Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 2 (2013), p. 358

Just over a hundred years ago, The practical grocer: a manual and guide for the grocer, the provision merchant and allied trades was published in four volumes. It is interesting to compare the approach of its contributors with that of Jon Stobart in his Sugar and spice. Although the treatment of grocery and grocers in the two works is very different, the groceries themselves have changed surprisingly little; hardly any have disappeared, with only some – not so many as one might think – added. The practical grocer includes authoritative articles on a wide range of products that any scholar working on the topic would be unwise to ignore. Like Stobart, it puts tea at the forefront of grocery, followed by other hot drinks and sugar. However, where The practical grocer sees these goods as established – and classless – Stobart explores how they morphed from novelty to part of how polite society presented itself. Largely because of a lack of evidence, he is weakest on the uptake of tea among the poor.

Stobart’s concentration on such a limited range of groceries is a pity, as it directs too much attention towards new imported goods and away from innovative changes in existing home production. Mustard, for example, was formerly sold mainly as the seed but, after the late 1720s, it was also found in the shops as the refined and more-or-less branded ‘Durham mustard’. The home manufacture of soap developed on a quasi-industrial scale so making it available to a broad market, replacing for many the less satisfactory lye. Simultaneously, developments in making candles enabled virtually all to abandon the malodorous rush light.

George Dodd’s Days in the factories published in 1843, not much more than a decade after the end of Stobart’s chosen period, shows how rapidly the industrialization of groceries progressed during the latter part of his period. Dodd included a chapter entitled ‘A day in a sugar refinery’ and another at a ‘Soap and candle manufactory’, as well as similar chapters on the large-scale production of tobacco and vinegar. The manufacture and processing of these groceries in what Dodd perceived as quasi-factory conditions must have had considerable effects on how these products were marketed and consumed in the early nineteenth century. None of these innovations are explored.

Apart from this relatively minor quibble, Stobart has produced a masterly synthesis of existing research, pursuing such themes as the old against the new in marketing practices, consumers’ perceptions of luxury against comfort and convenience, and the importance of polite sociability both in the home and the shop. Whilst former findings were sometimes based on limited evidence, Stobart has backed his conclusions with solid data covering what groceries were in the shops (and both where and when), before passing on to how they were deployed in recipe books and in personalized bills of fare. In the process he has investigated the production and consumption of a few groceries in early modern England from, as it were, ‘the cradle to the grave’. There has been no such work in the literature of retailing and consumption, and it will be valued accordingly.

Having recommended Sugar and spice wholeheartedly for what it does cover, I must take issue with aspects of its methodology. Too many of his illustrative examples are taken as given in secondary sources and then not always accurately. For example, Samuel Finney’s History of Wilmslow is not quoted from the original but from T. S. Ashton’s Economic history (1955, pp. 214–6), Stobart claims Finney was a cotton dealer (p. 93), which he was not, and implies that Finney’s industrial workers were barely distinguishable from workhouse inhabitants, except for being in work, whereas they were much more comfortably circumstanced. The old woman depicted in the ‘Cottage Interior’ by the genre painter, William Redmore Bigg, was not poor by the standards of the day, having among her possessions a warming-pan and a comfortable chair, with arms. Nor is it clear her loaf was of white bread, though other sources suggest it probably was. Stobart extrapolates too much (p. 273). Incidentally, Stobart neither references the picture nor indexes the painter. There are too many such minor slips, which should perhaps have been picked up by the editor.

Enough of minor criticisms. Accepting that it focuses too narrowly on some types of grocery, Sugar and spice fills a gap in the literature. It deserves to be widely read and I am only sorry I did not see a copy before my own text went to the publishers.