Apr 5, 2008
Pauper Chic: How Commerce Made Workers Better Off
Do read Ferdinand Mount's fascinating review of JohnStyles' recent and abundantly illustrated The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale University Press, 2008). You won't regret that you did.
The author's findings rebut the condescending conclusion of Marxist historian E. P. Thompson in his classic study The Making of the English Working Class (1966) that the share of the average working man in"the benefits of economic progress" was paltry, consisting of"more potatoes, a few articles of cotton clothing for his family, soap and candles, some tea and sugar, and a great many articles in the Economic History Review."
As the review explains,"John Styles, formerly a costume scholar at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has squirrelled together a remarkable, and often poignant, heap of evidence of what the poor actually wore...Styles never underplays the piercing poverty that the worst off endured. Nor is he claiming that eighteenth-century England was a fully fledged consumer society. But what he does show conclusively is that while the poor did not have a huge choice at the best of times, they did have some, and what they had they grasped with both hands...[W]hat strikes one throughout is the variousness of working-class experience and the determination of people to be agents rather than patients whenever they had a chance."
That said, please don't take my summary as an adequate subsitute for reading the entire review, one that will surely encourage you to read or even buy the book itself. The Dress of the People sounds like an essential addition to a shelf of books on British history that might include John Styles and Amanda Vickery's edited volume Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (Yale, 2006) and would certainly hold Jonathan Rose's acclaimed The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale, 2001/2003). This award-winning book tracks the rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century.
The author's findings rebut the condescending conclusion of Marxist historian E. P. Thompson in his classic study The Making of the English Working Class (1966) that the share of the average working man in"the benefits of economic progress" was paltry, consisting of"more potatoes, a few articles of cotton clothing for his family, soap and candles, some tea and sugar, and a great many articles in the Economic History Review."
As the review explains,"John Styles, formerly a costume scholar at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has squirrelled together a remarkable, and often poignant, heap of evidence of what the poor actually wore...Styles never underplays the piercing poverty that the worst off endured. Nor is he claiming that eighteenth-century England was a fully fledged consumer society. But what he does show conclusively is that while the poor did not have a huge choice at the best of times, they did have some, and what they had they grasped with both hands...[W]hat strikes one throughout is the variousness of working-class experience and the determination of people to be agents rather than patients whenever they had a chance."
That said, please don't take my summary as an adequate subsitute for reading the entire review, one that will surely encourage you to read or even buy the book itself. The Dress of the People sounds like an essential addition to a shelf of books on British history that might include John Styles and Amanda Vickery's edited volume Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (Yale, 2006) and would certainly hold Jonathan Rose's acclaimed The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale, 2001/2003). This award-winning book tracks the rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century.