'The "class" complex': Mass-observation and cultural distinction in pre-war Britain

Past and Present

Volumn 199, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 207-236

  Hinton, James ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 48949116546     PISSN: 00312746     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtm044     Document Type: Article

References (134)

1. An analysis of responses concerning the effects of class on romantic attachments, broadly convergent with the analysis presented here, has been published since this article was written: Claire Langhamer, 'Love and Courtship in Mid-Twentieth-Century England', Historical Jl, 1 (2007), 185-6, 189-90.
2. The fullest account of M-O's foundation and early goals is in Nicholas S. Stanley, 'The Extra Dimension: A Study and Assessment of the Methods Employed by Mass-Observation in its First Period, 1937-1940' (Birmingham Polytechnic CNAA Ph.D. thesis, 1981).
3. Stimulating recent discussions include Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London, 2002), ch. 6
4. Tony Kushner, We Europeans? Mass-Observation, 'Race' and British Identity in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 2004)
5. Nick Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke, 2006).
6. See also the articles in Nick Hubble, Margaretta Jolly and Laura Marcus (eds.), Mass-Observation as Poetics and Science, special issue of New Formations, xliv (2001).
7. They were also asked to describe what they took to be the typical attitudes of other classes to some of these issues. As might have been anticipated, this section of the directive produced tediously stereotypical answers; it confirmed that by and large Observers were far more insightful about themselves and their immediate circle than they were about more distant others.
8. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (Oxford, 1998), p. v.
9. In the early 1950s F. M. Martin found that people self-classified themselves as upper, middle or working class: See his 'Some Subjective Aspects of Social Stratification', in D. V. Glass (ed.), Social Mobility in Britain (London, 1954), 268.
10. Only twenty-one people failed altogether to classify themselves, and most of these were refusing on principle, rather than revealing an inability to deploy the language of class; indeed, several of these refusers gaily used class terminology when talking about others. A further twelve people failed to respond to the relevant part of the directive.
11. 1235. Mass Observers were guaranteed anonymity, so only the identifying number is given. All references to individual M-O panellists are to their replies to the June 1939 directive, unless otherwise stated. Where I have used names these have been changed, except in those cases where diaries have been published or are otherwise apparent from published sources. Individual responses are sorted in the archive by gender and alphabetically by name. To locate the individual concerned, therefore, it is first necessary to consult the archive's finding aid.
12. 1477; see also 2085.
13. 1334; see also 1154, 1266, 1326.
14. 1178. Several other young men (1271, 1374, 1600) told stories of aborted engagements to lower-class partners.
15. Most notably Nella Last, a middle-aged Barrow accountant's daughter who had married a jobbing builder when she was eighteen. It took her twenty-five years to persuade her husband to leave a working-class district of Barrow for a suburban house, and it was to her sons, not her partner, that she looked for companions who shared her tastes and interests. After the children left home her (published) wartime diaries tell a story of continuing frustration with a husband whom she had always considered to be beneath her. Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming (eds.), Nella Last's War: A Mother's Diary, 1939-45 (Bristol, 1981). See also 1046 and 1035. These women might have found it hard to understand the bank clerk's daughter in Northwood (2188) who found her husband's working-class milieu so much 'more kindly, real, and human than those of my own class'. But this woman was escaping from a childhood oppressed by her downwardly mobile parents' attempt to keep up appearances on inadequate resources, and had none of Nella Last's respect for her own forebears.
16. Figures from my own database. See also McKibbin, Classes and Cultures 45-6, 106.
17. Including thirteen clerks, most of whom were young men living at home with working-class parents and probably destined to acquire an identity more in keeping with their occupations when they left home. Several others used the term 'upper working class' to describe situations - a 'collar and tie job' - that would more conventionally be classified as lower-middle class: 1362, 1372, 2070.
18. Tom Jeffery, 'A Place in the Nation', in Rudy Koshar (ed.), Splintered Classes: Politics and the Lower Middle Classes in Interwar Europe (NewYork, 1990)
19. Tom Jeffery, 'The Suburban Nation: Politics and Class in Lewisham', in David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds.), Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (London, 1989).
20. 1024. Such people were often engaged in clawing back a status that had belonged to one or more of their grandparents but had been lost through parental misjudgement or bad luck - mother married down or the family business had been destroyed by the Great War, the slump, alcohol or the premature death of the breadwinner: 1130, 1135, 1211, 1286, 1390, 2068, 2149, 2182, 2194.
21. They also tended to be more likely to stick with M-O - nearly twice as many of the women as the men responded to twenty or more directives, and a smaller proportion dropped out after five or less. By the later war years the M-O panel had a much more balanced gender composition.
22. Indeed some men blamed snobbery and class consciousness on their womenfolk - 'class is mainly a feminine speciality' (1074).
23. Contrast the late twentieth-century young working-class women discussed by Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London, 1997), 75, for whom 'the centrality of class was exemplified... by their constant refusal to be fixed or measured by it'. While working-classness could offer a positive source of identity to men, she argues, for women this was not the case, leading them to strive for respectability in order to distinguish themselves from the fat, slovenly, dirty women who had 'let go' (pp. 83-4).
24. Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender
25. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, 1972).
26. Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, 3.
27. On class and the 'social imaginary', see Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994)
28. David Cannadine, Class in Britain (London, 1998).
29. Since the June 1939 directive did not ask specifically about the political views of respondents, there is no reliable way of establishing the extent to which respondents held left-wing views, although we know from other sources that the Mass Observers were drawn disproportionately from the left. Among the respondents to the class directive, about a quarter reveal their political views and these were overwhelmingly on the left.
30. The same might be said of much jazz, a taste for which, alongside classical music, several respondents cited as evidence of their distinction.
31. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London, 1984), 243.
32. For useful expositions of Bourdieu's thinking, see Derek Robbins, Bourdieu and Culture (London, 2000)
33. and the essays collected in Derek Robbins (ed.), Pierre Bourdieu, 4 vols. (London, 2000).
34. 1244.
35. 2127.
36. 1129.
37. 2173. See also the assistant optician who claimed that 'the only class to which I feel I belong is the one of my own intellectual level', but then added the income range within which such people were to be found! (1263).
38. 1548. This response is reproduced in Angus Calder and Dorothy Sheridan (eds.), Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology, 1937-49 (London, 1984), 158-62.
39. Ben Highmore neglects this association when he uses this example to illustrate the 'mutable, heterogeneous and performative' nature of the lived experience of class revealed by the M-O material: 'a meaningful distinction within everyday life [which] is open to any number of eccentric readings which can't be subsumed into overarching interpretations' (Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 103). Highmore's enthusiasm for the sheer heterogeneity of everyday life - which we might see as his own 'overarching interpretation' - obscures the degree to which quite visible threads of a common understanding of class run through the material solicited by Madge's very open-ended directive.
40. 1554.
41. 1543.
42. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; Harmondsworth, 1982), 108.
43. 1433.
44. 1064.
45. 1099.
46. 1048. Similarly, the woman who managed a holiday home in Wetherby for wives of unemployed men defined a professional as 'a member of the upper-middle class trained to serve rather than to trade' (2175).
47. 1075.
48. A point well made by Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Nice, 254, 283, 287-92.
49. Admittedly this was a leading question. But the strength of feeling informing the answers of those who responded positively to the suggestion that they were different makes it clear that the responses were not merely produced by the question.
50. 2175.
51. 1318.
52. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1966).
53. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989)
54. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (London, 1985)
55. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, 1991).
56. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 5,52-5,74-80. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London, 1989), following Foucault, argues that this appearance of choice is an illusion engendered by the operation of microtechnologies of power characteristic of modern social organization. But this is an account written from the perspective of experts manipulating the psyche, not of ordinary people resisting, subverting and adapting the language of psychology to serve the needs of their individual quests for meaningful selfhood. For a more balanced discussion of the impact of psychology on technologies of the self, see Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2006).
57. 5282, Dec. 1937.
58. D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford, 1988)
59. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London, 1992).
60. LeMahieu, Culture for Democracy, 317 ff.
61. The Common Reader, Orlando and A Room of One's Own were published by Penguin in 1939, 1942 and 1945 respectively, and Woolf's main novels followed in the 1950s and early 1960s. On 'Penguinization' and the broadening of the audience for high culture, see Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (London, 2006), 277-8
62. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (London, 2002), 431, 438.
63. 1130.
64. MacIntrye, After Virtue; Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge, 1977)
65. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, 2nd edn (London, 1991).
66. Mass-Observation, Puzzled People: A Study in Popular Attitudes to Religion, Ethics, Progress and Politics in a London Borough (London, 1947). This report was partly based on series of questions put to the M-O panel in the summer and autumn of 1944, including: 'Do you have any "aims in life" clearly enough formulated to put in writing?' and 'Outline your own personal attitudes to religion and your religious beliefs (ifany)'.
67. Lord Beveridge and A. F. Wells (eds.), The Evidence for Voluntary Action: Being Memoranda by Organisations and Individuals, and Other Material Relevant to Voluntary Action (London, 1949), 40-3
68. Mass-Observation, Puzzled People, 117-20.
69. Bob Willcock, 'Polls Apart', ch. 7, p. 2, unpubd MS, M-O Archive: Cited in Stanley, 'Extra Dimension', 164.
70. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 49, 68-9 (quotations), 483-6, 531-6.
71. Paul Filmer, 'Structures of Feeling and Socio-Cultural Formations: The Significance of Literature and Experience to Raymond Williams's Sociology of Culture', Brit. Jl Sociology, liv (2003), 202. For another valuable recent discussion of the concept, see also Scan Matthews, 'Change and Theory in Raymond Williams's Structure of Feeling', Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, x (2001).
72. Angus Calder,'Mass Observation', in Martin Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research (Cambridge, 1985); Penny Summerfield, 'Mass-Observation: Social Research or Social Movement?', Jl Contemporary Hist., xx (1985).
73. Tom Jeffery, Mass Observation - A Short History (Birmingham, 1978). Jeffery was elaborating on an insight of Stuart Hall, 'The Social Eye of Picture Post', Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 2 (1972).
74. On wartime radicalism, see Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson and Nick Tiratsoo, 'England Arise!': The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester, 1995)
75. and my critical review: James Hinton, 'The Apathy School', in History Workshop Jl, no. 43 (1997), 266-72.
76. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 531-6.
77. Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: Englandsince 1880 (London, 1989).
78. Madge to Harrisson, 18 Jan. 1940, cited in Kushner, We Europeans?, 107. For an elaboration of this perspective, see Tom Harrisson,'What Is Public Opinion?', Political Quart., xi (1940).
79. A statement of the joys and limits of autodidact culture that closely mirrors the opening commentary in Humphrey Jennings's 1939 documentary film Spare Time. Jennings had been involved in the foundation of M-O, and Spare Time drew on M-O sources.
80. 1393; see also his reply to the May 1942 directive.
81. 1176; see also his reply to the May 1942 directive.
82. 1234; see also his reply to the Aug. 1944 directive.
83. 2099.
84. 1543; and see the 54-year-old research chemist from a professional middle-class background who felt he shared his parents' social class but was distinguished both from them and from his neighbours by his 'love of intellectual pursuits' (2073).
85. 1151.
86. 1137; In this case, however, bucolic delights and contempt for suburban trivialities were not matched by involvement with the urban intelligentsia. Bradford's civic theatre was dismissed as a nest of intolerably affected 'upper middle-class cliques' and 'pseudo-highbrows': One of whom, unbeknown to this respondent, was a Mass Observer (5445).
87. 1270. For a full discussion of the balance struckby this man (and by his wife, who was also a M-O diarist) between political activism and cultural pursuits, see James Hinton, 'Middle-Class Socialism: Selfhood, Democracy and Distinction in Wartime County Durham', History Workshop Jl, no. 62 (2006).
88. 1974.
89. 2138; see also 2142.
90. 2176.
91. 2004.
92. 2019.
93. This stratum, she implied, formed more easily in Scotland with its democratic education system, and was reflected in her own family where a university education did not distance you from your working-class cousins (1313). John Baker, the intellectual Scottish steelworker cited earlier, came from working-class parentage, but his brother was a doctor.
94. Frances Partridge, Memories (London, 1981)
95. Frances Partridge, A Pacifist's War: Diaries, 1939-1945 (London, 1999).
96. 1084.
97. 1060. This is her real name: Some of her wartime diaries are deposited in the Imperial War Museum.
98. 1291. His idea of 'plebeian' was a catholic one, incorporating the social standing of his minor public school.
99. 1079.
100. 1558.
101. 1286. She had married a schoolmaster whom she believed was 'as ambitious as I am' in the expectation that 'we should climb socially'. After this marriage ended in divorce she took up with a middle-class man of good family, admitting that 'I rather think my affection is conditioned, perhaps born of the fact that he would lever me upwards'.
102. 1133, 1375.
103. Sennett and Cobb, Hidden Injuries of Class.
104. 1524.
105. 2097. For another Cambridge student the low point in such jousts for self-esteem arrived 'when confronted by a member of a class a little below my own who is in a clear position to question my "superiority". It being especially embarrassing when he is compensating (consciously) for his own "inferiority"' (2063).
106. 1294.
107. 1352.
108. 1040.
109. 2051.
110. 2007.
111. 1557.
112. 2175.
113. 1420.
114. Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier, 119.
115. 1554.
116. 1077.
117. 1204.
118. 1108, 2091.
119. 1543.
120. 1056. She added at the end of her response: 'if anything in the above gives the impression that I am free from the vulgarity of snobbery, it is incorrect. "Commonness", especially as evidenced by shrill-voiced, giggling girls and women is repellent to me'.
121. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 109.
122. For a discussion of the literary left and the 'class difficulty', see Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford, 1989), 211 ff.
123. Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life, 189-99.
124. Tom Harrisson, 'Notes on Class Consciousness and Class Unconsciousness', Sociological Rev., xxxiv (1942).
125. His key argument, that the British class structure satisfied a universal human desire to move upwards, owed nothing to the June 1939 directive replies, but much to the view he had already been expounding in a radio debate on 'class' eight months earlier: T. H. Marshall et al., 'What Do We Mean by "Class"?', Listener, 13 Oct. 1938, 765-6.
126. Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Mass Observation (London, 1937), 30.
127. Those claiming cultural distinction in the June 1939 survey were significantly more likely to become long-term members of the M-O panel than those making no such claim. 36 per cent of those claiming cultural distinction were still responding to M-O directives in 1942, compared with 24 per cent of those making no such claim.
128. Hilliard, To Exercise our Talents, 97, 289-90.
129. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, 1992). 'In these days of commercialism', wrote one Observer, 'it is gratifying to know that all over the country Observers are working quietly without a thought of material gain' (5282, Dec. 1937).
130. Hilliard, To Exercise our Talents, 7, 48-9, 71, 75
131. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 96-8.
132. 5420, Aug. 1947, 24 Feb. 1947.
133. LeMahieu acknowledges his debt to Bourdieu: LeMahieu, Culture for Democracy, 104.
134. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 6. We could argue that the organized self-reflexivity at the heart of the M-O project is rather closer to the sources of social change, more likely to reveal 'social experiences in solution' (Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 134) than the practices of literary creativity on which Williams focuses attention: Poets, especially sensitive to the as-yet-to-be-articulated mood of the times, as the legislators of mankind. But Williams himself was anxious to avoid any such romantic privileging of the artist - or, rather, to posit the potential for such creative capacities in everyone.