Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 3 Culturalism
to the town; for his part he gets a very large tip, collected during the run through
the last few miles of the town streets (147–8).
This is a popular culture that is communal and self-made. Hoggart can be criticized for
his romanticism, but we should also recognize here, in the passage’s utopian energy,
an example of Hoggart’s struggle to establish a working distinction to distinguish
between a culture ‘of the people’ and a ‘world where things are done for the people’
(151).
The first half of The Uses of Literacy consists mostly of examples of communal and
self-made entertainment. The analysis is often in considerable advance of Leavisism.
For example, he defends working-class appreciation of popular song against the dismissive
hostility of Cecil Sharp’s (Leavisesque) longing for the ‘purity’ of folk music
(see Storey, 2003) in terms which were soon to become central to the project of cultural
studies. Songs only succeed, he argues, ‘no matter how much Tin Pan Alley plugs
them’ (159), if they can be made to meet the emotional requirements of their popular
audience. As he says of the popular appropriation of ‘After the Ball is Over’, ‘they have
taken it on their own terms, and so it is not for them as poor a thing as it might have
been’ (162).
The idea of an audience appropriating for its own purposes – on its own terms – the
commodities offered to it by the culture industries is never fully explored. But the idea
is there in Hoggart; again indicating the underexploited sophistication of parts of The
Uses of Literacy – too often dismissed as a rather unacademic, and nostalgic, semiautobiography.
The real weakness of the book is its inability to carry forward the
insights from its treatment of the popular culture of the 1930s into its treatment of the
so-called mass culture of the 1950s. If it had done, it would have, for example, quickly
found totally inadequate the contrasting descriptive titles, ‘The full rich life’ and
‘Invitations to a candy-floss world’. It is worth noting at this point that it is not necessary
to say that Hoggart’s picture of the 1930s is romanticized in order to prove that his
picture of the 1950s is exaggeratedly pessimistic and overdrawn; he does not have to
be proved wrong about the 1930s, as some critics seem to think, in order to be proved
wrong about the 1950s. It is possible that he is right about the 1930s, whilst being
wrong about the 1950s. Like many intellectuals whose origins are working class, he is
perhaps prone to bracket off his own working-class experience against the real and
imagined condescension of his new middle-class colleagues: ‘I know the contemporary
working class is deplorable, but mine was different.’ Although I would not wish to overstress
this motivation, it does get some support in Williams’s (1957) review of The Uses
of Literacy, when he comments on ‘lucky Hoggart’s’ account of the scholarship boy:
‘which I think’, Williams observes, ‘has been well received by some readers (and why
not? it is much what they wanted to hear, and now an actual scholarship boy is saying
it)’ (426–7). Again, in a discussion of the ‘strange allies’ dominant groups often attract,
Williams (1965) makes a similar, but more general point:
In our own generation we have a new class of the same kind: the young men and
women who have benefited by the extension of public education and who, in