Charles Henry Madge (10 October 1912 – 17 January 1996)[1] was an English poet, journalist and sociologist, now most remembered as a founder of Mass-Observation.
Madge's essay "Surrealism for the English" (New Verse magazine, December 1933) argued that potential English surrealist poets would need both a knowledge of "the philosophical position of the French surrealists" and "a knowledge of their own language and literature".
[4] Madge contributed the essay "Pens Dipped In Poison" (1934) to Left Review, a strong critique of the British intellectuals who had supported the First World War.
By the end of the 1930s, he was more involved in the Mass-Observation social research movement, which he co-founded in 1937, socialist realism (in theory) and Communism.
In 1942 he married Inez Pearn, a young novelist who published under the name of Elizabeth Lake.