Histories of consumer culture and retailing in Britain have tended to focus on either the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century or the rise of the mass market from the late nineteenth century onward. In Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture, Tammy C. Whitlock has attempted to bridge the two periods by providing a history of retailing—and women's relationship to it—in the first half of the nineteenth century. In so doing, she has chosen to locate her narrative within the debates emerging from the literature on the department store and argues that many of the innovations in retailing associated with the mass market initially occurred prior to 1850 and that many of the debates about women's relationship to commerce—their role in the public sphere and the development of the female malady of kleptomania—were prefigured by similar concerns several decades earlier.

Whitlock begins by emphasizing her belief that consumption was the driving force behind the economy in her period. In two chapters on retailing, she sets out the main innovations existing between the “vanguard shops” of the eighteenth century and the department stores of the late nineteenth (20). These included the expansion of haberdashers and drapers and the creation of larger emporiums (with fixed marked prices and accepting cash payment), which had been previously observed in the north of England, but which Whitlock insists were developed first in London (not least with the shifting geography of shopping to the West End). Bazaars—first opened in 1815—served to feminize the consumer experience, first by focusing on visual display and exhibitions that appealed to women shoppers, and second by enabling respectable women (especially in charity bazaars) to serve behind the counter. Such developments brought the pressures of competition to many traders who resorted to fraudulent methods, though a more general discussion of “the character of English trade” was marked by a widespread critique of the practices—legal and illegal—of “cheap shops.”

Out of these concerns over novel trading methods, the discussion became highly gendered, providing the focus to Whitlock's book. The contradiction at the heart of this burgeoning consumer culture was—as has been noted elsewhere—the pressure to entice women as shoppers while warning of the dangers of their consuming excesses. Women were held to have contributed to the fraudulent tactics of traders through their “morally bankrupt” pursuit of the bargain sale, while their unprotected entry into the world of commerce only served to encourage the unscrupulous retailer (105). Fraud, however, was not the sole preserve of the salesman, and Whitlock uncovers a number of cases in which many women were accused and tried of shoplifting. Here, her main thesis is that at the beginning of the century, a woman's defense against such charges rested on the assumption of the irresponsible shopkeeper provoking a moral relapse in the otherwise respectable innocence of the female shopper. By the 1850s, however, female shoplifters, credit fraudsters, expectant “heiresses,” and “wealthy widows,” as well as exploiters of the law of necessaries, could increasingly defend themselves through recourse to medico-moral arguments such as “brain fever,” insanity, and other forerunners of kleptomania, a legal defense that Whitlock clearly demonstrates to have existed before the rise to prominence of the department store.

It needs emphasizing that Whitlock is only referring to a middle-class consumer culture, and she constantly reminds the reader of the class-based nature of her discussion. While many developments in luxury forms of retailing may well have formed the precedents for later imitations of the mass market, aspects of the cultural critique of women and consumption were more clearly class based. Kleptomania, in particular, she contends, was never the defense of the working-class shopper and was only ever used successfully to defend the middle-class shoplifter in the courts. And her discussion of the role of women more generally in this changing retailing world is focused solely on the middle class. Her other central argument—that middle-class society was redefining notions of luxury and needs—provides the context for understanding the pressures of position and status that she believes were crucial motivators behind women's experiences of new forms of retailing (whether they obtained their goods using cash, credit, or conspiracy).

In filling this important gap between the eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, Whitlock's book serves a useful purpose. She draws on an impressive range of primary materials—trial records, newspaper reports, novels, satires, letters, songs, advertisements, trade cards, and other printed ephemera—to recreate the culture and the experience of shopping in the period from 1800 to 1880. The book also usefully challenges the practices behind the rhetoric of women's relationships to the public world of commerce. Frequently, historians' discussions of the department store emphasize the nature of transgression as respectable women entered these very public places, but one wonders what is being transgressed if no such ideal of separate spheres was ever practiced. What Whitlock's work demonstrates is the continual and persistent nature of moral critiques of women's behavior, which—in the marketplace at least—never conformed entirely with the assumed roles proscribed to them.

Too much of the book, though, is concerned with point scoring, with arguing that whatever innovations historians of the department store might have noted of the late nineteenth century, all had arisen in the bazaars and emporiums of the first half of the century. This is to be regretted since it means Whitlock's focus (or, rather, distraction) is on the conceptual categories arising from a later period, rather than those that might emerge from her own evidence: thus, for instance, instead of pointing to differences, the “cathedrals of consumption” of an earlier literature on departments stores are merely translated into the “temples to consumption” of the early nineteenth-century bazaar (43). (The term “cathedrals of consumption” is originally from G. Crossick and S. Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 [Aldershot, 1999].) And, no matter how convincingly one can argue that any such innovations had actually occurred in an earlier decade, this is not sufficient to sustain the argument of a book, especially when—in filling the historiographical gap—Whitlock could have concentrated on the continuities and subtle changes in commercial culture from the eighteenth century onward. There is in the book, too, an assessment of women's actions that smacks of a certain moral relativism so implicit in much recent social historical writing. She argues forcefully against contemporary assumptions of the passivity of women shoppers (though who, today, would ever argue such a thing?) and seeks instead to legitimate all their actions. Even shoplifting, fraud, and theft, it seems, were not the actions of grasping shoppers but the entirely rational practices of consumers caught up in a redefinition of needs and aspirations that “made a little bit of lace significant indeed to the middle-class woman who did not possess it” (13).

But, overall, Whitlock is to be complimented for her uncovering of a fascinating period in the history of retailing. Her use of a range of materials brings a significant contribution to our understandings of the history of consumer society, and she provides an impressive case for a reinterpretation of many of the debates assumed to originate with the emergence of the department store.