Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century England

"Focusing on retailing in nineteenth-century Britain, 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. Using trial records, advertisements, newspaper reports, literature, and popular ballads, it analyses the rise, criticism, and entrenchment of consumerism by looking at retail changes around the period 1800-1880 and society's responses to them." "With its interdisciplinary approach drawing on social and economic history, gender studies, cultural studies and the history of crime, this study asks questions regarding the nature of consumer culture and how society reacts to the challenges this creates."--Jacket.