Iris Murdoch

Books

Literary hero to zero

This article is more than 10 years old

The only true judge of an author's merits is posterity. But why do some literary reputations last while others founder

DJ Taylor

Saturday 10 May 2024

Towards the end of his long and industrious career, the literary jack-of-all trades Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) sat down to ponder the enticing topic of his reputation. No doubt about it, he briskly informed his friends, in 200 years' time he would be spoken of in the same breath as Jane Austen and Beatrix Potter. Naturally, there is still quite a long way to go before this prophecy is, or isn't, fulfilled, but one doesn't need a crystal ball to suspect that the odds on Nichols's Cats ABC or Down the Garden Path re-emerging as Penguin Modern Classics sometime in the 22nd century are rather on the long side. the end of his long and industrious career, the literary jack-of-all trades Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) sat down to ponder the enticing topic of his reputation. No doubt about it, he briskly informed his friends, in 200 years' time he would be spoken of in the same breath as Jane Austen and Beatrix Potter. Naturally, there is still quite a long way to go before this prophecy is, or isn't, fulfilled, but one doesn't need a crystal ball to suspect that the odds on Nichols's Cats ABC or Down the Garden Path re-emerging as Penguin Modern Classics sometime in the 22nd century are rather on the long side.

My hero / Richard Hoggart by DJ Taylor

'We all need to remember that in the last resort there is no such person as "the common man"'…
Richard Hoggart. Photograph: David Newell Smith for the Observer

My hero: 

Richard Hoggart by DJ Taylor

Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy was a trail-blazing study of mid-century working-class life and I admired him without reservation

Obituaries / Richard Hoggart

Richard Hoggart / The uses of decency

Friday 18 April 2014

I

first read The Uses of Literacy, Richard Hoggart's trail-blazing 1957 study of mid-century working-class life and the factors conspiring to undermine it, in the mid 1980s: a time when the whole concept of working-class solidarity was being brought sharply into question. Not that Hoggart, who died last week at the age of 95, ever believed that the people whose lives he explored with such intense and penetrating sympathy were truly homogeneous. "We all need to remember, every day and more and more," he insisted, "that in the last resort there is no such person as 'the common man.'" If he was interested in communality – the shared assumption, the collective outlook that separates the tenant of a council flat from the owner of a three-bedroom semi – then he was also keen on individuation, and The Uses' particular hero, while never blatantly advertising the fact, is Hoggart himself.