The contents of a sweet shop are an edible archive of social customs and technological expertise recorded in sugar. Aniseed balls were once valued as digestifs. Humbugs developed from medieval cold cures and liquorice strings were originally stored for coughs. Novelty chocolate figures are the descendants of marzipan or cast-sugar ornaments which provided diversion at medieval feasts. The predecessors of little floral cachous were used by court ladies as breath fresheners. Fruit-based sweets became popular through keep-up-with-the-Joneses aspirations of Stuart housewives, and sherbet is an echo of a drink once considered as exotic as any cocktail.

As consumers in the late twentieth century, we do not see this. One view of sweets is dominated by health: every mother, watching her children head off to the shop with their pocket money, says the same thing: ‘They’ll rot your teeth!’ This doesn’t stop them; teeth are the last thing children think of. They have another picture firmly in mind: the dazzling sensuality of confectionery. Myriad colours, the smell of fruit and chocolate, the rustle of cellophane and the clunk as the jars are replaced on the shelves: anticipation and consumption—the fun of buying sweets, and the joy of eating them are what count. 

A sub-text of the sweet shop is the power of marketing expressed in infinite variety, glittery foil and attention-grabbing wrappers. There is consumer choice, and basic economics: if I buy two of those, I can get something else, but if I buy that, I can only have one of these, but if I get three of those for 10 pence each…Are toffees better value than chocolate? Shall I share these with my friends? In sweet shops we learn to be good consumers, handing over the cash for a reward of something deliciously sweet, or gloriously sticky, or fizzy, or colourful.

Given these powerful impressions, it is not surprising that everyone has childhood memories of sweet shops. Mine are of a mill village in Yorkshire in the 1960s. The best shop was the newsagent’s. Small children ascending three steps from the street door, saw first the sherbet flying-saucers and Lucky Bags behind the counter of glass. They raised their eyes past massed ranks of chocolate bars to a vibrant backdrop of boiled sweets, sparkling towers of sugar. But there was competition. In the large general grocer’s, a double row of tall glass jars filled with Rainbow Crystals, American Cream Soda, multi-coloured lollipops, toffees, and striped boiled sweets stood opposite the packets of tea and flour. The corner shop and off-licence offered four-for-a-penny chews, little bars of chocolate in purple foil, aniseed balls and gobstoppers. Even the greengrocer had a ‘tray’—a miscellany of cheap sweets in a wire basket, over which small children could deliberate on the merits of ‘spanish’ (liquorice) and bubble gum, banana toffee and candy shrimps. Within 50 yards, there were four shops selling sweets, and another three scattered further down the main street. Even the chemist sold sticks of 

barley sugar. This was in a place with a population of about 2,000. Its collective sweet tooth was phenomenal. 

In common with most British children, I began my sweet-buying career in a ‘C.T.N.’ These initials stand for Confectioner-Tobacconist-Newsagent, a category of business recognized by marketing people. Every high street and suburb has at least one. A feature of the British life for much of this century, their history is obscure. Just after the Second World War, the Cadbury Brothers wrote, ‘It has always been something of a tradition that "SWEETS AND TOBACCO" shops and small "GENERAL STORES" are gold mines. The tradition has survived wars and slumps and considerable evidence to the contrary.’ The word always implied that the retailing of sweets had remained unchanged for centuries. Yet tobacconists cannot have been common until people had the disposable income to smoke habitually; newsagents cannot have been a familiar sight until papers were cheap and the population reasonably literate. The concept of the C.T.N. reflects, perhaps, the development of leisure pursuits in late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. Classifying three minor treats together points up their importance, but weakens the idea of them as something special in themselves: eroded still further as garages, supermarkets and other unlikely outlets decide that confectionery is a profitable line.

Sweet shops once existed as separate entities. The ‘sweetie wives’ of Scottish towns early in this century were brilliantly evoked by F Marian McNiell:

There was always a sweetie-shop, to whose counter the bairns were lured by the delectable odour of boiling toffee that emanated from the kitchen behind. The sweetie-wives were usually known by some nickname as Candy Kate, Sweetie Annie, or Taffie (Toffee) Knott. Besides such homely sweets as gundy, glessie, cheugh jeans and black man, there were bottles of ‘boilings’ (Scotch Mixtures) that glittered like rubies, emeralds, topazes and all the jewels of the Orient, and tasted of all the fruits of the orchards and spices of the Indies. Striped rock in variegated colours and yellow spiral sticks of barley sugar were always prime favourites, and so was ‘taiblet’ of various flavours.

Sweet shops, village shops and general stores provided a relatively

constant supply of confectionery, compared with irregular, seasonal treats sold at great annual fairs throughout Britain. Previous centuries favoured ginger-bread and comfits as fairings to take home to sweethearts or children. Or it might be ‘cock on a stick’, boiled sugar cockerels sold until recently at Nottingham Goose Fair which combined innocent reference to the original purpose of the fair with innuendo characteristic of fairings.Today, toffee apples are an option, or some less romantic, inedible offering. 

Shopping mall administrators try to touch folk-memory and inject a little bit of street life by installing the odd toffee-stall. This echoes the street huckster as a source of cheap sweets in the recent past. Selling cheap confectionery from stall or barrow supported many poor journeymen sugar-boilers. Henry Mayhew, in his wonderful survey of Victorian street-life, estimated there were over 200 of these individuals working in London. He noted that, ‘I never heard them called confectioners.’ Brought up to the trade, these people were known as ‘sweet-stuff makers’, and lived in some of the poorest areas of town, where Dickens described the crowding together of numerous trades: ‘sweetstuff’ manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red herring vendors in the front parlours, cobblers in the back.’ The trade was open to the poor because small quantities of materials could be worked up for a quick turnover; and by the mid nineteenth century sugar was cheap.

When does a sugar-boiler become a confectioner, and when does a sweet shop become a confectioner’s shop? The boundary is imprecise. A confectioner’s, (whatever marketing theorists may think), is not just a shop which sells sweets; and a confectioner is more than someone who can do a little sugar-boiling. The idea of a confectioner’s implies elegance, high prices and special occasions. Because of this, confectioner’s shops are rarer than the high street sweet-cum-paper shop and are to be found in places where people have money to spend, or are in a mood to celebrate. 

Few old-fashioned confectioners now exist in Britain, and many that remain concentrate on chocolate. A village such as that of my childhood certainly never supported a confectioner, but the wealthy market town a few miles away did. This elegant shop followed the twentieth-century trend and made chocolate a speciality; their thin chocolate wafers with chips of mint sugar, orange peel, or candied ginger were locally famous. They also sold breads and fancy cakes, something I never quite managed to reconcile with the concept of a chocolate shop (but would not have seemed strange to French children, accustomed to the pâtisserie-confiserie). 

The other place where I saw confectioner’s shops—and where they still flourish—was by the sea. These had a brash and exuberant image. Trips to Blackpool or Bridlington yielded rock with letters running through it, and giant multi-coloured lollipops. Oral or visual puns abounded: bacon and eggs, or fish and chips and peas, the symbols of the seaside cafe, were wrought from sugar, as were baskets of gaudy yellow bananas and lacquered red

apples. Sugar false teeth grinned beside huge babies’ dummies made of hard sugar candy and ‘rock bottoms’. Scallop shells held handfuls of pebbles which turned out to be sweets. Stacked high in surreal profusion, the entire contents of sea-front shops appeared little more than several hundredweight of sugar, combined with dye and flavouring, wrapped in wisps of cellophane.

To get a flavour of an old-fashioned craft confectioners in Britain, one has to go to a museum. The few that are preserved, such as the nineteenth-century shop fittings formerly belonging to Terry’s of York, inspire questions. Why can we no longer buy the flavours of drops—damson, greengage, tangerine—displayed in shapely glass containers? Who provided the market for Superior Acid Drops, Linseed Lozenges, and White Acid Squares? How many colds were soothed by Wintergreen Squares (Terry’s began in business as apothecaries)? Did Silver Cachous have their moment of glory on top of birthday cakes, as they had done at the parties of my childhood? What were Lemon Pennets? Gorgeous lace-lined boxes for fondants must have been treasured long after the contents were eaten. Perhaps the girls courted with these ordered their wedding cakes from this shop as well—for Terry’s were pâtissiers, too.

Looking beyond British shores, one can get an impression of what a working confectioner’s shop might have been like before industrialization. In southern Europe such places have preserved their elegance and have more emphasis on fine hand-made sweets. Even quite humble French confiseries stock a rare choice of nougat, candied fruit, sugared almonds, fruit pastes and dragées alongside local specialities. Across the marble counters of Spanish confiterias, all gilt mirrors and glass shelves, one can take turron, candied fruit, piñones (sugared pine nuts) and cream cakes. Some concentrate on a single line; in Madrid, a tiny purple, white and silver bandbox mines the sweet possibilities of violets. A visit is an occasion, unlike the quick dash into a British C.T.N. to grab a bar of chocolate. 

One thing doesn’t alter: the indecision of children faced with apparently infinite choice. Dithering in a pastry shop in a small Sicilian town, I was pre-empted by an Italian family who poured through the door and requisitioned the large almond-paste lamb I had been about to purchase. Then the children turned their attention to the astonishingly realistic display of almond-paste fruit and vegetables and after chattering debate each grasped a fig, or a head of garlic, just like British children musing over the relative virtues of Mars Bars and Kit-Kats. It did not matter to them that all the shapes were made from the same basic mixture: form was more important than content. Sugar is fantasy land.

I discovered in Istanbul that there are 20 variations on rahat lokoum and in Amman the best coffee-house sold fantastic sugared pistachios. Crisp nougat

full of almonds could be bought near the tomb of Moulay Idriss in Fès. In Manila, jars of syruped limes or citrons were on sale, with patterns incised in the peel, like the carved fruit I’d seen described in seventeenth-century cookery texts. Friends brought moulded gingerbreads from eastern Europe, exquisite fragile sugar flowers from Japan, and eggy confections from Portugal. Triangular brown paper bags full of strange salty liquorice lozenges and turquoise, pill-like mints turned up from Holland. Rumour reached me from Mexico of cast sugar skulls, and funerals modelled in chocolate; and from India of sweets based on reduced milk or pulse flour, sold in temple courtyards. The sweet shops of the world were obviously stuffed with curious confections, some of which were recognizably descended from the same tradition as British favourites. But they didn’t have sherbet, or shiny black spanish, or toffee. It was time to read the contents of the sugar archives.