The fine mahogany secretaire with its secret drawers, the lacquered tea table, Chinese and Japanese porcelain tea ware. These fine luxury goods now seem to belong to the English country house or the exclusive antique shop. But what do they tell us about their eighteenth-century consumers? Who...

"Since the 1980s, scholars have made the case for examining nineteenth-century culture--particularly literary output--through the lens of economics. In Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics, two luminaries in the field of Victorian studies, Daniel Bivona and Marlene...