Middle-class Socialism: Selfhood, Democracy and Distinction in Wartime County Durham

This article examines the wartime diaries of a left-wing middle-class couple living in a small market town in the Durham coal-field. In the late 1930s Peter and Maggie Brittain were both active in Popular Front politics, but the diaries they wrote for Mass-Observation between 1939 and 1946 reveal sharply contrasting trajectories. Peter, English teacher and intellectual, became disillusioned with politics (though retaining a touching faith in the Soviet Union), and sought solace in cultural pursuits. Meanwhile Maggie, who had given up teaching when they married in 1929, blossomed as a shop steward in a local engineering factory. Following her inevitable victimization she persevered doggedly as a Labour Party activist in a notoriously corrupt local Party run in close collaboration with the capitalists who had sacked her. The fact that these bosses were German Jews, and that both Peter and Maggie had found relief from the philistinism of their lower-middle-class neighbours by befriending the well-educated young German Jewish refugees working in the local factories, throws an intriguing light on the way in which these particular middle-class socialists managed to combine democratic commitments with their own acute sense of cultural distinction.