Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America

Rating:
Summary: New interpretation of 19th-century America
Review: A fascinating and provocative study--White takes what might appear to be mundane activities like Valentine's Day, charity work, and sentimental novels, and she explains how they were crucial to the way Americans thought about the market. She also explores how what might appear to be sentimental activities outside the markeplace were actually crucial to keeping the market running. Additionally, very well-written, great stories, and interesting insights into what makes Americans appear to hold such contradictary stances towards the crass world of the marketplace. (Also, ignore the blowhard's review below, because it seems he has an axe to grind.)

Rating:
Summary: No Cents and Sensibility
Review: Since the publication of Barbara Welter's 1966 essay, 'The Cult of True Womanhood,' scholars have tended to see white middle class women in nineteenth century America as far removed from the worlds of politics, money, and power. Rather, for Welter, they inhabited a world of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness, confined spatially to the home and conceptually to a sentimental heart religion. Nelson's argument is that so far from being detached from the marketplace, as so many others have claimed, women and their sentimental discourses were deeply engaged with, and even at the vanguard of, the market revolution. In a series of brief chapters, Nelson looks at women authors and magazine editors, promoters of charity fairs, the business of valentine's day, conduct manuals, and other platforms through which women engaged in the market, using sentimental discourse to promote and (at the same time) reform the market. In many cases, her examples are not, to my mind, always completely convincing, but the argument is eminently sound and of far-reaching significance.

Interesting though the content may be, this is at the same time one of the most poorly designed and ineptly edited books I have ever seen. The endnotes are lumped into a *single* paragraph that runs across thirty solid pages, with no spacing between one note and the next. The font is tiny. The numbers for the notes are impossible to find in the solid clot of text. The documentation is seething with errors: spelling errors, punctuation errors, grammatical errors, factual errors, dating errors, pagination errors, and errors of consistency. There are missing letters, missing words, transposed sentences, and references to titles that only roughly correspond to the actual names of the books in question. And while the documentation is rendered in microscopic and excessively compressed print, the main text suffers from the opposite problem, with each line absurdly widely spaced, a visual effect that will remind most academic readers of the too-short student essay that has been typographically tweaked to look longer than it actually is. Many of the illustrations are darky and smudgy, and the book is in no way worth the exborbitant price asked.

Nelson, it would appear, is interested in the ways publishers manipulated sentiment to appease readers. Unfortunately, her own publisher (Smithsonian Press) apparently couldn't give a hoot if the book gives readers a warm fuzzy feeling or a powerful migraine. It gave me the migraine. A disappointment.