Looking at the rise of this form of popular music, I inevitably find myself drawn to Richard Thompson's exploration of the matter in his Thousand Years project and performances. While it's not meant to be an exhaustive scholarly exploration of the subject, it's a case of what works within the restrictions Thompson has placed on himself, it's interesting to see what he's chosen to represent the nineteenth century. There's a union song (Blackleg Miner), a bit from Gilbert and Sullivan (There Is Beauty...) and a couple of music hall numbers in Waiting At The Church, Trafalgar Square and Sam Hall, though I suspect music hall renditions of the latter would possibly have lacked the “Damn your eyes” chorus, and Shenandoah....
It's a selection that gives a fairly good example of elements of what later became more simply termed pop music. There's sing-ability in Blackleg Miner and Shenandoah, as well as a degree of clever humour in the G&S, Church and Trafalgar, but more than anything else there's a sense of performance in the story of the girl (and I'm presuming that we're talking servant girl or shop assistant here, rather than some daughter of the bourgeoisie) left waiting at the altar or the bloke reduced to sleeping in Trafalgar Square with a corresponding appeal to the broadest possible audience.
While this fairly sophisticated sense of commercialism emerged to play on the sympathies of the widest possible audience, there was a predictable but hardly universal rejection of that development in artistic and literary circles. Given the nature of the beast, that development didn't follow the same path around the globe. There were centres where what became known as the bohemian or avant-garde culture became firmly entrenched, others where you'd expect to find it where it didn't.
As a rule you'd expect to find the offbeat types gathering in Paris, Berlin, London or New York rather than Lille, Dortmund, Hull or Poughkeepsie. Where such scenes grew up was, on the whole, dependent on the individuals involved and the networks they developed, but as a rule they were based in the capital rather than regional centres and around the universities and other institutions of higher learning than in the factories or office blocks.
The growth of public education had, after all, produced a need for teachers and a subsequent necessity of finding some way to train them. As time passed there was a general sense of upward mobility that was largely dependent on access to tertiary education.
One suspects that many of those lured from the back blocks to the metropolis for higher education and subsequently found themselves back at home brought with them attitudes and ideas that wouldn't have got there otherwise, and found the odd kindred spirit in their local community who would have been encouraged to follow a similar path to the metropolitan educational facilities.
The actual forms these bohemian activities took were, largely, the result of the individual personalities involved and the interactions between them, but there's a general sense of trying to undermine the complacency that was coming through in the new popular culture.
That undermining might be as subtle as a James Joyce poem referring to the fact that 'earth and heaven trembled' due to the 'black and sinister arts/of an Irish writer in foreign parts' or as blatant as the 'Merde!' (generally translated as 'Pschitt') uttered by Alfred Jarry's grotesque Pa Ubu at the start of Ubu Roi, which was based on the author's portrayal of his physics teacher's eccentricities and these developments took place against a background of political and military changes that were as sweeping as those that transformed the agricultural, industrial and commercial worlds.
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