Bath Commercialis'd

BATH COMMERCIALIS'D Shops, Trades and Market at the 18th-Century Spa The shopping area of central Bath, from a map of 1789. Numbers 27-29 indicate the provisions market surrounding no.6, the Guildhall BATH COMMERCIALIS'D Shops, Trades and Market at the 18th-Century Spa by Trevor Fawcett RUTON : 2002 In Memory of a Leeds Shopgirl and a Market Florist First published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by RUTON, 25 Northampton Street, Bath, and produced by R. Milsom & Associates 01454 850033 Copyright © Trevor Fawcett All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder. ISBN 0-9526326-3-2 INTRODUCTION The Wedgwood cup-and-saucer on the title-page and the teapot above illustrate Georgian consumerism rather well. Tea consumption went up by sixty times between 1710 and 1800, a prime example of a luxury taste spreading to the masses. Shipped by the East India Company from distant China, tea also symbolised Britain's commercial prowess and global reach. At home it gave rise to the social rituals of the tea table, and to new ceramic forms (matching tea sets) which hastened the decline of pewter. And it was the demand for utilitarian tableware that underpinned Wedgwood's expansion into the range of ornamental pottery for which he is now best known. It is not surprising that Wedgwood chose Bath as the ideal place outside London to site his public showrooms. Nowhere else could boast such a modish clientèle with so much purchasing power. The spa's eighteenth-century growth was meteoric - in buildings, in amenities, in seasonal visitors, in permanent residents, and in prestige and sophistication. Long before Jane Austen began to use Bath as a setting in her novels, the shops there dazzled newcomers. One young visitor in 1788, Mary Anne Galton, could only wonder at 'the beauty of the shops... I could not conceive how it was possible to invent all the wants, which here were professed to be supplied'. This book attempts to recreate something of that vivid impression, and to do so it ranges over the whole spectrum of commercial activity from humble backstreet dealers and manufacturing workshops to the richly stocked provisions market and the flamboyant retailing establishments of Milsom Street. Some historians have seen the eighteenth century as pivotal in fostering our modern acquisitiveness. There has been much debate with regard to disposable incomes, living standards, and the aspirations of the rising middle class; about the effect of revolutionary changes in agriculture, industry, transportation, and marketing; and concerning the part played by population growth, the financial system, colonial exploitation, or simply the whirligig of fashion, in stimulating and feeding demand. What cannot be contested is the fabulous range of wares and produce that was on everyday sale at Bath. Familiar and unfamiliar, many of these goods are touched on in this book - full-bottomed wigs and gouty shoes, umbrellas and quilted petticoats, cosmetics and snuff, duelling pistols and kitchen smoke jacks, harpsichords and postchaises, Bath Olivers and sausages, ice cream and asses' milk, vintage clarets and cheap illicit gin, to list only a few. Commodities of all sorts, whether produced locally or brought in by road, river and canal from other places, were traded by generations of shopkeepers, market stall-holders, craftsmen, visiting dealers, street pedlars, and so on, all pushing for custom in an economic environment with few safety nets. In the pages that follow, some of the more significant tradesmen and tradeswomen are picked out and individualised to give some idea of the people behind the façade of business. Each occupation is covered in alphabetical order for ease of reference - from Apothecaries, Chemists and Druggists through to Woollen Drapers - but most are linked by cross-references to enable the reader to pursue with ease any particular topic of interest - clothes shops, for example, or luxury retailers, or the sale of foodstuffs. There are special sections too on Bath shops in general and on the vital provisions market. Old-established trades (butchers, grocers, shoemakers) mingle here with relatively new ones (carvers-and-gilders, coachbuilders, laundresses, music dealers, toymen), but the emphasis is always on suppliers of commodities. This means that some commercial sectors of eighteenth-century Bath are excluded on principle. Do not look here for information on the building industry, lodgings and transport services, or the various professions - nor on the business of diverting visitors (treated, however, in a companion volume, Bath Entertain'd). Although grounded in the particulars of the Bath scene, this is a book about the world of eighteenth-century retailing at large, with much about business methods, sales trends, production processes, and sources of products. Increasingly, as the century wore on, many articles on sale came from a distance, sometimes - like tea, sugar, cottons, and tobacco - from a great distance. Most perishable foodstuffs originated locally of course, but even so Brixham fish, Essex oysters, Yorkshire hams and Welsh butter were regularly available. By contrast manufactured goods poured in from all quarters, especially from London, the Midlands, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the Clyde, making Bath a veritable showcase of the early Industrial Revolution in action. Shopkeepers' lives grew more complicated as a result, dealing as they often did with dozens of wholesalers, importers, manufacturers and middlemen, with a plethora of transport services, and with all the pressures of credit terms and variable cash flow. The customer, meanwhile, was spoilt for choice - and above all at Bath. Admiring comments echo down the years, from a witness of the 1720s enthusing about the well- patronised Bath shops 'filled with every thing that contributes to Pleasure' down to a much later visitor appreciative of the 'Multitude of splendid shops, full of all that wealth and luxury can desire, arranged with all the arts of seduction'. But the luxury retailers they were referring to here were only part of a much broader story. N.B. Pre-1752 dates are always given in 'new style', i.e. 28 Jan 1726/7 is regarded as occurring in 1727. Certain entries quote sums of money. To obtain very approximate modern sterling equivalents multiply by around sixty - though because relative values have changed, this will sometimes understate, sometimes overstate, the true comparison. Market officials check for underweight butter, a woodcut from Hannah More's cautionary broadsheet, The Market Woman, or Honesty is the Best Policy (1790). Apothecaries, Chemists and Druggists A venomous satire of 1737, The Diseases of Bath, pictures a repulsive, slovenly apothecary (Stercorio) in his equally repulsive, slovenly shop - 'a nauseous, litter'd Magazine // Of all that is unwholesome and unclean'. Here amid the squalor he mixes cordials with dirty hands, speads plasters, powders oyster shell, and doles out pills and ointments, quite careless as to which medicine will eventually be sent to what patient. Taking on the physician's role he even dares to prescribe, boldly but quite ignorantly, and at the end presents his dying victim with a huge 'Assassin's Bill' for useless remedies. Nonetheless, the piece concludes, despite all his misdeeds Stercorio rates as 'a very Treasure... an Aesculapius' compared with the spa's other eighteen apothecaries - 'all worse than he'. Nineteen apothecaries in all seems about right for 1737, but does anything else in this scurrilous exposé ring true? Illness and disease were still poorly understood of course. Treatments were sometimes dangerous or, to modern thinking, quite misconceived. Yet Bath, hospital to the nation, remained the country's premier health resort, and its medical practitioners were regarded by and large as serious people. Apothecaries in particular had gained in status following a landmark legal judgment of 1704 which won them the right to advise and prescribe - transforming them almost at a stroke from mere tradesmen into something approaching family doctors. Still debarred from charging for their advice, they continued to make up physicians' prescriptions but now profited too from dispensing the medicines they prescribed - or overprescribed - themselves. At Bath they enjoyed a further advantage in supplying all the medication (purges, sweats, tonics, sedatives) that patients on a water cure were routinely dosed with. Their notoriously high mark-up on drugs could be defended on several grounds, including the need to keep in stock all 400-500 basic ingredients listed in their holy book, the London Pharmacopoeia, many of which tended to spoil and required periodic renewal. Materia medica divided into two main categories - traditional 'galenic' (mainly herbal) remedies and a growing number of chemical compounds. Medical supplies in general could be bought from Apothecaries' Hall in London or specialist wholesalers, though a few Bath apothecaries (Thomas Haviland, David Russell, William Sole) cultivated their own herb gardens, and others may have relied on the simple-gatherers or herb 1 women whom we sometimes hear of. Jones of Covent Garden was an important outside supplier for over forty years - even of the live vipers urgently requested in 1781 for West & Sole's dispensing shop in Trim Street. Far from the scene of disorder

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