Studies of material culture have proliferated during the last quarter-century. Many disciplines—art, music, theater, and literature, to name a few—have benefited from historians’ theories about patterns of consumption. In particular, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb's The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN, 1982) advanced opinions that have underpinned succeeding analyses of consumption in many other fields. But two new books, published approximately twenty-five years after The Birth of a Consumer Society, refine some of its premises and contest others based on more precise investigations.

John Styles and Amanda Vickery coedited the chapters of Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North American, 1700–1830 precisely to test some ongoing assumptions about “men, women, and things” (2). Their collection begins with a section called “Spaces,” four essays about how space was configured, furnished, and gendered in the transatlantic world. Bernard L. Herman compares inventories from modest houses in Deptford and Philadelphia, concluding that McKendrick's theory of “emulative spending” fails to explain the complex ways in which furnishings and objects functioned as signs of class membership as well as individual taste. John Styles's chapter likewise complicates the relationship between people and things, in this case, between lodgers and the furnishings provided to them. Styles concludes that lodgers had a dynamic relationship with objects. Their rented quarters gave access to better quality goods than they could have provided for themselves while freeing them to spend their earnings on clothing. Some lodgers, not content with using their landladies’ possessions, stole and pawned them: Old Bailey records provided Styles's data. Robert Blair St. George likewise describes New Englanders’ active engagement with the spaces in which they lived; in particular, with small chambers designated for reading and letter writing. St. George posits that reading spaces, or closets, shaped gender, while spaces themselves were gendered by the people who stocked and used them. Karen Lipsedge concludes this section with another essay on “closet culture.” She demonstrates how novelist Samuel Richardson uses closets as metaphors for his heroines’ souls, creating powerful imagery by exploiting contemporary gendering of domestic space.

“Shopping” opens with Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor's chapter challenging “emulative spending.” Hartigan-O’Connor shows how, in American port cities she studied, purchases often involved correspondence and even proxy shopping by relatives, neighbors, and slaves. Far from individualistic competition, such transactions involved a social network. Claire Walsh reiterates the social nature of shopping while challenging McKendrick's argument that shopping was an eighteenth-century phenomenon. Walsh observes that consumers had always shopped for goods, but now they shopped for an array of finished goods, while earlier consumers shopped for materials to be finished at home. Shopkeepers’ displays stimulated advanced skills of discernment rather than the mindless response to advertising McKendrick had suggested. Ann Smart Martin further complicates the act of shopping; even trivial items like ribbons involved relationships and choices. Martin's point is that mercantile culture depended upon countless individual transactions from rural Virginia to London and beyond. Amanda Vickery concludes “Shopping” with a study of wallpaper purchases in Regency England. When papering their rooms, Britons of every class drew upon a shared aesthetic vocabulary and sense of propriety. Countering McKendrick's suggestion that elite Britons determined fashions, Vickery deduces national consensus about the patterns and colors appropriate for each room.

Linzy Brekke opens “Politics” with a chapter on how elite North American males projected identity through clothing. While their new nation struggled to disentangle itself from the British market, leaders like Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson agonized about whether to display patriotism by wearing crude American fabrics or elite status by choosing fashionable British garments. Brekke's analysis confirms that fashion connoted much more than novelty among eighteenth-century consumers. Jonathan White's chapter about how the laboring class home became the object of contemporary social thought likewise suggests the inadequacy of modern theories about consumption, this time by the poor. While the latter were frequently blamed for self-indulgence, White shows how such diatribes reflected elite notions about gender and household economy rather than the domestic arrangements of laborers.

“People” comprises three articles about how consumption shaped and projected identity. Amy Henderson describes how a Philadelphia couple engaged the husband's British sister for help designing and furnishing a late-century neoclassical residence. Their communal effort confirmed family membership in a class with similar tastes and values. Hannah Grieg's chapter on the London beau monde is likewise about fashion as a complex signifier. Novelists like Frances Burney mocked the seemingly mindless pursuit of fashion, but Grieg shows how, for example, jewelry was understood by privileged observers to indicate connections among family and friends. Fashion was the sign system through which an elite class maintained their status. Kate Retford concludes the book with a chapter on how even displays of ancestral paintings were less straightforward than has been assumed. In particular, she discusses how shrewd ladies like Henrietta Cavendish, countess of Oxford, and Caroline Fox, baroness Holland, assembled collections emphasizing their ancestors’ contributions to their husbands’ heritage. Since aristocratic duty enjoined preservation of family portraits, such displays confirm that interplay between individual choices and communal values made consumption much more complicated than McKendrick and his fellow editors posited.

The Dress of the People studies a topic glanced at throughout Gender, Taste, and Material Culture. John Styles provides accurate data about nonelite clothing in order to answer long-standing questions about whether a new consumer society included the working poor and whether emphasis on individual consumption ruined the communal basis of working people's lives. He deploys sources such as an inventory of possessions lost to a fire in Brandon, Suffolk, in 1789 to deduce that British plebeians dressed in cheaper versions of their wealthier neighbors’ clothes. The garments constituting men's and women's wardrobes were the same, differing chiefly in fabric quality. Styles also observes that although their fashions usually lagged a decade behind, the rural working poor adopted London styles as soon as the latter could be procured. Conversely, while McKendrick's theory assumed elite consumers established fashions, Styles's evidence suggests that the gentry often adopted laborers’ garments, as in the case of aprons for ladies and plain shirts for men.

Detailed appendices support conclusions such as, although poor young people often spent most of their earnings on clothes, such purchases were not mere extravagance. Young women's clothing attracted promising mates and served as dowries, especially useful during the first postmarriage years when a couple's earnings supported their new household and growing family. Young men deployed clothes to impress employers and prospective wives. For both genders, clothes represented capital that could be sold or pawned. Styles describes a family economic cycle that reached its lowest ebb during the child-rearing years, then rose as children reached apprenticeship age and eventually married. Styles also addresses questions about the extent to which poor people exercised choice, given their uniforms, liveries, and donated clothing. He explains that parishes rarely supplied all a person's garments, sometimes giving money to individuals for clothing purchases. When parishes demanded that paupers wear badges to signify their dependence, some proudly rejected their aid, while some welcomed identification as deserving poor. Similarly, as the century wore on and liveries more obviously denoted a low-ranking male service, some men avoided liveried positions, while others proudly adopted the uniforms of elite households. Their varied responses emphasize the difficulty of formulating valid theories. Styles concludes, however, that the poor participated, if in a limited way, in the consumer society from which historians like Edward Thompson thought them excluded. He also believes that instead of replacing communal values, consumerism supported them by, for example, reinforcing the propriety of wearing special garments on Sundays and holidays.

Styles's book should caution those seeking support for modern theories in contemporary texts. Styles reminds us that publications were often polemical rather than sympathetic or well informed. When Henry Fielding describes Molly Seagrim's neighbors ripping off the silk gown given by her employer, he reflects not the likely behavior of poor people but the belief that acquisitiveness encouraged destructive envy in the poor. When Oliver Goldsmith laments a maiden who deserted her “robes of country brown” (“The Deserted Village,” line 336), he conjures an anachronism that supports his idealized portrait of rural life. The late-century poor were not clothed in homespun. The poor were neither uniformly downtrodden nor a mob of heedless consumers. John Styles deserves praise for restoring over half the population to their importance for the study of eighteenth-century British consumption.