Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams (1921-1988)

Born in the small Welsh town of Llanfihangel Crocorney to a family engaged in railroad work, Raymond Williams attended King Henry VIII Grammar School in Abergavenny, Wales from 1932 to 1939, when he won a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge.  Many critics suggest that Williams’ working-class Welsh background contributed to the formation of his cultural and socialist orientations to educational, literary, political, and media studies (O’Connor 7).  Williams’ study at Cambridge was marked by participation in the student branch of the Communist Party and the Cambridge University Socialist Club, but his student life was interrupted by World War II.  In 1941, he enlisted in the British forces and served as a tank commander.  At the end of the war, Williams returned to Cambridge and completed his degree in English, taking a Masters in 1946.

Williams worked as a lecturer and tutor at Oxford for fifteen years before returning to Cambridge as a lecturer in English and then Professor of Drama from 1974-1983.  In 1973, he served as a Visiting Professor of Political Science at Stanford.  As his biography belies, education was an important cultural field to Williams; his first critically-acclaimed books Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), and The Long Revolution (1961) were published while he lectured in adult education at Oxford.

While Williams located his professional career within prestigious universities, his study of literature, communication, media, and social structures engaged culturalist and materialist approaches not confined to traditional university settings.  He participated in British New Left political conversations and efforts from the 1950s, was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the U.K. division of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam in the 1960s, and co-wrote the New Left May Day Manifesto (1968) in critique of the British Labour party and in dialogue with leftist movements erupting across Europe in the late 1960s.  Williams responds to claims that intellectual or academic work is separate from the work of street demonstrations in this period as follows:

Anybody who participates in these movements knows of this link and these interactions, between theory and practice, between idea and mood.  Anybody who takes the trouble to talk to a regular participant with some readiness to listen, rather than simply to ask the usual questions about long hair and violence, can in fact discover this. (qtd. in O’Conner 24)

Anthony Barnett suggests that Williams found culture central to structures of change in society, in contrast to traditional Marxist approaches which tend to categorize culture as superstructure, or as produced by the kinds of capitalist mechanisms that also oppress laborers (qtd. in Elridge 2).

Williams’ culturally-attuned and cross-disciplinary approaches are evident in the kinds of publishing he engaged in – he wrote novels, short stories, and plays as well as the cultural and literary criticism he is known for – and in the sites where he published.  For example, he frequently contributed book reviews to the Manchester Guardian, a newspaper with a large working-class readership, beginning in 1959.  His interest in the work of media and communication in society, and his conviction that media remain publicly-owned, also motivated projects and broadcasts that were produced for, and responded to, radio, film, and television.  Television became a particular interest for Williams; from 1968 to 1972 he wrote a weekly column on TV for the BBC magazine The Listener (collected as Raymond Williams on Television: Collected Writings in 1989) and in 1975 produced the critical book Television: Technology and Cultural Form, a seminal theoretical study of the medium.  In his lifetime Williams produced over thirty books and hundreds of shorter pieces on topics as diverse as Ibsen’s drama, materialism, Marxism, English dramatic form, tragedy, and communications.  (BH)

Works Consulted:

Eldridge, John and Lizzie Eldridge. Raymond Williams: Making Connections. London: Routledge, 1994.

Inglis, Fred. Raymond Williams. London: Routledge, 1995.

O’Connor, Alan. Raymond Williams:Writing, Culture, Politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.