Abstract
Every age, every society, it goes without saying, has its own particular forms of pleasure, and only a brave historian would venture that some had more pleasure than others, or even were more pleasure-loving. Jeremy Bentham’s ‘felicific calculus’ notwithstanding, pleasure is hard to measure.1 But what is indisputable is that the pursuit of pleasure has taken different forms from century to century. This chapter will examine the shifting material bases and expressions of the quest for pleasure in the eighteenth century. It will argue that these alterations were to a large degree responsive to growing affluence within a more commercial, money-driven capitalist economy, which left more people with spare money in their pockets to be spent or squandered on a growing range of amusements and commodities.2
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Bibliography
Eighteenth-century pleasures should be seen in several contexts. One is the wider history of leisure: see Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c.1780–c.1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1980)
and for a theoretical perspective, Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1912).
Another is the rise of commercial society in the Georgian era, oriented towards commodities and enjoyment: see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa, 1982)
J. H. Plumb, The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth Century England (Reading: University of Reading, 1973)
J. H. Plumb, Georgian Delights (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980)
Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
A further context is the great urban renewal occurring at the time. This is discussed by Peter Borsay in ‘The English Urban Renaissance: The Development of Provincial Urban Culture, c. 1680–1760’, Social History, v (1977), pp. 581–603
Peter Borsay, ‘All the Town’s a Stage’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, (1660–1800) (London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. 228–58
Amongst studies to particular forms of plesure-taking newly catered for — sports, entertainments and types of higher culture — the following are particularly insightful: Alison Adburgham, Shopping in Style: London from the Restoration to Edwardian Elegance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979)
Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972)
Emmett L. Avery (ed.), The London Stage 1600–1800, 2 vols (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968)
Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
W. Vamplew, The Turf: A Social and Economic History of Horse Racing (London: Allen Lane, 1974).
Popular and commercial enjoyments had many critics and sparked debate. For these see Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
A. Clayre, Work and Play: Ideas and Experience of Work and Leisure (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974)
R. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
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© 1996 Roy Porter
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Porter, R. (1996). Material Pleasures in the Consumer Society. In: Porter, R., Roberts, M.M. (eds) Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24962-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24962-6_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-62977-2
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