The World That Never Was (46 page)

Holed up in Geneva, with the Swiss authorities slowly buckling under pressure for his extradition, Kravchinsky had for some time been keeping
a close eye on London as a possible alternative base for his operations. In 1880, Hartmann had called for help with his proselytising mission in England and Chaikovsky, taking Kropotkin’s advice that ‘the goal is to influence the opinion of western Europe and through it the governments’, had responded by moving to the English capital. Since then, Chaikovsky had supplied his old friend with tempting insights into the liberal character of the English. ‘[John Bull] is a strong person, very strong, and I confess that I like him very much for that reason…he does not like anyone to try to convince him of anything,’ he wrote in 1882. Observing from a distance, it was clear to Kravchinsky from the surprisingly positive reception of his book the following year that London would make a congenial new home, as long as he could conceal his true identity. For only that May, Britain had been outraged when Fenian ‘Invincibles’ had stabbed to death Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed chief secretary to Ireland, and his undersecretary, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, in an attack that some thought was inspired by that of Mezentsev four years earlier.

‘I think such a book ought to open people’s eyes a bit here & do good,’ was Morris’ verdict on
Underground Russia
. He first met Kravchinsky – now universally known as Stepniak, his old identity completely set aside - in July 1883, soon after the Russian’s arrival in London, and was impressed to find him more the humane radical than the guerrilla leader; a man capacious in his thinking, and generous in his interests. Their very physicality was consonant: Morris, with his shaggy mane of hair, having the ‘same consciousness of strength, absence of fear, and capacity for great instinctive action’ as a lion, Kravchinsky a brawny but kind-hearted bear, who prompted one English acquaintance to remark that ‘I never met an artist who was so amiable and so gentle in his judgements.’ The similarity of their literary personalities chimed too, as they reached for new modes through which to explore and make accessible the burden of political aspiration that weighed heavy on both, intuiting how fiction - sensationalist or utopian – could both shape and reflect the emerging ideologies of the age. Straightforward and candid men, neither had much truck with the kind of fads and factionalism that later prompted Kravchinsky’s dismissive comment that ‘In London, you must understand, “isms” have a curious tendency to segregation.’ Yet in some respects their instinctive friendship resulted in a strange transference of political perspectives.

By the time he reached England, Kravchinsky had already begun to distance himself from outright support for terrorism. ‘The terrorists will
be the first to throw down their deadly weapons, and take up the most humane, and the most powerful of all, those of free speech addressed to free men,’ he had promised his readers, and memories of his youthful study of Henry Thomas Buckle’s great unfinished
History of Civilisation in England
informed his hopes for his homeland’s future development. Used to an oppressive despotism, the sheer relief of living in a functioning democracy, however flawed, drew him towards reformist liberalism more quickly than he could have expected. Morris, meanwhile, felt newly ‘bound to act for the destruction of the system which seems to me mere oppression and obstruction; such a system can only be destroyed, it seems to me, by the united discontent of numbers.’

As to how to bring about that groundswell of popular support, Morris could draw upon the dynamic example of a small number of native activists, with the carter Joseph Lane and tailor Frank Kitz to the fore. During the boom years, as the British middle class prospered and capitalism crushed all in its path, Lane and Kitz had resolutely conserved the ideas of Chartism and then introduced those of socialism, first through the Manhood Suffrage League, which Kitz had founded in 1875, and more recently through the Labour Emancipation League. Kitz himself may have been half-German and fluent in the language, and have spent his youth gazing at illustrations of the French Revolution pinned to his bedroom wall, but it was the lost rights of the freeborn Englishman that both lamented: a Cockaigne of Anglo-Saxon justice and democracy, rather than bloody social revolution as formulated across the Channel. And it was with this Utopia as their touchstone that they organised public meetings around London, week in, week out, year after year, under the banner of the Manhood Suffrage League.

The Tory defeat in 1880 had raised hopes among many that Gladstone’s new Liberal government would champion the cause of social justice, but despite moves to extend the franchise and provide universal primary education, many had been left disillusioned by the Coercion Act, and its suspension of civil rights in Ireland. Inspired by ‘the propagandist zeal of foreign workmen’ whom Kitz credited with the true genesis of the socialist movement in England, and having made common cause where possible with the Fenians, he and Lane began to generate interest and a growing following. From a base in the East End at the Stratford Dialectical and Radical Club, whose members had drifted from their secularist origins to outright socialism, the tireless Lane’s recipe was simple: ‘Take a room, pay a quarter’s rent in advance then arrange a list of lecturers… then paste up bills in the streets all round…and [having] got a few members
get them to take it over and manage it as a branch.’ With Lane running two or three such operations at a time himself, the organisation’s spread was rapid.

The street corners of impoverished Morris with the environment in which he was most at ease, evangelising from his soapbox like a Christian preacher. ‘He bears the fiery cross,’ observed his old friend, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, somewhat despairingly. Yet Morris, like many of the most radical of the English socialists, was instinctively averse to to the idea London also provided of anarchism, with its potent connotations of transcendence and its embryonic martyrology. There may have been some concern over how he might lose support among the general public by associating himself with something so notoriously foreign; after all, the federation’s newspaper
Justice
had immediately been branded by its enemies as an ‘incendiary…[work] by the hands of atheists and anarchists’. Andreas Scheu, his effective lieutenant in the federation, who had witnessed the ultimately pointless chaos caused by Johann Most’s rabble-rousing in Vienna a decade earlier, was certainly in a state of perpetual exasperation with his fellow émigrés for ‘passing bloodthirsty resolutions at the anarchist club under the leadership of tried agents provocateurs’. The influence of Kravchinsky may have been felt too, murmuring disparagingly about ‘toy revolutionaries’ when the anarchists who harangued the crowd in Hyde Park hailed him as a kindred spirit. Even Joseph Lane would complain at the imputation that the clubs he ran were anarchist ‘just because we charged no entrance fee and no monthly contributions but [carry] out the doctrine “from everybody according to their ability”.’

However, it is hard to see where either Lane or Morris, with their federated organisation of clubs, anti-parliamentary attitude, distaste for authority and belief in revolution, differed from anarchism’s central tenets. And in such essays as Reclus’ ‘Ouvrier, prends la machine!’, with its loathing of artifice, suburbs and spiritual deracination, and medievalist longing, there was surely much for Morris to approve. ‘An end to frippery then!’ Reclus had declared. ‘An end to dolls’ clothes! We shall go back to the work of the fields and regain our strength and gaiety, seek out the joy of life again, the impressions of nature that we have forgotten in the dark mills of the suburbs. That is how a free people will think. It was the Alpine pastures, not the arquebus, that gave the Swiss of the Middle Ages their freedom from kings and lords.’ And whilst Morris was adamant in distinguishing himself from the ‘anarchists’, the difference between his view of revolution and that of Kropotkin or Reclus was a
mere matter of nuance. For though he believed that violent upheaval might be avoided by middle-class acquiescence to the demands of socialism, he saw no realistic prospect of any such resolution.

Morris had to contend, though, with an increasing demonisation in Britain of the revolutionary impulse. Henry Maudsley, the evolutionary psychologist, had clarified the contemporary threat to civilisation by reference to the French Revolution, which he termed ‘an awful example of how silently the great social forces mature, how they explode at last in volcanic fury, if too much or too long repressed’. For him, the greatest danger lay in giving concessions that were too generous. Charles Fairfield’s alarmist novel of 1884,
The Socialist Revolution of 1888
, concurred, leaving its readers in no uncertainty about where responsibility for the predicted turmoil would lie. The novel evoked a society in which ‘many desperate characters, including thousands of foreign anarchists, were abroad…preaching the duty of personal vengeance upon the middle and upper classes, and the nationalisation of women as well as of land.’ Published in the wake of a Fenian bombing campaign that had struck at not only Scotland Yard and the Carlton Club, but the Underground trains in which ordinary citizens travelled, even the book’s grossest exaggerations acquired a sheen of credibility.

In fact the threat may have been smaller than those responsible for its policing liked to maintain: before Scotland Yard had called in the contractors to clear away the debris of the Fenian bomb, the Metropolitan Police’s internal journal,
Moonshine
, had managed to laugh off the Fenian threat by reference to the ease with which the perpetrators had been tracked down. Nevertheless, extraordinary measures were taken to reassure the British public. In an unprecedented invasion of intellectual privacy, police agents now proposed to scour ticket records from the British Museum Library for evidence of suspicious interests. Elisée Reclus, writing in the
London Contemporary Review
in May 1884, talked of ‘devil raising’ by the black propagandists and provocateurs deployed by the police. He may well have been right.

A bombing campaign was the last thing on the minds of those members of the Democratic Federation whose growing antipathy to Hyndman’s dominance led them to coalesce into a libertarian faction. Their immediate anxiety concerned rumours of a plan to field candidates in the forthcoming parliamentary elections, and his overt jingoism in support of General Gordon’s expedition to subdue Egypt. Whilst the former notion appalled all those who deemed representative government to be a fraud to perpetuate Establishment authority, the latter especially riled Morris, for whom Britain’s colonial wars epitomised all that was worst about its exploitative commercial culture: the repression of the weak, abroad as at home, to
prop up an economy that was faltering, as the second wave of the Industrial Revolution gave Britain’s foreign competitors a novel advantage.

In the summer of 1884, Hyndman’s ambition finally caused him to make a fatal strategic blunder, when he urged Joseph Lane to attend the federation’s conference that August, eager for the mass of supporters he might bring with him. Moving swiftly, Morris outflanked him, inviting Lane to his home in Hammersmith where he persuaded him to help draft a new manifesto for the organisation, which would be renamed the
Social
Democratic Federation: a three-hour day of essential work would be promised for all, made possible by the common ownership of the means of production. When Hyndman refused to concede, a tense stand-off ensued. Approached by Marx’s daughter Eleanor for advice, Engels backed Morris, despite having previously scorned him as an ‘artist-enthusiast but untalented politician’. Morris, though, was reluctant to precipitate the circumstances that would oblige him to accept the leadership; it was with deep unease that he remembered how intoxicating was the sense of power he had felt, four months earlier, on finding himself unexpectedly at the head of a 4,000-strong procession to Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, on the anniversary of the Commune’s declaration.

In December 1884, Morris headed for Edward Carpenter’s home at Millthorpe in Derbyshire, ‘a refuge from all our mean squabbles’. Reclus had recently reproved those who sought to withdraw from the struggles of the world, and before long Morris would address Carpenter in similar terms. Watching Carpenter’s ease among the Sheffield factory workers, or in his small market garden, and envying the fact that his younger friend had put behind him the hierarchical prejudices of his middle-class upbringing, Morris must have doubted again his suitability for leadership of a movement whose commitment to equality he valued above all.

‘I cannot stand all this, it is not what I mean by socialism either in aims or in means,’ he wrote at the time, wrestling with his conscience, ‘I want a real revolution, a real change in society: society a great organic mass of well-regulated forces used for the bringing about of a happy life for all.’ Carpenter may well have steeled his friend’s nerve with the thought that ‘it seems to be admitted now on all hands that the social condition of this country is about as bad as it can be’, and weighed the arguments for the necessity of a ‘fierce parturition struggle’ to see the new world born. And whilst Carpenter still felt bound by his original loyalty to Hyndman, it is clear that he already tacitly recognised the problem of egotism in a man who believed ‘that it would be for him as chairman of [a committee of public safety] to guide the ship of the state into the calm haven of socialism.’

Morris returned to London fortified for the showdown. On 27 December, Hyndman was heavily defeated in a vote of the executive committee, and Morris led out the victorious dissenters. A new organisation was formed, the Socialist League, and according to Carpenter ‘there was a widespread belief that [it] was going to knit up all the United Kingdom in one bond of a new life’. The first edition of the league’s new organ,
Commonweal
, seemed to promise something more far-reaching still, with greetings from the Russians Peter Lavrov and Tikhomirov, and an early article from Kravchinsky offering a Russian perspective that resonated with Morris’ undertaking as editor, ‘To awaken the sluggish, to strengthen the waverers, to instruct the seekers after truth.’