The Modern and the Everyday

Abstract

‘Everyday life’ is today a serious and increasingly fashionable subject of academic study. We have now a sociology, a phenomenology, a philosophy, and a cultural theory of everyday life, drawing on methods as diverse as psychoanalysis, ethnomethodology and dramaturgy in order to capture, comprehend, classify or find sites of resistance or quiet revolution in the daily lives of ‘ordinary’ people. In one sense, of course, everyday life is the common portion of humanity, peculiar to no time or place; yet, as sociologists attest, ‘there is another sense in which everyday life is a relatively recent invention’.¹ It is generally agreed that the work of Georg Lukács in the 1920s marks the earliest appearance of a fully developed concept of everyday life,² a concept that emerges out of a number of shifts within Western social and cultural life over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

‘And what endeared Tennyson especially to me, the working man, was, as I afterwards discovered, the altogether democratic tendency of his poems […] not his political opinions, about which I know nothing, and care less, but his handling of the trivial every-day sights and sounds of nature. […] This is what I call democratic art — the revelation of the poetry which lies in common things. And surely all the age is tending in that direction: in Landseer and his dogs — in Fielding and his downs, with a host of noble fellow-artists — and in all authors who have really seized the nation’s mind, from Crabbe and Burns and Wordsworth to Hood and Dickens, the great tide sets ever onward, outward, towards that which is common to the many, not that which is exclusive to the few — towards the likeness of Him who causes His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust, and His sun to shine on the evil and the good; who knoweth the cattle upon a thousand hills, and all the beasts of the field are in His sight.’

Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (1850)