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This book explores students’ consumer practices and material desires in nineteenth-century Oxford. Consumerism surged among undergraduates in the 1830s and decreased by contrast from the 1860s as students learned to practice restraint and make wiser choices, putting a brake on past excessive consumption habits. This study concentrates on the minority of debtors, the daily lives of undergraduates, and their social and economic environment. It scrutinises the variety of goods that were on offer, paying special attention to their social and symbolic uses and meanings. Through emulation and self-display, undergraduate culture impacted the formation of male identities and spending habits. Using Oxford students as a case study, this book opens new pathways in the history of consumption and capitalism, revealing how youth consumer culture intertwined with the rise of competition among tradesmen and university reforms in the 1850s and 1860s.
Whilst there has been much recent scholarly work on retailing during the early modern period, less is known about how people at the time perceived retailing, both as onlookers, artists and commentators, and as participants. Centred on the general theme of perceptions, the authors address this gap in our knowledge by looking at a different aspect of consumption. They focus on two ancillary themes: the first is location and how contemporaries perceived the settlements in which there were shops; the other is distance. Pictures, prints, novels, diaries and promotional literature of the tradespeople themselves provide much of the evidence. Many of these sources are not new to historians, but they...
The purpose of this collection is to bring together representative examples of the most recent work that is taking an understanding of children and childhood in new directions. The two key overarching themes are diversity: social, economic, geographical, and cultural; and agency: the need to see children in industrial England as participants - even protagonists - in the process of historical change, not simply as passive recipients or victims. Contributors address such crucial subjects as the varied experience of work; poverty and apprenticeship; institutional care; the political voice of children; child sexual abuse; and children and education. This volume, therefore, includes some of the best, innovative work on the history of children and childhood currently being written by both younger and established scholars.
There has been a great deal of recent interest in masculine clothing, examining both its production and consumption, and the ways in which it was used to create individual identities and to build businesses, from 1850 onwards. Drawing upon a wide range of sources this book studies the interaction between producers and consumers at a key period in the development of the ready-made clothing industry. It also shows that many innovations in advertising clothing, usually considered to have been developed in America, had earlier British precedents. To counter the lack of documentary evidence that has hitherto hampered research into the dress practices of non-elite groups, this book utilises thousa...
Despite increasing academic interest in both the study of masculinity and the history of consumption, there are still few published studies that bring together both concerns. By investigating the changing nature of the retailing of menswear, this book illuminates wider aspects of masculine identity as well as patterns of male consumption between the years 1880 and 1939. While previous historical studies of masculinity have focused overwhelmingly on the moral, spiritual and physical characteristics associated with notions of 'manliness', this book considers the relationship between men and activities which were widely considered to be at least potentially 'unmanly' - selling, as well as buying clothes - thus shedding new light on men's lives and identities in this period.
This groundbreaking history challenges traditional assumptions about the development of British democracy and the struggle for women's rights.
A pioneering study of the importance of dress to the collective and individual identities of the nineteenth-century English poor.
Despite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with them—about the effect that the researcher’s race, gender, or class may have on her experience within them or about the impact that archival surveillance, architecture, or bureaucracy might have on the histories that are ultimately written. This provocative collection initiates a vital conversation about how archives around the world are constructed, policed, manipulated, and experienced. It challenges the claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive by telling stories that illuminate its power to shape the narratives that are “found” there. Archi...
In twentieth-century Britain, consumerism increasingly defined and redefined individual and social identities. New types of consumers emerged: the idealized working-class consumer, the African consumer and the teenager challenged the prominent position of the middle and upper-class female shopper. Linking politics and pleasure, Consuming Behaviours explores how individual consumers and groups reacted to changes in marketing, government control, popular leisure and the availability of consumer goods. From football to male fashion, tea to savings banks, leading scholars consider a wide range of products, ideas and services and how these were marketed to the British public through periods of im...
During the British women's suffrage campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women wrote plays to convert others to their cause; they wrote essays to justify their militant actions; and they wrote fiction and poetry about their prison experiences. This volume is a diverse collection of these writings, focused on the women's suffrage campaign in England and written primarily during the brief period between the New Woman writers of the 1890s and the modernists of the twentieth century. Many of these works have not been reprinted since they were first published. This important collection includes essays reflecting a variety of opinions and political positions; excerpts from autobiographies by women involved in the movement; suffrage poetry; the song that became the official song of the British suffrage movement; several one-act plays that were written and performed specifically to advance the suffrage cause; and short stories and excerpts from novels about suffrage.