Popular Culture in Industrializing England

Author(s): Emma Griffin

Source: The Historical Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Sep., 2002), pp. 619-635
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3133499
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The HistoricalJournal,45, 3 (2002), pp. 6i9-635 ? 2002 Cambridge University Press
DOI: Io.I17/Soo008246Xo2002571 Printed in the United Kingdom

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS
POPULAR CULTURE IN INDUSTRIALIZING
ENGLAND*
EMMA GRIFFIN
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

ABSTRACT. This reviewtraceshistorians'useof theconceptofpopularculture,sinceits entryinto

thedisciplinein theI970o. 'Popularculture'wasinitiallylooselyunderstood as thevalues,pleasures,
andpastimes of thepoor,andresearchin thefieldwasheavilyinfluenced
bybothMarxismandcultural
anthropology. By theI99os, earlierconceptionsofpopularcultureappeared crudelyreductionist,and
heterogeneity,diversity,and'appropriation'werefirmlyestablishedas keytermsandconcerns for the
historianof popularculture.But in thesearchfor socialandculturalcomplexity, theroleof politics
andthesimpleforceof powerandsocialinequality havebeenneglected. I argueherethatwealthand
powerhavelongbeenkeydeterminants shapingthecharacter of popularculturalpractice,and that
theiroperation needsto be incorporatedintoouranalyses.In this way, thestudyof popularculture
offersthepromiseof researchthatis bothof intrinsicinterestandof broader historicalsignificance.

What has happened to the history of popular culture? In the I970s, a new area of
researchopened up, unashamedly concerned with the kind of things that had previously
been thought not to matter much. Groundbreaking monographs appeared taking
'popular recreations', 'leisure', 'custom', and 'popular culture' as their subject;1 and
edited volumes ranging over topics as varied as the alehouse, street football, rural
holidays, wakes and fairs, Guy Fawkes celebrations, popular music, and the music hall
were published.2 For all the diversity in terms of material and methodology amongst
these writers, a common concern to uncover and understand the pleasuresand pastimes
of the poor was readily identifiable. Within the space of a decade, a distinctive area of
interest had been carved out: it was plebeian, festive, recreational, and academic
discussion was as animated and lively as many of the customs under consideration.
This body of researchinto popular culture provided a significant contribution to the
developing field of social history. True to the commitment of the newly formed tradition
* I would like to thank
Larry Klein, Gareth Stedman Jones, and Naomi Tadmor, who read
earlier drafts of this article and made valuable suggestions for improvement. Cath Frances,
Natasha Glaisyer, Matthew Nudds, and Sarah Pearsall all discussed this review on various
occasions and offered encouragement and inspiration.
1 Robert W. Malcolmson, Popularrecreations in Englishsociety,I70oo-85o (Cambridge, I973);
Peter Bailey, Leisureandclassin Victorian
England:rationalrecreationandthecontestforcontrol,1830-1885
(London, 1978); Hugh Cunningham, Leisurein theindustrialrevolution, c. I780-1880 (London, I980);
Bob Bushaway, By rite: custom,ceremony andcommunity in England,I7oo-i88o (London, i982); Peter
Burke, Popularculturein earlymodernEurope(London, 1978).
2 Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo, eds., Popularcultureandclass in the
conflict,I59o-I9I4: explorations
historyof labourandleisure(Brighton, I98 ); Robert Storch, ed., Popularcultureandcustomin nineteenth-
centuryEngland(London, 1982).
619
620 HISTORICAL JOURNAL

of'history from below', histories of popular culture challenged old assumptions about
the proper content and purpose of history.3 Simply by engaging with people and events
previously marginalized in the academic tradition, researchers of popular culture
valorized the experience of the weak and the poor, and considerably broadened the
scope and range of historical processes deemed worthy of serious study. They explored
the meanings of customs and pastimes to those who participated in them, and used this
to reconstruct the cultural values and mental horizons of the poor in industrializing
England. Furthermore, they located the pastimes they studied within a broader socio-
economic context. Frequently starting with no more than fragments of popular
experience - rough music,4 the music hall song,5 Saint Monday6 - this historiography
nevertheless succeeded in uncovering connections between popular experience and
broader historical processes. In this way, the festive and recreational were used to
deepen our understanding of the course of change in England during the period of
industrialization. Our appreciation of class conflict, commercialization, and of course,
the industrial revolution itself, was extended and refined through a focus on the ways in
which recreations, pastimes, and local customs fared.
Yetjust as the history of popular culture established itself as a valuable and legitimate
sub-discipline in its own right, the momentum somehow got lost. Contributions to the
history of popular celebrations, games, and holidays did not cease to appear in the years
following the initial spurt of interest, but they did become more infrequent, and with a
few notable exceptions, the history of pleasure and recreation has become increasingly
removed from the academic mainstream. There is little sense of dialogue amongst
writers in this field, and it is difficult to see recent books and articles as part of longer
tradition of research into the history of popular culture. My purpose in this
historiographical review is to consider these developments; to look back at the first wave
of academic interest in popular culture; to think about how the enterprise lost its way,
and look at ways to move it forward.

There is no simple and accurate way to summarize the research into the history of
popular culture undertaken in the I970s, but the impact of contemporaneous ideas
about the nature of industrialization is unmistakable across a wide range of early forays
into the pleasures of the poor. The industrial revolution was considered to be the
defining characteristic of this period, and industrialization accordingly loomed large in
many early accounts of the history of popular culture. The contrast between the

3 See E. P. Thompson, 'History from below', TimesLiterary 7 Apr. 966, pp. 279-80;
Supplement,
FrederickKrantz, ed., Historyfrom below;studiesinpopularprotest ideologyin honour
andpopular of George
Rude (Montreal, 1985), especially the essay by Eric Hobsbawm, 'History from below-some
reflections'; Jim Sharpe, 'History from below', in Peter Burke, ed., New perspectives on historical
writing(Cambridge, I99I). For the emergence of social history more generally see the essays by
Adrian Wilson and Keith Wrightson in Adrian Wilson, ed., Rethinking socialhistory:Englishsociety
I570-192oandits interpretation
(Manchester, 1993).
4 E. P. Thompson, 'Rough music', reprintedin Customs in common(London, 199 ), pp. 467-538.
5 Gareth Stedman Jones, 'Working-class culture and working-class politics in London,
1879-1900', reprinted in his Languagesof class: studiesin Englishworking-class
history(Cambridge,
I983).
6 o
Douglas Reid, 'The decline of St Monday, 1766-1876', PastandPresent,71 (1976), pp. 76- I.
 HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 621

traditional customs and recreations of pre-industrial England and the recognizably

modern patterns of life and leisure in the nineteenth century and beyond seemed as
undeniable as the 'industrial revolution' that had occurred during the interval, and it
was uncontroversial to argue that industrialization had been central in powering the
lurch from one state to the other.
A particularly colourful and influential account of the impact of industrialization was
provided by Robert Malcolmson in his Popular recreationsin English society. Malcolmson
offered a compelling account of the pre-industrial recreational calendar, and described
the changes it underwent over the eighteenth century as a result of the pressures known
collectively as the industrial revolution. He accumulated scattered, but sufficiently
numerous, examples of the disappearance of old pastimes in England over a period of
150 years to suggest the almost total destruction of traditional patterns of recreations by
I850, and he related this decline to contemporaneous economic change. Traditional
recreations were embedded in a paternalistic, agrarian society, and as the industrial
revolution broke down the traditional fabric of society, so were the vital supports of
traditional recreations fatally undermined. Some regions were in advance of the rest,
whilst others were culturally backward; nevertheless, industrialization and com-
mercialization showed little discrimination in their effects. Although Malcolmson
suggested that certain regions diverged from his chronology of change, no regional
peculiarities were considered to be of sufficient significance to undermine the 'basic facts
of this trend'.7
A succession of historians of the nineteenth century filled the cultural vacuum that
Malcolmson had left with the commercial leisure pursuits suited to a newly emergent
capitalist society. In place of the annual cycle of feasts and festivals, governed by seasons
and harvests, were to be found modern spectator sports and commercial music halls. By
the late nineteenth century, the industrial revolution had brought the rising incomes,
increased spare time, and modern transport system that spectator sports require. In
response to the relentless rhythm of the factory, rules had been codified, pitch sizes
standardized, and length of play fixed: sports were now pinned down in both time and
space.8 In similar fashion, the traditional sing-along of the local beerhouse had been
transformed into the commercial music hall. As befitted a capitalist society, a handful
of large chains dominated the market by the century's end, and ensured the
standardization of music hall programmes throughout the country.9 It all amounted, in
the view of one writer, to the 'urbanization, commercialization and nationalization of
popular culture'.10

7 Malcolmson, Popularrecreations, p. 170.

8
Wray Vamplew, Pay up andplay thegame:professionalsportin Britain,i875-1914 (Cambridge,
1988), pp. 21-43; John Hargreaves, Sport,powerandculture:a socialandhistoricalanalysisof popular
sportsin Britain(Cambridge, 1986); James Walvin, Leisureandsociety,183o-i95o (London, 1978);
John Clarke and Charles Critcher, The devilmakeswork: leisurein capitalistBritain (Urbana, IL,
I985), pp. 48-59. See also Richard Holt, SportandtheBritish: a modernhistory(Oxford, I989).
9 M.
Vicinus, Theindustrialmuse(London, 1974); P. Summerfield, 'The Effingham arms and the
empire: deliberate selection in the evolution of music hall in London', Yeo and Yeo, eds., Popular
culture.
10 Susan Easton et al., Disorderand discipline:popularculturefrom I550 to the
present(Aldershot,
1988), p. 56. See also Sally Alexander, St Giles Fair, 183o-g194: popularcultureand the industrial
revolutionin nineteenth-century
Oxford(Oxford, i970); Michael Marrus, ed., The emergence of leisure
(New York, 1974); Thomas S. Henricks, Disputedpleasures:sportandsocietyin pre-industrial England
(New York, 1991).
622 HISTORICAL JOURNAL

Large towns and industrializing regions, and the more formal and organized forms of
leisure they tended to encourage, formed the focus of much of this early research into
popular culture; yet the more ephemeral traditions of rural life did not entirely escape
attention. And researchers of rural culture shared similar preoccupations to those of
urban and industrial leisure, for whilst industrialization might be an urban phenom-
enon, the advance of capitalism was not believed to be confined to the urban sector.
Studies of time, of music in the village church, and of popular culture in rural
communities in Cornwall and Oxfordshire were all set in the context of economic
transformation.1' Likewise, Bob Bushaway's history of the place of custom in rural
society was set in the context of the economic transformation of the rural com-
-
munity from 'a small-scale system of agricultural production to the capital-intensive,
large-unit farming of the mid-Victorian age'.12
Not infrequently, these assumptions about the extent and pace of economic change
served to focus attention on instances of cultural conflict. It was not difficult to imagine
that the emerging industrial capitalism would find itself at odds with traditional culture,
or that recreation would emerge as a point of conflict between plebeians and middle-
class representatives of the new capitalist order. Books married 'popular culture' with
'disorder and discipline' and 'cultural conflict' in their titles and pursued the themes of
conflict and division within their covers."3 The emphasis on cultural consensus in Golby
and Purdue's Civilisation and the crowd placed it very clearly at odds with the stress on
social conflict to be found elsewhere in the historiography.'4
By the early i98os, revisionist historians had begun to challenge the established
account of the impact of industrialization on popular culture, and the suggestion that
traditional pastimes had sometimes succeeded in adjusting to the new industrial order
was made. Hugh Cunningham's Leisurein the industrialrevolutionoffered a comprehensive
reassessment of the ways in which the industrial revolution had transformed popular
recreations. In contrast to Malcolmson and others, Cunningham emphasized the
resilience of many traditional leisure forms and the new opportunities presented by
industrialization and commercialization, and his conclusions were supported by a
handful of scholars working on related practices.15 Robert Poole's research on the
annual wakes in the cotton districts of Lancashire, for example, demonstrated the way
in which traditional wakes entertainments continued 'with remarkable consistency',

"1 E. P.
Thompson, 'Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism', Past and Present,38
'
(I967) 56-97; Vic Gammon, "Babylonian performances": the rise and suppression of popular
church music, I660- 870', in Yeo and Yeo, eds., Popularculture, John Rule, 'Methodism, popular
belief and village culture in Cornwall', in Storch, ed., PopularCulture,Alun Howkins, 'The taming
of Whitsun; the changing face of a nineteenth-century rural holiday', in Yeo and Yeo, Popular
culture.See also Steven Yeo's chapter on leisure in the southern market town of Reading; idem,
Religionandvoluntary in crisis(London, 1976), ch. 7.
organizations
12
Bushaway, By rite,p. 21.
13 See for
example, the essays by Yeo and Yeo, Howkins, and Delves in Yeo and Yeo, Popular
culture;Easton et al., Disorderanddiscipline.See also Robert Storch, 'The policeman as domestic
missionary: urban discipline and popular culture in Northern England, I850--I880', Journalqf
SocialHistory,9 (I976), pp. 481-509.
14
J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, Thecivilisationof thecrowd:popularculturein England,175o-igoo
(London,I984; revised edn, I999).
15 c. I780-1880 (London, I980). See also
Hugh Cunningham, Leisurein theindustrialrevolution,
idem, 'The metropolitan fairs: a case study on the social control of leisure', in A. P. Donajgrodzki,
ed., Socialcontrolin nineteenth-century
Britain(London, I977), pp.I63-84.
 HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 623
despite the rapid pace of industrialization in the area.16Likewise studies of the music
hall suggested that the development of this form of entertainment was only weakly
influenced by the increasingly capitalist nature of the business. Peter Bailey illustrated
the control that working-class audiences continued to exercise over the entertainment
they were offered, and concluded that the commercial music halls of the late nineteenth
century remained an autonomous expression of popular culture.17What none of these
writersquestioned, however, was the economic transformationthat was presumed to lie
at the heart of nineteenth-century England. In each of these studies, the drama was
played out against the backcloth of the industrial revolution - universal, sweeping, and
pervasivein its reach and effects. Thus whilst the consequences of industrializationwere
interpreted differently, a number of key assumptions about the nature of nineteenth-
century society and economy were left unchallenged.
We have since learned to live with a very different industrial revolution, a revolution
so limited, so diverse, and so regionally confined that these attempts to generalize about
the fate of popular culture during the nineteenth century appear hopelessly dated.
There can be no doubting the value of this endeavour to explore the impact of economic
change on cultural practice, yet economic change has thus far been conceived so
narrowly that the extent to which the enterprise has even begun must be questioned.
The revisionist suggestion that traditional cultural practices continued to flourish
within newly industrializing districts is well founded, and it is furthermorelikely that
industrialization may have encouraged the development of new popular customs and
traditions. But what happened to sports and recreations outside the heartlands of the
industrial revolution? The corn counties, pastoral regions, declining industrial districts
in the south and south-west, ports, market towns, and historic regional centres: how did
the relationship between local economic conditions and popular custom and culture
work out in areas such as these? The first generation of research into popular culture
made a significant contribution to our understanding of the links between culture and
economics, but with so much of the country effectively untouched by the onset of
industrialization we are forced to concede that our understanding of the ways in which
economic conditions have historically influenced cultural practice still remains limited
in the extreme.

II
The relationship between economic change and cultural practice was never the only
problem with which early historians of popular culture were concerned. Since its
inception, the recovery of the 'meaning' of custom and tradition has been integral to
research into popular culture, and few studies have been considered complete without
some discussion of how cultural practices were understood and experienced by those
who participated in them. This concern to uncover the significance of popular

16 Robert Poole, 'Oldham wakes',

inJohn K. Walton andJames Walvin, eds., Leisurein Britain,
I78o-I939 (Manchester, I983), pp. 71-98, quote on p. 74. See also John K. Walton and Robert
Poole, 'The Lancashirewakes in the nineteenth century', in Storch, ed., Popularculture,pp. 100-24.
17 Bailey, Leisureand class. See also Robert Poole, Popularleisureand the musichall in nineteenth-
centuryBolton(Lancaster, I982); Reid, 'The decline of St Monday'; Peter N. Stearns, 'The effort
at continuity in working-class culture', Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980), pp. 626-55; Mark
Judd,'"The oddestcombinationof townand country":popularcultureand the Londonfairs,
I800-I860', in Walton and Walvin, eds., Leisure in Britain, pp. 1-30.
624 HISTORICAL JOURNAL
recreations to those who enjoyed them can be traced to the influence of anthropology,
a pervasive presence in social history since its development in British universities in the
I960s. For example Keith Thomas, pioneer of social history and advocate of the value
of anthropological techniques and concepts to the study of the past, cited the examples
of the Dogons of the Sudan, the Trobrianders, and Maori fishermen in an article on
work and leisure, in the belief that 'primitive societies' provided the 'most obvious
contrast' with the working habits of the modern industrial world. He was clearly
drawing upon the functional paradigm then dominant in anthropology when he
suggested that some pre-industrial recreations were the 'products of a society organized
for war', others 'explicable only in terms of the periodic release necessary in a rigidly
hierarchical society'; and that yet others 'reflect[ed] the web of kinship and
neighbourhood'.18 Though not without its critics,'9 there was perhaps a certain logic to
borrowing from anthropology as social historians began to mark out and study new and
previously uncharted areas of human existence in the discipline's early days, and
although the expansion of social history has arguably diminished the imperative to
borrow and test theories and concepts from neighbouring disciplines, the influence of
anthropology on social (and now cultural) history continues to be felt in the present. In
the past two decades, functional approaches in anthropology have been replaced by
interpretive or semiotic analyses, expounded most emphatically and eloquently, but by
no means uniquely, by Clifford Geertz, and it is principally these which inform
anthropologically inspired social and cultural history today.20
Certainly, Geertz's emphasis on the symbolic meaning of culture has been one of the
most pervasive and enduring influences on historians of popular culture. A study of
football in Northumberland mining communities, for example, was concerned to
establish the 'meaning of the game to the miners', and the 'role it played in their
lives';21 whereas research by Douglas Reid promised to 'reconstruct the experience of
the wakes and fairs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Birmingham'.22 Likewise,
Richard Holt's seminal text on the making of modern sports in Britain argued that the
historian needs to examine the 'motives, pleasures, and values enshrined in the daily
round of play. A social history of sport in modern Britain not only has to ask "What has
changed and why?" but "how did people feel about the changing place of sport in their
lives?" "23 Yet although the Geertzian paradigm has made itself widely felt in histories
18 Keith Thomas, 'Work and leisure in pre-industrial society', Past and Present,29 (1964),
pp. 50-62, quotes at pp. 52-4. See also idem, 'History and anthropology', Past and Present,24
(i963), pp. 3-24.
19 E. P. Thompson, 'Folklore, anthropology and social history', Indian HistoricalReview,3
(1978), pp. 247-66.
20 For Geertz and historians see Ronald K. G. Waters, 'Signs of the times: Clifford Geertz and

47 ( 980), pp. 537-56; Aletta Biersack,' Local knowledge, local history:

historians', SocialResearch,
Geertz and beyond', in Lynn Hunt, ed., The new culturalhistory(Berkeley, I989), pp. 72-96;
Raphael Samuel, 'Reading the signs', HistoryWorkshop Journal,32 (I991), pp. 88--o09, and idem,
'Reading the signs II', History WorkshopJournal, 33 (1992), pp. 220-5I; Jordan Goodman,
'History and anthropology', in M. Bentley, ed., Companionto historiography (London, 1997),
pp. 783-804.
21 Alan Metcalfe, 'Football in the mining communities of east Northumberland, 1882-I914',
InternationalJournalof the Historyof Sport,5 (I988), pp. 269-91, quote at p. 269. See also idem,
'Organized sport in the mining communities of south Northumberland, I800-I889', Victorian
Studies,25 (1982), pp. 469-95.
22 Douglas A. Reid, 'Interpreting the festival calendar: wakes and fairs as carnivals', in Storch,
ed., Popularculture,pp. 125-53, quote on p. 125. 23 Holt, Sport,p. 2.
 HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 625
of popular culture, it has arguably been incorporated in a rather uncritical way.
Concerns about Geertz's method voiced in anthropological literature have rarely been
addressed by historians, and the value of recovering the meaning of popular customs to
those who enjoyed them has received no serious challenge from the historical
community.24 It may be helpful, therefore, to turn here to a brief examination of
Geertz's work, for both the strengths and weaknessesof his methodology are strongly in
evidence in the historical research it has inspired.
In an important essay of I973 Geertz explained his semiotic concept of culture. He
argued that most human behaviour could be understood on different levels, and
borrowed the vocabulary - 'thin' and 'thick' description - and an example - involving
twitching and winking - from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe how one might
set about distinguishing and comprehending the different significations of human
action. Thin description involves a straightforward physical account of human
behaviour, whereas thick description seeks to establish exactly what that behaviour
symbolizes or means to those who perform it. Ryle provided a simple example of the
contrast between thin and thick description by presenting the case of two boys both
rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes in an identical fashion; in one case the
action is an involuntary twitch, in the other a conspiratorial signal to a friend. Thinly
described, the actions are indistinguishable; thick description entails describing the
socially established codes that enable us to discriminate between the twitch and the
wink.25
A detailed example of Geertz's semiotic approach to culture, and one familiar to all
historians, is to be found in his essay on the cockfight in Bali.26Though caricatured and
condemned by a Balinese elite as a primitive and backward pastime, Geertz used an
analysis of the ways in which participants betted to argue that the Balinese cockfight
could be read as an expressionof their pride in family and village. He argued that as the
stakes rose, the investment of familial pride became more pronounced, and fights in
which betting were high were in Geertz's formulation a form of'deep play', saturated
with symbolism for their participants. This then formed the 'meaning' of the Balincse
cockfight: the fight, he concluded, is 'fundamentally a dramatisation of status
concerns'.27
But whilst offering valuable insights into the significanceofcockfighting for those who
participate in the sport, this analysis is not without problems. It might be questioned,
for example, whose meaning is being privileged, for cockfighting is hardly enjoyed by
all. There are several restrictions on those authorized in Balinese culture to enter the
cockpit, suggesting it might be prudent to qualify any general conclusions concerning
the role of cockfighting in Balinese culture. Geertz is explicit about the relevance of the
cockfight for all Balinese people- 'much of Bali surfaces in the cock ring ... it is a
Balinese experience, a story they tell themselvesabout themselves' ;28 but his confidence

24 For
anthropological critiques of Geertz see William Roseberry, 'Balinese cockfights and the
seduction of anthropology', SocialResearch, 49 (i982), pp. 10 3-28; Talal Asad, 'Anthropological
conceptions of religion: reflectionson Geertz', Man, 18 (1983), pp. 237-59; Paul Shankman, 'The
thick and the thin: on the interpretive theoretical program of Clifford Geertz', Current Anthropology,
25 (I984), pp. 261-79; V. Valeri and Roger M. Keesing, 'Anthropology as interpretive quest',
CurrentAnthropology, 28 (I987), pp. 355-7.
25
Clifford Geertz, The interpretation of cultures:selectedessays(New York, I973), pp. 3-30.
26 27 28 Ibid.,
Ibid., pp. 412-53. Ibid., p. 437. pp. 417, 448.
626 HISTORICAL JOURNAL
in the universality of his conclusions appears to rest upon an unwarranted conflation of
the cockfighterswith 'the Balinese', for looking closely it becomes clear that 'much of
Bali' never gets anywhere near a cock ring. Children are excluded, so are young adults,
the very poor, and all women of all ages - as Geertz noted, 'Cockfighting is ... not for
youth, women, subordinates, and so forth'.29Furthermore,the 'deep play', and it is in
these matches that individuals invest status rather than the 'shallow play' of low stake
matches, is hardly the province of all. Deep play involves high money betting, but
precisely because betting is high in this, a poor peasant society, many of the regular
petty gamblers find themselveswith few opportunitiesfor deep play. Deep play, it turns
out, is for 'the really substantial members of the community, the solid citizenry around
whom local life revolves'.3 It may very well be a vehicle for the expression of status
concerns, but the position of high level betting cockfighting in Balinese culture is more
marginal than Geertz admits, and the significance of this conclusion is therefore more
problematical than he acknowledges.His account uncannily mimics the exclusion of the
young, the poor, and the female from an important social arena and there is something
unsettling about work that so complacently glosses these exclusions. One is led to
question what function these careful excisions of the subordinate majority from the
historical or anthropological record might serve in our own culture. At the least, the
political implications of modern scholarship that perpetuates the marginalization of
subordinate social groups should not be left unchallenged.
Of course, one might attempt to extend such an analysis by searching for more
meanings, but seeking to recover the meaning of the cock ring to those excluded from
it, whether for reasons of age, poverty, or gender. But however many meanings we
uncover for the Balinese cockfight, there are featuresof the cockfight that this approach
altogether fails to capture. Looking at the cock ring again it appears not simply as a
place of play, nor even as a stage for the ritual display of family pride; it looks very much
like a site of conflict. The urban elite and intelligentsia disdain to enter the cockpit - 'It
sees cockfighting as "primitive", "backward", "unprogressive", and generally
unbecoming an ambitious nation'31 and in their wisdom have elaborated criminal
sanctions designed to punish anyone who does. The prohibition of cockfightingsuggests
a very different context for cockfighting from that stressed by Geertz- that not of
Balinese culture, but of Balinese politics. Prima facie, there are no reasonsfor privileging
the 'meaning' of sport over the politics of sport, and there is something hopelessly
incomplete about an account of popular culture which does not address the pressures,
political and legal, circumscribingits very existence.
Where historiansof Britain have sought to 'read through' sportsand customs in quest
of their meaning, identical problems appear. Some of the most reflective work on
recreation produced in the first wave of interest in popular culture was contained in
Ross McKibbin's studies of hobbies and gambling in early twentieth-century Britain.32
His work on gambling promised to consider the 'part it played in the economic and
intellectual environment of the working class', and concluded that betting was a
rational activity for the working class, offering an opportunity for mental stimulation
that its members were otherwise too frequently denied.33Yet whilst offering valuable

29 Ibid., p. 440. 30 Ibid., p. 435. 31 Ibid., p. 414.

32
Ross McKibbin, 'Working-class gambling', and idem, 'Work and hobbies', both reprinted
in his Ideologiesof class: socialrelationsin Britain,188o-195o(Oxford, 1990), pp. ioI-66.
33 Ibid., p. ioI.
 HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 627
insights into the meaning of gambling for those who enjoyed it, there are significant
aspects of working-class betting that this account does not explore. A major source of
evidence for McKibbin's study of gambling was police records, for cash betting was not
only rational for the working classes; it was also illegal. Fines and imprisonment could,
and indeed did, follow for those found guilty of placing or accepting off-coursecash bets.
However, early twentieth-century gambling laws were the product of a very unequal
society, and embodied a fitting sense of social discrimination: thus credit betting,
inevitably the privilege of the wealthy, had not been classified as a criminal offence.34
In consequence, betting legislation bore down on society very unequally, and was
integral in shaping a working-classgambling culture that was fundamentally different
from that of wealthier citizens. More generally, the sheer poverty of early twentieth-
century manual workers severely restricted the scale and the scope of working-class
gambling, and was also instrumental in shaping the gambling culture that McKibbin
described. In sum, the distribution of power, authority, and wealth inflected and
constrained all working-class experiences of betting. These were forces which had laid
down the possible ways in which gambling might be experienced by the working class,
they are central to understanding why popular gambling took the form it did, and any
account which fails to address them is leaving significant parts of the historical record
unexplored.
Much that has been written about the meaning of popular culture, with its focus on
experience, is similarly unable to get to grips with the way in which forces beyond
working-class control shaped and defined the custom under consideration.35Popular
customs have generally been allowed to exist in conditions determined to at least some
degree by individuals not enjoying the practice under consideration, and a full account
of cultural forms therefore needs to address forces beyond popular control. The
meanings and significance that have been assigned to customs and recreationsmay well
be valid, and they are certainly not without interest. But the privileging of meaning, and
almost total exclusion of the operation of power and social inequality, have also served
to produce a number of studies of popular culture that are at best incomplete, and at
worst misleading. Although it is clearly important to understand cultural practice from
the perspective of those engaged in it, the challenge for historians of popular culture
must be to integrate popular cultural experiences with the power structures that
variously encouraged, permitted, and suppressed them.

34 Mark Clapson, A bit of a flutter;populargamblingandEnglishsociety,1823-ig61 (Manchester,

1992), pp. 14-78.
35 In addition to the references cited in notes 21-3 see David Underdown: 'Historians of
popular culture inevitably have to start with the formsin which culture is expressed- the mask, the
ritual, the dance ... but object of the exercise is to get at the values, and we can only do this by
decoding the expressive forms', in Underdown, 'Regional cultures?', in Tim Harris, ed., Popular
culture in England, c. I500-1850 (London, 1995), p. 29. See also Borsay, '"All the town's a stage":
urban ritual and ceremony, I660-800oo',in Peter Clark, ed., Thetransformationof Englishprovincial
towns(London, 1984), pp. 243-6; Douglas A. Reid, 'Brutes and beasts: popular blood sports,
c. I780-I860', in Richard Holt, ed., Sportandtheworkingclassin modern
Britain(Manchester, 1990);
David Cressy, 'The Fifth of November remembered', in Roy Porter, ed., Myths of the English
(Cambridge, 1992), pp. 68-90; Martin Walsh, 'November bull-running in Stamford
Lincolnshire', Journal of Popular Culture,30 (1996), pp. 233-47; Gary Owens, 'Nationalism without
words: symbolism and ritual behaviour in the repeal " Monster Meetings " of 1843-1845', inJames
Donnelly and Kerby Miller eds., Irishpopularculture,i65o-i850 (Dublin, 1998).
628 HISTORICAL JOURNAL

III
It is to be doubted whether the history of popular culture has moved in this direction in
the past decade. In outline, two developments stand out as being of particular
significance. In the first instance there has been a tendency to think more carefully
about what 'popular culture' might actually be. The expression has been scrutinized
with ever more care, and the difficulty of providing clear definitions of a 'culture' that
is genuinely 'popular' has contributed to a growing sense of anxiety about the existence
of a popular culture, and pessimism about the possibility of our researching and
comprehending it. Yet of no less significance than these developments on the conceptual
plane have been those on the historiographical level. As the discipline has become
increasingly reflexive and careful about its use of the term popular culture, research has
waned into those practices which were once unproblematically explored in books and
-
essays about 'popular culture' bull-baiting, dancing, music, football, wakes, fairs, and
so forth. The rather infrequent contributions to the history of the pleasures and pastimes
of the poor during the past decade have only rarely been informed by the new thinking,
and a more traditional style of inquiry has managed to survive unaffected by new ideas
about the nature of popular culture. The most recent contributions continue for the
most part to be written in an older social history tradition. They are based on archival
research, and are essentially investigative, more interested in counting and describing
customs than interpreting them, and consequently failing to link them to broader
processes of social and economic change.
Although debate and reflection about the term popular culture has been continuous
since the inception of research into this area, a number of interventions in the last
decade have set out explicitly to challenge the main supports of what is taken to be the
discipline's original conceptual framework.36 As might be predicted, at the heart of new
thinking lies a desire to introduce a greater degree of complexity and sophistication into
our understanding and analyses of popular cultural practice. The idea of one common
culture - a set of customs and practices - that is shared by all the poor has therefore
been challenged. It is argued that the diversity of cultural practices amongst the
subordinate classes undermines the idea of one culture belonging to the poor, and
suggested that historians of popular culture should investigate these tensions, divisions,
and oppositions, rather than obliterate differences in an endeavour to provide tidy
accounts of social and cultural practices and change. In opposition to the generalizing
tendencies of the early historiography of popular culture, we are now urged to explore
with greater care and precision the ways in which factors such as age, gender, religion,
and locality fractured the unity of cultural practice.
And just as the notion of a culture shared by the poor has been questioned, so has the
idea of a culture that is confined to the poor been scrutinized and found wanting. Critics
have claimed that early studies of popular culture assumed the existence of two distinct
social groups - the elite and the popular - and believed that customs, beliefs, and values

36
See Tim Harris, 'Problematising popular culture', in Harris, ed., Popularculturein England;
Barry Reay, Popularculturesin England,J550-1750 (Harlow, I998) ;John Mullan and Christopher
popularculture:a selection(Oxford, 2000). See also Simon Dentith, Societyand
Reid, Eighteenth-century
England(London,I998). Steven Kaplan's earlier edited volume on
in nineteenth-century
culturalforms
popular culture in early modern Europe prefaced some of these ideas. See Kaplan, Understanding
popularculture:Europefrom themiddleagesto thenineteenthcentury(Berlin,I984).
 HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 629
were sometimes shared by both groups, at other times the preserve of only one. It is
argued that cultural practices cannot be directly mapped on to sections of society in the
way this model supposes, that actions, objects, and beliefs are forever moving beyond
the confines of the social groups to which they are supposed to belong. The idea of
'appropriation' is introduced, not simply to express the circulation of cultural practices
throughout the ranks of society, but also to emphasize the way in which these practices
were simultaneously put to different uses by different social strata.
For all that these new ideas have been defined in opposition to the first generation of
research into popular culture, it should be recognized that there is little in this that is
particularly novel. As might be expected from an academic community in the process
of carving out a new area of research, a not inconsiderable degree of effort was initially
devoted to discussingand defining the subject of research.37And if early researchersdid
not talk about the 'fracturing' or 'fissuring' of popular culture, they nevertheless
captured something of these ideas in their discussions about the heterogeneity of the
customs and beliefs of the people they studied. Peter Burke's seminal text on popular
culture, for example, devoted a chapter to exploring the 'unity and variety' of popular
culture, and suggested we should replace the notion of one plebeian culture with that
of numerous popular cultures, each varying according to age, gender, and location.38It
was a constant refrain in the early literature on popular culture that the customs and
practices under consideration could not be neatly located in one social group. In both
theoretical overviews and carefully researched case studies, it was repeatedly pointed
out that an improving wing of the working class was as hostile to certain popular
traditions as the most fervent middle-classreformer;whilst some social elites, motivated
either by a desire for social control or by traditional values, were to be found amongst
the most committed and powerful defenders of plebeian culture.39Divisions within the
culture of the common people and moments of consensus across classes were widely
recognized from the outset.
It is not then in recognizing the complexity and variety of plebeian custom and
culture that new writing on popular culture differs from what preceded; it is rather the
handling of this diversity that distinguishes the two traditions. If early writers had
indeed noticed that the popular culture they were studying failed to correspond clearly
with a particular section of society, it is none the less fair to say that the ramifications
of these observationswere never quite fully incorporated into the final narrative. In the
end, these reservations would somehow be put to one side, so that the main trends of
social change were not obscured. There was consequently an ongoing and unresolved
tension in much of this early work, an awareness on the one hand of the complexity of
the relationship between the culture and the society, and a desire on the other to
37 Keith A. P. Sandiford, 'The Victorians at play: problems in historiographicalmethodology',
Journal of Social History, 15 (1981), pp. 271-88; Stuart Hall, 'Notes on deconstructing "the
I
popular" ', in Raphael Samuel, ed., People'shistoryandsocialisttheory(London, 98 ); Bob Scribner,
'Is a history of popular culture possible?', Historyof European
Ideas,19 (1989), pp. 175-9 ; see also
the introductory essays in the following edited volumes: Michael Marrus, ed., The emergence of
leisure(New York, 1974); Yeo and Yeo, eds., Popularculture,Storch, ed., Popularculture;Easton et
al., Disorderanddiscipline. 38 Burke, Popularculture,pp. 23-64.
39 See in
particular Robert Storch, '"Please to remember the Fifth of November": conflict,
solidarity and public order in southern England, 8815- 900', in Storch, Popularculture,pp. 71-99,
esp. pp. 76-8, 8o; David Vincent, 'The decline of the oral tradition in popular culture', in Storch,
ed., Popularculture,pp. 20-47, esp. pp. 40-2; Anthony Delves, 'Popular recreation and social
conflict in Derby, i8oo-i850', in Yeo and Yeo, eds., Popularculture,pp. 89-127.
630 HISTORICAL JOURNAL

simplify this relationship so that some coherent story about the changing cultural life of
the poor might be delineated.
The response of recent critics to this tension appears to be to that we should abandon
the attempt to provide general accounts of historical change altogether. Rather than
cast the cultural divisions, tensions, and unexpected similarities within and between
social classes to one side, this very heterogeneity is to become the focus of study; we
should be concerned, in the words of Tim Harris, with the 'the diversities within
popular culture itself'.40 In this new cultural history, the elucidation of difference ceases
to undermine the big story; it becomes the point of the story. And if observations
concerning the muddle and complexity that characterize popular culture are nothing
new, the suggestion that historians should occupy themselves with untangling and
deciphering this diversity does amount to significant departure in the agenda of social
history. At stake here is a redefinition of the very purpose of writing about the customs
and culture of the poor. This revisionism is rapidly becoming established as a new
orthodoxy, yet before accepting that this is the way for the discipline to move forward,
it ought to be scrutinized further.
In this, our point of departure should be the work of Roger Chartier, who developed
the concept of appropriation in the course of his work on the bibliothequebleue, the
chapbooks sold by peddlers in early modern France, and which has proved so influential
in the developing field of cultural history.41 Chartier's suggestion that the chapbooks
were widely shared cultural products, weaving their way through French society
heedless of conventional distinctions of rank and status fits very well for the books for
which he developed it. So too does his assertion that the starting point of analysis needs
to be the cultural product - in this instance the chapbooks - rather than the social
group to which it is assumed they belong. What remains to be considered, however, is
whether all other cultural products travel so freely through society, whether starting
with the product rather than the people is an insight with universal rather than specific
application.
We might consider the case of popular music. At first sight this seems to provide
valuable support for the concept of appropriation, as researchers have uncovered
numerous ways in which musical forms passed through the different ranks of society. To
take one of many examples from Dave Russell's Popular music in England, Handel's
Messiah, the preserve of high culture through much of the eighteenth century, was
transmitted to the humbler ranks of society in the course of the nineteenth, through
Methodism and the newly created choral movement.42 Equally, the music hall provides
numerous examples of cultural overlap: the varied social composition of music hall
audiences; the wide social backgrounds of music hall performers; and the complex and
ambivalent attitude of working-class leaders towards music hall entertainment belie
attempts to categorize the music hall as an authentic expression of working-class
culture.43 On the back of examples such as these one might well object to any attempt

40
Harris, 'Problematising', p. 5.
41
Many of these ideas were developed in the work of Roger Chartier. See Chartier, 'Culture as
appropriation; popular culture uses in early modern France', in Kaplan, ed., Understanding popular
culture;Chartier, The culturaluseof printin earlymodernFrance(Princeton, I987), pp. 3-12.
42 Dave Russell,
Popularmusicin England,I840o-9I4 (Manchester, 1987), pp. I54-5, 2 10-I 5
43 Dagmar Hoher, 'The composition of music hall audiences, 1850- 900 ', and Lois Rutherford,
' "Managers in a small way": the professionalizationof variety artistes, 186o- 914', both in Peter
Bailey, ed., Musichall: thebusinessof pleasure(Milton Keynes, 1986), pp. 73-92.
 HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 63I
to map certain musical formsand preferencesonto certain social groups, and argue that
it is the cultural product, and not the social level that should be the starting point of
analysis.
However, two decades of researchinto popular music also provide some indication of
the possible limitations of this approach. It has demonstrated, for example, that music,
particularly the music of high culture, did not simply float into the lives of the poor; it
was taken there by employers, educators, philanthropists, working-class leaders, and
others.44 Even that quintessential form of working-class music- the brass
band - originated, in the view of one of its historians,with the middle classes.45Equally,
it was rarely left to the poor to put music to the uses that they alone chose; its content,
location, and timing were all affected by the involvement and interferenceof a range of
individuals whose interest in popular music was not recreational. Nowhere is this seen
more clearly than in the commercial music hall. This form of entertainment may have
grown from the informal sing-along in plebeian beerhouses, yet by the end of the
nineteenth century businessmen, social purity campaigners, local councillors, and the
drink trade were all involved in controlling various aspects of this musical en-
tertainment.46So whilst there may be instances in which it is appropriate to envisage
musical forms as an autonomous cultural product, passing through society and being
put to new use by different social strata, there are arguably also occasions when it is not.
Society was not a neutral and passive recipient of culture, but was actively involved in
transmitting culture, and in determining the shape and form in which it was made
available to different social groups.
This is not intended to imply that the concept of appropriation is inherently flawed,
simply that its value to the cultural historian may be more limited than has sometimes
been suggested. It rests upon a distinction between cultural forms on the one hand, and
social structureson the other, and the extent to which these may be uncoupled is not in
fact easily known. It is no doubt legitimate of recent critics to suggest that early attempts
to link culture with a specific social group were clumsy and inaccurate, yet this in itself
does not provide good grounds for denying the possibility of significant links existing
between social groups and cultural forms. The nature of the relationship between
cultural practice and social relations surely remains one of the central problems facing
historians of popular culture; and its workings something that needs to be explored,
rather than assumed.
Popular recreations during the eighteenth century illustrate some of the problems
with recent moves to disengage cultural practice from social location. The ancient sport
of bull-baiting, although it had disappeared from most parts of England by the end of
the eighteenth century, continued as a popular and integral element of the wakes
festivities in Birmingham and across the Black Country well into the nineteenth. It
became the focus of local controversy in the first decade of the nineteenth century and
44 This emergesparticularlyclearlyin Russell,Popularmusic,part I. The rolesof working-class
leaders are described in Chris Waters, Britishsocialistsand thepoliticsof popularculture,I884-19g4
(Manchester, 1990), pp. 97-103.
45 TrevorHerbert,'Nineteenth-century bands: the makingof a movement',in idem, ed.,
Bands: thebrassbandmovement
in thenineteenth
andtwentiethcenturies(Milton Keynes, 1991), pp. 7-56,
quoteon p. 49.
46 Susan
Pennybacker,'"It was not what she said, but the way in whichshe said it": the
LondonCountyCounciland the musichalls',and ChrisWaters,'Manchestermoralityand the
Londoncapital:the battleover the Palaceof Varieties',bothin Bailey,ed., Musichall.See also
Kift, Victorian
musichall, pp. 15-74.
632 HISTORICAL JOURNAL
was only eliminated from the district's wakes in the i82os and I83os, following a long-
running and acrimonious series of battles between the bull-baiters and the local forces
of law and order. Yet it is not clear that conceptualizing bull-baiting as a cultural
practice variously 'appropriated' by different members of the local community will
take us far in understanding these events - in explaining the enduring popularity of
bull-baiting, the battles, and the sport's eventual suppression.47
Although ostensibly a 'popular' sport it is certainly true that bull-baiting was not
confined to a distinct social group, and the ways in which it was experienced or
appropriated by different social groups might therefore be explored. Besides looking at
the meaning of bull-baiting for the local workers who participated in the annual
festivities, one might also consider the experience of the small number of nonconformists
drawn from the humbler ranks of society who were opposed to bull-baiting, or search
for members of the local elite oddly tolerant of the ancient sport. Yet the pursuit of such
emphases risks becoming simply banal, offering no more than another restatement of a
well-known commonplace about how every generalization has its exceptions. At the
heart of everyone's experience of bull-baiting lay a conflict between two identifiable
social groups, and although precise definitions of these social groups may elude us, this
fact of social difference needs to be incorporated in our discussions of the history of the
sport.
As the battles over bull-baiting in Black Country townships intensified during the first
quarter of the nineteenth century, a social fault line emerged throughout the region,
consistently splitting those above the rank of the lowliest parish officer, from those
below. The bull-baiters reported in local newspapers were, without exception, engaged
in manual occupations- carters, iron-workers, labourers - whilst those involved in
parish government, the clergy, and other self-styled 'respectable' members of society
were united in their opposition to the sport. No doubt the majority of people, at all levels
of society, were indifferent to the continuation or otherwise of bull-baiting, yet
recognizing the social divisions surrounding the sport opens the possibility of a new
understanding of both the popularity and the controversy surrounding bull-baiting in
this region in the early nineteenth century.
The social difference between those who sought to suppress bull-baiting and those
who repeatedly defied their wishes was clearly understood by all those involved in the
annual battles over the sport, serving to raise the stakes each year and to invest the
pastime with ever more meaning and significance to those who supported it. Repeated
official interference in this element of plebeian recreation was resented as an unjustified
incursion into the rights of the local community to organize and enjoy their annual
holidays in the time-honoured way. The social coherency of this 'local community'
might well dissolve with closer scrutiny, but this does not mean that its significance
should be marginalized. It was a social category with meaning to those who positioned
themselves both within and outside it. It was used by all those involved in the battles
over bull-baiting as a basis for action, and is integral to understanding why the conflict
took the form it did.
Furthermore, social position was certainly instrumental in deciding the conclusion
that the battles over bull-baiting eventually reached. When individuals experienced or
appropriated bull-baiting, they did so from very different positions of power, and it is
not possible to understand the suppression of bull-baiting without reference to this social
47 What follows is based on my PhD thesis. See E. A. Griffin, 'Popular sports and celebrations
in England, I66o--1850 (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 2000) ch. 6, passim.
 HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 633
inequality. Local officials did not simply appropriate bull-baiting, they used the
mechanisms of power at their disposal to eliminate it. Equally, it was the political
weakness of the working population that fatally undermined their attempts to continue
to honour their annual tradition of bull-baiting. Any account of the changes undergone
in this cultural form in the early nineteenth century needs to consider the social rank of
its different appropriators,and an analysis of the social location of the sport should not
be too quickly dismissed as an out-dated and obviously flawed approach.
There is also something familiar about the idea of culture as appropriation, despite
the new vocabulary in which it is now discussed. In essence, it aims to understand the
ways in which individuals experienced their culture, rather than the ways in which
society made culture available to those individuals. As such, it amounts to a restatement,
albeit one of greater sophistication, of the importance of uncovering the meaning of
customs, cultures, and practice to their participants.And as such, it also succumbs to the
same kinds of criticism. I argued earlier that the search for meaning has gone hand in
hand with a refusal to engage with the way in which structures of domination and
subordination affected the practice of popular culture. The recent stress on cultural
diversity and overlap brings greater sophistication to the search for, and explication of,
meaning in cultural practices that has been so dominant in late twentieth-century
researchinto popular culture, but it does not offer a radically new interpretation of the
historical significance of these practices. It sanctions, even promotes, a scholarly
approach that remains closed to the political dynamic.
The depoliticizing tendencies of these new ideas is evident in Barry Reay's recent
survey of Popularculturesin England,I550-750.48 A chapter on riots explores the many
faces of the early modern riot; their uneven spread, chronologically and geographically;
the inclusion of both genders in the crowd; and the complex social composition of the
rioters in different contexts. Yet for all its sensitivity towards the complexity of riot, this
work never really comes to grips with the power with which social inequality forced the
patterns of behaviour described. At the heart of every rioting community lay a
fundamental imbalance between those who rioted, and those who called in the
dragoons, between those with access to local resources and the formal mechanisms of
power, and those who resortedto rioting, precisely because they did not. Of course Reay
is not unaware of the way in which social inequalities influenced the timing, nature, and
outcome of early modern riots.49The problem, however, is that this observation is left
in much the same position as early social historians trying to deal with the problem of
cultural variety and social diversity: having been acknowledged, it nevertheless does
not quite manage to make it into the final narrative. And in consequence, one is left
wondering whether the most fitting conceptual framework has been adopted.
Recent books in the 'Studies in popular culture' series from Manchester University
Press present an alternative way of understanding historical processes. Contributors to
this series have taken steps towards reconciling the search for complex and multiple
images and meanings with an older social history tradition emphasizing the social and
economic context within which cultures were created, sustained, and modified.50
Matthew Hilton's Smokingin Britishpopularculture,for example, explores the iconography
48
Barry Reay, Popularculturesin England,I55o-i750 (Harlow, I998).
49
Ibid., pp. i68-97, esp. pp. I89-94, i96.
5 Sean O'Connell, The car in Britishsociety:class, genderand motoring,i896-i939 (Manchester,
I998); John Walton, Britishseaside:holidaysandresortsin thetwentiethcentury(Manchester, 2000);
Matthew Hilton, Smoking in British popular culture, I800-2000: perfectpleasures
(Manchester, 2000).
634 HISTORICAL JOURNAL
and meaning of the cigarette and the ways in which they differed between social groups,
genders, and generations, but never loses sight of the fact that tobacco was also a
commodity made available to consumers through the market. Hilton goes beyond
merely enumerating and describing the different cultures of smoking within society and
over time, and examines the relationship between those cultures and the economy that
sustained them. Sean O'Connell provides a similarly rounded account of the rise of the
motor car in the first half of the twentieth century. He explores both the significance and
meaning of cars to those who owned them, and how the wealth and power of these
owners determined transport policy and influenced the integration of the car into
English society.
New books such as these testify to the ongoing interest in popular culture, yet they
also illustrate the extent to which the meaning of the expression has changed since its
introduction into academic history in the 1970s. In the first generation of research,
popular culture was closely associated with the festive and recreational. In the past
decade the concept of'popular culture' has become steadily more embracive, and its
connection with holidays and play has weakened. Popular culture is usually taken now
to refer loosely to the social, as opposed to the purely recreational, lives of the poor. Thus
Tim Harris's edited collection on Popular culturein England, 1500-1850 contains essays on
gender, religion, health, and work- subjects that once fell under the rubric of social
history. Equally, the Manchester University Press series takes a broad view of popular
culture, one which embraces in addition to cinema, music, and drinking, science,
spiritualism, and sex.51
At the same time, research on those topics that were formerly understood by the term
popular culture has become ever further removed from the academic mainstream. The
early literature on festivals and recreations set out to do more than provide colourful
and interesting descriptions of the customs and lore of the common folk of yesteryear.
Rather, it used these as a point of entry into a range of broader phenomena. There was
always a purpose to studying popular culture, it shed light on something else, it told us
something about the social consequences of the industrial revolution, of class conflict, of
the values of ordinary people. In the words of E. P. Thompson, wife sales offered a
' small window' into the lives of the poor that might be used to 'tease out what insights
we can into the norms and sensibility of a lost culture, and into the interior crises of the
poor'.2 This attempt to use exceptional moments in the lives of the poor to address
broader historical questions served to produce a body of literature that consistently
made its presence felt on the wider historiography of industrializing England, and it is
this that current research on the role of custom and recreation in plebeian life is largely
failing to do. In the past decade, research on popular culture has increasingly shied
away from larger conceptual or historical concerns, and in consequence the history of
play and festivity is currently only weakly integrated into our current understanding of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.
There are of course a handful of important exceptions to this. For example, Ronald
Hutton's Rise andfall of merryEngland provides extremely detailed archival research on
the timing and extent of parish festivities in the three centuries before 17o0, yet also
succeeds in relating this to wider questions about social and economic change.53 The
51 See also the
topics covered in Mullan and Reid's reader in popular culture, Eighteenth-century
popularculture. 52 Thompson, Customsin common, p. 407.
53 Ronald Hutton, Theriseandfall of merryEngland:theritualyear,I400-I700 (Oxford, 1994). See
also his Thestationsof thesun: A historyof theritualyearin Britain(Oxford, I996).
 HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 635
focus on class and gender in Peter Bailey's work on the nineteenth-century music hall,
recently collected together in Popular cultureandperformancein the Victoriancity, extends the
appeal of the work to researchers outside the field of late nineteenth-century musical
entertainment.54 A recent book on popular culture in Ireland likewise continues the
tradition of seeking connections between the recreational moments of village life and
broader historical processes.55 But these works stand apart for their commitment to
relate popular culture to concepts, arguments, and concerns of interest to the wider
historical community. With these exceptions, the history of custom, tradition, and
recreation is largely retreating from theory, and the opportunity to use popular culture
to extend our appreciation of some of the social ramifications of industrialization is not
therefore being exploited to the full.56
We develop concepts and vocabulary because they perform a valuable service for us,
foregrounding certain themes and ideas, and placing new problems on the historical
agenda. The concept of'popular culture' as developed in the I970s has served us
admirably in this respect. It placed the poor at the centre of interest and focused
attention on the neglected majority. Furthermore, it not only provided a way into the
lives of people who did not leave behind libraries and estate papers, it also took their
experiences to address a range of broader questions about social and historical change
during the period of industrialization. The history of popular culture still has the power
to achieve these goals, and the recent lull in research and retreat from theory are both
therefore to be regretted. The field requires the continual development and refinement
of concepts and frameworks. In this way it continues to offer the promise of research that
is both of intrinsic interest and of broader historical significance.

54 Peter Bailey, Popularcultureandperformance in the Victoriancity (Cambridge, i998).

55James Donnelly and Kerby Miller, Irishpopularculture,1650o-85o (Dublin, I998). See also
Richard Suggett, 'Festivals and social structure in early modern Wales', Past and Present,152
(1996), pp. 79-I I2; Mike Huggins, Flat racingandBritishsociety,i790-I914 (London, 2000); David
Underdown, Startof play: cricketandculturein eighteenth-century England(Harmondsworth, 2000).
56 J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, The makingof the modernChristmas(London, 1986); Lyn
Murfin, Popularleisurein the LakeCounties(Manchester, I990); Mark Clapson, A bit of aflutter;
populargamblingandEnglishsociety,i823-g96i (Manchester, 1992); John F. Travis, The rise of the
Devonseasideresorts,i75o-i9oo (Exeter, I993); Peter Haydon, The Englishpub: a history(London,
1994); Keith A. P. Sandiford, Cricketandthe Victorians (Aldershot, I994); PaulJennings, Thepublic
housein Bradford,i770-1970 (Keele, 1995); Roger Munting, An economic andsocialhistoryof gambling
in BritainandtheUSA (Manchester, 1996); Stephen Fisher, ed., Recreation andthesea (Exeter, 1997);
Derek Birley, A socialhistoryof Englishcricket(London, 1999); Dennis Brailsford,A tastefordiversions:
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