Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

The vast stream of cheap mass circulation print that flowed through nineteenth-century Britain – penny issue fiction, religious tracts, magazines, sheet music, and almanacs and the like – is frequently summarised under the term ‘popular literature’. Cheapness and a wide distribution network were centrally important in the development of a broadly based if disparate reading public that consumed print of all kinds. The availability of printed material was hugely increased by advances in printing technology and the increasing use of inexpensive reprographic processes such as wood engraving. Publications of this kind suggest a widespread socio-political tension between entertaining and informing, between the diversionary and the educative, and between dissenting opinions and the morally purposive. This essay briefly considers some of the complexities concealed in the various uses of the term ‘popular’ to describe nineteenth-century mass circulation literature, especially the extent to which popular culture was purposefully aimed at, rather than produced by, ‘the people’.

The idea of the ‘popular’

The idea of the ‘popular’ takes on new meanings in the nineteenth century. The economic and cultural needs of an emergent industrial society required a massive expansion in the readership for mass circulation print. By the 1840s a wide and rapidly growing range of cultural productivity, powered by new printing and reprographic technologies, and manifested in texts, performances, material culture (‘things’), and graphic images, was becoming available in cheap and easily accessible forms. The emergence of a mass circulation popular culture is widely evidenced by both written and visual contemporary sources, largely as an outcome of the politically and socially contested nature of the printed word and image in nineteenth-century Britain. Such controversies were especially prominent in the politically volatile 1830s and 1840s but persisted throughout the century. The spread of literacy, the availability of news, and the secularisation and politicisation of print culture remained controversial issues throughout the Victorian period. Some popular literary forms, such as cheap part issue fiction and broadside ballads, were regarded by many cultural critics as potentially damaging to the social order, and sporadic attempts were made to regulate or restrict their production and distribution. ‘Popular’ in this context thus becomes a term caught between its two potentially contradictory meanings of ‘widely accessible and enjoyed’ and ‘belonging to the people.’

One possible definition of the ‘popular’ in nineteenth-century Britain equates popularity with cheapness – thus ‘popular print’ would mean that portion of print culture that lay within the financial reach of the mass of the population. Yet ‘cheap’ is a complex word in this context, not just because of its pejorative, indeed snobbish, meaning of ‘trashy’ or ‘of doubtful moral status’. In these senses the cheap is associated with the ‘low’. But cheapness in the nineteenth century was frequently the product of entrepreneurial success, the outcome of a brilliant application of the benefits of mass production, or the result of effective distribution methods and aggressive marketing. The exploitation of serialised modes of publication, which emerged in the 1820s and were refined by the widespread issuing of fiction in modestly priced weekly or monthly parts, was commonplace. Magazines, a crucial element in the expansion of print, were serial publications, and facilitated patterns of consumption which employed the benefits of expectation and familiarity to good effect. The widespread adoption of wood engraving and, to a lesser extent, lithography as reprographic media hugely reduced the production costs of illustrated texts and brought a new vivacity to the print market.

On some occasions, however, cheapness was the result of subsidy, itself the outcome of a social purposiveness backed up with the cash, the organisational expertise, and the benefits of well- connected institutions that could draw on their members’ social status. Much of this kind of printed material – religious tracts or temperance broadsides, for example – became not so much cheap as free to the end consumer, thus running the risk of being considered worthless by their recipients. The Penny Magazine (1832–1845), making use of the ‘penny’ in its title as an emblem of cheapness and good value, nonetheless represented the cultural values of the propagandising Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a group which defined useful knowledge primarily as information rather than any form of socio-political awareness. Cheapness, then, while a crucial element, cannot be simply used as the central defining characteristic of the ‘popular’. A low price was sometimes the manifestation of the cultural and social purposes of the literature producing and governing classes as much as a reflection of the tastes, buying habits, and interests of consumers.

Another reading of the term ‘popular’ might use quantity rather than cost as the crucial defining characteristic. In other words, popular print might be best understood as ‘mass circulation’ literature or graphic imagery. The focus would thus be concentrated on the development of the modes of the mass production and distribution of print, and on the nature of the ‘mass’ audience. Consequently, the notion that popular culture can easily be defined as a form of commodity culture is a tempting one. Commodity culture is a term that focuses primarily on economic structures at the expense of any analysis of content and form – one ‘product’ is much like another and aimed at fulfilling demand rather than cultural aspiration. Of course, much popular print is best understood as a commodity – the series numbers often to be found on single sheet broadside song texts, for example, suggest their status as relatively indistinguishable commodities. Nonetheless, while any account of popular culture in the nineteenth century must seek to describe the commodification of popular print, it should not lapse into the assumption that popular print culture can be adequately described through a crudely derived Marxist model of class politics. The notion of a range of unscrupulous entrepreneurs cynically doling out one product after another to fulfil the assumed (but deluded) tastes of a mass readership, a readership interesting only for its increasing capacity to pay falls short of describing the socio-economic forces involved. The more interesting issues are concerned with models of consent rather than models of exploitation – how was it that the tastes and interests of relatively low status consumers were understood, analysed, and (perhaps) exploited by the hegemonic impulses of the cultural entrepreneurs of Victorian Britain?

The ‘popular’ and the ‘people’

The approaches to the popular described so far fail to allow ‘the people’ much agency in creating ‘a literature of their own’, to paraphrase the title of Margaret Beetham’s (1996) pioneering study of Victorian women’s magazines. It is important to note that Beetham added a question mark to the title of her book, thus foregrounding complexities about the ownership of ‘the popular’. The back cover of her book also posed a pertinent question – were women’s magazines ‘a source of pleasure’ or ‘an instrument of control’? The same question needs to be asked more broadly about nineteenth-century popular culture. One recent book, Rachel Teukolsky’s (2020) Picture World, has focussed on everyday forms of cultural production such as crudely drawn wood engraved cartoons, illustrated bibles, cartes de visite featuring women, stereoscope images of landscapes, advertising by means of art posters, and the early cinema. Her central aim is to challenge Jonathan Crary’s (1999) arguments in Suspensions of Perception about the diversionary and enervating effects of mass culture, and to confront the wide range of critical responses which have centred on ‘aligning mass culture with a depletion of agency’. Teukolsky argues instead that ‘the very concept of ephemera, locating certain forms of culture at the margins, is incommensurate with its import in conjuring self and identity’. Her subsequent re-readings of widely used nineteenth-century quotidian print and other visual media seek to analyse ways in which we “are often purposeful in choosing our mass-produced worlds” (Teukolsky 2020, 16).

In deploying terms like ‘ephemeral’ and ‘marginality’ Teukolsky sees the category of ‘the popular’ as a historical construction which has allowed mass circulation print culture to be robbed of significant agency. It remains the case that very few mass circulation texts were produced by members of the labouring classes for consumption within their own social sphere. Notwithstanding, this fact should not deny some kinds of agency to lowly born and little educated readers, let alone culturally ambitious artisans. Many popular texts were performed as well as, or even rather than, read and were mediated into a mass audience through the sociability of everyday social intercourse. The sharing of newspapers, songs, hymns, play texts, poetry, and magazines formed an essential element in the social lives of the mass of the people. The considerable mass of regional and dialect writing also drew on and constructed local identities, many of them specific to labouring-class industrial experience. Louis James’ (1969) magnificent pioneering anthology of early Victorian popular culture, Print and the People 1819–1851, first published in 1967, vividly suggested the relationship between printed texts and the shared performative occasions on which they were used. It is the intermediality of Victorian mass circular and cheap print that makes it possible to claim that ‘popular’ literature was in at least some ways ‘of the people’.

Amid the many factors that were helping to develop the structures of mass circulation cheap print in nineteenth-century Britain – the propagandist ambitions of religious organisations, the development of primary education, the increased presence of Mechanics Institutes and other library resources, more leisure time available to working people, the opportunism and sensitivity to popular demand within the book trade among them – what print forms can most plausibly defined as ‘popular’? As already suggested, much of the material gathered by Louis James for Print and the People was intermedial – broadsheets that would be sung or recited in popular gatherings, texts derived from stage melodramas performed in local theatres, anti-establishment political commentaries spread through local dissenting networks, almanacs and other prognosticating literature that would be shared within communities, magazines made available to members in Mechanics Institutes or bought collaboratively by politically active groups. Such ‘low’ forms of printed matter not only mediated between the personal and the social, the collaborative and the individual, reading and performance, but also exploited the visual appeal of print through the widespread use of the graphic image as a central textual element. James’s earlier, equally pioneering book, Fiction for the Working Man (1963), had foregrounded a similar interdependence between the visual and the verbal in the mass circulation serialised cheap fiction, much of it concerned with criminal life, that became a staple element of labouring class reading in the early and mid-Victorian period. Victor Neuburg in his 1977 ‘history and guide’ to popular literature, like James, saw broadsides and serial fiction as the central defining genres, but broadened the term ‘popular’ to include the mass of literature produced for ‘the people’ by cultural entrepreneurs like John Cassell, Edward Lloyd, and the Chambers Brothers as well as by institutions like the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, whose Penny Magazine aimed to provide culturally ambitious artisans with what was frequently defined by contemporaries as ‘useful knowledge’.

Popular song on the streets and in the parlour

Such a dialogue between popular literature that was demonstrably ‘of the people’ and mass circulation print that was provided ‘for the people’ by commercial or socially active organisations is made manifest by the history of popular ballads and songs in the nineteenth century. In the late 1960s and 1970s, hugely influenced by the publication of A. L. Lloyd’s (1967) Folk Song in England, ballads and street literature were being increasingly collected and scrutinised as examples of popular creativity, existing primarily within oral transmission, but frequently intersecting with print culture in the form of broadsides, garlands (small collections of texts), and songsters. ‘Authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ were keys terms in such acts of recovery which formed part of the ‘history from below’ movement led by scholars such as Raphael Samuel and Roy Porter. The influential belief that traditional song, available both within the oral tradition and from printed collections, formed an alternative historical account of British history led to a remarkable growth of interest in popular print ranging from the Radio Ballads devised by Ewan McColl and the Singers’ Workshop to educational texts compiled by Roy Palmer and Jon Raven. Ballad literature was central to Martha Vicinus’s (1974) The Industrial Muse, a wide-ranging account of a vivid industrial literature largely derived from labouring class experience.

More recent scholarship, less obviously driven by an attempt to redraw social history as a class-based narrative, has been more cautious in its account of popular creativity, locating performance and occasion rather than print as crucial elements. Oscar Cox Jensen (2021, 106), in his excellent recent study of ballad singers, suggests that street music was instrumental in ‘relocating authorised opinion from the informed classically educated to the affective, musicalized, idiomatic singer’, a process he defines as ‘inherently subversive’. Steve Roud, in his substantial Folk Song in England, sees the distinction between origin and use as a central one, arguing, like Jensen, that commercially produced song can be transformed by ‘the folk’ into something beyond a passively consumed commodity. His account of the ‘song cultures of ordinary people’…. ‘addresses the fundamental question of the role that printed materials played in what had previously been thought of as a purely “oral” tradition’ (Roud 2017, 429). Roud’s book connects the folk tradition in the nineteenth to both performance locales – he has a chapter called ‘Penny Gaffs, Music Halls and Parlours’ – and to the ‘natural habitats’ of folk song, which include the streets, the armed services, the church and chapel, and the workplace. Roud clearly suggests that the ownership of popular culture is not entirely, or even primarily, dependent on its origins however commercial and entrepreneurial those origins might have been.

Despite continuing attempts to limit or eradicate the potentially subversive presence of street singers and ballad sellers throughout the nineteenth century, access to popular song through an oral tradition remained in place throughout the Victorian period. But the shared inheritance of traditional song was increasingly incorporated into a variety of print locales that assimilated old and familiar lyrics into a broader repertoire, largely derived from new and fashionable sources. The new-found prominence of song lyrics as a mass circulation commodity in the early and mid-Victorian period suggests some of the ways in which ‘the popular’ engages with, and derives from, significant socio-cultural shifts and the force of the marketplace. The massive production of cheap song books in the 1830s and 1840s depended on publishers and editors gathering elements taken from street balladry, the theatre, literary lyrics, songs from the heterosocial gatherings of relatively well-off Londoners, and the common stock of memorised words and tunes. Piracy was rife with harassed editors willingly drawing on rival publications for the content of their publications. Song books of this kind were largely presented as collections of lyrics without musical notation, although appropriate tune titles were frequently given. Many song books sought to present themselves as resources that supplied singers of all kinds with an easily accessible repertoire for their performances. Others, less focussed on the possibility of their contents being performed, included the names of authors and performers associated with songs thus giving them the status of literary texts. Some publications gave reviews of concert rooms and free-and-easies where the songs had been performed, thus offering readers a virtual visit to a possibly disreputable concert room without ever leaving their respectable fireside. By the 1840s a few song books even gave the name of publishers who could provide, at some cost, sheet music versions of individual songs, suggesting that at least some readers might have enough cultural sophistication to perform songs with musical accompaniment. In all these ways song books assimilated a widely available shared cultural inheritance into a commercial product that nonetheless allowed consumers to repossess songs into their daily lives at little cost.

As well as suggesting the ways in which an oral tradition was to some extent maintained and even strengthened by print culture, the song books published in the years between 1820 and 1840 clearly suggest how early nineteenth-century popular culture was transformed by changes in the production, marketing, and reach of printed products. Three key developments underpinned the rising popularity of songbooks: the realisation that seriality was a major new way of publishing popular culture; the development of wood engraving as a cheap graphic medium; and the explosion of cheap print related to the development of public entertainment in London and the larger provincial centres. Seriality, frequently expressed in weekly or monthly formats that incorporated illustration into a carefully and distinctively branded format, used the immediate cheapness of a single issue as a means of inveigling a purchaser into a longer-term commitment as a continuing customer or even subscriber. Comic wood engravings, small in scale and cheap to produce, gave a visual appeal to gatherings of song texts. Many extremely accomplished comic draughtsmen, including Robert Seymour and George and Robert Cruikshank, contributed illustrations to song books, and the three-volume Universal Songster (1825–1828), with drawings from both the Cruikshank brothers, represented a moment of important transition at which a broad gathering of song texts drawn from every cultural level were embodied in a format aimed at the libraries and parlours of quite wealthy consumers. Here the popular and vernacular were reaching new respectability. The growth of London concert rooms, free-and-easies, and supper clubs where songs were performed brought both amateur and, increasingly, professional or semi-professional singers into public attention. Song books provided both a resource to be drawn on by singers in pursuit of a repertoire and, through editorial commentary, a memorandum of memorable public performances. Such performances might be re-enacted within sociable gatherings or even the family circle or, more passively, within a reader’s imagination.

If early Victorian song books suggest the ways in which popular lyrics, broadside ballads, and recently written commercial songs found their way into mass circulation print, by the 1840s the print culture around song had begun to split performance away from potentially disreputable public spaces and locate it firmly within the family home. Lloyd’s Songbook, an extended seven-volume anthology published between 1846 and 1849, represents this moment of shift when the performance of popular songs begins to be ascribed to the drawing room rather than the supper room or tavern. First published in a monthly eight-page format with specially commissioned wood engraved illustrations, the entire work was republished in volume format, each costing between 6d. (six pence) and a shilling, a very low price considering each volume contained over 400 songs as well as extensive illustration. A renowned and expert entrepreneur of mass circulation publishing, especially popular fiction, Lloyd was instrumental in constructing a publishing formula that made popular song a mass circulation commodity. Rather than associating the chosen texts with performances, Lloyd’s Songbooks frequently gave the names of sheet music publishers where versions of songs arranged for piano and voice could be purchased. Most telling of all is the self-reflecting commentary provided by an ‘Address’ to the first volume of the series. The ‘expense of such a publication must be very great,’ notes the ‘Address’, so that ‘the only thing that could render it a profitable speculation must be an exceedingly large demand’. The print culture of later Victorian song enacts the kind of commercial interactions suggested here by Lloyd. Songs for the parlour were, for example, produced as supplements to periodicals like The Illustrated London News, with music annotated for the piano and often accompanied by large and ambitious wood engraved illustration. Even though small cheap songsters, frequently drawing on local or dialect material, persisted, sheet music became increasingly popular. The performing of songs became increasingly associated with middle class cultural values, although towards the end of the century music hall stars and their work were celebrated by sheet music versions of their songs. Sheet music of this kind depended on spectacular visual content as well as the celebrity of the singer for its appeal, frequently using chromolithography.

The understanding and study of nineteenth-century song thus suggests how broadly the term ‘popular’ might be applied to forms of cultural production. Traditional song purists continue to limit the term ‘popular’ to texts that, even if they are to be found in printed forms, can be shown to predate print and survive from an oral culture that belonged to ‘the people’. At the other extreme, musicologists and print historians use ‘popular’ to denote songs drawn from many sources spread across a range of cultural levels. ‘Popularity’ in this case, derives from the knowledge that such songs were widely purchased, consumed, and performed within the public performance spaces and drawing rooms of Victorian society. The newfound prominence of song lyrics as a mass circulation commodity in the early and mid-Victorian period suggests some of the ways in which ‘the popular’ engages with, and derives from, significant socio-cultural shifts changes and the force of the marketplace.

The range of nineteenth-century popular culture

Using the broadest possible definition of popular print – cheap, widely accessible printed material produced for and distributed among the mass of population – what kinds of popular literature and visual imagery were most prevalent in nineteenth-century society? To answer such a question, it might be useful to distinguish between diversionary, pleasurable, and entertaining literature aimed at offering leisure time amusement to a mass readership and literature that, while it might incidentally offer pleasure, fundamentally derived from a wish to influence, educate, or improve the reader. Yet in practice this distinction is frequently misleading.

Popular literature aimed at fulfilling the newly acquired leisure time of the labouring classes and requiring relatively low levels of literacy to be enjoyed was widely dependent on magazines. A significant line of ‘artizan’ magazines aimed at improving the cultural and social awareness of the literate and relatively well-off labouring and trading classes persisted throughout the century, but less culturally ambitious cheap magazines centred on serialised neo-gothic and melodramatic fiction became increasingly popular. Even magazines aimed at artizans and working people that were driven by a social agenda included fiction and other forms of short narratives alongside more exhortatory elements. The British Workman (1855–1921), for example, used short fiction and biographical narratives as well as large scale and aesthetically ambitious wood engravings to convey its temperance message to respectable artizans for a miserly 1d. an issue. The yearly parts even offered spectacular coloured lithographs on their covers. The large multi-columned pages that formed the magazine were well designed making it a pleasure to read. In this case, the full resources of the popular press were brought to bear on the propagandist social mission of the magazine’s editor and proprietors. The magazine was bought by charitable people in bulk for door-to-door distribution, thus being free to end users. The print run of the magazine was substantial – over 250,000 copies by 1862. Yet, given that it was clearly produced for and not by the people, can The British Workman, despite its cheapness and huge circulation be easily characterised as ‘popular culture’? Was the simple pleasure of reading such a visually enjoyable text compromised by the underlying moralism and purposiveness of the magazine?

Cheap mass distribution literature remained centrally either an expression of middle-class notions of what might provide appropriate reading for the increasingly literate mass of the reading public, or else a response to the perceived tastes of a newly avid readership for the topical and the sensational. Much popular literature related to propagandising religious organisations – hymns, tracts, moralised stories for children, poetry, temperance fiction, educational texts – was produced and distributed in massive numbers. Women were significant producers of these kinds of texts, and were increasingly involved in the development, editing, and writing of magazines aimed at a female readership. This is not to say that such literature was read and understood entirely without scrutiny or that the pleasures offered by such texts were always subservient to a persuasive purpose. Such an outpouring of socially purposive mass circulation literature aimed at lower class readers was posited against the literature of entertainment and pleasure being produced in ever more sophisticated forms by publishers, editors, and writers in touch with popular taste – melodramatic fiction, sentimental poetry, songs and play-texts derived from entertainments like the theatre and the music halls, street ballads, comic dialect almanacs, and the like.

Within such a stream of mass circulation prints it is nonetheless possible to identify a significant range of Victorian publications, especially tracts, pamphlets, and magazines, as being both written by and addressed to working people. Some of this literature was related to class based political dissent. In the first 50 years of the century, reformist movements such as Chartism made widespread use of magazines as a mechanism for defining and solidifying popular support for political activism risking various forms of often fierce reprisals in the process. Later in the century a Socialist press sought similar results. If the radical press was not always the product of labouring class journalists, editors, and entrepreneurs, it formed a rallying place for contributors drawn from the lower socio-economic levels of society. Outside of the radical press, working men and women increasingly found ways to publish their own work – in autobiographies, contributions to local papers, or slim volumes of poetry – often with the support of better-off sympathisers. While most often localised in their appeal and distribution, writing by labouring class authors did appear in a range of magazines edited by liberal metropolitan literary figures who aimed their journals specifically at a sophisticated artisan readership. Dialect publications, notably comic almanacs, gave self-educated and local writers some support. But the working-class author remained a largely marginal figure, and the creativity of ‘the people’ was generally confined to a limited range of publications that enjoyed only local celebrity.

Popular nineteenth-century literature can be defined in socio-historical ways through evidence such as sales figures, contemporary diatribes about the corrupting effects of cheap books on the populace by the likes of Thackeray, Carlyle, and Ruskin, and official documents like the government reports on stamp duty. Nevertheless, the term ‘popular’ remains an elusive one to define. As suggested above, the ability of readers to claw texts back from the page into remediated expression in both public and domestic settings gave the mass of the population an active role as consumers who were often also performers. The consumption of popular culture was not an entirely passive process. Nor were the successful entrepreneurs of mass circulation print – printers, publishers, editors, and writers – entirely driven by commercial motives. The source of many widely read and enjoyed publications was to be found in social meliorist institutions, including religious organisations, that sought to manage the cultural advance of the working classes through the widespread dissemination of ‘improving’ literature. Texts of this kind co-existed with more localised literary and oral forms, like street ballads, radical tracts, or dialect almanacs, that sought ways of expressing points of view that might legitimately represent lower class ways of thinking and feeling. It is the attempt to negotiate these complexities that gives the study of popular literature, however that term might be defined, its particular and important place in the history of nineteenth-century Britain.

References

Beetham, Margaret (1996) A Magazine Of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in Women’s Magazines, 1800–1914, Routledge. 

Crary, Jonathan (1999) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, MIT Press. 

James, Louis (1963) Fiction for the Working Man, Oxford University Press. 

James, Louis (1967) Print and the People 1819–1851, Oxford University Press. 

Jensen, Oscar Cox (2021) The Ballad Singer in Georgian and Victorian London, Cambridge University Press. 

Lill, Sarah Louise and McWilliam Rohan (eds) (2019) Edward Lloyd and his World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain, Routledge. 

Lloyd, A.L. (1967) Folk Song in England, Lawrence and Wishart. 

Neuburg, Victor E. (1977) Popular Literature: A History and Guide, The Woburn Press. 

Roud, Steve (2017) Folk Song in England, Faber & Faber. 

Teukolsky, Rachel (2020) Picture World: Image, Aesthetics and Victorian New Media, Oxford University Press. 

Vicinus, Martha (1974) The Industrial Muse, Croom Helm.