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Ross Mckibbin St John's College, Oxford Dr Ross McKibbin, St John's College, Oxford OX1 3JP. ross.mckibbin@sjc.ox.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic
The English Historical Review, Volume CXXIII, Issue 502, June 2008, Pages 651–678, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cen162
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01 June 2008
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Ross Mckibbin, Politics and the Medical Hero: A.J. Cronin's The Citadel, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXIII, Issue 502, June 2008, Pages 651–678, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cen162
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IN February 1938, according to a Gallup Poll, A.J. Cronin's recently published novel, The Citadel (1937), ‘impressed' more people than any other book except the Bible.1 A.J. Cronin was perhaps the most successful novelist of the 1930s, and the most successful of his novels was The Citadel. This sold more copies, and faster, than any other hardback novel of the decade. It was to become an equally popular film. The Citadel, to the extent that any novel can claim such a status, was perhaps the representative novel of the 1930s. Its popularity is more surprising in that as a highly political–medical novel, it did not have the usual ingredients of the best-seller. Cronin's standing has nonetheless largely been ignored by historians. Even D.L. LeMahieu, in what is probably the best study of the literary–political culture of the interwar years, makes no mention of Cronin, though in the development of a broadly based ‘democratic' culture—which LeMahieu sees as a product of that period—Cronin is probably as significant a figure as J.B. Priestley, the author LeMahieu argues best represents that culture.2 The purpose of this article is to account for The Citadel's remarkable popularity within the political culture of the 1930s, and also to suggest reasons why Cronin was unable to repeat that success as a medical–political novelist, though he tried at least twice to do so.
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