Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge

Even if you haven’t watched Mr. Selfridge on PBS, the history of everything we experience out shopping in department stores will knock your socks off. It is a delight in seeing how shopping as we know it evolved over time. I thoroughly enjoyed this book!!

Harry Gordon Selfridge had already made his mark in American retailing at Marshall Fields. He wanted to go it alone or at least as a partner. Maybe America was too small for Harry. He had ginormous dreams an he acted on them! He was a kid and Oxford Street, London was his playground. He promised to change shopping forever, and he did.Woodhead did an excellent job of portraying early -20th century life in America and in Britain. The main difference was shopping. In America, merchandise was on display. No one pressured customers to buy. In London, gloomy floorwalkers patrolled the shops hoping to evict the "riff-raff. Selfridge changed that; he made shopping a respectable past time for the upper class woman.Alas, Harry had his vices: gambling and women. Both were expensive and cost him dearly. He lost control of the empire he built and he lost his legacy. Gordon, Jr. shared his father's love of expensive hobbies, but without the means to support them. His daughters were not close.In many ways the story of Selfridges, the store and Selfridge, the man is a thrilling and exciting journey. It called to mind the days of shopping at Marshall Fields in the 1950s. What a grand place! I am sure if I had gone to London, Selfridges would have been grander still.

If you like the show, I think you will like this book. This book is a history of Harry Selfridge and his eponymous department store, but it is also a history of shopping, fashion, Britain, the rise of the middle class, and the dramatic economic and political changes that occurred in Britain during the first third of the twentieth century. I absolutely loved it.There are some huge differences between the book and the show, so definitely do not go into the book with expectations of reading about some of the characters in the show. Rose Selfridge (Harry's wife) actually plays a very small role in the book, as compared to her big role in the show. Similarly, some of the other characters in the show are really amalgamations of many people. However, the overall themes of the show absolutely ring true. Selfridge really was an unfailingly positive man with an eye for detail and huge dreams, though he suffered from a crippling gambling addiction and was a compulsive philanderer. And Selfridge did revolutionize shopping.The book is very fast and enthralling read, combining information about macro global changes (like the changing role of women in society, the decline of the British aristocracy, World War I, etc) with details about Selfridge's personal and professional lives. I thought the author was also unbiased. She presented Selfridge as a man with incredible business sense who at the same time could not manage his own personal finances and had a weakness for gold-digging women. It's one of the best non-fiction books I have read in awhile, and I highly, highly recommend it.

I ordered this book as being one of the biographies of Mr. Selfridge that seemed to be most focused. My interest in Mr. Selfridge began when, as a genealogy researcher, I started again to look into the Buckinghams in my family line. As a result, I found that Rosalie Amelia Buckingham, wife of Harry Gordon Selfridge, is my 5th cousin twice removed. After discovering that he was a merchant in Chicago in 1900, searching more broadly on the internet led to a fuller picture of Mr. Selfridge. Needless to say, I have done more research on his life and times. I have also purchased the Masterpiece Series but have not yet seen the full set. I find his story interesting both from my particular association and also from seeing the changes in a number of arenas during his lifetime. Too late for me to visit London again but there are many photos on line that bring the store to life as it was in his time. Have to say, I'm intrigued.

I read after watching the series (much of which covered real events). Interesting to me how quickly retail and fashion changes in a few decades.

I really didn't think that I would like the book after watching the series. I was wrong. The book is a wonderful read and a compelling story of a very unusual man. Selfridge changed so much about the shopping "experience"; many of the things we take for granted today were innovations in his time. The story about how the perfume counter was moved to the front of the store is a great example. Selfridge had it moved close to the door to counter the street smells - remember, horses were still pulling carriages and the streets were a mess of mud and manure. Enter any department store now, and, the perfume is still the first thing you run into.Hopefully I won't be spoiling the book for anyone if I make reference to the end of Selfridges life by saying how very sad. Seems like the company used him up and booted him out.All in all, I recommend this if you are interested in those little pieces of history that you never hear about in school but still make a big difference in our lives today.

Had never heard of person or series, the quickly read biography prepared me to enjoy the series. Cast was outstanding. Lead Jeremy Pivens captured the “Mile -a-Minute” Harry perfectly.Changes in family dynamics and characters fit well with the ending of the series. Enjoyed both.

This book exhausted me! I couldn’t keep up with Mr Selfridge’s energy and I am very ambivalent about him as a person. I swung between admiring his creative vision, determination and innovation, and wanting to give him a very hard punch between the eyes for the disrespectful way he treated his wife and family.Lord Woolton, with a quote from the book, sums the character up perfectly: “He had commercial vision and courage of a high order, combined alas with personal vanity and pride in being a public figure, which has ruined so many men who have lost a sense of proportion in the exaltation that comes from surrounding themselves with yes-men”. I totally agree and the author has made this clear.The book is a very well researched, balanced mix between the history of the department store as a concept and the way people shop through time – which Selfridge changed forever - and a biography, and is a worthy aside to the TV series currently in its final season (Yes, I know the book came first). I liked how the story of Selfridge was fleshed out by reference to his beginnings, the stories of his contemporaries and the people he worked for in Chicago before coming over to England, and could see the showmanship that I think Jeremy Piven has perfectly portrayed. But for all that, I think him a sad character, really. How much more of a success would he have been with real moral fibre? I can’t help thinking that a lot of it was smoke and mirrors, actually.And I was very, very annoyed with him. I couldn’t understand him – why he was so utterly disrespectful to his wife and family by chasing all these showgirls. What on earth did he have to prove? I realise most people are flawed, but such a public display of these real weaknesses and frailties would have made him an object of derision, whether he realised it or not.I seriously think Selfridge had a distorted view of himself and thought himself on a par with nobility. The scenes in the TV show when his son Gordon marries a girl who works in the store is based in reality, though the children of that marriage never met their famous grandfather because he disapproved of the marriage. Excuse me? How did he start his career himself? Doesn’t such a view reveal that he secretly looked down on his employees? I like the way Jeremy Piven plays him, and I love the TV show, but I doubt very much that I would have liked the real Mr Selfridge underneath the bravura; I would have found him hard to respect, along with his “girlfriends”. This attitude makes a mockery of the real acts of kindness that he undertook. He comes across as a person of real contrasts in this telling.I felt dismayed too that Rose’s death merited just a couple of lines on page 152. This woman was astonishing – she had to have been – and I would love to know much more about her.Despite my annoyance with Harry, I felt sad at his demise, but ultimately, he was the architect of his own downfall. Such a shame that a brilliant man did not possess the common sense that would have made him a real success as a person.

It took me a while to get used to Shopping, Seduction and Mr Selfridge though this may be partly due to having seen the excellent (well I thought so! ) TV series before reading the book. It's important to realise that the series is inspired by the book rather than the other way round.The book doesn't include the stories of the various employees of the store which are featured in the drama though Harry Selfridge, his immediate family and a few other associates are present in book and screen. In fact, Harry's unique onscreen personality is supported by descriptions of him in Shopping, Seduction & Mr S.What the book is more about is a semi-academic study of the history of retail in the late 19th and early 20th century in Britain and the United States as well as corresponding social trends. On these issues, it is often a fascinating read even when the prose doesn't quite flow as well as it could.Shopping, Seduction and Mr Selfridge is well worth reading as long as you are not expecting the story of the TV series. An interesting and worthwhile read.

This book tells the story of Mr Selfridge, beginning with his childhood (about which little seems certain), progressing through his early career in retail, and eventually focussing on his business and personal life in England. It's an easy read, which tells the story in a succession of episodes, backed up with snippets of contextual information, such as the socio-political climate at the time, or the state of the retail market. The author refers to various experts along the way, but seems unwilling to question their contributions. The assumptions made about Mr Selfridge sometimes seem a bit lacking in substance, such as his relationship with his father, his predilection for infidelities, and his grand and overspending lifestyle. That latter point flies in the face of his evident business acumen, but the book never really digs into this. Overall though, this dip into Mr Selfridge's life is much more interesting than the TV series based upon it. Actually, his real life is rather different to that depicted in the TV series, which cobbles together many parts of his life into something that is entertaining but bears little factual closeness to the real man.He had a fascinating life, much more mish-mash that the TV series made of it. The writing is lamentable in places and, in the section about radio, the author seems unaware that an aerial and a transmitter are not the same thing. Even so, though the book lacks in depth, and skips through his life without much examination of the facts, it is a fun read that lifts the lid on the man and his place in a surprising number of historical landmarks.

I have just been reading Emile Zola's legendary 'Au bonheur des dames' about a Parisian department store, which apparently inspired a BBC mini-series which I missed. But Zola's tale was fiction; it seemed natural to build on that by reading the true story of visionary Harry Gordon Selfridge and his iconic London store. This doesn't disappoint, although I regret not reading it BEFORE watching ITV's 'Mr Selfridge'. This edition is a tie-in to that series, albeit without the (sometimes gross)'artistic licence' of the TV's fictional interpretation. H.G. Selfridge was undoubtedly a maverick character, a true showman, yet his legacy was to build a Cathedral to Commerce on Oxford Street at a time when London was on the cusp of unprecedented social change. Lindy Woodhead captures that era in a gripping way. Look, as an indicator of how good a read this is, I received the book just four hours ago, and I was already on page 109 when I reluctantly put it down to make some fresh coffee and pen this review!! So now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to read on.......

This is a terrific overview of the whole period regarding not just Mr Selfridge, but shopping and other leisure pursuits too. The notes at the end show just how much hard work went into this. It's not just the information - which is fascinating for all sorts, not just historians, but anyone interested in commercialism or social studies - but the way Woodhead has written this is seamless and fantastically enjoyable.Although the book follows the chronology of Selfridge's life, it weaves in the period and the crucial events so fully, you feel you are reading something much more than just what the title is telling you. If you think it will just be fluff, it really isn't; it gives a valuable insight into many cultural issues. It paints a vivid picture of both London and Chicago and has even made me want to visit the latter! It's also fascinating to discover how many marketing tricks are all down to the great Mr Selfridge. Wonderful read and easy to dip in and out of if you are reading on the train etc. Highly recommend.