on, I quoted the moment when Robinson addresses the reader—‘this will testify for me that I was not idle’—in the tone of one who is justifying himself in front of a judge. But then, the sentence veers in an unexpected direction: . . . that I was not idle, and that I spared no pains to bring to pass whatever appeared necessary for my comfortable support’.59 Comfortable: this is the key. If the ‘useful’ had transformed the island into a workshop, ‘comfort’ restores an element of pleasure to Robinson’s existence; under its sign, even The Protestant Ethic finds a lighter moment:
Worldly Protestant asceticism acted powerfully against the spontaneous enjoyment of possessions; it restricted consumption, especially of luxuries . . . On the other hand . . . it did not wish to impose mortification on the man of wealth, but the use of his means for necessary and practical things. The idea of comfort [in English in the original] characteristically limits the extent of ethically permissible expenditures. It is naturally no accident that the development of a manner of living consistent with that idea may be observed earliest and most clearly among the most consistent representatives of this whole attitude towards life. Over against the glitter and ostentation of feudal magnificence which, resting on an unsound economic basis, prefers a sordid elegance to a sober simplicity, they set the clean and solid comfort [Bequemlichkeit] of the middle-class home [bürgerlichen ‘home’] as an ideal.60
The bourgeois home—the English bourgeois home—as the embodiment of comfort. In the course of the eighteenth century, writes Charles Morazé in Les bourgeois conquerants, ‘England made fashionable a new type of happiness—that of being at home: the English call it “comfort”, and so will the rest of the world.’61 Needless to say, there is no ‘middle-class home’ on Robinson’s island; but when he resolves to make ‘such necessary things as I found I most wanted, particularly a chair and a table; for without these I was not able to enjoy the few comforts I had in the world’,62 or when he later declares that ‘my habitation grew comfortable to me beyond measure’,63 he, too, is clearly identifying comfort with the domestic horizon: a chair, a table, a pipe, a notebook . . . an umbrella!64
Comfort. The origin of the word is in a late Latin compound—cum + forte—that first appears in English in the thirteenth century, to indicate ‘strengthening; encouragement . . . aid, succour’ (OED), and whose semantic sphere remains more or less the same for another four centuries: ‘physical refreshment or sustenance’, ‘relief’, ‘aid in want, pain, sickness . . . mental distress or affliction’. Then, in the late seventeenth century, the sea-change: comfort is no longer what returns us to a ‘normal’ state from adverse circumstances, but what takes normality as its starting point and pursues well-being as an end in itself, independently of any mishap: ‘a thing that produces or ministers to enjoyment and content (usually, plural, distinguished from necessaries on the one hand, and from luxuries on the other)’.65
Necessaries on one side, and luxuries on the other. Caught between such powerful concepts, the idea was bound to become a battlefield. ‘The Comforts of Life are so various and extensive’, states the wonderful ‘Remark (L.)’ of The Fable of the Bees, ‘that no body can tell what People mean by them, except he knows what sort of Life they lead . . . I am apt to believe that when they pray for their daily Bread, the Bishop includes several things in that Petition which the Sexton does not think on’.66 In the mouth of a bishop, ‘comforts’ are likely to be luxuries in disguise; this is certainly how the nameless hero of the opening pages of Pilgrim’s Progress—who receives the name of ‘Christian’ in the act of forsaking them—understands the term.67 But grim Benjamin Franklin, for his part, hesitates: ‘ Friends and Countrymen’, proclaims the Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1756, ‘you spend yearly at least Two Hundred Thousand Pounds, ’tis said, in European, East-Indian and West-Indian Commodities: supposing one Half of this Expence to be in Things absolutely necessary, the other Half may be call’d Superfluities, or at best, Conveniences, which however you might live without for one little Year.’68 One little year is the period one can reasonably be asked to abstain from conveniences. Conveniences? ‘The words Decency and Conveniency’ are so full of ‘obscurity’, notes Mandeville, implacable, that they are completely useless. And the OED proves him right: ‘Convenience: The quality of being . . . suitable or well-adapted to the performance of some action’; ‘material arrangements or appliances conducive to personal comfort, ease of action’. If comfort was elusive, this one is worse.69
Wars of words are always confusing. So, let’s re-read that passage from Robinson Crusoe: ‘I began to apply myself to make such necessary things as I found I most wanted, particularly a chair and a table; for without these I was not able to enjoy the few comforts I had in the world; I could not write or eat, or do several things, with so much pleasure without a table.’70 From ‘necessary’ to ‘comforts’ and ‘pleasure’, from ‘wanted’ to ‘enjoy’ in fifty-six words: a modulation so rapid that it seems to confirm Mandeville’s sarcasm, or the OED’s non-committal definition of ‘necessaries on the one hand, and luxuries on the other’. But if we look at Robinson’s actual comforts, the notion loses its supposed equidistance: writing, eating, and ‘doing several things’ with a table are all things clearly inclining towards necessity—and with absolutely no relationship to luxury. Luxury is always somewhat out of the ordinary; comfort, never; whence the profound common sense of its pleasures, so different from luxury’s perverse delight in being ‘ornate, grotesque, inconvenient . . . to the point of distress’, as Veblen ferociously put it in Theory of the Leisure Class;71 less caustic, but just as trenchant, Braudel dismissed ancien régime luxury as ‘all the more false’, because ‘it was not always accompanied by what we would call comfort. Heating was still poor, ventilation derisory.’72
Comfort, as everyday necessities made pleasant.Within this new horizon, an aspect of the original meaning of the term returns to the surface. ‘Relief’, ‘aid’, ‘sustenance’ from ‘want, pain, sickness’, the word used to mean. Centuries later, the need for relief has returned: this time though, not relief from sickness but from—work. It’s striking how many of the modern comforts address the need that from work most directly arises: rest. (The first comfort that Robinson wishes for—poor man—is a chair.)73 It is this proximity to work that makes comfort ‘permissible’ for the Protestant ethic; well-being, yes; but one that doesn’t seduce you away from your calling, because it remains too sober and modest to do so. Much too modest, retort some recent historians of capitalism; much too sober to play a significant role in the precipitous changes of modern history. Comfort indicates those desires ‘that could be satiated’, writes Jan de Vries, and that therefore have in-built limitations; to explain the open-endedness of the ‘consumer revolution’, and of the later economic take-off, we must turn instead to the ‘volatile “daydreams of desire”’,74 or the ‘maverick spirit of fashion’75 first noticed by the economists of Defoe’s generation. The eighteenth century, concludes Neil McKendrick, with a formulation that leaves no conceptual room for comfort, is the age when ‘the dictate of need’ was superseded once and for all by ‘the dictate of fashion’.76
Fashion instead of comfort, then? In one respect, the alternative is clearly groundless, as both have contributed to shape modern consumer culture. What is true, however, is that they have done so in different ways, and with opposite class connotations. Already active within court society, and preserving to this day a halo of hauteur, and indeed of luxury, fashion appeals to the bourgeoisie that wants to go beyond itself, and resemble the old ruling class; comfort remains down to earth, prosaic; its aesthetics, if there is such a thing, is understated, functional, adapted to the everyday, and even to work.77 This makes comfort less visible than fashion, but infinitely more capable of permeating the interstices of existence; a knack for dissemination that it shares with those other typical eighteenth-century commodities—they, too, somewhere in between necessaries and
