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1 Going Shopping in Victorian England Shopping is, in a sense, one of the oldest of human interactions: from the earliest days of civilization, humans have traded for what they need. Great empires rose out of this need to trade, and historians see trade as the principle means by which ideas, technology, and goods made their way between cultures. At the same time, shopping is one of the most obscure of human interactions: people rarely recorded more than the barest details of how they shopped, and even then, their accounts of shopping are usually coincidental to something else. Shopping is also a dynamic human experience, constantly changing, and unrecognizable from one generation to the next some of what we once knew about Victorian shopping is lost and must be pieced back together from small references. Finally, historians have only recently begun to ask questions about shopping, preferring to look at the big picture of economic history. In the past, “studying the market” meant studying how goods were made and the general way that they were exchanged, rather than the specifics of the marketplace. As a result, there are still gaps in what we know about shops and shopping. This book is concerned with shopping in England from just before Victoria became queen to the period just after her death. Shopping changed tremen- dously in the course of this time. Over the course of the century, people were increasingly able to buy goods, especially food and clothing, which they had made at home. They found not only more shops selling traditional wares, but also new types of shops offering novel goods and services. Shopkeeping became more regular and predictable, and also more common as shopping became a regular part of some women’s lives. Shopping also became more impersonal as the processes connecting the producer to the consumer grew longer and more complex. Some older and traditional forms of shopping continued, but increas- ingly only in smaller towns and rural areas. This was a consumer revolution