The Character of Credit : Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914 (Hardcover)

List of illustrations; List of tables; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. Debt and Credit in English Memory and Imagination: 1. Fictions of debt and credit, 1740?1914; 2. Debt and credit in diaries and autobiographies; Part II. Imprisonment for Debt and the Economic Individual: 3. 'Mansions of misery': the unreformed debtors' prison; 4. Discipline or abolish? Reforming imprisonment for debt; Part III. Petty Debts and the Modernisation of English Law: 5. 'A kind of parliamentary magic': eighteenth-century courts of conscience; 6. From courts of conscience to county courts: small-claims litigation in the nineteenth century; 7. Market moralities: tradesmen, credit and the courts in Victorian and Edwardian England; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.