Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE ARTSthe more so as in Western Europe crafts and manufactures had hadseveral centuries in which to develop a, as it were, semi-industrialpattern of culture. In the countryside miners and weavers expressedtheir hope and protest in traditional folksong, and the industrial revolutionmerely added to their number and sharpened their experience.The factory needed no worksongs, but various activities incidental toeconomic development did, and developed them in the old way: thecapstan-chanty of the seamen on the great sailing ships belongs to thisgolden age of'industrial' folksong in the first half of the nineteenth century,like the ballads of the Greenland whalers, the Ballad of the Coalownerand the Pitman's Wife and the lament of the weaver. 20 In thepre-industrial towns, communities of craftsmen and domestic workersevolved a literate, intense culture in which Protestant sectarianism combinedor competed with Jacobin radicalism as a stimulus to self-education,Bunyan and John Calvin with Tom Paine and Robert Owen.Libraries, chapels and institutes, gardens and cages in which the artisan'fancier' bred his artificially exaggerated flowers, pigeons and dogs, filledthese self-reliant and militant communities of skilled men; Norwich inEngland was famous not merely for its atheistical and republican spiritbut is still famous for its canaries.* But the adaptation of older folksongto industrial life did not (except in the United States of America)survive the impact of the age of railways and iron, and the communitiesof the old skilled men, like the Dunfermline of the old linen-weavers,did not survive the advance of the factory and the machine. After 1840they fell into ruin.As yet nothing much replaced the older culture. In Britain, forinstance, the new pattern of a wholly industrial life did not fully emergeuntil the 1870s and 1880s. The period from the crisis of the old traditionalways of life until then was therefore in many ways the bleakest partof what was for the labouring poor an exceedingly bleak age. Nor did thegreat cities develop a pattern of popular culture—necessarily commercialrather than, as in the smaller communities, self-made—in our period.It is true that the great city, especially the great capital city, alreadycontained important institutions which supplied the cultural needs ofthe poor, or the 'little people', though often—characteristically enough—also of the aristocracy. These, however, were in the main developmentsof the eighteenth century, whose contribution to the evolution* "There yet stands many an old house' wrote Francis Horner in 1875 'deeply bedded ina town, that used to have its garden—oftentimes a florist's. Here for instance is the verywindow—curiously long and lightsome—at which a handloom weaver worked behind hisloom, able to watch his flowers as closely as his work—his labour and his pleasure intermingled.... But the mill has supplanted his patient hand-machine, and brickwork swallowedup his garden.'"275