Richard Hoggart

"Hoggart has the rare quality ofcomplete intellectual honesty. The Uses of Literacy should beread by all those concerned with the nature of modernsociety." -Asher Tropp,American Sociological Review "This sort of modern Mayhew is worth any amountof statistics as background for cultural evalutions....Required reading for anyone concernedwith the modern cultural climate." -TimesLiterary Supplement

The Uses of Literacy

Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, this pioneering work examines how mass media has changed the lives and values of the English working class.

Aspects of Working-Class Life

It is now over fifteen years since Richard Hoggart's classic study of British working-class life and culture, The Uses of Literacy, first appeared. In the meantime, he has written extensively on society, on literature and on the relationships between the two. Here he has selected, revised and grouped in two volumes some forty of his best essays and papers. 
In About Literature Professor Hoggart includes critical essays on such writers as Graham Greene, George Orwell and Samuel Butler; on autobiographical writing; on the role of literature in society; and on teaching literature. This volume also contains his seminal paper, "The Literary Imagination and the Sociological Imagination".
'Richard Hoggart is an incomparable observer of the very substance of our language and feelings'-Raymond Williams in the Guardian
About Society, the companion to this volume, is published simultaneously in Pelicans.

Volume Two: About Literature 

Speaking to Each Other 

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.

First and Last Things

'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

The Way We Live Now

The outstanding quality of Richard Hoggart's new book is its charm. 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 charm derives from the fact that like most truly great men 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. >

Thoughts in Old Age

Promises to Keep

George Orwell

The Road to Wigan Pier. With an Introduction by Richard Hoggart

W. H. Auden

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 14th through the 18th 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.

Everyday Language and Everyday Life

An Approach to the Study of Literature and Society

Contemporary Cultural Studies

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.

Richard Hoggart

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