Abstract
This paper addresses questions of gender and class in consumer behaviour in early industrial England. It explores the role of new commodities and their significance to the practices of middling consumers in two rapidly expanding industrial towns of eighteenth-century England, Birmingham and Sheffield. The paper investigates qualitative questions of the social and emotional significance attached to goods, as well as quantitative indicators of ownership through the use of wills, probate inventories and insurance policies. Bequests in wills display the kinds of goods thought to be significant by a large number of consumers, and reveal, in addition, different attitudes among men and women to their possessions. Urban middling women conveyed a sensitivity to commodities which may have been the crucial factor behind the shift from an elite consumption of foreign luxuries to a broadly-based demand for consumer novelties.
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