ABSTRACT
A new development within consumption studies has been an interest in secondhand goods. During the last twenty or so years consumption has largely taken over from production as an area for research in both humanities and social sciences.2 The first wave of interest took account of class and gender (ethnicity has yet to be fully addressed), for contextualizing the consumption of goods. Now aspects that might be considered on the margins of consumption practice, including purchasing second-hand goods, are receiving attention. The disciplines of anthropology and cultural studies have explored how people in modern day western societies make meaning out of industrial mass produced objects.3 How such commodities are subverted by consumers to make expressive individualized and customized goods have been studied. Consumption theory of this kind has shown that second-hand goods are often purchased in order to incorporate them in a sophisticated recycling process. However, most of this work has focused on contemporary society.4 And clothing has been the most examined of commodities since it is the most obvious means of expressing taste and opposition to acceptable forms of behaviour. This chapter situates itself within material culture studies as a means of extending the
interest in second-hand goods to the earlier period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The focus of the paper is specifically on furniture. Therefore our central aim is to show how this type of object in its second-hand state, lent itself to particular consumption practices that were specific to the type of good and to the period.
