ABSTRACT
Popular culture in the nineteenth century has its own particular interest, if for no other reason than that the contemporary rural and urban middle classes took it very seriously and were profoundly concerned with it. 1 By and large it was conceived as a set of lower-class beliefs and behaviours which were annoying, wasteful, immoral or even threatening and dangerous. Because many expressions of popular culture had, almost by definition, to be open and take place in public spaces, they frequently produced, as concomitants, crowds, noise, excessive drinking and, often, increased levels of violence:
On Saturday night, if a foreigner had chanced to pass near the cattle market, he would have seen a sight after which all stories of English virtue and morality would have fallen upon his ears in vain. Crowds of men and women ... drunk, surging up and down the streets, gurgling round the entrance of the ... beer-shops; pickpockets ... unfortunate women ... children struggling through the crowded booths ... witnesses of all the disgusting immorality, the ribald jesting, the cursing and profanity ... and other nameless things in which these fairs and feasts abound. 2
