places (Cockayne 2008). The sensorial experience of
shopping is not predominantly, let alone universally, positive.
This volume seeks to make two connected interventions at the intersec-
tion of consumer and sensory histories. Firstly, it asserts that browsing,
and the associated assessment of goods, must be framed as a sensory activ-
ity. Commercial materiality leads us to questions beyond abstract econo-
mies. While cultural capital, fashionability, and necessity shaped many
consumer choices, the material properties of goods, as understood through
intersensorial and somatic material knowledge, also shaped consumer
decisions. Secondly, that a sensorially attentive approach to histories of
retailing and consumption must go beyond the focus on the point of sale.
Shops were diverse sensory environments, which impacted upon not only
the transactions of commerce, but the health, bodies, and comfort of
shoppers and shop workers alike. A sensory approach to a holistic history
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

of shopping, the contributors to this volume show, presents an opportu-

nity for a far more complex, rich, and diverse examination of the cultural
dynamics of shopping. By placing feeling bodies back into the shops of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, it is possible to access embod-
ied histories of how these commercial spaces functioned for and upon the
people who inhabited them.
Vitally, shopping, as defined in this volume, encompasses more than the
simple exchange of money for goods. Extending out from transactional
and economic exchange there exists a complex web of cultural and social
phenomenon, as numerous historians of retail have outlined (Rappaport
2000; Stobart et al. 2007). Shopping shapes and is shaped by politics,
sociability, urban and rural space, colonialism, race, gender, and class
amongst numerous other cultural features. A sensory approach to shop-
ping reaches into those dynamics of power and practice, both within and
beyond the shop floor. Crucially, this volume situates itself not just at the
moment of monetary transaction, nor even within the process of browsing
alone. Instead, it comprises sensory experiences of retail work, urban
streets, and the bodily needs of a day’s shopping. Shopping, here, is a
conceived as a broad range of activities within and between retail spaces.
The bodies which sensorily experienced those spaces are not just those of
consumers, but shop workers, businesspeople, government officials, and
tourists. The sensory landscape of the shop extended far beyond the shop
counter itself.

Sensorially Attentive Histories

As sites of material evaluation, shop spaces may appear self-evidently sen-
sory. That browsing involves touching and examining objects is not in
itself revelatory. As the contributors to the volume show, however, the
cultural dimensions of how that sensory information is sought, processed,
received, and acted upon is complex and culturally wrought. As Mark
M. Smith has rightly noted, the senses “are not universal, and not transh-
istorical, and can only be understood in their specific social and historical
contexts” (2007a, p. 3; see also Classen 1993). How sensations are pro-
cessed, thought about, and acted upon depends upon the individual’s reli-
gion, class, gender, nationality, age, cultural background, and personal
experience. It is not only that an object or piece of music can fundamen-
tally change through time, but that the mental processing of sensory
responses is always subjective. As David Howes and Constance Classen
4 S. DYER

have stated, the concept of “a period eye” or the “educated listener” have
entered common parlance, but what they reflect is an acknowledgement of
the cultural cognitive understanding which shapes responses to sensory
stimuli (2013, p. 3). This subjective slipperiness makes sensory histories
tricky to handle, yet it also contributes to why the senses have played such
a vital role in fundamental debates around humanity, disability, race, social
roles and status, and gender. Sensory difference has been mobilised as a
tool to explain or reinforce numerous categories of human variety. Shops
are key venues for this sensorial evaluation, categorisation, and
logification.
The historical study of the senses has largely taken two forms: histories
of the senses and sensory histories; although, as Smith notes, these terms
are often deployed interchangeably (Smith 2007b, p. 4). The former
focuses in on a specific sense, such as touch or sight, and charts its evolu-
tion over time. Classen’s work, especially that on touch, is a particularly
influential example of this type of history (1993, 2005, 2012, 2017).
Sensory histories, on the other hand, tend to look to the role of the senses
in “texturing the past” (Smith 2007b, p. 4). Smith’s study of the Civil
War, for example, examined the “sensory totality of war” (Smith 2014b,
p. 8). Indeed, the connections and dynamics between the senses are as
important as the individual senses themselves in such intersensorial works.
This volume is framed as a step towards a sensory history of shopping. It
is interested in what happens to our understanding of histories of shop-
ping when approached from a sensory and intersensorial perspective. For
an activity which is so centred upon material evaluation, sensory histories
of shopping have been relatively sparse (Smith 2012; Dyer 2014;
Rappaport 2014). Indeed, the contributors to this book are primarily his-
torians of retail and consumption, rather than specialists in the senses.
However, their work demonstrates the fruitful opportunities available
when the theoretical frameworks of Classen, Smith and other sensory
studies scholars are applied to consumer histories. If, as Smith has claimed,
sensory history is a “habit” rather than a field, then this volume demon-
strates how general attention to the senses can spread beyond scholars
who specialise in sensory histories (2021, pp. 1–3). Smith’s concerns
around the etiolation of sensory history as a loosely defined field are, I
suggest, addressed in this broader sensorially attentive work.
One of the reasons behind what Smith perceives as the field’s lack of
cohesion is perhaps the blurred lines between sensory and other sensori-
ally attentive histories. Histories of the body and the emotions enjoy
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

significant overlaps with sensory histories but have experienced more

widespread engagement (e.g. Laqueur 1990; Reddy 2008; Boddice
2017). Twenty years ago, Roy Porter even referred the history of the body
as the “historiographical dish of the day,” and that interest is still going
strong (2001, p. 236). In the 2010s, the emotional qualities of material
culture have received particular attention (Downes et al. 2018; Holloway
2019). Yet here we find an intriguing lacuna between the emotions
ascribed to objects owned, gifted, and used, and the amorphous feelings
used to assess and judge objects in commercial settings. The emotive
power of objects seems to be at odds with their commercial stoicism. Yet
these objects are not empty vessels awaiting the application of their pur-
chaser’s emotions. Within the shop space they can elicit as much delight,
despair, and longing as a love token. Rob Boddice and Smith have called
for a “braided history of emotions and the senses,” and perhaps the body
should provide a third strand here (2020). In piecing together a sensory
history of shopping, this volume strives to repopulate the shops of the past
with the bodies, feelings, and experiences of shoppers and shop workers.
It frames shopping not as a straightforwardly procedural economic or even
social act. Shopping, here, was a holistically embodied experience. Shop
spaces were not the sanitised spaces conveyed in inventories and idealised
trade cards. They were charged spaces, full of the emotional, sensory, and
bodily experience which underpins humanity.

Shopping and the Senses

This volume commences at the dawn of the nineteenth century; yet it
certainly does not claim that the senses were only integrated into cultures
of shopping after this date. Instead, it positions the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries as sites of intersensorial tension, which broke away from an
eighteenth-century past of material literacy centred on a materially atten-
tive understanding of material goods (Dyer and Smith 2020). As Evelyn
Welch has demonstrated of Italian fairs, early modern retail spaces were
structured to privilege “viewing, touching, tasting and hearing” as much
as they were about commercial exchange (2006, p. 46). In many ways, the
senses were more fully and organically integrated into pre-modern shop-
ping practice. The industrial changes of the nineteenth century saw the
gap between producers and (middle class and elite) consumers widen
(Rappaport 2014, p. 71). As systems of class, manufacture, empire, trade,
and industry shifted gear, the sensory priorities of shops, shoppers, and
6 S. DYER

shop workers underwent parallel shifts. This period is often framed as a

time of retail ingenuity and innovation, from department stores to the
1960s boutique. Such spaces used sensory immersion in fresh ways. But it
is important to remember that they existed alongside the markets, fairs,
and itinerant traders who had plied their trades for centuries. An intersen-
sorial approach reanimates the bodies which existed within and between
all these spaces, and sheds light on the diversity of consumer experience
during this lauded period of retail innovation.
Prior to 1800, the senses had become part of the cultural rhetoric of
selfhood and humanity. The eighteenth century has been recognised as
the site of a newly sensual self. From fresh medical ideas around the nerves
to the cult of sensibility, the period was host to the establishment of new
ways of thinking about feeling (Tullett 2020, p. 4). “Feelings” incorpo-
rated both the senses and the emotions, and acted as an embodied marker
of social status (Brewer 1997). Cultural objects which stimulated the
senses, from art to literature and music, were framed through the emotive
notion of sensibility. Performing the correct sensory and emotional
responses to such stimuli was central to the presentation of the self.
Philosophical notions of the sensory body extended into the commercial
world through emergent shopping practices which centred on browsing.
Helen Berry’s browse-bargain model highlighted a consumer practice
centred on consumer choice, whereby the shopper would browse the
wares at various shops and haggle with the shopkeepers in order to find
the best deal for the best product (2002). Developments in the field of
sensory history led Kate Smith to revaluate this model through a haptic
lens (2012). Smith framed shopping as an intensely sensory experience,
centred heavily on the hands. Touching goods, assessing their weight,
quality, and suitability, became a means of building up a somatic memory
of materiality. This mental index facilitated and sensorily informed con-
sumer judgement, which was underpinned by a broad sense of material
literacy (Dyer 2014; Dyer and Wigston Smith 2020). Knowing and feel-
ing were not dichotomous poles, but interwoven and symbiotic states for
eighteenth-century consumers.
By the early nineteenth century, these sensory dimensions of browsing
were well established and recognised in cultural representations of shop-
ping practice. Knowledge of making and manufacture was encouraged
and catered for (Smith 2014a; Dyer 2018a; Dyer and Smith 2020). The
publishing entrepreneur Rudolph Ackermann’s (1764–1834) long-­
running periodical Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures,
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Fashion and Politics (1809–1828) offers a literary microcosm of urban

commercial sensory practice. This publication included profiles of
London’s leading shops within its early issues, accompanied by illustrative
engravings showing shoppers in action. The illustration in the periodical’s
very first issue depicted Ackermann’s own print shop on The Strand
(Fig. 1.1). Replete with prints and artistic paraphernalia and flooded with
light from the glass clerestory and domed skylight, the shop space is care-
fully constructed for sensual interactions. The illustrated figures of model
consumers act out the shopping practices which the reader-consumer was
encouraged to emulate. The bright daylight illuminates the shop’s con-
tents, which they methodically view, leafing through the stands of prints.
Other consumers reach out to touch, hold, and handle the objects on
display. As Kate Smith has observed of Ackermann’s depictions of china
shops, consumers are portrayed as conducting an intersensorial shopping
practice centred on touch (2012, p. 3). Visual and haptic interaction with
these goods is certainly privileged, and the auditory and even olfactory
dimensions of the shop space are notably missing from these cultural
depictions.
Ackermann’s recognition of the sensorial needs of consumers was also
underlined by his inclusion of fabric sample pages in his publication. Titled

Fig. 1.1 Repository of Arts, 101 The Strand. After Thomas Rowlandson and
Augustus Pugin. Published in Repository of Arts, vol. 1, no. 1, 1809
8 S. DYER

“Patterns of British Manufacture,” each of the early issues contained sam-

ples of three of four fabrics, accompanied by instructions about where they
might be purchased, as well as suggestions about what they could be used
to produce. If, as I have argued elsewhere, we can view Ackermann’s peri-
odical as a locum shop counter, then the inclusion of tactile samples within
its pages gestures towards the centrality of material examination within
nineteenth-century consumer practice (Dyer 2018b; Wilder 2018).
Periodicals like Ackermann’s, and similar nineteenth-century publications
such as Henry Cole’s Journal of Design and Manufactures (1849–1852),
highlight the intensely sensory lens through which shopping was viewed.
The genteel environs of The Strand and the polite consumers of the
Repository were, of course, only one pocket of consumers. The “retail cir-
cuits” which spread across modern and early modern Europe were toured
by a more diverse clientele than the urban and fashionable consumers
whom Ackermann sought to reach (Blondé et al. 2006). The history of
shopping is replete with so-called revolutions, from the eighteenth
through to the twenty-first century (McKendrick et al. 1982; Hilton
2003). Yet these revolutions are often focused on the commercially pow-
erful middling sorts or middle classes. As such, they take their cue from
the ripples which consumer activity casts on the economic, manufacturing,
or trade preoccupations of a particular period. A sensorial approach
encourages us to look beyond the privileged histories of the economically
powerful. Aristocrats and the working class alike mobilised sensory skill
when shopping. The variations in sensory priorities and interpretations
illuminate social status, economic, and class-based social divisions of the
modern period.
Some of the revolutionary moments in consumer history were funda-
mentally sensorial. The transition from market to supermarket in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is perhaps the most apparent
(Deutsch 2010; Mack 2010). The climate-controlled, ordered, and sani-
tised interiors of supermarkets at once prevented sensory inspection by
secreting food products in layers of plastic and engendered new types of
sensory experience (Rappaport 2014, p. 87). The chilly blow of air-­
conditioned units, the gustatory blandness of processed and frozen food,
and the privileging of cleanly purity over olfactory authenticity radically
redefined consumers’ sensorial expectations around shopping for food.
Display and visual consumption were favoured over intersensorial assess-
ment. As Rappaport explains, supermarkets “encouraged [consumers] to
fantasize about goods and their relationship to this material world” rather
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

than to sensorially assess and test out products (2014, p. 87). This senso-
rial sanitisation signals a centring of rejuvenation, pleasure, and comfort
within shop spaces, which occurred unevenly through the period this vol-
ume covers. Refuge and a form of retail sensory deprivation existed along-
side stimulation and sensory strain.

Sensory Variety: Capitalism, Comfort,

and Cacophony

This volume aims to open up discussion around the variety of sensorial

experience which bodies encountered and generated within and beyond
the commercial space of the shop. On the one hand, the senses were cast
as commercial tools, which were shaped and honed to understand the
material “world of goods.” In some ways, the senses were a capitalist
instrument, focussed on the assessment of market value and material
worth. Yet sensory experience and practices within shops went beyond this
commercial mechanism. Besides from the goods which these shops sold,
the spaces of commerce were diverse and sensorily rich. Whether sur-
rounded by the grand glass and velvet environs of a luxury department
store or the filth and stench of a rural fish market, the sensorial experience
of shopping was holistic, and spread far beyond a focussed myopic view of
the objects for sale. While elite shop spaces may have been carefully con-
structed and controlled as—in theory—sensorially pleasant spaces, the
sensory dynamics of the market stall or itinerant seller were transient and
haphazardly negotiated.
Individual shops also generated layered sensorial experiences. While
shops were intersensorial in nature, that mingling of the senses was not
immediate or consistent. Shops were often structured around stages of
sensory access to goods, which were carefully controlled and stage man-
aged by retail staff. Within elite, genteel, and middle-class shops, glass
windows offered opportunities to create visual spectacle, which became
increasingly artistic and fantastical as the nineteenth century proceeded
(Walsh 1995; Lomax 2006). Indeed, department stores as “cathedrals of
commerce” took this celebration of glass spectacle to an even greater
extreme (Crossick and Jaumain 1999; Rappaport 2000). Enclosed in their
glass cases, intersensorial inspection was restricted, but visual display was
heightened. Such encased objects are rarefied and rendered something to
marvel at, much like an exhibit in a museum. A comparison between shops
10 S. DYER

and museums is not a new one, but the synergy is especially relevant to a
discussion of sensory restriction (Classen 2007; Shimbo 2016, p. 129).
On entering the shop, this visual pre-eminence often continued, as wares
were piled high behind the counter. Haptics, smell, sound, and taste were
gradually layered onto the sensory experience at the hand of the shop
assistant, as they carefully revealed objects to the consumer, permitting
them controlled intersensorial access. Activities and modes of consump-
tion which threatened this sensory control were viewed with concern and
disdain (Tickell 2018). For genteel consumers, this mingling of sensory
experience was an act of intimacy with the objects they inspected. That the
senses exist in a hierarchy has been broadly questioned and interrogated
(Smith 2021, p. 109). While sight has widely been privileged, it is now
acknowledged that any attempts to conceive of the senses as hierarchical is
as subjective and fluid as any other element of their historicisation (Howes
2004, p. 10). Within shopping, different commercial spaces layered and
privileged different senses in various combinations.
This volume takes a broadly chronological journey through the com-
forts and discomforts, sights and sounds, pleasures and over-stimulation
of nineteenth- and twentieth-century consumer landscapes. The chapters
celebrate sensorial variety and reflect the uneven and occasionally chaotic
sensory negotiation of commercial spaces throughout this period. Matthew
Mauger’s chapter opens the volume with an appropriately multifaceted
interrogation of the early nineteenth-century tea trade. The senses were
called upon to codify and index tea’s quality and value. Crucially, Mauger
reminds us of the sensory limitations of consumers. Ideas about sensory
appreciation of quality were often constructed and disseminated to con-
sumers. While the East India Company sought to market sensation, shop-
pers, Mauger shows, were rarely able to distinguish between the various
olfactory and gustatory features of different teas. The sensory skill of
retailers, quality assessors, and traders is also foregrounded here in relation
to the commercial, political, and colonial facets of tea. The senses, Mauger
shows, impacted taxation and foreign policy as much as the commercial
practices of the shop floor.
Lucy Bailey takes us away from the metropolis and seats of parliamen-
tary power, and instead leads us into the village shops which proliferated
through nineteenth-century Britain. Plagued by accusations of adulterat-
ing the goods or providing false measure, village retailers were routinely
framed as incompetent and economically unproductive. Bailey examines
cultural representations of the village shop in contemporary literature to
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

reveal the sensory experiences of shopping in such spaces as unpleasant,

cramped, and sensorially overwhelming. In doing so, she uncovers how
the sensory landscape of the village shop evolved through the nineteenth
century into the rural idyll of the twentieth-century British imagination.
The senses, Bailey suggests, offer a significant crux upon which this shift
in cultural portrayals of the village shop rest. The picturesque and quaint
utopia of early twentieth-century rural nostalgia was built upon an imag-
ined sensory experience which fundamentally contradicted earlier Victorian
accounts of these pastorally framed commercial spaces.
The negotiation of the discomforts of shopping also dominates in
Stephanie Raines’s chapter on the introduction of tea rooms and public
conveniences for women in nineteenth-century Dublin. Raines builds on
Smith’s call to be attentive to the class and gender divisions in historicised
sensory experience. Expectations around and opportunities for sensory
relief were highly gendered in commercial urban spaces. Women were
required to physically enact their respectability, and the introduction of
the café into the urban retail landscape sat within a complex web of social,
cultural, and sensory issues. The development of suburban living and the
shopping day in town and city centres made the sensory experience of
women consumers’ bodies an urgent issue. As cafés opened, the sensory
immersion, offered within these spaces offered up its own gendered ten-
sions and controversies.
This holistic view of the shop as part of a broader retail landscape is
continued as Anneleen Arnout invites us into the shopping streets of
nineteenth-­century Amsterdam and Brussels. Looking beyond the much-­
studied commercial models of London and Paris, Arnout considers the
spatial ideals of urban space as these cities grew and developed. In particu-
lar, Arnout questions the primacy of the visual spectacle of shopping, and
instead highlights the intersensorial experience of the shopping street. The
cultivation of an urban space devotes to shopping, Arnout suggests,
required attention to the smells and sounds which shaped the city-­dweller’s
experience of that space as a venue for luxury and leisurely consumption.
The creation of a holistic intersensorial environment contributed to the
division and demarcation of urban space.
Having travelled the shopping streets of Europe, Wendy Ligon Smith’s
chapter brings attention to the consumption of a particular material: silk.
The sensory dimensions of this luxurious fabric are well established. The
sound and feel of silk are central to how this material is differentiated from
his manmade and artificial counterparts. Yet the sensuous language around
12 S. DYER

silk also engendered connotations around the fabric’s impact upon the
body. As Smith shows, silk could at once be praised for its physical health
benefits, and decried for its association with fetishism, deviant eroticism,
and diagnoses of mental illness. As with Raine’s chapter, the gendered
nature of rhetoric around response to sensory stimuli Is apparent. Smith
focuses on both Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames and the silk
consumption of Richard Wagner to unpack the complex sensory nuances
of this provocative and stimulating material.
Zola’s fictional department store continues to provide a point of focus
as we move away from the counters and public salerooms, and more into
the domestic areas of the shop. Alison Moulds’ chapter examines the sen-
sory experiences of shop staff who lived in—that is those who received
food and lodging as part of their employment. Moulds unpacks the rela-
tionship between the sensory and the sanitary, whilst also considering the
dynamics between bodily comfort and affective experience. By peering
behind the performative display of the nineteenth-century shop as luxuri-
ous spectacle, Moulds tallies the sensory experience of the shop floor with
that of the backrooms and bedrooms of shop staff. Here, we find screwed-­
down windows, cell-like rooms, and putrid air in reports on the living
conditions in such spaces. Elsewhere, however, those same spaces are
framed as a refuge from the sensorially overwhelming shop floor. The
senses, Moulds shows, were often mobilised in debates around heath, san-
itisation, and workers’ conditions.
Sensory chaos and cacophony follow the reader back out onto the
streets in Cheryl Roberts’ chapter on second-hand goods, street trading,
and jumble sales. A far cry from the department stores of Paris, Brussels,
and Amsterdam, Roberts’ examination of London’s East End reveals the
synergy of senses required to navigate wares that were not neatly and for-
mally displayed. These undisciplined spaces were key venues for the cross-­
class consumption of fashionable dress. Roberts deftly explains how
sensorial language pervaded the rhetoric used to think about these bus-
tling spaces, from the stink of the air to the noise of hawkers and bargain-
ing consumers. When removed from the carefully controlled retail
environment of the shop, Roberts shows, the intersensorial assessment of
goods became even more vital in order to find quality bargains.
Intersensorial approaches were equally important in the retail of high-­
fashion items, as Lucy Moyse Ferreira explains in relation to perfume.
Ferreira shows how the encompassing definition of fashion as “an assem-
blage of body modifications and/or supplements” led fashion designers to
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

enter the olfactory world of perfume (Eicher and Roach-Higgins 1993,

p. 15). Perfumes, Ferreira describes, were both a seductive and sexualised
commodity, and a necessity to distinguish the body from the unpleasant
aromas of everyday life. Shopping for perfume connected the olfactory
with the cultural and the bodily and, as this chapter demonstrates, neces-
sitated an intersensorial approach to marketing. The consumption, pack-
aging, and retail of perfume replied on more than the sense of smell.
In the volume’s final chapter, Bethan Bide coalesces the diverse sensory
experiences touched upon throughout the volume. The cultural rhetoric
of sensory delight attached to the 1960s fashion boutique is juxtaposed
with the viscerally unpleasant smells and alarming experiences of more
experimental forms of fashion retail. Bide reminds us of the ways in which
retailers attempted to pioneer fresh sensory shopping landscapes when
faced with a newly created category of consumer: the teenager. Yet, as
Bide demonstrates, the lineage of the strategies wrought by these sup-
posed innovators can be traced to the earlier shop spaces explored in this
volume. Vitally, Bide demonstrates how intersensorial stimuli in shops
were fundamental to the generation of new consumer cultures and identi-
ties. Whether luxurious and enticing or uncomfortable and disquieting,
the sensory landscape of the shop held significant cultural power.
Collectively, these chapters display the variety and diversity of intersen-
sorial practice and experience within the nineteenth- and twentieth-­
century shopping landscape. The dominance of online shopping, especially
in a world shaped by a pandemic and economically dominated by digital
technology companies, has brought new challenges (Molenaar 2013).
However, even there, the development of sensory technologies is a matter
of urgency (Kim and Forsythe 2009). Whether conducted in a physical
shop space, via the proxy of an online storefront, or on a platform for digi-
tal goods, how those goods are received and consumed by the shopper is
inherently sensory. The chapters in this volume have demonstrated that
intersensorial primacy within the consumer landscape stretches beyond
this functional and procedural paradigm. Repulsion, disgust, and discom-
fort could be part of the shopping experience alongside the conventional
framing of shopping as a pleasurable and leisurely experience. Feeling and
sensitive bodies moved between, through, and within commercial spaces,
constantly digesting the sensory environments which surrounded them.
Lucious or disconcerting, sensuous or sterile, the sensorial richness of
shops saturated the commercial landscape.
14 S. DYER

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 CHAPTER 2

“To Rub the Nose in the Tea”: Smell, Taste,

and the Assessment of Quality in Early
Nineteenth-Century Tea Retail

Matthew Mauger

In April 1834, soon after the conclusion of the East India Company’s
quarterly tea auction, 40 samples of tea were prepared by Henry Goodhall
(tea warehouse-keeper for the Company) under the superintendence of
William Hunt (the Company’s Inspector of Teas in London). They were
despatched for consideration by the Board of Commissioners for the
Affairs of India—more commonly known as the ‘India Board’ or the
‘Board of Control’—which had since 1784 imposed government oversight
on most aspects of the East India Company’s affairs. One of the
Commissioners, Henry Ellis, later recalled the tin boxes containing the
samples, with covers ‘which contained, upon the outside a description of
the contents’ in terms that included ‘Congou but middling, little on the
pekoe side’, ‘Twankay but middling, brightish leaf, curled and speckled’
and ‘Hyson Skin middling good, brightish leaf’ (House of Commons
1834, 67 and 19). Officials from the Board of Control then swapped the

M. Mauger (*)
Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
e-mail: m.p.mauger@qmul.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2022
S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_2
18 M. MAUGER

covers between tins, so that ‘what was written on it could not at all lead to
a knowledge of what was inside the box’. The stage was thus set for a curi-
ous experiment. Between three and six tea tasters (varying between the
reports of those who were present) were ushered into the room, and set
the challenge of distinguishing the samples laid out before them. Ellis’s
description of their method evokes a performative and sensual appeal:

I never saw tea tried before, but the process was as follows; the tasters took
it into their hands and smelled it first, rubbing it up and down; in that way,
I think, without exception they always distinguished the tea, and pro-
nounced at once of what description it was. They tried it also by infusion,
for we had small teapots sent us, and by that process also they always distin-
guished the tea without hesitation… In fact it much exceeded any anticipa-
tion I could have had. I was perfectly astonished at the accuracy with which
they distinguished the teas, for I am sure, with ordinary knowledge, a per-
son would not be able to distinguish tea by looking at it and smelling it.
(House of Commons 1834, 68)

He continues: ‘the mode of trying was to rub the nose in the tea; the
taster then took the tea into his hands, rubbed it and smelled it, and after-
wards made the infusion.’
In this striking description, a part of the witness evidence presented in
the published report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Tea
Duties (13 May—10 July 1834), tea is discovered to have a sensory com-
plexity—even in its dried state—little imagined by the non-specialist with
‘ordinary knowledge’. In the performance of artisanal connoisseurship
that Ellis witnessed, tea’s identity lies in the curl and speckle of its leaf, in
its wiriness, in the aroma released when rubbed in the hands of a ‘taster’
for whom actually ‘tasting’ the infusion seems an almost unnecessary—
perhaps even a somewhat vulgar—afterthought. As Denise Gigante
reminds us, the bodily ingestion required to stimulate taste relegated it to
the lower reaches of the classical philosophical hierarchy of the senses
(Gigante 2005, 3–4). Nonetheless, there is an undeniable physicality to
the experts’ approach. The sensory organs have a direct contact with the
tea: the leaves permeate the skin and press against the nose. For all that
certain visual characteristics bear significance for the process of evaluation,
it is clear that smell, touch, and (if only through its figuration as a last
resort) taste—are the key empirical markers for the assessment of quality.
These senses, as Gigante points out, had acquired across the long
 “TO RUB THE NOSE IN THE TEA”: SMELL, TASTE, AND THE ASSESSMENT… 19

eighteenth century a new experiential primacy in expressing the sensitivity

of human subjects to the material, sensory, and emotional landscapes
through which they moved. The skin, in particular, became regarded as
‘the subjective interface by which human beings touch and taste the world
of sensory reality’ (Gigante 11). So vivid is the sensory cacophony that the
tasters recognise the teas ‘without hesitation’. Elsewhere in the evidence
heard by the Committee, we find startling testimony of the role of sense-
based categorisation and assessment at all levels of tea’s complex distribu-
tion channel: from its initial acquisition and consignment as long-distance
cargo, to its evaluation and warehousing on arrival in London, to the
brokerage associated with the quarterly tea auction, to its wholesale, retail,
and consumption.1
We might readily imagine the premises of a typical ‘seller of fine teas’ at
the turn of the nineteenth century to have been full of smells, and at least
the promise of deferred tastes; and yet we conceive more clearly the visual
evidence of grocers’ trade cards, notes of goods received, satirical carica-
tures of the tea trade, and society portraits of fashionable aristocrats at tea.
As Constance Classen has argued (most recently in The Museum of the
Senses (2017), but perhaps most influentially in a collaborative study with
Anthony Synnott and David Howes, Aroma: A Cultural History of Smell
1994), our received understandings of the history of engagement with
material culture prioritise the more tangible, more scientifically verifiable
evidence of sight over the evidence of the more intimate bodily senses
such as touch, smell, and taste. In this chapter, I focus on the fascinating—
if unlikely—snapshot of the sensory life of the tea market in Britain, offered
in the pages of the report of a Parliamentary Select Committee established
to enquire into matters of taxation. It captures the trade, moreover, at a
moment of transition that was to define the nineteenth-­century tea busi-
ness: the ending of the East India Company’s monopoly, and the liberali-
sation of the trade. The statements offered by shopkeepers, warehousemen,
Privy Counsellors, inspectors, brokers, and merchants provide evidence
for the practical assessment of tea quality, and its importance in the sale of
dried tea leaves, at a moment when the settled circumstances of tea retail
in thousands of small shops across the country—contexts which had
changed little for over a century—were about to experience profound
upheaval. As such, they offer a tantalising glimpse of the role that sensory
experience had acquired in the sale of tea since its first appearance as a
regular item of grocery in London in the early eighteenth century (for
detailed accounts of the emergence of tea as an item of eighteenth-­century
20 M. MAUGER

grocery, see Rappaport (2017), pp. 46-50; Ellis et al. (2015), pp. 129-137;
Mui and Mui (1989), pp. 171–190). Moreover, in its consideration of the
question of the proposed tea duties, the Select Committee’s enquiries
demonstrate that the taste buds of tea’s consumers offered their own tes-
timony in the formulation of a national taxation policy.

Report from the Select Committee

on the Tea Duties

Although this chapter is not primarily interested in detailed matters of

taxation, some contextual information is necessary in order to understand
why sensual experience is accorded such prominence in the report. The
Select Committee’s work was part of the Parliamentary response to wide-
spread resistance within the British trade to a new approach to raising
revenue on tea sales, outlined in legislation of 1833 known as the Tea
Duties Act (‘An Act to provide for the Collection and Management of the
Duties on Tea’, 3 & 4 Will 4, c. 101). Key among the new provisions was
the cancellation of the pre-existing arrangements, originally set in place by
legislation of 1745, for taxing tea consumption chiefly via an ad valorem
excise duty levied at the point of sale, and the introduction of a new cus-
toms charge collected at the port of entry which varied according to the
supposed quality of the tea. The cheapest black tea, imported since the
early eighteenth century under the name ‘bohea’, was to be taxed at 1s.
6d. per pound, a provision ostensibly intended to keep prices low in shops
frequented by the poorest consumers. The premium teas, including
‘souchong’, ‘flowery pekoe’ and the highly valued green ‘hyson’, would
attract a customs rate levied at 3s. per pound. Between these, a mid-range
selection including the green varieties ‘twankay’ and ‘hyson skin’ and the
black teas designated ‘congou’ and ‘campoi’ was to be charged at 2s. 2d.
per pound.
The Select Committee was to enquire whether a single ‘fixed Rate of
Duty on all descriptions of Tea’, as favoured by many in the industry,
including importers and shopkeepers, might be considered more ‘expedi-
ent’. In the Chair was the Whig politician Sir Matthew White Ridley, who
had particular interests in matters relating to foreign trade, and domestic
industries such as soap and glass manufacture (for further biographical
details see Escott (2009)). Although it is presented as a chronological
series of testimonies in the form of numbered questions and answers
 “TO RUB THE NOSE IN THE TEA”: SMELL, TASTE, AND THE ASSESSMENT… 21

spanning some 136 printed pages, the Committee’s published report

observes a broad though unacknowledged pattern: those giving evidence
in May (comprising roughly half of the report, and including almost all tea
retailers called by the enquiry) express scepticism about the possibility of
the consistent fine judgement of tea grades anticipated in the Act, whereas
those giving evidence in June dismiss such concerns. By contrast, much of
the evidence presented in hearings of July—the final twenty pages of the
report—concerns two additional examinations of dried tea, in the service
of which first the Committee, and later its Chair alone, adjourned to the
East India Company’s Leadenhall Street headquarters, East India House.
In many respects, the list of those called to give evidence to the
Committee over the two-month period between 13 May and 10 July
1834 constitutes a roll call of significant men in the contemporary tea
trade. They include John Reeves, who had until 1831 been the East India
Company’s Inspector of Teas in Canton (Guangzhou); William Hunt, his
counterpart in London; William Wybrow, the newly appointed Tea
Inspector with the Customs; Henry Goodhall, the Company’s Tea
Warehouse-keeper, with over 50 years’ service; Charles Varnham and
Thomas Styan, London tea brokers; William Storrs Fry, a wholesale tea
dealer, and also secretary of a committee founded in 1832 to represent the
interests of the tea trade; and Edmund Antrobus, tea retailer of the Strand
who liked to describe himself as ‘tea man to the King’. Whilst a metropoli-
tan bias is evident, the Committee also hears the voices of provincial shop-
keepers who have corresponded with Storrs Fry. Among the matters on
which the Committee most regularly seeks guidance, two recur consis-
tently across the pattern of questioning. First, and perhaps most critically
for the proposed taxation regime, whether it is possible to determine with
confidence where any given consignment of tea might be placed in terms
of the three broad categories specified in the Act. Second, if the logic of
placing bohea in a category of its own is genuinely to alleviate the tax
burden experienced by the poorest of tea consumers, to what extent such
an assumption reflected actual patterns of retail.
The detailed consideration of these questions returns repeatedly to the
role of sense-based judgements in determining (on the one hand) the teas
that reached the canisters on the shelves of shopkeepers across the coun-
try, and (on the other) the role of sensory judgement in the shopping
habits of tea’s consumers. The sensory experience of tea is central to the
business of the Select Committee because tea leaves themselves cannot
bear a stamp certifying the details of their provenance or manufacture. If
22 M. MAUGER

the names and categorisations used in the Act are readily applicable in the
field of trade, then they need to be recognisable via a commonly agreed-­
upon, and easily acquired, sensory determination. Moreover, if the vary-
ing rates of duty are to be progressive in terms of their incidence (a clear
goal stated by, among others, Henry Ellis), then these terms must also
map onto the experience of shopping for tea and consumers’ own discern-
ment of quality, character, and strength.

Marketing Sensations
In 1834, John Reeves—the recently retired East India Company Inspector
of Teas in China—was the only witness with extended knowledge of the
conditions of tea acquisition. His evidence demonstrates that it is through
sensory judgement that a variable cash crop—imbued with a local Chinese
nomenclature connected with geographical origin, harvesting methodol-
ogy, and cultural practice—is transformed into a product with hierarchies
and values in Britain. The technical terms for tea varieties used in the
British trade for over 100 years, the terms we find deployed in the Tea
Duties Act, may echo distantly the names of the Chinese tea harvest; but
their meaning had long been divergent. The Canton-based British tea
inspector, a post introduced some forty-five years earlier, had established
an element of quality control at the point of export, to ensure that the
Company’s expected investments in the teas known in Britain under the
names ‘hyson’, or ‘pekoe’, or ‘congou’ were duly delivered (notwithstand-
ing the names under which they were traded in China). Reeves offers the
example of the high-quality black tea known as ‘souchong’: out of 10,000
chests delivered by the Chinese merchants under that designation, ‘the tea
inspector can pick out sometimes two, sometimes three… I am not aware
that we ever got four chops [i.e. consignments] which had what can be
considered as the real souchong flavour’ (House of Commons 1834,
p. 4).2 This distinction between the leaves harvested in China as ‘souchong’
and the product recognised by the British trade under that term is sum-
marised neatly by the Committee Chair as ‘a distinction between souchong
and souchong flavour’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 12). The role of the
Canton Tea Inspector can be characterised accordingly as a key interface
between the Chinese tea harvest, and the sensory expectations of the
British consumers whom the East India Company aimed to satisfy.
On the arrival of newly imported tea-chests at the East India Company
warehouses in London the evidence indicates a systematic and
 “TO RUB THE NOSE IN THE TEA”: SMELL, TASTE, AND THE ASSESSMENT… 23

multi-­layered process of repeated inspection and evaluation that folded

the imported leaves firmly within the complex descriptive languages that
had emerged within the domestic tea trade. These languages drew above
all on aspects of the smell and appearance of dried tea leaves. As tea
warehouse-­keeper, Henry Goodhall was responsible for all recently arrived
tea until its delivery to wholesalers following the quarterly Tea Sale.
Goodhall describes how the quality of each consignment is initially deter-
mined by the London-­ based Company inspectors, including William
Hunt. Their successive assessments determine the organisation of a tea
consignment into ‘lots’ in the tea auction, assign the ‘put-up’ price of each
lot, and influence the way in which the tea is described in the sales
catalogue.

They look over the teas, which are laid out for taring … and they put down
what they considered to be the qualities of the tea, and afterwards they get
an average sample from a parcel of tea, and they taste it, and put down their
opinion of the qualities; and then afterwards, previous to the sale, they re-­
examine them, and revise their opinion of the qualities, which of late years
have been printed in the catalogues… They take rather a deep sample from
the upper part [of each chest], but they also examine the bottom part of the
chest. (House of Commons 1834, pp. 26-27)

Hunt separately testifies that he judges the quality of each sample ‘first, by
smelling the tea; and next, by tasting’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 14);
the Committee describes this aspect of the inspector’s role as being ‘to
character the tea, that is, to describe the qualities of the tea that is put up
by the Company at their public sales’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 22).
‘Charactering’ tea in preparation for the London market is clearly a pro-
cess both of practical discernment of quality and of documenting those
determinations in written form.
For much of the period of the East India Company’s monopoly of the
tea market, bidding at the quarterly tea auction was limited to a number
of professional tea ‘brokers’ who serviced the wholesale trade (see Mui
and Mui (1963), pp. 240-241). In advance of the auction, as tea moved
into the wholesale phase of its distribution channel, Goodhall describes
how all chests to be included in the sale would be opened in the tea ware-
house for careful sampling by these agents. A number of tea brokers appear
in the list of those questioned before the Committee, including John
Miller (who claims that his business was at one stage ‘the largest
24 M. MAUGER

purchaser’ of tea in London), Charles Varnham (with over forty years’

experience in the trade), and William Storrs Fry (the third generation of a
family brokerage business). Thomas Styan—also a broker in a family tea
business of long standing—affirms the Chair’s summary of his practical
multi-­sensory approach: ‘is it not your practice to use all those … pro-
cesses, both smelling, feeling, looking at and tasting it?—Most assuredly’
(House of Commons 1834, p. 48). In their fine analysis of the teas, bro-
kers typically annotated their copies of the sales catalogue with shorthand
notes indicating with precision the condition and characteristics of each
tea lot. This practice is acknowledged in the evidence of John Crawford,
who claims to speak on behalf of British merchants of India campaigning
for a liberalised tea trade. In his evidence, Crawford underscores his ‘very
high opinion’ of the skills of the brokers:

They have no less than twenty-five different marks of their own to discrimi-
nate the different qualities of tea. They examine every chest offered for sale
out of nine millions of pounds weight. Their peculiar marks distinguish
every quality. The Committee, by reading over a few of them will see at once
what a degree of skill these gentlemen possess. (House of Commons
1834, p. 88)

Crawford’s description closely matches a remarkable manuscript preserved

among the papers of Davison Newman grocers in the London Metropolitan
Archive. Described as a list of ‘Brokers Marks & Characters’, it is appar-
ently a crib sheet—perhaps produced to assist the grocer in interpreting
the notes in a tea sales catalogue—documenting two separate annotation
systems: ‘Bagshaw’s Marks’, and ‘Popplewell’s Marks’ (for additional
details, see Ellis et al. (2015), pp. 123-124). The individuals in question
are probably Henry Bagshaw (one of John Reeves’s predecessors as
Inspector of Teas in Canton), and John Popplewell (who ran a tea broker-
age in Cannon Street in the 1770s). Alongside geometric symbols repre-
senting the quality of the tea (ranging from ‘Musty & Mouldy’, to ‘Very
ordinary’, ‘Good midling’, and ‘Fine’) are those defining its appearance
and flavour. Thus we learn that the character B denotes a ‘Burnt flavour’,
vB ‘High burnt’, and os tea with an ‘odd smell’. L represents a ‘large leaf’,
y a yellow appearance, and w, d and f indicate tea which is variously
‘woody’, ‘dusty’, or ‘flaggy’. Other symbols designate a ‘Heated smell’, a
‘Bitter Face’, or a ‘Smoakey’ profile. For Crawford, described in a contem-
porary account as ‘an avowed enemy of the East-India Company’ (Asiatic
Journal (1836), p. 221), this astonishing ability of the tea brokers to
 “TO RUB THE NOSE IN THE TEA”: SMELL, TASTE, AND THE ASSESSMENT… 25

determine such fine distinctions contrasts with the corrupt practices of the
Company’s own declared judgements: ‘I understand the officers of the
Company call teas by almost any name they think proper; that their clas-
sification is an arbitrary classification’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 89).
A bitter disagreement becomes evident within the report concerning
not so much the sensitivity of the skills of the inspectors or brokers, but
rather whether there is a tangible sensory distinction between the named
tea varieties. Is there a meaningful difference between the taste of a con-
gou tea (for example) and a campoi, that can be detected notwithstanding
the particular quality of the sample being considered? The provisions of
the Tea Duties Act are dependent on the existence of a distinction that can
be widely recognised (at least with reasonable practice, one might imag-
ine), and consistently determined. Yet it is by no means clear how consis-
tently the terms can be applied in practice, especially given the notorious
difficulty of representing any detailed flavour profile in words. Most of the
individuals questioned during May 1834 assert that the problem rests in
the boundary between the teas placed in the different taxation bands.
Here, there seems to be genuine confusion among some of those exam-
ined—an uncertainty that, it seems reasonable, may be indicative of a
widespread slippage within the British tea business—about whether the
terms designate genuine flavour profiles, or are simply markers of quality.
John Miller asserts that ‘I can decide the difference between souchong
and congou; but the congou teas work into the campois, and the campois
work into the souchongs, by very nice shades’ (House of Commons 1834,
p. 42). ‘The fact is’, agrees Thomas Styan, that ‘we consider the finest
bohea tea is sometimes better than the worst congou’ (p. 48). Charles
Varnham affirms the proposition that ‘about half the congou teas put up
at the last sale could not have been distinguished from bohea’ (p. 49). For
William Storrs Fry, the names associated with all but the most expensive
specialist teas are effectively arbitrary: ‘As a general position, I consider the
difference to be not of kind but only of quality; therefore the application
of the name to the description must be entirely matter of opinion’ (p. 56).
It is precisely on this question that those interviewed in June 1834,
who are largely supportive of the introduction of the Tea Duties Act, beg
to differ. Among these witnesses, perhaps the most combative voice is that
of former Borough tea dealer David Davies. The following exchange dem-
onstrates just how far his position differs from that of Storrs Fry:
26 M. MAUGER

Do you consider it easy to distinguish between Fokien bohea and inferior

congou?—There may be a parcel of bohea and a parcel of congou which
may approximate in value, but never in their characteristic distinctions …
There is a distinguishing character by which it [bohea] can be separated
from congou?—Always.
Do you mean though the lower congou may be inferior in value to bohea,
they may be separated?—There is no difficulty in it, and it never was
considered so till now; it is quite a new light which has fallen on certain
people all at once.
Did you ever hear, before these new duties were laid on, any doubt
expressed by any person connected with the trade as to the difficulty of
distinguishing between bohea and congou?—Never; how is a dealer to
sell them unless he can distinguish them? (House of Commons
1834, p. 76)

Davies’s rhetorical mannerisms suggest a quite deliberate political

manoeuvring. When later asked to confirm if someone connected with the
tea trade might mistake bohea for congou, he exclaims: ‘Impossible. I
could distinguish them blindfolded.’ He addresses Miller’s assertion of the
‘nice shades of difference’ that occlude the boundary between bohea and
congou, and argues that this does not ‘have any thing to do with this ques-
tion’. Challenged to account for the testimony of individuals such as
Edmund Antrobus and Charles Varnham, he responds bluntly: ‘I should
not believe one of them on that score.’ So distinctive does he consider the
flavours of the varieties, in fact, that he asserts that any difficulty there
might be in tea connoisseurship is rather to be found in distinguishing
quality within a variety, rather than the variety itself (House of Commons
1834, pp. 77-79).
In its final pages, the Committee’s report becomes increasingly domi-
nated by a particular voice: that of William Wybrow, until recently the
Registrar of Tea Sales at the Excise Board, but now relocated (as a conse-
quence of the imminent arrival of the new taxation regime) to the role of
Tea Inspector at the Customs. Wybrow is examined in person three times,
and is twice put to a practical test of his tasting skills at East India House.
Whereas Davies’s evidence can seem somewhat arrogant in its stridency,
Wybrow’s quiet assurance of his remarkable skills as a tea taster is more
convincing. In contrast to Davies, he pointedly refuses to engage in any
personal attack on the motives or skills of named individuals in the tea
trade. He claims to have ‘no difficulty whatever’ in distinguishing between
‘the whole of the teas as they are imported by the Company; boheas,
 “TO RUB THE NOSE IN THE TEA”: SMELL, TASTE, AND THE ASSESSMENT… 27

congous, souchong, twankay, hyson, and so forth’. He goes on to give a

rare description of early nineteenth-century estimations of the flavour pro-
file of the most common black teas. On being asked to give an example of
a recent occasion on which his skill in discriminating between bohea and
congou had been tested, he explains:

I very soon ascertained the Wo Ping flavour, the strong earthy flavour of
the bohea; there is in the Fokein bohea a different flavour from the low
congou; low congous have a cleaner flavour than Fokein bohea; the
Fokein bohea is a coarser, it may be a more useful kind of tea perhaps,
but it has not the cleanness of flavour which the low congou has.
Did you distinguish that by the tasting of the tea?—By smell principally;
by the smell of the leaf in this instance, without tasting, in fact; but
where there is difficulty in distinguishing by leaf and the smell, tasting
will always decide it. (House of Commons 1834, p. 108)

Time and again, Wybrow is pressed on this skill (p. 111). ‘Were you a
long time acquiring the knowledge and power of judging?’ ‘Does it require
a particular habit of life to keep the palate so delicate?’ ‘Does it require
constant practice?’ Examined for a third time on 7 July 1834, Wybrow
asserts that considering the distinction between bohea and congou as a
determination of quality is a misrepresentation: ‘the difference between
Fokein bohea and congou is of a wider kind than to be included in the
term quality’ (p. 128). The difference between them is manifest through
the exercise of three senses: in appearance, bohea ‘has generally a large ill-­
formed leaf’ whereas congou ‘seems to have been more pliant previous to
drying’; in smell, ‘there is a strong oily earthy smell attached to bohea tea,
which congou has not’; and in taste ‘bohea tea has a coarser flavor and
stronger, a heavier ranker flavor’ (p. 129). Wybrow’s earlier use of the
term ‘clean’ in his search for words to describe congou’s appeal was clearly
widespread in the tea business; Manchester wholesaler Thomas Binyon
had earlier noted that congou is ‘a stronger tea, and, as we designate it,
cleaner flavoured’ (p. 61).
Through the ways in which tea appeals to eye, nose, tongue, and even
touch, a Chinese cash crop is inserted into the contexts of British con-
sumer life as an item of regular grocery, and as revenue for the Treasury.
By replacing a straightforward ad valorem charge derived from the market
determination of quality at the tea auction, in favour of a scale of duties
based on varietal names, the Tea Duties Act required each tea’s sensory
28 M. MAUGER

properties to be recognised, defined, and measured. As the Committee

Chair remarks, ‘so long as the duty was collected ad valorem, the name
given in the Company’s catalogue was of no consequence’ (House of
Commons 1834, p. 30). The delicate and fluctuating flavour profiles of
congou, souchong and hyson become a matter for both tea’s marketing
and national fiscal policy. What is particularly striking in these accounts is
the way in which through multiple and repeated phases of sensory dis-
crimination and analysis, the tea cultivated in China under a set of local
designations understood only by those with a close and immediate con-
nection to the Canton trade, becomes relocated within a reserved vocabu-
lary of the domestic British tea trade, a vocabulary attached to specific
visual, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory characteristics of the imported
leaves, a systematised discourse which is hierarchical, standardised, and
based on practical experiential analysis. The evidence of the Committee
Report suggests that this terminology is as unfamiliar to the end-consumer
of the tea purchased in Britain’s grocery establishments as it is to the origi-
nal Chinese contexts of tea’s manufacture. Nevertheless, this language
deriving from tea’s sensory attributes—categorisations developed within
the context of British tea wholesale and brokerage over the course of the
eighteenth century—impacted directly on the varieties sold in retail prem-
ises across the country.

Shopping for Taste

As the Davison Newman sheet of ‘Brokers Marks & Characters’ demon-
strates, tea’s movement through its distribution channel from its whole-
sale into its retail phase is enabled through the formal assessment of its
sensory profile, an assessment expressed in the reserved vocabulary of the
East India Company sales catalogue, and the symbolic annotations of the
brokers and wholesale dealers. Monkhouse Davison and Abram Newman,
we might assume, procured the crib sheet of brokers’ marks in order to
inform the purchases they made from the selections offered by their
favoured agents. The evidence to the Select Committee demonstrates that
many of the grocers who sold tea had a highly refined understanding of
the sensory character of the dried leaves contained in the canisters on their
shelves. Edmund Antrobus may not have been unusual among well-­
established London retailers in claiming to sample the teas coming up for
sale in person at East India House: ‘I examine and taste everything myself,
 “TO RUB THE NOSE IN THE TEA”: SMELL, TASTE, AND THE ASSESSMENT… 29

and have done so for the last 11 years.’ Antrobus seems particularly keen
to emphasise his delicate palate as a connoisseur:

Do you consider that slight indisposition of the state of the stomach, for
instance, will effect your ability to make those distinctions [between tea
varieties]?—It has a very material effect.
Would port wine at night affect the taste in the morning?—Unquestionably,
if too much is taken. (House of Commons 1834, pp. 28-29)

David Davies’s performative incredulity at the supposed inability of

experienced retailers to distinguish between varieties at the boundaries
invoked in the Tea Duties Act, is itself indicative of the degree of skill
claimed by the tea-retailing fraternity: ‘how is a dealer to sell them unless
he can distinguish them?’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 77).
The shopkeepers providing evidence to the enquiry typically represent
their customers as knowing purchasers of tea, who can readily discriminate
according to quality; as such, most of the grocers and tea dealers insist that
their standard tea is of a mid-range quality. John Chenery, grocer of Little
St Thomas Apostle (just south of Cheapside in the City of London), noted
that his customers were ‘in general the lower class of people’ to whom he
sold ‘good congou tea, hyson and twankay’. On being asked if he ever
tried selling the cheaper bohea, he responds ‘No, I have not; I have never
bought any since I have been in business, for they generally like a good
strong flavoured tea; good congou tea’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 67).
Antrobus gives details concerning the specific congou grades that make up
the core of his business: ‘but middling’, ‘but middling, rather blackish
leaf’ and ‘but middling and middling’. He also observes that ‘the poor are
so very particular as to their purchasing tea’, and insists that if he tried to
sell tea of a lower quality, ‘they would find it lower tea than they had been
in the habit of drinking, and they would go elsewhere’ (House of
Commons 1834, pp. 30–31).
What becomes clear in this evidence, however, is that tea undergoes a
further series of transformations as it nears the end of its distribution chan-
nel, in which early nineteenth-century tea consumers—at the moment of
purchase—effectively deferred their own sensory judgement to those of
retailer, wholesaler, and broker, transformations which distance the end-­
product from the terms of the British tea trade and sever the final strands
of its association with the Chinese harvest. Whatever the terms may be
under which John Chenery has made purchases from his wholesaler, he
30 M. MAUGER

knows that his customers like a ‘good strong flavoured tea’. Thomas
Binyon’s evidence is instructive on this point:

You said they bought black tea, did you mean by that that they bought tea
under that name at a particular price?—The public in buying tea retail
at the shops very rarely know the names of the particular teas; they buy
it all under the designation of black tea, and name the price.
When they come to buy the tea of you, they ask for black tea at five shil-
lings a pound, or whatever price they choose to go to, without specify-
ing the name of any particular tea?—Yes. (House of Commons
1834, p. 58)

The report also underscores that these teas were often blends produced
by retailers to meet what they perceived to be the particular taste expecta-
tions of their customers, blends which often brought together black and
green teas. Binyon himself sells ‘a good strong black leafed congou, min-
gled with twankay’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 58); Antrobus (p. 28)
and Miller (p. 38) both recommend a similar mix. As tea has become natu-
ralised as an article of common British grocery, so we see its modernity as
a product blended to suit its local consumers, and sold under the regular
terms of the grocery trade; for all but the most expensive varieties, quality
is indicated by price alone. The names of the tea varieties inherited from
the China trade were thus mostly unknown to its drinkers in 1830s Britain,
and had little straightforward connection to the small tea packages that
they carried home. We see a process at work here that leads in the later
nineteenth century to the emergence of branded tea, and ultimately to the
invention of the tea bag in the mid-twentieth century.
This disconnection between the supposedly pure tea varieties of the
commercial market and the product sold in shops clearly represented an
opportunity for unscrupulous grocers to defraud their customers by up-­
selling cheap tea, and gambling that their purchasers might be insuffi-
ciently sensitive to the sensory distinctions to notice. Wholesale tea dealer
John Miller indicates the degree of trust that a consumer thus places in a
reliable tea retailer. He gives the example of a shop south of the Thames
in the Borough, in which he has spotted ‘good congou tea marked in the
window at 5s’; however, through his trade recognition of the ‘chop-mark’
on the tea-chests visible in the shop, he knows that this is in fact cheap
bohea being passed-off as congou: ‘the same article, perhaps, might be
sold at 3s. 6d., and so the public are imposed upon’:
 “TO RUB THE NOSE IN THE TEA”: SMELL, TASTE, AND THE ASSESSMENT… 31

If the public have a good discrimination in the quality of tea, would not
they soon find it out?—Poor people would soon find it out.
And then, of course, they would leave the shop?—Yes.
So that an imposition of that kind would not last very long?—If they
found their trade fall off, they would begin to sell a better quality.
(House of Commons 1834, p. 42).

Miller’s anecdote reminds us that although consumers place their trust

in the retailer’s fair-dealing when it comes to the sensory profiles of the
teas they offer for sale, that deferral of their own judgement is temporary.
The obvious point to make about the end of tea’s journey from crop to
cup, is that consumers are purchasing a sensory experience: the taste of the
infusion of the dried leaves. The moment of post-purchase preparation
and tasting, from the cheapest bohea to the floweriest pekoe, is thus the
reckoning for the entire supply chain. A customer dissatisfied with the
quality of the product will take their business elsewhere. A metropolitan
retailer who misunderstands or misrepresents the teas they sell will soon
lose business to their competitors.
For the Parliamentary Committee, understanding the behaviours of
tea’s majority consumers is critical in understanding a key dispensation of
the Tea Duties Act: the establishment of a reserved low-tax category for
the cheapest of the teas, bohea. For the proponents of the Act, this stipula-
tion is a progressive measure, designed to reduce the tax burden on tea’s
poorest purchasers. Witness after witness to the enquiry highlights that the
premise on which this provision is based—that the working poor purchase
tea purely on the basis of its cost—is false. Former East India merchant
and Liberal Party politician William Crawford is prepared to go further,
arguing that the lower rate for bohea is designed to establish a ‘fallacy …
that the scale of rated duties will benefit the poor consumer’. Crawford
adverts that the Act will only ‘make the poor man’s tea cheaper to him …
by inducing him to become the consumer of an article inferior in quality
to that which he now uses’ (House of Commons 1834, pp. 34–36). All of
the metropolitan tea retailers questioned by the enquiry specify that the
poorest consumers typically buy blends containing congou, rather than
bohea. The provincial grocers whose written responses are read to the
enquiry by William Storrs Fry tell a similar story: Joseph Weatherall of
Stockton notes that ‘the poor are not generally consumers of common
bohea tea’; Messrs Constance & Matthews of Bath state that ‘the working
classes usually purchase tea which at present sells at 5s. per pound, that is,
good common congou, with strength’; James Veale of Barnstaple insists
32 M. MAUGER

that ‘the majority of the working classes prefer a middling good tea at 4s.
8d. to 5s. 4d. rather than an inferior article at a lower price’ (House of
Commons 1834, pp. 53–55).
Whilst there is some acknowledgement that the poor find a ‘strong’ tea
more economical because its leaves can be infused on multiple occasions,
much of the evidence highlights consumer expectations of taste. On being
asked to account for the preference ‘among the poor’ for the higher priced
teas, Antrobus states that it is ‘because they have a better taste’ (House of
Commons 1834, p. 33). Even arch-sceptic David Davies concedes that
‘Every man prefers good congou to bohea … because it is a better tea than
bohea, in flavour’ (House of Commons 1834, pp. 80–81). Written evi-
dence from a Birmingham tea dealer introduces a moral dimension to
taste and consumption, claiming that only the ‘improvident poor’ pur-
chase the cheapest tea, and they typically do so on credit; for their poverty
arises from their careless disregard of the detail of their own consumption
and expenditure (House of Commons 1834, p. 52). The servicing of this
debt effectively locks such consumers to the offerings of the unscrupulous
‘hawkers’ who sell only the lowest grades. The careful ‘industrious’ poor,
by comparison, buy smaller amounts of a better-quality tea for ready
money. Attempts to lighten the tax burden for poor consumers will effec-
tively, in the view of this correspondent, reward the idle poor and punish
the hard-working. Retailers from other provincial market towns provide
further insights into the circumstances which might lead to the poor pri-
oritising taste over cost. In the view of Canterbury grocer James Ridout,
‘the lower orders are more in the habit of using a superior tea than the
middling orders, and state that as tea is almost their only beverage they
will have it good’. Similar evidence is offered by Somerset dealers
McDowall & Trainer of Wiveliscombe. They note a circumstance of tea
consumption that is easy to overlook: the ‘little tradesmen, mechanics and
labourers’ who frequent their shop, on being asked whether they prefer
tea at 4s or 5s per pound, answer: ‘We use neither milk nor sugar, and
unless it is good we will not have it at any price’ (House of Commons
1834, p. 54). Without the additional accoutrements that would make a
cheaper rougher-flavoured tea palatable, they opt for the ‘cleaner’ profile
of congou.
The experience of shopping for tea is unlikely to have provided oppor-
tunities for many consumers to ‘rub their nose’ in twankay or souchong,
even if they knew those terms and the qualities they signified. And whilst
we may readily imagine that many shopkeepers would have performed the
act of sensory evaluation on the shop counter, perhaps even inviting the
 “TO RUB THE NOSE IN THE TEA”: SMELL, TASTE, AND THE ASSESSMENT… 33

participation of their customers, Davies’s somewhat derisory characterisa-

tion is likely to be an accurate representation: ‘they cannot generally tell
the difference between fine pekoe flavored tea, provided there is no flower
in it, and bohea, that is, before they make an infusion of it’ (House of
Commons 1834, p. 79). The skills of fine judgement exercised by inspec-
tors, brokers and wholesalers in the earlier stages of tea’s distribution
channel inserted Chinese tea leaves within a domestic British market and
determined the way in which tea was retailed. The labouring majority of
tea’s consumers were not connoisseurs, who might recognise the touch of
a campoi leaf, the smell of good middling congou in its dried state, or the
appearance of a fine hyson; but they do drink an infusion of ‘good’ tea that
is typically unadulterated by the additional substances that otherwise mask
its natural flavour, and accordingly have expectations of taste (and perhaps
associated, less-tangible facets of the tea drinking experience such as colour
and aroma) that—on this evidence—they are prepared to maintain in their
shopping habits. As William Storrs Fry reminds the Committee, tea con-
sumption may be a habit observed in households across the nation, irre-
spective of differences in wealth, circumstance, or fashion; yet it remains
‘an article not of necessity but of luxury, and I am quite sure its consump-
tion depends on the continued supply of those good qualities to which we
have been so long accustomed’ (House of Commons 1834, p. 52).

Notes

1. I make use of the contemporary marketing model for understanding

the movement of goods from producer to consumer known as a ‘distri-
bution channel’. I prefer this to the synonymous term ‘marketing chan-
nel’, given the common association of marketing with advertisement
(which is not the overt subject of this chapter). For a detailed introduc-
tory account, see Rosenbloom (2013). In the terms of this model, we
might consider the structure of eighteenth-century tea’s distribution
channel to have been multi-layered, involving as it did multiple partici-
pants, including Chinese small-hold farmers and merchants; East India
Company supercargoes and inspectors; tea brokers and wholesalers;
grocers and ‘dealers in fine teas’.
2. Though the term has no consistent, precise meaning, testimony laid
before an earlier enquiry of 1830 stated that a ‘chop’ of black tea in this
34 M. MAUGER

period typically constituted 400–600 chests, and of green tea around

400 chests. Typically, all the tea in a chop was considered to be the
produce of a single small-hold farm, harvested and manufactured
together (see Reports (1830), p. 179).

Works Cited
Asiatic Intelligence—Calcutta. The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany for
British and Foreign India, China, and Australasia 21 (new series), September-­
December 1836, pp. 125–238.
Classen, Constance. The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections.
London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. Aroma: A Cultural
History of Smell. London: Routledge, 1994.
Davison Newman papers. ‘Brokers Marks & Characters’. London Metropolitan
Archives CLC/B/066/MS08631.
Ellis, Markman, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger. Empire of Tea: The Asian
Leaf that Conquered the World. London: Reaktion, 2015.
Escott, Margaret. Ridley, Sir Matthew White, 3rd bt. (1778–1836), of Blagdon,
Northum and 1 Grafton Street, Mdx. The History of Parliament online, 2009.
https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820–1832/member/
ridley-­sir-­matthew-­1778–1836. Accessed 11 August 2020.
Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
House of Commons, United Kingdom. Report from the Select Committee on The
Tea Duties, with Minutes of Evidence. 25 July 1834.
Mui, Hoh-Cheung and Lorna H. Mui. The Commutation Act and the Tea Trade
in Britain, 1784–1793. Economic History Review, vol. 16, 1963, pp. 234–253.
Mui, Hoh-Cheung and Lorna H. Mui. Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-­
century England. London: Routledge, 1989.
Rappaport, Erika. A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Reports from the Select Committee of the House of Commons appointed to Enquire
into the Present State of the Affairs of the East-India Company. London:
J. L. Cox, 1830.
Rosenbloom, Bert. Marketing Channels: A Management View. 8th ed. Mason:
South-Western, 2013.
 CHAPTER 3

An Assault on the Senses: Cultural

Representations of the Victorian Village Shop

Lucy A. Bailey

The Victorian period is widely recognised as a dynamic chapter in the his-

tory of retailing and consumption, ushering in various dramatic changes,
such as an increase in mass-produced, pre-packaged and branded goods,
which effectively linked manufacturer to consumer. This not only eroded
the shopkeeper’s role as processor, packager and expert, but also reduced
the ability of the consumer to use their senses to assess the quality of such
goods. Yet savvy shopping for everyday goods still required consumers to
apply various sensory skills in their interaction with the marketplace.
Provisioning required them to rely on their own judgement to inspect the
foodstuffs on offer, which needed to be sniffed, pinched and tasted and
dialogue or negotiations entered into with the shopkeeper. A consumer’s
reliance on their senses, instincts and the trust placed in their preferred
shopkeepers was vitally important, as shopping could be a precarious busi-
ness. By the mid-nineteenth century, widespread reporting on the adul-
teration of foodstuffs and accidental poisonings was a caution to all

L. A. Bailey (*)
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
e-mail: l.a.bailey-60@kent.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 35

Switzerland AG 2022
S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_3
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK

OF SCOTTISH STORY ***
Transcriber’s Note:
New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.
 THE BOOK

OF

SCOTTISH STORY:

HISTORICAL, HUMOROUS,

LEGENDARY, AND IMAGINATIVE.

SELECTED FROM THE

Works of Standard Scottish Authors.

“Stories to read are delitable,
Suppose that they be nought but fable;
Then should stories that soothfast were,
And they were said on gude manner,
Have double pleasance in hearing.”
Barbour.

EDINBURGH:
THE EDINBURGH PUBLISHING COMPANY.
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO.
 EDINBURGH:
PRINTED BY THE COMMERCIAL PRINTING COMPANY,
22 HOWE STREET.
 PREFACE.

Next to its Ballads and Songs, the Stories of Scottish Literature are
the most characteristic exponents of the national spirit. Allowing for
the changes which time and the progress of civilization have effected
in the national manners and character since the beginning of the
present century—the era to which the Stories chiefly refer—they shall
be found to delineate the social and domestic features of Scottish life
as faithfully as the Ballads do the spirit and sentiment of an earlier
age; or as the daily press reflects, rather than portrays, those of the
present day. While Songs—the simple expressions of feelings and
sentiments, musically rendered—change, in so far as they exhibit
habits and manners, yet their form is lasting. Not so the Ballads,
whose true historical successors are Prose Stories, as Novels are
those of Romances.
Whether we account for it on the theory that a larger infusion of
the imaginative and romantic elements, characteristic of the Celtic
race, gives additional fervour to the Scottish character, or otherwise,
it is a fact that in no other community, on the same social level as
that of the peasantry and working-classes of Scotland, has this form
of literature had so enthusiastic a reception. There can be no doubt
that this widely diffused and keen appreciation, by an earnest and
self-respecting people, of Stories which are largely graphic
delineations of their own national features, has been the chief
stimulus to the production of so large and excellent a supply as our
literature contains.
The present Selection is made on the principle of giving the best
specimens of the most popular authors, with as great a variety, as to
subjects, as is compatible with these conditions.
The favourable reception of the issue in the serial form, both by
the press and the public, is looked upon by the projectors as an
earnest—now that the book is completed—that its further reception
will be such as to assure them that they have not fallen short of the
aim announced in their prospectus, viz., to form a Collection of
Standard Scottish Tales calculated to delight the imagination, to
convey interesting information, and to elevate and strengthen the
moral principles of the young.
Edinburgh, August 1876.
CONTENTS.
The Henpecked Man, John Mackay Wilson
Duncan Campbell, James Hogg
The Lily of Liddisdale, Professor Wilson
The Unlucky Present, Robert Chambers
The Sutor of Selkirk “The Odd Volume,”
Elsie Morrice, Aberdeen Censor,
How I won the Laird’s Daughter, Daniel Gorrie
Moss-Side, Professor Wilson
My First Fee, Edin. Literary Journal,
The Kirk of Tullibody, Chambers’s Edin. Journal,
The Progress of Inconstancy, Blackwood’s Magazine,
Adam Bell, James Hogg
Mauns’ Stane; or, Mine Host’s Tale, Aberdeen Censor,
The Freebooter of Lochaber, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder
An Hour in the Manse, Professor Wilson
The Warden of the Marches, Edin. Literary Gazette,
The Alehouse Party, “The Odd Volume,”
Auchindrane; or, the Ayrshire Tragedy, Sir Walter Scott
A Tale of the Plague in Edinburgh, Robert Chambers
The Probationer’s First Sermon, Daniel Gorrie
The Crimes of Richard Hawkins, Thomas Aird
The Headstone, Professor Wilson
The Widow’s Prediction, Edin. Literary Journal,
The Lady of Waristoun, Chambers’s Edin. Journal,
A Tale of Pentland, James Hogg
Graysteel John o’ Groat Journal,
The Billeted Soldier, Eminent Men of Fife,
Bruntfield, Chambers’s Edin. Journal,
Sunset and Sunrise, Professor Wilson
Miss Peggy Brodie, Andrew Picken
The Death of a Prejudice, Thomas Aird
Anent Auld Grandfaither, &c., D. M. Moir
John Brown; or, the House in the Muir, Blackwood’s Magazine,
Traditions of the Old Tolbooth of Edinburgh, Robert Chambers
The Lover’s Last Visit, Professor Wilson
Mary Queen of Scots and Chatelar, Literary Souvenir,
A Night in Duncan M‘Gowan’s, Blackwood’s Magazine,
The Miller and the Freebooter, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder
Benjie’s Christening, D. M. Moir
The Minister’s Widow, Professor Wilson
The Battle of the Breeks, Robert Macnish
My Sister Kate, Andrew Picken
Wat the Prophet, James Hogg
The Snow-Storm, Professor Wilson
Love at one Glimpse, Edin. Literary Journal,
Nanny Welsh, the Minister’s Maid, Daniel Gorrie
Lady Jean, Chambers’s Edin. Journal,
The Monkey, Robert Macnish
The Ladder-Dancer, Blackwood’s Magazine,
The Elder’s Death-Bed, Professor Wilson
A Highland Feud, Sir Walter Scott
The Resurrection Men, D. M. Moir
Mary Wilson, Aberdeen Censor,
The Laird of Cassway, James Hogg
The Elder’s Funeral, Professor Wilson
Macdonald, the Cattle-Riever, Literary Gazette,
The Murder Hole, Blackwood’s Magazine,
The Miller of Doune, “The Odd Volume,”
The Headless Cumins, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder
The Lady Isabel, Chambers’s Edin. Journal,
The Desperate Duel, D. M. Moir
The Vacant Chair, John Mackay Wilson
Colkittoch, Literary Gazette,
The Covenanters, Robert Macnish
The Poor Scholar, Professor Wilson
The Crushed Bonnet, Glasgow Athenæum,
The Villagers of Auchincraig, Daniel Gorrie
Perling Joan, John Gibson Lockhart
Janet Smith, Professor Thomas Gillespie
The Unlucky Top Boots, Chambers’s Edin. Journal,
My First and Last Play, D. M. Moir
Jane Malcolm, Edin. Literary Journal,
Bowed Joseph, Robert Chambers
The Laird of Wineholm, James Hogg
An Incident in the Great Moray Floods of 1829, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder
Charlie Graham, the Tinker, George Penny
The Snowing-up of Strath Lugas, Blackwood’s Magazine,
Ezra Peden, Allan Cunningham
Young Ronald of Morar, Literary Gazette,
The Broken Ring, “The Odd Volume,”
A Passage of My Life, Paisley Magazine,
The Court Cave, Drummond Bruce
Helen Waters, John Malcolm
Legend of the Large Mouth, Robert Chambers
Richard Sinclair; or, the Poor Prodigal, Thomas Aird
The Barley Fever—and Rebuke, D. M. Moir
Elphin Irving, the Fairies’ Cupbearer, Allan Cunningham
Choosing a Minister, John Galt
The Meal Mob, Edin. Literary Journal,
The Flitting, “My Grandfather’s Farm,”
Ewen of the Little Head, Literary Gazette,
Basil Rolland, Aberdeen Censor,
The Last of the Jacobites, Robert Chambers
The Grave-Digger’s Tale, “The Auld Kirk Yard,”
The Fairy Bride, Edin. Literary Journal,
The Lost Little Ones, “The Odd Volume,”
An Orkney Wedding, John Malcolm
The Ghost with the Golden Casket, Allan Cunningham
Ranald of the Hens, Literary Gazette,
The French Spy, John Galt
The Minister’s Beat, Blackwood’s Magazine,
A Scottish Gentlewoman of the Last Century, Miss Ferrier
The Faithless Nurse, Edin. Literary Gazette,
Traditions of the Celebrated Major Weir, Robert Chambers
The Windy Yule, John Galt
Grizel Cochrane, Chambers’s Edin. Journal,
The Fatal Prayer, Literary Melange,
Glenmannow, the Strong Herdsman, William Bennet
My Grandmother’s Portrait, Daniel Gorrie
The Baptism, Professor Wilson
The Laird’s Wooing, John Galt
Thomas the Rhymer, Sir Walter Scott
Lachlan More, Literary Gazette,
Alemoor, Chambers’s Edin. Journal,
Tibby Fowler, John Mackay Wilson
Daniel Cathie, Tobacconist, Edin. Literary Almanac,
The Haunted Ships, Allan Cunningham
A Tale of the Martyrs, James Hogg
The Town Drummer, John Galt
The Awful Night, D. M. Moir
Rose Jamieson, Anon.
A Night at the Herring Fishing, Hugh Miller
The Twin Sisters, Alexander Balfour
Albert Bane, Henry Mackenzie
The Penny Wedding, Alexander Campbell
Peat-Casting Time, Thomas Gillespie
An Adventure with the Press-Gang, Paisley Magazine,
The Laird of Cool’s Ghost, Old Chap Book,
Allan-a-Sop, Sir Walter Scott
John Hetherington’s Dream, Old Chap Book,
Black Joe o’ the Bow, James Smith
The Fight for the Standard, James Paterson
Catching a Tartar, D. M. Moir
 THE BOOK OF

SCOTTISH STORY.
 THE HENPECKED MAN.

By John Mackay Wilson.

Every one has heard the phrase, “Go to Birgham!” which signifies
much the same as bidding you go to a worse place. The phrase is
familiar not only on the borders, but throughout all Scotland, and
has been in use for more than five hundred years, having taken its
rise from Birgham being the place where the Scottish nobility were
when they dastardly betrayed their country into the hands of the first
Edward; and the people, despising the conduct and the cowardice of
the nobles, have rendered the saying, “Go to Birgham!” an expression
of contempt until this day. Many, however, may have heard the
saying, and even used it, who know not that Birgham is a small
village, beautifully situated on the north side of the Tweed, about
midway between Coldstream and Kelso; though, if I should say that
the village itself is beautiful, I should be speaking on the wrong side
of the truth. Yet there may be many who have both heard the saying
and seen the place, who never heard of little Patie Crichton, the
bicker-maker. Patie was of diminutive stature, and he followed the
profession (if the members of the learned professions be not
offended at my using the term) of a cooper, or bicker-maker, in
Birgham for many years. His neighbours used to say of him, “The
puir body’s henpecked.”
Patie was in the habit of attending the neighbouring fairs with the
water-cogs, cream-bowies, bickers, piggins, and other articles of his
manufacture. It was Dunse fair, and Patie said he “had done
extraordinar’ weel—the sale had been far beyond what he expeckit.”
His success might be attributed to the circumstance that, when out of
the sight and hearing of his better half, for every bicker he sold he
gave his customers half-a-dozen jokes into the bargain. Every one,
therefore, liked to deal with little Patie. The fair being over, he
retired with a crony to a public-house in the Castle Wynd, to crack of
old stories over a glass, and inquire into each other’s welfare. It was
seldom they met, and it was as seldom that Patie dared to indulge in
a single glass; but, on the day in question, he thought they could
manage another gill, and another was brought. Whether the sight of
it reminded him of his domestic miseries, and of what awaited him at
home, I cannot tell; but after drinking another glass, and
pronouncing the spirits excellent, he thus addressed his friend:—
“Ay, Robin” (his friend’s name was Robin Roughead), “ye’re a
happy man—ye’re maister in your ain hoose, and ye’ve a wife that
adores and obeys ye; but I’m nae better than naebody at my ain
fireside. I’ll declare I’m waur: wife an’ bairns laugh at me—I’m
treated like an outlan’ body an’ a fule. Though without me they micht
gang an’ beg, there is nae mair respeck paid to me than if I were a
pair o’ auld bauchels flung into a corner. Fifteen years syne I couldna
believed it o’ Tibby, though onybody had sworn it to me. I firmly
believe that a gude wife is the greatest blessin’ that can be conferred
upon a man on this earth. I can imagine it by the treasure that my
faither had in my mither; for, though the best may hae words atween
them occasionally, and I’m no saying that they hadna, yet they were
just like passin’ showers, to mak the kisses o’ the sun upon the earth
mair sweet after them. Her whole study was to please him and to
mak him comfortable. She was never happy but when he was happy;
an’ he was just the same wi’ her. I’ve heard him say that she was
worth untold gold. But, O Robin! if I think that a guid wife is the
greatest blessin’ a man can enjoy, weel do I ken that a scoldin’,
domineerin’ wife is his greatest curse. It’s a terrible thing to be
snooled in your ain house—naebody can form an idea o’t but they
wha experience it.
“Ye remember when I first got acquainted wi’ Tibby, she was doing
the bondage work at Riselaw. I first saw her coming out o’ Eccles kirk
ae day, and I really thocht that I had never seen a better-faured or a
more gallant-looking lass. Her cheeks were red and white like a half-
ripe strawberry, or rather, I should say, like a cherry; and she seemed
as modest and meek as a lamb. It wasna very lang until I drew up;
and though she didna gie me ony great encouragement at first, yet, in
a week or twa, after the ice was fairly broken, she became remarkably
ceevil, and gied me her oxter on a Sunday. We used to saunter about
the loanings, no saying meikle, but unco happy; and I was aye
restless whan I was out o’ her sight. Ye may guess that the shoemaker
was nae loser by it during the six months that I ran four times a-
week, wet or dry, between Birgham and Riselaw. But the term-time
was drawing nigh, and I put the important question, and pressed her
to name the day. She hung her head, and she seemed no to ken weel
what to say; for she was sae mim and sae gentle then, that ye wad hae
said ‘butter wadna melt in her mouth.’ And when I pressed her mair
urgently—
“‘I’ll just leave it to yoursel, Peter,’ says she.
“I thocht my heart wad louped out at my mouth. I believe there
never was a man sae beside himsel wi’ joy in this warld afore. I fairly
danced again, and cut as many antics as a merryandrew. ‘O Tibby,’
says I,
‘I’m ower happy now!—Oh, haud my head!
This gift o’ joy is like to be my dead.’

“‘I hope no, Peter,’ said she; ‘I wad rather hae ye to live than dee
for me.’
“I thocht she was as sensible as she was bonny, and better natured
than baith.
“Weel, I got the house set up, the wedding-day cam, and
everything passed ower as agreeably as onybody could desire. I
thocht Tibby turning bonnier and bonnier. For the first five or six
days after the weddin’, everything was ‘hinny,’ and ‘my love,’ and
‘Tibby, dear,’ or ‘Peter, dear.’ But matters didna stand lang at this. It
was on a Saturday nicht, I mind, just afore I was gaun to drap work,
that three or four acquaintances cam into the shop to wush me joy,
and they insisted I should pay off for the weddin’. Ye ken I never was
behint hand; and I agreed that I wad just fling on my coat and step
up wi’ them to Orange Lane. So I gaed into the house and took down
my market coat, which was hangin’ behint the bed; and after that I
gaed to the kist to tak out a shilling or twa; for, up to that time, Tibby
had not usurped the office of Chancellor o’ the Exchequer. I did it as
cannily as I could; but she had suspected something, and heard the
jinkin’ o’ the siller.
 “What are ye doing, Patie?’ says she; ‘whar are ye gaun?’
“I had never heard her voice hae sic a sound afore, save the first
time I drew up to her, when it was rather sharp than agreeable.
“‘Ou, my dear,’ says I, ‘I’m just gaun up to Orange Lane a wee
while.’
“‘To Orange Lane!’ says she; ‘what in the name of fortune’s gaun to
tak ye there?’
“‘O hinny,’ says I, ‘it’s just a neebor lad or twa that’s drapped in to
wush us joy, and, ye ken, we canna but be neebor-like.’
“‘Ay! the sorrow joy them!’ says she, ‘and neebor too!—an’ how
meikle will that cost ye?’
“‘Hoot, Tibby,’ says I, for I was quite astonished at her, ‘ye dinna
understand things, woman.’
“‘No understand them!’ says she; ‘I wish to gudeness that ye wad
understand them though! If that’s the way ye intend to mak the siller
flee, it’s time there were somebody to tak care o’t.’
“I had put the siller in my pocket, and was gaun to the door mair
surprised than I can weel express, when she cried to me—
“‘Mind what ye spend, and see that ye dinna stop.’
“‘Ye need be under nae apprehensions o’ that, hinny,’ said I,
wishing to pacify her.
“‘See that it be sae,’ cried she, as I shut the door.
“I joined my neebors in a state of greater uneasiness o’ mind than I
had experienced for a length o’ time. I couldna help thinkin’ but that
Tibby had rather early begun to tak the upper hand, and it was what
I never expected from her. However, as I was saying, we went up to
Orange Lane, and we sat doun, and ae gill brocht on anither. Tibby’s
health and mine were drunk; we had several capital sangs; and, I
daresay, it was weel on for ten o’clock afore we rose to gang awa. I
was nae mair affected wi’ drink than I am at this moment. But,
somehow or ither, I was uneasy at the idea o’ facing Tibby. I thought
it would be a terrible thing to quarrel wi’ her. I opened the door, and,
bolting it after me, slipped in, half on the edge o’ my fit. She was
sitting wi’ her hand at her haffit by the side o’ the fire, but she never
let on that she either saw or heard me—she didna speak a single
word. If ever there was a woman—