Re-Reading Richard Hoggart: Life, Literature, Language, Education
Editor: Sue Owen
Date Of Publication: Jul 2008
Isbn13: 9781847186126
Isbn: 1-84718-612-2
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. Though best known for The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart 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. For Hoggart, public service is a duty of the intellectual. Therefore he has not lived in the ivory tower but has engaged in society, striving for change from within. He worked for five years as Assistant Director-General of UNESCO and has undertaken many activities in arts, culture, broadcasting and education, including: the Albermarle Committee on Youth Services, 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. Hoggart was also the first 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. 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 cultural enquiry; the rise of cultural studies; and educational reforms from the fifties onwards.

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

"Because The Uses of Literacy was first published half a century ago, we are in danger of regarding Richard Hoggart as a voice from the past, one to be recalled in moments of piety but otherwise safely forgotten. This excellent collection forces us to think otherwise. The contributors, with David Lodge, Fred Inglis, and Sue Owen herself to the fore, respond to what continues to be forceful, persuasive, and (in its own distinctive way) urgent about Richard Hoggart's writing. In fact, it is precisely by trying to capture and analyse that familiar yet elusive 'voice' that this book most effectively shows Hoggart to be, in every sense, a living presence, speaking to debates about class, education, literature, and what is misrepresented as 'dumbing down'. By re-examining his career and his work, the essays probe beyond a too-familiar reputation to bring out a man who has always been more complex, more multi-talented, and more literary than text-book histories of the origins of 'Cultural Studies' ever allow. And, from the opening contribution by his son, Simon Hoggart, onwards we get engaging glimpses of the private man, one who continues to inspire admiration, affection, and love."

Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

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