Originally, as we have seen, ‘consumption’ contained a double meaning that referred to ‘wasting diseases’ as well as the using up of goods. Shakespeare played on this when he had Falstaff complain ‘I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable’ (Henry IV, Part II). All use was cyclical and had its passage of waste. Consuming and being consumed (in the physiological sense) were inseparable, and nowhere more visibly than in the ingestion and digestion of food and drink. While the debate over overeating did not completely cut the connection, it certainly loosened it. Instead of scaling back when dyspepsia mounted, consumption marched on by opening up a new market in treating the consequences of high living.
The culture of politeness gave consumption an additional lift. Coffee houses and the taste for exotic beverages were just one part of an expanding universe of social spaces – from clubs and restaurants to promenades and pleasure gardens – that were simultaneously dedicated to leisurely entertainment and genteel self-fashioning. Fashionable clothes, tea sets, the latest novel and appropriate wallpaper and furnishings were vital to the polite lifestyle through which the expanding middling sort defined itself and asserted its place in a fluid, post-aristocratic society. Politeness put the enlightenment ideals of sympathy and sensibility into material practice. Refined emotions were demonstrated by making oneself agreeable to others and gaining their esteem. In this social game, consumer goods were essential because they revealed polite people’s sensitivity to style and aesthetics – which set them aside from the uncouth labouring masses – and at the same time facilitated sociability and conversation.
How to dress, what food to eat and how: all this could be learnt, just like how to carry on a conversation. There was an explosion of self-help manuals on polite behaviour. ‘In your Cloaths,’ The New Help advised in 1684:
accommodate yourself to the fashion of your Equals . . . with respect to times and places and if you do exceed them in any thing, let it be in Plainness and Gravity . . . Put not your meat to your mouth with your knife in your hand, as the Country clowns do . . . Wipe not your hands . . . on your bread, nor on the tablecloath, but on a corner of your napkin . . . carry not your Handkerchief in your hand, Mouth . . . or under your Arm, but in some secret place . . . Every action . . . ought to be done with some sign of respect to those that are present.76
For discourse to be polite, bodily gestures and the correct use of objects, from clothing to toothpicks and napkins, were as important as the words spoken. Politeness made consumption socially productive. Such manuals took their inspiration from Renaissance courtesy literature, but they were now addressed to ‘persons of all ranks and conditions’ and sold at one shilling, within reach of clerks.77
In Japan during the Tokugawa period (1600–1867), the standard of living also rose for merchants and commoners, but wealth was spent on better walls, wooden floors, drainage and clean water. The interior remained sparse, with core possessions kept in a trunk, and a solitary vase on display. Additional possessions were put in storehouses, out of sight.78 This culture of simple comfort, in part inspired by Zen Buddhism, made eminent sense in a country with few natural resources. Arguably, it gave Japan a higher well-being than Europe.
In Britain and the Netherlands, by contrast, the domestic interior was the centre stage for sociability and self-fashioning; the built environment was secondary. Furniture, wallpaper, chinaware and other possessions showed that one was in harmony with refined taste. They needed to change with the times. In the year 1713, 197,000 yards of wallpaper were sold in England. Seventy years later, it was over 2 million.79 By that time, it was common to repaper the home every few years. There was a powerful symmetry, then, between the rise in consumption, the culture of politeness and the philosophical notion of the self as a fiction. Just like the self, the polite person was always adapting, making himself affable and facilitating sociability with the help of fashions and accessories.
Taste – or the ‘polishing principle’, in the words of Frances Reynolds, sister of the artist Joshua – made consumption respectable. But what exactly was it? ‘Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world,’ one critic noted in 1756. ‘The fine ladies and gentlemen dress with Taste . . . fiddlers, players, singers, dancers and mechanics themselves are all the sons and daughters of Taste. Yet in this amazing superabundancy of Taste, few can say what it really signifies.’80 In fact, plenty of people felt they knew exactly what it was for. However frustrating to the philosopher, it is this extraordinary surge of competing definitions of taste that is so compelling to the historian. Frances Reynolds defined virtue, honour and ornament as the three pillars of taste, but this was of little practical use to a lady standing in a showroom having to decide between teacups with various classical and Chinese motifs.
Historians used to argue that the matter was simple: the monarchy and nobility set the tone, the middle classes followed – some sociologists still believe this story. Reality was more interesting. What was tasteful in the exclusive circle of the beau monde was not the same as in the homes of the average merchant or lawyer. Few could afford to spend a whole year redecorating their house, as the countesses of Strafford did in St James’s Square in 1712; the japanned cabinets had to have frames specially made to match those owned by the Duke of Marlborough. For the middling sort, it was as big a mistake to be showy, as it tended to look cheap. Taste had to be in line with one’s station. It meant modest elegance, not gaudy ostentation. Cabinet-makers and china merchants served as style counsellors. And if ‘any gentleman is so vain and ambitious as to order the furnishing of his house in a style superior to his fortune and rank,’ one manual advised, ‘it will be prudent in an upholsterer, by some gentle hints, to direct his choice to a more moderate plan.’81 A range of taste registers developed, catering for different ranks, wallets and social horizons.
To critics, the preoccupation with apparel and decorum was a dangerous trend that put ornamentation ahead of self and substance. Fashion, it was said, sapped the strength of the nation by reducing strong Britons to effeminate fops or, worse, Frenchmen. It is easy to see here a precursor of more recent fears that ‘consumerism’ hollows out individuals and public life. This is too simple. The pressure to please others did indeed put a strain on individuals. Yet politeness and the material trimmings that came with it also created a space for social interaction that was free from violence and conflict. In Britain – a society which was undergoing rapid economic change and had torn itself apart in a civil war, sectarian conflict and a glorious yet bloody revolution – such a social space was welcome. Without it, the spread of clubs, associations and conversation societies in the eighteenth century would be unthinkable. Consumption and civil society advanced hand in hand.
Everyone had to be polite, but women especially so. They were presumed to have a heightened sensitivity that made them better at refining morality, and society more generally. The cult of sociability cast women as civilizing consumers and reinforced an increasingly stylized but widespread view of the division of labour between the sexes: women consumed, men produced. In China, the diffusion of opium from Qing officials and eunuchs downwards created a distinctly male collectors’ culture of snuff bottles and phials with rich depictions of celestial birds and caves filled with peach blossom.82 That European men also shopped and bought coats, coaches and cigars was all but forgotten. One result was that the evils of consumption came to be portrayed through the corruption and fall of the ‘weaker sex’, from Moll Flanders to Madame Bovary. Fashion and tea parties pulled mothers away from their domestic duties, eighteenth-century observers complained. The disintegrating household was a microcosm of the entire economic order coming undone. Instead of spinning and knitting at home, women were wasting money on tea.
On the whole, however, the Enlightenment put the figure of the female as consumer in a more glowing light. Not only did it set out the economic gains from moderate luxury, it presented
the growing admiration of women and their social talents as a sign of human progress and refinement. Barbarians treated women as workhorses or slaves. It was private property and commerce that softened men’s warlike disposition and made them appreciate women’s delicacy and gift for multiplying the comforts of life. ‘Women become, neither the slaves, nor the idols of the other sex, but the friends and companions,’ Adam Smith’s protégé John Millar wrote in the Origin of the Distinction of Ranks in 1771. Unlike ancient Greece, modern ‘refined and polished’ societies like Britain and France valued women’s social as well as domestic skills. ‘They are encouraged to quit that retirement which was formerly esteemed so suitable to their character . . . to appear in mixed company, and in public meetings of pleasure. They lay aside the spindle and the distaff, and engage in other employments more agreeable to the fashion.’ In turn, their ‘polite accomplishments’ would refine men. The love of pleasure could be carried to excess, Millar warned, pointing to ‘the voluptuousness of the Eastern nations’ where polygamy ruled. In commercial society, women and pleasure were safer. Comfort and conversation were schools of civilization. In his own family, the ‘commerce of the sexes’ proved more frustrating – four of his six daughters never married.83
BACKLASH?
The American and French revolutions demonstrated the political force generated by the expanding culture of consumption. Never before had what one wore and what one drank been so important in a rebellion. In New England, throwing tea into Boston harbour and shedding imported clothes in favour of a home-spun coat moulded a nation of patriots. In France, freedom of religion and speech were joined by the freedom of dress (8 Brumaire, 29 October 1793). These were not consumer revolutions in the literal sense. People rallied as ‘citizens’, ‘the people’ and ‘daughters of patriots’, not as ‘consumers’. Rights and liberty mattered more than the price of tea. The influence was indirect. Goods connected rebels in shared experiences and offered a symbolic platform for oppositional politics.84
According to the Tory view in London in the 1760s, the American settlers were meant to produce, not consume. Luxury might be innocent at home but in the colonies it was a drain and should be taxed accordingly. Even fifty years earlier, Westminster would have had its way. But the colonists had been on a spending spree, filling their homes with teacups and cutlery and their bellies with tea, all imported from the mother country. They were in no mood to have their new standard of living taxed away. It was a momentous miscalculation. Rumours spread of a conspiracy: the British deliberately exaggerated Americans’ wealth so they could overtax and impoverish them. The colonists faced a choice between frugality and industry: ‘keep the British manufactures we purchase longer in use or . . . supply their place by manufactures of our own.’85 The boycotts of tea and the pledges not to buy or sell imported goods became demonstrations of patriotic virtue. This was not a renunciation of goods in general, only of British ones. The American Revolution defeated both Tory imperialists and American frugalists. Instead of going down, imported luxuries skyrocketed in the young Republic. The founding fathers hoped to steel manly virtue against corrupting luxury, but as John Adams, the United States’ second president, was amongst the first to note, in reality, material distinctions became more, not less important in a democracy.86
Similarly, in France, attempts to harness private dress to public politics were short-lived. The long trousers of the sans-culottes – the militant lower-middle classes and artisans – briefly became the uniform of revolutionaries in 1792, but their symbolic power was almost instantly undercut by the ease with which aristocrats and other suspected enemies could slip into them. After 9 Thermidor, 27 July 1794, revolutionary politics left private taste alone. Clothes, music and theatre ceased to serve official ideology. Fine dress returned, albeit in classical style.87 For an event that introduced its own calendar and terror, the French Revolution was remarkably insignificant when it came to consumer culture. Except for the compulsory tricoloured cockade, it left behind no distinctive dress, furniture or lifestyle. In France, as in America, consumption had a far greater impact on the revolution than the other way around.
Revolution and war dampened faith in the power of desire and novelty to improve and enrich society. The fear of luxury made new converts, right and left. Instead of making people more industrious, more goods and comforts made them bloody revolutionaries, conservatives argued. They needed a firm hand, not greater freedom to spend. In turn, counter-revolutionary measures proved to radicals that tyranny really was the twin of luxury. John Thelwall had first-hand experience. A champion of natural rights, universal suffrage and peace with France, and, according to the authorities, the most dangerous man in Britain, ‘Citizen’ Thelwall was charged with high treason and thrown in the Tower in May 1794. What better place to compose a sonnet on ‘The Source of Slavery’. ‘Ah! why, forgetful of her ancient fame/Does Britain in lethargic fetters lie?’ It was because once free-born Englishmen:
slight the once-lov’d name
of rustic Liberty, and deify
Luxurious Pride. To her the pliant soul
We bend degenerate! her vain pomps adore,
And chace the simple virtues from the shore
They wont to guard. Hence to the base controul
Of Tyranny we bow, nor once complain;
But hug with servile fear the gilded chain.88
Thelwall was acquitted after a few months and later turned his radical energy to the science of elocution, but the idea of the tyranny of things continued with early socialists, cooperators and Romantics who experimented with model societies of self-sufficient, simple living.
Karl Marx took the critique of consumption to a new level by turning the republican argument that luxury bred slavery into a full-blown analysis of industrial capitalism. The argument came in two giant leaps. The French Revolution, Marx wrote in 1844, did not bring freedom but split the human soul in two: a citizen in public life and a bourgeois in the comforts of his private home.89 With another failed revolution (1848) under his belt, Marx then traced alienation further, to the soul of objects and human labour. Das Kapital (1867) made the commodity the ‘elementary unit’ of the entire economic system. Robinson Crusoe, Marx explained, made all his furniture and clothes with his own bare hands. They were personal products. Under capitalism, by contrast, they were social products, made by one and bought by another: commodities. Exchange stripped objects of their essence. Prices made them interchangeable: ‘20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 10 lbs of tea or . . . = ½ ton of iron or = etc.’90 To the capitalist, it did not matter whether a particular coat brought back memories of winters past or whether tea was sipped with family. They were all the same, as long as they could be exchanged for profit. Buying and selling estranged things from the people who made them. The result was a modern fetishism, where people worshipped goods for their price tag. Exchange value hid the human love, sweat and tears that went into making the world of goods. In a famous passage in Das Kapital, a table, the minute it appears for sale, acquires transcendental qualities, ‘standing itself on its head’ in relation to other commodities, ‘stranger than if it were voluntarily beginning to dance’.91
Once he had converted them into abstract commodities, Marx lost interest in the life of objects. His ‘materialism’ was preoccupied solely with production. By making the exploitation of labour the source of surplus value, he effectively wrote consumption out of the story. What people did with the goods after they bought them was irrelevant. This way of thinking had two fatal effects. One was the delusion that getting rid of profit would bring human freedom. The other was an instinctive suspicion that the desire for goods had to be unnatural, the result of manipulation, which blinded socialist leaders and intellectuals to the simple fact that people not only lost but found themselves in their possessions.
In real life, the Marx family had to be more attentive to things. Exiled in London in the 1850s and ’60s, their life was a constant struggle to make ends meet and placate
shopkeepers and debt collectors. Next to the monthly income of £5 from Friedrich Engels, it was the pawnbroker who kept the Marx family from being thrown into the street. Without him, there would have been no Das Kapital, no Russian Revolution, no Stalin or Mao. ‘I do not think that more has ever been written about “money” when money was so short,’ Karl admitted to Friedrich.92
The little house in Kentish Town had few permanent possessions. Jackets, shoes and silverware went to the pawnbroker when Marx was short of journalistic work and when butchers, landlords and schools demanded their due; once, desperation drove his wife to try to sell his books, unsuccessfully. He would hide upstairs, writing to Engels, leaving her to deal with ‘the hungry wolves’ down below. ‘9 Graftonterrace [sic], 15 Juli 1858. Lieber Engels! I urge you not to be frightened by the content of this letter.’ The ‘daily struggle with the mere necessaries’ had ‘completely disabled’ him. His wife was a nervous wreck. It was ‘disgusting’. His wife had not spent a farthing on new clothes, which was particularly hurtful given her aristocratic upbringing. What his children wore was ‘subproletarian’. Marx included a list of his expenses. In May he had to pay £7 for water and gas, and £3 to the pawnbroker for interest. He now rented a jacket and trousers, at 18s. Shoes and hats for the children cost £1 10s. And yet, he still owed £9 in rent, £6 for schooling, £7 to the butcher and £30 to the pawnshop. The situation had reached a critical point. This time it was impossible to avoid tough decisions – a dire warning that usually extracted more money from Engels. Even if he took the children out of school, sacked the servants and ‘lived off potatoes’, he would still need to sell all the furniture to clear his debts. But here lay the crunch. Possessions were not just abstract commodities. They meant respectability and self-esteem. In 1852, when all his jackets were in pawn, he could not go out – ‘everything is shit, and I fear that this dirt will eventually end in scandal.’ Marx was painfully aware of his family’s shame and his children’s worry that they might be visited by their friends while their shoes and toys were pawned. He himself, Marx said, slightly exaggerating, had no problems with moving to ‘a truly proletarian flat’ in Whitechapel, but it would be the death of his wife, Jenny, a born ‘von’ Westphalen who liked to lay out her Argyll silverware and damask napkins in the parlour, when they were not at the pawnshop.
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