I liked this from
that Mass-Observation article I posted elsewhere,
Harrisson sat out “May the Twelfth,” writing to a friend, “It was a crazy idea to have it edited by a whole bunch of intellectual poets.” Jennings decided that Harrisson was a philistine, and quit. He didn’t abandon the ideas of Mass-Observation, however. He began to collect descriptions, in poetry and prose, of machines and the changes they had wrought in human life throughout history. He called the descriptions “Images,” and, as he assembled them, he came to believe that they could be read as “a continuous narrative or film on the Industrial Revolution,” much as he had meant “May the Twelfth” to be read as a film of the coronation. He carried the clippings, which eventually filled twelve notebooks, in a weather-beaten suitcase. When a Surrealist friend asked what was inside, Jennings answered, “Pandemonium.” Naming his anthology after the city that Lucifer and his fallen angels forged in Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Jennings wrote, “The building of Pandaemonium is the real history of Britain for the last three hundred years.”