Friday, April 18, 2014

My hero / Richard Hoggart by DJ Taylor

'We all need to remember that in the last resort there is no such person as "the common man"'…
Richard Hoggart. Photograph: David Newell Smith for the Observer


My hero: 

Richard Hoggart by DJ Taylor

Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy was a trail-blazing study of mid-century working-class life and I admired him without reservation

Obituaries / Richard Hoggart

Richard Hoggart / The uses of decency


Friday 18 April 2014

I

first read The Uses of Literacy, Richard Hoggart's trail-blazing 1957 study of mid-century working-class life and the factors conspiring to undermine it, in the mid 1980s: a time when the whole concept of working-class solidarity was being brought sharply into question. Not that Hoggart, who died last week at the age of 95, ever believed that the people whose lives he explored with such intense and penetrating sympathy were truly homogeneous. "We all need to remember, every day and more and more," he insisted, "that in the last resort there is no such person as 'the common man.'" If he was interested in communality – the shared assumption, the collective outlook that separates the tenant of a council flat from the owner of a three-bedroom semi – then he was also keen on individuation, and The Uses' particular hero, while never blatantly advertising the fact, is Hoggart himself.

Written in the mid 1950s, while its author held down a lecturing job in the University of Hull's adult education department, Hoggart's masterpiece belongs to a distinctive period in British cultural history: the era of Penguin specials, the BBC's Third Programme and the Festival of Britain, a landscape in which it was assumed that, if a new Jerusalem was going to be founded, then its architects would be drawn from the upwardly mobile class of postwar intellectuals in which Hoggart himself reposed. If some of George Orwell's early forays into the world of boys' weeklies and English murders are the template for what became known as "cultural studies", then it was Hoggart, together with Raymond Williams and EP Thompson, who refined and extended the design.

Inevitably, there was bad news as well as good, and if nothing else, Hoggart's early work is an exposure of some of the deceits practised on "ordinary people" in the name of progress. Like Alan Sillitoe, albeit in a very different way and with very different aims, he was responsible for wheeling into view an entire world, not to mention a world view, that had hitherto existed more or less beyond literature. I admired him without reservation and am desolate to find him gone.

THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
054 My hero / Michael de Montaigne by Liyun Li
055 My hero / Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
056 My hero / Richmal Crompton by Louise Crompton
057 My hero / Edward Thomas by David Constantine
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
059 My hero / Sefton by Jilly Cooper

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 My hero / Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson

102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill
111 My hero / Arnold Lobell by Julia Donaldson (23 December)

2012 (PAGE 9)
115 My hero / Nadime Gordimer by Tessa Hadley (27 January)

(PAGE 8)

2013

(PAGE 5)
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman (13 September)
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer (1 November)

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2015
250 My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre (22 January)
2016


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