The Department Store: A Social History.

Perhaps, as we have now begun to realize, consumption rather than work has been all along the defining experience of modern society. In this highly useful study Bill Lancaster revisits a central institution of Western consumer culture, the department store, adding the story of the British grand magasin to what has largely been the preserve of American and French business, social, and cultural historians. Lancaster has written neither a monograph nor a synthesis, lacking the scholarly studies for the latter and largely eschewing the archival sources of the former. Instead he has chosen to draw upon a variety of printed materials - the Draper's Record and the memoirs of Rowen Bentall in particular - and to combine these with the scholarly works on America and France to construct his comparative perspective on mass retailing in Britain. The result is a bit of a hodgepodge. A chapter on theories of consumerism is nicely done, but it succeeds not at all in advancing the presentation on England and could easily have been left on the cutting-room floor. Despite the social history subtitle, later chapters on work and women seem more justified by the attempt to cover all the bases than by the relevant material they marshal, and Lancaster is far more interesting and innovative when he writes about businessmen and their competitors. But the book has two great strengths: it is a nationwide survey and it carries its narration well into the twentieth century; and on both counts the author succeeds in commanding our attention.

Social geography looms large in this study, perhaps because Lancaster is insistent on refusing to allow London to take over his story. The first stores were northern ones - Bainbridge's of Newcastle and Kendal, Milne and Faulkner of Manchester - products of where the industrial revolution began, although in the capital the effects of social geography again, according to Lancaster, were decisive. Hence Whitely's genius "was to recognise the potential of Westbourne Grove as the shopping centre of the expanding suburbs on the edge of Hyde Park," (p. 20) while the construction of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park drew a better crowd to Knightsbridge, initiated the metamorphosis of the neighborhood from ratty to toney, and thus laid the basis for the future prosperity of Harrods. Elsewhere department stores followed tourists to the seacoasts of the south, responded to the class character of their cities (for example Lewis's of working-class Liverpool), and as in the case of Brown's of Chester understood that the coming of the motor car could be a godsend as well as a catastrophe.

Strangely, for this nation of cities and shopkeepers, the entrepreneurial spirit that would seize upon and exploit these occasions of geography was slow to develop. If Lancaster's telling is purposefully derivative, it is because, he argues, so too were his subjects. Time and again, he reminds us, what British department store owners did not steal from the French they took from the Americans. From France came building design, names (at least three Bon Marches), fashions, and a model of employee relations. From America, to where the innovating torch passed by the turn of the century, came advances in window dressing, new managerial and merchandising practices, and the palpable transfer of all these techniques with the building of Selfridge's. Within this schematic presentation that at times seems to proceed with the bibliographical chronology of his references, there is a whiff of the British business historian's obsession with rot, although one Lancaster quickly douses beneath sweeter fragrances. With a sensitive, easy feeling for his subjects, Lancaster reminds us that alongside a handful of moneyed lotharios (Whitely's universal providing of another sort proved his undoing) the British stores were operated by family dynasties who understood what worked, knew how to adapt, and represented a triumph of British labor management. In arguably the finest section of the book, Lancaster traces the threat that came in the post World War I years from cooperatives, chain stores, the automobile, and brand products (which eliminated pricing strategies and could be bought almost anywhere). Yet this was a threat that after an initial battle for survival the department stores readily surmounted, so that by the end of the thirties aggressive marketing, new electrical products, a plethora of new services (including free wart removal), but most of all "finely tuned antennae to shifts in living standards and consumer taste" (p. 105) revealed an unexpected resiliency to the British business world. Lancaster has given us the outlines of a history that others, with case studies based on archives, will have to fill in. Nonetheless, in his modest way, he has succeeded in reminding us of the widening compass of department store studies and has shown in this welcome volume what we should know, and should make, of the British experience.

Michael Miller Syracuse University