for the shopkeeping element cannot be
stronger than in France, where, besides, it
never goes beyond shopkeeping; while ours
carries us on to mercantile operations on a
gigantic scale), the appellation has stuck to
us. Still, with all our devotion to shopkeeping,
we are apt to feel a little sore, and a
little humiliation, at our connection there
with, and strive to sink the Shop at every
convenient opportunity. Few terms in the
English language are taken in so contumelious
and insulting a sense as shopboy,
shop-walker, or counter-jumper  the press
and the caricature-sheets teem with poignant
satires on such degraded beings, who become
lord mayors, aldermen, merchant princes not
infrequently. Those of us who do keep
shops are prone to conceal our servile
avocation under some pseudo-classical
cognomen. We call our shops warehouses,
emporiums, repositories, stores, pantechnicons,
establishments, magasins, anything but
what they really are—Shops. Our shopkeepers
are merchant tailors, chemisiers,
artists in hair, purveyors, costumiers,
corsetiers—anything but tailors, shirt-makers,
hair-workers, grocers, or stay-makers. Why
is this? Why, as we have hinted in a
previous page, should it be considered mean
and paltry to make a gentleman's coat, and
something high and genteel to manufacture
the cloth the coat is made from. The Leeds
clothier is a gentleman, a county magistrate
perchance, and a master of hounds;
the Pall Mall tailor is a snip, the ninth part
of a man, a beast with a bill. Sir Muscovado
Cane (of the firm of Cane, Lump, and
M'Trash, of London and Cutchcumapoore)
is senior partner in a great East Indian house,
dealing in rice, sugar, pepper, and spices.
Thomas Sandygrits, proprietor of the original
golden teapot, in High Street, Shoreditch,
deals also in sugar, pepper, and spices; yet
what an almost immeasurable distance there
is between the two shopkeepers: the one
whose shop has a plate-glass frontage and a
mahogany counter, and the one whose goods
are stored in a musty, rat-infected warehouse
up goodness knows how many flights of stairs,
with great cranes like gibbets outside the
windows. Sir Muscovado is a director of
the Bank of England, and at his country
residence at Putney he rears the finest
hothouse grapes in this realm. He goes to court
in a golden coach and a golden coat; he dines
with Cabinet Ministers. Sandygrits is simply
an elder of Little Rabshekah Chapel, hard
by, smokes his pipe nightly in the parlour of
the Hog and Tongs public-house, and has
serious thoughts of marrying his daughter
Jemima to young Joseph Sweetbread, the
butcher of Kingsland. Can you, without being
astonished, view the enormous social gulf that
yawns between these two men, brothers in
calling, aspirations, and sympathies—for both
yearn but for one great object: to buy their
sugars and rice in the cheapest market, and
sell them in the dearest? Yet do you imagine
that the head of the great Cutchcumapoore
firm would ever take, in public or in private,
the slightest notice of the grocer—that Lady
Cane would sit in the same apartment, eat at
the same board, as Mrs. Sandygrits? Why?
Is it more honourable to sell a hogshead of
sugar than a pound—a bale of cloth than an
ell? Why is there such an enormous social
disparity between Mr. Sheriff Slow who
contracts to supply the Horse Guards with
jackboots, and Mr. Crispin Snob who mends my
bluchers? Who made all these rounds of the
social ladder?

Of the infinite variety of shops which
afford scope for criticism as to their
internal economy and exercise for the faculty
of astonishification, I now propose to select a
few; and among these I shall be careful to
select those in which I can exemplify the
influence which this age of progress has made
or failed to make in shops as well as men.

Take the Everything Shop. It was situated
three or four miles from London, on the
highroad. The one I take for a type, and
with which my earliest recollections are
entwined, was situated somewhere on the road
to Edgware—not more than a mile and a
half, I believe, west of that ghastly range of
villas where years ago the mutilated trunk
of Greenacre's victim was discovered, sewn
up in a sack. Jerry Nutts kept this shop.
He was a weird old man, horrible in aspect,
and, to my young mind, shared with the
goblin potman at the Black Lion opposite all
the attributes of "Bogy." Jerry Nutts's face
was, I remember, of an unwholesome pasty
hue, like a half-congealed suet-pudding. The
anatomy of his face seemed all wrong, for
where you expected bones there were deep
hollows in his countenance, and where you
looked for flesh, osseous protuberances. He
had inflamed pink lines for eyelids. He had a
dreadful old semi-bald head, where the sutures
of the skull were minutely defined in inlaid
dirt, and at either lateral extremity of which a
flabby ear kept watch and ward like a scarecrow
to frighten the hairs away. A rimy
stubble upon his lips and chin; two purple
marks on his cheeks, as if all the blood
he had had in his cheeks had gathered there
and stagnated; a filmy eye; an indescribable
leer of malice and ill-temper; and teeth
yellow, crooked, and wide apart, gave this
old man such a vicious, unsightly aspect, that
he was the terror of all the children who
were his customers. I never heard of
anything unfavourable to Jerry, however.
Beyond his general forbidding demeanour he
was reported to be a hard man: that is, he
never gave any credit, and usually refused to
subscribe to any incidental charity or testimonial;
but he paid his way, and sold good
articles, and was, take him all in all, a quiet,
civil neighbour. So Jerry prospered.

Jerry sold everything, almost. Linen-
drapery, hosiery, stationery, confectionary,