Shops Topics

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

About the London shop girls of the meaner short no derogatory remarks can be too strong, just as no commendation can be too high of the courtesy, honest, and good nature of the girls who wait on you in the shops on Oxford and Bond Streets. This court-born, alley- nursed, street-bred girl is everywhere. Sometimes she is sober, oftener she is not. She sells you flowers and fruit on every corner, serves in bars and cheap eating-houses. We have nothing at all at home to correspond to her ...She wears flowers and paste jewels, but she seldom bathes, never has enough hairpins, and considers toothbrushes necessary only for members of the royal family.
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles,—life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old book stalls, parsons cheap’ning books, coffee houses, steam of soups from kitchens, pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade,—all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impells me into night-walks about her crowded streets, I often shed tears in the Strand from fullness of joy at so much life.
—Charles Lamb (1775–1834)