The Uses of Literacy, by Richard Hoggart

[p032] The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart (Chatto and Windus, 1957, 25s.) THIS BOOK has already received an enthusiastic welcome from the progressive Press and it is easy to see why. One reason is that it is so well written that reviewers are tempted to read it from cover to cover. Your present reviewer, having tasted the apple, eagerly wolfed the lot—core and all. Some hours later, however, a certain emotional gnawing led me to ask myself what were the specific causes of the book’s indiges- tibility. It was then that I saw what was wrong—Hoggart ts a liberal idealist and liberal idealists are excellent at discovering social diseases but have no effective therapy. In the Preface, Hoggart states his aims. “This book is about changes in working-class culture during the last thirty or forty years, in particular, as being encouraged by mass publications’. On reading this opening sentence, I feared the worst. I-imagined that I had been let in for yet another of those long-winded trivialities—a sociological monograph with a plethora of useless statistics, a British version of a ‘Kinsey Report’ on the British Press. Mercifully, we are spared this ordeal by graph. Hoggart’s book is a work of significance for sociologists not so much for the ideas it propounds as much as a source book. Hoggart’s method is essentially anecdotal and even auto- biographical. Hoggart himself is a teacher in the University of Hull, having risen (if, as he himself questions in an important section Scholarship Boy, to rise is the right verb) from a working class family in Hunslet (Leeds) whose forgetting mechanisms. praise the Lord, failed to work. I myself can re- cord a sociological history almost identical with that of Hoggart—but 100 miles away from Leeds. What so fascinated me about the early chapters was Hoggart’s faithful recording of the phrases, attitudes, beliefs, which must have made me substantially what I am today. Memories long pigeon-holed but well assimilated, were jogged once again into consciousness and I was astounded to discover that Hunslet’s working-class culture is not like that of Stoke-on-Trent but practically iden- tical. I kept on saying to myself, ‘Dr. X’ (a colleague—a man of essentially South of England petit-bourgeois stock) ‘would just not comprehend this at all’, so vastly different is Hoggart’s background from his. I well recall the snob distinctions be- tween families who had tinned peaches on Sundays as against those who only (!) had pineapple chunks. Hoggart wisely recognizes some of the limitations of his method. ‘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 the outsider’s more obvious risks of misinterpretation. On the other hand, this very emotional involvement presents considerable dan- gers. 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.’ But it is not sufficient to recognize that one has an Achilles heel—it is just as important to learn how to protect it. It is this which Hoggart fails to do and which, finally, mars the book. Properly enough. Hoggart defines what he means by the word ‘working-class’. He defines it by listing a page of ‘attri- butes’. The workers live in Hunslet, Ancoats, Brightside, etc. They get a wage rather than a salary and in 1954 averaged £9 to £10 per week. If they don’t work in a mine or factory they keep a shop in the working-class districts. They are the cobbler. the grocer, the bike-mender. and so on. Summing it all up, in spite of cheap mass-produced clothes, Hoggart (and

[p033] so can most of us) can simply tell a member of the working class (or his family) by looking at him and listening to him. A constellation of attributes (some defineable, some not) separates him from middle-class and upper-class people. You will see that this is no Marxist definition but it suits admirably Hoggart’s limited purpose—though it should be re- cognized that the circular reasoning it involves proves, finally, to be Hoggart’s undefended Achilles heel. For essentially he defines workers culturally, and then investigates their culture. As a methodological too! for investigating the laws governing the growth and changes of class cultures, Hoggart’s concept of class is useless. As a schema for Hoggart’s descriptive essay it is eminently suitable. In all the fascinating and many-sided details given in Hog- gart’s description of working-class culture, we can single out one working-class ‘value’ as dominant. Let Hoggart speak for himself. ‘Certainly working-class people have a strong sense of being members of a group, and just as certainly that sense involves the assumption that it is important to be friendly, co- operative, neighbourly. “We are all in the same boat”; “it is no use fighting one another”; but ‘in unity is strength”. One’s mind goes back to the movements of the last century, to the hundreds of “friendly” societies, to the mottoes of the unions: the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, with “Be United and Industrious’’; the Provisional Committee of the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers choosing, in the late *nineties. “Love, Unity and Fidelity”. And the “Love” in the last recalls the strength which this sense of unity acquired from a Christian background. ‘The friendly group tradition seems to me to have its strength initially from the ever-present evidence, in the close, huddled, intimate conditions of life, that we are, in fact, all in the same position. You are bound to be close to people with whom, for example, you share a lavatory in a common yard. That “luv” which is still the most common form of address, and not only to people in their own class, by tram and bus conductors and by shop-keepers, is used automatically, but still indicates something. To call anyone “neighbourly” or “right sociable” is to offer a high compliment; a club may be praised because it is a “real sociable place”; the most impor- tant recommendation for lodgings or seaside ‘‘digs” is that they are “sociable”, and this outweighs overcrowding; and a church is just as likely to be weighed in the same scales. “Ar’ Elsie got married at All Saints’,” they will say, of the church they chose from several nearby. not one of which can claim them as parishioners—“‘it’s a nice friendly church’. The story of a Christmas party at the local will end, “It was a luvly night. Everybody got real friendly.” Good neighbourliness consists not just in “doing fair by each other”, but in being “obliging” or “always ready to oblige”. If the neighbours in a new area seem to lack the right kind of neighbourliness, the newcomer will insist that she “just can’t settle”.’ Hoggart gives many examples of the all-pervasiveness of this sense of one-ness felt by the working-class—an attitude which has a respectable name in the labour movement, solid- arity. The feeling of solidarity is a typical, normal working- class sentiment. It would be narrow and one-sided to imagine that these feelings of solidarity have to be specially inculcated into factory workers as part of a trade union attitude towards the boss. Without these feelings, however, trade unionism is impossible. A sense of class solidarity is inculcated and main- tained as Marx showed. by the capitalist mode of production itself as a defensive weapon against exploitation. Although this is its real source, as a moral attitude solidarity is imbibed at every working class mother’s knee. Lenin wrote that the only weapon the working class has is that of organization. What was implicit in his concept of organization was work- ing-class solidarity. It is precisely because capitalism forces the workers to develop, as a class, feelings of solidarity that we can speak of capitalism producing its own grave-diggers. Of course it is easy to sentimentalize this concept of neighbourliness and solidarity. Hoggart is able to show how far wide of the mark middle-class Marxists can be in senti- mentalizing working-class behaviour patterns. But if solidarity is the central feature of a working-class outlook on the world, where does it come from, what produces it, what sustains it and what will result from it? This is the question the socio- logist has to try to answer, but it is here that Hoggart’s method loses its validity. He expresses surprise at the slight influence mass-produced cultural media appear to have upon the young 125, people in the working-class districts just at the time when other intellectuals are complaining of the omnipotence of the printed word, radio, television and cinema. He records how strong are the oral traditions of the working class and sees that the mass media controlled by the ruling class enable the workers to lead a double sort of life, one real, the other fantastic. Moreover, the ruling class do not have full control even of these media. In the interests of mass circulation, their news- papers and magazines find it necessary to reflect to some de- gree, the attitudes of the workers. Hoggart shows this in a study of weekly magazines and popular songs. The mass cir- culation newspapers are even driven to attacking ‘them’— leading figures of society. Hoggart’s illustration, necessarily fictional, is an attack in a Sunday newspaper on the ‘Arch- prelate of Pontyholoth’ for his ‘humbug, hypocrisy, smugness and reaction’. Hoggart, however, points out that these are for the most part pseudo-attacks, empty and wordy, and belonging not to politics but to the field of entertainment. ‘When one of these papers says, “We give the facts... astounding . . .” this is not so much a statement of their atti- tude as an entertainer’s patter of the same order as ‘“‘There’s 999 nothing up my sleeve”’. Hoggart shows. however, that particularly in printed magazines there is much which is increasingly violent, sadistic and absolutely repulsive. Some of his examples taken from modern sex and violence novels are as bestial as, surely, human beings can ever think up. ‘Even the new style man and woman come together without love...as physical enemies.’ How far will these reactionary anti-humanist values, the product of the violent decay of capitalism, fare in capturing and debasing the working class as Hoggart describes them? Here Hoggart would have been helped by a grasp of dialectics, which would show him how the material conditions of exist- ence are finally dominant in shaping man’s ideas. The violent ‘Western’, seen through the eyes of a working-class boy steeped in his class sense of solidarity, becomes a different film from that which the producer had in mind. The ‘Right’ which fin- ally bands together in a posse to put down ‘Might’ is re- fracted through the prism of his mind as ‘Us’ against “Them’. Hoggart, however, has no answer to this all-important question except the ‘liberal’ answer—one which unfortunately boils down to the expression of a set of pious hopes. It is clear also that Hoggart has himself little confidence that his hopes can be realized. I would like to hazard a guess that a man like Hoggart could discover the road out of this intellec- tual trap, in which capitalism has enmeshed us all, if he were again to study Marxism. He would then discover how socialism will realize to the full the ‘uses of literacy’. ;