Abstract
Mrs Bos, a fictional character in a novel set in The Hague and dating from 1886, was a self-confident woman. Her husband, a respectable though not well-off major, cherished the tranquillity of his heavenly home. Mrs Bos, however, was determined to do everything she could to ensure that her two marriageable daughters found good husbands. Thus the family had to be ‘seen’: at the fashionable summer concerts in The Hague woods, on the aristocratic beach terrace of Scheveningen, in the Theatre français, but also on the city’s main squares and streets. Every day from two till four o’clock Mrs Bos joined the daily promenade on the city’s main shopping streets, encouraging her sweet angels to make eyes at respectable officers and civil servants. Even earlier in the day the shopping streets were their natural terrain: ‘At half past ten in the morning Même and her daughters already furnished the most elegant streets with their presence, ‘for shopping’ [‘om te winkelen’], as they say in The Hague.’1
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Notes
J. Gram, Maurits van Moreelen (Leiden: Sijthof, 1886), p. 79 (translation mine).
Recent examples: R. Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (London: Faber and Faber, 2000)
B. Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (London: Leicester University Press, 1995).
N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)
C. Walsh, ‘The Newness of the Department Store: a View from the Eighteenth Century’, in G. Crossick and S. Jaumain (eds), Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 46–71
J. Stobart, Spend, Spend, Spend! A History of Shopping (Stroud: Tempus, 2008), pp. 66–7; 94–6.
E. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 5 is one of the few scholars working on late nineteenth-century shopping culture who explicitly acknowledges that ‘shopping was never synonymous with buying’ and emerged as a discrete consumer activity at least in the eighteenth century.
The historiography on nineteenth-century Dutch retailing and shopping is largely limited to H.Ph. Hondelink, ‘Van kleine nering tot grootwinkelbedrijf. Schets van de geschiedenis van de Nederlandse detailhandel, 1850-heden’, in Historische bedrijfsarchieven. Detailhandel. Een geschiedenis en bronnenoverzicht (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1993), pp. 15–26
R. Miellet, Honderd jaargrootwinkelbedrijf in Nederland (Zwolle: Catena, 1993), pp. 16–67
J. H. Furnée, ‘“Om te winkelen, zoo als dat in de residentie heet”: Consumptiecultuur en stedelijke ruimte in Den Haag,1850–1890’, in B. Henkes et al. (eds), Sekse en de city: Vrouwen en de stad in de lange negentiende eeuw. Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2002), pp. 28–56
J. H. Furnée, ‘Winkeletalages als moderne massamedia: Visuele cultuur en sociale verhoudingen in Den Haag, 1850–1890’, De Negentiende Eeuw, 27 (2003), 74–106
C. Lesger, Het winkellandschap in Amsterdam, ca. 1550–2000: Stedelijke structuur en winkelbedrijf in de vroegmoderne en moderne tijd (Hilversum: Verloren, 2013).
T. Wijsenbeek-Olthuis, ‘Economisch leven’, in T. Wijsenbeek-Olthuis (ed.), Den Haag: Geschiedenis van de stad, II, De tijd van de republiek (Zwolle: Waanders, 2005), p. 73.
T. Wijsenbeek-Olthuis, ‘Winkels in Den Haag, 1575–1795’, Die Haghe (2013), 11–40 offers the first overview of the complex institutional history of The Hague’s mercer’s guild.
See also T. Wijsenbeek-Olthuis, ‘Joodse winkels in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw’, in H. van Agt (ed.), 275 jaar Haagse Snoge: Nieuw elan in eeuwenoud gebouw (’s Gravenhage: BZZTôH, 2002), pp. 79–109.
W. F. H. Oldewelt, ‘De beroepsstructuur van de bevolking der Hollandse stemhebbende steden volgens de kohieren van familiegelden van 1674, 1715 en 1742’, Economisch-Historisch Jaarboek, 25 (1952), 193–202.
Cf. I. Van Damme, Verleiden en verkopen: Antwerpse kleinhandelaren en hun klanten in tijden van crisis (ca. 1648–ca. 1748) (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007), chapter 5.
J. H. Furnée, ‘City of Wealth: Urban Governance and Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, in L. Lucassen and W. Willems (eds), Living in the City: Urban Institutions in the Low Countries, 1200–2010 (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 129–46.
J. H. Furnée, Plaatsen van beschaafd vertier: Standsbesef en stedelijke cultuur in Den Haag, 1850–1890 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2012), pp. 708–9, table 1.1.
HGA, Lijst der kiezers van leden van den Gemeenteraad der stad ’s Gravenhage, 1851. Furnée, Plaatsen van beschaafd vertier, table 1.1.
B. Koopmans, Haagse winkelpuien: Een inventarisatie in de binnenstad (The Hague: Gemeente Den Haag, 1990), p. 16.
‘Een blik op Holland’, De Tijd. Merkwaardigheden der Letterkunde en Geschiedenis van den Dag voor de Beschaafde Wereld, II (1845), p. 39. See also A. J. van der Aa, Aardrijkskundig woordenboek der Nederlanden, IX (1849), pp. 685–6.
P. R. D. Stokvis, De wording van modern Den Haag: De stad en haar bevolking van de Franse tijd tot de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Zwolle: Waanders, 1987), p. 146.
E. Horlings and J. P. Smits, ‘Private Consumer Expenditure in The Netherlands, 1800–1913’, Economic and Social History in The Netherlands, 7 (1996), 20.
Verslag over den toestand […] 1852, p. 64. For a more elaborate account of the changes in The Hague’s shop windows and their reception, see Furnée, ‘Winkeletalages’. Some interesting parallels are offered by U. Spiekermann, ‘Display Windows and Window Displays in German Cities of the Nineteenth Century: Towards the History of a Commercial Breakthrough’, in C. Wischermann and E. Shore (eds), Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 139–71.
[Jochems], ‘De winkeliers voor een halve eeuw II’. The system of fixed and visible prices may have been introduced by F. H. Bothe from Oldenburg, when he associated himself with B. Bahlman, the former apprentice of the well-known Anton Sinkel on the Nieuwendijk in Amsterdam. N/N., NV Manufacturenmagazijn F.H. Bothe ’s Gravenhage 1836–1936 (‘s Gravenhage, 1936). Dagblad van ‘s Gravenhage, 1 May 1848. Cf. M. Schrover, Een kolonie van Duitsers: Groepsvorming onder Duitse immigranten in Utrecht in de negentiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2002), pp. 266–7.
V. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
A. Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
J. Gram, De familie Schaffels (Arnhem: Thieme, 1870), p. 41.
J. H. Furnée, From Parisian Cosmopolitism to Wiener Mélange. Negotiating Class and Gender in The Hague’s Grands Cafés in the 1880s’, Cahiers Bruxellois. Revue d’Histoire Urbaine, 43 (2012), pp. 177–88.
‘Uit de Residentie’, UPSD, 24 April 1881, 17 March and 15 June 1882; ‘Haagsche sprokkelingen’, UPSD, 11 August 1884 and 14 April 1885. Cf. P. R. D. Stokvis, ‘Haagse melksalons en conditoreien rond 1900: Vrouwenemancipatie en veranderende etenstijden’, in B. Henkes et al. (eds), Voeden en opvoeden. Jaarboek voor vrouwengeschiedenis, XIX (1999), pp. 102–5.
J. H. Furnée, ‘De “Passage-manie”. Een kleine cultuurgeschiedenis van de grote stad, 1879–1885’ (Master’s thesis, University of Groningen, 1997), pp. 56–63.
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© 2014 Jan Hein Furnée
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Furnée, J.H. (2014). ‘Our Living Museum of Nouveautés’: Visual and Social Pleasures in The Hague’s Shopping Streets, 1650–1900. In: Furnée, J.H., Lesger, C. (eds) The Landscape of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314062_10
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