Sources and References

Core theoretical texts — Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Chatto & Windus, 1958); Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford UP, 1977); Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Fontana, 1976); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Hoare & Nowell Smith (Lawrence & Wishart, 1971); Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language (Hutchinson, 1980); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard UP, 1984); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (U of California Press, 1984); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Social Studies Association, 1944; Verso, 1997); John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 8th ed. (Routledge, 2018)

Early modern popular culture — Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; 4th ed. Routledge, 2022); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (MIT Press, 1968); E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Merlin Press, 1991); Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford UP, 2000); Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge UP, 1987)

Witchcraft and magic — Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (Routledge, 1970); Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 1994); Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale UP, 2004); Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (Routledge, 1996)

Crime and punishment — Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Pantheon, 1977); V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford UP, 1994); Lincoln Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography (Cambridge UP, 1987)

Sport and leisure — Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (Columbia UP, 1978); Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge UP, 1983); Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester 1900–1939 (Open UP, 1992)

Media, youth culture, and subcultures — Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, 1979); Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (Hutchinson, 1976); Simon Frith, The Sociology of Rock (Constable, 1978); Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock (Pantheon, 1981); Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (Macmillan, 1991)

Consumer culture and advertising — Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Macmillan, 1899); Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867); Naomi Klein, No Logo (Knopf Canada, 1999); Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Polity, 2007)

Fashion and dress — Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Hill & Wang, 1983); Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Virago, 1985); Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (Kodansha, 1994); Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester UP, 1999); Angela McRobbie, British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (Routledge, 1998)

Food and drink — Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Viking, 1985); George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Pine Forge Press, 1993); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (MIT Press, 1989); Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830 (Longman, 1983); Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872 (Faber, 1971)

Comics and popular literature — Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (Rinehart, 1954); Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (Routledge, 1993); Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2001); Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2015); Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (U of North Carolina Press, 1984)

Digital culture and participatory media — Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Routledge, 1992); Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York UP, 2006); Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford UP, 1976); Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (Penguin Press, 2011); Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (Knopf, 2016); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019)

Online resources — Wikipedia: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies; Carnivalesque; The Newgate Calendar; Music hall; Great Exhibition; Penny press; The Theory of the Leisure Class; Sexual revolution; Victorian morality; Comics Code Authority; Sumptuary law; McDonaldization; Henry Jenkins; Subculture: The Meaning of Style; Fast fashion; English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries; History of arcade video games

Chapter 1: Defining Popular Culture — Theory, Debate, and Method

The Difficulty of Definition

Few concepts in the humanities resist easy definition as stubbornly as popular culture. At first glance the phrase seems self-evident: it refers to the cultural forms and practices that most people actually engage with — songs, stories, festivals, sports, newspapers, films, fashions. Yet at every point the apparent simplicity dissolves. “Popular” can mean produced by the people, consumed by the people, or simply enjoyed widely, and these three meanings do not always coincide. “Culture” carries its own freight, oscillating in English usage between an elevated achievement (a person of culture) and an anthropological description of any shared way of life. The tension between these senses has structured two centuries of debate and continues to animate the field.

One place to begin is with the distinction between high culture and low culture, a binary that crystallised in the nineteenth century but whose roots run deeper. High culture — opera, classical literature, oil painting, academic philosophy — was understood by its champions as the repository of civilisation’s finest achievements, requiring education and cultivation to appreciate. Low or popular culture — broadside ballads, carnival games, melodrama, sensational fiction — was dismissed as cheap, formulaic, and intellectually passive. This hierarchy was never merely aesthetic: it mapped onto class, gender, and race, functioning as a technology of social distinction. To police the boundary between high and low was simultaneously to police the boundary between the educated and the unlettered, the respectable and the vulgar.

The high/low distinction was challenged most forcefully in the twentieth century by scholars who insisted that all cultural forms deserved serious historical and analytical attention. The emergence of cultural studies as a discipline is inseparable from this challenge. Yet even the challenge was not simple: to argue that popular culture is worthy of study is not the same as arguing that it is unaffected by relations of power, or that commercial entertainment is innocent of ideology. The most productive scholarship in this field has held both propositions simultaneously — insisting on the analytical seriousness of popular forms while refusing to romanticise them.

Raymond Williams: Culture as a Whole Way of Life

The Welsh critic and novelist Raymond Williams (1921–1988) was among the first British intellectuals to dismantle the hierarchical conception of culture from within a broadly Marxist framework. Born into a working-class family in the Welsh border country, Williams was acutely aware of the class politics embedded in cultural judgements — aware, that is, of the way in which the very category of “culture” had been constructed to exclude the lives and experiences of people like himself. In Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), Williams argued that culture is not a select canon of masterworks but “a whole way of life” — the sum total of meanings, practices, and values through which people make sense of their experience. This definition deliberately included the quotidian, the vernacular, and the demotic.

Williams was equally insistent that cultural forms are not static. In Marxism and Literature (1977) he proposed a threefold dynamic: the residual (forms inherited from earlier social configurations that persist, sometimes in transformed shape), the dominant (the central, hegemonic cultural mode of the present), and the emergent (new practices and meanings that contest or supplement the dominant). This schema has proved enormously generative for historians of popular culture because it explains how older festive traditions can survive under capitalism, how working-class culture can simultaneously reproduce and resist bourgeois ideology, and how new forms — rock and roll, cinema, the tabloid press — can carry genuinely transgressive potential even as they are rapidly absorbed into commercial structures.

Williams also contributed the notion of a structure of feeling: the lived, pre-systematic experience of a particular period or class, the atmosphere of a moment before it has been rationalised into explicit doctrine. This concept encourages historians to attend to the affective and embodied dimensions of popular culture — what it felt like to attend a public execution, to sing in a music hall, to read a penny dreadful — rather than reducing culture to ideological function. A structure of feeling is, in Williams’s formulation, not a fixed ideology but a set of characteristic tensions, pressures, and experiences that are “at the very edge of semantic availability.” This makes it especially useful for capturing the lived texture of popular cultural participation, which so often escapes the categories of explicit belief.

Antonio Gramsci and the Concept of Hegemony

The Italian communist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), writing in the oppressive conditions of Mussolini’s prisons, developed the concept of hegemony that has become perhaps the single most important tool in the study of popular culture. Gramsci distinguished between domination by brute force and the subtler, more durable domination exercised through consent. A ruling class achieves hegemony when its particular worldview — its values, assumptions, common sense, aesthetic norms — comes to seem natural and universal rather than partial and interested. The dominated classes do not simply have ideology imposed upon them; they actively participate in reproducing it, because the hegemonic order offers genuine (if limited) satisfactions and incorporates elements of subordinate experience.

For popular culture, this insight is transformative. Popular entertainment is not simply a distraction (“bread and circuses”) deployed by elites to pacify the masses, nor is it straightforwardly the authentic expression of working-class consciousness. It is rather a site of negotiation and contest, in which dominant meanings are reproduced, modified, and occasionally challenged. The music hall song that mocks the aristocracy and the song that celebrates imperial conquest can coexist in the same repertoire; the newspaper that gives workers vicarious pleasure in crime also normalises police authority. Gramsci’s hegemony directs our attention to these complexities rather than to a simple binary of domination and resistance.

A further Gramscian contribution is the figure of the organic intellectual — the thinker who emerges from and articulates the worldview of a subordinate class rather than serving the dominant one. This concept productively reframes popular cultural producers: the ballad singer, the satirical pamphleteer, the stand-up comedian may all function, in different circumstances, as organic intellectuals of the working class. Crucially, hegemony for Gramsci is never fixed or complete; it must be continuously reproduced, and this continuous reproduction creates the space for what he calls a “war of position” — the gradual contestation of cultural ground that precedes any more dramatic political transformation.

Stuart Hall and the Birmingham CCCS

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), established at the University of Birmingham in 1964 and initially directed by Richard Hoggart, became the institutional home for a generation of British cultural studies scholars who took Gramsci’s framework and combined it with semiotics, psychoanalysis, and empirical attention to lived experience. Hoggart’s own The Uses of Literacy (1957) had been a foundational text, combining autobiographical memoir with sociological analysis to celebrate the vitality of traditional northern English working-class culture while lamenting what Hoggart saw as its corruption by Americanised mass entertainment. This ambivalence — respect for popular culture combined with anxiety about its commercial deformation — characterised much early CCCS work.

The Centre was transformed under the directorship of Stuart Hall (1968–1979) into a major international intellectual force. Hall (1932–2014), a Jamaican-British theorist who had come to Britain on a Rhodes scholarship in 1951, brought to the CCCS a sensitivity to race, diaspora, and postcolonial experience that fundamentally enriched its analysis of British popular culture. His 1973 paper “Encoding/Decoding” challenged the prevailing transmission model of communication, which imagined a sender encoding a message that a receiver decoded without distortion. Hall argued instead that encoding and decoding are distinct moments, each shaped by different social and discursive positions, and that the relationship between them is never guaranteed. He identified three typical modes of reading:

Hall’s framework has been applied far beyond television to literature, cinema, fashion, music, and sport. Its central insight — that cultural meaning is not fixed in the text but produced in the encounter between text and reader, a socially situated encounter — underpins most contemporary cultural history.

Beyond encoding/decoding, the CCCS produced path-breaking work on subcultures (Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979), race and representation (Hall’s own Policing the Crisis, 1978, which analysed the moral panic over “mugging” as a displacement of anxieties about British economic decline and postcolonial immigration), and feminist interventions into the male-dominated study of working-class culture (Angela McRobbie, Charlotte Brunsdon). The CCCS was closed by the University of Birmingham in 2002 in a decision widely condemned as an act of institutional philistinism, but its intellectual legacy remains foundational for cultural studies internationally.

Pierre Bourdieu: Taste, Distinction, and Cultural Capital

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) offers a different but complementary account of cultural hierarchy. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979/1984), Bourdieu deployed extensive empirical survey data on French cultural consumption — covering everything from musical preferences and museum-going to food choices and furnishing styles — to argue that taste is not a natural faculty but a socially acquired disposition. Different class fractions are systematically socialised into different aesthetic preferences — the working class valuing function, directness, and immediate bodily pleasure; the bourgeoisie performing a “pure gaze” that aestheticises form and disavows function.

The key concept here is cultural capital: the ensemble of knowledge, skills, credentials, and aesthetic dispositions that function analogously to economic capital in conferring social advantage. Cultural capital can be embodied (in habits of speech, deportment, and taste), objectified (in books, artworks, and musical instruments), or institutionalised (in educational qualifications). It is inherited and transmitted across generations but through mechanisms sufficiently opaque to make privilege appear as personal merit.

Bourdieu’s analysis explains why cultural hierarchies are simultaneously arbitrary and fiercely defended: they are arbitrary because there is nothing intrinsically superior about liking Bach over the Beatles, but they are defended precisely because they serve as markers of class distinction. The apparent naturalness of aesthetic judgement — the feeling that Tchaikovsky is “obviously” more sophisticated than a chart hit — is itself a product of class-specific socialisation. For historians of popular culture, Bourdieu’s framework suggests that campaigns against “vulgar” entertainment are always simultaneously campaigns to enforce class boundaries.

Michel de Certeau: Tactics of the Weak

The French Jesuit historian and theorist Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) offers a third analytical lens, focused less on structure than on the everyday practices through which ordinary people navigate and subvert the systems that govern their lives. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980/1984), de Certeau drew a fundamental distinction between strategies and tactics.

Strategies are the calculative operations of subjects with power — institutions, states, corporations, landlords — who establish a “proper place” from which they can manage their relations with an exterior, whether clients, subjects, or competitors. Tactics are the practices of those without a proper place: they operate within the space established by the strong, seized only at particular moments, making use of opportunities created by circumstance. De Certeau’s canonical examples are poaching (making use of a forest that belongs to someone else), la perruque (doing one’s own work on the employer’s time with the employer’s tools), and the creative misuse of consumer products.

Applied to popular culture, de Certeau’s framework reframes the act of consumption as a form of production. When a working-class audience attends an opera and finds in it meanings its aristocratic patrons never intended; when fans of commercial pop music create elaborate alternative worlds around their favourite stars; when colonised peoples adopt the colonisers’ religion but fill it with their own meanings — all of these are tactical appropriations that resist the strategic logic of cultural producers and distributors. De Certeau insists that the “weak” are never merely passive; there is always a politics of everyday cultural practice, even if it leaves no explicit manifesto.

De Certeau’s framework has proved particularly generative in the digital era, where practices of “poaching” — remixing, fan fiction, meme creation, the creative appropriation of commercial content — have become ubiquitous. Henry Jenkins drew explicitly on de Certeau’s figure of the “textual poacher” in his foundational work on fan culture, which we will encounter in Chapter 14.

Why Study Popular Culture Historically?

It is worth pausing, at the outset of this course, to ask why the history of popular culture deserves sustained scholarly attention. Several answers present themselves. First, popular culture is where most people have spent most of their non-working time: to study it is to study the texture of ordinary life rather than the exception of elite experience. Second, popular culture is a primary site where ideologies are naturalised, contested, and transformed: attending to it is indispensable for any adequate account of how power works in modern societies. Third, popular culture is the medium through which collective identities — national, class, gender, racial, generational — are formed, reproduced, and challenged. To study its history is to understand how we came to be who we are.

The chapters that follow trace the history of popular culture from the festive worlds of medieval and early modern Europe, through the transformations wrought by print, industrialisation, and urbanisation, to the digital landscape of the present. They are organised thematically rather than strictly chronologically, though each chapter attends carefully to historical context and change over time.

Chapter 2: Medieval and Early Modern Popular Culture

The Problem of Evidence

Recovering the popular culture of medieval and early modern Europe is an exercise in reading against the grain of surviving sources. Almost everything that has come down to us was produced by or for literate elites: chronicles, theological treatises, manorial records, legal proceedings. Popular culture was overwhelmingly oral, performative, seasonal, and local — features that leave few traces in the archive. Yet popular culture was not invisible to contemporaries; elites recorded it precisely when it alarmed, entertained, or puzzled them, and from these oblique records historians have reconstructed a rich picture of festive life.

Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978) was the founding synthesis of this field. Burke defined popular culture capaciously as the culture of the “common people” — the non-elite majority — and surveyed it across the continent from about 1500 to 1800, arguing that this culture was coherent, vigorous, and eventually subjected to systematic “reform” by the elites who had earlier participated in it. Burke’s sources included sermons denouncing popular amusements (invaluable precisely because the preacher had to describe what he was condemning), inquisition records, carnival accounts, and the testimony of antiquarians who recorded customs before they disappeared. Each source type carries its own distortions and requires its own critical reading.

The methodological challenges are considerable. How do we reconstruct a culture that was largely pre-literate, that expressed itself in performance and ritual rather than text, and that left records only when it intersected with the institutions of power? Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Carnival in Romans (1979) showed one possible approach: the intensive study of a single, exceptionally well-documented local episode (a bloody carnival in a provincial French town in 1580 that ended in massacre) can illuminate the whole structure of early modern popular culture. Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre (1984) used similar methods — close reading of an apparently bizarre episode (journeymen printers ritually killing their masters’ cats in Paris circa 1730) — to decode the meanings of popular culture from the inside out.

Carnival and the Festive Calendar

The festive calendar of medieval and early modern Europe was extraordinarily dense by modern standards. Religious feasts, seasonal celebrations, civic commemorations, and rites of passage created a rhythm of collective revelry that punctuated the otherwise grinding routine of agricultural labour. Carnival — the period of feasting and licence immediately before Lent — was the most spectacular of these occasions, but it was embedded in a broader culture of festivity that also included Midsummer celebrations, harvest festivals, May Day, saints’ days, and the Twelve Days of Christmas.

The scale and character of carnival varied enormously across Europe. In Venice and in the Italian cities generally, carnival was an extended aristocratic festival, elaborate in its organisation and its visual spectacle; in German towns it took the form of processions and theatrical performances organised by guilds and civic corporations; in rural communities it was a rougher, more spontaneous affair. But certain features recurred across these variations: the wearing of masks and costumes (which allowed temporary suspension of social identity), the inversion of normal hierarchies (the fool becoming king, the master serving the servant), the privileging of the body in its appetitive and sexual aspects, and the pervasive element of parody.

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), the Russian literary theorist, offered the most influential theoretical account of this festive culture in Rabelais and His World (completed 1940, published 1965; translated 1968). Bakhtin read the Renaissance French novelist François Rabelais — author of Gargantua and Pantagruel, with its mountains of food, scatological humour, and gleeful mockery of ecclesiastical authority — as the literary embodiment of a whole popular culture rooted in carnival. For Bakhtin, carnival was not merely a holiday but a distinct epistemology:

Carnival laughter, Bakhtin argued, was genuinely utopian: in temporarily dissolving hierarchy it pointed towards a world of genuine equality and free intercourse. This reading has been criticised as overly optimistic — critics note that carnival usually reinforced existing hierarchies by providing a controlled outlet for tension rather than genuinely threatening them — but Bakhtin’s basic insight that festivity is never politically innocent remains fundamental.

The satirical force of carnivalesque inversion operated at many levels simultaneously. The Feast of Fools — a mid-winter celebration in which cathedral clergy elected a “bishop of fools” and conducted parodic masses — was both a safety valve for clerical frustration with ecclesiastical hierarchy and a genuine, if temporary, democratisation of religious authority. The election of a boy bishop on St. Nicholas’s Day (6 December) followed similar logic: a choirboy performed episcopal functions for a day, satirising the pomp of the real bishop while simultaneously absorbing the potentially disruptive energies of youth and inversion into a controlled ritual frame.

Charivari and Rituals of Community Enforcement

Alongside the grand festivity of carnival stood a host of local ritual practices through which communities enforced their norms and punished deviants. The charivari (known in England as “rough music,” in Germany as Katzenmusik, and in the American South as “shivaree”) was perhaps the most widespread. It typically took the form of a noisy, mocking procession outside the house of a community member who had violated social norms — most commonly a man dominated by his wife, a widow or widower who had remarried too quickly after a spouse’s death, or an adulterous couple. Participants beat pots and pans, played discordant instruments, chanted obscene verses, and sometimes carried an effigy of the offender.

The charivari is a rich subject for cultural historians because it sits at the intersection of popular justice, gender norms, and community cohesion. On one level it is a mechanism of social control, enforcing community standards of marriage and gender hierarchy; on another it can be read as an assertion of communal authority against both individual transgression and elite interference. E. P. Thompson’s analysis of rough music, collected in Customs in Common (1991), emphasised its extraordinary persistence — rough music customs survived in rural England well into the nineteenth century — and its function as an expression of what Thompson called the moral economy: the informal normative framework through which communities regulated economic and social relations outside formal legal structures.

The Lord of Misrule (in England) and the Abbeys of Misrule (in France) were related institutions: temporary authorities elected or appointed during festive seasons to preside over inversion ceremonies. In the great festive seasons at the Christmas court, a Lord of Misrule would organise entertainments that parodied courtly order; in the abbeys of misrule, young men would oversee charivaris and other collective punishments. These institutions formalised inversion and thereby, paradoxically, made it manageable — a licensed transgression that ultimately confirmed the authority it temporarily mocked.

The anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of liminality is useful here: carnival and charivari are liminal moments — thresholds between one social state and another — in which normal structures are suspended, identities are destabilised, and the community undergoes a form of collective regeneration. Turner’s insight was that the transgression of normal social order in ritual contexts is not a failure of social control but an integral part of it: by periodically suspending the rules, the community reaffirms their importance and renews its collective identity.

Print Culture and the Chapbook World

The fifteenth-century invention of movable-type printing did not immediately displace oral culture, but it created new vectors for popular literature. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a flourishing market in cheap print had developed across Europe. In England the key forms were chapbooks and broadside ballads.

A chapbook was a small, cheaply produced booklet, typically eight, sixteen, or twenty-four pages, printed on a single folded sheet and often illustrated with crude woodcuts. Chapbooks circulated through networks of itinerant pedlars (chapmen) who carried them in packs to fairs, markets, and rural communities. Their contents were enormously varied: almanacs predicting weather and auspicious days, abridged romances recycled from earlier periods (such as Guy of Warwick or Valentine and Orson), jest books, accounts of monstrous births and providential wonders, moral tales, and practical guides to cookery, medicine, and farriery. Chapbooks were cheap enough to be purchased by artisans and labourers with minimal reading skills; they were designed to be read aloud, and their content often overlapped substantially with oral tradition.

The broadside ballad was a single sheet printed on one side, carrying a song with a woodcut illustration at the top. Ballads were sold in the streets by ballad-singers who performed them to attract buyers; the customer purchased not a performance (which they could hear for free) but a text to take home and sing for themselves. Broadside ballads addressed an extraordinary range of topics: love and courtship, criminal executions, military victories, natural disasters, political scandals, monstrous creatures, and the sufferings of the poor. The tune was indicated by the phrase “To the tune of [title],” meaning that existing melodies served as containers for an endless stream of new texts — a remarkably efficient system for disseminating information and commentary without needing to read music.

The relationship between print and oral culture in this period was far more fluid than a sharp literacy/illiteracy binary suggests. Texts were routinely read aloud in alehouses, workshops, and domestic settings; oral tales were written down and sold as chapbooks; ballads circulated in both sung and printed forms simultaneously. Adam Fox’s Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (2000) has been influential in mapping these interactions, arguing that we should think not of two separate cultures (oral and literate) but of a single communicative field in which print and speech constantly reinforced and transformed each other.

The content of popular print also reflected the concerns and anxieties of its readers. News pamphlets — the forerunners of the newspaper — reported murders, monstrous births, floods, fires, and providential wonders in a mode that mixed entertainment with theological commentary: disasters were signs of God’s displeasure, criminals were warnings to the godly, monsters were evidence of divine power. This providential framework, which seems alien to modern secular readers, was the normal cognitive register within which early modern readers processed extraordinary events.

The Reform of Popular Culture

Peter Burke’s most controversial thesis in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe is that popular culture underwent a systematic process of withdrawal and reform between roughly 1500 and 1800. In the medieval period, he argues, elites participated broadly in the festive life of their communities — the lord attended the village fair, the bishop joined the Feast of Fools. From the sixteenth century onwards, influenced by the Protestant Reformation’s suspicion of “superstition,” the Catholic Counter-Reformation’s campaign for clerical discipline, and the emerging bourgeois value system of industry, sobriety, and self-control, educated elites increasingly distanced themselves from popular recreations and actively campaigned to suppress or reform them.

The Puritans in seventeenth-century England provide one of Burke’s most vivid examples. Their systematic campaign against unlicensed festivity — closing theatres, suppressing sabbath recreations, prosecuting alehouses — was simultaneously a moral crusade and a project of class differentiation. The Restoration of 1660 brought a reaction, but the long-term trajectory was towards the privatisation and domestication of genteel recreation and the increasing policing of popular festivity. The emergence of the polite society ideal in the early eighteenth century — exemplified by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator (1711–12) — articulated a vision of sociable refinement that explicitly distanced itself from the coarseness of popular entertainment.

Burke’s thesis has been qualified and complicated by subsequent research. Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England (1994) showed that the destruction of the festive calendar in England was a complex and uneven process that cannot be reduced to the simple narrative of Puritan repression. Elites did not withdraw cleanly or completely from popular culture: the aristocracy continued to patronise bull-baiting and cock-fighting into the eighteenth century, and the line between polite and popular entertainment was repeatedly crossed in both directions. Nevertheless, the basic insight that popular culture must be understood as a contested terrain, shaped by ongoing negotiation between the powerful and the less powerful, remains the field’s guiding assumption.

Chapter 3: Witchcraft, Magic, and Popular Belief

The World of Popular Magic

To understand witchcraft historically, one must first grasp the broader cosmology within which accusations of maleficent magic made sense. The world of early modern England — and of much of early modern Europe — was permeated by magical thinking not because its inhabitants were ignorant but because the alternative explanatory frameworks we take for granted (germ theory, meteorology, actuarial risk) did not yet exist. Disease was mysterious; crop failure was unpredictable; fire, flood, and the death of livestock had no satisfying proximate cause. In such a world, the hypothesis that misfortune could be caused by the ill-will of a neighbour, expressed through occult means, was far from irrational.

Keith Thomas’s monumental Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) is the foundational text for this field. Thomas argued that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church had itself been deeply implicated in the provision of magical services: holy water to protect livestock, prayers for good weather, masses for the dead to hasten their passage through purgatory, and the intercession of saints for particular needs. In Thomas’s phrase, the Church functioned as “a vast reservoir of magical power.” The Protestant Reformation deliberately stripped Christianity of these functions — condemning them as superstition and popish corruption — and in doing so created a gap. The practical needs that Catholic magic had addressed were still there; what had changed was the institutional provider. This gap was filled by the cunning folk — local practitioners of beneficent magic who offered services including healing, the identification of stolen property, the location of missing persons, counter-magic against witchcraft, and love magic.

Astrology, Prophecy, and Popular Cosmology

Popular magic was not confined to the services of cunning folk; it extended to a whole popular cosmology in which the natural and supernatural worlds were densely interconnected. Astrology — the belief that the positions of the heavenly bodies influenced human affairs and individual temperament — was not merely an elite system but was widely diffused through annual almanacs, the most popular form of printed literature in early modern England. Almanacs predicted weather, advised on auspicious times for agricultural and medical procedures, and offered horoscopes for the year ahead. They were produced in enormous quantities: Richard Allestree’s almanac sold 30,000 copies annually in the 1660s. Astrological vocabulary penetrated everyday language — the word “lunatic” preserves the belief that the moon influenced mental states; “jovial,” “martial,” “saturnine,” and “mercurial” all derive from the supposed influence of the planets on human temperament.

The tradition of popular prophecy was equally tenacious. Prophecies attributed to ancient figures — Merlin, Thomas of Erceldoune (“True Thomas”), Mother Shipton — circulated in manuscript and eventually print, applying to contemporary political events with sufficient ambiguity to be endlessly reinterpreted. In times of political crisis — the Civil War, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution — prophetic texts multiplied and were earnestly discussed at all social levels. Keith Thomas argues that prophecy served the same cultural function as modern political commentary: it made sense of an uncertain present by relating it to a providential narrative and offering, however obliquely, predictions about the future.

Witch Trials: Mechanics and Distribution

Witchcraft accusations were a pan-European phenomenon between roughly 1450 and 1750, but they were distributed unevenly in time and space. The most intense persecution occurred in German-speaking central Europe, where perhaps 50,000 people were executed for witchcraft, with a concentration in the period 1560–1630. England and Scotland, France, Switzerland, and the Low Countries also experienced significant waves of prosecution. England was distinctive among major European states for not employing torture in witchcraft investigations, which significantly limited the scope of prosecutions: English witch trials tended to remain localised, arising from community quarrels rather than expanding into mass panics driven by torture-extracted confessions. The Salem trials of 1692–93 in Massachusetts were a late colonial episode of a European phenomenon, distinguished by their rapid escalation — from an initial accusation against three women in February 1692 to the execution of nineteen people by September — and by their equally rapid collapse once the accused included socially prominent community members.

The mechanics of accusation were typically local and interpersonal. Most accusations arose from community conflicts: a quarrel between neighbours, a refusal of charity, a dispute over livestock or land. The classic pattern, identified by Alan Macfarlane in Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970) for Essex and widely applicable elsewhere, runs as follows: a vulnerable and often elderly woman (perhaps widowed, living alone, dependent on the charity of neighbours) requests something from a neighbour — milk, food, small change — and is refused; the neighbour subsequently suffers misfortune (illness, the death of livestock, the souring of milk); the neighbour attributes this misfortune to the woman’s ill-will and brings an accusation of witchcraft. The social guilt of having refused charity to a needy neighbour is displaced onto the accused as aggression.

This pattern has been related by some historians to the specific social pressures of early modern England: the simultaneous erosion of older norms of communal charity by the emerging market economy and the legal provision of poor relief, which left people uncertain about their obligations to the poor but unable to escape the psychic burden of having refused them. The witch served as a projection of the bad conscience of a community in the process of abandoning its customary obligations.

Confessions were often obtained under torture on the Continent, and once a suspect had named accomplices (as torture encouraged) accusations could cascade into mass trials. The sabbath — the supposed nocturnal gathering at which witches worshipped the Devil, flew through the air, and performed blasphemous parodies of Christian ritual — was largely a learned, clerical fantasy elaborated in demonological treatises and torture chambers, not a popular belief. Ordinary accusers were typically concerned with maleficium (harmful magic) rather than diabolism; it was the educated witch-hunters, reading the fantasies of the Malleus Maleficarum (1487) and similar texts, who introduced the diabolical dimension into witch trials.

Gender and Witchcraft

The gendered dimensions of witchcraft accusation are striking and demand explanation. Across Europe, somewhere between 75% and 80% of those tried for witchcraft were women, with some regional variations (in some parts of Scandinavia and the Pyrenees, men formed a larger proportion of accused). The reasons for this skew are contested.

An early feminist explanation, associated with Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (1973), held that the witch trials were essentially a campaign by male medical professionals to destroy female healers and midwives. This argument, though historically appealing, is not well supported by the evidence: most accused witches were not healers, and the trials were not organised by the medical profession.

More sophisticated explanations have drawn on the psychoanalytic and cultural frameworks developed by Lyndal Roper (notably in Oedipus and the Devil, 1994, and Witch Craze, 2004) and Diane Purkiss (The Witch in History, 1996). Roper’s work on Augsburg and the German south-west showed that many accusations arose in the context of relationships between women, particularly between new mothers and older women (midwives, lying-in maids) who had attended childbirth. When an infant sickened or died, the attending older woman was a natural suspect: she had been present, she had touched the child, and she might be imagined to have motives of envy for the younger woman’s fertility. Roper situates this in a psychoanalytic framework of envy and maternal fantasy, arguing that the witch fantasy gave psychological form to anxieties about bodily vulnerability and female power.

Purkiss approached the question more through the lens of narrative and representation, arguing that the figure of the witch embodied anxieties about female agency, speech, and sexuality. The witch was a bad housewife, a bad mother, a woman whose domestic power had become destructive. Her powers of speech — the curse, the blessing turned malevolent, the evil eye — were distortions of the ordinary female speech acts of the household.

The Decline of Witch Trials

The witch trials largely ended in Western Europe by the early eighteenth century. The last execution for witchcraft in England took place in 1682; in Scotland, in 1727; in Germany, in 1775. Thomas attributes this decline to the broader intellectual transformation associated with the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment: as naturalistic explanations for misfortune became more credible and as skepticism about the reliability of confessions obtained under torture spread through educated opinion, the evidentiary basis for conviction eroded. But Thomas is careful not to reduce the decline to elite intellectual change: popular magical belief persisted long after the trials ended, and cunning folk continued to practise into the nineteenth century. The decline of witch prosecution was a change in the legal response to popular belief rather than a transformation of belief itself.

This distinction is historically important: it warns against the triumphalist narrative that sees the Enlightenment as the simple victory of reason over superstition. The “decline of magic” that Thomas traces in the title of his book was, in reality, an elite withdrawal from a shared popular cosmology — a cultural disengagement that parallels, and is related to, the elite withdrawal from popular festive culture that Peter Burke analyses in the same period. Popular magical belief did not disappear; it became invisible to the educated record-keepers whose testimony forms the bulk of our historical sources.

Chapter 4: Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture

The Spectacular Criminal

Eighteenth-century English popular culture was fascinated by crime to a degree that has few parallels before the modern era. This fascination was not merely prurient: it engaged real questions about law, authority, property, and social justice in a period of rapid economic change. The criminal — especially the spectacular, glamorous criminal — was a cultural figure of enormous resonance.

The reasons for this fascination were structural. English property law in the eighteenth century had been substantially remade in the interests of landed and commercial wealth: the number of capital offences had expanded dramatically (the “Bloody Code”), enclosures had dispossessed large numbers of rural people, and the gap between the propertied and the propertyless had widened. In this context, the highwayman who robbed the rich on the road or the housebreaker who redistributed the goods of the affluent could easily be read as a figure of popular justice rather than mere criminality. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) exploited this ambiguity with devastating satirical effect: its hero Macheath, a highwayman and polygamist, is simultaneously a criminal and a romantic hero, and the opera’s transparent parallels between the world of thieves and the world of politics — between Jonathan Wild the thief-taker and Robert Walpole the prime minister — made it the most politically charged popular entertainment of the century.

The Newgate Calendar and Its World

The Newgate Calendar — a periodically reissued anthology of criminal lives drawing on the records of London’s Newgate prison — was among the most widely read publications in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Along with the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress, it was reportedly one of the three books most commonly found in the homes of ordinary people. Its format was simple: each entry narrated a criminal’s career, typically ending with trial, condemnation, and execution, framed by explicit moralising commentary. The Calendar was thus ostensibly a didactic work, warning against the paths that led to Tyburn (and later Newgate’s gallows). But the extended, vivid narratives of criminal adventure that preceded the moral conclusion offered readers enormous vicarious pleasure.

The Calendar’s criminal biographies drew on a rich tradition of criminal biography that extended back to the seventeenth century. These lives shared certain generic features: the criminal’s birth in humble but respectable circumstances, the first youthful transgression that set him on the path to ruin, the thrilling adventures of his criminal career, the eventual capture, the trial, and the gallows scene. This narrative arc was simultaneously moralistic and sensational, and readers were not obliged to accept the moral framing any more than modern consumers of crime fiction are obliged to endorse law enforcement. The genre is thus a precursor not only to true crime but to the modern detective novel, the gangster film, and the crime drama: forms that derive their pleasures from a vicarious proximity to transgression that is always framed, but never fully contained, by a moral frame.

Lincoln Faller’s Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography (1987) provides the most searching analysis of this tradition, arguing that the genre served complex ideological functions: it affirmed the necessity of the law while celebrating the charisma of its violators; it reproduced bourgeois values (industry, sobriety, the maintenance of social position) by showing what happened to those who abandoned them, while simultaneously offering its readers fantasies of social mobility, sexual licence, and freedom from the constraints of respectable life.

Jack Sheppard: The Escape Artist

Jack Sheppard (1702–1724) was a young carpenter’s apprentice turned housebreaker whose real claim to popular fame lay not in the scale of his crimes but in his extraordinary repeated escapes from imprisonment. In 1724 alone, Sheppard escaped from custody four times, on two occasions from the most secure parts of Newgate prison itself, once while heavily manacled. He was recaptured each time — the last time with the assistance of the notorious thief-taker and gangmaster Jonathan Wild — and finally executed at Tyburn in November 1724, before a crowd estimated at 200,000.

Sheppard was a cultural sensation while still alive. Daniel Defoe (probably) wrote his biography; John Gay may have drawn on him for the character of Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera (1728); his portrait was painted by Sir James Thornhill. After his death his story was dramatised almost immediately and played at the St. Bartholomew Fair. Throughout the nineteenth century he was repeatedly the subject of plays, popular novels (including Harrison Ainsworth’s controversial Jack Sheppard of 1839, whose celebration of the criminal hero provoked considerable moral alarm), ballads, and eventually comic strips and films. The cultural longevity of Sheppard’s story is explained by its perfect embodiment of a popular fantasy: the small man who outwits the institutions of power through sheer ingenuity, refusing to be held.

The figure of Sheppard also illuminates the relationship between popular culture and social anxiety in this period. V. A. C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree (1994) shows how the gallows crowd was never a simple endorsement of legal authority; Sheppard’s case is a particularly sharp example of the way in which the spectacle of punishment could generate sympathy for the condemned and scepticism about the law. The enormous crowds that followed his cart to Tyburn were not merely passive spectators of legal power; they were active participants in a public drama whose meaning was contested.

Dick Turpin: The Manufacture of the Highwayman Hero

Dick Turpin (1705–1739) is an even clearer example of the gap between historical reality and popular myth. The real Turpin was a violent criminal who ran with a gang of Essex forest outlaws, committed several brutal house burglaries (during which he and his associates tortured elderly victims), and eventually turned to horse theft before being caught and hanged in York. He was, by any measure, a nasty piece of work.

The mythologised Turpin was an entirely different figure: a gallant highwayman who robbed the rich with charm and style, rode a magnificent black mare named Black Bess, and performed the legendary feat of riding overnight from London to York to establish an alibi — a feat attributed to him (and to Black Bess) by Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Rookwood (1834). It was Ainsworth’s romanticised portrait that fixed the popular image; the broadside ballads of the 1830s–1860s cemented it further. The transformation of Turpin from brutal criminal to romantic hero illustrates how popular culture does not simply reflect social reality but actively reworks it, projecting onto historical figures the fantasies and values of its own moment.

The highwayman figure more generally deserves comment. The romantic highwayman of popular culture — gentleman-like, mounted, addressing his victims with courtesy, redistributing wealth downwards — was a fantasy figure whose appeal was inseparable from its historical implausibility. Real highwaymen were typically young men of desperate circumstances for whom robbery was a short-term economic strategy with a well-known terminal outcome. But the fantasy projection of gentility onto crime — the idea that true gallantry transcended social class and could be found on the road as well as in the drawing room — spoke to deep anxieties about the relationship between social position and personal worth in a society undergoing rapid commercial transformation.

The Spectacle of Public Execution

Public executions were a form of popular entertainment in England from the Middle Ages until the abolition of public hanging in 1868. Hanging days at Tyburn (near modern Marble Arch) were public holidays: schools closed, workplaces emptied, crowds of tens of thousands gathered to watch the condemned ride in a cart from Newgate to the gallows, make their last speech, and die. The spectacle was accompanied by all the apparatus of festivity: vendors selling food and drink and souvenirs, ballad singers performing accounts of the criminal’s life and last words, pickpockets working the crowd, spectators renting window seats in nearby houses for a better view.

The state’s intention in public execution was exemplary deterrence: the law’s power was to be visibly displayed on the criminal’s body. But as Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish (1975) — and as contemporary observers noted with alarm — the crowd often refused to read the spectacle in these terms. If the condemned died well, exhibiting courage and composure, he became a popular hero; the crowd might cheer and chant his name. If the execution went badly — if it took too long, if the criminal resisted or screamed — the crowd’s sympathy shifted to the condemned. The hangman was frequently pelted. Far from demonstrating the power of law, public execution regularly dramatised the limits of legal authority and the sympathy of the popular audience with the condemned.

The abolition of public execution in 1868 — moved indoors to the prison yard, with only journalists and officials present — represented precisely the shift Foucault describes. But the popular appetite for execution spectacle did not disappear; it was displaced onto new media. The illustrated press published detailed accounts of executions, with artists present to sketch the condemned; later, wax museums reproduced famous criminals in effigy; sensational journalism made murder cases national events. The popular fascination with crime and punishment that had driven crowds to Tyburn found new outlets in the penny press and eventually in the true crime genre that remains one of the most commercially successful forms of non-fiction publishing and podcasting today.

Chapter 5: Spectacle, Performance, and Popular Entertainment

Blood Sports and the Culture of the Bear Garden

Before the age of music halls and cinema, the English popular appetite for collective entertainment was served by a range of activities that modern sensibilities find distasteful. Foremost among these were the blood sports — bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and cockfighting — which drew large and socially mixed audiences from the medieval period to the nineteenth century.

Bear-baiting was staged in purpose-built arenas, the most famous of which were concentrated in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, just across from the City of London. A bear, chained to a stake by the neck or leg, was set upon by a succession of dogs trained for the purpose; the entertainment lay in observing the contest between them. Samuel Pepys visited the Davies Bear Garden on multiple occasions in the 1660s, recording his impressions in his diary with evident pleasure. Queen Elizabeth I was a known enthusiast, and visiting foreign dignitaries were routinely taken to bear-baiting as an example of distinctive English popular entertainment. Bear-baiting was not merely a plebeian amusement: it was witnessed by continental visitors as a distinctively English spectacle, and the bear gardens were architectural and commercial neighbours of the Elizabethan theatrical companies on the Bankside.

What did contemporaries find pleasurable in blood sports? Modern historians have offered various answers. Blood sports offered the excitement of risk and unpredictability, the aesthetic pleasure of animal combat, and the opportunity for gambling — which was inseparable from the cultural practices of the blood-sport world. They were communal events — the bear garden, like the theatre, brought together people of different social ranks in a shared space, dissolving (temporarily) the barriers of everyday life. They also served as displays of masculine courage and technical expertise: the men who set the dogs had to handle the animals at close quarters, and the breeding and training of fighting animals was a skilled and respected occupation.

The Cruelty to Animals Act of 1835 made bull-baiting and bear-baiting illegal in England. Cockfighting was not fully prohibited until 1849. The campaign against blood sports is a revealing episode in the history of popular culture: it was driven by a coalition of evangelical reformers and middle-class humanitarians who objected simultaneously to cruelty to animals and to the social mixing, drunkenness, and disorder associated with these entertainments. The abolition of blood sports was simultaneously a moral reform and a project of class cultural differentiation — what historians have called “the civilising process” (following Norbert Elias) in its application to popular leisure.

Theatre and Its Popular Audiences

The history of theatrical entertainment in the early modern period is inseparable from the history of popular culture, because the theatre — unlike the court masque or the private entertainment — drew its audiences from across the social spectrum. The great Elizabethan playhouses of the 1590s and early 1600s — the Globe, the Rose, the Swan — were commercial enterprises that depended on the pennies of the groundlings (those who stood in the open yard surrounding the stage) as much as on the shillings of those seated in the galleries. Andrew Gurr’s research on the Shakespearean audience (Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 1987) estimates that the London theatres collectively attracted around 21,000 spectators per week in the 1590s — a remarkable proportion of a city with a total population of perhaps 200,000.

The popular theatrical audience of the period was not the quiet, reverential audience of the modern theatre but a noisy, interventionist collective. Groundlings ate and drank during performances, commented audibly on the action, engaged in conversation, and were not above throwing objects at performers who displeased them. This mode of audience behaviour was not a symptom of ignorance or bad manners but the normal condition of pre-modern collective entertainment — one that persisted in pantomime, music hall, and popular cinema well into the twentieth century. The relationship between audience and performer in this tradition was dialogic rather than reverential: performers acknowledged the audience, adapted to their reactions, and incorporated their responses into the event.

The Restoration of 1660 introduced patent theatres serving a primarily genteel audience, but popular theatrical entertainment survived in the form of the fairground theatre, the dumb show, and eventually the melodrama — a genre that combined thrilling plots, spectacular staging, and clear moral polarities (the virtuous heroine, the blackhearted villain, the honest working man) in a form designed for large, mixed audiences with limited theatrical literacy. The Surrey Theatre and the Coburg (later the Old Vic) in London served enormous popular audiences for melodrama in the early nineteenth century; their repertoire included nautical melodramas celebrating British naval heroism, domestic melodramas of seduction and ruin, and gothic melodramas drawing on the sensationalism of the Gothic novel tradition.

The Music Hall

The Victorian music hall was the dominant form of urban popular entertainment in Britain from approximately the 1840s to the eve of the First World War, when it was gradually supplanted by cinema. It grew out of the “song-and-supper rooms” and pub sing-alongs of the early nineteenth century. As audiences grew, purpose-built halls replaced pub rooms; by mid-century, major halls in London such as the Canterbury (1852) and the Oxford (1861) were elaborate venues seating several thousand people, with tiered galleries, a chairman who presided over proceedings from a raised table, and a bar where drink could be purchased and consumed during the performance.

The music hall offered its audiences a mixture of comic songs, sentimental ballads, acrobatic and specialty acts, magic lantern shows, and occasional drama. Its performing stars — figures like Marie Lloyd, Dan Leno, and Little Tich in London, and their equivalents in the provincial halls of Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham — achieved national celebrity and could command enormous fees. Their material was keyed precisely to the experiences of their working-class and lower-middle-class audiences: the difficulties of marriage, the tyranny of landlords and employers, the pleasures of the pub and the seaside holiday, the comedy of social pretension.

The music hall was also a site of contested politics. The Jingo song — the music hall song celebrating British militarism and imperialism — achieved its greatest influence during the 1870s and 1880s, and the term “jingoism” itself derives from a famous music hall song of 1878 (“We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do…”). Yet the same venue that produced imperialist celebration could also produce sharp social satire: Marie Lloyd’s songs about female working-class experience, in particular, have been read by scholars including Gareth Stedman Jones as expressions of a genuinely plebeian perspective that resisted middle-class moral uplift.

The music hall’s relationship to the emerging trade union and labour movements was complex. Some halls were centres of working-class sociability that provided platforms for labour organisers; others served as escape valves from the frustrations that might otherwise have generated political radicalism. The music hall simultaneously reflected and shaped the political consciousness of its audience, and its relationship to political mobilisation was never simple or predictable.

Fairs, Freakshows, and the Great Exhibition

The ancient institution of the annual fair was a crucial node in the popular entertainment network of pre-industrial England. Fairs like Bartholomew Fair (held at Smithfield in London from 1133 until its suppression in 1855) combined commerce with entertainment, offering theatrical booths, puppet shows, acrobatic performers, conjurers, fortune tellers, and exhibitions of curiosities alongside the buying and selling of goods, livestock, and the hiring of servants. The fair was a carnivalesque space in Bakhtin’s sense: temporarily licensed from the normal rules of urban order, spatially marked off from the surrounding city, and characterised by inversion, licence, and social mixing.

A particularly resonant feature of the fair was the exhibition of human and animal curiosities — what the twentieth century came to call the “freakshow.” Giants, dwarfs, conjoined twins, bearded women, and people with unusual physical conditions were exhibited for popular entertainment from at least the sixteenth century. The cultural meanings of this exhibition practice have been extensively debated by scholars. The traditional condescending account sees freakshows as simple exploitation of vulnerable individuals for the gratification of voyeuristic crowds. More nuanced analyses — notably Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996) — argue that the freak exhibit served as a site where cultural anxieties about the normal and the abnormal, the human and the monstrous, were publicly negotiated. Exhibiting the extraordinary body was a way of defining and affirming the normal body; the paying crowd was reassured of its own normativity by the spectacle of its violation.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 — held in Joseph Paxton’s revolutionary cast-iron and glass Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, attracting over six million visitors — was in many ways the apotheosis of this culture of exhibition. Though its official ideology was one of industrial progress and imperial achievement, the Exhibition’s appeal was in large part that of the spectacular curiosity: visitors came to gaze at the products of industrial manufacture displayed in an unprecedented building, to marvel at objects from every corner of the empire, and to experience the thrill of collective participation in a global spectacle. Its profits were used to found the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, and the Natural History Museum — cultural institutions that domesticated the popular impulse to exhibit and gaze while bringing it under middle-class management.

Chapter 6: The Rise of Mass Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Industrialisation and the Reorganisation of Leisure

The industrial revolution did not merely transform how things were made; it fundamentally reorganised time, space, and the conditions of everyday life in ways that created both the conditions and the audience for mass culture. Factory discipline imposed a sharp distinction between work time (wholly absorbed by the production process) and leisure time (the hours after work, the weekend, the holiday). This distinction was largely new: in pre-industrial England, work and recreation had been far more interleaved, with the festive calendar punctuating the working year with communal celebrations and the pace of agricultural labour allowing for socialisation during the working day.

E. P. Thompson’s influential essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967) traced the transformation of temporal experience required by the factory system. Pre-industrial workers measured time by task (finishing the job) rather than by the clock; they observed “Saint Monday” (the informal holiday taken at the beginning of the week to recover from Sunday’s drinking) and worked intensively when deadlines required. Factory discipline imposed clock-time on workers: the factory bell, the time-sheet, the fine for lateness — all were instruments for the inculcation of a new relationship to time that was simultaneously an economic discipline and a cultural revolution.

The concentration of population in industrial cities created large aggregates of consumers with disposable time (if not always disposable income) and with the shared experience of urban working-class life that could be addressed by commercial entertainment. The railway from the 1840s onwards allowed for the transport of performers and audiences over distances that had been prohibitive before, creating national rather than merely local networks of popular culture. The railway also made possible the seaside excursion — the day trip to Blackpool, Brighton, or Margate — which became the characteristic popular leisure event of the Victorian working class, a temporary escape from industrial urban life into a commercialised version of nature.

The Factory Acts of the 1840s–1860s, by restricting child labour and establishing a maximum working day, had the unintended consequence of creating a market for recreational provision. The campaign for the Saturday half-holiday — largely successful by the 1860s–70s — created what we would now recognise as “the weekend” for working-class men, releasing a mass audience for spectator sports, music hall, and eventually cinema.

The Penny Press

The penny press represents one of the most significant democratisations of information in the history of Western culture. Prior to the 1830s, newspapers in England and America were expensive, heavily taxed (in England, the “taxes on knowledge” — stamp duties, paper duties, and advertisement duties — kept prices high), and aimed primarily at educated and prosperous readers. In September 1833, Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun at a price of one cent, financing it through advertising revenue rather than subscription. Within weeks its circulation exceeded that of any other New York paper; within three years it was the largest-circulation newspaper in the world.

The penny press model — cheap prices, mass circulation, advertising revenue, sensational content — spread rapidly across the Atlantic world. In England the repeal of stamp duty in 1855 inaugurated a revolution in popular journalism: within a decade, cheap daily papers were available to working-class readers throughout the country. These papers differed from their predecessors not merely in price but in content and tone: they emphasised human interest stories (crime, sex, celebrity, disaster), local news, sport, and entertainment rather than parliamentary debates and financial news. They assumed a mass rather than an educated readership and addressed that readership in demotic, accessible language.

The penny press created what Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities (1983), calls the simultaneous consumption of shared cultural content — the experience of thousands of people reading the same newspaper on the same morning creates a particular form of social solidarity, a sense of belonging to the same community of readers, however different their actual social circumstances. Anderson deployed this argument primarily in relation to the formation of national consciousness, but it applies equally to the formation of class, regional, and generational identities through shared popular cultural consumption.

The late Victorian period saw the emergence of the popular Sunday newspaper as a distinct genre. Papers like Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and Reynolds’s Newspaper reached circulations of over a million by the 1890s, combining crime reporting, sport, political commentary, and serialised fiction in a format designed to fill the Sunday leisure hours of the urban working class. They were read in pubs and barbershops as well as in homes, and their content was discussed and argued over in the collective settings of working-class sociability.

Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls

If the penny press addressed the appetite for news and sensational reporting, the dime novel (in America) and penny dreadful (in Britain) addressed the appetite for fiction at a price working-class and lower-middle-class readers could afford. Dime novels — ten-cent paperbound booklets published in regular numbered series — were launched by the Beadle & Adams publishing firm in 1860 and proliferated enormously in the following decades. Their content was dominated by Western adventure stories, detective fiction, and melodrama, featuring recurring heroes and recurring narrative formulas that readers could follow across multiple numbers.

The penny dreadful was a British parallel: serialised fiction published in weekly penny instalments, often featuring gothic horror, criminal adventure, or sensational melodrama. The most celebrated examples — Varney the Vampire (1847), the stories of Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Dick Turpin stories — combined lurid plotting with vivid illustration to create an experience of collective serial entertainment remarkably analogous to modern television drama, with the same satisfactions of narrative continuity, character familiarity, and periodic climax.

Both forms were the target of moral panics about their influence on young and working-class readers. Critics alleged that they encouraged crime, sexual licence, and the dissolution of respect for authority. These anxieties tell us less about the actual effects of popular fiction than about the middle-class anxieties generated by the spectacle of the masses reading for pleasure. The assumption underlying these panics — that working-class readers were passive, credulous, and easily influenced by what they read — was not merely condescending but empirically unsupported. Research on actual reading practices suggests that working-class readers were at least as critically discriminating as their social superiors, and often considerably more so.

Department Stores and Consumer Culture

The mid-nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new institution that transformed the experience of urban shopping into a form of popular culture: the department store. Stores like Bon Marché in Paris (established 1852), Whiteley’s in London (1863), and Macy’s in New York (1858) were architecturally spectacular spaces that invited browsing as well as buying, staging consumer culture as a form of leisure and self-expression. They democratised access to fashionable goods — or at least the experience of encountering fashionable goods — while simultaneously creating new forms of desire through window displays, advertising, and the aestheticisation of merchandise.

The department store was particularly significant for women’s public culture. It created a respectable space in which middle-class and lower-middle-class women could spend time in the city without male escort, making consumption a form of female public life. Shopping was simultaneously an act of economic participation and a form of leisure, blurring the boundaries between work and play that industrialism had sharpened. Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) — set in a fictional department store clearly modelled on the Bon Marché — is among the most perceptive contemporary analyses of this new institution, tracing with brilliant sociological precision the ways in which the department store manufactured desire, organised female space, and destroyed the traditional small trades that surrounded it.

Cinema as Mass Medium

The development of cinema from the 1890s created a new form of mass entertainment that would come to dominate popular culture throughout the twentieth century. The Lumière brothers’ first public film screenings (Paris, December 1895) and the near-simultaneous projections in London, New York, and other cities inaugurated a technology that was immediately recognised as something qualitatively new: moving images, life-sized or larger, projected for a collective audience in a darkened room.

The early cinema was a fairground and variety show attraction: short films were shown as one item among several in a programme. By the 1910s the feature film had emerged, purpose-built cinemas were being constructed throughout the urban world, and cinema had become the first genuinely global mass medium. Its audience was remarkable for its social breadth: cinema cut across class, gender, and educational barriers in a way that few earlier cultural forms had managed, bringing together in the same darkened room people who would never have encountered each other in the concert hall or the library.

The nickelodeon era in America (1905–1915) is particularly significant for social historians. Nickelodeons — cheap storefront theatres charging five cents admission — were concentrated in immigrant and working-class neighbourhoods of American cities, and their audiences were precisely the populations that high-culture institutions sought to exclude. Cinema in this period offered not merely entertainment but a form of acculturation for recent immigrants: silent films crossed language barriers, and the visual grammar of melodrama translated across ethnic communities. The evolution of Hollywood from immigrant nickelodeon audiences to suburban multiplex audiences is itself a story about the changing class structure of American popular culture.

The Hollywood studio system’s global reach from the 1910s onwards created for the first time a truly international popular culture — one in which audiences from Buenos Aires to Bombay consumed the same images of American urban life, American romantic conventions, and American consumer goods. This cultural export was not merely commercial; it was an exercise in what Joseph Nye calls soft power — the projection of national values and ways of life through cultural appeal rather than coercion. The ambivalence with which European governments responded to Hollywood domination — simultaneously consuming and legislating against it — reflects the genuine ideological force of popular cinema as a carrier of cultural values.

Chapter 7: Sexual Attitudes and Popular Culture

Victorian Public Prudery and Private Vice

The term “Victorian” has become synonymous in popular usage with sexual repression, and there is substantial truth in this association. The nineteenth-century British middle class did articulate and enforce a public code of sexual conduct more restrictive than that of the preceding or following centuries: unmarried sexual activity was strongly censured for women (far more so than for men), sexual topics were excluded from respectable conversation and literature, and the body and its functions were hedged with elaborate verbal euphemisms. The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 provided a legal instrument for suppressing sexually explicit material, and the activities of social purity campaigners like the National Vigilance Association (founded 1885) demonstrated the energy with which middle-class reformers sought to police the public sexual sphere.

Yet the Victorian era simultaneously produced an enormous quantity of sexually explicit material, consumed privately. The underground trade in erotic literature flourished throughout the century: major works such as the anonymous My Secret Life (a multi-volume autobiographical account of sexual adventures, privately printed circa 1888–94), The Romance of Lust, and dozens of shorter texts circulated through clandestine booksellers, most notoriously on Holywell Street in London, a narrow alley near the Strand that was the centre of the trade in obscene publications until its demolition in the 1880s to make way for the Aldwych.

The co-existence of public prudery and private erotica was not simple hypocrisy but rather the expression of a deep cultural bifurcation: the respectable public sphere was governed by codes of bourgeois decorum that served important social functions (marking the boundaries of class respectability, protecting women from unwanted advances, providing a shared language of moral consensus), while the private sphere — particularly the private sphere of men — operated by different norms. The sociologist’s term for this structure is the double standard: one code for public, another for private; one for women, another for men.

The Victorian period also saw the emergence of a systematic medical and forensic discourse about sexual “perversion.” Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) catalogued a taxonomy of sexual deviance — sadism, masochism, fetishism, homosexuality — that gave medical names to practices previously described only in legal and theological terms. This medicalisation was double-edged: it pathologised sexual minorities while simultaneously creating a new language in which their experiences could be described and eventually claimed. The “invert” of late Victorian sexology became the “homosexual” of early twentieth-century reform discourse and eventually the “gay man” of post-Stonewall identity politics.

Prostitution and the Underside of Respectability

No account of Victorian sexual culture can avoid the institution of prostitution, which occupied a paradoxical position in the cultural landscape of the period. Officially condemned, practically ubiquitous, prostitution was the necessary shadow of Victorian sexual respectability: it provided an outlet for male sexuality that public norms forced underground, while simultaneously threatening the respectable femininity it was supposed to protect. The figure of the “fallen woman” — the prostitute as ruined innocent — was one of the most culturally productive of the Victorian period, appearing in fiction (Dickens’s Nancy in Oliver Twist, Hardy’s Tess), painting (Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, Rossetti’s Found), and social investigation.

Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851) and William Acton’s Prostitution (1857) attempted the first systematic sociological analysis of the trade in British cities. Their findings complicated the moral narrative: most women who worked as prostitutes did so intermittently rather than as a full-time occupation, many moved in and out of domestic service or factory work, and the trade was organised along a spectrum from casual street-walking to the elaborately managed high-class brothel. Judith Walkowitz’s Prostitution and Victorian Society (1980) showed how the Contagious Diseases Acts effectively criminalised working-class female sexuality in garrison towns while doing nothing to address the demand for prostitution.

The First Sexual Revolution and the Interwar Period

Historians of sexuality have identified what they call a “first sexual revolution” in the period roughly 1880–1918, in which the tight lid of Victorian sexual respectability began to crack. Contributing factors included the emergence of sexology as an academic discipline — Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886); Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (7 volumes, 1897–1928) — which created a new scientific language for discussing sexual diversity; the first-wave feminist movement, which challenged the sexual double standard and demanded women’s control of their own bodies; the suffragette movement, which asserted female public identity more broadly; and the upheaval of the First World War, which disrupted gender relations by removing men from their domestic roles and inserting women into the workforce and public life on an unprecedented scale.

The interwar period (1919–1939) saw further changes: the flapper culture of the 1920s explicitly celebrated female physical and sexual freedom through short skirts, dancing, smoking, and conspicuous enjoyment of public life. The popularisation of Freudian ideas through journalism and popular literature created a new vocabulary of sexual psychology and normalised the discussion of desire in middle-class culture. The birth control movement, led in Britain by Marie Stopes (whose Married Love of 1918 was a bestseller that frankly discussed female sexual pleasure) and in America by Margaret Sanger, made contraceptive knowledge publicly available for the first time and began to separate sexuality from reproduction in the popular imagination.

Popular culture reflected and accelerated these changes. The cinema of the 1920s, before the introduction of the Hays Code in 1930, explored sexual themes with a frankness that would not be permitted again until the 1960s: the films of Cecil B. DeMille, the comedies of Mack Sennett, and the vehicles of the great female stars (Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow) depicted a modernity in which sexuality was a consumer pleasure rather than a reproductive obligation. Jazz culture — the dance halls, the nightclubs, the music itself with its improvisatory energy and physical rhythms — was associated in the popular and reform imagination with sexual licence, racial mixing, and the collapse of Victorian propriety.

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s

The most commonly designated “sexual revolution” refers to the cultural transformations of the 1960s and early 1970s, accelerated by a combination of technological, legal, and cultural changes. The development and marketing of the oral contraceptive pill (approved in the US in 1960, available in Britain from 1961) separated sexual activity from reproduction in a way that no previous contraceptive technology had fully managed, removing the most powerful practical deterrent to extramarital sex for women.

Simultaneously, a wave of legal reforms liberalised the formal regulation of sexuality in Britain and America: the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 in Britain created a “public good” defence for literary works that permitted the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (the Regina v. Penguin Books trial of 1960 was a watershed moment); homosexual acts between consenting adult men were decriminalised in England and Wales by the Sexual Offences Act of 1967; abortion was legalised in 1967 in Britain and by Roe v. Wade in America in 1973.

These legal changes both reflected and accelerated cultural shifts that were expressed through popular music (the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the broader rock culture celebrated or at least explored sexual freedom), fashion (the miniskirt, the bikini), cinema (the New Wave and the gradual collapse of censorship codes), and the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, which brought a critical dimension to the sexual revolution by insisting that sexual liberation must also mean liberation from male sexual exploitation and violence.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s fundamentally altered the cultural politics of sexuality. The epidemic, initially concentrated in gay men and injecting drug users in the US and UK, generated a moral panic that enabled a social conservative backlash against the permissiveness of the previous decade, while simultaneously galvanising gay communities into unprecedented political mobilisation. The cultural response to AIDS — from the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt to the work of activist groups like ACT UP — produced a rich and politically charged body of popular cultural expression that challenged both the stigmatisation of gay sexuality and the indifference of government and media.

Chapter 8: The History of Sport

Sport as Cultural Practice

The history of sport is not merely a history of games but a history of how societies have organised competition, constructed masculinity and femininity, negotiated class relations, and imagined national identity. Modern sport in its organised, commercialised, and nationally standardised form is largely a product of the nineteenth century, though its roots run much deeper into festive and communal traditions that we have already traced in earlier chapters.

Allen Guttmann’s influential framework in From Ritual to Record (1978) identifies seven characteristics that distinguish modern sport from pre-modern games: secularism, equality, specialisation, rationalisation, bureaucratic organisation, quantification, and the quest for records. Pre-modern sports — the hurling match of the Irish village, the folk football of English Shrove Tuesday, the wrestling at the county fair — were embedded in religious or seasonal ritual, socially undifferentiated in terms of participation rules, and entirely uninterested in measured performance. Modern sport extracted competition from this festive context and subjected it to standardised rules, measurement, and record-keeping.

Folk Football and the Codification of Modern Sport

Before the codification of modern football, cricket, and athletics in the nineteenth century, a wide variety of traditional sports existed across the British Isles and continental Europe. Folk football — played between teams of unlimited size representing rival villages or parishes, with goals often miles apart, and with minimal rules restricting what could be done to the ball or to opposing players — was played on feast days and religious holidays throughout the medieval and early modern periods. The Shrove Tuesday football game at Ashbourne in Derbyshire, still played today, preserves a version of this tradition.

These games were characterised precisely by the features that Guttmann’s framework identifies as pre-modern: they were embedded in the festive calendar (Shrove Tuesday and Easter were common occasions), they made no attempt at equal teams or standardised rules, and outcomes were less important than participation and the communal experience of collective physical contest. Their suppression in industrialising towns was a direct consequence of the factory discipline discussed in Chapter 6: a game that could absorb entire communities for a whole day was incompatible with the demands of factory production, and magistrates and employers co-operated in attempts to eliminate it from urban space.

The codification of sport in the mid-nineteenth century was intimately connected with the reform of the English public school system. The great Victorian headmasters — Thomas Arnold at Rugby, Edward Thring at Uppingham — promoted organised games as a vehicle for the development of character, team spirit, and the qualities necessary for leadership in empire and commerce. The schoolboy who had learned to lose graciously on the cricket pitch would, it was supposed, deal with military and administrative adversity in the same spirit. This ideology of muscular Christianity and the character-building virtues of sport was enormously influential: it shaped not only British public school culture but the global spread of British sport through empire.

Football and Working-Class Identity

The codification of association football (soccer) by the Football Association in 1863 and its subsequent spread through working-class communities in the English industrial north and midlands is one of the most studied episodes in sports history. By the 1880s, football had become the dominant spectator sport of the English working class, drawing tens of thousands to matches at newly constructed grounds in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, and Birmingham.

The professionalism crisis of the 1880s was simultaneously a sporting and a class conflict. The Football Association, dominated by southern gentlemen amateurs, sought to maintain the amateur ethos of the game; northern working-class clubs, drawing on players who could not afford to forgo wages to play, demanded the right to pay professionals. After the FA expelled several clubs in 1884, it capitulated in 1885, formally permitting professionalism. The compromise crystallised a structural division that persists to this day: football became a sport in which working-class men played professionally for the entertainment of working-class crowds, owned and managed by a combination of local businessmen and (increasingly in the late twentieth century) global capital.

The extraordinary emotional intensity of football support — the identification of working-class communities with their local club, the ritualistic quality of match attendance — has been analysed by sociologists as a form of secular religion and as one of the few spaces in which working-class masculinity could find public, collective expression without shame. The crowd at a football match was a temporary community — strangers united by a common identification, sharing an emotional experience of unusual intensity. In a society that had systematically stripped working-class communities of many of their older solidarities (the church, the trade union, the neighbourhood association), the football club offered a form of collective identity that was culturally legible and emotionally vivid.

The commercialisation of football in the late twentieth century — the formation of the Premier League in 1992, the explosion of television rights, the arrival of foreign billionaire owners and global corporate sponsors — has profoundly altered the social character of the game, raising ticket prices beyond the reach of many traditional supporters and transforming the stadiums from working-class terraces to all-seat venues catering to a broader social mix including corporate hospitality. The debates generated by this commercialisation — about authenticity, belonging, and the commodification of fan loyalty — are themselves a form of popular cultural history, a continuing argument about who football belongs to.

Cricket, Empire, and National Identity

Cricket occupies a distinctive place in the cultural history of the British Empire, having been exported to the colonies as one of the primary vehicles of imperial culture. The game was played and promoted throughout the British Empire from the eighteenth century onwards, and in many formerly colonised countries — India, the West Indies, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia — it became deeply embedded in national identity and was eventually used as a vehicle for asserting equality with and independence from the imperial centre.

C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963) is the most intellectually ambitious exploration of these dynamics. James — Trinidadian Marxist, cricket theorist, and cultural historian — argued that cricket in the West Indies had simultaneously been a tool of colonial socialisation and a practice through which colonised people expressed their cultural distinctiveness and eventually their national aspirations. The West Indian cricketer who learned to bat in the classical English tradition, then developed a style of play that was recognisably his own — expressive, joyful, technically heterodox — was performing a kind of cultural independence. James famously asked: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” — meaning that cricket could only be understood in its full social and political context, as a practice through which power, identity, and resistance were simultaneously enacted.

Baseball and the Construction of American Identity

In the United States, baseball played a constitutive role in the formation of national identity from the mid-nineteenth century. The Knickerbocker Rules of 1845 codified the game that had been played in various regional forms; by the 1870s a National League of professional clubs had been established; by the early twentieth century baseball had been designated the “national pastime,” a status its proponents energetically promoted.

The mythology of baseball’s origins — the legend, thoroughly debunked by historians, that Abner Doubleday invented the game in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839 — was deliberately cultivated in response to the game’s obvious resemblance to English cricket and rounders, serving the purpose of constructing a distinctly American national game. Baseball’s symbolic function was to embody the democratic values of American ideology: a game of individual skill and collective teamwork, open in principle to all citizens, contested on a level field. In practice, of course, the color line excluded African-American players from the major leagues until Jackie Robinson’s integration of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, a fact that placed considerable pressure on baseball’s democratic mythology.

The Modern Olympic Games

The modern Olympic Games, revived by the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin with the first Games in Athens in 1896, were explicitly conceived as a vehicle for the promotion of international peace and understanding through athletic competition. De Coubertin was influenced by his admiration for the English public school tradition of athletic education and by the belief that international sport could foster the mutual respect and personal contact among elites that would prevent war.

From the outset, however, the Olympics were also a vehicle for national competition and propaganda. The unofficial national medal tables were assiduously compiled from the beginning; the 1936 Berlin Games, hosted by Nazi Germany, became a global showpiece for the Third Reich until Jesse Owens’ four gold medals complicated the racial ideology on display. The Cold War Olympics of 1952–1988 transformed international sport into a proxy for geopolitical rivalry between the superpowers, with drug scandals, boycotts, and political statements proliferating.

Chapter 9: Twentieth-Century Media and Youth Culture

Radio and the Creation of the Mass Audience

The development of radio broadcasting in the early 1920s created the first truly simultaneous mass medium — a technology through which a single transmission could reach millions of dispersed listeners at the same moment. This was qualitatively different from the newspaper, which was read at different times by different people, and from the music hall or cinema, which required physical co-presence. Radio created a new kind of imagined community, bounded not by geography but by the reach of a transmitter.

In Britain, the establishment of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) in 1927 under its first Director-General, John Reith, created a public broadcasting institution explicitly committed to a particular vision of popular culture. Reith was a cultural Calvinist who believed that broadcasting should elevate public taste rather than simply reflect existing preferences: the BBC should give the public not what it wanted but what it needed — a diet of classical music, serious drama, factual programming, and high-quality light entertainment. His oft-quoted mission statement — “to inform, educate and entertain” — placed entertainment last, and the ordering was significant. The BBC’s monopoly lasted until commercial television in 1955 and commercial radio in 1973, and its legacy — the assumption that broadcasting carries public responsibilities that cannot be reduced to market preferences — has shaped British media policy ever since.

The BBC’s Reithian ethos was not merely a cultural preference but a class programme. The BBC’s received pronunciation standard — “BBC English” — was imposed as the broadcasting norm, marginalising regional accents and dialects that were perfectly intelligible but socially marked. Light entertainment programmes were carefully distinguished from “popular” entertainment: variety shows were acceptable if they maintained standards; anything too closely associated with the pub or the music hall was suspect. The BBC simultaneously democratised access to high culture (broadcasting symphony concerts and Shakespeare to millions who had never attended a concert hall or theatre) and reproduced the cultural hierarchies that had defined high culture in the first place.

American radio took a different path, developing as a commercial medium funded by advertising from the outset. The major networks — NBC (1926), CBS (1927) — competed for mass audiences, creating stars of national celebrity through weekly programmes. By the late 1930s, radio had become the dominant medium of American mass culture: Franklin Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” used its intimacy to forge a personal connection between president and citizen; Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast demonstrated the medium’s power to create collective experience — and, for a portion of the audience, mass panic.

Hollywood and the Studio System

The Hollywood studio system of the 1920s–1940s was one of the most successful engines of popular culture production in history. The major studios — MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, RKO, Fox (later 20th Century Fox), Universal, Columbia — controlled every stage of the film industry from production through distribution to exhibition, owning the theatres in which their films were shown and signing actors, directors, writers, and technicians to long-term contracts. This vertical integration gave the studios enormous economic power and allowed them to produce films with a factory-like regularity.

The studio system produced an extraordinary range of cultural forms — the screwball comedy, the gangster film, the musical, the western, the horror film — that achieved global distribution and created the first truly international popular culture. Hollywood stars became the world’s most recognised faces; American idioms, fashions, and values circulated globally through the cinema. The studios also developed sophisticated mechanisms for managing their stars as cultural commodities: the star system involved not merely acting contracts but the management of public image, the suppression of private information (sexual orientation, health problems, criminal records), and the construction of a persona that matched the studio’s commercial interests.

The system was disrupted by a 1948 Supreme Court ruling (United States v. Paramount Pictures) that declared the studios’ ownership of theatres to be an illegal monopoly, forcing divestiture. This, combined with the rise of television in the 1950s, ended the classical studio era and drove the major studios towards the production of spectacle (epic films, widescreen formats, 3-D) that the small screen could not replicate.

Television and the Transformation of Domestic Space

Television’s rapid diffusion in the 1950s — from a luxury novelty to near-universal household presence within a decade — transformed the organisation of domestic life in ways whose full consequences are still being traced. By 1952, 25 million American households owned a television set; by 1960 the figure was 45 million, representing approximately 90% of all households. In Britain, ownership expanded dramatically around the Coronation of 1953, which drew unprecedented television audiences and demonstrated the medium’s capacity to create national collective events of extraordinary emotional intensity.

Television restructured family time around programming schedules, created new forms of celebrity (the television star, perceived as a regular presence in the home rather than a distant luminosity of the cinema), and eventually became the primary medium through which political events were experienced by most citizens — from Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to the moon landing in 1969 to the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. Todd Gitlin’s Inside Prime Time (1983) showed how the commercial imperatives of the American television system — the need to deliver the largest possible audience to advertisers — systematically shaped the content of programmes, favouring formula over experiment, reassurance over challenge, and demographic targeting over genuine diversity.

Critics from the Frankfurt School tradition saw television as the perfect instrument of the culture industry’s repressive desublimation (Marcuse): it created the illusion of participation and choice while actually homogenising consciousness and foreclosing genuine critical thought. More nuanced analyses, influenced by Hall’s encoding/decoding model, have emphasised the diversity of audience readings and the ways in which popular television genres — soap opera, situation comedy, the talk show — can contain oppositional or at least ambivalent meanings that audiences activate in their own ways.

The soap opera deserves particular mention in this context. Long dismissed as a culturally worthless form, the soap opera has been recuperated by feminist scholars including Christine Geraghty (Women and Soap Opera, 1991) and Dorothy Hobson (Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera, 1982) as a genre that addresses specifically female experience — the management of relationships, the navigation of domestic conflict, the social world of women’s networks — with a specificity and seriousness that mainstream television rarely brought to such subjects. The soap opera’s formal features — its non-teleological narrative structure, its multiple simultaneous plotlines, its serial temporality — have been read as expressive of a specifically female mode of temporal experience.

Youth Culture and the 1950s–1960s

The emergence of youth culture as a distinct cultural formation in the 1950s was inseparable from the specific economic conditions of the postwar boom. Adolescents and young adults in the United States and Britain benefited from unprecedented prosperity relative to earlier generations: full employment, rising wages, and the expansion of consumer credit meant that young working people had disposable income on a scale that had no precedent. This purchasing power — estimated by market researchers in Britain in the late 1950s at £900 million annually — created a market specifically addressed to youth, and an entire cultural apparatus (the record industry, the fashion industry, teen magazines, youth-oriented film and television) emerged to serve it.

The music that most dramatically expressed and consolidated this new youth identity was rock and roll. Emerging from the intersection of African-American rhythm and blues, country and western, and gospel in the American south, rock and roll was commercialised for white audiences from 1955 onwards through figures like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. Its combination of amplified guitar, driving rhythm, and lyrics celebrating teen romance, dancing, and rebellion against adult authority generated a moral panic among parents, churchmen, and political authorities that was itself a powerful advertisement for its transgressive appeal. Alan Freed, the disc jockey who championed the music on Cleveland and New York radio stations, was instrumental in its national diffusion and in creating the social ritual of the teenage concert.

The British response to rock and roll produced a distinctive national variant in the form of the skiffle craze of the mid-1950s — a stripped-down folk-blues-jazz hybrid that could be played on cheap and homemade instruments (washboard, tea-chest bass, acoustic guitar) and that created an enormous wave of amateur music-making in youth clubs, church halls, and front rooms. Skiffle was the immediate precursor to the British beat scene of the early 1960s: John Lennon’s first group, the Quarrymen, began as a skiffle group in 1956 before evolving into the Beatles.

The CCCS scholars who studied British youth subcultures in the 1970s — their work collected in Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, eds., 1976) and Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) — argued that youth subcultures (Teddy boys, mods, rockers, skinheads, punks) were not simply recreational phenomena but symbolic responses to the structural contradictions of working-class life in postwar Britain. Through style — the elaborate assemblage of clothing, hairstyle, music, and argot — subcultural groups worked through the tensions of their class situation in a displaced, imaginary form.

These readings have been criticised for over-reading subcultural style and neglecting its playful, hedonistic, and non-ideological dimensions. McRobbie and Garber’s feminist critique pointed out that the CCCS analysis was overwhelmingly focused on male subcultures and had very little to say about the girls who might be present at the same events, consuming the same music and fashion, but in quite different ways and with quite different social meanings. The domestication of female youth culture — the bedroom culture of girls’ magazines, fan posters, and private consumption — was a social fact that the predominantly male CCCS scholars had largely ignored.

Chapter 10: Consumer Culture, Advertising, and Commodity Fetishism

Veblen and Conspicuous Consumption

The American economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) offered, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the first systematic sociological analysis of what we now call consumer culture. Veblen’s central argument was that economic consumption in advanced capitalist societies is primarily expressive rather than utilitarian: people consume not merely to satisfy material needs but to display their social status and to compete with their neighbours for prestige. He coined the term conspicuous consumption for the deliberate, visible expenditure on luxury goods and services whose primary function is to signal wealth to others, and the related concept of conspicuous leisure for the equally deliberate display of freedom from the necessity to work.

Veblen traced the origins of this status competition to what he called the leisure class — the non-productive wealthy whose position in the social hierarchy was founded precisely on their exemption from the labour that occupied everyone else. In an inversion of earlier aristocratic culture, where wealth was displayed through productive management of estates and generous patronage, modern industrial capitalism had created a leisure class that displayed its status through purposeless expenditure. Veblen’s analysis was directed primarily at the wealthy, but his framework has been applied much more broadly. The aspiration to conspicuous consumption cascades down the social hierarchy: each social stratum imitates the consumption patterns of the stratum above, seeking to perform a status slightly above its actual economic position. This “emulation” dynamic explains much of the structure of consumer culture, from the persistence of fashion (which must change regularly to prevent those of lower status from catching up) to the premium placed on branded goods.

Marx and Commodity Fetishism

Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, introduced in the first chapter of Capital (1867), offers a different but complementary account of the cultural dimensions of capitalist consumption. Marx observed that in capitalist societies, commodities appear to have a life and value independent of the human labour that created them. The price of a commodity in the market seems to be a natural property of the thing itself rather than a social relation congealed in objectified form. This mystification is not an illusion that could simply be dispelled by correct analysis: it is built into the structural conditions of commodity production.

When the products of human labour are separated from their producers and circulate in the market as things with prices, the social relationships between people are mediated through and obscured by the relationships between things. The commodity takes on a quasi-magical quality — its value seems to reside in it rather than in the social relation it represents. This concept has been enormously productive for cultural analysis. If commodities are fetishes — objects invested with social and quasi-magical properties they do not intrinsically possess — then the advertising industry’s work of investing products with personality, aspiration, and emotional resonance is a sophisticated development of a tendency inherent in commodity production itself.

Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), extended Marx’s analysis into a critique of modern consumer society in which the commodity form had colonised not merely the economy but the whole of social life. For Debord, the “spectacle” — the totality of commodity images that mediate social relations in modern capitalism — is not a collection of images but a social relation between people mediated by images. The spectacle is the accumulated capital that has reached such a degree of accumulation that it becomes image. This formulation was enormously influential on the situationist movement and, through it, on the aesthetic strategies of punk, which deliberately deployed Debord’s concept of détournement (the subversive re-use of existing cultural images to undermine their intended meaning) in its collaged aesthetics and provocative public art.

The Rise of Advertising

Modern advertising as a systematic industry developed alongside mass print media in the second half of the nineteenth century. The penny press had established the model of advertising-funded publication; as circulation grew, the commercial value of advertising space grew with it. The development of national brands — manufactured goods sold under proprietary names rather than as bulk commodities — created the need for national advertising campaigns that could establish and maintain consumer preference for one manufacturer’s product over another’s physically identical competitor.

The early history of advertising is a history of the professionalisation of persuasion. The advertising agencies that emerged in the late nineteenth century developed from simple brokers of newspaper space into full-service communication firms that wrote copy, designed images, conducted market research, and advised manufacturers on product design and naming. Albert Lasker at Lord & Thomas agency in Chicago was instrumental in developing the concept of reason-why advertising — copy that gave consumers a rational argument for preferring a particular product, however contrived or trivial that argument might be.

John B. Watson, the founder of behaviourist psychology, moved from academic research to an advertising career in 1920 and applied behaviourist principles to the design of advertising campaigns. The insight that consumers’ choices could be shaped by associating products with emotional states rather than rational argument became the central premise of twentieth-century advertising: the cigarette advertisement that depicts a rugged cowboy sells masculinity and independence, not tobacco; the perfume advertisement that depicts romantic attraction sells desire, not fragrance. Edward Bernays — Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the founder of public relations as a discipline — applied psychoanalytic principles to mass persuasion in his influential Propaganda (1928) and Public Relations (1945), arguing that the engineering of mass consent through the manipulation of unconscious desires was both possible and necessary for the management of democratic society.

Brand Culture and the Branded Self

The late twentieth century saw the extension of brand culture from products to corporations, institutions, and individuals. The brand — the complex of associations, values, and identities that a name and logo can trigger in consumers — became the primary asset of many major corporations, exceeding in value the physical assets of factories and equipment. Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999) documented the way in which global brands like Nike, Starbucks, and Gap had effectively colonised public space, cultural life, and even personal identity, simultaneously while outsourcing actual production to poorly paid workers in the developing world.

Klein’s analysis built on a paradox at the heart of late-twentieth-century branding: as brands became more important as cultural signifiers, the material production of the goods they were attached to was progressively devalued and outsourced. Nike’s value resided in its “swoosh” and its associations with athletic achievement, celebrity endorsement, and urban cool — not in the shoes themselves, which were manufactured in Indonesian and Vietnamese factories under conditions that generated periodic international scandal. The brand was a marketing apparatus that floated free of material production, generating cultural meaning independently of the conditions under which the material goods were produced.

Consumer Culture and the Politics of Taste

The critical tradition from Marx through the Frankfurt School to contemporary scholars like Zygmunt Bauman has consistently insisted on the costs of identity-through-consumption: it displaces older forms of collective identity (class solidarity, religious community, civic participation) with individualised and commercially mediated forms; it renders the self always incomplete, always in need of the next purchase to fill the gap that the last one failed to fill; and it colonises the imagination in ways that make alternative social arrangements difficult to think. Bauman’s concept of the liquid modernity of contemporary consumer society describes a world in which identities, relationships, and commitments are as fluid and disposable as fashion seasons — a world in which the capacity for long-term commitment and genuine community is systematically undermined by the logic of consumer choice.

The consumer’s dilemma, in Bauman’s account, is not poverty of goods but poverty of alternatives to goods as the medium of identity construction. The proliferation of consumer choice does not increase freedom in any meaningful sense because it does not offer the option of opting out of the system of consumption as identity performance. To choose not to consume is itself a consumer choice — the carefully curated minimalism of the voluntary simplicity movement is as brand-inflected as any other contemporary lifestyle.

Chapter 11: Fashion, Dress, and Popular Identity

Dress as a Cultural Practice

Of all the everyday cultural practices through which people communicate identity, fashion is among the most immediate, most bodily, and most socially charged. Every morning, in choosing what to put on, people make decisions that signal their gender, their class position, their occupational role, their subcultural affiliation, their aesthetic sensibility, and their relationship to the norms of the society they inhabit. These signals may be deliberate or unreflective, conformist or transgressive, but they are never culturally neutral. Dress is, as the literary theorist Anne Hollander argued, a form of visual narrative — a text written on the body, readable by those who share the same semiotic codes.

The history of dress as a cultural practice is inseparable from the history of social hierarchy, because for most of human history dress has been one of the primary technologies through which social hierarchy was made visible. In societies without reliable means of checking economic credentials or social pedigree, clothing served as the most immediately legible marker of social position — and precisely because it was immediately legible, it was also a tempting arena for social fraud, for dressing above one’s station, for the sartorial claim to a position one did not actually occupy.

Sumptuary Laws: Regulating the Dressed Body

The legal attempt to regulate dress through sumptuary legislation is as old as organised statehood. Sumptuary laws — laws that restricted who could wear what fabrics, colours, and ornaments — were enacted across medieval and early modern Europe, China, Japan, and the Islamic world. In England, sumptuary legislation was enacted from the late medieval period and remained on the statute book until 1604, when it was finally abolished. The laws typically specified that certain luxury materials — silk, velvet, furs, gold and silver embroidery — could only be worn by those above a certain social rank, and that those below a given rank were prohibited from wearing garments that exceeded a specified monetary value.

The failure of sumptuary legislation was not merely a failure of enforcement but a reflection of the structural tension between the hierarchical social order it sought to maintain and the dynamic market economy that increasingly subverted it. As textile production expanded through proto-industrial rural putting-out systems and eventually through factory production, fashionable goods became progressively cheaper and more widely available. The imitation of elite fashions by social subordinates — what Veblen would later theorise as social emulation — was built into the commercial logic of the textile trade. Merchants had every commercial incentive to sell fashionable goods as widely as possible, regardless of the social rank of the buyer.

The Democratisation of Fashion through Industrialisation

The industrialisation of textile production in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fundamentally altered the social accessibility of fashion. The mechanisation of spinning and weaving — the spinning jenny, the water frame, the power loom — drove down the cost of cloth dramatically. Cotton, which had been a relatively expensive import fabric in early eighteenth-century England, became by the early nineteenth century among the cheapest fabrics available, affordable by working-class families who had previously worn only wool or linen. The introduction of synthetic dyes from the 1850s onwards vastly expanded the range of colours available to middle and working-class consumers.

The sewing machine, commercially viable from the 1850s (Isaac Singer’s machine, patented 1851, was the first to be successfully marketed to a mass consumer), transformed both domestic dressmaking and the ready-made clothing trade. By the late nineteenth century, the ready-made clothing industry was producing garments in standardised sizes that could be purchased off the peg — eliminating the need for bespoke tailoring and making fashionable styles accessible to consumers who could not afford made-to-measure clothing. Department stores like Marshall Field’s in Chicago and Selfridge’s in London (opened 1909) stocked enormous ranges of ready-to-wear clothing, presenting them in aesthetically sophisticated displays that democratised the experience of fashion even for those who could not afford the most expensive items.

The nineteenth-century fashion magazine played a crucial role in disseminating fashion across social classes and geographies. La Mode Illustrée (founded 1860), Harper’s Bazar (1867, later Harper’s Bazaar), and Vogue (founded 1892, acquired by Condé Nast in 1909) established the format of the fashion magazine as a vehicle for communicating elite fashion to a broader aspiring public. Fashion plates — hand-coloured illustrations of the latest Parisian styles — were reproduced in domestic magazines and used as patterns by home dressmakers, creating a chain of diffusion that ran from the Parisian couturier through the magazine to the provincial dressmaker and her client.

Roland Barthes and the Semiotics of Fashion

The French cultural theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) offered, in The Fashion System (1967, trans. 1983), the most systematic semiological analysis of fashion as a sign system. Drawing on Saussure’s structural linguistics, Barthes distinguished between the garment system (actual physical garments), the image system (the photographs and illustrations through which garments are represented in fashion media), and the written system (the verbal descriptions of garments in fashion journalism). His analytical focus was on the written system — the language of fashion magazines — because he argued that it is in the transformation of garment into word that the ideological work of fashion is most legible.

Barthes’s analysis can be extended beyond the specific case of fashion journalism to dress as a practice more generally. We dress within semiotic codes — codes that are culturally specific, historically variable, and socially stratified. To wear a business suit to a job interview is to perform seriousness, competence, and conformity to corporate norms; to wear a T-shirt and jeans to the same interview is to perform informality, independence, or ignorance of the codes, depending on context. These codes are never entirely fixed, but they are not entirely arbitrary either: they carry the historical sediment of the social relationships within which they were formed.

The 1960s Fashion Revolution

The 1960s produced the most dramatic democratisation of fashion in British history, and arguably in the history of Western dress. The centre of this revolution was London — specifically the small boutiques of Carnaby Street in Soho and the King’s Road in Chelsea, which in the early 1960s became the global epicentres of youth fashion. The key figure is Mary Quant (1930–2023), whose Bazaar boutique (opened in Chelsea in 1955) pioneered the style that became the defining look of the decade: the miniskirt.

Quant did not invent the short skirt in any absolute sense — hemlines had been rising gradually since the early 1960s — but she popularised and named the style that brought hems to unprecedented heights (several inches above the knee) and created a specifically youthful, urban, democratic aesthetic that was explicitly opposed to the stately formality of haute couture. The miniskirt was simultaneously a practical garment for active young women (easier to move in than longer skirts), a statement of female autonomy over the body (the right to bare legs), a symbol of generational revolt (shocking to parents and moralists), and a commercial product brilliantly marketed to the new youth consumer.

Quant’s designs were made in Britain from relatively cheap fabrics, sold at prices that working-class and lower-middle-class young women could afford, and modelled by working-class girls from comprehensive schools rather than aristocratic beauties from finishing schools. The model Twiggy (Lesley Lawson, b. 1949), who became the face of 1960s London fashion, was a working-class girl from Neasden with no conventional modelling background — her success was itself a symptom of the democratisation that the fashion revolution embodied.

The Carnaby Street world also produced the Mod aesthetic for young men — Italian-influenced suits, Chelsea boots, thin ties, and careful attention to detail — that asserted a masculine claim to fashion as a legitimate form of identity expression. The mods’ investment in style was as serious and elaborate as any high-fashion connoisseur’s, but its cultural reference points were the boutique rather than Savile Row and the Vespa scooter rather than the sports car.

Subcultural Style: From Punk to Hip-Hop

If the 1960s fashion revolution represents one mode of popular fashion history — a democratisation of elite aesthetics through commercial expansion — the history of subcultural style represents another: the creation of new aesthetic codes from below, by communities with limited economic resources but considerable semiotic creativity.

Dick Hebdige’s analysis of punk style in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) remains the locus classicus of this tradition. Punk style — assembled from safety pins, bin bags, bondage trousers, torn clothing, spiked hair dyed in unnatural colours, Nazi imagery worn with deliberate provocativeness, and union jack imagery used with ironic distortion — was a masterwork of bricolage, the assemblage of heterogeneous elements in a combination that violated every rule of conventional dress and communicated a comprehensive rejection of both respectable middle-class style and the aspirational consumer culture of working-class emulation. Punk style did not express a coherent political programme — its appropriation of fascist imagery was not advocacy of fascism but a deployment of the most shocking available imagery to disturb comfortable assumptions — but it articulated a mood of refusal that was politically charged without being politically definable.

Hip-hop fashion, emerging from the Bronx block parties of the early 1970s and diffusing globally through the 1980s and 1990s, represents a different subcultural sartorial tradition, rooted in African-American urban culture. The early hip-hop look — Adidas tracksuits (famously worn without laces), shell-toe sneakers, Kangol hats, gold chains — drew on the materials of mass consumer culture but combined them in configurations specific to a particular community and time. Run-DMC’s 1986 song “My Adidas” was not merely a celebration of a brand but an assertion of cultural ownership: the group was claiming the right to define what Adidas meant for themselves, rather than accepting the meaning that Adidas’s marketing department imposed.

The subsequent history of hip-hop fashion is a story of continuous negotiation between subcultural identity and commercial incorporation. As hip-hop became the dominant global youth culture from the 1990s onwards, its aesthetic codes were incorporated into mainstream fashion — initially through brands that deliberately cultivated hip-hop associations (FUBU, Rocawear, Sean John), and eventually through luxury brands that sought to claim hip-hop’s cultural cachet (Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Versace). The result was a complex feedback loop in which hip-hop artists affirmed their success by wearing luxury brands, luxury brands gained cultural relevance by being worn by hip-hop artists, and the meanings of both were continuously transformed by the interaction.

Fast Fashion and Its Consequences

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw the emergence of fast fashion — a production and retail model characterised by the rapid translation of runway and street-style trends into cheaply produced, low-priced garments available to mass consumers. The Spanish chain Zara, part of the Inditex group founded by Amancio Ortega, pioneered this model from the 1980s: Zara could design, produce, and deliver a new garment to store in as little as fifteen days, compared with the six-month lead times of traditional fashion production. Swedish H&M and the Irish chain Primark extended the model further, with prices so low that garments were effectively disposable.

Fast fashion democratised fashion in the narrowest economic sense — it made trendy clothing available to consumers at unprecedented price points — but at enormous social and environmental costs. The cost reductions that made fast fashion prices possible were achieved primarily through the relocation of garment production to countries with low wages and minimal labour protection. The 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory complex in Savar, Bangladesh — which killed 1,134 workers and injured more than 2,500 — was a catastrophic demonstration of the human costs of the fast fashion supply chain.

The environmental costs are equally significant. The fashion industry accounts for approximately 10% of global carbon emissions, consumes enormous quantities of water in textile dyeing and finishing, and generates textile waste on a massive scale: the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that one garbage truck of clothes is burned or landfilled every second globally. The micro-fibre pollution generated by washing synthetic garments has become a significant contributor to ocean micro-plastic contamination.

The politics of fast fashion connect to broader questions about the geography of consumption and production in a globalised economy. The ability of consumers in wealthy countries to buy cheap clothing depends on the exploitation of workers in poor countries — a global division of labour in which the cultural pleasures of fashion are purchased at the expense of those who lack the market power to claim a fair share of the value they create.

Chapter 12: Food, Drink, and Culinary Culture

Food as Culture

Food is perhaps the most universal of all cultural practices — every human society has a food culture, a set of norms governing what is eaten, how it is prepared, with whom, and on what occasions. Food is simultaneously a biological necessity and a dense symbolic system: the foods we eat signal our membership in communities, our adherence to religious prescriptions, our class position, our national identity, and our moral values. The anthropologist Mary Douglas argued in Purity and Danger (1966) and Deciphering a Meal (1975) that food classification systems — the distinction between clean and unclean foods, between the edible and the inedible — are maps of social order: what a society refuses to eat tells us as much about its self-understanding as what it chooses to consume.

The history of food is therefore a history of popular culture in the most fundamental sense: it traces the practices through which ordinary people, in their daily acts of eating and drinking, reproduce and occasionally contest the social structures in which they live. The festive excess of carnival — mountains of food, rivers of wine, the temporary suspension of the scarcity that was the normal condition of pre-industrial life — was a dietary as much as a cultural event. The harvest supper at which the labourer was temporarily fed at the master’s expense was a moment of symbolic redistribution that acknowledged mutual obligation within an exploitative relationship.

Sugar, Slavery, and the Transformation of Diet

No single foodstuff better illustrates the relationship between food, culture, and global power than sugar. Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985) is the foundational study in this field, tracing the transformation of sugar from a rare luxury of medieval aristocrats to a dietary staple of the industrial working class, and showing how this transformation was inseparable from the development of the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation economy of the Caribbean.

In medieval England, sugar was an expensive imported spice, available only to the wealthy and used medicinally and as a flavouring for elaborate dishes. By the seventeenth century, the development of sugar plantations in the Caribbean, worked by enslaved Africans, had dramatically increased supply and driven down prices. By the nineteenth century, sugar had become a staple of the working-class diet — the characteristic form being the heavily sweetened cup of tea that became one of the defining features of British working-class culture.

The British Alehouse and the Social History of Drinking

The alehouse (or public house, or pub) has been central to English social life from at least the medieval period. Peter Clark’s The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830 (1983) charts its development from a domestic cottage industry (the alewife who brewed and sold from her home) to the elaborately furnished Victorian “gin palace” and eventually the regulated licensed trade of the twentieth century. The alehouse served functions that went far beyond the sale of alcohol: it was a labour exchange (where workers and employers negotiated hire), a credit institution (where workers could run tabs against future wages), an entertainment venue, a postal address, a political meeting place, and the primary site of male working-class sociability.

The culture of the alehouse was organised around the practices of treating (buying rounds for the group) and conviviality (the social warmth generated by shared drinking), which created informal bonds of mutual obligation and solidarity within working-class communities. To refuse to participate in treating was a social offence; to be seen drinking alone was a mark of unsociability or degradation. These practices had an important economic function in communities of uncertain and irregular income: the informal obligations of treating created networks of mutual support that could be called upon in times of hardship.

The coffeehouses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries occupied a different but equally important position in the social geography of English popular culture. As Jürgen Habermas argued in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), the London coffeehouse of the period 1660–1730 was a crucial institution in the formation of what he calls the bourgeois public sphere — the space of rational-critical discourse, distinct from both the state and the private sphere of the household, in which private individuals came together as a public to discuss matters of common concern. The coffeehouse charged a penny for admission and a cup of coffee, and in return offered access to newspapers, access to the conversation of other customers, and a temporary suspension of the normal rules of social rank. It was not truly egalitarian — women were generally excluded, and the customers were predominantly from the middling and commercial classes — but it created a new form of publicness that was distinct from both court culture and popular festivity.

The Temperance Movement and the Politics of Drink

The campaign against alcohol that produced the temperance movement of the nineteenth century was simultaneously a moral crusade, a class project, and a political movement. The temperance movement in Britain, which began in the 1820s and reached its height in the 1880s–1900s, was driven by evangelical Protestantism’s hostility to bodily indulgence, by middle-class anxiety about working-class disorder and improvidence, and by a genuine humanitarian concern about the social costs of working-class drunkenness (domestic violence, neglect of children, industrial accidents).

The class dimensions of temperance are complex. The movement was predominantly organised by middle-class reformers and Nonconformist ministers, and its targets were predominantly working-class practices — the alehouse, the gin shop, the beershop. Yet the temperance movement also had a genuinely working-class strand: the teetotal working men who organised temperance societies, built coffee taverns as alternatives to the pub, and argued that sobriety was a prerequisite for working-class self-improvement and political credibility. The “temperance Chartists” of the 1830s–40s argued that working-class people needed to demonstrate their worthiness for the vote by demonstrating their capacity for rational self-governance — and sobriety was a key marker of that capacity.

The working-class response to temperance campaigns was generally hostile, because the pub was one of the few institutions that working-class communities actually controlled. As one working-class commentator pointed out, the middle and upper classes had their clubs, their country houses, and their private gardens; the working class had the pub. To campaign against the pub was to campaign against one of the few spaces of working-class cultural autonomy.

The Democratisation of Cuisine in the Twentieth Century

The most dramatic transformation in British food culture of the twentieth century was the democratisation of cuisine — the progressive diffusion of previously elite or exotic culinary practices to a broader public. This process had several distinct phases and vehicles.

Elizabeth David (1913–1992) is the pivotal figure in the mid-twentieth-century revolution in British middle-class food culture. Her books — A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950), French Country Cooking (1951), Italian Food (1954) — introduced to a Britain of post-war austerity and bland institutional cooking the flavours, aromas, and principles of Mediterranean cuisine. David’s prose was as literary as her cooking instructions were practical; she wrote about food with a sensuous precision that was itself culturally transformative, suggesting that eating well was not a luxury reserved for those with money and social connection but a practice open to anyone with intelligence, curiosity, and a willingness to seek out good ingredients.

The supermarket revolution of the 1960s–70s transformed the geography and economics of food retail, concentrating purchasing power in a small number of corporate chains (Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda) and driving out the small specialist retailers — butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, bakers — that had previously served urban communities. The supermarket offered unprecedented variety at lower prices but at the cost of relationship, provenance, and specificity: the supermarket shopper chose from a standardised, nationally consistent range of products rather than from whatever happened to be in season and locally produced.

The restaurant boom of the 1980s and 1990s transformed eating out from an occasional luxury into a regular middle-class leisure activity and eventually (through the proliferation of cheap restaurant chains, fast food franchises, and delivery services) into a more widely accessible cultural practice. The television cookery show, from Fanny Cradock in the 1950s through Keith Floyd in the 1980s to the spectacular proliferation of the genre in the 2000s (Delia Smith, Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigella Lawson, Heston Blumenthal), created a new form of popular cultural engagement with food — food as entertainment, as aspirational lifestyle, as vehicle for national and personal identity.

Fast Food and the McDonaldisation Thesis

The globalisation of fast food — led by McDonald’s, which had expanded from its California origins to become the world’s largest restaurant chain by the 1990s — has been one of the most significant transformations of food culture in the twentieth century. George Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis, first developed in a 1983 article and extended in The McDonaldization of Society (1993), argued that the McDonald’s system — with its emphases on efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control — represented the apotheosis of a broader rationalising tendency that was transforming not just food service but healthcare, education, entertainment, and virtually every other sphere of social life.

Ritzer drew on Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic rationalisation to argue that the rationalisation of food service exemplified in fast food was a contemporary equivalent of the iron cage of rationality that Weber had seen as the fate of modern society: a social order of unprecedented efficiency and productivity that was simultaneously dehumanising, deadening to genuine spontaneity and creativity, and incapable of the meaningful social intercourse that food culture at its best had always supported.

The McDonaldization of food culture has been contested on both empirical and normative grounds. Critics of Ritzer note that consumers are not simply passive recipients of rationalised food but active interpreters who use McDonald’s and other fast food chains in culturally specific ways: in many Asian countries, for example, McDonald’s functions not as a cheap food option but as a premium Western experience associated with modernity and aspiration. The anthropologist James L. Watson’s edited volume Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (1997) documented the complex ways in which McDonald’s was localised and reinterpreted across Asian cultures, challenging the simple cultural imperialism thesis.

Food Justice and the Politics of Eating

The history of food culture cannot be separated from the history of food inequality. Access to adequate, nutritious food has been one of the most fundamental markers of social inequality throughout human history. The poor have consistently eaten less, eaten worse, and suffered more from the diseases of malnutrition — both deficiency diseases (scurvy, rickets, pellagra) and, in the contemporary period, the paradoxical diseases of cheap food abundance (obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease).

The food desert — the urban residential area without convenient access to affordable fresh food, served primarily by convenience stores and fast food outlets — has become a focus of contemporary food politics, particularly in relation to racial and class inequalities in American cities. Research consistently shows that food deserts are concentrated in low-income, predominantly Black and Hispanic neighbourhoods, while affluent white neighbourhoods enjoy density of supermarkets, farmers’ markets, and specialty food retailers. The geography of food retail is thus a geography of social inequality made edible.

The contemporary food justice movement addresses these inequalities through a combination of community gardening, food co-ops, advocacy for living wages (which would enable low-income workers to buy better food), and campaigns for the regulation of food marketing practices that target children and low-income consumers with products associated with the worst health outcomes.

Chapter 13: Comics, Popular Literature, and Visual Culture

The Penny Dreadful and Its Descendants

The history of comics and popular visual literature begins, as we have seen, with the penny dreadful and the illustrated serial fiction of the early Victorian period. But the specifically sequential visual narrative that we recognise as the “comic” has its own genealogy, rooted in the development of cheap illustrated publishing and the growing market for visual humour and entertainment.

William Hogarth (1697–1764) is often credited as an early precursor of the comic strip, with his serialised pictorial narratives — A Rake’s Progress (1735), A Harlot’s Progress (1732), Marriage A-la-Mode (1745) — which combined moral didacticism with sharply observed social satire in a sequential format that told a story through a series of related images. Hogarth’s prints were made available in engraved form for the respectable domestic market, but pirated cheap copies circulated widely in popular culture, and the format of the pictorial series influenced subsequent illustrated journalism and eventually the comic strip.

The specific form of the newspaper comic strip emerged in the United States in the 1890s, as mass-circulation newspapers competed for readers through increasingly spectacular visual features. The Yellow Kid, created by Richard Outcault and published from 1895, is generally credited as the first recurring comic strip character. Drawn in the slum tenements of New York’s Lower East Side, The Yellow Kid was a bald, gap-toothed boy in a yellow nightshirt who commented, with irreverent humour, on the politics and social conditions of his urban environment. Its enormous popularity established the comic strip as a standard feature of the popular press, and the rivalry between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal for the rights to publish it contributed to the term “yellow journalism” (though the etymology is contested).

The Golden Age of Superhero Comics

The American comic book industry took its modern form in the late 1930s, with the launch of Superman in Action Comics #1 (June 1938) and Batman in Detective Comics #27 (May 1939). Both characters — and the genre of the superhero comic that they inaugurated — were products of Jewish immigrant writers and artists working in New York: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (Superman) were second-generation Jewish-American immigrants; Bob Kane and Bill Finger (Batman) were from similar backgrounds.

The superhero comic addressed the anxieties and aspirations of its Depression-era audience with a powerful fantasy: the ordinary person (Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne) who concealed an extraordinary power, capable of correcting the injustices that the ordinary world failed to address. In its original New Deal context, Superman fought against corrupt businessmen, abusive husbands, and coal-mine operators who endangered their workers — explicitly political targets that reflected the progressive politics of the era. Batman addressed urban crime and corruption in a darker register that anticipated the hardboiled detective tradition.

The wartime period (1941–45) saw the comic book become a mass medium: sales reached 1.5 billion copies annually at the height of the war, and superhero comics in particular served as vehicles for patriotic mobilisation (Captain America, whose first issue had him punching Hitler on the cover in March 1941, months before US entry into the war). The post-war period saw the genre proliferate but also begin to fragment, with horror and crime comics challenging the dominance of the superhero.

The Comics Code Authority and the Moral Panic of 1954

The most significant episode in the history of American comics censorship was the moral panic of 1954, generated by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings that followed.

Despite the methodological weaknesses of Wertham’s case, his book generated enormous public anxiety and prompted Senate hearings in April and June 1954. The comic book industry, fearing legislative censorship, responded by establishing the Comics Magazine Association of America and its Comics Code Authority (CCA) in September 1954. The Code prohibited, among many other things, the use of the words “horror” or “terror” in comic titles, the depiction of crime in a positive light, sexual content, excessive violence, and disrespect for authority. The effect was devastating: EC Comics, the most innovative publisher of the period (whose titles included Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science), was effectively put out of business. The horror and crime comic genres were largely eliminated.

The CCA episode is a classic case study in moral panic theory as developed by Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). Cohen defined the moral panic as a condition, episode, or person that emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests, and is diagnosed, predicted, and treated by the moral arbiters of society — editors, bishops, politicians, and crime experts — with a response that is disproportionate to the actual threat. The comic book panic exhibits all the features of the genre: a scapegoat (the comic book), a moral entrepreneur (Wertham), an amplification spiral (newspapers, politicians, concerned parents), and a resolution (the CCA) that addressed the panic but not the underlying social anxieties that had generated it.

Underground Comix and the Graphic Novel

The Comics Code Authority created a cultural vacuum that was filled in the late 1960s by the underground comix movement — self-published, small-circulation comic books distributed outside the conventional newsstands through head shops, record stores, and the alternative press. Underground comix were explicitly anti-Code: they featured explicit sexuality, drug use, political satire, and autobiographical self-revelation in a deliberately crude, expressive visual style that contrasted with the polished commercial art of the mainstream.

Robert Crumb (b. 1943) was the central figure of the underground comix world, his Zap Comix (launched 1968) establishing the aesthetic template for the genre: raw, confessional, sexually transgressive, politically radical, and formally experimental. Crumb’s work explored fantasies and anxieties — race, sex, class resentment, cultural alienation — with a directness that no mainstream publisher would have permitted, and in doing so expanded the expressive range of the comic medium well beyond anything the Code had allowed.

The development of the graphic novel as a concept and as a publishing format represents the bid of comics to be recognised as a legitimate literary and artistic form, capable of addressing complex subjects with the seriousness previously reserved for prose fiction and cinema. The key works that established this claim were Art Spiegelman’s Maus (serialised 1980–91, collected 1991/92), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (serialised 1986–87, collected 1987), and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986). Maus — which told the story of Spiegelman’s father’s survival of the Holocaust, representing Jews as mice and Nazis as cats — was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the first comic work to receive the honour. Watchmen was described by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923. Both works used the visual-narrative possibilities of the comic form — the relationship between panel and page, the play of time and space in the sequencing of images — with a sophistication that demonstrated the medium’s unique capabilities.

Romance Fiction, Detective Stories, and Genre Literature

The most widely read literary genres in the world are genres that literary culture has consistently struggled to take seriously: the romance novel, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction. The romance novel is the highest-grossing genre of fiction globally, with estimated annual sales in the billions of dollars; it is read overwhelmingly by women and dismissed overwhelmingly by (predominantly male) literary critics. The history of this dismissal is itself a cultural history of gender and aesthetic value.

Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (1984) was the first serious sociological study of romance reading, based on ethnographic research with a community of romance readers in the American midwest. Radway found that her subjects read romance not passively but actively and critically: they had clear aesthetic preferences (for strong heroines, emotionally responsive heroes, and stories that validated female experience), they discussed books with each other in reading groups and through correspondence, and they used romance reading as a form of time for themselves carved out from the demands of domestic and caregiving labour. Romance reading, Radway argued, was simultaneously an act of accommodation to patriarchal gender norms (the happy ending in heterosexual marriage) and a form of resistance (the claim to pleasure, time, and imaginative life outside the domestic role).

The detective story, which achieved its classical form in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle (the Sherlock Holmes stories, 1887–1927), Agatha Christie (1920–1976), and the hard-boiled American tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, is the other great genre that popular culture has produced in abundance and literary culture has been slow to credit. The detective story is, at its most basic, a fantasy of interpretive mastery: the detective (and through him or her, the reader) confronts a world of apparent chaos and confusion and restores order through the application of reason, observation, and inference. This fantasy has clear ideological dimensions — the detective is always on the side of property, law, and social order — but it also satisfies genuine intellectual pleasures that deserve to be taken seriously as aesthetic pleasures.

Science fiction, which found its modern form with H. G. Wells (The Time Machine, 1895; The War of the Worlds, 1898) and developed through the American pulp magazine tradition of the 1920s–40s into the sophisticated literary form it has become in the hands of writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler, is the genre most explicitly concerned with the relationship between technology, social change, and cultural anxiety. Science fiction’s characteristic move — the extrapolation of present tendencies into an imagined future — makes it a uniquely sensitive register of the anxieties and aspirations of its historical moment. Cold War science fiction was saturated with nuclear anxiety (Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, 1957); the 1960s–70s produced feminist and ecological science fiction (Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969) in response to the social movements of the period; the 1980s produced cyberpunk (William Gibson’s Neuromancer, 1984) in response to the rise of computing and global capitalism.

Manga, Anime, and the Global Circulation of Popular Visual Culture

The twentieth century’s most successful challenger to Hollywood’s global dominance in popular visual culture is the Japanese manga (comic) and anime (animation) industry, which has achieved remarkable global penetration from the 1980s onwards. Manga — serial illustrated fiction sold in enormous volumes (the weekly magazine Shōnen Jump sold 6 million copies per week in its peak years) and covering every imaginable genre — has developed a visual vocabulary, a set of narrative conventions, and a relationship between creator and audience that is quite distinct from the Western comic tradition.

The global diffusion of anime through video and later digital streaming has created communities of fans — otaku culture — that have challenged Western cultural imperialism in the popular imagination and raised new questions about the cultural politics of globalisation. If Hollywood’s global spread raised concerns about Americanisation, the global spread of Japanese popular culture raises different questions: about the relationship between Japanese national culture and its global repackaging, about the possibilities for non-Western cultural forms to achieve global reach, and about the nature of transcultural consumption — the pleasure taken in cultural forms from outside one’s own cultural tradition.

Chapter 14: Digital Culture, Social Media, and Participatory Media

The Internet as Cultural Revolution

The emergence of the internet as a mass cultural medium in the 1990s represents the most fundamental transformation of popular culture since the development of cinema a century earlier — and an argument could be made that it represents an even more fundamental transformation, since it altered not merely the content and distribution of culture but the basic relationship between cultural production and consumption. Television was a medium in which a small number of professional producers created content for a large mass audience of passive consumers. The internet, at least in its initial cultural imagination, was a medium in which anyone could be a producer as well as a consumer.

The internet’s precursors — the Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) of the 1970s–80s, the Usenet newsgroups of the 1980s–90s, the early online communities like The WELL (founded 1985) — were already creating new forms of popular cultural practice: fan communities forming around shared media interests, political discussion groups, collaborative fiction writing, and the trading of cultural information and commentary. These early communities established practices — the discussion thread, the user profile, the flame war, the lurker, the troll — that would migrate into the social media world of the 2000s.

Fan Culture and the Politics of Production

The history of fan culture is considerably older than the internet, rooted in the organised fan communities that formed around science fiction magazines in the 1930s, around film stars in the 1920s and 1930s, and around popular musicians from the 1950s onwards. What the internet did was to provide these pre-existing communities with the infrastructure to expand globally, to communicate instantly, and to produce and distribute their own cultural products without the barriers of traditional publishing and distribution.

Fan fiction — stories written by fans set in the fictional worlds of their favourite texts, often exploring scenarios, relationships, and characters that the official texts leave undeveloped — is among the most culturally significant of these fan-produced forms. Fan fiction predates the internet: science fiction fanzines carrying fan-written stories circulated from the 1930s onwards, and the first explicitly labelled “fanfic” communities formed around Star Trek in the 1960s and 1970s. But the internet transformed fan fiction from a small-scale, physically distributed practice into a massive global cultural phenomenon: the fan fiction archive site Archive of Our Own (AO3), founded 2008, hosts over 9 million works and registers over 3 million users.

The cultural politics of fan fiction are complex. On one level, fan fiction represents exactly the kind of creative appropriation of commercial cultural material that de Certeau’s framework celebrates: fans take the raw material provided by corporations and transform it in ways that express their own experiences, desires, and values, often filling in the gaps that commercial storytelling — constrained by market calculations about what is safe and profitable — leaves unfilled. Fan fiction communities have been particularly important spaces for the exploration of LGBTQ identities and experiences: the “slash” fan fiction tradition (fiction exploring romantic and sexual relationships between male characters) dates to the Star Trek fanzines of the 1970s and has created an enormous and sophisticated body of work that predates, and in some ways helped to create, the mainstream cultural acceptance of gay relationships.

On another level, fan fiction exists in a legally and commercially ambiguous relationship to its source texts. Copyright law has never definitively resolved the question of whether transformative fan works constitute infringement of the rights of the copyright holder; most major media corporations tolerate fan fiction as free marketing rather than pursuing it legally, but the legal position remains precarious.

The Social Media Era

The social media platforms that emerged in the mid-2000s — Facebook (founded 2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2011), TikTok (launched in China 2016, internationally 2017) — created new forms of popular cultural practice at a scale that dwarfs all previous media. Facebook reached 1 billion users in 2012; by 2026 the combined user bases of the major platforms run to billions of users who spend an average of multiple hours per day on these platforms.

The social media era has transformed popular culture in several ways simultaneously. It has democratised cultural production: anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection can create and distribute cultural content to a global audience. It has accelerated cultural circulation: trends, memes, and cultural moments can spread globally within hours. It has personalised cultural consumption: algorithmic recommendation systems curate individual feeds of content tailored to each user’s past behaviour, creating a personalised cultural experience that is simultaneously unique and commercially optimised. And it has platformised cultural life: the major platforms have become the primary infrastructure of cultural distribution, giving a small number of technology corporations unprecedented power over what cultural content reaches audiences.

The Attention Economy and Platform Governance

The social media platforms operate on a business model that converts human attention into advertising revenue. Since advertising revenue is proportional to user engagement — the time users spend on the platform, the number of interactions they generate — platforms are economically incentivised to maximise engagement by whatever means are most effective. The result has been the optimisation of platform design for addictiveness: the infinite scroll (eliminating the natural stopping points that pagination created), the notification system (creating variable-reward conditioning mechanisms analogous to slot machines), and the algorithmic amplification of emotionally charged content (anger, outrage, and anxiety generate more engagement than calm, considered discussion).

Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants (2016) and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) have provided the most searching analyses of this system. Wu traces the long history of the trade in human attention — from the early newspaper advertisers of the nineteenth century through radio and television broadcasting to the internet — as the fundamental economic logic of commercial mass media. Zuboff develops the concept of surveillance capitalism: the practice of extracting human behavioural data as a raw material for the prediction and modification of future behaviour, sold to advertisers who want to reach people at the moment when they are most susceptible to particular messages.

The cultural consequences of the attention economy extend beyond its commercial dimensions. The filter bubble — Eli Pariser’s term for the personalised information environment created by algorithmic curation, in which users are progressively shown content that reinforces their existing beliefs and preferences and screened from challenging or disconfirming material — has become a major concern in debates about democracy, polarisation, and the epistemological conditions of informed political participation. Whether the filter bubble effects of social media are as severe as its critics suggest is empirically contested: some research suggests that social media users are actually exposed to more diverse viewpoints than their offline social networks would provide. But the concern is real: a media environment in which each user inhabits a personalised information environment is fundamentally different from the shared public sphere that Habermas theorised as the foundation of democratic deliberation.

Streaming, the End of Broadcasting, and the New Gatekeepers

The streaming revolution — led by Netflix (founded 1997 as a DVD rental service, launching streaming in 2007) and subsequently by Spotify (founded 2006), Apple Music, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and dozens of others — has dismantled the broadcast model that organised popular cultural consumption for most of the twentieth century. Broadcasting organised culture temporally: everyone watched the same programme at the same time, creating the collective cultural events — the television finale, the sporting broadcast, the Christmas special — that generated shared cultural reference points. Streaming disaggregates this: each user watches what they want, when they want, and increasingly (through algorithmic recommendation) what the platform predicts they will want.

The consequences for popular cultural solidarity are significant. The shared cultural experience that a weekly broadcast serial created — the water-cooler conversation about last night’s episode, the sense of being part of a collective audience — is only partially replicated by the streaming binge culture, in which different viewers progress through a series at different rates and may have seen more or fewer episodes than their interlocutors. At the same time, streaming has enabled the survival of niche cultural forms that the broadcast economics of mass audiences would have eliminated: a streaming platform can profitably serve an audience of a million subscribers for a genre that could not have justified a broadcast timeslot.

The algorithmic recommendation system that determines what content each user encounters on streaming platforms is among the most culturally significant technologies of our moment. Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist (launched 2015) demonstrated that an algorithm could identify musical preferences with sufficient accuracy to serve as a genuinely useful cultural guide — and, crucially, one whose recommendations could be personalised to an individual user’s taste profile in ways that no human editor could replicate at scale. Netflix’s recommendation algorithm, which the company estimates drives over 80% of what its users watch, is the invisible cultural gatekeeper of the streaming age: it determines not merely what content is available but what content each user is likely to encounter.

Video Games as Popular Culture

The history of video games represents one of the most significant additions to the landscape of popular culture in the second half of the twentieth century. From humble technological origins — the first commercially available arcade game, Computer Space (1971), designed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, founders of Atari — video games have grown into the largest entertainment industry in the world by revenue, exceeding both music and film.

The arcade culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s — the social spaces organised around banks of stand-up arcade machines in shopping malls, seaside amusement arcades, and dedicated arcade venues — represents a genuinely distinctive form of popular cultural sociability. The arcade was a public space in which games were played for a small fee, in competition or co-operation with others, in an environment that combined the fairground atmosphere of spectacular entertainment with the social dynamics of the local gathering place. The high scores displayed on the machine’s leaderboard created a public record of local competitive achievement; the queue to play created moments of social interaction; the gathering crowd around a skilled player created a spontaneous audience for individual performance.

The domestic migration of gaming — from the arcade to the home console, driven by the Atari 2600 (1977), the Nintendo Entertainment System (1985), and their successors — transformed gaming from a public social activity into a primarily domestic and private one, though multiplayer gaming remained an important strand (from the early LAN parties of the 1990s to the online multiplayer games of the 2000s). The Nintendo Entertainment System’s launch following the video game crash of 1983 (caused by market saturation and a flood of low-quality software) established a model — the console manufacturer as quality controller, exercising strict oversight over third-party developers — that remains the basis of the console gaming industry.

Digital Populism and the Return of the Folk

One of the more surprising cultural developments of the digital era has been the revival, in digital form, of cultural practices that belong to the oldest traditions of popular culture. The open-source software movement — in which volunteer programmers collaboratively develop software that is freely available to all — exhibits the same logic of communal labour and shared resources as the pre-industrial commons. Wikipedia — the collaboratively produced encyclopaedia that now contains over 60 million articles in over 300 languages — represents a form of collective cultural production that has no precise historical precedent in scale but connects in its logic to the oral traditions of communal knowledge-making. The TikTok challenge — the invitation to imitate and vary a brief video format, which can generate millions of variations in the course of a few days — is a digital form of the folk song tradition, in which a basic melody and lyric structure is endlessly varied and adapted by performers across a dispersed community.

The relationship between digital culture and political populism — the mobilisation of anti-elite sentiment through social media — also has historical precursors in the popular cultural traditions we have traced in this course. The broadside ballad that mocked the king, the charivari that publicly shamed the community’s social deviants, the music hall song that gave voice to working-class resentment of the landlord and the factory owner — all of these are ancestors of the Twitter pile-on, the viral political meme, and the online petition. What is new is the speed, the scale, and the degree to which this popular political expression is now mediated, monetised, and potentially manipulated by commercial and political actors who have learned to exploit the affordances of digital platforms for their own purposes.

Concluding Thoughts: Popular Culture and the Making of Modern Life

The chapters of this course have traced popular culture from the festive world of medieval Europe — with its carnivals and charivaris, its cunning folk and printed ballads — through the transformations of print, industrialisation, urbanisation, and globalisation to the digital landscape of the twenty-first century. Across these historical transformations, certain persistent themes have emerged.

First, popular culture has always been a site of social contest. From the reform of popular festivity in the sixteenth century to the Comics Code of 1954, from the temperance campaigns against the pub to the contemporary debates about social media regulation, popular culture has been a terrain on which the powerful and the less powerful have negotiated the terms of cultural participation. These negotiations are never simply won or lost by either side; they produce continuously shifting compromises that give popular culture its characteristic mixture of conformism and resistance, commercial calculation and genuine expressiveness.

Second, popular culture mediates social identity. Across the centuries we have studied, popular cultural practices — what you eat, how you dress, what sports you follow, what music you listen to, what stories you tell — have served as markers of belonging: to a class, a generation, a gender, an ethnicity, a nation, a subculture. The social identities that popular culture mediates are not fixed or essential; they are produced in the practice of cultural participation and are always subject to negotiation, transformation, and contestation.

Third, popular culture has been continuously shaped by commercial forces without being fully determined by them. From the first chapbook publishers to the contemporary streaming platforms, popular culture has been produced and distributed by commercial enterprises with commercial interests. But the audiences and communities that consume popular culture have never been simply passive recipients of what commercial enterprises offer them; they have always found ways — through appropriation, re-interpretation, tactical use, and creative production — to make popular culture their own. The relationship between commercial production and popular creativity is not one of simple domination but of continuous, contested interaction.

The theorists we have encountered in this course — Williams, Gramsci, Hall, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Veblen, Barthes, Jenkins — offer us a set of analytical tools for navigating this complexity, each illuminating aspects that the others leave in shadow. No single theory is adequate to the full complexity of popular culture’s history; the scholar’s task is to deploy these tools with discrimination, sensitivity to context, and a willingness to be surprised by what the archive contains.

Popular culture, as this course has tried to show, is never simply entertainment. It is the medium through which societies make meaning, through which power is exercised and contested, through which individual lives are connected to collective histories. To study it is to study the human world in its most vivid, most contested, and most consequential dimensions.