As chance would have it, I began reading Lise Shapiro Sanders's Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880–1920 on a flight from London to San Francisco, and the film The Shop Girl was playing on the little screen. Assuring myself that this was additional research, and not simply frivolous time-wasting, I watched the film about a twenty-first-century shopgirl. There were some parallels between Clare Dane's character and Sanders's turn-of-the-century shopgirls, and the film's existence confirmed Sanders's premise of the continued significance of the shopgirl's life experience and her relevance as a “significant cultural symbol” (199).

Sanders's book, however, unlike the film, is not a work of fiction. In Consuming Fantasies, she examines how the shopgirl's individual and collective identities were shaped and shifted at the turn of the twentieth century. She constructs this shopgirl using some historical, but mostly literary, texts and brings to the fore contemporary anxieties of modernity while contributing to our understanding of women as integral parts of the workforce and as consumers of leisure and material goods.

Chapter 1 provides a glimpse of the life of Margaret Bondfield, who, Sanders admits, was not a typical shopgirl. Bondfield's early work experience as a shopgirl gave her the hands-on education to become a social reformer through her promotion of union participation. She also became an author and, using the pseudonym Grace Dare, wrote for the Shop Assistant. Her articles highlighted “the painful quality of the shop assistant's everyday life” (48) and reflected her own political consciousness and social activism (51). Bondfield critiqued “mass leisure practice,” and her “documentary realism” can be juxtaposed against the fictional world of the imagined shopgirl (51).

But before turning to this imagined shopgirl, Sanders examines, in chapter 2, the institutional world of the department store and its impact on cultural perceptions of a shopgirl's role within an increasingly consumer-oriented society. She links the female body of the shopgirl with “labor, sex, and desire” (54). Shopgirls became “cogs in the machine” of the “display culture” of the department store (56), and this objectification, Sanders argues, leads to a transformation of gendered description of the body of the worker: shopgirls become part of visual spectacle in the department store (57). The shopgirl becomes a part of, as well as a consumer of, this gendered culture of pleasure through the display and presentation of seductive consumer goods. Sanders charts the movement from the British paternalistic model of retailing to the “science of shopkeeping” imported by Gordon Selfridges and Frederick Winslow Taylor. These new practices were meant to introduce improvements in the treatment of staff and develop the upward mobility of the shopgirls’ profession. Sanders notes that the Harrod's shopgirl, by 1913, was no longer represented as a capricious young girl but as a serious store employee committed to Harrod’s. Sanders explains the ideological strategies by which Selfridges and others attempted to rewrite the shopgirls’ work experience to their individual and collective betterment.

Despite these implied improvements in the shopgirls’ worklife, popular romance fiction of the early 1900s critiqued the exploitation of workers, especially women, in department stores. In chapter 3, Sanders moves to fictional representations of shopgirls by George Gissing and Somerset Maugham. Gissing's fictional characters had been developed from his own investigative reporting, and in The Odd Women, he represented the boredom of working in a shop, the enticement of the surrounding consumer goods, and Monica Madden's craving (“vulgar desire”) for stimulating leisure activity (such as popular reading) and the thrills of consumption. This, for Gissing, leads to a degradation in moral behavior and causes Monica the shopgirl to act outside the norms of femininity (99). The next chapter explores popular reading—and particularly, the romance novel—as a cause of “women's moral, intellectual and emotional degradation” (126). This chapter (and the next) are a bit more speculative in terms of their connection to shopgirls, as they are based on the “potential” relationship between shopgirls and their reading material (168). There are few historical accounts of the reading practices of shopgirls; however, despite some opposition to popular reading, it is known that sensational fiction and news, penny periodical publications, novelettes, and magazines were consumed voraciously in the 1880s. These texts supplied readers with an alternative to their daily working lives: a “fantasy narrative of absorption” (127). This fiction, with its emphasis on dress, fashion, and display, placed shopgirls in the position to lose themselves in a world they could imagine quite readily given their day-to-day lives in the opulent surroundings of the department store (155).

From the “distraction” of fiction, the penultimate chapter moves to the distraction of mass spectacle culture. Again, the actual consuming practices of shopgirls is unknown, so this chapter, like the one before it, is speculative. Music hall sketches, musical comedies, and early short films produced from 1904 to 1920 reflected the “fragmented, distracted experience of leisure consumption associated with the shopgirl” (171). Few films featured shopgirls, although films such as Damaged Goods positioned the shopgirl “at the centre of a narrative of anxiety, danger, and consequence for young working women's moral subjectivity, sexual behaviour, and class position” (193).

In Consuming Fantasies, Lise Shapiro Sanders merges history and literature, using a culturist methodology, and notes the disjunctures between the two. She examines the shopgirl as a cultural icon, a “paradigm for a certain mode of consumer fantasy and the repository of societal anxieties over sexuality and moral propriety” (194). Shopgirls featured in many fictional narratives about women and urban life, and the representations of shopgirls were indicative of the discomfort of the developing world of consumerism and femininity.