The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain: 1880-1980.

The relatively recent upsurge in the interest in consumption has produced a number of works which regard consumerism as the dominant term to be used in describing modern British society. John Benson has provided a healthy contribution to this debate by placing consumerism alongside other trends and concepts that social historians regularly employ. He has also reminded us that the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were important periods in the development of 'consumer society' (the fragmented nature of the discipline has meant this phrase has been applied to a variety of times and places and has consequently lost much of its meaning). Benson claims that in his period the many empirical gaps which still remain have been filled somewhat imaginatively and/or ideologically. He seeks to resolve the problem by bringing together a wide range of sources to demonstrate the various changes and developments over time which, he hopes, will help improve our understanding of consumption. He concludes by arguing for scholars to be wary of applying the term 'consumer society' to Britain because it hides the many other identities (in particular, age, class, gender and region) which have been significant throughout the twentieth century.

The book is split into three parts; context, changes and consequences. The first section outlines the developments in supply and demand and serves as a useful empirical introduction for students of consumerism, but those more familiar with the topic are told little that is new. The second section is again based on secondary sources, but the strength here lies in the way in which the author has brought together the many divergent studies on shopping, tourism and sport and placed them under the coherent umbrella of consumption. The three case studies act as useful ways in which to explore consumerism as experienced by the young, the elderly, the genders, the social classes and the regions.

In the final section Benson embarks on the potentially rewarding enterprise of examining consumerism in relation to other historical developments. Consumption is first held to have strengthened local and national identities by the use of regional and imperial images in retailing, the increased awareness of one's background through the experience of tourism, and, most importantly, the attachment of sports fanatics to town and county organizations. However, Benson regards both sports participation and spectatorship as consumerism and his failure to distinguish between the two has led to an overemphasis on sport in creating national, regional and local identities. An examination of other aspects of consumerism would have prevented Benson from leaving the general impression that as Britain became more of a consumer society, so it followed that these identities were strengthened. For instance, the range of marketing images employed in recent decades would seem to cut across such national and regional boundaries, creating new concepts to which consumers attach themselves. In examining youth culture, Benson moves away from the much studied post-war sub-cultures and embarks on the far more promising subject of mainstream adolescence. He admits that his case studies are limited in examining the many aspects of youth culture, but he thinks he has enough evidence to conclude that although consumption and youth became increasingly intertwined, the former was not strong enough to overcome the class, regional and gender divisions in creating a distinctive culture for the latter. A study of commodities and services particularly associated with youth may well have gone some way in qualifying this conclusion.

In looking at women's emancipation through shopping, sport and tourism, Benson's analysis becomes more problematic. Firstly, it is peculiar as to why he chose to use the term emancipation at all. By showing that women were able to shop as a leisure activity thanks to greater household purchasing power, he is using a limited definition of what constituted emancipation. It would have been far better to have restricted his attention to the less ambitious project of measuring the changing experiences women had as consumers. This, he does, and one useful study in this chapter is the way women were important in maintaining family status through consumption. It might also have proved useful to turn the analysis on its head by examining how women's greater freedom, both real and desired, informed consumer decisions. By approaching consumption changes first and then seeing how this had an influence on emancipation, he misses much of the negotiative element that consumerism can play with other ideological movements. Another criticism is his concentration on married women. An examination of single working women would have shown how their desire for greater independence could inform and alter consumer decisions, some of which would continue into married life. Finally, and this also applies to the other chapters, it has to be asked whether shopping, tourism and sport are representative of all the elements of consumerism. Admittedly, size restrictions will hinder any topic as broad as this, but one cannot help feeling that perhaps the study of one particular consumer good would have improved his analytical framework. This would have enabled other questions to be asked about consumer society, such as the relationship between advertising and desires, how the meanings of goods are changed over time and by whom, and the different relationships commodities hold to the various classes, regions, ages and genders.

The final chapter, 'The defusion of class tension?,' shows the potential benefits which can be obtained by Benson's approach. He is dissatisfied with the way in which it is all too readily accepted that consumption reduces class tension, and therefore seeks to stress how feelings of class identity, and even class opposition, were often heightened through shopping, tourism and sport. However, he remains convinced that consumption "encouraged a culture of consolation, not revolution" (p. 226), and this is argued persuasively. The benefits of Benson's background as a social historian are apparent in this chapter. His awareness of other developments in society prevents him approaching the history of consumption in a blinkered manner which assumes we live in a late capitalist, post-modern, consumer society, and then works backwards explaining only this phenomenon. Even if one does not agree with the other labels he applies to British society over this hundred year period, he has to be praised for at least regarding class, region, gender and age as identities potentially separate from consumerism.

Whilst congratulating Benson for helping to establish consumption as a central theme in British social history, it has to be accepted that the book is something of a missed opportunity in that it fails to address questions being asked both by other historians and by academics in other disciplines. One would have liked to have seen a historical perspective placed upon topics such as the role of advertising, the meaning of goods before and after purchase, where these meanings came from and how they were altered, and the relationship between producer and consumer in the development of new products. Benson's reliance upon a theory of demand that assumes the "only thing that prevents consumers from increasing their consumption is their inability to do so" (p. 29) explains why he has not considered other approaches, but a more constructive engagement with them would have added to the empirical emphasis of his work and pointed more clearly to those areas of consumerism which require further research.

Matthew Hilton Lancaster University