Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy 41
surprising numbers, identify with the world into which they have been admitted,
and spend much of their time, to the applause of their new peers, expounding and
documenting the hopeless vulgarity of the people they have left: the one thing that
is necessary now, to weaken belief in the practicability of further educational extension
(377–8).
When, in the second part of his study, Hoggart turns to consider ‘some features of
contemporary life’ (169), the self-making aspect of working-class culture is mostly kept
from view. The popular aesthetic, so important for an understanding of the workingclass
pleasure on show in the 1930s, is now forgotten in the rush to condemn the
popular culture of the 1950s. The success of ‘the radio “soap operas”, with working
class women . . . is due to the consummateness of their attention . . . to their remarkably
sustained presentation of the perfectly ordinary and unremarkable’ (181). This is
repeated in newspaper cartoons featuring such figures as ‘the “little man” worrying for
days on end about his daughter’s chances in the school cookery competition ...a daily
exercise in spinning out the unimportant and insignificant’ (ibid.). What has happened
to the intrinsic significance of the everyday? Instead of talk of a popular aesthetic, we
are invited on a tour of the manipulative power of the culture industries. The popular
culture of the 1950s, as described by Hoggart, no longer offers the possibility of a full
rich life; everything is now far too thin and insipid. The power of ‘commercial culture’
has grown, relentless in its attack on the old (traditional working-class culture) in the
name of the new, the ‘shiny barbarism’ (193) of mass culture. This is a world in which
‘To be “old fashioned” is to be condemned’ (192). It is a condition to which the young
are particularly vulnerable. These ‘barbarians in wonderland’ (193) demand more, and
are given more, than their parents and their grandparents had or expected to have. But
such supposedly mindless hedonism, fed by thin and insipid fare, leads only to debilitating
excess.
‘Having a good time’ may be made to seem so important as to override almost all
other claims; yet when it has been allowed to do so, having a good time becomes
largely a matter of routine. The strongest argument against modern mass entertainments
is not that they debase taste – debasement can be alive and active – but
that they over excite it, eventually dull it, and finally kill it. . . . They kill it at the
nerve, and yet so bemuse and persuade their audience that the audience is almost
entirely unable to look up and say, ‘But in fact this cake is made of sawdust’
(196–7).
Although (in the late 1950s) that stage had not yet been reached, all the signs,
according to Hoggart, indicate that this is the way in which the world is travelling. But
even in this ‘candy-floss world’ (206) there are still signs of resistance. For example,
although mass culture may produce some awful popular songs,
people do not have to sing or listen to these songs, and many do not: and those
who do, often make the songs better than they really are . . . people often read