“This description and later descriptive passages in this chapter are largely based on memories of twenty years ago...” (37)
How many times do you hear the lower middle class stand up and shout “Wow it is a noble and wonderful place to be!... I truly do love being poor, having little hope of ever dying in a better position than the one in which I was born, and hoping for the most simple of pleasures to distract me from my empty stomach and dangerous work!” Probably not all that often. As much as I hate to start blog posts on a downer, it must be said that with each subsequent reading of Hoggart, the less and less I like him. I understand that at the time of its publication Literacy was a provocative and compelling work. Whereas Bourdieu perhaps relies too much on statistics and the philosophy of culture, Hoggart asserts the point of view of a man looking through the rosy lens of time. This lens allows words like 'malnutrition' to come out as 'meager diet'. Though Hoggart himself says we need to avoid speaking of the working class has heros, he does little shed the kind of nostalgia and admiration that perhaps Bourdieu lacked in his statistical evaluation.
In 1957, twenty or thirty years removed from his “working class” background, Hoggart seems preoccupied at examining the working class through the rosy lens of a person admiring and nostalgic for the struggles from their past. I am not calling in to question Hoggart's background or whether or not he truly comes from what he calls the 'working class', I am however a little put off by the language he uses when describing the people, places, and situations of the people trapped in the manufacturing cities of Northern England, and the general mood of the piece gradually moves from almost neutral toward a celebration of the noble savage making ends meet as best they can.
His longing for the simpleness of poverty comes off as condescending and celebrating the toils of those trapped by their means is certainly not something a person in that situation would find flattering. I am not a Birmingham factory worker, nor have I lived in a 'hovel' like those described in great Dickensian detail by Hoggart, but I do know what it's like to have a father who worked construction 70 hours a week, eating macaroni and cheese 5 days a week out of necessity, and living in a town in decline whose population has to struggle just to make ends meet. The skewed lens would seem awfully symptomatic of someone who no longer finds themselves longing for the simple pleasure of survival without the complications and burdens of academic responsibility and accumulation of the unnecessary.
Establishing his street cred not withstanding, Hoggart does present a portrait of a lower middle class as more involved in the creation and perpetuation of mass culture. The power that the working class seem to posses in Hoggart's evaluation is slightly liberating. Particularly in his evaluation of the oral tradition in contrast with Gramsci. Hoggart seems more nostalgic about the loss of an authentic popular culture in Britain, but seems more positive about the cohesive nature of the oral tradition and myth in Northern England. The past is in a kind of direct dialogue with the present, and mass culture (In this case primarily weeklys and the cinema) is in a give and take with the people themselves. In Hoggart they rely heavily on reciprocity (for better or worse), whereas Gramsci views these forms of mass culture as mere encylopedias for examining the habits and tastes of the population as indicators of their progression or evolution.
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