FAMILY BUSINESS: An Intimate History of John Lewis

The book asks who was John Lewis? Born into poverty, he was orphaned at the age of seven when his father died in a Somerset workhouse. Dreaming of a better life, the young man travelled to London at the start of what would become a retail revolution. From early years as a draper's apprentice, we see how Lewis's first pokey little business opened on Oxford Street in 1864, and expanded as an emerging middle class embraced the department stores as a recreational experience. Award-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning captures the toxic relationships that unfolded between Lewis and his two sons Spedan and Oswald, as they collided over the future of their retail empire. Their worst moments included emotional blackmail, face-slapping and a kidnapping, and much litigation between father and both sons. Behind the glass windows and displays of soft furnishings, she reveals the eccentricities of the family whose relationships became blighted by conflicts of epic proportions as their wealth bloomed. Yet the family never broke up, and Spedan's vision of a Partnership model to act as an ethical corrective and foster a community of happier, more productive workers was eventually realised and survives to this day and is now much copied in business as a model. This brilliant group biography has riveting details of this rags-to-riches story and a tempestuous family saga, all unfolding against the dramatic social and political worlds of 19th century London. The book concludes with an assessment of the position John Lewis holds in British sensibilities, and whether John Lewis and institutions like it have a place in our future. She also writes about the 157-year-old commercial enterprise famous for affordable haberdashery, wedding-list glassware, and more recently producing rather cute Christmas TV commercials. 16 pages of photos including colour and one of Spedan's radical new flagship store Peter Jones, now a listed building. Plus colour reproductions of original advertising on the endpapers, 338pp.