Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy 39
He describes the aesthetic of the working class as an ‘overriding interest in the close
detail’ of the everyday; a profound interest in the already known; a taste for culture that
‘shows’ rather than ‘explores’. The working-class consumer, according to Hoggart’s
account, therefore seeks not ‘an escape from ordinary life’, but its intensification, in the
embodied belief ‘that ordinary life is intrinsically interesting’ (120). The new mass
entertainment of the 1950s is said to undermine this aesthetic:
Most mass entertainments are in the end what D.H. Lawrence described as ‘antilife’.
They are full of a corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions
. . . they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist a
gradual drying up of the more positive, the fuller, the more cooperative kinds of
enjoyment, in which one gains much by giving much (340).
It is not just that the pleasures of mass entertainment are ‘irresponsible’ and ‘vicarious’
(ibid.); they are also destroying the very fabric of an older, healthier, working-class
culture. He is adamant that (in the 1950s)
we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture; that the remnants of what
was at least in parts an urban culture ‘of the people’ are being destroyed; and that
the new mass culture is in some important ways less healthy than the often crude
culture it is replacing (24).
He claims that the working-class culture of the 1930s expressed what he calls ‘The rich
full life’, marked by a strong sense of community. This is a culture that is by and large
made by the people. Here is a fairly well-known example of what he means – his
description of a typical day at the seaside:
the ‘charas’ go rolling out across the moors for the sea, past the road houses which
turn up their noses at coach parties, to one the driver knows where there is coffee
and biscuits or perhaps a full egg and bacon breakfast. Then on to a substantial
lunch on arrival, and after that a fanning out in groups. But rarely far from one
another, because they know their part of the town and their bit of beach, where
they feel at home. . . . They have a nice walk past the shops; perhaps a drink; a sit
in a deck chair eating an ice cream or sucking mint humbugs; a great deal of loud
laughter – at Mrs Johnson insisting on a paddle with her dress tucked in her
bloomers, at Mrs Henderson pretending she has ‘got off’ with the deck chair attendant,
or in the queue at the ladies lavatory. Then there is the buying of presents for
the family, a big meat tea, and the journey home with a stop for drinks on the way.
If the men are there, and certainly if it is a men’s outing, there will probably be
several stops and a crate or two of beer in the back for drinking on the move.
Somewhere in the middle of the moors the men’s parties all tumble out, with
much horseplay and noisy jokes about bladder capacity. The driver knows exactly
what is expected of him as he steers his warm, fuggy, and singing community back