Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation

Lucy D. Curzon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Alabama, USA. She is the author of Visual Culture and Mass Observation: Depicting Everyday Lives (2017), which was awarded the Historians of British Art Book Prize for a single-authored book with a subject after 1800. With Ben Jones, she co-edited The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation: 1930s to the Present (2025). She has previously published work on contemporary queer portrait painting and photography, British women war artists, the Ashington Group and Humphrey Spender.Benjamin Jones teaches Modern British History at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research focuses on classed experiences and identities from the mid-twentieth century to the present with a particular emphasis on life histories, social research and social memory. He is the author of The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory (2012) and his latest research on football casuals, fanzines and the emotional politics of rave and acid house was published in Modern British History and Contemporary British History in 2023 and 2024. He is currently drawing on Mass Observation material for a book manuscript entitled “Middle England” and its “Enemies Within”: Class, Race and Feeling in Thatcher’s Britain.

Curzon and Jones are to be warmly congratulated for assembling such a delicious and distinctive set of contributions. Each chapter reveals scintillating new riches from the inexhaustible fount of felt thoughts and thoughtful feelings that is Mass-Observation. This is essential, engaging and delightful reading.

• List of ChartsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Historical Contexts or Contemporary Uses? Mass Observation and the Politics of Continuity, Lucy Curzon and Ben Jones1. Mass Observation, Literature and Cultural Studies, Ben Jones and Matt Taunton, (both University of East Anglia, UK)2. Mass Observing Feeling, Claire Langhamer (University of London, UK)3. Anyone Can Paint: Mass Observation and the History of Art, Lucy Curzon, (University of Alabama, USA)4. ‘Anthropology’, MO, and a Bit of Surrealism: Past Encounters, Future Hopes, Jeremy MacClancy, (Oxford Brookes University, UK)5. Subjective Cameras and Ekphrastic Writing: The Present and Absent Photograph in Mass Observation, Annebella Pollen6. Mass-Observation and Popular Politics in Worktown, Jon Lawrence and David Thackeray, (both University of Exeter, UK)7. ‘On receiving your letter, I promptly dreamed you a war dream the next night’: Writing the Citizen in Mass-Observation’s Dream Archive, Charlotte Hallahan, (University of East Anglia, UK)8. Self-reflexivity, Class Consciousness and Social Change in Mass Observation Narratives, Nick Hubble, (Brunel University, UK)9. Perforating Event and Narrative, Experience and Analysis: Beyond the Retro Eighties, Lucy Robinson, (University of Sussex, UK)Conclusion: Presence and Absence in the Archive: the In/visibility of Mass Observation Writers, Rose Lindsey, (University of Southampton)Index