Books

The art of popularity

Ferdinand Mount PoPular Literature: A History and Guide Victor E. Neuburg (Penguin £1.25) The real underground literature is popular literature. Revolutionary or avant-garde writing has almost always had a visible coterie of influential supporters, however small and outnumbered by the forces of Convention that coterie might at first seem. But throughout most of history popular literature has had no powerful protectors. Indeed it has survived in the teeth of the remorseless hostility of the great, a neverending army of priests, princes, pedants and Prigs. Some of these improvers have brutally suppressed all expressions of PoPular taste; others have tried to drown it in Moral uplift; others again have tried to Purify it by inventing an imaginary tradition consisting solely of folk-song and political Protest.

The improvers have most of the time controlled not only the means of production and distribution but also the scholarly institutions, so that literary history has until recently been the history of 'high' literature. The improvers have also dominated the market as consumers because they could the easily afford to buy books. Ever since Lhe invention of printing, popular prints have been ferociously condemned as 'foolish and disbrderly matter', 'childish tollye', 'the vilest trash imaginable'. To Founteract their pernicious effect, improving tracts were distributed free by the million and improving fiction circulated like that of the temperance novelist whose Publisher boasted: 'The most fastidious Parents need not have the least fear of Introducing the works of T. S. Arthur into their families. They are full of instructive ',floral lessons and are written in a very attractive style.' Throughout the eighteenth century, intellectuals argued whether the Poor should be taught to read or whether uteracy would only teach them to be dissatisfied with their lot. But both sides agreed that if they were to be taught, it ought to be for the good of their souls and not for their entertainment.

In fact a large proportion of the _working class already could read. Mr Neuburg, in his lucid guide, inclines to

suPPort Sir Thomas More's remarkable assu

mption that in the sixteenth century Just over half the population could read, Writing was a skill for the learned, but the reading public was always large. Supply not demand was the problem. It was the costs of Production and distribution and the disapproval of Bowdlers, Grundys and Uradgrinds which combined to prevent the Poorer classes from obtaining all the reading matter they wanted. Exactly what they did want and how much they managed to get hold of are hard to gauge in detail; as Neuburg says, it depends so much on 'the curious accidents of survival'. Tattered broadsides and battered chapbooks tend to be lost or burnt while calf and morocco volumes are treasured. Yet the evidence that does survive forcefully suggests certain conclusions which remain unpalatable to intellectuals of all kinds, whether Marxist or mandarin.

It is a painful reflection for the fastidious scholar that 95 per cent of the Elizabethan public was less likely to have read The Faerie Queene than tales like How Howleglas set his hostess upon the hot ashes with her bare arse. It is an equally painful reflection for the radical that 95 per cent of the new Elizabethan public is more likely to enjoy Crossroads than The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

The library of a Coventry stonemason, Captain Cox, in 1575 contained the following categories of title: romances of mediaeval chivalry, contemporary fiction in the Boccaccio style, jokebooks, plays, almanacs and prognostications, ballads and a book about rogues and conmen. It is startling how exactly this list corresponds to the categories of entertainment enjoyed by a well-equipped modern lowbrow: Georgette Heyer, Bouquet of Barbed Wire, Are You Being Served?, Your Stars, Pop Songs, The Story of the Great Train Robbers. At the earliest date by which the market was at all equipped to cater for the public appetite for print, popular taste seems to have been fully formed. And judging by more fragmentary survivals from earlier times, Chaucer being one of the best guides, this range of taste was neither new nor peculiar to Tudor times. The broadsides conform with eerie consistency to the topics, attitudes and styles of modern tabloid newspapers. For example, 'a description of a monstrous Ctiylde borne at Chychester in Sussex, 1562' or, 'The arraignment and burning of Margaret Ferne-seede, for the Murder of her late Husband Antony Ferne-seede, found dead in Packham Field neere Lambeth, having once before attempted to poyson him with broth, being executed in S. Georges-fields the last of Februarie . ..' (1608/9) or 'True and Wonderful'. A Discourse relating a strange and monstrous Serpent (or Dragon) lately discovered, and yet living, to the great Annoyance and divers Slaughters both of Men and Cattell, by his strong and violent Poyson: In Sussex, two Miles from Horsam, in a Woode called St Leonards Forrest, and thirtie Miles from London, this present

Month of August, 1614' (cf. The Surrey Puma). Or —a more trendy news item —'The She-Wedding: Or, a Mad Marriage, between Mary, a Seaman's Mistress, and Margaret, a Carpenter's Wife, at Deptford. Being a full Relation of a cunning Intrigue, carried on and managed by two Women, to hide the Discovery of a great Belly, and make the Parents of her Sweet-heart provide for the same'.

Mr Neuburg talks of changing tastes, the development of a new reading public, the creation of a working class. Yet the glaring conclusion to be drawn from the evidence he has so lovingly assembled is quite opposite. There is no development, no new public, only a larger public. Industrialisation and the consequent changes in economic relationship appear to have had little or no effect upon popular taste; the only change is that we now have the means to gratify that taste. Neuburg is inclined to argue that people liked escapist stuff in Tudor or Victorian England because their social conditions were so intolerable and their daily lives so dreary. Why then do people in softer times still seem to have much the same tastes? Nor is it easy to argue that this is all part of a general proletarianising of taste. Lowbrow duchesses now like soap operas. But then they always did; they used to read saucy French novels only because there were no saucy English ones available. Snobbery not aesthetic preference was what prevented the vicar's wife from being caught reading a housemaid's novelette.

The only change is that the rich have stopped pretending. The assumption that the upper classes had upper reading tastes, that there were class distinctions in reading habits died in the tidal wave of laughter that greeted Mervyn Griffith-Jones's inquiry in the Lady Chatterley trial as to whether this was a book you would let your servants read. A taste for popular culture may now be admitted to in the most elevated circles, just as it is now permissible to say how delicious fish fingers are. This may be, as the guardians of high culture assert, a sign of our progressive degradation, but, in arguing that thesis, they must be careful to understand how modest is the role of the man who churns out the stuff.

In popular literature there is no subtle interaction between author and reader. Lew Grade and Rupert Murdoch do not create a new popular taste; they satisfy the existing one. Only a century of severe censorship could have blotted out the memory of the scabrous and scurrilous origins of the press. What could be more painfully reminiscent that the sixteenthand seventeenth-century descriptions of the ballad hacks with their 'ale-crammed noses' writing their colour pieces about 'the death of a great man or the burning of a house . . . now much employed in commendations of our Navy, and a bitter inveigher against the Spaniard'? Jack Moron is immortal.

Equally poignant in its own way is the spectacle of William Chambers reflecting

on the reasons for the relative failure of his Penny Magazine and his other improving and instructional publications, which he regretfully admitted had been bought 'by persons considerably raised above the obligation of toiling with their hands for their daily bread',

Keith Thomas and other historians are beginning to give us some idea of how little real impact religion had upon the lives of the mass of working men in earlier times. Perhaps we may soon begin to understand how small an impact the efforts to improve and elevate popular taste have ever made and how misleading it is to imagine, say, Victorian England as peopled with selfimproving mechanics. To understand this is not to undervalue those who did doggedly teach themselves the classics. It is rather to grasp the stubborn autonomy of popular taste, its suspicion of pretension and selfimprovement, its taste for the freakish, the filthy and the sentimental, its incorrigibility, its self-assurance.

But if popular taste has been so obstinately unchanging until now, why should it ever change? If hitherto it has been prevented from fully emerging only by a combination of economic and authoritarian obstacles, why should it fade or alter course once these obstacles have been removed? In a technologically advanced country with a developed market economy — a free modern place — there is no way in which popular taste can legitimately be frustrated. Mass production must mean production for the masses. Liberty must include the liberty to be vulgar.