The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914 (review)

Finn's excellent book offers both an important history of retail credit in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a model of intelligent interdisciplinary history. Her wide range of evidence includes diaries, memoirs, litigation, trade-association records, Home Office directives, novels—even an advertisement for a debtors' prison as "a welcome asylum, where persecution ends"—used conjointly to give a satisfying thick description of what it meant to extend or to use retail credit during this period (148). At the core of her story are the eighteenth-century courts of request (also known as courts of conscience) and their replacement by the country courts established by the Small Debts Act of 1846. Both kinds of court used summary procedures to enforce small debts, had low costs, were plaintiff-friendly, and had the power to imprison noncompliant debtors. The courts of request had lay judges, whereas the Victorian courts had lawyer judges and permitted—although did not require—plaintiffs and defendants to be represented by legal counsel. The courts of conscience explicitly used equity rather than common-law principles; the county courts were supposed to align their judgments with common-law rules.

Although some have seen the advent of the county courts as a sign of the triumph of common law and strict contract principles, Finn argues for considerable continuity, pointing to the county courts' continued use of equity principles in declining to enforce strictly what judges perceived to be unfair contracts. More generally, she argues that anonymous cash transactions at arms length, the paradigmatic market transactions of capitalism, did not dominate the retail markets of this period. Instead, economic relations were still deeply embedded in hierarchical and customary personal relations, household provisions often being acquired by combinations of barter, gift, pawning, and credit. In the credit relations at the heart of this study, Finn stresses the embeddedness of credit in social relations: tradesmen depending on personal or even religious denominational ties rather than price differentials to build their businesses, or itinerant vendors coming to homes appealing to customers' charity as well as need. In this account of a transitional and mixed retail economy, change came more slowly and more unevenly than many have maintained. Even imprisoned debtors clung to their identities asunfortunates, rather than criminals, and to their privileges of self- government well into the nineteenth century. Thus, in a book filled with fascinating characters and vivid moments, a railway clerk, imprisoned in 1848 for not paying £2, successfully sued prison officials for cutting his hair and recovered £25 in damages.

Using a wide variety of different kinds of sources, Finn deploys one kind of evidence to refine or to question conclusions suggested by another and to highlight cultural contradictions in how economic and personal agency were constructed. For example, she uses diaries and novels to tease out elements of gift and its concomitant social obligations in retail credit. Of special importance, she uses her detailed account of credit transactions to critique classical and Marxist economic theory. For instance, the ability of wives to obtain retail credit for "necessaries" for which their husbands—not they—were liable undercuts the model of individual contractual autonomy, reveals male identity embedded in the social relation of marriage, and helps to show that goods had social meanings as well as economic prices.

Finn's analytic brilliance, her skill in weaving together many narratives, her ability to synthesize a massive body of recent scholarship and will be valuable to historians, economists, lawyers, and literary critics.