The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents

by Alex Butterworth

  If Carpenter’s identity as a sexual outsider gave him a clearer perspective on the iniquities of society, then Morris’ position as a craftsman and artistic producer, and his awareness of the anachronistic nature of his practice and vision, had led him to an even more absolute position. In line with John Ruskin’s philosophy, he believed that the pernicious effect of the division of labour deprived the worker of the spiritual benefits of real creative investment in his tasks. ‘Art cannot have a real life and growth under the present system of commercialisation and profit-mongering,’ he wrote in a letter to a federation colleague in late 1883, while telling his own daughter that ‘art has been handcuffed by it, and will die out of civilisation if the system lasts’. The central position that Morris accorded to human creative fulfilment in his ideal society raised such statements above mere artistic pieties; they underwrote a passionate engagement with the most pressing debates of the day, and a growing commitment to ‘the necessity of attacking systems grown corrupt’.

  The challenges of degeneration and decadence were laid out in alarming fashion during 1883 by a flurry of publications in France, Germany and Britain; their shared thesis being that a dangerous pathology gripped industrialised society that was manifest too in the aesthetic of heightened artifice increasingly adopted by avant-garde culture. But whilst there was a certain consonance between Morris’ diagnosis and that of the evolutionary biologist Ray Lankester, who asserted that ‘Degeneration may be defined as a gradual change of the structure in which the organism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life’, he would have recoiled from the conclusions that many drew. The most acute symptoms of the decay that was gnawing at the very foundations of civilisation were to be found, they suggested, in the burgeoning underclass, whose existence was a necessary and permanent by-product of efficient capitalism. Following Henry Maudsley’s assertion in Body and Will that human evolution, like that of the nauplius barnacle, was on the brink of going into reverse, Francis Galton capped a lifetime of research into heredity by giving a name to his favoured solution to the problem: eugenicism.

  Even if mankind might no longer be capable of scaling the heights of perfection, Galton argued, well-intentioned science could at least assist those specimens best suited to the uphill struggle of maintaining the current status of the species. For without a programme of selective breeding, the risk was that ‘those whose race we especially want to have would leave few descendants, while those whose race we want to be quit of, would crowd the vacant space with progeny.’ Of course, for Galton, there was the humane consideration too: that by neutering the parents he could save the unborn children of the poor and indigent from a lifetime of suffering.

  It had been the absence of struggle in the nauplius barnacle’s carefree existence that had led to its degeneracy, according to Maudsley, and Morris was determined not to allow the same fate to befall the English working man. Morris was circumspect regarding the claim made by Engels following Marx’s recent death that ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution of human history’, but in no doubt that it was ‘upon the struggles due to this [class] conflict [that] all progress has hitherto depended’. Degeneracy was most apparent to him not in the slum-dwellers and factory workers, fighting for survival, but among the middle class, whose tastes and appetites required the corruption of ‘imagination to extravagance, nature to sick nightmare fancies…workmanlike considerate skill … to commercial trickery sustained by laborious botching’. It was there that the morbid signs could best be discerned of an old world trapped in terminal decline, and of a new one straining but unable to be born.

  As such, it fell to men like Morris and Carpenter, middle-class renegades with all the insights that their background afforded them, to awaken the world to the danger, prevent the spread of the contagion, and illuminate the possibility of a better future. Morris’ fiery commitment might have been enough to daunt Carpenter, with his somewhat retiring ways and aptitude for composing yearning poetry in a Whitmanesque mode. The contents of his recent slim volume, Towards Democracy, were certainly a far cry from the chivalric lays and heroic Norse epics that had hitherto inspired Morris’ verse. But each contributed as best he could, and Morris was more than happy to bank Carpenter’s generous contribution towards the founding of the federation’s newspaper, Justice, first proposed to Hyndman by Kropotkin two years earlier, when the two had met at the time of the London Congress.

  The reward Carpenter took away from that first meeting in Westminster was of the sort captured by Morris’ pen in ‘The Pilgrims of Hope’, a poem that transposed the excitement of the federation’s early days on to that experienced by an English volunteer in the Commune:

  ‘And lo! I was one of the band.

  And now the streets seem gay and the high stars glittering bright;

  And for me, I sing amongst them, for my heart is full and light.

  I see the deeds to be done and the day to come on the earth…

  I was born once long ago: I am born again tonight.

  Morris too had been grateful for Hyndman’s distillation of Marxist theory, having grappled with Das Kapital and found the economic sections particularly taxing. His socialism arose rather from his moral perspective on society than from economic pragmatism, and the policies he embraced were inspired by outrage at the injustices he saw and read about in the world around him. Having previously recoiled from the logical conclusions to which his developing beliefs led him, Morris felt such fury over the prosecution of Johann Most for freely expressing his mortal hatred of the assassinated tsar that it loosed his inhibitions; he had declared the condemnation of Most to penal servitude to be an open invitation for men of conscience to abandon all but revolutionary politics. It was a book by one of the Russians who had actually plotted and carried out assassination attacks, however, that provided Morris with what one of his old friends described as the ‘inciting cause’ of his intractable stance: Underground Russia, by the pseudonymous ‘Stepniak’, meaning ‘man of the steppes’.

  ‘The terrorist is noble, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimates of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero,’ its author pronounced. ‘From the day he swears in the depths of his heart to free the people and the country, he knows he is consecrated to death… And already he sees that enemy falter, become confused, cling desperately to the wildest means, which can only hasten his end.’ The French police would persist for two years in supposing Lev Hartmann to be ‘Stepniak’. In fact, Underground Russia’s evocation of the joys and fears of conspiratorial life in St Petersburg under the watch of the brutal Third Section – and of the strains and stresses of chasing the ideal of constitutional democracy by whatever means necessary in the teeth of ruthless suppression – was the work of Kravchinsky.

  Holed up in Geneva, with the Swiss authorities slowly buckling under pressure for his extradition, Kravchinsky had for some time been keeping a close eye on London as a possible alternative base for his operations. In 1880, Hartmann had called for help with his proselytising mission in England and Chaikovsky, taking Kropotkin’s advice that ‘the goal is to influence the opinion of western Europe and through it the governments’, had responded by moving to the English capital. Since then, Chaikovsky had supplied his old friend with tempting insights into the liberal character of the English. ‘[John Bull] is a strong person, very strong, and I confess that I like him very much for that reason…he does not like anyone to try to convince him of anything,’ he wrote in 1882. Observing from a distance, it was clear to Kravchinsky from the surprisingly positive reception of his book the following year that London would make a congenial new home, as long as he could conceal his true identity. For only that May, Britain had been outraged when Fenian ‘Invincibles’ had stabbed to death Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed chief secretary to Ireland, and his undersecretary, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, in an attack that some thought was inspir
ed by that of Mezentsev four years earlier.

  ‘I think such a book ought to open people’s eyes a bit here & do good,’ was Morris’ verdict on Underground Russia. He first met Kravchinsky – now universally known as Stepniak, his old identity completely set aside - in July 1883, soon after the Russian’s arrival in London, and was impressed to find him more the humane radical than the guerrilla leader; a man capacious in his thinking, and generous in his interests. Their very physicality was consonant: Morris, with his shaggy mane of hair, having the ‘same consciousness of strength, absence of fear, and capacity for great instinctive action’ as a lion, Kravchinsky a brawny but kind-hearted bear, who prompted one English acquaintance to remark that ‘I never met an artist who was so amiable and so gentle in his judgements.’ The similarity of their literary personalities chimed too, as they reached for new modes through which to explore and make accessible the burden of political aspiration that weighed heavy on both, intuiting how fiction - sensationalist or utopian – could both shape and reflect the emerging ideologies of the age. Straightforward and candid men, neither had much truck with the kind of fads and factionalism that later prompted Kravchinsky’s dismissive comment that ‘In London, you must understand, “isms” have a curious tendency to segregation.’ Yet in some respects their instinctive friendship resulted in a strange transference of political perspectives.

  By the time he reached England, Kravchinsky had already begun to distance himself from outright support for terrorism. ‘The terrorists will be the first to throw down their deadly weapons, and take up the most humane, and the most powerful of all, those of free speech addressed to free men,’ he had promised his readers, and memories of his youthful study of Henry Thomas Buckle’s great unfinished History of Civilisation in England informed his hopes for his homeland’s future development. Used to an oppressive despotism, the sheer relief of living in a functioning democracy, however flawed, drew him towards reformist liberalism more quickly than he could have expected. Morris, meanwhile, felt newly ‘bound to act for the destruction of the system which seems to me mere oppression and obstruction; such a system can only be destroyed, it seems to me, by the united discontent of numbers.’

  As to how to bring about that groundswell of popular support, Morris could draw upon the dynamic example of a small number of native activists, with the carter Joseph Lane and tailor Frank Kitz to the fore. During the boom years, as the British middle class prospered and capitalism crushed all in its path, Lane and Kitz had resolutely conserved the ideas of Chartism and then introduced those of socialism, first through the Manhood Suffrage League, which Kitz had founded in 1875, and more recently through the Labour Emancipation League. Kitz himself may have been half-German and fluent in the language, and have spent his youth gazing at illustrations of the French Revolution pinned to his bedroom wall, but it was the lost rights of the freeborn Englishman that both lamented: a Cockaigne of Anglo-Saxon justice and democracy, rather than bloody social revolution as formulated across the Channel. And it was with this Utopia as their touchstone that they organised public meetings around London, week in, week out, year after year, under the banner of the Manhood Suffrage League.

  The Tory defeat in 1880 had raised hopes among many that Gladstone’s new Liberal government would champion the cause of social justice, but despite moves to extend the franchise and provide universal primary education, many had been left disillusioned by the Coercion Act, and its suspension of civil rights in Ireland. Inspired by ‘the propagandist zeal of foreign workmen’ whom Kitz credited with the true genesis of the socialist movement in England, and having made common cause where possible with the Fenians, he and Lane began to generate interest and a growing following. From a base in the East End at the Stratford Dialectical and Radical Club, whose members had drifted from their secularist origins to outright socialism, the tireless Lane’s recipe was simple: ‘Take a room, pay a quarter’s rent in advance then arrange a list of lecturers… then paste up bills in the streets all round…and [having] got a few members get them to take it over and manage it as a branch.’ With Lane running two or three such operations at a time himself, the organisation’s spread was rapid.

  The street corners of impoverished Morris with the environment in which he was most at ease, evangelising from his soapbox like a Christian preacher. ‘He bears the fiery cross,’ observed his old friend, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, somewhat despairingly. Yet Morris, like many of the most radical of the English socialists, was instinctively averse to to the idea London also provided of anarchism, with its potent connotations of transcendence and its embryonic martyrology. There may have been some concern over how he might lose support among the general public by associating himself with something so notoriously foreign; after all, the federation’s newspaper Justice had immediately been branded by its enemies as an ‘incendiary…[work] by the hands of atheists and anarchists’. Andreas Scheu, his effective lieutenant in the federation, who had witnessed the ultimately pointless chaos caused by Johann Most’s rabble-rousing in Vienna a decade earlier, was certainly in a state of perpetual exasperation with his fellow émigrés for ‘passing bloodthirsty resolutions at the anarchist club under the leadership of tried agents provocateurs’. The influence of Kravchinsky may have been felt too, murmuring disparagingly about ‘toy revolutionaries’ when the anarchists who harangued the crowd in Hyde Park hailed him as a kindred spirit. Even Joseph Lane would complain at the imputation that the clubs he ran were anarchist ‘just because we charged no entrance fee and no monthly contributions but [carry] out the doctrine “from everybody according to their ability”.’

  However, it is hard to see where either Lane or Morris, with their federated organisation of clubs, anti-parliamentary attitude, distaste for authority and belief in revolution, differed from anarchism’s central tenets. And in such essays as Reclus’ ‘Ouvrier, prends la machine!’, with its loathing of artifice, suburbs and spiritual deracination, and medievalist longing, there was surely much for Morris to approve. ‘An end to frippery then!’ Reclus had declared. ‘An end to dolls’ clothes! We shall go back to the work of the fields and regain our strength and gaiety, seek out the joy of life again, the impressions of nature that we have forgotten in the dark mills of the suburbs. That is how a free people will think. It was the Alpine pastures, not the arquebus, that gave the Swiss of the Middle Ages their freedom from kings and lords.’ And whilst Morris was adamant in distinguishing himself from the ‘anarchists’, the difference between his view of revolution and that of Kropotkin or Reclus was a mere matter of nuance. For though he believed that violent upheaval might be avoided by middle-class acquiescence to the demands of socialism, he saw no realistic prospect of any such resolution.

  Morris had to contend, though, with an increasing demonisation in Britain of the revolutionary impulse. Henry Maudsley, the evolutionary psychologist, had clarified the contemporary threat to civilisation by reference to the French Revolution, which he termed ‘an awful example of how silently the great social forces mature, how they explode at last in volcanic fury, if too much or too long repressed’. For him, the greatest danger lay in giving concessions that were too generous. Charles Fairfield’s alarmist novel of 1884, The Socialist Revolution of 1888, concurred, leaving its readers in no uncertainty about where responsibility for the predicted turmoil would lie. The novel evoked a society in which ‘many desperate characters, including thousands of foreign anarchists, were abroad…preaching the duty of personal vengeance upon the middle and upper classes, and the nationalisation of women as well as of land.’ Published in the wake of a Fenian bombing campaign that had struck at not only Scotland Yard and the Carlton Club, but the Underground trains in which ordinary citizens travelled, even the book’s grossest exaggerations acquired a sheen of credibility.

  In fact the threat may have been smaller than those responsible for its policing liked to maintain: before Scotland Yard had called in the contractors to clear away the debris of the Fenian bomb, the Me
tropolitan Police’s internal journal, Moonshine, had managed to laugh off the Fenian threat by reference to the ease with which the perpetrators had been tracked down. Nevertheless, extraordinary measures were taken to reassure the British public. In an unprecedented invasion of intellectual privacy, police agents now proposed to scour ticket records from the British Museum Library for evidence of suspicious interests. Elisée Reclus, writing in the London Contemporary Review in May 1884, talked of ‘devil raising’ by the black propagandists and provocateurs deployed by the police. He may well have been right.

  A bombing campaign was the last thing on the minds of those members of the Democratic Federation whose growing antipathy to Hyndman’s dominance led them to coalesce into a libertarian faction. Their immediate anxiety concerned rumours of a plan to field candidates in the forthcoming parliamentary elections, and his overt jingoism in support of General Gordon’s expedition to subdue Egypt. Whilst the former notion appalled all those who deemed representative government to be a fraud to perpetuate Establishment authority, the latter especially riled Morris, for whom Britain’s colonial wars epitomised all that was worst about its exploitative commercial culture: the repression of the weak, abroad as at home, to prop up an economy that was faltering, as the second wave of the Industrial Revolution gave Britain’s foreign competitors a novel advantage.

  In the summer of 1884, Hyndman’s ambition finally caused him to make a fatal strategic blunder, when he urged Joseph Lane to attend the federation’s conference that August, eager for the mass of supporters he might bring with him. Moving swiftly, Morris outflanked him, inviting Lane to his home in Hammersmith where he persuaded him to help draft a new manifesto for the organisation, which would be renamed the Social Democratic Federation: a three-hour day of essential work would be promised for all, made possible by the common ownership of the means of production. When Hyndman refused to concede, a tense stand-off ensued. Approached by Marx’s daughter Eleanor for advice, Engels backed Morris, despite having previously scorned him as an ‘artist-enthusiast but untalented politician’. Morris, though, was reluctant to precipitate the circumstances that would oblige him to accept the leadership; it was with deep unease that he remembered how intoxicating was the sense of power he had felt, four months earlier, on finding himself unexpectedly at the head of a 4,000-strong procession to Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, on the anniversary of the Commune’s declaration.