Uses Of Literacy (1957) – a book about the working class and timeless human behaviours

As a psychotherapist in a first session with a client, you make a series of rapid instinctive decisions about how best to communicate. This is broadly based on the client’s age, sex, nationality, race, and social class. This is true whether you’re working in-person, on an online video call, or simply using voice. Because voice alone can contain at least the suggestion of this information. Accent, dialect, vocabulary choices, enunciation: so much is held in the voice, its tone, its speed, and the specific words we choose. In any social interaction, we can attempt to identify, adjust and mirror to develop the best possible connection. When faced with someone of a different age, sex, nationality, race or social class to yourself, you recalibrate accordingly, staying sensitive to your differences. This is not being inauthentic or fake or masking. It’s accessing a useful social skill-set. You do it in the same way that anyone working in any type of customer service setting might do it. Among these clearly identifiable differences, one of the most publicly under-discussed is social class. It can feel like a taboo to even utter the words out loud. It can feel somewhat stigmatised, like it is coarse or insensitive to mention or make an assumption about someone’s origins. There are thorny related issues of privilege, poverty, wealth, education, and opportunity. That was an over-lengthy preamble to an over-lengthy piece, perhaps, but it explains why my interest was initially piqued by this book, The Uses Of Literacy, which I’d heard mentioned a number of times on different podcasts, including Amol Rajan’s Radical podcast.

My now battered paperback of The Uses Of Literacy: Penguin Books in association with Chatto & Windus, London, 1957.

So I bought a used copy on eBay, and was so engaged and energised by the text that I felt the compulsion to take notes while reading it over several months (not a regular thing) and, eventually, produce this piece. It feels like around six months have passed from first opening the book to clicking publish on this post. It could be longer. Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart was first published in 1957 and from the perspective of 2026, nearly 70 years on, I find its title to be unrepresentative of the book. Even slightly misleading. In large part, this book is an intimate portrait of working class life in northern England, human attitudes, behaviours, neuroses of that time – informed by the growing behaviour of public reading and the burgeoning cultural landscape of print, in all its forms: newspapers, magazines, books, fanzines. There is no sharp focus on literacy until around halfway through the book. What is striking, from first to last page, is the pure timelessness of observations about human behaviour: that old truth of how much changes about us, and yet how much stays the same. There’s also a lot that feels eerily prescient, how the explosion in literacy and reading materials connects with today’s literally breakneck pace of smartphone behaviours and technology.

Back cover blurb

Consider that question, ‘...on balance a social benefit or a social danger?’ This might easily be posed of smartphones. Throughout the book there are keenly observed portraits of supposedly typical people of the time. Some of these feel dated and questionable. The outline of some bachelors as shy and uncomfortable with women seemed to skirt the risky edges of homosexuality, its illegality and taboo. Know Your Place, Stick Together While the working class descriptions concern northern England and people of Sheffield, it feels like they could concern working class areas across much of the United Kingdom, and even further afield. Hoggart wrote of the value placed in conformity, as opposed to ‘acting posh,’ being ‘highbrow’ or people behaving above their station. This is reflected in the Scout song… (p.188). He’ll look without dread at the snags on ahead, Wine, Women and Highbrows too; He won’t run aground but will work his way round; With a smile,... I wondered about a felt need for unity and sameness against difference, perhaps as a residual legacy of wartime spirit. And a connection with the demonisation of difference, diversity and ambition, and how this echoes in small working class communities today: ‘reading?\! You? At university?\! Who the bloody hell dyou think you are then?’ Domesticity and Alcohol Hoggart wrote of generational differences and a contemporary decrease in brutality on the streets, less fighting and rape. There is an idea that the modern times of 1957 are gentler than those of their parents and grandparents. This felt somewhat questionable in the same way that commentary on alcohol consumption felt questionable, sweeping, and unqualified: ‘there is little violent drunkennness nowadays, and much less drinking of all kinds, but it’s still a main pitfall’ (p96). While there doesn’t appear to be any acknowledgement of domestic violence, there is broader comment about how people accept that life is hard, ‘what is to be will be’, ‘grin and bear it’, which I couldn’t fail to connect with today’s popular ‘it is what it is’. (The latter tends to irk me as there’s a dull radiating fatalism rejecting the possibility of change, choice, or individual self determinism. It doesn’t have to be ‘what it is’. You could try and change it). Allied to grim acceptance is a stress on the need to ‘keep cheerful’, and an assumption that life will be unrewarding, difficult, and there is a need to make light through debunking humour. This is reflected in songwriting: ‘What’s it matter so long as you keep cheerful?’ (p225). One must not be downhearted and outspoken dissatisfaction was considered subversive. Such retro toxic positivity gave delicious power to betting, often via the football pools, and the fantasy of a big win. And of course in 2026 betting remains the moneyspinner it ever was, particularly in socially deprived areas and among desperate people. Of course it might be considered light entertainment to a point, but there can be a dark underbelly to it. Sex and marriage Domestic arguments were said to be about alcohol, ergo probably money too, rather than sex or unfaithfulness, which was reportedly more likely for ‘dapper’ men, who would take with married women. On the whole, women were said to wait for marriage to have sex, and are broadly characterised as prim, in spite of the howling provocation of men. Attention is given to printed images or women, or ‘pin-ups’, which might be seen as a point somewhere along to the road to pornography, and how clever photo angles were employed to expose difference female body parts. There’s also mention of hand-drawn amateur pornography fanzines with large regional circulation. Hoggart offers some graphic sex and violence extracts, which are framed with some judgement. But their existence and popularity suggests the service they offered in less digitally saturated times. Hoggart opined that such book-reading doesn’t necessarily correlate with any ‘active delinquency’ (p.269), but its effect on the reader is inward and it gives rise to fantasies, not action. How this could be assertively known is unclear, and it made me wonder about internalised modern ideologies, toxic masculinity and the manosphere. There may or may not be any ‘active delinquency’ but the result can still be insidious and broadly damaging. Marriage is closely connected with religion as a popularly held value and belief of 1950s’ working classes (p230). Religion extends the concept of home and family and love thy neighbour, and with ‘our father, who art in heaven’. I wondered how this sacred marital connection might have contributed to the stigma of divorce, the staying together in spite of violence, abuse, or other threatening behaviours that some might consider unacceptable. Advertising and Health Hoggart wrote of the early personalising technique of advertisers and broadcasters, leading to deceptions and distortions and oversimplifications. There are examples of health advertisements not too far removed in tone and content from ads you can see scrolling social media feeds. It seems that digestion has never been straightforward. There’s considerable interconnection between consumerism, print, technology, social media, and human anxiety, how inferiority and health anxiety is forever a rich and commercially profitable vein of human neuroses. Self improvement messages are arguably shaped more by science or pseudoscience today, but the core ideas are essentially timeless. Your digestion could be improved, as could your sleep, your strength, your energy levels, your concentration, your marriage, your parenting, your fitness, your hair, your general appearance. How exhausting. Precisely how far should we strive? Mental Health Today’s common term ‘mental health’ is absent from the book’s pages, but there is direct mention of suicide. It is not described as regular or common, not monthly, but it is said to be an accepted part of life’s rhythm. One common method of suicide that housewives tended to use involved putting their heads in gas ovens. Hoggart wrote of how couples argued in small terraced houses, and people in neighbouring houses would gather to listen in. There’s something here about gossip, how we are endlessly fascinated by our neighbours, terrified what they might think of us, how people will always be interested by other people, will want to feel better and superior to other people, will feel insecure about being inferior. This feels like an essential human interest and neurosis that will forever sustain. It sits at the nexus of connection and isolation: humans are social creatures that need to connect with each other, but connection comes with a risk of rejection, or at least effort and difficulty. If that risk is too great: social retraction, isolation and loneliness awaits. Moderating and managing our individual levels of connection and isolation is a lifelong challenge. Waste and belief New chapters of the book are marked by the words of others. One chapter focuses on ‘uprooted and anxious’ people from working classes who attain an unusually high level of education through scholarships. It’s introduced by the words of George Eliot. *“It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self” (p.290).* They strongly spoke to me of a sense of loss and waste of aliveness, which I can feel working with clients who are deeply attached to their own sense of limitation, to what they believe themselves capable of. To me, it also reflected how social class roots can inform those limitations. And how this can stunt ambitions or access to emotions, how it can suffocate an ability to trust and connect, to allow positivity and enjoyment. Negativity is rather more acceptable. It is established and habitual, therefore familiar, comfortable, and safe. And therefore it is prone to lifelong repetition through negative thought patterns, hounding inner critics and low expectations. It’s complicated by the rationality and reasonableness of negativity bias: being fearful of the unknowable future, the climate, global geopolitics, the world we will leave our children, not entirely trusting of strangers. These are all reasonable concerns. But it doesn’t serve us brilliantly right here in the present, to continually and habitually ruminate and catastrophise. Within this chapter is a portrait of a ‘gifted’ working class boy extracted from his roots to become more, to become different through their upward social mobility. There is the idea of life as a ladder or permanent exam. I saw something of my older brother here. Another portrait attempted to skewer an inverted middle class snobbery relating to confused ambition, a person only average and moderately equipped who has ‘great aspirations but not quite the equipment nor the staying power to realize them’ (p.304). The latter I personally identified with, and saw as a personal accusation, but at the same time I considered it cruel and unfair. Nobody should rule that someone doesn’t have the equipment or perseverance to realise their ambitions. Luck is always a component. But regardless, the perceptive timelessness continued. Politics and simplification Hoggart wrote of the power in enshrining generalisations, prejudices and half truths in politics. He gave the sense of a still prevalent rejection of detail and ambiguity, a languid oversimplification that still prevails: ‘nowt to choose between em’. However, there’s a surprising assertion that working class people of the 1950s are not particularly patriotic. I wonder if there has been a shift here, and consider how patriotism and the use of flags outside international football tournaments and royal events has almost become conflated with far right attitudes, national defence, and arguably racism. Some overlapping concession is suggested: “we will pay handsomely that man who gives some release to our sense of inferiority and disillusion by expressing himself violently in print what we all hate” (p186). There’s also a promoted idea that newspapers have the role of ‘exposing the evil in our midst’ (p212). It’s hard not to bring to mind certain tabloid newspapers, the pattern of villification, outrage and condemnation that sells. Communal hatred in the face of perceived threat is, again, a timelessly arousing human behaviour. This might be explicable through anxiety, which we all carry individually and collectively. It’s necessary to keep us safe in dangerous situations (walking through an unfamiliar, quiet street late at night), but never entirely trustworthy because it’s laced with an uncertainty that might ultimately embarrass us. We might need to be cautious and guarded, or we might not. Resilience and assimilation Towards the conclusion of the book, Hoggart wrote that the ‘wonder is not that so much remains, but that so much is newly born with each generation.’ (p330). This speaks to an idea of accumulation or assimilation on top of timeless human behaviours, a continued building of ideas and theories, of technologies, diversity, a sort of straining pressure. In these words I perceived a tone of judgement about the worthiness of some literature, and who should have the right to produce and distribute it: there is ‘no virtue alone in the habit of reading (or scrolling?) for itself — can become an addiction as separated from the reality of life (p332).’ Conflate this with limitless smartphone content, necks craned into screens on every train platform across the world. Are we not today more detached from the reality of life through screens, than connected with it? The book’s closing words had a personally chilling effect: ‘even if substantial inner freedom were lost, the great new classless class would be unlikely to know it. Its members would still regard themselves as free and be told that they were free’ (p346). I wondered how accurately this described our liberated information age, and free speech. It evoked an unsettling dystopian image that is perhaps our modern reality in 2026, or not far off it. And it highlights an acute problem of how our supposed freedom remains meaningful, nourishing and safe, alongside accessibility and continued technological development.