Polite consumption: Shopplng in eighteenth-century England

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Volumn 12, Issue , 2002, Pages 375-394

  Berry, Helen ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 2942613579     PISSN: 00804401     EISSN: 14740648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0080440102000154     Document Type: Review

References (90)

1. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford 1989)
2. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997)
3. Peter Borsay, Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660-1770 (Oxford, 1989)
4. Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (1993)
5. The Consumption of Culture, 1660-1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. John Brewer and Ann Bermingham (1995)
6. The re-orientation towards the consumer was anticipated by Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold in 'Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution', Social History, 15 (1990), 151-79
7. for new directions, see Amanda Vickery, 'Women and the World of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and her Possessions, 1751-81, in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Brewer and Porter, 274-301
8. Beverley Lemire, Fashion's Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1991)
9. see also idem, 'Consumerism in Pre-Industrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes', Journal of British Studies, 27 (1988), 1-24
10. Stana Nenadic, 'Print Collecting and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland', History, 82 (1997), 203-22
11. The vast literature on the economic history of eighteenth-century England in a global perspective may be no more than represented here; see for example J. Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (1978)
12. Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990)
13. Jan de Vries, 'Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe', in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Brewer and Porter, 85-132
14. Nuala Zahedieh, 'London and the Colonial Consumer in the Late Seventeenth Century', Economic History Review, 47, 2 (1994), 239-61
15. Influential in studying the Shaftesbury model of politeness is the work of Lawrence Klein; see his 'The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 8 (1974), 186-214
16. and idem, 'Politeness for Plebes: Consumption and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England', in Consumption of Culture, ed. Brewer and Bermingham, 362-82
17. A useful over-view of the recent historiography is Sara Pennell, 'Consumption and Consumerism in Early Modern England', Historical Journal, 42, 2 (1999), 549-64
18. As witnessed, for example, by the criticism levied against the work of Neil McKendrick by economic historians Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold for his 'trickle-down' theory of cultural emulation. McKendrick's hypothesis was that the dissemination of genteel taste was a stimulant to the rise of commercial culture, whereas Fine and Leopold's preference is for a more precise study of the incomes that made consumer spending possible. See Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold, The World of Consumption (1993), 120-3
19. The Birth of a Consumer Society, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb (1982)
20. Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, 1660-1760 (London and New York, 1988)
21. see also idem, 'Consumer Behaviour and Social Status in England, 1660-1750, Continuity and Change, 2 (1986), 191-216
22. See in this volume, Paul Langford, 'The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness', passim
23. Another useful survey of middling-sort consumers is Stana Nenadic, 'Middle-Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720-1840', Past and Present, 145 (1994), 122-56
24. Richard Hodges, Primitive and Peasant Markets (Oxford, 1988)
25. Religious houses were also significant centres of consumption before the Reformation. See Derek Keene, 'Shops and Shopping in Medieval London', in Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in London, ed. L. M. Grant (British Archaeological Association, London, 1990)
26. Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727 (Oxford, 2000), 331
27. Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England (Montreal and London, 1987), passim, observe this trend nationally, focusing chiefly upon the trade in tea
28. The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (1949), 210-11
29. On the development of English towns, see Penelope Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700-1800 (Oxford, 1982)
30. The Eighteenth Century Town: A Reader in English Urban History, 1688-1820, ed. Peter Borsay (London and New York, 1990)
31. Cambridge Urban History of Britain, II: 1540-1840, ed. Peter Clark (Cambridge, 2000)
32. T. S. Willan, An Eighteenth-Century Shopkeeper: Abraham Dent of Kirkby Stephen (Manchester, 1970), 19
33. Craig Muldrew has calculated that trade tokens, which served as change when small coins were scarce, were issued in over 1,500 places between 1649 and 1672, almost double the number of market towns then in existence. In, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (1998) 54
34. See also by the same author 'Hard Food for Midas: Cash and its Social Value in Early Modern EngLand', Past and Present, 170 (2001), 78-120
35. Lorna Weatherill, 'The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England', in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Brewer and Porter, 207-8
36. Frances 'Fanny' Burney, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford, 1998), 103
37. Peter Borsay, The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700-2000 (Oxford, 2000), 30
38. Burney, Cecilia, 52
39. A. W. Purdue, Merchants and Gentry in North-East England, 1650-1830 (Sunderland, 1999), 192-4
40. 'E. W.', Youthful Life, and Pictures of Travel: Being the Autobiography of Madam Schopenhauer: Translated from the German, I (1847), 243
41. Sophie in London, 1786, Being the Diary of Sophie V. La Roche, trans. and ed. Clare Williams (1933), 111-12
42. Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. F. A. Pottle (New Haven, 1950), entry for 1 Dec. 1762, 59-60
43. Helen Berry, 'The Metropolitan Tastes of Judith Baker, Durham Gentlewoman', in On the Town: Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Penelope Lane and Rosemary Sweet (Ashgate, forthcoming, 2002)
44. Margot Finn, 'Men's Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution', Social History, 25, 2 (2000), 135
45. Other gender-specific accounts are Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997)
46. Lorna Weatherill, 'A Possession of One's Own: Women and Consumer Behaviour in England, 1660-1760, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 131-56
47. Vickery, 'Women and the World of Goods', 274-301
48. Charles Speckman, The Life, Travels, Exploits, Frauds and Robberies of Charles Speckman, Alias Brown (1763)
49. A Foreign View of England in 1725-39: The Letters of Monsieur Cesar de Saussure to His Family, trans. and ed. Mme Van Muyden (1995), 50
50. Sophie in London, 111-12
51. For a European perspective see Roy Porter, 'Material Pleasures in the Consumer Society', in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke, 1996), 219 n. 21
52. J. P. Malcolm, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., 1808), II, 473
53. David Garrioch, 'House Names, Shop Signs and Social Organisation in Western European Cities, 1500-1900, Urban History, 21 (1994), 20-48
54. see also Ambrose Heal, Sign Boards of Old London Shops (1957), 2 and passim
55. Jon Stobart, 'Shopping Streets as Social Space: Leisure, Consumerism and Improvement in an Eighteenth-Century County Town', Urban History, 21, 1 (1998), 3-21
56. The Life of Francis Place, 1771-1854, ed. Graham Wallas 1898), 34
57. Eliza Meteyard, The Life of Josiah Wedgwood from his Private Correspondence and Family Papers, II (1866), 31-2
58. Malcolm, Anecdotes, II, 473
59. See Clare Walsh 'The Design of London Goldsmiths' Shops in the Early Eighteenth Century', in Goldsmiths, Silversmiths and Bankers: Innovation and the Transfer of Skill, 1550-1750, ed. D. Mitchell (Stroud, 1995), 96-111
60. J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), 328-30
61. Beattie cites the appearance of pamphlets with titles such as Hanging Not Punishment Enough a 'Case of Traders relating to Shoplifters ... &c.' (1701)
62. Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr (Oxford, 1981), 269
63. James Plumptre's Britain: The Journals of a Tourist in the 1790s, ed. Jan Ousby (1992) (entry for 24 May 1799), 101
64. 'N. H.', The Compleat Tradesman: Or, the Exact Dealer's Daily Companion (1684)
65. For a survey of the genre, see Natasha Glaisyer, 'The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660-1720' (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1998)
66. Dorothy Davis, A History of Shopping (1966), 155
67. Wedgwood, Life, 32-3
68. Fanny Burney, The Witlings (1778) Act 1, in The Complete Plays of Frances Burney, I, ed. Peter Sabor (1995), 9-10
69. Newcastle Courant (15 Aug. 1752)
70. Clare Walsh, 'The Newness of the Department Store: A View from the Eighteenth Century', in Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, ed. G. Crossick and S. Janmain (Aldershot, 1999), 62
71. see also Bill Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (Leicester, 1995)
72. On the increasing use of brand names for medicines, and product standardisation in the ready-to-wear clothes trade, see John Styles, 'Product Innovation in Early Modern London', Past and Present, 168 (2000), 148-64
73. Malcolm, Anecdotes, 11, 473
74. Austin, Letters, 1, 68
75. Spectator, no. 454 (11 Aug. 1712)
76. Boswell, London Journal (1 Dec. 1762), 60
77. Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (London and New Haven, 2000), 289-306
78. Athenian Gazette or Casuistical Mercury [hereafter Athenian Mercury], ed. John Dunton, undated [Mar.-Apr. 1692]
79. James Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (2000), 110-11. Davidson uses the example of hetaeras (courtesans) and their skill at masking 'fees for service'
80. For auction sales 'by the candle in coffee houses, see Brian W. Cowan, 'The Social Life of Coffee: Commercial Culture and Metropolitan Society in Early Modern England, 1600-1720' (PhD dissertation, Princeton, 2000)
81. Another literary example of enthusiastic salesmanship, followed by a cavil upon the price, made by 'the first architectural upholsterer of the age', Mr Soho, in Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee, 1812 (1904), 101-4
82. Saussure, Foreign View, 201-2
83. The Economic History of Britain since 1700, ed. Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (2 vols., Cambridge, 1981)
84. D. E. C. Eversley, 'The Home Market and Economic Growth in England, 1750-1800, in Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution, ed. E. L. Jones and G. E. Mingay (1967)
85. For Jan de Vries's influential theory of an 'industrious revolution', see 'Understanding the Household Economy', in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Brewer and Porter, 108, 113-15 and passim
86. James Lackington, Memoirs of the First Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington (1791), 214-15
87. E. D. H. Cole, The Life of Robert Owen, (1930), 50-1
88. Place, Life, 34
89. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain 1660-1800 (2000), 125 and passim
90. Lancaster, Department Store, 16-44