Introduction

The Uses of Literacy is one of the few truly essential books about British society to have been published in the last fifty years. It’s among the first books that anyone who has a persistent interest in class reads in order to understand how this apparently egalitarian nation, with its universal health service and well-funded education system, props up rigid social divisions from generation to generation. It is cited continuously by writers, teachers, and commentators, and is regarded as a source of limitless reference and remembrance by the ‘intelligent laymen’ – and women – for whom the book was written, who saw for the first time their experiences and concerns reflected back to them in print. It ought now to be a relic: no reader two generations younger than Hoggart should gasp in recognition at his descriptions of growing up and living in a working-class environment in the 1930s. Yet, despite the social and economic transformations that have taken place since its publication in 1957, there are thousands who do.

The material lot of most working-class people improved enormously between Hoggart’s childhood in the 1930s and the late 1950s – times in which the British, according to Harold Macmillan, had ‘never had it so good’. But while fortunes have continued generally to improve with every successive generation – higher wages, shorter hours, cheaper goods – there has remained a consistent imbalance between how popular culture is regarded by those who produce it (rubbish, but that’s what they want) and those who consume it (rubbish, but that’s what we’re offered). Hoggart argued with great pre-science of the cultural depredation that would ensue from maintaining such false divisions, and which would only increase in the 1950s as ‘mass’ media became more accessible. Given that the education, health and wealth of the majority improved throughout the twentieth century, we ought to be closer to ‘the classless society’ now than we have ever been, but we are not; everything ought to have changed by now, but it hasn’t, and many of the reasons we know why it hasn’t are contained in this book.

The Uses of Literacy describes, with tenderness and acuity, the lived experience of working-class people between the 1930s and 1950s in the urban centres of northern England – notably the parts of Leeds, Hull and Sheffield, and cities like them, which were laddered with closely packed terraces built to house industrial workers and their families in the mid-nineteenth century. It’s at once a personal essay, a novelistic study of character and environment, an invaluable anthropological document, and a powerful account of the scars inflicted on civil society by a collective refusal to value its members equally. It places the home, with its roasting hearth and often smothering attention, at the centre of most working-class lives, and emphasizes the importance of locality and familiarity in forming a worldview which strongly contradicts the abstracted Marxist idea of the working class as agents of history and little else. ‘Working-class people,’ Hoggart countered, ‘are only rarely interested in theories or movements’: if an idea doesn’t have its root in something real and felt, or ‘personal and concrete’ as he put it, then it is far less likely to appeal to the very people such ideas are intended to rouse. It’s not a book that sought to comfort the intellectual New Left of the 1950s any more than it did workers’ activists who had never met a worker – at least, an average politically uncommitted working man as opposed to an exceptional Jude the Obscure type – in their lives. If working-class lives were lived mainly in, and for, the domestic sphere when they weren’t doing the work that defined their social place, how would they ever get around to revolting?

Putting home and place at the centre of his portrait also overturned the assumptions of cultural elitists who preferred not to consider art-forms other than those featured on the Third Programme (these days known as Radio 3) as being of sufficient value to be documented and analysed. By discussing the significance of saucy postcards, ‘meat-teas’, fish-and-chip suppers, and women’s magazines in the context of ‘the full rich life’, he dignified that unexposed world without ever condescending to it. The ways in which working-class people created liveable lives for themselves were often ‘childish and garish’ in their immediacy, but for that reason were neither ‘corrupt’ nor ‘pretentious’. With fellow critics Raymond Williams and Edward (E. P.) Thompson, Hoggart helped to create a serious academic forum for the discussion of literature and society across class lines, which came to be known as the discipline of cultural studies.

As well as being tender, Hoggart’s account is angry, honest and to some degree anxious about the destructive power of rapid social change, though not panicky. He was writing at a time of transition, between the enforced austerity of post-war rationing and the gleeful acquisitiveness of the later 1950s. He saw the coming of mass affluence in a dual light: as something that would liberate the dispossessed, yet could, simultaneously and in ways not immediately visible, also dispossess them further. He saw where new class divisions could arise, based more on notions of taste and receptiveness to a certain kind of bold, simplified marketeer’s appeal than on simple economic power: he envisaged how snobbery could become institutionalised, rather than banished, by popular cultural products – magazines, tabloid newspapers, radio and television programmes among them – which sought not to stretch newly literate minds but to cater to their existing likes and dislikes. The corporate voice of these new ‘classless’ producers was all the more grating for the fact that their powerful position as cultural gatekeepers made them by definition part of a new, non-aristocratic, post-war ruling class. Yet he also believed in the sense and resilience of working-class people and their ability to take what they wanted from the new offerings and ignore the rest. In the 1960s, the Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan would proclaim that the power of mass media lay in their form, not their content; Hoggart would respond that this gave their producers an even greater responsibility to wield such power with honesty and integrity.

The book was originally to be called ‘The Abuses of Literacy’, and though Hoggart preferred its final title for being ‘less hectoring’, it is clear from its content that he regards ‘abuse’ to be the proper term for what he describes. He reserves his most bracing attacks for what he calls the ‘mass-publicists’ – advertising and editorial churnerouters whose purpose is to create a sense that ‘the gang’s all here’, like a boggle-eyed Butlin’s Red Coat, while simultaneously pushing ‘temptations… towards a gratification of the self and towards what may be called a “hedonistic-group-individualism”.’ The larger a receptive audience the mass-publicists can create for their smoothed-over inanities, the greater the revenue. He foresees a kind of cultural industrialisation occurring, wherein working-class people – already sidelined from large parts of their rightful cultural, as well as material, inheritance – ‘are in some ways more open to the worst effects of the popularizers’ assault than are some other groups… It is hard to find a way through such a crowd [of indulgences], especially as the entertainers are adept at discouraging the subversive thought that outside there may be other, quieter regions.’ The Uses of Literacy is a powerful refutation, long before its time, of the conning force of post-modernism – or, to use Hoggart’s preferred term, relativism. He saw with great clarity what ‘persuasion’ by ‘sincere’ people would come to mean in a mass-media culture: one long, taut, high-pitched appeal to blind and deafen oneself to the difficulty of truth.

To Hoggart, the contemporary mass-publicists of the 1950s – figures after the heart of Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset’s ‘mass man’ – were working ‘more insistently, effectively and in a more centralized form today than they were earlier; that we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture, that the remnants of what was at least in part an urban culture “of the people” are being destroyed’. That urban culture took the visible form of close, yet informal, neighbourhood ties clustered around catalogue clubs, corner shops, organised day-trips, public libraries, and, less tangibly, a set of shared assumptions about what is ‘right’, natural’, and ‘good’ to pursue in life. Indeed, such assumptions would only become tangible were you to transgress them. Despite widespread relative poverty, money-making for its own sake is regarded as a waste of time, and being ‘keen’, whether at work or at bingo, is a sign of an individual’s selfish desire to break ranks and show up the team. Writing as someone who hasn’t so much broken ranks as ignored them throughout his life, Hoggart warns that solidarity can give rise to conformity – the desire for which publications and products designed with the ‘mass’ in mind would come to exploit without mercy.

By the time he came to write the book, over a five-year period between 1952 and 1956, Richard Hoggart had made a vertiginous social ascent from the back-to-backs of Leeds, via grammar school and university scholarships, to a career as an academic. During that time he was employed by Hull University to teach literature to mainly working-class students at evening classes in towns as far apart as Goole, in East Yorkshire, and Grimsby, in Lincolnshire. In A Sort of Clowning, the second volume of his autobiography, Hoggart revealed that the writing of The Uses of Literacy was slow and often tortuous: ‘It was a huge cuckoo in an already full emotional nest and at times I hated its voracity and its assumption that it had to be served first’. Yet his internal compulsion matched the external force of change. As someone who felt himself to have been at once freed and cut adrift by education, his thoughts on changing working-class culture had a personal relevance beyond simple curiosity. He had grown up in the care of his impoverished mother, a widow who died when Hoggart was eight, and by his grandmother, and instinctively could not begrudge working people’s relief from constant ‘fadging’ on and below the line of poverty: ‘My grandmother and mother would have had much less worrying lives had they brought up their families during the mid twentieth century.’

Yet worrying lives had their own outlets for the expression of fear and hunger; worry-free lives, while lighter, may disregard those outlets or simply pretend they don’t exist. What disturbed him were the ‘invitations to a candy-floss world’ supplied by advertising copywriters and producers of the new ‘classless’ entertainments – mass-market fiction, popular women’s magazines, pop music – which threatened, from the late 1950s onwards, to uproot and replace the cultural fabric woven by working-class people over decades of shared hardship. He was writing with an uneasy awareness that the culture of the terraced streets in which he grew up was about to be disrupted permanently by new forms of building and abundant affordable comforts. Hoggart captured such information as working-class styles of deportment, speech (not just accent but the effects of a certain kind of life on the voice itself), and dress through his compulsion to observe the effects of external social factors on individual lives.

You can only become so acute in your observations if you are standing some way outside what you are seeing, but not so far that you can’t imagine experiencing it yourself. Hoggart’s route out of the enclosed terraces of his Leeds neighbourhood was his scholarship to the city’s Cockburn High School. He once recalled feeling self-conscious in his smart uniform on the dumpy tram between Hunslet and the city, Hunslet’s relative respectability not stretching to the prospect of a smartly dressed schoolboy. He could see what was being lost as it was being lost, and showed how and why this process could take place so easily. A long-hoped-for end to the grinding conditions in which most of Britain’s working poor lived did not bring about the death of class.

‘It is often said that there are no working-classes in England now, that a “bloodless revolution” has taken place,’ he notes coolly in the book’s opening line, before going on to account for the ways, both unconscious and conscious, in which working-class people might be more likely than those from other social groups to respond to the new inducements with a mixture of scepticism, ‘indifferentism’ (Hoggart’s word) and a sort of confused over-excitement. The result would be that class would simply reveal itself in different forms rather than disappear altogether, as has been the case. This is partly because the ‘mass-publicists’, in particular television producers, have continued to come from privileged backgrounds and the most prestigious universities while claiming – to themselves as much as to everyone else – that they produce ‘classless’ entertainments. There is also the fact that snobbery mutates in the hands of those best placed to change the rules of what represents ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste on a whim. ‘Each decade we shiftily declare we have buried class’, Hoggart was to write much later in his introduction to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, and ‘each decade the coffin stays empty.’ It remains so.

If this risks making his concerns sound moralistic rather than focused on the avoidance of injustice, Hoggart noticed his own tendencies while writing the book to assess working-class cultural choices according to whether he himself approved of them or not: ‘I found myself constantly having to resist a strong inner pressure to make the old much more admirable than the new, and the new more to be condemned, than my conscious understanding of the material gave me grounds for.’ Nonetheless, his fears – though here presented not as fears, but as the unprejudiced warnings of someone whose job brought him into daily contact with working-class students who wanted ‘to understand and criticise’ changes to their ways of life as they were happening – were well-grounded. You could argue that every generation fears that the next will lose its grip on hard-won cultural goods. What makes The Uses of Literacy so vital a document is the way it anticipates the collusion between an institutionally unwitting establishment and a cynical mass-marketing industry to try to make mugs of us all.

The persuasiveness of Hoggart’s argument, and the ease with which it’s possible to appreciate its nuanced, quizzical tone, lies in a combination of its evocative chapter headings and its division into two parts. Part One, ‘An “Older” Order’, is a simple exposition of working-class values as they were – and to some extent still are – lived, with headings such as ‘“Them” and “Us”’, ‘The “Real” World of People’, and ‘The Full Rich Life’. ‘Other people may live a life of “getting and spending”, or a “literary life”, or “the life of the spirit”, or even “the balanced life”, if there is such a thing’, he writes, suggesting that the ‘life–work balance’ was a recurring theme in middle-class conversation even fifty years ago. ‘If we want to capture something of the essence of working-class life in such a phrase, we must say that it is the “dense and concrete life”, a life whose main stress is on the intimate, the sensory, the detailed, and the personal.’ This is one of the few direct comparisons made between focal points of middle-class and working-class life; one of the book’s most exhilarating characteristics is its deliberate marginalisation of what matters to those who are affluent, educated and powerful. What matters to working-class people, Hoggart argues, are relationships within the group rather than between those who are inside it and those who are outside of it. For anyone on the outside, which goes for doctors, social workers, the police, and anyone with the power to demolish your feelings with a dirty look, the all-purpose ‘Them’ is used.

It was while writing what became the book’s second half, titled ‘Yielding Place to New’, which focused on the changes that had occurred in working-class culture since the Second World War, that Hoggart realised his misgivings about the influence of the ‘mass-publicists’ on working-class life needed to be placed in social and historical context. He had begun, he wrote later, ‘by wanting to write a sort of guide or textbook to aspects of popular culture: newspapers, magazines, romantic or violent paperbacks, popular songs… though in forms I did not suspect at the start.’ But he took to heart an incantation by W. H. Auden, the poet about whom Hoggart had written his first book in the early 1950s: ‘In grasping the character of a society, as in judging the character of an individual, no documents, statistics, “objective” measurements can ever compete with the single intuitive glance.’

Both halves of The Uses of Literacy continue to affect those who read it, for the first or for the tenth time, not least because Hoggart is so beautifully honest about his own experience of growing up in one class and in so doing moving towards another. The sub-chapter named ‘Scholarship Boy’, he wrote in A Sort of Clowning, brought him ‘more correspondence – both intimate and relieved (“so others have felt as I have!”) – from all sorts of people, including civil servants and under-secretary level and above, than anything else I have written.’ There is also the particular social milieu he describes: that of the respectable working class, a group whose broad tastes and range of budgets are given away by that affordable luxury, tinned salmon. At times it’s like reading a working-class Proust, written with love and respect for the author’s formative culture. Hoggart writes of the Hunslet middens having ‘a fine topcoat of empty salmon and fruit tins’ come six o’clock on a Sunday evening after tea. Salmon and peaches in the 1930s became salmon and peaches in the 1980s and beyond, though in my family’s case we’d have sliced ham on alternate weeks.

One definitive characteristic of the book is the sense of ‘self-respect’ – a phrase to which Hoggart returns throughout the book’s first half – that is generated and kept going within the less precarious and slightly less penurious end of the working class. Without self-respect, he argues, you are open to denigration and exploitation by those who see opportunities in human vulnerability. He talks of the ‘hurt pride’ aspect of the working-class tendency to refer to anyone not like ‘us’ as ‘them’, but also of the reasonable degree of satisfaction – or at least, lack of rancour – that a member of the ‘respectable’ working class could feel about his or her status. He remarks, for example, on the cheerful willingness of working-class men to walk miles across town with an empty pram in order to cart an old table or other found item back to the house.

You sense not that Hoggart is striving to give his own version of events, but that he wants to convey what he sees before him as clearly as possible. He was once described in a review as ‘today’s John Ruskin’; and indeed, he is given to quoting Ruskin’s famous maxim that ‘the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way’. His writing also fits Orwell’s description of good prose being ‘like a window-pane’. He learned from the best, then, but writes ringingly in his own voice as one would sing a hymn. Hoggart is less melodramatic than Orwell, who wouldn’t have been able to describe the dirt ingrained in a middle-aged housewife’s brow without giving the impression that it made him nauseous. But he is no less sure of what he sees or of his ability to communicate its significance. His writing embodies what the critic Lionel Trilling regarded as ‘the moral obligation to be intelligent’.

Another of Hoggart’s most bracing virtues as a writer is his ability to be honest about the central place of sense-flooding pleasure in working-class life: sex where and when it can be snatched, ferocious home-fires, ‘tasty’ food. He doesn’t try to conceal or sand down the arrow of his own sympathies, but writes warmly of such immediacy: ‘Round the basic features of life – birth, marriage, copulation, children, death – the old phrases cluster most quickly. On sex: ‘A slice off a cut cake is never missed’; ‘Y’ don’t look at the mantelpiece when y’ poke the fire’. Yet he also warns: ‘To each class its own forms of cruelty and dirt; that of working-class people is something of a gratuitously debasing coarseness.’ It’s this tendency to regard sex as ‘just natural’ which Hoggart fears could be sold back ‘in shiny packets’ to youths seeking liberation without a counterweight of responsibility. One of the book’s most celebrated sections features Hoggart’s mimicry of the slangy titles and slack-jawed dialogue of American pulp fiction, which came about by accident after the author was told by his publishers, Chatto, that their lawyer ‘thought the book the most dangerous, in libel terms, he had ever read.’ His imitations ring so true as to make it hard to tell the difference: The Killer Wore Nylon, Broads Don’t Like Lead, and Death Cab For Cutie are among his list of made-up zingers. (The last of these is the name of a present-day American rock band.) Most young men are after sex, he concedes, and it would be facile to suggest that reading these sex-and-murder concoctions will rouse them to violence; the greater point is that their two-dimensional portrayals of debased characters suggest ‘an endless and hopeless tail-chasing evasion of the personality’.

His inventory of sayings and greetings familiar to his ear brings to mind those I remember from growing up on the outskirts of Birmingham, fifty years on from Hoggart’s own childhood: ‘Yer’d forget yer ’ead if it was loose’ to a scatterbrained child; ‘All around the Wrekin’, in reference to a long bus journey or an arduous search for a shoulder of lamb big enough for Sunday dinner; ‘Ta-ra a bit’, meaning ‘see you later’. I’m not sure that a child growing up in Birmingham now would know what or where the Wrekin is. It has become common to note that the long vowels and glottal stops of south-eastern English have filtered into the speech of young people around the country; less so to observe that what is actually said has lost its sense of place. Because ‘change is slow’, as Hoggart notes, and our conscious selves lag far behind the unconscious, you may find yourself saying ‘Wha’evah’, or dropping the southern Californian place-holder ‘like’ into sentences without noticing.

Vocabulary, perhaps even more than accent, announces class as strongly now as in Hoggart’s time. Those less likely to have learned a large and diverse vocabulary no longer fall back on the aphorisms of their grandparents to express themselves, but rather on an all-purpose telly-lingo picked up from soap operas, song lyrics and the truthless paraphrasing found on magazine covers. Someone is someone else’s ‘rock’; jilted partners are told ‘there’s been no one else’ and that the jilter ‘needs some space’. Words can be taken off the peg like a cheap top. Yet English remains elastic, bending and stretching to reflect circumstances and the input of anyone who arrives to add to it. You can learn more about the possibilities of the language by eavesdropping on one bus conversation between a group of London teenagers than from listening to Radio 4 for a week.

Another highlight of the book is the discussion of the ‘big dipper’ style of singing employed by performers in the mid-century working-men’s clubs. Hoggart takes huge pleasure in trying to mimic on the page the way in which their vowels swooped to express ‘the need to draw every ounce of sentiment from the swing of the rhythm’:

‘You are- the only one- for me-,

No one else- can share a dream- with me-,

(pause with trills from the piano leading to the next great sweep)

Some folks- may say-…’

Club singers still exist, but their survival in the form Hoggart records so minutely depends on that of the clubs themselves, which, like neighbourhood pubs, are closing at a rate concomitant with that of Britain’s shrivelling manufacturing base. (Alcohol bought from supermarkets has never been so cheap, nor domestic refrigerators so big.) That is not to say that the performers’ desire to wreak sentiment from rhythm hasn’t found another expression. Family parties and karaoke nights, held in halls and in the top rooms of the larger pubs, often feature a female successor to the old-style male club singer. She is generally a young or early middle-aged woman with immaculate hair and make-up who holds the microphone like a fine-bone teacup, her free hand mapping every octave as though trying to carve sound from the air. She has learned these moves, and the melismatic singing style which stretches single vowels over several notes, from North American balladeers such as Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Céline Dion. The popularity of their epic, swoon-inducing songs of love lost, destroyed and regained is reflected in the content of television talent shows such as The X Factor, whose entrants perform weekly facsimiles in front of a panel which grades notional differences in delivery.

Hoggart was to spend much of his career as a public thinker talking about the function of mass broadcasting in the context of ‘mass culture’. In 2002, he wrote an essay – containing his characteristic mix of spleen and elegant reason – expressing his anger with the then-incoming BBC Chairman, Gavyn Davies, for insisting in a speech that the corporation’s output was neither ‘dumbing down’ nor targeting its output according to notions of ‘high’ and ‘low’. It had recently launched two digital channels, one of which (BBC Four) featured the sort of serious documentaries and niche arts coverage that was once carried on BBC Two, and the other of which (BBC Three) tailored its appeal to young extroverts through rudely named factual shows and coarse comedies. ‘A little caviar for the snobs and buckets of rubbish for the masses,’ he observed, concluding: ‘Quality is or should be indivisible, and its criteria should apply to “light” as much as to “heavy” programmes.’ That is, in essence, Hoggart’s message, and all the anger in it.

A few years earlier the authors Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard, in their 1997 book A Class Act, devoted a whole chapter to the role of the BBC in upholding ‘varieties of social distinction’, and I would argue that those distinctions have become even more pronounced in the last decade. Echoing Hoggart’s writing on the BBC throughout his career, they wrote: ‘No longer is Auntie out to raise the tone: her mission is to give the base what it wants… so as to fight the commercial competition and protect its funding base: the licence fee.’ Few of those who watch, for instance, a documentary made up of closed-circuit TV footage of police chases, or one of the stream of broad yet painfully bland sitcoms broadcast on peak-time BBC One, would be inclined to cherish the results of that mission. BBC Four hogs the best of the corporation’s most stimulating output for itself, occasionally permitting a later repeat on BBC Two; thousands, not millions, will stumble across it for the first time, still less feel the sense of entitlement needed to watch a ‘posh’ channel.

Not everyone is, or wants to be, posh. At the communicative core of The Uses of Literacy is a desire to emphasize that not all working-class people are on a ladder trying to scrabble up to the next rung; in all likelihood, Hoggart says, they are more likely to fear dropping down a rung. The security of a regular income, provided by a reliable head of the household, could tuck an entire family under its steadying wing. A housewife with a spare shilling left over each week could describe herself as ‘quite happy’, with her efforts and her circumstances as with the world. Equally, the time saved by not having to account for every last penny or work every last hour allowed eyes to look up and ahead for a while: not towards home-ownership, as is exhorted today of ‘hard-working families’ who are not ‘on the property ladder’, but perhaps towards the possibility of affording grammar school for at least one of the children, and even permitting the ‘brightest’ one to stay on beyond the age of sixteen. Now there is the call to ‘uni’ for the children of the better-off working class, though waves of expansion in higher education provision have tended mostly to absorb those middle-class children who once would have gone to work for their father’s firm or straight into offices at sixteen or eighteen. The rate at which eighteen-year-olds from the poorest section of society go to university – any university, most likely a local college only recently awarded university status – increases by about one per cent a year.

Who can call themselves working class now? It has become fashionable among salaried professionals to claim that the term refers to ‘anyone who works for a living’, but they are wrong. Options and opportunities, and with them health and longevity, still increase exponentially with status, which is why British society remains streamed according to ‘us’ and ‘them’. What ‘they’ have going for them, and which others are denied, is a sense of belonging to the public and national as well as the domestic and local realm, of having a voice that will be heard, of being able to explain oneself to someone who might cut you dead if you don’t do it correctly. It is ‘They’, the educated and self-entitled, who preserve the right to create and transmit that very ‘classless’ voice which Hoggart found so phoney. It is a testament to his authority that he doesn’t have to discuss his own class status: you know that he has struggled and that, by comparison, he no longer has to worry about where he stands.

One sentence, mentioned almost in passing, brings today’s reader up short. ‘The hooliganism and rowdyism which caused the police to work in pairs in several areas of many towns have almost gone’, wrote Hoggart in 1957. A town centre today will no longer contain police working in pairs on Friday and Saturday nights: it will contain a vanful, accompanied by a mobile hospital in larger towns to tend to alcohol-induced injuries, and teams of ‘street pastors’ charged with approaching the incapacitated and asking them whether they are bingeing on drink because they are happy or because they are miserable. Battened down by pressures for which an inadequate education has failed to prepare them, many British men and – now that they have the social and economic freedom to do so – women react by releasing themselves from their yoke in violent ways. They go out determinedly to get ‘trolleyed’, ‘langered’, ‘paralytic’, ‘oblivious’; to put themselves in danger from intoxicants and from each other. There is so little joy, so much determination to lay waste, among people on the streets of any given town at midnight on a Saturday that the proverbial visiting Martian might think we were at war.

There remains a suspicion, expressed as strongly now as Hoggart did then, that mass culture, produced by a small number of people for consumption by a greater number, kills diversity. Capitalism has co-opted the very idea of ‘diversity’, presenting it back to individuals who live and embody culture, rather than confect it, as a kind of pick-and-mix bag. ‘Diversity’ is offered as a component of style rather than the truest indicator of ‘the full rich life’. Yet, as the novelist and biographer D. J. Taylor has written, ‘it is still possible to live a substantial part of your life beyond the stultifying embrace of the mass culture, a culture whose main achievement, it might be said, is to steal from us the sense of who we are’. Throughout the book, Hoggart seeks to tell the reader: the sweetness lies within you, not without. Men with great powers of persuasion are about to suppress what you know about yourself in order to profit from what you haven’t yet explored. Don’t let them do it. By all means enjoy the finer things, if you can get to them beyond the sea of twopenny tins of pineapple, but don’t forget your own ability to provide riches for yourself. He encourages a kind of cultural, rather than economic, self-reliance, and notes that there is little net gain when the arrival of new goods obliterates the old.

When he reveals this, it’s as though he’s saying: ‘We once spoke the same language, and now we don’t, which means that in some way we’ll never again be able to share our thoughts.’ The loss ripples on the page. He feels broadly part of this world, of the people whose culture he is documenting, and considers its characteristics with the compassion of someone who knows it from within. But something causes him to hover anxiously on the edges and write about their experiences when few others – whether on the inside or outside – feel moved to. His own experience of social mobility informs the way in which he can write, about a young graduate of working-class origin, that ‘the test of his real education lies in his ability, by about the age of twenty-five, to smile at his father with his whole face and to respect his flighty young sister and his slower brother.’

In part this is because the easy command of language, built by curiosity and education, seems to bleed out sentimentality from all experience. If you can make language dance to your tune, rather than having to dance, or jump up, to it, you are on the way to being free. You no longer expect to be at the mercy of events because, if you can’t in some way shape their course, then you can manage their effects. You haven’t only got ‘them’ to contend with, you’ve got ‘us’, your own people, keeping you in line. Not keeping you down exactly, but keeping you chopped and shaped like a tin of York ham. Square pegs needn’t get their corners shaved off if they can learn to incorporate both halves of their experience into an integral whole.

For working-class people, seeking comfort – whether in family, food, locality or in entertainment – is a way of making aspects of an unjustly difficult life enjoyable. For the middle class, comfort is a way of further feathering a nest that is already secure and safe. We say of people that they are ‘comfortably off ’: they exist far above the threshold of hour-by-hour anxiety, of loan sharks’ teeth. We never say of the poor that they are ‘uncomfortably off ’, because we know that to be poor is by its nature uncomfortable. But external comforts have their limit. The curious person ceases to find such ready comforts comforting, and looks for other ways to find internal peace. When Hoggart writes of the cluttery bustle of a working-class household, where it seems an idea beyond reach to create a quiet, ordered space in which the Scholarship Boy can do his homework, he is both reaching back to his own childhood full of losses and pressures, and projecting forward to a time in which the television has become the house chatterbox.

Only sustained self-examination brings the ability to withstand the appeals of people who think they know best. Transformation, strength, dialogue: these are the things that enable you to hold your own, to be an equal participant, and to shape your own life in circumstances not of your own making. If you don’t know your own mind, he is saying, someone else will try and make it up for you. What he hopes for most profoundly is the coming of a true democracy based on individuals responding freely to what they see and experience and being able to contribute to a continuous debate that involves us all, not just those who are best equipped to use the microphone of mass media. Although this is a book concerned with the collective aspects of a broadly defined social and economic group – the working class of northern England – his sympathy, his heart, is with the preservation and encouragement of individual expression. In this sense The Uses of Literacy is a distinctively English call to arms, and as relevant today as it has ever been.

Lynsey Hanley, 2009