Christopher Caudwell

Christopher St John Sprigg was born into a Roman Catholic family,^[1] in Putney, London, on 20 October 1907.^[2] He was educated at the Benedictine Ealing Priory School, but left school at age 15 and worked first as a cub reporter for the Yorkshire Observer, where his father was literary editor, and then as editor of British Malaya.^[1]

Two years later he joined an aeronautical publishing company. He invented an infinitely variable gear and published his designs in Automobile Engineer.^[3] He was a prolific writer; by age 25 he had already published five aeronautics textbooks, seven detective novels, and books of poems and short stories.^[2] He was also following developments in 20th century physics; his writings on the subject were made available posthumously in The Crisis in Physics (1939).

Sprigg became interested in Marxism in 1934 and studied it with "extraordinary intensity".^[1] In summer of 1935, he wrote his first Marxist book, titled Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, which was accepted for publication by Macmillan.^[1] By this time, Sprigg was using the "Christopher Caudwell" pseudonym.^[3] Following completion of the book, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.^[1]

According to socialist magazine Monthly Review, Christopher Caudwell was killed on 12 February 1937 "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".^[4] He was 29.

In a 1942 essay, Hugh MacDiarmid labeled Caudwell and John Cornford (another young English writer killed in Spain) the "few inspiring exceptions" among "the leftist poets of the comfortable classes".^[5]

In 1949, The Bodley Head published a posthumously discovered Caudwell manuscript, Further Studies in a Dying Culture, and included a preface by Edgell Rickword. Caudwell's prior book, Studies in a Dying Culture (1938), had also been published by The Bodley Head, with a John Strachey introduction. In 1971, Monthly Review Press put out a volume combining the two Dying Culture books.^[4]

Lawrence & Wishart selected multiple Dying Culture essays, and chapters from The Crisis in Physics, and published the material in a book titled The Concept of Freedom (1965).^[6] In his Manchester Guardian book review, Raymond Williams stated that Caudwell's views on freedom and related topics were still relevant three decades later.^[7]

In an assessment of Caudwell's small body of political and cultural writings finished before his death, Marxist historian E. P. Thompson wrote: "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".^[8] The Marxist academic John Bellamy Foster similarly credited Caudwell with "breathtaking intellectual achievements in a brief period of time".^[4]

• Maurice Cornforth