Hookham

The booksellers of Hookham and Carpenter (hereafter referred to only as Hookham) were located on New Bond Street in London, and their records span the most politically turbulent decade of the eighteenth-century, the 1790s. Clients who frequented Hookham were primarily from the aristocratic or gentry classes. In fact, of Hookhams total buyers, 22% were the aristocracy, and 35% of the aristocracy purchased novels. We can also confidently assume that untitled female customers were of gentry income because their addresses were primarily in London's fashionable West End. Hookhams ledgers not only reveal a dramatic increase in the proportion of female purchasers of novels by comparison to earlier studies of provincial women, but they also reveal a remarkable increase in the proportion of female purchases of novels authored by females. Such a marked increase illustrates that Hookham's leisurely female customers were able to buy more novels. Furthermore, the fact that these female aristocrats and gentry have accounts under their own name, not their husbands, demonstrates the greater degree of agency and independence that these urban, moneyed women had relative to provincial women.