From Popular Music Vol. 29: 02, May 2010, pp 317 – 319. DOI: 10.

1017/S026114301000019X,

The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. By Richard Hoggart.

London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009. 370 pp. ISBN 978-0-141-19158-4

Review by James McGrath

Penguin have returned Richard Hoggart’s innovative 1957 cultural study to print in Britain
for the first time this century. This edition includes John Corner’s insightful 1991 interview
with Hoggart plus a new 6,000-word introduction by Lynsey Hanley, justly emphasising how
this study of working-class culture remains relevant. Hoggart’s son Simon adds a foreword.
Although the main text is unaltered, Penguin have abridged the subtitle: the book was
originally The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to
Publications and Entertainments. The amendment indicates how the most celebrated
sequences remain Hoggart’s vivid evocations of working-class existence, drawing on his
Leeds upbringing in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the new, more marketable, subtitle
misrepresents Hoggart’s main concern: how the working-classes’ social outlooks were being
remodelled by mass-produced entertainments, including popular music.
Hoggart’s text comprises two sections. Part 1, with both affection and criticism,
evaluates ‘working-class art’ c. 1890–1945, scrutinising how this reinforced what he
concernedly discusses as the abiding working-class outlook: ‘putting-up with things’
(chapters 3 and 4). Part 2 addresses newer ‘mass art’, whose producers aim for vaster
audiences while keeping the working-class majority as its main sales base. Hoggart argues
that, culturally, the working- and lower-middle-classes are being compounded into a mass,
defined less by occupation than by consumption of entertainments produced by a smaller
range of larger conglomerates. Thus, he concludes in 1957, ‘the great majority of us are being
merged into one class’ (p. 310), defined by passivity.
Hoggart laments the decline of ‘older’ working-class songs, produced as sheet music
and sung communally in working-men’s clubs. He emphasises consumers’ roles in selecting
such songs; numbers ‘which do not meet the requirements are not likely to be taken up, no
matter how much Tin Pan Alley plugs them’ (p. 138). However, ‘commercial’ (mechanically-
reproduced) popular music was taking the place of club singing, removing the element of
choice and, moreover, the group experience.
 The commentaries on newer recorded songs are less substantial. Hoggart appears less
informed about these and has seldom written about popular music since 1957. In 1966,
George Melly (1970, p. 19) implied that rock and roll immediately outdated Hoggart’s
commentaries, written in 1952–1955. Although, as Dave Laing (1994, pp. 183–86)
emphasised, Hoggart’s observations are applicable to later singers, The Uses of Literacy
remains largely overlooked in Popular Music Studies. The most soundly canonised pre-1960
critiques of the genre remain Adorno’s, which are ideologically sharper and musicologically
more astute than Hoggart’s. Yet these writers’ works are mutually complementary. Unlike
Adorno, Hoggart considers lyrics. He also offers closer analyses of vocal nuances in recorded
songs. More pervasively, contrasting with Adorno’s notion of near sub-human ‘masses’,
Hoggart’s proximity to working-class people yields his more complex, informed discussions
of audiences.
Significantly, Hoggart’s commentary on club singing follows his proud, exquisitely
detailed definition of working-class ‘baroque’: traditions of ‘rococo extravagance’ (p. 123) in
all that signifies relief from externally regulated routine. Surveying this ‘without necessarily
implying an historical link’ to classical baroque (ibid.), Hoggart emphasises the working-
classes’ capacity to shape their own traditions amid subordination. He extensively considers
how, in club-singing, consumers would ‘assimilate’ and ‘transmute’ songs into their canon
(chapter 6). His observations contrast with Adorno’s assumption that the masses, ‘excluded
from culture’, are unable to find expression (Adorno 1938, p. 292).
Hoggart’s study can offer much to debates on the demographics of popular
music consumption and indeed criticism. Melly (1970, p. 137) equated ‘the intellectualising
of pop’ with ‘its middle-class take-over’. Negus (1996, p. 155) emphasised the role of the
Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) in such processes, noting its release
just as young middle-class writers were ‘legitimating “their” music in terms of the aesthetic
tradition into which they had been educated’. Others, most recently Fowler (2008, p. 172),
have subjected the Beatles’ 1967 work to similar arguments. Yet these overlook how
working-class cultural references became newly foregrounded in the Beatles’ most
experimental work, suggesting perhaps a shrewd awareness of maintaining a mass audience.
No Beatles study alerts us to such implications in and of their work as extensively as
Hoggart’s 1957 commentaries, for example: the value placed on the local neighbourhood,
where ‘one knows practically everybody’ with an ‘intimacy of detail’ (p. 46–47) in ‘Penny
Lane’; the communal song motifs opening Sgt Pepper; the elevation of love in working-class
song as ‘a substitute for religion [. . .] Love for its own sake’ (p. 204), transmuted in ‘All You
Need Is Love’; and the use of a beer and sing-song infused charabanc outing – Hoggart’s
definitive example of working-class baroque (p. 126–28) – as the basis of the Beatles’ most
high-profile avant-garde excursion, Magical Mystery Tour (1967). Hoggart’s commentaries
are similarly applicable to work by the Who, the Smiths and Arctic Monkeys. The Beatles,
however, are a most interesting point of reference – for now at least – since their enduring
appeal indicates Hoggart’s contention that a mass audience is capable of appreciating far
more ambitious and complex popular music than was being offered pre-1957.
Since this book’s last British edition (1992), the University of Sheffield has acquired
Hoggart’s intended 1955 manuscript, ‘The Abuse of Literacy’. Unlike the published text, this
criticises specific publications. Lawyers urged Hoggart to cut all such unfavourable
references. He overcame this by parodying contemporary styles of journalism and fiction.
However, several sequences on popular song were wholly excised, including Hoggart’s
scornful review of national stereotypes in lyrics. That Penguin have not reinstated these and
other still-unpublished passages is disappointing. A scholarly edition, reflecting Hoggart’s
amendments, could interest many researchers.
Although the absence of his intended references to hits by Vera Lynn and Nat ‘King’
Cole renders Hoggart’s 1957 commentary generalised, this highlights the pervasiveness
of the trends critiqued and, usefully, obliges us to think of examples, including later songs.
This is not difficult. Most extensively, Hoggart attacks variations of ‘cheering-up songs’ (pp.
200–204) – characteristics of which define, for instance, Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge
Over Troubled Water’ (1970), Bob Dylan’s ‘Make You Feel My Love’ (1997) and U2’s
‘Stuck in a Moment’ (2000). To constructively utilise Hoggart’s commentaries, it is
necessary to read this book critically and expansively. My experiences of discussing it in
seminars suggest that for these reasons – alongside the still-resonant evocations of working-
class life – The Uses of Literacy makes a magnificently stimulating text on undergraduate and
postgraduate courses.

Dr James McGrath, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.

References

Adorno, T.W. 1938. ‘On the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening’, in
Essays on Music (pp. 288–317), ed. R. Leppert, R. 2002 (London, University of
California Press)
Fowler, D. 2008. Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c. 1920–c.1970 (Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan)

Laing, D. 1994. ‘Scrutiny to subcultures: notes on literary criticism and popular music’,
Popular Music, 13/2, pp. 179–90

Melly, G. 1970. Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts in the 50s and 60s (Oxford, Oxford
University Press)

Negus, K. 1996. Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge, Polity)