ABSTRACT
IBritish socialism, in the formative years of its existence, seems to have had an especially strong appeal to those who, whatever their particular walk in life, regarded themselves, or were regarded by others, as ‘artistic’. The term was then a great deal less exclusive in its connotations than it was to become witb the advent of ‘highbrows’ and a self-consciously minority avant-garde. It was freely applied to certain classes of artisan, as well as to the many classes of under-labourer (e.g. engravers and copyists) engaged in the lower reaches of the cultural industries and trades. It was also widely used as a synonym for the unconventional and Bohemian, for those who (like Edward Carpenter’s gardener-comrade, George Hulkin) were ‘not too exact or precise about details’.1 A house-painter could be regarded as a ‘bit of an artist’, like Owen, the hero of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, or Robert Tressell, his real-life original, whose frescoes have recently been retrieved.2 The artistic impulse was particularly strong (though sometimes unacknowledged) in the more revolutionary wings of the socialist movement - nowhere more so than in the ‘impossibilist’ and apparently severely Marxist Socialist Labour Party, for whom, in the early 1900s, James Connolly was spouting translations of Freilig-rath’s poetry on the Glasgow street corners, and whose members’ staple reading (when not The Communist Manifesto) was Eugene Sue’s romantically revolutionary fictions.3 To these one might add the thousands of scribblers who contributed verse to the socialist press (as late as the 1930s there was still a poetry-lovers’ corner in The Daily Herald); the amateur librettists who mounted operatic and choral concert-meetings; and the open-air ‘stump’ orators who electrified the crowds by reciting verse as much as by preaching the socialist Word - Shelley’s ‘Men of England’ was for decades a standard peroration in platform oratory, as it had been in that of John Bright during the 1840s.4
