Four reflective essays on the interactions between a burgeoning commodity culture and the politics of self-presentation in eighteenth-century Britain form the core of Alun Withey's new book. While it is short, its scope is admirable and Withey is careful to cover each of his four topics – posture, shaving, grooming and optometry – in detail, as well as to highlight points of convergence between the chapters’ arguments as they occur. The result is an engaging evocation of the consumer choices that were laid out before polite society during the long eighteenth century, and Withey charts the historic changes in significance of facial hair, spectacles, fob watches and even physical ailments with a dry wit. According to Withey, any associations of beards with wisdom and refinement were long gone by the time the Duchess of Devonshire was caricatured, in 1784, receiving a wet shave from Charles James Fox. And the intersections between learned behaviour and elderly decrepitude were trodden carefully by senior members of society, as they decided whether or not to wear their reading glasses in public.

Theft is a recurrent theme in Withey's source material, raising the interesting point that it is only when small but valuable objects, such as tweezers, were stolen that they appear in the historical record. The line between tool and treasure is criss-crossed constantly as nail clippers, razors and other toilet items become quotidian and luxury versions are developed. The decision to put the history of surgical instruments in a ‘coda’ to the rest of the book works nicely to emphasize not only the distinction between cosmetic and medical instrument use, but also the similarities in marketing styles. Most of Withey's source material is drawn from advertisements and he readily admits that this can lead to a biased understanding of the importance of these products across social classes. It is frustrating at times, for reader and author, to feel so locked out of any eighteenth-century view of how necessary steel toothpicks really were. Withey's work makes clear that tracing the history of use is difficult, especially as that use becomes more and more domestic.

Despite his own description of the book's aims as demonstrating ‘the strong relationship between the body and objects during the Enlightenment, and their centrality to the purposeful fashioning of the body’, Withey's work excites most when it discusses parallel developments in new technologies, and the ways they were combined by users (p. 136). His examination of ‘wig glasses’ is fascinating precisely because it demonstrates the ways in which spectacle manufacturers conceived of public (wig-wearing) use of their inventions.

The history of steel in the period runs through each of the chapters, joining an otherwise abstract notion of increased self-awareness to a very material process of metallurgy. It is fascinating to discover the numerous ways in which differences in the steel-casting process enabled the use of this metal in mass-market jewellery making, as well as innovations in surgical instruments, spectacle frames, posture-correcting girdles and other items. Withey shows that the aesthetic properties of a high-polish steel were deemed as important as the sharpness or strength of a blade by an increasingly professionalized class of surgeons, keen to utilize the latest metal technologies in their practice. At times, however, the return to the importance of steel at the ends of chapters can feel like an interruption of the more interesting conclusions that Withey draws, particularly about the difficulties of tracing private practices in the public record. The book seems intended to be both a social history of steel, and a technical history of polite society – two important, and doubtlessly related, topics, but both deserving of monographs of their own.