As Britain underwent transformation in the nineteenth century from a stable, predominantly rural, agriculturally based society
into an urban, industrial state, the culture of the people was inevitably subject to fundamental change. Age-old traditions
were eroded by multiple pressures, and during the second quarter of the century, when poverty was widespread and inequality
dire, few new forms of popular culture had emerged to take their place.
For centuries up until around the time Dickens was born in 1812, the majority of the British population lived and worked in
the countryside, where the cycle of the seasons regulated their lives. People got jobs at hiring fairs, or mops; spring renewal
was marked by May Day rituals; harvest homes celebrated the end of the growing season; Christmas and summer solstice were
occasions for communal enjoyment. Itinerant individual showmen travelled an annual circuit from village to village, assembling
together at local fairs. Many of these fairs had been offering the same sorts of entertainment since the Middle Ages: stilt-walking,
puppet shows, singing, dancing, performing animals, freaks and games. Most fairs had long since ceased to have any significant
commercial function, but provided annual holiday recreation and entertainment. Violent sports such as bull-baiting and cock-fighting
had largely disappeared, but amusement was robust, largely male, and well lubricated by drink.
In the towns, street performers and costers selling their goods with lively patter were ubiquitous, but urban settings lacked
space for recreation, and rapidly expanding industrial towns were designed to support work rather than to provide leisure
facilities. In any case, low wages and the prevailing view among employers that leisure for workers was unnecessary and economically
wasteful left most people with scant time for any activity other than work. Crowded dwelling space gave the public house importance
as a social centre, even as unsanitary conditions made water and milk less safe to drink than beer and gin. As the country’s
population
burgeoned and gravitated increasingly towards towns, opportunities for leisure pursuits diminished further.
As it was in the interest of the gentry to maintain good relations with the populace, fairs, sports days and other recreations
were not only tolerated but often actively sponsored by local landowners. Such events served as social control and were vigorously
defended by ordinary people as customary privilege. In Adam Bede (1859) George Eliot presents a circumstantial evocation of such a culture in her depiction of Arthur Donnithorne’s birthday
party: set in 1799, the event is organised and paid for by Arthur and his grandfather; the people entertain themselves with
food, drink and sports; everyone in the community participates, although working people are segregated from their betters.
It is simple, robust, local fun, deeply conservative in its reinforcement of the communal structure and, as Eliot’s story
dramatises, emblematic of a way of life that was coming irrevocably to an end.
There were two cultures: an elitist one only the moneyed and educated could afford, and a popular one, open to all. Gentry
and nobility as well as workers could and did go to theatres, to race meetings, to boxing matches and to fairgrounds. Pierce
Egan (1772–1849), the foremost sporting journalist of his day, championed amusements as a great force for national social
cohesion, but respectable patronage of the theatre had substantially declined by the end of the eighteenth century. Pugilism
attracted huge crowds, including royalty and aristocracy as well as lower orders, but the emerging middle classes were largely
absent. And the gentry increasingly withdrew their support of popular festivals, especially after the arrival of the railway
in the 1830s enabled them to seek their pleasures away from home.
A number of factors contributed to the erosion of popular culture. Within the first half of the nineteenth century the population
of England more than doubled, placing huge strains on traditional ways of life. At some point during these years, the majority
of that population came to live in urban rather than rural environments, with a consequent breakdown of the old structures
of local cohesion and wretched living conditions, which made mere survival a struggle. The rise of industrialism imposed a
wholly new concept of time, based on rigid clock discipline and divorced from seasonal patterns. Holidays were a casualty
of these conditions: one historian has calculated that their number declined from forty-seven in the mid eighteenth century
to four in 1834.
1 The political impact of revolutionary ideas in the aftermath of the revolutions in America (1776) and France (1789) led to
a breakdown of mutual toleration and respect and a
hardening of class divisions between defenders of tradition, on the one hand, and proponents of democracy, on the other. The
gradual collapse of the old, stable, conservative society, under the pressures of a quarter-century of war against France
and repression by reactionary governments, further undermined traditional popular culture.
Moreover, the very concept of popular culture was highly contested. The rise of evangelical Christianity from the middle of
the eighteenth century was a force inimical to the pursuit of worldly pleasure. No amusement could be innocent when idleness
was conceived as the root of evil. The Sabbatarian movement, an extreme wing of evangelicalism, waged often successful war
against activities other than church-going on a Sunday, the one day of the week in which working men and women had leisure
time. Utilitarian philosophy, another influential dogma of the day, offered a joyless view of human nature based on self-interest,
having no truck with such notions as imagination, play, generosity and gregariousness. Confronting the evils of drink, the
Temperance movement struck at the very heart of popular culture. And in reaction to Regency recklessness, emerging concerns
with earnestness and respectability led to an embarrassment over any deviation from industriousness and to the development
of the notion of ‘rational’ recreation.
These conflicts came to a head in 1840, in an event seen at the time as a symbolic blow to the very heart of popular culture.
That year, spurred on by the evangelical London City Mission, the London City Corporation banned the amusements of Bartholomew
Fair, thereby effectively suppressing the fair altogether. The action struck at the livelihoods of the entertainers, whose
income had been in steady decline for a decade and more. Henry Mayhew (1812–87), in interviews a few years later, circumstantially
recorded the hard times faced by individual showmen. But more importantly, the suppression of Bartholomew Fair challenged
what ordinary English men and women saw as their fundamental rights, based on centuries-old tradition.
It was a decade and more before new cultural opportunities became established. Foremost among these were the music hall and
organised sport. These differed significantly from earlier cultural activities in size, cost and a division between spectators
and professional entertainers. The halls sprang up in the 1850s, initially offering food, drink and smoke at tables in auditoriums
of unprecedented size, later charging admission to elaborate, purpose-built venues with fixed seating. They offered intimacy
between the largely working-class audience and the stars, with ritual participation as everyone joined in singing the chorus,
but increasingly music
hall was big business, with high salaries, professional management and strict licensing.
Professional sport, similarly, reflected the movement away from participatory culture and towards spectatorial entertainment,
with select teams of highly paid professionals watched by vocal but essentially passive audiences. Central controlling bodies
sprang up after mid century – the Football Association in 1863, the Rugby Union in 1871 – codifying regulations and organising
leagues. Both organised sport and music hall exemplify a commercialisation of entertainment and fed into the development by
the start of the twentieth century of the mass entertainment industry.
It is important not to over-schematise the transition: there were both long-term and short-term developments, with gaps and
overlapping. New fairs sprang up during the nineteenth century, with some, such as the Notting Hill Festival in London, continuing
to thrive today. Local markets, community celebrations, Christmas festivities, family parties and countless other small-scale
participatory activities carried on despite the larger trends, and traditions such as distinctive local ways of seeing in
the New Year were revived (or invented) as the century progressed. Theatre had always depended on a division between actors
and audience. Commercialisation, moreover, originated long before the mid nineteenth century. The circus, to take the most
conspicuous example (and the one which interested Dickens most), began in 1768 when a retired army officer, Philip Astley
(1742–1814), devised a programme at his riding school of equestrian exercises, comic routines and variety acts. He had rivals
almost at once, and for over a century (despite interruptions on four separate occasions by disastrous fires) Astley’s Amphitheatre
in Westminster Bridge Road was synonymous with popular entertainment, playing in the largest amphitheatre in London to packed
audiences until it finally closed in 1893.
Once the exceptions have been noted, however, the basic pattern is emphatic: age-old traditions of local, largely spontaneous,
small-scale participatory amusement were gradually superseded by commercially based, large-scale, highly organised professional
entertainment. And during the 1830s and 1840s the older cultural tradition was fading faster than the new forms were emerging
to replace them.
Charles Dickens took lifelong delight in what he called in a famous essay ‘The Amusements of the People’ (
Household Words, 30 March and 13 April 1850), and was from the outset of his career a staunch defender of the right of ordinary men and women
to leisure and recreation. The avowed intention of his published writing, and later of his public
readings, was to provide amusement, unabashedly endorsing ‘the capacity of being easily pleased with what is meant to please
us’ (‘Where We Stopped Growing’,
Household Words, 1 January 1853).
His support of amusements lay at the heart of his deep convictions about popular culture. In his early anti-Sabbatarian pamphlet,
Sunday Under Three Heads (June 1836), he proclaimed the basic decency of working men and women and, insisting that in pursuing their pleasures ‘nothing
but good humour and hilarity prevail’, he deplored ‘the iron-hearted man who would deprive such people as these of their only
pleasures’. Two decades later, his message was the same: ‘I entertain a weak idea that the English people are as hard-worked
as any people upon whom the sun shines. I acknowledge to this ridiculous idiosyncrasy, as a reason why I would give them a
little more play’ (Hard Times, bk 1, ch. 10).
Although he was decidedly hard-headed in his financial dealings as a professional writer and public performer, Dickens’s conception
of the popular culture to which he contributed was emphatically rooted in the older gregarious traditions rather than in the
commercial entertainment business. He was attracted to pugilism, and later in life sponsored cricket matches in the field
behind Gad’s Hill Place, but he had no interest at all in professional sport. It is symptomatic that his inclusion of a cricket
match in Pickwick (ch. 7) focusses less on the game itself than on the conviviality among players and spectators afterwards. He describes a
‘harmonic evening’ in ‘The Streets – Night’ (Sketches by Boz), and a number of characters in his early works frequent song and supper clubs – Jemima Evans (‘Miss Evans and “The Eagle”’,
Sketches by Boz), Dodson and Fogg’s clerks and Lowten (The Pickwick Papers) – and Dick Swiveller is ‘Perpetual Grand’ of the ‘Glorious Apollers’ (The Old Curiosity Shop). Nemo’s inquest in Bleak House is held in the Sol’s Arms, where Little Swills is the celebrated comic singer, but Dickens largely ignores the music halls,
which evolved from such precursors. He loved the circus, but he was more interested in describing Kit and Barbara with their
families in the audience than in observing the ‘coming wonders’ in the arena (Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 39), and in Hard Times Sleary’s horse-riding is presented as an idealised alternative to Mr Gradgrind’s facts rather than as a commercial enterprise.
Dickens strongly associated entertainment with childhood, recalling his own youthful delight. ‘There is no place which recalls
so strongly our recollections of childhood as Astley’s’, he declares (‘Astley’s’,
Sketches by Boz), and he humorously describes the ‘many wondrous secrets of Nature’ which he learned in the theatre, ‘of which not the least
terrific were, that
the witches in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good
King Duncan couldn’t rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it, and calling himself somebody else’ (‘Dullborough
Town’,
Uncommercial Traveller). Of his many compelling evocations of childhood, perhaps the most poignant is the depiction in ‘Gone Astray’ (
Household Words, 13 August 1853) of his young self lost in the streets of London. Anxious, solitary and sensitive, the child epitomises a
key Dickensian image, which lies at the centre of his values.
Those values include curiosity and imagination, for which entertainment was a prime stimulus. He considered ‘fancy’, as he
liked to call it, an innate human characteristic. Louisa Gradgrind gazing into the fire, and Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren sitting
on the rooftop, embody that openness to experience which pushes against the boundaries between reality and fantasy. Fancy
promotes gregarious fellow-feeling, selfless sharing of simple pleasures and contentment with one’s lot. Dickens valued the
theatre, circus and pantomime for taking the audience out of themselves, providing escape from life’s pains and sorrows, a
‘temporary superiority to the common hazards and mischances of life’ (‘Lying Awake’, Household Words, 30 October 1852).
Conversely, he was outspoken in his contempt for ‘the bleared eyes of bigotry and gloom’ (‘The Queen’s Coronation’, Examiner, 1 July 1838). ‘Whatever be the class, or whatever the recreation, so long as it does not render a man absurd himself, or
offensive to others, we hope it will never be interfered with, either by a misdirected feeling of propriety on the one hand,
or detestable cant on the other’, he wrote in ‘London Recreations’ (Evening Chronicle, 17 March 1835; omitted from the later version in Sketches by Boz). Scrooge, ‘hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary
as an oyster’, is the negation of the outgoing disposition on which common humanity depends (A Christmas Carol, Stave 1). From the Reverend Mr Stiggins in Pickwick through Murdstone (David Copperfield) and Mrs Clennam (Little Dorrit) to Luke Honeythunder in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens attacked what he saw as cant: killjoy attitudes that he considered fundamentally selfish and misguided in their
conception of human nature.
In his moral outlook Dickens took a benevolent view of mankind, believing that, given the opportunity, most people would act
not out of self-interest but with generous goodwill. He was politically radical, as that term was understood in his day, in
championing democratic values.
He endorsed the motives of entertainers such as Vincent Crummles, taking pleasure in providing amusement to others. Although
he actively supported steps to improve the provision of entertainment, he was firmly traditionalist in his conviction that
shared carefree enjoyment mattered more than any moral uplift or merely aesthetic artistry. For him, popular culture meant
sociability, harmless cheerfulness and good humour. ‘The people in general are not gluttons, nor drunkards, nor gamblers,
nor addicted to cruel sports, nor to the pushing of any amusement to furious and wild extremes … Let us go to any place of
Sunday enjoyment where any fair representation of the people resort, and we shall find them decent, orderly, quiet, sociable
among their families and neighbours’ (‘The Sunday Screw’,
Household Words, 22 June 1850).
During Christmas season in 1866/7, emboldened by his successful sponsorship of cricket matches in the field behind his home
at Gad’s Hill Place, he mounted a holiday sports day there. Over two thousand people, he estimated, were present – ‘labouring
men of all kinds, soldiers, sailors and navvies’ – and he invited the landlord of the pub across the road to set up a drinking
booth. Dickens himself distributed the prize money and made a speech requesting good behaviour. In the event perfect order
prevailed, and the crowd cheered as they dispersed. ‘Surely it is a fine thing to get such perfect behaviour out of a reckless
seaport town’, he confided to Forster.
2 Dickens’s role in this event was positively feudal: the lord of the manor patronising his loyal underlings. But this need
not be construed negatively. As Chesterton sagely observed, ‘Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted
what the people wanted … Hence there was this vital point in his popularism, that there was no condescension in it’.
3Writing in 1801, Joseph Strutt declared sports and pastimes to be a strong indicator of the character of a people. Particularising
from that truth, one can affirm that Dickens’s attitudes to popular culture provide a revealing lens into the core of his
values.