Some working class cultural things he describes sound familiar (e.g. naughty seaside postcards), but others have passed into history: “The rituals of the Buffs and Odd Fellows. The new clothes bought for children on Whit Sunday”. There were also things I recognised in myself; the “working class speeches and manners in conversation are more abrupt, less provided with emollient phrases than other groups....I find that even now I have to modify a habit of carrying on a discussion on an 'unlubricated' way”. Its primary importance, I’m to understand, is as a landmark of cultural studies – in which respect it is a curious blend of current observation and self-ethnography (making it already a bit of a curiosity and as much autobiography as treatise).

Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.

This book starts by painting a picture of working class life, considering everything from living in a two-up-two-down, what you might eat, the types of jobs you might do, your relationship to religion, to nationalism, to other social classes and even to sport. Naturally, a lot of this has changed in the years since, but perhaps not as significantly as we might like to think. One of the things he makes clear is that social class is relational, not least in the sense of it being about ‘us’ and our relation to ‘them’. This attempt to understand the changes in British culture after the second world war in which the mobilisation of the home front had ushered in “massification” – mass society and mass culture – will resonate with any reader struggling to make sense of the Brexit referendum vote. We will pay handsomely that man who gives some release to our sense of inferiority by expressing himself violently in print on what we all hate.” Katie Hopkins, anyone? Hoggart goes on to say: “It seems to me evident that most our popular journals have become a good deal worse during the last fifteen or twenty years”. Plus ca change and all that. Hoggart’s definition of mass product was something that contained no emotional truth – nothing that could be measured or felt as real, however painful that reality might be to confront – because it was produced by people who believed their audience had no ability or desire to detect that truth. “Sex-and-violence novels,” he wrote, epitomised “an endless and hopeless tail-chasing evasion of the personality”, a description that could have been taken from a review of Fifty Shades of Grey.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/18/lynsey-hanley-brexit-britain-divided-culture-uses-of-literacy Hall, S. (1980). ‘Cultural Studies and The Centre: Some Problems and Problematics’, in Culture, Media, Language, ed. S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis. London: Hutchinson and The Centre For Cultural Studies. He concludes: “One of the most striking and ominous features of our present cultural situation is the division between the technical language of the experts and the extraordinarily low level of the organs of mass communication.”To this reader, sadly, apart from one arresting piece of brilliant nonsense (“ Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”), Chomsky’s masterpiece is unreadable. I’m sorry: no doubt, as some have suggested, Syntactic Structures is comparable to the work of Keynes or Freud. On my reading, on behalf of the common reader, the presumed audience for a list such as ours, it is also unintelligible.