2020 (Sept.). Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford (Palgrave Macmillan) (original) (raw)

Young men’s consumption, especially that of students at Oxford, has not received much attention from scholars although they participated fully in the economic life of the University town by becoming customers, often compulsive shoppers. No work deals explicitly with male undergraduate consumption. If the family, that is to say married couples, were for a long time prioritized, the consumption of single people has only recently begun to be explored; but only domestic life and middle-aged adult singletons were taken into consideration. Other perhaps peripheral groups such as children have received more attention than students. Undergraduates’ consumption in the Victorian era has been overlooked, although it was part of what John Benson called a ‘sub-youth culture’. Activities such as shopping and sport were ‘ways of defining, and expressing their distinctiveness, a distinctiveness both from the children’s world that they were leaving and from the adult world that they were entering’. As Benson argues, ‘the relationship between shopping and young people is fundamental to a proper understanding of the rise of the so-called consumer society’. Yet, this “youth market” may have constituted a niche of its own for local tradesmen in the past, worthy of study and touched upon in some perceptive texts such as 'The Hidden Consumer: Masculinity, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914' by Christopher Breward, 'The Cut of his Coat: Men Dress and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914' by Brent Shannon and 'Men and Menswear. Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880–1936' by Laura Ugolini. However, these works focus solely on clothing, thus do not cover male consumption in its entirety. Moreover, according to Frank Trentmann, historians have sidestepped the interrogation of concepts such as consumer society, consumer culture and consumerism by focusing on two approaches: the birth of modern consumer society in the early modern period based on acquisitive desire for commodities; and, the department store and mass consumption from the late nineteenth century to the present day, based on the mass production of goods and of desires that were not necessarily related to needs. They have not examined closely the transition to capitalist structures and organization. The temptation has often been to bypass the nineteenth century, in particular the Victorian era. The book builds an understanding of student consumer culture in nineteenth-century Oxford. It opens new pathways in the history of consumption and capitalism by contextualizing and scrutinizing students’ expenditure and orders to suppliers, as well as the correlation between consumerism and modernized forms of credit. It also makes an important contribution to the local history of retailing by giving a new perspective to the nexus between merchants, students and the University, and by mapping the development of trade from the 1830s to the 1890s, years in which shops proliferated. This study explains how boys of the Victorian era who were to become adults and married men, became within a few years, materialistic men―and thus experienced, long before their wives, the pleasure of shopping. Along the way these students made mistakes: buying imprudently, overspending, getting in debt or simply purchasing things they neither liked nor needed. From these some learned lessons. In this sense, being at Oxford was, through the consuming process and consumer culture, an education in becoming a man.