'Astray in a dark forest?' The emotional politics of reconstruction Britain

Based on material generated by the British social investigative organization, Mass Observation, between 1944-1946, this chapter maps some of the political work that emotion did in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It adapts cultural theorist Sara Ahmed’s question - ‘What do emotions do?’ - to a precise historical moment. It approaches emotion through the lens of social, as well as cultural, history by asking an additional question - ‘What did people do with emotion?’ It examines how the interlinked categories of feeling and experience were invoked by individual Mass Observers as ways of knowing a rapidly changing world and as grounds for participating in a dynamic public sphere. The chapter argues that a distinctive form of ‘emotional citizenship’ emerged out of the war; one which deployed feeling as a form of epistemology and experience as an evidential base.