The World That Never Was (45 page)

Although the Cambridge graduate did not face anything like the same hazards as his Russian peers in his work as a lecturer for Cambridge University’s Extension Scheme, his frequent tours of northern industrial towns arguably afforded him a more effective education in the ‘rude unaccommodating life below’. Unlike the majority of Russian peasants, the workers he taught were enthusiastic for the insights he could offer into materialism, Darwin’s evolutionary theories or Beethoven’s life and works, and responsive when he challenged them with the notion that ‘Science has strode into the slumbering camp of religion and stands full armed in the midst. Some even brought their own makeshift telescopes to his
lectures on astronomy, ‘a curious subject in these towns where seldom a star could be seen’.

Carpenter’s gruelling exposure to working-class poverty and hardship sharpened his sense of social injustice, while a growing consciousness of his own sexuality lent a powerful personal impetus to his political development. As much as Paris’ status as a centre of social revolution, it was the promise of experimentation with male lovers that appealed: he visited occasionally ‘to see if by any means I might make a discovery there!’ He would soon realise that the answer was to be found closer to home, and that ‘my ideal of love is a powerful, strongly built man, of my own age or rather younger – preferably of the working class…not be too glib or refined.’

In Sheffield, Carpenter joined the nearby community that had recently been founded by John Ruskin’s St George’s Guild, to pursue his creed that ‘there is no wealth but life’; its failure to meet Carpenter’s expectations did not stop him from embracing other experiments in living. A vegetarian, he welcomed the foundation of the anti-vivisection movement, along with a society to promulgate the virtues of a meat-free diet; having dispensed with his dress clothes in favour of a more fustian style, he would surely have been intrigued by the arrival in England of the tight-fitting, rough woollen clothes inspired by the writings of the German hygienist Dr Jaeger with their bold claims to let the body and the spirit breathe. Fascinated by eastern mysticism, he initially kept an open mind too towards the theosophical beliefs being propounded by Madame Blavatsky and the current of enquiry into psychic phenomena and spiritualism. All were symptoms of a new, enquiring age.

Around Easter 1883, Carpenter set about creating his own miniature Utopia on a smallholding at Millthorpe in the Derbyshire countryside, funded by a generous inheritance from his father: over £20,000 of shares in the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had been at the heart of the strikes and violent clashes of 1877, of which he promptly divested himself. But as the year progressed, with the tide in the Thames surging and the sky tinted red from the August eruption of Krakatoa on the far side of the world, Carpenter felt drawn towards a more practical and outward-looking engagement with the socialism about which he had begun to lecture to the workers of Sheffield. And so it was that October of that year saw him crossing Westminster Bridge Road, in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, to enlist in the cause.

Compared to the grandeur of Pugin’s great Gothic palace in Westminster, the basement venue for the meetings of the Democratic
Federation were far from salubrious. By the light of a couple of candles, propped in tin sconces, Carpenter encountered what seemed like a ‘group of conspirators’, but both the atmosphere of earnest debate and the considered bearing of the leading members of the movement’s executive council reassured him that he was in the right place. Chairing the meeting with a proprietorial air was the federation’s founder, Henry Hyndman, a recent candidate for Parliament as an independent Tory, now turned socialist, whose proselytising political work
England for All
, including one chapter neatly summarising the economic theories of
Das Kapital
, had attracted Carpenter’s attention and helped him crystallise ‘the mass of floating impressions, sentiments, ideals, etc. in my mind’.

The crotchety Marx, approaching death, had taken exception to Hyndman’s interpretation of his theory of ‘surplus value’, while Engels remained intent on pressing charges of plagiarism against his rival populariser. For those who had struggled with the density of
Das Kapital
, however, Hyndman offered ready access to ideas that quickened their outrage and galvanised their activism, with the promise of social revolution and ‘genuine communism’ before the decade was out. ‘The well-to-do should provide for the poor certain advantages whether they like to do so or not,’ stated his audaciously titled essay ‘Dawn of a Revolutionary Epoch’, handed out to pioneering members at the federation’s inaugural meeting in 1881. Such a doctrine of paternalistic compulsion was not to every member’s taste, any more than were Hyndman’s authoritarian tendencies, but in this embryonic phase in British socialism all could subscribe to the basic sentiment.

That was the position taken by William Morris, a recent recruit who had promptly been appointed treasurer of the federation, and whose burly presence and acknowledged status as a poet, artist and entrepreneur presented Hyndman with the only meaningful challenge to his primacy. ‘I was struck by Morris’ fine face, his earnestness, the half-searching, half-dreaming look of his eyes, and his plain and comely dress,’ wrote one member, and there was certainly much to recommend a man whom others described as having the brusque and direct manner of a sea captain, instilling calm and confidence in his crew. For the moment, Morris denied any interest in leadership, and sincerely insisted that he had much to learn about socialism before contemplating any such responsibility. But prolonged disenchantment with the capitalist system had left him with a passionate longing for revolution, beside which Hyndman’s rhetoric rang somewhat hollow. ‘I think myself that
no rose water will cure us,’ Morris had pronounced five years earlier in reaction to Matthew Arnold’s proposal to outlaw inheritance. ‘Disaster & misfortune of all kinds, I think will be the only things that will breed a remedy: in short nothing can be done till all rich men are made poor by common consent.’

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.