The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914Using a wide range of printed and manuscript sources, and paying particular attention to distinctions of gender and of class, Margot Finn examines English consumer culture from three interlocking perspectives: representations of debt in novels, diaries and autobiographical memoirs; the transformation of imprisonment for debt; and the use of small claims courts to mediate disputes between debtors and creditors. This major new study of personal debt from 1740 to 1914 will appeal to social, legal and cultural historians, literary scholars and those interested in the history of consumer culture. |
Contents
Fictions of debt and credit 17401914 | 27 |
Debt and credit in diaries and autobiographies | 66 |
Imprisonment for Debt and the Economic Individual | 109 |
Mansions of Misery the unreformed debtors prison | 111 |
Discipline or abolish? Reforming imprisonment for debt | 154 |
Petty Debts and the Modernisation of English Law | 197 |
A Kind of Parliamentary Magic eighteenthcentury courts of conscience | 199 |
From courts of conscience to county courts smallclaims litigation in the nineteenth century | 238 |
Market moralities tradesmen credit and the courts in Victorian and Edwardian England | 280 |
Conclusion | 319 |
Other editions - View all
The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914 Margot C. Finn No preview available - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
behaviour bill Birmingham Borough Compter Cambridge cash century character claims CLRO commissioners common law confinement consumer markets contracts county courts county-court judges courts of conscience courts of requests Credit Drapers credit relations creditors criminal culture debt and credit defendants Diary early modern economic eighteenth eighteenth-century England English equitable exchange fictional Fleet Prison gaol gender gift Guardian Society Haydon History husbands Hutton Ibid imprisoned debtors imprisonment for debt individual inmates insolvents John Journal King's Bench King's Bench Prison labour Lancaster Castle Leicestershire Lincoln Castle Lincolnshire litigation Little Dorrit London memoirs Minute Book moral narrative nineteenth nineteenth-century novel novelists obligations officers Oxford Pamela parliamentary payment penal personal debt petitions petty debtors plaintiffs plebeian political pounds practice prison purchased reform retail shillings Small Debts small-claims courts social status superior courts trade protection associations Trade Protection Society tradesmen Whitecross wife William wives women working-class York Castle