This book studies C.P. Snow¿s eleven-volume series of novels (Strangers and Brothers) as
documents detailing the social and political life of mid-twentieth-century Britain and points
out the uses for the novels in the academic study of that time period. Both Snow and his
central character Lewis S. Eliot started from unremarkable origins in terms of their mutual
background in the lower reaches of the middle class their dreams of success in their teen
years and their early professional education in a new struggling academic institution in the
mid-1920s. Neither could really be considered typical for men of their class. Eliot¿s working
life would include being a very minor town clerk a barrister an advisor to a powerful
industrialist a Cambridge don a moderately powerful civil servant and finally in early
retirement a writer. Eliot would befriend members of both the traditional and Jewish upper
classes scholars and brilliant scientists powerful behind-the-scenes civil servants
second-tier British and Nazi politicians financiers and industrialists Communists and
writers and artists providing a fairly broad overview of parts of the middle class and ruling
elites of the periods. Snow¿s sequence of novels is therefore useful to the historian of
twentieth-century Britain both in understanding the period as it recedes away from common
experience and in presenting the period in the classroom. Snow was a classic twentieth-century
writer who presented a more balanced account of the British «governing classes» of the middle
third of the twentieth century than did the upper-class (and would-be upper-class) or
working-class writers of the same period. His novels provide an insight that every student of
twentieth-century Britain must have on hand.
