ABSTRACT
Shoplifting cases in England prior to the mid-nineteenth century reveal not only England’s treatment of petty female criminals, but also how society interpreted the scourge of light-fingered ladies. For women of all classes, the opportunities for crime evolved along with the progress of English consumption. The growth of commercial bazaars and other indoor markets like arcades marked the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although both men and women shoplifted in the eighteenth century and contributed to the rise in petty theft, the crime was notable for its many female perpetrators. By the nineteenth century, poor, lower-class women like David Jones were especially associated with shoplifting, but emerging evidence of middle-class, ‘nonprofessional’ women shoplifters threatened the comfortable image of the theft as a crime of the poor. The treatment of lower class women arrested for the crime of shoplifting exposes the bias of the gendered ideology that both limited and ‘protected’ middle-class women.
