In both France and England, the middle classes became the prime consumers of the arts and, due to this, exerted a good deal of influence over the form they took during the nineteenth century. Macleod draws on sociological and anthropological theories that consider money to be a cultural agent that transmits a wide variety of positive and negative messages. Looking at middle-class English Victorians, she explores the paradoxical, but not incompatible, way in which the consumption of the arts (in particular, the visual arts) provided a means by which the newly empowered and influential merchant classes could assert their status as both wealthy and ‘cultured.’ I wish to explore whether this conspicuous consumption of cultural forms applied to dance and the ballet as well as contemporary British painting. Macleod also opens up the possibility of looking at female consumption of the arts and how this was different than that of men.