Modern popular culture assumes its traditional forms between 1880 and 1920

Evidence

One of the main difficulties standing in the way of a proper periodization of popular culture is the profound transformation in the culture of the popular classes which occurs between the 1880s and the 1920s. There are whole histories yet to be written about this period. But, although there are probably many things not right about its detail, I do think Gareth Stedman Jones’s article on the “re-making of the English working class” in this period has drawn our attention to something fundamental and qualitatively different and important about it. It was a period of deep structural change. The more we look at it, the more convinced we become that somewhere in this period lies the matrix of factors and problems from which our history—and our peculiar dilemmas—arise. Everything changes—not just a shift in the relations of forces but a reconstitution of the terrain of political struggle itself. It isn’t just by chance that so many of the characteristic forms of what we now think of as “traditional” popular culture either emerge from or emerge in their distinctive modern form, in that period. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 996

Categorization

• QUESTION: Hall says whole histories of this 1880-1920 transformation remain unwritten — a ripe research opening worth chasing.