{"id":32,"date":"2024-08-23T10:42:23","date_gmt":"2024-08-23T10:42:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/routledgelearning.com\/rhr-cultureliteratureandthearts\/?page_id=32"},"modified":"2024-09-27T13:23:02","modified_gmt":"2024-09-27T13:23:02","slug":"popular-culture-in-nineteenth-century-britain","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/routledgelearning.com\/rhr-cultureliteratureandthearts\/essays\/popular-culture-in-nineteenth-century-britain\/","title":{"rendered":"Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Brian Maidment<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liverpool John Moores University<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The vast stream of cheap mass circulation print that flowed through nineteenth-century Britain \u2013 penny issue fiction, religious tracts, magazines, sheet music, and almanacs and the like \u2013 is frequently summarised under the term \u2018popular literature\u2019. 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 \u2018popular\u2019 to describe nineteenth-century mass circulation literature, especially the extent to which popular culture was purposefully aimed at, rather than produced by, \u2018the people\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea of the \u2018popular\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The idea of the \u2018popular\u2019 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 (\u2018things\u2019), 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. \u2018Popular\u2019 in this context thus becomes a term caught between its two potentially contradictory meanings of \u2018widely accessible and enjoyed\u2019 and \u2018belonging to the people.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>One possible definition of the \u2018popular\u2019 in nineteenth-century Britain equates popularity with cheapness \u2013 thus \u2018popular print\u2019 would mean that portion of print culture that lay within the financial reach of the mass of the population. Yet \u2018cheap\u2019 is a complex word in this context, not just because of its pejorative, indeed snobbish, meaning of \u2018trashy\u2019 or \u2018of doubtful moral status\u2019. In these senses the cheap is associated with the \u2018low\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>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<\/a>\u2019 social status. Much of this kind of printed material \u2013 religious tracts or temperance broadsides, for example \u2013 became not so much cheap as free to the end consumer, thus running the risk of being considered worthless by their recipients. The <\/a>Penny Magazine<\/em> (1832\u20131845), making use of the \u2018penny\u2019 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 \u2018popular\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Another reading of the term \u2018popular\u2019 might use quantity rather than cost as the crucial defining characteristic. In other words, popular print might be best understood as \u2018mass circulation\u2019 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 \u2018mass\u2019 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 \u2013 one \u2018product\u2019 is much like another and aimed at fulfilling demand rather than cultural aspiration. Of course, much popular print <\/a>is<\/em> best understood as a commodity \u2013 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 \u2013 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n