Between Two Worlds: Essays, by Richard Hoggart

Between two worlds? Which two worlds, exactly? At 82 years old, Richard Hoggart has plenty of contrasting experiences to consider.

Between two worlds? Which two worlds, exactly? At 82 years old, Richard Hoggart has plenty of contrasting experiences to consider. A bright orphan in a poor bookless home becomes a prominent academic and Committee Man. The indigenous culture of the working classes, minutely detailed in the academic's best-known work, is painlessly shrugged off in favour of television and fast food. The writers of Britain besiege the Arts Council for subsidy, while in the Third World our academic knows well, their peers risk a bullet in the back of the neck.

The title of this collection of essays obviously alludes to those bigger questions, but it actually comes from a specific piece, reprinted from Universities Quarterly, and possibly the flattest thing here. The two worlds in opposition prove to be academic insularity and wider cultural involvement: and the latter wins, in a one-sided contest enlivened only by a few sideswipes at cultural relativism and the prose style of bureaucrats.

This is an odd collection. Hoggart's explanation for his choice borders on the defensive. Collections of essays, he says, are often seen as "a form of self-indulgence"; not here, because they have never been widely available and only constitute about a quarter of what he might have included. Besides, he has also included a few new autobiographical pieces about his early life and even an interview he gave to an academic journal.

Since one essay lists, at some length, the ethical and intellectual failings of reviewers, there is a temptation to tread carefully. But anyone would notice the way this collection falls into two halves. On the one hand, there are arguments – about Unesco, and broadcasting, and censorship, and social work, and literacy. On the other, there are observations – about DH Lawrence and George Orwell, and about Hoggart's family.

Hoggart is a powerful figure, sui generis, detached even from the academic discipline he created. From the 1950s, he bestrode the academic and governmental scene: professorships at Leicester and Birmingham, the invention of cultural studies, five years with Unesco, the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting. He's still at it, too, serving recently on David Blunkett's committee to promote reading.

He was Herbivorus Rex, if you like, emerging from humble origins to build a new society through learning and a reverence for culture. The herbivores lost, of course, even before Thatcherism. The working classes deserted working-class culture, lovingly catalogued in Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy. He was not the first prophet to be let down by his followers.

That disappointment lurks here, but it is not prominent. A man who has already written three volumes of autobiography has had room to tackle those issues. Instead we have judicious and humane pondering on principles and policies. It's thorough and serious and hard to disagree with. But it lacks the element of surprise, or insights that take your breath away.

As a reader, rather than a Hoggart completist desperate to know his thoughts on social workers, tenure and the licence fee, I would favour his observations over his ideas. It was not the ideas in The Uses of Literacy that impressed: it was the close depiction of people, the speech, their manners and their entertainments. FR Leavis said that it should have been a novel. When you read Hoggart in observational mode, you wonder why he never pursued the fictional form.

Perhaps we should blame a disabling reverence for his literary heroes, with DH Lawrence at the head. But if he dared not compete, he is a fine critic and acolyte. The essays on The Rainbow and Women In Love here are acute and uninhibited by qualms about mingling the biographical and the critical. He acknowledges the repulsive in Lawrence at the same time as praising the insightful.

The essay on Orwell and The Road To Wigan Pier is not new, being available in shorter form as the introduction to the Penguin edition. He is hot on Orwell's contradictions and dishonesties, and he is not afraid to look closely at the prose. He nails Orwell's excessive taste in adjectives: "dreadful", "frightful", "disgusting" and the rest. As he says, "If you use them to describe a filthy boarding house you haven't many left for the Holocaust." It's a point worthy of Orwell's criticism.

But he also knows Orwell's qualities, and he bravely defends sentiment where others see sentimentality. The same note is common in Lawrence, especially about children and animals. And it comes over strongly too in Hoggart's autobiographical pieces, which are beautifully observed and pitched. "Memoir for our Grandchildren" is not quite that – if it was only for the grandchildren, it would have been more intimate and familial – but, like the other "portraits", it is a rich and characterful account of the author's formative experiences in a world now shockingly distant from our own.