Table Of ContentPopular Culture:
Past and Present
A Reader Edited by
BERNARD WAITES, TONY BENNETT AND
GRAHAM MARTIN
at the Open University
~} Routledge
~ ~ Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1982
by Croom Helm Ltd
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Selection and editorial material copyright © The Open University 1982
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical.
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the
publisher.
This reader is one part of an Open University Integrated teaching system and the
selection is therefore related to other material available to students. It is designed to
evoke the critical understanding of students. Opinions expressed in it are not
necessarily those of the course team or of the University.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Popular culture.
1. Culture
I. Waites, Bernard II. Bennett, Tony
III. Martin, Graham, 1927-
306 HMlOl
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-04033-4 (pbk)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Course Team List
Preface
Part One
Introduction 15
1. Popular Recreations under Attack Robert Malcolmson 20
2. Class Consciousness: the Radical Culture Edward Thompson 47
3. Class and Leisure in Mid-Victorian England Hugh Cunningham 66
4. Working-class Culture and Working~lass Politics in London,
1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking ofa Working Class
Gareth Stedman Jones 92
5. Wells as the Turning Poin t of the SF Tradition Darko Suvin 122
6. Residential Amenity, Respectable Morality and the Rise of the
Entertainment Industry: the Case of Blackpool, 1860-1914
John Walton 133
7. The Great British Picture Show: Boomtime and Slumptime
George Perry 146
8. Serving the Nation: Public Service Broadcasting before the War
Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff 161
Part Two
Introduction 191
9. Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935-1962 Dick Hebdige 194
to. Football since the War Chas Critcher 219
11. The Narrative Structure in Fleming Umberto Eco 242
12.Jackie: an Ideology of Adolescent Femininity
Angefll McRobbie 263
13. The Motor-bike and Motor-bike Culture Paul Willis 284
14. Confections, Concoctions and Conceptions Allison James 294
15. The Cold War in Science Fiction, 1940-1960 T. Shippey 308
Index 323
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is largely the result of the collective effort of a number of
people involved in preparing the Open University course Popular Cul
ture. The editors would therefore like to thank all members of the
course team for the part they played in the discussions which gave
birth to the shape of this Reader. In particular, our thanks to John
Golby, Bill Purdue, James Donald, Tony Aldgate, John Muncie and
Ruth Finnegan for their help both in suggesting articles for inclusion in
the Reader and indicating how best they might be edited. Thanks also
to Jane Bailey, whose assistance in co-ordinating the activities of the
editors has been invaluable, and to Deirdre Smith - a secretary valued
as much for her unfailing good humour as for her remarkable efficiency.
We are also indebted to John Taylor of the Publishing Division at the
Open University for the assistance he has rendered the course team in
all stages of the production of this Reader. Finally, we are grateful to
all of the contributors to this volume for allowing us to publish their
work in an abbreviated form.
THE COURSE TEAM
Authors
Tony Bennett, Course Team Colin Mercer
Chairman Richard Middleton
Tony Aldgate Dave Morley
Geoffrey Bourne John Muncie
David Cardiff Gill Perry
Alan Clark Bill Purdue
Noel Coley Carrie Roberts
James Donald Paddy Scannell
Dave Elliott Grahame Thompson
Ruth Finnegan Ken Thompson
Francis Frascina Bernard Waites
John Golby Paul Willis
Stuart Hall Janet Woollacott
Graham Martin
Other Members
Jane Bailey Course Manager
Susan Boyd.Bowman BBC Producer
Kate Clements Editor
Tony Coulson Liaison librarian
Liz Lane Editor
Vic Lockwood BBC Producer
Robert Nicodemus Representative from the Institute of
Educational Technology, the Open
University
Lesley Passey Designer
Mike Philps BBC Producer
Sarah Shepherd Editor
PREFACE
This collection of readings is intended primarily to support the Open
University interdisciplinary course on Popular Culture, U203. The
social and historical span of the course is Britain since the early nine
teenth century. We hope, however, that the Reader will be of interest
to teachers and students in other institutions of higher education where
the study of popular culture has, in recent years, attracted growing
interest. This introduction is addressed to au students and other
interested parties alike.
Briefly defining the field of study is by no means easy. The cultural
forms and practices which are - or have been - in a descriptive sense
'popular' are legion: the music hall, the cinema, football, science fiction,
motor-cycle gangs - all are in some way 'popular culture', but there is
no consistent patterning to their social defmition as popular. The diffi
culty of defming the field is amplified by the number of academic
specialisms which touch on the study of popular culture without
making it their exclusive domain: the history and sociology of leisure,
'media' and communications studies, literary criticism, semiology and
so on. The body of social, psychoanalytic and semiotic theory which
these specialisms now bring into play is daunting.
In preparing this course, the course team found it valueless to think
of popular culture as an aggregate of forms and practices or as a his
torically continuous entity. Rather, we have come to think of it as a
shifting region within a historical and cultural totality where cultural
domination, negotiation and exchange take place. Popular culture is
defmed relationally and the social defmition has changed in the con
junctures of history. We have tried to turn the interdisciplinary 'mix'
to good account by forming a matrix of skills on which the student can
draw to 'read' critically cultural forms and understand cultural change.
The readings in this collection are all substantive in character and the
theoretical range of the course is represented by a complementary
volume of readings: Culture, Ideology and Social Process (Batsford,
1981).
PART ONE
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION
The readings collected in the fust section of the Reader are intended as
a guide to current debates in the historical study of popular culture.
They are not, of course, totally comprehensive. One striking absence is
the neglect of those historical studies which have sought to reconstruct
the popular culture of pre-industrial, early modern Europe. The
intellectual richness of recent research into magic, witchcraft and
popular mentalities, pursued by historians like Keith Thomas,Peter
Burke and Carlo Ginzburg, makes this neglect very regrettable.1 How
ever, we have used the term 'popular culture' in a historically privileged
sense. For us, it is specific to societies where the market econo'llY has
penetrated most forms of cultural production and consumption.Popu
lar culture entails a system of prodUction, although that is not all it
entails and pin-pointing its historical origins in Britain is not easy. Until
recently, many historians would have accepted the idea of a 'Bleak Age'
for the common people separating the popular pursuits of eighteenth
century, largely rural, society from the new pattern of working~lass
leisure of urban, mid-Victorian Britain. Such an idea fitted the pessimis
tic interpretation of the social consequences of early industrialisation.
Yet Hugh Cunningham describes a thriving popular culture dating from
the 1820s, based on fairs, shows and travelling theatrical troupes,
supplied by thrusting cultural entrepreneurs and common to rural and
urban society (Reading 3). To his own surprise, he fmds himself
amongst the 'optimist' school ofhistorians.2 Cunningham's and others'
work emphasises the many continuities between the plebeian culture of
the late eighteenth century and the culture provided by the market for
the new working class of the nineteenth.
Our historically privileged use of the term does not, we hope, result
from wilful indifference to all the evidence for historical continuity.
None the less, we would argue that cultural relationships were funda
mentally transformed with the working out of capitalist industrialisa
tion during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century.
There was an inner disparity between the demotic culture of a largely
rural world and the new urban popular culture which the experience of
particular social and ethnic groups clarifies with some sharpness .. Lynn
Lees, in her excellent study of Irish immigrants in London, writes: 'The
comparison of nineteenth century rural Irish religion and folk beliefs
with the popular Catholicism of Irish migrants in London reveals two
very different worlds of imagination and action.'3 The rituals and
symbols of belief were transformed in the city, a process which can be
lli
