Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Archives

Reviews Adelyne revisited: militant feminism and feminist antimilitarism during World War I by K.E. Garay Catherine Marshall, C.K. Ogden, and Mary Sargant Florence. Militarism versus Feminism: Writings on Women and War. Edited by Margaret Kamester and Jo Vellacott. London: Virago Press, 1987. Pp. x, 178. C$IO.95 (paper). "DEAR Russ, THIS is a fair exchange for Og." With this warmly irreverent salutation to Russell begins a note of 13 October 1921 from C.K. Ogden, one on whom the accolade polymath is aptly bestowed. Ogden (1889-1957) devoted the greater part of his life to a crusade for linguistic reform, from his early seminal work, The Meaning ofMeaning (1923, coauthored with LA. Richards) to his language simplification project, Basic English. He was also an eccentric, an omnivorous collector of clocks, shoes, masks, musical boxes and, above all, books (and hence of houses in which to store them). He was, at various times, a bookseller, a dealer in scrap paper, an editor and a publisher as well as, at all times, an indefatigable writer. The connection with Russell, which was to be a close and enduring one, was first established when, as a Cambridge undergraduate and cofounder of the Heretics, a society at once less exclusive and less pretentious than the Apostles, Ogden managed to lure the philosopher to address the group. Through the turbulent years of the First World War Ogden, by means of his boldly dissenting weekly, The Cambridge Magazine, consistently upheld the right of free expression for all who opposed the conflict, and he risked the censor's wrath in order to publish Russell's articles and letters and to protest the treatment accorded him by his college and by his country. In 1925 Russell and his wife, Dora, named Ogden as their executor and as joint guardianI of their children, in the event of their deaths. Ogden also served as a sort of business and literary agent for Russell, booking halls in London for his lectures when Cambridge refused to accommodate him and assuming the burdensome financial arrange- \ Along with Dora's sister Biddy. See Russell's leller of 22 January 1925 (RA REC. ACQ. 429[1J). 179 180 Russell winter 1987-88 ments, as well as proposing and editing books by both Russell and Dora duri,ng the 1920S.' This recently published collection of writings on the theme of the antithetical relationship of militarism to feminism is dominated by Ogden. It was from his articles, appearing first under his punning nom de plume of Adelyne More, in the Cambridge Magazine as well as under his own name in Common Cause and Jus Suffragii, that Militarism versus Feminism was drawn. The work was first published anonymously as a slim, soft-covered volume by Allen and Unwin in April 1915. The extent to which two of the pieces from which the book was compiled were the product of joint authorship remains a vexing question which the editors are unable to resolve.' The manuscript ofMilitarism versus Feminism4 is in no other hand but Ogden's, and the style is so distinctively his throughout that one is left to speculate that the contribution of Mary Sargant Florence, an accomplished artist' and active suffragist, may have been limited to providing Odgen with some of the geographical and literary allusions with which the work abounds." As those who know her work will expect,' Jo Vellacott, with the capable collaboration of Margaret Kamester, has done a scholarly job of editing. Ogden the obscure emerges, albeit incompletely, from the gloom, although one might wish that our pacifist/feminist editors had not chosen to introduce him thus: We would love to be able to produce the evidence that Adelyne More was yet another forgotten feminist and the sole author of the book. However, this was merely one of the several pseudonyms used by C.K. Ogden, the editor of the Cambridge Magazine.' Nor are Vellacott and Kamester content to leave the advocacy of the antimilitarist /feminist caiIse to their authors. Instead, our editors, while earnestly pro- , To Ogden, through his friend W.S. Stallybrass who was its director, can be attributed Russell's connection with the publishing house Kegan Paul, Trench and...