Shelley Tickell's Shoplifting in Eighteenth-Century England examines shoplifting from 1699, when the Shoplifting Act was enacted, to 1820, when the Act was significantly amended. (The Act was repealed in 1823.) Tickell's book is a series of essays on shoplifting in London, supplemented by occasional references to evidence from the north of England, on shoplifters, shoplifted goods, the market for these goods, and retailers’ and the public's reactions to the crime and its criminals.

Tickell draws a very large part of her evidence from the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, a digitized version of the pamphlet reporting trials at the Old Bailey, London's major criminal court. Tickell analyzes reports of trials for shoplifting in four selected periods between 1743 and 1807. She argues that, until the nineteenth century, shoplifters were as likely to be male as female; that they were amateurs rather than professionals and usually worked in the least remunerative occupations; that they shoplifted less expensive goods from small shops in less prosperous neighborhoods rather than fashionable goods from the larger shops in London's new shopping districts; and that their shoplifting did not disseminate the interest in fashion associated with the eighteenth century's “consumer revolution” to the lower strata of society. Tickell also examines retailers’ responses to shoplifting, detailing changes in shops’ design, displays, and staffing devised to impede shoplifting, and presenting the Shoplifting Act in the context of collaborations between London's shopkeepers and government to encourage prosecution of shoplifters. In the final substantive chapter, Tickell interprets portrayals of shoplifters in the press and in fiction so as to accord with modern historians’ hypotheses that, during the eighteenth century, characterizations of criminals switched their emphasis from the sin inherent in everyone to defects inherent in the poor. Tickell extends these hypotheses to the nineteenth century, implying, through discussion of the trial of Jane Austen's aunt, that in the nineteenth century shoplifting by the prosperous was viewed more compassionately than shoplifting by the poor. Tickell therefore ignores presentments by Middlesex's grand jury in the 1820s and 1830s that castigated tradesmen for exposing goods so as to tempt poor boys and then prosecuting these boys for theft. Unfortunately, this omission is not the book's only defect.

The book's fundamental flaws arise from the disjunctions among its subject—shoplifting; its framing device—the Shoplifting Act; and its major evidentiary source—the Old Bailey Proceedings Online. Tickell defines the shoplifting that is her book's subject as “the theft of retail merchandise by customers or feigned customers from shops or stalls” (11). In contrast, the Shoplifting Act, which provides her book's chronological boundaries, defined the shoplifting from a shop or stall that it penalized as the unobserved theft of merchandise valued at five shillings or more. Tickell searched the Old Bailey Proceedings Online to identify the instances of shoplifting examined in her book, and she apparently found that this source did not permit precise identification of the law under which each defendant was tried and sentenced. In explaining why such identification plays little part in her book's analysis, she states, “[e]ighteenth-century indictments rarely clarify under which statute the charge was brought” (11). This assertion is misleading.

While it is true that an indictment does not contain a statement identifying the law under which its charges are brought, every indictment must present the specifics of the charge brought against its defendant—specifics that, when considered together, identify the law under which the indictment's charges are being brought. Therefore, an indictment for theft from a shop under the Shoplifting Act must charge: that the defendant took goods from a shop, goods which it specifies and values at five shillings or more; and that the defendant did so “privately”—that is, unobserved. Thefts from a shop, which did not qualify for prosecution under the Shoplifting Act, could be prosecuted under a few other laws, each law defining the offense that it penalized, and each indictment under these laws specifying the defendant's actions that made the defendant chargeable under that law. However, Tickell did not examine the indictments specifying the charges that are the subject of her book. In their stead, she used the Old Bailey Proceedings Online.

That restriction of research limits Tickell's analysis. For example, Tickell notes that she could not determine whether the female shoplifters brought before the Old Bailey were spinsters, wives, or widows. Such information is highly relevant to a depiction of female shoplifters, and while it does not appear to be available in the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, it is a feature of every indictment of a female defendant. Just as restriction of research to the Old Bailey Proceedings Online limits Tickell's analysis, so, too, that restriction undermines the book's structure, for the information available in the Old Bailey Proceedings Online is not suitable to a discussion employing the Shoplifting Act as its chronological frame. Because the reports of trials before the 1740s in the Old Bailey Proceedings Online are just terse summaries, Tickell's analysis of shoplifters begins in 1743, more than four decades after the passage of the Shoplifting Act. Similarly, because the Old Bailey Proceedings Online did not permit distinction among indictments for shoplifting brought under different laws, the book compares neither prosecution, nor verdict, nor sentencing under these laws. Therefore, Tickell does not examine the use of the Shoplifting Act, and so neither the Act's passage nor its repeal provides a terminus for the book's discussion. Because of such disjunctions among its subject, framework, and evidentiary base, this examination of eighteenth-century shoplifting is less cohesive, comprehensive, and reliable than it might be.