SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY.

On January 30, 1937, a letter to the New Statesman and Nation announced that Darwin, Marx, and Freud had a successor--or, more accurately, successors. "Mass-Observation develops out of anthropology, psychology, and the sciences which study man," the letter read, "but it plans to work with a mass of observers." The movement already had fifty volunteers, and it aspired to have five thousand, ready to study such aspects of contemporary life as:

Behaviour of people at war memorials. , Shouts and gestures of motorists., The aspidistra cult., Anthropology of football pools., Bathroom behaviour., Beards, armpits, eyebrows., Anti-semitism., Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke., Funerals and undertakers., Female taboos about eating., The private lives of midwives.

The data collected would enable the organizers to plot "weather-maps of public feeling." As a matter of principle, Mass-Observers did not distinguish themselves from the people they studied. They intended merely to expose facts "in simple terms to all observers, so that their environment may be understood, and thus constantly transformed."

The letter was the first of several manifestos, none of which made Mass-Observation easy to categorize. In February, the group declared, in the journal New Verse, that it would establish a new standard for literary realism and liberate poetry from the grasp of professionals: "In taking up the role of observer, each person becomes like Courbet at his easel, Cuvier with his cadaver, and Humboldt with his continent."

The inventors of the new science were Charles Madge, a poet, journalist, and card-carrying Communist; Humphrey Jennings, a Surrealist painter and documentary filmmaker; and Tom Harrisson, a renegade anthropologist more at home with cannibals than with academics. They were a fractious triumvirate from the outset, never even agreeing whether their group's name meant observation of the masses or by them, but between 1937 and 1945 hundreds of people mailed in regular reports of their daily lives. They came from all backgrounds, though young unmarried clerks and schoolteachers were especially well represented. No detail was too trivial. Mass-Observation studied which end of a cigarette people tap before lighting it (fifty-two per cent tap the end they put in their mouths), the nature of women's revenge fantasies in wartime (cut Hitler into slices for pie; saw off his ankles, sharpen his shins into stakes, and pound him into the earth with a big saucepan), and the number of outdoor copulations on a typical night in the working-class vacation town of Blackpool (four, including one in which an observer participated). The group released a series of quirky books, and during the Second World War its reports influenced the British government's approach to civilian morale and even tax policy. Young, confused, and vigorous, Mass-Observation sought to understand something that anthropology and sociology still took largely for granted: the everyday life of ordinary people.

The first to daydream about an "anthropology of ourselves" was 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 Andre 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 ...