The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor by Jonathan Rose (review)

Every year yields a cornucopia of new books on Winston Churchill. This has never been truer than in the run up to 2015, which marks the 50th anniversary of the great man’s death. The market seems to have developed a hunger for relatively vacuous books on Churchill. A quick online search might yield countless books on Churchill’s wit, Churchill’s dining habits, or the way Churchill’s leadership style can be used in twenty-first-century business situations. There is also a surplus of Churchill biographies that seem to rely entirely on Martin Gilbert’s official biography and its companion volumes, rather than actual archival research. These books do a disservice to Churchill’s legacy because they further remove Churchill from historical scholarship and place him in a swamp of hagiography. However, a new trend in Churchillian historiography has been to place Churchill in his social and cultural contexts, treating him as serious historical subject rather than a cottage industry for amateur historians.

Jonathan Rose’s book certainly belongs to this new Churchill historiography. In fact, The Literary Churchill is a brilliant and very interesting volume. As a very well-written, original account, it is a refreshing change from many of the Churchill tomes that flood the market. With the exceptions of David Reynolds’s magisterial account of Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (2005) and Peter Clarke’s Mr. Churchill’s Profession: Statesman, Orator, Writer (2012), his prolific authorial output has remained a relatively under-researched aspect of Churchill’s life. Rose further distinguishes himself by following Churchill’s relationship with literature through his entire life, distinct from Reynolds’s focus on Churchill as a historian and Clark’s on Churchill as a professional journalist.

Furthermore, Rose’s methodology sets him apart. While the book is structured as a biography and treats “political history as literary history” (x), it embraces Churchill as a serious literary figure, which departs from the typical approach to Churchill’s life. This approach includes exploring Churchill’s role as a reader. Examining Churchill’s exposure to ideas and the ways they later manifested themselves in Churchill’s own work, whether literary or political, undoubtedly took a meticulous level of research. The evidence of this is clear from the author’s use of rarely examined archives such as the Charles Scribner’s Son’s collection at Princeton, the Mass Observation Archive in Brighton, and the H. G. Wells papers. These and other more traditional collections go on to reveal that Churchill “adapted” his famous phrase “blood, toil, tears and sweat” from Giuseppe Garibaldi and that he spent some time trying the exact phrase in various forms. Rose also illustrates the importance of Churchill’s enjoyment of the science fiction of H. G. Wells by linking Churchill’s fascination with air power to Wells’s The War in the Air (1908) and Churchill’s interest in developing the tank to Wells’s short story “The Land Ironclads.” The Literary Churchill is full of such details, and this is the area in which Rose’s work shines.

Rose’s exploration of Churchill as an author is fascinating and informing as well, in part because he examines this aspect of Churchill’s life across its various incarnations. Everything from Churchill’s speeches and journalism to his histories and biographies are touched on. Churchill’s only novel Savrola (1899) is also included in the survey. Another strength of Rose’s book is its contextualization of Churchill’s authorship in the political situation of the day. It is thus made clear that the publication of My Early Life (1931) was no coincidence in coming during Churchill’s political campaign to deny home rule to India. This contextualization is bolstered by Rose’s use of contemporary reviews and reflections of key figures in British politics—for instance, Stanley Baldwin’s remark that Churchill had “become once more the subaltern of...