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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2016
This article considers the cultural work of commoditization through the example of the London Auction Mart and the market for real estate in early nineteenth-century England. The auctioneers who founded this exchange sought to reconfigure the organization of property sales in an institution that would bring order and transparency to a world of informal institutions, local markets, and private exchange. The Auction Mart made visible the idea of a universal, abstract property market. At the same time, it offered a new social and cultural space in which to negotiate the often contradictory meanings of marketable property. This work of making the property market meaningful is told through institutional archives, published accounts, diaries, and estate correspondence.
1 A Detailed Prospectus of the Auction Mart: Instituted 1808 (London, 1809), 7.
2 Ibid., 8.
3 Ibid., 11.
4 A commodity, argues Arjun Appadurai, is defined by its social situation and context, and commoditization therefore “lies at the complex intersection of temporal, cultural, and social factors.” Arjun Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. idem (Cambridge, 1986), 15.
5 Thompson, F. M. L., “The Land Market in the Nineteenth Century,” Oxford Economic Papers, n.s., 9, no. 3 (October 1957): 285–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. V. Beckett, “Landownership and Estate Management,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. G. E. Mingay, vol. 6, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1989), 545–640.
6 Thompson, “The Land Market in the Nineteenth Century,” 13, 15. On both of these pages reference is made only to the later Auction Mart and only as a place of sale. Elsewhere, Thompson notes that the Auction Mart did function as an institution of professional identification among auctioneers. Idem, Chartered Surveyors: The Growth of a Profession (London, 1968), 144.
7 Avner Offer, Property and Politics, 1870–1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology, and Urban Development in England (Cambridge, 1981), 255.
8 Beckett, J. V. and Turner, Michael, “End of the Old Order? F. M. L. Thompson, the Land Question, and the Burden of Ownership in England, c.1880–c.1925,” Agricultural History Review 55, no. 2 (2007): 269–88Google Scholar; Thompson, F. M. L., “The Land Market, 1880–1925: A Reappraisal Reappraised,” Agricultural History Review 55, no. 2 (2007): 289–300Google Scholar. The Oxford English Dictionary revealingly dates the origin of the phrase “property market” to the late nineteenth century. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “property, n,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/152674?result=1&rskey=SKOyC5&, accessed 4 February 2016.
9 Thompson, “The Land Market in the Nineteenth Century,” 292.
10 Key texts in this debate include Habakkuk, John, “English Landownership, 1680–1740,” Economic History Review 10, no. 1 (February 1940): 2–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “The English Land Market in the Eighteenth Century,” in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (London, 1960), 154–73; Beckett, J. V., “The Pattern of Landownership in England and Wales, 1660–1880,” Economic History Review 37, no. 1 (February 1984): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership 1650–1950 (Oxford, 1994); Lawrence Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1995). The conclusions of revisionists are well summarized in M. J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1995), 61–87.
11 Clay, Christopher, “The Price of Freehold Land in the Later Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review 27, no. 2 (May 1974): 173–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allen, Robert C., “The Price of Freehold Land and the Interest Rate in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review 41, no. 1 (February 1988): 33–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Offer, Avner, “Farm Tenure and Land Values in England, C. 1750–1950,” Economic History Review 44, no. 1 (February 1991): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, Gregory, “Land Hunger: Land as a Commodity and as a Status Good, England, 1500–1910,” Explorations in Economic History 35, no. 1 (January 1998): 59–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Clark does raise the possibility of a prestige premium on the price of land in the nineteenth century, across all categories of land.
12 J. T. Ward and R. G. Wilson, eds., Land and Industry: The Landed Estate and the Industrial Revolution (Newton Abbot, 1971); David Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns, 1774–1967 (Leicester, 1980); H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (Leicester, 1961); idem, “The Speculative Builders and Developers of Victorian London,” supplement, Victorian Studies 9 (Summer 1968): 641–90Google Scholar; F. M. L. Thompson, Hampstead: Building a Borough, 1650–1964 (London, 1974); Offer, Property and Politics, 1870–1914; J. Stuart Anderson, Lawyers and the Making of English Land Law 1832–1940 (Oxford, 1992). For a more recent review of property market institutions, see also Anderson, James, “The Operation of the Early Nineteenth-Century Property Market,” Construction History 24 (January 2009): 63–81Google Scholar.
13 The idea of “marketization” has recently been developed in the field of economic anthropology, particularly through the work of Michel Callon. Michel Callon, ed., The Laws of the Markets, Sociological Review Monograph (Oxford, 1997); Çalişkan, Koray and Callon, Michel, “Economization, Part 1: Shifting Attention from the Economy towards Processes of Economization,” Economy and Society 38, no. 3 (August 2009): 369–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Economization, Part 2: A Research Programme for the Study of Markets,” Economy and Society 39, no. 1 (April 2010): 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an example of market theory applied to real estate, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge, 2005). Historians have not been remiss in calling for a return to the study of economic life. For example, see Sewell, William H., “A Strange Career: The Historical Study of Economic Life,” History and Theory 49, no. 4 (December 2010): 146–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paul Johnson, Making the Market: Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Cambridge, 2010), 10–29.
14 For a similar view of auctions taken from a literary perspective, see Wall, Cynthia, “The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Poovey, Mary, “Beneath the Horizon of Cultural Visibility,” Journal of Cultural Economy 1, no. 3 (November 2008): 337–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Maxine Berg, “Consumption in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1, Industrialization 1700–1860, ed. Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (Cambridge, 2004), 361–62; Neil McKendrick, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, 1982); Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2007); Brian Learmount, A History of the Auction (Iver, 1985).
17 James Vernon, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (Berkeley, 2014), 100–1; Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850 (New Haven, 2012), 368–91.
18 David Kynaston, The City of London, vol. 1, A World of Its Own, 1815–1890 (London, 1995), 10; Ranald C. Michie, The London Stock Exchange: A History (New York, 2001). On the general transformation of institutional space, see Michael Reed, “The Transformation of Urban Space, 1700–1840,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 2, 1540–1840, ed. Peter Clark (Cambridge, 2000), 615–40.
19 Brian William Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, 2005), 134.
20 Learmount, A History of the Auction, 30–31. East India Company goods were required by statute to be sold by auction.
21 Peter Ash, “The First Auctioneer: Origins of Sales by Auction of Real Property,” Estates Gazette: Centenary Supplement, 3 May 1958, 35–37; see also Ralph Cassady, Auctions and Auctioneering (Berkeley, 1967); Robin Myers, “Sale by Auction: The Rise of Auctioneering Exemplified in the Firm of Christopher Cock, the Langfords, and Henry, John and George Robins (c. 1720–1847),” in Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Oxford, 1982), 126–63.
22 F. M. L. Thompson has suggested that development of sales by order of the Chancery Court was another important condition for the development of auction sales. F. M. L. Thompson, Chartered Surveyors, 47. Bankruptcy and estate sales were routinely noted in advertisements for auctions at the turn of the century. In a sample of 399 advertisements taken from the Times in 1805 and 1810 (for which see note 35), close to one in six sales specifically mentioned a deceased or bankrupt party.
23 Satomi Ohashi, “The Auction Duty Act of 1777: The Beginning of Institutionalisation of Auctions in Britain,” in Auctions, Agents and Dealers: The Mechanisms of the Art Market 1660–1830, ed. Jeremy Warren and Adriana Turpin (Oxford, 2007), 21–31.
24 “Auctions in London, No. II,” Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 13, no. 768 (1844): 105–7Google Scholar.
25 Charles W. Smith, Auctions: The Social Construction of Value (Berkeley, 1990), x–xi.
26 Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System, 397–400; Thompson's effort to gauge the proportion of auction sales to total sales of real property produced a range of 10 to 50 percent. For the purposes of this discussion, however, the precise figure is less important than the social and cultural impact of auction sales. Thompson, “The Land Market in the Nineteenth Century,” 290–91.
27 Schmidt, Albert J., “Marketing Property in Eighteenth-Century England: Lawyer History in the Huntington Library's Stowe Collection,” Huntington Library Quarterly 62, no. 1/2 (1999): 115–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Beckett, J. V., “Aristocratic Financial Troubles and the Operation of the Land Market: The Sale of Astwell and Falcutt in 1774–78,” Northamptonshire Past and Present 8, no. 5 (1993): 378–82Google Scholar.
29 Salmon to the Duke of Wellington, 30 September 1837, Wellington/1652, Wellington Estate Collection, Museum of English Rural Life (hereafter MERL), (emphasis in original).
30 Particulars of Sale for the Rushall Estate (to be sold 19 June 1838), Wellington/1652, Wellington Estate Collection, MERL; A. P. Baggs et al., “Parishes: Rushall,” in A History of the County of Wiltshire, vol. 10, ed. Elizabeth Crittall (London, 1975), 136–146, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/wilts/vol10/pp136-146, accessed 23 October 2015.
31 Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System, 378; Unwin, W., “A Nineteenth-Century Estate Sale: Wetherby 1824,” Agricultural History Review 23, no. 2 (1975): 116–38Google Scholar.
32 Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System, 413–76; On the debate over new men of wealth and the purchase of land, see Rubinstein, W. D., “New Men of Wealth and the Purchase of Land in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Past and Present 92 (August 1981): 125–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, F. M. L., “Life after Death: How Successful Nineteenth-Century Businessmen Disposed of Their Fortunes,” Economic History Review 43, no. 1 (February 1990): 40–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rubinstein, William D., “Cutting up Rich: A Reply to FML Thompson,” Economic History Review 45, no. 2 (May 1992): 350–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, F. M. L., “Stitching It Together Again,” Economic History Review 45, no. 2 (May 1992): 362–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Holderness, B. A., “The English Land Market in the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Lincolnshire,” Economic History Review 27, no. 4 (November 1974): 557–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Beckett, “Landownership and Estate Management,” 554.
35 Duncan George Forbes MacDonald, Estate Management (London, 1868), 226.
36 Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Philip Nicholas Furbank, W. R. Owens, and Anthony J. Coulson (New Haven, 1991), 7; Reed, “The Transformation of Urban Space, 1700–1840,” 617.
37 Jerry White, A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 68–76; Dyos, “The Speculative Builders and Developers of Victorian London,” 647–50, 669–73. Dyos rightly warns against drawing too strong a distinction between speculative and planned building. He specifically discusses the work of James Burton on the Bedford Estate, Thomas Cubitt in Belgravia and Pimlico, and Edward Yates in South London.
38 Dyos, Victorian Suburb, 117–18.
39 The following is based on a database compiled by the author of unique auction advertisements published in the Times for ten days in June and July of 1805 and 1810 (1, 3–8 June and 1–3 July 1805; 1, 2, 4–8 June and 2–4 July 1810). The database consists of 399 advertisements for real property only and has been used here to explore and illustrate the marketing of property, not necessarily its actual sale (hereafter cited as Auction Advertisement Database).
40 Times, 1, 6 June, and 1, 2 July 1805.
41 Alfred Cox, The Landlord's and Tenant's Guide: A Compendium of Information upon the Procuring, Occupying, and Disposing of Estates and Houses, and Many Collateral Subjects; with a Gazetteer of Great Britain (London, 1853), 34.
42 An Address to the Auctioneers of the Metropolis, Containing Proposals for Forming an Establishment to Promote Their General Accommodation and Interest, Embracing a System Advantageous to Their Principals and Eminently Beneficial to the Profession (London, 1807).
43 Rudolf Ackermann, “View of the Grand Saloon at the Auction Mart,” Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics 6, no. 32 (August 1811): 93–96.
44 An Address to the Auctioneers of the Metropolis, 7.
45 Ibid.
46 Learmount, A History of the Auction, 52. Of a sample of 183 advertisements published in 1805, 166 were for auctions to be held at Garraway's. Auction Advertisements Database compiled by the author.
47 An Address to the Auctioneers of the Metropolis, 26.
48 Alexia Yates, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-Siècle Capital (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 140–43. Unlike those in London, the auction room in Paris was a more highly regulated institution, with attendance limited to legal officials acting on behalf of clients.
49 The National Archives (hereafter TNA), J/90/1476 Auction Mart Register of Proprietors, 1808–1823; Times, 21 September 1808; Morning Chronicle 21 September 1808.
50 Times, 5, 12, 18, 25 January 1810.
51 Myers, “Sale by Auction,” 139; Robin Myers, s.v., “Robins, George Henry (1777–1847),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 4 February 2016, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23824. Most of what can be said of the earliest real estate auctioneers in London comes from those who would claim them as founders of present-day auction and real estate corporations. For references to Richard Winstanley, John Prickett, and Harry Phillips, respectively, see the history pages for Jones Lang LaSalle (http://www.us.jll.com/united-states/en-us/about/history), Prickett and Ellis (www.prickettandellis.com) and Phillips (www.phillips.com/about), accessed 4 February 2016. The remaining company directors were G. E. Shuttleworth, Charles H. Hoggart, George Adams, Daniel R. Munn, John A. Hermon, and William Snell.
52 Chance, I. O., “The Auction and Its Rôle in Commerce,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 119, no. 5177 (April 1971): 294–300Google Scholar, at 299. In addition to the three abovementioned auctioneers, James Christie, John Thompson, and Peter Coxe were also founders of the Select Society and investors in the Auction Mart.
53 TNA, J/90/1476. The following analysis is based on cross-referencing those holding original shares in the Auction Mart with the Auction Mart's Prospectus and the author's Auction Advertisement Database for 1805 and 1810.
54 Detailed Prospectus, 6.
55 For descriptions of the subscription rooms at Lloyd's, which may well have been the inspiration for the Auction Mart's design, see Rudolf Ackermann, The Microcosm of London or London in Miniature, 2 vols. (London, 1904), 2:174–75.
56 Detailed Prospectus, 10. These perceived advantages were similarly emphasized in later city guidebooks. Charles Frederick Partington, National History and Views of London and Its Environs; Embracing Their Antiquities, Modern Improvements, &c. &c. from Original Drawings by Eminent Artists (London, 1834), 157; Thomas Pennant and John Wallis, London: Being a Complete Guide to the British Capital (London, 1814), 453.
57 David Morier Evans, The City, or, The Physiology of London Business (London, 1845), 62–63; Michie, The London Stock Exchange, 38–40.
58 Despite the provision of space for both personal and real property sales, the dominance of the latter was reflected in later pressure to convert the upper floor rooms for estate sales. The board seriously considered investing in such renovations on at least one occasion in July, 1848. TNA J/90/1475 Auction Mart Board of Directors Minute Book, 1848–65.
59 Kynaston, The City of London, 1:9–10; Ziegler, Garrett, “The City of London, Real and Unreal,” Victorian Studies 49, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 431–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 Detailed Prospectus, 9–23.
61 Ibid., 22.
62 Ibid. Despite its founders’ hope that the Auction Mart would become an imperial real estate marketplace, the majority of sales that took place at the Auction Mart were of British land and estates. The occasional exceptions often attracted public attention. On 2 April 1831, for example, the Times reported a successful sale at the Auction Mart of a 3,400-acre estate in Jamaica, “together with 190 negroes, and 100 head of horned cattle.” The same report also noted the presence of two antislavery activists who denounced the sale as “irreligious and injust.”
63 “Auctions in London, No. II,” 106.
64 Ibid., 105; Evans, The City, 164.
65 James Grant, Portraits of Public Characters, 2 vols. (London, 1841), 2:263–65.
66 Ibid., 266.
67 The question of whether or not spaces like the Auction Mart are ever anything more than simple ideological representations of reality (versus actual mechanisms for disentangling social relations) has been much debated by critics of Michel Callon. Following Callon's suggestion that social entanglement and disentanglement are co-produced through each other, I would argue that the Auction Mart allows us to localize in time and space a particularly visible instance in which this dynamic of marketization emerged for real estate in England. Callon, The Laws of the Markets, 17–19; Miller, Daniel, “Turning Callon the Right Way up,” Economy and Society 31, no. 2 (May 2002): 218–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Callon, Michel, “Why Virtualism Paves the Way to Political Impotence: A Reply to Daniel Miller's Critique of The Laws of the Markets,” Economic Sociology: European Electronic Newsletter 6, no. 2 (February 2005): 3–20Google Scholar; Miller, Daniel, “Reply to Michel Callon,” Economic Sociology: European Electronic Newsletter 6, no. 3 (July 2005): 3–13Google Scholar.
68 Ackermann, “View of the Grand Saloon at the Auction Mart,” 95.
69 Pardoe, Julia, “Purchasing a Property,” Ainsworth's Magazine 2 (July 1842): 459–65Google Scholar.
70 Ibid., 461.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid., 463.
73 Diary of Edward Ryde (henceforth Ryde), 16 September 1847, 1262/4, Surrey History Centre (hereafter SHC).
74 Ryde, 21 June 1849, 1262/6, SHC.
75 Ryde, 10 May 1855, 1262/12, SHC.
76 Thomas Frewen to William Nanson, 9 April 1841, FRE/3101, Frewen Family Archive (hereafter Frewen), East Sussex Record Office (hereafter ESRO), (emphasis added).
77 Thomas Frewen to William Nanson, 13 July 1858, FRE/3707, Frewen, ESRO.
78 Memoranda and notes by Thomas Frewen concerning purchases of additional property he has made in Leicestershire, Sussex, and Ireland, since inheriting the family estates (i.e., since 1829), FRE/327, Frewen, ESRO.
79 Benjamin Adam to Thomas Frewen, 2, 19 February 1869, FRE/9543 & 9550, Frewen, ESRO.
80 Benjamin Adam to Thomas Frewen, 22 February 1869, FRE/9552, Frewen, ESRO.
81 Benjamin Adam to Thomas Frewen, 18 March 1869, FRE/9556, Frewen, ESRO.
82 John Summerson, The Unromantic Castle and Other Essays (New York, 1990), 11; Black, Iain S., “Spaces of Capital: Bank Office Building in the City of London, 1830–1870,” Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 3 (July 2000): 351–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
83 On the efforts to increase revenues, see Board Minutes, 3 April 1858 and 3 December 1859, in which the board considered refitting the Saloon as office space. TNA, J/90/1475. Demand for the lot previously had come from an unsolicited offer of £60,000 from the Liverpool and London Fire and Life Insurance Company, received by the board in December 1858. The board presented the offer to shareholders, who nonetheless equivocated at a general meeting held in January of 1859. This failed offer presaged the successful sale that came in 1864. “The Auction Mart,” Estates Gazette 7, no. 201 (March 1864): 90Google Scholar.
84 Unidentified newspaper clipping dated 1867, A. 34/13 P.1817, London Guildhall Library; H. B. Wheatley, London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions (London, 1891), 79; “Busy Centres of City Life: Tokenhouse Yard, the Headquarters of the Real Estate Market,” London (27 June 1895), 501–2.
85 “Sales by Auction (Garraway's),” Times, 1 June 1868.
