Editorial Board:
Dorothy Sheridan, Head of Special Collections, University of Sussex
Professor Stephen Brooke, Department of History, York University, Toronto
Dr Ben Highmore, Department of Media and Film Studies, University of Sussex
Professor James Hinton, Department of History, University of Warwick
Ben Lander, PhD student, Department of History, York University, Toronto
Dr Claire Langhamer, Department of History, University of Sussex
Professor Laura Marcus, Department of English, University of Sussex
Professor Bob Malcolmson, History Dept, Queen’s University, Canada
Professor Brian Street, Department of Education & Professional Studies, King’s College London
Jenny Taylor, PhD student, Department of History, University of Auckland
Dr Leslie Whitworth, Faculty of Arts and Architecture, University of Brighton
Source Library:
Special Collections, University of Sussex
Nature of the Material:
Original manuscript and typescript papers created and collected by the Mass Observation organisation, together with printed publications, photographs and interactive maps. The social research organisation, Mass Observation, was founded in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, film-maker Humphrey Jennings and poet Charles Madge. Their aim was to create an 'anthropology of ourselves', and by recruiting a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers, they studied the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. This resource covers the original Mass Observation project, the bulk of which was carried from 1937 until the mid 1950s.
Scope of the Collection:
Mass Observation Online offers revolutionary access to one of the most important archives for the study of Social History in the modern era. The material covers:
- The end of the ‘Hungry Thirties’ when the impact of the Depression was still being felt;
- The onset of war, the Blitz and war on the home front;
- The post war world, with the rise of consumerism and television.
The archive has always been immensely popular with students because it offers immediate and engaging evidence of major trends such as the increasing role of women in work, the birth of the welfare state, anti-Semitism and anti-communism, the growth of secularism and the increasing importance of radio, television and cinema in people’s lives. Through interviews, overheard conversations, directive responses and diary entries it offers brilliant cameos describing life in the jazz halls, what people thought of the movies they saw, how people survived the random terror of the Blitz, and where they lived and worked.
In addition to offering high quality images of over 300,000 pages of previously unpublished material, this resource also acts as a finding aid for the microfilm series (published by Adam Matthew Publications) and other unpublished material from the archives.
Mass Observation Online comprises:
- A complete set of the File Reports, 1937-1972, with full text searchability. Over 2,000 File Reports provide top-level summaries and conclusions of the findings of nearly every Mass-Observation study from 1937 to 1955. The range of topics covered is immense, including popular culture (with reports on cinema-going, radio and music, and the advent of television); consumerism, branding and fashion (including the rise of department stores and the New Look); sex, marriage, and the family, as well as attitudes to war, politics and America, Russia and Europe. We have added nearly 25% more material to the previously published microfiche set, as many of the longer reports that were intended for publication were previously withheld. Most reports run to between 16 and 49 pages and are a perfect introduction to the whole range of topics explored by Mass-Observation.
- Publications by Mass-Observation. Twenty-five books, most now out of print, appeared during Mass-Observation’s first period of activity, 1937-1950, including May 12th; First Year’s Work; and Britain By Mass-Observation. They are all included here, along with pamphlets and workbooks published by the Mass-Observation Archive. All material is full text searchable.
- Thirteen previously unpublished Topic Collections, including:
-
Famous Persons (the public’s perceptions of Chamberlain, Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt etc)
- Household Matters and Household Budgeting, 1939-1950
- Juvenile Delinquency (featuring a wonderfully insightful diary of borstal life)
- Korea, 1950
- Radio Listening, 1939-1948 (on war-time broadcasts and the post-war impact of television)
- World Outlook, 1945-1950 (on people’s fears of World War III and a nuclear Armageddon)
- Films 1937-1948 (on British and Hollywood films; newsreels by Pathé, Gaumont-British and others; surveys of audience behaviour; and the effects of air-raids on the cinema trade and the public reception of
propaganda during WW2)
- Capital Punishment Survey, 1938-1956 (attitudes to the death penalty)
- Victory Celebrations, 1945-46 (a record of reactions to the end of war over the periods leading up to and including VE Day and VJ Day)
- Dreams 1937-1948 (a fascinating collection of reports on their dreams from members of MO's volunteer panel)
- Religion 1937-50 (including studies on the effects of WW2 on religious attitudes)
- Reading Habits 1937-47 (the buying and reading of books, and the use of bookshops and libraries)
The Topic Collections represent the raw material behind many of Mass-Observation’s published studies, consisting of both quantitative and qualitative data including questionnaires, interviews, observations and contemporary ephemera. The extensive listings of these collections are fully searchable.
- The Day Surveys, 1937-1938. These were special diaries recording details of a single day, written by members of Mass-Observation’s National Panel, which consisted of over 500 observers. Initially the Panel recorded the 12th day of each month, but by 1938 they were recording special days such as Armistice Day, Christmas, and Bank Holidays.
- Diaries, 1939-1942 - offering roughly 500 separate accounts of what was happening each month, allowing users to compare accounts and trace events as they unfolded. For anyone studying the outbreak of the war, the impact of Dunkirk, the Blitz, evacuation, or a host of other topics, they are indispensable. As Professor Tony Kushner says, “it is a collection of diaries that has few equivalents for this period anywhere in the world.” We offer subject indexing to enable users to search diarist entries for key events and figures in World War II. Readers can also search by date, the gender of the diarist, their location and profession.
- Directives, 1939-1942 - these are specific responses to wide-ranging questions on topics concerning drinking, religion, political beliefs, and much more. Specific subjects included ‘Race’, ‘Class’, ‘Jazz and Dancing’, ‘Shopping’ and ‘the BBC’. There are also many directives relating to World War II, assessing attitudes towards wartime sexual behaviour, propaganda, conscription, air raids and evacuation.
This publication opens up a host of essay and project possibilities on topics such as abortion, old age, crime, eating habits, shopping, fashion, dance, popular music, coal mining, adult education, sex, reading, ethnic minorities, and the decline of Empire. It is a resource that will be welcomed by historians, literary scholars, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists.
There are nine contextual essays and a host of other supporting materials, which will guide the reader through the origins of Mass Observation, its working methods and its value as a source for history, literature, sociology, anthropology and gender studies. There are also essays on research strategies that can be adopted using the archive and on the use of Mass Observation Online as a teaching resource, including two essays by graduate students giving their experiences of working with the material.
Additional features include interactive maps, a bibliography, a chronology, and a collection of photographs by Humphrey Spender.
Supporting Comments:
“The publication of Mass Observation Online will afford undergraduate students, postgraduate researchers and professional historians access to one of the great treasure troves of twentieth-century British history. This is an absolutely critical resource.”
Professor Stephen Brooke, Department of History, York University, Toronto
From a recent article in the New Yorker by Caleb Crain (Sept 2006):
“On January 30, 1937, a letter to the New Statesman and Nation announced that Darwin, Marx, and Freud had a successor—or, more accurately, successors. “Mass-Observation develops out of anthropology, psychology, and the sciences which study man,” the letter read, “but it plans to work with a mass of observers.” The movement already had fifty volunteers, and it aspired to have five thousand, ready to study such aspects of contemporary life as:
Behaviour of people at war memorials.
Shouts and gestures of motorists.
The aspidistra cult.
Anthropology of football pools.
Bathroom behaviour.
Beards, armpits, eyebrows.
Anti-Semitism.
Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke.
Funerals and undertakers.
Female taboos about eating.
The private lives of midwives.
The data collected would enable the organizers to plot “weather-maps of public feeling.” As a matter of principle, Mass-Observers did not distinguish themselves from the people they studied. They intended merely to expose facts “in simple terms to all observers, so that their environment may be understood, and thus constantly transformed.”