Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

In 1775, after a trip to Scotland, Dr Johnson wrote, ‘The true state of every nation is the state of common life…The great mass of nations is neither rich nor gay: they whose aggregate constitutes the people, are found in the streets, and the villages, in the shops and farms; and from them collectively considered, must the measure of general
prosperity be taken.’

This seems to be such an unremarkable thought that to us it is scarcely worth saying. But before the nineteenth century it was a radical idea that prosperity, much less the true state of the nation, could be assessed by measuring the quantity and quality of the possessions of the nation’s inhabitants. The idea of a quantifiable ‘standard of living’ was as yet in embryo. 

By the time of the first ever World’s Fair, the Great Exhibition, held in London only seventy-six years later, the idea that one’s quality of life could be judged by the number of things one owned or consumed had come to be seen as natural: the consumer society had been born.