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Pennies from Heaven and Earth in Mass Observation's Blackpool

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Jennie Taylor
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 132 - 154
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2012

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References

1 Madge, Charles and Harrisson, Tom, Mass-Observation (London, 1937), 14, 41Google Scholar.

2 B.A., “Astrology,” report on press astrology, 4 March 1940, file report (FR) 44, Mass Observation Archive (MOA), University of Sussex, 2. Some of the observers reporting for Mass Observation can be identified only by their initials, as no other personal information was recorded. Similar sentiments are expressed in another wartime report on the subject of press astrology: “Today more people follow their fate (or Britain’s) in the stars, as indicated by astrologers, than follow the day-to-day advice of God as outlined by his archbishops, preachers, parish magazines.” See “Report on Mass-Astrology, 1941,” 7 July 1941, FR 769, MOA, 1.

3 In a short essay, Charles Madge (“Magic and Materialism,” Left Review 3, no. 1 [February 1937]: 33) reflected on what he described as the “problem” of magical belief in modern British culture. Other Mass Observers, Madge acknowledged, might not share his implicitly Marxist outlook, but “our common front is the application of materialism to superstition.”

4 Harrisson, Tom, Savage Civilisation (London, 1937)Google Scholar. For a more detailed account of Harrisson's background as an ornithologist and amateur ethnographer, see Heimann, Judith M., The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life (Honolulu, 1998).Google Scholar

5 Harrisson, Tom, Jennings, Humphrey, and Madge, Charles, “Anthropology at Home,” New Statesman and Nation, 30 January 1937, 155Google Scholar. There are a number of histories detailing Mass Observation's foundation and early years. See, e.g., Jeffery, Tom, Mass-Observation: A Short History, 2nd ed. (Brighton, 1999)Google Scholar; Hubble, Nick, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Calder, Angus, “Mass-Observation, 1937–1949,” in Essays on the History of British Sociological Research, ed. Bulmer, Martin (Cambridge, 1985), 121–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Summerfield, Penny, “Mass-Observation: Social Research or Social Movement?” Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 3 (July 1985): 439–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacClancy, Jeremy, “Brief Encounter: The Meeting, in Mass-Observation, of British Surrealism and Popular Anthropology,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1, no. 3 (September 1995): 495–512CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Heimann, The Most Offending Soul Alive, 132.

7 “Mass-Observation in Bolton: A Social Experiment,” n.d., Worktown Collection (WC) 1/C, MOA, 2. Bolton's initial appeal to Harrisson was symbolic. As the birthplace of William Lever, Bolton was linked to Harrisson's experiences of “cannibal” life in Melanesia through Unilever's expanding global empire; Harrisson, , Britain Revisited (London, 1961), 25–26Google Scholar.

8 Harrisson, Britain Revisited, 1.

9 Unlike bird-watchers, however, potential Mass Observers would “not need to go out onto the moors to find your quarry. It is at your door—the rich, varied, ever-shifting and sometimes tangled fabric of human affairs.” See “Mass-Observation in Bolton: A Social Experiment,” n.d., WC 1/C, MOA, 1–2.

10 Peter Gurney, for example, has argued that the Worktown study was colored by observers’ “deeply ingrained élitism and class-snobbery.” Gurney, “‘Intersex’ and ‘Dirty Girls’: Mass-Observation and Working-Class Sexuality in England in the 1930s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 2 (October 1997): 263. Hubble (Mass-Observation and Everyday Life, 133–39) has challenged the generalization that the Worktown project was dominated by educated, middle-class southerners.

11 Brian Barefoot, who participated in the Worktown study intermittently in 1937 and 1938 while studying medicine in Edinburgh, has written a detailed memoir of his experiences in Bolton and Blackpool. The memoir provides details on various observers involved in the project. See Brian Barefoot, unpublished memoir, 1939, Former Mass Observers, Box 1, MOA.

12 Exact numbers are difficult to ascertain. See Calder, Angus and Sheridan, Dorothy, eds., Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology, 1937–49 (London, 1984), 41Google Scholar; Harrisson, Tom, “Preface,” in Mass-Observation, The Pub and the People: A Worktown Study (London, 1943), 13Google Scholar, and Britain Revisited, 26. Harrisson and Madge switched roles in November 1938, by which time the Blackpool study was downsized. Madge focused primarily on the study of economics.

13 Historians’ exploration of Mass Observation's Blackpool study has been limited. To date, only three published works address the study in any detail. Gary Cross has edited an anthology of the Blackpool book drafts. He briefly outlines and contextualizes the study, noting its pertinence to contemporary debates about leisure. John Walton's closing chapter situates the anthology within a broader social history of Blackpool. See Cross, Gary, “Introduction: Mass-Observation and Worktowners at Play,” in Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s, ed. Cross, Gary (London, 1990), 1–15Google Scholar; and Walton, John, “Afterword: Mass-Observation's Blackpool and Some Alternatives,” in Cross, Worktowners at Blackpool, 229–39Google Scholar. There are several reviews of the anthology. See, e.g., McWilliam, Rohan, review of Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s, ed. Cross, Gary, Social History 17, no. 1 (January 1992): 160Google Scholar; Childs, Michael J., review of Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s, ed. Cross, Gary, Albion 24, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 364–66Google Scholar. Gurney has examined Mass Observation's representations of working-class sexuality in Blackpool. Gurney, “‘Intersex’ and ‘Dirty Girls’,” 256–90. James Vernon has explored Mass Observation's investigative reports on Colonel Barker's show in Blackpool in 1937. Vernon, “‘For Some Queer Reason’: The Trials and Tribulations of Colonel Barker's Masquerade in Interwar Britain,” Signs 26, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 37–62. Lucy Curzon has investigated Humphrey Spender's photographs of Blackpool. See Curzon, “Another Place in Time: Documenting Blackpool for Mass Observation in the 1930s,” History of Photography 35, no. 3 (2012): 313–26.

14 Walton, John, Riding on Rainbows: Blackpool Pleasure Beach and its Place in British Popular Culture (St. Albans, 2007), 41Google Scholar. For more context on the history of Blackpool's development as a working-class holiday resort in the 1930s, see Walton, John, The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2000)Google Scholar; Cross, Gary and Walton, John, The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 The figure of 7 million is commonly quoted, though its accuracy is questionable. See, e.g., Walvin, James, Leisure and Society, 1830–1950 (London, 1978), 143Google Scholar; Walton, The British Seaside, 58, Riding on Rainbows, 41; Pimlott, J. A. R., The Englishman's Holiday: A Social History (Hassocks, 1976), 239–40Google Scholar. The problems historians face in calculating the number of visitors to resorts are discussed in John K. Walton and Cliff O’Neill, “Numbering the Holidaymakers: The Problems and Possibilities of the June Census of 1921 for Historians of Resorts,” Local Historian 23 (1993): 205–16.

16 Walton, The British Seaside, 51–52.

17 See “Mass Observation in Blackpool,” n.d., WC 1/G, MOA, 2–5. Cross (Worktowners at Blackpool, 2) describes the Blackpool contingent as consisting of five “permanent” investigators, Bolton-based observers who visited on long weekends, and “about twenty-five university students” who helped out during holidays. One undated report stated that fieldwork for the Blackpool study was concentrated around a fortnight in September, 1938. See “Mass-Observation in Bolton: A Social Experiment,” n.d., WC 1/C, MOA, 4.

18 Julian Trevelyan (Indigo Days [London, 1957], 83, 98) recalled that “Tom would sometimes issue surprising directives. ‘All Observers will record conversation in a public lavatory at five-thirty’ was one that might be expected to produce a rich haul.”

19 The Pub and the People was the only published monograph based wholly from material collected as part of the Worktown study. Other anticipated book titles were listed as: Politics and the Non-Voter, by Walter Hood and Frank Cawson; How Religion Works, by J. L. Wilcock and others; Blackpool: One Week a Year, by Herbert Howarth and Richard Glew. See Harrisson, Tom and Madge, Charles, Britain by Mass-Observation (1939; repr., London, 1986), 227Google Scholar. The proposed title of the anticipated book on Blackpool varies in Mass Observation's publications and archival records. In a drafted preface for The Pub and the People, the title given is “Blackpool: A Study in Progress”; see “Preface,” typescripts prepared for The Pub and the People, WC 2/A, MOA, i.

20 “Slot,” unpublished manuscript, WC 61/A, MOA, 15 (original in upper case). The archival files contain multiple copies of drafted book chapters with varied titles and pagination. All page numbers referenced in notes accord with that provided on the particular document cited. At the same time as Mass Observation pieced together drafts, Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford was also tackling the subject of superstition in his archaeology of British life. See Hauser, Kitty, Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (London, 2008)Google Scholar.

21 The book was considered “well on the way to completion” when the war began and “scattered those responsible for the fieldwork in Worktown and Blackpool.” See “Holiday Town,” unpublished manuscript, WC 63/A, MOA, 1.

22 Unsigned letter to Norman Collins at Gollancz, 25 February 1940, Mass Observation Organisation and History, 3/10, MOA, 1. When Harrisson visited the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex in the early 1970s, he expressed plans to revisit the Blackpool manuscript.

23 Harrisson's handwritten name appears on the first page of “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth” (unpublished manuscript, WC 60/E, MOA, 1). In a memorandum addressed to Madge in early 1940, Harrisson asserted his leading role in writing the “whole of the Blackpool and politics books … always with one or both the people responsible for the fieldwork in the room, discussing, criticising, and planning the next few pages, but the actual words and arrangement of material being carried out by me”; Memo to Madge, 25 January 1940, Mass Observation Organisation and History, Box 1: CM-TH Correspondence, MOA, 4.

24 The terms “occult,” “occultist,” and “pseudoscience” were employed by observers to describe these practices. Prediction machines were relatively uncommon outside England's seaside resorts. Mass Observation noted that there was “only one slot-machine in Bolton that could be called in any way magical”; see “Slot,” WC 61/A, MOA, 18.

25 Authorial identity can be unclear due to the composite nature of the manuscript, which merges an editorial voice with extracts from individual investigative reports written by a number of observers (who cannot always be identified). Some of the original reports on occultism in Blackpool are missing. Several were archived as part of the Topic Collections rather than the Worktown Collection. Wherever an observation or argument pertains to an (identifiable) individual, I have endeavored to indicate this. Attributions to Mass Observation as a collective entity are reserved for overarching ideas or arguments that I consider to be representative of the study as a whole.

26 In 1897, for example, palmists, phrenologists, and other entertainment providers deemed “offensive” and disreputable were banished from the central beach by local authorities; Walton, Riding on Rainbows, 21–22.

27 Weber, Max, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (London, 1948), 129–56Google Scholar. See also Gane, Nicholas, Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalization versus Re-enchantment (Basingstoke, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Saler, Michael, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 692–716CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 See, e.g., Owen, Alex, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; During, Simon, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA, 2002)Google Scholar; Landy, Joshua and Saler, Michael, eds., The Re-enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, CA, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pick, Daniel, Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, CT, 2000)Google Scholar; Bennett, Jane, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saler, Michael, “‘Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes’: Mass Culture and the Re-enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890–c. 1940,” The Historical Journal 46, no. 3 (September 2003): 599–622CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 These terms are “somewhat rough-and-ready heuristic labels intended to highlight key features of particular interpretations, rather than being all-inclusive models”; Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment,” 693. Mass Observers did not employ the Weberian terminology of “enchantment” or “disenchantment” in their analyses or descriptions of occult amusements in Blackpool. I have borrowed the concept (as defined by Weber and Saler) as a useful framework for interpreting Mass Observation's research concerns.

31 This understanding was prevalent among Western “elites” from the seventeenth century. Enchanting relics were culturally marginalized and attributed to the weaker reasoning faculties of “‘primitives,’ children, women, and the lower classes.” Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movements rejecting positivism, such as spiritualism and aestheticism, represented a nostalgic, reactionary “revolt” against the forces of modernization. See Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment,” 695–97; Landy and Saler, The Re-enchantment of the World, 3–4.

32 Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment,” 698.

33 Landy and Saler, The Re-enchantment of the World, 4. The idea was influentially developed in Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Cumming, John (New York, 1972) (originally published as Dialektik der Aufklärung [Amsterdam, 1947])Google Scholar.

34 Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment,” 702.

35 Ibid., 701.

36 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154. On the Frankfurt School and Marxist critical theory, see Jay, Martin, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Lukács, György, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (London, 1971)Google Scholar.

37 Madge and Harrisson, Mass-Observation, 60–61.

38 “In one sense, the Worktowner, who has none of these machines in his own town, though there are plenty of other sorts of machine, is paying to get the machine's opinion of himself”; “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 15.

39 Ibid., 15–16. Mass Observation pursued the phenomenon of “wishful thinking” into the war years, when it reached seemingly epidemic proportions. One of Harrisson and Madge's wartime publications contains a chapter on wishful thinking: “The less people know about the reality situation and the less clearly they are able to visualise the future, the more they will infuse into the present some reassurance against awful doubts and fears”; see Observation, Mass, War Begins at Home, ed. Harrisson, Tom and Madge, Charles (London, 1940), 136Google Scholar.

40 “Often they profess scepticism or mild disbelief, but the words that they have heard or read about themselves nevertheless have their effect once they have been read or heard”; “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 16.

41 See North, Michael, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York, 1999), 65–106Google Scholar. Roiser, Martin (“Social Psychology and Social Concern in 1930s Britain,” in Psychology in Britain: Historical Essays and Personal Reflections ed. Bunn, G. C., Lovie, A. D., and Richards, G. D. [Leicester, 2001], 169–87Google Scholar) refers to Mass Observation as a “new form of social psychology.” See also Thomson, Mathew, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2006), 209–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 For a more detailed discussion on psychological enchantment at the turn of the century, see Pick, Svengali's Web, 68–91.

43 Le Bon, Gustave, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), 50Google Scholar.

44 Ibid., 52–53, 63.

45 Freud, Sigmund, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. Strachey, James (London, 1922), 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Ibid., 19–20.

47 “Fourth Dimension,” unpublished manuscript, WC 60/E, MOA, 15.

48 “Among local youth this act raises perhaps more controversy as to How It Is Done than any other single trick in the gamut of amusements. Not the least singular explanation heard is that when the girl returns for the decapitation it is in fact a mummy which returns regulated by electricity or radio”; Ibid., 16–17.

49 See Gange, David, “Religion and Science in Late Nineteenth-Century British Egyptology,” Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (December 2006): 1083–1103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daly, Nicholas, Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1999), 84–116Google Scholar; Hilliard, Christopher, “The Provincial Press and the Imperial Traffic in Fiction, 1870s-1930s,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 3 (July 2009): 671–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 “Fourth Dimension,” WC 60/E, MOA, 15.

51 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 11. Mass Observation expanded on this point: “The next step is for the occultist to make a machine to replace the urbane lady. This would be the civilised development from the gypsey [sic] and pyramid to technology and Unilever”; see “Robots,” unpublished manuscript, WC 62/F, MOA, 1.

52 “Blackpool: Automatic Palmistry and Fortune-Telling Machines,” AL [Allan Lockwood], 3 September, Topic Collection (TC) 8, Astrology and Spiritualism 1938–47, 1/A, MOA, 6.

53 For a general history of the development of British anthropology in the early twentieth century, see also Eriksen, Thomas Hylland and Nielsen, Finn Sivert, A History of Anthropology (London, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goody, Jack, The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918–1970 (Cambridge, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kuklick, Henrika, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; Urry, James, Before Social Anthropology: Essays on the History of British Anthropology (Chur, 1993)Google Scholar.

54 Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists, 28, 33. In contrast, diffusionist ethnologists interpreted cultures as “patchworks of traits, borrowed from others, the superior traits moving outwards from the centre like the ripples made by a stone thrown into a pond. … These cultural traits could be classified, on stylistic or other criteria, and their movement, or movements of their bearers, reconstructed”; Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists, 3.

55 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 5.

56 Ibid., 7.

57 See Thurschwell, Pamela, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Hazelgrove, Jenny, Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars (Manchester, 2000), 21Google Scholar.

59 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 5.

60 “Fourth Dimension,” WC 60/E, MOA, 15. Mass Observation put forward a similar argument in the 1937 introductory booklet: “As it is diffused for mass-consumption, the work of the scientist reassumes the very superstitiousness which it was to supersede”; see Madge and Harrisson, Mass-Observation, 39.

61 After three years of budgeting difficulties and struggling to maintain a public following, the service was halted in September 1939; see Robson, Neil, “Living Pictures Out of Space: The Forlorn Hopes for Television in pre-1939 London,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24, no. 2 (June 2004): 227–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The public broadcast of Coronation Day in 1937 was mentioned in Mass Observation's published account of the build-up and reaction to the event; see Jennings, Humphrey and Madge, Charles, eds., May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys, 1937 (London, 1937), 16Google Scholar.

62 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 5.

63 Harrisson, Britain Revisited, 206. Harrisson's broadcasting was aided by his friendship with Mary Adams, adult education officer and producer for the BBC Television Service. See Heimann, The Most Offending Soul Alive, 118.

64 A page of the manuscript, marked as a flyleaf, endorses a quote from “Kimball Young, (Professor of Social Psychology, University of Wisconsin)”: “As a matter of fact our own society may be said to be shot through and through with another kind of mysticism and magic—that of materialism and progress”; see “Title Page,” WC 60/E, MOA.

65 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 142.

66 Ibid., 147.

67 Leavis, F. R. and Thompson, Denys, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London, 1933), 32Google Scholar.

68 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 18.

69 Ibid., 19.

70 Heimann, The Most Offending Soul Alive, 142.

71 Ibid., 12. See original report, “Palmist: Madame Kusharney,” ZB [Zita Baker], 22 October 1937, TC 8/1/A, MOA, 2.

72 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 10. See original report, “Palmist: Madam Curl,” ZB [Zita Baker], 22 October 1937, TC 8/1/A, MOA, 3.

73 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 15. See original report, table of palmistry readings, n.d., TC 8/1/A, MOA.

74 A footnote in Harrisson's (1941) drafted article for New Statesman and Nation notes that Mass Observation was “concerned only with the social effects of contemporary mass astrology, irrespective of astrological theory, accuracy or intention”; “Mass Astrology,” TH [Tom Harrisson], 5 August 1941, FR 812, MOA, 1.

75 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 14. See also “Which Doctor,” unpublished manuscript, WC 62/B, MOA, 14.

76 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 16.

77 Ibid., 13.

78 Ibid., 16.

79 Ibid., 8. See original report, “Palmist: Madame Romano,” ZB [Zita Baker], 22 October 1937, TC 8/1/A, MOA, 2.

80 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 10.

81 Ibid., 15.

82 Ibid., 9.

83 Ibid., 8.

84 Ibid., 9.

85 Ibid., 11.

86 Ibid., 10.

87 Ibid., 13.

88 Ibid., 14.

89 Ibid., 14–15.

90 “Spoken, Sung,” unpublished manuscript, WC 62/D, MOA, 8–9.

91 Johnny Burke and Arthur Johnson, “Pennies from Heaven” (1936), cited in “Dancing,” unpublished manuscript, WC 60/D, MOA, 23.

92 Priestley, J. B., English Journey (London, 1934), 267–68Google Scholar.

93 Baxendale, John, “‘I had seen a lot of Englands’: J. B. Priestley, Englishness and the People,” History Workshop Journal 51 (Spring 2001): 96Google Scholar.

94 “Dancing,” WC 60/D, MOA, 17–24.

95 Ibid., 24.

96 “Formby reverses the symbolism or metaphor, away from the ethereal. … Observers are inclined to think that Formby's songs carry a sensible working philosophy.” See “Spoken, Sung,” WC 62/D, MOA, 10.

97 Godbolt, Jim, A History of Jazz in Britain 1919–50 (London, 1984), 51–65Google Scholar. For more context on the emergence and popular influence of the gramophone and jazz music in interwar British culture, see LeMahieu, D. L., A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford, 1988), 80–98Google Scholar; Nott, James, Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar; Laughey, Dan, Music and Youth Culture (Edinburgh, 2006), 55–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Nott, Music for the People, 193–202; Personage, Catherine, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935 (Aldershot, 2005), 35–77Google Scholar.

99 LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy, 89–90.

100 “Dancing,” WC 60/D, MOA, 17. See also Harrisson, Tom, “Whistle While You Work,” New Writing 1 (Autumn 1938): 47–67Google Scholar.

101 Nichols, Beverley, Cry Havoc! (London, 1935)Google Scholar. In a review of Nichols's (similarly critical) News of England (1938), the novelist, journalist, and essayist is described as being “an infallible barometer of public taste in registering successively the thoughts of the unthinking about America, gardening, pacifism, God”; see Verschoyle, Derek, “At the End of the Garden Path,” London Mercury 38, no. 223 (May 1938): 79Google Scholar.

102 Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (London, 1970).Google Scholar

103 The discussion of jazz concludes with a tone of frustration and urgency. It appeals to “politicians and ‘socially conscious’ people” to “wake up to the tremendous individualist, ‘selfish’, and thus ‘anti-social’ effect of jazz education,” which “has become or is becoming the rleigious [sic] ritual of postwar youth … our mass-poetry and a new folk-lore”; see “Dancing,” WC 60/D, MOA, 24.

104 “Mass Astrology,” TH [Tom Harrisson], 5 August 1941, FR 812, MOA, 5–6.

105 I have borrowed this phrase from the title of Jay's, Martin article “Taking On the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno's Critique of Genuineness,” New German Critique 97, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 15–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 Hilton draws largely from Mass Observation's studies on smoking; see Hilton, Matthew, Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800–2000 (Manchester, 2000)Google Scholar. Christopher Hilliard's discussion (To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain [Cambridge, MA, 2006], 70–97) of writers’ circles and the production of commercial fiction highlights a perceived compatibility between “authentic” and “sincere” writing and the mass market. Matt Houlbrook (“‘A Pin to see the Peepshow’: Culture, Fiction and Selfhood in Edith Thompson's Letters, 1921–1922,” Past and Present, no. 207 [May 2010]: 215–49) demonstrates how popular novels could provide a platform for creative self-fashioning in 1920s Britain.

107 Saler examines the mass-culture phenomenon associated with the fictional character of Sherlock Holmes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Scores of adult readers happily embraced Holmes and his fictive world as real, “with the double-minded awareness that they were engaged in pretence.” The detective charmed a modern audience by imaginative, yet secular crime-solving logic, which “made reason magical, the prosaic poetic”; see Saler, “Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes,” 606–7, 614. During explores the unique role of “technically produced” and “self-consciously illusory” shows and marvels which made “no serious claim to contact with the supernatural” as they evolved from the eighteenth century to satisfy an increasingly profit-oriented entertainment industry. Secular magic, he demonstrates, engaged its audience by providing a vehicle for astonishment tempered by skepticism and ironic reflection. To this effect, it simultaneously enchanted and demystified; During, Modern Enchantments.

108 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 6.

109 “Blackpool. Automatic Palmistry and Fortune-Telling Machines,” AL [Allan Lockwood], 3 September, TC 8/1/A, MOA, 6.

110 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 21.

111 Ibid. Howarth also expressed his remorse for the “sins” he had committed since receiving the prophecy.

112 In his influential work of literary criticism, William Empson asserted the primary role of conflict in poetic language and expression. When poetry invited a reappraisal of potential meanings, Empson explained, “there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect”; see Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2nd ed. (1947; repr., London, 1949), 3Google Scholar. Empson shared an editorial role with Jennings for the Cambridge magazine Experiment, launched in 1928, and co-edited May the Twelfth (1937). In 1937, he accompanied Trevelyan to Bolton, where Harrisson had him examine displays in sweetshop windows. John Haffenden notes Empson's limited involvement in the Worktown project. Empson's “casual association with Mass-Observation lasted for no more than a few weeks … he would have brought suggestions and counter-suggestions. … But above all, he was a sound, supportive friend to the ringleaders Madge, Jennings, and Harrisson”; see Haffenden, John, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Oxford, 2005), 429Google Scholar.

113 “Study Plan. Concerning Astrology,” n.d., TC 8/1/A, MOA, 4.

114 Ray, Paul C., The Surrealist Movement in England (Ithaca, NY, 1971), 52Google Scholar. See also Jackaman, Rob, The Course of English Surrealist Poetry since the 1930s (Lewiston, NY, 1989)Google Scholar; Remy, Michael, Surrealism in Britain (Aldershot, 1999)Google Scholar; Roberts, John, The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester, 1998), 98–113Google Scholar.

115 Ray, The Surrealist Movement in England, 41.

116 Ibid., 40. The movement's emphasis on the creative expression of meaning generated from the subconscious overlapped with elements of occultism in its exploration of the powers of the mind and the limitations of objective reason; see Saler, Michael, “Whigs and Surrealists: The ‘Subtle Links’ of Humphrey Jennings's Pandaemonium,” in Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture, ed. Behlmer, George K. and Leventhal, Fred M. (Stanford, CA, 2000), 123–42Google Scholar.

117 MacClancy, “Brief Encounter,” 496.

118 Jennings, Humphrey, Pandaemonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. Jennings, Mary-Lou and Madge, Charles (London, 1985)Google Scholar. For a more detailed description of this unique genre of historical writing, see Saler, “Whigs and Surrealists,” 124–26.

119 Madge, Charles, “Surrealism for the English,” New Verse 6 (December 1933): 14–18Google Scholar; Highmore, Ben, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London, 2002), 82–85Google Scholar.

120 Spender commented on his experience working with Harrisson in an interview with Jeremy Mulford in 1981, cited in Spender, Humphrey, Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England, 1937–38 (Bristol, 1982), 16Google Scholar.

121 Highmore has considered the implications of this crossover in terms of Mass Observation's methodological approach, suggesting that the Worktown project was an “implicit and necessary critique of the ‘scientificity’ of a Malinowskian framework that never found its way to explicit critique”; Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 103.

122 Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 121–22Google Scholar.

123 Ibid., 146. Clifford references Mass Observation as a “possible example of ‘surrealist ethnography’,” 142–43.

124 Harrisson was busy establishing the Worktown project while the book was being written. Jennings and Madge, May the Twelfth. The argument for Mass Observation as an example of surrealist ethnography has been advanced by MacClancy, and more recently, Highmore. See MacClancy, “Brief Encounter”; Highmore, Ben, “Hopscotch Modernism: On Everyday Life and the Blurring of Art and Social Science,” Modernist Cultures 2, no. 1 (May 2006): 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 75–112.

125 Highmore (Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 107–9) acknowledges Mass Observation's continued (though subtler) use of the “destabilizing effects of collage” in Mass Observation's later publications, such as Britain (1939).

126 Trevelyan, Indigo Days, 84.

127 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 145–48.

128 Ibid., 146.

129 For observers’ initial reports on occultism in Blackpool, see WC 58/A; WC 58/B; WC 58/C; TC 8/1/A, MOA.

130 There are four drafts of the manuscript chapter titled “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth.” All of these copies are undated, though earlier versions can be identified by obvious typographical errors, editorial commentary, and the addition or reordering of material through the attachment of documents. For an example of these multilayered texts, see the earlier drafts of “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 1–3, 22.

131 Cleaner (and presumably later) versions of the manuscript chapter “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth” contain few editorial markings and attachments.

132 Examples include “Slot,” “Robots,” “With More Point,” “Headless and Other Difficulties,” “End of a Perfect Day,” and “The Absent Joke.”

133 It cannot be assumed that all headings were penned by the editor (Harrisson). Subtitles may have been taken from initial reports, in which the investigating observer characteristically provided a subject heading or title. As some of these reports are missing, it is difficult to know.

134 “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” WC 60/E, MOA, 12–13.

135 Ibid., 15.