Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 28

potential as a human being by valuing culture and by cultivating personal creative
skills. Arnold, the foundational thinker behind the liberal humanist tradition, had an
elitist approach to culture: culture for him was synonymous with high culture. An
upper-class commentator, who like the nineteenth century philanthropists already
discussed earlier in this chapter, had an interest in regulating the working-class
he feared, argued that high culture offered an unruly proto-revolutionary mass the
ameliorative potential for enlightenment. This could be achieved, he argued, by
teaching high culture in the general school curriculum. Well-intentioned but naïve,
Arnold thought that culturally enriching forms such as poetry, painting and classical
music could erase class barriers. Arnold's myopic view of the role of culture can
be appreciated when one considers both the deeply ingrained class divisions of
the Victorian age in which he wrote and his failure to recognise the relationship of
culture to class and the obstacles to an appreciation of the high arts that lower class
positions imposed.
However, Arnold's ideas were foundational for the culturalist paradigm that later
emerged in British cultural studies. Culturalism has an ancestry from Arnold to F.R
Leavis to key thinkers allied with cultural studies, Raymond Williams and Richard
Hoggart. 7 It conceives of culture as a 'lived experience' and as a repository of
artistic value. Arnold was a culturalist and a liberal humanist and Leavis a culturalist
influenced by both conservative and liberal humanism. The poet T.S. Eliot was a
modern culturalist located by conservative humanism. In Notes Towards a Definition
of Culture (1948) he associates culture with social practice, identifying culture as
'a way of feeling and acting' handed down through generations, so that culture is
constituted by everyday life experience. Eliot's conservatism is revealed however,
through his belief that society is structured by a natural order in which people are
ranked. Although he argues that a number of ordinary activities constitute culture,
such as: beetroot in vinegar, the dog races, boiled cabbage cut into sections - he
conceived everyday culture as remaining segregated from the fine arts of elite culture.
Eliot harboured an Arnoldian view of the arts but was equivocal about extending the
arts to all social classes. For him, the arts are intrinsically elite - of interest only to
a select, elite minority. Indeed, Eliot argued that the cultural elite should act as the
vanguard of the artistic canon and ensure its continued nurturance.
Raymond William's topic Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958) contested Eliot's
conservative culturalism. Indeed, Williams' topic and Richard Hoggart's The Uses
of Literacy (1957), marked the rise of left-culturalism, a position which augmented
the institutional inception of cultural studies at the University of Birmingham in
1964. Both of these texts emphasise the essential bond between politics and culture,
the value of working-class culture and the importance of the inclusion of working-
class culture in cultural analysis. For early culturalists, for example, the analysis of
ordinary garden practices in the context of working-class communities would be
theorised as an intellectually rich and valid pursuit. Hoggart's alignment with left-
culturalism is filtered through a social democratic type of humanism, while Williams
is positioned more radically as a socialist influenced by Marxism. Both authors were
7 I must thank John Hughson for his lectures at the University of Wolverhampton on
left-culturalism.