William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 9780748643721

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William Morris and the Idea of Community

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Volumes available in the series: In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres Saverio Tomaiuolo 978 0 7486 4115 4 Hbk Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism Deaglán Ó Donghaile 978 0 7486 4067 6 Hbk William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 Anna Vaninskaya 978 0 7486 4149 9 Hbk

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William Morris and the Idea of Community Romance, History and Propaganda 1880–1914

Anna Vaninskaya

Edinburgh University Press

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© Anna Vaninskaya, 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4149 9 (hardback) The right of Anna Vaninskaya to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part I 1 2

3 4

1

11 34

History

The Dark Ages The Middle Ages

Part III 5 6

viii

Romance

The Romance Revival The Paradoxes of Mr Morris

Part II

vi

75 115

Propaganda

Socialist Hybrids Education and Association

137 175

Bibliography

204

Index

221

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Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and, simultaneously, an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenthcentury literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the so-called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually openminded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of their subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nineteenth century. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from

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convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and to augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar, and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of a few paragraphs from Chapter 1 have already appeared in print in ‘The Late-Victorian Romance Revival: A Generic Excursus’, English Literature in Transition 51.1 (January 2008): 57–79 and ‘Learning to Read Trash: Late-Victorian Schools and the Penny Dreadful’, The History of Reading, Vol. 2: Evidence from the British Isles, c. 1750–1950, ed. Katie Halsey and W. R. Owens (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); from Chapter 3 in ‘William Morris’s Germania: The Roots of Socialism’, William Morris in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Rosie Miles and Phillippa Bennett (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010): 169–92; from Chapter 4 in ‘Dreams of John Ball: Reading the Peasants’ Revolt in the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 31.1 (March 2009): 45–57; and from Chapters 5 and 6 in ‘William Morris: The Myth of the Fall’, Journal of William Morris Studies 18.4 (Summer 2010): 48–57 and ‘Literature and Propaganda: The Socialist Utopia of Robert Blatchford’, Utopia Matters: Theory, Politics, Literature and the Arts, ed. Fátima Vieira and Marinela Freitas (Porto: Editora da Universidade do Porto, 2005): 169–82.

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Introduction

Every period is characterised by certain widespread idées fixes, by favoured models or paradigms that migrate from field to field, sparking the most varied debates in the process. Eighteenth-century stadial theories of development took on a new life in nineteenth-century evolutionism, concepts from biology structured thinking in anthropology, sociology and philosophy, categories from philology entered historiography and the comparative study of myth and religion. And inseparable from all of these was the Victorian obsession with setting up contrasts between different types of social organisation. Writers returned again and again to the dichotomous nature of social types: organic vs mechanical, barbarian vs civilised, simple vs complex, traditional community – based on kinship ties and common ownership – vs modern society. Many viewed the history of Western civilisation in terms of a linear progression or decline, a movement from intuitive and organic kinds of association to the rational and instrumental. They traced the shift from the local village or town community to the large-scale national and international society, from the agricultural or handicraft-based family or clan governed by custom, to the industrial and commercial metropolis full of unconnected individuals ruled by state-administered legislation and interacting through self-interest in the market. They observed how capitalist production and the interchange of independent contracting parties had superseded community folk life, how individuals and the authoritative state had taken the place of fellowships and commonwealths. But not everyone translated the analytical distinction into a historical one: despite being conceptual opposites community and modernity could coexist in practice. Not only was it the case that different nations of the world occupied different stages of the evolutionary ladder – complex capitalist civilisations thriving contemporaneously with simple village communities – but elements of the two formations were often to be found in solution in the same society. Whether their relation was one

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of contradiction or of synthesis remained, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Some held, with the anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin, that ‘throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposing tendencies have confronted each other: the Roman and the Popular traditions; the imperial and the federalist; the authoritarian and the libertarian’ (1969, 55). But there was more to it than merely identifying the two opposing tendencies: almost inevitably the Victorians identified with one of them as well. Since the days of the classical pastoral, nostalgia for a simple and organic way of life had been a projection of its opposite, a longing for a lost (perhaps fictive) ideal by those who were far removed from it. Some of the most famous theorists of the disenchantment of modern society and some of the fiercest advocates of the idea of community, forever past or only just slipping away – Carlyle and Ruskin in England, Weber and Tönnies in Germany, Durkheim in France – appeared in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, in a Europe of globalising capitalism and centralising states. In fact, a whole school of writers challenged the ‘unwholesome idolatry of the state’, as well as ‘the individualism of thinkers . . . who conceived the bonds of society in terms of the recognition of personal rights’. Both statism and individualism ignored ‘the rich associational life by which they were bridged’, the ‘“spontaneous power of self-development” possessed by groups’ (Stapleton 2000, 260–1). The more optimistic chose instead to celebrate the fecundity of existing communal expression, the ‘gigantic development of associated life’, as Josef Maria Baernreither dubbed it in English Associations of Working Men (published in English in 1889). Contemporary German and French historians and political economists studied English trade unions, cooperatives and friendly societies, which along with the chapels, bands, clubs, youth organisations and other ‘voluntary institutions’, ‘carried in their rule books the concept of “association”, “union”, “federation”, “guild”, “league”, “connexion”’ (Colls 2004, 299, 302). But not all late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century observers were interested in or aware of the thriving associations. Instead of seeing the period as one of unprecedented flowering of conscious communal life, they mourned the inevitable passing of traditional ties. ‘Contrasting the old and new social orders, [they] feared that the disintegrating force of “individualism” had “‘destroyed’ the stability of social conditions”,’ and restoring the ideal of community became ‘the most important task’ of ‘fin de siècle social and political debate’. Everyone, from the philosophic Idealists to the Positivists, from neo-feudalist social critics to the founders of the Settlement and Ethical movements, was preoccupied with communal values and identities. ‘The opening of the twentieth century finds us all

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. . . “thinking in communities”,’ said Sidney Webb (Otter 1996, 149, 148, 150). Indeed, Carlyle and Ruskin did not have the last word on the subject, and the debates this book examines did not invoke them as names of the first order. The appeal of community reached far beyond the familiar tradition of anti-capitalist medievalism to fields, genres and subcultures rarely considered together. Why did the writers of a new type of fiction for a new mass audience, the happy beneficiaries of a capitalist publishing market, constantly refer to primitive communal modes of storytelling? Why did newly professional academics make the tribal and village community the focus of their most cutting-edge endeavours? Why did the ideologues and activists of the most radical and forward-looking political movement hearken back to the associational ethic of medieval guilds? All three groups were the latest products of modern society, each with its own understanding and sometimes theorisation of that society’s workings. Their interest in and advocacy of community were dependent upon, not to say symbiotic with, the structures and processes of the mature capitalist state, and their attempts to negotiate this paradoxical position are the subject of the book. The development of modernity gave rise not only to dreams about past community, but to attempts to regain it by making use, in a further ironic twist, of the most modern tools then available: from trade publication, to anthropological theory, to socialist propaganda. What were the ramifications of these ironies in the fields of popular literature, national historiography and socialist politics, at whose focal point stood the best-known British advocate of community of the late nineteenth century – William Morris? Literature, history and politics did not (and do not) exist in isolation from one another: authors, historians and political activists all had something to contribute to the debate. And in the case of William Morris – the polymath and iconic representative of late-Victorian interdisciplinarity – all three were joined in the same person. Morris believed that in the future ‘the society of so called freecontract’ ‘enforced by the State’ would yield ‘to that of communal organisation’ (1936, 2: 358, 460), and it was hardly a coincidence that the famous utopian romance that portrayed this future, News from Nowhere, was written during the height of the romance and socialist ‘revivals’ of the 1880s and 90s. The narrative of this book takes its cue from Morris himself and proceeds from the realm of publishers, reviews and adventure bestsellers, via debates in the pages of weighty historical tomes, to the headquarters of revolutionary parties, to streetcorners and shabby lecture halls. In each of these domains the dream of community clashed with the reality of state and market – sometimes

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literally, as in the quest for profits or electoral victories, sometimes in the imaginary or reconstructed worlds of fiction and social theory – and the three parts of the book focus on each of these domains in turn. Scholars interested in Morris have long known about the paradoxical relationship between communist ideology and capitalist enterprise in his arts and crafts projects and the design movement he helped found. But few have linked this specific dilemma to the more general arguments about community and modernity that agitated late nineteenth-century culture. Although Morris stands at the core of the study, it is merely as the most representative figure of an extensive and diversified network. The initial sharp focus on his late romances and their immediate literary context accordingly opens out into a wider consideration of the traditions of historical scholarship and socialist politics, the latter of which continued to be shaped by the ideas Morris treated in microcosm in his fiction for decades after his death. What did Morris and the other writers, critics, historians and political activists – the popular and the quickly forgotten, the brighter and lesser stars of the surrounding intellectual firmament – mean when they said ‘community’? How was the concept constructed, to what uses was it put, and how were its meanings appropriated? To what extent did the notion of a primitive or a socialist community depend upon an antithetical conception of modern capitalist society? One can begin to answer these questions by looking at the paradoxical discourses surrounding the late-Victorian mass-market romance. Although it was a product of the newest developments in the world of trade publishing, favourably disposed literary critics and authors did not like to dwell on its capitalist credentials, and instead insisted on viewing it as the typical expression of the ‘infancy of letters’ in the ‘childhood of the human race’. They were not touting a new product in the literary marketplace but reviving a primal and universal mode rooted in the constants of human nature. Most commentators limited their public recognition of market mechanisms to treatments of cheap literature, such as the penny dreadful of the working classes. The commercial origin of the middle-class New Romance was an almost taboo subject, if not for its detractors, then certainly for champions of the revival who engaged in the construction of a public image which erased all traces of the mode’s modern material provenance. They concentrated instead on generic issues, redrawing old battle-lines between romance and realism, and writing manifestos advocating action and idealism in place of modern analysis and morbidity. The self-mythologising of romance revivalists as heroes defending a morally salubrious fiction from the filthy or enervating clutches of realism did not take account of the inconvenient similarity between their market practices and those

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of the despised purveyors of penny adventure, nor of their fictions’ actual distance from the ‘popular’ literature of the pre-modern peoples they were supposed to be emulating. A close reading of several representative works against William Morris’s community-centred tales of the late 1880s and 1890s only serves to confirm the New Romance’s individualist ethos. But Morris, though a socialist, wrote for the same market as his less progressive peers, and while his romances may have celebrated a collectivist ethic, they reached their readership through the agency of the same trade publishers that disseminated the latest bestsellers. Although Morris was a generation older than most of the revival’s practitioners, and has not been considered in connection with it before, his late prose romances not only appeared during the peak of the phenomenon, but betrayed many affinities with it. In fact, the contradiction between Morris’s two personae as a ‘commercial’ and a ‘socialist’ romancer mirrored the more generalised doublethink of the revival as a whole. Wearing the latter hat in his essays and lectures, Morris asserted that it was impossible to produce communal art in capitalist conditions. Romance was a popular or associational genre embodied in the old ‘bibles’ of the people, and therefore a model for the socialist literature destined to supplant Victorian realism. What exactly he was doing trying to create that literature avant la lettre is one question, but an even greater irony lies in the fact that in his understanding of the barbarian roots of the genre and its antithetical relation to realism Morris was anything but unique or revolutionary. When he was at his most socialist he was also the most conventional, for the revivalists had from the beginning legitimated mass-market romance by appealing to its ancient pedigree, and even introduced concepts from evolutionary anthropology to justify their generic choices. Morris could only build his socialist edifice upon this common ground – by adding his ideologically driven communalism to the revivalists’ interest in action-packed primitivism. Far from being an exception, he participated fully in the late-Victorian economic and intellectual milieu, and shared its contradictions. Everything that was meant to remove him from capitalist modernity: his resuscitation of a barbarian past, his fiction and theory of community, and even the socialist discourse within which these were situated, was itself a product of modern notions of literary and historical development. The difficulty Morris faced in reconciling his aims with his practice was therefore much more than a personal idiosyncrasy. It was evident in the revivalists’ agonised attempts to square the circle of modern publishing with appeals to pre-modern values, and it appeared, at an even greater level of abstraction, in the historical theory of Morris’s fellow socialists.

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Nowhere was the necessary co-existence of the primitive and the modern more apparent than in the new disciplines devoted to the study of the past. For if the fin de siècle was the seedbed of the present, it was also a time of radical reformulations of the past, and it was precisely from such disciplines that the idea of the contrast between two types of social organisation drew its sustenance. All the new comparative sciences (philology, mythology, history, law) of the mid- to late-Victorian period made use of the literary monuments of primitive cultures as source material, and the communities of the national past preoccupied the historians and anthropologists who wrote about social evolution and the Dark and Middle Ages as much as certain of their romancer readers. But the scholarship was riven with conflicting interpretations. The Teutonic myth and the popular and controversial concept of the village community fed the historiographical obsession with a nationalist and progressivist continuity of blood and institutions. Evolutionary anthropologists offered an alternative reading of historical development – one that eschewed continuity, and insisted instead on a revival of the characteristics of the tribal gens after a period of civilised negation. The volumes of professional research both groups produced furnished matter for interpretation not just to romance writers keen to find interesting plots and establish a foundation for their literary practice, but to leading socialists who were pursuing altogether different goals. The socialists adapted both the Liberal narrative of democratic Teutonism and the anthropological emphasis on revival to their own dialectical theory of history, in which the principle of community and its notional opposite were represented by different agents at different stages in the evolutionary spiral. The primitive tribal clan so beloved of ‘bourgeois’ historians and anthropologists embodied a communal ideal that was reincarnated first in the craft guilds of the medieval towns, and then in the working-class associations of the modern period, while the centralised capitalist state emerged, by way of Rome and ‘Romanised’ feudality, as the end product of a similar but antithetical sequence. The conflict between Rome and the barbarians, the subject of Morris’s The House of the Wolfings, was the prototype of all subsequent conflicts between modernity and community, capitalists and proletarians. The utopian socialist synthesis, however, was going to incorporate elements of both barbarism and civilisation, so that the conundrum of the present – modern means vs communal ideals – would become the hoped-for resolution of the future. Marginal as British socialist historiography was, its belief that the Teutonic village community or ‘mark’ was linked with medieval and modern forms of association was based squarely on mainstream (albeit controversial) research. Earlier Victorian

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Anglo-Saxonists, as well as later academics who drew a direct line from the Germanic tribes to the guilds, had already prepared a scholarly foundation for such assumptions, although their depictions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did not accord in all respects with the socialist interpretation of medieval fellowship as embodied in the guild and the Catholic Church. The socialist political associations of the late-Victorian and Edwardian period saw themselves as the inheritors of this tribal and medieval ideal. They were supposed to help forward the expected change of society and to serve as prototypes of the communes of the future, but unlike the primitive (and largely fictitious) communities their leaders wrote about, they combined both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ elements in their practice and ideology. They were hybrids: just like the wider culture of which they were a part, just like the romance revivalists with their capitalist means to primitive ends – and just like them they found this hybridity problematic. Far from perceiving it as a desirable synthesis, most socialists agonised over what appeared to be an internal conflict between different ideological factions. But the resultant classification of socialist groupings into two ideologically antagonistic ‘camps’ was as inadequate as a ‘two phases’ narrative of decline that posited the replacement of a ‘religion of socialism’ golden age by bureaucratic and elitist modes of party organisation in the years leading up to the First World War. For just as the romance revival was a much more complex phenomenon than a superficial juxtaposition between a communalist Morrisian romance and an individualist market-driven one would allow, so the socialist revival that took place in the same years could not be reduced to a simple communalist-statist stand-off. A survey of the different types of socialism current in the period shows that some degree of synthesis was the order of the day across all parties and all years from 1880 to 1914, a creative mixture that was evident in the fiction as well as the politics of the movement. The problems of community creation were, however, considerable, and they came to a head in the delivery and reception of socialist propaganda. The pressing issue of audiences and how to educate them was familiar to all early socialist preachers, for ‘making socialists’ and converting to the Cause were perceived as central activities by every variety of socialism on offer. But the difficulties of educating the ignorant constantly got in the way, and the socialist leadership’s attitude towards the masses remained conflicted: were the people ready for revolution and communal self-government or were they apathetic brutes in thrall to capitalist shibboleths? No unequivocal answer was forthcoming, and an emphasis on propaganda for community creation continued to

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co-exist with statist proclivities and doubts about the capabilities of the working class. Shaping audience response was a pursuit with no guaranteed outcome, though a lot depended on choice of genre, of utopian or polemical methods of persuasion. But propaganda alone could not suffice if political activity did not shore up its message. The failures of socialist association were documented again and again in fiction and in the testimonials of real-life activists, which made it clear that too much focus on fellowship and conviviality at the expense of practical engagement with the existing state led to community disintegration. Paradoxically, the search for a socialist community could be frustrated as much by the internal rejection of certain useful aspects of modernity as by the external pressures of capitalism. If Morris’s communal romance message had to rely upon capitalist publishing practices for its dissemination, the ultimate success of socialist culture and propaganda also depended on modern methods of political organisation. The only way to transcend the paradox was to put aside antithetical modes of thinking and embrace instead the synthesis advocated by a minority of theorists. The state, the individual and the market: this was a matrix from which no late Victorian or Edwardian could escape. Romance and propaganda might present the communal ideal, might attempt to embody it, but in its pure form it was available only in a mythologised historical past. The tools that Morris and the rest had at their disposal belonged to modernity: romance was no longer a bible of the people, but a marketable commodity; a worker was no longer born into a natural association, but had to organise his fellows artificially into an effective force within the capitalist state. A viable notion of community at the turn of the twentieth century had no choice but to reconcile the mechanisms of modern society with the associational ideal, to break the binaries so dear to Victorian romancers and sociologists.

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Chapter 1

The Romance Revival

In the Marketplace: The New Romance and the Penny Dreadful ‘It is not needful, nor indeed is it possible, to define Romance,’ Sir Walter Raleigh, first Oxford Professor of English Literature, told his Princeton audience in 1915, and immediately went on to contradict himself. He discussed the origins and development of romance, ‘a perennial form of modern literature’ recurring in every period, and most notably in the ‘romance revival’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which rediscovered the medieval as the Renaissance had rediscovered the classical. The romance revival with which this book deals happened much closer to Raleigh’s own time, in the 1880s and 90s. It was a historically specific and therefore unique phenomenon, ‘an oddity, not a quiddity’, to borrow Raleigh’s words (1916, 8, 44, 10). But in what did its novelty consist? Was the ‘New Romance’ new because it was a tale of the marvellous and supernatural, of strange happenings in far-away times and places, or a narrative of improbable events and coincidences peopled by psychologically unrealistic heroes and villains, or simply a book with an adventure-dominated plot and a minimum of discursiveness and didacticism? What could such different works as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan and Stanley Weyman’s The Red Cockade have in common, besides their year of publication (1895) and the fact that all three were called romances, whether scientific, supernatural or historical? The hero of W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age wonders at one point if everything that is happening to him is true or ‘only a fantastic romance’ (1922, 37); the prologue to Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds explicitly states that ‘in the present narration, which I have purposely called a “romance”, I do not expect to be believed’ (1886, 1: 4). So was the New Romance merely a synonym for an impossible fable, a lie? Was it, as Richard Jefferies implied when

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he called After London ‘in no sense a novel, more like a romance’ (1980, ix), merely the novel’s antithesis? Most such pronouncements, popular with romance champions, were merely riffs on a view current since at least the eighteenth century. Ever since the rise of the novel, the place of romance as an antithetical literary category had been secure, and during the revival it sometimes became merely a handy stick with which to beat realism. In practice, of course, distinctions were not so clear-cut. Romancers like Wells, R. L. Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and George MacDonald also wrote realist fiction; old masters of the genre like Walter Scott were known to have influenced the leading realists of the century, abroad as well as at home. Realism itself had as many different recognised meanings as romance: realism of presentation was one thing, the realisms of the novel of manners or of the roman expérimental were something else. In the former sense, even romance could be realistic. She, Andrew Lang noted in an enthusiastic review of H. Rider Haggard’s romance bestseller, ‘is a legend, not a novel’, a work of fantasy, ‘impossible and not to be done’ and yet it has ‘a certain vraisemblance, which makes the most impossible adventures appear true’ (1912, 274–5). Augustus Moore, attacking She several months later, used virtually the same words to define romance as ‘the record of the impossible adventures of a man or a number of men, which the author clothes with a certain vraisemblance, and which, to the casual reader, not only appear perfectly possible, but even probable’ (1887, 513); and William Watson (1888) deplored the constant alternation between the naturalistic and the fantastic in his own antiHaggard tirade ominously entitled ‘The Fall of Fiction’. One reviewer called She ‘a marvelously realistic tale of fantastic adventures’ (cit. Saler 2003, 612), and no one would have thought this an oxymoron, since even letters to the Athenaeum from nit-picking readers of Haggard’s works commented on ‘the atmosphere of reality thrown about the most extraordinary incidents’ (Evans 1886, 144). Indeed, a certain kind of formal realism had been a distinctive feature of romance at least since the Middle Ages. Even William Morris, his well-known contempt for the analysis and didacticism of the Victorian realist novel notwithstanding, endorsed the very different sort of realism found in the Icelandic sagas, which he equated with ‘the simplest and purest form of epical narration’ (Morris and Magnússon 1891–1905, 1: xi). A Nineteenth Century reviewer of The House of the Wolfings found the mythical elements of Morris’s epic ‘blended so skilfully with historic and pictorial realism that the vraisemblance is almost perfect’ (Faulkner 1973, 330). But although many of the narratives that styled themselves ‘romances’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century clothed fantasy ‘in the guise of

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realism’ (Saler 2003, 611), this did nothing to lessen the long-standing rivalry between the two modes. Realistic or not, romance was everywhere: the word figured in the titles of hundreds of utopias and penny dreadfuls, historical swashbucklers and love stories, and no publisher’s fiction list throughout the second half of the century was complete without it. But the ‘New Romance’ was something much more specific: a tally of the names that kept cropping up in connection with it in mainstream reviews, cultural commentaries and other indicators of the middle-class reception scene reveals numerous references to Rider Haggard, R.L. Stevenson and Hall Caine, but virtually no mention of the authors of utopias or the hacks who produced the cheap romance literature gracing the windows of every news-shop, grocer and tobacconist in London. The latter, according to one commentator writing in the Contemporary Review in 1901, were excluded from ‘the field of criticism’ altogether. Though always useful for the purpose of unflattering comparisons, their names did not appear in the Athenaeum and the Spectator in their own right, and they were not the subjects of proper reviews – to ‘attain the dignity’ (Bosanquet 1901, 672, 678) of a review at all was a sign that an author was acknowledged, if not necessarily accepted, by the establishment. Despite the financial success of publishers like Edwin Brett, and the respectable status of writers like Bracebridge Hemyng (inventor of Jack Harkaway) and Talbot Baines Reed (stalwart of the Boy’s Own Paper), most authors of the penny dreadfuls and story papers remained anonymous and badly remunerated. They moved as far outside the radar range of the discussions of the romance revival as the authors of the more obscure utopias. And while the utopias were indeed obscure, the popularity of the writers of penny fiction surpassed that of Stevenson, Haggard and Caine. It was the penny dreadful, of course, that brought romance to the millions for whom even a six-shilling adventure tale was beyond reach. As the obituary of one J. F. Smith, ‘the great exemplar of the penny periodical romance’, put it: ‘“he had a thousand readers where Dickens had ten, or Thackeray one”’ (Hitchman 1890, 162). Yet names like his were unknown names, just like his public was an unknown public, to the middle-class arbiters of taste. There were, of course, exceptions. Helen Bosanquet, a leading social worker with the London Charity Organisation Society, specialising in home visits and philanthropic work with the urban poor, was convinced that some penny stories were superior to ‘many which are sold for shillings’ (1901, 681). Bosanquet was a prolific writer on social problems, though even among reformers it was still unusual to be acquainted with, let alone sympathetic to the literature aimed at the working class.

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A much more vociferous, not to say ideological, defender of the penny dreadful at the turn of the century was G. K. Chesterton. In his first volume of essays, he took to pieces the widespread claim that penny dreadfuls were the cause of criminal behaviour among the young: ‘It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes’ (1914, 21–2). The connection had already been established a generation or two earlier by Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor with regard to the reading of Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard romances, and confirmed by Parliament, which also attributed ‘the lamentable amount of juvenile criminality . . . to the spread of cheap publications’ (cit. James and Smith 1998, xviii). In the 1890s, review contributors were still complaining: ‘An errand boy or an office lad is caught in the act of robbing his master . . . In his desk are found sundry numbers of these romances of the road’ (Hitchman 1890, 154). But in vindicating the eternal desire for romantic fiction, and underlining the sexual innocence and moral blamelessness of ‘vulgar juvenile literature’ (1914, 22–3), Chesterton echoed point for point the assessment of its actual readers, as well as a few of the more attentive critics from James Payn to Stevenson himself. Working-class autodidacts recognised the beneficial effects of the stories in the boys’ papers, which were simply the bottom rung on a continuous ladder of romance leading, as one of them put it, from the Magnet, to G. A. Henty, to Stevenson and thence to Scott and Dumas (Rose 2001, 370). If there were distinct levels of quality, however, there was also affinity between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. Treasure Island was ‘the usual penny blood sort of story, with the halo of greatness about it’ (cit. Rose 2001, 369), though many middle-class contemporaries of the East Londoner who expressed this judgement would have begged to differ. Not so Chesterton: he understood that there was little to distinguish the adventure narratives of respectable romancers such as Stevenson from the knights, pirates and outlaws of popular errand-boy reading. Stevenson ‘did for the penny dreadful what Coleridge had done for the penny ballad’ (1923, 244). The classics and the trash had a number of generic similarities, and if middle-class critics championed the one and condemned the other they were using a double standard. But conventional men of letters were far from seeing the bestselling New Romance as the penny dreadful of the middle classes. If they condescended to consider the reading matter for ‘the million’, it was usually not in an article on romance, but in some survey entitled ‘Our Very Cheap Literature’ (Strahan), ‘On A Possible Popular Culture’ (Wright), ‘Penny Fiction’ (Hitchman), or ‘The Reading of the Working Classes’ (Humphery). The difference of approach was observable even in the

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style of the articles and studies devoted to the two kinds of writing. Penny fiction – or excommunicates from the romance class like some of Haggard’s books, which were accused of bad construction, bad taste and an overabundance of incident as frequently as the penny dreadfuls for boys – was usually examined in its modern economic context. Its status as a commodity was explicitly recognised and analysed, publishers’ marketing and distribution strategies and the sociology of audiences were given due consideration. There was even a kind of anthropological and book-historical tinge to the attempts at description and classification of the alien artefacts: the quality of the paper, the type and the illustrations, the physical conditions of reading, were all taken into account. Complaints about lurid, brightly coloured covers were legion. But when the New Romance was discussed in the periodicals, contributors confined their remarks to the much more reified domain of aesthetic speculation. Generic issues and questions of literary schools and influences were paramount, but hardly any attention was bestowed on material factors of production and distribution. Only when a commentator decided to critique the shortcomings of a particular author did the language come to resemble that of the researchers of cheap literature. What made the New Romance genuinely unique – the fact that unlike the romance of previous centuries it owed its existence to the modern capitalist publishing industry – was precisely what its devotees chose to suppress. Their disingenuousness had nothing to do with ignorance. It was not a secret to anyone that in the late 1880s and early 90s publishers increasingly began to issue new books priced at six shillings, and as the trade agreement with the circulating libraries collapsed, the expensive first edition ceased to be an economic reality. Authors could now reorient their practice to cater for the significantly larger buyers’ market: the lower prices stimulated a wider readership, and cheap first editions of one-volume romances sold in unprecedented numbers. With the pressure of filling three volumes taken off, short snappy plots could finally come into their own, accompanied by a theory of their aesthetic superiority. It is notable that ‘a good deal of children’s, horror, and adventure fiction’, as well as some historical romances, had already ‘long been published in the one-volume format’ (Keating 1989, 341). Certainly some of Stevenson’s, Haggard’s and Conan Doyle’s bestsellers predated the publishing revolution of 1894. By the 1880s, furthermore, the growing respectability of juvenile papers had enabled and justified the characteristic symbiosis of the New Romance and ‘boy’s own’ adventure: Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Black Arrow were all first published in the penny weekly Young Folks, and

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Conan Doyle wrote for the Boy’s Own Paper. Juvenile fiction of this kind, of course, had long been a staple of the penny trade, but in the late nineteenth century the segmentation between story papers which appealed to middle-class sentiment by dissociating themselves from the penny dreadful (such as the BOP, Kingston and Henty’s Union Jack and Harmsworth’s Marvel) and older magazines which aimed unashamedly at a working- and lower-middle-class market (such as Brett’s Boys of England) became even more pronounced. Children’s magazines were not the only ones to carry romances in serial form. The fiction-orientated middle-class periodicals founded in the second half of the nineteenth century, such as the Fortnightly and Contemporary Reviews and Longman’s Magazine, featured specimens of the genre by all the famous names, alongside debates about the romance revival. Lower down the scale, Jerome K. Jerome’s weekly ‘newspaper magazine’ TO-DAY – a two penny publication geared to a suburban clerk audience – showcased such well-known romancers as Stevenson, Corelli and Conan Doyle. At this time romances also began to take up the new guise of the selfcontained short story. Stevenson’s short stories were ‘written to exploit the rapidly growing periodical market of the 1880s and 1890s’ (Orel 1992, 5), and Conan Doyle, Kipling and Wells followed suit in popular magazines like the Graphic or the Strand. Conan Doyle, in fact, earned four times as much from the serialisation of his stories than from their book sales (Waller 2006, 649). The growing market for fiction, whether in the form of single volumes, serial-novels, short stories, or syndication in provincial newspapers, ensured that romance writers like Stevenson, Haggard, Conan Doyle, Corelli, Caine, Hope, Weyman, Du Maurier, Wells and Watts-Dunton would dominate the bestseller lists. Publicity was another contributing factor. Penny dreadful publishers had perfected selling devices like free gifts, lottery and prize draw tickets decades before (Bosanquet 1901, 679–80; Hitchman 1890, 168), but in the mainstream publishing industry the emergence of modern marketing practices is usually dated to 1885 and the unprecedentedly brazen publicity engineered for Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. The use of sandwich-men, hoardings and front page spreads that mimicked the style of adverts ‘for “Carter’s Little Liver Pills” or “Elliman’s Universal Embrocation” in the daily press’ became common with Haggard, and scaled new heights with Heinemann’s Hall Caine and Methuen’s Marie Corelli advertising campaigns of the 1890s (Feltes 1993, 114, 123–4). Haggard’s penchant for mentioning items of everyday merchandise like Gladstone bags and Bryant and May’s matches would even earn him the accusation of product placement for the Army and Navy Store (Waller 2006, 333). Yet while modern critics see mass-marketing as

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the defining characteristic of the New Romance – the feature that sets it apart both from the doomed realist and the coming modernist novel, and, of course, embeds it most deeply in capitalist structures – the same could not be said for contemporary commentators. Privately, in correspondence between James and Stevenson, or Wells and Conrad, expressions of contempt for the processes and rhetoric of bestsellerdom that guaranteed the success of writers such as Haggard and Caine abounded. Romance aficionado and Edinburgh Professor of English Literature George Saintsbury scoffed at ‘the best-rubbish-sellers of today’ (cit. Waller 2006, 680); W. T. Stead, who knew all about cheap publishing, called Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan ‘the zenith attained by the Penny Dreadfulesque in the last decade of the nineteenth century’ (cit. Feltes 1993, 127). Even Stevenson thought that ‘there must be something wrong in me, or I would not be popular’. Works that had a mass readership were contemptible; true masterpieces, he held, would not sell. While in his articles Stevenson defended romance on aesthetic grounds, in private he disparaged his own bestsellers and called himself a ‘whore’ (Booth and Mehew 1995, 5: 171). But in public, few friends of the genre were willing to admit the affinities between the commercial success of the New Romance and the even more phenomenal popularity of its debased doppelganger. On the contrary, when Augustus Moore denied Haggard’s books the right to the title of romance by emphasising their affinities with the penny dreadful, his argument presupposed a difference in kind between the two formats, although what supposedly brought Haggard down to the level of the penny dreadful – not least his vulgarly staggering sales figures – brought the rest of the New Romance down with it. Moore followed established patterns in blaming the success of She on the degeneration of the public’s judgement, but among the accusations levelled at the book – that it was tasteless, plagiarised and ungrammatical – one of the most significant was that it was assiduously marketed. Its success was produced not by street-hawking but, as Moore carefully noted, by more sophisticated methods such as favourable reviews from circulating library subscribers and advertisement in mass-circulation papers like the Daily News (1887, 514). While this was precisely what made Haggard the king of the New Romance, Moore took it for granted that it distanced him from it. He used his awareness of market mechanisms to uncover and condemn the causes of Haggard’s popularity, but he did not apply these insights to the genre as a whole, did not translate them into a more systematic assessment of the publishing trend. The connections between She and the older penny dreadfuls were obvious – one indicator of the penny dreadfuls’ inferior status had always been

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the aggressive marketing that accompanied their appearance – but for romance proper Moore continued to claim a distinguished lineage and a degree of literary mastery that freed it from any implication in the economic field. This kind of selective blindness was typical not just of reviews of the New Romance, but of the numerous contemporary surveys of penny fiction, such as G. B. Johns’s ‘The Literature of the Streets’. Indignant and judgemental, full of uncorroborated statistics and bombast worthy of the lowliest rag it cited with such disgust, Johns’s article nevertheless managed to offer both an exhaustive catalogue and an incisive analysis of the books, papers and weekly parts that furnished the exclusive reading matter of the majority of the population. Shop-girls, errand boys and street arabs, with their ‘scanty leisure’ and spare cash – the same simple formula that explained the middle-class readership of the New Romance – were a target market, whose demand for fiction and excitement was met with an overabundant supply of ‘poisonous’ trash ‘in paper covers’, ‘Price One Penny’ (1887, 41, 43; cf. Hitchman 1890, 151). After a brief excursus into history, to set up a contrast with the dearth of cheap popular books in the early Victorian period, Johns returned to the greatly increased literate population and surfeited market of the present, betraying an underlying disappointment with the fruits of the cheap literature movement shared by many other cultural critics. He compared the late-Victorian ubiquity of pernicious printed matter, the specially manufactured ‘pabulum’ which diverted young readers from the path of culture, with the ubiquity of advertisements; and the imposition of adverts on the pages and margins of penny novelettes and reprints of classics became not only a recurrent motif of the article but a metaphor for the disfigurement of literature by commerce. Johns took great care to describe (and condemn) the various types of penny literature: from broadsheets and nasty and scandalous ‘Society’ journals, to innocuous weeklies like the Family Herald, Bow Bells and the London Journal, which printed tamely sentimental love stories, anecdotes and Answers to Correspondents columns, and therefore made suitable reading for long railway journeys. Although widely lambasted for their vulgarity, such publications still stood a head above the tales of crime, piracy and general rascality, the novel of the fallen woman and the story of scandal and intrigue in high circles. The latter texts were united by their atrocious style, their falseness and unreality, as well as their small print, paper covers and lurid woodcuts. Yet their sales in ‘serial form exceed[ed] two million copies a week’, and the jails were filled with their readers (cf. Hitchman 1890, 154). Prominent among this species, according to Johns, was the penny tale of adventure: on

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land or by sea, set in ‘any part of the known world’, from the American prairie to the North Pole, ‘and in any century from William the Norman to Victoria’, with characters sharply divided between good and evil, and incredible incidents following one another with astonishing speed. Although this also happened to be the contemporary definition of the respectable New Romance, no word was breathed of the similarity by Johns. Stevenson, along with such older practitioners of the art as Fenimore Cooper, Captain Marryat and G. W. Dasent (the translator and populariser of the Icelandic sagas), was classed separately under the heading of wholesome literature. In fact, Johns went so far as to call upon these writers to enter the marketplace and compete with the penny dreadfuls. He yearned to offer the working-class consumers, otherwise doomed to a uniform diet of rottenness, a real choice. Although the reprint series could already boast horrible abridgements of Dickens and Thackeray, Poe and De Quincey, as well as penny editions of classics like Goethe’s Faust, Johns proposed an entirely new penny library of healthy fiction. ‘Romances’ and ‘Lives’, ‘tales of history, love-making, adventure, crime, and fairyland’, wonder and mystery, would be written not by the anonymous purveyors of trash, but by the likes of Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Oliphant, G. A. Henty and Walter Besant. Even the old Gothic romances of Walpole and Radcliffe would be resuscitated and repackaged for a modern readership. Though to reach their target working-class audience these authors would have to dispense with preaching and simply amuse, Johns saw no reason why they could not sell as well or make as much profit as the rubbish currently dominating the market. ‘Flood the market with good, wholesome literature,’ he exhorted, ‘instead of the poisonous stuff to which the hapless purchasers are now condemned.’ If it were only ‘made as easy and profitable’ (1887, 47, 62–3; cf. Hitchman 1890, 170–1) to potential publishers to supply the pure as it currently was to supply the tainted, the problem would be solved. What Johns omitted to mention was the fact that his ‘good’ authors (especially Collins and Braddon) were not merely already in the marketplace, but were enormous bestsellers to boot. Braddon was not only in absolute terms the most popular author of the century, but actually composed penny dreadful serials alongside middlebrow triple-deckers. Furthermore, many of the ‘wholesome’ writers to whom he referred were themselves decried for ‘rotting the minds of their readers, promoting vice, and subverting cultural standards’ (Brantlinger 1998, 2). Gothic romances and sensation novels aroused in their time the same kind of disapprobation as the penny dreadfuls. It is true that virtually no literary school or subgenre of the nineteenth century, from Newgate

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crime stories to Zolaesque naturalism, escaped censure from one or another cultural commentator. The new American realism of W. D. Howells and Henry James encountered as much hostility as the homegrown romance, and neither Howells nor James themselves could avoid a note of condescension when speaking of the mid-Victorian realism of Dickens and Thackeray. Ruskin disapproved of George Eliot (and crossed out her name from John Lubbock’s list of the Best Hundred Books), George Eliot sniffed at silly lady novelists, Marie Corelli charged all her contemporaries – from Braddon, Caine and Stevenson to Kipling and Zola – with depravity (Ferguson 2006, 58), and so on, the point being that condemnation from one quarter was no indication of the general attitude – either as expressed in sales figures or in critical acclaim. But the works of authors whom Johns wished to recruit for his wholesome penny novels campaign were no one’s idea of first-class literature. If not positively poisonous, sensation fiction was regarded as mass entertainment intended to produce thrills; Henty churned out boy’s own adventure stories with a moral by the hundred (he was, in fact, a contributor to the Boy’s Own Paper, along with Arthur Conan Doyle, R. M. Ballantyne and Jules Verne), and even Haggard looked down on the likes of Mrs Oliphant. But though Johns’s choices may have languished at the bottom of the literary pecking order, they were still part of the establishment hierarchy and therefore essentially legitimate. They wrote largely with a middleclass audience in mind, belonged to the same cultural milieu, and knew each other by name – something that could not be said for the anonymous authors of the penny trade. Collins may have been dangerously popular, but even to him the working-class readership was an ‘unknown public’ (218), as he wrote in his 1858 essay for Dickens’s Household Words. Just like Johns and many others, he had to discover the ‘reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of literary civilisation’, and its predilection for low-grade penny fiction, as if there were no hint of a resemblance between this world and the one in which he operated. It is not surprising that he objected to sixpenny reprints of his novels in the 1890s (Weedon 2003, 145). Johns, therefore, saw no contradiction in calling on Collins to come to the rescue of cheap literature while condemning popular novels in the same breath, nor in attempting to guard Stevenson, with his dubious publication practices, from association with the popular garbage. Johns noted with grave concern the difference between ‘the fiercest devourer of romance on Mudie’s list’, who had access to the best writing, and the children of the poor who were doomed to satisfy their desire for ‘novelty and excitement’ (1887, 65) with the vile fare of the

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penny dreadfuls, but in practice, of course, there were more than two gradations in the hierarchy of readers and more than two price bands. Both publishers and authors were supremely aware of the variety of markets they could address. In 1889 a magazine writer distinguished between ‘the hundreds who know of one Mr. George Meredith . . . the thousands who read Mr. Payn and Mr. Besant . . . the tens of thousands who glory in Mr. Rider Haggard . . . [and the] general public [which] is now to be counted in millions’ (cit. McDonald 1997, 42). The same year, in a letter to his publisher Arrowsmith, Jerome K. Jerome identified the ‘3/6d. public’ at which he proposed to aim Three Men in a Boat. He differentiated it from the 1/- customers: ‘The two classes of buyers are so distinct’ (Wild 2006, 65). Jerome was a New Humorist rather than a New Romancer, but the ‘new’ reading public that he targeted was the same. The Arrowsmith ‘Three-and-Sixpenny Series’ would go on to include works by Conan Doyle, Chesterton and such bestselling romances as Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. Furthermore, thanks to the attempts of reputable publishers in the 1890s to promote wholesome literature for the masses, middle-class romances reached even the people of the abyss in penny abridgements, as the cheap editions and condensations of Scott, Dickens and other classics had throughout the century. Haggard’s She sold 500,000 copies in W. T. Stead’s ‘Penny Novels’ series, and this was but one of many penny libraries and series that included English, French and American romances. As Helen Bosanquet remarked in 1901, ‘publishers of some standing’ have found out that ‘it is profitable to cater for the million’ (681). Johns was not the first to suggest it: cheap wholesome literature for the poor had been touted as an alternative to the penny dreadful since at least the 1860s, and religious societies were eager to provide it (examples include the Religious Tract Society’s Girl’s and Boy’s Own Papers and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge ‘Penny Library of Fiction’). So were mass-market publishers like Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press, with its halfpenny juvenile periodicals intended to ‘counteract the pernicious influences of the Penny Dreadfuls’ (James and Smith 1998, xviii–xix), though Harmsworth, ironically, resorted to the same hack writers. The anti-dreadful counter-attack was manypronged: W. B. Horner & Son, for instance, specialised in respectable ‘Penny Stories for the People’, with hundreds of thousands of copies of hundreds of titles printed (Neuburg 1977, 228). Yet even if distinctions were blurred by the efflorescence of wholesome penny fiction late in the century, and the successful dissemination of middle-class bestsellers to the poor by the staggered release of ever-cheaper editions, a binary approach still structured the perceptions of reviewers. The critics in

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Macmillan’s, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Nineteenth Century and the Contemporary and Quarterly Reviews still invoked the cheap blood as a degraded foil to the true romance of Scott and Stevenson. As far as they were concerned, for every aspiring clerk who graduated from penny serials to Scott, there remained a vast bottom stratum of untouchables.

‘The Calm Retreats of Pure Imagination’ In introducing his section on the New Romance in a literary history of The Later Nineteenth Century (1907), George Saintsbury dismissed other phenomena – such as the reduction of the novel from three volumes to one and the sudden vogue for the short story – from consideration, because he regarded them as less permanent. Yet these were symptoms of the same developments in publishing that enabled the romance’s apparently extraordinary rise in the final decades of the century, and that were related to the causes of the penny dreadful’s already established flourishing. Modern critics have, on the contrary, emphasised the indebtedness of the New Romance to the turn-of-the-century publishing boom, and underlined its conspicuously commercial nature. This was not just a matter of writing for money – after all, Walter Scott had done that nearly a century before – it was a matter of the changing economics of publishing. Although seen as a revival by contemporaries, the romance of the fin de siècle was ‘a distinctively modern phenomenon’ (Daly 1999, 9) if judged by the scale of its production, the methods of its distribution and the identity of its target audience. In fact, the often repeated claim of romance’s universal and timeless appeal had its ironic side if one considered how unprecedented was the enormous scale of its late-Victorian popularity (sales figures were now numbered in millions). The progressive cheapening of reading matter was matched by the expansion of the literate public, and respectable romance writers were as quick as daily newspaper proprietors and the publishers of penny serials to capitalise on this fortunate convergence. While George Gissing was still producing realist novels in the old three-decker mould (and complaining about being outsold by the likes of Haggard, Corelli and Caine), Stevenson’s progeny took advantage of the new developments and brought their publishers vast profits with their one-volume tales of adventure. But it was not the commercial processes that were creating the lateVictorian revival of romance that most contemporary critics and those coming in the next generation to summarise and institutionalise their views had their sights set on. Instead, they were engaged in doing

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battle with introspective, unmanly and morbid realism in the name of a healthy, action-orientated romance in the tradition of Scott and Dumas. The Contemporary Review, Longman’s Magazine, the Fortnightly Review, the Westminster Review, the Saturday Review, the Academy and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine were just some of the journals that featured opinions, manifestos and rebuttals in this new Battle of the Books, which is how Andrew Lang, the ‘dictator of letters’ (Street 1898, 595), characterised it in one of his own contributions to the fray entitled ‘Realism and Romance’. The proliferation of labels and overall self-consciousness about generic belonging, as well as the dogmatic intolerance of the different ‘schools’ towards each other, moved J. M. Barrie in 1890 to pen a parody in which a Realist, a Romancist, a Stylist, an Elsmerian and an American Analyst bicker about classification in the presence of the great novelists of the past, but fail to produce any actual writing of their own. It was not of course the case – bouts of worrying about the penny dreadful aside – that writers acknowledged nothing but matters of generic import. Discussions of the art of fiction in this period actually betrayed a heightened awareness of the role of non-literary factors. The circulating libraries figured prominently, and not just in George Moore’s famous ‘Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals’: everyone from Hardy and Saintsbury to Vernon Lee referred to their influence, as well as to other kinds of institutional censorship. Issues of professionalisation were addressed by those like Walter Besant, who advised authors to organise themselves in order to combat sweating and exploitation by publishers, and it was in response to Besant that Henry James produced the most famous contribution to the art of fiction debate. Questions of reception were never far off either, especially when the ‘ubiquitous Young Person’, as George Du Maurier ironically dubbed her (1994, 32), was publicly snubbed in the name of artistic freedom, or an ill-cultured public with a too-ravenous appetite for Corelli or Haggard was brought up to be roundly lambasted. Haggard himself, not to be outdone by his critics, cited the rising publication figures for fiction and wondered about the market that could consume this overproduction of worthless ‘rubbish’. His complaints about ‘the enormous appetite of readers, who are prepared, like a diseased ostrich, to swallow stones, and even carrion, rather than not get their fill of novelties’ (1887, 177, 173), were indistinguishable from the laments of his own detractors. The essay in which these complaints were voiced, ‘About Fiction’, offered a shrewd analysis of the economic underpinnings of the 1880s literary scene, but as in Moore’s case, this fact only made the omissions surrounding romance more glaring. For if everyone was happy to talk unsentimentally about

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the modern predicament of fiction in general, romance retained a special status apart. Haggard began his far from naïve article with a survey of the growing demand for English literature at home and abroad, drawing his readers’ attention, as had become usual, to the new state elementary schools, that ‘pour[ed] out their thousands every year’. He then directed his readers’ gaze to foreign shores: to the colonies and, more importantly, to the forty-million-strong American market. ‘For every reader that a writer of merit finds in England,’ Haggard reminded his audience, ‘he will find three in America.’ He pointed out the effects of piracy and America’s disregard for copyright law, remarked on the country’s ‘enterprising daily press’, and made a connection between the plotlessness of the ‘emasculated’ American school of fiction and the exigencies of the three-volume format. He also traced the roots of censorship to the circulating libraries’ dependence on subscriptions, and noted the hypocrisy of a press that allowed the coverage of sensational cases to boost evening paper sales, yet presumed to police authors in moral matters. He even raised the spectre of a state-regulated literature, and of literature as propaganda at the service of social and political sects. But despite this eminently practical approach to literary matters, Haggard remained curiously unwilling to apply his understanding to his own trade. ‘The market [was] flooded’ sure enough, but only with ‘unreal, namby-pamby nonsense’ designed to cater for the Young Person; bestselling romances like his own made no appearance. That certain ‘labourers in the field of letters’ (174–5, 179) earned their living by their art and had to please their readers was the only concession Haggard made to market considerations; otherwise, romance soared clear of the sordid. This was, on the whole, the dominant attitude, and when critics chose not to remain discreetly silent, what they said directed their readers’ attention away from economic factors altogether, and towards abstract questions of value and generic identity. When in the early years of the new century Saintsbury recalled the part Stevenson played in the ‘rejuvenescence of romance’, he was much less interested, as has been seen, in issues like the impact of periodical publication than in the formal alternative the romance provided to the domestic novel, and still harped on its role as ‘the appointed reviver of prose-fiction’ (1913, 295–6). He was merely echoing the characteristic terms in which the critical discussion about the New Romance had been conducted since the 1880s. It was still being conducted in those terms in the 1910s. The Yale professor William Lyon Phelps, taking stock of The Advance of the English Novel up to 1916, failed to develop his cursory references to the advent of mass literacy and the sharp increase in the demand for and production

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of fiction, and focused instead on what was by then the well-entrenched formal distinction between the romance of incident and the novel of character (1916, 16–17). Phelps was operating in a very different hermeneutical context from the contemporary publishers who also divided editions of Stevenson’s or Wells’s work into ‘romances’ and ‘novels’.1 The publishers were referring to the books in their status as commodities classified for more effective distribution, whereas for Phelps the two terms represented ideal generic types and embodied opposing philosophies of literature. His speculations had nothing to do with publishing categories and everything with the internal dynamics of literary history. Accordingly, Phelps began his discussion with an allusion to Clara Reeve’s 1785 founding text of genre criticism, The Progress of Romance, before proceeding to revise her definitions. The early twentieth century had inherited the convention of classifying certain types of historical fiction – which did not exist in Reeve’s day – as romance, so her limitation of the genre to the fantastic was no longer sufficient: ‘incident’ had become a more appropriate catch-all category. The definition of realism was also broadened accordingly – to include now not just pictures of the familiar and the everyday, but the analytical novel that first made its appearance in the Victorian period. Phelps reduced the difference between realism and romance to a belief in the faithful reproduction of the commonplaceness of life on the one hand, and a desire to be taken out of it to a more beautiful and refreshing world, on the other. Though he admitted that realism, in the end, made a deeper and more lasting impression than the diverting escapism of romance (the latter was a dream, the former ‘accurately typical of millions’), Phelps did consider the dream important enough to devote an entire chapter to what he called the Romantic Revival. Unlike Walter Raleigh in 1915, however, Phelps was not talking about the Romantics. He dated the beginning of the revival to 1894, the year of the demise of the triple-decker in all subsequent accounts of publishing history – but made no mention of this fact. Instead, he presented the student with an appropriately romantic tableau of English fiction being rescued from the giant ‘Realism’ by the ‘knightly figure of Stevenson’. In Phelps’s cyclical model, the excesses of realism – both its ‘afternoon tea’2 and ‘garbage’ varieties (the domestic and the naturalistic schools) – had led to a predictable turn of the tide. Stevenson, the ‘ardent advocate of the gospel of romance’, broke the stranglehold of a foul naturalism and let in the ‘invigorating air of the ocean’, thus inaugurating a ‘revolution in English fiction’ (24, 135, 137–8). Phelps did note the amazing sales of the new romances, which became ‘a matter of interest to critics who were watching the public taste’, and

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described the way their success spawned numerous imitations, stage adaptations and a fleeting vogue for historical adventure, prompting those who followed the literary market to turn romance-writers overnight. Once the flood of romanticism receded and was replaced by the new realism of the so-called ‘life novel’, the ‘great horde’ of marketwatchers veered about and passed from the aping of Conan Doyle, Kipling and Hope, to the imitation of Wells (of Tono-Bungay) and Arnold Bennett. Phelps had no qualms about uncovering the motives of the imitators, or repeating the well-known fact that Bennett spoke with journalistic levity about writing potboilers for a living (143, 161, 156). But – like Augustus Moore decades before – he made no such accusations against the original stalwarts of romance, who were in practice equally guilty of penning potboilers. Bennett’s moneymaking proclivities were flaunted for all to see, and his openly professional approach to authorship contrasted strongly with the reticence about profit motive of romance writers like Theodore Watts-Dunton (Hammond 2006, 173–91). Phelps would not admit that the knightly Stevenson could also write ‘for money’ (Booth and Mehew 1995, 5: 171), as the latter confessed in an 1886 letter to Edmund Gosse. The romancers had to personify the values of the genre they created: a beautiful and refreshing literature of idealism could not be subject to the same sordid constraints as the literature that made garbage its subject. Despite the opportunities that hindsight offered him, Phelps chose not to perform an analysis of the romancers’ own marketing strategies. Instead, he situated himself as a faithful inheritor of the critical tradition that saw its heyday in the periodical press of the 1880s and 1890s. And Andrew Lang was without a doubt that tradition’s patron saint. Although he often appealed for tolerance and the recognition of works of merit among all literary kinds – every genre had a right to exist and please those whose tastes were suited for it – and even dared to hope for a literature uniting adventure and character, there was never any doubt as to where his own allegiance lay. The romance whose image he emblazoned on his critical banner was not associated with anything so petty as marketing gimmicks and publishers’ bottom lines. What Lang championed was ‘tales of swashing blows, of distressed maidens rescued, of “murders grim and great”, of magicians and princesses, and wanderings in fairy lands forlorn’ (1887, 684–5). Translated into modern terms this very nearly matches up with the thrillers, women’s romances, murder mysteries and fantasies – the subgenres of popular fiction – that recent theorists of romance consider to be the latest incarnations of the form. The opposite of romance for Lang was the minute study of manners and character, or realism, which the reviewers of his day usually subdivided

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into its French (Flaubert, Zola), Russian (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) and American (James, Howells) varieties. Lang in fact offered a whole series of familiar antinomies to elucidate the distinction between the two modes: barbaric and savage vs civilised and cultured; boy’s own vs female; bright and merry vs dark and miserable; idealistically focusing on the pleasant and uplifting in life vs pessimistically dwelling on the worst aspects of humanity; engagingly plotted vs boringly introspective; Dickens and Haggard vs Dostoevsky and James. The same notes were sounded with unfailing frequency by Lang’s numerous allies. In an 1887 article in the Fortnightly Review, Saintsbury made an unapologetic case for the superiority of the romance form to the analytic novel of manners, and welcomed the coming age of romance illumined by the twin stars of Stevenson and Haggard. Dull, unclean, sterile, monotonous and pessimistic, the novel of character had outlived itself, and was finally giving place to that simplest and ‘earliest form of writing, to the pure romance of adventure’. It would not be a passing phase, for its popularity was based not only on the appeal of an interesting story, but also on the mode’s roots in the constants of human nature. Manners and conventions changed and grew stale, but the primal passions were ever fresh – eternally the same everywhere and always: ‘The novel is of its nature transitory and is parasitic on the romance’ (1887, 415–16). English literature would not attain the best it was capable of until gifted writers abandoned the novel form and returned to romance. A month after the appearance of Saintsbury’s article, an anonymous contribution to the Westminster Review trumpeting the merits of Hall Caine (‘A New Novelist’) took the argument to a new extreme. Reiterating the distinction between enduring human nature and transient ‘manners’, the author swept the field clean of the morbid and moping novels of introspection, all those dull dilations and ‘mental anatomisings’ which made up for paucity of narrative and incident in superabundance of critical comment. In their stead he hailed the ‘romantic revival’, at whose head came not Haggard with his supernatural impossibilities, but Caine: noble, pure and morally elevating. His was a ‘romance of reality’ (of course, this oxymoronic phrase was also used by Haggard’s reviewers), dealing with familiar things in an imaginative manner, and it was content to tell a story of passion and incident, leaving aside ‘lengthy disquisition and elaborate analysis’. It showed, contrary to Zola, that it was ‘possible to be artistic without being immoral’ (1887, 849, 843). The lineaments of a definition were growing clear through constant repetition, though at times the range of reference was somewhat widened: ‘according to the ordinary acceptation of the word . . . romance is taken to imply a story dealing more with adventure

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and with the tragic passions than with analytic character-drawing and observation of manners’ (Saintsbury 1881, 204). The tragic was usually rejected by the champions of romance, but for all intents and purposes this description, along with the authors who best embodied it (Scott, Dumas, Stevenson), was adopted without reserve. The most original explanation for the English predilection for romance, ‘or rather its modern form, the novel of adventure’, was given by an anonymous contributor to the Saturday Review, who linked literary taste and production to national character in an article helpfully entitled ‘Romanticism and Realism’. ‘The English is a colonising race that seeks adventures and finds them in every quarter of the globe . . . It is not to be wondered at that the race that most loves adventures and perils, and feels more keenly than others the fascination of the unknown, should prefer works of art that render its peculiar passion.’ The French excel at ‘the analysis of characters or passions playing within the frame of everyday life’ because they are ‘neither adventurous nor romantic, but, gifted with the Latin reasonableness and clearness of view’ (1894, 615– 16). The author concluded, rather unpatriotically, that realism would triumph because the modern ideal of art was scientific, and called upon the artist to depict life as it was. But bestselling writers of romance were not so sure, and made this known to the critics in their own contributions to the debate, defining the art that they practised. As W. E. Henley observed, ‘[J]ust as it was thoroughly accepted that there were no more stories to be told, that romance was utterly dried up, and that analysis of character . . . was the only thing in fiction attractive to the public, down there came upon us a whole horde of Zulu divinities and the sempiternal queens of beauty in the caves of Kor’ (cit. Saler 2003, 612). The person responsible for the savage divinities and immortal queens was Rider Haggard, and he unabashedly traced the love of romance to the very origins of humanity, and declared it to be innate to the barbarian and the cultured man alike, appealing across ‘class’, ‘nation’ and ‘age’. Romance was the finest type of literature, the wellspring of the most lasting masterpieces, offering the beauty and perfection that people of the modern world, longing to be taken out of themselves and refreshed, truly needed. Haggard also differentiated between three schools: the emasculated and enervated American school, the filthy and brutal productions of French naturalism – corrupting to the social fabric – and the prudish, conventional, morally straight-laced, ‘namby-pamby’ English novel. England had to develop a free and ideal art, with heroism as its proper subject, for if it did not do so, Zolaesque obscenity would engulf all. But meanwhile, it was best to soar with the writer of romance to the ‘calm retreats of pure imagination’ (Haggard 1887, 177, 180).

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Stevenson also contributed to the discussion, though in a very different key from his private confessions. One of his instalments, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, was in fact a reply to Henry James’s anthology-destined ‘The Art of Fiction’, in which he poured scorn on James’s naïve presumption that the novel could ‘compete with life’ or offer a transcript of it, and emphasised instead its complete artificiality. He singled out three types of novel for consideration: that of adventure, that of character and the dramatic novel of passion, and though he did not argue the pre-eminence of the first like his less reticent peers, he made it quite clear that issues such as virtuosity of style, moral seriousness and depth of character were of no relevance to it. In an earlier declaration, ‘A Gossip on Romance’, Stevenson had already homed in on circumstance, adventure, striking and memorable incident, story for the story’s sake, the pictorial quality of daydream and the total absorption of the reader in the progress of the tale as the main characteristics of his chosen form: ‘Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child’ (1882, 77). And these were also some of ‘The New Watchwords of Fiction’ that Caine echoed in his manifesto of 1890. Picking up where Lang left off, but giving the latter’s gentlemanly remonstrances an earnestly evangelistic turn, Caine exalted virtuous ‘ideal’ over rotten and degenerate ‘fact’, and preached the necessity of showing the highest that human nature was capable of, painting life as it should have been – wisely ordered according to the precepts of divine justice – rather than as it was. All art, in fact, had to be subservient to the idea of poetic justice; the purpose of the writer was to make the world better, to set up an ideal of heroism in an appropriately aloof setting, not to reproduce character or history photographically. Passion, imagination and enthusiasm were to rule over the harmful cynicism of French realism, to which – abandoning Lang’s good-natured inclusivity – Caine denied the very right to exist. Exhorting against the evils of this ungodly mode, he prophesied an idealist millennium, when romance, the only valid literary genre, would finally triumph across Europe and America. No mention of sales figures, prices or printing methods here, no hint that the romance may owe its success to a market-driven publishing industry. Commercial selfawareness does not enter even by the backdoor of the penny dreadful. But if the romance manifestos conspired to deny the genre’s embeddedness in contemporary capitalist structures, the nexus of associations they established between romance, children’s literature and primitive culture provided an alternative and much more appealing genealogy. Realism belonged, without a doubt, to modern civilisation; romance had a very different origin. Late-Victorian surveys of penny dreadfuls identified young readers as their target audience, and periodical attacks

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on the romance revival proper, like D. F. Hannigan’s ‘The Decline of Romance’, quickly adopted ‘juvenile’ as a term of opprobrium. Defenders of realism continued to bandy about accusations of childishness, but the meaning attached to this word by champions and detractors of romance alike went far beyond the province of literary criticism, and into the reaches of evolutionary biology and anthropology. For the romance, ‘dealing, as it did, with adventures and enchantments, with giants and dragons and dwarfs’, and appealing ‘only to childish credulity’, must also have belonged ‘to the infancy of art’ (‘Romanticism and Realism’ 1894, 615). This is what all the equivocations indulged in by critics from Moore to Phelps pointed to: if romance was exempt from the exigencies of the modern market, it was best thought of as something outside modern life altogether, something that hailed from the dawn of time, from the idealistic realm far removed from the contemporary material concerns of the adult realist novel.

The Childhood of the Race The infancy of civilisation metaphor had a long pedigree, and Victorian intellectuals were not the first to subscribe to stadial theories of development, but that ubiquitous drawing of ‘parallel[s] between the mind of the young child and . . . of primitive man’ (Bax 1918, 9) which was so characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century was only made possible by the concomitant rise of several new disciplines. The culturally influential theory of recapitulation, to which Ernst Haeckel’s embryological studies gave renewed impetus, established the analogy between species evolution and the biological evolution of an organism. Popularly translated to mean that social development mirrored mental development (and vice versa), the model even found its way into educational discourse, where the link between evolution and children’s reading habits was especially relevant. Those educationalists particularly influenced by Haeckel accepted the theory that the unit, in his passage through life, briefly epitomises the history of the race . . . as a working basis for instruction . . . As there is on the physical plane this recapitulation of animal forms, so also on the mental plane after birth does the mind of a child correspond in its unfolding with that of prehistoric man, who was a racial infant . . . [the] stages which were gone through by our early ancestors through long ages [are] briefly summarised in the psychic development of the modern [‘civilised’] child . . . the love of the heroic finds expression and satisfaction in the reading of ‘penny dreadfuls’. (Whitehead n.d., 11–13)

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And so by starting out from biological recapitulation one arrived at romance. Much of the scientific support for the child-savage connection also came from evolutionary anthropology, which developed as a discipline in the three decades preceding the romance revival. Along with comparative mythology and philology it made use of the writings of the ‘infancy of letters’ to create the Victorian image of pre-civilised life. Epics and romances, ‘the Icelandic sagas, the Nibelungenlied, etc.’ were the ‘oldest literary monuments’ that preserved the last ‘surviving traces’ of primitive social organisation (Bax 1886, 5), and they served as a quarry of primary material not only for modern romancers keen to find interesting plots, but also for the numerous scholars of language and culture (not to mention myth, religion, history, law and politics) looking for examples to corroborate their theories of social and linguistic evolution. Romance was assumed to be native to the early stages of society: Saintsbury called it the earliest form of writing. Practitioners in every field – political, literary and scientific – resorted to the analogy: Carlyle’s Norse hero lived in the ‘early childhood of nations’ (1897, 27); Friedrich Engels (1972, 87) and Max Müller (2002, 117, 225) talked of the ‘childhood of the human race’; T. H. Huxley referred to ‘the heroic childhood of our race’ (1903, 86); John Lubbock, a founding father of evolutionary anthropology, devoted some pages to the ‘similarity existing between savages and children’ in The Origin of Civilisation (1870, 402–3); and Charles Kingsley titled the first lecture of The Roman and the Teuton ‘The Forest Children’. Kingsley’s discussion was particularly self-conscious: ‘Races, like individuals, it has been often said, may have their childhood, their youth, their manhood, their old age, and natural death. It is but a theory – perhaps nothing more. But at least, our race had its childhood.’ He highlighted both the good and the bad children’s qualities of ‘our Teutonic race’, and developed the theme of the ‘boy-nature’, the ‘youthful strength and vitality’ and ‘childishness of our forefathers’ for many pages. The lecture concluded by invoking the Nibelungenlied as an allegory of the Teutonic conquest of Rome. The Romans were Trolls, ‘man-devouring ogre[s]’, the promise of their civilisation was vanishing fairy-gold, a ‘fatal Nibelungen hoard’. History became romance, ‘a myth, a saga, such as the men [of old] . . . loved; and if it seem to any of you childish, bear in mind that what is childish need not therefore be shallow’ (1864, 1, 8–9, 5–6, 15–16). That romance had primeval origins but was also a juvenile genre was therefore no paradox. On the contrary, as Kingsley had written in the preface to his reworking of ‘Greek fairy tales’ for his children: the Greeks ‘were but grown-up children . . . while they were young and simple they loved fairy tales, as you do now. All nations do so when they are young: our

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old forefathers did, and called their stories “Sagas.” I will read you some of them some day – some of the Eddas, and the Völuspá, and Beowulf, and the noble old Romances’ (1856, xvi). Nowhere was the analogy more in evidence than in the work of the romance revivalists themselves. Everyone knew that Stevenson wrote books for boys, but the dedicatory poem to Treasure Island made the link with ancestral literature explicit by characterising this tale for ‘youngsters’ as an ‘old romance, retold / Exactly in the ancient way’ (1883, front matter). Lang and Haggard were also fond of associating barbarians and boys, and as a practitioner in both fields and a figure linking romance and anthropology, Lang makes an interesting case study. He was not only the literary champion of Stevenson’s and Haggard’s New Romance, but a renowned folklorist – both author and collector of many volumes of romances and fairytales, and a founder of the FolkLore Society – as well as an acknowledged authority on anthropology. His studies of myth and religion played a prominent role in the debates led by E. B. Tylor and Max Müller, and he turned his attention to all ‘three classes of romance, savage fables, rural märchen, [and] Greek or German epics’ (1899, 2: 305). As Müller’s ideological opponent in the field of comparative mythology, Lang stood the accepted relationship between mythology and folklore on its head, but still preserved the essential connection between savages, peasants and civilised children. In the prefaces to his celebrated series of coloured fairy books, he continued to equate the tastes of children with those of ‘the young age of man’, ‘the tastes of their naked ancestors, thousands of years ago’ (1901, viii). He even wrote a sequel to the Odyssey with Rider Haggard, who had himself read both Lang and Tylor’s Primitive Culture before setting out to write his first successful book for boys. Stevenson and Kipling had done the same and, in fact, most of the authors of the romance revival were familiar with contemporary anthropological writing, and used its conclusions to define and defend their chosen genre. Nothing could be more symptomatic of the intense interdisciplinarity of fin de siècle intellectual life than the fact that Lang, the man who ‘was more than any other critic responsible for the great surge of interest in romance in the 1880s and 1890s’, should also have been an anthropologist. As George Stocking claims, ‘Romance may have served Lang as a kind of sublimated anthropology’ (1995, 52). And the same could be said for William Morris with his stories of barbarian tribes. Even the references to the second childhood of the world and to the ‘childish’ fairytales pictured on the walls in Morris’s utopian romance News from Nowhere acquire a much deeper resonance against this background. For Tylor’s primitive survivals, preserved in

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the folklore of the European peasantry, were precisely the specimens of popular art that Morris tried to recreate in his romances and wished to resurrect in the socialist future (Silver 1982, 149–50). When he was in a particularly facetious mood, Morris was even wont to ‘sublimate’ Müller and Lang for the entertainment of his socialist newspaper readers. In reference to an article about the ‘Siege of a Butcher’s Shop’ in the Daily News he wrote, tongue firmly in cheek: ‘the very rapidly growing myth of the Wicked Socialist and the Heroic Butcher . . . is, after all, perhaps the very latest example of the solar myth . . . Mr. Andrew Lang perhaps could tell us what it might signify according to the explanation of the “customary” theory of myths’3 (1996, 195). Anthropology and its kindred sciences were a source of jokes as much as of plot lines or literary theories, but, comic or serious, the paradigms they provided constituted a common point of reference for fin de siècle romancers of all kinds. Not only was it publicly unthinkable that romance could be mired in sordid mass-market practices, not only did the genre keep alight the torch of idealism and wholesome adventurousness in the surrounding realist murk, but it offered its nineteenth-century audience a genuine taste of literature as it had been in the childhood of the race.

Notes 1. See, for instance, the front matter to Wells, Socialism and the Family (1906) and New Worlds for Old (1908). The works were classified as ‘short stories’, ‘novels’ (which included his realist fiction like Love and Mr Lewisham, Kipps and so on), ‘sociological and socialist essays’ (such as Anticipations, Mankind in the Making and A Modern Utopia) and ‘romances’ – the latter consisted of his science fiction and utopias. 2. Arthur Tilley referred to it as ‘the tea-pot style’ in his ‘The New School of Fiction’ (1883); and Chesterton continued to talk of ‘tea-table novels’ and ‘the romance of the teapot’ in the twentieth century. 3. The ‘solar myth’ is a reference to Müller’s most famous (and derided) concept.

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Chapter 2

The Paradoxes of Mr Morris

New Contexts and Publishing Paradoxes: William Morris as a New Romancer When William Morris’s late-Victorian contemporaries referred to romance in general (as opposed to the New Romance in particular) they could have in mind any number of things, from Chaucer and the Icelandic sagas, to the historical novels of Scott and Dumas, to E. A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). But despite this generic diversity, most uses of the term activated one of two sets of antithetical associations. Either romance was a universal and popular creation like the old literary monuments of pre-modern communities, or it was a mass genre that was recognisably the product of a commercial society. Morris willingly participated in market processes; at the same time, he was one of the most vocal exponents of the romance-ascommunity idea. Was he, in this respect, typical of his contemporaries? There were many who recognised that romance could be a commodity; there were also many who thought of it as a primal mode of human expression with its roots in the national epics of primitive peoples. Both perceptions depended to some extent on new developments, whether the growth of the publishing industry towards the end of the century, or the anthropological and philological discoveries that shaped the Victorian understanding of pre-modern cultures. And it was by no means exceptional to hold both at the same time. By a curious form of doublethink romance revival giants managed to act according to the exigencies of the market, but to talk (at least in public) as if the market were non-existent. Of course, the reality of the mass market was an ever-present concern for authors who made their living by catering to it and for critics of working-class forms like the penny dreadful. But those late-Victorian men of letters who sprang to the defence of the New Romance did not like to remind their audience that it was a commodity of the same order

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as the cheap bloods. If they did – with regard to Haggard, for instance – it was only to cast him off as not belonging to the true type. With a few notable exceptions, commentators of this school assumed a nearly absolute distinction between working- and middle-class mass romance: the former was business, the latter was art. Economic indicators of their identity were occluded by a formal theory of romance as a pleasant, active, non-introspective literary mode, which required a rival conception of realism as its foil. The New Romance of the 1880s and 90s was an archetypal form of writing going back to the dawn of humanity, but it was also a new publishing category identified with a few specific names. William Morris was not one of these names. He was not habitually associated with the revival of the 1880s and 90s, let alone considered an originator of it (that was Stevenson, according to all contemporary accounts). Morris had been writing romances, in prose or in verse, since the 1850s, and some of the late ones had more claim to ‘prehistoric’ status than any contemporary fictional text, but not a single review linked them either with the revival – peaking in these same years – or with any of the authors who were taken to be part of it. It was not until the 1900s that Saintsbury made the connection. ‘For the last two decades’, he wrote in 1907, there had been a ‘strong turn of the tide towards the romance’. William Morris ‘in the last ten years of his life – influenced consciously or unconsciously, no doubt, by the general set of tide’ produced ‘a long series of curious romances’ to which Saintsbury wished ‘a far wider and more enthusiastic audience than they seem to have yet had’. ‘The other novelist of the New Romance (though a very different new romance), Robert Louis Stevenson . . . was of a younger generation, and followed totally different ideals and methods’ (127–9). Saintsbury was in no doubt that the two men could be placed in the same bracket, and that Morris’s tales of the 1880s and 90s had more in common with Stevenson’s adventures for boys than with Morris’s own ‘crude’ romances of the 1850s. Although Saintsbury was virtually exceptional among contemporary critics in holding this view, he was also correct. In the 1890s, however, if comparisons were drawn it was not with Stevenson, but with the romances of Chaucer, Malory, Cervantes and the Elizabethans, and the most frequently invoked contemporary context was a historiographical one. Reviewers, whether appreciative or antagonistic, knew that Morris’s A Dream of John Ball was to be taken on the same wavelength as J. R. Green’s Short History of the English People, that The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains were akin to E. A. Freeman’s Old English History for Children. The Icelandic

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sagas, comparative mythology and anthropology, socialism and the arts and crafts were all points of reference; the New Romance was not. The only kind of ‘Romantic revival’ these reviewers invoked was that of the early nineteenth century (Faulkner 1973, 318–20, 335–8, 376–80). Another context, present by implication, could loosely be termed ‘aesthetic’. It was evident chiefly in the vocabulary used by reviewers to describe Morris’s prose: artistic, beautiful, poetic, romantic, fairytale, archaic, medieval, affected, artificial. When Yeats, Swinburne and Theodore Watts-Dunton wrote about the prose romances shortly after Morris’s death, they dwelt on their uniqueness and singularity, on Morris’s love of beauty, perfection, dream and story for story’s sake. But ‘aesthetic’ adjectival choices aside, very few brought up specific affiliations like Pre-Raphaelitism by name. Pre-Raphaelitism, wrote Watts-Dunton in the 1890s, was something from the ‘antediluvian days’ (Faulkner 1973, 421), and D. G. Rossetti was useful chiefly as an example of what Morris was not. Morris’s literary reputation was made only after he was perceived to have abandoned the Pre-Raphaelite foibles of his first volume, The Defence of Guenevere. Even Walter Pater, in the 1868 review of Morris’s poetry that served as the source for his notorious manifesto of aestheticism in the conclusion to The Renaissance, had remarked on Morris’s change of manner in the ten years following the publication of the Defence. Although objections to archaism and medievalism dogged Morris throughout his life – the late prose romances in the eyes of many simply reconfirmed the penchant that had been recognised decades earlier – they were separate from objections to the ‘PreRaphaelite affectations’ of his early work. In 1858 he had been damned by association – with Rossetti, but by 1888 Rossetti was dead and Morris’s association with socialism was the more relevant and worrying issue. Reviewers were much more ready to find hidden socialist allegory than Pre-Raphaelite extravagance in the fairytale romances of the 1890s: Morris famously had to rebuff an attempt to read a socialist allegory into The Wood Beyond the World (1910–15, 17: xxxviij–xxxix). By then the Pre-Raphaelite Morris was a thing of the past, his great story-telling phase had intervened, and the positive reviews and amazing sales of The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise had established him as a pre-eminent narrative poet. Moreover, with Sigurd the Volsung he was widely perceived to have left behind the enervating softness of The Earthly Paradise to write in a ‘masculine’, ‘vigorous’ and ‘virile’ style (Litzenberg 1936, 419). Old Norse literature was supposed to have precipitated Morris out of his earlier romantic-melancholy dreaminess into a new vigorousness of perception, or as G. B. Shaw put it, changed him from ‘the facile troubadour of love and beauty into the

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minstrel of strife and guile, of battle, murder, and death’ (1966, 39). The vocabulary of vigour and virility never wholly displaced the ‘aesthetic’ one, but the shift was symptomatic nevertheless: very soon the same words would become commonplace in reviews of the New Romance. Morris’s last prose tales were composed several decades after the PreRaphaelite heyday, by a man who had in the meantime explored the grim sagas of the North, the day-to-day struggles of socialist politics and the academic literature of evolutionary anthropology. But if this took him away from the Pre-Raphaelite groove, the romance revivalists of the 1880s and 90s were never in it to begin with, and no one claimed that they were following the mid-Victorian aesthetes. They did not look to Rossetti, Swinburne or Pater for inspiration, but were a different growth entirely. They wrote about and had personal experience of exotic (imperial) locales – Africa, India, the South Seas. Their image was not bohemian or effeminate, but strenuous, earnest and masculine (even Marie Corelli was perceived to be as earnest and anti-decadent as the most macho imperialist romancer). Though it is difficult to make generalisations about their social origins, they were usually not upper-middle-class products of Oxford. Adventure was their metier, and it was certainly not a word one naturally applied to the creations of the aesthetic movement. Above all, their bestsellers appealed to the philistine public the aesthetes purported to despise. The Morris of the late 1880s and 90s was not a central figure of the revival generation or of literary aesthetic circles, but a bridge between the two. There were other links, of course, beyond the continuing fashion among literary practitioners of all schools, from Lang to Le Gallienne, for subtitling their creations ‘A Romance’. Stevenson, despite his juvenile subject matter and inclination to potboilerism, was widely admired for his elaborate ‘aesthetic’ style; Hall Caine had started out as Rossetti’s secretary; Kipling, for all his revulsion from ‘long-haired things / In velvet collar-rolls, / Who talk about the Aims of Art . . . And moo and coo with women-folk’ (1909, 195), was a nephew of Edward Burne-Jones and an admirer of Morris. Swinburne’s saviour Theodore Watts-Dunton accomplished what Morris never could by writing Aylwin (1898): a prose romance about the lives of the gypsies in the tradition of George Borrow (a favourite of Morris’s) which attained immediate popularity, and ran through many editions in the course of a few months. Oscar Wilde, the doyen of Decadence, was also a staunch defender of romance in Intentions. His famous attacks on popular taste concealed a surprising degree of implication in the literary market: just like the romance champions, he was forced to maintain a double standard with regard to the commercial imperatives that governed his

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practice at every level. But for all the overlapping, the aestheticist and the revival lines were recognised as being separate and were rarely confounded. Morris was one of the few who managed to have a foot in both camps. Indeed, far from living on into the age of Long John Silver and Allan Quatermain as an anachronistic Pre-Raphaelite survival, he turned native, and drank at the same sources as many of the revival’s guiding spirits. It was a rare critic who mentioned Morris in the same breath as Rider Haggard, yet they knew each other and enjoyed each other’s books, were published by the same house, read the same scholarly literature, and were equally invested in the value of action, and in the idea of the primeval origins of the genre. Haggard shared Morris’s interest in ancient Germanic societies, and the links between Morris’s anthropological stories of the late 1880s and Haggard’s archaeological and antiquarian romances are too strong to be dismissed. By virtue of being both an aesthete and a revivalist, Morris could simultaneously ‘carry out Oscar Wilde’s theory of the beauty of lying’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 3: 77) and write romances that appealed to the author of She (Haggard 1926, 1: Chap. 12). Morris’s prose romances were neither adventure tales for adolescents (their most appreciative contemporary readers included Watts-Dunton, Swinburne and Yeats) nor much-discussed bestsellers – and these were the most obvious markers of the mainstream revival – but they did grow, root and branch, out of the same soil as the works of Stevenson and Haggard. Morris may have been a staunch anti-imperialist politically, but this did not prevent him from succumbing to the spell of the heroic nationalist (even racialist) rhetoric that is more usually associated with the adventure writers of empire. Nor was drawing inspiration from his reading and translation of Old Norse literature particularly original, for the last decades of the century saw an outpouring of romances modelled on the Icelandic sagas or featuring Norse elements. Haggard, Caine and Kipling were among the more recognisable names associated with that particular vogue, while Morris’s tale of the Peasants’ Revolt, A Dream of John Ball, had to jostle for recognition in an equally crowded terrain. It did not help that his socialist newspaper the Commonweal, in which the romance of the fourteenth century first appeared, was in the same price range as the penny story papers, for among all those ‘weekly packets of trash none [was] more popular than the historical romance’, which ‘command[ed] a sale of ten or twelve thousand, each copy finding half a score of readers’ (Johns 1887, 51–2). Morris’s classic statement of socialist fellowship had to compete for the attention of working-class audiences with titles like Sword of Freedom; The Boyhood Days of Jack Straw, or romances about Wat Tyler serialised in boys’ magazines.

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But it was not just his choice of plots and settings that qualified Morris as a New Romancer. After all, Wilkie Collins had already depicted the conflict between the Goths and the Romans that formed the centrepiece of Morris’s The House of the Wolfings as early as 1850 in the triple-decker Antonina or, The Fall of Rome. What had altered since Morris began writing in the same decade was not the interest in medieval and Germanic themes but the intellectual context through which it was refracted. And what made Morris’s final experiments in the genre so much a part of their historical moment, and aligned them with the products of the romance revival, was precisely their degree of embeddedness in the new disciplines. The two full-length romances published in the late 1880s built upon an intimate acquaintance with the contemporary historiographical and anthropological field and were indebted to the comparative mythology of Max Müller; the works of the 1890s owed as much to Frazer. It is safe to say that neither the stories he contributed as a student to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine nor the verse romances of the intervening decades were informed by the same awareness of the theories of Aryan solar-worship, totemism and the exogamous gens as were the romances of his last years. The parameters of this new intellectual context are easily illustrated by a short excursus into the tables of contents of the same periodicals that featured the serials and manifestos of the romance revivalists. Most of the elements that were integrated into Morris’s prose romances – from philology and the village community to dramatic verse – reflected mainstream cultural concerns. Even the romances’ socialism, while it set them apart from the other texts of the revival, marked them as typical products of the fin de siècle. The same numbers of the Contemporary Review of 1887 that carried Lang’s and Haggard’s seminal essays on ‘Realism and Romance’ and ‘About Fiction’, also contained the Marxist H. M. Hyndman’s article on ‘The English Workers as They Are’, as well as pieces by or about Stevenson, Professor of English Literature and author of the influential Epic and Romance (1897) W. P. Ker, East End author Walter Besant, and the historians E. A. Freeman, J. R. Green and J. E. Thorold Rogers, on whom Morris drew extensively for his lectures and romances (1936, 1: 134; 1902, 199). In the same year the Fortnightly Review featured a running debate on socialism between Hyndman and W. H. Mallock, side by side with Max Müller on language, Sergei Stepniak on the Russian village community, Richard Jefferies on nature and books, Lang on ancient (Greek) song and Morris himself on poetry. If the range is extended to cover the last two decades of the century as a whole, the correspondences become too numerous to list. Longman’s Magazine in the three years from 1882 to 1885

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carried not only poems and serialised novels by Stevenson, J. A. Froude’s travel account of Norway and Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’, but also essays on Irish popular poetry, on the history of Teutonic and Romance languages, and on Goths, Vandals, Aryans and proletarians. The Contemporary Review of 1888 featured Müller, Morris’s friend the socialist MP Cunninghame Graham, Matthew Arnold on ‘The Invasion of Pauper Foreigners’, and articles like ‘Socialism and the Unemployed’. In 1890 it included Lang on fetishism, as well as essays on communism, new utopias and the origin of the English people. The Westminster Review of 1894 picked up on all of Morris’s favourite themes, from the customs of ancient and medieval times, the phases of human development and literary evolution, to land ownership, unemployment and socialism. The thematic range of the contributions to the periodical press provides a kind of homology for Morris’s own reading matter at this time: Marx’s Capital and Elton’s Origins of English History, Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, ‘snatches of Irish epic [and] a book of Finnish folk-tales’ sandwiched between Catlin’s Illustrations of the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North-American Indians and The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (Morris 1910–15, 22: xxv, xxvij). Romances like The House of the Wolfings, The Roots of the Mountains and A Dream of John Ball are in essence intricate collages of all these elements, old and new. It is not just that they owe their style and content in large measure to Victorian notions of romance and of Teutonic and medieval communality. Morris’s very understanding of what constituted popular art was based on recent Victorian scholarship, and his re-creations of pre-modern alternatives to contemporary society were only made possible by the latest developments, for in nothing was Morris’s modernity more evident than in his choice of disciplinary tools for reconstructing the past. But Morris’s productions were typical of the commercially successful New Romance, and even of its inglorious penny counterpart, in more than just their interdisciplinary allusiveness. The Commonweal targeted essentially the same market as the penny dreadfuls (though infinitely less successfully), and, in keeping with this working- and lower-middle-class orientation, the two romances (Dream and News) that made their first appearance in the pages of the socialist organ were also the only ones to be made immediately available through the trade publishers in cheap one shilling paper wrappers. Morris’s other tales, on the other hand, were geared from the outset to the New Romancers’ middle-class audience. The Story of the Glittering Plain; or, The Land of Living Men was serialised in Macmillan’s English Illustrated Magazine, edited by Morris’s

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friend Emery Walker; the one volume Wolfings went for the standard six shillings, while the longer Roots cost eight; two-shilling cloth pocket editions were not issued until 1913. Although, for all the parity in prices, Morris’s stories never sold like the New Romancers’, they came before the same reading public, a public familiar with Haggard’s She and Stevenson’s Treasure Island, as well as with the books of Corelli, Caine, Weyman, Hope and Conan Doyle. If it followed the reviews, this public would have been aware of the critical consensus on a number of generic features, such as the opposition of purity to immoral filthiness, the improving nature of the subject matter, and the focus on plot as opposed to analysis and introspection, and it would have associated romance in general with ‘Sir Walter’ and Dumas. Morris was not just a supplier to this market, but a customer himself, and there is every indication that his expectations were identical to those current among his contemporaries: ‘My leanings are towards the romantic side in art, and my literature is wholly romantic,’ he told an interviewer from Cassell’s Saturday Journal. ‘The Romantic School in art and literature concerns itself with incident or story-telling, and with beauty and ornament, and the loftiest example of romance is, in literature, a great epic’ (Pinkney 2005, 108). Morris had a prodigious taste for Scott and Dumas, both of whom – along with George Borrow, the writer of gypsy romances – were included in his list of the Hundred Best Books. He shared his countrymen’s predilection for Björnsen, who figured in Hall Caine’s list of eminent romancers, and was not averse now and then to a ‘story of gilded crime’ (Morris 1910–15, 22: xxv). He followed the newest sensations of the romance revival closely. In a letter to his daughter May of 26 November 1885, Morris wrote: ‘We ought to bestir ourselves now, & try to win as many radicals as possible. I have read King Solomon’s Mines (finished it Tuesday night!) & think amusing if a good deal made of Poe & C. Read’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 496). It seems that Morris was one of the thousands who fell prey to the unprecedented King Solomon’s Mines publicity campaign. On 14 October 1886 he wrote to Shaw: I have read Treasure Island & Kidnapt [sic] and was much pleased by both . . . I thought that in the first I could see the influence of 3 books, in the first part Lorna Doon, in the second Arthur Gordon Pym mingled with Masterman Ready . . . As to your lecture it was a very good one, especially to non-socialists of whom there were a few present, though at Hammersmith we are getting to be rather ‘a Congregation’ on Sundays. (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 582)

Socialist politics and romance entertainment were habitually mentioned in the same breath.

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Morris also made known his antipathy to the Victorian realist novel in no uncertain terms in News from Nowhere, an opinion which was neither especially philistine nor especially revolutionary, but simply mainstream among adherents of the romance cause. Saintsbury, with his contempt for ‘dreary introspective nonsense’ (Morris 1910–15, 16: 151) would have felt right at home with Morris’s socialist utopians, and Morris would no doubt have agreed with Saintsbury’s description of the average mid- and late-nineteenth-century English man or woman as having ‘been drawn and quartered, analysed and “introspected”, till there [was] nothing new to be done with him or her’ (Saintsbury 1887, 417). Although the rationale behind them was very different, some of the literary judgements expressed by the narrator in News from Nowhere would have fitted quite well in the pages of the Fortnightly Review. In ‘The Society of the Future’, Morris scorned the ‘“truly intellectual” man’ who elevates ‘mere rhetorical word-spinners and hunters of introspection above such masters of life as Scott and Dickens, who tell their tales to our senses and leave them alone to moralise the tale so told’ (1936, 2: 464–5). According to Sydney Cockerell’s notes of one conversation, Morris disapproved of ‘character-study’ in drama, and was against the introduction of ugly persons and disagreeable incidents (Morris 1910– 15, 22: xxx, xxvij). His own romances certainly presented an ideal of heroism in a remote setting, and omitted the cynical and tragic. They highlighted the best in human nature, and were on the whole bright, full of incident, and light on character, rather than lugubriously analytical. Even The House of the Wolfings, which alone among the romances ended with the death of the main character, had a happy conclusion, for individual tragedy was transcended in the affirmation of the communal spirit. The post-1890 romances, for their part, achieved a nearly utopian repudiation of sorrow, creating a world in which ‘sufferings [were] not overwhelming and scarcely bitter, and all adventures end[ed] in serenity and peace’ (Morris 1910–15, 14: xxv). Morris may not have been one of the publicists of the New Romance of morally salubrious action like Caine or Saintsbury, but he was its faithful consumer and practitioner. Morris’s late fantasies were even published by houses like Longmans and Green, whose list also included the bestsellers of Haggard and Lang. It is through such trade publishers, and not through his Kelmscott Press or the Socialist League Office in Farringdon Road that Morris’s romances reached their widest audiences. Of course, comparatively speaking, they never sold well: as Arthur Quiller-Couch put it in an unflattering obituary, ‘Morris’s archaic romances were never even popular’ (Faulkner 1973, 397–8). The total print runs of The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains in the twenty years

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following their publication hardly exceeded 7,000 each, not counting the American editions; by 1920 A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere had print runs just surpassing 15,000 and 40,000 respectively. Corelli, on the other hand, ‘achieved a first-day record of 100,000’ with The Treasure of Heaven: A Romance of Riches (Federico 2000, 2), usually her average for the year; Caine, the highest paid author of the time, was Corelli’s nearest competitor with 45,000 a year; while one of Haggard’s first day records was 20,000 (Maiwa’s Revenge [1888]). Wells and Conan Doyle trailed with 15,000 a year each. Total sales of Corelli’s and Caine’s romances eventually reached into the millions, though a different measure – bookshop and wholesale lists – seems to indicate that Hope sold well over a longer period than Corelli, and appeared on more lists. But whoever took precedence in the world of the bestsellers, Morris did not figure at all. Nevertheless, his trade sales figures look more impressive in context. The Kelmscott Press produced only a few hundred expensive copies (A Dream of John Ball on vellum cost ten guineas). The Commonweal was cheap (one penny) but had a small circulation. The first issue sold 5,000 copies (by comparison, the first edition of the Clarion, Robert Blatchford’s nearly contemporaneous socialist newspaper, sold 40,000), circulation then stabilised at 2,000–3,000, but sales declined after 1888, and by the time News from Nowhere was serialised in 1890 the paper was struggling for existence. Its position was always precarious: even before Morris’s withdrawal it generally managed to recoup only half its costs (MacCarthy 1994, 514). Above all, both Kelmscott and the Commonweal were very short-lived, so whatever admittedly modest level of recognition the prose romances managed to achieve, they owed it to the editions of Reeves and Turner – Morris’s main trade publisher from 1885 to 1896, as well as the distributor of the first Kelmscott books – or Longmans and Green (not to mention the American publishers), who reprinted them again and again into the twentieth century. This holds for the socialist romances like A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere – read out loud at meetings in the 1890s and sold as far away as Kansas – as much as for the Germanic and fairytale romances which were still being discovered (with momentous effects for the later development of popular literature) by the likes of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis in the 1900s and 1910s. There is no hard evidence – Paul Fussell’s notorious but unsubstantiated assertion in The Great War and Modern Memory notwithstanding – that Morris’s pseudo-medieval romances had any widespread popularity during the First World War. They were always a minority taste. But even if there was no vogue, at least they were still solidly in print, and the 1913 Longmans Pocket

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Library edition featured some of the biggest print runs (3,000) at some of the cheapest prices (one or two shillings) in the romances’ early publication history. As late as 1934, the influence of Morris’s communalist writings among the working classes still depended on these editions: ‘I went last week to the coalfields of Cumberland,’ observed Harold Laski, ‘and I saw again, in house after house of the miners there, the tattered pages of the paper-bound “A Dream of John Ball” and “Songs for Socialists”’ (cit. Eisenman 2005, 105). That was probably the Reeves and Turner cheap paper-cover edition which sold for one shilling. Morris thought of romances as the literature of the people, but in his case the literature only reached the people through the agency of capitalist publishers – the publishers of the romance revival.1 His tales may have had little in common politically with Haggard’s and Stevenson’s, but they could no more escape the realities of contemporary publishing economics than they could avoid mirroring the intellectual preoccupations of their time. Yet the fact that texts that celebrated community and advocated the transcendence of commercial society had to make do with less than desirable means of getting their message across – had to, in effect, make a bargain with the devil – was not for Morris a source of concern. After all, the bargain had been made long ago. The romances may not have been bestsellers, but Morris was also the author of the highly commercially successful The Earthly Paradise (thirty-eight editions by 1910), and had been working within the system since the middle of the nineteenth century. At the level of abstract social criticism, Morris recognised that a true literature of community could not exist in capitalist conditions, but this did not translate into a concrete condemnation of the publishing industry. In fact, most of the time Morris did not seem to be aware of any problem: he may have agonised over the contradiction between his principles and his design work, but he took the dominance of trade publication as a matter of course. It was adulterated and shoddy, as befitted any manifestation of commercial civilisation, and these aesthetic crimes were what the Kelmscott Press was there to combat – it was not there to further the Cause or to provide cheap reading matter for the common people. On the other hand, the relatively ‘untainted’ method of literature dissemination via movement periodicals, true to its own anti-capitalist principles, had only a limited impact precisely because of the competitive disadvantages and financial constraints such purity imposed in a capitalist publishing environment. (The issue of obtaining revenues from advertising, faced by periodicals like the Clarion, was not as pressing for privately financed and short-lived organs like the Commonweal, and Morris, unlike Blatchford, did not choose to resort to New Journalistic techniques to raise his circulation.)

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Ironically, the mass-produced Longmans editions were more responsible for fostering a sense of socialist community down the years than either the Kelmscott objets d’art or the Socialist League workaday weekly. They did not sell for a penny, but with their range of prices (varying from one shilling to as much as forty-two), sizes, paper quality and bindings, they were still geared to different buyers’ markets. If Morris’s romances were read at all in the decades after his death, they were read in their trade editions (by this time Longmans had also released the Collected Works). Community was propagandised and produced using modern commercial methods. All of Morris’s creative initiatives laboured under a similar contradiction. The Kelmscott Press may have pioneered ‘a new concept of a press as a community with a life and a creative volition of its own’, inspiring a host of craft presses across the world, but its workmen were dependent employees, and its books received pre-publicity in the Athenaeum just like Caine’s and Corelli’s (MacCarthy 1994, 624, 615). Above all, the enterprise was exclusive: its publications were originally meant to be distributed among a few chosen friends, and then sold by subscription. Like most arts and crafts experiments, in the words of Eric Gill, the press ended up ‘supply[ing] beautiful hand-made things to the rich . . . But as for wrecking commercial industrialism and resuscitating a human world – not a hint of it’ (cit. Faulkner 1975, 18). Morris’s critics had always been aware of this problem: one of the most virulently disapproving assessments of Kelmscott and its imitators was given by Morris’s nearcontemporary Thorstein Veblen, when describing the role of the arts and crafts in ‘conspicuous waste’ and consumption: As a further characteristic feature which fixes the economic place of artistic book-making, there is the fact that these more elegant books are, at their best, printed in limited editions. A limited edition is in effect a guarantee . . . that this book is scarce and that it therefore is costly and lends pecuniary distinction to its consumer. (1899, 163–4)

This was not the art of the people. With Kelmscott, as with his Firm, Morris was still, as he ruefully described it, ‘ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich’ (cit. MacCarthy 1994, 210). The problem went deeper than the old conflict between aesthetic autonomy and economic imperative experienced by Pre-Raphaelite artists working for industrialist patrons. The pleasure that Morris and his friends (Edward BurneJones, Emery Walker, Walter Crane) could take in the communal labour of book creation, the same pleasure that earlier in the century he and his Pre-Raphaelite brethren had taken in the design of Red House, could not be shared with the rest of society.

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Moreover, Morris himself was a capitalist employer, and this ‘socialist as capitalist’ paradox has remained a critical commonplace ever since hecklers first interrupted Morris’s propaganda speeches asking him why he did not practise what he preached. Morris paid his employees well, and gave them time to do the work at their own pace (albeit grudgingly), but even he could not escape industrial conflict: the introduction of a particularly stiff ink at the Kelmscott Press almost produced a strike, and Morris had to threaten to close it down (Needham et al. 1976, 82). Though the staff were unionised, the workplace relationship remained one of ‘man’ and ‘capitalist printer’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 443), as Morris phrased it when he engaged Thomas Binning, later compositor for the Kelmscott Press, to produce the Commonweal. Long before Kelmscott, however, similar objections were voiced against Morris and Co. As Punch expressed it in a ditty entitled ‘Sigurd the Socialist!’, parodying Morris’s long line: ’Twas Morris that spoke out of Kelmscott, that’s hard by the Hammersmith Mall, ‘A Socialist I, and the workmen the profits of things that you sell Should share, and employers of labour should act on a different plan, And give up their capital freely to help on the bold artisan.’ Then uprose a pestilent stranger, and wrote to the Standard also, Said he, ‘When you make your wall-papers, my Morris, I’d much like to know If you share all the wonderful profits you make, my aesthetical boy, With your brothers in Art and in labour – in short, with the men you employ?’ Then Morris he dodged and he ducked, as in angular flight does the snipe, And said that he thought on the whole that the time for such deeds wasn’t ripe; Quoth he, ‘I’m a Socialist true, but, on further reflection, the fact is, The theory’s all we should hold, and I won’t put the plan into practice.’ (1883, 286)

The socialists may have gone hoarse explaining that their doctrine had nothing to do with profit sharing or Christian charity, but the cliché of hypocrisy would not be dislodged. In vain did Walter Crane spend two pages of his Morris obituary exonerating him from the reproach (1897, 97–8), in vain did Morris reply to interviewers who wanted to know why he did not ‘publicly share whatever [he had] got and run [his] concern for the good of the community’, that it would do no good: ‘I am not fighting individuals, I am attacking a system. How could I attack it more effectually by reducing myself to the proletariat level?’ (Pinkney 2005, 49; see also MacCarthy 1994, 542). The taunts would never

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stop. Punch continued to make fun of Morris’s socialism throughout the 1880s and 90s. He ‘is far more at home in house decorating than in Socialist mob-orating’ (‘The House of the Wolfings’ 1889, 54), ran the familiar punch-line. Contemporary reviewers in Britain and America referred to Morris as ‘a most altruistic and sincere socialist . . . who – paradoxically enough – is a maker of wall papers and printer of books that only the rich can aspire to possess’ (Faulkner 1973, 366). But this self-contradiction was no more peculiar to Morris than his interest in anthropological theories or his reliance on mass-market publishers. Walter Crane was another socialist artist who enjoyed a successful commercial career alongside an equally fruitful one producing pictorial ephemera for the movement. In addition to his mainstream illustrated primers and fairytales, he supplied countless ‘cartoons for the cause’: membership card designs, illustrations, mastheads, covers and allegories for socialist newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, banners and posters. But while he opposed industrial mass production and the commercialisation of art as passionately as Morris, he happily made use of the former when it came to his illustrated books for children. Crane’s collaboration with Routledge preceded his conversion to socialism, and though, like Morris, he was concerned with the quality of printing, he did not go out of his way to make his non-socialist books accessible to the working class. In fact, when he saw the opportunity to move into a more expensive market, he had no qualms about raising prices. Neither Crane nor Morris was going to cut off the branch on which he was sitting. It made as little practical sense for Morris to give up the distribution channels made available by the big publishing houses as to give away the business profits that enabled him to finance the Commonweal – one had to be a capitalist in order to combat capitalism. But while he strenuously rationalised the business profits, his silence on the publishing issue, especially when contrasted with his persistent critiques of modern modes of artistic production and his sophisticated theorisation of art as an expression of social and economic conditions, pointed to something larger. As a socialist and an aesthete, Morris held commercial methods of book production in contempt, and his private press crusade to restore artistic craftsmanship followed naturally from his beliefs. But he was also a romance revivalist, and as such he was hardly going to boycott his capitalist trade publishers, or feel the need to justify, as he did with regard to his other business activities, the ideological inconsistency of his involvement with them. As Morris’s correspondence makes clear, typographical issues were uppermost in his mind when it came to bringing the romances before the world: the moral evils of massmarket publishing were even further from his thoughts than the seeming

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hypocrisy of expensive Kelmscott editions. That this blind spot should have fallen on the precise mechanism by which his communal rhetoric was most effectively broadcast to the modern public may have had more than a little to do with his alternate identity as a New Romancer.

Communities and Individuals Morris disseminated his books in accordance with the rules of the capitalist marketplace; his subjects and his sources, both primary and secondary, were used by other romance authors; he subscribed to the current anthropological ideas; and his plots answered to the definitions hammered out in the generic debates. In all these respects his works fell under the aegis of the romance revival. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to claim that Morris’s tales conformed in all respects to the New Romance template, for his unusual socialist preoccupations did dictate the thematics of his fiction, if not the conditions of its production and distribution. The stories of the revivalists were not just implicitly geared to members of an atomistic society considered in their capacity as economic agents making advertising-induced choices in the literary marketplace, but explicitly focused on the adventures of solitary heroes and unattached individuals. They did not make a fetish of ‘introspection’, like their despised realist opponents, but single-handed combat could be – no less than teatable self-analysis – an individualist business. Sometimes the heroes had helpers, or worked in a team, but few of these texts seriously aspired to imitate the national epic model their authors so admired in theory, actually to become the tale of a ‘people’, produced collaboratively and offered up to a community bound by shared cultural norms as a reflection of itself. Morris’s experiments in the genre could not meet the latter two criteria either, but unlike most of the texts praised by Lang and Saintsbury, they certainly did attempt to present a viable communal ideal. Of the romancers considered in this section, only Haggard was technically recognised as ‘New’, but spreading the net a little wider to Richard Jefferies and George MacDonald – both of whom Morris read or knew personally – puts the contrast between the general run of ‘individualist’ romances and Morris’s unique communal fantasies into perspective. The worlds of Haggard, Jefferies and MacDonald, whether past, future or entirely out of time, did not function on collectivist lines; their protagonists did not form an integral part of an organic society, but loomed large and solitary over a fragmented landscape. In Morris’s world it was different. In his essays and letters he frequently referred to his hatred of civilisation and his desire to see it destroyed in a flood of barbarism

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(1910–15, 23: 279; 1936, 2: 457; Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 435–6), and it was in the two Germanic romances, The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains, with their loving descriptions of the communal life of the ‘kindred’, that he provided a picture of what the opposite of civilisation had been like. This was a past in which individual ownership of land had not yet replaced a ‘primitive communism of wealth’ (1994, 498), and blood kinship determined the social unit (1910–15, 14: 5), at peace within itself, but in conflict with the outside world. That is why the action of both tales centres on war, not just with another tribe, but with groups like the Romans and the Huns, whose principles of organisation embody the antithesis of the Germanic barbarians’ communalism. In Roots victory in the conflict leads directly to the reunification of sundered kindreds. The heroes of Morris’s romances were, in the formulation he used to describe real-life Icelanders, ‘the Gothic family of the great Germanic race’, ‘people cognate to our own dominant race’, as evidenced by their ‘free tribal customs’. Iceland, Morris enthused in a lecture on ‘The Early Literature of the North’, ‘is to me a Holy Land’ (1969, 181), and Icelanders were the direct descendants of the Gothic tribes of Central Europe, whose world was depicted in Wolfings and Roots, and whose traditions and religion were still preserved in the language and literature of the island. It was natural, therefore, that the social detail of the Eddas and sagas influenced the portrayal of the reconstructed communities of the romances, and, looking further ahead, Morris’s conception of postcapitalistic society. The Icelandic Thing (or the Anglo-Saxon gemot) – an assembly in the open air of the freemen of the tribe for democratic self-government – was at the absolute centre of Morris’s thought about past and future, and pointed directly to his ideal of socialist administration. The folk-mote of the Markmen, Dalesmen and their allies in the romances foreshadowed the longed-for federation of small independent communities illustrated in utopian Nowhere and preached in political lecture and historical treatise. There is a Mote-house in Nowhere, and the Council of the Commune that meets under a tree in the postrevolutionary England of Morris’s little-known play The Tables Turned is not that different from the Gate-thing of the Burgdalers. One scene in particular is replicated throughout the romances of the Dark and Middle Ages and is depicted in its most vivid and concentrated form in a ballad appropriately entitled ‘The Folk-Mote by the River’. The reader sees a gathering of men (and often women) arrayed for war and arranged in companies by kindred – each with its own bright banner and a token of its House – about an elected war-leader or alderman speaking from a Speech-hill or burial mound set amidst fertile fields. He hears the clash

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of sword upon shield, and glad shouts arising from the host, expressing a unanimous decision to fight to preserve the Folk’s independence from an encroaching foe. The image, recurring not only in Morris, but in most scholarly Victorian considerations of Germanic tribal customs, goes, of course, all the way back to Tacitus’s Germany and its Tribes.2 Only in utopia is the pervasive tableau not to be found, for war, upon which the plots of the romances hinge, has been banished from the earth. Limited tribal communism, at odds with the outside world, is replaced by the complete communism of humanity, which knows no boundaries. In News from Nowhere, ‘the merry days to come’, for which the people of the past had so joyously sacrificed their lives – ‘looking forward to the good days to be . . . and the love and fellowship of Folks and of Houses’ – have finally arrived (1910–15, 14: 170; 15: 366). But while the Goths struggle ‘to sow the seed / Of the days to be hereafter’ (1910–15, 14: 144), they are also called upon to represent the ethos of communal life as it once existed among the barbarians. Rites of passage are performed collectively: all weddings take place at midsummer at a curious ritual called the Maiden-ward, and the dead are buried together in mounds. People eat, sleep and make merry in the Fathers’ Hall, deal out justice and elect leaders at common assemblies, muster for war at the Weapon-show, worship at the Altar of the Gods, and harvest, herd and hunt as members of kindred Houses. This is what C. S. Lewis was referring to when he wrote in his appreciation of the romances: ‘The great use of the idyllic in literature is to find and illustrate the good – to give a real value to the x about which political algebra can then work. The tribal communities which Morris paints in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains are such attempts, perhaps the most successful attempts ever made, to give x a value.’ The individual is completely immersed in ‘communal life’: ‘Life beyond life with the soul of the Wolfings’ is the Goths’ creed (Lewis 1969, 227–8), just as ‘living again in death in the souls of all the generations’ (Morris 1969, 192) is that of the Icelanders of the sagas. The War-duke Thiodolf’s daughter is sure that ‘remembrance still abideth, and long after the days of my life / Shall I live in the tale of the morning . . . And never again henceforward from the folk shall I fare apart’ (1910–15, 14: 176). Both Thiodolf in Wolfings and the Bride in Roots reject the promptings of individual love, choosing instead to ‘bear the burden of [their] people, in the battle and out of it’ (1910–15, 15: 180–1), and in doing so heal their own griefs. Thiodolf’s name, appropriately enough, means ‘Folk-wolf’ (compare ‘Folk-might’ in Roots), for as Victorian scholars liked to point out, ‘the word “thiud”, meaning people, enters into many of the names of Gothic chiefs and kings’ (Bax 1886, 169).

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One of the best expositions of the communal ideal and the ruling philosophy of the romances comes towards the end of Wolfings, when Thiodolf forsakes personal happiness and the love of a goddess in favour of the winter hunting and the spring sowing, the summer haysel, the ingathering of harvest, the happy rest of midwinter, and Yuletide with the memory of the Fathers, wedded to the hope of the days to be. Well may they bid me help them who have holpen me! Well may they bid me die who have made me live! . . . For I have lived with them, and eaten and drunken with them, and toiled with them, and led them in battle and the place of wounds and slaughter; they are mine and I am theirs; and through them am I of the whole earth, and all the kindreds of it. (Morris 1910–15, 14: 170)

Thiodolf effectively chooses ‘the daily life, health, and preservation of the community’ (Lewis 1969, 226) over his own life, because he knows that his decision is tantamount to suicide. He also chooses them over his identity, for when ‘within [him] was the world and nought without [him]’ (Morris 1910–15, 14: 169) – an apt description of the ethics of individualism – he let down his people and endangered the very existence of the tribe. As one American reviewer of Wolfings put it in 1890, commenting upon ‘the social union of the Marksmen as one people . . . their tribal self-consciousness, as an evolutionist would say’: ‘the doctrine of the brotherhood of men in races and kindred, and their duty to society as part of a larger life, has seldom been so nobly and almost triumphantly expressed’ (Faulkner 1973, 334). One natural point of comparison with Morris’s saga-inspired romances of the 1880s and 1890s is Rider Haggard’s Icelandic venture Eric Brighteyes, considered by Andrew Wawn to be the best of the numerous treatments of the ‘Old North’ matter in the late-Victorian period (2000, 331). As Haggard himself explains in the introduction, his ‘Norse romance’ was modelled on the Icelandic sagas, though cast ‘in the form of the romance of our own day’ (1895, viii, x) to make it more acceptable to modern readers. By the time it was published in 1891, Haggard already knew Morris, who recommended him to Eiríkr Magnússon in connection with his trip to Iceland in 1888 to visit the site of the story of Burnt Njal (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 785). Eric Brighteyes was probably written by 1889 – the year of its Dedication and of Morris’s Roots, while the most Icelandic of Morris’s own romances and the one closest in style and content to Eric, The Story of the Glittering Plain, appeared in 1890. Haggard’s introduction immediately arouses expectations with its Morrisian invocations of ‘our Norse forefathers’ and ‘the prose epics of our own race’. It strikes the same note as Wolfings with its emphasis

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on fame surviving in memory, and lives worthy of ‘a song in the ears of folk to come’ (1895, x, viii). But paradoxically, the degree of Haggard’s adherence to saga conventions actually undermines any fundamental similarity between the books. Haggard’s plot – like that of the models he alludes to in his introduction, but completely unlike Morris’s – is driven by blood feuds, oaths and divided loyalties, and the philosophy of the characters is bounded by a dour resignation to fate. Although the romance features a love triangle, like Roots, and Eric, like Thiodolf, does not flinch from going consciously to his death, the import and resolution of these narrative elements is of an altogether different order. In Morris’s romances, father does not fight against son, or brother against brother, because of allegiance to different lords, nor does unrequited love lead to a bloody and tragic slaughter of all concerned (as well as a hundred innocent bystanders). On the contrary, the keynotes of Wolfings and Roots are reconciliation, unification and transcendence of individual death in the greater life of the people. Haggard’s treatment of Icelandic society is far less utopian than Morris’s picture of its Gothic ancestors. The democratic potentialities of the Althing – defined by Haggard as ‘the annual assembly of free men which, in Iceland, performed the functions of a Parliament and Supreme Court of law’ (1895, 81) – are thwarted by private interests and alliances of intriguing self-seekers. The social divisions and hierarchies – from priests holding money out at interest to thralls and outlaws who mar the image of this ‘republic of aristocrats’ (vii) – take centre stage in a way that the barely mentioned slaves of Wolfings and the benign ranks of Roots never do. In Haggard’s Iceland, father and brother, to advance their position, contemplate selling the beautiful Gudruda in marriage to an evil but powerful chieftain from the North. Such motivations are unthinkable in the world of Morris’s tribes, where the two political marriages uniting the kindreds of the Wolfings and the Burgdalers are based on mutual love, historical necessity and commitment to the Folk. The handling of the issue of thraldom in Glittering Plain illustrates the difference perfectly. The hero Hallblithe makes a thrall of his Viking enemyturned-helper Puny Fox, just as Eric Brighteyes does with his erstwhile foe Skallagrim the Baresark. The former two, however, quickly swear brotherhood and Puny Fox is happily adopted into the Raven kindred. No such possibility is open for the outlaw Skallagrim, whose highest reward is to die fighting by the yeoman Eric’s side. In fact, the concept of the ‘kindred’ – perhaps the most significant refrain of all Morris’s romances, and the prototype of the socialist community – is entirely absent from Haggard’s depiction of the northern world. In its place are found atomised individuals, doomed to the path appointed to them by

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the gods, through the dark and hopeless strivings of a brief and bloody life to a hardly believed-in pagan limbo: ‘things will befall as they are fated. We may do nothing of our own will . . . and it is no good to struggle with the Norns’ (1895, 274). This is the whole theme and moral of the book, reinforced in every chapter by forebodings, prophetic dreams and ghostly visitations. It may have been a more authentic representation of the northern spirit as understood at the turn of the century by scholars like W. P. Ker – with its courage in the face of inevitable defeat – than Morris’s celebration of the life of the kindreds, but it also precluded any positive communal application. Ultimately, Morris was not retelling an Icelandic saga, but reinterpreting certain elements of the genre in line with his own thematic needs. There are, to be sure, numerous similarities of style and décor between his Germanic tales and Eric Brighteyes, observable even at the level of vocabulary (both authors are fond of words like ‘shutbed’ and ‘handsel’), but also in the other types of linguistic archaising, the insertion of dramatic alliterative poetry to be sung by the characters, and conventional transitions like ‘now the tale tells’. Culturally recognisable artefacts and backdrops, such as the hall with its separate men’s and women’s doors, the high seat and the men at the board, enchanted weapons and armour, barrow-mounds, the wearing of arm-rings, the practices of feast-oaths, wergild and sacrifice on the doom-stone and above all the Thing, gesture towards the same pre-Christian Germanic world. Yet in Haggard’s version, the judges of the Thing are manipulated by lawyers’ wiles, swayed by the eloquence of wealth and ready to proclaim unjust dooms. The institutions may be the same in name but their narrative roles are glaringly different, and not merely because Morris idealises Icelandic political customs under the influence of his Germanic bias. The focus of Eric Brighteyes is, after all, on the adventures and personal tragedy of the doomed lovers Eric and Gudruda, and on the villainy of Swanhild the witch. Institutions like the Thing only come into the tale as backstage mechanisms to help move the fast-paced plot. Though much effort is expended on securing the accuracy of local colour, the larger-than-life deeds of Eric and his berserker sidekick are consistently placed in the foreground. In the end, if the plot requires that Eric be outlawed, then justice inevitably miscarries. Haggard’s is thus a typical product in the late-Victorian romance mould – even if he bucks the rules by the grimness of his denouement, he upholds them in other respects with his heroic improbabilities, his action-packed story and a bewildering succession of incidents. Morris’s emphasis, on the other hand, is on constructing a model of barbarian society, and he would fail in his purpose if this were shown to be subject

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to the whims and jealousies of individual actors. Though he includes a love story and a personal plot, the characters’ motivations and the eventual resolution all point to Morris’s communal preoccupations. Human failings are given their due, as when the Alderman in Roots attempts to use violence at the Thing, but those who stray are reabsorbed into the community, and the Alderman quickly repents and restores the social balance in the acceptable way. The view of the workings of the democratic assembly is significantly more sanguine in Morris’s romances, and while Haggard is not concerned with pursuing the ideological implications of his portrayal of scheming and abuse (beyond their usefulness as plot devices), the political meaning behind Morris’s narrative choices is clear. It is not an accident that the action of his tales centres on massive battles, while Haggard’s deals predominantly with individual feats of arms. The Germanic romances are at bottom not about heroes, heroines and villains, but about the society they inhabit; and conflict occurs not between chieftains and their posses, but between different systems of social organisation, such as Roman civilisation and Teutonic barbarism in The House of the Wolfings. The presence of a significant utopian element in Morris’s historical romances necessitates a careful distinction between evaluative and structural uses of the term. The past seen in a utopian light is a familiar enough entity: the entire burden of Morris’s socialist writing is the rehabilitation of the desirable elements of the barbarian and medieval past. The world of the historical romances is an anticipation of the fulfilled utopia of the future – longed for nostalgically in the romantic paradigm, and taken up into the historical dialectic in the Marxist model. But the Germanic romances themselves are not formal utopias; the defining generic attributes are skewed or modified. The indispensable critique of the status quo is present only by implication, there is no representative of late-Victorian England to point the moral, and no identification possible between the reader and the first-person narrator. The society presented cannot be a literal solution to contemporary ills precisely because it is located in the past. There is no direct return to the Gothic settlements of Central Europe or to the exogamous gens. The ideal only functions by displacement – it is a pre-image, not an image or a prophecy. Elements that are warranted by the historical dimension of the romance – human sacrifice, Roman and Hunnish invasions, totemic religion – are extraneous in utopia. The very historicity of the romances undermines the presentation of an entirely imaginary alternative; the cognitive estrangement or defamiliarisation is of a different kind than in invented spatial or futuristic utopias. In this regard, the prose romances have more in common with Golden Age myths than with the modern utopian

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form, and even the presence of a strong narrative line puts Wolfings and Roots in a different category. In utopia conflict tends to be contained, peripheral, or non-existent, hence the expository, weakly plotted nature of so many exemplars of the genre. By no stretch of the imagination, however, could Wolfings and Roots be considered static, theoretical blueprints. The inclusion of a dominating antagonism within the narrative (as opposed to the merely notional foil of the reader’s present), and the crucial role it plays in bringing out the desirable features of Germanic society, is perhaps the single most important differentiating factor. The historical romances are not utopias structurally or formally, but they do present an evaluative utopia – located in the past – in the shape of the social values they celebrate. They may thus be fruitfully contrasted with another contemporary romance that presented an evaluative dystopia located in the future, the only book whose influence Morris himself acknowledged, and which may be regarded as a genuine precursor of his romances of barbarism. Richard Jefferies’s After London, or Wild England was written in the mid-1880s and read by Morris within months of its publication. Jefferies was an agricultural writer, journalist of rural life and nature mystic, and also one of the foremost names in Victorian catastrophe fiction; and it was his work that provoked Morris’s two famous letters to Georgiana Burne-Jones on the nature of the coming apocalypse. On 28 April 1885 Morris wrote: ‘I read a queer book called “After London” coming down [from Scotland into Yorkshire manufacturing country]: I rather like it: absurd hopes curled round my heart as I read it. I rather wish I were thirty years younger: I want to see the game played out’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 426). Exactly why the book should have inspired him with hope was explained in the second letter of 13 May: I have [no] more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of ‘civilisation’, which I know now is doomed to destruction, and probably before very long: what a joy it is to think of! and how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies. With this thought in my mind all the history of the past is lighted up and lives again to me. I used really to despair once because I thought what the idiots of our day call progress would go on perfecting itself: happily, I know now that all that will have a sudden check – sudden in appearance I mean – ‘as it was in the days of Noe’. (436)

But to anyone who is familiar with the plot of After London and Morris’s historical theories, such a reaction must seem inexplicable at the very least. J. W. Mackail, Morris’s first biographer, claimed that After London ‘was a book that Morris afterwards was never weary of

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praising. It put into definite shape . . . much that he had himself imagined; and he thought that it represented very closely what might really happen in a dispeopled England’ (1901, 2: 144). This is very puzzling, because if correct it implies a wholly negative vision of the future and of the nature of barbarism – for After London was anything but positive pastoral akin to Morris’s ‘green’ utopia, as some modern critics erroneously maintain – a conclusion that does not square with anything else that is known of Morris’s conceptions at the time. There are no indications that Morris literally believed in the imminence of a natural catastrophe that would destroy civilisation; it was far more likely that the sudden check of progress would be the fruit of the coming revolution. But nothing of that kind could be gleaned from Jefferies’s dystopia, and even if Morris were simply indulging in apocalyptic fantasies, the After London scenario would have been the last to provide material for an optimistic vision of the consequences. The kind of barbarism that floods Jefferies’s future England has nothing to do with real feelings and passions; on the contrary, it perpetuates the worst of the Victorian hypocrisies that Morris wished to see wiped out. ‘Under cover of the highest morality, the greatest iniquity is perpetrated . . . And yet they hypocritically say that these things are done for the sake of public morality.’ Through a variety of ‘refined hypocris[ies]’, beggars, thieves and dissidents are made bondsmen of the state and sold into slavery, the weak and helpless are left by the roadside to die, ‘men forever trample upon men, each pushing to the front’, but ‘all these things are done in the name of morality, and for the good of the human race, as they constantly announce in their councils and parliaments’ (Jefferies 1980, 30, 26, 32). No great leap is necessary to see this as a satire and critique of contemporary Victorian society, but it is hard to understand how a picture of the future that extrapolated the maleficent tendencies of the present could have been for Morris a source of hope. His recentlyacquired faith in the ‘Great Change’ had given Morris a certainty that transfigured and lent a new purpose to the movement of history; but he had begun the second letter with the words: I am ‘in low spirits about the prospects of our “party”, if I can dignify a little knot of men by such a word’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 435), and perhaps it was only in a moment of political downheartedness and frustration that he could countenance such a pessimistic outcome. Jefferies’s post-catastrophe society, unlike the culmination of Morris’s elegant and internally coherent dialectic, exhibits the worst traits of the savage, classical and feudal stages of history, all mixed up anachronistically for further dystopian effect. The Bushmen – violent nomadic hunter-gatherers descended from the tramps and gypsies – roam the

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woods in tribes; on the shores of the Lake that covers the site of London numerous kingdoms have arisen, ruled by tyrants forever at war with each other. Court intrigue, lawlessness, a vast slave population and the loss of old learning – except among the literate noble caste – complete the picture of the new Dark Ages. The old Dark Ages, at least as Morris portrayed them in Wolfings, Roots and Glittering Plain, bore as little resemblance to this as did his vision of reinvigorated barbarism in the socialist future of News from Nowhere. Why this should have been so is in part revealed by Jefferies’s very titles. The first part of After London is called ‘Relapse into Barbarism’, the second ‘Wild England’. Morris’s model of historical development (the letters above notwithstanding) presupposed not a return to a past that he did not in any case believe to be dark, but an onward movement, an evolution to a stage that would incorporate perfected aspects of the barbarian period. To ‘relapse’, to fall back into – these were never part of his socialist vocabulary. But Jefferies envisions a literal rolling back, a rewinding of history, as a tape running in reverse: nature swallows pernicious civilisation, animals and people revert to savagery, and the Celts creep back in from the margins like the forests that reclaim England. Though Morris did wish for something similar to the wave of barbarism that swept away Rome to cleanse capitalist civilisation, he never indicated that its aftermath should be ‘wild’. What its aftermath would be he showed plainly in the gardenworld of News from Nowhere, which was emphatically not a tale of the forests’ revenge – as was Jefferies’s – nor a celebration of individualism in an adverse world. For the second part of After London depicts a conventional quest narrative whose hero, solitary and uncommunicative to begin with, chooses to leave society behind – several times over – until a conclusion is reached that offers the reader no sense of closure. Felix Aquila is proud and independent, with a ‘scarce concealed contempt for others’ (Jefferies 1980, 48), which isolates him from his peers and elders, and causes him to brood even more within himself. While the society he flees is a cruel and debased one, even when he finds himself among the simple and earnest Shepherds, he is drawn to leave them by the thought of returning to his beloved. Hallblithe’s search for his beloved in Morris’s Glittering Plain leads him back to, not away from, his kindred. In painting the community of the Shepherds, Jefferies comes closest to Morris’s conception of barbarian social organisation: an ‘assembly of the tribe’ chooses Felix ‘by common consent as their king’ (235), and though he refuses, other tribes join in the request. In the end he agrees to be their war-duke (in Morris’s terminology), allowing the chiefs to retain their authority, and enabling the tribes to form a confederacy. What in Jefferies takes a

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few pages, Morris would develop over hundreds; what in Jefferies is a peripheral episode, Morris would set forth as his central theme. Certain narrative echoes are also perceptible: Felix’s tribe lives at a place called Wolfstead – one possible source for Morris’s Folk of the Wolf – and their fight with the gypsies prefigures the battles of Wolfings and Roots. There is even a parallel with Morris’s later romances, The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World’s End, where a quester also comes among a people occupying an earlier stage of development and becomes their ruler. In fact, it is probable that the episode in Well involving ‘The Folkmote of the Shepherds’ is taken directly from Jefferies. If anything in After London could have given sufficient cause for Morris’s excited reaction it could only have been this brief concluding episode of the Shepherds, but Jefferies never made use of its potential in a Morrisian fashion. His abortive picture of a tribal community provided at most a pointer for Morris’s socialist romances. For Jefferies’s hero is not content with being the first among equals, and as the curtain closes on the story he is setting off alone once more. He does not ‘melt into the society of the tribes’ like Thiodolf (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 835–6), but remains a solitary individual like the heroes of Haggard’s and George MacDonald’s romances. Morris read Jefferies, but he knew George MacDonald personally, as the two writers successively occupied the same house in 26 Upper Mall, Hammersmith. MacDonald called it the Retreat; Morris renamed it after Kelmscott Manor. His letters of March 1878 are all about visiting and buying the house from the MacDonalds, and the two families continued their acquaintance into the next decade. But Morris and MacDonald had more in common than similar tastes in real estate: both had also been writing romances since the 1850s. In 1895 MacDonald published Lilith: A Romance, a philosophical Christian allegory with elements of horror, a biblical parable cum children’s fantasy cum psychological and mystical nightmare, indebted to Kabbalistic demonology, and imbued with the German romanticism of Novalis and the American romanticism of Poe and Thoreau. It was a book that at first glance bore no resemblance to Morris’s historical and fantasy romances of the same years, nor to another contemporary fantastic tale by Morris’s other romancer acquaintance, Rider Haggard. Haggard’s She was, like Lilith, a parable about mortality, but being grounded in archeology rather than theology, suffused with bargain-basement spiritualism, and subsequently labelled an imperialist adventure tale for boys, it has largely escaped comparative analysis. Yet the structural similarities are telling. She and Lilith, as well as Morris’s own fantasies like The Wood Beyond the World, all resort to the medieval romance convention of the fairy queen. Their narratives

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revolve around Ayesha (She-who-must-be-obeyed), Lilith and the Lady respectively: femmes fatales reigning over cruel and debased peoples in isolated and uncanny lands. Haggard’s Arabic sorceress presides over the savage Amahagger amidst the dead civilisation of Kor in darkest Africa; MacDonald’s mythical Lilith sits in her palace in the ruinous city of Bulika in what appears to be another dimension, terrorising its heartless inhabitants; and Morris’s Mistress in her enchanted Wood beyond the World rules over a race of evil dwarfs. The story-arcs of the three romances follow the mortal hero’s penetration, after many perils and trials, into the enchanted realm, his interaction with the supernatural beauty and her eventual demise (literal or metaphorical). All three are quests after different objects, and Morris’s Glittering Plain also fits easily into this framework, though instead of a malevolent queen the hero meets a king who offers him – Ayesha-like – immortality and the eternal love of his daughter. C. S. Lewis contended that even Morris’s The Well at the World’s End should be considered a child of She because both deal with the escape from death. Both authors explore our irreconcilable reluctance to die, our craving for an immortality in the flesh . . . our intermittent awareness that it is not even really desirable, and . . . a very primitive feeling that the attempt, if it could be made, would be unlawful . . . In both books the . . . forbidden hope is aroused. When fruition seems almost in sight, horrifying disaster shatters our dream. (1982, 99–100)

Haggard, Morris and MacDonald were fascinated by the temptation of immortality and its rejection, by the choice between death and endless existence. Haggard’s Mr Holly and Morris’s Thiodolf are offered the chance of eternal life with the woman they desire, and refuse; along with Hallblithe in Glittering Plain and Mr Vane in Lilith, they eventually choose death. The fates of the beautiful, dangerous and flawed heroines are interwoven with this resolution. She-who-must-be-obeyed could have said of herself, like Lilith: ‘In me was every woman. I had power / Over the soul of every living man, / Such as no woman ever had in dower – / Could what no woman ever could, or can.’ But both learn the horror, the ‘fainting, dead, yet live Despair’, that is inherent in their immortality (MacDonald 2000, 144–5). There is a similar character in Glittering Plain, the Princess of the ironically named Land of Living Men: I the daughter of the Undying, on whom the days shall grow and grow as the grains of sand which the wind heaps up above the sea-beach. And life shall grow huger and more hideous round about the lonely one, like the ling-worm laid upon the gold, that waxeth thereby, till it lies all around about the house of the queen entrapped, the moveless unending ring of the years that change not. (Morris 1910–15, 14: 266)

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All the protagonists recoil from such ‘life-in-death’ existence (MacDonald 2000, 147), but in his treatment of character motivations Morris diverges radically from both Haggard and MacDonald, and this difference beneath the surface similarities is a defining one. Mr Vane, having spent most of the book running away from Adam and Eve’s House of Death, repents in the end and, like Lilith, lays himself down to sleep. But his only reason for doing so is to awaken in the resurrection and journey to heaven and the New Jerusalem. Mr Holly, similarly, chooses to ‘live [his] day and grow old with [his] generation, and die [his] appointed death, and be forgotten’, because Christianity assures him of a greater reward. He hopes for a more transcendent immortality than the one the earth-bound sorceress can offer him: ‘the immortality to which I look, and which my faith doth promise me, shall be free from the bonds that here must tie my spirit down . . . but when the flesh hath fallen from us, then shall the spirit shine forth clad in the brightness of eternal good’ (Haggard 2001, 251). The shopworn aspect of the vocabulary aside, this is essentially the message of MacDonald’s mystical vision. Holly also does not wish to live forever because he cannot face having to endure life’s griefs so long. Like the immortal but lovelorn Princess in Glittering Plain, he fears the prospect of living ‘on, green in the leaf and fair, but dead and rotten at the core, and feel that other secret worm of recollection gnawing ever at the heart’ (250). Nor, like her, does he want to suffer unrequited love until the end of time: ‘Yea, why is the earth fair and fruitful, and the heavens kind above it, if thou comest not to-night, nor to-morrow, nor the day after?’ (Morris 1910–15, 14: 266). But the motivations that drive Morris’s Thiodolf and Hallblithe are different in kind from these. Hallblithe refuses the hedonism of the deathless land not only because he has a suspicion that life there may grow wearisome, and he would fail in his quest to find and rescue his beloved, but because he must rejoin his kindred. The same desire guides Ralph after he has drunk from the Well at the World’s End, and given the place of the kinship community in Morris’s thinking, this is hardly unexpected. The contrast with the lonely and unattached individuals of Haggard’s and MacDonald’s tales is remarkable. Holly and Vane have no society to come back to upon the completion of their quests. Holly is a social outcast; the only human being with whom he has any connection is his companion and ward Leo Vincy. Vane is a friendless orphan inhabiting a virtually empty house, and the outside world does not once intrude into the narrative. Their social individualism is matched by a religious one: they live and die for the self, and it is for the self that salvation is reserved. Not so with Morris’s characters. The

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love of humanity, the importance of fellowship, which are only hinted at in Glittering Plain, are proclaimed clearly in Wolfings. Thiodolf is not concerned with the personal Christian immortality that Haggard and MacDonald preach, but with the collective survival of his people, and the very different immortality that comes of the ‘remembrance [that] still abideth . . . long after the days of [his] life’. Unlike Holly, he will die his appointed death precisely so as not to be forgotten. Anticipating MacDonald’s vocabulary, Morris has Thiodolf make a choice between ‘death in life, / Or life in death victorious and the crowned end of strife’. But when he accepts the latter, it is not for the promised glories of the resurrection, but so that the individual soul may live in ‘the soul of the Wolfing Kindred’, and that in turn – when the kindred is no more – ‘shall abide with the Kindreds of the Earth’ (1910–15, 14: 176, 165–6). This was the ‘simple ethic of our forefathers’ in the ‘earlier ages of the world’: they ‘live[d] fearlessly and confident of [their] immortality not as individuals but as a part of the great corporation of humanity’ (1969, 163). The ethic of Thiodolf was the same as that of the Icelanders and the Beowulf-poet, and it deserved to be revived again. It is worthwhile to note that MacDonald, in one particular episode, manages to evoke a sentiment which, for all its fundamental Christianity, is reminiscent of the communal ethic of Morris’s romances. Mr Vane, wandering the unpopulated regions of the other dimension, which may be in his own mind, realises the importance of human fellowship: What a hell of horror, I thought, to wander alone, a bare existence never going out of itself, never widening its life in another life, but, bound with the cords of its poor peculiarities, lying an eternal prisoner in the dungeon of its own being! I began to learn that it was impossible to live for oneself even, save in the presence of others . . . selfishness [was] but a parasite on the tree of life!

He understands how indispensable is the company of man and woman, of ‘brothers and sisters’ (MacDonald 2000, 83, 84). ‘Now first I knew what solitude meant . . . I saw now that a man alone is but a being that may become a man – that he is but a need, and therefore a possibility. To be enough for himself, a being must be an eternal, self-existent worm!’ Life is nourished by the presence of ‘other souls’; true individuality can only be developed ‘in other lives’: for the development of the differences which make a large and lofty unity possible, and which alone can make millions into a church, an endless and measureless influence and reaction are indispensable. A man to be perfect – complete, that is, in having reached the spiritual condition of persistent and

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universal growth, which is the mode wherein he inherits the infinitude of his Father – must have the education of a world of fellow-men. (102–3)

In places, as in the reference to the Church, this approaches the rhetoric of Morris’s John Ball; elsewhere, as in the image of the differences that make a unity, it recalls the socialist metaphysics of Morris’s political collaborator Ernest Belfort Bax. But these are, of course, mere associations. The fellowship that MacDonald was advocating was premised on what Bax would have called an introspective otherworldly theology, and was directed towards the ultimate development of the individual in God’s image. The children may find their mothers at the end of Lilith, but they find them in heaven, in the city of God, not in a rejuvenated community of men on this earth: ‘But the Wolfings throve in field and fold, and they begat children who grew up to be mighty men and deft of hand, and the House grew more glorious year by year’ (Morris 1910–15, 14: 208). The Roots of the Mountains concludes with marriages, the birth of babies and the coalescence of related tribes into one Folk; The Story of the Glittering Plain finishes with a wedding feast and the adoption of the enemy into the kindred; The Well at the World’s End and The Wood Beyond the World end in the conventional fairytale manner with Ralph and Ursula and Walter and the Maid – now kings and queens – begetting ‘between them goodly sons and fair daughters’ (1910–15, 17: 130), and founding a strong lineage in their cities. What sets Morris’s works furthest apart from Haggard’s and MacDonald’s is precisely this traditional happy ending. She and Lilith both end with returns: to Holly’s study in Cambridge; to Vane’s library in the empty house. The journeys there and back are completed, the individuals are tested, but there is no ‘integration with and ultimate responsibility for social continuity’. The ‘protagonists’ establishment in a continuing and harmonious society’, the ‘secular’ concern with ‘ordinary joy . . . in this world’ are not in evidence (Brewer 1978, 29, 34), as they are so abundantly in Morris’s romances, even in the one which concludes with the death of its hero. Thiodolf at least ensures, by his self-sacrifice, the continued thriving of his people. Mr Vane, in renewed solipsism, with only the Mother of Sorrows for a companion, dreams of a life or lives a dream that God has given him. Mr Holly sits alone at night brooding on the past and the future. Though all three writers explore the fantastic trope of immortality, William Morris’s adaptation is unique in its political implications. His prose romances end with the reconstitution of a threatened community, while the late-Victorian heroes of Haggard and MacDonald remain alienated individuals in a world without fellowship.

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The Bibles of the People: William Morris as a Socialist Romancer Morris’s focus on the community set him apart from his closest peers in the trade, but his romances not only put a people (as opposed to an alienated individual) at the centre, they were actually produced in the midst of – if not always in the service of – an educational drive intended to fashion real-life socialist association. At the same time that Morris was composing the romances destined for capitalist publication, he was also delivering up to four propaganda lectures a week, writing more than his share of the Commonweal’s articles, fundraising and attending to the daily business of the Socialist League. The romances were naturally situated in the wider context of socialist community-building, of the projects of socialist propagandists that attempted to create in the present the kind of communal organisation Morris perceived in the literature and society of the past, and hoped to see in the future. They could act as advertisements: not the real thing, but the representation of a way of life that was and that would be again. Morris’s literary and political preoccupations were particularly inseparable in the late 1880s and early 90s. ‘W. M. read me some passages from a Saga about King Bryan, and then we adjourned to the Socialist meeting, where he read the conversational chapters in “News from Nowhere”,’ reported Sydney Cockerell; and, ‘Party of the Soc.[ialist] Society at K.[elmscott] H.[ouse] in the evening. W. M. read the Shooting Party from Pickwick and afterwards the Burghers’ Battle from Poems by the Way, and John Ball’s Sermon most impressively’ (Morris 1910–15, 22: xxx–xxxj, xviij). The gestation period of the earlier and more politically explicit romances coincided with that of lectures and articles like ‘Dawn of a New Epoch’, ‘Early England’, ‘Feudal England’, ‘The Early Literature of the North – Iceland’ and ‘Socialism from the Root Up’, and the productions of these few intense years cannot be artificially extricated from each other, as if they belonged in separate sealed-off compartments of the mind. Poems such as ‘The Burghers’ Battle’, or the fairytale ‘Goldilocks and Goldilocks’ from the Poems by the Way volume, point in the same direction as the biographical examples. The references to agricultural and domestic labour (‘the shearing of the corn’ (1910–15, 9: 225), the baking of cakes, reapers going with sickles beside a wain full of wheat), the vocabulary and idiom (‘kin in the feasting hall’, ‘the folk of the kindred’, and ‘the Fathers’ House’ [9: 248]) are identical to those used in the romances. In 1889 a reviewer christened Morris – in mimicry of his manner of naming characters in The Roots of the Mountains – ‘Folk-Fellowship-Furtherer’, that is ‘Socialist’ (cit. Kelvin

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1984–96, 3: 132). The jibe mocked the book’s Wardour Street English, but also foregrounded its communal political implications. Though he may not have reached the widest possible working-class audience – may not, in some cases, even have aimed at it – Morris’s romance was a social genre dealing with a collective subject, and in a hundred permutations it asserted the theme of mutualism, corporativeness, fellowship. ‘The question of popular art,’ Morris wrote, ‘was a social question, involving the happiness or misery of the greater part of the community’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 173–4). What exactly Morris may have meant by this is hinted at in the notes to his List of the Hundred Best Books. Morris was solicited to produce the list, along with other celebrities from Ruskin to the Prince of Wales, by the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in the wake of the list-making mania set off by John Lubbock’s 1886 address to the Working Men’s College. Morris’s incomplete list of fifty-four titles excluded the modern ‘tools’ for learning philosophy, economics and history that furnished so much of the material for his romances, and focused instead on ‘works of art’: ‘the kind of book which Mazzini called “Bibles”; they cannot always be measured by a literary standard, but to me are far more important than any literature. They are in no sense the work of individuals, but have grown up from the very hearts of the people’. Morris was speaking of the Edda, the Kalevala, the Nibelungennot [sic], Homer and Beowulf, German and Norse folktales, Irish and Welsh traditional poems, and Danish and Scotch [sic]-English border ballads (1910–15, 22: xij, xvj, xiij–xiv): in other words, the works of the ‘infancy of art’ to which contemporary theorists of the romance revival referred when they wished to establish a pedigree for their genre, and to which many philologists, historians and anthropologists turned to reconstruct the world of the early tribes. Morris also included in his list ‘traditional history’, from the Heimskringla and the Icelandic sagas to the Anglo-Saxon and medieval chronicles; ‘medieval poetry’ and romances; ‘medieval storybooks’ like the Morte D’Arthur and the Mabinogion; and among the moderns such acknowledged romancers as Scott, Dumas and Borrow. The one ‘tool’ that made it onto his list was the Grimms’ Teutonic Mythology. Looking at the kind of book Morris himself produced in the decade following the publication of the list, one cannot fail to notice the parallels. He translated the Odyssey, a group of Old French Romances and Beowulf, as well as the volumes that make up the Saga Library in collaboration with Eiríkr Magnússon, and adapted Havelock the Dane as Child Christopher. His final verse collection, Poems by the Way, consisted largely of old translations from Danish and Icelandic ballads – the ‘ballad poetry of the people’ that Morris praised in ‘Feudal

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England’ (1910–15, 23: 52) – along with original poems in the ‘northern’ style and socialist lyrics. English ballads made an appearance in A Dream of John Ball; and the prose romances, especially Wolfings, Roots and Glittering Plain, were, as has been seen, unmistakably Icelandic in inspiration. For all its late-Victorian typicality, however, such activity amounted to more than just the imitation of the projects of the Folk-Lore Society, the Early English Text Society and their ilk. It was as if Morris had decided to dedicate himself to filling up the forty-six remaining spaces on his list with individually produced bibles of the people. The enterprise was as paradoxical as the attempt by a professional bourgeois poet to write socialist songs representing the collective voice of the working class, but it revealed the common impulse behind the political and the literary aspects of Morris’s work. Although it is dangerous to speculate about intention, the result clearly suggests an attempt to approximate genuine ‘popular’ art in form and in theme, and thus to provide the same kind of alternative to the individualism of realism in literature as socialism provided to capitalism in social organisation. The romances could serve as prototypes of the socialist art of the future and as conscious resuscitations of the communal art of the past, though in either case they would remain essentially artificial. Gothic architecture could not be reproduced in the nineteenth century, Morris believed, and his own ‘bibles’ occupied an equally uneasy space outside of the temporal scheme. Double anachronisms, outcasts of the past and the future in a present that did not presuppose their existence, individual creations that attempted to ventriloquise the collective voice, they could not, by Morris’s own definitions, be considered either genuine medieval or utopian works of art. Yet, for all their indebtedness to contemporary discourses and trade publication, neither were they the natural generic expression of capitalist society. As reconstructions of traditional forms and subjects imbued with a socialist ideology they were entirely antithetical to the spirit of bourgeois literature, as Morris perceived it. Morris did not publicly participate in the debate about realism and romance that was conducted in the pages of mainstream periodicals, but it was known to those who cared to read his essays and lectures that following Ruskin and Marx he believed art to be an expression of social and economic conditions. Real popular art was impossible under capitalism; it had to be the natural outgrowth of the free association of working people, such as had obtained in the past – in the Middle Ages and during barbarism – and would obtain again in the future, when the thesis of primitive communism and the antithesis of capitalism were resolved in the synthesis of a socialist utopia. Primitive and medieval

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forms – literary no less than decorative or architectural – owed their superiority to their mode of production; they were collective creations of the common people ‘working in harmonious co-operation’ (‘The Society of Arts’ 1892, 8; cf. Pinkney 2005, 77). Speaking of the future of the arts in the ‘Socialism Triumphant’ chapter of Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, Morris and Bax offered the following summation: ‘Architecture, which is above all an art of association, we believe must necessarily be the art of a society of co-operation’ (1893, 307). As to literature, fiction as it is called, when a peaceful and happy society has been some time afoot, will probably die out for want of material. The pabulum of the modern novel in its various dressings is mostly provided by the anomalies and futilities of a society of inequality wielded by a conventional false sense of duty, which produces the necessary imbroglio wherewith to embarrass the hero and heroine through the due number of pages. Literature, however, need by no means die; for we can neither limit nor foresee the development of the great art of poetry which has changed so little in essentials since the Homeric epics. (309)

That the epic – the narrative expression of the national history and mythology of a people in its primitive ‘heroic’ stage – should figure as the antithesis of the modern novel is not remarkable: a long nineteenthcentury tradition existed to legitimate the contrast. That it should serve as the prototype of the future embodiment of socialist literature may appear more surprising in a critical climate that almost automatically associates epic with empire. But if epics and romances – which had long been used in the construction of a heroic national past – were in the lateVictorian period redirected to an imperialist present, they could just as easily be redirected to a socialist future. For Morris both were avatars of the vox populi, the very quintessence of the communal ethic. His antipathy to Victorian realism – expressed in the passage above in virtually the same terms as in News from Nowhere – was the necessary counterpart to his preference for early popular literature. But the materialist grounding of Morris’s aesthetic theory took the passage beyond the standard realism-bashing and primitivism-praising of the New Romance manifestos: a society of co-operation produced an associational kind of art; an economically individualist society was epitomised by that most individualist form of writing, the realist novel. The critical short-sightedness of such a view, which ignored the novel’s capacity for sweeping social panorama and critique, as well as for the integration of individual and society, is beside the point. Morris was not concerned with Balzac, Tolstoy or George Eliot, but with the run-of-the-mill triple-decker, which was more escapist and less realistic – in the sense of truly portraying the iniquities of capitalist civilisation – than the most outrageously fantastic romance.

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Hence the seemingly counterfactual assertion in News from Nowhere that in the nineteenth century literature did not ‘deal with contemporary life’, ‘for, if there was any pretence of it, the author always took care . . . to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some way or other make it strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude there was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the Pharaohs’ (1910–15, 16: 102). Such books were ‘loathsome’: Some of them, indeed, do here and there show some feeling for those whom the history-books call ‘poor’ . . . but presently they give it up, and towards the end of the story we must be contented to see the hero and heroine living happily in an island of bliss on other people’s troubles; and that after a long series of sham troubles (or mostly sham) of their own making, illustrated by dreary introspective non-sense about their feelings and aspirations . . . while the world must even then have gone on its way, and dug and sewed and baked and built and carpentered round about these useless – animals. (151)

But if realism failed in its duty of portraying reality, naturalism took up the burden its more genteel cousin refused to carry. Morris’s attitude to naturalism is rarely adduced, but it is absolutely vital to understanding his communal literary theory, and it could not have been more different from the view of the romance revivalists considered in the first chapter. Most of them condemned Zolaesque ‘filth’ in the same breath as Anglo-American effeminacy, but Morris had read Germinal, and did not find it ‘harmful’, in fact, he considered that ‘the grossness is there not for “nastiness” sake, but because it forms part of a true picture of the life which our civilisation forces on labouring men’. He did not care about the infamous prosecution of Vizetelly, who was ‘a mere capitalistic publisher engaged in bringing out what will sell’, but he protested against what was effectively a trial of Zola, ‘for he was the real person tried’. Zola’s books were ‘powerful’ and held up a mirror to the foulness of ‘modern Society’, their ‘outspokenness’ was ‘not so provocative of lust as the veiled corruption of the ordinary erotic novels of the day’. If they were horrible it was because they reflected a horrible civilisation. ‘As to whether all this is due material for art – that is another affair. But an affair to come before a judge and jury? Preposterous!’ ‘Such things’ should be ‘entirely outside the judgement of a law court’. Besides showcasing Morris’s progressive attitude on questions of censorship, these pronouncements went to the political root of his attitude to realism, a genre that uncritically replicated the hypocrisies of the modern capitalist state. Morris’s contempt for the ‘clever but dull’ Henry James stemmed from the same source: James had no experience of workers’ lives, or imagination to perceive that they were human beings tormented in a ‘Hell’ created by his class. He was but a ‘clever historian of the deadliest

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corruption of society, the laureate of the flirts, sneaks, and empty fools of which that society is mostly composed’. Morris wished for someone to tell the ‘true tale’ of real suffering, although ‘if it were attempted it would probably be brought into Court and judged by a jury of comfortable and respectable men, and a luxuriously-living judge, and be condemned as filthy literature, horribly indecent – in short, shocking’ (1996, 456, 480–1, 490–1). He had obviously been following the outraged reactions to the public’s wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism; his own outrage was directed at something very different. But he himself was not the man to tell the true tale. Instead, Morris’s stories were rooted, like the popular tales of the Nowherians, in romance and folklore, their subjects taken from the kinds of ‘queer old-world myths and imaginations’ that decorate the dinner hall of Nowhere’s Bloomsbury market. Bearing only this fact in mind, Shaw claimed that Morris was resuscitating ‘Don Quixote’s burnt library’ (1966, 30), and Wells wrote that he was ‘restor[ing] the fragments that Rabelais and Cervantes scattered long ago’. But Morris’s taste for ancient and medieval literature was shared by Marx, Engels and Kropotkin, who could hardly be accused of concocting ‘dreamlands’ that were ‘no futurity, but an illuminated past’ (Faulkner 1973, 410), and who did not enter into the purview of Shaw’s and Wells’s assessments. Morris would have countered that while it was futile to endeavour to replicate authentic medieval writing in the midst of Victorian commercial civilisation – just as the ‘manner of work’ that produced medieval ‘popular art’ was ‘impossible’ ‘in this profit-grinding Society’ (Pinkney 2005, 63) – the future was another matter. As he put it in the 1883 lecture ‘Art, Wealth, and Riches’, it was ‘no use looking for popular art except in . . . Utopia, or at least on the road thither’, because it had to be ‘made by the co-operation of many minds and hands varying in kind and degree of talent, but all doing their part in due subordination to a great whole, without anyone losing his individuality’ (1902, 103, 88). His late romances seemed designed to appeal to ‘a future socialist audience’, and they would certainly have proved more popular with the utopians than they did with their actual lateVictorian readership. But the ‘burnt library’ explanation took no notice of the fact that, publishing practices aside, the romances ‘repudiate[d] capitalist ideology and the literary form that bears it [realism]’ in order to create ‘a new literary genre, the socialist romance’ (Boos and Silver 1990, 126). This genre demonstrated the value of association, fellowship and mutual aid, and celebrated true ‘individuality of character’, which was the ‘child of communal production’ (cit. Thomas 1977, 739), unlike modern individualism and introspection. Shaw and Wells

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did not perceive that the Acre of the Undying in Glittering Plain was an individualistic inversion of the social earthly paradise of Nowhere, and that Hallblithe rejected a life of instant gratification as vehemently as Guest in utopia embraced the epoch of rest. (The two books were serialised at the same time – the former in a bourgeois, the latter in a socialist organ.) Morris’s later ‘dreamlands’ of the 1890s, ‘pleasant, full of incident, and appropriate in mood to their function in communal life’ (Boos and Silver 1990, 121), seamlessly united the generic requirements of the New Romance (idealism and action) with the political message of socialism. At the textual level, therefore, the New Romance proved easily able to accommodate communal propaganda, and the very form of Morris’s fiction reinforced this unusual symbiosis. Morbid inwardness, excessive introspection and preoccupation with the inner life of the individual were, according to Morris’s collaborator Bax, the keynotes of ‘civilised’ ethics and religion, especially of Protestant capitalism (1886, 56, 98). They were also, as its detractors never tired of repeating in these same years, the salient characteristics of the nineteenth-century realist novel – itself the child of bourgeois civilisation. The Oxford Professor of Poetry J. C. Shairp picked up on all the keywords when he invoked Homer as an antidote to the ‘weakening’, ‘morbidly self-conscious’, ‘unhealthily introspective’ modern spirit (1881, 405). Bax opposed this spirit in favour of an all-embracing social consciousness, the romancers because of their allegiance to action-centred (though no less individualistic) narrative. Morris managed to steer his course between the Scylla and Charybdis of ‘introspective’ and ‘active’ individualism. He not only rejected and vilified the novel form, but synthesised late-Victorian romance and socialist theory by producing a strongly plotted adventure that illustrated communal morality transcending individualism. He did it by recourse to existing historical models, adopting as his generic prototypes for the fiction of the future precisely those bibles of the people that supposedly testified to the thriving of primitive communism in the past. For although Shaw’s view of the prose romances as escapist pieces of whimsy proved surprisingly resilient, it was not the only one available: as has been seen, there was another strand of 1880s and 90s criticism that automatically invoked contemporary historical treatises and surveys of early society to provide a context for Morris’s fiction. To aid in his imaginative reconstruction of primitive society, and to supplement primary ethnographic sources like Tacitus, Morris turned to the ‘tools’ he omitted from his List of the Hundred Best Books. The scholarly works of ‘anthropological or historical authorit[ies]’ (Bax 1889, 9), as

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much as the Icelandic sagas that supposedly preserved the traditions of the Teutonic tribes, furnished the raw materials Morris used to fashion his socialist romances. May Morris made a point of the fact that her father read the modern historical studies as they came out (1910–15, 14: xxv), and Bax observed in his memoir that ‘Morris was all his life an indefatigable historical student’; ‘to this he added, especially latterly, the study of comparative mythology and what may be termed the newer anthropology’ (1918, 120). Whether or not he drew on them directly, the foundations upon which Morris was able to build his vision of socialist community were laid not so much by other Victorian romancers as by historians like Sharon Turner, J. M. Kemble, Henry Hallam, Francis Palgrave, Charles Elton, J. R. Green, Edward Freeman and Bishop Stubbs; by Sir John Lubbock, originator of the new concept of prehistory that had elevated the hypothetical stage of primitive communism to ‘recognised scientific fact’ (Bax 1889, 9); by E. B. Tylor (father of evolutionary anthropology), J. F. McLennan (writer on primitive marriage), Sir Henry Maine (comparative jurist), Lewis Morgan (American evolutionary anthropologist) and the Germans G. L. von Maurer (theorist of the German mark) and J. J. Bachofen (discoverer of ‘mother right’). Many of these ‘historians, jurists, antiquarians, and economists’ studied what socialists like Bax and Hyndman called the ‘little oases in the arid desert of civilisation . . . the Russian Mir, the Swiss Allemen, and the Hindoo village community’ (Hyndman 1883, 294) – the surviving specimens of early social organisation that still retained the last vestiges of primitive communism, the ‘economical forms’ of prehistoric society where the individual was ‘completely merged in the race’ (Bax 1886, 5, 4). Against such a background, it was only natural that Morris intended The House of the Wolfings ‘to illustrate the melting of the individual into the society of the tribes’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 835–6). Morris may have been acting exactly like a ‘primitivist’ New Romancer in drawing upon contemporary scholarship, but his future-orientated political purpose ensured that the focus would remain firmly on the second term in the phrase ‘primitive community’.

Notes 1. Reeves’s son William, however, was a prominent radical publisher in the 1890s, the creator of the Bellamy Library, which brought a range of cheap socialist texts to the working- and lower-middle-class autodidact public. 2. ‘If they are satisfied, they brandish their spears. The most complimentary form of assent is to express approbation with their weapons’ (Hadas 1942, 714). Tacitus was also the source for descriptions of such tribal

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characteristics as the ‘wedge formation’, the arrangement of battle by ‘families and clans’ (712), turf mounds for tombs, animal cults, human sacrifice, female priestesses, the election of war-dukes and magistrates, general assemblies of the tribe for self-rule and ‘German independence’ (727) – most of which Morris picked up on.

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Chapter 3

The Dark Ages

The Evolutionary Spiral The individual-centred narratives of the New Romance may have been products in the capitalist marketplace, but with a little interdisciplinary help from history and anthropology they could also provide a picture of the communal ideal, or better yet, approximate in their form a communal literary creation. But though familiarity with those disciplines was a mark of the New Romancers as a group, Morris was virtually alone in adapting it to a collectivist agenda. At the time he wrote his late prose romances Morris was a socialist, and though he operated in the same intellectual context as his literary peers, his interpretation of the common sources was inflected by a particular political ideology. Nevertheless, it was an ideology premised on the findings of mainstream history and anthropology, and socialist fictions dealing with the communities of the past, no less than the political propaganda which used these communities as historical models, had to draw on the latest ‘bourgeois’ scholarship. The vision of community once again depended for its realisation upon modern institutions, though in this case it was not the capitalist publishing industry but the professional historical disciplines that were responsible for the paradox. The distinction between primary and secondary sources, between the books that made it onto Morris’s ‘Hundred Best’ list and the ‘tools’ that were left off of it, here takes centre stage. On the one hand there were the sagas, histories and codes of law, which, prior to any but an editorial and a textual interpretation, could furnish a wealth of lived detail to flesh out the historicity of the romances. Both romance writers and academic scholars of all political persuasions had to rely on these sources to create their versions of pre-modern society. The names of most of the characters in Wolfings, including Thiodolf, are found in the Heimskringla; Thiodolf’s cursed hauberk has prototypes in other magical objects of

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the legendary sagas; the custom of the chief putting a ring on his arm before judging cases at the Thing, referred to in the preface to the second volume of the Saga Library, is reproduced in Chapter 38 of Roots; the striking formal device of interspersing prose and poetry owes much to the polygeneric practice of family and legendary sagas, and such examples, drawn from the matter of the North, could easily be multiplied. But though Old Norse texts provided an indispensable treasure-trove of motifs for Morris’s Germanic romances, what gave them part of their ideological coherence, and enabled them to fulfil their propagandistic function, was the existence of a ‘Teutonist’ narrative in contemporary historiography. Morris had written: ‘what romance means is the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present’ (1936, 1: 148, my italics), and his romances were more than idiosyncratic gleanings from the Heimskringla or Jordanes’s Historia Getica, clothed in the special vocabulary of his translations from the Icelandic, and moulded upon the prosody of his northern ballads. That Morris thought it natural, when writing about Gothic tribes in Central Europe, to ascribe to them the customs of the Icelanders of the thirteenth century, that he drew analogies in the first place between the Goths, the Icelanders and the Anglo-Saxons, was due as much to Victorian historians’ demonstration of common Germanic origins as to his reading of primary sources like Hervarar saga. How did Morris’s romances, articles and lectures, as well as the writings of his Marxist contemporaries, from Friedrich Engels to H. M. Hyndman, interpret the mainstream schools of research and bring them in line with socialist ideology? How did the concepts of the Teutonic village community and the medieval spirit of association contribute to the socialist image of the community in history? As J. W. Burrow long ago observed, in the second half of the nineteenth century the primary task of social science was to elicit the laws of social evolution. No phase of development had meaning except as part of an ongoing process, and contemporary primitive societies were routinely projected into the past in the form of evolutionary stages. Of the various socialist groups in late nineteenth-century England, the Marxists were the most concerned with historical questions: as Hyndman wrote, ‘to forecast correctly the next stage of our growth’ we must ‘trace the evolution through the long ages of social development’ (1883, 435). But Marxists were not the only culprits.1 The socialist artist Walter Crane also talked of ‘inevitable . . . stage[s] in economic and social evolution’ (1897, 97), and socialist school textbooks and syllabi with no pretensions to Marxism were just as heavily indebted to evolutionary modes of thinking. ‘Historical Table[s] Showing the Evolution of Social Life from

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Early Man to the Present Day’ served as a standard tool of instruction (Gould 1913, 253), and teachers and students were referred not just to Marx and Engels or to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, but to Frazer’s Golden Bough, Darwin’s Descent of Man and Jack London’s Before Adam.2 A detailed Course of Study in the Socialist Interpretation of History by F. J. Gould, issued by the Young Socialist Education Bureau, began with ‘The Childhood of the Race’ and ‘Prehistoric Man’, and came in due course to the ‘tribal and village communities’ of Europe and India. Here it directed the lecturer to focus on ‘early communism in land and other property . . . co-operation in farm-work [which] lasted till the Middle Ages of Europe and even beyond. Survivals in village “commons” to-day.’ The main authority in this instance was the German economist Carl Bücher, whose discussion, in the book Industrial Evolution, of the ‘house communities’ with their ‘tribal constitution’, ‘common ownership of the soil’ and blood-based unions ‘for mutual protection’, from which ‘the present civilized nations of Europe’ arose, was quoted at length in preference even to Hyndman’s Economics of Socialism (Socialist Sunday School Collection, Uncatalogued, Ivy Tribe Collection, History Related Material, LHASC). Common land-ownership and local democracy based upon tribal kinship were the two essential points of reference for all scholars working in the field, but the model of primitive community to which they contributed was itself only a part of an overarching theory of social evolution. Instead of taking the familiar route through the big names, from Spencer and Huxley to Butler and Shaw, however, it pays to consider in detail an unusual and little-known formulation that was of more relevance to Morris’s practice than all the rest. For one of that multitude of enthusiastic exponents whose voices combined to make up the great chorus of the Victorian doctrine of evolution was E. B. Bax – Morris’s friend and collaborator, Marxist neo-Hegelian, Positivist and believer in Spencer’s social-biological analogy. In January 1888, the year Morris published The House of the Wolfings, the German Marxist journal Neue Zeit printed Bax’s ‘The New Ethic’. The article was subsequently reprinted in The Ethics of Socialism, and categorised by the author as a pendant to ‘Universal History from a Socialist Standpoint’, an essay which could be found in an earlier collection The Religion of Socialism. Why does this matter? Bax may have figured as an influential anti-feminist and critic of bourgeois morality in Shaw’s preface to Major Barbara, and been cited in the former capacity in Wells’s Ann Veronica, he may have engaged in disputes with famous contemporaries from Charles Bradlaugh and Eleanor Marx to Karl Kautsky and G. K. Chesterton, and been called ‘the most philosophical and learned of all living British

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Socialist writers’ (Boyle 1912, 40), but his influence as a thinker was not far-reaching, and he did not in the end leave much of a trace in the broader socialist movement, if only because Robert Blatchford disliked him. Blatchford was the founder and editor of the Clarion, the most widely circulated socialist periodical of the turn of the century, and originator of the various Clarion organisations. His untheoretical, reformist, nationalistic and moralistic brand of socialism evoked nothing but sneers from the bona fide Marxists of the Social Democratic Federation – Bax called him a reactionary, the Scottish-Irish Marxist James Connolly referred to him as a chauvinist – but it was Clarion-style socialism that made the most converts and reached the greatest number of people. Bax’s theorising never stood a chance as mass propaganda, and neither was his philosophical work recognised in the professional sphere by the established Oxford Idealists. Although his contribution to Marxist historiography has been acknowledged, as has his influence on Shaw, and his role as the co-author of the series of Commonweal articles ‘Socialism from the Root Up’ (republished as Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome) is not forgotten in studies of Morris, not all scholars can bring themselves to treat Bax seriously. He has been described as an ‘owl’, prone to ‘sudden fits of utter abstraction’, ‘unpractical’ and lacking a sense of proportion (Thompson 1977, 373); ‘despite Bax’s invaluable service in the transmission of ideas, it was better for them to be expressed by someone possessing a less woolly mind than his’ (Meier 1978, 2: 480). And yet it is Bax who provides the best key to the socialist conception of community development within which Morris operated. In fact, one need only turn to the assessments of contemporaries to get an entirely different picture. John Bruce Glasier, a friend of Morris and one of the leaders of the Independent Labour Party, could hardly be accused of harbouring a favourable bias towards the Marxist Bax. Yet in his reminiscences of Morris he assigned to Bax a more significant role than some subsequent commentators have been willing to admit. With regard to ‘that unsatisfactory series of chapters, “Socialism from the Root Up”’: ‘as [Morris] himself said, Bax wrote [them] and he said ditto.’ Glasier did not believe that the articles’ ‘dogmatism about the evolution of the family or the logical sequence of economic changes’ came from Morris: ‘This he as good as acknowledged once when he said, alluding playfully to Bax’s visits while they were writing the book together, “I am going to undergo compulsory Baxination again to-day”’ (Glasier 1921, 143). It is true that it would have been in Glasier’s interests to dissociate Morris from Marxism, as part of the general process of dilution turning Morris into a safe cultural icon that culminated in the 1920s with Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative appropriation. But though

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one may suspect Glasier’s motivations in wishing to attribute to Bax all that was uncomfortably Marxist in Morris’s writing, this is no reason to deny the biographical validity of his statements. For the extent of Bax’s and Morris’s co-operation in the 1880s is well-attested. Together they left Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation to found the Socialist League, and Bax stayed with Morris until its take-over by the anarchists. Together they wrote and published a revolutionary socialist programme, drew up the League’s Manifesto, and spelled out its aims in the Commonweal. Bax edited the newspaper along with Morris, and composed music for one of Morris’s socialist chants; he was often to be observed working with Morris at Kelmscott House – as his daughter recalled (Morris 1936, 2: 173–4), and as Morris himself described in his diary (1985, 37, 39). Bax defended Morris against accusations of sentimentality (Bax 1884, 2), and it was through him that Morris became acquainted with many of Marx’s and Engels’s works. As he wrote in his diary in 1887: ‘Tuesday to Bax at Croydon where we did our first article on Marx: or rather he did it . . . but I am glad of the opportunity this gives me of hammering some Marx into myself’ (1936, 2: 173). Though it is customary to attribute the sections of Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome dealing with the communistic nature of medieval Catholicism and the individualism of the Reformation entirely to Morris, it was Bax who wrote books about the Reformation and the German peasant revolts, and theorised about the relations between socialism, religion and individualism. In fact, reading Growth in tandem with The Religion of Socialism and The Ethics of Socialism (written in the same years) reveals just how much of this ‘collaborative’ effort was taken almost verbatim from Bax’s essays. Morris’s acquaintance with the evolutionary model they propounded could hardly be in doubt. Such an approach to composition was perhaps reminiscent of Morris’s translations of the Icelandic sagas, which were essentially redactions of Magnússon’s drafts, or his co-operation with Hyndman on The Summary of the Principles of Socialism, ‘the draft of which I [Hyndman] wrote and we revised together’ (Hyndman 1911, 357). In any case, it is safe to assume that Morris would have been familiar with Bax’s views on history and ethics, and would have discussed them concurrently with and in the years immediately preceding his composition of the first prose romances. With regard to Growth, Morris said that ‘each sentence [had] been carefully considered by both the authors in common’ (1893, vi), and as early as 1885, the jointly authored second edition of The Manifesto of the Socialist League testified to Morris’s acceptance of Bax’s fundamental ideas, and even formally bore the stamp of Bax’s method in its prolific use of notes. Although it is harder to prove

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empirically, it is also likely that through Bax Morris would have become acquainted with the contents of Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which was published in German in 1884 (an English translation appeared only after Morris’s death). Bax – having studied and worked in Germany – was fluent in the language, and regularly contributed articles in German to Marxist organs such as Neue Zeit. He had referred to Origin and used its findings in The Religion of Socialism and elsewhere, and followed Engels on a number of points, even to the extent of citing the same sources (Engels 1972, 237; Bax 1889, 90–105, 1886, 97–8; Morris 1910–15, 16: 43, 23: 47). So what exactly was Bax’s theory of historical evolution? One can begin with its utopian culmination. In a letter to the SDF organ Justice in 1901 – an effective summary of his thought of the previous twenty years – Bax defined the ethics of the future as a rejection of ‘the individualist ideal of the great religions’ and a return to ‘the social ideal of primitive man transformed and universalised as modern international scientific Socialism’ (1901, 6). His vision of post-revolutionary political arrangements was established as early as 1879 and remained stable in its outlines ever after. In 1875 Engels had written: ‘The state is merely a temporary phenomenon . . . We suggest that the word “state” should be replaced . . . by the word “community” [Gemeinwesen]’ (cit. Yeo and Yeo 1988, 252). Bax was a dutiful Marxist; he also thought of modern nation-states as temporary historical formations, destined to be superseded by a European, or, in fact, a universal federal republic, ‘which would unite the greatest possible local autonomy with solidarity as based on the authority of a . . . Federal Council’ (1879, 152). It would be democratic, and the religion of humanity would replace traditional theology. Morris too believed that the nation ‘must cease to exist as a political entity’, that ‘the idea of local administration is pushing out that of centralised government’, and ‘that the only way to avoid the tyranny and waste of bureaucracy is by the Federation of Independent Communities’ (1910–15, 23: 138–9; see 1994, 361; 1986, 151). It requires only a glance at Bax’s and Morris’s descriptions of the coming Co-operative Commonwealth to see the extent of their unanimity: in the concluding chapters of Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome it is not possible to tell their visions of the future apart. A planet-wide community, superseding both the traditional limited community and modern capitalist society, is Bax’s and Morris’s ideal. With one voice they describe the withering away of the state, and the central government’s devolution of powers to municipal and local bodies, until its replacement by a federal system in which townships and industrial guilds are the lowest units of local organisation, with fully functioning

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direct democracy. The federation of the locality follows at an intermediate level, and finally the council of the socialised world as a whole, with an international board of arbitration to settle disputes thrown into the bargain. In News from Nowhere, the federated independent commune is also presented as the fundamental administrative unit, and although he did not believe in the practical utility of Morris’s utopia, Bax did understand that far from being a regressive pastoral, it was ‘a transference of mediaeval society purified of its coarsenesses and cruelties into the conditions of a socialistic society at another phase’, a portrayal of ‘the rise of a Social-Democratic Commonwealth out of the wreck of modern civilisation’ (1891, 2). In other words, he saw the place of Morris’s utopia in his own evolutionary scheme. And when it came to the larger questions of historical evolution, Morris and Bax spoke the same language. It was probably Morris that Bax had in mind when he pointed out in an 1887 debate with the renowned secularist Charles Bradlaugh that ‘it is this great curse of civilisation which Socialists would fain see abolished. Many would doubtless gladly have a wave of barbarism sweep this rottenness away as it swept away the effete classical civilisation.’ The vocabulary here is that of Morris’s lectures of the period, and of his notorious letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones written in response to Richard Jefferies’s After London. Bax, however, rejected the desire for mere destruction to which Morris seemed prone at times, and concluded that there was no ‘putting back the clock of human evolution’, no return to barbarism with its crude ‘devotion to the social unit’. Instead, there was the inevitable development towards revolution and the overthrow of civilisation by socialism, towards a world governed by ‘an Ethic in which social and individual interest have ceased to conflict, which has as its foundation the principle that the perfect individual is realised only in and through the perfect society’ (1887, 9, 4, 10). This was the all-important moral counterpart to the familiar Marxist transformation, the hope that prevented Morris ‘from crystallising into a mere railer against “progress”’, and saved him from the ‘fine pessimistic end of life’ which he described in ‘How I Became a Socialist’ (1910–15, 23: 81). Bax’s view of social development was grounded, as was most of his thinking, in philosophy, specifically in the evolutionary interpretation of consciousness. He could hardly be accused of ‘vulgar’ Marxism: in a polemic spanning decades he had advocated a ‘synthetic’ conception of history, which gave as important a role to psychological factors as to economic conditions. Thus, in an 1881 essay tellingly entitled ‘The Ideal of the Future’, Bax postulated a Spencerian evolutionary path which, progressing from the simple to the complex, through the inorganic,

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organic, sentient and conscious or human individual stages, would culminate in the ‘Super-conscious’: a ‘social organism’ that would have its own higher ‘form of consciousness based on super-organic or social conditions’. That was the human ideal towards which all was tending – the absorption of the individual in the collective consciousness – though its remote consummation was displaced to an indefinite point in the future. Bax did not admit any ultimate end-state: since ‘Socialism denie[d] the finality of human progress’, evolution could go on forever. Although the immediate aftermath of the international socialist transformation would be somewhat more prosaic, as described above, ‘any particular form of Socialism of which we can now conceive must necessarily give way before fresh and higher developments’ (Morris and Bax 1893, 320). This was written in collaboration with Morris, and it is sometimes difficult to determine the direction of influence, for here is Morris, writing in 1894: ‘Socialism does not recognise any finality in the progress and aspirations of humanity . . . we clearly understand that the furthest we can now conceive of is only a stage of the great journey of evolution that joins the future and the past to the present’ (1986, 153). But there was no need to look to the very far-off future for the realisation of collective consciousness, because human history already furnished one instructive instance of it. Bax co-opted into his overall model of development not only the insights of Hegel, Spencer and Comte, but also those of contemporary historiography and anthropology. The historians of the Teutonic school and the researchers of the village community had already broached the idea of a modern revival and perfection of tribal organisation, and traced the breakdown of primitive communism and its threatened resurrection in the late nineteenth century. The anthropological mode of analysis imparted its own understanding of evolution, and in adopting it Bax did no more than take his cue from Engels, who founded his own conclusions on the research of the American anthropologist Lewis Morgan. Engels’s Origin was the most comprehensive, though by no means the only, socialist adaptation of Morgan’s work, as well as of the writings of Tylor, Bachofen, Lubbock and McLennan (whose theories of primitive marriage Engels was most concerned to disprove). Bax himself used anthropological insights in conjunction with the Marxist dialectic to arrive at a definition of the movement of history ‘from Socialism to Socialism – from the simple, limited, tribal Socialism of early man to the complex universal Socialism already prepared in the womb of time’ (1886, iii). This model explained how the ‘limited’ and ‘unconscious’ social morality of the barbarian peoples, based on ‘devotion to the social unit’, had given way to the introspective, individualistic morality of civilisation, when private

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property and class divisions replaced the primitive communism of kinship organisation. Modern capitalism was ‘the most extreme antithesis in every respect of tribal society. All the ties which formerly bound the individual to his group [were] ruptured. Modern society [was] based on the nominal independence of the individual as unit’. But it too ‘was destined to undergo a transformation’: ‘the old solidarity [would] again assert itself, purged from its imperfections, and with the seal of completeness and universality upon it’ (1887, 4). After the revolution, the newly socialised means of production and distribution would create a higher version of the tribal moral consciousness: no longer limited by blood ties, and fully conscious of individual self-realisation in the whole. When the Great Change took place, it would concern economics and ethics equally, and the solidarity of the gens would be transformed into ‘la solidarité humaine’ (1889, 19). In ‘Universal History’ and throughout his work, Bax developed a series of antinomies to characterise the positive and negative poles of this historical-ethical evolution (1886, 98). Positive Objective Public Communal Social utility Devotion to the race Aryan (including Classical and Norse peoples) Primitive Barbarism Kinship Tribe Autonomous Communist

Negative Subjective Private Individual (introspective) Personal holiness Devotion to the soul/divinity Oriental or Semitic (including Christian civilisation) Modern Civilisation Territory Nation-state Centralised Capitalist

The religion of socialism – the future ethics – was the realisation on ‘a higher plane’ of the social morality that identified self-interest with the interest of the community. It was the opposite of the ethics of inwardness and introspection embodied in Christianity and based on the economic individualism of capitalist society. In the modern world it could only express itself in the ‘conscious sacrifice of the individual to the social whole’, the sacrifice of a ‘Russian Nihilist’ or a ‘Paris workman’ and Communard – fully aware of his independent existence as an individual – to the cause of human welfare and brotherhood (1889, 18, 21–2). The element of consciousness made it qualitatively different from the sacrifice of the naïve Germanic barbarian for his limited kinship group.

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Nevertheless, the primitive morality that conceived of no existence for the individual outside of his society was the highest actually achieved in history, and the goal of socialism was therefore the ‘rehabilitation, in a higher form and without its limitations, of the old communal life’ (1889, 26; see 1886, 52, 97; Morris and Bax 1893, 292–9). Conscious sacrifice, like conscious federation, was only made possible by civilisation-bred self-awareness. ‘As regards the future form of the moral consciousness, we may safely predict that it will be in a sense a return on a higher level to the ethics of the older world, with the difference that the limitation of scope to the kinship group in its narrower sense . . . will disappear, and the identification of individual with social interests will be . . . complete’ (Morris and Bax 1893, 298). Morris and Bax shared a deep interest in the Paris Commune, and it is hardly a coincidence that Morris’s best-known imaginative work dealing with the present, The Pilgrims of Hope, should feature the emblematic Baxian figure of the socialist martyr. Though realistic depictions of his own time are scarce in Morris’s oeuvre, it is too simplistic to argue, as Norman Kelvin does, that the present in Morris’s art was constantly resolving itself into the past of the romances and the future of utopia, leaving a gap in the centre which was filled by the decidedly unliterary socialist critique of his lectures and journalism (1984–96, 2: xxxiii). The unliterary theory that had as its goal the explanation of the present, and the ‘art’ that imaginatively depicted the ‘ideals of past-in-future and future-in-past’ (Boos and Silver 1990, 3) could not have existed without each other. Their symbiosis, at least in the years of Morris’s involvement with the Socialist League, was complete. The present for Morris was part of the dialectical process of historical change: ‘civilisation is only a stage in the development of the human race, just as barbarism was . . . Civilisation must of necessity develop into some other form of society, the tendencies of which we can see, but not the details’ (Morris and Bax 1893, 16). So while both the past and the future fulfilled the role of ideal alternatives to the capitalist status quo – the former anticipating socialism, the latter realising it – the two were linked by a historical spiral that operated on the principle of ‘revival, in a higher form’ (as Engels wrote quoting Morgan [1972, 237]) of the characteristics of barbarism in the communist millennium. The use of this phrase in an almost identical form in Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome and in the second edition of The Manifesto of the Socialist League was probably due to Bax’s familiarity with Engels’s treatise, as well as with Morgan’s original work. All progress . . . involves a backward as well as a forward movement; the new development returns to a point which represents the older principle elevated to a higher plane; the old principle reappears transformed, purified, made

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stronger . . . The progress of all life must be not on the straight line, but on the spiral. (cit. Thompson 1977, 739)

The passage appeared in Morris’s and Bax’s jointly revised Manifesto of October 1885, but neither it nor the rest of the extremely Baxiansounding Notes featured in Morris’s single-authored February version. Much ink has been spilt over the attribution of the concept of the spiral, which by the turn of the century had permeated British Marxist discourse: progress was routinely conceived in terms of ‘a spiral chain, or a road winding up a mountain’ (cit. Johnson 2002, 43). But in the end it matters little whether Morris had come to an understanding of the dialectical nature of historical evolution through a first-hand knowledge of Engels’s unpublished writings, by way of Bax, or by independently working out the implications of the ‘Romantic critique’. What is significant is that already in his lectures of the 1880s, and certainly by the time he had come to write A Dream of John Ball, Morris thought of social change in terms of a spiral. This was why he located ‘value in medieval, Old Icelandic and Germanic contexts’, and believed in the future ‘reassertion at a new level and in new forms of pre-capitalist values of community and of “barbarism”’ (Thompson 1977, 783). Morris’s Germanic romances, drawing on the same anthropological sources as Bax, presented the ideal fictional dramatisation of Bax’s theory. The limited tribal solidarity, the triumph of social duty over individual interest, the personal self-realisation in the community, and through it in humanity as a whole, the transcendence of boundaries and the unification of hitherto sundered peoples, are all illustrated in the actions of Thiodolf, Gold-mane, Sun-beam and the Bride. Not only does Wolfings portray the principle of old tribal solidarity in action against an external foe (the Romans as symbols of individualistic civilisation), it also presents – in the figure of Thiodolf – the type of the New Ethic. Thiodolf, aware of his individual interests (personal happiness with the divine Wood-sun) in conflict with his social duty (the succour of his Folk), consciously chooses to sacrifice himself in battle. He chooses, that is, ‘immediate death for a cause into the realisation of which the individual as individual does not enter’ (Bax 1889, 25). Morris and Bax not only admired such dedication to the Cause in their own contemporaries, ‘who made so little account of their individual lives in their engrossing passion for the general life of humanity’ (Morris 1994, 621), but had it in mind when they wrote of the ‘revolutionised ethics of a Socialist epoch’ (cit. Thompson 1977, 739) as a purer version of that individual responsibility to the community which was the essence of tribal morality. Thiodolf sacrifices himself not only for the gens of which, significantly, he is not a

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blood member – ‘I am not of their blood, nor of their adoption’ (Morris 1910–15, 14: 170) – but for a community ‘not limited by frontier but world-embracing’ (Bax 1889, 29). Just as the socialist working man comes, through his class interest, to espouse the interest of all humanity (see Bax 1889, 102–5), so Thiodolf, ‘through’ the Wolfings, feels himself to be ‘of the whole earth, and all the kindreds of it; yea, even of the foemen’ (Morris 1910–15, 14: 170). Class and race distinctions melt away. The romance illustrates – without any transitional stage – both the incomplete communal ethic of barbarism (as with the suicides of the women watchers) and the fulfilled ‘corporate social consciousness’ of the future communist utopia, which is a synthesis of the best aspects of pre-modern community and developed modernity, uniting ‘the solidarity of early society with the cosmopolitan principle of individualism’ (Bax 1889, 30; 1886, 35–6). It short-circuits the historical dialectic, for in Thiodolf the new social ethic is already triumphant, and in the rest of the Gothic community the old ethic has not yet decayed. Although the civilised morality of self-interest and personal gain is present in the shape of the Roman Captain, it is not shown to be an inevitable stage in the path of historical evolution through which the Germanic barbarians will have to pass. On the contrary, it is an evolutionary dead end, an external force to be repulsed by the combined efforts of the tribal and socialistic spirit. Just as the death of the Goths in Wolfings exemplifies the sacrificial social ethic of communism – primitive and impending – so the double marriage and child bearing of Roots affirm the utopian possibilities of life secured by that ethic. It is significant that after the battle survivors not only grieve for the dead, but also rejoice in the victory achieved at the cost of their lives, certain that the slain would not grudge them the general freedom and happiness they all fought for (Morris 1910–15, 15: 388–9). The world of Roots is indeed ‘Morris’ Happy Valley’ (Grennan 1945, 117), the nodal point of Lewis’s idyllic quality, the real Earthly Paradise or Land of Living Men, of which the individualistic Eden of Glittering Plain is merely a hollow counterfeit. It is painted with the same utopian brush as Nowhere: ‘So glad were they, and so friendly, that you might rather have deemed that this was the land whereof tales tell, wherein people die not, but live forever’ (Morris 1910–15, 15: 232). Engels in Origin had also pictured the ‘gentile constitution’ of the upper stage of barbarism in appropriately utopian terms: No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, or lawsuits – and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected . . . the household is maintained by a number of families in common and is

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communistic; the land belongs to the tribe . . . All are equal and free. (1972, 159–60)

This, of course, was a cross between the society of Wolfings and Roots and of Nowhere, and only the fact of primitive man’s ‘undifferentiated’ and unindividualised – what Bax would have called ‘unconscious’ – submergence in the tribe prevented it from becoming the conscious community of a socialist utopia. The correspondences between Engels and Morris were not, however, limited to scene-setting and exposition.3 They reached to the ideological core of the romances, to their main thematic movement of federation – the great organising principle, past and future, to which Morris referred more than once in his lectures and essays (Morris 1969, 164; 1890, 226). The whole narrative of Roots is summarised in the following statement from Engels: ‘tribes which were originally related and had then been dispersed joined together again in permanent federations’ ‘on the basis of complete equality and independence in all internal matters’ (1972, 156–7). Roots concludes with precisely such an alliance between the long-sundered branches of the Wolfing kindred, using the happy ending to illustrate the highest possible stage of barbarian organisation, wherein it approached most closely to the ‘international league of free communes’ of the socialist future (Bax 1886, 118). Bax’s and Engels’s utopia – the utopia of men who did not, as ‘scientific’ socialists, believe in the efficacy of the genre – is given substance by Morris: the Germanic romances embody its abstract ideals in concrete literary form. If there is one insight that it would be worthwhile to carry away from a reading of Bax and Morris in each other’s light, it is that the universal human solidarity of the socialist future would be premised on the limited ethical ideals of primitive society. The old principle of association would return – transformed – after the revolution. But in its socialist and conscious incarnation it would be, for the first time, truly global – a feeling of fellowship encompassing all the inhabitants of the earth. What is globalised in Bax and Morris is not capital or government, but the socialist morality.

The Teutonic Myth and the Village Community Grand schemes of evolution must have concrete reference points, and if one were looking for the main wellspring of Bax’s and Morris’s conception of the primitive community one would find it, of course, in the ‘mark’ of the early Germanic tribes. The mark was an imagined

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community in a quite literal sense: it existed mainly in the imagination of nineteenth-century historians. The precise location of the burgs and steads of the Germanic barbarians in The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains – whose descendants the Englishmen of Morris’s day could claim to be – was not known. They may have been situated in some Central European forest, in the Alps or the Carpathians, as various commentators have speculated. But whether on European soil in the first centuries ad, or in a different but related form in the English countryside of the Middle Ages and the future, the Teutonic village community was the crucial and defining topos of Morris’s politics (topos both in the Greek sense of place or locality, and the modern sense of ‘traditional motif’ or ‘literary convention’). The model of socialist administration that Morris presented in News from Nowhere, and in the historical lectures and essays upon which it drew, owed as much to the conjectured primitive communism of the Germanic ‘theoths’, with their folk-motes and collective ownership of land, as to any contemporary example of co-operative organisation – whether the Russian obschina or the English trade union. Of all the places that played a part in shaping Morris’s worldview, the most intriguing was an imaginary construct: Germania. Its originator may have been Tacitus, but in the last third of the nineteenth century ‘Germania’ was revived in a complex new guise for the use of contemporary British culture. The national myth of Teutonism had a long history, going back at least to the sixteenth century, but around the time that Morris was discovering Iceland and casting about for a political solution to his dissatisfaction with modern civilisation it was undergoing a remarkable renaissance. The words ‘Teuton’ and ‘Teutonic’ proliferated in the titles of books in connection with everything from the study of Germanic languages to English constitutional history, Scandinavian literature and mythology, medieval history, archeology, law and racial taxonomy, usually contrasting the Teutons with the Latins, Gauls and Slavs. Several books attempted to prove that the Anglo-Saxons and other branches of the Teutonic race were one of the lost tribes of Israel; there was even an international language called ‘Tutonish’.4 The Teutonic myth rested upon the assumption of the superiority of the Germanic peoples, and was mainly concerned with demonstrating the Germanic origins of the English, who possessed – as the best representatives of the Germanic genius, and in inheritance from their Germanic forefathers – the freest political institutions in a world they were destined to lead. The recurring motifs of nationalistic writing included the ‘free forests’ of Tacitus’s Germany, the communal basis of Teutonic society, the democratic nature of Teutonic institutions,

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especially as contrasted with decadent and despotic Rome, the narrative of the revivification of Europe by vigorous, liberty-loving Germanic invaders, the purity of English blood, the superiority of the Germanic element in the English tongue, and the Saxon origin of Parliament in the Witenagemot. In the mid- and late-Victorian period, the evidence of the new discipline of evolutionary anthropology was brought in to corroborate the conclusions of the older historians, and the Teutonic race (especially its English branch) emerged as God’s chosen people. The crescendo of Teutomania reached its apogee in the nineteenth century in the works of Sharon Turner and J. M. Kemble, and later J. R. Green, William Stubbs and Edward Freeman, but a hundred years earlier Gibbon had already traced the ‘most civilised nations of modern Europe’ to the ‘woods of Germany’, and ‘the original principles of our present laws and manners’ to ‘the rude institutions of those barbarians’ (1929, 1: 245). Over half a century later Carlyle spoke of the Norsemen as ‘our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways’; ‘Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our progenitors’ (1897, 16, 20). The first chapter of On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History was an unabashed panegyric on Teutonism, complete with a summary of Norse mythology, a hefty dose of philology (and erroneous etymologies) and asides on the ‘Germanism’ of the speech of the common people, the Scandinavian blood affinity of the English, and the importance of Iceland. In the next generation, Charles Kingsley argued in a series of lectures tellingly entitled The Roman and the Teuton that the English had kept ‘unbroken the old Teutonic laws, unstained the old Teutonic faith and virtue’, which ‘form the groundwork of our English laws and constitution’. God had ‘appointed for this race’ a ‘strange and complicated education’, ‘by which he ha[d] fitted it to become, at least for many centuries henceforth, the ruling race of the world’, fulfilling ‘a glorious destiny’ (1864, 17, 9, 6, 13). Kingsley delivered the lectures as Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, but he was never considered a proper historian. The real academic culmination of this rhetoric came in the work of Freeman and his colleagues, whose task it was to show how ‘the many small Teutonic kingdoms in Britain had grown into one Teutonic kingdom of England, rich in her barbaric greatness and barbaric freedom, with the germs . . . of every institution which we most dearly prize’ (cit. Whitla 2001, 62). If one were looking for a work that could serve as a model of the convergence of the disciplines in the production of the patriotic myth, no better candidate than Freeman’s Comparative Politics could be found. Freeman, who succeeded William Stubbs as Regius Professor of

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Modern History at Oxford, aimed to apply the ‘comparative method’ of philology, mythology and anthropology – all branches of one scientific inquiry – to politics, and thereby to establish the original unity of the ‘primitive institutions of the Aryan nations, above all, in the three most illustrious branches of the common stock – the Greek, the Roman, and the Teuton’. He called to his aid Tylor, Maine, Max Müller and the German historians, while looking forward to the monumental accomplishment of Stubbs’s Constitutional History. He appealed to philology for the revelation of the unrecorded stages of prehistory, and expounded the theory of likenesses between institutions – whether due to derivation from a common source, to reproduction or imitation, or to mere historical analogy – which provided the foundation for all subsequent equivalencies between Teutonic and modern English social formations. But above all, he attempted to trace the unbroken line of continuity between the first Greek-Aryan democracies and ‘the last measure of progress’ achieved in contemporary England, to explain why the English race, as successor to the kinsmen who went before it, held by rights ‘the first place among the nations of the earth’ and in the history of mankind. The racial rhetoric attained here its full flower. The Teutons, as the Greeks and Romans before them, wrote Freeman, were entrusted with the mission of ruling and teaching the world. As the Aryan family stood out above the other nations of the earth, so these three in their turn, having reached the highest stage of civilisation available to their age, towered above the less brilliant branches of the Aryan family. And at the present time it was the Teutonic race, whose ‘truest representatives’ the English could boast themselves to be, that enjoyed predominance on both sides of the Atlantic. Though the Scandinavians and the Swiss preserved unchanged many relics of the Teutonic past, it was the English political institutions that could claim ‘the most unbroken descent from the primitive Teutonic stock’. Of these Parliament was of course the foremost example: the fruit of continuous growth from Anglo-Saxon times and a living proof that the English had ‘preserved more faithfully than any of our kinsfolk the common heritage of our common fathers’ (1896, 23, 24–5, 29–30). And though modern Europe was the product of the union of Roman and Teutonic elements, England, by virtue of its history, was a specimen of the pure Teutonic strain. The attraction of the Teutonic myth undergirded not only the political dream of an Anglo-American alliance based on common Saxon blood, or the receptivity to different strands of German culture, from comparative philology to Wagner, but the preoccupation with the village community or mark, which had been introduced into historical discourse by J. M. Kemble’s The Saxons in England. By the end of the century,

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publications on the village community proliferated: Kropotkin, in his comparative consideration of the subject in Mutual Aid, cited over thirty different authors from what was obviously a thriving pan-European scholarly industry. There were, to name but a few, the two Russian expatriates Maxime Kovalevsky and Paul Vinogradoff; the much-cited Émile de Laveleye, author of Primitive Property; James Long, who looked at Village Communities in India and Russia and Frederic Seebohm, who studied The English Village Community; Maine and his seminal Village Communities, which focused on the vestiges of early proprietary systems in Germany, Scandinavia and England; and G. L. Gomme, who wrote The Village Community: With Special Reference to the Origin and Form of its Survivals in Britain. The last was referenced in Morris and Bax’s Growth and in Bax’s A New Catechism of Socialism along with other treatises that provided proof for the theory of primitive communism and corroborated the socialist conception of history. Seen as a whole, the scholarly literature presented a tangle of cross-references, though it was usually divided into the ‘Roman’ and the ‘Teutonic’ camps – the former denying, the latter endorsing the significance, and even the existence of the mark. But cutting across this division, four schools of thought may be distinguished, each endowing the village community with its own ideological colouring. The two schools most closely related to each other may be called the Liberal (or Oxford, since not all its members were in the Liberal Party) and the socialist. The village community of professional historiography, though tainted by Whiggism, chauvinism and racialism, could easily be turned to socialist (and even anarchist) uses, depending on the relative emphases accorded to its political and economic aspects. For the Liberal patriots Freeman and Green it was an embodiment of ‘primeval Teutonic freedom [and] social democracy’ (Burrow 1974, 257, 259), and this version, based on the researches of von Maurer, was the one most readily adapted by socialists. The Liberals emphasised direct democracy and local self-government, whether in the primeval German forest or in the modern Swiss Landesgemeinden. Green was as adamant about the democratic law-making and administration in the communal folk-mote, as he was about each villager’s ‘jealous independence’ in his homestead (1874, 3) – what he described was certainly not primitive communism, but it could be called primitive Liberalism. And just as the socialists’ political platform integrated liberal democracy into a greater vision of economic transformation, so their historiography focused not only on self-government, but on the collective ownership of land, though their references remained identical to those of the Liberals. The Liberals incorporated the village community into their narrative of the

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continuity of English history: modern parliamentary democracy was the ‘revival and perfection of ancient Teutonic democracy on a wider scale’ (Burrow 1974, 268). The socialists merely replaced ‘modern democracy’ with ‘future communism’, but retained, partially in the form of the dialectic, the concept of the ‘restoration on a higher level’. The third school of thought was – unlike the Liberals – much more aware of the communistic nature of the mark community, but regarded this – unlike the socialists – as an impediment to progress. Whereas the socialists maintained that the breakdown of primitive communism and the emergence of class society were negative and regrettable (though inevitable) developments, writers like Maine, Gomme and Seebohm claimed that progress only began when the system of co-ownership gave way to individualism and private property. They celebrated rather than condemned the transition to modernity. Equally, if the socialists now looked forward to a revival of village communalism on a universal scale – just as Freeman hailed the return to origins in greater democracy – Maine could only lament both. As for Seebohm, he was the very antithesis of Morris and other socialist writers of history in his endorsement of individualism. According to Seebohm, the village community and the tribal household, whether in Tacitus’s Germania or in AngloSaxon England, were indeed ‘marked by the two notes of community and equality’, and ‘connected with a form of the open or common field system of husbandry’ (1884, 437). But in contradistinction to the free mark of the democratic Teutonist school, they were characterised from the very beginning by serfdom and manorial tendencies. Seebohm could have found no better way of spiting Morris if he had set out to do so intentionally than by wishing that ‘the knowledge what the community and equality of the English village and of the Keltic tribe really were under the old order may at least dispel any lingering wish or hope that they may ever return’. ‘Communistic systems . . . are hardly likely . . . to be the economic goal of the future’; they are ‘historical survivals’, ‘economic stages for ever past’, not ‘types likely to be reproduced in the future’. ‘The freedom of the individual and growth of individual enterprise and property which mark the new order imply a rebellion against the bonds of the communism and forced equality, alike of the manorial and of the tribal system. It has triumphed by breaking up both the communism of serfdom and the communism of the free tribe’ (441, 439). Seebohm was simultaneously confirming the facts and reversing the interpretation of Marxist historiography, for one of its most dearly held tenets – not to mention the guiding hope of Morris’s political writing – was the dialectical return on a higher level of tribal and medieval forms of communality. For Seebohm, communism was the opposite of

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freedom and democracy, and the Teutonist socialist dream of the ‘spontaneous communalism of free men’ was a mere delusion (Burrow 1974, 275; see Seebohm 1884, viii). The fourth school – effectively in the person of the Cambridge legal historian F. W. Maitland – also took up the communal and individualist strands, but in a completely different way. Significant parts of Maitland’s work were dedicated to the elucidation of the concept of voluntary association and corporate identity. ‘The spirit of association’ was a formulation he shared with many writers, socialist and otherwise, but unlike these, Maitland did not consider the ancient village community to be a truly corporate body. On the contrary, he claimed that individualism was primitive and corporateness modern, that the mark was merely an association of individuals without an awareness of corporate identity. Unity was first abstracted from plurality and the many members at last considered one body or ‘person’ only in the borough of the later Middle Ages, though the threads of development stretched back from it to the village community and forward to the freely formed companies. Maitland did not draw moral distinctions between communistic and capitalistic associations – between the guild and the joint-stock company. When he spoke of the ‘wealth of grouplife’ in England and imagined an English Fellowship law book, he did not differentiate between religious houses, Nonconforming bodies, universities, manors, counties and hundreds, guilds, Inns of Court, companies of all sorts, including those involved in trading, colonialism and war, friendly societies, trade unions, clubs, trusts and corporations, the Stock Exchange, parliamentary assemblies, New England towns and South Australian communistic villages. Such an indiscriminate ‘Korporationslehre’ would not have been acceptable to a single socialist (1958, vii–xlv, xxvii, ix), and unlike most historians hitherto considered, Maitland did not care for local institutions, ultimate origins, or village communities as such. Unlike Maitland and Seebohm, the Oxford School historians and socialists both made political capital out of the mark, and it is worth examining the relationship between them in greater detail. Karl Marx had noted that the focus on ‘the primitive age of every people’ on the part of mainstream scholars ‘correspond[ed] to the socialist tendency, though these learned men have no idea that they are connected with it. And they are then surprised to find what is newest in what is oldest’ (Marx and Engels 1975–2005, 42: 557). The ‘enlightened’ bourgeois historians like Stubbs, Freeman and Green, to whom Morris and Bax (1893, 76) referred approvingly, would indeed have been surprised to learn that their interest in primitive society betokened unconscious

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socialist leanings. When they looked at Germanic village communities, collective ownership and democratic decision-making, they saw not the prototype of a socialist utopia, but the antecedents of modern liberal representative institutions, or even more narrowly, explanations of some recalcitrant aspects of English property law. The scanty evidence furnished by Caesar and Tacitus, by the records and law books of the early Middle Ages, could be adapted to the purposes of both ideological groupings, moulded to act as the legitimating origin of ‘English liberty’ or ‘socialist solidarity’ in turn. Of course, neither grouping was entirely blind to the dangers inherent in anachronistic co-optation. Bax and Morris formally disapproved of the ‘reading [of] the spirit of the present into the records of the past’ – citing specifically Lewis Morgan’s penchant for ‘seek[ing] the American democratic constitution in the beginnings of social evolution’ (1893, 20) – and Bax frowned upon ‘the inability of man to interpret the past otherwise than in terms of the world in which he lives’ (1886, 166). Freeman in The History of the Norman Conquest of England castigated his Liberal and Tory contemporaries for being too fond of discovering modern political institutions like Parliament or trial by jury in the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot or the practices of Alfred. But his criticisms did not go very far, and he was quite ready to admit that the ‘germs’ and ‘rudiments’ (1867–79, 1: 73) of later institutions were to be found in the earliest times. For all their self-consciousness, the whole endeavour of both groups was always ‘to find what is newest in what is oldest’. In fact, in his romances Morris managed to add another dimension to this quest by demonstrating the potential of the ‘oldest’ literary form to give expression to the most cutting-edge political ideology. Socialism was uncovered not only in the proprietary and legislative practices of primitive tribes (vestiges of which were observable throughout the development of European history), but in the literary practices inherited from them as well. Communal storytelling complemented communal landholding, and while Engels wished for the revival of the mark in the appendix to Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, the romances actually brought it back for the general fiction-reading public – infused with the Baxian socialist ethic and clothed in what was (in both senses of the word) a popular form. Furthermore, because Teutonist genealogical assumptions allowed Morris to adopt Germanic social organisation as a model for the socialist future, Wolfings and Roots could be read alongside News from Nowhere in more than one way. They shared not only the concept of the local community, but a similarly indeterminate status suspended between the ‘historical’ and the ‘imaginary’. The barbarian society of the Wolfings and the socialist society of Nowhere were

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the beginning and end terms of a single historical sequence. The same theory of social evolution that presupposed the existence of the primitive village community and defined its outstanding features, also accounted for the future existence of the federated socialist community. And while the latter obviously belonged – for the time being at least – to the imaginary realm, the former was an equally ideological construction. To believe in the mark, in its communistic and democratic guise, was just as reasonable as to believe in the socialist utopia itself. The search for origins took a somewhat different form with the academic historians. There was nothing extreme or misguided per se in insisting that the roots of the present lay deep in the past, but saying that English constitutional history developed ‘from the primeval polity of the common fatherland’, as William Stubbs did in his monumental work on The Constitutional History of England (1874–8, 1: 11), was taking it a stage further, while engaging in the kind of comparisons for which J. R. Green’s popular A Short History of the English People was notable, bordered on sheer propaganda. Despite his friend Stubbs’s warning that analogies were not proofs, and the (admittedly hypocritical) admonitions of his other friend Freeman against this very proceeding, Green immediately equated the ‘Old English’ ‘witan’, who ‘met to settle questions of peace and war, to judge just judgement, and frame wise laws’, with ‘their descendants, the Wise Men of a later England, [who] meet in Parliament at Westminster, to frame laws and do justice for the great empire which has sprung from this little body of farmer-commonwealths in Sleswick’ (1874, 4). Morris’s opinion of Parliament, that grand institution of English liberty, was concisely illustrated by the use made of it in Nowhere – as a dung market. He could not have agreed with the Liberals’ employment of Germanic precedents as a vindication of the present system – they were a model for the future, not a justification of the status quo. While the Teutonists indulged their penchant for drawing analogies between primitive Germanic freedoms and contemporary English institutions, the socialists preferred to create similar identities between the past and the as-yet-unattained communist future. They differed little in their methods from the apologists of the status quo, but they took care to replace the utopia of existing bourgeois ‘democracy’ with the vision of a socialist alternative. The shared belief that modern Englishmen were the direct descendants of Germanic barbarians enabled the mainstream Liberal historians to legitimate modern institutions, and socialists like Morris to claim, on the contrary, that ancient ideals had been corrupted. It also justified analogies between the struggles of the barbarians against classical and of the proletariat against capitalist civilisation, presuming

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– in the latter as in the former case – that the principle of community and fellowship would triumph over individualism. Though its more virulent chauvinistic strains held no appeal, Teutonist ideology permeated socialist thinking nonetheless, and the Liberal historians’ ‘tendency to ascribe to ancient Saxon ancestors the social organisation of later times and to exaggerate their political progressiveness’ (MacDougall 1982, 129) was equally observable in socialist theory and propaganda. Because Morris shared the same penchant for ‘the forests of Germania’ (Stubbs 1979, xxvii) as Freeman and Green, he at times echoed their very vocabulary, as when he drew parallels in The House of the Wolfings between ‘the custom of our forefathers’ and the ‘councils’ and ‘Things’ of the Folk, or between the neighbours chosen to give the ‘Doom’ and our own ‘Jury’ (1910–15, 14: 7). It is no accident that his automatic invocations of ‘our Saxon forefathers’ (1969, 160) put one in mind of Freeman’s ‘forefathers and kinsmen’ (1896, 24), Green’s ‘our English fathers’ (1874, 4, 7) and Stubbs’s ‘our forefathers’ (1874–8, 1: 12). In 1870 Morris had already spoken of the Volsunga saga as ‘the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks’ (1910–15, 7: 286), and the preface to the first volume of the Saga Library made Morris’s participation in the Teutonist discourse even more explicit. The Icelanders represented ‘the Gothic branch of the great Teutonic race’: the most progressive, intellectual and active branch at that. Their language was ‘akin to our own. Their ancient laws . . . nearly the same as those under which the freemen of Kent and Wessex lived’, for they were ‘free men of the tribes’ who had fled from ‘the oppression of the early form of feudality’ (Morris and Magnússon 1891–1905, 1: v–vi). All of this was as faithful a paraphrase of Stubbs, Maine and Freeman as could be found: glorification of the race, the common origin of Germanic institutions, and the transition from democratic tribal egalitarianism (the ‘mark’) to feudalism (the ‘manor’) were among their main preoccupations. What made the Icelanders such perfect stand-ins for the hypothetical Goths, furthermore, was their retention of prehistoric memories of Teutonic mythology and customary law that had nearly disappeared in the rest of Europe, ‘so completely forgotten’, as Engels wrote in The Mark, ‘that recently G. L. Maurer has had to re-discover their real significance’ (Morris and Magnússon 1891–1905, 1: vi–vii; Marx and Engels 1975–2005, 24: 441). The socialists also took up another strand of the historians’ practice in their use of the term ‘Aryan’, and it was Bax who became the most vocal proponent of the ‘Aryan’ element in socialism: ‘Though Socialism has no sympathy with anti-Semitism as generally understood, it certainly represents the reassertion of the typical Aryan ethics (whether classical

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or Norse) of social utility as against the typical Semitic ethics of personal holiness’ (1886, 98). This kind of rhetoric had its roots in comparative theology (as well as philology and historiography), which ‘associated particular racial groups with certain spiritual characteristics’, specifically differentiating between the Semitic and Aryan cultures and their respective contributions to Christianity. The two concepts, however, possessed no stable meaning – Baron Bunsen’s Semites stood for ‘brotherhood’, while Dean Farrar’s had no ‘social instincts’ – so Bax had merely to pick and choose among the available options. Given this freedom of interpretation, it is not surprising that his ‘Aryanism’ had little to do with the more culturally diffuse fashion for imperialist Anglo-Saxonism. Teutons and Anglo-Saxons were but one side of the Aryan family, associated in mainstream discourse with individualism, liberty and Protestantism, while the Celts (and sometimes the Latins) remained in thrall to ‘tribal solidarity’ and the ‘community of the [Catholic] church’ (Kidd 2006, 171, 195). For Bax, of course, the value signs were reversed, and just as he would have nothing to do with Protestant individualism, so in an article entitled ‘Imperialism v. Socialism’, printed in the first issue of the Commonweal, he made it clear that ‘the establishment of socialism . . . on any national or race basis, is out of the question. Tall talk about the “Anglo-Saxon race” . . . can but disgust the socialist’ (1885, 3). But despite all such divergences, socialist and mainstream professional practice remained identical. Just as the Teutonists, using philology as a tool, focused on the unrecorded stages of history that succeeded the Aryan peoples’ dispersion from their original home, so Bax reserved the bulk of his ‘Universal History from a Socialist Standpoint’ for an exposition of the evolution of primitive society, disposing of the rest of ‘universal history’ in just a few pages. Engels devoted the whole of Origin to the subject, drawing upon and interpreting many of the same mainstream sources as Bax, Morris and Marx in his Ethnological Notebooks. Marx himself, as early as ‘Forms which Precede Capitalist Production’ in the Grundrisse (1857–8), had considered the differences between oriental, classical and Germanic forms of communality, the opposition of the Germanic commune to town life, and the Germanic character of the Middle Ages – concerns echoed by academic and subsequent socialist historians alike (1973, 471–9). Some years later, in letters to Engels of 14 and 25 March 1868, Marx offered a virtual résumé of the Teutonists’ case. He demonstrated a thorough acquaintance with Maurer’s work on the German mark and property forms, referred to the Russian village community, and to a ‘Celtic (Welsh) book of laws from the 11th century which is entirely communist’ and which showed that ‘common ownership’ was not limited to the Germanic tribes. He also

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quoted Tacitus and Caesar as primary sources on communal ownership of land and settlement ‘gentibus cognationibusque [according to gentes and kinships]’, admitted that Scandinavia was ‘as important for German jurisprudence and economics as for German mythology’, and noted that ‘Germanic primitive villages, in the form described, still exist here and there in Denmark’. He concluded with a philological point: ‘the general [das Allgemeine] in German and Nordic means only the communal land, and . . . the particular, the special [das Sundre, Besondere] means only private property divided off from the communal land[.] Here are the logical categories coming damn well out of “our intercourse” after all’ (Marx and Engels 1975–2005, 42: 547, 558). Marx was right. It is impossible to speak about the uses of history in the Victorian period without mentioning the uses of philology. Philology not only served as a method for interpreting history, but created historical categories that would have been inconceivable without it. The very concept of the Aryan or Indo-European, the extrapolation from a linguistic to a racial family, would not have been possible without its discoveries. Comparative philology revealed cultural affinities and uncovered connections between the different peoples of antiquity; for a long time – before archeology extended the span of human prehistory further than any linguistic speculation could reach – philology was deemed to provide the only ‘scientific’ gateway into the far past, the most precise method of reconstructing the world of the common Aryan ancestors before their dispersion, and demonstrating the continuity between prehistory and modern times. Dean Farrar spoke with the common voice when he proclaimed that ‘the ancestors of the Celts, the Germans, the Danes, the Greeks, the Italians, the Persians, and Hindus were all living beneath the same roof’ (cit. Burrow 1967, 191), and Morris’s romance descriptions of the folk-wandering and the sundering of the kindreds were inconceivable outside the conceptual framework of the Aryan migrations and dispersion within which the philologists worked. It is not surprising then that philological reconstructions – cultural and political extrapolations from etymological origins – abounded in the work of most historians concerned with the Germanic idea: from Sharon Turner in The History of the Anglo-Saxons to Stubbs in The Constitutional History of England, from Freeman and Seebohm to Marx and Engels (who were as interested as Morris in Icelandic remains, though mainly for the clues they provided to early social organisation). Engels’s by no means original philological asides dealt with the various words for ‘king’ and for ‘gens’, and he even found proofs for the prevalence of mother-right in the word choices of the Old Norse Völuspá (see

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Stubbs 1874–8, 1: 158; Freeman 1896, 44–5; Engels 1972, 169, 189, 91, 147–8, 196–7, 198). Engels could hardly be original when most of his words appeared as philological corroboration again and again in the works of historians, jurists, anthropologists, mythographers and economists. The academic community interested in primitive society was fairly inward looking, and scholars not only cited each other at every step (the lists of acknowledgements introducing most scholarly volumes read like carbon copies of each other), but drew upon the same relatively limited pool of primary evidence. Disagreements, though fierce, were mainly about matters of interpretation: the terms of the discussion were common, and the general permeability of the disciplines explained the striking congruencies. At the end of the century archeologists, ethnologists and historians uncovering hitherto untapped archival sources, furnished new data that transformed the accepted paradigms, but this did not happen in time to influence the socialist historiography of Morris’s generation. Morris’s village community also had its philological side, for the ‘mark’ was an etymological entity as much as a historical concept. The word ‘mark’, according to the philologists, may have meant boundary, or wood, or the province enclosed by the boundary; it occurred in the Edda, and had cognates in various Germanic languages. Jacob Grimm was the first to speculate about it, but by Morris’s time the ambiguous signifier had become encrusted with very specific historical associations. One can see the creative process at work in J. R. Green, who enthused over the ‘little [Saxon] farmer-commonwealth . . . girt in by its own border or “mark”, a belt of forest or waste or fen which parted it from its fellow villages, a ring of common ground’ (1874, 3), and even in Engels, who spoke of ‘the boundary forest of the Germans’ and its equivalents in other tongues, and of the ‘territory delimited by these uncertain boundaries’ as ‘the common land of the tribe’ (1972, 153). Morris adopted the ‘mark’ into his romances to designate the space inhabited by related gentes or Houses, located in the clearing of a wood, and characterised by the various attributes of the barbarian stage of social organisation. Wolfings opens with what is effectively a several-page-long definition of the mark, and the first chapter, which in any case reads like an anthropological primer, is also a perfect specimen of historical-philological reconstruction. As Tom Shippey points out, the tendency ‘to stretch from single words to whole histories’ (1982, 64) was characteristic not just of philologists, but of students of all the interrelated disciplines or comparative sciences that attempted to reconstruct the lost world of Germanic prehistory. In whose image they reconstructed it was a function of their ideological allegiance: from the

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patronymic local name ending in ‘ing’ one could make a leap to the free village community of the Anglo-Saxon settlers, or in the opposite direction to the Roman manorial type of tribal household (Seebohm 1884, 367). And thence it was but a short distance to the democratic communist utopia at one extreme, or to an endorsement of the triumph of economic individualism at the other. In the preface to his study of English village communities, Seebohm made no bones about the vast political implications of the choice of linguistic interpretation: he stressed its importance for state action, for ‘the future happiness of the human race – the success or failure of the planet’ (viii). The leadership role of the ‘English speaking nations’, the way politicians were to view the nature of economic development depended, in effect, upon the findings of toponymy. Where Morris’s allegiances lay was no secret. For him the roots of socialism, like the roots of those unspecified mountains, were to be found in the Germanic village community or mark.

Continuities: From the Forests of Germania to the Norman Conquest The fashion for reconstruction was not limited to aficionados of early Germanic society, nor was Morris the only creative writer to indulge in it. At the very beginning of the Victorian period Thomas Macaulay famously set out to reconstruct the lost Latin ballad-poetry in The Lays of Ancient Rome, and he was himself only following in the footsteps of previous national ballad revivalists. But the historiographical discourse of Teutonism as it emerged in the second half of the century had its own unique set of features and, as has been seen, the vocabulary of Freeman, Green and Co. was in many respects indistinguishable from that of Morris and the other socialist representatives of the Teutonist school. A closer look at the assumptions and phraseology of the discourse’s founding texts will illustrate this point in more detail. One ‘authority’ whose name would have been instantly recognisable not only to students of comparative jurisprudence, but also to anyone interested in the early history of society, was Sir Henry Maine. His treatises included Ancient Law, Village Communities in the East and West and Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, and his coverage ranged from anthropological considerations of kinship as the basis of primitive society to economic analyses of the Teutonic mark and its vestiges in England. The latter was his topic in Village Communities, and special mention should be made of his emphasis on the quarrelsomeness of little societies and the frequency of intertribal war, as well

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as his description of the market as a neutral area where antagonistic communities could meet for exchange. Bax’s concern with the ‘limited’ loyalties of the primitive tribes in a constant state of external war and Morris’s description of the market in Roots, where merchants from the enemy Cities of the Plain could trade in peace with all the other peoples of the Dale and the Mountains, only acquire their resonance against the background of such academic speculation. Morris would also have agreed with Maine’s economic formulation, in Lecture V of Village Communities, of the process by which the collective ownership of primitive societies dissolved into individual property and the free village communities fell into villeinage. Feudalism was more thorough, according to Maine, in countries that were Romanised at the time of the barbarian conquest, because Roman law gave precision to relations which under Teutonic conditions remained vague and indefinite. Systematic feudalism also reacted upon purely Teutonic societies and speeded up the changes. This crucial difference between social evolution in the Roman and the Teutonic parts of Europe was not lost on Morris, who dwelt upon it in ‘The Development of Modern Society’ (1890, 237), a series of lectures that set out to trace all the stages of evolution through which the ‘progressive races of man’ had passed, and the ‘condition of the workman’ during each (225). Here Morris had the chance to apply the dialectical paradigm of Bax and Engels to the findings of ‘bourgeois’ historians and anthropologists on a grand scale, and to recast the concepts he illustrated creatively in the romances into ‘scientific’ terminology. But it was Stubbs rather than Maine who was acknowledged as the pre-eminent authority on constitutional development from Tacitus to the Tudors by everyone from Green to Maitland, and his three-volume summary of German and English research, The Constitutional History of England, was dubbed by Freeman ‘the greatest monument of English historical scholarship’ (1867–79, 5: vi). To read it is to immerse oneself in the discursive climate within which Morris’s romances and lectures took root, and to experience firsthand the workings of the Teutonist ideology. It is noteworthy that plucked out of context Stubbs’s historical account of early Germanic life is virtually indistinguishable from the portrait of Morris’s romances. Whether this makes the romances historical or the history romantic is open to interpretation, but Morris’s contemporaries were more likely to opt for the former. An earnest German professor naturally assumed that Wolfings was based on newly uncovered sources, and although Morris is reported to have replied: ‘Doesn’t the fool realise . . . that it’s a romance, a work of fiction – that it’s all LIES! Hasn’t the pedantic ass ever heard of creative imagination . . . an

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artist who knows his business can fill out an epoch on the strength of half a dozen details’ (cit. Sparling 1924, 50), contemporary reviewers seemed to take the romance descriptions as fact. As one of them wrote: ‘For the material framework of his epic [Wolfings] he has resorted to Northern Europe at the time of the earliest Roman invasion, when the Gothic communities upon the banks of the Elbe kept their primitive institutions of Mark, Thing and Folk-mote unchanged, when totemism and exogamy were still inviolate customs’ (Faulkner 1973, 326). And Stubbs was instrumental in establishing that framework. Stubbs was a Tory, not a Liberal, and his stance with regard to the village community was ambivalent, but even he did not mince words: not only were the English ‘a people of German descent’, they were also in ‘possession of the elements of primitive German civilisation and the common germs of German institutions’. In fact, Stubbs engaged in speculations about the contribution of the Germanic barbarian genius to European development long before Engels and Morris co-opted the idea for socialist ends. In England, France, Spain and Germany, Stubbs wrote in the first chapter of the Constitutional History, the permanent and dominant influence was not Roman but ‘barbarian or Germanic’, and the effect of the Germanic conquest of Rome was to ‘revivify’ the composite nationalities, and furnish the base of their law and custom. ‘The polity developed by the German races on British soil is the purest product of their primitive instinct’ (1874–8, 1: 2, 3, 6, 9, 11; cf. Morris 1910–15, 23: 40–1). After thus establishing the context, Stubbs went on to recapitulate the accounts of Caesar and Tacitus – the starting place of every writer dealing with tribal Germania. He touched on all the same points as Engels and Morris: consanguinity and arrangement by kindred in war, common ownership, the relative unimportance of exchange, and the absence of cities and of private property in land. Every reported characteristic of the German ‘congeries of tribes’ was covered (1874–8, 1: 17): from equality and simplicity to the shaking of spears in expression of agreement (cf. Morris 1994, 498). Many pages were devoted to the election of magistrates and war leaders (principes and duces) from noble families of the kind represented by the House of the Face in Morris’s Roots. Stubbs was certainly not the only scholar (Maine was another) to remark on the existence, even in the democratic Teutonic communities, of families of purest blood descended from a common ancestor or god, from whose members the leaders would be chosen. Another historical leitmotif – the submission of the alderman to the war chief, who is chosen according to proven valour and renown and leads by example rather than by command – was carefully reproduced by Morris in the official relationship between Gold-mane and

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Iron-face in Roots, and in the description of Thiodolf’s role in Wolfings, not to mention episodes such as that involving Ralph and the Shepherds in the Well at the World’s End. Stubbs also noted the different kinds of business – from elections and the judgement of cases to questions of war, peace and alliance – conducted at gatherings of the magistrates (like the Gate-thing in Roots) and at full assemblies of the people. In fact, the tripartite division between chief, council and assembly that occupied most of Freeman’s attention in Comparative Politics was an important element of all treatments – fictional and scholarly – of Germanic tribal government, and like many others it went back to Tacitus. But Stubbs was not just retelling classical accounts, he was incorporating them into the Victorian scheme of social evolution, and it came as no surprise that in assessing the relevance of Tacitus’s Germania, he spoke of its interest both as containing the ‘germs’ of ‘later institutions of the race’, and as being itself the development of the ‘primitive civilisation of the Aryan or the Indo-Germanic family’ (1874–8, 1: 34). This evolutionary approach could be observed in Stubbs’s treatment of landholding and legislative practices. Vestiges of the ‘community of tenure and cultivation’ among a ‘body of kindred freemen’ yet remained in England, Switzerland and Germany, and the mark rather than the Roman municipality was ‘the origin of city life among the Germans’. Though he may have quibbled with the particulars, Stubbs was at one with Maine (whose work on village communities he cited in this connection) and the Liberals about the importance of Teutonic tribal organisation for later historical developments. The analogies between the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic, especially Scandinavian, ‘races’ were explicit: ‘Scandinavian law and practice . . . at a later date reproduces, with very little that is adventitious, the early conditions of selforganising society’. This was historical fact as Marx and Morris saw it, and it is not surprising that just a few pages later Stubbs went on to talk of the Icelandic Thing. He also described the mark in more detail, in words that foreshadowed the opening of Wolfings: it was a ‘settlement of a family or kindred in one of the great plains or forests of the ancient world’; in the centre of the clearing stood a village, ‘surrounded by a thick border of wood or waste’, where every freeman had his homestead and his equal share of the communal land. The mark was also a ‘political unit’, giving all freemen a voice in the assembly that regulated internal business and administered justice at the ‘mark-moot’. This picture of the tribes just before the British migration was a variation on the earlier set-up of Tacitus’s Germania, and would appear in yet another incarnation in the England of the Anglo-Saxons. Such a historical recurrence was possible because ‘the mark system preserve[d] in itself the two

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radical [i.e. root] principles of German antiquity, the kindred and the community of land’ (1874–8, 1: 53, 55, 57–8). These were also the main principles of any primitive community, and by rendering the study of Germanic society amenable to socialist appropriation, the principles proved to be ‘radical’ in the political sense as well. Primitive collective ownership and the social morality fostered by kinship organisation were the basis or prototype of future socialism, when common land ownership would be revived on a grander scale (Engels’s point in The Mark) and tribal solidarity transformed into a universal ethic (Bax’s main contention). That is why ‘the ancient German spirit’ was at one with socialism, why the Teutonism of bourgeois historians was so happily adopted by professed Marxists, and a socialist romance quite naturally took as its subject ‘the primitive German constitution’. Even under feudalism, wrote Stubbs, when the unrepresentative Witenagemot replaced the shire folk-mote that had signified the ‘original independence of the population’, when the ‘personal freedom and political right’ associated with people’s assemblies and communal property yielded to the inequality of separate land ownership, the survival of aspects of the earlier system enabled the preservation of ‘popular liberties’ (1874–8, 1: 188, 184, 130, 184, 56). Community persisted within modernity. But although Stubbs provided the evidence – indispensable for the Marxist historical agenda – of the survival of some communal institutions into the high Middle Ages, the socialists would not stop there. If the remnants of ‘German antiquity’ played such a beneficial role in the Middle Ages, serving as a counterweight to the encroachments of Romanised feudality, they could just as well furnish a model for the future development of society along socialist lines. When Stubbs turned at last from the speculative ‘forests of Germania’ to the recorded history of the Anglo-Saxons, it was only to trace the common threads that ran through the social evolution of the Teutonic races. His aim was to elucidate the connections between the stages, the ‘link[s] between the primitive and the medieval systems’ and the way the Anglo-Saxon institutions, for all their differences, reproduced the relations of ‘the German home’. The Anglo-Saxon system demonstrated the great ‘tenacity of primitive institutions . . . on which the permanent continuity of the modern with the ancient English life depends for evidence’ [my italics]. When the invaders came to England they ‘came in families, and kindreds, and in the full organisation of their tribes’, bringing with them their customary law and legislative institutions, transferring virtually intact their military and administrative arrangements (1874–8, 1: 76, 75, 69). In the English villages, as in Germania, traces of common land tenure and the bond of kinship were still observable, and

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the township represented the development of the mark principle. The various local gemots or assemblies of the people (folk-motes) preserved the liberty of election at the lower levels: the ‘hundred’ especially, as Freeman and others also liked to repeat, originated in ‘remotest German antiquity’ and was one of the most distinctive vestiges of ‘primitive organisation’. The Anglo-Saxon ealdorman corresponded to the princeps or dux of Tacitus, was elected at the general assembly and shared the rule of the shire with the sheriff in a system of double administration that was ‘common to the early Germanic constitutions’, and of course took centre-stage in Morris’s romances (1: 89, 104, 127). Stubbs summed up his observations on the development of Anglo-Saxon history by reasserting that – despite the various constitutional transmutations over its duration – ‘the forms of primitive organisation still generally survived’; at the local level ‘the old spirit of freedom found room’, and ‘in the preservation of the old forms . . . remained the seeds of future liberties’ (1: 229–30). The medieval co-existence of communalism and feudalism, which offered socialists the hope of a future transformation, was here linked firmly to a narrative of continuity and amelioration. Stubbs concluded with a patriotic flourish on the superiority of Anglo-Saxon literature and domestic civilisation, and an appraisal of the impact of the Norman Conquest, which destroyed much, but also brought England within the sphere of continental Europe and developed the English national character. It was with these very observations that Freeman opened his six-volume History of the Conquest. The Conquest, he insisted with a characteristically Stubbsian emphasis on continuities, was but a ‘temporary overthrow of our national being’, for ‘the older and stronger elements still survived, and in the long run they again made good their supremacy’, enabling us to ‘keep up a more unbroken continuity with earlier times’. But this was a continuity too far for Morris. Although the economic (communal property) and political (local democracy) components of socialism would arise from the same seeds as Stubbs’s purported ‘future liberties’, the Conquest marked a definitive break in the growth. Morris did not thank William the Conqueror, as Freeman did, for maintaining the ‘unbroken Teutonic political life’ in England, nor did he approve, even partially, of the Romance influence on an England ‘which had hitherto been purely Teutonic’ (Freeman 1867–79, 1: 2, 1; 5: 334; 1: 3). He would certainly have preferred the ‘Roman and Teutonic’ elements to have remained unfused, as can be ascertained from a reading of his companion lectures on ‘Early’ and ‘Feudal England’. The Norman Conquest ‘stopped forever’ England’s ‘development as a pure branch of the Teutonic family’, in history as well as in language. Morris bemoaned the fact that

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the English never produced the potential literature of ‘the Low German branch of the great Teutonic race’. Nothing could make up for him ‘the loss of the stories [we] might have had of how the folk of Middlesex ate and drank and loved and quarrelled and met their death in the 10th century’, the kind of stories that the Icelanders recorded in their family sagas (1969, 167–8, 176). ‘Duke William brought, in fact, his Normandy into England, which was thereby changed from a Teutonic people (Old-Norse theoth), with the tribal customary law still in use among them, into a province of Romanised Feudal Europe, a piece of France, in short’ (1910–15, 23: 40–1). He sighed after lost linguistic possibilities – ‘If we could only have preserved our language as the Germans have theirs’ (1969, 177) – and famously resorted to Icelandic calques in his own translations and prose romances. Although Morris’s diction had not always been ‘markedly Teutonic’, as Eiríkr Magnússon insisted, his later practice did endorse Magnússon’s view that ‘dignity of style’ could only be reached ‘by means of the Teutonic element in our speech – the nearest akin to the Icelandic’ (Morris 1910–15, 7: xvij–xviij). Freeman judged the Conquest to have been partly ‘evil’ in its effects on English language and literature only because it caused Englishmen to forget about ‘heroes of their own blood’ like Arminius and Hengest (Freeman 1867–79, 5: 597). His lament for the linguistic and cultural corruption caused by the Conquest did not get in the way of his ‘jubilant celebrations of English political continuity’ (Burrow 1981, 211, 213). But for Morris the Conquest was an unmitigated evil; Iceland rather than England was the true inheritor of Germanic institutions; and effusions about the persistence of the national character, when they implied the sort of self-righteous championing of English ‘liberties’ that Morris believed to have perished with the Middle Ages, held no appeal. His attitude to the mainstay of the Liberal school – the theory of Parliament as ‘the true and lawful representative, by true and lawful succession, of the ancient Meeting of the Wise’ – has already been adduced, and his socialist convictions prevented him from hailing the newest accomplishments of bourgeois commercialism as the ‘oldest heritage’ of the past (Freeman 1867–79, 1: 74; 5: 596). In ‘Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century’ he cut to the root of the ‘continuity’ fallacy: ‘The hypocrisy of so-called constitutional development has blinded us to the greatness of the change which has taken place’ (1910–15, 22: 379). If Morris were ever to endorse the Anglo-Saxon ‘mission’ of preserving ‘in new forms quickened by the old spirit, the ancient constitution of the Teutonic race’ (Freeman 1867–79, 5: 335), it would only be in reference to an English socialist revolution that would give new form to the old communal spirit.

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The issue of the Conquest was not the only ideological point of divergence between Morris and the Oxford School historians: the other was the institution of the Comitatus (the thainhood, or personal following of the chiefs), whose development was in large part responsible, according to Freeman, for the degeneration of primitive Teutonic democracy into serfdom. Although it was a central feature of Germanic society remarked upon by every writer starting with Tacitus, the Comitatus was absent from Morris’s romances. Idealisation had nothing to do with it. Morris had no qualms about incorporating slavery into his narrative, but the Comitatus was a ‘germ of feudalism’ (Freeman 1867–79, 1: 93) in the Old English constitution itself; it hinted that all was not well within the kinship community – a more worrying fact than the subjugation of conquered foreign tribes. External war was an admitted reality, but the existence of a militaristic, privileged and idle caste within a supposedly egalitarian tribal society could not be incorporated into the socialist model, and was best suppressed. Certainly this could be done with impunity in a work of fiction, if not in a treatise aspiring to historical accuracy, though unsurprisingly, socialist historical tracts also tended to skirt the issue. Freeman, however, did not shy away from its implications, mainly because he believed that primitive Aryan society contained the seeds of all three principles of government: monarchic (king), aristocratic (council) and democratic (assembly) (1896, 41). The democratic aspect of the early Teutonic constitution – manifested in the free self-governing community of the mark – did not die out entirely but survived into the post-Conquest period, when it eventually became the means of the enfranchisement of the villein class. This very interpretation (communalism persisting within and redeeming feudalism) was propounded by the socialists, though little was said by them of the other two ‘principles of government’ inherent in the Germanic system. Freeman, however, would not stop there. Although the old assemblies became merely aristocratic bodies, the ancient constitution was brought back in another shape with the Magna Carta, and as regards the Anglo-Saxon gemots, ‘no people ever enjoyed more complete political freedom than the English did in these early times’ (1867–79, 1: 105; 5: 464–5). No people, that is, except the Englishmen of the present – and as he launched into a celebration of historic freedom and the glories of Parliament, Freeman again parted ways with the socialists. But for all these differences of interpretation, the factual details contained in Freeman’s chapter on the ancient English constitution, as well as his assumptions about the necessity of comparison with kindred Teutonic nations, and the identification of the Germans of Tacitus with ‘our race’, were indistinguishable from Morris’s own articles of belief.

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He touched on familiar Morrisian and Stubbsian motifs like the predominance of certain houses (from which magistrates were chosen), the common Aryan division of powers between a civil ruler and a military chieftain on the one hand and the people’s assembly and chiefs’ council on the other, common lands as ‘the remains of the most ancient form of property’, the disappearance of the gentile system and the ‘feudalisation of Europe’ as the mark or village community was swallowed by the parish and manor (1867–79, 5: 463, 460). His The Growth of the English Constitution opened with an idyllic picture of the modern Swiss Landesgemeinden – self-governing communities ‘in the green meadow at the mountain’s foot’ – in which ‘we may see the institutions of our own forefathers, the institutions which were once common to the whole Teutonic race’, ‘the whole Aryan family of mankind’ and which were brought into England by the Teutonic conquerors (1872, 2, 8, 13–14). The free democratic Assembly as practised in the Swiss cantons could be ‘traced back uninterruptedly’ to the ‘Germans of Tacitus’ (1867–79, 1: 83). With this version of the ‘continuity’ narrative no Teutonist socialist would have disagreed.

Revivals: From Barbarians to Proletarians Although Teutonist historiography had a lot to offer Marxists looking to support their evolutionary theory of society, Stubbs’s and Freeman’s emphasis on the unbroken continuity of Teutonic blood and institutions could never match the appeal of the anthropologist Lewis Morgan’s belief in the future ‘revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes’ (cit. Engels 1972, 237). This corresponded much more closely to the dialectical form of socialist interpretation, which presupposed a lapse from an earlier state, a period of negation that would be reversed in the socialist utopia. The spiral would not map onto the straight line; the Marxist model could not be reconciled with the academic historians’ figuring of modernity as the natural inheritor of the virtues of the past, a teleological culmination of the stately process of national development. So it is not surprising that Engels, Bax and Morris all chose to adopt Morgan’s call for revival, as well as his three evolutionary stages and their subdivisions, in their own treatments of barbarism and civilisation. In his memoir, Bax devoted half a chapter to the new history and anthropology of the midto-late nineteenth century, and in addition to calling Freeman, Stubbs and Green ‘the leading lights in the new views of historical research as applied to English history’, he also highlighted the ‘remarkable work

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done in connexion with . . . Comparative Mythology and the science of Anthropology generally’ by von Maurer and Maine in the first instance, and then Frazer, whose Golden Bough produced ‘a revolution in our views of primitive society and of the early periods of universal history . . . Among works dealing with anthropological studies from another side may be mentioned Morgan’s “Ancient Society”, which Karl Marx was one of the first to appreciate on its appearance in 1876’ (1918, 67, 69–70). The evolutionary scheme Morgan developed in Ancient Society: or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization was to influence Marxist historians long into the twentieth century. But the Teutonists did not in any case control the Victorian historical field: they were engaged in a constant conflict with the so-called Romanist school. Fustel de Coulanges famously referred to the mark as a figment of the Teutonic imagination, and Frederic Seebohm argued the importance of the Roman influence. Stubbs, Freeman and Maine had to take time out especially to insist on the non-Roman origins of the municipal institutions of medieval Europe, and to attribute the rise of the towns to usages inherited from the barbarian conquerors of the Empire. Morris, in joining the debate, showed himself a diligent pupil. ‘The great towns of northern Europe,’ he wrote in ‘The Revolt of Ghent’, ‘were not originally “cities”, sovereign bodies with a definite polity like those of the ancient classical world. The origin of them was the agricultural district, the land that gave subsistence to the clan, all the free men of which took part in the affairs of the community’ (1888, 210). So when Engels chose to bring up the subject of Rome in his chapter on ‘The State among the Germans’, he was entering long-disputed territory, and by taking the side of the barbarians he appropriated for the socialists the home-ground of the Teutonist nationalists. Engels developed a motif dear to Stubbs’s and Freeman’s hearts: the contrast between the barbarians and Roman civilisation, found in its seminal form in Tacitus’s Germania. The contrast was, for all intents and purposes, one between autonomous community and centralised state. Freeman, in the third chapter of Comparative Politics, had juxtaposed the Roman and the Germanic conceptions of the state, but he saw contemporary English society as the inheritor of the Germanic idea, whereas for Engels it was unequivocally a replica of the Roman. At issue was not only the static opposition of Roman bureaucracy to the ‘primitive democratic character’ of the gentile constitution, but the use of the latter as ‘a weapon in the hands of the oppressed’, and a way ‘to rejuvenate a world in the throes of collapsing civilisation’. Engels went further than Stubbs and Freeman in his assessment of the

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contribution of the Teutonic genius to the development of Europe. He highlighted the application to nineteenth-century affairs, and suggested the analogy between modern capitalist society and the Roman Empire that Morris would draw with much greater vigour. He also denuded the historians’ conclusions of their racialist connotations by passing them through the sieve of Morgan’s anthropology. The ‘Germans breathed new life into a dying Europe’, wrote Engels, not because of ‘some miraculous power innate in the Germanic race, such as our chauvinist historians romance about’, but simply because their ‘sense of freedom, their democratic instinct’ were ‘the characteristics of the barbarian of the upper stage, fruits of his gentile constitution’. Bits of that constitution, ‘in the form of mark communities’, survived into feudal society and gave the serfs ‘a local centre of solidarity and a means of resistance’, leading eventually to their ‘liberation as a class’. Germanic barbarism brought with it a ‘vigorous and creative life’, and though in its original form it was destined to be superseded by the state – its gentile constitution ‘shattered by the division of labour’ and ‘the cleavage of society into classes’ – it was a type of the new state-less society of the future, organised ‘on the basis of free and equal association of the producers’ (1972, 211–16, 228, 232). This was Morris’s longed-for ‘revival’, the synthesis of the Marxist dialectic, the upper ring of Bax’s spiral – this, and not the Victorian Parliament of the Teutonist historians. Morris was even more definitive than Engels in his application of classical experience to the nineteenth century, and he clothed Engels’s argument in his own typical vocabulary. He bid his listeners draw inspiration and hope from the story of Rome’s fall to ‘the Fury of the North’: ‘Time was when the rule of Rome held the whole world of civilisation in its poisonous embrace’, and it ‘seemed doomed to last for ever’, but change ‘came none the less . . . and the Barbarians’ with their superior moral qualities, ‘were upon her’. And ‘so Rome fell and Europe rose, and the hope of the world was born again. To those that have hearts to understand, this tale of the past is a parable of the days to come; of the change in store for us hidden in the breast of the Barbarism of civilisation, the Proletariat’ (1910–15, 23: 204). In ‘Early England’ Morris spelled out the parable even more clearly – ‘the great taxgathering machine the Roman bureaucracy [was] [sic] the great curse of the ancient world, as our commercial market-hunting bureaucracy is the great curse of the modern world’ (1969, 161) – and repeated the equivalences between barbarians and proletarians, Rome and capitalist society with an almost disconcerting simplicity and insistence.5 The unmistakeable moral was that the working class would be the deliverer of modern civilisation as the barbarian tribes had been the saviours of the civilisation of antiquity.

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‘I have told you what was the condition of the civilised world in the days of the late Roman Republic, and the Absolutist Empire which followed it,’ Morris reminded his listeners in ‘The Development of Modern Society’. ‘What is its condition now that we have gone through chattelslavery and serfdom to wage-slavery? It can be told nearly in the same words.’ And he did go on to tell it, concluding: ‘And how does it differ from that of Roman corruption? Can its end be otherwise then – or worse!’ But though late nineteenth-century Europe was not the Europe of fifteen hundred years ago, and there was no longer anything outside civilisation that could regenerate the world – nothing to ‘turn to for new birth’ – help could still come from within. ‘So shall we be our own Goths, and at whatever cost break up again the new tyrannous Empire of Capitalism’ (1890, 260–1). The plot of Wolfings was effectively being invoked as a blueprint for the socialist revolution. But unlike the modern proletariat, the barbarians were the progressive force of antiquity precisely because they had not yet passed out of the ‘later days of tribal society’. A ‘sense of responsibility’ prevailed among those ‘tribes of the North and the East’ who furnished ‘fresh blood’ to the ‘worn-out populations’ of the Empire, and delivered the world from its ‘deadlock’. All the duties of the individual ‘had reference to the community of which he formed a part . . . he had no interests but the interest of the community; the assertion of any such private interests would have been looked upon as a crime, or rather a monstrosity, hardly possible to understand’ (1890, 225–7). Thiodolf, having renounced his private interests, would have heartily concurred. If in the lecture ‘Early England’ Morris described the gentile constitution of the Anglo-Saxons, who had attained the most advanced stage of barbarism, as something that ensured that every freeman took ‘his share of responsibility for carrying on the business of the Community’, in ‘What Socialists Want’, he used virtually the same words to explain the functioning of the future socialist society (1969, 165–6, 230). For the historical spiral that saw the vestiges of early German organisation preserved in and contributing to the communal character of the Middle Ages, also ensured that they would be taken up in the universal association of the socialist future. The Teutonic barbarians of the ‘upper stage’ became the first in a series of historical incarnations of the communistic ethos, locked in struggle with the antithetic force of the moment. In Wolfings that force was the Romans; at the next evolutionary stage or ring of the spiral – the Middle Ages – the conflict would be repeated in the standoff between the guild craftsmen and peasants and the aristocratic elements of feudal society. In modern times it was re-enacted again, in the battle between the working class and its capitalist enemies,

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which was destined finally to resolve the dialectic in a socialist utopia embracing all humanity. This is why, as has already been mentioned, fighting is at the centre of all the socialist romances, with the exception of News from Nowhere. The romances abstracted the data and analysis of Teutonist scholarship from its ideological ‘hypocrisy of constitutional development’, jettisoned the latter, and replaced it with the Marxian spiral as the more suitable model of social evolution. The fourteenth-century Revolt of Ghent, for instance, like the contemporaneous peasant rebellion in England, was ‘a link in the great chain of the evolution of society’, an instance of the class struggle which began with civilisation and ‘which will only end when civilisation has been transformed into something else’. The ‘story of the past’, Morris wrote, had to be treated as ‘a part of our own lives’, for ‘the craftsman citizen of the great towns’ handed over his hope ‘to us across the lapse of the drearier days’. The ‘strong Communistic feeling’ that accompanied the development of ‘gild democracy’, the aspirations of the ‘brotherhood of the old gildsmen’ were very familiar ‘to us Socialists to-day’. The intervening centuries ‘drew a dark veil of misery and degradation over all the feelings of the working-classes’, ‘commercialism and bureaucracy’ had ‘come between the partial development of those ideas of brotherhood and fair dealing which had place in the medieval gild, and the more inclusive ideas of the destruction of class distinctions and the new birth of society, which are stirring us to-day’, but now there was ‘hope of better days soon to come’ (1888, 258, 210, 259). The difference between the traditional and the future socialist community could not be expressed more clearly. If Wolfings and Roots were Morris’s pictures of the Teutonic element in its primeval purity, A Dream of John Ball was a portrait of its continued flourishing in the medieval period, and News from Nowhere its socialist culmination. John Ball’s fourteenth century was therefore not only a time of ‘communistic aspirations’, but also, building on the ‘survival of the primitive Communism’ of the early days (1888, 210), a development at full speed towards communism proper. What thwarted the straight-line progression from primitive to medieval to complete socialism was the intervening negation of capitalist society, but here the dialectic was at work, and Morris looked forward to the birth of a new barbarism that would herald the utopian resolution. Thus, though the communal ethic was well nigh extinguished with ‘the death of feudality’ and the advent of capitalism, and ‘between the time when the hope of the workman disappeared in the fifteenth century and our own times, there [was] a great gap indeed’, the social ‘aspirations of the workers five centuries ago’ could still serve as a model and a

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prefiguration of the hope of the workers of today. For cleared of certain ‘drawbacks’, Morris insisted, and allowed to develop ‘logically along the road that seemed to be leading [them] onward’, the Middle Ages ‘could scarcely have stopped short of forming a true society founded on the equality of labour’ (1890, 225; 1910–15, 22: 390, 388). As it was, the growth of ‘capitalism, aided by bureaucracy and nationalism’, along with the exclusivity of medieval-style association, whether municipal or craft-based (recall here the limitations of tribal solidarity), checked the development towards communism and ‘took away from labour the hope of a happy life on the earth’, plunging the working class into a period of voiceless suffering. But ‘the instinct of union’ was coming to life again, and the time would not be long before the churches ‘our forefathers raised in their hope’ would smile ‘on their new-born sisters the houses and halls of the free citizens of the new Communes’, built by ‘the happy people who have shaken off the curse of labour and kept its blessing only’ (1890, 253; 1910–15, 22: 388, 390).

Notes 1. A few more instances from the period include Edith Simcox’s (a prominent trade union activist) Primitive Civilizations: Or, Outlines of the History of Ownership in Archaic Communities (1894), the absolutely archetypal chapter ‘In Ancient Days’ in James Boyle’s What is Socialism? and the series of articles by Raymond Unwin, future architect of Hampstead Garden Suburb, in the Sheffield Weekly Echo of 1886 and the Commonweal of 1887 on ‘Communism in the Past and What It Teaches’ and ‘Early Communal Life and What It Teaches’. The Latter covered the village communities and communal property and family arrangements in Switzerland, Serbia, Russia, China, Mexico, Peru, India and Java. Samuel (1980) cites an 1887 article on ‘Primitive Socialism’ in the SDF monthly To-Day, and ‘The Nature . . . of Gentile Society’ in Plebs of 1910–11. These are just the tip of the iceberg. 2. Other important sources included F. S. Marvin’s The Living Past: A Sketch of Western Progress, Frederic Harrison’s The Meaning of History, Edward Clodd’s The Story of ‘Primitive’ Man, H. R. Hall’s Days before History, Émile de Laveleye’s Primitive Property, G. L. Gomme’s The Village Community, J. L. Myres’s The Dawn of History, Solomon Herbert’s The First Principles of Evolution and D. H. MacGregor’s Evolution of Industry. Quite a few were Home University Library titles, others were mainstream academic works, some were socialist or Positivist publications. 3. For specific correspondences see Engels 1972, 83, 92, 148, 150–1, 153, 155, 158, 197, 203–5, 236; and Morris 1910–15, 14: 5 and Chap. 8; 15: 9, 378 and Chaps 25–6, 31, 37–9. 4. For instance, Frederick Robert A. Glover’s Israel, or The Ten Tribes, Identified with the Anglo-Saxon and Other Branches of the Teutonic Race

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(1874) and Elias Molee’s Tutonish, A Teutonic International Language (1904). 5. For Bax’s analogies between barbarians and proletarians in the context of empire see ‘The True Aims of “Imperial Extension” and “Colonial Enterprise”’ (1896).

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Chapter 4

The Middle Ages

The Guilds Morris’s belief that ‘the ideas of tribal communism’ and the ‘customary law of the Germanic tribes’ furnished one stream in the emerging feudal system (the other stream was ‘Roman individualism and bureaucracy’) was a historiographical commonplace among Teutonists and socialists alike. The roots of medieval forms of communal association were to be found in primitive Germanic and Anglo-Saxon institutions whose democratic and egalitarian spirit had persisted despite overwhelming social pressures, and in the Middle Ages ‘the real popular history of Europe [was] comprised in that of the guilds’ (Morris 1969, 166, 176; cf. 1910– 15, 22: 382–3; 1890, 244). The guilds flourished only in ‘those countries where the undercurrent of the customs of the free tribes was too strong to be quite merged in the main stream of Romanised feudality’ (1910–15, 22: 382). ‘From the assembly of the mark,’ as Engels put it in his contribution to the large literature on land tenure among Teutonic tribes and their medieval descendants, ‘were copied the arrangements of the numberless free associations of medieval times not based upon common holding of the land, and especially those of the free guilds’; ‘the mark in the country, in the town, the guild’ (Marx and Engels 1975–2005, 24: 448–9, 312). Long before the guild socialists of the Edwardian period put an updated version of the concept at the centre of their industrial programme, the guilds (as well as the peasant revolts) were established as primary concerns of socialist historiography, and early twentieth-century educational initiatives like the Labour Colleges and the Socialist Sunday Schools disseminated the idea of the medieval guild as a workers’ community through their textbooks and lectures. As has been seen, most socialist historiography in the late-Victorian period was of the popularising kind, amounting to little more than the careful selection, arrangement and pruning of ideologically ‘friendly’

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scholarship. It was not only Engels, Bax and Morris who relied heavily on existing secondary sources: when H. M. Hyndman brought up the ‘village communities of India and Mexico . . . tribes working, cultivating, and living in common’ (1883, 109), he too had to refer to Lewis Morgan. Among their ideological friends the socialists could also count Lujo Brentano, an eminent German economist and scholar of guilds and trade unions, and one of the authorities cited by Hyndman (1883, 11, 20, 48, 89) and by Socialist Sunday School syllabi. Brentano’s research summary, ‘On the History and Development of Gilds, and the Origin of Trade-Unions’, appeared in an Early English Text Society reprint of the ordinances of some English Gilds, and a perusal of this volume alone would have supplied the socialists with all the necessary components of their distinctive picture. Morris certainly did peruse it: the volume ‘was particularly noted in the auction catalogue of Morris’s library as forming part of the numerous EETS books in lot 245’ (Cowan 2008, 110). The verbal coincidences are striking: the very first pages of Lucy Toulmin Smith’s introduction to the book define the fundamental idea of the early English guild as ‘the ancient principle of association’ for mutual help and defence and the ‘social aspect of good fellowship’ (1870, xiii, xvi, xxvi, xvii). The emphasis on fraternity and corporate identity had been a constant in the scholarship since the early nineteenth century, and Smith cited Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons and a passage from Kemble’s Saxons in England concerning the role of Teutonic vestiges in the medieval resistance to feudalism that had become a familiar refrain in the story of the guilds’ development. The Saxon guilds contained ‘the germ of those sworn communes . . . which in the times of the densest seigniorial darkness offered a noble resistance to episcopal and baronial tyranny, and formed the nursing cradles of popular liberty’ (cit. Smith 1870, xx). The guilds also, as Smith implied, provided an example worthy of revival in the present, though socialism is hardly what she had in mind. Brentano, as a student of the ‘English labour-question’ (Smith 1870, xxxix, liii), came even closer to the socialists’ practice with his historical parallels. He opened his five-part treatise on precisely this note, taking special care to point out ‘the analogies between the old Guilds and those existing in our days among working-men, the Trade-Unions’ (liv). Instead of seeing the guilds as precursors of capitalist corporation, both Morris and Brentano identified them as prototypes of a progressive kind of federation: socialist in Morris’s case, industrial in Brentano’s. Both traced their triumph over the aristocratic hierarchies of their time, and lamented the fact of their succumbing to the growing capitalist spirit. But Brentano anticipated Morris in more than just his outline of the

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historical trajectory. The governing ethic of the guilds – that ‘brotherly banding together into close unions between man and man . . . for the purpose of mutual help and support’ (lxvii) that preoccupied Brentano throughout the length of his essay – was cognate with the ‘tendency to association’ which was, according to Morris and Bax, one of the ‘most marked features’ of medieval society (1893, 66). The supposed origin of the guilds in the feasts and national assemblies of the Germanic tribes sufficiently accounted for the existence of the ethos, and it is not hard to see why Morris advanced this view without hesitation in ‘The Development of Modern Society’. Brentano traced the guilds’ lineage directly to the folk-motes of England’s Teutonic ancestors, and he was not the only one to perceive the similarities between the medieval guildhall and the tribal mote-house. For Morris both were places where a community gathered to spend time in good fellowship and to engage in democratic decision-making. The correspondences did not stop there. Morris described the guilds of ‘our Teutonic and Scandinavian forefathers’ as ‘corporate bodies of men united into artificial families for . . . the satisfaction of the mutual needs of their members’ (1910–15, 22: 383; 1969, 164; cf. 1890, 244), and Brentano also found the germ and archetype of the later guilds in the primitive ‘family’ whose essence was brotherhood and mutual support. At the appropriate historical stage, the family or kinship clan was replaced by artificial alliances like the guilds of the Middle Ages, held together – in the absence of the blood tie – by ‘the feeling of solidarity’ and the family spirit. These were not ‘mere associations of capital’ (1870, lxxx, lxxvii) – in a certain sense they may even have anticipated latter-day socialist co-operation. Brentano went on to champion the guilds in their struggle against ‘feudal arbitrariness’, but he also noted the cyclical process by which the degeneration of the ‘principles of association, of brotherly love and unity of interests’ called into being the next generation of seekers after equality. The merchant patricians – declined from the old freeman ideals with which they started – provoked the resistance of the craft guilds, which emerged as replicas of the earlier burgher confederations. By the end of the fourteenth century, as Morris also had it, the handicrafts gained complete victory and obtained the government of the towns, enabling artisans to live ‘freely and independently’ on their labour. But they in turn did not last long as upholders of the spirit of community and solidarity. Brentano described the aims of the guilds in their first stage of development in terms that would not have been out of place at the head of a Commonweal manifesto: ‘care for the common interest by means of association’. But degeneration soon set in, and as the craft guild transformed from a ‘society for the protection of labour, into

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an opportunity for the investment of capital’ the spirit of association withered, to be replaced by restrictions, monopolies and the exploitation of the newly created journeyman class. The masters became an ‘oligarchy of capitalists’, the workers, with no longer any prospects of independence, resorted to strikes, and the depopulation following the plague of 1348 brought the ‘opposition between the interests of the working-class and the employers’ to a crisis (1870, cviii, cx, cxxiii, cxxv, cxxix, cxxxvii, cxlii). In the countryside it precipitated the standoff between the lords and the villeins that Morris took for his subject in the romance of John Ball. In the towns, the oppressed formed fraternities, and the journeymen succeeded the craft guilds and the town guilds in the historical series of ‘benefit societies’, although – Brentano qualified in a rather Marxian aside – because of their isolated method of working they did not develop the class-consciousness necessary to supplant their forerunners. The fifteenth century presided over the final decline of the craft guilds into monopolistic excess, the possession of capital became a prerequisite and the democratic element was wholly extinguished. The guilds eventually met their inglorious end as technological discoveries created a new large-scale industry, but at this juncture the trade unions took over as their successors, to carry on the old flame of working-man association in opposition to the great capitalists. This constantly repeated process of combination among the excluded was incorporated by Morris into his treatment of historical evolution alongside the analogy between the ‘primitive kindred clan’ and the guild. Both the guilds of the free towns and the barbarian tribes expressed ‘the imperative claim for useful association which human nature makes’, and when one such form of association decayed – when the original egalitarian clans degenerated into the privileged castes of medieval municipalities – new ones sprang up, having the bond not of kindred but of ‘mutual interest’. One can observe here the introduction of an element of consciousness, which would play a much greater role in socialist association. The ‘democratic feeling’ of the guilds, Morris wrote, opposed itself ‘to the remains of the old tribal band of freemen, now become a mere exclusive oligarchy’, and by the fourteenth century – ‘the apex of the Middle Ages’ (1890, 244, 253) – triumphed in the virtual workers’ democracies of the free towns. In that class struggle the artisans’ spirit of association prevailed over the hierarchical spirit of feudality, but by the fifteenth century decay and corruption had set in again (1910–15, 22: 385, 389, 384). The extent of the journeyman networks of continental Europe and their suppression in England, the transformation of the guilds from antifeudal organisations into monopolist companies ‘including somewhat more than the germs of capital served by labour’, and of the guildsmen

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into a privileged middle class, all served to demonstrate the gradual death of the spirit of association (Morris and Bax 1893, 85–6, 88). Unlike Brentano, Morris did not go on to endorse trade unionism as the true inheritor of the guild ideal, but this divergence notwithstanding, the economist’s essay remained of inestimable value in illustrating the communal ethic that was the main theme of socialist scholarship. Brentano pictured the medieval period as a time that was ‘more moral than ours, when we give up our workmen without protection to their employers’. In fact, he went even further than Morris, claiming that ‘the first duty of the State’ in the Middle Ages ‘was to protect the weak against the strong’, and to enforce ‘the duties of the individual towards society’ (1870, cxliii, cxlii). Although this balance of rights and duties was, as will be recalled, a special characteristic of tribal society, whose offspring the guilds could claim to be, Morris stopped short of ascribing it to the medieval state as a whole. Medieval society, he believed, was always in a precarious balance between the forces of hierarchy and association, and though for a brief moment in the fourteenth century the craft guilds had the upper hand as ‘societies of freemen and equals’, the scale was soon tipped again with the introduction into the guild system of the journeyman or ‘unprivileged’ worker. In the end, though, Morris’s account of the degeneration of the guilds came so close to Brentano’s that such discrepancies virtually lost their significance.

A Dream of Fellowship: John Ball and the Peasants’ Revolt The socialist theory of historical evolution would not have been a spiral if it did not presuppose the resurrection of past ideological formations at a new level, and in ‘Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century’ Morris illustrated this process by way of a very characteristic symbolism. The article did not begin with the familiar story of tribal morality evolving into guild brotherhood, but with a naturalistic tour de force describing the modern-day town of Peterborough and its surroundings. Morris brought out the full battery of his rhetoric to paint the hideousness, meanness and squalour of the nineteenth century: the shabby, monotonous buildings, the ugly railway-works, the gangs of starved and depressed field labourers, with an overlooker beside them and the workhouse ahead of them. But amidst this ‘foul sea of modern civilisation’, beaten by ‘successive waves of degradation, the blindness of middle-class Puritanism, the brutality of the eighteenth-century squirearchy and the stark idealless stupidity of the early nineteenth century’,

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stood Peterborough Cathedral, a token of ‘the hopes that were, and which civilisation has destroyed. Might it but give a lesson to the hopes that are, and which shall some day destroy civilisation! (1910–15, 22: 379). Here the Marxist dialectic found its symbolic incarnation, and the reader was simultaneously reminded of the regenerative power of barbarism, past and future, and transported to another medieval church where John Ball, one of the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, offered the hope of his times to modern revolutionaries as a token of the real ‘dawn’ to come. The peasants’ armed struggle for community possessed a much greater narrative appeal than the story of the guilds, and it is perhaps not surprising that Morris gave it preference when choosing a subject for his first political romance. He was not alone in his fascination. A Victorian interested in the Revolt could consult not just scholarly editions of primary sources or footnoted academic treatises, but popular children’s histories, illustrated historical romances, cheap political pamphlets and expensive private press objets d’art. The material heterogeneity mirrored an ideological one: the interpretation of the Revolt was a battleground for Anglicans and Catholics, for Liberals, Tories and socialists. Each retelling, fictional or historical, academic or popular, supposedly neutral or avowedly partisan, presented a different version of the event. No two agreed on all the facts, let alone on the placement of political emphases, or the analysis of causes and effects. There was no consensus even on the basic elements of the historical narrative, such as the identity of the leader of the Revolt Wat Tyler, the religious affiliation of its ideologue, the priest John Ball, or the rebels’ actions and demands. The primary documents contradicted each other, and the Revolt’s long reception history in the intervening centuries only added to the confusion. John Cleveland, David Hume, Tom Paine and Robert Southey were just some of the famous writers who had condemned or celebrated the peasant insurgents. Penny pamphlets in the Regency period, plays during the agitation for the Reform Bill, Chartists in the 1840s, all invoked Wat Tyler, Jack Straw and John Ball. Anglican clergymen like the Rev. William Edward Heygate and authors of cheap sensational historical romances like Pierce Egan retold the story of the Revolt to condemn social insubordination or to endorse popular radicalism. Old ballads and political songs about the rebel leaders were collected by antiquarians like Thomas Wright in the first half of the nineteenth century, and used as evidence in the second half by professional historians like Stubbs. Morris brought up the Revolt more than once in his periodical publications: there was an entry on Wat Tyler in the Commonweal’s ‘Revolutionary Calendar’ and a critique in Justice of the 1884 Lord

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Mayor’s Show, which had featured a re-enactment of Tyler’s assassination. Throughout, Morris relied predominantly on Froissart’s chronicle: the primary source specifically dismissed by fellow activist James Leatham in his SDF pamphlet on the Revolt, and by the radical historian Charles Edmund Maurice (a friend of Morris’s not to be confused with the Christian socialist F. D. Maurice) in his Lives of English Popular Leaders in the Middle Ages in favour of the more reliable Knighton and Walsingham. But the chronicle’s self-evident anti-rebel bias in no way interfered with Morris’s purpose. Froissart’s ‘Gothic love of incident prevents his prejudice from damaging his account of facts too much’, he asserted, ‘besides it seemed to him so natural that such things should be, that he never thinks of softening any enormity of the lordly tyranny which he served’ (1994, 66). And so, with Froissart’s supposed naïveté and romantic allegiance to ‘incident’ guaranteeing the accuracy of his descriptions, if not his judgements, Morris could proceed to point the socialist moral. A Dream of John Ball was different from Morris’s two tales of Germanic tribes – in terms of length and subject matter most obviously, but also in its use of actual historical events, and, as May Morris observed, ‘in the mood in which it was written, and in the fire and concentration felt behind the easy flow of the narrative. It is, even more than News from Nowhere, a Confession of Faith’ (Morris 1910–15, 17: xiij). Indeed, Morris seems to have identified with Ball more than with most of his other characters: in an 1884 letter to the Manchester Guardian responding to criticisms of his lecture to the Ancoats Brotherhood, he proclaimed that John Ball ‘lives still, though I am but a part, and not the whole of him . . . Nor will he quite die as long as he has work to do’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 326). But when it came to turning romance to political purposes, Dream set the pattern for Wolfings and Roots, infusing certain ideologically kindred aspects of the nationalist historical discourse with the socialist ethic. This can be observed, for instance, in the disconcerting lapses into a ‘stout English yeoman’ vocabulary (1910–15, 16: 231, 234) that read strangely alongside allusions to Ball’s Thiodolflike self-sacrifice for the community. But the heart of the process lay in Morris’s adaptation of some and rejection of other aspects of the Liberal explanation of the causes and effects of the Peasants’ Revolt. In My Favourite Books, Robert Blatchford pronounced Dream to be the best of Morris’s prose tales, remarking on the weak characterisation and absence of humour, but praising the battle scenes and the lovely (albeit idealised) portrayal of Old England. To point out that Morris was good at morals and pictures, but incapable of developing character or creating distinct personalities was to say in so many words that he

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was writing romance and not realism – according to the definitions of the time. Blatchford was aware of the contemporary debate: in 1895 his newspaper discussed ‘Novels of Romance and Stories of Real Life’, mentioning Stevenson, Zola and a certain ‘medieval gentleman named Andrew Lang who can go into ecstasies over Haggard’s She’ (370). Blatchford’s own Julie: A Study of a Girl by a Man was compared favourably with Marie Corelli’s The Master Christian by the Liverpool Review, as a romance that succeeded in highlighting social wrongs, while My Life in the Army, published as one of the Daily Mail ‘Sixpenny Novels’, was festooned with advertisements for ‘The Best Historical Romances of Modern Times’. But in his discussion of Dream Blatchford was less interested in questions of genre than in the issue of Morris’s relation to his secondary sources. He was aware of the existence of conflicting historical discourses that could be adapted to different political ends, and conscious of the ideological dimensions of what he believed to be Morris’s choice of J. R. Green’s account among the versions available in contemporary scholarship. In his analysis Blatchford focused specifically on what – from the socialist and thematic point of view – was one of the two core sections of the tale: John Ball’s speech at the cross. If the concluding dialogue between Ball and the dreamer-narrator was significant for its Marxist exposition of economic development and the historical spiral, the earlier, more lyrical address, was one of the clearest and best-known descriptions of the socialist communal ethic. It was also, unlike the dream conversation, partially grounded in historical record. Blatchford confessed that he could not tell how much of it was historical and how much original, but he did something more critically savvy, he compared it to Ball’s speech in Green’s Short History. By no means a naïve, though maybe an inattentive, reader, Blatchford wondered what Green’s own authority for the speech was (Green did list these at the head of every section), and why he did not include Morris’s ‘Fellowship is heaven, lack of fellowship is hell’ peroration. This was the most distinctive part of the speech from the socialist standpoint – chosen by Blatchford’s Clarion cyclists as their motto, chanted at the Hammersmith meetings of the Socialist League, and deferred to by J. B. Glasier in The Meaning of Socialism – and it was also unique to Morris. Neither Froissart’s original (1901, 3: 224), nor Green’s condensed version of it (1874, 243), which omitted even Ball’s call for everyone to be ‘unyed toguyder’, gave any hint of its possibility. In Morris, however, the expression of the communal ethic became a centrepiece about which historical material could be meaningfully arranged. If Green believed ‘the levelling doctrine of John Ball’ to be ‘fatal to the whole system of the Middle Ages’ – by which he meant feudalism tout

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court – he was obviously not referring to the same Middle Ages that, according to Morris, ‘saw the promised land of Socialism from afar’ (1910–15, 22: 388). In Green’s brief excerpt there was talk enough of social equality and common ownership, but not a word regarding that all-important ‘element of association’ that was to serve as the Middle Ages’ example to the socialists of the future. But then Green was not interested in dramatising the socialist ethic, in propagandising either the collective struggle or the contribution of past stages to socialist evolution. Morris’s Ball, in fact, resembled the Ball of the Liberal historians only to the extent that his Middle Ages did, that is to say, he was a silhouette drawn from the same primary sources and coloured with the brush of broadly similar ‘radical’ sympathies, but with notable features accentuated or added so as to bring him in line with the exigencies of socialist theory. The contrast with Morris’s faithful reproduction of the ‘Brentano’ model of guild history is instructive. When it came to the Oxford School account of the Peasants’ Revolt, Morris altered the emphases conspicuously, focusing not on the action centred around Wat Tyler – though it was briefly acknowledged – but on the ethical message of the uprising’s ideologue. ‘He who doeth well in fellowship, and because of fellowship, shall not fail though he seem to fail to-day, but in days hereafter shall he and his work yet be alive, and men be holpen by them to strive again and yet again’ (1910–15, 16: 233). Modern critics have long noted the presence of this new ‘fellowship’ element in Ball’s speech, and linked the sermon to Morris’s own lectures delivered to Victorian workers. But the focus on fellowship was not just Morris’s way of endowing the medieval uprising with Victorian socialist overtones: the ethical parallel between the fourteenth and the nineteenth century both depended upon and enabled a much broader dialectical model of development. The final dialogue between Ball and the dreamer-narrator is concerned precisely with this symbiosis. The illusions fostered by capitalist false consciousness, the narrator tells the priest, have to intervene between the imperfect communal ethic of the Middle Ages and its more ideal incarnation in the socialism that will grow out of the struggles of the late 1800s. The historical movement is one of negation followed by transcendence: ‘Then shall those things, which to thee seem follies, and to the men between thee and me mere wisdom and the bond of stability, seem follies once again.’ For nothing can permanently hinder the ‘Host of the Fellowship’: ‘yet shall all bring about the end, till thy deeming of folly and ours shall be one, and thy hope and our hope; and then – the Day will have come’. The convergence of medieval and Victorian worldviews which this passage anticipates was part of the same historical

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spiral that also linked the dream-vision of the past to the Nowhere of the future, and the gathering of the armed freemen of Kent about the cross to the earlier Germanic folk-motes in the forests of Central Europe and around the shire-oak in Anglo-Saxon England. As the symbolic day dawns John Ball tells the narrator: ‘[S]carce do I know whether to wish thee some dream of the days beyond thine to tell what shall be, as thou hast told me.’ The dreamer wakes up in his bed in Hammersmith, just as he does again a few years later after having had another dream: not of the fourteenth century this time, but of the ‘new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness’, otherwise known as News from Nowhere. And it is this dreamer who stands at the cross-roads of the past and the future, who is able to assure the priest: ‘The time shall come, John Ball, when that dream of thine that this shall one day be, shall be a thing that men shall talk of soberly, and as a thing soon to come about.’ The vision of communism fulfilled can only become reality because the socialists of Morris’s time have inherited John Ball’s dream of the ‘Fellowship of Man’, handed across the yawning gulf of commercialism as the craftsmen of Ghent and Peterborough handed over their ideal of democratic association: for ‘if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream’ (1910–15, 16: 285–6, 211). The English rebels and the Flemish guildsmen, of course, were not the originators of the communal ethic. They were simply the descendants of the Teutonic tribes who fought against Roman domination, and whose resistance was re-enacted in the medieval struggle of the peasants and artisans against feudalism, and of the workers against capitalism on the final ring of the historical spiral. More than a thousand years separated the assembly of the Markmen about Thiodolf from its mirror image in the village of Kent, but the fellowship preached by Ball was as much a re-embodiment of the principles of the gentile constitution as an anticipation of the socialism of the nineteenth century. One should not conclude from all this, however, that socialists had nothing useful to draw from the Liberal treatment of the Peasants’ Revolt. Obviously, the Liberals did not invoke John Ball as an example of the working class’s misguided neglect of its socialist leaders, as James Leatham did in a lecture to the Aberdeen Socialist Society in 1891 (1892, 12–13). But though they did not commend Ball as a paragon of class hatred, they did, as Blatchford put it with regard to that ‘honest historian, Green’, ferret ‘out the truth about the peasant revolt’, and clear ‘the people’s memory from the slanders which class prejudice had heaped upon it’ (1900, 115). The Oxford School historians could boast neither Brentano’s intuition of the evolutionary spiral nor his evocation of the medieval ethic of association, but they did provide one influential

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version of the subject of Morris’s romance. Morris’s Ball, like Bax’s socialist martyrs, goes to his death for the cause of fellowship, but his and the peasants’ defeat also brings about a concrete historical result: the demise of villeinage. Yet when the lords have vanquished . . . shall their victory be fruitless; for the free men that hold unfree lands shall they not bring under the collar again, and villeinage shall slip from their hands, till there be . . . but few unfree men in England; so that your lives and your deaths both shall bear fruit. (Morris 1910–15, 16: 270)

Morris recapitulated the reasoning in less archaic terms in his ‘Revolutionary Calendar’ entry on Wat Tyler: ‘though the rebellion was put down it had slain the reaction it was aimed at before it died itself, and the extinction of serfdom in England went on faster and faster’ (1996, 415). This was the central thesis of the Oxford School historians with regard to the underlying economic consequences of the Revolt (Green 1874, 244; Stubbs 1874–8, 2: 485). Both Stubbs and Green acknowledged James Thorold Rogers in their accounts, for it was Rogers’s economic history – the brightest star in the medievalist scholarly firmament – that was responsible for the widespread acceptance of this version of events. Rogers was the first Professor of Statistics and Economic Science at King’s College London and Professor of Political Economy at All Souls. His frequently cited economic study of 1884, Six Centuries of Work and Wages: The History of English Labour, devoted a whole chapter to the Peasants’ Revolt. It went through at least fifteen editions, and was published by Swan Sonnenschein, a house specialising in sociological and political literature, which also included many of Bax’s (as well as Edward Carpenter’s, Beatrice Webb’s and other socialists’) works on its lists. The story as it would have been familiar to Morris involved a period of ‘prosperity and abundance’ just before the Black Death, a subsequent ‘dearth of labour’ and ‘an excessive enhancement of wages’ which resulted in a virtual emancipation of the serfs, and the failure of the Statute of Labourers to contain them, so that ‘as by a stroke, the labourer, both peasant and artisan, became the master of the situation in England’. It was not accidental that Morris in his articles pictured the fourteenth century as a time of pan-European working-class supremacy. The English landowners, Rogers continued, were in an evil plight, ‘the serfs entered into what are now called trades unions’ to support each other ‘in resistance to the law and in demands for higher wages’, so that the lords had no choice but to attempt to ‘reverse the customary commutations of money for labour by force’ – attempt, in other words, to reduce the serfs to

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villeinage again (1884: 221, 226, 240, 252–4). The opening pages of Dream repeat this sequence of events practically in its entirety, and sometimes the very phrasing is identical: ‘the lords that would turn them all into villeins again’ (Morris 1910–15, 16: 222–3). The peasants, as per Rogers (1884, 252), are called ‘upland’ folk to distinguish them from the artisans, though greater emphasis, since this is Morris writing, is placed on the ‘guilds of craft . . . waxing in the towns’ (1910–15, 16: 222). The very form of Rogers’s history may have influenced Morris’s portrayal, for just as Rogers went into the minds of the lawyers, so Morris provided a transcription of the thoughts of the lords (Grennan 1945, 95). Even Rogers’s summary of Ball’s preaching, though not a paraphrase of Froissart like Green’s, was closer to Morris’s version in spirit and drama, for it incorporated both a call to action and an imagined audience reaction: ‘their eyes kindled, and they grasped their staves’. Rogers described the further happenings of the Revolt in a narrative that resembled in its essential details the accounts of Green and Stubbs and highlighted the same aspects of the chronicles, insisting all the while that the rebellion’s true cause was dissatisfaction with the revival of villeinage. And though the armed uprising itself was doomed to failure, the rebels’ claims were inevitably conceded: labour rents were commuted for money payments, serfs became copyholders and the Revolt took its place in the annals as ‘an insurrection of frantic communism’ (1884, 255–6, 268). Although Morris omitted most of the action-filled storyline from his romance, choosing instead to focus on the ethical and economic implications of the events, his description of historical development in the concluding dialogues of Dream owed a debt to Rogers’s analysis of the period. According to Rogers, the labourers of the fourteenth century were unprecedentedly prosperous. Wages were high and prices low, and because their prospects were good and comfort was general the teachings of social equality fell on ready ears, the efforts at combination and organisation succeeded and the object of the movement was attained. According to Morris, conditions throughout England were getting worse, but the men of Kent were a special case: they were not serfs and enjoyed a standard of living significantly higher than the rest of the country (1910–15, 16: 235). By setting the stage of his fictional episode of resistance and, more importantly, of Ball’s preaching in Kent, he implicitly confirmed Rogers’s thesis that agitation for social improvement was most effective when the population was already well off. The Revolt of 1381 was the only time in the history of England, Rogers wrote, when ‘peasants and artizans attempted to effect a revolution by force’. They ‘gained all that they claimed . . . The English labourer, for a century or more, became virtually free and constantly prosperous’

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(1884, 271). Or, as the dreamer-narrator tells John Ball in the church: ‘The times shall better . . . the Gilds of Craft shall wax and become mightier . . . There shall be plenty in the land and not famine. Where a man now earneth two pennies he shall earn three’ (Morris 1910–15, 16: 270). While Morris took what he needed to fill out his model of historical development, other socialist propagandists picked up on aspects of medieval historiography more in line with their own ideological agendas. Hyndman was one of the first to make use of this material, citing Rogers liberally, but unlike Morris, he chose to skip the Anglo-Saxons, skim over the early craft guilds as democratic fraternities of fellowship and instead give much greater play to nationalist rhetoric. The plenty of later centuries, wrote Rogers, would be ‘as nothing to the golden times of the fifteenth, when the earth brought forth by handsful, and the yeomanry were planted in England’ (1884, 271). The first chapter of Hyndman’s The Historical Basis of Socialism in England was entitled ‘The Golden Age of the People’ and was devoted to the period – from the end of the fourteenth to the first quarter of the sixteenth century – when English yeomen, craftsmen and labourers were supposedly better off than ever before or since. The predominant tone of the chapter is set immediately with references to ‘Merry England’ and the ‘great risings of the peasantry’ that made fifteenth-century Englishmen the envy and wonder of all Europe. Hyndman was a Tory turned Marxist, and his language is more heavily laden with patriotic clichés than Rogers’s or even Green’s. The first twenty or so pages are thronged with ‘stout’ and ‘stalwart’ free Englishmen, and full of statements like the following: ‘All records of the time go to show what a fine, vigorous folk were these independent small farmers of the fifteenth century. The longer these favourable conditions continued, the sturdier and more independent became these people who were the backbone of the country.’ Lest there remain any doubt, Hyndman makes it clear that the peasants were their own masters, free to speak their mind and extraordinarily wealthy to boot, ‘their sturdy freedom was based upon property and good living.’ A page later this becomes ‘luxurious living’ (1883, 1, 5–6, 10, 11), for the English common men were better fed and better clothed than any foreign peasants. Thorold Rogers is here hyperbolised and simplified to an embarrassing degree, in places the rhetoric is no better than that of the elementary school readers that disseminated the nationalist historical narrative to the working classes, though there is no Froudeian championing of expansionist Tudor glories (Hyndman had no love for Tudor social policies). The patriotic bluster, however, is meant to serve the same

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purpose as Morris’s more subtly idealised portrayals of the Middle Ages: condemnation of capitalist civilisation by contrast with a more worker-friendly past. The process of modulation between nationalism and socialism can be observed in passages such as this: It was from this period that the sturdy character of Englishmen as a nation was developed, and the nature of the society was such as to encourage the growth of the finest qualities of self-reliance and independence among men . . . restrictions . . . were meant to check the efforts of one portion of the community to get the better of the other . . . the fact still remains that the common working Englishman of the fifteenth century fared better and was in every respect a more independent vigorous man than his descendants of any later age. (1883, 22)

The workers who built the cathedrals, writes Hyndman, had more certainty of employment and ‘better conditions of life than the skilled artisans of today’ (11). And he continues to strike this note for many pages to come (162–3, 295, 310). In fact, in the scheme of the book as a whole the first chapter functions as a stylistic and expository foil, a picture of a lost Eden against which the rest of English history is supposed to be compared – to the latter’s detriment. Beginning with the second chapter and ‘The Iron Age’ of the labouring class in the sixteenth century, real economic history ousts the slogans and caricatures of the medieval section. Hyndman’s very language changes, becoming dryer and more abstract, leaving behind patriotic mythmaking in favour of a mixture of statistics, block quotes from contemporary records and documents and a Blatchfordian species of propaganda. In painting the portrait of his Merry England, Hyndman certainly did not resort to the Liberal historians alone. As a Marxist he also made sure to mention – very much as Engels had done in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific – that in the Middle Ages the means of production and exchange were alike at the disposal of the individual, that production was carried on for use instead of profit in the absence of international markets, and that personal rather than commercial relations prevailed. But the illustrative support for his arguments, without which there would have been no chapter, came from the writings of Rogers, Green, and their ilk. The prosperity and independence of the common people in the late Middle Ages and the communistic nature of the peasant uprising were precisely the kinds of academic assumptions that Hyndman depended upon to make his listing of John Ball and Wat Tyler in a genealogy of native English socialists more plausible. As was the case with Teutonism, the medievalist academic texts that Hyndman and Morris chose to draw upon already betrayed radical leanings, and were therefore amenable to partial appropriation. Rogers was quite evidently

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on the side of the people: the harshness with which they were treated during the Peasants’ Revolt, he said, could not break their spirit, for ‘you will never break the spirit of an Englishman’. Wyclif’s poor priests, ‘the most active and outspoken’ of whom Rogers believed Ball to be, ‘had honeycombed the minds of the upland folk with what may be called religious socialism’; and the purpose of the rebel leaders, many of whom were craftsmen, was not merely the destruction of villeinage and the emancipation of the serfs, but ‘the reconstruction of English society’ (1884, 268, 255, 254, 261–2). It was not for nothing that C. E. Maurice headed a section of his 1875 treatise on Tyler, Ball and Oldcastle ‘The Class Struggle in Richard II’s Reign’. When it came to the Peasants’ Revolt, Green’s rhetoric was also calculated to endear itself to socialists with its emphasis on ‘the socialist dreams of the peasantry’, ‘the socialist peasant leaders’ and ‘the tyranny of property that then as ever roused the defiance of socialism’ (Green 1874, 252, 233, 243). The next generation of historians would deny the communistic nature of the Revolt – ‘the attempt to picture the Rising as a communistic movement ignores the plainest facts’ wrote G. M. Trevelyan in 1899 (1972, 197) – but they came too late to make any impact on Morris’s and Hyndman’s historical theory. Rogers’s view, on the other hand, formulated in A History of Agriculture and Prices in England and in Six Centuries of Work and Wages, held sway until the 1890s and influenced socialist writers even when, like Hyndman, they ostensibly considered him nothing more than ‘a typical bourgeois economist’ (Hyndman 1883, 18). As Raphael Samuel confirms, ‘The early Marxists took over the liberal-radical version of “people’s history” virtually intact, though giving it a new, more revolutionary perspective.’ The Liberal version ‘provided the mental landscape within which a socialist outlook was formed’ (1980, 38), and Rogers and Green were its twin pillars of economic and political history. Rogers’s picture of the thriving fifteenth-century Englishman entered socialist propaganda via numerous channels. Leatham, in his pamphlet on the Peasants’ Revolt, quoted Six Centuries of Work and Wages at length and called Rogers ‘a splendid guide in matters of economic fact over his particular area’ (n.d., 15). In the 1900s and later the book was regularly assigned in Socialist Sunday Schools and adult workers’ classes, and in the middle decades of the twentieth century it was still being advertised alongside G. D. H. Cole and Marx and Engels. But although Liberal medieval scholarship furnished the foundation for a socialist interpretation of history, it was – like its Teutonist counterpart – hesitant to acknowledge the extent of its socialist implications. As Hyndman had written in the preface to Basis: ‘Even men who

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pride themselves upon their sympathy with the democratic system of our ancient Anglo-Saxon village communities have failed to see beyond the limits of their own class when treating of the affairs of the last 200 years’ (1883, viii). He may as well have said five hundred. Rogers, for instance, despite his assessment of the Revolt and his sympathetic attitude to labour and trade unionism, was actively hostile to all manifestations of modern political socialism. Even when talking in entirely Baxian terms of the self-sacrifice of the English workman ‘to the good of the voluntary corporation with which he has associated himself’, Rogers still believed he was contradicting the ‘Continental’ communist ethic (1884, 11). Furthermore, the same Liberal obsession with continuity that determined the ideological colouring of the Teutonist field was at work in the medieval: ‘For the liberal-radical historians of the 1870s and 1880s, “people’s history” was a way of showing the historical lineage of the “democracy” which had allegedly come to power after the Reform Bill of 1867’ (Samuel 1980, 40). It was the old story of Parliament and representative government all over again, and Rogers, for all his socialist-like indignation at the wrongs of capitalist society and support for the combination of labour, was no less sanguine about the possibilities of the extended franchise than his more conventional contemporaries.

Socialism and the Church The discrepancy between the socialist and the academic interpretations of medieval society also came to the fore in the matter of religion, for though Morris acknowledged the necessarily Christian form any proto-socialist thought would have taken in the period, he did so with particular political applications in mind, and these applications dictated his choice of denomination. Morris was an atheist, but if there was any strand of Christianity that garnered his political approval in his own time, it was Catholicism. At the end of the year in which he finished serialising A Dream of John Ball in the Commonweal he wrote in its pages: ‘Of the Cardinal [Manning] it must be said that he showed none of that base and cowardly hatred of the degraded poor . . . which is the ordinary feeling of the cultured classes . . . the Catholic clergy . . . [startle] smug respectability from its after-dinner doze by the enunciation of some obvious social truth’ (1994, 313–14). And what of Catholicism in the fourteenth century? Bishop Stubbs did not mention John Ball in the main text of his constitutional history, but in a single footnote he remarked briefly on Ball’s relation to Wyclif. He implied

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– like Green, but much less generously – that Ball was a Lollard, ‘spreading through the country perverted social views in the guise of religion’ (1874–8, 2: 473). Morris’s Ball, on the contrary, was in favour of a very Catholic and catholic devotion to the ‘Fellowship’ of the ‘Holy Church’ (1910–15, 16: 230). In an ironic confirmation of Stubbs’s accusation, it was Morris, and not the historical Ball, who used religious language to propound politically suspect views. With Morris the Church became a metaphor for Baxian human solidarity, the kingdom not only of God, but of socialism on earth. The Christian socialist Stewart Headlam had preached just a few years earlier that ‘the Church [was] the true Commune’, ‘a great co-operative organised institution for human welfare and human righteousness in this world’, a ‘brotherhood of equals’ with a ‘Democratic basis’, whose goal was to set up ‘a Kingdom of Heaven . . . upon earth . . . a righteous Communistic Society’ (1882, 72, 59, 3, 12, 11). And Morris was concerned not so much with the role of egalitarian Christian doctrines in the social life of the fourteenth century, as with this Victorian religion of socialism. He put himself at odds with the prevailing view – both of the chroniclers and of historians until the 1890s – in not making his Ball a Wyclifite, and Dream pointedly abjured the Lollards because of their complicity with the lords in wishing to do away with the people’s holidays (Grennan 1945, 87, 103–4). The reason was obvious. Lollardy was the ‘precursor of the Reformation’, of Bax’s individualistic, capitalistic Protestantism, and according to Six Centuries of Work and Wages the poor priests were proto-puritans, and Wyclif the real father of English Protestantism (Rogers 1884, 248, 273). Although as portrayed by Rogers the Lollards also inculcated the ‘virtues of social life’, sacrificed their lives to their creed and were looked upon by the peasants and village artisans as activists ‘hostile to the rights of property’, Marxist historiography in the 1880s found no place for them. Rogers’s working classes may have associated the poor priests with their ‘emancipation in the past and their progress in the present’ (1884, 270, 272), but Morris, Bax and Hyndman chose to identify with the medieval Catholic Church. Bax had no sympathy for contemporary Catholicism, but preferred medieval Catholicism to Protestantism because its Church was a universal community. It subordinated Christian individualism to the ‘communal and pagan tendencies it took on from the barbarians’, while the ‘Reformation, the religious side of the rise of capitalistic individualism, affirmed salvation to be a matter solely of personal concern’ (1887, 7). Hyndman in Basis went to great lengths to rehabilitate the name of the Church from the smear campaign carried on against it by historians and economists hostile to all non-‘huckster’ forms of society:

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Just as the modern capitalist can see nothing but anarchy and oppression in the connection between the people and the feudal noble, so the authors who represent the middle-class economy of our time, the Protestant divines whose creed is the devil take the hindmost here and hereafter, fail to discover anything but luxury, debauchery, and hypocrisy in the Catholic Church of the fifteenth century.

Thus in one sentence Hyndman re-established Bax’s equivalencies between Protestantism, middle-class capitalism and the individualist ethic, implicated writers like Green, Stubbs and the pro-free trade Rogers (mentioned by name), and partially redeemed the medieval economic system as a corollary. The Church was ‘the one body in which equality of conditions was the rule from the start’ (1883, 14–15): the children of the people formed its hierarchy, and the poor could become ecclesiastics. In his dialogue with Morris’s dreamer-narrator Ball mentions this medieval version of equality of opportunity, but not very approvingly, as it fails to strike at the root of social injustice. According to Hyndman, however, there was more to it than that. His Church, like Rogers’s Lollards, was for the people and against the dominant class. It contributed to general education and supported the poor, to prove which Hyndman pointed to the absence of permanent pauperism before the confiscation of its lands. The Church was also a beneficent resident landlord: it kept the roads in good repair and improved agriculture; the monasteries and nunneries provided parochial relief and supplied midwives, teachers and doctors. ‘Abbatial government’ was better than ‘baronial authority’, and more popular, and the Church was, in effect, the ‘greatest institution of the Middle Ages’. Though ‘to sigh for a restoration of Catholicism is as absurd as to mourn for yeomen and peasant proprietors, or to lament the destruction of the feudal system in its entirety . . . the denunciations of Protestant historians and shopkeeper economists are quite as foolish on the other side’ (Hyndman 1883, 17, 16, 19). Hyndman was wise enough to guard himself against the ridicule that a generation later would be aimed at the Distributist schemes of Chesterton and Belloc,1 but he established his allegiances clearly nonetheless. He also anticipated Morris’s and Bax’s stance in Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome. During 1886 and 1887 ‘Socialism from the Root Up’ appeared in the Commonweal side by side with A Dream of John Ball. The sections on medieval society were greatly expanded and revised for republication as Growth several years later, and in its final form the work offered not only the most complete explanation of the function of Catholicism in Dream, but also a concise summary of all the elements that made up Morris’s picture of the medieval world. Like Hyndman, Morris

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and Bax made sure to include a disclaimer regarding their portrayal of the Middle Ages: they did ‘not stand forward as apologists for them except in relation to modern times’. But whereas Hyndman’s intent was to provide a prosperous foil to the woeful economic condition of the workman in contemporary England, Bax and Morris had in mind a strictly ideological contrast. Speaking the language of John Ball, they praised the ‘corporate ethics’ of the medieval Church, ‘of which each one of the “faithful” was but a part’; ‘all men . . . belonged to the great corporation of the Church’. More accurately even than the limited guild or tribe, the Church foreshadowed the universalised communalism of socialism, and by contrast with the individualist ethics of Protestant and Jesuitical Christianity – both of which arose in tandem with commercialism – it embodied the idea of association, the ‘prominent feature of the Middle Ages’. The Church ‘brought the kingdom of heaven to earth’ (Morris and Bax 1893, 83, 95, 67, 97–8, 65), and concerned itself with this world. So Bax said before in The Religion of Socialism, and Stewart Headlam in his Christian socialist sermons, and so also preached Morris’s Ball: ‘for I say to you that earth and heaven are not two but one; and this one is that which ye know, and are each one of you a part of, to wit, the Holy Church’ (1910–15, 16: 230). But the ethic of fellowship did not spring up on virgin soil, it flourished because medieval Catholicism retained ‘the solidarity of barbarian society, and so show[ed] . . . a communistic interest in the corporation, whether church, guild, parish, or even monastery’ (Morris and Bax 1893, 58). And so the Church and the guild – those two great manifestations of the spirit of corporation – were finally linked up on the basis of a common origin in the ‘primitive communism of the tribes’ (Morris and Bax 1893, 65), whose survivals, absorbed into feudal society, were responsible for the development of ‘associations for mutual protection and help, which at first were merely a kind of benefit societies according to the ideas of the times’ (Morris 1994, 503). The reader is brought back full circle to Brentano’s early ‘gilds’ and the familiar narrative of resistance, triumph and decline. Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome offers a recapitulation of the entire range of academic interests – Teutonist, anthropological and medievalist – that shaped Morris’s historical understanding of community. Here we find the ‘unbroken original barbaric constitution’ that came with the incursion of the ‘Teutonic tribes’ and contributed to the ‘reconstruction of society’ as ‘progressive barbarism’ blended with the ‘decaying Roman civilisation’. Here we meet again the ‘centralised taxgathering machine’ of the Empire, which, fusing ‘with the system of the Teutonic Mark, gradually produced the Manor’. We behold for the last

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time the remains in ‘Teutonic countries’ of the freemen’s ‘communal land’ and the customs of the mark. The conflict between the hierarchical and the associational aspects of medieval life passes once more before our eyes: the free towns grow out of the ‘tribal land-holding body’, the guilds rise and fall, the ‘movement towards the break-up of serfdom is marked by the Peasants’ War in England’, as the villeins resist the attempts of the nobles to turn back the tide. Now the journeyman appears on the scene, capitalism rears its head, and England loses for many centuries to come its ‘rough joviality, plenty, and independence of spirit’ (Morris and Bax 1893, 52, 57–8, 60–1, 63, 66, 71, 85–6, 92). From the echoes of Hyndman in these last lines and back along the gamut to Brentano, Rogers, Stubbs, Maine, Freeman and Engels, Growth reads like a farewell chorus of all those secondary voices. Published just three years before Morris’s death, and dismissed by some reviewers as a tired and unnecessary exercise in regurgitation (Faulkner 1973, 364, 367), this little piece of ‘amateur’ history brought again before the general public (in literal rather than parable form) the socialist communal ethic of Thiodolf and John Ball.

Note 1. Compare Morris (1996, 142–3): ‘The three acres and a cow, duly reduced to a very humdrum allotment scheme, will not bring about a very great revolution.’ Morris was not in favour of dividing property between ‘sham peasant proprietors’.

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Chapter 5

Socialist Hybrids

Definitions We have seen how Teutonic community yielded place to medieval fellowship, which was to await its own resurrection in the socialist Commonwealth. But meanwhile, what of the present? The present was capitalist to be sure, but did no counterpart to the communities of the past and the future exist in fin de siècle Britain? Did the seeds of community not slumber in the womb of commercial civilisation? The answer was yes on both counts: as the plaque in the Hammersmith Guesthouse in Nowhere made plain, the present also contained its share of the ‘spirit of association’, whose highest expression was in associations of a specifically socialist kind. They were the inheritors of the medieval ideal and harbingers of the international association to come, and their literary correlative, their natural imaginative offspring, was not the romance of the past or the future, but present-orientated propaganda. Contemporary socialist association was no longer unconscious, like the ‘primitive’ form of community, but neither did it embrace all of society, like Bax’s conscious communism of the future: it needed the help of propaganda to get from the one to the other. The Victorian socialist community was, in fact, a paradox. It could not possess the natural, spontaneous communality of barbarism, and was in this sense recognisably modern. The freestanding, atomised individuals who composed it came together by choice; they were not born into a traditional community already held together by ties of kinship or custom. All such associations were in essence mere contractual groups, rational and instrumental organisations. But this did not prevent some of them from viewing themselves as self-fulfilling fellowships based on common mores (and even ‘religion’ of a sort) and familial-style co-operation. Their purpose was the recreation of a collectivity characterised by many of the features of a small-scale organic community, but having

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the global reach (via federalism) and self-consciousness only afforded by modern civil society. As Bax never tired of repeating, the return to unconscious tribal communitarianism was out of the question. The individualism of civilisation had intervened and thus ensured that the future socialist utopia would be a higher version of the prehistoric community, because it would combine elements of both types of social organisation. But the socialist movement and its propaganda were characterised by hybridity in more than one sense, and the communal aspects of socialist ideology upon which the previous Chapters have concentrated were sorely beset both within and without the movement. Without, the growing mass leisure industry appeared to be wreaking havoc with the associational culture of the working class, and the established parliamentary parties seemed determined to quash communal alternatives, especially after the turn of the century, when the New Liberals greatly expanded the powers of the state. Within, the spectre of statist modernity was also rearing its head. It encompassed such familiar values and policies as the championing of the new professional managerial class: government administrators and functionaries, professional politicians, civil servants, bureaucrats, white-collar experts and specialists; a focus on national political machinery, party consolidation and parliamentary top-down legislation; a preference for state concentration rather than the devolution of power; elitist contempt for working-class potential and agency and lack of sympathy for rank-and-file insubordination; technocracy and efficiency. Of course, other attitudes, dubbed in standard historical accounts ‘democratic’, ‘libertarian’, ‘idealist’, or ‘ethical’, such as the belief in voluntary working-class organisation and workers’ initiative and self-education; an orientation towards propaganda (rather than electioneering), towards ‘making socialists’ and converting to the Cause; a commitment to the persuasive power of reason whose strategic expression was teaching and preaching and spreading the gospel of the religion of socialism, were equally ‘modern’. But unlike the former, they were often regarded as the prelude or the means to the formation of the self-governing community, the prerequisites for the resurrection of fellowship. Paradoxically, the one sense in which the socialist movement approximated most closely to the hypothetical barbarian community – that is to say in its exclusivity – was precisely the sense that the coming utopia was meant to transcend. It is a well-established fact of autodidact historiography that the organisations of late-Victorian lower middle-class and skilled artisan self-improvers were marked apart by their exclusivity, that many working-class intellectuals felt alienated from their

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peers and rejected the popular culture from which they came. The selfimprovement ethos prompted many of them to join socialist societies, coming together ‘in attempts to create or recreate a sense of community, and then wall[ing it] off from unsympathetic outsiders’ (Rodrick 2004, 37). Although artificially formed, these associations embodied at least one aspect of the primitive tribe, precisely that aspect which was least conducive to the propagation of socialist principles. Ironically, if this interpretation is correct, the ultimate failure of socialist culture was due to the very self-sufficiency – now political rather than kinship-based – that was implied in the concept of a traditional community. But not all of the traditional aspects deserved to be resurrected, and even if they were often the inadvertent results, exclusivity and sectarianism could never be the conscious goals of proselytising societies whose main purpose was outwardly directed propaganda. If the anthropologists felt that the way forward during the barbarian stage had been ever-wider federation (from gens to tribe to people), the principle of federation was still regarded as the key to the future success of socialism by many besides Morris and Bax. Socialists were not the typical Victorian selfimprovers acquiring ‘useful knowledge’ for personal liberation, if only because their political ideology made it incumbent upon them to diffuse that knowledge to others, no matter how frequently their attempts were rebuffed. One must look for signs of the communal mentality elsewhere, such as in the assumption of an identity between means – the movement – and ends – the ‘New Life’, that was a hallmark of the so-called ethical or romantic strains of early socialism. ‘Socialists not only had a duty to struggle to realise the creation of the co-operative commonwealth; they were morally bound to practice as many of its features in their daily lives as was at all practicable’ (Manton 2001, 163). The nature of branch or club life was supposed to prefigure the future fellowship; attempts to achieve internal democracy within the movement, which were the cause of so much debate throughout the period, were meant to anticipate the practice of the ‘Federation of Independent Communities’. Direct legislation was a goal because it would provide an education in self-government as well as prepare the coming of socialism. The more communitarian aspects of the ideology, therefore, those that had to do with ‘group-life’ in opposition to the state and individual: virulent antistatism and suspicion of officials and leaders; egalitarianism, grass-roots democracy, and local self-government; enthusiastic espousal of ‘communal values’ and emphasis on co-operation, association, mutual aid and fellowship, pointed the way to and foreshadowed the conditions of the hybrid utopia.

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The Two Camps: A Political Overview But what does it mean to speak of community and modernity with regard to something as complex and self-contradictory as the fin de siècle socialist movement? The history of socialism in Britain in the period 1880–1914 is a history of competing definitions, of proliferating political groupings, interpretations and classifications. Some favourite dichotomies over the years have included: revolution vs reformism, a workers’ movement from below vs a middle-class socialism from above, industrial vs political action, libertarian devolution vs state centralisation, necessity vs agency, scientific vs utopian, education vs legislation. The possible combinations are legion, and fixing on any single one inevitably skews the perspective. None correspond in some simplistic fashion to the community/modernity antithesis, if only because opposite ideal types cannot be mapped onto perpetually shifting historical groupings. Meanings change from context to context, the attributes of a historical label alter in accordance with the binary in which it is placed. Consider ‘ethical’ socialism, a notoriously chameleon-like concept. One set of definitions contrasts it with party-political pragmatism, or with militant action by syndicates or revolutionary groups (and these two are often juxtaposed themselves). In this context ethical socialism refers to a nebulous, probably middle-class ‘religion of humanity’ rhetoric – at the opposite pole from the hard grind of practical working-class organisation. Yet in other contexts ‘ethical’ is defined as the opposite of Fabian – with its distrust of working-class agency – or of Marxist – with its belief in blind necessity. ‘Ethical’ is then identified with the non-theoretical northern grass-roots labour movement, rather than with the socialism of metropolitan intellectuals. We are left with a paradox: is ‘ethical’ working-class and pragmatic, or is it middle-class and sentimental? Needless to say, no such distinction is viable: woolly rhetoric and pragmatic politics often went hand in hand, and vice versa. Theory and sentimentality could be opposites or synonyms, depending on the speaker in question. The same groups who put up candidates for local elections or preached revolution on the street-corner also spouted phrases about universal brotherhood and co-operation. Nor is the picture made any clearer by taking the opposite tack, by depicting the whole movement as homogeneously ethical, or reducing all socialism to a species of Nonconformist Liberalism. This proceeding is only made possible by a wilful neglect of the movement’s internal variety, of the ideological incompatibilities that contemporaries recognised from the very beginning. The Socialist Sunday School movement – one of the main sites of the ‘religion of socialism’ rhetoric, whose main purpose

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was the teaching of the socialist ethic – harboured deviant strains that stressed class war rather than class harmony. The hard-core Marxists who never missed a chance to criticise their Labourite, Fabian and Christian socialist confederates for denying the class struggle, believing in reformism and engaging in moral rather than economic critiques of capitalism were not unconscious Liberals, even if they used, as has been seen, certain Liberal assumptions in their historiography. Shared historical assumptions did not translate into political identity: the hostility between Marxism and Liberalism on the ground was well known, the Social Democratic Federation refused to co-operate with the Liberals, even if the Independent Labour Party did not. The distrust of the state in favour of self-help, the Mill or Gladstone-like emphasis on popular self-government, may have been signs of the Liberal inheritance, but they were also a feature of anarchist and syndicalist doctrines that drew their ideological inspiration from abroad and bore no relation to the English tradition. Some characteristics of the movement, especially of its northern and Labour varieties, were indeed ‘rooted in the traditions of local working-class self-help institutions’ – but it is impossible to attribute many others exclusively to a ‘deeply entrenched Liberalism’ (Joyce 1991, 78–80). Scotland and London had different, in many respects more radical histories, and political variation by region and city was immense. At the same time, there was a constant movement between centre and periphery: important activists (Blatchford, McMillan, Gossip) relocated to London from Manchester, Bradford or Glasgow; lecturers and branch organisers dispersed from London to every town and hamlet across the land. No individual’s, let alone group’s, system of beliefs, whether expressed in writing or in action, was a pure specimen of some ideal type. Whichever grouping one considers – from the anarchists and syndicalists to the Fabians, the ILP, the SDF, Blatchford’s Clarionettes and Morrisian Socialist Leaguers – internal disputes took centre-stage, boundaries were blurred and characteristics from several conflicting structures of feeling mixed promiscuously. Yet attempts to distribute actually existing labour and socialist organisations along two perpendicular ideological axes were pervasive. As soon as one turns to older labour histories and memoirs of the socialist movement one becomes aware of an overwhelming inclination to superimpose antithetic analytical categories onto the historical muddle. Instead of seeing a variety of parties, whose relative influence was indeed unequal, but whose sets of beliefs consisted of elements from both ‘categories’ in fluctuating proportion, many contemporary observers and twentieth-century historians thought in terms of a simple rivalry between two camps. But the actual inclusivity of socialist rhetoric made

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nonsense of the artificial division into ethical and utopian vs pragmatic and materialist approaches. The pigeonholing of groups and individuals, even when it had some basis in contemporary assessments, ignored the fact – demonstrated at length by more recent historians – that ideology did not correspond to ‘organisational affiliation’. Which society a person joined was often a matter of chance, membership was ‘fluid’, ‘the splits in the socialist movement . . . ran not along party lines but rather cut across them’ (Manton 2001, 6–7, 153, 162, 179). Representatives of one camp would always frustrate expectations by making pronouncements that seemed to belong in the other. One would expect John Trevor, the founder of the (largely northern) Labour Church, a non-theological but ‘religious’ organisation, to insist on the value of personal moral regeneration, and he did, but he also dwelt on systemic social conditions. One would expect the metropolitan Marxist Bax to reject the moral panacea, and that was indeed the case, but he also wrote more than his share about ethics. The synthesis was, of course, typified by William Morris. ‘The foundation of Socialism . . . is economical,’ he wrote, ‘but this economical aim . . . must be accompanied by an ethical or religious sense of the responsibility of each man to each and all of his fellows. Socialism aims, therefore, at realising equality of condition as its economical goal, and the habitual love of humanity as its rule of ethics’ (1986, 151). The creation of a socialist ethic and the economic restructuring of society had to come in tandem; they did not stand in a relationship of cause and effect. Neither the old individualist change of heart nor the new collectivist alteration in material conditions took precedence when it came to the question of social reform; both had to happen together. Accordingly, SDF branch meetings functioned as both ‘revivalist gatherings’ which ‘opened with a song and closed with one’, and places for the study of ‘economic and historical’ theory (Lansbury 1928, 78). Ends and means were identical, and the Labour Church Statement of Principles illustrated this union perfectly: ‘improvement of social conditions and the development of personal character are both essential to emancipation from social and moral bondage’. One had a duty to study both the ‘economic and moral forces of society’ in order to establish ‘Socialism – a Commonwealth founded upon Justice and Love’ (The Labour Church Hymn Book 1907). The synthesis was also at work in the Socialist Sunday School movement, launched to teach economics and history as well as ‘the principles of Socialism’ which consisted of ‘the Gospel of Justice, Humanity and Love’. ‘The moral teaching of our schools is interwoven in economic history’ (2), declared the official publication of the National Council of British Socialist Sunday Schools, Socialist Sunday Schools:

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Aims, Objects, and Organisation. (Socialist Sunday School Collection, Uncatalogued, Annual and National Conferences, LHASC). Some teachers opted to focus on the former, others on the latter (it is customary to draw a distinction between the ‘religious’ ILP and the Marxist SDF schools), but more often than not social evolution and ethics went hand in hand. George Whitehead, in a pamphlet on Education in Socialist Sunday Schools, began with the usual religion of socialism rhetoric about ‘converting’ the adult population to ‘the Socialist faith’, and ‘spreading our gospel’ to the children, only to end by confounding all the reader’s expectations with a statement of scientific determinism. ‘Our moral conceptions are those embodied in the theory of Determinism. From a physiological standpoint we consider a study of Eugenics necessary’ (n.d., 3, 5–6). No explanation of how determinism squared with conversion was offered, but such philosophical paradoxes did not give much pause to anyone – except perhaps a few theorists of the SDF, and opponents of socialism like Chesterton, who specifically took up the issue of determinism in a newspaper dispute with Robert Blatchford. Chesterton found it strange that a ‘determinist’, with his unshakable mantra of ‘heredity and environment’, should also be a ‘demagogue; shouting to a mob of millions . . . thunder[ing] furiously from a pulpit’ (1959, 165–6). But Blatchford’s determinism did not interfere in the least with his belief in the persuasive power of reason. As Archie McArthur, one of the Glasgow founders of the Socialist Sunday School movement, explained in Lectures Delivered to the Young Socialist Guild: You will hear . . . Socialists speaking about the environment and the necessity of changing the environment as if it were the only necessary change. Others speak as if all you had to do . . . was simply to change the man himself, change his heart and spirit . . . both these views are one-sided, therefore they are wrong. Each is simply a part of the whole truth. In order to solve this great social problem, we must have both external change and internal change. (cit. Reid 1966, 25)

Lizzie Glasier, editor of the Socialist Sunday School magazine the Young Socialist, insisted in The Socialist Sunday School Movement, A Brief Outline of What It Teaches that it was upon the knowledge of natural and historical evolution that ‘our faith and hope in the future of a higher form of social life . . . is built. Upon this knowledge is rooted our religious belief that the Socialist Kingdom of Love and Happiness’, ‘the long-hoped-for paradise on earth’, ‘will gradually dawn upon this earth. Evolution is creation . . . The new religious and scientific conception of social life – Socialism – is rapidly evolving in the mind of the race’ (Socialist Sunday School Collection, Uncatalogued, Box Four – Miscellaneous, LHASC, 1, 4). Science and religion, evolution and

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creation: all such antitheses were resolved in socialism. As if wishing to symbolise the synthesis, F. J. Gould’s Pages for Young Socialists, a Socialist Sunday School lesson book written by a prominent moral educationist (also active in the Moral Instruction League and the Ethical movement), included two forewords. One was by Keir Hardie of the ‘religious’ ILP, the other by H. M. Hyndman, the leader of the ‘scientific’ socialist SDF, who congratulated Gould on successfully illustrating the ‘bed-rock truths of Socialist Science, Ethics, and Religion’; ‘it is a most valuable work, because it teaches social morality without dogma and inculcates brotherhood without cant’ (1913, viii, ix). It was not just economics and ethics that could not be extricated from each other: neither could ‘educationalism’ and ‘legislativism’. Here the rhetoric often dealt in absolutes: on the one hand were the pragmatic gradualists, interested in securing municipal and parliamentary seats, on the other, the impractical propagandists, concerned with social morality rather than with short-term expedients for political advancement. Educationalists assumed that the ‘education of the people’ was ‘not merely one necessary precondition for realising an aim’ but was actually sufficient to realise it – hence the emphasis on ‘“making socialists” and preaching the word’ (Barrow 1982, 203; Thompson 1951, 197; Samuel 1980, 49). As Morris maintained early on, ‘propaganda by electioneering’ could not co-exist with ‘educational propaganda’: those who wanted to get ‘Socialists into Parliament’ (1994, 362–3) only felt hampered by the educational agenda. Robert Blatchford underlined the distinction in a pamphlet entitled ‘Real Socialism’, which later provided the basis for several chapters of Britain for the British, the follow-up to his wildly successful propaganda piece Merrie England. ‘Some . . . hope to bring Socialism to pass by means of a reformed Parliament; others hope to bring it to pass by means of a newer, wiser, and juster public opinion.’ As far as Blatchford was concerned, once the people understood socialism, the ‘real revolution’ would be accomplished, ‘the first thing to be done is to educate them . . . our method is persuasion’ (1989, 89–90; 1902, 75–6). As one contributor to a provincial newspaper put it in 1893, in elucidating the difference between ‘state’ and ‘true’ socialism, which sought ‘to establish free communes, working on true co-operative principles’: ‘It is not by looking to government to remedy our evils, to supply our needs, and to manage our affairs that we shall ever realise a better state of things; let us rather do these things ourselves, by education and organisation’ (cit. Manton 2001, 161). But while the rhetorical antagonisms flourished, the situation on the ground was hardly so clear-cut. Morris eventually accepted piecemeal reform and industrial action as acceptable though by no means

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sufficient tactics, and understood the necessity of the formation of a socialist party to enter politics. Blatchford had actually agreed to stand for Parliament in 1891, and saw the ‘propaganda value’ of Socialist MPs (cit. Thompson 1951, 190). If the educationalists tended to compromise with Parliament, however, the legislativists also betrayed surprisingly educationalist leanings. The ILP leader Keir Hardie directed much of his propaganda at children and even established a youth organisation, the Labour Crusaders, which played a prominent part in the formation of the Socialist Sunday School movement, with local branches providing numerous volunteers to organise and staff the schools. Examples of such ideological hybridity may be multiplied endlessly. Syndicalism garnered criticism for being too anarchist on the one hand, and too authoritarian on the other. Anarchism itself was composed of virtually incompatible individualist and mutualist strands. The SDF was associated in the popular mind with continental Marxist orthodoxy; its public face was the dictatorial, top-hatted Hyndman. But from the beginning it was also identified with short-term parliamentary demands or ‘stepping stones’ to socialism; it had a local electoral agenda and a grass-roots network, as well as a strong democratic ethos; and it combined revolution with reformism. The ILP was equally janus-faced. On the one hand, it was a specimen of communitarianism in action: branches were formed before the national party; the membership was in favour of decentralisation and against the concentration of power in the hands of officials. On the other hand, it had what was widely perceived to be an anti-democratic leadership in Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, it accepted – like the Fabians – the legitimacy of the existing system and of the state, and sought only to become part of the government rather than to overthrow or reform it. One could hardly talk of a monolithic ILP ideology if at one end of the spectrum a Stoke branch took internal democracy to the point of abolishing the office of president, while at the other end a Labour Leader columnist called for the arrival of a Nietzschean leader and dubbed socialism an ‘aristocratic’ creed (Barrow and Bullock 1996, 80, 82). (Of course, in the Edwardian period the New Age had no problems championing Nietzsche and guild socialism simultaneously.) The year 1911 saw the secession from the ILP of a number of dissident branches and members to form a new socialist party with the SDF and the Clarionettes. Changes of outlook were a frequent occurrence, and flux was in the very nature of political association. In the 1880s there were still revolutionary and anarchist elements within the Fabian Society, its membership overlapped with the SDF, and its leading lights contributed articles to the SDF newspaper Justice and lectured to the Socialist League and

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at public meetings of every imaginable stripe in order to educate the people. According to Brian Simon, in 1891 ninety Fabian speakers gave a total of 1,400 lectures (1965, 33). By the mid-1890s it had evolved the administrative expert mentality and familiar contempt for ‘primitive democracy’ with which it is associated, but by the mid-1900s guild socialism arose within its ranks, and H. G. Wells led a rebellion to turn it into a mass party. Stewart Headlam, founder of the Guild of St Matthew and one of the more prominent members of the Society, was a thoroughgoing believer in direct democratic control and popular government, and an opponent of Fabian bureaucracy, as his stand against the Fabian-sponsored abolition of the school boards (elected ad hoc bodies) made apparent. He was not the only one to disagree, and every few years influential Fabians would resign in protest at some new change of direction. But even the Webbs – the gurus of statist socialism – understood the capacity of the organised working class for co-operation and selfgovernment. If worker control was not the way forward, at least it deserved to be studied in detail, as Beatrice’s work on The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain (1891), and the Webbs’ History of Trade Unionism (1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897) demonstrated. Early on, Beatrice Webb was impressed by working-class association, by the ability of ‘manual workers’ to ‘initiate and maintain the network of Nonconformist chapels, the far-flung friendly societies, the much-abused trade unions, and that queer type of shop, the Co-operative store’ (1971, 166). Both were fully aware that trade unions offered a ‘century-long experience of a thousand self-governing working-class communities’ (Webb and Webb 1894, 475–6), and were even ‘inspired by the example afforded by the pre-1688 institutions of local self-government in England’ (Stapleton 2000, 259–60). The moment one looks closely at any particular organisation or any individual within it – either diachronically, by tracing pronouncements over a period of time, or synchronically, incorporating the views of leaders and members, both regional and metropolitan – ideological homogeneity dissipates like the mirage it is. The communal model appealed equally to reformers and revolutionaries, to sentimental armchair socialists who talked of altruism and class harmony, to ILP lecturers – simultaneously ‘ethical’ and politically pragmatic – and to leaders of the industrial struggle with impeccable working-class credentials. In other moods or circumstances, or for different purposes, all these groups were also thorough advocates of the statist solution. As has already been mentioned, there was no sure correlation between outlook and class or organisational affiliation: Marxists and Fabians were to be found among the provincial working class and trade union organisers among the

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London intellectual elite. Shaw could advocate the religion of socialism as eloquently as Blatchford, while Blatchford’s frequent abuse and show of contempt for the working-class audience of his propaganda were on a par with anything produced by the Fabians. Morris rejected anarchism, but was also friends with Kropotkin, and it would take a wilful blindness not to see the similarities between the two men’s conceptions of art, history, the decentralised federated commune and the opposition between state and community. Despite the very real antagonisms between various party leaders, the wide and well-documented practice of multiple membership across different societies was enough to preclude one-to-one identification between sect and ideology. It was common practice for enthusiasts to join as many organisations as possible – often the same person would be a member of the SDF, the ILP and the Fabian Society, and would attend the meetings of the Christian socialists and the Labour Church (see the biographies of the McMillan sisters or Ben Turner). Harry Lowerison, for example, was a socialist educationist ‘well-known on the socialist lecture circuit’ who served on the Fabian Society’s National Executive Committee, founded the Clarion field clubs and established the Ruskin School (Manton 2001, 10). James Leatham was an important SDF activist, but in his long career he also worked on the Clarion, founded an ILP branch and even briefly joined the Labour Party. Tom Mann was a New Unionist and SDF organiser, an ILP candidate, a member of the Fabian Society and a prominent syndicalist. Charlotte Wilson, the editor of the anarchist paper Freedom, was also a Fabian. Orators from one society would lecture for most others: one need only consider the variety of engagements of prolific public speakers like Morris or Shaw or Annie Besant, or take a look at the roster of those who came to speak at the Hammersmith coach-house. For all their factionalism, the different parties would intermittently launch efforts at unification. Blatchford promoted multiple membership for precisely this purpose, advising his readers to join both the ILP and the SDF to work for party unity, and along with Hyndman and Shaw, Morris initiated unification drives in the early 1890s. In 1894 and 1895 he supported Blatchford’s campaign for the fusion of the SDF and the ILP, writing to him about ‘the necessity of the formation of a definite and united Socialist party’ (1936, 2: 353–4). A ‘spirit of fraternity’ also permeated the print culture of the movement: local ILP papers advertised the Labour Leader together with the Clarion and Justice, and in the preface to the 1895 edition of Merrie England, Blatchford thanked ‘the Clarion Scouts and the members of the I.L.P. and S.D.F. Branches and Fabian Societies in the three Kingdoms, for their untiring zeal and industry in selling and distributing the penny edition of my book’ (1895b, 6).

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The penny ‘Pamphlets for the People’ (which sold a reported 260,000 copies) included an ‘Important Notice to Readers’ entirely representative of the ecumenism in question. Every socialist branch and member of the labour movement was encouraged to purchase, with no regard for ideological consistency, ‘as many as they can of the following Reform Newspapers: – The Labour Leader, Clarion, Social Democrat, Justice, Factory Times, Weekly Times and Echo, Reformer’s Year Book, The Labour Record, The Socialist Review, The Socialist Vanguard.’ Readers were exhorted to join trade unions as well as the ILP and the SDF, ‘the two great regiments in the Socialist Army, who are going to bring about the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth’ (Glyde n.d., inside front and back cover). The ILP and the SDF may have been bitter antagonists on many programmatic points, but among the rank-and-file sectional loyalty was not the foremost virtue. The practice of ‘federal sectarianism’ (Yeo 1977, 36), however, was not confined to clerks and artisans. Intellectual figures had an even greater field of radical and generally avant-garde causes with which to identify: from the different socialisms, feminism and secularism, to vegetarianism, theosophy and the Simple Life. The world of middleclass metropolitan progressives was closely interconnected: everyone knew everyone else. Dollie Radford, for instance, a poet with aesthetic and ethical socialist leanings, was a member of the Fabian Society and of the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League; she knew Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, Aveling, Kropotkin, Stepniak, Bax and Joynes, William and May Morris, Crane, Shaw and Carpenter (not to mention Symons and Yeats, who held a séance at her home with the Simple Life socialists Kate and Henry Salt) (Livesey 2007, Chap. 5). Radford was typical. Orthodox Marxists hobnobbed with anarchists and nihilists, New Unionist organisers mixed with aesthete socialists who had never met a working man. At Shaw’s plays, in the British Museum, in Bloomsbury drawing rooms, they got together and socialised and went their separate ways again to Hyde Park corner, or the East End docks, or the offices of the Bodley Head. Given such a background of personal interaction it was no wonder that ideological boundaries did not prove as rigid as historians interested in tidy labels sometimes made them.

‘A Clamorous Confusion’: H. G. Wells and Robert Tressell But ideological heterogeneity was not confined to political and social practice, it could also be observed in fiction, especially in two very

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different socialist novels of the Edwardian period. The first – the Fabian Wells’s resounding succès de scandale, Ann Veronica – depicted it in a documentary fashion in order to condemn it. The second – the most noteworthy, though at the time hardly noticed, piece of fiction produced by a member of the SDF – embodied the hybridity, perhaps unconsciously, in its very rhetoric. Wells published Ann Veronica in 1909, the year after he resigned from the Fabian Society (having failed to reform it along the lines he envisioned), and much of his description of the London avantgarde milieu, of that ‘curious stratum of people who are busied with dreams of world progress, of great and fundamental changes, of a New Age that is to replace all the stresses and disorders of contemporary life’ (1980, 107), was characterised by a tone of disillusioned mockery. But in the process of revealing the flaws, the pettiness, the self-importance, the contemptible mediocrity of the self-styled ‘Children of Light,’ Wells managed to evoke their idealistic millenarian atmosphere, their uncategorisable ferment of ideas to great effect. The heroine is initiated into the subculture of the ‘small but energetic minority’, the people ‘in the van’, by the highly strung suffragette Miss Miniver; a schoolteacher who serves as the type of the enthusiastic (and therefore patronisingly comical) lower middle-class rank-and-file devotee. ‘There never was such a time as this!’ she exclaims constantly, ‘everything seems so close to fruition’ (109, 108). Everything, Miss Miniver said, was ‘working up’, everything was ‘coming on’ – the Higher Thought, the Simple Life, Socialism, Humanitarianism, it was all the same really . . . now it was the dawn . . . I see all the movements. As far as I can, I belong to them all . . . You must let me take you to things – to meetings and things, to conferences and talks . . . I am up to the ears in it all – every moment I can spare . . . movements! . . . I must take you to the suffrage people, and the Tolstoyans, and the Fabians . . . It’s the society . . . It’s the centre of the intellectuals. Some of the meetings are wonderful . . . Just think – they are making a new world! (109–10)

She introduces Ann Veronica to her friends, people whose jumble of ideas presents itself to Wells as an ‘absurd’ muddle: vegetarianism, teetotalism, vivisection and Simple Life garments are mingled indiscriminately with socialism, anarchism, Hegel, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Chesterton, Shaw and free love. Ann Veronica and Miss Miniver attend ‘suffrage meetings’ and ‘various central and local Fabian gatherings’, followed by ‘cocoa’ drinking. They go to Essex Hall to hear and see ‘the giant leaders of the Fabian Society who are remaking the world . . . all displayed upon a platform’. They go to ‘a very much larger and more enthusiastic gathering, a meeting of the advanced section of the woman movement in Caxton Hall, where the same note of vast changes in progress sounded

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. . . to a soiree of the Dress Reform Association and . . . a Food Reform Exhibition, where imminent change was made even alarmingly visible’. The whole social scene subsists on the naïve belief that it needs ‘only a few pioneers to behave as such and be thoroughly and indiscriminately “advanced”, for the new order to achieve itself’ (135, 115–17). Despite the heavy dose of irony, the laugh at the expense of the Fabian ‘giants’, Wells leaves the reader in no doubt about the ‘clamorous confusion of ideas for reconstruction – reconstruction of the methods of business, of economic development, of the rules of property, of the status of children, of the clothing and feeding and teaching of everyone’. No tidy dichotomies here – only art students, New Women, cranks who dress as if they are ‘foreign visitors from the land of Looking Backward and News from Nowhere [rather than] indigenous Londoners’, ‘weird’ people who never state arguments clearly, who contradict themselves and are habitually inconsistent. In her more pessimistic (or lucid) moments Ann Veronica wonders whether ‘the whole mass of movements and societies and gatherings and talks’, ‘meetings and conferences’ ‘was not simply one coherent spectacle of failure protecting itself from abjection by the glamour of its own assertions’. The remedy for the socialist and reformist chaos – since this is H. G. Wells writing – is to be found in the ‘coherent and systematic development of ideas’ exemplified by science, ‘a more systematic and particular method of examining just the same questions that underlay the discussions of the Fabian Society, the talk of the West Central Arts Club, the chatter of the studios, and the deep, the bottomless discussions of the simple-life homes’. Against the background of the ‘confused movements’, ‘the comings and goings of audiences and supporters that were like the eddy-driven drift of paper in the street’, the ‘methodical chamber’ of Ann Veronica’s college biological laboratory (116, 118, 133–4, 130), where every detail is strictly and clearly subordinated to the overall aim, shines as a beacon of Wells’s scientific world state. Needless to say, Wells omits to mention that ‘science’ was already one of the many discourses pitched into the intellectual melting pot of the socialist movement. Miss Miniver’s ‘everything is working up and coming on’ is itself an echo of the evolutionary analogy beloved alike of Marxists and Socialist Sunday School educators. Ann Veronica’s portrayal of modern relations between the sexes unleashed a literary scandal and provoked extreme reactions from the public, but Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists caused barely a ripple at the time of its initial (delayed) publication in 1914: its unknown author was already lying in a pauper’s grave. Its subsequent impact, however, dwarfed that of Wells’s portrait of the liberated woman. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was responsible

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– according to popular myth – for Labour’s landslide victory in 1945. It influenced Labour MPs throughout the twentieth century, was consistently in the top hundred in polls of the nation’s favourite reading, and proved popular with generation after generation in three widely differing editions. It was also a mixed bag of communal and statist elements. If Morris’s romances had fulfilled their propagandistic function by presenting an undiluted communal ideal from the past, Tressell’s novel faithfully reflected the ideological hybridity of the present. It did not set forth a sociological case study like Ann Veronica, but actually embodied in its own rhetoric the different strains of left-wing discourse on offer in the period. Narrative promiscuity mirrored sociological fact. The book could be read, effectively, as a product of that very subculture of ‘confusion’ that Wells analysed from a distance – with one important caveat. Philanthropists was not seen in the form its author intended it to take until 1955, forty-one years after the original date of publication, and what greeted the world in the middle of the twentieth century was a political medley quite unlike that presented by Wells. Tressell lived far away from Wells’s world of metropolitan intellectual ferment: as a provincial activist struggling with the daily realities of poor pay and unemployment he could hardly bear witness to the political fads and fashions of London students, artists and assistant newspaper editors. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was a microcosm, a container of the different socialisms current in pre-war Britain, and despite significant omissions – such as that of the organised labour movement (unionisation is never offered as a solution to the workers’ ills) and revolutionary socialism – it still covered much of the spectrum of available anti-capitalist ideology. But it was a spectrum refracted through the prism of a different geographical and class milieu, and Tressell’s book addressed the needs and reflected the experiences and concerns of a very different audience from that targeted by Ann Veronica. Wells’s novel did not feature a single working-class character; among its proliferating ‘movements’ it did not once mention trade unions, Labour members of Parliament, parties like the SDF and ILP, or major cultural formations like the Clarion Fellowship. That was because, as Wells expressed it two years earlier, ‘under the peculiar conditions of London, the hope of socialism resides in the middle class . . . Unlike the industrial regions of the Midlands and the North, in which socialism is now making such strides, there is no homogenous mass of London workers of sufficient relative magnitude to serve as a permanent basis for socialistic activity.’ Wells was addressing the Fabians, whom he saw at the time as the main hope for socialist propaganda among the London middle class; the ILP, the SDF and the Clarion organisations covered ‘a world of activity that

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seems to lie no longer within our sphere of influence’ (cit. Hynes 1968, 393). Tressell, on the other hand, was part of that world, and a founder of the Hastings branch of the Social Democratic Federation. His novel channelled the currents of contemporary socialist propaganda that were destined to irrigate a much humbler soil. But before one can assess the novel’s ideological hybridity, one has to come to terms with its generic one. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a sometimes incongruous mixture of three separate generic modes. First: an extreme naturalism, disintegrating towards the end into sentimental melodrama, in the sections describing the struggles and small joys of everyday working-class life (the Eastons, the Owens, the Lindens). The setting of these Elizabeth Gaskell-like subplots is usually familial and domestic, at home or in the pub. Second: parable or satire, complete with allegorical names (Sweater, Rushton, Crass, Starvem, Slyme, Bosher, Graball D’Encloseland and the various Benevolence Society subscribers), to deal with the villains in their complementary capacities as patrons of the church, capitalists in the office and municipal governors in the Town Hall. Here the influence of Dickens, Swift and Fielding comes into play. Third: an intermediate mode for portraying the working environment of the men in the building trade, where straightforward representational realism blends with comedy on the one hand, and with authorial ventriloquism via the main characters’ preaching on the other. The exploiter villains remain confined to one mode: they do not cease to be allegorical even when mentioned in the realist-level conversation of the workers, as demonstrated by the most absurdist moment of the book when the Reverend Belcher explodes like the balloon he is. But the workmen, depending on the purpose at hand, can be moved at will across generic boundaries. The middle-aged Philpot, for instance, is not just a personification of working-class self-delusion, but a concrete person, even though his fate is to be literally crushed by the system (in an interesting anticipation of E. M. Forster’s Leonard Bast). But the unemployed who voluntarily harness themselves to pull the election victor’s carriage are nothing more than figures in an allegorical tableau. In this respect the book is static: it presents not a development of characters, but a cross-section of society, and in the preface Tressell admits that it is his goal to describe the life-path of a worker ‘from the cradle to the grave’ (1997, 13) in the space of one calendar year. Thus, neither Ruth Easton’s ‘fall’, nor Jack Linden’s descent from full employment to the workhouse and eventually to the cemetery, are narrative arcs in the traditional sense. Ruth is seduced by Slyme – the personification of religious hypocrisy – and Linden is Old Age in the life-journey of the working class, which

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begins at Childhood with Frankie Owen, and proceeds through successive stages embodied in Bert, Owen and Philpot. Even the tyrannical foreman Hunter’s suicide is too symbolic to be explained solely in terms of psychology and social pressures. At all levels the narrative is structured spatially, as a series of discrete pictures on a single theme, not a progressive movement through time, which partly accounts for the length and repetitiveness of the manuscript. The pictures allow of endless, though limited, variation. A different kind of variation can be observed at the level of explicit political propaganda. Despite his social and geographical distance from the middle-class enthusiasts of H. G. Wells’s London, Tressell was a product of the same intellectual environment, and some of the sources that went to make up his ideological patchwork would have been familiar to Ann Veronica’s progressive acquaintances. The concluding part of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a veritable babel of voices. Romantic dawn imagery, clothed in the stock metaphorical language of the socialist songbooks that goes back at least to Edward Carpenter’s Chants of Labour (1888), clashes with a military vocabulary derived from Edward Bellamy, the American author of the most successful ultra-statist utopia of the late nineteenth century, Looking Backward (1888). The jarring of discourses is particularly palpable in the description of the socialist future. Tressell indulges in Walter Cranelike illustrations of ‘the Golden Light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism’, with all the attendant nebulously sentimental flowers of Sunday School rhetoric, and simultaneously gives full reign to a hard-headed vocabulary bristling with ‘national armies of industry’, ‘national service retail stores’ and ‘state armies of productive workers’ retiring at the age of forty-five (1997, 587, 477, 480–1). Looking Backward is an obvious influence on Tressell’s depiction of the Co-operative Commonwealth, and he is happy to adopt elements of Bellamy’s version of the transition to socialism, as well as a number of other details of the organisation of life in the future state. He even quotes one of William Morris’s most popular socialist chants, ‘The Day is Coming’ – with all its communal associations – to describe Bellamy-like statist arrangements (485–6), apparently oblivious to the glaring ideological contradiction involved in combining the two authors. Morris’s legacy is more directly discernible in the presentation of the ideal of craftsmanship in the figure of Frank Owen, the artisan hero of the book, and in the references to pleasurable labour or useless toil. In fact, Morris’s 1879 lecture ‘The Art of the People’ foreshadows one of the defining contrasts of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists:

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between the working man who is driven to ‘self-contempt and degradation’, to toil in which there is ‘no hope and no pleasure’, and who therefore tries to evade and shirk it, ‘to shuffle [it] off in the speediest way that dread of starvation or ruin will allow him’, and that rare kind of workman who does his duty ‘heroically’ and is ‘the salt of the earth’ (Morris 1910–15, 22: 44–5). Morris’s influence is also evident indirectly – for it had been diffused throughout socialist propaganda – in the preoccupation with ‘making socialists’, this being the first and most important of the three imperatives of Morris’s by then defunct Socialist League. But in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists the working class is to be educated to very unMorrisian ends. For Morris, ‘education in Socialism’ was a means of attaining the revolution, part of the ‘organisation for the time when the crisis shall force action upon us’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 368). But Owen does not want to prepare workers for the coming revolution, he is looking to recruit voters for socialist candidates and to ‘raise’ and ‘enlighten’ his culturally and mentally impoverished peers. There is more than a hint of Fabian elitism, of Toynbee Hall and the People’s Palace, about the way his intentions are phrased. Tressell includes the charity organisations and the philanthropic gestures of the rich in his withering satire, but he does not go as far as Morris’s criticism of ‘goody-goody people’s palaces’ and ‘demi-semi-Socialistic’ schemes (1994, 208), and the narrator’s superior tone is more reminiscent of Blatchford than of Morris. The latter two may have had similar democratic-educational agendas, in that what mattered most was to teach the workers socialist principles so that they could do the rest for themselves, but their notions of what that ‘rest’ was differed significantly. The patronising elements of Blatchford’s rhetoric are imported into Tressell’s novel along with the propagandistic urge. But the cacophony of discourses does not end there. Though Tressell does not shy away from invoking the example of the ‘Workman of Nazareth’ in good Christian socialist fashion, and explicitly dissociates himself from any attack on sincere religion in the preface, his book is notable for its virulent anti-clericalism and its orthodox Marxist portrayal of churchmen as the paid lackeys of the capitalist class. Yet for all of Tressell’s membership in the one explicitly Marxist party, most other Marxist concepts are conspicuous by their absence. There is no mention of class warfare or revolution, and the limit of radical aspirations is a cradle to grave welfare state. Capitalism is not going to collapse because of its internal contradictions or the dialectical laws of history, but because it is wicked – a staple assumption of the ethical gradualist interpretation of socialism. The change will come about peacefully through the ballot box, as a socialist party takes over the machinery of the state

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and directs it to its own benevolent purposes. It will set up a parallel society alongside the capitalist one and convert it by good example (as well as assured economic superiority), unhindered by vested interests or foreign powers, and compensating fairly the capitalists it drives out of business. Until this thoroughly unMorrisian transition to ‘International Brotherhood’ comes about, however, Tressell – like Robert Blatchford and other jingo socialists, not least among whom was H. M. Hyndman – is content to support the Big Navy for protection of English commerce, and universal military training for a citizen army: the pet project of the SDF. The only identifiable element of Marxist economics in the work (aside from the belief in the panacea of collectivisation) – the so-called Money Trick – is an illustration by parable of the surplus theory of value. The parable was a manner of writing that the socialist periodical press of the 1880s, 90s and 1900s made its own, and the book’s lineage may be traced in this direction with equal surety. SDF periodical fiction contained many of the narrative and thematic elements that later found expression in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: ‘the satire on the delusions of the workers, the lonely, often thankless fight of the isolated socialist, the actual descending spiral of social misery . . . even the use of melodramatic episodes’ (Mitchell 1987, 70). It is likely that Tressell read Justice and the Social Democrat: his socialist lecturer’s description of ‘the primitive Communism of the tribes’ (1997, 472) in an aside on social evolution could easily have come from a contemporaneous article by Bax. But although similar unattributed echoes may be found here and there, for the greater part of his political content Tressell was indebted to the much more populist and popular writing of Robert Blatchford. Merrie England, the most successful and influential piece of propaganda produced by the British socialist movement – with a recordbreaking two million copies sold – and Britain for the British, another of Blatchford’s bestselling books, are the only socialist works alluded to by name (albeit under slightly disguised titles) in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which is otherwise noteworthy for not naming any reallife socialist writers or societies. Tressell borrows many of Blatchford’s arguments from Merrie England almost verbatim, especially the sections on anti-socialist objections (what to do with loafers, who will perform disagreeable work, what if the rich should leave taking their capital with them) and on agricultural self-sufficiency. He also adopts Blatchford’s polemical methods of persuasion, as instanced by the presence of diagrams like Owen’s Oblong, and the extrapolation of tendencies ad absurdum (the hyperbole of monopolised air was in fact used by James Leatham as early as 1891 (1892, 4)). Large parts

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of the socialist characters’ set speeches are simply dramatisations of Blatchford’s letters to Mr Smith, and even the use of parodic newspaper names echoes Clarion practice – issues from 1895 to 1896 featured such gems as the ‘Daily Desolator’ and ‘Dustpan’, while Tressell coined ‘The Daily Obscurer’ and ‘Daily Chloroform’. Another likely influence, at the thematic rather than the formal level, is Blatchford’s celebrated determinism. Tressell frequently points out that neither the workers nor the capitalists are responsible for the way they are – stupid and grovelling on the one hand, greedy and cruel on the other – both are shaped by the society in which they live. The middle-class socialist character Barrington offers excuses for the workers’ behaviour based entirely on environmental determinism. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a seminal literary document of Edwardian socialism, but as the foregoing summary makes clear, it cannot be accommodated in any ‘two-camp’ schema: reformist and Marxist, statist and ethical, Morrisian and Blatchfordian, it is nothing if not a hodgepodge. Tressell did not come from the enthusiastically confused stratum of Wells’s metropolitan ‘vanguard’, but he spoke the same ideologically inclusive language, and his socialist sermons veered from woolly lyricism to systematic exposition. A similar analysis could be performed on Blatchford’s Merrie England, or on any contemporary piece of socialist propaganda, and with the same results.

The Two Phases: A Narrative of Decline But what exactly counts as contemporary? If one avoids the trap of the ‘two camps’, one can still succumb to the related fallacy of the ‘two phases’, simply by turning the antithesis from a synchronic to a diachronic one. Instead of imposing absolute types on a complex historical scene twentieth-century historians often charted a no less artificial trajectory of rise and fall over the 1880–1914 period, although two conceptual models are no more reducible to two historical phases than to two political camps. A scenario in which the movement started out small, tightly knit and driven by devotion to the Cause, but lost its unity and religious momentum, breaking apart into factions or ossifying into officialdom by 1914 (or even 1900), was as unlikely as the structural division of the socialist scene into ‘communal’ and ‘statist’ groups. But the compulsion to express antagonistic conceptual categories like communalism and statism in terms of a historical progression was always strong, and few of those who articulated such a dichotomy could avoid viewing it in temporal terms. The temptation was to focus on

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the historical shift from the one to the other, on the process by which modern pragmatic statism outgrew and eventually ousted communalism in the realm of practical possibility, by which the combination of Fabianism and Labourism came to represent British socialism in the twentieth century. The entrenchment of the ‘death of communalism’ myth was due in no small measure to the autobiographical accounts of the pre-First World War movement. These were often governed by a perception of transition, a narrative of decline from a golden age, which easily passed into the labour historiography of the twentieth century. Many of them took it for granted that there existed a time – in the early years when socialism was small and outside politics – when a beleaguered group of the faithful worked in brotherhood for the realisation of the new society, driven by a spirit which dissipated as the movement grew and became formalised. The religious enthusiasm of local voluntary organisations yielded at the turn of the century to centralised professional bureaucracy. Communalism was both the first stage and the ideal – captured in glowing memoirs – that statist socialism would ever afterwards look back to. To what extent this was a formal convention of the life-writing genre – rather than a straightforward reflection of reality – was a question that subsequent historians rarely asked. Yet for all the countervailing evidence of an overlap between state and communal, scientific and religious strains of socialism, the myth of an original unity or happy state before the fall proved perennially popular. Leaders made pronouncements and activists recorded in their memoirs an originary ‘New Life moment’ which coloured everything with its fairy light, but flickered out in the cold morning of sober reality or descended into the dark twilight of ignorance and apathy. Old believers in the religion of socialism woke up one day to find that it was time to put away childish things and get down to the serious business of winning municipal elections. Percy Redfern’s much-cited autobiography described the progressively tightening grip of the ‘statist’ mentality, and he dated the end of the ‘New Life days’ (Yeo 1987, 238), with their general atmosphere of enthusiasm for the Cause, to 1900. W. Stephen Sanders wrote that the ‘“emotional intensity” which attracted him to the movement in 1888 was gone by 1927’; by 1926 Joseph Clayton also believed that ‘socialism defined as “a cause, a new order of society to be set up”, had changed so much since 1884 that it had in fact died off leaving behind only its name and a programme of social reform’ (Manton 2001, 4). ‘Never at any period . . . did things look so bright for our propaganda’ as they did in 1884, wrote Hyndman in his autobiography. ‘In those days we were all full of zeal, enthusiasm and revolutionary confidence’, but the years brought ‘treachery and loss

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of enthusiasm’, though not all efforts were in vain (1911, 345–6, 351, 344). According to Leatham, ‘the old gaiety seemed to have left [J. B. Glasier] when in 1908 we met after a long interval. From being a revolutionary, impatient of pedestrian politics, he had swung round so far that he preferred the title “Labour” to the more explicit word “Socialist”’ (cit. Thompson 1977, 747). George Lansbury, in his autobiography, remembered the ‘early pioneers’ as people who ‘never for a moment thought Socialism possible of achievement without the conscious cooperation of the working classes’, and who ‘had no intention of creating a huge party organisation controlled from the top, but were true democrats . . . teaching the masses to think and act for themselves’ (1928, 1–2). This may have been a wonderful description of the educationalist ideal, but amongst other things it somehow managed to forget the pioneers of state socialism who were also there from the outset.1 We have seen that conceptual antagonisms did not map onto organisational ones, that parties were not monolithic, and fault-lines ran through groupings as much as between them. Socialist societies constantly stretched the boundaries, members practised ecumenicalism, and labels did not always accord with substance. But ideological cross-fertilisation could not have taken place without real ideological distinctions, political co-operation made sense as an aim only in light of a pre-existing factionalism. By definition, then, there could not have been a phase when everyone thought alike. Even if it was impossible to guess with certainty which organisation they would be found in at this period, many socialists saw themselves as combatants in an ongoing guerrilla warfare. Morris had no problems differentiating between the ‘New Trades’ Unionism’ which sought to obtain concessions by industrial action, the ‘Parliamentary’ or ‘State Socialist’ path represented by the ‘Fabian lecturers and pamphleteers’ (1994, 492–3), which would achieve the same objectives by passing legislation, and his own side which aimed to educate and organise the working class, to ‘make socialists’ in order to prepare them for the coming revolution. He charged the SDF with weakening ‘our propagandist force by driving us into electioneering’, seeking ‘alliances, however temporary, with one or other of the political factions’, as well as ‘opportunism & political adventure, ending with controul [sic] by a parliamentary party’. This may not have been a fair and balanced assessment of the groups in question – in a fractious environment people were not likely to give their due to the subtleties and complexities of their opponents’ positions – but it did signal the existence of genuine disagreements, about the parliamentary ‘red herring’ among other things (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 372–3). Whatever his later changes of opinion, Morris was on his guard against the tentacles of state socialism

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and palliation as early as 1885: the very dawn of the ‘New Life’ when even the Fabians were still dabbling in ethical fellowship. It was not as a result of any early universal optimism that Joseph Lane, a prominent working-class activist on the Council of Morris’s Socialist League, penned in 1887 his Anti-Statist, Communist Manifesto. He thundered against parliamentary socialism and palliatives, opposed all government and politics, called for the abolition of even the democratic state, whose centralisation squelched the initiative of individuals and social groups, warned revolutionary socialists against seizing the political machine to acquire power for themselves, and condemned political reforms as tricks to deceive the workers. Morris referred approvingly to ‘the free communes of Lane’s manifesto’ (1996, 340), but such an anarchistic statement was necessary precisely because the 1880s were no golden age, the parliamentarist ‘enemy’ encroached on all sides (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 656). Unruffled unanimity was hardly the order of the good old days: Morris may have written about fellowship, but no sooner did the SDF declare itself socialist than he was splitting from it to form the Socialist League, and the fate that the latter came to was caricatured by Morris himself in News from Nowhere. ‘There were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but divergent Anarchist opinions’ (1910–15, 16: 3). Unity may have been an element of the communalist ideology, but uniformity and homogeneity never were: even a synthesis required a prior antithesis. But the formation of the narrative had started almost immediately, and if ten years on from the birth of socialism participants were already exhibiting a tendency to gloss over the internal contradictions, it is not surprising that those who looked back over a much longer period succumbed to the idealising urge. Morris himself, in ‘What We Have to Look For’, sinned by omission with regard to the early ‘sect’ days of the movement,2 and in 1895 an ILPer wrote of ‘ten years ago’ – a naïve and optimistic time of preaching in parks and at street corners, of painting ‘vivid pictures of the Promised Land’ to ‘kindle a desire’ and ‘prod the proletariat’ (cit. Yeo 1977, 45) – as a first stage now best left behind in order to concentrate on the practical realisation of the vision. Needless to say, the evangelist aspect of the movement was not confined to the 1880s. The ‘religion of socialism’ was still going strong in the 1900s; lecturers and itinerant speakers like Katharine Conway and Margaret McMillan, Caroline Martyn and Glasier, carried on the practice of ethical preaching into the 1890s and the Clarion vans wheeled it into the new century. In 1907, writing in the aptly named New Age, Edwin Pugh reminded his readers that

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Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward’ has made its thousands of converts to Socialism where Rowntree’s and Booth’s Reports have made their scores. One has only to stand in a crowd gathered round a speaker to discover that when he deals in mere figures his listeners yawn; but when he gives them visions they are rapt in attention . . . It has always been the dreamers, rather than the mathematicians, who have helped the world along. (103)

If the 1900s had their share of idealistic fervour, the 1880s had as much of sober pragmatism: the gold of the golden age was no pure metal, and the iron age that followed it had veins of gold. Yet though this may seem little more than common sense, the majority of accounts still managed to convey a picture of the 1880s as a dawn in which a ‘little band of pioneers’ (Bax 1914, 6) came together to work for a great cause. The fervour of the religion of socialism supposedly reached its zenith in the 1890s, but by the 1900s the bloom was off the flower. Parliamentary compromise inevitably followed the first flush of political idealism, Blatchford’s Christian controversy and move to the right alienated supporters, and continuing wrangles over the creation of a united socialist party did not help to promote harmony among the sectarian factions. Factors responsible for the decline of the religion of socialism included, according to this view, the triumph of a narrow political Labourism at the expense of the vision of educationalism, the erosion of the autodidact culture that provided the social base for the movement, the exclusiveness of socialist club life and, finally, the leaders’ loss of faith in the capacities of the working class. Thus, over the roughly thirty years from the 1880s to the 1910s a general shift was effected, paralleling wider social developments in the direction of statism and mass capitalism, and accompanied by much disillusionment. National party machinery displaced branch initiative, business methods came to influence the running of organisations, and the mass leisure industry usurped the place of the associational life cultivated by socialist groups (see Yeo 1977, 1987; Levy 1987; Waters 1990a). This is the orthodox historical account, the lapsarian ‘two phases’ narrative. But while it would be wrong to deny the actual changes that were taking place in this hinge period, one could begin by asking how much faith the leadership had in the working class in the first place, how far back into the nineteenth century the cultural pessimism that gave rise to fears about the impact of leisure on political consciousness really stretched, or how far forward into the twentieth century the autodidact tradition in fact survived? Idealism and cynicism, enthusiasm and dissension had always lived side by side. Disagreements racked the movement from the outset, and just as many were frustrated with officialdom, bureaucracy and the spectre of state socialism in the 1900s and 1910s as

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had given up on the ‘naïve’ utopianism of the 1880s and 90s. The flowering of the Socialist Sunday School movement; the rise of syndicalism with its rejection of the parliamentary methods pursued by Labour, and calls for direct action via the general strike, militant worker organisation outside politics, industrial self-management and union federation; the welcome given by the SDF, the guild socialists, the syndicalists and the Clarion to Hilaire Belloc’s warning of the ‘servile state’; the Clarion and SDF campaigns for the referendum and popular control of the school boards; the growth of guild socialism and the renewed emphasis on education and conversion: none of these pointed to the final triumph of statism. The SDF continued its vociferous denunciation of the ‘New Bureaucracy’ and endorsement of community and co-operation; the Clarion made pronouncements about machinery that would not have been out of place in the Commonweal. The guild socialist G. R. S. Taylor ‘applauded both the reaction against over-centralisation and the syndicalist emphasis on avoiding bureaucracy by preparing people to be their own administrators’ (Barrow and Bullock 1996, 265; Chap. 12). Even the Labour Leader questioned the Fabian shibboleth of experts, and its editor Fenner Brockway congratulated the ‘intelligent working class’ on awakening ‘to the dangers of bureaucratic State Socialism’ (cit. Barrow and Bullock 1996, 264), and on their newfound spirit of self-reliance. As Barrow and Bullock remind us, the forces contending for community self-government, whether local or industrial, remained as important as the countervailing tendencies to centralisation and the development of state machinery. In fact, the conceptual oppositions of the 1890s were only reinforced in the 1900s. Working-class community-building practices continued even when the Labour Party became institutionalised; local co-operation and a grass-roots democratic culture persisted in the interwar period. Yet not a few contemporaries writing the story of the movement, as well as subsequent historians and cultural critics, preferred to substitute an inescapable teleology for the uneasy co-existence. The institutional machinery had to triumph in the end, and many placed that triumph before 1914. Those who had themselves followed the path from branch to Parliament (see the life stories of most ILP leaders) could be excused for thinking that the whole world moved with them, but their laments for the passing of a socialist or working-class communalism did not necessarily reflect the experience of others. Nevertheless, by the time of the first Labour government, the conceptual opposition had come to be seen more than ever as an opposition between past ideal and present reality. The narrative of historical transformation within the 1880 to 1914 block, however, also clashes with the perception of socialist literary

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continuity in the same period. As a type of writing more than usually contingent upon political developments, socialist fiction would surely have reflected a shift as significant as that from communalism to statism. Yet a text like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – the product of several living traditions rather than a consciously post-lapsarian use of the recent past – demonstrates that this was not the case. If the religion of socialism was in its death throes by the mid-1900s, why was Tressell’s educationalist masterpiece produced at precisely this time? The period certainly had its share of political turning points and watersheds: Bloody Sunday, the Dock Strike, the Boer War, the 1906 election, the Great Unrest, World War I and so on, but the socialist literary field throughout this time may be viewed as one unruptured whole. This is not to say that socialist writing was a homogeneous entity: even within the small world of socialist periodicals serialisations ran the gamut from medievalist Morrisian romance to topical realist sketches. There was no lack of generic variety, or scarcity of ideological currents and circles of influence. William Morris’s socialist romances were entirely unlike the satirical realism of Robert Tressell, while the sketches and Whitmanesque poetry of Edward Carpenter, the obscure socialist and working-class novels of Clementina Black and W. E. Tirebuck, the Zolaesque fiction of Margaret Harkness and the idiosyncratic fantasies of H. G. Wells, had little enough in common. The authors were working in very different literary traditions, but this kind of diversity is characteristic of any temporal cross-section – the more important point is that the cultural and political background of socialism of a book written in 1888 and 1908 was recognisably the same. The vaguely guild socialist New Age journal and the Fabian New Statesman of the Edwardian period were very different beasts from the socialist periodicals of the fin de siècle, but they inhabited the same universe and continued the same campaigns as the older Justice and Labour Leader. Shaw and Wells may have changed their minds about the New Life, but Wells was still attacking Fabians in 1911 (in The New Machiavelli) in a way that would not have seemed out of place in the Morrisian 1880s. Blatchford may not yet have come to prominence at the earlier date, but his subsequent work would have been equally intelligible to the first socialist readers of Morris and Shaw, just as the Clarion van of 1914 was recognisably the same as the first van of 1896. Large parts of Blatchford’s 1907 utopia The Sorcery Shop were taken verbatim from Merrie England and Britain for the British, even to the extent that statistics, quotes and documentary examples first used in 1893 were allowed to stand unchanged fourteen years later, despite the detrimental effect their outdatedness may be supposed to have had on the efficacy of the argument. The utopia, like Merrie England, was first

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serialised in the Clarion, and the pressure of competing commitments may go a long way towards explaining Blatchford’s recurrent practice of recycling entire passages, if not chapters, from article to pamphlet to book. But if Blatchford, like so many journalist-writers, was a serial self-plagiarist, his practice only helped to guarantee the continuity of the reader’s experience over several decades. There is no disjunction, no radical shift of paradigm, only a development along several predictable lines; tendencies are not diverted into unexpected channels, but are allowed to come to their fruition. For as far as political literary culture was concerned, Victoria’s reign may as well have lasted until 1917 – the year of the Russian Revolution. The era was brought to an end not by the election of Labour MPs or the founding of the London School of Economics, but by the joint advent of modernism and communism. The socialist poetry of Carpenter and Morris was still recited and sung in the 1910s against a background drawn by Walter Crane; the abyss that separated it from the 1930s communist poetry of the Auden and Spender group is measured not in years but in epochs. The socialist writers of the early twentieth century still operated in a world largely determined by the previous generation. As Jack Mitchell has written: ‘Tressell’s genius did not arise immaculate from the waves. It is the finest flowering of a talent developed by the socialists in the course of the twenty preceding years’ (1987, 51). The numerous socialist propagandists of the late-Victorian period continued their activity into the 1900s. The slate of reminiscences and memoirs by Hyndman (1911 and 1912), Bax (1918), Glasier (1921) and Blatchford (1931) – offering a reassessment of the first phase of the movement by those who had lived through it – only began appearing in the teens, twenties and thirties; other participant autobiographies followed even later. It was by the 1930s (especially with the rise of fascism), not the 1910s, that the textual terrain finally changed. Shaw may have outlived Orwell; Blatchford, Wells and the Webbs outlived some of the Spanish Civil War poets, and not a few of the late nineteenth-century activists (Margaret McMillan, Tom Mann, John Burns) lasted into the thirties and forties. But whatever their internal differences and oscillations of opinion, to a representative of the new generation like George Orwell, they were all creatures of another era. Orwell’s writing may have unconsciously echoed many of the themes and stereotypes of pre-War socialism (his debt to authors like Wells cannot be underestimated), but it betrayed no awareness of any breaking point between 1880 and 1914. As the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier shows, the whole era was associated as much with educational enthusiasm as with top-down reformism – and its survivals deplored equally on both counts.

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Apathy or Enthusiasm? The inadequacy of the ‘disintegration of communalism’ myth becomes even more apparent when one examines the leadership’s conflicted attitude towards the ‘masses’. According to the standard account, the twentieth-century awakening brought with it the discovery that the workers upon whose enlightenment the leaders had pinned their hopes were degraded and passive brutes. In 1900, already in a depressed mood over the Boer War, Beatrice Webb observed: ‘To us public affairs seem gloomy; the middle-classes are materialistic, and the working-class stupid, and in large sections sottish, with no interest except in racing odds . . . The social enthusiasm that inspired the intellectual proletariat of ten years ago has died down’ (1948, 195). Others seemed to concur with this assessment, and mourned the fading away of enthusiasm into apathy and ignorance. The Clarion, also in 1900, carried the following words from the most influential propagandist of the movement: ‘I have now come to the belief that the great mass of workers are too apathetic and selfish to be moved,’ and Blatchford continued to ask himself whether the people were ‘sufficiently educated and intelligent to desire Socialism’ for the rest of the decade (cit. Waters 1990a, 179). In 1901, Hyndman was apparently ‘quite astounded at the ignorance and apathy of [his] fellow countrymen’, and observed that ‘the British working class since the fall of Chartism have become completely rotten . . . They are often positively reactionary’, ‘apathetic, addicted to grumbling and drink, and for the most part indifferent to their own welfare’. ‘Ignorant, conceited and too often degraded and embruted by their wretched surroundings, the English working classes are not nice people to work for’ (cit. Yeo 1977, 53; cit. Samuel 1989, 1: 125; cit. Johnson 2002, 150). Although he still insisted on education ‘from above’, he registered his opposition to the democratic enfranchisement of ‘a mass of deteriorated, uneducated voters’ (cit. Yeo 1987, 259) because it was detrimental to that very education. Bax, more famous for his abstract preoccupation with questions of philosophy and history than for any particular interest in John Smith of Oldham, was appalled by the reaction to the Boer War, and the contemptible spectre of the flag-waving, beer-swilling, musichall jingo took an increasingly prominent place in his journalism after the turn of the century. He held, like many, that if socialism had gained ground immeasurably since the heady days of the early eighties, it had also degenerated in a lot of respects. In 1905, Wells berated ‘the ignorance, the want of courage, the stupid want of imagination of the very poor, too shy and timid and clumsy to face any change they can evade!’ (1907a, 34). Glasier and Carpenter – the ILP evangelist and the poet of

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democracy – also came to express doubts about the motivations, apathy and inertia of the masses by the turn of the century. That is one version of what happened, favoured by historians as an explanation for the decline of the religion of socialism and the ‘making socialists’ approach. But it is based on a very selective reading. Wells followed up the gloomy characterisation of the Edwardian masses just cited with the assertion that ‘popular education is doing its work; and I do not fear but that in the next generation we shall find Socialists even in the slums’ (1907a, 34), while Hyndman continued in the same breath with his insults: ‘[W]e must not despair on that account . . . but must keep working on to awaken them to class-consciousness and vigorous action’ (cit. Johnson 2002, 150). The year 1900 was no sort of turning point for Hyndman, who already as early as 1883 entitled the chapter of his history dealing with the post-1848 years ‘The Period of Apathy’. Bax believed that the socialism of the eighties and nineties had been ‘mainly a middle-class movement’ precisely because it was then that the workers ‘were largely apathetic and unresponsive’, whereas an ‘increase of education and intelligence in the English working classes’ only became apparent in the 1900s (1918, 72, 70). Closer examination of the evidence does in fact show that there was never any smooth progression from faith to disillusionment: the two co-existed from the very beginning, and words of praise mingled with abuse in all mouths from the 1880s onwards. That there was cause for hope but that there were also grounds for fear in the behaviour of the workers, that their ignorance was appalling but that there was always a possibility of improvement, was recognised throughout the period. It was one thing when a confirmed statist like Ramsay MacDonald told an ILP meeting that ‘we can talk socialism seriously to [the man in the street] and we will likely disgust him’ (cit. Coleman 1994, 53), or Beatrice Webb affirmed her lack of ‘faith in the “average sensual man”’, and gave her private judgement of ‘the rank and file of [English] Socialists’ at the London International Socialist Congress of 1896 – ‘the callow youths and maidens of the I.L.P. and S.D.F.’ – as ‘unusually silly folk (for the most part feather-headed failures)’, who ‘approached raving imbecility’ (1948, 120, 134). Such pronouncements came as no surprise from the ideologues of state socialism who were prone to regard the policy of workers’ self-education with Gissing-like contempt. But ironically, the worst offenders when it came to castigating workingclass apathy and ignorance were the very ethical evangelists whose soft-headedness and sentimentality had become a cliché in some quarters. Being more invested in converting the people, they were the more easily horrified when the people proved recalcitrant. As early as 1891,

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Glasier described workers as ‘dunderheads and donkeys . . . sneaks, flunkeys, cowards, traitors and nincompoops’; next year John Trevor, founder of the Labour Church, called them ‘docile, idle and stupid’ (cit. Manton 2001, 16). These were not private expressions of frustration. They appeared in print, and were sometimes addressed directly to live working-class audiences by irritated lecturers. Hyndman was notorious for this kind of tactlessness, and in 1887 he identified the calm acceptance of references to ‘their apathy and ignorance, which I do not believe would be put up with by the men of any other nation’ (1887, 135), as a notable characteristic of the English workers. These were certainly not the same sturdy and independent Englishmen that Hyndman praised in his historical tracts. The yeomen had turned docile. But docility would have been a prerequisite in order to withstand lectures by the likes of James Leatham, the bulk of which were devoted to the chastisement of the ‘men in this hall’ – for their belief in the necessity of capitalism, their acceptance of the status quo, their trades unionism, their selfish thriftiness whose object was to live upon the labour of others and their acquiescence in half-measures like temperance, vegetarianism and Co-operation. It was quite in the order of things when Leatham told his listeners: ‘[Y]ou prefer the man with money to the man with brains and good intentions. You snub your political friends, and send them away sick at heart, and despairing of you and your cause. It is little wonder if at times we get sick of you, get sick of talking to you’ (1892, 3, 5). The sentiment was frequently voiced. Leatham’s complaints were echoed word for word in Merrie England, and Blatchford let show his exasperation with the intended audience at the supposed zenith of ‘New Life’ enthusiasm: ‘Is there any logic in you, John Smith?’ he asked, ‘Is there any perception in you? Is there any sense in you?’ (1895b, 200). To his friend and Clarion co-founder Alex Thompson he wrote: ‘Are these creatures worth fighting for; are they fit to fight alongside of? By God, Alec, I feel ashamed. I do. I feel degraded. We cannot win battles with such a rabble rout’ (cit. Thompson 1951, 137). In 1892 Blatchford continued to complain to Glasier of their selfishness, ‘apathy, ignorance, stupidity, and meanness’ (cit. Manton 2001, 16), and he did not feel obliged to hide his doubts from the Clarion readership: ‘I am beginning to think the British working man just a little bit more stupid than I had imagined,’ he wrote in the newspaper (cit. Thompson 1951, 137). There was no need to wait until 1900 to express that opinion. Hyndman could be no less scathing. ‘A slave class cannot be freed by the slaves themselves,’ he recorded in his autobiography. ‘The leadership, the initiative, the teaching, the organisation, must come from those who were born into a different position’ (1911, 432) – not fostered, as Morris and

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Blatchford would have had it, and as Hyndman himself averred on other occasions, in the workers themselves. One article in the Social Democrat expressed disdain extreme enough to undermine the very rationale of propaganda activity: The man in the street is not converted to ideas; he drifts along the sluggish current of public opinion . . . He will enter on a state of brotherhood, not as a result of being preached at (for to preaching he is impervious), or from any inner conviction (with which he is never troubled), but simply because the drift of economic evolution carries him with it. (cit. Coleman 1994, 53)

But even those who believed in preaching went about it in a highly paradoxical manner. In the very act of standing on a platform to convert the minds of his listeners, Hyndman would taunt them ‘with their apathy, indifference and ignorance’. In his autobiographical account of ‘speaking at public meetings in halls and in the open air’, he painted a picture of working-class crowds in the East End of London, at once hopelessly debauched and sharply inquisitive. He accused them to their faces of being ‘idiots’, incapable of understanding their own power, ‘destitute of any sense’ to put up as they did with their conditions of life instead of organising politically. This was a different experience from addressing receptive Oxbridge undergraduate audiences: Hyndman’s disgust with the ‘beer-swilling, gin-absorbing’ public of the Radical Clubs was apparent (1911, 354–6, 342–4). But unflattering assessments of the average man frequently came in tandem with calls for self-government of the purest communal kind. This was not seen as a contradiction: the leaders were lamenting the wasted chances, for it was precisely the fulfilment of their own high potential that the working class’s baser qualities perversely inhibited. In 1894 Blatchford wrote: The greatest bar to successful self-government by the people is the general ‘apathy’ of the average man. The masses have been so used to the pernicious practice of follow-my-leaderism, that nothing short of an earthquake will make them think for themselves or act for themselves . . . It is impossible to establish rule by the People so long as the People are too idle, too heedless, too ignorant, or too diffident to master and manage their own affairs. We shall never see a Democratic England while the bulk of the People wait to be led. (cit. Thompson 1951, 135–6)

In an 1887 article for the Contemporary Review, Hyndman anticipated this democratic frustration. There was no sign here of elitist hankerings after change from above, but also no leniency towards the perceived flaws of the working class:

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Nothing is more discouraging to any one who goes much among the workers than their lack of initiative and ‘go’ . . . they too often display hopeless stolidity when the possibility of complete change is pointed out to them. Among the older ones apathy has become chronic . . . Moreover, they are so accustomed to put out their thinking and political organisation to be done for them by this faction or that, by a wire-puller or a sectarian of some sort, that the idea that any real change for the better must come from themselves seems absurd to them at first . . . [They] are so far quite incapable of taking any initiative of their own to remedy their own deep-seated grievances. (129–30)

But for all his pessimism, Hyndman could also see the silver lining. New working-class leaders were arising, young men from the board schools who were not afraid to voice their discontent: ‘the period of social apathy is clearly at an end’, ‘that hopeless apathy which until lately has afflicted the whole working community’. The assessment may not have been judicious, it may have veered from extreme harshness to unfounded expectation, but it could not be accused either of simpleminded rosiness or of unrelieved gloom. Like most of his contemporaries, Hyndman could see both sides of the issue. On the one hand, the workers were ‘too ignorant, too apathetic, and too much split up among themselves’, the gulf between the unorganised and the unskilled and the unionised aristocracy of labour was too wide. Hyndman, like Leatham and Morris, believed that the workers’ preferred means of addressing the roots of their misery, such as teetotalism and Co-operation, were of limited usefulness. But on the other hand, working people were ‘more open to the reception of high conceptions of duty and far-reaching ideals of what might be than the upper or middle class’; they displayed ‘great qualities of citizenship’, and managed to acquire knowledge despite degrading overwork and complete lack of leisure. Above all, they possessed the unsurpassed virtue of solidarity, the ‘feeling of fellowship’: ‘Working-men, whatever may be their deficiencies in other respects . . . do as a rule stand by one another in trouble . . . the poorer they are the more certain is it that they will help their friends in distress’ (1887, 136, 123, 128, 132, 135, 133, 126). All that was needed to transform this unconscious communal tendency into socialist fellowship was a political awakening. For when all was said and done, revolution – the pressure to turn theory into practical politics – had to come from below. The working classes had to take control of administration and learn to manage their own wealth, thus acquiring the ‘democratic training for self-government’ that had been part and parcel of ‘the recognition of common interests and mutual duties in village communities’ (Hyndman 1883, 404, 448). The example of past community was to light the way to the future. As Harry Quelch, another SDF stalwart, wrote: ‘The

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emancipation of the working-class must be the work of the working class themselves,’ the socialists had only to raise their ‘consciousness of their present enslaved position’ and inspire them with a ‘passionate desire for their own emancipation’ (cit. Johnson 2002, 150–1). The double optimistic/pessimistic vision was also characteristic of Morris, whose pronouncements had far more in common with this kind of rhetoric than factional differences would allow him to admit. Ironically (given that this was Hyndman’s constant refrain), in a letter of explanation regarding his secession from the SDF and founding of the Socialist League, Morris accused Hyndman of ignoring the real difficulty of ‘the apathy of the working-classes’. Miserable and ignorant people could not and would not rise, he argued, ‘there is no revolt as yet among the workers’ and ‘preaching wont [sic] turn men into revolutionists, but men driven into revolutionary ideas may be educated to look to the right aims instead of wild folly’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 372, 402). ‘The education of the vague discontent which (happily) is now so prevalent among the workers into a definite aim, is the chief business of the Socialist League,’ he explained in ‘The Policy of the Socialist League’, ‘thereby to quicken their desires and give something for their intelligence to seize hold of, and for their hope to feed on’ (Morris 1994, 361). But Morris could never really make up his mind as to whether or not the workers were ripe for revolt. In 1884 he remarked on the ‘large audiences’ gathered ‘in London by the Socialist speakers’, and the ‘cheers’ with which Radical Clubs received ‘the name of the Social Democratic Federation’. Neither did he find the Manchester working men ‘stupid or contented’: ‘they seemed much interested in what undoubtedly was new to most of them’; ‘I had about a dozen of them round me after my Saturday’s address, and we had a brisk conversation’; ‘I think I might convince some of them.’ He was, however, fully aware that the Manchester ‘aristocracy of labour’ whom he had addressed represented a very different class from the enslaved agricultural labourers of Wiltshire or ‘the frightful crowd which I saw thronging the [London] streets on the occasion of the franchise demonstration, composed of men and women without hope or thought, far worse than ordinary savages’. They could certainly not be trusted with revolutionary action, nor were they community material. In 1885 his lecture trip up North gave some grounds for hope: in Manchester Morris was ‘feeling good on the whole: very eager discussion’; Oldham was ‘a good place if properly worked strike threatened [sic] . . . the Soc. Union is really doing good work and is very active’; in Desborough ‘class-feeling [was] strong . . . among the workers . . . I think we shall get a branch here’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 326–8; 2: 443–4). Although English socialism was not yet

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organised, in Glasgow and Edinburgh socialist principles were making headway, and socialist students at the University did not waste time with ‘legislative machinery and the like; what they do care for is the moral side of it, the introduction of a higher ethics into work and life’ (Pinkney 2005, 28). In 1886 the prospects for community brightened up even more: Morris’s socialist lectures in Sheffield were well attended and well received, the interest in the subject had increased since a year and a half before: ‘indeed I have never stood before a more sympathetic audience’. In Liverpool ‘the hall was crowded with an audience mostly of working men, who not only listened with very great attention, but took up all the points . . . with very hearty applause’. They were ‘eager to ask questions’ and to ‘learn’. The 800–strong working-class audience in Norwich ‘seemed to be quite in sympathy with the movement . . . it seems as likely a place as any in England for the spread of Socialism’. Morris concluded his Commonweal account with the assurance that ‘everywhere people are willing and eager to listen to Socialists, and that the doctrines will take root’ (1994, 128–30). But the very next year, in 1887 (26 January, 7 February), he recorded in his Socialist Diary an assessment of working-class audiences diametrically opposed in its irredeemable pessimism to the upbeat newspaper report: ‘I thought the applause rather hollow’; ‘they seemed to me a very discouraging set of men’; ‘the frightful ignorance and want of impressibility of the average English workman floors me at times’. ‘However simply one puts the case for Socialism one always rather puzzles an audience,’ Morris confessed. The unenthusiastic ‘labourers and their wives’ in the Radical Clubs were ‘perfectly supine and not in the least inclined to move except along the lines of radicalism and trades Unionism’, ‘I doubt if most of them understood anything I said.’ ‘I wonder sometimes if people will remember in times to come to what a depth of degradation the ordinary English workman has been reduced,’ he concluded. The March entries were peppered with admissions of ‘dead’ or ‘wretched’ failures, each providing a ‘fresh opportunity (if I needed it) of gauging the depths of ignorance and consequent incapacity of following an argument which possesses the uneducated averagely stupid person’ (1985, 23, 26, 33, 42). The note of gloom may have chimed with the pronouncements of others in the socialist leadership, but Morris’s perception clashed dramatically with the view from the floor. If no hope for a conscious workers’ communalism could be gleaned from his jottings, the branch report of the 23 February meeting painted a very different picture, complete with ‘enthusiastic reception’, audience participation in the discussion and the conversion of four new members: ‘We closed as

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usual with singing’ (cit. Morris 1985, 34). Morris obviously underestimated his persuasive power. The reaction to another of his lectures was described by a listener thus: ‘[W]e workmen . . . soon realised the presence of a champion, forgot ourselves, and frequently burst into rounds of applause’ (cit. Yeo 1977, 29). His lectures in Manchester in 1885 were followed not just by heated discussions and social events, but by the recruitment of new members to the Manchester Socialist Union; the audiences enthusiastically purchased Commonweals and pamphlets. Charles Rowley, founder of the Ancoats Brotherhood, remembered how Morris ‘lectured for us at Ancoats in his Socialistic days to enthusiastic audiences of nearly a thousand . . . It was delightful to watch his patience when the same old questions were asked by labouring men, or his vehemence when flooring some well-to-do jabberer’ (cit. Frow and Frow 1996, 12, 14, 10). A few years later the communal readings of News from Nowhere and singing of Morris’s chants, the embroidering of banners and the decoration of walls by ILP and SDF branches with quotes from A Dream of John Ball, belied Morris’s downhearted assessment and testified to the existence of at least some audiences that could hardly be described as supine. Leatham and Glasier recalled Morris’s preaching in their memoirs, while enraptured listeners expressed their adulation in verse: ‘Like an archangel in the morning sun / He stood with a high message, and men heard / The rousing syllables, and scarcely stirred, / Rough though they were, until the tale was done’ (cit. Frow and Frow 1996, 23). But if Morris was pessimistic in 1887, in 1888 things seemed to be looking up again. The progress of ‘Socialist propaganda in Norwich’ was a cause for celebration, to be contrasted with other towns. The branch welcomed the speakers with ‘singing and recitation, and agreeable converse generally’; people were ‘attentive and sympathetic’ and ‘listened eagerly’; speeches were ‘received with much enthusiasm’, and the questions demonstrated that the working-class audience ‘took up every point in the [difficult] lecture’. They did ‘not come to stare or loaf, but to listen’: ‘it was clear that the whole audience were really Socialists’ (Morris 1994, 383–5). Morris’s lecture tour of Scotland, including all the major cities and a number of villages, was plagued by bad turnout due to inclement weather, but he still believed that the movement had gained ground there and the progress since the previous year had been ‘remarkable’. A few months later in Manchester he was pleased with the eagerness of the workers, though the ‘lower middle-class’ and the ‘aristocracy of labour’ who made up most of the listeners were not as forthcoming. In the next four days he also lectured in Bolton, Blackburn, Liverpool and Rochdale: the reception differed according to the

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make-up of the audience, but it was obvious that the SDF branches in Lancashire were doing very well, and the socialist autodidacts deserved praise (1994, 352–6, 390–3). In 1890, reviewing the first seven years of the movement in the Commonweal, Morris congratulated his fellow socialists on their success in raising the general discontent, but chided them for failing to develop a ‘talent for administration and conduct of affairs’. When he ‘first joined the movement [he had] hoped that some working-man leader, or rather leaders, would turn up, who would push aside all middle-class help, and become great historical figures’, but this did not happen. And even the wider acceptance of socialism had its disappointing side: ‘Our very success has dimmed the great ideals that first led us on; for the hope of the partial and, so to say, vulgarised realisation of Socialism is now pressing on us.’ ‘Sordid and discouraging’, though ‘necessary’ methods had become more important than ‘ideals’, ‘means’ were mistaken for ‘ends’. When in a dark mood Morris was always liable to endorse the lapsarian narrative. Fabian-style reforms, he maintained, would never lead to community, and workers would remain slaves until they learned to ‘manage their own business themselves’, ‘to do without masters’, to believe ‘in their own capacity to undertake the management of affairs . . . When they are so prepared, then Socialism will be realised; but nothing can push it on a day in advance of that time’ (1994, 490–4). Blatchford and Tressell would later repeat that message ad nauseam, but Morris, only the month before, had assured an interviewer that the working classes [were] being thoroughly permeated by Socialist ideas. It is that which has given a totally new significance to all the recent strikes. Till lately a successful strike for higher wages was an end in itself . . . the recent strikes . . . have all been part of a great movement. They have been means to a further advance.

In 1889 Morris had already welcomed the ‘element of conscious or semiconscious attack on the slave-drivers generally which distinguish[ed the Dock Strike] from the usual trade union bickerings’ (Pinkney 2005, 50–1), and over the next half a decade he would go on to develop that view despite occasional relapses into pessimism. In 1892 he wrote in the Hammersmith Record: ‘For us Socialists this obvious move forward of the class-feeling is full of real hope; for we cannot doubt that it is the result of the last ten years of Socialist agitation’ (cit. Thompson 1977, 599). ‘Ten years ago,’ he repeated in 1893, ‘the British working classes knew nothing of Socialism . . . This is now so much changed that . . . those working men who take genuine interest in general politics are in favour of Socialist tendencies as far as they understand them’ (Morris

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and Bax 1893, 269–70). In 1894 he told an interviewer from Justice: ‘Socialism has made considerable progress in this country – more, I think, than the most sanguine among us could have anticipated ten years ago’ (Pinkney 2005, 84), and by 1896 he could state confidently that ‘the attitude of the workmen toward Socialism has quite altered within the last twelve years’. It was now ‘widely accepted’ not just among the middle classes or ‘small knots of Socialist preachers’, but among the strikers, who were ‘pushing it forward practically, though in a vague and unorganised manner’. No longer was it a case merely of ‘the spread of academic discussion, or the setting forth of Utopias with their roots in the air’. ‘For a long time the struggle was blind and narrow, but within the last few years it has become a conscious strife’ (1999, 188–9, 191). Conscious socialist community was being forged before Morris’s very eyes, and when he was optimistically inclined, he was capable of seeing it. It is safe to assume that when Morris died in 1896 he was still celebrating the growth of militant working-class organisation outside the state. But within a week of his death, in a Daily Chronicle obituary ‘William Morris as a Socialist’, reprinted in a special Morris issue of the Clarion, Shaw announced that after the Trafalgar Square fiasco of 1887 the disillusioned Morris had retreated from socialist activity. By the end of his life, claimed Shaw, Morris had ‘practically adopted the views of the Fabian Society as to how the change would come about’ (1896, 325). So did the story of the falling off take root, and Morris was probably spinning in his freshly dug grave. The evidence, however, contradicted the facile generalisation of the ‘two phases’ narrative, just as the ample record of audience abuse by self-proclaimed democrats like Blatchford and Hyndman tarnished the image of a golden age. In 1890, Leatham was very sanguine about the socialistic views of the unemployed in Aberdeen: he felt encouraged by ‘the interest they manifested in the news of the movement and the literature and the men connected with it’. Many would read the Commonweal and other publications in ‘the public reading-room (in this northern town an exceptionally well-patronised institution) . . . That it is the same with the workers of other towns one after another of my Socialist friends have assured me; and, indeed, I have seen it for myself’ (1890, 2–3). A year later he was engaging in tirades against these very same workers (see his Class War). If one is to make sense of all the pronouncements on the subject of the masses, therefore, one must choose between two possibilities. Regional and occupational differences aside, either audiences swung from apathy to enthusiasm and back at the drop of a hat and several times a year, or hopes for improvement simply co-existed with dismay in the minds of the observers, and

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prompted them to focus now on the positive signs and now on the discouraging aspects of working-class activity. The fact that Morris, whose name above all others was associated with the communal version of socialism, could descend to such depths of despondency at a time when – according to the dominant paradigm – the tide of enthusiasm ran so high, and reach such peaks of optimism when everyone around him was supposedly languishing in despair, is more than a warning against the danger of simplifying complex situations. It is a reminder that faith in the efficacy of the education of the working class towards socialism always existed side by side with a painful perception of the difficulty of the task – a difficulty that it was natural to ascribe to the recalcitrance of the human material with which the socialist propagandist had to work.

Notes 1. In fairness to Lansbury, it must be said that his autobiography does not in any other way participate in the ‘two phases’ narrative. On the contrary, he confirms throughout his own and others’ thriving faith in socialism, and concludes with a vision of the dream becoming reality that is worthy of the most utopian statements of the golden age: ‘These millions are wakening: when at last they really arise they . . . by their own work and organisation will lead themselves into the promised land of Socialism’ (1928, 288). 2. Morris’s description of the socialists of the 1880s as a ‘little band of oddities’ was typical: ‘a few working-men . . . a sprinkling of the intellectual proletariat . . . one or two outsiders in the game political; a few refugees from the bureaucratic tyranny of foreign governments; and here and there an unpractical, half-cracked artist or author’ (1994, 489).

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Chapter 6

Education and Association

The Religion of Socialism It has long been known that ‘preaching the socialist word’ (Samuel 1980, 48) was an activity with many of the characteristics of a revivalist religious movement. Socialist street-corner orators, competing with the Salvation Army for the attention of the working class, resembled nothing so much as missionaries fishing for the souls of the unbelievers. They also had a lot to say about Christianity as such: Dennis Hird, first principal of Ruskin College, churned out books like The Believing Bishop and Jesus the Socialist. The penny fortnightly ‘Pass On Pamphlets’ and the ‘Clarion Pamphlets’ featured titles about Christianity and socialism from the likes of Blatchford, Conrad Noel, Joseph Clayton, Tom Mann and the Rev. Percy Dreamer. Some of these were atheist polemics, others – like the publications of Stewart Headlam – were expressions of Anglican Christian socialism, many were reprinted numerous times by labour presses. In The Service of Humanity, Headlam preached ‘the Christian Communism of the Church of the Carpenter’, and admonished his congregation to ‘remember that it is a Socialistic Carpenter whom you are worshipping’. His sermons urged listeners to strive to abolish class distinctions, to ‘do your best to bring about a better distribution of wealth and leisure’, and to ‘agitate for social reform’ (1882, 3, 13, 58, 95). But Christianity, as friend or enemy, had nothing to do with the kind of preaching that was advocated by Morris and his followers. ‘Our immediate aim should be chiefly educational,’ Morris wrote in 1884, ‘in short, to make Socialists however slowly for the permeation of the society in which we live’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 364), and in every article and lecture he repeated the ‘making socialists’ mantra. Once the people are convinced of the benefits and plausibility of the creed,

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they will find out what action is necessary for putting their principles in practice . . . We Socialists can do nothing else that is useful, and preaching and teaching is not out of date for that purpose, but rather for those who, like myself, do not believe in State Socialism, it is the only rational means of attaining to the New Order of Things. (Morris 1994, 493–4)

Education would lead to co-operation – the instrumental co-operation needed to achieve socialism, and the intuitive co-operation necessary to live it – it was the rational road to the creation of a communal socialist consciousness. Morris was not the only one to strike up the note of teaching and preaching towards the ‘New Order’; that was also Robert Blatchford’s avowed goal throughout his active political life, and his entire output was merely a series of somewhat unoriginal variations on the theme. ‘I think that the best way to realise Socialism is – to make Socialists . . . My work is to teach Socialism,’ to get ‘recruits for the Socialist Army . . . The most useful work which Socialists can do at present is the work of education and organisation’ (Blatchford 1895b, 197, 104–5). Shaw would later mock the naïveté of the approach: ‘We will explain our good intentions and our sound economic basis to the whole world: the whole world will then join us . . . and we shall inaugurate the millennium’ (cit. Yeo 1977, 46). But this was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Fabian permeation was a strategy no less dependent on the making of socialists than Morris’s and Blatchford’s propaganda drive; it was merely aimed at a different demographic. Shaw’s criticism only underlined the ubiquity of the proselytising impulse, the omnipresence of the evangelistic diction. Wells was a lapsed Fabian who understood this well, and during his time in the Society he attempted to extend the evangelising activities of working-class-orientated groups like the Clarion Fellowship, the ILP and the SDF to a different target audience: There remains for us an enormous field still untouched in which . . . we ought to be working most strenuously now, and that is the field of socialistic propaganda among the educated classes and the middle classes . . . All this great mass needs educating for socialism, and then organizing for socialism.

Wells may have dismissed Morris on more than one occasion, but their vocabulary was identical. He wished to transform the exclusive Fabian Society into a propaganda organisation, and for this purpose he advocated, in all seriousness, the same means that he parodied in Ann Veronica: Fabian alliance with the Ethical societies, ‘decentralisation’ and the creation of ‘a great network of . . . local nuclei’, ‘Sunday afternoon gatherings’ and ‘local meetings’ ‘in which the emotional spirit of

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our propaganda should be kept alive and intensified’. He touched also on ‘the more religious aspect of socialistic propaganda – because, you know, socialism is religious, is to many people at any rate a sufficient religion’. With respect to this side of the enterprise, Wells’s rhetoric could scarcely be distinguished from Morris’s and Blatchford’s. ‘Make socialists and you will achieve socialism,’ he echoed, the only possible socialistic state is a state which is understood, upheld, willingly and cheerfully lived, by the great mass of its people. Even were it possible to achieve really socialistic institutions in our insidious way, what would it all amount to? We should have the body of socialism without its spirit, we should have won our Utopia with labour and stress – and behold it would be stillborn! (cit. Hynes 1968, 393, 407–8, 401)

Here was the same repudiation of mere economic or political solutions, of legislative machinery as an end-in-itself, the same emphasis on the utopia of the conscious community, and the educational means of its attainment. ‘You will find Socialists about,’ Wells wrote, ‘who will assure you that some odd little jobbing about municipal gas and water is Socialism, and back-stairs intervention between Conservative and Liberal the way to the millennium. You might as well call a gas jet in the lobby of a meeting-house, the glory of God in Heaven!’ (1907a, 35–6). The socialist movement had to ‘attempt to create a force of conviction in the community’, to convert the public to its cause. ‘The right way is . . . by the open road of teaching – propaganda. Develop by writing, speaking, teaching the socialist habit of mind’; the ‘supreme need [is an] outspoken statement and open confession of our Socialist faith’ (1907c, 105–6; 1907b, 143). For all his love of scientific statism, Wells believed in a socialist education for a socialist consciousness. In Socialism and the Family he wrote: ‘Socialism is still essentially education . . . a profound change in the circle of human thought and motive’ (1906, 7); and in New Worlds for Old he ‘insist[ed] upon the mental quality of Socialism . . . Ultimately the Socialist movement is teaching’. His ‘unless you can change men’s minds you cannot effect Socialism, and when you have made clear and universal certain broad understandings, Socialism becomes a mere matter of science and devices and applied intelligence’ (1908, 282), is not that different from Blatchford’s ‘give us a Socialistic people, and Socialism will accomplish itself’ (1895b, 198). Socialism ‘is to me . . . the form and substance of my ideal life, and all the religion I possess’ (Wells 1906, 5) were words to which prominent activists in most of the socialist factions at the turn of the century could have subscribed. Making socialists by teaching the new creed in order to achieve the Kingdom of Socialism on Earth was the fundamental

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article of belief. Beyond it tactical paths diverged; fault lines opened up as soon as it came to the issue of methods: for the likes of Blatchford propaganda was the be-all and end-all, for many others it was one necessary but insufficient factor. Marxists like Bax and Morris cleaved to the idea of working-class organisation and possible revolutionary transformation; Labourites like Glasier pinned their hopes on Parliament. But whatever their doctrinal differences, the object of all believers in the religion of socialism was succinctly expressed by William Morris in the mid-1880s: ‘The work that lies before us at present is to make Socialists’, ‘our business is more than ever Education’ (1994, 100, 125). And whether they reacted against Morris, like Wells, or considered him a mentor, like Blatchford and Glasier, these words remained a guiding principle. No single sect had the monopoly on ‘religiosity’ and its accompanying propagandistic and utopian associations. Ritualistic hangovers like Labour Churches and Socialist Sunday Schools, with their hymns and commandments, or Stewart Headlam’s Christian socialist Guild of St Matthew, were obvious contenders, but the spirit of utopianism and the rhetoric of political conversion pervaded the entire movement to some extent. The anti-Christian Marxists wrote catechisms, and there was no discernible difference in this regard between the followers of a ‘Socialist evangelist’ like Blatchford (Thompson 1951, 162) and the branch members of organisations that had explicit electoral (SDF, ILP) or revolutionary (Socialist League) agendas. Bax theorised about the ‘religion of socialism’ in countless articles from the 1880s onwards – even entitling his much-reprinted collection The Religion of Socialism. He used the phrase in The Manifesto of the Socialist League and in Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome. Glasier also contributed to the elaboration of the concept in a pamphlet published by Blatchford’s Clarion Newspaper Company and co-authored with Katharine Conway, The Religion of Socialism: Two Aspects. Although they hailed from the opposite ends of the socialist spectrum, and had virtually incompatible ideological perspectives, Bax and Glasier both speculated about the nature of the new socialist ethic. They could sound surprisingly alike when dealing with the issue: ‘Hence I, for my part, stick to the old word “religion” . . . i.e. the ideal of Socialism, of human solidarity,’ wrote Bax (1901, 6). ‘Socialism, therefore, is religion,’ echoed Glasier. ‘Socialism gives us our highest ideal of the conduct of life . . . it is our aim and prophecy, and to it is due the utmost and gladdest devotion of all our gifts and powers.’ It is ‘an all sufficing religion of itself – so far as concerns the doings and relations of men and women in the visible world . . . it derives its authority from

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no other religion’. The latter point was indeed important: socialism is ‘not that part of religion that relates to our beliefs concerning God, immortality’, Glasier wrote, ‘but that part . . . that concerns the right state of our present lives, the right state of our relation to our fellows’. ‘Socialism has solely to do with the weal of society upon this planet’; ‘it is time we were setting ourselves to the realisation of our fullest hopes of life upon earth’ (Glasier 1925, 173; Conway and Glasier 189-?, 10, 16). In ‘Socialism and Religion’, Bax also rejected the ‘other world’, claiming that socialism brought ‘back religion from heaven to earth’ and looked ‘to another and higher social life in this world. It is in the hope and the struggle for this higher social life . . . that the Socialist finds his ideal, his religion . . . the reconstruction of society in the interest of all’ (1886, 52). The focus on community in ‘this world’ made unlikely bed-fellows of militant Marxists and Socialist Sunday School founders such as Archie McArthur, who wrote twopence pamphlets with titles like A World of Justice and Love: Its Possibility and Religion and Socialism: A Plea for Both. The Socialist Sunday School movement’s statements of aims affirmed that ‘Socialism is essentially a religion . . . The Socialist . . . wants to see the Kingdom of Love and Happiness established here and now . . . Surely this is but the practical working out of Christianity’s fundamental ethic, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”’. (Walford 1908, 1–2). Or as Blatchford put it somewhat more radically in a penny ‘Clarion Pamphlet’ helpfully entitled The New Religion: The old religion obeys half the command: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself.’ It stops short before it comes to its neighbour. The new religion begins at its neighbour, though it does not necessarily end there . . . We want a realisation, in fact, of the brotherhood we hear so much about in theory . . . Our religion is the religion of humanity. (1897b, 6, 11)

Sunday School lesson books disseminated this rhetoric to a rising generation. Stories ended with morals like: ‘This is the Spirit of Humanity, of whom we are all the daughters and sons, and whose service is our religion . . . [it] speaks of the glory of fellowship . . . the victory of love’; ‘the whole world slowly approaches federation under the banner of the Religion of Humanity’ (Gould 1913, 237, 259). The Socialist Sunday Schools: Aims, Objects and Organisation ‘Declaration of the First Principles of Socialism’ stated that ‘morality is the fulfilment of one’s duty to the community . . . Socialism is something more than a political theory – it is a Way of Life, unhampered by dogma, either political or theological . . . Society [is] an organization for the purpose of mutual

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service . . . the best interests of the individual are to be found in working collectively for the good of all’ (Socialist Sunday School Collection, Uncatalogued, Annual and National Conferences, LHASC, 1–3). This transcendence of both theological and political dogma was highlighted by Blatchford at every opportunity: ‘Their movement was not politics to them; it was religion’ (1931, 207), he wrote of his much maligned audiences in his autobiography. Our new religion turns its back upon religious symbolisms and ceremonies and display . . . [It] is something much higher and much greater than a wage question, an hours’ question, or a franchise question . . . it is something more than a mere system of scientific government, something more than an economic theory, something more even than political or industrial liberty . . . As John Trevor said in the Labour Prophet: ‘It has not been to a new economic theory merely that these converts have been introduced. It has been to a new life. Their eyes shine with the gladness of a new birth. (1897b, 3, 2)

The converts themselves concurred. Socialism was ‘Religion the binder without Theology the Separator’, said one participant (cit. Yeo 1977, 36); ‘In 1900 we got converted to socialism . . . We used that term just as the Methodists did, to express a keen sense of moral and spiritual rebirth,’ confessed another autobiography (cit. Samuel 1980, 47). Words like ‘conversion’, ‘gospel’ and ‘missionary’ became the fundamental building blocks of socialist discourse. And because it transcended dogma, the religion of socialism could also transcend factional divisions. Blatchford readily acknowledged the variety of ideological bases from which it could spring: If you asked a London Socialist for the origin of the new movement he would refer you to Karl Marx and other German Socialists. But so far as our northern people are concerned . . . the new religion, which is Socialism . . . is more largely the result of the labours of Darwin, Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman . . . To love each other as brothers and sisters, and to love the earth as the mother of us all, that is part of our new religion. (1897b, 2–3)

Though the Manchester Guardian famously, and on the whole correctly, claimed that ‘for every convert made by Das Kapital there were a hundred made by Merrie England’ (Blatchford 1931, xiii), no one thought it incongruous to apply the word ‘convert’ to adherents of Marx’s ‘scientific’ socialism. Majority Labour or minority Marxist, singing the praises of a Positivist or quasi-Christian love and altruism, or warning in stern tones of an imminent class war, they were all out to ‘make socialists’.

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Educating the Ignorant There was only one problem: not everyone wanted to be educated. Audiences, as has been seen, could be apathetic, or downright hostile, and making socialists of people against their will was a tough business. Robert Tressell – or more accurately, his fictional alter ego Frank Owen – was one proselytising convert who found the problem to be well nigh insurmountable. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was, as its insultingly contemptuous title indicated, a sustained indictment of the political passivity and ignorance of the English working class. Tressell had no way of knowing what the subsequent impact of his book would be: in his own experience, if the novel’s portrayal is to be believed, most attempts to make socialists resulted in failure. Audiences continued to appear as unreceptive and uneducable in the 1900s as they did during Morris’s less sanguine moments in the 1880s, but those who addressed them still harboured, for their part, a seemingly unfounded hope. This is the central dilemma of the novel, the mechanism which drives the plot on and on. Attempt succeeds failure in numberless iteration: Frank Owen, continually faulting the workmen for their rejection of abstract thought, resistance to theory and blind reliance on conventional ‘common sense’, has to persist in believing, despite all evidence to the contrary, that rational argument and appeal to reason are the only way to convince them of the truth of socialism. Owen is a representative of the autodidact subculture, in whose educationalist campaign Enlightenment conceptions of reason played a very great part. And ‘reason’ – or the workers’ lack thereof – is a leitmotif of the novel. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists exhibits on the narrative level the paradoxes so apparent in socialist practice. It does little to alleviate the recurring fears of the leadership, depicting the common clay at which so much educational effort was directed in all its frustrating mediocrity. But it is also a case study in the appropriation of various strains of left-wing propaganda by a politicised member of the Edwardian working class, an example of the success, or at least the persistent thriving of the ‘making socialists’ approach. That the labouring classes were stupider than ever was a paradoxical claim to make for a decorator who quoted Ruskin, Morris and Edward Carpenter. A certain section of those classes had fully imbibed and now reproduced the teachings of the socialist evangelists; they were presumably the ones who composed Morris’s more receptive audiences. But, of course, they were an exceptional and self-selecting group. The socialist autodidact of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is virtually a stock figure of labour historiography, but one that

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is ‘not necessarily representative of the broader working-class’. The selfeducated could appear ‘queer and snobbish’ and ‘distance themselves unintentionally or consciously from popular custom’ (Levy 1987a, 23), which is precisely Frank Owen’s predicament in the novel. As Morris put it in 1895, referring to the early days of the socialist movement: ‘Of course there were many working-men amongst us, but they were there by dint of their special intelligence, or of their eccentricity; not as working-men simply. In fact as a friend of ours once said to me, We are too much a collection of oddities’ (1936, 2: 359). Things were not much different in 1905, according to Tressell. Owen repudiates many of the earthier habits of his peers, and is regarded by them as strange and somewhat of an outsider. The stylistic juxtaposition of his unnaturally correct lecturer’s voice with the dialectal speech of the workers is meant to signal audibly the intellectual gap between the self-educated socialist and his dull-witted mates. A tradition of complaints similar to those of middle-class intellectuals existed among the provincial working-class socialists, who struggled no less than their metropolitan ‘superiors’ to elevate and to spread light among their ignorant comrades. Like Hyndman, Blatchford and Leatham, Owen is forever being appalled by the behaviour of the workers, so convinced of their own ‘intellectual inferiority’ that they are unwilling to try to understand anything for themselves, preferring to believe the propaganda of their masters: ‘a flock of foolish sheep [who have] placed themselves under the protection of a pack of ravening wolves’ (Tressell 1997, 541). No one calls it false consciousness, but Owen, his socialist friend Barrington and (not least) the narrator, constantly echo Morris’s condemnation of men so uneducated that they have not even escaped the reflexion of the socalled education of their masters, but in addition to their other mishaps are saddled also with the superstitions and hypocrisies of the upper classes . . . an intellectual slavery which is a necessary accompaniment of their material slavery. That as a mass is what revolutionists have got to deal with. (1910– 15, 23: 268–9)

Morris, however, did not rely exclusively on the powers of reasonable persuasion, whose failure so disheartened educationalists everywhere. Although making socialists was the primary aim, socialism needed to be more than just a ‘movement of opinion’ (Levy 1987b, 148); evangelist exuberance would have to be supplemented by the organisational efforts forced upon the workers by their own circumstances. In 1886 he wrote: No amount of preaching, of enthusiasm, or of devotion even, will induce the workers . . . to accept and to act upon mere abstract propositions . . . necessity must push them on before they can even conceive of the future of equality

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and mutual good-will . . . And necessity only can make them conscious of this [class] struggle. (1994, 207)

In 1892 he admitted that socialist propaganda was not the only source of knowledge: ‘the conduct of the labour war under its present purblind guidance and weak organisation will teach the workers by hard necessity’ (cit. Thompson 1977, 587). Desire and necessity had to act in tandem. But no such consolation is available to Owen. The preaching of ‘abstract propositions’ is the only tool he has at his disposal, for in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists ‘necessity’ is a dirty word, the last resort of a traitor to the socialist cause. The nameless man with the scar is one such traitor – a former socialist lecturer who becomes a victim of audience hostility and turns hired orator for the party of the exploiters. Now that he dupes the people for money they adore him; when he was a socialist evangelist they had nearly stoned him to death. The educationalists, those who persist in regarding the workers as ‘rational beings’, are wasting their time, he argues. Only ‘object lessons’ will compel the poor; they must learn by ‘bitter experience and not from theoretical teaching’ (Tressell 1997, 545–6). This was a common refrain in the movement: English workers, unlike their advanced Continental counterparts, were deemed to be particularly unresponsive to abstract economic formulations. In line with the national stereotype, they were supposed to be empirical, not speculative – a stereotype Blatchford made much of in Merrie England. ‘You pride yourself upon being “a shrewd, hard-headed, practical man”,’ Blatchford addressed his reader, Hence you have come to believe that you ‘entertain a wholesome contempt for theories’, and have contracted a habit of calling for ‘Facts’ in a peremptory manner, like a stage brigand calling for ‘Wine’ . . . I am myself a plain, practical man. I base my beliefs upon what I know and see, and respect ‘a fact’ more than a Lord Mayor . . . I shall appeal to that robust commonsense and English love of fairplay for which, I understand, you are more famous than for your ability to see beyond the end of your free and independent nose at election times. (1895b, 9–10)

Blatchford’s appeal is dripping with irony, but Tressell’s renegade is deadly serious when he assures Barrington that it is no good trying to ‘reason with them, to uplift them, to teach them the way to higher things’. The workers have never had an ‘independent thought in their lives’, they are the enemy of those who try to help them. The man’s scar takes on a symbolic function: he is someone who has given up the religion of socialism while retaining its theoretical insights. Socialism is true knowledge: the understanding of the causes of misery and their remedy, but the traitor is no longer willing to sacrifice himself in teaching others

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what he has learned – he has lost the naïve zeal to spread the gospel, the ‘good news’. When he served his fellow workmen out of love and ‘sought to teach them how to break their chains’ they hated and injured him, when he helped their masters to rob them they respected him. The renegade’s predicament was familiar to James Leatham and, presumably, to numerous other activists for the Cause. He can recite the educationalist creed: ‘Socialism is practical and inevitable and right; it will come when the majority of the people are sufficiently enlightened to demand it,’ and he does not question its essence (Tressell 1997, 543–6). But unlike Leatham’s ideal agitator of the class war, whose ‘hopes were dashed again and again’, who was abused and mocked and ‘plunged in despair and doubt’, but did not let his ‘hopes and [his] desires go’ (Leatham 1892, 16), the traitor has lost faith in the people’s potential for enlightenment. ‘That enlightenment will never be brought about by reasoning or arguing with them, for these people are simply not intellectually capable of abstract reasoning’ (Tressell 1997, 545). The bitterness and resentment are all Owen’s own, and the renegade simply expresses Owen’s thoughts when he accuses Barrington of attempting to ‘make idealists’ out of savages and beasts: ‘The only things they feel any real interest in are beer, football, betting and [sex].’ And ‘party shibboleths’, Tressell could have added in Morris’s words, for the whole election chapter in which the renegade makes his appearance, with its mindless orgy of violence, its allegorical tableau of the exploited happily harnessing themselves to their elected master’s carriage, is a damning condemnation of the working-class’s irrational allegiance to the Tory or Liberal flag. The renegade is a warning of what Owen and all educationalists could become if they give in to ‘hopelessness’ and contempt; his conversation takes ‘all the heart out of’ Barrington, drains ‘all his enthusiasm’ (1997, 544–5, 540, 547). But unlike the scarred man – unlike the real-life exasperated lecturers who insulted their audiences and gave the hecklers back as good as they got – Owen hangs on to his mad belief in the power of reason. The main elements of Tressell’s narrative were, of course, anticipated in a hundred real-life testimonials. A generation earlier C. Henze, a Bradford Commonweal contributor, complained that the workers were too tired to read anything but the occasional adventure story, that their recreation consisted solely ‘in a pint of beer and a pipe of tobacco’, they derived their opinions from the local press and were indifferent to anything outside their daily toil. The local socialists could not get at them, not least because there was a lack of speakers and a scarcity of means to push propaganda. All these complaints were voiced by Owen more than twenty years later, but in the ‘religion of socialism’ mindset, if apathy

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was the problem, the solution was always more education. The Bradford letter phrased this succinctly: ‘However much we may differ in minor points, as to tactics or organisation of the future free Society, one point is important above all – the Education of the Masses’ (Henze 1886, 289–90). ‘Convince the people, and never mind the parties’ (1931, xiii), was Blatchford’s famous exhortation; organisation was crucial, but it depended on the workers as much as on the ‘evangelists’. As the 1885 secessionists from the SDF asserted in their letter of explanation: a socialist body ‘in the present state of things has no function but to educate the people in the principles of Socialism’ (Kelvin 1984–96, 2: 373). Morris would later come to regret that purism, but education and propaganda would remain, if not the only, still one of the primary functions of most socialist bodies: ‘preaching the Word, tearing the blinkers from the workers’ eyes, revealing the true nature of capitalist exploitation’ (Mitchell 1987, 51). And that is precisely what Tressell was doing with his book and what Frank Owen, a provincial socialist artisan like his creator, was attempting to do inside it. Every now and then, efforts bore fruit: for all the hardships described by Henze in 1886, it was only seven years before Bradford became the home of the newly founded Independent Labour Party. The programme of political instruction for self-emancipation presupposed the ultimate educability of the people; whatever the frustrations of day-to-day experience, socialist consciousness could be raised, discontent could be organised. Yet conviction as to the efficacy of propaganda remained in constant and unresolved tension with scepticism about popular potential, and propagandistic fervour often came in tandem with a paternalistic or condescending attitude towards the capabilities of the masses. Whatever their other ideological divergences, all who held it as a fundamental article of belief that the teaching and conversion of labouring men to the Cause was a primary aim of the movement, also simultaneously suspected those men of gross unreceptivity. Henze’s letter from Bradford is a good instance of the paradox. On the one hand, he hopes that Annie Besant’s lectures will stimulate intelligent workers to think and study and lay the foundation of a better life for themselves. No better statement of the autodidact ethos and the purpose of socialist education can be imagined. On the other hand, the workers are downtrodden slaves who have to be forced to accept what they would otherwise refuse, who take out nothing but ‘trash’, ‘lying novels and sea-adventure stories’ from the free library (1886, 289). This schizophrenia lay at the bottom of most audience abuse. The narrator of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is rarely more polite, and his insults also have the force of lived experience. The heavy (and

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sometimes heavy-handed) use of the bitter ironic tone is one of the distinguishing features of the book, and often in his asides Tressell abandons all pretence of irony and lets indignation and exasperation flow forth unimpeded. Tressell’s stated aspiration is to persuade his readers, but the reader-representatives within his narrative remain unswayed to the end. Frank Owen is not successful: despite his unceasing efforts he fails to convert his workmates, and despite the utopian vision of the conclusion, the actual moral of the novel is grim. If Owen is regarded – in terms of propagandistic purpose – as a stand-in for Tressell, this fact portends no hope for the author’s own project. Robert Tressell was a housepainter like the ones he depicts, and many episodes in the book are based on real incidents. It is easy to imagine him engaging in the kinds of debates with his apathetic or hostile co-workers that form the substance of the book, and the claim in his preface that he invented nothing has more weight than the usual narrator’s ploy. This is not merely a case of autobiographical authorial projection onto the main character (who also, for instance, suffers from tuberculosis). The dramatisation of such debates reminds us that interaction takes place both within and via the novel. The increasingly exasperated socialist lecturer is both the fictional hero and his author; the stubbornly ignorant worker audience – deaf to the call of class consciousness, blind to the blatant facts of exploitation, enmeshed in the capitalist ‘party shibboleths’ – is a set of imagined characters but also the book’s intended readers. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as a whole revolves around the unknown variable at the centre of real-life propaganda activity: the audience response.

Utopia and Propaganda: Robert Blatchford’s Audiences Audiences were crucial, the advent of communal socialism depended on their conversion, but how could one get them to respond and participate? One way out of the difficulty lay in the choice of genre, or method of education: utopia, unlike propaganda, not only allowed the satisfaction of the expository urge, but provided a fictional audience that could be moulded and controlled by the author. The socialist utopia, like the socialist tract, was essentially a question and answer session, but whereas in the tract (as in the lecture) no favourable outcome was guaranteed, in utopia the authority figure was the undisputed fountain of truth, and struggle as the unenlightened guest might, he had to yield in the end to the superior reason of his guide. Propaganda offered no such assurance. The reader may have been present in the text in the form

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of an addressee – as he was present in body in the lecture hall or on the street corner – but his agreement could not be assured by a simple narrative dictat. The author of the lecture or tract could not dispense his advanced brand of knowledge unchallenged; he had to supplicate and leave the audience to decide for itself. Much as Nunquam (Blatchford’s pseudonym in socialist circles) may have striven to impart his wisdom, ‘John Smith of Oldham’ was never as easily convinced by ‘the hardest of hard facts, and the coldest of cold reason’ as he should have been; never did he yield as readily to the persuasion of propagandising preachers as did the utopian traveller to the self-evidently correct demonstrations of his futuristic host. Blatchford was quite conscious of this generic inconclusiveness: When I began these letters, Mr. Smith, I promised to put the case for Socialism before you as clearly and as plainly as I could, asking you in return to render a verdict in accordance with the evidence. I have now done the work as well as I could under the circumstances; and I leave the matter in your hands. (1895b, 9, 201)

This humble attitude was very much in line with Blatchford’s insistence on independent thought, democratic grass-roots action and workingclass agency. It even reflected his invariable resistance to party hierarchies and to what he called ‘Carlyle’s doctrine of hero-worship and follow-my-leader’ (cit. Thompson 1951, 135). He often concluded his pieces by such exhortations to collective self-improvement as: ‘I hope you will be good enough to think about it, for yourselves’ (1989, 101); ‘So, now then, you other fellows, what are you going to do?’ (1895a, 409); ‘The Socialist begs you to form a party of your own, and to do your work yourself’ (1895b, 200). The implicit open-endedness of propaganda suited his purposes much better than the generically imposed authoritarianism of utopia. Propaganda allowed the reader or listener to make up his own mind, but it could not force him to do so. There was a price to be paid for such democratic generosity, however, for all the exasperation and name-calling that the previous sections have documented stemmed from this very open-endedness. It was no wonder if the street-corner orator, hoarse from responding to the taunts and heckles, lost his patience – he did not have the appreciative audience of the utopian guide. After the clearest possible case had been presented, Mr Smith could still choose to vote for Tories or Liberals, in which case Blatchford could only shrug his shoulders and conclude – for once more tolerantly than Tressell – that though ‘the People are neither base nor foolish; they lack self-reliance’ (cit. Thompson 1951, 135). But despite this formal divergence, utopia and propaganda did

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resemble each other in function and technique, and their symbiosis created the type of community that was meant to pave the way for the socialist society of the future. Utopia, like propaganda, was an instrumental genre: fictional audiences aside, its success in the real world was also measured by the degree of its effect upon the intended readers, by its ability to convince, persuade, convert. Both forms attempted to achieve this end by presenting dichotomies, painting the status quo black and their particular favoured alternative white. Blatchford expected propaganda to fulfil the traditional function of utopia: the presentation of an ideal. ‘I hold that the chief work for Socialists is the work of propaganda . . . Our great hope is to bring the Socialist ideal before the people’ (cit. Thompson 1951, 190). And the corollary applied as well. When Blatchford finally came to write a proper utopia – The Sorcery Shop: An Impossible Romance – he took it for granted that the genre was a means of ‘political exposition’, and a way to ‘show what might be done . . . by a united and cultured English people’ (1907, xiii–xiv). Blatchford certainly intended both forms – by providing a moral and economic critique of capitalist society as well as a picture of the desired alternative – to serve the same purpose: the conversion of the reader to socialism, to quote Britain for the British (1902, 2). The method of that book was applicable to all of Blatchford’s output, and when he asserted in the ‘Author’s Note’ to The Sorcery Shop that ‘to indicate the possibilities of communal efforts . . . and to meet the common arguments brought against Socialism . . . was the purpose I had in view’ (1907, xiv), he was merely repeating the prefatory material of the earlier tract. Repetition was one of Blatchford’s most frequently employed rhetorical devices, but identity entailed something more than the mere duplication of arguments and supporting evidence. The fundamental structuring principle of temporal (as opposed to spatial) utopias, the contrast of present misery with future happiness, was also the device of choice in the propaganda of the religion of socialism. Blatchford’s short story ‘The Rioters’, printed in the 1897 collection of Impressionist Sketches, provides a vivid illustration. ‘A poorly paid, middle-aged clerk in a Lancashire cotton factory’ dreams of a great strike. His starving family, the murder of a grocer, the soldiers shooting at a mob of colliers, the narrator’s wife – a ‘demoniacal red-handed figure of revenge’ – and finally his suicide, are all described with a naturalistic intensity that borders on the phantasmagoric. But the winter scene, with its background of blazing buildings and dead bodies gives place suddenly and without explanation to a May day paradise, a bowdlerised Morrisian Merry England of dancing ‘craftsmen and artists’, beautiful maids and bronzed men inhabiting a garden-city Wigan. Two pictures are simply

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juxtaposed; no means of transition from the one to the other is ever specified, except the vague indication by the utopian alter-ego of the narrator’s wife that – echoing News from Nowhere – it ‘shall all be true for others because that [sic.] you have dreamed it’ (1897a, 55, 63, 67–8). Blatchford was adept at juxtapositions of this sort, and in The Sorcery Shop the technique of alternation between the positive and the negative poles becomes wearyingly mechanical. Here is how women are treated under capitalism, and here is their position under socialism; this is how workers use their leisure in utopia, and this is what they must resort to for amusement in reality; consider the demographic data and the crime, housing and disease statistics for London and Glasgow and then cast your eyes over the ‘blossoming woods’ and ‘flowery meadows’ of the new England; admire the health and beauty of the dancers in the elegant ballroom of socialist Manchester, and gaze in disgust at the drunken habitués of the dingy and vulgar dancehall in the Manchester of the present. The same oscillation can be observed even at the rhetorical level, in the wizard guide’s constant invitations to his guests to ‘compare the Socialist ideal’ with the ‘modern British fact’: ‘And now, gentlemen, let us turn our attention to our England.’ The book is merely an extended elaboration of two opposing statements: ‘With these people, in this new England, life itself is beautiful. With us life is sordid, ugly, and monotonous’ (1907, 188, 179, 102, 104). But this, of course, was also the entire thrust of the propaganda, ‘to convince’ the reader, as Blatchford wrote in Britain for the British, ‘that the present system – political, industrial and social – is bad . . . and to prove to him that Socialism is the only true remedy’ (1902, 2). With that purpose in mind, the utopia no more than the propaganda needed to provide an account of the actual process by which the transition to socialism would be effected, whether by a working-class insurrection, Fabian permeation, winning by-elections with the ILP, or campaigning for the referendum and initiative with the Clarion’s A. M. Thompson. The Sorcery Shop was not News from Nowhere, with its detailed description of ‘How the Change Came’. ‘The establishment and organisation of a Socialistic State are the two branches of the work to which I have given least attention,’ Blatchford confessed in Merrie England (1895b, 104). The means would certainly have to be democratic, as befitted the ends, and as a typical ecumenist, Blatchford gave his support to a variety of initiatives. He worked consistently for a united socialist party; he always cited Fabian gas and water municipal programmes as prototypes of viable collectivism; and he concluded Merrie England and Britain for the British by calling on his readers not just to become activists and join socialist societies, but to elect Labour

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representatives. Nevertheless, the single most important duty was proselytising the socialist gospel; all that was necessary was to make socialists and to wait for evolution to bring about the inevitable millennium. As he said in a Christmas 1895 editorial for the Clarion, ‘The greatest and most persistent . . . Worker on our side is Time. Though we lose an election here, though we get a set-back there, though a dozen gallant champions die, Time silently, steadfastly, irresistibly pushes on towards the cure of ills unendurable’ (1895a, 409). But the problem of means could be circumvented altogether, and utopia could be had in the here and now if the generic could be translated into the practical, recreating in life the melding of utopia and propaganda on the page. The socialist propaganda organisations that were supposed to further the coming of the conscious community might actually embody and prefigure in themselves the experience of life under socialism. And that was the function of the Clarion organisations: bodies that existed both to disseminate propaganda and to provide a communal experience for all converts. For Robert Blatchford, to his contemporaries, was not so much the author of Merrie England, as the leading light of the Clarion newspaper; and the Clarion was much more than the socialist newspaper with the largest circulation in the years prior to the First World War. It was the centre of a movement, a state of mind and a way of life for its readers, that very ‘Way of Life’ that the Socialist Sunday Schools evoked in their declarations. The Clarion Fellowship – ‘an association for social intercourse’ – brought people together; the various Clarion Clubs provided a framework for their activities, political and recreational. It was, according to his biographer, ‘what Blatchford meant by Socialism’, an alternative socialist culture in which ‘leisure was an extension of politics’ (Thompson 1951, 159–60). There were Clarion vocal unions and socialist choirs performing songs from the Clarion Songbook, cycling clubs, field clubs and Clarion ramblers, dramatic societies, handicraft guilds, camera and swimming clubs, Clarion clubhouses and summer camps for co-operative holidays, young Clarion Scouts who did propaganda work and were in part responsible for the huge sales of Merrie England, and the Clarion propaganda vans that travelled across the country spreading the message, and were immortalised in a memorable episode of Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The purpose of these various organisations was to provide fellowship for those who shared in the socialist faith, to further the Cause and to offer a foretaste of life under socialism, an experience of communal participation, comradeship and new forms of association for all enthusiastic Clarionettes. The National Clarion Cycling Club was perhaps the model of all such

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groups. Its motto: ‘Fellowship is Life, Lack of Fellowship is Death’, was taken from Morris’s A Dream of John Ball; its letterhead was designed by Crane; its mission was ‘mutual aid, good fellowship and the propagation of the principles of Socialism’, and, more pragmatically, the dissemination of the newspaper after which it was named. The Club’s founder once defined the Clarion cyclist as ‘a Socialist utilising his cycle for the combined purposes of pleasure and propaganda’. Though these two purposes were often at odds – and the cycling societies eventually went the way of the vocal unions and the handicraft guilds by becoming essentially apolitical bodies – in the beginning, at least, it was ‘the Clarion [that] had made Socialists of us; it was the Clarion which had brought us together’. So Blatchford’s propaganda fostered a short-lived socialist utopia in the midst of capitalist society, in which clerks, skilled workers and sympathetic members of the middle class could come together to enjoy their leisure in each others’ company and to engage in further propaganda activities, distributing tracts and leaflets, pasting stickers and addressing public meetings. The circle was complete. If the Clarion cyclists were indeed the ‘travelling prophets of a new era’, as Blatchford called them, and if it was ‘the aim of Socialist missionaries in the Clarion movement to awaken workers to the ideal of a new life’, as one reader of the Clarion Scouts’ monthly journal phrased it, then utopia and propaganda were linked in practice into one indissoluble whole (cit. Pye 1995, 26, 10, 32, 31). The utopia promised by the religion of socialism was achieved in the very act of propaganda.

Association: Solution or Failure? The experience of the Clarion Fellowship showed that propaganda depended for its success upon association. Education, whether towards a revolution or towards some vague sea-change of public opinion and the election of a socialist party, was the engine of the transformation, but it had to be paired with association at all levels of theory and practice. In ‘Dawn of a New Epoch’, Morris expressed the ideal of the future as ‘fellows working in the harmony of association for the common good, that is, for the greatest happiness and completest development of every human being in the community’ (1910–15, 23: 123). Although his Socialist Diary bore witness to failures of branch organisation, Morris never tired of repeating that the basis of socialism was association: ‘The work that lies before us at present,’ he wrote in the Commonweal, ‘is to make Socialists, to cover the country with a network of associations composed of men who feel their antagonism to the dominant classes’

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(1994, 100). As Edward Carpenter wrote in his obituary of Morris, ‘There is no doubt that, in the early days of the Socialist League Morris had . . . a strong hope, that the little branches of the League, spreading and growing over the land, would before long reach hands to each other and form a network of free communal life over the whole country’ (Faulkner 1973, 403). The creation of working-class networks that would help forward the expected change of society and serve as prototypes of the devolved but federated communes of the future was foremost on the agenda of many socialist societies. Papers like the Commonweal existed to facilitate such networks, ‘to link locally based groups to a national centre, serving as the main medium of communication with its variegated membership’ (Levy 1987b, 145). Alongside romances about medieval or future utopian association like A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere, the Commonweal carried reports on the progress of association in the present. Morris’s April 1886 account of ‘Socialism in the Provinces’, for example, welcomed the formation of League branches and ‘socialist bodies’ in the provincial towns – though Morris appreciated how difficult that ‘step of association’ must be – and offered a good snapshot of the interaction between working-class audiences, visiting lecturers and local branches engaging in ‘open-air work’ (Morris 1994, 128). A much more detailed account of rallies and speeches appeared in ‘Socialist Work at Norwich’ in 1888: especially exciting was a meeting on a ‘waggonette’ in front of an audience of 10,000, which opened with the singing of ‘No Master’ by the ‘comrades of the Branch’, and competed with a Salvation Army band (1994, 383–4). In fact, a look at random issues of Commonweal reveals numerous ‘progress of socialism’ reports from various towns and branches, provincial correspondence, a ‘Lecture Diary’ to keep readers informed of what was happening where and a listing of ‘Open-air Propaganda’ with times and places. The early Clarion had also covered branch life (including information on SDF, Fabian, Christian socialist, Labour Church and ILP branches or elections) in its ‘Notes from the Front’ section. A perusal of its issues from 1895 to 1896 turns up lists of meetings and lectures by town, advertisements of ILP Bazaars and fairs, ‘Notes to Clarionettes’ for people to write in with announcements and notices, ‘The Clarion Post-Bag’ which included letters to the editor and commentary from subscribers, a cycling column for Clarion Club reports, sections to keep readers abreast of socialist happenings and parties in other countries like Germany and France, a report from Katharine Conway on the Cinderella project which took children from the slums to the countryside, and numerous other illustrations of a thriving socialist community. The Clarion was

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known for its familiarly conversational and gossipy style, the language was frequently colloquial and even dialectal, peppered throughout with in-jokes, puns and rhymes. It was a prime example of the ‘synthesis between the popular and the political’ (Vincent 1989, 257); not for nothing was Blatchford’s paper and the culture it generated considered by many the epitome of socialist associationism. The range of roles available for a participant in such a network was suitably large. According to one pamphlet, if you wanted ‘to help the Socialist movement’, you could ‘do this in various ways, either as public representative, president, secretary, treasurer, member of committee, public speaker, chairman, writing letters to public press, sticking bills, selling or distributing literature, chalking foot-paths, or ringing of bell announcing meetings, or helping to form an audience indoors, or make a crowd at an out-door meeting’. Disseminating propaganda and facilitating communication in order to extend the reach of the network was one of the most important tasks. Activists were enjoined to Purchase as many Socialist and Independent Labour Newspapers as you can, get your Newsagent to put out Contents Bills, try and sell copies amongst your friends; also purchase Socialist Books and Pamphlets and after you have read them lend them to friends or relatives, or give or send them to the unconverted; try also and sell as many copies as possible . . . do not be afraid to subscribe to the collections to carry on propaganda. (Glyde n.d., back cover)

Robert Tressell, for a time at least, was part of such a network. Hastings formed an SDF branch after the 1906 General Election, and he took part in the local socialist life, lecturing and designing posters and banners. In The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, some evidence of organised nation-wide activity is provided by the remarkable episode of the socialist van – clearly a reference to the Clarion vans that travelled the country from 1896 holding meetings and distributing literature (there were also the red vans of the English Land Restoration League and the yellow vans of the Land Nationalisation Society). A socialist subculture is briefly evoked in the context of a visit by Clarion-style cyclist agitators. The reader gets glimpses of city-dwellers coming in by rail to speak on make-shift platforms, of the pamphlets, banners and songs, as well as the heckling and abuse that were the daily lot of public lecturers or Clarion Scouts (no less in 1906 than in 1886). One of the speakers that the narrator describes could easily have been Morris twenty years earlier – as Leatham or Glasier remembered him in their retrospectives. Throughout the novel, Tressell also incorporates various musical specimens to build up the background of working-class life: religious hymns, music hall songs dating from the 1880s to the 1900s

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and socialist chants, specifically Morris’s ‘The Day is Coming’ and Carpenter’s ‘England, Arise!’ The singing of the latter by the anonymous agitators lifts a curtain on a socialist music culture that was as vital as the more traditional Tory and Liberal repertoires.1 But on the whole, Tressell’s book is not the best place to turn to for illustrations of socialist association. Despite such flashes of optimism, the overall picture is a bleak one, a tangible embodiment of the autodidact’s fraught relationship with his audience. Most of the time, Frank Owen appears as an isolated figure, without access to any kind of support structure. The all-important network of associations, whether of SDF branches or Clarion Clubs, is absent: someone out there prints the socialist matter that Owen reads, but he himself exists in a vacuum. The hostility and violence with which socialist propagandists meet extinguishes even the hope held out by the visiting lecturers – it is one of their speakers who turns renegade and hires himself out as an orator to the Liberals after being seriously injured by a stone. With the exception of the deus ex machina Barrington, Owen possesses no socialist acquaintances, no socialist society has a branch in Mugsborough (unlike its real-life prototype Hastings), and the leaflets Owen and a nameless ‘few others’ (1997, 538) distribute come from nowhere in particular. The fate of those leaflets throws a somewhat ironic light on the instructions to potential helpers of the movement cited above: Owen did his best to convert the other men to his views. He had accumulated a little library of Socialist books and pamphlets which he lent to those he hoped to influence. Some of them took these books and . . . in nine instances out of ten, they had not attempted to read them . . . Some, when Owen offered to lend them some books or pamphlets, refused to accept them, and others who did him the great favour of accepting them, afterwards boasted that they had used them as toilet paper. (367–8)

When recruits were encouraged to ‘do their best’ in distributing socialist literature they were probably not warned of such eventualities. Reports in the labour press describing people ‘flocking’ to welcome the vans, seizing pamphlets and papers ‘greedily’, while ‘Merrie England, Looking Backward, Clarions, Fabian, Clarion and Land Nationalisation leaflets [were being] given away by the thousand’ (cit. Simon 1965, 38), begin to look somewhat exaggerated in light of Tressell’s description. In the very last chapter of the book, Barrington promises to come back with a socialist van: ‘We’ll have some of the best speakers in the movement,’ he says, ‘we’ll hold meetings every night, we’ll drench the town with literature, and we’ll start a branch of the party’ (Tressell 1997, 579). But after almost 600 pages of barely relieved disappointment, one cannot

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help thinking that this utopian scenario is only a bit of Dickensian wish-fulfilment. What caused such failures of socialist association? Though a work of fiction, in this regard The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists may be taken as a documentary portrait of the kinds of fiascos Morris referred to in his diary. Modern historians have argued that audiences were impervious to argument and unimpressed by emotional appeals because they were ‘conditioned by inherited ideologies’ (McKibbin 1990, 24) that emphasised class harmony, free trade, patriotic nationalism and deference to institutions like Parliament and the monarchy. This much the socialists were perfectly well aware of: not for nothing did they stress the brainwashing role of the mass and local newspapers, as well as the deleterious effects of jingoism, and of popular enthusiasm over jubilees and elections. They accused the workers of conservatism and reverence, of a willingness to be bought off by a devious ruling class. Marxist ideologues like Hyndman tended to point fingers at the treacherous aristocracy of labour, or the degraded lumpenproletariat. The brutalised masses could only engage in useless violence, while the skilled artisans who possessed the necessary experience of organisation and administration were also more likely to belong to trade unions, traditionally suspicious of socialist appeals. But worker ignorance – that great scapegoat – could be only part of the explanation, as it was equally palpable in towns that did form successful branches as a result of the dedication of capable men like Owen. Morris judged in ‘Socialism in the Provinces’ that ‘two or three energetic and uncompromising men pushing our principles . . . would soon have a following, especially if they spoke quite roughly and plainly to their listeners’ (1994, 129). According to these criteria Owen’s and Barrington’s efforts should have met with success. There must have been other reasons for failure. Local features, including everything from strikes and the weather to levels of illiteracy and disturbance of meetings, could contribute to the progress (or lack thereof) of propaganda. More systemic obstacles to solidarity included the fragmentation and dispersal of the working classes due to industrial, regional and occupational factors, the individualist nature of the service sector (although clerks and shop-assistants formed a significant proportion of the Clarion and, earlier, Socialist League membership), and social tensions within local communities. This was exactly the situation dramatised by Tressell in his portrayal of the conservative and divided society of Mugsborough, a marginal ‘provincial backwater’ in which artisans serviced the ‘middle-class luxury economy’ (Haywood 1997, 24–5), and servility towards masters thrived alongside internal mistrust. The building trade in the South of England was weakly unionised

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and social stratification rather than close working-class community of the kind that existed in the coal-mining regions, for instance, was the norm. The ILP and even the Clarion Fellowship were more of a northern phenomenon, and the book was written in the years after the Taff Vale Decision but before the ‘Great Unrest’ – the wave of militancy and industrial strikes that swept the country after 1910 – so it is not surprising that association in the form of labour organisations got barely a mention in the nearly 2,000 pages of the manuscript. But did failure also have something to do with the relationship between leisure and politics in the life of the late-Victorian working class? Was it, as many contemporary moralisers – including socialists – maintained, the fault of the new commercialised forms of recreation? The gloomier among them believed the working class to be in thrall to a jingoistic music hall and organised sport, which quickly turned into the symbol of mass culture doping. If the rise of party machinery theory had no relevance to Owen’s predicament – there was no socialist party in Mugsborough to speak of – could capitalism have done just as much damage? Popular music hall songs certainly featured prominently in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, but this explanation was also insufficient, for at the turn of the century ‘working-class associations of all kinds as users of leisure time, had not yet been faced with the competition of a fully-developed capitalist mass leisure industry’ (Yeo 1977, 31). Ironically, the very robustness of the non-socialist working-class culture – rather than the passive consumption of ‘corporate alternatives’ – may have been ultimately responsible for the failure of socialist association. The good old English devotion to hobbies championed by later mythologists of national identity like Chesterton and Orwell, the thriving nonpolitical voluntary sphere, that very ‘gigantic development of associated life’ which foreign observers marvelled at, could have been part of the problem. For the pessimistic assessments of the activists notwithstanding, late-Victorian and Edwardian workers had a lot more to occupy their leisure time than beer and betting, and could turn to many other interests outside their daily toil. The very diversity and sophistication of the working class’s existing recreational life distracted from political participation. ‘English recreational associations . . . neither relied on nor necessarily led to socialist organisation,’ and as a result the Clarion Fellowship and other socialist cultural initiatives could never hope to achieve a ‘mass membership’ (Vincent 1989, 266–7). This is one explanation that Tressell most emphatically does not offer: non-political working-class association in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists barely extends beyond a few social evenings down the pub. But what the book omits may potentially provide the key to what

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it includes, for the degradation of the working class could hardly be portrayed so convincingly if it were seen to be engaging in healthy and active recreation of a collective sort. Socialist propaganda did not just vie for attention with recognisably ‘pernicious’ and readily available pastimes like mass sport, betting and commercialised entertainment – the growing shadow of modern capitalism – it also had to contend with grass-roots hobbies like gardening, cycling or pigeon-breeding, as well as church-based activities. Each of these voluntary leisure pursuits ‘scattered and localised political ambitions . . . “political” energies were dispersed amongst a profusion of associational activities’ (McKibbin 1990, 15–16, 38), which did not prefigure a future utopia. From the point of view of socialist association they were a distraction and a substitute, the corrosive of a greater political community. Socialist leisure activities thus had to compete directly with other kinds of association that occupied the workers’ spare time. This problem fell outside of Tressell’s circle of interests altogether, but it was highly relevant to those concerned with the internal dynamics of socialist organisations. Blatchford had achieved temporary success in co-opting existing associational patterns (football, cycling, choral unions) to the democratic socialist agenda, combining the recreational with the political. But such a utopian alliance was always in danger of disintegrating into its component parts; politics and leisure could again go their separate ways. It was not the case that, like the men who were too absorbed in pigeon-breeding to join the local SDF branch, the Clarionettes in general were too busy practising ‘fellowship’ to bother about practical things like the industrial struggle or to influence policy by legislation or strikes. To claim as much would be to perpetuate the ‘ethical’ stereotype of the period, to ignore the political campaigns of the Clarion, its involvement in trades federation in the late 1890s and engagement with syndicalism in the 1910s, not to mention the activities of other socialist organisations to which many Clarionettes also belonged. But as far as the specifically recreational aspects of the Clarion phenomenon were concerned, the cracks could not be ignored. Clarion cycling clubs were always divided on the ‘relative importance of political work and cycling as a sport or pastime’. Even in the pre-1914 years of political activism and propaganda for the Cause there was a strong centrifugal tendency to abandon socialism in favour of racing. ‘From the beginning, the main purposes were social: eating, drinking, but above all, talking. The Clarion Fellowship’s slogan was once given as: “The propagation of the principles of Socialism – and leave politics to them as likes ’em”’ (Pye 1995, 32–3, 53). It was only a matter of time before the principles of socialism were left to them as liked ’em as well, and the

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remaining Clarion organisations lingered on into the mid-twentieth century denuded of most of their political purpose. When the emphasis shifted from ‘socialist’ to ‘association’, and the quest for community lost its element of political consciousness, the greater educational project for the socialist future was effectively scuppered. Conviviality alone would not do: the religion of socialism did not just mature, among some, into electioneering pragmatism, it could also peter out in apolitical communal recreation. The social aspects of the many Clarion activities (from the Cinderella outings to Montague Blatchford’s choirs) tended to distract from and replace rather than reinforce the socialist agenda. But though the Blatchfordian union of political activism and social fellowship was short-lived, other initiatives always arose from the rubble. Institutionalised parties and recreational clubs were not two models of socialism forever sundered from each other: if the synthesis disintegrated in one place, it was reconstituted elsewhere. In the interwar period the existence of such projects as the Workers’ Theatre Movement (which grew, significantly enough, out of the Clarion Players) testified to the continued thriving of cultural-political association. Socialist culture could not subsist without a political framework, and a refusal to make use of the tools provided by the modern state would often result in the disintegration of communal efforts. If the romance message of community had to rely upon capitalist publishing practices for its dissemination, the ultimate success of socialist culture also depended on modern methods of political organisation. The only way to transcend the quandary was to accept the necessity of both. In the revolutionary scenario offered by News from Nowhere, the workers did indeed achieve the communal utopia by teaching themselves (and allowing the circumstances to teach them) the practices of modern civil society: organisation and administration. As Old Hammond explained it to his Victorian guest, the original leaders of the movement had little administrative capacity . . . But now that the times called for immediate action . . . a new network of workmen’s associations grew up very speedily, whose avowed single object was the tiding over of the ship of the community into a simple condition of Communism; and as they practically undertook also the management of the ordinary labour-war, they soon became the mouthpiece and intermediary of the whole of the working classes. (Morris 1910–15, 16: 120)

One might as well be reading a Commonweal analysis of the present struggle. ‘Direct control by the people of the whole administration of the community’ (cit. Thompson 1977, 740) had always been a realworld goal, and the very vocabulary of this passage – ‘administrative capacity’, ‘labour-war’, ‘network of workmen’s associations’ – reminds

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us that the original serialisation of News from Nowhere appeared amidst the day to day reports of socialist agitation. The reader’s eye would pass from accounts of real strikes and branch meetings to the imagined account of revolutionary change without registering any difference in tone or phraseology. The one grew naturally out of the other; the future was firmly grounded in the activities and preoccupations of the present. If the vocabulary of the chapters depicting the utopian end-state was akin to that of the medieval romances, ‘How the Change Came’ could only be described in the matter-of-fact political idiom of the speeches and articles. Education and organisation paved the way to community.

The Conscious Community The foregoing pages have emphasised what historians call the rationalist or Enlightenment nature of the socialist educational project: the belief that if only ignorance were dispelled by knowledge, socialism would be immediately accepted. As Morris and Bax wrote, These men thought it possible to regenerate Society by laying before it its shortcomings, follies, and injustice, and by teaching through precept and example certain schemes of reconstruction built up from the aspirations and insight of the teachers themselves. They . . . believed that their schemes would win their way to general adoption by men’s perception of their inherent reasonableness. They hoped to convert people to Socialism, to accepting it consciously and formally, by showing the contrast between the confusion and misery of civilisation, and the order and happiness of the world which they foresaw.

But although this passage may appear to be a convincing selfcharacterisation, Bax and Morris were not talking about themselves. They had in mind the ‘Utopists’ who preceded the birth of scientific revolutionary socialism, the men who ‘had not learned to recognise the sequence of events that forces social changes on mankind whether they are conscious of its force or not’, and who therefore built up ‘elaborate and detailed schemes of future Society’. Furthermore, though the communities founded by the utopian socialists were useful ‘experiments in association’, they were not true communism, which depended on workers taking hold of ‘political power’ and destroying civilisation (1893, 206–7, 217). The paradox was inescapable. On the one hand, participant reminiscences and novels like Tressell’s emphasised the early groups’ utopian faith in reasonable persuasion, which burned as brightly in the breasts

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of revolutionary Marxists as of reformist educationalists like Blatchford. As has been shown, the use of ‘contrast’ was the number one tool in the kit of any socialist propagandist. In fact, the overwhelming importance attached to propaganda activity as such reeked of ‘utopianism’; the propagation of doctrines and ideas, the dissemination of information was a utopist tactic by definition. On the other hand, the concept of necessity, of social change being ‘forced’ upon mankind by historical evolution, radiated far beyond the small Marxist circle. It was not only in the pages of the Commonweal or the Social Democrat, or in Bax’s many variations on this theme, that one found confident assertions of inexorable inevitability – Blatchford also believed that Time was on his side. By his own definition, then, Morris was both a utopist and a scientific socialist, because he managed to reconcile agency and necessity. ‘If individual men are the creatures of their surrounding conditions . . . it must be the business of man . . . or of Society . . . to make the surroundings which make the individual man what he is. Man must and does create the conditions under which he lives; let him be conscious of that, and create them wisely’ (Morris 1936, 2: 456). When in 1888 Leatham had pressed Morris on the question of social evolution, Morris answered that analogy was a dangerous thing, that we must not run animal biology too hard, that human beings were conscious agents, and that it was our mission to convert the head and body, which consisted of all the workers with hand and brain. Let the tail of useless people wriggle and resist. They will be absorbed right enough. (cit. Bloor 2008, 31)

The transition to socialism, in other words, would not take place automatically; social transformation did not proceed with the inevitability of its biological counterpart, but if sufficient conscious effort were applied in the direction of the desired change, the rest would follow. One cut the Gordian knot by assuming that social evolution would help those who helped themselves. The next stage of economic development would be reached, paradoxically, by the conscious act of revolution, and the advent of revolution was to be facilitated by education and propaganda. Marx’s abstract ‘negation of negation’, the transition from capitalistic property to socialised property, from private to public control, was to be accomplished not by some faceless systemic shift, but by the very personal ‘expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people’ (cit. Morris and Bax 1893, 267), and the mass of the people would be prepared for political action by the preachers of socialism. Until the very recent past, Morris and Bax wrote, there may have been a discrepancy between ideal and action, a historical lack of sympathy between theoreticians concerned with the utopian goal, and

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the semi-unconscious participants in the ‘working-class struggle’ and in ‘popular revolutionary action’. But lately a ‘practical unity of aim between the theorist and the agitator’ had developed, utopists could no longer disdain to ‘take part in all action that tends towards Socialism’, and the working class had to keep in mind the utopian ideal and ‘accept the theorists as leaders’ (1893, 277–8). Neither path was adequate in isolation. Working-class combination and organisation might amount to nothing more than trade unionism, to the creation of what one Justice editorial contemptuously called conservative ‘insurance associations’ (cit. Manton 2001, 63), which were doing precious little for the overthrow of capitalism. On the other hand, though individuals of all classes could be convinced and shown the socialist ideal by propagandists, this merely ‘ethical’ conversion would not be sufficient either: propaganda that addressed itself to opinion while neglecting party organisation laid the foundations of its failure in the very moment of its success. When it came to the crunch, teaching people socialism and leaving them to figure out the rest for themselves was not enough. What was needed was a synthesis. Unions had a great part to play in teaching co-operation and solidarity in the present and organising production in the future, but a socialist consciousness was the indispensable catalyst to action and the guarantor of its subsequent success. It is hardly surprising, then, that Morris could not rest content with fostering isolated ‘experiments in association’ as ends in themselves: community values had to contribute to the overall change of society that was to be effected by political and industrial working-class action. Such values were not just the utopian goal, they were the materialist tools, the means of historical transformation. Despite his commitment to association, Morris was often unsympathetic to trade unions, Co-operative stores and workingmen’s clubs, because mere association was useless without a socialist purpose. Tressell’s ignorant workers, with their shared practical ‘common sense’, may have stayed true to a traditionally limited kind of communality, but it was Owen, with his insistence on rational thought and political action, who pointed the way to the future Co-operative Commonwealth. But even socialist organisations would remain nothing more than experiments if they contented themselves with impersonating a utopian fellowship. They could only serve larger historical forces if they also taught workers political agency and selfgovernment. In isolation from each other, neither preaching and persuasion nor the ‘practical’ activities of trade unions and political parties were sufficient for the purpose at hand. Modern people had to resort to both mechanisms in order to resurrect the true community. Education and organisation, association and propaganda, the ethical and the

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material, ends and means had to come together for the realisation of the ‘Change’. Morris and Bax were not alone in their paradoxes; many other members of the SDF shared their dialectical belief in a synthesis arising out of a combination of opposites. For Hyndman and Quelch, two things were necessary to achieve socialism: ‘economic development and educated consciousness of that development’. The road to utopia lay not just via economic evolution, but via voluntary agency, ‘the will of the people expressed in the organised conscious effort of the working class’ (cit. Johnson 2002, 35, 34). If the workers were not ready, no amount of historical inevitability would suffice. In 1900 a controversy erupted in the pages of the Social Democrat that prefigured the later, much more publicised debate between Blatchford and Chesterton. At stake was the relative importance of the two parts of E. P. Thompson’s famous diad: necessity and desire. Economic determinism, historical materialism and social evolution were pitted against human agency, free will and responsibility. Here was another of those recurrent motifs of the late-Victorian and Edwardian period, another seminal idée fixe, like the familiar pairs ‘individual and community’ or ‘barbarism and civilisation’. The theorists of the SDF did not reach a consensus on this (or any other) occasion, but a strong chorus of voices proclaimed that there was ‘no contradiction or antithesis between evolution and revolution’, ‘evolution [could] be stimulated’ and guided, ‘human effort’ could help along ‘the trend of [historical] destiny’, the future turned ‘upon the initiative of the present’ (cit. Johnson 2002, 45, 63, 55), man’s conscience was the agent of social change. Was the concept of the conscious community the preserve of a few Marxist dialecticians? When Kropotkin envisioned his anarchist commune, he thought of it as a natural outgrowth of the innate human capacity for co-operation – no effort would be required to bring it into being once the shackles of the state were removed (Kinna 1999, 227–8). Morris’s communist future, on the other hand, was artificially constructed; the spontaneity, the unforced mutualism of Nowhere’s community were the products of a long education and a thoroughly theorised process of social organisation. It was not ‘unimaginably complex’, but neither was it a return to a simple state of ‘original unity’ (Yeo and Yeo 1988, 252). The utopian community was not a primitive commune, it was to be reached by rational means. Modern people – cajoled, persuaded, abused by socialist evangelists – would have to work consciously towards its realisation. If necessary, the commercial romance would join forces with the propagandist tract and lecture as a tool of conversion, and the romance and socialist ‘revivals’ of the 1880s

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and 90s flower together in the achievement of William Morris. Only with the whole might of the capitalist publishing industry, the research output of the professional academic establishment, and the political organisational experience of modern civil society at their backs, could the small band of believers in the conscious community hope to achieve their quest.

Note 1. Orwell’s famous claim that the English socialist movement had produced no songs worth singing is certainly confuted by the popularity of Morris’s chants with branches at meetings and during marches and May Day demonstrations, and the proliferation of socialist songbooks and choirs during this period.

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the Present’, in New Views of Co-operation, ed. S. Yeo, London: Routledge, 229–58. Yeo, S. (1977), ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896’, History Workshop Journal 4 (Autumn): 5–56. –– (1987), ‘Notes on Three Socialisms – Collectivism, Statism and Associationism,’ in Levy 1987a, 219–70.

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Academy, 23 Abbott, E. A., 34 Aberdeen, 173 Aberdeen Socialist Society, 124 activists, 3, 4, 8, 113n, 121, 131, 141, 147, 151, 157, 159, 163, 177, 184, 189–94, 196 aestheticism, 36–7, 148 Africa, 37, 59 agency, 138, 140, 187, 200–2 agitation, 120, 126, 172, 175, 184, 193–4, 199, 201 alderman see tribe Alfred, 94 allegory, 31, 36, 47, 58, 152, 184 Althing see Thing Amalgamated Press, 21 America, 24, 29, 47 anarchism, 2, 79, 91, 141, 145, 147, 148, 149, 159, 202 Ancoats Brotherhood, 121, 171 Anglicanism see religion Anglo-Saxons, 49, 64, 76, 88, 90, 92, 94, 97–8, 100, 103–7, 111, 113n, 115, 116, 124, 127, 130; see also Aryans; Teutonism anthropology, 1, 3, 5, 6, 15, 30–3, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 47, 48, 64, 69, 70, 75, 82, 85, 89, 90, 99, 100, 101, 108–10, 133, 139 anti-capitalism see capitalism antiquity, 56, 81, 83, 95–8, 104–5, 109–11 anti-Semitism, 96 anti-statism see state archaism, 36, 42, 64, 125 archeology, 58, 88, 98 architecture, 65–6, 113n aristocracy, 52, 107, 111, 116, 118, 121, 125–6, 131

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aristocracy of labour, 168, 169, 171, 195; see also working class Arminius, 106 Army and Navy Store, 16 Arnold, Matthew, 40 Arrowsmith, 21 artisans, 46, 117, 118, 124, 125, 126, 128, 131, 138, 148, 153, 185, 195; see also craftsmen arts and crafts, 4, 36, 45 Aryans, 39, 40, 83, 90, 96–8, 103, 107–8; see also Anglo-Saxons; Teutonism assembly, 49, 50, 52, 54, 57, 71n, 93, 103–5, 107–8, 115, 117, 124; see also folk-mote; tribe association, 1–3, 5–8, 63, 65, 66, 68, 76, 87–8, 93, 110, 111, 113, 115–19, 123, 124, 130–1, 133, 134, 137–40, 144–6, 158, 160–1, 175–6, 190–9, 201–2; see also community; fellowship atheism, 130, 175 Athenaeum, 12, 13, 45 Auden, W. H., 163 audiences, 3, 6–8, 11–14, 15–16, 17–24, 29, 33, 34–5, 38, 40, 42, 51, 64, 68, 126, 147–8, 150–1, 162, 164–74, 176, 180–95 authoritarianism, 2, 145, 187 autobiography, 70, 108, 141, 157–8, 163, 166, 167, 171, 174n, 180, 186 autodidacts, 14, 70n, 138–9, 160, 172, 181–2, 185 Aveling, Edward, 148 Bachofen, J. J., 70, 82 Baernreither, Josef Maria, 2 Baldwin, Stanley, 78 ballads, 14, 49, 64–5, 76, 100, 120

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Ballantyne, R. M., 20 Balzac, Honoré de, 66 barbarians see barbarism barbarism, 1, 5, 6, 27, 28, 31–2, 48–50, 53–7, 65, 81–9, 94–6, 99–102, 108–12, 114n, 118, 120, 131, 133, 137, 138–9, 202; see also civilisation; Teutonism Barrie, J. M., 23 Bax, E. B., 62, 66, 69, 70, 77–87, 91, 93–4, 96–7, 101, 104, 108, 110, 114n, 116–17, 125, 131–4, 137, 138, 139, 142, 148, 155, 163, 164, 165, 178–9, 199, 200–2 The Religion of Socialism, 77, 79–80, 133, 178 Bellamy, Edward, 153, 160 Bellamy Library, 70n Belloc, Hilaire, 132, 161 Bennett, Arnold, 26 Beowulf, 32, 61, 64 Besant, Annie, 147, 185 Besant, Walter, 19, 21, 23, 39 bestsellers, 3, 5, 12–21, 24, 26, 28, 37, 38, 42–4, 155 Binning, Thomas, 46 Björnsen, B. M., 41 Black Death see peasant revolts Black, Clementina, 148, 162 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 22, 23 Blatchford, Montague, 198 Blatchford, Robert, 43–4, 78, 121–2, 124, 141, 143, 144–5, 147, 154–6, 160, 162–3, 164, 166–7, 172, 173, 175–80, 182, 183, 185, 186–91, 193, 197–8, 200, 202 Britain for the British, 144, 155, 162, 188, 189 Merrie England, 144, 147, 155, 156, 162, 166, 180, 183, 189, 190, 194 The Sorcery Shop, 162, 188–9 Bloody Sunday, 162, 173 Bloomsbury, 68, 148 board schools see elementary schools Bodley Head, 148 Boer War, 162, 164 Booth, Charles, 160 Borrow, George, 37, 41, 64 Bosanquet, Helen, 13, 21 Bow Bells, 18 Boyle, James, 113n Boys of England, 16 Boy’s Own Paper, 13, 16, 20, 21 boys’ papers see story papers Braddon, Elizabeth, 19, 20

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Bradford, 141, 184, 185 Bradlaugh, Charles, 77, 81 branches racial, 87, 88, 89, 90, 96, 105–6 socialist, 139, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148, 152, 160, 169–72, 178, 191–5, 197, 199, 203n Brentano, Lujo, 116–19, 123, 124, 133, 134 Brett, Edwin, 13 British Museum, 148 Brockway, Fenner, 161 Bücher, Carl, 77 Bunsen, Baron, 97 bureaucracy, 7, 80, 109–10, 112–13, 115, 138, 146, 157, 160–1, 174n Burne-Jones, Edward, 37, 45 Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 55, 81 Burns, John, 163 Butler, Samuel, 77 Caesar, 94, 98, 102 Caine, Hall, 13, 16, 17, 20, 22, 27, 29, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 45 Cambridge, 62, 89, 93, 167 capitalism, 1–8, 15, 17, 29, 44, 46–8, 57, 63, 65–9, 75, 80, 83–4, 87, 93, 95, 97, 110–13, 116, 118, 123–4, 128, 130–2, 134, 137, 141, 151–2, 154–6, 160, 166, 185–6, 188–9, 191, 196–8, 200–1, 203 Carlyle, Thomas, 2, 3, 31, 89, 180, 187 Carpenter, Edward, 148, 153, 162, 163, 164, 181, 192, 194 Cassell’s Saturday Journal, 41 Catholicism see religion Catlin, George, 40 Celts, 57, 97, 98 centralisation, 2, 6, 80, 83, 109, 133, 140, 145, 147, 157, 159–61, 176 Cervantes, Miguel de, 35, 68 Charity Organisation Society, 13 Chartism, 120, 164 Chaucer, 34, 35 cheap literature see penny dreadful Chesterton, G. K., 14, 21, 33n, 77, 132, 143, 149, 196, 202 childhood of the race, 4, 30–3, 77; see also primitive culture children’s literature see juvenile literature Christianity, 46, 53, 58, 60, 61, 83, 97, 130–1, 160, 175, 178, 180; see also religion Cinderella, 192, 198 circulating libraries, 15, 17, 20, 23, 24

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Index civilisation, 1–2, 6, 20, 27, 29, 30–2, 44, 48–9, 54–7, 59, 66–70, 81–6, 88–90, 95, 102–3, 105, 108–12, 119–20, 128, 133, 137–8, 199, 202 commercial see capitalism see also antiquity clan, 1, 6, 71n, 109, 117–18; see also gens; tribe Clarion, 43, 44, 78, 147–8, 156, 161, 163, 164, 166, 173, 189, 190–2, 194, 197 Clarion choirs, 190, 198 Clarion Clubs, 147, 190, 192, 194 Clarion cyclists, 122, 190–1, 193, 197 Clarion Fellowship, 151, 176, 190–1, 195–8 Clarion Newspaper Company, 178 ‘Clarion Pamphlets’, 175, 179 Clarion Players, 198 Clarion Scouts, 147, 190–1, 193 Clarion Songbook, 190 Clarion vans, 159, 162, 193 Clarionettes, 141, 145, 190, 192, 197 class war, 141, 180, 184 classics, 2, 11, 14, 18–19, 21, 103; see also antiquity Clayton, Joseph, 157, 175 clerks, 16, 22, 148, 188, 191, 195 Cleveland, John, 120 Clodd, Edward, 113n Cockerell, Sydney, 42, 63 Cole, G. D. H., 129 Coleridge, S. T., 14 Collins, Wilkie, 19, 20, 29 Comitatus, 107 Commonweal, 38, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 63, 78, 79, 97, 113n, 117, 120, 130, 132, 161, 170–3, 184, 191–2, 198, 200 commune, 7, 49, 81, 87, 97, 113, 116, 131, 144, 147, 159, 192, 202; see also Paris Commune communism, 40, 50, 86, 92, 112–13, 124, 126, 137, 151, 163, 175, 198–9 primitive, 3, 49–50, 65, 69–70, 77, 82–3, 86–8, 91–2, 104, 112–13, 115, 133, 137, 155, 202 see also primitive culture community, 1–8, 34, 40, 42, 44–6, 48–52, 61–9, 75–6, 80, 83, 85–7, 92, 94, 96–7, 104–13, 115, 119, 117, 120–4, 128, 131, 133, 137–40, 146–7, 151, 153, 161, 167–70, 172, 179, 195, 198–9, 201–2 conscious, 2, 87, 137, 170, 177, 190, 199–203 land ownership, 1, 49, 77, 88, 91–2, 94, 97–8, 101–4, 115, 123, 134

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primitive see tribal socialist, 3–4, 7–8, 45, 49, 52, 63, 70, 75–6, 78, 80, 84–7, 93–5, 112, 115, 122, 133–4, 137–9, 145–6, 156–9, 161–2, 164, 168, 170–4, 176–7, 179, 186, 188, 190–2, 196–9, 201–2 tribal, 1, 3–4, 6–7, 34, 40, 49–54, 57–8, 60, 70, 75–7, 80, 84–8, 91–3, 94, 97, 100–2, 104, 107, 109–13, 131, 137–9 village, 1, 3, 6, 39, 70, 76–7, 82, 88, 90–4, 95, 97, 99–103, 108, 113n, 116, 130, 168 Comte, Auguste, 82 Connolly, James, 78 Conrad, Joseph, 17 Conservatism see Tories constitution, 77, 86, 88–90, 94–5, 101–2, 104–12, 124, 130, 133 Contemporary Review, 13, 16, 23, 39, 40, 167 conversion, 7, 47, 78, 138, 143, 160–1, 165, 167, 170–1, 177–8, 180–1, 185–6, 188, 190, 194, 199–202 Conway, Katharine, 159, 178, 192 Cooper, Fenimore, 19 Co-operation, 146, 166, 168, 201 Co-operative Commonwealth, 80, 139, 153, 201 Co-operative stores see Co-operation Corelli, Marie, 11, 16, 17, 20, 22, 23, 37, 41, 43, 45, 122 Coulanges, Fustel de, 109 craftsmen, 111–12, 124, 127, 129, 188 Crane, Walter, 45, 46, 47, 76, 148, 153, 163, 191 critics, 2, 4, 13–14, 16, 18, 20–30, 32, 34–5, 38, 41, 45–6, 56, 66, 69, 122, 123, 161 Cunninghame Graham, R. B., 40 Daily Chronicle, 173 Daily Mail, 122 Daily News, 17, 33 Dark Ages, 57, 75 Darwin, Charles, 77, 180 Das Kapital see Marx, Karl Dasent, G. W., 19 De Quincey, Thomas, 19 decentralisation see centralisation democracy, 6, 49, 52, 54, 77, 80–1, 88–96, 100, 102, 105, 107–10, 112, 115, 117–18, 124, 127, 130–1, 138–9, 145–6, 154, 158–9, 161, 164–8, 173, 187, 189, 197 Denmark, 98 determinism, 143, 156, 202

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development, 1, 3, 5–6, 11, 30, 40, 57–8, 76, 78, 81–4, 86, 92–5, 100–13, 116–18, 122–3, 126–8, 133, 150, 160–1, 200, 202; see also evolution dialectic, 6, 54, 56, 82, 84–6, 92, 101, 108, 110, 112, 120, 123, 154, 202 antithesis, 4, 6, 8, 34, 49, 65, 83, 111, 140, 156, 159, 202 synthesis, 2, 6, 7–8, 65, 81, 86, 110, 142, 144, 159, 198, 201–2 Dickens, Charles, 13, 19, 20, 21, 27, 42, 152, 180 Distributism, 132 Dock Strike, 162, 172; see also strikes Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 27 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 15, 16, 20, 21, 26, 41, 43 Dreamer, Percy, 175 Du Maurier, George, 16, 23 Dumas, Alexandre, 14, 23, 28, 34, 41, 64 Durkheim, Émile, 2 dystopia, 55–6 Early English Text Society, 65, 116 East End, 39, 148, 167 economists, 2, 70, 77, 99, 116, 119, 129, 131–2 Edda, 32, 49, 64, 99 Edinburgh, 17, 170 Edith Simcox, 113n education, 7, 30, 63, 76–7, 115–16, 138–46, 150, 154, 158–61, 163–6, 168–9, 174, 175–9, 181–7, 191, 198–202 Edwardian period, 7, 8, 115, 145, 149, 156, 162, 165, 181, 196, 202 Edwardians see Edwardian period Egan, Pierce, 120 elections, 4, 49–50, 71n, 102–3, 105, 140, 145–6, 152, 157, 162, 163, 178, 183, 184, 189–93, 195 elementary schools, 24, 127, 146, 161, 168 Eliot, George, 20, 66 Elizabethans, 35 Elton, Charles, 40, 70 Empire, 37–8, 66 British, 95, 97, 114n Roman, 2, 109–11, 133 Engels, Friedrich, 31, 68, 76–7, 79–80, 82, 84–7, 94, 96–9, 101–2, 104, 108–10, 115–16, 128–9, 134 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 80, 82, 84, 86–7, 97, 99, 109–10 English Illustrated Magazine, 40 English Land Restoration League, 193

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epic, 12, 31–2, 34, 39, 40, 41, 48, 51, 66, 102 Ethical movement, 2, 144, 176 ethics, 3, 5, 51, 56, 61, 66, 69, 77, 79–87, 94, 96–7, 104, 112, 117, 119, 121–4, 126, 130, 132–4, 138–44, 146, 148, 154, 156, 159, 165, 170, 178–9, 197, 201 Europe, 2, 29, 33, 49, 54, 76, 77, 80, 88–91, 94, 96, 101–2, 105–6, 108–11, 115, 118, 124–5, 127 evolution biological, 30, 143, 150 economic, 76, 167, 202 historical, 57, 80–3, 85–7, 97, 118–19, 143, 200 social, 1, 6, 31, 70, 75–9, 81–2, 94–5, 101, 103–4, 108–9, 111–13, 123–4, 143, 155, 190, 200, 202 see also development; spiral exogamy, 39, 54, 102; see also gens Fabian Society, 140, 141, 145–51, 154, 157–9, 161–2, 172–3, 176, 189, 192, 194 fairytales, 26, 31–2, 58, 62 Family Herald, 18 Farrar, F. W., 97, 98 federation, 2, 49, 80–1, 84, 87, 95, 116, 138–9, 147–8, 161, 179, 192, 197 fellowship, 1, 17–18, 38, 50, 61–4, 68, 87, 93, 96, 116–17, 119, 122–5, 127, 131, 133, 137–9, 142, 159, 168, 179, 190–1, 196–8, 201; see also association; community feudalism, 6, 56, 92–3, 96, 100–1, 104–8, 110–12, 115–18, 122, 124, 132–3 Fielding, Henry, 152 fin de siècle, 2, 6, 22, 32–3, 39, 137, 140, 162 Flaubert, Gustave, 27 folk, 1, 50, 52, 58, 62–3, 85, 96, 98 folk-tales, 40, 64 Folk-Lore Society, 32, 65 folk-mote, 49, 88, 91, 102, 104–5, 107, 117, 124 Forster, E. M., 152 Fortnightly Review, 23, 27, 39, 42 France, 2, 21, 27–9, 102, 106, 192 Frazer, J. G., 39, 77, 109 free trade, 132, 195 Freedom, 147 Freeman, E. A., 35, 39, 70, 89–96, 98, 100–1, 103, 105–9, 134 Comparative Politics, 89–90, 103, 109

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Index The History of the Norman Conquest of England, 94, 105–8 friendly societies, 2, 93, 146 Froissart, Jean, 121–2, 126 Froude, J. A., 40, 127 Fussell, Paul, 43 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 152 gemot see folk-mote gens, 6, 39, 54, 83, 85, 98, 139; see also tribe Germania, 88, 92, 96, 100, 102–4, 109; see also Teutonism Germany, 2, 80, 88–9, 91, 102, 103, 192 Gibbon, Edward, 89 Gill, Eric, 45 Girl’s Own Paper, 21 Gissing, George, 22, 165 Gladstone, W. E., 141 Glasgow, 141, 143, 170, 189 Glasier, J. B., 78–9, 122, 158, 159, 163, 164, 166, 171, 178–9, 193 Glasier, Lizzie, 143 Glover, F. R. A., 113n Goethe, J. W. von, 19 Gomme, G. L., 91, 92, 113n Gosse, Edmund, 26 Gossip, Alex, 141 Gothic architecture see architecture Gothic literature, 19, 121 Goths, 39, 40, 49–50, 52, 54, 76, 86, 96, 102, 111; see also Teutonism Gould, F. J., 77, 144 Graphic, 16 Great Unrest, 162, 196 Greeks, 31, 32, 39, 90, 96, 98 Green, J. R., 35, 39, 70, 89, 91, 93, 95–6, 99–101, 108, 122–32 A Short History of the English People, 35, 95, 122 Grimm, Jacob, 64, 99 Guild of St Matthew, 146, 178 guilds, 2, 3, 6, 7, 80, 93, 111–12, 115–20, 123, 126–7, 133–4, 190–1 Haeckel, Ernst, 30 Haggard, H. Rider, 12–13, 15–17, 20–4, 27–8, 32, 35, 38–9, 41–4, 48, 51–4, 58–62, 122 Eric Brighteyes, 51–4 King Solomon’s Mines, 16, 41 She, 12, 17, 21, 38, 41, 58–60, 62, 122 Hall, H. R., 113 Hallam, Henry, 70 Hammersmith, 41, 46, 58, 122, 124, 137, 147, 148 Hammersmith Record, 172

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Hannigan, D. F., 30 Hardie, Keir, 144–5 Hardy, Thomas, 23 Harkness, Margaret, 162 Harmsworth, Alfred, 16, 21 Harrison, Frederic, 113n Hastings, 152, 193, 194 Headlam, Stewart, 131, 133, 146, 175, 178 Hegel, G. W. F., 77, 82, 149 Heimskringla, 64, 75–6 Hemyng, Bracebridge, 13 Hengest, 106 Henley, W. E., 28 Henty, G. A., 14, 16, 19, 20 Henze, C., 184–5 Herbert, Solomon, 113n Heygate, W. E., 120 Hird, Dennis, 175 historiography, 1, 3, 6, 31, 35, 39, 64, 75–134 passim constitutional, 88, 90, 95, 98, 101, 130 economic, 125, 128, 142 labour, 138, 141, 157, 181 legal see law Liberal see Oxford School medieval see Middle Ages socialist, 6, 78, 91–2, 99, 115, 131, 141 Teutonist see Teutonism history see historiography Home University Library, 113n Homer, 64, 66, 69, 96 Odyssey, 32, 64 Hope, Anthony, 16, 21, 26, 41, 43 Horner, W. B. & Son, 21 Household Words, 20 Howells, W. D., 20, 27 Hudson, W. H., 11 Hume, David, 120 Huns, 49, 54 Huxley, T. H., 31, 77 hybridity, 7, 137–9, 145, 149, 151–2 Hyde Park, 148 Hyndman, H. M., 39, 70, 76, 77, 79, 116, 127–9, 131–4, 144, 145, 147, 148, 155, 157, 163–9, 173, 182, 195, 202 The Historical Basis of Socialism in England, 127–8 Iceland, 49, 51–3, 61, 63, 65, 76, 85, 88, 89, 96, 98, 103, 106 Icelandic sagas, 12, 19, 31–8, 49–53, 63–5, 70, 75–6, 79, 96, 98, 106 Hervarar saga, 76 Volsunga saga, 96 Idealism, 4, 78

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ideology, 3–5, 7, 47, 54, 65, 68, 75, 76, 87, 91, 94–6, 99, 101, 107, 112, 115–16, 119–23, 127, 130, 133, 138–42, 145–8, 151–3, 156, 158–9, 162, 165, 178, 180, 185, 195 immortality, 28, 58–62, 179 imperialism see Empire Independent Labour Party (ILP), 78, 141, 143–8, 151, 161, 164–5, 171, 176, 178, 185, 189, 192–3, 196 India, 37, 77, 91, 116 individual see individualism individualism, 1–2, 8, 42, 46, 48–66, 68–70, 75, 79, 81–6, 92–3, 96–7, 100–1, 111, 115, 119, 128, 131, 137–9, 180, 200, 202 individuality, 61, 68 Indo-European family, 98, 103; see also Aryans Indo-Germanic family see Indo-European family Industrial Revolution, 2 infancy of civilisation see primitive culture interdisciplinarity, 3, 32, 40, 75 James, Henry, 20, 23, 27, 29, 40, 67 Jefferies, Richard, 11–12, 39, 48, 55–8, 81 After London, 12, 55–8, 81 Jerome, Jerome K., 16, 21 jingoism, 155, 164, 195 John Ball, 62, 118–34 Johns, G. B., 18–21 Jordanes, 76 journeymen, 118–19, 134 Joynes, J. L., 148 jurisprudence see law Justice, 80, 120, 145, 147, 148, 155, 162, 173, 179, 201 juvenile literature, 14–16, 21, 29–31, 37, 47, 58, 120 Kalevala, 64 Kautsky, Karl, 77 Kelmscott House, 79 Kelmscott Manor, 46, 58 Kelmscott Press, 42–6, 48 Kemble, J. M., 70, 89, 90, 116 Kent, 96, 124, 126 Ker, W. P., 39, 53 kindred, 1, 49–53, 57, 60–3, 77, 83–4, 86–7, 98, 100, 102–5, 107, 117–18, 137, 139 King’s College London, 125 Kingsley, Charles, 31–2, 89 Kipling, Rudyard, 12, 16, 20, 26, 32, 37, 38

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Knighton, Henry, 121 Kovalevsky, Maxime, 91 Kropotkin, Peter, 2, 68, 77, 91, 147, 148, 202 Labour Church, 142, 147, 166, 178, 192 Labour College, 115 Labour Crusaders, 145 Labour Leader, 145, 147, 148, 161, 162 labour movement see Labour Party Labour Party, 140–1, 147–8, 151, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 178, 180, 189–90 Labour Prophet, 180 labourers see working class Lancashire, 172, 188 Land Nationalisation Society, 193 Landesgemeinden, 91, 108 Lane, Joseph, 159 Lang, Andrew, 12, 23, 26–7, 29, 32–3, 39, 40, 42, 48, 122 language, 31, 39–40, 49, 88, 96, 99, 105–6; see also philology Lansbury, George, 158, 174n Laski, Harold, 44 Latins, 28, 88, 97, 100; see also Celts; Rome Laveleye, Émile de, 91, 113n law, 6, 31, 75, 88–9, 91, 93–7, 98–104, 106, 115 Le Gallienne, Richard, 37 Leatham, James, 121, 124, 129, 147, 155, 158, 166, 168, 171, 173, 182, 184, 193, 200 lecturing, 3, 31, 77, 89, 100–1, 115, 124, 141, 143, 145–7, 158–9, 166, 183–7, 192–4, 202; see also Morris, William Lee, Vernon, 23 Lewis, C. S., 43, 50–1, 59 Liberalism, 6, 91–2, 94–6, 102–3, 106, 120–1, 123–4, 128–30, 140–1, 177, 184, 194; see also Oxford School libertarianism, 2, 138, 140 Liverpool Review, 122 Lollards, 131–2 London, 13, 14, 141, 147, 149–51, 153, 167, 169, 180, 189 London International Socialist Congress, 165 London, Jack, 77 London Journal, 18 London School of Economics, 163 Long, James, 91 Longmans and Green, 42, 43 Longman’s Magazine, 16, 23, 39

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Index Longman’s Pocket Library, 43–4 Lord Mayor’s Show, 120–1 lords see aristocracy Lowerison, Harry, 147 Lubbock, John, 20, 31, 64, 70, 82 Mabinogion, 64 McArthur, Archie, 143, 179 Macaulay, Thomas, 100 MacDonald, George, 12, 48, 58–62 Lilith: A Romance, 58–62 MacDonald, Ramsay, 145, 165 MacGregor, D. H., 113n Mackail, J. W., 55 McLennan, J. F., 70, 82 McMillan, Margaret, 141, 147, 159, 173 Macmillan’s Magazine, 22 Magna Carta, 107 Magnet, 14 Magnússon, Eiríkr, 51, 64, 79, 106 Maine, Henry, 70, 90–2, 96, 100–3, 109, 134 Village Communities, 91, 100–1 Maitland, F. W., 93, 101 Mallock, W. H., 39 Malory, Thomas, 35 Morte D’Arthur, 64 Manchester, 141, 169, 171, 189 Manchester Guardian, 121, 180 Manchester Socialist Union, 171 Mann, Tom, 147, 163, 175 Manning, Cardinal H. E., 130 manor see feudalism mark, 6, 70, 87, 90–6, 99, 100–5, 107–10, 115, 133–4; see also village community market, 1, 3–5, 7–8, 15–26, 29–30, 33–4, 37–8, 40–1, 45, 47, 68, 95, 101, 110, 128 Marryat, Frederick, 19 Martyn, Caroline, 159 Marvel, 16 Marvin, F. S., 113n Marx, Eleanor, 77, 148 Marx, Karl, 65, 68, 77, 79, 93, 97, 98, 103, 109, 129, 148, 180, 200 Capital, 40, 180 Marxism, 39, 54, 76–82, 85, 92, 104, 108–10, 112, 118, 120, 122, 127–9, 131, 140–3, 145–6, 148, 150, 154–6, 178–80, 195, 200, 202 mass market see market masses see working class Maurer, G. L. von, 70, 91, 96, 109 Maurice, C. E., 121, 129 Maurice, F. D., 121

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Mayhew, Henry, 14 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 64 medievalism, 3, 36, 125, 128, 133, 162 melodrama, 152, 155 memoirs see autobiography Meredith, George, 21 Merry England, 127–8, 188 Mexico, 113n, 116 Middle Ages, 6, 7, 11, 12, 39, 40, 54, 65, 77, 85, 88, 92–4, 97, 104–6, 111, 113, 115–30, 127, 132–4, 137, 192 middle class, 4, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 35, 37, 40, 119, 132, 140, 151, 153, 156, 164–5, 168, 172–3, 176, 182, 191, 195 lower middle class, 16, 40, 70n, 138, 149, 171 Mill, J. S., 141 modern society see modernity modernism, 17, 163 modernity, 1–8, 40, 67, 83, 86, 92, 101, 104, 108, 111, 138, 140–1 Molee, Elias, 114n Moore, Augustus, 12, 17–18, 26, 30 Moore, George, 23 Moral Instruction League, 144 morality see ethics Morgan, Lewis, 70, 82, 84, 94, 108–10, 116 Morris and Co., 45–6 Morris, May, 41, 70, 121, 148 Morris, William ‘bibles of the people’, 5, 8, 63–5, 69 Hundred Best Books List, 41, 64, 69, 75 lectures, 5, 39, 41, 49, 63, 65, 68, 76, 81, 84–5, 87–8, 101, 105, 111, 121, 123, 153, 169–72, 175 reviews of, 35–7, 47, 51, 63–4, 102, 134 works ‘Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century’, 106, 119 ‘The Art of the People’, 153 ‘Art, Wealth, and Riches’, 68 Beowulf, 64 Child Christopher, 64 ‘Dawn of a New Epoch’, 63, 191 The Defence of Guenevere, 36 ‘The Development of Modern Society’, 101, 111, 117 A Dream of John Ball, 35, 38, 40, 43–4, 65, 85, 112, 119–32, 171, 191, 192 ‘Early England’, 63, 110, 111 The Earthly Paradise, 36, 44

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Morris, William (cont.) works (cont.) ‘Feudal England’, 63, 105 The House of the Wolfings, 6, 12, 35, 39–42, 47, 49–52, 54–5, 57–8, 61–2, 65, 70, 75, 77, 85–8, 94, 96, 99, 101–3, 111–12, 121 ‘How I Became a Socialist’, 81 The Life and Death of Jason, 36 ‘The Literature of the North – Iceland’, 49, 63 The Manifesto of the Socialist League, 79, 84–5, 178; see also Bax, E. B. News from Nowhere, 3, 32, 42–3, 49–50, 57, 63, 66–9, 81, 86–8, 91, 94–5, 112, 121, 124, 137, 150, 159, 171, 189, 192, 198–9, 202 Odyssey, 64 Old French Romances, 64 The Pilgrims of Hope, 84 Poems by the Way, 63, 64 ‘The Policy of the Socialist League’, 169 ‘The Revolt of Ghent’, 109 ‘Revolutionary Calendar’, 120, 125 The Roots of the Mountains, 35, 40–2, 49–52, 54–5, 57–8, 62–3, 65, 76, 86–8, 94, 101–3, 112, 121 The Saga Library, 64, 76, 96; see also Magnússon, Eiríkr Sigurd the Volsung, 36 ‘Socialism from the Root Up’, 63, 78, 132 ‘Socialism in the Provinces’, 192, 195 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, 66, 78–80, 84, 91, 132–4, 178; see also Bax, E. B. The Socialist Diary, 170, 191 ‘Socialist Work at Norwich’, 192 ‘The Society of the Future’, 42 ‘Songs for Socialists’, 44 The Story of the Glittering Plain, 40, 51, 52, 57–62, 65, 69, 86 The Tables Turned, 49 The Well at the World’s End, 58–60, 62, 103 ‘What Socialists Want’, 111 ‘What We Have to Look For’, 159 The Wood Beyond the World, 36, 58–9, 62 Mudie see circulating libraries Müller, F. Max, 31–3, 39, 40, 90 mutual aid see association Myres, J. L, 113n mythology, 66, 88–9, 96, 98 comparative, 6, 31–2, 36, 39, 70, 90, 99, 109

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National Clarion Cycling Club see Clarion cyclists National Council of British Socialist Sunday Schools, 142 nationalism, 6, 38, 78, 88, 109, 113, 121, 127–8, 195 naturalism, 20, 25, 28, 67–8, 152 necessity, 52, 84, 140, 182–3, 200, 202 Neue Zeit, 77, 80 New Age, 145, 159, 162 New Humour, 21 New Journalism, 44 New Liberalism, 138 ‘New Life’, 139, 149, 157, 159, 162, 166, 180, 191 New Statesman, 162 New Unionism, 147–8, 158 New Woman, 149–50 Newgate, 20 Nibelungenlied, 31, 64 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 145, 149 Nihilists, 83, 148 Nineteenth Century, 22 Noel, Conrad, 175 Nonconformism, 93, 140, 146 Norman Conquest, 94, 100, 105–7 Northern England, 140–2, 151, 169, 173, 180, 196 Norwich, 170, 171, 192 Novalis, 58 novel, 4, 12, 16–20, 22–30, 33n, 34, 40, 42, 48, 66–9, 122, 149, 151–2, 162; see also realism; romance; tripledecker Old Norse see Icelandic sagas Oldham, 164, 169, 187 Oliphant, Margaret, 19, 20 Orwell, George, 163, 196, 203n Oxford, 11, 37, 39, 69, 78, 90, 167 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 39 Oxford School, 39, 91–3, 106–7, 121–5, 129–30, 141 Paine, Tom, 120 Palgrave, Francis, 70 Pall Mall Gazette, 64 ‘Pamphlets for the People’, 148 parable, 58, 110, 134, 152, 155 Paris Commune, 83–4 Parliament, 14, 52, 89–90, 94–5, 106–7, 110, 130, 144–5, 151, 158, 161, 178, 195 ‘Pass On Pamphlets’, 175 Pater, Walter, 36, 37 patriotism, 89, 91, 105, 127, 128, 195 Payn, James, 14, 21

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Index peasant revolts, 79, 115 Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, 38, 119–30, 134 peasants, 32, 111, 119–32, 134n penny dreadful, 4, 11, 13–23, 29, 30, 34, 40 penny fiction see penny dreadful ‘Penny Library of Fiction’, 21 ‘Penny Novels’ series see Stead, W. T. ‘Penny Stories for the People’ see Horner, W. B. people’s history see Oxford School People’s Palace, 154 Peterborough, 120, 124 Phelps, W. L., 24–6, 30 philology, 1, 6, 31, 34, 39, 89–90, 97–9 philosophy, 1, 64, 81, 164 Plebs, 113n Poe, E. A., 19, 41, 58 popular art, 33, 40, 64–5, 68; see also popular literature popular literature, 3, 5, 40, 43, 64–6; see also popular art Positivism, 2, 77, 113n, 180 prehistory, 30, 35, 70, 77, 90, 96, 98, 99, 138; see also primitive culture pre-modern society see primitive culture Pre-Raphaelites, 36–8, 45 press see newspapers priests, 52, 123, 124, 129, 131 primitive culture, 3–7, 29, 30–2, 34, 40, 49, 59, 64–6, 69–70, 75–8, 82–4, 86–8, 90–5, 97–105, 107, 109, 112, 115, 118, 133, 137, 139, 146, 155, 202 primitivism, 5, 66, 70 proletariat see working class propaganda, 3, 7, 8, 24, 46, 63, 69, 75, 78, 95, 96, 128, 129, 137–9, 144, 145, 147, 151–7, 167, 171, 176–8, 181–93, 195, 197, 200–1 prose romance see romance Protestantism see religion publicity, 16, 41, 45; see also publishing industry publishing industry, 3–5, 8, 13–23, 25–6, 29, 34–5, 42–5, 47–8, 67–8, 75, 198, 203; see also market Pugh, Edwin, 159 Punch, 46–7 Puritanism, 119, 131; see also religion Pym, Arthur Gordon, 41 Quarterly Review, 22 Quelch, Harry, 168, 202 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 42

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Rabelais, 68 race, 28, 30, 49, 51, 86, 88–91, 97–8, 106–8, 110, 113n human, 4, 30–1, 33, 56, 70, 77, 83, 84, 96, 100, 103, 143 Radcliffe, Ann, 19 Radford, Dollie, 148 Radical Clubs, 167, 169, 170 radicalism, 41, 70n, 120–1, 123, 129–30, 170 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 11, 25 Reade, Charles, 40, 41 readers see audiences realism, 4, 5, 12–13, 17, 20, 22–3, 25–6, 28–30, 33, 35, 42, 48, 65–9, 84, 122, 152, 162 recapitulation, 30–1 Red House, 45 Redfern, Percy, 157 Reed, Talbot Baines, 13 Reeve, Clara, 25 Reeves and Turner, 44 Reeves, William, 70n Reform Bill, 120, 130 Reformation, 79, 131; see also religion reformism, 13, 39, 140–2, 144–6, 148, 150, 157, 159, 163, 172, 175 religion, 1, 21, 31, 32, 49, 54, 60, 69, 79–80, 93, 120, 130–3, 137, 142–4, 152, 154, 193 Anglican, 120, 175 Catholic Church, 7, 62, 79, 97, 120, 130–3 Jesuit, 133 Protestant, 69, 97, 132–3 religion of humanity, 80, 140, 179; see also religion of socialism religion of socialism, 7, 83, 129, 131, 133, 138, 140–3, 147, 156–7, 159–60, 162, 165, 175–80, 183–5, 188, 191, 198; see also socialism Religious Tract Society, 21 Renaissance, 11 Revolt of Ghent, 109, 112 revolution, 3, 7, 56, 79, 80–1, 83, 87, 106, 111, 120, 125, 126, 129, 140, 144–6, 151, 154, 157–9, 168–9, 178, 191, 198–202 Rogers, J. E. Thorold, 39, 125–32, 134 romance, 11–70 passim and anthropology, 30–3 Germanic, 49–51, 53–4, 75–6, 85–8, 99, 101–3, 112, 121 historical, 15, 38, 54–5, 75–6, 120, 122 manifestos, 26–30 medieval, 43, 58, 112, 120–7, 192, 162, 192, 199

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romance (cont.) New, 4–5, 11–22, 24–5, 32, 34–43, 48, 66, 69–70, 75, 198, 202 socialist, 5, 43, 58, 63, 68–70, 104, 111–12, 122–5, 137, 151, 162 utopian, 3, 32, 54–5, 86–7, 112, 188–9, 192 Romantic Revival, 25, 27, 36; see also romance romanticism, 26, 36, 41, 54, 58, 85, 101, 121 Rome, 2, 6, 31, 39, 49, 54, 57, 85–6, 89–91, 100–3, 105, 109–11, 115, 124, 133 Romanist school, 109 Rossetti, D. G., 36–7 Routledge, 47 Rowley, Charles, 171 Rowntree, B. S., 160 Ruskin College, 175 Ruskin, John, 2, 3, 20, 64, 65, 180, 181 Ruskin School, 147 Russia, 27, 39, 70, 83, 88, 91, 97, 113n Russian Revolution, 163 Saintsbury, George, 17, 22, 23, 24, 27–8, 31, 35, 42, 48 Salt, Henry, 148 Salt, Kate, 148 Salvation Army, 175, 192 Sanders, W. S., 157 Saturday Review, 23, 28 savagery see barbarism Scandinavia, 88–91, 98, 103, 117 Norse, 31, 83, 97, 106 see also Iceland science, 6, 33, 76, 99, 109, 143–4, 150, 177 Scotland, 55, 141, 171 Scott, Sir Walter, 12, 14, 21–3, 28, 32, 41, 42, 64 sectarianism, 139, 147–8, 159–60, 168, 178 secularism, 148 Seebohm, Frederic, 91–3, 98, 100, 109 self-government, 7, 49, 91, 107, 108, 138–9, 141, 146, 161, 167–8 Semites, 83, 97 serfdom, 92, 107, 110, 111, 125–6, 129, 134; see also villeins Settlement movement, 2 Shairp, J. C., 69 Shaw, G. B., 36–7, 41, 68–9, 77, 78, 147, 148, 149, 162–3, 173, 176 Sheffield Weekly Echo, 113n Sheppard, Jack, 14 short story, 16, 22, 33n, 188

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Simple Life, 148–50 slavery, 56, 107, 111, 182 Smith, J. F., 13 Smith, Lucy Toulmin, 116 Social Democrat, 148, 155, 167, 200, 202 Social Democratic Federation (SDF), 78–80, 121, 141–5, 147–9, 151–2, 155, 158–9, 161, 168–9, 171–2, 176, 178, 185, 192–4, 197, 202 socialism, 3, 5–8, 54, 63, 65–6, 68–70, 75–203 passim Christian, 121, 131, 133, 141, 147, 154, 175, 178, 180, 192 ethical, 138–44, 146, 148, 154, 156, 159, 165, 197, 201–2 guild, 115, 145, 146, 161, 162 international, 80, 81–2, 87, 137, 155 ‘making socialists’, 7, 138, 144, 154, 158, 165, 175–8, 180–2, 190–1, 199 scientific, 80, 87, 157, 180, 199–200 socialist evangelism, 159, 164–5, 176, 178, 181–3, 185, 202 socialist party, 145, 147, 154, 158, 160, 191 socialist songs, 44, 65, 79, 142, 153, 171, 190, 192–4, 203n socialist unification, 147, 159–60, 201 state, 144–6, 157–61, 165, 176, 189, 196 utopian, 6, 65, 87, 95, 104, 108, 112, 122, 138, 186, 191, 199 see also religion of socialism Socialist League, 42, 45, 63, 79, 84, 122, 141, 145, 148, 154, 159, 169, 178, 192, 195 socialist movement see socialism Socialist Sunday Schools, 129, 140, 142–5, 150, 153, 161, 178–80, 190 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 21 sociology, 1, 15 solidarity, 85–7, 110, 117, 168, 201 socialist, 80, 87, 94, 131, 178, 195 tribal, 83, 85–6, 97, 104, 113, 133 South Seas, 37 Southey, Robert, 120 Spanish Civil War, 163 Spectator, 13 Spencer, Herbert, 77, 81–2 Spender, Stephen, 163 spiral, 6, 75, 84–5, 108, 110–12, 119, 122, 124; see also development; evolution stadial theory, 1, 30 Standard, 46

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Index state, 1–3, 6, 8, 24, 56, 67, 80, 83, 100, 108–10, 119, 138–41, 144, 145, 147, 150, 153, 155, 156–62, 165, 173, 176–7, 189, 198, 202 statism see state Statute of Labourers see peasant revolts Stead, W. T., 17, 21 Stepniak, Sergei, 39, 148 Stevenson, R. L., 12–17, 19, 20, 22, 24–9, 32, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 122 story papers, 13, 14, 16, 38 Strand, 16 Straw, Jack, 38, 120 strikes, 46, 118, 161, 169, 172–3, 188, 195, 196, 197, 199; see also Dock Strike Stubbs, William, 70, 89–90, 93, 95, 96, 98, 101–5, 108, 109, 120, 125, 126, 130–1, 132, 134 The Constitutional History of England, 95, 98, 101–5 Swan Sonnenschein, 125 Swift, Jonathan, 152 Swinburne, A. C., 36, 37, 38 Switzerland, 70, 90–1, 103, 108, 113n Symons, Arthur, 148 syndicalism, 140, 145, 161, 197 Tacitus, 50, 69, 70n, 88, 92, 94, 98, 101–3, 105, 107–9 Taff Vale Decision, 196 Taylor, G. R. S., 161 teetotalism see temperance temperance, 149, 166, 168 Teutons see Teutonism Teutonism, 6, 31, 40, 54, 64, 70, 76, 82, 87–92, 96–7, 100–17, 124, 128, 133–4, 137; see also Anglo-Saxons; Aryans Thackeray, W. M., 13, 19, 20 theology, 58, 62, 80, 97, 142, 179–80; see also religion theosophy, 148 Thing, 49, 52–4, 76, 96, 102, 103; see also folk-mote Thompson, A. M., 166, 189 Thompson, E. P., 202 Thoreau, H. D., 58, 180 Tilley, Arthur, 33n Tirebuck, W. E., 162 TO-DAY, 16 To-Day, 113n Tolkien, J. R. R., 43 Tolstoy, Leo, 27, 66, 149 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 2 Tories, 78, 94, 102, 120, 127, 177, 184, 187, 194

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totemism, 39, 54, 102 Toynbee Hall, 154 trade unions, 2, 88, 93, 113n, 116, 118–19, 125, 130, 146, 148, 151, 158, 166, 170, 172, 195, 201 Trafalgar Square see Bloody Sunday Tressell, Robert, 148, 150–6, 162, 163, 172, 181–7, 190, 193–7, 199, 201 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 150–6, 162, 181–6, 190, 193–6 Trevelyan, G. M., 129 Trevor, John, 142, 166, 180 tribe, 3, 6–7, 32, 49–52, 57–8, 62, 64, 70, 76–7, 82–3, 86–8, 92, 96–7, 100–4, 106–7, 110–11, 113, 115–19, 121, 124, 133, 138–9, 155 administration, 49–50, 54, 57, 70, 71n, 77, 94, 102–6, 117 landholding, 40, 77, 87, 94, 97, 99, 102–4, 115–16, 134 see also gens triple-decker, 15, 19, 22, 24, 25, 39, 66; see also novel Troy, 96 Tudors, 101, 127 Turner, Ben, 147 Turner, Sharon, 70, 89, 98, 116 Turpin, Dick, 14 Tyler, Wat, 38, 120–1, 123, 125, 128, 129; see also peasant revolts Tylor, E. B., 32, 70, 82, 90 Union Jack, 16 universities, 89, 93, 170; see also Cambridge; Oxford Unwin, Raymond, 113n utopia, 3, 6, 8, 13, 32, 33n, 40, 42, 49–50, 52, 54–6, 65, 68–9, 80–1, 84, 86–7, 94–5, 100, 108, 112, 138–40, 142, 153, 161–2, 173, 174n, 177–8, 186–92, 195, 197–202 utopianism see utopia Veblen, Thorstein, 53 vegetarianism, 148, 149, 166 Verne, Jules, 20 Victoria, 19, 163 villeins, 101, 107, 118, 125–6, 129, 134; see also serfdom Vinogradoff, Paul, 91 Vizetelly, Henry, 67 Völuspá, 32, 98 Wagner, Richard, 90 Walker, Emery, 41, 45 Walpole, Horace, 19 Walsingham, Thomas, 121

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Wardour Street see archaism war-duke see tribe Watson, William, 12 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 16, 26, 36, 37, 38 Webb, Beatrice, 125, 146, 163, 164, 165 Webb, Sidney, 3, 146, 163 Weber, Max, 2 Wells, H. G., 11, 12, 16, 17, 25, 26, 33n, 43, 68–9, 77, 146, 148–51, 153, 156, 162–5, 176–8 Ann Veronica, 77, 148–51, 153, 156, 176 Westminster Review, 23, 27, 40 Weyman, Stanley, 11, 16, 41 Whitehead, George, 143 Whitman, Walt, 162, 180 Wilde, Oscar, 37–8 William the Conqueror, 105 Wilson, Charlotte, 147 Witenagemot, 89, 94, 104

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Workers’ Theatre Movement, 198 working class, 2, 4, 6–8, 13–16, 19–21, 34–5, 38–40, 44–7, 64–7, 70n, 83, 86, 95, 101, 110–16, 118–19, 123–31, 133, 138–41, 146–8, 151–6, 158–78, 181–7, 189, 191–202 Working Men’s College, 64 World War I, 15, 43, 157, 162, 190 Wright, Thomas, 120 Wyclif, 129, 130, 131 Yeats, W. B., 36, 38, 148 yeomen, 52, 121, 127, 132, 166; see also peasants Young Folks, 15 ‘Young Person’, 23, 24 Young Socialist Education Bureau, 77 Young Socialist, 143 Zola, Émile, 20, 27, 28, 67, 68, 122, 162

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