ABSTRACT

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, working-class activism changed in nature and increased in scale along with the rise of the Labour Movement, institutionalised workers’ and women’s education, the professionalisation of politics and the impact of the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions. Three intellectual streams converged in the late Victorian labour and socialist movements, two of which were indigenous and the third to an extent developed in London, where A. Marx and Engels worked from 1849. Besides the Communist Classics dons, there was a substantial group of CPGB intellectuals who did not operate within the ‘Ivory Tower’ but in the public world of letters. Lindsay’s Marxism gave him an ideological bedrock from which he could spring into the ancient world and an intellectual method of socio-economic analysis into which he could pour his substantial literary experience and his powerful imagination.