Shoplifting proliferated in eighteenth-century England with retail expansion, acquiring a new prominence as it was made a capital crime. This study comprehensively examines this phenomenon, seating it within the historiographies of crime, marketing and consumption. The majority of offenders were occasional thieves, drawn from some of the most economically vulnerable sectors of plebeian communities, their profile confirming the significance of age and gender. While specialist shops were shoplifters' primary target, particularly those selling textiles and clothing, a spatial analysis suggests that thieves preferred smaller, local shops to their more prestigious counterparts. Shoplifters matched their tactics to the size and status of shop, using performance as a tool to achieve their ends. Yet the study questions assumptions around the influence of fashion and consumer desire on shop theft, discussing how the type and quantity of goods stolen points to more complex economic motives, both financial and social. The potential impact of the crime on women's role as shopkeepers and the tendency to sexualise female offenders are also scrutinised. While retailers were initially instrumental in driving legislative change and worked constructively with magistrates to control the crime's incidence, their constant reluctance to prosecute conveys a false impression of the crime's true extent. The study calculates prevalence, and projects the financial impact of shoplifting on its victims at a time of highly competitive retailing. 'Risk-based' in their thinking, retailers developed practical means of protecting their stores, while new marketing techniques proved variously a boon and handicap. Yet shopkeepers' reactions were not uniform, some apparently preferring such situational prevention, while others turned more readily to the law. This ambivalence was also exhibited in their engagement with the capital law reform that ultimately saw the repeal of the Shoplifting Act. Employing a variety of sources from court transcripts to literature, the study finally explores how changing social perspectives on crime during the period coloured public attitudes to shoplifting, foreshadowing reconfigured nineteenth-century perceptions of the crime.

This thesis addresses the growing impulse towards establishing a public, national collection of Old Master pictures for Britain, located in London, in the last quarter of the eighteenth-century. It does so by identifying the importance of individual conceptualizations of what such a collection might mean for a nation, and how it might come to be realized for an imprecisely defined public. My thesis examines the shifting dynamics between private and public collections during the period of 1775 to 1800, repositioning notions of what constituted space for viewing and accessing art in a national context, and investigates just who participated in the ensuing dialogues about various uses of art for the nation. To this end, three case studies have been employed. The first examines the collection of pictures assembled by Sir Robert Walpole and their public legacy. The second explores the proposal for a national collection of art put forth by art dealer Noel Desenfans. The third examines the frustrated plans of Sir Joshua Reynolds for his collection of Old Master pictures. Through the respective lenses provided by the case studies, it is demonstrated that the envisioning of a national gallery for Britain pitched competing perspectives against each other, as different kinds of people jockeyed for cultural authority. The process of articulating and shaping these ambitions with an eye towards national benefit was only beginning to be explored, and negotiations of private ambitions and interests surrounding picture collections for the public was further complicated by factors of social class and profession. This thesis demonstrate that the boundaries of participation in matters concerning art for the nation were not fixed regarding Old Master pictures and the value placed on them in late eighteenth-century London. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2009-01-26 09:01:22.591

This thesis provides a comprehensive source study of the eighteenth-century Chapel Royal partbooks (London, British Library R.M.27.a–d). The 56 manuscript volumes in this collection, which are now catalogued into four groups (or ‘sets’), were used in the daily choral services at St James’s Palace during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The sources have a complex history since they have an ‘organic’ quality whereby the books continued to be copied into and altered whilst they were in regular use. The first part of the thesis (chapters two to six) examines the physical characteristics of the manuscripts by considering the books’ construction, the traits of the copyists, and the way material was gradually added. Paper and scribal analysis, as well as general cataloguing work, are used to identify the contents and explore the layers of copying. The second part of the thesis (chapters seven and eight) looks at the function of the books and considers the collection within its eighteenth-century context. Documentary sources are considered alongside various elements of the books to establish how the partbooks were used in performance. The Chapel’s method of partbook organisation is then compared with the organisation of similar collections at other choral foundations (including those with which the Chapel had strong connections).