The Civilisation of the Crowd: Popular Culture in England 1750-1900 (review)

From its very beginning popular culture seems to have been a set of activities pursued by people off work just as much as an issue of controversial debate fought at least on two levels. Contemporaries fed and feed this debate with their anxieties and fears of social upheaval, their ideas of a people behaving morally and socially correctly and their missionary zeal to make the lower classes conform to these ideas. Historians and, more recently, sociologists have added their views, bringing to bear a zeal of interpretation that seems equal to the ardor of devoted reformers in nineteenth-century England. It is these three facets of social and everyday life that this book is about, tracing the changes of popular recreations in England and the efforts to turn them into rational recreations from the middle of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century.

This book was written in the early 1980s and first published in 1984, at a time when the history of popular culture was strongly influenced if not dominated by class analysis in the line of classical marxist theory and the concept of contested hegemony propounded by the Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci. His concept has since been used to think of the civilization of the crowd as an arena in which classes, products of the transformations effected by the Industrial Revolution, contest for ideological hegemony. According to this view, not only did social classes emerge, creating an unbridgeable gulf between their members, but a new, a post-industrial popular culture arose as well that was separated from its pre-industrial form just as markedly as classes were. While the former are supposed to be commercial and individualist, the latter is romanticized as non-commercial, organic, and traditional.

These are the central assumptions on English popular culture that the book sets out to refute, obviously a more important aim than writing a comprehensive social history of leisure. Though the authors' fervor in setting the interpretations of a liberal pluralistic approach against the marxist view may seem out of place after some fifteen years, their arguments most certainly do not. They are as convincing as they must have appeared to historians several years ago, for most of the theses have become common sense.

Golby and Purdue, then as now lecturers in history at the Open University, contest the hegemony of the marxist view in turning first to recreations of the people before the advent of industry. In pointing to the economic and social uniqueness of eighteenth-century England, to the elements of a commercial culture already in existence, including an entertainment industry, they conclusively prove the idea of a sharp divide between pre-industrial and industrial times to be a myth. Instead of going through a process of metamorphosis, the 'old' popular culture modified, as it adapted to commercial forces and their increasing impact. This, however, was not brought about by middle class—nor later by working class—critics, but rather by the labouring classes themselves, who stuck to cherished leisure activities or changed them as they chose and as economic conditions such as working hours and real wages allowed. Despite continuous attacks against pastimes described as immoral, irrational, irreverent and bloody-minded, popular culture retained a remarkable vigor and autonomy even in the age of industry with its supposedly bourgeois character. And, as another subtle argument of the authors goes, to some degree a modified popular culture or some of its aspects proved attractive to more than one social class. While part of the middle classes utilized leisure activities as a means of social distancing from the labouring poor—or damned pastimes altogether—, others felt the lure of popular attractions too. Nineteenth-century theater, for instance, with its mixture of Shakespeare, melodrama, pantomime and performing animals, watered down the divisions between high and popular art. Seaside resorts and sports like horse-racing and football became arenas in which classes met, even though a...