Penguin have returned Richard Hoggart's innovative 1957 cultural study to print in Britain for the first time this century. This edition includes John Corner's insightful 1991 interview with Hoggart plus a new 6,000-word introduction by Lynsey Hanley, justly emphasising how this study of working-class culture remains relevant. Hoggart's son Simon adds a foreword. Although the main text is unaltered, Penguin have abridged the subtitle: the book was originally The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. The amendment indicates how the most celebrated sequences remain Hoggart's vivid evocations of working-class existence, drawing on his Leeds upbringing in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the new, more marketable, subtitle misrepresents Hoggart's main concern: how the working-classes' social outlooks were being remodelled by mass-produced entertainments, including popular music.

Hoggart's text comprises two sections. Part 1, with both affection and criticism, evaluates ‘working-class art’ c. 1890–1945, scrutinising how this reinforced what he concernedly discusses as the abiding working-class outlook: ‘putting-up with things’ (chapters 3 and 4). Part 2 addresses newer ‘mass art’, whose producers aim for vaster audiences while keeping the working-class majority as its main sales base. Hoggart argues that, culturally, the working- and lower-middle-classes are being compounded into a mass, defined less by occupation than by consumption of entertainments produced by a smaller range of larger conglomerates. Thus, he concludes in 1957, ‘the great majority of us are being merged into one class’ (p. 310), defined by passivity.

Hoggart laments the decline of ‘older’ working-class songs, produced as sheet music and sung communally in working-men's clubs. He emphasises consumers' roles in selecting such songs; numbers ‘which do not meet the requirements are not likely to be taken up, no matter how much Tin Pan Alley plugs them’ (p. 138). However, ‘commercial’ (mechanically reproduced) popular music was taking the place of club singing, removing the element of choice and, moreover, the group experience.

The commentaries on newer recorded songs are less substantial. Hoggart appears less informed about these and has seldom written about popular music since 1957. In 1966, George Melly (Reference Melly1970, p. 19) implied that rock and roll immediately outdated Hoggart's commentaries, written in 1952–1955. Although, as Dave Laing (Reference Laing1994, pp. 183–86) emphasised, Hoggart's observations are applicable to later singers, The Uses of Literacy remains largely overlooked in Popular Music Studies. The most soundly canonised pre-1960 critiques of the genre are Adorno's, ideologically sharper and more musicologically astute than Hoggart's. Yet these writers' works are mutually complementary. Unlike Adorno, Hoggart considers lyrics. He also offers closer analyses of vocal nuances in recorded songs. More pervasively, contrasting with Adorno's notion of near sub-human ‘masses’, Hoggart's proximity to working-class people yields his more complex, informed discussions of audiences.

Significantly, Hoggart's commentary on club singing follows his proud, exquisitely detailed definition of working-class ‘baroque’: traditions of ‘rococo extravagance’ (p. 123) in all that signifies relief from externally regulated routine. Surveying this ‘without necessarily implying an historical link’ to classical baroque (ibid.), Hoggart emphasises the working-classes' capacity to shape their own traditions amid subordination. He extensively considers how, in club-singing, consumers would ‘assimilate’ and ‘transmute’ songs into their canon (chapter 6). His observations contrast with Adorno's assumption that the masses, ‘excluded from culture’, are unable to find expression (Adorno Reference Adorno and Leppert1938, p. 292).

Hoggart's study can offer much to debates on the demographics of popular music consumption and indeed criticism. Melly (Reference Melly1970, p. 137) equated ‘the intellectualising of pop’ with ‘its middle-class take-over’. Negus (Reference Negus1996, p. 155) emphasised the role of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) in such processes, noting its release just as young middle-class writers were ‘legitimating “their” music in terms of the aesthetic tradition into which they had been educated’. Others, most recently Fowler (Reference Fowler2008, p. 172), have subjected the Beatles' 1967 work to similar arguments. Yet these overlook how working-class cultural references became newly foregrounded in the Beatles' most experimental work, suggesting perhaps a shrewd awareness of maintaining a mass audience. No Beatles study alerts us to such implications in and of their work as extensively as Hoggart's 1957 commentaries, for example: the value placed on the local neighbourhood, where ‘one knows practically everybody’ with an ‘intimacy of detail’ (p. 46–47) in ‘Penny Lane’; the communal song motifs opening Sgt Pepper; the elevation of love in working-class song as ‘a substitute for religion […] Love for its own sake’ (p. 204), transmuted in ‘All You Need Is Love’; and the use of a beer and sing-song infused charabanc outing – Hoggart's definitive example of working-class baroque (p. 126–28) – as the basis of the Beatles' most high-profile avant garde excursion, Magical Mystery Tour (1967). Hoggart's commentaries are similarly applicable to work by the Who, the Smiths and the Arctic Monkeys. The Beatles, however, are a most interesting point of reference, for their enduring appeal indicates Hoggart's contention that a mass audience is capable of appreciating far more ambitious and complex popular music than was being offered pre-1957.

Since this book's last British edition (1992), the University of Sheffield has acquired Hoggart's intended 1955 manuscript, The Abuse of Literacy. Unlike the published text, this criticises specific publications. Lawyers urged Hoggart to cut all such unfavourable references. He overcame this by parodying contemporary styles of journalism and fiction. However, several sequences on popular song were wholly excised, including Hoggart's scornful review of national stereotypes in lyrics. That Penguin have not reinstated these and other still-unpublished passages is disappointing. A scholarly edition, reflecting Hoggart's amendments, could interest many researchers.

Although the absence of intended references to hits by Vera Lynn and Nat ‘King’ Cole renders Hoggart's 1957 commentary generalised, this highlights the pervasiveness of the trends critiqued and, usefully, obliges us to think of examples, including later songs. This is not difficult. Most extensively, Hoggart attacks variations of ‘cheering-up songs’ (p. 200–4) – characteristics of which define, for instance, Simon and Garfunkel's ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, Bob Dylan's ‘Make You Feel My Love’ and U2's ‘Stuck in a Moment’.

To constructively utilise Hoggart's commentaries, it is necessary to read this book critically and expansively. My experiences of discussing it in seminars suggest that for these reasons – alongside the still-resonant evocations of working-class life – The Uses of Literacy makes a magnificently stimulating text on undergraduate and postgraduate courses.