Christopher Caudwell

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. 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. 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.

Death and legacy 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". He was 29.

Just before his death the CPGB recognised his tremendous potential as a thinker who could make a real impact in cultural / intellectual circles and be a major force for popularising Marxism in the Anglophone world. Harry Pollitt attempted to recall him from Spain as a more valuable asset back in England, but Cauldwell declined having seen the urgency of the job in Spain. From Spain he had overseen the final stages of the publication of his second book and the submission of a draft of his third The Crisis in Physics. Both of these, along with a raft of essays and poetry, were published overseen by the Communist Party in the following few years.

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".

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. In his Manchester Guardian book review, Raymond Williams stated that Caudwell's views on freedom and related topics were still relevant three decades later.

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". The Marxist academic John Bellamy Foster similarly credited Caudwell with "breathtaking intellectual achievements in a brief period of time". 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)