For years Richard Hoggart has observed the oddity of a common speech habit: the fondness for employing ready-made sayings and phrasings whenever we open our mouths, a disinclination to form our own sentences "from scratch," unless that becomes inescapable. But in this book he is interested in more specific questions. How far do the British, and particularly the English, share the same sayings across the social classes? If each group uses some different ones, are those differences determined by location, age, occupation or place in the social scale? Over the years, did such sayings indicate some of the main lines of their culture, its basic conditions, its stresses and strains, its indications of meaning, and significance? These and other concerns animate this fascinating exploration of how the English, and particularly working-class English, use the English language.Hoggart sets the stage by explaining how he has approached his subject matter, his manner of inquiry, and the general characteristics of sayings and speech. Looking back into time, he explores the idioms and epigrams in the poverty setting of the early working-class English. Hoggart examines the very innards of working-class life and the idioms, with the language that arose in relation to home, with its main characters of wives and mothers, husbands and fathers, and children; the wars; marriage; food, drink, health, and weather; neighbors, gossip, quarrels, old age, and death. He discusses related idioms and epigrams and their evolution from prewar to present.Hoggart identifies the sayings and special nuances of the English working-class people that have made them identifiable as such, from the rude and obscene to the intellectual and imaginative. Hoggart also examines the areas of tolerance, local morality, and public morality, elaborating on current usage of words that have evolved from the fourteen through the eighteenth centuries. He touches on religion, superstition, and time, the beliefs that animate language. And finally, he focuses on aphorisms and social change and the emerging idioms of relativism, concluding that many early adages still in use seem to refuse to die.With inimitable verve and humor, Hoggart offers adages, apothegms, epigrams and the like in this colorful examination drawn from the national pool and the common culture. This volume will interest scholars and general readers interested in culture studies, communications, and education.

This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing. Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances. Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed. In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.

Richard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literacy, established his reputation as a uniquely sensitive and observant chronicler of English working-class life. This large volume vividly depicts his origins in that setting. It is an autobiographical account combining Hoggart's three masterful works, A Local Habitation, A Sort of Clowning, and An Imagined Life, in which he details his life from 1918 to the present. The first part of the trilogy (1918-1940) describes Hoggart at an early age, recreating his circle of family and friends. It ends with him earning his degree from Leeds University, and about to leave Yorkshire to go into the army. The second section (1940-1959) opens in wartime England and moves into the beginnings of Hoggart's career in writing. The final installment (1959-1991) traces and assesses a changing Britain and Europe and finds Hoggart reconsidering to his childhood. The book provides vivid insight into the life of one of Britain's outstanding writers, and chronicles changes in working-class and English culture after World War I to the present. Following the original publication, Philip Oakes of The Times Literary Supplement wrote, "He writes with a passion that is usually well banked, but which flows now and then with a visionary intensity. It is a remarkable way of looking at England." Beryl Bainbridge, writing for the New Statesman, said, "The setting of his own life in the context of social history makes Hoggart the ideal autobiographer." A Measure Life will be an enjoyable and insightful read for students of literature, culture, and English history as well as admirers of Richard Hoggart. Few will walk away from this volume without being the wiser with respect to Western liberal thought in our times.

Throughout his life, Richard Hoggart has been involved with four main areas: broadcasting, arts policy, education, and social work, all of which he finds have characteristics in common. This collection of essays represents less than a quarter of his essays published over the last two decades. The subjects, to which he turned again and again and which recur in public debate, are still current and contemporary. His views on culture and society, on literature and censorship, and on higher education are both unique and timely.The volume is divided into six parts. Part 1, "Society and Culture: Home and Away," discusses the question, "Are museums political?"; the use of the battered word culture in relation to UNESCO; and the end of the public service idea. Part 2, "A Very English Voice," looks at the rural English culture and country of D. H. Lawrence, and examines the controversy and censorship involved with three of Lawrence's works: The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Part 3, "Politics and Literature," reveals the author's penchant for timely debates on such subjects as "The State versus Literature" and "Freedom to Publish: Even Hateful Stuff"; and his thoughts on reviewers and reviewing. Part 4, "Levels of Education," touches upon the subjects of politics in universities; the use of public funds for various purposes presumed to be socially valuable; academics in the marketplace; and the need for government to foster critical and cultivated literacy. Part 5, "Figures from a Distant Past," contains reminiscences on and portraits of Hoggart's close relationships and family. Part 6, "Summing Up and Signing Off," is an interview with Nicolas Tredell in which Hoggart discusses his life's work and concerns.Written in Hoggart's characteristically graceful but direct style, these essays touch on issues of contemporary importance in his unique manner. This volume will be of interest to scholars and general readers interested in culture studies, communications, and education.

The Tyranny of Relativism is an impassioned attempt by one of England's most distinguished critics to capture the feel of British culture at the end of the twentieth century: its moods, attitudes, and institutions. Richard Hoggart presents a double argument, suggesting first that cultural dilemmas stem from a long slide towards moral relativism, as consumerism rather than authority increasingly determines the texture of life; and secondly, that despite its claims to the contrary, British Conservative governments have exploited these changes to their own ends. Blunt and forthright, humorous and humane, Hoggart supports his themes by analyzing particular forms of change in education at all levels, in the arts, mass and popular entertainment, in broadcasting, in the use of language, and in the uncertain base of "cultural studies" themselves. But he also shows how some social forces have worked against this monumental process: old-style checks and balances, the resistance of class sentiments, the uneasy sense of lost values. But in this series of cultural struggles, the intellectuals are noteworthy by their absence. The great merit of The Tyranny of Relativism is its resistance to platitudes, and its fearless probing of thorny questions that go to the heart of Western cultural traditions for a new age. When Hoggart concludes by asking "where do we go now" no one should expect complacency. In The Tyranny of Relativism, Hoggart makes the reader appreciate the silent complicity of the intellectual class for the cultural rot of relativism characteristic of western culture today. The book is must reading for those engaged in cultural studies, European politics, literary criticism, and the sociology of knowledge.

For years Richard Hoggart has observed the oddity of a common speech habit: the fondness for employing ready-made sayings and phrasings whenever we open our mouths, a disinclination to form our own sentences "from scratch, " unless that becomes inescapable. But in this book he is interested in more specific questions. How far do the British, and particularly the English, share the same sayings across the social classes? If each group uses some different ones, are those differences determined by location, age, occupation or place in the social scale? Over the years, did such sayings indicate some of the main lines of their culture, its basic conditions, its stresses and strains, its indications of meaning, and significance? These and other concerns animate this fascinating exploration of how the English, and particularly working-class English, use the English language.

Hoggart sets the stage by explaining how he has approached his subject matter, his manner of inquiry, and the general characteristics of sayings and speech. Looking back into time, he explores the idioms and epigrams in the poverty setting of the early working-class English. Hoggart examines the very innards of working-class life and the idioms, with the language that arose in relation to home, with its main characters of wives and mothers, husbands and fathers, and children; the wars; marriage; food, drink, health, and weather; neighbors, gossip, quarrels, old age, and death. He discusses related idioms and epigrams and their evolution from prewar to present.

Hoggart identifies the sayings and special nuances of the English working-class people that have made them identifiable as such, from the rude and obscene to theintellectual and imaginative. Hoggart also examines the areas of tolerance, local morality, and public morality, elaborating on current usage of words that have evolved from the fourteen through the eighteenth centuries. He touches on religion, superstition, and time, the beliefs that animate language. And finally, he focuses on aphorisms and social change and the emerging idioms of relativism, concluding that many early adages still in use seem to refuse to die.

With inimitable verve and humor, Hoggart offers adages, apothegms, epigrams and the like in this colorful examination drawn from the national pool and the common culture. This volume will interest scholars and general readers interested in culture studies, communications, and education.

This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing.

Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.

Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed.

In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.

Has legislation over-reached itself? The contributors to this volume discuss whether the increase in legislative instruments of many kinds, often promoted with good intentions, may be progressively limiting both our individual and our communal freedoms. Contributors include Bernard Crick, Maurice Peston and James Ferman discuss this key idea in accessible and forthright style.

Part meditation, part commonplace book, "First and Last Things" is an attempt by a writer of great distinction and strong convictions to take stock of his beliefs and values. Here, Richard Hoggart considers the big questions without shortchanging readers with easy answers. He examines problems (as he sees them) of faith; the mysterious origins of conscience; the importance of family and friends; the value of literature; the nature of memory; and the need, in old age, to find some value in existence. To these issues, and many others, the author brings a lifetime of rich experience and a mind well stocked with the best that has been written by those who have gone before.

What emerges above all in this work is Richard Hoggart's love of, almost obsession with, quotations from great authors, especially, of course, Shakespeare. He muses on the business of capitalism and democracy, noting a reluctant conclusion that democracy is the least worst form of government, and that capitalism is its inevitable partner, but one which democratic societies should treat with "a very long spoon." He argues that market and consumer driven societies are inevitably led to relativism, head-counting, and populism. The result is a book that is introspective without being self-absorbed, that is thought-provoking but never preaching, that is, profound without being portentous. "First and Last Things" is a work that the young should read, if only to discover how much there is still to understand, and one that the old will treasure.

Richard Hoggart was educated at Leeds University. Later, as professor of modern English literature at Birmingham University, he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He has authored or edited twenty-seven books, including "Between Two Worlds: Politics, Anti-Politics, and the Unpolitical, The Uses of Literacy," and "The Tyranny of Relativism," all available from Transaction.

Part meditation, part commonplace book, "First and Last Things" is an attempt by a writer of great distinction and strong convictions to take stock of his beliefs and values. Here, Richard Hoggart considers the big questions without shortchanging readers with easy answers. He examines problems (as he sees them) of faith; the mysterious origins of conscience; the importance of family and friends; the value of literature; the nature of memory; and the need, in old age, to find some value in existence. To these issues, and many others, the author brings a lifetime of rich experience and a mind well stocked with the best that has been written by those who have gone before.

What emerges above all in this work is Richard Hoggart's love of, almost obsession with, quotations from great authors, especially, of course, Shakespeare. He muses on the business of capitalism and democracy, noting a reluctant conclusion that democracy is the least worst form of government, and that capitalism is its inevitable partner, but one which democratic societies should treat with "a very long spoon." He argues that market and consumer driven societies are inevitably led to relativism, head-counting, and populism. The result is a book that is introspective without being self-absorbed, that is thought-provoking but never preaching, that is, profound without being portentous. "First and Last Things" is a work that the young should read, if only to discover how much there is still to understand, and one that the old will treasure.

Richard Hoggart was educated at Leeds University. Later, as professor of modern English literature at Birmingham University, he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He has authored or edited twenty-seven books, including "Between Two Worlds: Politics, Anti-Politics, and the Unpolitical, The Uses of Literacy," and "The Tyranny of Relativism," all available from Transaction.

A searing account of George Orwell’s experiences of working- class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, slum housing, mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity.

When a society becomes more affluent, does it lose other values? Are the skills that education and literacy gave millions wasted on consuming pop culture? Do the media coerce us into a world of the superficial and the material - or can they be a force for good? When Richard Hoggart asked these questions in his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy Britain was undergoing huge social change, yet his landmark work has lost none of its pertinence and power today. Hoggart gives a fascinating insight into the close-knit values of Northern England's vanishing working-class communities, and weaves this together with his views on the arrival of a new, homogenous 'mass' US-influenced culture. His headline-grabbing bestseller opened up a whole new area of cultural study and remains essential reading, both as a historical document, and as a commentary on class, poverty and the media.

'I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.' With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth 'in the bosom of a Christian family'. With irony, wit and sometimes rancour, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family's life through several generations.

The outstanding quality of Richard Hoggart's new book is its warmth. In the style of Montaigne, Hoggart looks back over his years and pinpoints those human qualities which have come to mean most to him and which he has appreciated in others. Part of this man's attraction derives from the fact that he is also extremely self-effacing. Literacy and the use of language remain an abiding concern of Professor Hoggart but he also analyses in these pages the nature of human courage, the uses of memory, the true purposes of education, love and charity, and the approach of the Grim Reaper. Throughout, Hoggart considers the public ideas and events which have interested him, and their intertwinings with his personal life. Examples would be- the family, politics, the intellectual life, beliefs and morals, words and writing. All of these are looked at through what the author describes as his 'time telescope'. Thus this book is not a theoretical or abstract record. Its argument is illustrated from life. We live in the age of the cult of youth and personality. Our lives are increasingly driven and influenced by The Media.But in these pages is contained the wisdom of one of the most astute and perceptive of our contemporary critics - a literary, social and cultural judge who is also very greatly loved by his admirers.

Richard Hoggart, famous for his writings on literature, education, and the means of communication, and especially for his influential book The Uses of Literacy, has written a new work in which he looks at the ways in which mass communications in the twenty-first century both encourage and hinder greater understanding of the modern world. Hoggart takes a number of aspects of mass society today - celebrity worship, youth culture, broadcasting, and a decline in the proper use of language - and considers the paradox that the ready accessibility of information of all types does not automatically lead to greater comprehension of our world. Information itself is inert and only leads to knowledge if it has been ordered and assessed. He assesses the slow but uninterrupted dissolution of old beliefs, in particular the widespread corruption of language. He analyses the erosion of the traditional pillars of authority throughout a century and a half of sustained intellectual criticism of existing assumptions and beliefs, especially in the religious sphere. Throughout the book, he examines broadcasting as the prime disseminator of mass information. truest form, and sees the Public Service ideal as coming increasingly under attack from today's BBC broadcasters. People who seem to believe that the overwhelming function of television today is to entertain.