Socialism, Masculinity, and the ‘Faddist’ Sage: Edward Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw

Schreiner's good friend Edward Carpenter was her chief source of news about the socialist movement during her self-imposed exiles on the continent throughout the later 1880s. Carpenter sought to reshape masculinity and civilization through sexual desire itself. This chapter examines how the fads of vegetarianism, Jaegerism, and sandal wearing came to be associated with socialism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that for Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw, these ascetic regimes provided a means of investigating and reforming conventional ideals of masculinity. Both writers represent such fads as bodily labour and discipline, thus overcoming the opposition between the man of letters and the manly labourer. While Carpenter's theory of Lamarckian biological idealism concluded that such practices would result in species change and a socialist utopia of liberated sexual bodies, Shaw's regime aimed to supplement the necessary redistribution of capital.

Engendering a New Age: Isabella Ford and Alfred Orage

This chapter analyses the dissemination of socialist aesthetics in the press up until 1914. During the 1890s, the rise of the ILP shifted the locus of such debates from London to northern manufacturing towns, as is evident from the contributions of Isabella Ford, Margaret McMillan, Robert Blatchford, and Alfred Orage to the Clarion, Labour Leaden and the Leeds Arts Club. The discussion focuses on the development of Orage's politics and aesthetics from his early work with Isabella Ford and Edward Carpenter in Leeds to the peak of his influence as editor of the New Age in 1914. Orage came to reject both the ‘sentimental’ aesthetics of the ILP and the compromises of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the early twentieth century; turning instead to the model of guild socialism.

Politics, Fellowship, and Romance: Clementina Black and the Culture of Socialism in 1880s London

This chapter examines the lives and writings of three sisters, each of whom responded to Morris's works with enthusiasm: Grace, Constance (Garnett), and Clementina Black. It explores the rhetoric of ‘fellowship’ that permeated the mixed-sex discussion groups and early socialist organizations frequented by the Blacks and all the writers whose works are subsequently studied in the book. The discussion examines the Black sisters' idiosyncratic political beliefs and their various attempts to advance the socialist cause through labour organization. The chapter also explores the extent to which the Blacks' work and writing for the socialist movement forced them to address the ‘Woman Question’ as a concern in its own right by the late 1880s. The chapter closes with an analysis of Clementina Black's historical romances published in the late 1890s.

William Morris and the Aesthetics of Manly Labour

This chapter traces this complex history of aestheticism, socialist aesthetics, and early modernism through a study of the development of William Morris's works in the later nineteenth century. Placing Morris's aesthetic development in the context of the writings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the discussion explore Morris's resistance to an emerging aesthetic that emphasized individual taste and consumption, rather than communal production. In his socialist essays, Signs of Change (1888) Morris developed an aesthetic continuum that enabled him to collapse the distinction between art and bodily labour and imagine a future of communal artistic production after the revolution. Both the radical nature of Morris's aesthetic and its preoccupation with productive masculinity are emphasized by contrasting his work to Wilde's essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891).

Legacies: Socialism, Aesthetics, and the Modernist Generation

This chapter examines the afterlife of 1880s socialism in the early modernist generation. It focuses upon Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry and examines their negotiations with the productive, engaged aesthetics of those Bloomsbury socialists before the Bloomsbury Group. Both Woolf and Fry had significant relations with writers examined in earlier chapters of this work. Woolf's writings concerning the Women's Co-operative Guild reflect her rejection of the socially engaged and productive aesthetics of that generation in favour of a radical statement of aesthetic autonomy and the individualism of the artist. Meanwhile, Roger Fry's aesthetics strained between a belief in a democracy of aesthetic responsiveness and a conscious attempt to rewrite the aesthetic legacy of Ruskin and Morris. In the debacle that surrounded Wyndham Lewis's secession from Fry's collective Omega Workshops, however, Lewis himself sexed Fry's aesthetics as effeminate traces of the fin de siècle.

Dollie Radford and the Ethical Aesthetics of Fin-de-Siecle Poetry

This chapter uses the case of the poet, Socialist League member, and Fabian, Dollie Radford, to examine the relationship between socialism and fin-de-siècle aestheticism. After outlining Radford's conversion to socialism, the discussion examines her attempts to publish her work in the socialist journal Today. Radford's work from the 1880s forms a marked contrast with that of her widely published fellow Fabian E. Nesbit and the contrast highlights the oft-remarked ‘feminine’ lyricism of Radford's poetry. The chapter argues that, like Schreiner's Dreams, Radford's ‘A Ballad of Victory’, published in the Yellow Book, uses allegory to render political questions in an aesthetic register. The chapter concludes by comparing Radford's work from the 1890s with that of her fellow in the League, William Morris.

Olive Schreiner and the Dream of Labour

On her arrival in London in the early 1880s, Olive Schreiner became a regular visitor to many socialist clubs and debates and developed her interest in the movement hand in hand with her pursuit of the ‘Woman Question’. This chapter explores Schreiner's feminist works, ‘The Woman Question’ (1899) and Woman and Labour (1911), in the context of her exchanges with the socialist Karl Pearson and her good friend Eleanor Marx. In the latter work, Schreiner adopts and revises the rhetoric of manly artistry familiar from Morris's works: a revision that defines women as virile labourers rather than ‘sex parasites’. Meanwhile, it was in her creative collection of allegories and fragments, Dreams (1890), that she insisted upon the autonomy of the aesthetic as an ideal that transcends gender divisions.

Introduction

This chapter begins by citing an excerpt from Oscar Wilde's Paul Mall Gazette. In 1889, Oscar Wilde suggested that the growth of socialist activism over the previous decade had been nurtured by the arts. This study explores how the artists and writers involved in the socialist movement during this period evolved a distinct socialist aesthetic in creative tension with such aestheticism. Whilst aestheticism tended towards individualism, the sensuous pleasures of taste and consumption, and insisted on the absolute autonomy of the aesthetic, socialist writers tried to frame an alternative in which art was by its very nature a communal product of labour and will, with only relative freedom from the material determination of capitalism. This book explores Wilde's fleeting allusion to the sex of socialism and its relationship with aesthetics by examining the lives and works of socialist writers and activists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.