ABSTRACT
Age of demand, economy of abundance, democratization of luxury, retail revolution, consumer capitalism: such are the terms in which the period between the 1870s and the 1920s has been described by economic and social historians. Lawrence Birken points out that the sciences of human enjoyment both stressed scarcity and idiosyncratic consumption. David Ricardo noted the existence of certain commodities (diamonds, for example) whose value is determined by their scarcity, not by the labour required to produce them. In 1897 Henry James published a perceptive essay about Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, in which he pointed out that the main purpose of the event was to reinforce the nation’s ‘passionate feeling for trade’ by defacing London with advertisements; the Queen herself was both a victim of and party to this tawdry exhibition.
