Eighteenth-century popular culture was enmeshed with polite society despite appearances

Evidence

The study of popular culture has tended to oscillate wildly between the two alternative poles of that dialectic—containment/resistance. We have had some striking and marvelous reversals. Think of the really major revolution in historical understanding which has followed as the history of “polite society” and the Whig aristocracy in eighteenth-century England has been upturned by the addition of the history of the turbulent and ungovernable people. The popular traditions of the eighteenth-century laboring poor, the popular classes, and the “loose and disorderly sort” often, now, appear as virtually independent formations: tolerated in a state of permanently unstable equilibrium in relatively peaceful and prosperous times; subject to arbitrary excursions and expeditions in times of panic and crisis. Yet, though formally these were the cultures of the people “outside the walls,” beyond political society and the triangle of power, they were never, in fact, outside of the larger field of social forces and cultural relations. They not only constantly pressed on “society”; they were linked and connected with it, by a multitude of traditions and practices. Lines of “alliance” as well as lines of cleavage. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 995

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to E.P. Thompson’s ‘making of the English working class’ and the broader cultural-history turn that recuperated the ‘loose and disorderly sort.’ — connects to: Salon society let ambitious eighteenth-century women shape French political and intellectual life. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 230