High Life Below Stairs, by John Collet, London, England, 1763. From the collections of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

CONTENTS

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Buying Respectability
December 14, 2006

The differences between the ways people lived during the Middle Ages and those in the period just before the American Revolution are almost unimaginable to modern, comfort-loving Americans. What caused this dramatic change in lifestyles and standards of living? Many factors combined to make new consumer goods available to nearly everyone in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Incomes were rising, so more people had more money left over after they acquired the bare necessities.

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John Collet’s High Life Below Stairs satirizes the behavior of servants in their own quarters (below stairs) imitating the fashionable attire and behavior of their masters. Even though the primary purpose of the painting is to mock those who aspire to genteel behavior and appearances, the print provides visual documentation of the ways the eighteenth-century consumer revolution made material goods available to people lower on the social and economic scale.

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Colonial Williamsburg offers a variety of quality instructional materials dealing with 18th-century life, including:

• Buying Respectability: The Consumer Revolution in 18th-Century Virginia (lesson unit)
• Eighteenth-Century Clothing at Williamsburg (book)
• A Williamsburg Household (book)
• Virginians at Home (book)

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—Charles Dickens, British novelist
Sketches by Boz, 1836