informative piece on Humphrey Jennings & Mass Observation--

"In a 1938 radio talk, Jennings had suggested it was no accident that the search for the meaning of everyday life led to history. "Mysteries reside in the humblest everyday things," he said; they are a kind of legacy, and the poet, by examining them, can extract "an idea of 'what I am' from the past." To share this discovery, he relates it to contemporary experience, "the things that the community knows about, the things that they're interested in." Jennings cited, as an example, "The Waste Land," in which Eliot represents the past as a Christopher Wren church and the everyday as a pub in Lower Thames Street. The poet has to love both in order to connect them, Jennings insisted; "Everything else is snobbery." "