ABSTRACT
One might as well point out straight away that the extreme originality of the work is liable to disconcert many of its readers. Richard Hoggart calls into question the artful naivety, the class ethnocentrism or the hidden anachronisms of numerous analyses largely accepted to-day of ‘the cultural homogenisation of consumer societies’, the evil or beneficial power of the mass press, radio and television, on the ‘atomisation’ and ‘massification’ of the urban proletariat or of the destruction of the traditional way of life of the working class. Not
without vehemence when taking fashionable ideas to pieces, he has put himself in the position of being labelled a vitriolic writer by all those who would find that a convenient way of dismissing tiresome analyses. Moreover the work, which doubtless owes much of its success to the fluidity of its style and descriptions, cannot be fitted into a neatly delineated tradition of anthropological literature. Although the author is aiming at a synthesis of the specialised studies on the life style of the working class1 in urban and industrial England and on the characteristics of the production and diffusion of new cultural messages, The Uses of Literacy, deliberately stripped of the more obvious signs of sociological debate – jargon or statistics, crushing documentation or methodological emphasis – could be taken, in part one, as a study of manners, in which the treatment of the setting, the stories and the characters is sometimes not unlike the novelistic tradition of the depiction of milieu; whilst in its second part it could pass for an exercise in method: transposing the classic technique of literary analysis to the context and audience of the mass press. In addition there is a variety of other concerns which might dismay a reader too exclusively faithful to the religion of clear distinctions between disciplines. At one level a protest in the name of scientific objectivity against aristocratic, populist, apocalyptic or foolishly optimistic pronouncements which come between the life of the working class and its necessarily intellectual or bourgeois observers, The Uses of Literacy also derives in large part – as the author admits several times – from autobiography, if not self-analysis. Moreover, while he methodically sets about grasping the mechanics behind the failures of proportion or the optical illusion to which the majority of moral judgements commonly applied to popular culture may be reduced, Richard Hoggart has no intention of refraining from sticking his neck out and assessing the value of cultural changes associated with the transformation of working class life. Whilst offering elements of autobiography which allow him to situate himself in relation to the working class and thereby, as he suggests to his readers, to relativise his own judgements, the author never hesitates to formulate his likes and dislikes, his hopes and regrets concerning, say, the developments in popular song or furniture, changes of style in women’s magazines or pornographic literature, or other transformations in popular resourcefulness and cynicism; and it is in this way that the work clearly touches on moral and aesthetic criticism.
