Introduction

Abstract

Evelina Anville’s much quoted epistolary account of a day spent ‘a shopping’ in Frances Burney’s first novel (1778) encapsulates much of the ambivalence that characterises eighteenth-century responses to the consumer revolution.¹ As an innocent abroad, she is suitably sceptical of, and amused by, the games played by ‘smirking’ mercers and ‘finical’ man-milliners to extort money from their female customers. But even this most virtuous of heroines is not entirely immune to the tantalising allure of material objects. Her description of her visits to purchase ‘silks, caps, gauzes, and so forth’ is related with a breathless excitement that could scarcely have been better calculated to arouse her guardian’s fears about his charge’s moral well-being.² But Reverend Villars does not travel to London to return his ward to the safety of the country, for he knows that ‘a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World’ of eighteenth-century culture was, in no small part, marked by her entry into the world of goods.