Consumption and Status: Shopping for Clothes in a Nineteenth-Century Bedfordshire Gentry HouseholdMidland HistoryPrize Essay 2010

Review of periodical literature published in 2011

“…As Stobart points out, these value systems may have allowed the elites to eschew the call of fashion but they were not available to the middling sorts. Bailey, in Midland History 's prize‐winning essay for 2010, considers the consumption habits of the Gibbard family of Sharnbrook in Bedfordshire during the early nineteenth century. A wealth of evidence allows a detailed reconstruction of the family's interactions in the marketplace, their consumption patterns, and their relationships with their suppliers, and allows Bailey to speculate on the motivations behind their purchases.…”

“…Bailey, in Midland History 's prize‐winning essay for 2010, considers the consumption habits of the Gibbard family of Sharnbrook in Bedfordshire during the early nineteenth century. A wealth of evidence allows a detailed reconstruction of the family's interactions in the marketplace, their consumption patterns, and their relationships with their suppliers, and allows Bailey to speculate on the motivations behind their purchases. She concludes that, in the case of the Gibbards, the sway of fashion was tempered by prudence and propriety and the need to consume was motivated more by a desire to maintain than to enhance status.…”

“…Williams takes unmarried mothers as her subject. Drawing chiefly on infanticide cases heard at the Old Bailey between 1760 and 1866, she explores the way pregnancy and childbirth were experienced by unmarried women. The article reveals a great deal about the identification and signs of pregnancy and of labour and the nature of, and dangers associated with, solitary birth.…”

Retail revolution and the village shop, c. 1660–1860

“…148–59; but their focus is more on the household economy than the shop. Stobart, ‘Village shop’, offers an overview for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century; for the nineteenth century, see Bailey, ‘Consumption and status’; eadem, ‘Squire, shopkeeper and staple food’; eadem, ‘Village shop’.…”

“…For fuller discussion, see Bailey, ‘Consumption and status’; idem, ‘Squire, shopkeeper and staple food’.…”