Writing to the Archive: Mass-Observation as Autobiography

Abstract

The social research organisation, Mass-Observation, which operated between 1937 and 1950, recruited volunteer writers to join a `panel' to record aspects of their everyday life in Britain during those years. In 1981, the Archive which houses that material (diaries, detailed questionnaire replies) initiated a revival of the panel. This article describes this revival and argues that the contemporary writing for the Archive can be considered a form of autobiography, providing the definition of autobiography is broadly defined to include a wide variety of forms of self-expression and writings about self in a social context. Furthermore, the desire to be a contemporary Mass-Observer demands that a new genre be forged which draws on the writer's experience of other similar forms of written expression and which evolves as a result of a process of negotiation within a specific relationship with the Archive.