Intellectuals & the masses, lecture notes
Who were these intellectuals?
- Writers such as Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, W.B. Yeats; artists such as
Paul Nash, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis; philosophers & commentators such
as George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, Maynard Keynes
- Impossible to group under single artistic or intellectual banner. But, concerns
of British intelligentsia during the earlier decades of the 20th century closely
aligned to a movement known at the time and since as Modernism
- British modernism in literature and visual arts characterised by desire to break
established traditions & conventions relating to narrative or realism, through
bold experiments in form & style
- Eg, stream of consciousness style adopted by James Joyce (Ulysses, Finnegan’s
Wake); poems such as ‘The Wasteland’ by T.S. Eliot; paintings by British artists
drawing on Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Van Gogh & Gauguin; sculpture by Henry
Moore, Barbara Hepworth. A few Modernist buildings also sprang up in London
(1920s-30s), marked out by purity of form, rationalism, abstraction
Social/cultural context
- Priorities of Modernists socio-cultural as well as aesthetic
- John Carey’s work portrays activities of intellectuals as a response to their
deep-rooted fears about the masses
- The masses were assumed to be different and inferior: lesser beings,
inherently lacking the qualities & independence of mind of their social superiors
- Threatening sense that the masses were growing, changing and disturbing the
social order, eg fears about population growth among the working classes
- Fostered notions of eugenics – idea that working-class fertility should be
restricted, allowing a ‘superior stock’ to regain control
- Anxieties enhanced by increasing social and political power of working classes
through franchise & unions: a new power base
- Intellectuals also threatened by late 19th century educational reforms creating
unprecedentedly large reading public & phenomenon of a mass culture
generated by cheap printing, photography, gramophone records & cinema
- Intellectuals presumed that anything created by or for the masses would be
debased and aesthetically worthless. Masses, they believed, too doggedly literal,
mundane to appreciate higher things: a basic, pleasure-seeking crowd
- Popular press lambasted for its vulgarity in pandering to the lowest common
denominator (rather than leading & improving it)
- But intellectuals saw that growth of democracy would make it harder to
control mass culture. Culture, as they saw it, was therefore in a state of crisis
- Small discerning minority increasingly cut off from the power and influence
- Response of Modernists and other intellectuals, as Carey presents it, was to
reinforce their cultural separateness & superiority. So, rather than the realism
the masses were believed to enjoy, artists cultivated irrationality & obscurity
- Abstraction, complexity & self-referentiality of Modernism thus a conscious
strategy of exclusion, preserving the intellectuals from the contaminating masses
- Intellectuals also defined ‘the masses’ in ways that denied not only their
culture but their humanity: dark, menacing and sub-human
- Thomas Hardy described London’s populace as ‘a monster whose body had 4
million heads & 8 million eyes’; Virginia Woolf visualised the masses as ‘a vast,
featureless, almost shapeless jelly’
- Mass of ordinary people contrasted against the individuality of superior man
- Carey thus polemically defines Modernism as an attempt to exclude the
masses; neutralise their power; remove their literacy; and deny their humanity
- Demonstrates that British Modernists shared many middle-class conservative
prejudices about the working classes (see exceptions such as Arnold Bennett…)
- Intellectuals also ridiculed lower-middle-class suburbia as dull, small-minded
and fake; & for its supposed diet of detective novels & the Daily Mail
Wider middle-class context
- Artists and intellectuals shared many middle-class attitudes, but the wider
middle class often deeply distrusted intellectualism and aesthetic endeavour
- Introspective, contemplative artiness of Modernism seemed unmanly,
effeminate, homosexual and, because of its continental roots, just foreign
- To vast majority of middle class, Modernist art , literature & architecture were
strange, threatening, and entirely unappealing
- The cultural forms that they developed and consumed were much less selfconsciously intellectual, & enjoyed a far wider cultural influence (eg, Kipling,
Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Warwick Deeping, John Buchan, CS Forrester)
- The wider middle class also continued to work hard to influence & control the
cultural consumption of the working class
Radio broadcasting
- British Broadcasting Corporation: national, state-funded broadcaster (1927-)
- Nnumber of radio licences: 36,000 in 1922; 8.9 million in 1939; 10.8 million in
1945 (which represented a large majority of households in all classes)
- Corporation dominated by middle-class men, with its higher executives
educated in public schools & Oxbridge
- Their vision: BBC should embody the best values of the educated classes, and
should educate and raise national tastes towards their upper-middle-class ideal
- This approach was personified in John Reith, the corporation’s director general
from 1927-1939
- He ‘presumed that the working class lacked a legit cult of its own’ (Mandler), &
provided a diet of middle-class culture, delivered in a middle-class accent
- Saw radio & TV as instruments of self-improvement & social discipline
- As Reith put it: ‘Give the public slightly better than it now thinks it likes’
- Audience research only introduced in later 1930s. For Reith, the idea of
harnessing programming policy to audience reaction was entirely foreign
- BBC in early years: desire not merely to protect its own vision of culture, but to
extend it and to define British national culture around it
- Radio/cinema/theatre of era: the working class rarely given an authentic voice.
Included as figures of fun, petty criminals or sources of amusing sentimentality
- BBC radio defined itself against tabloid focus on sensation, gossip & crime
- BBC often appeared biased towards Conservative Party (eg General Strike)
- 1930s: working-class listeners increasingly defected to Radio Luxembourg or
Radio Normandie which copied American broadcasting: popular music, comedy
- BBC responded with live sports broadcasts (1937-), coverage of royal events.
By late 1930s, BBC programming also more responsive to its varied audience
- Process of diversification hastened by WW2: BBC’s Forces Programme was
much like those offered by Luxembourg etc, & was popular with civilians too
- New emphasis on comedy with programmes like Workers’ Playtime & ITMA
- Upper-middle-class received pronunciation of BBC announcers occasionally
interspersed with the Yorkshire accent of Wilfred Pickles, although the voice of
radio authority remained largely a male one
- BBC’s emphasis on un-sensational, restrained, unemotional and reliable news
reporting during the war also gained the public’s trust and respect
- Structural and cultural changes continued after WW2: BBC radio was divided
into the Light Programme (comedy & light music), the Home Service (current
affairs & general interest programming), & the Third Programme (intellectual
diet of classical music, with literary & artistic discussion)
- All the same, the corporation’s opposition to the large-scale broadcasting of
popular music remained adamant for some time
- Importance of Radio Luxembourg thus remained post-war, & it became a major
broadcaster of rock & roll music