“For the look of the thing”: middle-class consumerism in the Mayhew Brothers’ Living for Appearances and the Greatest Plague of Life
“For the look of the thing”: middle-class consumerism in the Mayhew Brothers’ Living for Appearances and the Greatest Plague of Life

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses the problem of consumerism in the Mayhew brothers’ Living for Appearances and The Greatest Plague of Life: Or, The Adventures of a Lady in Search of a Good Servant. The two novels offer a satirical comment on the emergence, in the mid-19th century, of a distinctive commodity and consumer culture in England – a development intimately related to the growth and the new visibility of the middle classes. The paper places the novels within their appropriate cultural-historical context and discusses the ways in which they address contemporary anxieties about the new consumerism. Most importantly, it focuses on the nexus between consumption and social aspiration; on commodification; on the imitation and adulteration of commodities and social identities; on the specularization of the self; and, with respect to The Greatest Plague of Life, on the problem of the specifically female gender of consumerism.

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