EN / nl

Mass-Observation movement

Mass-Observation (M-O) was founded towards the end of 1936, in response to the coincidence of the Crystal Palace fire and abdication of King Edward VIII. The movement was comprised of Charles Madge’s and Humphrey Jennings’s Marxist-Surrealist archive of popular feeling, and Tom Harrisson’s participant-observation study of the working-class north of England. Styling itself as ‘an elementary piece of human organisation’, M-O quickly attracted a following of thousands and co-ordinated groups of expert observers in London and Bolton. Its early reports covered such ground as the coronation of King George VI, the Munich Crisis, Blackpool nightlife, and ‘a slight case of totemism’ in a Lancashire village. Although M-O altered course drastically after the first few years—losing Jennings, and with him the group’s humour and surrealist eye—it continued to subvert the relationships between the government, the press, and their publics. By gathering only the ‘facts’ of individual observations, dream reports, and opinions, M-O not only appeared to transcend academic theorizing and ideology, but it also compiled one of the most comprehensive and eccentric archives ever amassed. As a meta-discipline, claiming to be of use to almost every science, to policy makers, and crucially to the people themselves, M-O outgrew itself, failing to recognise that no index of everyday life could be purely factual, no representation of opinion unmediated. Curiously, in losing a highly politicised version of surrealism, M-O had lost its own aesthetic organising principle. During the War it was co-opted by the government, and post-War by advertising agencies. The archive is housed at the University of Sussex and is now a treasure trove for social and cultural historians of the period. BJ