In Hilliard’s words, the author of the later Uses of Literacy (1957) was of the firm opinion that understanding ‘how such different texts worked was one of the ends of a literary training, and it was inseparable from discrimination’. As part of this training, Hoggart’s ‘students were asked to adjudicate between “good” and “bad” pieces of writing, stripped of their titles and authors’ names’. When it worked properly, this process of anonymous literary assessment, otherwise known as ‘practical criticism’ (or ‘criticism in practice’) was capable of yielding, in Hilliard’s estimation, ‘sensitive but exacting interpretations of texts’. Moreover, this method of practical criticism appealed to teachers such as Hoggart because it was a form of close reading that ‘was at the same time a mode of teaching close reading’.

Significantly, Hoggart’s favoured teaching methods had much to do with the influential work of F.R. Leavis and the circle surrounding the Cambridge-based journal Scrutiny, which was founded in 1932 and ran until 1953. Like its founder and principal editor, Leavis (who received his PhD in English from Cambridge in 1924), Scrutiny was, from the very outset, ‘a self-consciously Cambridge enterprise’. As Hilliard tells it in English as a Vocation, Scrutiny emerged during the ‘uncertain but germinal period’ that preceded the announcement of Leavis’s full-time lectureship at Downing College in 1936. It was during this period (1924–31) that the notoriously difficult Leavis, while employed as a temporary university lecturer at various Cambridge colleges, met and taught a number of notable figures who were later to collaborate with him on Scrutiny, including L.C. Knights, Denys Thompson, D.W. Harding, and, most enduringly, his wife Q.D. Leavis (née Roth). Inspired by Leavis’s ‘urgent sense of mission’, these and other assorted ‘Scrutineers’ set out to challenge mainstream assumptions concerning the state of literature, criticism, and, more broadly, that most amorphous of socio-historical formations, ‘the culture of modernity at large’.

Channelling the cultural pessimism of influential poet–critics such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the Leavis-led band of Scrutineers championed the cause of great literature and art in a contemporary social and cultural realm that they regarded as hopelessly devalued. In his account of the movement, Hilliard describes how, for the majority of writers associated with the oppositional Scrutiny, ‘the modern age was the machine age, and mass culture had an industrial logic that compromised human living’. As he notes, these were writers who held fast to ‘a conviction that literary training was a moral discipline’, and who also believed that popular forms of fiction and modes of advertising were wholly complicit in ‘the business of manufacturing desires’. Hence the appeal of enduring literature for the Scrutineers: it ‘offered access to genuine emotional experiences and ways of exposing and resisting the operations of mass culture’.

As Hilliard suggests, this distinctive attitude and approach to literature was a crucial element of what L.C. Knights (Leavis’s co-editor) once described as ‘the educational project associated with Scrutiny’. As well as providing often compelling readings of classical and contemporary literature, Leavis and his followers had much to say about the general state of education in mid-twentieth-century Britain. In their eyes, ‘schools were an object of both anxiety and hope’. On the one hand, they could serve an important function in the battle against mass culture. Yet, as Hilliard points out, ‘they were part of the machinery of mass civilisation themselves’. Accordingly, for the Scrutineers, educational institutions such as schools and teacher-training colleges often represented little more than ‘a dispiriting catalogue of authoritarianism, trust in rote-learning, and philistinism’. Similarly, they decried the negative impact of ‘external examinations on teaching, and interpreted examinations as part of the standardising apparatus of an industrial or bureaucratic civilisation’. Believing it imperative to resist these and other such impingements on pupils and teachers, the deadly serious Scrutineers sought to develop alternatives that might rectify this unsatisfactory educational situation. Generally speaking, these alternatives revolved around the notion that English could, and indeed should, serve ‘as a coordinating force as well as a supremely important subject’, and the interrelated belief that an education in English literature provided ‘training for a morally intelligent life’, a training which might also equip schoolchildren with the intellectual means to withstand the oppressive conditions of contemporary existence.

Understanding the nuances of this educational project as it flourished in British grammar and secondary modern schools between 1945 and 1970 is one of Hilliard’s main tasks in his impressive critical reading of the Scrutiny movement. Making excellent use of unearthed archival material, empirical data, and a wide range of primary sources, Hilliard demonstrates convincingly how the many figures associated with this influential project – be they left-leaning university lecturers, sixth-form teachers, students, writers, or general readers – can be said to have played important roles in ensuring the postwar circulation of educational practices and ideals associated with Leavis’s Scrutiny. In equal measure, however, Hilliard also seeks to detail how this pedagogical project, despite being inextricably linked with Leavis and the principles of practical criticism, was both ‘remade’ and ‘rehoused’ when it was exported ‘beyond the very distinctive setting in which it took shape, the intellectual milieu and intimate and intensive teaching practices of interwar Cambridge’.

This becomes especially clear in the closing chapter of English as a Vocation. As Hilliard notes in the opening line of the chapter, ‘Scrutiny’s history is an international history’. In this fascinating account of ‘Scrutiny’s Empire’, Hilliard describes how this most important of modern literary movements directly influenced educational systems far and wide. Scrutiny’s impact outside Britain could, according to Hilliard, be felt indirectly, ‘as students and teachers came across copies of Scrutiny or Leavis’s books in shops remote from Cambridge’. But this is not all. Scrutiny’s influence was also felt in universities across the globe. To an extent, this was true of the English curricula developed at certain universities in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, where academics attempted to couple the interpretative methods promoted in Leavis’s periodical with the principles of the so-called New Criticism. Perhaps most notably of all, however, was the way in which the Scrutiny movement ‘inspired reforms and attempted reforms of university English teaching around the British empire’. Hilliard charts the sometimes surprising ways in which, for better or worse, ‘Scrutiny’s cultural criticism was pressed into colonial service’ in diverse locations such as Colombo and Sydney. Hilliard creates a revealing critical portrait that succeeds in suggesting that the ultimate significance of what started out as a relatively small critical movement based in Cambridge ‘is to be found in the energies it released unpredictably as well as those it channelled’.