Perceptions of Retailing in Early Modern England

Whilst there has been much recent scholarly work on retailing during the early-modern period, much less is known about how people at the time perceived retailing, both as it were as onlookers, artists and commentators, and as participants. Centred around the general theme of perceptions, this book addresses this gap in our knowledge, looking at a different aspect of consumption. To do so the authors focus also on two ancillary themes, the first is location and how contemporaries perceived the settlements in which there were shops, the other is distance. Pictures and prints, novels and diaries provide much of the evidence, as does the promotional literature of the trades-people themselves. Many of these sources are not new to historians, but they have not always been scrutinized and analysed with the questions in mind that are here posed. The methodology to be employed has been developed by Nancy Cox over the last decade, and used successfully in her book The Complete Tradesman and in the compilation of the forthcoming Dictionary of Traded Goods and Commodities 1550-1800. This book will find a ready market with scholars concerned with British social and economic history in the early modern period and among those interested with the history of retailing and of consumption. Although it is first and foremost a book written by historians for historians, it nevertheless borrows concepts and approaches from various disciplines concerned with theories of consumption, material culture, and representational art.