Christopher Caudwell

Christopher Caudwell
Born	Christopher St John Sprigg (1907-10-20)20 October 1907 Putney, London, England
Died	12 February 1937(1937-02-12) (aged 29) Jarama, Spain
Cause of death	Killed by Spanish nationalists
Education	St Benedict's School, Ealing
Occupation(s)	Journalist, author, machine gunner
Known for	Communist activism, poetry, literary criticism
Political 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. 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 his 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.

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.

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".

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".

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:

• 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)

See also

• Maurice Cornforth

Further reading

• Morgan, W. John, 'Pacifism or Bourgeois Pacifism? Huxley, Orwell, and Caudwell'. Chapter 5 in Morgan, W. John and Guilherme, Alexandre (Eds.), Peace and War-Historical, Philosophical, and Anthropological Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp, 71–96. ISBN 978-3-030-48670-9.

External links

• Works by Christopher Caudwell at Faded Page (Canada)
• Christopher Caudwell Archive at the Marxists Internet Archive
• The Concept of Freedom, collection of thirteen essays by Caudwell from three of his books.
• Christopher Caudwell by Helena Sheehan: an extract from Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (Humanities Press: 1985, 1993).
• A British Hero - Christopher St.John Sprigg aka Christopher Caudwell by Dr. James Whetter (Lyfrow Trelyspen: 2011).