Comfort, the Acceptable Face of Luxury: An Eighteenth-Century Cultural Etymology

The use of the term comfort to refer to material well-being developed in the eighteenth century from the expressions creature comforts and comforts of life. It provided an alternative term to luxury in eighteenth-century economic theory. Comfort always retained its traditional meaning of assistance, support and solace, enabling middle-class writers and novelists to present it as necessary to a perfect lifestyle. A comfortable lifestyle was also considered as characteristic of the English constitution and so evidence of Englishness itself. As a study of the introduction of the term confort into France indicates, there seems to have been, in Britain, a consensual view that happiness, both mental and physical, was guaranteed by the right to accumulate material possessions, which in turn was supposed to be evidence of the superiority of European civilization, a sign of its progressive nature, and a justification for the dissemination of its values.