Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700-1900

Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade

From a catalogue for sale of goods belonging to the Rev. Schutz, 8 April 1811 Source: Northamptonshire Central Library, Sales Catalogues.

Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–1900 Edited by

Jon Stobart Professor of Social History, University of Northampton, UK

Ilja Van Damme Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme 2010 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22946–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Modernity and the second-hand trade : European consumption cultures and practices, 1700–1900 / edited by Jon Stobart, Ilja Van Damme. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–22946–4 (hbk.) 1. Secondhand trade—Europe—History. 2. Consumers—Europe— History. 3. Consumption (Economics)—Europe—History. I. Stobart, Jon, 1966– II. Damme, Ilja van. HF5482.M63 2010 2010023953 381 .190940903—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures

vii

List of Tables

viii

Preface

ix

Notes on Contributors

x

Introduction: Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: Themes, Topics and Debates Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme

1

Part I The Nature of Second-Hand 1 What’s New? Legal Discourse on Second-Hand Goods in Early Nineteenth-century Stockholm Martin Wottle 2 ‘All but the Kitchen Sink’: Household Sales and the Circulation of Second-Hand Goods in Early Modern England Sara Pennell 3 A Stolen Garment or a Reasonable Purchase? The Male Consumer and the Illicit Second-Hand Clothing Market in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Alison Toplis

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4 Second-Hand Dealing in Bruges and the Rise of an ‘Antiquarian Culture’, c. 1750–1870 Ilja Van Damme

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5 The Polarization of the Second-Hand Market for Furniture in the Nineteenth Century Clive Edwards and Margaret Ponsonby

93

6 ‘Souvenirs of People who have Come and Gone’: Second-Hand Furnishings and the Anglo-Indian Domestic Interior, 1840–1920 Robin D. Jones v

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Contents

Part II Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods 7 ‘Old books – New Bound’? Selling Second-Hand Books in England, c. 1680–1850 Ian Mitchell

139

8 Power to the Broker: Shifting Authorities over Public Sales in Eighteenth-century Antwerp Dries Lyna

158

9 Going for a Song? Country House Sales in Georgian England Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart

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10 Tables and Chairs Under the Hammer: Second-Hand Consumption of Furniture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Sweden Sofia Murhem, Göran Ulväng and Kristina Lilja

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11 ‘Consuming Identities’: Patterns of Consumption at Three Eighteenth-century Cape Auctions Tracey Randle

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12 The English Church Jumble Sale: Parochial Charity in the Modern Age Vivienne Richmond

242

Bibliography

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Index

277

List of Figures

4.1 View on the ‘prondel’ market alongside the Dijver around 1895. Old clothes are hanging in trees, or they are simply stacked on the ground (Source: CAB, FO/A03026) 4.2 View on two antique shops along the Rozenhoedkaai (Quai du Rosaire) around 1900. The one in the background is promoting itself as an ‘Old Curiosity shop’, clearly anticipating English tourists (Source: CAB, FO/B00008) 6.1 A typical Anglo-Indian bungalow. ‘Magai Bungalow, Terhoot’, Champaran District, North India, c. 1880 (Source: author’s own image) 6.2 Interior of indigo planter’s house. ‘Drawing room, Turcouleah (Turculea) House’, Champaran District, North India, c. 1880 (Source: author’s own image) 6.3 The furnishings of the Rev. and Mrs James Nicholson, Ceylon. Drawing room of the Wesleyan Mission House, Colombo, Ceylon, 1880 (Source: author’s own image) 6.4 Textiles and European-style furniture within the Anglo-Indian interior. Drawing room in bungalow with three men at Kalagdi, Bijapur, Bombay, 1870 (Source: author’s own image) 8.1 A public sale on the Friday market in Antwerp, 20 July 2007 (Source: author’s own image) 8.2 A public sale of household goods in Antwerp, 7 June 1796. Aquarelle by P. A. J. Goetsbloets (Source: Royal Library Brussels, Manuscript Department, II, 1492, vol. 7) 9.1 Frontispiece of the catalogue for a sale of goods belonging to W. B. Fairchilds, 22 November 1842 (Source: Northamptonshire Central Library, Sales Catalogues) 9.2 Frontispiece of the catalogue for a sale of goods belonging to Rev. Charles Burton Phillipson, 21 April 1800 (Source: Northamptonshire Central Library, Sales Catalogues)

vii

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130 161

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List of Tables

7.1 Minimum number of booksellers in selected north midland towns 7.2 Number of towns with booksellers – north midland counties 9.1 Location and nature of house sales in Northamptonshire, 1761–1849 9.2 Descriptors appearing on the title pages of Northamptonshire sales catalogues, 1761–1849 10.1 Objects sold at auctions in Stockholm in relation to the population in 1690, 1781 and 1870 10.2 Objects sold at auctions in Enköping in relation to the population in 1760, 1870 and 1900 10.3 Furniture as a proportion of all lots auctioned in Stockholm, Enköping and the Uppland region (countryside) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 10.4 Social standing of sellers and buyers in Stockholm, Enköping and the Uppland region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (percentages) 10.5 Furniture sold by burghers in the auctions in Stockholm in 1781 and 1870 by social group (percentages) 10.6 Furniture sold by burghers in the auctions in Enköping in 1730, 1760, 1810 and 1870 by social group (percentages) 10.7 Women as a proportion of all furniture buyers in each social group in Stockholm, Enköping and the Uppland region (countryside) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 11.1 Buyers at case study auctions, by gender 11.2 Percentage spent on fabric goods by a sample of women at the De Savoije auction 11.3 Auction buyers: categories of buyers

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146 146 177 184 202 203

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206 208

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213 225 229 232

Preface This volume originated in a session organized by Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme at the European Social Science History Conference in Lisbon, 2008. The session aimed to build on the recent growth in interest in trade in and consumption of second-hand goods in Western Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specifically, we sought to address three key areas of concern. First was the question of who bought second-hand goods and why they chose these rather than new goods. Implicit here was a challenge to assumptions that motives were primarily economic, and an invitation to consider the social and cultural attractions of second-hand goods. Second was the need to identify the variety of mechanisms by which used goods were brought to the market and to examine the ways in which these were formalized or regulated by urban or state government. Third, and perhaps most importantly, we wanted to try and throw some light on the long-term trajectory of the second-hand trade – particularly its relationship with industrialization and modernity. It is the last of these aims that forms the central theme of the current collection of chapters. Some are drawn from the conference in Lisbon, but others have been specially commissioned in an attempt to bring together a wide range of perspectives on the second-hand trade in its various guises, from house sales in seventeenth-century Westmorland to the furnishing of late nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian homes, and from the corporatist regulation of Swedish auctions to the casual purchases of used clothing by English farm workers. The collection, of course, owes much to the meticulous work of the various contributors, but we would also like to thank the organizers of the European Social Science History Conference for the opportunity to bring together such a fruitful mix of ideas and interpretations. In addition, we acknowledge, with gratitude, the support given by our respective institutions and by Palgrave Macmillan, in particular Michael Strang and Ruth Ireland who, from the start, showed great enthusiasm and confidence in the project. Lastly, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewer, whose careful reading and thoughtful comments did much to hone the arguments of all contributors. Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme ix

Notes on Contributors Clive Edwards is a Reader in Design History at Loughborough University. His research interests focus on the furnishing and decoration of interiors, the trades involved and the process of supply and consumption. Robin D. Jones is Principal Lecturer and Programme Group Leader in the School of Visual Arts, Southampton Solent University. His research interests lie in the material culture of British-controlled South Asia, particularly the furniture and interiors of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India. His book, Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, 1800–1947, was published in 2008. Kristina Lilja is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Economic History at Uppsala University. Her main research interests are financial history and social history. Since 2005 she has been working with a research project concerning auctions and second-hand consumption during the period 1700–1900. She is currently studying family savings during the nineteenth century from a life-cycle perspective. Dries Lyna is a Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders, at the Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp. He is currently preparing his PhD thesis, ‘The cultural construction of value. The birth of the art auction in Antwerp and Brussels, 1700–1794’. His interest lies in the functioning of the resale market for art; the development of marketing strategies, and the evolution of taste for paintings in the early modern period. Rosie MacArthur is a research student at the University of Northampton. She is currently completing her PhD on the material culture and consumption practices of the English gentry, specifically the Hanbury family at Kelmarsh Hall, Northamptonshire. Ian Mitchell is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton. His current research interests centre on markets and other forms of non-shop retailing in nineteenth-century England, and on books as objects of material culture in the early modern period. x

Notes on Contributors

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Sofia Murhem is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economic History, Uppsala University. Her research has focused mainly on labour economics and industrial relations, but she has also headed a research project on auctions and consumption in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Sweden. She is currently researching pawnbrokers in Sweden, 1850–1950. Sara Pennell is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern British History at Roehampton University. Her interest in second-hand goods grew out of her work on the material cultures of food and eating in early modern England, and feeds into her current research interests in the materiality of the ‘everyday’, experiences of consumption of non-elite objects and the creation of domestic knowledge in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Margaret Ponsonby is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Wolverhampton. Her research interests include the material culture of the home 1750–1850 and the interpretation of historic interiors open to the public. Tracey Randle is Principal Researcher and Resident Historian for the Museum van de Caab, situated on Solms-Delta estate in Franschhoek, South Africa. She is currently doing her PhD at the University of Cape Town with a focus on social identity and material culture in eighteenthcentury Cape colonial society. Vivienne Richmond is a Lecturer in Modern British History at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently writing a monograph on the dress of the poor in nineteenth-century England and researching the burial practices of the London poor, 1832–1870. Jon Stobart is Professor of Social History at the University of Northampton. His research currently centres on consumption and the country house, and on the retailing and consumption of groceries in the period 1650–1850, on which he is writing a book for Oxford University Press. Alison Toplis is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton. Her research interests include provincial clothes retailing during the period 1800–1850 and working-class dress.

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Göran Ulväng is a Research Fellow at the Department of Economic History, Uppsala University. His research has focused on the importance of economic and social processes for the rural building tradition. A member of the team researching ‘Forgotten consumption: the role of auctions in relation to the transformation of society 1700–1900’, he is now working on a project on pawnbrokers and their role in the Swedish welfare state, 1850–1950. Ilja Van Damme is member of the Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp, and a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders. His research covers a range of topics including consumption preferences, fashion and taste, advertising and shopping. Currently he is conducting research into the rise of an antiquarian culture in Bruges. Martin Wottle is Lecturer in History at Södertörn University, Sweden. His research includes works on early modern urban history, not least from a gender perspective, with special regard to the retail trades, legal corporations and the fashion market.

Introduction Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: Themes, Topics and Debates Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme

Introduction The second-hand trade has long been the Cinderella of retail and consumption history. However, not unlike the famous character in this classic folk tale, second-hand research has recently undergone a remarkable change in fortune. Interest is growing, and so are the methodologies and interpretations needed to bring this field of research into mainstream historical understanding. This introduction will review the historiography of second-hand consumption across Western Europe and beyond, highlighting it as a ‘forgotten’ topic of modernist interpretations. We explore this neglect – and the recent growth in interest – in terms of more general trends in the historiography of consumerism and retailing, emphasizing the varied approaches taken by scholars in different countries as they respond to national schools of history and a highly variable set of primary source materials. In doing this, we seek to identify common ground as well as differences, and outline the ways in which second-hand and first-hand circuits of exchange interrelated both for the buyer and the seller. In particular, we challenge the under-theorization of second-hand consumption and argue that ideas drawn from analyses of present-day practices and motivations can prove fruitful in this regard. To conclude, we outline the general aims of this volume and suggest how its various chapters can challenge or correct existing paradigms and assumptions regarding second-hand transactions.

‘Discovering’ the second-hand trade Studying consumption and retail practices has become increasingly en vogue in the last 20 years – neatly coinciding with the ‘end’ of 1

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Introduction

historical narratives constructed as a Marxist struggle between the rich and the poor. From a dialectical story of capitalism and its labour relations, historiographical focus shifted attention to the more elusive and hitherto neglected middling sorts of people.1 On the Continent (especially in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy) historians re-thought the functioning of guilds and corporations, revising our understanding of small craft and retail businesses, and the emergence of the petit bourgeoisie.2 In England too, the middling layers of society were discussed in the context of the growing literature surrounding the ‘birth of a consumer society’.3 Consumption has long been acknowledged as a crucial field of interest, capable of reflecting on historical processes of material, social and even cultural change. More recently, however, research into the actual transactions between buyers and sellers has sought to bridge the gap between the supply structure and the product market, on the one hand, and the demand preferences and material culture of the households, on the other.4 Thus, the study of consumption has become ‘increasingly articulated with, and not become an opposition to, the study of the mechanisms by which goods are produced and distributed’.5 Precisely this longitudinal perspective was at the heart of the ‘systems of provision’ approach, pioneered by Fine and Leopold.6 It is recognized how the ‘world of goods’ is not located in a single moment of self-centred acquisition, but spread more evenly over a longer series of consumption flows.7 Consumption is seen as pliable, a practice of consolidating past owning as much as purchasing something new. Cultural and anthropological studies emphasize the tempo or periodicities of consumption: the relationships between people and things have life-histories of their own, dominated by use and reuse, frequency of purchase, disposal and dispersal, gifting, storage and lending, pawning and circulation, renewal or lifestyle changes.8 Studying people’s attitudes to and retention of old possessions is one way of grasping the ‘biographies of things’ and thus places the history of consumption in an essential social and cultural perspective.9 It is ironic, then, that consumption studies have been almost exclusively interested in innovation and novelty. A widening demand for novelty and change has been analysed as a privileged motivation to consume and a driving force behind the construction of a so-called consumer society. It has been variously portrayed as underpinning the rise of a ‘fashion-system’ which drove the demand for exotic imported goods, stimulated the introduction of new products by domestic manufacturers, and structured the consumption practices of an ever broader range of consumers.10 Laurence Fontaine connects this historical neglect

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of ‘all things old’ to the ‘enlightened’ eighteenth century, which ‘gradually raised the status of the new, and valorised the replacement of objects and wardrobes, to the detriment of their conservation and re-use’.11 But equally important is the long-running dominance of ‘whiggish’ interpretations of history, presenting complex historical processes as a linear and optimistic story of progress in which modernity comprised both the process and product of renewal. From this standpoint, everything ‘old’ became backward – a remnant of the past, bound to be conquered by modernity, and hence uninteresting for further study. Only recently have historians sought to escape these enlightenment and whiggish perspectives and become interested in the less eye-catching moments of a ‘consumption flow’, including the second-hand trade. The emerging interest in used goods links, in part, to the growing array of ‘alternative’ forms of exchange which characterize modern consumption: anything from car boot sales and ‘swishing’, to farmers markets and online retail sites such as eBay. More broadly, it is tied to the growing confluence of scientific research and the political attention given to environmental issues. Just as activists and political parties are trying to establish global or even national ‘green policies’, so historians are struggling to understand the ‘environmental behaviour’ of consumers. The resulting analysis of recycling practices and waste disposal has encouraged a better understanding of the importance of second-hand transactions in the past as well as the present.12 Combined, these two strands of enquiry reveal how any emerging consumer society is vested in a much older and omnipresent world of the second-hand trade where nothing of value was left untouched or readily discarded.13 Household possessions were redistributed and reused from generation to generation; new purchases were worn-out, patched up and refashioned; all sorts of products circulated between social ranks and provided alternative currencies and employment in different segments of the market.14 It is clear that second-hand dealing and consumption warrant a more general analysis than hitherto has been attempted. Beverly Lemire’s work on the textiles and clothing trades in eighteenth-century England was important in emphasizing the place of second-hand in the earlymodern retail infrastructure, but it must be balanced by research into other consumer goods and other segments of the second-hand market.15 Moreover, in addition to an emphasis on the actual evolution of secondhand objects, we need to theorize more fully the specific social position and motivations of the buyers and sellers of older goods. Economists and sociologists alike have tended to ignore the intricacies and complexities

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inherent to second-hand dealing, too often leaning on simplistic arguments of economic necessity.16 Cultural and anthropological studies too have made little attempt to conceptualize the specific relations between consumers and their world of used belongings. A rare exception is the work of Gregson and Crewe, who have constructed a framework to understand why present-day consumers buy second-hand goods.17 Whilst there are problems in applying this model to historical contexts, it remains useful to historians since it demonstrates and conceptualizes the ways in which second-hand cultures are still an essential part of our modern affluent and throwaway society. It urges historians to reconsider their assumptions about the evolution and structural significance of the second-hand trade throughout history. Moreover, whilst they acknowledge the importance of economic imperatives for some consumers of used goods, Gregson and Crewe also emphasize the links between individual identity and second-hand consumption. Their analysis is helpful, therefore, in integrating second-hand into broader analyses of consumption and consumer society. It also challenges the axiomatic association of modernity with mass consumption and mass-produced goods.

Second-Hand trade and modernity Conventional understandings of the second-hand trade in early-modern Britain emphasize its importance in the consumption practices and cultures of the lower orders, with used goods forming a mainstay of the household economies of poor consumers who could not afford to buy new. Yet the reality here and across Europe was rather different: consumers from all social groups bought a wide variety of second-hand goods. The aristocracy acquired luxury items such as Old Master paintings at auctions or through private sales; and they joined the gentry and the middling sorts in buying furniture, tableware, linen and so on from house sales and public auctions.18 From the eighteenth century, however, the market for used goods declined in its relative importance, especially for higher status groups. This is attributed in part to a shift in consumer tastes which placed a greater emphasis on fashionable and often less durable items: fewer goods of any value reached the secondhand market and when they did, fewer high status consumers wanted to buy them. By the early nineteenth century, this decline was compounded by increasingly efficient production and distribution systems, which meant that poorer consumers shifted their preferences to cheap new goods.19 In a modern economy, then, there was a reduction both in the supply of and demand for used goods. Indeed, modernization in

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science, healthcare and industry made old things suspicious, unsound, and eventually old-fashioned and useless. With the exception of a small and specialized trade in antiques and fine art, second-hand became equated with cast-offs and rubbish: neither socially and economically important nor worthy of academic analysis. Whilst this long-term relative decline in the importance of secondhand goods as a whole is well established,20 recent research suggests that we need to refine our understanding of both the nature of second-hand goods and the ways in which supply and demand varied across time and space, and between different sectors of the second-hand market. The chapters in this book demonstrate that second-hand remained important throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and dispel the myth of a single monolithic market for second-hand goods. Moreover, they show how second-hand outlets have to be judged on their own merits, fulfilling historical contingent needs and desires, without necessarily being residual or backward to present-day alternatives. A linear or even teleological story of second-hand transactions being eclipsed by ever more efficient and modern commercial practices is as unhelpful as the supposedly sudden disappearance of long established customs and manners in handling consumers. As such, all chapters in this book challenge intuitive assumptions about ‘modernity’ and its relationship with second-hand markets. Modernity was fragmented and contingent, and so too was the market for second-hand goods. The clothes trade formed one important branch, but was itself highly differentiated both in terms of the goods being offered and the ways in which they were traded.21 In addition, there were also vibrant markets for books, furniture, household goods, carriages, artwork and even food which had previously been owned by other people.22 Each of these sectors of the second-hand market was structured and driven by different economic and social imperatives, with financial necessity and fashion being just two of many motivations. Books, for example, may have been out of print and thus only available secondhand, whilst used furniture was sometimes preferable because of its superior quality or proven durability. Artwork could gain cultural and economic value from it previous owner – a point often played upon by sales catalogues.23 Furthermore, there was considerable variety in modes of buying and selling used goods, both between and within these various sectors. Some sellers were highly specialized, whilst others dealt in a wide range of used goods; some were part of highly regulated trades and others were opportunists operating at the margins of the formal economy. The range of possibilities is perhaps best illustrated by the trade

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in used clothing. In eighteenth-century England, tonnes of clothes were shipped out of London and into the provinces and the Continent by wholesale dealers. These were sold on stalls in markets and fairs, or from the growing number of specialist retail shops – a mix which persisted well into the nineteenth century, albeit with a tendency to decentralization.24 But more local systems of exchange also operated. Clothing constituted the most common pledges at pawnshops, which then sold off goods which remained unredeemed. Outside formal retail systems unwanted or stolen clothes were frequently sold in seemingly chance encounters between strangers in taverns, streets or fields.25 This range of possibilities was by no means exceptional. Used furniture and household goods could be bought at fairs, pawnbrokers, auctions, house sales or from a growing number of furniture brokers whose shops contained a mixture of old and new.26 Second-Hand books were most often found in booksellers shops, but they could also be bought at auctions or from stalls at fairs. And unwanted carriages were sold by coach makers and directly by their owners who placed advertisements in the provincial press.27 Overall, it is difficult to discern a secular trend to greater formalization of the kind that might characterize rational or modern markets. Indeed, the eighteenth century saw a move in many countries towards deregulation of the second-hand market: guild controls were relaxed and the trade was opened up to a greater range of venues and vendors. This triggered the decline of once important retail systems, such as the Friday market in Antwerp; but it also encouraged the growth of new forms of selling, including specialist auctions.28 These were sometimes state controlled (as in Sweden) and were increasingly held in dedicated premises, especially when the goods were high value items such as antiques or art.29 Yet the sale of many second-hand goods remained informal and fragmented. Indeed, the nineteenth century saw the rise of a range of new venues for buying and selling second-hand goods across much of north-west Europe. At one end of the spectrum were jumble sales, often organized by churches as part of their fund-raising and charitable works. These linked back to pre-modern notions of paternalism; their popularity with consumers questioning the domination of modern systems of production and exchange, even in late nineteenthcentury England. At the other end of the scale were the antique shops, showrooms and auctions which tapped into the growing fashion for the old and the whimsical.30 These were especially significant since an emergent culture of antique collecting might be seen as a marker of modernity: a means of integrating the (distant) past with the present and marking progress between the two. This tied directly to the ways in

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which classical civilizations were valorized in enlightenment thinking, but extended the time frame to include more recent periods of history. At the same time, it served to distinguish antiques from the mass of second-hand goods: the valued from the valueless. Collecting antiques marked the taste and discernment of the owner, the goods themselves being seen as reservoirs of cultural and economic capital. The inflated price of antiques reflected this cultural value. Perhaps most importantly, the emergence of a market for antiques served to codify and legitimize the collection of these valued items as a distinct type of consumption, thus separating ‘respectable’ second-hand consumption from the mainstream of consumption practices and ideals, which were – or should be – increasingly focused on the new and the novel.31 At the same time, the continued existence of a wide variety of secondhand markets forms a tacit challenge to modernity. At one level they constitute a form of consumption based on motivations other than rational economics. As Gregson and Crewe demonstrate in a presentday context, not just antiques, but a range of second-hand goods enable the consumer to express identity and distinction. At another, the huge market in used goods at once marked and constructed through online retailing sites such as eBay shows that the second-hand trade is not simply a social and cultural construct, but also a reality in economic terms.32 This is especially significant because the survival of second-hand markets, even in diminished form, signals the inability of the first-hand market (and by implication ‘modern’ systems of production and marketing) to meet growing demand for a wide range of durable goods. The fact that many people continued to buy second-hand goods throughout the nineteenth century and into the present day – often in preference to new ones – clearly indicates that there was a significant body of demand not being directly sated by the production of Europe’s factories and workshops. In developmental terms, the continued importance of the second-hand trade into the nineteenth century uncouples mass consumption from mass production. It also challenges the supremacy of the shop – and especially the department store – as the apogee of retail modernity.

Variations on the standard narrative As is apparent from the collection of chapters contained in this volume, the nature and practices of the second-hand trade varied considerably from country to country – a reflection of different systems of regulation, patterns of demand and cultures of consumption. Across Europe

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and beyond a huge range of goods were bought and sold second-hand, but the importance of used goods in supplying the needs and wants of consumers was often determined at a fundamental level by the availability of new goods. For Sweden, Sophia Murhem, Göran Ulväng and Kristina Lilja argue in Chapter 10 that a relative lack of new consumer goods made auctions of used items central to the consumption practices of a wide range of social groups: second-hand was essential to both basic furnishing requirements and attempts to embellish the home with small luxuries or a better standard of household goods. Indeed, their economic significance appears to have continued growing through the nineteenth century, despite the onset of modern industrialization.33 Much the same was true in the Cape Colony and in colonial India. During the eighteenth century, Tracey Randle (Chapter 12) argues, second-hand goods were essential to the construction of a respectable and comfortable domestic environment since official supplies were limited and costly. In India, Robin Jones (Chapter 6) shows how the limited availability of new goods and the itinerant lives of the British administrative class encouraged reliance on second-hand, often in contradiction with the cultural preferences which they brought from England. In Britain itself, where we might assume the supply of new goods to have been less problematic, second-hand was one of several options open to consumers who also enjoyed ready access to a wide array of new and fashionable items – if household budgets allowed. Indeed, in such developed economies, there were often finely graded distinctions in terms of the quality of second-hand as well as new goods – as Clive Edwards and Margaret Posonby demonstrate in their discussion of the furniture trade (Chapter 5). Such differences were marked by geographical as well as social divides. At the luxury end of the second-hand market, art and elite goods were most readily available in the metropolis, especially at the auctions run by Christies and Philips in London and at the Hotel de Ventes in Paris.34 Within provincial towns there was a clear divide between the reputable auctioneers and dealers on the main thoroughfares, and the clothes salesmen and pawnbrokers in the back streets. In the countryside, as Alison Toplis shows in Chapter 3, informal and casual systems of exchange continued to operate through much of the nineteenth century, despite the expansion of modern retailing systems. Modes of selling were also highly varied, sometimes along national lines as well as according to the type of goods being sold. In Sweden, for example, Martin Wottle (Chapter 1) argues that ‘pre-modern’ corporatist attitudes to trading persisted right through the nineteenth century.

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9

Not only were public auctions heavily regulated, the state was also intimately concerned with defining the terms of trade and even the nature of second-hand goods themselves. Such close regulation also shaped the practices of second-hand dealers in early-modern Belgium. However, economic modernization was here accompanied by deregulation. Ilja Van Damme (Chapter 4) and Dries Lyna (Chapter 8) demonstrate how the powers of the ‘second-hand’ guilds and the monopoly of the Friday market in Antwerp were gradually eroded and a much broader range of venues and vendors developed through the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These developments often followed or paralleled precedents set in Britain where there was relatively little formal guild or state involvement in second-hand trading by the eighteenth century. This freedom goes some way to explaining the wide variety of formats through which used goods were sold, but these also reflected the huge social and economic importance of the second-hand trade, even in an industrializing and modernizing country. Sara Pennell (Chapter 2) shows how public auctions served both a basic need for household goods and a mechanism for reinforcing social position within the community. Writing about a period some 150 years or so later, Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart (Chapter 9) argue that, whilst many of these concerns remained, house sales also fed into broader discourses of modernization. Both Ian Mitchell (Chapter 7) and Edwards and Ponsonby (Chapter 5) remind us how closely interwoven were the markets for new and second-hand goods, with retailers and brokers often selling new and old alongside each other. Whilst none of these modes of selling were peculiar to Britain, the range of possibilities was unusually wide, and events such as jumble sales do appear to have been an essentially British phenomenon. As Vivienne Richmond (Chapter 12) demonstrates, these combined traditional notions of charity and community obligation, with more modern ideas of commercialization and consumerism, underlining the liminal nature of second-hand exchange. Linked to these varied modes of selling – but also to the underlying cultures of consumption that characterized different countries and, indeed, different geographical areas or social groupings within them – were different experiences and perceptions of buying. We have already noted the wide range of possible motivations that encouraged the purchase of used goods. It is clear that those buying a coat or a pair of boots from a stranger in a country lane (see Toplis, Chapter 3) were actuated by different motives from those which shaped the actions of connoisseurs at metropolitan art auctions (see Lyna, Chapter 8). Equally, there were various, if rather more subtle distinctions in the motivations of those

10

Introduction

buying used furniture or books: from economy and availability to the capturing of value and marking of distinction (see Chapter 5 by Edwards and Ponsonby and Chapter 7 by Mitchell). Layered on top of these were the different experiences and motives that arose from national differences in systems of buying and selling second-hand. Auctions varied enormously as public events: from the formalized and regulated sales in Sweden (see the contributions by Wottle in Chapter 1 and by Murhem, Ulväng and Lilja in Chapter 10) through the rather more haphazard practices of house clearances and sales in provincial England or colonial India (see Chapter 2 by Pennell, Chapter 6 by Jones and Chapter 9 by MacArthur and Stobart), to the glamorous social occasion seen at Christies or at the Hotel de Ventes. There was, then, a huge range of experiences to be enjoyed or endured in buying second-hand goods, and no uniform perception of what it meant to buy second-hand. Meanings and experiences varied in accordance with the goods being bought and sold, but also along social, economic, ethnic and national lines. They ranged from the aspirational purchasing of Swedish peasants and Cape colonists (see Chapter 10 by Murhem, Ulväng and Lilja and Chapter 11 by Randle), through the bargain-hunting of working-class women buying at jumble sales (Richmond), to those seeking distinction in the particular and the whimsical, available at country house sales or Bruges’s nascent antiques trade (Chapter 9 by MacArthur and Stobart and Chapter 4 by Van Damme). These variations are significant as they undermine whiggish arguments that second-hand consumption was driven by economic necessity and would thus decline in the face of increasingly efficient production and supply systems. If people bought second-hand goods for social and cultural as well as purely economic reasons, then there is nothing incompatible or contradictory between economic modernization and the persistence of a vibrant second-hand market.

A research agenda Studying the second-hand trade in a long-term perspective can only be successful if findings are placed in a comparative perspective.35 Analyses of particular times and places have been useful in bringing attention to a largely neglected research field, but can only be considered a starting point. We must move on to consider the ways in which the second-hand trade responded to changing social, economic and cultural circumstances across Europe, but also in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme

11

How was the second-hand trade organized; who was involved in buying and selling second-hand goods, and what were their motivations for doing so – particularly in the context of increasingly efficient systems of production and distribution. Indeed, we should examine the extent to which the reuse of old goods was only economically viable in societies with an abundance of low wage labour and a scarcity of highpriced resources. Do second-hand markets become obsolete as societies and economies modernize or do they continue to play an important role in supplying the needs and wants of consumers? This volume forms an attempt to address some of these questions. By drawing together analyses of the second-hand trade in a variety of European and colonial contexts, it highlights the importance of secondhand consumer cultures and practices across a wide range of goods and to a broad spectrum of society. Moreover, by offering perspectives from England, Belgium and Sweden, we highlight the ways in which national and local differences in economy, politics and culture helped to shape the operation of the market for second-hand goods. These differences are brought into sharper relief by analyses of European colonial communities – a perspective which allows us to explore the ways in which attitudes and motivations from ‘home’ were susceptible to change in the very different social and cultural contexts of life in the colonies. Most particularly, the chapters seek to investigate the relationship between the second-hand trade and notions of modernity in a range of different contexts, highlighting the ways in which the two operated in constructive opposition. At the same time, they challenge the established orthodoxy which claims that the economic and cultural value of second-hand declined from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, with the rise of industrialization, standardized products, the manufacture of cheap and new goods and the advent of a ‘throwaway’ society. Taken as a whole, these chapters reveal that the second-hand trade – broadly defined – was not a relict of a primitive past, but an integral part of modern systems of consumption, serving all sections of society.

Notes 1. Especially in England, a ‘history from the middle’ became very popular in the 1990s. See P. Earle (1989) The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London: Methuen); J. Barry (1991) ‘Consumer passions: the middle class in eighteenth-century England’, The Historical Journal, 34, pp. 207–216; M. Berg (1993) ‘Small producer capitalism in 18th-century England’, Business History, 35, pp. 17–39; J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds) (1994) The Middling Sort of People. Culture, Society and Politics

12

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

Introduction in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan); J. Smail (1994) The Origins of Middle-Class Culture. Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660–1780 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press); M. R. Hunt (1996) The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). For a recent status-questionis, see the special issue of Journal of Urban History, 31(3) (2005) entitled ‘The middle class and the city’. See, for instance, G. Crossick and H.-G. Haupt (1995) The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe 1780–1914. Enterprise, Family and Independance (London: Routledge); J. R. Farr (1997) ‘On the shop floor: guilds, artisans, and the European market economy, 1350–1750’, Journal of Early Modern History, 1, pp. 24–54; G. Crossick (ed.) (1997) The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate); M. Prak, C. Lis, J. Lucassen and H. Soly (eds) (2006) Work, Power and Representation: Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries (Aldershot: Ashgate). N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb (1982) The Birth of a Consumer Society. The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Hutchinson). For useful overviews, see C. Fairchilds (1993) ‘Consumption in early modern Europe: a review article’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35, pp. 850–858; P. Glennie (1995) ‘Consumption within historical studies’, in D. Miller (ed.) Acknowledging Consumption. A Review of New Studies (London: Routledge), vol. 1, pp. 164–203; M. S. Beerbühl (1995) ‘Die Konsummöglichkeiten und Konsumbedürfnisse der englischen Unterschichten im 18. Jahrhundert’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 82, pp. 1–28; D. Poulot (1997) ‘Une nouvelle histoire de la culture matérielle?’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 44, pp. 344–357; P. M. Stearns (1997) ‘Stages of consumerism: recent work on the issues periodization’, Journal of Modern History, 69, pp. 102–117. Recent comparative volumes include B. Blondé, E. Briot, N. Coquery and L. Van Aert (eds) (2005) Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early-Modern Europe. England, France, Italy and the Low Countries (Tours: Tours University Press); B. Blondé, P. Stabel, J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds) (2006) Buyers and Sellers. Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols). D. Miller (1995) ‘Consumption as the vanguard of history, a polemic by way of introduction’, in Miller (ed.) Acknowledging Consumption, p. 17. B. Fine and E. Leopold (1993) The World of Consumption (London: Routledge). S. Pennell (1999) ‘Consumption and consumerism in early modern England’, The Historical Journal, 42, pp. 557, 560. M. Douglas and B. Isherwood (1979) The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (New York: Basic Books), pp. 114–127. I. Kopytoff (1986) ‘The cultural biography of things: commodification as a process’, in A. Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 64–94. See also G. McCraken (1988) Culture and Consumption. New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). McKendrick et al., Birth of a Consumer Society. See also J. Brewer and R. Porter (1993) Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge); J. de Vries (2008) The Industrious Revolution. Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: University Press).

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13

11. L. Fontaine (ed.) (2008) Alternative Exchanges. Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York and Oxford: Berghahn), p. 8. 12. S. Strasser (1999) Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan Books). 13. A point made evident in the much debated W. McDonough and M. Braungart (2002) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press). 14. See, for example, A. Vickery (1998) The Gentleman’s Daughter. Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), p. 282; J. Styles (2008) The Dress of the People. Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), pp. 277–301. 15. B. Lemire (1988) ‘Consumerism in preindustrial and early industrial England: the trade in second-hand clothes’, Journal of British Studies, 27, pp. 1–24; B. Lemire (1991) Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 61–76, 176–190; B. Lemire (1997) Dress, Culture and Commerce. The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 95–120; B. Lemire (2005) ‘Shifting currency: the culture and economy of the second-hand trade in England, c.1600–1850’, in A. Palmer and H. Clark (eds) Old Clothes, New Looks: Second-Hand Fashion (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 29–48. 16. See, for example, C. Williams (2003) ‘Participation in alternative retail channels: a choice or necessity?’, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, 31, pp. 235–243. 17. N. Gregson and L. Crewe (2003) Second-Hand Cultures (London: Berg). 18. J. Woodforde (1935) Diary of a Country Parson, 1758–1802 (London: Oxford University Press), passim; S. Nenadic (1994) ‘Middle-rank consumer and domestic culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720–1840’, Past and Present, 145, pp. 122–156; I. Van Damme (2006) ‘Changing consumer preferences and evolutions in retailing. Buying and selling consumer durables in Antwerp (c.1648–1748), in Blondé et al. (eds) Buyers and Sellers, pp. 199–224; G. Stöger (forthcoming) ‘Disorderly practices in the early modern urban second-hand trade (sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries), in Thomas Buchner and Philip R. Hoffmann-Rehnitz (eds.), Shadow economies and irregular work in urban Europe. 16th to early 20th centuries (Austria: Forschung und Wissenschaft – Geschichte 2, Berlin). 19. Lemire, ‘Shifting currency’, pp. 29–48; D. Lyna (2008) ‘Changing geographies and the rise of the modern auction, transformations of the secondhand markets of eighteenth-century Antwerp’, in B. Blondé, N. Coquery, J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds) Fashioning Old and New. Changing Consumer Patterns in Western Europe (1650–1900) (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 169–184; Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumer’, p. 134. 20. See B. Blondé and I. Van Damme (2009) ‘Fashioning old and new, or remoulding the material culture of Europe’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Fashioning Old and New, pp. 4–7. 21. M. Ginsburg (1980) ‘Rags to riches. The second-hand clothes trade 1700–1978’, Costume, 14, pp. 121–135; B. Lemire (1991) ‘Peddling fashion: salesmen, pawnbrokers, taylors, thieves and the second-hand clothes trade in England, c. 1700–1800’, Textile History, 22, pp. 67–82; J. Styles (1994) ‘Clothing the North: the supply of non-elite clothing in the eighteenthcentury North of England’, Textile History, 25, pp. 139–166; M. Charpy (2008)

14

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

Introduction ‘The scope and structure of the nineteenth-century second-hand trade in the Parisian clothes market’, in Fontaine (ed.) Alternative Exchanges, pp. 99–101. C. Edwards (2004) Turning Houses into Homes. A History of the Retailing and Consumption of Domestic Furnishings (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 71–74; Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumer’; J. Stobart (2006) ‘Clothes, cabinets and carriages: second-hand dealing in eighteenth-century England’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Buyers and Sellers, pp. 225–244; C. Guichard (2008) ‘From social event to urban spectacle: art auctions in late eighteenth-century Paris’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Fashioning Old and New, pp. 203–216; C. Wall (1997) ‘The English auction: narratives of dismantlings’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31, pp. 1–25. J. Salman (2007) ‘Watching the Pedlar’s movements: itinerant distribution in the urban Netherlands’, in R. Myers, M. Harris and G. Mandelbrote (eds) Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade (Newcastle: Oak Knoll press), pp. 137–158; Wall, ‘The English auction’; Guichard, ‘From social event to urban spectacle’, pp. 206–207. Lemire, ‘Shifting currency’; Charpy, ‘Second-Hand trade in the Parisian clothes market’. For a detailed discussion of this, see Styles, ‘Clothing the North’, pp. 139–166; M. Lambert (2004) ‘ “Cast-off waering apparel”: the consumption and distribution of second-hand clothing in northern England during the long eighteenth century’, Textile History, 35, pp. 1–26. Edwards, Turning Houses into Homes, pp. 71–74; Van Damme, ‘Changing consumer preferences’; Lyna, ‘Rise of the modern auction’. J. Salman (2003) ‘Peddling in the past. Dutch itinerant bookselling in European perspective’, Publishing History, 53, pp. 5–9; stobart, ‘Clothes, cabinets and carriages’. Van Damme, ‘Changing consumer preferences’, pp. 207–216 and, more generally, H. Deceulaer, ‘Second-Hand dealers in the early-modern low countries. Institutions, markets and practices’, in Fontaine (ed.) Alternative Exchanges, pp. 13–42. Wall, ‘The English auction’; Guichard, ‘From social event to urban spectacle’; D. Lyna and F. Vermeylen (2009) ‘Rubens for sale. art auctions in Antwerp during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in F. Vermeylen, H. Vlieghe and D. Lyna (eds) Art Auctions and Dealers. The Dissemination of Netherlandish Art during the Ancien Régime (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 139–153. See, for example, M. Charpy (2009) ‘The auction house and its surroundings: the trade in antiques and second-hand items in Paris during the nineteenth century’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Fashioning Old and New, pp. 217–233; Edwards, Turning Houses into Homes, pp. 126–128; D. Cohen (2006) Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), pp. 148–156. C. Campbell (2001) ‘The desire for the new. Its nature and social location as presented in theories of fashion and modern consumerism’, in D. Miller (ed.) Consumption. Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences (London: Routledge), vol. 1, pp. 246–261; S. Nenadic (1999) ‘Romanticism and the urge to consume in the first half of the nineteenth century’, in M. Berg and

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32. 33.

34. 35.

15

H. Clifford (eds) Consumers and Luxury. Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 208–227. See Blondé and Van Damme, ‘Fashioning old and new’, p. 5. K. Lilja, S. Murhem and G. Ulvang, ‘The indispensable market: auctions in Sweden in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Fashioning Old and New, pp. 185–201. Wall, ‘The English auction’; Guichard, ‘From social event to urban spectacle’. See Blondé and Van Damme, ‘Fashioning old and new’.

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Part I The Nature of Second-Hand

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1 What’s New? Legal Discourse on Second-Hand Goods in Early Nineteenth-century Stockholm Martin Wottle

Introduction In this chapter I will examine the concepts of new, old, used and so on in the context of the second-hand trades of early-nineteenth-century Stockholm.1 My aim is to examine the ways in which a discourse of ‘new’ and ‘used’ was employed and handled by protagonists in legal cases concerning the clothes brokers in Stockholm, and how this discourse might shape our understanding of contemporary notions of the second-hand market. Today, the concept of second-hand refers primarily to the flow of goods and the functioning and structure of the market. Basically, an object becomes second-hand once it has changed hands between distributor and consumer more than once, regardless of its state and age. In fact, many second-hand shops tend to sell obviously new items, sometimes in their original packaging, thus providing an outlet for misdirected purchases, unwanted birthday presents and so on. Second-Hand is a designation describing a relation between the goods, the distributor and the consumer, which may or may not have something to do with the condition of the object itself. In early-nineteenth-century Sweden – and Stockholm in this case – things often turned out to be more complicated. There was no such thing as a free market and the demarcation line between old and new was but one of many instruments for dividing the existing market between the citizens proper – the licensed manufacturers, artisans and tradesmen belonging to the Burghers’ Estate within the Diet – and all the others.2 Providing for the less fortunate was, however, also one of the formidable tasks of the city authorities and, from the 19

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The Nature of Second-Hand

mid eighteenth century, legislators put aside a few areas of petty trade for needy women of good repute. These were to become the mongers (månglerskor), itinerant saleswomen of primarily food products; the trinket dealers (nipperhandlerskor), selling manufactured or home-made women’s and children’s accessories, and finally – and in focus here – the clothes brokers (klädmäklerskor).3 Despite the name, their field was not restricted to clothes, but included also furniture and household utensils: to judge from the records, primarily copper, tin or brass vessels. Of these, at least clothes and metalwares may be seen as being particularly attractive on a second-hand market, where items may very well be used as alternative currency.4 The catch was that their merchandise should be ‘old and worn’. As may easily be guessed, the everyday economic practices of the city made the boundaries between the different trades considerably more blurred than was intended and litigation between legal corporations, and between corporations and individuals, constituted a considerable part of the Trade Board’s workload. In the case of the second-hand sector, new versus old became one of the key issues. Corporations regularly accused the clothes brokers of selling goods that were in effect new and thus of acting as illegal competitors. But, according to contemporary standards, the assumed issue was not whether the goods had changed hands once, twice or more times, but whether it appeared new or not. What was on trial was the apparent state and quality of the individual item. But of course it was not just a matter of deciding between new or old. In discussing this, the authorities addressed issues of how and from whom the clothes brokers procured their merchandise and in what ways it had been used and worn. The ultimate goal was to ascertain that the basic tenets of the corporatist urban economic policies would be maintained.

Modernity, consumption and the second-hand market An extension of the popular view among sociologists, that what we tend to call modern society emerged in the Western world sometime during the late eighteenth century, is the notion that modern patterns of consumption emerged at about the same time.5 Key factors are the gradual spread of industry and industrially produced consumer goods, and the ensuing democratization of consumption. McCracken depicts a Europe where the shift towards modern consumption had already taken off in the sixteenth century, but gained decisive momentum during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the wake of industrialization

Martin Wottle 21

and the massive expansion of the market for consumer goods. To condense his argument, the path towards the modern consumer included the following transitions: from being part of a collective assignment – where family fortunes, tradition, convention and the notion of patina were central – consumption increasingly became part of the individual project, of self-definition, immediate satisfaction, and the quest for novelty and fashion.6 McCracken brings these factors together in the concepts of curatorial versus modern consumption. In the world of curatorial consumption, durability, patina and the transferring of goods between generations were important elements in creating belonging and feelings of heritage. McCracken quotes McKendrick in claiming that, until the breakthrough of the alleged consumer revolution, people inherited more goods than they purchased; whereas, in modern consumption, the acquisition and disposition of new commodities are central features.7 The rapid expansion of the market for consumer goods in the eighteenth century also included the phenomenon of fashion spreading to new categories of merchandise, besides clothing, accessible to the ‘common man’. Furniture, pottery and so on were now also part of an increasingly rapid turnover of goods.8 This increased turnover rate may be linked to another characteristic of the democratization of consumption, important not least for the second-hand sector. Blondé, in his account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Antwerp, points to a transition from durable goods to others which were cheaper, breakable and more easily worn out, as part of the great transformation of the market. Whereas pewter, copper and even wool had a value beyond their utility and retaining a raw-material value even after long usage or if torn or broken, the new materials were usually useless and valueless when and if they became broken and worn out.9 Nijboer refers to the intrinsic value of the nonbreakable goods which made way for new articles, more subjected to rapid fashion cycles. Whereas investing in refundable goods (more akin to McCracken’s curatorial consumption) may have been rational for increasing and preserving one’s economic capital, investing in novelty, however perishable, became part of the cultural capital of modern consumerism.10 For the second-hand market, this evolution may have had positive or negative results. Blondé claims that the Antwerp second-hand dealers suffered from the gradual decline in goods that were suited to repair and resale.11 On the other hand, the entire expansion of the market and the overall increase in turnover of goods may have contributed to an expanding second-hand market. However, this discussion of modern

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The Nature of Second-Hand

consumption focuses mainly on the supply and demand of desirable commodities and the mental evolution of the consumers. It does not take into account institutional and legal conditions surrounding the production and retailing of those desirable objects, whether new or second-hand. Irrespective of whether the second-hand market suffered from a decline in suitable goods, the early nineteenth century seems to have witnessed a certain dislocation between emerging patterns of consumption and what we would call the market. If one important aspect of modernity is the recognition of the individual and thus an acceptance of consumption as a constituent of the individual project, it does not automatically follow that the market as a societal institution developed in the same way or according to the same principles and schedule. A ‘modern’ consumer market, as we know it, accommodates to the needs and desires of the individual. The Swedish urban economy in the early nineteenth century was, however, in most respects still part of an early-modern, corporatist society. Hence, the market was an institution serving two major purposes: first to guarantee the supply of food and other necessities for the population, and second to secure the position and wealth of the burghers’ collective bodies – the legal corporations. From the perspective of the institutional and legal framework, the market was still guided by moral as much as economic considerations – a framework into which many facets of modern consumption, such as the quest for novelty, were not easily accommodated. It is not my intention here to survey or describe the condition of the second-hand market in Stockholm per se, but rather to draw attention to the modes of thought that guided this business. Thus, the focus is not on what was sold, by whom and to whom, and at what price, but rather on legal argumentation and on the possible obstacles to the emergence of a modern consumer market.

Gender issues and the urban economy of early-nineteenth-century Stockholm From the 1760s, Stockholm was cast into a recession, with a collapsing textile industry being its most notable expression. Population growth came to a halt and there are indications of widespread social and demographic crisis, such as high mortality rates and low marriage rates.12 This stagnation lasted until the Swedish industrial breakthrough in the mid nineteenth century, placing the present discussion firmly within this problematic setting. The widespread legal obstacles to female

Martin Wottle 23

economic activities in a corporatist society, in these times of crisis, pushed increasing numbers of women into the informal sector of the economy.13 The situation called for political action and the so-called ‘woman issue’ became part of the economic debate in early-nineteenthcentury Sweden. Despite early tendencies toward more liberal ideas, calling for a gradual dissolution of some of the privileges of the Burghers’ Estate in order to open more trades to women, the main framework remained in place until 1846, when more thorough liberal reforms were finally launched.14 Until then, most female urban occupations were still regarded as anomalies and exceptions, as something to be tolerated but never encouraged. Yet, as van Aert and van Damme show, economic decline by no means had to result in a contraction of the retailing sector or any slowing down of the introduction of new consumer goods and fashions.15 International scholarship has pointed to the importance of the secondhand sector in providing for the needs of the less well-off; in spreading fashion to the lower strata of society and in acting as institutions of credit.16 However, the gendered character of the clothes brokers’ trade in Stockholm pushed it to the margin of the urban economy. Thus, the Stockholm brokers were at a decisive disadvantage compared to, for instance, the Parisian fripiers − also basically second-hand dealers − who were allowed to develop their trade into a major actor on the Parisian fashion market.17 In summary, then, the Stockholm second-hand trade was part of a sector that was not really acknowledged as being of any real importance to the flow of goods, but meant primarily as a temporary relief for women in need. On the other hand, the trade of the clothes brokers was of potential importance to the development of a growing market for consumer goods, albeit against a background of a generally contracting economy.

Some notes on the sources and the legal framework The main municipal court in early-modern Stockholm was the Magistrate. Apart from acting as court in criminal cases, the Magistrate handled all of the city’s administrative and economic matters through its four boards, each one headed by its own mayor. These were the Board of Justice and the Board of Public Order (headed by jurisprudent mayors), and the Board of Guilds and Building and the Trade Board (headed by mayors from the ranks of the burghers).18 The cases discussed in this chapter were dealt with by the Trade Board and the

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The Nature of Second-Hand

Magistrate, respectively. From the municipal scene, the next levels of appeal were the National Board of Trade and, sometimes, His Majesty’s Government. The material is extracted from the records of appeal cases from the Stockholm Magistrate.19 From the diaries of appeal cases,20 all preserved records from between 1787 and 1838 have been traced. From the records of appeal cases,21 I have chosen those cases where the issue of new or old appears as central. Some additional material, on the 1809 case, has been found in the documents of the Tailors’ Guild.22 The set of documents normally found in each case is a copy of the minutes of the Trade Board, frequently with a transcript of the prosecutor’s original report; the appeal (to the Magistrate) of the convicted party and a declaration/commentary from the opposite party. To find the Magistrate’s verdict, the usual source is the minutes of the notary in economic cases, which may or (more frequently) may not contain records of actual discussions, apart from the more formalized verdict.23 The material found comprises seven cases covering the years 1809−38. Of these, some concern more than one clothes broker, raising the total number of women involved to 28. An important presumption for this chapter is the, in many ways, antiquated legislation regulating urban economic life in Sweden. Until the liberal breakthrough in the mid nineteenth century, urban trades were submitted under legislation from the 1730s and 1740s. Mercantilist in essence, regulations focused on the protection of domestic manufacture, recurring import restrictions, a clear division of labour between production and distribution and a remaining strong corporatist structure. A small number of amendments had been made to meet economic development, but the basic structure remained and proved surprisingly resistant to political changes.24 At the municipal level, authorities generally trod very cautiously, their main concern being the welfare and preservation of the burghers and their trades. Particularly revealing in this context is the reaction of the Trade Board in 1828, when 12 female clothes brokers petitioned for an extension of their privileges. The Board reasons that, because their petition was not supported by any existing statute, there was no way the Board could condone any change in those same statutes.25 This kind of circular argument points to the anxiety characterizing much of the behaviour of the authorities. Further, many regulations were implemented more rigorously in Stockholm than in other towns. With its well-developed trade specialisms, the Stockholm market more easily lent itself to a clear separation between production and distribution. Small industrial and commercial centres, sometimes

Martin Wottle 25

with just a handful of artisans and tradesmen, had greater potential for more market-oriented entrepreneurial merging.26

The clothes brokers’ trade As has already been noted, the clothes brokers’ trade was a female one. Whilst the occasional man can be found earlier in the eighteenth century, women reigned supreme after 1790.27 Apart from being needy and of good repute (the usual prerequisites for any such position) they were expected to be ‘daughters of the city’ – born and raised there and preferably married to, or daughters of, burghers or city servants.28 Despite the prerequisite of being needy – meaning without adequate support from a man – a majority of these women were married, although the share of unmarried women tended to increase towards the mid nineteenth century.29 The ‘serving or labouring classes’ were largely absent; most of the clothes brokers originating from the middle social strata of the city – increasingly so during the first half of the nineteenth century, probably mirroring the growing difficulties among many families in relying on solely the husband’s or father’s income.30 Between 1779 and 1829, around eight or nine women a year obtained permission to engage in clothes broking in Stockholm.31 According to early-nineteenth-century statistics, there seems to have been between 80 and 100 women active annually.32 Apart from their three main areas of merchandise – clothes, furniture and household utensils – the clothes brokers were entitled to sell just about anything old and worn. The main restriction was that they were not allowed to interfere in any activity close to the burghers’ trades. In common with most artisans and traders, they were also forbidden to occupy more than one shop or stall.33 From the legal records studied here, one can easily draw the conclusion that they normally specialized in one of the main areas (most cases concern only one type of merchandise). This may be a misapprehension, however, since the prosecutor normally acted on behalf of only one or two corporations at a time – rather than making general investigations – leaving a false impression of specialization. As was the case with the other female trades of food mongering or trinkets dealing, it is fair to assume that incomes were, in general, rather modest. On the other hand, it is equally obvious that some women managed to carve out a substantial enough piece of the market to be rather well-off. It is, for instance, apparent that many of them had employees, even if those often seem to have been relatives.34 There are also indications that their shops could contain quite impressive amounts

26

The Nature of Second-Hand

of goods. Regina Christina Dahlpihl, brought before the court in 1837 for allegedly selling new furniture, saw the following items confiscated by the prosecutor: four sofas (from mahogany and West Indian cedar), eighteen chairs, four stools, one chest of drawers and one work-table. Considering that this might very well be only part of her stock, the size of her premises must have been considerable.35 Resolutions regulating the clothes brokers’ trade are known from the late seventeenth century, but a more clearly specified ordinance was issued in 1752. Subsequent ordinances were issued in 1762 and 1775, but the alterations seem to have been marginal. In effect, clothes brokers active in the 1840s, just before the liberal reforms, worked under legal conditions dating back almost a century.36 In the licenses, two major ways of acquiring merchandise were stated as legal: selling on commission and buying goods at public auctions. In fact, the auctions occupy a special place in this context. Even if the licenses clearly stated that the auctions were one of their primary sources for acquiring goods, the situation was by no means unproblematic. Lilja, Murhem and Ulväng, who have researched the system of public auctions in Sweden, define auctions as ‘the sale of second-hand goods through bidding’.37 However, although most goods sold at auctions would certainly be labelled second-hand by modern standards, early-nineteenth-century authorities by no means equated second-hand with used. The clothes brokers frequently commented that at auctions the goods were sold in batches, often with old and new items mixed, and that it was not always within their means to tell old and new apart in the purchase. Some argued that, since they were entitled to make purchases at auctions, they also had the right to dispose of those purchases as they saw fit. One of their legal representatives tried to appeal to the fundamental law of private property: no law could prohibit anyone from selling that which they had lawfully acquired. If so, the clothes brokers would in effect be ‘reduced to rag-and-bonewomen’.38 For the authorities, however, that was beside the point. It was the apparent state of the item that was essential. The fact that something was sold at an auction was not enough to label it used or worn. If it looked new, it probably was new, and hence out of bounds for a clothes broker. It was their duty to separate old from new, and refrain from selling the new.39 Ironically, the only thing the authorities could do with confiscated goods if the clothes broker was finally convicted was to leave it to the public auctions, putting them back into circulation.40

Martin Wottle 27

Before the court: old, new, borrowed or . . . The main reason a clothes broker found herself before the court was a denunciation. The initiative seems in most cases to have come from one of the guilds active within the brokers’ main sectors: tailors, coppersmiths, cabinet makers and furniture dealers. The craft guilds had the right to conduct regular ‘hunts’, of bunglers and any unauthorized craftsmen and dealers suspected of infringing on their monopolies. The hunt in itself, though, could be pursued only by the public prosecutor. Since this issue was not really determined by market relations or the flow of goods, there was really just one thing to do – to take a thorough look at each item separately, trying to determine whether it had actually been used, and in that case, how and to what extent. ‘New’ could mean mint, straight from the manufacturer; but it could apparently also mean fairly new, worn once or twice, partly new or basically new but with a few blemishes. Each party elected their own inspectors – supposedly people with some professional knowledge in the field – and the court set a date for the inspection. Not surprisingly, the different teams of inspectors often came to different conclusions, leaving to the court the delicate job of interpreting their various statements. It did not help, of course, that sometimes the inspectors were dismissed as clearly partial.41 In the meantime, storage conditions and time could result in the items faring badly. For a modern reader it is sometimes incomprehensible how any of these things could have been regarded as new. When lists with descriptions of the confiscated goods appear in the records, terms like moth-eaten, broken, veneer in splinters, repaired and soiled are not uncommon.42 However, it is often hard to corroborate, either for the modern reader in particular or the protagonists, when this damage had actually occurred. The lines of defence and arguments utilized by the clothes brokers varied, of course, but references to principles and more abstract ideas about society and the rights of the individual (as mentioned above) are exceptions. More frequently, they resorted to rather evasive explanations regarding how the goods in question had ended up in their shop. Some of these point to the early-nineteenth-century shop not so much as part of public space, but more of a semi-permeable interface between private and public. It was a place where proprietor and employees, relatives, acquaintances and customers moved and intermingled, mixing buying, selling, pawning, lending or just passing the time of day.43 Hence, there are several references to goods just left in the shop

28

The Nature of Second-Hand

by chance or being the proprietress’ private property and not for sale at all.44 The prosecutor, on the other hand, could argue that anything found in the shop should be regarded as part of the merchandise.45 Occasionally the cases touch upon matters of principle. Among these is the question of selling on commission from the city’s artisans. This was the only accepted channel for acquiring merchandise apart from buying at auctions. But the presupposition was, of course, that the goods should be used and worn. Selling new products from other producers was a direct infringement on the rights of the city’s retail-trade societies. For many artisans, however, a channel such as the clothes brokers could prove useful. Artisans were generally entitled to sell their own products from their own workshop, but opening a shop was another matter. Some had access to outlets within the system – smiths, for instance, could supply the dealers in ironware – whereas a few, like the shoemakers, had obtained the right to set up joint-venture stores. When it comes to those areas in which clothes brokers were involved, the situation was rather mixed. The Stockholm tailors fought for decades for the right to set up a warehouse for ready-made clothing, but without success.46 Cabinet makers had, in principle, an outlet in the city’s furniture dealers. To avoid over-dependence on these dealers, the cabinet makers apparently set up a guild warehouse around 1750, but its success is unknown.47 In 1832, several cabinet makers petitioned the Trade Board for permission to use the clothes brokers’ shops as showrooms. Many of them, they argued, had their workshops located too far out of the city centre or were too poor to keep their own shops.48 For an artisan in the 1830s, even in a comparatively small city like Stockholm, the workshop alone was no longer sufficient to attract customers. Modern shopping was on its way and for many trades access to a real shop must have been of increasing importance.49 Apparently, at least some of the cabinet makers and clothes brokers were under the impression that the petition from 1832 was successful. In 1837, both Lovisa Damström and Regina Dahlpihl maintained that the procedure was quite in order, as several craftsmen had placed furniture in their shops, not so much for sale as for display, should some interested customer appear. For the court, however, the main issue was, as usual, whether the items could be judged new or used, and, as usual, many of the items were in fact both soiled or in need of repair, rendering it almost impossible to ascertain whether they had been new or not at the time of their original appearance in the shop.50 As 12 clothes brokers in 1828 advanced the idea of an extension of their licenses – including the right to sell new goods − they argued that,

Martin Wottle 29

from the perspective of the national economy, it was all the same where someone bought their goods, as long as they were manufactured within the realm. If an artisan chose to engage a broker in selling his products, they were still Swedish goods and put to the same use.51 In this, the brokers made an attempt to raise the matter to a macro-level. As long as domestic production was encouraged and allowed to flourish, the question of new or worn, or the exact venue of the exchange of goods would be of minor importance. However, the rigid separation of new from old served to uphold one of the foundations of the corporatist society: the antagonism to the middleman (or, in this case, middlewoman). The fact that the designation used for these women was clothes brokers of course points to the deliberately intermediary position they inhabited, but also to the importance that they kept to old items. New products should be sold by the manufacturer, whose gain ought to be solely the worth of his time and work effort, thus limiting the risk of unethical levels of profit. If artisans started to use independent salesmen or -women as middlemen, new and unwanted actors would interfere, claiming their share. Much of the corporatist ethics would be lost in such a development.

Defining use and used In 1831, the public prosecutor Anders Salomonson filed a case involving the coppersmiths’ guild and seven clothes brokers. Christina Westlind tried to explain to the court that if new pots and pans had been found in her shop that was entirely beyond her control. Many a poor coppersmith would pawn part of his stock to make money and, since such goods were pawned according to the metal value, there was no difference between pawning a used or a new pan. If the item was not redeemed it could very well find its way to the auctions, where it was sold solely according to weight, and the buyer was usually at a loss to decide whether it was new or not.52 According to the prosecutor, however, several of the sequestered copper vessels in question were in fact used, but in an inappropriate manner. They had obviously been put over the fire, smutty and sooty as they were. But, concluded the prosecutor, this was a common trick. Many women bought new pots and pans, filled them with water – so as to protect the tinned inside − and put them over the fire, where they quickly acquired a superficial sootiness. But they had never been used in the proper sense – for real cooking – and should, hence, be judged as new.53 It is hard to say whether the prosecutor was correct in his suspicions, but the argument sheds some light over the strange predicament of the

30

The Nature of Second-Hand

clothes brokers: to buy new things and then try hard to make them look old, in order to sell them. To judge from the examples discussed here, some clothes brokers also seem to have had some difficulties in actually procuring merchandise that was unquestionably old and worn. Moreover, it is apparent that sometimes not even real use was recognized as proper use. The fact that the item in question had actually been used or worn did not automatically transfer it beyond status of new. As the role of fashion increased, for clothes in particular but for other types of commodities as well, more nearly new items would end up on the second-hand market, making the judgement of new or worn even harder. When the Tailors’ Guild accused Helena Liffman (and others) of selling new clothes, in 1809, they specifically declared to the Trade Board that even if the ladies’ coat in question had maybe been worn once or twice that was hardly enough for it to merit the label ‘old’ or ‘worn’.54 For the tailors, an item of clothing was new when it looked new enough. (Since they did not have the right to sell ready-made clothes themselves, the tailors were extra sensitive in this respect.) The case found its way up to the National Board of Trade, where deputy judge Altin made some observations, stating that clothes could not be regarded as a special case. Like all other traded goods, clothes − more or less used − became lawful merchandise for the brokers, once they had left the tailor’s workshop. In his view, the key issue was not whether the clothes in question had been somewhat worn, but rather whether they had been made to order on behalf of the clothes brokers, or by an unauthorized producer. Since that was not the case, there really was no case.55 Actually, what Altin implied was that the state of the individual item was in fact less important than the question of from where the goods originated. Clothes brokers as subcontractors would have constituted a real challenge to the system. But, whereas the tailors’ use of unaffiliated women as seamstresses was a well-known secret at the time, there is no evidence of the clothes brokers fulfilling a similar role.56 Indeed, in one respect Altin’s stance here is closer to that of the clothes brokers themselves: putting less emphasis on the actual condition of the merchandise. On the other hand, however, he was just as adamant as the corporations in preserving the borderline between production and distribution. The 1831 case about the copper kitchenware is illuminating in this respect. The accused women were also confronted with the question of whether they had bought the copper pans new, used them privately and then put them up for sale.57 They answered in the negative, but the question is, in itself, interesting. What if they had answered yes? If that were a problem, we must change our focus from the question of what

Martin Wottle 31

they sold to the question of what they bought! Could the crux of the matter have been the purchasing stage, rather than the selling stage? Otherwise, it is not really comprehensible why a clothes broker should be prohibited from selling her own laid off clothes, her own pots and pans or chairs. Again, this thought leads us to the concept of the middleman, and also to the dividing line between raw materials and manufactured goods. Within the textile sector, for instance, fabrics were intermediate between raw materials proper and worked up consumer goods. Mercers and linen drapers thus filled an acceptable gap between the two stages. But the overall principle was, still, that manufactured consumer goods should be sold directly by the producer himself. Any middle stage was to be seen as an exception. Returning to the aforementioned petition from 1828, where the clothes brokers applied for extension of their privileges, their stance was that it did not really matter − from an overall perspective − where the customers bought their necessities, as long as the mercantilist goal of stimulating domestic industry was fulfilled. Following my line of reasoning, however, the catch was not that someone had bought a pot or a chair from a broker instead of an artisan. The catch was that they had bought something new, directly from the producer; not for their own use, but to sell it a second time (or even for their own use, and then selling it a second time). These ethical foundations of the urban trades remained in full working order right up to the abolition of the corporatist system in 1846. From a legal point of view, the ensuing transition to a liberal system appears to have been rather swift, as these matters disappear completely from the records of the municipal boards within a year. But, until then the intent of legislators and authorities to keep the dividing line between production and distribution, and to avoid any intermixture between trades as far as possible, remained a fundamental obstacle to any ambitions that the second-hand dealers had to develop their trade according to the demands of a modern consumer society.

Conclusion Initially, I addressed the question of modern consumption, its development and its consequences for the market of second-hand goods. According to Blondé, the shift from curatorial to modern consumerism, with its focus on novelty and less durable goods, resulted in a decline of the second-hand sector. In reading these accounts from earlynineteenth-century Stockholm, one might get the impression that the

32

The Nature of Second-Hand

clothes brokers sometimes did have difficulties in acquiring secondhand goods, to a degree where they actually had to purchase new commodities and then put them out for sale as used. This would be an over-interpretation of course. The material does not contain sufficient evidence of the daily conditions of the Stockholm second-hand market and the everyday business of the women within this trade. However, it does tell us something about contemporary notions of the market, the relation between production and distribution, and the possibility of a second-hand market proper. It seems obvious that the modern concept of second-hand did not have any real meaning to the protagonists in these cases. Nor did ‘new’ necessarily connote the same things as today. Our idea of a new piece of merchandise, straight out of the wrapping and never touched or used by anyone before us, did not have any significance in the early nineteenth century. Items that were beyond doubt used or worn to some extent could also be regarded as new or at least new enough to be the subject of debate about their status. Both ‘old’ and ‘new’ were used to describe various conditions, from unquestionably new to almost in fragments. And somewhere along that scale was the tipping point, where the clothes broker transgressed into the realm of illegality. The ultimate goal of scrutinizing every single item of merchandise was to make clear its origin and its route to the clothes broker’s shop. The main issue was not exactly what the broker sold to her customers, but how she had acquired the goods. Any hint of the brokers acting as agents or even subcontractors for other tradesmen or artisans would have meant a serious transgression. When tried before the court, there is some evidence that women relied on arguments of principle: the right of the individual and the ‘law’ of private property. However, although much of the economic debate of early-nineteenth-century Sweden did embrace liberal ideas, society was still largely organized along corporatist lines and ideas of individual rights could still raise controversy, especially if women were involved. From my perspective, the rules regulating the second-hand trades of early-nineteenth-century Sweden mirror conceptions of work, trade and profit founded in a corporatist mindset. And these conceptions tended to work against many other factors conducive to the emergence of ‘modern’ modes of consumption. As ‘middlewomen’, there was something inherently suspicious of the clothes brokers. Manufactured consumer goods should, in principle, be sold by the manufacturer. Most regulated retail trades were involved in the sale of raw or semi-raw materials, such as textiles or foodstuffs. Any middle stages were seen as exceptions.

Martin Wottle 33

Being, by definition, inhabited by women in need, the clothes brokers’ trade was one of only a handful that were allowed to deviate from this basic principle. But the whole idea that someone would profit from the resale of an item, without any apparent effort of his or her own, did constitute a break with corporatist ethics. Thus, the restrictions on the clothes brokers relied as much on the purchasing as on the resale stage. How they bought their merchandise was just as important as how they sold it. Gender was an important issue here. Although many of the constituent parts of the political economy were in principle gender neutral, the urban economy was to a great extent still controlled by legal corporations openly maintaining most urban trades as male prerogatives. Any trade set aside for women or other needy groups would be pushed to the margin, carefully supervised and controlled by guilds and authorities alike. As such, second-hand trades were firmly regarded as second-rate and thus denied the role they could have played in the development of a modern consumer market. The idea that a new item could actually perform the journey from manufacturer to a shop, to a buyer, and then to a second shop or buyer, and by virtue of that journey to change its status from new to secondhand was doubtful. Equally doubtful was the idea that someone could buy a new item with the sole intention of selling it on and making a profit. The mid nineteenth-century liberal reforms – both economic and political – removed corporatist society and most of the corporatist ethics in Sweden. But before that, and as long as consumer goods remained part of an embedded economy, where the privileges of manufacturers and tradesmen were just as important as any consumer demand, the second-hand trades found themselves entangled in this scrutinizing of the state and fate of individual pieces of merchandise. In Sweden, the early nineteenth century was, in many ways, part of the march towards modernity. When it comes to consumption and material culture, Sweden saw the same trends of fashion and new kinds of consumer goods as most of Europe. The country experienced the same debate over the hazards and possible blessings of this supposedly new quest for luxury and novelty, and the social perils of the democratization of consumption. But, as is noted in the Introduction to this volume, modernity is not an unambiguous concept, and the inclinations and desires of the public were frequently at odds with the relative inertia of the law and institutions. The goods and shops were there, as was the willingness of the public to embrace the new material culture; but there was still some delay for ‘the market’, in a modern sense, to join in.

34

The Nature of Second-Hand

Notes 1. This chapter is written in connection with the research project Fashion, Power and Market. Sweden, Pomerania and Russia 1600–1830, which is financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen) at Södertörn University, Stockholm. 2. The four estates of the Swedish Diet – the clergy, the nobility, the burghers and the peasantry – were consolidated during the sixteenth century, and would remain as the foundation for political and societal organization until 1866. 3. C. Bladh (1991) Månglerskor. Att sälja från korg och bod i Stockholm 1819−1846 (Stockholm: Stockholmia förlag); M. Wottle (2010) ‘Detaljhandeln med kläder och tyger, 1734–1834’, in K. Nyberg (ed.) (2010) Till salu. Stockholms textila handel och manufaktur 1722–1846 (Stockholm: Stads- och kommunhistoriska institutet), pp. 119–141. 4. B. Lemire (2005) The Business of Everyday Life. Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600−1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 91−9. 5. H. Thörn (1997) Modernitet, sociologi och sociala rörelser (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet), p. 33; P. Wagner (1998) A Sociology of Modernity. Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge), p. 3. 6. G. McCracken (1990) Culture and Consumption. New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), pp. 10−22. 7. Ibid., pp. 50−3. 8. Ibid., pp. 39−40. 9. B. Blondé (2005) ‘Cities in decline and the dawn of a consumer society: Antwerp in the 17th−18th centuries’, in B. Blondé, E. Briot, N. Coquery and L. Van Aert (eds) (2005) Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modern Europe. England, France, Italy and the Low Countries (Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais), pp. 37–52. 10. H. Nijboer (2005) ‘Fashion and the early modern consumer evolution. A theoretical exploration and some evidence from seventeenth century Leeuwarden’, in Blondé et al. (eds) (2005) Retailers and Consumer Changes, pp. 21–36. 11. Blondé, ‘Cities in decline’, pp. 50−1. On second-hand dealers in Antwerp, see I. Van Damme (2006) ‘Changing consumer preferences and evolutions in retailing. Buying and selling consumer durables in Antwerp (c. 1648–c. 1748)’, in Blondé et al. (eds) (2006) Buyers and Sellers (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 199–223. 12. J. Söderberg, U. Jonsson and C. Persson (1991) A Stagnating Metropolis: The Economy and Demography of Stockholm, 1750−1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 13. Ibid., chapter 4. 14. G. Qvist (1960) Kvinnofrågan i Sverige 1809–1846. Studier rörande kvinnans näringsfrihet inom de borgerliga yrkena (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet). 15. L. Van Aert and I. van Damme (2005) ‘Retail dynamics of a city in crisis: the mercer guild in pre-industrial Antwerp (c. 1648−c. 1748)’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Retailers and Consumer Changes (Tours: Presses Universitaires FrançoisRabelais) [cf. note 9], p. 142.

Martin Wottle 35 16. B. Lemire (1988) ‘Consumerism in preindustrial and early industrial England: the trade in secondhand clothes’, Journal of British Studies, 27, pp. 1–24; D. Roche (1999) The Culture of Clothing. Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Regime’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 344−63; P. Perrot (1994) Fashioning the Bourgeoisie. A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 42−52. 17. Roche, The Culture of Clothing, pp. 355−63. 18. I use the term Trade Board instead of Board of Trade, to make a clear distinction between the municipal board (Handelskollegium) and the National Board of Trade (Kommerskollegium). 19. Stockholms stadsarkiv (Stockholm Municipal Archives, henceforth SSA); Magistratens och Rådhusrättens arkiv (The Magistrate and Town Law-Courts, henceforth MR). 20. Diarier i besvärsmål, vol. 3. 21. Akter i besvärsmål (henceforth ABM). 22. Kungliga Biblioteket (National Library, henceforth KB); Skräddareämbetets skrå och handlingar, B. 609 (henceforth Skr.Ä B.609). 23. SSA, MR, Notariens ekonomiprotokoll (henceforth NEP). 24. H. Lindström (1923) Näringsfrihetens utveckling i Sverige 1809−36 (Göteborg: Göteborgs högskola); M. Wottle (2000) Det lilla ägandet. Korporativ formering och sociala relationer inom Stockholms minuthandel 1720−1810 (Stockholm: Stads- och kommunhistoriska institutet), chapters 3 and 4. 25. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 152, 17 March 1828: protokollsutdrag Handelskollegium (minutes of the Trade Board, henceforth HK), 12 February 1828. 26. K. Nyberg (1999) Kommersiell kompetens och industrialisering. Norrköpings ylleindustriella tillväxt på Stockholms bekostnad 1780–1846, (Uppsala: Uppsala Studies in Economic History 44). 27. C. Sjölin (2004) ‘Klädmäkleri i Stockholm 1779−1829. En studie av en för behövande kvinnor förbehållen handelsgren och dess plats i privilegiesamhället’, unpublished BA thesis, Södertörn University, spring, p. 15. 28. Ibid., pp. 28, 31. 29. Ibid., pp. 21–2, 25–6. The tendency towards more unmarried women could possibly be an indication of a degrading social status of the trade as such. More probable, though, it is more a result of the changing demography, including a surplus of women and low marriage rates. 30. Ibid., pp. 24–5; see also Bladh, Månglerskor, pp. 103−5. 31. Sjölin, ‘Klädmäkleri i Stockholm’, p. 15. 32. Qvist, Kvinnofrågan i Sverige 1809−1846, p. 357, table 21. 33. Sjölin, ‘Klädmäkleri i Stockholm’, p. 16; G. M. Danckwardt (1823) Sammandrag af gällande författningar rörande handtwerkerier och manufacturer samt in- och utrikes handel och sjöfart ( . . . ) (Stockholm: Kongl. tryckeriet), p. 266. 34. Sjölin, ‘Klädmäkleri i Stockholm’, pp. 18–19. 35. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 182, 1837. 36. Danckwardt, Sammandrag af gällande författningar, p. 266. 37. K. Lilja, S. Murhem and G. Ulväng (2007) ‘Auktionshandeln i stad och på landsbygd. Varucirkulation i Enköping med omnejd under 1700- och 1800talen’, in C. Ahlberger and P. Lundqvist (eds) (2007) Varans vägar och världar. Handel och konsumtion i Skandinavien ca 1600−1900 (Göteborg: Historiska

36

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

The Nature of Second-Hand institutionen, Göteborgs universitet), p. 48 (author’s translation). See also Chapter 10 in this volume. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 161, 29 July 1831 (Hultman, Hallberg, Berggren et al.). The reference to ‘rag-and-bone-women’ should, in this case, be seen primarily as legal rhetoric. Some trade of that sort did probably exist, but no legal corporation or other way of organizing such a trade is known, and, hence, evidence is scarce. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 161, 29 July 1831, HK, 14 June 1831 (Westlind). SSA, MR, NEP, vol. 100, 18 May 1838 (pp. 173−80) and 1 August 1838 (pp. 219−25). SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 182, 30 December 1837 (Holmström) and 17 January 1838 (Dahlpihl). KB, Skr.Ä B. 609, fol. 626−627a, (1809−1811) (Liffman, Nyberg, Eggertz et al.); SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 182, 8 December 1837 (Damström). Nancy Cox notes that for many early-modern shopkeepers, the actual selling may very well constitute only a minor part of a working day, where other ways of social mingling with prospective customers were just as important. N. Cox (2000) The Complete Tradesman. A Study of Retailing, 1550−1820 (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 131–5. In the case of Sweden, see M. Edgren (1997) ‘Makt, sexualitet och våld: lagen, rätten och det sociala livet genom ett våldtäktsmål i Helsingborgs kämnärsrätt 1821’, Scandia, 63, pp. 227−57. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 182, 8 December 1837, HK 7 November 1837 (Hammarström and Schouger); vol. 161, 29 July 1831, HK 26 April 1831 (Hallberg, Berggren and Norman). SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 161, 29 July 1831, HK 14 June 1831. M. Wottle (2008) ‘Opposing Prêt-à-Porter: mills, guilds and government on ready-made clothing in early nineteenth-century Stockholm’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 56(1), pp. 21−40. M. Lagerquist (1981) Den yrkesmässiga möbelhandeln i Sverige intill år 1780. Studier i Rokokotidens möbelhantverk och möbeldistribution (Stockholm: Nordiska museet), pp. 71−72. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 182, 8 December 1837, HK 4 July 1837. Cox, The Complete Tradesman, pp. 76–115. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 182, 8 December 1837 (Damström); 17 January 1838 (Dahlpihl). SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 152, 12 March 1828, HK 12 February 1828. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 161, 29 July 1831, HK 26 April 1831. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 161, 29 July 1831; appeal to the Magistrate 13 July 1831. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 108, 20 November 1809; the Tailors’ Guild to the Magistrate 4 December 1809. KB, Skr.Ä B. 609, transcript from KK, minutes 20 December 1810 (fol. 589a−592b). RA, KK to His Majesty’s Government (Kmt), vol. 303, The Tailors’ Guild to Kmt 14 January 1806. SSA, MR, ABM, vol. 161, 29 July 1831, HK 10 May 1831.

2 ‘All but the Kitchen Sink’: Household Sales and the Circulation of Second-Hand Goods in Early Modern England Sara Pennell

Introduction On 7 October 1703 the young curate of Sefton (Lancashire), Thomas Brockbank, married Elizabeth Whittingham. Five days later, he wrote to his new bride that ‘we sho’d think of the many footed monster, housekeeping, and be providing somewhat for it’.1 Brockbank and his wife did not actually live together until April 1704, but the process of bringing together the means to make that household began immediately after the wedding. Having written to his parents at Witherslack (Westmorland) at the end of October 1703 about the possibility of their supplying him and his new wife with second-hand bedding and brass, Brockbank received the fatherly advice by return, to ‘buy new and it will last, for you or we may buy at sales which may seem new, yet be half worn’.2 This counsel about used goods is telling on several levels, not least that assembling the material household was not simply a matter of popping down to the local shops to purchase the basics. The newly-wed Brockbanks borrowed, were gifted and on one occasion ‘Begg’d’ the household goods to set up home;3 but it is their expectation of participation in an extant rural sales market for used domestic goods which is the focus of this chapter. Recycling and reuse are phenomena foregrounded in the recent history of mass consumerism, but they are also relevant in the study of early modern, pre-consumerist material culture. Indeed, without recirculation of a wide range of goods and materials, it is possible that the phenomenon problematically called the ‘consumer revolution’ could 37

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not have happened at all. In an under-industrialized, but increasingly industrious society, household access to what de Vries has called ‘desired consumption bundles’ was in part founded on the increasingly speedy circulation of used, but not used up, goods, as well as upon people’s desires to change their consumption practices through choice, as much as custom.4 Alongside the more widely studied new, and increasingly ‘semi-durable’, consumer goods accompanying the ‘new eating habits, new cooking techniques, new drinks or domestic decorations’5 of early modern British domestic material culture, consumers still secured nonnew goods via both retail and other routes: what Lemire has termed the ‘alternative economies’ of borrowing, gifting, bequests and second-hand circulation.6 This last form has received little attention from scholars of premodern British consumption, and the extant scholarship has to date been focused firmly on textiles and clothing, the mid to late eighteenth century, and on used goods circulation in provincial urban and metropolitan settings.7 There is, however, a growing body of evidence to suggest that the apparent birth of the specialized art and book auction market in late seventeenth-century London was not solely a consequence of continental ‘borrowing’, but ran alongside an existing, if small, competitive sales market for other used goods.8 Furthermore, in other areas, notably Kent and north-west England, auction sales of domestic, husbandry and occupational goods, as well as of stock-intrade and real estate, were recognized forms of commodity circulation by the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and probably well before that. This chapter will present some of the evidence for this activity, to initiate a long overdue debate about whether such sales do indeed embody what the editors have termed ‘a tacit challenge to modernity’, or a staging post en route to it.9 If these pre-1750 sales of secondhand goods functioned purely economically, as an essential component of an under- (or proto-) industrialized rural economy ‘to be endured’ rather than enjoyed, then we might construct them as an essentially pre-modern phenomenon. Yet, if we perceive in such sales an activity we might construe as ‘œconomic’, carrying significant positive moral and cultural valencies, as well as being a means both to secure and realize monetary value through commodity exchange, perhaps they should be seen rather as a confirmation that the rational economic theory of the twentieth century can neither capture the full variety, direction and consequences of modern consumption, nor effectively consign earlier historical second-hand consumption to the sidelines of the procession towards that problematic destination, ‘modernity’.

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Finding the pre-1750 English household sale It is true that the sources for non-elite household sales in England before 1750 are far from systematic, and far from official in nature; there is sadly no English evidential repository to match those documenting the formalized, guild-based dealing in second-hand goods documented for Renaissance Venice and Florence, early modern Paris and Flanders.10 Indeed, as Nenadic noted in her study of ‘middle-rank’ consumption practices in eighteenth-century Glasgow and Edinburgh, which occasionally embraced purchase of second-hand goods at household sales, ‘understanding the precise character of this market is difficult because of a lack of consistent recording’.11 Yet clues to the activity are scattered across diaries and private correspondence. Thomas Turner (1729–93), the diary-keeping shopkeeper-cum-schoolmaster of East Hoathly (Sussex), recorded that on the morning of Friday 30 September 1757, he ‘walked up to a sale of the late Master Goldsmith’s, where after staying an hour or two and buying an handbill and a pothook for 8d., I came home’.12 In the unabridged manuscript of the diary there are at least a further half dozen entries regarding Turner’s attendance at household sales and commodity auctions, from Smyrna raisins to his neighbour’s house.13 But these are only records of attendance, and sometimes of purchases, at household and agricultural sales. Sale schedules or bills recording the disposal of household, occupational and agricultural goods bridge the gap between such records of attendance and understanding what exactly was being attended. These documents are by no means common, but where they do survive, they can include the prices that goods realized at sale, details of purchasers and of the sale organization. George Browne (1626–1703) and his son Benjamin (1666–1748) served their neighbours in the Westmorland community of Troutbeck as executors, administrators, trustees and, on occasion, appraisers and it was via these ‘offices’ that such records of the household sales they helped organize survive amongst their family archive.14 Such manuscript schedules and annotated accounts of sales exist in other repositories – notably as part of probate accounts winding up estates, and the accounts of parochial overseers of the poor – but it is impossible to quantify such survivals.15 By the end of the seventeenth century, however, such manuscript records are supplemented by printed resources: advertisements in London newspapers and the Old Bailey Sessions papers, followed by provincial press advertising in the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century; and from at least 1720, printed catalogues

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detailing the goods and estimated prices of forthcoming sales (especially metropolitan ones), sometimes annotated by a sale attendee.16 What follows focuses in great part on analysis of specific sale schedules and ancillary documentation. They pertain entirely to middling and lower status rural household sales; this is in contrast to the genteel and elite metropolitan sales studied by Wall, and also the agricultural auctions of the later Georgian and Victorian era, analysed by Walton.17 The examples are also drawn from particular regions; the geographic extent of such sales is again impossible to map at this stage. Although a small sample, it will nevertheless help to initiate exploration of the rationales behind, and perhaps also the appeal of, household sales in pre-modern rural England, as well as suggest how these opportunities for second-hand circulation differed from more formalized, commercialized auctions and specialist commodity sales.

Contexts for pre-1750 household sales: law, legacies and life-cycles The common aim in the construction of a suitable testamentary settlement in early modern England was the avoidance of passing on financial incumbrances to succeeding generations, and providing for survivors. The success of appointed executors and administrators turned upon their efficiency in the settling of debts to effect both ends. Yet, within the copious contemporary literature regarding these areas, there is little discussion of the procedures by which a decedent’s goods might be dispersed to achieve this. Real and chattel estates were ‘currencies’ in their own right, and transferable; but the increasing visibility of chattel and real estate sales noted for the eighteenth century is surely linked to a developing preference for the liquidation of these assets.18 Probate inventories were in part formulated to provide an estimate of the saleable value of the movable elements of an estate.19 The legal authority Richard Burn is explicit on this point: The inventory shall be made in the presence of some credible persons, who shall competently understand the value of the deceased’s goods; for it is not sufficient to make an inventory unless the goods therein contained be particularly valued and appraised by some honest and skilful persons, to be the just value thereof in their judgements and consciences, that is to say, at such a price as the same may be sold for at the time.20

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This last comment was not merely a reflection upon the need to incorporate some ‘real’ market gauge into appraisal, or to assess accurately the condition of the chattels through depreciation in value, but rather signalled that appraisal was indeed occasionally the prelude to disposal via sale, whether it be to liquidate chattels which were of no use to the testator’s family or to settle disputes amongst heirs.21 Sales were also not just undertaken in disposing of intestates’ estates.22 That testators might explicitly specify the sale of chattels and property as a mandatory preliminary to the distribution of legacies and settlement of debts is not discussed by contemporary framers of ‘perfect wills and testaments’, but it was not unusual. Thus Henry Handley, a husbandman of Helsington in Kendal, in his will dated 13 November 1740 asked his executors to: sell and dispose of all my goods, cattles and chattels . . . for the best price that can be had or gotten for the same and pay, apply and dispose of the money arising by such sale and to be raised out of my personal estate in manner hereinafter mentioned.23 A cursory survey of other printed collections of early modern wills suggests that such a clause was not a peculiarity of the Lakes,24 nor solely the recourse of testators, especially widows, facing up to indebtedness.25 Indeed, insertion of such clauses clearly reflected the life-cycle position of the decedent. A household and estate sale to realize money certainly appealed to Handley who left a widow and a daughter of school age. Handley’s will also notes that his wife brought numerous household goods of her own ‘at their intermarrying’, which she retained at his death; she could thus be seen as ‘settled’ without recourse to the goods to be sold off.26 Furthermore, in those households where realty was either negligble or non-existent, a monetary distribution was probably preferable to, and easier to achieve equitably than, the division of ‘unconverted’ movable property.27 The law of distress for rents due, other debts and damage-feasant in this period also reveal a changing perception of the potential of goods to be liquidated for the realization of debts due. Acts such as the 1690 ‘Act for enabling the sale of goods distrained for rent’, the Landlord and Tenant Act (1709) and the Distress for Rent Act (1737), while transforming landlord/leaseholder relations, also recognized the potential of goods seized in lieu of rent themselves as commodities to be resold; and the availability of and access to a market for such resale.28 Yet while we might expect death and/or debt to dominate as causes for household sales, they were only the most dramatic motivations.

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Pre mortem disposal of goods was conducted frequently by competitive sale as well as via gift. The language used to describe such sales in early eighteenth-century metropolitan newspaper advertisements (in lieu of such evidence from rural contexts) clearly signalled the lack of financial pressures behind these ‘dismantlings’, instead highlighting property downsizing, retirement or the vagaries of transportation between an old and new household.29

Format: the how, who and when of an early modern household sale The household sales detailed in the schedules studied for this chapter were predominantly mixed auction sales, disposing of domestic and occupational goods together, rather than at distinct events. They were auctions in that goods were sold to the highest bidder in attendance, rather than what were usually termed ‘open’ or ‘hand’ sales in which goods were ready-priced, or a bargain was struck between seller and buyer without competition.30 London newspaper advertisements demonstrate that sales by auction were clearly distinguished from those which were simply ‘sales’ with set prices. Thus, the Daily Post for Monday 28 May 1733 contains one sale notice of the stock-in-trade of a cabinet maker, ‘the lowest price being fix’d’, followed by several for household sales explicitly to be conducted ‘by Auction’.31 The bidding process used in these household sales is not explicitly mentioned in any account yet found so it is unclear whether such auctions were conducted in the way with which we are familiar – the highest bid at hammer fall – or via another of the formats common in this period. Sale by candle used the burning of a candle to dispose of each lot, and involved bidders putting forward their bids while a specified length of candle burned, the successful bid being that secured as the flame expired. ‘Mineing’, involved the prospective buyer shouting out ‘mine’ at the desired price when it was announced (in descending order) by the cryer/auctioneer, and was a variant on the Dutch or descending bid auction.32 The organization of a sale was no mean undertaking, especially for those men and women implicated in them. As one of the administrators, George Browne senior was assiduous in his recording of monies disbursed ‘about the appraisement and sales of the goods of the late Leonard Ayray, gentleman’ in 1690–91. The chronology of the sale process is clear, from the entry of 25 November 1690 recording the two shillings spent at agreeing the appraisal of the deceased’s goods through

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to the shilling spent at ‘William Fleming’s at the sealing of the writings’ on 19 February 1691, endorsed by Browne in March 1691.33 The administrators of Ayray’s estate oversaw three sales of ‘moveables’ and one of the real property. The chattel sales – two staged in early December 1690 and the third a month later – were advertised by means of printed tickets (cost two shillings), which were ‘published’ or cried at seven local chapels, and twice throughout Kendal, on the occasion of the last sale (cost 1s 10d). Sale goers were treated to beer, mutton, ‘white bread’ (note the colour: this is high-status bread) and tobacco, while the two purchases of candles either indicate that they were conducted as sales by candle, or that they took place in the late afternoon or evening of the short winter days. The Ayray sale is more formalized than others in the Lake District, and may be explained by the fact that he was denoted a ‘gentleman’; but this sale was far removed from those later eighteenth-century spectacles of James Christie, not least because there is no evidence for the participation of a professional broker or auctioneer. However, certain elements of the sale process were overseen, if not by a specialist, then by recognized ‘men of credit’ like Browne senior, in the locality. Isaac Fletcher (1714–81), the Quaker lawyer and farmer of Underwood, near Cockermouth, Cumbria, regularly discharged the duty of recording household and real estates sales, as noted in his diary. On 27 April 1756, for example, Fletcher ‘was writer at Deborah Atkinson’s sale which began about three’. Two days later he ‘examined and added the sale bills which exactly answer’.34 Fletcher was certainly paid for these writings, but it is unclear whether he undertook this role solely because of his legal expertise, or in relation to any of his other occupational and neighbourly ‘roles’, be it ‘yeoman . . . merchant’ or co-religionist.35 Fletcher, however, never appears to have served as a sale seller or caller. Nicholas Blundell, the recusant squire of Little Crosby (Lancashire), attended the late Thomas Syer’s sale at his house, the Ford, on 2 December 1726, and noted that the ‘sellers’ were ‘Mr Whittle and Tatlock the dyer’.36 The insertion of Tatlock’s occupation helpfully points to this being another of the duties which men of standing were obliged to undertake within their localities, rather than being a distinct occupation. Even sales of distrained and pauper goods required the services of such men, as the Underbarrow (Westmorland) accounts of the overseers of the poor for 6 May 1720 show; the expenses incurred in the sale of the late Ellin Pow’s goods include payment of 1s 6d to Robert Aire for calling the sale which raised £4 1s 9 1 /2 d.37 Clearly these ad hoc auctioneers were recompensed for their effort, but there were other perks too. John

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Mackereth, who cried on each of the five sale days dispersing the movable estate of William Hawkrigg of Grasmere (Westmorland) between 17 October 1710 and 8 March 1711, earning himself 11s 4d, also enjoyed the free beer, food and tobacco. He was also not excluded from buying goods himself; ‘John Mackereth, cryer’ appears on the schedule as purchaser of a fleshfork, skewers, pans and other goods.38 It is this involvement of neighbours, rather than ‘professionals’, in the conducting of household sales which clearly distinguishes the pre-1750 rural household sale from later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century agricultural auctions.39 But tracing the evolution of the specialist second-hand broker or auctioneer outside of London and larger provincial centres before mid century is problematic without the survival of a larger corpus of sale schedules from particular areas. It is possible, for example, that the south-eastern towns settled by Low Countries’ emigrants in the late Tudor and early Stuart period did develop a more formalized second-hand sales market. In early seventeenth-century Sandwich (Kent), for example, the ‘liefcope’ (a Dutch derivation) or sale noted by Jacqueline Bower was conducted by ‘liefcope men’: ‘professional’ auctioneers as Bower calls them, who were due fees from their conduct of the sale.40

Attending the household sale Whether selling the chattels of a pauper or prince, a household sale needed to have keen potential buyers to be successful. It is a constant refrain in Isaac Fletcher’s diary that the household sales he oversaw were well attended,41 while the American-born Anne MacVicar Grant suspected the large audiences for the ‘roups’ or household sales she witnessed in later eighteenth-century Scotland were engineered: It is customary to send letters of invitation to all connections, which intermarriages have created . . . for a century past in the neighbouring counties, inviting them to countenance the ceremony by their presence. This invitation tacitly involves an expectation, warranted by old custom, that these allies, as they call them, will purchase things rather beyond their value . . . the friendly greetings of so many people, bound by a common tie . . . render no unpleasing scene to those who witness the conclusion of it.42 Given the wide advertising of sales, it is unsurprising that the inner ‘circle’ of kith and kin was augmented by ‘the general public’. The 1730

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printed catalogue for the sale of the household goods of Judith Jermyn, Lady Dover (d. 1726) at Newmarket was distributed to inns in Bury St Edmunds, Cambridge, Norwich and made available at the London auctioneer, Thomas Cock’s premises.43 Thomas Turner was informed in this manner of some sales he attended rather than by his personal association with the seller/estate, and sometimes he could be disappointed by such information; on 26 April 1762 he rode with his brother to Seaford (some 20 miles by road from East Hoathly), ‘with the view of being at a sale advertised today, but when we came there the Gentleman, Mr Sam. Winter, his affairs was made up.’44 To map the geographic ‘pull’ of a household sale, one can attempt a form of reconstitution based on surviving schedules; and what follows is a very preliminary attempt at this for the schedules of the pre mortem sales of Benjamin Browne’s goods which took place on 8 and 22 April 1731.45 On the first day 118 lots were sold to 41 different purchasers and 130 to 38 on the second (of whom 18 had not been at the first day’s sale). The ‘catchment’ area of the sale is suggested by those buyers who came to Troutbeck from Patterdale, about ten miles to the north; and from Staveley to the east and Grasmere to the west, both about five miles away. This may be a conservative estimate too, since buyers’ place of residence was only given to distinguish between buyers with identical surnames, so others may have travelled from further afield.46 The socio-economic topography of attendance can also be mapped, albeit partially. The annotation of occupation as a distinguishing mark between like-named buyers shows a smith, shoemaker, butcher, waller, weaver, fiddler and doctor all in attendance. Some of the names are further identifiable in their links to Browne. Jonathan Elleray was probably the incoming tenant of part of Townend (Browne’s house), and in 1748 was named as a supervisor in Browne’s will.47 Widow Sharp emerges from other sources in the Browne archive as a local general shopkeeper; she is surely the ‘Eliz. Sharp’ to whom 7s 6d was paid for ‘shop goods’ used at George Dixon’s sales (for which see below) the year previously.48 Agnes Tyson was perhaps the same Agnes Tyson who appears in Browne’s surviving household accounts as a paid supplier of small amounts of bread and butter.49 Mackereth, Longmire and Birkett are all common Troutbeck Valley names, and Browne was connected by marriage to the Longmires and Birketts. The George Birkett and James Brathwaite amongst the buyers were conceivably Browne’s sons-in-law, married to his daughters Elinor and Ann, respectively.50

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Buying goods at sale: families and ‘the fairer sex’ Benjamin Browne’s sales schedules are invaluable for illustrating who attended these sales, but we also need to be cautious in reading too much into even these records of seeming acquisition; the schedules after all only record those who ‘contracted’ to buy something. They do not give any sense of whether the transaction was actually completed as per the sale regulations given at the head of the schedule; nor any insight into why purchasers bought what they did. Perhaps most puzzling is the inclusion of family members amongst the purchasers; if they were indeed Benjamin Browne’s sons-in-law, what were George Birkett and James Braithwaite doing buying their father-inlaw’s chattels? Were they bidding up the sale, as Anne Grant suggested for her Scottish neighbours, or simply playing out a legal manoeuvre? The familial claim on goods that were to be sold at household auctions like these is difficult to unpick, although a later legal handbook, Bateman’s Law of Auctions (first published in 1838) notes the historical practice whereby ‘an executor, selling the goods of a testator by auction, [had] agreed with a legatee that the price of the goods brought by the latter at the sale were to be set against the legacy’. By such an arrangement the legatee was not bound by the signed conditions of sale.51 This may account for the presence of widows and other family members ‘buying back’ certain household goods at sales, as demonstrated in the disposal of the estate of George Dixon. In 1729–30 Benjamin Browne served as a co-trustee of the estate of Dixon, a yeoman farmer of Orresthead, and may have been the compiler of the schedule of goods disposed at a sale held on 16 April 1730, and accompanying notes recording incurred costs.52 The partial details of the sales conducted by his trustees, while undoubtedly a component of the guaranteeing ‘provision’ for his heirs, could easily be misread, if taken in isolation, as a pathetic attempt to recoup some value for an indebted estate. The April 1730 sale raised only £9 17s 4d; Widow Dixon and the deceased’s son George even appear to buy back those key utensils of the Lakeland kitchen, the reckin crook (chimney hanging iron), girdle (griddle) and brandreth (griddle stand). Yet, if Dixon’s estate was finally ‘worth’ the sum of £1177 4s 6d appended to the foot of Browne’s notes, then Widow Dixon was in a very comfortable position to buy back her girdle (or have its cost set against legacy). Dixon’s inventory also records that he was buried in a funeral that cost £13 to stage, and at his death left an appraised movable

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estate valued at £358 8s (including £240 owed to him on securities).53 The sale of his real estate, conducted nearly a year earlier, on 12 June 1729, incurred costs of £2 14s 1d on brandy, bread and shop goods to lubricate potential buyers, while William Grave was also paid £1 19s 6d, a significant sum, on 15 June 1729 for calling ‘the sales’. This plural reference suggests that the 16 April 1730 sale of chattels must have been the final attempt at dispersal of the residual items, with his widow’s and son’s ‘purchases’ tying up the final disposition of goods and cash legacies.54 By contrast, the widow of the intestate Robert Jackson of Sidgwick (Cumberland), who died in 1706, was less fortunate. She is listed as purchasing a variety of basic household goods back from her dead husband’s estate – gridiron, brass pot, bed and brewing gear – for £1 5s 2d out of the £1 14s 2d which the sale raised. This may of course have been a paper fiction, if the procedure outlined above was adhered to, but the fact that sums are attached to the goods suggests that Widow Jackson may indeed have had to repurchase her own pots and pans, albeit at the prices they were valued at in the inventory.55 Yet women were not only present at household sales as family members buying back domestic necessities, or as organizing executrixes; indeed, at Benjamin Browne’s two sales 13 out of 59 identified purchasers (22 per cent) were women.56 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the purchasing of kitchen equipment was a female priority at Browne’s sales. Mary Birkett of Beckside bought a tin pan, a brass spoon, a saucepan, two pewter porringers and a pitcher for 2s 7d altogether on the second day of the sale, while Agnes Tyson paid 5s 8d for a pewter dish, a basin, a cream pot, ropes and a leather girth. Strikingly, none of the women present are amongst the buyers of livestock and field crops in either of these sales or the earlier livestock sale (held October 1729). Such a division of purchasing labour was by no means absolute, but female knowledge about the use and maintenance of domestic utensils rendered them useful judges of the quality of both new and used goods. The April 1727 sale bill of the goods of the late Anne Elliot, a widow of Bridgewater (Somerset), also records a predominantly female buying audience; while the men present did not stop from buying domestic utensils, none purchased any of the items of Elliot’s clothing.57 This visible, active presence of women as sale-goers (and the female buyers were surely only the most active members of a far larger ‘concourse of the fairer sex’58 in attendance) is a valuable addition to a growing history of women as discerning and, above all, canny

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consumers, rather than as frivolous and passive vessels for the consumption of novelties.59 In the face of the evolving practicalities of domestic labour, both housework and market-oriented production, few women could manage the quotidian lives of their households without going to market, or to specialized producers such as tailors or apothecaries; in provincial England, we may well add ‘household sale’ to this list of destinations.

Understanding sale-holding and sale-going in pre-1750 England The key question remains: what purpose did household sales of used domestic and occupational goods serve in late Stuart and early Georgian England? Were such goods viewed as a necessary part of ‘involuntary consumption’ by consumers who could afford nothing else; or were they viewed as a source of ‘good value’ or even alternate values by ‘clever’ consumers?60 And for the sellers, was the sale of household goods in this manner, rather than by direct sale, the optimal route to guarantee good returns in an otherwise volatile and uncertain market system, as Walton has proposed for later agricultural auctions?61 Let us turn to value first. At Benjamin Browne’s sales, apart from Sally, Jewet and Throstle the cows and four other unnamed cattle, all of which sold for more than a pound, the next most expensive items sold were two kettles (£1 4s and £1 5s 6d, respectively); the least expensive item sold was a pitcher or jug for halfpence – an item and a price which undermines Amy Erickson’s view that certain domestic goods simply never enter our historical purview.62 Even items clearly constructed as ‘old’ and worn could be disposed of. At Anne Elliott’s April 1727 sale, Mary Jones paid 2s 6d for ‘a bad rugg and an old chair’, while the mid-century printed sale catalogue covering the households of Mrs Jane Gilchrist and her neighbour, Mr de la Motray, of Homerton (London), listed broken china and sundry other ‘old things’ as lots.63 Once again, there is not sufficient material in the manuscript sale bills to do more than speculate about the matter of value, but what there is, is thought-provoking. What the prices recorded in such bills (when compared with surviving inventories), and those in annotated printed catalogues (where anonymous attendees have inscribed prices realized alongside estimates), can demonstrate is that the final value of the good depended on the circumstances of the moment, rather than any objective and agreed ‘market’ valuation of these goods as

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second-hand.64 Indeed, Thomas Turner’s comments upon a chattel valuation he undertook on 2 April 1762 make this explicit: we took an inventory, or rather a list of his [Thomas Fuller’s] effects; the stock in trade, utensils, furniture in the house, husbandry tackle etc. Debts excepted, amounted to £152-19-7d. And I dare say we valued it at £50 under the real worth was it to be sold.65 While sales could disappoint executors and administrators when selling was not ‘sharp’, the alcohol- and tobacco-fuelled atmosphere and the competitive nature of the event could also result in goods realizing more when sold as individual lots than their given inventory valuation. The brief inventory of Robert Jackson of Sidgwick and the appended bill of sale allow comparison of appraised and realized prices; the goods ‘bought’ by his widow match the appraised prices, but amongst those goods sold to others the decedent’s woodworking tools raised more in being sold separately than they were inventoried at together; the chaffbed valued at 1s sold for 11d more, while a barrel sold for 3 1 /2 d more.66 Other sales more spectacularly outran appraisals, as in the case of the intestate William Matthew, a weaver from Abingdon (Berks) where a 1705 sale of his goods raised £7 6s 9d (or over 14 per cent) more than the inventory appraisal (£49 19s 3d); and in the Shipley, West Sussex example from 1682 supplied by Erickson, where the sale of Maurice Greenfield’s goods bought in £42 more.67 What these sales successes might embody, in the willingness of buyers to pay over the odds, is neighbourliness in action. As Jack Hinton has suggested for sixteenth-century Venetian sales, active participation in such auctions could support those left vulnerable by the death of a household head.68 At the Jackson sale noted above, the small amounts raised in excess of inventory valuations may seem insignificant, but when the total movable estate was appraised at under £2, every extra halfpenny raised would bring Jackson’s widow closer to providing a dignified burial for her husband, and further away from disabling debt. Perhaps it was this local desire to support the needy in an active rather than policed way which made sales of pauper domestic goods a charitable endeavour, as well as a means of offsetting rising overseers’ expenditure.69 Perhaps, too, this was a widely appreciated communal value of early modern household sales which falls away across the eighteenth century, to be replaced by a sense of such goods as purely ‘used’ and thus more marginal in purely economic terms by its close.

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But household sales were not merely, or even predominantly, a solution in extremis for dispersing meagre or indebted estates, as George Dixon’s sales demonstrate.70 Instead, we should perhaps consider them in terms of what they offered the potential consumer, both as buyer and vendor. Given that there were other routes by which goods could be dispersed (not least closed or direct, rather than open, sale), it seems that auction sales were a risk, but a risk worth taking.71 The parameters of risk involved were mappable, to a degree. Despite the fears expressed by Brockbank senior to his son that he might ‘buy at sales which may seem new, yet be half worn’, the quite localized involvement in rural sales surely meant that the credibility of vendors and knowledge of the purchasing interests of the potential buying public could be easily ascertained, leaving the element of chance (the possibilities of buying a ‘dud’, or not selling everything, or of securing a bargain) at a manageable level.72 Rural household sales may of course have been a necessity, in the face of limited alternative retail sites. In the Lake District, where, despite the growth of Carlisle, Kendal, Lancaster, Penrith and Preston as market centres of some sophistication by 1750, a wider range of specialist retailing remained accessible only by visiting York, Newcastle to the east, or Liverpool or Chester to the south, the sale was a crucial interstitial retail opportunity, providing convenient access to useful, if also used, goods.73 But these rural household sales also shared in the performative qualities that Cynthia Wall has assigned to mid-eighteenth-century metropolitan auctions. Just as with the sales of high-status furniture and fittings stage-managed by the ‘father’ of modern auctioneering, James Christie, these rural household sales were a comparable ‘theatrical performance, a spectacle’ in their locality, where people came to ‘see and be seen’, as well as to ‘buy up the fragments of another’s life and begin to reshape their own’.74 Thomas Turner’s eagerness to attend local household sales might not seem on a par with the literary enthusiasm for the London salerooms detailed by Wall, but it was fuelled by no less a blend of voyeurism, bargain hunting and a desire to socialize. What we might, however, add as a distinctive feature of the rural household sale before the mid eighteenth century is the motivation of neighbourliness, and even charity, underpinning such attendance and participation. What is common to both urban and provincial household sales is that, where sales did not derive from bankruptcy or post mortem indebtedness, monies were generated for beneficiaries to employ in their own consumption trajectories. Experience of participating in pre and post mortem sales also developed and reinforced widespread knowledge of

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the prevailing values of household goods. The ability of individuals who were not themselves makers or retailers of saucepans, bed linen or ceramic plates, to know the precise value of these things when they were stolen from them, or exhibited as evidence before them, so apparent in the court records of the long eighteenth century, is surely testament to the impact of the household sale. This was where values for such used goods were set, and seen to be set, by many people; it was at sales rather than through participation (by the very few) in probate valuations that individuals developed their highly tuned knowledge of chattel values.75 Moreover, anybody could attend a sale, especially those which were not ticketed. The ‘poor woman’ who bought a gown at Anne Elliott’s Somerset sale for four shillings was not excluded, and her money was good enough for Elliott’s administrator William Yeo. Anybody could attend and ‘gaze’, carrying home with them no pothooks, but nevertheless bearing information about realistic prices and available forms, to deploy in future consumption acts. And the sale dramatically engaged the potential buyer and her available knowledge, since successful purchase was predicated upon that buyer swiftly assessing and matching goods, prices and utility – as a candle swiftly burnt down its inch, or other bids rang out around her.

Conclusion More work on the provincial, non-elite household sale in early modern England is clearly needed, alongside the growing number of extant studies of elite country house sales and metropolitan auctioneering. Rural auctions like Browne’s, Dixon’s and Elliott’s clearly contributed to the resources available to the early modern householder for amassing domestic goods; and by providing affordable, usable alternatives to buying new, enabled the householder to tame Brockbank’s ‘many footed monster, housekeeping’. Moreover, household sales were part of an arguably ‘egalitarian circuit’ wherein the novel goods of Weatherill’s domestic interiors could be secured in rural England, but without the goods themselves actually being new.76 Mary Birkett’s inventory (had one been made) might well have noted her ownership of a saucepan, one of the ‘new’ kitchen vessels of the late seventeenth century; but it was a second-hand one, bought at Benjamin Browne’s household sale.77 Household sales were nevertheless more than just an opportunity to consume cannily. The œconomic and communal roles of the rural auction have been sketched here, but again we need more data in the

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form of both sales schedules and recorded attitudes to buying at and participating in such sales. Moreover, early modern attitudes to used goods were not, as we have seen in Brockbank senior’s advice, necessarily wholly positive; cheap did not always equal long-lasting even before 1750. The roots of this ambivalence, encompassing as it does the desire for durability and stability in the pursuit of home-making, and the growing knowledge of how material novelty might be accommodated in that process, must also be disentangled if we are ever to truly understand the experiencing of both ‘new’ and ‘old’ goods as possessions across the long eighteenth century, within the historiography of early modern consumption and the material cultures of that consumption.

Notes 1. Thomas Brockbank to Elizabeth Brockbank, 12 October 1703, in R. TrappesLomax (ed.) (1930) The Diary and Letter Book of the Rev. Thomas Brockbank 1671–1709, Chetham Society, vol. 89 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press), p. 256. 2. John Brockbank to Thomas Brockbank, 30 October 1703, ibid., p. 258. 3. Thomas Brockbank to John Brockbank, 15 November 1703, ibid., p. 270. 4. B. Lemire (1991) Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain 1660–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 4–5, 61, 75; J. de Vries (2008) The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 177 (cf. p. 144). 5. L. Weatherill (1986) Material Culture and Consumer Behaviour in Britain, 1660–1760 (London: Routledge), p. 50. 6. B. Lemire (2005) The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 82–109; B. Lemire (2006) ‘Plebeian commercial circuits and everyday material exchange in England, c.1600–1900’, in Blondé, P. Stabel, J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds) Buyers and Sellers. Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, pp. 245–266. 7. J. K. Walton (1984) ‘The rise of agricultural auctioneering in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain’, Journal of Historical Geography, 10(1), pp. 15–36; B. Lemire (1991) ‘Peddling fashion: salesmen, pawnbrokers, tailors, thieves and the second-hand clothes trade in England, c. 1700–1800’, Textile History, 22, pp. 67–82; S. Nenadic (1994) ‘Middle-rank consumers and domestic culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720–1840’, Past and Present, 145, pp. 122–156; J. Stobart (2006) ‘Clothes, cabinets and carriages: second-hand dealing in eighteenth-century England’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Buyers and Sellers (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 225–244; C. Edwards and M. Ponsonby (2008) ‘Desirable commodity or practical necessity? The sale and consumption of second-hand furniture, 1750–1900’, in D. E. Hussey and M. Ponsonby (eds) Buying for the Home: Shopping for the Domestic from the Seventeenth Century to

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8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

53

the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 117–138. For industrial recycling, see D. Woodward (1984) ‘ “Swords into ploughshares”: recycling in pre-industrial England’, Economic History Review, 38, pp. 175–191. B. Cowan (2006) ‘Art and connoisseurship in the auction market of later seventeenth-century London’, in N. De Marchi and H. J. Van Miegroet (eds) Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe 1450–1750 (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 263–284, on p. 265. Stobart and Van Damme, ‘Introduction’. D. Roche (1987) The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), pp. 184–186; J. Hinton (2002) ‘By sale, by gift: aspects of the resale and bequest of goods in late sixteenth-century Venice’, Journal of Design History, 15(4), pp. 245–262; P. Allerston (2005) ‘Meeting demand: retailing strategies in early modern Venice’, in B. Blondé, E. Briot, N. Coquery and L. Van Aert (eds) Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modern Europe. England, France, Italy and the Low Countries (Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais), pp. 169–187; I. Van Damme (2006) ‘Changing consumer preferences and evolutions in retailing: buying and selling consumer durables in Antwerp, c.1648–c.1748’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Buyers and Sellers, pp. 199–223; A. Matchette (2007) ‘Credit and credibility: used goods and social relations in sixteenth-century Florence’, in M. O’Malley and E. Welch (eds) The Material Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 225–241; I. Van Damme and R. Vermoesen (2009) ‘Second-Hand consumption as a way of life: public auctions in the surroundings of Alost’, Continuity and Change, 24(2), pp. 275–305. Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers’, p. 130. D. Vaisey (ed.) (1984) The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754–65 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 111–112. Originals at the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; also available on microfilm at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MSS Film 1673–1675). Deposited at the Cumbria Record Office, Kendal (hereafter CROK). The published index of probate accounts does not indicate whether an account includes details of a sale. P. Spufford with M. Brett and A. L. Erickson (eds) (1999) Index to the Probate Accounts of England and Wales, 2 vols (London: British Record Society); but see J. Bower, ‘Introduction to probate accounts’, in idem, vol. I, pp. xv–xciv, on pp. xlix–l. For example, the annotated copy of A Catalogue of the Household Goods c of Mr Robert Surman . . . to be Sold by Cant or Auction on Friday 21st Day of September 1721 (London, 1721), John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, ESTC ref. T152692. See Clive Edwards and Margaret Ponsonby (Chapter 5) and Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart (Chapter 9) in this volume for later examples of such catalogues. Cynthia Wall (1997), ‘The English auction: narratives of dismantlings’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31(1), pp. 1–25; Walton, ‘The rise of agricultural auctioneering’. B. Learmount (1985) A History of the Auction (Iver: Barnard and Learmount), p. 15. N. Cox and J. Cox (1984–1985; 1985–1986) ‘Probate inventories: the legal background’, Local Historian, 16(3), pp. 133–145, 16(4), pp. 217–227.

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20. Richard Burn (1842) Ecclesiastical Law, 4 vols (first published 1763, this edn London: S. Sweet), vol. IV, p. 418, emphasis added. 21. As in early modern Alost. See Van Damme and Vermoesen, ‘Second-Hand consumption’, pp. 293–294. 22. Cf. ibid., p. 278. 23. CROK, GL114, will of Henry Handley, 13 November 1740. Handley’s inventory (dated 14 December 1740), although containing domestic goods valued at a modest £54 15s 6d, also indicated debts owing to the deceased of some £317. 24. See, for example, H. C. F. Lansberry (ed.) (1988) Sevenoaks Wills and Inventories in the Reign of Charles II, Kent Records XXV (Maidstone: Kent Archaeological Society), pp. 35–36, 56, 98–99, 114–116, 191–192; S. Pennell (1997) ‘The material culture of food in early modern England, c. 1650–1750’ (unpublished Oxford D. Phil.), chapter 2. 25. Cf. A. L. Erickson (1990) ‘Introduction to probate accounts’, in P. Spufford and G. H. Martin (eds) The Records of the Nation (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer), pp. 273–286, on pp. 277–279. 26. Practices also observed for the early nineteenth century in A. Owens (2001) ‘Property, gender and the life course: inheritance and family welfare provision in early nineteenth-century England’, Social History, 26(3), pp. 299–317. 27. See the 1664 will of John Harrison, in which the monetary proceeds of the sale of his household and husbandry goods are to be equally divided between his four unmarried daughters and his son: CROK, GL111, will of John Harrison, 14 December 1664. 28. S. Staves (1990) Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 212; F. A. Enever (1931) History of the Law of Distress for Rent and Damage Feasant (London: Routledge), pp. 278–281. 29. Wall, ‘The English auction’, p. 14. See also Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers’, p. 130; Walton, ‘The rise of agricultural auctioneering’, p. 15. 30. The sale of Charles I’s art collection was by set price or negotiated sale. See J. Brotton (2006) The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection (London: Macmillan), pp. 230–232. 31. Daily Post, Monday 28 May 1733, issue 4274, p. 2. 32. For auction by candle, see Vaisey, The Diary of Thomas Turner, pp. 28–29. For ‘mineing’ and Dutch auctions, see Notes and Queries (1932), 162, p. 225 and Notes and Queries (1936), 170, p. 336. 33. No schedules survive for this sale. CROK, WD/TE/ box 3, vol. VIII, f. 147v. 34. A. Winchester (ed.) (1994) The Diary of Isaac Fletcher of Underwood, Cumberland, 1756–1781, Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society Extra Series XXVII (Kendal: CWAAS), p. 7. There are a further 41 references to household and real estate sales in Fletcher’s diary. 35. Ibid., pp. xv–xxviii. 36. J. Bagley (ed.) (1972) The Great Diurnal of Nicholas Blundell Volume III: 1720– 28, transcr. Frank Tyrer, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 114 (Chester: Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire), p. 200. Other sales attended by Blundell are noted on pp. 27, 98–101, 228 and 231.

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37. CROK, WPR/26/01, f. 13. For a brief discussion of sales of goods by overseers of the poor, see S. Hindle (2004) On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 38. H. S. Cowper (1895) ‘A Grasmere farmer’s sale schedule in 1710’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, old series 13, pp. 253–268, on p. 264. 39. Walton, ‘The rise of agricultural auctioneering’. 40. J. Bower (1991) ‘Probate accounts as a source for Kentish early modern economic and social history’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 109, pp. 51–62, on p. 62. Individual auctioneers did set their own rates of commission; see the auctioneer Samuel Paterson’s rates given in a 1761 catalogue (‘household furniture and moveables of all kinds worth £100–£500 . . . at 7 1 /2 %’), cited in Notes and Queries (1906), 6, p. 387. 41. For example, Joseph Hutchinson’s sale of 28 April 1758, attended by a ‘great number of people’; see Winchester, The Diary of Isaac Fletcher, p. 45. 42. Letter XXI, 5 July 1786, Anne McVicar Grant (1807), Letters from the Mountains, 3 vols (London: no publisher given), vol. II, p. 111. 43. A Catalogue of All the Rich Furniture of the Right Honourable the Countess of Dover, Deceas’d . . . (London, 1730): copy at Suffolk Record Office (Bury St Edmunds), call no. 941/74/1. 44. Bodleian Library, MS Film 1675, Turner MS Diary, vol. 77, 26 April 1762. 45. CROK, WD/TE/ box 3, vol. III, ff. 171–173r. For a more comprehensive attempt at this type of reconstitution, see Van Damme and Vermoesen, ‘Second-Hand consumption’, pp. 286–288. 46. But the William Hawkrigg’s sale schedule also suggests a catchment area of no more than 5–10 miles. Cowper, ‘A Grasmere farmer’s sale schedule’. Cf. Walton, ‘The rise of agricultural auctioneering’, p. 29. 47. Elleray is named as a tenant in CROK, WD/TE/ box 2, vol. IV, f. 121r, ‘contract and agreement’ between Benjamin Browne senior and his younger son Benjamin, 1 February 1737; and in WD/TE/ box 7, will of Benjamin Browne, 7 September 1748. 48. CROK, WD/TE/ box 3, vol. VIII, f. 121r. 49. CROK, WD/TE/ box 8/2/1, Benjamin Browne, household accounts 1721– 1728, entries for 21 December 1726 and 23 December 1730. 50. S. H. Scott (1904) A Westmorland Village: The Story of the Old Homesteads and ‘Statesman’ Families of Troutbeck by Windermere (London: Archibald Constable), p. 43 (facing). 51. D. Napley (ed.) (1954) Bateman’s Law of Auctions (London: Sweet and Maxwell), p. 174. See also Van Damme and Vermoesen, ‘Second-Hand consumption’. 52. CROK, WD/TE/ box 3, vol. VIII, f. 121r. 53. CROK, GL100 (D), inventory with attached funeral account of George Dixon, 17 April 1729. 54. CROK, WD/TE/ box 3, vol. VIII, ff. 135r, 137r, 139r. 55. CROK, GL117, inventory (6 January 1706) with undated attached schedule of goods sold of Robert Jackson. 56. Cf. Erickson, ‘Introduction to probate accounts’, p. 277.

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57. Somerset Record Office, D/D/Ct A, probate account with sale schedule for Anne Elliott, dated 20 August 1728 (administrator William Yeo). 58. The term used to describe the sale-goers at Cumbrian open-air auctions in the 1860s. Notes and Queries (1863), 4, p. 526. 59. For women as distinctive consuming agents, see L. Weatherill (1986) ‘A possession of one’s own: women and consumer behaviour in England, 1660– 1740’, Journal of British Studies, 25(2), pp. 131–156; A. Vickery (2006) ‘His and hers: gender, consumption and household accounting in eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present, Supplement (vol. 1). pp. 12–38. 60. See J. Styles (2002) ‘Involuntary consumers? Servants and their clothes in eighteenth-century England’, Textile History, 33(1), pp. 9–31; Stobart, ‘Clothes, cabinets and carriages’, p. 11. 61. Walton, ‘The rise of agricultural auctioneering’, p. 4. 62. A. L. Erickson (1990) Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge), p. 34. 63. Somerset Record Office, D/D/Ct A, Elliott probate account; (W. Hopley), A Catalogue of all the Houshold-furniture, Linen and China, of Mrs. Jane Gilchrist, Widow, deceas’d (London, 1749), pp. 9, 11. 64. Erickson, ‘Introduction to probate accounts’, p. 274. 65. Vaisey, The Diary of Thomas Turner, p. 247, emphasis added. 66. CROK, GL117, Jackson inventory, 6 January 1706. 67. Berkshire Record Office, D/A1/99/75, inventory of William Matthew, Abingdon with annotation of sale outcome, 25 April 1705; West Sussex Record Office, EpI/33/1682, probate account of Maurice Greenfield, Shipley, 1682, quoted by Erickson, ‘Introduction to probate accounts’, p. 279, n. 27. 68. Hinton ‘By sale, by gift’, p. 246. 69. Hindle, On the Parish? 70. Cf. Erickson, ‘Introduction to probate accounts’, p. 277. 71. As suggested in N. De Marchi and H. van Miegroet (1994) ‘Art, value and market practices in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century’, Art Bulletin, 76, pp. 451–464. 72. See also Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart (Chapter 9) in this volume. 73. J. D. Marshall (1983) ‘The rise of the Cumbrian market town, 1660–1900’, Northern History, 19, pp. 128–209. 74. Wall, ‘The English auction’, pp. 2, 19–20; see also Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart (Chapter 9) in this volume. 75. Cf. N. Cox and J. Cox (1986–1987), ‘Valuations in probate inventories’, part II, Local Historian, 17(2), pp. 85–100, on pp. 97–98. See also Walton, ‘The rise of agricultural auctioneering’, p. 30. 76. Van Damme and Vermoesen, ‘Second-Hand consumption’, p. 298. 77. For saucepans, see S. Pennell (1998) ‘ “Pots and pans history”: the material culture of the kitchen in early modern England’, Journal of Design History, 11, pp. 201–216.

3 A Stolen Garment or a Reasonable Purchase? The Male Consumer and the Illicit Second-Hand Clothing Market in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Alison Toplis

Introduction The trade in second-hand clothing has been well documented, particularly during the eighteenth century.1 Second-Hand or ‘cast-off’ clothing allowed poorer consumers to participate in the expanding consumer market. Used clothes were not necessarily cheap, but at around a quarter of the price of new, were more affordable to less the well off.2 However, it has been suggested that as the price of new clothing fell, particularly during the second quarter of the nineteenth century,3 there was a corresponding decline in the importance of the second-hand clothes trade. Francis Place noted that by the 1830s people no longer wanted to wear second-hand clothes, leading to a noticeable decline in the number of ‘old clothes’ sellers in London.4 Second-Hand clothing became increasingly associated with poverty and destitution, especially as knowledge about the transmission of disease through clothing spread beyond medical circles, following the cholera epidemics of the 1830s.5 Thus it is generally supposed that the second-hand clothes trade was in decline by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. However, this narrative is largely based on studies of London and the larger northern cities; the second-hand clothing trade in smaller towns and the countryside has not been systematically documented.6 Moreover, much attention has focused on women’s involvement in trading second-hand clothing;7 the working man being largely overlooked.8 57

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This chapter will therefore explore the provincial second-hand clothes markets in the first half of the nineteenth century. In particular, attention will focus on firstly, the buying and selling of clothing by men and secondly, the informal market and its links with illicit trading networks. It will argue that the strength of the illicit trade in men’s clothes, particularly in rural areas, allowed it to compete with retailing through shops in local towns, both on price and the ease of access for the working man. I argue clothing was more than a practical consideration for some men, and second-hand clothing could be acquired to help form sartorial identities and fashions recognized within peer groups. Second-Hand clothing might have been, in effect, the only fashionable clothing available for some men in rural areas. The analysis focuses on Herefordshire and Worcestershire, these two counties providing a useful provincial case study and comparison to studies concentrating on large urban centres.9 Although mainly rural with agricultural occupations predominant, there were also industrial areas within both counties (for example, the Black Country in the north of Worcestershire) which provide comparative evidence for different geographical localities. Court records reveal the extensive network, both legal and illicit, through which clothing could be acquired without resorting to shops. In Herefordshire between 1800 and1850, Quarter Session Minute Books and Papers contain 772 cases relating to clothing, typically involving theft. There are 155 cases in Worcestershire, where the court rolls from the 1830s onwards have yet to be fully opened and sorted. Additional evidence about informal clothing networks is drawn from the reporting of court cases in the two principal weekly newspapers of the region, the Hereford Journal and Berrow’s Worcester Journal, examined across the period 1800–50. The evidence allows an investigation into both how these clothing networks operated and what clothing consumers wanted. For example, two thirds of the cases of clothing theft in Herefordshire relate to men stealing clothes from other men of a similar social group, the clothing then often sold onto other men. The consumers of this illicit second-hand clothing represented in surviving court records from Herefordshire were thus predominantly male. I begin by examining how far the appearance of the provincial working man was influenced by practical needs and how much was driven by concerns about fashion. I then turn to consider how this clothing might have been obtained, firstly through shops selling ready-made clothing, many of which had close links to the second-hand trade. Attention then moves on to the illicit market as a parallel system for supplying men’s clothes, with attention focusing on the type of clothing bought

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and sold, and the setting of these transactions. Finally, the chapter will question whether the illicit market offered more than a purely financial transaction. Other motives are considered, including support in times of need – something that shops could not compete with. I conclude by arguing that the illicit second-hand clothes trade gave working men access to a modern way of dressing, with the expectation that clothing would be changed frequently and not always for practical reasons.

Clothing the working man: function and fashion Historians have begun to highlight how important clothing was for the non-elite during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Valverde, clothing was the most public way to demonstrate social status, with indicators such as homes and furniture being less visible. The type of clothing worn showed who was earning good wages and improving their position in society.10 Styles, too, has suggested that clothing formed the majority of the possessions for the non-elite, as living spaces and furnishings were often rented. Plebeian consumption was thus focused on sartorial culture to a greater degree than other durable or semi-durable goods.11 Nevertheless, there has been no agreement amongst historians as to the main motivation for consumers in acquiring clothing, whether new or second-hand, or about the role of fashion in the choice of this clothing. Too often an elitist view of fashion neglects to look for evidence lower down the social scale. Svendsen has noted the limited reach of elite fashion within the lower social classes during the nineteenth century. He sees functionality as more important than fashion for the lower orders.12 Indeed, the ordinary dress of labourers was described in rural protest ballads from the 1820s and 1830s as affordable, decent and ‘honest’, made of durable and hardwearing fabrics such as cotton and wool rather than silk, and in plain, simple styles. Some historians have argued that this was the way that the non-elite wanted to dress.13 Such clothing did not pretend to be in the latest fashion but could be acquired by those who were being paid a ‘fair’ wage. However, the authors of the ballads did not condemn frivolity in dress per se. They were critical of ostentation in the dress of farmers’ wives when farmers were paying labourers such low wages that the workers were unable to afford even plain and simple clothes. They cannot be viewed as a general guide to what labourers wished to wear. Fashion has thus been associated firmly with elite modes of consumption emanating from London. However, Lemire has shown that novel

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and inexpensive articles worn by the non-elite created fashions within their own milieu, and challenged the ‘norm’.14 Accessories, which were cheap and easily changeable, were frequently used for this.15 Items such as stockings, silk handkerchiefs and gloves can be viewed as ‘populuxe’ goods,16 but they were not necessarily used in direct imitation of the elite. Different meanings might be associated with particular items or certain colours, making clothing a medium which could be used for complex sartorial elaboration within social classes. A style of labouring dress, often a smock frock and breeches, enlivened with a colourful waistcoat, along with a coloured handkerchief and striped stockings, emerges from reports of garments stolen from the non-elite during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. For example, in 1812 a man employed for the harvest at Luston in Herefordshire stole from a servant, presumably a farm servant, a jean frock, a red plush waistcoat, velveteen breeches, a blue coat, a black striped waistcoat, light cord breeches, two silk handkerchiefs and three pairs of black stockings. The thief himself was described as wearing a short frock, white trousers and a red spotted handkerchief at the neck.17 Similarly, in Marston near Ross, Herefordshire, the house of Richard Smith, a ‘poor man’, was broken into and food, money and clothing taken. His stolen handkerchiefs were described in detail: a yellow India silk handkerchief with a brown border; a similar crimson one with a black border; two white ones with a red striped border; and two purple and white ones.18 These colourful items were obviously a distinctive part of his dress and an important one, as they were singled out for notice.19 Accessorizing outfits by using such colourful additions, along with bright or patterned waistcoats and stockings, contrasted with the early nineteenth-century elite male ideal of light and sober colours and fine tailoring. Epitomized by Beau Brummell, this style, with pale coloured and tight fitting pantaloons giving a nude impression, a high-waisted silhouette with short coats and waistcoats, along with curled and tousled hair, sought neo-classical inspiration, echoing dress depicted on statues from the Roman period.20 The dress of the labourers described above constituted a popular fashion in which ordinary people of limited means could engage without the expense of a tailor. Waistcoat pieces could be bought ready-made and buttons, handkerchiefs, ribbons and stockings could easily be added to an outfit. For example, a labourer working in a field could wear a colourful checked waistcoat and bright red handkerchief tied around his neck. In 1809, Francis Whatmore, a thatcher, left his family chargeable to Wolverley parish. He was wearing a spotted neck handkerchief and purple and white stockings when he

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absconded.21 These men were thus not emulating a fashion plate ideal, but perhaps keeping up with other men who sought to differentiate their appearance both from elite modes and from other non-elite consumers who chose not to be so ostentatious in their dress. Fashionable clothing could therefore be important to male, as well as female, non-elite consumers. Small value fashionable objects had various connotations for the individual who wore them, dependent on their social group and also personal identity.22 Where economic circumstances would allow, it appears to have been important for working men to spend money on fashionable clothing both for everyday and ‘best’ wear. Breward notes that ‘cockney’ fashions were well established in the first half of the nineteenth century, espoused by characters such as Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers of 1837. This way of dressing used tight, bright clothing, an urban ‘flashness’, to mock the priggishness and vanity of the elite.23 This boldness in dress demonstrated the sartorial confidence of the London working classes in directly opposing the elite male fashion of studied simplicity. A certain way of dressing meant belonging to a particular group, whether a local peer group or a wider social set. It is clear from the above that such brashness and bold use of colour were also widely used in working men’s dress outside urban areas – suggesting similar social groupings.

Obtaining clothing: shops By 1800, men’s ready-made clothes were widely available across Herefordshire and Worcestershire. This might not be evident from the bill-heads of some drapers but is visible through the stock detailed in the same bills. Selling this type of clothing could be highly profitable, as demonstrated by the longevity of the businesses of the salesmen Richard Saunders of Worcester and John Pumfrey of Droitwich.24 Salesmen often dealt in both new ready-made clothing and second-hand clothing, emphasizing the continued importance of the second-hand trade. Such classifications of occupation were used with flexibility, allowing several occupations to be undertaken, including second-hand clothes dealer, seller of new ready-made clothes and tailor and draper.25 For example, Richard Saunders ran a shop at number one, Lich Street, Worcester. In Lewis’s Directory of 1820 he is listed as a woollen draper; in Pigot’s Directory of 1828 he is listed as a woollen draper, salesman, hatter and hosier; in Pigot’s Directory of 1835 he is listed as a linen draper and tailor; in a guide to Worcester from 1837 he is listed as a linen draper, silk mercer and tailor;26 his own bill-head from 1837 describes him as a

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‘wholesale and retail Salesman, woollen and linen draper, hatter, hosier, and men’s mercer, At the original Warehouse, No. 1, bottom of Leech St, established 1712’.27 Lich Street and Friar Street was where salesmen and second-hand clothes dealers were concentrated in the city. They were streets of unfashionable timber-framed houses, unlike the newly built Georgian terraces of the more desirable central streets. The success of shops selling cheap ready-made clothing was reflected in their new visibility and increasing promotion during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. For example, some drapers renamed their businesses using titles such as ‘smock warehouse’ to emphasize the type of clothing sold.28 The cheapness of the stock was also highlighted by shops such as the ‘Cheap Mart’ in Hereford which in 1843 advertised waistcoats from 9d and coats and jackets from 2s 6d.29 The falling price of new clothes in the 20 years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars perhaps meant that more people could afford to buy new readymade clothing, including ‘fashionable’ clothing, promoted and readily available in their local shops.30 Furthermore, new clothing was sold on when shops went bankrupt. The stock of Samuel Sillifant, the owner of Albion House in Hereford, a tailor who sold ready-made clothing as well, was sold off when he went bankrupt in 1848. John Preece, a dealer in shoes and clothes, who in addition took stalls in the ‘New Markets’ on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Fair Days, bought some of his stock, his new waistcoats noted as being from Samuel Sillifant’s old stock.31 The stock-in-trade of a bankrupt salesman and draper was also being sold at Pershore Fair in 1812. The large stock included wool, fustian and nankeen coats, quilting toilinet and shag waistcoats, kersey cloth, cord and velveteen breeches, buck and doe leather waistcoats, striped cotton and Russia Duck trousers, smock frocks, shirts and stockings.32 New goods such as these could thus be bought at something nearer to second-hand prices.33 This type of stock presumably also had some cachet as it had a known provenance and therefore gave the customer some idea about its quality. It stood in contrast with the murkier, illicit origins of many other garments circulating in the second-hand trade. The only advertisements in the local press to advertise second-hand clothes explicitly were those placed by pawnbrokers. Hereford pawnbrokers frequently placed advertisements advising of the sale of forfeited pledges and listing the type of garments available. Abraham Myer of Hereford, who also ran a ‘Clothing Establishment’, advertised in 1849 that he had returned from London and Manchester with a ‘large assortment of GENERAL CLOTHING, New and Second-Hand, suitable for all classes’34 He must have found the sale of second-hand clothing

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profitable enough to go on buying trips for more stock and to advertise its arrival.

Buying on the illicit market The illicit market in second-hand clothes appears to have run in parallel to these established networks; it provided further opportunities for the male non-elite consumer to buy clothing. Such activities were carried out in both rural and urban areas; convenience and opportunism in securing a deal at a good price often being the primary motives for consumers. Little evidence survives from this informal network, although it appears to have been commonplace. Generally, it was only when a victim of theft had enough evidence, and was willing to go to the expense of prosecuting, that some of this network was revealed in legal records. Yet it was clearly part of a general strategy for survival that by-passed other trade networks and in which it was common for non-elite consumers to engage. Male consumers were active participants in the illicit clothing market. Agricultural labourers largely stole working clothing from each other, increasing the flow of second-hand garments in circulation.35 They were also ready buyers of such goods; seemingly unaware or unconcerned that the clothing they were purchasing from fellow workers or acquaintances might have been stolen. Part of the attraction was probably the ease of such transactions for the buyer, as it was the seller who tended to seek out potential customers. The evidence from prosecutions and the reaction of the court show how this ad hoc market operated. For example, in 1820 James Calder, a husbandman from Cotheridge in Worcestershire, absconded with clothing including a smock frock, shirt and stockings taken from his fellow servants. The smock frock was sold ‘on the highway’ to Job Smith. Smith ended up in court accused of stealing the smock frock himself, but his defence of buying the smock on the highway was believed and he was acquitted.36 Similarly, Edward Wallace, a ‘travelling’ man from Chesham in Buckinghamshire was tried in 1807 for being in possession of a stolen cloth coat, value 2s. This had been taken from the house of Zachariah Hicocks, a labourer from Clifton in Severn Stoke, Worcestershire. Like Smith, Wallace was acquitted as he said that he bought the coat for half a crown from an unknown person on the turnpike near Severn Stoke.37 It appears that it was not unusual to buy clothing from fellow travellers, often in a very casual manner. This is confirmed by a case from 1822 in which the shopkeeper whose goods had been stolen, by chance

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found his property himself. Mr Morris, a mercer from Hereford, was travelling to Leominster fair when he encountered two men sitting by the road. He recognized them as the men who had stolen handkerchiefs from his apprentice the previous day. According to the report, he pretended to ask the way and seeing they had bundles beside them asked if they had anything to sell. They were wearing handkerchiefs from his shop around their necks and said they had ribbons and handkerchiefs to offer. With an acquaintance, Morris conveyed them to a nearby inn where they were arrested.38 Clearly selling goods on the roadside was not unexpected and it would also seem acceptable to approach strangers who potentially had something in a bundle to sell. The handkerchiefs may have been targeted by the thieves as a cheap and desirable fashionable item which they could sell on easily to their male peers. This is perhaps emphasized by the eagerness of the two men caught to wear the handkerchiefs, which ultimately led to their prosecution. The court cases reveal how quickly goods became absorbed into the informal community network and then became increasingly difficult to trace, particularly if there were no specific identifying features.39 The speed of this chain was also important for the buyers operating in this market. If goods were quickly removed from the original source, especially if obtained illicitly, buyers further down the chain could claim not to know where the goods had come from. The successful acquittals in the court cases described above demonstrate how this was used effectively. If it was possible to rationalize how the goods had come into one’s possession, it was feasible to preserve a good moral character if questioned.40 For example, in 1808 William Bourne, a servant from Stoke Prior, stole another servant’s coat from a stable. He sold it for 16s to Edward Caswell, a labourer from Stourbridge. Isaac Read, a nail maker from nearby Bromsgrove, had bought it from him when the case came to court.41 Read had presumably bought the coat as second-hand but not necessarily stolen, since it was once removed from the original theft, although he may have suspected it might have been stolen. Whilst Read lost both money and the garment he had just purchased, he received no further punishment and presumably retained his good character.42 Similarly, the landlord of the Swan public house in Ross recognized his stolen jacket being worn by Henry Payne in a nearby village and arrested him. Payne explained how the jacket had come into his possession. He had received it in exchange for a pair of trousers he had given to Arthur Bedwards, a blacksmith, who had been staying at the landlord’s pub. Both Payne and Bedwards were found not guilty.43

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Male consumers in the illicit market favoured chance encounters where goods could be passed on quickly, often between strangers. This was also a safer method of dispersal for a thief than through neighbourhood links, goods rapidly becoming untraceable from their origin, passed between people who were unlikely to meet again. These encounters often appeared to have been random, between two strangers meeting on the road at a particular time. However, in places such as pubs, the potential of finding a buyer was increased by the greater number of men congregated there. They frequently had a transient clientele from a cross section of society, but were also the focus of village life where local meetings were held, newspapers read aloud44 and commercial transactions carried out, including auctions, informal pawnbroking and sales by hawkers.45 With a ready-made clientele of male customers, running a pub was often combined with the tailoring trade and presumably, in some cases, also facilitating the second-hand clothing trade.46 This combination seems to have been taken up by several tradesmen, both in villages and towns.47 In a court case reported from 1830, stolen articles of clothing were sold at a public house between Worcester and Leominster, reflecting the idea of pubs as places where goods could be traded, or perhaps fenced, especially clothing.48 Likewise, a sale of male new and second-hand clothing took place at the Fox and Goose Inn, Redditch, in 1844, including jackets, smock frocks and mackintoshes.49 Presumably, for consumers the knowledge that a purchase might be made, especially if it was at a bargain price or in part exchange for ale, was an additional reason to frequent such an environment.

Motivations for using the illicit market Most theft of clothing seems to have involved a certain amount of opportunism, since items were often stolen when left on a hedge to dry, in barns or taken with other miscellaneous items from a house. The ease and frequency with which clothing was stolen from fellow labourers suggests that this opportunity was seen as a simple way to raise money. To be successful, the exchange of goods needed to be quick and untraceable, so ideally relied on payment at least partly with cash.50 This is shown by the case of Richard Jones, a sawyer, who was accused of breaking into the cottage of Thomas Mantle, a labourer of Eastham, Worcestershire, in 1850 and stealing clothing including a coat, leggings, waistcoats and handkerchiefs. Jones took a jacket (which belonged to him) and stolen waistcoat to Joseph Collier of nearby Grendon Bishop who refused to buy them. However, Jones said that if Collier did not buy

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them someone else would as he was obliged to sell them as he was ill. He was given 2s 6d for them. In a hurry to sell the clothing and, apparently unable to find other buyers informally, the remaining stolen clothes were offered to a clothes dealer in the local town of Bromyard. Jones accepted low prices for this clothing, a fact remarked upon in the court proceedings. In his defence, Jones said he was desperate to raise money as he was ill and therefore accepted what was offered, although this was less than they were worth.51 There was a general recognition, which was highlighted in court, that both buyers and sellers in the informal market had a clear idea about the value of garments although deals were there to be made in the right conditions. Jones seems to have regarded the sale made in the informal market through local contacts as preferable to the last resort of visiting a professional clothes dealer. Professional dealers and pawnbrokers were often alerted about stolen items both by the police and their rightful owners.52 As in this case, they could also report suspicious activity, making them a more risky channel for selling on illicit clothing. Second-Hand clothing can therefore be seen as an alternative currency, held in lieu until it was necessary to utilize it.53 Stealing and selling clothes was thus primarily a way of raising cash. The motivations for those buying illicit second-hand clothing were probably more complex. The ease of the purchase and good value of the clothing were important considerations. Buyers were presented with an easy opportunity to gain clothing which they also could convert to cash when needed in the future. Given the low prices paid, such clothes might also be seen as constituting a bargain. However, as in the example above, the buyer may have been motivated in part by feelings of charity and sympathy for a neighbour or friend who found themselves in a difficult situation. In 1844, William Perry stole a smock frock, boots and other articles from a male servant in Hentland, Herefordshire. Perry had allegedly gone to see Thomas Morgan, a labourer working a lime kiln some six miles away from the original crime. Perry had told Morgan that he was ‘badly off’ and needed to sell the smock frock, accepting three shillings for it although he said he thought it could be worth six shillings.54 Ready-made smock frocks sold in local clothing warehouses were priced between two and six shillings so if in reasonable condition or of good quality, this would have been a prudent buy. Such clothing could either be worn or converted back to cash when needed, hopefully with the same ease. Stolen clothing from Much Cowarne in Herefordshire was likewise offered to Moses Wilkins, a shopkeeper, who refused to take it. He then decided to take the clothes as a pawn as the

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defendant needed to raise money for his ‘poor old mother’.55 Such buyers of second-hand clothing seem to have been sympathetic to those who were struggling. Clothes were thus not just bought and sold as an economic venture. They were also outward symbols of status, perhaps highlighting complex peer group associations and were essential for maintaining relationships, in these cases, the purchasers of clothing offering some sort of wider community support.

Conclusion This chapter has largely focused on one particular aspect of the secondhand trade in clothing, the illicit trade in stolen clothing between working men. A certain type of clothing was seemingly expected to be traded, bought and sold within known localities, often linked by male social networks. The illicit trade was a recognized system of buying and selling male clothing, closely linked to other methods of retailing including hawking and salesmen. It was an important component for distributing men’s clothing, one which shop retailers of new clothing were as yet unable to meet fully or perhaps even understand, certainly in terms of male non-elite fashions. This perhaps contributed to its continuing importance. As new clothing in shops became cheaper in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the opportunism and convenience of the informal network had to be weighed up against the lowering prices of new garments sold in outlets such as the ‘Cheap Mart’ in Hereford. However, in rural areas, the expectation that cheap clothing could be purchased through illicit networks appears to have reinforced the second-hand trade. Not only were clothing retailers more sparsely scattered, secondhand clothing could be purchased at a cheaper price than new clothing and without the necessity of going into a town to visit a pawnbroker or designated second-hand dealer.56 Informal networks, including illicit trading, helped to provide the means by which men could easily engage in sartorial display in both rural and urban areas. Thus second-hand clothing contributed to that most modern concept, fashion – albeit within a non-elite context. Old clothes were reinterpreted to form new personas and perhaps helped the wearer to both fully engage with work and with his social peers. The informal second-hand trade in clothing also continued in urban areas, suggesting that there were sometimes other motivations for buying such clothing above economic necessity. Such deals were not purely about the retailing of clothing but might also be an act of charitable

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support. The compassionate purchase of clothing to help out a seller at a time of want, and the flexibility required to enable this to happen, was an important facet of informal second-hand trading networks. It helped to contribute to the survival of such networks in working-class communities into the twentieth century.57 There is still much research needed on how retailers appealed to working people during the first half of the nineteenth century across all areas of the country. The survival of thriving second-hand networks for trading clothing shows that there was active consumption of clothing, a desirable commodity for many reasons. It also suggests that new clothes retailers had yet to realize how large the market was for selling clothing to working people. Informal second-hand clothing networks thus remained an integral part of clothing acquisition methods for working people in both rural and urban areas for at least another century enabling them to participate sartorially in modern life.

Notes 1. For example, see B. Lemire (1988) ‘Consumerism in pre-industrial and early industrial England. The trade in second-hand clothes’, Journal of British Studies, 27(1), pp. 1–24; D. Roche (1996) The Culture of Clothing. Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Regime’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 330–363; M. Lambert (2004) ‘ “Cast-off wearing apparell”: the consumption and distribution of second-hand clothing in northern England during the long eighteenth century’, Textile History, 35(1), pp. 1–26; E. Sanderson (1997) ‘Nearly new: the second-hand clothing trade in eighteenth-century Edinburgh’, Costume, 31, pp. 38–48; M. Ginsberg (1979) ‘Rags to riches: the second hand clothes trade 1700–1978’, Costume, 14, pp. 121–135. 2. Ginsberg, ‘Rags to riches’, pp. 123–124. 3. S. Chapman (2004) ‘The “revolution” in the manufacture of ready-made clothing 1840–1860’, London Journal, 29(1), p. 49. 4. British Library, Manuscript Collection, Francis Place Papers, Volume XXXIX, ‘Manners, morals, improvement of the people and its causes . . . , 1646–1836’, vol. III, add. 27827, pp. 144–145. 5. See M. Charpy (2008) ‘The scope and structure of the nineteenth-century second-hand trade in the Parisian clothes market’, in L. Fontaine (ed.) Alternative Exchanges. Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York and Oxford: Berghahn), pp. 145–146. 6. See J. Styles (1994) ‘Clothing the North; the supply of non-elite clothing in the eighteenth century north of England’, Textile History, 25(2), pp. 158–160, for the north of England. 7. For example, see G. Walker (1994) ‘Women, theft and the world of stolen goods’, in J. Kermode and G. Walker (eds) Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London: UCL Press), pp. 91–92, 97–98. See also B. Lemire (1997) Dress, Culture and Commerce. The English Clothing Trade

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8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

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before the Factory (Basingstoke: Macmillan), particularly pp. 95–120, for earlier female involvement in the informal economy relating to second-hand clothing. For the working-class male consumption of clothing in a later period, see L. Ugolini (2007) Men and Menswear, Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate); C. Breward (1999) The Hidden Consumer, Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce, pp. 127–145, focuses on London. M. Valverde (1989) ‘The love of finery: fashion and the fallen woman in nineteenth century social discourse’, Victorian Studies, 32, p. 187. J. Styles (2007) The Dress of the People. Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), pp. 322– 323. See also C. Fairchild (1994) ‘The production and marketing of populuxe goods in eighteenth-century Paris’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds) Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 228–248, who explores the emergence of accessories such as stockings, umbrellas and fans in eighteenth-century France as cheap copies of luxury items. L. Svendsen (2006) Fashion: A Philosophy (London: Reaktion Books), p. 47. See also D. Crane (2000) Fashion and Its Social Agendas, Class, Gender and Identity in Clothing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), pp. 4, 62. See P. Jones (2006) ‘Clothing the poor in early-nineteenth-century England’, Textile History, 37(1), pp. 32–33, who suggests that the ‘poor’ actively desired to be clothed in such ‘decent’ garments. See also Styles, The Dress of the People, pp. 199–202, who sees this type of plain dress as a ‘customary, oppositional identity, worn in defiance of enclosing landlords, opulent farmers and oppressive vestrymen’. See B. Lemire (2000) ‘Second hand beaux and “red armed belles”; conflict and the creation of fashion in England, circa 1660–1800’, Continuity and Change, 15(3), pp. 391–412; B. Lemire (2006) The Business of Everyday Life, Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 120–121. Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life, pp. 114, 122. Fairchild, ‘The production and marketing of populuxe goods’. However, the incidence of populuxe goods occurring in England in the same way as Fairchild traces in Paris has yet to be ascertained, as noted by the author, see p. 230. Hereford Journal, 5 August 1812. Hereford Journal, 11 June 1817. Handkerchiefs and neckerchiefs were advertised for sale by all the major drapers, for example, the Manchester Warehouse in Hereford in 1830, ‘Shawls and neckerchiefs in endless variety’, Hereford Journal, 14 April 1830. For Beau Brummell, see Svendsen, Fashion, p. 145. Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 5 January 1809. See also S. Levitt (1991) ‘Cheap mass-produced men’s clothing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, Textile History, 22(2), p. 181, who comments that by the mid nineteenth century, young working men had a separate, more flamboyant

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22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

The Nature of Second-Hand fashion system involving fancy buttons and collars on shirts, particularly for Sundays. She states that this ‘had little in common with the conventional Victorian male image’ and was worn principally by young urban wage earners. Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life, p. 229. Breward, The Hidden Consumer, p. 203. A. Toplis (2008) ‘The non-elite consumer and “wearing apparel” in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, 1800–1850’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wolverhampton), pp. 41–44 and pp. 77–80. Styles found that ready-made clothing was harder to come by in country and market towns than in urban areas in the eighteenth-century north. Styles, ‘Clothing the North’, p. 157. Charpy, ‘The scope and structure of the nineteenth-century second-hand trade’, p. 139. Worcestershire General and Commercial Directory for 1820 (Worcester: S. Lewis); Pigot and Co.’s, National and Commercial Directory and Topography . . . for Worcestershire . . . 1828 and 1835 (London: James Pigot and Co.); Guide and Directory to the City and Suburbs of Worcester for 1837 . . . (Worcester: T. Stratford). Worcestershire Record Office (WRO), Richard Saunders, Bills and Receipts, 2193/77 iv, 3 February 1837. Edward Meates, Worcester, previously a draper, advertised a ‘ReadyMade Clothes and Smock Frock Warehouse’ on his printed bill-head, Worcestershire Record Office, Ombersley Parish Accounts, 3572/16, bill to overseers, 8 December 1832. Hereford Journal, 12 April 1843. When Samuel Sillifant took over the ‘Cheap Mart’, he renamed the shop ‘Albion House’, his satin waistcoats priced from 15s, see Hereford Journal, 14 August 1844. See also Toplis, ‘The non-elite consumer’, appendix, pp. 248–255, for the pricing of Poor-Law clothing in the area. See, for example, Chapman, ‘The “revolution” ’, p. 49. Hereford Journal, 9 August 1848. Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 18 June 1812. The accepted value for second-hand clothing was usually around a quarter of the cost of it new. See Ginsberg, ‘Rags to riches’, pp. 123–124. Hereford Journal, 18 April 1849. In a survey of 772 Herefordshire Quarter Session Records between 1820 and 1850, approximately two thirds of all clothing theft cases were non-elite men stealing workaday clothes such as smock frocks, shirts and corduroy breeches seemingly from men of a similar status. Herefordshire Record Office, Herefordshire Quarter Session Minute Books, vols 20, 22 (labelled 23 though should be 22), 23, 24, 25, 26; Herefordshire Quarter Session Order Books, vols 17 and 18. WRO, Worcestershire Quarter Session Papers, 1/644/189-191, 1820, and Worcestershire Quarter Session Order Book, vol. 10, p. 319b. WRO, Worcestershire Quarter Session Papers, 1/589/38, 1807. Hereford Journal, 25 December 1822. Descriptions of property had to be entered correctly in the court records. If they did not match items exhibited or there was no proof about the

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40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

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ownership of clothing, cases would be dismissed by the judge. Clothing was therefore often identified through patches and marks; for example, in 1813, in Great Malvern, a smock frock was stolen when drying in a garden. Edward Bridges, the owner, identified it by a mark on the collar. WRO, Quarter Session Papers, 1/610/86, 1813. S. Henry (1978) The Hidden Economy: The Context and Control of Borderline Crime (London: M. Robertson), pp. 43, 56. WRO, Worcestershire Quarter Session Papers, 1/593/64-5, 1808. Receiving goods was not formalized as a felony in its own right until 1826. Prior to this, receiving was prosecuted as an accessory to felony but this was only possible if there was already a successful conviction for the original theft. See D. Philips (1977) Crime and Authority in Victorian England, The Black Country 1835–1860 (London: Croom Helm), p. 221. Hereford Journal, 2 August 1843. See Hereford Journal, 13 September 1820. Sarah Lerry, widow, took over the New Duke’s Head Inn, Leominster, ‘NB Two London Newspapers every Evening except Monday, and on that day, the Glocester [sic] Herald, which are publicly read at Eight o’ Clock’. See P. Clark (1983) The English Ale House, A Social History, 1200–1830 (Harlow: Longman), pp. 311–318, for further uses of the pub as a focus for local society and the emphasis on male customers. See also Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 6 April 1843, for a report of a court case involving a hawker selling stockings at an inn in Upton-upon-Severn. See Ugolini, Men and Menswear, p. 226, for male sociability and the atmosphere of leisure in tailors’ shops in a later period. For example, in the towns of Tenbury and Evesham. Eight further examples have been found in J. Bentley (1840–42) Bentley’s History and Guide and Alphabetical and Classified Directory of Worcester . . . , Evesham . . . , Dudley . . . , Stourbridge . . . , and Bentley’s History, Gazetteer, Directory and Statistics of Worcestershire (Birmingham: Bull and Turner), 3 vols., including some in small villages. In Herefordshire, examples have been found in Lugwardine, Kington and Madley; see Directory and Gazetteer of Herefordshire (1851) (Birmingham: Lascelles and Co.). Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 24 June 1830. Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 1 February 1844. See Lemire, ‘Consumerism in pre-industrial and early industrial England’, for the exchange of clothes and services in an earlier period, particularly, pp. 9–10. Hereford Journal, 17 July 1850. For example, Hereford Journal, 15 September 1830, after a burglary at Little Dewchurch, Herefordshire, pawnbrokers were alerted about the stolen items. See also B. Lemire (2005) ‘Shifting currency: the culture and economy of the second hand trade in England, c. 1600–1850’, in A. Palmer and H. Clark (eds) Old Clothes, New Looks, Second Hand Fashion (Oxford and New York: Berg), particularly pp. 34, 45. Hereford Journal, 14 August 1844. See also Styles, ‘Clothing the North’, p. 158, for a similar example, of clothing purchased as the seller was in a ‘distressed situation’. Hereford Journal, 16 October 1850.

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56. See Lemire, ‘Shifting currency’, pp. 42–43, who notes the skill of secondhand dealers in finding the right market and customers to release the latent value in their goods for sale. 57. A. Taylor (2002) Working Class Credit and Community Since 1918 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), chapter 1, particularly pp. 24–35.

4 Second-Hand Dealing in Bruges and the Rise of an ‘Antiquarian Culture’, c. 1750–1870 Ilja Van Damme

Introduction This chapter argues that second-hand markets in Bruges grew increasingly segmented and polarized towards the end of the eighteenth and in the course of the nineteenth centuries.1 This resulted from an interplay of supply and demand-side factors. Gradually, old and used belongings became harder to recycle because of the lighter, more breakable and less durable nature of the product market.2 The dawn of the much discussed consumer and industrial ‘revolutions’ eventually yielded to a material culture dominated by quickening fashion changes, convenience, hygiene and respectability.3 As standards of living started to improve, consumers came to perceive old and used belongings as inferior: age-old and socially widespread practices that centred on second-hand goods and the reuse of household possessions slowly began to wane in favour of renewal of the urban home. Nevertheless, in the rising heap of easily discarded belongings, several product categories were accorded increasing respect and passion. A blossoming group of excited bourgeois ‘collectors’ and ‘connoisseurs’ sought second-hand books, art, jewellery or period piece furniture precisely because of their age and ‘patina’.4 A set of specialized commercial venues arose that catered to this growing demand for old collectables. Newly equipped auction rooms and professional antique shops in particular stood at the centre of this quickly developing ‘antiquarian culture’.5 The interaction between three overlapping second-hand circuits in Bruges roughly indicates the range of changes occurring in this period. As such, I will examine, respectively, ‘recycling’ practices, second-hand trade proper and public auctions. Archives from local and central 73

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authorities, along with documents from guild organized second-hand sellers (oudekleerkopers) and civil criers (stokhouders), are the backbone of this chapter, Information from commercial material, such as advertisements and almanacs, and late nineteenth-century pictures and descriptive accounts also provide interesting clues. Nonetheless, this chapter is tentative in nature, as most of the narrative evidence for Bruges remains to be pieced together.6 Belgium’s historiography has left Bruges largely unstudied for the greater part of its so-called ‘dead’ and ‘silent’ era, and has tended to neglect the city’s second-hand dealings in particular.7 Yet, as I show in this chapter, Bruges’s history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is particularly suited to etch the evolutions of second-hand markets. For most of the studied period the city remained an old, almost preindustrial city, yet the problems and evolutions it faced were very much of a new, modernizing world – comparable to other cities and regions in Europe. To make the picture clear: Bruges in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was far removed from its important financial and commercial position in the Middle Ages. Around 1750, Bruges remained an important textile centre of the southern Netherlands and the pre-eminent commercial hub of its surroundings. With the ascendance of Napoleon, however, it became clear that Bruges lagged behind other regions in Europe and Belgium. The city had been unable to keep pace either technologically or industrially, primarily due to lack of capital investment. Massive unemployment greatly increased the number of poor and destitute within the city walls. In 1848, during the famous grain and potato famines in Europe, at least 44 per cent of Bruges’s 49,211 citizens needed social support.8 The cityscape became plagued with poor men’s ghettos. New economic stirrings under the liberal regime of Mayor J.C. Boyaval were eradicated by a severe economic crisis in the Belgian economy of the 1870s onwards. Most importantly, this heralded the downfall of the trustworthy local banker and entrepreneur Felix Dujardin, which, for the moment, ended economic modernization in Bruges. However, despite a lack of sustained economic growth, the second-hand sector of Bruges was rapidly changing, in line with broader alterations on the supply- and demand-sides of the economy.

‘Recycling’, reuse and changes on the product market Pervasive poverty and unemployment before and after 1800 made recycling, adjustment and repair of ‘waste’ and ‘cast-off’ items an important, although not exclusive strategy for the growing number of needy

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citizens.9 Beggars, for instance, were known as active ‘muck pickers’ (mestraepers).10 Moreover, because of an abundance of low-paid labour and a scarcity of high-priced resources, scavenging the streets was also beneficial to developing industrial activities. Glass manufacturers, eagerly seeking broken window-glass and bottles of all sorts, established contacts with the junk dealers of Bruges.11 Similar to other regions in Europe, all kinds of materials were collected and recycled for domestic or industrial reuse in Bruges: organic materials enriched the soil of collective kitchen gardens; animal skins and pelts were used in the leather industries; soot was used in candle making; human urine was used for bleaching activities; old iron was reused by blacksmiths; pewter, lead, copper or other, even more precious metals were melted down and remade into other things and so on.12 Arguably the most widespread and profitable of these reuse and recycling activities evolved around old clothing and textiles. Before 1840 recycled sheets, robes, sails and so on were crucial for all paperprocessing industries.13 Not surprisingly, exportation of rags and old linen out of the city was watched closely in eighteenth-century Bruges.14 Other regulations regarding cast-off textiles were regularly evoked in the city, especially in the early-modern times of pestilence.15 A royal ordinance of 1732, for example, decreed that England could no longer export to nearby Ostend ‘a multitude of old and rotten textiles’.16 According to this prohibition, such rags arrived almost daily from English hospitals and dead sailors, carrying germs from throughout the world (the Levant in particular was perceived as dangerous after epidemic stirrings in Marseille in 1720). Curiously enough, however, it was stated that prohibition on importing old cloth would actually benefit local textile manufacturers. Clearly, not all imported cast-offs were ‘rotten’ dirty; rather they diverted demand for cheap garments away from local supply. Textile recycling and the reuse of garments stood at the centre of many second-hand dealings crossing all layers of society. Two other aspects typical of Bruges and other industrializing societies confirm this. Firstly, pawning cloth was a convenient way of gaining access to money and credit, especially again for less wealthy people.17 It is notable that the state-organized pawn house in Bruges, the ‘Berg van Barmhartigheid’ (located in the former Gruuthuse residence at the Dijver), identified shirts, coats, stockings, sheets and other garments as typical of the pawns received from ‘poor or ordinary people’.18 Secondly, and in accordance with the general acceptance of converting textiles into cash (or credit), theft of used clothing remained widespread in eighteenth- and

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nineteenth-century Bruges. Between 1841 and 1851, the most severe decade of hardship and starvation in Bruges, theft of clothing was pre-eminent, even more so than pilferage of food and money.19 Clothing emerges as a typical barter product, ideally suited to start direct exchange of goods or illicit dealings of all kind.20 It is important to emphasize that reuse of previously ‘owned’ or ‘used’ products was not a practice restricted to the lower tiers of society. Middling and upper sorts of people bequeathed goods to their heirs, bestowed clothing upon their maids and servants or gave presents to friends. Even noble households did not refrain from such basic, ‘clever’ recycling activities as mending, adjusting, patching, turning and repair.21 These wealthier groups, however, were probably the first to be affected by important changes to the product market, thus leading the way to an overall decline of reuse and recycling practices from the end of the eighteenth century onwards.22 Indeed, is has been argued that the old system of material reuse and recycling began to pass into history at the turn of the twentieth century.23 The possibilities for natural resource exploitation and recycling grew more difficult in the highly urbanized and populated southern Netherlands; but nineteenth-century modernization made such practices even less likely.24 Certain reasons for this evolution were clearly supply oriented. Mechanization and an improving transport infrastructure in particular brought new, cheaper and different products to Bruges. Such goods were more breakable (like glass or modern pottery); made of lighter, less durable and repairable fabrics (the nineteenth-century dominance of cotton, for example); and, after 1870, products were even fabricated in new, industrial materials, substituting for natural and recyclable resources. Changes on the product market were also oriented towards demand: population growth led to a demand for new, cheap, easily replaceable products; and as incomes started to improve, old and used belonging became increasingly unwanted and perceived as inferior. In a treatise on the working classes in Belgium, written around 1860, the author summarizes the effects of these changes as follows: ‘even in the previous century, among the working classes, and you could not have ignored this, my friends, an attire of cloth was handed over from father on son, like a true relic, during three or four generations’.25 This had changed significantly in his time, as the dominance of newly made fabrics had led to ‘a progress of the people in their exterior and appearance . . . it is, so to speak, a visual equality’.26 Thus, apparently even people from the lower layers of society increasingly oriented themselves towards newly made items. But especially middle- and upper-tier consumers subordinated

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opportunities for self-sufficiency and making do to a desire for new and fashionable products. Indeed, such goods became not only cheaper but also more desirable, as they reflected hygiene, respectability and social mobility. These evolutions on the product market, however, were bound to alter the second-hand sector of Bruges.

Second-Hand trade and its eventual demise Second-Hand trade proper was more formally organized, and before the nineteenth century it was connected to regular retail and craft guilds active within the city and its rural surroundings (called the ‘Freedom of Bruges’ or ‘Brugse Vrije’). Second-Hand trades were characterized by diversity in products, practices and the social range of consumers involved. At the lower ends of this trade, closely connected with the recycling activities described above, one could find non-guild organized slop-women (uitdraagsters) or destitute ragmen, usually called prondelaers or prondelettes (for women).27 We lack the sources with which to measure these groups in detail, but they probably consisted of a shifting core of people holding several jobs as a survival strategy. No commercial know-how, fixed costs or elaborate networks were needed. To get started, one needed only a peddling attitude and a stash of clothing or household goods. Even this haphazard trading stock was not normally in their personal possession; a wide social scale of bankrupt citizens used these professions as intermediaries, selling or disposing of goods for an agreed percentage. Ragmen and slop-women wandered side- and backstreets or in the surrounding countryside, stopped passers-by, entered inns and alehouses, and pounded on doors, crying goods on sale – an obtrusive practice officially prohibited by the local authorities.28 Sometimes, however, regular craftsmen and shopkeepers hired the more successful of these ‘free resellers’ (vrije voortverkopers), as they were sometimes called, in illegal subcontracting arrangements. In 1765, for instance, it was ordered that prondelaers of furniture, pots and pans could only deal in goods that were ‘visibly old’.29 This arrangement was deemed necessary because several ragmen were selling newly made goods for well-to-do craftsmen, who were keen on circumventing guild-trading restrictions typical of the Ancien Régime.30 Similarly, in 1762, a certain Joannes Caeseele was arrested for selling old cloth on the Friday Market and Great Market (Vrijdagmarkt en Grote Markt), clearly being ‘employed’ by an official member of the second-hand guild.31 It is no coincidence that several of these small traders can be linked to illicit second-hand dealing and fencing of stolen goods.32 Especially

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during periods of ongoing warfare, like the end of the eighteenth century, renegade soldiers tried to dispose of unwanted goods (and even their uniforms) via these informal, unregulated channels.33 Guildorganized second-hand dealers (the ‘old-cloth sellers’ or oudekleerkopers, as they were called) were, of course, also mentioned in these prohibitions, as they were one of the oldest guilds of the sort within the Low Countries.34 Their activities were generally akin to the ‘free resellers’, buying all sorts of second-hand goods from different sources, mostly at auctions. During several public auctions in 1786–87, for instance, the old-cloth seller Pieter Van Minnecreede bought various lots of clothing (pants, skirts, shirts, hats and so on) as well as accessories, jewels, pots and pans, furniture and other auctioned household effects.35 Such goods were normally resold or rented.36 With regard to the important and omnipresent trade in textiles and clothing, however, the guild of old-cloth sellers had gathered specific privileges. To be clear, the guild of old-cloth sellers had never had the power, nor the ambition and will, to control all trade in used textiles. From the Middle Ages onwards, every inhabitant of Bruges held the liberty to sell his household effects (including textiles) for a specified monetary amount.37 This freedom clearly indicated the divide between professional retailers and craftsmen, and a person trading or selling his belongings on a casual basis. Moreover, these and similar guidelines for weekly and annual ‘free’ markets within the city also fostered the existence of a diverse assortment of street peddlers – such as the uitdraagters and prondeleirs described above – many of whom were officially not ‘selling’ anything stricto sensu, but simply ‘mediating’ exchanges between an accidental seller and buyer. As long as these transactions remained restricted to small dealings, resellers were tolerated or pushed into dependent subcontracting arrangements with old-cloth sellers. Besides, the old-cloth sellers always boasted of having the ‘better quality’ secondhand goods, and likely oriented their businesses towards the middle and upper layers of society. Indeed, within this complex field of second-hand transactions, the guild of second-hand dealers tried to mediate a ‘superior’ reputation towards its clients. A wary customer had to be made aware that only guildsmen were selling second-hand clothes of ‘quality’ and standing, and not ‘rotten’ throwaways or stolen products. For this reason, clothes from the second-hand guilds were inspected and marked by lead, unlike the products sold by ‘free resellers’ and slop-women. Also, only members of the guild held exclusive rights to establish clothing shops in their houses and install their goods in a visual and attractive way.

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Furthermore, only retailers of this guild could have a clothing booth or a stall at the weekly free markets.38 Around the middle of the eighteenth century, they had also secured a ‘cloth sellers arch’ in the important ‘old’ and ‘new’ Hall – located in the wealthy centre of all commercial and political activity in Bruges.39 Men and women ‘reselling’ old cloth could not actually stall their wares at these markets and halls, but were ordered to wear them on their arms or unfold them on the ground.40 Along with the symbolic capital attached to the guild, these formal prerogatives made old-cloth sellers stand out from other retailers handling old cloth. In the Middle Ages, not surprisingly, old-cloth sellers in Bruges appear to have been a wealthy and influential few: all known fifteenth-century old-cloth dealers were linked to respected families.41 In the eighteenth century their social position is less clear, and good figures are frustratingly elusive. However, due to the previously mentioned changes to the product market, dealing in second-hand goods became less and less interesting as a way of earning a living. Nineteenth-century modernization in general did not bring much welfare to the guild members of Bruges. On the contrary, with the invocation of the famous d’Allarde decree and Le Chapelier law (1791), craftsmen and retailers lost all corporate backing and help. After 1795, freedom of trade and manufacturing in Belgium reduced the corporations to welfare organizations without any actual significance. Although it is hard to follow the evolution of the old-cloth sellers guild after its abolishment, commercial directories from the nineteenth century indicate that a similar profession still existed.42 They were called in Bruges, somewhat disrespectfully, ‘rag collectors’, already revealing a subtle shift from ‘clothes’ to ‘rags’. Several years later they were generally referred to as ‘bone, rags and old iron traders’ (‘handelaars in benen, vodden en oud ijzer’), indicating that dealings in textiles had to be complemented with ‘recycling’ of pots and pans and discarded furniture. Between 1830 and 1870, no less than 33 such traders were identified in Bruges and its surroundings, with an overall growth in numbers from 3 in 1830 to 16 in 1863. Although no information about their wealth is available, the addresses of second-hand dealers in the directories give a rough indication of the social standing and character of their neighbourhood.43 Only four of them lived in the old commercially and politically important city centre, traditionally the place where shops and market activities of oldcloth sellers were situated in the Middle Ages and early-modern times. Another five rag collectors were living in the ‘quarter of Magdalena’, a neighbourhood near the common quarter Den Hoye (Schaarstraat).

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The presence of pauper ghettos and a ‘working house’ for vagrants in this borough seems to further underline the social deprivation of the second-hand dealers.44 This impression is confirmed by pinpointing the residences of the remaining 22 rag traders. All lived in the northern, more impoverished quarters of Bruges, some even in the seediest neighbourhoods of the nineteenth-century city. The area around the Carmersstraat and St-Annarei was notorious for its poverty, and housed 25 per cent of the urban population in abominable conditions.45 Signs of social squalor notwithstanding, the listed rag and bone collectors were in any case wealthy enough to advertise their trade in the directories. Most likely there still existed a shady world of peddlers and even poorer second-hand traders in Bruges, comparable to the Ancien Régime, but they remain mostly invisible in the sources.46 Such traders worked for paper industries or catered only to the poor and marginalized of society.47 In Bruges, at the end of the nineteenth century, secondhand markets remained in place. On Saturday, at the Dijver and on the bridge to the Wollestraat, one could find a ‘prondel’ market, selling old iron, discarded furniture and worn-out clothing (Figure 4.1). And on

Figure 4.1 View on the ‘prondel’ market alongside the Dijver around 1895. Old clothes are hanging in trees, or they are simply stacked on the ground Source: CAB, FO/A03026.

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Wednesday, at the Memling- and Oosterlingenplein, centrally located between the impoverished boroughs of ‘St-Gillis’ and ‘St-Anna’, cheap rags were sold to nearby labourers.48 Looking at late nineteenth-century pictures of these markets, the clientele indeed appears rather poor: no typically nineteenth-century bourgeois families are evident. Newspapers, in any case, hardly bothered to advertise such dealings. A recent analysis of advertisements in the ‘Gazette’ of Bruges during the first half of the nineteenth century indicates that few notices could be related to genuine second-hand transactions.49 Not surprisingly, advertisements in nineteenth-century Bruges that did inform the audience about such deals focused on forthcoming sales of luxury belongings, such as special books, jewellery, paintings and so on. This finding introduces the next section.

Public auctions and the rise of an ‘antiquarian culture’ Obviously, second-hand products did not disappear from nineteenthcentury Bruges. Yet, when compared to the eighteenth century, the overall structure of the second-hand markets appears more segmented and polarized. The dwindling second-hand trade was more onedimensionally oriented towards the lower tiers of society, catering products of less value and respect as an age before. At the same time, however, an already existing retail circuit dealing in old books, arts and antiquities was further specializing and gaining genuine ‘connoisseur’ interest. Interestingly, the depreciation of ‘old objects’ in general added value to specific goods laden with history and ‘patina’.50 Many of these changes had already crystallized in the eighteenth century, some even earlier, and were closely connected to selling second-hand goods via public auctions. Public auctions were undoubtedly the cornerstone of the second-hand trade in Bruges in the Ancien Régime. At the end of the eighteenth century public auctions were paramount for such diverse second-hand transactions as used clothing, furniture, jewellery, paintings and most other household effects. They were organized on a monthly basis in the pawn shops of Bruges; almost daily in the houses of the (deceased) owners of the auctioned goods; and in a specialized auction house called the ‘city house’ or ‘stedenhuys’, located in the Wollestraat.51 In contrast with Antwerp, the second-hand guild of Bruges did not hold a monopoly on the appraising and organization of these public sales.52 Instead, three (in earlier times, four) officially appointed ‘stokhouders’ or ‘civil criers’ controlled all auctions in the city and surrounding countryside.53 They were

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allowed to practise their profession for a settled amount of time, paying considerable sums to be sworn into office at the city council.54 Such investments could prove hazardous when the quality of the appraised and auctioned goods – on which criers earned a fixed percentage of the hammered price – was low. Moreover, the civil authorities regularly invoked regulations and heavy fines to stop illegal appraising and auctioning by brokers, notaries and other rivals in the city and in the countryside alike.55 To counter fraud, ‘stokhouders’ had to keep precise accounts of their activities, to be handed over to the city, detailing the seller, the name of the highest bidder and the hammered price.56 Organizing a public sale in Bruges depended on different motivations. Goods could be auctioned on legal order (after an execution, a banishment or on demand of the pawn shops). Public sales were due when a business or shop went bankrupt or wanted to move from town;57 and they were ordered when a decease involved orphans. Finally, auctions were often organized voluntarily. This could happen, for instance, when conflicts arose between heirs regarding movable property.58 The proceeds of a particular sale – where everyone was free to buy – could then be shared equally among legatees (or the creditors to settle debts). Public sales on demand of a merchant or wealthy reseller wishing to auction old or newly imported goods from nearby ports like Ostend or Dunkerque had to be arranged by a special ‘civil crier of merchandise’. In September 1726, for instance, the civil crier Franchois de Ceuninck advertised that he was auctioning ‘superfine’ linens just imported from England.59 The freedom and widespread liberty in using auctions to settle all sorts of affairs could be frustratingly confusing. More importantly, it fostered numerous tensions between the different second-hand dealers, as auctions were evidently their main source of supply. For one thing, retailers dealing in old goods could not sell ‘visibly new’ products, although these were also sold at public auctions. Such new products were sometimes smuggled into sales of used products or bought by second-hand dealers under the guise of ‘personal consumption’. These goods were then resold as ‘used’ merchandise.60 This practice gave rise to illegal subcontracting arrangements between craftsmen and retailers, the latter reselling newly ordered products that passed through the auctions.61 Moreover, among second-hand dealers, prondelaers or free resellers were allowed to provision themselves at auctions with old furniture and used household belongings. However, only old-cloth sellers were officially allowed to buy large quantities of old clothing at these sales. This privilege was often simply ‘forgotten’ and stimulated a wholesale business

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in old clothing outside the official guild regulations.62 Rochus Emmerij, the caretaker of the city house in the Wollestraat, was accused of continuously importing ‘newly’ remade clothing in Bruges, to be sold in the daily sales there. On demand of the old-cloth sellers he was ordered to publicly expose these auctioned goods before the actual sale took place, so that members of the guild could inspect them without trouble.63 Other commercial middlemen auctioned into Bruges ‘large quantities of used clothing’ (‘groot nombre van oude cleederen’) from England, France and Holland, without direct interference from the second-hand guild. Not giving the old-cloth sellers any chance to view the goods, these trading stocks were then exported again to other places in Flanders, such as Ghent, Courtrai, Tournai, Yper and Lille.64 Such practices were, of course, prohibited by guild regulations and strongly contested. The use of auctions for selling both old and new goods, and disposing of goods of varying quality, value and origins, made these events true social spectacles, appreciated and attended by different layers of society.65 Thus, it is no surprise that especially luxury goods (old paintings, precious books, period furniture, family belongings and jewellery) from wealthy estates of deceased owners attracted interest from an emerging group of fervent ‘collectors’ and ‘connoisseurs’.66 Although the group identity of this audience has yet to be analysed for Bruges, their attendance at the public sales marks the true beginning of a typically specialized ‘antique’ market, one almost ‘invented’ for bourgeois, recreational use. Such a market was not motivated by budget constraints or by ways of capturing second-hand value and quality for better prices as first-hand equivalents – motivations that were imperative for the lower and middling sorts of people. Selling and buying ‘antiques’ – the concept itself was new, and in alliance with an emerging ‘romantic-sentimental’ body of thought – nurtured a socially and culturally constructed experience, a longing for the ‘past’, for pre-industrial traditions, for ‘authentic’ and ‘exotic’ goods, attractive and respected for their old age. Of all mechanisms of second-hand exchange, public auctions were especially well suited to cater to this specific ‘knowledgeable’ demand. The private space of an auction room had always felt more comfortable and civilized than the hustle and bustle of streets and markets. And in a sector increasingly fraught with ‘rotten’ goods and shady dealings, the strictly prescribed procedures at auctions guaranteed some minimal trust regarding the source and quality of goods. The institutional evolution of the profession of the crier in the nineteenth century is telling. Already providing some legal supervision in the previous age, his role became restricted to that of a bailiff or public notary, conscientiously

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giving legal authenticity to auctions.67 Organizing these events, and making them public through advertisements and specialized auction catalogues, became the task of a new, commercial entrepreneur, the directeurs de ventes or directors of sales.68 For most of the nineteenth century, the commercial directories of Bruges indicate the continuous existence of two, sometimes three, auction houses. These were operated between 1828 and 1870 by at least eight directors, and one was active for 37 years.69 These auction houses, catering increasingly to bourgeois demand, were (unsurprisingly) located in the central shopping streets of Bruges, such as the Wollestraat, the Vlamingstraat and the Oude Burg. The old ‘stedenhuys’ in the Wollestraat, already active as an auction house in the eighteenth century, received a fashionable, neo-classical makeover in 1828, clearly making it better suited for its specialized, more bourgeois purposes.70 Bruges in general was an ideal setting to allure consumers fond of such antiquarian pastimes. After the Battle of Waterloo (1815) Bruges was ‘discovered’ by English travellers, soldiers, artists, scientists and Catholics as a place of traditions and ‘authenticity’. The city had not yet been shaken by industrial upheaval, and accommodation and basic needs were cheaper than in most English towns. This ‘English colony’ comprised 400 souls around 1846 and 1200 around 1866. Artists like Thomas Harper King and James Weale belonged to it, and both became active propagators of the neo-gothic revival.71 As such they made a significant impact on J.-B.-Ch. De Bethune, a citizen of Bruges and father of Belgium’s neo-gothic movement. In 1874, the author Eugène van Bemmel eloquently captured this romantic mood in Bruges by writing: ‘these dead cities in Flanders have something particular and striking in the contrast between their present solitude and the religious and civil buildings from an era filled with grandeur. . . . [E]verywhere, almost constantly, the most profound silence reigns, interrupted only, once in a while, by the melancholy notes of the carillon, fluttering in the air, vibrant, confused, and almost undecided . . . It is a civilisation which in the meantime has departed, an entire world that is vanished.’72 This was literary imagery, of course, but influential enough to reveal Bruges as such in the symbolist paintings of Fernand Knopf and in the Paris bestseller of Georges Rodenbach Bruges-la-Morte (1892).73 More importantly, beginning in 1876 with the Catholic policy of Mayor A. V. de Bocarmé, municipal authorities began, ironically, to successfully exploit and even reconstruct Bruges’s own ‘antiquity’. Earlier industrialization had mostly spared the city centre from disruptive settlements and factories, but at the end of the

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Figure 4.2 View on two antique shops along the Rozenhoedkaai (Quai du Rosaire) around 1900. The one in the background is promoting itself as an ‘Old Curiosity shop’, clearly anticipating English tourists Source: CAB, FO/B00008.

nineteenth century the vista of Bruges became more picturesque than ever.74 In 1877 King Leopold II already hoped ‘that the entirety of the city would be nothing more as a vast and splendid museum, and that no stranger would visit Belgium without seeing it’.75 The neo-gothic revival

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took this task to heart and boosted the building sector, art and luxury industries, and the craze for antiquities in general. At the turn of the century Bruges truly awakened by embracing mass tourism, guided by the immensely popular walking guides of canon Duclos.76 Pictures from the time attest to the existence of growing numbers of ‘antique shops’, situated conveniently along renovated tourist thoroughfares (Figure 4.2).77

Conclusions The present chapter has tried to show how second-hand dealing in Bruges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries followed broader changes on the supply and demand sides of the economy. Given the lack of detailed studies of second-hand dealing in Bruges, the present survey remains general and tentative in nature: many gaps need to be filled and nuances made. That said, two trends appear as worthwhile ‘working hypotheses’ for further research. On the one hand, the second-hand trade seems to have been declining in importance due to the interplay of supply-led changes on the product market and growing consumer preferences for new, fashionable and ‘respectable’ products. In other words, buying new goods became increasingly affordable due to, among others, declining prices and, at least for middling layers of society, rising standards of living. Thus, low-grade second-hand dealing was certainly influenced by both supply and demand-side alterations. On the other hand, certain second-hand goods were increasingly laden with new meanings, closely tied to a demand-driven process which I have called an emerging ‘antiquarian culture’. As a result of these parallel evolutions, I have argued how the second-hand market grew more segmented and polarized. This does not necessarily imply a rigid dichotomy between antique collecting for the rich and economic necessity for the poor – ignoring in the process the complex consumer motivations of the middling sorts, and the continuous distribution of second-hand goods, which were neither ‘bad’ nor ‘luxurious’. It does, however, indicate that ‘traditional’ second-hand dealers lived in a world of shrinking opportunities. Fewer used products were suitable for resale, or considered ‘appropriate’, ‘respectable’ or ‘good’ by people with rising standards of living. Recycling and reuse became linked to economies of scarcity, especially for easily infected and replaceable goods such as clothing. Also, a general decline in profits in the second-hand trade weakened social prospects, although much, of course, depended upon the products on offer. Dealing, for example, in second-hand shirts or cupboards

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became very different undertakings, especially as the furniture trade could always appeal to the emerging sentiments of an antiquarian culture. Public auctions in Bruges dealt in all manner of household effects, provisioning lower, middle and upper layers of society alike. But again it made a difference if goods were advertised in sale catalogues as ‘antiques’, rather than as ‘decent’, ‘modern’ or ‘good’ second-hand. By embracing and catering for this emerging antiquarian culture, the second-hand market remained an essential aspect of the economy of Bruges, even if previous changes on the supply and demand side had reduced the importance of second-hand trades as such. Bruges’s past had become its sign of innovation and modernity.

Notes 1. I wish to thank H. Deneweth, D. Lyna and J. Stobart for their useful comments and remarks. 2. See B. Blondé and I. Van Damme (2009) ‘Fashioning old and new or moulding the material culture of Europe’, in B. Blondé, N. Coquery, J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds) Fashioning Old and New. Changing Consumer Patterns in Western Europe (1650–1900) (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 1–13. 3. These basic shifts have been attested in such diverse works as J. E. Crowley (2001) The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press); W. D. Smith (2002) Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York: Routledge); J. De Vries (2008) The Industrious Revolution. Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 4. See also Chapter 5 by Clive Edwards and Margaret Ponsonby in this volume. 5. Aspects of this evolution are discussed in D. Lyna (2009) ‘Changing geographies and the rise of the modern auction. Transformations on the second-hand markets of eighteenth-century Antwerp’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Fashioning Old and New, pp. 169–184; and in Chapter 8 by Dries Lyna in this volume. 6. Comparative material for the southern Netherlands is provided in H. Deceulaer (2001) Pluriforme patronen en een verschillende snit. Sociaaleconomische, institutionele en culturele transformaties in de kledingsector in Antwerpen, Brussel en Gent, 1585–1800 (Amsterdam: Aksant); I. Van Damme (2007) Verleiden en verkopen. Antwerpse kleinhandelaars en hun klanten in tijden van crisis (ca. 1648–ca. 1748) (Amsterdam: Aksant). 7. See M. Ryckaert, A. Vandewalle, J. D’hondt, N. Geirnaert and L. Vandamme (eds) (1999) Brugge: de geschiedenis van een Europese stad (Tielt: Lannoo), pp. 140–189; V. Vermeersch (ed.) (2002) Brugge (Antwerpen: Mercatorfonds), pp. 115–143. 8. Ryckaert et al., Brugge, pp. 175–176. 9. D. Woodward (1985) “‘Swords into ploughshares”: recycling in preindustrial England’, Economic History Review, 38, pp. 175–191; R. Reith

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10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

The Nature of Second-Hand (2003) ‘Recycling im spaten Mittelalter und der fruhen Neuzeit – eine Materialsammlung’, Fruhneuzeit-info, 14, pp. 47–65. See Y. Vanden Berghe (1978) Brugge in de Revolutietijd. Een verzameling opstellen over Brugge op het einde van het ancien régime (1770–1794) (Brugge: Koninklijke Gidsenbond Brugge en West-Vlaanderen), pp. 86, 90. City Archives Bruges (CAB), Hallegeboden, 1763–1775, f. 41 recto (23 July 1765). See, for example, ibid., f. 45 (recycling of old soot); f. 47 (old animal pelt and skin); Hallegeboden, 1786–1793, f. 83 verso (recycling of pewter, lead, copper, precious metals and iron). After that date, wood and other substitutes came into use. See S. Steffens (1997) ‘Des chiffoniers et fripiers Belges entre 1800 et 1914’, International Paper History, 7, p. 17. CAB, Hallegeboden, 1749–1763, f. 83 verso–84 recto (9 August 1752); State Archives Bruges (SAB), Inventaris van de verzameling stad Brugge (Toegangen in beperkte oplage, 119), no. 723, ‘project-ampliatie’ tot ambachtskeure van de oudekleerkopers tot Brugge (19 March 1719). CAB, Plakkaten, 1st series, register 8, no. 3 (11 August 1625 and repeated August 1634); and register 14, no. 4 (22 May 1666). Ibid., 2nd series, register 14, no. 37 (13 November 1731), ‘menichte van oude ende verrotte clederen’. See also L. Fontaine (2008) ‘The exchange of second-hand goods between survival strategies and “business” in eighteenth-century Paris’, in L. Fontaine (ed.) Alternative Exchanges. Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York and Oxford: Berghahn), pp. 97–114; M. Charpy ‘The scope and structure of the nineteenth-century second-hand trade in the Parisian clothes market’, in Fontaine (ed.), Alternative Exchanges, pp. 127–151. CAB, Plakkaten, 2nd series, register 36, no. 116 (23 November 1789), ‘armen ofte gemeynen menschen’. Similar, in the civil pawnshop of Bruges, the ‘Berg van Charitate’, situated at the Lange Rei, textiles and metals of ‘daily use to the ordinary people’ were the only pawns allowed. A sample at the end of the eighteenth century effectively indicates that 91 per cent of all pawns were textiles of some sort. See also P. Soetaert (1974) De Berg van Charitate te Brugge, een stedelijke leenbank (1573–1795) (Brussels: Pro Civitate), p. 65. S. De Meester (2003) ‘De “Armste stad van België” tijdens de crisisjaren. Onderzoek naar de conjunctuurgevoeligheid van de diefstallen te Brugge (1841–1851)’, Unpublished Masters Thesis, University of Ghent), chapter 5, available at http://www.ethesis.net/brugge_conjunctuur/brugge_conj_ hfst_5.htm (accessed 29 January 2009). See also Chapter 3 by Alison Toplis in this volume. K. De Vliegher-De Wilde (2005) Adellijke levensstijl. Dienstpersoneel, consumptie en materiële leefwereld van Jan van Brouchoven en Livina de Beer, graaf en gravin van Bergeyck (ca. 1685–1740) (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën); for France, see V. Pietri (2008) ‘Uses of the used. The conventions of renewing and exchanging goods in French provincial aristocracy’, in Fontaine (ed.), Alternative Exchanges, pp. 115–126. See also Blondé and Van Damme, ‘Fashioning old and new’.

Ilja Van Damme 89 23. S. Strasser (1999) Waste and Want. A Social History of Trash (New York: Holt), p. 13. 24. See also D. Woodward (1998) ‘Straw, bracken and the Wicklow whale: the exploitation of natural resources in England since 1500’, Past and Present, 159, p. 74. 25. J. Dauby (1860) Les classes ouvrières en Belgique. Parallèle entre leur condition d’autrefois et celle d’aujourd’hui (Alimentation, Vêtement, Logement, Mobilier, Salaire, Conditions de travail, Instruction, Niveau Moral, etc) (Brussels: Lesigne), pp. 39–40: ‘Au siècle dernier encore, dans la classe ouvrière, et vous ne devez pas ignorer cela, mes amis, un habit de drap se transmettait de père en fils comme une véritable relique, pendant trois ou quatre generations.’ 26. Ibid.: ‘un progrès du people dans l’extérieur et l’apparence, . . . c’est, pour ainsi parler, l’égalité visible’. 27. M. Danneel (1985), ‘Handelaarsters in oude kleren in de 16de eeuw te Brugge’, Brugs Ommeland, 25, pp. 210–215. 28. Ibid., p. 213; CAB, Cleercopers Dossiers, 1673–1763, no. S4 97 (undated, eighteenth century). 29. CAB, Hallegeboden, 1763–1775, f. 46 recto–47 verso (18 October 1765), ‘visibelyck oudt’. On this aspect, see also Chapter 1 by Martin Wottle in this volume. 30. Craftsmen and retailers, for instance, could only rule over one shop per person. See more detail in P. Stabel (2006) ‘From the market to the shop. Retail and urban space in late medieval Bruges’, in B. Blondé, P. Stabel, J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds) Buyers and Sellers. Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 79–108; H. Deceulaer, ‘Second-Hand dealers in the early modern Low Countries: institutions, markets and practices’, in Fontaine (ed.) Alternative Exchanges, pp. 16, 22. 31. CAB, Cleercopers Dossiers, 1673–1763, no. S4 45 (lawsuit 1762). 32. For instance, CAB, Hallegeboden, 1786–1793, f. 83 verso (19 June 1788, in repetition of a similar ordinance of 16 September 1762); and even older Plakkaten, 1st series, register 14, no. 24 (29 June 1667). 33. CAB, Hallegeboden, 1763–1775, f. 16 verso–17 recto (21 November 1763); 1793–1795, f. 23 verso–24 recto (2 September 1793); Plakkaten, 2nd series, register 34, no. 9 March 1790. Also see B. Sandberg (2008) “‘The magazine of all their pillaging”. Armies as sites of second-hand exchanges during the French wars of religion’, in Fontaine (ed.) Alternative Exchanges, pp. 76–96. 34. For more detail, see A. Schouteet (1970) ‘Het ambacht van de oudkleerkopers te Brugge’, Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis te Brugge, 107, pp. 46–48. 35. L. Brabant (2007) ‘Tweedehandsmarkten op het einde van de 18de eeuw. Brugge en het Brugse vrije’, Unpublished Masters Thesis, University of Ghent, pp. 92–93. For more examples of second-hand dealers buying at public auctions, see CAB, Oud Archief, no. 203, Stokhouders, ‘verkoopboek Guillaume Pavot’ (1786–1788) and ‘verkoopboek Jan-Baptist Cle’ (1764– 1774). 36. See also Deceulaer, ‘Second-Hand dealers’, p. 18; I. Van Damme (2006) ‘Changing consumer preferences and evolutions in retailing. Buying and

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37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

The Nature of Second-Hand selling consumer durables in Antwerp (c. 1648–c. 1748)’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Buyers and Sellers, pp. 199–223. Stabel, ‘From the market to the shop’, pp. 89, 102. SAB, Inventaris van de verzameling stad Brugge (Toegangen in beperkte oplage, 119), no. 725; CAB, Cleercopers dossiers, 1763–1796, no. S4 61 (request, 27 September 1725). CAB, Verz. K & Pl, no. 139: index at the bottom, no. 7, ‘cleercopers boge’. Their presence in the close by ‘new’ Hall is attested in CAB, Cleercopers dossiers, 1673–1763, no. 465 (request, 26 March 1754). SAB, Inventaris van de verzameling stad Brugge (Toegangen in beperkte oplage, 119), no. 723, ‘project-ampliatie’ (19 March 1719). Schouteet, ‘Het ambacht van de oudkleerkopers’, pp. 57–58. CAB, Almanach der provincie van West-Vlaanderen, en wegwyzer der Stad Brugge (the years 1828–1870 were consulted). The location of two rag traders was not found, namely the one living in the ‘Diskalenstraat’ and another one in the ‘Sint-Catharinastraat’. S. Gilte and A. Vanwalleghem (2004) Bouwen door de eeuwen heen (2004) (Turnhout: Brepols), vl. 18n B: Stad Brugge. Zuid, pp. xxxi–xxxiv. G. Michiels (1978) Uit de wereld der Brugse mensen. De fotografie en het leven te Brugge 1839–1918 (Brugge: Westvlaamse Gidenkring VZW), pp. 147–148. Police reports and discussion on vagrants seem the most likely sources. See CAB, Modern Archief, 9.IX.A.Politie. The same evolution was attested for England, see M. Ginsburg (1980) ‘Rags to riches: the second-hand clothes trade 1700–1978’, Costume, 14, pp. 121–135. Michiels, Uit de wereld der Brugse mensen, p. 407. L. Vansteenbrugge (2008) ‘De consumptierevolutie in het vroeg 19deeeuwse advertentiewezen’, Unpublished Masters Thesis, University of Ghent, pp. 40–42. Of a total of 11,487 advertisements analysed by Vansteenbrugge, only 237 could be recognized as notices of auctions of household belongings. G. McCracken (1988) Culture and Consumption. New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Apparently the civil criers also used the ‘Florentijnse Loge’, on the corner of the current Academiestraat and Vlamingstraat, after the Florentine merchants abandoned it in the sixteenth century. But it is not clear if this was still the case in the eighteenth century. See Deceulaer, ‘Second-Hand dealers’, pp. 19–20 and Chapter 8 by Dries Lyna in this volume. See E. Vanden Busssche (1883) ‘Le stockhouder’, La Flandre. Revues des monuments d’histoire et antiquités (Bruges), pp. 61–82; A. Vandewalle (1982) ‘De stokhouders te Brugge. Het geval Adriaenssens (1678–1694)’, in Gedenkboek Michiel Mispelon (Kortemark-Handzame: Familia et Patria), pp. 463–476. The stockhouders were assisted in their duties by female appraisers, see A. Van den Abeele (1982) ‘Prysighe. Een vrouwelijk beroep onder het Ancien Regime’, Biekorf, 82, p. 39; A. Vandewalle (1982) ‘Het vrouwelijk beroep van “uijtghevighe” en “prijsighe”, 17de–18de eeuw’, Biekorf, 82, p. 238.

Ilja Van Damme 91 54. J. Van Walleghem (1984) Merckenweerdigste voorvallen en daegelijcksche gevallen. Brugge 1787 (Brugge: Gemeentebestuur van Brugge), p. 162, n. 8. The sum was mainly a kind of security deposit, guaranteeing that a stokhouder was personally solvable and paid the taxes on his profession. Usually direct relatives, such as the parents, were co-securing the deposit, thus supporting the career of the young stokhouder. See also A. Vandewalle (1993) ‘De benoeming van een stadspensionaris, testcase voor de invoering van de ambtstaks in Brugge, 1673–1674’, in H. Soly and R. Vermeir (eds) Beleid en bestuur in de oude Nederlanden: liber amicorum Prof. dr. M. Baelde (Gent: RUG), pp. 405–413. 55. See, for instance, CAB, Plakkaten, 1st series, register 11, no. 27 (14 August 1660); 2nd series, register 10, no. 68 (13 July 1690); register 11, no. 5 (13 February 1721); and Hallegeboden, 1763–1775, f. 86 verso (30 May 1767); 1786–1793, f. 8 verso–9 recto (9 January 1787). 56. On these instructions, see CAB, Plakkaten, 1st series, register 13, no. 8 (7 August 1666); register 16, no. 13 (22 October 1712); 2nd series, register 21, no. 15 (20 October 1752); register 26, no. 19 (21 October 1780); register 36, no. 73 (4 April 1787). 57. This practice was strictly regulated, as can be read in CAB, Hallegeboden, 1749–1763, f. 46 verso–47 recto (8 March 1751). 58. Civil criers also organized auctions of real estates; of financial interest, tithes and shares; and of trees, firewood and other agricultural produce. See D. Lyna and I. Van Damme (2009) ‘A strategy of seduction? The role of commercial advertisements in the eighteenth-century retailing business of Antwerp’, Business History, 51, pp. 104–109. 59. CAB, Plakkaten, 1st series, register 17, no. 12 (23 September 1726). 60. CAB, Hallegeboden, 1763–1775, f. 46 recto–47 verso (18 October 1765). 61. For Antwerp at least, such practices were common: see Van Damme, Verleiden en verkopen, pp. 229–257. 62. SAB, Inventaris van de verzameling stad Brugge (Toegangen in beperkte oplage, 119), no. 724. 63. CAB, Cleercopers dossiers, 1673–1763 (request, 22 October 1751; Cleercopers dossiers, 1763–1796, no. S4 61 (request 27 September 1725). Also see SAB, Inventaris van de verzameling stad Brugge (Toegangen in beperkte oplage, 119), no. 724 (lawsuit 1749). 64. SAB, Inventaris van de verzameling stad Brugge (Toegangen in beperkte oplage, 119), no. 723, ‘project-ampliatie’ (19 March 1719); CAB, Cleercopers dossiers, 1763–1796, no. S4 61 (request, 21 February 1727). 65. CAB, Oud Archief, no. 203: Stokhouders, ‘verkoopboek Guillaume Pavot’ (1786–1788); and ‘verkoopboek Jan-Baptist Cle’ (1764–1774). See also Chapter 10 by Sofia Murhem, Göran Ulväng and Kristina Lilja and Chapter 2 by Sara Pennell in this volume. 66. See C. Guichard (2009) ‘From social event to urban spectacle: art auctions in late eighteenth-century Paris’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Buyers and Sellers, pp. 203–216; and Chapter 9 by Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart in this volume. 67. Pasinomie: collection complète des lois, décrets, arrêtés et règlements généraux qui peuvent être invoqués en Belgique, under ‘ventes publiques de meubles’. See also

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68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

The Nature of Second-Hand X. Lasage (1993) Den deurwaerder. Geschiedenis van het gerechtsdeurwaardersmbacht (Kapellen: Pelckmans), pp. 137–222. Les pandectes Belges. Corpus Juris Belgici (1933) (Brussels: Les éditions Edmond Picard), volume 136, ‘ventes publiques de meubles’, pp. 387–613. CAB, Almanach der provincie van West-Vlaanderen, en wegwyzer der Stad Brugge, 1828–1870. CAB, Bouwergunningen, Z, Nr. 1828. L. Van Biervliet (1999) ‘De Engelse kolonie’, in M. Ryckaert et al. (eds) Brugge, pp. 172–173. E. Van Bemmel (1874) Patria Belgica, encyclopédie nationale (Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe). Cited in H. De Smaele (2009) Rechts Vlaanderen: religie en stemgedrag in negentiende-eeuws België (Leuven: Universitaire Pers) 378: ‘Ces villes mortes de la Flandre ont quelque chose de singulier et de saisissant par le contraste de leur solitude présente avec les édifices religieux et civils d’une époque pleine de grandeur. . . . [P]artout règne, presque constamment, le plus profond silence, interrompu seulement, de temps à autre, par les notes mélancoliques du carillon s’éparpillant dans l’espace, vibrantes, confuses et comme indécises. . . . Il y a là toute une civilisation désormais éteinte, tout un monde qui a disparu.’ For more examples, see F. Bonneure (1984) Brugge beschreven: hoe een stad in teksten verschijnt (Brussels: Elsevier), p. 90. H. De Smaele (2009) ‘Een (on)vrijwillig begijnhof. Brugge in de negentiende eeuw’, Museum Bulletin. Speciale editie: De uitvinding van Brugge. De stad van Delacenserie, 3, pp. 7–13. Cited in J. A. Van Houtte (1982) De geschiedenis van Brugge (Tielt: Lannoo), p. 521: ‘Que la ville toute entière ne soit qu’un vaste et splendide musée et pas un étranger ne visitera la Belgique sans aller le voir.’ A. Viaene (1972) ‘Antecedenten van Duclos’ standaardwerk “Bruges, histoire et souvenirs” ’, in Panorama van Brugse geschiedschrijving sedert Duclos (1910) (Brugge: Gidsenbond van Brugge en Westvlaanderen), p. 19. On early tourism in Bruges, see F. Welvaert (1983) ‘Toeristische verengingen te Brugge omstreeks de eeuwwisseling’, Brugs Ommeland, 23, pp. 5–22; F. Welvaert (1984) ‘Het toerisme te Brugge, 1890–1914’, Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis te Brugge, 121, pp. 167–219. See the pictures of Bruges in C. Ruys (2002) Brugge: portret van een stad, 1847– 1918 (Gent: Ludion); J. A. Rau (1984) Brugge, de memoires van een stad (Brugge: Van de Wiele).

5 The Polarization of the Second-Hand Market for Furniture in the Nineteenth Century Clive Edwards and Margaret Ponsonby

Introduction This chapter explores the markets for and the meanings attached to second-hand and antique furniture in Britain in the nineteenth century. It examines the changing consumption practices surrounding these goods, the impact of industrialization and the increase in production of new goods on this aspect of the furniture trade. Rather than being a simple new for old exchange, the economic and cultural values of second-hand furniture changed in various and complex ways. We can address these issues by exploring the changes in the meaning and connotations of ‘old’ furniture and the impact of the new fashionable ‘modern’ furniture. This chapter uncovers a number of contradictions. By its nature, modernity tended to make the old suspect: it equated second-hand with unwanted items. Yet it also promoted second-hand consumption in two distinct ways. Firstly, by valuing certain aspects of the past, modernity helped to legitimize the collecting of particular ‘old’ goods. Secondly, since developing modernity could not satisfy the demand for goods, so the purchase of second-hand was a direct economic response. It is also important to remember that the markets for second-hand goods were as fragmented as those for new goods, as were the range of outlets that supplied them. By illustrating both middleclass and working-class attitudes, we can gather something of the varied nature of the second-hand furniture trade and its customers. Along with second-hand clothing, the market for used furniture was changing in the early nineteenth century; however, changes were of a somewhat different and more complex nature. Lemire suggests that 93

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by the end of the eighteenth century, in polite society, it was generally unacceptable to wear used or old clothes.1 Nenadic has argued a similar history for furniture. Her findings suggest that during the later eighteenth century furniture produced for a middle-rank market was then recycled within the same market; but by the 1820s, the situation had changed. To purchase second-hand was, she says, an indication of a lack of interest in fashion and style, and ‘it was much more likely that working people would be able to purchase second-hand goods that had once belonged to the relatively wealthy’.2 However, this does not fully explain the changing trade in second-hand furniture, which developed into segments that supplied polarized and clearly defined markets. These markets included the antiquarians of the early part of the century and the amateur furniture collector who became a feature of the later nineteenth century. As the century progressed, the particular nature of aged furniture became desirable for interiors that followed the fashion for furnishing with a mixture of old and new.3 Even more of a statement was the emerging desire for antique furniture, particularly for a wealthy and established section of society who perhaps wished to distinguish themselves from new money.4 Above all, though, were the roles that objects played in homes. It seems clear that although economics might be a major incentive for some, the motivations for purchasing second-hand went well beyond the economic. So what was the fascination of old objects? McCracken has argued that, since the establishment of the fashion system in the eighteenth century, patina on objects was no longer important.5 For furniture, this argument does not hold up since it was at precisely the same time that antiques became desirable, albeit for a minority in the first instance. Gregson and Crewe suggest, in their examination of current interests in second-hand merchandise, that consuming such goods ‘captures difference’.6 While their analysis cannot be fully adopted for the period in question, the notion of expressing difference does apply to antique furniture during the period when it was of limited appeal; limited that is to a few wealthy patrons and some rather eccentric or at least scholarly professionals.7 In these cases, the ‘old furnishings’ expressed a passion for history looked at through the prism of Romanticism, but the underlying motives were still expressing wealth, education and taste as their forebears had done with the results of their efforts on the Grand Tour. An important aspect of this taste was the cultural capital that it displayed. According to Bourdieu, cultural goods equate with symbolic capital and there was clearly a process of transference of capital from the old to the new during the nineteenth century. The gradually emerging

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exception was the case of ‘charismatic’ objects such as antiques. In addition, the values of antiques were often more than economic in that they were defined as part of a history: ‘every material inheritance is, strictly speaking also a cultural inheritance’.8 Cultural capital was an essential part of the family legacy, in the material form of goods such as books and antique furniture, as well as house and property. Education and connoisseurship assisted the acquisition of the cultural capital of antique furniture.9 What had once been a strictly minority antiquarian taste became more established in the early to mid nineteenth century with the development of specialist retail brokers and dealers. In addition to these positive reasons for purchasing a variety of second-hand furniture of varying qualities and ages, there were also ‘problems’ with new furniture.10 The changes within the manufacture and retailing of new furniture called into question the quality of these new and fashionable items perhaps making them less desirable, or at least questionable, and putting aged furniture in a better light. This aspect again highlights the differences in the consumption of furniture and home furnishings as opposed to clothing where fashion was of paramount importance.11 To understand the economic and cultural meanings of second-hand furniture, and how these evolved in the nineteenth century, it is important to examine the different definitions of second-hand and the context in which the goods were consumed. To capture these various strands, the chapter will take four themes: the practical and economic value of second-hand furniture; the moral aspects of homemaking that included the emotional investment in ‘old’ things; the cultural caché of the ‘antique’; and the negative associations of new furniture, both practical and cultural. Taking this further, if modernity is in part a recognition of individuality and the self, then taste and morality take on extra significance as indicators of difference and social standing. Thus, for an aspiring and growing upper middle class the antique, or failing that the antique style, may have offered an ideal method of expressing the self.

The market for second-hand furniture Modernity is partly recognized through an increase in the transfer of goods, both new and second-hand, that encouraged the expansion of a particular retail infrastructure to support the purchase and sale of both of these sorts of goods. In this sense, second-hand markets were integral to the modern system of consumption. Specific consumption practices

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were associated with purchasing furniture second-hand. The reasons are firstly practical, including economic considerations and the lack of availability of new furniture. Purchasing any goods requires them to be available, affordable and desirable. In the early-modern period, people were less likely to make a distinction between first and second-hand. The desirability of the goods was the important factor. There had long been good practical reasons for buying second-hand furniture. In the later eighteenth century, furniture made in fashionable styles and in fashionable hard woods such as mahogany was not always available in the provinces. In addition, since furniture styles changed less rapidly than clothing, good quality furniture continued to be desirable in its second-hand state. However, changes in the industry including the introduction of simple mechanized primary processing, an increase in the choice of materials and the development of largescale manufactures all began to contribute to changes in the furniture trade. This resulted in the increased production of new goods and the wider opportunities for purchase in retail emporia would appear to be reasons for ignoring the ‘old’ in favour of something new and modern. The issue here is that of fashion not necessarily of quality. So why did the trade in second-hand furniture continue to thrive in the nineteenth century? One reason was that in the mid nineteenth century good quality second-hand furniture was often better value and therefore often more desirable than newly made ‘slop goods’ of an equivalent price.12 For some middle-class families, although there were some financial restraints, there were other benefits to purchasing used furniture, providing it was in keeping with their status. Furniture that was second-hand, but not antique, took on a fresh appeal to middle-class homemakers due to its inherent material qualities. In particular, there was an investment value in furniture made of solid wood and incorporating fashionable hard woods, such as mahogany. The Magazine of Domestic Economy recommended homemakers to purchase the best furniture that they could afford partly because such goods would fetch a reasonable price if resold.13 Clearly, there was a perception that quality furniture was an investment that would hold its value reasonably well within the second-hand market. This was an important consideration since many homemakers had to sell up their home furnishings when they moved due to economic problems, or when necessitated by a change of occupation or family circumstances. On the other hand, poorer families often purchased old, often discarded furniture from financial necessity. At this end of the spectrum,

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‘old furniture’ was still valued, but it often had to undergo a metamorphosis to make it saleable. Adolphe Smith reported how: Furniture dealers of this class, that is to say, the men who cater for the poor, generally obtain their stock from brokers and bailiffs. They will buy up the entire furniture of a poor household for a given sum, without discussing in detail the separate value of each article. Of course, the greater portion of the goods thus obtained are more or less old, damaged, and some even broken into fragments; but, to the secondhand dealer, no article of furniture can be so entirely destroyed as to be totally useless. He will contrive, with two broken chairs, to make one sound one. The boards taken from one chest of drawers will serve to repair another which may be in a less dilapidated condition; and when once old furniture, particularly a chair, has been repainted, repaired, varnished, or polished, it is impossible to distinguish any difference between an old and a new article, if both are made after the same model.14 This recycling of old furniture and its components was part of the supply of necessities to those whose needs were minimal. There was no ‘special’ association offered or expected: the items were simply a means to an end. In other cases, the recycling process involved deception. In a separate realm of society, second-hand could mean something very different.

The emotional value of second-hand furniture Despite the growing importance of fashion and therefore in replacing goods, there was still a continued expectation that substantial objects such as furniture were expected to last, not just a lifetime but often for several generations. It would therefore have made good economic sense when setting up a home to buy some second-hand goods. In addition, during the period from the early to mid nineteenth century, the nature of homes and homemaking changed with the development of a distinct domestic ideology.15 Middle-class consumers increasingly valued the emotional aspects of homemaking. For these consumers, second-hand furniture provided symbolic qualities, often woven into their homemaking practices. The upper middle classes, unlike the dedicated antique collectors, wanted to conform, to fit in and belong to society. They were often newly rich and unsure of their status. To understand how second-hand

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furniture complied with their homemaking requirements, rather than merely meeting the demands of house furnishing, the material qualities of these goods, and the cultural meanings that might have been associated with this kind of consumption practice, needs consideration. One inevitable aspect about old furniture was that it had a past, a history. This past was manifested through physical characteristics: a general patina of darkened wood and faded textiles, but also minor blemishes such as scratches, scuffs, stains and pulled threads. Even furniture that was well cared for would inevitably have borne testimony to its past use and its past owners. How did homemakers respond to these physical reminders of the past? Antique collectors became increasingly keen on patina as a proof of authenticity,16 but were such qualities ever valued in second-hand furniture that was not ‘antique’? Furniture, in common with other objects, can communicate meaning through a display of fashion or particular taste. Understanding the meanings of cultural values by particular parts of society was crucial for their shared meaning. The investment of meanings in objects was often through associations with events in the life of the owner or with the lives of past owners.17 This process is of relevance to the discussion of second-hand furniture since a means of acquiring it, not yet discussed, was through inheritance. Although furniture did not figure in bequests as often as personal items such as jewellery and portraits, legacies with clear emotional connotations were evident. One example was Fanny Downes, a spinster who died in Coventry in 1858,18 whose will demonstrated the Victorian obsession associated with mourning rituals.19 Jewellery made from the deceased’s hair was an obvious example of remembering the dead, and Fanny left instructions for her hair to be made into rings. Other objects were also emotionally associated with the deceased. A favourite armchair, the desk used for writing letters every morning, the bed habitually slept in by them, for example, all had strong physical associations by which friends and relatives could remember the deceased.20 So, Fanny Downes also left instructions that her brother Henry was to receive her writing desk; surely this was a piece of furniture that had important meanings for her and which she hoped Henry would share. Furniture could thus carry memories of individuals and family association down through the generations. For the new middle class that was growing in numbers, particularly in urban areas, the material culture of the home expressed the moral and even religious values connected with homemaking. We now refer to this as a ‘domestic ideology’. As The Family Economist: A Penny Monthly

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Magazine for the Industrious Classes stated, in 1851, ‘We may keep with fondest care some article of furniture, some piece of silver plate which belonged to our fathers and grandfathers, which brings memories of former homes and old familiar faces to consecrate the homes of the present.’21 This seems to reflect not only the desire for quality old furniture but also the collecting of domestic objects often with memories associated with them. However, for many newly middle-class homemakers there were either no bequeathed furnishings or they were too humble to acknowledge. Purchasing second-hand furniture perhaps offered a solution or at least made a virtue out of a necessity. The evident popularity of house sales suggests that people liked the idea of purchasing goods that had a known provenance and associations with a wealthy person or family or a well-respected member of the community. Perhaps there were also less easily quantified associations of ‘pedigree’. In the early to mid nineteenth century, a few pieces of second-hand furniture in amongst a generally fashionable interior were woven into the material culture of the middle-class home – indeed making it a home rather than just a fashionable interior. Furniture allowed a form of escape that was also part of the role of the domestic interior. Whereas new furniture was simply functional, the old was both functional and emotive.

A taste for antique furniture Interest in second-hand furniture and the appearance of age continued as divisions within the trade of furniture making and selling developed in the later nineteenth century. Of particular significance was the increase in dealers who designated themselves ‘antique’ furniture dealers. The growth of interest in antiques, rather than merely secondhand furniture, began as a specialized antiquarian taste. It was about the mid eighteenth century that antique furniture along with other objects became identifiable as a collectable type of object for a minority, mostly wealthy people but also some professionals such as clergymen and schoolteachers. Making a distinction between purchasing furniture for furnishing a home and amassing a collection is useful for making apparent the difference between the two categories. Muthesius points out that ‘What distinguished [decoratively furnished domestic] interiors from the earlier antiquarian ones was that there was no precise historical scheme’.22 Collecting assumes knowledge and discernment; it also implies method and purpose to acquire objects to form a collection where objects relate to each other in a particular way.23 Dant neatly sums up the differences: ‘collecting is a passionate rather than

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a functional form of possession’.24 The nineteenth-century collectors of antiques wished to distinguish themselves as superior to users of new or simply ‘second-hand’ furniture. Although there was a growth of interest in ‘old things’ from the later eighteenth century, it is difficult to define the nature of the trade. From the early nineteenth century, there was an increase of traders in London (but less so elsewhere) who adopted the title of antique dealer. In any event they appear to have developed from either or both the furniture broker and curiosity dealer. The London trade directories only list 7 antique furniture dealers in 1833, 16 in 1854 and 47 by 1890, whereas brokers numbered 632 in 1833, 567 in 1854 and 390 in 1890.25 The rise in antique dealers indicated a growth in demand, whereas the decline of brokers reflected changes in purchasing habits as hire purchase for new goods gradually became more prevalent. It probably also indicated a decline in the basic second-hand market. In contrast to this, the term ‘antique furniture dealer’ first appears in street directories from c. 1826. Like other trades, it is evident that the antique dealers concentrated in particular parts of town. Wainwright has shown how London’s Wardour Street, Soho, developed into a centre of antique shops and traders. In 1817, there were no brokers but 13 cabinet makers or upholsterers. By 1850, the numbers had increased to 23 brokers and 24 cabinet makers/upholsterers.26 However, the spurious dealings of some dealers who tried to ‘cash-in’ on the taste contributed to a declining reputation of the trade in this quarter, which is recognized by the term ‘Wardour Street English’, defined as a modern article with a sham antique appearance about it.27 Nevertheless, J. Elder Duncan still recommended ‘the quaint little second-hand shops in Wardour Street and elsewhere’ in 1907,28 although he noted that the better class of ‘antique’ trade had moved to the Bond Street area. Many of the nineteenth-century middle classes had an ambivalent attitude to the progress that was occurring around them. This in part fuelled an interest in nostalgia.29 The American commentator on homes and gardens, Andrew Downing, wrote in 1850 that ‘There are also many among us who have a taste for antiquities and find the greatest pleasure in collecting about them the furniture and forms of a past age, and will find more pleasure in hunting for old Elizabethan chairs than in the possession of the finest and most faultless productions of any modern school of art.’ For him, the reason was clear: But, above all, it is undeniable that, to the present age, the charm of this antique furniture is in its romance in its long association with

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times, events, and names that have an historical interest and that move our feelings deeply by means of such powerful associations.30 Whilst the spread of such sentiments might be questioned, the demand for ‘antique furniture’ grew to such an extent that the regular furniture retailers also began to sell products under this description that were actually contemporary, and there were even ‘antique furniture makers’ listed in trade directories. By the later nineteenth century, the interest in pre-eighteenth century furniture had increased. This resulted in the rise of outright faked antique furniture,31 which had the effect of dividing the trade between those more elite traders who dealt with ‘true’ antiques and those who supplied modern copies as well as the simply second-hand. The so-called ‘Queen Anne’ decorative style that represented informality, irregularity and non-conformity in the 1870s further encouraged the collecting and use of second-hand and antiques of all sorts, both as decoration and a hobby. In 1875, the Cornhill Magazine included an article which declared that ‘the art of furnishing must for the present moment be closely connected with the judicious buying of old furniture’.32 Such pronouncements might well have stimulated this demand. They were certainly commonplace. In the same year, The Pall Mall Gazette wrote about the business of refurbishing old furniture to prepare it for market: There are still great quantities of [eighteenth-century furniture] to be bought at a lower price than the same goods could be made for. These common chairs, tables, or cabinets only need the addition of appropriate ornament and exhibition in a fashionable dealer’s rooms to take rank and value as fine old Chippendale or marquetry furniture. There are many workmen in London who are mainly or wholly employed in ‘enriching’ goods for the old furniture market.33 Domestic advice books began to recommend antiques as a form of romantic ideal that supposedly opposed the ugliness associated with developing modernity. In 1876, the Rev. Loftie published his Plea for Art in the House, with Special Reference to the Economy of Collecting Works of Art. This started with a chapter on the prudence of collecting, which was followed by a chapter entitled ‘Furnishing and old furniture’. This second chapter made a comparison between two hypothetical families who were furnishing their homes. Loftie compared the Brown’s house furnished almost instantly in the latest style and patterns by a well-known retailer who supplied chairs ‘carved by machinery’ with the Smith’s who

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enjoyed the gradual acquisition of goods purchased from sales and from ‘Wardour Street warehouses – but not in Wardour St’ over a period of three or more years.34 There seems to be some moral judgement at work here in terms of quality and acquisition. Mrs Loftie also wrote about the attractions of the second-hand in her 1878 work, The Dining Room. Discussing a ‘mahogany double cupboard’ (Sheraton style sideboard) she suggests that it might be found: away in the schoolroom, or doing duty as a dressing table in a spare room. It may have lost its brass rail and its escutcheons and ring handles with lions mouths; but it could be brought back into condition and ‘elbow grease’ applied to the dark panels, making it infinitely more useful and handsome than anything you can afford at the present day.35 Alternatively, these items might have to be sought out – a process which could be presented, in itself, as enjoyable and uplifting. Writing in 1884, an anonymous author in Chamber’s Journal wrote of his thoughts in a second-hand furniture saleroom; how he had a ‘weakness for sauntering into musty old salerooms and staring idly at the miscellaneous articles of second-hand furniture huddled within their walls, and moralising on the mutability of human hopes and possessions’.36 Even if these descriptions were not templates for individual actions, they demonstrated an attitude of mind. The pleasure found in ‘picking up’ objects that would help to furnish an eclectic or artful interior was evident. Not surprisingly perhaps, the retailers Oetzmann and Co. warned their customers about the issue of appropriateness of furnishings, particularly concerning the antique: Of late years, a taste for antique furniture has developed . . . This taste may appropriately be displayed in the furnishings of a house, which is architecturally appropriate, but . . . for modern houses, we should prefer the comfort and elegancy of modern furniture to antique and for drawing rooms, antique furniture is simply inadmissible.37 Although Oetzmann and Co. eschewed the sale of antique furniture in their business, other stores were not so concerned. Debenham and Freebody, better known for drapery and clothing, started to sell antique rugs and embroidery. In 1897, the company published The Chippendale Period in English Furniture by K. W. Clouston and then soon opened an ‘antique furniture’ department.

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The interest in antiques and ‘old furniture’ continued into the early twentieth century. H. J. Jennings wrote in 1902 that ‘Fashions have changed, beliefs broadened, intellectual revolutions have taken place; yet the old chairs and cabinets and commodes remain to remind us . . . Vita brevis, Ars longa’.38 In 1905, Harrods department store opened a gallery for ‘Antique and second-hand modern furniture’.39 A little later, Herman Muthesius, writing about modern English furniture, noted that ‘Numerous workshops are now busy copying old pieces and copying them in such a way that the public is deceived about their origins, that is to say, they use artificial ageing.’40 Baudrillard has commented about later twentieth-century tastes ‘that there is a cultural paradox but an economic truth: that only the counterfeit can now quench this thirst for authenticity’.41 This was clearly also the case in the later nineteenth century. Indeed, the demand for antique or old furniture with a patina or signs of age had come full circle and reproductions and fakes were taking the place of genuine second-hand or antique pieces to meet the demand. The distinction between connoisseurs who ‘appreciated’ the true antiques and those who simply wanted to acquire the look was clear. For many bourgeois middle-class consumers it was an antique look in newly made furniture rather than concerns with authenticity that prompted the demand. Collecting curios became more general, particularly for ‘artistic’ interiors. However, the move to furnish extensively in antiques remained a minority pursuit that continued to express a wealthy and educated taste.

When new was suspect The most direct choice made by many consumers was between new and second-hand goods. As with clothing, fashion was increasingly important in the market for home furnishings, innovations in production methods and outputs occurring as a response to its pressures. There were important developments in such processes as sawing timbers and cutting veneers, cutting joints and carving shapes. On the other hand, some manufacturers met the growing demand by adding labour rather than mechanized processes. Forceful retailers, meanwhile, promoted new goods over second-hand. Their combined success can be measured in part by the steady growth of the retailing and manufacturing sectors in the nineteenth century. Yet it is also seen in the social significance of new mass-produced goods to many newly risen workingclass families, for whom the purchase of a new piece of furniture was a landmark.

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Letters to the Morning Chronicle describing the living and working condition of the labouring classes between 1849 and 1851 explore the furnishings of working-class homes and demonstrate the appeal of new furniture. The reporter from South Wales recorded this passage: I observed in these houses, the same disposition on the part of their inhabitants to accumulate showy and good furniture which I have described as existing amongst the workmen in the iron works at Merthyr.42 While in a pit village in the North East, it was noted that: As a general rule the furniture is decidedly good; some items are even costly. ... The women are the great agents in getting the houses so well furnished as they are. They strive to outdo each other in the matter of beds and chests of drawers, the two great features of their rooms.43 Even allowing for the hyperbole of newspaper reporting, these workingclass attitudes to the purchase of furniture demonstrate that the competitive vigour of these communities extended the demand for status goods, which in these cases was identified as new. This of course contrasted with an establishment taste for antiques, on the one hand, and the distasteful image of simply old or used furniture, on the other. At the same time, though, there was a growing mistrust of new furniture amongst the middle classes. It was often rightly disparaged in terms of quality, due to the nature of the ‘slop work’ system and the poor quality materials used. Something of the problems can be gleaned from an 1836 newspaper advertisement for second-hand furniture: Families furnishing are cautioned against purchasing the new furniture made of unseasoned wood, and slighted in every process of the workmanship merely to delude the public by its seeming cheapness. T. Metcalfe respectfully invites the real economist to inspect his splendid and extensive stock of genuine second-hand furniture manufactured by the most celebrated makers and which he is able to sell at half its value.44 Whilst Metcalfe was hardly an impartial observer, his warnings about the poor quality of new furniture and the economy of buying his second-hand goods were echoed by advice manuals. The Magazine of Domestic Economy (1838), advised homemakers that the use of veneers

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and unseasoned wood by unscrupulous manufacturers led to materials splitting and it was best, they advised, to purchase items ‘which had been sometime on sale; because the chances are that the union of the two woods will be thoroughly effected’.45 In the same year, Charles Dickens drew attention to the distinctions between brokers of new and used furniture in his Sketches by Boz, which gave descriptions of the classes of shops in London: Perhaps when we make use of the term ‘Brokers’ shops’, the minds of our readers will at once picture large handsome warehouses, exhibiting a long perspective of French polished dining tables, rosewood chiffoniers, and mahogany wash-hand stands, with an occasional vista of a four poster bed and hangings . . . . Perhaps they will imagine that we mean an humble class of second-hand furniture repositories. Their imagination will then naturally lead them to that street at the back of Long Acre, which is composed almost entirely of broker shops: where you walk through groves of deceitful, showy looking furniture . . . . The goods here are adapted to the taste, or rather to the means, of cheap purchasers. There are some of the most beautiful looking Pembroke tables that were ever beheld: the wood as green as the trees in the Park, and the leaves almost as certain to fall off in the course of a year.46 Like all good satire, his contrast of the new ‘deceitful showy furniture’ with the older furniture of a previous age had a strong element of truth and no doubt resonated with his readers. The same attitude is discernable in John Ruskin’s letter to The Times, in 1854, condemning the interior illustrated in Holman Hunt’s painting The Awakening Conscience that reflected the issue of morality in connection with the new. He made the comment that the ‘fatal newness’ of the furnishings expressed the immorality of the depicted relationship between a married man and his young female lover.47 This extreme response was in part a condemnation of new styles in furniture that he considered were bad design and poorly made, faults which were thinly disguised by their shiny veneers and decoration. However, Ruskin was also pointing out that if the couple depicted in the painting had been married they would have inherited family items, rather than furnishing with all new shiny and glossy objects. To purchase all new furnishings risked classification as upstarts, if not worse. Charles Dickens explored this theme in Our Mutual Friend, through the aptly named nouveau riche family, the Veneerings. In the

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eighteenth century, cutting veneers was highly skilled work and used exotic rare timbers. It was therefore associated with expensive and smart goods and was highly desirable. However, the veneer-cutting machines introduced in the 1840s began to make the process economic. This led to the use of veneers to cover up shoddy goods of poor materials and tacked together.48 Although ‘new’ money had always been suspect, fine nuances of respectability became more prevalent during the nineteenth century. By calling this family Veneering, Dickens was emphasizing their superficial hold on respectability. He expounded on this theme in a detailed description of the family: Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, Frenchpolished to the crown of his head.49 Dickens clearly brought together the family associations, the emotional aspects of homemaking and the necessity for furniture that was not ‘in a state of high varnish and polish’ as a comment on contemporary society.50 Two years later, in a short story entitled ‘A house and its furnishing’, published in The Ladies Treasury in 1867, a mother and daughter are described purchasing goods for the latter’s new home. Mother says ‘Far better than new, unless it be first class, is second-hand furniture.’51 Although a fictional story the ideas represented are important. Warnings about the quality of new goods probably prompted consumers to consider purchasing better made but less fashionable older goods. By sacrificing fashion for quality, the acquisition of second-hand furniture made out of solid timber posed less of a risk than the purchase of new for consumers. Much the same was true for furniture dealers. James Hopkinson, a cabinet maker in Liverpool, wrote in his diary of 1851 about purchasing goods at an auction. He wanted to fill his showroom and did not have sufficient items that he had made, so he went to an auction and bought what he thought were second-hand, good quality pieces, only to find that they were new, slop-made goods. The furniture,

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darkened to look old, had misled him. He later had difficulty reselling the furniture.52 It is important to note that in this instance, the bad practices of the auction room fooled Hopkinson but it does show that he had expected to find a ready market for the good quality second-hand furniture that he thought he was buying.

Conclusion Four themes have been highlighted in this examination of the continued interest in second-hand furniture. Firstly, the economic or practical reasons; secondly, the moral aspects of homemaking that included emotional investment in ‘old things’; thirdly, the defining of difference and status that was expressed through connoisseurship and the cultural caché of antiques; and lastly, the response to negative associations that were made with much new furniture. The prevailing attitudes to the home in the early nineteenth century made second-hand furniture acceptable to middle-class homemakers who were unsure of their social position, not confident of their taste, afraid of being criticized for their nouveau status and careful with their money. By the second half of the century, they were more established. Contradictions soon developed. The growth in the supply and sale of new furniture, often in novel designs and using newly introduced materials and techniques, distinguished it from the ‘antique’ and therefore represented an idea of modernity. However, these styles were in competition not only with the true antiques but also with the reproduction historical styles that were popular. These latter styles carried the visual signs of cultural capital but they were also obviously new – which suggested a comfortable affluence that created distinction. New furniture benefited from associations with the past so it is not surprising that there were reproductions of both correct and pseudo-historic styles. Modernity and its emphasis on individualism, the relationship between interiors and the self, and the important role of taste as a social indicator meant that the second-hand was never neutral or straightforward.

Notes 1. B. Lemire (1997) Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade Before the Factory, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan). 2. S. Nenadic (1994) ‘Middle rank consumers and domestic culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1920–1840’, Past and Present, 145, pp. 132–133. 3. D. Cohen (2006) Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). See also D. G. Rossetti’s interiors, for example.

108 The Nature of Second-Hand 4. See D. S. MacCleod (1996) Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (London: Cambridge University Press), on ‘taste’ in paintings and the distinctions between new and old money. 5. G. McCracken (1988) Culture and Consumption (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). 6. N. Gregson and L. Crewe (2003) Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg), p. 83. 7. See C. Wainwright (1984) The Romantic Interior (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press). 8. P. Bourdieu (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge), p. 76. 9. See, for example, S. Raikes (2003) ‘ “A cultivated eye for the antique” Charles Winn and the enrichment of Nostell Priory in the nineteenth century’, Apollo, CLVII( 494), pp. 3–8. 10. See, for example, A. Forty (1986) Objects of Desire: Design and Society 1750– 1980 (London: Thames and Hudson), pp. 55–59. 11. For further analysis of the meanings attached to home furnishings, see C. Edwards (2005) Turning Houses into Homes (Aldershot: Ashgate); M. Ponsonby (2007) Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors 1750–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate). 12. J. B. Goodman (ed.) (1968) Victorian Cabinet Maker: The Memoirs of James Hopkinson 1819–1894 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. 36. 13. Magazine of Domestic Economy (1840) (London: W. S. Orr and Co.), p. 65. 14. J. Thomson and A. Smith (1877) Street Life in London (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington), p. 128. 15. L. Davidoff and C. Hall (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge). 16. S. Muthesius (1988) ‘Why do we buy old furniture? Aspects of the authentic antique in Britain 1870–1910’, Art History, 11(2), pp. 233–251. 17. Characterized by Marius Kwint as the embodiment of memories, in the introduction to M. Kwint, C. Breward and J. Aynsley (eds) (1999) Material Memories: Design and Evocation (Berg: Oxford). 18. Coventry Archives, will of Fanny Downes, 1858, 1010/8/426. 19. L. Taylor (1983) Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: George Allen and Unwin). 20. This is in sharp contrast to the concerns of the Anglo-Indian population about the probable unpleasant associations with any second-hand good purchased. See Chapter 6 by Robin Jones in this volume. 21. The Family Economist: A Penny Monthly Magazine for the Industrious Classes (1851), vol. 5 (London: Groombridge and Sons), p. 182. 22. Muthesius, ‘Why do we buy old furniture?’, pp. 244, 251. 23. On the subject of collecting, see J. Elsner, and R. Cardinal (eds) (1997) The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books). See McCracken, Culture and Consumption, pp. 41–42, on the modern practice of using patina as a method of differentiation. 24. T. Dant (1999) Material Culture in the Social World (Buckingham: Open University Press), p. 148. 25. The first use of the term broker is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as being in 1377 and subsequent entries often refer to a certain relationship with stolen goods. In 1641 Termes de la Ley (law) (43b), it was

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

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explained that the name broker ‘is now also appropriated to them amongst us that buy and sell old and broken apparell and household-stuffe.’ In 1766, John Entick’s History and Survey of London and Places Adjacent (1766 IV. 69) noted that ‘Brokers [were those] who deal in both new and old houshold goods.’ Wainwright, The Romantic Interior, p. 35. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn 1989, entry for Wardour Street. J. Elder Duncan (1907) The House Beautiful and Useful (London: Cassel), p. 134. P. Mandler (1999) The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). A. J. Downing (1850) The Architecture of Country Houses (New York: D. Appleton), p. 450. Before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of reproduction furniture did not exist since copying was normal. See Muthesius, ‘Why do we buy old furniture?’, pp. 243, 248 and J. Attfield (2000) Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg), for a discussion on reproduction furniture. Muthesius, ‘Why do we buy old furniture?’, p. 234. R. W. Symonds and B. B. Whinnery (1962) Victorian Furniture (London: Country Life), pp. 82–83. Rev. Loftie (1876) Plea for Art in the House (London: Porter and Coates). See Cohen, Household Gods, for analysis of Loftie’s work. Mrs Loftie (1878) The Dining Room (London: Macmillan), p. 50. Chamber’s Journal, 14 June 1884, p. 380. Oetzmann and Co. (1871) Hints on House Furnishing and Decoration (London: The Company), p. 293. H. J. Jennings (1902) Our Homes and How to Beautify Them (London: Harrison and Sons), p. 76. A. Adburgham (1979) Shopping in Style (London: Thames and Hudson), p. 300. H. Muthesius (1908) The English House (reprint 1979) (New York: Rizzoli), p. 195. J. Baudrillard (1999) Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968–83 (London: Pluto Press), p. 43. J. Ginswick (ed.) (1983) Labour and the Poor in England and Wales, 1849–1851 (London: Taylor and Francis), vol. III, p. 139. Ibid., vol. II, p. 40. The Age (London), Sunday, 27 March 1836. The Magazine of Domestic Economy, May 1838, p. 345. C. Dickens (1838) Sketches by Boz, various edns, chapter 21, available at http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/sketches-by-boz/28/ (accessed 15 July 2009). Ruskin’s letter is reproduced in C. Arscott (1988) ‘Employer, husband, spectator: Thomas Fairburn’s commission of the awakening conscience’, in J. Wolff and J. Seed (eds) The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 172–173. See C. Edwards (1993) Victorian Furniture (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 32–42, for technical details. Also Forty, Objects of Desire.

110 The Nature of Second-Hand 49. C. Dickens (1960) (first published in 1865) Our Mutual Friend (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 6. 50. Ibid. 51. ‘A house and its furnishing’, The Ladies Treasury, Friday, 1 March 1867, p. 125. 52. Goodman, Victorian Cabinet Maker, p. 36.

6 ‘Souvenirs of People who have Come and Gone’: Second-Hand Furnishings and the Anglo-Indian Domestic Interior, 1840–1920 Robin D. Jones

Introduction This chapter discusses the contemporary discourse surrounding the acquisition of second-hand furnishings within the Indian Subcontinent, during the heyday of the British Raj (c. 1840–1920). It assesses the associative value attached to such furnishings which is apparent in this discourse and how it sought to reassign the values attached to household furniture, particularly second-hand, within the Anglo-Indian home.1 This chapter also discusses how the British in India endeavoured to incorporate such furniture into their homes through rituals of divestment (and re-vestment). These rituals allowed the new owner to eradicate traces of the previous owner and personalize their possession of these previously owned objects.

The domestic sphere in Britain and British India In nineteenth-century Britain, the domestic sphere was assigned great symbolic significance. Numerous sources testify to that period’s addiction to dwelling. Home was imagined as a place of refuge from the harshness of the outside world, particularly the world of work. Quoting the writings of Walter Benjamin, Brown suggests that the nineteenthcentury middle-class ‘interior became something more than “just the universe of the private individual; it became his étui”, the protective cover designed to shield him from the shocks of [modern] urban life’.2 The domestic interior (together with its contents) was also conceptualized as a location instrumental in the expression and constitution 111

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of an individual’s identity. Indeed, prior scholarship has argued that nineteenth-century household management advice literature ascribed to the Victorian home the power to shape human character.3 This understanding of the potency of the domestic environment and buildings of England was also translated to India in the writings of contemporary commentators. In a speech delivered in 1878 at the Royal Society of Arts in London, T. Roger Smith argued that the re-creation of English architectural structures and spaces within the Subcontinent created a number of beneficial effects. Not only did these structures possess the power to impress the local population, but, more significantly he argued, they helped to ensure that the English civil servant in India remained ‘British to the backbone’.4 Contemporary commentators such as Smith argued that the creation of English-style buildings within India acted as a bulwark, for Anglo-Indians, against the threat of identity loss. Summarizing T. Roger Smith’s argument, the literary critic Ian Baucom has suggested that ‘one becomes, or remains, English’ by seeing, touching, using and being amongst English things.5 One perception, at the present time, is that home, for the Victorian middle class in Britain, signified a place of refuge, a place of permanence and personal expression of taste, where domestic space and its contents both soothed and supported the persona of the occupier. This perception requires qualification. As recent research has indicated, many Victorians inhabited what have been described as ‘anxious homes’, where servant trouble or uncertainty about how to decorate the main reception rooms preoccupied the inhabitants. If the ideal of the troublefree and secure middle-class domestic interior in the homeland was problematized by a number of issues, then rarely could the beneficent aspects of metropolitan domesticity be applied to the Anglo-Indian bungalow, lower-roomed house or garden house (Figure 6.1). Maleuve has described the nineteenth-century bourgeois experience of dwelling as ‘a refusal to be somewhere’.6 This phrase could, more forcefully, be applied to the Anglo-Indian experience of dwelling within the Indian Subcontinent. During the nineteenth century (as was the case with their compatriots in the homeland), the great majority of British residents in India rented their accommodation rather than owning it. In addition, many contemporary commentators noted the idiosyncratic and unsettling material, aesthetic and organizational properties of the Indian bungalow or house. These included the large proportions and bareness of the rooms, the numerous window and door openings in the walls (all of which were intended to reduce heat within the interior), the ‘Indianization’ of a notionally English space and the large number of

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Figure 6.1 A typical Anglo-Indian bungalow. ‘Magai Bungalow, Terhoot’, Champaran District, North India, c. 1880 Source: author’s own image.

local servants who peopled the dwelling. Furthermore, the furnishings of the Anglo-Indian dwelling differed markedly from comparable items within the home country in terms of their quality, age and arrangement. Contemporary commentators often noted the motley collection of second-hand chairs, tables and settees which, due to the over-sized proportions of many Anglo-Indian rooms, unsatisfactorily occupied the domestic space (Figure 6.2 and Figure 6.3). Through its representation in contemporary discourse, furnished domestic space within Victorian Britain was believed to have a marked effect on the personhood of the inhabitant of that space. In fact, house furnishings and interior decoration were assigned great significance in the formation and maintenance of character. However, British residents within the Indian Subcontinent were compelled to affirm their individual and national identities within the unsettling, impermanent and oddly furnished interiors of their rented bungalows and houses. Some contemporary commentators opined that, removed from familiar surroundings, the European persona in Asia underwent a process

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Figure 6.2 Interior of indigo planter’s house. ‘Drawing room, Turcouleah (Turculea) House’, Champaran District, North India, c. 1880 Source: author’s own image.

of alteration. It was believed that ‘correct’ habits of consumption and the performance of social practices appropriate to status were more difficult to maintain and regulate within the Subcontinent. In fact, it has recently been suggested that ‘for the European-born, the Indies was transformative of cultural essence, social disposition and personhood itself’.7 The unsettling interior of the Anglo-Indian bungalow, together with its awkward mix of second-hand furniture, was imagined as a location where these troubling processes might be held in check. A number of contemporary commentators highlighted the changes that were taking place within the domestic sphere in India as a result of more than a century of British colonial rule. In 1884, Charles Buckland wrote that ‘over the whole length and breadth of India there is a now a growing colony of English families, who endeavour to maintain their old home feelings and to keep all those old surroundings, which remind them of the land of their birth’.8 However, this attempt to ‘maintain their old home feelings’ was unsettled by the local domestic

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Figure 6.3 The furnishings of the Rev. and Mrs James Nicholson, Ceylon. Drawing room of the Wesleyan Mission House, Colombo, Ceylon, 1880 Source: author’s own image.

environment in India; as a later commentator noted, ‘the Indian house, in construction and every possible arrangement, is an entirely different thing from anything to which we are accustomed here at home [that is, in England]’.9 In fact, the dwellings inhabited by Anglo-Indians during the nineteenth century, together with their interiors, were represented in numerous accounts as strange, uncomfortable, barn-like environments. These were furnished with a mixed collection of, often, second-hand furniture and usually lacked the most basic staples of the middle-class drawing room in Britain, such as patterned curtains, wallpaper, furnishing textiles and matching and tasteful furniture.10 In 1872, Edward Braddon described the Anglo-Indian domestic interior in the following terms, ‘no costly papering drapes the walls; rarely is there any pretension to decorative effect; rich mouldings, cornices, beadings & c. are conspicuous by their absence’.11

Acquiring furniture in South Asia Before the arrival of Europeans in South Asia, some local traditions existed for the production and use of furniture. Perhaps tending to essentialize local practice, the furniture historian Amin Jaffer has written

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that prior to and during the early part of the colonial era members of the local elite in India ‘sat cross-legged on textiles placed on the floor and this posture, in which they socialized and ate, determined the design of objects that surrounded them’.12 In fact, evidence from local, contemporary visual sources depict members of this elite not so much cross-legged as lounging on the floor, leaning back against bolsters with one leg tucked under the other. Alternatively, they placed themselves in a squat, kneeling posture. In fact, this aspect of furniture history is under-researched at present but evidence from written sources such as the great chronicle of Sri Lanka, the Mahavamsa, suggests that limited production and use of furniture in royal and priestly circles were activities of great antiquity in parts of South Asia. As Europeans (Portuguese, Dutch and British) settled for longer and longer periods within the Indian Subcontinent, they required elevated, Western-style furniture to support their Westernized lifestyles and body postures.13 Such furniture could be obtained from a number of sources. A small proportion of items were imported from Europe as cabin furniture, but the cost of shipping large objects such as desks, cupboards, bookcases, beds and other cumbersome objects by sea was prohibitive. In 1828, John Briggs advised the British traveller to India to bring only a few items of furniture on the sea voyage ‘as you will probably have a cabin to yourself or at all events part of one, a small table containing a wash-hand basin, a chair and common chest of drawers, should comprise all your furniture’.14 The more usual sources for obtaining furniture in India were either to purchase ready-made items from local carpenters, to commission new furniture from local carpenters or, more usually during the nineteenth century in India, purchase or commission bespoke furniture from European cabinet makers residing in the main urban settlements of the Subcontinent. In Ceylon, local rather than European carpenters supplied all the new furniture. However, from 1800 onwards, the great majority of furniture found in the homes of Anglo-Indians was second-hand and comprised a mix of objects selected from a vast circulating stock of items. This circulating stock of second-hand furnishings was given its momentum and was constantly replenished by two factors: the high mortality rate amongst the European population within the Subcontinent (particularly during the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries) and the impermanent nature of settlement in British India.15 Contemporary commentators noted the insalubrious climate of the Subcontinent, the filth and prevalence of disease in the

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major settlements and the deadly speed with which British residents in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras met their untimely ends. For example, on 27 July 1826, Lady West wrote in her diary at Bombay ‘These frequent sudden deaths make one tremble. The last year they have been quite awful.’ On an earlier occasion (30 July 1823), she noted that during the two monsoons which drenched Bombay and caused conditions in the city to become dangerously unhealthy for European residents ‘Here people die one day and are buried the next. Their furniture is sold on the third and they are forgotten on the fourth.’16 Both she and her husband were carried away by fevers in the monsoon of 1828. In addition to the high mortality rate amongst European residents, another reason for the plentiful supply of second-hand furnishings lay with the career patterns of the majority of the ‘official’ British population in India. Those Britons who were members of the administration of the English East India Company and, after 1857, members of the Indian Civil Service lived peripatetic existences, frequently moving from one posting to another. Often they toured for long periods of time throughout the vast regions of the Subcontinent for which they were responsible. In 1923, Kate Platt wrote ‘the [official] British population in India is a floating one. In all services, changes of station [European settlement] are frequent and it is seldom that the whole of a man’s service is spent even in one province.’17 As a consequence, contemporary commentators noted that ‘owing to the frequent transfers and departures of officials, there [was] a considerable floating stock of household articles in the market’.18 In 1872, Edward Braddon wrote that ‘the AngloIndian population is a shifting one, always on the move, always selling off its effects at one place to buy them . . . at another.’19 Historian David Gilmour has recently noted that British ‘Civilians’ or civil servants in many parts of India spent up to seven months of each year ‘on tour’ in camp, administering justice and conducting reassessments of revenue.20 This regular disruption to settled domestic life inflected the meanings attached by Anglo-Indians to their household furnishings. Moreover, furniture was a positive hindrance to life on the move or ‘on tour’. As Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner recommended in 1888, ‘Regarding furniture: it should rarely be imported. Then the instability of the Indian home must be considered. To those who are here to-day and gone tomorrow, solidities and fragilities are alike a nuisance. Therefore let all big and heavy things be of a kind which can be sold by auction without a pang.’21

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Second-Hand furnishings in India During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo-Indian consumers were guided in most of the household management advice literature to procure second-hand furniture rather than commission new objects. These second-hand items could be acquired in a number of ways.22 For example, it was usual practice, when leaving an area, for a list of furniture to be circulated throughout the British community.23 As one advice book noted, ‘the custom is when people in India have to break up their establishment that they send round a price-list of their goods for sale to all their acquaintances’.24 It was also common practice among the Anglo-Indian community to lease a property together with some or all of its furnishings. In March 1854, Mrs Janet Wells wrote to her father in England from Barrackpore near Calcutta that she and her husband had moved into a well-placed bungalow and had ‘taken all Mr Gladwin’s [the previous owner] mattings and chicks [blinds] and some of his furniture which will spare us some trouble’.25 During the nineteenth century, in the main urban centres of British India, auctioneers did a thriving business. Not only did they sell immense quantities of second-hand furnishings but also, before the emergence of department stores, retailed imported new goods for wholesalers. Trade directories and other sources list the most prominent auctioneers within the European settlements of the Subcontinent. For example, in 1865 Thacker’s Directory for Bengal lists the following auctioneers in Calcutta: Cohn, Feilmann and Co., 166 Lall Bazaar; Mackenzie, Lyall and Co., 29 and 30 Tank Square and Mendes and Co., 6 Cossitollah Street.26 Mackenzie Lyall and Co. continued to be listed as auctioneers throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century, occupying premises at prestigious addresses (Tank Square and Dalhousie Square) at the heart of the British administrative and financial nexus in the city. Contemporary commentators noted the activities and types of goods offered for sale by auctioneers in the major settlements of the Subcontinent. In 1843, George Johnson described the types of items offered for sale by one of the foremost auctioneering firms in Calcutta during the first half of the nineteenth century when he wrote ‘Messrs. Tulloh & Co. auction rooms, where are to be found assembled articles of every description; the manufactured goods of every quarter of the globe in countless variety . . . articles for daily use, from the meanest vessels for domestic purposes to the most splendid fabrics of furniture and dress’.27

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Not only were auction sales held at regular intervals but the number of items disposed of was often on a grand scale. In a similar manner to practice in the home country, sales of second-hand property took place in situ as well as in the premises of the auctioneers. One example of this is provided by an advertisement in The Ceylon Herald of 3 May 1839. The notice alerted the public to a ‘Sale by Auction, at Queen’s House, Colombo . . . A.M. Ferguson has received instructions to sell . . . the following articles, the property of Government, 2 chandeliers, 2 square and 7 circular mirrors, 60 single and 21 double wall shades, 7 reed and 2 rattan mats, 54 plain Jackwood chairs, 21 Ebony armchairs and 8 ditto plain ditto’.28 In 1862, a contemporary commentator, Colesworthy Grant, described to his mother in England the amount of business conducted by the auction sale rooms in Calcutta, ‘when I tell you that these auctions are held alternately every day in the week and that I have seen the catalogue for one day’s sale exhibit lots to the number of 3958 you may conceive the amazing mass of business daily gone through at these marts’.29 In 1874, Edmund Hull described the best way for a British resident in India to furnish a dwelling: for 1200 to 1500 rupees, ample furniture can be procured for a small bungalow . . . of course one should not go off straight to the best European cabinetmakers and order articles required, out of hand, at shop prices. Here, as throughout, a little management and prudence must be exercised. In every large town auctions are constantly taking place, at which second-hand furniture can be picked up.30 In addition, during the nineteenth century, many European cabinet makers, who were established in the major settlements of the Subcontinent, also retailed second-hand furniture as well as providing bespoke or newly made furniture. For example, The Bengal Directory of 1875 contained an advertisement for J. M. Edmonds and Co., ‘Cabinet-Makers, Upholsterers and Billiard Table Manufacturers’ of 27, 28 Bentinck Street, Calcutta, stating that the firm sold ‘every description of furniture new and second-hand’.31 The mixed nature of the trade in furnishings within the Indian Subcontinent and the various ways in which objects for the home could be acquired (or disposed of) is also indicated in an advertisement of 1848 for ‘the Furniture Store, No. 5 Prince’s Street, Fort, Colombo’. The notice alerted the public that within ‘the Furniture Store’ ‘may be had every description of furniture, upholstery, fittings . . . . N.B. All kinds of Household Goods bought, valued, sold on commission or advanced upon together

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with cabinet, carpenter’s or other work executed on the shortest notice.’32 One very noticeable effect on the Anglo-Indian domestic interior of the absorption of different items from among this large pool of second-hand goods was, as some contemporary commentators noted, that ‘every . . . habitation assumed in some degree the character of a second-hand furniture warehouse or curiosity shop’.33 This contrasted with the situation in most middle-class homes in England during the nineteenth century. It also implies, amongst the Anglo-Indian community, a familiarity with this type of retail setting.34 Pragmatic concerns were uppermost in the minds of British residents in India when they furnished their dwellings. The aspiration to acquire a tasteful and matching group of furnishings which would have been an overriding concern in the homeland was, for most Anglo-Indians, an unachievable goal. Furniture was obtained from whatever source presented itself with the consequence that, as Edward Braddon suggested in 1872, within the Anglo-Indian bungalow ‘as to any one particular item of furniture harmonizing with any other, there was rarely any thought given’.35 Elizabeth Collingham and others have argued that, during the nineteenth century, the British in India were all too aware of their tenuous legitimacy as rulers and felt the need to bolster that legitimacy through the maintenance, in their lifestyles, of prestige and social distance from the local population.36 It has also been suggested that the AngloIndian domestic interior was a significant location where these aspects of British rule were played out. However, the notion of prestige, status and taste as expressed through one’s furnishings was problematized in British India. The widespread penetration of a second-hand culture throughout the Anglo-Indian community disrupted the normative associations which the British middle class formed with the furnishings of their dwellings in the homeland. Recent analysis of diaries and journals recording household possessions kept by late eighteenth-century middle-class women has suggested that the acquisition of durable items such as furniture had a number of ulterior meanings beyond the provision of functional objects. Prior scholarship has suggested that women inscribed the purchase of newly commissioned furniture from such firms as Gillows of Lancaster, with specific meanings.37 Such furniture was often acquired to mark particular family events. Its cost and solidity also signified the continuation of family life, as well as the acquisition of durable and tasteful goods which could be passed on to the next generation.

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Acquiring new furniture in India To a limited extent, some new furniture was commissioned by the British in India and Ceylon, during the nineteenth century, from both local and European craftsmen. In 1841, Mrs Griffiths, a British resident in Ceylon, recorded the tortuous and time-consuming processes involved in commissioning furniture from local makers when she wrote, a few days after our arrival, we sent for one of the best carpenters in the place, to bespeak the various articles of furniture necessary . . . . Accordingly with Mr Templar’s38 kind assistance we chose the patterns and sizes of couches, chairs, tables & c., & c., mostly from those in his house for they [the local furniture makers] will never undertake to do anything, however trifling, without some kind of pattern . . . and fixed upon the various prices, the carpenter naming a sum and we another, until we met about half way. This first settled we found we had to advance half the money for each thing, for the ostensible purpose of purchasing wood to make them.39 From the 1760s, immigrant craftsmen from Britain, including carpenters and furniture makers, had begun to establish themselves in greater and greater numbers within the Presidency cities of the Subcontinent.40 By the mid nineteenth century, a number of European cabinet-making firms had become established in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. This is evidenced by the entries in trade directories of the period. For example, The New Calcutta Directory for 1856 listed the following under the heading ‘Cabinet Makers and Upholsterers’: Dunn & Taylor, 64 Cossitollah Street; J. M. Edmond, 21 & 22 Cossitollah Street & 10 Waterloo Street; Lazarus & Co., 49, 54 & 55 Cossitollah Street; Paxton & Co., 30 & 48 Cossitollah Street; Shearwood & Co., 39 & 40 Cossitollah Street.41 A number of inventories in the Oriental and India Office collections at the British Library also record, in great detail, the ownership of new furniture by members of the British community in Calcutta and elsewhere. For example, in February 1845, the Calcutta auctioneers Tulloh and Co. sold ‘the Handsome Furniture and Fittings Up’ of Major R. Fitzgerald.42 The inventory lists the furnishings contained in each room of Major Fitzgerald’s house, the greatest quantity being itemized in ‘the Drawing Room’. This room contained items of furniture made by some of the leading European cabinet makers of the day in Calcutta, including Shearwood & Co. and Currie & Co. It is most probable, given that the

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auctioneer described many of the objects as having been made by these firms, that some proof of origin existed, perhaps a bill of sale to Major Fitzgerald. Amongst the many items of furniture listed in ‘the Drawing Room’ of his house were: A handsome large sized circular drawing roomed [sic] table by Currie, made of dark Spanish mahogany measuring 6 feet in diameter, supported on a richly carved cross-shaped pedestal . . . ; an elegant, extra sized occasional table of picked mahogany with curved sides by Currie, supported by handsomely carved scrolls having a platform for a vase; . . . a pair of large Ottoman couches by Shearwood, with neat frames and legs of mahogany covered with figured crimson silk damask [and so on].

Evidence of second-hand furnishings However, the great majority of furnishings acquired for the British domestic interior in India were second-hand. This is apparent from such sources as household management guides of the period. This fact can also be inferred from other evidence, such as the large number of inventories made by appraisers after the frequent deaths of British residents in India. In 1888, Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner recommended to newly arrived British residents to the Subcontinent that ‘furniture is good and cheap. Sales go on constantly, at which whole fittings of a house may be bought at half the cost price of new things.’43 As late as 1923, Kate Platt noted that in British India ‘some people sell their old and buy new furniture each time of moving, others always hire. In every station [European settlement] of any size, there are furniture dealers who hire, buy and sell. Auction sales take place frequently and furniture constantly changes hands. Much of it is accordingly to a standard pattern, plain and serviceable and ugly.’44 Occasionally, inventories of deceased estates explicitly record that an object was second-hand. For example, the list of furniture made after the death of Henry Martindell, Calcutta in May 1840 records ‘in the East Room’ as lot 315 ‘A second-hand teak clothes press almirah [cupboard], with folding panel doors above and fitted with four drawers below . . . 13 rupees’.45 Similarly, the inventory of Robert Dunlop, Calcutta, recorded in January 1859, lists, amongst other items, ‘a handsome sissoowood [dalbergia sissoo – Indian ‘blackwood’] dwarf almirah, nearly new, fitted with two drawers’.46 Descriptions in other nineteenthcentury inventories and sales lists indicated to potential buyers that

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certain household furnishings were definitely not new. It is unsound to claim that all of the following items were second-hand, but may, in fact, have been in the possession of the owner from new. However, given the noted durability of Indian furniture and the harsh treatment it received, inventories which describe furnishings as ‘old’ most probably record objects that had passed through a number of hands. In addition, the low valuations or low prices realized for these objects so designated also supports the suggestion that the furnishings were most probably second-hand. In May 1829, the auctioneers J. Alexander of Madras sold the house contents of Joseph Dacre, formerly a civil servant with the English East India Company in that city.47 The list of Dacre’s moveable property records, amongst other furnishings, such objects as: ‘1 Old Large Chair, 10 annas . . . 1 Old Sofa Table w. Four Drawers, 6 rupees 6 annas . . . 1 Old Small Table, 4 rupees’. In March 1859, an inventory was made of the property of Mary Shillingford, in the District of Purneah, Northern India.48 Amongst her possessions were recorded such items as ‘I pair of old card tables . . . 1 old couch’. Other objects in the inventory were described ‘as quite new and good’, inferring that the descriptor ‘old’ most probably indicated second-hand goods.

Antique furniture in British India Appraisers’ descriptions of household items as ‘old’ in nineteenthcentury inventories and sales’ lists within the Indian Subcontinent did not usually connote any positive characteristics. On the contrary, the adjective indicated to potential purchasers that the item was nearing the end of its functional life and was therefore perhaps to be passed over in favour of other objects. However, from the 1830s, the age of a small number of items of furniture offered for sale by auction was emphasized and the fact of their longevity was promoted as a desirable characteristic. In a few notices of sale, the word ‘old’ was replaced by the word ‘antique’. For example, a notice of sale by auction of the property of George Hay Boyd in July 1848 at Colombo, Ceylon noted that the auction would contain ‘Elegant Ebony Bookcases and Antique Chairs with and without arms’.49 Similarly, in January 1863, the sale of property from the estate of Mrs E. F. Austin was announced at Galle, Ceylon. The advertisement for the auction stated that it comprised: a choice collection of Ebony, Calamander and Jackwood furniture . . . [the auctioneer] C.J. Piters takes this opportunity of announcing that the furniture above mentioned, has been pronounced by

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connoisseurs to be excellent specimens of the antique style now so rarely to be met with in the island and includes elaborately carved Ebony and Calamander couches and settees, handsome book-cases of Ebony and Calamander, almirahs [cupboards] of Ebony, Jackwood and other ornamental woods & c. These have been manufactured from the best materials and are of excellent workmanship.50 The foregoing items possessed different associative values to the mass of second-hand furnishings circulating within the Subcontinent. First, as Edwards and Ponsonby (Chapter 5) and MacArthur and Stobart (Chapter 9) have noted in this book, the items were promoted through their connection to a well-known and respected family and the cachet that attached to such a provenance.51 Second, an appeal was made to the connoisseurial inclinations of potential purchasers and the growing awareness of and interest in historical associations that were beginning to be attached to ‘old things’, not only in the home country but also in the far-flung colonies. Finally, knowledge of the previous ownership by a well-regarded (and well-to-do) family acted as another form of guarantee that the furniture would, most probably, have been well made and of choice timbers. These points are emphasized in an advertisement in The Colombo Observer of April 1861 for an ‘auction sale of handsome household furniture and effects’ from the estate of a Mrs Curgenven. The mixed ebony, calamander, satinwood and jackwood furniture was promoted in particular as ‘having been made to the order of the late T. Lavalliere Esq., of Caltura [Kalutara], [and therefore] will be worthy of attention’. Theodore Lavalliere, a close relative of Mrs Curgenven and member of the Ceylon Civil Service since 1831, had served in high judicial positions in the south of the island, becoming District Judge in Kalutara. Emphasizing the longevity of service as well as his seniority, the furniture was promoted by association with his name. Prior scholarship has noted the development of an antiquarian taste for ‘antique’ furnishings within the metropolitan country from the late eighteenth century.52 It is evident that this appreciation of ‘old things’ extended from the second quarter of the nineteenth century, in a limited manner, to the Indian Subcontinent. As the editors of this volume argue, even in locations far from the metropolitan country, ‘the emergent culture of antique collecting might be seen as a marker of modernity’ through the integration of the ‘past with the present’.53 However, the great majority of British residents within India and Ceylon had no choice but to furnish their dwellings with second-hand items of the

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more common, quotidian variety and had to negotiate the meanings invested in such in furniture.

Personalizing second-hand furniture in British India A few contemporary commentators drew attention to the issue of the previous ownership of furniture, however the majority made no reference to this subject. One account, written in 1872, explicitly addressed this aspect of Anglo-Indian furnishing practice: if anyone were interested in the matter, there is a history attached to nearly every piece of [furniture] thus collected. The chair on which we sit was bought from a distinguished civilian [civil servant] . . . . That table was picked up when the inspector of railways gave up housekeeping in consequence of his wife’s prolonged absence from her Indian home . . . . That davenport was purchased when the late judge left the country on his retiring pension . . . . That couch was added to the collection when the doctor before last . . . left the station [European settlement] in a funeral palanquin.54 And so on to the end, chairs, tables, whatnots & c. – all souvenirs of people who have come and gone.55 In a similar fashion, the Anglo-Indian novelist, Sara Duncan, in The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893) described how her main character, Helen Browne, had taken a house with its second-hand furnishings and suggested that: the people’s furniture, moreover, would have been entertaining if it could have talked, to so many people it had been let and sub-let and re-let and leased, always with the house, since it left Bow Bazaar [the furniture mart, Calcutta], where it was originally bought outright by an extravagant person, second-hand.56 A number of contemporary commentators noted that negotiation of the meanings invested in second-hand furniture altered the associative value of household furniture for the British within the Subcontinent. This factor caused it to differ from the normative practices of furnishing in the homeland. The chairs, sofas, tables and other articles within the Anglo-Indian interior possessed a previous history, but that history was usually unknown, of little consequence and unconnected with the

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present owner. In addition, these second-hand furnishings involuntarily evoked, through the sensory perceptions of the new owner, powerful and less than pleasant associations. Such furnishings bore the persistent traces or imprints of their previous owners; their bodies had literally left their marks, through personalized ways of using, traces of touch, bodily odour, bodily secretions and so on, these exudations being exacerbated by the intense heat and humidity of the Subcontinent. During the nineteenth century, within the Subcontinent, the purchase of second-hand furniture obliged Anglo-Indians to negotiate that which a known or more usually unknown body had used. This required Anglo-Indians to confront the cultural constructions and taboos of personal bodily dirt and especially death and their own threshold in relation to these.57 The new owners chose to ignore the history not only as reflected in the dirt of the second-hand furniture, but also in its association with disease and death. In fact, to integrate such objects satisfactorily into the household, the new owner consciously had to set aside knowledge of the previous possession and marks of bodily contact to which such second-hand furniture bore witness.

Reassigning the associative value of second-hand furniture Following the discourse presented in the household management advice literature, second-hand Anglo-Indian furniture acquired the role simply of domestic apparatus within the colonial bungalow. It rarely served memory or evoked the kinds of associations which many of the furnishings in the homeland did. It was often described in derogatory terms as ‘tarnished, cracked, frayed [and] soiled . . . no one had ever regarded it, or mended it or kept it any cleaner than decency required’.58 For the most part, its non-functional role as signifier of status, taste, family history or class was erased within the Indian context. It was, as Sara Duncan suggested in 1893, ‘a mere convenience . . . a means of enabling people to give dinner parties’ and ‘a typical part of the absurd pretence that white people make of being at home in this place’, that is, India.59 In addition to problematizing the signifying practices of furnishing, the general practice of acquiring and using second-hand furniture also inflected the social practices of British residents within the Subcontinent. Some commentators noted with dismay how AngloIndians accepted ‘other peoples’ furniture so pacifically’ and how during the process of acclimatization to India, ‘a born British gentlewoman’ in contrast to her compatriot in the homeland ‘will live without antimacassars and sleep on a charpoy [light Indian bedstead]’ – behaviour

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that would have been considered aberrant within middle-class society in Britain.60 Many Anglo-Indian household management guidebooks assigned new cultural value to the second-hand furniture acquired in the Anglo-Indian context. They sought to re-present such furnishings as lightweight, inexpensive and emotionally neutral props within the colonial domestic environment. These guidebooks asserted that AngloIndian domestic arrangements functioned best when traditional notions of the value of furniture (both financial and psychological) were discarded. As Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner advised in The Complete Indian Housekeeper of 1888: So let the young housekeeper [in India] go out armed with energy, hammers, tacks, brass nails, a goodly supply of Bon-accord enamel . . . Japanese black, varnish & c. and then buy the old sticks of [furniture] at the bazaar, provided they are strong . . . . Then . . . she will have the prettiest house in the station, [European settlement] with nothing worth a button in it!61

Divestment rituals and Anglo-Indian furniture In this extract and similar ones, Anglo-Indian household management guides suggested that second-hand furnishings could be revalorized or personalized through what McCracken characterizes as divestment rituals.62 These rituals allowed the newly acquired but previously used furnishings to undergo a process of what Gregson and Crewe have more recently described as ‘cleansing, purification and personalization – to enable them to enter new cycles of consumption’.63 Divestment rituals allowed the new owner both to erase and personalize the meaningful properties of possession. Household management guides of the day described the processes involved in assimilating second-hand furniture into the Anglo-Indian home. For example, the author of The Englishwoman in India (1864) offered detailed if drastic instructions for household servants with regard to the cleaning of furniture, which ‘must be well cleansed with boiling water, in which ammonia and corrosive subliminate have been dissolved’.64 Many accounts exist of the enactment of divestment rituals in relation to the acquisition of second-hand furnishings within the Indian Subcontinent. In addition to thoroughly cleansing the furniture, replacing the upholstered covers of chairs, sofas, Ottomans and so on was the most common method adopted. This process was intended to secure, in

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the words of Gregson and Crewe, a ‘safe, imaginary distance from previous owners’ and allowed the object to ‘become a metaphorical clean sheet for the re-enactment of meaning’. In this way, divestment rituals allowed the new owner, through the agency of their servant, to remove evidence of previous bodily contact. It also allowed them, through rituals of re-vestment, to impose their own taste on these second-hand items, as well as maintain a tenuous link with the homeland by referencing the furnishing practices of the metropolitan country.65 In September 1854, John, Baron Elphinstone wrote to his correspondents in England requesting that they select and send out to India enough furnishing material to re-cover the seating furniture of the British government house in Bombay, ‘I want you to do me a great kindness – will you choose some chintz for the furniture of the Govt. houses here? . . . the first item I see is for Parell [location of government house in Bombay] – about 50 pieces . . . . The chintz should be of a large pattern . . . I ought to tell you that it is to cover some very Dowbiggin66 furniture covered with yellow damask’.67 Elphinstone’s request can be interpreted as an attempt to sustain the illusion, in a far-flung colonial settlement, of connectedness with the modern metropolis, as well as the maintenance of social significance. It also helped to suppress the reality of his diminished social function at the periphery of the modern, capitalist economy. The process of re-covering seating furniture not only erased the physical marks of previous ownership but also the taste of the previous owner. There was a strict division of labour in this process. Servants were usually charged with the unsavoury task of cleansing the furniture, whereas British elite women in India took it upon themselves to re-upholster second-hand seating furniture. In 1896, the anonymous correspondent of The Bungalow – a Paper for Anglo-Indian Homes wrote a detailed account of this process: As my husband was then only a subaltern, the strictest economy was necessary in furnishing but I felt that whatever else we did without, I must have a comfortable drawing-room sofa; and after many weary days spent at sales, I discovered a sofa that though utterly hideous, had great capabilities. It was broad and had a comfortable head piece and good springs but oh, the cretonne,68 how the worthy people could have lived in the same house with that puzzled me – poor thing I do not think it ever made the acquaintance of a duster – and hid the detestable cretonne for ever under a chestnut coloured art serge,69 on which I embroidered large suns in yellow silk . . . 70

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Through the process of re-covering the sofa with ‘art serge’ embroidered with sun motifs, the author of this article not only obliterated the unsatisfactory (and dirty) material used by the previous owner. She also made a statement about her connection to the homeland, by referencing the recently fashionable interior decoration ideals of the Aesthetic movement. Similarly, in 1928, Mrs Ironside-Smith described the processes of arranging the second-hand furniture and the divestment rituals involved at her rented house at Waltair, Vizagapatam in south-eastern India: of course the Rani helped by lending a lot of furniture . . . how we moved and removed that furniture about . . . months of work, but it was worth while, for the old house, once a dreary desert of midVictorian furniture in all stages of decay, began to blossom . . . and the furniture, washed and polished and dressed in nice new covers, regained its self respect. It was literally muddy when we got it, having been stored in a go-down [store-room] with a leaky roof . . . .71 Such activities allowed the British in India a measure of control over their immediate environment. It also assuaged, to some degree, the anxieties of many Anglo-Indians who imagined themselves living on the periphery of civilized existence, far from the modern, metropolitan country.

Conclusion Prior scholarship in relation to Anglo-Indian domestic life has largely addressed the role of household management advice literature in domestic material culture. By virtue of the paucity, general lack of quality and indeterminate taste of the contents of many Anglo-Indian domestic interiors, goes the general argument in recent secondary literature, there took place a renegotiation of the status or worth of the inhabitants of the colonial bungalow as measured through domestic artefacts. However, despite the advice (endlessly promoted in the household management literature) to treat the second-hand furnishings of the Anglo-Indian interior as culturally and emotionally neutral props, the creation of an acceptable form of domesticity within the Indian Subcontinent rarely depended upon the wholesale adoption of a prescribed set of ideals as promoted in these publications.

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Figure 6.4 Textiles and European-style furniture within the Anglo-Indian interior. Drawing room in bungalow with three men at Kalagdi, Bijapur, Bombay, 1870 Source: author’s own image.

The British in India could do little to mitigate the unsettling spatial arrangements of their dwellings. However, attempts were made to modify that space through the acquisition and arrangement of appropriate domestic furnishings and the enactment of familiar social practices through the placement and use of those things (Figure 6.4). Despite other notions promoted in contemporary discourse, the arrangements of second-hand and other furnishings in the Anglo-Indian bungalow might be considered, in the words of Pierre Nora, as ‘sites of memory’, intended to evoke cultural memories of the homeland and help to stabilize the British persona within India. The British resident in India had both an emotional and sensory need for Western-style furniture in South Asia. The arrangement of furnishings within the domestic interior of the bungalow, however scant or unsatisfactory according to standards applied in Europe, was intended to enable the British within the Subcontinent to operate socially and culturally as Westerners. The second-hand furnishings also sustained the illusion of connectedness to the material culture of the modern West. It allowed Anglo-Indian senses to experience familiar forms, materials and body postures. The

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physical environment of the Anglo-Indian home, including the odd array of second-hand furnishings, was intended, however imperfectly, to evoke the space of ‘home’, a term that encompassed notions of dwelling-place, region as well as nation. However, as argued elsewhere, there was a disjunction between this intention and its actualization.72 Within the Anglo-Indian home, the everyday practices and domestic material culture of the homeland were not simply translated, unaltered, to the Subcontinent. Instead, they were problematized by a range of factors, including the plan of, and domestic arrangements within, the bungalow. The unsettling spatial arrangements and widespread use of second-hand furnishings within the British domestic interior in India rarely soothed the inhabitants. Indeed unease about this situation was the sub-text to most Anglo-Indian accounts (particularly within household management advice literature) of domestic life in India. Throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century, Western contemporary commentators located the East within a discourse of decline. They posited a series of binary oppositions between East and West – pre-modern versus modern, stagnating versus progressive – that served to justify British intervention in South Asia. Through this intervention, so the general argument ran, every facet of the culture of that region could be awakened from its backward-looking state. The majority of British residents in India well understood the non-functional role that European material culture performed within the Indian Subcontinent. They were aware of its symbolic value and its transformation into a marker of Western cultural superiority and modernity in colonial South Asia. As the commentator H. B. Henderson asserted in 1829, ‘in the first place, is it nothing that a Chair is a visible sign of our civilisation and our superiority over the barbarous nations we have conquered? [It is] an outward symbol of our proud distinction from among the enslaved millions of the East’.73 Not only did Western-style furniture (and the social practices engendered by such furniture) distinguish Anglo-Indians from the local population but it also helped buttress the persona of the Anglo-Indian within the unfamiliar and unsettling ambience of the Subcontinent. The meanings invested in and the use of second-hand furnishings within the Subcontinent replicated, to some degree, those of the home country, but with some clear differences. Auctions of second-hand goods in India became important sites not only of object exchange but of information. To a greater degree than in the home country, these auctions became significant sites of information exchange, entertainment and social networking, activities that were so crucial to the maintenance of cohesion and contact amongst

132 The Nature of Second-Hand

the relatively small Anglo-Indian community. Newly made furniture or imported ‘Europe’ furniture was prohibitively expensive and was only available to a small minority of Britons in India. Furthermore, unlike the situation in Britain, the ‘aristocracy’ of British India were those who had served longest in the civil service or military. When their goods came up for sale due to death or departure for the home land, the middling sort of the Anglo-Indian population could satisfy their curiosity by viewing the contents of their homes but, at these sales, they could also acquire objects which possessed some guarantee of quality (vouched for by their previous ownership) that distinguished them from amongst the mass of second-hand goods that circulated within the Subcontinent. Finally, in contrast to the situation in Britain, the acquisition of secondhand furnishings by Anglo-Indians was less a matter of choice than a normative practice within the material culture of British India.

Notes 1. ‘Before the census of 1911, the term Anglo-Indian usually referred to British residents in India. Since that date it has referred to descendants of relationships between European men and Indian women’. A. Blunt (1999) ‘Imperial geographies of home: British domesticity in India, 1886–1925’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24(4), pp. 421–440. 2. J. P. Brown (2008) The Bourgeois Interior (Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press), p. 14. 3. K. Grier (1997) Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930 (Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press). 4. I. Baucom (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 79. 5. Ibid., p. 80. 6. D. Maleuve (1999) Museum Memories: History, Technology and Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 121, 151. 7. A. L. Stoler (2000) ‘Cultivating bourgeois bodies and racial selves’, in C. Hall (ed.) Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 92. 8. C. Buckland (1884) Sketches of Social Life in India (London: W. H. Allen and Co.), p. 2. 9. W. H. Hart (1906) Everyday Life in Bengal and Other Indian Sketches . . . (London: Charles H. Kelly), p. 66. 10. R. D. Jones (2007) Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity Within the Indian Subcontinent, c. 1800–1947 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 1. 11. E. Braddon (1872) Life in India; a Series of Sketches Showing Something of the Anglo-Indian (London: Longmans and Co.), p. 104. 12. A. Jaffer (2001) Furniture from British India and Ceylon (London: V & A Museum), p. 106.

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13. Initial contact between Europeans and South Asian courts (c. 1600–1800) led, in many cases, to the adoption of an Indianized lifestyle by Westerners. During this period, some Western men co-habited with (or married) South Asian women and this fostered an Indianized material culture in home life which was not without its problems. For example, James Achilles Kirkpatrick, resident at Hyderabad between 1797 and 1805, married Khair-un-Naissa, a great niece of the Diwan of Hyderabad. This caused difficulties for him with the British as Christopher Bayley has noted, ‘by 1800 official and private opinion was turning against inter-racial marriage and Kirkpatrick’s advancement in the service was jeopardized by his easy relations with Indians’. C. A. Bayley (ed.) (1990) The Raj: India and the British 1600–1947 (London: National Portrait Gallery), pp. 176–177. During the nineteenth century, with a few exceptions, Indian social habits or objects were gradually eradicated from the Anglo-Indian domestic interior. See Jones, Interiors of Empire, pp. 91–92. 14. J. Briggs (1828) Letters Addressed to a Young Person in India Calculated to Afford Instruction for his Conduct in General . . . (London: John Murray), p. 3. 15. Jaffer, Furniture, p. 99. 16. T. Wilkinson (1977) Two Monsoons (London: Duckworth), p. 13. 17. K. Platt (1923) The Home and Health in India and the Tropical Colonies (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox), p. 64. 18. J. A. D. (1903) Notes on an Outfit for India and Hints for the New Arrival (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co.), p. 24. 19. Braddon, Life in India, p. 109. 20. D. Gilmour (2005) The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London: John Murray), pp. 104–105. 21. F. A. Steel and G. Gardiner (1921) The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (London: William Heinemann, first edn 1888), p. 28. 22. These advice books included such titles as: C. Mem (1909) The English Bride in India; Hints on Indian Housekeeping (London: Luzac); E. Garrett (1887) Morning Hours in India; Practical Hints on Household Management . . . (London: Trübner and Co.); S. Leigh Hunt and A. Kenny (1883) Tropical Trials; a Handbook for Women in the Tropics (London: W. H. Allen and Co.); Mrs H. Reynolds (1903) At Home in India; or Tâza-be-Tâza (London: Henry J. Drane). 23. These were both printed in newspapers and circulated as hand-written lists. 24. J. A. D., Notes on an Outfit for India, p. 24. 25. Berners papers, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge University. 26. (1865) Thacker’s Directory for Bengal, the North Western Provinces, the Punjab . . . for 1865 (London, Allahabad, Bombay: Thacker and Co.), p. 340. 27. G. W. Johnson (1843) The Stranger in India; or Three Years in Calcutta (London: Henry Colburn), vol. 1, p. 52. 28. See MacArthur and Stobart’s chapter in the present volume for a discussion of the situation regarding the country house sale in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 29. C. Grant (1862) Anglo-Indian Domestic Life; a Letter from an Artist in India to his Mother in England (Calcutta: Thacker and Spink), p. 39. 30. E. C. P. Hull (1874) The European in India or Anglo-Indian’s Vade Mecum (London: Henry S. King and Co.), p. 76.

134 The Nature of Second-Hand 31. The Bengal Directory, 1875 (Calcutta, Bombay, London: Thacker and Co.), p. 646. 32. The Colombo Observer, 22 May 1848. 33. Braddon, Life in India, p. 109. 34. I am grateful to Jon Stobart for this suggestion. 35. Ibid. 36. E. Collingham (2001) Imperial Bodies; the Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity), pp. 141–143. 37. A. Vickery (1998) The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), pp. 161, 189, 192. 38. A senior member of the Ceylon Civil Service and long-term resident on the island. 39. Major and Mrs G. Darby Griffith, ‘Ceylon during a Residence in the Years 1841–2’, pp. 59–60, 23 March 1841, Mss., University of Peradeniya, Kandy, Sri Lanka. 40. Jaffer, Furniture, pp. 83–88. 41. The New Calcutta Directory for 1856, vol. 2, parts 6–11 (Calcutta: Thacker and Co.), p. 176. 42. London, British Library: Bengal Wills, 1845, L/AG/34/27/133, estate of Major Fitzgerald. 43. Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper, pp. 33–34. 44. Platt, The Home and Health in India, p. 65. 45. London, British Library: Bengal Wills, 1840, L/AG/34/27/120, estate of Henry Martindell. 46. London, British Library: Bengal Wills, 1859, L/AG/34/27/163, estate of Robert Dunlop. 47. London, British Library: Madras Wills, 1829, L/AG/34/27/261, estate of Joseph Dacre. 48. London, British Library: Bengal Wills, 1859, L/AG/34/27/163, estate of Mary Shillingford. 49. The Ceylon Chronicle, 2 July 1848. 50. The Ceylon Times, 6 January 1863. 51. George Hay Boyd was a prominent merchant on the island and members of the Austin family had, for many years, served the Colonial Government in various appointments in Galle. J. P. Lewis (1913) List of Inscriptions on Tombstones and Monuments in Ceylon (Colombo: H. C. Cottle), pp. 168, 170. 52. C. Wainwright (1989) The Romantic Interior (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). 53. Stobart and Van Damme, ‘Introduction’. 54. Palanquin – a box-litter for travelling in, with a pole projecting before and behind which is carried on the shoulders of four or six men. 55. Braddon, Life in India, pp. 109–110. 56. S. J. Duncan (1893) The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (London: Chatto and Windus), pp. 249–250. 57. N. Gregson and L. Crewe (2003) Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg), p. 7. 58. Duncan, The Simple Adventures, p. 250. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 249. 61. Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper, p. 28.

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62. G. McCracken (1988) Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), pp. 87–88. 63. Gregson and Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures, p. 7. 64. A Lady Resident (1864) The English Woman in India (London: Smith, Elder and Co.), p. 39. 65. Gregson and Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures, p. 163. 66. Dowbiggin – a prominent London cabinet-making firm that supplied furniture to Windsor Castle in 1846. The firm worked in a stolid, classical-revival style. 67. London, British Library: Mss.Eur.c.725, letters from John, 13th Baron Elphinstone from Bombay, 1854–1859 to Mme Flahaut and Lady Shelburne. 68. Cretonne – stout, unglazed cotton cloth with a pattern print on one or both sides. 69. Serge – twilled and worsted fabric for rough wear. 70. Anon. (1896) ‘Our homes in India and how to beautify them’, The Bungalow – a Paper for Anglo-Indian Homes (Bombay: Bell and Sons), p. 8. 71. London, British Library: Mss.Eur.D.898, Ironside-Smith papers. 72. W. Glover (2004) ‘ “A feeling of absence from Old England”: the colonial bungalow’, Home Cultures, 1(1), p. 79. 73. H. B. Henderson (1829) The Bengalee; or Sketches of Society and Manners in the East (London: Smith, Elder, 1829), p. 329.

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Part II Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

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7 ‘Old books – New Bound’? Selling Second-Hand Books in England, c. 1680–1850 Ian Mitchell

Introduction Sir William Boothby, who lived at Ashbourne Hall in Derbyshire towards the end of the seventeenth century, was an avid collector of books, old and new.1 He knew what texts he wanted; but he also knew how he wanted them to appear. His correspondence with Michael Johnson, bookseller of Lichfield in Staffordshire, shows him to have had strong views about book bindings. He was frequently critical of Johnson’s endeavours whose bindings were, Boothby complained in 1684, ‘very slight and weak’. This was unsatisfactory since, as Boothby said, ‘I designe my bookes for posterity’.2 Boothby’s concern both for the contents of his library and its appearance is revealing about the nature of the book as a commodity, including as a potential second-hand commodity. He could be very particular about what he wanted, for example asking Johnson in August 1683 about the cost of Pitt’s new atlas on the best and largest paper and in the best binding. But he also complained that books were too dear. In April 1683 he wrote to Richard Chiswell in London, wanting to know the price of ‘those large forraigne books’ before they were sent and in a 1684 letter to John Smith, a Coventry bookseller, he asked, with reference to Walton’s Polyglot Bible, ‘whether you can get me one at second hand cheap’. Boothby had no qualms about collecting old and second-hand books, even though he also occasionally exchanged books for newer editions, but he was less than pleased when on examining two parcels from Johnson he found that ‘all or most are old Bookes, new bound’.3 Was Johnson trying to make an earlier edition look like a new book? Price was clearly of some importance to Boothby and his involvement in the second-hand market may have been partly 139

140 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

a matter of economics, but this was almost certainly secondary to his use of his library as a marker of distinction. For Boothby, books were precious commodities that signified his status as a gentleman and as a man of taste and learning. They needed to look good. But he was also passionate about what was inside the book – it is apparent that Boothby enjoyed reading and that his library was for use and not just for show. It would be hard to over-state the importance of the book as one of the engines of modernity. The printed book revolutionized the transmission of knowledge and the circulation of ideas, making it possible for these to be disseminated more rapidly, widely and accurately than ever before.4 Books and pamphlets could widen access to radical ideas, promote social cohesion or be used in government propaganda.5 This print culture depended on the wide circulation of texts, both old and new. But books were also material objects and can be viewed as an important component of that burgeoning material culture that was also a key aspect of modernity. Elaborately produced and lavishly illustrated books displayed the erudition and taste of their subscribers from at least the middle of the seventeenth century.6 In the course of the following century and a half, book ownership became much more widespread, even though new books remained expensive. Acquiring and displaying books, and generally, though perhaps not always, reading them, can be set alongside the consumption of other luxury and semi-luxury goods that both created and denoted social and cultural status. They demonstrated good taste and the ability to participate in polite society.7 But whether valued primarily as texts or as material objects, books like any durable item of value were likely to be passed from owner to owner, whether by gift, inheritance or sale, and thus to form part of the circulation of second-hand goods. They are a good example of the sort of object that needs to be considered in terms of consumption flows and the life-history of things. Books were read and re-read and their contents shared with other readers. Book buyers did not limit themselves to new texts, even if they were able mainly to buy newly printed books. Old texts were and are a vital part of the canon, and for much of the early modern period old texts were more widely available than new ones. So any book collector, and any bookseller, was likely to acquire or deal in a mixture of old and new, both in terms of the texts and the books themselves. Choosing to buy an old rather than a new copy of a classic text might be a matter of aesthetics, of price or simply of availability. It was certainly not just a matter of economic necessity. It is difficult, therefore, to disentangle the second-hand book trade from the book trade as a whole. But it is also impossible to ignore the second-hand trade in

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books. Second-Hand booksellers were not at the fringes of modernity but played a vital role in the creation of that print culture that is at the heart of modernity. There is a large and growing literature on the history of print culture and of the book trades in England. Raven’s The Business of Books is the most comprehensive study of the bookselling trade in the period up to 1850, even if its major focus is on the London publishers who dominated the trade for much of this period through their control of copyright. Feather’s work on the provincial book trade remains the best overview of developments in the eighteenth century, although recent research on individual booksellers and through the British Book Trades Index means that it is somewhat dated. From the perspective of the reader, St Clair has posed some challenging questions about the availability of new works in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the extent to which ordinary people could purchase them. There are other important recent studies of eighteenth-century readers and reading by Fergus and Colclough. The itinerant book trade has also attracted some recent attention.8 The second-hand trade is acknowledged as significant by these scholars, but it is perhaps not given as much attention as it deserves by book historians. Similarly, recent work on second-hand retailing has focused more on clothing and furniture than on the book trades, although the involvement of the middling sorts of people and not just the poor in buying second-hand goods like books has been noted by Stobart.9 This chapter looks at the trade in second-hand books mainly in provincial England from the late seventeenth to the mid nineteenth centuries. It examines first how consumers accessed and used books in this period, before considering briefly the growth of the bookselling trades and then discussing the different types of second-hand bookseller. It demonstrates the continuing importance of second-hand as a means of accessing print culture in the context of rapid growth and change in the book trades as a whole. At the same time, the second-hand trade was both becoming increasingly separate from the trade in new books, and itself becoming more differentiated between those who traded in old and low value books and those who were developing a specialist antiquarian trade.

Accessing and using books Books might be prized possessions, or they might be a means to an end: that of acquiring knowledge. In some instances they could even be a useful store of value to be sold or pawned when times were hard. All

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of this affected how books were acquired or disposed of. For example, Joseph Hunter, a Sheffield apprentice, kept a record of his book buying, borrowing and reading in 1798. He obtained his books from a subscription library, a circulating library, several shops and a stall. He borrowed travel, history and fiction from a subscription library, but theology from family and friends. In this period, he bought only two new books, but a number of second-hand ones, including 18 volumes of an encyclopaedia.10 Earlier in the century in Derbyshire James Clegg, a dissenting minister living in the High Peak, recorded in his diary how he would buy books at auction, from a Manchester bookseller when he was in town or occasionally order them from London.11 Clegg’s books were a mixture of new and second-hand. Also in Derbyshire, Titus Wheatcroft, parish clerk, schoolmaster and carpenter from the village of Ashover, prepared a catalogue of his books in 1722. He had nearly 400 in all. Many were religious books, some were classics and some schoolbooks. Wheatcroft included in his catalogues some works he himself had written. Each book was given a value, sometimes only a few pence but sometimes much more.12 It seems doubtful that Wheatcroft was planning to sell his books as he was clearly a keen reader, but it may have given him some reassurance to know that his collection had a monetary value. There are no details of how Wheatcroft obtained his collection, but many of his books must have been second-hand. None of these readers was necessarily typical of the purchaser of second-hand books, but then there may not have been a typical purchaser. In general, buyers tended to be from the educated, middling sort of people and usually to be male. But this may simply reflect the nature of the sources – we do not know who browsed at a street stall where old books were sold. There were, of course, female readers and book collectors, but these were probably less typical.13 Thus readers accessed their books in a variety of ways. Bookshops were not the only source of second-hand books. Book auctions were relatively common in the provinces as well as in London from the late seventeenth century. For example, Thomas Goddard regularly held auctions in Norwich in the early eighteenth century,14 while in the north of England, York, Leeds and Halifax were popular venues.15 Auctions were an important means through which the libraries of local book collectors entered the second-hand market. Auctions may, however, have been regarded with suspicion by some collectors who feared paying too high a price for the books. Thus by the late eighteenth century some would-be purchasers seem to have preferred to use a bookseller as their agent at a sale rather than attend in person.16 In the early nineteenth century the

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Manchester bookseller William Ford bought for his customers at book sales. A letter from John Bateman of Congleton in 1830 asked that if Grayson’s Lancashire Fragments went at a moderate price, Ford would purchase one for him, and that he would buy anything else curious in English history or antiquities, up to a total of £20.17 Book auctions were also increasingly supplemented or even superseded from the mid eighteenth century onwards by booksellers’ catalogues, often listing the contents of libraries that the bookseller had purchased. Much lower down the scale, and perhaps especially in London, second-hand books could be obtained from street traders, or from a board outside a house or workshop.18 Some of these books were of dubious origin. For example, in 1732 a Mrs Gibson, wife of a carpenter and daughter of a bookseller, unwittingly bought some stolen books to sell on the stall outside her husband’s shop.19 Book theft was not uncommon, and was another way in which books could enter the second-hand market. Thefts might be of just a handful of books from a gentleman’s library, as in Bakewell in 1756, with the books subsequently coming to light in a neighbouring village;20 or might involve more systematic attempts to steal from an employer, as in the case of James Holmes who stole from his master Peter Wright’s bookseller’s shop in London in 1828.21 Some of those receiving and selling stolen books may have done so innocently, but others were no doubt aware of what they were doing. Another London bookseller, Christopher Mudie of Princes Street, St James, whose shop was described as ‘an old book-shop, where they deal almost exclusively in second-hand books, or books of low value – It has an open window’ was convicted in 1835 of receiving books stolen from James Leech Ridgway, a bookseller and publisher of Piccadilly.22 As well as being texts to enjoy or items to collect and cherish, books, like many other goods in the early modern period, could also be a store of value. Books therefore sometimes entered the second-hand market because their owner needed to realize their value, or because a creditor accepted them in lieu of a debt. For example, the early eighteenth century Worcester bookseller John Mountfort was on one occasion advised to take books from a deceased clergyman customer as payment for debts owed.23 This may not have been uncommon. One Edward Stubbs of Walsall was pleading with a London bookseller in the 1820s to take books in settlement for debt. He listed several new books, including six of Walter Scott’s novels which he priced at varying amounts from 17s 6d to £1 2s. These were perhaps not unreasonable as prices for new books, but almost certainly well above what a bookseller might

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get second-hand. His letters became increasingly desperate, and it seems unlikely that he realized as much for his books as he hoped he would.24 Books were constantly circulating and re-circulating between readers, collectors and booksellers. Those in the trade were presumably well aware of changes in prices determined by the condition of a particular book, its rarity, whether it was in or out of fashion, or whether there were numerous unsold copies of a long print run. Customers, at least until provincial booksellers regularly issued printed catalogues including prices of old as well as antiquarian items, must have found it much harder to know whether or not they were getting a fair deal. It was important throughout the whole period to develop a good relationship with your bookseller or booksellers, while at the same time being wary of them. We have already seen how William Boothby was frequently critical of the service he received from booksellers. Particular issues were prices, bindings and the risk of receiving unrequested and unwanted books. John Mountfort of Worcester also had demanding customers who sometimes returned books, queried the price asked or asked to be informed of the lowest price for a particular work. Lord Vernon at Hanbury was one of these. Other customers were more content, with one sending a gammon of bacon as a token of his appreciation of Mountfort’s services.25 Some books were hard to come by and hence pricy. But this did not stop John Dixon of Mansfield from being unhappy in 1779 when shown a ‘very dirty’ copy of Evelina which the bookseller wanted to sell at close to the original price.26 Buyers were still being cautious in the nineteenth century. The Revd J. Riland of Yoxall in Staffordshire, writing to his London bookseller to order various books in 1807, specified, ‘I shall be glad if you could send me . . . a copy of Baxter’s Gildas Salvianus; but not Palmer’s Abridgement under the title of “the Reformed Pastor”, unless the original cannot be met with . . . ’ He also asked for a discount for ordering direct rather than via a country bookseller.27 And some booksellers were perhaps less than scrupulous – a customer of Robert Sunter of York complained in 1860 of being sent an old copy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology which he had rejected when at Sunter’s shop because there were later editions that recorded more recent discoveries. Sunter had a large Yorkshire trade, again with demanding customers, some of whom exchanged books with him.28

Book trades growth William Boothby in the late seventeenth century had relatively little choice regarding where to buy his books. The London booksellers,

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mainly grouped around St Paul’s Churchyard, largely controlled the trade and Boothby dealt with both Richard Chiswell and Joseph Watts. He was lucky to have Michael Johnson only 25 miles or so away at Lichfield, and in October 1684 wrote to John Smith in Coventry requesting a catalogue, as there was a carrier who went to Oxford via Coventry.29 A century later he would have had many more local booksellers to patronize. London continued to dominate the English book trades, particularly with regard to the publishing and sale of new books, and although the abolition of perpetual copyright in 1774 had some impact, especially with regard to imaginative literature, there were many cheap editions prior to that date and the copyright share system continued afterwards.30 There was, however, rapid growth in the provinces in the eighteenth century. Provincial booksellers were not only a vital part of the distribution network for new books, but invariably had an extensive second-hand trade. It is difficult to put numbers on this and John Feather’s estimate of around 1000 firms involved in the book trade in the 1790s in 316 towns is almost certainly too low.31 Booksellers, stationers, binders or printers were to be found in 23 per cent of north-west and west midlands towns in the period 1700–40, but in 88 per cent by 1830.32 Growth in some north midlands towns is shown in Table 7.1, though again the figures (largely derived from directories) are on the low side. Yet directories can still be a very useful source for comparing the broad magnitude of the trade in different towns in the same year, and the overall picture of growth, and the relative importance of different towns, is likely to be broadly correct. Not only were there many more booksellers in the larger towns, but many more towns had a bookshop (Table 7.2). The rapid growth in Staffordshire, for example, reflects the appearance of bookshops in many of the Potteries towns. Growth of this nature was perhaps only to be expected given both the increase in population in the period and the significant growth in the number of books published, particularly after 1740.33 It meant, however, that unlike Boothby who seems to have bought none of his books from a Derbyshire bookseller, Sir Henry Herbert Fitzherbert of Tissington was able to purchase the latest part of Dombey and Son in 1847 from his local bookshop in the small market town of Ashbourne.34 Of course, these bookshops were not all specialist emporiums dealing in quality new or antiquarian books. Especially in the smaller towns, trading in stationery and patent medicines was generally combined with selling books. James Whittaker, taking over a bookseller’s shop in the

146 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods Table 7.1 Minimum number of booksellers in selected north midland towns

Chester Stockport Derby Leicester Newark Nottingham Lichfield Stafford Wolverhampton Total

1740s

1790s

1820s

1840s

5 0 3 3 1 5 2 1 1

7 1 4 6 1 7 2 0 2

7 7 12 10 4 11 2 3 5

13 17 20 19 9 22 4 4 6

21

30

61

114

Sources: 1740s – William B. Todd and Peter J. Wallis (1974) ‘Provincial Booksellers c. 1744: The Harleian Miscellany Subscription List’, The Library 5th series xxix, pp. 422–440; 1790s – P. Barfoot and J. Wilkes (1792–96) Universal British Directory (London); 1820s – Pigot and Co. (1828) National Commercial Directory for 1828–29 (London); 1840s – Pigot and Co. (1842) Royal National and Commercial Directory (London and Manchester), Samuel Bagshaw (1846) Directory of Derbyshire (Sheffield), D. Nuttall (ed.) (1992) The Book Trade in Cheshire to 1850: A Directory (Liverpool: Liverpool Bibliographical Society). I have derived the Chester and Stockport figures for the 1840s from Nuttall because Cheshire is not well served by directories for the early to mid 1840s.

Table 7.2 Number of towns with booksellers – north midland counties 1740s Cheshire Derbyshire Leicestershire Nottinghamshire Staffordshire Total

1790s

1820s

1840s

5 2 2 3 4

8 7 6 5 11

9 10 8 7 21

16 13 9 7 26

16

37

55

71

Sources: see Table 7.1.

small Derbyshire town of Wirksworth in 1827, announced his presence as follows: An extensive Collection of Books, Music, and Musical Instruments, Fancy Stationery, etc constantly on hand. A liberal price given for Libraries or Parcels of Books. Periodical Publications, etc procured agreeable to order. A new and well selected Circulating Library, containing upwards of One Thousand One Hundred Volumes.35

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Very few booksellers, even in the much more differentiated London trades, would simply have claimed to be, or been perceived as, ‘secondhand booksellers’. The term was, however, sometimes used, particularly by the early nineteenth century. An early (pre-1750) trade card in the John Johnson Collection has Jacob Silver of Sandwich announcing that he ‘Sells all sorts of Books, New o[r] Second-Hand . . . Ready Money for any Study of Books . . . ’36 Nineteenth-century trade directories occasionally distinguished those selling ‘old’ or ‘second-hand’ books from booksellers in general. There were two such ‘second-hand’ booksellers in Chester in the 1820s and 1830s, and eight of the 26 booksellers and stationers listed in Baines’s Leeds Directory for 1834 were specifically described as dealers in old as well as new books.37 Similarly some booksellers’ catalogues, rather than referring to books purchased from various libraries as was common in the eighteenth century, were simply entitled ‘A Catalogue of Second-Hand Books’. An 1812 example from W. M. Rusher of Banbury ran to 127 pages and was available from booksellers in several south midlands towns.38 By the middle decades of the century London booksellers were issuing regular circulars or lists of second-hand books.39 The second-hand trade continued to be important, but was increasingly fragmented into marginal traders selling from a street stall, general second-hand booksellers and specialist sellers of antiquarian books.40

Selling books Dealing in second-hand books had long been the staple trade of the generality of provincial booksellers, even if they also advertised books newly published in London. Many of these second-hand books were acquired from gentlemen’s libraries, although some would have been obtained from other bookshops. And there was some element of buying in smaller quantities from customers, or taking old books in exchange for new. Witnesses in Old Bailey trials in the early nineteenth century referred to the casual buying of books over the counter as common practice. But by the early nineteenth century this may have mainly been in bookshops dealing primarily in second-hand or just ‘old’ books. The generalist provincial bookshop of the eighteenth century with its mixture of old books, a few new novels, some items of stationery and a range of patent medicines was perhaps beginning to seem rather old-fashioned, although still a feature of many provincial high streets throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. The trade increasingly divided into those who sold old books cheaply for

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cash from market stalls or low grade premises; those who continued the tradition of the typical eighteenth-century bookseller with well-located premises, regular advertisements, printed catalogues, and credit sales to a customer base that included local gentry and leading town families; and those who were developing a specialist antiquarian trade through catalogues and correspondence with the world of book collectors. Those selling ‘old books’ have inevitably left the fewest records, particularly if they traded mainly from market stalls. Some eighteenthand early nineteenth-century provincial bookshops may have been little more than repositories of old books. For example, Ellen Feepound of Stafford had a stock of about 200 books in 1776 plus about 30 in her circulating library. Her stock was old-fashioned, with much seventeenth-century theology and some old law and medical books.41 One well-documented Manchester seller of old books, James Weatherley, was approached by a Methodist in 1817 who said that his class leader wanted a young man to stand in the street with a bookstall for 12 shillings a week.42 Weatherley agreed to do this and so began his bookselling career working for Joseph Macardy. Prices were marked in all the books and Weatherley was told not to take less than the marked price. He set up on his own account when Macardy wanted to reduce his wages to eight shillings. Weatherley told how he got his own books together, along with some from his neighbours, and wheeled them in his wife’s large clothes trunk to the front of the Exchange. Among his first sales was Murray’s English Grammar in two volumes which had cost nine pence and which he sold for 3s 6d. He reckoned to make about 12 shillings on his first day. 43 His business grew quickly. He would buy from other booksellers such as James Nuttall in Back King Street, taking off their hands books they had bought by private contract and were perhaps struggling to sell in the shop.44 In 1819 he bought a large quantity of books from an old school for one pound, and claimed to have made about £100 from them.45 Knowing what to buy and at what price was crucial for business success. By the early 1820s he was trading from a cellar in Warren Street and had a stock of around 3000 volumes.46 Weatherley was moving up in the world. In 1823 he bought around £70 worth of books belonging to the late Warden of the Collegiate Church and sold most of them at a good profit to the Rector of Denton who, he said, had the finest classical library in Manchester.47 He did not always judge his purchases so well: in the early 1830s he ordered £22 of books from a London traveller without seeing any samples. When

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they arrived they were ‘Nothing but low priced books he had bought at sales in London for a mere trifle and not at all what he had represented them to be.’ Weatherley lost about £8 on this transaction.48 About the same time he bought a load of Gentleman’s Magazines at auction, paying 1s 1d per pound weight. On discovering that they were damp, dirty and presumably unsaleable, Weatherley managed to avoid paying the £18 12s they should have cost.49 At this time he was selling around 50 books a week, and taking £5 or more in a good week. In a bad week, however, he would take less than £1. His average weekly profit, taking no account of overheads, was a little over £1. He must have barely been making a living. Weatherly rarely handled high value books, with few selling for more than £1, but equally he never sold for less than 6d. Most of the books he sold fell in the usual categories of second-hand books, particularly religion, textbooks, grammars, science and history.50 A fairly typical day’s sale in August 1831 included 15 ‘old books of Divinity’ at £1 5s 6d, a work by Byron (Cain) at 1s 0d, Law’s Serious Call and Watts’ Hymns at 2s 0d. The Byron was relatively recently published and again illustrates how even quite lowly second-hand booksellers were part of the mechanism whereby new literature quickly became obtainable at cheap prices. Weatherley took £1 16s 6d in the day and reckoned to have made 8s 6d profit. His daybook occasionally records sales to other booksellers or the disposal of old and valueless stock, possibly to go as waste paper. In March 1833 he recorded ‘A sale of Books under a Distress for Rent’ and soon afterwards started selling in Liverpool.51 Weatherley’s fondness for drink led to debt and business failure. He began his career with a board in Lever Street and ended it selling a few books on a board in John Dalton Street. General booksellers who sold both new and second-hand books from town centre shops and who regularly issued sales catalogues were common in provincial towns from at least the early eighteenth century. They might operate on a substantial scale with stock running into several thousand volumes. In mid eighteenth-century Derby, for example, Jeremiah Roe and Samuel Fox used the Derby Mercury to advertise both recently published books and their catalogues of old books. Customers of such county town booksellers included local gentry families, such as the Chandos-Poles, buying both new and second-hand and sometimes exchanging books.52 In March 1740 Roe advertised that he had just published a free catalogue of books in divinity, history and physick. These would be mainly second-hand, probably purchased from sales of libraries.53 In November of the same year, Roe advertised some recently published religious books, the novel Pamela, a range of patent

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medicines, and that he had ‘a considerable number of second-hand Classicks, such as are mostly used in Schools, which will be sold very cheap’.54 Most of the books in Roe’s catalogues were priced, some at as little as three pence or four pence each and rarely exceeding ten shillings. Twenty years later Roe was advertising: A Catalogue of a valuable Collection of Books, including a Library of a Clergyman latterly deceased . . . which (for the sake of Ready Money) will be sold at the very low Price mentioned in the Catalogue, on Monday the 28th of this Instant July and continue upon Sale till Christmas.55 Catalogues were available from Roe, from a Mrs Sarah Roe in Ashbourne and from the booksellers of the neighbouring towns. This sort of networking among booksellers was common and important in widening access to books by those who were not regular visitors to a major centre like Derby. Across the Pennines in Chester, Thomas Ledsham published in 1757 a catalogue of around 1500 books, ‘lately purchased . . . out of the Studies of several late Learned Gentlemen, and many choice New Books’. Something under half the books dated from before 1700, and theology, history and law books were much in evidence. Ledsham’s catalogues were available from booksellers in north Wales, Stockport, Macclesfield and other Cheshire towns.56 Similar selling practices were still in evidence in the early nineteenth century. W. Appleby of Bath listed over 6000 items in his 1826 catalogue of new and second-hand books. He occasionally noted the published price as well as the price he was selling at, and again seems to have been offering some relatively new books at affordable prices. For example, Scott’s Rob Roy in three volumes and bound was on sale at nine shillings; newly published it would have cost well over a pound.57 By the late eighteenth century some of these provincial booksellers were beginning to develop a trade in antiquarian and rare books. For example, in Chester Peter Broster headed a family firm that dealt in a wide range of books. His 1783 catalogue stated on the title page: A Catalogue of Scarce and Valuable Books, consisting of several valuable libraries which will be sold on Monday, September 15 1783 at the prices affixed to each article for ready money only . . . P. Broster . . . gives the full value, in ready money, for libraries and parcels of books.58

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The catalogue, of which eight pages are missing, listed over 2000 works, with particularly significant numbers in the history, antiquities, law and classics categories. Of the 273 folios listed, 133 were printed before 1700, and 55 of the 99 law books were of a similar date. But the catalogue also included some newer works, such as Johnson’s Journey to the Western Isles published in 1775 and priced at 3s 6d and Raffald’s Cookery published in 1782 and described as new and neat, price 6s.59 Even if second-hand in the sense that they had had a previous owner, these were hardly ‘old books’ and offer an example of how booksellers could make relatively recently published works available to customers who might have been unwilling or unable to pay the newly published price. By the early nineteenth century, Broster’s antiquarian leanings were becoming more apparent. His 1801 catalogue was available from booksellers in London, Bath and Dublin and claimed that rare and valuable books were constantly on sale.60 A copy of this catalogue was sent to Charles Burney at Greenwich, illustrating how provincial booksellers of this type could network with the scholarly world of book collectors. Peter Broster also corresponded with John Nichols of the Gentleman’s Magazine about some Randle Holmes manuscripts that were at one time in his possession and about information he had sent to Lysons.61 Broster was not the only Chester bookseller dealing in rare and antiquarian books. In 1792 J. Poole published a catalogue running to over 200 pages and which he claimed comprised at least 20,000 volumes, including the libraries of the late Ralph Leeke and J. Ball, esquires. This catalogue was available from G. Sael of the Strand as well as from Poole. It cost sixpence, a sum that would be refunded on the purchase of five shillings worth of books. The usual categories – history, divinity, poetry, plays, philosophy and law – dominated the catalogue. Books were priced and dated, sometimes with a note on their condition. Among the more expensive were the five volumes of Bayle’s Biographical, Historical and Critical Dictionary, described as neat and gilt and priced at £3 13s 6d and King’s Vale Royal of England, described as exceeding rare, with morocco back and corners, printed in 1656 and priced at £3 3s. A copy of Plot’s Natural History of Staffordshire (1686) lacking plates but half bound and very fair was priced at 18s. On the other hand it was possible to purchase cheaply books that might be regarded as part of the old canon of English literature, particularly if there was nothing remarkable about their binding. For example, a 1669 edition of Donne’s Poems was only one shilling and a 1678 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost 1s 6d.62 But even books like this would only just

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be within the reach of a skilled labourer earning perhaps two shillings a day.63 Broster and Poole can be regarded as general booksellers with a significant antiquarian trade. The specialist antiquarian trade, however, is well illustrated by the career of an early nineteenth-century Manchester bookseller, William Ford who was born in 1771 and whose correspondence with customers has survived.64 Ford was a book collector who went into business in 1805 when he published a catalogue of over 3000 books to be sold at his premises at 14 Cromford Court. The books were described as ‘a Curious and Valuable Collection’ and the catalogue was available from Robert Bickerstaff in the Strand as well as from Ford. Ford was aiming high for a new entrant to the trade. His books included high quality antiquarian and second-hand items, some priced at over £10 and including such rarities as a 1593 edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.65 Ford’s business increased substantially during the next decade or so: in 1808 he was at 85 Market Street Lane and selling oriental books and his 1811 catalogue listed 15,000 items. The Dublin historian William Monck Mason bought regularly from him in 1806.66 One John Davidson of Newcastle ordered four books in 1814, commenting that he had just received the first part of Ford’s new sale catalogue and, finding that books he had previously bought from Ford had increased in value, was content to deal with him again.67 Pricing books could be tricky. When Ford was newly in business a London bookseller offered him seven numbers of Heath’s Shakespeare at 15 shillings a volume. He claimed the trade price was 17 shillings and that Ford should be able to sell at a guinea, and said he was offloading the books because he had no room – or was he trying to pass off unsaleable stock to a new provincial bookseller? For bookselling was a precarious business and in 1816 Ford was declared bankrupt. His stock was listed in three catalogues and auctioned over a three month period from December 1816 to February 1817 at his premises in St Anne’s Square.68 Ford resumed business and continued to sell books, pictures and other objects and to correspond with book collectors throughout the United Kingdom. Ford and Weatherley were dealing in books in Manchester at the same time, but could hardly have been further apart in their business practices and customer contacts. Weatherley was essentially selling for ready money and relied on potential customers seeing and browsing among his display of books; Ford used catalogues to advertise his higher quality goods to a more exclusive clientele and sold by mail order as well as over the counter. The second-hand book trade had numerous layers.

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Conclusions As Raven has recently reminded us, the four centuries from 1450 saw a transformation in access to and the use made of books so that by 1850 ‘the great majority of the population of England (and also of Western Europe) daily encountered books, magazines or newspapers. Almost everyone was sensible of information conveyed by print.’69 Books, and other forms of print culture, were a key component in the making of the modern world. This transformation also affected the nature of the book as a commodity. More widespread access to texts meant that only some, rather than most, books were prized possessions, treasured as rare objects in the way they had been in the pre-modern period. By the mid nineteenth century much print was available in cheap, commercialized editions; or on the shelves of second-hand bookshops. Ways of accessing books also changed in the century and a half before 1850. Subscription and circulating libraries were to be found in most large or middling towns. The London booksellers still dominated publishing, but no self-respecting town was without its bookshop by the early nineteenth century. Most of these had a mixture of new and second-hand books and many of the larger ones issued catalogues giving details of their stock and how much each book cost. Customers were both physically nearer to bookshops than they had been, and had much better information if they wished to buy unseen. The second-hand book trade was itself diverse and its relationship to modernity complex. Throughout the period, some booksellers operated at the margins of the economy, trading from a board or a street stall and obtaining books from sometimes dubious sources, including those stolen from other booksellers or private collectors. Most secondhand trades had some element of this. The majority of second-hand booksellers, however, offered a very wide range of different types of book, including old editions of classic works and more recently published novels and other items of popular reading. Some of their older works were no doubt difficult to dispose of and may have ended up as waste paper. But a significant part of their stock consisted of books that were in demand and that, because second-hand, could be obtained at affordable prices, unlike new books which generally remained expensive well into the nineteenth century. They played a vital role in widening access to print and to a book-based culture. Customers bought secondhand books partly for economic reasons, but also because these might be the only available copies of a particular text. There was, however, another side to the second-hand book trade. Especially by the late

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eighteenth century, some booksellers were increasingly distinguishing rare and antiquarian books from what were merely old books. These sellers, like Ford in Manchester, dealt with serious collectors throughout England and beyond and can be associated with that emergent culture of antique collecting that is a marker of modernity. They were among those who operated on the boundary between the commercial and cultured world, supplying items that enabled consumers to express identity and distinction through purchasing goods that, instead of being novel and fashionable, came with their own history. The second-hand book trade had an important role to play in the making of modernity.

Notes 1. P. Beal (1997) ‘ “My books are the great joy of my life”: Sir William Boothby, seventeenth-century bibliophile’, The Book Collector, 46, pp. 350–378. 2. Derbyshire Record Office (DRO), Microfilm of Boothby Letterbooks, 15 April 1684 (XM 856). 3. Ibid., 24 August 1683, 19 April 1683, 10 November 1684, 23 September 1684. 4. L. Jardine (1996) Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan) explores the ‘triumph of the book’, chapter 3 passim. 5. J. Raven (2007) The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), p. 1. 6. L. Levy Peck (2005) Consuming Splendour: Society and Culture in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 272. 7. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘distinction’ is applicable here – for a useful summary of Bourdieu’s ideas, see R. Bocock (1993) Consumption (London: Routledge), chapter 3. There is a growing literature on eighteenth-century consumption, luxury and culture, but particularly useful are J. Brewer (1997) The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins) and M. Berg (2005) Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 8. Raven, The Business of Books; J. Feather (1985) The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); W. St Clair (2004) The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); J. Fergus (2006) Provincial Readers in EighteenthCentury England (Oxford: Oxford University Press); S. Colclough (2007) Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities 1695–1870 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); R. Myers, M. Harris and G. Mandelbrote (eds) (2007) Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll). 9. J. Stobart (2006) ‘Clothes, cabinets and carriages: second-hand dealing in eighteenth century England’, in B. Blondé, P. Stabel, J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds) Buyers and Sellers. Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 225–244. 10. S. M. Colclough (2000) ‘Procuring books and consuming texts. The reading experience of a Sheffield apprentice, 1798’, Book History, 3, pp. 21–44.

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11. V. S. Doe (ed.) (1979, 1981) The Diary of James Clegg of Chapel en le Frith 1708–1755, Derbyshire Record Society, vols III and V. 12. DRO, Titus Wheatcroft of Ashover, Memorandum Book, D5433/2. 13. On women readers, see, for example, Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 193–197, and Susan Staves (2007) “‘Books without which I cannot write”: how did eighteenth-century women writers get the books they read’, in J. Batchelor and C. Kaplan (eds) Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 192–211. 14. D. Stoker (2007) “‘To all booksellers, country Chapmen, Hawkers and others”: how the population of East Anglia obtained its printed material’, in Myers et al. (eds) Fairs, Markets, pp. 107–136. 15. E. A. Swain (1977) ‘The auction as a means of book distribution in eighteenth century Yorkshire’, Publishing History, 1, pp. 49–91. 16. N. Ramsay (2001) ‘English book collectors and the salerooms in the eighteenth century’, in R. Myers, M. Harris and G. Mandelbrote (eds) Under the Hammer: Book Auctions since the Seventeenth Century (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll), p. 105. 17. Chetham’s Library, Ford Letterbooks, vol. 2B f. 519. 18. Pedlars were also an important part of the book distribution system in Western Europe, including France and the Netherlands. Many seem to have specialized in ballads and cheaply printed small books, particularly in England. See M. Spufford (1981) Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen), especially chapter 5; L. Fontaine (1996) History of Pedlars in Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press), for example, pp. 42–43 on pedlars and the bibliothèque bleu in the Troyes area. 19. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), May 1732, trial of Sarah Beeston and James Gibson (t17320525–68), accessed 16 January 2008. 20. DRO, Quarter Sessions Papers, Q/SB/2/1311–12. 21. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), May 1828, trial of James Holmes, Mark Norden (t18280529–151), accessed 23 December 2008. 22. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), December 1835, trial of Christopher Mudie (t18351214–288), accessed 23 December 2008. 23. Worcestershire Record Office, Steward the Chemist, Letters etc. of John Mountfort, 1688–1707, 705:781/7537/1. 24. William Salt Library, Letters from Edward Stubbs, 1824, S.MS.478/19/ 134/1-4. 25. Worcestershire Record Office, Mountfort letters, 705:781/7537/1. 26. Nottinghamshire Archives, John Hewett Correspondence, 1779, DD/FJ/ 11/1/4. 27. William Salt Library, Letter from Revd J. Riland to Mr Baynes, 2 April 1807, S.MS. 478/18/17. 28. West Yorkshire Archives, Leeds, Letters to Robert Sunter, c. 1838–70, WYL 149/SC6. 29. Beal, ‘My books are the great joy of my life’, especially pp. 355–356. 30. Raven, The Business of Books, pp. 230–237.

156 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods 31. Feather, The Provincial Book Trade, p. 147, n. 88. Feather estimates that the Universal British Directory generally omits around 10–15 per cent of book traders. The development of the British Book Trades Index (http://www.bbti.bham.ac.uk) has greatly increased the number of named individuals known to have been associated with the book trades, but does not easily allow for the identification and counting of the number of businesses in a specific branch of the trade at any given date. 32. J. Stobart, A. Hann and V. Morgan (2007) Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c.1680–1830 (London: Routledge), p. 34. 33. According to Raven, the number of titles published was growing at an average of 2 per cent a year from 1740 to 1800 (The Business of Books, p. 131). 34. DRO, Fitzherbert Papers, Ashbourne Bills, 1847–48 (239M/F2436/21). 35. Derby Mercury, 25 July 1827. 36. Bodleian Library, John Johnson Collection, Circulating Libraries 4(53). 37. Pigot and Co. (1828) National Commercial Directory for 1828–29 (London); General and Commercial Directory of the Borough of Leeds, 1834 (Leeds: Baines and Newsome, 1834). 38. DRO, Pares of Leicester and Hopewell Hall, Financial, business papers (D5336/2/25/31). 39. See, for example, those at Bodleian Library, Vet.A6.d.224. 40. There are parallels with developments in the second-hand furniture trade with its clearly defined markets for new, low quality second-hand and antique furniture (see Edwards and Ponsonby, Chapter 5 in this volume). 41. Feather, The Provincial Book Trade, p. 79 and Appendix I. 42. On Weatherley, see M. Powell and T. Wyke (1998) ‘Penny capitalism in the Manchester book trade: the case of James Weatherley’, in P. Isaac and B. McKay (eds) The Reach of Print: Making, Selling and Using Books (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies), pp. 135–156; M. Powell and T. Wyke (2001) “‘Aristotle to a Wery tall man”: selling secondhand books in Manchester in the 1820s’, in P. Isaac and B. McKay (eds) The Moving Market: Continuity and Change in the Book Trade (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll), pp. 93–106. 43. Chetham’s Library, Recollections of Manchester and Manchester Characters and Anecdotes . . . by James Weatherley, transcript, Mun A.6.30, pp. 30–33. 44. Ibid., p. 39. 45. Ibid., pp. 42–44. 46. Ibid., p. 63. 47. Ibid., p. 70. 48. Ibid., pp. 117–118. 49. Ibid., p. 119. 50. Powell and Wyke, ‘Aristotle to a Wery tall man’, pp. 97–101. 51. Chetham’s Library Mun A.6.30∗ , Weatherley Day Book, 1831–33. 52. DRO, Chandos-Pole, Receipts, 1772, D5557/10/38/1. 53. Derby Mercury, 20 March 1740. 54. Ibid., 27 November 1740. 55. Ibid., 18–25 July 1760. 56. Cheshire and Chester Archives and Local Studies, Earwaker Collection, Early Deeds etc. relating to Chester, A Catalogue of Books Lately Purchased by Thos Ledsham . . . (Chester, 1757) (ZCR63/1/14).

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57. W. Appleby’s General Catalogue of New and Second-Hand Books for 1826 . . . (Bath). See St Clair, The Reading Nation, p. 194 for prices of newly published novels. 58. Bodleian Library Vet. A5.e.1895, A Catalogue of Scarce and Valuable Books . . . Which Will be Sold . . . by P. Broster . . . (Chester, 1783). 59. Ibid. 60. British Library, A Catalogue of Classical Books . . . Now Selling for Ready Money . . . by Broster and Son. 61. I. Mitchell (1999) ‘The book trades in Cheshire, 1680–1830’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 95, p. 35. 62. Poole’s Catalogue for 1792 (Chester and London, 1792). 63. St Clair, The Reading Nation, p. 40 emphasizes the high cost of new books in comparison to wages. 64. On Ford, see B. J. Scragg (1999) ‘William Ford, Manchester bookseller’, in P. Isaac and B. McKay (eds) The Human Face of the Book Trade (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies), pp. 155–170. 65. British Library S.C.743.(3), A Catalogue of a Curious and Valuable Collection of Books . . . Now Selling . . . by William Ford (Manchester, 1805). 66. Chetham’s Library, Ford Letterbooks, vol. 1, Mun A6.78–79. 67. Ford Letterbooks, vol. 2B, f. 409. 68. British Library 1560/1069, A Catalogue of the First (-third) Part of the Genuine and Valuable Stock in Trade of Mr Wm. Ford, Bookseller, of Manchester . . . (Manchester, 1816, 1817). 69. Raven, The Business of Books, p. 1.

8 Power to the Broker: Shifting Authorities over Public Sales in Eighteenth-century Antwerp∗ Dries Lyna

Introduction The existing literature on the advent of specialized art, book and furniture auctions in the course of the eighteenth century tends to frame this history within a framework of ‘modernization’. In this, product segmentation (separate sales of art, books and furniture), and the parallel move to novel salesrooms, complement the growing need for distinction of the upper classes, and appealed both to their desire for alternative modes of leisurely sociability and to the increased ‘collection mania’ of the late eighteenth century.1 By highlighting the novel commercial culture of the specialized auction, the literature – often English or French – has tended to emphasize discontinuity with the existing market(s) for public sales, implying a causal connection between the growing deregulation of the second-hand market in general and the increased freedom of auctioneers to ‘create’ the modern-style public sale. But the prevalence of this modernization narrative has blurred our vision and held back critical questions on the presupposed ‘novel’ character of specialized auctions. This chapter aims to reconsider one aspect of the chronology of modernization by analysing the advent of specialized public sales in eighteenth-century Antwerp. From this provincial perspective we can thoroughly interrogate the modernization narrative, developed for auctions in large cities such as Paris and London. In addition, the Southern Netherlands in general and Antwerp in particular were characterized by a regulated market for public sales. Following the rationale of the reigning hypothesis this should imply that the arrival of specialized auctions could only occur with a time lag, compared to France and Great Britain. But the empirical evidence contradicts this 158

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idea, as Antwerp witnessed the advent of the modern-style auction from the 1750s onwards, broadly in parallel with other European cities.2 Collections of books, artwork and jewellery were increasingly removed from traditional public estate sales and sold at separate auctions. New salesrooms throughout town provided venues for the development of a different type of auction, one that surpassed the mere economic transaction of earlier times, to become a socio-cultural event that both articulated and shaped the taste for second-hand luxury goods. One major difference was that the Antwerp actors involved in this transformation rarely stepped into the limelight: influential dealerauctioneers elsewhere in Europe, such as James Christie in London or François-Edme Gersaint and Jean Baptiste Lebrun in Paris, always promoted sales under their own names, giving them a prominent place in the advertising discourse.3 Despite the fact that Antwerp experienced a similar birth of the modern-style auction, a large portion of catalogues and advertisements publicizing specialized art and book auctions in the city never mentioned the individual in charge of the sale.4 I seek to explore this anomaly by examining the auctions from the point of view of those who organized them, but set this firmly within an institutional perspective. It appears that the arrival of the modern auction brought with it issues of power and authority which were strongly linked to the local corporate context. Did the institutional framework of public sales, laid out in the late Middle Ages, succumb to the advent of the modern-style auction in the eighteenth century, and, if so, why? To establish the necessary answers, I will analyse in detail the eighteenth-century world of Antwerp public sales. After a short introduction on the local history of auctions, I will examine the fortunes of the sworn criers of the Antwerp corporation of second-hand cloth dealers. These oudekleerkopers had, since the Middle Ages, been in charge of auctions; but during the eighteenth century they seem to have lost control over the high end of the market to a new type of specialized broker or commercial middlemen, to whom I devote attention afterwards. Records of Antwerp decedents help clarify the precise role that both criers and brokers played in dealing with the luxury goods of deceased citizens, and census information allows us to locate these figures socially and economically within the broader Antwerp society. Accounts of lawsuits of the corporation and its criers provide answers to the questions of why, when and to whom the criers had to cede control over luxury auctions in eighteenth-century Antwerp. In the end, this empirical case study will contribute to our understanding of second-hand markets at the verge of modern times. The growing diversity of material culture,

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the changing consumer patterns and shifting attitudes towards expertise after 1750 not only structurally transformed markets for new products; it also reverberated in those for second-hand goods, leading to the development of specialized brokers in luxury objects and their modern-type auctions.

Auctioning in early modern Antwerp The general structure of public sales of consumables in early modern Antwerp was unique in the Southern Netherlands. In cities such as Brussels, Bruges and Ghent the general privilege to hold public sales was leased to the highest bidding citizen for several years. Sometimes these stokhouders or pachters van den publiecken oproep delegated sworn criers and clerks to execute the sales. The leaseholders, criers and clerks were civil officers. In Antwerp, however, the corporation of second-hand cloth dealers had bought the permanent right to organize public sales from the Spanish ruler Philip IV in 1627. Thereafter, only the so-called sworn criers of the corporation held the exclusive right to sell myriad objects by public sales, both of immoveable (real estate, land and so on) and moveable property (household effects, firewood, annuities and so on). These criers, especially in their role as organizers of household sales for their fellow citizens, held an important position in Antwerp society. Indeed, although corporate regulations forbade them from doing so, criers often combined their profession with that of sworn appraiser, thus making them even more unmissable as public servants in matters of inheritance.5 Nobody else was allowed to hold public sales in Antwerp without the written consent of the criers, who vigorously controlled their privilege. A key difference with the criers in most other cities throughout the Southern Netherlands was that the Antwerp criers were primarily corporate, rather than civil, officers. This unbreakable link with the corporation of second-hand cloth dealers would prove crucial to their fate after 1750. In the seventeenth century the Antwerp sworn criers and appraisers were an exclusive faction within the broad corporation of second-hand cloth dealers. Several years of apprenticeship and a significant fee were required to obtain the right to be a crier or appraiser. Their small group was characterized by a high degree of homogeneity and continuity, as becoming a crier was often a family affair and was passed from one generation to the next: several dynasties had two or more registered criers, often father and son.6 These families of criers controlled the public sales within the Antwerp city walls. Their workplace was the Vrijdagmarkt

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Figure 8.1

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A public sale on the Friday market in Antwerp, 20 July 2007

Source: author’s own image.

(Friday market), a square designed for the purpose of public sales every Friday (Figure 8.1). Here the criers ran their daily businesses and organized most of Antwerp’s public sales, which were often in the open air.7 Contrary to what one might expect in interpreting the name of their corporation (oudekleerkopers), the criers not only auctioned old objects. In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, when the city began to experience what would become a century-long economic and demographic recession, the Friday market still thrived as a market for imported novel goods, and new consumables were often mingled with used household effects. The boundaries between old and new products

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were blurred, much to the dislike of rival corporations like the mercers, tailors and Guild of Saint Luke. The success of public sales did not pass unnoticed: the city administration levied tax on all Antwerp auctions of moveable goods, initially in 1664 and again in 1673 when an additional tax for public sales held at the Friday market was instituted. An avalanche of complaints from other corporations, whose privileges were obviously infringed, would eventually lead to a serious blow for the sworn criers in 1682, when the city government filed an ordinance which specifically forbade them from auctioning any new merchandise at the Friday market.8 This resulted in a huge downturn for the public sales in Antwerp, and never again would the revenues from these municipal taxes on public sales reach the peaks of the 1660s and 1670s.9

Liberalizing the market for public sales At the turn of the eighteenth century the corporation of second-hand cloth dealers felt they needed to do something to prevent the imminent fall of the Friday market. The lost legal fights with other corporations in the late seventeenth century, and the following ordinances that resulted in a considerable drop in public sales, forced them to take action to protect their sworn criers. As early as 1698 they took rather modern and liberal measures to address the matter and guarantee the future of public sales. Criers would now be allowed to apply overtly for jobs with the legatees and to offer their service for fees less than the statutory stipulation of 1520. A fixed fee of 6.25 per cent on the total sales returns and a passive attitude on the part of the criers had proved to be a good policy in earlier times of prosperity. But in the current period of recession, radically opening the market and allowing fair competition between the criers seemed like the best solution to the corporation. In theory, this would allow all criers to make a living, not just a lucky few. Even criers with long-lasting sales records, who had previously benefited from their established reputations, now had to compete in a declining market. Looking back at their decision, one can say that the measure of the deans or head of the guild did not yield the expected result. Indeed, during the first decades of the eighteenth century the revenue of the sales on the Friday market and elsewhere stagnated, and the Antwerp fees for public sales dropped to the lowest level in the Southern Netherlands.10 ‘Freeing’ the sworn criers of a fixed fee had forced them to lower their fees considerably to remain competitive, even to the extent that some had begun evading not only city taxes but also the fee due to the corporation.11 In the times of crisis, the additional taxes increasingly

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became a thorn in the criers’ sides. The financial evasion grew so excessive that the corporation filed a request to the city council in 1710 to force the criers to pay their overdue accounts.12 The measure of 1698, besides not stimulating the number of public sales, had not even created a fair division of sales and revenue among the criers: around the middle of the eighteenth century a widow of a sworn crier complained that there still remained structural inequality between the criers and that the severe competition amongst them had resulted in the criers oppressing each other.13 Nonetheless, although the situation seemed to recommend otherwise, the deans refused to revoke the decision of their late seventeenth-century predecessors. In 1741 several criers started a lawsuit against their own corporation: in addition to immediate withdrawal of the measure of 1698, they demanded that the court impose a minimum salary for criers. The deans of the corporation of secondhand cloth dealers claimed that cancellation of the measure would be to the detriment of most criers and would benefit only a few (the plaintiffs, in particular). According to the deans, only those criers who used ‘malicious tricks’ would then be able attract clients, and this would be at the expense of honest criers who followed the rules.14 Nevertheless, and somewhat surprisingly, the central court (Raad van Brabant) ruled in favour of the three criers a year later. The old seventeenth-century system was restored, much to the displeasure of numerous criers and their clientele who had benefited greatly from lower fees.15

Shifting agency The growing disunity amongst the criers echoed within the Antwerp city walls and brought opportunities for the formerly passive clients of the Friday market. The corporate measure of 1698 had weakened the financial position of the crier towards his client; and, paradoxically, revoking the rule contributed further to the criers’ decay: as they were no longer permitted to actively offer their services after 1742, the authority to act had shifted even further from the crier and towards either the broker looking to organize a public sale or the executor of a decedent who handled the inheritance of a deceased citizen.16 An interesting lawsuit of 1752 reveals the evolved procedure: after the successful sale of the household goods, the executor of the mortuary had solicited several criers, hoping that one of them would sell the remaining jewellery for half of the statutory stipulated fee. When several criers, referring to their professional honour and reputations, refused him, the executor requested the city government to allow the sale at only

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half of the city taxes: without hesitation the city agreed, as long as the deans of the second-hand cloth dealers would also give approval. Even the clerks of the Friday market had consented to hold the sale for a lower fee. Although there had apparently been successful requests in the past, the corporation of second-hand cloth dealers nevertheless denied the request at hand, leaving the executor to search (and eventually find) a crier who wanted to do the sale, despite the corporate ban. The widespread willingness of the city, clerks and a crier to take the job for a lower fee is staggering and points to the dramatic situation of public sales at the time, both in terms of number of sales and the profit that could be made.17 In particular it accentuates the enormous agency of executors or brokers and their powerful bargaining position. In his request to the city the executor even threatened the city administration that he could also sell the jewellery via a broker for a much lower fee, in which case neither the city nor the corporation would see any money.18 Public sales were clearly not the only option for selling off secondhand consumables, and rather than being in control of the auctions, sworn criers and the corporation were increasingly perceived as obstacles to be overcome. Expressing this decreased agency of their profession, several sworn criers in the mentioned lawsuit accused their willing comrade of being a mere assistant or ‘mercenary’ to the executor. The rogue crier, however, called his colleagues jealous and stated that, according to him, criers were indeed nothing more than mercenaries who received their recompense from their labour and not their professional honour.19 The downfall of public sales after 1682, the issues with fixed or floating fees and subsequent internal frictions had brought forward a shift in agency away from the sworn criers and to their clients. Indeed, criers had become hirelings and were losing control over the public sales.20

The influx of new criers After 1750, when Antwerp experienced economic and demographic revival, the brokers increasingly took over the public sales, to the disadvantage of the criers. If the corporation thought that the executor in 1752 had made a bold move by shopping for criers and threatening the city government, they were in for a surprise. In 1760 the deans of the second-hand cloth dealers filed a request to the Raad van Brabant in which they asked to impose new rules for becoming a sworn crier. They sought to (re-)enforce a period of two or three years as a secondhand cloth dealer before one could become a crier, and they henceforth expected a security of several thousand guilders from every potential

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crier.21 The reasoning behind their request was what the corporation called ‘the latest harassment’: outsiders, apparently, created as many new criers as there were wealthy decedents, and thus ‘stole’ income from the traditional criers.22 There had been several instances whereby a dealer became a crier only days before an auction (often of jewellery): they needed to pay just 100 guilders to receive the master’s title.23 Money was no problem for these outsiders, as such luxury auctions could yield thousands of guilders.24 The corporation of second-hand cloth dealers seemingly won its case, and received a new ordinance stipulating three years of probation as second-hand cloth dealer and an additional financial security. Nevertheless, this ordinance was not enough to stop a wave of new criers coming into the corporation: the deans were unable to enforce the rules, or perhaps the brokers found unknown ways around the regulation. Newspaper advertisements testify to this sudden growth of the once highly privileged group of sworn criers in the second half of the eighteenth century.25 The limited number of sworn criers in the seventeenth century was replaced by a fivefold increase of criers a century later. This enlargement brought a growing heterogeneity: whereas at the end of the seventeenth century becoming a crier was a family matter, after 1750 new criers flowed in from far and wide (Figure 8.2). An important distinction between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ criers was that for the latter being a crier was often an addition to their other major profession. Some second-hand cloth dealers or clerks of the Friday market had worked their way up, but a substantial number of these new criers consisted of jewellers, book printers or art dealers, who could buy their way into being a crier. Brokers, having earlier tried to gain control over public sales by playing the criers against one another, managed in the 1750s to infiltrate the group of criers and undermine their position from within.

Specialization and market segmentation General evolutions in the material culture and consumption patterns in eighteenth-century Antwerp strongly stimulated the brokers’ control over public sales of luxury consumables. Processes of specialization and market segmentation, driven by changes in material culture, had already influenced the markets for new goods and, in the course of the eighteenth century, would begin to influence the markets for old goods. The changes were occurring at every stage of second-hand selling, which commenced from the death of an Antwerp citizen. In the seventeenth century the executors of decedents had to turn to the sworn

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Figure 8.2 A public sale of household goods in Antwerp, 7 June 1796. Aquarelle by P. A. J. Goetsbloets Source: Royal Library Brussels, Manuscript Department, II, 1492, vol. 7.

appraisers to arrive at a correct and approved value, and such appraisers were sometimes the same people who held the office of crier. They were responsible for appraisal of all household goods, and only on special occasions were external experts called to the scene to assist. For instance, when artists’ estates were about to be auctioned off, the deans of the Guild of Saint Luke were frequently involved due to their knowledge of the artworks for sale.26 Likewise, silversmiths could be summoned to

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weigh and estimate silverware. However, in general it was the sworn appraisers and criers who were responsible for appraisal of estates in seventeenth-century Antwerp. The situation changed in the course of the eighteenth century as the diversified material culture enforced other customs and practices. In 1756 the former burgomaster Jacob Gerard Knijff died, leaving behind an impressive estate. Besides the sworn criers, an army of experts was called to the scene by his executor, each to appraise a specific group of items. A dozen categories of luxury objects were separated from the rest of the estate, and estimated as such: silver, porcelain, weaponry, jewellery, music, watches, sculptures, paintings, prints and drawings, carriages and horses, books, . . . .27 The sworn criers were only allowed to value general household goods, some rarities and several products from East India. The exceptional wealth of the estate may blur our vision, but numerous post-mortem records confirm the general idea: unlike in the seventeenth century, when criers appraised virtually every household good, now they were only allowed to value the leftovers, after the estate had been stripped of valuable objects like books, art, jewellery and silver. Just as the criers had to leave control over the luxury sales in favour of brokers and executors, they also had to give up their right as privileged appraisers, again to the benefit of external experts. Some of these experts were clearly linked to corporative milieu (for example, silversmiths), but a considerable number seem to have been chosen for practical experience and knowledge that was coupled with a strong commercial background: art and book dealers, porcelain sellers or jewellers. As the end of the Ancien Régime drew nearer, dealing in luxury goods was more highly esteemed than producing them, at least in terms of expertise.28 This process of segmentation continued at the level of distribution of second-hand goods after appraisal. In the course of the eighteenth century luxury products such as art, books and jewellery were increasingly sold at separate sales, apart from the rest of the estate. As described above, these luxury sales were increasingly moved beyond the reach of the criers. This occurred not only in terms of control and regulation, but also physically: the brokers, executors and new criers moved these luxury sales away from the Friday market, which had been the traditional power centre of the second-hand cloth dealers, and to the new salesrooms across town.29 Important vehicles of communicating knowledge were printed auction catalogues, which became ever more popular after 1750.30 Written by experts rather than by criers, these were a means to convey information about the objects for sale and to communicate

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trust to the customers. Besides basic descriptions of the products, they offered readers direct indicators of value such as an item’s provenance, or more subtle indicators hidden in the discourse.31 The experts and brokers distributed the catalogues among their professional networks, both officially by offering them for sale through advertising and unofficially by delivering them to personal contacts. The printed auction catalogue can thus be considered a crucial element in further liberating high-end sales from corporative powers. Coupled with a changing attitude to professional expertise, the power of the criers/appraisers was undermined by the increasingly apparent limits to their knowledge of a material culture that was becoming ever more diverse as the eighteenth century progressed. Accounts of a lawsuit in the 1730s concerning correct attribution of artwork make the sworn criers’ limited knowledge painfully clear: crier Guillielmus Willemsens regularly sold paintings in his shop and at the Friday market, yet he confessed that he never informed customers about the size of paintings and seldom about the topic, and only if clients explicitly asked. Furthermore, he could not guarantee authenticity, as he had no training in recognizing artwork: lack of knowledge did not permit him to do this.32 Some decades later the corporation refused admittance to a jeweller, explicitly referring to the fact that his foreknowledge would ensure that no other crier would ever hold a sale of jewellery again.33 In the seventeenth century criers had dealt with all sorts of second-hand luxury goods on the Friday market, and few customers questioned their ability to do so. However, the specialization of material culture in the course of the eighteenth century called for specialized experts, and the all-round sworn criers were no longer considered knowledgeable enough to do so.

The birth of a modern profession The specialization of high-end public sales was of course in favour of the executors and knowledgeable brokers. It allowed them to ease these sales further from the criers and deplete their profession to a greater extent. In the first half of the eighteenth century the agency to act had already shifted from the crier to these outsiders, such that the former became mere assistants or mercenaries. In the latter decades of the eighteenth century these brokers and executors continued to erode the profession of the sworn crier, and eventually just hired them to hammer down the lots. But the criers never completely left the auction scene: although their role in public sales had become much more limited than before, the criers still mediated trust to the customer and, most importantly,

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legal certainty. The newly created profession of director of sale was not officially recognized, and buying directly from him offered no guarantees to the client. In the high-end public sales many responsibilities that had previously belonged to the criers were assumed by the director of sale. The concept seems to have been imported from jewellery sales, and was later implemented in book and art auctions.34 From 1783 onwards numerous new sworn criers, in their advertising for forthcoming book sales, mentioned that the auction was under their ‘supervision’, thus differentiating between their corporate role as criers and their function as directors of sale.35 This points to shifting roles and the construction of new hierarchies. A further indication of the arrival of this new profession was the attempt by brokers to create additional revenue at public sales, probably as some sort of fee for their efforts. A request in 1776 from the corporation of second-hand cloth dealers shows that the organizers of some valuable public sales in Antwerp had decided to impose an additional charge on the selling price, a sort of buyer’s premium.36 This new profession of director of sale thus comes close to what we consider today an auctioneer or auction house: appraising, describing, advertising and selling. The role of the corporative sworn criers was reduced to a mere administrative function. Professional dealers, experts and brokers had taken command of the high-end public sales, and changed the concept of auctioning with the introduction of specialized salesrooms and printed catalogues. The modern auction had seen the light of day.

Conclusion Just as commercial middlemen became ever more important in mediating taste in the markets for new consumables throughout the eighteenth century, the growing diversity of the material culture ensured that customers of Antwerp auctions increasingly needed assistance from experts who could discern original paintings from copies, fake jewellery from real diamonds and point them to valuable old books. The traditional sworn criers, who had performed such tasks in the past, were no longer (considered) knowledgeable enough to do so, and increasingly lost power over public sales. Although brokers and specialized dealers had gained the upper hand by hollowing out the institutional framework of public auctions, they had not abolished it. In legal terms the guild of the second-hand cloth dealers still held its privilege to organize public sales, and the brokers risked being fined or sued if they promoted sales under their own name in advertisements or catalogues. The longlasting monopoly of corporate sworn criers – in European perspective

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rather unique – ensured that brokers could only take over control of the auctions gradually and invisibly. The broad functions of sworn criers in matters of public sales, probably built up in their seventeenth-century heyday, had to be colonized with care. This helps to explain differences from dealer-auctioneers in France and England, whose sales could flourish in a deregulated market. But the Antwerp case proves that auctions could also develop in a more regulated environment, questioning the axiomatic association of modernity with free markets. The inertia of the Antwerp institutional framework in adapting to changing market needs led to brokers pulling the strings from behind the curtain, rather than front stage. They stepped into the limelight only after the French invaders had overthrown the Ancien Régime structures: auction catalogues from the period 1795–1820 refer to the names of organizers, all of them professional art dealers, without a single reference to the involvement of former sworn criers.37 After having controlled Antwerp public sales for so long, it now seemed as if they had never existed at all. Without a doubt, the rise of the modern auction had caused the decline of the traditional sworn crier and the birth of the new director of sale.

Notes ∗ I would like to thank Ilja Van Damme and Jon Stobart for their comments on earlier versions of this text. This article is an adaptation of chapter 3 of my doctoral dissertation The cultural construction of value. Art auctions in Antwerp and Brussels (1700–1794), which I wrote as a Research Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) at the University of Antwerp (2006–2010).

1. Although this list is not exhaustive, it offers an overview of some recent literature on specialized auctions in Paris and London, often stressing processes of discontinuity rather than continuity. A. McClellan (1996) ‘Watteau’s dealer: Gersaint and the marketing of art’, Art Bulletin, 78(3), pp. 439–453; C. Guichard (2009) ‘From social event to urban spectacle: auctions in late eighteenth-century Paris’, in B. Blondé, N. Coquery, J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds) Fashioning Old and New. Changing Consumer Preferences in Europe (17th–19th Centuries) (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 203–216; N. De Marchi and H. Van Miegroet (2006) ‘Transforming the Paris art market, 1718–1750’, in N. De Marchi and H. Van Miegroet (eds) Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe and the New World, 1450–1750 (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 391–402; H. Van Miegroet (2007) ‘The market for Netherlandish paintings in Paris, 1750– 1815’, in J. Warren and A. Turpin (eds) Auctions, Agents and Dealers. The Mechanisms of the Art Market 1660–1830 (Oxford: Archeopress), pp. 41–51; N. De Marchi and H. Van Miegroet (2009) ‘The rise of the dealer-auctioneer in Paris: information and transparency in a market for Netherlandish paintings’, in A. Tummers and K. Jonckheere (eds) Art Market and Connoisseurship.

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

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A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), pp. 149–174; C. Wall (1997) ‘The English auction: narratives of dismantlings’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31(1), pp. 1–25; B. Cowan (1998) ‘Arenas of connoisseurship: auctioning art in later Stuart England’, in M. North and D. Ormrod (eds) Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 153–164; B. Cowan (2006) ‘Art and connoisseurship in the auction market of later seventeenth-century London’, in De Marchi and Van Miegroet (eds) Mapping Markets for Paintings, pp. 263–282. D. Lyna (2009) ‘Changing geographies and the rise of the modern auction. Transformations on the second-hand markets of eighteenthcentury Antwerp’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Fashioning Old and New, pp. 169–184. McClellan, ‘Watteau’s dealer’; Guichard, ‘From social event’; Wall, ‘The English auction’. See also Chapter 9 in this volume by Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart. Between 1750 and 1794 no less than 453 book sales with catalogues were advertised in the local Gazette van Antwerpen: 166 (37 per cent) did not mention an organizer. Of the 58 Antwerp art auctions between 1741 and 1792 whose catalogues remain, 50 (86 per cent) do not indicate the person in charge on the title page of the printed catalogue. The newspaper advertisements for the same sales are more revealing: only 25 (43 per cent) lack this information. A few other institutions held the right to organize public sales in specific circumstances, but their overall influence on the second-hand markets was limited compared to the oudekleerkopers. Craftsmen had the right to auction off their merchandise, but only if they had produced it themselves. I. Van Damme (2007) Verleiden en verkopen. Antwerpse kleinhandelaars en hun klanten in tijden van crisis (ca. 1648–ca. 1748) (Amsterdam: Aksant), p. 66. According to newspaper advertisements from the first half of the eighteenth century these were Joannes and Michiel Schalck, Judocus and Franciscus van As, Giellielmus and Petrus Willemsens. A separate document listing public sales in Antwerp between 1721 and 1734 mentions the clan Vanderhaegen, consisting of Gijsbert, Gasper, Joannes and possibly related Mendeken V(and)erhaegen. I would like to thank Ilja Van Damme for bringing this document to my attention. Occasionally auctions were held in situ (in the houses of the deceased or bankrupted), especially if the estate was too large or too costly to move to the Friday market. Exceptions were made for products such as paintings, diamonds, jewellery, gold and silver, probably because visual differences between old and new were difficult to establish with these products. See the Chapter 1 by Martin Wottle and Chapter 4 by IljaVan Damme in this volume. In one year the revenues of the municipal tax dropped from 6232 guilders to 3216. For a thorough description of these ordinances and their consequences, see Van Damme, Verleiden en verkopen, pp. 242–247. According to three criers who would sue their own corporation in 1741. Cf. below.

172 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods 11. In the early seventeenth century the second-hand cloth dealers had temporarily lost their privilege to sell second-hand goods. They were eventually able to buy it back, but this operation left a huge financial burden of 50,000 guilders. To cover these costs, criers had to hand over part of the sales’ revenue, even in the eighteenth century. This tax was called the ‘prince-geld’, referring to the debt to the ‘prince’ of Spain Philip IV in 1627. Van Damme, Verleiden en verkopen, pp. 319–320. 12. City Archive Antwerp (CAA), Processen 7.560, Lawsuit of the Corporation of the second-hand cloth dealers against widow Van Lemens. Request from the corporation to the city of Antwerp, 30 September 1710. 13. CAA, Processen 7.560, Lawsuit of the corporation of the second-hand cloth dealers against widow Van Lemens, Redenen voor impertinentie, 9 October 1750. 14. Van Damme, Verleiden en verkopen, pp. 168–169. 15. CAA, Guilds and corporations (GC), 4277, Vonnis en reglement nopende het schatten en roepen van meubels, 14 November 1742. 16. This executor was either a notary or a friend/relative appointed by the deceased in his final will. When the deceased left minors, the city government appointed a so-called momboir to handle matters. 17. The Antwerp population would drop from some 70,000 inhabitants in 1709 to 45,000 in 1755, which naturally meant fewer deceased citizens and thus fewer public sales. B. Blondé (1999) Een economie met verschillende snelheden: ongelijkheden in de opbouw en de ontwikkeling van het Brabantse stedelijke netwerk (ca. 1750–ca. 1790) (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën), p. 255. 18. The broker would only cost a half to 1 per cent, far less than the statuary stipulated 6.25 per cent of the corporation. CAA, Processen S929, Lawsuit of the Bailiff against Franciscus Muskyn, rekwest Walterius Janssens, 29 December 1750. 19. CAA, Processen S929, Lawsuit of the Bailiff against Franciscus Muskyn, Antwoorde van Muskyn, 4 May 1751. His lawyer even used a swollen Latin phrase to define the profession of the sworn criers: quia non honorium, sed mercedem laboris consequuntur. CAA, Processen S929, Lawsuit of the bailiff against Franciscus Muskyn, Responsiven van Muskyn, 9 September 1751. With thanks to Nicolas Mazeure for helping with the Latin translation. 20. A further indication of the decreasing control of the criers was that executors and brokers began taking over some of their tasks: from about 1750 onwards they would settle the accounts with the clerk of the corporation, a job normally done by the crier. Records of decedents indicate that although the corporation heavily opposed such a practice in the lawsuit of 1752, it had become common practice to settle accounts directly with the clerks in the late eighteenth century. One example is the De Coninck mortuary of 1761, where the executor paid the clerk himself, bypassing the crier. CAA, Notary Records of Kramp, N 2343 no. 40, Records of Louis Fr. De Coninck, 1761. 21. Apprenticeship was an important part in the regulation of second-hand cloth dealers, and was observed carefully in the seventeenth century. Around the middle of the eighteenth century this rule had apparently lost its power to such an extent that some criers wanted to reinstall it. 22. CAA, GC, 4277, Request aan Raad van Brabant, 22 April 1760. 23. Not only the corporation of second-hand cloth dealers but also rival corporations and guilds complained about this low threshold for becoming a

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24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

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crier. Already in 1753 the Guild of Saint Luke had protested against it: they said, somewhat dramatically, that nobody who wanted to sell books would bother to apprentice in their guild anymore, since becoming a crier was far easier and would also allow them to trade in books. Antwerp Academy, Archive of the Guild of Saint Luke, Lawsuit of the Guild of Saint Luke against the corporation of second-hand cloth dealers, Contrarie redenen, 24 December 1756. For example, some of the specialized public sales following the death of citizen Petrus Snijers in 1758 yielded several thousand guilders: the artwork (14,092 guilders), silverware (1800 guilders), diamonds (14,922 guilders) and furniture (3406 guilders). The painting collection of Louis de Coninck was estimated at 9109 guilders in 1759, while even the remainders of the De Wael estate fetched nearly a thousand guilders in 1765. CAA, Notary Records of Masquar, N 2336 no. 35, Records of Petrus Joannes Snyers, August 1757; Notary Records of Kramp, N 2343 no. 40, Records of Louis Fr. De Coninck, 1761; Notary Records of Le Puisnier, N 2395, Records of Norbert Louis de Wael, 1765. In 1750 some 13 criers used the advertising section of the local Gazette van Antwerpen to promote their public sales, a number that would double to 25 in 1770 and triple to 43 two decades later. Although other factors influenced the growing willingness to advertise in a newspaper, these numbers nevertheless reflect a real rise in criers. For a contextual study of newspaper advertisements in eighteenth-century Antwerp, see D. Lyna and I. Van Damme (2009) ‘A strategy of seduction? The role of commercial advertisements in the eighteenth-century retailing business of Antwerp’, Business History, 51(1), pp. 100–120. The published documents on seventeenth-century art collections in Antwerp by Erik Duverger reveal several such cases. For example, when the wife of the late painter Cornelis Schut died in February 1638, several people from the Guild of Saint Luke were called upon to appraise the artwork in the estate. E. Duverger (1989) Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën), vol. IV, p. 146. CAA, Notary Records of Schepmans, N 2957, Records of priest Jacobus Gerardus Knyff, July 1756. The general shift from production to distribution and the consequences for the craft guilds is analysed in B. De Munck (2008) ‘Skills, trust, and changing consumer preferences: the decline of Antwerp’s craft guilds from the perspective of the product market, c. 1500–c.1800’, International Review of Social History, 53, pp. 197–233. For a thorough analysis of this evolution, see Lyna, ‘Changing geographies’. For a general introduction into the Antwerp world of art auctions and the growing importance of catalogues, see D. Lyna and F. Vermeylen (2009) ‘Rubens for sale. Art auctions in Antwerp during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in F. Vermeylen, H. Vlieghe and D. Lyna (eds) Art Auctions and Dealers. The Dissemination of Netherlandish Art during the Ancien Régime (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 139–153. For a case study on art auctions, see D. Lyna (forthcoming) ‘Der Wert von Anzeigen – Der anzeigen von Wert. Uncertainty and brand names in the art auction market of eighteenth-century Antwerp’, in A. Tacke (eds.) Kunstwerke

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32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

und Luxusgegenstände vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart: Produktion – Handel – Formen der Aneignung (Irsee: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft). See also Chapter 9 in this volume by MacArthur and Stobart. For a detailed account of this lawsuit, see F. Vermeylen and K. Vander Stighelen (2006) ‘The Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke and the marketing of paintings, 1400–1700’, in De Marchi and Van Miegroet (eds.) Mapping Markets for Paintings, pp. 202–204. CAA, Processen G 7476, Lawsuit of the corporation of the second-hand cloth dealers against Henricus Laurentius Geerts, 28 April 1760. Most of the early references to these directors of sale were found in relationship to public sales of jewellery: in 1758 the jewellery from the Snyers estate was sold in a separate auction, for which a broker was paid to be directeur van den koopdagh or director of sale. Notary Records of Masquar, N 2336 no. 35, Records of Petrus Joannes Snyers, 1758. For numerous examples of book auctions, see P. Delsaerdt and D. Vanysacker (1997) ‘Repertorium van Antwerpse boekenveilingen 1750–1800’, De Gulden Passer. Jaarboek van de Vereeniging der Antwerpsche Bibliophielen, vol. 75, pp. 5–119. More precisely, they asked the customers to pay one or two additional stivers per guilder. Since the corporate ruling did not mention anything about the recording of this buyer’s premium by the clerks, the unidentified auctioneers managed to escape taxes on this sum and thus created additional revenue for themselves. CAA, GC, 4277, Corte reflexie offte bijvoeghsel tot de gepresenteerde requeste in den maendaeghscne raede van wegens die dekens van het OKK, 1776. A quick scan of art auction catalogues after 1795 offers us three examples to support this hypothesis: the Francois Emmanuel van Ertborn-sale, under direction of N. F. Beeckmans (18 August 1807), the Zanna/Peytier de Merchtem-sale, supervised by J. F. J. Mertens en H. J. Tielemans (21 June 1808) and the Charles De Man-sale by N. F. Beeckmans en P. Van Regemorter (9 September 1816). During the years 1814–30 the dealerauctioneers Beeckmans and Van Regemorter seem to have controlled the Antwerp resale market for paintings (catalogues to be found in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp).

9 Going for a Song? Country House Sales in Georgian England Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart

So, you would not go to the auction? Well, you had a prodigious loss, I assure you. . . . I never saw such a collection of sweet things in my life.1

Introduction The nascent consumerism of Georgian England was built on growing economic prosperity, the emergence of new social groups and the availability of an expanding range of goods and services. In this context, much has been made of the role of novel goods in shaping consumption imperatives and practices, and in feeding the ambiguities that arose from the rise of new social groups.2 However, there is a growing recognition that a considerable portion of middling sort consumption was of used goods, often acquired at auctions.3 These public sales were thus important mechanisms for the redistribution of goods: spreading the material markers of status down the social scale and further blurring social distinctions. As events, they facilitated social and cultural interchange, bringing new people and new money into contact with elites and more established cultures of consumption. One particular form of auction that became increasingly common through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involved the sale of goods from country houses. Whilst the ability to sell landed estates was limited by the tradition of strict settlement, money could be raised by selling the moveable contents of a house. Auctions arose because of family misfortune or neglect; failure to produce an heir, crippling financial difficulties or the abandonment of a property in favour of another family seat. More positively, they could be used by heirs to monetarize unwanted belongings. Whatever the motive, they created a social and 175

176 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

geographical redistribution of high quality goods as buyers flocked to these great houses – motivated by the desire to pick up a bargain, to gain kudos by acquiring furniture once owned by the great and good, or simply to be part of the crowd gazing at the trappings of the wealthy, now laid bare for public inspection.4 Up-market auctions were an established part of fashionable London life by the 1770s, but these were a distinct category. Most country sales generally depended for their success upon consumers (who were often not part of fashionable society) being accustomed to buying used as well as new household goods at a wide variety of venues, including the showrooms of manufacturers and craftsmen, brokers’ shops and market stalls.5 They were thus part of a much broader second-hand trade. Indeed, even a cursory examination reveals that advertisements for auctions of household goods were a staple of provincial newspapers by the mid eighteenth century. They appeared alongside those for freehold or leasehold property; shops, assemblies or horse races; patent medicines or books, and items lost or stolen – a context which cemented their place in contemporary cultures of consumption. Yet there was another context: that of the country house itself. Clearing a great house of some or all of its contents might be cathartic: the act of an heir stamping their own taste and identity on the property or displaying their (new-found) wealth to neighbours. However, it could also form part of a narrative of family deaths and inconsistent occupancy, and the gradual decline of the physical, domestic and social composition of the country house that could ensue from the dispersal of its material culture. In this chapter we want to explore both the nature of country house sales as a mechanism for selling a wide range of second-hand goods, and the ways in which these sales impacted upon the spaces and fortunes of the country house. The former is achieved through analysis of a remarkable collection comprising 81 catalogues for a range of house sales occurring in Northamptonshire over the period 1761–1849.6 It is impossible to know how representative these catalogued sales are of the much larger number of auctions taking place during this period. They were undoubtedly drawn from the higher end of the market and thus provide a useful window onto the spread and organization of house sales, defined broadly to include both the mansions of the aristocracy and the more modest dwellings of wealthy tradesmen, professionals and clergymen. Here we examine the type, arrangement and description of the goods being sold in all sales; focusing in particular on the language used on the title pages of the catalogues. We then focus more particularly on country houses and highlight the ways in which they were transformed into consumer spaces, and how the accoutrements once

Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart 177

used and displayed in an entirely different context were now presented as, or reverted back to, consumer goods.7 To assess the impact of the sales, we focus on one particular house: Kirby Hall. This is done, not so much because Kirby is seen as representative of all country houses (indeed, it would be near impossible to identify such a property), but rather because it experienced three sales in fairly rapid succession, in 1772, 1824 and 1831. The catalogues from these sales reveal much about the changing reasons for and organization of country house sales. They also demonstrate how such sales could both mark and contribute to the decline of a country house. In the case of Kirby Hall, the trajectory was sharply downward: from being one of the grandest houses of sixteenth-century England (owned by Elizabeth I’s Lord Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton) it was a ruined shell by the late nineteenth century, home to ‘vagrants and peddlers’ who made fires from the rotting wood.8

Goods and sellers Our sample of catalogues reveals that house sales were widespread in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Northamptonshire. They took place across the county: in towns and villages as well as at country houses (Table 9.1). Whilst the social character of urban auctions is difficult to determine precisely, they were characterized more by tradesmen Table 9.1 Location and nature of house sales in Northamptonshire, 1761–1849 1761–1800 (n = 23)

1801–1849 (n = 58)

Total (n = 81)

N

%

N

%

N

%

Town

9

39.1

21

36.2

30

37.0

Gentry Professionals Tradesmen Others/unknown

0 3 2 4

0.0 13.0 8.7 17.4

2 5 4 10

3.4 8.6 6.9 17.2

2 8 4 16

2.5 9.9 4.9 19.8

Village

8

34.8

23

39.7

31

38.3

Gentry 1 Professionals 5 Others/unknown 2

4.3 21.7 8.7

3 16 4

5.2 27.6 6.9

4 21 6

4.9 25.9 7.4

Country House

6

26.1

14

24.1

20

24.7

Gentry

6

26.1

14

24.1

20

24.7

Source: Sales catalogues at the Northamptonshire Central Library.

178 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

and professionals than the gentry. In villages, the clergy formed by far the largest body of men whose goods were auctioned; whilst country house sales, of course, comprised only the gentry and aristocracy. Overall, the catalogues were dominated by the upper reaches of local and county society: gentry and professionals accounting for nearly twothirds of those whose goods were being sold. This reflects the social character of (rural) Northamptonshire, but also the fact that it was these groups which owned better quality goods – worth selling at auction and advertising via a catalogue. The frequency and wide geographical spread of these sales underlines their importance in the redistribution of goods via the second-hand market, and in the cultures of consumption and household economies of provincial England.9 Most auctions represented the complete clearance of houses, and comprised a wide range of domestic and personal possessions. The mainstay was furniture and household goods: anything from beds to birdcages, with little indication that particular commodities were favoured or shunned. Over half the catalogues also included significant numbers of books; about one-third listed paintings and/or silver plate, and a minority contained carriages, musical instruments, scientific equipment or even stuffed animals (Figure 9.1). The precise mix varied between social groups. Although the gentry and nobility were most likely to include luxury items such as paintings, the traditional markers of gentility – mahogany, silver, porcelain and silk10 – were also regular features in catalogues of the middling sorts. It was the quality rather than the type of goods that made sales at country houses stand out. At the first sale at Kirby Hall, for example, there were paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Ruysdael and Brughel; tapestries, gilt leather wall hangings and the ‘India paper hangings of the bow’; and ‘A beautiful small oblong tureen, cover and dish, of the Chelsea porcelain’. But there were also everyday items, including two chicken coops and a bottle crate in the chicken house, a variety of wainscot (oak) furniture, and various pieces of blue and white earthenware.11 Thus, a broad swathe of society could find goods suiting its taste and pocket. As well as detailing a world of goods, the sales catalogues were also assiduous in giving the reasons why the goods were being sold off. Unsurprisingly, most sales took place because of the death of the householder. Only ten offered a different rationale: a change of residence, bankruptcy or, more enigmatically, ‘by order’ of the owner.12 This careful noting of the underlying circumstances has two important implications. The first is that household goods were seen as retaining economic value as well as holding utilitarian, sentimental or hedonistic attractions. They

179

Figure 9.1 Frontispiece of the catalogue for a sale of goods belonging to W. B. Fairchilds, 22 November 1842 Source: Northamptonshire Central Library, Sales Catalogues.

180 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

could be sold to pay debts, provide cash legacies or generate capital for investment elsewhere. Most famously, the first Fonthill sale in 1801 was intended to raise money for the building of the gothic abbey just two miles away; whilst George Finch-Hatton’s move to sell off the contents of Kirby Hall might be seen as part of his broader plan to rebuild Eastwell Park, by then the family’s principal house.13 Clearly, any shift away from goods as stores of wealth to symbols of status or discernment was relative. The continued importance of goods as a realizable form of wealth was true for landowners selling their silver plate, paintings and mahogany furniture as well as the urban poor who visited the pawnbroker with an old watch or greatcoat. The second implication is that bringing second-hand goods onto the market in this way required some justification. The auctioneers who produced the catalogues clearly felt the need to account for why Sir Thomas Cave was selling a large collection of china and glassware, or why Lord Hatton’s paintings were available to the highest bidder.14 In explaining that these auctions arose, for example, from a family death or a change of address, they were seeking to legitimize their sales: these were the genuine goods of respectable householders. Auctioneers were key to the nature and operation of house sales. In the provinces, many had their background in the furniture trade or as appraisers, but were cementing their position as respectable professionals by the early nineteenth century. Together with their wide distribution,15 this made them the obvious choice for the middling sorts when it came to selling off household contents; auctioneers from Northamptonshire or the neighbouring counties being used in all but eight of the sample sales. But the gentry and nobility often looked to London. William Beckford employed Harry Phillips to organize the 1801 sale at Fonthill.16 In Northamptonshire, Sir Thomas Cave, Lord Douglass and a number of esquires all employed London auctioneers, who duly advertised both in the provincial and metropolitan press. Langford and Son, who arranged the first sale at Kirby Hall, placed near identical notices in the Northampton Mercury and the Daily Advertiser, announcing the sale of ‘The Furniture and Exoticks, and other Effects of Kirby Hall’. Their catalogue was available from inns in local towns and at the auctioneer’s London offices.17 Unsurprisingly, the auctioneer’s name was always prominent on the catalogue, increasingly being set in the largest or boldest type (see Figure 9.1 and Figure 9.2). However, it was usually accompanied by the name (and often the status) of the person whose belongings were being auctioned. This reinforced the authenticity of the goods and signalled their quality, thus appealing to the desire on the part of discerning

Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart 181

Figure 9.2 Frontispiece of the catalogue for a sale of goods belonging to Rev. Charles Burton Phillipson, 21 April 1800 Source: Northamptonshire Central Library, Sales Catalogues.

consumers to secure a bargain.18 This ‘clever’ consumption underpinned many purchases at auctions; consumers acquiring useful household goods at low prices.19 Assuring the public of the provenance and quality of the goods was thus paramount. Whilst the owner remained

182 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

anonymous, one catalogue reassured buyers that this was the ‘Genuine and Elegant Household Furniture of a Gentleman’. Another underlined the quality of the goods by noting that ‘the Furniture is of the very best description, principally supplied by Messers Gillows’.20 Naming the seller also played on the desire to ‘capture difference’. If the individual had local or national renown, there was kudos to be gained in buying at the auction. This worked in at least two ways. First, auctions represented an opportunity to acquire special pieces or to bask in the reflected glory of owning a painting, bed or carriage that once belonged to a member of the aristocracy. At Fonthill, the crowds were drawn by the opportunity to buy furniture designed by Soane and Wyatt, and paintings by old masters, as well as by the celebrity of William Beckford. Much the same was true – at a smaller scale – with the Northamptonshire sales at Kirby Hall, Brixworth Hall, Stanwick, and Stamford Baron. These were the best places to capture value and distinction by buying a ‘handsome mahogany billiard table’, ‘a pair of elegant treble-light girandoles’ or a Sevre dessert service that had once belonged to a baronet.21 As Stewart argues, this fits with a wider eighteenth-century desire for ‘authentic experience’ and ‘the search for the authentic object’ which conferred human interest.22 Such motivations were apparent at Fonthill, where the buyers included a theatre proprietor who later advertised a production of Othello, noting that ‘Desdemona would be exhibited on the very sumptuous state bed, which was sold at M Beckford’s sale’.23 Most people incorporated acquisitions into their domestic décor, adding lustre to rooms, enjoying a ‘share in another’s “genuine” world’ or, in theory at least, recreating ‘whole’ interiors for themselves.24 A previous owner of high status could add value to the most mundane items, a point noted by Walpole of a sale at Holland House: ‘I hear the most common furniture has sold as dear as relics.’25 Second, because the sales themselves almost invariably took place at the premises of the current owner, they gave people the opportunity to gaze on the belongings of the wealthy and perhaps take on some of the splendour of the surroundings – a point to which we return later.26

Selling goods: a language of persuasion? Viewing and engaging with the goods in situ meant that catalogue descriptions of individual lots were largely concerned with identifying, and promoting interest in, the specific items for sale. The catalogues operated as an advertisement for the auction as an event and for the

Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart 183

goods as objects of desire; but they were also a convenient guide to locating individual lots spatially, within the house, and temporally, in the sequence of the auction itself. The ways in which goods were described thus mixed persuasion with practicality, and there was a fine line to be trod between promotion and puffery. As one catalogue acidly observed: ‘Bombast Puffing of Pictures, as well as of other Articles, is always ridiculous; as not furnishing any just or clear Ideas by which the unskilled may form any judgment of their Merits, but at the same time never fails to excite the Laughter and Contempt of the Connisseur [sic]’.27 Sometimes auctioneers were very restrained. In their catalogue for Kirby Hall, Langford and Son confined themselves to simple descriptions of each item; only occasionally asserting that particular pieces were ‘very elegant’ or ‘beautiful’. Other auctioneers waxed lyrical. Skinner and Dyke’s catalogue for the sale at Rugby Assembly Rooms included: ‘an elegant full-sized four-post bed with . . . mahogany feet, the furniture a beautiful striped and flowered chints pattern cotton lined through with fine calico and fringed, made up in the immediate taste, and ornamented with a neat sweep japanned cornice’.28 Despite such variations, there was remarkable consistency in the adjectives deployed by auctioneers in their catalogues. The use of language is very instructive, both in terms of the messages projected about second-hand goods and the ways in which prospective buyers might see themselves and their putative purchases. Like newspaper advertisements, the title pages of sales catalogues sought to attract trade by creating a ‘positive impression on the minds of the consuming public’, but they also helped to shape the broader parameters of consumption by communicating the norms and ideals of domestic material culture.29 It is significant, therefore, that there were no references on title pages to goods being old, worn or cheap. Indeed, such adjectives were rare even in the detailed descriptions contained within catalogues. That for the 1772 sale at Kirby Hall starts with goods in the Store Room, including ‘an old trunk’, ‘an old viol de gambo’, ‘a parcel of old bed furniture’, ‘an old door’ and ‘6 old tables’.30 But these were clearly items long removed from other rooms and put here for storage. Very rarely are goods described in this way elsewhere in the catalogue, and where they are, for example, an ‘Old turkey carpet’ and ‘Two fine old green bottles and 2 ditto of the crackled china’, the emphasis seems not to be on the potential cheapness of the goods but rather their patina or antique value (see below).31 As with other sales, importance was attached to utility, with goods being described as ‘useful’ or ‘valuable’ (Table 9.2). The latter underlines the continued role of goods as stores of economic wealth,

184 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods Table 9.2 Descriptors appearing on the title pages of Northamptonshire sales catalogues, 1761–1849

Useful Valuable Elegant/neat Fashionable Genteel Modern Antique

1761–1800

1801–1820

1821–1849

N

%

N

%

N

%

4 1 6 1 8 0 0 20

20.0 5.0 30.0 5.0 40.0 0.0 0.0

5 5 7 0 11 7 0 35

14.3 14.3 20.0 0.0 31.4 20.0 0.0

1 11 11 1 12 14 5 50

2.0 22.0 22.0 2.0 24.0 28.0 10.0

Total N 10 17 24 2 31 21 5 105

% 9.5 16.2 22.9 1.9 29.3 20.0 4.8

Note: The title pages of catalogues could contain more than one descriptor, hence the total number of descriptors (105) is greater than the number of catalogues (81). Source: Sales catalogues at the Northamptonshire Central Library.

whilst the former links closely with Gregson and Crewe’s notion that the often very practical purchases made by the middling sorts when buying second-hand could also be a means of capturing value. It also reminds us of the importance of what Vickery terms ‘prudent economy’ in the domestic arrangements of the gentry and middling sorts.32 These descriptors were generally paired with others that spoke of taste, fashion and discernment – also important considerations for the self image of those buying and selling at auctions. ‘Elegant’ and ‘neat’ were terms that appeared in nearly a quarter of the catalogues; far more often than did ideas of fashionability. At one level this is unsurprising, as it would be difficult for auctioneers to claim that second-hand goods were the height of fashion. However, it also played to a polite culture of consumption which was distinguished from both the vulgar and the ultra-fashionable. When linked to the solid mahogany furniture that predominated in these sales, neatness and elegance ‘embodied the social distinctions of provincial gentility’.33 It is therefore significant that the most common descriptor was ‘genteel’, since it was gentility that marked out the occupants of country houses and, more arguably, the substantial town and village properties that were the sites of these sales. Describing goods in such terms echoed the status of their previous owners and offered the chance for this to rub off onto those who might attend the auction and purchase lots. And yet these socio-cultural markers were far from being fixed. ‘Genteel’ declined both in its appearance in the catalogues and as a

Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart 185

normative and aspirational category in cultures of consumption.34 It was replaced in the catalogues by notions of modernity, which grew to pre-eminence in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In describing goods as ‘modern’, auctioneers were trying to reassure consumers that second-hand did not necessarily mean outmoded. But it was more than simply a sales pitch: it also placed the goods and their prospective buyers within a culture of consumption that emphasized change and progress. This challenges the contra-distinction between modernity and second-hand: goods were presented as both, allowing consumers to buy second-hand yet remain ‘modern’. Moreover, the sales themselves, whilst being a traditional form of exchange, formed an integral part of modern consumerism. This was particularly true in the way that they fed off and into the growing interest in antiques. No eighteenth-century catalogue included ‘antique’ on its title page: at this time antiques were the preserve of a select group of collectors who were primarily concerned with assembling sets of objects rather than furnishing their homes with deliberately chosen old pieces.35 However, ‘antique’ was used in the descriptions of individual items of china in the catalogues of Kirby Hall and Stanford Hall, amongst others. This association is quite striking: china is often seen as one of the touchstones of a new material culture, and yet it was the first to be described and valued as ‘antique’.36 Not until the 1840s did any catalogue specifically identify furniture as antique. Although this was some time after the appearance of antique dealers in London, it pre-dated by several decades the emergence of specialist dealers in smaller provincial towns. As such, house sales formed an important venue through which this emerging form of consumption could be serviced. In doing so, they opened up the country house to a very different kind of public scrutiny and rendered it a commercial space.

Organization: the country house as showroom There were very practical reasons for holding sales at owners’ premises. It saved on removal and storage costs, and few auctioneers had rooms large enough to accommodate the belongings of a substantial town house or country mansion.37 The vendor’s house was therefore opened up to the public during the sales and in the preceding days to allow viewing of the various lots. In total, this could amount to a week or more. From the catalogues analysed, the average length of sales was about 3.5 days, but over 17 per cent were spread over five or more days. These longer sales were sometimes occasioned by the specialized nature

186 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

of the goods – a large library or a long list of stock-in-trade38 – but more often they resulted from the sheer number of items. The arrangement of goods was remarkably consistent across all sales in the sample, with lots usually organized by room.39 Sometimes this spatial sequencing was interrupted by batches of particular types of goods, so that linen, books, paintings or china were often presented together. On occasions, this reflected their placement in the house; more often it was done to create an orderly dispersement of goods or to conduct a sale within a sale, perhaps appealing to a rather different clientele. Books were often dealt with in this manner, as with the sale of Henry Fryer’s belongings, where they were auctioned separately in the week preceding the sale of furniture and household goods.40 At some auctions, the arrangement of goods room by room was adhered to very rigidly; as at the first sale at Kirby Hall, where pictures were listed in the catalogue as they appeared in the rooms. Thus we have three paintings (including two by Brughel) appearing as lots 15 and 16 in the ‘Dressing Room next the Cotton Bed Chamber’, whilst others (presumably by lesser artists) were bundled into lots with surrounding goods, for example, in Mr Field’s Room where one lot comprised ‘a nest of draws, fixt in the window, a picture of a lady, and a piece of still life’.41 Even when sales took place away from the vendor’s house, the room-by-room configuration was often reproduced. When the possessions of the late Sir Thomas Cave were auctioned at the Rugby assembly rooms and theatre in 1792, they were laid out in a series of 25 ‘rooms’ with names presumably reflecting those at Stanford Hall.42 In this careful reconstruction of the lived space of the house, sales catalogues strongly resemble probate inventories. Braunmuller writes that ‘people of quite modest means would know about this [post-mortem] system . . . and therefore lots of auction audiences would have the sense of death-and-transition from the very printed catalogue they read or held.’43 This would have heightened the awareness for the consumer that the goods for sale were, until recently, objects of everyday life. In the catalogue and at the sale, these objects were situated in a liminal space between personal belongings and consumer objects. In some cases the lots grouped items together as they would have been used. For example, in the catalogue for the 1772 sale at Kirby Hall, lot two in the Dressing Room comprised: ‘A deal toilet table, with needlework petticoat, silk veil, and white cover, a dressing glass in a japan’d frame, 4 japan’d dressing boxes, 5 trays, 2 pincushions, and a brush’.44 Elsewhere, as with the listing of china and glassware, they were organized more systematically. Whether grouped together or separated for sale individually,

Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart 187

it was the act of segmentation which broke the goods away from a ‘pattern of living meaning’ and into a purchasable lot.45 Thus, the country house stopped being a space for living and was rendered a space for selling and buying. Those attending the auctions did so for a variety of reasons, of which the desire to purchase second-hand goods was just one. Some simply wanted to see how the other half lived. Others responded to the social stir and speculation on the reasons for the sale that accompanied auctions at the great houses – as was the case at Fonthill, where the state of the owner’s finances was centre stage.46 However, a major attraction of these auctions was that they allowed unprecedented access to the homes of the wealthy. In Burney’s Cecilia, Miss Larolles plans to go to Lord Belgrade’s sale: All the world will be there; and we shall go in with tickets, and you have no notion how it will be crowded.’ ‘What is to be sold there?’ asked Cecilia. ‘O every thing you can conceive; house, stables, china, laces, horses, caps, every thing in the world.’ ‘And do you intend to buy anything?’ ‘Lord, no; but one likes to see the people’s things.’47 The culture of hospitality and the rise in tourism meant that country houses the size of Kirby Hall were rarely completely private,48 but in any other circumstances it would have been unheard of to admit all classes of the general public to wander at their leisure around bedrooms, service areas and attics. At the first Kirby sale, access was even given to the family chapel and the royal suite, and the catalogues helped to guide the visitor around these private spaces. Fabricant notes that ‘within the traditional framework of country house visiting, the ideal tourist remained at a respectful distance’ and ‘identifie[d] with the values of the landowner without actually coveting his possessions’.49 Such understandings were abandoned at the auction, where the house was made public in very different ways and goods were inspected with a view to purchase, rather than from polite admiration. Such access made for a novel kind of space of consumption – one that was at odds with traditional notions of the country house and the social order which it embodied. A writer from the Literary Chronicle, after visiting the second Fonthill auction of 1822 complained that ‘from beginning to end, the Fonthill business has seemed to me to have been carried on, as far as the public has been concerned, with too much

188 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

of the tradesman, or rather, perhaps, showman-like spirit; it has been made too much of a shop’.50 The auction of artworks was particularly problematic:51 stately homes were for displaying works of art, not for selling them. Furthermore, selling paintings alongside everyday objects denied them status as ‘aesthetic and morally elevated’.52 Whereas the paintings for sale at Kirby in 1772 would no doubt have attracted serious and wealthy collectors, these prospective purchasers would have viewed the paintings room by room alongside everyone else. The result was that works of art could be sold for less than their market value, Walpole lamenting of a 1751 sale that ‘the large pictures were thrown away; the whole length Vandykes went for a song!’53

Decline and fall There is a story behind each individual catalogue in our sample. In some cases, where more than one sale was held, this story can be followed over time, allowing us to explore the ways in which sales of contents impacted upon the long-term fortunes of the house. At Kirby Hall, the architectural shell remains to this day, but the furnishings and contents are long gone: a process facilitated and accelerated by three sales held within 60 years between 1772 and 1831. These sales, when looked at in the context of the broader narrative of the hall, demonstrate the significance and consequences of the dissection and dispersal of the moveable material culture of the country house. Examining the history of Kirby reveals that the factors leading to these sales echoed circumstances seen in many other country houses: financial difficulties, indirect descent, a desire to modernize and the position of Kirby often as a second or even third family seat.54 The first sale took place a year and a half after the death in 1771 of Edward Finch-Hatton, who had inherited the hall through his mother, the daughter of Sir Christopher Hatton (1632–1706). Edward had also inherited Eastwell Park, the seat of his paternal family the Earls of Winchilsea, where he had chosen to spend most of his time. Edward’s son George employed auctioneers from London to clear the hall of the possessions of his predecessors in a sale lasting three days. It is telling that the catalogue of 1772 advertised Kirby as ‘The Seat of the late Right Hon. Lord Viscount Hatton’; not the absentee Edward, but his grandfather Sir Christopher, who had been well known as resident there.55 The 342 lots were spread evenly across the three days and largely organized by room.56 In all, the catalogue lists the goods and furnishings in over 30 rooms in the main house, as well as the service areas, courtyards and

Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart 189

gardens, with the long gallery in the west range being the only notable omission. Apart from the ‘Four family pictures’ listed in the Chapel Room, the sale included few identifiable heirlooms; family silver was not for sale, most likely being retained at a more frequently occupied property.57 With these few exceptions, the clear-out appears thorough. Valuable but old-fashioned items such as tapestries were sold, including ‘the historical tapestry hangings’ (which may be the Hercules series of the 1619 inventory).58 Even some of the fixtures were to go, from a ‘piece of curious shellwork, fitted to the chimney’ in the Tapestry Room, to a ‘turret clock (fixt at the top of the house)’.59 The process of clearing a second seat such as Kirby Hall may not have been a great loss to the family and could have produced significant financial gain. It would also have been an essential move in order to modernize: Walpole noted in 1786 that George Finch-Hatton planned ‘to refit Kirby and inhabit it’ and English Heritage surveys have revealed a period of considerable renovation around this time.60 George Finch-Hatton died on 17 February 1823; the property passed to his son and on 23 August 1824 the second contents sale was held.61 This auction appears lower key: organized by a local auctioneer, Samuel Deacon of Benefield in Northamptonshire, and lasting just two days. The property was noted as belonging to ‘G.W.F. Hatton Esq’ (George was not to inherit the Earldoms of Winchilsea and Nottingham until 1826), but no reason was given for the sale or mention made of his recently deceased father.62 Whilst comprising 245 lots, its relative size is exaggerated somewhat by the fact that the majority of items were listed in single lots. Indeed, only 13 rooms appear in the catalogue, most of them bedrooms or attics. Perhaps these were the only rooms that had been refitted for habitation or perhaps contents had remained from an earlier period. That said, it appears that some rooms might have been emptied into others for the sale itself. The ‘Bow Window Dressing Room’, for example, contained three bedsteads with hangings and mattresses, a feather bed, two child’s cribs, two chests of drawers, seven chairs and a ‘Japan foot bath’.63 Despite the sale being relatively small, there were still opportunities to secure high quality pieces. Unsurprisingly the goods were lauded in the catalogue, described on the title page as ‘Valuable and Elegant Household Furniture, Implements in Husbandry & c.’ There are no paintings or books, and again no plate, but the furniture was good quality and mostly mahogany. It included a ‘Very excellent mahogany dressing table, fitted up with draws, bidet, night table & c complete’ in the Little White Room and a ‘Large mahogany book case with folding doors, new’ in the Green

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Bed Room. Missing from the first sale, but present here, was a range of husbandry-ware, including ‘a very excellent spike roll (new)’, hay making and chaff cutting machines, and a ‘turnip and potatoe washer’.64 The sale clearly appealed to motives of utility as well as discernment and distinction. Kirby was still the property of George William Finch-Hatton in 1831 when the final sale took place; however the title page for the catalogue states that the goods for sale were ‘the property of Mr Webster who is changing his residence’. Daniel Webster is listed in the 1841 Pigot’s Directory as ‘brewer and agent to Lord Winchelsea’ living in Weldon, a nearby village. It seems that Webster had previously lived at Kirby to manage the family’s interests in their absence, but moved out, perhaps as the hall became uninhabitable.65 This sale was again conducted by Samuel Deacon and just one day was allocated. Despite this, there were 277 lots to get through and the auction began at half past nine ‘In account of the great number of lots’. Attempting to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, the catalogue highlighted the ‘Genteel and Useful Household Furniture, Grand Piano-forte, organ, books and pictures, Kitchen and dairy utensils, cows, draught horses, potatoes, and other Effects’.66 Unlike the majority of sales in the sample, this one was not organized by room. In fact there appears to be no logical pattern to the order in which the goods appear. They may have been seen in situ, but were more likely laid out in the hall or courtyard to save viewing time. If so, it appears that they were informally grouped into rooms, as at the sale in Rugby Assembly Rooms. Thus we have lots 130–132: ‘Four-post bedstead, with dimity hangings, gilt ornaments, & c. complete’, ‘Hair mattress’ and a ‘Pair of window curtains, with ornaments, & c. to match the bed’.67 Most items were in single lots with the occasional groupings of chairs, pictures or hen pens, although lot 276 comprised ‘six hundred sawed rails’. Other useful items include two ferrets, a ‘milch cow in full profit’ and ‘two very superior plough horses’.68 There were also some high quality items, such as ‘Twelve Wedgwood Custard Cups with covers’, a set of ‘real nankeen china’ and many ‘handsome’ and ‘excellent’ mahogany items including a ‘handsome carved four post mahogany bedstead elegantly trimmed’.69 We also find books: 33 volumes of the racing calendar, copies of the London Magazine 1776–81, the Farmers’ Journal ‘for about twenty years’, 11 volumes of Sporting magazine and Chamber’s Dictionary.70 These may have remained at the house throughout the previous sales, but their mostly low-brow nature makes it more likely that they were brought there by Mr Webster. The agent was living very comfortably at Kirby, and yet the auction appears to have been a hurried affair, with so many

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items to sell in one day – everything, it seems, that Webster could not take to his new property. As is apparent, the grandeur and range of wares available, and therefore the importance of the auction, could decline markedly if a house experienced a series of sales in rapid succession. At Kirby Hall the sales of 1824 and 1831 were lower key events, organized by local auctioneers and devoid of expensive fittings or important paintings. Whereas the first sale in 1772 was a clear-out after generations of acquisition, the subsequent sales demonstrate the difficulty of refurnishing and living in such a large property. The changed circumstances meant that there were no goods of ‘antique’ or historical value in the later sales; neither is there any evidence that unsold goods were being re-offered for sale. Instead, the focus shifted to the ‘newness’ and quality of the goods, and to their use value. As the status of the sellers declined, the catalogues ceased to focus on Kirby as an aristocratic estate, neglecting to mention in 1831 that the hall was the property of the 10th Earl of Winchilsea. What remained of the country house in the wake of a sale or a succession of sales? Kirby Hall was certainly unable to recover, although the sales were only one element of a much longer narrative of abandonment and decline. It is clear that George Finch-Hatton had maintained an active interest in Kirby and his son George William was born at the house in 1791. However by 1809, Beauties of England and Wales described the house as ‘unoccupied, the Paintings, furniture and garden statues having been sold’ and the gardens as ‘neglected, and fast going to ruin and decay’.71 And yet in 1812 George William held parties for his 21st birthday in the Great Chamber. After one of these, a guest wrote that he remembered paintings of the Earl’s family and of Sir Christopher (the Chancellor) hanging on the walls, and scarlet curtains in the Great Chamber. John Bridges also saw a full length portrait of the Chancellor, a picture of his coach returning to the house and a portrait of ‘Sir Christopher the exile’.72 These descriptions depict a semifurnished house and, significantly, include items which had obviously not been sold in the 1772 auction, despite it being a seemingly thorough clearance. Four years after the second auction, Nichols wrote that ‘the house is now dismantled and going fast into decay’.73 A party guest from 1812 returned in 1834 and found the dilapidated house only partly furnished. There were handsome cabinets in the south-west wing, an unplayable organ in the Library (perhaps unsold from the 1831 sale), a bed in one of the rooms above and scarlet curtains still hanging in the Great Chamber.74 The Rev. Canon James saw ‘the very action of

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decomposition going on, the crumbling stucco of the ceiling feeding the vampire ivy, the tattered tapestry yet hanging on the wall, the picture flapping in its broken frame’.75 In 1844 farm servants were sleeping in the empty rooms ‘surrounded by exquisite carvings’ and a labourer was living in the library.76 Once the domestic and social functions of the house had ceased and the contents dispersed, the architecture itself started to collapse. By 1857 the clock works had fallen through the ceiling of the chapel and the roof was stripped to pay the gambling debts of the 11th Earl. By the late nineteenth century the entrance gates hung on broken hinges and the staircase to the minstrels’ gallery in the hall was taken down.77 When the 12th Earl Murray Edward Gordon FinchHatton inherited in 1887 it was reported that he intended to ‘at least preserve the ruins’, but the kitchen quarters fell in 1896. The ruins were finally preserved and secured by the Office of Works in 1930.78

Conclusion The country house auction provided an important opportunity for consumers to secure high quality goods (increasingly advertised as ‘modern’ or ‘antique’) at bargain prices and to acquire a share in another’s world. Both as conduits of material objects and socio-cultural events, these sales blurred social distinctions and helped to create new cultures of consumption. In this way, they formed an important part of the broader marketing of second-hand goods in Georgian England; continuing to prosper at least into the second quarter of the nineteenth century, despite the emergence of more ‘modern’ retail formats and in contradiction to the decline suggested by Nenadic. Country house sales thus form an important thread of continuity from the early modern period through to the present day. Moreover, they were important in the development of increasingly specialist and modern forms of retailing and consumption: promoting and supplying ‘antiques’ well before antique dealers were found in provincial towns. At the same time, these sales destroyed the mysticism of the elite lifestyle and ‘laid bare the financial transactions that underlay the collections of fine art and furniture contained in the grand estates’. The private house was no place for the practices and rituals of the marketplace and when the accepted norms of behaviour ‘were not observed . . . the country house system itself was at stake’.79 This reveals a real tension between the country house as a site of consumption and as a lived space and symbol of elite power. Auctions involved the removal of (some of) the contents, but threatened to puncture the aura surrounding

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the country house and, indeed, its very fabric. Whilst not all auctions at country houses held such bleak prospects as those at Kirby Hall, its fate highlights the financial and demographic difficulties of continuing the family ownership of a country house and its collections. Richter argues that the press responses to the Fonthill sale of 1822 ‘exposed the fault lines between older economic models, represented by the paternalistic and land based world of the country house, and newer ones based on international trade and the open markets’.80 And Walpole seemed all too aware of the significance of the growing number of auctions of the contents of England’s country houses. In 1793 he asked, ‘What is permanent? And what does not present morality and mortality to my old memory! and what a string vibrates on a Houghton demolished . . . who knows how soon my playthings may fall under Mr Christie’s Hammer.’81 Yet such calamity would also afford opportunities for the recirculation of these playthings, releasing them onto an eager market and reaffirming the auction as a key part of modern consumerism.

Notes 1. F. Burney (1986) Cecilia. Memoirs of an Heiress (first published 1782; London: Virago), p. 44. 2. See, for example, N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. Plumb (1982) The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Hutchinson); W. D. Smith (2002) Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (London: Routledge); M. Berg (2005) Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 3. C. Wall (1997) ‘The English auction: narratives of dismantlings’, EighteenthCentury Studies, 31(1), pp. 1–25; S. Nenadic (1994) ‘Middle-rank consumers and domestic culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1720–1840’, Past and Present, 145, pp. 122–156. 4. Wall, ‘English auction’; R. Gemmett (2008) ‘ “The tinsel of fashion and the gewgaws of luxury”: the Fonthill sale of 1801’, The Burlington Magazine, CL, pp. 381–388. 5. Wall, ‘English auction’, p. 2; J. Stobart (2006) ‘Clothes, cabinets and carriages: second-hand dealing in eighteenth-century England’, in B. Blondé, P. Stabel, J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds) Buyers and Sellers. Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 225–244; Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers’; S. Pryke (1989) ‘A study of the Edinburgh furnishing trade taken from contemporary press notices, 1708–1790’, Regional Furniture, 3, pp. 52–67. 6. Northamptonshire Central Library, Sales Catalogues. 7. C. Wall (2006) The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), pp. 167–170. 8. A. M. Purser (1988) Kirby Hall. The House in the Hollow (Kettering: Auvis), p. 61.

194 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods 9. Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers’. See also Chapter 2 by Sara Pennell in this volume. 10. A. Vickery (1998) The Gentleman’s Daughter. Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), p. 161. 11. Sale Catalogues (SC), Kirby Hall, 4 November 1772, pp. 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 19. 12. SC, Barton Hall, 20 December 1784, p. 1. 13. A. N. Richter (2008) ‘Spectacle, exoticism, and display in the gentleman’s house: the Fonthill auction of 1822,’ Eighteenth Century Studies, 41(4), p. 544 and Gemmett, ‘Tinsel of fashion’, p. 882; G. H. Chettle (1984) Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire (London: HMSO), p. 28. 14. SC, Stanford Hall, 1 October 1792, p. 1; Kirby Hall, 4 November 1772, p. 1. 15. In 1841, only a handful of towns in the Midlands and north-west England were without auctioneers. Stobart, ‘Clothes, cabinets and carriages’, p. 229. 16. Gemmett, ‘Tinsel of fashion’, p. 381. 17. Northampton Mercury, 19 October 1772; Daily Advertiser, 28 October 1772. 18. N. Gregson and L. Crewe (2003) Second-Hand Cultures (London: Berg), p. 11; Wall, ‘English auction’, p. 14. 19. Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers’, p. 128. 20. SC, Braunston, 14 September 1779, p. 1; Geddington House, 2 April 1823, p. 1. 21. SC, Stanford Hall, 1 October 1792, pp. 10, 12. 22. S. Stewart (1984) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 133. 23. The Times, 23 October 1801, quoted in Gemmett, ‘Tinsel of fashion’, p. 387. 24. Wall, ‘English auction’, pp. 14–15, 20. 25. W. S. Lewis (ed.) (1937–1983) Walpole, Correspondence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 32, pp. 279–280 (4 December 1775). 26. Gemmett, ‘Tinsel of fashion’, p. 383. 27. SC, Islip Mills, 19 December 1787. 28. SC, Kirby Hall, 4 November 1772, pp. 6, 7; Stanford Hall, 1 October 1792, p. 4. 29. See J. Stobart (2008) ‘Selling (through) politeness: advertising provincial shops in eighteenth-century England’, Cultural and Social History, 5, pp. 309–328. 30. SC, Kirby Hall, 4 November 1772, p. 3. 31. Ibid., pp. 4, 11. 32. Gregson and Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures, p. 11; Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers’; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, pp. 127–160. 33. Ibid., p. 161. 34. Smith, Consumption, pp. 189–222. 35. See Chapter 5 by Clive Edwards and Margaret Ponsonby in this volume. 36. SC, Stanford Hall, 1 October 1792, p. 12. The term ‘old’ was also used, suggesting that ‘antique’ carried particular connotations of desirability or collectability. 37. Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers’, p. 130. 38. SC, Peterborough, 4 January 1796. 39. This spatial organization is noted in the London catalogues by Wall, ‘English auction’, pp. 12–13. 40. SC, Stamford Baron, 11 August 1823.

Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart 195 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

SC, Kirby Hall, 4 November 1772, p. 11. SC, Stanford Hall, 1 October 1792. Quoted in Wall, Prose of Things, p. 170. SC, Kirby Hall, 4 November 1772, p. 11. Wall, Prose of Things, p. 11; Wall, ‘English auction’, p. 150. Gemmett, ‘Tinsel of fashion’, p. 381. Burney, Cecilia, pp. 27–28. C. Fabricant (1987) ‘The literature of domestic tourism and the public consumption of private property’, in F. Nussbaum and L. Brown (eds) The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (London: Methuen), p. 270. Ibid., p. 255. Richter, ‘Spectacle’, p. 551. Wall, ‘English auction’, p. 17; Richter, ‘Spectacle’, p. 544. Richter, ‘Spectacle’, p. 553. Lewis, Walpole, Correspondence, 20, p. 268 (18 June 1751). For details of the rise and fall of the house, see Chettle, Kirby Hall, pp. 26–28; L. Worsley (2006) Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire (London: English Heritage), pp. 26–30. Worsley, Kirby Hall, p. 32; SC Kirby Hall, 4 November 1772, p. 1. SC, Kirby Hall, 4 November 1772, p. 1. Ibid., p. 5. Northampton Record Office, Inventory 1619; SC, Kirby Hall, 4 November 1772, p. 14. Ibid., pp. 7, 11, 18, 19. N. Hill (2005) ‘Kirby Hall: the inside story’, ASCHB Transactions, 28, pp. 39–40. Worsley, Kirby Hall, p. 32. SC, Kirby Hall, 23 August 1824, p. 1. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., pp. 6, 5, 9, 10, 11. Pigot and Co.’s Directory of Northamptonshire, 1841; Worsley, Kirby Hall, p. 33. SC, Kirby Hall, 23 April 1831. Ibid., pp. 5–6. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., pp. 3, 6, 5. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Chettle, Kirby Hall, p. 28. Purser, Kirby Hall, p. 59. Hill, ‘Kirby Hall’, p. 31. Purser, Kirby Hall, pp. 59–61; SC, Kirby Hall, 23 April 1831, p. 5: ‘Very excellent hand organ (to play ten tunes) with stand, & c.’ Worsley, Kirby Hall, p. 33. Ibid., p. 35. Chettle, Kirby Hall, p. 28; Purser, Kirby Hall, p. 61. English Heritage, NMR Complete Monument Report (2007), p. 5. Richter, ‘Spectacle’, pp. 556, 555. Ibid., p. 544. Lewis, Walpole, Correspondence, 34, p. 184 (16 July 1793).

10 Tables and Chairs Under the Hammer: Second-Hand Consumption of Furniture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Sweden Sofia Murhem, Göran Ulväng and Kristina Lilja

Introduction In comparison with many other goods, furniture is usually comparatively expensive and durable, both reasons why second-hand consumption has been and remains important, not least through the auction trade.1 As is the case with many other goods, furniture also has considerable symbolic meaning, reflecting the economic, social and cultural status of the individual consumer. To buy furniture often meant judging between one’s present economic means and the lifestyle to which one aspired. For many people, second-hand consumption represented an affordable way to reconcile these two objectives. Due to lack of good sources, second-hand consumption of furniture has not been subject to the level of analysis merited by its importance for the daily lives of consumers. Most interest has focused on clothes, a field in which Lemire in particular has provided valuable contributions. She points out that the scale of second-hand retail in clothes and its duration was connected with industrialization. When new and fashionable clothes became affordable for the lower classes, the demand for second-hand clothes diminished, as it did in London during the 1870s.2 A similar line of argument has been adopted by Nenadic in her analysis of household consumption in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Scotland. She suggests that in the eighteenth century ‘second-hand markets and recycling operated on a vast scale, touching rich and poor alike. Custom and the traditions of family 196

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association remained an important force in the construction of patterns of consumption.’3 However, the main reason why the middling ranks bought goods at household sales was the scarcity of decent quality furniture. Thus, when this became available from other sources around the year 1800, they abandoned auctions to the working class. This view has been tempered in recent years by Edwards who argues that the consumption of second-hand furniture continued to be important well into the nineteenth century, the poor being motivated by necessity and the middle class by a search for more elegant and status-filled objects.4 This chapter aims to discuss some of these issues in the context of the second-hand consumption of furniture in Sweden during the period 1720–1870. Attention centres on two Swedish cities – Stockholm (the capital of Sweden) and Enköping (a small city located about 80 km north-west of Stockholm) – and the surrounding countryside. These different locations were chosen because, as Nenadic emphasizes, what was fashionable could vary locally.5 Our key question is whether the economic and cultural value of auctions declined from the end of the eighteenth century onwards (as claimed by Nenadic and Lemire) as a result of industrialization, standardized products, the manufacture of cheap and new goods, and the advent of a ‘throw-away’ society. At a basic level, this involves a general review of the changing scope and scale of auctions. Focusing more specifically on furniture, we are firstly interested in who the buyers were, that is, their social background. This relates directly to Nenadic’s characterization of the changing socioeconomic status of those buying at Scottish auctions. Was the same decline in the social standing of those buying second-hand goods at auctions also apparent in Sweden? Secondly, we are also interested in what the buyers bought and how that changed during the period studied. Consumption of furniture was dependent on budget, expressed both as means, in the form of available capital, and the nature of housing. But the consumption of furniture was also a way of creating a social identity. According to Nenadic, the vast extent of second-hand trade meant that the importance of fashion for the new consumption patterns in general has been overrated. Rather, patterns were more complex.6 What kind of second-hand furniture was popular among buyers and how did this relate to changes in fashion? Thirdly, and related to this, we also need to study who the sellers were. As Edwards points out, second-hand furniture could be a means for the middle class to access furniture from people of a higher social standing.7 Was there a relationship between the socio-economic status

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of the buyer and seller, and how did second-hand furniture move from a socio-economic point of view: horizontally or vertically? Finally, and briefly, we also consider the gender dimension of buying at auctions. During the nineteenth century, the home and the domestic environment increasingly became a woman’s responsibility.8 Yet studies of England suggest that it was men rather than women who were responsible for purchasing most substantial items of furniture, while women’s expenses included smaller items for the home – a pattern that continued into the nineteenth century.9 What was the position in Sweden: to what extent did women buy furniture at auctions?

Contexts and sources The relative costliness of furniture made buying it dependent on the available budget for consumption and thus most likely on social standing. During the first half of the nineteenth century, real wages were more or less static in Sweden, as in many other European countries.10 For the land-owning classes, nobility, gentry and self-owning peasants, the agrarian revolution caused a growth in their material standard between 1750 and 1850. The development was similar for tenant peasants. For the landless, growth of material wealth was much slower, but despite this they managed to acquire some household goods that were in excess of sheer necessity, as shown by Hallén.11 For day-labourers in agriculture, real wages declined in the 1820s to the 1840s. When industrialization took off in the second half of the nineteenth century, real wages increased as a result of an increased demand for labour. Levels of consumption followed real wages.12 Thus, if we compare the standard of living in Sweden with other countries from the 1750s onwards, it seems that, while England was way ahead, economic development and living standards in Sweden were similar to those of France, with the exception of the nobility, which as a group never reached the same levels of wealth in Sweden.13 Even if the level of consumption was stable, its composition changed considerably. De Vries has shown for the Netherlands and Berg for Britain that there was an increasing demand for novel goods, and for more durable items, in the period preceding real wage increases. De Vries calls this the ‘industrious revolution’, a demand for new durable goods produced outside the household. The satisfaction of this new demand was made possible through a reallocation of resources within the household. The transformation of demand was not a privilege of the upper classes, but took place also among the middle ranks and the poor.14

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Certainly, we might expect the transformation to become more evident when real wages increased. In order to be able to consume furniture, you need, if not a house, then at least a room to keep them in, as the consumption of furniture brings about specific problems not connected to other, smaller items. Basically, furniture is bulky, demanding a certain amount of space. It is more space-consuming to store chairs, than, for example, china plates. Housing patterns changed in Sweden during the nineteenth century. While the number of nobility, landed gentry and land-owning farmers remained constant, the number of landless wage labourers increased by 400 per cent. This was the result of several coinciding processes: better economic conditions caused by the agrarian revolution meant that more children survived in both peasant and farmhand families, while the demand for specialized farmhands and contract workers increased. Furthermore, freehold farmers were increasingly unwilling to divide their land among their heirs. Instead, only one child inherited and the remaining sons and daughters had to make their living as waged labourers. The estates were reorganized, replacing tenant farmers with waged labourers. This meant that many people, who formerly had lived in larger family households on the estates and on family owned land, now formed their own households and had their own cottages. The housing pattern for servants also changed from the eighteenth century, when servants had lived with their masters, to maintaining their own quarters in the nineteenth century.15 In addition, the home became increasingly more socially important during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and more emphasis was placed on the domestic environment. This produced a more socially diversified demand for furniture. It is into this changing socio-economic context that we must place our analysis of the public auctions of second-hand goods. The Stockholm Auction House (Stockholms Auktionsverk) was founded in 1674 and held auctions ranging from royal sales to the most humble items. Auctions were held several days a week from the founding year up until today. Due to the enormous number of lots auctioned, we have concentrated on March and October – two of the busiest months in terms of auctions. For 1690, all auctions during these two months have been studied, but for 1781 and 1870, only the records of two notaries have been studied, due to the considerable number of auctions. There is, however, nothing to indicate that the notaries chosen were exceptional in any way. In 1780, 75,000 people lived in Stockholm. By 1870, the population had almost doubled to 136,000 inhabitants. The auction house in Enköping was founded in 1720. During the eighteenth and nineteenth

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centuries this was a small rural and agrarian town. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Enköping had about 500 inhabitants and 100 years later there were about 1000. The nineteenth century witnessed a marked expansion of the city, and by the end of the century there were about 4000 inhabitants. Still, farming was an important part of the city’s economy. There were several estates in the surrounding countryside, as well as freehold farmers.16 The items sold at the auctions reflected local business structures as well as economic conditions. For instance, farm equipment, animals and grain were more common at countryside auctions, where land was also sold. In the cities, we often find merchants’ goods, either in the form of stock clearances or as the result of bankruptcy. During the eighteenth century, city auctions were announced in the churches during Sunday services and advertised on posters in public places. In the nineteenth century, advertisements in urban newspapers replaced the church announcements, but posters were still used.17 In the countryside, where newspapers were less widely read, announcements in churches continued throughout the nineteenth century, together with posters at crossroads and other places frequently visited by many people.18 All auctions were required by law to keep detailed records of the sales.19 These form a remarkably rich source of information on Swedish second-hand consumption.

The scope and scale of auctions in cities and the countryside The number of auctions held in Stockholm was quite considerable, even if we exclude auctions of real estate, bonds and so on and concentrate on those selling material goods. Auctions were of two different kinds: those held on the premises of the auction house and others at the house of the seller. According to the records, the number of auctions increased from one every fortnight in the late seventeenth century to three to four every week in the 1780, and four or five per week by 1870.20 In addition to the official Auction House, sales were held by the Generalassistanskontor (General Relief Office) – a public pawnbroker, opened in 1772, which provided a mechanism for even the poorest to obtain credit at reasonable interest rates. In 1848, the Generalassistanskontor was converted into Stockholms stads allmänna pantlåneinrättning (Stockholm City Public Pawnbroker). According to newspaper advertisements, auctions of unredeemed goods were being held once a week in the nineteenth century.

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Added to the sales organized by the Auction House, there were thus about 275 public auctions every year in Stockholm during this period. In the 1690s, about 1500 lots were auctioned every year. In 1781, there were almost 33,000 lots and around 1870, there were close to 67,000 lots. On average, every lot contained five items in 1690 and 1870, and three in 1781. This means that in 1690, about 7000 items were sold, in 1781 there were almost 98,000 and around 1870 no less than 333,000.21 The number of buyers also increased. On average, there were between 50 and 100 buyers present at each auction. However, many of these were regulars and perhaps the number of unique buyers is more interesting. In 1690, there were 200 unique buyers, in 1781 there were 7000 and in 1870 more than 13,000 (Table 10.1). It is likely that there were many more individuals visiting the auctions than there were actual buyers. By comparing the number of sellers and buyers and the number of objects to the population of the city, we can get a rough estimate of the economic importance of auctions. The vast majority of sellers and buyers were from the city itself. We can thus conclude that of all Stockholm citizens, including children, about one-tenth bought objects at the Stockholm Auction House in 1781. On average, more than every third household bought at the auctions. The number of objects equalled more than one object per citizen and about five per household. If we exclude children, the number of objects per citizen increases to about two. In 1870, the number of objects per citizen had increased by 50 per cent. The increase of auctions witnessed in Stockholm is also evident in Enköping, where again the number of auctions doubled between 1760 and 1870. The number of objects sold in 1870 was almost three times that in 1760, and increased by almost 70 per cent from 1870 to 1900 (Table 10.2). The number of objects sold per lot was smaller in Enköping than in Stockholm, one or two objects compared to three or five; but the number of objects per citizen was higher, probably both reflecting the smaller supply of new objects in Enköping and the poorer population. This would equal approximately 10–15 objects per household per year. As in Stockholm, most of the buyers were local, with the exception of 1900, when more people from the countryside ventured into the city. Numerous auctions were also held in the countryside surrounding Enköping. In the county of Uppland, about 200 auctions were held during March every year in the 1810s. This was by far the busiest month and the annual number of sales was about 730, at which almost 110,000 items were sold in total. The number of auctions did decline somewhat in 1870, while the number of objects per lot seems to have remained

202

Table 10.1

Objects sold at auctions in Stockholm in relation to the population in 1690, 1781 and 1870

Year

Number of objects

1690 1781 1870

74, 00 98, 000 333, 000

Change Unique % buyers

1224 240

2,400 7,100 13,400

Change Objects/ Change Population % Unique % total buyers

196 89

3 13 24

233 85

57, 000 69, 000 170, 000

Object/ Citizen

0.1 1.4 2.0

Adults Households

52400

19500

Objects/ household

5.0

Note: Average size of household in Stockholm in 1760, see Hayen (2007), p. 80. The average household consisted of 3.53 people, and children made up 24.1 per cent of the population. Source: Auction records 1690, 1781 and 1870, Stockholm Auction House, Stockholm City Archives; Register to Mantalsböcker 1800–75; CD record (2003), Stockholm City Archives. Population of Stockholm from http://www2.historia.su.se/urbanhistory.

Table 10.2

Objects sold at auctions in Enköping in relation to the population in 1760, 1870 and 1900

Year

Number of objects

1760 1870 1900

1750 5850 9790

Change %

234 67

Unique buyers 270 1290 1160

Change %

278 −10

Objects/ Unique buyers 7 5 8

Change %

Population

Object/ Citizen

−29 60

1100 1900 4000

1.6 3.0 2.4

Source: Auction records 1730, 1760, 1810 and 1870, Enköping Auction House, Enköping magistrate, Uppsala regional state archive (ULA); Husförhörslängder AI. vol. 2 (1755–67), vol. 10 (1810–17), vol. 19–20 (1860–70), Enköping parish, Uppsala regional state archive. Population of Enköping from http://www2.historia.su.se/urbanhistory.

203

204 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

constant or even increased slightly. By 1900, more of those living in the countryside attended the auctions in Enköping instead. What these figures show is that there was no decline in the economic importance of auctions in Sweden before 1900 similar to those noted in the early nineteenth century by Nenadic, Lemire and Van Damme.22 Auctions continued to attract large, even growing numbers of people, although buyers were in general poorer and bought cheaper goods. The assumption has been that the decline from 1800 onwards was caused by industrialization, standardized products, the manufacture of cheap and new goods, and the advent of a ‘throw-away’ society. Industrialization did not take off in Sweden until the middle of the nineteenth century; even then it took quite some time before the auction became obsolete in Sweden. This might indicate that the process was more complicated than hitherto assumed. Something of this complexity can be teased out by looking in more detail at the auctioning of furniture.

Furniture bought and sold At auctions, the buyer seldom paid cash. Instead they were given credit, usually until the end of the business year, 1 November, which meant that the period of time before the buyer actually had to pay extended to several months. Because of the system of giving credit, buyers were also noted in the auction records, often with their title. The records clearly state that the bidder was the actual buyer. When there was bidding by proxy, both the proxy and the real buyer were noted. The same was true for the sellers. The titles given were usually occupational, such as merchant, captain, carpenter and labourer or, in the case of women, denoted marital status, such as Mrs, Miss or Widow. If a person’s title is missing, we have been able to trace them in the clerical survey books kept at this time. We have used the titles of sellers and buyers to divide them into four socio-economic groups, following the methodology developed by, among others, Sten Carlsson and Hans Norman.23 The four groups – people of rank, burghers and civil servants, peasants and landless – make it possible to divide the auction purchases by socio-economic status.24 Auctions attracted all groups in society. However, what was sold depended on who the seller was, with those of higher social standing usually selling more furniture at the auctions. Furniture was therefore more common in Stockholm, where the population in general was wealthier, than in Enköping. On average, furniture comprised 9–16 per cent of goods sold at urban auctions (Table 10.3), a figure which decreased somewhat in Stockholm during the period studied, from 22

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Table 10.3 Furniture as a proportion of all lots auctioned in Stockholm, Enköping and the Uppland region (countryside) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Location

Seller

Year

Stockholm Stockholm Enköping Enköping Enköping Enköping Enköping Countryside Countryside

Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants Landless Landless Persons of rank Persons of rank

Countryside Countryside

Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants

Countryside Countryside Countryside

Peasants Peasants Peasants

Countryside

Peasants

1781 1870 1760 1810 1870 1810 1870 1822 (Manor houses) 1869 (Enköping countryside) 1825 (Manor houses) 1869 (Enköping countryside) 1776 (Simtuna) 1843 (Simtuna) 1869 (Enköping countryside) 1887 (Almunge)

Percentage 15 14 9 10 16 10 13 16 15 9 9 6 5 8 4

Source: Auction records 1781 and 1870, Stockholm Auction House, Stockholm City Archives; Auction records 1760, 1810 and 1870, Enköping Auction House, Enköping magistrate, Uppsala regional state archive (ULA). For the countryside 1822 Höja Manor archive, Örsundsbro; for the countryside 1869 Kronofogden i södra fögderiet vol. 3. v 1860–69, ULA; for the auction in Rasbokil 1825–26, Enskilda arkiv, Gårdar, Årby säteri i Rasbokil, ULA; for the auctions in Simtuna 1776–1843, Enskilda arkiv, Gårdar, Norrby (Gårdshandlingar från Norrby socken) vol. 5, ULA; for the countryside 1887, Protocoll Almunge, auctionist Fernstedt, private collection.

to 19 per cent, but almost doubled in Enköping, from about 9 to 16 per cent. This could be explained by a decreasing demand in Stockholm: the city’s burghers, being comparatively wealthier, bought more new furniture in the nineteenth century as this became cheaper and more accessible due to industrialization. Enköping was, by comparison, both poorer and less industrialized. To this should be added a growing demand for furniture from peasants from the surrounding countryside, who had seen their wealth increase. Accordingly, they started to buy furniture at the auctions in Enköping in the early nineteenth century. Few people of rank bought and sold objects at the city auctions. Rather, it was burghers, equating with Nenadic’s middle-rank, who dominated, both as sellers and buyers. The most expensive pieces of furniture went to the burghers and civil servants, which could be explained by

206 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods Table 10.4 Social standing of sellers and buyers in Stockholm, Enköping and the Uppland region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (percentages) Status of seller

Year

Buyer (%) Persons of rank

Burghers & civil servants

Peasants

Landless

Total

Stockholm Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants

1781

5

85

0

10

100

1870

0

68

0

33

100

1760

0

96

2

2

100

1810

7

75

7

11

100

1870

1

64

22

13

100

1810 1870

0 0

66 8

16 17

18 66

100 100

1822 1869 1825

14 47 0

10 10 61

45 27 34

31 16 5

100 100 100

Enköping Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants Landless Landless Countryside Persons of rank Persons of rank Burghers & civil servants Source: See Table 10.3.

their comparative wealth, but perhaps also by them using the auctions to acquire more elegant furniture, as shown by Edwards.25 This meant that, when burghers and civil servants sold furniture, the buyers were themselves mostly burghers and civil servants, and to a smaller extent people of lesser rank (Table 10.4). A notable exception is 1810 in Enköping, when burghers bought a comparatively high proportion of furniture sold by landless people; however, as the numbers are very small, this reflects the habits of a few individuals. In the countryside, persons of rank sold furniture and they also bought furniture being sold by their own group. The numbers are not very high, but that is because there were few people of rank in the countryside and thus few potential buyers. More numerous were peasants and the landless, who made up a large percentage of those buying from persons of rank.

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Overall, furniture was either circulated within the social group of the seller or downwards to the groups of lesser means and wealth. Examples where furniture was bought by someone of a higher social class are rare, at least as long as old furniture was considered to be just that: old, rather than antique. When the value of antique furniture was beginning to be appreciated in late nineteenth-century Sweden, we find, for instance, a Stockholm commander in 1870, who bought expensive chests of drawers and mirrors from a working man. The revaluation of eighteenth-century furniture from old and used to high status objects took place first among people of rank and the burghers, while among the working people such objects were still considered a poorer alternative to new furniture. So probably both the seller and buyer were happy about the deal; the seller got good money for something he considered less attractive and could buy new furniture for what he earned and the buyer acquired furniture that would give him a higher status among his peers.

Buying at urban auctions Those who attended the Stockholm auctions were virtually all residents of the city. The attendance depended on who the seller was. If the seller was a burgher, which was the case in most instances for all city auctions in the eighteenth century, object were bought by burghers, but also by landless people (Table 10.4). Hardly any peasants bought lots at the Stockholm auctions. If the seller was a landless person, as was increasingly the case in the nineteenth century, few burghers bought items at the auction. What the individual buyer purchased was dependent on their socioeconomic standing. At a Stockholm auction in 1781, the merchant Christian Abell sold various items of furniture. The rich factory owner Carl Rehn bought a gilded mirror, while the journeyman Johan Browall bought a chair and the firewatcher Anders Lundin bought a green painted chair. In the eighteenth century, burghers’ purchases were denominated by chairs, which comprised more than one-third of all furniture bought, followed by cupboards, tables and beds, with the same amount of sofas, mirrors and chests, respectively. The landless bought goods in about the same proportions, albeit with a slightly greater emphasis on chairs, as shown in Table 10.5. However, the landless bought only about one-tenth of the total amount of furniture in the eighteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, chairs were still very popular. The second largest category was tables, followed by cupboards and mirrors. The landless bought about the same proportion of chairs

208 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods Table 10.5 Furniture sold by burghers in the auctions in Stockholm in 1781 and 1870 by social group (percentages) Furniture sold

Buyers Persons of rank 1781

Burghers & civil servants 1781

1870

Landless

1781

1870

Tables Cupboards Chairs Sofas Beds Chests Paintings Mirrors Clocks Rest

15 0 70 0 0 0 0 15 0 0

5 11 31 3 5 3 34 3 2 0

20 8 36 6 1 0 13 6 0 8

12 20 40 8 8 0 0 8 0 4

15 14 43 6 2 0 13 5 0 2

Total (numbers)

13

239

181

25

97

Source: See Table 10.5.

and so on, but the total number of objects had now increased to about half of that of the burghers, signifying the increased wealth of landless people. In Enköping, the pattern was similar to that in Stockholm (Table 10.6), with furniture for entertaining becoming increasingly popular, reflecting new modes of social life. There were nevertheless some differences. While the Stockholm auctions to a very large extent were attended by the residents of the city alone, the Enköping auctions attracted people from the surrounding area, at least from the turn of the nineteenth century. Enköping was becoming more of an urban regional centre, so that peasants, for instance, came to Enköping to buy furniture, acquiring 10 per cent of all furniture sold in 1810, whereas in Stockholm, they hardly ever attended the auctions. They almost exclusively bought chairs and chests, but overall chests were more popular in Enköping. While unfashionable in nineteenth-century Stockholm, in Enköping they were still being bought to a small extent by peasants in 1870, and to a larger extent by the landless both in 1810 and 1870. Interestingly, although burghers did not buy any beds at all in 1870, they were sought after by the landless. Evidently, this group prioritized goods for basic needs such as sleeping and storage. For those of meagre means, the auction was

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Table 10.6 Furniture sold by burghers in the auctions in Enköping in 1730, 1760, 1810 and 1870 by social group (percentages) Furniture sold

Buyers Burghers & civil servants 1730

Tables Cupboards Chairs Sofas Beds Chests Paintings Mirrors Clocks Rest Total (numbers)

1760

1810

1870

Peasants 1810

1870

Landless 1810

1870

8 11 18 0 6 14 36 7 0 0

16 9 34 1 6 24 0 2 2 6

12 12 33 5 5 20 3 8 1 1

24 14 39 5 0 0 3 5 3 7

13 13 25 0 6 38 0 6 0 0

12 8 51 6 6 4 1 11 1 0

13 13 30 7 13 17 0 7 0 0

9 7 43 4 11 15 0 2 4 4

159

82

280

171

18

101

30

46

Source: See Table 10.6.

possibly the only means of acquiring furniture, but such purchases were also a way of showing one’s comparative wealth and improving one’s status. After all, these goods had previously been owned by someone of much higher status and were sometimes a comparative luxury.26 The purchase of a toilet table by the worker P. E. Andersson from a teacher called Rosalie Stenbeck may fall into this category, reflecting what Wall describes as an attempt to buy part of someone else’s life and thus begin to reshape and recreate your own.27 However, the furniture bought by landless people was often comparatively cheap, so perhaps expediency was foremost in their minds.

Buying at rural auctions Rural auctions, except those in manor houses, were dominated by peasants, although more and more landless people bought furniture as the nineteenth century progressed. In the countryside, furniture comprised about 5–6 per cent of goods sold in auctions when the seller was a peasant, rising to 9 per cent when the seller was a burgher or civil servant. However, while they rarely bought objects in city auctions, many persons of rank bought furniture at the countryside auctions, especially those at manor house auctions. Interestingly, few burghers and

210 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

civil servants bought goods sold by persons of rank; rather they were purchased by their peers, or by peasants and the landless. In the few instances when burghers and civil servants sold goods in the countryside, burghers and civil servants went on shopping sprees and bought more than 50 per cent of the auctioned objects. Importantly, these people were not dealers, as was increasingly the case at rural auctions in the Southern Netherlands, but private buyers.28 Second-Hand consumption of furniture was therefore not only for the less well-off – at least in the countryside. The nobility and gentry did circulate used furniture as well. On average, estates and manor houses remained in their owners’ hands for 10–15 years during eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sweden. For officers, for example, the house went with the commission; when their commission ended, they had to move. Also, financial difficulties were common, and goods had to be sold to obtain money. Even for estates and manors that were entailed, sales were held, usually at the time of the owner’s death to raise money for legacies and so on – a practice which reflects experiences in England and the Southern Netherlands.29 Hence, goods often moved between homes. In addition, wealth accumulated among the nobility and gentry as a class, as a result of the agrarian and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also among the land-owning farmers. As a result, the amount of furniture doubled in Swedish homes between 1740 and 1860, especially the number of chairs, sofas and tables for social interaction.30 Auctions held at manor houses differed markedly from the others, as the goods sold were of higher quality and more expensive. Unsurprisingly then, the total value of goods sold at these auctions was also much higher. In manor house auctions, about 15 per cent of the goods sold consisted of furniture. Apart from auctions held in cases of financial difficulty, auctions were also used to get rid of unfashionable furniture in preparation for major refurbishments. Moreover, despite their irregular occurrence, these auctions remained an important mechanism through which the nobility and gentry both acquired and divested goods (see Table 10.6). These groups often bought the more expensive items, which circulated between homes.31 In some cases, furniture and other objects were bought by relatives for sentimental family reasons, in order to retain property within the family or to maintain family status. However, not all people of rank had vast fortunes and for them as for many others auctions made it possible to obtain the kind of furniture that would fit with the lifestyle aspired to, if not always affordable straight away.

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Sales by nobles were not only important for people of the same class wishing to acquire a certain object, but also for the lower classes. Peasants were the largest single group at the manor house auctions studied here, making up 40 per cent of the buyers (see Table 10.4). In addition, burghers and civil servants living in the countryside bought goods; although, as in other types of auctions, the landless increased their percentage in the nineteenth century. In 1765, the owner of Höja Manor, Count Carl Gustaf Spens, held a sale to get rid of unfashionable furniture and other items. The count was a wealthy man, who did not particularly need the money, but who used the auction as a means to get rid of old furniture and make room for new. He was at that time 24 years old and had just returned from his studies at Uppsala University to claim the estate. The destiny of his belongings tells us much about the demand for furniture in rural communities. At the auction, for instance, there were three pairs of late-baroque gueridons for sale. Two pairs were sold to nearby farmers, Jan Ersson and Mats Ersson, while the third and most expensive pair was sold to the local magistrate Dahlman. Some of the most expensive, albeit unfashionable, furniture was sold to peasants. During the nineteenth century, the economic and social position of Swedish peasants underwent a dramatic change. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, only one-third of farmed land was owned by peasants, while they farmed about 85 per cent. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the amount of land owned by peasants had almost doubled. This went hand in hand with increased political interest and influence, especially after 1886, when the election process to the parliament was changed in a manner which favoured the ownership of land. At the same time, the furnishing standard of peasants changed and improved to reflect their new wealth and position. From formerly being dominated by fixed furniture, peasants increasingly started to furnish their homes with free-standing furniture which was predominately acquired second-hand at auctions. A reflection of these changes can be seen in the purchasing patterns of certain individuals at the auction of Carl Gustaf Spens’s belongings. The farmer and miller Norberg was a major spender. He bought an imperial bed, covered by blue wool damask and silk cords and a red velvet couch adorned with gold damask. These two objects were sold at 100 daler kopparmynt each, which at that time equalled two and a half monthly wages for a skilled labourer.32 For many millers, the eighteenth century was a prosperous time, and many of them gained wealth and had social ambitions manifested in such things as sending their sons to universities.

212 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

It is highly likely that Norberg was one of them, aiming at a higher social standing and buying two highly impressive objects to be placed in the main room, perhaps to amaze his neighbours. The farmers could make use of their increased wealth, compared to 50 years earlier, and adorn their houses and cottages with objects that previously had belonged to wealthier classes. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, there was little to separate the furnishing of burgher and peasant homes, given the same wealth.33 The disappearance of peasant society caused many burghers, gentry and scholars to despair. The Swedish peasant society was widely romanticized at the end of the nineteenth century and actions to save a Swedish culture thought to be disappearing were initialized, leading to the inauguration of the Skansen open air museum of Swedish heritage in 1891 and the Nordiska museum for Swedish traditions, whose collections were started in 1872. Paradoxically, the lust for novelties among the peasants, which led them to create new ideals for their living – ideals which became affordable through the second-hand consumption of burgher furniture – caused the burghers to acquire second-hand the old peasant furniture and place it in museums.

Women and men at the auctions Vickery shows from account books from eighteenth-century England that, while the exact pattern differed between couples, there was a gendered division in consumption responsibilities within the household.34 Husbands were responsible for major refurbishments and expenses for furniture were kept in their accounts; women bought smaller items or individual pieces. Significantly, the fact that women in many countries, including Sweden, were not legal entities of their own did not hinder them from partaking in economic activities, even if it did restrict them to a certain extent.35 The auctions were an arena for both men and women (Table 10.7). While they were not legal entities of their own, women (including widows, spinsters and wives) attended and were active at the auctions. Sometimes the wives were alone and sometimes they came with their husbands. There are cases when both the husband and wife bought lots at the auctions. In the eighteenth century, many burgher women bought furniture, comprising 50 per cent of burghers and civil servants making purchases in Stockholm and 25 per cent in Enköping. The percentage did diminish during the period, to 8 per cent of all burgher buyers of furniture in Stockholm in 1870, their place being taken by

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Table 10.7 Women as a proportion of all furniture buyers in each social group in Stockholm, Enköping and the Uppland region (countryside) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Status of seller

Year

Percentage women in each group Persons of rank

Burghers & civil servants

Peasants

Landless

1781

0

68

0

0

1870

0

16

0

46

1760

0

25

0

50

1810

4

10

0

26

1870

0

48

8

0

1810 1870

0 0

15 100

0 33

0 0

1822 1869 1825

0 0 0

24 67 0

2 0 0

5 0 0

1869

0

73

0

0

1776 1843 1869 1887

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 0 11 6

Stockholm Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants Enköping Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants Landless Landless Countryside Persons of rank Persons of rank Burghers & civil servants Burghers & civil servants Peasants Peasants Peasants Peasants Source: See Table 10.3.

landless women. In 1870, women made up almost 50 per cent of all furniture purchases made by landless people. Many of them were working women and widows who had their own households to furnish. For example, the maid Anna Jansson bought a couch sold by the merchant Zetterström in 1870. She is one of the many wage labourers who, if they had been born 100 years earlier, would not have had a room of their own in which to put furniture, but would have lodged with her mistress, and who made up this new class of auction buyers.

214 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

Their legal limitations may have restricted women in many senses, but it is clear that they did consume at the auctions. Nevertheless, while Ponsonby has demonstrated that English women gained increasing responsibility for the home, buying furniture was not a specifically female pursuit, either in England or in Sweden. Vickery has shown that, amongst the minor gentry at least, it was men that bought large objects for the home, while women purchased smaller or cheaper pieces.36 From the auction records it is clear that women bought significant amounts of furniture at the auctions, but they did not predominate. Indeed, their purchases of furniture were proportionate to their overall spending at auctions, suggesting that they were not peculiarly responsible for furnishing the house.

Conclusions Auctions formed an important part of Swedish public life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; important enough to be announced during church services. The fact that this custom ceased in the cities in the nineteenth century, while remaining in place in the countryside, may indicate that the social importance of the auction declined, at least among the more influential in society. This observation is also supported when studying the buyers of furniture in Swedish auctions, who in the eighteenth century were mostly burghers, and to some extent the nobility and gentry. As in other places, auctions of second-hand goods were gradually abandoned by the wealthier classes (especially in Stockholm), who presumably turned to new goods instead. Their place in the auctions was taken by new social groups, such as the landless, but auctions remained an important source of furniture throughout the nineteenth century. While Nenadic and Lemire have claimed that the decline of auctions began in the early nineteenth century, in Sweden this change came much later: well into the twentieth century.37 Lots became cheaper on average, but the number of auctions increased, as did the number of items sold and the number of people who bought them. Thus, the economic importance of auctions remained considerable and may even have increased. Although their cultural and social significance may have declined, much depends on which social group is considered: they became less important for the wealthy, but more important for the poor. This does not mean that the effects were alike for all individuals in a particular group. As we have shown, the importance of auctions – be it economic, social or cultural – depended very much on the individual. Even if

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Sweden became wealthier and more industrialized from the middle of the nineteenth century, auctions remained an attractive way to obtain otherwise scarce or expensive goods. The scarcity of goods was probably a result of the closely regulated market for manufacturing and retailing that existed before new laws on the freedom of trade and business were introduced in 1864. Even after this date, it took a long time to establish new markets for both manufacturing and retail, not least because Sweden was large and sparsely populated. Until such markets were established at the turn of the twentieth century or even later, a well-functioning market for second-hand goods in the form of auctions remained an important way of obtaining consumer goods. Furniture at the auctions largely circulated horizontally or moved down the social scale. Apart from an emerging interest in ‘peasant’ furniture as antiques towards the end of the nineteenth century, people of rank hardly ever bought anything not sold by others of a similar standing and so were infrequent buyers, except at manor house auctions. Here, they often purchased family items, bought for sentimental reasons or – since not all people of rank were wealthy – because it was a way for those of lesser means to access socially suitable, high quality furniture at a reasonable price. This suggests that notions of novelty and modernity were less important in Sweden than elsewhere – a point underlined by the fact that some people of rank and many burghers bought unfashionable second-hand furniture instead of new objects throughout the nineteenth century. However, the fact that many Swedes, because of financial restrictions, were dependent on secondhand furniture to make a respectable home meant that novelty worked as a divider not only between social groups, but also within the groups. Since new objects were unavailable for many Swedes of higher social standing and auctions made it possible for them to acquire ‘appropriate’ furniture, a key indicator of comparative wealth was the ability to buy new furniture. Thus, novel objects meant higher status. When new goods became cheap enough to be affordable for all, secondhand furniture was transformed into antique furniture and became more desirable for some groups in society as a way to distinguish themselves. The auction thus went from being an event for everyone, mainly out of necessity, to an exclusive affair for those with money and knowledge. The increase in the number of households in Sweden, created by the increase of landless people and changing housing patterns for servants, meant that those people, who in earlier times would not have had their own home, now needed furniture. This development went hand

216 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods

in hand with a general increase in consumption, and from the middle of the nineteenth century, also in general wealth. For the landless, the auction served as a means of fulfilling their demand for furniture. When social life, as shown by Ponsonby, became more domestically oriented in the nineteenth century,38 there was an increased demand for ‘social’ furniture, such as chairs and tables, among all groups studied. In spite of the spreading notion of the domestic environment as a field for women, furniture buying at the auctions was not a specifically female pursuit. For those with social ambitions, such as the miller Norberg, the auctions meant access to furniture previously not available to their socio-economic group; furniture which was highly desirable, even if it had gone out of fashion among higher status consumers. As Edwards claims, furniture could be used to gain access to status and patina, and, in some cases, purchases could reflect the attempt to buy into another’s life, in the manner described by Wall.39 The spectacular bed bought by Norberg should probably be viewed as such an object. In a sense, we could also view all the landless people buying expensive items at auctions as creating their own fashion in furniture, since the objects were new and remarkable in that particular socio-economic context. In that respect, they fulfilled a desire for novelties. We could argue, therefore, that the auction served a dual purpose, depending on social standing. For those of high standing, but less money, the auction meant a means of preserving status, albeit at the same time sacrificing ambitions for modernity and novelty. For those of lesser social standing, but with money and dreams of social mobility, the auction meant a way of achieving status and feeding ambitions for modernity and novelty, since both modernity and novelty depend to a high degree on their social context.

Notes 1. The authors would like to thank the editors, the anonymous commentators, participants in the ESSHC 2008 session, the Swedish network for trade and retail history, Gudrun Andersson and Klas Nyberg; K. Lilja, S. Murhem and G. Ulväng (2009) ‘The indispensable market. Auctions in Sweden in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, in B. Blondé, N. Coquery, J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds) Fashioning Old and New. Changing Consumer Preferences in Europe (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 185–202. 2. B. Lemire (1988) ‘Consumerism in pre-industrial and early industrial England: the trade in second-hand clothes’, Journal of British Studies, 27(1), pp. 1–24. 3. S. Nenadic (1994), ‘Middle-rank consumers and domestic culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1720–1840’, Past and Present, 145(1), p. 125.

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4. C. Edwards (2009) ‘Perspectives on the retailing and acquisition of new and old furniture’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Fashioning Old and New, pp. 54–55. 5. Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers’, p. 138. 6. Ibid., p. 128. 7. Edwards, ‘Retailing and acquisition’, pp. 54–55. 8. M. Ponsonby (2007) Stories from Home. English Domestic Interiors 1750–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. 3. 9. A. Vickery (2006) ‘His and hers: gender, consumption and household accounting in eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present, Supplement (vol. 1), pp. 12–38; D. Cohen (2006) Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), pp. 91–92. 10. F. Trentmann (2004) ‘New historical perspectives on consumption’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39(3), p. 381. 11. P. Hallén (2009) Överflöd eller livets nödtorft. Materiell levnadsstandard i Sverige jämfört med Frankrike, Kanada och Storbritannien (Gothenburg: Preindustrial Research Group), pp. 161–170. 12. L. Magnusson (1997) Sveriges ekonomiska historia (Stockholm: Tiden), p. 309. 13. Hallén (2009) Överflöd eller livets nödtorft. 14. J. De Vries (1993) ‘Between purchasing power and the world of goods: understanding the household economy in early modern Europe’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds) Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge), pp. 107, 177; M. Berg (2002) ‘From imitation to invention: creating commodities in eighteenth-century Britain’, Economic History Review, 55(1), p. 3. 15. G. Ulväng (2004) Hus och gård i förändring. Uppländska herrgårdar, boställen och bondgårdar under 1700- och 1800-talens agrara revolution (Hedemora: Gidlunds förlag). 16. Å. Lundell (1974) Auktionsverket 1674–1974 (Stockholm: AB Stockholms auktionsverk); C. M. Kjellberg (1905) Uppland 1–2. Skildring af land och folk (Uppsala: Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet). 17. This reflects transitions taking place elsewhere. See Chapter 2 by Sara Pennell and Chapter 9 by Rosie MacArthur and Jon Stobart in this volume. 18. As stated in the records of the Stockholm Auction House (1781, 1870) and the Enköping Auction House (1760, 1870), Nordiska Museet’s questionnaires from the nineteenth century and the following newspapers: Dagligt Allehanda, Stockholmsposten, Stockholms Dagblad and Enköpings Veckoblad. 19. For details, see Lilja et al., ‘The indispensable market’, pp. 187–189. 20. To determine the economic importance of the auctions, we here discuss all lots sold, not just lots of furniture. We only include auctions of household goods, not those of real estate, bond, books or other such specialized goods. 21. The estimates are made from the notations made by the notaries, which means that we may sometimes have underestimated the numbers when large lots of goods such as handkerchiefs or buttons were sold. They have not been included in the figures. 22. Lemire, ‘Consumerism in pre-industrial and early industrial England’; Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers’. See also I. Van Damme (2009) ‘The lure of the new: urban retailing in the surroundings of Antwerp furniture’, in Blondé et al. (eds) Fashioning Old and New, pp. 108–111. 23. See S. Carlsson (1949) Ståndssamhälle och ståndspersoner 1700–1865. Studier rörande det svenska ståndssamhällets upplösning (Lund: Gleerup); S. Carlsson

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24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

(1968) Yrken och samhällsgrupper. Den sociala omgrupperingen i Sverige efter 1866 (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell); H. Norman (1974) Från bergslagen till Nordamerika. Studier i migrationsmönster, social rörlighet, och demografisk struktur med utgångspunkt från Örebro län 1851–1915 (Uppsala: Studia Historica Upsaliensia). Sellers, as well as buyers, have been identified from their titles. The individuals are divided into four groups, persons of rank, that is, officers and landed proprietors or gentry, burghers and civil servants, that is, merchants, craftsmen and civil servants living in the city, peasants, that is, people living in the countryside with their own or leased land, and landless, meaning people without property. There are also people we have not yet been able to identify, without a title or paying cash. They have been classified as others. Most likely they were landless. There are still some problems with the material. We know that some of the sellers were merchants, and not private individuals, but that does not compromise our results. More troublesome is that we do not know for sure that the buyers really bought the items for themselves. While buying by proxy was always noted, there is always the possibility that objects were bought for reselling or for furnishing other rooms than those inhabited by the family, for instance, for lodgers. While we have tried to estimate the number of ‘professional’ buyers, and have found them to be rather few, we have no way of knowing where the furniture ended up. It seems unlikely, though, that the more expensive pieces of furniture were intended for lodgers’ rooms. Edwards, ‘Retailing and acquisition’, p. 56. See N. Gregson and L. Crewe (2003) Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg) for a discussion of such motivations in a late twentieth-century context; and Chapter 5 in this volume by Clive Edwards and Margaret Ponsonby for a nineteenth-century comparison. C. Wall (1997) ‘The English auction: narratives of dismantling’, EighteenthCentury Studies, 31(1), pp. 8–10. Van Damme, ‘The lure of the new’, pp. 108–111. Wall, ‘The English auction’; and Chapter 9 in this volume by MacArthur and Stobart. Ulväng, Hus och gård i förändring. There are parallels here to the ways in which goods moved between the houses of colonial administrators in India – see Chapter 6 in this volume by Robin Jones. L. Jörberg (1972) A History of Prices in Sweden 1732–1914 (Lund: Gleerup), p. 710. Fifty years later, Count Spens went bankrupt and a new auction was held: 230 pieces of furniture were sold, of which one-seventh went to local persons of rank, one-fifth to civil servants, two-fifths to peasants and one-fifth to landless buyers. The average value of the furniture bought by persons of rank, civil servants and peasants was about the same, but was double that of furniture bought by the landless. Vickery, ‘His and hers’. See, for instance, C. Shammas (1990) The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press); M. Finn (1996) ‘Women,

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36. 37.

38. 39.

219

consumption and coverture in England, c. 1760–1860’, Historical Journal, 39(6), pp. 703–722. Ponsonby, Stories from Home, p. 3; Vickery, ‘His and hers’. Lemire, ‘Consumerism in pre-industrial and early industrial England’; Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers’. See also Van Damme, ‘The lure of the new’, pp. 108–111. Ponsonby, Stories from Home, p. 3. Wall, ‘The English auction’; Edwards, ‘Retailing and acquisition’, pp. 54–55.

11 ‘Consuming Identities’: Patterns of Consumption at Three Eighteenth-century Cape Auctions Tracey Randle

Introduction By the turn of the eighteenth century the Cape Colony of the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or Dutch East India Company) was still dependent on its role as a stopover for ships to and from the economically pivotal spice entrepôts of the East. At the same time it was also a well-established settlement in its own right with a burgeoning free and enslaved population. Slave, settler, Free Black,1 Company employee, indigenous labourer, all had their role to play in society and in the formation of class and group identities.2 Through investigating the material objects that these groups purchased, greater insight can be gained into the nature of their constructed identities. One avenue open for such investigation is the world of estate auctions. By conducting a prosopography of the buyers and sellers at a small sample of Cape auctions in the eighteenth century, I seek to understand the apparent connection between group identities and the material goods they publicly purchased.3 By conducting a prosopography of auction buyers, their social and kinship webs between each other and the deceased, as well as the economic details of their lives, the purchasing patterns of these consumers within early eighteenth-century Cape society are revealed. More than this, how these purchasing patterns correlate with constructions of identity within this hierarchical colonial society can be observed. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries can especially be seen as a time of new identity construction for the Cape Free Burgher population. As Brink argues in her work on material culture at the 220

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Cape during this period, land ownership had effectively shifted the perceived status of former VOC employees who were granted relatively large parcels of land, a privilege normally the sole preserve of the aristocracy and clergy of Europe, even if the Company itself was determined not to recognize this change in status.4 While the VOC consistently tried to reign in the autonomy of Free Burghers, this new land-owning class was determined to assert their gentrified status and identity both through overt action and symbolic discourse.5 This discourse does not refer solely to the realm of written language, but as Brink argues, to ‘brick and stone, porcelain and cloth, spaces and shapes’.6 Brink explores the notion that the Free Burgher farm dwellings were indicative of their new constructed identity through its: growth and development, display of symmetrical order . . . [and gave] solid evidence of owners able to create and maintain order without VOC intervention, to act independently, to be capable of discernment, and therefore to command respect and to be treated as equals rather than as child-like obedient servants. The free burgher’s plaats, literally his place, stood in clear contrast to the inferior social ‘place’ designated him by the Company.7 In the same vein, what Free Burghers or colonists chose to consume in terms of the goods they purchased to furnish their households or bodies would be a reflection of their perceived and newly constructed social status and land-owning identity. Not that they had a wide variety of choices to make where the purchasing of goods was concerned. At the Cape, household auctions were critically important in an economy where free trade was highly limited and regulated by the VOC. Neither Burghers nor Company officials were permitted to openly run a wholesale or retail shop, as all public trade was strictly the monopoly of the Company. This does not mean that private trade was absent. In fact it would almost seem that illicit trading had a ubiquitous presence within almost all echelons of eighteenth-century Cape society. For example, Malan found evidence of an illegal tavern being run in the backroom of one Free Black and perhaps a smugglers den or fence for stolen goods in another.8 She also found colonists using their front rooms (voorkamers) to sell all manner of goods.9 Such practices were recognized by contemporary commentators. Otto Mentzel, who lived at the Cape in the mid eighteenth century, noted that private trade was largely ‘surreptitious, a variety of goods being kept in private houses, the nature of which varies considerably from time to time’.10 He argued

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that the Company was well aware of this illicit trade, and put up with it, simply because it was unable to keep up with the increasing needs of the burgeoning population.11 Certain goods, for example porcelain, were particularly reliant upon illicit trading,12 but the problem was endemic. As Malan explains, ‘everyone had the same limited commodities from which to choose, according to their cultural and/or financial restraints’.13 So, while historians have argued that during this period England witnessed an increased consumption of manufactured goods and clothing, Cape citizens were very much at the mercy of the import market and the internal circulation of goods within the colony. Was the Cape any less a modern society because the inhabitants primarily participated in the consumption of second-hand goods rather than new mass-produced goods? I argue that it is rather the social values that people attributed to goods in the Cape Colony that held meaning for these citizens, especially in terms of chattel and fabric goods. The problem for current historians is that, due to the illegal nature of these private shops, there are no surviving records or documents of what goods people purchased. While one can sometimes ascertain what goods might have been on offer when a probate inventory was drawn up, there is no way of tracing patterns of consumption for these illegal outlets. In contrast, the sale of second-hand goods at auctions was one of the few ‘legal’ means through which Cape citizens could participate in the world of commodities, and also perhaps one of the few ways we can try and understand such patterns of consumption in relation to the purchaser’s socio-economic position in society, and hopefully more than this to the construction of their own outward identities they hoped to express through the items they purchased. Many sales were involuntary: the product of insolvency or debt, or after deceased estates were inventoried and valued in order that the heirs could receive their rightful portion of their inheritance in accordance with Roman Dutch law. The Orphan Chamber oversaw the execution of these estates and sales, often in order to protect the interest of minors. There were also more informal, voluntary sales that were held to assist members of the community in disposing of their houses, land or moveable property and goods. When auctions occurred, private household goods came on the market in a very public way, with everything from bed linen to teaspoons being auctioned. Such events comprised not merely businesses and economic transactions, they were often a time of social gathering of the deceased person’s kin and community. Even in outlying frontier districts such as the Cedarberg, auctions were occasions where family, neighbours, company

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officials and farmers from the surrounding region would congregate as purchasers of goods, but also probably just for the social occasion of it all.14 In this chapter, therefore, I aim to show their importance not only to the circulation of goods, but also to the conceptualization and propagation of social status. Since ‘identity constitutes the form of presentation of the actor, both in internal and external relationships’, the act of purchasing goods at an auction can be seen as a form of public identity presentation.15 Both what these purchased goods were ultimately used for (that is, displayed within the household or displayed upon the body) and what was actually publicly purchased in the presence of others would have been significant in terms of asserting one’s wished for identity and status. The importance of these kinds of public performances would perhaps have been a result of the VOC’s obsession with public display of rank and hierarchy as a way of enforcing its power in the territories it claimed.16 Such hierarchies have been documented to play themselves out in terms of church seating arrangements, so it is perhaps no wonder that Free Burghers sought to flout whatever status the company tried to impose on them by any means possible, even if it be more symbolic through the public purchasing of slaves and fabric goods – some of the most expensive commodities within the colony that attested to status and wealth. As Brink has noted, ‘slaves could enhance the status image of their owners enormously, even by their mere presence, for example, in family portraits and other portrayals of their owners’.17 Similarly, due to the introduction of sumptuary laws, dress and the wearing of certain fabrics clearly demarked a person’s social status within the community.

Case studies This chapter focuses on the 1729 auction of the estate of the deceased Barbera Thérèse de Savoije,18 but I have also looked at comparisons with, and connections to, the estate auctions of two other women, Margaretha Guildenhuijs19 in 1728 and Anna de Koning20 in 1734. These estates represent a fairly elite section of Cape society, but the buyers present at the auctions seem to include a large cross-section of free society at the Cape. By delving into the social and economic background of not only these three women, but all the buyers at their auctions, it is possible to infer purchasing patterns for various groups or classes of society at the Cape. I specifically construct prosopographies of buyers at these deceased estate auctions as a method in understanding people’s purchasing choices. Through assessing their social connections and economic

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status, I am able to link the purchasing of auction items with perceived group identities for these select members of Cape society. Firstly, I explore the role of women as auction buyers and how their purchasing power might have been mediated in the early eighteenth century. It is clear that both social connection and economic roles influenced which buyers were present at these auctions, and also what they purchased. One of the ‘goods’ I focus on is on the role of cloth as a luxury item, and how this was ‘valued’ by all manner of buyers and classes in the construction of status and identity. Wealthy elites in the form of auction administrators and wine and meat pachters could be found purchasing second-hand goods alongside Free Black citizens. The 1731 town census shows there were 3157 people living at the Cape: 959 Company employees, 585 Free Burghers and 1333 Company and Private slaves.21 While the deceased estates of these three women represent just a tiny segment of the Cape’s population, and one that was restricted to the households of freepersons (as slaves could not own property), these auctions represent moments in time where a Cape community came together at what would have been some of the most elite and extensive auctions of the eighteenth century. Despite this, these auctions attracted a wide variety of citizens to attend, from those who would have been considered starting out in life, those with debts, to well-to-do Free Blacks. De Savoije was a wealthy widow who had owned two properties in Table Valley (from which she ran a bakery), a house in the town and a farm at the foot of Devil’s Peak.22 Her possessions were so numerous that it took four days to appraise her properties in Table Valley and a further day to inventory her possessions lying at the farm called Rietfontain in the ‘Piquet Berg’ region belonging to her son, Ernst Christiaan Elers.23 The auctioning of her goods took place over 21, 22 and 23 February 1729, realizing a total of 6992:3 Rixdollars (Rds) or over 20,000 Cape Florins (f ).24 The total value of her estate came to f 56,186:7:8. An astounding 132 different people purchased goods from this auction: just over a tenth of all free adults in the Colony. Similarly De Koning’s auction witnessed 173 actual auction buyers (not including general participants or observers present), representing one of the most prestigious auctions of that decade. De Koning’s estate included four houses in Table Valley, the world-renowned wine estate Groot Constantia, and two properties situated in the Piquet Berg.25 Margaretha Guidenhuijs’s estate did not match De Koning’s in scale, however it was extensive, consisting of three houses and one farm, and the numerous possessions contained within.26

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Buyers at the auctions Overwhelmingly the purchasers at these auctions were men. Only 12 per cent of the purchasers at De Savoije’s 1729 auction were women,27 and at least four of these were directly related to her (Table 11.1). Similarly at Anna de Koning’s auction five years later, just under 10 per cent of the purchasers were women and at least five were directly related to her. Only 7 per cent of the auction buyers at Margaretha Gildenhuijs’s auction in 1727 were women. This does not mean that women were not present nor engaging actively in auctions. Certainly, on a social level, the presence of women was an enduring tradition. Samuel Hudson, writing in the early nineteenth century, explained that ‘the principal amusement of the Ladies of the Cape is attending these Auctions and [they] will sit mixed up among a variety of frowsy smells . . . for 3 or 4 hours listening to the low and not infrequent obscene Jokes of the Auctioneer whose chief object is to keep his Audience in good humour’.28 The purchasing power of women was possibly mediated through their husbands. Clues to the purchasing procedure at Cape auctions can be found in the 1683 auction records of the liquidated estate of the Free Black, Anthonij Jansz van Bengale.29 There are two sets of records; the first a neatly written list of goods that each buyer purchased, with the amount owing. Attached to this is another rougher list which is the actual auction record, following the sequence in which the goods were sold.30 There was an interesting discrepancy between the two lists. In the rougher item by item list, it was recorded that Oelof Berg purchased ‘1 p:w borduurde muijlen,31 2 sluijers’ and Juffrouw Berg: ‘2 goude ooringetjes’ and a ‘borate samaer’,32 whereas in the neater list organized

Table 11.1

Buyers at case study auctions, by gender

Estate Auctions

Buyers Total number

Guildenhuis 1727 De Savoije 1729 De Koning 1734

85 132 173

Men

Women

% Women

79 116 158

6 16 16

7 12.1 9.2

Source: Western Cape Archives Service (Hereafter CA) MOOC 10/3 No. 81 Vendurol of Barbara Theresia de Savoije 1729; MOOC 10/3 Nos 79 and 80 Vendurol of Margaretha Gildenhuijs 1728; MOOC 10/4 Nos 125, 126 and 127 Vendurol of Anna de Koning 1734.

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according to buyer all of these items are recorded as being purchased by Oelof Bergh (also known as Olof Bergh) himself with no mention of his wife, Juffrouw Berg. Women were, indeed, participants and bidders at auctions, even if it was their husbands who controlled the family finances. Women were treated legally and cognitively different to men in eighteenth-century Cape settler society even though inheritance was equal and participle under Roman Dutch law.33 Despite such laws, women played powerful economic roles within communities and households. As widows, women could amass huge properties and many possessions from their share of their deceased husband’s estate, and they often participated in the establishing and running of coffee and beer houses, shops, lodging houses and brothels.34 In fact, Mentzel considered trade to be an important part of the activities of Cape women, and that the ‘disposal of the purchases rest[ed] largely with the wives; the burghers usually practice a definite and regular craft such as that of blacksmith, joiner, shoemaker, tailor . . . while their wives often earn more than they by means of trading’.35 It is possible, then, that men were the official purchasers of goods at auctions, while women were the selectors, users and disposers of items acquired. Most of the women buyers at the three auctions studied were widows, unmarried women or direct heirs of the estate. At both De Savoije’s auction in 1729 and De Koning’s auction in 1734, women who were direct heirs to the estate had different purchasing patterns to those that were not. De Savoije’s daughter, Christina Elers, spent vast sums on kitchen and baking items, probably to keep her mother’s bakery afloat.36 However, just over one-third of the total went on two slaves. This fits in with the spending patterns of Anna de Koning’s daughter, Juffrouw Aldersz (also known as Apolliana Africana Bergh), who spent almost 770 Rds at her mother’s estate auction, 65 per cent of which went on three slaves. Aldersz also spent nearly 20 per cent of her money on four horses. This is in contrast to the lesser amounts of money spent by other women present at the auction, and it would seem that the only time a woman was recorded as spending large sums of money was if she was a direct heir of the estate. In fact, many of the buyers present at all three auctions were directly related to the deceased.37 At De Savoije’s auction were her two adult children,38 her sister Marguerite Thérèse de Savoije, the husbands of her numerous nieces and many others connected through blood or family ties. After pachter Melt van der Spuij,39 who was no obvious relation, the next largest purchasers of goods at her deceased estate were daughter and son, Christina and Ernst Christiaan Elers. Ernst spent nearly 600

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Rds, the largest portion of which went on livestock and slaves. Ernst spent 60 per cent of his money on four slave boys and 15 per cent on livestock – a spending pattern which fits well with Shell’s assertion that the largest transfer of slaves at Cape auctions often occurred between the closest family members of the deceased.40 In fact, of the 20 slaves auctioned, eight were purchased directly by De Savoije’s children and one by her nephew, Philip Snijman.41 The rest were purchased entirely by men who held pachts, but not her direct family members (although often there were some sort of social ties in one way or another). Indeed, there were complex ties of bondage and family within Cape society. Slave women were especially connected to the household due to their status as wet nurses or nannies to the children of the families for whom they laboured.42 At her mother’s auction Aldersz purchased a number of fabric and furniture items such as an embroidered bedspread, pieces of chintz fabric, small table cloths, a blanket, eight porcelain plates and a little cabinet with copper mounting. She also purchased an array of goods that does not fit with the regular spending patterns of other women present at these auctions: a chest with carpenter’s tools, a carpenter’s bench, five planks, eight ‘winkel’ hooks and a ‘pedra de porke’. By further investigating her background, Aldersz’s purchases start to make sense. Juffrouw Aldersz was the wife of Jan Aldersz, a bookkeeper and salesman in the Company’s service, meaning that he probably owned a store or shop of his own. According to Hudson, ‘many persons who attend these auctions have small Shops which from having no Capital they gradually furnish by these means and sometimes are very fortunate in their endeavours’.43 At least three buyers present at De Savoije’s auction were recorded as having a shop (een winkeltje) and the wives of these shop owners would have had an integral part to play in the running of such stores, from the point of purchasing the goods at auction to the sale of goods from their households. The widow of Coenraad Feijt also made some exceptional purchases at the 1728 Gildenhuijs auction. She was the only woman at all three auctions who purchased goods relating to the wine trade and industry, purchasing two leaguers of white wine and a cellaret with bottles. Her choices make sense when looking at her deceased husband’s occupation: Coenraad Feijt was a wine pachter for Cape malt beer in 1726 and 1727. Even after his death, it appears that Feijt’s widow continued her husband’s business – a common practice in the Cape, with many of the requests sent to the Council of Policy from fishermen or butchers including the signatures of widowed women whose husbands had been involved in that trade during their lifetime.44

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Many of the people present at the auctions were connected to the deceased by occupation, rather than family ties. There were at least four bakers present at the auction of De Savoije’s household goods and, predictably, much of what they purchased pertained to the abundant amount of baking equipment and ingredients on offer. Hendrik de Vries was not only a baker, but a meat pachter. Aside from buying two slaves, his money was spent entirely on baking and kitchen goods: 18 canvas bags filled with wheat; a vat with butter; a copper frying pan; wooden and metal cooking utensils; ‘1 partij backers gereetschap’; a pot to extinguish live coals as well as five copere,45 a large copper kettle and a hamper of 17 bars of soap. Another baker, Hermanus Kriel, purchased a number of baking goods despite being known as having many debts.46

‘Clothes that make the man’ Interestingly Kriel spent just over a third of his money on fabrics: a stuk soesje (a cotton and silk cloth from India), fine guinees and pieces of unbleached linen, red linen and two pieces of canvas. Thus men of all strata, even those up to their ears in debt bought clothes and fabrics at auctions. For women, it was their main item of purchase (Table 11.2). Christina Elers spent 80 Rds on rolls of taffeta, chintz, blue guinees, pieces of drougan,47 tutuorijnse chintz and silk ribbon as well as ten empty canvas sacks. Nearly 70 per cent of the women at De Savoije’s auction purchased fabric goods and 53 per cent of their purchases in total were of fabrics. Juffrouw de Koning bought luxury material items: a roll of taffeta, 12 packets of raw yarn or thread, a little box with grooved edges and a little bunch of false pearls. Rather more modestly, Nonje Muller and Nonje Meijboom spent all their money on pieces of fustian, silk ribbon, fine and raw yarn or thread, and wide cambric. Similarly, at Anna de Koning’s auction five years later, over 60 per cent of the women purchasers spent the majority of their money on fabric goods: chintz, diemet, strengthened pelang, red linen, bethielles, estinien, celas, zijl doek,48 table cloths and handkerchiefs. It is perhaps noteworthy that the focus of these women’s fabric purchases was almost solely on rolls of fabric. While clothing was sold at these auctions, cloth maintained a strong dominance in terms of high prices – perhaps because it was possible to thus make something ‘new’ in a society where so much of what was consumed was second-hand. Certainly many Cape households included slave girls who could knit or sew – skills that were valued, especially in rural regions where access to local markets was more limited.

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Table 11.2 Percentage spent on fabric goods by a sample of women at the De Savoije auction Female purchasers at De Savoije Auction 1729 Christina Elers Marguerite Thérèse de Savoije Juffrouw1 Slotsboo Juffrouw van Brakel Beatrix Verweij Juffrouw de Koning Juffrouw Admiraals Juffrouw Robberts Juffrouw Baarsenurg Nonje2 Moller

Percentage of total spending on fabric goods 17.4 21.9 0 17.7 100 83.2 68.3 80.9 86.6 49

Notes: 1. ‘Juffrouw’ is derived from the contraction of ‘jonkvrouw’, the form of address for a noble lady. At the Cape, however, it was used more generally by settlers for women with status in the society. See N. Worden and G. Groenewald (eds), Trials of Slavery: Selected Documents Concerning Slaves from the Criminal Records of the Council of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope, 1705–1794 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society Publication), p. 621. 2. Ibid. The term ‘Nonje’ was used to accompany a woman’s maiden name. Source: CA MOOC 10/3 No. 81 (1729).

Mentzel wrote of the Colony in the late eighteenth century; ‘No one can do without shoemakers and tailors, and I doubt whether there is another town in the whole world which has so many tailors in proportion to its population as the town at the Cape.’49 The tailor, Pieter Venter, was present at De Savoije’s auction, purchasing a roll of taffeta and numerous pieces of canvas. Fabrics were also available from the Company, with one ordinary member of the Council of Policy being a ‘shop-keeper’ who sold a range of cloth, including India cottons.50 However, fabric and material goods sold at estate auctions probably undercut the Company’s prices, making attending an auction a profitable endeavour for women and Company elites alike. Locally manufactured articles were among the most expensive goods available at the Cape. Mentzel explains that ox-wagons could reach a price as high as 192 Dutch Gulden (or 80 Rds). Furthermore, ‘a very inferior shoe, the uppers of sheepskin and the soles of poor quality costs a whole dukaton, and lasts no more than 4 to 5 weeks. A respectable suit of clothes, coat, sleeved-doublet, and breeches complete, will involve an expenditure of 7 Rds. for the making alone. All other locally made articles are proportionately dear.’51 With its restricted economy dependent

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often on the sale of goods from passing ships, the value of goods at the Cape was known to fluctuate due to an exacerbated scenario of supply and demand. Certainly the high cost of fabric and clothes would have been a factor in the value attached to these items. However, it was the attached social value that really moulded their role as markers of social status within this Cape community. Ross has argued that clothing was used as a sign of social status and respectability at the VOC Cape.52 Sumptuary laws remained in place with, for instance, Free Black women ‘forbidden to wear coloured silk clothes, hooped skirts, fine lace or any other adornments on their caps or on their waved hair . . . they were thus exclusively to wear chintz or striped linen’.53 Status and respectability was woven into the very clothes a person wore. Only members of the High Government were allowed to wear clothing ‘embroidered with gold and silver thread, while only those one step lower in the hierarchy were allowed to wear gold or silver buttons’.54 There were further regulations about the wearing of velvet and jewels, and even how many slaves were allowed to follow you in the street: ‘Only the wives and widows of members of the High Government were allowed to parade through the streets followed by a train of three slaves.’55 Both clothing and the possession of slaves were clear markers of social status, with the double edge that fashion was a marker of freedom. At the Cape, slaves were forced to go barefoot, in a symbolic act of demeaning the status of chattels through their appearance.56 These rules and regulations had a purpose: ‘They [European settlers] dressed and lived in a way that was intended to impress if not awe the population into accepting their superior status.’57 The first principle of the VOC was the maintenance of law and order ‘using whatever psychological or physical measures might be needed’.58 Clothing and the display of status and identity was thus part of entrenching social order at the Cape, both for those who were free on those who were not. It is perhaps no wonder that even for slaves clothing and material goods would come to have particular significance. In 1718 the slave Doulat van Balij was found guilty of stealing cash, clothing and food from various farms in the Stellenbosch district.59 From one of the farms, Doulat stole ‘an old jacket and six skeins of yarn’.60 Fabric items held enough value for slaves that they were worthy of being stolen. In 1753 Neptunus van Bengalen broke into the Company’s slagthuijs near Simon’s Town and stole various amounts of coins and paper money along with a ‘black velvet jacket, a brown silk frock and a white shirt’.61 Receiving insufficient clothing from one’s master was often cause for

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complaint. Cina, a slave of farmer Arij van Wijk, ran away ‘because of getting no clothes nor tobacco, and continually being abused as an old dog by the wife and children’.62 For colonist, Free Black and slave alike, fabric and clothing possessions were an important part of the marking of one’s social status and position. As expensive items, with attached social status and value, fabrics were highly sought after at auctions. In fact, it was not only women who were purchasing these items in large quantities, but men as well. Aside from baker Harmanus Kriel who spent over 30 per cent of his money on fabric goods at De Savoije’s auction, 40 per cent of the money spent by the butcher Jonas van der Poel went on two pieces of unbleached linen and 12 packets of rough yarn. Even young, recently married men bought some: perhaps a piece of white or fine guineess, or a chintz bedspread. Free Blacks spent a great deal of their money at auctions on material goods. Pieter van Bengalen’s only purchase at Anna de Koning’s auction was four pieces of celassen, and fisherman Jan Verbeek spent 12 Rds on a roll of taffeta (half of the money he spent in total). By far and away, however, it was the wealthy elite government administrators who purchased the highest volume of luxury fabrics. Secretary to the Orphan Chamber, Jacob Lever’s most expensive purchase at De Savoije’s auction was a roll of taffeta. At De Koning’s auction in 1734, Lever spent 50 per cent of his money on pieces of twilled linen, moeris,63 muslin, chintz, fijn linnen and two embroidered Cabaaij(en).64 Similarly, Junior Merchant and member of the Orphan Chamber, Olof de Wet spent almost 30 per cent of his money at the auction of De Savoije on rolls of taffeta, floral damask and twilled linen as well as seven pairs of men’s stockings, one pair of red silk stockings and a wardrobe. Such purchases (and the wearing of ‘luxury’ clothing items which could so readily be translated into social status) might have been important even from an economic point of view, not least through the ways in which appearance was linked to reputation, honour and trust. And, as Groenewald has shown in his work on the alcohol pachters of Cape Town, honour and respectability was the basis for successful entrepreneurship in the Cape as elsewhere in the early modern world.65

Administrators of the estate Being a member of the Orphan Chamber meant that one had access to intimate knowledge of a deceased person’s estate; what was being put up for auction, and hence which auction was worth attending. At each of the auctions studied here, the Orphan Chamber administrators were

232 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods Table 11.3

Auction buyers: categories of buyers

Estate Auctions

Guildenhuis 1727 De Savoije 1729 De Koning 1734

Total number of buyers

Administrators of the estate %

Pachters %

85 132 173

2.3 3 2.3

5.8 9 3.5

Free Blacks %

1.1 4.5 1.1

Note: Free Blacks includes buyers considered to be ‘Fishermen’ by De La Fontaine. See L. Guelke, R. Shell and A. Whyte (1990) The De La Fontaine Report 30th January 1732 (Algemeen Rijksarchief: Opgaaf Project). Source: CA MOOC 10/3 No. 81 (1729); MOOC 10/3 Nos 79 and 80 (1728); MOOC 10/4 Nos 125, 126 and 127 (1734).

present not only in their official capacity as overseers of the proper running of these public sales, but also as purchasers themselves (Table 11.3). It has been suggested that members, such as the Secretary of the Orphan Chamber, might have ‘received preferential credit from the Commissary of Auctions’.66 Jacob Lever, for instance, was the bookkeeper and Secretary for the Orphan Chamber as well as being a merchant. This enabled him to profitably straddle two worlds at the same time, his official administrative ‘insider’ knowledge of estates being advantageous in his more private dealings of buying and selling. Lever appears in the vendurolle of the estates that he was administering on numerous occasions as a purchaser of goods. Lever made 23 purchases at De Savoije’s 1729 auction, ranging from expensive, luxury fabric goods to ten packs of playing cards, a teak bed with pillow and cushion, 30 beer glasses, a copper pork kettle, 12 porcelain basins, 39 iron harrow teeth and numerous plates, platters, bowls, beakers, buckets, pots and bottles. At the De Koning auction five years later, Lever made 21 purchases, of which half were luxury fabric items. By far and away, however, it was Olof de Wet who was the largest purchaser of auction goods. Like Lever, De Wet was Orphan Master and a Junior Merchant of the VOC. De Wet made 27 purchases at Barbara’s auction, over 30 per cent of which was related to luxury fabric goods. Orphan Masters Johannes Blankenburg and Frederik Russouw were similarly buyers at these auctions at the same time as being administrators of the estates. As Groenewald has noted, ‘in early modern Dutch cities there was a clear link between holding of public offices on the one hand, and the attainment of wealth and status on the other’.67 Significantly more money was spent by these officials at De Koning’s auction in 1734 than the previous auctions. This might relate to the

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status of De Koning herself. Anna de Koning was well known amongst the citizens of the Cape – as the daughter of freed slave Angela van Bengale (widow Basson) who herself died a wealthy property owner. Anna was also the wife of ensign Olof Bergh, who purchased the prestigious Constantia wine estate in 1716 from the Governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel.68 To attend and purchase goods from such an illustrious estate auction would have been attractive for Company official, Free Burgher and Free Black alike, not least as a public expression of their social status and connections. If auctions were places where social connections could be aired and made, and social status could be witnessed and perhaps even emulated, it would have been extremely important that men high up in the Company display their status and wealth through the purchasing of many luxury goods. With few other avenues open to barter and attain goods legally, purchasing goods at auction was both of economic and social necessity. Weatherill, among others, has warned against overstating the importance of emulation as a motivation for owning certain goods. At the same time, she does acknowledge that goods could be used to ‘emphasise positions in the community and to convey a desired image’, albeit in a subconscious way.69 To have been seen both at such a prestigious auction as De Koning’s and to publicly purchase luxury goods from an elite estate would certainly have conveyed an image of status and wealth to fellow participants. This might have been especially important for those whose livelihoods fell outside the realm of official government office. There is a world of difference in the role of auctions as public performance versus the buying of necessities from someone’s private shop or store from their house. Ross has argued that the most important social barrier was between burghers and high company officials; a distinction which might explain why it was so important for those most intent on social and economic mobility – the pachters – to attend and purchase goods at an auction and thus engage in the most public act of consumption.70

The Pachters The other major purchasers of luxury and expensive goods at these auctions were the pachters71 (see Table 11.3). In fact, the largest purchaser at De Savoije’s auction in terms of the monetary value of goods purchased was Melt van der Spuij, a pachter of brandy and Cape wine from 1722 to 1733. Van der Spuij separately purchased one of her Cape properties72 and spent nearly 800 Rds at her estate auction, presumably to retain

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production. Over 60 per cent was spent on livestock and 20 per cent on two slaves. Similarly, Jan Hendrik Hop, Jonas van der Poel, Pieter van der Heijde, Jacob van Bochem and Gijsbert La Febre were burgher or Company butchers or lessees of the meat pacht at some stage during their lifetimes. Aside from their roles as butcher contractors, many of these men also held official positions such as Heemraad, Burgher Lieutenant, Member of the Marriage Board or Church Elder. Elite positions in state and church went hand in hand with wealth and positions of economic power. Predictably, at De Savoije’s auction in 1729 the meat trader Jan Hendrik Hop bought 21 goats, and at De Koning’s auction 96 per cent of his purchases were of sheep and lambs. Often men were not just involved in one occupation, but diversified their economic activities in being not only butcher, but also a fisherman, wine lessee, lodging keeper and so on. Hop purchased six old fish vats with some salt at De Savoije’s auction, indicating that, like many others, he could have been involved in small-scale fishing. At Margaretha Gildenhuijs’s auction Hop did not purchase any livestock but he did buy goods related to his business: a vleijs vat along with a butter churn, little butter tubs as well as two sacks of salt and four little buckets – items that could be used in the pickling or preserving of meat and fish. Johannes Zacharias Bek was involved in butchery, but was also the pachter of Brandy, ‘Vaderlandse Bieren and Wijnen’, and Cape wine and spirits for Rondebosch and False Bay.73 Mentzel considered one of the most profitable businesses to be a licensed wine shop.74 Aside from the administrators of the estate, some of the largest purchasers of goods present at the auction of Barbara’s estate were the wine pachters. As expected, some of the goods that Johannes Zacharias Bek purchased reflected the various economic activities he was involved in. Thirty-six beer glasses, part of a stand for barrels, eight porcelain dishes and ten table cloths purchased by Bek at De Savoije’s auction can best be understood in light of his position as an owner of local ‘taps’ or drinking houses frequented by the public. The diversified economic practices of these pachters and their associated spending patterns were a direct emulation of Governor Simon van der Stel, and later his son Willem Adriaan van der Stel, who had numerous and varied (mostly illegal) economic pursuits.75 Even though the Governor and all other Company officials were legally forbidden from engaging in agricultural practices, such practices were commonplace. In 1700 Willem Adriaan van der Stel had been granted a 400 morgen estate called Vergelegen in the region of Hottentots Holland (present day Somerset West). He used ‘Company slaves and servants as if they

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were his own . . . [and] constructed extensive farm buildings, planted out 500, 000 vine stocks and tended over 18,000 sheep and 1000 cattle’.76 Other Company officials followed suit, and it was perhaps inevitable that elite members of Cape society would realize there was profitability in economic diversity, especially if this created a monopoly over certain sectors of the economy.

Free Blacks It was not only family, wealthy pachters and Company administrators who were present and purchasing goods at these community auctions. Modest purchases were made by Free Blacks,77 although they made up only a very small percentage of total buyers. Pieter van Bengalen bought five teapots for less than a rixdollar at De Savoije’s auction, but Jacobus Hendriksz seemed to have a bit more money at his disposal and spent 7:3 Rds on an empty cask. At De Koning’s auction Pieter van Bengalen bought four pieces of chelas (a bright red fine cotton), and Philip van Bouton purchased part of a rafter and pokers for 1 Rd. At Gildenhuijs’s auction in 1727 Hendriksz spent 25:1 Rds on a horse and 8:3 Rds on a rustbank. More striking were the purchases of the Free Black, Robbert Schot (van Bengalen). He spent nearly 40 Rds at De Savoije’s auction, with half going on a glass cabinet; and, at De Koning’s auction, he spent a further 45 Rds on four oxen and 43 Rds on various household sundries. Robbert Schot, Pieter van Bengalen and Jacobus Hendriksz were all slave and landed property owners.78 The majority of Free Blacks were too poor to buy property and lived in hired rooms.79 In the seventeenth century, however, some were ‘more well-to-do than many a Free Burgher’.80 On the basis of the late seventeenth-century estate inventories of two Free Blacks, Böeseken believed that ‘within one generation of being manumitted, the Freeblacks had begun to adopt the way of life which they had shared when they were slaves in the houses of the Free Burghers or the officials’.81 The inventories listed mirrors and paintings on the walls, numerous cups and saucers for entertaining, kitchen pots and pans, tables . . . the evidence of a colonial driven consumer life. Interestingly, Malan argues that the children of Free Black women might have moved up the social and economic scale more readily than those of Free Black men. This is especially true for Free Black women who married European colonists as they would often see their grandchildren prosper as colonists. A case in point is Anna de Koning, daughter of the freed slave Ansela van Bengal, who was readily accepted into the highest echelons of colonial society within one generation.

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At the time of his death in 1741, Robbert Schot owned two homesteads lying along the Liesbeek River and three houses and plots in the Tafelvalleij.82 Christiaan Cok, Cornelis ‘de wagenmaake’r, Jan Mulder ‘d’smitt’ and the widow Constant owed Schot money for house rent. His inventory of worldly possessions showed him to have been living comfortably within his ‘landlord’ status, evidenced by the eight slaves he owned by the time of his death, as well as several gold and silver items and quantities of expensive linen: bethilles, chits, damas and bandanoes as well as ivory combs.83 Similarly, the 1737 inventory of Jacobus Hendriksz’s widowed Free Black wife, Susanna van Boegies,84 shows that she owned a house and plot in Tafelvalleij and also had numerous silver and gold possessions – a pair of gold trouser buttons, a gold signet ring, seven gold oorcrabbetjes (earrings), a silver snuff box with a thimble, two pairs of silver buckles – as well as four shirts, four bed curtains with valances, three chintz blankets, dresses and cabaijen, eleven table and bed spreads, an umbrella and three slaves. All of these valuable possessions stood within Susanna’s house in Tafelvalleij that consisted of little more than one room and a kitchen. It is interesting that Susanna owned so many textile goods that outwardly expressed social status within the home (such as table and bed spreads, bed curtains and valances and so on) and outwardly in public (clothing, jewellery and an umbrella or parasol). Susanna’s inventory also included quantities of lace, raw yarn or thread, and hampers filled with bone lace and odds and ends. With so many textile goods at her fingertips she may have run a small business. Susanna was not the only Free Black woman whose household goods contained numerous fabric goods that outwardly expressed social status. The household of Johannes Pool and Lucretia Tauke, for instance, included a chest filled with women’s gowns and dresses, lengths of Chinese silk, bonnets, a smaller chest filled with an extensive number of gold and silver shirt buttons, and tellingly, a sewing basket containing gloves, garters, neck-cloths, bonnets and fans.85 Outward status and appearance might have been even more important for those hoping to both emulate Cape officials and dissociate themselves from a former or not so distant ‘enslaved’ status. Most of the Free Blacks found at these auctions were categorized by Jan de La Fontaine as subsisting ‘van visschen’, but this sweeping generalization was not entirely correct. The majority of Free Blacks made a living by fishing, and certainly many of the buyers at De Savoije’s auction were fishermen by trade; however they were not so impoverished that they had to live their lives in hired rooms. Rather they were the

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ones hiring out rooms, and were slave and property proprietors, purchasers of fine cloths and silks (even if in small quantities) and owners of gold and silver jewellery. It is perhaps because of their financial position or success that they were present at these auctions in the first place. Public auctions allowed them space to participate within the monetary dealings of the elite and upper class and hence perhaps enhance their own outward social appearance by purchasing the possessions of those of a higher social echelon.

Conclusion Auctions were places where social connections could be aired and made, and social status could be witnessed and perhaps even emulated. As can be seen from just the three auctions under study, these public events encompass a whole range of the Colony’s occupants from widow to Free Black to Orphan Master and the records from such events act as a window into their everyday lives. The purchasing patterns of the buyers present at the auction often reflected the occupation of the buyer, be they a baker, meat or wine pachter or clothing maker. Even those few women present at these auctions purchased goods that related to the maintenance of their husband’s business (whether he be deceased or alive), an indication of the inherent and unofficial role that many women played in the running of these economic practices. Family connections to the deceased similarly influenced spending patterns, especially as it concerned the purchasing of slaves to keep them within these connections. On a deeper level, however, the goods people bought at auctions can be seen as reflections of their perceived status and identity within society. The close associations between cloth and status, enforced through sumptuary laws, helps to illuminate why men and women from varying economic strata might value textiles (aside from reasons of just basic necessity). Rolls of fabric also came with the promise of being able to be turned into something ‘new’ or perhaps even modern. That said, within such a highly restricted market, the circulation of second-hand goods was important to those low down the economic sale, but also for those at the highest echelons of colonial society. At the Cape, ‘modernity’ might not have been defined so much by the use of ‘new’ consumables, but rather by access to the wealth needed to purchase the most luxurious of second-hand goods. This might help to explain the persistence of the second-hand trade throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century.

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Company administrators purchased many of the most luxurious of fabric items, with the aim of physically imposing social order through the outward display of their official status. Economic elites in the form of wealthy pachters sought to emulate the highest echelons of Cape society in the purchase of luxury fabric, and the diversity of their economic practices. Even those situated at the lowest levels of society sought to enhance their status through the purchase of luxury auction goods. Those Free Blacks who economically had the ability to participate within these auctions showed purchasing patterns that reflected their status as slave and landed property owners, as they too sought to enhance their social standing through the connections they could make at these auctions and the luxury fabric goods they could outwardly purchase. It was here, at these auctions, that those wishing to move up in status could engage in the monetary and social dealings of the elite and upper classes, and get a chance to purchase goods that could help emulate those classes who were intent on enforcing this social order themselves.

Notes 1. ‘Free Black’ was the term given to manumitted slaves and free-born descendants at the Cape during the VOC period. See K. Schoeman (2007) Early Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope 1652–1717 (Pretoria: Protea Book House), pp. 307–308. 2. See Y. Brink (2008) They Came to Stay: Discovering Meaning in the 18th-Century Cape Country Dwelling (Stellenbosch: African Sun Media), chapter 1. 3. This research was first published in N. Worden (ed.) (2006) Contingent Lives (Cape Town: University of Cape Town) and as part of a paper that was presented at an international conference held at the University of Cape Town in December 2006. My thanks to Antonia Malan for reviewing a previous version and Gerald Groenewald for his valued suggestions. 4. Brink, They Came to Stay, pp. 27, 31. 5. Ibid., pp. 38–40. 6. Ibid., p. 73. 7. Ibid., p. 106. 8. A. Malan (1998/99) ‘Chattels or colonists? “Freeblack” women and their households’, Kronos, Journal of Cape History, 25, pp. 50–71. 9. A. Malan (1997) ‘The material world of family and household: the Van Sitterts in eighteenth-century Cape Town, 1748–1796’, in L. Wadley (ed.) Our Gendered Past; Archaeological Studies of Gender in Southern Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press), pp. 273–302. 10. O. F. Mentzel (1925) A Geographical and Topographical Description of the Cape of Good Hope 1787. Translated by G. V. Marais and J. Hoge and edited by H. J. Mandelbrote (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society), vol. 2, p. 79. 11. Ibid. 12. Malan, ‘Chattels or colonists?’, p. 56.

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13. Ibid., p. 564. 14. L. Mitchell (2008) Belongings: Property, Family and Identity in Colonial South Africa. An Exploration of Frontiers, 1725–1830 (New York: Columbia University Press), chapter 7. 15. B. Holzner and R. Robertson (1980) ‘Identity and authority: a problem analysis of processes of identification and authorisation’, in Robertson and Holzner (eds) Identity and Authority: Explanations in the Theory of Society (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 1–39. 16. Brink, They Came to Stay, p. 105. 17. Ibid., p. 192. 18. Western Cape Archives Service (Hereafter CA) MOOC 10/3 No. 81 Vendurol of Barbara Theresia de Savoije, 1729. 19. CA MOOC 10/3 Nos 79 and 80 Vendurol of Margaretha Gildenhuijs, 1728. 20. CA MOOC 10/4 Nos 125, 126 and 127 Vendurol of Anna de Koning, 1734. 21. N. Worden, E. van Heyningen and V. Bickford-Smith (1998) Cape Town: The Making of a City (Cape Town: David Philip), pp. 49–50. 22. CA MOOC 8/5. 22a Estate Inventory of Barbara Theresia de Savoije, 6 January 1729. 23. CA MOOC 8/5. 22b Estate Inventory of Barbara Theresia de Savoije, 16 January 1729. 24. CA MOOC 13/1/2 No. 53 Liquidation & Distribution Account of Barbara Theresia de Savoije. 25. CA MOOC 8/5. 118a Estate Inventory of Anna de Konink, 20 May 1734. 26. CA MOOC 8/5. 118a Estate Inventory of Margaretha Guildenhuijsen, 6 August 1728. 27. For more detailed discussion of how men and women buyers were listed at auctions, see T. Randle (2006) ‘Patterns of consumption at auctions: a case study of three estates’, in Worden (ed.) Contingent Lives, p. 58, n. 17. 28. R. C.-H. Shell (1985) ‘Auctions – their good and evil tendency’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library, 4(1), p. 148. 29. CA MOOC 22/2 (a) Liquidated Estate of Anthonij Janz van Bengale, 1683. 30. The list by purchaser is known as a Maancedul and the list by items is the Vendurol. Antonia Malan, personal communication, May 2009. 31. Embroidered slippers. 32. A loose, light garment or undergarment worn by women such as a chemise or a long, fur cloak worn by men. 33. N. Penn (1999) Rogues Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth-Century Cape Characters (Cape Town: David Phillip), p. 36. 34. See, for example, ibid.; Malan, ‘The material world of family’. 35. Mentzel, Geographical and Topographical Description of the Cape, p. 80. 36. The largest purchaser of kitchen and baking goods in 1729 was Barbara’s daughter, Christina Elers. Whilst the other bakers present at the auction spent under 50 Rds on their baking/kitchen goods (excepting pachter Hendrik de Vries), Christina spent nearly three times as much, suggesting that baking was a business she wanted to maintain. It was due to her status as the daughter and heir of Barbara’s estate that her spending patterns were different to all the other women who purchased items at her mother’s auction.

240 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods 37. Not only were many auction buyers related in some way to the deceased, but countless others were related in some way to each other. For more details, see Randle, ‘Patterns of consumption’. 38. Christina and Ernst Christiaan Elers are Barbara’s children from her first husband, Christiaan Elers; Magdalena and Susanna Kina from her second husband, Elias Kina. 39. A pachter was a holder of one of the alcohol or meat monopolies at the Cape. Gerald Groenewald has written extensively on their role in VOC Cape society as well as issues of their status and identity. See G. Groenewald (2006) ‘A Cape bourgeoisie?: alcohol, entrepreneurs and the evolution of an urban free-burgher society in VOC Cape Town’, in Worden (ed.) Contingent Lives, pp. 278–304. 40. R. C.-H. Shell (1994) Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Hanover and London: University Press of New England). 41. Philip is the son of Marguerite Therese de Savoije. 42. Shell, Children of Bondage, p. 304. 43. Shell, ‘Auctions’, p. 148. 44. See the reference to the widow Maria van Aalwijk in H. C. V. Leibbrant (1905) Precis of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope: Requesten (Memorials) 1715– 1806 (Cape Town: Cape Times Limited), n. 529. 45. Copere could refer to brass or copper. Antonia Malan pers comm. May 2009. 46. Leibbrandt, Archives of the Cape of Good Hope, n. 238; L. Guelke, R. Shell and A. Whyte (1990) The De La Fontaine Report 30th January 1732 (Algemeen Rijksarchief: Opgaaf Project). 47. Probably dark red-brown cotton cloth. 48. These were, respectively: dimity, a type of silk, muslin, an open woollen material used for making sieves, a fine cotton (usually bright red) and a type of canvas. 49. Mentzel, Geographical and Topographical Description of the Cape, p. 65. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., p. 83. 52. R. Ross (1999) Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870: A Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 53. Ibid., p. 11. 54. Ibid., p. 10. 55. Ibid., p. 11. 56. Shell, Children of Bondage, p. 225. 57. L. Guelke (1985) ‘The making of two frontier communities: the Cape Colony in the eighteenth century’, Historical Reflections/Reflections Historiques, X11, p. 427. 58. Ibid. 59. N. Worden and G. Groenewald (eds) (2005) Trials of Slavery: Selected Documents Concerning Slaves from the Criminal Records of the Council of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope, 1705–1794 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society Publication), p. 63. 60. Ibid., emphasis added. 61. Ibid., p. 519. 62. Ibid., p. 3.

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63. A simple blue cotton cloth, or high quality white cotton textile woven in Coromandel. 64. A cabaan or caban: a long, loose gown for women buttoned or pinned in front; a long over-garment with sleeves worn by men; or a short jacket worn over sarong. 65. G. Groenewald (2009) ‘Kinship, entrepreneurship and social capital: alcohol Pachters and the making of a free-burgher society in Cape Town, 1652–1795’, unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Cape Town, p. 165. 66. C. Cornell and A. Malan (2005) Household Inventories at the Cape (Cape Town: University of Cape Town), p. 29. 67. Groenewald, ‘A Cape bourgeoise?’, p. 289. 68. M. P. S. Van der Merwe (1997) Groot Constantia 1685–1885; Its Owners and Occupants (Cape Town: South African Cultural History Museum). 69. L. Weatherill (1986) ‘Consumer behaviour and social status in England, 1660–1750’, Continuity and Change, 1(2), p. 211. 70. R. Ross (1993) Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press), pp. 72–74. 71. See note 31. 72. CA, MOOC 13/1/2 No. 53 Liquidation & Distribution Account of Barbara Theresia de Savoije. 73. G. Groenewald (2005) ‘A database of alcohol pachters at the Cape Town from 1680–1795’, unpublished report, University of Cape Town, p. 8. 74. Mentzel, Geographical and Topographical Description of the Cape, p. 85. 75. A. J. Böeseken (1964) Simon van der Stel en sy Kinders (Cape Town: Nasou). 76. Penn, Rogues Rebels and Runaways, p. 22. 77. The term ‘Free Black’ or ‘Vrij Swart’ or ‘Vrijgelaten Swart’ originated in the Cape, meaning ‘Liberated Black’. For further discussion, see A. J. Böeseken (1977) Slaves and Free Blacks at the Cape 1658–1799 (Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers). I was able to classify these auction buyers as Free Blacks from De La Fontain’s 1731 report on the Cape inhabitants and the census records for the Cape, Stellenbosch and Drakenstein for the years 1725 and 1731, a few years prior and subsequent to the auctions under study (CA J187 and A2250). 78. According to the Cape Town census records of 1725, Philip Boeton and Susanna van Boegies (both ‘Vrijswaarten’) owned two slave men and one woman; Jacobus Hendriksz and his wife Christina van Kanarie owned six slave men, one slave woman and a slave boy; Robbert Schot and Lea van de Kaap similarly owned three slave men, two slave women and one slave boy. 79. Worden et al., Cape Town. 80. Böeseken, Slaves and Free Blacks, p. 97. 81. Ibid. 82. CA MOOC8/6 No. 96 Estate Inventory of Robbert Schot, 4 September 1741. 83. CA MOOC 8/6 No.96 ½ Estate Inventory of Robbert Schot, 6 September 1741. 84. CA MOOC 8/5 No. 144 Estate Inventory of Susanna van Boegies, 5 January 1737. 85. Malan, ‘Chattels or colonists?’, pp. 58–59.

12 The English Church Jumble Sale: Parochial Charity in the Modern Age Vivienne Richmond

Introduction The Annual Jumble Sale – the proceeds of which will this year be given to the Schools – will be held early in June. We feel that our May issue affords a very opportune occasion for bringing this institution before our readers, as the visitation called ‘spring cleaning’ must unearth a great many articles, of the kind we need, in most households, from which they can readily be spared. We shall be very grateful if you can help us, by sending any cast off clothing, either men’s, women’s or children’s: Pieces of carpet, curtains, boots and shoes, kitchen utensils, furniture, crockery, or any odds and ends will be most acceptable. Parcels will be received at S. Matthew’s Mission Room, Harrington Hill, or we will gladly send for any contributions if notice is given. This sale is a great help in two ways, it enables the poor to get useful articles at a cheap rate, and the proceeds, which last year amounted to £35, are a considerable help to those of our parochial organisations which may be most needy.1

Appeals for donations to a new charitable initiative, the jumble sale, mushroomed in Anglican parish magazines across England in the closing years of the 1800s. And while there was nothing unusual about a call to aid the poor – the intended customers – jumble sales were distinctive. Parish charities at this time typically focused on providing just one type of commodity or service, particularly clothing or footwear, and while at jumble sales these remained the chief wares, they also offered 242

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an assortment of household goods. Furthermore, jumble sales dealt in second-hand items, whereas a growing trend in nineteenth-century charity had been the supply of new goods.2 There was, for example, scarcely a parish without its ladies’ working parties where middle- and upper-class women transformed yards of cheap calico into garments for the impoverished. Or a clothing society where the small savings of the poor were combined with donations from wealthier neighbours for the purchase of new clothing and fabrics. Similar schemes operated for boots and coal and in all cases the rules required the poor to adhere to a given moral agenda to ensure the charity reached only the ‘deserving’.3 Here again, jumble sales differed since most were ostensibly open to all. Admittedly, in order to raise as much money as possible they commonly charged an entrance fee which, while nominal, excluded the poorest. And while this could be interpreted as a tacit attempt to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving there appears to have been no explicit limitation of access on a moral basis. The sales examined here are gathered from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century parish magazines which are a mine of information about the Church’s function as a key provider of neighbourhood welfare services and social activities. Parish magazines were introduced in the 1860s and by the early 1890s had an estimated circulation of one and a half million.4 Despite free or cut-price distribution to the poor, the magazines were written, mainly read by and, in their appeals for money and assistance, chiefly directed at the middle classes who were also the main organizers of the jumble sales.5 Parish magazines were the primary, and sometimes only, printed vehicle to convey information about the sales and generally contained two types of notice. The first announced a jumble sale was to be held and requested donations. The second, published after the event, reported on the extent of its success. In this chapter I use these reports to explore the reasons behind the sales’ appearance, the motivations of those who ran them and – although the notices rarely address the issue directly – the mechanics of jumble sale organization. Church jumble sales were introduced in the 1880s and their proliferation is evident in the parish magazines.6 At this time, as Jose Harris points out, there was in Britain ‘a widely diffused sense of living in a peculiarly “modern” age’, and histories of late Victorian consumption have more often focused on the freshly minted wares of mass production and the new retailing methods devised for their disposal.7 Against this, the jumble sale’s provision of used goods and the widespread adoption of an alternative form of second-hand trading perhaps seem

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retrograde. But it is also my purpose to show that in fact the jumble sale was a quintessentially modern institution. Harris adds that an impulse ‘to improve, reform, rationalize, and revolutionize social institutions and to bring them into harmony with the perceived requirements of the modern world’ was characteristic of the last decades of the nineteenth century.8 As I demonstrate, the jumble sale was such an institution, a reforming, rational approach to charitable aid inextricably bound up with a range of fin de siècle transitions themselves commonly identified with modernity: the challenges faced by the Anglican Church, widening horizons for middle-class women, the expansion of leisure activities and the decline of paternalism.

The Church under pressure Secularization is widely accepted as a feature of modernity, and Hugh McLeod notes a ‘substantial’ fall in church attendance in England between the late 1880s and 1914.9 The reasons for this are contested, but according to Jose Harris, religion was quickly becoming a more private issue.10 Anglican congregations were ‘shrinking fastest’, with the biggest drop among the middle and upper classes, whose declining religious practice became ‘marked’ in the 1890s.11 This falling away of the more prosperous portion of the congregation coincided with – and doubtless contributed to – some serious financial challenges for the Church of England which reduced its ability both to maintain its own infrastructure and to assist the parish poor. Between the 1830s and 1890s, building construction, maintenance and repair costs, as well as clergy salaries, rose as the amount of church buildings increased by over 40 per cent, and the number of beneficed clergymen almost doubled.12 At the same time, regular guaranteed income was reduced with the abolition of compulsory church rates in 1868 and the removal of pew rents in some churches.13 Building and maintenance of schools were also expensive priorities, especially when the expansion of non-denominational schools after the 1870 Education Act challenged the Church’s educational supremacy.14 These various economic problems left congregations deep in debt, yet there was no reduction in the lists of parochial charities which, in the face of persistent need, they felt duty-bound to support.15 It is no surprise that in 1903 Charles Booth noted the frequent references in Church of England reports ‘to the absorption of time in raising funds’.16 Unlike many charitable initiatives which required the purchase of goods or materials as doles or for resale, jumble sales required virtually

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no capital investment. They were not, therefore, a drain on parochial finances but actually made money for the Church and its organizations at the same time as they helped the poor. A favourite destination of jumble sale profits, as at Whitchurch, Warwickshire, was the Restoration Fund, but the proceeds were also applied to a variety of causes.17 At Aldenham in the 1890s and 1900s, for instance, the sales helped the New Mission Room Fund, the Parish Nurse Fund, decorating and furnishing a Working Men’s Club, the purchase of carved oak furnishings for the choir at St Alban’s cathedral and the ‘Building Fund of the Cornwall Club, Lambeth’.18 Both clergy and organizers were fully cognisant of the multiple advantages that jumble sales offered. As the report of a Clapham sale noted: It is not often that anything gives such general gratification as this Sale has done; the donors of the various articles are glad, for they have freed their houses from things which they did not want; the purchasers are pleased, for they got at a low price things which are useful to them, and the School Managers are grateful, for £33 is a most acceptable addition to our School Funds.19

Female philanthropy, the bazaar and the jumble sale Frank Prochaska has highlighted the important contribution of middleclass women to nineteenth-century charitable work. Among the best known of their enterprises was the charity bazaar through which committees of ‘ladies’ raised money for good causes at home and abroad by selling an array of fancy goods to wealthier parishioners. Bazaars became widespread from the 1820s and continued throughout the century as important vehicles for community cohesion as well as fund raising.20 However, Prochaska notes that ‘The Times, the best guide to the most fashionable fancy fairs in London’, advertised 21 bazaars in 1875, but only 16 in 1895. He attributes the reduction to increased advertising in local newspapers at the expense of The Times, but even taking into account those advertised in the local press he discusses very few after 1875.21 According to Hugh McLeod, many churches were finding it difficult to maintain a wide programme of charitable activities by the early twentieth century, because of a shortage of voluntary workers. Any decrease in the number of bazaars may, therefore, have been connected with the decline in middle-class church attendance.22 However, across all denominations more women than men continued to attend public worship

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throughout the closing decades of the century, and perhaps equally significant in the shortfall of volunteers was increasing female emancipation.23 A successful bazaar required enormous and time-consuming creative and organizational input to produce sufficient ‘interesting, beautiful, rare, quaint, comical and necessary articles‘ with which to stock the stalls, and even among the Anglican faithful, many middleclass women were finding more interesting outlets than the sewing bee for their skills, energy and public works.24 By 1900 some 200 women were serving on the School Boards created by the 1870 Education Act, nearly a thousand were Poor Law Guardians and thousands more were occupied with district and workhouse visiting or rescue work.25 They were also serving on parish and district councils as well as London vestries.26 Admission to higher education allowed some single women to enter the professions, while many others took up paid work in, for example, the rapidly expanding clerical sector.27 These new opportunities made it increasingly difficult to recruit volunteers for the more banal and time-consuming aspects of parish charity work such as sewing for the poor. Thus an 1893 appeal for new members of a south London church clothing charity stressed that there was ‘more need of workers than of subscriptions’.28 Jumbles sales were, as St Matthew’s, Upper Clapton, put it, ‘a really “economic” method of helping the poor’.29 Unlike bazaars, there were no goods to be produced and donations could be solicited by a simple appeal for donations in the parish magazine, perhaps followed up with a distribution of handbills.30 Most organizers asked donors to bring contributions to a central collection point, often the sale venue, although offers to collect were not uncommon. Even this, though, was usually the responsibility of just one volunteer as in Loughton where parishioners were asked to contact ‘Mrs. Cecil Pelly’ who would ‘gladly arrange for a donkey and cart to call’.31 All that remained was transfer to the point of sale, where necessary, then sorting the goods and pricing which, together with the actual selling, formed the bulk of the work. Prochaska dismisses jumble sales as ‘inferior bazaars, dealing in miscellaneous, often second-hand, goods’.32 Certainly the two were very different events. Not only did they target different markets, but there are, for example, only occasional references to jumble sales offering the refreshment stalls or side shows with which bazaars induced customers to linger.33 And it wasn’t just, as Prochaska says, that jumble sales ‘often’ dealt in second-hand goods; it was their defining feature. But jumble sales, like bazaars, were organized predominantly by women – the ‘energetic Committee of twelve ladies’ who ‘arranged and conducted’ a

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Staffordshire sale was typical – and the experience of organizing a bazaar equipped many women to organize a jumble sale.34 Indeed, the two were sufficiently connected to sometimes be held in conjunction. All Saints’, South Acton, advertised ‘The Afternoon and Jumble Sale’, with the former, held at the time when middle-class women paid social calls, designed to dispose of a number of items left over from a recent bazaar. The Jumble Sale, in contrast, opened at 7.30 p.m. – the close of the working day – and was ‘a splendid and advantageous . . . opportunity for getting rid of old clothes of all descriptions and much that is ordinarily termed rubbish’.35

Sorting and selling There is little explicit reporting in the magazines of arrangements inside the sale rooms or the actual selling of the goods, but they provide valuable glimpses. At a combined Sale of Work and Rummage Sale in Worthing, Sussex, there appears to have been just one stall for rummage, suggesting that different items were mixed together.36 They may, though, have been displayed in some order on the stall and frequent references to the ‘work of sorting and arranging’ suggest separation and classification of goods was common.37 In Sydenham, for example, ‘[t]he articles had been analysed and divided into five classes: men’s clothes, women’s clothes, children’s clothes, boots and hats, and miscellaneous articles’.38 Mostly, it seems, goods were piled on tables and the buyers searched through them. Numerous reports of the stalls being ‘cleared in about half-an-hour’, noted the swiftness of jumble sale proceedings suggesting, at best, a strictly business-like, and at worst, rapacious atmosphere.39 In 1893, ‘Whitechapel housewives’ who attended a small sale were ‘congratulated on their self-restraint’ which, together with the diminutive scale of the enterprise, had prevented the degeneration ‘into a struggle and a grab’ allegedly characteristic of large sales.40 But there are signs of a more considered and congenial aspect to the transactions. At Holy Trinity, Southwark, for instance, the reporter ‘saw Mr. R. Hammon acting as a “block”, arrayed in an overcoat . . . and turning round and round to show its many excellencies to a possible purchaser’.41 The magazines also give little specific information about prices, preferring generalized references to universal cheapness ‘for the benefit of the poor’.42 But the poor were not the only intended beneficiaries and one vicar considered that ‘as the proceeds of the Sale go to help the Church cleaning . . . the things should not go quite “dirt cheap”’.43 It is

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also difficult to determine whether prices were fixed or negotiable. At St Matthew’s Upper Clapton, the reporter gave no indication of how prices were decided, only that ‘[a]fterwards’ – presumably at the end of the sale – ‘the remainder’ were ‘disposed of . . . by auction’.44 Here it seems the goods were offered at fixed prices and the auction reserved only for those goods which had failed to sell. Certainly five years later the same parish was thanking ‘those who helped us by sorting, pricing, and selling the various goods’, while at Clapham Park, in 1898, the goods were ‘marked by a sub-committee at very low prices’.45 There are also instances of novelty sales techniques; at St Mary Newington ‘[s]ome of the goods’, although the report does not state which, ‘were disposed of by Dutch Auction’, in which the price is set high and then lowered until a purchaser is found.46 But advance pricing seems to have been the most common practice – although this does not obviate the possibility of on-the-spot negotiation – and there was variation in the way it was conducted. A Dorset parish, for instance, held a ‘Mothers’ Sale of old things’ which appears to be a jumble sale under another name. Here ‘the older [items] and sets of a kind’ were ‘tied up 2 or 3 together’ with ‘each Mother . . . able to have 9 or 10 purchases’, the (presumably predetermined) prices varying ‘from ½d. to 1.6’. 47 Claims that goods were sold ‘at the most “extravagantly moderate” prices’ are clearly subjective, but supported by the sales’ relatively modest profits.48 The average takings at 56 jumble sales held between 1889 and 1901, reported in the magazines examined for this study, were around £21.49 In comparison, Prochaska found that a provincial bazaar might expect to make about £27, with some raising less than £2.50 The profits from both were, then, similar, but jumble sales required a great deal less effort to achieve them. Most sales were open to all (who could pay the entrance fee), but this could create problems. At a Langham Place sale organized by the inexperienced Lady Sophia Palmer in 1892, the arrangements were not ideal, and it is feared that many of the regular attendants of the Mothers’ Meetings suffered, being kept out by strangers, some of whom were light fingered ladies who swooped away some of the best goods.51 Quite who these ‘light fingered ladies’ were is unclear, but second-hand dealers were the main worry. To prevent them gaining entrance, some sales restricted admission to local residents who were presumably known

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to the organizers. At an 1899 Hertfordshire sale only ‘parishioners of Aldenham and Radlett’ were to be allowed in because on a previous occasion ‘a woman who bought up greedily the good clothes marked at cheap prices to benefit the poor . . . was really an old clothes dealer from a distance’.52 Alternatively, entrance tickets might be distributed to specific individuals, such as members of Mothers’ Meetings. At Pinner, in 1895, only people who had previously obtained a free admission ticket ‘procurable through the District Visitors’ were allowed in. A couple of years later, there was no mention of entrance tickets, and while the reporter was pleased to note that ‘[a]lmost all’ the customers ‘were bona fide purchasers’, the implication is that some imposters had got in.53 Clapham Park was similarly concerned ‘to secure to our bona-fide working classes the benefit of the sale, and to exclude second-hand dealers’, and the managers therefore reserved ‘the right of refusing to anyone, (1) admission, and (2) sales, without assigning any reason’.54 In The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell’s fictional portrayal of early twentieth-century poverty, the jumble sale is attended by the ‘local rag-and-bone man’ who ‘reaped a fine harvest’.55 Although in contrast with the magazines’ second-hand dealers, accused of plucking out choice items, Tressell’s rag-and-bone man is a scavenger picking over detritus, both accounts suggest that if, as seems probable, jumble sales provided competition for the dealers, they were also potential sources of stock for resale at profit on the open market. Thus, while aligned primarily with the voluntary sector, jumble sales also became, albeit unintentionally, part of the complex commercial circulation of secondhand goods, and are testament to the continuation of the commercial used goods market amid the abundance of new, cheap, mass-produced items. The sellers at jumble sales were predominantly female and usually included the organizers, the class difference between them and their customers being indicated in some reports by distinctions between ‘the ladies’ who sold and ‘the women’ who bought.56 None of the reports indicate the ratio of sellers to buyers, but several hint at relatively large staffing levels. In Southwark, for instance, the reporter ‘counted about thirty sellers’, while the named nine vendors at an 1898 Hertfordshire sale were only some of ‘the chief sellers’ who served the 160 customers.57 Plentiful sellers may have simply reflected the number of volunteers, but fears about second-hand dealers, theft and unruly crowds probably also played a part.

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The main exceptions to the female hegemony were the auctioneers who seem invariably to have been male, such as ‘our old friend Mr. F. JACOMB’ in Upper Clapton and men were also sometimes drafted in to do the heavy work.58 Perhaps because the jumble sale reports were frequently written by men – the vicars – they often named any male assistants even when it was deemed impossible to individually identify the female helpers. At Whitechapel, for example, there was insufficient space ‘to enumerate by name all who gave help in kind, or in service’, but it was considered necessary to single out Mr. Woolsey, as the solitary benefactor of the stronger sex, whose aid in opening boxes, carrying bundles, and generally being a thorough help to a number of tired but courageous women, was a thing to be grateful for.59 By presenting men in this rather heroic light and privileging their individualized ‘professional’ roles, whether as auctioneers or handymen, such reports reflected established ideas about gender roles and capabilities. But in reality jumble sales, as predominantly female-run events, were challenging those ideas by replacing more time-consuming, needlework-based, charity work with a more efficient form of philanthropy which also provided middle-class women with, simultaneously, a new public function and more time for other pursuits.

Women, department stores and domesticity Modernity is also associated with an increase in leisure time and activities, which Hugh McLeod cites as a contributory factor to declining middle-class church attendance. ‘Between about 1875 and 1885’, he says, ‘dinner parties, trips into the country, boating, cycling, golf . . . began to take up the Sundays of the urban middle class’, so that by the 1900s Sunday in England was ‘no longer a day dominated by religion’.60 And, on other days, women could visit the new department stores. Even if they were not, as Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme point out in their Introduction to this volume, ‘the apogee of retail modernity’, they were certainly a feature of it.61 Department stores promoted shopping as a leisure activity and even, claims Brian Nelson, functioned ‘in the same way that the Church had previously done, by providing women with a haven outside the home, in which to sit, think, and find solace’.62 But with their focus on fashion and novelty, department stores also encouraged a culture of

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consumption that could only benefit the jumble sale: if buying a new item released its predecessor to the jumble sale there was justification for a purchase.63 This kind of philosophy even permeated jumble sale appeals; Alderminster, Warwickshire, in 1897 urged readers to ‘give the tradesman a chance, and your poorer neighbours an opportunity’, by parting with an unused item rather than keeping it in case of future need.64 And perhaps the jumble sale, with its promise of a bargain, opportunity to socialize with friends and neighbours, and a ‘large and strange collection of articles for sale’ – which might include ‘silk hats and old fenders, a patent fire-escape and paper fans, bonnets and books, coats and crockery’ – also functioned as a form of poor woman’s department store.65 Certainly this is how a Daily Express journalist viewed it when reporting on an Islington sale, organized by the paper to raise money for its fund to assist impoverished women, in January 1913: ‘8 p.m. – Doors opened, and an eager multitude, bent on bargains like any woman at Whiteley’s or Selfridge’s almost run in’.66 Many jumble sale appeals for donations highlighted the opportunity offered by spring-cleaning to unearth unwanted possessions.67 Holy Trinity, Southwark, urged readers in March 1895 ‘to anticipate that terrible thing “Spring cleaning”, and send what they can to us for sale’, and the reports’ authors clearly expected spring-cleaning to be part of the female domestic routine.68 Writing about twentieth-century secondhand cultures, Louise Crewe and Nicky Gregson note that the practice of clearing out domestic articles for donation to others is performed mostly by women. It is ‘a deeply gendered activity’, in part ‘bound up with questions of good housekeeping’.69 So it was in the nineteenth century when, although the middle-class housewife had more domestic assistance than most of her equivalents today, ‘the creation of order in her household’ was, as Leonore Davidoff reminds us, her ‘special task’.70 But the expansion of women’s activities, whether for work or pleasure, risked criticism that they were neglecting this primary duty. The Anglican Church, says Brian Heeney, repeatedly cited the home as ‘woman’s appointed sphere’, particularly during the last quarter of the century and beyond when female emancipation appeared to threaten family life.71 Jumble sales were an opportunity to show that the threat was unfounded. By the simple act of clearing out and donating unwanted articles – which might include taking them to the collection point and being seen to do so, or discussing with others what had been found and disposed of – women could demonstrate, publicly, that whatever else they were doing, they were still attending to their housekeeping.

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Jumble sales and the decline of paternalism The willingness of wealthier parishioners to release their cast-off belongings to the poor is another notable feature of jumble sales. Many charities supplied new goods to ensure they provided only items deemed suitable to the recipients’ station in life. Clothing societies, for instance, dealt only in utilitarian garments and prohibited the purchase of ‘finery’, but there seems to have been no parallel ambition at jumble sales.72 And while the sorting and pricing process might have provided an opportunity to remove ‘unsuitable’ items, there is nothing to suggest this occurred. Indeed, several reports commented on ‘what really good clothing was sent in’, although the authors’ assessment criteria for this decidedly subjective view are not stated.73 But even if the quality of donations is hard to discern the range and type of goods described suggests there was little attempt to restrict what was sold on the grounds of the purchasers’ social status. Nor, unlike other contemporary charities, did jumble sales overtly attempt to regulate moral behaviour through the exclusion of, for example, drinkers, unmarried mothers or the able-bodied unemployed.74 The evangelical ideology which accepted the social hierarchy and deemed different types of possessions appropriate for the different classes was declining at the end of the century, replaced by ‘religious liberalism’.75 Also, the Christian Socialist revival in the last quarter of the century argued that poverty was a social problem, not the result of personal sin. Its practitioners were relatively few and generally with ‘ “advanced” socialist or left-wing liberal views’, but they included many senior clerics and were influential. The result, says Gerald Parsons, was that by 1900 the Church was much less concerned about social control.76 Or, as Charles Booth put it, ‘The Evangelical body within the Church of England has fallen on difficult times . . . . The general movement of taste and habit in religion, as well as in life generally, has been in the direction of greater brightness.’77 This is not to claim that paternalism and deference had vanished, swept aside by an all-consuming spirit of egalitarianism. The very fact that jumble sales were organized by the wealthy for the poor indicates the continuance of ‘them and us’ in the social order, and it is possible that where advance distribution of entrance tickets occurred, ostensibly to prevent second-hand dealers, the opportunity was also taken to exclude the ‘undeserving’. And in contrast to the self-congratulatory reports in the parish magazines, Robert Tressell’s account of the jumble sale – portrayed through fiction but reflecting the author’s very real

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anger at the social divide – presented it as one of ‘the farcical, imbecile measures’ by which well-to-do inhabitants and the local authorities attempted – or rather, pretended – to grapple with the poverty ‘problem’ . . . . On the day of the sale the parish room was . . . filled with all manner of rubbish, with the parson and the visiting ladies grinning in the midst.78 Also, jumble sales were occasionally promoted specifically because they were seen as a paternalistic form of aid which fostered self help. All Saints, Clapham Park, for example, declared that as the items ‘are bought and not given . . . no pauperising results need be feared’. But it also pointed out that selling, rather than giving the goods meant there would be ‘no favouritism’, signalling a deviation from many charitable schemes in which wealthy donors nominated ‘deserving’ recipients.79 In some instances the custom of honouring subscribers to charities by publishing lists of their donations was replicated in jumble sale reports by identifying key individuals. At Aldenham in 1898, for example, the author thanked ‘the Hon. Mrs. Holland-Hibbert, the Hon. Mrs. Barnett, the Hon. Edith Gibbs, the Hon. Mrs. K. Gibbs’, and eight other named women who were among ‘the givers’.80 But in a markedly nondeferential manner, other authors stated plainly that the sale was as much a benefit to the donors as to the poor customers since it provided them with a free rubbish-disposal service. Hence the author of an appeal for donations at St Matthew’s felt confident of success because ‘help given to the Jumble Sale is help at the same time to the donors of goods, by relieving them of useless articles’.81

Conclusion Before the jumble sale, most parochial charity operated on the transfer of money from wealthier parishioners to the poor. This might occur directly, through cash donations or subscriptions, or via an intermediary event, such as a bazaar where goods were sold to the middle and upper classes and the profits passed to the needy in one form or another. Alternatively money might be invested in goods, particularly clothes, to be given or sold to the poor at cost price, the profits being reinvested in the charity. Jumble sales differed by taking unwanted goods from the wealthy, but raising the money from the poor, albeit while simultaneously helping them. In some instances the profits were returned

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to them, through application to causes from which they would benefit. In other cases, such as the oak choir furnishings, the profits were spent on projects which were probably of more interest to the wealthier parishioners than to their poorer neighbours from whose pennies they resulted. Despite Prochaska’s stress on the philanthropic generosity of the middle classes at the turn of the century, without a denominational breakdown of the donations it is unclear whether relief on the purses, as well as the time and energy, of the Anglicans among them is a further reason for the jumble sale’s success.82 The second-hand trade, says Beverly Lemire, provides ‘a medium through which to appraise great societal transformations’.83 And Britain in the 1880s was experiencing a widespread ‘consciousness of living in a new age, a new material context, and a form of society totally different from anything that had ever occurred before’.84 Modernity has, since Weber, been coupled with rationalization and when seen in that context the jumble sale was, arguably, a modern charitable institution par excellence. It rationalized charitable activity by recycling unwanted existing goods, rather than producing new ones, to present a time- and laboursaving means of simultaneously aiding the poor, raising money for the Church and accommodating the philanthropic impulse of socially conscious parishioners. And it did so in response to the challenges and opportunities modernity presented: the increased competition from other faiths or a preference for private over public religious observance that faced the Church of England; new employment and leisure opportunities vying with philanthropic activity for women’s time and energy; mass production encouraging disposability among wealthier consumers; declining paternalism and the inability of divinity to continue to justify social inequality. The jumble sale did not sweep aside older charitable enterprises but operated in tandem with them until most dwindled away in the early decades of the twentieth century, made obsolete by state welfare reforms, or proving too paternalistic in the new liberal democracy where, also, the increasing reluctance of working-class women to enter domestic service constrained still further the time available for middle-class women to engage in local philanthropic initiatives.85 Jumble sales, however, continue today, over 120 years since parish magazines introduced them to their readers. They remain as a resource for the impoverished, a cheap, labour-saving means for busy citizens to make a charitable contribution or raise money, and resonate with current trends for retro fashion, ‘vintage’ and recycling. Even as I write, art students at my college are posting advertisements for one. But anecdotal evidence suggests that competition from car-boot sales and eBay,

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where people sell their unwanted goods for personal profit, has led to a decline in jumble sales. Perhaps, through demonstrating the value of second-hand items, they are victims of their own success. But philanthropy is far from dead, and if the jumble sale itself is declining, its legacy lives on in the charity shop where the concept of reselling used articles at low prices and applying the profits to a ‘good cause’ has been adopted, adapted and formalized, and examples of which can be found on virtually every (post)modern high street.

Notes 1. St Matthew’s, Upper Clapton, Service Papers, London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), P79/MTW/43, May 1891. 2. Throughout ‘second-hand’ includes items with multiple previous owners. 3. V. Richmond (2009) ‘ “Indiscriminate liberality subverts the morals and depraves the habits of the poor”: a contribution to the debate on the poor law, parish clothing relief and clothing societies in early nineteenth-century England’, Textile History, 40, pp. 56, 58. 4. O. Chadwick (1970) The Victorian Church, Part II (London: A. and C. Black), pp. 426–427. 5. At Sydenham, for example, the monthly magazine was sold ‘to the poor’ at 1d. per copy and to ‘wealthier parishioners’ for 2/6 annually. Sydenham Parish Magazine, January 1868, Lewisham Local Studies Centre (hereafter LLSC), A/89/92/2. 6. For the origins and earliest instance of English charity jumble sales I have found (1888), the buyers’ perspective and the quality of the goods on offer, see Vivienne Richmond (2010), ‘Rubbish or riches? Church jumble sale purchases in late-Victorian England’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 2. 7. Jose Harris (1994) Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914 (London: Penguin Books), p. 32. For an example of the focus on mass production and new retailing methods, see Stanley Chapman on the move of Jewish second-hand clothes dealers into ready-made clothing: S. Chapman (1993) ‘The innovating entrepreneurs in the British ready-made clothing industry’, Textile History, 24, p. 10. 8. Harris, Private Lives, p. 36. 9. H. McLeod (2000) Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 199–200. 10. Ibid., p. 200; Harris, Private Lives, p. 176. 11. McLeod, Secularisation, pp. 200–201. 12. R. Currie, A. Gilbert and L. Horsley (1977) Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles Since 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 60, 196–197, 213. 13. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, ibid., p. 111; S. Yeo (1976) Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London: Croom Helm), p. 79. 14. Yeo, Religion, p. 157. 15. Ibid., p. 79.

256 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods 16. C. Booth (1903) Life and Labour of the People in London: Third Series: Religious Influences – 7 Summary (London: Macmillan and Co.), p. 82. 17. The Alscot Magazine, British Library (hereafter BL), 1866, b. 7.(15), June 1897. 18. Aldenham Parish Magazine, BL, P.P. 344. ab, March 1898–December 1907. 19. St Paul, Clapham Parish Magazine, LMA, P95/PAU 1/25, May 1892. 20. F. K. Prochaska (1980) Women and Philanthropy in 19th Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 50; Yeo, Religion, pp. 79, 170–171. 21. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, pp. 49, 51–52. 22. McLeod, Secularisation, p. 202. 23. Harris, Private Lives, p. 155. 24. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Charity Bazaar: An Allegorical Dialogue (1868) cited in Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, p. 47. For the work involved in arranging and running a bazaar, see ibid., pp. 63–66. 25. S. King (2004) ‘ “We might be trusted”: female poor law guardians and the development of the new poor law: the case of Bolton, England, 1880–1906’, International Review of Social History, 49, p. 29; P. Hollis (1987) ‘Women in council: separate spheres, public space’, in J. Rendall (ed.) Equal or Different: Women’s Politics 1800–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), pp. 193–195; Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, chapters IV, V and VI; A. Summers (1979) ‘A home from home – women’s philanthropic work in the nineteenth century’, in S. Burman (ed.) Fit Work for Women (London: Croom Helm), pp. 33–63. 26. Hollis, ‘Women in council’, p. 205. Hollis points out that property qualifications and the absence of remuneration meant that, until the late 1890s, these women were necessarily middle class. Hollis, ‘Women in council’, pp. 193–195. 27. A. V. John (1986) ‘Introduction’, in A. V. John (ed.) Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England 1800–1918 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), pp. 17–19. 28. St Mildred’s, Lee, Parish Magazine & Parochial Record, LLSC, A83/21/9/2, October 1893. 29. St Matthew’s, Upper Clapton, LMA, P79/MTW/43, April 1892. 30. Holy Trinity, Southwark, Parish Magazine, LMA, P92 TRI/75, April 1896. 31. Loughton Parish Magazine, BL, P.P. 343. cbp, December 1891. 32. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, p. 47. 33. Ibid., pp. 59–61. 34. Kinver Parish Magazine, BL, P.P. 344. u, January 1896. 35. All Saints, South Acton, Church Monthly, LMA, DRO/056/028, March 1898. 36. Church of the Holy Trinity, Worthing, Parish Magazine, BL, P.P. 344. i, June 1895. The terms ‘jumble’ and ‘rummage’ were interchangeable. 37. Holy Trinity, Southwark, LMA, P92 TRI/75, June 1895. 38. St Philips, Sydenham, Church Magazine, LLSC, A 64/12/290, January 1891. 39. All Saints, Clapham Park, Church Magazine, LMA, P95/ALL2/29, July 1898. 40. S. Jude’s Whitechapel, Parish Magazine, BL, P.P. 343. de, December 1893. 41. Holy Trinity, Southwark, LMA, P92 TRI/75, June 1895. 42. All Saints, Clapham Park, LMA, P95/ALL2/29, April 1894. 43. S. Jude’s, Whitechapel, BL, P.P. 343. de, December 1893. 44. St Matthew’s Upper Clapton, LMA, P79/MTW/43, July 1890.

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45. St Matthew’s Upper Clapton, LMA, P79/MTW/44, August 1895, emphasis added; All Saints, Clapham Park, LMA, P95/ALL2/29, May 1898. 46. St Mary Newington Parish Magazine, BL, P.P. 343. df, January 1889. 47. Wimborne Minster Parish Magazine, BL, P.P. 343. cl, November 1894, January 1895. 48. Camden Parish Magazine (Camberwell), LMA, P73/CAM/105, May 1893. 49. It is not always clear whether the sums declared are takings or profits. Where both are stated, net profits have been used for the calculation. 50. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, pp. 50–51, 53. The figure of £27 is calculated by dividing £28,817 by 1083, the latter being the number of fancy sales at which the former was raised. 51. All Souls, Langham Place, Parish Magazine, LMA, P89/ALS/149, May 1892, June 1892. 52. Aldenham, BL, P.P. 344. ab, July 1899. 53. Pinner Parish Magazine, BL, P.P. 344. ae, April 1895, December 1897. 54. All Saints, Clapham Park, LMA, P95/ALL2/29, May 1898. 55. R. Tressell (1993) The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (London: HarperCollins), p. 337. 56. Forest Row Parish Magazine, East Sussex Record Office, PAR 342/7/1/5, December 1894. 57. Holy Trinity, Southwark, LMA, P92 TRI/75, June 1895; Aldenham, BL, P.P. 344. ab, April 1898. 58. St Matthew’s Upper Clapton, LMA, P79/MTW/43, July 1890. 59. S. Jude’s Whitechapel, BL, P.P. 343. de, December 1893. 60. H. McLeod (1997) Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 115. Jose Harris believes the ‘threat to organized religion from the new recreational culture’ has been exaggerated, but also notes the ‘muted’ religious character of Edwardian Sundays. Harris, Private Lives, p. 178. 61. There is disagreement about what constitutes a department store and consequently the precise date of its first appearance. P. Horn (2006) Behind the Counter: Shop Lives from Market Stall to Supermarket (Stroud: Sutton Publishing), pp. 101–102; E. D. Rappaport (2000) Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Woodstock, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 29. 62. R. Bowlby (1985) Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London: Methuen), pp. 4, 19; B. Nelson (1998) ‘Introduction’, in Émile Zola (ed.) The Ladies’ Paradise (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. xvii. Also, for the department store as a social space for women, see E. Wilson (2007) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: I. B. Tauris), p. 150. 63. Nelson, ‘Introduction’, p. xi; Bowlby, Just Looking, p. 3. For a full discussion of women and shopping, see Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure. 64. Alscot, BL, 1866. b. 7.(15), August 1897. 65. St Paul, Clapham, LMA, P95/PAU 1/25, April 1892. 66. Daily Express, London, Thursday, 30 January 1913, p. 7. 67. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘spring-cleaning’ entered the language in the middle of the nineteenth-century. 68. Holy Trinity, Southwark, LMA, P92 TRI/75, March 1895.

258 Buying and Selling Second-Hand Goods 69. N. Gregson and L. Crewe (2003) Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg), pp. 112–113, 120. 70. L. Davidoff (1995) Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 52. 71. B. Heeney (1988) The Women’s Movement in the Church of England 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 9–10, 15–16. 72. Richmond, ‘Indiscriminate liberality’, p. 59. 73. Holy Trinity, Southwark, LMA, P92 TRI/75, June 1895. 74. Richmond, ‘Indiscriminate liberality’, pp. 56, 58. 75. McLeod, Religion and the People, pp. 113, 115. 76. G. Parsons (ed.) (1988) Religion in Victorian Britain: Volume II Controversies (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 51–52, 55, 60. 77. Booth, Life and Labour, p. 53. 78. Tressell, Ragged, pp. 13–14, 336–337. 79. All Saints, Clapham Park, LMA, P95/ALL2/29, May 1898. 80. Aldenham, BL, P.P. 344. ab, April, 1898. 81. St Matthew’s, Upper Clapton, LMA, P79/MTW/43, June 1893. 82. F. K. Prochaska (1993) ‘Philanthropy’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, Volume 3: Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 358. 83. B. Lemire (2005) ‘Shifting currency: the culture and economy of the second hand trade in England, c. 1600–1850’, in A. Palmer and H. Clark (eds) Old Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion (Oxford: Berg), p. 29. 84. Harris, Private Lives, p. 32. 85. J. Burnett (ed.) (1994) Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Routledge), pp. 131–135.

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Index

advertisements, 74, 81, 104, 119, 123, 124, 148, 159, 165, 176, 182, 200 advice manuals, see handbooks ‘alternative’ consumption, 3 Anglo-Indian, 111–35 antique, 5–7, 10, 73, 83, 85–7, 93–104, 107, 123, 124, 154, 183, 184, 185, 191, 192, 207, 215 Antwerp, 6, 9, 21, 158–74 artwork, 5, 159, 166, 168 see also paintings associative value, 124, 125, 126–7 auction accounts, 39, 198–200 auctioneers, 8, 42, 43–4, 45, 118, 119, 121–2, 123, 159, 169, 180, 183, 184, 185, 189 auctions, 26, 65, 81–6, 118–19, 124, 131, 158–9, 165, 169, 197, 221 buyers at, 44–8, 78, 106, 142, 149, 204–14, 225–7 metropolitan, 50, 176, 187 organisation, 40–4, 160–2, 178, 185–8, 190, 199–200 authenticity, 83, 84, 103, 168, 180, 182 bankruptcy, 50, 62, 77, 152, 178, 200 beds, 104, 116, 126, 189, 190, 207–9 bidding, 42, 46, 204 books, 5, 6, 81, 139–57, 159, 167, 186, 190 booksellers, 151–4 broken goods, 21, 27, 48, 97 brokers, 6, 9, 19, 20, 23–33, 82, 95, 97, 100, 105, 159, 160, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 176 Bruges, 73–92 burghers, 22, 23, 25, 204–14, 220–1, 224, 226, 233–4 buyers, 2, 3, 44, 45, 47, 49, 63, 64, 66, 67, 122, 140, 142, 144, 176, 182,

183, 185, 197, 201, 204, 205, 206, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 220, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 232, 235, 236, 237, 247, 249 class, 10, 59–61, 62, 95–100, 103, 120, 196, 197, 198, 207, 214, 224 gender, 10, 59–61, 120, 198, 212, 225 buying, 5–6, 46–8, 63–5, 137, 207–12 cabinet makers, 28, 100, 106, 116, 119, 121 Cape Colony, 220–41 catalogues (auction/sales), 45, 48, 119, 142–52 (passim), 159, 168–9, 176–8, 179–92 (passim) chairs, 26, 31, 48, 97, 98, 101, 103, 113, 119, 121, 123, 125, 131, 189, 207–9 charity, see philanthropy Chester, 50, 150–1 chests of drawers, 104, 189, 207, 208–9 chinaware, 21, 48, 76, 180, 183, 185, 186, 190, 199 chintz, 128, 183, 227, 228, 230, 231 city, 19, 20, 23, 25, 28, 62, 74, 75, 77–86, 117, 118, 123, 159–64, 168, 197, 200–2, 205, 207–9, 215 class, 8, 10, 25, 59, 60, 62, 68, 76, 93, 95–100, 103, 104, 105, 107, 111, 112, 115, 120, 126, 127, 148, 158, 187, 196, 197, 198, 207, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 220, 221, 223, 224, 237, 238, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254 see also middle class; social status; working class clocks, 189, 208, 209

277

278 Index cloth, 75–9, 82, 83, 159, 160, 162–5, 167, 169, 221, 224, 228, 229, 237 clothes, 5, 6, 8, 19, 20, 23–33, 57–63, 66–8, 79, 94, 122, 148, 196, 227–31, 234, 236, 237, 247, 249, 253 clothing, 3, 6, 21, 28, 30, 38, 47, 57–63, 65–8, 75–81, 82, 83, 93, 95, 96, 102, 103, 141, 222, 228, 230, 231, 236, 237, 242, 243, 246, 252 see also individual garments connoisseurs, 9, 73, 83, 95, 103, 124 consumer society/consumerism, 2–4, 31 consumption, 2–3, 7, 48, 95, 187, 196–7, 198, 222 cultures, 4, 59, 175, 178, 181, 184–5, 251 modern, 20–2, 38 practices, 4, 8, 38, 39, 98, 140 see also gender; motivations copperware, 20, 2, 30, 228, 232 cost, 8, 43, 46, 47, 77, 104, 115, 116, 120, 122, 139, 148–51, 153, 185, 189, 229, 230, 244, 253 cotton goods, 59, 62, 183, 228, 229, 235 see also chintz court records, 23–5, 27–9, 32, 51, 58, 63–6, 163 see also Old Bailey Coventry, 98, 139, 145 craftsmen, 27, 28, 77–9, 82, 121, 176 credit, 75, 148, 200, 204, 232 criers, 42, 81–2, 159–69 cultural capital, 7, 94, 95, 107 see also distinction dealers, 61, 62, 66, 97, 100, 165, 170, 249 see also individual trades death, 41, 49, 117, 122, 126, 165, 180, 210, 227, 236 see also post-mortem debt, 40–1, 49, 82, 143, 180, 222, 228 democratisation of consumption, 20, 21, 30 department stores, 7, 103, 118, 250–1

Derbyshire, 139, 142, 145, 146 deregulation, 6, 162–5 diaries, 106, 117, 120, 142 directories, 61, 79, 80, 84, 100–1, 118, 119, 121, 145–7, 190 dirt, 75, 126, 127–9, 144, 149 discernment, 7, 99, 180, 184, 190, 221 distinction, 7–10, 96, 99, 103, 105, 107, 131, 140, 154, 158, 165, 175, 182, 184, 185, 190, 192, 233, 249 divestment rituals, 127–9 domestic, goods, 37, 42, 47, 48, 99, 178 interiors, 51, 99, 120, 129–30, 182 sphere, 97, 98, 111–15, 127, 198, 216 domesticity, 112, 129, 250 durable goods, 21, 59, 76, 120, 198 early-modern, 4, 9, 22, 23, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 49, 51, 52, 75, 79, 96, 140, 143, 160, 192, 231, 232 eBay, 3, 7 economy, 4, 5, 10, 23, 33, 86, 101, 104, 128, 153, 235 national, 11, 29, 38, 74, 96, 221, 229 personal, 128, 184 urban, 22, 23, 87, 200 elegant, 102, 122, 123, 182–4 (passim), 189, 190, 206 elites, 40, 59, 101, 116, 128, 192, 224, 229, 237 emotional value, 97–9, 107 emulation, 233, 246 Enköping, 196–219 (passim) fairs, 6, 245 fashion, 2, 4, 5, 21, 23, 30, 58, 59–61, 64, 77, 94–6, 103, 106, 184, 197, 216, 230, 250 see also novelty Fonthill Abbey, 180, 182, 187 food, 5, 20, 32, 44, 76 friends, 76, 98, 106, 251 furniture, 25, 27, 28, 49, 50, 78, 80, 82, 93–110, 111–35, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 189, 196–219, 227 see also beds; chairs; chests of drawers; tables

Index gender, 22, 23, 33, 198, 212, 225, 250, 251 see also men; women genteel, 184, 190 gild fees, 162–3, 164 glassware, 180, 186, 232 guilds, 2, 6, 24, 27, 29, 30, 77–9, 83, 160–2, 169 handbooks, 46, 96, 101–3, 104, 112, 118, 126–9 handkerchiefs, 60, 64, 65 Herefordshire, 58, 60, 61, 62, 66 home, 8, 11, 37, 94, 96, 97–9, 104, 106, 107, 111–12, 117, 126, 127, 131, 187, 198, 199, 214, 215, 251 household goods, 5, 6, 8, 9, 37, 41, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 77, 119, 163, 166, 167, 176, 178, 181, 186, 198, 222, 228, 236, 243 houses, 62, 78, 81, 84, 102, 104, 113, 128, 209, 210, 212, 221, 222, 224, 226, 234–6, 245 country houses, 175–95 warehouses, 66, 102, 105 house sales, see auctions illicit market, 58–9, 63–7 income, 25, 76, 165, 244 India, 111–37 industrialisation, 8, 11, 20, 22, 74, 84, 196, 197, 204, 215 informal exchange, 6, 23, 58, 63, 66, 67–8, 78 inventories, 40, 48, 122–3, 186, 235 jumble sales, 242–58 Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire, 177, 178, 180, 183, 186, 188–92 kitchen ware, 30, 46, 47, 190, 226, 228 see also copperware knowledge, 27, 47, 50, 51, 83, 99, 124, 140, 167–8, 215 labourers, 59–61, 63, 65, 198, 199, 213 see also working class language, 42, 182–5

279

legal framework, 19–36, 40, 43, 46, 58, 63, 77, 82, 83, 84, 162, 169, 212, 214, 221, 222, 226, 233, 234 linen, 4, 51, 75, 82, 186, 228, 230, 231, 236 London, 6, 8, 38, 42, 44, 48, 50, 59, 61, 100, 105, 106, 139, 142–5 (passim), 147, 149, 153, 159, 176, 180, 188, 245, 246 luxury, 4, 8, 33, 81, 83, 140, 159–60, 165, 167, 178, 231–3 mahogany, 26, 96, 102, 105, 122, 178, 180, 182, 189, 190 Manchester, 62, 142–3, 148, 152 market, 2–11, 19–25, 27, 30–3, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 48, 50, 57–9, 62–6, 68, 73, 74, 76–81, 83, 86, 87, 93–5, 101, 103, 107, 117, 139, 142, 143, 145, 148, 152, 158–65, 167–70, 176, 178, 180, 188, 192, 193, 196, 215, 222, 228, 237, 246, 249 men, 42, 43, 44, 47, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 74, 77, 79, 97, 99, 101, 104, 130, 176, 178, 198, 212, 214, 225–8, 231, 233, 234, 235, 237, 242, 244, 245, 247, 250, 251 see also gender middle class, 95–100, 103, 104, 107, 111, 112, 115, 120, 127, 197, 243–5, 250, 251, 254 middlemen, 29, 159, 169 modern, 3–9, 11, 20, 21, 22, 26–8, 31–3, 38, 50, 59, 67, 68, 76, 87, 83, 95, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 111, 128–31, 153, 158, 159, 160, 162, 168, 169, 170, 184, 185, 188, 189, 192, 193, 222, 237, 242, 243, 244, 254, 255 modernity, 1, 3–7, 11, 20, 22, 33, 38, 87, 93, 95, 101, 107, 124, 131, 140, 141, 153, 154, 170, 185, 215, 216, 237, 244, 250, 254 modernization, 4, 9, 10, 74, 76, 79, 158 motivations, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 41, 65, 66, 67, 82, 83, 86, 94, 182, 218, 243 see also buying; selling

280 Index neighbourliness, 43, 49, 50, 66 see also philanthropy neighbours, 39, 44, 46, 176, 212, 243, 251 new goods, 4, 8, 62, 77, 96, 118, 165, 204, 243, 252 differentiated from used, 29–31, 83 as suspect, 103–7 newspapers, 39, 42, 58, 65, 81, 104, 186, 200 Northamptonshire, 175–95 (passim) novelty, 2, 7, 21, 22, 33, 48, 107, 158, 187, 212, 215–16, 250 see also fashion Old Bailey, 39, 147 old, definitions, 19–22, 27–31, 73, 77–8, 82, 123, 161–2 overseers of the poor, 39, 43, 49 paintings, 4, 81, 84, 167, 168, 178, 180, 186, 188, 191, 208–9 parish magazines, 243, 246–53 (passim) patina, 21, 73, 81, 94, 98, 103, 183 pawnbrokers, 6, 8, 62, 65, 66, 180, 200 peasants, 198–9, 204–11 (passim) philanthropy, 9, 50, 66, 243, 245–6, 253 see also neighbourliness post-mortem, 50, 167, 186 pottery, see chinaware prices, 7, 39, 40, 42, 46, 48–9, 51, 57, 62, 65, 66, 82, 83, 96, 101, 119, 121, 123, 139, 140, 142–52 (passim), 181, 192, 215, 228, 245, 247–8 private property, 26, 28, 32 professionalisation, 43, 44, 66, 73, 94, 163, 168, 169 profit, 29, 33, 86, 148, 149, 164, 245, 248, 249, 253 public houses (alehouses, taverns), 6, 64, 65, 77, 221 public sales, see auctions recycling, 3, 37, 74–7, 94, 97, 254 repair, 21, 27, 28, 76

respectability, 7, 77, 86, 106, 180, 215, 230, 231 retailers, 9, 51, 67, 79, 82, 101, 102, 103 see also dealers retailing, 1, 7, 8, 23, 50, 58, 95, 103, 141, 243 reuse, 2, 3, 11, 37, 74–7, 86 risk, 29, 50, 106 rural, 38, 42, 58, 59, 63, 67, 68, 77, 178, 200 consumers, 209–12 markets, 37, 228 sales, 40, 44, 50, 51 see also village salesman, 61, 62 second-hand dealers, 3, 4, 9, 23, 31, 78–80 (passim), 82, 86, 248 see also auctioneers; brokers; pawnbrokers selling, 5, 6, 8–10, 26, 28, 30, 31, 49, 50, 66, 78, 83, 139–57 (passim), 175, 180, 182–5, 245 see also auctions; informal exchange; shops; stalls (market, fair and street) semi-durables, 4, 21, 38, 59, 76, 97 servants, 60, 63, 64, 66, 76, 113, 127, 128, 199, 221 shoes and boots, 9, 62, 78, 229, 242, 247 shopkeepers, see dealers; retailers shops, 6, 25, 27–8, 32, 37, 58, 61–3, 67, 78, 85, 100, 105, 120, 142–3, 147–52, 176, 188, 221, 222, 226, 227, 233 showrooms, 6, 28, 106, 176 silk, 59, 60, 122, 128, 178, 186, 211, 228, 230, 236 slaves, 223, 224, 226–8, 230–1, 234, 235–6 slop, 77, 78, 96, 104, 106 smock frock, 60, 62, 63, 66 social status, 4, 40, 59, 96, 97, 107, 114, 120, 126, 140, 18, 182, 191, 197, 204–12 (passim),

Index 216, 221, 223, 224, 230–1, 233, 236 see also class; middle class; working class specialisation, 38, 158–9, 168–9 stalls (market, fair and street), 6, 25, 62, 79, 142, 143, 147, 148, 176, 246–8 state control, 6, 23–5, 33 Stockholm, 9–36, 196–219 stockings, 60, 62, 63 stolen goods, 6, 51, 57–72, 77, 78, 143, 176, 221, 230 supply and demand, 4, 5, 8, 22, 73, 74, 86, 230 symbolic capital, 79, 94, 131, 223 tables, 101, 105, 113, 121, 123, 125, 183, 207, 208–9, 235 tailors, 24, 27, 28, 30, 61, 62, 162, 226, 229 taste, 7, 94, 95, 99–103, 105, 107, 112, 120, 126, 128, 140, 176, 183, 184 textiles, 3, 32, 38, 75, 78, 115, 116, 236 see also cotton goods; silk; woollen goods theft, 58, 63, 64, 65, 75–6, 143, 249 town, 8, 24, 44, 57, 58, 65, 66, 67, 82, 64, 100, 119, 142, 145–50, 153, 159, 167, 177, 180, 184, 185, 192, 200, 224, 229, 230, 231 see also urban trade, 1, 3, 4, 5–11, 19, 20, 23–6, 28, 30–3, 38, 42, 49, 57–9, 61–3, 65, 67, 73, 77–81, 86, 87, 93, 94, 96, 99–101, 118, 119, 121, 140, 141, 143–8, 150, 152–4, 176, 177, 180, 183, 186, 188, 193, 196, 197, 215, 221, 222, 226, 227, 234, 236, 237, 251, 254 trousers, 60, 62, 64, 236

281

upholsterers, 100, 19, 121 urban, 20, 22, 23, 24, 31, 33, 38, 50, 58, 61, 63, 67, 68, 73, 76, 80, 98, 111, 116, 118, 177, 180, 200, 204, 207–9, 250 see also town used goods, 4, 5, 9, 38, 47, 243 definitions, 29–31 value, 3, 5, 38, 41, 44, 46, 47, 83, 93, 96–8, 104, 111, 119, 124–7, 131, 140, 142, 143, 150, 152, 166–8, 178, 187, 188, 197, 222, 224, 228, 231, 237 of goods, 4, 6, 7, 11, 21, 29, 40, 49, 51, 61, 63, 66, 81, 95, 101, 141, 149, 191, 207, 210, 233, 255 as motivation for buying, 10, 48, 182–5, 230 veneer, 27, 103, 104, 105–6 village, 64, 65, 104, 142, 143, 177 see also rural waste, 3, 74, 149, 153 wealth, 22, 76, 79, 83, 94, 99, 103, 167, 176, 180, 183, 198, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 215, 223, 224, 231, 232–3, 237, 245, 252–3 Westmorland, 37, 39, 43, 44 widows, 41, 46, 212 women, 10, 20, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 32, 33, 42, 47, 48, 57, 77–9, 104, 120, 128, 198, 204, 212–14, 216, 223–31, 235–7, 242–7, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254 woollen goods, 61, 62 Worcester, 58, 61, 65 Worcestershire, 58, 61, 63, 65 working class, 10, 61, 68, 76, 93, 104, 197, 249, 254 worn out goods, 3, 21, 80