Review: British Popular Culture: I

> The Debate over Art and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century England by Leo Lowenthal; Marjorie Fiske
> The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 by Richard Altick
> The Uses of Literacy: Changing Patterns in English Mass Culture by Richard Hoggart
> The Book World Today: A New Survey of the Making and Distribution of Books in Britain, John Hampden, ed. (The Macmillan Company, 1957).

The greatest weaknesses in contemporary criticism of popular culture are its provincialism and excessive contemporaneity. To read most critics of popular forms like penny journalism, movies, TV, and comics, you would never guess that these forms exist outside the United States and that they can best be understood in the light of a fairly long evolution. The essays and books at hand therefore have a double usefulness: they not only make it possible to get a good perspective on American popular culture; but they also suggest new strategies for teaching the traditional survey of English literature to the American adolescent.

Lowenthal and his wife are sociologists. The purpose of their study is "to explore some of the antecedents of the popular culture issues, particularly those generated by the mass media, which we face today." In effect, they are exploring what writers in eighteenth century England had to say about problems "engendered when literary works began to be produced as marketable commodities." The essay's five sections deal with (1) a brief summary of the new literary forms which emerged during this period; (2) the reaction of the literati to the new commercial audience-building devices; (3) an analysis of how and why the initial enthusiasm of the English intellectuals withered away; (4) the specific criticisms the intellectuals brought to bear on the new literary forms and their audiences; (5) the search for new artistic standards applicable in a democracy of culture.

To try to go into detail in the space available is impossible; suffice to say these two sociologists present us with new perspectives on old figures (Pope, Doctor Johnson, Goldsmith, and others) that must be quickly assimilated into our classroom discussions and anthologies. Oddly enough, much of the material is based on traditional English literary research; but it apparently took the sociological point of view to make the material relevant for teaching literature in a media-dominated age. This suggests a blindness on our part that puts the humanist's ritual denigration of the sociologist in an embarrassing light.

Professor Altick (English Department, Ohio State University), on the other hand, reveals in his study of emergence of the mass reading public in the nineteenth century how compatible popular culture research is with the sensibility of the traditional literary historian. "The history of the mass reading audience is, in fact," he says, "the history of English democracy seen from a new angle."

In an age when most take the right to literacy too casually, if indeed their right ever occurs to them through a fog of TV entertainment, it is both inspiring and yet disheartening to see how indomitably the middle and working classes fought for the freedom to read, against the most obtuse kind of religious and political obscurantism.

I suspect if we are to dramatize sufficiently the dearly secured but all too easily ignored accessibility to print, it will be by assimilating Altick's survey into our textbooks and lectures. There is a summary of some sixty-odd pages of printing history from Caxton through the eighteenth century, at which point he begins the story of various innovations such as "railway literature," the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, penny-a-week installment Bibles, the Society for the Diffusion of Pure Literature among the People, "elegant extracts," the penny post, pleas for the place of contemporary literature in the curriculum, the mechanics' institutes (whose clientele soon became business and professional people!), newsrooms for working men, mutual improvement clubs, the growth of public libraries and the spread of elementary and secondary education, the "itinerating libraries," street auctions for second-hand books, number-publications and classic reprints, the Penny Cyclopaedia, Thomas Tegg's experiments with remaindering and "penuriously contrived reprints," John Cassell's aggressive advertising for printed matter, and many other landmarks in the ordinary Englishman's progress to literacy.

Altick is especially good in showing the crucial importance of extra-literary factors, for example, the relationship between poverty, the window tax, and houses too dark to read in, day or night. Indeed, the importance of this indispensable book is its placing of an "abstract" subject like reading deeply into the changing social and political contexts of nineteenth century England.

Professor Richard Hoggart (late of the English Department, University of Rochester, now in his native England) has a similar respect for the earthy roots of culture. He himself grew up among the English working classes whose reactions to the mass media in the last thirty or forty years he analyzes in The Uses of Literacy. Part autobiographical, part sociological, Hoggart's book has the faults of neither method, the values of both subjective empathy and objective analysis. Unlike the typical hysterical tirade against "mass culture," this study presents the hopeful thesis that the working class values of family and loyalty to local groups have great powers of resistance to the tinsel blandishments of the trivial press.

Hoggart tempers this optimism, however, with the equally shrewd perception that the mass journalist has learned how to subtly pervert the real achievements of democracy. The flattery of the mass publicist presents the working classes with very attractive "invitations to self-indulgence"; he turns their very virtues into vices. Tolerance declines into acquiescence in anything. Respect for the common man becomes the insidious hubris of the "ordinary chap."

Progressivism is debased to a callow denigration of the past. Hoggart achieves his remarkable analysis of the threat of mass culture to democracy by comparing the new journalism with the kind he knew as a youngster in the 1910's and '20's, by examining the new popular songs with older traditions of club singing, by scrutinizing the mores of juke box boys, spicy magazines, and sex-and-violence novels.

The Book World Today, on the other hand, is an examination of the more respectable aspects of contemporary British culture. It contains twenty-two short essays by specialists in the book trade on such subjects as the author, agent, and the publisher; the general structure of the book business, as well as analyses of individual branches of publishing; newer media like paperbacks, book clubs, and radio and television; libraries, book leagues, and other cultural institutions in support of the habit; and other articles on reviewing and bookselling of more direct interest to people in the trade itself.

It is interesting to compare the British and American book trades, by reading Chandler Grannis, ed., What Happens in Book Publishing (Columbia University Press, 1957). For one thing the British business seems less tied to the book club bonanza than ours. For another, they have devised some ingenious experiments to test the effectiveness of the B.B.C. in motivating the withdrawal of books from libraries.

But most important, these books give us a new perspective on mass culture in America. The mass society is not necessarily an aesthetic dead end, but admits of various freedoms, depending on historical traditions and contemporary circumstance. Further, these volumes provide the teacher of the English literature survey with many new opportunities for relating the culture and civilization of the United Kingdom with the moral and aesthetic choices facing a student in modem America.

This is another way of saying they provide us with much more effective ways of teaching English literature to our kind of students than we have ever had in the past. In September the discussion of British popular culture will be continued with a consideration of new books on British broadcasting, journalism, the popular theatre, and the British national character.