Men's things: Masculine possession in the consumer revolution

Abstract

This article uses the diaries of the Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner, the Reverends James Woodforde of Norfolk and William Holland of Somerset, and the Yorkshire schoolmaster Robert Sharp to explore men's multiple relations to the consumer market in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Arguing that historians have unduly discounted male participation in household provisioning and personal purchasing, it documents these diarists' engagement with a host of quotidian exchange activities. Avid purchasers and consumers of fish, potatoes, lace, buttons,china and clocks,these men were also active in promoting extended gift relations among neighbours, friends and kin. Their strategic deployment of gifts fostered sociability and commerce while bolstering hierarchical distinctions within the community and the state. Helping to constitute a broad-based moral economy of exchange, these masculine gifting behaviours meshed easily with the men's identities as acquisitive purchasers of consumer goods but undercut their ability to act as economic free agents. An understanding of men's shifting relations to the world of things in this period helps to explain the broader changes in English market moralities that underpinned the transition from custom to contract in the nineteenth century.