Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

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Название Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
Автор произведения Judith Flanders
Жанр Историческая литература
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Издательство Историческая литература
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isbn 9780007347629



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growth’.

      It is hard, in our age of material possessions, and given the stereotypical ‘overstuffed’ image of the late Victorian period, to appreciate from what a bare minimum the acquisition of possessions began. As late as the 1690s, something as basic to us as a utensil to hold a hot drink—that is, a cup—was ‘extremely rare’ even in prosperous households. A mere thirty years later, by 1725, ‘virtually all’ of these households had some.37 We don’t really have any idea of what the poorest in the seventeenth century owned—they died leaving no records. But of those who had enough goods that it was considered worth drawing up an inventory on their deaths, it is illuminating to compare one James Cushman, who died in 1648, with the poorest man listed in the inventories of Sedgley, Staffordshire, ninety years later. Cushman left, in his kitchen, ‘one small iron pott’, ‘a small scillite [skillet]’ and ‘one small brass scimer [skimmer]’. The deceased in Sedgley in 1739 owned, by contrast, a fire shovel, a coal hammer, a toasting iron, a bellows, a copper can, wooden furniture, a ‘tun dish’ or funnel, scissors, a warming pan, a brass kettle, bottles, earthenware, two iron pots, a pail, a ‘search’ or sieve, two old candlesticks, a kneading tub, two barrels, two coffers, a box, some trenchers, pewter, a brass skimmer, a brass basting spoon, an iron meat fork, a tin ‘calender’ or colander, and more.38 A similar increase in the quantity of goods can be found among those with more disposable income: in a survey of 3,000 inventories taken on the death of the head of the household in more prosperous homes, in 1675 half owned a clock; by 1715, 90 per cent of households did.39 This continuous growth in the number of possessions, this concern with the acquisition of goods for the home, was marked enough to be gently satirized in George Colman and David Garrick’s 1784 play The Clandestine Marriage, in which one character announces, ‘The chief pleasure of a country-house is to make improvements.’40

      These are a few small examples of the marked increase in the number of possessions among all classes, from Garrick and Colman’s countryhouse owners down to those who, in previous ages, would have inherited a few goods, possibly acquired a few more after much struggle, or simply done without. From 1785 to 1800—a mere fifteen years—the rate of consumption of what had previously been considered luxuries and were now regarded as part of the ordinary necessities of life increased at more than twice the rate of population growth. In those fifteen years the population of England and Wales rose by 14 per cent, while over the same period the demand for candles grew by 33.8 per cent, for tobacco by 58.9 per cent and for spirits by a staggering (literally, perhaps) 79.9 per cent, while demand for tea soared by 97.7 per cent and for printed fabrics by an astonishing 141.9 per cent.41 (For more on tea, see pp. 56—61.)

      By the time of the Great Exhibition it was expected that one’s quality of life—one’s standard of living—could be judged by the number of possessions one owned, the number of things one consumed. This was an entirely new way of looking at things. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for the phrase ‘standard of living’ dates from 1879. Punch, as always quick to spot a novelty, was already making fun of the idea by 1880. In a George du Maurier cartoon, an ‘Æsthetic Bridegroom’ looks at an oriental teapot, saying to his ‘Intense Bride’, ‘It is quite consummate, is it not?’ She responds rapturously, ‘It is, indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!’42 Buying goods, owning goods—even living up to goods—were now virtues. Comfort was a moral good. A hundred years after Colman and Garrick wrote of the prosperous and their country houses, the Illustrated London News carried an advertisement for a piano, the purchase of which would make the ‘home more attractive and save [the family from] more expensive and dangerous amusements’.43 The advertisement could not be more explicit: buying commercially produced goods, in this case a piano, would make one’s family life more entertaining, safer and, somehow, better. This was not simply an advertising conceit. Ford Madox Brown, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, told one of his patrons that, to be happy, ‘much depends upon getting a house and adorning of a beautiful house’.44 In 1876 the Revd William Loftie, in A Plea for Art in the House, expanded on this idea: there ‘seems to be something almost paradoxical in talking about the cultivation of taste as a moral duty…[but] if we look on the home here as the prototype for the home hereafter, we may see reasons for making it a sacred thing, beautiful and pleasant, as, indeed, we have no hesitation about making our churches’.45 The cultivation of taste had become a ‘moral duty’, with the ‘sacred’ space, the shrine, epitomized by Paxton’s Crystal Palace, which looked like a great shining box built to hold all the commodities that could ever be produced. All the manufactured items in the world seemed to be collected under its transparent lid. It resembled nothing so much as one of those glass domes that Victorians put on their mantelpieces to protect their most precious objects from dirt and dust.

      But, in a way no one could have foreseen, the lack of prices made everything appear much more available. No one looked at a display and thought, ‘That is out of my reach.’ Instead, everything became acquirable in the imagination, because nothing was for sale in reality. Everything could be dreamed of. At the same time, exhibitors, who had their own agendas, became ingenious in finding ways around the price ban as the fair continued. ‘Explanatory’ notes were handed out and, just coincidentally, were