A 'Brave and Daring Folk'? Shopkeepers and Trade Associational Life in Victorian and Edwardian England

Abstract

Trade associations are generally acknowledged to have occupied a critical position in the shopkeeping community of early twentieth-century England.2 Yet surprisingly historians have made little attempt to reconstruct the precise mechanics of such associational activity.3 This study, which focuses on associational life in one representative provincial centre, Leicester,4 attempts to explain how associationalism both fostered the emergence of a parochial shopkeeping subculture, oriented around specific trades, and transformed shopkeeping politics. First, an investigation of this sub-culture explains the genesis of important structural changes within the business community. Trade solidarity caused shopkeepers to reassess their relationship with other retailers, leading for the first time to the development of divisions within the shopkeeping community based on a collective self-consciousness. The consequence was the gradual emergence of a clear-cut division within the shopkeeping world between two fractions: principal' (specialist) shopkeepers and domestic' (general) shopkeepers. The thrust of the argument is that by the early twentieth century principal shopkeepers emerged as a group whose members drew their social identity from their trade, and its accompanying sub-culture, rather than, as in earlier years, their association with the wider community. Second, local investigation also suggests that late nineteenth-century associationalism was responsible, in large part, for shopkeepers' changing political expectations. An examination of shopkeeper activism in Leicester goes some way to reinterpreting the current orthodoxy that shopkeepers occupied a marginal role in the political life of the nation. Historians such as Geoffrey Crossick and Michael Winstanley argue with some confidence that nineteenth-century British shopkeepers were politically impotent. This was in direct contrast with their continental counterparts who were leaders of right-wing lower-middle-class militancy.5 Certainly, as both Geoffrey Crossick and Michael Winstanley argue, British shopkeepers remained committed to mainstream party politics.6 Both Liberals and Conservatives were sympathetic to shopkeeping concerns by the early twentieth century; however, in a stable community neither party needed shopkeepers as allies against potential threats to the established order.7 This allows Crossick to conclude that as a political force shopkeepers were not essential in Britain.8 However, just because shopkeepers were not required as political saviours does not mean that their political activities should be ignored. Indeed, it is precisely because shopkeepers accepted mainstreampolitics' that their own unique political/trade sub-culture developed as it did in the late nineteenth century.