ABSTRACT
Few of the English middle-class Socialists of the 1880s possessed either the open-handed manliness or the deeply-felt awareness of the working-man’s downtrodden condition that William Morris did; and none, including Morris, had the strategical acumen to inspire in late-Victorian Britain an authentic form of practical class-conscious Socialism. The shame was doubly acute in the context of the political existence of W. Morris, who not only had a far more generous vision of Socialism, but also came much closer to understanding the changing motive forces of late-century capitalism. The high moral tone of the mid-1880s, not yet gone soggy, was the response of men to whom the acceptance of Socialism as the method of regeneration was as a religious revelation. ‘An army of light is no more to be gathered from the human product of nineteenth-century civilisation than grapes are to be gathered from thistles’ he wrote in 1889 in Fabian Essays in Socialism.
