BR TO PATRICIA RUSSELL, 20 OCT. 1935
BRACERS 20317. ALS. McMaster. Russell 31 (2011): 101–40
Edited by M.D. Stevenson. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

On Carlton Hotel letterhead
In train to Oslo1
Sunday, 20 October 1935

Dearest P. —

I am having a less busy time now. No lecture yesterday or today, today all day in train. Nice country but all alike. The best thing is the atmosphere which is incredibly clear. Yesterday morning the publisher Hansson took me over Stockholm Town Hall,2 a magnificent affair, but not modern in style. The afternoon was spent arguing with a philosopher named Wogau,3 who belongs to the “Upsala School”,4 of which I had never heard before.

In the evening I wrote to Crompton about his pie dish5 and your income.6 His letter asked a string of questions, all of which I have dealt with in my books, but I did my best to answer them.7

Hansson is a Henry George Liberal8 and insisted on my reading a book about “Govt. by Social Justice”.9 He is a masterful man, hard to disobey. There are few communists in Sweden because of the traditional hatred of Russia — most people are Social Democrats, but the institutions are Liberal, and I must say very successful. University teaching is free, and class divisions hardly exist except among a few old-fashioned people like the lady in the castle near Lund — and even she is addressed by her butler as thou.

I have to go to Bergen on Tuesday and then back to Oslo and then back to Bergen on Sunday, and sail Monday morning. It seems foolish, but they pay my fares, and I enjoy the train. It is a very sensational journey through snow mountains.

I suppose everybody is excited about the General Election. I wish the Labour Party was better.10 I shall be glad to get letters from you at Oslo. I love you

B

• 1

  [document] The letter was edited from ??. The letter was published in Michael D. Stevenson, ed., “‘No Poverty, Much Comfort, Little Wealth’: Bertrand Russell’s 1935 Scandinavian Tour”, Russell 31 (2011): 101–40 (at 130–2).

• 2

  Stockholm Town Hall Designed by Ragnar Östberg in the National Romantic style and constructed between 1911 and 1923, the rectangular, red-bricked Stockholm Town Hall is marked by an imposing 106-metre high tower on its southeast corner; it is the location of the annual banquet for Nobel prizewinners.

• 3

  philosopher named Wogau Konrad Marc-Wogau (1902–1991) completed his doctorate in philosophy at Uppsala University in 1932 and was appointed professor in theoretical philosophy there in 1946. Wogau seems to have been a good arguer, as he probably convinced BR at this meeting to allow a Swedish translation of “The Limits of Empiricism” to appear in Theoria, the journal he co-edited. The translation, “Empirismens gränser”, Theoria 2 (April 1936): 107–27, was a significant coup for a fledgling publication.

• 4

  “Upsala School” Founded by Axel Hägerström, professor of philosophy at Uppsala University from 1893 to 1933, the Uppsala school of philosophy rejected metaphysics and subjectivism and was the Swedish equivalent of the Vienna Circle and logical positivism (see Robert T. Sandin, “The Founding of the Uppsala School”, Journal of the History of Ideas 23 [1962]: 496–512).

• 5

  pie dish As BR recounts in the first volume of his Autobiography, Crompton Llewelyn Davies referred disparagingly to his manuscript on philosophy as his “pie-dish”. After losing the manuscript on a train in June 1935, Davies spent “most of his spare energy on trying to make up the work that was lost; but the pie-dish was never finished” (1: 62). Davies — BR’s last intimate friend from his undergraduate Cambridge days — died on 23 November 1935 shortly after BR returned from his Scandinavian tour. The pie-dish allusion is to a play of the same name written by George Fitzmaurice, which premiered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1908. In the play, the central character spends the last twenty years of his life in a futile attempt to make the perfect pie-dish.

• 6

  your income This matter seems to relate to the income Peter received from acting as BR’s secretary. BR listed his 1935–36 secretarial and typing expenses as £277.3.3; this figure declined sharply to only £29.1.7 in 1936–37, so a different arrangement was clearly entered into as a result of BR’s intervention.

• 7

  I did my best to answer them Neither Davies’ letter to BR nor BR’s reply is to be found in the Russell Archives.

• 8

  Hansson is a Henry George Liberal American reformer Henry George (1839–1897) advocated the taxation of land values to redress economic and social inequalities, most notably in Progress and Poverty (1879). Introduced to George’s ideas as an adolescent at Pembroke Lodge by his Aunt Agatha, BR strongly supported the single tax until the First World War, when the growth of monopolies and international finance “blurred the distinction between land and other forms of capital” (see “The Single Tax”, Papers 14: 432–3). Although BR stopped seeing land nationalization as an alternative to socialism, he nonetheless remained sympathetic to George’s general aims, writing in 1960 that “I have always been an admirer of Henry George, with whose writings I became acquainted when I was a boy, but they have not, in this country at least, become the programme of any politically important group. I regret this, but have never been able to do anything about it” (BR to William Krumreig, 3 Sept. 1960, RA1 720).

• 9

  book about “Govt. by Social Justice” Unidentified — Henry George did not publish a book with this title, and a book of the same title written by another author cannot be located.

• 10

  I wish the Labour Party was better. The 1935 General Election in the United Kingdom took place on 14 November. Under the leadership of Stanley Baldwin, National Government candidates secured more than 53% of the popular vote and nearly three-quarters of seats in Parliament, although these majorities were reduced from the landslide National Government victory in the 1931 election following Ramsay MacDonald’s defection from the Labour Party to lead the coalition. Despite BR’s negative opinion of MacDonald and the Conservative-dominated government he led before being replaced by Baldwin in 1935, BR remained surprisingly unenthusiastic about the Labour Party, noting in 1932 that Labour was “doing nothing” to confront the National Government “and has no programme” (quoted in SLBR 2: 308).