ABSTRACT
In one of Henry Salt’s last publications, The Creed of Kinship (1935), published when the author was in his eighties, he refl ects on a lifetime of efforts to bring about a “fusion of certain great causes,” and recounts: “I felt fl attered by the remark of a hostile journalist that I was a ‘compendium of the Cranks,’ by which he apparently meant that I advocated not this or that humane reform, but all of them. That is just what I desire to do” (qtd. in Preece 144). Despite criticism from “hostile journalists” and some of the more single-minded members of the emerging English socialist movement in which Salt participated, his inclusive approach to reform was in some respects typical of the activist climate of the 1880s and 1890s, when Salt formed the Humanitarian League with the aid of his friend Edward Carpenter. In his autobiography My Days and Dreams, Carpenter looks back fondly on the shared enthusiasm and sense of purpose among social activists in England during this period, which drew together a number of disparate groups:
Hyndman’s [Social] Democratic Federation, Edmund Gurney’s Society for Psychical Research, Mme. Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, the Vegetarian Society, the Antivivisection movement, and many other associations of the same kind marked the coming of a great reaction from the smug commercialism and materialism of the mid-Victorian epoch, and a preparation for the new universe of the twentieth century.
