ABSTRACT

Like shoplifting, the practice of fraud by both lower-class and middle-class women was aided by a growing consumer culture in the nineteenth century. Although the reality of female fraud in the nineteenth-century clashes with the contemporary stereotype of dashing male swindlers, this female crime was part of the preponderance of fraud that frightened nineteenth-century observers. The records of trade protections societies, as well as police and other court cases of the period, help separate the stereotype of the dashing, extraordinary, usually male, swindler of the novel from the more mundane everyday frauds that took place in England. Credit aided all levels of fraud from the servant drinking beer at the mistress’s expense to the professional fraud pretending to be a lady of fortune to the middle-class wife shopping beyond the boundaries of her budget. The idea that middle-class frauds, like middle-class shoplifters, suffered from some form of insanity rather than criminal intent seemed to be spreading.