Charles Madge
Encyclopedia
Charles Madge was an English poet
, journalist
and sociologist, now most remembered as a founder of Mass-Observation
.
As a sociologist, he co-founded Mass-Observation with Tom Harrisson
in 1937, an endeavour which would occupy more of his time than literature. The Charles Madge Archive illuminates Madge's aptitude as a poet more fully than they reveal his distinction as a sociologist. A 276-page typescript draft autobiography which traces the progress of his sociological career and covers Mass-Observation in detail. This work draws heavily on extracts from letters and diaries found elsewhere in the Archive.
. He was the son of Lieut Col. C. A. Madge and Barbara, née Hylton Foster, and the brother of the sociologist John Madge
who wrote The Origins of Scientific Sociology.
Charles was educated at Winchester College
and Magdalene College, Cambridge
(which he left without a degree). He was a literary figure from his early twenties, becoming a friend of David Gascoyne
; like Gascoyne he was generally classed as a surrealist poet. He worked for a spell as a reporter for the Daily Mirror. By the end of the 1930s, he was more involved in Mass-Observation surveys and reports, socialist realism (in theory) and Communism
.
The two Madges were active in Cambridge University Socialist Society. Cyril Bibby
comments with reference to them as well as Maurice Dobb
, the Cumming-Bruce twins, Margot Heinemann
and "the beautiful Eileen Wynne that "it was noticeable how many of these extreme left-wingers came from privileged upper-class homes" (Reminiscences of a Happy Life, p.171)
, Christopher Isherwood
and T. S. Eliot. Eliot was Madge's editor at Faber
(the company published his poetry as The Disappearing Castle (1937) and The Father Found (1940)) and published some of his work in The Criterion
; he even pulled strings to help Madge secure a 'real' job as a Daily Mirror reporter in 1935 (dispiriting work as it turned out, but good grounding for his burgeoning interest in sociology and the experience of 'the masses'). Nine of his poems appeared in The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) and W. B. Yeats made further selections for The Oxford Book of Modern English Verse (1938) in which Madge appeared alongside Auden, Stephen Spender
, Louis MacNeice
and C. Day Lewis. Faber published two volumes of his poetry: The Disappearing Castle (1937) and The Father Found (1940). By the early 1940s, sociological work had become all-consuming, and it was not until retirement that Madge found renewed opportunity to write. His collected verse was eventually published as Of Love, Time and Places (Anvil, 1994).
Critical reaction to Madge's poetry is well documented throughout the Archive and ranges from informal correspondence (early praise from Rudyard Kipling
and John Masefield
) to transcriptions of ambivalent, yet often prescient, reviews in the press. The autobiography contains his own analysis of his poems and comments on their inspiration. Many autograph notebooks record the creative process. Among his non-sociological prose works are early short stories, an essay "Notes on the Technique of Poetry" (from the 1930s), and schoolboy essays on Blake and Milton
. Published works present include Myth, Metaphor and the World Picture, a study of metaphor in literature, contrasted with its use in religious symbolism.
through the pages of the New Statesman
in 1937 led to the pair's establishment of Mass-Observation
, a unique social experiment to record the thoughts of 'ordinary' people on contemporary subjects. The wide-ranging and demanding work of this radical survey organisation triggered further studies conducted for other bodies, including the National Council for Social and Economic Research (1940-42) and Political & Economic Planning (1943). Madge became a director of Pilot Press in 1944 and published a quarterly magazine, Pilot Papers, with sociological essays by non-academics, copies of which are included in the Archive.
From 1947 Madge was Social Development Officer for Stevenage New Town
, until in 1950 he took the first chair of sociology at the University of Birmingham. This he held until retirement in 1970, despite his lack of academic training and personal doubts about the validity of the discipline as it then stood. In the first decade of his tenure he worked for the United Nations' agencies in Asia and Africa. His documents of the time, and later recollections of the academic life contained within his papers, illuminate the volatility of the 1960s, including the student unrest of 1968.
(previously married to Hugh Sykes Davies
), and in 1942 Inez Spender (née Inez Maria Pearn, previously married to Stephen Spender
).
His archived correspondence with Kathleen and Inez is particularly revealing. Often tortuous relationships within a close-knit circle of peers are recorded with candour. Madge's letters to Inez also record his work with Mass-Observation and the Communist Party
in some detail. Inez died in 1976.
From his marriage to Raine he had two children: Anna and James. James married Jennifer Alliston, daughter of the architect Jane Drew
from her first husband James Alliston.
In 1979 he married Evelyn Brown, who died in 1984.
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
and sociologist, now most remembered as a founder of Mass-Observation
Mass-Observation
Mass Observation was a United Kingdom social research organisation founded in 1937. Their work ended in the mid 1960s but was revived in 1981. The Archive is housed at the University of Sussex....
.
As a sociologist, he co-founded Mass-Observation with Tom Harrisson
Tom Harrisson
Major Tom Harnett Harrisson DSO OBE was a British polymath. In the course of his life he was an ornithologist, explorer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, guerrilla, ethnologist, museum curator, archaeologist, documentarian, film-maker, conservationist, and writer...
in 1937, an endeavour which would occupy more of his time than literature. The Charles Madge Archive illuminates Madge's aptitude as a poet more fully than they reveal his distinction as a sociologist. A 276-page typescript draft autobiography which traces the progress of his sociological career and covers Mass-Observation in detail. This work draws heavily on extracts from letters and diaries found elsewhere in the Archive.
Early life
He was born in JohannesburgJohannesburg
Johannesburg also known as Jozi, Jo'burg or Egoli, is the largest city in South Africa, by population. Johannesburg is the provincial capital of Gauteng, the wealthiest province in South Africa, having the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa...
. He was the son of Lieut Col. C. A. Madge and Barbara, née Hylton Foster, and the brother of the sociologist John Madge
John Madge
John Madge was an English sociologist and brother of Charles Madge. He wrote The Origins of Scientific Sociology.He was the son of Lieut Col. C. A. Madge and Barbara, née Hylton Foster and like him was educated at Winchester College and University of Cambridge.The two Madges were active in...
who wrote The Origins of Scientific Sociology.
Charles was educated at Winchester College
Winchester College
Winchester College is an independent school for boys in the British public school tradition, situated in Winchester, Hampshire, the former capital of England. It has existed in its present location for over 600 years and claims the longest unbroken history of any school in England...
and Magdalene College, Cambridge
Magdalene College, Cambridge
Magdalene College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college was founded in 1428 as a Benedictine hostel, in time coming to be known as Buckingham College, before being refounded in 1542 as the College of St Mary Magdalene...
(which he left without a degree). He was a literary figure from his early twenties, becoming a friend of David Gascoyne
David Gascoyne
David Gascoyne was an English poet associated with the Surrealist movement.-Early life and Surrealism:...
; like Gascoyne he was generally classed as a surrealist poet. He worked for a spell as a reporter for the Daily Mirror. By the end of the 1930s, he was more involved in Mass-Observation surveys and reports, socialist realism (in theory) and Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
.
The two Madges were active in Cambridge University Socialist Society. Cyril Bibby
Cyril Bibby
Cyril Bibby was a biologist and educator. He was also one of the first sexologists.-Early life, family, etc. :...
comments with reference to them as well as Maurice Dobb
Maurice Dobb
Maurice Herbert Dobb , was a British Marxist economist, and a lecturer 1924-1959 and Reader 1959-1976 at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 1948-1976.-Life:...
, the Cumming-Bruce twins, Margot Heinemann
Margot Heinemann
Margot Claire Heinemann was a British Marxist writer, drama scholar, and leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain ....
and "the beautiful Eileen Wynne that "it was noticeable how many of these extreme left-wingers came from privileged upper-class homes" (Reminiscences of a Happy Life, p.171)
Life as a poet
Madge's development as a poet is amply revealed in his notebooks and in numerous files of verse dating from as early as 1920, when he had yet to reach double-figures. His Cambridge student days afforded the opportunity to establish connections with leading left-wing poets of the 1930s, although he left Magdalene College without a degree. Students of twentieth-century literature will find among his papers lively anecdotal information about key figures of the day, including W. H. AudenW. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...
, Christopher Isherwood
Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an English-American novelist.-Early life and work:Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, was stationed...
and T. S. Eliot. Eliot was Madge's editor at Faber
Faber and Faber
Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...
(the company published his poetry as The Disappearing Castle (1937) and The Father Found (1940)) and published some of his work in The Criterion
The Criterion (magazine)
The Criterion was a British literary magazine published from October 1922 to January 1939. The Criterion was, for most of its run, a quarterly journal, although for a period in 1927-28 it was published monthly. It was created by the poet, dramatist, and literary critic T. S...
; he even pulled strings to help Madge secure a 'real' job as a Daily Mirror reporter in 1935 (dispiriting work as it turned out, but good grounding for his burgeoning interest in sociology and the experience of 'the masses'). Nine of his poems appeared in The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) and W. B. Yeats made further selections for The Oxford Book of Modern English Verse (1938) in which Madge appeared alongside Auden, Stephen Spender
Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work...
, Louis MacNeice
Louis MacNeice
Frederick Louis MacNeice CBE was an Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis; nicknamed "MacSpaunday" as a group — a name invented by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco...
and C. Day Lewis. Faber published two volumes of his poetry: The Disappearing Castle (1937) and The Father Found (1940). By the early 1940s, sociological work had become all-consuming, and it was not until retirement that Madge found renewed opportunity to write. His collected verse was eventually published as Of Love, Time and Places (Anvil, 1994).
Critical reaction to Madge's poetry is well documented throughout the Archive and ranges from informal correspondence (early praise from Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
and John Masefield
John Masefield
John Edward Masefield, OM, was an English poet and writer, and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967...
) to transcriptions of ambivalent, yet often prescient, reviews in the press. The autobiography contains his own analysis of his poems and comments on their inspiration. Many autograph notebooks record the creative process. Among his non-sociological prose works are early short stories, an essay "Notes on the Technique of Poetry" (from the 1930s), and schoolboy essays on Blake and Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
. Published works present include Myth, Metaphor and the World Picture, a study of metaphor in literature, contrasted with its use in religious symbolism.
Life as a sociologist
The poet Madge's early, vigorous output diminished after 1940 as the sociologist in him won out. A chance encounter with Tom HarrissonTom Harrisson
Major Tom Harnett Harrisson DSO OBE was a British polymath. In the course of his life he was an ornithologist, explorer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, guerrilla, ethnologist, museum curator, archaeologist, documentarian, film-maker, conservationist, and writer...
through the pages of the New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
in 1937 led to the pair's establishment of Mass-Observation
Mass-Observation
Mass Observation was a United Kingdom social research organisation founded in 1937. Their work ended in the mid 1960s but was revived in 1981. The Archive is housed at the University of Sussex....
, a unique social experiment to record the thoughts of 'ordinary' people on contemporary subjects. The wide-ranging and demanding work of this radical survey organisation triggered further studies conducted for other bodies, including the National Council for Social and Economic Research (1940-42) and Political & Economic Planning (1943). Madge became a director of Pilot Press in 1944 and published a quarterly magazine, Pilot Papers, with sociological essays by non-academics, copies of which are included in the Archive.
From 1947 Madge was Social Development Officer for Stevenage New Town
Stevenage
Stevenage is a town and borough in Hertfordshire, England. It is situated to the east of junctions 7 and 8 of the A1, and is between Letchworth Garden City to the north, and Welwyn Garden City to the south....
, until in 1950 he took the first chair of sociology at the University of Birmingham. This he held until retirement in 1970, despite his lack of academic training and personal doubts about the validity of the discipline as it then stood. In the first decade of his tenure he worked for the United Nations' agencies in Asia and Africa. His documents of the time, and later recollections of the academic life contained within his papers, illuminate the volatility of the 1960s, including the student unrest of 1968.
Private life
In 1938, he married the poet Kathleen RaineKathleen Raine
Kathleen Jessie Raine was a British poet, critic, and scholar writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founder member of the Temenos Academy.-Life:Raine was...
(previously married to Hugh Sykes Davies
Hugh Sykes Davies
Hugh Sykes Davies was an English poet, novelist and communist who was one of a small group of 1930s British surrealists.Davies was born in Yorkshire to a Methodist minister and his wife. He went to Kingswood School, Bath and studied at Cambridge, where he co-edited a student magazine called...
), and in 1942 Inez Spender (née Inez Maria Pearn, previously married to Stephen Spender
Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work...
).
His archived correspondence with Kathleen and Inez is particularly revealing. Often tortuous relationships within a close-knit circle of peers are recorded with candour. Madge's letters to Inez also record his work with Mass-Observation and the Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
in some detail. Inez died in 1976.
From his marriage to Raine he had two children: Anna and James. James married Jennifer Alliston, daughter of the architect Jane Drew
Jane Drew
Dame Jane Drew, DBE, FRIBA was an English modernist architect and town planner. She qualified at the AA School in London, and prior to World War II became one of the leading exponents of the Modern Movement in London....
from her first husband James Alliston.
In 1979 he married Evelyn Brown, who died in 1984.
Books
- Grids, perspectival space, and rules of deduction: Of Love, Time, and Places; Selected Poems (1994) Anvil.
- Charles Madge & Humphrey Jennings, eds. May the Twelfth, Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937, by over two hundred observers, London, Faber & Faber, 1937. ISBN 0571148727
External links
- Bolton Museums potted biography
- Archives http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/0402cm.html