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Imagining Socialism
Imagining Socialism
Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature
in Britain, 1817–1918
MARK A. ALLISON
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Mark A. Allison 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945736
ISBN 978–0–19–289649–0
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896490.001.0001
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TJ Books Limited
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For K.
Ahora y siempre
Acknowledgments
Socialism maintains that society precedes the individual; consequently, a book on

the subject should be expansive in its acknowledgement of the contributions of
others. I am delighted to oblige!
My first debt is to Catherine Gallagher, Ian Duncan, and James Vernon, who
supervised a singularly unpropitious Ph.D. thesis—to which, I am pleased to
report, this study bears no discernable resemblance. Nevertheless, the sagacious
will detect their salutary influence on every page. I am grateful for their intelli-
gence, generosity, and wisdom.
I am fortunate to have learned from the faculty of three outstanding academic
institutions. James P. Carson, C. Perry Lentz, Adele Davidson, Donald Rogan,
and Joel Richeimer (at Kenyon College); Elaine Hadley, Elizabeth Helsinger, and
Lawrence Rothfield (at the University of Chicago); Kevis Goodman, Celeste
Langan, and Jeffrey Knapp (at the University of California, Berkeley) among oth-
ers, taught me to think, write, read, and teach. Equally important, they encour-
aged me to continue my studies despite the daunting odds and my periodic—and
appropriately Victorian—crises of faith.
Teachers are indispensable, but so, too, are friends in the trenches. Erin Zink,
Currey Dorris, Dan Young, Scott Scrivner, Katie (Warwick) Scrivner, Darren
Eisenhauer, Taylor Wray, and Felicia (Bonani) Wray challenged my assumptions
and lifted my spirits. Penelope Anderson was my foremost confidant and
co-enthusiast during the intellectual and emotional gauntlet of graduate school.
Paul Hurh, besides much else, shamed me into raising my stylistic game with his
inimitable prose and all-seeing editorial eye. Paul Stasi rekindled my interest in
Western Marxism and was always eager to talk shop (or hoops). Chris Eagle
ensured that I never lost touch with the aesthetics of literature and the joys of
signification. Joseph Scalice was my inexhaustible reading partner for what, in
retrospect, was a staggering amount of Marx. My colleagues and students at Ohio
Wesleyan University have continued to support and sustain me. Marty Hipsky,
Zack Long, and David Caplan, in particular, deserve thanks for their contribu-
tions to this study. My (former) students, Patrick Shay and Andrew Padget-
Gettys, provided scrupulous assistance with the preparation of the manuscript,
saving me from many errors.
Sincere thanks is due as well to Jacqueline Norton and her team at Oxford
University Press, who shepherded me through the publication process with a
rare combination of professionalism and warmth. The anonymous referees who
viii Acknowledgments
assessed this project—both as a whole and in the stages along the way—were
collegial and constructive, and this book is much stronger for their suggestions.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that it is a luxury to grow up
in family as caring as my own. My mother, Carole K. Allison, made me a reader
through her example as much as her unfailing encouragement—though, mom,
the encouragement didn’t hurt either! With unflagging patience, my father, Jerry
Allison, taught me to be methodical and disciplined. My siblings, Lane Allison
and Greg Allison, made me (and make me) that rarest of creatures: a contented
middle child.
Speaking of families, my daughters, Sabrina Elyse and Vivian Alexandra, have
grown up alongside this study: girls, I could not be more proud of you. (And
sorry for keeping you waiting so long for the book-release party. I promise you
can stay up as late as you want!) Finally, and most important, I wish to thank my
wife, Kimberly—with gratitude, respect, awe, and love. “Worthy t’ have not
remain’d so long unsung.”
List of Figures
1.1. George Cruikshank, A Peep into the City of London Tavern. By an Irish
Amateur—On the 21st of August 1817 (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1817).
British Museum, 1859,0316.122. © The Trustees of the British Museum 47
1.2. Robert Owen, A View and Plan of the Villages of Mutual Unity and
Co-operation (1817). Repr. in A Supplementary Appendix to the First Volume of
A Life of Robert Owen (London: Effingham Wilson, 1858). Courtesy of the
Baker Old Class Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 54
1.3. Stedman Whitwell, Description of an Architectural Model from a Design by
Stedman Whitwell, Esq. for a Community upon a Principle of United Interests,
as Advocated by Robert Owen, Esq. (London: Hurst & Chance, 1830).
Courtesy of the Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 54
2.1. Laura Lofft, untitled portrait of Capel Lofft (n.d.). With permission of the
Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge 81
4.1. Jean-Jacques Frilley and Félix Philippoteaux, Le Père Enfantin (Paris: Impr.
Frault Jeune r. S. and des Arts, n.d.). Gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque/nationale
de France, ark:/12148/btv1b530061784 184
E.1. Walter Crane, The Party Fight and the New Party, or Liberalism and Toryism
Disturbed by the appearance of Socialism. In Cartoons for the Cause,
1886–96 (London: The Twentieth Century Press, 1896), n.p. 235
Introduction
A Socialist Century
In early January 1892, Oscar Wilde and the socialist organizer Henry Hyde
Champion rushed to the aid of John Evelyn Barlas. Barlas, a mentally disturbed
member of the Socialist League, had been arrested after firing multiple revolver
rounds at the wall of the House of Commons on the final day of 1891. “I am an
anarchist,” Barlas explained as he surrendered peacefully. “What I have done is to
show my contempt for the House of Commons.”1 The medical officer of Holloway
Prison quickly determined that Barlas was insane and recommended he be
institutionalized.
Yet on 16 January, Barlas was bound over to Champion and Wilde on the con-
dition that he keep the peace.2 Barlas’s liberators had met for the first time mere
hours earlier; Champion had hurried to the author’s door in quest of a second
householder to provide surety, recalling that Barlas said that he knew Wilde well
when they were students together at Oxford. He intercepted Wilde “just setting
out to read his first play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, at the St. James’s Theatre,
to . . . the Company who were to produce it.”3
Despite the exceptional circumstances, each man served as a surety for half
the £200 bond, and Champion took Barlas under his care.4 Responding to
Barlas’s letter of gratitude a few days later, Wilde struck a magnanimous tone:
“Whatever I did was merely what you would have done for me or for any friend
of yours whom you admired and appreciated. We poets and dreamers are all
brothers.”5
1 “Police,” The Times, no. 33,523 (1 January 1893): p. 6.

2 “Police,” The Times, no. 33,536 (16 January 1892): p. 4.
3 H[enry] H[yde], C[hampion], “Men I Have Met.—VII. Oscar Wilde,” Champion 4, no. 87
(13 February 1897): p. 3.
4 For the definitive study of Barlas, see Philip K. Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas, a Critical Biography:
Poetry, Anarchism, and Mental Illness in Late-Victorian Britain (High Wycombe: Rivendale, 2012);
Cohen recounts this episode at greater length (pp. 111–118). For a helpful recent discussion of
Champion, an important but understudied figure in fin-de-siècle British socialism, see John Barnes,
“Gentleman Crusader: Henry Hyde Champion in the Early Socialist Movement,” History Workshop
Journal 60, no. 1 (autumn 2005): pp. 116–138, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbi003.
5 Oscar Wilde to John Barlas, [postmark 19 January 1892], in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde,
eds. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), p. 511.
Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918. Mark A. Allison, Oxford University Press
(2021). © Mark A. Allison. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896490.003.0001
2 Imagining Socialism
While Barlas wrote poetry and Wilde coquetted with socialism, the fraternal
bond that Wilde evokes here is more expansive.6 It enfolds poets and socialists
alike within a brotherhood of “dreamers”: a virtual fellowship of those who
imagine a more just, cooperative, and beautiful world. It would be irresponsible
to attribute too much significance to the actions of Barlas, an accomplished poet
and once- formidable socialist agitator whose mental health was declining
precipitously.7 Yet Barlas’s “contempt” for institutional government, though rarely
so melodramatically expressed, is a constitutive feature of the anti- political
socialist tradition that this study investigates.
Operating on the supposition that socialism is best understood as a goal to be
imagined, rather than an ideological program to be instantiated, Imagining
Socialism examines an aesthetic impulse that animates some of the most conse-
quential socialist writing, thought, and practice of the long nineteenth century.
Specifically, this study investigates a tradition of radical aesthetic experimentation
that lies at the heart of a century of British socialist activity. This tradition includes
such seemingly disparate figures as Robert Owen (the “father” of British social-
ism), the midcentury Christian Socialists, and William Morris and his disciples.
In very different—and highly illuminating—ways, the neglected Chartist poet
Capel Lofft and George Eliot find themselves passionately engaged with this tra-
dition as well.
While this book’s focus on the imagination, literature, and aesthetically
inflected practice certainly bespeaks my own disciplinary training and interests, it
also has considerable justification within the period itself. By referring to a
notional fellowship of poets, socialists, and other dreamers to console Barlas,
Wilde was drawing upon a well-established topos. In the nineteenth-century
popular imaginary, literary and artistic proclivities and utopian emancipatory
projects like socialism were closely—albeit rather vaguely—associated. Many of
the giants of the Romantic age, the dimming stars in the cultural firmament in the
period under examination here, were famous for their radical and egalitarian
enthusiasms. Exemplary British poets, they were also Jacobins-in-recoil, thwarted
Pantisocrats, and fallen champions of liberty.8 (The figure of Shelley, as we will
6 Wilde’s Soul of Man under Socialism had appeared in The Fortnightly Review in February 1891
(55, pp. 292–319). Cohen suggests that Barlas helped Wilde with its composition by serving as his
“tutor and advisor” and clarifying the finer points of “radical political theory and practice” (John
Evelyn Barlas, p. 106).
7 Barlas had to be institutionalized within a year of his release from custody. Although he claimed
to be an anarchist when he surrendered to the authorities, Barlas had previously characterized himself
as “neither exclusively collectivist nor anarchist” and had been extremely active in the Social
Democratic Federation (SDF), Britain’s first Marxist organization (quoted in David Goodway,
Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to
Colin Ward, 3rd ed. [Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012], p. 81). I discuss the relationship between social-
ism and anarchism later in this Introduction.
8 I derive the phrase “Jacobins-in-recoil” from E. P. Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default? A
Lay Sermon,” in Power and Consciousness, eds. Conor Cruise O’Brien and William Dean Vanech
Introduction 3
see, cast an especially long shadow.) At midcentury, Charles Kingsley and the
bohemian man of letters Thornton Hunt were all but alone in respectable society
in advocating forms of socialism; at century’s end, William Morris, Edward
Carpenter, and G. B. Shaw were highly visible standard-bearers for the cause.
Beyond Britain’s shores, the ranks of the international literati were thick with
republicans, socialists, and other members of the “party of movement.”9 Even
America boasted its phalanx of Brook Farmers and advanced men and women of
letters, with George Ripley and Margaret Fuller heading the column. Both the
writings and the socio-political activities of these outsized figures reinforced
the association of radical emancipatory commitment and literary and artistic
sensibilities.
Perhaps more surprising than this intersection of the artistic and socio-political
vanguard is the frequency with which socialist ideas themselves were discussed
and debated in aesthetic terms during this period, theoretically as well as collo-
quially. Writing shortly after his first long sojourn in Manchester, for example, the
young Fredrick Engels complained that “When one talks to people about social-
ism or communism, one very frequently finds that they entirely agree with one
regarding the substance of the matter and declare communism to be something
very beautiful [etwas sehr Schönes]; ‘but,’ they then say, ‘it is impossible ever to put
such things into practice in real life.’ ”10 To Engels’s British interlocutors, the social
arrangements posited by “socialism or communism,” while intuitively appealing,
were simply too beautiful to be practicable. The very same formulation is still cir-
culating some six decades later; we find it, for example, in Robert Tressell’s The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914). After the novel’s protagonist regales his
co-workers with a “great oration” on the virtues of socialism, one of them opines
that “Socialism was a beautiful ideal, which he for one would be very glad to see
realized, but he was afraid it was altogether too good to be practical, because
human nature is too mean and selfish.”11
(London: University of London Press, 1969), p. 152. Boyd Hilton has characterized the Pantisocracy
scheme as a form of “utopian socialism” (A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], p. 489). Given its projectors’ ardent individualism, however,
“proto-socialist” is a more precise descriptor. The literature on the Pantisocracy is extensive; good
points of entry include J. R. MacGillivray, “The Pantisocracy Scheme and Its Immediate Background,”
in Studies in English by Members of University College Toronto, ed. Malcolm W. Wallace (Port
Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1969), pp. 131–169; Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: William
Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2002), pp. 43–67; James C. McKusick, “ ‘Wisely Forgetful’: Coleridge and the Politics of Pantisocracy,”
in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing Empire, 1780–1830, eds. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 107–128.
9 Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2016), p. 608, n. 31.
10 Frederick Engels, The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 50 vols. (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004), vol. 4, p. 214, translation modified. Subsequent references to this
edition will appear parenthetically by volume and page number.
11 Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, ed. Peter Miles (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), p. 487.
As we will see, anti-socialists exploited the aesthetic response that Engels and
Tressell lament here, using it to dismiss socialist theory itself as a species of
poetry—the discursive fantasies of unworldly individuals with hypertrophied
imaginations.12 Issuing from multiple directions, the association of beauty, the
arts (particularly poetry), and socialism could be difficult to evade, even when
they were inopportune. Sounding a note that is frequent in her correspondence,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning declares that “I love liberty so intensely that I hate
Socialism. I hold it to be the most desecrating & dishonoring to Humanity, of all
creeds.”13 As one might anticipate, her epic portrait of the artist as a young
woman, Aurora Leigh (1856), subjects socialism of every variety to blistering cri-
tique. Yet the poem’s representative socialist, Romney Leigh, is also Aurora’s
cousin—and, eventually, husband.
The impressionistic connections I have sketched thus far will be delineated
more precisely in the remainder of this Introduction; I will need to make analyti-
cal distinctions between forms of social and political engagement that were typi-
cally blurred (or simply ignored) within the period itself.14 Moreover, I am
scarcely the first to observe that the British socialist tradition teemed with writers
and artists and was unusually preoccupied with questions of beauty, literature, and
aesthetics. Important recent work by Ruth Livesey, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, and
Anna Vaninskaya, among others, has enriched our understanding of the intricate
ways in which aesthetics and socialism were interwoven during Britain’s fin-de-
siècle “socialist revival.”15 What has not been sufficiently recognized, however, is
that significant examples of the generative imbrication of artistic and socialist
practice can be found throughout the long nineteenth century. Imagining
Socialism seeks to redress this oversight by investigating a series of ambitious
socialist initiatives—some implemented, others only imagined—that drew upon
the resources of the aesthetic to subtend plans of communal regeneration. In so
12 As Laura Penny notes, “Poetry is the art that comes closest to the work of discursive reason,
being made of the same mental stuff, language and ideas” (“The Highest of All the Arts: Kant and
Poetry,” Philosophy and Literature 32, no. 2 [2008]: p. 374, DOI: 10.1353/phl.0.0023.374). A conse-
quence of this proximity is that radical social theory can readily be caricatured as poetry—as the lin-
guistic flights of overly imaginative minds.
13 Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 15 June 1850, in The Brownings’
Correspondence, eds. Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, and Edward Hagan, vol. 16 (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone,
2007), p. 136.
14 Radicals and commentators alike tended to be extremely loose with their terminology during
the period that Imagining Socialism investigates—not least because the boundaries between these phe-
nomena tended to be fluid and porous. On this problem see, for example, Gregory Claeys, “Non-
Marxian Socialism, 1815–1914,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought,
eds. Gareth Stedman Jones and Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 524–529.
15 Ruth Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007); Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late
Victorian Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Anna Vaninskaya, William
Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
Introduction 5
doing, this study reveals unexpected commonalities between what are often
treated as discontinuous and even antithetical stages of socialist activity.
The perspective I take in this study is thus quite different from the one that lit-
erary critics and cultural historians customarily adopt. Scholars typically construe
nineteenth-century British socialism as a story that unfolds in two, more or less
self-contained, episodes.16 The first, lasting from roughly 1817 to 1845, was dom-
inated by the communitarian schemes of Robert Owen and his followers, the first
men and women in Britain to call themselves “socialists.” Although the Owenite
movement possessed a potent millenarian undercurrent, it was essentially ration
alist and utilitarian in its sensibility—a late bloom of the radical enlightenment of
the 1790s. Not only did Owenites conceive of communal good in terms of
maximizing human happiness (the standard narrative continues), they approached
art and culture instrumentally, as a vehicle for hastening the arrival of the new,
rational social order.17 Owenite socialism dramatically broadened the scope of
popular radicalism and seeded movements dedicated to economic cooperation,
secularism, and women’s emancipation. But it eventually collapsed under the
weight of accumulated disappointments, public disapprobation, and the over-
bearing personality of Owen himself.
The customary narrative’s second episode, the “socialist revival,” begins in the
early 1880s. A new generation took up the mantle of socialism, spurred on by a
renewed crisis of religious faith, the disintegration of the classical economic para-
digm, and what was believed to be a prolonged economic depression. While they
acknowledged Owen as their forerunner, the new socialists took their ideological
bearings from other sources—Carlyle and Ruskin, late Mill, Marx.18 Students of
literature and culture have largely ignored the early, Owenite period, but fin-de-
siècle socialism is well-trodden territory, thanks to its beguiling array of canonical
authors (William Morris, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw), feminist intellectuals
(Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner), and avatars of sexual liberation
and queer politics (Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis). The revival
had run its course by the second decade of the twentieth century, disoriented by
16 While there are historians who work across this divide, both methodological convenience and
the very paucity of avowedly socialist activity between the collapse of Owenism and the socialist
revival of the early 1880s militate against such scholarship.
17 “In the historiography of English utopias . . .,” H. Gustav Klaus observes, “the first half of the
nineteenth century is not held in high regard. It is seen as a sterile period which produced no works
of distinction, nor any significant developments in the utopian form. The sober writings of Robert
Owen . . . are cited as evidence that the gradual evolution of the utopian genre had come to a standstill
at this point” (The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition [New York:
St. Martin’s, 1982], p. 22). More succinctly, the Fabian Society secretary Edward R. Pease declared
that “Owen, one of the greatest men of his age, had no sense of art” (The History of the Fabian
Society [London: Frank Cass, 1963], p. 23).
18 For a fuller account of the precipitates of the socialist revival see Mark Bevir, The Making of
British Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 22–42; Stanley Pierson, British
Socialists: The Journey from Fantasy to Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979),
pp. 7–42.
the cataclysmic political events in Europe and Russia and demoralized by the
uninspiring realpolitik of its own offspring, the Parliamentary Labour Party.
Like most heuristics, the bipartite periodization of nineteenth-century British
socialism I have just rehearsed is not so much incorrect as it is one-sided. As
Fredric Jameson has pointed out, whether one emphasizes continuity or rupture
when periodizing is, at bottom, a narrative choice; inevitably, different narrative
decisions make available certain truths while occluding others.19 In this study,
I have opted for a “long socialism” that extends from the first airing of Owen’s
communitarian “Plan” in 1817 to the acceptance of the Parliamentary Labour
Party’s new constitution and first party program in 1918. For reasons I describe
below, the adoption of Labour’s new constitution and program marks a terminus
for the particular socialist ideal that I trace in the following chapters—although
not, of course, the end of socialism’s potency as an emancipatory force in Britain.
Approaching the 101-year span between 1817 and 1918 as a “socialist century”
enables me to complement the extant scholarship by analyzing the activity, literal
and discursive, that occurred between the two major waves of British socialist
activism.20 Crucially, this interstitial period was the heyday of the Christian
Socialist movement, a group that Marxian-inflected historiography has never
quite known what to do with.
Though many of orthodox Marxism’s central theoretical postulates have lost
their intellectual luster in academic discourse, certain Marxist assumptions of
dubious worth have proven far harder to relinquish. Adopting a longer historical
perspective helps me eschew the questionable binaries that sanction the division
of nineteenth- century British socialism into two episodes: rationalist/class-
conscious; nostalgic/future-oriented; communitarian/statist; utilitarian/aesthetic.
It is not difficult to detect the Communist Manifesto’s tendentious division of
socialism into a “utopian” pre-history and “scientific” (i.e., Marxist) present and
future lurking behind these dichotomies.21 While there are significant differences
between Owenite and fin-de-siècle socialism, the aforementioned binaries do lit-
tle to capture them, even as they presuppose that the differences between these
two cultural moments are more significant than their affinities.
If British socialism before its encounter with Marxism tends to be treated as
utopian, moreover, this too is done in a decidedly one-sided fashion. “Utopian” is
taken solely in its pejorative sense, as a form of unrealistic aspiration; it designates
19 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso,
2002), pp. 23–24.
20 To be clear, my decision to approach the nineteenth century as a whole is a methodological deci-
sion, not a historical postulate. I am not suggesting, in other words, that socialism in Britain enjoyed a
unified and uninterrupted (much less a teleological) development over the course of the nineteenth
century.
21 Marx and Engels, Works, vol. 6, pp. 514–517. As a rhetorical maneuver, Marx and Engels’s uto-
pian/scientific distinction was a masterstroke; as an analytic judgment, it is irredeemably partisan. For
more on the origins of the utopian/scientific distinction, see this study’s fourth chapter.
Introduction 7
a condition (to paraphrase Engels’s Mancunian interlocutors) which is too ideal

to be realized in practice. But it is equally possible to stress the fecundity of
utopianism: its status as a cognitive mode that draws upon the potentialities of
the aesthetic to grasp possibilities that lie beyond the compass of conventional
ratiocination—and to imagine the world otherwise. As if picking up where
Wilde’s consolation of Barlas left off, the utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch
affirms that “More than one daydream before now has, with sufficient vigour
and experience, remodelled reality.”22
The Ambiguities of Anti-politics
A utopian aspiration shared by many British socialists—and the fulcrum of this

study’s revisionary argument—is what historians term socialism’s “anti-politics.”
Before considering the role the aesthetic can play in its articulation, we need to
familiarize ourselves with this key concept. We can do so by examining chapter
13 of William Morris’s celebrated socialist utopia, News from Nowhere (1890)—in
full. Entitled “Concerning Politics,” the chapter is just over one hundred words
long, for that is all the (typically loquacious) Old Hammond needs to explain to
his visitor, William Guest, how politics function in the England of the future:
Said I: “How do you manage with politics?”

Said Hammond, smiling: “I am glad that it is of me that you ask that question;
I do believe that anybody else would make you explain yourself, or try to do so,
till you were sickened of asking questions. Indeed, I believe I am the only man in
England who would know what you mean; and since I know, I will answer your
question briefly by saying that we are very well off as to politics,—because we
have none. If ever you make a book out of this conversation, put this in a chapter
by itself, after the model of old Horrebow’s Snakes in Iceland.”
“I will,” said I.23
Between its puckish humor and respectful allusion to a Nordic text, “Concerning
Politics” is unmistakably the work of Morris. But the dismissive attitude it evinces
toward “politics” was a distinguishing feature of socialism from its twin emer-
gence, in France and Britain, in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
22 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), vol. 1, p. 87. Subsequent references to this edition will appear
parenthetically by volume and page number.
23 William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris, vol. 16, p. 85.
Subsequent references to this volume will appear parenthetically by page number.
In his monumental History of Socialist Thought, G. D. H. Cole observes that

socialism’s principal founders—Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon (in
France) and Robert Owen (in Britain)—shared an anti-political posture. Despite
significant differences in their systems, all three of socialism’s progenitors were
“deeply distrustful of ‘politics’ and of politicians, and believed that . . . if the eco-
nomic and social sides of men’s affairs could be properly organised, the traditional
forms of government and political organisation would soon be superseded.”24
Contemporary historians of socialism, while introducing exponentially more
complexity (and drawing markedly different conclusions), have echoed Cole’s
observation that “the economic and social sides” of human relations were the
locus of these “utopian” socialists’ reformist intentions. Thus Gregory Claeys
maintains that “All of the leading forms of early socialism expressed discontent
about most traditional forms of polity . . . or were indeed explicitly anti-political in
believing that partisan ‘politics’ emanated from the existing system of unequal
property ownership.”25 Similarly, Gareth Stedman Jones insists that “socialism
was not simply a form of politics as many commentators have assumed. One fea-
ture common to all the founding works of ‘socialism’ was the relegation of politics
to a subordinate or derivative status.”26 Although several of the early socialists
were eager to use the powers of government to implement the sweeping changes
they envisioned, Stedman Jones elaborates, “The relationship of socialism with
politics was strictly instrumental.”27 Once social relations were set right, the sup-
pression of tradition political institutions and logics would follow as a matter of
course. In Martin Buber’s judicious summation, “it is the goal of Utopian social-
ism so-called to substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible, more-
over a society that is ‘genuine’ and not a State in disguise.”28 A non-governmental
form of society could be asymptotically approached—and perhaps even achieved.
To be sure, none of the authorities I have cited deny that socialism, in Britain
and elsewhere, became increasingly statist in outlook as the century unfolded.
This reorientation gained added impetus from the 1848 revolutions and the
French Second Republic’s tantalizingly short-lived experiment with social democ-
racy. Moreover, strains of socialism with significant political content, including
24 G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, 5 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1957–60), vol. 1, p. 3.

25 Claeys, “Non-Marxian Socialism,” p. 523.
26 Gareth Stedman Jones, “Religion and the Origins of Socialism,” in Religion and the Political
Imagination, eds. Stedman Jones and Ira Katznelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), p. 187.
27 Ibid. In advancing the first version of his socialist “Plan,” for example, Robert Owen observed
that “There are several modes by which this plan may be effect. It may be accomplished by individuals,—
by parishes,—by counties,—by districts, &c. comprising more counties than one,—and by the nation
at large, through its Government” (Selected Works of Robert Owen, ed. Gregory Claeys, 4 vols. [London:
Pickering & Chatto, 1993], vol. 1, p. 151). Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthet-
ically by volume and page number. As his ecumenicism about the agent who instantiates his Plan
intimates, what truly mattered to Owen was simply that it be set into motion.
28 Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. 80.
Introduction 9
Marxism, coalesced before the fabled year of European revolutions. Although

Marx and Engels were committed to the “political struggle” of proletarian revolu-
tion, we should not forget that they, too, anticipated the “withering of the state”
under achieved communism.29 And as we will see in the chapters that follow—
and as the example of Morris suggests—a powerful anti-political impulse remained
a vibrant part of the socialist tradition’s common inheritance. This was particu-
larly so in Britain, where socialism’s anti-political inclinations were reinforced by
the culture’s deeply ingrained suspicion of centralized authority.30
Setting to one side these subsequent developments momentarily, the early
socialists sought to reinvigorate collective life by, as one follower of Owen put it,
“the furtherance of social as opposed to political reform.”31 “If the institutions of
society were based upon sound first principles in reference to the production and
distribution of wealth, and the formation of character; [sic],” the same writer
explains, “the form of the government would naturally grow out of, and accom-
modate itself to such arrangements.”32 Indeed, Owen himself affirmed that the
proper configuration of the social sphere would quickly render “the business of
government a mere recreation” (1: 323). It was in the “character” of the populace
and the institutions of everyday life—the school, the family, the workplace, the
locality—that the struggle for social regeneration would be won or lost.
In this respect, too, News from Nowhere proves illustrative. Guest learns that
the elimination of politics was made possible by a battery of reforms in civil
society. Private property has been abolished; patriarchal marriage, a reflex of
the property relation, has disappeared with it. But the most significant trans-
formation is the de-alienation of work. By restoring the artisanal ethos and its
urge to beautify—a drive monopolized by the fine arts under capitalism—labor
has been rendered pleasurable. “It is this change,” Old Hammond avers, “which
makes all the others possible” (92). Through these and other social reforms,
the Nowhereians have been able to liquidate the judiciary, police, army, and
parliament—which, in a show of contempt to rival Barlas’s own, has been
repurposed for manure storage.
29 Marx and Engels, Works, vol. 6, p. 493. The “withering away of the state” is a free translation of
Engels’s assertion that under communism “The state is not ‘abolished.’ It dies out [er stirbt ab]” (Works,
vol. 25, p. 268). More elliptically, Marx affirmed that “the public power will lose its political character”
(Works, vol. 6, p. 505).
30 William Stafford has observed, moreover, that British radical social theory at the turn of the
nineteenth century often “rests upon metaphysical assumptions”—particularly, the presupposition of
a providentially established or naturally given harmony of interests; consequently, social melioration
can be achieved without “politics” (Socialism, Radicalism, and Nostalgia: Social Criticism in Britain,
1775–1830 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], p. 273). Socialism is the continuation,
and arguably consummation, of this trend.
31 “Will Chartism Be an Effectual Remedy for National Evils?” The New Moral World 10, no. 25
(18 December 1841): p. 199.
32 Ibid. p. 198.
Yet there are several fundamental ambiguities about the concept of anti-politics
that I will be exploring in this study in relation to aesthetics—and to which News
from Nowhere’s very structure gestures. Morris’s gleefully diminutive chapter on
politics is flanked by two others, “Concerning the Arrangement of Life” and “How
Matters Are Managed,” that restore some of the complexity that “Concerning
Politics” disavows. Guest learns, for example, of the existence of the folk-Mote, or
“ordinary meeting of the neighbors” (88). In these regular gatherings, the popu-
lace exercises self-governance on a local scale by hashing out their differences and
allowing “the will of the majority” to prevail (87). Guest voices his suspicion that
“there is something in all this very like [direct] democracy,” and Old Hammond
cheerfully agrees (89).33 But Hammond maintains that “politics” have neverthe-
less been superseded, because disagreements no longer “crystallize people into
parties permanently hostile to one another, with different theories as to the build
of the universe and the progress of time. Isn’t that what politics used to mean?”
(86). While impressed, Guest confesses that he is “not so sure of that” (86). Both
Guest’s favorable reaction and his ambivalence would seem well founded.
Many socialists hoped to liberate humankind from the morass of politics, by
shifting the gravity of collective life away from the state—or by transcending tra-
ditional political practices and logics altogether. Perhaps the most widely known
catchphrase for this widely held ambition is the Saint-Simonian prophecy that the
“government of men” would soon be supplanted by the “administration of
things.”34 Émile Durkheim accordingly observed that “socialism . . . far from
demanding a stronger organization of governmental powers was, on the contrary,
in one sense, essentially anarchistic.”35 But insofar as socialists understood them-
selves to be addressing perennial problems of governance, from the maintenance
of order to the allocation of collective resources, one might argue that they failed
to escape the conceptual ambit of the political.36 As we will have occasion to
33 It should be noted, however, that Morris did not seem to believe that anything of consequence
would remain to be decided in the folk-Motes. See the depiction of one such meeting in his delightful
socialist drama, The Tables Turned (in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris, 2 vols.
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], vol. 2, pp. 562–564.
34 “The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things” is Engels’s formulation
of an idea that is scattered throughout Saint-Simon’s erratic writings (Works 25: 268). See Henri Saint-
Simon (1760–1826): Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation, ed. and trans.
Keith Taylor (London: Croom Helm, 1975), pp. 157–218.
35 Émile Durkheim, Socialism and Saint Simon, ed. Alvin W. Gouldner, trans. Charlotte Sattler
(New York: Routledge, 1959), p. 153. Socialism’s aspiration toward a non-governmental social order
helps to explain why anarchism was frequently construed as a variety of socialism, by anarchists and
non-anarchists alike. (See, for example, Fabian Tract 4, What Socialism Is, where socialism is typolo-
gized with reference to two major categories, “Collectivist” and “Anarchist” [London: Fabian Society,
1886], p. 6.) Simultaneously, anarchism was often considered an antagonistic tradition; the quarrels
between Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (and later Mikhail Bakunin) are the loci classici of this
rivalry. For a helpful overview, see K. Steven Vincent, “Visions of Stateless Society,” in Stedman Jones
and Claeys, Cambridge History, pp. 433–476.
36 Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti- politics in Early British Socialism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 14.
Introduction 11
observe throughout this study, moreover, anti-political schemes often bear an

attenuated resemblance to traditional political institutions that they are intended
to supersede. In News, for example, the folk-Motes are reminiscent of the
golden-age ideal of popular radicalism, the “libertarian, egalitarian, fraternal
and ‘State-less’ cantonal democracy” that ostensibly existed before the Norman
Conquest.37 With at least equal frequency, socialist anti-political practices rely
upon forms of tutelary authority reminiscent of Tory or ecclesiastical paternalism,
although such measures are frequently conceived as temporary arrangements,
which are necessary merely to facilitate the transition to a form of society in
which “politics” has been supplanted.
Finally, and most challengingly, Claeys has argued that socialist anti-politics
might just as plausibly be characterized as a form of “hyperpoliticisation.”
Socialist aspiration, he elaborates, characteristically impinges upon “large areas of
both civil society and economic activity, where hitherto private property or tradi-
tional institutions of social order, such as the church or patriarchal family, had
predominated, and defined the mechanisms of power.”38 With the dissemination
of socialist ideas and examples of communal experimentation, swaths of col-
lective life that had either escaped or weathered scrutiny were made “objects of
contention and debate, and hence politicised.”39 This process might democratize
the stubbornly hierarchical institutions of the lifeworld. But it might also lead to
the policing of every aspect of everyday life—as the appalling record of many
self-avowed twentieth-century socialist regimes illustrates.40
Aesthetics and the “Problem of Politics”
The category of socialist anti-politics, then, is fretted by ambiguities and charged

with a deeply ambivalent potential. Viewed from one perspective, it holds out the
tantalizing prospect of superseding the state and escaping the deprivations of
“politics”; seen from a different angle, anti-politics culminates in the hyperpoliti-
cization of society. As befits so compelling, yet so vexed a concept, I will examine
a range of anti-political institutions, practices, and forms of authority in this
study—some implemented, others only imagined. But the particular purpose of
Imagining Socialism is to disclose and elucidate the role of the aesthetic in under-
pinning the heterogenous anti-political experiments it investigates. As we saw in
the case of News from Nowhere, the treatment of (virtually) all labor as a mode of
artistic practice is the foundation upon which a non-governmental society is
erected—it is the reform that “makes all others possible.” This study argues that
37 Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age Of
Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 92.
38 Claeys, “Non-Marxian Socialism,” p. 555. 39 Ibid. p. 511. 40 Ibid. p. 555.
aesthetic concepts and modalities subtended not just Morris’s utopia, but many of
British socialism’s most influential and compelling anti-political visions. It fur-
ther contends that, far from being confined to the fin de siècle, significant social-
ist experiments with the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic may be found
throughout the long nineteenth century.
Although they may sometimes appear in unexpected contexts, I employ the
terms “aesthetic” and “aesthetics” in a quite conventional sense in this study.
I thus use “aesthetic” to refer to experiences of beauty and sublimity, as well as
phenomena intended to elicit an aesthetic response, particularly works of art and
literature. And by “aesthetics” I mean the systematic investigation of beauty, taste,
and the arts, as well as the relationship of the aesthetic sphere to other domains,
including ethics, epistemology, and—crucially—politics. In his classic survey of
the British aesthetic tradition, Walter J. Hipple concluded that there was “no
tendency for multiplicity to reduce to unity in the British speculations . . . and in
consequence no simple historical progression from inadequacy to completeness,
from error to truth.”41 While Hipple makes this observation in relation to
eighteenth-century discourse, it articulates a perspective that informs my under-
standing of aesthetic philosophy more broadly. In other words, I do not privilege
any one aesthetic theory in what follows; instead, I assume that competing theo-
ries bring to the fore different facets and potentialities of the aesthetic, and that
no single paradigm maps the aesthetic domain in its entirety.
As both Andrew Bowie and Terry Eagleton have argued, the emergence of
modern aesthetic discourse in the mid-eighteenth century bespeaks, in Eagleton’s
phrase, “a certain crisis of traditional reason.”42 Specifically, the coalescence of
aesthetics as an autonomous branch of philosophical inquiry entails a tacit admis-
sion that the Enlightenment project of comprehending reality through the codifi-
cation of abstract universal laws fails to capture vital aspects of both the natural
world and human experience.43 From Shaftesbury through Schelling, much early
aesthetic discourse traffics in irrationalism and special pleading—particularly for
the deity relegated to the sidelines by the protocols of modern philosophical and
scientific inquiry. Yet, as Bowie points out, “there are no necessary grounds for
assuming that concern with aesthetics should . . . be connected to a rejection of
rationality.” Rather, “art and the understanding of art can enable what has been
repressed by a limited conception of reason to be articulated.”44 Consequently,
aesthetic thought and practice may even be seen as pointing the way, however
41 Walter J. Hipple, Jr., The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British
Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), p. 284.
42 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 60.
43 Ibid. p. 16; Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd ed.
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 25.
44 Bowie, Aesthetics, p. 5.
Introduction 13
haltingly, toward a philosophy of the future: a new intellectual paradigm built

around a more capacious and adequate conception of reason.
Socialism’s gestation period—roughly 1789–1815—coincides with a pivotal era
in the development of modern aesthetics. As is well known, philosophers and
artists swiftly rebelled against the rigid epistemological strictures that Kant
placed upon aesthetic experience in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790).
Leveraging the expansive role that the critical philosophy accords to the creative
imagination, Kant’s Idealist and Romantic successors, in Britain as well as
Germany, construed the aesthetic as a kind of supplementary, or even a superior,
logic: an imagination-centered alternative to prematurely totalized modes of con-
vention ratiocination.45 An alternative politics quickly followed suit. Within five
years of the publication of Kant’s critique, Friedrich Schiller was extrapolating
from avowedly “Kantian principles” in the face of the French Revolution’s devolu-
tion into terror and war.46 In On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), he
famously suggested that the aesthetic provided a way beyond the impasse at
which republican politics had arrived: “if man is ever to solve that problem of
politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aes-
thetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.”47
Like Schiller’s aesthetic treatise, the first iterations of socialism coalesced in
response to the perceived failures of the French Revolution, and the seismic ideo-
logical, political, and economic shockwaves that it unleashed.48 Albeit with widely
varying degrees of theoretical self-consciousness and intentionality, it is the con-
tention of this study that many British socialists found themselves in implicit
45 For a particularly clear overview of the Idealist and Romantic departures from Kant, see Mary
Warnock, Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). For more detailed national
surveys, Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002) and Timothy M. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to
Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) are especially lucid. Following Bowie, I
do not consider modes of aesthetic logic as, ipso facto, irrationalist—although some instances
clearly are.
46 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans.
Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 4.
47 Ibid. p. 9. For a succinct account of the socio- political context of Schiller’s treatise, see
Hammermeister, German Aesthetic Tradition, pp. 45–51. Jacques Rancière has argued that Marx’s pro-
gram for human emancipation ultimately derives from Schiller, claiming that Schiller’s “ ‘aesthetic
revolution’ produced a new idea of political revolution: the material realization of a common humanity
still only existing as an idea” (The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill [London: Continuum,
2006], p. 27).
48 Claeys, “Non-Marxian Socialism,” p. 521; Stedman Jones, “Religion”; Gareth Stedman Jones,
“Il Socialismo nella storia religiosa Europea,” in Pensare la contemporaneità: studi di storia Italiana
ed Europea per Mariuccia Salvati (Rome: Viella, 2011), pp. 113–154; Pamela Pilbeam, French
Socialists Before Marx: Workers, Women and the Social Question in France (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), pp. 26–38. The breakdown of the French Revolutionary
project was the explicit starting point for early French socialism. Owen was responding, in the first
instance, to the economic and social convulsions generated by Britain’s new manufacturing system.
But he framed these issues in the context of the prodigious economic expansion necessitated by the
demands of “a war of twenty-five years”—and the excess “productive power” that remained in the
wake of Napoleon’s defeat (1: 144).
agreement with Schiller: in order to solve the “problem of politics,” it was necessary
to explore the potentialities of the aesthetic.
Socialism and Its Others
Having explicated the category of anti-politics and clarified my understanding of

the aesthetic, I must now consider that most evasive of terms: socialism. Writing
in 1852, the liberal journalist William R. Greg complained that socialism “has as
many shapes as Proteus, and as many colours as the chameleon.”49 As late as 1915,
H. G. Wells was still employing the same figure, affirming that “Socialism is an
intellectual Proteus.”50 By then, however, Marxism’s international ascendency was
well underway. Famously, orthodox Marxism never succeeded in displacing Britain’s
native traditions of constitutional radicalism and Romantic anti-capitalism.51
Nonetheless, it did steadily consolidate its intellectual hegemony over the cate-
gory of socialism and its attendant concepts. As a result, Marxism succeeded in
occluding much of socialism’s historical diversity, even as it came to occupy the
position of implicit norm against which all other varieties of socialism were
understood.
With methodological reorientations (paradigmatically, the various linguistic
turns) and Marxism’s epistemological and political decline, many historians now
take as a starting point a perspective reminiscent of Greg’s: that socialism is irre-
ducibly fluid and plural.52 That plurality increased exponentially over the course
of the nineteenth century, moreover, as varieties of socialism proliferated, and the
term itself was used in an ever-looser fashion.53 While acknowledging the ideo-
logical diversity, terminological promiscuity, and mutability of socialism more
faithfully reflects the historical record, it raises a knotty methodological chal-
lenge: how do scholars of socialism define their object of analysis?
49 [William R. Greg], “Progress and Hopes of Socialism,” The Economist 9, no. 418 (30 August
1851): p. 950.
50 H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli, ed. Simon James (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 98.
51 On Britain’s inhospitableness to Marxism, see Ross McKibbin, “Why Was There No Marxism in
Great Britain?” The English Historical Review 99, no. 391 (1984): pp. 297–331, https://www.jstor.org/
stable/568982.
52 “Socialism has no necessary core,” Bevir urges. “Rather, socialists made plural socialisms by
drawing on inherited traditions to respond imaginatively to cultural, social, and political dilemmas”
(Making, pp. 13, 14). Also see, for example, Claeys, “Non-Marxian Socialism,” pp. 524–529; Pilbeam,
French Socialists, pp. 1–11. For helpful overviews of the demise of class as an analytical category, and
of the cultural-Marxist interpretation of nineteenth-century British history, see Dennis Dworkin,
Class Struggles (Harlow: Pearson, 2007), pp. 63–133; David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in
Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 8–22.
Introduction 15
Nor do the difficulties cease there. For if “socialism” was always already “social-
isms,” these discourses were not hermetically isolated from other traditions, many
of which are as reticulate and protean as socialism itself. Rather than ideological
purity, we must contend with constant interchange between socialist and non-
socialist traditions, with eclecticism (long acknowledged as a common socialist
predilection) the norm.54 Elizabeth Gaskell nicely captures this ideological catho-
licity in North and South (1854–5), when a bit character jokes that Margaret Hale
is “a democrat, a red republican, a member of the Peace Society, a socialist—.”55
One wonders when she had time to sleep!
In his important The Making of British Socialism (2011), Mark Bevir argues
that the solution to these interrelated methodological conundrums lies in adopt-
ing a more “pragmatic” and “relaxed” approach to the task of defining one’s object
of analysis.56 This flexibility is then countervailed by rigorous attention to the
local contexts—historical, intellectual, and cultural—in which the various itera-
tions of socialism were “made.”57 In keeping with Bevir’s advice, I have allowed
my interest in manifestations of British socialism that utilize the potentialities of
the aesthetic to undergird their emancipatory schemes to guide my choices. This
approach lifts into view an anti-political tradition that spans the century, revealing
surprising continuities between what has hitherto seemed to be sharply distinct—
and even qualitatively different—waves of socialist activity. However, I want to
acknowledge at the outset that this focus relegates to the periphery of my study
several large categories of nineteenth-century British socialist endeavor.
One such category is working-class experiments in economic cooperation and
communitarianism, such as the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers, with their enor-
mously influential paradigm of retail cooperation, or the Spa Fields urban com-
munity organized by the Owenite printer and journalist George Mudie. While
such projects were frequently buoyed up by a utopian impulse, the hardscrabble
struggle to remain viable (or, far more rarely, the soporific influence of financial
success) tended to preclude bold forms of aesthetic experimentation.58 Another
54 On socialist eclecticism more generally, see Vaninskaya, William Morris, pp. 147–148; Pilbeam,
French Socialists, pp. 6–7; J. F. C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the
Owenites in Britain and America (New York: Scribners, 1969), p. 127; Terry Eagleton, “The Flight to
the Real,” in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, eds. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 12.
55 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ed. Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 330.
56 Bevir, Making, pp. 13, 14. 57 Ibid. p. 14.
58 On the Rochdale Pioneers, see Brett Fairbairn, “The Meaning of Rochdale: The Rochdale
Pioneers and the Cooperative Principles” (University of Saskatchewan: Centre for the Study of Co-
operatives, 1994). For pithy discussions of Mudie’s community, see W. H. G. Armytage, Heavens
Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1560–1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp.
92–95; R. G. Garnett, Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–45
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), pp. 41–45. Both cooperative and communitarian
category that my study relegates to the periphery is the more forthrightly political
and statist forms of socialism, such as the social-democratic platforms of late
Chartism, or the municipal socialism and parliamentary social democracy advo-
cated, with increasing discipline, by the Fabian Society. This latter category
receives slightly more attention in this volume than the first, however, since polit-
ical strains of socialism often harbored and transmitted anti-political ideas or
included members who retained strong aestheticist inclinations.
I have also heeded Bevir’s second injunction, by providing thickly contextual-
ized interpretations of the phenomena that I investigate in each individual chap-
ter. Imagining Socialism thus offsets its (diachronic) emphasis on similarity across
time with a (synchronic) concentration on particularity. From the latter perspec-
tive, the anti-political strand of socialism this study investigates appears as a
series of relatively independent recourses to forms of aesthetic experimentation
to foster radical social renewal. As a rule, however, the reformers I study here
were deeply familiar with the efforts of their rivals and precursors (from which, as
we will see, they often inherited personnel) and actively engaged in the kinds of
dialog and debate that are the sine qua non of a “tradition” as such.
In the remainder of this section, I want to draw some rough-and-ready distinc-
tions between socialism and several adjacent nineteenth-century traditions: civic
republicanism, liberalism, and Marxism, this last now understood simply as one
strain of socialism among others. For while it is not possible to treat ideologies as
unalloyed and eternal Platonic essences, a comparative analysis can nonetheless
illuminate (shifting and permeable) boundaries between ideologies and tease out
the Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” that obtains between various iterations
of socialism. Bevir has meticulously traced how the leading fin-de-siècle strains
of British socialism arose from the interfusing of socialist ideas with preexisting
ideological traditions.59 Accordingly, I concentrate on the first half of the century
here.60 The following typology seeks to respect the complexity of the tangled
experiments continued throughout the century; in my view, this makes any hard-and-fast distinction
between a “communitarian” early and “statist” late nineteenth-century socialism untenable. (It is
worth recalling that Britain’s first socialist Prime Minister, J. Ramsay MacDonald, lived for a year in a
socialist cooperative in Bloomsbury [Armytage, Heavens Below, pp. 334–336]!) For a survey of
nineteenth-century cooperative experiments, see Arnold Bonner, British Co-operation: The History,
Principles, and Organisation of the British Co-operative Movement (Manchester: Co-operative Union,
1961); for communitarian experiments, see Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth
Century England (London: Longman, 1979).
59 Briefly, Bevir argues that British Marxism arose from the confluence of Marxism with both pop-
ular and Tory radicalism; Fabianism emerged from liberal radicalism and ethical positivism; and a
more profuse “ethical socialism” resulted from the immanentist turn of late nineteenth-century
Protestantism, as well as popular radicalism.
60 Insofar as British socialism is overwhelmingly Owenite in the first half of the nineteenth century,
two books by Gregory Claeys perform much of this labor. For Owenite politics, see Claeys, Citizens;
for Owenite economics, see Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to
Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). Margot C. Finn covers much
of the ground between the disintegration of Owenism and the resurgence of socialism in the early
Introduction 17
ideological field while simultaneously differentiating socialism from the primary

traditions with which it competed—and, increasingly, cross-pollinated—during
the nineteenth century.
In English, the word “socialism” derives from the “social system” of Robert
Owen; the term begins to appear in the mid-1820s, although it was not in com-
mon circulation for another decade.61 According to Claeys, socialism was “origi-
nally understood as a synonym for a particular way of acting unselfishly for the
common good and for the body of knowledge which outlined, described, and
‘proved’ this mode of action.”62 Socialism was thus at once practice and theory,
ethics and science, and, for many of its adherents, religion.63 Its primary antithe-
sis was individualism (or, more precisely, selfish individualism), and its principal
task to produce social harmony by aligning individual and collective good, so that
“each individual sought his or her own happiness in conjunction with that of the
community as a whole, rather than at the latter’s expense.”64 While not all subse-
quent British socialists shared this entire suite of commitments, a valorization of
cooperation (rather than competition), a conviction that society could be organ
ized in a more communal, egalitarian, and harmonious way, and a determination
to provide justice—particularly economic justice—to the poor and laboring
classes were characteristic investments.
As we will see in my first chapter, some of Owen’s interlocutors recognized that
his claims about the malleability of human character reprised elements of the mil-
lennial republicanism adumbrated in William Godwin’s epochal Political Justice
(1793). Others observed that his communitarian “Plan” resembled the land
scheme of the plebeian republican Thomas Spence. Commentators were most
preoccupied, however, by Owenite socialism’s possible affinities with Jacobinism
and its cult of republican virtue. This fear is memorably expressed in Rev. William
Gresley’s charmingly hysterical novel Charles Lever; or, The Man of the Nineteenth
1880s; see Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1878 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
61 Claeys, “Non-Marxian Socialism,” p. 529. See, more generally, Gregory Claeys, “ ‘Individualism,’
‘Socialism’ and ‘Social Science’: Further Notes on a Process of Conceptual Formation, 1800–1850,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 47, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1986): pp. 81–93, https://www.jstor.org/sta-
ble/2709596. For the broader linguistic field in which “socialism” emerged, Bestor is still useful; see
Arthur Eugene Bestor, Jr., “The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,” Journal of the History of Ideas 9,
no. 3 (1948): pp. 259–302, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707371.
62 Claeys, “ ‘Individualism’ ”: p. 83.
63 I am ultimately not persuaded by the strongest conclusion one might draw from this fact: Gareth
Stedman Jones’s brilliant argument that socialism is best considered “a self-proclaimed, science-based
post-Christian religion” (“Religion,” p. 187). Briefly, this appears to me to take a profound and well-
nigh ubiquitous intellectual phenomenon—the incomplete disaggregation of modern “secular”
thought from religion—and treat it solely as if it is characteristic of socialism. At a minimum, how-
ever, Stedman Jones has conclusively demonstrated that socialism’s origins and subsequent fortunes
cannot be understood without reference to a pan-European atmosphere of religious ferment, and that
the conflation of socialism and secularization is fallacious. See Stedman Jones, “Religion,” “Il
Socialismo.” His forthcoming study, In the Shadow of the French Revolution, is to be eagerly anticipated.
64 Claeys, “ ‘Individualism’ ”: p. 85.
Century (1841). The novel’s diabolical Owenite lecturer, Scipio Suttle, informs
Lever that the socialists intend “the wholesale murder of those who opposed their
schemes; and with a fiendish look spoke of Maximilian Robespierre, and a guillo-
tine by steam.”65 While this can hardly be deemed “suttle,” it bespeaks the abiding
anxiety that socialism was a stalking horse for republicanism at its most
unrestrained.
While civic republican discourse was one of the sources from which British
socialism emerged (and with which it increasingly overlapped), differences in
emphasis quickly suggest themselves.66 Like socialism, the republican tradition is
marked by its preoccupation with communal vitality and its valorization of public
over private interest. But in republican discourse, these commitments are articu-
lated in a political register, as suggested by its themes of patriotism, citizenship,
and the curtailment of aristocratic privilege. Anthony Taylor observes that “the
ideal republic invokes balanced government, civic virtue, and the separation of
power and authority, while placing checks upon the centralised executive and
urging resistance to arbitrary rule.”67 In the wake of the American and French
Revolutions (and the enormously popular writings of Thomas Paine), such
classical-republican topoi were increasingly complemented—and arguably, dis-
placed—by a concern with broadening the franchise.68
Although Owenite thought and culture bear traces of republican influence, the
distinction between early British socialism and republicanism can nonetheless be
sharply drawn. “Unlike republicanism, socialism was preoccupied not with the
pursuit of virtue . . . but with the attainment of harmony,” Stedman Jones argues.
“Its concern was not with popular sovereignty but with the reign of truth, not
with the enlargement of politics, but its subordination.”69 If one substitutes “the
reign of Christ” for the “reign of truth” in the previous sentence, it provides a
65 William Gresley, Charles Lever; or, The Man of the Nineteenth Century (London: James Burns,
1841), p. 137.
66 For a classic typology of republican thought, see Norbert J. Gossman, “Republicanism in
Nineteenth Century England,” International Review of Social History 7, no. 1 (1962): pp. 47–60, https://
www.jstor.org/stable/44581472; for a helpful recent overview, see Gregory Claeys and Christine
Lattek, “Radicalism, Republicanism, and Revolutionism: from the Principles of ’89 to the Origins of
Modern Terrorism,” in Stedman Jones and Claeys, Cambridge History, pp. 200–253. I discuss the
(incomplete) convergence of republicanism and socialism in Britain in this study’s second chapter.
67 Anthony Taylor, “Medium and Messages: Republicanism’s Traditions and Preoccupations,”
Republicanism in Victorian Society, eds. David Nash and Taylor (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), p. 1.
68 Mark Philp, “English Republicanism in the 1790s,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 3
(1998): pp. 243–247, DOI: 10.1111/1467-9760.00054.
69 Gareth Stedman Jones, “European Socialism from the 1790s to the 1890s,” in The Cambridge
History of European Modern Thought, eds. Warren Breckman and Peter E. Gordon, vol. 1 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 199. On the differences between Owenism and republicanism,
also see Stedman Jones, “Millennium and Enlightenment: Robert Owen and the Second Coming of
the Truth,” in Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought, eds. Béla
Kapossy et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), esp. pp. 224–229.
Introduction 19
surprisingly apposite description of the priorities of the mid-Victorian Christian

Socialists as well. As I will discuss in greater detail throughout this volume, a
desire to widen the franchise increasingly characterized British socialism as well
as republicanism. But the relationship of socialists to the machinery of political
institutions and “the ideal of representative government” remained more vexed—
particularly among the members of the anti- political tradition with which
Imagining Socialism is principally concerned.
A more tangible indication of the differences between socialism and
nineteenth-century iterations of republicanism is the frequency with which Tories
were drawn to the socialist cause. A commitment to (relative) equality, coupled
with rhetorical hostility to the monarchy and the established Church, was a com-
monplace of republican discourse, particularly in its more populist strains. Yet
throughout the century, Tories of both traditional and radical cast gravitated
toward socialism, attracted by its ethos of paternal care and concern with the
deprivations wrought by commerce and the manufacturing system.70 Many of
Owen’s earliest supporters were Tories—including the Duke of Kent, father of
Queen Victoria.71 The Tory divine Frederick Denison Maurice provided the spir-
itual leadership of the Christian Socialism movement. The group briefly attracted
that self-described “violent Tory of the old school,” John Ruskin, whose work so
inspired a later generation of socialists.72 And at the fin de siècle, Tory radicals
such as Henry Mayers Hyndman, Robert Blatchford, and Henry Hyde Champion
(savior of Barlas) were instrumental to socialism’s revival.73 In contrast, the cen-
tury’s major popular republican tribunes—from Richard Carlile to William James
Linton to the secularist firebrand Charles Bradlaugh—were vocal anti-socialists,
fearing socialism’s potential encroachments on individual liberty.74
70 Of course, Tories were in some cases drawn toward socialism by older republican ideals, particu-
larly Country party ideology. For canonical discussions of the Country party tradition, see
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican
Tradition, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 401–505; Pocock, Virtue
Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 215–310.
71 There is even an anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, that Owen “was the first man who had the infant
Queen in his arms, placed there by her father, his friend, the Duke of Kent” (Joseph Collinson, “The
Queen and Robert Owen,” Notes and Queries, 8th ser., 3 [18 February 1893]: p. 128).
72 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 35
(London: George Allen, 1903–12), p. 13.
73 On Blatchford as a Tory radical, see Gregg McClymont, “The Cultural Politics of Tory Socialism:
The Clarion in the Labour Movement During the 1890s,” in Classes, Cultures, and Politics: Essays on
British History for Ross McKibbin, eds. Clare V. F. Griffiths, James J. Nott, and William Whyte (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 211–226.
74 Carlile admired Owen as an individual but complained that his socialism would dissolve “the
noble spirit of independence” in a “tyranny of rules and regulations” (quoted in Joel H. Wiener,
Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile [Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1983], p. 232). On Linton’s anti-socialism, see Gregory Claeys, “Mazzini, Kossuth, and
British Radicalism, 1848–1854,” Journal of British Studies 28, no. 3 (1989): pp. 237–244, https://www.
If some Tories proved quite sympathetic to socialism, liberals tended to be

deeply skeptical—at least until, as Bevir has argued, the classical liberal intellectual
and political consensus began to unravel in the 1870s and 1880s.75 This skepti-
cism had significant institutional and characterological dimensions, the latter of
which have been of especial interest to literary scholars.76 But here I will highlight
two other important grounds for liberal wariness. The first is respect for classical
political economy, according to whose canons most socialist plans looked vision-
ary, counterproductive, or even dangerous. As we will have occasion to observe in
these pages, devotees of political economy would be among socialism’s most
dogged and formidable critics throughout the century, often expressing qualified
sympathy for socialists’ goals and exasperation at their methods. (Not for nothing
does Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, a frustrated communitarian, characterize
political economy as the “science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her
lights.”77) A second ground for liberal distrust of socialism is the former’s valori-
zation of the self-determining individual, free to embark upon “different experi-
ments of living.”78 Not unreasonably, many liberal commentators feared that
individual autonomy would be the first casualty of any socialist scheme of associ-
ated living or cooperative labor.
Both of these liberal commitments are prominent in a fascinating series of
debates that the teenage John Stuart Mill held with the Cooperative Society, a
group of London Owenites led by the formidable William Thompson, in 1825. In
the drafts and notes that survive, Mill systematically rehearses the tenets of
Ricardian political economy to rebut the Owenite claim that “Competition is the
cause of the distress which is diffused over all classes” (26: 325). Criticizing the
Owenite socialists’ reliance on feelings of benevolence to motivate economic effort,
Mill asserts that “There is a principle in man, far more constant and far more
universal than his love for his fellows—I mean his love for himself: and without
excluding the former principle, I rest my hopes chiefly on the latter” (26: 324).
jstor.org/stable/175571. For a typical specimen of Bradlaugh’s anti-socialism, see Charles Bradlaugh,

Some Objections to Socialism (London: Freethought Publishing, 1884).
75 Bevir, Making, pp. 38–40.
76 Institutionally, we might think of the veneration of disinterested, parliamentary government,
which Jonathan Parry has argued is constitutive of the Victorian liberal tradition (The Rise and Fall of
Liberal Government in Victorian Britain [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993]). From a char-
acterological perspective, the “liberal many-sidedness,” “liberal cognition,” and “bleak” attitudinal
stance, theorized, respectively, by David Wayne Thomas, Elaine Hadley, and Amanda Anderson, are
pertinent as well (Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic [Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003], p. x; Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-
Victorian Britain [Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2010], p. 9; Anderson, Bleak Liberalism
[Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2016], p. 17).
77 George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, ed. Rosemary Ashton (New York:
Penguin, 1994), p. 18.
78 John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, eds. John M. Robson et al., 33 vols.
(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1963–91), vol. 18, p. 261. Subsequent references to this edition
will appear parenthetically by volume and page number.
Introduction 21
With equal vigor, he reiterates the Malthusian strictures embedded in the classical
economic paradigm, warning that “every plan for ameliorating the condition of
the people, which is not founded upon a regulation of their numbers, is futile and
visionary” (26: 312).79 With the inexorable efficiency of a “reasoning machine,”
Mill proceeds to deduce the inevitability of inequality, the necessity of private
property, and the virtue of competition (1: 111).
Occasional glimpses of Mill the budding liberal individualist are visible in this
episode as well. For Mill punctuates his political-economic critique of Owenism
with a stirring appeal to the principle of individual liberty: “other things being
alike, it is infinitely better to attain a given end by leaving people to themselves
than to attain the same end by controlling them. It is delightful to man to be an
independent being” (26: 321). Mill affirms that he and the Owenites “have in view
the same great end, the improvement of the human race” (26: 324). However, his
conviction of the validity of political economy and the value he places on individ-
ual autonomy alike compel him to look to education and “reform in the govern-
ment of my country” to better the condition of the laboring classes (26: 323).
These same commitments would animate many subsequent liberal engagements
with socialism.80
But the liberal conviction that socialist schemes were economically misguided
and threatening to individual autonomy is only part of the story. In good
Victorian fashion, most liberals believed that “the improvement of the human
race” was not simply (or even primarily) a matter of an improved standard of liv-
ing; rather, it entailed intellectual and moral growth as well. Consequently,
advanced liberals such as Mill and Harriet Martineau were increasingly willing to
acknowledge the desirability of a more cooperative and egalitarian society, once
the populace achieved greater enlightenment and developed firmer characters.
Political economy, too, might be interpreted as providing support for some forms
of economic cooperation.81 Insofar as cooperative schemes were designed to give
workers a tangible stake in their own productivity, they might even provide more
incentive to labor than a traditional capitalist/laborer relation.
79 In fact, the first round of debates Mill and his friends conducted with the Owenites was devoted to
“the question of population” (1: 127). As we will see in my first chapter, Malthus himself polemicized
against Owen’s plan in the third edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population (1817).
80 As Finn points out, liberals’ hostility to socialism was heightened by the tendency to view it
through the prism of Continental developments, leading to the conviction that socialism entailed sub-
stantial state intervention in the economy to ameliorate the condition of the poor and laboring classes
(After Chartism, pp. 303–304). Herbert Spencer’s bombastic Man Versus the State (1884) is perhaps
the apotheosis of this tradition.
81 In different contexts, both Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys have pointed out that
nineteenth-century political economy and early British socialism share a foundational premise, despite
their antipathy: that the economy is governed by natural laws that statesmen and legislators violate at
their own peril. Consequently, both classical political economic and socialist discourses participate in a
devaluing of politics and the science of the legislator. See Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical
Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Claeys, Citizens, pp. 142–166.
Here, too, Mill presents a particularly interesting case. In his epochal Principles
of Political Economy (1848), he expressed a cautiously articulated support for
experiments in worker cooperatives, encouraged by the success of such ventures
in Paris. These statements were to become more fulsome in the second (1849)
and third (1852) editions of the Principles. But this progression would have done
little to prepare readers for the conversion announced in his posthumously pub-
lished Autography (1873). Describing the culmination of his studies with his wife
Helen Taylor, Mill famously affirms that
our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class
us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists . . . The social problem of
the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of
action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal
participation in all the benefits of combined labour. (1: 239)82
Here, the liberal valorization of the “individual liberty of action” coalesces with
the socialist emphasis on “common ownership” and “equal participation” in a sin-
gle problematic. A generation of advanced liberals cut their teeth on Mill’s work.
A number of them eventually followed their master’s example, unfettered by the
collapse of orthodox classical economy.83 “The economic influence most potent
among the Socialist Radicals,” the Fabian Society leader Sidney Webb roundly
declared in 1889, “is still that of John Stuart Mill.”84
Having considered both republicanism and liberalism, we must finally discuss
Marx and Engels’s revolutionary socialism, or communism. Although Marx
began living in London in 1849, he did not register in Britain’s national con-
sciousness until 1871, when he gained infamy as “the Red Doctor” who, ostensi-
bly, orchestrated the Paris Commune from afar.85 But Marxism does not enter the
story of British socialism in a decisive way for another decade—and only then
through a dense filter of native traditions and concerns.86
82 Many scholars have questioned Mill’s self-description. For a careful reconstruction and assess-
ment of Mill’s ideological progression, see Gregory Claeys, Mill and Paternalism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. pp. 123–172.
83 Of course, liberalism itself developed in the 1880s and 1890s in a more collectivist direction,
yielding a “new liberalism” which shares considerable ideological territory with socialism. For canon-
ical studies of the new liberalism, see Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social
Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978); P. F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971).
84 Sidney Webb, Socialism in England (Baltimore, MD: American Economic Association, 1889), p. 47.
85 Quoted in Stedman Jones, Karl Marx, p. 508.
86 Marx died in 1883, when Britain’s socialist revival had scarcely begun. Engels lived another
twelve years, but his energies were focused on developments in Germany—and on preparing the
remaining volumes of Capital for the press. Capital’s first volume did not appear in an English transla-
tion until 1887; its earliest British readers encountered it in the French edition (1875). For the assimi-
lation of Marx’s thought into British socialism, see Bevir, Making, esp. pp. 43–127; for the British
reception of Marx more broadly, see Kirk Willis, “The Introduction and Critical Reception of Marxist
Introduction 23
It is worth pausing momentarily, however, to register the shift in terminology.

The Marxist founders called their position “communism,” in part, to claim
descent from the extreme—and militant—tip of the republican tradition, which
sought to guarantee equality by abolishing private property. While the word
“communism” was a coinage of the 1840s, the practice of holding property in
common has, of course, ample precedent in the Christian, classical, and uto-
pian literary traditions.87 In a particularly elegant formulation, the Christian
Socialist J. M. Ludlow observed that “Communism is indeed the germ of all
Socialism, as it is its extreme limit.”88 However, few commentators were as erudite
or as fastidious as Ludlow, and both proponents and critics tend to treat “social-
ism” and “communism” as synonyms in the period this book investigates.89
Marx and Engels’s effort to differentiate their “scientific” socialism from their
“utopian” precursors and rivals extended beyond their adoption of the mantle of
communism. While their claims to qualitative epistemological superiority have
not held up to twentieth- and twenty-first-century scrutiny, they were deeply
influential within the period, and, as we have seen, they continue to exercise a
strong, inertial force on contemporary scholarship.90 Claeys enumerates three of
the central criticisms that the Marxist founders leveled at other socialists, as well
as their obverse, which formed the basis of their own position:
(1) that the proletariat were merely a passive “suffering mass,” rather than the
active agent of revolution; (2) the belief that society could or should be trans-
formed by propaganda and experiments only, rather than revolution; (3) a
refusal to acknowledge that the seeds of social development lay in the economic
development of capitalism.91
Thought in Britain, 1850–1900,” The Historical Journal 20, no. 2 (1977): pp. 417–459, https://www.
jstor.org/stable/2638539. For Engels’s involvement in British socialism at the fin de siècle, see Stanley
Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism: The Struggle for a New Consciousness (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 182–185; Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary
Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), pp. 317–332.
87 See Gareth Stedman Jones, introduction to The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, 2002),
pp. 27–38; “communism, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., entry updated September
2009, www.oed.com/view/Entry/37325. The anti-communist tradition has an almost equally long lin-
eage; Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s scheme of community of property in the Republic provided talking
points for many nineteenth-century anti-socialists. See Aristotle, Politics, bk. 2.
88 J. M. Ludlow, Christian Socialism and Its Opponents (London: John Parker, 1851), p. 11; also see
Durkheim, Socialism, p. 55.
89 Claeys, “Non-Marxian,” p. 524. To add an additional wrinkle, “communism” was sometimes uti-
lized to refer to “communitarianism,” particularly in the early part of the century (Arthur Eugene
Bestor, Jr., Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in
America, 1663–1829 [Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950], pp. vii–viii).
90 Gregory Claeys points out the utopian/scientific distinction is untenable not least because
Marxism might be considered as utopian in its assumptions as many of the forms of socialism it
claims to have superseded (“Robert Owen and Some Later Socialists,” in Robert Owen and his Legacy,
eds. Noel Thompson and Chris Williams [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011], pp. 33–36; Claeys,
Marx and Marxism [New York: Nation Books, 2018], pp. 150–157.
We may peremptorily dismiss the third distinction since (as we shall see in my
first chapter) it is foundational to Owenism and was thus available to British
socialists from the beginning. This leaves the agency of the proletariat and the
necessity of a revolution as the primary grounds for Marxism’s claim to scientific
distinction.
To begin with the more controversial, British socialism in the long nineteenth
century was characteristically—although by no means universally—a pacific
creed.92 This did not prevent critics from insisting that violence would be the
inevitable outcome of socialist experimentation, as the sensational examples of
Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Gissing’s Demos: A Story of English Socialism
(1886) illustrate. And, of course, there were socialists who embraced political vio-
lence and/or accepted the necessity of working-class revolution. As I will discuss
in my second chapter, elements of the Chartist movement were prepared to use
insurrectionary means to achieve socialist ends. At the fin de siècle, William
Morris and his comrades in the Socialist League, among others, followed Marx in
accepting revolution as the necessary mechanism for capitalism’s overcoming.93
Concomitantly, the Marxist contention that the laboring classes could accom-
plish their own deliverance was also unusual in Britain until the 1890s, when a
more demotic and millennialist “ethical socialism” took wing. To be sure,
working-class practitioners of economic cooperation or participants in experi-
ments in communal living believed that they were capable of achieving their own
emancipation (though rarely with pretensions to liberate humankind as a whole).
But middle- or even upper-class leadership remained the norm for most of the
century.
Indeed, Marxism’s theoretical emphasis on the agency of the working classes
had a salutary influence on British socialism at the fin de siècle, encouraging
socialists to venture beyond their metropolitan hubs in order to “make contact
with the masses.”94 But as Barbara Taylor has argued, the Marxist founders might
92 As Barlas’s case suggests, the category of anarchism complicates the characterization of British
socialism as predominately non-violent. In Britain, the divergence between socialism and anarchism
accelerated in the late 1880s, as anarchists turned to dynamite and other sensational forms of “propa-
ganda by deed” (Bevir, Making, p. 267). The classic studies of fin-de-siècle British Anarchism are John
Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse (London: Paladin, 1978) and Hermia Oliver, The International Anarchist
Movement in Late-Victorian London (London: Croom Helm, 1983); important recent discussions
include Goodway, Anarchist Seeds, pp. 1–92; Bevir, Making, pp. 256–277; Matthew S. Adams,
Kropotkin, Read, and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism
(Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
93 Despite its penchant for saber-rattling, the avowedly Marxist Social Democratic Federation
advocated a parliamentary road to socialism. While there was a general sense of catastrophist possibil-
ity in the air in the early years of the socialist revival, the ease with which the authorities put down
protestors on Bloody Sunday (13 November 1887) dispelled the belief that a spontaneous popular
revolution was imminent. As G. B. Shaw put it five years after the event, “Insurrectionism vanished
from the field and has not since been much heard of ” (The Fabian Society: What It Has Done and How
It Has Done It [London: The Fabian Society, 1892], p. 10).
94 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd ed. (Oakland: PM Press,
2011), p. 427.
Introduction 25
also be criticized for narrowing the scope of socialism, so that it became ever-
more fixated on the twin topoi of class struggle and economic crisis. By contrast,
Taylor characterizes early British socialism as a “humanist ideal of universal
emancipation.”95 Universal, moreover, in a twofold sense: not only would
emancipation extend to everyone, it would eliminate every form of injustice. The
community, the workplace, the church, the school, the market, the connubial
bed—none of these sites of domination would be left unredeemed by what Owen
liked to call “The great change” (3: 11). This intoxicating sense of socialism’s
emancipatory vocation was not held by every socialist that we will encounter in
these pages. But the socialists who did share it inclined toward anti-political
stances—and, as we will see, were more open-minded about the emancipatory
potentialities the aesthetic might afford.
Structure and Trajectory
I turn now to the task of providing an overview of this book’s structure. Imagining
Socialism proceeds chronologically, developing its argument across a series of five
case studies. While making no claims to be encyclopedic, I have conscientiously
engaged with the three major stages of nineteenth- century British socialist
endeavor—Owenism, the (frequently elided) Christian Socialism, and the fin-de-
siècle socialist revival—in my first, third, and fifth chapters. While I continue to
develop my overarching argument in Chapters 2 and 4, they have a more oblique
relationship to the main body of this study. Specifically, these chapters investigate
important subthemes (the relationship of socialism to political violence, land
reform, and Chartism in Chapter 2; to women’s liberation and high Victorian cul-
ture in Chapter 4) and reconstruct some of the mediating links between socialist
endeavor and British cultural life more broadly.
Chapter 1 begins with British socialism’s symbolic birth: Robert Owen’s
unveiling of his plan for a “new state of society” in the summer of 1817 (1: 201).
Although Owen has been canonized as a stalwart of the political left, his propos-
als baffled and enraged partisans across the ideological spectrum. Commentators
had great difficulty deciding whether his plan was radical or reactionary—or even
if it was “political” at all. Using the vitriolic debates that consumed the “Plan” as a
focal point (and drawing on contemporary commentators as varied as William
Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, and future Dickens illustrator George Cruikshank),
I undertake a revisionary interpretation of Owenite socialism that uncovers its
latent aesthetic core. Owen and his followers have long been associated with utili-
tarian indifference, if not downright vulgarian insensitivity, to the arts. I show,
95 Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. x.
however, that Owen’s very anti-political ambition to govern citizens through “the
proper arrangement of the circumstances which surround them” rests upon an
aesthetic conceptual underpinning.96 In particular, the distinctive curriculum
that Owen designed to produce human beings who would not require “politics”
to produce consensus relies upon extensive training in the musical arts to incul-
cate the principle of universal harmony. In the final part of this chapter, I locate
the origins of British anti-socialist rhetoric at the juncture of Malthusian political
economy and anti-Jacobin polemic. This discourse equates socialist experimenta-
tion with nothing less than civilization’s self-destruction—even as it intimates
that socialists are not serious thinkers, but poets.
My second chapter unearths a forgotten masterpiece of Chartist poetry to
explore the most divisive tactical question in the history of socialism: should the
new order be brought about by force? In 1839, an economically battered Britain
teetered on the threshold of revolution. The neo-Spencean poet Capel Lofft
aspired to use his anonymously circulated epic, Ernest; or, Political Regeneration,
to send it over the brink. Ernest describes, in unflinching and sanguinary detail,
the growth and eventual triumph of an agrarian-communist insurrection. A char-
ismatic poet leads the revolt, using fiery oratory to inspire his co-conspirators and
swell the ranks of the insurgency. Because Ernest was clearly intended to galva-
nize militant elements within the Chartist movement into action—and because
its author was alarmingly eloquent—hysteria greeted the epic’s appearance. My
reading of Ernest traces how Lofft employs vanguardism, the belief that artists can
lead the masses in a progressive direction, to allay his own doubts about the via-
bility of popular self-governance. And I reveal the extent to which his epic
depends on the sublime figure of the committed revolutionary, a mainstay of
socialist iconography, for its anti-political vigor. More broadly, this chapter uti-
lizes Ernest, a hybrid of contemporaneous radical social and political thought, as
a staging ground to investigate the uneasy comingling of Chartism and Owenite
socialism. Although both movements sought the emancipation of the laboring
classes, the former concentrated on parliamentary enfranchisement, while the
latter pursued mechanisms of social reform that could be achieved outside of the
sphere of politics.
In Chapter 3, I offer a comprehensive reassessment of the most vocal advo-
cates of socialism in Britain at midcentury, the Christian Socialists. In the rev-
olutionary year 1848, a group of young professionals and clergymen resolved
to address working-class discontent. Inspired by the egalitarian theology of
their leader, the Anglican divine Frederick Denison Maurice, they set out to
“Christianise Socialism.”97 Refuting the oft-repeated claim that the movement
96 Robert Owen to the editor, The Times, no. 10,158 (29 May 1817): p. 7.
97 Frederick Denison Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice: Chiefly Told in His Own
Letters, ed. Frederick Maurice, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribners, 1884), vol. 2, p. 36.
Introduction 27
was inauthentic because it discouraged working-class political engagement, my

analysis contextualizes Christian Socialist doctrine in light of recent scholarship
on the diversity—and, in many cases, religiosity—of socialism. Moreover, it
reveals that the group’s signature anti-political undertaking, the sponsorship of
cooperative workshops, owes a quiet debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s aesthetic
philosophy. While maintaining that the Christian Socialists deserve to be taken
seriously qua socialism, I nevertheless identify several deep-seated antinomies in
their project. Through a reading of Charles Kingsley’s influential social problem
novel Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet (1850), I explore the fundamental incongru-
ities between not only the group’s Anglican Christianity and its socialism, but also
its militant affect and resolutely moderate intentions. These contradictions doomed
the movement to be a “self-consuming socialism”—an outcome eerily prefigured
by Kingsley’s predilection for the topos of cannibalism.
After the winding down of Owenism and Christian Socialism, it is sometimes
assumed that British socialism lay dormant until the 1880s. While socialist prac-
tice was rare during the age of equipoise, its very infrequency facilitated the dis-
semination and repurposing of socialist ideas—often in unexpected contexts.98
My fourth chapter demonstrates that George Eliot’s investigation of the early,
“utopian” socialists catalyzed the writing of perhaps the most iconic of all
Victorian novels, Middlemarch (1871–2).
The utopian socialists (as Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and their followers were
increasingly known) frequently suggested that the transition to a new, non-
governmental social order hinged upon the emancipation of women. Their

untimely calls for female liberation became newly salient with the coalescence, in
the 1860s, of Britain’s first national campaign for women’s suffrage. In my reading
of Middlemarch, I show that socialist discourse provides Eliot with a rich sym-
bolic vocabulary with which to conduct her own novelistic investigation of “the
Woman Question”—and to engage in a clandestine meditation on the claims of
the suffragists. Attending to Middlemarch’s socialist motif enables me to demys-
tify the novel’s shrouded origins and decode a hitherto illegible record of Eliot’s
proto-feminist aspirations which, like the early socialists’ own, were inextricably
intertwined with skepticism about institutional politics. In the course of my dis-
cussion, I provide a genealogy of “utopian socialism,” a category that has exerted a
98 These relatively fallow years did see the writing of J. S. Mill’s “Chapters on Socialism” (1867), the
rise and fall of the International Workingmen’s Association (i.e., the “First International”), and the
founding of John Ruskin’s quasi-socialist Guild of Saint George. On the First International, the stan-
dard studies are Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement:
Years of the First International (London: MacMillan, 1965) and Henryk Katz, The Emancipation of
Labor: A History of the First International (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992). For recent discussions
of the Guild of Saint George, see Stuart Eagles, After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a
Victorian Prophet, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 52–94; Sara Atwood,
Ruskin’s Educational Ideals (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 151–175; Mark Frost, The Lost
Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George: A Revisionary History (London: Anthem, 2014).
distorting influence on scholarship since Marx and Engels tarred their rivals
with it.
In my final chapter, I engage with the fin-de-siècle socialist revival through the
work of its presiding spirit, William Morris. Morris is revered for inspiring a cul-
ture of “aesthetic socialism” characterized by its fusion of artistic and (anti-)polit-
ical commitments.99 From the longer perspective that Imagining Socialism affords,
however, this synthesis of aesthetics and socialism looks less like a new develop-
ment than it does a change in modalities. Instead of an (implicit) aesthetics of
depth, of the variety that had characterized the socialist undertakings I investi-
gate throughout this study, Morris promulgates a (self-conscious) aesthetic of
sensuous surfaces. This modal shift catalyzed the development of socialist artistic
culture. But despite Morris’s own intentions, I argue, it also conspired to drain
socialism of its anti-political vigor.
I stage this argument through a thickly contextualized reading of News from
Nowhere. In this celebrated utopia, Morris employs an erotically saturated style
and romance plot to entice readers to embrace his own vision of Britain’s socialist
future. However, this approach sanctions the emergence of a privatized aesthetic
ideal that is fundamentally at odds with the non-governmental utopia of the arts
that the text officially espouses. By desublimating the aesthetic impulse, in other
words, Morris inadvertently contributes to the dispersal of the vitality and
resources that the aesthetic had hitherto lent the socialist anti-political tradition.
In my Epilogue, I set the waning of British socialist anti-political aspiration
in the context of the literary career of H. G. Wells, on the one hand, and the
coalescence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, on the other. In their respective
spheres, both Wells and the Labour Party represent a decisive turn toward a
statist—and forthrightly political—conception of socialism in the early decades
of the twentieth century. Wells, the new century’s most prolific and influential
socialist writing in English, shares with his antecedents an abiding preoccupa-
tion with the aesthetic dimension of socialism. In stark contrast to his predeces-
sors, however, he self-consciously subordinates this aesthetic impulse to his
overmastering vision of an emerging socialist world state. Concurrently, the
fledgling Labour Party became a locus for the longstanding debates about how
socialism was to be made and what posture the socialist movement should
adopt to Britain’s existing political institutions and traditions. These debates
were foreclosed by the party’s adoption of a new constitution and party pro-
gram in 1918. The constitution includes the famous Clause IV, which affirms
the party’s commitment to “the common ownership of the means of production
and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each
99 Livesey, Socialism, p. 19.

Introduction 29
industry or service.”100 Labour’s reorganization effectively confirmed that in

Britain, socialism would be pursued via the parliamentary road—and that state
socialism would be its ultimate institutional goal. Consequently, 1918 provides a
symbolic end to the anti-political tradition Imagining Socialism delineates—and
of the socialist century that it surveys.
Imagining Socialism
“The golden age of the human race is not behind us; it lies before us, in the
perfection of the social order.”
Henri de Saint-Simon and Augustin Thierry,
The Reorganisation of European Society
“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to
shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes
the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure
in imagination before he erects it in reality.”
Karl Marx, Capital
“Any one who set himself to collect all occurrences of the word Socialism in the
Victorian age would probably conclude that it might be taken, or made to mean
everything which a respectable man saw reason to disapprove of or to fear.”
G. M. Young, Portrait of an Age
I want to conclude this Introduction by returning, briefly, to the priority I have

accorded the imagination in this study, a topic that we may conveniently broach
through my title. Why “Imagining Socialism”?
The thrust of this title becomes more apparent if we juxtapose it with the names
of two important works of nineteenth-century scholarship to which I have already
alluded, Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism and Mark Bevir’s The Making of British
Socialism. In my view, British socialism was, in the first instance, neither lived nor
made. This is not to deny that there were noble experiments in living and heroic
amounts of making. But whether we train our gaze on worker cooperatives,
branch meetings of socialist organizations, or even full-blown communitarian
experiments, we eventually discover the same thing: a wistful sense that, however
fulfilling the experience of socialism in the present, it is merely a pale approxima-
tion of life in the realized socialist dispensation of the future.101 (“ ‘If I could but
100 “The Constitution of the Labour Party,” in Report of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the
Labour Party (Nottingham and London: The Labour Party, 1918), p. 140.
101 Here my argument dovetails with Anna Vaniskaya’s shrewd observation that socialist branch
organizations were founded on an insuperable paradox: their members aspired to practice the values
see a day of it,’ ” William Guest muses, as he makes his lonely way home from a
Socialist League meeting. “ ‘If I could but see it!’ ” (4).)
We should not attribute this pervasive intimation that socialism is incomplete
solely to the brute fact that it remained a minority position throughout the long
nineteenth century. Rather, incompleteness inheres in socialism’s very concept.
“Socialism . . .,” Durkheim points out in the opening pages of his study, “is entirely
oriented toward the future. It is above all a plan for the reconstruction of societ-
ies, a program for a collective life which does not exist as yet or in the way it is
dreamed of.”102 The homeland of socialism is the future; its golden age, in the
famous aphorism coined by Saint-Simon and Thierry (and approvingly cited in
Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus [1833–4], one of the Ur-texts of Victorian culture), lies
before us, in a dispensation that has not yet come into being.103 Consequently, the
only way to experience socialism in its fullness and plentitude is by utilizing the
imagination.
Realized socialism’s location in the future is at once an asset and an encum-
brance. Although shielded from disconfirmation by its temporal remoteness,
socialism can easily be dismissed as a castle in the sky. Ultimately, this dual char-
acter stems from the nature of the imagination itself. As Raymond Williams has
demonstrated, the history of the word “imagination” is characterized by an
ambivalent “double judgment.”104 On the one hand, the imaginative faculty has
been consistently associated with creativity, the empathetic capacity to put oneself
in another’s situation, and (most relevant to our current discussion) the ability to
foresee “what will or could happen” (260). On the other hand, the imagination
quite literally produces “a mental conception of something not present to the
senses”—and which may well be a delusion (259). Despite periodic efforts to
make a distinction that would separate the ideational gold from the dross (by, for
example, attributing them to different cognitive faculties), the difficulty appears
insuperable: “much that is valuable has been imagined, and much that is worth-
less and dangerous” (260). Although its creations are both unverifiable and pro-
spectively harmful, Williams nevertheless maintains that the imagination is an
indispensable gnoseological (knowledge- producing) faculty. When directed
of “co-operation, association, mutual aid, and fellowship” that they simultaneously held were impossi-
ble to realize under capitalism (William Morris, p. 139).
102 Durkheim, Socialism, p. 5.
103 Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books, text established by
Mark Engel and Rodger L. Tarr (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), p. 174. At the
novel’s conclusion, the narrator hypothesizes that the missing Diogenes Teufelsdröckh has gone “to
confer with” or “confront” the leaders of the Saint-Simonian sect (p. 217). The Saint-Simonian influ-
ence on Victorian literature is discussed at greater length in this study’s fourth chapter.
104 Raymond Williams, “Tenses of the Imagination,” in Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1991),
p. 259. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically by page number.
Introduction 31
toward futurity, it enables us to discern “the shape of an alternative, a future, that

can be genuinely imagined and hopefully lived” (268).
While intriguing, this formulation is riven by paradox: how can a condition
that does not yet exist be “genuinely imagined” and “hopefully lived”? Fortunately,
Ernst Bloch’s theoretical armature offers a systematic development of Williams’s
intuition. In his magisterial The Principle of Hope, Bloch argues that the future-
directed imagination constitutes a “Ratio of a militant optimism” (1: 146). This
ratio, an imagination-driven supplement to conventional modes of reasoning,
sustains hope in the face of unjust present—even as it keeps faith with the unfin-
ished, open character of a future that is still in the process of becoming.105 I will
explicate Bloch’s claims in greater depth in my first chapter; suffice to say here that
acts of imagining socialism provided both insight and resolve to the figures that
we will encounter in these pages.
In researching this book, I was surprised to discover that opponents of
socialism were perhaps as reliant on the imagination as its advocates. The per-
nicious activities that these critics suspected and feared could only be inferred
from the events and texts that were available for public scrutiny. As we will see,
moreover, it was an anti-socialist article of faith that the ultimate consequences
of socialist experimentation would only become apparent with time—in a
future that could only be accessed by extrapolating, imaginatively, from the
conditions of the present. (“To combat the principle of Association is legiti-
mate; to combat it by fears of what it will lead to is vicious,” complained
G. H. Lewes, who accepted communism as an “indefinitely distant” social
ideal.106) Socialism certainly elicited fair-minded and astute criticism through-
out the period under investigation here. But it is not difficult to detect the
“Ratio of a militant pessimism” at work in some of the more overwrought attacks
we will encounter in these pages.
As G. M. Young observed in his classic essay, socialism was perhaps the ulti-
mate bogey of the Victorian age, just as Jacobinism had been for the era preceding
it. “If a Chartist was suspected of designs tending to the wholesale infraction of
the eighth commandment [prohibiting theft],” the veteran radical Thomas Frost
quipped, “a Socialist was held in horror as certainly capable of violating the entire
105 Particularly helpful discussions of Bloch’s thought include Wayne Hudson, The Marxist
Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982) and Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The
Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984),
pp. 174–195; a recent essay collection is Paul Thompson and Slajov Žižek, eds., The Privatization of
Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). While this is
not the place to mount an argument, I believe that one can adopt many of Bloch’s insights without
taking on board his metaphysics (roughly, a Hegelian-Marxist dialectics of nature).
106 G. H. Lewes, “Social Reform. Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum. XIV.—Communism as an
‘Ideal,’ ” The Leader (26 October 1850): p. 733.
decalogue.”107 With—and frequently, without—warrant, nineteenth- century

commentators associated socialism with a veritable checklist of abominations:
revolutionary violence, crude leveling, atheism, free love, foreignness, unlettered
vulgarity, sexual equality, plebeian democracy, anarchy, the expropriation of
property, and (yes) Jacobinism.
Daunting as this catalog is, this study will suggest that, for most of the nine-
teenth century, socialism connoted something still worse in the British social
imaginary, to which these aberrant symptoms only gesture: the process by which
humanity’s benevolence and rationality turn back upon themselves, and thereby
initiate civilization’s auto-destruction. This is quite similar to the perverse
dynamic that Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called the “dialectic of
enlightenment,” albeit with a moralizing twist: through naiveté and hubris, social-
ists overestimate humanity’s goodness and capacity for reason. If their schemes
are allowed to proceed unchecked, they may precipitate the very collapse of civili-
zation, perhaps even the bestialization of humankind. For a culture that enjoyed
nothing so much as contemplating its own progress, few prospects could be more
harrowing than a regression to barbarism or animality.108
My title gestures, then, to the fact that both socialism’s partisans and its oppo-
nents relied upon the faculty of the imagination to conduct their struggles. One
might even suggest that “imagining socialism” was their primary—and shared—
activity! Rather than lingering on this irony, I want to close by restating this
study’s principal argument. Imagining Socialism contends that socialists through-
out the long nineteenth century marshalled the resources of the aesthetic to sub-
tend their anti-political ideals of communal redemption and to imagine the world
otherwise. It thereby reveals surprising affinities between what are typically con-
ceived as discrete, even antithetical, phases of socialist initiative—and discloses a
tradition of radical aesthetic experimentation that stretches over a century of
British socialist practice.
Many of us continue to imagine socialism, no longer as the inevitable outcome
of history, but as a byword for a more rational, egalitarian, and humane mode of
collective life. Foregrounding the imaginary status of British socialism in the long
nineteenth century has the added virtue of lifting it closer to our own historical
107 Thomas Frost, Forty Years’ Recollections: Literary and Political (London: Sampson Low, Marston,
Searle, and Rivington, 1880), p. 16.
108 As Christopher Herbert has observed in the context of the (so-called) Indian Mutiny, “the creed
of progress contained within itself a bad dream that had in fact haunted the slumbers of Victorian
optimism and ideological solidarity well prior to the shock they were fated to suffer in the crisis of the
Mutiny: the bad dream of a catastrophic reversion to the primitive” (War of No Pity: The Indian
Mutiny and Victorian Trauma [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008], p. 28).
Introduction 33
moment, where the grip of “capitalist realism” on the collective imagination

seems to be loosening.109
It would be folly to believe that a literary study of nineteenth-century British
socialism can unlock the door to utopia. But it would be vanity to think that the
struggles of so many intelligent, committed, and well-meaning men and women
have nothing to teach us today.
109 On capitalist realism, see Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Alresford:
Zero Books, 2008). Both the renaissance of the socialist movement in the Anglosphere and the
appearance of many scholarly works addressing capitalism’s declension may be signs that a recalibra-
tion of what the future holds is underway. See, for example, Giacomo Corneo, Is Capitalism Obsolete?
A Journey through Alternative Economic Systems, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2017); Immanuel Wallerstein et al., Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013); Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System
(London: Verso, 2016); Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life after Capitalism (London: Verso, 2016).
1
“Society Is a Simple and
Beautiful Science”
Aesthetics and Anti-Politics in
Robert Owen’s Socialism
If one wanted to date the origin of British socialism, one could do worse than
choose the summer of 1817. True, Robert Owen, “the prince of cotton-spinners”
and manager of the famous New Lanark Mills, had already published the rudi-
ments of his “new view of society.”1 True, there were precedents for many of the
doctrines, practices, and institutions that would eventually be termed his “social-
ism.” True, Owen’s theory would become ever more capacious in the ensuing
decades and benefit significantly from contributions—theoretical as well as prac-
tical—of others.2 Nevertheless, British socialism might reasonably be said to have
begun in the summer of 1817, because that is when it became increasingly appar-
ent, and finally incontrovertible, that Owen’s widely publicized “Plan for the
General Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor” was not simply one of
the myriad schemes in the air for relieving the nation’s economic crisis. It was,
rather, a blueprint for the “emancipation of mankind” (1: 211).
In Britain, “socialism” and “Owenism” were essentially synonymous until
mid-century. What began as Owen’s one-man campaign to win acceptance of his
“Plan” blossomed into a diversiform popular movement committed to the found-
ing of a “new moral word” (3: 23). Owen’s ideas inspired a transatlantic counter-
culture that undertook several major communitarian experiments, produced an
impressive corpus of dissident political economy, and disseminated millions of
tracts and newspapers.3 At its peak in Britain in 1840, Owenite socialism could
1 Robert Owen, Selected Works of Robert Owen, ed. Gregory Claeys, 4 vols. (London: Pickering &
Chatto, 1993), vol. 4, p. 218; vol. 1, p. 27. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parentheti-
cally by volume and page number. A New View of Society (1813–14) adumbrates the philosophical
foundations of Owenism; The Book of the New Moral World (1836–44) provides the most complete
articulation of Owen’s socialism. That said, Owen’s writings are less a series of discrete, formally inte-
grated works than one great unfurling scroll: significant developments in both thought and figure are
interspersed with vast, arid stretches of repetition.
2 Many of the key texts by other Owenites are collected in Gregory Claeys, ed., Owenite Socialism:
Pamphlets and Correspondence, 10 vols. (London: Routledge, 2005).
3 Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti- politics in Early British Socialism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 250. The best synoptic introduction to Owenism
Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918. Mark A. Allison, Oxford University Press
(2021). © Mark A. Allison. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896490.003.0002
“ Society Is a Simple and Beautiful Science ” 35
boast some sixty local branch organizations, where as many as 50,000 people
attended lectures, entertainments, and other activities in the organization’s Halls
of Science each week.4 Five years later the movement was in ruins, undone by the
failure of an imprudently lavish communitarian project and, ultimately, the ebb-
ing conviction of its adherents.
The nucleus of Owen’s socialism consists of two simple, mutually reinforcing
principles: human perfectibility and communitarianism. The former, embodied in
the doctrine of the “formation of character,” maintains that “children are, without
exception, passive and wonderfully contrived compounds; which . . . may be
formed collectively to have any human character” (1: 154, 1: 41). It would thus be
possible, with the proper combination of scientific precision and humane pedagogy,
to rear a generation free of error and prejudice (1: 159). This project necessitated
the creation of planned environments in which children would be surrounded by
rational circumstances from birth. Self-sustaining communities of 500–3,000
people were the centerpiece of every iteration of the Plan, beginning with the one
Owen floated in 1817 as a means of pauper relief. These “Villages of Unity and
Mutual Co-operation” would serve as an incubator for the rising generation while
offering their adult residents unprecedented equality, leisure, and opportunity for
self-cultivation (1: 163). From this mustard seed, Owen’s “social system”—later
“social science,” and finally “socialism”—luxuriated.5
Within his lifetime, Owen was already being enshrined as the founder—or
“father”—of British socialism and the forerunner of Marx and Engels.6 However,
remains J. F. C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain
and America (New York: Scribners, 1969). For Owenite communitarianism, see R. G. Garnett, Co-
operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–45 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1972); Edward Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A
Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Arthur Eugene
Bestor Jr., Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in
America, 1663–1829 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950); Anna Taylor, Visions
of Harmony: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Millenarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
On Owenite political economy see Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From
Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Noel
Thompson, The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816–34
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
4 Claeys, Citizens, p. 250. On the distinctive culture of Owenism see Eileen Yeo, “Robert Owen and
Radical Culture,” in Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor, eds. John Pollard and John Salt (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1971), pp. 84–114; Gregory Claeys, “From ‘Politeness’ to ‘Rational
Character.’ The Critique of Culture in Owenite Socialism, 1800–1850,” in Working Class and Popular
Culture, eds. Lex Heerma van Voss and Frits van Holthoon (Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer IISG,
1988), pp. 19–32; Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 217–237.
5 On this terminological history, see Gregory Claeys, “‘Individualism,’ ‘Socialism’ and ‘Social
Science’: Further Notes on a Process of Conceptual Formation, 1800–1850,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 47, no. 1 (January–March 1986): pp. 81–93, http://doi.org/10.2307/2709596. Owen cycled
through a half-dozen names for his system over his career, and he continued to use the superseded
terms as synonyms for the ascendant one.
6 For the canonization of Owen as the founder/father of British socialism, see, for example,
Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845), in The Collected Works of Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, 50 vols. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004), vol. 4, p. 459; Arthur
Owenism’s beginnings were far more equivocal than its creator’s posthumous
reputation as a bastion of the left would suggest. The leading voices of popular
radicalism greeted the Plan with fury, objecting to its substance and Owen’s
patronizing attitude toward the laboring classes alike. Scholars of the stature of
Edward Royle and E. P. Thompson have argued that Owen was essentially a Tory
paternalist whose socialism would not take on a democratic orientation until it
was developed by others.7 Simultaneously, Thompson emphasized that Owen was
“one of the last of 18th-century rationalists,” vainly persisting in high-minded
enlightenment philanthropy despite the inexorably politicized landscape of post-
revolutionary Europe.8
These assessments have been challenged by Gregory Claeys, Owenism’s most
prolific historian. Although Claeys’s analysis belies easy summary, he is most con-
cerned with vindicating the republican and democratic impetus of Owenite
socialism. While Owenites held democracy in high esteem, Claeys argues, “its
potential was not identified with existing forms of government.”9 A root-and-
branch transformation of existing society was required to achieve “true democ-
racy”: a dispensation in which “equal rights at birth and through life” were
secured for women and men alike, and civil society was freed of its exclusionary
and hierarchical character.10 Owenism’s essentially egalitarian nature was further
obscured, however, by its founder’s anti-political ambitions. For Owen, no more
satisfied with contemporaneous modes of government than he was existing
examples of democracy, aspired to “transcend politics” and inaugurate a nongov-
ernmental form of society.11 Given Owenism’s internal complexity (its combina-
tion of both democratic and anti-political impetuses) and its founder’s autocratic
disposition, Claeys concludes, it was inevitable that Owen and the popular radi-
cals would talk past one another. Consequently, they missed the opportunity to
forge a synthetic radical platform—a social-democratic “social radicalism”—that
would not truly come into its own until mid-century, after Owenism’s dissolution.12
John Booth, Robert Owen, the Founder of Socialism in England (London: Trübner, 1869); Beatrice
Potter, The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891), pp. 15–16.
For Owen as the antecedent to Marxism, see, among others, Marx and Engels, The Communist
Manifesto (1848), in Works, vol. 6, pp. 514–517; William Morris and E. Belfort Bax, Socialism: Its
Growth and Outcome (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), pp. 206–217.
7 Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), pp. 43–44; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English
Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 780. The working-class cooperative movement blossomed
while Owen was in America, engaged in his ill-starred New Harmony communitarian venture. Upon
returning to Britain in 1829, Owen found himself at the head of a loyal, though not unquestioning,
popular following. On the working-class cooperative experiments inspired by Owen’s theories, see
Garnett, Co-operation, pp. 1–164; Arnold Bonner, British Co-operation: The History, Principles, and
Organisation of the British Co-operative Movement (Manchester: Co-operative Union, 1961), pp. 22–40.
8 Thompson, Making, p. 784. 9 Claeys, Citizens, p. 2.
10 Ibid. p. 83. The feminist dimension of Owen’s socialism is explored in this study’s fourth chapter.
11 Ibid. p. 66.
12 Ibid. p. 15. More recently, Claeys has called for a genealogy of socialism that investigates its roots
in the Christian, communitarian, and utopian traditions. See Gregory Claeys, “Early Socialism as
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alike. On the whole, greater sympathy was expressed for his sister,
lady Frances, who was more likely to be mortified,—who certainly
was more mortified at the connexion than the rest of her family. Her
father was understood to have insisted on her making the best of the
affair, since it could not be helped; but, whatever her outward
demeanour might appear, it would be too hard upon her to suppose
that she could do more than barely keep on terms with a sister-in-law
who had been on the stage. A solitary voice here and there
reminded the speculators how it was that lady F—— had adopted a
profession, and asked whether the connexion would have been
thought very preposterous if she had been known only as the highly
educated daughter of an eminent merchant; or whether the
marvellousness of the case rested on her father’s misfortunes, and
her choice of a way of life when he was no longer living to support
and protect her: but these questions met with no other answer than
that such a marriage was so very strange an one that the
speculators longed to see how all the parties carried it off; though, to
be sure, such beauty as lady F——’s went a great way towards
making the thing easy;—almost as far as her husband’s
carelessness of the opinion of the world.—Meanwhile, who had seen
her riding in the park? Was she more or less beautiful than on the
stage? Was lady Frances with her? Who had called, and who had
not? How was it to be the fashion to treat her? And so forth.
How much did all this signify to lord and lady F——, to the earl,
and to lady Frances? The bride fancied little, and feared nothing.
She had been conversant with many ranks of society, and had found
them all composed of men and women; and she never doubted that
in that with which she was about to become acquainted, she should
also have to deal with men and women. Her husband guessed what
speculations were going on, and did not care for them. The earl also
knew, and did care, as did lady Frances; but they disposed
differently of their anxieties; the earl repressing them in order to the
best disposition of circumstances which he could not prevent; his
daughter allowing them to fill her mind, appear in her manners, and
form a part of her conversation with her intimate friends.
Lady F—— and her husband dined alone on the day of the Duke
of A——’s ball. As the bride entered her dressing-room, she met her
lady’s-maid fidgeting about near the door.
“O, dear, my lady,” said Philips, “I am glad you are come. I was
just going to take the liberty of venturing to send Thérèse, to remind
your ladyship how very late it is growing. It would scarcely be justice,
either to myself or your ladyship, to cramp us for time in our first
toilet; and I was not able so much as to lay out your dress; for
Thérèse was so idle, I find, as not to have ascertained what your
ladyship intends to wear.”
“I have been so idle as not to have made up my own mind yet,
Philips. There is abundance of time, however, if you are no longer
dressing my hair than Thérèse and I shall be about the rest.”
Philips immediately looked very solemn; and though the toilet
lamps were duly lighted, and all was ready for her operations, she
stood with her arms by her side, in the attitude of waiting.
“Well, Philips, I am ready.”
“Will you please, my lady, to send Thérèse and her work
elsewhere? It cannot be expected that I should exhibit my ways so
as a mere novice may supplant me any day, my lady.”
“This is Thérèse’s proper place, and here she shall stay,” replied
the lady. “However, she shall read to us; and then, you know, she
cannot be a spy upon your doings.”
Thérèse read accordingly till the hair was dressed. At the first
pause, Philips observed that she must brush up her French, her
fluency in which she had lost from having missed the advantage of
visiting Paris last year.
“Thérèse will be obliged to any one who will talk with her in her
own tongue, Philips. Suppose, instead of having fancies about
supplanting one another, you make the best use you can of each
other, since you must be a good deal together.”
“I will do my best, I am sure, my lady, to instruct the girl in all that
relates to her own sphere, without encroaching on mine. I will do my
best to reform her dress, which really bespeaks her to be a green-
grocer’s daughter, if I may venture to say so. But as to dressing hair,
—allow me to appeal to lady Frances whether it can be expected
that I should disseminate my principles out of my own sphere.”
“See who knocks, Thérèse.”
The earl and lady Frances were below, and lady Frances would be
particularly glad to speak to Mrs. Philips, if not engaged with my lady.
Mrs. Philips, at her lady’s desire, went to receive her late mistress’s
commands, and Thérèse enacted the lady’s-maid, as she had done
from the time she had left Paris in lady F——’s train.
“Come, Thérèse, let us have done before anybody arrives to
criticise us novices. How nervous you look, child! What is the
difference between dressing me to-day and any other day?”
“There is no toilet in travelling, madame,—no fêtes like this; and in
the inns there was so much less grandeur than here. I have not been
educated to serve you, like Mrs. Philips, or to live in a great house.—
I am more fit to sew for you, madame, or read to you, than to help
you instead of Mrs. Philips.”
“I do not want two Mrs. Philipses, you know; and as for the
grandeur you speak of,—if we do not find it comfortable, we will have
done with it. What have we too much of,—of light, or of warmth, or of
drawers and dressing boxes, or of books? You like old china, and I
like old pictures, and here are both. Which of all these things do you
wish away?”
“O, none of them, I dare say, when I grow used to them: but they
are so little like my father’s house! I felt the inns very grand at first,
but they are bare and tarnished, compared with what we have here.”
“Yes. You would have been glad of such a rug as this under your
feet in those cold rooms at Amiens; and I should have liked such a
mirror as this instead of one so cracked, that one half of my face
looked as if it could not possibly fit the other. I see much to like and
nothing to be afraid of in rugs and mirrors.”
“You, madame, no! You are made to have the best of everything
come to you of its own accord; and you know how to use everything.
You....”
“And yet, Thérèse, I was once as poor as you, and poorer. If I
know how to use things, and if, as you say, they come to me of the
best, it is because I think first what they were made for, and not what
they are taken as signs of. If, instead of enjoying the luxuries of my
house, I were to look upon them as showing that I am lady F——, I
should be apt to try to behave as people think lady F—— should
behave; and then I should be awkward. Now, if you consider all the
pretty things you have to use, not as pointing you out as lady F——’s
lady’s-maid, but as intended to make me and my little friend
comfortable, you will not be distressed about being unlike Philips:
you will know that I had rather see you the same Thérèse that I
always knew you.”
“O, madame, this is being very good. But then, I cannot feel as
you do, because there is more occasion for me to think about the
change. There is my lord to take off your thoughts from such things;
he is with you in every new place, and you see how accustomed he
is to everything that is strange to you.”
“That does make some difference certainly,” said the lady, smiling,
“but then you should consider how many more new places and
people I have to make acquaintance with than you. Except Philips, or
two or three of the servants below, you have nobody to be afraid of,
and I am never long away. You will feel yourself at ease in one room
after another, and with one person after another, till you will learn to
do all your business, and speak all your thoughts, as simply and
confidently as you once watered the salads in your father’s shop,
and made your confession to good old father Bénoit.”
Thérèse sighed deeply, as she finished her task and withdrew to
the fireside, as if no longer to detain her lady about her own affairs.
“I have not forgotten, Thérèse, about finding a confessor for you. I
am only cautious lest we should not observe exactly your father’s
directions.”
“Madame—they are so very particular!—that the priest should be a
devout man, and very old and experienced in the confession of girls
like me.”
“I know; and we thought we had found such an one; but he has
forgotten almost all his French, and you could hardly confess in
English. But make yourself easy; your conscience shall soon be
relieved.—Good night. Philips will sit up.... More work, do you want?
—You may give Philips a French lesson. O, you have read all these
books. Well: come with me into the library, and I will find you more.”
On the stairs they met lord F——.
“Where are you going, Letitia? Frances is closeted with Philips in
the library.”
Thérèse immediately stole back to the dressing-room; but before
the carriages drove off, she was furnished with a fresh volume
wherewith to be occupied when she should have made tea for Mrs.
Philips and herself.
The earl had dreaded lest he should find Letitia nervous at the
prospect of the formidable evening she was about to pass. His visit
was meant to reassure her, and she understood the kindness of the
intention, and showed that she did. When lady Frances came in from
her conference with Philips, she found them side by side on the sofa,
—Letitia quiet and self-possessed, and the earl regarding her with as
much admiration as kindness.
“I am sure you may be obliged to me for giving up Philips to you,”
said lady Frances to Letitia. “She has dressed you beautifully to-
night. Is not she a treasure?”
“A great treasure to you, Frances,” said her brother, “so pray take
her back again. Letitia has one treasure of a maid in her dressing-
room already, and it is a pity she should rob you of yours.”
“Indeed it is,” said lady F——. “Philips’s accomplishments are
thrown away upon me, I am afraid. If you will allow her to give my
little French girl a few lessons, I shall be just as much obliged to you,
and shall not deprive you of your servant.”
Lady Frances protested; but her brother was peremptory, to her
utter astonishment, for she had never known him speak of lady’s
maids before, and would not have believed that he could ever learn
one from another. She did not perceive that he did not choose that
his wife’s beauty should be attributed to the art of her toilet.
Not the slightest trace of trepidation was observable in the bride
when she alighted from her carriage, when her name was shouted
up the staircase, or when all who were within hearing turned to gaze
as she entered the crowded saloon, leaning on the arm of the earl.
There was something much more like girlish glee than fear in her
countenance; for, the truth was, Letitia had a taste for luxury, as all
simple-minded persons would have, if their simplicity extended as far
as a disregard of the factitious associations by which luxury is
converted into an incumbrance. Having been early accustomed to so
much of it as to excite the taste, then deprived of it, then baulked and
tantalized with the coarse and tinsel imitation of it which had met her
during her short professional course, it was with lively pleasure that
she now greeted the reality. The whole apparatus of festivity inspired
her with instantaneous joy:—the bowers of orange and rose trees,
light, warmth and music together, the buzz of voices, and above all
the chalked floor,—all these set her spirits dancing. A single glance
towards her husband told him enough to have placed him perfectly
at ease respecting the affairs of the evening, even if he had been a
man who could be otherwise than at his ease. He knew perfectly well
that it was impossible for any one of good sense and taste not to
admire and respect Letitia, and he cared little under what pretence
others might depreciate her accomplishments.
“Lady F—— is the star of the night, as every one is observing,”
said an old friend of the earl’s, who was absorbed in watching the
dancers, among whom was Letitia. “The brightest star, we all agree,
and shining as if in her native sphere.”
“This is her native sphere,” replied the earl. “She is in her own
sphere wherever there is grace, wherever there is enjoyment.”
“True: so young, so simple as she appears! She seems perfectly
unspoiled.”
“Perfectly. She has gone through too much to be easily spoiled.
Change,—anything more than modification—is impossible in her
case, do with her what you will. You are an old friend, and I have no
objection to let you see that I am proud of Letitia.”
“I am truly glad.... I felt uncertain.... I did not know....”
“Nor I till to-night,” said the earl, smiling. “But I find I have no more
wish than right to question my son’s choice.”
“But you must expect the world to criticise it.”
“Certainly. If my son acts so as to imply contempt of conventional
marriages, there will be contempt cast on his marriage of love. If
both parties carry off their contempt inoffensively, both are welcome
to their opinions.”
“Well! there are many here whose parents have had occasion to
use your philosophy, or some other to answer the same purpose.”
“Lady F—— is the star of the night,” observed lady Frances’s
partner, gazing at Letitia through his glass. “Peerless indeed!”
Lady Frances made no answer, which emboldened the gentleman
to proceed.
“The star of the night, as she has often been called, and never
more justly. Never, in the proudest moment of her glory, was she
more lovely.”
Still lady Frances was silent.
“Perhaps your ladyship feels this to be the night of her glory; and,
indeed, it is a triumph to have risen, through her own radiance, into a
higher sphere.”
“I question whether she feels it so,” replied lady Frances. “Letitia is
very proud, and her pride takes rather an odd turn. She would tell
you that she considers it a condescension to come among us, who
are only born to our station.”
“Surprising! And what inspired her condescension?”
“O, love, of course; pure love. Nothing else could have prevailed
with her to submit to marriage. You should hear her talk of the
condition of wives,—how she pitied all till she became one herself.
You cannot conceive what poor slaves she thinks them.”
“And what says lord F——?”
“He is fired by her eloquence. You have no idea how eloquent she
is. She pours it out as if....”
“It was in her heart, as well as by heart. How will she keep it up,
now she has no practice?”
“They will have private theatricals down at Weston, I have no
doubt.”
“I beseech your ladyship’s interest to get me invited. It will be such
a new thing to see lord F—— on the stage. Of course he will play the
heroes to his wife’s heroines. Whatever may have been hitherto, he
will scarcely like, I should think ... he is scarcely the man.... Faith! if
she is proud and high-spirited, as you say, she has met her match.”
Lady Frances smiled; and as she was led away to supper, assured
her partner that nothing could be pleasanter than the terms they
were all on with lady F——; for she was, after all, a noble creature;
which information was received with a deferential bow.
In every group of talkers, lady F——’s merits were canvassed.
Some ladies would give any thing in the world for her courage, till
reminded by their mammas that she had been trained to self-
confidence, when they suddenly became contented with their own
timidity. Others would have supposed her not out of her teens, by the
girlish enjoyment she seemed to feel; but these were reminded that
this kind of scene was as new to her as if she had not been seen
and heard of in public for nearly four years. Everybody agreed that
she was beautiful, and very amiable, and astonishingly simple, and
conducting herself with wonderful propriety: and everybody admired
the good-natured earl’s manner towards her, and wondered whether
it was lady Frances’s own choice to come with her, and conjectured
what lord F——’s happiness must be to witness his bride’s flattering
welcome to the rank he had given her.
Lord F——’s happiness, though as great as these kind friends
could wish, was not altogether of the character they supposed.
“You have enjoyed yourself, Letitia,” he observed, as they were
going home in the grey of the morning, and when she made the first
pause in her remarks to let down the glass, as a market cart, laden
with early vegetables and flowers, passed for a few moments
alongside the carriage.
“How sweet!—O how sweet those violets are!” she exclaimed, as
a whiff of fragrance was blown in. “Enjoyed myself! Yes,—it is a new
page,—quite a new page of human history to me.”
“Your passion is for turning over such pages. What next?”
“If I had a market-woman’s cloak and bonnet, I should like to step
into that cart and go to Covent-Garden, to see the people dressing it
up against sunrise. I should like, some morning, to go into the city
when the sun is just touching the steeples, and see life waken up in
the streets.”
“I wonder you did not stand in the door-way to-night,” said her
husband, smiling, “to see the contrast between speculating life on
the pavement and polished life in the saloon.”
“I saw enough, without standing in the door-way,” replied Letitia,
gravely. “It was more different than I had supposed from something
of the same kind that I had seen often enough before. I had seen the
great and the humble throng about our theatre doors; but then there
was room for each, though far apart. All went to share a common
entertainment,—to be happy at the same time, though not side by
side. Here there were peers within and paupers without; careless
luxury above, and withering hardship below. This is too deep a page
for my reading, Henry; and not the easier for my having been in both
conditions myself.”
“Why wish then for more experience, till you have settled this
matter?”
“Because we cannot tell, till we have tried, what we may find in
any matter to throw light upon any other matter.”
“Suppose you should find all wrapped in darkness at last, as Faust
did when he had gratified his passion for experience.”
“Impossible,—having Faust before me for a warning. He kindled
his altar fire from below when the sun was high, and he let
somebody put it out when both sun and moon were gone down.
Where was the use of his burning-glass then? How should he be
otherwise than dark?”
“True; but how would you manage better?”
“I would never quit stability for a moment. Faust found out that the
world rolled round continually. He jumped to the conclusion that
there was no such thing in nature as a firm footing, and so cast
himself off into perdition. If he had taken his walks in God’s broad
sunshine, he would have found that the ground did not give way
under him, nor ever would, till he was etherealized enough to stand
on air.”
“So instead of speculating on the incompatibilities of human
happinesses, and concluding that there is no such thing as a
common welfare, you would make trial of all conditions, and deduce
the summum bonum from your experience.”
“Yes; that is the way; and if you would help me, the thing would be
done twice as well. If we were each to go a pilgrimage through the
ranks of society, (for we would settle the affairs of the moral world
before we began upon the natural,)....”
“Very reasonably, certainly,” replied her husband, smiling, “since it
is easier to get into palaces and hovels, than into thunder-clouds and
sea-caves.”
“Well;—if you began at the top and I at the bottom, if we were to
meet in the middle, I do think we might see how all might dance
amidst fragrance and music, and none lean starving on the frosty
area-rails. You should be king, minister, peer, and so on, down to a
tradesman; and I would be a friendless Italian boy with his white
mouse, and a pauper, and a cotton-spinner, and a house-servant,
and so upwards, till I met you at the tradesman’s we spoke of.”
“My dear, why do you put yourself at the bottom instead of me?”
“Because you would be longer in learning what to make of poverty
than I. I know a good deal about it already, you are aware.”
“Since we cannot rove up and down as we will through the mazes
of society, Letitia, we will do what we can by varying our
occupations. Variety of research may partly stand in the stead of
migration from rank to rank.—You spoke at random, just now, of my
being minister. What would you say if I were to become a servant of
the crown;—that is, in other words, a servant of the people?”
“That I would serve you,—O how humbly, how devotedly!—as the
servant of the people,” cried Letitia, colouring high. “You know....”
“I know that in marrying me you dreaded, above all things, falling
into the routine of aristocratic idleness. I know that you felt it a
sacrifice to surrender your public service and influence; and this is
one reason among many, Letitia, why I should like to accept office;—
that you might espouse another kind of public service in espousing
me. But here we are at home. I shall be able to tell you more after
dinner to-morrow than I know at present of this matter.”
Letitia’s experience of this day was not yet over. She found it very
painful to be undressed by a yawning, winking lady’s-maid; and she
resolved that her engagements should never more deprive Mrs.
Philips of her natural rest, however lady Frances might teach Mrs.
Philips herself to laugh at the absurdity of a lady of rank troubling
herself to lay aside her own trappings.
Chapter II.
PASTIME.
Lady F——’s “experience” might have been of a very different kind

from that which now lay in her way, if her regard to “stability” had
been less. When very young,—at the period of her father’s
misfortunes and death,—she had been strongly tempted to marry Mr.
Waldie, a merchant, who was thought by the few friends of the
destitute girl to have done her great honour by offering her his hand
at such a crisis, and to have proved the disinterestedness of his
attachment in a way which should have ensured it a better return.
Letitia refused him, however; giving to her protectors the very
sufficient reason that she did not love Mr. Waldie; and keeping to
herself the further justification that she had no confidence in the
steadiness of his principles and conduct. His impulses were
generous, but fitful; and there was an excitement about him which
had never yet been absorbed by any pursuit, or allayed by any
possession. This might take any turn as he grew older,—either
benevolent or selfish. It might be philanthropy,—but it might also be
wine, billiards, roving, or many other things which would involve the
slavery of his wife;—and Letitia, unblinded by passion, was able to
perceive that there is little enough of rational freedom at the best in
the condition of a wife, and that a woman’s only hope of that which
the marriage law at present denies her rests in the steady principle
as well as the enlightened views of her husband. Her friends soon
after exclaimed against Mr. Waldie’s fickleness in a case which did
not, in her opinion, testify fickleness of affection so much as
rashness of conduct. He offered (as soon as he found his cause
hopeless with Letitia) to her elder sister; and Maria, being really, and
having been long, attached to him, married him, not unwarned by her
sister of the tendency of his failings. The tenderest affection
henceforth subsisted between the sisters. Maria was full of gratitude
to Letitia for having refused Mr. Waldie; and Letitia was full of
respectful compassion for Maria when she witnessed her devotion to
her husband, and could not stifle the conviction that that husband’s
first affection had not died out the more rapidly for being too
suddenly repressed. Maria was satisfied that she had as much of Mr.
Waldie’s affection as he would ever have to bestow on one
permanent object; and that she was much happier than she could
ever have been without him; so that she called herself, and all who
spoke on the matter called her, a very fortunate wife.
Mr. Waldie had begun life as a rich man. His business was almost
as considerable as any in the city; his abode on the Surrey side of
London was elegant, and beautifully situated, and he kept two
carriages. The wonder had been, during all the four years of Letitia’s
professional career, why so rich a brother-in-law should have
allowed her to live by any such means. Mr. Waldie incessantly and
truly pleaded that he could not help it; and much was said of her
unconquerable love of the fine arts, and of the eccentricities into
which her passion for independence led her. The sisters knew of
very good reasons besides these why Letitia should not submit to
live on the bounty of a brother-in-law, even if he were as generous
as Mr. Waldie; and when the matter ended in Letitia becoming lady F
——, her eccentricities met with all due respect.
Lady Frances never could conceive why Letitia called her present
life an idle one, and seemed to think entertaining her sister’s children
the most serious business she had. Lady Frances thought no life so
busy as that of persons of rank during the season. For her part, she
saw tradespeople loiter about much more than she had time to do.
Did not the baker’s man stop for a few minutes’ talk with the kitchen-
girl in the area? Were not fishmongers seen leaning with folded arms
against their stalls? Did not shopmen read newspapers behind the
counter, and merchants’ clerks stop in the Strand to look at
caricatures? All this while, ladies of her rank never could get through
all the shopping they planned for a morning, unless they gave up
one or two of the exhibitions; and nobody ever went down Regent-
street in such a hurry as lord B. or the duke of C.; unless it was the
newsman or letter-carrier. She, for one, had been intending for
weeks to call on poor old lady Y., and had never found time; while
Letitia, who had such superior tastes too, complained (if you asked
her) that she had not enough to do. With her books, and her harp,
and her singing,—she was very careful to keep up her singing,—with
all these in addition to her “social duties,” so engrossing during the
season, one would have thought she had had enough on her hands;
but she had asked her husband to read German with her; and they
actually sat down, like school children, with a dictionary between
them, every morning before his lordship went out. Moreover, she
was polishing up her little French girl,—perhaps for a governess for
her sister’s children. Very sweet children those were; and it was
natural that Letitia should love them, as being her sister’s; but it
seemed really to be giving up too much to them to refuse a sweet
spring ride to Hampton Court, because she had promised to take the
little things into the park with her, that particular day. The worst of it
was, Letitia was infecting her husband with this notion of not having
enough to do. He....
“You will hear no more of that,” quietly observed the earl. “Henry
will have quite enough on his hands henceforward. He has accepted
office.”
“Poor Letitia!” exclaimed lady Frances, laughing. “She will have
more time hanging heavy than ever, unless, indeed, Henry makes
her his private secretary.”
“He might do worse,” observed the earl. “And, proud as you think
Henry, he will not disdain to let his wife cast many lights into the
affairs he is taking in hand. If he knows most of the theory and
practice of trade, she has had the most to do with individual and
social character.”
“Of course, sir, as she had to make human nature a professional
study. When Henry has to do with bonds and liabilities, she can
enact Portia; when he studies insurance, she will find something à
propos in the Tempest; and she must have many a fine smuggling
scene at her tongue’s end.”
“True. It is a happy thing for a man of business, as Henry will find,
to have an accomplished wife to lighten and recompense his toil.”
This was one of the many thoughts in lord F——’s mind when he
sought Letitia to tell her that the negociation was concluded, and that
he was to take office immediately. He found her and Thérèse in the
music-room, busy with the three little Waldies. The youngest was
sitting on the table, clutching aunt Letitia’s curls, while she was
explaining to the eldest what Bewick’s old man was doing in the
churchyard. The second kneeled on Thérèse’s lap, babbling French,
of which she knew about as much as of English. A charming discord
of sweet sounds greeted lord F——’s ears as he entered the room.
The “Da, da, da,” of the baby; the coqueting in French about a kiss
between Thérèse and her charge; and the anxious questions and
explanations of the two engaged upon Bewick, made the uncle
prefer looking on in silence, till Letitia turned to him with,
“It will not do. We must give it up at present. There is no making
little children understand about old age, and death, and
churchyards.”
The child turned her frowning face upon her uncle, as if appealing
to him for light. He could not but try. He found she had seen Brixton
church, seen something there this very morning; whether a wedding
or a funeral, it required some time to find out; and this involved a
description of each. Then came the question,
“Why are people white when they are married, and black when
they are buried?”
In the middle of the explanation, she turned to the picture,
“Is that little boy with his hoop going to be buried? Is that old man
going to be buried?”
No: they were neither of them dead yet; but the old man would be
before very long, for he was very, very old....
“Then, was he rather new once?”
Uncle could no longer keep so grave as the subject required, and
besides, did not know how to convey that old and new would not do
in all cases so well as old and young. He too gave up.
“Shall we ride?” asked Letitia, as lord F—— looked at his watch. “I
can send Thérèse home with the children.”
“Suppose we take them ourselves. This may be the last morning
for some time that I shall be able to devote to you and yours.”
“It may be the last time we shall see Maria for some weeks,”
replied Letitia. “I am glad you can go.”
As soon as they were seated in the carriage, lady F—— explained
that Waldie was so much out of spirits, and looked so wretchedly ill,
that his wife was bent on getting him from home. She was sure he
must have overworked himself at business, and he did not attempt to
account for his depression in any other way.
“You had better take them down to Weston with you,” said lord F
——. “It will be a comfort to you to have your sister with you till I can
join you.”
“None whatever,” said Letitia, smiling. “While you are a man of
business, I will not be a woman of pleasure. I will stay in town till you
can introduce Weston and me to each other.”
And Letitia would hear nothing about the heat, the emptiness of
the town, the solitude to which she would be doomed while her
husband was being initiated into his office. In town she would stay
while her husband remained; and so it was settled, as this happened
not to be one of the points which his lordship had fixed unalterably
within himself.
“There is papa!” exclaimed the eldest child, quitting her stand at
the carriage window, and clinging to her aunt’s neck, as soon as they
entered the sweep which led up to Mr. Waldie’s door.
“Yes; it is your papa. I wonder what brings him home so long
before dinner to-day.”
Waldie had been standing with his hands in his pockets, gazing on
vacancy, till the sound of the carriage wheels roused him. When he
saw who was come, he appeared suddenly busy among his shrubs,
and turned his back towards the house door.—Maria appeared, with
a smile; but there was discomposure under it.
“Go and tell papa, my dear. He did not see the carriage. Go and
ask him to come in.”
But the child for once was slow to obey. She clung closer to her
mamma the more she was bid to go.
“We will go together,” said Letitia, leading the way to where Waldie
was half buried among the shrubs. When he could no longer pretend
not to see them, he came forward and shook hands; but his
countenance was black as night. His anxious wife busied herself in
pointing out how grievously the Portugal laurels were blighted.
“Blighted! aye, look! Not a leaf that does not crumble like ashes in
my hand,” said Waldie, twitching off a spray and crumbling the
leaves. “I had set my heart upon these laurels, and now to see them
ruined in this way.... Damn the blight!” muttered he between his
teeth.
“I hear there is much mischief done in Kent,” observed lord F——.
“In Kent! You would think there had been a shower of Gomorrah
rain by the look of the place. Young ash plantations, miles long, with
their shoots crisped and black, worse than my laurels. Curse the
blight!”
“And the hops....” lord F—— was going on to inquire; but Mrs.
Waldie held up her finger to stop him. He broke off suddenly, and
Waldie turned round upon his wife with a look which made her
change colour. In order to relieve everybody, lord F—— summoned
up all his experiences of the mischiefs done by blight at Weston,
diverging gradually upon topics nearly related,—modes of improving,
embellishing, &c., and ending with an invitation to the Waldies to go
down and occupy the place for the few weeks of its greatest beauty.
Waldie glanced quickly from one to another, as if suspicious of some
plot to humour and amuse him, and then bluntly intimated that his
going from home at present was out of the question. Scarcely
another word could be got out of him, even when the ladies had
walked away into the greenhouse, and the children had tried who
could run fastest from papa, leaving him alone with lord F——.
“Do not you think him looking very ill,—very much altered?”
inquired Maria of her sister, with a quivering lip.
“Very unlike himself to-day, certainly. Something has discomposed
him. But you must not fancy him more ill than he is. No man varies
more from hour to hour, you know. He may be quite a different man
to-morrow.”
Maria shook her head, and then asked Letitia to observe what they
came to see, without delay. She should not like her husband to think
they were consulting about his looks. Letitia snatched up the plant in
question, and carried it to lord F—— to ask whether there were any
of the kind in the Weston greenhouses.
“You had better take it with you,” said Waldie. “It requires a
greenhouse, and we shall have no greenhouses when we remove.”
“Remove!” said his wife faintly.
“Remove! yes, my dear. You would not stay here, would you? The
blights ruin everything I set my heart upon; and you know I cannot
bear to see a house so exposed as ours, with not a tree to cast a
particle of shade on any part of it. There is Erpingham’s house, down
below, with those fine spreading sycamores beside it ... that is
something like a house. We could live there for a lifetime, and never
grow tired of it. But you see it will take a lifetime for our clumps to
grow roof-high. I shall move into the city.”
“Nevertheless we shall find you still here, five years hence,” said
lord F——, smiling. “When the blights are over, you will love this
pretty place too well to leave it.”
“Curse the blights!” was the reply.
“You have not been in town to-day, Waldie?” said lord F——.
“Then you have probably not heard that I have taken office....”
“At the Board of Trade?—Well! I suppose one ought to be glad of
it,—I suppose you expect to be congratulated; but, upon my soul, I
do not know how to feel upon it. There is such a curse clinging to
trade. People talk of the honour and glory of being a British
merchant, and of legislating for British merchants. I wish both you
and I, my lord, may not find more plague than profit in it.”
“I know I am about to encounter much perplexity, Waldie—perhaps
some abuse, and certainly, much painful knowledge about the
distresses of the country. Nevertheless, I have accepted office—or I
should rather say, we have taken office; for Letitia remains in town as
long as business detains me here.”
“I am glad you allow wives to be official too,” said Letitia, smiling.
“Come plague, come profit, brother, it is hardly fair that they should
have double the one and only half the other; which is the case when
they are shut out from that department of their husbands’ concerns.”
“‘Double, double toil and trouble’....” said lord F——.
“And watchfulness, and struggle, and woe,” continued Letitia,
“when they feel they could solace and help, and are not allowed.
When I find I can do neither, I will go down to Weston without
another word.”
“My dear,” said Waldie, “would you like to take the children down
to Weston? I must stay in town, but....”
“O, indeed, we want no change. Unless you ... you....”
“Then we will remain at home this summer, lord F——, thank you.
Our wives both prefer it, I see.”
And Mr. Waldie put some cheerfulness into his manner as he
handed lady F—— into the carriage. At the first opening in the trees,
Letitia saw him draw his wife’s arm within his own, and walk with her
towards the house.
“It cannot be the blight that has soured him so,” observed lady F
—— to her husband. “That must be a mere pretence.”
“Blights destroy other things besides Portugal laurels,” replied her
husband. “Did not you see how I was forbidden to enlarge upon
hops?”
“What can he have to do with hops? O! I begin to see. Speculation
is to be his ruin,—not wine, or gaming.”
“Must he be ruined?” enquired lord F——.
“Yes. There is wide ruin in success, where it comes from
speculation. Ruin of peace.—Who would possess paradise, if it were
on an island which might be sunk in the sea at any moment? O! poor
Maria!”
Chapter III.
DISCUSSION.
Week after week the steward sent reports from Weston of the beauty
of the place, and the high order it was kept in for its lady’s approval,
and the impatience of the tenants and the villagers for my lord and
lady’s arrival. Week after week did friends and acquaintance leave
town, till it became what the inhabitants of Westminster call a desert,
though it would still puzzle a child to perceive the resemblance
between it and the solitary places where lions await the lonely
wayfarer. Week by week did Mrs. Philips expatiate on the delights of
watering-places, and the charms of the country, and the
intolerableness of town in the summer,—and still neither master nor
mistress seemed to dream of stirring. “A few weeks in the autumn!
Was that all the change they were to have? And how were they to
exist till the autumn, she should like to know?” Lady F—— was so far
from wishing that Philips should not exist, that on learning her
discontents, she took immediate measures for forwarding her to her
dear lady Frances, more than half of whose pleasure at Brighton had
been spoiled by her having no one to manage her toilet on whose
taste she could rely as a corroboration of her own. The day which
saw Philips deposited in a Brighton coach brought ease not only to
herself, but to those who lost, and her who gained her. Philips was
certainly right. Her talents were not appreciated in her new home;
and she would indeed never be able to make anything of her new
lady. Like other persons of genius, mere kindness was not enough
for Philips; she pined for sympathy, congeniality, and applause, for
which London affords no scope in the summer season.
How Thérèse sang as she watered her lady’s plants, that day!
How many confessions had she to pour forth to her old priest of
feelings in which he traced incipient envy and jealousy, but in which
she acknowledged only fear and dislike! How long a letter did she
write to her father to inform him of her promotion to Mrs. Philips’s
place, and consequent increase of salary;—of her intention to take a
few lessons in hair-dressing, now that she could afford it, and felt it
to be due to her mistress; and how happy she should be, when this
duty to madame was provided for, to send money enough to put
Annette to school, and perhaps even to place a new hot-bed at her
father’s disposal!—How charming a variety was made in the
household by a passing visit from the earl! And how pleased he
looked when, on popping his head in at the library-door, late one
evening, he found Letitia acting as secretary to her husband, looking
over books, making notes, and preparing materials for a reply to a
deputation which was to wait on him the next morning.
“I hope you like hard work as well as you thought you should,” said
he, laughing. “Have you begun to think yet of petitioning for a more
equal division of it,—for a multiplication of places?”
“Heaven forbid!” exclaimed Letitia. “A multiplication of places now,
when there is such an outcry against places and placemen! It would
be as much as our lives are worth.”
“And, what is more to the purpose,” said lord F——, “it is
unnecessary. It matters little that it is the fashion to mix up in
ignorant minds the odium of holding a sinecure, and the honour of
filling a laborious office;—it matters little that all the people have not
yet learned to distinguish the caterpillars from the silk-worms of the
state; for they will soon learn to hold the servants of the nation in due
honour. Meanwhile, all that we want is a more equal distribution of
the toils of government.”
“All that we want, son! It is much to want. What an absurdity it
seems that a nobleman should, from having merely his private affairs
to manage, be suddenly burdened with the responsibilities of an
empire;—a burden, under which how many have been crushed!
Again, there is your old school-fellow, lord H——, yawning half the
day on the pier at Brighton, and airing his horses the other half, while
you are sitting here, pen in hand, from morning till night.”
“I have no objection to it, sir. It has been a serious grievance to
me, ever since I returned from my travels, that I had nothing better to

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Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics,

Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain,

Politics and Aesthetics of the Female Form, 1908-1918

Frontier Socialism: Self-Organisation and Anti-

Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture 1st

A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium,

Feminist Art in Resistance: Aesthetics, Methods and

Injurious Vistas: The Control of Outdoor Advertising,

Anti-Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, 1600–2000:

Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in

Socialism maintains that society precedes the individual; consequently, a book on

1 “Police,” The Times, no. 33,523 (1 January 1893): p. 6.

a condition (to paraphrase Engels’s Mancunian interlocutors) which is too ideal

The Ambiguities of Anti-­politics

A utopian aspiration shared by many British socialists—and the fulcrum of this

Said I: “How do you manage with politics?”

In his monumental History of Socialist Thought, G. D. H. Cole observes that

24 G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, 5 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1957–60), vol. 1, p. 3.

Marxism, coalesced before the fabled year of European revolutions. Although

observe throughout this study, moreover, anti-­political schemes often bear an

Aesthetics and the “Problem of Politics”

The category of socialist anti-­politics, then, is fretted by ambiguities and charged

haltingly, toward a philosophy of the future: a new intellectual paradigm built

Socialism and Its Others

Having explicated the category of anti-­politics and clarified my understanding of

ideological field while simultaneously differentiating socialism from the primary

surprisingly apposite description of the priorities of the mid-­Victorian Christian

If some Tories proved quite sympathetic to socialism, liberals tended to be

jstor.org/stable/175571. For a typical specimen of Bradlaugh’s anti-­socialism, see Charles Bradlaugh,

It is worth pausing momentarily, however, to register the shift in terminology.

Structure and Trajectory

was inauthentic because it discouraged working-­class political engagement, my

99 Livesey, Socialism, p. 19.

industry or service.”100 Labour’s reorganization effectively confirmed that in

I want to conclude this Introduction by returning, briefly, to the priority I have

toward futurity, it enables us to discern “the shape of an alternative, a future, that

decalogue.”107 With—and frequently, without—warrant, nineteenth-­ century

moment, where the grip of “capitalist realism” on the collective imagination

Lady F——’s “experience” might have been of a very different kind

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The Ambiguities of Anti-politics

observe throughout this study, moreover, anti-political schemes often bear an

The category of socialist anti-politics, then, is fretted by ambiguities and charged

Having explicated the category of anti-politics and clarified my understanding of

surprisingly apposite description of the priorities of the mid-Victorian Christian

jstor.org/stable/175571. For a typical specimen of Bradlaugh’s anti-socialism, see Charles Bradlaugh,

was inauthentic because it discouraged working-class political engagement, my

decalogue.”107 With—and frequently, without—warrant, nineteenth- century