Richard Hoggart’s Impact on Cultural Studies and Literacy
Theme 3: Richard Hoggart and Culturalism
Culturalism is a school of thought that includes the works of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams. It emphasizes the study of culture as being of crucial importance for a full sociological and historical understanding of a given social formation. Hoggart’s contribution to cultural studies is usually reduced to two very important facts: the publication of his book, The Uses of Literacy (1957), and his founding of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in 1964. The CCCS provided an important context in which scholars could be trained and in which something like a cultural studies group identity could evolve. Looking back to the publication of his book, it helped to establish Hoggart as a major voice in discussions of the media and popular culture. The title of his book has a lot to do with the extension of obligatory education in Britain; for this reason, the title is so significant.
Hoggart, unlike the Leavises, was brought up in a working-class family in Leeds, so he was able to give an ‘insider view’ of communal working-class urban life, consciousness, culture, and experience. He was interested in how mass literacy impacted the lives of working people: that is, how people used this ability and whether it was being used for positive or negative ends. The task he set himself was to study how the appeals of the mass publications connect with commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. His book actually goes beyond the uses of literacy to consider many other aspects of working-class life.
Hoggart’s Analysis in *The Uses of Literacy*
The first thing he does in The Uses of Literacy is to reflect on how the working class may be defined. In his book, he offered a detailed description and discussed the meaning of everyday events in the lives of working-class people. Just as the Leavises applied the methods of close reading to mass culture, Hoggart offered close readings of popular music, newspapers, magazines, and fiction, without necessarily condemning them in the process. In fact, working-class life could be ‘a full rich life’. What made Hoggart different from the Leavises, and what allowed him to offer a detailed description of working-class people, is his childhood. He was brought up in a working-class family in Leeds, so he was able to give an insider view of working-class urban life. His work was written about the working classes by a man from the working classes who could draw on valuable personal knowledge to challenge the rather more simplistic versions of the working class offered by the Scrutiny Circle.
However, the working class is not a watertight concept because there could be some overlap between the richer working families and the lower middle-classes. He argued also that different working-class groups distinguished themselves from others. Another important thing he does in his book is that he concentrated on the working-class culture of the 1920s and 1930s and compared it with the contemporary mass culture of the 1950s.
Hoggart’s Approach
Hoggart’s way of understanding working-class life is reminiscent of approaches associated with the social sciences like Anthropology and Ethnography.