Richard Hoggart, witness in UK 'Lady Chatterley' obscenity trial and cultural historian, dies
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Richard Hoggart, a distinguished cultural historian and a significant witness in the court case that ended British censorship of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," has died at age 95.
His family announced that Hoggart died Thursday at a nursing home in London.
The trial in 1960, which ended with the jury finding that D.H. Lawrence's novel was not obscene, was a landmark for free expression at the outset of London's "swinging sixties."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Hoggart, then a university lecturer, defended the work as "highly virtuous and, if anything, puritanical."
His monumental work was "The Uses of Literacy," published in 1957. It portrayed urban working-class life in the 1920s and 1930s, and how it was affected by mass media and the influence of America.