The novel and popular culture

What conditions are necessary for popular culture to develop and thrive?

From your answers
Means of production: printing, industry

Talented writers who chose to write for middle class audience


Aspects of the audience:
“a society in which members are continually in contact to create, uphold, disseminate a trend”

“well-educated middle class”

sense of shared values—at least among sub-groups large enough to provide an audience

Social aspects:
several of you mentioned different aspects of security—peace, prosperity, strong military—note that the 18th century was an era of unprecedented peace and political stability.

“basic needs have been met: food shelter, education, health, for society to have the extra time”—people must have enough time and money for entertainment


Decline of measures of control:
“religion being accepting and supportive of it”—or at least unable to control it

lack of family control

lack of effective political or elite control of literature


Expanding on the class discussion:

Urbanization:
A new type of reader: the development of a distinct urban, middle-class culture in London, consisting of lawyers, clerks, skilled craftsman, traders, merchants, shop-keepers, upper servants like valets, housekeepers, butlers, ladies maids, large numbers of teenage apprentices living away from home

A new type of writer: GRUB STREET: highly distinctive literary culture associated with Grub Street in London; large class of professional and semi-professional writers, many of them barely scraping together a living. Both respected and disreputable writers were part of an essentially middle-class commercial culture. Some aspects of that culture:

Professional: they made a living by their writing, publishing and selling books; can be contrasted to older ideas of the aristocratic amateur writing for a court readership or a court writer under the direct patronage of an aristocrat. Most of the major writers of the period come from solidly middle class (Defoe, Richardson, Samuel Johnson) or genteel professional (Fielding, Pope, Swift) backgrounds.

ongoing conflict over need to write for money—similar to contemporary anxieties about “selling out,” sacrificing art to satisfy audience

Women writers: writing provided one of the few openings for women to make a living—although they still faced massive discrimination, significant numbers of women were able to break into publishing for the first time especially because of the popularity of fiction; some of the most successful and prolific novelists of the century were women

Publications for the new readership: Grub Street produced a wide range of literary material, much of it printed as cheaply as possible and now lost:

Some characteristic types of publication:

sensational news accounts: stories of criminals a la “true crime”, scandalous stories, shipwrecks

religious work, especially conversion stories, accounts of apparitions, didactic stories

Political work: parliamentary reporting, polemical political and religious pamphlets—Defoe got his start with this kind of writing

literary material in our sense of the word: poems, fiction, biographies and autobiographies—much of it “occasional”—e.g. a poem on the King’s birthday.

“serious” literature, often sold in expensive editions by subscription: theological and didactic works, science, philosophy, history, translations of classics, fancy editions of poetry, Johnson’s Dictionary;

The Novel: grew up in the nexus of this culture; as a new genre it lacked established conventions; in practice, and probably by its nature, it was eclectic--it proved malleable enough to be able to incorporate many different styles, genres, ideological positions.