Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England

Robert Storch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317215219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1982, this book is concerned with the tensions between continuity and change in customs, rituals, beliefs of artisans, factory workers and sections of the lower middle classes in the nineteenth century. It explores a range of factors which contributed to changes in custom, including the effects of urbanisation, conflict over the use of public land, new conceptions of public order, the decline of the oral tradition and the growth of a new recreational nexus in the larger cities. Drawing on material from all parts of the British Isles, the book demonstrates the enormous variety and diversity of popular tradition.

This book will be of interest to those studying Victorian history.

1 Introduction: Persistence and Change in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

Robert D. Storch

DOI: 10.4324/9781315619866-1

Popular culture in the nineteenth century has its own particular interest, if for no other reason than that the contemporary rural and urban middle classes took it very seriously and were profoundly concerned with it.¹ By and large it was conceived as a set of lower-class beliefs and behaviours which were annoying, wasteful, immoral or even threatening and dangerous. Because many expressions of popular culture had, almost by definition, to be open and take place in public spaces, they frequently produced, as concomitants, crowds, noise, excessive drinking and, often, increased levels of violence:

On Saturday night, if a foreigner had chanced to pass near the cattle market, he would have seen a sight after which all stories of English virtue and morality would have fallen upon his ears in vain. Crowds of men and women ... drunk, surging up and down the streets, gurgling round the entrance of the ... beer-shops; pickpockets ... unfortunate women ... children struggling through the crowded booths ... witnesses of all the disgusting immorality, the ribald jesting, the cursing and profanity ... and other nameless things in which these fairs and feasts abound.²

The annual scenes at Ilkley Feast in the 1870s could be truly frightening. Close to Leeds, Bradford and the populous villages on the railways which converged there, Ilkley was inundated each year. In 1870 ‘the scenes in the streets were simply disgraceful ... owing to the number of disorderly, drunken people who were reeling about. The public houses were open from morning to night to Visitors’, many of whom [got drunk] on the Sabbath.³’ The police were inadequate to keep order and few could be arrested because the town had no proper lock-up.

Most frightening of all were occasions such as Bradford New Year’s mumming, when large numbers of men and boys with blackened faces and in bizarre disguises penetrated not only middle-class neighbourhoods but, occasionally, even the middle-class home. Importuning sometimes led to harsh words and violence when money or drink was refused – as in 1868, when a man and woman were assaulted and knocked down on their doorstep by a young man who had been refused.⁴

In the past, mumming had been ‘used’ to reaffirm the solidarity of local communities, a function which became less and less viable in the nineteenth century. Certainly by the 1860s the ritual meant something quite different both to those who mounted it and to the recipients of their attentions – although the outward form hardly changed at all. To the former it represented not only an opportunity to get drink and money from those who could well afford to give them (which was nothing new at all), but also a chance to extort, coerce and frighten – precisely to aggress. Mumming was, of course, a classical instance of a reversal ritual (and it survived in urban, industrial England long after some might have thought it would have vanished), but it could be used, like many other similar rituals, either to reaffirm or to attack the social order. The Victorian middle classes perceived it, quite rightly I think, as an attack. How could it have been otherwise? By the 1860s Bradford had long since ceased to be a locality in which old folk rituals could express communal solidarity, the mutual obligations of one social element to another, or even be used to recall those at the top of the local social order to their ‘traditional’ duties. No wonder such confrontations, when not directly prevented by the police, were suffused with mutual hostility and bad feeling.

The key event in the process of social and cultural rupture in this particular locality occurred long before – in the 1820s – when the old Bishop Blaize processions, previously participated in by both masters and men, foundered during the combers’ strike of 1825 precisely on the rock of industrial and class conflict. No doubt 1825 was only the culmination of that process of rupture. Its origins could probably be traced back a number of decades. Looking back from the 1850s, a Bradford man wrote:

Fifty or even Thirty years ago the connection between the employer and employed was quite different. It was then a matter of everyday occurrence for the master to mix socially with his workpeople, to enter into their pastimes with a healthy zest ... But now ... employers not only live apart from their operatives but are as socially separated as the Europeans at the Cape are from the Hottentots.⁵

The urban middle classes knew all about this rupture which, in addition to being social and cultural, was also political, and made strenuous (and sincere) efforts to recreate new patterns of deference and patronage either in the context of the workplace itself, or by reaching out into the working-class neighbourhood with conventicles of respectability and domestic missions. The object was to create a new kind of urban paternalism which would bypass, ignore and refuse to compromise with the old popular culture.

In some areas and to some limited extent this enterprise bore fruit. Joyce has clearly demonstrated the development of a new, paternalistic Lancashire factory culture. But here the masters occupied quite different places in the revised relations between the classes, remaining somewhat distant figures – symbolic clan heads, rarely met with in person, but like the Queen presiding from a distance over ceremonies and rites which often revolved around important events in their families.⁶ Reaching out to the working-class neighbourhood was a very much less successful proposition for any number of reasons – one of them perhaps being that such enterprises took place at too many removes from the workplace itself.⁷

Popular culture was seen and redefined as a major problem by the dominant classes in the early nineteenth century. For any number of reasons the latter were considerably more anxious in the face of real differences in values, beliefs and behaviour within society than the components of previous English ruling classes had been in the recent past. The social world which they perceived between the 1790s and, say, 1860 seemed frighteningly lacking in normative regulation and moral authority. They believed strongly in the need to create some commonly affirmed array of values and ‘morals’ in society, thinking that this was the only solid and durable platform of social discipline and public order there could be. The reform of popular values and customs inevitably became intimately bound up with the nineteenth-century problems of public order and social and industrial discipline – and thus a matter of some importance. It may be that the more formal study of popular customs began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, not only because they were thought to be disappearing and, like sperm whales, ought to be preserved (at least on paper), but also because popular values, rituals, customary practices, crowds (and also politics) were now reconstrued as problems. David Vincent illustrates the growing interest in popular traditions and customs within certain literary circles,⁸ but these also became concerns of local elites, publicists, writers of letters to editors, writers on social questions and ideologists of the state. All were conscious of an immense cultural divide in contemporary society. This was perhaps new but, unlike the eighteenth-century gentry, they were neither complacent in the face of it nor indifferent to it.

The standard prescription was the clarification and broadcasting of new ethical and moral perspectives and norms – the hope of moralising the masses and remoulding the ‘character’ of the English worker. A major problem, however, was that, in the words of one education reformer, workers did ‘not in the least comprehend that what is in the interest of society is their own also’. Neither simple restraint nor the discipline of mill or labour market alone seemed adequate to the task, for how could the magistrates or the police by themselves change men’s characters and produce greater orderliness, less dangerous political ideas and social longings amongst those below? Thus within the numerous movements designed to alter, channel or restructure popular culture were contained (au fond) approaches to the solution of the important problem of reconstituting the lines of deference, patronage and moral authority in society. In the eighteenth century their proper functioning depended to a large extent on the degree to which they contacted (and accepted on their own terms) elements of popular culture at certain points. How to do it without such contact, or running the danger of creating something which could be perceived as ersatz was a problem in itself. Little could be done along these lines until the later nineteenth century in any case, for a necessary prerequisite was getting over the fear of popular public display and popular crowds in the first instance. Only then could intelligent techniques for the neutralisation and incorporation of, say, the old popular version of Guy Fawkes manifestations or the creation of new style ‘consensual festivals’⁹ be tried.

The later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, we are told, saw the efflorescence of a vigorous plebeian culture and a great bursting-out of wakes, feasts, communal rites and sports in a secularised form.¹⁰ The extent to which this ‘old’¹¹ popular culture flourished so freely was a result of both the fecundity of the people and the willingness of their rulers – either through active patronage or indifference – to allow it scope. E. P. Thompson has carefully outlined for us the extent and nature of the reciprocal dealings between England’s eighteenth-century elites and popular custom, and shown us how the gentry were both able and willing to patronise or occasionally even manipulate it. What seems so remarkable to students of the nineteenth century is the degree to which England’s rulers seemingly exempted from their musings about the disciplining and control of the poor, customs, values and practices which later would be redefined as intolerable and dangerous, and their sense of complacency in the face of immense differences of values within society. John Brewer has recently written about the beginning of the end of that particular line, demonstrating how, before a halt was called in the changed atmosphere of the French Wars, some of the greatest in the land lent their presence to the raucous mock elections at Garrat near London.

The complex of early-nineteenth-centuty attitudes towards popular culture which we have discussed above was a function of the process of class formation itself; but the withdrawal of the upper classes from participation in and patronage of popular culture had an important and closely related political dimension. The English upper classes as a whole became terrified by the ‘French Revolution and the development of a domestic, natural-rights radical movement involving artisans and workingmen’, and leery of ‘all plebeian revel [s] that had political overtones’.¹²

The period of the French Wars and its immediate aftermath was crucial for our concerns in a number of respects. In the first place, a good deal of the support and patronage the ‘old’ popular culture had enjoyed was lost. In addition, this period saw a new concern about the underlying bases of social stability; the development of an independent radical politics; the appearance of a new rhetoric centring on doubts that workers could understand what was in the best interest of society and the imperative to moralise the masses and purvey new systems of moral authority; and the development of new techniques (and agencies) of policing and order keeping. But the period was crucial for one more reason.

Brewer reminds us that the Garrat mock elections were abandoned not only by their erstwhile patrons but by popular radicals as well. The latter now noticeably began to shun the old form of festival-cum-protest, rejected the patronage and upper-class manipulation which often accompanied it, and stressed sobriety, order, restraint, education and a new concept of worker self-respect. Popular radicalism began to develop its own new standards of personal conduct and repertoire of collective action which became standard components of working-class political rhetoric and practice by the 1850s. In Bradford, a woolcomber leader of a Non Electors Committee told a meeting after the 1837 election:

You have ... shown your more fortunate neighbours that ... you are ... their equals in knowing how to conduct yourselves with propriety ... you have practically schooled them in the arts of civilised society. You have shown them that you can pursue an object publicly but yet peaceably ... without breeding a riot in front of the Sun Inn ... We challenge those who describe anarchy and confusion and destruction of property as the results of entrusting us with the franchise, to say that we have been guilty of a single breach of the peace ... Can they say as much for themselves?¹³

Later Chartists, trade unionists and self-improving workers of all varieties would set themselves firmly against older popular fêtes and forms of collective action which borrowed from them. Reid shows below how, by the 1870s, such elements refused to lift a finger to protect the old Birmingham wakes and fairs.¹⁴ Hooting through the streets, excessive consumption of alcohol, disguising or masking, effigy burning and other types of folk violence had no attractions for the Vincents, Coopers and Applegarths – nor for their less-well-known local counterparts. In other words, by the 1840s at the latest the ‘old’ popular culture had not only been abandoned by the upper classes but had begun to fracture in many regions.

Before the nineteenth century popular fêtes contained within themselves a specific repertoire of beliefs, symbols and actions which, apart from periodically affirming local solidarities, had important uses in the statement of political and social demands. Public ceremonies were used to make protests and voice the complaints of communities and corporate groups; they employed raucous and vivid street theatre (‘visual imagery, effigies, symbolic objects and other dramatic devices’); and frequently borrowed ‘the authorities’ normal forms of action’. In both 1830 and 1848, Charles Tilly writes, carnival and revolution could still ‘link arms to dance in the streets’ of France.¹⁵ It would be useful to know more about how these linkages frayed and ruptured in England. It has been suggested that the appearance of ‘modern’ mass movements could have had rather sudden solvent effects on the older, explosive forms of collective action and festivity. Dorothy Thompson writes that Chartism

appears ... to have reduced the violence in the community – the folk-violence of effigy burning and the direct action of the anti-poor law campaign gave way to the disciplined organisation of the Chartists in which thousands could gather ... and yet remain completely peaceful.¹⁶

This seems quite sensible and correct but, useful as it is, it cannot be – nor does it pretend to be – an all-purpose explanation of nineteenth-century popular cultural change. Specific popular cultural items withered – or were incorporated into newer forms – for severa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Persistence and Change in Nineteenth-century Popular Culture
• 2. The Decline of the Oral Tradition in Popular Culture
• 3. Methodism, Popular Beliefs and Village Culture in Cornwall, 1800-50
• 4. ‘Please to Remember the Fifth of November’: Conflict, Solidarity and Public Order in Southern England, 1815-1900
• 5. The Lancashire Wakes in the Nineteenth Century
• 6. Interpreting the Festival Calendar: Wakes and Fairs as Carnivals
• 7. Secrecy, Ritual and Folk Violence: The Opacity of the Workplace in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
• 8. Custom, Capital and Culture in the Victorian Music Hall
• Notes on Contributors
• Index