ABSTRACT
For the eighteenth century there is a range of sources through which to study the interface between shopkeeper and customer. Personal diaries, account books and novels, provide insights into contemporary perceptions of shopping and into the relationship between shopkeeper and shopper as seen from the public's side of the counter. Surviving tradesmen's account books, covering a variety of trades and a range of social contexts, present the retailer's side, while several autobiographical works flesh out the bare bones of the records of sale and credit. Such sources encapsulate individual and personal experiences, but contextualization for these sources can be found in several ways. A few eighteenth-century topographical prints and townscapes of fashionable shopping streets furnish useful evidence of former practice. Newspaper advertisements surviving in their thousands, and many bill heads and trade cards offer opportunities for a different sort of analysis from the more personal records. One of the most valuable sources is the probate records of tradesmen, especially the inventories of their stock and equipment, although the number of inventories taken after 1720 fell, particularly in the South-east, and after 1750 dropped almost to nothing over the country as a whole.
