Rebecca Stern. Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England. Columbus: The Ohio State Press, 2008. ISBN: 139780814210901. Price: US$39.95

The biggest fraud Stern wishes to expose in her provocative investigation of domestic fraud is the one perpetrated by writers like John Ruskin, who famously characterized the home as immune to the corruptions that lurked beyond the garden gate. In this regard, her work follows “the two decades of scholarship in feminist and cultural studies in taking the Victorian ideology of separate spheres as precisely that—an ideology, one that operated alongside, and crucially depended on, a reality that offered no such clear separation” (4). Offering a new lens through which to re-assess the familiar topic of Victorian domesticity, Stern catalogues a variety of domestic frauds, from thieving servants to marital scams, in order to support her central thesis: that the fraudulent practices of the Victorian marketplace, exacerbated by the growth of financial capitalism, were replicated in the domestic economy. Drawing on an impressive array of primary sources, including legal cases, newspaper articles, and street ballads, Stern makes a compelling case for putting fraud at the center of the Victorian imagination. Stern’s first chapter takes up the sensation caused when a butcher from Wapping claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long-lost heir to the Tichborne fortunes. While historians usually explore the Tichborne Claimant’s considerable notoriety for what it reveals about the social tensions of mid-Victorian England, Stern reframes the Tichborne case as a “paradigmatic story of domestic fraud” (25). Focusing on the domestic rather than political nature of the case, Stern contends that the private and personal “nature of the stories surrounding the case was responsible for much of its appeal” (25), a contention supported by the fact that the doddering dowager Lady Tichborne accepted the Claimant’s claim of kinship and embraced the Wapping butcher as her prodigal son. Stern investigates the way the case merged the financial and the familial, in that the Claimant attempted to acquire not only the “resources of the Tichborne property, but also the family name and the social relationships that went with them” (25). While the Tichborne melodrama played out in the press and in the courts, ordinary Victorians were also troubled by strangers who claimed intimacy: the servants who lived among them. Stern’s second chapter focuses on the servants who made possible the creature comforts of the middle-class home but who also turned it into a site of employment. The ideologues of domesticity emphasized the home’s distinctiveness from the marketplace, but like any manager or overseer, the Victorian housewife was consumed by anxieties about the dependability and honesty of her employees. The loyal and long-serving family retainer was largely a myth by the mid-Victorian period. Moving frequently in search of a better place, servants were often an unknown quantity to their employers, despite the reference in the form of a “character,” which was typically required. The butler might make off with the silver; the cook might give over the Sunday roast to a follower; the nursery maid might convert family secrets into neighbourhood gossip. No haven in a heartless world, Stern’s representation of the Victorian home through the prism of the master-servant relationship exposes the household’s vulnerability to “the very competition, insurgence, and fraud that trouble the Victorian marketplace” (86). Dishonest servants made a family’s life uncomfortable, but adulterated foods, the topic of Stern’s next chapter, posed a more serious threat. “Adulterated food,” Stern contends, “worked as a signifier that all commodities and people that vended them were potentially poisonous” (94). Inventively reading Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” as an allegory for the widespread problem of food adulteration, Stern makes clear the dangers of consumption: Rossetti’s Laura sickens and nearly dies after eating the …