Auctions and the Consumption of Second-Hand Goods in Georgian England

Second-hand goods have long been marginalised in histories of consumption. Novelty and new forms of material culture are lauded as the drivers to wider economic change in eighteenth-century Britain, leaving second-hand exchange as outmoded and in decline. This book offers an innovative corrective to this view by providing the first comprehensive and coherent examination of the sale and purchase of used goods through household auctions in the long eighteenth century in England. It tells the stories of the people and things as well as the broader processes, practices and attitudes that were bound up in the commercial recirculation of used goods through auctions. In doing this, it challenges four key problems in the historiography of second-hand exchange. First, by offering a coherent history of the re-circulation of all household goods, it addresses the tendency to fragment second-hand exchange into studies of clothing, books, art or antiques. Second, by detailing the involvement of middling and elite consumers in second-hand exchange, it debunks the idea that used goods were the last resort of those too poor to buy new goods. Third, it shows that demand for second-hand goods remained buoyant throughout the Georgian era and beyond: auctions remained an important venue for recirculating the household possessions of rich and poor alike. Fourth, these consumers were not only motivated by financial necessity, but by a range of other imperatives, from social distinction to thrift to utility. Used as well as new goods were often acquired for what they did rather than what they meant.