The Boot and Shoe Trades in London and Paris in the Long Eighteenth Century

Boots and shoes are sold there, to be sure, but what boots and shoes? Varnishes
and embroidered and be-nbbonned figments, fitter for a fancy ball or a lady's
chamber, there to caper to the jingling melody of a lute, than for serious
pedestrianism.25
As the producer/retailer association remained consistent till the 1850s, also the
association between craft skills and specialist knowledge of products remained a
distinctive feature of the market. 26 By the 1840s the appearance of large retailers
not at all related to production created concern in the market:
there is a large class of persons in London... who sell boots and shoes, but do not
manufacture them. The great part of those persons know no more how a boot or
shoe is made, than the boots and shoes can said to possess such knowledge. These
articles are principally made in the country or the Eastern part of the metropolis,
and sent up for sale: perhaps a hundred dozen pairs are made on one pair of
lasts.27
At the opposite end of the spectrum bespoke and ready-made still lived together.
Bespoke survived because of the superiority of the article produced, although
ready-made shoes were purchased by the bulk of the population. 28 Bespoke
could be still considered attractive even for those who had large premises and
consistent cash business. It provided a touch of class. Mr. Page, boot and
shoemaker in Fleet Street, advertised in 1844 that he had a 'Bespoke
Department' where "Mr Page takes under his own immediate management,
adopting a mode of measuring by which he can obtain the form and fit the foot
with accuracy; he also makes the last for each customer and keeps it exclusively
for whom it is made".
Cit. in A. Adburgham, Shopping in style. London from the Restoration to Edwardian
elance (London, 1979), p. 102.
M.J. Winstanley, The shopkeeper's world, 1 830-1914 (Manchester, 1983), pp. 8-9.
27 j Sparkes Hall, The book of the feet; a history of boots and shoes (London, 1846?), p. 87.
Ibid. p. 83.
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