The Culture of the English People
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Modern man's originality, his newness in comparison with traditional societies, lies precisely in his determination to regard himself as a purely historical being, in his wish to live in a basically desacralized cosmos … his ideal no longer has anything in common with the Christian message, and … it is equally foreign to the image of himself conceived by the man of the traditional societies.
Traditional society merged into modern at some indeterminate period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One cannot be precise to the decade or even the century. It did not result from the Industrial Revolution, though the Industrial Revolution was part of the transition. It did not consist only of material innovations, numerous and important though these were. It was marked by a change in mental attitudes to society and to the world; in short, by cultural change in its most profound sense.
This book has surveyed the ways in which popular culture in Britain has changed and developed during a period of more than two thousand years. This change has arisen from innovations which have been consciously adopted, used and diffused through at least some segment of society. Innovations have, very broadly, been of two kinds. First, there have been those which effected a fundamental change in the ways in which goods were made or people reacted to their environment. Each had long-term consequences, preparing the way for other innovations sometimes in very different fields.
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