An important move towards the consumer society occurs when a significant part of one’s disposable income is left after paying for the obvious necessities of life: food, housing, and clothing. In 1901 the average American family would earn $769 a year. A worker would earn $0.23 per hour, which meant that working fifty hours a week every week of the year would enable him to bring home $600. Of this, 42.5 per cent was spent on food, 14 per cent on clothing, and 23.3 per cent on housing (rent, heating); in other words 79.8 per cent of the household’s income would go on necessities. In the larger French cities such as Lyon and Grenoble, 26 per cent of the working-class budget was spent on food (1913 figures).103 Of course even this was a remarkable improvement over the eighteenth-century French labourer, who spent half of his income on bread and 16 per cent on vegetables, fats, and wine.104
Between 1876 and 1885, in Germany, the proportion of working-class income spent on food remained more or less the same (about 47 per cent, the same as in the USA), the percentage spent on housing dropped a little (20.4 to 18.2 per cent), and that on clothing rose from 9.8 to 13 per cent. This means that these three items represented 77.9 of total expenditure in 1876 and 78.2 per cent in 1885 – almost unchanged.105
By the year 2000, the proportion of average income spent on food in the United States was down to 13.1 per cent (and 40 per cent of this 13 per cent was consumed on food prepared outside the home, i.e. restaurants and take-aways); 4.2 per cent was spent on clothing and 32.8 per cent on housing (more than in 1901). This left a full 50 per cent of household income available for holidays, entertainment, a car, television, radios, computer games, and other items that had become necessities of life for almost all Americans.106
In 1905, Simon Patten, an American economist, was already welcoming the first ‘ready to eat’ foods. ‘These,’ he wrote, ‘were less monotonous, more palatable, and very easily prepared’ and ‘perhaps the cheapest, in proportion to nutrition and to labor-power saved, that have yet to be found’.107 He equally welcomed ‘The “specials” offered by cash groceries at seven, six, and five cents’, for these extended ‘the circle of purchasers and the poor man’s wife finds their ragged contents very satisfactory when served with her dull meat stew’. Now, he enthused, the working men could have cereal for breakfast, with milk, and sugar; and they could eat tomatoes and preserved food.108
The United States was well ahead of Europe in the development of branded products one could eat (though the idea of putting food such as fish in tins had been pioneered by French and British inventors at the beginning of the nineteenth century). In the 1870s the Heinz brothers started producing a sauce called ketchup, whose origins are Chinese.109 In the 1880s, Singer sold sewing machines, Underberg sold a herb liqueur in a special, recognizable bottle. On 8 May 1886 in Atlanta, Georgia, John Styth Pemberton started selling a drink based on extracts of kola nuts which, allegedly, could cure hangovers and headaches. He called it Coca-Cola. In 1894, John Harvey Kellogg invented the cornflakes that still bear his name. In January 1912, Procter and Gamble introduced a vegetable shortening called Crisco which, according to the advertisement placed in the Ladies’ Home Journal, was a ‘scientific discovery which would affect every kitchen in America’.110 Developments such as these and the greater abundance of food in the West would mean that the three-course meal became common in Europe and North America. Later in the twentieth century a multiplication of snacks led to all-day eating sprees, the primary cause of an illness almost unheard of in the nineteenth century (except among the rich): obesity.
Overeating was not a problem for workers even in prosperous Milan, where, in 1879, they lived on what was a not necessarily unhealthy diet of rice, beans, onions, and fried cabbage.111 But there were problems. Their wages were low and the municipal authorities did little for housing. The immigrants who poured into Milan throughout the 1870s and 1880s unsurprisingly met with hostility from the resident working class, since their arrival increased the competition for housing and other resources.112 The influx of workers into cities caused massive housing crises almost everywhere, while the unhygienic conditions of such dwellings were regularly denounced in various surveys.113
To be a wage worker at the end of the nineteenth century was a situation of course envied by the ‘really poor’, but it could be a calamity. Wage workers found themselves in a situation of extreme dependency and uncertainty, a predicament they did not choose but into which they were forced by poverty. They were often artisans ruined by machinery, farmers whose land could no longer support them or who could no longer compete against the more technologically aware. As wage workers they could lose their jobs at a stroke, because of illness or disability, including disability contracted during work, or because of the vicissitudes of the business cycle, or because of the inefficiency of their employer.114
In the poor countries of eastern Europe, factory workers and miners lived in conditions far worse than the rural workers in the West. At the turn of the century in the Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, in factory districts, there were virtually no sanitary facilities such as running water and sewerage. The residents used water from wells, rivers, and reservoirs that was usually contaminated by industrial waste. Many drank water from the river, as they had done in pre-industrial days. Excrement commonly littered the ground.115 As a result typhus and cholera repeatedly swept through the Donbass working population.
Worst of all were the living conditions of those who worked in the mines, and not just those digging coal. In the salt mines of Lungro in Calabria the conditions were particularly appalling. The mines reached a depth of 220 metres but the mechanical means of bringing the salt to the surface only extended to 118 metres; the remaining distance had to be covered by miners carrying the salt on their backs. Women and children were used in this work as late as 1888.116
In large firms, even one run along paternalistic lines by ‘caring’ entrepreneurs such as the Schneiders, owners of the steel works of Le Creusot in Burgundy, France, workers still toiled under inhuman conditions. In 1897, Jules Huret, a socialist journalist working for the conservative daily Le Figaro, described the Creusot foundry as if it were a vision of hell: chimneys spitting smoke and flames and the air polluted by the smell of sulphur. The faces of the workers looked thin and grey, eyes were red, their eyelashes burnt. They ate a bread ‘blackened by their hands’ (le pain que leurs mains noircissent), and they got up every day at six, and worked every day for twelve hours, from dawn to dusk with no rest, and why? – parce qu’un jour sans travail est pour eux un jour sans pain (‘because one day without work is one day without bread’).117 This was true in Paris too, where a regime of overwork followed by unemployment was the pattern.118
On the other side of the globe, in Japan, matters were no better. A rotting smell pervaded the slums. In Tokyo, in the 1890s, at a time of great economic development, Matsubara Iwagoro, a young journalist, inspired by Charles Booth’s investigation into the London poor and by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, had decided to live in what he called ‘Poverty Street’. He wrote that ‘there are narrow lanes and alleys that have no outlet, and by the wayside stand closets, which have to serve several families, and vitiate the air. Why is this permitted? Because the landlord wants to build as many houses as he can on the ground he owns.’119 Matsubara spent the night in a hostel for the poor where ‘the sultry air was filled with nauseous odours from the bodies of the coolies, so that one could scarcely breathe. The fleas came charging in legions, the mosquitoes got through the rents of the net, and there was fear of worse vermin.’120 Another journalist, Yokoyama Gennosuke, claimed that the smell in the Asakusa district of Tokyo was ‘indescribable’, that it caused migraines, and that it made it impossible to linger in the area for more than half an hour.121
Paris did not smell any better than Tokyo or New York before Napoleon III’s prefect, Baron Haussmann, improved the sewage system remarkably. Writing in 1848, Henri Lecouturier, author of the radical Paris incompatible avec la République. Plan d’un nouve
au Paris où les révolutions seront impossibles, wrote that ‘Most of the streets of this marvellous Paris are just like dirty bowels full of infected water … A crowd, pale and ill, crosses them constantly.’122
It was not just the smell, it was the people. A sense of disgust towards the workers overcame the socialist and feminist writer and activist Flora Tristan (Paul Gauguin’s grandmother) when visiting a working-class home in Paris: ‘I have learned so much in a fortnight living with these workers – they are horrible when seen from up close.’123 A few weeks later she was even more disgusted:
Who can serve the poor people so gross, so ignorant, so vain, so unpleasant to mix with, so disgusting when up close! Many compare the people to animals, but animals, even wild ones, would be a thousand times less unpleasant … And those stupid rich live calmly in the midst of a people in this state of degradation. This is madness.124
The rich may have lived in tranquillity, but the authorities were anxious. The police prefect, in a letter to the French Ministry of the Interior (11 September 1831), signalled that the misery was so great that its victims were likely to turn to violence.125
One way to resolve the overcrowding was simple: encourage people to leave the cities. In 1851 the City of London (as distinct from the wider conurbation) had 132,354 inhabitants, all crowding into the fabled square mile; sixty years later there were only 27,402.126 In 2015 the numbers were down to 8,072 and poverty was not their problem.127 Greater London, meanwhile, grew from one million in 1801 (already the largest city in Europe) to 2.2 million in 1851, to 6.2 million in 1901, peaking at 8.1 million in 1951.128 Then the population dropped slightly due to suburbanization before returning to vigorous growth thanks to immigration. By 2014 it had reached 8.6 million.129 Nowadays most of the top urban agglomerations are in Asia. They include Guangzhou (Canton), Tokyo, and Shanghai.
The romantic view that people moved from an allegedly salubrious countryside to the rotten life of the cities is, however, as simplistic as the starry-eyed celebration of towns against the idiocy of rural life. A study based on autobiographies of English industrial workers in the 1820s and 1830s points out that many of those who left the countryside never cast a nostalgic backward glance, never lamented the simplicity or health of rural life, and never returned.130
But even those who were enthusiastic about the long-term benefits of industrialization could not avoid allowing their pride in the achievements of technology to be tempered by a foreboding of the losses inflicted on the environment. Thus the radical journalist and free-trade supporter William Cobbett, writing in the 1820s in his Rural Rides (published in 1830):
All the way along, from Leeds to Sheffield, it is coal and iron, and iron and coal. It was dark before we reached Sheffield; so that we saw the iron furnaces in all the horrible splendour of their everlasting blaze … It is a surprising thing to behold … whatever other nations may do with cotton and with wool, they will never equal England with regard to things made of iron and steel. This Sheffield, and the land all about it, is one bed of iron and coal. They call it black Sheffield, and black enough it is; but from this one town and its environs go nine-tenths of the knives that are used in the whole world …131
This ‘wondrous works of their hands’ came at a terrible cost: it was estimated by J. C. Hall in the British Medical Journal (March 1857) that Sheffield metal grinders rarely lived beyond the age of 35.132
Cities were not centres of modern rationality. Many urban dwellers, particularly in southern Europe, were hardly more enlightened than their rural counterparts. Axel Munthe, a Swedish doctor who worked in cholera-stricken Naples in 1884, lamented the battles he had to fight against the ‘primitive superstitions’ of many of its inhabitants who distrusted doctors and medicines.133 In Caltanissetta, in Sicily, in 1886, only a few homes had toilets, and these discharged the waste into the sewers; otherwise excrement was usually thrown into the street.134 The writer and traveller Maxime Du Camp, who followed Giuseppe Garibaldi’s 1860 expedition to southern Italy, described the Sicilian town of Messina as a den of superstitions, run by priests who scared their congregation with stories of devils attracted by the local sulphur. He described Maida, a town near Catanzaro in Calabria, as inhabited by semi-savages. Du Camp found the place reminiscent of oriental towns he had visited (with Gustave Flaubert), with dogs running wild, naked children caked in dirt, pigs in the middle of the street, and women singing melancholic songs while their friends combed their hair looking for lice.135
In France, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the population that could be classified as destitute, kept alive only by private philanthropy and public assistance, was just under 10 per cent.136 The link between pauperism and industrialization was by then well established. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Mémoire sur le paupérisme, asserted that industrial society increased the numbers of those who had to rely on private or public benefaction. Rich countries, such as England (which Tocqueville had visited in 1833), contained the greatest number of people in a state of destitution: ‘If you go through the English countryside, you feel you are in the Eden of modern civilization.’ Roads were well-kept, the houses solid and clean, the cattle well fed. But once inside towns, ‘you will discover that one-sixth of the population live on public charity’.137
Some forty years later a not dissimilar verdict was recorded by a different traveller. Kume Kunitake, chronicler of the Iwakura embassy sent round the globe by the Japanese government in 1871, noted that ‘Britain had been able to become the wealthiest country in the world … because its people’s industriousness exceeds that of other nations.’ But, he added, ‘the numbers of the poor are probably greater than in almost any other country’.138
There had been laws in England to deal with the destitute for a long time, but the old form of charity, the Poor Laws (1601), were an impediment to the development of industry, not because they made the poor lazy but because, to obtain public assistance, people had to be registered in the parish in which they resided and this was an obstacle to the mobility of labour. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 forced the poor to accept work in workhouses whose conditions were such as to make even work in factories acceptable.139 Causing the poor to be even more miserable if they did not accept any work was seen, then as now, as a way of reducing poverty. The advantage, from the point of view of capitalism, is that it accelerated the process of urbanization, since the workhouses were in urban centres, and, of course, they kept wages down. The drawback was that urban taxpayers had to pay more to maintain them. By the middle of the century, according to travellers’ reports, a similar repressive attitude towards the poor existed even in prosperous Geneva, where 5 per cent of the inhabitants were on public assistance.140
Matters did not seem to have improved significantly by the end of the nineteenth century, at least not for the very poor – though precision is impossible in a field where statistics are unreliable and the definition of poverty uncertain. In 1899 in York, northern England, according to the famous survey conducted by Seebohm Rowntree, almost 10 per cent of the population of the city were below what Rowntree defined as ‘the primary poverty line’ (the ‘really really poor’), a further 13 per cent were below the secondary poverty line (the poor), and a further 21.5 per cent were not far from the first two groups.141 After further calculation, Rowntree concluded that ‘nearly 30 per cent of the population are found to be living in poverty’.142
Why were they poor? Although Rowntree suggested that gambling and drinking were a main cause of secondary poverty, people found themselves in real poverty when the main breadwinner had died, or was incapacitated, or unemployed, or because the families were too large, or the wages too low.143 These causes might be seen as unexceptional now, but it was believed then (as many still believe now) that people were poor because they did not want to work. The belief that poverty might be caused by circumstances outside the control of the poor clashed with the apparent evidence that society was not at fault. If it were, why were some peopl
e poor and others, born in similar circumstances, not?
Charles Booth in his 1891 investigation had no doubt: the main causes of destitution, he wrote, were ‘drink, immorality, laziness and pauper associations or heredity’.144 But, like Rowntree, he tried not to be judgemental: ‘It may be their own fault that this is so; that is another question,’ he wrote, adding, with the balanced tone of the impartial sociologist (one of the first), ‘my first business is simply with the numbers who, from whatever cause, do live under conditions of poverty or destitution.’145
THE PROSPEROUS
In practice, between the truly rich (the landowners, major bankers, and industrialists) and the really poor (those with no jobs, the so-called dangerous classes) there was a variety of social groups, each separated from the next by minor differences in income and status (semi-skilled workers, skilled workers, shopkeepers, clerks, etc.).
The nobility enjoyed an entirely different lifestyle from the rest. This was true not only of the aristocracy in London, Paris, Naples, Berlin, and other major cities, but also of petty aristocrats in peripheral areas. The French geologist Barthélemy Faujas-Saint-Fond, who travelled to Scotland in 1784, a century before the period I am describing, gives us a fascinating account of the breakfast table of his host ‘Monsieur Mac-Liane’, the son of the Laird (Lord) of Torloisk, in the Isle of Mull. ‘Mac-Liane’ was, in all likelihood, General Allan MacLean, who had taken part in the Jacobite rebellion and the defence of Quebec from the American revolutionary armies. He was far from rich (Faujas-Saint-Fond writes that the house was simple), but the food he offered his French guest was quite remarkable in both quantity and range. Perhaps he was trying to impress; he certainly did so. Breakfast was at 10 a.m. and consisted of smoked beef, salted herrings, butter, milk, and cream, what is evidently porridge (boiled farine d’avoine), milk mixed with egg yolk, sugar, and rum (some kind of eggnog), gooseberry jam, blueberries, local fruits, tea, coffee, various kinds of bread, and Jamaica rum. At 4 p.m. they had dinner: a great bowl of soup of beef, mutton and fowl with oats, onions, parsley, and peas, followed by black pudding with lots of pepper and ginger, ‘excellent’ grilled beef slices, ‘high quality’ roasted mutton, potatoes cooked in meat juices, chickens, cucumbers, and ginger chutney, milk, Madeira, ‘poudingue’ of barley flour, cream, and Greek raisins. All this was laid on the table at the same time along with beer and wine. When dinner was over, they were served port, sherry, Madeira, and punch; two cheeses, a Cheshire and a local; and finally tea, bread, and butter.146 Faujas-Saint-Fond then tells us that the ordinary inhabitants of Mull (7,000 people) were mainly shepherds and fishermen who went around without shoes or hat (in the north of Scotland!) and just ate oats and potatoes, though those who fished also smoked the salmon they caught; that the women were ugly (unlike MacLean’s daughter, whom he describes several times as jolie, d’une taille élégante, de la plus charmante figure), which he attributes to the climate, the food, and the lack of proper clothes and shelter.147
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