The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life

With a new introduction by Lynsey Hanley

and a Foreword by Simon Hoggart

‘A vivid inside view of working-class culture and one of the most influential books of the postwar era’

Observer

When a society becomes more affluent, does it lose other values? Are the skills that education and literacy gave millions wasted on consuming pop culture? When Richard Hoggart asked these questions in his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy Britain was undergoing huge social change, yet his landmark work has lost none of its pertinence today.

Drawing partly from his own boyhood, Hoggart gives a fascinating insight into the close-knit values of Northern England’s vanishing working-class communities, and weaves this together with his views on the arrival of a new, homogenous ‘mass’ US-influenced culture. His headline-grabbing bestseller opened up a whole new area of cultural study and remains essential reading, both as a historical document, and as a commentary on class, poverty and the media.