🛍️💰Regency series: Shopping in a Regency Marketplace💰🛍️
Penelope’s dress she wears shopping in BRIDGERTON 2x01
From by The Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain, by Ian Mortimer, page 40:
"...traders are doing business among a dozen ramschackle buildings and sheds, selling flowers, fruit and vegetables. Many of them are women, hauling full baskets from the back of their covered stalls to the front, where they arrange them artfully to catch the eye. Men and women push wheelbarrows through the crowds of shoppers and people gossipping, with dogs running around their heels. Horse-drawn wagons stand around the perimeter, waiting to be unloaded. Listen for a moment and you'll hear the iron-tired wheels grinding on the cobbles and market traders calling out in hard London accents how much their flowers or oranges are. Others are shouting out the prices of hot pies or copies of the latest broadside ballad. Some lads advertise their shoe-cleaning services; girls with pails suspended from a yoke across their shoulders call out in the nearby lanes for anyone who wants to buy milk. Everything is on sale here, bit seems, from matches to the morning newspapers."
Page 339:
"Bookshops are now regularly to be found in most market towns. In London the principal two are Lackington's 'Temple of the Muses' in Finsbury Square and Payne & Foss in Pall Mall. Major booksellers not only have their volumes on display, they also print and distribute catalogues: Lackington's runs to more than a thousand pages. Prices vary considerably. You'll have to pay 18s for the three-volume set of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice when it first comes out in 1813, and 21s for her Emma two years later..."
Page 153:
As an apprentice bookseller, James Lackington has to work from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. every day, even in winter. Although London shops are usually open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., some grocers and haberdashers don't bring down their shutters until 10 or 10.30 p.m. If a great deal of tidying up is needed on the premises, staff may have to stay there until past midnight.
Regency Era + Haberdashers & Dressmaker shops
From Jane Austen at Home, by Lucy Worsley, pages 279-280:
Shopping was just as much an attraction as sight-seeing, and Jane was a determined, if thrifty, consumer. While she now had a bit more money, she still faced the same challenge of finding appropriate, moderately stylish, but affordable things to wear. One morning she and Eliza's maid Manon walked out from home in Knightbridge to Grafton House off New Bond Street, to visit the haberdasher's Wilding & Kent... Upon Jane and Manon's arrival at Wilding & Kent, 'the whole Counter was thronged' so that they had to wait 'full half and hour'. Such a shop would be 'filled with goods, unrolled and displayed in the most advantageous manner. Cards pinned to each article made claims such as 'this beautiful piece of muslin at so much, two shillings in a yard cheaper than any other shop in London'. One of the heroines of Jane's youth, Burney's Evelina, was almost daunted by the persistence of London's shop assistants....
But Jane could be delighted with even the meagre purchase of some trimming and three pairs of silk stockings. "I am getting very extravagant & spending all my Money', she told Cassandra; '& what is worse for you, I have been spending yours too', on 'pretty coloured muslin'. She quietly mocked her niece Fanny's lack of shopping success on another trip: 'She is rather out of luck, to like neither her gown nor her Cap... I consider it a thing of course at her time of Life - one of the sweet taxes of Youth to chuse in a hurry & make bad bargains.'