United Kingdom

Commercialization of public culture was evident in the music hall from the 1850s, though more so in the late 19th century, with the construction of large purpose-built halls and the development of a nationwide chain of venues and a national “star” system. Before then, even if commercial, organizations were smaller-scale, less commercial, and more locally rooted. Commercial pressures were accompanied by political and moral pressures from above. The civic provision of culture was intended not only for the well-to-do but also for the mass of the population. For example, the public park, from its introduction in the 1840s, was an attempt to reproduce rational recreation among the lower classes through the design of the park as a place where civilized and rational behaviour and deportment could be encouraged. Of course, in practice, parks served other purposes, but their place in what was a widespread and marked reshaping of popular manners should not be underestimated. This reshaping owed a great deal to the beneficiaries of reform themselves, in that some of the most vocal supporters of the reform of the old order of “superstition and brutality” were radical workingmen whose conception of reason pitted them against the old culture. They were joined by Dissenter workingmen who were equally uncomfortable with traditional culture. Commercial and reform interests combined in the proliferation of reading matter for the “popular classes.” Indeed, the creation of a literate population was one of the most striking achievements of the century, but, while journals and books advocating self-improvement reached a surprisingly wide audience, this readership was not as wide as that of the sensational popular literature of the 1830s and ’40s. About this time a mass popular press also developed, though at this stage a Sunday press only, in the form of Lloyd’s News and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper. The explosion of the provincial press in the 1850s reached a somewhat different social constituency but was tremendously important in constituting the sense of identity of the towns that it served.

Late Victorian Britain

State and society

From the 1880s a mounting sense of the limits of the liberal, regulative state became apparent. One reflection of this awareness was the increasing perception of national decline, relative to the increasing strength of other European countries and the United States. This awareness was reinforced by British military failures in the South African War (Boer War) of 1899–1902, a “free enterprise war” in which free enterprise was found wanting. One consequence of this and other developments was the growth of movements aimed at “national efficiency” as a means of establishing a more effective state machine. The recognition of social problems at home—such as the “discovery” of urban poverty in 1880s in the assumed presence of plenty and increasing anxiety about the “labour question”—also raised questions about the adequacy of the state in dealing with the mounting problems of an increasingly populous and complex society. Toward the end of the century, the possibility of a violent outcome in the increasingly intractable problem of Ireland brought existing constitutional methods into question. Behind much of this anxiety was a sense that the Third Reform Act of 1884 (see Reform Bill) and changes in local government were precipitating a much more democratic polity, for which the classical liberal state had no easy answers. The example of what was called at the time municipal socialism, especially as it existed in Birmingham under the direction of its mayor, Joseph Chamberlain (1873–76), indicated what the local state could accomplish. Instead of the old “natural order” religion that had underpinned the state previously, different currents of thought emerged that saw the state and community as necessary for individual self-realization. German idealism, socialism, and new liberalism (see libertarianism) all encompassed different ways of rethinking the state.