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The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914. By Margot C. Finn. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii + 362 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, £50.00. ISBN 0-521-82342-0.
This is a wonderful book. Margot Finn's achievement is to take one of the most central and, we thought, familiar institutions of industrializing England and to extend our understanding of it in several directions. Economic and business historians have increasingly recognized the importance of credit as the essential lubricant of eighteenth-century commerce, and they have recently begun to explore the complex variations in its use in different markets and trades. By contrast, Finn turns her attention to the social and cultural character of credit, particularly consumer credit, and to the personal experience of debt.
Contrary to those who believe there was a shift away from the older economy of mutual obligation during the course of the eighteenth century, Finn argues that the transition from status-based credit as a social gift to contract-based credit as a market commodity remained incomplete before 1914. She pursues this thesis in a number of arenas. Examining fictional accounts of debt and credit by authors from Richardson to Galsworthy, Finn shows that they favored notions of mutual reciprocity and gift over individualist conceptions of contract. Similar evidence for the resilience of the moral economy of gift relations in the face of the rise of contract is found in a range of autobiographies and diaries. A chapter on the unreformed culture of debtors' prisons shows that these were characterized by a substantial degree of self-government and were based on custodial rather than punitive traditions of confinement. They were thus at...