20s v 20s

[fange]

I'm for the 1820s, me. Drinking arsenic tea with Boney, founding the Mormon church with Smithy, letting Burt get all the credit for my Typowriter - heady days.

[tory]

Nov 30, 2020 10:20:28 GMT @madcyril1 said:

Well let's introduce two caveats to my proposition.
1. You would have no memory of the future you'd come from so you'd be experiencing everything for the first time.
2. You would be in a solidly middle class job. Not fabulously wealthy, but one that afforded you a reasonably comfortable existence. Working for a newspaper or in an architect's office say.

We would be a very small minority of the population. In 1945 80% was solidly working class.

[DarknessFish]

Nov 30, 2020 10:20:28 GMT @madcyril1 said:

2. You would be in a solidly middle class job. Not fabulously wealthy, but one that afforded you a reasonably comfortable existence. Working for a newspaper or in an architect's office say.

I'd be too full of self-loathing to appreciate the times.

[Deleted]

Nov 30, 2020 11:25:49 GMT fange said:

I'm for the 1820s, me. Drinking arsenic tea with Boney, founding the Mormon church with Smithy, letting Burt get all the credit for my Typowriter - heady days.

Or in a 1720s gin house, reading Defoe and Swift, whilst Bach was writing his cantatas and Newton was redefining the laws of the universe.

[tory]

A lot of things that we might find shocking would have been prevalent in everyday discourse.

Anti-Semitism was rampant - not perhaps in Germany's levels, but certainly views such as "The Rothschilds control everything" would have been common amongst the middle-class. The idea that they were a distinct, separate group that were "shady" was very common 100 years ago, particularly as immigration into London's poorer parts had only happened 30 years previously. Reference to people of African or Caribbean heritage in terms we might find shocking was common parlance.

Accents, with specific reference to more "west country" and rural places would have been far more distinct. Places like Sussex, which is not so far from London, for example, would have had a huge dialect that has now all but disappeared. The same would have been for places like Essex, Kent, Hampshire - all these places have seen dialects pretty much decline.

Horses would have been much more apparent - and all the trades, such as tinkers, rag and bone men etc, that were associated with them would have been more visible. Door to Door sales would have been very common and accepted. Many people would have had their front doors open all day and shopped every day to the high street grocer, butchers etc. I suspect that High Streets themselves were bustling in an everyday sense in a way that our consumer driven high streets are not - in that people had to buy necessities like food, haberdashers - there certainly wouldn't have been a sense of luxury that you get today (people more likely to be buying clothes, technology etc).