Bolton

• What if some people, even lots of people, were tensely watching “the racing news and daily horoscope”?
• This is the question posed by Mass-Observation at the start of the 1939 book, Britain.
• I first came across Mass-Observation while doing my doctoral research in the 1990s and became a trustee in 2022.
• But unlike social media, Mass-Observers – as the project’s voluntary contributors are known – write with posterity in mind, and write at length, anonymously and with candour.

Candour and idiosyncrasies

• To this end, people were invited to volunteer to answer directives, to write diaries on specific days and to observe and describe the world around them.
• The first Mass-Observation material I worked on, in the 1990s, was a microfiche file entitled Bad Dreams and Nightmares.
• These accounts had been collated a few months before the start of the second world war, in an attempt to gauge social anxiety.
• Reading the 66 reports that observers had sent in, however, had a cumulative effect of gnawing unease.

Archive of feelings

• By the mid-1950s, it had stopped using a national panel of voluntary writers and slowly shut up shop.
• Mass-Observation found a new lease of life in the mid-1970s when Harrisson bequeathed the archive to the University of Sussex, for safekeeping and public use.
• It represents an invaluable archive for future historians.
• Mass-Observation is a growing archive of feelings.