Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford, by Sabine Chaouche

Abstract

Reviewed by: Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford by Sabine Chaouche Emily Rutherford (bio) Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford, by Sabine Chaouche; pp. xv + 318. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $109.99, $109.99 paper, $84.99 ebook. In 1848, a twenty-two-year-old man named Edward Napleton Jennings appeared before the London Insolvent Debtors' Court in connection with debts of £1,865 that he had incurred while a student at Oxford—a sum over seven times the annual allowance he received from his father. Among other things, Jennings had spent £56 on wine, £40 on billiards, and—to the astonishment of the press reporting on the case—£98 on hats. Jennings was evidently a highly unusual nineteenth-century Oxford student, with his case provoking a furor about unscrupulous merchants who extended too much credit to naïve undergraduates who were too young to possess sound financial judgment. But the details about his spending habits are indicative of how Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford recovers what nineteenth-century Oxford undergraduates wanted to buy, what they bought, how they bought it, and how much they spent. Sabine Chaouche has delved into the accounts of Oxford colleges, the records of the Chancellor's Court (which, instead of the county sessions, heard legal cases involving members of the university), students' personal papers, commercial directories, and the national and regional press to reconstruct a fine-grained picture of the spending habits of one specific group of elite young men amid the rise of a mass consumer culture. A monograph that began its life as a PhD thesis, Chaouche's book is organized thematically, with chapters covering topics including the overall cost of attending Oxford; masculinity, the social relations of undergraduate culture, and how they influenced consumption habits; the economic relationships between the university and the city of Oxford; the roles of debt and credit in the Oxford economy; and some students' opposition to consumer culture. Over the course of these chapters, a narrative of continuity and change in student consumer habits emerges. Chaouche demonstrates with convincing detail and precision that the Oxford economy continuously ran on credit over the course of the nineteenth century and did so to a greater extent than wider British commerce in this period. Layers of credit governed the relationships between town and gown, as shopkeepers secured business by extending generous long-term credit to their student customers, but then needed to borrow themselves from banks or wholesale suppliers to cover the risk they took on through their extension of consumer credit. Chaouche identifies two spikes in student spending and indebtedness, for which she offers two very different explanations. The first occurred in the 1830s, when the Chancellor's Court sued as many as twenty percent of students for repayment of truly enormous consumer debts, and it came at a time when the percentage of Oxford students who were noblemen was at a peak. At this time, indebtedness indicated extravagant spending associated with the performance of a lifestyle of extreme privilege. But when student indebtedness rose again in the 1870s, the debts were smaller and reflected significant changes in the university's constitution and student body that followed a series of mid-nineteenth-century university reforms. Chaouche offers two broadly convincing explanations for these latter debtors: a new class of aspirational bourgeois students who spent beyond their means in their efforts to keep up with the conspicuous consumption of their wealthier peers; and a shift to more students living out of college, meaning that [End Page 478] they were more liable to participate in the urban economy—and to fall prey to the temptation of easy credit. It is unusual for literature on Oxford to span the entire nineteenth century, including both sides of the period of university reform. By doing so, Chaouche is able to offer new insights into how both student experiences and the social and economic world of the city of Oxford changed over the course of this dynamic and consequential period. Her sources allow her to say much more about the relationships between town and gown, and about how the city of Oxford and its local economy depended on the...