Christopher Caudwell

{{short description|English Marxist writer and activist (1907–1937)}}

{{Infobox person

| name = Christopher Caudwell

| image = Christopher Caudwell portrait.jpg

| birth_name = Christopher St John Sprigg

| birth_date = {{birth date|df=y|1907|10|20}}

| birth_place = Putney, London, England

| death_date = {{death date and age|df=y|1937|2|12|1907|10|20}}

| death_place = Jarama, Spain

| death_cause = Killed by Spanish nationalists

| education = St Benedict's School, Ealing

| occupation = Journalist, author, machine gunner

| known_for = Communist activism, poetry, literary criticism

| party = Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)

}}

Christopher St John Sprigg (20 October 1907 – 12 February 1937), best known by his pseudonym Christopher Caudwell, was an English Marxist writer, literary critic, intellectual and activist.

Life

Christopher St John Sprigg was born into a Roman Catholic family, in Putney, London, on 20 October 1907.{{Cite web |last=Stevenson |first=Graham |date=2009-09-19 |title=Caudwell Christopher |url=https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2008/09/19/christopher-caudwell/ |access-date=2024-03-11 |website=Graham Stevenson |language=en-GB}} He was educated at the Benedictine Ealing Priory School, but left school at the age of 15 and worked first as a cub reporter at the Yorkshire Observer, where his father was literary editor, and then as editor of British Malaya.

Two years later he founded an aeronautical publishing company with his brother. He also published on automobiles and he designed a infinitely variable gear. He continued scientific studies and published The Crisis of Physics in 1936.{{Cite book |author=Caudwell |first=Christopher |title=Poems |publisher=John Lane, The Bodley Head |year=1939 |location=London |language=en}}

Caudwell became interested in Marxism in 1934 and began to study it with "extraordinary intensity". In the summer of 1935, he wrote his first Marxist book entitled Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, which was published by Macmillan. Following the completion of his book he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.{{Cite web |last=Sheehan |first=Helena |date=6 July 2008 |title=Christopher Caudwell |url=http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/caudwell.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080706020738/http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/caudwell.htm |archive-date=6 July 2008 |access-date=30 October 2021}}

Death and legacy

According to the socialist magazine Monthly Review, Caudwell on 12 February 1937 "was killed by fascists in the valley of Jarama during the Spanish Civil War. He died at a machine gun post, guarding the retreat of his comrades in the British Battalion of the International Brigade".{{Cite web|url=https://monthlyreview.org/press/75-years-after-the-death-of-christopher-caudwell/|title = Monthly Review | 75 Years after the Death of Christopher Caudwell|website=Monthlyreview.org|date = 12 February 2012}}

The Marxist historian E. P. Thompson wrote of Caudwell, "It is not difficult to see Caudwell as a phenomenon – as an extraordinary shooting-star crossing England’s empirical night – as a premonitory sign of a more sophisticated Marxism whose true annunciation was delayed until the Sixties". The Marxist academic John Bellamy Foster similarly credited Caudwell with "breathtaking intellectual achievements in a brief period of time".

In his 1942 introduction to The Fury of the Living, a collection of poems by John Singer, Hugh MacDiarmid called Caudwell (along with John Cornford, another young writer killed fighting in Spain), one of the "few inspiring exceptions" from the "leftist poets of the comfortable classes".MacDiarmid, H. (1970). Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Duncan Glen, Cape, 1969, p.90

In 1949, The Bodley Head also published the posthumously discovered manuscript of Further Studies in a Dying Culture, which included a preface by Edgell Rickword. His earlier (1938) book Studies in a Dying Culture, also published by The Bodley Head, was introduced by John Strachey. Both were published posthumously by Monthly Review.{{Cite web |last=News |first=Filed |date=2012-02-12 |title=Monthly Review {{!}} 75 Years after the Death of Christopher Caudwell |url=https://monthlyreview.org/press/75-years-after-the-death-of-christopher-caudwell/#:~:text=The%20following%20year,%20his%20remarkable,was%20published%20eleven%20years%20later. |access-date=2025-02-23 |website=Monthly Review |language=en-US}} Both books have since been republished. Subsequently, Lawrence and Wishart compiled a selection from these two books and from The Crisis in Physics and published with the title The Concept of Freedom. In 1965, reviewer Raymond Williams picked out what Caudwell has to say about freedom, being as relevant when written as now.{{Cite news |last=Williams |first=Raymond |date=18 November 1965 |title=A young man's papers |work=Manchester Guardian}}

Works

=Criticism=

Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (1937)
Studies in a Dying Culture (1938)
The Crisis in Physics (1939)
Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949)
Romance and Realism: A Study in English Bourgeois Literature (1970)
Scenes and Actions (1986)
Culture As Politics: Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell (Pluto Press, 2017)

=Poetry=

Poems (1939)
Collected Poems (1986)

=Short stories=

Scenes and Actions (1986)
"Death at 8:30"
"The Case of the Jesting Miser" (unpublished)
"The Case of the Misjudged Husband"

===Novels===

As Christopher St. John Sprigg:{{Cite web |title=Christopher St John Sprigg |url=https://moonstonepress.co.uk/christopher-st-john-sprigg/ |access-date=2024-03-11 |website=Moonstone Press |language=en-GB}}

The Kingdom of Heaven (1929)
Crime in Kensington/Pass the Body (1933)
Fatality in Fleet Street (1933)
The Perfect Alibi (1934)
Death of an Airman (1934)
The Corpse with the Sunburnt Face (1935)
Death of a Queen (1935)
This My Hand (1936)
The Six Queer Things (1937)

=Other=

The Airship: Its Design, History, Operation and Future (1931)
British Airways (1934)

References

External links

{{FadedPage|id=Sprigg, Christopher St. John|name=Christopher Caudwell|author=yes}}
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/index.htm Christopher Caudwell Archive] at the [http://www.marxists.org Marxists Internet Archive]
[https://archive.org/details/conceptfreedomcaudwell The Concept of Freedom], collection of thirteen essays by Caudwell from three of his books.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20080706020738/http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/caudwell.htm Christopher Caudwell] by Helena Sheehan: an extract from Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (Humanities Press: 1985, 1993).
[https://web.archive.org/web/20121118071618/http://www.theroselandinstitute.co.uk/html/lyfrow_trelyspen_publications_17.html A British Hero - Christopher St.John Sprigg aka Christopher Caudwell] by Dr. James Whetter (Lyfrow Trelyspen: 2011).