The Uses of Literacy

Richard Hoggart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351302029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Alfabetización

This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing.

Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.

Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed.

In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.

Part I

An Older’ Order

Chapter I
Who are ‘The Working-Classes’?

A. Questions of Approach

IT is often said that there are no working-classes in England now, that a ‘bloodless revolution’ has taken place which has so reduced social differences that already most of us inhabit an almost flat plain, the plain of the lower middle- to middle-classes. I can see the truth in such a statement, within its proper contexts, and do not wish to under-estimate the extent or the value of many recent social changes. To appreciate afresh the scope of these changes as they affect working-class people in particular, we need only read again a social survey or a few novels from, say, the turn of the century. We are likely to be struck by the extent to which working-class people have not only improved their lot, acquired more power and more possessions, but especially by the degree to which they no longer feel themselves members of ‘the lower orders’, with a sense of other classes, each above them and each superior in the way the world judges. Some of this remains, but it has been greatly reduced.

In spite of these changes, attitudes alter more slowly than we always realise, as the first half of this book seeks to show. Attitudes alter slowly, but obviously a great number of complex forces are bringing about changes here too : the second half of this book discusses some ways in which a change, towards a culturally ‘classless’ society, is being brought about.

It will be necessary to define rather more specifically what I mean by ‘the working-classes’, but difficulties of definition are less troublesome than are those of avoiding the romanticisms which tempt anyone who discusses ‘the workers’ or ‘the common people’, and these romanticisms deserve to be mentioned first. For they increase the danger of over-stressing the admirable qualities of earlier working-class culture and its debased condition today. The two over-emphases tend to reinforce each other, and so the contrast is often exaggerated. We may have serious doubts about the quality of working-class life today, and especially about the speed with which it may seem to deteriorate. But some of the more debilitating invitations have been successful only because they have been able to appeal to established attitudes which were not wholly admirable; and though the contemporary ills which particularly strike an observer from outside certainly exist, their effects are not always as considerable as a diagnosis from outside would suggest, if only because working-class people still possess some older and inner resistances.

No doubt such an over-emphasis is often inspired by a strong admiration for the potentialities of working-class people and a consequent pity for their situation. Related to it is a more positive over-expectation which one frequently finds among middle-class intellectuals with strong social consciences. Some people of this kind have for a long time tended to see every second working-class man as a Felix Holt or a Jude the Obscure. Perhaps this is because most of the working-class people they have known closely have been of an unusual and self-selected kind, and in special circumstances, young men and women at Summer Schools and the like, exceptional individuals whom the chance of birth has deprived of their proper intellectual inheritance, and who have made remarkable efforts to gain it. Naturally, I do not intend in any way to limit their importance as individuals. They are exceptional, in their nature untypical of working-class people; their very presence at Summer Schools, at meetings of learned societies and courses of lectures, is the result of a moving-away from the landscape which the majority of their fellows inhabit without much apparent strain. They would be exceptional people in any class : they reveal less about their class than about themselves.

From the pity—‘How fine they would be if only . . .’, to the praise—‘How fine they are simply because ..: here we encounter pastoral myths and ‘Wife of Bath’ admirations. The working-classes are at bottom in excellent health—so the pastoral descriptions run—in better health than other classes; rough and unpolished perhaps, but diamonds nevertheless; rugged, but ‘of sterling worth’ : not refined, not intellectual, but with both feet on the ground; capable of a good belly-laugh, charitable and forthright. They are, moreover, possessed of a racy and salty speech, touched with wit, but always with its hard grain of common sense. These over-emphases vary in strength, from the slight over-stressing of the quaint aspects of working-class life to be found in many major novelists to the threadbare fancies of popular contemporary writers. How many major English writers are there who do not, however slightly, over-emphasise the salty features of working-class life ? George Eliot does so, unusually brilliant though her observation of workers is; and the bias is more evident in Hardy. When we come to our own much more consciously manipulative times, we meet the popular novelists’ patronisingly flattered little men with their flat caps and flat vowels, their well-scrubbed wives with well-scrubbed doorsteps; fine stock—and amusing too ! Even a writer as astringent and seemingly unromantic as George Orwell never quite lost the habit of seeing the working-classes through the cosy fug of an Edwardian music-hall. There is a wide range of similar attitudes running down to the folksy ballyhoo of the Sunday columnists, the journalists who always remember to quote with admiration the latest bon-mot of their pub-pal ‘Alf’. They have to be rejected more forcefully, I think, because there is an element of truth in what they say and it is a pity to see it inflated for display.

Again, one has sometimes to be cautious of the interpretations given by historians of the working-class movement. The subject is fascinating and moving; there is a vast amount of important and inspiring material about working-class social and political aspirations. But it is easy for a reader to be led into at least a half-assumption that these are histories of the working-classes rather than, primarily, histories of the activities—and the valuable consequences for almost every member of the working-classes—of a minority. Probably the authors would specifically claim no more for them, and these aims are important enough. But from such books I do sometimes bring away an impression that their authors overrate the place of political activity in working-class life, that they do not always have an adequate sense of the grass-roots of that life.

A middle-class Marxist’s view of the working-classes often includes something of each of the foregoing errors. He pities the betrayed and debased worker, whose faults he sees as almost entirely the result of the grinding system which controls him. He admires the remnants of the noble savage, and has a nostalgia for those ‘best of all’ kinds of art, rural folk-art or genuinely popular urban art, and a special enthusiasm for such scraps of them as he thinks he can detect today. He pities and admires the Jude-the-Obscure aspect of working-people. Usually, he succeeds in part-pitying and part-patronising working-class people beyond any semblance of reality.

It is some novels, after all, that may bring us really close to the quality of working-class life—such a novel as Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, at least, rather than more popular or more consciously proletarian fiction. And so, in their own way, do some of the detailed surveys of working-class life which sociologists have made during the last twenty years. These books convey powerfully the complex and claustrophobic impression which working-class life can make on an observer who tries to know it in all its concreteness. I mean the impression of being immersed in an endless forest, full of the most minute detail, all of it different and yet all of it similar; a great mass of faces and habits and actions, yet most of them apparently not very meaningful. The impression seems to me both right and wrong : right in that it indicates the sprawling and multitudinous and infinitely detailed character of working-class life, and the sense—often depressing to an outsider—of an immense uniformity, of always being part of a huge and seething crowd of people, all very similar even in the most important and individual matters. I think such an impression is wrong if it leads us to construct an image of working-class people only from adding together the variety of statistics given in some of these sociological works, from the numbers who do this or do not do that, from the percentage who said that they believe in God, or who thought free-love was ‘alright in its way’. A sociological survey may or may not assist us here, but clearly we have to try to see beyond the habits to what the habits stand for, to see through the statements to what the statements really mean (which may be the opposite of the statements themselves), to detect the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.

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 another class. I am from the working-classes and feel even now both close to them and apart from them. In a few more years this double relationship may not, I suppose, be so apparent to me; but it is bound to affect what I say. It may help me to come nearer to giving a felt sense of working-class life, to avoid some of an outsider’s more obvious risks of misinterpretation. On the other hand, this very emotional involvement presents considerable dangers. Thus it seems to me that the changes described in the second half of this book are, so far, tending to cause the working-classes to lose, culturally, much that was valuable and to gain less than their new situation should have allowed. To the extent that I can judge the matter objectively, that is my belief. Yet in writing I found myself constantly having to resist a strong inner pressure to make the old much more admirable than the new, and the new more to be condemned, than my conscious understanding of the material gave me grounds for. Presumably some kind of nostalgia was colouring the material in advance : I have done what I could to remove its effects.

In both halves of the book I discovered a tendency in myself, because the subject is so much part of my origins and growth, to be unwarrantedly sharp towards those features in working-class life of which I disapprove. Related to this is the urge to lay one’s ghosts; at the worst, it can be a temptation to ‘do down’ one’s class, out of a pressing ambiguity in one’s attitudes to it. Conversely, I found a tendency to over-value those features in working-class life of which I approve, and this tempted towards a sentimentality, a romanticising of my background, as though I were subconsciously saying to my present acquaintance—see, in spite of all, such a childhood is richer than yours.

A writer has to meet these dangers as he can and in the very process of writing, as he struggles to find out what it is that he truly has to say. I suppose it is unlikely that he will ever quite succeed. But his reader is in a luckier position, like Marlowe’s hearers in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness :

Of course in this you fellows see more than I could see. You see me.

The reader sees what is intended to be said and also, from tone, from the unconscious emphases and the rest, he comes to know the man saying it.

B. A Rough Definition

In deciding who would be ‘the working-classes’ for the purposes of this survey my problem, as I saw it, was this : the mass publications from which I draw most of my evidence affect far more than those working-class groups of which I have a close knowledge; in fact, in so far as they tend to be ‘classless’ publications, they affect all classes in society. But in order to discuss the way in which these publications affect attitudes, and to avoid the vagueness which almost inevitably results from talking about ‘the common people’, it was necessary to find a focus. I have therefore taken one fairly homogeneous group of working-class people, have tried to evoke the atmosphere, the quality, of their lives by describing their setting and their attitudes. Against this background may be seen how the much more generally diffused appeals of the mass publications connect with commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes and how they are meeting resistance. Unless I am much mistaken, the attitudes described in this first part will be sufficiently shared by many other groups which go to make up ‘the common people’, to give the analysis a wider relevance. In particular, many of the attitudes I describe as ‘working-class’ might also be attributed to what are often called the ‘lower middle-classes’. I cannot see how this kind of overlapping is to be avoided, and hope readers will feel, as I do, that it does not weaken the main lines of my argument.

The setting and the evidence as to attitudes are drawn mainly from experience in the urban North, from a childhood during the ‘twenties and ‘thirties and an almost continuous if somewhat different kind of contact since then.

I admitted earlier that working-class people probably do not feel themselves to be members of a ‘lower’ group as strongly as they did a generation or two ago. Yet those I have in mind still to a considerable extent retain a sense of being in a group of their own, and this without there being necessarily implied any feeling of inferiority or pride; they feel rather that they are ‘working-class’ in the things they admire and dislike, in ‘belonging’. Such a distinction does not go far, but it is important; others may be added, none of them definitive but each of them helping to give the greater degree of definition which is needed.

The ‘working-classes’ described here live in districts such as Hunslet (Leeds), Ancoats (Manchester), Brightside and Attercliffe (Sheffield), and off the Hessle and Holderness Roads (Hull). My fullest experience is of those who live in the miles of smoking and huddled working-class houses in Leeds. Such people have their own recognisable parts of the towns; they have, almost city by city, their own recognisable styles of housing—back-to-backs here or tunnel-backs there; their houses are usually rented, not owned. They are increasingly being moved on to the new estates now, but this does not seem to me at present to affect strongly my main contentions as to their attitudes.

Most of the employed inhabitants of these areas work for a wage, not a salary, and the wage is paid weekly : most have no other sources of income. Some are self-employed; they may keep a small shop for members of the group to which, culturally, they belong or supply a service to the group, for example as a ‘cobbler’, ‘barber’, ‘grocer’, ‘bike-mender’ or ‘cast-off clothing dealer’. One cannot firmly distinguish workers from others by the amount of money earned, since there are enormous variations in wages among working-class people; and most steel-workers, for instance, are plainly working-class though some earn more than many teachers who are not. But I suppose that in most of the families described here a wage of about £9 or £10 a week for the chief wage-earner, at 1954 rates, would be regarded as roughly normal.

Most of them were educated at what ought now to be called a secondary morden school, but is still popularly known as ‘elementary’ school. In occupation they are usually labourers, skilled or unskilled, or craftsmen and perhaps apprentice-trained. This loose boundary includes, therefore, men who do what used to be called ‘navvying’ and other outdoor manual work, commercial and public transport workers, men and girls on routine jobs in factories, as well as skilled tradesmen, from plumbers to those who perform the more difficult tasks in heavy industries. Foremen are included, but office-clerks and employees in large shops, though they may live in these areas, are on the whole better regarded as members of the lower middle-classes.

Since this essay is concerned with cultural change, my main means of definition will be less tangible features of a working-class way of life than those named above. Speech will indicate a great deal, in particular the host of phrases in common use. Manners of speaking, the use of urban dialects, accents and intonations, could probably indicate even more. There is the cracked but warmhearted voice, slightly spitting through all-too-regular false teeth, of some women in their forties. The comedians often adopt it; it suggests a heart which, without illusions or regrets about life, is nevertheless in the right place. There is a husky voice which I have often heard, and heard only there, among working-class girls of the rougher sort; it is known among the more ‘respectable’ working-classes as a ‘common’ voice. But unfortunately, I have not sufficient knowledge to pursue this examination of manners of speaking.

Cheap mass-produced clothing has reduced the immediately recognisable differences between classes, but not as greatly as many think. A Saturday-night crowd leaving the cinemas in the city centre may look superficially one. A closer glance from an expert of either sex, from a middle-class woman or a man particularly conscious of clothes, will usually be sufficient even nowadays for them to ‘place’ most people around them.

There are thousands of other items from daily experience which, as will be seen, help to distinguish this recognisably working-class life, such as the habit of paying out money in small instalments over month after month; or the fact that, for as long as anyone except the old can now remember, almost every worker has been on the ‘panel’ at the local doctor’s, and so on.

To isolate the working-classes in this rough way is not to forget the great number of differences, the subtle shades, the class distinctions, within the working-classes themselves. To the inhabitants there is a fine range of distinctions in prestige from street to street. Inside the single streets there are elaborate differences of status, of ‘standing’, between the houses themselves; this is a slightly better house because it has a separate kitchen, or is at the terrace end, has a bit of a yard, and is rented at ninepence a week more. There are differences of grade between the occupants; this family is doing well because the husband is a skilled man and there is a big order in at the works; the wife here is a good manager and very houseproud, whereas the one opposite is a slattern; these have been a ‘Hunslet family’ for generations, and belong to the hereditary aristocracy of the neighbourhood.

To some extent there is, also, a hierarchy of specialisation in any group of streets. This man is known to be something of a ‘scholar’ and has a bound set of encyclopedias which he will always gladly refer to when asked; another is a good ‘penman’ and very helpful at filling in forms; another is particularly ‘good with his hands’, in wood or metal or as a general repairer; this woman is expert at fine needlework and will be called in on special occasions. All these are group services before they are professional services, even though some of the workers may be professionally engaged on the same work during the day. This kind of specialisation seemed, though, to be dying out in the large urban working-class centres I knew even when I was a boy. A friend who knows well the smaller West Riding urban working-class centres (such as Keighley, Bingley and Heckmondwike) thinks it is still quite strong there.

Yet one may fairly make generalisations about attitudes without implying that everyone in the working-classes believes or does this or this about work or marriage or religion. (Perhaps I should add here that my experience is of predominantly Protestant areas.) The implication of my generalisations throughout the book is rather that this or this is what most working-class people assume should be believed or done about such matters. I am writing particularly of the majority who take their lives much as they find them, and in that way are not different from the majority in other classes; of what some trade union leaders, when they are regretting a lack of interest in their movement, call ‘the vast apathetic mass’; of what song-writers call, by way of compliment, ‘just plain folk’; of what the working-classes themselves describe, more soberly, as ‘the general run of people’. Within that majority there is obviously a very wide range of attitudes, and yet there is a centre at which a great number of people are represented.

It follows that I shall give less attention to, for example, the purposive, the political, the pious and the self-improving minorities in the working-classes. This is not because I underrate their value but because the appeals made by the mass publicists are not primarily to their kinds of mind. Nor is the amount of attention which I give to different attitudes that which would be required if this ...