Kingsley Martin and Britain in the 1920s: The Crisis of Democracy

Abstract

Kingsley Martin was the editor of the New Statesman from 1930-1960 and this part of his professional life has already been heavily scrutinised by academics and more general writers alike. The purpose of this thesis however, is to examine and explain his work in the immediately preceding decade, the 1920s, and place it in its intellectual context. In 1922 Kingsley Martin graduated with a first class honours in history from Cambridge University. He had already published articles while still an undergraduate but from 1923 on his employment as an academic and a journalist afforded him more opportunities for comment on the problems Britain faced in the 1920s. These problems were many and serious; mass unemployment, the general strike of 1926, the position of the newspaper industry in wider society, the threat of Bolshevik revolution in Britain, even the continuation of democracy itself, so newly installed, was under consideration. Martin made serious contributions to these debates, contributions that were published in places as diverse as the Manchester Guardian, where he was employed as a leader writer from 1927-1930, and relatively small circulation journals such as the Nation and Athenaeum and Economica, the in-house journal of the LSE. Martin’s work still finds its way into contemporary historiography, particularly on the subject of press theory, and it is this fact, together with the obvious relevance of Martin’s 1920s work to his subsequent employment as editor of the New Statesman, that gives this thesis both its originality and modern relevance. One thing Martin’s 1920s work did was to convince John Maynard Keynes, co-owner of the journal, that he was a suitable candidate for the editor’s chair at the New Statesman when it became available in 1930.