Christopher Caudwell
Christopher Caudwell was the pseudonym of Christopher St John Sprigg (20 October 1907 – 13 February 1937), a British Marxist writer.[1]
Contents
Life[edit]
He was born into a Roman Catholic family in London, England.[1] 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.[1]
According to Marxist historian Helena Sheehan In 1934 Caudwell became interested in marxism and began to study it with "extraordinary intensity" . In the summer of 1935, he wrote his first marxist book entitled Illusions and Reality which was published by Macmillan. [1] Following the completion of his book he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.[1]
Death and legacy[edit]
According to the socialist magazine Monthly Review, on 12 February 1937 Caudwell "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."[2]
Marxist historian E.P. Thompson writes 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" while Marxist academic John Bellamy Foster similarly credited him with "breathtaking intellectual achievements in a brief period of time".[2]
Works[edit]
Criticism[edit]
- Illusion and Reality: A Stufy 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)
Poetry[edit]
- Title Unknown, The Dial, date unknown. St John Sprigg's first poem
- Poems (1939)
- Collected Poems (1986)
Short stories[edit]
- Scenes and Actions (1986)
- Death at 8:30
Uncollected short stories[edit]
- ’’The Case of the Jesting Miser’’ (Unpublished)
- ’’The Case of the Misjudged Husband’’
Novels[edit]
- 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[edit]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
External links[edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Christopher Caudwell |
- Works by Christopher Caudwell at Faded Page (Canada)
- Christopher Caudwell at Find a Grave (surname misspelled)
- Christopher Caudwell Archive at the Marxists Internet Archive
- 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).
- 1907 births
- 1937 deaths
- 20th-century English poets
- 20th-century male writers
- British Marxists
- British people of the Spanish Civil War
- Communist Party of Great Britain members
- Communist poets
- Communist writers
- English anti-fascists
- English literary critics
- Former Roman Catholics
- International Brigades personnel
- Marxist journalists
- Military personnel killed in the Spanish Civil War
- People educated at St Benedict's School
- People from Putney