Upon reading Fanny Fern’s Tyrants of the Shop, I was immediately reminded of the freshman text the Class of 2016 was assigned over the summer: Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn. That novel focused on the main character of Eilis, who spent a good portion of the story working in a fabric and clothing store, much like the women featured in Tyrants of the Shop. She had to learn what it was like to work in that kind of environment, and even though it was not as harsh as it was for those in Fern’s story, she did not have the most enjoyable of times.
Tyrants of the Shop also reminded me of the few times I worked in my uncle’s hardware as a kid when he was shorthanded in the shop. I was a fairly young boy at the time, and thus didn’t do much of PR stuff. My main job was just to stay out of the way and fetch things from the back that the customers required, as well as take inventory of the small items in the store.
Though he had apparently controlled himself when I had been working as a young lad, I had seen my uncle in later years yelling at one of his employees in what I would imagine to be a similar fashion to the man in the story, only he was yelling at a man, not a woman.
We clearly live in a drastically different time than was depicted in Fanny Fern’s Tyrants of the Shop, yet, as evidenced by my own connection, this pieces still remain relevant to this day. Reading the passages from this anthology provide a clear and interesting window into what it was like to live in these days past, and yet we can see how they are not quite as different from today as we might believe.
