Historical significance of popular culture in the eighteenth century

Popular Culture in the 18th Century

A number of different factors would conspire to make popular culture into a new and different thing in eighteenth-century Britain. There had been popular culture before the eighteenth century, of course: Shakespeare's plays in their original context being staged at the Globe amid bear-baiting, orange-selling, and prostitution definitely counted as authentically popular culture. And the remarkable efflorescence of religious and political tracts during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century -- as outlined in Christopher Hill's seminal monograph on the topic, The World Turned Upside-Down -- seems to define a culture not only popular but populist. But I would like to identify three factors -- the rise of mass literacy, the decline in religious values, and the increase in colonialism -- which marked out eighteenth century popular culture as uniquely different from what had come before.

The rise of mass literacy in the eighteenth century is the first factor that would contribute to a new form of popular culture. The eighteenth century is, simply put, the cradle of the English novel, which barely existed as an art form before the eighteenth century. Elizabethan prose narrative, such as found in Sidney's Arcadia or Thomas Nashe, presents the opposite picture of what prose narrative would turn into during the eighteenth century: Sidney operates within a distinctly courtly context, and Nashe still qualifies as a "university wit" writing for an elite audience. But the major figures in the eighteenth century British novel -- Richardson, Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Fanny Burney, Sterne -- were writing directly for the masses. This accounts for the inclusion of "low" subject matter in some of these writers: the scapegrace heroes of Fielding and the salty nautical yarns of Smollett, the low social status of Defoe's Moll Flanders. This descent towards the "low" would even go so far as to permit the invention (more or less) of pornography with works like John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (more popularly known as Fanny Hill). But it is worth noting that this low subject matter -- possible intended to court the newly literate popular audience (who would purchase these newly affordable and accessible books) -- was not incompatible with a seriousness in artistic purpose. Henry Fielding was arguably doing more to create a popular taste in (amusing) fiction by mocking Richardson than Richardson was with his own massive best sellers, yet when Fielding came to define the newly-fledged novel as a genre he settled for the most august and honorific sort of generic designation: a "comic epic poem in prose" is Fielding's witty phrase to describe this new form aimed at a popular audience. But to some extent the popularity of Fielding was only enabled by the popularity of Richardson first.

It is important to see this all within the religious context of the eighteenth century as well. England in the seventeenth century had suffered a bloody civil war fought purely over minute doctrinal questions regarding the Christian religion. The 1660 Restoration offered a truce to religious infighting in Britain, with a number of judicial safeguards imposed (such as the Act of Succession, and the requirement of all clergy -- or matriculants at Oxford and Cambridge -- to swear to the 39 Articles) so as to maintain the religious peace. But the dissenting sects of the interregnum whom Christopher Hill has analyzed so fascinatingly in consequence became increasingly divorced from the mainstream of public and intellectual life, instead building up their own intellectual associations through public societies, extension of civil debate into coffee-houses and the exploding Grub Street culture of ephemeral publication in London, and by avoiding "official" educational and cultural outlets. By the late eighteenth century, numerous intellectual and scientific achievements would emerge from this culture of "dissenting academies," including Daniel Defoe (whose satirical fiction "The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters" would accidentally get him punished for sedition, by authorities who did not notice the satire), the chemist Joseph Priestley (discoverer of oxygen), even the poet Coleridge (a Bristol Unitarian). The weakening of the hold of the established state religion over cultural dissent would eventually result in both an Enlightenment approach to religion by redefining it (what is usually termed "Deism") but also a new approach for morals and ethics. The birth of the novel would come directly out of the eighteenth century popularity for conduct and etiquette manuals: Richardson would begin as a dissenting scribbler who wrote model letters for his emergent bourgeois (and largely female) audience, and these model letters would eventually turn into a moralistic model plot in the epistolary novels Pamela and Clarissa.