Mass Observation

A New Yorker article reviews the English movement Mass Observation, which grew out of surrealism and became a kind of art sociology dedicated to exposing everyday life to public gaze as a power of demystification.

Mass-Observation undercut the nationalist message of the coronation. To one onlooker, the Queen seems to have bed head, and the King looks “bony, frozen-nervous, staring.” Another mistakes the Viscount Craigavon for Princess Juliana. Beside a radio in Nottingham, a hairdresser’s mother weeps and moans, “Oh, it ought to be Edward—it—it—it ought to be Edward.”
A woman praises snuff, unforgettably: “Eeee, it’s lovely, makes your navel perk like a whelk!” The book celebrates the pub as an active and social form of leisure, a way of life that, Orwell wrote when he reviewed it, was in danger of being “gradually replaced by the passive, drug-like pleasures of the cinema and the radio.”
In a 1938 radio talk, Jennings had suggested it was no accident that the search for the meaning of everyday life led to history. “Mysteries reside in the humblest everyday things,” he said; they are a kind of legacy, and the poet, by examining them, can extract “an idea of ‘what I am’ from the past.”

Caleb Crain 'The Mass-Observation movement and the meaning of everyday life'