Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Department of History

Seminar 4

Seminar 4: A Common Culture?
  1. To what extent did inter-war Britain see the emergence of a 'common culture'?
  2. Was the working class a united and monolithic grouping? To what extent was it internally stratified by age, gender, and hierachies of status?
  3. To what extent was the middle class united by shared attitudes, practices and living conditions, and who did they define themselves against?
  4. How fundamental was the divide between the intellectuals and the masses in early twentieth-century Britain?

Seminar Reading

Joanne Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1880-1960 (1994)

Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (1998)

Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum (1971)

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

K. McClelland & T. Jeffrey, 'A World Fit to Live In: The Daily Mail and the Middle Classes, 1918-1939' in J. Curran, A. Smith & P. Wingate (eds.), Impacts and Influences: Essays in Media Power in the Twentieth Century (1987), 27-52.

John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992)

 

Further Reading

J. Baxendale & C. Pawling (eds.), Narrating the Thirties: A Decade in the Making, 1930 to the Present (1996)

John Benson, the Rise of a Consumer Society (1993)

Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain (2004)

Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1880-1960 (1994)

Asa Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years (1985)

Asa Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless (1965)

David Cannadine, Class in Britain (1998)

* John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992), pp. …

Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006)

Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of a Consumer Society (1993)

James Curran & Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (1997)

H. Jennings & W. Gill, Broadcasting and Everyday Life (1939)

N. Joicey, ‘A Paperback Guide to Progress: Penguin Books, 1935-1951’, 20th Century British History, 4 (1993), 25-56

* D. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communications and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (1988)

J. McAleer, ‘Scenes from Love and Marriage: Mills and Boon and the Popular Publishing Industry in Britain, 1908-1950’, Twentieth Century British History, 1 (1990), 264-88

K. McClelland & T. Jeffrey, ‘A World Fit to Live In: The Daily Mail and the Middle Classes, 1918-1939’, in J. Curran, A. Smith & P. Wingate (eds.), Impacts and Influences: Essays in Media Power in the Twentieth Century (1987), 27-52

* Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (1998)

Sian Nicholas, ‘”Sly Demagogues” and Wartime Radio: J.B. Priestley and the BBC, 1939-1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 6 (1995)

Sian Nicholas, ‘The Construction of a National Identity: Stanley Baldwin, ‘Englishness’ and the Mass Media in Inter-War Britain’, in Martin Francis & Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (eds.), The Conservatives and British Society, 1880-1990 (1996), pp. 127-146

Sian Nicholas, ‘The People’s Radio: The BBC and its Audience, 1939-45’, in Nick Hayes & Jeff Hill (eds.), Millions Like Us: British Culture in the Second World War, 62-92

Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler (eds.), After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (1994)

J. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930-1939 (1984)

* Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001)

Dave Russell, ‘Sport and Identity: The Case of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, 1890-1939’, 20th Century British History, 7 (1996), 206-30

Michael Saler, ‘”Clap if you Believe in Sherlock Holmes”: Mass Culture and the Re-enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890-1940’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), 599-622

Michael Saler, ‘Making it New: Visual Modernism and the “Myth of the North” in Interwar Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 37 (1998), 419-40

Michael Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (1999)

Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting. Volume One, 1922-1939: Serving the Nation (1991)

Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race, and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (2002)

Selina Todd, ‘Flappers and Factory Lads: Youth and Youth Culture in Interwar Britain’, History Compass, 4/4 (2006), 715-30