‘Counter-jumpers’ and ‘Queens of the Street’: The Shop Girl of Gissing and his Contemporaries

Abstract

In Gissing’s London, women employed in shops had a variety of names: ‘women in business,’ ‘queens of the street,’ ‘counter-jumpers,’ and, most commonly, ‘shop girls.’ This constellation of names indicates the range of responses the female shop assistant elicited, and also points to a number of anxieties that surrounded her and her place of employment.¹ At once a victim of commercialism and an aspiring social climber, the woman behind the counter was associated variously with the New Woman, the slave worker, the prostitute, and the modern commerce itself. As Sally Ledger has convincingly argued in her essay on Gissing’s The Odd Women, it was the shop girl rather than the New Woman that was the more problematic figure of modern urban life. I build upon Ledger’s recognition that the shop girl was a figure of fascination and discomfort for both Gissing and his contemporaries by reading Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) and In the Year of Jubilee (1894) side by side with contemporary discourse about the shop girl in the periodical press. This comparative reading not only confirms that Gissing’s conflicted attitudes toward these emblems of modernity were shared by his contemporaries, but also suggests his use of a prevalent narrative: the shop girl, who may be morally tainted by her exposure to the public sphere, will marry perhaps into a higher social circle, and is liable to corrupt the sanctity of the private sphere.