The Popularity of Popular Delusions: Charles Mackay and Victorian Popular Culture

Mid-Victorian journalist Charles Mackay wrote popular ballads and nonfiction prose on topics of general interest. ¹ His Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841, was one of a number of popular histories on the subject of collective behavior published around this time, and today it is referenced by scholars as an example of early Victorian ideas
on crowd psychology. ² In Mackay's hands, the topic takes on a protean quality; it explains everything from amorphous collective behaviors, such as fashions and fads, to concentrated group behaviors, like political demonstrations. But whatever shape it takes, collective behavior is always represented unfavorably by Mackay, usually as the action of an unthinking mass in the grip of forces beyond its comprehension. Individuality is the only assurance of rational integrity. Ironically, this Victorian popular writer represents popularity in distinctly negative terms.

Explaining the popularity of texts that criticize popular behavior as dangerous, foolish, and even ignorant presents an interpretive dilemma. Mackay's text was in fact popular, as a matter of historical record, and it also identifies itself as written for a popular audience, through recognizable textual markers. Because of this, it participates in a type of collective behavior as an object within popular culture. This text and others like it embody a contradiction between its (negative) representation of the popular and the (positive) popularity of its representation. That is, Mackay's text has a formal interest as a contradictory, self-reflexive cultural artifact that comments unfavorably on the same popularity it solicits and enjoys. That contradiction, as I will discuss, was not unique to Mackay, but was in fact a familiar feature of Victorian popular literature, and so considering the problem posed by his popular appeal has broad implications.

For cultural critics today, this contradiction poses a challenge. Many critics (myself included) view historical representations of popular culture as a constructed fantasy of the Other. As Roger Chartier has argued, historical writing on popular culture needs to be understood within the context of its production and consumption: "For each motif, what is said must be related to the social position of whoever says it" (1988, 5). Thus, when Thomas Carlyle or Matthew Arnold describes Victorian popular culture as dangerous, foolish, or ignorant, we understand these representations as self-reflexive projects, authoritative primarily as guides to the attitudes of the elite group producing and consuming the representation. Like John Frow's, my interest "is ultimately in that position, and that social group, from and for which knowledge of the objectified Other is produced" (1995, 3). But Mackay is neither a Carlyle nor an Arnold; that is to say, he is not a writer who addressed an elite readership but rather one who wrote for the broadest possible audience. In such cases, the representation of popular culture is instead closely identified with the consumer for whom the knowledge is produced. So a negative representation of popular culture in popular literature raises questions about not just why it was produced but why it was consumed.

I want to pursue the question of such popularity by looking closely at Mackay's Popular Delusions and the subgenre of Victorian popular histories of the crowd, and I will be addressing two basic issues. First is the logic informing the represented popular behaviors: what explanation does Mackay offer for why collective bodies behave in the negative ways he describes? With this ground, we can turn to the separate issue of how the popular readership understood its own relationship to this representation of the popular. We know that, rather than acting as passive consumers of information, readers in history placed their own constructions on what they read. ³ But what kind of a construction could transform Mackay's negative view of popularity into an appealing prospect for a popular readership?

Taking up this question requires a clarification of what is meant by the term popular. In current usage...