Re-Reading Richard Hoggart

Re-Reading Richard Hoggart:

Life, Literature, Language, Education

Edited by

Sue Owen

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart: Life, Literature, Language, Education, Edited by Sue Owen

This book first published 2008 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2008 by Sue Owen and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-84718-612-2, ISBN (13): 9781847186126

To John
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix

Foreword by Simon Hoggart ....................................................................... x

Introduction by Sue Owen........................................................................ xvi

David Lodge
Richard Hoggart: A Personal Appreciation ................................................. 1

Fred Inglis
Richard Hoggart: The Intellectual as Politician......................................... 11

Jon Nixon
The Legacy of Richard Hoggart: Education as Democratic Practice ........ 26

Ben Clarke
“To think fearlessly”: Richard Hoggart and the Politics of the English
Language .................................................................................................. 43

Sue Owen
Richard Hoggart and Literature ................................................................ 58

Sean Matthews
The Uses of D. H. Lawrence ..................................................................... 85

Katie Wales
The Anxiety of Influence: Hoggart, Liminality and Melvyn Bragg’s
Crossing the Lines ................................................................................... 102

Simon Grimble
“Stances and Tones Before Life”: Richard Hoggart and the Question
of Voice ................................................................................................... 118
viii Table of Contents

Michael Rosenfeld
Local Habitations: Working-Class Childhood and its Uses
in the Memoirs of Richard Hoggart and Others....................................... 131

Tom Steele
Questions of Taste and Class: Richard Hoggart and Bonamy Dobrée .... 142

Malcolm Hadley
Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO years (1970-1975) ................................... 153

Appendix
Letter from W. H. Auden to Richard Hoggart, 7 January 1958 .............. 175

Notes on Contributors ............................................................................. 178

Index........................................................................................................ 182
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Cover Photo of Richard Hoggart as UNESCO’s Assistant Director-

General for Social Sciences, Human Sciences and Culture. February 1970.
Photo © UNESCO/ Dominique Roger. Reproduced by permission.
 FOREWORD

SIMON HOGGART

“YOUR Dad’s famous, isn’t he?” I was sometimes asked at school. Hard
to know how to reply, so I evolved the all-purpose answer, “he’s well
known in his field”, which was both true and, I thought, pleasingly
modest. Of course he was rather more famous than that, though a long way
from what is known now to young people as a “sleb”–a celebrity.
The nearest Dad came to real celebrity was during the Lady Chatterley
trial in 1960, which filled page after page in the papers. One carried the
headline: “Lady C ‘puritanical’ says the potty prof”. For a schoolboy son
this was both exhilarating and deeply embarrassing, though we were
naturally exceedingly proud when the jury found in favour of the book. In
2006 BBC4 made another film about the trial. Dad was played by David
Tennant, who had just started as Doctor Who. He had researched the part
thoroughly, had a picture of Dad on his mobile phone, had studied
newspaper pictures of the time to get the right clothes, and watched old
TV interviews for the crucial intonation. It was a fine performance (Doctor
Who, Hamlet, Richard Hoggart makes an eclectic collection of roles), but
the only thing wrong was his long sideburns. I told him Dad had never
ever worn those; he grinned and said that he had to play the Doctor again
next day, and the sideburns wouldn’t grow back in time. That’s a very
modern form of fame: being depicted on television wearing Doctor Who’s
face furniture.
I learned other things at the time. The son of Mervyn Griffiths-Jones
QC, the prosecuting counsel, told me that his father always prepared his
words to the jury with great care and never deviated from his script. But
on that occasion he felt that his opening address was going so well that he
could risk an ad lib. The line, “would you want your wife or servants to
read this book?” popped out. He realised immediately that he had blown
the speech, and possibly the whole trial, though Dad’s evidence was also
critically important. He had seen some other academics being turned over
by Griffiths-Jones, who had easily backed them into qualifications and
scholarly caveats, making their evidence seem feeble and evasive. So he
was determined not to back down from anything he said. Hence the long
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xi

discussion of the word “puritanical”–“yes, and poignant and tender too”,

he added. And there was the splendid moment when Mr. Griffiths-Jones
expostulated: “Reverence? Reverence for a man’s balls?”
We were in America in 1957–Dad had an exchange year at the
University of Rochester, New York–when The Uses of Literacy (the
original title, The Abuse Of Literacy would perhaps not have caught on so
fast) was published. The gestation had been long and difficult. Dad’s
thoughts on the degradation of the language had been illustrated with
extracts from real newspapers and books, especially American pulp
fiction. Chatto & Windus’s lawyer warned that if these publications
decided to sue, it could cost up to a million pounds–a large sum now, quite
unimaginable then. So he had to write his own extracts, which delayed
publication for many months, though he clearly had a lot of fun doing it.
One of his inventions was a novel called Death Cab For Cutie; someone
in the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band must have read the book and wrote a
song with the title, which was then adopted as the name of my own son’s
favourite American rock group. In such ways do jokes spill down the
generations.
We returned to find the book a huge success, with Dad feted, and even
asked to go on television. Now there is so much TV that few are spared
from appearing on it, but in those days it was a form of glory reserved for
a handful of people, even if the programmes in question went out at
curious times to what must have been small audiences.
America had been an exciting trip for the whole family. Rochester paid
him a fairly pitiful salary, but we managed trips to Washington, New
York, Canada and New England, driving a second-hand brown and cream
De Soto, one of the last American cars to be shaped like a toad rather than
an elongated coffin. We returned to find The Uses Of Literacy a great
talking point. Tony Warren, who created Coronation Street, told Dad that
its depiction of working class culture had made him realise you could
weave fascinating and involving narratives around it. Since then I have
long lost count of the number of people–from strangers I meet in the
normal haphazard way, to government ministers and other establishment
figures–who have said how much the book inspired them by mirroring
their own experiences, or in some sadder cases, reflecting all that they had
missed. I suspect that the only people who took against the book were
those A-level students for whom it was a set text, though the money
helped–as Sir Keith Joseph would have said–to embourgeousify the
family. He has never been remotely rich, but the contrast with the newly
married adult education lecturer–living in a flat in Hull, driving up and
down the East Yorkshire coast on icy, foggy night–was considerable. We
xii Foreword

could afford holidays in France, and a car that actually started on winter
mornings.
Two more years in Hull were followed by a move to Leicester, where
Dad loved working with the cerebral, gentle and endlessly generous
Arthur Humphreys. This was also the time he was working on the
Pilkington committee on broadcasting. Its bold assertion of the importance
of public service broadcasting was controversial at the time–at least among
those who wanted to make themselves rich by giving the public “what it
wants”–but did, I think, keep the argument along the right lines and helped
considerably to maintain broadcasting standards in Britain. The committee
was partly peripatetic, meeting in members’ homes on occasion, so when
Billy Wright, former captain of the England football team, came to visit us
my brother and I were thrilled. (Though Wright let us and the
neighbourhood boys beat him at tackling in the garden, which wasn’t the
idea at all.) Joyce Grenfell also came, and she remained a life-long friend.
I won’t forget the summer party we three children gave for Mum and Dad.
It rained, so everyone had to come in from the garden. Joyce perched on
the arm of a sofa and did her act. Everyone was entranced.
Leicester had been satisfactory in very many ways, but around then
Birmingham offered the chance to set up the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, and he moved there in 1962. The Centre was hugely
absorbing, though staff relationships in the English department were
perhaps not quite so good. However, Malcolm Bradbury–briefly–and
David Lodge were there and they were frequent visitors to our house.
As was the poet Auden, one memorable summer in 1967. Dad’s first
book had been a critical discussion of his work, and Auden had liked it.
Dad nominated him for an honorary degree at Birmingham, and the
tradition was that if your graduand was picked, you had to put them up.
Auden had been partly raised in Birmingham, and was pleased to visit the
place again. He swept in and made himself very much at home. Various
friends and colleagues from the university were invited to meet the great
man. I was in charge of drinks. Auden asked if I knew how to make a dry
martini. I said I thought I did. “I’ll show you how I make them”, he
growled (his voice seemed a strange mixture of English, American and
even a touch of Germanic, since he spent half the year in Austria.) He took
a three pint jug from the cupboard, emptied an entire bottle of gin into it,
added a whole lemon sliced and a trayful of ice cubes. He then poured in
one bottle-cap of dry vermouth and stirred. He placed the jug in front of
him on a coffee table and held court. It lasted the length of the party, just.
His conversation was, for someone anxious to learn about the
wellsprings of his poetry, perhaps disappointing. He spoke at length about
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xiii

the merits of Kenwood mixers, and recounted an amusing story about the
time he and his partner Chester Kallman had tried LSD in New York, in
order to discover what all the fuss was about. A doctor friend had
administered the drug but nothing had happened. They had gone out to a
diner for a meal. Auden was delighted to see his mailman apparently doing
a dance on the sidewalk. This was a proper druggy hallucination, so they
had hurried back to their apartment. Next morning the mailman rang the
doorbell and asked why they had ignored him. “I had a parcel for you, Mr
Auden, and I was jumping up and down to get your attention, but you
looked right through me…” Much of the time the poet spent in a deckchair
in the garden, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes. There was a touching
moment at the end of his stay, a Sunday morning, when I descended to
find him tracing the grid of the Observer crossword onto baking paper, so
he could solve it without spoiling it for anyone else.
Next was Paris in 1970, working as an assistant director-general at
UNESCO, the UN’s cultural organisation, and a real culture shock in
itself. It offered bureaucracy that made Indian railways clerks seem as free
spirited as sailors on shore leave, and gave an alarming introduction to the
grand certainties of French life (there was a lovely, cosy restaurant round
the corner from their apartment called Le Lloyds. It would never admit
them–“desolé, monsieur, nous sommes tout à fait complet”–even when
they were plainly empty. Dad’s French secretary knew how to solve that
problem over the phone: “M. Richard Hoggart, le sous-directeur
MONDIALE de l’UNESCO commande une table!” They were honoured
customers from then on.)
To begin with, it was a lonely time for my mother. Her own mother
had just died, my sister and I had left home, and my younger brother was
just starting university. The empty nest was not even her own house. The
French are not the easiest people to be close to, and Dad’s work was
demanding and absorbing, if at times horribly frustrating. For us three
children, however, it was wonderful–the salary was generous and they
announced they would pay fares for as many times as we wished to visit.
Many friends and acquaintances came to stay or at least get a proper cup
of tea in apartment they rented in a fine hôtel particulière on the
Boulevard Haussmann. UNESCO took him around the world,
accompanied by our mother as often as was possible. These travels
included India, Japan, Australia, the US, Africa, Latin America and
countless small nations where there might be a temple, a library, a mural
or a fortress to be saved.
Back in Britain after five years, they moved to an old converted hop
barn in Farnham, Surrey, almost the countryside and only an hour from
xiv Foreword

London. Dad took a job as warden of Goldsmiths College in New Cross

and helped steer it towards full status within the University of London,
while encouraging the world-celebrated art department (“though we are
not responsible for Tracey Emin”, one tutor told me happily.) Recently
they re-named the college’s main building after him.
They retired to live full-time in Farnham in 1984. More books
followed–the three volume autobiography, the book about Farnham itself,
full of unexpected detail and insight, and books about language, mass
culture, and the experience of growing old. There were also innumerable
articles for learned journals, serious magazines and for newspapers. BBC
producers, radio and TV, trekked down from London to do interviews, and
seemingly endless requests to speak came week after week in the post. He
liked getting honorary degrees himself; among the ones he was proudest of
were Bordeaux–he had quite some success in France–and, perhaps
belatedly, his own alma mater, Leeds. On several occasions, the last quite
recently, he told my younger brother Paul that he felt he had missed his
way and had not produced anything of lasting worth. He had, he said,
always wanted to be a novelist (he did try once, but I don’t think ever got
past the first chapter). We have thousands of novelists, most now
forgotten, but only a few writers who have been quite so influential.
They moved to Norwich in 2001 to be near my sister and her family. It
has been a time of steady winding down. But there are now eight
grandchildren, three already launched in careers, and in 2007, a great-
grandson.
It has been, on the whole, a very happy life, though not an easy one.
Not difficult because of the poverty he experienced as a child and often
wrote about–money hasn’t been a problem for a long time. My mother has
been a wonderful helpmeet for him, and both of them were tremendous
parents for us. Dad worked astonishingly hard–as hard at home as at work,
and we used to think it extraordinary that on Christmas Day, for example,
after presents and lunch but before Morecambe and Wise, he would
quietly nip off for his writing board, a battered thing which had probably
seen war service, and make notes for a lecture, or a new chapter. He would
cheerfully work away while the rest of the family played a board game
under his nose. For the rest of the year, the door of his study was always
open, and if you wanted to pop in for some advice, help, money, or just a
chat, he’d drop was he was doing and pay full attention. And of course like
most dads he ran an unpaid taxi service for his offspring.
His public image was always somewhat austere, and he could be
ferocious in argument, as many people know–though I’ve noticed how the
people with the most intellectual bruises to show are often the most
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xv

admiring and affectionate. But at home he loved comedy on television, the

company of old friends, wine with dinner–in France we would invent
magnificently complicated cocktails before going to Le Lloyds for seafood
and guineafowl. I, and my brother and sister, feel the same–it’s wonderful
to have a Dad who you love so much and of whom you are also so proud.
In his last book, Promises To Keep, which is about growing old, he wrote
in the introduction: “Gradually, but more and more I also began to look
back, and through that inverted telescope tried to reconsider the main
elements of our lives … the public events and ideas which have interested
me, and their intertwining with personal life. Such as the family; above all
the family.”
 INTRODUCTION

SUE OWEN

Richard Hoggart has been one of the leading cultural commentators of the
last sixty years. He was the first literary critic to take the working class
seriously and to extend the parameters of literary criticism to include
popular culture. Hoggart put the working class on the cultural map. He
differentiated between what was offered by the “popular providers”
(media, popular fiction, advertisements) and the resilient culture of
working-class people themselves. Hoggart’s most famous work is the
seminal The Uses of Literacy. Part II (written first) offers a searing
indictment of the specious populism and banality of popular newspapers
and magazines, the fake “pally patter” of the tabloids and of adverts aimed
at ordinary people, and the literary flatness and moral emptiness of much
popular fiction. Part I celebrates the resilient culture of working-class
people themselves and offers a basis for the argument that working-class
people deserve better than what passes for popular culture.
This creates the basis for a challenging the elitism of his predecessors,
such as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot and F.R. and Q. D. Leavis. Hoggart
questions these critics’ view of “the masses” as passive recipients of a
debased “mass culture”. Discussing in an interview Queenie Leavis’s
Fiction and the Reading Public¸ he observes:

It’s a classic text, but throughout it she treated romantic fiction as though
she had a peg on her nose. She also made a fairly simple equation between
what people read, and what they become. So I wanted to look at popular
literature in a more inward way to show that a good bad book may bring
out good impulses, or that people may bring to it things which are
themselves almost unconsciously critical. (Hoggart, 1990, B6)

Similarly, in his Inaugural Lecture at Birmingham University in 1963, he

advises humility about what people actually take from popular art and
adds, “Perhaps no one should engage in this work who is not, in a certain
sense, himself in love with popular art” (Hoggart, 1973, 242). Even in Part
II of Uses, where what we would now call “dumbing down” is most
strongly deplored, there are signs of a certain relish for aspects of popular
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xvii

fiction, as I discuss in the chapter on Hoggart and Literature below. Thus,

Hoggart distinguishes himself from Leavisite cultural elitism and at the
same time initiates the important mid-twentieth-century shift from
deploring “popular culture” to seeing it as a source of possible insight and
inspiration.
Yet Hoggart also warns that “Assimilated lowbrowism is as bad as
uninformed highbrowism” (ibid). It is all about getting the balance right.
Questions of value, for Hoggart, cannot be evaded:

It is plain that behind almost any discussion today about the arts, and
indeed about any of those areas if British culture with which I have been
involved, lies the evaded question of value judgments. (1993, 240)

For Hoggart, the idea of value must be defended. Otherwise democracy is

open to abuse:

It is true … that it is better to be free to find our own rules than to have
them imposed by church or state. But it is precisely in these kinds of
democracies that this openness is comprehensively abused by people with
their own ulterior purposes, does not lead to our being left alone, let alone
aided to find our own beliefs. We are besieged by a mass of apparently
conflicting but actually consonant voices, each peddling its own patterns of
overt or more likely hidden beliefs. All of them–politicians, advertisers,
tabloid newspaper hacks and many another–are interested parties; the ways
of life they offer have overwhelmingly at their centre the notion that it’s all
a matter of taste, and of changing taste, since that’s what keeps the wheels
of this kind of society turning. Openness becomes emotional promiscuity,
choice becomes whim; but underneath is a passivity, the acceptance of
things as they are and are offered. (1993, 240)

A crucial aspect of the argument of The Uses of Literacy is that the

“popular persuaders” (all “consonant” in method, however different in
their particular ideology) exploit and graft themselves on to old, positive
values. Thus, traditional working-class openness becomes shared
passivity: “Above all, you mustn’t resist, like a stone in the water,
snagging the inchoate flow. Or make distinctions” (1993, 242). And he is
not afraid to challenge those who abandon critical value judgments in
favour of populism and so critically disempower those from disregarded
sub-groups whom they ostensibly defend. Hoggart challenges the view
that “anything goes”, that one shouldn’t be a snob or a spoilsport, that
high-mindedness or intellectual snobbery must be avoided at all costs and
can’t be distinguished from intellectual discrimination and critical
stringency. For Hoggart it is crucial to tackle this error in order to arm
xviii Introduction

people against the manipulations of the popular persuaders and to

challenge the tyranny of relativism which they exploit.
Hoggart is best known for The Uses of Literacy, but has been a prolific
writer, publishing twenty-seven books, including two in 2004 at the age of
eighty-seven. These range from works of cultural analysis such as The
Way We Live Now, to works of personal reflection such as First and Last
Things and Promises to Keep, and to collections of essays on a wide
variety of topics, such as the two volumes of Speaking to Each Other,
Between Two Worlds and An English Temper. One of his most important
contributions to the transformation of perceptions of class and culture was
the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
Birmingham University in the early 1960s. He explains the thinking
behind the move in his Inaugural Lecture.1 The new field of cultural
studies was conceived as within English Literature. Hoggart had been
prompted to study popular culture partly by the questions asked by his
students in adult education about connections between literature and daily
life. He had made such connections in The Uses of Literacy and in his
inaugural lecture at Birmingham he challenges others to follow his lead as
he makes the case for widening the boundaries of English. English,
Hoggart argues, “has to do with language exploring human experience, in
all its flux and complexity. It is therefore always and finally in an active
relation with its age; and some students of literature–many more students
of literature than at present–ought to try to understand these relationships
better” (1973, 243). Schools of English, Hoggart argues, have a mission to
engage with how language is being used in the world today, even if this
means moving outside disciplinary boundaries. Hoggart is not debunking
literary criticism but giving it a broader mission. A training in English
encourages “increased respect for the life of language, and for the
unpremeditated textures of experience” (1973, 234). Thus, the literary
critic is uniquely fitted to expose debased uses of language by the
persuaders and manipulators, when “prose has its eye only slightly on the
object and almost wholly on the audience” (1973, 235). This is effectively
a political stand:

As it is, too many of us stay most of the time within our well-defined
academic areas – but succumb easily to occasional invitations from the
world outside. We do not with sufficient confidence separate ourselves
from that world nor sufficiently critically engage with it. By insisting on
the difficult but responsible life of language, and on the overriding
importance of the human scale, we can try to do our part in resisting the
unreal, unfelt and depersonalized society. (1973, 237)
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xix

This still seems pertinent.

The remit of the new cultural studies, as Hoggart envisages it, is
threefold: “one is, roughly, historical and philosophical; another is, again
roughly, sociological; the third–which will be the most important–is the
literary critical” (1973, 239). The “historical and philosophical” approach
includes the need to know more about the history of “the cultural debate”
along the lines pioneered by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society,
and a better definition of terms to avoid confused assumptions as “The
clash of undernourished generalizations and of submerged apologetics
takes the place of what should be a dialogue” (1973, 240). Some might
call this work “theoretical”. It has gone on in the last forty years without
Hoggart’s appeal for it being recognized. And his appeal remains topical:
whilst terms like “highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows” might now be
discredited, other dubious terms Hoggart questions, such as “the common
man” and “the masses”, may still have a certain regrettable currency. And
Hoggart’s appeal for more philosophers to come into the field has been
entirely unheeded, so that there is still a cavalier creation of “new little
cultural patterns” such as “the Angry Young Man” movement (1973, 240).
The sociological approach Hoggart envisaged would include attention
to the background and rewards of writers and artists; the audiences for
“different levels of approach”; the opinion formers and their channels of
influence; organizations for the production and distribution of the written
and spoken word (including the impact of the “paperback revolution” and
what it means to see books as commodities); links between
commercialization and (literary) reputations; and finally:

…how little we know about all sorts of interrelations: about interrelations

between writers and their audiences, and about their shared assumptions;
about interrelations between writers and organs of opinion, between
writers, politics, power, class and cash; about interrelations between the
sophisticated and the popular arts, interrelations which are both functional
and imaginative; and how few foreign comparisons we have made. (1963,
241)

Hoggart insists throughout on accuracy and historical specificity and on

the avoidance of schematism and specious generalizations. At the same
time, he draws a much bigger map here than he is often given credit for.
He appears to envisage cultural studies as a multi-disciplinary project to
build up an overall view of contemporary culture through attention to
specifics. This method of a dialectic between the particular and the general
has not really been grasped by his successors in cultural studies. And,
xx Introduction

though some of the issues he outlines have been addressed, others remain
comparatively unexplored.
Hoggart reiterates that the literary critical approach is the “most
important of all” and explains why it is distinct from the sociological
approach:

Most important of all: the directly literary critical approach in cultural

studies is itself neglected. Yet it is essential to the whole field because,
unless you know how these things work as art, even though sometimes as
“bad art”, what you say about then will not cut deep. Here, we particularly
need better links with sociologists. It is difficult, outside a seminar, to use a
literary critical vocabulary–to talk about “the quality of the imagination”
shown; or to discuss the effect on a piece of writing of various pressures–
for instance, to talk about corner-cutting techniques, or linguistic tricks, or
even (perhaps especially–about what tone reveals. All this needs to be
analyzed more, to be illustrated and enforced–and at all levels, not just in
relation to mass arts.2

It will be clear that there is a literary critical slant to all this from which
later cultural studies has largely departed. Hoggart values literary critical
method for its truth-revealing power, its ability to reveal tones and
nuances, identify influence, to elucidate, expose and debunk. But always
Hoggart insists on the quiddity of the literary or cultural object of study.
The text is never to be read as historical evidence, but always from inside
out rather than outside in. My essay in this volume elaborates on these
issues. Unsurprisingly, these disciplinary distinctions were not always
maintained in the way Hoggart envisaged them, especially after his
departure from the Centre, though as Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg
have pointed out, his influence was nevertheless very strong (Grossberg
2007 and forthcoming; Hall, 2007 and forthcoming). The importance of
Hoggart’s initiative in founding the CCCS would be hard to overstate.
In this volume both the origins and continuing relevance of Hoggart’s
contribution to cultural studies are explored. Sue Owen and Ben Clarke
discuss the origins within literary criticism of cultural studies as practised
at the Birmingham Centre, and explore the significance of this. Fred Inglis
locates Hoggart within the history of ideas and argues for his importance
amidst the “dreadful babble of management jargon which constitutes the
élite conversation of culture” (below, 11). Many critics have traced the
origin of Hoggartian cultural studies in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, T.
S. Eliot, and especially in the work of F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, tempered by
voices such as Tawney’s and Orwell’s which were more sympathetic to
working-class culture. Sue Owen discusses below another influence, that
of W. H. Auden, a fellow though very different outsider, about whom
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xxi

Hoggart wrote his first book, Auden: an Introductory Essay. Tom Steele
traces origins of Hoggart’s interest in cultural studies in unexpected
places: the influence of his tutor at Leeds University, Bonamy Dobrée, and
of Italian intellectuals encountered in wartime. Steele argues that Hoggart
has close affiliations to the maligned autodidact tradition, and that public
institutions also played an important role in forming his taste and feeling
for class: schools, libraries, universities, adult education, the serious press
and public service broadcasting. Sean Matthews argues for the influence
of D. H. Lawrence on the formation of the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies and on the whole field of Cultural Studies.
Hoggart did not remain at the Birmingham Centre but handed over to
Stuart Hall in 1970 to take up a post as Assistant Director-General of
UNESCO. Malcolm Hadley discusses this period of his life in the final
essay in this volume. Hoggart’s description of the move in his Life and
Times is revealing:

I agreed to go there in what a friend, urging me to accept, called a

“walking-the-plank spirit”–that which leads us to take on certain
commitments not because we particularly want to, and even though we
know that much in them will be boring or unpleasant, but because we have
been asked to walk the plank in the service of a valuable idea. (1993, 146)

For Hoggart, public service is a duty of the intellectual. It flows from his
conception of the intellectual’s social and political role that he has not
lived in the ivory tower but has engaged in society, striving for change
from within. In addition to his five years as Assistant Director-General of
UNESCO, he has undertaken many activities in arts, culture, broadcasting
and education. Amongst other positions, he has served as: a member of the
Albermarle Committee on Youth Services, a member of the Pilkington
Committee on Broadcasting, Reith Lecturer, Chair of the Broadcasting
Research Unit, Vice-Chair of the Arts Council, Chair of the Statesman and
Nation Publishing Company, Chair of the Advisory Council for Adult and
Continuing Education and member of the British Board of Film
Classification Appeals Committee. Hoggart was a leading witness for the
defence in the trial at the Old Bailey in 1960 of Penguin Books Ltd. for
publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. His evidence is
widely acknowledged to have been central in leading to the acquittal,
which marked a watershed in public perception and shifted cultural
parameters. As Sean Matthews argues below, this “was an event which
drew together several different strands of his life and work, as well as
being saturated with wider cultural significance, and its echoes and
resonances continue to this day” (below, 86). Hoggart was also the first
xxii Introduction

British critic to take TV and radio seriously. He made a number of critical

interventions: his Reith lectures, his contributions to the report of the
Pilkington Committee and his works on media, including Only Connect:
on the Nature and Quality of Mass Communications, The Mass Media: A
New Colonialism, and Mass Media in Mass Society. Hated by Margaret
Thatcher and Mary Whitehouse, Hoggart nevertheless, strove to serve
culture in the public sphere, as an important extension of his ideas about
the need for cultural quality.
The impulse which has informed all Hoggart’s activities in the public
sphere is democratic and communitarian. He summarizes his “credo” in
the concluding volume of his Life and Times:

I began this chapter with an image for the shape of my professional life
after the publication of The Uses of Literacy; the picture of a single river
breaking into many subsidiary streams. Yet the dispersal was in forms of
activity, not in types of interest. The delta has had only four or five
branches, and they all interconnect.
Their common source is a sense of the importance of the right of each
of us to speak about how we see life, the world; and so the right to have
access to the means by which that capacity to speak may be gained. The
right, also, to try to reach out and speak to others, not to have that impulse
inhibited by social barriers, maintained by those in power politically or
able to exercise power in other ways.
So the main currents of my interests have been: the right of wider
access to higher education, the need for wider access also to the arts as the
most scrupulous explorations we can make of our personalities and
relationships, and of the nature of our societies; and, as a support to all this,
the best uses of mass communications. (1993, 26)

The diversity of Hoggart’s cultural interventions has meant that his

reputation in the academy has been slow to gain ground. Yet, as Jon Nixon
argues in this volume, “The unity of Hoggart’s life … has been achieved,
not through these rituals of differentiation and self-positioning, but
through a no less difficult process of identifying commonalities and
continuities … Hoggart gained his sense of intellectual identity (and,
indeed, moral authority), not only through his insistence that there is still a
“we”, but through the invocation of this “we” as a means of achieving “the
unity of a human life” (below, 30). Fred Inglis similarly argues: “There
can be no distance set between this man's life and his work; the published
volumes are printed meditations on the stuff of the everyday life which
made them possible … His way of answering the demands of the vast
international bureaucracy of which he was Assistant Director-General, of
carrying out his duties as Chair or Member of the Pilkington Committee or
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xxiii

the Arts Council–crucial seats in the middle echelons of political power–is

the same way as he has of thinking and writing”. Inglis adds: “This
identity of theory and practice is indeed his single most compelling
contribution to the intellectual methods of the day” (below, 17).
Inglis’s statement about theory and practice raises the issue of
Hoggart’s relationship to theory. I argued above that there was a
theoretical dimension to Hoggart’s vision for the work of the CCCS, but
the fact remains that Hoggart has been seen as untheoretical, and this must
be explored. David Lodge below cites Hoggart’s most recent book,
Promises to Keep: “I have no general theoretical approach of the sort
which in other people can produce adherents … instead, only pragmatic
observing and assorted conclusions”. Lodge believes that Hoggart decided
to move on because “he instinctively recognized as the sixties gave way to
the seventies, that Theory’s historical moment had come” and that “If he
had continued in his professorial career [at Birmingham] he would have
been swimming against the tide, fighting an unwinnable battle, and
perhaps holding back the development of his own research centre” (below,
9). Hoggart himself describes Stuart Hall, his successor at the CCCS, as
“particularly at home with theoretical issues, one of my weak spots”
(1993, 90). But this modesty about his own relationship to theory masks a
deeper concern. A little later in the same volume of his Life and Times,
Hoggart expresses scepticism about resorting too quickly to theory:

I mistrust the way some people use abstractions as props or crutches,

substitutes for thought, ways of showing others and assuring themselves
that they belong to an inner group. I suspect anyone who peppers his
papers with “heuristic”, “hegemony”, “hierarchy”, “paradigm”,
“problematic”, “reification”, “homology” and the like. One can sometimes
work through almost unintelligible and certainly rebarbative papers only to
realise at the end that, though what they say is sensible and in some ways
perceptive, it could have been said almost entirely without that apparatus
of in-group theoretical language. (1993, 95).

There is more here than the decent man’s hostility to the use of theory to
exclude. Hoggart’s reservations are methodological. He believes in the
emergence of ideas about the “bigger picture” from the building up of
evidential detail:

If you look long enough at a group of similar things, if you hold back from
the first and second and third general comment which comes to mind
(whether those comments are small talk or large theory), then occasionally
a new unifying idea forms, more useful than what preceded it, able to
xxiv Introduction

become a tool of enquiry. Others may have reached similar ideas by that or
different, more structured routes.
My own early ideas of this sort, ideas now much written about
theoretically by others and reaches independently by different routes than
mine, include, in looking at the ways of working-class people: the manner
in which resistance and resilience to new things (cars, videos, television,
houses owned not rented) and then their adoption, adaptation, modification
and absorption if they prove interesting and useful, if they chime with
existing cultural assumptions–how all this works.
Working-class people are then seen as less passive than is often
assumed; and not likely to be quickly “made middle-class” by acquiring
what are labeled middle-class objects.

Though the acknowledgment that others may reach similar ideas by more
structured and theoretical routes is characteristically generous and open-
minded, the real thrust of Hoggart’s argument is that reaching too quickly
for theory or approaching the working class through a theoretical prism
obscures the truth. In particular, theories about bourgeoisification of “the
masses” obscure subtle processes of resilience, adaptation and evolving
class identity.
There have been two strands of critical judgment of Hoggart’s
relationship to theory: the first either criticizes or marginalizes him for
being untheoretical, or praises him for decency, in spite of an absence of
theory. An example of the negative version of this approach is discussed
by Simon Grimble on p. 129 below. A positive version is exemplified
Stefan Collini in English Pasts.3 Collini considers Hoggart to be a moralist
rather than a theorist:

… moral appraisal of the Hoggartian kind has struggled to get a hearing in

political debates increasingly conducted in the idiom of double-entry book-
keeping. None the less, this insistence on moral judgement has been the
cornerstone of his career, both its foundation and its distinctive note.
… the terms of praise that most readily come to mind to describe his public
voice point, for all the distinctiveness of that voice, towards one typically
English way of being an intellectual: unpretentious, morally serious,
reflective, and (the word is inevitable) decent–unshowily but bottomlessly
decent. Above all, he has had the priceless gift, apparently from quite an
early age, of knowing who he is … Hoggart’s natural home is not with that
international company of cultural analysts, literary theorists, and assorted
academic superstars who are today’s most familiar intellectuals. He
belongs, rather, to an older family, one with strong local roots and some
pride in ancestry; his forebears include Ruskin and Lawrence on one side,
Cobbett and Orwell on the other. Richard Hoggart is an English moralist.
More than ever, we need him to be in good voice. (1999, 228, 230)
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xxv

Collini recently reiterated his early championship of Hoggart in similar

terms: “It still seems to me hard not to admire the modest, honest,
thoughtful voice of his best prose, just as it is hard, even on relatively little
acquaintance, not to like and feel affection for the man himself” (Collini,
forthcoming).
The second approach to Hoggart and theory is to find theoretical rigour
implicit in his methodology. The first to discern the theoretical weight and
methodological importance of The Uses of Literacy was French sociologist
Jean-Claude Passeron. The Uses of Literacy was published in France in
1970 as La Culture de Pauvre: Etude sur le Style de Vie des Classes
Populaires en Angleterre, with an introduction by Passeron. Passeron is an
important figure in the European history of ideas. He collaborated with
Pierre Bourdieu in the 1960s in various works exploring the
epistemological foundations of popular culture, including Le Métier de
Sociologue: an assertion of the scientific basis of sociological methodology.
Taking his distance from Bourdieu, Passeron moved into exploring the
sociology of culture and was drawn to the work of Hoggart. His
Introduction to Uses is very significant. Patrick Gaboriau and Philippe
Gaboriau, in an overview of “Popular Culture Studies in France” cite it as
one of the key theoretical texts in the evolution of French studies of
popular culture (1991, 178). Passeron’s introduction was translated into
English in 1971, at a time when the British intelligentsia was beginning to
be excited by the ideas of French intellectuals, and published in the series
Working Papers on Cultural Studies by the CCCS. An introductory
passage states that Passeron “suggests the theoretical foundations and
hypotheses in this apparently untheoretical book and goes on to indicate
the ways in which it seems to have been misunderstood by bourgeois
intellectuals”. The first statement is extremely important, while the second
is an understatement: Passeron argues that the book confronts intellectuals
with their own biases. Where British critics might see a weakness in the
book’s jargon-free style, its grounding in personal experience and
empirical method, Passeron sees the autobiographical element as a
strength, as it allows Hoggart to “relativise his own judgments” (Passeron,
1971, 121), or in other words to avoid claims to a specious objectivity
typical of bourgeois intellectuals. More than this, it allows an honest
representation, understanding and reinstatement of the popular voice in
culture.
Passeron discerns a theoretical rigour behind the ‘liveliness of the
description’ in Hoggart’s book (1971, 122). He explains how the book has
social scientific validity in the tradition of ethnography. Hoggart’s lack of
distance is a strength not a weakness, allowing him to give a more
xxvi Introduction

complete picture than an ethnographer could, in a “properly sociological

effort on the part of the author to hold together systematically a whole play
of determinations and a whole constellation of attitudes” (1971, 124).
Hoggart’s style allows him to “let the object of study speak for itself”
(1971, 124), and thus to redress the bias of studies of the working class by
intellectual outsiders. His combination of “distancing and participation”
allows him to “perceive and explain by example even the very nuances of
the behaviour of intellectuals with working-class backgrounds” and his
“particular habit of mind is peculiarly effective when bourgeois or petit-
bourgeois ethnocentrism needs ousting” (1971, 126). His method reveals
the “class biases” of apparently “obvious” views of the working class
which are “in their own way as racist as those of pre-scientific
ethnographers limited to detailing the barbarism of the ‘primitives’” (1971,
127). For Passeron, Hoggart exposes the “apparently neutral language”
and the self-serving “screen of an ideology of experts” behind which
bourgeois intellectuals hide.
Such French praise of British empiricism is astonishing. Passeron
establishes Hoggart’s social-scientific credentials and traces the debt to
Uses of a whole swathe of sociological studies throughout the sixties. Of
even greater significance is Passeron’s rebuttal of misreadings of Hoggart
as non- or even anti-theoretical. Hoggart is able “without any great
theoretical fanfares, to pose some questions as pertinent for theory as for
the empirical analysis of the transformations in popular culture and the
receptivity of the different class levels to the ideological solicitations
contained in the message of the cultural industry and directed at them”
(1971, 128). This is because Hoggart’s understanding of working-class
resilience gives him a more complex perspective on the reception of the
mass media and hence a more nuanced appreciation of transformations in
popular culture. Far from considering Hoggart untheoretical, Passeron
discerns “the originality of this theoretical approach” which allows him to
“tease out the law which subordinates the efficacy of the factors of change
to their relevance to the pre-existing structures” (1971, 130). Thus,
Hoggart is able to demolish retrospective myths of a golden age of
working-class culture, as well as making “a protest in the name of
scientific objectivity against aristocratic, populist, apocalyptic or foolishly
optimistic pronouncements which come between the life of the working
class and its necessarily intellectual or bourgeois observers” (1971, 121).
Passeron shows an exceptional awareness of Hoggart’s theoretical
importance.
The publication of Passeron’s text in English by the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1971 should have been
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xxvii

significant, but Passeron’s views were not followed up in Britain at the

time. It is only recently that some critics have argued for a theoretical
dimension to Hoggart’s work. In a recent article, Lawrence Grossberg
cites Hoggart’s statement in “Contemporary Cultural Studies”:

… that a society bears values, cannot help bearing values and deciding
their relative significance; that it makes what seems like a significant or
ordered whole out of experience, a total and apparently meaningful view of
life; that it embodies these structures of values in systems of meaning,
rituals, forms; that it lives out these values expressively, in its actions and
arts; that this living out of values is a dialectical process, never complete,
always subject to innovation and change; that no one individual ever
makes a perfect ‘fit’ with the dominant order of values of his culture.
(Hoggart, 1969, cited, Grossberg, 2007, 127)

Grossberg notes that this is a theoretical position and adds “I say this
because Hoggart (like [Raymond] Williams sometimes) is often described
as being either anti-theoretical or at least, atheoretical. But this “dismissal”
depends on an argument that slides from a number of correct
observations–that Hoggart did not see himself as a theorist; that he
disliked certain kinds of (at the time, increasingly influential) theories; and
that he despised theory for its own sake, as if theory could answer
questions before one even begins the real (empirically grounded) work of
analysis–to the fundamentally incorrect conclusion that Hoggart’s vision
of cultural studies was not theoretically based, and that he thought cultural
studies could somehow function without theory” (Grossberg,
forthcoming). He adds in a note: “The defense of Hoggart as anti-
theoretical is often predicated on, or aligned with the rather patronizing
assumption that ‘ordinary people’ cannot or will not read theory, and
hence, that anything addressed to them must be atheoretical”. (ibid)
Bill Hughes has argued that Hoggart’s work parallels the more
theoretical analyses of the “Culture Industry” by Adorno and Horkheimer:

As they do, following classical aesthetics, he upholds the reality of artistic

value, and approves of the social and ethical utility of art that accompanies
it. Though not overtly theoretical in the sense that we have come to
understand “theory”, Hoggart’s writing is not a simple disengaged
empiricism either; there is something of the novelist in the way he
passionately describes, and indeed invents, cultural phenomena and colours
his account with a strong senses of personal involvement and commitment.

Hughes defends Hoggart from the charge of naïve empiricism and

couples him with the more overtly theoretical Raymond Williams:
xxviii Introduction

Hoggart’s … personalisation and concretisation escapes that typically

Anglophone naive empiricism which spurns the theoretical, though there is
also something of the bluff, common-sense pragmatist in his tone.
Hoggart’s “experiential dimension” rescues his thought from Adorno’s
“baleful enchantments of the concept”. The autobiographical elements in
Uses also connect with Williams’s ideas of “lived experience” and the way
that Williams, too, self-consciously connected his work with his situation.

Some critics have contrasted Hoggart and Raymond Williams, but Hughes
sees that they have much in common. Stuart Hall, similarly, discusses the
importance of the collective redefinition offered by Hoggart, Raymond
Williams and E.P. Thompson of culture as the lived experience, self-
expression and capacity for historical intervention of ordinary people.
(1980, 57-72). Raymond Williams himself saw Hoggart more as a
collaborator than a rival. In the second issue of the Universities and Left
Review (summer 1957), devoted to a debate on The Uses of Literacy,
Williams praised Hoggart’s deep loyalty to his own people but repudiated
his critique of working-class materialism and criticized his exclusion of
the politically active minority of the working class. This debate has been
read differently by Francis Mulhern and by Stuart Hall. Where Mulhern
sees grave criticism of Hoggart’s method, Stuart Hall sees a collective
effort to expand the definition of culture and politics and a growing
perception of culture as one of the constitutive grounds of all social
practices (Mulhern, 2000, 62-3; Hall, 2007).
Hoggart is sometimes contrasted with his successor at the CCCS,
Stuart Hall, with a crude assumption that Hoggart is empirical where Hall
is theoretical. However, this view is not purveyed by Hall himself. Hall
regards present-day Cultural Studies as possessing an “astonishing
theoretical fluency”. This is an implicit criticism of the over-theorization
of Cultural Studies, since Hall continues: “The only theory worth having is
that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound
fluency” (1992, 280). In a recent essay, Hall cites the redefinition of
culture as the most important of Hoggart’s “methodological and
conceptual innovations”:

By “culture”, Hoggart meant how working-class people spoke and thought,

what language and common assumptions about life they shared, in speech
and action, what social attitudes informed their daily practice, what moral
categories they deployed, even if only aphoristically, to make judgments
about their own behaviour and that of others–including, of course, how
they brought all this to bear on what they read, saw and sang. This view of
culture as the practices of “making sense” was very far removed indeed
from “culture” as the ideal court of judgement, whose touchstone was “the
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xxix

best that has been thought and said”, which animated the tradition from
Arnold to Eliot and Leavis. The aim to make culture in the former sense a
central and necessary part of the object of study, however fitfully achieved,
was as defining a break as [Raymond] Williams’ third definition in The
Long Revolution–culture as “ways of life”–and, moreover, despite
significant differences, a break moving in a parallel direction. This was a
formative moment for Cultural Studies. (Hall, 2007, 42-3)

Hall pays tribute to Hoggart’s historical significance and reinstates him in

his place in the history of ideas:

It is widely recognized that, without Richard Hoggart, there would have

been no Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It isn’t always so
widely acknowledged that. Without The Uses of Literacy¸ there would
have been no Cultural Studies. (2007, 39)

For Hall, “The Uses of Literacy, in trying to break from this master-
discourse of cultural decline, was precisely ‘a text of the break’ … and for
that very reason opened possibilities that Cultural Studies and ‘the cultural
turn’ were subsequently to build on”. By “the cultural turn” Hall means
the growing centrality of culture, both in terms of the global expansion and
sophistication of the cultural industries and as a category of analysis.4 For
Hall, Hoggart’s argument about working-class resilience has a vital
theoretical importance which makes a “break” with the pessimism of his
predecessors and has influenced Hall’s own subsequent work:

… working-class audiences are not empty vessels, on which the middle-

classes and the mass media can project, tabula rasa, whatever they want.
They are not simply the products of “false consciousness” or “cultural
dopes” (Hall, 1981).5 They have a “culture” of their own which, though it
may lack the authority afforded by the literary tradition, and is certainly
not unified, is in its own way just as dense, complex and richly articulated,
morally, as that of the educated classes. It follows that the effects of
cultural products cannot be “read off” or inferred from the contents of what
is produced for them to consume because, to have “effects” of any depth,
they must enter into and be in active negotiation with an already fully
elaborated cultural world. (Hall, 2007, 42)

Hoggart’s other key departure from his predecessors in cultural enquiry is

to advocate humility about what audiences actually take from unpromising
material: to know working-class readers is to understand that they are not
as easily influenced as is assumed. Overall, for Hall, Hoggart’s theoretical
importance lies in his anti-reductionism which set the tone for the decades
of theoretical enquiry which ensued at the CCCS:
xxx Introduction

There was a profound insight embedded here which runs like a thread
through the subsequent twists and turns of Cultural Studies. It posed a
critical challenge. It set cultural analysis irrevocably against any tendency
to reductionism–whether to pure ideology, “the economy” or “class
interests” (while not denying that social interests have a bearing on how
ideologies and culture develop or that social location is significant for
which ideas are taken up and made effective). Of course, this had
consequences for its theoretical work. The relation between the cultural
and the social could not be assumed; and, since it did not operate
automatically–as what Marx once called “the reflex” of the economy in the
sphere of thought–it had to be re-conceptualised, in all its concreteness and
historical specificity. Culture did not consist of free-floating ideas; it had to
be understood as embedded in social practices. But it was something other
than a reflection of some more determinate “base” in some dependent
“superstructure”. The question of the Centre’s relation to classical
Marxism is written in to this conceptual conundrum, and begins to explain
why the Centre went on such a long theoretical “detour” (Hall,
forthcoming).

Hall finds in Hoggart the roots of other innovations at the heart of Cultural
Studies:

Second, there was the insistence that “ways of life” had to be studied in
and for themselves, as a necessary contextualising of any attempt to
understand cultural change, and not inferred from textual analysis alone.
We may call this the social imperative at the heart of Hoggart’s method:
and from such origins the interdisciplinary character of Cultural Studies
(which has since been somewhat obscured by the Humanities deluge)
derived. Third, there was the emphasis on culture as primarily a matter of
meaning: not meanings as free-floating ideas or as ideals embodied in texts
but as part of lived experience, shaping social practice: analysis as “the
clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular
ways of life” (Williams, [The Long Revolution], 1965: 57). Fourth, there
was the methodological innovation evidenced in Hoggart’s adaptation of
the literary-critical method of “close reading” to the sociological task of
interpreting the lived meanings of a culture. One says “sociological”, but
clearly something more innovative than standard empirical sociological
methods was required–nothing less than a kind of “social hermeneutics” is
implied in these interpretive procedures: “we have to try to see beyond the
habits to what the habits stand for to see through the statements to what the
statements really mean (which may be the opposite of the statements
themselves) to detect the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic
phrases and ritualistic observances” (Hoggart, [The Uses of Literacy],
1958: 17). (Hall, 2007, 43)
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xxxi

Like Passeron before him, then, Hall traces the methodological

underpinnings in Hoggart’s work and contextualizes it within the history
of ideas.
Hall credits Hoggart with initiating the turn to “a fully interdisciplinary
enterprise”, as well as the study of culture as a whole way of life, and the
relation of the “cultural” to “other practices in social formation” which
became central at the CCCS in the 1970s (Hall, 2007, 44). Hall sees the
residue of Hoggart’s “literary” approach not as a flaw, but as the germ of
the preoccupation with semiotics in the CCCS milieu:

The trace of the “literary” remained in Hoggart’s close and sensitive

attention to language and his insistence (in his inaugural lecture) that
popular and mass cultural texts must be understood as functioning “as art–
even as bad art”: a comment which, while not quite bypassing the
traditional high/low good/bad categories of the mass culture debate,
reinforced attention to language as a cultural model and the symbolic
modality in which culture operates. This connects with the persistent
return, subsequently, via the dialogue with semiotics, post-structuralism
and theories of discourse, to the necessary “delay through the symbolic”
without which all cultural studies threatens to become reductionist. (Hall,
2007, 44)

Hoggart’s work is not to be located in opposition to Marxism, post-

structuralism and other strands of theory, but as the catalyst of their
reception into English Cultural Studies (Cultural Studies then serving as
the conduit for the entry radical theory into the discipline of English
Literature):

The notion that audiences actively bring something to, rather than simply
being spoken to by texts, and that “reading” is an active exchange, was
taken up in the critique of the dominant “effects” tradition in mass
communications research that organized much of the Centre’s early
research projects, certainly underpins my own work on the
“encoding/decoding model” (Hall, 1980)6 and was revived in the influence
of Bakhtin’s idea of the dialogic and the “active audience”, reader-
response and even the elements of overkill in the so-called “populist”
emphases of later work on audiences. The legacy of culture as the
interpretive study of meanings embedded in “ways of life” is to be found in
the many studies that deployed ethnographic, participant observation and
other anthropological techniques of what Geertz called “thick description”,
and beyond that, to the language of “signifying practices”. The view that
textual material have real social effectivity only when they “work along the
groove” of existing attitudes and inflect them in new directions contains a
model of how social ideologies really achieve their effects much in
xxxii Introduction

advance of existing models of influence, ideological domination and false

consciousness; anticipating much that was to follow in theories of multi-
accentuality and transcoding, and the impact on Cultural Studies of the
more fully developed Gramscian model of ‘hegemony’ and cultural power
as dependent on “the winning of consent”; a very different conception of
the popular (see Hall, 1981)7. And so on … (Hall, 2007, 44-5)

Hall locates the reception of Uses within the context of the rise of the New
Left. He sees Hoggart’s arguments not as in conflict with those of the left,
but as being in keeping with leftist assessments of the “conjuncture” (a
term borrowed from Althusser and much in vogue in the 1970s), for
example, in relation to Americanisation, the post-war boom, rising living
standards, the shift from “older, tiered, socially embedded class structures
and Protestant Ethic typical of Western European bourgeois societies to
the more truncated, “post-industrial” class structures, based on corporate
capital, money, celebrity lifestyle, hedonism and consumption” (2007, 47).
Hoggart is no longer a “Matthew Arnoldian liberal humanist”,8 but the
precursor of Althusser and Saussure.
However, it is important to qualify Hall’s view of Hoggart as the
precursor of post-modern theory. The opposite may also be true: Hoggart
has a strong dislike of the preference for style over substance. He makes a
searing critique of superficiality, whether in contemporary literature or
popular culture. I shall discuss this in depth in the chapter on Hoggart and
Literature below. His exposure of the moral, political and cultural danger
of superficiality and of the preference for form over content may also
serve as an indictment of the excesses of post-modernism:

The best way to keep their people from seeking alternative goals would be
to flood them with “data”, to offer them the chance to become anxious only
about “form”, so that they came to believe that goals are out and poise in.
Then they might keep on playing roles endlessly, and harmlessly–with no
political effect. But by God they’d have style! (1973, 135).

There is an implicit critique here of the tendency in literary and cultural

studies to fetishize theory at the expense of substance. Such a critique may
be timely. Stuart Hall, though he does not quite say so, implies that some
of the tasks for Cultural Studies identified in Hoggart’s Inaugural Lecture
have not been addressed precisely because of an over-emphasis on theory
within Cultural Studies:

Mass society, mass culture, mass consumerism and mass markets were
integral aspects of this historic shift [towards post-industrial class
structures]: precisely how to understand their real interdependencies
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xxxiii

remains one of Cultural Studies’ unfulfilled tasks–probably lost forever in

the hyper-theoretical and post-political climate that came to prevail. (2007,
48)

It is important, then, whilst crediting Hoggart with a level of theoretical

sophistication, to retain a sense of his critique of the over-use of theory.
The theoretical (or proto-theoretical) content of Hoggart’s work has
been missed in part because his style is plain and jargon-free. Hoggart
values plainness and integrity of style and mistrusts of posturing and
artificiality. He sees it as desirable “to find a usable plain tone–not an
imitation of an established ‘literary’ voice.” He values “sensitive integrity”
and a “clarity which seems almost like talking to yourself, since no one is
being wooed” (1973, 175). Below, Jon Nixon discusses the way in which
this commitment to a plain style becomes a political intervention. Ben
Clarke also discusses below the political challenge posed by this plain
style and sees Hoggart’s untheoretical writing as a political strength as
well as a site of democratic interaction of multiple popular voices.
Coupled with “plainness” is a focus on “ordinariness”, a vexed but
important notion, the slipperiness of which is discussed by Sean Matthews
below. Melissa Gregg has argued for the importance of Hoggart’s focus on
the lives of “ordinary people”:

There are two things to take from Hoggart’s idea of ordinariness. Firstly,
the way that it revealed the categories for scholarly analysis to be so
narrow that only the exceptional in society were worthy of study. His
suggestion that the majority of working-class lives remained outside of
analytic attention pointed to a fundamental problem in the academic value
system. The second point is the recognition that most people in the
working and middle classes demonstrate a profound lack of interest in
politics. Daily life hinges upon the twin axes of home and neighbourhood,
with any sense of a wider world kept at a safe distance from everyday
dealings. Hoggart purposefully avoided reference to the outwardly political
actors within the working class because they were a minority. This was a
key distinction to make: to differentiate between the working-class
movement and the culture as a whole. (Gregg, forthcoming)

Gregg argues that Hoggart’s focus on ordinary and domestic life

allows empathy with the working class in a way more theoretical
discourses (by implication) do not:

… Hoggart’s writing employed an affective voice to build a relationship

between the majority on each side of class-segregated Britain. Rather than
affirming the distant and scrutinising gaze of the middle-class academic, he
encouraged his readers to care about the lives of the people discussed.
xxxiv Introduction

… Hoggart reveals how “ordinary” people come to terms with what is a

negligible agency. He writes so that the reader might engage emotionally
with the subject. The voice is successful because it articulates values
shared by both the working and middle class—in particular the privileged
place of family—so as to maximise an affective response to the
circumstances illustrated. For the reader unfamiliar with this kind of life,
Hoggart’s discourse of empathy seeks a projection of one’s own likely
reaction to these influences on normal domestic freedoms, threats that
otherwise might not be contemplated, much less realised. It relies on the
shared cross-cultural appeal of family as a trigger that might generate
empathy with the position of working-class people yet to see the effects of
economic improvements post-war.
… In Hoggart’s use, then, ordinariness is the way to generate empathy
from and for others. It takes the reader inside an unfamiliar culture, but
draws out shared values that act as powerful affective magnets. In this way,
his writing transcended the economic or class based distinctions of
traditional politics of his time.
Hoggart’s great legacy was to draw attention to the quiet dignity of
everyday life and the sophistication evident within the most ostensibly
unremarkable cultural practices. His discourse of empathy was a model for
scholarly writing to bridge the spatial, institutional, economic and cultural
divides in society.
… His highly personal writing meant that the reader could not ignore the
reality of another kind of life. It provided the “landscape with figures”
(Hoggart, [The Uses of Literacy] 1958) necessary to imagine how it would
be to live differently. (ibid)

This approach shows a way forward for cultural studies:

It is this form of scholarship that is sorely required in today’s altered

political environment to reveal the inequalities in opportunity that persist in
contemporary culture. The separation between ‘them’ and ‘us’ so crucial to
Hoggart’s description of working-class life was never meant to be
celebrated because it was desirable: it was merely a creative way for
ordinary people to deal with an unacceptable arrangement of society. The
them/us divide helped to maintain dignity and self-respect in everyday
encounters, but the distinction was born of a fundamental injustice, where
the less educated and the resource-deprived had little recourse or outlet for
equal treatment.9

For Hoggart, the personal is, in a sense, political. Michael Rosenfeld

argues below that, for Hoggart “childhood memory transmuted into
memoir becomes a form of political engagement”. This connects with the
argument of Jon Nixon and Fred Inglis about the political significance of
Hoggart’s own life. Elsewhere, I have argued that Hoggart’s focus on
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xxxv

“ordinariness” and domesticity is pre-feminist.10 The Uses of Literacy is

marked by a capacity for feeling and a domestic focus typical of 1980s
feminists, of the empirical, British kind. Hoggart makes a statement which
seems extraordinary for a male academic writing about the working class:
“my own experience had been overwhelmingly domestic, internal, home
and woman-centred” (Hoggart, 1991, 142). In an interview, Hoggart has
stated: “I was not writing a comprehensive picture of the working class: I
was recreating the working-class life I knew and that was a woman-
centred life” (Corner, 1991, 142). Growing up in a world of women
accounts for Hoggart’s domestic focus, for his sense of rootedness in what
is known and for his assertion of the authenticity of what is personally
experienced. In The Uses of Literacy he portrays working-class women
with sympathetic but unromanticized insight. In the section on “Mother”
in chapter II, as well as celebrating their strength, he depicts the financial
struggles, domestic, contraceptive and health problems of women. This
section contains moving glimpses of the hardships of his own mother and
grandmother (Hoggart, 1957, 29-31) In Chapter 10, he writes tenderly
about the role of women in the life of the “scholarship boy” or working-
class intellectual. In his Life and Times he shows immense gratitude and
appreciation for the struggles of his mother. He described finding intense
love and rootedness in his grandmother’s house and later with his wife.
Yet, if Hoggart’s method resembles 1980s Anglo-feminism, it is also
opposite in its striving for detachment and objectivity. His style mutes
personal pain. Writing before the licensed rage of identity politics,
Hoggart achieves a tone that is judicious with an undertone of restrained
passion. Sympathy is balanced by detached, ironic observation. It is a
combination of “distancing and participation” which we may follow
Passeron, cited above, in finding peculiarly effective.
The time for a re-evaluation of Hoggart is exactly right. There may be
two reasons for this. Firstly, there is a need to return to the idea of class,
and to the working class in particular, when other categories such as race,
gender and sexual orientation have been prioritized within cultural studies
(see Collini, 1999, 258). Secondly, it may be time for an informed re-
evaluation of “totalizing” theories of working-class culture. We are finding
a new value in Hoggart’s humane approach to the study of the working
class and popular culture, his refusal to over-simplify and his resistance of
totalizing judgments about “the masses”. The rehabilitation of Hoggart
represents a shift in theoretical thinking. Discomfort with recent trends in
theory, as applied to the working class, may be countered by reasserting
Hoggart’s focus on the humanity, variety and specificity of working class
people, and the “quiddity” of working-class life and culture.
xxxvi Introduction

This book emerged from an important conference, The Uses of Richard

Hoggart, at the University of Sheffield in April 2006. The success of the
conference indicates the timeliness of re-evaluating Hoggart. The
conference was an international, cross-disciplinary event, attended by
people from the UK, France, USA and Australia. Scholars from nine
disciplines (English Literature and Language, Politics, Cultural Studies,
Sociology, History, Education, Adult Education, Epistemology, and a
biologist), who held a genuine intellectual exchange across disciplinary
boundaries. Speakers ranged from “big names” such as Hoggart himself,
David Lodge, Stuart Hall, Stefan Collini and other leading figures in
cultural studies, to young scholars and representatives of a diverse range of
organisations from UNESCO to the WEA, relatives and friends of Hoggart
and members of the wider community. This book, however, is far from
being simply the “book of the conference”. Instead, papers on diverse
aspects of Hoggart’s life and work have been selected in order to offer a
focused collection. The book sheds new light on Richard Hoggart’s life
and re-evaluates his contribution to Literature, Language, Education and
the History of Ideas. This volume affirms the importance of Richard
Hoggart, focusing, in particular, on new understandings of his life, of the
importance of literature and literary criticism to his method, and of his
significant role in literary, cultural and educational shifts from the fifties
onwards. It locates Hoggart’s work and identifies his influence within
multiple contexts: the working-class and “angry young man” novels of the
fifties and sixties; the Lady Chatterley trial and resulting literary and
cultural change; the shift from the “new criticism” to a broader field of
literary enquiry and the associated rise of cultural studies; educational
reforms from the fifties onwards.
The volume begins with a Foreword by Richard Hoggart’s son,
journalist and media personality Simon Hoggart. This is a personal
memoir which also provides insight into Richard Hoggart’s life and
contexts. David Lodge’s contribution also combines personal testimony
with an attempt to situate Hoggart in context, specifically the context of
the post-war boom in working-class writing which, Lodge argues, Hoggart
both spoke for and enabled. Lodge describes the impact of Hoggart’s The
Uses of Literacy on his own development as a novelist. He locates
Hoggart’s work within the new wave of new-realist post-War and
“provincial” writing: Lucky Jim, Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving, The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Less Deceived, Roots, A
Taste of Honey, This Sporting Life. He traces the influences on Hoggart
and these other writers, especially the influence of Orwell. He identifies
novelistic tendencies within Hoggart’s own writing and examines his
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xxxvii

profound influence on other writers such as Alan Bennett. He identifies

Hoggart’s importance within new trends in University English studies and
education in the wider sense, thus providing a framework for the
contributions which follow.
Fred Inglis analyses Hoggart’s three-volume Life and Times to show
how “a good life illumines history” and to explore the significance of
Hoggart’s life as social drama. Inglis makes use of the ideas of Alasdair
MacIntyre to argue that a .good life illumines history. As a working-class
orphan Hoggart had a hard schooling in love and detachment, and in local
rootedness; but his access to Higher Education and the Arts also
illuminates the times he lived in. Inglis discusses Hoggart’s “Englishness”
and the values of “community” which shaped him, comparing Hoggart to
Raymond Williams. Hoggart values domestic love, loves art, is hostile to
corruption, and shows self-knowledge, moral courage, consistent courtesy
and a sense of the ridiculous in his writing. Hoggart eschews mere evoking
of values of community and finds evidence and illustrative detail that
working-class communities continue to thrive. Hoggart shows us that
working-class people do not see themselves as consumers or targets. In his
life and work he shows us the humanity of the working class better than
many who use more theoretical methods. Inglis locates Hoggart in the
tradition of Coleridge: “Men are to be weighed not counted”. Hoggart
shows the practicability of living an intellectual life one may be proud of
in the age of modernity.
For Jon Nixon’s generation of educators, setting out to work in
education on the 1960s, there was no “before Hoggart”. Together with
Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, he was a life to be reckoned
with, an idiom to be challenged and understood, and a commitment that set
the agenda. For Nixon, as for Inglis, Hoggart exemplified what Alasdair
MacIntyre termed “the unity of a human life”. Complex, multifaceted,
operating across diverse institutional and international boundaries, his life
seems almost disconcertingly all of a piece. His early work in adult
education was formative. Nixon cites a diverse range of Hoggart’s
writings, not just those on education, to show continuities of insight, style
and stance from his adult education work, through The Uses of Literacy to
his later writings such as First and Last Things (1999) and Everyday
Language and Everyday Life (2003). Like Inglis, Nixon argues that it is to
the whole life, the entire corpus of public service and authorship, that we
must look for the distinctive idiom which comprises Hoggart’s legacy to
democratic education. Like Wales, Clarke and Grimble later in this
volume, Nixon pays attention to Hoggart’s language. Hoggart’s idiom is
remarkably consistent and, in its ordinariness, highly distinctive. Hoggart
xxxviii Introduction

eschews specialist language in favour of an “uncommonly common”

vocabulary. His prose builds strategic alliances and traces unexpected lines
of continuity. It is a listening, synthesising idiom, the idiom of a new kind
of civic leadership intent upon reconstruction, within institutional contexts
characterised by increasing stratification, of a genuinely civil society.
Hoggart’s life and idiom express deep commitment to the idea of
education as truly democratic. His educational commitment is not just to
traditionally defined “institutions of education” but to civil society as a
whole and to the development of an educated public capable and willing to
participate in such a society. Nixon concludes by restating the relevance
for those in higher education forty years on not just of Hoggart’s analysis
but also of the language in which it is expressed: the authority, the touches
of self-irony, the insistence on getting the question right, the steady but
uncompromising critique, the sense of moral urgency: these are Hoggart’s
legacy for democratic education.
Ben Clarke’s starting point is George Orwell’s "The Prevention of
Literature", where he wrote: “To write in plain, vigorous language one has
to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically
orthodox.” Clarke examines the political and ethical implications of
Hoggart's prose style, and the importance of this to his “fearless”,
iconoclastic texts. In so doing, he exposes his contribution to politics
itself, in Bernard Crick's sense of a process founded upon the “tolerance of
different truths” and “open canvassing of rival interests”. In producing a
form of prose at once critical and accessible, Hoggart's work can be
identified with what Stephen Ingle describes as the “moralistic” tradition
of English socialism. Ingle distinguishes this tradition of a politics founded
upon democratic participation from a “scientific” socialism based upon the
idea of the dominance of an educated elite dedicated to the common good.
The form of Hoggart's writing is both founded upon and reinforces such a
tradition. As it implies a broad involvement in politics, in the widest sense
of the word, it is of necessity at once straightforward and persuasive,
contestable and committed. Clarke questions the distinction between
“style” and “content”, focusing instead on the function of style as the
expression, or indeed realisation of values. He draws upon the work of a
wide variety of writers, including George Orwell, Primo Levi, Noam
Chomsky, Bernard Crick and John Carey to analyse Hoggart's role in
producing a style that is analytical, accessible and contestable. In the
process, he aims to expose problems, not only in the academy, but in the
notion of critical writing itself.
Sue Owen shows how Hoggart was the first literary critic to expand the
parameters of criticism to include popular and working-class culture. From
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xxxix

a poor working-class background himself, Hoggart drew on his working-

class roots as a strength. He was influenced by the work of F. R. and Q. D.
Leavis, and he shared their commitment to great literature and interest in
culture; but whereas the Leavises regarded the masses with suspicion,
Hoggart took the working class seriously. His work also contains the seeds
of the important mid-twentieth-century shift from deploring “popular
culture” to seeing it as a source of possible insight and inspiration. Owen
identifies a literary as well as a literary-critical method in The Uses of
Literacy, arguing that it is the evoking of working-class life in a quasi-
novelistic way that gives the first part of the book its power. She goes on
to analyse a range of Hoggart’s literary criticism, showing how his
position as working-class intellectual allows him unique insights. For
example, it enables him to understand other kinds of literary outsider such
as Auden and Orwell and to appreciate an authentic working-class literary
voice e.g. in Lawrence at his best, but also to see where a working-class
author is not being true to his own voice; and allows him to defend
working-class characters even when their own author disparages them, for
example in Greene’s Brighton Rock. His working-class background gives
him insight middle-class writers do not have, for example into the
working-class capacity for feeling, often simply condemned as
sentimental; and into the spirituality of love for the “thisness” of material
things, condemned as vulgar materialism e.g. by Virginia Woolf. His class
background also influences his views on style: he mistrusts the preference
for style over substance. He sees it as desirable “to find a usable plain
tone–not an imitation of an established “literary voice.” He values
“sensitive integrity” and a “clarity which seems almost like talking to
yourself, since no one is being wooed.”
Sean Matthews locates Hoggart's testimony at the trial of Penguin
Books for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover within
what he calls the discursive field of the Trial. He examines the cultural
importance of Lawrence even before the trial and assesses the significance
of the Trial for the emergence of cultural studies. Hoggart’s evidence was
seen pivotal, both at the time and later. Matthews asks why. He considers
the paradox that Hoggart defends Lawrence’s writing as “puritanical”. He
looks at the blurring of legal and literary language in the trial itself,
showing how legitimacy emerges from ideas about ordinary experience
and common decency: ideas which are central to Hoggart’s writing.
Matthews, like Owen, pays attention to “tone of voice”, commenting on
how both Hoggart and Lawrence show a fine awareness of impressions of
tone and emphasis and voice. This theme is picked up by Simon Grimble
later in this volume. As noted above, Matthews examines the neglected
xl Introduction

influence of Lawrence not just on Hoggart but on the discipline of cultural

studies.
Katie Wales argues that the cultural history of the North from ancient
times provides numerous examples of the “Dick Whittington trope”:
northerners leaving home for fame and fortune in London. Wales locates
Hoggart within the “Pygmalion trope”: because of changes in the
Education Acts, working-class northerners could cross social boundaries
to go to grammar school and university, at each stage facing the dilemma
of changing their linguistic identity. Wales compares Hoggart’s discussion
of the “scholarship boy” (Uses of Literacy, chapter 10) and Melvyn
Bragg’s autobiographical novel, Crossing the Lines (2003), allowing each
text to interrogate the other. Central to her argument is the concept of
liminality, or being on the threshold between social identities. She shows
the relationship of the liminal to language. In changing social status of
class, aspiring northerners had to face the prospect of crossing particular
socio-linguistic and psycho-linguistic boundaries to meet the expected
norms of “Received Standard” and “Received pronunciation”, norms
which came to be more significant as the twentieth century progressed.
She makes comparisons with poet Tony Harrison and playwright Alan
Bennett, both from a working-class Leeds background similar to
Hoggart’s. Bragg’s novel confirms and develops Hoggart’s argument but
also develops another strand of the theme, namely the archetypal role of
teacher as “crossing-guide” or ferryman between the two worlds.
Simon Grimble’s chapter follows on from the preoccupations with
Hoggart’s language in Wales’s chapter and prepares the ground for the
biographical considerations in the last three contributions to the volume.
Grimble argues that throughout Richard Hoggart’s writing there is an
emphasis on the value and power of the distinctive voice, the sound of
which signifies the existence of both real critical and creative thinking and
the existence of a genuine–because various–personality. He considers the
rageful, rhetorical excess of Aunt Ethel’s voice in the house in which
Hoggart grew up and the role of this kind of speech as a counter-example
for Hoggart. Grimble considers the ways in which Hoggart’s own voice as
a writer developed to encompass the different roles that he came to take
up–literary critic, adult education lecturer, senior administrator–whilst
striving to retain “the sound of a disinterested, lonely, absorbed, brooding
voice”. He argues that, in so doing, Hoggart’s voice came to take on a
representative quality in England in the 1950s, 60s and 70s; it was the
sound of the decent, aware, discriminating individual marking out a way in
a bureaucratised world. There are now broader concerns that this particular
quality of “voice” in academic debate has been confined to the past, to a
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xli

time before the audit culture. Grimble ends by placing some of these
concerns within recent arguments about the presumed decline in the status
of the intellectual in contemporary society, and consider how some of the
virtues of “voice” could be reclaimed.
The remaining contributions examine Hoggart’s life and continue
Grimble’s focus on his early influences. Michael Rosenfeld shows how,
although The Uses of Literacy draws us into Richard Hoggart’s early
twentieth-century childhood in Leeds, the first volume of his
autobiography, A Local Habitation, does so even more directly and
intimately. Rosenfeld compares the experiences Hoggart recounts with
those depicted in other memoirs of early twentieth-century working-class
childhood in the industrial slums of the North and Midlands. The two
volumes by the prison educator Robert Roberts, A Ragged Schooling and
The Classic Slum, and The Road to Nab End (a.k.a. Billy Boy) by the
expatriate economic historian William Woodruff, dealing respectively
with Salford and Blackburn in the 1920s and 1930s, present a similar set
of circumstances and experiences to those that shaped Hoggart. Set against
that common background, Rosenfeld attempts to delineate what those
childhood experiences were and how they were instrumental in shaping an
enduring and similar social and political outlook that kept these men
morally committed to the working class and the vision of a more humane
Britain. Rosenfeld also compares Paul Johnson’s recently published
memoir of his childhood, The Vanished Landscape, which gives a picture
of a very near contemporary professional middle class childhood on the
fringes of the claypits of The Potteries. For all of them, childhood memory
transmuted into memoir becomes a form of political engagement, although
the purposes they pursue are far from identical. In contrast to the others,
Roberts and Hoggart narrate the past to problematize the present.
Rosenfeld concludes with reference to Carolyn Steedman’s strategy in
Landscape for a Good Woman: in order to write history we must first
narrate backwards and then interpret forward. This is what Hoggart and
Roberts have done.
Tom Steele argues that one of the biggest ruptures in Hoggart's early
life was his northerly trek across town to become an undergraduate at the
University of Leeds. Unlike many middle class students for whom such a
journey is merely part of a seamless continuum of bourgeois acculturation,
for Hoggart as for most working class students it posed a formidable
challenge. The fascination with the style and composure of literary
intellectuals like his mentor Dobrée and exultance in the sheer joy he gave
to reading could have resulted in his turning his back on his own class
experience once and for all. But Steele shows that for Hoggart it did not.
xlii Introduction

Instead it led to a lifelong interrogation of that experience for its strengths

and weaknesses. By applying literary method to both working class and
popular culture, Hoggart went far beyond both what Q. D. Leavis had
achieved in Fiction and the Reading Public and what Orwell had done in
his journalism, though both were important to him. The difference, as
Raymond Williams remarked, was that whereas they were anthropological
visitors to a foreign culture, Hoggart was a native. Steele tries to
understand the significance of Leeds University and especially Dobrée in
Hoggart's early grappling with taste and class and his successive turns to
what became interdisciplinary cultural studies. As I noted above, Steele
also breaks new ground in identifying a different origin for Hoggartian
cultural studies in “the anti-Puritanism of the cavalier, in its best sense,
style–replete with disregard for disciplinary boundaries, formal niceties,
appropriate tone and relishing the social reference which the modern
defenders of the faith so dislike and call dilettantism. For Hoggart …
Dobrée acts as a key reference point for his own dogged determination to
interrogate his own class difference and, increasingly, the margins
between the Hunslet childhood and post-educational maturity, against
which Dobrée is a fascinating and exotic other”.
Malcolm Hadley assesses a period of Hoggart’s career neglected or
misunderstood by scholars, his UNESCO years. From January 1970 to
March 1975, Richard Hoggart served as Assistant Director-General for
Social Sciences, Human Sciences and Culture of UNESCO (the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) based in Paris.
As described in his 1978 book, An Idea and its Servants: UNESCO from
Within, Hoggart’s “madly mixed brief” included a range of politically
sensitive and intellectually tricky issues confronting the Organisation,
including human rights, ethics, cultural heritage, cultural tourism, social
and cultural dimensions of environmental, development and population
problems, and fostering teaching and research in social sciences,
humanities and philosophy in developing countries. Hadley dissects
Hoggart’s own analysis of UNESCO: its tensions and paradoxes, its
weaknesses and shortcomings, as well as its “indisputably useful
activities”. He argues that Hoggart’s views still carry much insight for
those interested in international intellectual life and cultural development
and for those grappling with such contemporary issues as cultural diversity
and freedom of expression.
Appendix 1 contains a letter from W. H. Auden to Richard Hoggart.
The occasion of the conference mentioned above was the inauguration of
the archive of Hoggart’s papers at Sheffield University library. The letter,
never seen before outside Hoggart’s household, was presented to the
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xliii

archive by Simon Hoggart on this occasion. Auden thanks Hoggart for The
Uses of Literacy “which I found fascinating”. He adds: “I have no doubt
whatever that it is first class”. Auden goes on to praise Hoggart’s study of
his own work as “most understanding and generous”. He speaks of his
own wish to épater not just the bourgeoisie but all conceptions of artistic
decorum. He discusses his own “mixed style” and antipathy to French
classical drama. He speaks of his own middle-class background and says
he feels lucky to be born into the middle class: “Whatever their faults, the
middle class have realised and introduced into civilisation two great
virtues, integrity about money and devotion to work”. He elaborates upon
this remark with some remarks about the different values of the aristocracy
and the poor and discusses the legacy of his own family background: a
horror of debt and guilt about indulging in any pleasure unless he can feel
he has done enough work to deserve it. He tackles some specific criticisms
made in Hoggart’s Auden: an Introductory Essay and makes a few
corrections. He ends by hoping they might meet. The letter is important
because it shows Auden’s respect for Hoggart and sheds light on the
literary methods of both writers.

Works Cited
Collini, Stefan (1999). English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture.
Oxford: OUP.
—. (forthcoming). “Richard Hoggart: Literary Criticism and Cultural
Decline in 20th-Century Britain” in Richard Hoggart and Cultural
Studies, ed. Sue Owen. Palgrave.
Corner, John (1991). “Studying culture: reflections and assessments. An
interview with Richard Hoggart”, Media, Culture and Society 13, 137-
151.
Gaboriau, Patrick and Philippe Gaboriau (1991). “Popular Culture Studies
in France”, Journal of Popular Culture 24.4, Spring, 177-181.
Gregg, Melissa (forthcoming). “The Importance of Being Ordinary” in
Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies, ed. Sue Owen, (Palgrave).
Grossberg, Lawrence (2007). “Rereading the Past from the Future”,
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Special Issue: the Uses of
Richard Hoggart, ed. Sue Owen and John Hartley, 10.1. (March), 125-
134.
—. (forthcoming). “Richard Hoggart, Cultural Studies and the Demands of
the Present” in Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies, ed. Sue Owen,
(Palgrave).
xliv Introduction

Hall, Stuart (1980). “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms”, Media, Culture

and Society 2, 57-72.
—. (1992). “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” in Cultural
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—. (2007). “Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and the Cultural
Turn”, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Special Issue: the
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Hoggart, Richard (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of working class
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—. (1969). “Contemporary Cultural Studies”. CCCS, University of
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—. (1973). “Schools of English in Contemporary Society”: Inaugural
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—. (1990). “Scholarship Boy”: Interview with Jonathan Croall, Times
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—. (1991). A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times, Vol. II: 1940-1959.
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—. (1993). An Imagined Life: Life And Times, Vol. III: 1959-91. Oxford:
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Mulhern, Francis (2000). Culture / Metaculture. London: Routledge.
Passeron, Jean-Claude (1971). “Introduction to the French Edition of Uses
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1970.
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart xlv

Notes
1
See also Hoggart, 1993, Chapter 4: “Great Hopes From Birmingham”.
2
1963, 241-42. He elaborates the distinction between literary and sociological
method in “The Literary Imagination and the Sociological Imagination”. Given as
a talk to the Sociology Section of the British Association at its 1967 annual
conference, distributed as a pamphlet and reprinted in Speaking to Each Other,
Vol. II, 244-258.
3
For a detailed rebuttal of Mulhern see Hall, 2007.
4
See also Hall, “’The Centrality of Culture’: Notes on the Revolutions of Our
Time” in K. Thompson (ed.), Media and Cultural Regulation, (London: Sage and
Open University, 1997).
5
The reference is to Hall, “De-constructing the Popular” in Raphael Samuel (ed.),
People’s History and Socialist Theory (History Workshop Series, London:
Routledge, 1981).
6
“Cultural Studies and The Centre: Some Problems and Problematics” in S. Hall et
al (eds.), Culture, Media, Language, (London: Hutchinson and CCCS, 1980).
7
The reference is to Hall, “De-constructing the Popular” in Raphael Samuel (ed.),
People’s History and Socialist Theory (History Workshop Series, London:
Routledge, 1981).
8
A term applied to him by leftists at the CCCS (Hoggart, 1993, 98).
9
Gregg (forthcoming). See also her Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (London:
Palgrave, 2006), Chapter 2: “Activating Empathy: Richard Hoggart, Ordinariness
and the Persistence of ‘Them’ and ‘Us’”.
10
See my “Hoggart and Women” in Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies, ed.
Sue Owen, (Palgrave: forthcoming). Here I also engage with feminist criticism of
Hoggart.
 RICHARD HOGGART:
A PERSONAL APPRECIATION

DAVID LODGE

As my title implies I’m going to focus on those aspects of Richard

Hoggart’s work which have meant the most to me personally, so there will
be an autobiographical element in what I have to say. I think this is
appropriate, since there is an autobiographical strain in most of his own
writing. The first time his name impinged on my consciousness was in
association with The Uses of Literacy, as I imagine was the case with
many people reading this volume. I remember very clearly the
circumstances in which I read that book. It was in the autumn of 1957, the
year in which it was first published. I had just been released from the
Army after doing National Service, and was returning to University
College London, where I had obtained my B.A. in 1955, to start on an
MA, then a two-year research degree. I was invited to take part in a
weekend seminar at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park. This
house had been given to the University of London by the Queen Mother
for use as a residential study centre, a place where reading parties could be
organized for London University students who did not enjoy the kind of
collegiate life provided at Oxford and Cambridge. When I was an
undergraduate at UCL the English Department organized several weekend
reading parties, which were really more like discussion parties, at
Cumberland Lodge, and they were a very valuable part of our education:
we particularly appreciated the chance to mix with and talk to the
members of staff who took part. Cumberland Lodge is still going, though
I’m not sure it is as student-oriented as it used to be.
I presume I was invited to the seminar in the autumn of 1957 as a new
postgraduate of the University. I can’t now remember who organized it–it
wasn’t my own Department–nor can I remember its theme or title. It was
something fairly broad and interdisciplinary, about the arts, culture and
society, and the invitation came with a reading list, which included The
Uses of Literacy. I was living at home in South East London, as I did
throughout my university education, and went along to the excellent
2 Richard Hoggart: A Personal Appreciation

Deptford Public library to borrow Richard Hoggart’s book. I found it

absolutely fascinating–and also inspiring: not so much as an apprentice
critic and scholar but as an aspiring creative writer.
In my second year in the army, a clerk at a Royal Armoured Corps
training establishment in Dorset, I had started writing a novel which was
eventually published in 1960 as The Picturegoers, and I had written about
half of the first draft when I read The Uses of Literacy. The basic idea was
to follow the interlinked fortunes of a large number of characters in a
scruffy southeast London suburb who patronised the same cinema on
Saturday nights. Several of them were Catholics, who went to mass the
following morning at the same church. Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning would have been a good title for my book if it hadn’t already
been used by Alan Sillitoe, two years before my novel was published.
What excited me about The Uses of Literacy was the almost novelistic
quality of the writing, in the first part in particular-its vivid, concrete,
humorous, compassionate and empathetic observation of the specificity of
working class life. I mean passages like this description of the denizens of
the bleak newspaper reading-room of a public library:

This is the special refuge of the misfits and left-overs, of the hollow
cheeked, watery-eyed, shabby, and furtively sad. An eccentric absorbed in
the rituals of his monomania sits between a pinched unmarried brother,
kept by a married sister for the sake of his war-pension, and an aged
widower from a cheap lodging or a house smelling permanently of old tea
and the frying-pan. They come in off the streets, on to which they had gone
after swilling under a cold-tap and twisting scarves round collarless necks:
they come in after walking around a bit, watching other people doing
things, belonging somewhere. If a bench in the paper-strewn square is too
chilly, they come in after a while to the warmth they have been looking
forward to. A few make for one of the items of sect-journalism and resume
their endless cult-reading; some-shifty and nervous of detection, or with a
bland and cheeky skill-plot how to win on the pools or mumble through a
rough sandwich; some turn leaves aimlessly or just sit and look at nothing,
picking their noses. They exist on the periphery of life, seeing each other
daily but with no contact. Reduced to a handful of clothes, a few primary
needs and a persistent lack, they have disconnected from the only kind of
life in which they ever had a part, and that was a part unconsciously
accepted; they have no conscious arts for social intercourse. (Hoggart,
1957, 60-61)

My own background was lower-middle class, and London not Leeds, but
the stance of writer to milieu in The Uses of Literacy was similar to what I
was trying to achieve in my novel. In fact it is now clear, in hindsight, that
 David Lodge 3

all three of the books I have mentioned-The Uses of Literacy, and The
Picturegoers–belonged to the same seismic shift in the English literary
landscape in the 1950s.
This is often discussed under the headings of “The Movement” or “The
Angry Young Men”, but it was a much larger and more complex
phenomenon than those labels suggest. Basically it was the displacement
of a literary establishment that was constituted of ageing remnants of pre-
war modernism, Bloomsbury, and bohemianism, that was predominantly
middle to upper-middle class, public-school and Oxbridge-educated,
domiciled in central London or the country, and enamoured of Abroad-the
displacement of this literary establishment by a new generation of writers
who were working class or lower-middle class in social background,
beneficiaries of free secondary and tertiary education under the 1944
Education Act, often the first members of their families to go to university,
suspicious of inherited power and privilege, critical of all forms of
snobbery, hypocrisy, affectation, rank-pulling in social life, and of
pretentiousness and wilful obscurity in art and literature. The writers of
this new wave were interested in telling the truth as they saw it, life as it
was actually lived in post-war England, especially in places largely
neglected by the most prestigious writers of the 1940s – northern industrial
towns, dull suburbs, provincial universities. Lucky Jim, Look Back in
Anger, Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving, The Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner, The Less Deceived, Roots, A Taste of Honey, This
Sporting Life, were some of the key works by this new literary generation.
Only a few of them could be described as masterpieces, but collectively
they made a difference, and many of them were made into successful
films, which increased their cultural clout. It was essentially a new kind of
realism in English writing, responding to changes in English society
triggered by the Second World War and the foundation of the Welfare
State. In due course it ran out of steam and was superseded by writing that
was formally more various and experimental, but at the time it had a
transforming effect on the literary landscape.
The Uses of Literacy was I believe a key work in that phenomenon.
Though not itself a work of fiction, it validated many of the characteristic
fictional enterprises of the period. It provided a kind of moral and
sociological justification for dealing truthfully and realistically with
ordinary life, especially urban life, and it encouraged young writers whose
social backgrounds had nothing special, exotic or glamorous about them,
to write about their own experience, which was often the experience of
being detached from their roots by education, without feeling they really
belonged in the bourgeois world into which they had been promoted. “The
4 Richard Hoggart: A Personal Appreciation

scholarship boy,” Hoggart wrote, “has been equipped for hurdle-jumping,

so he merely thinks of getting on, but somehow not in the world’s
way…He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways
unusual, and he is still unusual in another class, too tense and overwound.”
That passage is quoted by Alan Bennett, who was born and brought up
in Leeds, and is almost exactly the same age as myself, in the introduction
to his recent play The History Boys, where he describes The Uses of
Literacy as:

…a book which made a great impression on me as a young man … in

particular [Hoggart’s] account of growing up in the slums of Leeds, going
to Cockburn High School, and eventually to Leeds University … it was a
harder childhood than mine (and an earlier one) but it was reading Hoggart
forty years ago that made me feel that my life, dull though it was, might be
made the stuff of literature. (Bennett, 2006, xxii )

I was perhaps less diffident than Alan Bennett. I had already completed
one novel, mercifully unpublished, and was halfway through my second,
when I came across The Uses of Literacy, but reading it confirmed my
faith in what I was trying to do in The Picturegoers, and fed into its
continuation and revision (which took some time because I was
researching and writing a very long thesis at the same time). I was
particularly interested in trying to render through my characters the ways
in which the often meretricious products of the film industry related to the
real concerns and experiences of ordinary people, how the cinema
provided for some a kind of dreamworld of escape or wish-fulfilment that
might be compared and contrasted with the consolations of religious belief
and worship; how even for those who recognized the falsity of the movies’
representation of reality the films they saw nevertheless provided models
for negotiating and making sense of their lives.
Richard Hoggart was of course concerned with the written and printed
word in his book, and only incidentally with other media, but the kind of
attention he brought to the examination of the reading matter of working
class people-cheap magazines, pulp fiction, tabloid newspapers, etc-had a
similar orientation. Instead of dismissing it all as corrupting rubbish, in the
manner of the Leavises and their disciples, then the dominant school of
English criticism and one to which he owed a good deal-Hoggart studied
this material carefully, made discriminating judgments and distinctions,
discussed the way it was received and interpreted by its audience, and
demonstrated that the products of mass culture as well as high culture were
well worth studying for what they revealed about the interface between
culture and society. I had encountered nothing like this since I discovered
 David Lodge 5

as a 6th former in my school library a book of essays by George Orwell,

and read it with the same fascination and delight. The scholarship boy of
this period was conditioned to think that only “serious” literature was
worth studying seriously, and if he continued to enjoy the products of
popular culture-comics, Tin Pan Alley music, Hollywood movies etc-it
was almost as a secret vice. So it was exciting and liberating to read a
critic who had something as interesting and intelligent to say about “Boys
Weeklies”, “The Art of Donald McGill”, and “Raffles and Miss Blandish”
as about Dickens, Swift, and Yeats.
George Orwell was a kind of father figure to many of the new wave
writers of the Fifties, John Wain and Kingsley Amis in particular. His
reputation has been somewhat tarnished recently, in some eyes, by
revelations that in 1949 he provided the Foreign Office with a list of pro-
communist writers and artists. But in the post-war period he was virtually
the only writer from the Thirties who seemed to have survived that “low,
dishonest decade” (as Auden, with more than a touch of self-accusation,
called it) with his integrity intact. Orwell’s essays “Politics and the English
Language” and “Inside the Whale” could be read almost as manifestos for
much of the prose and poetry of the young Fifties writers. Richard
Hoggart, a generation younger than Orwell, continued his critical spirit
and his style into academic discourse. There are echoes of The Road to
Wigan Pier, for instance, in the autobiographical and descriptive passages
about life in the slums of Leeds in The Uses of Literacy. Orwell of course
was an outsider, a man from the “lower upper middle class” (as he wittily
described himself), an old Etonian who consciously constructed a kind of
classless identity for himself in order to investigate the lives of working
class people in the Depression, while Richard was writing out of memory
and personal experience, from a distance or height attained by education.
His concern with the commercialisation and Americanisation of popular
culture makes his stance towards its products less relaxed, more
censorious, than Orwell’s. But the similarity and the continuity is there, in
the invocation of “decency” as a fundamental value, in the cultivation of a
style that is clear, conversational, jargon-free, but salted with vivid homely
figures of speech; above all in the effect of honesty and sincerity in the
authorial voice.
In 1960 I was appointed assistant lecturer in the Department of English
at Birmingham University. Two years later Richard was appointed to a
newly established second chair in the Department, and he soon became a
personal friend as well as a valued colleague. I had however already seen
him, at a distance, when in 1961 or perhaps early in 1962, he came to
Birmingham to give what was called a Guild Lecture. The student union at
6 Richard Hoggart: A Personal Appreciation

Birmingham was-and still is-called the Guild of Students, and in those

days they hosted a public lecture every Thursday lunchtime by some well-
known person in the main hall of the Guild. These events were usually
well-attended, and deserved to be. The only time I heard F.R. Leavis speak
was when he gave a Guild lecture. The hall was packed on that occasion,
and it was for Richard Hoggart. It was already known, I believe, at least to
the academic staff of the English Department, that he had been appointed
to the chair, and he was coming to us on a wave of celebrity caused not
just by the success of The Uses of Literacy, but more immediately by his
role in the Lady Chatterley trial which took place in October-November
1960, and of which we have been recently reminded by the BBC TV film,
The Chatterley Affair, written by Andrew Davies. Those of you who know
Richard may have been surprised to see him impersonated by a quite tall
and slightly languid actor, with sideburns. I asked Andrew Davies, who is
a friend, about the sideburns, and he said that the actor had grown them for
another part he was about to play, but I imagine Richard was not best
pleased when he saw the programme.
At the time, he was generally regarded as having contributed
significantly to the acquittal of Penguin Books. In his excellent account of
the trial, C. H. Rolph described him as “a self-composed, determined and
unshakeable witness.” Richard disconcerted the prosecution by describing
the spirit of Lawrence’s novel as being “virtuous, and if anything,
puritanical,” and backed this up with a lucid and persuasive account of
Lawrence’s literary intentions and effects. What would have happened if
the chief barrister for the prosecution, Griffith-Jones, had cross-examined
him about the veiled reference to anal intercourse in the novel is an
interesting subject for speculation, for Richard has since admitted that he
was not aware of the significance of this passage (nor was I-nor was
Andrew Davies, I can tell you-nor was anyone I knew at that
comparatively innocent time; we had to wait for the Warden of All Souls
College, Oxford to enlighten us) but perhaps fortunately for Richard, and
for Lawrence, and the freedom of novelists to write without censorship,
Griffith-Jones reserved this passage for his closing speech and did no more
than hint darkly at its meaning.
The title of Richard’s Guild lecture was “The Paperback Revolution,”
and the choice of topic was typical of his instinctive recognition of
significant trends in contemporary culture. It’s hard to convey to younger
people nowadays the scarcity of cheap books in the 1940s and 50s.
Penguin was virtually the only publisher of quality books in paperback,
and hardback publishers were often reluctant to release the rights in new
work. Lucky Jim, for instance, one of the most popular literary novels of
 David Lodge 7

the decade, first published in 1954, went through 20 impressions in

hardback, and was not paper-backed until 1959, as a tie-in edition with the
newly released film. Towards the end of the decade, however, publishers
suddenly began to see the potential of the paperback market, new imprints
sprang up to challenge Penguin, and the range of choice for the book-
buyer dramatically expanded. It is doubtful whether the state would have
prosecuted the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover if it had been
available only as an expensive hardback. It was the thought of Lawrence’s
novel being available to anyone and everyone with three shillings and
sixpence to spend that really alarmed the nation’s moral guardians.
I did not make any notes on Richard’s lecture, but I do remember one
or two of the things he said, which is not bad considering it was more than
forty years ago. He had been doing some investigation into the marketing
of paperbacks, and he said that bookshops had noticed people would buy
the paperback edition of a book even when the remaindered hardback
edition was available in the same shop at a lower price-demonstrating that
paperbacks, compact, portable, with slick artwork and shiny covers, were
now more covetable, cool, and seductive to the consumer than hardbacks.
He also mentioned that the bookshops enticed punters to buy them by
piling them high in heaps that seemed on the point of cascading into
dumpbins, tempting a purchase by the spectacle of sheer excess, and I can
see now the caressing, plucking gesture of his hand to illustrate his point,
and hear the answering laughter of the audience.
Richard Hoggart came to Birmingham when he was a kind of hero to
liberal, left-leaning literary intellectuals, to the first-generation university
graduates, like myself, who were increasingly staffing universities,
especially provincial ones, and to the first-generation students they were
teaching. He was the scholarship boy as star. He seemed to embody the
centrality of the humanities in general, and of English studies in particular,
to social and cultural life, by rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck into
debates that really mattered. He had successfully opposed the language of
literary criticism to the language of stuffy lawyers at the trial of Lady
Chatterley, and he was deeply involved from 1960 to 1962, as a member
of the Pilkington Committee, in laying down guidelines for the future
development of television and radio in Britain. It is an open secret, I think,
that Richard was mainly responsible for drafting the Pilkington Report,
which effectively defended the tradition of public service broadcasting,
embodied in the BBC, against new, aggressive commercial interests.
Richard had been lured from the University of Leicester, where he was
happily settled with his family, not just by the offer of a chair, but also
with the promise that he could set up a new research institute concerned
8 Richard Hoggart: A Personal Appreciation

with his own special interests, to be known as the Centre for

Contemporary Cultural Studies. Others have had much to say about the
seminal influence of that institution, which virtually created a new subject
area in higher education, but I would like to record that initially the Centre
was physically located within the English Department, and contributed
greatly to its intellectual life. In particular I remember with gratitude a
regular weekly open seminar, held at the end of the normal teaching day,
at which all kinds of interesting visitors from many different disciplines
would come and expound their perspectives on a wide range of cultural
topics to an eager and attentive audience. I continued to attend some of
these seminars when the Centre moved into its own quarters and I recall
one such seminar, chaired by Stuart Hall, whom Richard recruited as his
assistant, and who in due course became Director: an illustrated talk on
recent developments in rock music by Charlie Gillette, at which I first
heard, and indeed first heard of, Van Morrison, after which I went straight
out and bought an early edition of the LP Astral Weeks, for the possession
of which I later earned a good deal of street cred from my teenage son and
his friends. Just a little example of how the Centre widened one’s
horizons.
The sixties was of course a decade of great expansion and innovation
in higher education, and nowhere more obviously than in English studies.
When I came to the Birmingham Department in 1960 the syllabus was a
gentle Oxfordian amble through Eng Lit from Beowulf to the Victorians,
and if you were a good boy or girl and passed your second year exams in
Old English you could drop it and do a third-year course on modern
literature. I was specifically hired to teach that increasingly popular option.
In the years that followed several other new fields of study were added to
the syllabus. Malcolm Bradbury was appointed in 1961 to teach American
literature. The study of English language shifted its approach from
historical philology to systemic and applied linguistics under John
Sinclair. There was a demand for new courses on critical theory and
methodology. The old unitary syllabus collapsed and disintegrated under
these pressures. There were great Departmental debates, and clashes of
principle and personality, out of which eventually emerged a syllabus with
a common first year containing a bit of everything, and three more
specialised streams of study, with a medieval, Renaissance, or Modern
core, in the second and third years. Then these Departmental debates were
caught up in the ideological ferment of the campus-wide, nation-wide,
world-wide Student Revolution of ‘68 & ’69, with its teach-ins and
occupations.
 David Lodge 9

Amid all this upheaval Richard Hoggart remained an invaluable

presence: calm, patient, unflappable, pragmatic. Much in demand on
University and national committees, and for speaking engagements all
over the world, always working to build the reputation of the Centre and
secure its future, he nevertheless insisted on doing some undergraduate
teaching to keep in touch with his own first love-literature-and with the
new generation of students, and he was always ready to help individuals
through personal crises. When the Department instituted an annual
Reading Party for the first year, on the lines of those I had enjoyed myself
at Cumberland Lodge, but more liberated and democratic in style, (they
always ended with a party, sketches and a disco) Richard found time to
take part. Obviously something had to be sacrificed to keep up with the
punishing schedule he set himself, and it was his own work-not writing as
such, for he continued to produce occasional papers and essays-but
research: that is, the kind of long-term, slowly developed immersion in an
unexplored subject which had produced his masterpiece, The Uses of
Literacy.
Eventually, in 1970, he went to Paris as Assistant Director General of
UNESCO. He-and we-thought it would be a temporary secondment; but
he stayed on in Paris, resigned his Birmingham chair, and committed
himself to a career of cultural and educational administration, eventually
as Warden of Goldsmith’s College in London. Many of his colleagues at
Birmingham, including myself, felt his departure as a great personal and
professional loss; but there was in retrospect something inevitable about it.
Both English studies, and the new subject of cultural studies which he had
founded, were about to be overtaken-were indeed already being overtaken-
by an intellectual movement in the humanities, coming chiefly from
Continental Europe, loosely known as Theory. Richard had no natural
sympathy for theory, with or without a capital “T”, as he has said on
several occasions, including his very latest book, Promises to Keep:
Thoughts in Old Age, published in 2005: “I have no general theoretical
approach of the sort which in other people can produce adherents” he says
there; “instead, only pragmatic observing and assorted conclusions”
(Hoggart, 2005, 73). I think he underestimated the influence he has had on
others. But I also think he instinctively recognized, as the sixties gave way
to the seventies, that Theory’s historical moment had come. If he had
continued his professorial career he would have been swimming against
the tide, fighting an unwinnable battle, and perhaps holding back the
development of his own research centre. It made sense for him to move
into high-level administration and go on writing his books in his own
inimitable style-conversational, down-to-earth, and never far from
10 Richard Hoggart: A Personal Appreciation

autobiographical-as he has done to our great benefit and pleasure these last
forty-odd years. But those writings lie outside the chronological boundary
of my brief-the fifties and sixties, two decades on which he left an
indelible mark.

Works Cited
Bennett, Alan, (2004). The History Boys. London: Faber and Faber.
Hoggart, Richard (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class
Life, with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments.
London: Chatto and Windus.
—. (2005). Promises to Keep: Thoughts in Old Age. London: Continuum.
 RICHARD HOGGART:
THE INTELLECTUAL AS POLITICIAN

FRED INGLIS

I take for granted the metaphysical view propounded by R. G.

Collingwood in An Autobiography in 1939 that the predominance of
science as the type of explanatory framework is over, and that history,
conceived as the narrative of mind, has superseded it.
The most popular form of contemporary history is biography, and for
all that the form is so disfigured by mendacity, gossipmongery,
hagiography, celebrity-goggling and unspeakable triviality, there is surely
a common-sensible commonsense at work in the supposition that now the
grands récits of an absolute and bien-pensant progress in social
democratic or socialist guise are lapsed, the best means we have of
grasping local historical movement and the flares of hope are by way of
the light cast by good, brief lives.
A good life illumines history as far as it may reach; a bad one thwarts
possibility, stifles freedom, obscures answers to the questions, each
intrinsically related, what is the good for this person? and, what is the
common good?
This kind of diction has largely died out in political and moral
philosophic theorisation, and is indeed not much to be heard above the
dreadful babble of management jargon which constitutes the élite
conversation of culture. But it may be suggested, with the help of Alasdair
MacIntyre (1998), that nonetheless there endures a strong Aristotelian and
Thomistic strain in the everyday philosophic musings and moral actions of
plain people. Questions of what is good for me as put by plain people to
their experience are inseparable from the larger question, demanding an
answer, as to what is the common good. Even in a moral atmosphere
irrevocably distorted by the necessity of utilitarianism and de-oxygenated
by liberalism, people still put these questions in such a way as to frame
and direct their lives. Finally, MacIntyre insists, whether or not we
conclude that these are Aristotelian moral forms discernible, in spite of
themselves, in the moral actions of all agents, whether putative
12 Richard Hoggart: The Intellectual as Politician

Nietzscheans, existentialists or neocon bureaucrats, it is still possible and

necessary for there to be plain persons living according to principles of
practical rationality directed towards the goal of the good but
unenvisageable society, and guided in that direction by those virtues of
which their character and their social formation make the plain persons
capable.
MacIntyre further contends that the ordering framework which gives
direction, energy and meaning to the plain person trying to sort the virtues
into a manageable whole is simply "the stock of stories which constitute
[the] initial dramatic resources of any society" (1981, 201). 'Meaning'
these days is called upon to do so much work for anti-positivists in the
human sciences that it has become hard to say what meaning means.
Perhaps here it will do to make it more or less synonymous with 'value',
and to define value as a fierce little condensation of significance, the
constellations of which give a person moral bearings to steer by, fire up
passion for more or less righteous action in his or her veins and heart,
permit the contrivance of a form to be placed around or discovered in the
fatuous and frightening eventuality of life, and thereby to transform one
damn thing after another into the landscape of history and the path of
experience.
Everything in this very abstract account turns on the grasp, quality and
scope of that stock of stories available from history and culture. It is a
striking feature of Britain in this first decade of the twenty-first century
that the continuity of culture which is carried and assured by the narrative
stock is becoming so thin and transparent that people can see right through
it. The stories themselves are not strong enough to make the thread1
between what is past, or passing, or to come.
There have been such hiatus before, and into the gap pour the hordes of
the Philistines, apocalyptics and fundamentalists who are convinced that
their crude or brutal or simpleminded tales will supply the missing bridge
over the chasm. Certainly, some of them are right to suppose that what is
missing is a religious faith and a belief in the stories which subtend it, but
far and away the majority of the British people–to remain within that
plausibly generalisable entity–have let such belief decay into folklore and
regard their lost faith with not unkindly indifference.
In these circumstances, it is no surprise that the giddy pleasures and
abandoned self-indulgence of consumerism provide such satisfactions,
especially at a time when increasing control over economic forces has
released such a torrent of mere money into the country. The reckoning
certainly will come, and this is not the moment to look out for the
fearsome weather rolling towards us in a cloud of greenhouse gases. My
 Fred Inglis 13

point is, for the time being, historical: the British, according to their own
traditions, are a steady people. No doubt they are nowadays less steady
than they were–angrier maybe, more tearful, in any case their emotions
less sure, contained and assignable. But, one judges, they are steady
enough to reject apocalypse, to accept a deceleration in progress, and the
grands récits having proved themselves illusory and good riddance, too,
are now prepared to fashion a religious sense out of a sufficient number of
good lives and to put together a picture of the good society in terms of
what seem to be those best values in the present which may be capable of
projection into a not-very-distant future. Given the hideous things done by
Fascism, Communism and Liberal Capitalism on its bad days also, and
done to the present in the name of a dementedly imagined future, it will be
prudent to keep our vision of possibility for the good society down to a
horizon no further away than our grandchildren's old age.
MacIntyre himself has come to think that any such view of the moral
life commits him, at least, to theism. His moral vocabulary, however, is
held in common with the great tradition of the British idealists, the
tradition of T. H. Green and his pupils which led directly to the low-key
philanthropic and humanitarian liberalism of the early Fabians and their
comrades in LSE sociology. In his fine chronicle of one such avatar,
Stefan Collini ends, with particular emphasis on the intellectual leadership
of the school of L. T. Hobhouse by observing bleakly:

… it is no part of my intention to restore Hobhouse's reputation or to

advocate a return to his methods. On the contrary, my aim has been to
emphasise that his thinking was embedded in a set of assumptions which
no longer demands our allegiance, and addressed to a range of problems
which no longer commands our attention. (Collini, 1979, 253)

Hobhouse, for Collini, is eponym for the high-minded, idealistic (in both
senses), public-spirited application of a moralised scientism to the building
of national progress which was terminated by the First World War.
One riposte to this is that, by way of Beveridge's report, Mannheim's
reconstruction theory, Collingwood's historicism, Keynes's emergency
economics, and Crosland's egalitarian politics, British idealism held up
and held sway until the colossal ruptures in world economics caused by
the end of world empires and the beginning of world history. But this is
not the time for such arm-waving generality. MacIntyre himself notes that
in its political form, Aristotelian rationality is

… itself also a form of enquiry, so that established views of what

constitutes the good and the best, either unqualifiedly or for the citizens of
14 Richard Hoggart: The Intellectual as Politician

that polis in their circumstances … will from time to time be put in

question, perhaps because new relevant theoretic considerations have come
to light or perhaps because of changing internal or external circumstances
… such traditions are thus socially embodied theories and [their]
theoretical standpoints may be presented … in the form of those social
dramas which are at one and the same time historical segments of the life
of a community and enacted theories.2

II
As I began by suggesting, biography is the form most readily (and
popularly) capable of first comprehending and then enshrining such a
social drama. (By biography, it should be plain I do not only mean as
written down in books, but also as lived in gossip, family history, as well
as in the family history of a nation whether in libraries or as broadcast by
radio and television.) Such a formulation takes in the often dreadful
phenomenon of celebrity, for amongst the spite, envy, lies and hypocrisy
of celebrity narratives, there are ringing tales of good lives lived in public
and to the edification of others, probably best seen when enough years
have told and tolled on their subjects.
Those lives are then gathered into our 'narrative stock' and arranged in
such a way as to enshrine a configuration of moral ideas about how to live
well. This is less a matter of the influence of particular characters, which is
incalculable, still less of moral examples one might try to emulate, or–if
that is what the repellent phrase intends–of 'role models', on which dizzy
youngsters may fasten so uncritically as to suppose that if the r-m takes
heroin or gets plastered seven nights a week, then it's just fine to do the
same.
The configuration of moral ideas dramatised by good lives isn't a
matter of copying others. Such lives come through from the past as "lines
of force for transformation" (Anderson, 1980, 98). The virtues they
enacted are made available as a moral resource to the lives of later
generations. If those virtues fail to find their dramatisation in a sufficient
number of subsequent generations, they may, as John Stuart Mill pointed
out, lapse altogether, as has happened, for better and worse, to chivalry
and chastity. Insofar as a virtue keeps up its connection with the future as
having been enacted, each in its peculiar way, in assorted biographies, it
can be earthed in new lives and, charging those lives with its fierce
current, release a quite new dramatisation of its energy, the virtue being
transformed (but still itself: courage is courage on the Somme, at Harfleur,
or in the Trojan ditch), transformed, I say, by the action of a new life.
 Fred Inglis 15

As the clerics disappear from the tomes of emulable lives, it is

reasonable for someone of my profession to offer incarnations of the
intellectual life and its particular virtues as taking a larger place in the
constellation of good lives. This bid may seem the more permissible at a
time when mass education, for all its failures and injustices, has brought to
the British temper and temperament (apparent any day on television or
radio) a certain respect for the criteria of evidence, for the strengths of
intellectual authority, for the necessity of heedful and courteous argument,
for both allegiance and detachment, for humanism itself.
In a manner perhaps presaged by Bertrand Russell, Keynes and the
Bloomsburyans, even by C. E. M. Joad and The Brains Trust, the life of
the scholar and the public role of the intellectual has, over the past half-
century or so, been accorded a more general respect, given greater public
visibility, had bestowed upon it far more substantial rewards and amiable
recognition in the forms and roles of civil society than was ever the case
within the highly insulated enclaves of Oxford or Cambridge in the 1920s.
It has followed that, even in the inevitable contradictions and
ambiguities with which intellectual life is represented, traduced and
admired on television, its best spokesmen and women have found a way of
dramatising the virtues of their tradition in the public gaze; whatever pub
jokes may be circulated about the expert, some such office is regarded as
indispensable to serious newscasting as well as to the forums of
democratic debate as these are performed on television.
The scholars presenting their view of art, of politics or history, of
climatology, evolution or God, can do so with freedom, fluency, a
permissible degree of vulgarisation, a sufficiency of personal charm, all
bound together by a clear sense on the part of the individual concerned, the
programme makers, and the audience that the virtues essential to the
vocation–the virtues of impartiality, high seriousness, personal modesty,
necessary detachment, ardent commitment to the truth about the subject-
matter in hand–are here displayed and celebrated for their own sake and as
contributing to the common good of society, its keeping alive the great
trinity of truth, goodness and beauty.
Seen like this, the scholar-intellectual is a source of edification to the
society, and the moral point of such edification is brought out explicitly by
one such hero in American society, now alas dead. Richard Rorty wrote:

One way to see edifying philosophy as the love of wisdom is to see it as

the attempt to prevent conversation from degenerating into inquiry, into an
exchange of views. (1980, 372, 377)
16 Richard Hoggart: The Intellectual as Politician

Such degeneration is naturally endemic in a mass democracy, egged on by

a special failing of liberalism, always apt to believe that truth stands on a
balancing point between two extremities. Rorty adorns the moral of this
tumultuous difficulty by saying defiantly (to the stern objectivists as well
as to the demagogues of mere opinion):

… the point of edifying philosophy is to keep the conversation going rather

than to find objective truth. Such truth in the view I am advocating, is the
normal result of normal discourse. Edifying philosophy is not only
abnormal but reactive, having sense only as a protest against attempts to
close off conversation by proposals for universal commensuration through
the hypostatisation of some privileged set of descriptions.

To take the force of such a lesson we need good lives to celebrate and
understand, lives which sustain by example this kind of conversation as it
is practised in civil and domestic life.
The example to hand is the life of Richard Hoggart, and work, as well
as the works, as constitutive of that life and its exemplary force. In this
special account of the relations between character and career, it must of
course be the case that the individual is not to be thought of according to
the expressivist and Romantic tradition as an impossibly singular rarity
(allowing the pleonasm to pass) freed from membership of social
structure, but as a citizen of many and interlocking forms of institutional
life, the family, the social class, the academy, the committee, the
international bureaucracy. In saying this, however, I am saying no more
than the ontologically obvious, and nothing is thereby remitted of the
propriety of paying affectionate and admiring tribute to that same brave
citizen, earnest and timely moralist, wise and amused commentator, loving
parent, husband and neighbour, faithful patron of that incomparable
location of Englishness, the plateful of bacon, sausage, eggs, mushrooms
and tomatoes.
Writing in these terms, one needs not so much a literary as an
anthropological idiom. That is to say, if we were to turn to Hoggart's
volumes on the shelves, a ready way of treating them as in a 'Life and
Work' textbook offers itself, according to which one would go through
them in a more or less chronological order, starting with the book on
Auden, treating The Uses of Literacy (quite rightly) at greatest length as an
English classic of social commentary, and taking the rest as they came, the
book on Farnham as, perhaps, a winning detour from the main lines of
intellectual advance, The Way We Live Now as a mature commination on
the coming society presaged in The Uses of Literacy as one which would
 Fred Inglis 17

"unbend the springs of action", the final two books as Hoggart's

'Montaigne moments'.
The autobiography, on this treatment, would, I suggest, be slighted as
not a strictly intellectual achievement. Evidence for this opinion is to be
found perhaps in the disgraceful fact that Hoggart has never been elected
to the British Academy; knighthoods and so forth he has of course
declined. But presumably the omission would be justified because his
work cannot be classified as a body of objective scholarship contrived in
the idiom of an acknowledged discipline.
That, however, is my point. There can be no distance set between this
man's life and his work; the published volumes are printed meditations on
the stuff of the everyday life which made them possible–possible, indeed,
and essential for our purposes only as providing a faithful record of the
passage of time and the thought which marked it off.
Such a life might certainly have been lived only on and beside
university campuses, a kind of career now familiar enough to society to
have become a narrative sub-genre–the campus novel (Small World) or
film (Lucky Jim), television serial (The History Man) or sitcom (A Very
Peculiar Practice). But it has been our extraordinary good fortune that
Richard Hoggart also became an international bureaucrat with power in his
hands, and therefore cannot only tell us directly how that world is (and
explain to us thereby how we are ourselves governed, by him as well as
others) but also how it ought to be (conspicuous as he is for incarnating the
best principles of such a powerful position). In his plain, straight, pawky
(his word) way, he is utterly at odds with the more usual incarnations of
power. As his ally, Raymond Williams has it:

It is the combination of those quiet voices, those composed manners, those

relaxed drawing-rooms, that keeps suggesting there is nothing whatever to
hide: all is the purest rationality and normality, whatever cruel or stupid (as
well as reasonable) acts they may happen to be engaged in. The appearance
of frankness, of that cool but always available politeness, is the most
efficient collective disguise I have ever encountered, and for my own part I
have given up asking it questions. I look for the answers in what they do.
(1989, 137)

Hoggart doesn't just contrast with this ineffable manner; nor does he ever
go in for that other, demotic way of refusing upper class demeanour as
acted out by the determinedly bad manners, worse faith and fake outrance
of columnists in The Daily Mail and such as Melanie Philips or Janet
Street-Porter. His way of answering the demands of the vast international
bureaucracy of which he was Assistant Director-General, of carrying out
18 Richard Hoggart: The Intellectual as Politician

his duties as Chair or Member of the Pilkington Committee or the Arts

Council–crucial seats in the middle echelons of political power–is the
same way as he has of thinking and writing.
This identity of theory and practice is indeed his single most
compelling contribution to the intellectual methods of the day. But this is
to put his significance in diminuendo. Let me rather say, as Leavis does in
his great essay on Hardy's splendid poem, After a Journey:

It is a poem that we recognise to have come directly out of life; it could,

that is, have been written only by a man who had the experience of a life to
remember back through. And recognising that, we recognise the rare
quality of the man who can say with that truth 'I am just the same', and the
rare integrity that can so put the truth beyond question. It is a case in which
we know from the art what the man was like; we can be sure, that is, what
personal qualities we should have found to admire in Hardy if we could
have known him. (1968, 257)

III
What I am suggesting is that in Hoggart's case, we know from the life
those qualities we find to admire in Hoggart, and that the life is a happy
instance of the art of living, if the phrase can be emptied of rather riminy-
piminy, fin-de-siècle associations, and turned into a robust component of
what might as well be called a non-theistic religion. To substantiate, sotto
voce, this latter claim just is to instantiate his publicly lived virtues and the
social dramas in which they are embodied, and to take them directly from
the third volume of autobiography, An Imagined Life, which covers the
years from 1959 to its publication in 1992, thereby omitting of course the
six gripping books subsequently published in a show of astonishing
stamina, not to say unstoppable talkativeness. What is more, in treating An
Imagined Life directly, as a work of art for sure, but also as a truthful and
straightforward testimony (the title notwithstanding), I am claiming
something about its (and its author's) civic and civil being and essence. As
with a great novel, a noble still life, a solo instrumental suite, the absorbed
reader of An Imagined Life grows slowly more familiar with Hoggart's
way of being an Arts Council or Pilkington Committee member or witness
for the defence of D H Lawrence or a cultural diplomat, and finds, in
growing so familiar, his or her own subjectivity opened and contrasted
with the one on the page.
That there is art in the rendering of that solid presence is certain, but it
is a kind of art peculiarly unamenable to the ineffable superciliousness of
deconstructive method, of which the only dependable conclusion is that
 Fred Inglis 19

the methodist knows better than the writer what is going on. Our author
knows very well what is going on, and knows it precisely because of that
hard schooling in love and detachment, dependence and loss, that local
rootedness (a word impossible to use disapprovingly) and blithely
venturesome taking-of-the-opportunity, which are so vividly presented in
the first two volumes.
One could not do better than begin with this little anecdote at the
beginning of the volume.

One evening in the Middle West of America, after I had given a lecture
(about educational changes in Britain, not about anything I had written), a
young woman came up and spoke in the way I have described. She was a
lecturer at the local land-grant university. She had been brought up in a
back-to-back house in Newcastle. I said I was going there in a few weeks'
time; she asked me to call on her widowed father to confirm she was well
and happy. After finishing the work in Newcastle I had an hour before the
train south, took a taxi to the address and knocked on the door. Her father
opened it and said simply: 'Oh, you've come then.' (1992, 8-9)

This is a discharge of more than a citizen's duty; it is a moral action,

deliberate but unforced, tinily renewing the bonds of social solidarity in
the days before telephones were general among the working class. It is a
gesture formed in 1920s Hunslet, going back, if you want to look that far,
to what may as well be called the organic communities of Carlyle's St
Albans and Bunyan's Elstow.
As he walks through the landscape of his life, Hoggart stops from time
to time and looks for his readers to make sure they are following him:

So the main currents of my interests have been the right of wider access to
higher education, the need for wider access to the arts … and as a support
to all this, the best uses of mass communications. (1992, 26)

Then he turns briefly caustic, quoting Chekhov:

… speaking with love and anger to his own people: 'You live badly my
friends; it is shameful to live like that' … (ibid)

The obverse of attention to questions of the highest good for a society is

anger at what it does to itself in fact.
The subtitle of the American edition of the complete autobiography is
The Times and Places of an Orphaned Intellectual–orphaned literally, but
perhaps also an orphan as being without a direct intellectual home, family
and lineage. And yet only a very sure sense of membership in a polity
20 Richard Hoggart: The Intellectual as Politician

could have enabled such calm, confident, unofficial leadership as his on

the Pilkington Committee in 1962. Hoggart ushers T. S. Eliot onto his
stage.

Before he came in, I was deputed to invite him to give an opinion on the
foolish, false comparison which had been made again and again: 'We aim
to give the people what they want, not what we think is good for them.'
The programme companies–Granada with most conviction and more
convincingly than others–officially rejected that argument. But the tawdry
standard was unfurled by shabby entrepreneurs and titled public figures
alike in defence of whatever their commercial television transmitted; low
populism masquerading as democracy. Eliot paused a moment on the
question and then produced, in a voice with hints of Kensington, the
Middle West and New England, a sentence so finely phrased that you
could easily identify the semi-colon before the final assertion: 'Those who
claim to give the public what the public want–(pause)–begin by
underestimating public taste; they end by debauching it. (1992, 69-70)

This is his cue for summarising the committee's agreed view as radically
critical of the workings of commercial television, noting as he did the
effrontery of the tricksters who got away with the adjective 'independent'.
The Chairman agreed, the Government was angry, television was
unmistakably improved by the Act of 1964, and Hoggart was justifiably
gratified by much later turning up on Mrs Thatcher's hit-list.
This is what it is to sustain a moral tradition and the socially ratified
principles of rational inquiry which embody it and are only intelligible in
relation to the question, what is the common good?
That question was dizzily enlarged by Hoggart's move to Paris and
UNESCO. One point is worth making first about this man's Englishness
and how bluntly that must have been challenged by living in another
country, servant of an international organisation, assigned obligations
nonetheless by his home government.
He declines the obligations in the name, on one occasion, of common
humanity, resisting a minister's bullying of his junior official; on another,
of an instinctive detestation of English racist arrogance (1992, 149-50).
Hoggart's English class identity, the politics of his politeness, rejects a
different, repellent version of English class identity. That class identity of
his, deepened and extended by the vast strength of the national literature,
was further toughened by life in that most "ingenious and resolute of
armies" (in Edward Thompson's words, 1980, 131) "which became"
(Thompson goes on) "an anti-fascist and consciously anti-imperialist
army", but was given its essential shape and composition by his
 Fred Inglis 21

grandmother, his brother, and the lost, harsh, close neighbourhood around
33 Newport Street.
'Community' is become almost a canting word. For some, as a social
value it is now radically attenuated by–to speak blankly–the tidal waves of
new technology and old capitalism. The trouble is that when the term
'values' enters either media opinionation or social theory the values
themselves remain chronically underdescribed, and are largely used as
sonorous chords in a threnody on decline. This is markedly true of
'community', and Hoggart is here strong on two counts. First, he finds
plentiful signs of community's continued thriving, as in the splendid
Townscape with Figures; second, he sees, none clearer, the small-
mindedness and bigotry which also may attend upon community, so that
his narrow little island itself comes to seem, after the years in Paris,
'snobby' and 'grey', caught in a mixture of amusement, fondness and
exasperation by this anecdote about his return to university life from Paris
in 1975.

I went up early to see friends at Birmingham and, walking into the Senior
Common Room with them after almost five and a half years, met that
familiar but always slightly surprising collapsing of time towards one who
had been away by others who have stayed. 'Hello,' they said, 'haven't seen
you for a while. All right?' (1992, 173)

The living tradition of practical rationality which I am using Hoggart to

instantiate (and in doing so reviving the disparaged, ancient, minor literary
form of moral eulogy) requires regular and pungent reappraisals of its
goals. The good, as we heard MacIntyre note, is subject to revision in the
light of new knowledge. When Hoggart frees himself from the rules of the
role of international civil servant, the freedom best manifests itself as the
sound of his own voice.
By this token, freedom itself–as the recent surge of anti-utilitarianism
in economics led by Amartya Sen affirms–is a virtue. To live freely, to be
self-reliant, independent-minded, unafraid, self-possessed, self-governing,
is to be at least prepared for virtuous action. I would however rather say
that such a condition of either personal or collective freedom is itself
virtuous, as well as the essential context for engendering the virtues
peculiar to democracy.
It is obvious that liberty on these terms is miles away from what is now
referred to as neo-liberalism or, indifferently, neo-conservatism. Both
these unappetising figures in the global drama of ideas are misshapen
progeny of American pragmatism, always liable to breed monsters out of
its nightmare parleying with moral "realism", its "eclipse of the public" in
22 Richard Hoggart: The Intellectual as Politician

Dewey's phrase (1929, 110 ff), its displacement of public ethics into
technology by way of C. S. Peirce's "science of prediction".
These gestures at the history of ideas most likely to deprave and
intoxicate Western modernity give the lie to any attempt to lay claim to a
tradition of Anglo-pragmatism or to place Hoggart in it. He remains such a
compelling figure partly because he rejoins us to the hopeful innocence
and trust in the truths of historical experience as embodied in the lives of
such as Mill, Green, Keynes, Leavis, Tawney, Titmuss (the last two
invoked by Hoggart himself as moral examples). But he is also exemplary
because of the work of art which time, chance, history ("picked up by the
tide") and character enabled him to make of his life. Relevant to this is the
metaphysical presence of his self-knowledge.

This prompted me to think again about the nature of moral courage. I

realised then that what sometimes seemed moral courage in myself, in
what I said and wrote, could be a form of personal pride. Below this level,
when the element of self-regard had been so far as possible discounted,
there came into play a deep obstinate, stubbornness. I tried not to let that be
the prime impulse, but most of the time it had to do for a purer form of
moral courage.

Any value shades into other values, which is why historical contextualisation
is so necessary a method if we are to learn from the past–the pastness to
hand being this one career.
As one reads and recalls the life, the conviction grows that its passages
and accomplishments are the exhilaratingly happy consequence of
accidents and decisions on the part of the one man who could have made
such a triumph out of them. Hunslet, Leeds University, Naples, Marske,
Leicester, the CCCS, Paris, Goldsmiths, Farnham, Norwich: no wonder
that it is the truths and beauty of art which Hoggart most wanted to bestow
on his people, truths and beauties which, as he says, they wanted for
themselves if only they could get the chance to find them.
In 1982 Hoggart organised a seminar at Goldsmiths which collected
together some modest amounts of what he himself would hate to call
'market research'. It issued in a short book (Hoggart, 1982).

For me, the most surprising and encouraging result of the surveys made for
the From Policies to Practice book was the evidence it gave of why people
wanted more provision of adult education. We had guessed the unmet
demand would be large but not as large as it turned out to be. We had
assumed, especially because of the hard-headed mood of the new
government, that much of the demand would be for vocational training and
retraining (evidence from 1991 suggests that vocationalism is now
 Fred Inglis 23

dominant). We had hoped there would still be some demand for adult
education for the old high purposes. What we did not expect, back in '82,
was the weight of people giving that last sort of reason. They used old-
fashioned, value-laden, beautiful phrases, usually rather tentatively. They
wanted more education so as to be more 'whole', so as to 'understand better'
the world or society or themselves, so as to 'broaden' their minds, so as to
have 'fuller' lives, more 'enriching' experiences. You wanted to throw your
hat in the air. They were not at all talking like the images thrust on them by
the persuaders of modern life, did not see themselves–they positively
refused to see themselves–as 'consumers', 'clients', self-seeking atoms,
'targets' for politicians or advertisers, 'audiences to be delivered'. They
recalled a wonderful phrase of Coleridge which I quote often: 'Men, I
think, are to be weighed not counted'. That rings down almost two
centuries and makes today's fashionable phrases about the nature of
society, of the individuals within it and of our judgments on its purposes,
show as the tinsel they are. (Hoggart, 1992, 214-5).

My purpose has been to prove the practicability of living an intellectual

life one may be proud of in the epoch of modernity, globalisation and all
that. It is further to vindicate the claim that such a life may embody those
virtues which remain feasible at these moments in history. Alasdair
MacIntyre has been the reassuring theorist of this brief life. He pictures the
good life (MacIntyre, 1981, 190-209) as given unity by the singleness of
its narrative, a narrative understood as a quest whose goal is only
determinate and intelligible in the terms of its actuality: its accidents and
incidents, dangers and temptations. In such a life, the virtues are those
dispositions the individual possesses or confects which sustain those social
practices to which the individual as a social defined entity has given his (in
this case his) life, such practices being sufficiently worthy, and capable of
yielding up both self-knowledge and knowledge of the good.
It is a peculiar thing that nowadays it is rare to find elegies outside the
obituary pages. Given my terms of reference, what is needed is rather
more the art-form of historical biography than old Leavis's "essential
discipline" of literary criticism or any more recent self-promoters of
universal interpretation such as cultural psychoanalysis or pan-global
pessimism. As I suggested, biography lends itself, as a duly democratic
form of narrative, to everyday habits of coming-to-moral-judgements and
finding-reassurance-from-the-counsel-of-better-people-than-oneself. It is
easy enough to suggest, in an offhand list of putative biographies, taken
from men and women of Hoggart's generation, just how such brief lives
fall into a guiding constellation such as might conduce to a usable and
practical rationality for the present. The names of Michael Young, Denis
Healey, the brothers Attenborough, Learie Constantine, Mary Warnock
24 Richard Hoggart: The Intellectual as Politician

(nobody's perfect), will do to indicate the direction of this idea; the reader
can readily compile a rival rollcall.
These names, with Hoggart's at their head, serve to rebut present
convictions about the shallow foundations of personality in public, and
still more, dismiss by example the more strident assertions about identity
as being immitigably racial or class-based or negotiated or otherwise out
of the reach of mind and manners. These selves are marked by history and
class and all that, for sure; but they are the product of those best
dispositions their possessors (being self-possessed) found themselves to be
capable of, and turned into their characters, on their own behalf and in
duty towards their shared conception of the common good.
Such a concept of selfhood has become less common in consumer
modernity, and is shouldered out of the way by notions of self-invention,
self-discovery, freedom from social structure and other slogans of radical
individualisation. But the good life is given unity and meaning to the
extent that the virtues exhibited in it are virtues in all possible
circumstances–at home, in intellectual composition, in a television
interview, in the university or in UNESCO. Eminence itself inflects the
enactment of the virtues. It is the importance of Richard Hoggart's life that
it justifies by its mere existence the claim that the pre-modern conception
of the virtues still lives and moves within its tradition. The damnable thing
about the concept of a tradition is that it has become monopolised and
disfigured by the Right. In urging that, in Leavis's phrase, Richard
Hoggart's is a name that, in these days, we should peculiarly honour, I am
intent upon the calm consistency with which he incarnates both domestic
and intellectual virtues as these are livable in our time. Domestic love, the
love of art, intellectual straightness and stubbornness, a vigorous
egalitarianism, absolute hostility to what is shameful, corrupt and wicked
in people's lives and the life of the times, unfailing courtesy, a keen sense
of the ridiculous … these qualities are very far from being fragments to
shore against ruined lives, and modern Britain is far from being a
wasteland. They are strong and active, as we have seen, and we had better
keep them in as good repair as Hoggart has.

Works Cited
Anderson, Perry (1980). Arguments within English Marxism. London:
Verso.
Collini, Stefan (1979). Liberalism and Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dewey, John (1927). The Public and its Problems. New York: Holt.
 Fred Inglis 25

Hoggart, Richard (1992). An Imagined Life. London: Chatto and Windus.

Hoggart, Richard et al (1982), Continuing Education: from policies to
practice. London: Goldsmiths College.
Leavis, F. R. (1968). 'Judgment and Analysis', A Selection from Scrutiny,
Vol. I, ed. F R Leavis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981). After Virtue: a study in moral theory. London:
Duckworth.
—. (1998). 'Plain persons and moral philosophy', in A MacIntyre Reader,
ed. K. Knight. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rorty, Richard (1980). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Thompson, E. P. (1980). Writing by Candlelight. London: Merlin.
Williams, Raymond (1989). Raymond Williams on Television, ed. Alan
O'Connor. London: Routledge.

Notes

1
I borrow here from Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life.
2
MacIntyre (1998, 132-4). This argument is identical with that of Clifford Geertz,
in his Negara: the theatre state in 19th century Bali (Princeton, 1982). See also my
Clifford Geertz: culture, custom, ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, 107-132.
 THE LEGACY OF RICHARD HOGGART:
EDUCATION AS DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE

JON NIXON

After so many years the light is

Novel still and immensely ambitious
—W. H. Auden1

Introduction
The quotation with which Richard Hoggart concludes his (1951)
“introductory essay” on W. H. Auden is an apt reflection upon his own life
and work. After fifty years as a public figure, his work still has the
capacity to arrest and challenge. At its best, it remains “novel still and
immensely ambitious”. Moreover, the Hoggart corpus is still in the
making, and continues to challenge and let new light break. In this chapter
I shall focus on Hoggart’s legacy as a public educator with reference to the
broad span of his writing. While he has written specifically on educational
topics, that legacy cannot be restricted to this particular strand of his
thought. It is the whole life, the complex idiom, and the unswerving
commitment, to which we must look for an appreciation and understanding
of that legacy.2
For my generation of educators, setting out to work in schools,
colleges, polytechnics and universities in the late 1960s, there was no
“before Hoggart”. We grew up already in his long shadow. Along with
Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams, he had already set the
political and moral agenda for those concerned with the development of
education as democratic practice. The Uses of Literacy (1957), along with
The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Culture and Society
(1958), were the indisputable starting points from which we took our
bearings.3 Of course, other influences were to feed in: The New Left
Review, identity politics, briefly (and perhaps ashamedly for some of us)
the politics of the “the third way”.4 But Hoggart stood his ground, was
always there, sometimes in places that we would have preferred him not
 Jon Nixon 27

be, and pointed a way forward. His was a life to be reckoned with, an
idiom to be challenged and understood, and a commitment that set the
agenda.
This chapter argues that Richard Hoggart’s legacy as public educator is
to be found in the moral unity of his life and work: his life as an adult
educator, university professor, and international administrator; his
distinctive idiom as writer and critic; and his commitment to education as
a deeply deliberative process of widening participation. The right use of
judgement is central to the life, the idiom and the commitment. As an
abiding presence, Hoggart is an exemplar of how critical discrimination
and discernment can be deployed, from the centre ground, in the interests
of the good society. Holding that centre ground, from the liberal,
humanistic and secular position that Hoggart occupied, was not without its
ideological and political tensions. Central to the life, the idiom and the
commitment was the steady insistence on holding the tensions in albeit
uneasy unity, on keeping the argument going beyond the sharp points of
disagreement, on finding a democratic and deliberative way forward.
Much has been written of late regarding the crisis of democracy. For
example, Jacques Rancière, the eminent French philosopher, argues that if
democracy is to be understood as the power of the demos, then the
dominant regimes of western democracy are not only mistrustful of that
power but constitute an organised “hatred of democracy” (Rancière,
2006). That hatred presages “the end of politics” insofar as politics is
understood as “the power of the people” (Rancière, 2007, 5-37).
Democracy so conceived can, and does, Rancière maintains, “provoke
fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the
magisterium of thought”; but, as he goes on to argue, “among those who
know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of
intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy” (Rancière,
2006, 97). The legacy of Hoggart as public educator contributes modestly,
but significantly, to these resources of courage and joy, through its steady
insistence on education as a democratic and deliberative process to which
anybody and everybody can contribute.

The unity of a human life

Hoggart is a remarkable exemplar of what Alasdair MacIntyre (1985)
termed “the unity of a human life”. Complex, multifaceted, operating
across diverse institutional and international boundaries, his life seems
almost disconcertingly all of a piece. Given the range and diversity of his
later professional and public responsibilities, it is worth reminding
28 The Legacy of Richard Hoggart: Education as Democratic Practice

ourselves that his early work as an adult education lecturer was highly
formative. In a talk given to the Annual Conference of the Society of
Teachers of English, in April 1952, he reveals the extent to which his
thinking about poetic form, critical method, and the practicalities of
teaching, are mutually supportive of his broader vision of education as
deeply democratic:

By increasing depth in reading I mean what I called trying to help students

to read “vertically” instead of simply “horizontally”. There is, we have
seen, a direct relationship between their emphasis on what the poem seems
to state and their almost entirely “horizontal” reading, their reading for the
“straight” prose meaning. Subsumed in this attitude is the view that the
things done with language in poetry are decorative, not constitutive. Poetry
is prose dressed up. Students find it hard to realize that what the poem is, is
not something which can be abstracted from the whole, from these words
in this order, or to appreciate that form and that language, used in this way,
embody a greater intensity and immediacy of experience than prose can
achieve without itself tending to become poetry. (Hoggart, 1973b, 215)

Hoggart, the scholar, is here adamant in his refusal to compromise on the

necessary complexity of language usage within the poetic form; but, as
teacher, he is equally adamant in his conviction that this linguistic
complexity can be rendered accessible to the non-traditional learners (as
we would now call them) for whom he is responsible. Crucially, he wants
them to understand that “things done with language” are “constitutive” not
merely “decorative”. He does so, in that clearly Leavisite echo, in the
interests of “a greater intensity and immediacy of experience”, which (and
here the cracks in the Leavisite tradition begin to appear) he believes are a
common resource.
A couple of decades later we witness Hoggart addressing a rather
different audience. In his “closing observations” delivered at a conference,
in May 1980, on “The Foundations of Broadcasting Policy”, which was
attended by (among others) Asa Briggs, Shirley Williams and Randolph
Quirk, Hoggart remarked:

In this whole part of our discussion we touched on one aspect quite often,
and almost wholly ignored another. We talked a good deal about
“reinforcement” through broadcasting, through current affairs, plays,
situation comedies and almost anything else. We talked about
broadcasting’s tendency to legitimate authority. We heard almost nothing
about what audiences take from programmes, what they do with them;
about what happens inside individuals. There is a useful comparison with
literary criticism of popular fiction here. Early criticism tended to assume
that what an educated reader found in popular fiction – the conventional,
 Jon Nixon 29

trite and stereotyped – exactly reflected the lives of those who read it, that
there was an unselective and uncritical match between books and readers.
It was C. S. Lewis who, surprisingly, first persuaded me (through his
writing; I did not know him) that people can take good things from poor
literature, that they can select from it rather than being victims of it.
(Hoggart, 1982a, 155-156)

In this fascinating “closing observation” on what had not been discussed

by the great and the good at the Leeds Castle conference, we glimpse
Hoggart, the adult educator, peeping out from behind Hoggart, the now
public, establishment figure, and reminding us that learning is about “what
happens inside individuals” (and, with a degree of cunning, drawing in C.
S. Lewis as an unlikely ally in the class struggle). This is vintage Hoggart.
Continuing the arguments developed in his The Uses of Literacy (1957),
and tested in what he called his “working groups” of adult learners, he
directs them forward to new civic spaces. Notwithstanding the altered
circumstances within which the argument is advanced, and upon which the
critique is gently but firmly brought to bear, there is a continuity of
insight, of style, of stance, and of persuasive method.
In his later work–I am thinking particularly of First and Last Things
(1999) and Everyday Language and Everyday Life (2003–Hoggart has
returned explicitly to some of his earlier themes: language and social class,
family and neighbourliness, and what he calls the “uneasy alliance”
between capitalism and democracy. There remains the familiar, dogged
insistence upon the possibility, in an increasingly privatised, competitive
and specialised world, of “connection” and the primacy of the
commonplace:

There has always been, for me, the sense of a possible audience, of
someone out there. “Whom do you think you’re writing for?”, I am
sometimes asked, now and again with near truculence. “Who makes up the
“we” you invoke often and with some apparent confidence? Haven’t you
realised that your supposed habitual audiences, “the saving remnant”, have
all but disappeared or been, through professional training, dispersed
beyond reach; that most stick to their own specialised professional reading
nowadays?” (Hoggart, 1999, 181)

Some good, examined lives achieve unity through an ongoing process of

differentiation and self-positioning. This process was central to the
intellectual culture that Hoggart inherited and to the ideal of the engaged
public intellectual that was dominant within that culture. These engaged
intellectuals (and this is true of English intellectuals such as Edward
Thompson and Raymond Williams as of their celebrated French
30 The Legacy of Richard Hoggart: Education as Democratic Practice

counterparts) honed their public identities through combative exchanges

one with another. Theirs was, by definition, an oppositional identity. The
unity of Hoggart’s life, on the other hand, has been achieved, not through
these rituals of differentiation and self-positioning, but through a no less
difficult process of identifying commonalities and continuities. There is, as
he puts it, always “the sense of a possible audience, of someone out there”
with whom it is possible to connect and communicate.
Both Hoggart and Williams have been associated with the notion of “a
common culture”. With the rise of identity politics and its emphasis on the
recognition of difference, this notion has been increasingly questioned.
Associated with an earlier solidarity politics, the idea of “a common
culture” has been criticised for its colour-blindness and gender-blindness
and for its failure to recognise the full political implications of the new and
emergent forms of individualisation. It is not the purpose of this chapter to
defend Hoggart against these and similar charges. What needs to be
emphasised, however, is that Hoggart gained his sense of intellectual
identity (and, indeed, moral authority), not only through his insistence that
there is still a “we”, but through the invocation of this “we” as a means of
achieving “the unity of a human life”.
In all this, Hoggart’s origins are clearly in evidence: the sense of what
it meant to be brought up as a member of the working class; of what it
meant to move into the border country of a highly stratified and class-
ridden society; of what the post-War settlement meant in terms of the idea
of a welfare state and the provision of a public education and health
service; and of what it meant to dismantle, brick by brick, that ethical and
political vision of an imagined community. What is biographically and
historically interesting about the life of Hoggart is that he remains true to
his origins, while having initiated so many new beginnings both in his own
life and in the life of the institutions with which he was involved. It is a
varied but unfolding life; a life that in its unpredictable diversity is
somehow all of a piece; a life that acknowledges the possibility of
continuity. Perhaps such lives were easier then than now. Nevertheless,
there are lessons to be learnt. It is to the whole life and to the entire corpus
of public service and authorship that we must look for that distinctive
idiom which comprises Hoggart’s legacy as a public educator. In
Hoggart’s case the idiom is the man.

An idiom for life

The idiom is remarkably consistent and, in its ordinariness, highly
distinctive. Hoggart has always been at home with the first person singular
 Jon Nixon 31

and the first person plural: the “I” and the “we” of common parlance. Yet,
his prose is rarely polemical and never makes an emotional appeal to its
readership. It is never strained. Although Hoggart the man is an
unmistakable presence in his prose, it has an impersonality that seems to
speak for and from a wider constituency. After The Uses of Literacy
(1957), his chosen form was the essay.5 Even the sustained argument of
The Way We Live Now (1996), developed across 350 printed pages, is a
skilful weaving together of “occasional” essays addressed to diverse
audiences. The expressive impulse is invariably directed towards the
creation of the conditions necessary for common understanding.
Regardless of audience, he rarely uses specialist language. Indeed, his
vocabulary is uncommonly common. In the passage quoted above, for
example, “truculence” carries weight precisely because of its deployment
in a passage constructed largely around Anglo Saxon, and indeed
monosyllabic, derivatives. Its usage is witty because it associates his
detractors with a word which, in context, is slightly indecorous. It is as if
Hoggart were saying, “I can use words like “truculence”, but I choose not
to, because they are your words not mine, and because they are not part of
my idiom, not part of where I come from or choose to be”. The Hoggart
archive gives ample evidence of the meticulous stylistic redrafting that
went into achieving this kind of effect in even quite minor pieces. The
directness of style is deliberate and hard won. It is the expression, as Fred
Inglis (1995, 158-159) puts it, of “his own exemplarily principled self,
independent-minded, bluntly intelligent and knowing it … – impartial,
clear, confidential, extremely well informed, rational and upright in all
things, specific”.
Common meanings and understandings are, then, central to the
Hoggart idiom. But so, too, is the way in which he positions himself in
relation to the centre ground. Unlike some of the public intellectuals on the
Left who were his eminent contemporaries, Hoggart carried his arguments
into the heartlands of the establishment. By doing so he placed himself in
ambivalent relation to many on the Left who chose to position themselves
in the outposts of the academy or in the vanguard of radical social
movements. He risked, and sometimes incurred, the accusation of
collusion or even betrayal. In an article published in 1977 in New
Statesman he declared: “I am a left-wing social democrat and a gradualist
… I believe in the long, slow, I hope fair-minded haul”. That positioning
was, and is, central to the Hoggart idiom. To hold that position, at that
time, required a steady nerve.
It also required the capacity, and linguistic resources, necessary to go
on arguing beyond the point of partisan disagreement. Moreover, this was
32 The Legacy of Richard Hoggart: Education as Democratic Practice

a quality he greatly admired in others. In almost all his obituary notices

and orations, Hoggart prioritised assessment of character over the
chronicling of achievement. Repeatedly he paid tribute to plainness of
speech, lack of pomposity, honesty, hard work, fair-mindedness, kindness;
but, above all, he seems to value the way in which certain individuals are
able to bring these dispositions together in the interests of achieving
mutual understanding. Here he is, for example, extolling the virtues of
Arthur Humphreys, his erstwhile colleague and Professor of English at
Leicester University: “[He] was the most accessible and unmalicious of
men so that both lions and lambs, hawks and doves, of academic life
gathered round and sat, for a time at ease, under his benign shadow …
This moral authority gave him the kind of dignity which is not imposed by
a sense of self importance” (Hoggart, 1978).
Hoggart’s prose aspires to that kind of moral authority. It builds
strategic alliances and traces unexpected lines of continuity; it reaches out
to its readership, rather than standing back and expecting its readers to
decode its meaning. It adopts a listening, synthesising idiom, which, while
not averse to highlighting significant differences and uncomfortable
silences, is centrally concerned with building commonality and a sense of
shared understanding. It is the idiom of a new kind of civic leadership
intent upon the reconstruction, within institutional contexts characterised
by increasing stratification, of a genuinely civil society. Hoggart himself
made clear his sense of the need for such an idiom in public life when
commenting upon Thatcher”s (“Mrs Thatcher” as he referred to her) style
of “confrontational government”:

Her eyes flashed: how else, she asked, does one move forward except
through the battle between firmly held opinions and the refusal to
compromise? Consensus is assumed to be precisely a smudging word for
compromise. The short first answer is that if we all act like that we will get
nowhere, will have a stalemate until someone finally capitulates out of
exhaustion, bullying or the pulling of rank, rather than by a process of
thoughtful exchanging of opinions … Confrontation can be tonic but,
except as a debating device, should be controlled by the overriding wish
eventually to arrive at what you will hope to call, if not the truth, then the
right course in the circumstances. Otherwise the tonic becomes a heady
drug, which can lead to bad judgement … At that point the process has
become a form of creeping mild corruption. (Hoggart, 1996, 285-287)

Hoggart’s own idiom, as evidenced in this passage, models what he sees as

the necessary components of deliberative democracy: the plain speaking
back to power without belligerence or bile; the lack of pomposity; the
slight uneasiness in laying claim to “the truth”; the preference for “the
 Jon Nixon 33

right course of action in the circumstances”; the emphasis on judgement as

the hallmark of civility; and the insistence that “bad judgement” is a form
of “mild corruption”. Judgement is central to that idiom: judgement
grounded in experience; grounded, that is, in “the unity of a human life”.
His prose is always discriminating. (Note that “mild corruption”,
suggesting a scale, a sense of balance, a sense of proportion). He returns
relentlessly to his origins for an understanding of his own authority as a
public figure and as a writer and for a reminder of his own responsibility
for making right judgements. Right judgement is not, for Hoggart, a matter
of cautious calibration. It is what happens when one brings the sum total of
one’s past experience to bear on present circumstances in the interests of a
better future. It involves purposeful circumspection, looking before and
after, but also a wary acknowledgement of its own uncertainty and
indeterminacy.
Hoggart, one feels, would be in broad agreement with Montaigne
regarding “the uncertainty of our judgement”. Montaigne, the 16th Century
French essayist, so unlike Hoggart in his social and cultural origins, shared
with him a background in public administration and humanistic
scholarship, a deep interest in education, and a passion for the essay form.
Indeed, in many ways they shared a common idiom: that of the self-
questioning essayist forever testing ideas against life and life against ideas.
The idiom lay in the deliberative to and fro of thought and action. Life
taught Montaigne, as it seems to have taught Hoggart that our reasoning
has to be in constant interplay with the unpredictability and contingency of
what happens to us:

… events and results … depend for the most part on fortune, which will
not conform to or subject itself to our reason and foresight … [T]o
understand things aright, it seems that our opinions and deliberations
depend upon fortune just as much, and that she involves our reason too in
her uncertainties and confusion. (Montaigne, 1958, 129-130)

This is not to suggest that Hoggart’s world view is in any way fatalistic or
deterministic. On the contrary, he is unswervingly open to future
possibilities. Indeed, “prospectus”–the operational requirements of our
orientation towards the future–is one of Hoggart’s key words. Yet a
disciplined retrospect is always at the heart of his impulse towards, and
organisation of the resources necessary for, that orientation. That too is in
the language and the habitual referents: Leeds, the Grammar School, Aunt
Clara, the “bundles and clusters” (as he came to term them) of the
vernacular (“I wish I could write so that the timbre of that life was carried
in my prose”, he wrote in 1961. See Hoggart, 1973b, 188). Judgement,
34 The Legacy of Richard Hoggart: Education as Democratic Practice

discrimination, balance, and occasional bloody-mindedness, exercised

always in the interests of a better society, have their complex, entangled
roots in that unresolved past. But there is no hint of nostalgia, nor any
suggestion of bitterness; just the insistence upon the moral necessity of
carrying the best of the past forward into a better, and fairer, future. “To
live is itself a value judgement”, as Albert Camus put it. “To breathe is to
judge” (Quoted in Hoggart, 1996, 321).
In his 1963 review of the reception of the Pilkington Report on
Broadcasting (published in the previous year), Hoggart defended the way
in which the Pilkington Committee had “walked a rough road in trying to
find a plain voice; it ran right between professional narks and trigger-
happy shooters at clay feet, on the one side; and on the other, the organ-
voiced and archaic chauvinists”. One senses that Hoggart approved of the
“plain voice” adopted in the report and the “rough road” taken by the
committee. In expressing that approval he quotes Auden’s line about the
lack of any “sane affirmative speech” (Hoggart, 1973a, 195). “Sane” is a
striking word to use in this context and is clearly associated in Hoggart’s
mind with plain speech and with maintaining a balance between
contrasting forms of wrong-headedness (sharp-shooting “narks” versus
out-moded “chauvinists”). Indeed, it is a word which might well be
applied to Hoggart’s own distinctive idiom, with its emphasis on balance
and discrimination, its insistence on calling a spade a spade (but not a
bloody spade), and the premium it places on sound judgement. It is an
idiom that owes something to Dr Johnson, who knew what madness was
but valued sanity. In his great Dictionary of the English Language of
1755, he defined sanity simply as “soundness of mind”.
Sanity has never been a popular word. As Adam Phillips, the
psychoanalyst, puts it: “there are no professional experts on the subject, no
famously sane poets … No one is famous for their sanity” (Phillips, 2006,
33-35). It is worth bearing this point in mind in assessing Hoggart’s
legacy. The idiom with which we associate Hoggart never was
fashionable. It has too few quirks and intensities, too much composure and
balance, too much breadth of understanding, too few inventive leaps and
flourishes, ever to be modish; but in its measured tones, its fair-
mindedness and sense of proportion, its steadiness and eye to the future,
the sanity of Hoggart’s idiom has enduring relevance. “Havoc”, suggests
Phillips (2006, 245) “is always wreaked in fast cures for confusion. The
sane believe that confusion acknowledged, is a virtue; and that humiliating
another person is the worst thing we ever do.”
 Jon Nixon 35

A life-long commitment
The life and the idiom are expressive of a deep commitment to the idea of
education as innately democratic. Education should here be interpreted
broadly. I have referred to Hoggart’s early work in adult education. But his
work with UNESCO, the Arts Council, and the BBC, was also part of an
educative project that aspired to be both democratic and deliberative.
Indeed the notion of “broadcasting” is a fitting metaphor for the way in
which he conceives of education as necessarily “extra-mural”: always
rendering the institutional boundaries permeable, always reaching out. For
Hoggart, that process is not some kind of optional extra. It is a
requirement. Unless education reaches out, it ceases to be educational and
becomes merely a residue of received wisdom, a mechanism of social
selection, and/or a means whereby the elite maintain their power and
control. Whatever is educational about education has to do with this
democratic impulse to connect across institutional and cultural boundaries.
Hence the educational commitment, not just to those institutions
traditionally defined as “institutions of education”, but to civil society as a
whole and to the development of an educated public capable and willing to
participate in such a society.
Educators, Hoggart claims in The Way We Live Now, have a
responsibility to “bear witness”: “not automatically to accept majority
opinion as a value-judgement in itself”, but to cultivate “a self-aware
consciousness, the unwillingness to be swayed by either public fashion or
self-interest” (Hoggart, 1996, 314). But the “witnesses”, he insists, do not
correspond to what (following Coleridge) he terms “a clerisy”, even when
we define the latter in secular humanist terms such as “intellectual” or
“public intellectual”. He holds on, as he puts it, to the idea that

some people in a society “bear witness” but, even more, to the belief that
they are not a special caste, that a society should be fluid and that that
fluidity allows for very many–more than are habitually assumed–to bear
witness, to be among the intelligent lay people who are as important as the
recognised intellectuals, whatever their origins. Such a sense of
responsibility depends on a certain spirit and cast of mind; and those may
exist or be elicited in many people and all parts of society. This is the
major counterforce to the pressures of hegemony. (Hoggart, 1996, 317)

So the impulse towards the democratisation of education is both cross-

institutional and cross-cultural, and those in the vanguard are a mixed
bunch. One of the crucial commitments they have in common, however, is
the commitment to the right use of language. Hoggart is always at pains to
36 The Legacy of Richard Hoggart: Education as Democratic Practice

distinguish right usage from specialist usage, which he associates with the
proliferation, and increasing stratification, of the professional middle
classes. Precision, for Hoggart, is not a matter of specialisation. He is also
suspicious of, as he puts it, “that range of words which suggest a wish,
probably unconscious, to evade reality; and judgement”: words and
phrases such as “liquidate”, “take out”, “friendly fire” (Hoggart, 1996,
161). Those who “bear witness” spot their own recurrent images and are
alert to the linguistic usage of others. They are, as Lakoff and Johnson
(2003) put it, attuned to the “metaphors we live by” and to the ways in
which those metaphors shape and sometimes distort our view of the world.
A commitment to education as democratic practice involves a deep
entanglement with the exactitudes of communication. Saying what you
mean and saying it in such a way that others will grasp what it is you
intend to say is central to the democratic process. It is not just literacy that
matters, but the uses to which we put literacy and the moral ends and
purposes that are involved in that usage.
Language is the point at which the political project of social democracy
confronts the moral project of respect for one’s self (the way one says
things) and respect for others (the way they understand things). In this, as
in so many respects, it is difficult not to see Hoggart as a child of his time.
Against the allurements of modernist rhetoric and stylistic complexity,
Hoggart (1973b) affirms the Orwellian values of plain speech and Auden’s
insistence on the need to “undo the folded lie”. In his essays on these two
authors, he commends Auden’s later poetry for being “both warm and dry,
exceptionally elegant, civil and agreeable” (83), and responds with “a
feeling of relief” to Orwell’s written style “because it refuses to pussyfoot
… It has a distinctive kick and energy” (117). He wants not only to tell it
as it is, but to tell it in such a way that others will understand and not be
deceived. He wants, as did the best of his generation, to reclaim language
for the telling of truth and in support of right action and for ensuring that
everyone has the wherewithal for discerning the truth and assessing the
moral implications of their own and others” actions.
This is a particularly relevant concern within contemporary society
where the parameters of what in the past might have been seen as
specialist domains of academic thought have shifted radically. Coping
with everyday life involves making choices which necessarily raise
questions regarding, for example, the nature of human dignity and the
balance of moral responsibility that have traditionally been specialist
philosophical questions. As Slavoj Zizek, the renowned Slovenian
sociologist and cultural theorist, has argued,
 Jon Nixon 37

today we live in extremely interesting times where one of the main

consequences of such developments as biogenetics, cloning, artificial
intelligence and so on is that for the first time maybe in the history of
humanity we have a situation in which what were philosophical problems
are now problems that concern everyone, that are discussed widely by the
public … It is a unique time when everyone is, in a way, forced to be some
kind of philosopher. (Zizek and Daly, 2004, 53-54)

Hoggart understood early on that these “extremely interesting times”

require sustainable communities to ensure the democratisation of
language: networks of relationship that render the telling of truth both
possible and necessary. “Before making larger gestures or assertions”, he
wrote in a 1967 essay on state support for the arts, “we have to learn to
talk to each other, and that includes listening to each other, more simply
and directly” (Hoggart, 1973a, 243). Relationship is fundamental to
Hoggart’s understanding of this necessary link between the political and
ethical dimensions of education as democratic practice: hence his abiding
interest in notions of family, kinship, affiliation, association,
neighbourhood, institution, discussion, working groups, seminars, etc.
These are the civic spaces within which we acquire the dispositions, the
attitudes, necessary for thoughtful, critical enquiry. They are where for
most people most of the time learning takes place and where learning
matters. The impulse towards education as a form of democratic practice
sustains, and is sustained by, what Hoggart termed this “delicate but tough
spider’s web of relationships” (Hoggart, 1996, 331): delicate, because
worthwhile relationships necessarily involve the recognition of difference;
tough, because such recognition rarely comes ready made but must be
worked at.
Hoggart’s commitment to education as democratic practice is premised
on the assumption that learning is a social process: that it involves
dialogue, discussion, debate, and the working through of complex
disagreements regarding matters of principle and procedure. That, for
Hoggart, is what learning is all about. That commitment is also premised,
however, on the assumption that learning is something that learners do
rather than something they have done to them. It is not so much what
learners receive as what they make of what they receive that matters in the
educational long run. This insight was central to his analyses of the
emergent post-1945 popular culture. It enabled him to resist both the
cultural pessimism of the Frankfurt School, with its radical critique of
“mass culture”, and the received wisdom of the establishment, with its
reactionary fears regarding any supposed dilution of their “high culture”. It
enabled him to understand that, notwithstanding the quality of what I am
38 The Legacy of Richard Hoggart: Education as Democratic Practice

looking at, the quality of my seeing and the sense I make of what I am
seeing also matters educationally. Learners are active and sometimes
collaborative agents in their own learning, not just passive and isolated
recipients of what others have learnt and choose to pass on.
Central to Hoggart’s democratic vision for education is his belief that
learning belongs to people not to particular institutional settings. He
considered the state provision of public education to be of supreme
importance, but never assumed that schools, colleges and universities had
a monopoly on learning. His long march through a variety of institutions,
in a variety of roles, is testimony to his belief in the goods of civil society
and the need for the organisational and bureaucratic structures that
underpin and sustain it. For Hoggart, however, the potential for learning is
everywhere; it cannot be confined within school gates, college cloisters or
the ivory towers of higher education. Learning is part of the cultural
groundswell that sifts from the residual the emergent elements: “living
culture recognizes the diversity, the particularity, of all experience. It sits
down before its material, and does not fear being clumsy or gauche so long
as it is in touch with that material. … It does not let virtuosity take over
from virtue, presentation from substance, the “way” of saying from the
“what” is being said” (Hoggart, 1973a, 131). Hoggart trusts–unfashionably,
waywardly, cussedly, but gently–in our capacity to learn.

Conclusion
Stefan Collini (2006) argues, in what he calls the “absence thesis”, that the
English have traditionally been reluctant to admit that they have
intellectuals. Indeed, the claim to be immune to intellectual influence is a
large part of England’s albeit fuzzy sense of itself and of what Collini sees
as a distinctively British “tradition of denial”. “Intellectuals”, as Timothy
Garton Ash (2006) puts it, “begin at Calais”. “British intellectual”, he
claims, is an oxymoron: “The river of colloquial English carries a heavy
silt of mildly pejorative or satirical epithets: egghead, boffin, highbrow,
bluestocking, know-all, telly don, media don, chattering classes, too clever
by half. The qualifier “so-called” travels with the word “intellectual” like a
bodyguard. The inverted commas of irony are never far away”.
In his posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism,
Edward Said coined the term “scholar teacher” to describe his work as an
academic and to distinguish this from his more overtly political activities
as a spokesperson and arbiter for the rights of the Palestinian people.
(Said, 2004, 1-30). It seems an appropriate descriptor of Hoggart’s various
activities within the broad field of education, culture and the arts. Like
 Jon Nixon 39

Said, Hoggart has defined his role in terms of scholarship and teaching
even when fulfilling administrative responsibilities. Moreover, he has
always insisted upon the public significance of that role. He has
exemplified in his life and work the public significance of the scholar
teacher: the significance, that is, of scholarship and teaching within the
public sphere. He has crossed intellectual and institutional boundaries; he
has refused to be confined within a particular academic specialism; he has
communicated through a variety of media. He has brought the resources of
persuasion and scholarly enquiry to bear on a wide range of public
concerns. Moreover, he has shown that these resources matter; that they
have the capacity to inform public debate and shape the political agenda;
that occasionally they may even give direction and moral purpose to the
faming of public policy. Educational policy is not just a brokered
agreement as to what works in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. It
constitutes an always difficult, always provisional, agreement as to what
works in practice in terms of whatever a good, or just plain decent, society
we might ultimately settle for.
Forty years on his assessment of the impasse faced by those of us who
work in the higher education sector still holds true:

By now it is possible to see the outline of what ought to be the next great
wave in discussion about higher education … To put it only a little more
melodramatically than it deserves, the question will not be “Should
universities expand?” but “Can universities preserve their essential
freedoms?”. These freedoms are beginning to be eroded not by deliberate
political action nor by conscious wish on the part of politicians of any
party, but by the steadily increasing movement towards a controlled
functionalism, the movement towards making universities into, primarily,
servicing agencies to society’s existing needs and assumptions (most
obviously in science and technology), and the slow withering away of the
idea of universities as centres of free, speculative enquiry about the
assumptions of society itself. (Hoggart, 1966)

The authority, the touch of self irony, the insistence upon getting the
question right, the steady but uncompromising critique, that
unmistakeable sense of moral urgency: these are quintessential Hoggart.
We have his exemplar of a life well lived and lived for the good of others,
his complex idiom played out across the impressive range of his writing,
and his commitment to the goods of civil society. We also have his
prescience, his sense of what the future holds, and his realistic grasp of the
consequences of particular courses of action. Richard Hoggart, the public
educator, leaves as his legacy the enduring idea of education as a way of
40 The Legacy of Richard Hoggart: Education as Democratic Practice

doing deliberative democracy; or, as he might put it, of learning how to

use our various literacies in order to speak to and understand each other.

Works Cited
Ash, T.G. (2006. Are there British intellectuals? Yes, and they’ve never
had it so good. The Guardian. (27 April), 31.
Collini, S. (2006). Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hoggart, R. (1951). Auden: An Introductory Essay. London: Chatto and
Windus.
—. (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with
special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto
and Windus.
—. (1966). After the bulge. (Review of Lord Robbins, “The University in
the Modern World”) The Listener. (2 June).
—. (1973a). Speaking to Each Other. Volume One: About Society.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. (1st published 1970).
—. (1973b). Speaking to Each Other. Volume Two: About Literature.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. (1st published 1970).
—. (1977). Extremism in higher education, New Statesman. (14 October),
505.
—. (1978). Professing the good life (Obituary: Arthur Humphreys),
Guardian (12 August).
—. (1982a). Closing observations, in R. Hoggart and J. Morgan (eds) The
Future of Broadcasting: Essays on Authority, Style and Choice.
London and Basingstoke: Macmillan.
—. (1982b). An English Temper: Essays on Education, Culture and
Communications. London: Chatto and Windus.
—. (1993). Death of a tireless and true radical (Obituary: E.P.Thompson),
The Observer (29 August), 3
—. (1996). The Way We Live Now. London: Pimlico. (1st published by
Chatto and Windus, 1995).
—. (1999). First and Last Things. London: Aurum Press.
—. (2003). Everyday Language and Everyday Life. New Brunswick
(USA) and London (UK): Transaction Publishers.
Inglis, F. (1995). Raymond Williams. London and New York: Routledge.
Johnson, R. (1979). Three problematics: elements of a theory of working-
class culture, in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds) Working-
Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory. London, Melbourne,
Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg: Hutchinson in association with the
 Jon Nixon 41

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies University of Birmingham,

201-237.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London:
Duckworth.(2nd edn.).
Montaigne, M. de (1958). Essays. (Trans. J.M.Cohen) London: Penguin
Books.
Phillips, A. (2006). Going Sane. London: Penguin Books. (1st published by
Hamish Hamilton, 2005).
Rancière, J. (2007). On the Shores of Politics. (Trans. L. Heron) London
and New York: Verso.
—. (2006). Hatred of Democracy. (Trans. S. Corcoram) London and New
York: Verso.
Said, E.W. (2004). Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York:
Columbia University Press
Skidelsky, R. (2006). John Bull”s small ideas, Prospect (July), 64-66.
Taylor, D.J. (2007). Working-class hero, Guardian Review (February 24)
Thompson, E.P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class.
London: Gollancz.
Williams, R. (1958). Culture and Society: 1780-1950. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Zizek, S. and Daly, G. (2004). Conversations with Zizek. Cambridge:
Polity.

Acknowledgement
I acknowledge with thanks the assistance of Jacky Hodgson, Head of
Special Collections, University of Sheffield Library, for pointing me in the
direction of relevant documents contained within the Richard Hoggart
archive.

Notes
1
Quoted in Hoggart, 1951, 220. Hoggart quotes these lines again in his 1957
(revised 1966) essay on Auden, “The long walk: the poetry of W. H. Auden”.
(Hoggart, 1973b, 83).
2
Hoggart’s legacy is, of course, broader than that sketched in this chapter. As D. J.
Taylor (2007) points out, “no survey of 1950s social trends … lacks its half-dozen
42 The Legacy of Richard Hoggart: Education as Democratic Practice

references to Uses or omits subservience to the Hoggart line. Almost single-

handedly, he established a tradition which every working-class novelist who
followed in his path seemed to illustrate or magnify”.
3
In his obituary of E.P. Thompson, Hoggart (1993) wrote: “With Raymond
Williams and myself, he really came through in adult education in the Fifties. We
all wrote our big books then, although we were not aware of what each other was
doing”. Johnson (1979) links Hoggart, Thompson and Williams not only in
generational terms and with reference to their early involvement in adult education,
but through the way in which for each of them “experience” defined both the
object and the method of inquiry: “there is much self-revelation in Hoggart’s
portrayal of his childhood, in Williams’ pursuit of “the implications of personal
experience to the point where they have organically emerged as methods, concepts,
strategies”, and in Thompson’s style of polemical address” (215).
4
Collini (2006, 171-198) provides a comprehensive intellectual history of the ideas
in play during this period. See also Skidelsky (2006).
5
“I’ve been practising the long essay, which sometimes starts life as a formal
lecture, for almost a quarter of a century”, he wrote in the preface to his 1982
collection of essays.
 “TO THINK FEARLESSLY”:
RICHARD HOGGART AND THE POLITICS
OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

BEN CLARKE

In A Local Habitation, Richard Hoggart writes that

My socialism emerged from looking round and deciding that that sort of
life, those sorts of divisions, were simply not good enough, least of all in a
society with the pretensions of Britain. It was a Tawneyesque democratic
socialism which stressed fraternity as the ground for equality and of the
urge towards liberty; it was not theoretic and to have called it ideological
would have been a misuse of language. (1988, 130)

The statement locates him within a particular political tradition. The

reference to “democratic socialism”, for example, evokes George Orwell’s
deployment of the term, as in his declaration that “Every line of serious
work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly,
against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”1
More broadly it identifies Hoggart with a tradition that Bernard Crick
traces through “Morris, Blatchford, Carpenter, Cole, Tawney, Laski,
Bevan and Foot” (1988, 4). This form of socialism, amongst other things,
emphasises democratic participation, values tradition, and recognises that
“there are some areas of life which have to be preserved from politics: a
good politics even sets up barriers of laws, institutions and customs
against itself” (ibid,16). It fosters both individuality and “fraternity”,
arguing, as Hoggart writes, that we “should feel members one of another,
but also retain all we have of sparky, spikey individuality” (1990, 78). As
such, it posits constant interaction between individuals and the
communities they inhabit, a process of communication and indeed
argumentation, in Habermas’ sense of “a competition with arguments in
order to reach a consensus”, a “cooperative search for truth” (1990, 160).
Integral to these ideas of “democratic” politics and “fraternity” are
questions about communication, language, and the ways in which we
44 Richard Hoggart and the Politics of the English Language

speak to each other. This does not mean that democratic socialism
neglects, for example, economic issues, but simply that the political
struggle is carried out across a wide range of interwoven fields that
influence and modify one another. As Althusser argued, the “philosophical
fight over words is a part of the political fight” (1971, 25). This fight is
concerned not only with the content of critical analyses but also with the
practices of critical texts, their language and methods of persuasion.
Hoggart’s “democratic socialism” does not precede his texts, which then
give it form, but is encoded and enacted in his writing.
Issues of language and communication dominate Hoggart’s work, from
his interpretations of specific literary texts to his studies of the techniques
used by the mass media. His analyses consistently focus upon the
connotations of words, phrases and images, paying close attention to style
and tone. This approach is inseparable from his view of texts, literary or
otherwise, as cultural products. In a discussion of his critical practice in An
Imagined Life, he writes that his “preoccupation was and remains: to try to
develop the closest and most sensitive reading possible of any literary
work in the belief that, read in and for itself, the work might throw a
unique light on the culture within which it had been written.” As he
recognises, this idea relies upon “a belief in the power of language itself as
the most important indicator of a hold on values” and a belief that the
“meanings, the weights, of those words and the sense of common
assumptions would vary in different periods” (Hoggart, 1992, 93) His
analyses of language, literature and culture move between text and
context, exploring not only narratives but also the conditions within which
they are produced and consumed. For Hoggart, literature has a particular
importance as a complex form of expression that provides unique insights
into cultural structures and processes. He argues that “good writer can give
us a sense of the formative but largely submerged currents in an age’s
life”, including a sense “of the way life was lived ‘in the bone’ at the
time—that behind people’s actions and reactions lay this particular sense
of a nation’s destiny, these assumptions about the relations between the
sexes, about class and money and duty” (Hoggart, 1970, 24). Literature
encodes and questions the ideas and values that structure society, exposing
them to critical analysis.
In a 1969 lecture to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
Birmingham, Hoggart outlined the methodology and objectives of what he
described as “literary-cultural studies” (1969, 15). The new subject was
inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on work by historians, psychologists
(particularly social psychologists), anthropologists and sociologists. Its
distinctive contribution to cultural research lay in its use of the techniques
 Ben Clarke 45

of literary criticism to interpret a wide variety of “texts” including “non-

formal but nevertheless richly expressive phenomena of contemporary
culture” (ibid, 15) such as “styles of dress” and “manners” (ibid,14)
Hoggart argued that in contrast to sociologists, for example, whose work
“is at bottom–it must be–quantitative”, those trained in literary analysis
practice “qualitative or tonal cultural reading” (ibid, 17). They are
particularly concerned with literature “at all levels”, as all texts, from
Hamlet or Ulysses to “James Bond, the Archers, Andy Capp, Mrs. Dale,
Science fiction, Coronation Street” are “shot through with–irradiated
with–values, with values ordered and values acted out” (ibid, 19). This
interest in the implications of even the “apparently most processed forms
of mass art” (ibid, 12) distinguishes the “literary-cultural” scholar from the
literary critic whose work focuses on canonical texts. The difference
illustrates the objectives of the new field, which concentrates on the ways
in which texts reflect, shape and question social structures and values. In
contrast to “traditional” forms of literary criticism that treated literature as
a relatively self-contained field and used historical information only as a
background to the analysis of narrative or aesthetic problems, “literary-
cultural studies” explores the constant exchanges between text and society.
This approach has obvious implications for the study of literature as
such, as it suggests that literary texts are the products of particular
histories, cultures and debates rather than expressions of an ahistorical
pursuit of “beauty” or “truth”. This does not mean that they signify only
within the conditions of their production, as texts are by definition
transmissible and, as Hoggart argues, “some words, some weights, would
echo down the years” (1992, 93). The recognition that all texts bear
cultural meanings similarly does not necessarily mean abandoning the
attempt to distinguish between different “levels” of artistic production.
Hoggart insists that cultural studies “was not a lapse into the ‘The Beatles
are in their own way as good as Beethoven’ nonsense” (1990, 130).
Although he argues it is “better not to start out with a priori divisions
between types of art (high, middle, low or any of the others)” there are
“valid distinctions” founded upon differences in “integrity, complexity,
perceptiveness” (1969, 13). Some literature offers more to readers than
others. He describes the encounter with canonical writers such as “Jane
Austen or George Eliot or Thomas Hardy” as “one of the most important
of all liberating experiences” (1990, 61-2), and one which education
should extend to the greatest possible number of people. However, all
texts provide insights into the cultures within which they are produced and
consumed, and “popular literature and art” are “worth study” as they
46 Richard Hoggart and the Politics of the English Language

“might tell us surprising things about ourselves, about other people and
about our and their imaginations” (ibid, 130) As Jonathan Rose argues:

Hoggart had never been an uncritical populist: he originally intended to

title his most famous book The Abuses of Literacy. His definition of culture
combined a reverence for great books, a lesser but real admiration for not-
so-great books, and a sociological interest in the uses of all levels of
literature. It avoided the sharp dichotomies drawn by the Romantics,
Victorians and Modernists, who tended to make a fetish of the highest art
and dismiss everything else as pernicious rubbish. It equally rejected the
postmodernist notion that "the comic strip cannot be treated as
qualitatively inferior to a Shakespeare play or any other classic text."
(2002, 366)

The argument that scholars should analyse a wide range of texts neither
precludes nor resolves questions about their relative value, although it
does challenge the ideas that some of them can simply be disregarded and
that the “established curriculum in English Studies” is a “prescription from
heaven” (1992, 91). Hoggart exposes the canon to debate and
reinterpretation, but his own interventions in these discussions argue that
certain texts do have a consistent value and that it is not only possible but
worthwhile to discriminate between different “levels” of literature.
Hoggart argues that all texts are informed by the culture within which
they are written, whether they reinscribe or question its values, narratives
and rhetorical modes. In so doing, he suggests that criticism itself reflects
and contributes to the cultures it analyses. Just as he argues that literature
“can never be aesthetically pure or abstractly contemplative”, because “its
medium, language, is used by everybody in all sorts of everyday
situations; and because it tries both to say and to be” (1970, 13), so
criticism deploys the narratives and values it interprets. A critical book or
article is a text amongst others, and so potentially subject to the same
interpretative strategies. A close reading of the form and content of
Hoggart’s own writing reveals the way it aligns itself within cultural
debates. This chapter focuses on the political principles his work promotes
and enacts. It explores the narratives he draws upon and persuasive
techniques he employs, arguing that his texts contribute to the kind of
democratic socialism outlined above, founded upon broad participation in
politics and collective decision making, ideally by an educated and
informed constituency. It is a form of political practice, and undermines
the idea the contributions to academic knowledge are neutral or
disinterested.
 Ben Clarke 47

An obvious starting point for an analysis of Hoggart’s writing and

politics is his scepticism about a particular range of academic discourse.
He insists that if “anything would make me at last give up taking part in
the arts/culture debate it would be the thought of having to push around
yet again those tired counters which do duty for clearer or new thoughts,
the to’ing and fro’ing as in an endless verbal tennis game, with worn-out
balls on a badly marked-out court” (1992, 280). This is not a simple
refusal of a “technical” or “theoretical” vocabulary. Indeed, he writes that:

I admire and sometimes use a language of theory which captures concepts

irreplaceably. I mistrust the way some people use abstractions as props or
crutches, substitutes for thought, ways of showing others and assuring
themselves that they belong to an inner group. I suspect anyone who
peppers his papers with “heuristic”, “hegemony”, “hierarchy”, “paradigm”,
“problematic”, “reification”, “homology” and the like. One can sometimes
work through almost unintelligible and certainly rebarbative papers only to
realise at the end that, though what they say is sensible and in some ways
perceptive, it could have been said almost entirely without that apparatus
of in-group theoretical language. (Ibid, 95)

The passage identifies two distinct problems with such language. In the
first place it is imprecise, as it consists of self-sustaining tokens that act as
“substitutes for thought” rather than means of negotiating the complex and
specific. The description evokes Orwell’s famous condemnation of an
“inflated style” in which “Latin words fall upon the facts like soft snow,
blurring the outlines and covering up all the details” (1968, 136-7), a style
he argued was better suited to concealing than exposing oppression.
Despite the overt complexity of “theoretical language” it can function as a
series of “counters” that replace rather than clarify critical thought. The
objection is to what Italo Calvino describes as “generic and abstract words,
words that are used for everything, words that are used not to think and not
to say” (2000, 220).
In addition, however, Hoggart focuses upon the way “theoretical”
language appeals to and reinforces the notion of an “inner group”,
confining discussion and debate to a limited community defined by a
particular vocabulary and the educational and cultural background that
sustains it. As Jonathan Rose argues, this strategic use of language
consolidates the identity and position of its users by protecting particular
forms of criticism or artistic production:

One can copyright literary works but not literary genres: though The Waste
Land, Howl, and Of Grammatology are all protected, anyone is free to
enter the business of producing vers libre, beat poetry, or deconstructive
48 Richard Hoggart and the Politics of the English Language

criticism. Such literature can be protected from imitators, popularizers,

critics, and rival schools only through various forms of encryption, such as
Latin bibles, Marxist jargon, modernist obscurantism, or postmodernist
opacity. (2002, 395)

The use of language to exclude and to thereby produce and reproduce the
identity of an “inner group” is not peculiar to the academy, “theory”, or a
particular political position. As the reference to “Marxist jargon”
illustrates, the notion of an “inner group” persists even amongst some who
identify themselves as on the Left. Those who support the idea of a
socialist elite frequently legitimise their position by insisting that a
political movement requires leaders capable of determining collective
strategy, such as the Communist Party described by Marx and Engels as
possessed of “a theoretical insight into the conditions, progress and
general result” of the “class struggle” (1996, 13). The Russian Bolsheviks
provided one model for such an organisation, and the example helped
sustain a variety of small left-wing parties who failed to achieve broad
support, including the Communist Party of Great Britain, which as
Valentine Cunningham observes remained “tiny” even during the political
crises of the interwar period, “with a mere 3,200 members in 1930, rising
to about 11,700 in 1936-7 with the impact of the Spanish Civil War,
mounting on a crescendo of anti-fascist zeal to 18,000 or so in 1939,
before wilting away to 9,000 upon the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1940”
(Cunningham, 1993, 30). The belief that a small group could initiate and
direct revolutionary change ignores Marx and Engels insistence that the
“proletarian movement is the independent movement of the vast majority
in the interests of that vast majority” (1996, 11), and so necessarily
involves not only mass action but mass participation. However, the
implication of both the argument and specialist jargon it sustains is that
there is a particular section of the Left capable, by virtue of their insights
or abilities, of guiding or even directing the actions of the majority in
whose interests they act. This idea has proved influential, and indeed
Stephen Ingle divides the “development of socialism in Britain” into two
distinct traditions, the “moralistic” and the “scientific”, one of which
“seeks to give wider scope to individuals to play a part in the decisions
which affect their lives, holding, almost invariably, that this can only be
achieved in an egalitarian society; and one which believes that although
government must be carried out in the interests of the many, it can only be
managed on their behalf by their superiors” (Ingle, 1979, 10). Hoggart’s
“democratic socialism”, which is interwoven with his belief in “the
importance of the right of each of us to speak about how we see life, the
world” (1992, 26), identifies him with the “moralistic” tradition, although
 Ben Clarke 49

in an interview with Nicholas Tredell he queries the word itself, arguing

that his “socialism is moral (I hope not moralistic)” (Hoggart, 2002a, 303).
In contrast to the “scientific”, which confines both power and the debate
over its use to a minority, this form of socialism is political, in Crick’s
sense of politics as a process that incorporates “at least some tolerance of
different truths, some recognition that government is possible, indeed best
conducted, amid the open canvassing of rival interests” (1976, 18).
A technical jargon not only reflects but reproduces the dominance of
an “elite”. As Frantz Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth, it “is true
that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates
in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be
managed from above.” The use of such language, or any other specialist
vocabulary, constructs the conditions upon which its arguments are
founded, defining the terms of communication and implicitly, therefore,
who can speak. The use of a minority language consolidates the position
of this minority. As a result, if “recourse is had to technical language, this
signifies that it has been decided to consider the masses as uninitiated”
(Fanon, 1990, 152). Hoggart’s texts conspicuously avoid such “technical”
language, employing a style that evokes the novelist or essayist rather than
the academic. He acknowledges particular “debts to Butler and Orwell”,
who provided examples of a “clear unembroidered” (2005, 112) style, but
his work draws on a broad range of literature for its methods of
representation and interpretation. He employs a variety of literary, and
most prominently novelistic techniques, including the use of authorial
asides and dense, impressionistic description. In a famous account of a
public library in The Uses of Literacy, for example, he writes that:

This is the special refuge of the misfits and left-overs, of the hollow-
cheeked, watery-eyed, shabby and furtively sad. An eccentric absorbed in
the rituals of his monomania sits between a pinched unmarried brother,
kept by a married sister for the sake of his war-pension, and an aged
widower from a cheap lodging or a house smelling permanently of old tea
and the frying-pan. They come in off the streets, on to which they had gone
after swilling under a cold-tap and twisting scarves round collarless necks;
they come in after walking round a bit, watching other people doing things,
belonging somewhere. (1957, 60)

The passage evokes the representation of urban poverty by figures such as

Orwell, Greene, and the documentary writers of the nineteen-thirties, who
Hoggart acknowledges had “a great impact” (2002a, 305) on his
generation. It relies upon the description of “typical” characters and
sensual impressions rather than, for instance, statistical surveys or
50 Richard Hoggart and the Politics of the English Language

interviews with actual library users, and consequently suggests a passage

in a novel more than one in a text by the kind of sociologist Hoggart
described as a “number-cruncher” (ibid, 309). This approach to writing
produces a lucid, accessible prose that distances itself from the specialist
registers used in much scholarship. It also implicitly attaches a value to
varieties of understanding conventionally excluded from formal studies
but integral to literature. The texts do not dismiss traditional academic
systems of knowledge, but implicitly seek to extend both the language and
methods of cultural research.
The openness of Hoggart’s texts to other ideas and forms of knowing is
compounded by their openness to other voices. His texts are “novelistic”
in Bakhtin’s sense, incorporating a variety of distinct and sometimes
competing tones, registers and narratives. In The Uses of Literacy, for
example, he describes how the working-class define “Them” as:

“the people at the top”, “the higher-ups”, the people who give you your
dole, call you up, tell you to go to war, fine you, made you split the family
in the “thirties to avoid a reduction in the Means Test allowance, “get yer
in the end”, “aren’t really to be trusted”, “talk posh”, “are all twisters
really”, “never tell yer owt” (e.g. about a relative in hospital), “clap yer in
clink”, “will do y” down if they can”, “summons yer”, “are all in a click
(clique) together”, “treat y” like muck”.(1957, 62)

The description is a montage of phrases drawn from the communities

described, but glossed or translated in two instances to admit the reader
from “outside”. It therefore undermines the rigid hierarchical division
between “Them” and “Us” by admitting different linguistic registers,
different voices. These voices, from “districts such as Hunslet (Leeds),
Ancoats (Manchester), Brightside and Attercliffe (Sheffield), and off the
Hessle and Holderness Roads (Hull)” (ibid, 20), are not segregated within
the text, reduced to sociological material to be examined, but form an
integral part of it, a source of value. The text is the site of democratic
interaction, enabled by a style that realises a “directness and openness in
dealing” it insists is prized in working-class communities and embodied in
phrases such as “Ah tek a man as “e is” (ibid, 89).
In including previously marginalised voices in his texts, Hoggart
employs the same techniques as Tony Harrison, a writer whose upbringing
and intellectual development parallel his own. Like Hoggart, Harrison was
born and educated in Leeds, earning places first at grammar school and
then at the university, and the two men have interacted in print and person.
Harrison dedicated one of his best-known poems, "Them & [uz]", to
Hoggart, and was interviewed by him for the television series Writers on
 Ben Clarke 51

Writing. Both explore the working-class Leeds they inhabited as children,

introducing its language and values into spheres of writing from which
they have previously been excluded. Harrison, for example, uses
Yorkshire dialect within traditional poetic structures, perhaps most
conspicuously in works such as v. and his sonnets from “The School of
Eloquence” series, insisting that he wanted to produce “things that were
classically formed, but in my own voice” (Astley, 1991, 40). His work
explores articulation and the experience of those who “went unrecorded in
the chorus of history” (ibid, 436), such as the Luddites mentioned in "The
Rhubarbarians" and Cornish tin-miners in "National Trust". In so doing, it
extends ideas about the language, subjects and function of poetry. The
play and competition of voices in his writing leads Terry Eagleton to
argues that he is a “natural Bakhtinian, even if he has never read a word of
him”, as he demonstrates “how the sign is a terrain of struggle where
opposing accents intersect, how in a class-divided society language is
cultural warfare and every nuance a political valuation” (ibid, 349). The
diversity of his texts is both politically and aesthetically productive,
broadening definitions of literature and revealing a new range of artistic
material and possibilities. Just as Hoggart’s work challenges the exclusive
language of academic writing, which restricts debate to a minority, so
Harrison undermines similarly exclusive ideas of poetry that confine it to
certain privileged subjects and linguistic registers. Though both writers are
committed to education that fosters independent though and articulation,
they are also alert to the ways in which class shapes ideas of eloquence,
scholarship and art.
The presence of multiple voices in Hoggart’s texts means that they
function as discursive spaces rather than rigid expositions of a single
viewpoint. His writing is permeated by other narratives and forms of
language. In contrast to more conventional academic studies, whose style
separates the critic from the material he or she analyses, Hoggart’s work
recognises itself as embedded in broader cultural structures. His
exploration of his own background, education, and shifting social position
in texts from The Uses of Literacy to Promises to Keep reinforces this
emphasis upon the systems that shape both criticism and critic. His
autobiographical writing is not an addition to his scholarship but an
integral part of it, providing a frame within which to interpret his analyses
and judgements. In his essay "Are Museums Political?", he argues that
even in the best academic work what “we decide to include and what to
omit, what we decide to say by way of interpreting any objects–these are
determined by our ways of looking, and we do not often enough look-at-
our-own-ways-of-looking, our own hidden agendas (2002b, 13-14). By
52 Richard Hoggart and the Politics of the English Language

tracing his own intellectual and professional trajectory, he provides

material for an analysis of his “hidden agenda”, the values and ideas that
inform his negotiations of society. The structure of The Uses of Literacy,
in which Hoggart’s descriptions of his upbringing and experience of
working-class life frame his readings of popular culture, evokes that of
The Road to Wigan Pier, in which Orwell’s account of his “lower-upper-
middle-class” (Orwell, 1997, 113) origins and subsequent political
development frame his responses to poverty in the industrial north of
England. Though Hoggart does not explicitly suggest with John Carey that
“all books of social commentary should carry up-to-date information about
the author’s income and property-holdings” so that the reader “would
know from the start how much of the book’s contents he could
automatically discount” (Carey, 1987, 10), he does emphasise the
importance of “placing” the critic within intellectual, political, and
economic structures. His work positions him as a subject as well as an
author of cultural analysis.
Hoggart’s insistence that the critic is a member of society and therefore
an actor in cultural and political discussions shapes his prose. Though both
complex and persuasive, his texts are also open and contestable,
encouraging readers to engage with their arguments. He avoids technical
jargon that would confine participation in debate, but his resistance to “in-
group theoretical language” does not mean he practices what Orwell
described as a “fake simplicity” (1968, 138). Indeed, his analyses of the
mass media expose the ways in which such “simplicity” is founded not on
a commitment to “directness and openness” but on need to simplify, to
reproduce to what is already accepted and thereby to appeal to the largest
possible market. In The Uses of Literacy, for example, he writes that the
reader of the mass media,

must feel intimately one with the dream that is being presented to him, and
he will not feel this if he has to make an effort to think about the weight of
a word, or puzzle over a nuance, or follow even a moderately involved
sentence-structure. Since these qualities are the results of trying to express
the complexity of a subject, it follows that the personal dramas daily
unfolded in the simplest language are also emotionally and intellectually
conceived in the simplest manner. But the “average reader” (who, for the
publicist after mass sales, must be a hypothetical figure compounded of
three or four key responses at their most simplified) need never feel out of
things. (1957, 166)

The notion of the “average reader”, like that of “the common man”, a
“hypothetical figure whose main value is to those who will mislead us”
 Ben Clarke 53

(ibid, 200), both presumes and reinforces the idea of the mass, that “crude
metaphor” which, as John Carey argues, obscures the “intricacy and
fecundity of each human life” (1992, 160). It is a reduction rather than a
reflection of actual readers. Despite the conspicuous differences between
an academic discourse that uses “abstractions as props or crutches” and the
techniques employed by the popular press, both, Hoggart suggests, are
“substitutes for thought”, obscuring the complex nature of particular
communities, practices, conventions, and texts. The language of marketing
and “mass communication”, which is both conventional and imprecise,
reinforces the established values that ensure its own intelligibility. As
Theodor Adorno argues in Minima Moralia, “Vague expression permits
the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any
case”(1974, 101). The apparent accessibility of texts addressed to the
“common man” depends upon repetition of what is already “known” and
the absence of any new or critical content.
According to Hoggart, the problem lies in the process of writing itself.
In an analysis of “popular writing”, he argues that the author who
produces such work “does not stand before his experience and try to
recreate it in a form of words, with which—rather than with the writer
himself directly—the reader must seek an understanding according to its
complexity” (1957, 150). Instead, pre-existent patterns of language and
thought structure “his” writing, determining what is represented and the
categories within which it is interpreted. This limits the range of ideas that
can be explored and prevents texts from engaging with the specific
qualities of the experiences they ostensibly represent. In contrast, Hoggart
insists, literature and art engage with experiences or objects themselves
rather than with conventional images of them. His argument that effective
writing should reflect an object that precedes language evokes Orwell’s
claim in "Politics and the English Language" that when “you think of a
concrete object, you think of it wordlessly, and then, if you want to
describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till
you find the exact words that seem to fit it.” Both insist on the primacy of
the object or experience described, and indeed Orwell insists that the
writer should “put off using words as long as possible” (1968, 138). There
are a number of problems with this argument. In the first place, it suggests
that the writer “stands before” and contemplates an object or experience
innocent of language, rather than one that is always already permeated
with words and the cultural values they carry. In addition, it implies that
texts can “recreate” experience, as Eliot’s “objective correlative” recreates
a “particular emotion” (Eliot, 1975, 48). Nonetheless, the statement
emphasises the importance of a language that is shaped by the
54 Richard Hoggart and the Politics of the English Language

complexities of specific formations, specific moments, a language which

recognises difference. The form of writing both Orwell and Hoggart
describes resists cliché, even if it can never entirely expunge ideologies
that shape not only representation but experience itself. It is not opposed to
difficulty, but to rhetorical forms used to obscure the particular, to “words
that are used not to think and not to say”, whether these are “theoretical”
or “simple”. It therefore evokes Calvino’s objection to language being
“used in a random, approximate, careless manner” and, implicitly, shares
his commitment to “the Promised Land in which language becomes what
it really ought to be” (1993, 56).
In "The Prevention of Literature", George Orwell argued that “To write
in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks
fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox” (1968, 66). Throughout his
work, Orwell represents “orthodoxy” as a set of received values and
interpretations that resists analysis and requires the continual suppression
of its “unresolved contradictions” (ibid, 411). It is, as Pierre Macherey
wrote of ideology, a closed, self-sustaining system that is always
“adequate to itself as a reply” (1986, 131). A “plain, vigorous language” is
amongst other things one that resists such closure, exposing ideas, values
and interpretations to broad critical scrutiny. Hoggart’s writing
consistently demonstrates such a resistance. He can therefore be placed
within a tradition Christopher Hitchens argues includes both Orwell and
contemporary figures such as Noam Chomsky, of those who insist “on
plain contestable speech as one of their critical resources” (2002, 138).
The commitment to such a form of language is founded is part upon the
idea that, as Primo Levi argues, it is “up to the writer to make himself
understood by those who wish to understand him: it is his trade, writing is
a public service and the willing reader must not be disappointed” (1999,
159). Indeed, there is an obvious parallel between his descriptions of the
process of writing, and Levi’s account of “exalting to search and find, or
create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong” (2000,
128). However, these ideas about the function of the writer as a member of
community, someone practising a trade, in turn rest upon both a
commitment to “democratic socialism” and to politics itself, to the “open
canvassing of rival interests”. Hoggart produces texts that are open and
contestable, texts that recognise the voices, ideas and debates which both
“in-group” languages and the ideas of the “mass” obscure. In an essay on
The Road to Wigan Pier, Hoggart described Orwell’s prose as “charitable,
morally earnest and convincing” (1970, 125), and as such as a “political
weapon” (ibid, 124). The description fits his own writing, which contributes
to the same diverse and evolving political tradition.
 Ben Clarke 55

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor (1974). Minima Moralia. London: NLB. First pub. 1951.
Althusser, Louis (1971). "Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon" in On
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 13-26. London: New Left
Books.
Astley, Neil (ed.) (1991). Tony Harrison. Newcastle: Bloodaxe.
Calvino, Italo (2000). "Montale’s Cliff" in Why Read the Classics?, 219-
22. London: Vintage. First pub. 1991.
—. (1993). Six Memos for the Next Millenium. New York: Vintage. First
pub. 1988.
Carey, John (1992). The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice
among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. London: Faber.
—. (1987). Original Copy: Selected Reviews and Journalism 1969-1986.
London: Faber.
Crick, Bernard (1976). In Defence of Politics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
First pub. 1962.
—. (1988). "Orwell and English Socialism" in George Orwell: A
Reassessment, ed. Peter Buitenhuis and Ira B. Nadal, 3-19.
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Cunningham, Valentine (1993). British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. First pub. 1988.
Eagleton, Terry (1991). "Antagonisms: Tony Harrison’s v." In Astley,
348-350.
Eliot, T. S. (1975). "Hamlet." In Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank
Kermode, 45-9. London: Faber.
Fanon, Franz (1990). The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth:
Penguin. First pub. 1961.
Habermas, Jürgen (1990). Moral Consciousness and Communicative
Action. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Harrison, Tony. "Facing up to the Muses" in Astley, 429-54.
Hitchens, Christopher (2002). Orwell’s Victory. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hoggart, Richard (1957). The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto &
Windus.
—. (1969). Contemporary Cultural Studies: An Approach to Literature
and Society. Birmingham: University of Birmingham, Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies.
—. (1970). "George Orwell and The Road to Wigan Pier" in Speaking to
Each Other: Volume Two, 111-128. New York: Oxford University
Press.
—. "Literature and Society", ibid,19-39.
56 Richard Hoggart and the Politics of the English Language

—. "Why I Value Literature", ibid, 11-18.

—. (1988). A Local Habitation: Life and Times, Volume I: 1918-1940.
London: Chatto & Windus.
—. (1990). A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times, Volume II: 1940-59.
London: Chatto & Windus.
—. (1991)."In Conversation with Tony Harrison" in Astley, 36-45.
—. (1992). An Imagined Life: Life and Times, Volume III: 1959-91.
London: Chatto & Windus.
—. (2002a). "Looking Back: An Interview with Nicholas Tredell" in
Between Two Worlds: Politics, Anti-Politics, and the Unpolitical, 301-
13. New Brunswick: Transaction,
—. (2002b). "Are Museums Political?" in Between Two Worlds: Politics,
Anti-Politics, and the Unpolitical, 9-17. New Brunswick: Transaction.
—. (2005). Promises to Keep. London: Continuum.
Ingle, Stephen (1979). Socialist Thought in Imaginative Literature.
London and Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Levi, Primo (1999). "On Obscure Writing." In Other People’s Trades,
157-63. London: Abacus. First pub. 1985.
—. (2000). The Periodic Table. Harmondsworth: Penguin. First pub. 1975.
Macherey, Pierre (1986). A Theory of Literary Production. London:
Routledge. First pub. 1966.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1996). Manifesto of the Communist
Party. In Marx: Later Political Writing, ed. Terrell Carver, 1-30.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Orwell, George (1968). "Politics and the English Language" in The
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. IV, ed. Sonia Orwell
and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt Brace, 127-40.
—. "The Prevention of Literature", ibid, 59-72.
—. "Writers and Leviathan", ibid, 407-14
—. (1970). "Why I Write." In The Collected Essays, Journalism and
Letters: Volume 1, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 23-30. First pub. 1968.
—. (1997). The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Secker & Warburg. First
pub. 1937.
Rose, Jonathan (2002). The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes. New Haven and London: Yale Nota Bene.
 Ben Clarke 57

Notes
1
Orwell (1970, 28). Significantly, however, Hoggart does not, like Orwell, give
“socialism” a capital letter.
 RICHARD HOGGART AND LITERATURE

SUE OWEN

Richard Hoggart was the first literary critic to expand the parameters of
criticism to include popular and working-class culture. From a poor
working-class background himself, Hoggart drew on his working-class
roots as a strength. He was influenced by the work of F.R. and Q.D.
Leavis, and he shared their commitment to great literature and interest in
culture; but whereas the Leavises regarded the masses with suspicion,
Hoggart took the working class seriously. His perception of both “high”
and working-class culture, and of the relationship between the two, was
more subtle and complex than that of his predecessors. Thus, in
“Literature and Society”, he says of his fore-runners, including Arnold,
Eliot and the Leavises:

Popular and mass art is more varied than they recognize (and what
professes to be ‘high art’ sometimes no more than a profession), and the
continuity and change within working-class attitudes more complex than
they allow. (Hoggart, 1973, 30)

Hoggart sought to extend the methods of literary criticism and cultural

analysis to popular culture. With popular culture, as with high art, “the
assumption must be that the productions have in some ways the kind of
relation to language and to their audiences that ‘high art’ has, and are
therefore open to similar analytic approaches” (ibid, 31). Hoggart
differentiated between what was offered by the “popular providers” of
mass culture and the resilient culture of working-class people themselves;
but his work also contains the seeds of the important mid-twentieth-
century shift from deploring “popular culture” to seeing it as a source of
possible insight and inspiration. Thus:

Social scientific content analysis is much more sophisticated than it was a

few years ago, but is still insufficiently alert to the inner character–and so,
to the likely effect–of many forms of mass communication (for example,
most sociological analyses of crime-and-violence series on television leave
you wondering whether their authors have ever felt the appeal of one of
 Sue Owen 59

them) … By close attention to individual words and images, to syntax, to

stress, to the movement of each passage, the literary critic can just begin to
make some assumptions about each author’s sense of his audience and his
society, about the assumed relations between literature and social class and
about other assumptions shared and unshared. (ibid, 33)

What is interesting here is not just the defence of literary criticism as a tool
for understanding society, but a sensitivity to the appeal of popular culture
itself. Similarly, in his Inaugural Lecture at Birmingham University in
1963, he advises humility about what people actually take from popular art
and adds, “Perhaps no one should engage in this work who is not, in a
certain sense, himself in love with popular art” (1973, 242). Thus, he
distinguishes himself from Leavisite cultural elitism; though he also warns
that “Assimilated lowbrowism is as bad as uninformed highbrowism.” It is
all about getting the balance right.
Hoggart is known as the author of The Uses of Literacy, and of other
important works on culture and class, as a key figure in the rise of cultural
studies and founder of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies. Yet Hoggart began as a literary critic and retained a love of good
literature. In his Inaugural Lecture he argues that Schools of English
should pay attention to contemporary culture, but that they must also
remain grounded within literary tradition:

Although I am going to argue that time should be given–more than most

Schools give at present–to the study of certain aspects of modern society, I
am sure that even this will not be done well unless English Schools keep
central to their work those elements I have called fundamental. And those
of us who choose to work in this contemporary area will not work well
unless we regularly refresh ourselves with traditional work, and remind
ourselves that a special occupational risk is loss of balance. (ibid, 232)

Good literature is important because:

It works not by precept and abstraction but by dramatization, by ‘showing

forth’, in a fullness of sense and feeling and thought, of time and place and
persons. In ordering its dramas it is driven by a desire to find the revelatory
instance, the tiny gesture that opens a whole field of meaning and
consequence. It does not do this pointlessly, nor explicitly to reform; it
aims first at the momentary peace of knowing that a little more of the
shifting amorphousness of experience has been named and held, that we
are now that bit less shaken by the anarchy of feeling and the assault of
experience. To push for this kind of truth, no matter how much it may hurt,
is a kind of moral activity. (233)
60 Richard Hoggart and Literature

I do not mean that we all need to have read the best books; but what has
the fact that they have been read, and that their insights have to some extent
passed into the general consciousness, contributed to our understanding of
our own experience? (234)

Hoggart argues that language is now too often used persuasively and
manipulatively, not just by admen and P.R. men, but by governments, so
that “the snags and roughnesses of real response have been smoothed
away” (ibid, 236). Schools of English have a double responsibility: on the
one hand, they must separate themselves from this deterioration and insist
on the standards and insights that only good literature can offer; but at the
same time, they must engage with contemporary society and not withdraw
into an ivory tower:

We do not with sufficient confidence separate ourselves from that world

nor sufficiently critically engage with it. By insisting on the difficult but
responsible life of language, and on the overriding importance of the
human scale, we can try to do our part in resisting the unreal, unfelt and
depersonalized society. (237)

He goes on to speak of the need to connect with popular culture and to

define some questions Cultural Studies needs to address: about the
background and financing of writers and artists; about the nature of
audiences for different forms and whether there is such a thing as “the
common reader” or the “intelligent layman”; about the opinion-formers
and their channels of influence and the organizations for the production
and distribution of the written and spoken word; about the effect of
commercial pressures on the rise of literary and artistic reputations; and
about all sorts of inter-relations, for example between writers and
audiences, writers and organs of opinion, writers, politics, power and cash,
and between sophisticated and popular arts (ibid, 240-241). These
questions seem quite “literary” in focus.
Hoggart sees literary critical method as essential in Cultural Studies, as
he explains in the following passage:

Most important of all: the directly literary critical approach is itself

neglected. Yet it is essential to the whole field because, unless you know
how these things work as art, even though sometimes as ‘bad art’, what
you say about them will not cut deep. Here, we particularly need better
links with sociologists. It is difficult, outside a seminar, to use a literary
critical vocabulary–to talk about ‘the quality of the imagination’ shown; or
to discuss the effect on a piece of writing of various pressures–for instance,
to talk about corner-cutting techniques, or linguistic tricks, or even
 Sue Owen 61

(perhaps especially) about what tone reveals. All this needs to be analysed
more, to be illustrated and enforced–and at all levels, not just in relation to
mass arts. (ibid, 241-2)

He advocates the extension of “developed critical practice” to film, TV

and radio, popular fiction, journalism, cartoons, adverts and popular
music. (ibid, 242).
Similarly, he explains in his autobiography his firm belief in the
application of literary critical methodology to the study of working-class
culture:

… the methods of literary analysis could be applied not only to

academically received literature or, if you go wider, to popular literature.
They can be applied to all other forms of popular culture, and give insights
no other method gives. But always, and again, you have first to read these
things in and for themselves: then, the literary critic’s ear for language, for
tone, for stress, for selection, for inclusion and omission, for the power of
images and symbols, for all the elements of the rhetoric of persuasion, all
these can be relevant and revealing. (1993, 94-5)

All Hoggart’s writings on culture are informed by literary critical insight

and methodology and an understanding of his literary criticism is key to an
understanding of his outlook on culture.
The Uses of Literacy exemplifies the application of literary critical
method to popular culture. Much of the second part consists of quite
detailed, comparative literary analysis of high and popular literature. For
example, in Chapter VII “Invitations to a Candy-Floss World: the Newer
Mass Art”, he compares a passage from George Eliot with a passage in the
style of modern popular writers and concludes:

We end, with the new material, by reaching a region where nothing real
ever happens, a twilight of half-responses automatically given.
‘Meaningless and niggling’ curiosity is more and more appealed to. But
less and less is there a sense of the fibre of life. And this, for the readers, is
perhaps the worst effect of all. It is not possible that people could
positively, could actively enjoy this; there is nothing for them to be
engaged with, to be positively reacting to. Since nothing is demanded of
the reader, nothing can be given by the reader. We are in a pallid half-light
of the emotions where nothing shocks or startles or sets on edge, and
nothing challenged, or gives joy or evokes sorrow; neither splendour nor
misery: only the constant trickle of tinned-milk-and-water which staves off
the pangs of a positive hunger and denies the satisfactions of a solidly-
filling meal. (1958, 195)
62 Richard Hoggart and Literature

His examples of “a cheap, gum-chewing pert glibness and streamlining”

and “brash confidence” in modern popular fiction have to be made up for
legal reasons, but are fairly close to the real examples discussed in his
manuscript, originally entitled The Abuse of Literacy (Owen, 2005a).
Hoggart’s battle with the lawyers over the content of The Uses of Literacy
involved a defence of the literary critical outlook against those who
misunderstood it. In a letter to his publisher he expresses puzzlement at the
lawyer’s reaction to the discussion of the sex-and-violence novels in
Chapter VIII: “[Chapter] 8 puzzles me. It’s the nearest to pure literary
criticism in the book … I don’t despair of amending that–the core of it, if
not the first section, because it is such technical lit. crit.” (Hoggart, 1955a).
It seems lawyers don’t understand the distinction between libel and literary
criticism. Hoggart feels that the literary critic is entitled to his judgments.
On the lawyer’s notes on the typescript, objecting to a reference to
vicarious sadism in James Hadley Chase, Hoggart has written: “no worse
than usual in lit. crit.” (undated, 8-27). The literary critic and the lawyer
are speaking different languages and have conflicting frames of reference.
It is astonishing that Hoggart manages to retain the force of his critique
of popular fiction in the face of a comprehensive legal veto against
anything with even the remotest potential for libel. Yet, as I have shown
elsewhere, Hoggart makes his point quite effectively using made-up
examples very close to the originals. (Owen, 2005a) Stefan Collini has
argued that The Uses of Literacy shares the dominant critical practice of
the “New Criticism” of F. R. Leavis and the broader tradition which
shared some of Leavis’s assumptions but also drew upon Auden and
Orwell. He considers that Hoggart shared the cultural pessimism of the
dominant postwar school of criticism (in Owen, ed., forthcoming).
However, Collini’s reading of Part II of Uses, in which Hoggart substitutes
made-up examples for extracts from popular publications, emphasizes
denigration at the expense of a certain relish. For example, in the original,
Hoggart offers a detailed comparative analysis of William Faulkner’s
Sanctuary and James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The
comparison works to the latter’s disadvantage but there are qualifications
on both sides and literary critical even-handedness. Faulkner’s novel is an
early pot-boiler, “yet one can see in it the marks of a serious and
disinterested creative writer. A gifted, varied and complex perception is at
work (undated, 8-27; 1958, 219). A passage from Chase is “in large
measure dead, full of trite simile, weak imitation of tough American talk
and flatly photographic description. It moves in jerky, short-winded
periods which match the thinness and one-sidedness of the imaginative
presentation. Yet it undoubtedly has in parts a kind of life. When it is
 Sue Owen 63

describing the thrill of inflicting pain, it sometimes moves closely along

the nerve” (undated, 8-27). In Uses, the analysis of Faulkner is retained,
but made-up passages have to be substituted for Chase and the above
critique is applied to “Gangster-fiction writing” in general (1958, 219).
Between pages 8-20 and 8-21 of the typescript of the Abuse of Literacy
is the cover of a sex-and-violence novel called The Corpse Wore Nylon,
taken from Hoggart’s papers pertaining to the Lady Chatterley trial. The
author is given as Luke Paradise. The illustration is of a blonde woman,
holding a revolver and wearing a scant, strapless, black, lacy bra, waist-
slip, stockings and high-heels. The Corpse Wore Nylon receives detailed
analysis in The Abuse of Literacy. In The Uses of Literacy this is replaced
by general discussion and made-up examples:

From one point of view, Slim Grissom [in The Corpse Wore Nylon] is the
imbecile half-brother of Kafka’s ‘K’. (undated, 8-30)
The ‘Spike’ of these stories is the slower-witted half-brother of Kafka’s
‘K’. (1958, 221).

It is important to restore an understanding and appreciation of Hoggart’s

literary critical method and assumptions in The Uses of Literacy because
this has frequently been misunderstood, and not just by lawyers. Hoggart
embraces an idea of literary value more subtle than either Arnoldian
elitism or the populist backlash against it.1
If literary criticism forms the basis for the analysis of popular culture
in Part II of The Uses of Literacy, the description of working-class life and
culture in Part I draws its strength, from a literary method. What this
means is summed up by Hoggart himself in “Why I Value Literature” in
the Times Educational Supplement in 1963:

I value literature because of the way–the peculiar way–in which it

explores, re-creates and seeks for the meanings in human experience;
because it explores the diversity, complexity and strangeness of that
experience … because it re-creates the texture of that experience; and
because it pursues its explorations with a disinterested passion ( not
wooing or apologizing of bullying) …
The attention good literature pays to life is both loving and detached. It
frames experience and, in a sense, distances it. But it always assumes the
importance, the worthwhileness, of human experience even when – as in
tragedy–it finds much of that experience evil … It helps to make us believe
more in the freely willing nature of man; and it helps us to feel more
sharply the difficulties and limits of that freedom. Good literature insists on
‘the mass and majesty’ of the world–on its concreteness and sensuous
reality, and on its meanings beyond ‘thisness’. It insists on the importance
of the inner, the distinctive and individual, life of man, while much else in
64 Richard Hoggart and Literature

our activities and in our make-up–fear, ambition, fatigue, laziness–tries to

make that life generalized and typecast. (1973, 11-12)

This is what characterizes the first part of The Uses of Literacy and is its
strength: an ability to re-create the texture of working-class experience, to
insist on the worthwhileness of working-class people, and to do so with a
combination of love and detachment. For his epigraph, Hoggart chooses an
extracts from Ludwig Lewishohn about critics of mass culture who “have
not affected their fold more profoundly because they have not loved it
enough”, then balances this with what he calls “a warning against
romanticism” from Tchekov: “There is peasant blood in my veins, and you
cannot astonish me with peasant virtues”. Part I of The Uses of Literacy is
a loving, though unromanticized, celebration of working-class people and
their values: tolerance, pragmatism, humour and cheerfulness, straight-
dealing, looking on the bright side, lending a helping hand, not being
stuck-up, loyalty, “goodwill-humanism,” good-neighbourliness, taking life
as it comes, belief in progress. It is these values which are exploited by the
popular publicists as newer, commercial values are grafted onto the old:
ammorality, sensationalism, “bittiness”, shared passivity, fake “palliness”,
the “cant of the common man”. The upshot is that “working-class people
are culturally robbed” (1958, 201). Running throughout Uses is also a
strong thread of celebration of the resilience of working-class people to the
blandishments of popular culture.
F. R. Leavis is said to have remarked on reading The Uses of Literacy
that Hoggart should have written an novel, though Hoggart, referring to
this in his Life and Times, denies any novelistic ability (1991, 206). Yet
throughout Part I of Uses, vivid, quasi-literary descriptions bring the
working class alive. For example, here is Hoggart writing in the mid-fifties
about working-class attitudes to contraception:

Here as in most aspects of domestic life, the wife is by tradition

responsible; the husband is out wage-earning. He wants food and his own
sort of relaxation when he comes home. I suppose this is why, as it seems
to me, the wife is often expected to be responsible for contraceptive
practice. Most non-Catholic working-class families accept contraception as
an obvious convenience, but both husbands and wives are shy of clinics
where advice is given, unless they are driven there by near-desperation.
The husband’s shyness and an assumption that this is really her affair often
ensure that he expects her to take care of it, that he ‘can’t be bothered with
it’. She has rarely been told anything before marriage, and the amount she
has picked up from older girls or married women at work or nearby varies
enormously. She must take what advice she can unless there are likely to
be more children than either she or her husband want. When she has done
 Sue Owen 65

that her knowledge of the possibilities is likely to be limited to coitus

interruptus, the best-known type of pessary and the sheath. Husbands tend
not to like sheaths–‘they take away the pleasure’; she may be embarrassed
in buying either those or pessaries, and both are dear; coitus interruptus is
probably the commonest practice.
But to use any of these methods requires a rigid discipline, a degree of
sustained competence many wives are hardly capable of. She forgets just
once or ‘lets herself go’, or a sheath is cheap and bursts or the husband
demands awkwardly after a night at the club. How often, therefore, it is
assumed that any children after the first one or two were ‘not intended’. I
am inclined to think that among, say, the lower middle-classes the child
who was ‘not intended’ is apt to arrive when the parents are about forty.
They have had two or three children during their late twenties and early
thirties and their contraceptive practice has thereafter been effective.
Perhaps by the time they reach forty they feel safer and grow careless.
With the working-classes the pattern seems to be different: unless a
miscarriage is procured, the first unintended child is likely to arrive only a
year or two after the others. It is usually accepted ‘philosophically’; after
all, ‘what did yer get married for?’ It is a ‘philosophic’ acceptance but one
without much sentimentality; ‘kids are a trouble’; they mean more work
and less money to go round. But they receive the same indulgences and
smothering attention.” (1958, 30-31)

Passages like this exactly evoke a mentality which social reportage would
merely stigmatize.
The sympathetic but unromanticized insight with which Hoggart
depicts working-class women has not been sufficiently appreciated.2 The
section on “Mother” in Chapter II, “Landscape with Figures” is one of the
most evocative in the book and contains brief portraits of his own mother
and grandmother which have a vivid detail and resonance. Here, for
example, is what Hoggart says about his mother, a widow and lone parent:

During the years in which my mother had the three of us on her own, she
was never strong enough, since she had acute bronchial trouble, to do any
outside work. She managed with surprising skill on a weekly twenty-odd
shillings from ‘the Guardians’ (some of this was in the form of coupons
exchangeable at specified grocers’). Surprising to a spectator, but not to
her: she had been a gay young girl, I believe, but by this time had lost most
of her high spirits. She was well past the striking of attitudes about her
situation, and though she would gladly take a pair of old shoes or a coat,
she thanked no one for their pity or their admiration; she was without
sentimentality about her position and never pretended to do more than go
through with it. It was too much an unrelieved struggle to be at all
enjoyable, and three young children, always hungry for more food and
pleasures than she could afford, were not–except occasionally–rewarding
66 Richard Hoggart and Literature

companions. She helped herself along by smoking Woodbines–furtively, in

case ‘They’ found out: my brother was trained to put the two-penny packet
in the drawer without a word if he came back from the shop to find a
visitor at home. The tiny house was damp and swarming with cockroaches;
the earth-closet was a stinking mire in bad weather. Food was unvaried but
a lot more nourishing than it would have been with many mothers in that
situation. My mother had firmness and intelligence enough to resist all our
demands for fish-and-chips and tea, and we drank nothing but cocoa. We
had a succession of cheap stews with vegetables throughout each week: I
remember someone bringing (I must have been about six at the time) a
small box of assorted biscuits to the house, and how dazzled we were by
them. For a tea-time treat, we occasionally had sweetened condensed milk
on bread. Pocket-money was one penny a week for the whole family, so
our separate turns came up every three weeks. We were usually advised to
buy something that could be shared, and we usually objected. We were
always ‘well-turned out’, well darned throughout the year, and had new
outfits at Whitsun; the last I remember were sailor-suits with whistles for
the two boys.
On one occasion my mother, fresh from drawing her money, brought
herself a small treat, something which must have been a reminder of earlier
pleasures–a slice of two of boiled ham or a few shrimps. We watched her
like sparrows and besieged her all through tea–time until she shocked us by
bursting out in real rage. There was no compensation; she just did not want
to give us this, and there could be no easy generosity in the giving. We got
some, though we sense that we had stumbled into something bigger than
we understood. (ibid, 32-3)

There are also glimpses of his own younger self:

At my grandmother’s we were not living on ‘relief’ but, like many around

us, we were ‘a bit short’. For years during the early ‘thirties, I queued on
Friday evenings for the family groceries; each weekly bill was between
fifteen and twenty shillings, and always we carried something over. In my
self-conscious ‘teens I had a regular sick envy of those who paid off
cheerfully, a horrid shyness at going through the weekly form of words,
‘Grandma says she’ll leave five shillings till next week.’ (ibid,29)

These moments are to be valued all the more for their rarity in a writer not
much given to self-revelation. But the picture Hoggart paints of working-
class life is by no means purely autobiographical. It draws strength from
little cameos, such as a glimpse of an older working-class woman furtively
seeking a remedy for a “stone” at a fairground stall (ibid, 31); or from the
truthfulness of attitudes which are both described and evoked: acceptance
of prostitution and suicide; a combination of openness and shyness about
sex, the “feeling of warm and shared humanity” in club singing (ibid, 124).
 Sue Owen 67

These touches have more in common with a literary than a sociological

method.
Hoggart values other disciplines, such as sociology, but sees literature as
having a distinctive contribution, as he argues in “Literature and Society”:

One is arguing that literature provides in its own right a form of distinctive
knowledge about society …Read in and for themselves, with an openness
to the author’s imagination and art, works of literature give an insight into
the life of an age, a kind and intensity of insight, which no other sources
can give. They are not a substitute for these other sources; to think so
would be foolish. It is just as foolish to think that these other sources can
be sufficient in themselves. Without the literary witness the student of
society will be blind to the fullness of society’s life … Good literature re-
creates the experiential wholeness of life … Good literature re-creates the
immediacy of life … It re-creates the pressure of value-laden life so that–to
the extent of the writer’s gifts and art–we know better what it must have
meant to live and make decisions in that time and place… A good writer
can give us a sense of the formative but largely submerged currents in an
age’s life. From his books, quite apart from their considerable value as
social documents, one of the rewards is this sense of the way life was lived
‘in the bone’ at the time–that behind people’s actions and reactions lay this
particular sense of a nation’s destiny, these assumptions about the relations
between the sexes, about class, money and duty. Occasionally a single
moment, placed at just the right point, brings together and contains within
itself a world of individual and social meanings, becomes a comprehensive
unstated statement about those people and that sense of values (and in so
doing transcends its time and place). (1973, 19-37)

One such moment is the scene where Hardy’s Tess baptizes her
illegitimate baby:

But it is crucial to realize that what makes the scene effective is not that
Hardy overtly makes it ‘representative’, but that he keeps his eye on the
particulars … This is the way art releases its meanings, by looking
honestly at the object until the meaning emerges as if of its own volition,
not by rigging the scene as symptomatic documentation. What the novel
can supremely give is a sense of the texture of life as it is lived; and of the
way in which that texture is all the time shot through with moral choices.
(ibid, 25)

I can scarcely think of a better description of Hoggart’s method in Part I of

The Uses of Literacy than the above: it is precisely his achievement to re-
create the experiential wholeness of life, to re-create the immediacy of life,
to re-create the pressure of value-laden life and to give a sense of the way
68 Richard Hoggart and Literature

life was lived ‘in the bone’ at the time–that behind people’s actions and
reactions lay this particular sense of a nation’s destiny, these assumptions
about the relations between the sexes, about class, money and duty.
Exactly what he does is to keep his eye on the particulars without rigging
the scene and to give is a sense of the texture of life as it is lived, and of
the way in which that texture is all the time shot through with moral
choices.
Of course The Uses of Literacy is not literature. But I think the book
has suffered from being considered purely as social theory and compared
to other works of theory. The obvious comparison is with Raymond
Williams’ critique of the concept of the masses and mass communication
in the concluding chapter of Culture and Society. Williams, however, does
not share Hoggart’s enthusiasm for the indigenous culture of the Northern
industrial working class, arguing that:

The traditional popular culture of England was, if not annihilated, at least

fragmented and weakened by the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution.
What is left, with what in the new conditions has been newly made, is
small in quantity and narrow in range. It exacts respect, but it is in no sense
an alternative culture. (Williams, 1961, 307).

Hoggart’s method is to bring alive traditional popular culture in all its

range and vitality. He might well be describing his own method when he
defends the value of both literature and literary criticism to understanding
society:

… it is important on several grounds for the students of mass

communication within the social sciences to have a good sense of the
contribution literature and literary criticism can make to his studies. They
can help to bring to the light better, like a brass-rubbing, the face and body
of mass communications, and so inform consideration of their impact
below the ‘objective’ level. (1973, 32)

In a talk given to Sociologists in 1967, and published as a pamphlet, “The

Literary Imagination and the Sociological Imagination”, he defended the
literary method as equally valid to the sociological method in
understanding society:

…creative writing recognizes ‘significant detail’ whilst at the same time

recognizing and recreating the flux of untypical life. Part of the experience
of literature is this sense of pattern-and-lack-of-pattern at one and the same
time … Sustained imaginative perception of any depth into a society only
looks like a sudden gift; it takes off from saturation in experience …
 Sue Owen 69

literature may help keep open our sense of the richness of human
experience … all findings, whether in literature or in the social sciences,
must be based on a set of agreed hypotheses, all rest finally on assent
rather than proof, on a common conceptual frame with which we begin to
make sense of the world … So I do not see that a creative writer is
inherently more likely to lead us astray in our understanding of society
than a social scientist. The rules of his kind or work may not be as plan as
those of the social scientist but they are at least as numerous and probably
more tricky. (1973, 249, 251, 254, 255, 257)

He is aware of the faults of literary critics: “Our cultural ideas are too
comfortable, limited and enclosed;” and when moving out to comment on
society directly. “they usually move directly into undisciplined
impressionism” (ibid, 257). In the end, for both literary critics and social
scientists, “we are acting most intelligently when we face valuations, not
when we evade them.” (ibid, 257) His method in Part I of The Uses of
Literacy combines a quasi-literary recognition of “significant detail” with
a recognition and recreation of “the flux of untypical life”. It opens our
sense of the richness of working-class experience. But it also shows an
awareness of traps, such as sentimentalism and impressionism, and tries to
face valuations honestly.
This may be illustrated from what is perhaps the most famous chapter
of The Uses of Literacy, Chapter X: “Unbent Springs: a Note on the
Uprooted and the Anxious”, and in particular the first section “Scholarship
Boy”. This section has resonated with socially displaced readers for many
years, and holds a clue to Hoggart’s own development as a working-class
intellectual. He begins the chapter: “This is a difficult chapter to write”.
(1958, 241). It would be easy for Hoggart either to err either on the side of
subjectivity in this chapter, or to veer to the other extreme of “heartless”
objectivity. But he steers a middle course. The chapter is shot through with
the pain and insight of personal experience, but the personal angle is only
implicit: there are none of the memories which made the section on
“Mother” in Chapter II so compelling. He moves immediately to the
general, the passive voice: “But the people most affected by the attitudes
now to be examined–the ‘anxious and the uprooted’–are to be recognised
primarily by their lack of poise, by their uncertainty” (ibid, 241). “It will
be convenient to speak first of the nature of the uprooting” (ibid, 242).
A further layer of distancing lies in the implied location of himself not
within the anxious and uprooted category, but within the category of the
professionally assimilated:

I have in mind those who, for a number of years, perhaps for a very long
time, have a sense of no longer belonging to any group. We all know that
70 Richard Hoggart and Literature

many do find a poise in their new situations. These are the ‘declassed’
experts and specialists who go into their own spheres after the long
scholarship climb has led them to a Ph.D. There are brilliant individuals
who become fine administrators and officials, and find themselves
thoroughly at home. (1958, 242)

Hoggart did not do a Ph.D. because of the war, though he completed his
MA. He was an established academic and a notable administrator,
however. His discussion of the anxiety of the uprooted seems permeated
by personal experience, yet he insists “the problem of self-adjustment is,
in general, especially difficult for those working-class boys who are only
moderately endowed, who have talent sufficient to separate them from the
majority of their working-class contemporaries but not to go much further
… who have been pulled one stage away from their original culture and
yet have not the intellectual equipment which would then cause them to
move on to join the ‘declassed’ professionals and experts” (ibid, 243). It is
possible that this is an attempt to distance himself from the phenomena of
anxiety and uprootedness being discussed, and to claim objectivity; it may,
equally, be modesty, eschewing any particular claim to the privilege of
exceptional suffering on the grounds others suffer worse.
Hoggart positions himself both as a professionally assimilated expert
of intellectual distinction and as one of the anxious and the uprooted, the
perpetual outsiders whose working-class roots will always show.
Hoggart’s literary criticism draws strength from this doubleness.
Engagement with literature empowered Hoggart as a working-class boy in
his “push for meaning outside the day-to-day” (Hoggart, 1991, 89); and his
status as conflicted working-class intellectual in turn empowered him as a
literary critic. Being an outsider gives him empathy, whilst his intellectual
assurance prevents him from obstacles of class resentment and hostility.
Indeed, his particular combination of social estrangement, intellectual
ability and the particular insight of the displaced gives him empathy with
other outsiders, even those of the ruling class. Literary criticism gives him
a way to engage with the dominant culture. He eschews other possible
positions: the rationalised rage and revenge of the oppressed, the
celebration of liminality; in favour of a sensitive engagement with the
dominant culture, informed by a combination of literary critical finesse
and working-class experience. His literary critical method in turn inspires
all his writings on culture.
This becomes clear if we look in more detail at Hoggart’s literary
criticism. How do his working-class origins and his status as that
contradictory phenomenon, the working-class intellectual, inform his
literary critical judgments? We might perhaps expect the scholarship boy
 Sue Owen 71

to bend himself out of shape to prove himself by aping the literary critical
methods of the establishment. But even in Hoggart’s first book, Auden: An
Introductory Essay (1951), we can see him bringing to the topic his
particular combination of literary critical expertise and working-class
insight (Hoggart, 1965). The title is modest: the book runs to over 250
pages and is far more than an essay. It was the first substantial published
study of Auden and received commendation from Auden himself.3
The book exemplified the doubleness I have tried to describe: the
assurance of the literary critical “expert” and the distance of the working-
class outsider. Hoggart’s intellectual assurance means he is sensitive to
Auden’s occasional arrogance but doesn’t feel patronised by it (1965, 15).
Literary criticism gives the former “scholarship boy” tools to make
confident and incisive judgements about the foremost poet of the day: for
example, the analysis of the weaknesses of the early work (ibid, 17); of the
poetic “failure” of “The Age of Anxiety” (ibid, 211); and of the
deficiencies of the post-war output (ibid, 217). These judgments are
confidently grounded in quite skilful literary-critical analysis. At the same
time, Hoggart is able to discern in Auden “the émigré’s pride, that pride
which is the self-defence of the outsider and the rebel” (ibid, 15). This
sounds like the sympathy of one outsider for another. More than anything
else, it is the figure of the outsider that draws Hoggart to Auden, and that
links these apparently dissimilar writers. Hoggart offers a sensitive
discussion of the recurring figure of the wanderer in Auden: “the man
setting out on some positive action, alone” (ibid, 98), his “homesick
isolation and a longing for gentleness” (ibid, 100). He focuses on Auden’s
special interest in the lonely and the lost: “The displaced persons of the
heart are everywhere” (ibid, 119). For Hoggart, Auden is “a spiritual
exile” as well as a geographical exile (in America). But this is an
advantage, as it gives him greater insight and a capacity for intervention:

Previously Auden had often discussed the function of the writer. He had
agreed, for instance, that the artist today must be in some ways an émigré,
but had refused to wear that title like a badge or indulge in the pride of the
odd. He meant to indicate by it the necessity for the artist, as for any
imaginative and critical personality, to refuse simply to accept the terms of
life which his society offers, without questioning the ends which the terms
subserve. (ibid, 139)

Since all writers must be exiles to an extent, the writer who is a social
outsider becomes privileged, turns the conditions of exile to his own
advantage.
72 Richard Hoggart and Literature

Hoggart, like Auden, seems especially drawn to Caliban, the

archetypal outsider. In Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, based on The
Tempest, “Caliban’s dazzling prose address to the audience occupies just
over half the whole work” (1965, 176). The section on Auden’s Caliban is
one of the strongest in Hoggart’s book and the character clearly resonates
powerfully for Hoggart. Hoggart goes on to summarize the reason both
Auden and he are drawn to this figure: “Caliban symbolises the dark
forces in man which … if ignored, break out in terrible forms” (ibid, 177).
It is hard not to see some relevance here to the working-class, society’s
repressed “other”. Auden himself seems to view Caliban in more
psychological terms as the suppressed id, but social implications are
always present for Auden. Hoggart summarizes, citing Auden: society
“never dares quite to face Him, Caliban, “the represented principle of not
sympathising, not associating, not amusing:, for He is the awful fact about
man which makes aesthetics–if it is regarded as a source of values, as a
religion–look irrelevant and silly” (ibid, 177). Caliban comes to represent
life itself, and “we are happy for art to omit crude Caliban in order to make
its soothing patterns”. Class is occluded for Auden, whose Caliban divides
his audience into ordinary people (whether bourgeois or working-class,
there is no differentiation) and the exceptional (intellectuals), both groups
being criticised. Hoggart takes Auden a stage further, developing Auden-
Caliban’s critique of popular attitudes to culture in a way which
foreshadows The Uses of Literacy.
Hoggart is enough of a social outsider to discern a similar sense of
estrangement in Auden but enough of an intellectual to eschew the facile
resentment of the inverted snob for the public school boy. He is sensitive
to the upper-class background of Auden and his fellow poets, to the
potential for exclusion and cliquishness, for alienation of the “ordinary
reader” who is always so close to Hoggart’s heart:

At its worst it [Auden’s verse] may leave the reader feeling, among other
things, that he does not belong to the right set …And what was the
ordinary reader to make of the full parade of private references and group
paraphernalia? – the boys’ school and guerrilla warfare props … the
privately weighted symbols and general air of a Boy Scout patrol. These
were characteristic of all members of the group … the group afflatus was
from the leader himself, the head prefect, the cock of the patrol.4

But Hoggart himself is not a victim of exclusion, instead using his insight
as a different kind of outsider to find sympathy and common ground with
the thirties poets; to look behind their “clique-values” for the reasons
behind their “group solidarity” and their “urge to reform” (1965, 21). The
 Sue Owen 73

following insight into Auden seems freighted with personal identification:

“For the moment it will be sufficient to remember that the strain of ‘maps
and chaps’ on the not normally gregarious person can be great, and that
therefore the occasional indulgence in clique-snobbery may be viewed
with sympathy”.5 This is quite extraordinary, both for the hint of self-
revelation by the reticent Hoggart and also for its insight and empathy
where one might expect the chip on the shoulder or the politics of envy.
Hoggart dissects the middle-class radicalism of the thirties intellectuals
with a surprising amount of sympathy:

It is true, and has been often remarked, that the Auden ‘group’ were all of
middle-class origin, and that a good deal of their political enthusiasm
seemed to be that of the sensitive middle-class boy who has just discovered
that the charwoman is a person. The guilt was obtrusive … But this is no
more reprehensible an origin for a social conscience than the working-class
boy’s revulsion from poverty: both are emotional starting-points and
cannot legitimately be introduced to judge the final achievement. (1965,
114)

Because he can sympathize with Auden’s group, Hoggart has more

authority when he identifies Auden’s “bourgeois idealisation of working-
class life” (ibid, 115) and notes that “his address to the workers could be
very stiff-collared” (ibid, 116).
What Hoggart values in the thirties poets is that “They tried to be
aware of their own historical and sociological position” (ibid, 21) and the
same is true of Hoggart himself: he moves always away from the personal
to the general. Even his discussion of the uprooted and anxious in The
Uses of Literacy is justified “because the difficulties of some people
illuminate much in the wider discussion of cultural change” (1958, 243).
Even in his three-volume Life and Times, Hoggart offers little in the way
of interiority. This is not an accident but an attitude, perhaps explained in
the following description of Auden:

So very few of Auden’s poems betray personal emotions or fears. He has

decided–helped by his natural bent–that he has no right to take up the time
of his readers with his own heart-searchings. He rejects the conception of
the poet as a tortured, self-centred neurotic: neurotic, perhaps, but one who
cures himself by working out that neurosis in artistic creation, who makes
himself as informed as possible, who is concerned with others and
especially with others in society, He has therefore never been in danger, in
his philosophic thinking, of solipsism. (1965, 29)
74 Richard Hoggart and Literature

A clue to the thinking behind this attitude in both writers lies in Hoggart’s
explanation of the importance of love for Auden and the evils of self-
regard: “Since ‘Love’ can flourish only in the field of relationships, the
greatest obstacle to its free growth is self-regard” (ibid, 131). Hoggart’s
personal reticence, like Auden’s, may spring from the diffidence of the
outsider but is informed by an explicit psycho-social outlook.
Hoggart’s position as a working-class intellectual gives him a multiple
strengths. It energizes his literary criticism, gives him a “bullshit detector”
and allows him to see class bias. This is clear in his critique of Virginia
Woolf. On the one hand he credits her with capturing the essence of the
scholarship boy: “He is Charles Tansley in Virginia Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse, but is probably without such good brains” (1958, 251).
However, he goes on to rebuke Woolf for her lack of understanding:

Virginia Woolf often returned to him, with not so deep an understanding as

one might have hoped; she gives very much the cultured middle-class
spectator’s view:
… a self-taught working-man, and we all know how distressing they
are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.

The arrogance of that last adjective makes one cringe and Hoggart’s tone
is criticising Woolf for this passage seems restrained.
Woolf is also guilty of failing to grasp the importance of the “material”
for writers from an unprivileged background, for example in her dismissal
of Arnold Bennett:

Virginia Woolf was mistaken to think Bennett’s love of all the thisness of
things and their prices indicated a lack of spirituality, of response to an
inner being. Bennett’s love of objects and their value expressed itself in
some extravagant personal ways (the expensive shirts and all that). But
these things were poetic to him, luminous, vibrating with suggestions of
luxury, of a glamour and a freedom the Five Towns never knew and which
were not merely ostentatious or vulgar. That hat, those gloves, that dress–
whatever they cost a lot or a little and whoever was wearing them–were a
gateway to what a spirit was reaching after, They were, if seen for what
they were, more interesting than disembodied, abstracted, sketchings of
what a pure soul might be imagined to be seeking. (1991, 191)

Here Hoggart’s position as a working-class intellectual allows an

extraordinary recuperation: what to a middle-class writer seems like vulgar
materialism is actually a form of working-class spirituality.
Hoggart’s insight as a working-class literary critic is further developed
in his analysis of Orwell, whom he sees as a sort of scholarship boy in
 Sue Owen 75

reverse: “It is plain, from Wigan Pier and from many of Orwell’s other
writings, that he was much of the time trying to cast off his class. But he
always respected certain virtues of that class, such as fairmindedness and
responsibility” (1973, 106). Hoggart’s own class displacement allows him
to see and understand Orwell’s: “He had to try to root out the class-sense
within himself. He did not have a romantic idea of what that last duty
meant; he knew it always means trying to root out a part of yourself” (ibid,
108). However, Hoggart, typically, resists dehumanizing theories:
“Orwell’s attitude was as much personal as representative” (ibid, 109,
note). He sees Orwell as a fellow-exile, like Auden, and resists the
temptation to “classify” him. And he offers an insight about “exiles of
Orwell’s kind”: “All of us may not be able to accept all his moral
solutions; but we are bound to respect his moral stance. For exiles of
Orwell’s kind a moral stance rather than a moral programme is probably
the way in which they speak to a fellow feeling in other me” (ibid, 120).
This might well be applied to Hoggart himself.
As Hoggart summarizes Orwell’s description of poverty in Northern
Britain in the thirties, it is his own passion we hear as well as his own
descriptive words:
He set out to recreate as vividly as he could the shock of this world of slag
heaps and rotting basements, of shabby men with grey clothes and grey
faces and women looking like grandmothers but holding small babies–their
babies, all of them with the air of bundles of old clothes roughly tied up;
the world of the Means Test and of graduates nearly penniless and
canvassing for newspaper sales. This is the Thirties all right, for many in
the working-classes a long-drawn-out waste and misery which only the
preparations for the war of 1939 ended. We may qualify Orwell’s account,
but would falsify history if we tried to qualify it out of existence. These
things happened and not long ago in this country (as they are happening in
many other countries now); and it matters–matters, as Orwell would have
been the first to admit, far more than simply the need to get his record
right–that we should take their emotional measure. (1973, 110-111)

He praises Orwell’s “exceptional honesty” and values Orwell’s “eye for

telling gestures and incident” and the way “He tests on himself, bites
between his teeth, the kind of socially conventional coinage which most of
us accept” (ibid, 116). This exactly captures his own approach in The Uses
of Literacy. Hoggart is writing about Orwell, but might be describing
himself when he writes: “All this seems a down-to-earth common sense
though it is in fact so uncommon as to be a form of high intelligence … It
is informed by an urgent, nonconforming and humane personality” (ibid,
76 Richard Hoggart and Literature

117). The two writers are also comparable in their style, what Hoggart
calls Orwell’s “immediate and demotic voice” (ibid, 118).
As with Auden. Hoggart’s class-position enables both positive and
negative insights. Thus, his own experience of working-class poverty fuels
his appreciation of Orwell, but also his critique. He sees that Orwell
sentimentalizes working-class life, a temptation he warns against in Uses;
and also that Orwell underestimates working-class resilience which is the
subject of the first section of Chapter XI of The Uses of Literacy:

Orwell sometimes sentimentalizes working-class life. His famous

description of a working-class interior is slightly idealized and ‘poetic’.
His account of working-class attitudes to education is oversimplified, and
has a touch of the noble savage. Before we look more closely at these
charges we could add some others not so evident. Orwell’s picture of
working-class life, even of that good side typified in a working-class
interior, is too static, is set like a picture caught at a certain moment. It
becomes in part a nostalgic looking back (and for Orwell himself probably
also suggested an unanxious calm, free of status-striving, which was balm
to him). In general his portrayal of the working-classes in Wigan Pier has
not sufficient perkiness and resilience, is a bit dispirited … There is just a
hint now and again of a related quality, the ability to solider on, to stick
together and bear it, that basic stoicism which Orwell himself possessed
and which may have been one of the reasons why he found the disposition
of working-class people so immediately attractive. (1973, 111-112)

But Hoggart never uses his own working-class credentials to beat others,
and he eschews inverted snobbery. He writes in a generous spirit and
values the truth in Orwell’s work: “It was true to the spirit of the misery.”
(ibid, 112)
Even Orwell’s sentimentality is a good fault: “He was not foolish when
he said that he felt inferior to a coal-miner … He may have sometimes
sentimentalized working-class interiors. But fundamentally he is not
wrong to praise them … And it is not at all foolish – as some have called
it–but it is sensible and humane, to say that the memory of working-class
interiors ‘reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live
in.’” 1973, (112). Hoggart values the working-class capacity for feeling.
There is a danger of overlooking this in over-emphasizing the dangers of
sentimentality. Thus, he says in “Teaching Literature to Adults”: “In
proscribing sentimentality we may inhibit sincere emotion” (1973, 209).
He sees a need to start from the existing position of adult, working-class
students and also to question the assumptions of middle-class critics and
teachers that excessive sentiment is worse than excessive cynicism: “Our
generation seems to reserve its ‘debunking’ for the ‘debunking’ of
 Sue Owen 77

sentimentality, of overdone emotion. It might be better – it is just as useful

an exercise, and one less likely to trouble the students in the wrong way –
to examine clever and cynical writing instead.” (ibid, 217) This double
attitude to working-class sentimentality is reflected in Hoggart’s use in
The Uses of Literacy of the phrase “the feeling heart”. Indeed, when the
lawyers rejected the title The Abuse of Literacy as too inflammatory, The
Feeling Heart was one of Hoggart’s suggestions for a title for the book
(Hoggart, 1955b). “The Feeling Heart” is referred to in a passage at the
end of the section on Club-singing which concludes Chapter V and “Part I:
An Older Order”:

‘A feeling heart’ can often be soft and sentimental, but is not to be derided.
Most of these [working-class] songs express, in their melodies, in their
verses, in the manner in which they must be sung, the ‘feeling heart’. They
touch old chords; they suggest values which people still like to cherish.
Life outside, life on Monday morning, can be a dour affair. Meanwhile,
these sentiments are right, people feel, ‘when y’ get down to it’. The songs
warm and encourage at the time, and no doubt their sentiments remain
somewhere in the memory through all the unsentimental ordinariness of
the working-week (1958, 137).

Hoggart also invokes the term in a parody of a t.v. programme title:

“There is the appeal to old decencies, as in programmes with titles like,
‘For Your Feeling Heart’” (ibid, 277). It seems that the “feeling heart”
stands for traditional working-class values and cherished attachments.
Hoggart, therefore, is both critical and defensive of Orwell’s
sentimental depiction of working-class life, because he has a nuanced
understanding of the complex role of sentimentality within working-class
culture. Moreover, Hoggart identifies with Orwell’s passion, and therefore
forgives him his excesses. Even in relation to the polemical second half of
Wigan Pier, which Hoggart admits is exaggerated in places, “it is
important to say, and say firmly, that Orwell’s sense of the importance and
pervasiveness of class in Britain was sound, sounder than most of those
who criticize him for it. He feels the smallness of small snobbery
accurately. He grasps the rooted nature of class feeling and the immense
effort needed to grow out of it. To believe that it can be easily shaken off
is one of the continuing self-deceptions of the British. Orwell was right to
stress the subtle pervasive force of class, the way in which it cuts across
and sometimes surmounts economic facts” (1973, 113).
This perception of the subtle, pervasive force of class, which Hoggart
shares with Orwell, informs Hoggart’s whole approach to literature. His
working-class origins enable him to see the middle-class bias of the
78 Richard Hoggart and Literature

English novel and to identify as middle-class rather than simply English,

some of its most noted characteristics:

Whatever the present changes in English social patterns–I think we shall be

able to see in another generation that they have been major changes–the
English novel is still largely class-based. It belongs to the self-possessed
and firm, the cultivated and kindly, intelligent middle class. It is difficult
for anyone writing outside the class modes not to be defiantly strident (as
in the proletarian novels of the Thirties) or fiercely experimental, since the
establishing of a ground from which to work demands a reassessment of
tonal range and so of style. (1973, 90)

Contrary to what is often assumed, emotional restraint is middle-class not

(or nor merely) English: “At the back of the class connections lie the
qualities which have made that class–restraint and understatement,
obliquity used as an emotional check. How often does a man ‘break down’
(the manner in which the phrase is used is significant) and cry in an
English novel? One goes to the Russians–or the Americans–for that …
Dickens was something of an exception ... in part his tonal unsteadiness
reflects his unsteady relation to the models of the class for which he
wrote”(1973, 91). Perhaps what Hoggart means here is that Dickens is
prone to sentimentality, but also shares the working-class capacity for
feeling. Hoggart goes on to trace “the understatement and obliquity of
most English writing” through to Kingsley Amis, pointing out that
occasionally, as in Greene, “the understatement is intermittently inverted
into a huge, inflating, and the obliquity becomes a wry, dry, sin-and-
bitters” (ibid, 93).
The middle-class basis of the English novel causes problems for the
working-class reader:

All this may help to explain why some English readers feel more
responsive to American than to English novels. The English novel usually
presents itself in the tones (and often the properties) of a group. Here one
realizes again, sharply, that when an English reader not of the cultured
middle class seeks to ‘become cultured’ he is led to acquire a culture of a
peculiarly defined kind. He is led to adopt the traditional ways of feeling of
a particular social group. It is easy for such a reader–one, say, from a
provincial grammar-school to feel out of place, even though he may also
admire. There is likely to be some loss, whatever the gains. (1973, 93)

Hoggart gives class content to literary sentiment.

Hoggart has a strong dislike of the preference for style over substance
in contemporary literature. He makes a searing critique of superficiality,
 Sue Owen 79

whether in modern literature or popular culture. He says of Tom Wolfe,

“His style is the symptom of an important characteristic of modern mass
communications. When this period’s cultural history comes to be written
one chapter ought to have the heading: ‘It ain’t what you do; it’s the way
that you do it.’ Mr Wolfe’s medium, his stylistic poise, is more important
than his message, his manner more than his matter” (1973, 134). Hoggart’s
exposure of the moral and political / cultural danger at the heart of this
may also serve as an indictment of post-modernism:

In Russia the authorities fear that to expose their people to the open,
multitudinous play of messages in a ‘free’ consumer society would be to
risk making them dissident (in search of other goals). So Russian teenagers
are not required to be ‘data processors’ on anything approaching the
Western scale. You can see this in the different set of their faces (whether
they are acceptors or rejectors of the status quo) and in their much less
fluid style and gestures. But if Marshall McLuhan is right – and Tom
Wolfe’s success seems to support him – the Russian authorities are
mistaken. The best way to keep their people from seeking alternative goals
would be to flood them with ‘data’, to offer them the chance to become
anxious only about ‘form’, so that they came to believe that goals are out
and poise in. Then they might keep on playing roles endlessly, and
harmlessly–with no political effect. But by God they’d have style! (1973,
135).

Hoggart values plainness and integrity of style and mistrusts posturing and
artificiality. He sees it as desirable “to find a usable plain tone–not an
imitation of an established ‘literary’ voice.” He values “sensitive integrity”
and a “clarity which seems almost like talking to yourself, since no one is
being wooed” (1973, 175).
It is especially important to find integrity of language in representing
working-class life: “The movement, the rhythm, of our kind of life odes
not often get into prose … In this sense, it is more difficult to find your
style if you are from the working classes” (1973, 185). The only person
who has really achieved this in the English novel is D. H. Lawrence:

D. H. Lawrence, whose Sons and Lovers is still the only considerable

working-class novel we possess–one that is organic, unpolemical and
unpatronizing–and who went on in his next novels to explore emotional
alignments and formulations which included but passed beyond class.
(1973, 90)

The adjective “unpatronizing” distinguishes Hoggart from the T.S. Eliot

and the Leavises.
80 Richard Hoggart and Literature

Comparing a passage from Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers with a

passage from Forster, Hoggart notes:

… its movement, its ‘kick’, its voice, were those of a working-class man
who had become articulate and–instead of acquiring the rhythms foreign to
his deep-rooted ways of feeling–had kept the rhetoric of his kind and so
(this is the point) could better say what he had to say … The moment you
hear it, it sounds quite different from the Forster passage. The words are
used differently; sentences are put together differently; the emotional
keyboard is different. To begin with, it is more direct. … The writing hits
you more, has more attack … It is more dramatic and demonstrative …
Emotions seem more plain and exposed, more in front of you… It sounds
less as though it’s meant to be read than as though a man is speaking. It
reminds me of the talk I heard as a boy in an English working-class home.
(1973, 186-87)

Hoggart’s working-class background enables him to appreciate an

authentic working-class voice where he does find it, and to see when a
working-class author is inhibiting his own “voice” by not being true to his
class background:

At one end of his range of effective voices Lawrence embodies some

elements from his working-class background. At its best, this voice has a
quick, resilient intelligence; it is quirky, irreverent, and eager … Perhaps
one would expect to find such tones more often and more surely used in
the poems written before Lawrence had moved far from home. But in fact
we find only odd touches, occasional passages, in which this kind of voice
gets through for a while; and then the restrictions of form or emotional
uncertainty hide it again. Some of the dialect poems–especially ‘Whether
or Not’–show the tone beginning to appear if you listen, so to speak, below
the dialect itself (the use of dialect has little to do with the timbre of a
voice); and the ‘Hymn to Priapus’ is an extraordinary mixture of manners
derived from other writers and individual intonations. Many of the early
poems seem baffled and half-throated. (1973, 97-8)

Hoggart sees that the working-class writer’s early striving for literary
voice hampers expression of the authentic working-class poetic voice.
Maturity liberates the “full-throated” working-class voice in Lawrence’s
poetry. Hoggart suggests that a level of acceptance of oneself as working-
class is needed:

There were elements in Lawrence’s working-class background which

helped him–once he had discovered their strengths and limits–to explore
parts of the emotional life. I am suggesting that the effort to draw on these
 Sue Owen 81

elements showed itself, in part, as a search for tones true to their native
temper. (ibid, 99)

He adds a tantalizing speculation that “probably the links between the

‘working-class’ voice and the mystical are deep-seated, for they seem to
help validate each other.” (ibid, 99)
As well as helping him to discern an authentic working-class voice in
literature, Hoggart’s working-class background enables him to appreciate
working-class characters even when their own author despises them. For
example, his offers the following critique of Graham Greene:

Indeed, Greene sometimes finds only sinfulness where many of us would

find something less reprehensible. Ida, the fat Guiness-and-oysters barmaid
of Brighton Rock, who has clearly all kinds of virtues, even though she
may not recognize sin and will go on talking about right-and-wrong, is
several times directly and violently savaged by Greene. I think particularly
of the way he vilifies her as she prepares to spend the night in an hotel with
Phil Corkery. Or of his comment on the workers who come in their
thousands for a day at Brighton, people very much like Ida: ‘Her
amusements were their amusements, her superstitions their superstitions …
she had no more love for anyone than they had.’ It is the last clause which
grates, which is–one’s own experience of life insists, and without being
simply a jolly humanist–just not the whole truth. Greene has
misunderstood; his obsession has blinded him to an important part of the
truth”. (1973, 40-41)

Hoggart’s journey from the working-class to the literary intelligentsia has

opened his eyes to the truth.
Hoggart understands Ida. He values the traditional working-class
virtues of charity and common decency. Similarly, he admires Orwell for
being “tolerant, generous, brave, charitable and compassionate” (1973,
136). He continues:

It is therefore a temper of heart and mind that we most respond to in

Orwell. In trying to define that temper briefly we find ourselves using (and
he would have been unlikely to object old-fashioned phrases. We say, for
example, that he stood for common decency; and though that phrase is
difficult to define and often woolly, with Orwell it indicated a hope which
he tried to embody in action; it indicated his active commitment to the
notion of brotherhood and kindly dealing. (1973, 120)

Similar qualities arouse Hoggart’s respect in Samuel Butler’s The Way of

All Flesh: “we respond to its temper of mind, its energy, charity and irony”
(1973, 136). He adds: “… at its best, it speaks out for unpretentiousness,
82 Richard Hoggart and Literature

honesty and a charitable, pragmatic openness to life.” (159) It is precisely

these qualities of charity, unpretentious honesty, openness and common
decency that we value in the writing of Hoggart himself.

Works Cited
Collini, Stefan (forthcoming). “Richard Hoggart: Literary Criticism and
Cultural Decline in 20th-Century Britain” in Owen (ed.) (forthcoming).
Hoggart, Richard (undated). The Abuse of Literacy. Typescript of The
Uses of Literacy. In the Hoggart archive at the University of Sheffield
Library.
—. (1955a). Letter to Peter Calvocoressi of Chatto and Windus Ltd., 27
July. In the Hoggart archive at the University of Sheffield Library.
—. (1955b). Letter to Peter Calvocoressi, 18 Sept. 1955. In the Hoggart
archive at the University of Sheffield Library.
—. (1958). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with
Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments.
Harmondsworth: Penguin. First pub. Chatto and Windus, 1957.
—. (1965).Auden: An Introductory Essay. London: Chatto and Windus.
—. (1973). Speaking to Each Other, Vol. II: “About Literature”.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
—.“The use of literary criticism in understanding popular art, mass art and
some other forms of mass communication” in “Literature and Society”
in A Guide to the Social Sciences, ed. Norman Mackenzie. Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1968. In ibid, 19-37.
—. “Schools of English in Contemporary Society”: Inaugural Lecture,
University of Birmingham, 1963. In ibid, 231-143.
—. “Why I Value Literature” in Times Educational Supplement (1963,
reprinted in The Critical Moment (London: Faber, 1964). In ibid, 11-
18.
—. “The Literary Imagination and the Sociological Imagination.” Given as
a talk to the Sociology Section of the British Association at its 1967
annual conference and distributed as a pamphlet. In ibid, 244-258.
—. Introduction to George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. London:
Heinemann, 1965. In ibid, 104-121.
—. “Teaching Literature to Adults”: a collection of short pieces from
various sources. In ibid, 205-230.
—. “A Matter of Rhetoric: American Writers and British Readers” in The
Nation , 27 April 1957. In ibid, 89-94.
—. “The Dance of the Long-Legged Fly: On Tom Wolfe’s Poise”,
Encounter 27:2 (August 1966). In ibid, 122-133.
 Sue Owen 83

—. “A Question of Tone: Problems in Autobiographical Writing”: The

Tredegar Memorial Lecture of the Royal Society of Literature.
Reprinted in Essays by Divers Hands, Vol. 33 Oxford: (OUP, 1961). In
ibid, 164-188.
—. “Lawrence’s Voices”, Listener, 29 October 1964. In ibid, 96-99.
—. “The Force of Caricature: Aspects of the Art of Graham Greene, with
Particular Reference to The Power and the Glory” in Essays in
Criticism, Vol. 3-4, Oct. 1953. In ibid, 38-52.
—. Introduction to Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). In ibid, 136-159.
—. (1991). Life and Times, Vol. II: A Sort of Clowning. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
—. (1993). Life and Times, Vol. III: An Imagined Life. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Owen, Sue (2005a). “The Abuse of Literacy and the Feeling Heart: the
Trials of Richard Hoggart”, Cambridge Quarterly 34:2, 147-76.
—. (2005b). Film of Interview with Richard Hoggart 6.5.05. In the
Hoggart archive at the University of Sheffield Library.
—. (ed.) (forthcoming). Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies. London:
Palgrave.
Williams, Raymond, (1961). Culture and Society, 1780-1950.
Harmondsworth: Penguin. First pub. London: Chatto and Windus,
1958.

Notes
1
See also Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies, (Owen ed., forthcoming). One of
the continuing threads through the collection, which includes essays by leading
scholars in cultural studies, is how the roots of Hoggart's critical practice in literary
studies has been forgotten and need to be revisited. The importance of the volume
rests not only upon its rethinking of Hoggart’s position within cultural studies, but
upon its recovery of the complicated (and in recent terms, largely ignored) relation
between Hoggart's roots in literary studies and his foundation of the new discipline
of cultural studies. The volume therefore contributes to a rapprochement between
cultural studies and literary studies, fields with over-lapping interests and many
common goals.
2
See my “Hoggart and Women” in Owen, Sue (ed.) (forthcoming).
3
About a decade after the book was published Auden told Hoggart he had been
“all in all over-generous” in the book (Hoggart, 1991, 89). See also the letter from
Auden to Hoggart at the end of this volume.
84 Richard Hoggart and Literature

4
Hoggart, 1965, 19-20. In speaking of the “group” Hoggart has in mind not just
poets such as Spender, Day Lewis and MacNeice but also prose writers such as
Isherwood, Upward and Connolly
5
For Hoggart’s own lack of gregariousness see Owen (2005b). He attributes this in
part to being an orphan.
 THE USES OF D. H. LAWRENCE

SEAN MATTHEWS

I always find that my critics, pretending to criticise me, are analysing themselves.
—D. H. Lawrence (1988, 240)

As a result of Richard Hoggart’s testimony in Regina v Penguin Books

Ltd, the “Chatterley Trial”, his name will always be linked with that of D.
H. Lawrence. Hoggart was himself conscious at the time of a tendency–he
does not specify on whose part–to identify him with the controversial
writer, acknowledging with typical modesty that he was “a very very
slightly sub-Lawrentian figure: ex-working class, provincial, literary but
unflashy” (2001, 87). Certainly it was the credentials he shared with
Lawrence, as a “working-class boy made good”, as much as his
professional status as Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Leicester
University “who lectured on D. H. Lawrence to the young people under
his care”, which had provoked Penguin Books’ lawyers to call him as an
“expert witness” for the Defence, but it was as a result of his steady,
articulate presentation of Lawrence’s significance during his cross-
examination, one of the longest in the history of the Old Bailey, that the
author of The Uses of Literacy secured a still wider celebrity as cultural
individual intonations” (1970, 97). The writing “embodies some elements
the attention, and imagination, not only of the court but of the whole
media circus surrounding that most peculiar event.
Hoggart famously defended Lawrence’s artistic and moral purposes on
the grounds of their “puritanical” spirit, a term which in equal measure
surprised and provoked the Prosecuting Counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones,
Q.C.. Much to Hoggart’s relief–and that of the Defence lawyers–E. M.
Forster, in his testimony, concurred with what he conceded was a
“paradoxical” characterisation of Lawrence (Hoggart, 1961, 54; Hoggart,
2001, 90; Matthews, 2007, x). In his own exchanges with Griffith-Jones,
Hoggart explained the importance of Lawrence’s example for the
emergent post-war generation of readers, how Lawrence’s experiences and
representation of the values of provincial, non-conformist, working-class
life, chimed so much more tellingly with the contemporary mood than the
86 The Uses of D. H. Lawrence

anachronistic prejudices of Griffith-Jones, views encapsulated in his

notorious question, “Is it a book you would even wish your wife and
servants to read?” (Rolph, 1961, 17) Brian Cox, editor of the Critical
Quarterly, immediately grasped the significance of this clash:

During the Trial, the conflict between Mr Griffith-Jones and Richard

Hoggart repeated a debate which has been going on now for decades. It
was almost as if Lawrence himself were facing the established order
responsible for censorship of his work during his life-time […] the old
upper class idea that literature should be the imitation of beauty, a
delightful, aesthetic frill among the civilized pleasures of life is confronted
by the new lower class, non-conformist, puritan view of literature as the
expression of the whole man, a moral commitment to a total way of life.
(Cox, 1961, 101)

“It is almost as if Lawrence himself were facing the established order”:

Hoggart and Lawrence are identified on the grounds of the continuity not
only of their class position, and their sense of the moral function of
literature, but of their shared status as representatives of a new structure of
feeling, writers embodying together an emergent discourse of culture and
experience. With symptomatic rightness the second Penguin edition of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, necessitated within months of the first by the
extraordinary sales of the unexpurgated edition (some two million in the
first year alone), includes Hoggart’s ‘Introduction’, an acknowledgment
not only of the central role he had played in the Defence, but also of this
inescapable association.2
The frequency with which Hoggart himself returned in his writing to
the Trial is but further testimony to its importance, both to him and to our
understanding of post-war cultural history.3 It was an event which drew
together several different strands of his life and work, as well as being
saturated with wider cultural significance, and its echoes and resonances
continue to this day. Hoggart’s assessment neatly captures the primary
elements of this significance:

Clearly, the event touched on sensitive English nerves: about the limits and
justifications for censorship, about sex, about literature and–bound up with
all those–about social class. It became a setting for these issues to be
publicly laid out and played out to a degree not seen before. In that sense it
focussed certain changes in mid-twentieth-century Britain as nothing else
did; or it seemed to do so–some of the conclusions drawn from it were
mistaken, overdrawn. (1992, 87)
 Sean Matthews 87

Censorship, sex, literature and class: these were the most obvious currents
in play in the Old Bailey, and they are, in their interrelations and
complications, the staple concerns of Hoggart’s career. D. H. Lawrence
himself, however, at the level of the influence of his work and his life on
Hoggart’s own writing and criticism, remains oddly absent from the
account. Lawrence–as opposed to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Trial–
is, in fact, rarely present either in assessments of Hoggart’s career (Leavis,
Orwell or Auden tend to be most often cited as dominant early influences),
or in narratives of the emergence of Cultural Studies; and yet Lawrence
was a powerful determinant not only on the formation of the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, but also of the initial
articulation and dynamics of the whole field of Cultural Studies. The
establishment of the Birmingham Centre was only made possible by a
substantial financial commitment from Allen Lane, proprietor of Penguin
Books, a donation made explicitly as a gesture of gratitude to Hoggart
following Penguin’s acquittal at the 1960 Trial (Hare, 1995; Hoggart,
1992, 89-90). The institutional formation of Cultural Studies thus derived
invaluable, if largely unremarked, material impetus from Lawrence’s
work. Equally crucial, and equally underestimated, is Lawrence’s
intellectual influence on Hoggart, and by extension on the disciplinary
articulation of Cultural Studies. What we might, following Foucault, call
the “discourse” of D. H. Lawrence provided means and moment for the
radical changes in the critical and disciplinary paradigms of English
Studies taking place in the decades following the 1939-45 War. Lawrence
provided a unique, if complex and often contradictory, model for a
generation of working-class intellectuals of the 1950s, and yet there has
been little analysis either of that wider story or of Hoggart’s specific, but
representative, case. I therefore sketch in this essay one aspect of that
broader cultural pattern of influence and engagement, tracing Hoggart’s
own relation to Lawrence. Such an investigation serves several purposes:
first, the better to recognise the shape and distinctiveness of Hoggart’s
own work, by coming at it from this less familiar angle; second, to qualify
our understanding of the forces at play in the emergence of Cultural
Studies; third, to add a further current to work already taking place in the
field of D. H. Lawrence studies which examines the later significance of
the writer’s work.4
It is a commonplace to associate D. H. Lawrence with the social and
cultural upheaval of the 1960s, not least because of Philip Larkin’s
conjunction of the Chatterley Ban with Sexual Intercourse and the Beatles’
first LP (Larkin, 1988, 167), but the writer’s influence and importance
were arguably still greater during the 1950s, if less spectacular or
88 The Uses of D. H. Lawrence

controversial. C. H. Rolph contended that there were “no dynamic reasons

why Lady Chatterley’s Lover, thirty-two years after its publication, should
have been brought to trial under a new Statute designed to inhibit
prosecutions of this very kind” (1961, 10). This ignores, however, the
many ways in which the figure of Lawrence came to dominate critical
debate during the postwar years, and–as a cornerstone of Penguin’s
“Paperback Revolution”–was a strikingly popular and pervasive author
across the reading publics. In 1948, T. S. Eliot had remarked, in an
Introduction to the first postwar study of Lawrence, that “after being
misunderstood, he [Lawrence] is in danger of being ignored”, but between
1951 and 1961 over a dozen monographs and countless articles about
Lawrence were published in Britain alone, and these studies marked not
only a powerful resurgence of scholarly and critical interest after the hiatus
of the war years, but also a striking movement away from the
predominantly biographical emphases of previous studies.5 At the Trial,
reference was made to “over eight hundred books about Lawrence”
(Rolph, 1961, 33; 42). A series of influential essays by F. R. Leavis which
had been the basis of D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955), were published
between 1950 and 1953. As the decade progressed, articles concerning
Lawrence’s novels, tales, poems and criticism outnumbered those of all
other authors but Shakespeare in Essays in Criticism. Still more tellingly,
casual or incidental reference to Lawrence’s work became so widespread
in the journal, even in writing concerned with other authors or topics, that
Robert Hogan, writing in 1959, made the exasperated claim that
“Lawrence is too critically fashionable” (1959, 381). In a different vein,
Lawrence’s growing importance is indicated by Malcolm Bradbury’s
recollection that he took “some pride in the fact that I published my first
stories in the Nottinghamshire Guardian, where D. H. Lawrence published
his first story: this gave me a rather grand sense of continuity, a sequence
to follow” (1989, 292).
Alan Sinfield, however, in his account of post-war British culture,
notes that during the 1950s, “D. H. Lawrence suddenly became very
important”, but he offers only a single paragraph on the topic, and derides
Lawrence’s function as a “bridge” between New Left intellectuals and the
working class, glibly concluding that “reading Lawrence was not the same
as living in a Nottingham pit village” (1989, 259). Peter Widdowson
introduced a 1992 anthology of Lawrence criticism by suggesting that a
small “Lawrence revival” began in the later 1940s, but only really “took
off, of course, after the famous trial in 1960” (1992, 3). Such glancing
acknowledgment of the significance of the debates about Lawrence is
common in cultural and intellectual histories of the period, in part no
 Sean Matthews 89

doubt due to priorities of emphasis and focus, but also because we lack
criteria or tools for the measurement of such influence, of significance of
this order. I am conscious of the challenge a scrutiny of impressions of
tone and emphasis and voice, as much as facts, offers to our contemporary
theoretical models, although it is also the case that Hoggart’s critical
technique, just as Lawrence’s, is finely attentive to just these issues.6
Lawrence’s status is typically remarked by historians and critics, but
“explained” as a result of the Chatterley furore. The earlier function of his
example as a catalyst for wider changes in the discursive field is
underestimated or overlooked.7 Nevertheless, Sinfield’s “suddenly” is as
suggestive as Widdowson’s acknowledgment of a “revival”.8 The Lawrence
of the 1950s was altogether a new, strong and pervasive presence, and the
issues his writing provoked were strikingly contemporary. In this
perspective, the Chatterley Trial is more properly interpreted as the
culmination, rather than the beginning, of resurgence and change in the
attention to Lawrence. It is in this context that Richard Hoggart’s work,
and his own debt to Lawrence, should be situated.
Lawrence is a continual presence in Hoggart’s writing at the level not
only of direct commentary and analysis, as an object of evidence or
example, but also as a recurrent point of allusion, or of formal, or stylistic,
exemplification. There are even specific biographical parallels: Hoggart,
like Lawrence, was known as ‘Bert’ as a child, and .he grew up in
households dominated by women, later noting the significance of this in
Lawrence’s experience (Matthews, 2007; Hoggart, 2001, 64). In The Uses
of Literacy, it is of a passage from Lawrence that Hoggart thinks when
recalling the “habitual gesture” of his grandmother (1957, 44); when
seeking to ground a judgement or opinion it is often a Lawrentian axiom
for which he will reach.9 Even when not an explicit presence, Lawrence
often reverberates in Hoggart at the level of persistent themes and
concerns, or, less tangibly, simple tone and conviction. It is to Lawrence
that Hoggart routinely returns throughout his career, and even a cursory
attention to the Hoggart bibliography reveals Lawrence–far more than
Orwell–to be Hoggart’s touchstone, and he is writing is studded with
comments on the relationship: “I remember a peculiar excitement when
one day I read the opening of Sons and Lovers”; “Sons and Lovers is still
the only considerable working-class novel we possess–one that is organic,
unpolemical and unpatronizing”; “Lawrence is one of the authors whom in
adolescence I ‘made my own’” (1970, 197, 96; 2001, 49). The composure
and confidence of Hoggart’s testimony at the Trial is predicated on a
profound and comprehensive knowledge of the author’s writing, and an
evident sympathy with what he calls its “distinguishing feature”, the
90 The Uses of D. H. Lawrence

puritanism which he famously defined at the Old Bailey as “an intense

sense of responsibility for one’s conscience” (Rolph, 1961, 100). Although
there is always a danger of reading evidence backwards or outwards, with
hindsight, from so dramatic an event as the Chatterley Trial, Hoggart’s
testimony does offer a peculiarly precise index to his relationship with
Lawrence, isolating the formal, theoretical and thematic pressures, not to
mention social and political themes, which his reading of Lawrence served
to clarify and focus.
The characterisation of the Trial on the back cover of the Penguin
volume as “probably the most thorough and expensive seminar on
Lawrence’s work ever given” is playful but apt, since sixteen of the thirty-
five expert witnesses were academics (Rolph, 1961, rear dust jacket).
Throughout the transcript, indeed, there is widespread use of language
which blurs the distinction between court and lecture hall. Sir William
Emrys Williams, Secretary-General of the Arts Council and editorial
adviser to Penguin, explained that the firm published the novel on the
grounds that the 1959 Obscene Publications Act declared “the work should
be studied as a whole” (Rolph, 1961, 85); Griffith-Jones chides Hoggart
twice for ‘lecturing’ (ibid, 100); Penguin Books is likened to ‘a University
Press in paperbacks’ (ibid, 142); Gerald Gardiner, Q. C, for the Defence,
refers to “students of literature in all walks of life” (ibid, 195); Vivian de
Sola Pinto suggests that the most appropriate criterion of “literary merit”
might be whether a book was “studied in the universities and prescribed by
the people who teach in the universities” (ibid, 74).10 In all these very
immediate and obvious ways the Trial figures a mingling of educational,
literary critical and legal concerns, but the transcript also contains a
detailed staging of the complex relationship between academic critics,
literary journalists and common readers which is such a constant,
indeterminate but vital aspect of the British critical tradition, and a crucial
concern in Hoggart’s own voice and position. In addition, the opportunity
which the Trial provided to reach a wide public audience, the way events
were subject to daily scrutiny in the media, directs us to a further element
in Hoggart’s project, a belief not only in the existence of “the Common
Reader”, “intelligent lay readers”, but the unflagging effort to engage and
sustain public intellectual discourse with that elusive figure in mind.11
One of the most important themes of Hoggart’s work is, of course, his
assessment of the implications of the “democratisation” of culture which
had taken place within his own lifetime, the broad extension of literacy
and education which resulted from the extensions of educational provision
from 1870 onwards–extensions which had provided the means for
Lawrence, and then Hoggart himself, to profit from a secondary, and then
 Sean Matthews 91

a university education. The latter half of The Uses of Literacy is a fiercely

indignant attack on the poverty of mass-produced, commercial reading
matter, an argument for resistance to such exploitation and abuse of the
new mass literacy, an argument which, aptly enough, take its cues from
Lawrence: “Purely on this evidence, the situation looks dreadful:
sensation, fragmentation, over-simplification, unreality; ‘never a real or a
good thing read’ to paraphrase D. H. Lawrence” (1957, 198); “Most mass-
entertainments are in the end what D. H. Lawrence described as ‘anti-life’.
They are full of a corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral
evasions” (1957, 277).12 Hoggart is sensitive to the ambiguities and
challenges of this mass literacy. One may be literate, in the sense of being
able to read, but this does not necessarily mean either that one is an
intelligent reader, or that one is given access to appropriate reading:

[T]hough we are now a literate people, not everyone reads, say, T. S. Eliot
[...] there might reasonably have been an improvement in the general
standard of reading, in its quality, over the last fifty years; a great deal has
been done to ensure it. And certain developments do suggest that such an
improvement has taken place. But when we look at the increase,
proportionately, in the hold which the simplified and fragmentary
publications have come to exercise during the same period, and at their
failure to be one whit better than the publications of half a century ago, it
becomes very doubtful whether we can claim that there has been any
general improvement in the quality of reading. It seems, rather, as though a
very large number of people are being held down at an appallingly low
level in their reading. (1957, 193)

The people being “held down”, needless to say, are in Hoggart’s account
above all the “working-people”. It is the working class, the ordinary
people, who are, he argues, “culturally robbed” (1957, 201).
There is an immediate reminder of these issues early in Rolph’s
account of the Trial, when he reports the swearing-in of the Jury, and
remarks that five jurists struggled in their reading aloud of the Oath. In
Rolph’s description, such “difficulty or hesitancy” marks them out as
“ordinary men and women”, whereas the other seven are “manifestly
literate and educated persons” (1961, 6). Rolph thus explicitly
distinguishes the “literate and educated” not from, say, those with weaker
or less confident public reading and speaking skills, but from “ordinary
men and women”. Experiments with contemporary university students,
reading the same Oath before a class of their undergraduate peers rather
than a packed Old Bailey, suggest that very few of them might be
described as “literate” in Rolph’s definition of the term. Ironically, his
easy prejudice brings abruptly into focus an issue which dominates the
92 The Uses of D. H. Lawrence

Trial, and is at the heart of the paradigm shift in literary and cultural
studies in the postwar era. Griffith-Jones reminds the jurors that when it
comes to formulating their verdict, educated opinion should be disregarded
if it seems at odds with their own common sense:

Are these views you have heard from these most eminent and academic
ladies and gentlemen, are they really of such value as the views which you
(perhaps, if I may say so, without the eminence and without the academic
learning they possess) hold and can see from the ordinary life in which you
live? (Rolph, 1961, 212)

Griffith-Jones gives repeated emphasis to “ordinary” reading and readers,

largely in anti-intellectual contradistinction to “expert” reading (see for
instance his closing remarks: Rolph, 1961, 215, 217, 219, 225). He insists,
“You will judge this as ordinary men and women, with your feet, I trust,
firmly planted upon the ground” (Rolph, 1961, 212). In his own
summation, Gerald Gardiner for the Defence in some ways try to pre-empt
the strategy, arguing that experts are also ordinary people Rolph, 1961,
177), and the Defence is at pains throughout to stress the “ordinariness” of
its witnesses, normally figured through emphases on their family life
and/or contact with working folk.
In contrast to the other–predominantly Oxbridge–academics, the
evidence of both Hoggart and Raymond Williams (who gave evidence the
following day), is predicated less upon their considerable professional
standing, than on their representatively ordinary, indeed specifically
working-class, origins. This exemplifies the constant slipperiness of the
term “ordinary”, meaning at one moment “non-expert”, at another,
“working class”, sometimes both at the same time, sometimes one to the
exclusion of the other. The Defence’s line of questioning of Hoggart is a
typical demonstration of this trope:

“I want to pass now to the four-letter words. You told the Jury yesterday
you were educated at an elementary school. Where was it?” – “Leeds.”
“How did you start your life?” – “I was born into the working class and I
was orphaned at the age of eight and brought up by my grandmother.”
“What is your view as to the genuineness and necessity in the book of the
use of the four-letter words in the mouth of Mellors?” – “They seem to me
totally characteristic of many people.” (Rolph, 1961, 98)

Hoggart’s working-class identity is established as an essential quality,

rather than a cultural or experiential characteristic, and is the primary
grounds from which an appeal is made to his judgement on Lawrence’s
obscenity.13 Typically, Hoggart subsequently gives a humorous example
 Sean Matthews 93

of this “ordinary” theme, recalling that “one of the preferred items of

uniform for provincial lecturers was the V-neck pullover. It later became
for some of us too identifiably conventional-ordinary to be retained
“(Hoggart, 1992, 89). However, he was also profoundly conscious of the
real difficulties, finding himself particularly caught up at the Trial in
definitions of “a careful reader” (Rolph, 1961, 92), and “an ordinary
reader” (Hyde, 133). He specifies “a good reading of the book, I don’t
mean a highbrow’s reading, a good, decent person’s reading of the book”
(Rolph, 1961, 95; Hyde, 143). These difficulties take us to the heart not
only of the ways in which the Trial dramatised questions of method and
priority in literary criticism (judgement and verdict having a unique double
sense for the occasion), but how Hoggart himself formulated his critical
positions.
Teasing apart these layers of meaning and implication in phrases such
as “an ordinary reader”, “a good reading”, and “a good decent person’s
reading” is to explore a network of tensions which is the defining motif
not simply of Hoggart’s work but of his generation (see e.g. Williams,
1988, 3-18). First, there are the distinctions of different kinds, modes or
styles of reading. Next, there is the association of different kinds of
reading with different types, and to some extent classes, of people. Finally,
with a potential for dangerous circularity, there nevertheless remains the
question of the grounds of evaluation both of the different kinds of
reading, and within each of those readings, the framework and criteria of
literary critical judgement, which may involve an appeal to values beyond
the text.14 This final category, needless to say, is complicated by the ways
in which the very criteria of value are to some extent class-specific, with
close connection to precisely the distinctions of reading community, and
by extension social class, which are already at stake in the second
category. The peril, to which Hoggart consistently alerts us, is that the
complex interdependency of the terms can result in an exasperated and
defeated relativism, a refusal to make judgements at all. The latter part of
The Uses of Literacy gives repeated emphasis to this danger (it is a theme
which continues in Hoggart’s work to the present day):

On Sundays, in particular, journalists with suitably democratic names

make their columns ring with straight pride in speaking for the common
sense of the ordinary man, which is better than all the subtlety of the
intellectuals who ‘have notions’. We are encouraging a sense, not of the
dignity of each person but of a new aristocracy, the monstrous regiment of
the most flat-faced. (1957, 151)
94 The Uses of D. H. Lawrence

The passage anticipates one strand of the Trial, at which the intangible and
unknowable “common sense of the ordinary man” is the elephant in the
room, an elephant Hoggart spent much of his career trying properly to
delineate. He responds to the challenge in several ways, and Lawrence
offered him a crucial resource.
I mentioned earlier my own anxiety, deriving from a formation in the
rigorous scientism of Theory, that attention to characteristics of tone, of
voice, can seem impressionistic and imprecise, and yet it is precisely his
alertness to these characteristics, and Hoggart’s ability to identify and
categorise them, which is the strength of his literary and cultural criticism.
He is sensitive to the ways in which the form and shape of writing, the use
of language, “embodies” tensions between experience or sensibility on the
one hand, and convention, or genre, on the other. He is as conscious of this
in his extrapolations from, and articulations of, his own experience as he is
in discussing the writing of other authors. In his attention to these aspects
of Lawrence’s work, he thus often specifies issues of particular
significance to his own case. In “Lawrence’s Voices”, for example, he
notes how Lawrence’s early poetry offers “an extraordinary mixture of
manners derived from other writers and individual intonations” (1970, 97).
The writing “embodies some elements from his working-class
background” but, “restrictions of form or emotional identity hide it again”.
Reading Sons and Lovers, in contrast, in a remarkable close reading in “A
Question of Tone”, Hoggart is conscious of the voice of “a working-class
man who had become articulate and–instead of acquiring the rhythms
foreign to his deep-rooted ways of feeling–had kept the rhetoric of his
kind” (1970, 197).15 In Sons and Lovers, Hoggart argues, Lawrence
achieves the writing of experience in a voice which remains consistent
with the class and community of his origins, and it is the rarity of that
achievement which gains Hoggart’s admiration: “I am saying that one
would like one’s prose to carry one’s own rhythms, and that to find them
has interesting complications for a writer from the working classes, since
most of his models, his often attractive models, come from and come with
the tones of other social groups” (1970, 199). It is also worth noting that
Hoggart’s own establishment of his critical authority on this occasion is,
just as at the Trial, partly derived from his own comparable experience: “It
reminds me of the talk I heard as a boy in an English working-class
home.” It is this defining opposition between the experience of home,
community and class with the wider world of school, education and
training which, in Hoggart’s classic account, so disables the “Scholarship
Boy” (1957, 242). Hoggart is at his most cautious and self-conscious in
these passages (“This is a difficult chapter to write” 1957, 238), because
 Sean Matthews 95

he is exploring experiences, he acknowledges, so close to his own: “I am

from the working-classes and feel even now both close to them and apart
from them […] this very emotional involvement presents considerable
dangers” (1957, 18). As he repeatedly makes clear, however, it is
nevertheless precisely the facility to articulate emotion, to achieve a tone
which is neither ironic nor sentimental in its relation to emotion and
experience, which is one of Lawrence’s most telling attributes, an attribute
which Hoggart traces directly to his working-class origins: Lawrence’s
prose “recreates something of the peculiar feel of experience as working-
class people live it, just as E. M. Forster’s prose suggests that of the
intelligent middle-class”; “There were elements in Lawrence’s working-
class background which helped him–once he had discovered their
strengths and limits–to explore parts of the emotional life” (1970, 199;
105). There is, Hoggart maintains, no other author to whom someone from
Hoggart’s environment could go for a model or example for his own
writing.
Raymond Williams brought into focus, in a 1957 review of The Uses
of Literacy, the ways in which Hoggart’s struggle with these issues was
representative of the challenge, in writing from their experience, for their
whole generation and class:

I am not blaming Hoggart for this variety, but since the condition is
general, I am trying to insist on the distinctions we shall all have to make,
if the voice of this generation is to come clear and true. We are suffering,
obviously, from the decay and disrepute of the realistic novel, which for
our purposes (since we are, and know ourselves to be, individuals within
society) ought clearly to be revived. Sound critical work can be done;
sound social observation and analysis of ideas. Yet I do not see how, in the
end, this particular world of fact and feeling can be adequately mediated,
except in these more traditionally imaginative terms. Of course it cannot be
George Eliot again, not even Lawrence, though the roots are in both. But
there, I think, is the direction, and there […] in this solemn, earnest, heavy
voice, that one hears, at the crises, in Hoggart, is a voice to listen to and to
welcome. (1989, 24-9)

Williams characterizes Hoggart’s writing as a “mixed form”, and regrets

he had not chosen instead to write a realistic novel, noting that Lawrence’s
example would be the obvious point of departure. In fact, Hoggart had
earlier discounted the possibility of a novel, though he does acknowledge
in the opening pages of his study that, “It is some novels, after all, that
may bring us close to the quality of working-class life–such a novel as
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, at least, rather than more popular or more
consciously proletarian fiction” (1957, 17).16 Just as Hoggart sees in
96 The Uses of D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence’s writing the achievement of a voice which mediates experience

and received form, Williams sees in Hoggart the pressure of new
experience struggling for a new voice. What is striking about that “earnest,
heavy voice” is precisely the extent to which it captures the rhythms and
tone of Hoggart’s own speaking voice. This was brought home to me
when interviewing Hoggart, at an event where he had offered to read from
his work. It is impossible, when trying to transcribe the interview, to
determine where ex tempore comment ends and reading begins, so fluent
is the form Hoggart achieved in his writing. “Speech will indicate a great
deal,” (1957, 21), he remarks at the beginning of The Uses of Literacy, and
it is as if, throughout his work, he is most comfortable when close to the
idiom and tone of the ordinary, working-class people amongst whom he
grew up. More than anything, it is in these intangible ways that
Lawrence’s influence is perhaps most apparent. It is this element of
Lawrence’s achievement to which he returns most regularly, the very titles
of his essays which address or refer to Lawrence indicating the strength of
this concern: “Lawrence’s Voices”; “Finding A Voice”; “A Question of
Tone”; “A Very English Voice”.
Lawrence’s presence in Hoggart at the level of attitude and style is
consistently evident, even when not explicitly acknowledged, and in some
ways it is this diffuse or subterranean element of Lawrence’s influence
that is its strongest force: Hoggart tellingly characterises writing itself,
again using Lawrence as his example, as a “difficult moral exercise”,
bringing together form and expression with the explicit statement as
continuous moral attributes of the work (2001, 84). At the Trial, when
questioned about his stance on censorship, Hoggart argues that he would
indeed support the suppression of some books, and tellingly, perhaps
inevitably, employs Lawrence: “Those are books, to use a phrase of
Lawrence’s, which ‘do dirt on life’” (Rolph, 1961, 103). In the discussion
of weekly family magazines in The Uses of Literacy, regretting many
tendencies in popular “modern, mid-century magazines”, Hoggart
particularly deprecates the representation of sexual material:

I have suggested that on the whole their interest is not so much in the
widely curious as in the narrowly startling and sexually-sensational. What
is worse, this sex-interest is largely “in the head” and eye, a removed,
vicarious thing. It thinks of itself as a smart and sophisticated interest, but
is really bloodless and reduced to a very narrow range of responses;
slickness disguising emotional thinness is no improvement on the older
kind of family magazine. (1957, 183-4)
 Sean Matthews 97

The phrase in quotation marks recalls Rupert Birkin’s diatribe against

Hermione Roddice in the “Class-Room” chapter of Women in Love,17 but
the tone and voice of the prose, as so often in Hoggart, is particularly
reminiscent of the Lawrence of the later essays such as “Climbing Down
Pisgah” (1924), “John Galsworthy” (1927), “Sex versus Loveliness”
(1928), “The State of Funk” (1928-9) and “Introduction to His Paintings”
(1929)–essays which Hoggart knew from the 1950 Penguin collection,
edited by Richard Aldington for, appropriately enough, “the wide non-
specialist reading public” (Lawrence, 1950, 8). It is this critical work
Hoggart characterizes as “brilliant […] so direct and idiomatic that it
opens new doors, especially to those who come from similar backgrounds”
(2001, 61). The stress falls again on the “direct and idiomatic” voice and
tone, and on an acknowledgement of a crucial precursor.
F R Leavis, in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, defends Lawrence against
two negative critical judgements. The first of these judgements is that
Lawrence, although a “genius”, lacked the education, intelligence and
discipline necessary to disinterested art. The second is that Lawrence was
a snob. Leavis’s defence of Lawrence’s art, in the opening chapter of the
book, “Lawrence and Art”, is grounded on an exploration of Lawrence’s
“technical originality” (Leavis, 1955, 21). His rebuttal of the snobbery
charge is in the second chapter, “Lawrence and Class”:

The consciousness of class-distinctions expressed in The Daughters of the

Vicar is precisely a consciousness that we have to define as wholly
incompatible with snobbery or any related form of class-feeling. Lawrence
registers them as facts that play an important part in human life. The part
they play in the given tale is a sinister one, and the theme is their defeat–
the triumph over them of life. (ibid, 71)

Leavis concedes that, “It is one of the difficulties of criticism that the critic
has to use such phrases as the last”. His writing may seem an odd point of
reference for my own conclusion, but his timely and telling account of
Lawrence resonates now for my reading of Hoggart. Literary and Cultural
Studies have moved on from the moment of The Uses of Literacy and the
Chatterley Trial, to a language far more explicit about its technical
ambitions and theoretical self-consciousness than Hoggart’s “solemn,
earnest, heavy voice”, and to critical practices far less attentive to nuances
of voice and tone, or to “the great number of differences, the subtle shades,
the class distinctions, within the working-classes themselves” (Hoggart,
1957, 21), which characterise Hoggart’s work. We tend not to be attentive
at all, except in deconstructive mode, to the great imperatives of
humanism, of “life”, which underpin his moral vision, and we still hesitate
98 The Uses of D. H. Lawrence

over questions of the place and form of emotion in writing.18 In beginning

to trace the continuities between Lawrence’s example and. Hoggart’s,
however, one becomes convinced of the need to re-examine, and to
defend–even to celebrate–both the complexity of Hoggart’s technical
accomplishment, the attainment of that distinctive and proper voice, and
the representative importance of his own critical achievement.

Works Cited
Bradbury, Malcolm (1989). “Afterword”” No, Not Bloomsbury. Bury St.
Edmunds: Arena Books. First pub. 1987.
Cox, C. B. (1961). “Editorial Comment: The Teaching of Literature”, in
“Symposium: Pornography and Obscenity”, Critical Quarterly., Vol. 3.
Eliot, T. S. (1951). “Introduction”, in Fr. William Tiverton, D. H.
Lawrence and Human Existence. Barrie and Rockliff, 1951. Tiverton
was the pseudonym of Robert Jarrett-Kerr.
Hare, Steve (ed.) (1995). Penguin Portrait: Allen Lane and the Penguin
Editors 1935-70. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hogan, Robert (1959). “D. H. Lawrence and His Critics”, Essays in
Criticism, 9.4 (October).
Hoggart, Richard (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of working-class
life, with special reference to publications and entertainment. London:
Chatto & Windus.
—. (1961). ““Chatterley”, The Witnesses and the Law”, Encounter, 16.3
(March).
—. (1970). Speaking to Each Other, Volume II: About Literature. London:
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—. “Lawrence’s Voices”, The Listener, October 29, 1964, in ibid.
—. “Question of Tone: Problems in Autobiographical Writing” in ibid.
—. “Finding a Voice” in ibid.
—. (1992). An Imagined Life: Life and Times 1959-1991. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
—. (1995). The Way We Live Now. London: Chatto.
—. (2001). Between Two Worlds. London: Aurum.
—. “The Rainbow” in ibid, 60-73.
—. “Women in Love” in ibid, 74-84.
—. “Lady Chatterley and the Censors” in ibid, 85-100.
Hoggart, Richard and Raymond Williams, “Working Class Attitudes”,
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and Sallie Westwood, (eds.), Border Country: Raymond Williams in
Adult Education (NIACE).
 Sean Matthews 99

Hough, Graham (1961). The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence.

Harmondsworth: Penguin. First pub. 1956.
Hyde, H. Montgomery (1990). The Lady Chatterley’s Lover Trial (Regina
v. Penguin Books Limited). Oxford: Bodley Head.
Larkin, Philip (1988). “Annus Mirabilis”, High Windows (1964). In
Collected Poems. London: Faber.
Lawrence, D. H. (1950). Selected Essays, ed. with an Introduction by
Richard Aldington. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
—. (1961). Lady Chatterley’s Lover (2nd edition). Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1961.
—. (1967). The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren
Roberts. London: Heinemann.
—. (1985). “John Galsworthy” in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other
Essays, ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
First pub. 1927.
—. (1987). Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John
Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. (1988). “Accumulated Mail” (1925), Reflections on the Death of a
Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Leavis, F. R. (1955). D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto &
Windus.
Matthews, Sean (2007). “An Interview with Richard Hoggart”, Key Words
5 (Autumn).
Rolph, C. H. (ed.) (1961). The Trial of Lady Chatterley. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Sinfield, Alan (1989). Literature, Culture and Politics in Postwar Britain.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Widdowson, Peter (ed.) (1992). “Introduction”, D. H. Lawrence: A
Longman Critical Reader. London: Longman.
Williams, Raymond (1988). “Culture is Ordinary”, in Norman Mackenzie,
ed., Conviction (MacGibbon and Key, 1958), 74-92. Reprinted in
Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope ed. Robin Gable. London:
Verso, 3-18.
—. (1989). “Fiction and the Writing Public”, Essays in Criticism 7.4
(October 1957), 422-428. Reprinted in Raymond Williams, What I
Came to Say, ed. Francis Mulhern (Hutchinson Radius), 24-9.
100 The Uses of D. H. Lawrence

Notes
1
Where Rolph’s account omits or elides material (his is a heavily abridged
version), references given in the text are taken from the more complete transcript
in Hyde, (1990).
2
The second edition was itself reprinted repeatedly through the 1960s, further
securing the association of the two writers: Lawrence (1961).
3
Hoggart wrote a number of pieces in the aftermath of the Trial. Apart from the
“Introduction”, and “‘Chatterley’, The Witnesses and the Law” (Hoggart, 1961),
see also “Lawrence’s Voices”, The Listener, October 29 1964 (in Hoggart, 1970).
In his later writing, the Trial is a recurrent point of reference: see “Lady Chatterley
and the Censors” (in Hoggart, 1992, 47-70); and The Way We Live Now (1995,
252-3).
4
There is a wealth of material on the pre-history of Cultural Studies, with much
detailed reference to the 1950s: see for instance Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s
Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (Routledge, 1990); Tony
Dunn, “The Evolution of Cultural Studies” in David Punter, ed., Introduction to
Contemporary Cultural Studies (Longman, 1986); Antony Easthope, Literary into
Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1991); Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture
(Routledge, 2000); Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction
(Routledge, 1990). There is little or no discussion, however, of the ways in which
the clarification and focus of debates around culture in the period drew so
specifically and repeatedly on Lawrence. For Lawrence studies, see particularly
Peter Preston, “‘I am a Novel’, Lawrence in Recent British Fiction”, in Keith
Cushman and Earl Ingersoll, eds., D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds (Rosemount,
2003), 25-49; Chris Baldick, “Post-mortem: Lawrence’s Critical and Cultural
Legacy”, in Anne Fernihough, ed., The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence
(Cambridge University Press, 2003) 253-270; Jeffrey Myers, ed., The Legacy of D.
H. Lawrence (Macmillan, 1987).
5
Eliot (1951, 11). Eliot later agreed to testify at the Chatterley Trial, although he
was not called–his trial deposition was given to Vivian de Sola Pinto and is now
deposited at the University of Nottingham. Graham Hough, the first witness for the
Defence to give evidence at the Trial, characterised the state of Lawrence criticism
before Leavis’s postwar essays as a “critico-biographical stew” (Hough, 1961, 9).
6
“Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and
in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores […] all this pseudo-
scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is
mere impertinence, and mostly dull jargon” (Lawrence, 1985, 209).
7
Chris Baldick goes some way to redressing the balance in his account of
Lawrence’s posthumous reception and reputation: see note 4 above.
8
See e.g. Graham Hough’s comment in the 1961 reprint of his book The Dark Sun:
‘This book was first published five years ago, and even in that short time
Lawrence’s reputation seems to have passed into a new phase’ (11).
 Sean Matthews 101

9
Hoggart returns at greater length to the way in which his attempt to describe that
habitual gesture was enabled by Lawrence in “A Question of Tone: Problems in
Autobiographical Writing” (in Hoggart, 1970, 192-3). See below for Hoggart’s use
of “anti-life” and “doing dirt on life”.
10
There is, perhaps, a teasing Lawrentian reference in Pinto’s use of the term
“prescribed”. In the satirical poem, “Nottingham’s New University”, Lawrence
plays with the institution’s origins in a donation from the chemist Sir Jesse Boot:
“they’ve built a new university/for a new dispensation of knowledge” (1967, 488).
11
Hoggart specifies the challenge Lawrence offers to “intelligent lay readers” in
his essay on The Rainbow in Between Two Worlds (2007, 60).
12
The original title for The Uses of Literacy was The Abuse of Literacy, but this
was changed, along with a large portion of the text which had been drawn from
actual magazines, at the insistence of the publisher’s lawyers. “Unfortunately”,
Hoggart remarks, “it is not possible to quote an actual example from a modern
popular publication”, and he proceeds to supply his own pastiches of the offending
material (1957, 194).
13
These exchanges should be set in the context of contemporaneous debates about
class consciousness and class identity which characterise the period. The
importance of class consciousness for the formation of class was the dominant
theme of, for instance, E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(Penguin, 3rd ed., 1980, c1963), and was a major concern in the early work of the
Birmingham Centre.
14
It is important to recall that the 1950s were, above all, the period of the vogue of
close reading, of the New Criticism, modes of reading which shared an ideal of
critical attention sustained entirely from within the text, and a disavowal of all
appeals to intention, or to the world outside the artefact, as illegitimate distractions
from exposition. The struggle to extend and historicize literary studies was an
important part of the changes which took place in the 1950s, with studies of
Lawrence providing a key means to achieve such a goal.
15
I am grateful to Sue Owen for bringing this passage to my attention.
16
Hoggart mentions the origins of The Uses of Literacy in “bits of a novel and
some unconnected descriptive pieces” in a conversation with Williams (Hoggart
and Williams, 1993, 111).
17
“‘You are merely making words,’ he [Birkin] said; ‘knowledge means
everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head.’” Later in the
same exchange Hermione demands, “How can you have knowledge not in your
head?” (Lawrence, 1987, 41, 43).
18
The turn to ‘emotion’ in Hoggart’s work is again paralleled in Williams, who
was developing the concept of the ‘structure of feeling’ during the 1950s, see Sean
Matthews, ‘Change and Feeling in Raymond Williams’s Structure of Feeling’,
Pretexts 10:2, 179-194. For an example of a turn back towards Humanism, see
particularly Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Columbia
University Press, 2004).
 THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE:
HOGGART, LIMINALITY
AND MELVYN BRAGG’S CROSSING THE LINES

KATIE WALES

Introduction
The cultural history of the North from ancient times provides numerous
examples of what I would term the “Dick Whittington” trope or narrative
(Wales, 2006): Northerners leaving home for London and Down South,
crossing the “North-South Divide” in search of fame and fortune.
However, the first half of the twentieth century witnesses a striking
variant: the “Pygmalion” trope. Because of changes in Education Acts, for
example, the working-class Northerner crosses a social boundary by being
able to go to grammar school, and then on to university, and even
Oxbridge: and at each stage faces the dilemma of changing even his
linguistic identity.
The significance of this trope is endorsed particularly in the well-
known Uses of Literacy (1957) (henceforth UL) by Richard Hoggart; or
what he might term the “Scholarship Boy” motif (see also Samuel, 1998).
It appears time and again in many post-World War 2 literary and cultural
representations, with varying degrees of autobiographical reference: from
the poetry of Tony Harrison to the first episodes of Coronation Street
(1960). Here Ken Barlow is more properly the “Scholarship Winner”,
rather than “Scholarship Boy”, as he prepares to go off to university
(locally, however, in Manchester) amidst scenes of tension at home.
In this chapter I wish to highlight a relatively recent novel, Crossing
the Lines (2003) by Melvyn Bragg: the third volume set in Cumbria of the
late 1950s of a trilogy, in Bragg’s own words, of “fiction disguised as
autobiography” (Independent Review 15.01.04). This particular volume
(henceforth CL) traces Joe Richardson’s passage from grammar school to
Oxford as a “Scholarship Winner”. In its structuring and themes this
bildungsroman reveals very clear similarities with Hoggart’s work,
particularly Chapter 10 of UL. In the first part of this chapter I shall
 Katie Wales 103

illustrate some of the most striking examples as part of a critique of the

novel; but in the second part I shall use the novel to provide a critique of
Hoggart. In my conclusion I shall reiterate the rather obvious point that
Bragg appears to have drawn upon Hoggart’s work, but that both writers
themselves are sensitive to a cultural phenomenon which strikes a chord–
or is that rather a nerve?–with the Northern-born educated working and
lower-middle classes, blue-collar and white-collar workers alike. But
Hoggart’s work is impressive precisely because it expressed so well and so
vividly, perhaps for the first time, the anxieties of those anxious to succeed
or to escape the trap of poverty.

Uses of Literacy and the Liminal

There is no doubt of the deep impression left by UL on the upwardly
mobile since its first publication. Fellow “loiners”, the Leeds-born Tony
Harrison and Alan Bennett spring obviously to mind. Harrison’s Them &
[uz] is dedicated to Hoggart; and in his recent Untold Stories Bennett
admits that the work made a great impression on him as a young man; and
also on the poet D. J. Enright (2005, 402). Enright had particularly noted
in his commonplace books a passage from UL to which I shall return:

(1) The scholarship boy has been equipped for hurdle-jumping, so here
merely thinks of getting on, but somehow not in the world’s way. He has
left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual, and he is
still unusual in another class, too tense and overwound. (cited Bennett
2005, 402)

Bragg himself has told me in a personal communication that not only had
he read UL in his youth, but that he had even thought at one stage of
dedicating CL to Hoggart (but perhaps he remembered that Harrison had
got there first). He and Hoggart have also worked together in the media on
several occasions since the late 1970s. Particularly noteworthy was the
BBC2 programme (5th June 1976) called Mirror on Class, about the
handling of class issues on television, in documentaries and soaps like
Coronation Street. Both Hoggart and Bragg appear to agree that the class
“divides” since the late 1950s had not gone away, although they were
handled differently. In this programme Bragg interestingly places UL itself
in a “literary breakthrough”, as he calls it, along with John Osborne,
Kingsley Amis and Arnold Wesker: seeing it as a work of literature.
However, Bragg has also been eager to point out to me that in the forty
or so years between the publication of UL and his own novel, other writers
had come to influence him. It certainly makes sense to see CL as paying
104 The Anxiety of Influence

homage, not only to writers like Orwell and Lawrence, but to the Northern
realistic fiction and cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s: John
Braine’s Room at the Top (with the main character also called Joe)
published to same year as UL; and certainly Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning (1959), which is referred to several times in the
novel. There is a strong sense in general of the 1950s Northern youth
scene, with its skiffle groups and rock n’ roll, granted that Wigton in
Cumbria, although a former centre for textile manufacturing, is no Leeds
or Manchester. Since Joe himself is a teen-ager, the novel also lacks the
strong air of disapproval of the new youth culture that undoubtedly
pervades UL. On the contrary, the future is to be embraced, from Butlins
to G-plan furniture.
But it is also undoubtedly the case that UL validated, as it were, other
works. It encouraged authors to write, cathartically, about their own
educational experiences, and not just in the North: think of Border
Country (1960) by Raymond Williams, set in Wales. Williams has spoken
of the “shock of recognition” (cited in Gregg, 2003, 295). As Gregg
writes, generally:

In speaking our experience… we come to discover …ways in which [it]

resonates with other [experiences], forging bands of mutuality or
dissonance, but all the time finding fresh ways of communicating… (2003,
286)

What I am keen to stress here, however, is that UL struck a chord

precisely because the resonant cultural tropes of the Scholarship Boy or
Winner are themselves based on a more fundamental cultural “master”
trope or archetype, which I shall call the liminal: well known in
anthropology and also sociology (See, e.g. Turner, 1966; Martin, 1981;
Rampton, 1995). Liminality arises from the “rites of passage” between
stages of life (e.g. childhood, adolescence and maturity) and also from the
movement, or more properly dis-location, between one social role and
another, with all the associated psychological states of tension, anxiety and
friction, and feelings of being in social limbo. So as its Latin root suggests,
liminality is the stage or state of being “on the threshold” between clear
social identities, “between [two] worlds” to echo Hoggart’s own words
(1976: 296, 300; also 2001).1
The title of Chapter 10 of UL explicitly refers to this anxiety: “Unbent
Springs: A Note on the Uprooted and the Anxious”. “Scholarship Boys”,
he says, are recognised “by their lack of poise, by their uncertainty” (1976,
291, my italics). Poise, of course, in one of its more literal senses, refers to
a state of suspension or balance. Such boys:
 Katie Wales 105

(2) for a number of years, perhaps for a long time, have a sense of no
longer really belonging to any group.’ (ibid, 292, my italics)

Any working-class person eager for self-improvement he notes later,

“belongs now to no class” (1976, 300); such a person is in a “no-man’s
land” as it were. Verbs like waver are striking in this respect:

(3) He wavers between scorn and longing. (ibid, 302)

And there is even the striking and poignant evocation of a “real” threshold,
as he pictures the aspiring working-class man who would “like to be a
citizen of that well-polished …world of the successful intelligent middle-
class which he glimpses through doorways” (1976, 302; my italics).
Hoggart’s metaphors also vividly evoke the liminal, especially those of
friction:

(4) Almost every working-class boy who goes through the process of
further education by scholarship (finds himself chafing against his
environment during adolescence. He is at the friction-point of two cultures.
(ibid, 292)

(5) There is bound to be occasional friction… when they wonder whether

the boy is “getting above himself.” (ibid 295-6)

Note also the metaphors of the coiled spring:

(6) …he is still unusual in another class, too tense and overwound. (ibid,
302)

–exactly the final lines in the passage noted by D. J. Enright in quotation

(1) above. Hoggart’s syntax also enacts, by a process of grammatical
metaphor, the same vacillation. Note the use of antithesis and paradox, of
contrastive conjunctions:

(7) …those who are self-conscious and yet not self-aware in any full sense.
(ibid, 293)

(8) He cannot go back; with one part of himself he does not want to go
back…with another part he longs for the membership he has lost…He
both wants to go back and yet thinks he has gone beyond his class.
(ibid,.301)

This suggests almost schizophrenia: cf. also:

106 The Anxiety of Influence

(9) He is usually ill at ease with the middle-classes because with one side
of himself he does not want them to accept him…He is divided as in so
many other ways… with one part of himself he admires much he finds in
them… With another part of himself he develops an asperity towards that
world. (ibid, 302)

The Liminal in Crossing the Lines

As the very title of Bragg’s own novel suggests, the liminal is an
important motif in Crossing the Lines: indeed, the cover of the hardback
version shows a young man in an overcoat in silhouette going through a
doorway from what looks like the quadrangle of an Oxbridge college. The
novel is structured basically into five parts according to the five crucial
“stages” in Joe Richardson’s growing maturity from adolescence to
adulthood, and significantly his later education in Wigton over four years
from 1955-9: from O-levels ( Part 1: Easter 1955); Sixth Form (Part 2:
Lessons, 1956) ; Oxford scholarship exams (Part 3; Tests, 1957); a “gap”
period (Part 4: Open Country ,1958); and going to Oxford (Part 5:
University Entrance, 1958/9). Quite coincidentally, of course, it covers the
years just before and after UL was published. Unlike Hoggart himself, the
young Joe (and the young Bragg in real life) was a beneficiary of the 1944
Education Act, and the ensuing “Eleven Plus” examination: the first of a
generation that saw even more working-class pupils entering grammar
school and higher education. Obviously the first critical liminal stage, the
transition to grammar school, is not part of the novel’s theme, as for UL;
but its structuring clearly illustrates the now deeply-rooted frames or
schemas of reference for which the education system as developed in the
twentieth century was responsible, reflected also in conventional
metaphors in common parlance. If “Life” itself is a “ladder” (Hoggart,
1976, 297), especially for those, as we say, “UP-wardly mobile”; and jobs,
in Hoggart’s words, are “spread around … vertically” outside the working
class (ibid, 82), for the boy caught up in his grammar school career, then
life is

(10) a series of hurdle-jumps, the hurdles of scholarships…. (ibid, 297)

and (11) He has been equipped for hurdle-jumping (ibid,.299)

–again noted by Enright in quotation (1) above. Not surprisingly, the agent
(or better, the instrument?) of hurdle-jumping can also be a horse:
 Katie Wales 107

(12) He has been trained like a circus-horse, for scholarship winning (ibid,
298)

There is also in UL a recurring metaphor of a blinkered pony. In CL

similar equine imagery occurs. So Joe’s father, Sam, ex-serviceman and
landlord of a Wigton pub, notes:

(13) “You’re coming up for the final furlong” (Bragg, 2003, 204)

Sam also has another appropriate, if rather different, metaphor, but one
which reflects the underlying difficulty or hardship of hurdle-jumping:

(14) “He’s going into battle”, he said quietly. “That’s what it is”. (ibid,
267)

Joe himself thinks along similar lines; but the “UP-ness” of ladders and
hurdles is echoed in his own metaphor of cliff-scaling:

(15) It was as if, sword still in hand, he had slain the dragon and turned the
corner only to find himself confronted by a cliff, sheer, unscalable, no
holds to be seen: Oxford University. (ibid, 282)

The degree of intensity of this metaphor clearly matches the degree of

perceived social distance between Joe and an institution like Oxford, and
the highest level of prestige in any case that Oxford holds generally in
society. As the narrator adds about both Oxford and Cambridge:

(16) …the twin citadels of scholarship were seen across a chasm of class
as wide as a continent. (ibid, 282)

Not surprisingly, therefore, the anxieties of this particular “rite of

passage” which Oxbridge entrance entails become ever more acute as the
novel progresses. Yet right from the beginning, the sense of a growing
alienation from home and old school-friends, which Hoggart vividly
describes, is also evoked by Bragg, and with the same emphasis on the
liminal both in content and expression. The same metaphor of the coiled
spring occurs as in Hoggart:

(17) The spring in himself had now been wound so unbearably tightly that
instead of releasing it would break him. (ibid, 266)

Note the syntax of:

108 The Anxiety of Influence

(18 ) [For Joe, listening to classical concerts on his radio was] a secret vice.
…it was not that he was too embarrassed about it, although there was
some of that. Nor was he altogether ashamed, although there was a little of
that too… (ibid, 126)

(19) It was odd about Malcolm. He riled Joe and yet Joe thought of him as
a friend…There was something about Malcolm which made Joe feel
inferior and while he resented it he was also attracted to it. (ibid, 157-58)

Most dramatically, Joe is prone to feel that once “across the line”, so to
speak, he may find a void of nothingness should he fail:

(20) As long as he was working …he could keep at bay the strong anxiety
which threatened him. An anxiety which he feared…It was close to fear.
Perhaps it was fear. That he would fail. And then? There was nothing on
the other side. (ibid, 251)

To stay in the North, to stay in his “class” therefore, was no longer an

option; he had surely passed the point of no return:

(21) Yet there was within this coiled frenzy of anxiety, fear that if It [sic]
happened, his world would end…it would be the end. It was unimaginable,
he could not deal with this fear: it would wipe him out. (ibid, 307)

The Liminal and Accent

Crucial for the concept of the liminal in relation to the particular trope of
this essay, namely my “Pygmalion” trope, is the issue of language as a
semiotic. It is also crucial for Bragg’s novel. In changing social status or
class aspiring Northerners have had to face the prospect of crossing
particular sociolinguistic and also psycholinguistic boundaries to meet the
expected norms of the “Received Standard” and “Received Pronunciation”
(RP) in particular, norms which came to be more and more significant as
the twentieth century progressed. Local dialect and accent became more
and more stigmatised; and the “higher” the level of education–and with
Oxbridge at the “summit” so to speak- the more crucial issues of accent
become. In finding a new voice through education, the old voice of class
and region is lost. In this respect, Oxford-educated Alan Bennett’s
autobiographical writings are closer to CL than UL; and Tony Harrison’s
poetry is closer to Hoggart than Bragg, since like Hoggart he went to
Leeds University within the North not Oxbridge. Harrison is also closer in
that his School of Eloquence for instance, evokes the particular transition
to grammar school, and the linguistic consequences of this. For as Hoggart
 Katie Wales 109

indicates, one result is “code-switching”, having two accents at first for

school and home:

(22) Once at the grammar school he quickly learns to make use of a pair of
different accents. (1976, 296)

Another is the sense (also invoked quite dramatically by Tony Harrison in

Them & [uz]) that language is now a minefield, a trap:

(23) …a hundred habits of speech and manners can “give him away” daily.
(ibid, 301)

Interestingly, however, unlike many grammar-school teachers in the

North, and the figure of the teacher in Tony Harrison’s poem Them &
[uz], Joe’s teachers in CL appear to put no pressure on him to change his
accent, despite, for example, Mr. Braddock’s “superior” voice (Bragg,
2003, 247). Mr. Tillotson, Joe’s English teacher, actually has the “flat
Northern voice” (ibid, 250) of a Yorkshireman, which Joe himself mimics
(ibid, 257). In Hoggart’s own autobiography (1988: 164), however, he
recounts how Cockburn High School in Leeds in the 1930s “imported”
masters with accents to match from the South.2 I return to schoolteachers
in the next section. While Bragg makes us aware that there are issues of
accent and dialect in Joe’s social milieu in his Wigton youth (the vicar’s
son Alfred, for instance, has an accent “clean of dialect” (ibid, 24), “so far
above his own” (ibid, 84), these differences are simply taken as
symptomatic of social difference, between Harrison and Hoggart’s
“Them” and “Us”. Joe is clearly embarrassed on occasion by his own
background (tea for Alfred must be served upstairs in the pub, in the
“parlour” [ibid, 84]); but there is no indication that he feels he must “code-
switch”, in this market town community that is relatively close-knit and
friendly in any case: unlike a city like Leeds for example. Indeed, Bragg
makes no attempt to render Joe’s Wigton or Cumbrian dialect; and this, I
feel, is not only because of the longstanding convention whereby the
speech of the main character is represented by Standard English. It is that
for Joe himself, whose consciousness is the “filter” or focalisation through
which events are mainly perceived and felt, his dialect was perfectly
normal to him on “home” territory.
To leave the solidarity of one’s community, however, to be “up-
rooted” in Hoggart’s recurring garden metaphor, and to cross the North-
South line and to go to Oxbridge in particular, the young Northerner faces
a more potent minefield. There is now the likely prospect of changing
accent altogether: “code- crossing” in Rampton’s terms (1995), and so of
110 The Anxiety of Influence

changing one’s very identity, betraying those same roots, becoming

“posh”. RP, the lingua franca of Oxbridge, with its high social prestige,
has for the whole of the twentieth century has acted as a “key” to success,
a “passport”to a new world of advantage and privilege. Such metaphors
actually recall the real objects, but with symbolic significance, necessarily
associated by anthropologists with the rituals of “passage”. So Joe soon
learns the value of RP when he reaches Oxford:

(24) Already Joe knew that accent could make a man. Accent and a few
code words and a twang worth a life’s mortgage to learn. (Bragg, 2003,
393)

Hoggart certainly uses the related metaphor of “currency”, but to describe

the value of brains per se, rather than accent:

(25) For brains are the currency by which he has bought his way, and
increasingly brains seem to be the currency that tells…in the new world of
brain-currency… scholarships which are won by learning how to amass
and manipulate the new currency (Hoggart, 1976, 296-7)

For Joe a new “code” awaits, a “Sanskrit” as distinct from “plain English”
(Bragg, 2003, 294); and a necessary code to crack in order to gain
acceptance by “Them”. In his very first letter home to his girlfriend Rachel
(ibid, 383-4), already suggesting a high degree of general social unease
that persists until the end of the novel, he “translates” for her benefit the
terms he has already picked up : “Porter’s Lodge”, “up” not “down” to
Oxford; “hall” for “canteen”; “battels” for bills, “scouts” for servants,
“sporting your oak” for “do not disturb”, etc: and, what every Northerner
learns : “lunch” not “dinner” and dining at night not noon .
So it is only really at this point that we the readers become
dramatically aware of Joe’s own accent, precisely at the moment when his
own awareness of it is sharpened, and when it is becoming a
sociolinguistic problem for him. One is reminded of Robert Colls’ Preface
to Collier’s Rant (1971, 11), where he describes how, the son of a South
Shields shipyard worker, he went to Sussex University:

Amidst bourgeois Sussex, the self-concept of being working-class came

upon me for the first time. I had never before had this sense of being
different, and I cannot say I enjoyed the pleasure.

In the fictional universe that is Joe’s Oxford neither does he. He is very
obviously heard as different by his peers, who are mostly public school
 Katie Wales 111

boys in any case; and he is mercilessly either verbally patronised or

bullied. “Language”, as P. J. Waller so nicely puts it, “is an instrument of
both communication and ex-communication” (1987, 1).

(26) “You’re from the North, aren’t you?” George looked closely at Joe,
who was instantly mired in self-consciousness. “I think people from the
North”, he said carefully, ‘”your sort of people, are much more real than
we are”.
Joe felt flattered. Later, in recollection, he suspected that he had been
regarded as a bit of a specimen.
“…I mean coal miners and steel workers, men in shipyards and the
factories–the Satanic Mills”, George said, his face set in sympathy. (Bragg,
2003, 391; my italics)

The evocation by Southerners of Northern stereotypical images is

continued with the “ruggah buggahs” in the bar:

(27) “Say something in your funny accent, Richardson!” Full back’s

sentence was delivered as an order. “Something like ‘oop’t’North like’, or
‘Doon’t’pit like’, or ‘Bugger Off , like’”, said the big prop.
“Oh come on! Why don’t we take Richardson’s trousers off?” (ibid, 397)

And once again the liminal state is evoked in the very imagery of
vacillation, as Joe begins to cross the “accent bar”:

(28) Joe’s accent had started to behave as if it were on black ice. Whenever
he braked the attempted pronunciation of a word to fit the governing sound
of English it slithered around helplessly. (ibid, 393)

When he goes home to Wigton for the vacation as a temporary

returnee, his girl-friend Rachel notices that:

(29) sometimes his pronunciation just skidded away. Neither Oxford nor
Wigton nor anything else (ibid, 449)

One can recall Alan Bennett’s linguistic dilemma which he describes in

Writing Home (1994, xiii): “I tried to lose my Northern accent at one
period, then reacquired it, and now don’t know where I am” (my italics).
Joe’s dilemma is mirrored by his friend Mike’s from Manchester:

(30) [His] accent had been worked on, but, Joe thought, still “us” not
“them” (Bragg, 2003, 432; my italics)
112 The Anxiety of Influence

But “they” will surely prevail: as Mike himself tells Joe, tellingly forced to
“lean down and whisper” in an almost Orwellian manner:

(31) “… don’t lose the northern thing. They all want you to. They want to
absorb you. They want to rub you out. Don’t let them. Look what’s
happened to me! I was Manchester when I came up two years ago. Don’t
let them get you!” (ibid, 433-4; my italics)

The Novel as a Critique of Hoggart

So far I have tried to illustrate how, in relation to liminality from a social
and linguistic perspective, Crossing the Lines both confirms what Hoggart
writes in The Uses of Literacy and also develops it, as secondary education
gives way to the “higher” education of Oxford. But it seems to me that the
novel also develops another strand of the theme, which is also only briefly
referred to by Hoggart in this work, namely the archetypal role of the
teacher as a “crossing guide”, a “ferryman” between worlds.3 Certainly, as
some of the metaphors described in this essay imply, any hurdle-jumper or
circus-horse needs a ‘trainer’: see in (12) for example. And as Hoggart
says himself:

(32) … sometimes he is trained [as a blinkered pony] by those who have

been through the same regimen, who are hardly unblinkered themselves.
(Hoggart, 1976, 297)

This is hardly a complimentary image; indeed Hoggart also elsewhere in

the book dismisses some schoolteachers as being over cynical (ibid, 288-
9). In his later Everyday Language and Everyday Life he does recognise
that those kids who had a “spark” could be recognised by “devoted”
teachers and “brought along” by them and other “secular saints” (2003,
119). And in Between Two Worlds it is clear that his own “crossing-guide”
was Mr Harrison, the headmaster of his primary school (2001, 231); and
indeed at Cockburn he had two more of what he terms “Encouragers”
(ibid, 234), who became “preeminently, [his] way out” (my italics). But in
UL there is only just a hint of the teacher as “Encourager” in the
interesting (Freudian) notion of the teacher as father-substitute:

(33) …in the other world of school his father can have little place; he tends
to make a father-figure of his form-master. (1976, 297)

Certainly, in CL Joe’s relations with his father are characteristically

maladroit, although sensitively depicted. That is not my concern here,
 Katie Wales 113

however (nor the parallels that could be drawn with Harrison and
Bennett); although in one sense Joe himself acts as a “guide” to his father,
who is keen to read what Joe recommends to him. My concern here is
rather the significant role played by Joe’s teachers, particularly in English
and History, in encouraging him to study, to broaden his intellectual
horizons, and not only as narrowly as Hoggart would rather imply. Indeed,
Joe’s all too “mechanical” answers in his Mock O-levels are disapproved
of. And their kindly interest in the boy extends even beyond school, to
Oxford. Wadham College is in any case the alma mater of Mr Braddock
his history teacher, whose subject Joe will study. For Bragg, a more
appropriate metaphor for the teacher’s role is that of a navigator or
steersman (the ferryman):

(34) [Mr Braddock felt that some of the boys] were in uncharted waters,
already adrift from their parents and their past…more than usually reliant
on those who had encouraged them to slip their moorings. (2003, 237)

Another metaphor implies that he sees himself as a Hoggartian “secular

saint” perhaps; a vicar or pastor, guiding his flock, in a passage that is
much less cynically toned than the Hoggart of 1957, more positive and
forward-looking:

(35) But it was the schoolchildren, the variety and character in them, that
held him. He liked to imagine them as the crucible of a new England.
Some came from the mining town of Aspatria, others from the port of
Silloth, others from the hill villages still speaking the dialect of their
conquerors eleven hundred years ago, others from the rich Solway Plain,
others from the market town of Wigton…The schoolteacher saw some of
them as first of their kind to be off the land…first out of the mines, out of
the factories, and he saw himself bringing them to a new and better life
through the salvation of scholarship. (ibid, 156; my italics)

There is one teacher of Latin, however, Miss Castle, who does not
appear to like Joe very much. No reasons are given; but Miss Castle’s own
educational history might give a clue. Her presence in the novel also draws
attention to a significant omission in Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, namely
the motif of the “Scholarship Girl”. When Miss Castle learns that Joe has
been "put in" for Oxford, but that the equally talented and middle-class
girl Brenda, a doctor's daughter, has not been "put in" despite her excellent
Latin results, she comments:

(36) “I still think it was a mistake not to put Brenda in but it is literally
seven times more difficult for a girl. I have reason to know. I was in the
114 The Anxiety of Influence

same predicament.” Joe was too self-consumed to pick up the sadness in

her voice. (ibid, 294)

The pain of her “exclusion” still rankles. When Joe gets to Oxford, his
friend from a London independent school underlines the marginality, not
only of Northerners, but of women generally:

(37) “And of course people like you are under-represented, to say nothing
of women”. (ibid, 483)

Brenda, at least, is destined for Edinburgh University; but the younger

Rachel, Joe’s girl-friend and a main character in the novel, is not even
destined for A-Levels, despite her excellent Mock O-Level results, and her
actual GCE awards with four A grades, two B’s and one C: amongst the
best results of her year. She is clearly under pressure from her
domineering father to go out to work, even if she herself was “rather proud
of the anvil certainty of her father’s reaction” (ibid, 233), and quite
cheerfully goes off to work in the local bank. Hoggart has nothing to say
in UL about the unequal expectations of working class girls and boys; nor
the difficulties and extra anxieties surrounding the potential aspirations of
the working-class grammar-school girl in the 1950s. In an interview with
Hoggart and Raymond Williams in the first issue of the New Left Review
in 1960, Williams acknowledged that some girls “would drop out early, if
they were wanted at home” (Hoggart and Williams, 1960, 27). Even in
1969 the chance of a working-class girl entering any university, let alone
Oxbridge, was one in 600 (Dennis et al 1969, 235). Hoggart’s omission,
however regrettable, does at least aptly symbolise a recurring “absence” or
“silence” in the social semiotics of gender in the twentieth century.

Conclusion: The Anxiety of Influence

There are many more ways in which Bragg’s novel both evokes Hoggart’s
sensitively described world of those anxious to “get out” and to “get on”
as Joe’s father would say; and also at the same time differs in its
presentation of the late 1950s scene: but these are beyond the scope of this
essay. For me, however, the crucial issue is not simply one of direct
influence. It is arguable that the “Scholarship Boy/ Winner” tropes and
also the variant, the “Pygmalion” trope, are simply two of the most
significant socio-cultural tropes of the twentieth century, particularly for
Northerners. Remember Mike’s apparent paranoia in quotation (31) above:
“They want to rub you out!” This is deeply telling about the strong
relationship perceived by Northerners between their Northern English and
 Katie Wales 115

their personal identity. Dodd (1990) has famously written quite

dismissively about the way so many post-World War II Northern writers
were prone to an obsession with looking back. But this is no mere
nostalgia. In looking back to childhood and adolescence such writers, and
no doubt Hoggart himself, revisit vivid scenes of angst. They are also,
many of them, trying to reclaim an erstwhile meaningful identity at the
same time. Again, it was part of the enduing appeal of UL, as Hoggart was
later himself to admit, that it helped in this process of adjustment by
retrospection (1993,7).
Moreover, as I have tried to argue here, based as these tropes are on the
more fundamental anthropological phenomenon of the liminal, intertextual
accretions and variations are almost inevitable. Bragg’s novel with its
sensitivity to social and emotional detail is ultimately much more than a
one-dimensional reworking of this “conventional” story. Likewise,
Hoggart has made it his own by narrative skills and an empathetic
perspective actually appropriate to a novelist. The archetype of the liminal,
however, clearly continues to haunt Melven Bragg. He has confessed to
me that he almost called his new novel in progress, dealing with Joe’s
further career at Oxford: “No Man’s Land”.

Works Cited
Barry, P. (1999). “‘The hard lyric’: re-registering Liverpool poetry”,
Cambridge Quarterly 28.4, 328-48.
Bennett, Alan (1994). Writing Home. London: Faber.
—. (2005). Untold Stories. London: Faber.
—. (2003.) Crossing the Lines. London: Hodder & Stoughton/ Sphere.
Bragg, Melvyn and Richard Hoggart (1976). “Mirror on Class”. BBC2, 5th
June. In Richard Hoggart Archive, Sheffield University Library:
3/160/1.
Braine, John (1959). Room at the Top. London: Penguin. First pub. 1957.
Colls, R. (ed.) (1977). The Collier’s Rant. Beckenham: Croom Helm
Common, Jack (1993). Kiddar’s Luck. Newcastle: Bloodaxe. First pub.
1951.
Crowley, T. (1991). Proper English: Readings in Language, History and
Cultural Identity. London: Routledge.
Dennis, N., F. Henriques and C. Slaughter (1969). Coal is Our Life.
London: Tavistock.
Dodd, P. (1990). “‘Lowryscapes’: recent writings about the North”,
Critical Quarterly 32, 17-28.
116 The Anxiety of Influence

Gregg, M. (2003). “A neglected history: Richard Hoggart’s discourse of

empathy”, Rethinking History 7.3, 285-306.
Harrison, Tony (1987.) Selected Poems. London: Penguin. First pub. 1978.
Hoggart, Richard (1976). The Uses of Literacy. London: Pelican. First
pub. 1957.
—. (1988). A Local Habitation: Life and Times Vol.1 1918-1940. London:
Chatto & Windus.
—. (1993). An Imagined Life: Life and Times Vol. III 1959-91. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
—. (2001). Between Two Worlds. London: Aurum.
—. (2003). Everyday Language and Everyday Life. London: Transaction.
Hoggart, Richard and Raymond Williams (1960). “Working class
attitudes”, New Left Review 1, 26-30.
Martin, B. (1981). A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among
Adolescents. London: Longman.
Samuel, R. (1998). Theatres of Memory Vol.2: Island Stories. London:
Verso.
Sillitoe, Alan (1994). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London:
Flamingo. First pub. 1958.
Turner V. (1966). The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Wales, K. (2006). Northern English: A Social and Cultural History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Waller, P. J. (1987). Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain.
Brighton: Harvester.
Williams, Raymond (1960). Border Country. London: Chatto & Windus.

Notes
1
The cover of the paperback version of CL, with a young woman and young man
on either side of a stream seems to symbolise another kind of boundary or ‘line-
crossing’ important in the novel, namely the line of “acceptable” sexual
exploration for adolescents that was increasingly foregrounded in the late 1950s.
2
In 1921 the Newbolt Committee, set up by the Board of Education, strongly
advocated “systematic training in the use of Standard English”, to be taught to
those pupils with “defective dialects”, and “evil habits of speech contracted in
home and street” (cited Crowley 1991). The teacher’s role was seen as paramount
in the “fight” to civilise their charges. As Jack Common notes in his semi-
autobiographical novel Kiddar’s Luck (1951), set in Newcastle around the time of
 Katie Wales 117

World War I: “the teacher must prepare [pupils] for that position [in adult society]
by the appropriate character-conditioning, initiation into that peculiar code of
behaviour which is the mark of their kind” (1993, 83, my italics).
3
See Barry’s interesting comments (1999, 338) on the Liverpool poet Matt
Simpson’s “Latin Master”: “an archetypal figure in such ‘transiting’ lives, that is,
the schoolmaster who opens the way for the crossing of social boundaries”.
 “STANCES AND TONES BEFORE LIFE”:
RICHARD HOGGART
AND THE QUESTION OF VOICE

SIMON GRIMBLE

Throughout all of Richard Hoggart’s writing there is a preoccupation with

the question of voice: the question of how we find our own voice, the
question of how through education we could help others to find their
voice, the question of how all these voices could possibly be heard – as
well as much consideration about how modern society renders the first two
of these difficult, and the third close to impossible. At the same time, and
in passing, Hoggart has paid attention to the particular voices of many
writers and individuals, characterising their distinctive modes and tones,
so that even some of his family members described in A Local Habitation,
the first volume of Hoggart’s memoirs, come to take on qualities that we
might associate more readily with a Victorian sage, speaking out on issues
of contemporary moment. In such a light emerges the troubled figure of
Aunt Ethel, part domestic harridan, part moralist, here described in her
attacks on Hoggart’s uncle Walter, whose early promise has been ruined
by drink:

Aunt Ethel had a remarkable range of tones […], small in the subjects they
covered since they concentrated on the criticism of aberrant personality
but, within that area, complex and surprisingly varied. Did she get them
from the plays, usually domestic dramas, which she and her woman friend
from Huddersfield saw from time to time at the Theatre Royal? Had they
been handed down orally from generation to generation? Was she an
original genius? Her style was extremely theatrical and abounded in stagey
ejaculations, studied pauses, rhetorical questions, upliftings of the eyes and
deafening conclusions. But it tore you apart and I hope to never see or hear
its like again. There was an agonised spirit in there but it would not give an
inch in pity or qualification or benefit of any doubt, not whilst it was
actually possessed. (Hoggart, 1988, 20)
 Simon Grimble 119

Here is a message from the other side: of the perils of too much voice.
There is a sophisticated rhetorician here, but one defeated by the fact that
this argument is over before it has begun. None of the family has any
response to this unappeasable sound. We could, tendentiously, read the
whole of Richard Hoggart’s career as an attempt to resist the example of
Aunt Ethel, to find ways of acting and thinking that did, exactly, lead to
“pity or qualification or benefit of any doubt”. But her example would
remain a problem, the feeling that some kinds of speech, even, perhaps
especially, the most potent kinds, represented a dead end for the speaker
and an experience of torture for the listener. It is important that Hoggart, in
A Local Habitation, admits that “I can make little coherent sense of Aunt
Ethel and wish I could; that would be a kind of breakthrough” (ibid, 26).
Instead, she remains a barrier to proper thinking, even as her eloquence is
a kind of flood. Hoggart has to conclude by placing Ethel outside of the
realm of those who could be redeemed, because, he writes, “I later came to
realise that Aunt Ethel was not, in spite of her great energy and
articulateness, really intelligent” (ibid, 27). This is because she lacked “a
strong imagination”, “the fluid which can transform intellect, bare mind
and drive, into intelligence” (ibid, 27). This seems to be a way to stop
thinking about her: an allowable one, especially for someone who went on
to become a literary critic and a recommender of the value of the literary
intelligence, but, still, a way.
The question of Aunt Ethel, her voice, and its possible implications for
how Hoggart has thought about himself and his own intellectual and
literary career bears further examination. She is the third person to be
substantially described in A Local Habitation, after her sister, Annie, and
her mother, Hoggart’s grandmother, both of whom are portrayed as great
sources of love and comfort to Hoggart, who would grow up in his
grandmother’s house after the death of his mother at the age of six. The
arrival of Ethel into his life is presented with the force of a kind of Fall:

The Newport Street house was dominated emotionally by Aunt Ethel, the
eldest daughter. Since our mother had been the only adult in our cottage
and was, all the time I was aware of her, overborne and ill, I had never met
full, physically charged, emotional rage until I lived in the same house as
Ethel. It was an awful revelation and even now, if I hear a woman raise her
voice along certain scales or registers, I want to be out of the way quickly.
(Ibid, 15)

Despite the fact that his mother had been so unwell in their previous home,
there appears to be a slightly pastoral emphasis to its description as a
“cottage”, full of care, decency and low voices, which is now opposed to
120 Richard Hoggart and the Question of Voice

the “Newport Street house”, which manages to seem large, impersonal and
unwelcoming when invested with Ethel’s presence, despite its status as a
Leeds back-to-back. Yet Ethel’s arrival also seems to signify Hoggart’s
own arrival into consciousness; to be exposed to her rage was “an awful
revelation”, yet “awful” here both suggests its modern sense (i.e. terrible,
useless), and its older, partly religious, sense of what the OED defines
as”Worthy of, or commanding, profound respect or reverential fear”, and
the related sense of “Solemnly impressive; sublimely majestic”.
“Revelation” itself still carries some of its biblical power to suggest
judgment and an epic making clear of things, and, from the first, the reader
senses Hoggart’s rather vexed feelings towards Ethel, who he wants to
sometimes dismiss, or, at least, be “out of the way” of, but the analysis of
whom produces some of his most complex and interesting writing. One of
the key aspects appears to be the question of sexuality and gender.
“Towards men,” Hoggart writes, “Aunt Ethel was deeply ambiguous. She
was much of the time bitterly scornful, as though she was talking about
some aberration of the Creator, or randy dogs”. Meanwhile, however, “one
of her favourite epithets was ‘manly’ and to that word she could give a
vibrant force”, and she would sometimes remark on “how much she liked
‘the smell of a good cigar’”. In summary, “her ideal man appeared to be a
capon or gelding who could smell of tobacco but not of sex” (ibid, 15).
There does seem to be anxiety here about emasculation, the directness of
which Hoggart tries to sidestep by his, emasculated, alternatives: “capon”
gives a Shakespearean, slightly comic, quality, whilst “gelding” is a little
more visceral, but still seems at a historical remove. At the same time,
there is a focus on Ethel’s voice here, as if the power of her voice–as in the
“vibrant force” she could give to her pronunciation of the word “manly” –
may well come at the cost of Hoggart’s own voice, and of his own sexual
development: he does not want to become a “gelding” or, mysteriously,
never to reach puberty at all. Her power derives from the fact that her,
female, voice, appears to Hoggart to be itself partly “manly”, and yet it is
her frustration at the lack of a clear role and place for her that gives her
speech its harsh and biting quality.
These issues are very much entangled with those of class. Hoggart
presents Ethel as a person who was frustrated in her desire to look beyond
the streets in which she now lived. She had worked in Huddersfield, and
went back there at alternate weekends, but had returned to Leeds, for
unexplained reasons, to work in a clothing factory–perhaps because she
was “needed in the family”. What is clear is that Ethel had definite social
aspirations and wanted to leave the traditional working class of her own
upbringing. But, by returning to Leeds, “once home, Ethel was trapped
 Simon Grimble 121

and she knew it, though would not have acknowledged it. Trapped with.

not only her mother but with a sister and brother to whom she would be all
her life emotionally connected, whose respect and affection she wanted,
but of whom she did not approve; she was trapped in those shabby streets
among those ‘common’ people; and she hated it all. Huddersfield had been
an embodiment of a dream she never quite lost […] a dream of semis, of
colourful curtains which pulled across rather than lace curtains”, “an
inside ‘toilet’”, “a bathroom”, “some garden at front and rear and nicely
spoken neighbours” (ibid, 18). Hoggart recognises and, at times in A Local
Habitation, criticises this desire for gentility, and yet may also recognise
Ethel’s desire for social mobility as a version of his own story of
“improvement”, whilst trying to think of his own career as not merely that
of trying to get away from the class to which he belonged.
A further way of thinking about both Hoggart and Ethel in relation to
the working class bears exactly on the question of voice. The social
historian Ross McKibbin has noted, in his Classes and Cultures, the
“fatalism” common in “traditional” working-class attitudes during the
inter-war period: it was a class “much attached to the workplace, but ruled
by group opinion [and] … seemingly without ambition” (McKibbin, 1998,
132). Such attitudes had a clear influence on the ways in which people
thought and spoke. Hoggart would address this situation directly in The
Uses of Literacy, and McKibbin later refers to the passage in that book that
addresses the magazines written for the working class, where:

There must be no connected sequences of any length; everything is

interesting, as interesting as the next thing, if only it is short, unconnected
and pepped-up. The rain of undifferentiated anecdotes pours down: a hen is
born at Bolton (Lancs.) with two heads, a politician commits suicide, a
mother in Edmonton (Alberta, Can.), has her third set of triplets, what odd
habits lemmings have, a cyclist in Sunderland is lifted clean off the road by
a freak wind. One doesn’t read such papers; one “looks at” them. (Hoggart,
1992, 202-3)

The discontinuity and “bittiness” that characterise this writing is evidence

of the “abuse” of literacy that troubles Hoggart, where commercial society
acts to disenfranchise the readership of these magazines. The kind of
reading that is thought of in opposition to the “looking” at the papers
described above is the reading of a complex, layered literary text, which
requires and repays the seriousness of attention lacking here; the insistence
on reading, and against looking, brings home the influence of both F.R.
and Q.D. Leavis on Hoggart’s thinking. But this kind of reading culture
leaves the working-class reader, to Hoggart’s mind, short of resources,
122 Richard Hoggart and the Question of Voice

lacking raw material for the processes of articulation and imagination

(with implicit consequences for the possibilities for political action). As
such, Hoggart is concerned with the difficulty of finding one’s voice, both
individually and collectively, in this kind of culture. He is also concerned
by one possible reaction against this kind of material: the development of
an interest in what Hoggart termed the “baroque”, highly coloured,
derivative but grandly mannered writing, which could be found in the
romances, crime thrillers and Westerns that were popular amongst
working people in mid-twentieth century Britain. Ross McKibbin
describes the impact this kind of writing had: “the grand manner much
influenced the writing style of young working-class women particularly,
either in prose exercises or in the torrential letters they wrote to each
other” (1998, 515). In that sense, Hoggart’s anxiety, reflected in his
complex reaction to his Aunt Ethel, was that a reading culture that lacked
connectedness and eloquence could possibly produce these kinds of
superabundance of eloquence, which lead, in both McKibbin and, as we
shall see, in Hoggart, to metaphors of the flood: the “torrential letters”
noted above. McKibbin does not link this, as Hoggart explicitly does, with
stage traditions of melodrama, but he does argue that “for many working
men and women there was nothing between an almost inarticulate
fragmentation of speech and an overcharged grand manner” (ibid, 515)
In that sense, Aunt Ethel can be seen as a later example of Richard
Hoggart’s social and cultural criticism, a woman caught between her
limited education and her own aspirations in a culture that implicitly is
hostile to her full development. However, in fact, he cannot achieve the
kind of distance required to see her merely as a kind of product of society,
even though literary criticism’s “culture and society” tradition–the path
that goes from Matthew Arnold to the Leavises, and in which Hoggart was
so absorbed–gives him such an immediate mode of analysis of her. This
must be at least partly due to the fact that Hoggart does not want to
achieve that kind of distance; it would be a betrayal of both his own roots,
his own sense of connection to her, and, most importantly, it would be a
betrayal of her. But without that distance he struggles to get beyond or
away from her, and her presence in the house in which he grew up:

Ethel’s rage was torrential and seemingly inexhaustible in drive and thrust;
you felt yourself being broken apart by it. I did not know then the word
“reduced”, in the sense used in “reduced to tears”. But one certainly felt
reduced to pure misery by these occasions. There was no love left
anywhere, not “in the whole abandoned world”; all was a waste of volcanic
rancour. It’s not right, you whispered within yourself, without realising
 Simon Grimble 123

then what an all-embracing moral judgment you were reaching after.

(Hoggart, 1988, 21)

Hoggart has to attempt his own distancing here, referring to himself in the
second person, but still describes the experience of not being able to
escape this consuming voice, a voice that has the power to turn the world
into a “waste of volcanic rancour”. But in so doing, Ethel has provoked
him to reveal his own literary skill, in his extension of the, perhaps more
clichéd, metaphor of the “torrential” rage. And yet there is also a sense in
which he would, much rather, deflect her presence retrospectively by
seeing her as a certain kind of northern, working-class female “type”, one
who has over-indulged in native non-conformist traditions of plain
speaking, traditions which have to be counterbalanced by a pervasive,
undemonstrative irony. Hoggart moves directly from this painful
recollection to that kind of perspective: “Years later, it was discovered that
Ethel had gallstones; it was a sort of relief to think that they may have
been partly responsible. On the other hand she was not all that much better
tempered after the huge things had been removed and put in a jar on the
mantelpiece” (ibid, 21).
Hoggart’s career has been an attempt to work out his own version of
plain speaking, a version that could be both critical and have some affinity
with the processes of imagination, to be educated but not to be weighed
down by a class-based vocabulary. What has remained is a determination
to avoid the possibility of a kind of over-extended rhetoric, and to avoid
any staginess in his own self-presentation. In A Sort of Clowning, the
second volume of his Life and Times, he recalls going for a interview for
an extension lectureship at Cambridge, where he overheard the chairman
of the panel warning the panel before he entered the interview room that
he was against Hoggart’s appointment, on the grounds that he was a
“northern puritan” (the job was given to an Oxbridge man, who gave
courses on the Nineteen Twenties and liked to teach with a piano in the
room, so he could launch into Noel Coward renditions if the class was
drifting off). Hoggart’s response is telling: “”I wondered whether to tell
them with a flourish where to put their job, but my histrionic sense is weak
so I kept tight-lipped, did not try to promote my claims and answered
briefly” (1990, 112). The absence of that “histrionic sense” can be found
throughout his work, a sense which is associated in his mind with facile
displays and complicity with an undemanding audience. In “A Question of
Tone”, an essay on the writing of autobiography, he remarks on “how easy
it is to slip into indulgent, throat-catching rhythms – and how willingly
one’s audience will accept them. There are hundreds of different
deceptions” (1970, 180). In response to this, Hoggart writes that “I find
124 Richard Hoggart and the Question of Voice

myself … led more and more into a sort of neutral tone, one washed as
free as I can make it of accidental literary or social overtones. In the end
one hopes to find the real, right tone for one’s own personality; until then,
better what may look like no personality at all than any of the artificial
ones” (ibid, 187)).
So, out of this experiences such as these, combined with many other
warnings and siren-calls from the worlds of politics and the consumer
society, emerged a sense these rhetorical kinds of voice needed be resisted.
But there is also a clear and immediate biographical context which helps
explain this sensibility. In A Local Habitation, it is striking the extent to
which Hoggart positions himself as an observer and witness, rather as an
active presence or initiator. He ties this quality of carefulness to his
family’s fear of sinking away from their desperately guarded position of
working–class respectability. He writes that “the traps and the treadmill
were there all the time and only by being nervously aware of them could
you not so much rise as at least stay in place, keep your head above water.
‘Watchful’ is the word above all others” (1988, 26). To be watchful is to
keep yourself in check. It is not just to watch the world but to watch any
extraordinary or disruptive possibilities in yourself, and to hold them back.
And to be watchful is to be careful of rhetoric and where it might put you:
as both an appalled listener, not allowed to leave the set of a domestic
drama, or as the abandoned ham-actor or lecturer, strutting and fretting his
hour upon the stage.
Furthermore, Hoggart had also experienced, in a very close and painful
way, what it was to hear oneself talked about, and the kind of heightened
sensitivity that it brought. The fact that he and his siblings lived in
considerable poverty and then were orphaned at an early age would mean
that they could be viewed as a problem, for the authorities to manage and
for relatives to discuss:

… children in our position quickly learn to interpret adult tones of voice,

not simply hostile tones but, much more importantly, uncaring tones, the
tones of voice of people who speak of you as an outsider and a lower form
of outsider, voices talking about you as a problem, one which has to be
solved no doubt but which is still an outside matter, an irruption, voices
which address their own children in the low tones of love across the tea-
table but which switch key, if only to the carefully polite, when they turn to
you; and the worst voices will even discuss you with others in the third
person, in your presence: “They might be better off in a home, you know”.
(Ibid, 39)
 Simon Grimble 125

Such modes of non-address could only heighten the watchfulness of its

subjects towards these looming adults, both members of the community or
employees of municipal authorities concerned with “the needy”, as well as
producing a lifelong awareness on Hoggart’s part of what it was like to be
the subject of officialdom’s involvement with private lives, the raw human
matter that has to be reformed or controlled. The unreferenced quotation–
they might be better off in a home, you know”–cuts to the quick,
reminding us of the power of these casual judgments, coming down to
these children as if from nowhere, yet possessed of an alarming authority.
It could be argued that Hoggart’s later interest in literature and literary
criticism was a desire to escape from these narrow-spirited and mean-
minded voices towards a world which at least offered the opportunity of a
catholicity of spirit and of the possibility of a disinterested attitude toward
both literature and the world, one where the truth could be given time to
come to light, where it would not be cut off by some immediate exigency.
Furthermore, literature and the imagination could even provide the space
to imagine oneself as somebody else, and so not be permanently identified
as an individual needing to be managed or needing Aunt Ethel’s
correctives. When Hoggart began his degree in English at Leeds in the late
Thirties he would meet Professor Bonamy Dobrée, the critic and scholar,
and friend of T.S. Eliot, and be introduced to a kind of variousness and
range that he had not encountered before. Once again, Hoggart focuses on
the voice of Dobrée: “To me his voice was the most remarkable thing
about him. It was light and high-pitched and when it rose with enthusiasm
took on a feminine ring. It was a mannered voice and in drab old Virginia
Road, where the English department occupied a Victorian terrace-house,
as exotic as a flamingo’s call” (1988, 210). This exoticism, with its slight
blurring of gender divisions, was invigorating and yet not quite to be
owned by this Leeds, working class recipient. In his attempt to find his
own intellectual space, he would have to go his own way
The consequences of these complicated feelings would leave Hoggart
with a fascination but a wariness about the power of the individual voice,
even as in his work he considered the ways in which the lines of
communication could best be opened up in a class-bound society subject
to innumerable distracting pressures. A telling example of this wariness is
found in the preface to the first edition of The Uses of Literacy. Here
Hoggart sketches his intended audience for this work:

I have thought of myself as addressing first of all the serious “common

reader” or “intelligent layman” from any class. By this I do not mean that I
have used any particular tone of voice, or that I have avoided using any
technical terms and all but the most obvious allusions. But I have written
126 Richard Hoggart and the Question of Voice

as clearly as my understanding of the subject allowed … For one of the

most striking and ominous features of our present cultural situation is the
division between the technical languages of the experts and the
extraordinarily low level of the organs of mass communication. (1992, 9-
10)

What is important here is Hoggart’s feeling that he must communicate

with the wider readership denoted by the “intelligent layman” but that he
must avoid, has, in fact, already avoided, the use of “any particular tone of
voice”. The emphasis is instead on clarity rather than on the engagingness
of the particular writer. One of the things that Hoggart may be getting at
here are some of the associations of the word “tone” that may no longer be
immediately apparent to us: that a tone of voice was necessarily associated
with a position of social superiority and that what one might get in the
attempt to open out to a wider audience would be a form of overfamiliar,
“toney”, address: a kind of “my dear fellow, what we all really need to
understand …” tone and all the kinds of de haut en bas problems that
would ensue from that. On the other hand, Hoggart also, very obviously
and for good reason, did want to not play up any common man or voice of
the people associations in the actual form of The Uses of Literacy. Instead,
the element of autobiography in the book is described in a language that
differentiates him from the world on which he is trying to gain a
perspective, even as the possession and exposition of his experience of
growing up in working-class Hunslet gives him the proper authority to
write the book in the first place.
There are, of course, much wider issues at stake here: the question of
how the literary intellectual relates to his public, the question of the
apparent size, nature and power of that smaller “reading” public in relation
to the much broader public beyond, the question of where we stand in
history, whereby we feel that the nature of such relationships and lines of
communication are imperilled, as Hoggart feels above, by “the division
between the technical languages of the experts and the extraordinarily low
level of the organs of mass communication”. As Stefan Collini has shown
in his Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, there has often been a kind of
pastoral nostalgia about earlier phases in the intellectual and cultural life
of this country, at which time its leading figures are fondly imagined as
being able to readily “command the ear of the public” and to do so in ways
which seem, through these tinted lenses, as fresh and direct, confident
without being complacent. For the purposes of the early twenty first
century, the moment of The Uses of Literacy in 1957 seems as
conveniently just-over-the-backward-horizon as any book that we can
imagine, so it is important to stress the ways in which Hoggart felt his own
 Simon Grimble 127

relation to the public to be, at best, problematic, and, more generally, a

portent of grave cultural concerns. However, just because this concern
seems characteristic of the problems of intellectual and literary life in
England, it is also important that we do not dismiss its weight: after all, it
is the very pressure of these feelings that enabled the book to happen and
to be written in the first place. In particular, it is out of these difficulties
that Richard Hoggart was able to begin to find his own distinctive voice,
even as that voice was characterised by a desire to fight free of the ways in
which “voice” as such can get between the audience and the material
which he is trying honestly and clearly to present.
In an essay on D.H. Lawrence, published in 1964, Hoggart would
expand on the difficulties of finding a voice that one would could live and
work with in stratified English society, where voice so clearly–if often
misleadingly–marks you in terms of class and region. Here Hoggart writes
that: “like the other outstanding nonconformist, puritan, idealistic British
‘voice’ of this century–George Orwell–Lawrence’s effort at saying what
he had to say meant that he had to reject most tones–social or literary, or
most likely a mixture of both–which were offered him.” He goes on to say,
with what seems to be his own note of identification, that this desire
especially affects those, such as Lawrence and Orwell, “whose lives and
art are particularly interdependent, who want to ‘live-out’ their beliefs,
whose ‘personalities’ are not easy to separate from their art” (1970, 106).
Hoggart here seems to be drawn by the sense of integrity and conviction
that marked the lives and works of his “puritan” predecessors, even as the
form and place of his remarks, at the end of a reasonable and temperate
review published in the reasonable and temperate pages of The Listener,
show him to be capable of holding himself back, in the interests of a
valuable professional life and of feelings of personal responsibility
towards his own family, from the kinds of abandonment, of both voice and
action, that sometimes characterised their lives. In a later piece on Bernard
Crick’s biography of Orwell, he quotes, with wonder, Eileen Blair’s
saying that, for Orwell, “his work comes before anybody”, as well as
another friend’s “chillingly impressive” assessment that testified to his
belief that Orwell “only cared for himself in his capacity as a writer”
(1982, 115). This degree of commitment, to the life of the writer, is a step
too far for Hoggart, even as his own disposition makes him very capable
of imagining what that degree of carelessness would be like.
It is to Richard Hoggart’s personal credit that he necessarily diversified
in his career, taking on various roles–literary critic, adult education
lecturer, senior administrator–whilst always striving to retain, in his words,
“the sound of a disinterested, lonely, absorbed, brooding voice” (ibid, 100.
128 Richard Hoggart and the Question of Voice

His voice as a writer and intellectual has, in turn, come to be criticised,

criticised, in particular, for its continuation of a supposedly unintellectual,
English, anti-theoretical, “humanist” tradition, an attack that has been
made from both those to the left and to right of Hoggart’s political
position. George Watson, reviewing Hoggart’s collection of essays, An
English Temper, in 1982, complained of Hoggart as a singularly
representative example of the “Conventional Left”, whose work was
complacent and unscholarly, and who blithely continued to be an exponent
of a Victorian style “literary moralism”. For Watson, Hoggart’s “voice” is
“one of high amiability … and reminiscent of an age of certainties once
potent and now dying or dead” (Watson, 1982, 334). This is evidently a
mischaracterisation–“high amiability” really never enters into Hoggart’s
careful, thoughtful writing–but the transposition does demonstrate what
happens when the critic moves into print. Hoggart may have thought when
writing The Uses of Literacy that he was not using “any particular tone of
voice”, but the fact remains that any kind of writing, and especially those
kinds of writing which are aimed at some kind of wider “reading public”
from a position in an academic department, necessarily involve the writer
putting on a form of performance, which does indeed involve the use and
manipulation of the writer’s voice in order to attract the interest and trust
of the reader. This voice can then be–as it seems, Hoggart’s was by
Watson–misjudged or misinterpreted, but that is the nature of the
enterprise. This essay has tried to show how Hoggart’s career has been
marked by an extraordinary awareness of voice, an awareness of its power
to impress, but also by an anxiety about this power when it is
miscontrolled or misapplied. This anxiety, born out of a particular culture
and a particular biography, has led to a mild but persistent “anti-theatrical
prejudice” in Hoggart, where he suspects staginess or stridency or overt
“playing to the audience” in other writers, whilst, at the same time, being
necessarily involved in trying to insure a continuity of interest from his
readers that involves putting on a form of performance himself, but one
which revolves around what are, for him, the central virtues: of
disinterested, questioning, aware reflection. As others have remarked,
Hoggart has been particularly gifted, despite his status as a member of
British academia, at writing from his own experience, and of using his
own experience in ways that are neither merely self-referential and
egocentric (“My life as a Cultural Critic”) nor as a type of quarry for more
extended theoretical reflections. Fred Inglis is right to think of The Uses of
Literacy as “written and thought about as it was in the border country
which is neither everyday life nor academic study, along the high tension
which keeps us all taut and humming between public and private lives,
 Simon Grimble 129

work and home, tradition and novelty, custom and education” (Inglis,
1982, 168). Hoggart’s situation in that “border country” marks his
distinctiveness as a figure, but it also makes for a perennial uncertainty
over where he and his audience are actually situated: on which side of the
border they stand, of whether they can hear him, or indeed, whether he can
hear them. Because of this anxiety, the premium put on open, extended
communication by Hoggart is extremely high; it is no accident that one of
his collections of essays is entitled Speaking to Each Other–“speaking to”,
that is, rather than “shouting at”.
The question is, for present readers of Hoggart, whether his mode of
address can be extended or if, however unsubtly, George Watson is right,
and the social and historical conditions which allowed his particular voice
to develop have disappeared, and with it the possibility of forming any
similar relationship with one’s audience. The answer, to this writer’s mind,
remains open and is, necessarily, extended upon in every sentence we
write: if we can imagine a reader, we can think about the possibility of
communication. But we will be, if we follow Hoggart’s example of the
intellectual, always in that “border country”, that in-between position, a
role, as Collini has written, “perpetually tacking between the Scylla of
timidity, hermeticism, and over-specialism, and the Charybdis of
exhibitionism, philistinism, and over-exposure” (2006, 495). Richard
Hoggart has spent his career crossing and re-crossing these alarming
straits, and in his own way, he has lived its contradictions, and dramatised,
whether intentionally or otherwise, its difficulties. In that sense, he has
provided an example of how these tensions might be managed, but only, as
it were, accidentally: the more hagiographic accounts of Hoggart’s life
appear to me to be finally misplaced. Any intellectual that sees him or
herself following in his tradition needs to be conscious of the fact that we
start, not in his shade, but de novo: in our own place, with our own voice,
such as it is. In that sense, Hoggart is certainly an important example: of
what it is not be an “original genius” but instead to be “one of us”, with all
of its ambiguous implication.
But perhaps a final model for understanding Hoggart’s own voices is
indicated in a talk he gave on Radio Three in 1980, on The Education of
Henry Adams, the troubled and coded autobiography of the American
historian, Henry Adams. Hoggart describes himself as reading the book in
late adolescence and finding that “its stances and tones before life–a
narrow but subtle range of voices–were notes from the new world which
chimed in with some in such native writers as Arnold and Hardy to whom
I’d already become attached” (Hoggart, 1982, 106). Hoggart would later
write that he “was drawn to the soft-shoe precisions and dry pawkiness of
130 Richard Hoggart and the Question of Voice

the prose and the way he distanced himself from himself” (1988, 197).
This “narrow but subtle range of voices” become associated in his mind
with a sense of modest yet powerful representativeness that he finds in
Adams’ account, where his teasing at various continual concerns, both of
content and of metaphor, eventually allows Adams “to present his life as
both in itself insignificant yet as in some ways illustrating great
movements of cultural change” (1982, 108). Hoggart’s three volume Life
and Times often takes on some of the same qualities as Adams” account,
with its own impressive distancing of “himself from himself”, yet without
losing its most touching human qualities, as well as preserving this sense
of the life lived as “insignificant”, while thinking of insignificance as the
best place for the really accurate, the really concerned and thoughtful
observer and witness. It is in this quality of the representative witness–and
not as Aunt Ethel’s stage rhetorician–speaking in his modest, yet mixed
tones, that Richard Hoggart’s writing will continue to stand in this
country, not just as a series of propositions about culture and society, but
as a way of giving voice to experience, of the way we live now.

Works Cited
Collini, Stefan (2006). Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Hoggart, Richard (1970). Speaking to Each Other, Vol. II: About
Literature. London: Chatto & Windus.
—. (1982). An English Temper. London: Chatto & Windus.
—. (1988). A Local Habitation: Life and Times, Volume I: 1918-40.
London: Chatto & Windus.
—. (1990). A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times, Volume II: 1940-59.
London: Chatto & Windus.
—. (1992). The Uses of Literacy. London: Penguin. First pub. 1957.
Inglis, Fred (1982). Radical Earnestness: English Social Theory, 1880-
1980. Oxford: Martin Robertson.
McKibbin, Ross (1998). Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-51. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Watson, George (1982).”The Higher Cosiness”, Times Literary
Supplement, 334.
 LOCAL HABITATIONS: WORKING CLASS
CHILDHOOD AND ITS USES IN THE MEMOIRS
OF RICHARD HOGGART AND OTHERS

MICHAEL ROSENFELD

The landscapes of early life are indelibly engraved on the mind.

—Richard Hoggart

In The Vanished Landscape, the memoir of his 1930s Potteries childhood,

Paul Johnson revisits in memory a primarily working class world that in
significant ways resembles the childhood worlds of Robert Roberts,
Richard Hoggart, and William Woodruff. Although almost a quarter-
century separates the childhood of Roberts, born in 1905, from that of
Johnson, born in 1928-those of Woodruff and Hoggart occurring between
those two dates-the essential lineaments of working class life in the North,
especially its cultural structure, had remained unchanged. Even allowing
for the impact of the Great War and the advent of the welfare state and
mass communications, there is a resonance between Roberts’ Salford,
Hoggart’s Leeds, Woodruff’s Blackburn and Johnson’s Tunstall. Spatially,
once local variations are allowed for, all four writers seem to occupy the
same ground. But while Roberts, Hoggart, and Woodruff occupy that
space and report to us from within-witness, if you will-Johnson’s presence
in that space is that of a privileged outsider, something he himself realizes.
Johnson observes rather than witnesses. Almost naturally his pronoun
of choice for the local inhabitants is “they,” with “us” as a rule used to
refer to his immediate family circle. Such pronouns, as Hoggart noted in
The Uses of Literacy, can be class markers, as when “them” for working
class Hunslett comprised all of the patronizing or censorious official or
semi-official representatives of authority. Yet even though Johnson uses a
linguistic marker to fence off social space and mark the distance between
himself as a child and many of those around him, his vantage point is
instructive. Implicitly it brings to life cultural and social assumptions that
informed class relations and thus became a constituent component of
childhood class experience. Sympathy and feelings of human decency
132 Working Class Childhood and its Uses in the Memoirs
of Richard Hoggart and Others

aside, The Vanished Landscape illustrates the very prejudices many in the
working class knew their middle class “friends” to hold. By juxtaposing
the two worlds that overlapped in his childhood, Johnson’s memoir brings
into relief the chasm of class that kept them apart.
The image of the 1930s Potteries Johnson offers us is of “idle men
with pipes gripped upside down in their jaws.” J. B. Priestley-like, it is an
almost iconic portrait of the interwar North as depicted in the photography
of Humphrey Spender, the novels of Cronin and Greenwood, and the
reportage of Orwell. So, too, the recollected olfactory pungency: “But in
those days the working class smelt. In the Potteries I doubt if one-in-ten
working class families had a bathroom, though the authorities were doing
everything in their power to build new housing estates with three
bedrooms in each home, a bathroom, proper kitchen and downstairs indoor
lavatory.”(Johnson, 2004, 68) Girls were, for the most part, free of such
odoriferous blemish, but boys gave off a potent combination of “urine,
sweat, and indeterminate grime.” But it was the old men, the library
denizens, who were the most offensive. “They smelled powerfully, a
sickly sweet geriatric pong, composed of tobacco, beer stains, chronic
bodily complaints, and sheer weariness. Their feet in particular stank of
unwashed socks and ancient shoes barely holding together” (ibid,69).
Such a recollection of the defining odors of others, especially after
seven decades, signifies a powerful consciousness of one’s own
cleanliness and the importance of un/cleanliness as a marker, especially in
an era when lice, described as the “town livestock” by Johnson’s family,
were the bane of millions. But the very structure of the world that
produced “nits” and “wogs” and “powerful pongs” went unquestioned,
perhaps not surprisingly in a home in which those beyond the pale were
condemned as “worse than trade unionists.” What would improve the
conditions of that world, however, was art—Johnson’s father was head of
the Burslem School of Art—and Johnson recalls an early lesson in the
religion of art: “But I’ll tell you this little Paul. The destructiveness in
human beings can be mitigated if the everyday things in their lives are
made beautiful. Beauty is the enemy of violence and war and crime…If
people live in well-designed houses, have simple furniture which strives
for elegance, and eat off plates and drink from cups which have fine
shapes and beautiful patterns and colors, their characters will be softened
and refined and their behavior will improve. So it is up to us to provide
these things…” (Johnson, 2004, 116-117). This was said with a complete
absence of self-consciousness and represents, more than a half-century
after they were first espoused, the East End missionary ideals of Samuel
Barnett and his Whitechapel Art Gallery. Absent was any awareness of
 Michael Rosenfeld 133

working class culture or any faith that workers had the capacity to create
culture or that cultural uplift might be directed at helping workers to
discover the sounds of their own voices. As multifarious, deep and rich as
working class culture could be—witness Sheffield in 1918 as presented in
Jonathan Rose’s Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes—(2005,
chapter 6) Johnson senior was blind to it.
While many may still look back at that world in anger, Johnson’s
memory-landscape affirms that world of nits and wogs and powerful
pongs. “It amazes me now, looking back, how free my life as a small boy
was, how little I was supervised and how confident my parents were that I
would come to no harm. Children today, by comparison, are prisoners of
the evil which walks in the world….Poverty was everywhere but so too
were the ten commandments.” (Johnson, 2004, 37-38) Johnson entombs
that world in nostalgia, engaging in what the philosopher Edward Casey
has termed “social cryogenics.” Thus The Vanished Landscape ends with
the following paean: “When I visited the place, nearly half-a-century later,
all had changed. The smoke, the soot, the smog and fog had gone. The
coal mines were still. The railways…had vanished….I saw no slums
either. Most of all, a thousand bottle-shaped pot banks, the main and
essential ingredient of that landscape, had been demolished….Every
element of dreary modernity had been introduced. It looked like anywhere
else in England. It was clean, comparatively prosperous, comfortable after
a fashion and totally lacking in character….in the process [the Potteries
area] had lost her strong, romantic beauty; and I suspect, her soul” (ibid,
200.) Nostalgia and a gemeinshaft grouse are thus fused so that the past
becomes a form of cultural critique of a present that falls far short of it.
In affirming and romanticizing the past Johnson’s memoir differs
profoundly from those of Roberts and Hoggart and somewhat less
profoundly from Woodruff’s, which also makes use of nostalgia, though
for different ends than Johnson’s. While the physical geography all four
writers negotiated may have been similar, they occupied different social
spaces and experienced different intellectual and social formations.
Johnson is middle class, conservative, and Roman Catholic, a man whose
loyalties run to the past; Roberts, Hoggart, and Woodruff working class,
socialist in sympathy if not in explicit commitment, and unchurched,
individuals for whom the past had been something to overcome and
transform, not affirm and validate, to be remembered heuristically as a
way of witnessing to the present. Transmuted into written memory their
pasts become teaching tools as cultural actors. For all of them, childhood
memory transmuted into memoir becomes a form of political engagement,
although the purposes they pursue are far from identical.
134 Working Class Childhood and its Uses in the Memoirs
of Richard Hoggart and Others

In a stimulating essay about the painter L. S. Lowry (a Salford Art

School classmate of Johnson’s father) and the construction of an industrial
pastoral for postwar Britain, the historian Chris Waters critically notes,
“Nostalgia for the world of mills and cobbled streets, and for the
communities and community spirit that sustained them, is not merely a
product of the recent heritage industry…Richard Hoggart’s classic study
of that world, The Uses of Literacy (1957), is certainly the best known of
the many laments for the traditional working class community that
appeared after the War” (Waters, 1999, 135).
It is arguable that A Local Habitation, the first volume of Hoggart’s
three volume autobiography, has a personal therapeutic dimension
beginning as it does with the author working out in its opening pages long
harbored feelings towards a dying aunt/surrogate mother. But there is little
else in the text to advance a claim that the work is a paean to an idealized
and lost working class world. There is a complete absence of the
romanticized past that haunts nostalgically-organized works, no quality of
elegy or of distance constructed to evoke a sense of loss, nor any indulgent
sentimentality evoking working class neighborliness and fellowship.
Instead there is a pointed and sober realism presenting “unmistakably
massive working class Leeds” as it was experienced by a sensitive and
self-conscious young man, fatherless, orphaned at eight, growing up in
closely circumscribed physical and psychological space. And yet within
that world Hoggart calls attention to social forms and cultural ideals whose
loss has impoverished the world of succeeding generations. Praise of the
past is not ipso facto an exercise in teary-eyed nostalgia; while one should,
as Waters cautions, be wary of such self-indulgence, one also needs to be
chary of the presentist conceit that, de haut en bas, dismisses
automatically any extolled virtue of the past
Writing of the emotional economy of working class families in the
1920s and 1930s Ross McKibbin noted that they often lacked the language
to articulate the things that mattered most. (1998, 169) One gets a clear
sense of this in A Local Habitation as Hoggart, looking back, retrospectively
voices all of those things that could not be expressed at the time. As
autobiographer he is reenacting family drama, but in its totality it is meant
to be representative of that time, place, and of all of those whose
circumstances paralleled his own. Just as his grandmother noticed there
was something about him that would take him out into a larger world-“she
realized that I was bright and that that brightness could get me at least out
of the dreary, without-perspective, working class life against which she
always inwardly and sometimes outwardly raged”–his autobiography
presents that larger world, “bread-and-dripping Leeds,” recreating the
 Michael Rosenfeld 135

tension of an era and the world of “unemployment, consumption, early

widowhood, scarlet fever, and heads in gas ovens.”(Hoggart, 1984, 25)
The psychological tension of the family becomes the social tension of the
street; the claustrophobia of the two up-and two down becomes the
bounded world of Hunslett.
“The physical enclosure mirrored our psychological enclosure”,
Hoggart wrote (1984, 37). One sees that in his choice of key words, noting,
as he did, that “any attempt at an anatomy of a group of people should
begin with their ways of talking, the pattern of recurrent images…the
stresses and tones of voice”(ibid, 126). For him, “Watchful is the word
above all others. The traps and the treadmill were there all the time and
only by being nervously aware of them could you not so much rise as at
least stay in place, keep your head above water…an endless clinging to
respectability for fear of sinking without a trace” (ibid, 26).
The tension expressed here is both personal and collective, the
juxtaposing a deliberate construction, its humanism and empathy reflective
of the folk rather than doctrinaire Marxism that permeates much of
Hoggart’s writing. There is therefore a near convergence of the personal
and the communal in much of what he writes. “We had virtually no lines
out to lives, interests, concerns beyond ourselves. This was not an innate
selfishness or self-absorption; these were the terms, the ground plan of our
lives forced on us by the stringency with which our mother had to
operate…we were wholly outsiders because we had to be so much insiders
and, since we knew no other way, we did not seek to belong.” But belong
Hoggart did. “We belonged mentally not only to a different world but to a
different era. We and our neighbors were the very poor and the very old, a
tiny forgotten group tucked into a forgotten corner of one of the bigger
cities in one of the richest continents on earth.” (ibid, 38)
Such conditions drew Hoggart to socialism by the age of fifteen, and
the past recalled here is a form of political witness. Yet while embracing
the viewpoint, he steered clear of any obligation of collective or
categorical thinking. Hence his ability to see the humanism in Miss Jubb,
the Board of Guardians visitor whose interest and intervention enabled
him to remain at school an additional two years; or his affection and
admiration for the old Haileyburian, Bonamy Dobrée, who, strictly
assessed, would qualify as one of Them. For Hoggart and others like him,
a generation before Carolyn Steedman, saw a similar world rather
differently; they opened up the world to the Scholarship Boy. As he wrote,
“I am not a strong intellectual, but what Cockburn started in me was the
habit of questioning the world I had previously been offered, and that in
turn reflected on my willingness or unwillingness to accept the world
136 Working Class Childhood and its Uses in the Memoirs
of Richard Hoggart and Others

which Cockburn itself was offering. After a break like that you never sit
entirely or wholly at ease in your local culture” (ibid, 182). In that
disjunctive and partially destabilized space we can locate the landscape of
Hoggart’s non-doctrinaire humanism, his commitment to decency, and his
enduring loathing for “the sniffer dogs of social class.”
Robert Roberts was born fifteen years earlier than Hoggart, in Salford,
in what he believed was “as closed an urban society as any in Europe”
(Roberts, 1971, 17). Like Hoggart, he is no nostalgist. In 1971 he wrote
scathingly, “But realists among the old working class today remember and
with sadness…the many women broken and aged with childbearing well
before their own youth was done. They remember the spoiled
complexions, the mouths full of rotten teeth, the varicose veins, the
ignorance of simple hygiene, the intelligence stifled and the endless battle
merely to keep clean. Unlike many in the middle and upper classes fondly
looking back…they weep no tears for the past….The tragedy was that in
the most opulent country in the world so many possessed so little” (ibid,
41). As Andrew Davies has noted, Roberts’ writings were a deliberate
attempt “to puncture the romanticized images of the traditional working
class community advanced by sociologists and cultural commentators in
the late 1950s and 1960s.” (2004)
Almost four decades after it was written, Roberts’ anger, a legacy from
his autodidact mother and transmuted by him into a lifetime of work in
support of labor, is still palpable. His books, all three of them minor
classics, were the work of his final few years of life—he died aged 69 in
1974. Imprisoned Tongues is a pioneering work in teaching adult literacy,
the result of his years teaching prisoners—some of them childhood
friends—at Strangeways. The Classic Slum is a critically acclaimed
account of growing up in Salford in the first quarter of the 20th century,
while its sequel, A Ragged Schooling, is an elaboration on some of the
themes first sketched in The Classic Slum. Typically, Roberts had left
school at 14 to become an engineering apprentice, only to be sacked, like
so many of his generation, as soon as he came of age. Several years of
characteristic 1930s idleness passed before his employment as a teacher
which ended abruptly in his dismissal upon application for conscientious
objector status in 1939. Subsequently he worked for the National Council
of Labor Colleges, the Anglo Swedish Institute, and the Prison Service.
Raymond Williams, in reviewing Hoggart’s work, faulted it for what it
had failed to include in its depiction of working class life, most notably the
absence of conflict, the silence about many adult preoccupations, and the
omission or under-estimation of those influences which combined to
create the labor movement in the 20th century. Perhaps Hoggart had not
 Michael Rosenfeld 137

written the books that Raymond Williams had wanted. But it is arguable
that Robert Roberts did. If, as Melissa Gregg claims, Hoggart’s Uses of
Literacy needs to be situated within a discourse of empathy, then perhaps
the appropriate discourse for situating Roberts’ Classic Slum would be one
of disappointed radicalism. (Gregg, 2003)
Toward the end of A Ragged Schooling Roberts recounts an episode
from the last of his schooldays. “Free speech,” he wrote, ‘didn’t come
easily to children kept down at home or in the classroom.” But Roberts
had had a teacher who had wanted to help working class children develop
a consciousness of their own selfhood. To that end he staged a debate of
the proposition that “children should go to school until they are fifteen.”
Roberts was chosen to defend the proposition and, with the aid of his
mother, he developed a case that emphasized intellectual growth and
social fairness, arguing that the children of the poor ought to have as much
opportunity for education as the children of the rich. Lily Weeton, “a
pallid girl with plaits,” made the case against the proposition.
She came out and climbed atop the speaker’s box. “Her words were few
but explosive. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we should gerrout to work at fourteen
and fetch some money in for us parents.’ Then she stepped off the box to a
thunderclap of applause, cheering, and clog-stamping that rocked the
school” (Roberts, 1976, 171-172). The vote: Roberts 2, Weeton 48. “Like
their fathers,” Roberts reflected, “the children of the proletariat were, as
yet, unripe for revolution.”(ibid, 173).
Of the fathers of the children of the proletariat Roberts wrote,
“Ignorant, unorganized, schooled in humility, they had neither the wit nor
the will to revolt. Like the working class as a whole they went on gazing
up still to the ineffable reaches of the middle and upper orders” (1971,
185.) But Roberts recognizes that prior to the Great War, and especially
for those he termed the undermass, it was almost impossible for it to be
otherwise. The poor experienced power working down on them through
parsons, teachers, policemen, doctors, and employers. Nor was that power
benign. “Under the common bustle crouched fear. Fear was the common
leitmotif of [their] lives, dulled only now and then from the Dutch courage
gained by drunkenness” (ibid, 88).
Those who made up that fearful undermass were the neighbors of
Roberts’ youth, the customers of his mother at his family’s corner shop,
those on whom he eavesdropped and early discovered much about the
world of adults. Roberts deftly presents that knowledge as autobiography,
but it is so thickly described as to offer us a more detailed and nuanced
picture of urban working class life than that presented of Leeds by
Hoggart. The memory landscape is one of oppression, immiseration,
138 Working Class Childhood and its Uses in the Memoirs
of Richard Hoggart and Others

brutality, and constant, never-ending struggle: the smallness of many, the

disdain for art and any higher culture, the spiritual wasteland, the vicious
prejudice against the Irish, the stone-hearted and unforgiving morality, the
cheap scrounging, the perverse masculinity that linked homosexuality and
literacy, copulation, pregnancy, menstruation, masturbation, the predatory
hypocrisy of the Salvation Army, and the short-sightedness and stupidity
that was so pervasive. This is Roberts’ urban-industrial townscape,
Salford, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, more a dirge than a
pastoral.
But it is just possible that Roberts in memory recalls a bleaker past in
order to emphasize a greater break brought about by War and Revolution.
“Ever since the Russian Revolution in 1917,” he writes, “those behind the
scenes in Britain with real power had shown themselves morally afraid of
any attempt at a proletarian uprising….But the workers went on talking
and talk it was above all else that swept the labor party to its final victory
of sorts in 1924. On the night of that triumph…simple socialists like my
mother wept for joy and we, the young, felt ourselves the heralds of a new
age….Less conventionally moral, less censorious and self-righteous, our
community had somehow grown in knowledge, confidence and
sophistication. One felt the new awareness that men had brought back
from the war. Not only the poor but the working class as a whole had
grown far bolder and more articulate” (ibid, 228).
It was a false dawn. The workers, both skilled and unskilled, had
already been coopted and the revolutionary impulse subdued by the
provision of a minimum of social security. “More than any one single
factor,” he writes, “[the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1920] might well
have stifled revolution” (ibid, 237). Later there would be the Beveridge
Report, and while the percentage of the population classified as working
class would fall only by eight percentage points between 1920 and 1951
(from 79% to 71%), the material conditions of working class lives would
alter substantially and would continue to change over the several
succeeding decades. There would be no revolution.
So where then do we situate The Classic Slum? Do we assign it a well
deserved but mummified place in the academic discourse about the
condition of England? Or should it be part of a discourse about the dashed
hopes and dreams of those who expected too much of the people? There
are strong echoes in it of Herbert Marcuse’s 1970s disappointment with
the young and the new age they were going to inaugurate. An even closer
resonance seems to be with the historian A. L. Rowse, a tin miner’s son
born in 1903 and the first working class youngster to receive a scholarship
to Ballilol. Rowse’s diaries and memoirs of those years, notably A Cornish
 Michael Rosenfeld 139

Story and A Cornishman at Oxford, are full of the same exaggerated hopes
and heightened expectancy that mark Roberts, the same brutal realism in
his descriptions of working class life, and the same frustration and anger at
the short-sightedness and stupidity—Rowse’s own words—of his own
class. But it may also be possible to situate Roberts Classic Slum as an
important corrective to manufactured images, a counter–narrative not only
to puncture academicians but to check as well a contrived working class
popular culture image typified in the 1950s and 1960s by such films as I’m
All Right Jack or Ladies Who Do and which lives on today in such
programs as Coronation Street or East Enders. Although there are key
points at which Roberts and Hoggart disagree with one another—the
relationship of the working class to the arts, for example—their
autobiographies complement one another as they both narrate the past to
problematize the present.
The past presents no obvious problem for William Woodruff, most of
whose life for the past five decades has been lived as an accomplished
economic historian in the United States. The Road to Nab End (originally
published as Billy Boy), the account of his Blackburn childhood he
published in his eighties, became such a popular success that it led to a
sequel and a novel. It is the least satisfactory of the autobiographies
considered here. It is an engaging and enjoyable work, but little more than
that. Unlike Hoggart and Roberts, the past is not used by Woodruff to
problematize or interrogate the present; unlike Johnson, Woodruff does
not use the landscape of his childhood to construct an anti-modernist
discourse. Instead, for him the past is a foreign country. But with a good
tour guide—the author—we can visit it as tourists, enjoy what we see, and
avoid encountering anything too disconcerting. This is obvious from the
very start of Woodruff’s narrative as he consciously takes the reader with
him on a journey-“It was now or never”—from Florida to Blackburn,
arriving in clothes too thin for the bracing winds and receiving a querying
are-you-sure ?second-look from the taxi driver when he indicated his
destination. “The Blackburn I saw was becalmed. We stood in what had
been Griffin Street and surveyed a wind-swept, rubble-strewn wasteland
covering many acres. ‘Slum clearance,’ the driver mused, picking his
teeth. ‘Had to do it, Pakis were moving in. It’s a pity you came all the way
from America to find everything gone.’ ‘Oh, no,’ I answered. ‘On the
contrary everything is here’” (Woodruff, 1999, 6).
The topography that Woodruff recreates and leads us over is the usual
one with few surprises. There is strangeness, but nothing so unrecognizable
as to foster a feeling of dissonance. There are head to feet sleeping
arrangements in crowded beds, piss pots frozen because of the cold,
140 Working Class Childhood and its Uses in the Memoirs
of Richard Hoggart and Others

knockers-up in the morning, a mother surreptitiously leaving a mill to

nurse a newborn, older sisters unknowingly sacrificing their own childhoods
as apprentice mothers, unemployment, hunger, prurient preachers, parental
love-making, cringe or starve public charities, and a few by-gums. Except
for a brief digression into the comparative economics of the cloth trade in
the 1920s there is neither analytical nor critical dimension to the work. It is
an episodic recreation of happenings, possibly because, as Woodruff
remarked, “We lived in a world of intense activity; a world in which we
didn’t have enough time to fit everything in.” (ibid, 187) Yet in its final
pages the book does at last seem to place itself, but the location seems
more American than English.
The remembered past and the told story have been about freedom and
opportunity, the adversity of childhood instilling self-reliance and igniting
a hunger for success. “My heritage was joyful as well as bleak. I had never
had the time or need to ask, ‘Who am I?’ I was a weaver’s son, somebody
close to the bottom of the social pile; somebody who could not evade
reality; somebody who had been brought into direct contact with the
conditions of labour; somebody who had been blessed by constant
challenge: the challenge of poverty, the challenge of making do; even the
challenge of a harsh climate and a cold north wind….Hard times had bred
resourcefulness and self-reliance. I also knew that nobody owed me a
living. I took it for granted that in life I’d have to shift for myself.” (ibid,
407) Whether the echo is of Samuel Smiles or of Horatio Alger, this is
nostalgia as self-affirmation and self-congratulation. Perhaps this is the
explanation of Woodruff’s best-seller status—his readers find in his
memoir and experience an echo of their own personal triumph. The past
had not presented a problem, only a challenge successfully overcome.
In Landscape for a Good Woman Carolyn Steedman has written that in
order to write history we must first narrate backwards and then interpret
forward. (1986, 21) This is in essence how she reconstructs the emotional
landscape of her childhood in the 1950s and that of her mother two
decades earlier before presenting those childhoods as emblematic of the
larger history of working class experience and aspiration in mid-twentieth
century Britain. This is what the two most significant writers discussed
here—Robert Roberts and Richard Hoggart—have done. They have
deliberately and systematically reconstructed their childhood worlds—
narrated backwards—in order to present those childhoods as representative
class experiences—interpreted forward. In a larger sense their childhoods
are not solely their own but belong to all who inhabited similar social,
emotional and economic topographies. Thus their personal memories of
working class childhood inform public memory and texture the collective
 Michael Rosenfeld 141

story. This is not the case with either Woodruff or Johnson who seem
locked in a personal idiom that ultimately localizes rather than
collectivizes their experiences. Whether looking out on the working class,
as in the case of Johnson, or in passing through it, as appears to have been
the case with Woodward, their memories of childhood, charming,
interesting, or engaging as they are, never really transcend the level of
personal concern. Yet for all of them, regardless of how they used their
narrated pasts, the landscapes of early life were, as Hoggart noted,
indelibly engraved.

Works Cited
Davies, Andrew (2004). “Robert Roberts,” DNB, www. Oxforddnb.com
Gregg, Melissa (2003). “A Neglected History: Richard Hoggart’s
Discourse of Empathy,” Rethinking History 7 (3), 285-306.
Hoggart, Richard (1984). A Local Habitation. New Brunswick:
Transaction.
Johnson, Paul (2004). The Vanished Landscape. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson.
McKibbin, Ross (1998). Classes and Cultures. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Roberts, Robert (1971). The Classic Slum. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
—. (1976). A Ragged Schooling. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Rose, Jonathan (2005). The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Steedman, Carolyn (1986). Landscape for a Good Woman. New York:
Virago.
Waters, Chris (1999). “Representations of Everyday Life: L. S. Lowry and
the Landscape of Memory in Postwar Britain,” Representations 65
(Winter), 121-150.
Woodruff, William (1999). The Road to Nab End. London: Abacus.
 QUESTIONS OF TASTE AND CLASS:
RICHARD HOGGART AND BONAMY DOBRÉE

TOM STEELE

Glaswegians know about Hunslet, the name is stamped in capitals on the

footplate of each of the carriages of its underground train, boldly denoting
their place of manufacture. On a good day the tube, locally known as the
Clockwork Orange, since literature is inescapable, will whisk you from the
university to the city in less than ten minutes. For Richard Hoggart his
journey across Leeds from Hunslet to the university on the edge of
Woodhouse Moor but known to polite society as “Hyde Park” marked a
considerable rupture. It would take a good thirty minutes by bus, tram and
foot and it crossed a class divide of dizzying depths. It marked for him the
start of an epic navigation of class and taste that he still pursues but
possibly only a few among the tiny elite he joined would know or care
where Hunslet was.
Hoggart’s northerly trek across town to become an undergraduate at
the University of Leeds posed a formidable challenge. The fascination
with the style and composure of literary intellectuals like his mentor
Bonamy Dobrée and exultance in the sheer joy he gave to reading could
have resulted in his turning his back on his own class experience once and
for all (Hoggart, 1973, 189-204; 1958, 250-51). But for Hoggart, on the
contrary, it prompted a lifelong interrogation of that experience for its
strengths and weaknesses. By applying literary method to both working
class and popular culture, Hoggart went far beyond both what Q. D.
Leavis had achieved in Fiction and the Reading Public and Orwell in his
journalism (though both were important to him). The difference, as
Raymond Williams remarked, was that whereas they were anthropological
visitors to a foreign culture, Hoggart was indeed a native. This chapter
tries to understand the significance of Leeds University and especially
Dobrée in Hoggart’s early grappling with taste and class and his
successive turns to what became interdisciplinary cultural studies.
A striking feature of Hoggart’s work especially in the The Uses of
Literacy (UoL) is the ready mix of experience and literary reference where
 Tom Steele 143

reflection on working class life is often complemented by a literary

quotation confirming or extending the insight. We are well used to
questioning the “innocence” of experience and it is frequently not easy to
see where something keenly felt ends and where literary framing begins.
In someone so acutely attuned to cultural contextualising as Hoggart this is
even more difficult.
In his first volume of autobiography Hoggart vividly summons up the
moment that literature called to him: “the great private discovery from
Hunslet library was poetry” (1988, 174). Hunslet library, “a home from
home for people like me” with its open access shelves and its small study
room was an “indispensable extension of the space, quiet, warmth and
facilities of the school” (ibid, 173). Better than home, in fact, since
crammed in between the radio, father’s random remarks on the issues of
the day and mother’s ironing, or in Hoggart’s case the nagging of his aunt,
the scholarship boy had little private space for study. Bea Campbell has
noted how his autobiographical account already lacks that mother-centred
family and suggests he is drawing on received cultural versions. She feels
it is recognisably related to Orwell’s nostalgic drawing on the memory of
an “older order”1. But it is more complicated than this. Hunslet library, for
Hoggart, offered a public space beyond home, through whose bookish
windows could be glimpsed quite another world from the one outside the
door through which he had entered. This revelation about literature, this
extraordinary power of imaginative words in books, was common to many
a working class child who had to get away, as Hoggart did, from the
stifling cosiness of the working class home. Hoggart notes that he does not
recall when he first knew he would–“I did not say ‘had to’”–get out of
Hunslet, but he knew that, unlike most of his fellows, he would leave.
The first step was his admission to Cockburn Grammar School, which
already marked him out as one of a small minority already loosening its
ties to class and community. At the end of this chapter that describes his
time there he evokes a powerful literary image which says much about his
state of mind. As he walked back home across the “moor” from the school
of a winter evening he would look back and “see over the house-tops half
a mile away the pale glow of its classrooms and cupolas standing up half
silvery-grey in the near-darkness” (Hoggart, 1988, 183). But there is a
curious twist: it exercised on his imagination as powerful a pull as did
Oxford’s dreaming spires on Matthew Arnold or Christminster on Jude the
Obscure. Curious because those literary images represented a future as
attainable for the Rugby school boy “Arnold” as it was unattainable for the
fictional stonemason Jude. But for Hoggart it was the place from which he
had already come, he was already there, already at home in it. Both
144 Questions of Taste and Class: Richard Hoggart and Bonamy Dobrée

references are of course deeply literary. Could he have seen Cockburn this
way without them, through as it were, the naked eye? Is “Richard
Hoggart” already a literary creation like Jude?
Hoggart seems to have achieved his first immersion into literature
through public institutions but without the aid of the personally enabling
master also familiar to many working class students who make the break.
Indeed his masters seemed puzzled if not a little disturbed by his
precocity. But Cockburn had opened doors to him, Disarmingly, Hoggart
notes: “I am not a strong intellectual, but what Cockburn started in me was
the habit of questioning the world I had been previously offered”. That in
turn makes him dissatisfied with Cockburn itself and “After a break like
that you never again sit entirely or wholly at ease in your local culture”
ibid, 182). What then Hoggart goes on to say seems to be the precursor for
the cultural work that so distinguished him from his predecessors: “You
can make your peace with your native culture, can learn to be to some
degree at ease with it, may come to respect it; but you can never again be
an integral part of it, and that is not to be regretted; you have bitten the
fruit” (ibid). This statement of deep but necessary loss makes Hoggart a
part of the future that speaks powerfully to the condition of the generation
of working class undergraduates that were as a result of the university
reforms of the 1960s to come in increasing numbers.
Hoggart’s reference to Jude the Obscure is not surprising since at
Cockburn reading Hardy had been, if not the blinding flash on his road to
Damascus, at least the brightest gas lamp. Hoggart’s vacation essay on the
novelist, very much against the grain of conventional opinion, described
him as “a truly cultured man”: “Something in Hardy’s whole manner of
facing experience spoke to me in way I hardly understood” (ibid,179).
Intrigued by Hardy’s lack of formal higher education and his dismissal by
the metropolitan elite, with the important exception of Edmund Gosse, as a
simple countryman, Hoggart found himself for the first time questioning
received notions about culture and cultivation in the form he was to
master, the extended essay.
You could say Hoggart’s relationship with Bonamy Dobrée was then
overdetermined by his early wrestling with words which had the power to
produce a felt experience so significantly different yet uncannily similar to
the world he had grown up in. The “glamour” of Cockburn Grammar
School, experienced by Hoggart has to be a cultural product of a literary
immersion.
Unlike Raymond Williams, who grew up in a strongly political climate
and a remarkable tradition of educational self-help in the Welsh labour
movement, Hoggart experienced class as an exclusion from culture and
 Tom Steele 145

intellect. In a conversation with Raymond Williams in 1959, published in

the first edition of New Left Review, Hoggart confessed:

I felt from your book [Culture and Society] that you were surer, sooner
than I was, of your relationship to your working-class background. With
me, I remember, it was a long and troublesome effort. It was difficult to
escape a kind of patronage, even when one felt one was understanding the
virtues of the working-class life one had been brought up in–one seemed to
be insisting on these strengths in spite of all sorts of doubts in one’s
attitudes (Hoggart and Williams, 1960, 26).

For him, Williams’s life in rural Wales was a moment of an “organic”

relationship among working people such as the smaller townships of the
West Riding still possessed but was no longer to found in an industrial
town like Leeds. It already seemed to belong to the past whereas Leeds
signified an oppressive modernity. Instead of the organic, Leeds
represented itself to him as great “blocks” of people where relations were
defined spatially or geographically rather than by trade or labour. In true
modernist fashion, the divisions of space in a town like Leeds
predominated for Hoggart over the solidarities of time and occupation.
His long march out of this alienating environment then took him to the
University of Leeds, which although only a couple of miles across town to
the north was light years away. Leeds University–“nothing very grand,
only Leeds University in the mid-Thirties” (Hoggart, 1988, 181)–across
the Leeds Bridge over the River Aire, through town, up Woodhouse Lane
to the edge of another moor, Woodhouse Moor. No dreaming spires there
and the modernist Portland stone (rather than ivory) tower, that now
signifies the university, had yet to be built. As one of a very few working
class students, he entered, a culture of patronage inscribed into the history
of the University of Leeds from the time of Michael Sadler and Frederic
Moorman. Sadler, who was most responsible for transforming what was,
according the historian Maurice Beresford, little more than a jumped up
technical college into a true university, was vice-chancellor between 1911
and 1925. Earlier, as secretary for the Oxford Delegacy in the 1890s, he
had been a leading light in that missionary movement of university
extension which had seen as its prime object the conversion of the
northern working-classes. He was a Ruskinian whose message, he told a
WEA audience in 1913, was to leave “no Giotto among the sheepfolds”
and he was a catalyst in art for both Henry Moore and Herbert Read and
personally responsible for nurturing the career of the remarkable Jewish
expressionist painter, Jacob Kramer (Steele, 1990, 200). Similarly,
Frederic Moorman, Professor of English Language at Leeds until his
146 Questions of Taste and Class: Richard Hoggart and Bonamy Dobrée

untimely death in 1919, had turned Herbert Read’s career into the path of
literature in 1912. The patronage of gifted working-class and disadvantaged
students by liberal intellectuals is well enough known as, perhaps, the
balm of an otherwise savagely discriminatory higher educational system.

Dobrée and style

For Richard Hoggart, the man who assumed that role was the newly
appointed Professor of English, Bonamy Dobrée. Through his urbanity,
wit, connections and ultimately “style” he seemed to embody the best of
English high culture, which for Hoggart was also a matter of “class” as
expressed in physicality and gesture. He remembered him as

… a man of great intellectual sparkle, and great physical charm. But that
charm had to express itself in the precise restrained codes for physical
gesture used by the English upper class. It belonged to a separate
compartment from his lively intellect–the style of that had been picked up
on his slightly eccentric road through parts of academic life and the
literary-artistic circle he moved in (Eliot, Lawrence, Read, Moore).
(Hoggart, 1991, 50)

Hoggart was particularly struck by his mode of teaching in which the

manner and the matter seemed to fuse, carrying erudition lightly and
imparting it in an almost offhand way. He encouraged the chosen few of
which Hoggart was one: “Each year Bonamy Dobrée seemed to pick one
or perhaps two students to keep an eye on. We were probably the brightest
in both the good and bad senses of that word. We were intelligent but also
likely to be quirky and offbeat” (Hoggart, 1973, 191).
Dobrée was an intriguing figure in Leeds, part of a tradition of
metropolitan intellectuals who sought out the industrial north as previously
they might have served in the colonies. Born into a wealthy banking and
arms manufacturing family in Guernsey, he was educated at the private
school Haileybury and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich after
which he was commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery in 1910. But the
professional soldier could equally be a Bohemian and in 1913, resigning
his commission, he married the painter Valentine Pechell and toured
France in a horse-drawn caravan until April 1914, when he re-enlisted.
After the war took his degree at Christ’s College, Cambridge (1920–21)
where he was captain of the university fencing team. Dobrée then turned
his attention to writing dramatic and journalistic criticism and from 1921
to 1925 he and Valentine lived mainly at Larrau, a village in the Pyrenees
 Tom Steele 147

where he wrote Restoration Comedy (1924), Essays in Biography (1925),

and edited Congreve's Comedies (1925).
This presaged a period of intense literary activity during which he
formed a close relationship with Herbert Read, the poet, art critic, and
former Leeds graduate. Having made a considerable reputation as a
literary critic, recognised by an OBE in 1929, he was appointed in 1936 to
the chair of English literature at the University of Leeds, a post he held
until his retirement in 1955. Already well known in national circles with
Read and T.S. Eliot, Dobrée became involved with Orage’s second journal
the New English Weekly founded in 1932, which championed the work of
young writers including George Orwell and Dylan Thomas as well as
Orage’s eccentric enthusiasm for the economic doctrine of Social Credit.
He subsequently made a considerable impact on the university’s academic
culture, where he promoted a department of fine art and persuaded his
friend, the printer, Peter Gregory, to establish the pioneering Gregory
fellowships in poetry, painting, sculpture, and music. Dobrée, with Read’s
help, was also instrumental in securing the appointment of the Marxist art
historian, Arnold Hauser, to a lectureship following the publication of his
The Social History of Art (1952) (Steele, 2005, 236-53).
How different from Hoggart could Dobrée have been? Although he
was perceived as an exotic, he retained the marks of the military
gentleman, for example roundly discouraging Hoggart from taking up the
study of psychology as a study option because he felt he needed all his
time to develop his literary studies, a rebuff Hoggart carried with him for
many years. It was as if “the culture” had spoken to remind him of its
absence in him, his own hollowness. Dobrée represented the patrician
upper class, the southern gentleman who had become genuinely affianced
to the north because of its different way of life, its otherness. But he also
represented “France” and cosmopolitanism as against English
provinciality–perhaps, as Orwell remarked, it is the peculiarity of the
English intellectual upper class is that the more upper, the less English–a
point of reference for Hoggart’s intellectual journeying in the years to
follow.
Crucially, however, for those who date the beginning of cultural
studies to the Scrutiny years, he was “not-Leavis”. His style of teaching
was to communicate the sheer pleasure in the excess of reading:

[His lectures] were exciting and stimulating rather than comprehensive or

exhaustive. He deliberately moved across the formal boundaries of
specialisms. He laced his lectures with side-comments, odd aperçus from
other disciplines, sudden changes of level, irruption into contemporary
affairs. I can trace the origins of some of my own less formal literary-and-
148 Questions of Taste and Class: Richard Hoggart and Bonamy Dobrée

social interests to incidental comments he threw out–on Faulkner and

violence in literature, for instance. (Hoggart, 1973, 199)

This clearly is part of the distinctly non-Leavisite genealogy of Cultural

Studies: the anti-Puritanism of the cavalier, in its best sense, style–replete
with disregard for disciplinary boundaries, formal niceties, appropriate
tone and relishing the social reference which the modern defenders of the
faith so dislike and call dilettantism. For Hoggart although as a teacher he
was always committed to nurturing his students’ pleasure of the text, there
is no sense in which he wanted to emulate his mentor socially. Rather
Dobrée acts as a key reference point for his own dogged determination to
interrogate his own class difference and, increasingly, the margins
between the Hunslet childhood and post-educational maturity, against
which Dobrée is a fascinating and exotic other.
Wartime service in the army wrenched him away. During this period
his letters to Dobrée chart his intellectual progress and formation of taste.
He kept up with Cyril Connolly’s eclectic literary journal, Horizon, which
was forwarded to him regularly by Dobrée, and expected great things after
the war from the feminist and communist Storm Jameson (another Leeds
graduate and protégé of Alfred Orage). In his letters to Dobrée he
comments widely, on for example: Coleridge’s theory of the imagination,
the building of an aesthetics in Jacob Epstein’s autobiography, G.D.H.
Cole, “who says what a lot of us are thinking”, Rilke’s poetry, which
helped him to understand the 1930s and the communist literary journal,
Our Time, whose “literary criticism smells”.2 He very much admired Louis
McNiece’s “Epitaph to Liberal Poets” which so finely drew the
consequences of the managerial revolution and the poet’s subjection to
“tight lipped technocratic conquistadors”. He found Orwell, Pritchett,
Betjeman and Pudney, “a few of those spare, critical, well-informed
writers... who are well suited to our times” and who had done great things
for English didactic prose; Orwell in particular he greatly admired.3
Signs of the future direction of his own work could perhaps be seen in
his admiration for Edmund Gosse’s autobiographical Father and Son,
which he thought impressively literary and also in his contact with an
Italian Professor at Naples called Binni. Binni was something new, a kind
of “Italian Empson” whose recent work was regarded as a “hotchpotch of
psychology, anthropology and economics”.4 He also met the Italian
philosopher, Benedetto Croce, who despite his opposition to Mussolini
had been left more or less alone and who was doing a “superhuman job
around here”.5 Croce’s approach to cultural questions had also influenced
Antonio Gramsci a few decades earlier and may have been suggestive to
Hoggart. It was at this time, he told Dobrée, that he would like to lecture in
 Tom Steele 149

a training college or university after the war, but definitely not school
teaching. But he also wanted to do “something social” and to that end was
interested in the plans for a post-war ABCA (army education) in which
W.E. Williams the modernising editor of the WEA’s journal The Highway
was said to be involved.
More than any other educational area, perhaps, adult education was a
site at this stage for ideological contestation over cultural meanings. Its
already politicised nature, a result of its historical constituencies,
experimental pedagogies and marginal status, bred strong factional feeling.
Cultural interpretation, therefore, was often formulated against or in
reaction to other well-formed ideological positions, especially Marxism.
An example of the passions raised here, marked the onset of the Cold War.
In a letter to Dobrée he notes:

I should have added, apropos of our work, that there’s a small group of
neo-Thomist tutors–whom I like, but who I suspect are as a result of recent
events, in danger of helping the anti-Communist witch-hunt–one of them,
inspired, it seems, by Middleton Murry’s new book–was talking yesterday
about “fighting the last fight”. I havent (sic) read the book and of course I
care as much about what’s happening in Central Europe as they do–but it
seems to me that for people of any responsibility to start talking like that at
this point is disastrous. I wonder how undergraduates are taking it; it’s the
thirties with a new twist. I feel like a little sober (but by no means flippant)
stoicism–but it’s very fashionable just now.6

As a consequence of the heightened political tension and the nature of

students in adult education, the teaching of literature was as a practice
always threatening to spill over its allotted space. It and the aims of adult
education could not be easily separated and it was in one of these highly
wrought exchanges in the adult education journals that Hoggart first came
into contact with Raymond Williams, then teaching on the south coast for
the Oxford Delegacy, in which they argued about the distinction between
social justification and possible political direction. Hoggart notes that they
were somewhat puritanical in their judgements. But unlike members of
internal departments they could not dismiss the “popular” with an easy
shrug, because adult students lived in that world and did not care for it.
They came to the study of literature, he believed, in the hope that it would
speak to their condition in profound ways. Confronted with these high
expectations, he argued, the adult tutor had to use a strategy of indirection.
Literature was not a manual for solving existential problems but if read
with openness and understanding the pleasure it gave would reveal itself
as relevant to life in unexpected ways. In a remark not calculated to appeal
150 Questions of Taste and Class: Richard Hoggart and Bonamy Dobrée

to Leavisites, he said the tutor also had to shed the “armour of specialist
language” and talk to the adult student as an equal (Hoggart, 1991, 126).
The redefinition of the subject began to take shape therefore under the
institutional setting of limits and exertions of pressure. Partly it was the
continual need to answer the demand for “relevance” which Hoggart took
to mean more than simply what “could be fitted into the Co-op shopping
bag of ‘social realism’” (ibid, 129). But his most important insight was that
the methods of literary criticism and analysis were relevant to “the better
understanding of all levels of writing and much else in popular culture and
the way people responded to them” (ibid).
Can we see Dobrée in all this? Collini notes how Hoggart distances
himself from the elitism and cultural pessimism of the Leavises and how
much more positive he is about the possibilities of the new media (1999,
226). On rereading UoL he finds it not the sentimental tract of later
criticism but alive with “literary confidence and stylishness” reflected in
experiments in form and its “allusive, learned, manner”; how he takes for
granted the existence of a non specialist audience with “no defensiveness
about transgressing academic norms” (ibid). As we have seen, these
qualities were exactly those Hoggart admired in his mentor at Leeds
University and may have been expected to emulate. But this is perhaps
easy. Ignoring Dobrée altogether, Collini notes how he cultivated a writing
voice “out of Leavis by Orwell” perhaps, and locates him ultimately in the
“family of English moralists” but this too is not quite right.
Hoggart was no more the creature of patrician patronage or critical
school than he was of an unreflected working class culture. By his own
account we can find any number of “influences” lurking in the wings
waiting for recognition like Gosse, Hardy and especially Orwell–not then
on any university reading list. Thus in truth Hoggart has closer affiliations
to the crassly maligned autodidact tradition, so brilliantly documented by
Jonathan Rose, which enabled him to keep an informed critical distance
from all who wanted to sign him up (Rose, 2001).
More than anything it was public institutions that formed his taste and
feeling for class; schools, libraries, universities, adult education, the
serious press and public service broadcasting as institutions with resources
to plunder, time for contemplation, staff for stimulation, peers for
comparison and, crucially, intermediary spaces where class and taste could
be considered from a reflective distance, are his points of reference. His
lifelong commitment to defending and extending such essential
constituents of democracy says it all.
 Tom Steele 151

Works Cited
Campbell, Beatrix (1984). Wigan Pier Revisited, London: Virago
Collini, Stefan (1999). English Pasts: essays in culture and history.
Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press.
Hoggart, Richard (1958). The Uses of Literacy. London: Pelican.
—. (1973). “Teaching with Style (on Bonamy Dobrée)”, in Speaking to
Each Other, Vol. II: About Literature. London: Pelican, 189-204. First
pub. 1970.
—. (1988). A Local Habitation London: Chatto & Windus.
—. (1991). A Sort of Clowning, Life and Times 1940-1959. Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
Hoggart, Richard and Raymond Williams (1960). “Working-Class
Attitudes”, New Left Review, No. 1, Jan./Feb., 26-30.
Rose, Jonathan (2001). The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Steele, Tom (1990). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893-1923.
Scolar, Aldershot.
—. (2005). “Arnold Hauser, Herbert Read and the Social History of Art in
Britain” in Britain and Hungary 3: Contacts in architecture design, art
and theory, ed. Gyula Ernyey. Budapest, Hungarian University of
Craft and Design, 236-253.

Notes
1
Campbell (1984, 222). For a critique of Campbell’s “positioning” of Hoggart,
which has affected Hoggart’s reputation, see Sue Owen, “Hoggart and Women” in
Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies (London, Palgrave, forthcoming). Alan
Bennett wrote in a letter responding to a draft of this article: "[Hoggart's] vision of
Cockburn in the dusk is a wonderful creation–I don't know that it needed to be
literary, though. I remember similar elegiac feelings about my school particularly
in my last weeks there–and I'd never thought of it in any literary context (and I
never got round to Hardy for another 30 years at least)." (Alan Bennett, personal
communication, February 2007).
2
Hoggart, undated letter to Dobrée, No.19, Dobrée Collection, Special Collections,
Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.
3
Hoggart, letter to Bonamy Dobrée, No. 26, Dobrée Collection.
4
Hoggart, letter to Dobrée, No.16, Dobrée Collection.
5
Hoggart, letter to Dobrée, No.12, 18 December 1943, Dobrée Collection.
6
Hoggart, letter to Bonamy Dobrée, No.128, Tues. 10 Feb., no year but before
1951, Dobrée Collection. Who this group were is unclear. It may have been
152 Questions of Taste and Class: Richard Hoggart and Bonamy Dobrée

associated with the journal Humanitas, for which Hoggart occasionally wrote or
inspired by the teaching of Father Herbert Rickabee at Manchester University -
some other extra mural staff tutors who converted to Roman Catholicism, possibly
under his influence, included Walter Stein and Roy Shaw at Leeds. Jacques
Maritain’s Art Scholastique, which had recently been translated, may have been a
touchstone for the group.
 PROMOTING INTERNATIONAL
UNDERSTANDING AND COOPERATION:
RICHARD HOGGART’S UNESCO YEARS
(1970-1975)

MALCOLM HADLEY

From January 1970 to May 1975, Richard Hoggart served as Assistant

Director-General for Social Sciences, Human Sciences and Culture of
UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization, based in Paris. As described in his 1978 book An Idea and
its Servants: UNESCO from Within,1 Hoggart’s “madly mixed brief”
included a range of politically sensitive and intellectually tricky issues
confronting the Organization, including human rights, ethics, cultural
heritage, cultural tourism, social and cultural dimensions of
environmental, development and population problems, and fostering
teaching and research in social sciences, humanities and philosophy in
developing countries. Hoggart’s own analysis of the UN specialized
agency–its tensions and paradoxes, its weaknesses and shortcomings, as
well as its “indisputably useful activities”–still carries much insight for
those interested in international intellectual life, cultural development and
multilateral cooperation, and for those grappling with such contemporary
issues as cultural diversity and freedom of expression.

1. An academic’s detour
It was on a BAC 111 flight from Birmingham that Richard Hoggart
arrived in Paris on a leaden-grey low-clouded day in late January 1970, to
take on a new three-year assignment at UNESCO Headquarters there.
The new appointment had come about almost by accident, or better, by
the slow accretion of small events. In the mid-1960s, Hoggart had been
asked to join one of the subcommittees of the UK National Commission
for UNESCO, which had been transferred at that time from the Ministry of
154 Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO Years (1970-1975)

Education to the Ministry of Overseas Development. The subcommittee on

culture met two or three times a year and Richard Hoggart’s involvement
was not heavy. He made a couple of short trips to the meetings of the
Organization’s governing body, the biennial General Conference, in 1966
and 1968. He paid one very brief visit to one of the Executive Board’s
meetings and to one meeting of experts to plan a programme of work on
cultural development. He contributed to a study on Cultural Policy in
Great Britain, written and compiled by two colleagues from the University
of Birmingham, Michael Green and Michael Wilding, and published by
UNESCO in its Cultural Policy series (Green and Wilding, 1970). All in
all, it didn’t add up to much, and UNESCO was very much on the margins
of his life.
And then came a telephone call, in fact three such calls, in the summer
of 1969 to the Hoggart household in Birmingham. Later, in describing this
period (Hoggart, 1978, 15), he was to recall Auden’s line about the
dramatic force of the telephone call from long distance which defines
one’s future. Each of the three calls proposed an interesting job. The third
of them asked whether he would be willing to be proposed as a possible
Assistant Director-General at the Paris-based United Nations agency.
Given family commitments, that seemed the most manageable.
Richard Hoggart was not seeking to leave Birmingham and had
certainly made no effort to do so. But there are some propositions one
cannot put aside on personal grounds. Borrowing from his own personal
narrative, if they are offered, they have to be taken. Not for self
aggrandizement but because someone has to do them, even against the
inclination to stay put.
So Richard Hoggart allowed his name to be put forward. This was in
spite of the candidate’s recognition that “The British lack of much
concern, amused dismissal or near contempt for some international
organizations have been constant for nearly half a century.”
He was duly offered the job. Though there were other tempting
options,2 he accepted the offer–in what a friend, urging him to accept,
called a walking-the-plank spirit. The spirit which leads us to take on
certain commitments not because we particularly want to, and even though
we know that much in them will be boring or unpleasant, but because we
have been asked to.

2. UNESCO: “A World Apart”

A whole suite of reasons and features have served to make UNESCO
something of “A World Apart”–a phrase used by Richard Hoggart in
 Malcolm Hadley 155

several of his writings3–from its origins and charter to its mandate,

constituencies and ways of working.
The forerunners of the Organization were on the one side scholarly and
intellectual, and on the other governmental. One forerunner was the
International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, which had started after
the First World War and was associated with the League of Nations.
Among its activities was encouraging international cultural and intellectual
exchanges, promoting cooperation in the natural sciences, and revising
historical textbooks so as to make them less chauvinistic. Two of its
structural features (both of which UNESCO took over) was the
development of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and
the idea of National Commissions charged with forwarding the Institute’s
work in their own countries.
The other godparent was the Conference of Allied Ministers of
Education (CAME), which from the early 1940s met in the United
Kingdom to examine ways and means to reconstruct their systems of
education once the war had come to an end.
Upon the proposal of CAME, a United Nations Conference for the
establishment for an educational and cultural organization was convened
in London in November 1945. Representatives of forty-four countries took
part, and decided to create an organization that would embody a genuine
culture of peace. In their eyes, the new organization must establish the
“intellectual and moral solidarity” of humankind and, in so doing, prevent
the outbreak of another world war. They also subscribed to the emblematic
rallying call that “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds
of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” 4
At UNESCO’s founding, two conflicting types of organization were
proposed. One would have been rather like the International Institute of
Intellectual Cooperation: a very high level forum for objective
international intellectual exchanges, as free as possible from political
considerations and pressures. The other would be an intergovernmental
agency, funded by member governments.
In the end it was an organization of the second type that was created–
an intergovernmental body governed by a corporate general conference of
Member States. Yet upon the urging particularly of the French, it had
some characteristics of the first type of body. It was set-up with some
built-in checks and balances not found in more simply functional
intergovernmental agencies–notably a network of relations with non-
governmental organizations (more about these anon) and with special
National Commissions set up specifically to act as a focal point for
national participation in the Organization’s programmes. At the end of the
156 Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO Years (1970-1975)

conference, thirty-seven countries founded the United Nations

Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
As laid down in Article I of its Constitution:

The purpose of the Organization is to contribute to peace and security by

promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and
culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law
and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for
the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or
religion, by the Charter of the United Nations.

After ratification by twenty countries, the Constitution came into force on

4 November 1946, followed shortly afterwards by the first session of the
Organization’s governing body–the General Conference.
The first Director-General was the British biologist and humanist
Julian Huxley–“one kind of classic British intellectual, free-wheeling and
eccentric” (Hoggart, 1995a, 216)–and under his direction the fledgling
programmes of the Organization took shape. Among the priorities was
helping to rehabilitate educational, cultural and scientific infrastructures
devastated by the war, including the work of the non-governmental
community and its networks of associations in different academic and
professional fields.
This is not the place to enter into the ways that UNESCO tries to
approach its mandate, the discrepancy between intentions and hopes on the
one hand and actual accomplishments on the other, the mismatch between
ambitions and resources, and the mix of ambiguities that pervade and
colour its work. Suffice perhaps to say that from its beginnings the
Organization has laboured under a dispersion and fragmentation of activities
and of an unending tension between the perceptions and priorities of
governments and of civil society.

3. Richard Hoggart’s brief

During his period at UNESCO, Richard Hoggart was in charge of one of
the so-called programme sectors–that for the Social Sciences, Human
Sciences and Culture.5 His brief as Assistant Director-General was
“enormous, complicated and complex”, with a daunting range of activities
and responsibilities.
A long-term programme relating to the study of cultures which had
started many years earlier with studies of African and Asian cultures) was
extended to cover all major regions of the world. Highlights included the
full editorial phase of the General History of Africa and the launching of
 Malcolm Hadley 157

new studies on Malay cultures, Slav cultures and Oceanic cultures. The
first Festival of the Arts of the Pacific was held in Fiji. Two series of
cultural studies in Latin America were launched.
In line with the emergence in the 1960s of notions of “cultural
development” and the “cultural dimensions of development”, an
intergovernmental conference on the institutional, administrative and
financial aspects of cultural policies was held in Venice in 1970, and this
gave rise to a series of regional intergovernmental conferences for Europe
(Helsinki, 1972), Asia (Jogjakarta, 1973), Africa (Accra, 1975), and later
for the Americas (Bogota, 1978) and the Arab countries (Baghdad, 1981).
In the field of the cultural heritage, there was a burgeoning of work to
preserve what is now known as the tangible cultural heritage. Several
high-profile campaigns were launched and funds mobilized for the
safeguard and restoration of such sites as Venice, Philae (as the final phase
of the overall Nubia operation), the Buddhist temple and Sanctuary of
Borobudur in Java, and the remains of the Phoenician city of Carthage in
the environs of present-day Tunis.
In 1972, the Convention concerning the Protection of the World’s
Natural and Cultural Heritage was approved by the General Conference,
and this has since developed to become one of the most important
normative instruments in the conservation field, in terms of the protection
of sites and properties of outstanding, universal importance.6 But even
before the Convention became operational, the initial and fundamental
success in the early 1970s was to bring together in a single instrument the
conservation of the natural and the man-made heritage of humankind,
something that had been essentially addressed up till that time as two
separate issues.7
At about the same time, the United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment took place in Stockholm in June 1972, and this led within
UNESCO to several initiatives for developing closer links between the
social and the natural sciences in relation to environmental issues. Also to
address such multisectoral challenges as development and population.
Other significant activities in the sector included taking the lead for the
Organization’s work in favour of human rights, including action against
racism. A consultative group was set up which linked the UNESCO
Secretariat, the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic
Studies and the International Social Science Council. A major effort was
made to foster teaching and research in social sciences, humanities and
philosophy in developing countries.
158 Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO Years (1970-1975)

4. Perceptions of and from “A World Apart”

4.1 Words and language
Richard Hoggart’s love of words and respect of language shine through his
writings. In the first pages of Promises to Keep (Hoggart, 2005), there is a
bracketed qualifier in respect to “bridle”, when he notes that “I could
‘bridle’ (lovely word) at the assumption that you can have little to say at
80-odd.” And a page later, one reads “I go for a short, late afternoon walk
along pavements crowded with school children of various ages heading for
home, most of them continuously joshing–a good word, that last.”
During his time at UNESCO, Hoggart’s use of English words
sometimes had an unexpected impact, such as the time that he cheerily
rebuked one diplomat for “being a bit naughty”–a phrase that was part of
idiomatic speech in England at the time but one not often used in
diplomatic circles. The upshot was a complaint from the ambassador to the
protocol officer of the Organization, complaining about being treated like
a child.
But much more importantly, he encouraged his colleagues to be more
rigorous in their language, in line with Ezra Pound’s remark that when a
language goes rotten, thought goes to pot.8 One of the early things that he
did was to ask his Publications Officer to trawl though a selection of the
Organization’s documents and extract some of the more tortuous and
intelligible constructions, and some of the more “awful” examples of the
use of jargon.
These extracts were presented in a well remembered “Bafflegab”
document that was roneotyped on yellow paper and distributed to all staff–
the examples of institutional jargon then being dissected and commented
upon followed by an alternate version of the said text (which totalled just
under 300 words, as against 785 in the original, i.e. a little over one-third
of the length).
In the covering note, Assistant Director-General Hoggart noted that the
spoof UNESCO-speak text

… is, of course, a comic exaggeration – for therapeutic purposes. But you

will note that practically everything in it is taken from existing documents.
[...] I am sure that we can all learn from such an exercise. It does not
criticise the proper use of technical terms, but a woolly and lazy use. In
matters like this, clear and precise expression is part of the movement
towards clear thought and action. 9
 Malcolm Hadley 159

At the same time, Hoggart recognized the pressure in international

organizations to find a form of language which, though its users hope it
says what has to be said, avoids unnecessary incidents, insoluble
problems, time-wasting arguments, accusations of bias. In one of his 1971
BBC Reith Lectures (Hoggart, 1972, 65), he commented that over one
hundred and twenty nations (that was the number of Member States at the
time) have, almost literally speaking, over one hundred and twenty
different styles. The pressure is strong to find an “esperanto style”, one
which has not too many unmanageable and unpredicted reverberations.
Woolliness has sometimes to be resorted to so as to help keep the
institution still talking, still getting some good things done.

4.2 Links with civil society and non-governmental organizations

The role of civil society in the life and workings of an intergovernmental
body such as UNESCO is another issue addressed by Richard Hoggart in
several of his books–in particular, the connection with independent, free,
voluntary non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as part of a family of
constituencies and networks.
In the early years of UNESCO, creating and supporting NGOs was an
absolutely central part of the Organization’s programme, reflecting the
liberal intellectual spirit of its first Director-General and Deputy Director-
General, Julian Huxley and Jean Thomas, and its founders. In the
beginning, UNESCO’s relations with the NGOs were close. But by the
time that Richard Hoggart took up his service, relations were less close
and more constrained. There was increasing opposition by some
governments to the principle of giving a basic operating subvention to
some NGOs. That these bodies might then say something critical about
UNESCO was not something that appealed to some governments.
In the debate about the role of NGOs, Hoggart was very much a
Huxley/Thomas man. He considered that disinterestedness, like
democracy itself, might be very hard and perhaps impossible to attain. But
it is the right ideal, the right condition to aim for, everywhere.10
In the face of increasing criticism of the NGO community during the
late 1960s, a month or so after arriving at UNESCO, Richard Hoggart
drafted three criteria for his sector’s obligatory regular examination of
NGOs, which was then due. Is it at the forefront of its discipline? Is it
making reasonable efforts to spread itself, especially in developing
countries? Is its proposed programme complementary to that of
UNESCO? (Hoggart, 1996, 114).
160 Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO Years (1970-1975)

The order and the phrasing were both deliberate, and aimed at
recognizing all at once the authority of intellectual life, the autonomy of
the NGOs and the constitutional duties of UNESCO. It is perhaps worthy
of note that these sorts of considerations are now (in the early 21st century)
resurfacing anew within the broader international community, through
such initiatives as the Cardoso report on United Nations-civil society
relations (United Nations, 2004) and increasing interest in embedding,
expanding and deepening the participation of different constituencies in
the work of intergovernmental bodies, as part of the process of UN reform
(e.g. United Nations, 2006).

4.3 Societal and cultural concerns

During his association with UNESCO, Richard Hoggart had to take up
many issues, some perhaps of no particular interest to him, others of life-
long concern.
Cultural identity is recurring concern in Hoggart’s writings and
interests, and during his time at UNESCO he encountered many different
dimensions of cultural identity from different parts of the world. One
example was a mission that he made to Poland in September 1972, to take
part in a symposium on “Human and Social Values in Slavonic
Literature”, the first major meeting within the Slav Cultures project. For
several reasons, he needed to see the rebuilding of Warsaw. In reporting to
the Director-General on his mission,11 in noting that the rebuilding of the
city was indeed a fantastic achievement, he mentioned that there were still
people in Poland who doubted whether the massive rebuilding operation
should have been undertaken, especially since it ran counter to some of the
principles of conservation. But in Hoggart’s view the operation was less an
attempt to meet all the scientific tenets of conservation practice than to
make an assertion, both to the world and indeed to themselves, that the
national identity of the Polish people could not be removed by the erasing
of their capital city. In this sense, it was psychologically essential to start
again as though the 1944 destruction had not taken place.
Oral and intangible heritage is a field which has taken on an
increasing importance in UNESCO’s programmes in recent years,12 which
represented one of Richard Hoggart’s early contacts with the Organization.
This was when he attended a session of the General Conference in the late
1960s and heard what he was later to describe (Hoggart, 1993, 146) as a
remarkable intervention from a delegate from Mali13 making an
impassioned plea for support to record the oral memories of old people.
His country’s history was still almost entirely oral and would almost
 Malcolm Hadley 161

entirely die out with that generation of old people. When an elder dies in
one of our villages, the delegate passionately stated, it’s like a shelf-full of
books is being lost.
Another issue addressed by Richard Hoggart in his UNESCO-related
writings is that of educating pupils and students in the art of critical
literacy in a democracy.14 This means, among much else, training young
people both to understand and value their particular culture but also to
stand outside it and be able and willing to judge it. If the power of
education towards tolerance is an important force, it is not easy, not a
matter of warm injunctions. Again, Hoggart recalled W. H. Auden and his
“We must love one another or die.” That was a call to a sort of tolerance.
Later, he (Auden) altered it, because he thought it phoney, sentimental,
face-saving, to: “We must love one another and die.”

4.4 Political dimensions

As a specialized intergovernmental agency of the United Nations,
UNESCO is subject to pressures from the governments of its Member
States and any number of blocs and groupings. All Member States have
accepted the idealistic constitution of the Organization, with its references
to the disinterested exchange of knowledge, internationally, and that is a
process that has not always been popular with governments. This is the
paradox and ambiguity of UNESCO and the roots of the tension that is
inseparable from its work.
Throughout its 60 years, there have been explicitly political debates
about the Organization’s work in its governing organs–and within its
connected intellectual communities and civil society associations. On his
side, Richard Hoggart has commented that the regrettable thing about such
debates was not that they had a political inspiration–UNESCO is and
always has been political and cannot avoid being so–but rather that very
often these debates were in themselves distorted and conducted on false
premises (Hoggart, 1978, 80).
Perhaps the most striking example during Hoggart’s time at UNESCO
was in respect to the so-called Israeli resolutions adopted by the UNESCO
General Conference in 1974, relating to accusations and counter-
accusations about damage to cultural property in Jerusalem.
Another example which reflects his defence of academic standards in
an intergovernmental agency concerned an Anti-Apartheid Kit which had
been initially developed by a voluntary non-governmental organization,
the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). The programme sector that
Richard Hoggart was heading came under a fair amount of political and
162 Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO Years (1970-1975)

institutional pressure to get this kit published and released without further
delay, with a flurry of internal memoranda in the autumn of 1973 between
those concerned with substance and those concerned with diplomacy and
external relations. Richard Hoggart concluded one such communication as
follows.

For the record, this project is being pushed along by the Sector as fast as
possible, given its inherent difficulties. But there are issues here of
intellectual integrity and so of the reputation of the Organisation as one
able to do a good, hard and objective job even in hot political fields. It is
the maintaining of this reputation that has given our previous publications
on race etc. the effectiveness they have. That is why I am unwilling–no
matter how strong the political pressures–to ask people to work faster than
the quickest speed consistent with doing a good job in terms which uphold
the Organisation’s Charter and its current high reputation in handling hot
issues. (Incidentally, we could go faster if the AAM answered letters more
quickly). In this position, too, I am sure you join me. 15

If the penultimate bracketed sentence is a very “Hoggartian” critique of

one of the sources of complaint, the final sentence is a no less elegant
entreaty to solidarity addressed to another service in the institution.

4.5 On the Director General ...

Richard Hoggart has written at some length on the responsibilities of the
Director-General of UNESCO, commenting that the nature of the job
shows in high operatic relief most of the good and bad possibilities within
the Organization. As the only “elected” member of the Secretariat, the
Director-General appoints everyone else. The job is one of peculiar
isolation, and has at one and the same time too much power–vastly too
much power–and too little power, so little that for some main aspects of
his role he is rendered ineffective. Because he has been elected by a series
of accommodations between groups who do not often see eye to eye, his
head is always quite near the block. In the cold war days of the early
1970s, at least, there were moments when it seemed as though the
Director-General simply had to be humiliated, as a purgative for the
internal workings of the Organization’s governing organs.
Almost the whole of Richard Hoggart’s service at UNESCO was
passed under one Director-General, the French philosopher René Maheu, a
contemporary and friend of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Maheu was
perhaps the strongest of UNESCO’s seven Director-Generals. He was a
 Malcolm Hadley 163

highly intelligent man, pugnacious, courageous in pursuit of his own

intellectual principles.16
René Maheu and Richard Hoggart did not become friends and they did
not always like each other.17 For Hoggart, Maheu could be a quite dreadful
autocrat, who had the capacity to spoil months of good work by a single
gratuitous act. For anyone who worked closely with him, conflicts were
certain to happen. Early on, someone who had suffered at the hand of the
Director-General told Hoggart that such conflicts were pretty well
unavoidable, otherwise Maheu would “despise you and eat you alive.”
Sure enough, when these conflicts did arise, the two combatants became
like a caricature of their national styles.18
Eventually, after two spectacular disagreements, the Director-General
decided that Richard Hoggart was not after all an agent of the British
government nor under anyone else’s thumb. He, Hoggart, might perhaps
be difficult and sometimes (in Maheu’s eyes) plainly stupid in not seeing
matters in the clear way that French logic demanded. But this was
attributed to the “native inadequacy and wilfulness of a British provincial
academic.”
Though the two never became close, they ended with some respect for
each other, for “that sweet enemy”.19 And Richard Hoggart was one of less
than forty people invited by René Maheu to a farewell glass of wine at the
close of the Director-General’s mandate in late 1974. This really was a
very selective group. Not even the members of the Direction Générale had
been invited. After a while, Maheu silenced the slight hum. With a
diabolically amused grin, he told the invitees that they were there because
they were the hand-picked few he respected. The Director-General had
indeed fought with all those present. What was more important, all the
invitees had fought him back. As for the rest … Maheu’s dismissal with a
gesture of his hands was one of his last professional acts that
“encapsulated that arrogance, that candour and that cavalier sense of his
own life as a special drama…” (Hoggart, 1978, xx).

4.6 … and the UNESCO Secretariat

As head of the Sector of Social Sciences, Human Sciences and Culture,
Richard Hoggart had in the order of 150 staff under his wing at UNESCO
Headquarters in Paris,20 in addition to personnel in the various field offices
in different parts of the world. Within such a context, Hoggart commented
on the attitude of different countries to staff. For some countries,
Secretariat members are simply required (this was the early 1970s, still in
the Cold War years) always to have in mind the interests of their countries,
164 Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO Years (1970-1975)

to tell all and to act in the way that they are told. “Loyalty and leaks” is
what is expected.
With the ending of the Cold War, links between the nationals of some
countries and their delegations have changed. But some of the other
observations of Richard Hoggart on Secretariat members would appear no
less relevant today: the tendency for many–too many–staff to retreat into
the technical, to restrict themselves to a tight servicing role, the provision
of hardware and verbal technicalities; the widespread uneasiness about
introducing ethical considerations into the work, the strong desire to
operate at the level of the factual and pragmatic. Hoggart also commented
damningly “that a great many lack conviction and that the best certainly
don’t wear their convictions on their sleeves” (Hoggart, 1978, 132).
Getting a right balance between specialists and generalists is a long
standing and still continuing debate at UNESCO, one where Hoggart held
firm views. The case for staffing the programme departments with high
grade intellectuals, artists and scientists is strong. But such individuals are
not always good administrators and managers. And specialists, though
they may be at the forefront of their disciplines when they enter the
Organization, may become rusty from sitting at an executive’s desk.
For Hoggart, the solution was to place a solid core of generalists at the
heart of the Organization. They may well have entered the Organization as
specialists, but have come to recognize that that they can carry out
UNESCO’s work with enjoyment and satisfaction, can be competent and
also remain sufficiently aware of developments within their disciplines to
know a promising idea when they see one. Around such a core of people, a
large range of thoroughly up-to-date specialists can be deployed, whether
for periods of a few years within the full-time Secretariat or as short-term
consultants.
Hoggart felt that a basic structure of this kind would do more than any
other single innovation to reduce the worst dog-in-the-manger habits
within the Secretariat. At the same time, he recognized that such a shift
would take years to effect and would be resisted step-by-step by some in
the Secretariat and some Member States. That the debate is still continuing
today might not unduly surprise the Assistant Director-General of the early
1970s.
 Malcolm Hadley 165

An intellectual Olympian, a modest man too Box 1

Hoggart was probably the last world-class intellectual to accept a “permanent” job
at UNESCO. He was invited by the then Director-General René Maheu, another
remarkable intellectual (and man of action). I suppose Hoggart must have accepted
the job because Maheu was the Director-General. They could together sit on the
intellectual Olympus, and discuss or quarrel.
At UNESCO, Hoggart was an inspiring boss, a hard-working Assistant
Director-General, completely on top of his complex, heavy responsibilities. I was
recruited by UNESCO under him, at the age of 29. I remember having been
impressed by his personality, a mixture of intellectual power and simplicity and
directness, totally devoid of any kind of arrogance. A man of working class origin
and a great intellectual. I had never seen this combination before. His talks and
writings display such a combination: a very simple, sober, direct style, far away
from grandiloquence, so common at UNESCO.
One day, I met him in the corridors of the small building over-looking the
Japanese Garden where the Sector of Social Sciences, Humanities and Culture was
located and said ‘Good morning’, obviously with an exaggerated deference. His
reaction was “Don't be so polite, Ali”.
Richard Hoggart belonged to an exceptional, very rare category of UNESCO
people: Julian Huxley, Torres Bodet, Alva Myrdal, Tom Marshall, René Maheu,
Roger Caillois, Alfred Métraux, Jacques Havet. It is a miracle that a bureaucracy,
even one that deals with education, culture and science, could attract such great
minds. Richard left UNESCO shortly after Maheu's retirement. That was the end
of this Organization's ‘trente glorieuses’ (1945-75).

Ali Kazancigil, political scientist, UNESCO Division of International

Development of Social Sciences (in early 1970s), later Deputy Assistant Director-
General for Social and Human Sciences (serving for ten months as Assistant
Director-General), since 2003 Secretary-General of the International Social
Science Council. Personal communication, March 2006.

On a personal level, Hoggart is warmly remembered as being a caring

and sympathetic director and supervisor, as reflected in personal
reflections by two members of his staff, political scientist Ali Kazancigil
and social anthropologist Georges Kutukdjian (See Boxes 1 and 2). He
was courageous too. An illustration is of a large meeting in which
Director-General René Maheu mercilessly dressed down a divisional
director in front of that person’s own junior and senior colleagues.
Usually, the latter would keep silent in such circumstances, and leave the
subordinate to endure the criticism. But Hoggart was not prepared to
accept such bullying. He intervened, and told Maheu to attack him
(Hoggart) if the Director-General wanted to criticise the work of his
Sector. Maheu was evidently furious, and afterwards sent Hoggart a
166 Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO Years (1970-1975)

fierce note warning him to rein in his tendency to see himself as ‘a

systematic defender of the Secretariat.’ But once his anger had subsided,
Maheu put the incident to Hoggart’s credit (Hoggart, 1993, 155).
Hoggart’s style and working methods were also appreciated. Thus, the
sometime editor of the International Social Science Journal, Peter Lengyel,
has commented that Hoggart’s

directness and democratic attitude blew like a cleansing wind through the
offices, corridors and meeting halls of a UNESCO already infamous for
contorted bureaucratese, elaborate circumlocution and respectful
submission to centralized power. He delighted many by the way he scolded
hypocritical delegates, the very brief hand-written notes he often preferred
to send in lieu of verbose memos and the informal, no-nonsense
atmosphere he created at working meetings. Others, of course, found all
this a deplorable breach of diplomatic manners and protocol. (Lengyel,
1986, 41).

On intellectual and administrative tasks Box 2

It was around Christmas time in 1973. Richard Hoggart had invited the junior staff
to his office. He wanted us to tell him how we felt about UNESCO, if there were
any problems, etc. He was genuinely interested in the younger generation of
international civil servants. My work experience prior to UNESCO was with a
national research centre. When I joined UNESCO, I thought it would be the same,
except that the research would be on an international scale.
So that day, I said that I had expected at UNESCO to devote 75% of my time
to intellectual activities and only 25% of my time to administrative matters and
that I was disappointed because it had turned out that I was spending 75% of my
time on administration and only 25% on intellectual questions. Hoggart snapped
back at me "I wish I could spend 25% of my time dealing with intellectual issues!
In fact I spend 100% of my time on administrative problems."

Georges Kutukdjian, social anthropologist, UNESCO Division of Applied Social

Sciences (in the early 1970s), later Director of the Division of Bioethics of Science
and Technology and Secretary of the International Bioethics Committee. Personal
.communication, March 2006.

4.7 Encouraging critical comment about an institution

Since its creation in the mid-1940s, there have been relatively few books
written about UNESCO, its programmes and projects, its impacts and
outcomes.21 If critical comment from outside has been relatively
uncommon, even more so has been open critical comment from within. At
the official level, discouragement often takes the form of invoking Staff
 Malcolm Hadley 167

Regulation 1.5 of the United Nations against any staff member or former
staff member who publishes any critical comment on the Organization.
Under Article I dealing with “Duties, Obligations and Privileges”, this
Regulation reads as follows:

Staff Members shall exercise the utmost discretion in regard to all matters
of official business. They shall not communicate to any person any
information known to them by reason of their official position which has
not been made public, except in the course of their duties or by authority of
the Secretary-General. Nor shall they at any time use such information to
private advantage. The obligations do not cease upon separation from the
Secretariat.

This Regulation is designed, quite properly, to prevent staff members or

former staff members from revealing confidential official material
acquired in the course of their duties.
The Regulation was evoked by Richard Hoggart in the preface to An
Idea and its Servants. He commented that throughout the book he strived
to obey both the letter and the spirit of the Regulation. Notwithstanding
this, he criticized (and praised) States by name where this seemed
justified. He also extended the Regulation and did not include in his book
material which might hurt individuals. He expressed himself content to be
judged on this approach.
One such judgement is the esteem in which his book is held by
UNESCO staff and ex-staff, some three decades after the book was
written. An example is the comment of a more recent Assistant Director-
General of UNESCO–Sir John Daniel, sometime President of the Open
University in the United Kingdom and later head of the Commonwealth of
Learning. Speaking in 2003, Sir John says that Richard Hoggart’s book is
the “most perceptive and candid account of UNESCO” that he has found.22
Another commentator, writing in the mid-1980s, considered that the book
“remains the best available account of actual personal experience as a
functionary of the organization.” (Lengyel, 1986, 41). Yet another ex-
employee, writing more recently, has used the descriptor “lecture
indispensable” (indispensable reading) for those wishing to learn more
about the institution (Courrier, 2005, 21).
But returning to the Preface of that book, Richard Hoggart’s reflections
on his institutional critique bear repeating–within the various
constituencies of UNESCO and the United Nations but also more widely,
within many other institutional contexts, public and private, national and
international.
168 Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO Years (1970-1975)

Among points mentioned was that all organizations need regular, frank
and fair criticism. UNESCO is one organization that does not get enough
of that. One of its great weaknesses is over-defensiveness, unwillingness
to listen to criticism. This lesson–the value of open critical comment–is
one that the Organization must at last learn, or it will become even more of
an enclosed Byzantine system than it is at present. It is after all the one UN
agency whose constitution enshrines the idea of free speech. Throughout
the world that idea is having a hard time now. UNESCO will not reinforce
the idea among its Member States by refusing to honour it internally. It
must learn to live less self-protectively, more bravely.
Those reflections date back nearly three decades. Some observers
might argue that they remain entirely valid today. More generally, the call
for more rigorous criticism of the ways in which institutions behave and
function is one that has relevance far more widely than the cloistered
concerns of the United Nations and its specialized agencies. As is the call
for institutions to act more courageously.

4.8 Should UNESCO survive?

Over much of its 60 years, diverse commentators have called into question
the continuing existence of UNESCO. Richard Hoggart addressed this
issue in the final substantive chapter of An Idea and its Servants, and he
set out in some detail some of the “indisputably useful activities” that
UNESCO has done and can do. But he also commented that the world
does not need an organization with a high minded constitution such as
UNESCO’s to carry out straightforward activities in technical cooperation.
Hoggart’s conclusion was that UNESCO is worth saving because it has
a constitution which calls it to activities beyond technical cooperation. The
Organization has operational, intellectual and ethical roles and has to be
judged on all three terms. Writing in the 1975-77 period, Hoggart
commented that a convinced cynic would say that the operations are
hardly ever well-done, the intellectual work at far too low a level and the
ethical role a total failure.
Since Hoggart wrote those words, UNESCO has indeed changed, in
many ways. In terms of its programme, the last ten years have seen
substantive innovations in such fields as bioethics and the expression of
cultural diversity, accompanied by the introduction of sharp priorities in
each of the Organization’s major fields of activity. The extent to which
those changes have responded to reservations about UNESCO’s worth and
value is for others to judge, and is in any case outside the scope of this
contribution. More certain is Richard Hoggart’s merit, as in so many other
 Malcolm Hadley 169

domains, of having posed the issues and contributed tellingly to the

process of critical debate; and of commenting so pointedly on the
Organization and its ways (See Box 3).

5. Returning home
Richard Hoggart left Paris in the spring of 1975, to return to academic life
in Britain. He took his leave discreetly. His letter of resignation to the new
Director-General Amadou Mahtar M’Bow was confidential, and he took
special pains to keep it that way. It was carefully worded, without heat,
and polite. Hoggart resisted the advice of some colleagues to make the
letter public. He wanted to give the new Director-General a chance to see
that it is possible for an individual to take an uncomfortable decision out
of personal principle, that not every such action is taken either under
political pressure or to make private capital out of a public gesture.
The Hoggarts left Paris, as they had arrived, at a weekend. They had
arrived by plane on a bitter winter weekend. They left by car on a
“lambent spring Sunday”, travelling largely at first in silence. There was
still much to say and sort out, and they were deeply torn. But they had no
doubt that it was right to go and to go then.
They were conscious that they would miss Paris intensely. They would
miss friends and colleagues; and they would most of all miss UNESCO.
The Hoggarts had invested over the years so much energy, thought,
emotion in that “fantastic bureaucracy” that to leave it was like cutting off
a limb. But they felt that part of themselves would never leave it–both the
idea and reality of UNESCO, the one so idealistic and imaginative, the
other so complex a tapestry of human failings and virtues.
What of a balance sheet on these five years? What did Richard Hoggart
learn and gain from his service as an international civil servant? Some
clues have been suggested in his writings: about governments and the
ways they work, about national and international public personalities who
threw shadows larger than any he had met before, about the much more
melodramatic world outside of parochial Britain and parochial Europe,
about the shabbier sides of nationalism and the nauseous over-concern
with face and protocol.
170 Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO Years (1970-1975)

Richard Hoggart on UNESCO Box 3

The establishing of UNESCO, “like that of the UN as a whole, is one of those

rare instances in which the world of sovereign states has thought and acted better
than it is usually inclined.”

The Constitution “assumed virtues many governments did not and still do not
have, or seek ... UNESCO regularly stubs its toes on the unwillingness of some
highly developed and sophisticated “parliamentary democracies” to live up to the
spirit of the constitution to which they have pledged adherence.”

The General Conference: “a swirling parade of important people, or of people

who were once important, or of people who think they are important.”

The Director-General: “One is altogether too aware of the Director-General, day-

by-day and job-by-job. He signs too many things, too many documents go out in
his name, too much directly flows from him, too much patronage depends on him.”

The Secretariat “yields too much, too often and too soon to improper pressures”.

Working in UNESCO “is sometimes to feel as though you live in an unprotected

territory of boundless good intentions, pressed in from all sides by bodies with
other, more practical, forceful and precise purposes.”

The Western nations “should remind themselves more often that UNESCO’s
extraordinary Constitution is a Western invention, founded on Western intellectual
values; and that these values are not easily lived up to.”

Non-Governmental Organizations “should provide a constant check on

government’s behaviour towards the intellectual purposes of the Organization and
should protest loudly if they believe governments are making it excessively
difficult for those purposes to be fulfilled … NGOs are essential to UNESCO if it
is to keep intellectually up to date and retain the respect of the scholarly, scientific
and intellectual communities.”

On programme management: “Large institutions evolve internal lives so strong,

complex and all-engrossing that their full-time staffs tend to forget from day to day
what it is, primarily, that the institution is meant to achieve. UNESCO ... is a
supreme example of this process. Another way of evading the challenge of the
Constitution is so to complicate procedures that substance is almost wholly
submerged. Hence the extraordinary complexity of its Programme management.”

Quotes are from Hoggart (1978) and other sources. Box adapted from Hadley
(2006).
 Malcolm Hadley 171

And what did the Organization gain in return? That of having an

independent thinker–an extraordinary, ordinary bloke–in a position of
influence. That of having a renowned intellectual and writer in charge of
its programmes in the social sciences, humanities and culture. That of
having a battler in the one international agency founded on the assertion
that free speech, objective speech, and its free circulation, are inalienable
rights.

Acknowledgements
Thanks are given to UNESCO colleagues who have shared recollections of
their work with Richard Hoggart and/or commented on earlier drafts of
this contribution: Gérard Bolla, Raj Isar, Ali Kazancigil, Georges
Kutudkjian, Lisbeth Schaudinn-Braun. Thanks also to Jens Boel and
Mahmoud Ghander in the Archives and Records Management Unit for
their help in making accessible the archival records of the early 1970s.

Works Cited
Association of Former UNESCO Staff Members (AFUS) (2000). René
Maheu, Portrait-souvenir par ses collaborateurs / Recollections by his
staff. Paris: AFUS.
Batisse, Michel and Gerard Bolla (2003). L’invention du “patrimoine
mondial”. Les Cahiers d’ Histoire 2. Paris: AFUS.
Courrier, Yves (2005). L’UNESCO sans peine. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Green, Michael and Michael Wilding (1970). Cultural Policy in Great
Britain. Cultural Policy Series. Paris: UNESCO. (In consultation with
Richard Hoggart).
Hadley, Malcolm (2006). “The Uses of Richard Hoggart”. Lien/Link, 97
(June-September), 16-17. Paris: AFUS.
http://www.unesco.org/afus/LIEN/b97/index_2.htm.
Hoggart, Richard (1972). Only Connect: On Culture and Communication.
The BBC Reith Lectures 1971. London: Chatto & Windus.
—. (1978). An Idea and its Servants: UNESCO From Within. London:
Chatto and Windus.
—. (1993). An Imagined Life. Life and Times Volume III: 1959-91.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—. (1995a). The Way We Live Now. London, Chatto and Windus.
—. (1995b). The watchful eye of democracy. UNESCO Courier,
(November), 50. Paris: UNESCO.
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—. (1996). “UNESCO and NGOs: A Memoir.” In “The Conscience of the

World”: The Influence of Non-Governmental Organisations in the UN
System, ed. Peter Willetts, 98-115. A publication of the David Davies
Memorial Institute of International Studies, London. London: Hurst &
Company.
—. (2001). Between Two Worlds. London: Arum Press.
—. (2005). Promises to Keep: Thoughts in Old Age. London: Continuum.
Lengyel, Peter (1986). International Social Science: the Unesco
Experience. New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books.
Passeron, Jean-Claude, ed. (1999). Richard Hoggart en France. Paris:
Bibliothèque publique d’information/Centre Georges Pompidou.
Petitjean, Patrick, Vladamir Zharov, Gisbert Glaser, Jacques Richardson,
Bruno de Padirac and Gail Archibald, (eds.) (2006). Sixty Years of
Science at UNESCO 1945-2005. Paris: UNESCO.
Tombs, Robert and Isabelle Tombs (2006). The Sweet Enemy: The French
and the British from the Sun King to the Present. London: William
Heinemann.
United Nations (2004). We the People: Civil Society, the United Nations
and Global Governance. Report of the Panel of Eminent Persons on
United Nations-Civil Society Relations. DocumentA/58/817. New
York: United Nations. http://www.ngls.org/Final%20report%20-
%20HLP.doc
United Nations (2006). Delivering as One. Report of the Secretary-
General’s High Level Panel. New York: United Nations.
http://www.un.org/events/panel/resources/pdfs/HLP-SWC-
FinalReport.pdf

Notes
1
Richard Hoggart’s own description of his life and times at UNESCO provides the
basic source of information for the whole of the present contribution.
2
According to Nicholas Wroe (“The Uses of Decency”. The Guardian. 7 February
2004), the same week that Hoggart accepted the UNESCO post, he was asked to
go to New York University to discuss the Albert Schweitzer chair and was also
offered the vice-chancellorship of the University of Queensland.
3
“A World Apart: UNESCO, 1970-5” was the title of Chapter 6 in the third and
final volume of his Life and Times (Hoggart, 1993).
4
This bannerhead phrase was drafted by Francis Williams, and first uttered at the
founding Conference by Clement Attlee and then, modified by the Library of
Congress’s Archibald MacLeish, found its way into the Preamble to UNESCO’s
 Malcolm Hadley 173

Constitution, “from which secure eminence it has haunted, inspired or befuddled

UNESCO’s councils ever since.” (Hoggart, 1978, 27).
5
In 1972-73, the name of the sector was changed from ‘Social Sciences, Human
Sciences and Culture’ to ‘Social Sciences, Humanities and Culture’, without major
change in scope. After Richard Hoggart’s departure in 1975, there was a split into
two separate sectors – ‘Social Sciences and Humanities’ and ‘Culture’.
6
As of August 2007, the World Heritage List includes 851 properties forming part
of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers
as having outstanding universal value. These comprise 660 cultural, 166 natural
and 25 mixed properties in 141 States Parties.
7
The story of the negotiations which gave rise to the World Heritage Convention
has been related by the two members of the UNESCO Secretariat most closely
concerned with that process–Michel Batisse from the Natural Sciences Sector and
Gérard Bolla, who at the time was Director of the Department of Cultural Heritage
within the Sector of Social Sciences, Human Sciences and Culture headed by
Richard Hoggart. But for that duo, nature protection was not among Assistant
Director-General Hoggart’s priorities : “À l’époque, ce Sécréteur était chargé à la
fois des questions de sciences sociales et de culture et était dirigé par un homme de
lettres, Richard Hoggart, pour qui la protection de la nature n’était certainement
pas la priorité ” (Batisse and Bolla, 2003, 22).
8
Ezra Pound’s remark was used by Richard Hoggart in a somewhat different
context, that of broadcasting (in an article “Dumb and Dumber” in The Guardian,
14 March 2002). But it is also a remark that fits very well the language that one
finds in all-too-many United Nations documents and publications.
9
UNESCO Memo ADG/SHC/3/556, dated 19 March 1970.
10
Following earlier reflections on NGOs (Hoggart, 1978, 85-88), he returned to
the theme in his essay “Novel aspirations: UNESCO and civil society, a memoir”
(Hoggart, 2001, 18-33).
11
UNESCO Memo ADG/SHC/3/558 of 14 September 1972 (Mission to Poland. 7-
10 September 1972).
12
An example is the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural
Heritage, which was adopted by the General Conference at its 32nd session in
October 2003. The Convention entered into force in an exceptionally short period
of time, on 26 April 2006, three months after the deposit at UNESCO of the
thirtieth instrument of ratification.
13
Though the Mali delegate was not named by Hoggart, it was almost certainly
Amadou Hampâté Bâ, a member of the Executive Board from 1962 to 1970, a
philosopher and historian who was a master story-teller, a conciliator and a
trenchant advocate of the importance of safeguarding oral traditions.
14
The art of critical literacy in a democracy was a topic taken up by Richard
Hoggart in a one-page magazine article for the monthly UNESCO Courier, twenty
years after the end of his work in Paris, on the occasion of the United Nations Year
of Tolerance (Hoggart, 1995b, 50).
15
UNESCO Memo ADG/SHC/3/829 (‘Anti-Apartheid Kit’) dated 3 October 1973.
From ADG/SHC to Director RMO.
174 Promoting International Understanding and Cooperation:
Richard Hoggart’s UNESCO Years (1970-1975)

16
A range of recollections of René Maheu as Director-General of UNESCO, by
more than thirty members of his staff, have been brought together in a composite
222-page English/French publication published by the Association of Former
UNESCO Staff Members (AFUS, 2002) on the occasion of the twenty-fifth
anniversary of his death. http://www.unesco.org/afus
17
This account is culled from Chapter 7, “The Director General”, in Hoggart
(1978).
18
The impression should not be given that the French do not appreciate Richard
Hoggart and his writings and outlook. The Uses of Literacy and the first volume of
A Measured Life are among his books that have been translated into French.
Background and appreciations are given in Richard Hoggart en France, a
collection of texts based on a symposium held in Marseille in 1994 (Passeron,
1999).
19
Borrowing the title of Robert and Isabelle Tombs’ 2006 study of nearly five
hundred years in the relationship between the British and the French.
20
For example, the List of Members of Secretariat for the Social Sciences, Human
Sciences and Culture Sector for March 1972 contained 148 persons–including 68
so-called professional staff. In February 1974, the list for the renamed Social
Sciences, Humanities and Culture Sector comprised 158 staff (71 Professional
grade, 87 General Service).
21
Whence an initiative over the last year to encourage critical assessments of its
different fields of work. Examples include an international symposium in
November 2005 on “60 Years of UNESCO” and a book on Sixty Years of Science
at UNESCO: 1945-2005 (Petitjean et al., 2006).
22
In remarks on “What is UNESCO?”, on the visit to UNESCO of a delegation
from the United States. 13-14 January 2003.
 APPENDIX

LETTER FROM W. H. AUDEN

TH
TO RICHARD HOGGART, 7 JANUARY 1958

This previously unpublished letter is in the archive of Hoggart’s papers at

Sheffield University library.

Copyright by the Estate of W. H. Auden. Reproduced by permission.

176 Appendix

77 St Mark’s Place
New York City 3
New York
U.S.A.
Jan 7th, 1958

Dear Mr Hoggart:

Before thanking you for your studies of my work, let me thank you for
The Uses of Literacy which I found fascinating. It is difficult to be
objective when the subject of a book is oneself, but about your sociological
work, I have no doubt whatever that it is first class.
As to the British Council Essay, I can only say that, to me, it seems most
understanding and generous. If I may make a small observation, I think
that what I have always wished, often childishly, to epater is not the
bourgeois, but all conceptions of artistic decorum. What I have always
tried for – and, of course, often failed to achieve – is to carry the notion of
Mixed Style to its limits. The most antipathetic literature in the world to
me, is French Classical Drama, Racine, Corneille etc. (I don’t know if you
have read Auerbach’s wonderful book Mimesis: he puts his finger exactly
on what I dislike).
As regards the bourgeois, I am, as you know, middle-class, and count
myself lucky to have been born in it. Whatever their faults, the middle
[class] have realised and introduced into civilization two great virtues,
integrity about money and a devotion to work. The aristocracy did not pay
their debts, and the peasants, naturally enough, reacted by cheating them
when they could. The aristocracy thought work beneath their dignity, and
to the poor, by and large, work was pure work, ie had no element of play
in it because there was scarcely any element of choice.
To me, for instance, Sir Walter Scott is a bourgeois saint – having gone
bankrupt through no fault of his own, he worked himself to death to pay
his creditors. I grew up in a family where there was always enough money
to pay for necessaries, the butcher, the grocer etc – but any luxuries had to
be saved for. Consequently, I have a horror of debt – I like to pay bills by
return post and I have never in my life bought anything on Installment.
Again – this may be rather neurotic – I feel guilty about indulging in any
pleasure unless I can feel that I have done enough work to deserve it.
 Letter from W. H. Auden to Richard Hoggart 177

I see you object to “Intendant Caesars left, slamming the door”: you are
probably right, but what I had in mind was a remark made, I think, by
Goebbels: “If we are defeated, we will slam the door of history behind us.”
One little technical point. The principle of the ‘long line’ poems like In
Praise of Limestone is syllable counting (e.g. 13:11) but with elision of all
contiguous vowels and through h.

Once again, many thanks. Is there any chance of your being in the
neighborhood of Oxford during the Trinity Term which is the period of my
annual visit? It would be so nice if we could meet.

Yours sincerely,

W. H. Auden
 CONTRIBUTORS

Ben Clarke received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, and has
taught in Taiwan, the United States and Britain. He is currently a Lecturer
in English at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published on
utopian literature, Western representations of Taiwan, George Orwell, and
Virginia Woolf. His first book, Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths,
Values was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007, and he is currently
writing a monograph on politics and aesthetics in the nineteen-thirties.

Simon Grimble is Lecturer in English Studies at Durham University. He

was previously a Junior Research Fellow at New Hall, Cambridge, and
held a temporary lectureship in English literature and intellectual history at
the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Landscape, Writing and
‘the Condition of England’: Ruskin to Modernism, 1878-1917 (Edwin
Mellen Press, 2004) and editor of Lives of Victorian Literary Figures:
Ruskin (Pickering & Chatto, 2005). He is now working on how writers and
intellectuals in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain have used public
lectures and other public appearances to find an audience for their work .

Malcolm Hadley is a biologist by training. After doctoral studies on

subapterous tipulid flies in upland areas of northern England, he spent
most of his professional career with the Natural Sciences Sector of
UNESCO and its Division of Ecological Sciences. Primary concerns have
included natural resource issues and human-environment interactions in
tropical regions. He has been involved in diverse initiatives for
communicating scientific information for different audiences, including
the twenty-eight volume Man and the Biosphere book series, and has
authored or co-authored over 70 scientific articles and technical reviews.
From 1995-1999, he was editor of the quarterly magazine Nature &
Resources. Hadley was at grammar school in the English Midlands in the
late 1950s. The Uses of Literacy was 'required general reading' for 17-18-
year old science students taking their 'A' levels (school-leaving exams) at
that time. His empathy with Richard Hoggart's thinking and writings dates
back to that encounter. His presence and contribution at the 2006 Sheffield
Conference on Hoggart was an illustration of the cross-disciplinarity both
of the conference and of Hoggart's work and influence.
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart: Life, Literature, Language, Education 179

Simon Hoggart is a journalist and broadcaster. He is the son of Richard

Hoggart and Mary Hoggart. His brother is The Times television critic Paul
Hoggart. He joined The Guardian in 1968, becoming the parliamentary
sketch writer in 1993. He worked for The Observer for eleven years and
has also written for, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post,
New Statesman, The London Review of Books, Punch and New Humanist.
He is TV critic and writes a wine column for The Spectator. He chaired
the radio comedy show The News Quiz until March 2006 and has made
various TV appearances, including the BBC’s Grumpy Old Men. His
books to form an eclectic list, including debunking the supernatural,
anecdotes about Parliament, a biography, his thoughts about the United
States, a political review, and collected Christmas round-robin letters. His
most recent book is The Hands of History: Parliamentary Sketches 1997-
2007 (2007).

Fred Inglis is Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies at the University of

Sheffield. Prior to that he held a similar Chair at Warwick after spending
18 years at the Division of Advanced Studies in Bristol. He has been
member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and of the sister
Institute in the Netherlands. His most recent books include The Delicious
History of the Holiday (Routledge, 2000), People's Witness: the Journalist
in Modern Politics (Yale 2002) and Culture in the key concepts series
published by Polity Press (2004). He has been a friend of Richard
Hoggart's for many years and is to write the biography. His biography of
R. G. Collingwood, History Man, will be published in 2008.

David Lodge is a novelist and critic and Emeritus Professor of English

Literature in the University of Birmingham. His most recent publications
are the novel Author, Author and a collection of essays, The Year of Henry
James. A new novel, Deaf Sentence, will be published in 2008.

Sean Matthews came to The University of Nottingham, where he directs

the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre, in 2004. His primary interests are in
D. H. Lawrence, Twentieth Century Literature and Culture, and
Contemporary Fiction and Theory. He has previously held positions at the
University of East Anglia; University of Wales, Aberystwyth; University
of California Los Angeles, and Kyushu University, Japan. Current projects
include digitization of the 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' manuscripts; a
study of the Chatterley Trial; the 1990s volume of the Edinburgh
University Press History of Twentieth Century Literature; and an essay for
the Modernist Magazine’s Project on Scrutiny. With Professor Keith
180 Contributors

Cushman, he has curated the exhibition 'Lawrence Among the Women' at

The University of Nottingham). He directed the 11th International D H
Lawrence Conference, 'Return to Eastwood', August 2007. His ‘Interview
with Richard Hoggart’ is in Key Words 5 (2007/8).

Jon Nixon is Professor of Professional Education and Dean of the Faculty

of Education at Liverpool Hope University. He has previously held Chairs
at the University of Sheffield (where he continues to hold an Honorary
Chair in Education), the University of Stirling, and Canterbury Christ
Church University. His most recent publication is Towards the Virtuous
University: the Moral Bases of Academic Practice (Routledge, 2008).

Sue Owen is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Analysis at the

University of Sheffield. As well as numerous books and articles on a range
of subjects (Restoration Drama, drink, chaos theory and Marxism), she has
published: ‘The Abuse of Literacy and The Feeling Heart: The Trials of
Richard Hoggart,’ Cambridge Quarterly (2005) and ‘Richard Hoggart as
Literary Critic,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies, (2007). She
organized ‘The Uses of Richard Hoggart’, an international, cross-
disciplinary conference on Richard Hoggart at Sheffield in April 2006 and
co-edited with John Hartley the special Hoggart issue of the International
Journal of Cultural Studies (2007). In press: (ed.) Richard Hoggart and
Cultural Studies (Palgrave) and a book-length critical study of Richard
Hoggart

Michael Rosenfeld teaches history at Pace University in New York City

and is Director of the University’s Center for Academic Excellence. He
also teaches in the Program in Social Studies at Teachers College,
Columbia University. A cultural historian of modern Europe with a
primary interest in 19th and 20th century Britain, he also writes regularly in
the fields of history pedagogy and local history. He is the editor of
Community, Continuity and Change (Pace University Press, 2000), a
collection of essays in local history.

Tom Steele is Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of

Glasgow, and Principal Research Associate at the Institute of Continuing
Education, University of Cambridge. Previously a Tutor Organiser for the
WEA in Leeds and then Lecturer in the Dept of Adult and Continuing
Education at Leeds, he ended his tenured academic career as Reader in
History and Theory of Adult Education at the University of Glasgow in
2003. He has published widely on adult education and modern British and
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart: Life, Literature, Language, Education 181

European cultural history. His books include: Alfred Orage and the Leeds
Arts Club, Scolar Press (1990), The Emergence of Cultural Studies,
(Lawrence and Wishart, 1997) and with Richard Taylor and Jean Barr, For a
Radical Higher Education, After Postmodernism, (Open University/SRHE
Press, 2002). His most recent study is Knowledge is Power! The Rise and
Fall of European Popular Education Movements 1848-1939, (Peter Laing,
2007).

Katie Wales, FRSA, FEA is Research Professor in English, University of

Sheffield, formerly Professor of English Language and a Dean of Learning
and Teaching at the University of Leeds. Author of numerous books and
articles on stylistics, usage and writers as various as Johnson and Joyce,
her latest book is Northern English: A Cultural and Social History
(Cambridge University Press 2006).
 INDEX

Adams, Henry, 129 Braine, John

Adorno, Theodor, xxvii, 53 Room at the Top, 3, 104
Albermarle Committee on Youth Briggs, Asa, 28
Services, xxi Butler, Samuel, 49
Althusser, Louis, xxxii, 43 The Way of All Flesh, 81
Amis, Kingsley, 5, 78, 104 Calvino, Italo, 47, 53
Lucky Jim, 3, 6, 17 Campbell, Beatrix, 143
Arnold, Matthew, xvi, xx, 58, 122, Camus, Albert, 34
129, 143 Carey, John, 52
Arts Council, xxi, xxiii, 35, Carpenter, Edward, 43
Ash, Timothy Garton, 38 Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Attenborough, David, 23 Studies, xii, xviii, xxiii, xxx-
Attenborough, Richard, 23 xxxi, , 7, 44, 59, 87
Auden, W. H., xii, xx, xliii, 5, 26, Chase, James Hadley, 62
34, 36, 62, 71-3, 87, 154, 161, Chomsky, Noam, 54
176-177 Cole, G. D. H., 43, 148
Auerbach , Erich, Mimesis, 176 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 35, 148
Austen, Jane, 45 Collingwood, R. G., 11, 13
Bakhtin, Mikhail, xxxi, 50 Collini, Stefan, xxiv, 13, 38, 62,
Barstow, Stan 126, 129, 150
A Kind of Loving, 3 Colls, Robert
BBC, 35 Collier’s Rant, 111
Beatles, 45, 87 Communist Party of Great Britain,
Bennett, Alan, 3, 151 48
The History Boys, 4 Connolly, Cyril, 148
Untold Stories, 104 Constantine, Learie, 23
Writing Home, 112 Coronation Street t.v. series, xi, 45,
Bennett, Arnold, 74 103, 104, 139
Betjeman, John, 148 Cox, Brian, 85
Bevan, Aneurin, 43 Crick, Bernard, 43, 48
Beveridge Report, 138 Croce, Benedetto, 148
Blatchford, Robert, 43 Cronin, A. J., 132
Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, xi Crosland, Anthony, 13
Bourdieu, Pierre, xxv Cunningham, Valentine, 48
Bradbury, Malcolm, xii, 8, 88 Daniel, Sir John, 167
Bragg, Melvyn Davies, Andrew, 136
Crossing the Lines, 103-118 The Chatterley Affair, 6
passim Death Cab For Cutie (band), xi
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart 183

Delaney, Shelagh Hoggart, Mary, xiii, xiv

A Taste of Honey, 3 Hoggart, Nicola, xiv
Dewey, John, 21 Hoggart, Paul, xiii
Dickens, Charles, 78 Hoggart, Richard
Dobrée, Bonamy, xxi, 125, 135, The Abuse Of Literacy, xi, 61,
143-153 passim 62, 77
Eagleton, Terry, 51 "Are Museums Political?", 51
East Enders t. v. series, 139 Auden: an Introductory Essay,
Eliot, George, 45, 61 16, 26, 70, 59
Eliot, T. S., xvi, xx, 19, 53, 58, 79, Between Two Worlds, 113
88, 147 La Culture de Pauvre, xxv
Engels, Friedrich, 48 An English Temper, 127
Enright, D. J., 104, 106 Everyday Language and
Epstein, Jacob, 148 Everyday Life, 29, 113
Fanon, Frantz, 49 “Finding A Voice”, 96
Faulkner, William, 62 First and Last Things, 29
Foot, Michael, 43 From Policies to Practice, 22
Forster, E. M., 85, 95 The Future of Broadcasting, 28
Foucault, Michel, 87 An Idea and its Servants:
Frankfurt School, 38 UNESCO from Within, 153
Gardiner, Gerald, Q. C., 90, 92 An Imagined Life, 18, 44
Geertz, Clifford, xxxi Inaugural Lecture, xviii
Gosse, Edmund, 144, 148, 150 “Lawrence’s Voices”, 96
Gramsci, Antonio, xxxii Life and Times, xxi, xxii, xxiii,
Green, T. H., 13 73, 123, 130
Greene, Graham, 49, 81 “The Literary Imagination and
Greenwood, Walter, 132 the Sociological
Gregg, Melissa, xxxiii, 105, 137 Imagination”, 68
Grenfell, Joyce, xii A Local Habitation, 43, 118-119,
Griffiths-Jones, Mervyn, Q. C., x, 6, 121, 124, 134, 143
85, 90, 92 Promises To Keep, xv, xxiii, 9,
Grossberg, Lawrence, xx, xxvii 51, 158
Habermas, Jurgen, 43 “A Question of Tone”, 96, 123
Hall, Stuart, xx, xxviii, xxix, xxxi, Reith Lectures, xxi, 159
xxxii, 8 A Sort of Clowning, 123
Hardy, Thomas, 45, 67, 129, 150 Speaking to Each Other, 129
Jude the Obscure, 143, 144 "Teaching Literature to Adults",
Harrison, Tony, 50, 103 28, 76
Them & [uz], 104, 110 Townscape with Figures:
Hauser, Arnold, 147 Farnham - Portrait of an
Healey, Denis, 23 English Town, 16, 21
The History Man t.v. series, 17 The Uses of Literacy, x, xvi-xvii,
Hitchens, Christopher, 54 xxviii-xxix, xxxv, 1-3, 5, 9,
Hobhouse, L. T., 13 16, 26, 49-51, 59, 61, 63-4,
Hogan, Robert, 88 67, 69, 73, 75, 77, 85, 89-90,
184 Index

93, 95-6, 103-118 passim, Leavis, Q. D., xvi, xx, 4, 58, 79,
121, 125-126, 128, 131, 134, 121, 122, 142
142, 150, 176 Lengyel, Peter, 166
“A Very English Voice”, 96 Levi, Primo, 54
The Way We Live Now, 16, 31, Lewis, C. S., 29
35 Lodge, David, xii
“Why I Value Literature”, 63 The Picturegoers, 1, 2, 4
Horkheimer, Max, xxvii Small World, 17
Hughes, Bill, xxvii Lowry, L. S., 134
Humphreys, Arthur, xi, 32 Macherey, Pierre, 54
Huxley, Julian, 156, 159 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 11, 12, 13, 21,
Inglis, Fred, 31 23, 27
Jameson, Storm, 148 Maheu, René, 163
Joad, C. E. M., 15 Marcuse, Herbert, 138
Johnson, Paul Marx, Karl, 48
The Vanished Landscape, 131- McKibbin, Ross, 121, 122, 134
133 McNiece, Louis, 148
Johnson, Samuel, 34 Middleton Murry, John, 149
Kazancigil, Ali, 165 Mill, John Stuart, 14
Keynes, John Maynard, 13, 15 Montaigne, Michel de, 33
Kramer, Jacob, 145 Moore, Henry, 145
Kutukdjian, Georges, 165 Moorman, Frederic, 145
Lady Chatterley trial, x, xxi, 6, 62, Morris, William, 43
85-6, 89, 91-2, 94, 96 Mulhern, Francis, xxviii
Lane, Allen, 87 Orage, Alfred, 147, 148
Larkin, Philip, 87 Orwell, George, xx, 4, 5, 36, 43, 47,
The Less Deceived, 3 49, 53, 62, 74-7, 81, 87, 104,
Laski, Harold, 43 127, 132, 142, 147, 148, 150
Lawrence, D. H., xxi, 79, 80, 85- “Inside the Whale”, 5
102 passim, 104, 127 “Politics and the English
“Climbing Down Pisgah”, 96 Language”, 53
“Introduction to His Paintings”, "The Prevention of Literature",
96 54
“John Galsworthy”, 96 The Road to Wigan Pier, 5, 51,
“Sex versus Loveliness”, 96 54, 77
“The State of Funk”, 96 Osbourne, John, 104
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 7, 86, Look Back in Anger, 3
87 Passeron, Jean-Claude, xxv, xxxi,
Sons and Lovers, 79, 89, 94, 95 xxxv
Women in Love, 96 Peirce, C. S., 21
Leavis, F. R., xvi, xx, 4, 18, 24, 58, Phillips, Adam, 34
62, 64, 79, 87, 121, 122, 147, Pilkington Committee on
150 Broadcasting, xii, xxi, xxii, 7,
D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, 88, 97 19, 34
Pilkington Report, xxii, 7, 34
 Re-Reading Richard Hoggart 185

Pinto, Vivian de Sola, 90 Tawney, R. H., xx, 43

Pound, Ezra, 158 Tennant, David, x
Priestley, J. B., 132 Thatcher, Margaret, xxii
Pritchett, V. S., 148 Thatcher, Margaret, 32
Pudney, John, 148 Thomas, Dylan, 147
Quirk, Randolph, 28 Thompson, E. P., xxviii, 20, 26, 30
Rancière, Jacques, 27 The Making of the English
Read, Herbert, 145, 147 Working Class, 26
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 148 UNESCO, xiii, xxi, xxxvi, 9, 20, 35,
Roberts, Robert, 131, 133, 136, 138 154-175
A Ragged Schooling, 136, 137 Van Morrison, 8
Imprisoned Tongues, 136 A Very Peculiar Practice t.v. series,
The Classic Slum, 136, 138 17
Rolph, C. H., 87, 91 Wain, John, 5
Rorty, Richard, 15 Waller, P. J., 112
Rose, Jonathan, 45, 47, 133 Rose, Warnock, Mary, 23
150 Waters, Chris, 134
Rowse, A. L., 138 Watson, George, 127
Russell, Bertrand, 15 W.E.A, xxxvi, 149
Sadler, Michael, 145 Wesker, Arnold, 104
Said, Edward, 39 Roots, 3
Saussure, Ferdinand de, xxxii Whitehouse, Mary, xxii
Scott, Sir Walter, 176 Widdowson, Peter, 88
Sen, Amartya, 21 Williams, Raymond, xxviii, 17, 26,
Sillitoe, Alan, 2 30, 68, 92, 95, 115, 136, 142,
Saturday Night and Sunday 144, 149
Morning, 2, 105 Border Country, 105
The Loneliness of the Long Culture and Society, xix, 26
Distance Runner, 3 Williams, Shirley, 28
Sinfield, Alan, 88 Williams, Sir William Emrys, 90
Spender, Humphrey, 132 Wolfe, Tom, 78
Steedman, Carolyn Woodruff, William, 131, 133
Landscape for a Good Woman, The Road to Nab End, 139
140 Woolf, Virginia, 74
Storey, David Young, Michael, 23
This Sporting Life, 3 Zizek, Slavoj, 37