(Subscription or participating institution membership required.) ^ Tak Wing Chan, Social Status and Cultural Consumption 2010: 60.Levine, 'Prologue', Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, 1990: 3 The theory, later discredited, led to the expression 'highbrow' for an intellectual, which is first recorded in 1875. Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), founder of the 'science' of phrenology, gave support to the old folk notion that people with big foreheads have more brains. The three genres of fiction, as American readers approached them in the 1950s and as obscenity law differentially judged them, are the subject of Ruth Pirsig Wood, Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow Novels, 1995. It was popularized by the American writer and poet Margaret Widdemer, whose essay 'Message and Middlebrow' appeared in the Review of Literature in 1933. For instance, she considers Prince Hamlet to be a highbrow lacking orientation in the world once he had lost the lowbrow Ophelia with her grip on earthly realities: this, she thought, explained why in general highbrows 'honour so wholeheartedly and depend so completely upon those who are called lowbrows'. In spite of their wide-reaching differences, Virginia Woolf describes the highbrow as intimately reliant on the lowbrow. It is to be hoped that culture will soon be democratized through some less conventional system of education, giving rise to a new type that might be called the middle-brow, who will consider books as a source of intellectual enjoyment.

Here is an alarmingly wide chasm, I might almost say a vacuum, between the high-brow, who considers reading either as a trade or as a form of intellectual wrestling, and the low-brow, who is merely seeking for gross thrills. The term had previously appeared in hyphenated form in The Nation, on 25 January 1912:

It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like'. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word middlebrow first appeared in print in 1925, in Punch: 'The BBC claims to have discovered a new type-'the middlebrow'. The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow, and between them is middlebrow, describing culture that is neither high nor low as a usage, middlebrow is derogatory, as in Virginia Woolf's unsent letter to the New Statesman, written in the 1930s and published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). The term was popularized in 1902 by Will Irvin, a reporter for The Sun of New York City, who adhered to the phrenological notion of more intelligent people having high foreheads. The first usage in print of highbrow was recorded in 1884. The term highbrow is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discerning or selective and highbrow is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: 'We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres-opera and classical'. 'Highbrow' can be applied to music, implying most of the classical music tradition to literature-i.e., literary fiction and poetry to films in the arthouse line and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate.

The highbrow