Eclipse of 'Elegant Economy'

Elizabeth Gaskell might have been amused to learn that the Victorian ''elegant economy'' she mocked so poignantly in Cranford reached a new apogee in the mid-twentieth century and endured the invasion of its precise antithesis, ''conspicuous consumption''. For Britons of all classes the years of austerity during and after the Second World War were years of disorientation and fears of resurgence of...