Aspects of Working-Class Life

The Uses of Literacy

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Richard Hoggart was born in Leeds in 1918. He served with the Royal Artillery in North Africa from 1940 to 1946, after which he taught literature at the University of Hull, was visiting professor of English at the University of Rochester in America and senior lecturer in English at the University of Leicester. Professor Hoggart has been a member of numerous bodies and at different times was an Assistant Director-General of UNESCO, Chairman of the New Statesman and Vice-Chairman of the Arts Council. 
 
The Uses of Literacy, his most widely acclaimed work was partly autobiographical and drawn from his own boyhood growing up in the North of England.

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His headline-grabbing bestseller opened up a whole new area of cultural study and remains essential reading, both as a historical document, and as a commentary on class, poverty and the media.

Dilemmas in Contemporary Culture

The Way We Live Now

An uncompromising attack on the way English society has been damaged over the last 20 years by the denial of standards, the triumph of the market and cynical exploitation.

Tough and principled, it is a testimony to his astonishing energy and stamina... It displays a calmness, a perfectly justified habit of intellectual (but always egalitarian) authority, and a considerable courage...

Hoggart has been a pawky, powerful and articulate critic of the way we live now for more than forty years... His arguments are detailed and thoughtful... He demonstrates that not everyone, even now, has lost the passion, the decency and the critical rage that he mourns.

Richard Hoggart was born in Leeds and educated at Leeds University. As Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham University, he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. For five years he was assistant Director of Unesco at its headquarters in Paris, where he and his wife still live. Until 1984 he was Warden of Goldsmith's College, University of London. His many works range from The Uses of Literacy, Speaking to Each Other, An English Temper, to An Idea of Europe (with Douglas Johnson). His recent work includes the highly acclaimed autobiographical trilogy A Local Habitation, A Sort of Clowning, and An Imagined Life, and the inimitable study of modern provincial life, Townscape with Figures: Farnham - Portrait of an English Town.

'This is his most powerful book since THE USES OF LITERACY and. . . deserves to be equally widely read. ' SUNDAY TIMES Richard Hoggart is one of Britain's most distinguished cultural critics. In this clear-eyed and controversial book he sets himself to take the temperature of the nation at the end of the 20th century - to test its blood for health and heartiness, sample its imagination for largeness amd magnanimity, conduct examinations of its intelligence, judgement and moral sense. As always, he makes us see how responsible we all are for the way we live now. 'Compelling, very important' NEW STATESMAN and SOCIETY

Richard Hoggart

A beautiful and poignant account of growing up in the working-class back-to-back houses of inner-city Leeds in the 1920s and 1930s

Life and Times, Volume One 1918-40

Richard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literary, established his reputation as a uniquely sensitive and observant chronicler of English working-class life. In this vivid first volume of autobiography he describes his origins in that milieu. Orphaned at an early age, Hoggart grew up in a working-class district of Leeds, in an intimate world of terraced back-to-backs, visits from the local Board of Guardians, clothing checks and potted-meat sandwiches. With affectionate insight he recreates the family circle - a loving grandmother, one domineering and on gentle aunt, and a bibulous, melancholy uncle - and recalls his early schooling, the friends he made and the mentors he admired. Hard-working and articulate, Hoggart did well enough at grammar school to go on to Leeds University. This volume ends as, having earned a higher degree and travelled in Nazi Germany, he prepares to leave Yorkshire, via the Army, for the world beyond. Wry, compassionate, exact, A Local Habitation is a classic recreation of working-class England between the wars.

Richard Hoggart

Praise for A Local Habitation

A beautiful and poignant account of growing up in the working-class back-to-back houses of inner-city Leeds in the 1920s and 1930s

Books by Richard Hoggart

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter