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A neglected history: Richard Hoggart’s discourse ofempathyMelissa Gregga The University of SydneyPublished online: 04 Jun 2010.

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DOI: 10.1080/1364252032000135265

• A R T I C L E S •

A Neglected History: Richard Hoggart’s discourse of empathy

Melissa GreggThe University of Sydney

Introduction

He doesn’t look like a professor. Looks more as if he runs a pub.1

Richard Hoggart’s career smacks of the kind of success graduate students only

fantasize about in our current, cash-stripped academic climate. Granted the

directorship of a new research centre for contemporary cultural studies

almost solely on the strength of one book – and that written in his early

thirties – Hoggart was, it may be admitted, in the right place at the right time.

But such a hasty appraisal does him a disservice. His full resumé is as diverse

as it is striking. Before achieving scholarly recognition, Hoggart served in the

Second World War with the Royal Artillery, and following the worst of the

battle, was transferred to Naples to help protect the harbour. In this, less

combative role, Hoggart had some spare time to form the Three Arts Club

for the Allied Forces, the intention of which was to provide a space for

servicemen to share artistic and literary ideas. Hoggart collected and edited

the best of the soldiers’ writing and also taught part-time at the University of

Naples. On returning home, these interests were extended by tutoring adult

education classes for many years. This position brought the majority of

Hoggart’s political anxieties to the fore. In 1960 he appeared for the defence

of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at its Crown trial, and for two years served on

the Pilkington Committee into the future of British broadcasting. After a stint

as Senior Lecturer in English at Leicester University, Hoggart was only then

appointed as the first Director of the Birmingham School for Contemporary

Cultural Studies, which would become his most celebrated educational role.

Hoggart left Birmingham to become Assistant Director General at UNESCO

for five years, in France, and only retired after eight years as a committed

Warden of Goldsmiths’ College at the University of London, Deptford.

Throughout these varied roles, Hoggart remained loyal to two great

passions: the effects of social change and its particular relation to education.

His more than twenty books draw together essays and lectures given, usually

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by invitation, on many public occasions over the years. For cultural studies,

and its preoccupation with engaged intellectual work (Hall 1980a, 1980b,

1992), Hoggart remains instructive for the way his academic concerns

remained pertinent to the quotidian reality of his constituent community.

Hoggart felt no compulsion to privilege academic work over any other;

rather, he experimented with a number of different environments in which to

enact a political project. Hoggart brought a certain modesty to discussions of

culture that suffered no delusions of the possibilities an insular form of

academicism can claim. He became very much involved in the situation he

sought to effect, which is precisely the way his breakthrough work came

about.

I want to look in detail here at the particular way The Uses of Literacywas written, with its amalgam of apparent recollections and personal obser-

vations. The style is commonly thought symptomatic of early experience, as

Andrew Goodwin’s American introduction surmises (Goodwin 1990: xiii),

or, in earlier appraisals, it is seen as a manifestation of ‘subjective impres-

sions, largely based on childhood memories’ (Thompson 1959: 53). In each

case this experiential dimension is considered inferior to the sobriety of a

more obviously sociological approach. That experience or memory may be

used as a means to base an argument is assumed to be troublesome due to its

inevitable bias, its rose-coloured lens. Cultural studies’ development has been

characterized, however, precisely by this kind of writing of the self, the

voicing of one’s formative environment to provide the material for pressing

critical inquiry. As Elspeth Probyn has demonstrated for the history of

cultural studies, this speaking the self is unquestionably a form of intellectual

practice:

The self is an ensemble of techniques and practices enacted on an everyday basisand entails the necessary problematization of these practices. The self is notsimply put forward, but rather it is reworked in its enunciation . . . culturalstudies and feminism offer the necessary elements needed to think theimmediacy of theory – of thinking the social through my self . . . the tools withwhich to think through the pleasures and pains of being in the social.

(Probyn 1993: 2–3)

Informed by Foucauldian notions of ‘care of the self’, and Judith Butler’s

sense of performing gender, Probyn helps us realize that all articulations of

our ‘selves’ are particular displays. Far from being natural, uncensored or

passive intimations of a fixed identity, the enunciative act is a process of

selection, of revealing delimited aspects of a complex whole. In speaking our

experience, then, we come to discover the ways in which they resonate with

others’, forging bonds of mutuality or dissonance, but all the time finding

fresh ways of communicating our ways of being in the world. Indeed, in

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Probyn’s formulation, ‘It is only at the extreme limits of who we think we are

that we can articulate, respect and use our differences’ (Probyn 1993: 2).

It is this kind of ‘self’-conscious presentation I want to argue is at the core

of Hoggart’s work – a tactical writing of experience which tries to draw

together common reactions to the social (as Williams described it, the ‘struc-

ture of feeling’ of society). This style of writing was a way of reinforcing the

differences between working-class and middle-class life, yet at the same time

sought ways to overcome this division, to advance a mutually beneficial

understanding and connection between classes. That The Uses of Literacy has

yet to be recognized in terms of the theoretical paradigms now available in

cultural studies works to endorse existing categorizations of the text as mere

memoir, or worse, nostalgia.2 Such perspectives efface any kind of thought-

fulness behind Hoggart’s approach, and attribute his motivation to whim-

sical, if not simply self-serving ends. But given his literary training, not to

mention the title of the book itself, it is hard to sustain the idea that Hoggart’s

style could be anything other than deliberate. It is just not likely that his

writing betrays such an unproblematized technique. Hoggart’s unavoidable

placement in pre-poststructuralist Britain bars him from fashionable endorse-

ment in contemporary cultural theory, despite the continued relevance of his

critique of class privilege, which survives the fluctuations of mainstream

politics and new sites of radical action. With Hoggart’s autobiography now

available, we are in a position to clarify the way he purposefully employed

experience in Uses to make manifest broader social trends. The contrasting

genres deploy similar theorizing ‘selves’, one veiled, the latter more explicit;

and in combination give a more intricate, and mobilizing, account of

Hoggart’s concerns.

Boxed in

Those willing to consider a more theoretical component to Hoggart’s writing

have continued the initial trend of muffling the distinctiveness of his address.3

He is seen as a colleague of Raymond Williams in the ‘socio-culture’ arm of

the British New Left (Sedgwick 1976: 136); or in a related role, again with

Williams, as a ‘Cultural Marxist’ (Dworkin 1997). These designations are

important in providing a schematic account of the New Left’s rise within a

particular historical conjuncture, but by associating him with the macro-

perspectives implicit in such terms as ‘culture’, ‘Marxism’, and, indeed, ‘New

Left’, a clear understanding of Hoggart’s distinct politics is prevented. While

Sedgwick and Dworkin’s histories strive to account for the shared concerns

of left-wing writers of a given period, the precise way that Hoggart differs

from others in this cohort continues to be underplayed. This is particularly

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the case given the reams of analysis and debate bestowed upon the other

typically hailed founders of British cultural studies: Williams, E. P. Thompson

and Stuart Hall.

Sedgwick and Dworkin’s representations make squabbles over Hoggart’s

partisan affiliations the primary interest of his work, when he actually strove

to distance himself from the uncritical loyalty ideologies tend to demand.

Although he contributed to journals such as Universities and Left Review,4

Hoggart’s political viewpoints were not outwardly expressed until much later

in life, and make clear his aversion to Marxism (Hoggart 1990: 78). Hoggart

was important for demonstrating the way political work could take place

from the inside, without the need to offend or overthrow the achievements

of his predecessors. According to former student Paul Willis, the overt

politicization of the Birmingham Centre was something of an embarrassment

for Hoggart, ‘always down to earth and courteous’ (Willis 2001: 395). Claims

Willis: ‘I think he must have felt cause for alarm when [the Centre] ran in to

a kind of continuation of New Left battles in different form’ (Willis 2001:

397).

Relating writers to movements or categories not only forfeits their individ-

uality, it also reduces their contribution to an allotted time frame, working

against a critical application of their work in the present. At a time when Left

politics is doubtlessly the underdog, it seems an important strategic move to

take comfort in the different approaches of our many actors and forebears,

and the way they can be used in service of a contemporary counter-hegemonic

force. By associating Hoggart with the New Left movement, and only the

postwar political climate in Britain, the concerns he raises in Uses may be

seen to suffer, ipso facto, a similar fate.5 Factional ascriptions offered by

political historians can, in this situation, ironically serve to encourage ahis-

toricism, for the way that they avoid connecting the concepts and themes

which recur in politically concerned cultural thought.

Against this, to read Hoggart’s book as enacting a discourse of empathy is

an attempt to see through the ephemerality of individual issues and realize a

sensibility that eludes conscious political paradigms. I want to use the term

empathy to describe a way of cutting through the hot air of polemics, and

the particularities of historically specific political issues: of finding opportu-

nities and means by which otherwise alienated individuals might be able to

converse, communicate, understand, connect. Of course, empathy has a

chequered history; its previous use in feminist consciousness-raising, for

example, exhibits its potential for encouraging essentialist identification.

Against this, I want to use empathy in a more modest way, as the route to a

particular form of humanism Hoggart sees possible on each side of class-

splintered British society. Empathy is the way Hoggart bridges the divide

between two ‘ways of life’. Its invocation of deeper instincts, of affective

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289A Neglected History

responses, hopes to a find a sense of greater good, an interest common to the

working and middle classes. Hoggart uses empathy, I argue, in order to make

reasonable the new measures he proposes – in particular, the need for ‘critical

literacy’ in the face of a commercially driven mass communications industry.

Hoggart’s political critique is therefore more focused (indeed, neighbourly in

that immediate sense of living with each other) than the socialist intervention

of Williams; and in contrast to Thompson’s restorative impetus, Hoggart

maintains a stubbornly contemporary, and forward-looking perspective.6

Rereading The Uses of Literacy

In an interview with John Corner (1991) we learn that Hoggart began writing

back in 1952 with the intention of creating a textbook for his university extra-

mural classes. Part of this desire was out of practicality, and partly too a result

of observation. He perceived a problematic disparity between the material

studied within the classroom – the realm of ‘high’ culture – and the culture

in which students immersed themselves following the conclusion of teaching

each week. The two sites, one of learned, the other of lived culture, were

distinct, and as yet unrelated. Hoggart wanted to bridge the gap.7

The origin of the gulf between class cultures in Hoggart’s time lay in the

history of higher education in Britain and its exclusive availability to the

middle and upper classes. But as education reform spread, Hoggart realized

it would be necessary to extend patterns of judgement and discernment more

broadly. He knew that students could make sense of new ideas and concerns

mentioned in lessons by making teaching apprehensible in an interesting way.

His task, then, was to seek relevancy. Hoggart decided to dedicate one half

of the book to examples from the students’ own cultural world. This was a

way of adapting the tools of literary analysis to new purposes, of making

them more useful. It was not the idea of academic criticism that was prob-

lematic for Hoggart (he seemed to support Leavis’ general paradigm), rather

there was an obvious benefit in applying these hermeneutics to texts other

than those typically seen as worthy of study.

In several senses, then, Hoggart wanted to change teaching practices. These

motivations comprised the underlying strategy and formed the principal

tenets of Uses. First, the realm of popular culture and the cultural choices of

the working class called for appreciation in their own right. The experiences

of the working class were seen to be just as significant as those of the

bourgeoisie, which at that time featured exclusively on course reading lists.

This was a challenge, quite revolutionary for its time, urging the questioning

and rupturing of canons, and had to do with a certain empathy Hoggart

himself felt for his students. How could he make his teaching useful for their

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needs, their interests? Hoggart realized that the ‘exemplary’ nature of set texts

had no pertinence for this new kind of student. The bourgeois mode of

literary valuing was empty of any application to the lives these kids knew;

indeed the abstract, aesthetic qualities for which the books were celebrated

lacked the expression of any way of life. It was a controversial assertion

Hoggart made, then: that the texts on offer needed connection with everyday

knowledge, and further, that working-class life told as much about society

and the lived world as the dynamics of the more privileged.

Hoggart also believed that the increased availability of education following

the Second World War necessitated a democratization of analytic tools.

People needed help in grasping and reaping the rewards of the knowledge-

making mechanisms that, until this point in history, had been reserved for an

endowed class. A guide for living in the changed circumstances of postwar

society was required, one that was a reliable alternative to the persuasive

motivations behind advertising. Hoggart sought a particular kind of vigilance

in the face of the media’s increasing role in everyday life. Without this hyper-

awareness, he believed, commercial interests would override the truly positive

aspects offered by new communication technologies. Hoggart’s answer to all

these challenges was to help people gain a ‘critical literacy’. He wanted to

make learning easier and more enjoyable, its benefits obvious. But he also

strove to emphasize the sheer opportunity which knowledge could secure. It

was the comfort of feeling proximate to and practised in the information

necessary for making decisions about life. Thus, although Hoggart began

writing with certain intentions, he soon realized that in order to establish the

grounds for this new subject matter, and his overall argument, he would have

to locate the analysis quite specifically. The first half of the book therefore

creates the world in which the artefacts of popular culture came into play,

and it is this world that stands as the basis for the critique unleashed in the

second half of the book.

Them and us

The opening section, ‘Landscape with figures’, provides a textured exposition

of the lifestyle usually assumed of those who make use of popular culture:

that is, the working class. Hoggart activates a propensity for empathy by

laying down the canvass on which these working-class lives are played out.

He creates a landscape of urban density imbued with poverty. In minute

detail, the inhabitants of this highly populated, cramped environment are

described. He notes their distinctive attitudes, their positive engagement with

life despite the difficulties brought about by industrialization. The oral tradi-

tion of the people is emphasized, especially its strength before the mass

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penetration of the press, radio or television (pp. 27–33). Certain phrases,

superstitions and myths are given extra attention, to show how people came

to terms with the basic features of life – ‘their lot’. Rituals and traditions are

given extensive discussion – the activities in the neighbourhood for the

mother, father and children of the family are all portrayed – from the weekly

shopping trip, to religious festivals, to Bonfire Night (p. 68). The smells,

sounds and tastes of the local area are enumerated to give a full account of

the complexity of the life (p. 65). The absolute depth, the pervasiveness of

the culture, is made evident. Revelling so indulgently in the particular reiter-

ates and intensifies the ultimate aim – to concretize the hitherto unacknowl-

edged materiality of working-class culture.

Exemplifying Hoggart’s recourse to empathy is the section titled ‘“Them”

and “Us”’ (pp. 72–101). This critical component of the book acts as a major

support for later claims which question the merits of losing the established

working-class attitudes here so fondly depicted. The them/us distinction refers

to the working-class ability to exercise an ideological closure which can

separate their world from those that, to all appearances, run it. Drawing a

barrier between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is a way of making a subordinate position

palatable: among those typically labelled ‘them’ include, patently, bosses; but

also police, magistrates, doctors, means test officials and employment

exchange bureaucrats. It is a term used in reference to those representatives

of the outside world with whom working-class people may have some

contact. The separation has the effect of marginalizing ‘them’, because ‘they’

have no place in ‘our’ world. As such it is a device for deflating authority.

Significantly, the title is largely bestowed upon those who are seen as a threat

to the separation (them/us) itself, and this is a crucial point which Hoggart

wants to establish.

Hoggart figures that any reader might understand the outrage one would

feel knowing that an outsider could influence access to loved ones, or dictate

the terms in which a life is allowed to be conducted. These ‘others’ in

postwar Britain have the power to break up families, to incarcerate members

away from the otherwise self-contained, tight community.8 So Hoggart’s

discourse of empathy is most successfully materialized by finding values

shared by both classes, such as the privileged place of family, in order to

garner an understanding response to the circumstances illustrated. For the

characters Hoggart describes, the them/us divide works as a defence mech-

anism, to maintain a dignity and self-respect in everyday dealings. But for the

reader, the concept helps in projecting one’s own likely reactions to these

threats to everyday domestic freedoms, that otherwise might not be contem-

plated or realized.

Hoggart deploys a strategic display, a conscious performance of self and

experience, in order to advance a favourable impression of the working-class

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lives he depicts. Prefacing the book with a number of qualifications, which

work to justify the selectivity of his depictions,9 Hoggart creates the illusion

that his book is not ideologically motivated, that everything he does recount

has a genuine transparency. So he describes the working-class people he

imagines, and wants the reader to imagine, providing a second- and third-

order hermeneutic rather than just observation. He writes of actual towns, of

the kinds of houses; that the people are rent-payers, wage-earners or self-

employed. He comments on their educational standard, pattern of speech,

type of voice, style of clothing. Hoggart sets his own terms for the discussion.

He creates, crucially, what is an endearing picture, one which, also signifi-

cantly, is interchangeable. Thus he recounts his own family as an example

because it serves ‘as well as any’ (p. 24). The impression Hoggart tries to

effect, through this particular enunciation of self, is that the great majority

of these people are decent, honest and hard-working folk. Readers might

share some of their values, gain a sense of their motivations, given this

sympathetic portrayal.

Hoggart has to paint an admirable and respectable picture of the working

class if he is to prove the rest of his argument. This is why he avoids the issues

E. P. Thompson wanted raised, which include:

the absence of conflict in the early chapters, the absence of many adult pre-occupations (especially at the place of work), the neglect of the role of theminority, the omission or under-estimation of most of those influences whichcombine to create the labour movement in this century.

(Thompson 1959: 53)

Thompson makes the point that working-class life is not as great as Hoggart

wants to make out. There is more to the story. Notably, much of the history

of these people is characterized by conflict, which takes place not only within

the class itself (something Hoggart rarely mentions), but also in organized

struggle against oppressors. For Thompson, as a Marxist historian, these are

the positive aspects of working-class culture that ought to be celebrated.10

But Hoggart’s concerns are of a different nature, addressing social change

and what it means for education and entitlement. To make the working class

appear as generally good people is part of the strategy of encouraging

empathy, serving to reinforce the point that they deserve better. In the 1950s

they deserve better than to suffer from manipulation; whether at the hands

of advertisers in the exploding media industry, or the propaganda of election

campaigns in an era of bipartisan complacency. To help the reader engage

with the people discussed, despite their traditional distance from the bour-

geois gaze, is the facilitating task performed by Hoggart’s address.

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Living-room wars11

Another example of how the discourse operates may be seen in this passage,

which has Hoggart describing the typical working-class living-room:

It is a cluttered and congested setting, a burrow deeply away from the outsideworld. There is no telephone to ring, and knocks at the door in the evening arerare. But the group, though restricted, is not private: it is a gregarious group,in which most things are shared, including personality; ‘our Mam’, ‘our Dad’,‘our Alice’ are normal forms of address. To be alone, to think alone, to readquietly is difficult. There is the wireless or television, things being done in oddbouts, or intermittent snatches of talk (but rarely a sustained conversation); theiron thumps on the table, the dog scratches and yawns or the cat miaows to belet out; the son drying himself on the family towel near the fire whistles, orrustles the communal letter from his brother in the army which has been lyingon the mantelpiece behind the photo of his sister’s wedding; the little girl burstsinto a whine because she is too tired to be up at all, the budgerigar twitters.

(Hoggart 1958: 36)

Hoggart describes an uncomfortably cramped space, filled with all of those

nick-nacks which pile up over time. There is no need to keep the room

manageable anyway, in the sense that there is no chance of ever moving from

this place. There is the feeling of revelling in the little one does own. In this

way the room is a contrast to the slick, streamlined living areas celebrated in

utopian images of modernity. The clean, minimalist ‘look’ is in fact a luxury

only the middle class can afford. There is little incentive to keep this room

tidy for unexpected guests. It is functional rather than fashionable.

As a ‘burrow’ the depiction lends emphasis to the hidden nature, the sheer

impenetrability of the room, of in fact the entire house. The associations here

are in some respects negative. Impenetrability suggests a kind of backward-

ness, that the world outside cannot affect things too greatly. There is no

contact with the excitement or faster pace of another kind of life. Indeed,

there is no hint that escape might be possible. Yet Hoggart also seems to be

saying that this is part of the room’s very purpose. This place is the comfort,

the recompense, for the little effect one has in the outside world. As we have

already seen, this is the way of dealing with – by not having to acknowledge

– the reality of being part of a subordinate class. Insularity is the result of a

long process of coping with a lower place in society, and is preferable, in

Hoggart’s eyes, to an otherwise exhausting contempt of one’s superiors.

The phone is not there to ring, a reflection of the financial position of this

kind of working class at this time in history, but by mentioning it Hoggart

also indicates more of the self-sufficiency of these people. This is a local,

neighbourhood society where contact across distances greater than the next

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street is infrequent. All of one’s needs are met by a reciprocal reliance on

proximate others. So one neighbour

is known to be something of a ‘scholar’ and has a bound set of encyclopediaswhich 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 fineneedlework and will be called in on special occasions.

(Hoggart 1958: 22)

Hoggart engages with the details otherwise dismissed in stereotypes about

the working class. Not all of their capacities can be essentialized in terms of

manual labour. In mentioning the encyclopedia, that archetype of knowl-

edge, an interest in learning is seen as common. A ‘penman’ is sometimes

needed, which signifies the inadequacy of literacy levels. Men and women

both have gifts to offer, and are revered and respected accordingly. Hoggart

shows that within this diverse group dismissed collectively as the working

class there are intricate patterns of specialization, ability and skill. There is a

whole network of relationships established in this microcosm, separate and

protected from the greater structures of middle-class surveillance and govern-

mentality.

That said, however, the notably ‘restricted’ nature of the family group, and

the few night-time visitors, also unveils conventions that generalizations tend

to miss. There are levels of status within the group, and appropriate behav-

iours – standards and codes specific to each situation. In contrast to that other

reductive, if romantic generalization about the working class, there is no

evidence of an inevitable solidarity which welcomes anyone at any time.

The shared family personality is the primordial form of solidarity

Hoggart brings out. Family loyalty comes first, a value which manifests in

the contempt for the means test officials and magistrates referred to above.

The attitude is also reified in the working-class aphorisms Hoggart cites

throughout the book, such as ‘There’s no place like home’ (p. 33). An

obligation to family comes before class, but, as I want to argue, the two are

intimately intertwined. This familial bond is also what is significant about

the difficulty Hoggart conveys of being ‘alone’ in the living-room. It is a near

impossible position to inhabit. To want ‘to be alone, to think alone, to read

quietly’ is to suggest that the family group is not all that is needed, that

something else demands one’s interest, that there is a world outside the

precious living-room. Here we begin to notice the significance of the osten-

sibly banal depiction above. On closer inspection, once Hoggart mentions

the desire for solitude, the action of the room is henceforth characterized by

an incessant soundtrack. There is a perpetual string of noises: the wireless,

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295A Neglected History

the television, the iron that ‘thumps’, the dog that ‘scratches and yawns’; the

cat ‘miaows’, the son ‘whistles’ and ‘rustles’ the letter, the girl ‘whines’ and

the budgerigar ‘twitters’. Following the suggestion of reading as an activity,

the passage builds to an acoustic crescendo which makes this very sugges-

tion unimaginable. This is what Hoggart, as a student, seems to remember,

and vividly. But the enumeration of noises, and their concentration in this

one instance, hints at Hoggart’s intent, which is to shepherd the reader into

a heightened sensitivity regarding the potential for distraction. Hoggart

shows the difficulty posed by reading to the reader, who in turn can hope-

fully empathize with this as a problem for anyone contemplating a scholarly

life. In this respect the scene is almost unbearable in its claustrophobia.

There is just no relief from the numerous sounds. In effect, what the scene

does is to make the scholarly life, in all of its bourgeois confinement, appear

strange.

So Hoggart tries to effect a discourse of empathy on two levels. The one:

to draw attention to, and respect for, the working-class way of life as he sees

it. The world hidden within the terraces and walk-ups is revealed to more

privileged readers for just how different and difficult it can be. Yet at the same

time this is how the book can be appreciated by the working-class reader, the

student in the night class who recognizes these scenes and can identify, quite

literally in some cases, with the life described. This response (what Williams

called the ‘shock of recognition’) also proved common for many first-gener-

ation university students entering the academy on scholarships postwar

(Hoggart 1990: 140). Thus one kind of reader can empathize with the

insularity of the family, the stabilizing structures of enforced affinity which

counter the non-existent hope for social mobility. But from the next genera-

tion who reads, and harbours the drive to want to avoid this same fate, there

is a certain kind of empathy too. For students embarking on a new trajectory

made possible by further education (and the established middle-class reader

who can see the ladder of opportunity education will allow), the discourse of

empathy invokes that sense of it being understandable that one would want

to escape to enjoy a better kind of life, a life that involves all the opportunities,

material success and cosmopolitanism brought by academia, for example. So

within Hoggart’s particular writing style there is here the chance for a

momentary connection between classes – a textual staging of the tensions

involved in moving from one to another – which makes plain the fact that

class progression is full of difficult choices and negotiations. In the figure of

the Scholarship Boy, Hoggart finds a way to articulate that unforgiving

double bind, where the potential to escape one life ultimately beckons, but

the reality of a kind of betrayal will always haunt.

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Scholarship blues

The figure of the Scholarship Boy loses theoretical potency and contemporary

usefulness in a too hasty association with Hoggart’s experience. The impact

of the term as a way of framing class mobility and familial relations is lessened

if it is read within the self-evident, under-elaborated autobiographical frame-

work typically accompanying Uses. Certainly Hoggart’s personal experience

gives an added weight to his musings. His intimacy with the subject has the

inclination to slide into confession. But it is its conduity as a means to ‘think

through the social’ that is the important conceptual advancement often

neglected in discussions of the Scholarship Boy passages, and which, I want

to argue, makes them a worthy resource and example for framing historical

change through the everyday.

Hoggart employs the figure of the Scholarship Boy to encapsulate the

emotional processes of inter-class subjectivity in postwar Britain, and it is in

this guise of memoir or reflection that he allows a politically engaged social

commentary. Ultimately the Scholarship Boy is a means to embody trauma,

an unavoidably direct way of evoking the artificial progression perpetuated by

the scholarship system. Reaching down and wresting the individual out of a

complex, intricately structured ‘way of life’, the benefactor initiates a significant

rupture in familial and social relations. This is a trauma to which the patronage

system, until Hoggart’s intervention, had been blind.12 The appeal to empathy,

however, has the reader’s assumptions reversed. Against common-sense

dictums, that scholarship recipients are privileged souls, Hoggart’s engaged

narrative shows them as figures to be pitied: ‘He begins to see life, for as far

as he can envisage it, as a series of hurdle-jumps, the hurdles of scholarships

which are won by learning how to amass and manipulate the new currency’

(Hoggart 1958: 229). Further: ‘He begins to see life as a ladder, as a permanent

examination with some praise and some further exhortation at each stage. . . .

He has been trained like a circus horse, for scholarship winning’ (p. 230).

The Scholarship Boy is a lonely, and tragic, figure. He exchanges the

poverty of his upbringing for an assured and better future. The path is put in

front of him, but the trade-off is that he can only go alone. Hoggart empha-

sizes the solitude of this trajectory. It is a single race of ‘hurdle-jumps’, a

‘ladder’ of opportunity, or a series of tricks to accomplish. In each case the

student is called upon to perform for appreciative masters. It is this kind of

learning, the unquestioned regurgitation of knowledge, that Hoggart seri-

ously criticizes in the second half of Uses.The seemingly ‘better’ life that awaits the Scholarship Boy is presented as

predetermined, in the same sense that staying in the working-class neighbour-

hood is also futile. Neither option has any bearing, Hoggart implies, on the

British class structure itself. What the student’s progression does ensure,

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297A Neglected History

however, is a radical displacement. The scholarship system will estrange all

of the terms of cultural reference to which he is accustomed. The Scholarship

Boy’s experience is a succession of disruptions, following the initial dis-

location:

he has been equipped for hurdle-jumping; so he merely dreams of getting-on,but somehow not in the world’s way. He has neither the comforts of simplyaccepting the big world’s values, nor the recompense of feeling firmly criticaltowards them.

(Hoggart 1958: 299)

The patronage system demands gratitude from the scholarship holder,

because of the improved life chances it brings about. However, steeped in the

overbearing sense of obligation behind the benevolence, the reader is encour-

aged to empathize with this poisoned chalice and all that it entails. For the

obligation is a burden working in tension with all the intimate detail about

working-class attitudes to which we have already been alerted. Complicating

matters is the vivid description of traditional values Hoggart has shown to

constitute the student’s cultural world. It establishes the grounds for under-

standing why the student struggles to conform to the solitude of academia.

This atomized, isolated life goes against the gregariousness and warmth of

the working-class family and neighbourhood. In this way, the Scholarship Boy

encapsulates the real antagonism Hoggart sees as defining two different – that

is, classed – modes of valuing.

Thus the Scholarship Boy neatly summarizes an unenviable, torn position.

What is initially a family betrayal becomes, on the scale of Hoggart’s gener-

ation, a class betrayal. The artificial progression of the Scholarship Boy to a

different kind of life was, in a sense, too quick. The speed of his trajectory

out of one set of values into another did not match the amount of time it

would take for working-class attitudes to catch up. Probyn’s ‘pleasures and

pains of being in the social’ are made palpable here: Hoggart’s Scholarship

Boy is a classic example of ‘thinking the immediacy of theory’. Seeing the

figure as representative of broader social circumstances, a kind of trauma was

always going to be unavoidable. Ultimately this is why Hoggart writes this

important experience: ‘because the difficulties of some people illuminate

much in the wider discussion of social change’ (Hoggart 1958: 293).

Generational change

The level of detail Hoggart’s discourse of empathy allows gives us an

especially rich and material sense of how historical change comes about. The

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choice to move away from the working-class neighbourhood in post-Second

World War Britain could not be made on the same grounds as those of a

different time. All the terms for loyalty had altered. In his autobiography,

Hoggart sees that the distinction between the poor and affluent in British

society was sharper before the war: ‘We knew about the reality of unemploy-

ment as we knew about chicken-pox and consumption and scarlet fever and

early widowhood and heads in gas ovens and many other apparently ines-

capable and inalienable ills’ (Hoggart 1988: 176). At this earlier moment,

before the great legislative reforms ensuring unemployment benefits and

health insurance (the ‘welfare state’), people lived under a constant threat and

unease. Here too, Hoggart’s mode of address is aimed to meet with an

emotional response, an unchecked affective reaction from the reader. There

was no comfort, or peace of mind, at this point in time. The sense of insecurity

was ubiquitous. Controlling one’s life, or planning ahead, were basically

unthinkable options. A focus on ‘the immediate, the present’ is the safeguard

built up over time, to cope with the knowledge that interventions in working-

class life are only ever those of ‘fate and luck’ (Hoggart 1958: 132). The

autobiography in this instance complements neatly the insights of Uses: ineach case Hoggart gives an extra glimpse of the history behind the working-

class spirit, hinting at the absolute revolution in working-class culture

postwar prosperity would bring.

Hoggart’s autobiography brims with examples of the kind of historical

writing which, like those in Uses, perceive increments of social change

through the minutiae of culture. If relief was available before the war, for

instance, it always came with strings:

We were on the Parish, the Board of Guardians, Public Assistance. [Hoggart’smother] had about a pound a week in all, though I imagine they also paid therent which would be only three or four shillings a week. They took great carethat you did not blue the public funds on beer, betting, trips to the pictures. Nodoubt they had had problems, so they gave the weekly allowance largely in theform of grocery coupons exchangeable at specified grocers only.

(Hoggart 1988: 43)

Despite support from at least three charities, Hoggart’s family still required

further assistance to pay the rent. Hoggart is careful, though, not to appear

ungracious. He is keenly aware that on top of their set weekly allowance,

someone also took care of the rent. He is careful too in negotiating the issue

of religion in the dispensation of the assistance. Whether transparent or not,

this kind of aid rarely escapes preconceived ideas of appropriateness, and

these issues continue today in the current era of ‘mutual obligation’ and the

privatisation of welfare services.13 Hoggart, however, appears reasonable,

indeed empathetic, himself in the comment ‘No doubt they had had

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299A Neglected History

problems’. The ambiguousness of the statement avoids any direct criticism.

But ultimately someone puts together this arbitrary monetary figure, which

is only enough for essentials, and certainly not enough for any treats. ‘Such

an allowance provided, was meant to provide, no more than a bare living,

one just above the level of undernourishment – so long as the mother knew

how to buy cannily and well, with great good sense’ (Hoggart 1988: 43).

Hoggart’s take on the situation implies that a particular kind of life is none

the less, and unacceptably, imagined for the recipients. What is curious is how

the prescribed amount can possibly be thought to sustain a ‘way of life’. The

specificity of the allowance seems to actively dissuade those notorious

elements of working-class culture, ‘beer, betting, trips to the pictures’.

Hoggart makes plain that any kind of luxury is cancelled out in this desperate

financial situation. In this autobiographical mode, thirty years on from Uses,the empathy of the reader is again demanded: we cannot help but want to

reach out to Hoggart’s widowed mother, and her life of enforced stringency

and struggle.

As a companion to Uses in another sense, the autobiography clarifies that

the outbreak of war was the principal factor in ensuring the delineations

between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in Hoggart’s urban landscape would be forever

blurred. The kinds of sacrifice required by the times and the need for cama-

raderie in war-time were symbolic of a changing Britain. Reflecting on the

situation Hoggart observes:

By 1944 there was an unusual feeling in the air among servicemen, not oftenarticulated cogently, but indicated by banal-sounding phrases: ‘We don’t meanto go back to what it was like before’; ‘Things have got to change’; ‘I’m notstanding for that lot again’; ‘We didn’t go through all this just to settle backwhere we were’. There had been a sea-change among men who had been, mostof them, ill-educated, not encouraged to have many expectations or to lookforward to any change for the better, to progress, to movement.

(Hoggart 1990: 60)

Who knows what the women were thinking away from all this admirable

breast-beating, but amidst the chaos of war came a crystallization of thought

for many servicemen. Forced into combat by the higher powers, with whom

their day-to-day contact had been minimal before this time, Hoggart writes

of an evident sense of contempt and outrage. The accommodating border

between ‘us’ and ‘them’ had been breached. The working class had been

summoned to enter the ‘other’ world of the higher powers, to settle unknown

disputes and serve the objectives of ‘them’. Thus Hoggart sees the Second

World War as a particularly significant moment in the breakdown between

classes in Britain. It did not have the reliance on trench warfare typifying the

First World War, and as such there was a quite unprecedented intermixing of

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officers and ranks. The phrases Hoggart chooses here are particularly potent.

The reflections are like field notes, or random jottings from battle. He

establishes the motivations and justifications for a change in people’s attitudes

with the experience of war. As readers, we are invited to make the relation-

ships suggested by the soldiers’ comments. It is as if the futility to which their

lives had been reduced as soldiers – or civilians – correspondingly exacerbated

the need to recapture and retain a sense of self-worth. Returning home, these

soldiers might contemplate new possibilities and allow their expectations to

rise. Suggestions of ‘progress’ or ‘movement’, once unthinkable from the

loyalties of the cluttered lounge room, lose their previous status as taboo. The

need for change becomes something deserved.

The snippets of dialogue, the lived culture of war recounted here, draws

attention to the soldiers’ lost dignity. We empathize with their new hopes and

dreams as they learn their place in the world. Noticing the effect of new

knowledge on the men, with the introduction of compulsory current affairs

discussion, Hoggart’s passion for educational advocacy is also sparked. The

very ruminations on the politics of pedagogy which underpin the second half

of Uses are here animated, and the democratization of knowledge tools

previously withheld from workers becomes a fundamental tenet of Hoggar-

tian cultural studies:

there they all sat, month after month, being introduced not only to the mainissues in social security policy or educational planning or industrial prospectsor trade unionism or local government, but – more importantly – being intro-duced also to the idea that these things concerned them and that they couldhave, should have, a say in the discussion and resolution of them.

(Hoggart 1990: 62)

With this extended list of different kinds of policies and concepts Hoggart

makes clear the extent of the soldiers’ ignorance. Without addressing it

specifically, the inadequacy, the obviously classed nature of Britain’s educa-

tion system in this description becomes obvious. There was just so much they

did not know. The issues which ought to have pertained most to these people

had not even been made plain to them before. To ‘have a say’ in these matters

would have broken the traditional walls of physical and ideological separa-

tion of ‘them’ and ‘us’. So while a successful self-defence mechanism, the

segregation and insularity of the private realm of home and neighbourhood

had prevented the possibility of self-determination in a public, in any way

political, sense.14 Thus with access to this new knowledge, some of the

opportunities of the outside world could now be glimpsed, perhaps even

reached. Like those students in the extra-mural classes in the years to follow

this moment, Hoggart is part of the first generation with the means available

to access unprecedented opportunities. Yet he conveys the complexity of the

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301A Neglected History

situation in a way that overcomes the dialectical impasse of disloyalty to

family and class. Rather, Hoggart argues the absolutely crucial role of educa-

tion in the production of a more equitable society. Being able to learn, to self-

actualize, and act in accordance with their own needs was just another of the

necessities that had been denied the working class.

Against his contemporaries of the 1950s and 1960s, whose debates were

stalled to the extent that they relied on a purely fiscal interpretation of class

character, Hoggart’s was a cultural definition of class. The strength of this

innovation was that it ‘shifted analytical attention from the production

(political/economic) to the consumption (social/cultural) side of modern

society’ (Hartley 1999: 15). As Hartley recognizes, Hoggart turned the terms

of the debate on their head. His interest was on a higher level than the

bickering between Left and Right, because access to education, in particular,

was an issue that concerned both sides. To stress the centrality of the cultural

realm was really different: until this point it was still seen as the ‘superstruc-

ture’, the added-on consideration for serious political thought.15

Conclusion

A recent interview with Richard Hoggart coincides with the fortieth anni-

versary of The Uses of Literacy (Gibson and Hartley 1998). In it, he is still

very much caught up in debates about social change, what it means for

education, and what is at stake more generally:

what I’m going around arguing, until people start saying ‘Oh he’s at it again’,is this: if you train people only to the level which is required by all these[government] initiatives, all you do is produce a society which is capable ofbeing conned. People are not encouraged to be critical, they’re not given acritical literacy. They’re given a literacy which is just enough to fill in the footballpools and the lottery coupon and read the Sun and so on, and that’s not goodenough in a democracy – in a commercial democracy above all. . . . People looka bit awry, as though you’re expecting too much of most people, which you’renot.

(Gibson and Hartley 1998: 13)

In conversation Hoggart’s rhetoric is not so veiled. People are no longer in

danger of being manipulated or persuaded by the new mass-culture postwar,

they are verily being ‘conned’. The opportunities promised by wider economic

improvements have only meant that the divisions between classes are evident

somewhere else. The education system still maintains limitations on the

possibility of social mobility. The working classes still rely on ‘fate and luck’

– ‘the football pools and lottery coupon’ – to give them access to a better life.

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302 Melissa Gregg

Hoggart’s concerns are essentially the same: he identifies the factors perpetu-

ating an inequity of opportunity that a professedly democratic society ought

to prohibit. That he is ‘still going around arguing’ for educational reform

shows that despite many other changes since the 1950s, this fundamental

aspect of his project, from The Uses of Literacy onwards, maintains a

contemporary relevance.

Hoggart significantly influenced accepted intellectual thinking by

becoming part of the very situation he sought to change. He was prepared to

carry out a political vision without limiting it to a predetermined institution

or discipline.16 But Hoggart found his major insights required constant

reiteration over time; indeed, his autobiography and interviews shirk the

more prudent strategies of earlier writing in line with the lack of significant

improvement in classes ‘speaking to each other’. In our age of the digital

divide, city/country antagonism and North/South income disparities,

Hoggart’s critique continues its pertinence and challenge. To foster empathy,

and work to improve opportunities for those with whom we might otherwise

connect, requires practical strategies to realize and make visceral their, and

our, everyday struggles.

Hoggart especially inspires, though, for the way that he uncautiously

pursued a textual methodology which, above all, would help people under-

stand their history, and those of others. His discursive address forces a more

overt responsibility on the part of his readers to engage with, and work to

change, past and present inequalities. The risk that Hoggart took in striving

for empathy in The Uses of Literacy (a risk which continues to thwart his

complete deification in the cultural studies canon) is one we might consider

in some of our own work. If our ultimate aims are to secure more democratic

accounts of the past, and more inclusive participation in forging our collective

future, then employing some affect might be a faster way to get there.

Providing the most forceful articulation, cognizant of the inadequacies of all

of our disciplines, is a step we still hesitate to take. And while Hoggart will

not be remembered as a historian, he will stand as someone who fully

perceived the connection between historical change and our particular

performances and acts within a living culture. In the quieter moments, when

the disciplinary bickering dies down, it is worth contemplating this modest

but imperative point, and what it means for the histories that all of us, every

day, are creating.

Notes

1 Remark to Hoggart’s wife Mary, from her domestic helper (Hoggart 1992: 81).Richard Johnson’s comments mentioned in the abstract refer to his plenary address

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303A Neglected History

at the Pavis Centre Conference ‘Cultural Returns: Assessing the Place of Culturein Social Thought’ held in Oxford, September 2002.

2 Again, see Goodwin’s summary of Uses, where it is acknowledged as ‘notoriouslynostalgic’ (Goodwin 1992: xiv).

3 The exceptions to this trend are few but sincere: Gibson (1998, 2001); Hartley(1999); Passeron (1970, 1999).

4 Usually in reference to broadcasting policy, for example (1958), ‘BBC and ITVafter three years’, Universities and Left Review 5: 32–6.

5 Sedgwick’s narrative, for example, brackets off the chance of any longevity to NewLeft revisions, claiming the movement ‘spread wide but never penetrated’(Sedgwick 1976: 114). Yet I would argue that the critique of class reductionism,indeed, the ‘cultural turn’ the New Left was involved with, is terrain stillinadequately registered by some mainstream political parties in the West.

6 Although Thompson’s mammoth task, of more appropriately historicizing the‘whole way of struggle’ that characterizes working-class life, remains a testimonyto the selective articulatory processes that take place at all levels of representationat all times.

7 Considering recent trends in academic publishing, Hoggart’s motivation to writea textbook is interesting. He saw a hole in the market – both in publishing andpedagogy – for intellectual appraisals of popular culture. Today, however, withthe market brimming with publications in this same area, the need for textbookshas returned: ironically in order to make sense of the burgeoning field. Textbookfashions are representative of broader social change, which is also the significanceof Hoggart’s intervention. The increased availability of higher education, and thesubsequent corporatization of the university as an institution, is an element of suchchange in our own time. As John Hartley points out, today ‘we are not studyingto lead or to manage society, but to join it. Now we are what we analyze; productsof and participants in the popular-knowledge-producing apparatus of internation-alized consumer society’ (Hartley 1999: 4–5). Here Hartley redefines the role ofthe university to fit the context of our expanded economic base. Not only do weneed to think our economics on global terms, but, correspondingly, we need tolearn a whole new currency of knowledge. We have to learn how to act, basically:what expectations and behaviours are appropriate, given this changed world ofbroader, indeed global, opportunity. This is precisely the kind of guide Hoggartwas writing in Uses, albeit for a different time. That the publishing trend hasturned full circle is an interesting development within cultural studies’ own brieflife-span.

8 These same instances of discretionary power also govern our contemporaryeveryday in the West – thinking of detention centres in Australia is a particularlytopical example – and have done throughout our colonial past.

9 An apology for a bias towards literary analysis opens the book, and ensuingparagraphs give reasons for Hoggart’s decision to generally overlook the political,or exceptionally earnest of the working class (p. 15). He also recognizes thedifficulty, given his own background, of writing about the working class withoutsentimentality (p. 17).

10 Thompson’s humanist, historical perspective drew inspiration from the moralizingauthority of William Morris’ utopianism to balance the academic and alienating

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discourse of Marxist doctrine. His work constantly tried to recapture the silencedvoice of the working class, especially in The Making of the English Working Class(1965), a text also mentioned often as formative in British cultural studies’ earlydevelopment.

11 This title is taken from Ien Ang’s book, published in 1996, but I use it here toshow the importance of the living-room for cultural studies long before theintroduction of television. As with the principles behind Mark Gibson’s article‘Richard Hoggart’s grandmother’s ironing’ (Gibson 1998), and as he elaboratesfurther elsewhere (Gibson 2001), I am interested in recapturing some of thestylistic strategies often neglected in appraisals of early British cultural studies.

12 In a longer contemplation of these issues, I compare the similarity here betweenthe benevolent, though culturally myopic assumptions behind this form ofpatronage and others, thinking especially of the stolen generations of indigenouschildren in Australia.

13 In Hoggart’s time, charities are the sole providers of help, but today any distinctionbetween charitable, business or government assistance has become negligiblethrough their interdependence and overdetermination. This is another instance ofthe wheel having turned full circle: government responsibility for welfare came inwith Labour in Britain, and is now on the way out again. And the morality behindsuch assistance is increasingly less veiled.

14 Hoggart intervenes here, incidentally, in debates about voter apathy so furiouslycirculating in Left circles at this point in time. Apathy did not explain why Labourtook so long to win a majority in Britain; it was the fact that people had neverbeen educated about political issues, and therefore which party ought to be themost attractive.

15 Althusser’s work had not penetrated critical thinking in the British Left at thistime. Within a decade, however, this situation would alter significantly. A changein editorial arrangements at New Left Review in the mid-1960s brought PerryAnderson to ascendancy, and under his influence, continental philosophy becamea significant component of radical left-wing political theory. E. P. Thompson wasthe most serious objector to this move (see Thompson 1978), which initiated asplit between humanist and structuralist interpretations of Marxism (the latterwas associated with Althusserianism). Thompson became increasingly marginal-ized for his parochialism, both in Left circles and in terms of gaining a broaderrecognition in the chronicles of cultural studies (Hartley 1992: 17).

16 An interesting development worth noting is the unique status Hoggart enjoys inFrance since his work was translated and introduced by Jean-Claude Passeron(1970), and following Hoggart’s work there with UNESCO. The collection editedby Passeron (1999) comes from a conference held in Marseille in 1994. My thanksto Jeremy Ahearne for this helpful information.

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