Margaret Storm Jameson and the London PEN Centre: Mobilising Commitment1

Founded in London in October 1921 by Mrs. C. A. Dawson Scott, PEN (“Poets, Essayists and Novelists”) started life as a literary dining club, on the American model. Its beginnings were explicitly apolitical – refusal to take any particular political stand was one of the founding principles – and politeness was its watchword. John Galsworthy was invited to be first President, in preference to H. G. Wells, partly because he was “big enough to act as a magnet to draw in all the rest,” but mostly ..