Knowledge, unity, responsibility: the left book club movement, 1936-1945

© 2016 Dr. Chloe Elizabeth WardIn the late 1930s, as political darkness drew on Europe, tens of thousands of Britons chose books as their route to stopping fascism and war. The publisher Victor Gollancz founded the Left Book Club (LBC), an anti-fascist, subscription-based book club, in 1936. Historians have cited the LBC as a proxy for a Popular Front in Britain, and argued it won converts for socialism in advance of the Labour Party’s 1945 General Election victory. This thesis expands the purview of studies of the LBC to include the LBC movement, convened among its 57,000 members and centring on its 1200 local discussion circles across Britain. Using a diverse and expansive archive, and methods associated with cultural history and the study of social movements, this thesis provides new insights into the LBC’s contributions to electoral politics and a wider political culture in the 1930s and 1940s. This thesis examines how members worked through the central contradiction of the LBC and the wider, anti-fascist political alliance. Gollancz founded the LBC as an instrument of mass education for democratic citizenship; his allies in the Communist Party of Great Britain saw it as an instrument of Popular Front politics. The LBC movement mediated the most sectional political claims offered in its books, situating them instead inside an inclusive, ‘democratic’ culture. Members did so in personal and collective engagements with LBC books; interventions in civic life and local political debate; and mobilisations for a United or Popular Front, humanitarian aid to Republican Spain and China, against Appeasement, and, during the Second World War, against past Tory domestic and foreign policy and for a socialist peace. The LBC movement helped diversify political debate in the 1930s, made socialism commensurable to democracy, and took part in the reconstruction of public politics on inclusive, deliberative, sober, and rational lines. In these respects, it aided the Labour Party’s attempts to commend itself to, particularly, the lower middle-class voting public