This book investigates how the emergence of public opinion polling in mid-century Britain fundamentally altered the representation of the collective consciousness in literature. Megan Faragher, a scholar of twentieth-century British literature, examines the intersection of social science methodology and narrative form. She argues that the 'psychographic turn'—the shift toward quantifying individual attitudes—forced novelists to reconcile traditional character interiority with the new, data-driven definition of the public. The text analyzes how authors navigated the tension between subjective experience and the objective, aggregated data produced by early polling organizations.

Scholars in the field of twentieth-century studies recognize this work for its interdisciplinary approach to the history of the novel. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which is intended for an audience familiar with both literary theory and social history.