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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I mean, I don't really know what it was like to live back then. but there were some interesting advantages. eg:

Were the goods available in a day really comparable to those in a modern grocery

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:

"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by a mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any color I please, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknel, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons."

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.

It’s unlikely that their entertainment was better. Not just for the meme reasons, either, but because we kept almost all the good stuff.

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.

We have to pay out the nose for a trip to Broadway to get that kind of experience.

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.

West End shows are a lot cheaper. Nosebleed seats start at £25 and top price tickets are generally around £100.

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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