the CAN OPENER, patented in 1870
the SAFETY PIN, invented in 1849
the SEWING MACHINE, developed by I. M. Singer in 1851 (ready-made clothes would become more common from the 1860s; machine-made underclothes would be introduced in the 1870s)
the TYPEWRITER, invented in 1867 (the first full-length manuscript to be typed was Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883)
PROCESSED FOODS: By the 1860s, the British company Crosse & Blackwell was producing twenty-seven thousand gallons of ketchup a year. In the early 1880s, the chemist Alfred Bird came up with an eggless custard powder. Blancmange powder was developed in the 1870s, and jelly crystals in the 1890s.
LIGHTING: Stearic candles were used from the 1830s, replacing the much shorter-lived tallow-dip candles of old.
SANITATION: In 1846, Doulton began manufacturing glazed stoneware pipes, which sparked a revolution in metropolitan sewerage. By the late 1870s, public toilets had begun to spring up in Europe and America. George Jennings’s famous “pedestal vase” of 1884 stunned the public with its ability to wash away, as its advertisement put it, “ten apples and a flat sponge with a two-gallon flush.”
George Jennings, pedestal vase, 1884
the TELEPHONE, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1875
DRY CLEANING, invented in 1849 began manufacturing glazed Jolly-Bellin, who accidentally spilt turpentine on a tablecloth and found that on the patch the spill covered, stains had disappeared (by 1866, Pullars of Perth was offering a postal two-day dry-cleaning service anywhere in the British Isles and had improved on Jolly-Bellin’s cleaning fluid with a formula combining petroleum and benzine).
4.
Material progress accelerated still further in the twentieth century. In his English Journey (1934), J. B. Priestley observed that a new England had taken shape, a country of arterial roads and bungalows whose inhabitants, for the most part ordinary workers, read tabloid newspapers, listened to the radio, spent their leisure hours shopping and looked forward to rising incomes year after year. “In this England, for the first time,” he asserted,“Jack and Jill are nearly as good as their master and mistress.”
George Orwell, in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), sketched a similar picture of the Western material revolution:“Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes. The differences in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and improvements in housing. The place to look for the germs of the future England is in light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes—everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns—the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick there is a rather restless, culture-less life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine.”
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what one book he would give the Soviet people to teach them about the advantages of American society, he singled out the Sears, Roebuck catalogue.
Amid the economic expansion that followed the Second World War, Westerners, and in particular Americans, became the most privileged, and most harried, consumers on the planet.
A democratic consumer revolution: Hoover advertisement, February 1933
Sears, Roebuck catalogue, spring 1934
Across the United States, new longings were created by the development of shopping malls, which enabled citizens to browse at all hours in climate-controlled environments. When the Southdale Mall opened in Minnesota in 1950, its advertising promised that “every day will be a perfect shopping day at Southdale.”
By the 1970s, Americans were estimated to be spending more time at the mall than anywhere else other than their workplaces and their Taj Mahals.
Andreas Gursky,99 cents, 2000
Equality, Expectation and Envy
1.
The benefits of two thousand years of Western civilization are familiar enough: an extraordinary increase in wealth, in food supply, in scientific knowledge, in the availability of consumer goods, in physical security, in life expectancy and economic opportunity. What is perhaps less apparent, and more perplexing, is that these impressive material advances have coincided with a phenomenon left unmentioned in Nixon’s address to his Soviet audience: a rise in the levels of status anxiety among ordinary Western citizens, by which is meant a rise in levels of concern about importance, achievement and income.
A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense or fear of deprivation. Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.
2.
Such feelings of deprivation may seem less peculiar if we consider the psychology behind the way we decide precisely how much is enough. Our judgement of what constitutes an appropriate limit on anything—for example, on wealth or esteem—is never arrived at independently; instead, we make such determinations by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, a set of people who we believe resemble us. We cannot, it seems, appreciate what we have for its own merit, or even against what our medieval forebears had. We cannot be impressed by how prosperous we are in historical terms. We see ourselves as fortunate only when we have as much as, or more than, those we have grown up with, work alongside, have as friends or identify with in the public realm.
If we are made to live in a draughty, insalubrious cottage and bend to the harsh rule of an aristocrat occupying a large and well-heated castle, and yet we observe that our equals all live exactly as we do, then our condition will seem normal—regrettable, certainly, but not a fertile ground for envy. If, however, we have a pleasant home and a comfortable job but learn through ill-advised attendance at a school reunion that some of our old friends (there is no more compelling reference group) now reside in houses grander than ours, bought on the salaries they are paid in more enticing occupations than our own, we are likely to return home nursing a violent sense of misfortune.
It is the feeling that we might, under different circumstances, be something other than what we are—a feeling inspired by exposure to the superior achievements of those whom we take to be our equals—that generates anxiety and resentment. If we are short, say, but live among people of our same height, we will not be unduly troubled by questions of size:
But if others in our group grow just a little taller than us, we are liable to feel sudden unease and to be gripped by dissatisfaction and envy, even though we have not ourselves diminished in size by so much as a fraction of a millimetre.
Given the vast inequalities we are daily confronted with, the most notable feature of envy may be that we manage not to envy everyone. There are people whose enormous blessings leave us wholly untroubled, even as others’ negligible advantages become a source of relentless torment for us. We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like—we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our ostensible equals.