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| Richard Hoggart Posteb by T.A. |
Richard Hoggart - obituary
Richard Hoggart was a commentator and academic whose Uses of Literacy lamented the impact of mass culture on traditional working-class life
2:20PM BST 11 Apr 2014
Richard Hoggart, who has died aged 95, was best known as the author of The Uses of Literacy (1957), a study of working-class culture widely regarded as one of the most influential books of the immediate post-war era, and one which is still quoted and misquoted by commentators anxious to prove the negative effects of mass culture on people’s lives.
In the 1950s it had become fashionable to argue that a newly affluent worker was emerging who was becoming middle-class in lifestyle and political attitudes. Hoggart saw the cultural impact of such developments as almost entirely negative.
Drawing on his own experience as a scholarship boy from a very poor home in Leeds, he described how the old, tightly-knit working-class culture of his boyhood — of stuffy front rooms, allotments, back-to-back housing and charabanc trips — was breaking up in the face of an Americanised mass culture of tabloid newspapers, advertising, jukeboxes and Hollywood. “The hedonistic but passive barbarian who rides in a fifty-horse-power bus for threepence, to see a five-million dollar film for one-and-eightpence, is not simply a social oddity; he is a portent,” Hoggart thundered.
Fifties popular culture, he argued, was “full of corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions”, tending towards a view of the world “in which progress is conceived as a seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral levelling and freedom as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure”.
He particularly disliked “milk bars”, in which he believed he could detect “a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk”. The influence of what he called “the mass publicists” was so all-pervasive that the culture of the people was being destroyed.
Hoggart wrote in the 19th-century tradition of radical idealism, with its strong sense of moral values. He was a tireless enemy of independent broadcasting — and of the public schools, which he saw as perpetuating social privilege.
Yet he was also essentially conservative in his dislike of change; hawkish in foreign affairs; and thoroughly elitist in his disdain for modern mass culture. He believed fervently in the value of great literature : “In a democracy which is highly commercialised you have to give people critical literacy. If you don’t do that, you might as well pack it in.”
He also thoroughly detested the fashion for relativism, which “leads to populism which then leads to levelling and so to reductionism of all kinds, from food to moral judgments". For Hoggart, those who maintained that the Beatles were as good as Beethoven represented a “loony terminus”.
The Uses of Literacy made Hoggart a highly influential commentator on British culture . He served on government advisory bodies and spent five years working for Unesco. He also founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, which established Cultural Studies as an academic discipline.
The son of a regular soldier and sometime house painter, Richard Herbert Hoggart was born on September 24 1918 in Potternewton, part of the Chapeltown district of Leeds. Both his parents died when he was young and he was brought up by two aunts and a grandmother.
In 1930 he failed the equivalent of the 11-plus but won a grammar school place at Cockburn High School after his headmaster insisted that the education authorities reread his scholarship essay. He went on to read English at Leeds University, graduating with a First.
During the Second World War, Hoggart was commissioned in the Royal Artillery, serving in North Africa and then in Italy, where he found his true vocation as Staff Captain (Education) teaching current affairs to soldiers awaiting demob. After the war he became a staff tutor in adult education at Hull University, and in 1951 published his first book, a study of W H Auden.
The Uses of Literacy brought Hoggart lasting fame . In 1959 he became a senior lecturer at the University of Leicester.
The following year he gave evidence for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial, declaring the book to be “highly virtuous if not puritanical”, a judgment that made him nationally known overnight. In his third volume of autobiography, An Imagined Life, Hoggart described his fellow defence witnesses as “like a stage army of earnest Guardian readers” and himself as “cast as the northern working-class provincial now a university teacher; a sort of muted 'eeh-bah-gum’ figure fit for a short walk-on part in Sons and Lovers”.
In 1962 he was invited to Birmingham University to take a chair in Modern English Literature. He agreed to come on condition he was allowed to start his own postgraduate course. “I invented it on the spot. It was to be in contemporary cultural studies.”
The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which opened in 1964 with the Marxist Stuart Hall as its deputy director, was to develop some of the interests first explored in The Uses of Literacy.“Of course, you know, Hoggart, your people won’t get jobs,” one colleague remarked. “No one will recognise a subject like that.” Hoggart’s insistence that the study of popular culture should be based on a thorough grounding in literary criticism also met opposition from some of the more radical elements at the university. At one meeting a student announced: “We have no time for the Matthew Arnoldian liberal humanist line of Hoggart.”
In 1970 Hoggart accepted the post of assistant director general of Unesco after one of his colleagues suggested that he should “walk the plank in the service of a valuable idea”. He wrote entertainingly about his years at Unesco in his autobiography, describing the frustrations of working in an agency with grand international ideals whose members insist on thinking nationally.
On his return to Britain, Hoggart moved to Farnham, Surrey, and took up a post as Warden of Goldsmith’s College, University of London, where he remained until his retirement in 1984.
In Speaking to Each Other (1977), Hoggart examined how the tone and manner in which people communicate carry assumptions based on social class and religious and political opinions that are often antipathetic to the person addressed. In Landscape with Figures: Farnham, Portrait of an English Town (1994) he claimed that he could differentiate between an Etonian, a Harrovian and a Wykehamist purely on the basis of their “conversational conventions” casually observed at Farnham station.
In The Way We Live Now (1995), Hoggart suggested that modern dilemmas stem from a long slide towards relativism and from the way in which consumerism rather than “authority” increasingly determines the texture of life.
Hoggart was a member of various committees and quangos, including the Pilkington Committee on broadcasting, which in 1961 predicted that the development of commercial television would have dire social consequences.
He served on the Albemarle committee on youth services; chaired an advisory council for adult and continuing education set up by Shirley Williams in 1977; and was vice-chairman of the Arts Council from 1977 to 1981 . He was also chairman of the New Statesman from 1978 to 1981.
After the 1997 general election he was on the committee set up by Education Secretary David Blunkett in preparation for “The Year of Reading”, though he did not have much time for it : “They were all talking about image and targets and impact and all this stuff. One of them said we should ask the Spice Girls to have 'Reading Is Good For You’ across their bosoms.”
In addition to his many books on literacy and communication, Hoggart wrote a highly acclaimed autobiographical trilogy: A Local Habitation (1988), A Sort of Clowning (1990) and An Imagined Life (1992).
Among his later publications were First and Last Things (1999); Between Two Worlds (2001); Everyday Language and Everyday Life (2003); and Mass Media in a Mass Society: myth and reality (2004).
Richard Hoggart married, in 1942, Mary France; they had a daughter and two sons, of whom the elder — the political commentator Simon Hoggart — died in January.
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| Richard Hoggar Poster by T.A. |
Richard Hoggart, born September 24 1918, died April 10 2014
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