Part Two in a series of posts on Mass Observation’s book, May the Twelfth, on the last but one coronation on 12 May 1937. Following up on Part One which deals with the reception of May the Twelfth up until the 1990s (there have been more appreciative responses since then, as I will discuss in a subsequent post), I’m drawing now on the text of my PhD thesis (2002) to discuss the ideas involved in the formation of MO and why the crisis surrounding the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 led them to want to make a ‘weather map’ of public feeling about the coronation of George VI. There are parallels of course with the forthcoming coronation following a succession of crises surrounding, first, Diana and then Harry, as well as the squalid behaviour of Andrew. We should remember that the 1930s were in some ways the most modern decade of the twentieth century (the net effect of the War over time has been reactionary in a number of respects) and people recognised the monarchy for the outdated feudal institution that it is. MO was expecting to chart the cracks in the façade and to find these reflected by a surge in public consciousness leading to liberating social change. However, Jennings and Madge weren’t naïve. They understood only too well how the mass media worked and therefore May the Twelfth was designed to resist those totalising tendencies. Hence, the sustained effort that has gone in to marginalising the work in MO reception as discussed in the previous post. The great lie of twenty-first century Britain, is that no one ever questioned anything back in the old days or at the time of the War, but this is the reverse of the truth. Instead, the forces of reaction and progress have been fighting back and forth over modernity since at least the late Victorian period and this struggle will go on until either we break free, or we’re forced back into the pre-Reform-Act past.
* * *
The intellectual trajectory leading to Mass-Observation shows how what began as a Surrealist technique used to regain meaning from an emergent engulfing media totality, had to move beyond literature because all the possible positions of the artist are already inextricably compromised by that media totality. Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge by virtue of their dual positions in the literary avant garde and as everyday workers in the modern media (documentary film-maker and journalist respectively) were both in place to see this; and in a place from which to do something about it. The undated notes jotted down in a notebook by Madge under the title ‘Popular Poetry’, which have only been available to scholars since the donation of the Madge papers to the University of Sussex in 1999 and remain hitherto unwritten about [ed: at that point: I have written further about them in my article, ‘Charles Madge and Mass Observation are At Home: From Anthropology to War and After’ in new formations 44 (2001) and in Mass-Observation and Everyday Life (2006)], are significant because they suggest both that the plans behind Mass-Observation predate the Abdication crisis of which the notes make no mention and that the original conception was of a political movement.[1] The notes call for ‘Coincidence Clubs: groups in colleges, factories, localities’ that would study the press and advertisements, and be involved in ‘exercises for imagination’. Under a list of ‘Plans for PP’ come ‘First Text Book of PP’ and lectures, training courses, ‘mimeographed record sheets’, delegate conferences and ‘PP Newspaper on mass basis’. Possible slogans include ‘Newspaper Active’ and ‘Mass Science’. The concepts ‘Materialism’ and ‘Class Consciousness’ indicate the Marxist objectives of the putative organisation, while Jennings and Madge’s vision of England remains important: ‘English people must learn to like their surroundings before they can change them.’
It could be that the Left Book Club started by Gollancz in the Spring of 1936 was partly the inspiration for the project; but, as is the case with that organisation, it is clear that ideas worked out in the Labour movement and especially in the Communist Party – with whom Madge had gained plenty of practical experience in organising meetings, running branches and editing newspapers – were a major influence.
The particular impetus for the transition of the organisation from paper plans into being was the crisis triggered by the abdication of Edward VIII. Many years later Madge described his personal experience in an account of ‘The Birth of Mass-Observation’.
As a reporter on the Daily Mirror, I was in 1936 one of many journalists helping to ‘cover’ the events leading up to the abdication of Edward VIII. Deployed now here, now there by my news editor, I stood little chance of an overall view of what was going on, but at least what I did know was at first hand, and of potentially more historical interest than the largely fabricated and contradictory accounts that appeared in the newspapers, including my own. This experience was for me one major precipitant of the idea that history and social self knowledge could be served by organized collective observation.[2]
Madge’s discussion of his concerns with Jennings and other friends led to their thinking about ‘the possibility of enlisting volunteers for the observation both of social happenings like the Abdication and also of “everyday life,” as lived by themselves and those around them.’[3] In December 1936, the group prepared a questionnaire which, as well as asking for people’s specific responses to the possibility of the King marrying Mrs Simpson, asked ‘do you pay any attention to coincidences?’ Also that December, a letter to the New Statesman from Geoffrey Pyke raised the issues of whether the press was responding to, or moulding, public opinion about what he described as the ‘sexual situation’ (i.e. the prospect of Mrs Simpson becoming Queen). Pyke pointed out that, as the response of primitive tribes to sexual situations was one of the main interests of anthropologists, the contemporary situation provided ‘some of the material for that anthropological study of our own civilisation of which we stand in such desperate need.’[4] This served as the stimulus for Madge to reply, in a letter published by the New Statesman on 2 January 1937, that such a study was already underway:
English anthropology, however, hitherto identified with ‘folk-lore,’has to deal with elements so repressed that only what is admitted to be a first-class upheaval brings them to the surface. Such was the threatened marriage to the new ‘Father-of-the-people’ to Mrs. Ernest Simpson. Fieldwork, i.e., the collection of evidence of mass wish-situations, has otherwise to proceed in a far more roundabout way than the anthropologist has been accustomed to in Africa or Australia. Clues to this situation may turn up in the popular phenomenon of the ‘coincidence.’[5]
It is clear from the repetition of the term in these early writings that the concept of the ‘coincidence’ was highly important to Madge and Jennings’s understanding of what Mass-Observation was about, predating the response to the Abdication crisis and then subsequently combined with it. Madge expands on this slightly in his autobiography: ‘Neither Humphrey nor I were inclined toward Jungian ideas of a collective unconscious, but we had read Freud’s essay on the coincidence, which had led to an interest among certain French surrealists, especially André Breton, in coincidental happenings of various kinds.’[6] Breton, with whom Jennings had been in contact during the London International Surrealist Exhibition of the previous summer, had recently described the political position of Surrealism as being in line with Marx’s demand to create ‘more awareness’:
The question ‘How does something become conscious?’ may be advantageously replaced, Freud says, by this question: ‘How does something become preconscious?’ The answer: ‘thanks to the association with the corresponding verbal representations’…
Now these verbal representations, which Freud tells us are ‘mnemonic traces stemming from acoustic perceptions’ are precisely what constitutes the raw material of poetry.[7]
Breton’s argument is that in a situation where society, itself, and the Left in particular have run out of energy tantalisingly close to the threshold of a new society, it is necessary to create a collective myth.[8] This is similar to William Empson’s idea of the possibility of creating ‘rival myths’, which he discusses in the ‘Proletarian Literature’ chapter of Some Versions of Pastoral. What is required is that ‘poetry must be created by everyone’ and ‘the organisation of perceptions with an objective tendency around subjective elements.’[9] It is this model that we see in Popular Poetry and in Jennings and Madge’s early Mass-Observation article for New Verse, ‘Poetic Description and Mass-Observation’, where they explain that through Mass-Observation what is subjective becomes ‘objective because the subjectivity of the observer is one of the facts under observation.’ Therefore, ‘what has become unnoticed through familiarity is raised into consciousness again.’[10] It appears that the Freud essay they were interested in is chapter twelve of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, ‘Determinism, Chance, and Superstitious Beliefs’. Here Freud discusses the unconscious recognition of unconscious processes as manifested in the phenomena of paranoia and superstition. He writes ‘for example, the last paranoiac seen by me concluded that there was a general understanding among people of his environment, because at his departure from the railway station they made a certain motion with one hand.’[11] Freud suggests that everything has a meaning but that the paranoiac projects his own unconscious fears on to the actions he so acutely notices. Mass-Observation effectively set out to observe with the attention of paranoiacs – hand movements at railway stations is an entirely plausible subject for one of their directives – but by recording the observer’s own subjective feelings they hoped to be able to identify unconscious projection as well as the unconscious motives behind seemingly insignificant behaviour and so open up to consciousness huge swathes of everyday life. Superstition is a more specialised – frequently collective – form of paranoia in which unconscious fears are projected on to chance external events. Freud sees the opportunity arising from the sudden experience of a superstitious moment in oneself, or a coincidence or a feeling of déjà vu or some such sensation, as being that some of one’s unconscious activity is brought to surface consciousness and so can be analysed. This was exactly the opportunity Mass-Observation saw at a mass rather than individual level in the symbolic crises arising in 1936 over the Abdication and the burning down of the Crystal Palace.
Madge’s letter in the New Statesman attracted the attention of Harrisson, reading in Bolton public library, owing to the coincidence that it was immediately adjacent to his poem ‘Coconut Moon’, printed in the same issue.[12] He wrote to Madge, met him and Jennings and various others and agreed to join forces. The end result was another letter, appearing in the New Statesman on 30 January 1937, from this reconfigured grouping, of which ‘Mass Observation’ (as yet unhyphenated) now appeared as the name. Now, given that Madge and Jennings had already been working on ideas revolving around Surrealism and Popular Poetry for some months at least and that there was to be a sharp division in 1937 between their work on day-diaries and Harrisson’s organisation of the Worktown project, it is tempting to assume that Mass-Observation was fatally fissured from the start – as seems to be born out by the subsequent acrimonious disputes between Madge and Harrisson in 1940 but this wasn’t the case [Ed: here my argument had evolved from my MA dissertation into the more sophisticated position that Harrisson, Madge and Jennings were actually reasonably aligned in 1937 and that it was only after the subsequent fall out between Madge and Harrisson – although even after that they did collaborate on occasion – that the origins of MO were rewritten in retrospect to suit their divergent career paths].
While Harrisson might have had an inflated view of his own personal ability to interpret facts, he never subscribed to the simple position that facts speak for themselves. He was more consistently hostile throughout his career to empirical positivism than Madge, who had read widely in ethnology, sociology and pyschology while at school and even written an unpublished book [Ed: Arethusa or The Future of Enthusiasm presumably targeted at the Kegan Paul To-day and To-morrow series] dealing with ‘applied psychology in the context of industrial society’.[13] The personal statements of Madge and Harrisson in the booklet Mass-Observation illustrate the problems of trying to construe their relationship as a simple opposition between interpretation and positivism:
Tom Harrisson believes that Mass-Observation by laying open to doubt all existing philosophies of life as possibly incomplete, yet by refusing to neglect the significance of any of them, may make a new synthesis … The whole study should cause us to reassess our inflated opinions of our progress and culture, altering our judgements on others accordingly ….
In the other author’s opinion, Mass-Observation is an instrument for collecting facts, not a means for producing a synthetic philosophy, a super-science or super-politics … It is each man’s job to find his own salvation as best he can. Mass-Observation merely proposes to acquaint him with relevant scientific facts.[14]
There has been a tendency for critics to surreptitiously reverse these statements in order to suit their purposes, as Jeffery does for example: ‘One strange thing about these two statements is that one would have expected the latter statement to have been written by Tom Harrisson, even if Charles Madge could never have written the first. Harrisson was always the scientist, he was determined to collect facts …’[15] It would be more truthful to acknowledge that Harrisson always transcended a positivist approach and anticipated Mass-Observation concerns as, for example, in his 1933 analysis of the ‘Physical Ox’ [i.e. Oxford rower etc]:
The Physical Ox talks very largely about extraordinary episodes connected with copulation: these are generally known as dirty jokes, and there can be no question that they are dirty. The psychology of smut is interesting. It is partly a frustration, a continuously offered insult to sex. More than that it is a way of belittling that factor, sex, which is inescapable even in the most civilised man or woman, and which offers a special impertinence to the athlete’s controlled body. It is interesting that dirty jokes are an important feature of many savage communities and it is questionable whether the man who cannot bear a little dirt is not the unhealthy specimen. In Britain dirty jokes have in a queer way become localised and specialised in certain strata of the community; they are entirely absent in many. The presence or absence of dirt, and the type of dirt, provide master keys to the understanding of these strata.[16]
Harrisson was able to share in the founding of Mass-Observation with Jennings and Madge in a genuine moment of common interest rather than an ill matched marriage of convenience, because of his sense of everyday life: ‘Life is exciting if only people will see it so. Not wonderful; just life … nothing emotional or romantic … Keep on building up the structure from little things, from words and looks and lines and sudden incidents; not emotionally, but in a romantic-plus-rational way, neither one or the other.’[17] His advent to Mass-Observation meant that there were now two people with experience in organisation and planning. At a practical level, the relative independence of Madge and Harrisson with respect to each other was to make the whole operation possible. Madge ran the national projects from London while Harrisson ran the Worktown project in Bolton. Each knew what he wanted to do and both had the connections to produce published results. Through Eliot, Madge was able to get Faber and Faber to commission May the Twelfth; while from Gollancz, Harrisson received advances for four books (of which only one was ever to see the light of day in 1943) with which he was able to employ full-time observers. Thus, in the beginning there was no need to argue over resources and no real opportunity for friction to occur in the day-to-day running of the organisation.
The joint letter of 30 January 1937 contained the promise that ‘observers will … provide the points from which can be plotted weather-maps of public feeling in a crisis.’[18] Weather maps are a means of plotting non-linear sequences (chaos theory originated from research into the weather) – thus they provide a means of countering the linearity of schedule and calendar time while remaining relatively simple to understand and to act on. The cover of the booklet Mass-Observation, designed by Jennings, consists of typed extracts from observers’ reports detailing the weather first thing in the morning and thereby incorporating the subjective experience of being up and about early, suggesting a refreshing everyday perspective.
The inset on the front cover of the first edition of my Mass-Observation and Everyday Life is the cover of the Mass Observation booklet designed by Jennings.
Inside, a brief introduction is followed by a section dated January 1937,[19] written by Madge and Harrisson together in the immediate enthusiasm following the founding of Mass-Observation. The theme throughout is a detailed engagement with superstition, which they argue has its roots in ‘the earliest days of prehistoric man’ and is ‘infinitely adaptable’[20] – something which had become ever more apparent with the onset of modernity.
The more recent acquisitions – electricity, the aeroplane, the radio – are so new that the process of adaption to them is still going on. It is within the scope of the science of Mass-Observation to watch the process taking place – perhaps to play some part in determining the adaption of old superstitions to new conditions. These forces are so new and so terrific that they are commonly thought of as kinds of magic power that can only be wielded by a few men, the technicians. Hence there is a widespread fatalism among the mass about present and future effects of science, and a tendency to leave them alone as beyond the scope of the intervention of the common man. The technician on the other hand, is not concerned with the implications of his activity or its effect on the masses.[21]
The situation is portrayed as a Wellsian choice, in the age of gas and the bomber, between scientific and anti-scientific attitudes, which Madge and Harrisson reduce to a simple question: ‘which gives us most hope of surviving?’ Taking the answer for granted, they discuss how the mass can be educated scientifically. Historically the problem had been that while the industrial revolution created the conditions enabling mass education and literacy, it ‘had a disruptive effect on the morals and beliefs of the working class’ throwing up two strands – effectively, respectable and tavern – equally resistant to science: ‘It is only gradually that the prolongation of industrialism has made more numerous a third type who has looked for a solution in terms of science rather than of religion.’[22] Madge and Harrisson further relate this class to a more rational attitude to gender equality and are clearly seeking the emergence of a form of scientific consciousness. The main remaining problem is the mass media: ‘In 1937, the advertising agencies and daily newspapers employ the best empirical anthropologists and psychologists of the country. These great organisations base their work on the assumption that the human mind is suggestible and they aim their suggestions at the part of the human mind in which the superstitious elements predominate.’[23] So the scene was now set for Mass-Observation to take on the media and prove themselves to be better empirical anthropologists and psychologists.
However, we can see that the relationship to superstition has already changed from the initial surrealist-inspired approach. It is no longer seen as an opportunity to bring the unconscious to the surface for analysis, but is something to be identified and combated in the name of science. On the one hand, we are told that this science is subsuming art, which flourished previously only because it could attempt to answer the questions that science was not yet ready for.[24] Yet, at the same time, we are informed: ‘In certain branches of science and of art, the individual scientist or artist becomes absorbed in a collective activity which is purely human in type, and which excludes neither of the two categories.’[25] Rather than inconsistency, this represents the ambiguity of the project as it is now being formulated. It is not clear if the science proposed is to be an all-encompassing method that must be adhered to, or something to be built up from the close observation of everyday life. Nor can this dichotomy be assigned to the divide between Madge and Harrisson, as Madge’s article ‘Magic and Materialism’ (1937) published that February makes clear. Here, he repeats the same two positions albeit with different nuances. He acknowledges that science will supersede poetry but in a way that emphasises poetry’s freedom from superstition: ‘Poetry deals, not with the inexplicable, but with what has not yet been explained. It lights up by fitful flashes, a scene on which the full day of science will presently dawn.’[26] At the same time, he tries to reconcile socialist science with socialist realism:
The wishes and needs of mankind are rendered accessible, on a class-basis, to the artist-scientist, but the nature of his field of inquiry, as scientist, or his subject-matter, as artist, is found to extend beyond himself as observer. His observations must be mass-observations, his data mass-data … His problem is not to raise to the level of his own consciousness aspects of humanity hitherto concealed or only guessed at, but he has to raise the level of consciousness collectively of the whole mass, he has to induce self-realisation on a mass scale.[27]
These positions suggest an equal overall ambiguity. However, this state of affairs could not indefinitely persist. The career trajectory of Madge is readily decipherable from the earlier poetic position to the later mass science position and on into the heart of planning the post-war state. The particular interest of these writings appears to be that they catch exactly the pivotal moment of equilibrium before the impetus of transition takes over. But what is even more significant, and part of the fundamental importance of Mass-Observation, is that this fruitful moment of dual perspective was held open for nine months by a combination of method and organisation.
The reasons for this become clear from the third section of Mass-Observation, concerning what the organisation is actually intending to do. Here, they discuss the importance of presenting results so that both academicism and ‘the facile temptations of popular exposition’ are avoided and science reaches the mass in the form of ‘the completely objective fact’.[28] The actual examples of presentation methods given suggest that this concept of the ‘fact’ is not as straightforward as it appears. Firstly, there remains a distinct aesthetic component that promises to bring a new perception to ‘even the drab and sordid features of industrial life’ indicating an approach more akin to Orwell than the mainstream documentary tradition: ‘His squalid boarding-house will become for the observer what the entrails of the dog-fish are to the zoologist – the material of science and the source of its divina voluptas.’[29] Secondly, the metaphor of the detective, suggestive of the discovery of clues and traces, comes with a surrealist twist: ‘In the detection which we intend to practise, there is no criminal and all human beings are of equal interest.’[30] Finally, it emerges that the object of detection will be the image, ‘something between an idea and a sensation’, for which purpose the observers will be trained: ‘We intend to issue series of images, like packs of playing cards, and to suggest various exercises which can be played with them.’[31] The idea was to spread the expertise of painters and poets in the use of imagery to the mass-observers, thus liberating their perceptions from externally imposed sense associations and creating a sense of the possibility of change. This is clearly linked to Mass-Observation’s early standing directive for observers to record the dominant image of each day:
The observer is to ask himself at the end of each day what image has been dominant in it. This image should, if possible, be one which has forced itself on him and which has confirmed its importance by recurrence of some kind. the image may occur in a series of varying forms or may take the form of a coincidence. For example, the same name or object may forcibly strike the observer’s notice from within or without, several times on the same day.[32]
It was these images that Mass-Observation wanted to plot across their weather maps.[33] So in a sense these were intended as ‘facts’, in that they would comprise neither academic nor journalistic report, but not as facts functioning as the points of reference in a controlling discourse. Instead these ‘facts’ would present both their own meaning and the potentiality of its transformation into other meanings.
The importance of this third section of Mass-Observation is brought out by the preface to May the Twelfth, dated August 1937: ‘The main development of Mass-Observation has been two-fold, firstly the network of Observers all over the country; secondly an intensive survey of a single town. Charles Madge runs the former, Tom Harrisson the latter. Humphrey Jennings is responsible for the business of presenting results. These three activities are closely linked.’[34] This tripartite operational division is common to both accounts and it is how Mass-Observation functioned from January to September of 1937. Thus, it can be seen that there is a potential division in the text of Mass-Observation between the ambiguously poised mass science position of Madge and Harrisson, and the operational structure which also included Jennings. However, in practice the tripartite structure held the mass science position at its moment of equilibrium, because with Jennings presenting results there was no question of the poetic, image-based technique collapsing into an all-encompassing scientific narrative. When Jennings left Mass-Observation, this tripartite structure simply ceased to exist and the equally originating mass science position of Madge and Harrisson was released from the tensions that held it at a point of fruitful equilibrium.
The first major ‘weather map’ Mass-Observation had it in mind to produce was one of public feeling in the abdication crisis.[35] So, while Harrisson organised the intensive study of Bolton, Jennings and Madge instigated day-surveys to take place on the twelfth of each month, in which the observers (recruited from the New Statesman letters and sympathetic articles in the popular press) recorded all that they did and saw on that day. These were an end in themselves – and ran throughout 1937 – but the first three in February, March and April were also trial runs for that to take place on 12 May 1937, the Coronation of George VI. Mass-Observation was explicit in its understanding of the abdication crisis as a breakdown in the symbolic order: ‘Millions of people who passed their lives as the obedient automata of a system now had to make a personal choice, almost for the first time since birth.’[36] The unwritten questions with respect to the coronation were: in what manner will the symbolic order be restored? And how can the emergent elements be prevented from disappearing in this process?
Follow the link for Part Three.
[1] This notebook was started 9 December 1934, but the notes on ‘Popular Poetry’, which are the last entry in the book, obviously come from much later. However, they must precede 30 January 1937 because by that date the name ‘Mass Observation’ was definitely in use and it seems further reasonable to assume that they precede the Abdication crisis (because they make no mention of it), so I would place them as being written sometime in the autumn of 1936. See 10/-, C.M.P.
[2] Madge, ‘The Birth of Mass-Observation’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 November 1976, p.1395.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Geoffrey Pyke, letter, New Statesman and Nation, 12 December 1936, p.974.
[5] Madge, letter, New Statesman and Nation, 2 January 1937, p.12.
[6] Madge, ‘Autobiography’, p.64, 2/1, C.M.P.
[7] André Breton, ‘Political Position of Surrealism’ [1935], in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trs. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1998, pp.229-230.
[8] Ibid., pp.210, 231-232.
[9] Ibid., pp.262, 278.
[10] Jennings and Madge, ‘Poetic Description and Mass-Observation’, p3.
[11] Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938, p.192.
[12] Harrisson, ‘Coconut Moon’, New Statesman and Nation, 2 January 1937, pp.12-13.
[13] See Madge, ‘Autobiography’, pp.19-23.
[14] Madge and Harrisson, Mass-Observation, London: Frederick Muller, 1937, pp.47-48.
[15] Jeffery. ‘Mass-Observation: A Short History’, p.23.
[16] Harrisson, Letter to Oxford, Wyck, Glos.: Reynold Bray, The Hate Press, 1933, p.69.
[17] Ibid., p.96.
[18] Harrisson, Jennings and Madge, letter, New Statesman and Nation, 30 January 1937, p.155.
[19] See Madge and Harrisson, Mass-Observation, p.28.
[20] Ibid., pp.13-14.
[21] Ibid., p.16.
[22] Ibid., p.18.
[23] Ibid., p.20.
[24] Ibid., pp.25-26.
[25] Ibid., p.27.
[26] Madge, ‘Magic and Materialism’, p.32.
[27] Ibid., p.33.
[28] Ibid., pp.39-40.
[29] Ibid., pp.29-30. Wigan Pier was first published in March 1937 so this could conceivably be a direct reference to Orwell.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid., pp.37-38.
[32] Quoted (presumably from the directive sent out, which is no longer in existence) in Madge, ‘Magic and Materialism’, p.34.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Jennings and Madge, eds., May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937, [1937], London: Faber and Faber, 1987, p.iv.
[35] Madge and Harrisson, Mass-Observation, p.30.
[36] Ibid., p.9.
Social Humanities 