Hoggart

HOGGART, RICHARD (1918- )

The English analyst and historian of working-class culture, the mass media and education, is one of the formative influences in the development of cultural studies in Britain, both through his book Uses of Literature (1957), and through his role as the first director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Hoggart was born into a working-class family in Leeds. After war service, he taught English literature to adult education classes at the University of Hull. It has been suggested that this experience is vital, not merely for Hoggart's own career, but also for the development of cultural studies as such. A number of key early figures in cultural studies (including Williams) were adult education tutors, and as such engaged with those who, for economic or other reasons, had been excluded from the more orthodox educational institutions. Cultural studies therefore emerges, in part, in the attempt to relate literary criticism (and social and political science) to those standing outside the typical academic audience. Uses of Literature is addressed to these readers. The book is a documentation and analysis of the culture of pre-war working-class life. Hoggart brings to this culture the techniques of literary studies, but applies them to the cultural products and artefacts of everyday life (such as newspapers and magazines, popular music and popular fiction). Working-class life is revealed through the complex interrelations of its parts (the pub, the working man's club, sports, family roles, gender and language, and even the apparently regressive or negative elements of this life, such as violence). Hoggart thus helps to turn the understanding of culture away from an exclusive interest in high culture.

However, his analysis of post-war working-class culture reveals that he is still, in certain respects, under the influence of Leavis and even Arnold. Where Arnold had lamented the rise of a 'philistine' urban culture in the mid-nineteenth century, Hoggart sees a decline in working-class culture with the impact of commercial and North American culture, after the war. He is dismissive, for example, of the culture of the 1950s cofTee-bar, and the life of the young working-class men and women that focus on it. Uses of Literature did turn Hoggart into a public authority on popular culture and the media (and included his appearing as a defence witness in the Lady Chatterley trial). None of his later work has had the impact of Uses of Literacy, although institutionally, apart from directing the Birmingham Centre (from 1964 to 1968), Hoggart has since been assistant director-general at UNESCO, and Warden of Goldsmith's College London.