SHAPES ON THE GROUND

THE EARLIEST London trade directories provided limited amounts of information about those involved in finance and overseas trade, including only the surnames of partners and the name of the street where their house was located under the general appellation of ‘merchant’. The content of directories changed slowly as publishers experimented with different formats, making claims of greater accuracy and comprehensiveness in order to win over customers and capture a larger share of the market. The inclusion of first names became more common from the 1740s and street numbers began to appear in 1768. ‘Merchant’ remained the standard appellation throughout the eighteenth century, but from the late 1750s an increasing number of houses advertised their specializations as brokers, factors or particular types of merchants. The first listing of ‘Irish’ merchants came in 1759, but of the 1,549 entries in Kent's Directory of that year, only six were ‘Irish’, representing a fraction of the actual number of Irish merchants in London at the time. These six were all linen factors who sold cloth and yarn in the London market for merchants and manufacturers based in Ireland. The Irish linen trade had expanded rapidly in the 1740s with the War of the Austrian Succession, and growth continued during the Seven Years’ War when increasing numbers of Irish factors settled in London. Those who advertised as linen factors in 1759 were taking extra steps to stand out in a highly competitive trade, but other Irish merchants had not yet resorted to those measures.

In 1763, Thomas Mortimer introduced a new type of directory to the public and in doing so identified a large number of Irish houses that would have been labelled differently in more conventional lists. His Universal Director was a grand undertaking, a work in three parts that served as a ‘true guide’ to the principal London practitioners involved in the professions, the skilled trades, and finance and overseas trade. The main axe Mortimer had to grind with compilers of previous directories was their error in lumping together different occupational groups under single headings and he was particularly keen that merchants, who were the ‘chief support’ of the commercial state, be ‘accurately and distinctly pointed out’.