The Uses of Literacy

by Richard Hoggart

""Hoggart has the rare quality of complete intellectual honesty. "The Uses of Literacy "should be read by all those concerned with the nature of modern society.""-Asher Tropp, "American Sociological Review"""This sort of modern Mayhew is worth any amount of statistics as background for cultural evalutions....Required reading for anyone concerned with the modern cultural climate."-Times Literary Supplement"

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, History, Cultural Studies, Theory, Education, Cultural

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Half a lifetime ago, I did a unit in my undergraduate degree on Literary Criticism. And this was one of the books that the lecturer mentioned he’d found particularly interesting and suggested we read. Oh, I should explain that more. He told us one night that teachers are paid in inverse proportion to the impact they are likely to have on your life. Kindergarten teachers get paid the least, university lecturers the most. He said, a kindergarten teacher could well convince you that you were hopeless and destroy your education, whereas he could, at best, suggest a couple of books you might find a bit interesting – hardly life altering. I think he grossly understated the impact he was going to have on my life, in many ways. I still think of him very fondly and feel he introduced me to many ideas I’m not sure I would have found nearly as easily on my own.

I bought this book at the time, on his recommendation, but never actually read it. All the same, it has turned up repeatedly over the years, mentioned in other books I did read. And now that I have read it, I didn’t expect it to be nearly as interesting or as affecting as it has turned out to be.

This book shouldn’t be nearly so affecting. It was written before I was born and in a country on the opposite side of the world to where I eventually grew up. All the same, my parents were both born, educated and spent almost the first 10 years of their married life together in Northern Ireland – so, much of this isn’t completely unfamiliar to me either. I don’t think the relationship to education of the working class in Northern England was all that different from that in Northern Ireland.

This book starts by painting a picture of working class life, considering everything from living in a two-up-two-down, what you might eat, the types of jobs you might do, your relationship to religion, to nationalism, to other social classes and even to sport. Naturally, a lot of this has changed in the years since, but perhaps not as significantly as we might like to think. One of the things he makes clear is that social class is relational, not least in the sense of it being about ‘us’ and our relation to ‘them’.

He was witnessing a change of these relationships as people moved out of the communities of the past and into new council housing in England. He was concerned that this change diminished the ‘we’re all in this together’ feel of the communities and therefore acted to undermine working class feeling and sensibility. He is also clearly worried that the rising materialism of the working classes (perhaps consumerism is a better word here) was also destroying working class community and creating instead a form of isolated individualism.

The introduction says that he first wanted to call this book The Abuses of Literacy, but changed his mind. I think that is a useful thing to know. This is an early work of cultural criticism and his discussion of the newspapers, magazines, novels and music that working class people are likely to read and listen to is utterly fascinating. A profound lesson from much of this is that it would be wrong to assume that the working class assimilate this material whole, rather than first ‘making it their own’. Nonetheless, a lot of his discussion here shows how these materials either completely reinforce ‘normal’ working class life, or, like the hard-boiled novels discussed, are so beyond belief that they can only really be used as a form of escapism. His book publisher was concerned that they might get sued if he used direct quotes from some of these novels – and so he made up books. One of those was a book called ‘Death Cab for Cutie’ – which later became a pop band, stealing his title. All very amusing.

At the gym I sometimes see (but not hear) snippets of films as the morning programs chat about the latest releases. I’ve been struck by how a favourite scene from many of these films involves the hero jumping from one building to another, only to not quite make it and having to catch the wall with his fingertips and then pull himself up. I literally saw this same scene repeated three times from three different films. These are the kinds of clichés from popular fiction he discusses here – while considering what they might mean in relation to working class life.

The bit of this that I found surprising, confronting and also wonderfully insightful was his discussion of what happens to you if you move out of the working class after getting more education than working class people are meant to get. And this was the bit that, despite perhaps 60 years passing, still seemed to me both raw and prescient. While I was doing my Masters at Melbourne University I kept finding myself singing that bit from Radiohead’s Creep – ‘I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here’ – and all the while walking about the sandstone buildings and manicured lawns and the arches of the Old Arts Building. But that feeling of being an outsider was also true when I did my first degree. A friend of the family asked me at the time, ‘when are you going to stop going to school and get on with your life?’ The discussion here, quoting Gramsci, of the old world being dead, but the new world not being able to be born pretty much sums up my lived experience of all this. It is hard to explain, but the inescapable feeling is of not really belonging in any world – not that of the working class one I’ve left behind, nor of the middle class one I presume one is meant to now belong to. Naturally, he is writing all of from his own experience as the educated working class boy. When I’ve spoken about this theme before here on good reads I’ve sometimes been told off because this did not chime with some other people’s experience of ‘becoming educated while working class’, others have said they have not experienced anything like this odd isolation, half their luck, I say – now, if I get into this argument again, I will just refer them to the chapter in this book, A Scholarship Boy. Like I said, I found it a remarkable read, not least since I couldn’t help feeling that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I regret not reading this at the time, nearly 30 years ago now. I should have trusted John Hanrahan, my lit crit teacher, more. All the same, it is nice that I’m still reading books he recommended to me all these years later.

[Tea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hoggart’s comprehensive survey of working class culture published in 1957 is neither patronising nor sentimental. He confronts his subject with clear and knowledgeable eyes, criticising the faults and acknowledging the values of the class he originates from himself.

The opening chapters describe working class communities in the early decades of the 20th century – their customs, family life, clubs, songs, love of ostentation and group mentality. Such cohesion has the unfortunate flipside of rejecting anyone who diverges from the norm, including those with the impetus and self-discipline to develop intellectually. Hoggart also demonstrates that misunderstandings between social classes can arise from different value systems. What the middle class regard as responsible thrift, the working class interpret as mean-minded stinginess. It is hardly surprising that people consigned to the most tedious jobs seek consolation in a hearty meal, the cinema or trips to the seaside.

After defining the working class through its mores and mind-sets, Hoggart unfolds his concerns about developments in mass-produced culture. He fears that the organic culture engendered within the working class community reflecting group experience and cementing solidarity, is being replaced by the slickly produced but vacuous outpourings of canny commercial organisations whose sole motivation is profit. The shortcomings of the working class previously identified by Hoggart make its members especially vulnerable to the blandishments of the savvy and disingenuous media professionals, who under the guise of democratising culture and idolising the ‘common man’, ensure that standards of literacy and critical acumen amongst the masses are suppressed. Hoggart doubts that this is a deliberate conspiracy and regards it rather as a purely profit driven policy. The results are unfortunately the same, and entrench the conformity and convention of a passive audience that isn’t encouraged to question and think independently. People accustomed to equating self-improvement with snobbery are only too glad to applaud the ‘high-brow hunting’ of the dailies and weeklies whose circulation depends largely on a working class readership.

In this climate, gravity becomes a cardinal sin, to the extent that ‘nothing was told straight’. The readership is infantilised by the assumption that plain facts and news have to be sensationalised to grab attention. Hoggart’s other bête noire is the Americanisation of culture, with its glamorisation of violence and rootlessness.

The general effect of all the new tendencies is a growing estrangement from the real lives of the majority of ordinary people. Even songs that used to unify with a sense of shared experience are now targeted at the individual in a superficial way.

Hoggart is not glorifying a mythical golden past. He acknowledges improvements in material conditions and the rise in literacy itself. His regret is that the spread of literacy is not being matched by a corresponding drive to put it to meaningful use in either serving the community or simply developing oneself. Instead, undemanding literature and mindless TV are emerging as the victors and their purveyors silence any challenge to their hegemony with the charge of élitism. The phenomenon of reality TV clearly emerged way before Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle. Hoggart refers to programmes in which ‘intimate details are exposed before an audience.’

Hoggart is not suggesting that Proust and broadsheets become required reading, but he clearly wants all members of society to have access to material with genuine significance to their lives that will contribute to them becoming ‘wise in their own way’. His book whilst of its time in some ways, was cannily and regrettably prescient in others.

[Kamal · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is amazing to read a book of cultural analysis, such as this, which is still as relevant today as it was when it first appeared in the 1950s. Its sensitivity and depth of analysis hold up against contemporary prejudices, unlike the work of F.R. Leavis and other early pioneers of British cultural studies. Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy still has much to say about class dynamics and the consumption of popular culture.

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this book from Tim Lott’s glorious memoir ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’, in which he described how his later discovery of ‘The Uses of Literacy’ helped him fully understand his parents’ working class to lower-middle-class background and his mother’s (fatal) combination of pride and huge shyness.

Its primary importance, I’m to understand, is as a landmark of cultural studies – in which respect it is a curious blend of current observation and self-ethnography (making it already a bit of a curiosity and as much autobiography as treatise).

What’s most interesting to me is the record it gives of pre-war and immediately post war street-level culture (books, music, fashion, consumerism), and its often rounded and enduring pronouncements on popular ways and vices. There’s a lot that seemingly hasn’t changed and could be said as much of a middle class as a working class now: the (healthy and unhealthy) cynicism about politics which still afflicts us (all that ‘they’re all the same’; they’re in it for themselves’); the disdain for intellectualism (generally healthy) and the eternal power of the folksy cliché and the ‘mustn’t grumble’ shrug.

The shortness of the attention span fed and sated by media also has its strong, familiar contemporary parallels: there’s a section on ‘fragmentation’ in reading that reads exactly like an explainer of Buzzfeed and passive social media-led ‘content grazing’. The welcome assertion too that readers of newspapers aren’t a tabula rasa and don’t ingest every position of the editor is also worth celebrating (against the patronising fallacy that ‘Murdoch’ tells the ‘sheeple’ what to think, which persists today on much of the witless Left).

Meanwhile, several surprises for me along the way (which might be debated), including his claim that working class people in this era weren’t patriotic (really?) and that they were only really monarchists if it involved glamour (that surprised me).

In other ways it is, inevitably, hugely dated and paternalistic. I loved the semi-genetic conviction with which Hoggart damns the young frequenter of 1950s milk bars as a sort of degenerate among degenerates; his detailed attack on a certain kind of almost-intellectual (all the way down to how he decorates his house) is also quite barmy. The idea that reading ‘bad stuff’ is bad also feels dated (these days we’d be delighted if anyone read anything). His frequent disdain for much contemporary music is also amusing (all that harking back to the songs of youth that were truly beautiful). Today, that same argument is of course being made by portly dads in Fred Perry and Weller haircuts.

It’s the close up record and parody of pre- and post war pulp reading and music that I enjoyed the most. I now have a list of early 20th century and late 19th century popular and musical hall songs of the ‘Danny Boy’ variety that are mostly forgotten but doubtless buried in the culture (e.g. ‘Bird in a Gilded Cage’). I must look up Wilfred Pickles – who sounds like a working man’s Clarkson. The commentary on family magazines, proto-scud, SF and Westerns is fascinating: you can still see boxes of that stuff in musty seaside second hand bookshops.

But lastly, oh: that title. It’s possibly the worst title I’ve ever come across for a thoughtful piece of non-fiction – and it was originally going to be called ‘The Abuses of Literacy’ (even worse). Could anything sound more turgid? I get that it’s a ‘text’, but if I were selling it now, I’d be begging the publisher to call it something like ‘Death Cab for Cutie’ or ‘Mustn’t Grumble’. There’s so much more charm and depth in it than the dreary red brick tedium of that title.

[Rosalind · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I've meant to read for years. It's a bit of an icon, because when it was published it was something genuinely new; an attempt to pin down the culture of the northern working classes and assess how general social changes have influenced it. As such, it was a pioneer of that much-derided and misunderstood area of academia, Media Studies.

It was first published more than fifty years ago, and we would expect that society has moved on a great deal since then and its relevance might be diluted. What seems surprising, however, is how much of this world of the dour, post-WW2 fifties is still recognisable in our own time. Step back fifty years from its publication and we are in Edwardian England; a world of horse-drawn carriages and gas-lights, of domestic servitude and deference. Step forward fifty years and there's still the motor-car and electricity, sensational tabloids, pop music and cinema. The government then as now embroiled in the Middle East, the teenagers much like our teenagers, and their young queen is now our elderly queen, but the same queen for all that. There is one big difference as a consequence of that similarity; when today's young people look back on the lives of their grandparents they (if they are honest) see themselves in similar conditions. In 1957, older people still had roots in that older world of deference and a more rural society with its distinctive regional culture and dialects. The mass media of the fifties changed all that, creating a more homogenised society. Was this a good thing? In some ways yes, but perhaps with its candy-floss ways it's a shallower one.

The Uses of Literacy is a classic and fully deserves to be so. What makes it especially valuable is that it is a serious academic work by a serious academic which is yet complete accessible to the lay reader. That is not something that can often be said these days. My copy is an original Pelican edition; it says a lot, which Professor Hoggart would no doubt have had something to say about, that there are no more Pelicans and the lay reader is now treated with less respect; today's equivalent would be presented by a celebrity in the way that those old learned television documentary series by Jacob Bronowski and Kenneth Clark have been displaced by excitable comedians. I'm not sure that this doesn't reinforce what the book has to say.

[Jan Szczerbiuk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the source of insight I hoped it would be, not least because it is so out of date. While Hoggart's worries about the malign influence of 'mass culture' have proved well founded (certainly to the extent that the working classes have not followed an upward path of intellectual and cultural improvement - I cite the Daily Mail, X-Factor and Brexit) his 1957 analysis couldn't take in the effects (some good, some bad) of future phenomena such as mass immigration and the internet (to name but two). Coincidentally the New Statesman a couple of weeks ago ran an article on The Uses Of Literacy which quoted Hoggart as saying that the world it describes no longer exists and that the tone of the book was puritanical. I would agree.

[Ade Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This gave my life foundation. Hoggart and Raymond Williams, then later on Eagleton, helped a confused working class boy negotiate an understanding of culture and identity, power and ideology, values and a faith in the benevolent heart. I reread it last year. It has still its voice that supported and supports me.

[Romany · Rating 4 out of 5]

So that’s where “Death Cab for Cutie” came from!

[Grant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wrily, self-deprecatingly amusing in patches. Sometimes fascinating glimpses of the bygone. All too often, however, tediously moralistic.

[Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting read.

[Sofia · Rating 3 out of 5]

un poco wtf sinceramente la gente escribe sobre cualquier basura aunq interesante ig

[Eilidh Mulroy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought this was really interesting but slightly put me in a slump from the intense wording. It was so intriguing to understand the context of the post war life in Britain and I was hocked. The values and attitudes also but sometimes got slightly too therotical and I could not focus or understand. Overall good, will come back too when in the right mindset.

[Paul Taylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have read the first part of the three parts of this book and have severe misgivings that I will throw it out of the window before I finish it. At the same time last year I was reading Leon Trotsky's monumental history of the Russian Revolution aswell as the critically revilved Mein Kampf. I can tell you I had a lot more enjoyment reading those two than this monumental (and it only feels monumental) pile of self indulgent drivel. I have just completed a legthy chapter on pub and club songs. Hoggart could have said all that was worth saying in his book in a decent 5,000 word essay. Instead he rambles on ad nauseum recounting (as in the case of the most recent chapter) titles of the sentimental, mawkish songs that were popular in Northern pubs and working men's clubs and to what purpose? To impress us with the number of lousy song titles he can remember? I'd sooner read a list of post codes for a city I will never visit. I pity anyone whoever had to proof read this meandering reminisence or worse still having to sit next to him at supper (sorry, Northern parlance being de rigeur, meat tea) and listen to him wittering on. Do not be fooled by the publisher's puff this is the most boring book you could possibly pick up.

Hoggart spices his text with phonetic lists of northern phrases, all phonetically mis-spelt and wthout an h in sight (as Orwell succintly referenced in the Road to Wigan Pier).

I have so rarely failed to finish a book but this one could be the exception to my rule. It is only my dogged northern heritage that will enable me to soldier on. I am not going to let Hoggart grind me down.

[Sophy H · Rating 2 out of 5]

I agree with Paul Taylor's review. I found this pithy, dour and stereotypical. The portrayal of life in the North at the time of my parents is quite depressing, all the girls should be looking to get married and have babies! Er......
Thankfully time has marched on and progress has moved us on from fishwives with their weekly "allowance" from "our dad". I'm sure my parents would read this and be rubbing their hands in glee at the "back in my day things were better" scenario described. I couldn't get into it, it was repetitive, boring, sour, painful and depressing! I gave up after a few chapters. Psh 😵😖🙈

[Julio César · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book, really mind-broadening. It's amazing to realize how much things have changed since Hoggart's time, in some ways, buy how little in others.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, as some reviewers have said, this book is old fashioned. However, it is still relevant for two reasons.
1. It shows how people behaved and thought in the 50s. It is told anecdotally and in a style different from scientific writing today but that is because is a product of its time which again makes it interesting.
2. The author is prescient. In the second half of the book he describes/predicts trends we are worried about today including: anti-intellectualism, the decline of newspapers, the increase in personalization and reduction of fact in news, and the reduction of tolerance/freedom into something that on the surface looks the same but in reality conscripts us to one way of thought only - a mind "open for its own sake and broad enough not to require disagreement with anyone". (I found him very quotable and occasionally hilarious when he was describing something he particularly didn't like e.g. " juke box boys" are unlikely to have relationships as "it requires more management of their own personalities and more meeting with other personalities than they can compass". A last point (until I think of more, I found him very quotable) is his explanation of the moral abrogation of newspapers/news outlets that continues today: " the General Council of the Press seems readier to indicate the responsibility of readers for thee present quantitative and qualitative changes [in standards of reporting, comment, and layout] in the Press than to analyse the nature of Press responsibility"

[Brian Gowthorpe · Rating 4 out of 5]

RH died this year and since this was such a famous book, which I had never got round to reading, I decided to make it my first ebook. It works well in electronic format and the indexing is impressive. It is dated and, as he says, is a curious book in that it started off as a textbook and became much more: a memoir and polemic. He had come to be very anxious about mass culture and the commercial drivers behind it. The alarm at the Teddy Boys in coffee bars was a little surprising, given that it kept them out of the pub. His own fervour for culture in the sense of the best and finest is touching, as is the poignancy of being apart as the scholarship boy. An interview in 1990 as a postscript is interesting: his views remained very strong. It is easy to see why his son Simon decided to plough his own furrow. I decided to read it partly because of my tail end involvement in the WEA when I worked at the British Library in 1973-74. It was so important for Hoggart to demonstrate that many working-class people were just as intelligent as their economic superiors.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm told this is a classic in the field of cultural studies - taking the baton from George Orwell and his ground-breaking essays on Boys' Weeklies and running with it across the media. It's well-written, which isn't, as a rule, something something you can say often about a Sociologist. You can't complain 'it's dated', since all books date. By all rights this should merit a rating of 4 stars...yet there is still this nameless thing that seems absent holding it down.

I don't quite agree with 'popular' being distinct from 'mass', either - something that's popular by very definition has reached a mass of people.

[Alexa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read a lot of histories and nonfiction, so I've read my share of academic style texts, but this was much more academic than I was expecting. My current obsession is the history of the British working class in the 20th century, and this book was referenced a lot in my other readings. It truly was not what I was expecting. I would estimate there was about 30 pages total of truly interesting material, and the rest was a lot of referencing old cliches and ramblings that made my eyes glaze over.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the topic of this book completely fascinating. Many concepts I already knew but this book got those little wheels in my head turning. It is one of those book that I will be thinking about for a while .

[Christopher Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was 65 years old last year and examines a time most of us would not recognise any more, though even in 1957 Hoggart speculated that the classes were merging into one, influenced by the emerging mass media.

[Amy Carver · Rating 2 out of 5]

This made me want to bang my head against a table far too frequently. I agree entirely with Sinfield's problems with it as a typical 'left culturist' text.. Nonetheless, it was useful for showing the anxiety around the activities of working-class families in the immediate post-war period.

[Patrick Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frustratingly inconsistent and inevitably dated, but at it's best brilliant.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Paul Edward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. explains so much about modern culture and the very loose class structure that remains in the UK today. 60 years later and it's still relevant.

[Mr. Davies]

After years of teaching Richard Rodriguez's "The Achievement of Desire" chapter, I requested Hoggart from the library. I did not make it through the book.

[Molly Furnival · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm struggling with this one a bit. It is quite dated and patronising.

The interview at the end from 1990 gives really helpful context. I suggest reading the interview and then dipping into the book.

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and looking back, 60 years on, the reader can see how Hoggart was simultaneously right and wrong. We may now have a “hedonistic-group-individualism", but the things Hoggart criticises: TV, American music, jukebox boys, gangster novels, now seem benign, some have been critically reassessed, and he doesn't foresee the future youth culture formed from the English working class, but influenced by the US. I'm not a fan of e.g. the Beatles, but I can see that they are better than the club singers that Hoggart admires purely (it seems) because they were part of his culture growing up. He criticises the stratification of culture – Elgar for the snobs, music-halls for the yobs, but doesn't see that there could be worth in the new youth culture. On the other hand, when he describes trivial mass culture, I can only think of X Factor, Fifty Shades, the “warm diarrhoea” of mainstream comedians, Heat magazine, Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, the appalling tabloids*; everything that is dumbed down for the consumption by the masses. Although he effectively invented cultural studies, Hoggart didn't foresee the mingling of cultures, that Beyonce could be a proposal for an MA thesis, that educated people would enjoy Eurovision, that one can read James Joyce and watch Coronation Street.

* “We will pay handsomely that man who gives some release to our sense of inferiority by expressing himself violently in print on what we all hate.” Katie Hopkins, anyone? Hoggart goes on to say: “It seems to me evident that most our popular journals have become a good deal worse during the last fifteen or twenty years”. Plus ca change and all that.

He criticises the middle class for their patronising portrayals of the working class: horny handed sons of toil, the common sense ideals, the honest worker, but his own assessment strays very near to condescension: “The group works against the idea of change. It does more than this: it imposes on its members an extensive and sometimes harsh pressure to conform”. He comments on working class ways of spending money – on a new ornament, for example, rather than replacing the worn bed sheets. Or his main topic: that the working class are more susceptible to mass culture because of their uneducated, tolerant gullibility; because they work hard and for little money and want entertainment and pleasure, they will mop up anything they're offered.

Some working class cultural things he describes sound familiar (e.g. naughty seaside postcards), but others have passed into history: “The rituals of the Buffs and Odd Fellows. The new clothes bought for children on Whit Sunday”. There were also things I recognised in myself; the “working class speeches and manners in conversation are more abrupt, less provided with emollient phrases than other groups....I find that even now I have to modify a habit of carrying on a discussion on an 'unlubricated' way”.

Nowadays, it seems that politicians have to bring forth anecdotes from their family life and put “husband, father” in their twitter bios, but Hoggart claims it from 60 years ago: “Every tycoon, major or politician is at bottom 'homely' and ordinary, fond of his pipe, of his chair at the fireside, and of his visit to the football match”. Depending on whether he can remember which football team, he supports, of course.

I found his style quite difficult, he is not the clearest of writers, e.g. “A writer who is himself from the working classes has his own temptations to error, somewhat different from but no less than those of a writer from anther class”. If the book was meant to be accessible, he needed to write more clearly than this. He also overuses the 'apostrophe' so that everything starts to sound 'sarcastic'. In fact, if this is reported speech, it should be in “quotation marks”.

[Rumimi · Rating 2 out of 5]

un peu dépassé car s'intéresse aux pratiques culturelles des classes populaires de l'angleterre des années 1950. Certains trucs restent pertinents. L'idée que les pauvres achètent souvent des objets dits futiles à un prix trop grand, s'attirant ainsi les foudres des classes supérieures, mais ce sont des objets qui ont tous une valeur sociale, de rassemblement, d'appartenance ; ils entretiennent le collectif cher aux catégories populaires (ex télévision)