Popular Culture in 18th-Century Britain: Key Forces

Introduction: Defining Popular Culture Before the Eighteenth 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 — 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 The World Turned Upside-Down, seems to define a culture not only popular but populist. Nevertheless, three factors mark out eighteenth-century popular culture as uniquely different from what had come before: the rise of mass literacy, the decline in religious authority, and the increase in colonialism and material commerce.

The Rise of Mass Literacy and the English Novel

The rise of mass literacy in the eighteenth century is the first factor that contributed 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 that period. Elizabethan prose narrative, such as that found in Sidney's Arcadia or in 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.

By contrast, the major figures of 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, the salty nautical yarns of Smollett, the low social status of Defoe's Moll Flanders. This descent toward the "low" would even go so far as to permit the invention — more or less — of pornography, with works such as John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (more popularly known as Fanny Hill).

It is worth noting, however, that this low subject matter — possibly intended to court the newly literate popular audience, who would purchase these newly affordable and accessible books — was not incompatible with seriousness of 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 on 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. To some extent, however, the popularity of Fielding was only enabled by the popularity of Richardson first.

Religious Dissent, the Established Church, and the Enlightenment

It is important to see all of this 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 that all clergy, or matriculants at Oxford and Cambridge, swear to the Thirty-Nine Articles — so as to maintain the religious peace.

The dissenting sects of the Interregnum, whom Christopher Hill analyzed so fascinatingly, consequently became increasingly divorced from the mainstream of public and intellectual life. Instead, they built up their own intellectual associations through public societies, the extension of civil debate into coffee-houses, and the exploding Grub Street culture of ephemeral publication in London, while 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" accidentally got him punished for sedition, by authorities who failed to notice the satire — the chemist Joseph Priestley (discoverer of oxygen), and even the poet Coleridge (a Bristol Unitarian).

The weakening hold of the established state religion over cultural dissent eventually resulted in both an Enlightenment approach to religion — what is usually termed "Deism" — and a new approach to morals and ethics. The birth of the novel would come directly out of the eighteenth century's popularity for conduct and etiquette manuals. Richardson began as a dissenting scribbler who wrote model letters for his emergent bourgeois (and largely female) audience; these model letters would eventually develop into a moralistic model plot in the epistolary novels Pamela and Clarissa.