“If the fathers of ruined families could be put to the question or brought to confession,” a Leeds county court judge recorded in his diary in 1878, “ninety [percent] at least of them would own that their primary embarrassments … arose from the wish to keep up appearances. Vanity would be found to be a more fruitful source of misery than vice” (65). Having just read The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), the judge was reflecting unhappily on the way in which life imitated art, even across the temporal divide of over a century. Goldsmith's novel had elaborated on the twin financial perils of bankruptcy and social ambition, played out through the giddy marital aspirations of two daughters in thrall to fashion and status. In his own daily experience, the judge officiated over numerous cases in which bankruptcy and indebtedness figured large, and he himself was enmeshed in debt. Such were the hazards of living in a society governed by resilient social hierarchies but emboldened by consumer culture. It is no wonder that a Leeds judge searched for a few simple verities from his library of classic English literature.

In this brief inscription, one of many uncommon sources cited by Margot Finn in this densely researched work, three threads of her interlocking arguments become visible: the intertextuality of the imaginative lives of English people in their contemplation of the ubiquitous dilemmas of credit and debt; the importance of gender in shaping the experiences of spending and owing; and the persistent tendency of English chroniclers and novelists to moralize against the historical tide of legal developments that placed judges—not clergymen—at the center of dilemmas relating to character. Also at issue is a particular quality of Englishness evident in the Victorian age, as older hierarchical norms clashed with the demand for equal accountability before the law made by capitalist economic relations. Despite the secular implications of the debtor's plight, this side of the story might be inscribed, so to speak, on the head of a pin: the premise underlying a crucial line of the Lord's prayer—translated from the Greek, instead of Hebrew, as “forgive us our debts”—provided a legitimate moral defense of the debtor against the demand for accountability made by new legal mechanisms. Misfortune, not deliberate derogation of financial responsibilities, might render a person unable to repay his debts. The recognition that society had not provided the poor debtor with sufficient means to live made this assumption a badge of English Christian morality. Yet, paradoxically, incarceration of the debtor's only property, his body, remained a persistent judicial response to insolvency into the twentieth century. This was no “just measure of pain” but, rather, an archaic custodial measure intended to prevent further spending by improvident individuals; in essence, it functioned as a shaming ritual. Finn's account revels in the ironies of many such residues that resisted the fierce light of modernity in a nation of industrious spenders.

The arguments of this book move on abstract and concrete levels, and given its three overlapping but distinct sections, it is impossible to measure the import of its arguments in a brief review. Finn's contribution to two and possibly three fields of research is considerable. It is worth reflecting that over a decade of important scholarship has changed the fundaments of understanding British culture in relation to money. Where an earlier generation might have emphasized the messages of Samuel Smiles and Victorian moral consensus, and a successive approach would have looked to regulating institutions and the power of property, historians today must pay attention to a large literature on finance, credit, and above all, consumption. Early modernists were in the vanguard of at least one aspect of this movement, as they attempted to trace the demand side of a culture laden with petty possessions of all sorts. They discovered that exchange relations in early modern England did not necessarily make life nasty, brutal, and faceless for individuals, mainly because they were forced to carry on their economic activity with an extraordinary shortage of coin. As a result, nearly everyone lived in a continuous round of debt, owing and lending wherever they went, leaving a paper trail of their entanglements in their cashboxes when they died. This brings us to the starting point of Finn's study: close readers may recognize that her introductory chapter picks up exactly where Craig Muldrew left off in An Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England in 1998 (Basingstoke and New York). Muldrew concluded that the mutuality of exchange relations based on credit, whose hallmark was trust, diminished over time as an epistemological shift of the late seventeenth century introduced an emphasis on legal, rather than social relationships of indebtedness. This movement from status to contract could be detected in writings by Hume, for example, who argued that promises were essentially self-interested and not really extensions of altruistic interest. Finn speaks to this claim in the first third of her work, which argues that promises and indebtedness continued to bind English social relations well into the nineteenth century. In the final two thirds of her book, she turns to legal history and the model of contract society formulated by Muldrew by examining imprisonment for debt and the reform of laws and punishments throughout the course of the nineteenth century.

Finn counters Muldrew's contention of a rising tide of contractual relations by turning to cultural assumptions revealed in imaginative literature. She shows the fictional world matching, reflecting, and informing the evidence drawn from autobiographies and diaries like the one cited above, and she offers insightful readings, particularly of Francis Burney's The Wanderer, which convey the extent to which writers and women in particular were obsessed (not too strong a term) with indebtedness. Finn should be commended for crossing the barrier between British literary and historical studies that historians, curiously enough, have been reluctant to breach; though literary critics have often ventured to pronounce on historical developments, the tables have seldom been turned. In synthesizing a large literature on eighteenth-century commercial culture, Finn's point is a subtle one: literary texts produced a thorough critique and, in some instances, a utopian mirror image of what was actually happening at this time, as contractual principles pressured social relations in an era of market expansion. Women were critical agents in asserting differentials in gender and class through strategies of Maussian gifting, even as enlightenment ideologies of equality and natural rights eroded established hierarchies. If Georgian and Victorian society wore a time-resistant, protective cast in its revulsion toward formal contract and its preference for personal relations of indebtedness, it may well have been owing, in part, to the cultural work of literature. As Finn ingeniously shows in later sections of the book, an aversion to contractual relations no doubt played a role in confusing the process of modernizing legal mechanisms. How else to explain the release of genteel Dickensian debtors from the punishment of imprisonment, while less sentimentally inflected prisoners languished in the shadows?

Building on legal history by Julian Hoppit and C. W. Brooks, Finn turns to the question of why, in the face of mounting consumer spending and credit, litigation in common law courts declined. The answer lay in numerous “courts of request” and “courts of conscience,” which were devised by dissatisfied merchants eager for a cheaper and faster way of collecting unpaid debts, as no juries were required for summary decisions. Finn has pieced together the narrative of this development in court proceedings through painstaking research against the grain of what a standard liberal account might have entailed. Though contract law, according to theory, was supposed to be democratic (meaning neutral in the face of class, gender, and age differentials), the law regarding debt was anything but. While access to legal means of pressing debtors might have become more available, the final outcome remained bizarrely bound by class privilege. Reformed bankruptcy law enabled merchants to avoid imprisonment by forfeiting goods (instead of their bodies), but small debts of forty shillings or less usually meant that the petty violator went to prison, even into the twentieth century. The anachronisms of law sustained the protection of coverture from the legal persons of women until 1935. Such tangled threads of legal developments prevent Finn from formulating a single perspective. The law oppressed and protected; it was manipulated and subverted. The simple sentimentalism of Dickens (and the Lord's Prayer) become wholly untenable in the modern world of getting and spending.

Yet one must avoid Stephen Blackpool's conclusion that it was “aw a muddle.” The modernizing tendencies generated by the consumer revolution (an extended process, if there ever was one) were never fully triumphant in this class-bound, volatile, but sentimental nation. But the pressures of contractual demands were real. It is unfortunate that Finn did not uncover more about those litigants who championed the self in “self-interested” as they unhesitatingly used the courts to obtain payment, as they are important agents in her story who obviously existed; the reader must settle instead for the theoretical model sketched in the introduction and a statistical sense in later chapters. But it seems wrong to make further demands on a richly designed study like this, in which each chapter, standing alone, repays careful reading and reflection. Margot Finn has done more than limn the features of a complex consumer society in the making. She has offered up a map of densely woven social relations set against crucial, yet highly imperfect, legal frameworks of the modern age.