Feeling the strain

A cultural history of stress in twentieth-century Britain

Jill Kirby

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526123312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Teoría, práctica y referencia médicas

Examining the popular discourse of nerves and stress, this book provides a historical account of how ordinary Britons understood, explained and coped with the pressures and strains of daily life during the twentieth century. It traces the popular, vernacular discourse of stress, illuminating not just how stress was known, but the ways in which that knowledge was produced. Taking a cultural approach, the book focuses on contemporary popular understandings, revealing continuity of ideas about work, mental health, status, gender and individual weakness, as well as the changing socio-economic contexts that enabled stress to become a ubiquitous condition of everyday life by the end of the century. With accounts from sufferers, families and colleagues it also offers insight into self-help literature, the meanings of work and changing dynamics of domestic life, delivering a complementary perspective to medical histories of stress.

1
Nerves and the nervous: self-help books in the early decades of the twentieth century

Britain in the early twentieth century was a stressful place to live. According to Dr Edwin Hopewell Ash, writing a book for the nervous in 1928, ‘everything is being speeded up more and more’. Not only were many people still coming to terms with the psychological after-effects of the First World War, but they were ‘working at full pressure to meet present conditions, travelling hundreds of miles in a week-end, dancing into the early hours of the morning’. Adding to this already hectic life were news services bringing the ‘most interesting, varied and exciting events’ from all over the world almost as soon as they occurred. If that were not enough, there were also the marvels of wireless and the ‘excitements of flying’. The speed and sophistication of such modernity were all very well, noted Ash, but unfortunately, it put a strain on the nerves that urgently needed attention.¹

Ash was a doctor specialising in nervous diseases, who worked in several London hospitals and through a series of popular works, was one of several writers aiming to help the general population deal with such challenges in the early decades of the twentieth century.² Like him, many were doctors keen to offer advice for the nervous in easily understood lay terms. Although this sort of book was by no means new – building on a rich tradition of medical self-help books – a boom in psychological advice books at the beginning of the century reflected the growing interest in popular psychology and the increasing market for ‘self-help’ publications, although publishers did not yet recognise or categorise such works thus. Self-help books allowed the reader to negotiate meaning for their experiences without engaging with formal medical diagnoses which might legitimise or dismiss their worries, both of which could be troubling. They ensured privacy and, not surprisingly, were underpinned by an assumption of reader agency and self-sufficiency. They framed the nervous reader as intelligent enough to recognise the need for help, but sufficiently capable to learn about, understand and treat their condition themselves.

The early century was notable for a growing fascination with the psyche reflected in enthusiasm for occultism and spiritualism, as well as mental training systems such as Pelmanism, and saw a boom in books of psychological guidance.³ Increased levels of literacy, expansion of mass media and a growing drive for self-improvement meant that the issues and concerns that might previously have been largely limited to the domain of politicians and professionals, became much more available to a popular audience.⁴ Public interest in psychology was fuelled by debates over shell shock and its treatment, and in many cases by the struggle to obtain pensions. Ultimately 120,000 veterans of the First World War were given pensions for psychiatric disability, more than a quarter of them still being paid in 1937.⁵ Although mental illness carried a considerable stigma, and the treatment of shell-shocked veterans was heavily bounded by class assumptions, their presence in the general population ensured an increased awareness of the potential frailties of the psyche among the lay population as well as the institutions of medicine and government.⁶ This was reflected in the appearance of afflicted veterans in popular culture such as Dorothy L. Sayer's aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of whose suspects in the 1928 novel The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is a fellow shell shock sufferer.⁷

The psychological scars of the First World War were accompanied by a loss of faith and confidence in the world that was reinforced by the economic vagaries of the interwar period.⁸ The intermittent unemployment of the Depression of the 1930s created insecurity, anxiety, humiliation and loss of self-esteem in the men affected and permeated the lives of their families. According to contemporary research this provided fertile ground for mental instability and neurasthenia, which in turn fed into concerns, particularly in the 1930s, that such mind states could be contagious, an idea that was increasingly current in popular culture and news reporting, apparently demonstrated by the spread of fascism in Europe.⁹ This contributed to a widespread culture of decline and crisis that for Richard Overy created an ‘undifferentiated sense of malaise’.¹⁰ In many cases those turning to self-help books were undoubtedly looking for ways to manage this feeling and deal with their own nervous suffering or that of someone close to them, whether caused by the war or wider issues.

Such hunger for psychological knowledge owed less to Freud and psychoanalysis and more to an eclectic British interpretation of such ideas based on a psychology of self-improvement rather than the breaking down of the self required by psychoanalysis.¹¹ At the same time, increasing secularism and the development of mass marketing and new opportunities for leisure offered what Thomson has called ‘commodity solutions’ to constructions of health and treatments for illness so that by the late 1930s popular psychology was embraced in newspaper advice columns, correspondence courses, psychology clubs and a range of self-help books. Their content tended to reflect a psychology that drew on lingering Victorian values of self-control and moral management as well as the new possibilities of upward mobility through self-improvement.¹²

Drawing on a sample of self-help books, published between 1907 and the outbreak of the Second World War, this chapter examines popular explanations and treatments for nervous conditions as well as the wide range of symptoms constituting those ailments. These books were selected specifically because they were intended for a lay readership, albeit a mostly middle-class, educated one. They deployed the concepts and terminology more likely to be accessible and taken up by the ordinary reader, as opposed to more medical and technical texts designed for a specialist audience, although the latter might also be among their readership.¹³ The variety of symptoms discussed by self-help authors indicated just how broad the parameters of popular conceptions of nerves and nervousness were for authors and sufferers alike. Popular understanding of nerves also revealed the privileging of certain explanations, symptoms and treatments as well as the contemporary gender and class assumptions that informed interpretations of causality and proposed remedies. Self-help books reveal how contemporary notions of health and well-being, stoicism and personal responsibility underpinned the way nervous suffering was understood. They highlight concepts such as self-responsibility, personal agency and the privileging of physical symptoms. Such ideas continued to inform popular understanding of nerves and ultimately stress for much of the century.

Self-help books

Ash's concerns about the effects of modern life on Britain's population were by no means new. Indeed the diagnosis of neurasthenia in the nineteenth century had been based on similar ideas about the effects of too much work, speed and mental effort.¹⁴ Hence, although the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Nerves and the nervous: self-help books in the early decades of the twentieth century
• 2 Neurotic tendencies: workplace and suburban neurosis in the interwar period
• 3 ‘Just Nerves!’: civilian nerves in the Second World War
• 4 The great strain: domestic troubles in post-war Britain
• 5 The democratisation of stress: popular and personal discourse in the 1960s and 1970s
• 6 The ‘ruthless years’: burn-out and the paradigm of stress
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index