C. P. Snow, Baron Snow

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Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow, CBE (15 October 1905–1 July 1980) was a scientist and novelist.

Contents

[edit] Life

Born in Leicester, he was educated at University College, Leicester and the University of Cambridge, where he became a Fellow of Christ's College in 1930. He was knighted in 1957 and made a life peer as Baron Snow, of the City of Leicester, in 1964. He served as an assistant to the Minister of Technology in the Labour government of Harold Wilson. Friends included the mathematician G. H. Hardy, the physicist P.M.S. (later Lord) Blackett and the X-ray crystallographer J. D. Bernal.[1]

C.P. Snow was married to the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson.

[edit] Work

Snow's first novel was the whodunit Death under Sail (1932). He also wrote a biography of Anthony Trollope.

However, he is much better known as the author of a sequence of political novels entitled Strangers and Brothers depicting intellectuals in academic and government settings in the modern era. The Masters is the best known novel of the sequence and deals with the internal politics of a Cambridge college as it prepared to elect a new master. It has all the appeal of being an insider’s view and it reveals how concerns other than the strictly academic influence the decisions of supposedly objective scholars. The Masters and The New Men were jointly awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1954.[2] The Corridors of Power added a phrase to the language of the day.

In The Realists, an examination of the work of eight novelists: Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Benito Pérez Galdós, Henry James and Marcel Proust, Snow makes a robust defence of the realistic novel.

[edit] Notable views and insights

Snow is most noted for his lectures and books regarding his concept of "The Two Cultures", as developed in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). Here he notes that the breakdown of communication between the sciences and the humanities is a major hindrance to solving the world's problems.

In particular, Snow argues that the quality of education in the world is on the decline. For example, many scientists have never read Charles Dickens, but artistic intellectuals are equally non-conversant with science. He wrote:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, law of entropy. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.

Snow's lecture aroused considerable ferment at the time of its delivery, partly because of the uncompromising style in which he stated his case. He was strongly criticised by the literary critic F. R. Leavis. The dispute even inspired a comic song on the subject of the second law of thermodynamics from Flanders and Swann.

Snow wrote:

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

Snow also took note of another divide; that between rich and poor nations.

[edit] Other Achievements

Academic Offices
Preceded by
Robert Boothby		 Rector of the University of St Andrews
1961 - 1964		 Succeeded by
John Knewstub Maurice Rothenstein


[edit] See also

[edit] Works

[edit] Fiction

[edit] Strangers and Brothers Sequence

  • Time of Hope, 1949
  • George Passant (first published as Strangers and Brothers), 1940
  • The Conscience of the Rich, 1958
  • The Light and the Dark, 1947
  • The Masters, 1951
  • The New Men, 1954
  • Homecomings, 1956
  • The Affair, 1959
  • The Corridors of Power, 1963
  • The Sleep of Reason, 1968
  • Last Things, 1970

[edit] Other Fiction

  • Death Under Sail, 1932
  • The Search, 1934
  • The Malcontents, 1972
  • In Their Wisdom, 1974
  • A Coat of Varnish, 1979

[edit] Non-fiction

  • Science and Government, 1961
  • The two cultures and a second look, 1963
  • Variety of men, 1967
  • The State of Siege, 1968
  • Public Affairs, 1971
  • Trollope, 1975
  • The Realists, 1978
  • The Physicists, 1981

[edit] References

  1. ^ Snow P (2006) C. P. Snow Christ's College Magazine 231, 67–9
  2. ^ The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes: The Prize Winners

[edit] External link

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