Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

In November of 1844 a Mrs. Jane Tyrwhitt, a "respectable lady" living in an aristocratic square in London, was arrested for stealing a small microscope from a stall in the Soho Bazaar. Although she was caught red-handed, class and gender-based assumptions about the status of the criminal and the commodity led to her acquittal. Tammy Whitlock's new study of consumer crime in Victorian England explains why Tyrwhitt and countless others like her could have been found innocent of such a crime. Whitlock's book weaves together such fascinating stories to document the related histories of crime, consumerism, and gender, primarily in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century England is part of a new series on The History of Retailing and Consumption,edited by Gareth Shaw, which seeks to bring together the history of the consumer with that of the retailer and to illuminate the diverse nature, timing, and meaning of modern forms of retailing.

Like the debate that has questioned the centrality of the factory in the history of industrialization, a newer argument is emerging around the department store and the periodization of the onset of mass consumer society. Along with several others, such as Clare Walsh, Jane Rendall, and Margot Finn, Whitlock has presented a picture of gradual change from the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries. They have examined the ways in which Georgian and early Victorian Britain, especially London, boasted a vibrant commercial culture that encouraged women from diverse walks of life to shop for and/or steal a range of commodities, including microscopes, lace collars, ribbons, dress materials, tea, and steaks. Whitlock's main contribution is to recreate the social history of female consumption prior to the appearance of the department store and mass market women's magazines of the late nineteenth century. She examines how smaller shops began to adopt newer retail techniques such as fixed prices, ready money, plate-glass windows, and advertising, long before either the northern department stores or the London variety appeared on the scene. Retail historians have long suggested this. What we have not understood heretofore is to what extent women, either alone or in groups, shopped or how they and others understood such activity prior to the 1850s.

Whitlock's argument is that consumer crime flowered along with changing retail forms and that by studying the nature of and reaction to such crimes we can better understand how men and women responded to and manipulated a changing urban marketplace. Rather than merely focus on shoplifting and its development into a female pathology by the 1880s, Whitlock places this crime within a wider context of consumer and retail fraud. She explores how the larger stores and charity and commercial bazaars of the early Victorian period were viewed by some as carrying on fraudulent forms of trade. She also documents the many cases of retailers swindling customers and customers cheating shop owners. All of these crimes were imaginable in a world in which buyers and sellers did not personally know each other and could masquerade as respectable. She argues that fraud and the laws governing buying and selling were flexible and that there was a fine line between a female debtor, who was not legally responsible for the goods she purchased, and a true professional criminal like Mrs. Jane Tyrwhitt, who had a long history of shoplifting and swindling. Whitlock thus adds much to the history of female criminality and of commercial fraud.

The archival evidence for this period is somewhat thin. Whitlock cannot rely on trade papers and large department store archives and instead must make do with court records, novels, periodical articles, and trade ephemera available at the John Johnson archives. The most innovative records that Whitlock uncovered, however, were the papers of trade societies that formed to protect retailers from consumer fraud. These societies provide a good deal of insight into the minds of small shopkeepers...