ABSTRACT
Probate evidence provides few answers to these questions. Although the requirement to list goods on death remained until 1792, the numbers of surviving inventories thinned out rapidly after 1720 (Cox and Cox, 2000). Moreover, even for periods when inventories are plentiful, they largely pertain to the ‘middling sorts’, tradesmen, artisans, small farmers and upwards, rather than the labourers and work people whose industriousness is central to any attempt to link expanding consumption to an increasing supply of labour. More generally then, the evidence from inventories shows increased ownership among the elite in urban areas but a much slower uptake in rural areas and further down the social strata (French, 2007; King, 1997; Overton et al., 2004; Shammas, 1990; Sneath, 2009; Weatherill, 1998). And, if the reach of probate leaves out exactly those households whose behaviour is central to the industriousness hypothesis, the evidence itself might also be in doubt. Inventories required a valuation to be given to the goods recorded but the accuracy of these is uncertain, and the quality, age and other detail of the good typically remain unspecified. A value was sometimes ascribed to a cluster of items in a room or store cupboard. However, these valuations show the increased quantity of consumer goods owned to be attained with a static overall cost, implicating falling prices rather than cupidity in expanding demand (Shammas, 1990). At any rate, probate evidence cannot resolve the key questions about the role of consumption in economic growth. Alternative data sources are hard to come by. Although from 1792 we have information on the food brought by ordinary households, starting with the work of Davies (1795) and Eden (1797), we have nothing on the larger durable purchases and rarely anything on clothing. Few commentators were sufficiently interested in the standard of comfort of the mass of the people to provide descriptions of how they lived until the conditions in factory towns in the midnineteenth century prompted authors such as Engels (1845) to report on this aspect of people’s lives. This information gap bedevils attempts to demonstrate links between new wants, increased industriousness and economic growth. However, with ingenuity and care, we can bring another source to bear. Specifically we use crime data for London to reveal desirable items of consumption over time. The digitisation of the Old Bailey records (Old Bailey, 2012) and improved adeptness at converting largely qualitative accounts into databases which can be subjected to econometric analysis using standard statistical software has facilitated the use of this source for the oblique investigation of trends in goods available. Over the period we consider, 1750-1821, the Old Bailey covered all serious crimes committed in the City of London and the county of Middlesex, essentially the area north of the Thames, which accounted for 60 per cent of London’s urban population in 1680 and more subsequently (Shoemaker, 1991, ch. 1). At
this time, London was the fashion centre whose extensive emporia showcased new goods (Boulton, 2000, p. 325; Schwarz, 2000, p. 648). The provinces lagged behind.1 If a consumer revolution was happening in England and Wales, this is where the action must have been, quite by accident, etched into the capital’s crime statistics. While stolen goods do not equate to consumption, they do represent the shifting nexus between demand and supply. As Social Trends puts it summarizing current crime statistics:
The nature of crime may change over time. Some crime, such as burglary, may stay the same in that it involves the breaking and entering of households and theft of goods, but the type of articles stolen in a burglary will change, reflecting amongst other things fashions, technological developments, and the desirability and availability of various household goods.
