“I have heard many professional sociologists deride M-O as a somewhat amateurish pastime of a poet and a biologist. Nobody could read this book without feeling that it was something far more useful, more important and more interesting than that” (quoted, 142). So wrote the diplomat and diarist Harold Nicolson, in a review of the Mass Observation (MO) publication War Begins at Home published in the Daily Telegraph in October 1940. James Hinton, the author of The Mass Observers, is a historian, not a sociologist, and he is less concerned to criticize the organization's methodological pitfalls than to celebrate its success as an “enterprise designed to construct an archive appropriate to the creation of a people's history of the war” (viii).

Constructing such an archive was MO founders Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge's self-conscious ambition as they struggled to keep their organization financially afloat during the early years of the war. Hinton quotes an August 1939 letter from Madge to the MO diarists in which he asks them to keep a detailed record of their quotidian activities over the next several weeks and assures them that doing so was “perhaps the largest contribution they can make at the present time.” The MO diaries, Madge argued, would ensure that future “historians and social scientists” would have access to “a detailed, authentic record of the effects of war on the civil population” (140). In The Mass Observers, Hinton makes clear his view that MO's wartime activity is its greatest legacy to posterity. In doing so, he argues against an existing literature that has lavished praise on the organization's early work and viewed the war as marking the beginning of MO's decline.

The Mass Observers is not for the uninitiated. Hinton's earlier work on MO, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford, 2010), was the kind of scholarly social history that could easily cross over to interest the general reader. The Mass Observers, in contrast, is a detailed institutional history that rewards prior knowledge of the literature on MO and presupposes that its readers are deeply interested in the bizarre ambitions and machinations of Madge and Harrisson, particularly the latter, who is the indisputable hero of the narrative.

The book begins with the two men meeting in a flat in Blackheath in January 1937, and it follows them through MO's declaration of intent in the pages of the New Statesman a few week's later, to the establishment of “the panel,” the group of volunteer diarists and directive respondents on whose reports the resultant MO publications drew heavily, to the development of the art of “participant observation” in the chaotic environment of Bolton or “Worktown,” through the Munich crisis, and into the war—the organization's arguable heyday.

After Madge left MO in 1940, Harrisson continued to pour his exceptional energy and ingenuity into guaranteeing that MO survived to construct a popular archive of wartime activity. Hinton devotes considerable attention to the breakdown of Harrisson and Madge's partnership in 1940—so much so that the reader is left wondering how these two mismatched personalities ever contrived to work together in the first place. Although the earlier sections of the book are weak on the ties that held Harrisson and Madge together in the 1930s, their shared commitment to chronicling the wartime experience for posterity offers a glimpse into the depth of their ideological affinity.

While The Mass Observers subtly critiques earlier histories of MO throughout, Hinton's explicit engagement with the existing literature is limited primarily to the brief preface and conclusion. Here, Hinton takes issue with the work of scholars such as Tom Jeffrey, Penny Summerfield, and Mike Savage, who have sought to understand the short-lived career of MO as a reformist social movement specific to the politics of 1930s and wartime Britain: a particularly peculiar manifestation of a broader middle-class, scientifically minded, popular-frontist critique of prewar society. Such an analysis, he argues, falls apart upon closer inspection of the individuals who made up both MO's paid staff and its volunteer panel of diarists. Rather than a representative cross section of the 1930s and 1940s lower middle class, the mass observers were an exceptionally unrepresentative (and largely upper middle class) cohort. Their eccentricities come through clearly in Hinton's potted biographies of the young men and women who drifted through the organization's offices during the war. Take, for example, Veronica Tester, whom Hinton describes as “the youngest of the team, 24 in 1941, . . . a vegetarian ex-ballet dancer and acrobat who lived with her brother in a caravan” (246). MO's wartime office was staffed primarily by idealistic women, because the male members of the prewar staff were almost all called up by 1941. While Hinton perceptively highlights the masculine clubhouse culture of the Bolton terraced house that served as MO's northern HQ in the 1930s, and the casual misogyny of its inhabitants, Harrisson's not least, he offers little insight into how (or even if) the influx of female staff during the war changed the boss's gendered preconceptions about British society.

The Mass Observers is persuasive in its argument that the rise and fall of the organization should not be read as allegory for a broader middle-class upsurge against prewar society. However, Hinton is less persuasive in arguing that “those who write about MO as though it were some kind of failed revolutionary project misunderstand its nature—indeed Harrisson's ongoing connection with the radical wing of the Liberal Party was considerably more important to MO's development than Madge's engagement with Marxist or surrealist ideas” (ix). Tom Harrisson did identify as a Liberal, and in fact he unsuccessfully ran, in abstenia, as a Liberal candidate in the 1945 general election. He was also, demonstrably, not a revolutionary. Over and over again, Hinton shows Harrisson twisting the available evidence to suit his arguments that what the British people needed was strong leadership from the traditional ruling classes. Yet many of the young men and women who worked for the organization, especially in the 1930s and the early years of the war, were politically far to the left of their boss. It is not coincidental that Hinton's description of Tester calls to mind George Orwell's infamous 1937 caricature of crankish, sandaled, and pistachio colored shirt–wearing, vegetarian yogi socialists, overflowing the country's garden cities and giving socialism a bad name in The Road to Wigan Pier. While Harrisson may have wanted to create a better-informed ruling class in order to reform the existing hierarchy, many of these men and women (none of whose names is mentioned in the index) did hope that MO would prove to be a stepping-stone to a more profound social revolution.