Charles Madge

Charles Henry Madge (10 October 1912 – 17 January 1996), was an English poet, journalist and sociologist, now most remembered as a founder of Mass-Observation.

Charles Henry Madge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, son of Lieut-Col. Charles Madge (1874-1916) and Barbara Hylton-Foster (1882-1967). He was educated at Winchester College and studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge. 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. Madge's essay "Surrealism for the English" (New Verse magazine, December 1933) argued that potential English surrealist poets would need both a knowledge of "the philosophical position of the French surrealists" and "a knowledge of their own language and literature". Madge contributed the essay "Pens Dipped In Poison" (1934) to Left Review, a strong critique of the British intellectuals who had supported the First World War. 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. By the 1940s, however, Madge was moving away from Communism.

From 1950 to 1970, Madge was Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham.

Faber and Faber published his poetry as The Disappearing Castle (1937) and The Father Found (1940).

In 1938, Charles Madge married the poet Kathleen Raine (previously married to Hugh Sykes Davies). He had two children by Kathleen Raine: Anna Madge (b. 1934) and James Wolf Madge (1936-2006) who married Jennifer Alliston, daughter of architects Jane Drew and James Thomas Alliston. In 1942 he married Agnes Marie Pearn (known as Inez, previously married to Stephen Spender). In 1984, he married Evelyn Brown.

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