John Harold Plumb

The Birth of a Consumer Society

There were plenty of small books available on all scientific subjects for sixpence—or, after 1810, for less. In the prefaces and advertisements for these books one theme is repeated again and again, best perhaps expressed by the author of The Lilliputian Magazine (1752) 'Had nobody deviated from the beaten path, we should have had no improvements in the sciences, nor even in the common business of life: and have enjoyed our forefathers ignorance and bigotry'. Books for children and young people on science certainly led to an appreciation of the Creator through the wonders of His universe. They also fortunately led, according to their authors, to knowledge, modernity and profit.

There are two further points to make about children's literature in creating a sense both of belonging to a fresh exciting world, a natural, yet complex, world that could be intellectually explored. This first is easier to identify—illustrations and diagrams, often of the highest merit and of a visually exciting kind, surged like a flood into children's literature between 1780 and 1830. These illustrations, particularly in those dealing with the natural world, either the microcosmic world or the macrocosmic world of the stars, spoke of worlds beyond worlds, but ever knowable worlds that man could investigate. That is, they encouraged a belief in a new, progressive and developing knowledge of the Universe. Equally important was the fact that children's books were consumed, edition after edition, new books followed new books; and although the same stories might persist, novelty was constantly sought in their presentation. We know that many children's books had very large sales—editions of 10,000 to 15,000 were not uncommon, and some books ran through twenty or thirty editions, often with new material or new illustrations. And yet, as every bibliography of children's books demonstrates many editions have completely disappeared, others frequently remain in single copies. The importance of this very quick turnover of children's literature—instructional literature as well as mere entertainment—implies that parents wanted the latest, the most up-to-date, for their children and were prepared to regard children's books as a constant item of their family expenditure. An astonishing change in the social attitudes in perhaps three generations.

Quite as important as the enormous expansion of children's literature is the growth in the availability of children's toys between 1750 and 1830. Their range is very extensive. Instructional board games, such as Pleasures of Astronomy or Natural Philosophy and games of moral improvement, such as The Road to the Temple of Honour and Fame were very popular indeed between 1790 and 1830. Card games to teach spelling, arithmetic, music, historical and classical knowledge—along with jig-saws (an invention of the 1760s)—became increasingly available from 1730 onwards and were to be found in most provincial bookshops by 1800. More important still, I think were the industrial and scientific toys such as the world had never seen before. Miniature printing presses, cheap microscopes, cheap telescopes, looms that took to pieces but also worked when assembled—likewise coaches and wagons, zoos and aviaries with foreign animals—giraffes, ostriches elephants; all of these brought a sense of novelty and change to the eighteenth-century children. Few of us realize the range of such toys or their availability. Benison of Margate in 1800 had more than two hundred varieties of toys for sale from simple dolls to microscopes and camera obscura. Again the contrast between one or two generations is very great.

And the advertisements for these toys stress frequently their novelty, their modernity, as well as their instructional value: a microscope will teach a child the inexhaustible wonder of God's creation, that is of the reality of the world about him. There may be mysteries in God's creation but such mysteries may also be explicable. The world in which the middle class child now lives is more exciting, full of wonder, discovery and change—far different than 'the bigotted age of our forefathers'. If we add to these toys, the visits to museums and zoos—both institutions of great novelty in 1800—and the scientific lecturers with their mechanical as well as their rather alarming electrical apparatus, we should be able to imagine both the excitement of parents and children in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth, when both parents and children were having novel experiences together, and the children were acquiring objects such as their parents had never possessed. It is, of course, impossible to cover all the novelties that abounded at this time, and one more must suffice—the balloon, for example: for the first time man conquered travel in the air in the 1780s, and for the eighteenth century this was equivalent to setting foot on the moon.

'Improvement' was the most over-used word of eighteenth-century England—landscapes, gardens, agriculture, science, manufacture, music, art, literature, instruction both secular and religious, were constantly described as improved. Advertisements use the word to the point of boredom: after 'improvement', the phrase in which salesmen put their faith was 'new method', after that 'latest fashion'. This is true of dresses, hair arrangements, children's clothes or furniture or china or prints. The middle and lower middle classes, not only in England but increasingly too in Western Europe, particularly the Netherlands, had been taught to buy, to expect novelty, to relish change. Not all were happy about it, many feared that it would create greed and excess. Hence the constant iteration in the sale of any amusement that it would be instructive either in knowledge or in moral improvement.

This ever-expanding world of knowledge and of things led, or helped to lead, to the acceptance of modernity—of the replacement of the Providence-dominated world of early modern and mediaeval Europe by the world of expanding knowledge and science, of discoverable nature and rational exploration. In the middle ages, the peasant knew nothing of the elaborate theological arguments of the doctrine of the Reservoir of Grace. Nor could he have explained the nature of the Trinity or the Holy Ghost, but he accepted without question that the Church held the key to the understanding of his world. He knew that the forces of Satan could be active in his farmyard, that Providence was there to be invoked to save him from disaster. God was certainly not abolished from the life of eighteenth-century society. Even though He was not then controlling every event of daily life, the living world was still His creation. Yet it was a rational creation whose mysteries could be penetrated by the mind of man. Amongst the intellectual elite God was retreating to more strictly defined areas—of personal life and commitment or to a shadowy existence at the boundaries of knowledge. A rational explanation increasingly carried more weight than a theological or biblical one. The great intellectual change from a providential to a scientific world was under way, and, by 1800, could not be reversed. The difference in intellectual climate between 1700 and 1800 was therefore qualitative. An intellectual attitude of scientific rationalism was acquiring greater social acceptance. The modern factory worker knows nothing of the Quantum Theory or the Double Helix but he believes without question that scientists do and can explain the natural world.

This change cannot be explained by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century or the discovery, before that, of the new world of flora and fauna in America which so stimulated Europe's imagination, although they were strong contributory streams. To change the attitudes of men, the ideas of intellectual elites must be socially accepted. It is my belief that quite humble activities played their part in the acceptance of modernity and of science: growing auriculas or cucumbers, crossing greyhounds with bulldogs, giving a child a microscope or a pack of geographical playing cards, taking it to look at the first kangaroo seen in England or to watch a balloon rise in the skies did much to create one of the greatest revolutions in human life. These were the tiny channels and rivulets by which the main stream of elitist thought reached the mass of the people.