Oswald Mosley - Literary Influences
Mosley the Reader
MOSLEY, Oswald Ernald (1896-1980), was born at Rollaston Hall, Staffordshire. He studied at Winchester (1909-1913) and was there confirmed as a member of the Church of England. Entering Sandhurst in 1914 he was commissioned into the cavalry before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps. Invalided out of active service Mosley spent the rest of the war at the Ministry of Munitions and the Foreign Office. Beginning his political career as a Conservative MP in 1918 he broke with that party to sit first as an Independent before joining the Labour Party and becoming an MP and then a junior minister in the government of 1929-31. Following the rejection of his proposals to mitigate the effects of the Slump, Mosley founded the New Party which failed at the polls in 1931. After this he took the step which would make him notorious, founding the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932 which he led until interned as a security risk in 1940. Although framing innovative solutions for Britain’s problems, Mosley became most associated in the British public mind with violence and anti-Semitism. This view of him ensured that his attempts to re-enter politics after 1945 were doomed to failure.
The pattern of Mosley’s reading reflected the vicissitudes of his career. During times of intense commitment he relied on the research of assistants but periods of enforced idleness were seized upon for personal study. He described his reading whilst recuperating from wartime injuries – including Thomas Macaulay (1800-59), Edward Gibbon (1737-94), and theosophist works – as ‘omnivorous and voracious’. Having decided to enter politics he read the speeches of great parliamentarians. The hiatus in his parliamentary career in the 1920s and the year before the founding of the BUF were similar periods of concentrated study. In this respect at least Mosley lived up to his ideal of the man of thought and action. His thought is distinctive in his attempt to synthesise a reasoned critique of liberal capitalism and proposals for its transformation with the stress on authoritarianism and vitalism more commonly associated with fascism. During the 1920s his economic ideas were influenced by John Maynard Keynes’ (1883–1946) Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) and the ‘underconsumptionist’ thesis of J.A. Hobson (1858-1940) espoused by the Independent Labour Party. The other side of Mosley’s thinking was influenced in the 1920s and after by George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), in particular The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), and Back to Methususelah (1921). Shaw remained an intellectual hero for Mosley throughout his life but he also read more widely during the 1930s, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844-1900) Thus Spoke Zarathusta (1883-91) and he was strongly influenced by Oswald Spengler’s (1880-1936) critique of European society, The Decline of the West (1918-22). During his wartime internment (1940-43), Mosley learnt German and immersed himself deeply in modern and classical philosophy, drama, and literature – although, apart from Stendhal’s [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783-1842) The Red and the Black (1831), he never cared much for the novel. Of his wartime reading Karl Jung (1875-1961) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) probably had most influence on him. He committed many passages from Goethe’s Faust (1808, 1832) and Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) to memory and later wrote an introduction for a translation of the former.
Bibliography
Archives:
Mosley Papers, Special Collections, University of Birmingham Library.
Printed Works
Mosley, Diana. Loved Ones: Pen Portraits. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985.
Mosley, Nicholas. Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896-1933. London: Secker and Warburg, 1982, and Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933-1980. London: Secker and Warburg, 1983.
Mosley, Oswald. My Life. London: Nelson, 1968.
Ritchel, Daniel. The Politics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in Britain in the 1930s. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.
Skidelsky, Robert. Oswald Mosley. London: Papermac, 1990; first published London: Macmillan, 1975.
Philip M. Coupland
University of Glasgow
Scotland, United Kingdom
This article originally appeared in: in John Powell (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Influences: The Twentieth Century, 1914-2000 (Westport Conn.: Greeenwood Press, 2004).
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