Utopian Socialism, Women’s Emancipation, and the Origins of Middlemarch

This 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 Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and their followers were increasingly known) frequently suggested that the transition to a new, nongovernmental 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. This chapter’s reading of Middlemarch shows that socialist discourse provides Eliot a rich symbolic 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. By incorporating socialist elements into her novel, Eliot could unobtrusively position herself in relation to the ideals and activities of this burgeoning movement—a movement in which a number of her closest friends were involved. Attending to Middlemarch’s socialist motif demystifies the novel’s shrouded origins and decodes a hitherto illegible record of Eliot’s proto-feminist aspirations which, like the early socialists’ own, were inextricably intertwined with skepticism about institutional politics. This chapter also provides a genealogy of “utopian socialism,” a category that has exerted a distorting influence on scholarship since Marx and Engels tarred their rivals with it in The Communist Manifesto.

Epilogue

This Epilogue sets 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 preoccupation with the aesthetic dimension of socialism. In stark contrast to his predecessors, 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 program in 1918, which were drafted by the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb. The constitution includes the famous Clause IV, which affirms the party’s commitment to the collective ownership of the means of production. 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.

“What Is to Come After This?”

This chapter engages with Britain’s fin-de-siècle socialist revival by investigating its presiding spirit, William Morris. Morris is revered for inspiring a socialist culture characterized by its fusion of artistic and emancipatory commitments. From the longer perspective that Imagining Socialism affords, however, this synthesis of aesthetics and socialism looks less like an unprecedented development than a change in modalities. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that the aesthetic was constitutive of an important strand of the British socialist tradition; sublimated aesthetic energies underpinned and invigorated a succession of anti-political schemes of communal regeneration. Morris corrected this excessively instrumentalizing tendency by promulgating a highly self-conscious aesthetic of sensuous surfaces. By desublimating socialism’s aesthetic impulse, he fostered an environment in which successful socialist art and literature was finally possible. But despite Morris’s own intentions, this chapter contends, his intercession also conspired to drain socialism of its anti-political vitality. This argument is staged through a thickly contextualized reading of News from Nowhere. In his utopia, Morris employs an erotically saturated style and 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 nongovernmental utopia of the craft arts that News from Nowhere officially espouses. By desublimating the aesthetic impulse, Morris inadvertently contributed to the dispersal of the vitality and resources that the aesthetic had hitherto lent Britain’s socialist anti-political tradition.

Self-Consuming Socialism

This chapter provides a comprehensive reassessment of the most vocal advocates of socialism in Britain at midcentury, the Christian Socialists. In the revolutionary 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 “Christianize Socialism.” Refuting the oft-repeated claim that the movement was inauthentic because it discouraged working-class political engagement, this chapter’s analysis contextualizes Christian Socialist doctrine in light of scholarship on the diversity—and, in many cases, religiosity—of nineteenth-century socialism. Moreover, it reveals that the group’s signature anti-political undertaking, the sponsorship of cooperative workshops, the “Working Men’s Associations,” owes a quiet debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s aesthetic philosophy. While maintaining that the Christian Socialists deserve to be taken seriously qua socialism, this chapter nevertheless identifies several deep-seated antinomies in their project. Through a reading of Charles Kingsley’s influential social problem novel Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet (1850), it explores the fundamental incongruities 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. Finally, a brief coda considers the group’s legacy and impact on Britain’s “socialist revival” at the fin de siècle.

Introduction

The original goal of socialism in Britain was to supersede “politics” and achieve a non-governmental form of collective life. This Introduction argues for approaching the period between 1817 and 1918 as a “socialist century,” demarcated, respectively, by Robert Owen’s introduction of his first socialist “Plan” and the Labour Party’s adoption of its first constitution and party program. Adopting this approach brings into view a tradition of anti-political socialist activism that spans the century. But the particular purpose of Imagining Socialism is to disclose and elucidate the role the aesthetic concepts and modalities play in subtending the heterogeneous anti-political experiments it investigates. In so doing, this study reveals unexpected commonalities between what are often treated as discontinuous and even antithetical stages of socialist activity. The Introduction also elucidates this study’s central theoretical terms and defines its central object of study by distinguishing socialism from several adjacent traditions (including liberalism, civic republicanism, and Marxian communism). Finally, it argues that socialism is best conceived as a goal to be imagined, rather than a readymade ideological program to be imposed.

“Society Is a Simple and Beautiful Science”

This chapter investigates British socialism’s symbolic birth: Robert Owen’s unveiling of his plan for an entirely new social order in the summer of 1817. Although Owen has been canonized as a stalwart of the political left, his proposals 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 George Cruikshank), this chapter undertakes a revisionary interpretation of Owenite socialism that uncovers its latent aesthetic core. Owen and his followers have long been associated with utilitarian indifference, if not downright vulgarian insensitivity, to the arts. However, Owen’s very ambition to govern citizens without recourse to the state or the Church rests upon an aesthetic substratum. This chapter demonstrates that the curriculum Owen designed to produce human beings who would not require “politics” to produce consensus relies upon extensive training in the musical arts to inculcate the principle of universal harmony. The final part of this chapter locates the origins of British anti-socialist rhetoric at the juncture of Malthusian political economy and anti-Jacobin polemic.

Poetic Vanguardism and Political Violence in Capel Lofft’s “Chartist Epic”

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 sanguinary detail, the growth and eventual triumph of an agrarian-communist insurrection. A charismatic poet leads the revolt, using fiery oratory to inspire his co-conspirators. Because Ernest was clearly intended to galvanize militant elements within the Chartist movement into action—and because its author was alarmingly eloquent—hysteria greeted the epic’s appearance. This chapter’s 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 viability of popular self-governance. More broadly, it utilizes Ernest, a hybrid of contemporaneous radical social and political thought, as a staging ground to investigate the uneasy comingling of Chartism and Owenite socialism, the two great working-class movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. Lofft’s epic stages several questions with exemplary clarity: is revolution a political event, or the anti-political mechanism by which “politics” is definitively superseded? Are the people the heroes of the emancipatory narrative? Or does the revolutionary leader, rendered sublime by the fervency of his commitment, inevitably eclipse them? Can poetry, a literary mode increasingly defined by its detachment from practical concerns, marshal the rhetorical and conceptual resources of the aesthetic to foster national regeneration?