The forgotten class? Shopkeepers of nineteenth-century Melbourne
Shopkeepers played a vital role in the functioning of nineteenth-century Melbourne society. They owned the businesses where residents obtained goods, from basic daily needs to the flights and fancies of an emerging modern consumer culture. Echoes of their presence live on in the shopfronts and main shopping streets. This lecture investigates and compares the shopkeepers who operated in three distinct, representative suburbs of nineteenth-century Melbourne: genteel Malvern, inner urban North Melbourne and industrial Footscray. In doing so it provides a genuine comparative cross-section of the urban retail trade in this period and reveals the subtle differences between these localities in terms of the prestige and identity ascribed to shopkeepers within the socio-economic fabric of these local societies. Yet across all three towns (or suburbs), shopkeepers held an important and unique role, one that cannot be understood through the same lens as the working class or middle class.