Representing Commerce in Tallis’s London Street Views

Abstract

This essay examines how the London Street Views organize the city as a space of commercial interaction, one that is curiously at odds with an image of crowded Victorian streets full of shoppers, street-sellers, advertisements, and window displays. As a commercial directory, it is at once tightly self-referential and open ended, cross referring information between the lists of businesses, the advertisements, and the street elevations while also including advertisements for shops in other streets and neighbourhoods than that focused on in each issue. This essay considers the distinctiveness of Tallis’s project by contextualizing his Street Views within a range of forms of urban commercial information, including directories and advertisements.

Keywords:

• Tallis
• London
• advertising
• commerce, street views
• directories
• shops

I. Introduction

This article considers the distinctiveness and significance of Tallis’s Street Views by situating his project in relation to a range of forms of urban commercial information such as trade directories and advertisements. Accounts of Victorian advertising frequently present the 1850s as a watershed moment. For Lori Anne Loeb, the period between 1850 and 1880 witnessed ‘an unparalleled advertising craze’ that was the result of ‘a combination of factors – new techniques of illustration, the recognition of an expansive middle-class market, the rise of the press, the abolition of the advertising duty, and the professionalization of technical and creative assistance’.¹ For Thomas Richards, the Great Exhibition changed the world of advertising completely, beginning a new era in which ‘Capitalism was now consolidating its hold over England not only economically but semiotically’.² Up until this point, he contends, advertising ‘could not transcend a repertoire of representation that had been fixed in early modern Europe’.³ Against this view of the 1850s as a moment of radical shift from essentially early modern practices of buying and selling, however, John Strachan argues that Romantic-period advertising is ‘a cultural form that is often as innovative, resourceful, and witty as the advertising culture of the later nineteenth century’.⁴

The Street Views are not yet shaped by the mid-century changes described by Loeb and Richards. Yet, as Strachan’s work reminds us, they are published in a period marked by innovations in which paid advertisements in print were ‘complemented by a variety of subsidiary marketing devices: widely distributed handbills, advertising vehicles, roadside advertisements, wall-posting and wall-painting.’⁵ In what follows, I want to consider how the Street Views reimagine and rework existing forms to create a new and distinctive account of London as a commercial metropolis, a city saturated with advertisements and one in which certain shops – in particular those that feature in the topographical vignettes – are elevated to the status of landmarks. London in the early nineteenth century was being transformed by a range of activities including mass production and the swifter transportation of goods from across the country and around the globe. As Jeffrey A. Cohen argues, a new ‘landscape of consumption had not only to accommodate such activities, but also to announce them, to identify its offerings and its invitation to customers by a range of means, from signboards to architectural individualization, proffered on the street as well as through surrogates on paper’.⁶ Tallis’s work shows how one publisher at the start of the Victorian period engaged with contemporary cultures of advertising in order to organize the city as a space of commercial activity and interaction in new and innovative ways, shaping readers of what he presents as a guide through the city into consumers of the world of goods on offer in it.

II. The Street Views as directory

Tallis presents his series of street views as ‘forming a complete stranger’s guide through London’, positioning his work in relation to texts that catered to visitors to the metropolis (see Sangster’s essay in this roundtable for an account of how Tallis fits into topographical accounts of London more broadly in this period).⁷ Some aspects of the Street Views, including their portability and the inclusion in each issue of a brief account of the history, public institutions, and contemporary sites of entertainment relating to the area covered, together bear out Tallis’s description of his work as a guide. Such works, Caroline Arscott explains, ‘needed to show transport routes, shopping streets, civic or government amenities, trading halls, religious edifices and centres of entertainment and leisure’.⁸ Taken together, she notes, such locations were ‘the defining aspects’ of the city and were thus ‘highlighted by vignettes in the borders of street plans, emphasized or labelled in the all-inclusive sweep of panoramic views, and listed and illustrated systematically in town directories, railway guides and guide books’.⁹ The Street Views present the city as a series of shopping streets hosting a range of consumer delights, while the topographical description offers a brief history of the area and an account of its sites of interest. In the first 16 issues of the Street Views especially, it is more usually churches, civic structures, and other public places and institutions that feature in the scene bordering the elevation rather than the individual shops that were the subject of later vignettes. This suggests either that Tallis had not yet hit on the possibilities for generating additional advertising revenue in this way, or that, at the start of his project, there was a lack of interest in paying for further advertising in a medium so new (Figure 1). In these early issues in particular, the topographical information provided by the Street Views resembles that which is presented to tourists in guidebooks, maps, and views. Tallis’s localized accounts of individual streets and parts of streets might have been especially of interest to new arrivals who wanted to get a sense of what was on the doorstep of their accommodation or in an area they planned to visit.

Figure 1. All-Soul’s Church, Langham Place, in the vignette for number 16 featuring part of Regent Street. Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Both the claims to completeness in the title, and the work’s usefulness as a guide through London, however, are questionable. Across the Street Views, the metropolis becomes a series of disjointed streets as opposed to connecting thoroughfares. Indeed, on occasion, individual streets are broken down into parts; Regent Street, for example, runs over four issues, the Strand five, and Oxford Street six. While each issue contains a small map of nearby streets, routes through the city to streets beyond the confines of the area covered by the map are not available. When focusing on a section of the street, connections are further broken: for example, the map of the area that appears for Regent Street division 2 (number 4) shows Oxford Street and New Bond Street, but not Piccadilly; division 3 (number 12) shows Piccadilly and Old Bond Street, but not Oxford Street. The lack of flow through the city in the Street Views is further reinforced by the fact that individual streets that are covered over a series of issues appear neither consecutively nor in topographical order. For example, Regent Street’s first appearance, in number 4, shows division 2; number 12 division 3; number 16 division 1; and number 17 division 4. To travel through Regent Street from Langham Place south to Waterloo Place (covering divisions one through four in order), a reader of the Street Views would need to move from number 16 to number 4 to number 12 to number 17. As a topographical guide, then, the Street Views function at a very localized level, dividing the city up into individual segments. The absence of pedestrians and wheeled traffic in the elevations, and of information relating to transport routes that might take someone to or from the street in question (including routes by hackney coach, omnibus, and the railways that were beginning to appear), further emphasizes this sense of disjuncture.

While they advertise themselves first and foremost as a ‘stranger’s guide’, the Street Views are more accurately an attempt to develop a new kind of commercial directory for the metropolis (see Stobart’s essay in this roundtable for an account of Tallis in relation to other commercial directories). Tallis’s title page boasts that the work ‘exhibit[s] upwards of one hundred buildings in each number … with a commercial directory corrected every month’.¹⁰ Contemporaneous directories, such as the Post Office London Directory, Robson’s London Directory, and Pigot & Co.’s London Alphabetical and Classified Commercial Directory were updated and reprinted annually at most. Alongside an alphabetical listing of names and occupations, these works frequently included lists of streets, hospitals, and other public institutions, as well as information on banking, the postal service, and transportation through the capital and out to various parts of the country. By the 1830s, these directories presented their listings in a range of formats for ease of use: in addition to listing tradespeople by name alone (which would require a reader to know who he or she was searching for) Robson’s, for example, also included a list of streets with names and occupations, allowing readers both to look up tradespeople by name and to search for businesses along a particular street. Pigot & Co. had a third listing by trade, to allow readers searching for a chemist or a tailor to look one up by occupation.¹¹ Because they covered all of London and because they presented the same information in different formats, these were large works: in 1838, Pigot & Co. ran to nearly 500 pages, the Post Office to over 800, and Robson’s to over 1000 pages, making them more useful as reference works in the home (much like a twentieth-century phone book) rather than a portable guide through city. Tallis was able to distinguish his work in this market by producing brief accounts of particular locations that were much less expensive than purchasing a directory. The ephemeral nature of the Street Views also enabled Tallis to update his information more frequently than other directories: in addition to noting that his directory was ‘corrected every month’, the title page also notes that ‘Orders for Advertisements must be at the Office before Thursday in each Week’, highlighting the fact that this was a serial publication being continually reworked, with all 88 numbers appearing in multiple printings.

The Street Views are distinct from more traditional London directories in the way that they present information. One of Tallis’s major innovations is the presentation of the details normally found in a directory on a two-page elevation framed by a map and vignette, visually reworking the listing of names and addresses in each issue’s ‘Street Directory’. As with all directories, claims to completeness in the Street Views are questionable; in contrast to other directories, however, the incompleteness is far more pronounced. Every business in the street covered within an individual issue is listed in the ‘Street Directory’, yet for a business to be named there it has to be located in a street featuring in one of Tallis’s elevations. This means that, for example, businesses on Jermyn Street never appear in an elevation or a directory because the street never features in an issue (though a shopkeeper in Jermyn Street could pay for advertising space in any issue). At the same time, while every building in the street or portion of street covered is present in the elevation, it is not named there unless a proprietor pays to have his or her shop identified. On the whole, then, these two pieces of information – which business is at which number, and the location and appearance of the building in the street – remain separate. Where information does overlap, though, this is frequently highlighted. Businesses that have placed an advertisement, paid to appear in the vignette, or arranged to have their name written on or above their façade are normally noted as having done so in the street directory (though not all issues follow this rule). Readers are advised in the directory to ‘See Advertisement’, ‘See Vignette’, or to see, for example, ‘No. 30, in the Street View’, linking this information together by gesturing to other notices of a business within the issue. The advertisements, too, sometimes point the reader to the shop in the elevation, inviting them to ‘See the Engraving’. The result is a much more tightly self-referential work than other directories, one that points readers across the various kinds of information – directory, vignette, advertisement, elevation, and topographical description – contained within.

III. The Street Views as advertising medium

Another of Tallis’s key innovations is the role played by advertisements, whose revenue helped him to keep down costs to the purchaser. In the elevations, Tallis presents the buildings as a series of blank façades that are effectively advertising opportunities, inviting shopkeepers to pay to have their businesses named. Here, Tallis strips shops of the window displays that were their key method of advertisement.¹² The power and attractiveness of these displays is referred to in Tallis’s description of Regent Street in issue four, where readers are told that the buildings designed by John Nash ‘chiefly consist of palace-like shops, in whose broad shewy windows are displayed articles of the most splendid description, such as the neighbouring world of wealth and fashion are daily in want of’.¹³ In issue 12, focusing on the Quadrant, the topographical description tells of how ‘the windows are sometimes formed of a single pane of plate glass, so beautifully transparent as almost to induce the spectator to doubt its existence as a barrier to the touch’.¹⁴ In these accounts, shopkeepers attract the attention of passers-by with scenes of splendour and variety, enticing them to reach out (or, to walk in) to handle the goods on offer (see the essays by Hoskins and by Jenkins and Newman in this roundtable for an account of how interiors were designed to signal a business’s status and how they shaped interactions between business owners and their clientele). The scale of the elevations, however, does not offer scope to reflect this kind of visual detail and even the vignettes occasionally add to this sense of emptiness; in Bishopsgate Street, for example, a couple stare into the curiously bare windows of Thomas Millington’s white lead and colour shop (Figure 2). There are occasional suggestions of goods in windows in the elevations, though, most usually meat in butchers’ shops (perhaps because they were open-fronted). On very rare occasions, the elevation offers something more. In the presentation of High Street Bloomsbury, a tailor at 59 and a clothier at 66 both have clothing hanging at the front of the shop; the former also has three hats on display, a moment of detail that is especially unusual given that the proprietors have not paid to have their names advertised on their shop front (Figure 3). Such moments reinforce the sense of emptiness elsewhere.

Figure 2. Empty Windows at Thomas Millington, White Lead and Colour Manufacturer, Bishopsgate Street. Tallis’s London Street Views, number 51. Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Figure 3. Clothing and Hats on Display. Tallis’s London Street Views, number 27. Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Where shopkeepers choose to pay to be named in the elevation, its scale limits space for an accurate presentation of the signage on a shop’s façade. While in some cases basic information about name and occupation fits neatly on to the front of the shop, more usually the advertisement hovers above it, or begins in the space above the shop and finishes on the front itself. Occasionally, names stretch over the space above the neighbouring business. In Regent Street, for example, ‘STEVENS late Cobb Chemist & Druggist’ spans over a narrow building to impose on its neighbour, unnamed in the elevation but listed in the directory as a flower and glove warehouse.¹⁵ The variety of these advertisements – ranging from simple statements of name and business to more extensive descriptions highlighting information about royal connections or links with foreign trade – suggests that payments depended on the word or character length of the inscription. In the years immediately following Victoria’s coronation, shopkeepers appear especially invested in establishing and advertising links with the new monarch, while others – whether by choice or necessity – continue to highlight connections ‘to His Late Majesty’.¹⁶ Across the elevations, a number of businesses ranging from perfumers and silk mercers to pin makers and purveyors of biscuits include details of links ‘to Her Majesty’ or ‘to the Queen’, some, though not all, noted as ‘by appointment’ or even ‘by special appointment’.

On the whole, Tallis’s shop fronts contrast sharply with those sketched by the Bavarian-born artist George Scharf, best known for his images of London Zoo and an avid recorder of London’s street life.¹⁷ In Scharf’s sketches of the city’s shops, goods fill the windows and lengthy pronouncements about patents, royal patronage, connections to former premises, and the retailer’s lineage cover the shop façade (Figure 4). In his sketch of the Strand, a shop front announces Fox’s move to number 70 ‘from 456’ while the history of hats on Lloyd and Co.’s façade offers assurance that this business is longstanding. Scharf also notes the colour and details of the design of the words on the frontage. Capitals and italics appear in Tallis’s elevations, but they cannot capture the colour of the lettering in relation to a backdrop, or the swirls and angled text that we can see on Lloyd’s and Fox’s frontage. In the Street Views, Fox’s seems to have moved again (the directory lists no one at number 70) while the elevation notes ‘LLOYD AND Co. HATTERS’ above number 71 and ‘LLOYD & Co.’ above the window. There is no sign of the hats through the ages, no mention of them as ‘MANUFACTURERS AND PATENTEES’, no display filling the windows, and no advertisement for their ‘Circumfolding CHAPEAU-BRAS adapted for various purposes’ (Figure 5).

Figure 4. George Scharf, In The Strand (c. 1830). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 5. Lloyd & Co. The Strand, Tallis’s London Street Views, number 19. Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

The elevations are unable to capture, and even seem to resist, the bold and striking world of early Victorian street advertising, which included fixed and ambulatory signs as well as window displays. George Scharf’s drawings of advertisements seen in the streets serve as a reminder of how these signs command and cajole pedestrians as they tell readers where to find the best deals in the city (Figure 6). Such advertisements can also be seen crowding the wall in John Orlando Parry’s A London Street Scene (1835) and in Punch’s comic vision of ‘A Billsticker’s Exhibition’ (1847) (Figure 7), and are alluded to in Tallis’s view of Moorgate Street (Figure 8).¹⁸ While the elevations themselves are mostly devoid of such scenes, the advertisements that fill each issue situate the Street Views within a much more ephemeral world of street advertising in which signs, handbills, posters, and walking billboards compete for the attention of passers-by. Indeed, the appearance of the advertisements on the page might seem to be a more orderly rendering of the city wall covered with posters. On the pages of Tallis’s publication, images, coats of arms, and a variety of fonts compete for the reader’s attention even while each advertisement stays more neatly in its bounds than those displayed in the streets (Figure 9).

Figure 6. George Scharf, Sheet of Posting Bills (c. 1815–1860). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 7. ‘The Billstickers’ Exhibition’, Punch 29 May 1847. Image supplied courtesy of the Borthwick Institute for Archives.

Figure 8. Moorgate Street, Tallis’s London Street Views, number 88. Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Figure 9. Advertisements, Tallis’s London Street Views, number 12. Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

The directives recorded by Scharf to stop and look, or to go to a particular shop, are echoed in the pages of the Street Views in advertisements full of imperatives, enticements, and cautions. Readers are told that they ‘will observe the Noted Holborn Cloth Exchange’, warned of imitation cures, invited to purchase ‘eye-preserving spectacles’, informed of the latest ‘fashionable and peculiar handkerchief scent’, instructed which was ‘The original Fish-sauce Warehouse’, and advised, should they ‘have had the misfortune to lose a Limb’, where to purchase artificial legs.¹⁹ These pages of advertisements have an affinity with ‘the language of the walls’, a phrase used by James Dawson Burns in his 1855 work of the same name to describe ‘the silent, but often powerful and eloquent’ language of advertising bills stuck up around the city, ‘arresting our attention whether we will or not’.²⁰ Unlike many daily London newspapers, which did not allow for images and unusual fonts, Tallis’s medium offered advertisers the opportunity to print illustrated advertisements (and perhaps to avoid the advertising duty levied on newspapers).²¹ While each advertisement in the Street Views competes for the reader’s attention without encroaching on the space of another, this is not always the case in the elevation. In number 36, numbers 88 and 89 Oxford Street spill out over the map, even though they had already appeared, with their names on their shop fronts, in number 34 (Figure 10). It seems likely the accommodation was made as a means of gaining advertising revenue: George Barron’s Italian Warehouse at 88 Oxford Street is featured in the vignette of issue 36 (space presumably already assigned when the business first appeared in issue 34).

Figure 10. Buildings Spilling out onto Map, Tallis’s London Street Views, number 36. Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Placing an advertisement, featuring in the vignette, and having a business’s name inscribed in the elevation were the key ways to advertise in the Street Views, but they were not the only means. Broadly speaking, the topographical descriptions in the Street Views varied in length and in the kind of material they explored. In some issues, where the description is more than usually brief, an advertisement fills the remaining space in the column. Elsewhere, the description itself includes a puff for a particular business. In number 34, for example, much advertising space is given over to Williams and Sowerby’s, a shawl manufacturer and linen merchant with shop premises on Oxford Street and a wholesale warehouse with frontage around the corner on Wells Street. Their premises feature in the vignette, and the elevation signals their show rooms on Wells Street as well as their Oxford Street shop. The first page of the topographical account is framed by two advertisements for Williams and Sowerby, one for the shop, and another for the wholesale warehouse. In the topographical description itself, readers are informed that theirs ‘is the most remarkable commercial establishments [sic] in this or any other country’ before two paragraphs celebrate the beauty of the shop’s appearance, its fame ‘as a resort for the most fashionable’, its reputation among and ‘constant intercourse’ with European manufacturers, its extensive business transactions, and its ‘enlightened principles’.²² Readers are told that ‘The changing modes and evanescent fashions of the day are not here viewed as trifles, but rather as paramount events’ before noting that the firm ‘continue to be honoured by royal patronage, and daily visited by the most distinguished families in England’.²³

Similar advertising puffs can be found in issue 41 for the linen drapers Williams and Hatton at 111 Oxford Street, though their shop appears in the elevation in issue 36, named simply as ‘Cloak and Shawl Warehouse’ (and as ‘Williams, Linen Draper’ in the Directory).²⁴ In 36, an advertisement pronouncing ‘GRAND IMPROVEMENT IN THE CIRCUS, OXFORD STREET’, informs readers that ‘The Proprietors of the new premises have been actively engaged on the Continent, in making arrangements with the most celebrated Fabricants, for the earliest supply of Foreign Goods’ and announces an opening date of March 1839.²⁵ In 41, their plate glass-fronted shop features in the vignette, even though they do not appear in this issue, and the topographical description is framed by two advertisements for their business. The description opens by noting the ‘elegant shops’ of the street before celebrating the ‘truly noble and commanding appearance’ of Williams and Hatton, where ‘the aristocracy and gentry are supplied with all the magnificent and tasteful fabrics (in constant succession)’.²⁶

In their focus on opportunities for advertising, the Street Views offer a glimpse of what David Henkin has described as ‘the spectacle of competitive commerce’.²⁷ Unlike the lists that feature in more traditional commercial directories, and which imply a sense of fixity, change and flux are at the heart of the medium that Tallis invents, which is as much an advertising circular as it is a commercial directory. Advertisements in the Street Views signal commercial activity that might at first glance seem to be absent in the elevations as they tell of businesses that relocate, change hands, or open new premises. Indeed, it is the ephemerality of the form, in which advertisements are placed weekly and the directory updated monthly, that makes it possible to capture this sense of dynamism and change. In number 17, for example, John W. Stalman, a tea dealer and grocer located in Jermyn Street ‘Begs to inform his Friends, Neighbours, and the Public, that having succeeded to the Business of his late Employer, MR. JOHN HOLMES, he respectfully solicits a continuance of their favours.’²⁸ In the same issue, the hosiers Pope & Co. alert readers in their advertisement that they ‘Have Removed from 28, Friday Street, to 4 WATERLOO PLACE, PALL MALL’ before inviting them to ‘See 4, in the Engraving’.²⁹ This movement is also sometimes echoed in the elevations, where businesses refer to former names or addresses: ‘Hair Cutter & Wig Maker late of St. James’s Street’, ‘Mitchell Late Vereys Hosier Glover Shirt & Stock Maker’, and ‘Old Parr’s Head New Revived by T. Jones’ signal the transformations taking place.³⁰ Such pronouncements, which might – as Scharf’s view of Fox’s façade suggests – also appear on the signage of the shops themselves, serve, as Henkin explains, ‘as captions for an unstable cityscape … project[ing] a highly transitory picture of city life’.³¹ Tallis’s major innovation is to create a work that, through the regular updating that was made possible by its ephemerality, can attempt to accommodate this sense of continual movement and transformation.

The sense of change suggested by businesses relocating and changing hands is just one aspect of a broad range of urban transformations that, as Elizabeth Grant argues, the seemingly static elevations reveal.³² This sense of flux also comes through both in the content of the advertisements, which sell readers new products, inform them of the latest fashions, and announce changes of ownership and location, and in the changes that take place between printings. Different printings of the same issue can feature different advertisements, and different businesses might appear named on the elevation. Such changes can be seen, for example, when comparing the presentation of The Saracen’s Head, a coaching inn on Skinner Street, in different versions of number 43. In some printings, it appears unnamed in the elevation but with an outline of its sign. No doubt a landmark in that neighbourhood, the inn is listed in the ‘Street Directory’ not as a business, but as an intersection, signaled by the use of the manicule that Tallis uses to note all turnings off from the street covered. In other, presumably later, printings the elevation changes from listing ‘Saracen’s Head’ as if it were the name of a lane, to announcing ‘SARACEN’S HEAD Family Hotel, Coaches to all Parts of England’, suggesting that the owners decided to advertise (Figures 11 and 12).³³ The pair of horses turning out of the lane signals the movement into, out of, and across the capital that is otherwise unseen in the elevations.

Figure 11. Saracen’s Head Marked as a Lane, Tallis’s London Street Views, number 43. Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Figure 12. Saracen’s Head as Hotel with a Coach Turning out of the Entrance. Tallis’s London Street Views, number 43. Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

IV. Conclusion

The Street Views draw on a range of forms of urban information to create something entirely new – part guide, part directory, and part advertising circular – that presents the city like no other work in this period. They offer an account of London as a commercial metropolis in which shops become landmarks and movement through the city is prompted by consumer desire. In announcing changes of ownership, movement to new premises, and the arrival of the newest fashions, the seemingly static pages of the Street Views reveal the commercial dynamism of early Victorian London. Each issue offers both a detailed account of a street or part thereof, with information relating to the businesses located there, and invites readers to move around the city, prompted by advertisements from businesses across the capital. At the same time, the advertisements, elevations, and vignettes frequently describe London as a vast repository for goods from across the globe. The Street Views invite readers to see the city not as a collection of historical artifacts and national monuments, as many guidebooks did, but as a vast marketplace of goods from across the country and around the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 5.

2. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London: Verso, 1991), p. 3.

3. Richards, The Commodity Culture, p. 50.

4. John Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 8.

5. Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture, p. 14.

6. Jeffrey A. Cohen, ‘Corridors of Consumption: Mid-nineteenth Century Commercial Space and the Reinvention of Downtown’, in Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, ed. by Louisa Iarocci (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 19–36 (p. 19).

7. John Tallis, Tallis’s London Street Views, 88 numbers (London: John Tallis, 1838–1840), title page to each number.

8. Caroline Arscott, ‘The Representation of the City in the Visual Arts’, in Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. by David M. Palliser, Peter Clark, and Martin J. Daunton, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000–2008), III, 811–31 (p. 814).

9. Arscott, ‘The Representation of the City’, p. 814.

10. Tallis, London Street Views, title page.

11. Charles W. F. Goss, The London Directories, 1677–1855: A Bibliography with Notes on their Origin and Development (London: Denis Archer, 1932), pp. 130–32.

12. Claire Walsh, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, 8:3 (September 1995), 157–76, (p. 160).

13. Tallis, London Street Views, number 4, p. 1.

14. Tallis, London Street Views, number 12, p. 1.

15. Tallis, London Street Views, number 17, n.p.

16. See Tallis, London Street Views, number 16.

17. Sir John Soane’s Museum, George Scharf: From the Regency Street to Modern Metropolis (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2009); Peter Jackson, George Scharf’s London: Sketches and Watercolours of a Changing City, 1820–1850 (London: John Murray, 1987); Alison O’Byrne, ‘George Scharf’s London Scenes’ London Journal, 37.3 (November 2012), 215–233, and Frederic S. Schwarzbach, ‘George Scharf and Early Victorian London’, in Victorian Artists and the City: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Ira B. Nadel and Frederic S. Schwarzbach (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), pp. 93–105.

18. Paul Dobraszczyk, ‘The Language of the Walls: Victorian Posters’. Available at: https://ragpickinghistory.co.uk/2012/07/13/the-language-of-the-walls-victorian-posters/ (accessed 25 January 2017).

19. Tallis, London Street Views, number 17, p. 2; number 28, p. 2; number 65, p. 1; number 1, p. 1.

20. James Dawson Burn, The Language of the Walls: And a Voice from the Shop Windows. Or, the Mirror of Commercial Roguery (Manchester: Abel Heywood, 1855), p. 34.

21. Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture, p. 14, pp. 22–24; Nicholas Mason, Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), pp. 19–20.

22. Tallis, London Street Views, number 34, pp. 1–2.

23. Tallis, London Street Views, number 34, p. 2.

24. Tallis, London Street Views, number 36, n.p.

25. Tallis, London Street Views, number 36, p. 2.

26. Tallis, London Street Views, number 41, p. 1.

27. David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 40.

28. Tallis, London Street Views, number 17, p. 4.

29. Tallis, London Street Views, number 17, p. 4.

30. Tallis, London Street Views, number 28, n.p.; number 4, n.p.; number 44, n.p.

31. Henkin, City Reading, p. 52.

32. Elizabeth Grant, ‘John Tallis’s London Street Views’, London Journal, 37.3 (November 2012), 234–51.

33. Tallis, London Street Views, number 43, n.p.