Victorian penny dreadfuls were Britain's first mass-market entertainment for the young
Long before video games, British teenagers devoured penny serials, cheap thrillers that the Guardian called the Victorian equivalent of a console. Rising literacy, spending money and a brand-new railway network made them possible, and they mark one early starting point for what we now call pop culture.
Popular culture means the practices, beliefs, art and objects that dominate a society at a given moment, plus the feelings people have about them. The phrase dates to the 19th century or earlier and was long linked with the poorly educated lower classes, set against the official culture of the educated elite. That contrast sharpened late in the century and was firmly established between the two world wars. Before then, folk culture filled a similar role for ordinary people.
Industrialisation changed the picture. During the 18th and 19th centuries British literacy climbed, and workers spent more on commercial pubs, sport and reading. The Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first public railway, opened in north-east England in 1825, and rail travel allowed cheap literature to be distributed widely. The first penny serials appeared in the 1830s to meet demand.
After the Second World War, mass media blurred popular culture into mass culture, consumer culture and image culture. The short form pop, as in pop music, arrived in the late 1950s and is narrower: it implies deliberate mass appeal, while popular simply means well liked. The philosopher Theodor Adorno called the whole Western machine of media, marketing and capitalist mass appeal the culture industry, a critical label.
Japan shows how the flow can reverse. From the 1970s a post-war techno-nationalism drove innovations such as the Walkman and Sony's and Matsushita's moves into Hollywood studios. It also spread kawaii, the cult of cute. The word entered everyday speech in 1914, when Tamaki Kishi used it to advertise her boutique, and it now attaches to manga characters, Pokemon and above all Hello Kitty, with Sanrio and Nintendo carrying it across East Asia and the West.
Source: Popular culture
