Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford by Sabine Chaouche (review)

Sabine Chaouche's Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford focuses on the consumer experiences and identities of a group of young, mostly upper- and upper-middle-class men as they studied at the University of Oxford during the nineteenth century. Among this relatively select group of men, furthermore, Chaouche concentrates on the minority whose consumer escapades led them into trouble over debt. These are the young men whose consumer misadventures ended up among the cases that appeared before the Chancellor's Court, the university's civil court of justice. The records of this court—together with a wealth of business records, press reports, and personal and college archives—form the book's foundations. Inevitably, then, we encounter the students who spent freely and not always wisely, rather than those who budgeted carefully and remained below the radar of college and university authorities.

As a consequence, it is perhaps reasonable to question whether a study that focuses on such a select group of individuals can really shed new light on Victorian consumption. The answer is a definite yes, mostly because these students embodied so many of the contradictions of nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class youthful masculine status. As a result, a study of their purchasing and consumption practices does more than extend our understanding of undergraduate life. As Chaouche points out, these were minors with relatively little life experience outside the confines of highly regulated boarding schools and generally still financially dependent on their parents, while at the same time they were also well-educated, autonomous individuals, responsible for their own consumption choices.

Indeed, something that emerges very clearly from the book is the importance for students of getting right the choice of not only commodities such as clothes and furnishings, but also entertainment and sociability, ensuring the achievement of a comfortable place within "the undergraduate class hierarchy" (95). The astounding number of bottles of wine and spirits and the amount of luxury food that some students ordered from Oxford merchants may appear (and sometimes were) ruinously extravagant, but in a context where years spent at Oxford were intended to establish and cement contacts and networks, the sociability they indicated may have been viewed as an investment as much as a falling for "temptation" (6). Either way, as the book shows in rich detail, there was an expanding range of Oxford merchants that sought to supply students' demands, adapting to changing fashions: guns, umbrellas, jewelry, and watches, for example, all waxed and waned in popularity.

Turning to retailers' business practices, Chaouche points to ruthless pushing of commodities and even "economic bullying" (133), particularly of first-year students. She also emphasizes the negative consequences of retailers' willingness to extend credit to minors who generally had no independent income of their own, and who could become "trapped into a burdensome chain of obligations" (171). The picture that emerges of Oxford retailers is not a flattering one—it also risks being a little one-sided, although here and there we do get shopkeepers' side of the story as well as hints of manipulative students who took advantage of the availability of easy credit. Either way, Chaouche shows in vivid detail that at least until the end of the century, when a new culture of moderation seems to have emerged, many students spent freely on clothes, furnishings, grooming, and sporting and leisure products. Not so evident—it is amusing to note—is expenditure on books, dictionaries, or other commodities needed for studying. Whatever the reality of lectures or tutorials, the records of students who got into trouble over debt give the impression that Oxford undergraduate life approximated nineteenth-century fictional portraits: of drinking, leisure, and sociability rather than of academic study.

Yet one of the book's most interesting findings is that debt did not necessarily equate with academic failure: "More than two thirds of student debtors between the 1830s and 1870s finally graduated, having an average debt of £53 [End...