Jon Stobart - Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England, 1650-1830

SUGAR AND SPICE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jon Stobart is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published widely on the history of consumption, retailing, and leisure in eighteenth-century England, and has a particular interest in the spatiality of consumption and the marketing of goods. His recent publications include Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century (2014), co-edited with Bruno Blonde, The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption (2015), co-edited with Andrew Hann, and Consumption and the Country House (2016), co-authored with Mark Rothery.

Sugar and Spice

Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England, 16501830

JON STOBART

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

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Jon Stobart 2013

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First published 2013

First published in paperback 2016

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ISBN 9780199577927 (Hbk.)

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eISBN 9780192515629

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For Jane

Acknowledgements

There are many people and organizations that have assisted in the research and production of this book. Grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the AHRC have made possible much of the archival work for this project, and I am grateful for their support. Undertaking this work would have been impossible without the assistance of archivists and search-room staff in a large number of places: the record offices in Bedford, Chester, Hanley, Lichfield, Maidstone, Northampton, Norwich, Oxford, Preston, Shrewsbury, Stafford, Stratford-upon-Avon, Truro, Warwick, York, and at the British Library, the Central Library in Manchester, the John Rylands Library, Northamptonshire Central Library, and The National Archives. I would like to thank Lucy Bailey, Amy Barnett, and Andrew Hann for generously making available some of their data and thus enriching various sections of the book. Thanks also to the following for permission to reproduce images: the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, John Johnson Collection; the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies; the Norfolk Library and Information Service, and Northamptonshire Central Library.

There are numerous colleagues who have helped to refine my thinking about groceries, retailing, consumption, and material culture. These include the organizers and participants at a wide range of conferences and seminars in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Berlin, Cambridge, Exeter, Ghent, Jyvaskyla, Leeds, Leicester, Lisbon, Liverpool, London, Lyon, Northampton, Nottingham, Oxford, Paris, Rouen, Telford, Warwick, and Wolverhampton. Particular thanks go to Amy Barnett, Bruno Blond, Nancy Cox, Sheryllynne Haggerty, Ian Mitchell, Mark Rothery, and Sara Pennell for reading drafts and talking about groceries and grocers. They encouraged me to think broadly and to be rigorous in my analysis. The quality of the final text owes much to the care and attention of Hilary Walford and Andrew Hawkey, who helped to correct my grammatical, typographical, and presentational errors. Finally, thanks to my family, who have, more or less convincingly, shown an interest in the grocery trade of eighteenth-century England. They have been very patient.

Contents

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In May 1742, the Norwich grocer Robert Baret advertised a range of teas recently acquired at the East India Company sales, along with coffee, chocolate, sago, capers, anchovies, and spirits. Around the same time, Molly Brooks was buying tea, sugar, fruit, spices, nuts, and chocolate from the Worcester grocer Thomas Dickenson. Indeed, the combined attention of economic, social, and cultural historians has placed onto imported groceries an enormous weight of conceptual, historical, and empirical significance. Few have stopped to consider whether these goods can really carry such a heavy explanatory load or to think about the everyday practicalities of selling, buying, and consuming sugar, tea, spices, or tobacco. This book attempts to do both of these thingsand more. The explicit focus is the character and development of the grocery trade in provincial England between the spread of new exotic goods in the mid-seventeenth century and the emergence of Co-Operative Society stores and multiples in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In tracing the lines of supply that carried groceries from merchants through retailers to consumers, I demonstrate how changes in retailing and shopping were central to the broader transformation of consumption and consumer practices.