ABSTRACT
Socialism was a movement and a body of ideas long before it became a party. As the modern socialist movement took shape from the 1880s, there were multiple attempts to celebrate its origins, plot its course over time and conjure up the sense of the past that defined its world-view almost as much as its sense of future. The influence of Christian socialism was important after 1850, as a group of clerics and bourgeois intellectuals concerned about class polarisation sought to Christianise economy and society. E. V. Neale and J. M. Ludlow in particular worked to remove some of the legal disabilities that were constraining co-operation, though not without trying to impose a straightjacket of their own. Socialism, however, could not yet be described as a political movement. Socialism as a body of ideas had never been confined within national boundaries. It was, moreover, on British soil and among British workers that the idea of an international labour organisation first took root.
