Behind the Shop

I HAVE just discovered what it is I miss from the abundant fiction of the present hour. Many years ago (when I read stories because they were stories and passed the time so pleasantly in an old-fashioned library looking out on an old-fashioned garden), I continually lost myself in the rapt contemplation of a kind of life so filled with romance and quiet enchantment as to leave to this day an ache in my heart that I could never actually experience it. It was the life of certain happy English people who lived behind the shop, and got from their intercourse with the great world sending its ambassadors to their doors all the perfectly pure satisfactions to be gained from a great world. The drama and tragedy of the little shop must have appealed with special strength to the minor writers of my childhood. I cannot remember the name of a single character in the very humble fictions of which I speak, but I remember the tidy little sums brought in by the sale of tidy little wares, and how the customers came in at inopportune moments, and delayed the cooking of the dinner. I remember how the tape and ribands, and the cotton thread put a dreadful strain on every one in the dressmaking season; and once when an illustrated edition of Can You Forgive Her? came into my hands, I lost the thread of the story — positively lost the thread of a Trollope story — wondering at which of my shops had been bought the trimmings for Lady Glencora’s voluminous gown. I remember one very sorrowful story in which a small shopkeeper entertained a rival who, in the course of conversation, nefariously extracted all sorts of information about the trade and the neighborhood, and turned out to be the agent for a large dealer who presently set up across the way from “The Teapot,” and put out a great sign with the name, “The Two Teapots,” cruelly blazoned on it. Whenever I think of that bit of enterprise, all that is said of the modern Corporation and the greed of Trusts falls sweetly upon my ear, mingling curiously with the hum of bumblebees in syringa bushes, and the sound of hammering in a distant blue-stone yard.

When I first read Evan Harrington, and the problems of tailordom were forced upon me, I harked back to my little shops, and considered if they were not perhaps the simpler and more dignified of the two kinds of trade. They were never places in which skill of hand and loving labor in a difficult craft were exchanged for lucre. They were merely mediums of exchange, as our banks and trust companies may be, in which commodities were bought and sold without any question of whether the dear work of one’s trained fingers was worth the price. One little shop, the most famous and touching and delightful of all those in which I have lingered, is well known to all readers of English fiction, — Miss Matty’s shop in Cranford, where the good lady gave five lozenges to an ounce instead of four, and so was out of pocket; the decorous tea and candy shop whose proprietress was so much afraid of interfering with the business of the regular tea merchant of the town that she went to him, and asked if he thought that by any possibility she could be running the risk of doing him an injury by setting up a rival establishment.

Of course, it can’t be helped. The day of the small shop with the lodging rooms behind it is practically over, and writers of the present can hardly concern themselves with such annals of the past. But when I read novels in which the growth of vast golden fortunes is commemorated, and the society to which they give rise is described, I sigh for those canisters of Gunpowder and Pekoe, those cakes and lolypops, that mixture of bread, shoes, tape, and bacon, that viny window looking out upon a thorn tree, that frugal meal of a hot chop and some slices of fried pudding, the smart bow at the neck on a Saturday afternoon, all the homely thrills and busy-ness of pleasant days in and behind the shop.