The Moral Negotiation of Fashion in Regency England Available to Purchase

Religion and the Georgian world of goods are rarely discussed in tandem. The modern history of consumerism is secular in conceptualization. The booming literature on the Georgian world of goods has engaged only glancingly with religious ideas. A series of prejudices about the Hanoverian Church has militated against sustained inquiry into the religious challenges of the Georgian world of goods. The strenuously Christian are conspicuously absent from the history of consumerism. The fashion victim and shrewd consumer matron have their historians, but what of the pious and judgmental? This essay brings two often disconnected schools of historical inquiry into conversation, through an exploration of the spiritual and material for two devout female Anglicans: Katherine Plymley (1758–1829) and Anna Larpent (1758–1832). It charts the negotiation of material ambivalence and the performance of both studied restraint and social status.