Charles Madge (1912-1996), was an English
poet,
journalist and
sociologist, now most remembered as one of the
founders 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.
Early life
He was
born in Johannesburg
. 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.
Although Madge worked successfully as both a poet and a
sociologist, there was little congruence between the two in his
life and his early promise in the former was soon eclipsed by the
demands of the latter. Precociously talented as a poet, his work
received greatest recognition in the 1930s when T. S. Eliot was his
editor and Faber his publisher.
Faber and Faber published his poetry
as
The Disappearing Castle (1937) and
The Father
Found (1940).
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. Auden, Christopher Isherwood
and T. S. Eliot. Eliot was Madge's editor at Faber 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 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.
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 Harrisson 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.
Private life
In 1938, he married the poet
Kathleen
Raine (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, daughter of the architect
Jane Drew 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
Notes
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