Important Gobbets

Question 1

Richard Hoggart Context from George Hoare

Answer 1

• First, it is a deeply humane account of a social group (the mainly Northern working-class) at a decisive historical conjuncture, experiencing the interaction of the two broad cultural forces of the (predominantly pre-war) local traditions of the working class and the increasingly powerful commercialism of post-war consumer capitalism.
• Second, it is routinely cited as one of the foundational texts of cultural studies—along with Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society(1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) and EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963)—and is both theoretically far-reaching and easy to read, making important points about the relationship between art (especially popular publications) and everyday life without a resort to hyper-theoreticism (which marred much cultural theory of the 1970s).
• Third, the reception of The Uses of Literacy in the British New Left of the late 1950s tells us much about both the text itself and the political movement it soon related to, as well as our own difficulties in formulating a compelling and popular account of radical politics today.
• The ‘Early’ British New Left, in its initial late-1950s, early-1960s incarnation, attempted to re-define the very meaning of socialism: beyond, that is, the narrow ‘economism’ of the Stalinist orthodoxy of the Communist Party and the arguably even narrower ‘Gas Board Socialism’ of the Labour Party, to a system of thought that included the importance of literature, cinema, criticism, housing, schooling, human relationships, experimentation—in short, the ‘total scale of man’s activities’. If the ‘Early’ New Left has any relevance to contemporary politics, as I would argue it does, then it is through its emphasis on cultural renewal and the question of how to orient ourselves to the cultural force of a pervasive, high-powered, and ambiguously satisfying consumer capitalism—and The Uses of Literacy is a key text in thinking through these ideas of ‘culture’ and everyday, lived experience.
• Structure and argument: two conflicting parts:
• First, a reading of the dense working-class life (the place of mother and father, the sights, the smells…) which Hoggart grew up with in Leeds
• Second, a wide-ranging (and almost curmudgeonly) critique of the post-war ‘commercial culture’ beginning to take root and interface with that culture. The tension between these two sections is clear; The Uses of Literacy was originally titled ‘The Abuse of Literacy’.
• The first part of Hoggart’s account, then, describes ‘An “Older” Order’.
• Shot-through with a emotional identification with and intuitive sympathy for the manners of speech, behaviour, and even thought of the working-class community Hoggart studies. Briefly: I was raised in a suburb of Reading in what was held by local legend to be, at the time, the largest housing development in Europe outside of Sweden, full of identical brick semis and mock-tudor detached houses, all built in the mid 1980s. So, I thought about the effect on ‘community’ of the following two facts: the houses were all, as I realised, deliberately constructed so as not to face each other—you looked at your neighbours’ garden wall, or the side of their house—and therefore you could not easily see if your neighbours were home (we did not know our neighbours); and, as all the houses had been put up in one go, like turning the page of a pop-up story-book, there had been no development of smaller streets, with corner pubs or shops, and there was no local high street, only a massive Asda.)
• Part of the value of The Uses of Literacy as a historical document to a twenty-first century reader lies here, in the ethnographically-rich autobiographical first section, which details ‘The Personal and the Concrete’ of working-class life. Hoggart details an entire order, from the centrality of the neighbourhood to group life, to characteristic attitudes to fate and luck, and (influentially) ideas of ‘Us’ (working-class) and ‘Them’ (bosses and the rest) to understanding the inequalities of life and the way things work. Stuart Hall has called this method ‘social hermeneutics’, with The Uses of Literacy as a signal example. Two important partialities must be noted though. First, Hoggart takes regional (West Yorkshire) culture for class culture, forgetting that in Britain there is not, for example, such a thing as standardised ‘working class speech’: there is, even today, upper-class and middle-class speech, and working-class speech exists as a set of regional variants. Second, and the greater partiality, Hoggart’s experience is, as he notes, based on his life as a hard-working scholarship boy: he stays at home, struggling for a quiet place to study rather than entering the work of work. The Uses of Literacy, it is often pointed out, is an account of the private life of the working-class, with the public world of politics centred around the workplace, and the (at times creative, at times destructive) tension between the two wholly excluded.
• Hoggart’s account, then, is incomplete (not that we could reasonably expect anything else). But even in placing politics to one side and examining one aspect of working-class life—with such detail and compassion—Hoggart contributes decisively to a movement that would later find its home, directed by Hoggart, in an off-shoot of the Birmingham English Literature Department in 1963: ‘Cultural Studies’. In The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart, along with (in radically different ways) Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, radically overturns the meaning of ‘culture’ used in any kind of literary studies by providing an account of a way of life not merely marginalised but excluded from the dominant discourse of culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said’, running from Arnold to Eliot and, later, the Leavises.
• ‘Culture’ here, in a way that we easily accept today, instead also refers to the experiences and habits of everyday group life, even filtering down to varieties of light (‘the sun forcing its way down as far as the ground-floor windows on a very sunny afternoon, the foggy gray of November over the slates and chimneys, the misty evenings of March when the gangs congregate in the watery yellow light of the kicked and scratched gas-lamp’, p56) and tastes (‘not so much the ordinary toffees and boiled sweets, nor even the sherbet-fountains, monkey nuts and aniseed balls, but the stuff of which each generation of boys transmits the secret—a penny stick of licorice or some cinnamon root from the chemist, two pennyworth of broken locust, a portion of chips ‘with some scraps, please’, well soused with salt and vinegar and eaten out of a piece of newspaper which is licked at the end’, p57) in this case known to a working-class boy. For Hoggart, all these aspects of a way of life must be given their place for us to begin to understand culture; The Uses of Literacy is a warning against any kind of ‘reductionism’ that does not hold on to these complexities of human reality.
• The Uses of Literacy also provoked wide-ranging and vocal debate in the British New Left of the late 1950s, and it is the nature and contours of this debate that I find instructive: by looking at the criticisms made of Hoggart’s work at the time, we can better situate it in its historical and political context, particularly by looking at why it was thought by the Left as so important to engage with.
• In the Summer of 1957, shortly after the publication of The Uses of Literacy, the Oxford-based New Left journal Universities and Left Review printed three responses to The Uses of Literacy based around a central review by Raymond Williams. The responses collected around the regional differences between the Irish and Welsh working-class and that of West Yorkshire, structural changes in the position of ‘the scholarship boy’, and the twin theoretical poles of the importance of cultural subordination and cultural classlessness.
• Williams’ response to The Uses of Literacy’s critique of commercial society and the idea of this culture ‘replacing’ or ‘subordinating’ existing working class ways of life seems to me to be valuable. Hoggart correctly identifies in the second part of The Uses of Literacy the shallowness and specious populism of popular publications, as well as their banality and the meretriciousness of the industry that produces them—which he compares fairly straightforwardly to the (in parts) resilient working-class culture he has previously outlined. Hoggart argues that questions about the interaction between these two cultures are important, and the unbalanced nature of their meeting is something we must bear in mind, unless we are satisfied with losing all that is good in the older order and uncritically accepting the newer mass art.
• This thought was an important one for the Early New Left, caught up in the same quick processes of cultural shift that Hoggart described. However, there are passages, notably about the ‘Juke-Box Boys’ where Hoggart talks about the ‘spiritual dry-rot’ of those who hang around in milk bars with ‘no aim, no ambition, no protection, no belief’, in which a moral critique is offered of those members of the working class seduced by ‘sex in shiny packets’ (p. 204). Williams is however correct in emphasising that it is the exposure to ‘commercial culture’ not its consumption to which we must attend, and that this culture has influenced all classes (even if not equally). Our response, then, must be not only to examine the content of the publications that are read, but to accord central importance to the ownership of the media and the institutions for cultural dissemination and promotion. Analogously, free speech is not just a matter of what can be said; it is increasingly important who owns the vehicles through which that speech is produced, circulated, and received.
• The question of cultural classlessness—which Hoggart is clear in the Conclusion we are heading towards, or have already started achieving—is more complex, and I will do no more than scrape the surface of that debate here. Williams’ key insight into The Uses of Literacywas how Hoggart focuses on the (class) similarities in the use of material objects (for example, newspapers to paperbacks—but this equally applies to, to take two, washing machines and cars) without highlighting the persistent class differences in understandings of society and constitutive human relationships (1).
• Williams sees a distinctive working-class culture as inhering in (among other things) an emphasis on ‘extending relationships’ through associational groups and political organisations, in contradistinction to bourgeois ideas of competition (economically) and ‘service’ (which Williams sees as complexly providing the explanation for Tory preaching about family values to single mothers while packing their children off to boarding school). While the centrality of ideas about society and constitutive human relationships to any type of thinking about politics is difficult to exaggerate, we must also think carefully about the role of associational (sports, volunteering, political) groups in today’s society and whether the idea of ‘extending relationships’ is still one with much currency today.
• The continuing relevance of ideas of ‘cultural struggle’ and the relationship between culture and class can be seen, among other places, in Stuart White’s recent ‘ideological map’ of the four strands of evolving progressive thought in the New Statesman (2). Here White delineates ‘Left Communitarianism’, ‘Left Republicanism’, ‘Centre Republicanism’, and ‘Right Communitarianism’. More relevant here (but perhaps less important) than the simple observation that there must be more to progressive thought than these (where is socialism? where is public ownership? what is our conception of a radically different and better way to live?), is the central conceptual importance within Communitarianism of determining ideas of culture. ‘Left Communitarianism’, for instance, contends that ‘human beings are social creatures… we need a social vision that emphasises solidarity and mutuality’.
• Here culture, in Hoggart’s sense of the texture of lived experience and the real social vision that exists in actual communities, is key to how we emphasise solidarity, and which mutualities we should endorse (and which we should oppose). A key legacy of the ‘culturalist’ New Left, as shown in, at least in my reading, The Uses of Literacy and the debate around it in the Early British New Left, is the taking culture seriously as constitutive ground for all social practices—including politics. For instance, debates about affluence in the 1950s and the ‘embourgeoisement’ of the working class, about the dangers of ‘Americanisation’ and what Hoggart calls ‘the candy-floss world’ of the newer mass art with its sugary consumerist treats, have a deep resonance with Right Communitarians worrying about the effect of the ‘moral vacuum created by… lifestyle liberalism in society’.
• The Uses of Literacy poses, directly and indirectly, a set of difficult questions for the strands of progressive thought White describes: where could an alternative to an atomistic liberal view of human beings come from (‘working-class culture’)? on the other hand, what is the role of materialism in progressive politics (does it undermine bases of solidarity)? what about class (does it still exist, does it form the basis of political action)? how are class, politics, and the potential for radical change expressed in popular culture? how do we avoid taking the facile intellectual shortcuts of thinking about ‘the masses’ and ‘the common man’ when contrasting the real bases of solidarity and mutuality that exist in society with a culture in television and the newspapers which seems to emphasise wholly different aspects and values of life (the value of competition, the necessity of having low (and even fearful) opinion of others)? In short, can we construct a radical politics that takes into account the complexities and contradictions in contemporary culture and does not end up anti-humanist or with a thinly-veiled contempt for ‘the masses’?
• To answer these questions with the resources set down by Hoggart, The Uses of Literacymust be placed in its dual historical context. In the story of the foundation of cultural studies, it plays a key part, particularly in its insistence that ‘ways of life’ must be studied in and for themselves, and culture should thus be understood as a matter of ‘meaning’ or, as Hoggart puts it, the ‘practices of ‘making sense’’. On its release, The Uses of Literacy raised questions for the Early New Left about the character of a class culture, the very meaning of culture, and the interaction between culture and politics (in cultural struggle) and culture and class—questions which have not (cannot?) be decisively answered once and for all and are still core to a truly ‘progressive’ politics.

Question 2

Wilmott and Young - Lawrence Findings

Answer 2

• • Highlight [567]: Culture and lifestyle changed much less with the move out to suburban Essex than Family and kinship would suggest, partly because Bethnal Green’s family and neighbourhood networks were considerably less cohesive than they claimed.
• Highlight [568]: But, if Family and kinship built on an established British tradition of ethnographically sensitive social investigation, it nonetheless still represented a landmark study.
• Highlight [568]: Reinforced by Richard Hoggart’s pioneering study of urban popular culture, The uses of literacy, which was also published in , and by the wider explosion of interest in working-class life captured in literature and film (a moment recently conveyed with brilliance by Selina Todd), Young and Willmott’s account of the impact of post-war rehousing policies on the
• Highlight [569]: people of Bethnal Green came to define the concept of ‘working-class community’ in British public debate.
• Highlight [569]: sell more than half a million copies, influencing generations of scholars, social workers, and other professionals
• Highlight [569]: Mike Savage sees Family and kinship as a ‘pioneering’ qualitative study which helped to rehabilitate the in-depth interview in social research, while in their review of post-war community studies Graham Crow and Graham Allan describe it as the ‘pre-eminent’ study for fixing ideas about ‘community life in times past’
• Highlight [570]: Like Hoggart’s treatise on popular culture (in which ‘our mam’ was again the pivotal figure), Family and kinship had its origins in its author’s critical, if sympathetic, response to the state-directed reforms of the post-war Labour governments.
• Highlight [570]: Peter Willmott was eight years younger than Young and had enjoyed a less privileged upbringing. Young was from a bohemian middle-class family and had been educated at Dartington Hall and the London School of Economics (LSE)
• Highlight [570]: Willmott came to work as Young’s research assistant at the Labour party in . P
• Highlight [570]: In Family and kinship, Young and Willmott argued that the British authorities had failed to recognize working-class people’s powerful attachment to place, and to the dense networks of kinship and neighbourliness built up over preceding generations, which they saw as the building blocks for a more mutualistic socialism
• Highlight [570]: They famously insisted that ‘very few people wish to leave the East End. They are attached to Mum and Dad, to the markets, to the pubs an
• Highlight [571]: settlements
• Highlight [572]: Young and Willmott’s findings therefore played a central role in the construction of this model of the (disappearing) ‘traditional’ working-class community.
• Highlight [572]: Most famously, in , Jennifer Platt offered a book-length critique of the ICS and its ‘impressionistic’ methods, in which she argued that Family and kinship had constructed ‘an ideal-type Bethnal Green family rather than a typology’ capable of explaining their supposedly ‘deviant cases’
• Highlight [572]: In recent decades, historians have also sought to puncture romanticized accounts of working-class community, building on Robert Roberts’s pioneering
• Highlight [573]: semi-autobiographical treatise The classic slum ()
• Highlight [573]: Indeed, this remained a central premise of Roberts’s own anti-romantic account of life in the classic slum; at the book’s opening, surveying the flattened streets of s Salford, he comments ‘A kind of culture unlikely to rise again had gone in the rubble.
• Highlight [573]: It is probably the powerful personal testimony mobilized throughout Family and kinship which helps to explain why Young and Willmott’s celebratory account of working-class community has proved so influential, and has come to represent the classic account of ‘traditional’ working-class life before ‘affluence’ and mass consumption supposedly changed everything
• Highlight [574]: Thanks to recent deposits of materials found at the ICS in the s, we now have a sizeable chunk of the project’s original field-notes available for re-analysis
• I
• Highlight [575]: Attitudes towards neighbours, neighbourhood, and kinsfolk were all more equivocal than Young and Willmott suggest
• Highlight [575]: A surprising number actually welcomed the chance to be more distant from their close kin, while, even among those who missed their kinsfolk, few had any wish to return to the crowded streets of Bethnal Green. Arguably, such voices went almost unheard in Family and kinship because they challenged the authors’ model of the extended family as lynchpin of an organic, self-servicing working-class community – a community which they hoped might yet provide the basis for an alternative, less Statist, model for British social democracy.
• Highlight [575]: filtering out these voices created a myth of working-class community which has too often stood in the way of understanding the extent to which working people played an active role in remaking their own lives in the decades after the Second World War
• Highlight [575]: Intriguingly, both in his Ph.D. thesis and in Family and kinship, Young observed that he had not managed systematically to investigate the question of neighbour, as opposed to kin, relations
• Highlight [577]: Here the warmth and camaraderie that characterized Young and Willmott’s vision of working-class community was wholly absent.
• Highlight [577]: But perhaps most suggestive is Young’s response to Mrs Kimber when she told him that ‘she wouldn’t be afraid of being cut off from people’ if she moved out to one of the new estates because one was ‘better off if you keep yourself to yourself’: Young simply scribbled in the margin: ‘Again!’ B
• Highlight [577]: Young’s field-notes also demonstrate that the widespread preference for houses over flats, which is noted in Family and kinship, was directly related to the strains that often characterized neighbourly relations in Bethnal Green
• II
• Highlight [581]: At times, Young directly challenged residents who appeared not to be living up to his idealized model of their family-centred culture.
• III
• Highlight [583]: For some, Bethnal Green had already changed so much that there was no longer any reason to stay. As well as those who insisted that community feeling was in decline, some reported that most of their family had already left the borough and felt that they should follow (this was despite the fact that the sample was drawn from the Bethnal Green rather than London County Council (LCC) housing list and, by focusing on households with at least two children under fifteen, also largely excluded the elderly who were most likely to be left behind)
• IV
• Highlight [584]: Flux was also a feature of life on the new LCC estate of Debden, fourteen miles from Bethnal Green along the Central Line as it snaked into suburban Essex.
• Highlight [585]: According to Young and Willmott, ‘the migrants [to Debden] did not have weaker kinship attachments than other people’ before they left. They support this claim by stating that on average migrants reported having seen their mothers just as often when they lived in Bethnal Green as those still resident there.
• Highlight [587]: This reference to ‘mateyness’ conjures up images of male bonding which perhaps hint at the gendered undertones of Young and Willmott’s idealized working-class ‘community’. But there are other problems with this passage. Although Mrs Painswick made the final comment, it was another woman, Mrs Minton, who was pleased that her neighbours were not ‘rowdy’ or ‘shouty’. In fact, what she said, in answer to Young’s question about social contacts, was: ‘Friends? No we don’t make a habit of that. No we don’t go in for that at all. We like to avoid trouble. The neighbours round this way do seem a nice lot. Not a rowdy, shouty, rough lot.’ 
• Highlight [589]: In Family and kinship, Young and Willmott argued that ‘bitterness’, rather than ‘a tacit agreement to live and let live’, tended to dominate personal relationships in Debden because acute social isolation bred status anxieties.
• V
• Highlight [591]: The sharp contrast between Firth’s downbeat account of ‘community’ in Bermondsey and Young and Willmott’s very different findings for Bethnal Green is striking, but so too is the different impact of the two studies.
• Highlight [593]: Only by going back to the original testimonies can we begin to understand the complex mix of push and pull factors at work in the reconfiguration of nineteenth-century urban neighbourhoods, and hence urban popular culture, across the middle decades of the twentieth century. In doing so, it also quickly becomes apparent why a politics based around a mythologized picture of ‘community’ and the extended family was bound to fail.

Question 3

Goldthorpe and Lockwood

Answer 3

Appearances:

• The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure: Famed work of British sociologists, considered by Ely Chinoy to be “carefully planned, well-executed research design; a systematic and thorough analysis of the data”. Sought to test the hypothesis that “rising income levels, technological change, and ecological trends are leading to the embourgeoisement of the working class. The position and character of that class has long been a circulatory issue in Marxist theory, for the historical record seemed to refute Marx’s assertion that workers possessed a revolutionary potential.”

Jon Lawrence - Social Science Encounters

• Highlight [page 2]: But it is not only the poor who leave little trace in the historical record.
• Highlight [page 2]: Even in advanced capitalist societies with high literacy rates and sophisticated mass communications, most people leave only fragmentary traces of their lives.
• Highlight [page 2]: Here, the focus is on interview transcripts from two large-scale studies of so-called ‘affluent workers’ undertaken in early 1960s Britain: Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s famous Luton study of 1962–4, and their earlier pilot study of Cambridge.
• Highlight [page 2]: As Mike Savage has argued, in many respects it was the Luton study, with its lengthy semi-structured questionnaire about workers’ lifestyle, attitudes and behaviour, which defined sociology as a distinct discipline in postwar Britain
• Highlight [page 3]: Savage is probably unique in having examined interview transcripts from both the Luton and Cambridge studies
• Highlight [page 3]: He uses interviews with firmly middle-class Cambridge workers to explore respondents’ individualist narratives of self-making in which education and the acquisition of technical and managerial skills came to define their place within a modern, progressive and supposedly meritocratic society.
• Highlight [page 3]: In turn, he uses interviews with Luton’s highly-paid manual workers to highlight their sharp antagonism to conventional, hierarchical models of social and occupational class, and their insistence on proclaiming themselves ‘ordinary’ part of a large mass of hard-working individuals that would include almost all those conventionally termed ‘working’ and ‘middle’ class in the classifying schema of sociologists
• Highlight [page 3]: Focusing more closely on social interaction between researcher and subject suggests a number of important refinements to Savage’s influential analysis of class identities in newly ‘affluent’ Britain. I
• Highlight [page 3]: In short, Savage underestimates the extent to which age and gender shaped the testimony of Luton and Cambridge workers, and hence shaped Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s influential conclusion that British workers remained untouched by middle-class values and aspirations.
• Highlight [page 4]: Finally, the article returns directly to the testimony of the ‘affluent workers’. It focuses on two areas where the social dynamics of the interview, and the preconceptions of both sides, proved particularly important: first, how husbands and wives tended to differ in their perception of class snobbery, though not in their perception of class as an abstract concept, and second, how the emotional economy of class broke through when respondents tried to reconcile their professed views on class with the assumed status claims of their interviewer. 1
• Highlight [page 4]: At the heart of the affluent-worker project were two young Cambridge academics, David Lockwood (born 1929) and John Goldthorpe (born 1935). Both were grammar-school boys who had grown up in the industrial West Riding of Yorkshire (in the Holme and Dearne valleys respectively), and both took degrees in London after the war (LSE and UCL respectively), before embarking on the academic careers that eventually brought them to Cambridge at the start of the 1960s.
• Highlight [page 5]: The interview transcripts deposited at Essex University have been anonymized, so we know interviewers only by shorthand codes, though thankfully gender difference has been preserved since these codes take the form F1, M1
• Highlight [page 5]: As Mike Savage has observed, interviewers were often surprisingly frank about the experience of visiting working and lower-middle-class respondents in their own homes.
• Highlight [page 5]: The research team met frequently to discuss progress in the field, and such comments would have served to emphasize a researcher’s membership of a professional, academic sub-culture defined by its ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ understanding of ‘good’ (and ‘bad’) taste, as well as to clarify the social placement of different households in the survey.
• Highlight [page 6]: Although our sample is too small to draw strong conclusions, there are signs that male interviewers may have been more willing to praise plebeian ‘taste’, or at least happier to present themselves as indifferent to the supposed cultural markers of good tast
• Highlight [page 10]: In one of the first Luton home interviews F2 was acutely conscious that establishing a good rapport had been hampered by social anxieties: ‘Considerable anxiety when I first arrived. Both very friendly and anxious to please but I was made to feel above them. . . . They both regarded me as intellectually superior
• Highlight [page 11]: As Mike Savage has noted, the researchers’ comments about social rituals around food and drink often tell us much about expectations on both sides.
• Highlight [page 11]: Both parties could feel socially awkward as they sought to work out the etiquette for negotiating unfamiliar cross-class encounters.
• Highlight [page 12]: It is striking, in all these examples, that ‘knowingness’ was displayed to reassert control over questions about social class.
• Highlight [page 14]: Moreover, we know that some workers discussed these interviews in advance at work – after all there were only three firms involved in the main Luton stud
• Highlight [page 15]: In general, husbands and wives tended to agree about class in its abstract, impersonal sense, probably because, as Mike Savage has shown, the survey’s expectation that they would discuss classes as broad sociological constructs defined by occupation or lifestyle was an alien and uncomfortable business, far removed from their everyday lives
• Highlight [page 16]: It is striking how women’s testimony is often deeply conflicted around the question of ‘snobbery’ – denouncing it as a social evil, but simultaneously mobilizing it, sometimes explicitly – to draw lines of distinction between themselves and those living around them
• Highlight [page 17]: Certainly men dominated the affluent-worker project – they were the primary subject of the research project (in the pilot study the only subject); nine of the twelve interviewers were men, and three of the four authors of the published volumes (and, of course, both grant holders).
• Highlight [page 18]: Even diagonal sandwiches, a mortgage and private education did not label this worker as ‘aspiring’ because he knew not to present as someone striving to impress. Another V
• Highlight [page 19]: The argument of this paper is not simply that the affluent-worker study focused too narrowly on men, and that in consequence it misread the social and cultural effects of rising prosperity. This would not be a very new or interesting claim
• Highlight [page 19]: Rather, the argument is that the affluent worker team worked with a narrow, preconceived model of what constituted ‘bourgeois’ striving which was rooted in their palpable dislike for overt markers of class distinction and social snobbery (hence the comment that a Hungarian worker who apparently lacked class feeling may not have come across ‘class distinction in its more pernicious forms’)
• Highlight [page 19]: As we have seen, the researchers tended to valorize individuality over conformity, and reviled the perceived mediocrity and pretension of ‘petit bourgeois’ taste.
• Highlight [page 19]: Female interviewers may have expressed themselves more strongly on the horrors of ‘bad’ taste, and male interviewers may have been more vocal in their praise of respondents who entertained ‘without ceremony’, but there was a general consensus that ‘snobbery’ and social striving were ‘bourgeois’, and that a natural, unaffected, take-us-as-you-find-us demeanour was its antithesis
• Highlight [page 19]: In short, the researchers went into the field with stronger preconceptions about what was ‘bourgeois’ than what was ‘proletarian
• Highlight [page 19]: They were clear that a new working class was in the making, and in a sense set out to establish that it was making itself to its own blue-print, not that of the old conformist, socially judgemental English middle class. The ‘class in the head’ for researchers was not the working class, ‘traditional’ or ‘new’,
• Highlight [page 20]: but the traditional middle class – a class that many of them had shunned in their own lives in favour of the modern, meritocratic and scientific world of the new professions
• Highlight [page 20]: Hence M1’s manifest annoyance when a clerk’s wife, ambitious for her own son’s education, told him that she was ‘surprised’ he’d been to grammar school and ‘puzzled’ that he ‘hadn’t capitalised more on [his] degree’ (in retaliation he informs her that her own son ‘would be lucky to go to Cambridge because it’d probably be a graduate seminar by then’).
• Highlight [page 20]: Doing masculinity’ required the disavowal of overt interest in status or social aspiration, especially when the dialogue was between men who normally inhabited very different social and cultural worlds.

Question 4

Carolyn Steedman

Answer 4

• -Objective of the book: to contrast Steedman’s familial experience of working-class south London with the bourgeois theories of psychosexual development. Heavily critical of feminist, leftist and patriarchal theories from the perspectives of disempowered fathers and of mothers who used their children as exchange for subsistence and contracts with the state.
• -In Steedman’s writing, the mother/ child dyad was routinely disrupted by patriarchy, but not on the father’s behalf. The Father is seldom present within the account – Steedman writes that he left her with “the lineaments of an unused freedom” (Landscape, p. 61). Rather, the social worker, policeman and school inspector represented such disruptors.
• -This relationship with her mother was poor, and Steedman projected her lack of familial intimacy onto the wider working class youth – “their exile from their mothers’ attention mirrored a wider exclusion…”
• -Acts largely in defence of the postwar labour government’s welfare policies. Steedman attempted to remind an increasingly privatized society of the subjective effects of large-scale social welfare:
• “I think I would be a very different person now if orange juice and milk and dinners at school hadn’t told me in a covert way, that I had a right to exist, was worth something…. It was a considerable achievement for a society to pour so much milk and so much orange juice, so many vitamins, down the throats of its children, and for the height and weight of those children to outstrip the measurements of only a decade before …. What my mother lacked, I was given; and though vast inequalities remained between me and others of my generation, the sense that a benevolent state bestowed on me, that of my own existence and the worth of that existence-attenuated, but still there -demonstrates in some degree what a fully material culture might offer in terms of physical comfort and the structures of care and affection that it symbolizes, to all its children.”
• • “History and autobiography work in the same way as narrative: they use the same linguistic structure, and they are both fictions, in that they present variations and manipulations of current time to the reader.” Carolyn Kay Steedman, History and Autobiography
• • -Steedman was writing in the context of the reclamation of autobiography by third-wave feminists as a form of subjective expression entirely distinct from its point of origin: that being a self-conscious introspection of a white, middle class man, who details a progressive narration of self in the context of gendered family relations and increasing material wellbeing. This fits in with a line of authors including Sandra Cisneros, Adrienne Kennedy, Kim Chernin, Kate Simon and Denise Chávez
• -
• -The form of Steedman’s autobiography is distinct from the existing milieu – she self-consciously adopted the narrative structure of the psychoanalytic case study, because it “shows what went into its writing, shows the bits and pieces from which it is made up, in the way that history refuses to do, and that fiction can’t” (LfaGW, p. 21)
• • -This was facilitated by Steedman’s reading of memory. To Steedman, memory is a legitimate alternative source of historical truth. These memories arise in the text without warning, and as such, her recollections do not fit neatly into a fixed chronology. Steedman intentionally avoids traditional primary sources, as she felt her experiences as a working class child lie outside the purview of conventional historiographical methodology – without reconfiguration, history was incapable of narrating Steedman’s life story. This stands as part of Steedman’s attempt to reject narratives that attempted to forge a universalised experience. “Accounts of working class life are told by tension and ambiguity, out on the borderlands. The story – my mother’s story – cannot be absorbed into the central zone: it is both its disruption and its essential counterpoint: this is a drama of class”
• • Recurrent theme within Steedman’s work (c. 1982, in The Tidy House) referring to a short account from Henry Mayhew in London, late 1850.
• “although only eight years of age, had entirely lost all childish ways, and was, Indeed, in thoughts and manner, a woman. There was something cruelly pathetic in hearing this infant, so young that her features had scarcely formed themselves, talking of the bitterest struggles of life, with the calm earnestness of one who had endured them all.” (Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1861)
• • Becomes what Steedman calls herself a ‘historical obsession’, as signposted in Strange Dislocations (1998)
• • Retrospectively, Steedman claimed the history of the watercress girl made her self-history possible:
• “I see [the watercress girl] now as the shade of Landscape for a Good Woman, the means by which I allowed myself to recall my own childhood, and write another account of working class childhood… the Little Watercress Girl is what I want: the past, which is lost and which I cannot have: my own childhood. She is my fantasy child, and in a different way, she is Mayhew’s fantasy child too”
• • Notions of obsession and ‘transference’ surrounding the Watercress Seller have led both Steedman and Paul Ricoeur to highlight that the account of biography is implicitly a fabrication of imagination; “history reflects the subjectivity of the historian”
• • A feminist reading of Steedman argues this invocation of the Watercress Seller ‘fantasy child’ as a driving force of Landscape forms in part an explanation as to why Steedman decided not to become a biological mother:
• “At the heart of Steedman’s historical project of obsessional recovery lies a loss…. That is utterly personal. That loss, it seems, can only be healed through the creation of a fantasy daughter, for whom Steedman does what her own mother never did. Only by becoming a mother herself, even on the level of fantasy, can Steedman recover from the damage done by her own mother”
• • Things of Note
• • Recurrent focus on clothing, and specifically, the ‘New Look’; promotion of desire to become an affluent consumer in a period of austerity. Steedman discusses this at length in reference to memory.
• • “Dresses needing twenty yards for a skirt were items as expensive as children – more expensive really, because after 1948 babies came relatively cheap, on tides of free milk and orange juice.” (Landscape, p. 29)
• • • The influence of the war on Steedman’s experience
• “The war was so palpable a presence in the first five years of my life that I still find it hard to believe that I didn’t live through it”
• • Steedman’s bitter experience of being “a lucky little girl”, made by highlighting her relative comfort in certain regards, (“she didn’t go… and tie a piece of string round my big toe, dangle it through the window and down the front of the house, so that the drunken mother, returning from her carousing, she could tag at it, wake the child, get the front door open…”) with her relative discomfort (“My sister… with children of her own… tells me to recall a mother who never played with us, whose eruptions from irritation into violence were the most terrifying of experiences, and she is there, the figure of nightmares”)
• Things of Note
• Religion
• Steedman discusses how her grandmother instilled a sense of otherness between Catholics and Protestants. “She was a Catholic, my grandmother said, but I could play with her, she was a nice little girl, but they weren’t like us: you could tell them by their eyes… Anti-Catholicism propelled my mother’s placing of herself in the public sphere” (Landscape, p. 33)
• Class
• ­“I was about seven, the age at which children start to notice social detail and social distinction, but also more particularly because the long lesson in hatred for my father begun…” (35)
• ­“By 1955 I was beginning to hate him – because he [the father] was to blame, for the lack of money, for my mother’s terrible dissatisfaction at the way things were working out” (36)
• ­“We had the first fridge in our section of the street (which he’d got cheap, off the back of a lorry, contacts in the trade) but were very late to acquire a television” (36)
• ­“She was smiling… [I] would be going to grammar school I remember the afternoon because I asked her what class we were; or rather, I asked her if we were middle class, and she was evasive. I answered my own question, said I thought we must be middle class, and reflected very precisely in that moment on my mother’s black, waisted coat with the astrakhan collar, and her high-heeled black suede shoes, her lipstick. She looked so much better than the fat, spreading, South London mothers around us, that I thought we had to be middle class” (37)
• ­“She knew where we stood in relation to this world of privilege and possession…” (38)
• ­“What we learned now, in the 1960s, through the magazines and anecdotes she brought home, was how the goods of that world of privilege might be appropriated, with the cut and fall of a skirt, a good winter coat; but above all with clothes” (38)
• ­“We weren’t, I now realise by doing the sums, badly off… We believed we were badly off because we children were expensive items“ (39)
• ­“At meal times, my mother, sister and shared the last knife between us” (45(
• Gendered Division of Labour & Maternity
• ­“I was expected to clean more with the new [vacuum] machine” (37)
• ­ “Later in 1977, after my father’s death, we found out that they were never married, that we were illegitimate… He and my mother had been together for at least ten years when I was born, and we think now that I was her hostage to fortune, the factor that might persuade him to get a divorce and marry her. But the ploy failed.” (39)
• ­“I was a better deal than my sister, because I passed the eleven plus, went to grammar school, would get a good job, marry a man who would in her words “buy me a house and you a house. There’s no virtue in poverty” (43)
• ­“At six I was old enough to go on errands, at seven to go further to pay the rent and the rates, go on the long dreary walk to the Co-op for the divi. By eight I was old enough to clean the house and do the weekend shopping. At eleven I understood that I washed the breakfast things, lit the fire in the winter and scrubbed the kitchen floor before I started my homework. At fifteen, when I could legally go out to work, I got a Saturday job which paid for my clothes … I can always earn a living by my hands; I can scrub, clean, cook and sew: all you have in the end is your labour” (43)
• ­“The dreary curtailment of our childhood was, we discovered after my mother’s death, the result of the most fantastic saving: for a house, the house that was never bought”

Question 5

The Listener

Answer 5

• Magazine founded in 1929 by the BBC, ceased publication in 1991. Under Reith.
• Readership
• Intended Target: “a medium for intelligent reception of broadcast programmes by way of amplification and explanation of those features which cannot be dealt with in the editorial columns of the Radio Times”
• Tended towards liberal/left publications, featuring Orwell, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Philip Larkin.
• BBC comment: Literate and engaged, it had the mild irony of all the best of British culture.
• Scepticism and wit.

Question 6

Picture Post

Answer 6

• Picture Post was a photojournalistic magazine published in the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1957.
• 1,700,000 copies a week after only two months.
• The magazine’s editorial stance was liberal, anti-Fascist and populist.
• Sales of Picture Post increased further during World War II and by December 1943 the magazine was selling 1,950,000 copies a week. By the end of 1949 circulation had declined to 1,422,000.
• By June 1952, circulation had fallen to 935,000. Sales continued to decline in the face of competition from television and a revolving door of new editors. By the time the magazine closed in July 1957, circulation was less than 600,000 copies a week.

Question 7

The Sunday Times

Answer 7

• TST was the largest-selling British national newspaper in the “quality press” market category. It sits as a conservative/ centre right paper. At this time, it was owned by Lord Thompson, and had high circulation (peaking 1,000,000 in 1960 for the first time). Harold Evans, editor from 1967 until 1981, established The Sunday Times as a leading campaigning and investigative newspaper. On 19 May 1968, the paper published its first major campaigning report on the drug Thalidomide.

Question 8

NOVA

Answer 8

• 1965-1975, emergent ‘at the very moment when women’s hemlines rose six inches above the knee’.
• Kate Muir: “A politically radical, beautifully designed, intellectual women’s magazine. In 1965 Nova discussed sex and the Pill, and epitomised the sophistication of London with its bold type and white space.”
• Nova’s agenda of journalistically taboo subjects included contraception, abortion, cancer, race, homosexuality, divorce and royal affairs, invariably boosted by stylish and provocative cover images, making it a rarity among magazines
• Dennis Hackett, together with visionary art director Harri Peccinotti, who swiftly established their magazine as an influential must-read for the movers and shakers of Swinging London, with men as well as the original target audience of women becoming devotees of its heady mixture of social issues and cutting-edge fashion and modern lifestyle features.
• Peccinotti became one of the first professional photographers to use black models extensively in his fashion shoots. He stated in an interview: “Nova started as an experiment. The thinking behind it came from the fact that there were no magazines at the time for intelligent women… The women’s liberation movement was strong and there were a lot of good female writers. Nova’s aim was to talk about what women were really interested in: politics, careers, health, sex. George Newnes threw some money in, just to see if anyone was interested in a magazine like that, and so it started.”
• The distinctive Nova headline font, adapted by Pentagram from a vintage woodcut typeface, became a formative influence on typography for many years. As part of a revolution in graphic design led by the progenitors Town, Queen, Elle and The Sunday Times Magazine, Nova took specific inspiration from the universally admired German magazine Twen.
• Nova’s radical approach to female liberation aroused men’s curiosity too and it became famous in publishing circles as a woman’s magazine that had more male readers than female, which was an aspect of its financial decline during the economic crisis of the 1970s.

Question 9

Ken Loach

Answer 9

• • Major director during period; with overt socialist ideals predominating his works, most famously:
  
  • Poor Cow (Poverty)
  • Cathy Come Home (Homelessness)
  • Riff-Raff (Labour Rights)
  • Up the Junction (working class life - controversial for abortion scene)
• Son of electrician.Graduated from Oxford with Law degree, attended RAF,from sixth-form background (KEGS).
• Films during 1970s tended to perform poorly; suffering from poor distribution, lack of interest and censorship. His documentary The Save the Children Fund Film (1971) was commissioned by the charity, who subsequently disliked it so much they attempted to have the negative destroyed.
• 1987 - theatre production - Perdition - Zionists in Hungary collaborated with the Nazis to help the operation of the Holocaust in return for allowing a few Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Banned for anti-semitism. (Probably valid - was pro-Palestine.
• BFI ‘Britain’s foremost political filmmaker’

Question 10

Provide some background for Spare Rib

Answer 10

• Second Wave Feminist Magazine - Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe; 1972-1993.
• Initially some refused to stock (WHSmith)
• 20,000 per month in circulation
• Explore the role of the virgin, wife and mother. Cross-cutting.
• 1973 - became a collective - rejected male articles where possible.
• Less serious than Red Rag (Published by a collective of Marxist feminists. 1972, from WLM. Circulation=4,000. Bi-annual publication. Ran until 1980)