Popular Culture

Abstract

There is something very familiar about late Victorian Britain — the neat lawns of suburbia, an urban environment saturated with advertisements, popping down the ‘local’, watching professional football, eating fish and chips. Much of what is regarded as ‘traditional’ in British culture is little more than a hundred years old, and despite the cataclysmic events of two world wars the social landscape has remained remarkably untouched. Major transformations in demographic structure, urban and rural life, production and consumption, class identity and civic consciousness all predate the last decade of the nineteenth century, and a good deal of the twentieth century can be read as a coming to terms with this legacy. Historical periods are no more than the historian’s sleight of hand, but there is something to be said for the view that the great upheavals of British social history are better placed in the 1870s and the 1960s than at any time in between. In many ways the ‘character’ of late Victorian Britain resembles Britain of the 1950s more than its early or mid-Victorian persona, and the ‘never had it so good’ mentality echoes well the brash optimism of the 1890s.1KeywordsReal WagePopular CultureProfessional FootballLower Middle ClassPocket MoneyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.