Popular Culture and Working-Class Taste in Britain, 1930–39: A Round of Cheap Diversions? By Robert James.

摘要

Robert James sets out to rescue the working-class readers and cinema-goers of the 1930s from the enormous condescension of contemporary critics and subsequent historians. Those dependable Aunt Sallies, Q. D. Leavis and J. B. Priestley, treated the ‘consumers’ of mass culture as ‘passive observers’, and historians have been similarly culpable, ‘reluctant to analyse the meaning of popular leisure for those consuming it’. But is a rescue needed? Which historians in the last two decades have ‘denied agency’ to working-class movie-goers and readers? (pp. 1–2; James's italics). Certainly not Jonathan Rose, whose Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001) argues strenuously that working-class people read canonical and ephemeral literature on their own terms. James does not engage with Rose's arguments, nor those of many other scholars whom he cites for factual points. Parts of the book show little awareness of other scholars’ contributions. Surveying attitudes to working-class taste in the 1930s, James makes no reference to the work of D. L. LeMahieu, John Baxendale, or John Carey. James comes close to conflating ‘élite’ opinion with ‘official attitudes’. He refers persistently to ‘the Establishment’ and ‘Establishment figures’. My objection is not to the anachronism (the sorts of structures and networks described as the Establishment in the 1950s were present in the 1930s) but to the …