'Because a Sixpence has been Lost...' The Greatness of Richard Hoggart

A number of famous or notable people died last week, and may they rest in peace. But by far the greatest and most notable of them was Richard Hoggart ( a superb obituary of him, from the Daily Telegraph) can be found here, and I commend it to all my readers. I found it extremely moving.

 

Nearly 50 years ago I read, I read, and was greatly influenced ever afterwards by, his masterwork ‘The Uses of Literacy’.

 

I have delved into it since then, but I doubt if a second reading could ever have the power of a first encounter with this extraordinary and evocative book about a country and a people who were already disappearing when it was published. My long-lost old Pelican edition had on its cover an L.S. Lowry painting, of that magical landscape of industrial Britain,  cold and dirty, yet strangely safe and peaceful.

 

I just caught the end of it. I still remember, a child of Sussex, Hampshire,  Devon and Oxfordshire, gaping in wonder at the power, dirt, fire and clangour of Sheffield on a York-bound train some time in 1969.  I’d seen the more workful parts of Plymouth and Portsmouth, and the rather restrained 20th-century car plants and pressed steel works of Cowley. I’d seen pictures and films of the industrial north, but the real thing surpassed them far beyond expectation. And then in a few years it just vanished. Travel the same way now and it’s all parks and shops. You have to go to the USA or China to see industry of any size any more. I also remember (and I shall be returning to this image in something I plan to write shortly) what was in many ways the moment of its death, which happened in York round about the time they began to abolish English money, sixpences and all (see below). Over a few rather spectacular days and nights, they burned the old town gas out of the mains, to clean them ready for the new North sea Gas that was going to take us into anew, clean modern era.

 

Over countless manholes stood curious tripods, glowing red hot and making a sighing noise as the old fuel was consumed. I was fascinated. Nobody else seemed to care.

 

When the great Ian Jack isn’t writing daft suppositious stuff about climate change, he is very good on the extraordinarily swift and total disappearance of Industrial Britain. But what Hoggart cared about was the society that existed amid the furnaces and the gasworks.

 

And what I like about him is his utter conviction that critical literacy on a large scale was essential to a free society. As the obituary puts it :

 

‘Yet he was also essentially conservative in his dislike of change; hawkish in foreign affairs; and thoroughly elitist in his disdain for modern mass culture. He believed fervently in the value of great literature : “In a democracy which is highly commercialised you have to give people critical literacy. If you don’t do that, you might as well pack it in.”

 

‘He also thoroughly detested the fashion for relativism, which “leads to populism which then leads to levelling and so to reductionism of all kinds, from food to moral judgments". For Hoggart, those who maintained that the Beatles were as good as Beethoven represented a “loony terminus”.’

 

Alas, he did not take the next step of asking what the real foundation for such relativism was, or he might have had to revise some of his other beliefs. For culture, being essentially moral, as beauty is related to truth, and truth is related to goodness, requires an absolute foundation.

 

And he rightly saw, in the 1950s to which I am always falsely accused of wishing to return, the beginnings of a cultural and moral cheapening that has only now reached full speed and full pressure. Imagine if you will ‘Game of Thrones’ being shown to a young man or woman in the working class Leeds of 1954.  Yet their children and grandchildren would do so. As the obituary notes Richard Hoggart said the era was ‘“full of corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions”, tending towards a view of the world “in which progress is conceived as a seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral levelling and freedom as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure”.’

 

Social conservatism, you see, is by no means confined to the political right. In fact, the political right have largely abandoned that. Nigel Farage is beginning to grasp this, though his atrocious attitude towards cannabis decriminalisation suggests that he still hasn’t thought this through.

 

Funnily enough, nor did Richard Hoggart really think his thoughts through. He should have grasped that the ‘Chatterley’ trial had almost nothing to do with D.H.Lawrence’s not-very-good book (there were no prosecution witnesses, apart from a policeman to confirm that the book had been published and put on sale, an amazing fact revealed in C.H.Rolph’s book on the trial, and dwelt on in my ‘Abolition of Britain’. The other important fact is that all the defence witnesses had managed to obtain and read unexpurgated versions of this supposedly banned book, which was in truth readily available to the educated elite, and not truly banned at all ).

 

It was a conscious test case, designed to give a first outing to the new defence of ‘literary merit’, an attribute so vague that anything can be said to have it. And its main effect  has been to license the publication of almost anything, often with the assistance of John Mortimer.

 

Richard Hoggart  (whose whole career was the result of enlightened selection) also supported comprehensive schooling, which just shows how wrong intelligent people can be when they let their faith interfere with their appreciation of the facts.  

 

By the way, in the newspaper itself, Richard Hoggart’s obituary took second place to that of the author of ‘The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole’.  How strange. You either like ‘Adrian Mole’ or you do not. I don’t. But Richard Hoggart was so important that it didn’t matter whether you liked him or not. And it should not be forgotten that as John Ezard recalled in his fine Guardian obituary of the great professor, he wrote what must be one of the most moving passages of autobiography I have ever read, thus…

 

‘”When I see – or see film of – a driven bird flying to its nest and anxiously, earnestly feeding the open mouths, the image of our mother comes to mind," Hoggart wrote. "When you have seen a woman standing frozen, while tears start slowly down her cheeks because a sixpence has been lost ... you do not easily forget.”’

 

I should think not.