ABSTRACT
Historians have been slow to acknowledge that some established conclusions about the spread of fixed shop retailing are mistaken. Jefferys, in his detailed and influential analysis of retailing in the nineteenth century, concluded that this sector of trade was slow to respond to the economic, social and cultural changes associated with the so-called Industrial Revolution.2 His belief that fixed shop retailing did not really replace a system based on markets, fairs and pedlars until the second half of the nineteenth century dominated historical thinking for several decades, and even now has not been entirely eradicated.3 Alexander in 1970 was still arguing that it was not until the nineteenth century that conditions were conducive to a complex retailing system and thus to a substantial number of shops, and while Deane accepted that the shop had begun to supplant the pedlar, she believed that this started only in the eighteenth century and then only in the larger towns.4
