Our Hidden Lives Summary

Simon Garfield has presented the diary entries of five ordinary citizens living between 1945 and 1948 in his book, Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain. The content was drawn from what came to be known as the Mass-Observation Archive, an effort initiated by an anthropologist, a journalist, and a documentary filmmaker as “a study of everyday people living regular lives.” (Garfield, 1) From the thousands collected, Garfield selected these five diaries because they provided a fresh view into the thoughts and lives of the British middle class in post-war Britain. The writers included adult men and women, both single and married, with various backgrounds, educations, living conditions, hobbies, families, pets, quirks, and
Herbert Brush betrayed no thoughts of failure as he cultivated his garden allotment, wrote bad poetry, and attended as many free exhibitions as possible. Maggie Joy Blunt loved her cats, kept a neat apartment, and believed that someday she would be a successful writer and never again work at a job beneath her education. George Taylor might have been one of our busiest correspondents. He was a husband, an accountant, and an auxiliary police officer, who worked tirelessly as an executive of the Worker’s Educational Association (WEA) and still had time for a variety of other hobbies. Edie Rutherford was a South-African expatriate housewife that cared for an emotionally troubled husband. She worked as a clerk and would have been described as a food hoarder, if in the post-war Britain that term had any meaning. She was highly opinionated, politically minded, and never hesitated to come to the defense of the Socialist Party. She would complain about politics and prices, but she never complained that life was not worthwhile. The last correspondent, homosexual antiques dealer B. Charles, probably had the most negative outlook on life of those surveyed. He was a snob and anti-Semite, and had a soft spot for German prisoners of war, but spent most