How do the diaries and memoirs of ordinary British people reflect periods of intense social change? What does self-reflexive narrative reveal about how class consciousness affects the way in which they adapt to paradigmatic social change? This interdisciplinary project funded by the British Academy will investigate self-reflexive narrative, from the Mass Observation Archive (Brighton), the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies (Brunel University), and selected published sources, in relation to social changes over the century from the end of the First World War (focusing initially on two key periods of change, 1939-43 and 1981-4, before moving on to the present).
During the course of this project, I aim to (A) trace the influence of Mass Observation’s participatory project (which democratised modernism and promoted self-reflexive life writing): (B) explore the relationship between working-class autobiography and proletarian autobiografiction; (C) investigate some of the ways in which autobiographical narratives record social change; (D) analyse the relationship between self-reflexive narrative and class consciousness in the context of social change; (E) chart the interlinked history of the attempts of British Sociology and English Studies to map social value formation through qualitative narrative analysis; (F) analyse qualitatively how narrative self-reflexivity enables individuals to cope with paradigmatic social change; and (G) synthesize a new interdisciplinary approach in order to explore the social values and structures of feeling emerging in the 21st Century.
In designing this project I was drawing from two long-standing interests; working-class and proletarian writing (which I’ll discuss in a subsequent post) and Mass-Observation (MO). In its focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people, the original MO Project (1937-49), exemplified the way in which the British documentary movement laid the groundwork for the 1945 political settlement. However, what particularly distinguished MO’s approach is the manner in which it sought to combine subjectivity with objectivity by encouraging its participants to embrace a democratised modernist self-reflexivity in observing both themselves and others. In this respect its strength lay in its capacity to investigate the relationship between private and the public within the context of the rise of mass society. The fact that MO participants were writing about themselves with the knowledge that their writing would be read by MO staff, might be published, and would certainly be made available to future researchers, gave their work a unique status somewhere between a conventional diary and a published autobiography. This mode of writing proved to be of great value both to intellectuals involved in the project, such as Naomi Mitchison, and to the ordinary women and men who participated. Since 1981, a contemporary MO project has been run from the MO archive established at the University of Sussex and now based at the Keep in Falmer. The contemporary MO project is one of the longest running longitudinal life-writing projects anywhere in the world. Three times a year (or sometimes more), MO participants receive a ‘directive’, which is a set of open questions that invite them to write freely and discursively about their views and experiences. Reading across the directive replies of individuals over the years reveals layered life stories which show attitudinal changes in relation to the contradictions of everyday life.
The timing of the original MO project and its contemporary relaunch coincide with two of the key periods of paradigmatic social change in Britain in the twentieth century. As Ross McKibbin notes in Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (1998), ‘the Second World War threw British history, and even more English history, off course’ by replacing a dominant form of individualised democracy centred on a modernised middle class with a social democracy centred on the organised working class. However, an equally ‘profound change came over Britain in the early 1980s’ described by Andy Beckett in Promised You a Miracle: Why 1980-82 Made Modern Britain (2015) as a ‘revolution in the head’ which on the one hand established Thatcherism as a ‘national story’ but also broke with the traditional deference of the post-war years in more radical ways as exemplified by the Labour GLC’s creation of an enduring legacy of network-based identity politics. The MO project provides a unique window on how ordinary people perceived these two periods of paradigmatic social change and how their perceptions were changed by their experiences at the time.
Further Reading:
Casey, Emma and Nick Hubble, eds (2014). ‘Mass Observation as Method’, special section, Sociological Research Online, 19: 3 (September): http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/
Hinton, James. Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Hinton, James. The Mass Observers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Hubble, Nick. Mass-Observation and Everyday Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Hubble, Nick. ‘Documenting Lives: Mass Observation, Women’s Diaries, and Everyday Modernity’, in Adam Smyth (ed.), A History of English Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 345-358.
Social Humanities 