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redit has played a fundamental and controversial role in working-class budgets. Numerous historical surveys have acknowledged its significance in both the diffusion of consumer durables and in the management of the basic needs of the poorest families. Consumer credit was already extensive by the time County Courts were established in 1846 to deal with disputes over petty debts, and the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of several new modes of consumer credit. 2 This article investigates check trading, which has not received concerted analysis, unlike hire purchase, mail order, the credit drapers, or pawnbroking. 3 The sector is significant for several reasons. First, its scale and scope were impressive. Check trading was utilized by millions of working-class consumers in managing family budgets. Second, its creation and success underline the validity of recent assertions by Finn and Taylor-who both maintain that important segments of the consumer credit market remained reliant on informally gathered personal information about customers and a high degree of sociability between retailers (or their agents) and shoppers long into the age of modern-day consumer society, which is often identified with de-personalized shopping. 4 Finn argues that economic models inadequately theorized the social nature of credit offered by Victorian and Edwardian retailers. Borrowing from Mauss and Bourdieu, she argues that nineteenthcentury retail credit remained strikingly reliant on factors that had their roots in the routine obligatory gifting patterns of traditional societies. Thus, for Bourdieu credit 'creates obligations . . . by creating people obliged to the late 1960s and early 1970s, check traders have transformed themselves into a highly organized, well-financed, and lucrative brand of moneylenders, specializing in lending to low-income households. 10 As a result, they have attracted the ire of anti-poverty campaigners, being accused of exacerbating the money management problems of the poorest groups, which echoes earlier critiques of check trading. 11 The final aim of the article is, therefore, to describe the check trading system, its operations, and its scale. It does so in order to explain how check traders established the knowledge, systems, agency, and customer networks that underpin their current role as 'subprime lenders'. 12 It demonstrates how the system operated-through the check trader's imposition of an external discipline of contract on those working-class consumers who became regular customers as a result of the routinization and the intimate contacts that formed the bedrock of check trading, and continue to be integral to contemporary moneylending.

The production of reactive oxygen species on addition of hexavalent chromium (potassium dichromate, K2Cr2O7) to lung cells in culture was studied using flow cytometer analysis. A Coulter Epics Profile II flow cytometer was used to detect the formation of reactive oxygen species after K2Cr2O7 was added to A549 cells grown to confluence. The cells were loaded with the dye, 2',7'-dichlorofluorescein diacetate, after which cellular esterases removed the acetate groups and the dye was trapped intracellularly. Reactive oxygen species oxidized the dye, with resultant fluorescence. Increased doses of Cr(VI) caused increasing fluorescence (10-fold higher than background at 200 microM). Addition of Cr(III) compounds, as the picolinate or chloride, caused no increased fluorescence. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopic studies indicated that three (as yet unidentified) spectral "signals" of the free radical type were formed on addition of 20, 50, 100, and 200 microM Cr(VI) to the A549 cells in suspension. Two other EPR "signals" with the characteristics of Cr(V) entities were seen at field values lower than the standard free radical value. Liver microsomes from male Sprague-Dawley rats treated intraperitoneally with K2Cr2O7 (130 mumole/kg every 48 hr for six treatments) had decreased activity of cytochromes P4503A1 and/or 3A2, and 2C11. Hepatic microsomes from treated female Sprague-Dawley rats, in contrast, had increased activities of these isozymes. Lung microsomes from male Sprague-Dawley rats had increased activity of P4502C11.

The history of general mail-order retailing in Britain has a distinctive trajectory. Though there were some important similarities, companies like Empire Stores, Great Universal Stores and Littlewoods did not simply replicate the Montgomery Ward/ Sears, Roebuck model. British mail-order retailing was shaped in response to the requirements of an urbanized market where less af uent socio-economic groups predominated and relied on credit sales and local spare-time agency to an extent unmatched elsewhere. During the period c. 1900-60, mail order's share of total retail sales grew at the expense of conventional outlets. The ability of the mail-order companies to compete successfully in this period is explained largely in terms of their role as credit providers and the ef cacy of an agency system that allowed them to exploit pre-existing social networks.