Superstition is infinitely adaptable,” proclaimed Mass Observation's leaders in January 1937 in a manifesto intended as a “preliminary statement” of the organization's visions and agenda. Many long-standing superstitious beliefs and practices were recognizable, while others “assumed modern disguises.”Footnote 1 Occult practices of divination and diagnoses—such as “crystal-gazing,” “tea-cup reading,” and press astrology—were co-opted into new forms of commercial culture. To Mass Observation, their rising twentieth-century influence reflected “the failure of the religious (Christian) idea which centres round FAITH, i.e. apparently getting nothing for your money.”Footnote 2 At a time of spreading fascism and renewed “racial superstition” in Nazi Germany, irrational fears and mythologies were apparently flourishing in Britain. Mass Observation's founders hoped to examine people's subconscious yearnings, including their manipulation by public officials, media, and mass culture. This kind of interpretation of collective symbols, as practiced in developing fields of social science, was the “first step” toward social change.Footnote 3 From around Easter 1937, shortly after these objectives were laid out, a team of observers descended on the seaside resort of Blackpool. Every summer, crowds of working-class holiday makers exchanged pennies for prophecies in the clairvoyant and palmistry booths along Blackpool's beachfront. With notebooks in hand, observers immersed themselves in the mysteries of occult marvels and tried to make sense of their popular appeal.
The Blackpool investigation was the seaside counterpart to Mass Observation's Worktown (Bolton) study directed by Tom Harrisson, an experienced bird-watcher and people watcher who had recently published an ethnographic account of indigenous culture in Malekula in the New Hebrides.Footnote 4 Mass Observation was introduced as an “Anthropology at Home” in the New Statesman and Nation in January 1937.Footnote 5 The ambitious social research initiative launched two major operations. Charles Madge, then a poet and Daily Mirror journalist, and Humphrey Jennings, painter, documentary filmmaker, and writer, coordinated a “National Panel” of hundreds of part-time volunteers, who sent in diary entries recording their everyday lives and responded to regular “directives” based on sets of open-ended questions about selected topics or themes. Madge's “literary” approach did not, however, satisfy Harrisson's preference for a more direct study of ordinary Britons.Footnote 6 The idiosyncratic twenty-five-year-old expanded his research efforts in Bolton, where he had been working variously as a cotton mill worker, ice cream vendor, truck driver, and shop assistant, to observe the local working-class culture. Harrisson considered the Lancashire cotton town to be “representative of the industrial life-pattern which prevails for the majority of people in Britain.”Footnote 7 Recruiting a squad of full-time and casual investigators, he aspired to “a more objective-aimed approach” to fact gathering based on intensive participant observation of diverse aspects of working-class life and culture.Footnote 8
Harrisson likened the Worktown “experiment” to ornithology, which had “made its biggest advances in recent years through the help of thousands of amateur bird-watchers.”Footnote 9 Observers conducted their investigations between 1937 and 1940. The study is typically associated with its contingent of southern, middle-class intellectuals, artists, and Oxbridge students (who have been accused of projecting a bourgeois gaze on their Lancastrian subjects), though this stereotype has been challenged.Footnote 10 There were a number of observers who fell outside this bracket, including local helpers Eric Bennet, Bill Rigby, and Leslie Taylor, who were unemployed; Walter Hood, who was a Labour campaigner and ex-miner from Durham (and had attended Ruskin College in Oxford on a scholarship); and tramp preacher Joe Willcock.Footnote 11 Around eighty observers contributed over the duration of the project.Footnote 12 Their efforts produced a rich repository of written reports, photographs, artwork, and ephemera.
As well as a resource for reconstructing everyday life in a period of intense social uncertainty, the Worktown study should be recognized as an event shaped by emergent cultural processes. Observers were compelled to tackle the wider implications of their findings for understanding the complexities of modern life. To make “facts” about British culture meaningful—and publishable—Mass Observation was prepared to grapple with indeterminate results, abstract ideas, and uncertain analytical concepts. As this article aims to demonstrate, looking at observers’ attempts to juggle these tensions in their documentary practices can provide valuable insight into the cultural and intellectual dynamics of the late 1930s.
Blackpool would provide a suitable base for watching—and joining—workers at play over two summers.Footnote 13 After months of careful saving, many of Bolton's residents embarked on a thirty-eight-mile “pilgrimage” to the seaside resort in the last week of June, when the factories and mills shut down. Blackpool expanded dramatically in the interwar period, with a steadily growing resident population, improved bus and tram systems, a growing accommodation sector, and the development of promenades, bathing pools, sea defenses, shopping facilities, and parks.Footnote 14 In the mid-1930s, it was said, millions of visitors flocked there each year.Footnote 15 Lancashire cotton towns were responsible for much of the demand for working-class seaside holidays, building on the established popularity of Blackpool during the customary wakes in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 16 Harrisson established a small permanent unit there from August 1937. A larger cohort consisting of field workers from Bolton, university students, and Harrisson's London-based associates journeyed to the town on day trips, long weekends, and holidays. The landlady for Mass Observation's Shetland Road headquarters recorded a steady flow of forty-six visiting observers during August–October 1937.Footnote 17
The observers embarked on an impressively broad investigation, including analyzing the function of local government, transport, leisure behavior, eating places, and religious worship. They stayed in a range of temporary lodgings to experience and monitor workers’ holiday routines. Harrisson is said to have wielded “an almost hypnotic power” over his collaborators, who indulged his often unorthodox requests.Footnote 18 Observers listened in on conversations, stalked individuals for hours on end, considered people's reactions to sideshows and amusements, and studied mannerisms of the crowd. Resulting investigative reports and data were redrafted, ordered, and interpreted to form a book on holiday leisure—one of four anticipated volumes based on the Worktown study to be published by Gollancz.Footnote 19 “Ultimately in this book we are concerned with Blackpool's motto of progress and with the question: what is progress?” Mass Observation wrote. The volume, scheduled for publication in the autumn of 1938, would serve as a “case-book of ordinary life in now-a-day England, providing material for unlimited inevitable and urgent further study.”Footnote 20 Wartime disruptions and other complications resulted in repeated postponements, and the manuscript never made it to print.Footnote 21 In February 1940, Harrisson wrote a frustrated letter to Norman Collins at Gollancz claiming that the publisher had ignored the deposited manuscript.Footnote 22
This article examines Mass Observation's attempts to identify and harness the productive tension between modern and superstitious cultural forms in Blackpool. It focuses primarily on two previously unexamined manuscript chapters, “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth” and “Fourth Dimension,” likely edited by Harrisson, who later claimed primary responsibility for most of the writing, arranging, and “synopsising” of the book drafts.Footnote 23 The former presents a series of observations of various personalities and slot machines peddling occult or heterodox practices of divination or diagnosis, while the latter documents an array of sideshows and demonstrations that incorporated mystery, magic, and spiritualism.Footnote 24 Extracts from observers’ investigative reports make up the bulk of the text, interspersed with an editorial voice.Footnote 25 Palm readers, fortune tellers, and their mechanical counterparts were ubiquitously stationed around Blackpool's seafront promenade, tower, piers, entertainment arcades, and amusement parks. Occult practitioners had maintained an enduring—though controversial—presence since the town's early development in the nineteenth century.Footnote 26 To a greater extent, perhaps, than other mass-market amusements, fairground occultism presented a complex intermingling of the archaic and the new, the scientific and the retrograde. An analysis of its popular appeal provided observers with a platform for interrogating the role of modern enchantment in commercial pastimes. Over the course of the investigation, Mass Observation revealed itself as an instantiation of the phenomenon it aimed to shed light on. The initiative can thus be viewed as a challenge to and product of contemporary ambivalence toward cultural change. Exploring Mass Observation's response makes it possible to grasp the organization's role as a cultural analyst—as well as researcher and retriever of quirky information—and retrace a concrete investigation of a problem, the relationship between the traditional and the modern, that is typically discussed in the abstract.
Reenchanting Modernity through Leisure
The narrative of “disenchantment” has powerfully shaped historical interpretations of the role of magic, spiritualism, animistic associations, and the wondrous in modern Western culture. Max Weber's reflections on the decline of spiritual beliefs and transcendent value systems under the rationalizing forces of the bureaucratic state were shared by many of his contemporaries.Footnote 27 Historians, too, have overwhelmingly subscribed to the notion of a progressively demystified and “disenchanted” way of life.Footnote 28 In recent years, however, a new scholarship has challenged this approach, breaking away from debates about secularization to acknowledge the continuing presence of “enchantment” in modern life.Footnote 29
Michael Saler's categorization of modern enchantment into three distinct (but occasionally interweaving) interpretive schemas or ideal types—“binary,” “dialectical,” and “antinomial”—offers a valuable conceptual tool and elastic structure for the following analysis.Footnote 30 A binary model sets modernity in opposition to enchantment. Exponents of this established scholarly trope interpret surviving enchantments as “residual holdovers from the premodern world”: an antiquated alternative to a secularizing and “progressive” modernity that steadily unveiled the mystical as material.Footnote 31 Closely associated, a dialectical approach presents modernity as a kind of “mythic construct” that conditions a decidedly deceptive form of enchantment.Footnote 32 The cultural forces of modernity, while propounding logic, freedom, and human advancement, were working paradoxically to seduce, oppress, and stultify. A blind conviction in the powers of instrumental reason as the key to societal progress makes modernity “a self-legitimizing force that transcends its own properties of self-criticism.”Footnote 33 Saler's third and most accommodating model affords a greater receptivity to conflicted understandings of modernity in past contexts. An antinomial framework recognizes the existence of “forms of enchantment compatible with, and even dependent upon, those tenets of modernity usually seen as disenchanting the world.”Footnote 34 Historians have only recently embraced this approach as “more true to the lived experience of their subjects.”Footnote 35 While Saler's discussion surveys the historiographical application of these schemas, I employ them loosely as a useful starting point for untangling a messy script. As we will see, Mass Observation's treatment of occult amusements does not fit tidily into any one of these three approaches. Rather, it sits uneasily at the interface between the latter two, revealing the organization's capacity to manifest the very qualities it set out to objectify.
The first section of the article briefly establishes the disjunction between Mass Observation's investigative efforts and a binary approach. Influenced by contemporary crowd psychology, Mass Observation located various forms of atavism in Blackpool's entertainment arena. Yet images of an “unenlightened” and hopelessly impressionable working-class crowd were incoherent and undeveloped. Observers felt that irrational beliefs developed in response to social realities. A thriving demand for mass-produced magic was a symptom of an uncertain present, not a relic of an antiquated past.
The discussion then shifts to examine Mass Observation's dialectical approach to modern enchantment, which offered a more satisfactory means of rationalizing popular marvels. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote of a “culture industry” that epitomized the deleterious effect of modern instrumental reason on independent thought: “In the culture industry the individual is an illusion. … He is tolerated only so long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned. Pseudo-individuality is rife: from the standardized jazz improvization to the exceptional film star. … The peculiarity of the self is a monopoly commodity determined by society; it is falsely represented as natural.”Footnote 36 Though most of the Frankfurt School's major works on mass culture postdate the Worktown project, Mass Observation's appraisal of commercial entertainment was contingent on questions arising from these emergent strands of intellectual thought. (Incidentally, Madge and Harrisson included the Institute of Social Research in a list of “Organisations with Similar Aims” in Mass Observation's introductory booklet.)Footnote 37 Skeptical observers found that occult amusements standardized experience, privileged business interests, and crushed autonomous expression. “Pseudo individuality” or manufacturing of self was especially evident in Blackpool's mass-produced “character readings” distributed to the paying public by palm readers or coin-operated machines. By commodifying subjectivity, so the argument went, these readings promoted excessive introspection and otherworldliness at the expense of social awareness and social responsibility.
Yet this somber view of modern enchantment as a beguiling but sinister deception did not sit altogether comfortably with Mass Observation. It left no room for exploring the possibilities of reconciling the irrational with a progressive self-awareness. The final section of the article examines the antinomies underlying observers’ exploratory efforts. Mass Observation harnessed aspects of modern enchantment to facilitate a more interactive approach to social enquiry. Reflecting the Worktown project's eclectic methodology, the Blackpool study drew from the techniques of surrealist ethnography to explore the ironic side of occultism. Ironic play promoted the kind of rational detachment and self-reflexivity that observers found lacking in their research subjects. At the same time, it indulged Mass Observation's devotion to finding mysterious, nonrational harmonies within British culture as a pathway to individual and collective enlightenment. Through a highly participatory mode of participant observation, Mass Observation acknowledged an opening for individuality and experimentation that defied the powerful grip of the standardizing culture industry.
The “Progressive Idea of Spirit and Magic”
In Mass Observation's Blackpool, the appeal of enchanting amusements stemmed from the instability of modern industrial life. Occult forecasts offered an alternative marker of self-identity in the absence of defining labor. When the “Worktowner” temporarily found himself in unfamiliar surroundings and outside of his usual work routine and social circle, “the opinion of others is important.”Footnote 38 The palm reader, clairvoyant, or prediction machine could provide the desired affirmation of identity. Widespread fatalism, resulting from employment uncertainty, also played a role in demand. Both these afflictions combined to engender a sense of helpless desperation: “During this week the normal trajectory of working life is suspended; there is no pay-day, no washing-day. And this accentuates the moment, and the future, which for this week is not turning on the endless chain of industry. … As with unemployed Worktowners, and those who feel that their jobs are insecure (the latter appear to be continually increasing), with the future offering little sign of improvement, it is easy to grasp at any straw or star.”Footnote 39 Worktowners’ pursuit of occult marvels had more to do with the nature of their working lives than their underdeveloped reasoning faculties. The willingness of the crowd to part with hard-earned money in exchange for a “grasp at any straw or star” was further evidence that the appeal of fairground occultism went deeper than mindless conformity or frivolous fun seeking: “It is not to be supposed that persons regard these machines simply as a joke. It is unnecessary to point [this] out … [to] the mediums and clairvoyants who charge half-a-crown. And even at a penny there isn’t much of a joke about it. … It is the experience as well as the opinion of observers both in Blackpool and Worktown, that the great majority of people who go in for these things believe in them.”Footnote 40 Prophecies seemed to provide holiday makers with mental fortification during a period of heightened financial and emotional vulnerability.
Mass Observation's interest in workers’ subconscious fears and desires reflected the popularization of professional psychology in the interwar period, as the discipline increasingly focused on social concerns.Footnote 41 Crowd psychology developed alongside sociology in the 1880s and 1890s and was part of a wider discourse on the alarming potential of the irrational mind.Footnote 42 Gustave Le Bon's well-known and widely published study The Crowd (1895) was a product of a burgeoning investigation into crowd behavior and power relations. According to Le Bon, individuals in a mob were easily seduced by ideological “contagion.”Footnote 43 Engaged in a “collective hallucination” and ruled by unconscious instinct, “an individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.”Footnote 44 In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922), Sigmund Freud was generally complimentary toward Le Bon's “brilliantly executed picture of the group mind.”Footnote 45 “Groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them.”Footnote 46
The manuscript drafts for “Fourth Dimension” challenge Le Bon's crowd psychology in the context of atavism in Blackpool. An extract from The Crowd was considered “perhaps relevant” to Mass Observation's investigation. In this passage, Le Bon proclaimed a thriving fetishization of “old divinities” in popular culture, despite a more general lack of interest in “the words of divinity and religion.”Footnote 47 In accordance with Le Bon, observers found that Blackpool catered to a contemporary fascination with ancient symbols through mass-culture tributes to the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis. One particularly controversial magical act involving the apparent beheading of a girl by guillotine provided an example.Footnote 48 As the field of Egyptology professionalized in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, ancient Egypt received considerable media coverage in Britain and developed a popular following. Egypt and Egyptologists became a common subject of fin-de-siècle popular fiction, and public interest was renewed in the 1920s with the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb.Footnote 49 Despite conceding Le Bon's point on this matter, Mass Observation was less supportive of his equation of atavism with collective stupor and hypnotic susceptibility. The holidaying hordes were not as homogenous as the “oligarchically-minded pioneer student of crowds” might suggest. People's incredulous responses to spectacles such as the “Headless Woman” provided the necessary proof: “the individual even in a crowd displays a proper scepticism on points like the normal necessities of sleeping and waking.”Footnote 50
Blackpool's prediction machines appropriated and adapted older conventions to attract a modern consumer. Mass Observation stressed the continuities between traditional occult practices (such as palmistry and clairvoyance) and newer, mechanical contraptions under the subheading “Persistent Egypsy”: “From Madame to Telepathic Robot to Television clairvoyant, crystal globe stared at and diving rod touched, to the stright [sic] palmistry of Ultra-Science. It is evident that the oldest ideas of prediction have persisted in these modern developments of the idea.”Footnote 51 In keeping with this emphasis, a description of variously themed machines contains a handwritten instruction to the manuscript editor: “NB—progress from ‘gypsy’ to ‘robot.’”Footnote 52 From British anthropology's early development in the nineteenth century, studies of cultural evolutionism (like that exhibited in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough) influenced ethnographic descriptions of magical beliefs, myths, and rituals. Evolutionary works promoted intrigue in vestiges of ancient or “primitive” rituals and superstitions in contemporary Western European society, preserved in quaint folk customs and village folklore. Mass Observation's investigation of fairground occultism, however, was guided less by this model (and the diffusionist paradigm that followed) than by the synchronic functionalism that dominated British social anthropology in the 1930s.Footnote 53 This theoretical approach stressed the essentially biologically grounded nature of the construction and character of societal institutions that, it was assumed, served “basic human needs.”Footnote 54 The goal of participant observation in Blackpool was to demystify the functional role of enchanting pastimes in everyday life, and this required studying the way they were marketed.
Many of Blackpool's occult offerings relied on scientific motifs to attract patrons. Prediction machines were commonly styled with technical jargon and imagery, parading names such as “The Green Ray Television Wonder,” “The Robot King,” “Electrical Crystal Gazer,” and “Violet Ray Ozoner.”Footnote 55 Mass Observation interpreted these newer contraptions as “mechanisms for bringing the remote, invisible, the almost-incredible, right into our own lives.”Footnote 56 Observers were aware of the continuing influence of the occult on the popular imagining of modern technology; similar concepts had shaped literary discourse since the later decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote 57 Newer modes of communication had introduced novel forms of contact and intimacy, traversing distance and space in ways that were not inimical to the claims of spiritualist mediums. Indeed, interwar spiritualists often incorporated aspects of modern technology into their practices, partly to imbue them with scientific prestige, and partly out of a desire to find adequate means of communicating abstract concepts.Footnote 58
As part of the fabric of modern living, technological enchantment embodied a “progressive idea of spirit and magic.”Footnote 59 “For most people,” Mass Observation declared, “there is, in fact, no hiatus between the miraculous and the scientific; electricity and television are their miracles.”Footnote 60 The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) launched its first experimental television service in late 1936, though the service was inaccessible for most of the population. Clear transmission was limited to those within a forty-kilometer radius of the only transmitter in Alexandra Palace, London, and the purchase price of a television set excluded a wider audience beyond the middle class.Footnote 61 The Blackpool book drafts contain an obscure reference to two observers who had appeared on television and had subsequently acquired near “superhuman status among many northern folk.”Footnote 62 One of the proclaimed luminaries was probably Harrisson, who made a “half-dozen” guest appearances on television and radio following his return from the New Hebrides, including a “tele-feature programme” on the popular dance craze of the Lambeth Walk in 1938.Footnote 63 Mass Observation's assumptions regarding working-class reverence toward television supported a broader thesis: enchantment was firmly anchored in modern living. By incorporating technological or scientific themes to attract custom, Blackpool's occult amusements were a prime example of the bewitching qualities of “materialism and progress.”Footnote 64
Searching for Inauthenticity
Hunting profit, palmists, clairvoyants, and prediction machines employed calculated tactics to fool the paying customer into thinking they were receiving an individualized product or service. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno contended that the culture industry stamped its films, artwork, and literature with a “surrogate overall meaning.”Footnote 65 Manufactured amusements denied the consumer imaginative freedom and resulted in a “vigorous and prearranged promulgation of the status quo.”Footnote 66 Comparable views were expressed by 1930s literary critic F. R. Leavis, who voiced concern regarding “the possible relation between standardization of commodities and standardization of persons.”Footnote 67 Observers approached popular occultism with a similar cynicism, probing the mechanics of manipulation. Identifying the deceptive qualities of enchantment was critical to realizing its potential social and psychological repercussions.
Observers attempted to rationalize claims of clairvoyance by exposing superficial appearances. Locating inauthenticity required the careful observation of entrepreneurial techniques. A detailed, five-page report described a demonstration of telepathy by a woman styled as “La Celeste”: “the Lady with the Miracle Mind.” Four observers viewed the spectacle: John Sommerfield, Herbert Howarth, Harrisson, and Bruce Watkin. A male assistant called on a blindfolded Celeste to psychically identify various objects held up by members of the audience. The manuscript account of proceedings shifts from description to speculation regarding Celeste's assistant's role: “One guess at his identification-method is that he is here using pre-agreed word-combinations. Sometimes Celeste is seen moving her lips to herself and apparently counting.”Footnote 68 Also suspicious was the fact that Celeste “often starts her sentences with an adverb.”Footnote 69 The revelations of other occultists were similarly formulaic and disingenuous. Observer Zita Baker visited a series of eight palmists and clairvoyants and compared the results. Harrisson invited Baker, who had spent time at the Bolton headquarters but was not a permanent member of the Worktown team, to assist in Blackpool during the summer of 1937.Footnote 70 According to this observer, “Madame Kusharney,” who operated from a stall along the central beach stretch, spoke in “a very sing-song voice, as if she knew it off by heart (sort of genteel accent, London suburban).”Footnote 71 The prosaic prophecies of “Madame Curl” in the Winter Gardens, Olympia, were unworthy of elaboration: “She then went on for some time about how though I’d been happy before now I was going to be even happier, etc., etc.”Footnote 72 “Etc.” jumps off the page for its rarity in Mass Observation's reportage. For an enterprise that championed detail and rallied against selectivity in sociological research, the abbreviation presented an obvious paradox. Baker's breach of protocol reflects the weariness with which Mass Observation approached occult amusements.
A desire to uncover subtleties led to more systematized analysis. Extracts from each of the forecasts Baker received were collated and tabulated alongside common themes (such as “life,” “future,” “money,” and “marriage”) in order to provide a direct visual comparison of multiple readings.Footnote 73 Baker passed no comment on the quality or validity of the predictions; the table was clearly composed as a method of cross-examining consistency, rather than perceived accuracy.Footnote 74 A similar experiment was conducted using observers’ “Palm-a-Graph” readings. The Palm-a-Graph was described as a printed sheet with a “fully-protected Patent” that indicated personality traits and personal fortunes associated with different areas of the palm. The occultist marked the applicable sections on the sheet, which was subsequently offered to the patron to take away.Footnote 75 On five separate instances when different observers had their Palm-a-Graphs marked, “the section Health and Strength was underlined every time.”Footnote 76 Prediction machines were subjected to the same scrutiny as their human counterparts. Harrisson's assessment of printed readings from “forty three different machines … on the same day” allowed him to “score his lucky day on every day of the week and 26 days of the month.”Footnote 77 By highlighting curious discrepancies, observers aimed to expose more than blatant fraudulence. Their judgments focused on the impersonal and generic elements of occult provisions.
Observers’ skepticism extended beyond careful comparisons and tentative speculations to intentional sabotage. The compère for Celeste's exhibition of telepathy “reject[ed] attempts to be tricked by all four observers.”Footnote 78 Celeste was not the only occultist at the receiving end of observers’ ploys to confound and subvert. When “Madame Romano” inquired about Baker's age, she “said 38 … a good deal older than my real age, just to surprise her, but she didn’t seem to be.”Footnote 79 An earlier draft of the encounter contains the remark: “Madame Romano's psychic powers seem to have been disturbed by the perverse answers of her subject, for her matrimonial predictions went all wrong.”Footnote 80 This statement was crossed out, evidently deemed inappropriate for publication. Its omission in the final manuscript was not a cover up for Baker's noncompliance, which was openly divulged. By passing judgement on Madame Romano's competence, Baker's assessment lay outside Mass Observation's evaluative framework of inauthenticity.
Many of these spectacles, observers felt, exploited a kind of pseudo-individualism. Patrons were lured in on false pretenses, believing they would receive personalized service. Blackpool's assorted prediction machines relied on a modern form of animism. Consumers imagined a logical connection between their own monetary contribution and the resulting character reading: “from these machines the Worktowner reads about a personality, clearly himself because he put the money in the machine and made it work.”Footnote 81 A number of machines provided patrons with the opportunity actively to participate through a technique described as a “human intelligence angle.”Footnote 82 By turning a dial to a preferred topic of inquiry, staring into or touching an imitation crystal, or placing one's hands against a special surface, Mass Observation suggested, “you are nearly being the seer yourself.”Footnote 83 “Scientific Automatic Palmistry” and “The Hand Impressionist: Ultra-Modern Palmistry” were two common machines that integrated interactive features of this type. After patrons pressed their palms on a plate, the contraptions emitted flickering lights, sounds, and vibrations before producing a small yellow card. Newer machines like these appealed to holiday makers by simulating “personal contact.”Footnote 84 Yet vicarious thrill was not to be confused with individualized service, and observers endeavored to highlight their mass-produced and impersonal qualities. A machine styled as the “Robot” produced “ten varieties” of cards printed with character readings, which were “numbered in roman numerals in an inconspicuous way … and printed by ‘The Argyle Auto. Co., London, E.C.2.’”Footnote 85 A note of sarcasm is evident in a description of “Ultra-Modern Palmistry”: a contraption that “gives the typewritten forecast which is the hall-mark of personal attention apparently—none have a handwritten account.”Footnote 86
Appeals to the individual were a dangerously effective form of modern enchantment. Character-reading machines were generally concerned only with the present and failed to provide any detail on “the welfare of society or anyone other than yourself.”Footnote 87 Cards collected from the machines, along with medium readings and “some forty spiritualist services” sampled, “advised only in terms of the individual, there is no social aspect … the advice is directed towards making him feel good or better about things as they are.”Footnote 88 Character readings assumed predestination; the recipient might be able to make slight “modifications,” but the positioning of the planets and stars ultimately sealed her or his identity. This “essential and fundamental assumption” could provide society with a powerful tool, but its commercialized fairground variant thwarted this potential: “Obviously, if it were developed, and could demonstrate a [v]alidity equal to that of the everyday assumptions of physics, chemistry and genetics, it would afford a useful political and social technique. Its actual effect at the moment is in the reverse direction. These cards, like psycho-analysis, to which, in a mass produced way they approximate, assume that the only changes needed are those within the individual.”Footnote 89 As Mass Observation saw it, the worrisome absence of any “social aspect” in these manufactured prognoses reinforced a tendency to narrow-minded introversion that was fast becoming institutionalized.
If the manuscript emerging out of the Blackpool study had made it to press as planned, contemporary readers would have recognized the reference in the chapter title “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth” to the American jazz tune “Pennies from Heaven.” The hit was originally performed by Bing Crosby in the Hollywood film of that name released in 1936 and was recorded by Billie Holiday soon after. Mass Observation included it in a list of “dominant songs in 1937” and judged it “the year's second most popular Blackpool song.”Footnote 90 The tune's lyrics allude to a time gone by when “the best things in life” (such as “a sky that was always blue”) cost nothing but were taken for granted:
Collected “pennies” could be traded for “a package of sunshine and flowers.”Footnote 91 The lyrics can be interpreted as a reflection on changes in communal value systems brought about by a modern commercial culture, whereby individual happiness must be traded or exchanged. The market for this transaction was an enigmatic mixture of “heaven” and nature, and the implied currency was spiritual rather than material. By altering the phrase to “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth,” Mass Observation grounded enchantment in the everyday.
Stopping over for a night in Blackpool during his travels around England, the novelist and commentator J. B. Priestley felt the “new Blackpool” of the 1930s was most suited to the “less intelligent and enterprising” of holiday makers. The entertainment was “becoming too mechanised and Americanised”—a trend evidenced by the “jaded weary nonsense” of popularized American songs in comparison to the uplifting tunes of bygone times.Footnote 92 As John Baxendale has pointed out, Priestley's nostalgia was “not a matter of landscapes and traditions, but of character and habits of mind.”Footnote 93 Mass Observation shared Priestley's concern about the implications of popular music for the individual and collective psyche. “Pennies from Heaven” was included in an examination of song lyrics in another set of drafts produced for the Blackpool manuscript on the subjects of dancing and jazz. In this analysis, Mass Observation drew attention to the universal application of nature motifs in allegorical song and ritual that transcended temporal and cultural divides.Footnote 94 Ancient ceremonial rituals and modern jazz lyrics both placed considerable emphasis on the elemental forces of nature. In the case of the former, this preoccupation was essentially pragmatic and tied to the social realities of everyday existence in preindustrial society. In contrast, modern jazz music was characterized by dreamy abstraction from the material world: “the emphasis have [sic] been transferred from this world to the life of the hereafter. … It has given the world and the afterworld, free gratis, to anyone.”Footnote 95 The popular songs of Lancashire-born entertainer George Formby Jr. were an exception to this trend; they “contain[ed] few of those elements which are often called escapist” and brought “things right down to earth.”Footnote 96 Along with manufactured jazz hits like “Pennies from Heaven,” Blackpool's occultism was contributing to cultural stasis by fostering a collective withdrawal into otherworldliness.
As a commodity in the popular entertainment market, the song “Pennies from Heaven” was pertinent to Mass Observation's wider inquiry into commercial entertainment and cultural complacency. African American jazz, recognized for its spontaneous improvisation and syncopation, was introduced to Britain during the First World War and embraced for its unconventional exoticism. Over the following decade, compositional features traditionally associated with the genre were “prettified” and “neutered” as part of its transformation into a marketable commodity.Footnote 97 In the 1920s, “jazz” became an amorphous description that encompassed most popular dance music. By the mid- to late 1930s, critics and middle-class enthusiasts engaged in debates that sought to differentiate authentic jazz from its commercial variant.Footnote 98 Recorded and broadcasted jazz tunes could be endlessly replayed to suit demand. Constant repetition tended to shorten the lifespan of a record, resulting in a quicker turnover rate than previous decades had experienced. Subsequently, individuals tended to associate songs with memories of specific events or limited temporal periods.Footnote 99 Like popular jazz tunes, manufactured character readings and predictions encouraged a distorted view of time and reality. The shape of the present and future was only important insofar as it affected the individual, who was resigned to limited agency in worldly affairs.
British people were disillusioned with the concept of “surefire progress” and had lapsed into “a flat spin of cyclic periodicity, future equals past, time within the individual, progress still—but up and down, or inside yourself.”Footnote 100 With no elucidation, Mass Observation listed a curious cluster of personalities who in some way exhibited or “manifest[ed]” this condition. Popular English writers J. B. Priestley, Beverley Nichols, and Aldous Huxley were among those acknowledged—likely in reference to their frustrated commentary on shallow commercialism, political apathy, and public ignorance. Nichols, for example, worried that the “common citizen” thought the possibility of war too remote to visualize and did not take it seriously.Footnote 101 Civilized society in Huxley's dystopian Brave New World (1932) depended on rampant consumerism, psychological conditioning, and sedating narcotics to ensure complacency.Footnote 102 Other personalities listed were P. D. Ouspensky (a Russian philosopher who explored the idea of esotericism in his 1931 publication A New Model of the Universe), the press astrologist Petulengro, and Benito Mussolini. In addition to these figures, the consortium included familiar icons of national mass culture: the gambling company Littlewoods, which coordinated the football pools, and, finally, “Blackpool and modern mass-astrology.”Footnote 103 Occult amusements and press astrology offered “immediate, temporary, and continually renewed and re-arranged antidotes and sedatives.”Footnote 104 They provided a soothing distraction from reality, dulling consciousness and impeding progressive thought.
The “Master Mind”: Finding Individualism in Commercial Amusements
Blackpool's palmists, fortune tellers, and prediction machines in many ways exemplified the distorted rationality of commercial culture. They enticed holiday makers through the pretense of personalized interaction but offered only mass-produced and one-dimensional superficialities. Yet, manufactured amusements could be adapted by more enterprising members of the public, effectively shedding the “stigma of inauthenticity.”Footnote 105 Historians have pointed to a reconciliation of commercial interests and individualism in early twentieth-century Britain. Matthew Hilton, for example, has examined the marketing and culture of smoking to demonstrate the role of the standardized cigarette in the construction of individual identities. Brand preferences and idiosyncratic smoking methods offered personal distinction, as well as being symbolic markers of gender and class identity.Footnote 106 In Blackpool, observers tacitly recognized that occult spectacles provided fertile space for invention—even if this creative license was not extended to their research subjects.
Saler has identified a particularly “modern” and self-reflexive means of enchantment: the “ironic imagination.” Marvels could be approached with muted skepticism, allowing for indulgence in irrational possibility as an entirely conscious submission to the imagination over reason—offering experimentation without full subscription. Blackpool's mysteries reconciled the tension between the rational and the magical as “constructs in which one can become immersed but not submerged.”Footnote 107 Observers expressed delight in the irony of occult amusements through their written reports. Harrisson, for instance, recalled the shrewd advice he received from two prediction machines. One unusually embellished machine showcased flickering orbs inside glass globes for “eyes” and a thin chain for a “brain”: “Observer (T.H.) was unscientifically laughing at this [machine’s] performance, when he received the long st[r]ip of thin paper with typewritten words on, starting with an admonition from the eyes[:] ‘Don’t look so serious.[’] But from the ‘Robot King’ he got a professional hint—‘Muster your powers of observation especially between Thursdays and Sundays.’”Footnote 108 Coincidently, the “professional hint” from the Robot King was also quoted in a separate report composed by observer Allan Lockwood.Footnote 109 It is possible that both men received identical messages, but it is equally likely that Harrisson—as editor of the manuscript—appropriated Lockwood's findings as his own in order to facilitate the deliberate juxtaposition of the two machine readings.
Observer Herbert Howarth also exercised a playful reflexivity to individualize his enchanting encounter. His investigative report details an episode involving a Blackpool landlady who regularly interpreted observers’ tea leaves to tell their futures. Obliging lodgers were instructed to “raise the teacup in the left hand, turn it round three times, then pour the remnants into their saucer.” After watching another man receive his prophecy, it was Howarth's turn: “Observer (H.H.) does the same trick with his cup. She takes it. [She] says, ‘Has one of your friends got an aeroplane? A tall, very tall man? That Lord Trevelyan, has he got an aeroplane? … well, he's coming, and you’re going [on] a flight in it. I see your life [as] a clean book. There’ll be no sin in your life.’”Footnote 110 The landlady was presumably referring to Julian Trevelyan, the surrealist painter who had been invited to participate in the Worktown project in 1937–38, primarily as a photographer and artist. Howarth, apparently, could not resist indulging his ironic imagination. In an addendum, he informed readers that “six-foot-two surrealist Julian Trevelyan” did not own an aeroplane but did have “aeroplanic views.”Footnote 111 Howarth's response acknowledged the characteristic ambiguity of occult prophecies, which left them open to multiple understandings.Footnote 112 Occultists’ reliance on vague language and phrasing was considered worthy of further investigation. Mass Observation's “Study Plan” for wartime enquiries into astrology instructed observers to make a list of “ambiguous expressions used [in newspaper horoscopes], which can ‘fit’ any situation.” Published astrological forecasts offered “ample scope to imagination, and to interpretation.”Footnote 113
Harrisson and Howarth's accounts of the astute Robot King and tea leaf–literate landlady find irony in coincidence. Chance and “coincidence” were integral components of the surrealist movement in film, literature, and photography between the wars.Footnote 114 By juxtaposing that which initially appeared trivial or incongruous, surrealists privileged the random over the rational as a new method of discovery. Their objective was deliberately to unsettle “psychological expectations” and thereby obstruct “passive enjoyment of the world.”Footnote 115 While surrealism was based loosely on Freudian concepts, it contradicted Freud by proposing a relationship between material reality and the psychic realm that “saw no reason for subordinating the unconscious.”Footnote 116 The London-based group of surrealists differed from their continental counterparts through their more determined pursuit of effecting social change.Footnote 117 Jennings was heavily involved in the movement and helped organize London's International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936. His commitment to Mass Observation coincided with his writing of Pandaemonium, an unfinished work of surrealist history.Footnote 118 Madge's literary efforts promoted a more elastic or democratic surrealism that extended beyond exclusionary aestheticism and could be located in the “poetry of everyday life.”Footnote 119
Harrisson was more closely involved in the Blackpool study than were Madge, Trevelyan, and Jennings, but his interest in superstition overlapped with their surrealist preoccupation with coincidence. Harrisson's fascination with superstition, magic, and myth was loosely tied to contemporary social anthropology. He believed “primitive” behavior and ideas manifested themselves in new forms in modern culture and were often manipulated for commercial and political prerogatives. Humphrey Spender, who took photographs in Bolton and Blackpool for the Worktown study, wondered if Harrisson's earlier ethnographic forays in “remote” locations had left him “perhaps too anxious to find parallels in the life of this country.” Harrisson was “inclined to put rather mysterious interpretations” on aspects of working-class culture and “had a tendency to wish things onto events.”Footnote 120 Though Harrisson pursued a more empirical approach in contrast to Madge and Jennings, his research efforts were hardly systematic (in any methodologically regimented sense). His devoted but undisciplined quest for meaningful connections in accumulated facts risked converging with the surrealist abstraction he wanted to avoid.Footnote 121
The surrealist movement coincided with the developing discipline of ethnography in the 1920s and 1930s and has been described as “ethnography's secret sharer.”Footnote 122 Surrealist “moments” occur in ethnographic practice when “distinct cultural realities are cut from their contexts and forced into jarring proximity.”Footnote 123 Mass Observation experimented with surrealist ethnography in May the Twelfth, an account of media and public responses to the coronation of George VI.Footnote 124 The book was a montage of related press cuttings, surveys, questionnaire responses, and detailed observations juxtaposed in a manner intended to highlight the disparity between official media representations of the event and actual lived experience and to expose repressed facets of the collective subconscious.Footnote 125 Trevelyan's surrealist-inspired collages provide an example of the application of these techniques in Bolton for Mass Observation's Worktown study. The artist towed around “a large suit-case full of newspapers, copies of Picture Post, seed catalogues, old bills, coloured papers and other scraps, together with a pair of scissors, a pot of gum, and a bottle of indian ink.” Trevelyan recalled tearing apart “pictures of the Coronation crowds to make the cobblestones of Bolton”: “It was awkward, sometimes, in a wind, when my little pieces would fly about, and I was shy of being watched at it; but it was a legitimate way, I think, of inviting the god of Chance to lend a hand in painting my picture.”Footnote 126 In the same spirit as Trevelyan, Blackpool observers embraced the “god of Chance” for its creative and emancipatory potential as a representational and interpretative tool. They celebrated the imaginative possibilities presented by chance and contingency, while simultaneously decrying the abstract notions of fate or destiny promoted by occult offerings.
Earlier versions of the Blackpool book manuscript resemble the kind of highly textured, polyphonic “collage” that Clifford identifies as an exemplary “paradigm” for surrealist ethnography.Footnote 127 An ethnographic collage creates meaning from “elements that continually proclaim their foreignness to the context of presentation.” To achieve this, “the cuts and sutures of the research process are left visible; there is no smoothing over or blending of the work's raw data into a homogeneous representation.”Footnote 128 Mass Observation's initial drafts on occult entertainment contain pages of (literally) multilayered text. Collated individual reports and observations resemble the raw “field data” of the book drafts.Footnote 129 During the editorial process, selected segments of these original reports have been cut out from the page and attached to another document by staple or paper clip.Footnote 130 Stripped of their original context, these textual fragments can be disorientating and visibly confronting. As the presentation becomes more refined in the later stages of redrafting, the typescript reappears in synthesized form, and the raw seams are less apparent.Footnote 131 Though less jarring visually, editorial features of later drafts work to promote an imaginative reconfiguration of the investigatory findings.
Manuscript chapters are divided into a number of small subsections headed by short, punchy titles—usually of consisting of three words or less.Footnote 132 The occasionally poetic and ambiguous subheadings employed in “Pennies from Heaven and from Earth” and “Fourth Dimension” (and other drafted chapters) suggest deliberate double entendre.Footnote 133 “The Master Mind,” for example, can be read on a number of levels beyond a casual referent to an unusual machine billed as “Professor Renerb's Master Mind.” A subsection titled “Palm-a-Graph” contains observational material relating to the eponymous diagram, discussed earlier in this essay. A brief description of the printed and patented sheet is provided, detailing its division of the palm into a number of areas corresponding to personal traits.Footnote 134 The same section also contains a grid tabulating the prognoses that Baker received from consulting eight occultists. The table was acknowledged earlier in this piece as an editorial effort to emphasize the standardized nature of “mass-predictions.” A brief glance, for example, reveals that six of the eight occultists forecasted future “happiness” or success.Footnote 135 Mass Observation aimed to demonstrate the way in which workers’ selfhood was distorted and manipulated through occult entertainment. Ironically, the imposition of rational order through a tabular format required the replication of the process under critique. Occult personalities are categorized and objectified in an appeal to modern reason. The table can be read as a Palm-a-Graph of the editor's own self-fashioning.
Superstition and commercial entertainment converged in Blackpool, providing Mass Observation with an ideal platform to wrestle with ideas about enchanting leisure. A committed investigation of occult spectacles inspired varied responses from observers, exposing antinomies in the project's interpretative framework. On the one hand, palmistry, clairvoyance, and prediction machines exemplified the pseudo-individuality and inauthenticity of 1930s mass culture. They enchanted holiday makers by exploiting science's cachet in an appeal to “progressive” reason. Occult forecasts promoted passive introspection and complacency at the expense of worldly awareness and critical reflection. On the other hand, this understanding competed with a more nuanced approach to ideas of chance and superstition. Observers suspended disbelief to find humor and coincidence in mysterious marvels. Their ironic play revealed a distinctly participatory side to enchanting leisure that remained unrealized in Mass Observation's dialectic.
By creatively engaging with Blackpool's manufactured prophecies, observers colluded with a culture they otherwise condemned. The book drafts showcase the ways in which Mass Observation embraced a form of modern enchantment as part of its outlook and methodology. In this sense the organization can be viewed as an expression of the same phenomenon it subjected to scrutiny. This subtle convergence enabled Mass Observation to look beyond modern enchantment as a depersonalizing social process. Other contemporary commentators—who observed and postulated from a distance—were quicker to dismiss commercial amusements as synthetic or standardized and to pathologize their social effects. A resistance to more conventional pathways of enquiry made Mass Observation well equipped to register fresh ways of thinking about the role of magic in modern life, anticipating a revisionist historiography that would not develop for many more decades.
