Brian Rigby (1945–2017)

The death on 14 November 2017 of Brian Rigby, founding Editor of the journal French Cultural Studies, is a sad loss to the academic community and a cruel blow to his close-knit family. Brian was a scholar of broad interests across French and British cultural studies, whose work opened domains of research that many colleagues have since entered. In debate, he was challenging and especially critical of conventional thinking, but he was personally warm and generous with his extensive knowledge and his time. He took particular care to support younger scholars in exploring new approaches and new areas of research.

Brian was born on 9 February 1945 in Station Cottage by the railway line on which his father worked, at Lostock Junction, near Bolton, Lancashire. His railway background, and especially the provision of free travel to the families of employees, opened up opportunities, in particular for visits to France, which triggered his love affair with the French language and culture. He had a lifelong respect for the working-class world of his family, which gave him a strong sense of self, and a curiosity about the world. He was intellectually gifted and gained a place at the academically ambitious Bolton School. From there, he won a place at New College, Oxford, where he read Modern Languages and followed this with postgraduate studies leading to a B.Phil., specializing in the literature and culture of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He began his academic career as a Lecturer in French in the late 1960s at the then new University of Warwick. His profile and interests were well suited to the pioneering Department of French Studies, built by Professor Donald Charlton, who was also an alumnus of Bolton School. Brian shared his vision of educating students to the highest level in disciplines that could assist them to understand French life and culture, including the study of European literature, philosophy, politics, and history. On Donald Charlton’s retirement, Brian took responsibility for editing a volume of essays in his honour, under the title French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century: A Material World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993). During more than twenty years at Warwick, Brian gained the respect of his colleagues and the affection of generations of students, who remember him as an inspiring and supportive teacher, always ready to share his knowledge, but spurring them to develop their own independent views.

In 1992, he was appointed to a Chair at the University of Hull, where he taught first in the French department and later in English. His cross-disciplinary interests enabled him to straddle a wide range of subjects and he was equally at home teaching the French literary canon, cultural critique, literature in translation, or children’s literature.

During the 1980s, Brian had worked on relations between France and Britain during the nineteenth century, publishing articles on ‘Stendhal and the English Jacobin Novelist Thomas Holcroft’ (in Stendhal et l’Angleterre, ed. by K. G. McWatters and C. W. Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1987), pp. 191–210) and ‘Radical Spectators of the Revolution: The Case of the Analytical Review’ (in The French Revolution and British Culture, ed. by Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 63–83). However, his interest was increasingly drawn towards the wider cultural landscape. He was profoundly influenced by Richard Hoggart, whose portrait of the ‘grammar school boy’ resonated deeply with the generation of working-class students and young lecturers coming to terms with life in the rapidly expanding universities of the 1960s and 1970s. Hoggart’s commitment to take seriously the growing role of the mass media and popular culture struck a similar chord.

Brian never lost sight of the comparative cultural perspective, and his inaugural lecture at the University of Hull, in January 1994, was on the French translation of Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957). He subsequently contributed a related paper to a colloquium organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou on Richard Hoggart en France (‘La “Culture populaire” en France et en Angleterre: la traduction française de The Uses of Literacy’, in Richard Hoggart en France...