ABSTRACT
Darwin's law of natural selection acts with unimpassioned, merciless severity. Lynda Nead claims that at this time 'portraiture functioned specifically as a site for the production and definition of respectability', and Braddon uses Lucy's portrait as a means to overturn her appearance of respectability and, in so doing, also highlights the problems of distinguishing the respectable woman from the unrespectable via her things. The Exhibition remained a model for shop display in the decades after 1851, in which retailers continued to push the ideal of equality through material goods, promoting the illusion that material wealth was available to all by encouraging shopping as a leisure activity open to everyone. Most worrying for the fashionable middle-class woman who enjoyed shopping for clothes and decorating the home with the latest things was the similarity between the modern female consumer and the prostitute as Judith Walkowitz has pointed out, 'in their dress, prostitutes emulated the conspicuous display of Victorian ladies'.
