Reflections on British Royalty

Jennifer J. Purcell is Professor of History at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, USA. Using Mass-Observation diaries and directives, her first book, Domestic Soldiers (2010), seeks to understand the day-to-day lives of six women on the home front during the Second World War. She is also the author of Mother of the BBC: Mabel Constanduros and the Development of Light Entertainment on the BBC, 1925–1957 (Bloomsbury, 2020) and editor of Mass Observation: Text, Context and Analysis of the Pioneering Pamphlet and Movement (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Reflections on British Royalty: Mass Observation and the Monarchy, 1937-2022 (with Fiona Courage; Bloomsbury, 2024).Fiona Courage is Deputy Director of Library, Culture and Heritage & Director of the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex, UK. Her publications include ‘Recipes for co-production with children and young people’ in Time, Technology and Documentation in a Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2018; with Liam Berriman and Kate Howland) and ‘Mass Observing Sport’ in Recording Leisure Lives: sports, spectacles and spectators in 20th century Britain (2013; with Jessica Scantlebury).

• 1. Introduction2. Coronation of George VI (1937)3. Royalty in Wartime4. Royal Wedding (1947)5. Coronation of Elizabeth II (1953)6. Ordinary or Extraordinary? The Royal Family in the 1950s and 60s7. Middle-Aged Royalty: The 1977 Silver Jubilee8. Mass Observation Project: 1980s-1990s9. Mass Observation Project: TodayIndex

Purcell and Courage have selected an impressive and broad range of sources that serves as an accessible, affordable, and useful entry point into the Mass Observation archive, and the book’s focus on centering primary source material with minimal commentary welcomes scholars, researchers, and students to engage with and analyze these sources.