Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 29

from working-class backgrounds and this was crucial to their contributions to cultural
studies. Indeed, they developed a specifically British approach to the connection
between class and capitalism (Savage 2000a, 31). For example, while contemporary
intellectuals in other capitalist nations highlighted working-class vulnerability to
the damaging tenets of mass society as a result of commercial capitalism, Hoggart
and Williams argued that '“traditional” working-class values might constitute some
kind of critical bulwark against “massification”' (Savage 2000a, 31). As a means
to show this, both authors constructed the working-class as both the likely victim
of widespread commercialism and as a countervailing force against it. Drawing on
autobiographical material, Williams and Hoggart chart a historical and nostalgic
account of the working-class in which working-class collectivism offers a positive
impetus against competitive, individualistic middle-class society.
Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957) is a topic of two parts. In the first, he
writes of the 'older order', in effect his impression of working-class community
life in pre-war Britain - a community under threat of being eroded by commercial
imperatives. The cultural life he describes is drawn from memories of his own life
growing up in Leeds in the 1930s. Hoggart offers a unique and finely detailed account
of the 'rich full life' of the working-class; indeed his analysis offers an account of the
region where my own study is set. He sympathetically sketches aspects of working-
class sociability to be found in the neighbourhood, family bonds and, drawing on
his educational training, he applies literary concepts to a variety of popular culture
artefacts - from popular song to popular fiction. Most especially however, critics
have lauded his sensitivity to the 'interconnections' between the public and private
aspects of the typical working-class neighbourhood: 'what is revealed is the network
of shared cultural meanings which sustains relationships between different facets
of the culture' (Critcher 1979, 19). In these ways, Hoggart's work is invaluable
for my study of the working-class garden; for I argue that the garden as a site is
characterised by its position as an interface between public and private connections
within a community. Yet, while Hoggart's conception of the working-class mourns
the loss of authentic, organic forms of culture of the 1930s, his important contribution
to cultural studies is to value the lived experience of working-class culture. His view
that working-class culture is both ordinary and 'intrinsically interesting' (Hoggart
1957, 120) became inspirational to the ongoing academic study of the cultural
activities of ordinary people. The garden, for Hoggart, was precisely the kind of
ordinary site that would merit cultural analysis.
Raymond Williams was from a Welsh working-class background. In his topic
Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958), he charts the history of British 'culture and
civilisation' writers within the culturalist tradition, citing F.R Leavis and T.S. Eliot
within its twentieth century lineage. He argues that both Leavis and Eliot work with
a selective, yet obsolete notion of culture because it segregates culture from the
structural developments of contemporary society. Leavis and Eliot create a chasm
between cultural values and the cultural experience of everyday life. Williams rebuffs
this position, arguing that culture is ordinary; it emanates from lived experience and
represents 'a whole way of life'. The study of culture, for Williams, should not imply
a closed tradition but rather the possibilities of openness and democracy. The high
arts should not be elevated to a higher quarter of cultural life than other cultural