ABSTRACT
This essay will reconstruct the experience of the wakes and fairs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Birmingham in the light of the concept of the ‘carnivalesque’. It will contend that much that is seemingly unconnected or bizarre falls into place if we make the ‘carnivalesque’ the central organising concept of our efforts to categorise the content and social functions of these popular festivals. The essay analyses the causes of the ‘taming’ of the wakes and the gradual decline of both the wakes and fairs. Precisely because the wakes were ‘carnivalesque’ they came under early attack from both without and within the plebeian culture, though, ultimately, the forces arrayed against the wakes were similar to those which attacked the fairs: industrial capitalism, urbanisation, and, perhaps most important, the hostile culture – strongly associated with evangelicalism – of sobriety, orderliness, ‘rationality’ and the pursuit of progress.
