Abstract
Scholars have targeted the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the advent of department stores such as Whiteley's and Selfridge's populated by the female flâneur out for a day in town, as the critical period when shopping led to fiscal, moral, domestic, and legal tensions.1 Erika Rappaport's fascinating research has traced how wives pledged their husbands' credit, and in so doing "quite literally placed their spouses in a dependent economic position vis-à -vis the shopkeeper, in effect jeopardizing their husbands' economic and personal well-being. Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, calculated to regulate the affections, and form the mind to truth and goodness (1788) lobbies for a mindful consumerism which will reserve funds for the practicing of charity; she also urges a responsible patronage of carefully selected shops, arguing that frivolous spending and failing to pay bills defrauds the working poor and strengthens foreign markets.