The Long Revolution of Raymond Williams: "Culture and Society" Fifty Years On

Abstract

The scene was an Oxford lecture hall in the off-term, a gathering in the early 1970s of international summer school students. Among the many things I was clueless about that undergraduate summer is that I was catching my only glimpse of in a defining posture, physically close to the heart of the Oxbridge establishment but simultaneously working in the margins. This is where labored long after World War II, in what was then called extramural studies--literally outside the walls--and what has now morphed at Oxford and at my own institution from continuing to online and distance learning, a euphemism that I wish could have a crack at. I want to hold for a moment this snapshot of in extension education mode a block or two over from the Bodleian, because it epitomizes a number of oppositions in his career: the extramuralist who later held a Cambridge fellowship; the Welsh outsider who spent his career unpacking English culture; the socialist always working the edges of establishment criticism; the critic whose heart was increasingly in his fiction; the English faculty syllabus lecturer who insisted that television and other new forms of media were necessary objects of scholarship. One of the texts I was assigned that Oxford summer was Culture and Society 1780-1950, a book that was then only a teenager. Published in 1958, Culture and Society has now sold nearly a quarter-million copies as it has reached its early middle age, on the verge of its half-century mark. Regardless of the popularity of later works, Culture and Society remains Williams's signature book, a fact that did not especially please him. Here is in a 1979 interview gently complaining that the book circulated in the U.S. was the critical equivalent of alcohol-free beer: Still today many American readers say, oh yes, we agree with your position, we read Culture and Society and that sort of thing. And I say that is not my position. And they say well it's still a very radical book, and I say, well, first-stage radicalism. (Politics 110). After Williams's death in 1988, there was a flurry of assessment and debate about his career, and his legacy has now begun to settle into institutionalized forms such as a Blackwell Reader and at least one research institute in his honor, the Raymond Centre for Recovery Research at Nottingham Trent University, dedicated to archival resurrection of voices previously off the curatorial map. Not so easy to pin down, however, the name Raymond Williams can still ignite fierce intramural firefights about the aims and methods of cultural studies or post-Marxist criticism. I do not propose to intervene directly in those large and important conversations today. My more modest aim is the question of and Romanticism, to which I want to call attention by the still more limited horizon of the history of his 1958 book. To bring into focus the history of Culture and Society in Romantic scholarship, I borrow for a set of signposts what is probably Williams's most popular contribution to the toolkit of the English professor--the temporal trope of the emergent, the dominant, and the residual. My students are often puzzled when they consult the full text of Culture and Society, especially after being introduced to through excerpts from later texts in anthologies of literary theory or cultural studies. Rather than the expected firebrands of British radicalism, unearthed by recovery research, they encounter instead an opening chapter on Southey, of all people, and sustained engagements with the likes of Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Here again is in his 1979 interview with the editors of the New Left Review, explaining how Culture and Society is located at several removes from radical culture: [T]he origins of the book lie in ideas of either explicitly conservative or contradictory thinkers in the nineteenth century--but conservatives who, at the point of irruption of a qualitatively new social order put many of the right questions to it but of course came out with the wrong answers--or people with whom I shared certain impulses, like Leavis, moving towards explicitly reactionary positions in the twentieth century (Politics 109). …