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:

**{: .break one} ** 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 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.

Madge’s chief collaborator was Jennings, a close friend since Cambridge days. Jennings had a nervous habit of eating paper and a mannered way of sucking on sugar cubes. Peggy Guggenheim, one of his lovers, claimed that he “looked like Donald Duck”—she dumped him and took up with Samuel Beckett—but in a 1944 photograph that Lee Miller shot for Vogue Jennings appears glamorous and confident. For all his peculiarities, he succeeded at almost everything he put his hand to. In college and after, he designed theatre costumes and sets, and in 1931, at the age of twenty-four, he went to Paris to design in silk. “My balls feel as quiet & rich as the paintings of Poussin in exile,” he wrote home to his young wife, yearningly. As the simile suggests, his first and greatest love was painting, and he painted until his money—and his wife’s patience—ran out. In 1934, he at last settled down to steady work, making films. For Britain’s General Post Office he edited a half-hour history of the British mail, and for Shell Oil he helped out on a commercial about a robot thrilled into life by lubrication. In 1936, he helped to organize the International Surrealist Exhibition, in London, and his connections with the movement made him a natural partner for Madge’s new venture.

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.

In Bolton, an industrial town in northern England so bleak that even the riverbed was paved, Madge’s letter caught the eye of twenty-five-year-old Tom Harrisson, who was reading the New Statesman in the public library because he couldn’t afford to buy it. He saw it because the next item on the page was a poem of his, “Coconut Moon,” written some three years earlier, in the New Hebrides (the South Pacific archipelago today known as Vanuatu), where he had gone on a zoological expedition. He had ended up staying for two years, studying the natives and establishing himself as a “booze-artist of first rank” with kava, the native drink. He let a chief’s wife scarify his chest, and later insinuated that he had participated in a cannibal feast. Judith M. Heimann, in her lively and scrupulously researched biography, “The Most Offending Soul Alive” (1998), writes that this claim was disingenuous, but she does believe that he ate a rotting wood grub offered to him by a leper.

Back in Britain, Harrisson lectured about his experiences, wrote them up in a book, and then found himself at loose ends. Alienated from his peers and about to be disinherited by his father, he decided to go down and out and become a participant-observer of his own country, then mired in the Great Depression. In much the same spirit in which George Orwell went to Wigan, and James Agee to Alabama, Harrisson chose Bolton. He worked there as a mill hand, truck driver, shop assistant, and ice-cream man.