The Uses of Literacy, by Richard Hoggart

In the early 1950s, 30-year-old university lecturer Richard Hoggart (father of Simon, brilliant political sketch-writer from The Guardian) started writing a book rooted in his 'northern urban working-class' childhood (in Leeds), that he thought about calling The Abuses of Literacy. He changed it to The Uses of Literacy so as to sound less confrontational, and had to change parts of the contents so as to avoid possible libel charges. However, the result was published in 1957 and 54 years later I read it, appreciated it, and marvelled at how much is still relevant.

I was wary of mentioning it on my blog because part of me doesn't want anyone to read it - then I figured I don't have much influence and few people would find it an interesting topic for their leisure hours so I needn't worry about a stampede. The reason for my mixed feelings is that in the wrong hands (i.e. those of anyone not born into northern working-class families) it could become a kind of anthropological study of peculiar speech, attitudes and customs, a kind of sneering affirmation of superiority on the part of the reader. When I read it, I found myself thinking 'that's a bit harsh' occasionally, then realising I'd said almost the same thing plenty of times myself, usually for OneMonkey to reply 'that's a bit harsh' - but for me, as for Richard Hoggart, there's a mixture of exasperation that comes from looking closely from the outside, and affection for and/or understanding of the relatives and family friends looking back.

Hoggart set out to write a textbook about mass culture, by which he seemed to mean newspapers (newly-sensationalised), magazines (with pin-ups and short attention-span), cheap paperbacks (badly-written and full of sex and violence) etc and the habit of reading among a class of people who had more education as a basic background than their predecessors, but didn't appear to be much better off for it. He then wrote the first half of the book (a summing up of recent or current attitudes in the northern urban working classes) to set his ideas in context. He seems to wander off-topic a fair bit and I must admit I didn't follow all of his arguments, which is due in part to some of the contemporary references. I can say now a Sun-reader, a Guardian-reader, and conjure up in my own and other (British) people's minds an idea of the sort of background or attitude I mean by that (it will be stereotypical, and in many instances unfair, but it's a handy shorthand and a useful generalisation in some contexts, including as advertising targets, which Hoggart also covers) - but I have no idea what The Listener was like or who it was aimed at, I know nothing about any of the radio programmes he mentions (TV hadn't really taken off at the time) and even the distinction between types of paper-shop is lost on me. However, there is enough of endurance there that I get the general gist.

OneMonkey has noted how many conversations in the last couple of weeks I've chipped in with 'it's funny you should say that because in this Hoggart book...' and I do find it fascinating (and also quite depressing) that so little has changed in some areas; in the introduction to the 2009 edition Lynsey Hanley (a politically informed writer a couple of years older than me) says 'no reader two generations younger than Hoggart should gasp in recognition at his descriptions of growing up...Yet, despite the social and economic transformations that have taken place since its publication in 1957, there are thousands who do.'

Talking to OneMonkey about this book reminds me how different our views are on this kind of thing. OneMonkey sees the worth or value of culture as largely subjective (I'm not sure I agree, but I'd be hard pushed to say where worth lies - see my occasional disparaging comments on Dickens and Shakespeare), and if hard-working people with jobs that give them little satisfaction want to come home and read easy to digest escapism about sex and adventure, who am I to say that's trash? Not everyone wants to read history textbooks for fun, or even multi-layered novels with complex characters. And anyway, some of the sci-fi and fantasy I read would be seen as trash by those with even greater intellectual snobbery than me. OneMonkey also argues, and here I do agree with him, that it's not a class divide any more (if it ever was) - the middle classes watch X-Factor just as much as anyone else does, it's just that they're more likely to have some kind of hypocritical guilt going on. In the same way, they're more likely to use the argument 'at least I read'. Why is it intrinsically more worthy to read a cheap paperback romance than to watch with keen interest a BBC4 programme on human rights, for instance? They read, therefore they don't have to examine their reading-material or opinions because they're automatically better than you. Dangerous thinking.

Maybe what it comes down to is a misplaced emphasis, or one that's no longer relevant. It's thinking that matters (if, like Richard Hoggart and I, you think any of this matters), not reading, surely. If you never read a book or magazine from one year to the next, but listen to the radio, watch TV or discuss things with friends and colleagues and think matters through for yourself (even if you argue yourself round in the end to the position that everyone else you know holds) isn't that better (by which I mean more indicative of some hope for humanity) than reading the papers every day, accepting what they say, and parrotting back their opinions when asked for your own (and I'm as guilty on occasion of quoting Private Eye or The Guardian as other people are of quoting papers I'm sniffy about)? Of course you may think that it doesn't much matter either way, most people have no real say in major aspects of their lives, and deep thought and political awareness just lead to depression and a feeling of hopelessness. But if you've reached that position by weighing it all up for yourself, then we're both happy. In a manner of speaking.