Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century England

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book traces the expansion of commodity culture and a mass consumer orientated market, and explores the wider social and cultural implications this had for society. The author emphasizes the key role women played in this evolution and, through a focus on retail crime and individual cases of middle-class shoplifting and fraud, provides the first detailed history of the "kleptomaniac" woman in 19th c. England.