Richard Hoggart

Herbert Richard Hoggart FRSL (24 September 1918 – 10 April 2014) was a British academic whose career covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture.

Hoggart was born in the Potternewton area of Leeds, one of three children in an impoverished family. His father, a soldier, died when Hoggart was a year old, and his mother died when he was eight. He grew up with his grandmother in Hunslet, and was encouraged in his education by an aunt. He gained a place at Cockburn High School which was a grammar school, after his headmaster requested that the education authority reread his scholarship examination essay. He then won a scholarship to study English at the University of Leeds, where he graduated with a First Class Degree. He served with the Royal Artillery during World War II and was demobilised as a Staff Captain.

He was a Staff Tutor at the University of Hull from 1946 to 1959, and published his first book, a study of W. H. Auden's poetry, in 1951. His major work, The Uses of Literacy, was published in 1957. Partly autobiography, the volume was interpreted as lamenting the loss of an authentic working class popular culture in Britain, and denouncing the imposition of a mass culture through advertising, media and Americanisation.

He became Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester from 1959 to 1962. Hoggart was an expert witness at the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, and his argument that it was an essentially moral and "puritan" work, which merely repeated words he had heard on a building site on his way to the court, is sometimes viewed as having had a decisive influence on the outcome of the trial.

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