570
THOMAS R. EDWARDS
CULTURE AND ITS USES
SPEAKING TO EACH OTHER. Vol. I: About Society; Vol. II: About Liter–
ature.
By
Richard Hoggart. Oxford Univ. Press. Vol. I. $6.50. Vol. II. $7.50.
In 1957 Richard Hoggart's
The Uses of Literacy
impressively
helped one see what was at stake in the difficult and uncertain redefin–
ing of politics and manners Britain had been attempting in the decade
since the war and Labour's coming of age in the general election of
1945. It was not, however, a visibly political book. For Hoggart the
transformation in working-class life was mainly a matter of "culture,"
changes of style - including styles of consciousness - and not of pol–
itical identity or modes of action; and in this outlook he was supported
by his training in disinterest as a literary critic and by his own origins
in the working class, which in England (as he notes) has traditionally
found little to value or trust in the bourgeois mechanisms of practical
politics and civic participation. Through critical analysis of newspapers,
books, popular songs and the like, he sought to show how mass media,
which of course must continually be
creating
the mass they purport to
address, were altering the thinking and behavior of working-class people
as he had known them in his youth.
But
The Uses of Literacy
had considerably more force as a per–
sonal document, a way of imagining the meaning of Hoggart's own social
experience, than as an "objective" analysis of particular cultural phen–
omena. In 1957 there was no McLuhan, apart from
The Mechanical
Bride,
which Hoggart had read but made no direct use of; Raymond
Williams's
Culture and Society
was yet to come; with some important
exceptions like the Leavises and Orwell (writing however from social
positions and assumptions distant from Hoggart's own) and Lawrence,
who had obviously taught him a lot, the study of popular culture with
the instruments of modem literary criticism had not yet burgeoned into
the massive enterprise it became in the sixties.
The Uses of Literacy
it–
self was a major stimulus to that enterprise, but its ways of analyzing the
media-environment of working-class people now seem rather improvisa–
tional and sketchy. Yet the book has a quality that no sophisticated
methodology could have earned, and that quality derives from Hog–
gart's fully experienced grasp of the conditions and tone of working–
class life, his loving skepticism about its own sense of itself and his under-
