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Grace Huxford, Seven Lives from Mass Observation: Britain in the late Twentieth Century. By James Hinton, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 29, Issue 4, December 2018, Pages 634–636, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwx060
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Mass Observation (MO), its diarists, and its directives continue to fascinate historians of twentieth-century Britain. Coinciding with the eightieth anniversary of the social surveying project's foundation, James Hinton’s Seven Lives from Mass Observation is a timely reminder of the richness of the material at the heart of this ‘anthropology of ourselves’. Historians tend to have particular expectations of MO histories, envisaging that they will address the dynamics of daily diary-keeping, the mechanisms of the survey, and the representativeness of responses. These questions remain important, and much of Hinton’s previous work has offered astute answers to them, but they are not the primary focus of this moving and skilfully written book. Rather than simply focusing on methodological issues, this small book is teeming with life. Bob Rust—a lorry driver by profession and the only one of Hinton’s respondents who refused his offer of anonymity—describes how academic history has ‘nothing to do with real life’ (p. 122). Not so with this book. As its rather unassuming title indicates, the book is built around the lives of seven MO diarists, born between the two world wars and writing under MO’s second phase (often called the Mass Observation Project) which was launched by anthropologist David Pocock in 1981. Hinton pieces together these seven lives—of four women and three men—reading the archives ‘vertically’ to extract their responses to particular directives and assemble their life stories. It uses a mixture of the diarists’ own inimitable words alongside summaries of their lives. In doing so, this book does not repeat the well-rehearsed methodological debates surrounding MO, but reveals the stories at the core of the archive. As one respondent, social worker ‘Stella’, states when describing her work with disturbed children: ‘the pressure to appear normal is a tyrannical social force’ (p. 77). The same can perhaps be said of MO: rather than flattening people’s experiences to make them appear representative, Hinton’s book conveys the personalities, writing practices, and detailed viewpoints of the respondents, aiming to show these lives in all their ‘fullness, ambiguity [and] complexity’ (p. 161).
