An understanding of the transformative effect of the Industrial Revolution has long been at the heart of conceptions of the distinctiveness of modern British history. This chapter addresses a particularly influential reworking of that understanding that emerged from the forms of literary criticism I have been discussing and that has continued to have a shaping presence in subsequent interpretations of the intellectual and cultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. The story begins, improbably enough, in the basement of the Seaford public library in Sussex. As Raymond Williams recalled the episode in the introduction to Keywords, published in 1976, he had in the late 1940s been thinking about the notion of ‘culture’ and the ways it was deployed in contemporary debate, especially after the publication of T. S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture in 1948. He had also been pondering its relations with other terms such as ‘art’ and ‘industry’.
Then one day in the basement of the Public Library at Seaford, where we had gone to live, I looked up culture, almost casually, in one of the thirteen volumes of what we now usually call the OED: the Oxford New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. It was like a shock of recognition. The changes of sense I had been trying to understand had begun in English, it seemed, in the early nineteenth century.1
As anyone familiar with Williams’s various historical retrospects will be aware, such reconstructions of earlier episodes are not always to be trusted, and certainly not taken literally. This is especially true of some of the accounts he gave of his earlier thinking in the interviews published in 1979 as Politics and Letters, interviews largely conducted in the year following the publication of Keywords. The apparent specificity of the passage I have quoted is thus no guarantee of its reliability, though it presumably signals both an actual memory of some kind and a claim that was important to Williams and that it pleased him, during his period of later fame, to recount in this way. As it happens, we also have, from the records of his teaching during the relevant years, some contemporary evidence of his thinking about this topic, to which I shall return.
In narrative form, the little vignette I have quoted conforms to the classic ‘eureka’ moments celebrated in various branches of scientific or intellectual discovery, including the earlier unsuccessful or frustrated enquiries into the topic, the casual or accidental nature of the key moment, and the inauspicious banality of the location. One rather surprising feature of the quoted recollection is that if, as Williams emphasized, he had been thinking about the concept for some years, and had already taught adult education Tutorial Classes on the subject, it seems curious that he had not consulted this most obvious of sources before, and to say that he now did so ‘almost casually’ is an odd way to describe looking up a word in those large volumes. Then there is that resonant sentence: ‘It was like a shock of recognition.’ This seems to imply that in some sense he already knew what he claimed to have discovered there, or at least half-knew or was prepared for. And what, it could be said, he ‘recognized’ was that the relevant sense of a term he had been brooding over dated from a specific period, the early nineteenth century. Since he was writing almost twenty years after the publication and great success of the book that issued from this moment, he knew that his readers would appreciate the structuring centrality of this ‘discovery’ to his eventual argument. After all, the very first sentence of that book, Culture and Society, published in 1958, is: ‘The organizing principle of this book is the discovery that the idea of culture, and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinking in the period which we commonly describe as that of the Industrial Revolution.’2 By making the issue of this ‘discovery’ so salient and so central, Williams was laying claim to a kind of originality, for which the episode in the library basement was the light-bulb moment.
When reading Raymond Williams’s writings, we get a much stronger sense than with most critics of the contemporary presence of the various pasts that engage his interest. Ostensibly, his work is pervasively and assertively historical, a series of arguments about change, usually about what he terms ‘growth’ and ‘development’. Yet there is a sense in which the pastness of the past can seem to be only an incidental characteristic of it for Williams: whatever is significant or interesting about it is experienced as active within the present, a collective present in which a capacious ‘we’ embraces all relevant predecessors in a community that, at least in his earlier work, is now and England—where, for all his later insistence on being a ‘Welsh European’, Williams, like so many of his contemporaries, allowed ‘England’ to stand unselfconsciously for the larger political unit of which it has been only a part. Of course, there is a lot of Williams’s writing, even in the books that exhibit these characteristics, that is historical in a more conventionally chronological sense, but even then there is a constant undertow, a pull towards the omnivorous present of Williams’s determined, all-encompassing argument.
The two books that made Williams famous and that, by his own testimony, completed the programme of work he had embarked upon in the post-war years—Culture and Society 1780–1950, published in 1958, and The Long Revolution published in 1961—presented themselves as accounts of change over long periods of time. Yet they were in their form and their manner of argument very distant from the work of contemporary professional historians, who in turn largely ignored them. This disciplinary gulf has had curious consequences. Few books did as much to shape the wider public understanding of modern British intellectual history as Culture and Society, an understanding that particularly flourished in the world of literary and related cultural studies, yet that barely registered on the thinking of modern British historians at the time. The book’s reach has been immense, yet for long it remained unintegrated into the established historical narratives of the period it deals with. So what kind of historical story does that book tell? This chapter will explore the presence, at once ghostly and all-pervading, of a conception of the Industrial Revolution as defining modern British history and culture, and it dares to suggest that we may, even now, still not quite have taken the measure of this idiosyncratic classic.3
Given Williams’s emphasis on that moment in the Seaford public library, it is worth asking what he would have found when he looked up the entry on ‘culture’ in the OED round about 1950. That edition of the dictionary identified four main senses of the noun, and it provided no illustrative quotations later than 1891 (the relevant fascicle of the dictionary having originally been completed in 1893). The first two main senses have to do with agricultural or animal husbandry. The third sense, marked ‘figurative’, is defined as: ‘The cultivating or development (of the mind, faculties, manners etc.): improvement or refinement by education and training.’ This is clearly a familiar extension of the agricultural senses—a movement from, as it were, ‘the culture of the vine’ to ‘the culture of the mind’—and refers to a process; the illustrative quotations range from the early sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. And then the fourth or abstract sense is: ‘The training, development, and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners; the condition of being thus trained and refined; the intellectual side of civilization’, to which are appended four illustrative quotations, one dated 1805 and three from between 1860 and 1889. Although the third sense emphasizes a process while the fourth focuses on a condition or outcome, the distinction is obviously going to be hard to sustain in interpreting many concrete uses. ‘Culture’ as ‘development or refinement of mind’ could refer to either process or outcome.
It seems, therefore, that a consultation of the OED entry could (with the exception of the 1805 quotation) only confirm what any passably well-informed student of the topic of culture around 1950 would have known already. The term had a long-established agricultural sense; from some point in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries it became common in a figurative sense as describing the process of cultivating the intellect or sensibility; from the 1860s onwards it was well established in the familiar modern sense of ‘the condition of being thus trained’ or ‘the intellectual side of civilization’. In fact, the more closely one looks at the OED entry, the less clear it becomes just what Williams believed he had discovered. Perhaps the fact that the earliest quotation for the fourth sense is dated to 1805 could be read as indicating that the sense of ‘culture’ as some kind of achieved or embodied values came into use at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But, as with most ‘discoveries’, one would have to be primed to think this in order to reach such a conclusion from the dictionary’s entries, since, taken alone, they tell no such simple story, and, most important of all for my argument, they certainly suggest no connection with the Industrial Revolution.
Williams, however, treated the entries as though they did demonstrate such a connection, as is evident in the earliest published version of his interpretation, his 1953 article in Essays in Criticism entitled ‘The Idea of Culture’, in which he clearly follows and depends upon the trail of illustrative quotations given in the dictionary, and asserts: ‘The decisive change came in the first half of the nineteenth century.’4 He had by this point tracked down the ‘1805’ quotation to a passage in Wordsworth’s Prelude, which he reproduces in full in his article (the OED quoted from the 1850 Prelude, though, following Wordsworth’s account of the composition of the poem, it dated the passage to 1805; Williams, writing subsequent to Ernest de Selincourt’s 1926 edition of the 1805 Prelude, gives both the 1805 and 1850 versions). But first he gives a quotation from The Excursion, which, he claims, shows that Wordsworth is ‘still conscious of the figurative use of the word’. ‘Still conscious’ is intended to suggest that it was now rather outmoded and that Wordsworth elsewhere tended to follow the more up-to-date usage, though actually the lexicographic evidence suggests otherwise. Certainly, Wordsworth’s use of ‘culture’ in The Excursion (a poem that may have been written after The Prelude) exhibits the ‘process’ sense:
that none
However destitute, be left to droop
By timely culture unsustained …
The use of ‘droop’ reinforces the horticultural association here: the ‘timely culture’ involves the process of tending or cultivating. Williams then gives the passage from The Prelude in which, he suggests, Wordsworth is ‘combatting the argument that “love” depends on “leisure” and its advantages’:
True is it, where oppression worse than death
Salutes the Being at his birth, where grace
Of culture hath been utterly unknown,
And labour in excess and poverty
From day to day preoccupy. …
Williams immediately comments:
This use of culture, it seems to me, is genuinely transitional. It has elements of the old sense of process, but it can be read also in the developed nineteenth-century sense of an absolute. However this may be (and I think myself that it is the first significantly modern use), the development of culture as a concept, the idea of culture, was thereafter rapid.5
It is indeed hard to say how the word should be construed in Wordsworth’s line: it looks more like a genuinely Empsonian ambiguity than a straightforward case of one sense or the other. Williams’s rather breezy ‘however this may be’ indicates that his mind is made up: this is where the ‘modern’ sense dates from. And one would certainly have to put a lot of weight on this single, ambiguous illustration in order to conclude that the abstract sense emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century and then developed rapidly, since that edition of the OED gave no other example for this sense earlier than the 1860s, starting then from that most predictable of sources, Matthew Arnold.6 In other words, the whole case for the claim that the modern sense of ‘culture’ becomes established at the beginning of the nineteenth century thus far seems to rest on a highly contestable reading of one line of poetry, and that from a source which, though probably written in or prior to 1805, was not actually published until 1850. Interestingly, the relevant section of Culture and Society, which does not follow the 1953 article in attending so closely to the OED entry, also does not reproduce the passage from the Prelude and the related commentary, though Williams’s later claim would seem to make it the essential stimulus for that book.
I have dwelt on this short passage of autobiographical retrospect because Williams himself made it so central to the story of his most famous work: the emphasis on the appearance of the term, and hence on the role of the dictionary, is his, something partially borne out by his reproduction of its examples in his 1953 article. There is, as I have suggested, something a little odd about it, and we can perhaps get closer to the heart of this oddity by returning to the opening sentence of Culture and Society, which announces, as already quoted, that the central theme of the book is ‘the discovery that the idea of culture, and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinking in the period which we commonly describe as that of the Industrial Revolution’. I do not want here to get entangled with the extensive literature about what might or might not count as an ‘Industrial Revolution’ in British history of this period, but let us simply accept that, for most readers in the 1950s, this phrase would point to the period from about 1760 to about 1830. Williams begins his book in 1780 with Burke and Cobbett, taken to represent contrasting aspects of what he calls ‘the mood of England in the Industrial Revolution’.7
Now, given the enormous authority that Williams’s book has achieved, the taken-for-grantedness that his account of the development has for some time possessed, it may seem almost perverse to begin by asking whether his book does in fact show that ‘the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinking’ in this period. This question can be made sharper still by asking whether his book does in fact show that the word is used in this way at all before the 1860s. Of course, the concerns that he argues were condensed into the later uses of the word are indeed there, as are some closely related terms such as ‘cultivation’. But I want to suggest, heretically, that a close scrutiny of the book’s first five chapters demonstrates that ‘the word itself in its general modern uses’ never occurs in the works he discusses by Burke and Cobbett, Southey and Owen, Blake and Wordworth, or even Coleridge and Carlyle. The earliest unambiguous example of this sense of the term comes in the chapter on Arnold, precisely where students of the topic (as well as casual users of the OED) would, before Williams’s book, have expected to find it. In his 1953 article Williams claims there is no need to wait for Arnold: ‘But already, before Arnold, the word was commonly used in this sense,’ he writes, though his examples there do not in fact support this claim. For instance, he quotes a famous passage from Coleridge’s Idea of Church and State on ‘civilization’: ‘a nation so distinguished [is] more fitly to be called a varnished than a polished people, where this civilization is not grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity.’ Williams then declares: ‘This analysis of Coleridge’s is the first Idea of Culture, in its modern sense.’8 Well, that is debatable, to say the least, and it is manifestly not an illustration of the relevant modern use of the word, since the word Coleridge uses there is ‘cultivation’.
Culture and Society greatly extended the range of writers who are now said to make up ‘the tradition’ of talking about culture in this way, taking it back to Burke and Cobbett, but the more closely we examine the earlier chapters, the more we find a certain slipperiness in Williams’s assertions about the appearance of this sense of the term. In several places he comes close to speaking as though the term appeared in his chosen writers, even when the textual evidence he cites does not support this. Take, as an example, his discussion of Wordsworth’s disdain for the clamour of the ‘public’: ‘Towards the Public, the Writer hopes that he feels as much deference as it is entitled to; but to the People, philosophically characterized, and to the embodied spirit of their knowledge … his devout respect, his reverence, is due.’ In his first pass at commentary on this passage, Williams very slightly adjusts the quotation, seeing in it a final appeal to ‘the embodied spirit … of the People’, which is not actually how the phrase is used by Wordsworth. He continues: ‘The “embodied spirit”, naturally enough, was a very welcome alternative to the market,’ which, though arguably close to Wordsworth’s sentiment, is not quite what he wrote. This, Williams is then able to say, ‘is one of the primary sources of the idea of Culture. Culture, the “embodied spirit of a People”, the true standard of excellence, became available, in the progress of the century, as the court of appeal in which real values were determined.’9 Notice, first, the slight shift from ‘the’ People to ‘a’ People; then, second, how the ‘embodied spirit of a People’ is now treated as a quotation, though that phrase does not appear in Wordsworth; and then, third, how this is equated (by Williams) with the term ‘culture’ that ‘became available’ in the course of the century. It may be thought that no great violence is done to Wordsworth’s thinking in the course of this slightly high-handed procedure, but it requires an effort to remember that the passage contributes nothing to support the main claim about how ‘the word itself in its general modern uses’ appeared in this period.
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of Williams’s rough handling of the textual evidence comes with his quotation of a long passage from Newman’s Idea of a University of 1852. Newman begins: ‘It were well if the English, like the Greek language, possessed some definite word to express simply and generally … ’ the values he then goes on to enumerate, but, Newman concludes sorrowfully, ‘I am not able to find such a term’. Williams’s first comment after quoting this long passage is: ‘The most surprising fact about this paragraph is that Newman does not meet the want of “some definite word” with the word “culture”.’10 But wait a minute: who should be surprised by what here? If, in this passage, Newman specifies so fully the elements of what Williams maintains are the core of the ‘tradition’ of contrasting ‘culture’ and ‘society’, and if Newman then explicitly looks for a single term to refer to those elements, finally concluding that none is to hand in the resources of contemporary usage, does that not rather suggest, contra Williams, that the term ‘culture’ was not current in this sense by 1852? (This is, incidentally, another of the places where there is a significant difference of emphasis between the 1953 article and the 1958 book. In the article he finds it strange that Newman did not meet the need with the word ‘culture’ as ‘a generation later … he would have seemed certain to do’.11 Quite so; by the 1870s the term ‘in its general modern sense’ had achieved currency: in 1852 it had not. The quoted phrase does not appear in the discussion of the passage in Culture and Society itself.) So, a careful rereading of his 1953 article and of the first five chapters of Culture and Society suggests that Williams did not in fact demonstrate that this sense was present in his chosen writers before the middle of the nineteenth century. On his own evidence, that does not come until the 1860s: it is, as he himself observes, Arnold’s use ‘which at last gives the tradition a single watchword and a name’.12 ‘At last’ surely makes its own commentary on what had gone before.
Of course, the book does not present itself as a purely lexicographical enquiry and nor should it, but, since the history of the word ‘culture’ does not in fact hold it together as neatly as Williams sometimes suggests, we have to recognize that the structure of the book, and the criteria for the inclusion of certain writers and not others, depend on less explicit premises. We can start to uncover these by recognizing the function Williams ascribes to the concept of ‘culture’. He argues, in a functionalist manner, that the word, and therefore the associated concept, emerges when it is needed, and it becomes needed as a counterweight or court of appeal against the dominant logic of the allegedly new form of society introduced by the Industrial Revolution. So, even if the writers he discusses do not contribute to the history of the word in its dominant modern meanings, they do, it might be claimed, contribute to a history of thinking about the defects of industrial society that Williams argues was condensed into those meanings. Before moving on to an examination of how this argument is worked out in Culture and Society, we should return to the young man who consulted the OED in the basement of Seaford public library in the late 1940s to consider the development of his historical thinking from another perspective.
In his late twenties at that point, Raymond Williams, originally from a working-class home just inside the Welsh border, had gone up to Cambridge to read English in 1939. After two years, his studies were interrupted by war service, so he returned for his final year in autumn 1945, when he was strongly engaged by Leavis’s work. Upon graduating in summer 1946, he immediately found a post as an extra-mural Tutor for the Oxford Delegacy, and he began to run classes in literature in small towns across east Sussex. At this point he had practically no formal training in history or engagement with the work of contemporary professional historians. ‘The absence of history from your adolescent intellectual interests seems very striking,’ observed his New Left Review interrogators in 1979. Williams acknowledged the lack, claiming that, when he went on to write the books that made him famous, ‘I later had to reconstruct for myself the main lines of the history’. The Williams of the later 1940s and 1950s could be regarded as something of an autodidact where history was concerned: ‘Even my cultural research’, he recalled, ‘taxed me with learning English history as I went along, for the autobiographical reasons that I have explained’.13
At this stage of his career, the quasi-historical perspective with which he operated, in lieu of any more systematic account, was largely derived from Scrutiny. This allegiance was evident in his earliest writings, especially for the short-lived radical journal Politics and Letters, which Williams edited from 1947 to 1948 with two friends from Cambridge.14 For example, in one of his first contributions he insisted that D. H. Lawrence was vital to ‘the work which Politics and Letters will undertake on culture and environment’, and he still took a favourable view of the contribution of Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy and ‘The function of criticism’, he asserted, ‘were the beginnings of the study of Culture and Environment, and still serve as models for it’.15 In an article on ‘The Soviet Literary Controversy in Retrospect’, also published in 1947, Williams stated his belief plainly:
We must, then, retain the right to judge a civilization by its culture. For culture is the embodiment of the quality of living of a society; it is this ‘standard of living’ [note: As insisted upon by F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson in Culture and Environment] with which the critic is concerned. Assessment of it is the social function of the critic and the creative writer.
And he concluded:
We must attempt, however often we fail, to ensure that in our own inevitable development towards a planned, rational, society, the distinctive values of living embodied in our literary tradition are preserved, re-created, expanded, so that ultimately with material may grow human richness.16
The ‘minority culture’ argument enjoyed a considerable resonance in the years immediately after 1945, notably as a response to the supposed ‘collectivism’ of the Labour government. Clive Bell had earlier stated the argument in its purest form; Leavis had given it a more strenuous and in some ways appealing twist, though without altogether shaking off its conservative affinities; and the publication of Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture in 1948 had brought the issue into fresh prominence, posing theoretical difficulties for those like Williams (and Richard Hoggart) who wanted somehow to rescue a critical notion of ‘culture’ from this anti-progressive embrace. However, the historical framework within which these matters were discussed in Scrutiny was not so easily sloughed off.
Two unpublished (and undated) typescripts in the Williams papers at Swansea throw light on the structure of his historical thinking at this stage of his career. The first is a substantial typescript, probably written around 1948, as part of a proposal for a film, to be directed by his friend Michael Orrom, commissioned by the Central Office of Information on the history and achievements of British agriculture. Entitled ‘Effect of the Machine on the Countryman’s Work, Life, and Community’, this ran from in-depth accounts of the enclosure movement to depictions of the rural depression of the late nineteenth century and on to the interwar years. Williams’s script compares, in its own words, ‘the old peasant community, with its settled, integrated system’, with the contemporary form of the village. ‘The general conclusion’, wrote Williams, ‘is that there has been no settled organic community life in the villages since they were radically altered by the various phases of industrial expansion’.17 The film would show, it was claimed, ‘how and why late eighteenth-century industrialization altered everything’. (Compare Timothy Boon’s claim, based on an analysis of films by, among others, Paul Rotha, for whom Williams wrote another script, that the ‘catastrophic’ view of the Industrial Revolution was how ‘people historicized their lived experience’ in the 1930s and 1940s, though this perspective started to lose its hold from the late 1940s.18) Although, as his biographer emphasizes, Williams was contesting a certain kind of fashionable cultural pessimism that romanticized the early twentieth-century village as the heart of an organic way of life now under threat from current changes in communication and travel, underlying his account was a deeper, structural contrast between life before and after the Industrial Revolution. Leaving aside the question of whether he was right to argue that this changed the lives of the countryman as well as of the town dweller, the framework once again suggested that a kind of pathology had been introduced in the late eighteenth century as a result of which all subsequent history was to be contrasted with what had gone before.
The second, shorter, piece, headed ‘The Isolation of Culture’ and probably written around 1950, begins: ‘The Industrial Revolution is a myth: that is why it is important.’19 Williams’s purpose in describing it in these terms is, as he makes plain, to emphasize its importance, not to diminish it. By ‘myth’ he means a powerful conception by which a people understands itself. He recognizes that economic historians have challenged the traditional account of an ‘Industrial Revolution’, and so ‘there are those who will say that because wage levels rose throughout the period the whole affair is a device of simplification or propaganda’. He is here evidently referring to the early phases of what economic and social historians came to know as ‘the standard of living debate’. To this he immediately responds with a comment that is revealing both of the genesis of his famous work and of his relation to professional history:
These are matters, fit and serious matters, to be settled by historians, and we shall watch what they conclude. But the present importance of the Industrial Revolution is that it is a concept, a significant myth, in terms of which we have come to understand our origins as an industrial people. It is our own construct, the basis of our immediate tradition. It is in terms of the Industrial Revolution that we are interested in culture.
Three things stand out here. First, the enduring significance of the Industrial Revolution as a ‘myth’ is seen as unlikely to be changed or ended by the researches of professional historians. Whatever the truth about wage rates, the fundamental self-definition in terms of the Industrial Revolution will not be displaced. Second, this insistent use of the first-person plural signals membership both by the author and by the implied reader of a social entity that is unproblematic or taken for granted. Elsewhere in this typescript he speaks of ‘the land and people of England’ and again he declares that ‘a particular consciousness of origins which we associate with the Industrial Revolution has impressed itself upon the English mind’. This was not an identification he would have been at all happy with later in his career, but at this point it accurately reflects his strong sense of an argument internal to a society he is securely part of. And, third, the interest in culture (‘our’ interest suggesting both his and his ‘people’s’) is determined in advance by its relation to the Industrial Revolution. This is not a link he ‘discovered’ in the OED or anywhere else: it was the frame of understanding he brought to considering the question of ‘culture’. There grew up a ‘tradition’, as he terms it, of protesting against the deforming effects of the Industrial Revolution. It did not matter that these protests took many forms: ‘All that is really common is the myth, the myth of the Industrial Revolution. All that is really important is the response to the myth, a response that is scattered and diverse.’20 The argument of Culture and Society is already dimly discernible in these few sentences.
A similar framework is prominent in the first full-length book that Williams wrote (though because of delays it was the second to be published), Drama from Ibsen to Eliot in 1952. In the introduction he set out some of his governing assumptions about drama and society. The historical scheme implicit in this argument was, by this date, familiar to readers of Leavis and of Scrutiny. He begins with the inadequacy of contemporary speech to the purposes of the naturalist drama:
For many reasons—and perhaps primarily under the pressure of that complex of forces which we call industrialism—contemporary spoken English is rarely capable of exact expression of anything in any degree complex … The medium of naturalism—the representation of everyday speech—is immeasurably less satisfying in the twentieth century than in the sixteenth.
This is simply asserted: Williams would presumably have felt that its truth had been amply demonstrated in countless Scrutiny discussions of the verbal richness of Elizabethan drama and its close relationship to the common speech of the time. That relationship had, in any case, made possible a kind of theatre that could not succeed under the conditions of contemporary speech. ‘In a rich, vital, and intensely personal language such as the Elizabethan, the limitations of naturalism, if they do not disappear, are at least disguised.’ He then moves out from this assertion to address the larger claim about the relation between drama and shared beliefs in a society. ‘Very powerful arguments can be advanced in support of the idea that a fully serious drama is impossible in a society where there is no common system of belief.’ Williams sounds pretty indulgent towards this Eliotic doxa, but he returns the question to language by insisting that what is really at issue is the question of a common sensibility, expressed through language and thus bearing shared ethical commitments.
There is no such common sensibility today. The pressure of a mechanical environment has dictated mechanical ways of thought, feeling, and conjunction, which artists, and a few of like temper, reject only by conscious resistance and great labour. That is why all serious literature, in our own period, tends to become minority literature (although the minority is capable of extension and in my view has no social correlative).
So, serious drama, in these circumstances, can only be minority drama. However, Williams was not willing to accept resigned pessimism as the conclusion to this analysis, the pessimism that, in their different ways, Eliot and Leavis had made so fashionable in literary-critical circles around the middle of the century, and so he went on: ‘But its communication may be extended, and its writing made more possible, if developments in society (the sum of individual developments) make possible the re-creation of certain modes of living and of language against which such complexes as industrialism have militated.’21 The passing use of ‘re-creation’ is telling. It was with good reason that twenty-five years later his New Left Review questioners remarked the book’s ‘categorical, unqualified fidelity to Leavis’s meta-historical conceptions’.22
Perhaps too much weight should not be attached to the fashionable formulas through which young critics announce their allegiances, but these affirmations were deeply felt in Williams’s case, and I would argue that they expressed a feature of his historical sensibility that, though much modified over time, is fundamental to Culture and Society. We may begin with that inelegant final clause about ‘the re-creation of certain modes of living and of language against which such complexes as industrialism have militated’. It is not clear quite how the noun ‘complexes’ is being used here; it certainly hides, or displays, a considerable vagueness about the actual historical changes in question. But ‘re-creation’ is plain enough: these more desirable modes of living once existed, they were destroyed or fatally damaged by industrialism, and now they could be reinstated in modern form. History would then show an interregnum, a kind of aberration, stretching from the Industrial Revolution to the present, before and after which uniquely desperate period there flourished or could flourish fuller, perhaps normal, human living. Culture and Society 1780–1950—the dates in the title are a crucial part of the argument: the book was to be the record of responses to that aberrant episode.
The main medium through which, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Williams explored the question of culture was, of course, his adult education Tutorial Classes. Not surprisingly, given the suddenness of his transformation from student to teacher, the young tutor fell back on the intellectual resources he had already acquired, especially during his final year at Cambridge. The first short course he offered in Maresfield in 1946–7 was called ‘Culture and Environment’, and he used the book of that name by Leavis and Denys Thompson as his main text, with the opening class being devoted to ‘the cultural tradition’ (Arnold, Clive Bell, Eliot, Leavis).23 The Leavis and Thompson primer Culture and Environment had been prepared with the practical demands of such teaching in mind, and Williams clearly followed its lead, analysing the constraining power of commerce on contemporary ‘cultural’ phenomena (cinema, newspapers, advertising, and so on), from which material was taken for exercises in practical criticism. The first course entitled ‘Culture and Society’ was given in 1948/9, and in 1949/50 he gave a course entitled ‘What is Culture?’, the outline for which addressed themes that were to receive more extended treatment in his later work, such as ‘what is a highbrow?’, ‘who are the masses?’, and so on.24 At this point, the courses seem to have had, at best, a very sketchy historical dimension.
A one-page outline for a projected book on ‘Culture and Work’ (in the Williams papers), dated by Dai Smith to 1949, similarly focused on newspapers, radio, propaganda, advertisements, and so on, but was accompanied by a section headed ‘The Theories’, which listed an interestingly eclectic range of names: ‘Marx; W. Morris; Arnold; Eliot; Dawson; Leavis; Social Democratic; Mumford; D. H. Lawrence; Caudwell’.25 The presence of names such as Christopher Dawson and Lewis Mumford in this list suggests that the focus was still on the contemporary debate, which the publication of Eliot’s book had done much to stimulate, about the conditions necessary to the flourishing of cultures (religious, economic, and so on). An article entitled ‘Books for Teaching “Culture and Environment” ’, which Williams published in the adult education journal in 1950–1 (but which was probably first written in 1949), displays a wider range of reading, but even here the books that deal with the theme of ‘culture and civilization’ practically all date from the previous two or three decades. Only the mention of works by the Hammonds and Tawney starts to provide some historical background, though even here he cites the latter’s Acquisitive Society not Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. At this point, there was no long list of nineteenth-century advocates of ‘culture’ and no explicit link to ‘responses to the Industrial Revolution’.
In 1950/1 he taught another Tutorial Class (at Hastings) under the title ‘Culture and Society’. Although this, too, was still recognizably in the ‘Culture and Environment’ mould, focusing on the ‘mechanical’ ‘commercial’ forces at work in contemporary culture, with topics on advertising, cinema, radio, and so on, Williams was now beginning to give these classes a more historical dimension, too, with a section entitled ‘Theory and Practice in English Culture since the Industrial Revolution’, for which he had been pursuing a somewhat haphazard course of reading in such nineteenth-century authors as Coleridge and Carlyle. As Williams later recalled, perhaps accurately: ‘By then [1951] I was clear that since the term had emerged in the course of the industrial revolution, it was a very key moment in the interpretation of that experience and indeed in all the social thought that had accompanied it.’26
The intellectual framework of Williams’s analysis of ‘culture’ in these years is most fully illustrated by the reading list for this class, which contained sixty-nine titles. The outline of the course expresses its Leavisite inheritance unmistakably, promising close attention to the development of advertising and the media—for example, fiction is treated as a business focusing on bestsellers, while the first gloss given for the section on radio is ‘the problem of response to a mechanical institution’, and so on. It followed from this focus that several of the books were contemporary works of analysis on these current cultural activities. But the course was explicitly premised on a historical development ‘since the Industrial Revolution’, while individual sections had their own historical dimension, such as ‘development of the modern press (since 1881)’. This makes it all the more remarkable that, of the sixty-nine titles, only three are works of history by authors who would have been recognized as professional historians: Eileen Power’s Mediaeval People, R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and Elie Halévy’s History of the English People. These choices are themselves striking: Power’s book deals with nothing later than the fifteenth century; Tawney’s, though it had a legible contemporary moral, discusses developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the face of things, such books sit oddly with a course focused on the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though it is not hard to imagine the part they may have played. Only Halévy’s work may seem directly addressed to this period, though even here the reference was most probably to the cheap reprint of the first volume of Halévy’s six-volume set; this was marketed under the title of the whole series, The History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, although the title of that particular volume was, strictly speaking, England in 1815, so even it did not bear directly on the relevant period. This was the volume in which Halévy argued that Methodism had made a crucial contribution to the avoidance of revolution in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an argument that could be congenial to those drawn to the moral critique of unrestrained individualism.27
The bulk of the list, and all of the asterisked ‘essential’ reading, comprises works in literary and cultural criticism, especially by Eliot, Leavis, Denys Thompson, and some of the studies that they drew upon, such as George Sturt, the Lynds, Stuart Chase, and so on. (Fourteen of the titles are asterisked as constituting ‘the essential books’, and these mostly comprise the works of Leavis, Thompson and their sources.) Although in these years Williams was known as something of a zealot for the methods of Leavisian practical criticism, he was far from unusual in drawing on this body of work for his classes. What this underlines is the extent to which there was a well-established interpretation of what might be loosely called cultural history, which depended scarcely at all on the work of professional historians.
Williams’s understanding of how such work might be pursued is suggested by a review he wrote of Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words, published the following year, a review whose existence appears to have been overlooked by all bibliographies and discussions of Williams’s work.28 There, Williams notes that Empson’s ‘historical comments, though always interesting, are often vague’, and he linked this to the gentlemanly discursive manner of Empson’s own prose. In Williams’s view, this manner arose from a defensiveness on Empson’s part about his larger theoretical claims (as in his apologies for his use of symbols). This defensiveness, it is suggested, indicates ‘the public situation of which he is a victim’. Williams does not elaborate on this point, but in context it seems to suggest that an analytical form of criticism that is proposing a new theory of how language operates is unwelcome to the current climate and so Empson has to sweeten the pill with more readable literary explications and jokey asides. More substantively, Williams announces that Empson’s book ‘is an example of that kind of literary criticism which, beginning from analysis of language, proceeds not only to specific judgements on works, but also to generalizing judgements in the history of language and of society’. ‘Generalizing judgements in the history … of society’ might again seem to be part of the province of History, but for Williams (though not Williams alone) Empson’s delicate unravellings of semantic change provided a form of historical illumination that was a good deal brighter than that obtainable from what Williams termed dismissively ‘the study of dates and treaties and constitutions’.29 From as early as 1948 Williams had been insisting that literature is central to any ‘coherent record of human experience’. The study of literature, thus conceived, becomes one way to provide the missing social history.
Of course, by the 1950s other disciplines were also offering to undertake not dissimilar work in the service of social criticism. Williams published an essay on Eliot’s idea of culture in Essays in Criticism in 1956,30 but when he republished it as a chapter of Culture and Society two years later he made one significant interpolation. While still insisting that the modern sense of ‘culture’ derived from the literary tradition’s ‘general experience of industrialism’, he now observed that this sense was being most fully elaborated in ‘twentieth-century anthropology and sociology’. However, one consequence of the impact of these newer social sciences on ‘ordinary thinking’ he found to be of ‘doubtful value’, namely that
we have been given new illustrations of an alternative way of life. In common thinking, the medieval town and the eighteenth-century village have been replaced, as examples, by various kinds of recent simple societies. These can reassure us that the version of life which industrialism has forced on us is neither universal nor permanent, but can also become a kind of weakening luxury, if they lead us to suppose that we have the ‘whole arc’ of human possibilities to choose from, in life as in the documents. The alternatives and variations which matter are those which can become practical in our own culture; the discipline, rightly emphasized, drives us back to look at these within our own complex, rather than outwards to other places and other times.31
Here we see a striking instance of what I earlier termed ‘the omnivorous present’ of Williams’s thinking. He is made uneasy by the way that fashionable invocations of, say, the Trobriand islanders get used to illustrate an alternative way of life to that of contemporary capitalism without being constrained to focus on what is practicable, starting from our modern capitalist present. But he apparently had not felt this unease with the long-established tradition of invoking ‘the medieval town and the eighteenth-century village’ for the same purpose. These, too, ‘can reassure us that the version of life which industrialism has forced on us is neither universal nor permanent’, but they are still somehow ‘ours’, and thinking about them is central to ‘the English tradition of social thinking’. This suggests the need for a closer analysis of the way these claims contribute to the argument of Culture and Society.
Culture and Society aims to chart what it calls a ‘structure of response’; not every element of the structure has to be present in each ‘contribution’. Culture is presented as the form taken by the response to a new world. Although in a couple of places in the book Williams suggests that he is dealing with the response not to industrialism alone, but also to democracy, it is fair to say that the former overwhelmingly preponderates in his selection and, more tendentiously in some cases, his characterization of his quotations, as his later reflections again confirm. One question provoked by the very structure of the book concerns the issue of alleged novelty: in what sense did the kind of ‘proto-cultural’ concerns with the moral and spiritual health of society only begin, or take a decisively new form, at the end of the eighteenth century? Surely there had been a long tradition of recognizing that (to quote Williams’s phrase) ‘certain moral and intellectual activities’ were practically separate from the ‘driven impetus’ of their society?
Even if we leave aside entirely, as Williams largely does, the role of religion, we could still point to the various forms of revived or adapted humanism in early modern Europe, including England. These were constantly proposing that the literary and intellectual inheritance of antiquity, in which the ideal of the whole man was enduringly embodied, furnished both a critique of, and a remedy for, the short-sighted, practical, and passion-powered activities that were the ‘driven impetus’ of their societies. ‘Humane learning’ and its cognates were recognized as, in this sense, standing apart from society and providing a kind of court of appeal in just the way that Williams claims ‘culture’ emerged to do.
This relates, in turn, to the implicit idealization in Williams’s account of earlier periods of history. He writes at one point, collusively invoking a notion of the appallingness of social conditions introduced by industrialism and the accompanying political repression, especially in the years after Waterloo: ‘Over the England of 1821 there had, after all, to be some higher Court of Appeal.’32 But arguably this point could be made with equal moral or rhetorical force about the England of 1721 or 1621 or any other year, even if the scale of direct political repression may have fluctuated. Williams asserts that the ‘new society’ embodied ‘primarily economic relationships’, but, without any analysis of the sense in which this was not true for earlier periods, this amounts to little more than a rehearsal of the Lake Poets’ complaints about how political economy encouraged the treatment of human beings as machines. The concept of ‘culture’ had not then been needed, the argument claims, because the values it invokes had previously been integrated with the lived fabric of life. This is the central, though often only implicit, premise of the argument. Despite all Williams’s later disclaimers (and despite his own subsequent intellectual development away from such thinking), it is hard not to see a kind of nostalgic organicism informing the argument from the start.
Needless to say, an author has to be allowed to begin his book somewhere, and any beginning necessarily interrupts what, from another perspective, could be presented as a continuity. But it is important to notice that Williams’s chosen starting point has the effect of making his claim about the emergence of ‘culture’ as a response to industrialism seem necessarily true. It must be allowed that the figures he chooses, at least from Southey and Owen onwards, do sometimes identify industrialism as a new and destructive force—though actually most of the figures discussed in the first two chapters do not do this—and so, when they invoke some ideal of human wholeness or level of moral and imaginative functioning, they will, inevitably, seem to be doing so as a response to these new circumstances. But one can see how they do not have to be represented like this if one conducts a little thought experiment and imagines a learned intellectual historian writing a book called, let us say, From Humanism to Bildung: The Ideal of Human Wholeness in European Thought from the Renaissance to the End of the Nineteenth Century. This imaginary historian might well quote the same passages as Williams from the figures discussed in the first half of his book, but, instead of their seeming to articulate a new and distinctive response to the novel conditions of industrialism, they would merely seem to be late English examples of a much wider and more long-standing European pattern.
Once we have reoriented ourselves in this way, we can see how several of the passages that Williams quotes in his first few chapters do not really seem to be referring to ‘culture’ as a body of imaginative or intellectual activities set over against the logic of industrialism: they seem much more concerned with ancient issues such as the humanly damaging consequences of an individual overdeveloping a single skill or specialism. For instance, Coleridge’s celebrated contrast between ‘civilization’ and ‘cultivation’, and his gloss on the latter as ‘the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity’,33 ought to be immediately recognizable as a rendering of the German Romantic conception of Bildung, which is part of the larger German legacy of Neo-Hellenism. Or, to take an equally striking instance, having quoted John Stuart Mill’s attempted balance sheet of the gains and losses of what Mill, in the essay of that title, calls ‘Civilization’, Williams says that Mill’s essay is about what ‘might better be called Industrialism’.34 But this is a highly prejudicial move. In the relevant passage, Mill is evidently addressing the case—mounted in the eighteenth century by writers such as Ferguson or Rousseau—about the loss of the virtues of ‘independence’ in social relations (Mill even refers to the trope of ‘the man in the woods’), an argument that finds its place in a long tradition of European moral thought, going back well before the arrival of industrialism, about the relations between virtue, opulence, corruption, and so on. Williams might be excused for failing to recognize parts of this vocabulary as that of a Civic Humanism whose centrality in early modern thought has been fully established only by the scholarship of the last generation or two, but in the essay in question Mill himself makes perfectly clear that the case against the independence-sapping effects of civilization long predated, and could in no way be seen as a response to, the specific economic arrangements of late-eighteenth-century Britain.
Williams’s high-handed way with the evidence also came out in the kinds of small slip that would have particularly roused the ire of professional historians. Approaching his discussion of Arnold’s classic contribution on ‘culture’, Williams observes that there was by this date a more general response to the agitation of the industrial working class: ‘One stock reaction to this agitation’, he writes, ‘is well known in Macaulay’s phrase “we must educate our masters”. Macaulay, characteristically, argued that the “ignorance” of the “common people” was a danger to property, and that therefore their education was necessary.’35 The relevance of introducing the theme at this point was obvious: Arnold’s reflections had notoriously been partly stimulated by the behaviour of working-class crowds at the time of the debates on the 1867 Reform Bill. The phrase ‘we must educate our masters’ was a later popular rendering of the observation made in the House of Commons on the passing of that Reform Bill: ‘I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters.’ However, the remark was made, as any competent history textbook would have revealed, not by Macaulay but by the Liberal minister Robert Lowe; indeed, Macaulay could hardly have commented on the significance of the 1867 act in these terms, having died eight years earlier.36 Williams’s knowing use of ‘characteristically’ could perhaps be justified by reference to some of Macaulay’s views expressed in earlier decades, but in this paragraph it risked turning an already bad mistake into a more general tendentiousness.37
If the passages from which Williams quotes so copiously were put together in an anthology, without any directing commentary, they would appear to be about a cluster of recurring themes: the whole against the fragmented, the general against the specialized, the common against the individual, and so on. Industrialism would, of course, be a significant presence, as how could it not be in this period, but largely insofar as it embodied or corresponded to the latter terms in these pairings. Conversely, the positive terms would all be linked to what is, in fact, one of the remarkable absences in Williams’s work—namely, the huge presence of an idealized Hellenism in Victorian thought and beyond. The question of the book’s range might also be raised from a different angle. The ‘we’ of Williams’s prose, as I have said, is most often a national community of reflective persons stretching over time: Cobbett and Morris are living presences in Williams’s sense of who ‘we’ are, whereas actually living foreign commentators such as, say, Sartre, Adorno, and Trilling are emphatically not. It is perhaps not surprising that such a book written in England in the 1950s should contain no mention of, say, Nietzsche, but it may seem more striking that a book on this theme at that time should not make any reference at all to, say, Spengler. In his 1982 introduction to a reissue of the book, Williams referred, in somewhat defensive tones, to its exclusively English orientation, but he was essentially unrepentant: ‘I am still sure that the book could only be formed, in its particular method, around this particular experience and tradition.’ And his elaboration of this point only underscores the centrality of the response to the Industrial Revolution: ‘The fundamentally new social and cultural relationships and issues which were part of that historically decisive transition were therefore first felt, in their intense and unprecedented immediacy, within this culture.’ He conceded that there may later have been comparable responses to industrialism elsewhere, but ‘it is nevertheless of some permanent general importance to see what happened where it happened first’.38 The organizing force of the response to industrialism in constituting ‘the tradition’ is very evident here. I am making these points not, I hope, in the spirit of that type of reviewer who berates the author for failing to have written a different kind of book, but to indicate that Williams’s chosen chronological and national limits impose a kind of false unity of purpose or concern among the figures he includes, and that it is only insofar as they can be presented as addressing the same ‘problem’—essentially the response to industrialism—that they can be seen as constituting a single ‘tradition’.
It is not until we get to the forty-five-page concluding chapter in which Williams described himself as ‘attempt[ing] to extend [the tradition] in the direction of certain meanings and values’ that the rationale for, and significance of, his interpretation of the book’s selection of writers becomes fully apparent. It is here that he introduces what he calls ‘the crucial distinguishing element in English life since the Industrial Revolution … [that] between alternative ideas of the nature of social relationship’. On the one hand, we have individualism, self-seeking, the middle-class notion of meritocracy; on the other hand, the working-class ethic of collective action, communal loyalties, and, in a phrase redolent of the earlier phases of the Labour movement, what he calls ‘the general and controlled advance of all’. So ‘working-class culture’ should not be understood in the narrow sense as ‘proletarian’ art and literature, but, rather, as the solidaristic institutions produced by the ethos of that class, such as ‘the trade unions, the cooperative movement or a political party’.39
But then we get what is in some ways the key move in the whole argument. Having sketched these two contrasting models of society, he writes: ‘The development of the idea of culture has, throughout, been a criticism of what has been called the bourgeois idea of society.’40 Culture, it is suddenly revealed, really lines up with the working-class idea of community. Culture, once its history has been properly excavated, should no longer be seen as the property of the elitists and the pessimists, as something that is of its very nature threatened by the progressive advance of the Labour movement, as Eliot and others had claimed in the late 1940s. On the contrary, the informing ideal of this whole ‘tradition of English social thinking’, as Williams calls it, has precisely been, when understood as a series of attempts to articulate the notion of a ‘whole way of life’, to posit an alternative to ‘the bourgeois idea of society’ of the kind that ‘working-class culture’, properly understood, now offers in the present.
It is important to recognize how this same decisive argumentative move has the effect of introducing a sharp binary division into British intellectual history of the period. The book is essentially structured around what, until the concluding chapter, has been a largely implicit contrast between ‘the culture and society tradition’ and ‘the bourgeois idea of society’. But the scholarship of recent decades has persuasively demonstrated that this reductive contrast has a distorting effect on our understanding of British intellectual life in the nineteenth century. Where, in terms of this binary opposition, do we put, for example, a political moralist like Malthus or a social critic like Bagehot or a proponent of ‘national purpose’ like Seeley or a theorist of the evolutionary role of altruism like Kidd? On which side of the divide would we place a social and literary critic like Leslie Stephen, a disciple of Mill in politics and economics who, at the same time, makes notions of human wholeness and moral health central to his social and literary criticism? Or, again, Arnold obviously has to be at the centre of Williams’s ‘tradition’, and that would seem to place his opponents in the ‘bourgeois idea of society’ or individualist camp. But is this really the place for, say, one of Arnold’s most persistent antagonists such as Frederic Harrison, a Comtist, an upholder of the values of cooperation and altruism, and a proponent of the idea of a spiritual caste—all values that are the antithesis of the supposed ‘bourgeois idea of society’? And what about all those historians and social theorists who explored the role of custom, of national character, and of the critical function of reconstructing earlier or other forms of society—precisely the kinds of consideration that are supposed to be on the ‘culture and society’ side of the divide from Burke to Morris?
Probably no one figure exerted greater influence over the whole discourse of ‘character’ that was constitutive of the supposedly individualist core of Victorian social and political thought than Carlyle, yet he is precisely the figure Williams recalled as being absolutely central to his ‘discovery’ of ‘the tradition’—that is, the ‘culture-and-society’ side of the divide.41 This is not just a scholarly quibble about the interpretation of Carlyle, or indeed of any other single figure, but rather a point about how the major figures and traditions of discourse in the nineteenth century cannot in fact be squeezed into these two categories. The danger in trying to impose this division on nineteenth-century thought is that in the end the only people left to represent the alternative to his ‘tradition of English social thinking’—that is, the ‘culture and society tradition’—would seem to be a few strictly orthodox political economists, a travesty of Victorian social thinking we have met before but that has now long outlived its day. It is worth mentioning here that, although the New Left Review interviewers for the Politics and Letters volume probed much else, they accepted this etiolated contrast unblinkingly when they themselves contrasted the ‘culture and society tradition’ with what they called at one point ‘the opposite side—that of political economy’.42
To get the logic of Williams’s book clear, we need to recognize that what his chosen figures had in common, therefore, was that they adumbrated ideas that were in some ways critical of, or suggested alternatives to, what he called ‘the bourgeois idea of society’. Since they were essentially selected in terms of this negative criterion, such ideas were inevitably fairly diverse: they included ideas of the moral health of the nation, of human wholeness, of the distinctiveness of human spiritual or imaginative activities, of the precious inheritance of intellectual and artistic achievements, of the inappropriateness of quantitative or mechanical measures of human welfare, and so on. A selection of the figures who expressed some of these ideas in especially influential or interesting ways then become ‘the tradition of English social thinking’, and this tradition is, in turn, defined in terms of its criticism of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
This logic can be exhibited in another way by considering three books that someone might have considered writing in the mid-1950s:
In writing Culture and Society, Raymond Williams could be seen as undertaking something of each of these three projects. The critique of the reactionary uses provided his starting point and much of his initial motivation; the history of contributing arguments partly defined the scope of his book; and the literary-critical analysis of some of the main statements provided the method and the greater part of the substance or texture of his book.
To this could be joined a fourth possible book:
This, summarizing briskly, is more or less what Williams was doing in the conclusion to his book. But, even if we assume the successful integration of these four projects, we are still left some way short of the actual book that Williams wrote. For that, I want to argue, involved aspects of three other possible books:
It is constitutive of the argument of Williams’s book that the period he discusses saw the development of the modern meanings of the word ‘culture’. But no less constitutive of it is the claim that this development expressed ‘our’ response to industrialism. And, more central still, what holds together the various ideas discussed in the book is that they are all repudiations of the bourgeois individualist ideal. Without any one of these themes, the book would not have been what it is, nor, we can reasonably assume, would it have been so influential. The upshot is that the book rests on a structuring polarity between what Williams calls ‘the tradition of English social thinking’ and what he calls ‘the defenders of the existing system’. That binary polarity constitutes the chief and defining weakness of the book, despite its obvious and manifold strengths, and that in turn accounts for its questionable impact on much subsequent understanding of modern British literary and intellectual history.
The question of where to place the book on the contemporary map of academic disciplines was one that exercised both publishers and reviewers at the time. Penguin editor Dieter Pevsner attempted to answer the question for his colleagues when recommending that they publish a paperback edition of Culture and Society:
It is a notable example of the best work of the inter-discipline [sic] kind that is probably the most important and original contribution of the present generation of humanist academics. … Finally, this is very much a book of its time. Its approach, which takes it for granted that there is and can be no sharp dividing line between literature, politics, sociology, and linguistic analysis, is one which is producing some of the best results in contemporary social and literary studies.43
To a later eye there is one very striking absentee from this brisk assemblage of disciplines: Pevsner makes no mention of History, an omission that, at the time, would have seemed entirely justified when characterizing Williams’s book. But, although the book was largely ignored by professional historians when first published, its problematic historical features did not altogether escape notice. In a review in the New Reasoner, V. G. Kiernan, writing both as an ally on the Left and as a historian, shrewdly identified a major structural weakness: Williams, he complained, does not
draw any outline of the social order, the ‘way of life’, he thinks of as flourishing in England before 1780. … Mr Williams indeed leaves far too much room for supposing that he himself takes ‘the good old days’ at their face value. … [In this way, Williams] allows his traditionalists to go on one after the other, without any contradiction from him, founding their case on the assumption that what the Industrial Revolution brought to England was something essentially new, and essentially bad.
Kiernan was keen to insist that many of the relevant social and economic changes had been under way long before the late eighteenth century. For example, taking issue with Williams’s treatment of Cobbett, he pointed out that ‘what most moved his indignation was the oppressive agrarian capitalism of the age, long in train though intensified by the Napoleonic wars, and scarcely to be brought under the black flag of “industrialism” ’. Similarly, he argued that it was far too simplistic of Williams to allow his subjects to imply that ugliness came in only with industrialism, just as in their concentration on the wretched condition of factory workers they entirely overlook the conditions of domestic servants who were in fact far more numerous. Moreover, once Williams has identified the late eighteenth century as the key moment of supposed qualitative transformation, Kiernan pointed out, he largely ignores historical change thereafter: ‘as the book proceeds from decade to decade, there is very little reference to the rapidly altering condition of England.’44 Although subsequent commentary seems to have lost sight of these features of the book, Kiernan was surely right to insist on the historical untenability of this ‘before-and-after’ view. In effect, the Industrial Revolution functions as the Fall, and the need for the modern sense of the word ‘culture’ is taken to be the index of man’s fallen state.
In all these ways, Kiernan was suggesting, the book rested on an untenably simplistic historical or quasi-historical narrative. ‘The prime requisite for any study of cultural history’, he pronounced, ‘is a firm framework of historical fact—economic, social, political; and … the one great deficiency of the book is the lack of just this’.45 Perhaps it was partly for such reasons that Richard Johnson, writing twenty years later, could remark that, although Williams valuably expanded the sense of ‘culture’ beyond the narrow category with which earlier progressive historians had worked, ‘Williams’s concerns have none the less often remained too literary to deliver the full implications of such a profound re-ordering; his “cultural materialism” remains, centrally, a form of literary criticism’.46 Here, yet again, is the question of the nature of the ‘cultural history’ that is being propounded: did it ‘remain, centrally, a form of literary criticism’?