Sunshinetrooper87 t1_it9r6i2 wrote on October 21, 2022 at 11:48 PM

Reply to comment by pkgary in [OC] Most of the items pawned in a poor district in 1836 Glasgow were CLOTHES, especially WOMEN's clothes by Equal-Crew-3367

Culturally you wore your Sunday best, you kept up with the Joneses.

Quote from Pratchett is useful here:

"He could here his granny speaking. ‘No one’s too poor to buy soap.’ Of course, many people were. But in Cockbill Street they bought soap just the same. The table might not have any food on it but by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill Street, where what you mainly ate was your pride."

blindeey t1_itait2w wrote on October 22, 2022 at 3:39 AM

I would've said the Boots quote. Which I haven't really read Pratchett but seen it floating around:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two
and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could
afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”