Introduction

Abstract

Beginning in the early 1880s and continuing through to the Edwardian period, there was a quite dramatic, seemingly spontaneous awakening of new socialist political life in Britain. This followed the earlier failures of the Owenite co-operative experiments of the 1820s and 1830s. This rebirth is all the more remarkable given that during the 1860s and 1870s there was virtually no socialist presence in Britain to speak of. This presence was confined to a handful of activists that included Owenite survivors, ageing ex-Chartists or O’Brienite radicals with socialist leanings, socialist émigrés from continental Europe and a small body of Christian socialists linked to J.M. Ludlow, Frederick D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley.² In stark contrast, the late Victorian and Edwardian period saw the proliferation of a veritable kaleidoscope of new socialist groups and large numbers of new converts to the socialist faith.