ABSTRACT
Tom Harrison, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings founded the movement known as Mass-Observation in 1937. Its aim was to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain, to produce what it called an anthropology of oneself. Although Mass-Observation began in 1937, many of its concerns with the everyday lives of ordinary people first emerged in the nineteenth century a tradition of the middle class reporting on the lives of the working class. It is a tradition driven by a conflicting sense of injustice, pity, shame, guilt, fear and condescension; the exact mix depending on the particular moment in history and the politics of the writer involved. Mass-Observation, and the middle-class tradition of social exploration more generally, can be criticized for their use of certain organizing assumptions the working class as (i) a race apart, (ii) inarticulate, (iii) an object of middle-class knowledge but this work did bring a new kind of critical attention to popular culture and everyday life.
