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PROLOGUE
    ‘And there is a girl behind the counter too – I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats.’
    Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own
, 1929
     
    In 1900, a quarter of a million women worked in shops. By the mid 1960s, the number was over a million, nearly one fifth of the country’s female workforce. Today, women are such familiar figures behind the till, the counter and in the boardrooms of retail chains that it’s hard to imagine shoplife without them. Yet there was a time, not so long ago, when they were rare. This is the story of shopgirls and the part they have played, from the Victorian age through to the present day, in Britain’s retail revolution.
    Napoleon’s famous line – often quoted in the many biographies of him bemoaned by Virginia Woolf – that Britain was ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ was meant as an insult. To him, we were a country powered by nothing more than shallow commerce, not grand designs.
    But British shopkeeping went hand in hand with growth in trade and empire. By the early nineteenth century, British commerce was booming and the country was indeed experiencing a huge growth in shops of every kind. And, as Woolf may have guessed, in becoming a ‘nation of shopkeepers’, we had come to rely on a growing, but unsung, army of shopgirls.
    Coined in the 1820s, the very word ‘shopgirl’ was new: a new term to describe a very new kind of employee, and a term that would be used for the next 150 years. The Industrial Revolution had created jobs for legions of additional workers but they only had jobs if people bought the things they made. Britain’s prosperity depended on consumers just as much as on manufacturers. As people left the countryside and crowded into towns and cities, wages rose and even the most meagre income had to buy basic provisions. More demand meant more shops, and more shops meant a different kind of shop assistant. From small local outlets to large drapery stores, proprietors started to see selling as a job for the girls and no longer just for the boys.
    The story of British shopgirls is one woven deep into the fabric of our country’s history and yet, until now, historians have allowed them to fall through the cracks. They have remained ‘behind the counter’ of history – playing a vital part in the stories of work, consumer culture, living standards and politics but rarely mentioned. We hope this book changes that.
    In contrast, the writers of Victorian music hall songs, newspaper columns, plays and novels were obsessed with shopgirls. The label itself was always double-edged, quickly becoming a shorthand for both the lowering effects of mass consumer culture and, at the same time, its guilty pleasures and attractions. Certain kinds of shopgirls became the stuff of fantasy: who were these girls behind the counter in their demure black silk dresses and what were they really selling? Émile Zola’s classic 1883 novel,
The Ladies’ Paradise
, is a torrid tale of the temptations posed by Paris’s new and decadent department stores. His lead shopgirl is ingénue Denise Baudu, a provincial draper’s assistant. The story sees her battling through the store’s moral maze to find her eventual reward, not only in a promotion, but also in a socially mobile marriage to the boss, Octave Mouret, having steadfastly resisted his earlier efforts to seduce her.
    Zola based his novel on the Bon Marché, one of Europe’s first and finest department stores. As we shall discover, by the time the book was published, Britain also boasted several stores of a similar scale, from Whiteley’s and Harrods in London, to Kendals in Manchester and Jenners in Edinburgh. These large stores, with their opulent designs, seductive displays and luxury goods, seemed to be far removed from the two other worlds that the Victorians held most dear: home and work. Shops like these were places for spending, distinct from