Mass Observation - Publications

Publications

• Charles Madge & Humphrey Jennings, eds. May the Twelfth, Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937, by over two hundred observers, London, Faber & Faber, 1937. ISBN 0-571-14872-7
• Charles Madge & Tom Harrisson, Britain, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1939

A number of publications are also available from the University of Sussex. The following selection of titles also gives some idea of the scope of Mass Observation's work:

• Attitudes to AIDS
• Bolton Working Class Life
• Children's Millennium Diaries
• Everyday use of social relaxants and stimulants
• Gender and Nationhood. Britain in the Falklands War
• Health, sickness and the work ethic, Helen Busby (2000)
• Looking at Europe: pointers to some British attitudes
• Researching women's lives: notes from visits to East Central Europe
• Mass-Observation: des 'capsules' de vie quotidienne
• One Day in the Life of Television, ed. Sean Day-Lewis (1989)
• Sex surveyed, 1949–1994 – The actual Mass-Observation survey was called Little Kinsey, the results were published in a book by Liz Stanley of the above name.
• Pub and the People: A Worktown study ed. Tom Harrisson (1943)
• Weeping in the Cinema in 1950, Sue Harper and Vincent Porter (1995)

Since the archive was moved and re-established at Sussex University, a number of books based on the diaries commissioned by Mass Observation in 1939 have been published. These include:

• Among You Taking Notes. The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison ed. Dorothy Sheridan. 1985 (Victor Gollancz). 2000 (Phoenix)
• Our Hidden Lives, The Everyday Diaries of Forgotten Britain between 1945–48 ed. Simon Garfield 2005 (Ebury Press)
• Love and War in London. A Woman's Diary 1939–42 by Olivia Crocket, ed. Robert Malcolmson. 2005 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press). 2008 (The History Press)
• We Are At War. The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times ed. Simon Garfield 2006 (Ebury press)
• Nella Last's War ed. Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming, 1981 (Falling Wall Press). 2006 (Profile Books)
• Nella Last’s Peace,covering the years 1945–8. ed. Patricia and Robert Malcolmson, 2008 (Profile Books)
• Our Longest Days - a People's History of the Second World War, an anthology ed. Sandra Koa Wong 2008 (Profile Books)
• Wartime Women. A Mass Observation Anthology ed. Dorothy Sheridan 1990 (Heinemann). 2009 (Phoenix Press)
• Dorset in Wartime: The Diary of Phyllis Walther 1941-1942 ed. Patricia Malcolmson and Robert Malcolmson 2009 (Dorset Record Society)

See also:

• Hubble, Nick. Mass-Observation and Everyday Life. Houndmills-Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2006. ISBN 1-4039-3555-6. A history of the Mass-Observation movement from a former Research Fellow at the Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex, UK (from back cover).

Findings of Mass Observation have also played a large part in such works of social history as Joe Moran's Queuing for Beginners.