Beverly Lemire

Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes

The secondhand clothes trade was a vital reflection of consumer demand in preindustrial and early industrial England, one that has gone unrecognized because of the nature of the trade. It did not involve the manufacture, finishing, or refining of raw materials or the sale of new commodities. It was largely invisible trade, leaving few records and generating no legislation. Yet the trade in secondhand clothing was a common feature of English life and met the needs of much of the English population in a way that other manufacturing trades and industries did not. Historians considering the characteristics of the domestic market in this era have naturally focused on the new manufactures and the widening range of goods produced in response to domestic demand both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—everything from caps, stockings, and pottery to the products of the British cotton industry. The growth of these industries has been seen as a testament to a strong demand among consumers for varied, attractive, and inexpensive goods. But the extent of demand among the various ranks of people and the intensity of this demand cannot accurately be determined solely from the development of new industries and the sale of new commodities. The demand for clothing, textiles, and other consumer goods was not the sum total of the consumer impulse. An equally powerful drive was manifested not through the purchase of new commodities but through the sale, trade, and purchase of secondhand merchandise. Joan Thirsk has noted that “the labouring classes found cash to spare for consumer goods in 1700 that had no place in their budgets in 1550.”

Second-hand beaux and ‘red-armed Belles’: conflict and the creation of fashions in England, c . 1660–1800

Fashion, like luxury, has been largely conceived in terms of the elite experience. Indeed, the European fashion cycle was noted first among the aristocracy where the fashion system celebrated novelty over tradition, highlighting the individual aesthetic even as it consolidated the group identity of exquisitely garbed nobles. The counterpoints to the mutability of style were the legal constraints designed to curb the fashion impulse, bridling the sartorial ambitions of non-elites. Sumptuary legislation aimed to enforce luxury codes. The right to extravagant inessentials, which distinguished those of noble blood, was forbidden to lesser beings; however, fashion was a contested concept whose influence permeated first the middling and then even the labouring ranks. In this article I will examine the competing forces at work within England as the dress of the common people was transformed over the long eighteenth century. Although sumptuary legislation came to an end in England in 1604, government and moralists continued to claim the right to restrain material expression within the lower ranks, but without success. I will assess the challenge to a unitary hegemonic elite fashion, and explore the creation and significance of the multiple expressions in dress within the varied social ranks of England.

Disorderly Women and the Consumer Market: Women’s Work and the Second-Hand Clothing Trade

Our knowledge of early modern economic activity in England has been selectively filtered through a dense historic mesh of economic agendas and theories laid down layer upon layer by historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Many of these historians were preoccupied with the transformations and innovations displayed within major textile, metallurgical, mining, transportation, banking and distribution systems. Records from these sectors are tantalizing in their prominence and seductive in the apparent ease with which they could be quantified and analysed to trace change over time. Some elements in these sectors have also been described as forming definably ‘modern’ components of economic development.3 However, as other historians have noted, these systems did not constitute the whole of the economy. Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson recently reiterated this point, noting that: ‘Large areas of economic activity have of course left no available source of quantitative data at all.’4 In spite of such caveats, selected economic activities are still seized upon as defining landmarks in the economic landscape, easily discernible from our great distance. Such prominent features may obscure with their wide shadows as much territory as they reveal. The lowlying terrain of ubiquitous humdrum enterprises is too often unnoticed, yet it constituted the bedrock upon which the visible prominences rose.5

Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700 1870. By Katrina Honeyman. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, Pp. viii, 204.

The process of industrial change energized generations of historians to explain the transformations that reformed the modern world. Over much of the twentieth century, historians of Marxist and liberal persuasions staged mighty contests to define most persuasively the effects of factory production, work discipline, class, and capital formation. The sometimes triumphalist chronicle of factory reform, capital accumulation, and trade-union growth were painted across the nineteenth century; more detailed studies of communities, corporations, and institutions had to fit in as best they could. Until the 1970s, as graduate students signed up for one or the other of these interpretative camps, few authors, liberal or Marxist, considered the experience of women. Adding womens history and gender analysis to the study of industrialization has brought about one of the most significant transformations of this chronicle. Katrina Honeymans most recent contribution stands as an essential text for those teaching and working in this field.

59.95

Thousands of Bobby Shaftos left for sea over the long eighteenth century. They travelled in merchant brigs to the Caribbean, manned naval vessels in a continuing circuit of wars and manoeuvres, staffed the ships and outposts of merchant companies from the fur-rich territories of Hudson Bay to tropical forts on the Gulf of Bengal. Their lives at sea and the fate of these ventures are well known for the most part. Less familiar is the history of one of the major supply industries on which the crews depended, the clothing trade. The expansion of the military is the starting point for this study.

Bobby Shafto’s Shirt and Britches: Contracted Clothing and the Transformation of the Trade

The clothing trades assessed in this work are not those of court tailors and fashionable modistes, and neither is this a study of changing styles in dress. Rather this work examines the trades that covered the backs of sailors and soldiers; the trade in apparel that shirted labouring men and skirted working women; the trade that employed legions of needlewomen and supplied retailers with new consumer wares; the trade whose commodities, once bought, returned to the marketplace, circulating like a currency and underpinning demand.1 These clothing trades were at the cusp of formal and informal market activities, the intersection of solid main street commerce and networks of kerb-side hagglers. The agents active in the former commerce spanned the social spectrum, from government contractors for military clothing to female homeworkers employed by putters-out. The making of these garments was increasingly dependent on a labour-intensive female outwork. The experiences of these needlewomen exemplify critical features of an expanding capitalist industry unconstrained by its technological stasis; responding to demand, a re-organization of production, a re-ordered labour and an abundance of raw materials sustained the growth of this manufacturing sector, in an alternative model of industrial development outside the factory.

Introduction: Dress, Culture and the English People

Popular consumerism swept through England during the early modern period, centring first on appropriate apparel. Clothing in a wider breadth of fabrics and fashions was increasingly the article of choice among a range of classes well below the social median. The incentive to acquire a broader array of garments was a catalyst among shoppers around the kingdom, as well as for thieves working in town and country; indeed, it can be difficult to separate the motivation of the opportunistic thief from that of the resolute shopper. In some cases the individuals were one and the same. This chapter aims to assess the relationship between consumerism and crime in early modern England, as expressed through the appetite for clothing.1 Consumerism has been described as generating a level of social emulation, an elasticity of demand and a ‘competitive spending which infected all levels of society from the aristocracy down to the very labourers’.2 But the motivation for consumerism was more complex than simple trickle down emulation. As Fine and Leopold contend, the specific nature of commodities must be considered one of the defining criteria in the construction of demand.3

The Theft of Clothes and Popular Consumerism

From 1650 to 1800, the clothing commonly worn in England underwent noticeable changes in fabrics, in styles and in the method of manufacture. Throughout the second half of the 1600s ready-to-wear apparel became a discernable and increasingly important part of the national clothing market in which the total annual consumption of clothing accounted for about one quarter of all national expenditure, in 1688.1 Manufacturers distributed a wave of products well beyond the confines of regimental storehouses and naval slop chests, serving diverse institutional customers, laying the ground work for routine production directed at civilian markets. Implicit in this development was a qualitative re-organization of production in a trade which was as common as the shirt on men’s backs, as varied as the petticoats worn by women of every class.

Redressing the History of the Clothing Trade: Ready-Made Apparel, Guilds and Women Outworkers, 1650–1800

By 1800, Jewishness and clothes dealing were so closely identified that they were often portrayed as one and the same thing, fusing into the single entity all the negative characterizations assigned to the two categories. Anti-semitism and xenophobia coloured attitudes towards Jews. But the taint of the second-hand trade was also passed on to the Jewish community as a whole. An eighteenth-century commentator, author of A Peep into the Synagogue, lamented the pattern of trade of poor Jewish immigrants who ‘sembrace the most pitiful and mean employment to procure them food, such as buying and selling old clothes, buckles, buttons … lemons, pencils, or such like’.1 In the last half of the eighteenth century, recently arrived Jews from Central and Eastern Europe came to symbolize all the alien elements of a foreign people. Accented English, bearded faces and uncommon garments, such as kaftans, added to the visible singularity of a group already marked by its distinct religion. The frissons of distaste enjoyed bya literate middle class reading descriptions of the wilds of urban England, were intensified by references to occupations abhorrent to genteel sensibilities.