ABSTRACT

Over the past three decades, interest in consumption has provided an ongoing critique of the classical theories of social and economic development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whether this has been couched in reinterpreting supply-led or demand-driven models, with their associated cultural assumptions, attention has been drawn towards an awareness of gendered modes of consumer activity in the creation of a distinctive and historically-specific ‘consumption ethic’.1 Following Neil McKendrick’s research, much work has equated the birth of a highly speculative ‘Consumer Revolution’ in the later eighteenth century with an expansion of female acquisitiveness as arguably one of the main agencies of cultural change. To McKendrick, female materialism found expression in frenzied personal spending. Frivolities, luxuries and the kinds of decorative and expressive goods that had been hitherto restricted to the elite, permeated the market in early industrial Britain seeping through a fluid and culturally permissive social order. The increased

earning power and commercial presence of women was pivotal. It released a ‘desire to compete with social superiors, a desire pent up for centuries or at least restricted to a very occasional excess’. Central to this conception was the emblematic, culturally transgressive presence of conspicuous female consumption: the déclassé ‘mill girl that wanted to dress like a duchess’ and whose unchecked, emulative expenditure ‘helped to create the industrial revolution’.2