Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century England

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book traces the expansion of commodity culture and a mass consumer orientated market, and explores the wider social and cultural implications this had for society. The author emphasizes the key role women played in this evolution and, through a focus on retail crime and individual cases of middle-class shoplifting and fraud, provides the first detailed history of the "kleptomaniac" woman in 19th c. England.

Tammy C. Whitlock is Professor of the Department of History at the University of Kentucky, USA.

Contents: Introduction. Part I Destroying 'The Nation Of Shopkeepers': Ready money only: small shops and new retail methods; Vanity fairs: the growth of bazaars and fancy fairs; 'Mothers beware!': fraud by the retailer; The culture of fraud and the female consumer. Part II Criminal Consumption: Shoplifting in early 19th-century England; Mrs McGregor's sealskin jacket: female frauds and the art of buying without paying; Solving the problem of the criminal consumer: women and kleptomania. Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.