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Notes -
Yes and no.
Telephone orders for goods or investments are kind of like Amazon or stock-market apps, except for the throughput, usability, and expense. The upper classes could get a reasonable approximation of 1980s life. Lower, less so. Electric lighting is not the same as electric heating, appliances, and personal devices.
I say 1980s because the Internet was an absolute paradigm shift. It was astonishingly difficult for the WWI Royal Navy to communicate; everyone else was worse off.
I mean, what exactly are you missing? Be specific. They had coal and gas to keep themselves warm, not that different from today. They could get stuff delivered literally the same day, actually faster than today. They had books, newspapers, comics, movies, and West End musicals to keep themselves entertained, often in much higher quality than what we have today. They had doctors who could come pay you a house call at a moment's notice. They had police who would take on a serious, lengthy investigation to solve a burglary, let alone a murder. They had a trustworthy news service to keep them up-to-date on world events. They had a stock ticker to let them make real-time stock trades for the sort of thing that any normal, non-day trader needs to do. It was a very comfortable middle-class life!
The only thing I'll grant you was that life for the lower classes was much worse then, since so much of their life was built on the backs of the working poor. But it's not like a normal, middle-class professional really needed to think about how the Royal Navy did their signalling.
I think there are a lot of differences in degree, if not kind. Were the goods available in a day really comparable to those in a modern grocery? On Amazon, which offers same-day delivery even in my suburb?
The city was electrified, but that mostly meant lighting. Washing machines were just starting to take off, as were electric stoves. Electric dishwashers didn’t become popular until the 50s. Microwaves possibly later than that. With the exception* of the electric stove, electric appliances are a QoL improvement that was barely available in the first decade of the 1900s.
It’s unlikely that their entertainment was better. Not just for the meme reasons, either, but because we kept almost all the good stuff. You could spend your life reading only early 20th century literature. Hell, you probably could have done that in the 80s, but it got a lot easier after the Internet. I mean, I also disagree that modern options are generally worse, but you do you.
I have to imagine similar situations for most avenues of life. At the dawn of fingerprinting technology, how many of those murder investigations bore fruit? How many house calls were pointless without access to antibiotics? How many would have been prevented with vaccines? It’s easy to say that all the pieces were present for a near-modern experience. But the devil is in the details, and I wouldn’t pick London over my present time and place.
I mean, I don't really know what it was like to live back then. but there were some interesting advantages. eg:
They had a million varieties of cheese and baked goods that have been lost to time since the people making them died in WW1. And old-growth french wines that are now changed, for similar reasons. A wide variety of things that would now be considered "artisinal" compared to the highly processed fructose and tasteless GMO vegetables available at a standard american big-box grocery store.
Or, in poem form:
So they definitely weren't lacking for fun shopping options.
The appliances, sure, I'll grant you that one. Though I'll point out that since we're just talking about the upper-middle class here, they would have all had a servant or housewife to take care of that stuff for you. Watson wasn't washing his own laundry or cooking his own food, he had "help" for that.
Well, not exactly. So much of their entertainment back then was live. Live theater (shakespeare!), live opera, live musicals, live discussion in the social clubs. We have to pay out the nose for a trip to Broadway to get that kind of experience. I'll grant you that their movies haven't exactly aged well, but they were thrilling for the people of their time.
Medicine... well yeah, it's certainly improved. But from everything I've read, it hasn't actually improved that much for most people. It's mostly been the decrease in child mortality that really moved the needle. People still lived well into old age, just like they do now. And being able to quickly and affordably get a housecall from a doctor means you can treat simple stuff fast, and avoid getting infected from someone else at the hospital, which really does make a difference.
If we are comparing the life of an upper class Londoner with servants on the eve of WW1 to the life of a middle class Londoner shortly before the Internet, we are of course ignoring the biggest improvement of the 2nd half of the twentieth century (labour saving home appliances). But I think @BahRamYou is right that if money was no object you could enjoy a pretty modern lifestyle in Edwardian London. (And that Edwardian London is close to the first time and place that you could do so). The big things that you absolutely couldn't do (apart from electronic media) were fast travel (no aeroplanes, trains and cars ran at about half the speed they do now), certain types of fresh food (downstream of fast travel), and antibiotics. The doctor who did house calls was arguably more likely to kill you than save you in 1910.
Also there was no way of avoiding the air pollution if you regularly had to be in central London for business.
West End shows are a lot cheaper. Nosebleed seats start at £25 and top price tickets are generally around £100.
To be clear, I wasn't talking about someone where "money was no object." I was trying to focus specifically on the upper middle class. My understanding is that, at that time, it was pretty normal for anyone in the middle class to have a servant, or at least a part-time housekeeper. It wasn't really an upper-class thing, it was just a not-being-poor thing.
And yeah, no super fast travel, but the travel they did have was more comfortable than today. I don't think doctors in 1910 were all that bad, they did at least know about washing their hands and keeping things clean.
Ah really? That's awesome. But I was thinking of me, as a regular American, where I would first have to book a flight to New York to see a show. Or wait several years for the off-broadway production to come around, and I get one chance to see it or miss it forever. There's just not a lot of live theater here in most places.
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