Free Republic

In his little book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, published many years ago, Henry James has the following significant sentences: “The charm [of Hawthorne’s slighter pieces of fiction] is that they are glimpses of a great field, of the whole deep mystery of man’s soul and conscience. They are moral, and their interest is moral; they deal with something more than the mere accidents and conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it.” The interest of this passage lies...

Richard H. Hoggart, a pioneering British cultural historian who was most widely known outside academia as the star witness for “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in a 1960 trial that ended British censorship of that novel, died on April 10 in London. He was 95. His death, at a nursing home, was announced by Goldsmiths College of the University of London, where Professor Hoggart was the warden, or provost, from 1976 until his retirement in 1984. Professor Hoggart was a senior lecturer in English literature and the author of a seminal analysis of changes in working-class culture in England when he was...

When Evelyn Waugh died, only a bold man would have bet on his reputation. 1966 was the apotheosis of "Swinging London," but Waugh, while a Londoner born and bred, was the antithesis of swinging. Waugh was, in modern parlance, a snob, a racist, and a sexist. He was a self-styled "craftsman" who loathed proletarian culture. He was a political reactionary, and a lonely and anguished opponent of the Second Vatican Council that was soon to render unrecognizable his beloved Catholic Church. He was a man of the past. Of course anyone who had bet on Waugh then could easily retire...