netnik.com/wordpress

An interesting article in the New Yorker about the Mass-Observation movement in England from 1937 to 1945, which I never knew about before (but then there’s a lot I don’t know).

‘

The first to daydream about an “anthropology of ourselves” was Charles Madge, a young man with a long face, slender fingers, beautiful manners, and a steely will. At Cambridge, he had studied English with I. A. Richards, best known for giving his students unsigned poems to get their unprejudiced responses, and had joined the Communist Party. After Madge left school, Yeats put two of his poems in the “Oxford Book of Modern Verse,” and Eliot arranged a day job for him as a reporter for the Daily Mirror. On the night of November 30, 1936, London’s Crystal Palace—the iron-and-glass home of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and a triumph of Victorian capitalism—burned down. Madge, then twenty-four, had been mixing with England’s Surrealists, who, following Freud, saw significance in accidents, and he started to wonder if there could be a meaning in the destruction of such an iconic building. Perhaps, by documenting events that shook public consciousness, one could make society aware of its unexamined myths and fantasies, and thus free to change them. For this kind of liberation, the French Surrealist André Breton had explained, “poetry must be created by everyone.” So Madge had started to plan a movement that he called “Popular Poetry,” to be spread by “Coincidence Clubs” throughout Great Britain. The fire provided a perfect opportunity, particularly since, soon afterward, the news broke that Edward VIII was being forced to choose between his crown and his not yet divorced lover, Wallis Simpson. Coincidence? Now a double omen hung over Britain. The press had delayed reporting the abdication crisis until the last minute—exactly the kind of society-wide repression that the Surrealists wanted to break…

In a letter to the New Statesman published on January 2, 1937, Madge announced that he and his friends intended to crack “the Crystal Palace-Abdication symbolic situation,” and asked for help with the collection of evidence. “Only mass observations can create mass science,” he wrote, and gave his address.

Read the whole thing here.