Self-reflexivity, Class Consciousness and Social Change in Mass Observation Narratives

Abstract

The original Mass Observation (MO) movement (1937–49) has a well-established position in British history as both the primary archival source for social history of the Second World War and part of a wider political constellation that paved the way to the post-war Labour Government. These two contexts for MO were established during the course of the PhD research of Angus Calder and Paul Addison at the University of Sussex, where the MO Archive was to be established, and contributed respectively to Calder’s The People’s War (1969) and Addison’s The Road to 1945 (1975). Since 2000, attention to this period of MO’s history has leaned more towards the wartime diaries MO asked observers to keep, of which there are around 400, with nearly 100 written for the duration of the war, many by women. In Nine Wartime Lives (2010), James Hinton argues that the historical significance of these diaries lies in the unique way in which they combine private and public spheres: ‘Mass-Observation offered a discipline and a context which transcended the purely private, meeting a need to frame individual quests in relation to larger public purposes.’...