Lord Snow of Leicester was born at 40 Richmond Road Leicester. This plaque is displayed opposite his birthplace.
Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow (15 October 1905 – 1 July 1980[1]) was an English novelist andphysical chemist who also served in several important positions in theBritish Civil Service and briefly in theUK government.[2][3] He is best known for his series of novels known collectively asStrangers and Brothers, and for "The Two Cultures", a 1959 lecture in which he laments the gulf between scientists and "literary intellectuals".[4][5][6][7]
Born inLeicester to William Snow, a church organist and choirmaster, and his wife Ada,[8] Charles Snow was the second of four boys, his brothers being Harold, Eric andPhilip Snow,[9] and was educated atAlderman Newton's School.[1][10]
In 1923, he passed the intermediate British School Certificate, but remained at Alderman Newton's to work as a laboratory assistant for a further two years.[11] In 1925 he began aUniversity of London external degree in science atUniversity College, Leicester, graduating with a first in chemistry in 1927 and an MSc the following year.[12][13] Upon leaving Leicester, Snow gained a prestigious Keddey-Fletcher-Warr postgraduate studentship worth £200, allowing him to embark on doctoral research atChrist's College, Cambridge.[14] He received hisPhD in physics from Cambridge in 1930, with a thesis on theinfrared spectra of simplediatomic molecules.[15][16]
In 1930 he became aFellow of Christ's College. After aNature paper on a new method of synthesisingVitamin A turned out to be incorrect, he withdrew from further scientific research.[17]
Snow served in several senior civil service positions: as technical director of theMinistry of Labour from 1940 to 1944, and as a civil service commissioner from 1945 to 1960. He was appointed a Commander of theOrder of the British Empire (CBE) in the1943 New Year Honours.[18] Snow was among the 2,300 names of prominent persons listed on theNazis'Special Search List, of those who were to be arrested on the invasion of Great Britain and turned over to theGestapo.[19]
In 1944, he was appointed director of scientific personnel for theEnglish Electric Company. Later he became physicist-director.[20] In this capacity he was to employ his former studentEric Eastwood.
Snow married the novelistPamela Hansford Johnson in 1950; they had one son. Friends included the mathematicianG. H. Hardy, for whom he would write a biographical foreword inA Mathematician's Apology, the physicistPatrick Blackett, the X-ray crystallographerJ. D. Bernal, the cultural historianJacques Barzun and the polymathGeorge Steiner.[24][25] At Christ's College he tutored H. S. Hoff – later better known as the novelistWilliam Cooper. The two became friends, worked together in the civil service and wrote versions of each other into their novels: Snow was the model for the college dean, Robert, in Cooper'sScenes from Provincial Life sequence.[26] In 1960, Snow gave theGodkin Lectures atHarvard University, about the clashes betweenHenry Tizard and F. Lindemann (laterLord Cherwell), both scientific advisors to British governments around the time of the Second World War. The lectures were subsequently published asScience and Government. For the academic year 1961 to 1962, Snow and his wife both served as Fellows on the faculty in the Center for Advanced Studies atWesleyan University.[27][28][29]
Snow's first novel was awhodunit,Death under Sail (1932). In 1975 he wrote a biography ofAnthony Trollope. He is better known as the author of a sequence of novels entitledStrangers and Brothers in which he depicts intellectuals in modern academic and government settings. The best-known of the sequence isThe Masters. It deals with the internal politics of a Cambridge college as it prepares to elect a new master. With the appeal of an insider's view, the novel depicts concerns other than the strictly academic that influence decisions of supposedly objective scholars.The Masters andThe New Men were jointly awarded theJames Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1954.[30]Corridors of Power added a phrase to the language of the day. In 1974, Snow's novelIn Their Wisdomwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize.[31]
On 7 May 1959, Snow delivered aRede Lecture calledThe Two Cultures, which provoked "widespread and heated debate".[3][32] Subsequently, published asThe Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, the lecture argued that the breakdown of communication between the "two cultures" of modern society – the sciences and the humanities – was 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. 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 theSecond Law of Thermodynamics. 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 ofShakespeare's?'
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean bymass, oracceleration, 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 theirNeolithic ancestors would have had.
The satiristsFlanders and Swann used the first part of this quotation as the basis for their short monologue and song, "First and Second Law".
As delivered in 1959, Snow's Rede Lectures specifically condemned the British educational system, as having since the Victorian period over-rewarded the humanities (especiallyLatin andGreek) at the expense ofscience education. He believed that in practice this deprived British elites (in politics, administration, and industry) of adequate preparation for managing the modern scientific world. By contrast, Snow said, German and American schools sought to prepare their citizens equally in the sciences and humanities, and better scientific teaching enabled those countries' rulers to compete more effectively in a scientific age. Later discussion ofThe Two Cultures tended to obscure Snow's initial focus on differences between British systems (of both schooling and social class) and those of competing countries.
Snow was attacked byF. R. Leavis in his Richmond Lecture of 1962 whose subject was "The Two Cultures", something that has come to be referred to as "the two cultures controversy".[33][34] Although it was seen as a personal attack against Snow, Leavis maintained that he was targeting how public debates worked.[34]
^Ellis, David, ed. (2013),"The Richmond lecture",Memoirs of a Leavisite: The Decline and Fall of Cambridge English, Liverpool University Press, pp. 67–73,ISBN978-1-78138-711-5, retrieved19 August 2023{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
Quotations related toC. P. Snow at Wikiquote