Sources and References

Supplementary texts — 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); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971); Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language (Hutchinson, 1980); 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); 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); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Macmillan, 1899); Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 1994); Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (Routledge, 1996)

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; Literariness.org, Analysis of Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding; Not Even Past, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971); Britannica, Bearbaiting; Britannica, Great Exhibition of 1851

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.

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. 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.

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.

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. The Centre was transformed under the directorship of Stuart Hall (1968–1979) into a major international intellectual force.

Stuart Hall (1932–2014), a Jamaican-British theorist, developed the CCCS’s most influential analytical tools. 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), 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Burke’s thesis has been qualified and complicated by subsequent research — the relationship between elites and popular culture was never as clean as his model suggests — but 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.

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. The Salem trials of 1692–93 in Massachusetts were a late colonial episode of a European phenomenon.

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.

Confessions were often obtained under torture, especially in Continental jurisdictions, 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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), 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.

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 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.

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. 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.

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. 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: 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.

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.

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 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 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. 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.

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 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 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.

The Exhibition’s 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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), 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.

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 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 (Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis of 1886; Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, begun 1897), 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 and in America by Margaret Sanger, made contraceptive knowledge publicly available for the first time.

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.

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.

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.

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 (David Conn) and as one of the few spaces in which working-class masculinity could find public, collective expression without shame (Gareth Stedman Jones).

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 role of baseball in absorbing waves of European immigration into American national culture was extensively remarked by contemporaries: the Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Eastern European immigrant communities who produced major league players in successive generations used the sport as a vehicle of Americanisation and social mobility.

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. The politicisation of the Games — the boycotts of 1980 (Western powers over Afghanistan) and 1984 (Soviet bloc in response) — demonstrated how thoroughly the ideal of apolitical athletic competition had been subordinated to national interest.

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 (but not too light). 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.

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 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: each studio had its distinctive style, its roster of stars, and its specialised genres.

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 in a form of what has been called cultural imperialism, though the term underestimates the creativity with which non-American audiences appropriated Hollywood material for their own purposes.

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. Hollywood’s response to television was initially defensive — studios refused to release films to television and experimented with widescreen formats (CinemaScope), 3-D, and other technologies to differentiate the theatrical experience. Eventually, a more productive relationship developed: the studios became primarily television producers as well as film producers.

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.

Television brought the world into the living room in a way radio had not quite achieved, combining sound with moving image and making the domestic space a site of collective viewing. It restructured family time around programming schedules, created new forms of celebrity (the television star, different from the film star in being perceived as a regular presence in the home), 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.

Critics from the Frankfurt School tradition (notably Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, 1964) saw television as the perfect instrument of the culture industry’s repressive desublimation: 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 can contain oppositional or at least ambivalent meanings.

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 coined the term “rock and roll” and championed the music on Cleveland and New York radio stations, was instrumental in its national diffusion.

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. The mod’s Italian suit expressed an aspiration to classlessness that the labour market denied; the skinhead’s aggression performed a caricature of working-class toughness at a moment when that class was being materially dissolved. These readings have been criticised for over-reading subcultural style and neglecting its playful, hedonistic, and non-ideological dimensions, but they remain influential.

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. The wealthy man’s wife, dressed in impractical clothes that signalled her freedom from manual labour, was a “vicarious consumer” of her husband’s wealth, her decorativeness itself a form of conspicuous expenditure.

Veblen’s analysis was directed primarily at the wealthy, but his framework has been applied much more broadly. The aspiration to conspicuous consumption, he argued, 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 (whose conspicuous markings signal their price to observers).

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 — goods produced for exchange rather than for direct use — 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 (the worker and the factory owner, the farmer and the consumer) are mediated through and obscured by the relationships between things (the wage and the commodity price). 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.

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. Figures like Albert Lasker and later Claude Hopkins in America, and Charles and Maurice Saatchi in Britain, became figures of cultural influence comparable to film directors or novelists.

The psychological dimension of advertising received systematic attention from the early twentieth century. John B. Watson, the founder of behaviourist psychology, moved from academic research to an advertising career in 1920 and applied behaviourist principles (stimulus-response conditioning, emotional association) 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.

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.

The extension of brand logic to personal identity — the idea that individuals can and should cultivate a personal brand, that self-presentation in consumer markets (clothing, music taste, lifestyle choices) is a form of identity expression — represents the fullest development of the consumer culture that Veblen observed in embryo. In this context, popular culture is not merely entertainment: it is the raw material from which branded identities are assembled. The music you listen to, the sports team you support, the films you watch, the clothes you wear — all function as signals in a complex social semiotics of identity and aspiration.

The critical tradition from Marx through the Frankfurt School to contemporary scholars like Zygmunt Bauman has consistently insisted on the costs of this 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.

Consumer Culture and Identity in the Digital Age

The histories traced in this course converge on the present moment in a digital consumer environment that accelerates and intensifies all of the tendencies discussed here: the commodification of attention, the industrialisation of entertainment, the segmentation and targeting of audiences, the use of brand association to construct identity, and the simultaneous narrowcasting (delivering specific content to specific audiences) and global reach of cultural production. The theories developed to analyse earlier moments — Gramsci’s hegemony, Hall’s encoding/decoding, Bourdieu’s cultural capital, de Certeau’s tactics, Veblen’s conspicuous consumption — remain indispensable tools for navigating this environment, even as the specific forms it takes continue to evolve.

Popular culture, as this course has shown, has never been simply entertainment. It has always been a site where power is exercised and contested, where identities are formed and challenged, where the experiences of ordinary people are simultaneously expressed, packaged, and sold back to them. Understanding its history is understanding a central dimension of the modern world.