ABSTRACT
In his Memoirs of Life and Literature, W. H. Mallock recalls his early days as a Conservative apologist and the reasons which at the beginning of the 1880s had stung him into activity on his party's behalf. For several reasons, the Conservatives found the first half of the 1880s a time of reorganization. Initially the Liberals adapted themselves better to this changed political context. They had the best of the new periodicals, and their victory in the 1880 elections was crushing enough to trouble the most complacent of Conservatives. In 1880 there was practically no chance of organized revolution in England, and from this point of time the near panic of politicians and social observers may seem absurd. For as a revolutionary movement, anarchism was comparatively unimportant in England; and though the scattered bomb activities of the 1880s may be connected with each other, there is nothing of any genuine significance to these sporadic and mostly comic attempts at violence.
