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Conspicuous Consumption and Working-Class Culture in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Paul Johnson
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Extract

In the last decade, as economic orthodoxy has shifted from a Keynesian–influenced study of demand towards the monetarist concern for the supply side in the economy, so history seems to have moved in the opposite direction. After many years studying the role of production and supply in the economic development of Britain, historians have belatedly turned their attention to demand, and have been discovering, or rediscovering, the history of consumption. The advent of consumerism in Britain has been positively identified by Joan Thirsk in the seventeenth century, and by Neil McKendrick in the eighteenth. Putting a date to the consumer revolution has become a highly competitive business; W. Hamish Fraser, and before him Peter Mathias, have identified just such a transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century, while Derek Aldcroft prefers to locate this change in the inter–war years.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 38 , December 1988 , pp. 27 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1988

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References

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