As December approaches, and with it the barrage of TV adverts dripping in fairy lights and shop displays designed to empty the wallet, one's thoughts ought perhaps to turn not to A Christmas Carol, but to Dickens's more complicated and disturbing novel, Great Expectations.

I say this not to disparage the season of comfort and joy, but to reflect the fact that for most of us, we have never had it so good. For every hard-up Tiny Tim or Bob Cratchit we know as many Miss Havishams, living in luxury, who cannot see how fortunate they are and manage to remain miserable.

Yet, thanks to years of recession and pay freezes, of cutting back on holidays and nights out, or darning jumpers rather than buy a new one, much of the country is feeling hard done-by, and not a little sorry for itself. Austerity is stalking the land, if only, it would seem, in our imaginations.

According to a leading economist, Sir Andrew Dilnot, whose series A History of Britain in Numbers begins on Radio 4 next week, standards of living in the UK have rarely been higher. We are twice as affluent as we were 30 years ago, and five times more so than at the start of the 20th century. And, despite the gloomy predictions of certain politicians who clearly share the same thistly field as Eeyore, our children and grandchildren will very likely be better off still than we are.

A common sight in the 1930s for my mother was a child going to school barefoot. Thankfully in these isles that degree of deprivation is now history. And yet despite the welfare state there is no question that some today are living in desperate want - cold, hungry, and ill. The rise of food banks, and the number of unemployed or underemployed requiring their help to get them through the month is both alarming and distressing. I also suspect there is even more of a stigma to poverty these days, since it is so much less common than before.

Communities and families being far less tightly knit, there's not nearly as much informal support for those in need, whose humiliation is thus more public and painful.

What Dilnot's history will doubtless show, however, is how our concept of serious hardship has changed. Once it was defined by hot meals each day, by standards of sanitation, or the number of people living in one room. Now, basic necessities include televisions, mobile phones, microwaves and washing machines.

One wouldn't want it any other way; the dire poverty of the past is almost inconceivable, so primitive it casts a stain on our past. Those mean-spirited souls who point at satellite dishes on the walls of today's unemployed as if they have committed a crime in having a Sky subscription are as lacking in charity as others are in need of it.

In The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark describes London in 1945, a time when "all the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit." In that era, and long after, almost everyone had to be careful. Today, only those of vintage years can recall how little money there once was for extras, which was the case in households with a decent income as well as those without. Yet even I can remember when chocolate biscuits were kept for Sundays; in some houses they were cut in half, to make them go further.

Such scrimping belongs to a different world, but the wealth we enjoy today goes far beyond our incomes. Apparently the average life expectancy after retirement in 1900 was one year; today it is between 15 and 20. We work far fewer hours, and have much longer holidays. Owning property is regarded as a right, not a pipe-dream, as is having as many children as we want.

Thus, in the space of 50 years, Britain has changed beyond recognition.

As December 25 looms, and some of us head to Florida to escape the fuss, or spend a fortune to make sure everyone around the Christmas tree is smiling, it's worth asking why it takes a hefty price tag to make us think we're happy.

Why do we always feel the need for more when, unlike poor Oliver Twist, we actually have everything anyone could wish for?