The rise of the bourgeois

I've been reading a good bit of classic literature through the pandemic. Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Marx, Henry James, Austen, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Thoreau, Emerson. It makes me realize how many good books were left out in my high school, undergrad, and grad education. The other realization is that these books (across nationalities) really hold up a mirror to the experience of the newly produced bourgeois class at the time. Never in the 1700s or before were there as many wealthy and literate people as in the 1800s, and as leisure, quality of life, and more widespread access to education increased, we find this explosion of writers chronicling the experience for us. Affairs have existed in literature since the writing of the Bible, but never the bourgeois affair as so majestically and satirically portrayed in Bovary. The bourgeois affair is a product of its time, and likewise each of these writers comment in their own way on the rapidly shifting economic landscape brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Politics, economics, sociology, and literature all see an explosion in the 1800s that lays the groundwork for the modernism of the early 1900s. Now we are in a fully postmodern age, where bourgeois pleasures (so many couches, so many TVs!) are taken for granted, and everything is worthy of snark and bite, but to see the lineage through to the 1800s is instructive. Our broad-based, high quality of life is only ~200 years old. Our highly technologized lives are only ~30 years old. We act as if we've had iPhones since forever. The global and historical awareness of the human remains still so narrow. No wonder older cultures had highly ritualized ceremonies commemorating life, death, war, and even the weather and the seasons. There was no other means of recording but of the ritual. Thank goodness we have these books to remind us who we were, and where we came from.