The intellectual environment of London to which Kravchinsky introduced Kropotkin was highly congenial: one peopled by men who were at least intrigued by his ideas, like William Morris, and often wholly sympathetic to them, and women who were frequently as smitten by the charm of the unlikely revolutionary as by his impressive and enquiring mind. Coming in the immediate aftermath of the Black Monday riot, the annual commemoration of the Paris Commune had special piquancy, and the following months witnessed a slew of works that engaged with the unfulfilled promise of 1871 and its continued relevance to the political life of Kropotkin’s new friends. Eleanor Marx led the way, with her translation of Lissagaray’s ten-year-old magisterial work of myth-making, Histoire de la Commune; William Morris and Belfort Bax revisited the subject, yet with the same romantic desire to cast the victims of the Bloody Week as having chosen ‘to bury themselves in the smoking ruins of Paris rather than…allow socialism and the revolution to be befouled and degraded’. Then, in 1887, Henry Hyndman drew out the urgent relevance of their historical accounts in his provocatively titled pamphlet A Commune for London. ‘It is in the power of London’, he wrote, ‘to lead the way in the great social revolution which will remove the crushing disabilities, physical, moral and intellectual, under which the great mass of our city populations suffer at the present time.’
For all his personal antipathy to Hyndman, his old sparring partner from the Social Democratic Federation, Morris undoubtedly shared his sentiments. ‘The East End of London is the hell of poverty,’ John Henry Mackay would write. ‘Like an enormous black, motionless, giant Kraken, the poverty of London lies there in lurking silence and encircles with its mighty tentacles the life and wealth of the City and of the West End.’ Venturing frequently into the maw of the monster for speaking engagements in Shoreditch and Whitechapel, or simply to research and more fully understand its misery, Morris was shocked by what he found. Commenting on the hovel in which the Socialist League stalwart Kitz lived, he confided to a friend: ‘It fairly gave me the horrors to see how wretchedly off he was; so it isn’t much wonder that he takes the line he does.’ Affluent London society was, he believed, ‘so terrified of the misery it has created that at all hazards it must be swept out of sight’. And yet, all the while, the finely appointed homes of the wealthy, some furnished from Morris’ own interior design shop on Oxford Street – which had itself narrowly escaped the Black Monday window-breaking – offered the dispossessed a tantalising, infuriating glimpse of warmth, satiety, ease and comfort. ‘If you want to see the origin and explanation of an East London rookery you must open the door and walk in upon some fashionable dinner party at the West End,’ remarked Edward Carpenter, whose absence from the capital gave him an outsider’s clear perspective on its iniquities.
Despite criticising Carpenter for his withdrawal from the political fray, Morris clearly found the simple life at Millthorpe in Derbyshire deeply appealing, with its sparse furnishings and meals of home-grown vegetables shared from a single wooden plate. It was during a visit in 1886 that he read the newly published novel by Richard Jefferies, After London, a vision of a post-apocalyptic Britain returned to the state of untamed nature that its countryman author so cherished. ‘Absurd hopes curled around my heart as I read it,’ Morris wrote and the book’s premise lodged in his imagination. A country lapsed into barbarism and dominated by feuding warlords was scarcely what Morris aspired to, but the notion of beneficent erasure – of a London reduced to ruination and submerged in swampland, and a society purged of all the corrupt influences that had led mankind astray since the Middle Ages – spoke directly to Morris’ deepest political and imaginative instincts.
The affinity between Kropotkin and Morris was apparent to both, even though their political positions remained distinct, and frequently at odds. The Russian found in his new friend a shared aptitude for viewing contemporary issues with a long historical perspective, and this would lead to a fruitful cross-fertilisation of ideas in the years to come. For the moment, however, Morris allowed himself to indulge his taste for fantasy – whether dreaming of revolution tomorrow, or the distant prospect of Utopia – while Kropotkin’s attention was drawn to concrete planning for the day after the existing authorities and institutions had been toppled.
During his years in Clairvaux, experimental gardening had provided Kropotkin with a seemingly harmless occupation. And though the scurvy from which he had suffered suggests he lacked green fingers, tilling the soil had focused his thoughts on the necessity of ensuring tangible benefits to the masses in the immediate aftermath of social upheaval, in order to cement their loyalty and avoid the problems of starvation that he mistakenly saw as having helped defeat the Commune. ‘To what should the two million citizens of Paris turn their attention when they would be no longer catering for the luxurious fads and amusements of Russian princes, Romanian grandees and wives of Berlin financiers?’ he pondered. His proposals would not be published in book form until some years later, as The Conquest of Bread, but it was already clear to him that the equal distribution of food was key. He imagined parklands and aristocratic estates handed over to smallholders as common land, along with the credible promise of ‘a more substantial well-being than that enjoyed today by the middle classes’.
‘We are living at the close of an era, during which the marvellous advance of science [has] left social feeling behind,’ an article asserted in the first edition of Kropotkin’s and Charlotte Wilson’s newspaper Freedom in October 1886, which was printed on the presses of Morris’ Commonweal. In the narrow lecture hall created out of the old stables at Kelmscott House, Morris’ home in Hammersmith, west London, the path to the future was thrashed out in meetings attended by the leading lights of socialism in Britain. Kropotkin was ‘amiable to the point of saintliness, and with his full red beard and loveable expression might have been a shepherd from the Delectable Mountains,’ Shaw would write, and it may well have been he too who wrote the report of the first, halting speech that a self-conscious Kravchinsky attempted, after months of persuasion, in his broken English.
It was an environment that encouraged cosmopolitan participation. Kropotkin entertained his audience with apocryphal stories of Russian settlers in the United States outwitting the Native Americans and stolid frontiersmen alike. And along with Shaw, William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde added an Irish flavour to the proceedings, the latter organising a petition against the execution of the Haymarket martyrs, and working out the ideas that would eventually appear in his overtly anarchist essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’. Ford Madox Ford, then known as Hueffer, and a young H. G. Wells comprised the core of the English literary contingent, though many other writers and artists put in an occasional appearance. But amidst the ferment of amicable debate, the distrust and animosity that had torn apart the Social Democratic Federation and seemed to poison socialist unity at every turn, in England as abroad, could not be laid to rest.
‘The anarchists are making rapid progress in the Socialist League,’ Engels remarked wearily in the spring of 1886. ‘Morris and Bax – one as an emotional socialist and the other as a chaser after philosophical paradoxes – are wholly under their control for the present.’ Morris clearly saw the atmosphere of toleration as a source of strength, considered himself to be ‘on terms of warm personal friendship with the leading London anarchists’, and readily accepted the principle that ‘the centralised nation would give place to a federation of communities’ with Parliament of use only to facilitate the latter stages of the transition. Even the Fabian Society toyed with anarchist ideas for a while, with Shaw, a leading light, admitting that ‘we were just as anarchist as the Socialist League and just as insurrectionary as the federation’. When Morris visited the Glasgow branch of the league, soon after Kropotkin had addressed them, he appeared pleasantly surprised to find his colleagues turned ‘a little in the anarchist direction, which gives them an agreeable air of toleration’. It would not be long, though, before Morris discovered that his positionin
g of the league ‘between parliamentaries and anarchists’ could only aggravate the hardliners on either side, and Shaw came to see the Fabians as suffering ‘a sort of influenza of anarchism’: a more deadly and rampant form of the ‘children’s ailment’ on which Engels had poured scorn.
The summer of 1887 was marked by the withdrawal from the league of Bax, Eleanor Marx and her husband, Edward Aveling, angry at what they thought had come to be a ‘swindle’ that used their support for ends that they could not endorse. Neither this, though, nor the bloodletting in the ‘brothers’ war’ between the German contingent, in the form of Reuss’ resignation that May and the Commonweal’s subsequent publication of a list of suspected spies and informants, helped settle matters. Accusations continued to fly and recriminations simmered, with the fault lines increasingly drawn in intractable terms of class. The ownership of ‘anarchism’ itself was also perversely contested, and Kropotkin found himself stranded in the middle of the factions.
David Nicoll, a strange young man who until recently had styled himself an aesthete, frittering away a sizeable inheritance on theatrical speculation and extravagant velvet outfits before his unstable mind led him to extremist politics, recollected how his hard-line ‘individualist’ associates within the league poured scorn on those who grouped themselves around Kropotkin’s Freedom newspaper. ‘We looked upon them as a collection of middle-class faddists’, he wrote, ‘who took up with the movement as an amusement, and regretted that Kropotkin and other “serious” people ever had anything to do with them. But they called themselves “Anarchists!” and that had great influence with many of our international comrades.’ The ideological differences were minimal, with the key exception of the violent methods advocated by the opponents of the Freedom group. ‘If the people had only had the knowledge, the whole cursed lot would have been wiped out,’ was the punishment for scabs proposed during one strike by Henry Samuels, a militant figure from Leeds with a high opinion of his own abilities, who had married into the émigré French community. ‘Fire the slums and get the people into the West End mansions,’ fulminated Charles Mowbray, an ex-soldier and tailor from Durham with a widow’s peak and drooping moustache, whose controlling presence as an orator had seen him among those charged after the Dod Street riot.
‘The noblest conquests of man are written on a bloodstained book,’ wrote Joseph Lane in his Anti-Statist Communist Manifesto, a clear and well-argued response to the more moderate socialists who had left the league. ‘Why evade the fine old name which for years has rung out in the van of the socialist movement throughout the world?’ Charlotte Wilson reprimanded him for failing to embrace the term ‘anarchist’ in favour of a ‘clumsy’ alternative. Her criticism must have rankled deeply with a man who had devoted his life to a cause, fostered by him from the grass roots up. His circumspection about simplifying his political beliefs with catch-all labels that seemed to cause only contention, and signified an adherence to the worst aspects of the individualist creed, was surely wise.
In Sheffield, for the moment, Carpenter kept such unpleasant bickering at bay, thanks to a modesty and self-effacement that the city’s Weekly Echo newspaper evoked in awestruck terms. Instead Carpenter threw himself into opening the Commonwealth Café, an enterprise inspired in part by the small-scale Utopia described in Walter Besant’s novel of 1882, All Sorts and Conditions of Men. In Besant’s story, a communal workshop is established by a brewery heiress, Angela Messenger, where the seamstresses were kept entertained by edifying readings, and kept healthy by leisure breaks for tennis and gymnastics. On visiting Carpenter’s café, one local journalist was overcome with religious emotion: ‘One could not help thinking of another upper room of considerable importance in history, where not many mighty and not many learned were present … there was another Carpenter not a bit more exclusive: one who had nowhere to lay his head; who wore the purple only once and then in mockery.’ To those caught up in the political factionalism of the capital, the Christlike Carpenter offered calm conciliation in his 1887 book England’s Ideal, with the advice to ‘Think what a commotion there must have been within the bud when the petals of a rose are forming! Think what arguments, what divisions, what recriminations, even among the atoms!’ By then, though, William Morris was already doubting that he could keep up the ‘pig-driving’ necessary to hold the league together for even a few more months.
External factors too were putting pressure on the movement. The work of philanthropic and religious organisations such as the Salvation Army in the East End increasingly offered practical benefits to the poor of a kind that the anarchists could only promise in some nebulous future. And the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee would see a monumental expression of their presence rise up in the Mile End Road.
Three storeys high, with a swimming pool, cast-iron galleries, vast hall and rib-vaulted library inspired by the medieval Prior’s Kitchen in Durham, the East End’s ‘People’s Palace’ was, proclaimed The Times, a ‘happy experiment in practical socialism’ that would ‘sow the seeds of a higher and more humane civilisation among dwellers and toilers in [that] unlovely district’. Neither Kropotkin nor Morris could have questioned the nobility of its stated aim of providing all with opportunities previously open only to the aristocracy; Oscar Wilde even applied unsuccessfully to serve as its secretary. The education it promised, though, watched over by the busts of England’s greatest poets, was unlikely to be one that would cultivate revolutionary sentiments in the tens of thousands who passed through its doors every week. If they were in any doubt about how it would reinforce the existing social order, the socialists need only have looked at the guest list for the opening of the People’s Palace on 21 June 1887. The German kaiser was present, dressed in the silver and white livery of a Teutonic knight, while the honour of opening the Queen’s Hall, its centrepiece, went to King Leopold II of Belgium, whose private army was then embarking on its campaign of terror against the natives of the Congo Free State.
Queen Victoria also attended, though she had very nearly been indisposed. Twenty-four hours earlier, a ceremony of thanksgiving for her reign had been held in Westminster Abbey, during which it had been the intention of Fenian militants to blow up both her and her ministers. Only a delay in the ship carrying them from the United States had intervened, according to the press reports of her merciful escape. In fact, the truth was rather different. The plot itself had been initiated and guided over a period of many months by agents of the British police, with the acquiescence of Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government; the decision to allow it to progress so far was a risk calculated to heighten popular outrage when the danger was finally exposed. Furthermore, the indirect target of the provocation was Charles Parnell and the other moderate advocates of Home Rule, whose names it sought to blacken. Had any of this been known, it would have provided a sharp warning to Britain’s socialists that they might expect similar treatment at the hands of the police.
The origin of the provocation lay in the rivalry between two men, Edward Jenkinson and Robert Anderson, both ambitious to make their name in the policing of Fenianism, and with an arrogance that led them to believe that they could play politics too. Three years earlier, Jenkinson had been transferred to London, where Anderson, an Irishman by birth, was already working alongside Adolphus Williamson, the chief of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-subversion division, Section D. Expertly manipulating interdepartmental tensions, the newcomer had outflanked the heir apparent to claim Section D as his own fiefdom, with thirty agents at his disposal and a direct line of accountability to the Home Secretary.
‘The four essentials for a policeman are truthfulness, sobriety, punctuality and tremendous care as to what you tell your superiors,’ ‘Dolly’ Williamson advised those who worked for him. Jenkinson ignored the first point and embraced the last wholeheartedly. Indeed, such was the secrecy with which he ran his operations that whatever suspicions his colleagues may have harboured about quite how he landed such a remarkable tally of
arrests during the Fenian bombing campaign of 1883 to 1885 were almost impossible to prove. Something catastrophic would have to happen for more serious questions to be asked.
‘The sands of destiny, they are almost run out, is the crash of all things near at hand?’ was the kind of question that Anderson, a strong believer in Christian millenarianism, liked to ponder in his spare time. When a bomb placed beneath the urinals used by the Special Irish Branch demolished part of Scotland Yard, it must have seemed to those in the building that the End of Days had arrived. But for Anderson it heralded a fresh start. The new head of the CID, James Munro, who shared Anderson’s Unionist politics and religious leanings, recalled him from the Home Office backwater to which he had been posted and together the pair set about tracing the underground Fenian networks active in mainland Britain. Time and again their investigations exposed unknown agents run by Jenkinson with a cavalier disregard for both his loyalties to the Metropolitan Police and the basic principles of law enforcement, as he coached them to twist their testimony to suit his own agenda.
Reprimanded, Jenkinson nevertheless persisted in his clandestine activities, trimming his strategy to the prevailing political wind at Westminster, where Salisbury’s Conservative government had now come to power. Only after it was revealed that the ringleader of the conspiracy to import dynamite from America for the Jubilee Plot was in fact a veteran British agent operating out of Paris and New York, and now being run by Jenkinson, was action taken to remove him from his position. As much as the risk Jenkinson’s actions had posed, however, by toying with catastrophe, it was the lack of coordination that was most hazardous, as he maintained what Munro described to his superiors as ‘a school of private detectives working as rivals and enemies of Scotland Yard’. For Anderson too had embarked on a simultaneous intrigue of his own, forging documents that supposedly revealed Parnell’s links to terrorism and leaking them to The Times for its ‘Parnell and Crime’ exposé, that had begun early in 1887.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 38
