Richard Hoggart (1918–2014)

This is a book I've meant to read for years. It's a bit of an icon, because when it was published it was something genuinely new; an attempt to pin down the culture of the northern working classes and assess how general social changes have influenced it. As such, it was a pioneer of that much-derided and misunderstood area of academia, Media Studies.

It was first published more than fifty years ago, and we would expect that society has moved on a great deal since then and its relevance might be diluted. What seems surprising, however, is how much of this world of the dour, post-WW2 fifties is still recognisable in our own time. Step back fifty years from its publication and we are in Edwardian England; a world of horse-drawn carriages and gas-lights, of domestic servitude and deference. Step forward fifty years and there's still the motor-car and electricity, sensational tabloids, pop music and cinema. The government then as now embroiled in the Middle East, the teenagers much like our teenagers, and their young queen is now our elderly queen, but the same queen for all that. There is one big difference as a consequence of that similarity; when today's young people look back on the lives of their grandparents they (if they are honest) see themselves in similar conditions. In 1957, older people still had roots in that older world of deference and a more rural society with its distinctive regional culture and dialects. The mass media of the fifties changed all that, creating a more homogenised society. Was this a good thing? In some ways yes, but perhaps with its candy-floss ways it's a shallower one.

The Uses of Literacy is a classic and fully deserves to be so. What makes it especially valuable is that it is a serious academic work by a serious academic which is yet complete accessible to the lay reader. That is not something that can often be said these days. My copy is an original Pelican edition; it says a lot, which Professor Hoggart would no doubt have had something to say about, that there are no more Pelicans and the lay reader is now treated with less respect; today's equivalent would be presented by a celebrity in the way that those old learned television documentary series by Jacob Bronowski and Kenneth Clark have been displaced by excitable comedians. I'm not sure that this doesn't reinforce what the book has to say.

… (more)

This is a book I've meant to read for years. It's a bit of an icon, because when it was published it was something genuinely new; an attempt to pin down the culture of the northern working classes and assess how general social changes have influenced it. As such, it was a pioneer of that much-derided and misunderstood area of academia, Media Studies.

It was first published more than fifty years ago, and we would expect that society has moved on a great deal since then and its relevance might be diluted. What seems surprising, however, is how much of this world of the dour, post-WW2 fifties is still recognisable in our own time. Step back fifty years from its publication and we are in Edwardian England; a world of horse-drawn carriages and gas-lights, of domestic servitude and deference. Step forward fifty years and there's still the motor-car and electricity, sensational tabloids, pop music and cinema. The government then as now embroiled in the Middle East, the teenagers much like our teenagers, and their young queen is now our elderly queen, but the same queen for all that. There is one big difference as a consequence of that similarity; when today's young people look back on the lives of their grandparents they (if they are honest) see themselves in similar conditions. In 1957, older people still had roots in that older world of deference and a more rural society with its distinctive regional culture and dialects. The mass media of the fifties changed all that, creating a more homogenised society. Was this a good thing? In some ways yes, but perhaps with its candy-floss ways it's a shallower one.

The Uses of Literacy is a classic and fully deserves to be so. What makes it especially valuable is that it is a serious academic work by a serious academic which is yet complete accessible to the lay reader. That is not something that can often be said these days. My copy is an original Pelican edition; it says a lot, which Professor Hoggart would no doubt have had something to say about, that there are no more Pelicans and the lay reader is now treated with less respect; today's equivalent would be presented by a celebrity in the way that those old learned television documentary series by Jacob Bronowski and Kenneth Clark have been displaced by excitable comedians. I'm not sure that this doesn't reinforce what the book has to say.

… (more)