Family Business

An Intimate History of John Lewis and the Partnership

New Hardback Illustrated

Postscript summary

Granted access to company and family archives, the award-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning presents an unvarnished history of one of Britain’s best-loved stores. She tells how the first shop that penniless orphan John Lewis opened on Oxford Street met the aspirations of the Victorian middle class, and how success led to quarrels between him and his sons, before explaining the partnership model that emerged, and reviewing the firm’s subsequent history and future prospects.

Product information

Publisher: William Collins
Year: 2021
Format: Hardback
Pages: 346pp
Illustrated: Yes
Dimensions: 240x162mm
Condition: New
Weight: 0.6kg
ISBN: 9780008273750
Product code: 519964

Full publisher description

From Victoria Glendinning, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and (twice) the Whitbread Prize for Biography.

'It's Succession in tailcoats and spats ... This is a vivid and eye-opening group biography, backgrounded by the rise of supermarket moguls from humble beginnings' Sunday Times

Who was John Lewis? What story lies behind the retail empire that bears his name? Behind the glass windows and displays of soft furnishing, this book reveals the family that founded the shops in all their eccentricities, and whose relationships became blighted by conflicts of epic proportions as their wealth bloomed.

Born into poverty, John Lewis 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.

Prize-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning has had full access to the company and family archives to write this eye-opening story. She 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 including emotional blackmail, face-slapping and a kidnapping - and much litigation between father and both sons.

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.

With riveting personal detail, this brilliant group biography captures a rags-to-riches story and a tempestuous family saga, all unfolding against the dramatic social and political worlds of nineteenth-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.

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