Walt Whitman and British Socialism: ‘The Love of Comrades’ 9781315757988

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 6
Copyright Page......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Introduction......Page 12
1 Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic: Edward Carpenter’s Democracy......Page 41
2 Permeating Socialism: James William Wallace and the Bolton Whitmanites......Page 76
3 Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press......Page 115
4 William Clarke’s Walt Whitman: A Socialist Exposition......Page 161
5 “Have the Elder Races Halted?”: Uses of Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”......Page 180
Coda......Page 203
References......Page 212
Index......Page 226

Citation preview

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Walt Whitman and British Socialism

The project promises to provide a richly documented sense of a British “socialist culture,” allowing readers to appreciate the distinctive contribution of Whitman’s poetry to it. —Andrew Lawson, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK [This book] speaks to a growing sense of the importance of transatlantic exchange in the formation of British political identities across the 19th century and will add to this growing and very current field of scholarship. It is clearly based on meticulous research and draws on interdisciplinary resources to analyse the textual examples used. —Ruth Livesey, University of London, UK This is the first sustained examination of Walt Whitman’s influence on ­British socialism. Harris combines a contextual historical study of ­Whitman’s ­reception with focused close readings of a variety of poems, books, articles, letters and speeches. She calls attention to Whitman’s own demand for the reader to “himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, m ­ etaphysical essay,” linking Whitman’s general comments about active reading to specific cases of his fin de siècle British socialist readership. These include the editorial aims behind the Whitman selections published by William Michael Rossetti, Ernest Rhys and W. T. Stead and the ways that Whitman was interpreted and appropriated in a wide range of grassroots texts produced by individuals or groups who responded to Whitman and his poetry publicly in socialist circles. Harris makes full use of material from the C. F. Sixsmith and Bolton Whitman Fellowship collections at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, the Edward Carpenter collection at Sheffield Archives and the archives of Swan ­Sonnenschein & Co. at the University of Reading. Much of this archival material—little of which is currently available in digital form—is discussed here in detail for the first time. Accordingly, this study will appeal to those with interests in the archival history of nineteenth-­ century literary culture, as well as in the connections to be made between literary and political cultures of this era more generally. Kirsten Harris is currently Senior Tutor in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol, having previously lectured in English Literature at the University of Nottingham and taught at the University of Sheffield.

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Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

1 Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our Feverish Contact’ Allan Conrad Christensen

9 Science and Religion in NeoVictorian Novels Eye of the Ichthyosaur John Glendening

2 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Jean Fernandez

10 Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture Edited by Katharina Boehm, Anna Farkas, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein

3 Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry F. Elizabeth Gray 4 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era Lara Baker Whelan 5 Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road American Mobilities Susan L. Roberson 6 Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home Caroline Hellman

11 A Female Poetics of Empire From Eliot to Woolf Julia Kuehn 12 Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture Immersions and Revisitations Edited by Nadine BoehmSchnitker and Susanne Gruss 13 Dickens’ Novels as Poetry Allegory and Literature of the City Jeremy Tambling

7 The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature Josephine Guy and Ian Small

14 Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family Monica Flegel

8 Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction Novel Ethics Rachel Hollander

15 Queer Victorian Families Curious Relations in Literature Edited by Duc Dau and Shale Preston

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16 Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle Libidinal Lives Edited by Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates, and Patricia Pulham

17 Walt Whitman and British Socialism ‘The Love of Comrades’ Kirsten Harris

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Walt Whitman and British Socialism

‘The Love of Comrades’

Kirsten Harris

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Kirsten Harris to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harris, Kirsten, 1981– Walt Whitman and British Socialism: ‘The Love of Comrades’ / by Kirsten Harris. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature; 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892—Political and social views. 2. Socialism—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. PS3242.S6H37 2016 811'.3—dc23 2015035160 ISBN: 978-1-138-79627-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75798-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

1 Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic: Edward Carpenter’s Democracy

30

2 Permeating Socialism: James William Wallace and the Bolton Whitmanites

65

3 Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press

104

4 William Clarke’s Walt Whitman: A Socialist Exposition

150

5 “Have the Elder Races Halted?”: Uses of Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

169

Coda

192

References Index

201 215

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Acknowledgments

Much of the primary research for this book was archival, and I would like to begin by thanking the librarians and archivists at the following for their assistance: Bolton Archives; John Rylands Library, University of M ­ anchester; London School of Economics Archives and Special C ­ ollections; Manchester Central Library; Sheffield Archives; University of Bristol ­Special Collections; University of Reading Special Collections; the Working Class Movement Library, Manchester. I am grateful to Jamie Carstairs at U ­ niversity of Bristol Special Collections, Julie Lamara at Bolton Archives, the John Rylands C ­ entre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care, and Dan H ­ ayman for images. An early version of Chapter 3, “The ‘Labour Prophet’?: R ­ epresentations of Walt Whitman in the British Nineteenth-­Century Socialist Press,” was published in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (Winter 2013), and some introductory notes that became Chapter 5, “‘Have the Elder Races Halted?’: British Socialist Reading of ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!,’” in 19: ­Interdisciplinary ­Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (November 2009). I thank the editors for permission to draw from these articles. My debts to colleagues and mentors are numerous. Thanks, especially, are due to Danny Karlin for his long-standing and unstinting support and guidance. Matthew Campbell, M. Wynn Thomas, Josephine Guy and Samantha Matthews have read drafts and offered advice which has helped shape the direction of this work. This study benefited considerably from the generous feedback of the three anonymous reviewers at Routledge, and I would also like to thank Elizabeth Levine, Kathleen Laurentiev and Christina Kowalski at Routledge. The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded my initial doctoral research, and the University of Nottingham funded research trips to England while I was working in Malaysia. Finally I would like to thank my family and friends, especially my mum, Penny Garbutt, for her incredible support and patience, Andrew, Cameron and Georgina Harris, Anna Pidgeon, Anna Jones and Will Cooke. This book is dedicated to my gran, Anne Garbutt, a true friend, with gratitude for everything.

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Introduction

On 25 April 1888 Walt Whitman had a visit from a young Russian revolutionary seeking the poet’s seal of approval. Characteristically, Whitman refused to align himself with organized political activism, giving instead only vague assurances of support. “We had no quarrel,” he later explained, I only made it plain to him that I was not to be impressed into that sort of service. Everybody comes here demanding endorsements: endorse this, endorse that: each man thinks I am radical his way: I suppose I am radical his way, but I am not radical his way alone. Socialists, single tax men, communists, rebels of every sort and all sorts, come here. I don’t say they shouldn’t come—that it’s unreasonable for them to come: the Leaves is responsible for them and for more than them.1 But Whitman was “impressed into service,” willingly or not. The “rebels” may have been influenced by Leaves of Grass but they also put it to work, taking Whitman at his own word that he was “the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over.”2 In Britain, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialist revival produced one such group of agitators. Whitman was discussed and quoted in socialist journalism. His poems were reprinted in socialist periodicals; they were advertised and recommended to socialist readers, and a complete edition of Leaves of Grass was published by the Labour Press Society. Poems were set to music, published in socialist songbooks and sung at meetings. Chromolithographs of the poet were sold to and through the socialist press, and he even featured in a calendar of socialist saints. In 1901 an American religious magazine grumbled that “an association in Birmingham, England, which calls itself ‘The Labour Church’ … has arranged a form of service in which readings from Walt Whitman alternate with hymns and the Lord’s Prayer.”3 This volume offers a detailed examination of the different ways ­Whitman was interpreted, appropriated and put to use by British socialists at the turn of the century. I investigate why, at this key moment of socialist history, Whitman mattered. And how, despite Whitman’s outright refusal to endorse a socialist “political program” (WWC, 1, 222), his poems were understood to speak to and for the socialist cause, to be charged with a special

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2 Introduction socialist significance. Certain theoretical assumptions about meaning-­ making clearly underpin this kind of work, most crucially that meaning is determined through complex, dynamic interactions between a text and its readers. Prefiguring reception and reader-response theorists, Whitman himself understood the interpretive process to work in this way. Using an appropriately active sporting metaphor, he urges: “Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work” (PP, 1016–17). As Wolfgang Iser would do in the twentieth century, Whitman draws our attention to the “gaps” the reader creatively fills while reading, a process his work lends itself to so readily that it provoked Edmund Gosse to complain in 1894 that Whitman criticism shed light only on the idiosyncrasies of its authors.4 Whitman is a “bathybius” Gosse states (italics in original), a protoplasmic organism; the critic who touches him “is immediately confronted with his own image stamped upon that viscid and tenacious surface.”5 That Whitman has elicited such a varied set of powerful, personal responses from his readers—and that his global reception constitutes such a major part of Whitman scholarship—seems to attest to Gosse’s view.6 The keynote is that of suggestiveness. Whitman’s claim in November Boughs that “the best poetic utterance, after all, can merely hint, or remind, often very indirectly, or at distant removes” (PP, 1176) can be mapped onto Iser’s argument that “the message is transmitted in two ways, in that the reader ‘receives’ it by composing it.”7 The model of interpretation as “rewriting” operates doubly in our context: Whitman’s broad democratic “frame-work” allowed socialist messages to be “composed” first as his work was read and understood and second as his readers wrote and published their own articles, books and poetry. The reader of these latter works, himself or herself the next link in the interpretive chain, then begins to compose the “message” afresh. As will become very clear in the forthcoming pages, Whitman’s socialist readers did not compose one neat, uniform socialist message. As interpretations were produced within the clear parameters of socialist philosophy, some readings were rendered impossible (“Whitman as the poet of American imperialism”), some plausible (“Whitman as the poet of socialist revolution”) and others very probable (“Whitman as poet of the people”). Stanley Fish goes some way towards explaining these orientations, accounting for agreement between certain readers with the proposition that meaning is not derived from the text or the individual reader as much as it is from the “interpretive community” to which he or she belongs.8 Members of the same community will “necessarily agree because they will see (and by seeing, make) everything in relation to that community’s assumed purposes and goals.” Members of different communities will disagree because each thinks that the other can’t see “what is obviously and inescapably there.”9

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Introduction  3 In this theorization the reader is a socialized subject; if interpretation cannot be objective, it cannot be entirely subjective either: ways of reading are “extensions of community perspectives.”10 Certainly, the people discussed in this book read the “assumed purposes and goals” of socialism into Walt ­Whitman, connecting the dots between Whitmanian ideas and their own political ideology. Their appropriations of the American poet are firmly located in the specific conditions of their time (the turn of the century) and place (Britain) and bound into socialist versions of nineteenth-century political, spiritual, scientific and aesthetic discourses. But the socialist community does not slot neatly into Fish’s model of academic literary reading. For some readers Whitman came first: if he was read prior to a socialist conversion, interpretations of Whitman’s “message” could influence interpretations of socialism, which would then influence re-readings of Whitman. Moreover, this was no stable interpretive community. The movement was in the process of defining itself: in the final decades of the nineteenth century the hybrid socialist movement was made up of overlapping networks that did not always agree on the “assumed purposes and goals” of the movement or the role that literature was to play within it. Socialism intersected with other clusters of communities, such as those built around mysticism, vegetarianism, same-sex relationships and women’s rights. Whitman’s suggestiveness and inclusiveness, I will argue, made him a particularly useful literary figure in this complex, multi-faceted early phase of socialism. Within this broad interpretive community, Whitman and his work tended to be treated as one and the same, a conflation that adds an extra dimension to traditional understandings of how meaning is created by the reader. It was best, stated Ernest Rhys in his preface to Whitman’s poems, to approach Whitman “through his personality; […] His life and personality are absolutely one with his poetry.”11 In the socialist press it was standard practice to consider character alongside content. When William Jupp commemorated Whitman’s death in Seed-Time with an article called “Walt Whitman: The Man and His Message” (July 1892, 1–3) the subtitle was already a familiar construct that continued to be used well into the twentieth century (see, for example, Keir Hardie’s Karl Marx: The Man and His Message, John Bruce Glasier’s Keir Hardie: The Man and His Message, and Tom Swan’s Edward Carpenter: The Man and His Message and Kropotkin: The Man and His Message). Personality mattered, and Whitman’s loomed particularly large. If the notoriously porous boundaries between Whitman and his poetic persona in Leaves of Grass affected its interpretation for some readers, so did first-hand knowledge of the poet for others. Horace Traubel’s meticulous account of Whitman’s final years, With Walt Whitman in Camden, details a flow of letters and visits from British socialists. Founding members of the Fabian Society and Fellowship of the New Life Edward Pease and Percival Chubb, as well as Ernest Rhys, Edward Carpenter and Bolton socialists John Johnston and James William Wallace all made it across the Atlantic. ­Writing to Whitman, eating together, meeting his friends, discussing

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4 Introduction poetry—in short, becoming friends (and in Edward Carpenter’s case possibly lovers)—altered the experience of reading his work.12 Understandings of Whitman as a prophetic or even messianic figure further complicated the interpretive process.13 For Wallace, Carpenter, the Labour Church’s John Trevor, popular orator Caroline Martyn, a young Alfred Orage and leading Independent Labour Party figures John and Katharine Bruce Glasier, among others, Leaves of Grass was read as a sacred text of divine origin, not judged as an ordinary literary work.

Reading Whitman Most nineteenth-century British readers encountered Whitman in incomplete form, through poems reprinted in periodicals or edited selections. Two major editions were published in Whitman’s lifetime by editors generally presumed to have very different motives. In Edward Whitley’s words, “The Pre-Raphaelite William Michael Rossetti aimed to deliver Whitman to the British upper classes; and the Welsh socialist Ernest Rhys tried to bring Whitman to working-class Brits.”14 Rossetti’s much-maligned editorial policy of excising poems that could be deemed morally “offensive” seemingly lends weight to this distinction (about half of the poems from the 1867 version of Leaves of Grass were removed, including “Song of Myself”).15 It would be a mistake, however, to overlook the democratic thrust of Rossetti’s project.16 A political and religious radical, he would later write and publish a collection of “democratic sonnets,” and his literary heroes were Blake and Shelley, frequently championed in the nineteenth-century literary press as the great poets of democracy.17 Significantly, his correspondence with Whitman reveals a sympathy with the poet’s democratic politics that can be transposed onto his editorial work. In 1867 the two men exchanged a series of letters concerning Poems by Walt Whitman. Whitman had developed misgivings about authorizing a selection, and there was an uneasy negotiation of terms and conditions (WWC, 3, 295–308). The tone relaxed, however, when discussion rested on Whitman’s essay “Democracy” (later reworked into Democratic Vistas), a copy of which Whitman had sent to Rossetti. Rossetti, who described himself in these letters as a “democratic republican” who hoped “to live and die faithful to the meanings of that glorious creed,” responded enthusiastically (WWC, 3, 306). The “main truth” of Whitman’s paper, he told the poet, is that “after one has said that such and such people or classes are not exactly fitted to make the best use of political enfranchisement, one has said only a small part of the truth, the further point remains that to induct these people or classes into the combined national life, and to constitute that life out of them along with all other classes, is an enormous gain” (WWC, 3, 307). For Whitman, a democratic literature of the people was the key to achieving this “combined national life,” and in this light Rossetti’s ­project, with its aim of bringing Whitman to an English readership, takes on a more

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Introduction  5 democratic hue. Rossetti believed that the selection would perform the function of “paving the way towards the issue and unprejudiced reception of a complete edition of the poems in England” and, in this regard, Poems by Walt Whitman can be counted a success.18 Harold Blodgett may have complained in 1934 that “many Englishmen met Whitman only after he had been gone over by Rossetti, his shirt buttoned and his hat set at a decent angle,” but through this influential selection the unconventional American poet had, at least, been met.19 When Rossetti was approached in 1885 by a passionate young man, keen to produce a new, cheap selection of Whitman’s poetry, he was happy to oblige in passing on Whitman’s address and writing a brief note of introduction (WWC, 3, 65–66). Since 1868 much had changed in Britain: literacy rates had improved, the third Reform Act of 1884 had recently extended suffrage, the nascent socialist movement had begun to stir, and the swell of New Unionism was just around the corner. Ernest Rhys, the young man in question, was acutely aware of these social rumblings. Rebelling against his father by becoming a mining engineer in Durham rather than taking up a place at university, Rhys moved to London to try and make his way in the literary world.20 In the early 1880s he mixed eagerly with leading figures in the early phase of the socialist revival, moving around the edges of groups such as H. M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation, the ­Fellowship of the New Life, William Morris’s Socialist League and the Fabian Society, with his good friend Percival Chubb as guide. Rhys’s enthusiasm for socialism would cool a little over the years, but notes from ­Carpenter and Rhys to Whitman indicate that they were still meeting at Fabian lectures throughout the 1880s (WWC, 3, 441; 4, 169). The preface to Rhys’s selection, and his correspondence with Whitman about it, reveal an avowedly “democratic” enterprise—a word Rhys uses often—cultivated in this climate of new-found socialistic fervor. Like Rhys’s earlier efforts to create a library in his Durham mining community, this mission had a strong autodidactic thrust and was guided by the principles of accessibility and affordability (principles that later informed his work as editor of Everyman’s Library). What was needed, believed Rhys, was an “edition for the poor,” an edition that put Whitman in the hands of “the poorest member of the great social democracy” (WWC, 1, 452). The halfguinea price tag of Wilson & McCormick’s Leaves of Grass forestalled a popular readership, giving color “to the notion of its being a luxury only for the rich.” For Rhys Whitman was not a luxury: a cheap edition was an “imperative requirement.” “You know what a fervid stir and impulse ­forward of Humanity there is today in certain quarters!” he wrote to ­Whitman, “and I am sure you will be tremendously glad to help us here, in the very camp of the enemy, the stronghold of caste and aristocracy and all selfishness between rich and poor!” (emphasis Rhys’s). If Whitman’s ideal took root in the hearts of the workers then the “War of liberation of Humanity” would be valiantly fought (WWC, 1, 453). Yet some people, he claimed, wanted to

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6 Introduction keep Whitman as “the property of a certain literary clique,—a rara avis, to be carefully kept out of sight of the uneducated mob as not able to understand and appreciate the peculiar qualities of your work” (WWC, 1, 452). It was untenable to Whitman, who desperately wanted to be the poet of the people, that his poetry should exist merely as a commodity for the rich or a curio for the literary. Playing to the poet’s romantic hope that laborers would keep copies of Leaves of Grass on their person, reading while they rested, Rhys assured Whitman that the new selection “could easily be carried about anywhere in the pocket” (WWC, 3, 163).21 If, as M. Wynn Thomas suggests, Rhys’s library endeavor in Durham was an “initiative to bridge the class divide between himself and the miners,” a similar kind of “bridging” can be seen at work in his correspondence with Whitman.22 Rhys’s life experience had given him more contact with the working classes than the literary classes, a distinction he made use of to secure Whitman’s approval. He positioned himself as one of the workers by emphasizing his involvement in the coal industry and flagging the laboring class credentials of the Canterbury Poets series editor, Joseph Skipsey (who had enjoyed some renown as the “Pitman Poet”), to Whitman. In a heady declaration of intent, showing an acute awareness of the editor’s role as mediator between author and reader, Rhys employs a Whitmanian vocabulary to assert that his chief claim to be Whitman’s “interpreter” in England was that he stood with the “young men of the people, not academicians; not mere university students, but a healthy, determined, hearty band of comrades, seeking amid all their errors and foolishnesses to help the average, everyday man about them” (WWC, 3, 163–64). Rhys flatters Whitman’s democratic sensibilities and Whitman was, of course, attracted by such an argument; he wrote to Rhys: “I much hope to reach the working men, & guilds of the British Islands—especially the young fellows—& trust the W[alter] S[cott] vol. will forward that object.”23 Yet a surprising passage in Rhys’s preface betrays an anxiety about the average man. Where Rossetti’s selection policy was guided by issues of moral propriety, Rhys’s was led by issues of accessibility. Many poems were omitted, he tells his “average popular English audience,” because this same audience found much of Leaves of Grass “unintelligible.” Using “average” in a distinctly un-Whitmanian way, Rhys places the blame for the selection’s shortcomings squarely on the head of his working-class reader: “The limitations of the average run of readers have been, as far as they could be surmised, the limitations of the book, and upon the head of that unaccountable class, who have in the past been guilty of not a few poets’ and prophets’ maltreatment, rest any odium the thorough-paced disciple of Walt Whitman may attach to the present venture.”24 This paradoxical concern—that the working classes were in need of Whitman’s poetry but that they would not read or could not understand it—would be voiced at different times by others in the socialist movement. Rhys’s intentions, nevertheless, were genuine and Poems of Walt Whitman went some way towards achieving them, selling eight thousand copies in its first two months.25 He and Whitman maintained

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Introduction  7 an affectionate relationship, with Rhys making the voyage to America in 1888 to spend time with the ailing poet.26 Two other editions of Whitman were advertised in the socialist press. W. T. Stead’s 1895 Penny Poets selection served less of a pioneering purpose than Rossetti’s or Rhys’s because by this date Whitman’s poetry had become better known and easier to find.27 Its strength, however, was its cheapness: at one penny, the same price as a weekly socialist newspaper such as the Labour Leader, it was easily affordable to the working-class reader. Exemplifying how Whitman’s work was understood to be an extension of his personality, in the Labour Prophet John Trevor commended Stead’s selection as “a great assistance” in the matter of getting to “Whitman himself through his poetry.” Again, Whitman’s verse is not commodified as a luxury but promoted as a necessity, and members of the Labour Church are advised to make the selection a “constant companion” until they could no longer resist the temptation to buy a complete edition (“Review,” March 1896, 40–41). Finally, in 1896 the first complete 1891–92 Leaves of Grass was published in Britain, under Manchester’s Labour Press Society imprint. At 2s 6d it was more than three times cheaper than the American version published by David McKay (9s). Alfred Orage, Fabian and founding member of the Leeds Independent Labour Party, reviewed it in the Labour Leader, riffing on the same themes as Rhys—affordability and democracy—while finding fault with Rhys’s own selection for being “trivial” and incomplete (“A  Bookish Causerie,” September 5, 1896, 308). “Editions there have been,” says Orage, “complete but not cheap, cheap but not complete.” To experience the full force of the poetry, to truly understand Whitman’s radical spiritual philosophy, Leaves of Grass—founded as it was on the principle of inclusion—had to be read in its entirety. It was a point of pride that the first complete British edition should be both affordable to the working reader and produced by a labor press: “A good omen—if one were needed— for Democracy” in Britain. The labor press, like Whitman, was bold and fearless, in the vanguard of the great movement towards “Democracy.” Yet Orage, raised in modest circumstances himself, wrestled with the same paradox as Rhys: the democratic movement needed Whitman but “the man in the street”—the “commonest fraction of our Democracy”—would have “nothing to do with it.” Over the following chapters I consider how this sticking point is negotiated as Whitman is inscribed into popular socialist cultures, philosophically, spiritually and aesthetically.

The Socialist “Political Program” Whitman was well aware of the burgeoning socialist movement on both sides of the Atlantic, largely due to the efforts of his socialist admirers. His many visits and letters from British socialists, for example, led him to remark to Horace Traubel that “all the young fellows over there seem to be S­ ocialists” (WWC, 4, 110). Traubel, Whitman’s great companion in the poet’s old age,

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8 Introduction was himself an ardent young socialist who threw himself into the business of bringing about socialism with nearly as much gusto as he set about conserving Whitman’s literary and spiritual reputation. In the 1890s he would come to correspond intensively with leading radicals such as Eugene Debs, write ­Whitmanesque socialist verse and use his periodical, the Conservator, to spread socialistic as well as Whitmanite ideas. In With Walt Whitman in ­Camden Traubel records his numerous frustrated attempts in the four years before Whitman’s death to get Whitman to admit to a socialist agenda, which, to Traubel, was the logical extension of the philosophy of Leaves of Grass. True to form, Whitman hedged. At times he drew nearer to socialism (“it looks like our only hope”; WWC, 3, 422); at others he pushed back (“I have no soft spot for the Anarchists, the Socialists. […] Our point of view [is] entirely different”; WWC, 5, 22). On one occasion Traubel asked if he had any sympathy for William Morris and the “noble group of English socialists” (Whitman’s phrase). “Lots of it—lots—lots,” Whitman replied, but when pressed on their “political program”: “Of that I’m not so sure—I rather rebel. I am with them in the result—that’s about all I can say” (WWC, 1, 221–22). Steadfast in his evasiveness, Whitman wriggled out of Traubel’s offensives by pleading ignorance and old age, once joking with Edward Pease that he “didn’t so much object to Socialism as to being talked to about it” (WWC, 3, 478). The fact of the matter was that pluralism and inclusivity were important matters of principle for Whitman, the cornerstones of Leaves of Grass. “I am large,” he famously declared in “Song of Myself,” “I contain multitudes” (PP, 87).28 For Whitman, the great equalizer, the perceived exclusivity of any social or political movement was a major obstacle, even if, like socialism, the movement was driven by egalitarian objectives. “I hope I make room for all—include all—exclude nobody—nobody whatever—shut no door,” he told Traubel, explaining on another occasion that he must include all of the “ists” and “isms” (WWC, 2, 37, 71). He went as far as to claim that though he spoke “for Anarchists, socialists, George men […] I include as well Kings, Emperors, aristocracies, financial men—not only am one with the masses, but with all men” (WWC, 5, 208). The idea that no part of the universal whole should be elevated above another is pushed so far that at one point he explains his refusal to endorse socialism by describing himself as “a great contender for the world as it is—the ill along with the good,” adding “I am more and more persuaded that the ill, too, has its part to subserve—its important part—that if ill did not exist, it would be a hopeless world and we would all go to the bad” (WWC, 5, 276). As Traubel wryly observes, this line of argument presents a “singular paradox.” Using the principle of equality to justify opting out of working to make the world more equal didn’t seem entirely satisfactory and was certainly out of step with Traubel’s convictions. It is my contention, however, that it was precisely this, Whitman’s determination to resist “isms” and speak for all, which made his poetry such a useful resource at this nascent stage in British socialism. Able to accommodate overlapping and competing ideas, Whitman could speak

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Introduction  9 powerfully to a movement cutting its teeth in numerous different directions, fiercely debating what it was and how it should develop. As Mark Bevir suggests, socialism is “a fluid set of beliefs and practices that people are constantly making and remaking and in which no one idea or action has a fixed or necessary place.”29 A brief sketch of the socialist landscape will suffice to show the scale and pace at which this “making and remaking” proceeded during the so-called fin de siècle “revival.” Two articles inspired by the teachings of Marx, published in 1881, marked the emergence of the late nineteenth-century socialist movement in Britain: Ernest Belfort Bax’s “Leaders of Modern Thought—XXIII: Karl Marx” (Modern Thought, December 1881) and Henry Mayers Hyndman’s “The Dawn Revolutionary Epoch” (Nineteenth Century, January 1881). When of a ­ ­Hyndman’s radical Democratic Federation remodeled itself as the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1884 it was the first organization in Britain to assume an explicitly socialist program. Under H ­ yndman’s leadership the SDF laid a parliamentary, reformist agenda on top of a dialectical belief in the economic inevitability of revolution, with the hope of preparing the ground for a peaceful social transition. These tactics were not always popular in a diverse group that included anarchists, trade unionists and a range of individuals with different socialist beliefs, and in 1884 William Morris led a breakaway group to form the Socialist League. Favoring the policy of “making socialists,” the Socialist League adopted an antiparliamentarian, revolutionary stance. In 1890 it became dominated by an anarchist contingent, and an ousted Morris left to establish the independent ­Hammersmith Socialist Society. At the same time, the Fellowship of the New Life formed to discuss ideas of moral and social regeneration in 1883, with the Fabian Society splitting away amicably in January 1884 in order to dedicate itself to matters of social reform. Supporting gradual rather than revolutionary change, the Fabians pursued various strategies of permeation, hoping to infiltrate governmental decision-making processes as well as Liberal and radical circles.30 As New Unionism and its program of direct industrial action gathered force in the late 1880s SDF socialists such as Tom Mann and John Burns turned to the labor movement to focus on agitating for workers’ rights; by the early 1890s socialists had about 25% of the Trades Union Congress vote.31 The Guild of St Matthew publicly declared its support for political socialism in 1884, gaining maximum membership in the 1890s, as did the Christian Social Union, which formed in 1889; the Baptist-led interdenominational Christian Socialist Society was established in 1886 and the nonconformist Christian Socialist League in 1894.32 John Trevor’s Labour Church movement grew rapidly from its inception in 1891, reaching a peak of 54 congregations in 1895, and 1892 saw the arrival of Socialist Sunday Schools.33 With a firm belief in winning support by making socialism enjoyable, Robert Blatchford initiated the Clarion movement in 1891, a network of socialist societies promoting the idea of fellowship through communal activity. Both the Scottish Labour Party and

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10 Introduction the ­Independent Labour Party (ILP) were established to facilitate the election of labor candidates on a non-Liberal platform. At its inaugural conference in 1893 the ILP, led initially by Keir Hardie, committed to a socialist agenda and a program of progressive parliamentary reform. Recent historical accounts have rightly challenged the historiography popularized in the 1970s by Stanley Pierson, of a tripartite division of the development of Marxist, Fabian and ethical socialist strands of fin de s­ iècle British socialism.34 A diverse movement constitutionally and ideologically, the boundaries between socialist sets were not hard and fast. As Anna Vaninskaya puts it, “No individual’s, let alone group’s, system of beliefs, whether expressed in writing or in action, was a pure specimen of some ideal type.”35 Morris’s revolutionary paper of the Socialist League, the ­Commonweal, for instance, declared its intent to encourage “the union of the working classes towards Revolution” (Morris and Bax, “Editorial,” May 1, 1886, 33) yet printed a popular strike song during the dockers’ action of 1889, in what could be read as a tacit gesture of support for the ongoing industrial action (“The Dock Labourers’ Strike,” September 7, 1889, 285). There were points of contact between the different groups and often as much conflict within as between them. People commonly belonged to or moved among a number of societies. Edward Carpenter, to give just one example, came to socialism through Hyndman’s England for All, donated £300 to the SDF’s periodical Justice, was friendly with Morris, joined the Socialist League, debated in the Fellowship of the New Life, played a key role in running the Sheffield Socialist Society, joined the Fabians, lectured at ILP meetings and wrote for a number of different socialist organs. Numerous and seemingly paradoxical strands of thought pulsed through the movement, which was, in many ways, defined by the interaction between contradictory ideas. One such area of discussion was the triangular relationship between liberal radicalism, socialism and anarchism, how they fed into one another and where the boundary lines between them could be drawn. How far did continuities between liberalism and socialism extend? Should the focus of socialism be to permeate liberalism (the Fabian strategy) or to offer an alternative platform for resistance (as pushed by Keir Hardie and the ILP)? At what point did socialism and anarchism diverge? Liberalism, socialism and anarchism all claimed freedom as their pet project, but what was the relationship between individual freedom and the freedom that socialists envisioned growing out of a communal or cooperative society?36 The tension between individualism and socialism wasn’t always as great as may be supposed. As Gareth Stedman Jones writes, the Communist League discussions of 1845–46 were particularly concerned with how communism would facilitate individual self-realization, with the Communist Manifesto famously stating that the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”37 Various iterations of the same idea echo throughout socialist discourse: individualism and socialism were complementary rather than contradictory, provided that individualism manifested

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Introduction  11 itself in a higher, moral form than that of competitive materialism. Picking through these juxtapositions, John Trevor pithily sloganned in the Labour Prophet: “The end of Socialism is Individualism, the end of the organisation of Labour is the emancipation of Labour, the end of Law is Liberty, the end of the means of Livelihood is Life” (“Editorial,” June 1892, 44). For Tom Mann, working men should be in favor of the “highest possible development of each individual” but self-perfection must be motivated by “regard for the brethren (brethren meaning all).”38 Self-reliance, self-help and self-improvement, concepts traditionally associated with Victorian liberalism, were worked into socialist rhetoric, with Keir Hardie making the case for mutual, cooperative self-help: “Socialism is not help from the outside in the form of state help, it is the people themselves acting through their organisation.”39 These comments point to two further seams of debate: the relationship between socialism and the labor movement and the role of the state and of parliament. Was change an inevitable outcome of the forces of dialectical materialism or did it need to be self-produced either by reformist or revolutionary means? Not as rigidly theorized as its continental counterpart, British socialism drew liberally on ideas from religion, philosophy and literature. Marx and economic theories played an important role, but for many socialism meant more than this. In Robert Blatchford’s words, “English Socialism is not Marxian; it is humanitarian. It does not depend upon any theory of ‘economic justice’ but upon humanity and common sense” (“A Socialist’s Answer to Dr. Crozier’s Challenge,” Fortnightly Review, February 1908, 227–28). A crucial debate surrounded the issue of how far socialism was an economic, materialist movement or was instead religious and spiritual by nature, and opinion was rarely polarized down the lines of either/or. Discussion more typically involved a negotiation of terms; William Morris, for example, held that: The foundation of Socialism, therefore, is economical. […] But this economical aim which, to put it in another way, is the fair apportionment of labour and the results of labour, must be accompanied by an ethical or religious sense of the responsibility of each man to each and all of his fellows.40 Addressing a socialist demonstration, Keir Hardie baldly stated that socialism was “not a system of economics.” He then used emotionally affective rhetoric to explain precisely why socialism had to follow his lead and appeal to emotion rather than economic theory or logic: “It is life to the dying people,” he claimed, “and unless we can inspire and enthuse with the higher ideal which underlies the Socialist movement, it will never touch the heart of humanity. It is not by talking economics that the world will be made better” (emphasis in source).41 Elsewhere, however, he admitted that “the economic side of the question must be kept well to the front as a means to an end” and the Labour Leader unquestionably “talked economics” under his tenure as editor.42

12 Introduction

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Stephen Yeo’s seminal essay on “The Religion of Socialism” decisively reclaimed the spiritually charged socialism of the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries as a distinctive and important phase in the movement’s history. It begins with Blatchford, writing in the Labour Prophet in April 1897: We have the right to refuse the name of socialist to those who have not grasped the economic truth. But an economic theory alone, or any number of economic theories will not make a religion. If you want socialism to be a religion, you must widen your definition of socialism. You must draw out all the ethical and spiritual implications of these desires and efforts for a juster social order.43 Blatchford speaks of definitions and meaning-making: the label of “socialism” was flexible enough to denote as narrow or broad a construct as its adherents chose, even an ideology as far-reaching as a world religion. The very phrase “religion of socialism” was applied variously across the movement. If Yeo’s wide-ranging discussion doesn’t make enough of the distinction between the rhetorical function it served in theorizations such as Bax’s 1885 collection of essays The Religion of Socialism and the profound spiritual convictions held by many others at this time, it does highlight the heterogeneity of this aspect of fin de siècle socialism. From conversion narratives to Labour Churches to socialist missionary work, among other influences less easy to categorize, religious interpretations spanned Christianity, Theosophy, transcendentalism, mysticism, Hinduism and other E ­ astern philosophies. Crucially, and as to be expected, spiritual concerns were meshed with the material: even the most spiritual conceptions of socialism were underpinned by an understanding of—and desire to improve—the material conditions of the present.

Key Words If Whitman’s rejection of “isms” and the ability to absorb had traction in a mixed socialist climate, the themes of Leaves of Grass resonated with these specific debates. Whitman is (and was then) well known for both his celebration of the self and his celebration of comradeship, a dualism that can be mapped onto the socialist concern with the intersections between individualism and socialism. Copious critical space has been devoted over the years to the paradox of the “many in one” in Leaves of Grass: to the relationship between the “I” and the “en masse,” the social whole and its constituent parts. Whitman’s nineteenth-century socialist readers were perfectly aware of the strength of his individualism but were not averse to constructing it in social terms. After all, Whitman himself had written in the preface to the British version of Democratic Vistas (also published with Rhys’s help in Walter Scott’s Canterbury series) that the essay’s central idea was “the building up of the masses, by building up grand individuals” (italics in original).44

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Introduction  13 “The two”—the individual and the mass—“are contradictory, but our task is to reconcile them,” he wrote in the main body of the essay (PP, 965); Whitman’s individualism would thus benefit the social whole. Comradeship was the defining idea that lay at the heart of many socialist appropriations of Whitman. Looking back on the rise and fall of ­British socialism, ILP activist, writer and editor Joseph Clayton mused: “The movement, it was generally felt, was bigger than any one person; the note was comradeship, social equality, brotherhood. The influence of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, of Edward Carpenter’s prose writings, was considerable.”45 One admirer from Bolton explained the effect that reading “Song of the Open Road” first had upon him: It was a revelation—the idea of Comradeship. I had learned something of what brotherhood was in studying the French Revolution, but here was an explanation of it. It was not brotherhood only. It was going along as comrades. It was nobler and vaster, that idea of Comradeship.46 A distinction is made between comradeship and brotherhood, though it is not clear exactly what this is. The word “comrade” has military origins: meaning more than simply being together, “comradeship” invokes the bond that is forged when a common cause is fought side by side, as in the “­brotherhood” of the French Revolution. But it seems that comradeship implied something deeper about fellowship and interconnectedness, something that chimed with a strong current in socialist thought: the idea of community. Appearing in different guises (among others: communal living, Clarion groups, choirs, book clubs and churches), the community had powerful potential; communal socio-economic relations threatened those of capitalism, and fellowship was often deemed to be a cornerstone of the ideal socialist future. Of course, the word “comrade” came to play a special role in socialist movements, and by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a stock left wing form of address. The first recorded use of it in this sense in English was in the SDF’s magazine Justice in April 1884, and it is significant, though this was long after Leaves of Grass first appeared in print, that by the time many of ­Whitman’s socialist readers discovered his poetry the theme of comradeship had acquired specific political connotations. For those readers who had come to Whitman earlier in the century the socialist use of “comrade” opened up new readings. Some leading fi ­ gures in the ILP conflated socialist and ­Whitmanian comradeship. Addressing the Bolton Whitmanites, for example, as “dear comrades,” Katharine Bruce Glasier claimed the greeting for Whitman: “That is his word, Walt ­Whitman’s, and I use it fearlessly.”47 Caroline Martyn wrote that Whitman was “rejoicing with us in our constantly increasing numbers and the constantly intensifying Comradeship which binds us all together.”48 For some of the men discussed in these pages, Whitman’s “love of comrades” provided an intimate framework for egalitarian male relationships and carried homosocial or homoerotic associations.

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14 Introduction The socialist debate over spirituality and materialism can likewise be laid onto Leaves of Grass; again, Whitman held that the two were entirely reconcilable: “I believe materialism is true and spiritualism is true, I reject no part” (PP, 382). Like the “religion of socialism,” Whitman’s spirituality had multiple sources. It was non-dogmatic, having reference to numerous deities and privileging none over the poet-speaker himself. Leaves of Grass—packed with objects, buildings, occupations and daily activities—communicates transcendent cosmic vistas through a celebration of the physical reality of an earthly world. Looking no further than “Song of Myself” we find numerous affirmations of the divine in the present and the tangible: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars” (PP, 57); “I have said that the soul is not more than the body” (PP, 84); “I hear and behold God in every object” (PP, 85). Whitman’s famous catalogues focus on the people and things of material labor relations: a carpenter and his tools, a whaler and his weapons, a spinner and her wheel, a farmer and his crop, a slave sold at auction (PP, 39). Whitman’s radical, democratic, poetic model of the “divine average” (a phrase that appears three times in the final edition of Leaves of Grass) where, as he writes in the 1855 preface, the “genius” of a nation was to be found in its “common people,” was appealing (PP, 5–6). As we have seen with Ernest Rhys, the attention that Whitman paid to the average worker was deeply important to his socialist readers. Yet rather than focus on Whitman’s workers as the locus of class war, most British socialists chose to situate them within the broader theme of democracy. It is not, perhaps, immediately obvious why they chose to do so. Among socialists and non-­socialists alike it was something of a commonplace in the nineteenth century, as it is now, to describe Whitman as a “poet of democracy,” and it is a term that needs some unpacking. For, as one contributor to Orage’s New Age remarked in the first number under his editorship, “Democracy, which is only the political device of elective institutions, has no more necessary relationship with Socialism than walking has with any given place” (“R. M.,” “Socialism and Democracy,” May 2, 1907, 4). Democracy to this commentator was a means rather than an ends; it was a tool that could be made to serve different political purposes. M. Wynn Thomas discusses this quotation in Transatlantic Connections; as he observes, central to liberal and socialist ideologies democracy was “a very heatedly contested term.”49 Raymond Williams reminds us in Keywords that everything depends on the sense given to demos, people, and kratos, rule.50 Somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, suggests Williams, two major modern meanings of democracy separated: in the socialist tradition “democracy” continued to denote “popular power,” but within liberalism it came to signify the “open election of representatives.” Where, on the one hand, liberal conceptions of democracy focused on conditions that enabled open political argument, for socialists on the other, democracy meant a state in which “the interests of the majority of the people were paramount” and controlled by the majority.51 Williams’s argument can be linked

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Introduction  15 back to Fish’s notion of interpretive communities: Fish posits that words carry no weighting towards one precise definition but, rather, “in the light of an already assumed interpretation,” words are seen “to obviously have one meaning or another” (emphasis Fish’s).52 So Whitman the liberal “poet of democracy” could be the voice of self-reliant individualism, while Whitman the socialist “poet of democracy” spoke for the united masses. Williams’s distinction, though true in emphasis, sits a little neatly in the muddy waters of fin de siècle socialism, strands of which were strongly oriented towards parliamentary action. In line with competing definitions of socialism, the movement negotiated different definitions of democracy. “Democracy” could mean the current political system, which should be better used to represent working-class interests; it could mean universal suffrage or the people themselves; it could be synonymous with “socialism” or “egalitarianism”; sometimes it denoted a higher ideal state, an end to which socialism, along with other progressive movements, was simply a means. Democracy is a particularly complex concept because, as Lucy Hartley puts it, it is at the same time “a set of values and an organizing system.”53 The strong textual emphasis on “democracy” in Leaves of Grass allowed the “socialist Whitman” to speak broadly in the interests of “the people” while being employed variously to cut across these different understandings. Thus, in an example to be considered more closely in my chapter on “Pioneers! O ­Pioneers!,” a journalist who believed in a Whitman-inspired spiritual democracy could reference Leaves of Grass in a piece about unionized industrial action that was written for a readership with predominantly parliamentary conceptions of democracy.54 For Whitman, the idea of democracy was crucial. It lay at the heart of his politics, his spirituality, his understanding of self and his poetic strategy. “A great original literature,” he believed, was what America needed in order to develop its full democratic potential (PP, 956–57). Poets did not merely articulate democracy but breathed life into it. Literature, like democracy, was an active social force. Introducing a posthumous Labour Press publication of John Bruce Glasier’s poetry to a socialist readership, James William Wallace suggests that Glasier spent his life in the service of “‘the Great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,’ which Whitman says ‘is the mission of poets.’”55 Typifying the socialist appropriation of Whitman’s individualism, Wallace’s comment also gestures towards a general feeling that literature had a liberating “mission.” Echoing Whitman in Democratic Vistas, Carpenter’s friend Charles Sixsmith, an active socialist in Bolton, wrote for Henry Salt’s Humane Review that “the ordinary conception or definition of democracy is ‘the government of the people by the people and for the ­people.’” However, he continued, “democracy is more than that, it is a social life of the people by the people and for the people; an industry, an art, a literature, a religion—of, by, and for the people” (“The Democratic Ideal in Literature,” October 1903, 257). This “refusal to divide aesthetics and politics” was, Ruth Livesey comments, “one of the defining characteristics of British socialism as it gained

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16 Introduction force in the early 1880s,” and it is one which permeates this study.56 Though the movement found a strong visual identity in the illustrations of Walter Crane and the Arts and Crafts designs of William Morris and others, opinion was divided as to the purpose and style of a socialist literary aesthetic. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller describes “a series of debates concerning how to use l­iterature as an agent of radical change, how to make and distribute print literature without compromising anticapitalist values, and how to situate radical values within an evolving media ecology.”57 For some socialists, the collective experiencing of literature was paramount, as is evident in the popularity and profusion of socialist songbooks, and, as Anne Janowitz demonstrates, in the rhythm and titles of William Morris’s socialist “songs” and “chants.”58 Morris himself was concerned with establishing the supremacy of “Art” over “Commerce,” of breaking the tyranny of a culture of luxury and the practice of “enslaving men by their labour.”59 For socialists such Robert Blatchford, literature and culture were formative in the education of a politically active working class. Blatchford’s tremendously successful ­Merrie England, a propagandist piece famously said by the Manchester Guardian to have made a hundred converts for every one by Das Kapital, recommends a list of books and pamphlets for the “hard-headed” working-class reader.60 The reader interested in exploring socialism is first directed towards a series of economic and political tracts and then 23 books, preferably to be read in the order listed, beginning with Dickens, Thackeray and Carpenter. Rhys’s Poems of Walt Whitman is the next book recommended, in front of more overtly political texts such as the Fabian Essays, Hyndman’s England for All and Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, giving some indication of the kind of preparatory function that Whitman’s work was often thought to perform. Some contemporary socialist poets critiqued the social, economic and political conditions of the present; some, as Miller shows in her chapter on socialist periodical poetry, “Measured Revolution,” used traditional structures (the ballad, the song, the sonnet) and imagery, themes and tropes (the march, the battle, spring, dawn, the East) to envision a Utopian socialist future.61 Readers were persuaded to join the socialist fight and cheered on as they battled. For Carpenter, Salt, Wallace and others, art and literature had a spiritual purpose. Commentators such as Alfred Orage held a ­Whitman-like belief in the necessity of a new kind of democratic literature that would both reflect the democratic spirit of the people and usher in a new, truly democratic, era – a literature that would “bend its vision toward the future, more than the past” (PP, 1003). And here Whitman—whose thematic and stylistic innovations seemed to be inherently associated with modernity and ­progress—held a privileged position (notwithstanding the obvious irony that the first edition of Leaves of Grass had been published over a generation earlier in 1855). Whitman’s writing on democracy was fundamentally concerned with a movement towards the future. According to Whitman, the organizing

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Introduction  17 principles of government and the “political foundation rights of immense masses of people” were only the “first stage” of American democracy (PP, 1000). If a new class of writers was needed, it was because “the fruition of democracy” lay in the future (PP, 980). In defining democracy, then, Whitman attempted to attach meanings to what existed as a word but not a reified concept, a signifier but not a signified (more will be said on this in Chapter 1 and on the significance Whitman and Carpenter ascribed both to the act of defining democracy and to exploring its relation to other key words). Whitman’s democracy was evolutionary and progressive, moving in a single direction towards a natural democratic future that the United States, and then the world, was destined to occupy. This forward-looking impulse chimed not only with broad-based evolutionary and progressive Victorian narratives but with their various specific socialist applications. Emerging from a culture gripped by theories of social evolution, and drawn from selective readings of Darwin, Lamarck, Wallace, Hegel and Spencer, socialist explanations of human development focused on the idea of stages in an ongoing process. In these discourses the past was significant for the projection of directions of future travel; it was the seed out of which the present had—and the future would—develop. Some socialist narratives focused on this more closely than others. Vaninskaya, for example, suggests that Marxist groups were the most concerned with “historical questions,” citing Hyndman’s comment that “to forecast correctly the next stage of our growth” one must “trace the evolution through the long ages of social development.”62 Morris and Bax famously describe a dialectical spiral in the Manifesto of the Socialist League where “every distinctive stage of progress, involves a backward as well as a forward movement.”63 A fellow Labour Church activist commented that John Trevor “accepted Evolutionary theory à la Spencer, and applied it to Religion—i.e. Godward evolution now revealing itself in Labour.”64 Here, where individual and social developments were part of an inevitable teleological advance towards an ideal spiritual state, the divine perfection of humanity, the socialist’s duty was to urge evolutionary activity onwards. William Clarke’s understanding of evolution derived from a Hegelian interpretation of flux and Carpenter’s Lamarckian model pointed not only towards a socialist future but to universal cosmic enlightenment. It is in this kind of construction, spiritual as well as material or biological, that Whitman was most likely to be found. Such hopeful evolutionary narratives offered an alternative to those of degeneration, decadence and decay, symptoms of the stage of advanced capitalism beyond which humanity would progress. Notwithstanding the deeply worrying state of impoverished material and spiritual conditions, there was a concurrent optimism derived from the feeling that people were living on the very cusp of radical, wholesale social transformation. “People said it was a ‘period of transition,’” socialist writer Holbrook Jackson remarked, “and they were convinced that they were passing not only from one social system to another, but from one morality to

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18 Introduction another, from one culture to another, and from one religion to a dozen or none!”65 The timing was resonant. Living at the end of the century powered a highly charged sense of witnessing the end of one age and the birth of the next, apparent in the proliferation of what Frank Kermode has called “fin de siècle phenomena,” such as the millenarian consciousness and a profound sense of modernity.66 Jackson draws attention to the popularity of the adjective “new” and its application in phrases such as “New Journalism,” “New Fiction,” “New Woman” and “New Unionism.”67 Whitman could speak to this mood. The poet was “passionately contemporary,” wrote Rhys; his poetry took in “the whole scope of Time and Space open to the modern mind” and his song was that of the “far-stretched universe as modernly known.”68 The first and last lines of the inscription poem that opens every Leaves of Grass from 1867 (in its shorter, final form from 1871–72) are given near the beginning of Rhys’s preface: One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. . . . . . . . Of life immense in passion, pulse and power, Cheerful, for freest action, form’d under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.69 The powerful, generative relationship between the individual and the mass is thus contextualized early on for Rhys’s readers, as it also was for Whitman’s American readers, as an inherently modern pursuit. In “Song of Myself” the “word of the modern” is “a word en masse” (PP, 49). In modeling a democracy (and a democratic poetry) that was egalitarian, expansive and inclusive, and characterized by evolutionary progress and the modern, Whitman constructed a democratic vision that was peculiarly American (the “American,” he told Traubel, was “progress, movement, democracy, push”; WWC, 8, 288). At the same time it was intended as a global prototype (in “Years of the Modern,” previously “Years of the Unperform’d”: “I see not America only, not only Liberty’s nation but other nations preparing”; PP, 597). In Democratic Vistas “America” and “democracy” were to be used as “convertible terms,” interchangeable conceptually and linguistically (PP, 954). Britain was, at times, consciously excluded from this construction but, at others, it was incorporated into a vision of an American-led global democratic awakening. “The great word ­Solidarity has arisen,” Whitman wrote; “That is the lesson we, these days, send over to European lands by every western breeze” (PP, 973). America was “more and more the goal” for young English socialists and anarchists, he thought (WWC, 6, 256). On a different occasion Traubel heard how Rhys was the type of young man who would “come our way and learn the best we have to teach […] and then go back and democratize Great Britain” (WWC, 1, 221).

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Introduction  19 Despite having had, as he told Carpenter, “America chiefly in view,” if Whitman believed that America could teach the Old World a lesson about democracy, he came to think that his poetry had the same potential.70 Whitman’s national positioning was representative of a shift whereby the assumption that America was bound to develop along European lines had given way to the belief instead that the old mother country was destined to follow in its offspring’s youthful footsteps. It was in keeping with a broader nineteenth-century association of America with democracy and liberty. As Douglas Grant suggested in 1962, “to be a democrat was to be a friend of America, at least of America in the abstract.”71 America was, argue Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey more recently, “an experiment in radical imagination for many writers and political thinkers.”72 Rossetti spoke of the “recent Reform discussions” in his correspondence with Whitman (WWC, 3, 307) and perhaps it is no coincidence that work was begun on the two major British editions of Whitman’s poetry around the time of the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts. Identification with Whitman and Whitman’s America was a badge of progressiveness, and the power of American democracy— and its poetry—was harnessed as part of a broader international movement towards freedom, solidarity and democratic modernity. This was not the only understanding of the United States, however, nor was it the sole way that Whitman’s articulation of his nation was managed within socialist circles. The idea of America elicited a complex set of responses: if it carried a particular currency in the democratic imagination, it also epitomized all that was wrong with contemporary capitalist society. Writing on the influence of American land reformer Henry George in the Fortnightly Review in 1897, J. A. Hobson remembered George’s 1882 English lecture tour. He drew attention to the discrepancy between the idea of America as the “land of boundless promise, where, if anywhere, it might seem that freedom and material progress were secure possessions of honest labour” and George’s loud denunciation of its “grinding poverty, the squalor of congested city life, unemployment, and utter helplessness” (“The Influence of Henry George in England,” December 1897, 838). For socialists such as Hyndman who worked from a Marxist model, the advanced capitalism of the American Gilded Age would breed its own destruction earlier than in less industrially developed nations. “Just as North America is today the most advanced country economically and socially,” he wrote in 1904, “so it will be the first in which Socialism will find open and legal expression.”73 For others, the American democratic experiment offered a distinctly discouraging prototype. Harold Blodgett’s early study claims that the power of Whitman’s idea of democracy was lost in England because he was “too naïvely confident in presenting America as a model for other nations to follow.”74 Although this would be difficult to put to the test, American industrial and social developments could certainly be troubling, and Whitman’s resolute nationalism was not always easily digested. Different strategies were adopted. America could operate symbolically, as an idea rather than a lived reality; like the

20 Introduction

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French Revolution, it could be used as an emblem of the idea of democratic progress/promise. Conversely, Whitman’s Americanness could be edited out: references to the States were frequently omitted or ignored. His democratic vision was often divorced from its American context and reworked to fit the conditions of British socialism, in what M. Wynn Thomas identifies as acts of “cultural translation.”75

“Whitman as a Socialist Poet” In July 1888 Whitman settled himself to read an article published the same month in the British magazine To-Day, associated through its editors Bax and J. L. Joynes with the SDF and the Socialist League. Running under the heading “Whitman as a Socialist Poet” the article makes the claim that Leaves of Grass was the nearest socialism came to a poetry of its own, and Whitman was curious to see how he looked to “one who sees all things from the standpoint of the socialist” (WWC, 2, 4). In much the same way I do in this study, Whitman investigated how his words were understood when a different set of cultural and political assumptions were brought to the text. The author, Reginald A. Beckett, was a young man of 23 who spoke for a socialism that was at once “scientific” and a “religious force” (see his letter to the editor of Justice, “Fair Play for Religion,” March 15, 1884, 7). ­Illustrating how ­Whitman’s poetry could be applied to and interpreted in the light of this matrix of socialist discourses, Beckett’s acute analysis covers quite some ground. Whitman the socialist poet is contemporary: alluding to Whitman’s claim in the 1855 preface that “a bard is to be commensurate with a people” (PP, 7), Beckett suggests that the poetry which is to be “­commensurate” with socialism must be, like socialism itself, “the crowning result of modern science and achievement” (“Whitman as a Socialist Poet,” To-Day, July  1888,  8). As a progressive, Whitman believes in the force of nature and “all natural processes” which is “the first thing that will win him sympathy from Socialists” (9). He adheres to “the doctrine of evolution, which is the foundation of Socialism” (11). The progress from imperfection to perfection is carried along two lines: the evolution experienced by any one person in his or her individual life, and that of the democratic social whole. Beckett is approving of the Hegelian evolutionary faith that allows ­Whitman to be “undaunted” by the “acute evils” of America, but this optimistic view is also Whitman’s weakness (11); the “poet of America” is uneasily said to represent “a little more than its good, a little less than its evil” (8). His expression of society “as he finds it” produces an admirably unromantic depiction of the “commercial prosperous world of America” (9) but also a naive acceptance of “the existence of classes of rich and poor, of social inequalities, as mere temporary and trivial accidents” and this, for Beckett, was a shortcoming (8). Whitman’s strengths, on the other hand, were his “inexhaustible” conviction in liberty and his “insatiate love of the common people” (9). Suggestively, Beckett observes that Whitman’s love of the people

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Introduction  21 was “for their own sakes as well as for their possibilities” (9). Whitman cared about the workers not because of the revolutionary role they would play in the class struggle but for who they were as individuals. Whitman submits an alternative perspective on comradeship: with the caveat that his “gospel” could not come into fruition without “some measure of social equality,” Beckett contrasts it with the socialist idea of comradeship—“necessarily perhaps, too much a militant one—that of the earnest union of those who are waging war with the enemies of humanity” (10). Whitman instead offered comradeship as “a permanent source of strength and happiness” (10). It is not only the means but the end. Though there is the suspicion that here again Whitman hadn’t quite grasped what was needed in such unjust times, his democratic vision had hope and depth. ­Quoting from both “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire” (9–10; cf. PP, 497–98), a song of “insurrection,” and “For You O Democracy,” in which companionship is planted as “thick as trees” (10; cf. PP, 272), Beckett straddles the destructive and the constructive, moving between revolutionary violence and peaceful communitarianism. Indeed, Whitman’s ability to absorb “conflicting and contradictory” elements is crucial to Beckett’s reading, and to his own expansive and non-dogmatic brand of socialism: “Whitman marks the fusion of the great Hebraic and Hellenic tendencies, the spiritual and concrete, the mystical and realistic” (15). “Of course,” remarked Whitman rather drily after reading, “I find I’m a good deal more of a socialist than I thought I was,” adding more gently—in what is the key to his socialist ­appropriation—“maybe not technically, politically, so, but intrinsically, in my meanings” (WWC, 2, 4). If Whitman’s topicality (and vocabulary) made his poetry a useful source for inspiration (where Leaves of Grass was looked to for guidance) and illustration (where it was used to flesh out or underline an argument), his suggestiveness meant that it could be employed in nuanced, varied ways. As I discuss in Chapter 3, in circles associated with the SDF and the S­ ocialist League his more revolutionary poetry, such as “To a Foil’d E ­ uropean ­Revolutionaire” and “Resurgemus” (which became “Europe, The 72d and 73d Years of These States”), was popular. Among socialists who rejected doctrines of class conflict, the two poems depicting ideal, peaceful democratic societies that Carpenter set to music in Chants of Labour, “For You O Democracy” and the “Great City” section from “Song of the BroadAxe,” were favorites. As might be expected, extracts from “Song of Myself” and “Starting from Paumanok” were also common, along with passages from “Years of the Modern,” “Song of the Open Road” and ­Democratic ­Vistas. More surprisingly, given its strong nationalist overtones, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” was frequently drawn on (the various ways that this poem was employed will be explored in Chapter 5). During the Boer hostilities in South Africa at the turn of the century, the antiwar socialist contingent used quotations from “Song of the Exposition” (“Away with themes of war! away with war itself!”; PP, 346) and the “Drum-Taps” poem “Reconciliation.”

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22 Introduction

Figures1 and 2 Quotations used to conclude a commemorative article by James William Wallace. Reasonably typical of Whitman’s socialist use, the selection includes extracts from “I Hear It Was Charged against Me,” “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice,” “Starting from Paumanok,” “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” and the “Great City” section from “Song of the Broad-Axe.” “The Walt Whitman Centennial: The Man and His Message,” Labour Leader, May 29, 1919, 9.

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Introduction  23 Not just poems but extracts and lines were used selectively to claim particular versions of Whitman for particular versions of socialism—though this isn’t to suggest that he carried the same sway across the socialist spectrum. He tended to hold more weight for those who were spiritually inclined, supported nonviolent action, and valued unity—between classes and between socialist factions—and these strands of socialism accordingly feature most prominently in the following chapters. I focus on those who engaged publicly with Whitman and fed their readings back into the socialist community. A range of texts and genres is considered: letters, speeches, journal articles and books; poetry, propaganda, literary criticism, and philosophical, political and spiritual inquiry. In selecting the people and texts under discussion I have concentrated primarily on the 1880s and 1890s, as these were the decades that Whitman’s influence was most keenly felt, but draw on twentieth-­century material to follow the development of particular figures or publications. Recent scholarship has valuably considered the socialist revival in the context of developing conceptions of modernism and modernity, drawing out the connections between fin de siècle and twentieth-­century socialist ideologies and expressions and challenging the “two phases” narrative of the rise and decline of British socialism. Vaninskaya usefully reminds us that “the gold of the golden age was no pure metal, and the iron age that followed it had veins of gold,” warning against a historiography that glosses the 1880s as a period of “idealistic fervour” at stark odds with the “sober pragmatism” of the 1900s.76 As Carpenter’s enduring (and increasing) popularity would attest, the religious element did not simply disappear from British socialism in the early twentieth century. But as the new century drew in with no clear sign that a socialist utopia was any closer to existence there was a shift in mood that impacted how ­Whitman was received and put to use, compacted by the parliamentary success of the Labour R ­ epresentation Committee in its first decade. Many activists felt that something had changed, and their accounts largely created the historiography now being called into question. J. H. Harley, for example, lamented the loss of “the soul of socialism” in a Labour Leader article of that title in 1905 (April 28, 42). Joseph Clayton believed that 1900 was “the high-water mark,” “the turn of the tide”: The forces that helped to create a party for the establishment of S­ ocialism, turned from the Socialist propaganda to the propaganda of party. For the sake of bringing in Socialism men and women forged this instrument of an independent political Labour Party, and scarcely had they done so when it appeared that henceforth Socialist propaganda was to be used for bringing in a Labour Party.77 In this atmosphere Whitman, no longer a living prophet, was not such an important voice; his socialist admirers were moving into middle and old age themselves, and socialism had grown its own sages in its first-generation activists.

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24 Introduction In keeping with the hybridity of British socialism, the people I discuss should be considered as part of a network of socialist readers. A few examples follow. Carpenter regularly visited the Eagle Street College in Bolton, and some of them stayed at his Derbyshire smallholding. They read his books and reviews and sent him their poems and articles. James William Wallace of the College wrote to Robert Blatchford and Keir Hardie and was close friends with John and Katharine Bruce Glasier who, after H ­ ardie, edited the Labour Leader. Blatchford was friends with Carpenter and wrote to him in praise of his essays; in one letter he mentions writing to John Trevor, the founder of the Labour Church and editor of the Labour Prophet. Wentworth Dixon of the Eagle Street College gave a talk about the Labour Church at the Eagle Street College, and Charles Sixsmith spoke at the Labour Church about Whitman and his friend Carpenter. Ernest Rhys attended at least one of ­Carpenter’s lectures in London, and they met at other Fabian gatherings. Rhys was friends with Percival Chubb and gave him and Pease letters of introduction to Whitman. William Clarke wrote to Bolton’s John Johnston asking for permission to quote from Diary Notes of a Visit to Walt Whitman, which was sent to him by Rhys, and the Bolton group kept reviews of Clarke’s Walt Whitman. Alfred Orage c­ orresponded with ­Carpenter and wrote articles about him for the Labour Leader before becoming owner and editor of the New Age. As this list—which only begins to hint at the complex web of relations at play here—might indicate, socialist interpretations of ­Whitmanian ideas and themes were usually interconnected and so weave through the forthcoming pages in overlapping, transmuting forms. Chapter 1 will consider the most influential nineteenth-century British adaptation of Whitman’s radical poetic style, Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy. Carpenter’s evolutionary spiritual philosophy, derived in significant part from repeated readings of Leaves of Grass, determined that humanity was progressing towards the final stage of its development: the conscious awareness of its divine interconnectedness. Though this spiritual democracy could only be attained when the “truth” of Carpenter’s philosophy was understood and experienced on a mass scale, in accordance with its evolutionary character the message demanded continual development. This chapter will read Towards Democracy as an evolutionary work, examining the impact that Carpenter’s felt sense of divine responsibility to continue ­Whitman’s work had on his treatment of the text’s major poetic symbols, on its formal politics and on his theorization of a democratic aesthetic – on how he thought the evolutionary message was to be appropriately communicated and received in literary form. It will conclude by discussing the implications of such a message for socialist thought and assessing Carpenter’s rising influence in the rapidly developing movement. The substantial collection of archival material relating to the group of Whitman admirers in Bolton that became known as the Eagle Street

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Introduction  25 College, housed between John Rylands Library and Bolton Archives, ­ offers a rare record of Whitman’s reception outside educated literary circles. This group of readers is the subject of Chapter 2, which will begin by glossing the central tenets of their collective interpretation of ­Whitman’s message. Analyzing the intersection between Whitman’s demands for a new program of culture and the College’s complex negotiation of class identity, it will explore how the group’s evolving class consciousness meshed Whitman’s campaign with more traditional notions of mutual improvement, focusing on the potential of the “average” or ordinary. It will argue that the group’s reception was fundamentally performative and that its members stepped into the role of “worker/reader”—as Whitman did the “worker/poet”—in order to validate his efforts by being examples of his success.78 The vibrancy of Bolton’s regional socialist culture encouraged Wallace’s conviction that the Eagle Street men had a special role to play in the development of ­British democracy. He believed that they were called to be “heaven-appointed preachers to the Democracy of England,” and to bring Whitman’s message to the movement.79 The final part of the chapter explores this outreach work and relationships with leading figures in the ILP, most significantly Katharine Bruce Glasier and Caroline Martyn. By 1897 Robert Blatchford was proud to declare that socialism had its own literature and its own journalism. As an alternative public sphere that provided a forum for the debate of social, economic and political problems and, crucially, the definition and development of socialism itself, the periodical press played a major role in the movement’s evolution. Chapter 3 will discuss the formal politics and practices of a proliferating socialist print culture. Whitman’s inclusion within the periodical press will be assessed in the context of its discussions about the nature and purpose of socialist journalism, the nature and purpose of a democratic literature and the nature and purpose of socialism itself. The second part of the chapter will explore the propagandist function that Whitman and his poetry were made to perform in different parts of the movement and what these various uses reveal about the political positioning of the socialist writers who put it to work. Though the pluralism of Leaves of Grass enabled its selective use across the socialist spectrum, the expansive possibilities of the text were exploited most effectively when testing the boundaries and connections between the movement’s constituent parts and with progressive liberalism. Two shorter chapters follow. Chapter 4, “William Clarke’s Walt W ­ hitman: A Socialist Exposition,” provides the first sustained analysis of the only book-length literary critique of Whitman from a British nineteenth-century socialist perspective.80 Clarke’s Walt Whitman offers an alternative to the apostolic approach adopted by many of Whitman’s socialist admirers. He believed that Leaves of Grass was the “first rough draft” of a democratic literature but not its final expression: it looked forward to a new era but was, necessarily, a product of the individualist age in which it was written.

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26 Introduction Focusing on this liminality, this chapter will argue that Clarke’s literary criticism is used to enter into a wider political discussion about the relationship between liberalism and socialism in the pursuit of freedom, and the roles and “limits” of collectivism and individualism. A study of what Whitman did not say as well as what he did, Clarke criticizes Whitman for failing to pay sufficient attention to the material conditions of the new democracy, but his own political analysis ultimately falls short on similar grounds. In the final chapter, I offer a case study of socialist appropriations of “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” An atypical Whitman verse in terms of its formal structure, it sits at some remove from the poems focused on love and democracy, such as “For You O Democracy,” that tended to gain most traction in the socialist context. “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” was, however, used regularly across the socialist campaign, despite its staunch nationalism. The thematic focus on the consolidation of national identity in the aftermath of the Civil War is transposed in socialist interpretations and reworkings, and this ­chapter will explore how the layered pioneer motif offered three distinct but interrelated seams of metaphoric possibility: the development of the land, the call to arms and the progressive march. It will form a composite idea of how these interpolations operated to issue a summons to the reader to move away from the literary—from books and newspapers—into action.

Notes 1. Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 1, 65. All volumes hereafter cited in text as WWC; publishing details for each are provided in the references. 2. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Kaplan, 497; hereafter cited in text as PP. This edition of Whitman’s poetry and prose is used throughout unless otherwise indicated. Where there are typographical differences between this edition and the sources under discussion, quotations are given as reprinted in the source and the reader referred to Kaplan for comparison. 3. Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England, 4; ellipsis as in Blodgett. As Whitman frequently employed suspension points for artistic effect in his early poetry and prose, my omissions are indicated throughout in bracketed ellipses. 4. See Iser, The Implied Reader, The Act of Reading and Prospecting. 5. Gosse, “A  Note on Walt Whitman,” New Review (April 1894), reprinted in Critical Kit-Kats, 97–98. 6. See, for example, Asselineau and White, Walt Whitman in Europe Today; Erkkila, Walt Whitman among the French; Pucciani, “The Literary R ­ eputation of Walt Whitman in France”; Greenspan, The American Reader; Allen and Folsom, Walt Whitman and the World; Grünzweig, Constructing the German Walt Whitman; Folsom, Whitman East and West. 7. Iser, Prospecting, 31. 8. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 14. 9. Ibid., 15. 10. Ibid., 16. 11. Rhys, Poems of Walt Whitman, xi–xii.

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Introduction  27 12. Chester Alan Arthur III, who adopted the pseudonym Gavin Arthur, gave two accounts of visiting Carpenter. The sexologist and astrologist, an activist in the US gay liberation movement and friend to a number of beat poets, famously claimed that Carpenter had told him how he and Whitman had slept together (with Whitman’s sexual lineage thereby running to Allen Ginsberg through Carpenter, Arthur and Neal Cassady); see his account The Circle of Sex. For a detailed discussion see Murray, “Walt Whitman, Edward ­Carpenter, Gavin Arthur, and The Circle of Sex”; Murray concludes that Arthur’s is a “truthful record” (197). In A Life of Liberty and Love Sheila Rowbotham assigns Arthur’s comments to the realm of hearsay but agrees that the “gist rings true” (422). 13. On the spiritual reception of Whitman on both sides of the Atlantic, ­including some of the figures discussed here, see Robertson, ­ Worshipping Walt; ­Marsden, “Hot Little Prophets.” Also “Whitman’s Disciples” (Fall 1996), a special double issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review edited by Ed Folsom, including Folsom, “Whitman’s Disciples: Editor’s Note”; Salveson, “Loving Comrades: Lancashire’s Links to Walt Whitman”; Krieg, “Without Walt Whitman in Camden”; Sarracino, “Redrawing Whitman’s Circle.” 14. Whitley, “Introduction to the British Editions,” para. 1. 15. Rossetti, Poems by Walt Whitman, 20. 16. For the history of Rossetti’s publication see Paley, “John Camden Hotten and the First British Editions.” 17. See Rossetti, Democratic Sonnets and Letters Concerning Whitman, Blake, and Shelley. 18. Rossetti, Poems by Walt Whitman, 23. 19. Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England, 9. Britain was omitted from Gay ­Wilson Allen’s 1955 summary of global responses to Whitman, Walt Whitman Abroad, because Blodgett’s work was considered to have sufficiently covered the ground. Allen and Folsom recognized that it needed to be brought up to date in their revisiting of Allen’s project, Walt Whitman and the World, in 1995. M. Wynn Thomas, who carried out this work (“Whitman in the British Isles,” 11–70), returned to the subject in Transatlantic Connections. For Welsh responses see also Thomas, “Walt Whitman’s Welsh Connection” and “From Walt to Waldo.” 20. See Rhys’s memoirs Everyman Remembers, Chapters 1–3, and Wales England Wed, Chapters 6–10. 21. Rhys was not the first to suggest such a project. In 1880 Carpenter asked ­Whitman about “the possibility of publishing a cheaper edition of yr [sic] Leaves of Grass in England” because “there are so many now who cannot afford the long price of the present editions”; Carpenter to Whitman, 28 March 1880, ­Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1170/1/1/6/1. 22. Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 232. 23. Whitman to Rhys, 20 March 1886; Whitman, The Correspondence, 4, 22. 24. Rhys, Poems of Walt Whitman, xxxv. 25. Whitley, “Introduction to the British Editions,” para. 7. 26. Rhys, Wales England Wed, 110, 115–16. 27. Stead, The Penny Poets, No. 1. 28. Here and throughout I refer to the 1855 version of “Song of Myself” unless otherwise stated.

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28 Introduction 29. Bevir, The Making of British Socialism, 13. For a survey of the major strands of socialist thought see Wright, Socialisms. 30. A number of leading Fabians wrote early histories of the society. See, for ­example, Shaw, The Fabian Society: Its Early History; Pease, A History of the Fabian Society. 31. Dowse, Left in the Centre, 3. 32. On the Guild’s political commitment see Orens, Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism, 55. 33. See Bevir, “The Labour Church Movement,” 228. 34. See Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism and From Fantasy to Politics. The term “ethical socialism” is not used in this study as it seems to me to homogenize a range of approaches and strategies, and I wish to avoid the implication that other forms of socialism are somehow less “ethical.” 35. Vaninskaya, William Morris, 141. On the hybridity of British socialism see also Linehan, Modernism and British Socialism. 36. On the relationship between radicalism and socialism see The Making of British Socialism, in which Bevir sets out to “provide a general account of the making of British socialism in continuity and discontinuity with earlier radicalisms” (9). See also Lawrence, “Popular Radicalism and the Socialist Revival in Britain.” 37. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, ed. Stedman Jones, 46, 244. 38. Mann, “Preachers and Churches,” 310, 303; quoted in Yeo, “Religion of Socialism,” 15. 39. Royal Commission on Labour, Minutes of Evidence; quoted in Yeo, “Religion of Socialism,” 15. 40. Morris, “A Theory of Life,” 151. 41. Lowe, From Pit to Parliament, 104. 42. Hardie, Keir Hardie’s Speeches and Writings, 79. 43. Quoted in Yeo, “Religion of Socialism,” 5. 44. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers, ii. 45. Clayton, Rise and Decline, 88. 46. “Typescript of the College Farewell to Dr. R. M. Bucke and J. W. Wallace,” 24 August 1891, Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1170/2/4/1/1. 47. Glasier to Eagle Street College, May 1893, Whitman Collection, ZWN 9/278. Katharine, née St John Conway, married John Bruce Glasier in June 1893; for consistency her married name is used throughout. 48. Martyn to Wallace, 6 July 1894, Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1170/2/4/2. 49. Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 211, 196–97. For a comprehensive ­consideration of the competing and mutating definitions of democracy in the ­nineteenth-century political context, see Saunders, “Democracy.” For transatlantic considerations see Dzelzainis and Livesey, The American Experiment. 50. Williams, Keywords, 93. 51. Ibid., 96. 52. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 340. 53. Hartley, “Democracy at the Crossroads: Tocqueville, Mill, and the Conflict of Interests,” in The American Experiment, ed. Dzelzainis and Livesey, 61–77 (61). 54. See discussion in Chapter 5 on Sam Hobson’s use of “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” in the Labour Leader. 55. Glasier, On the Road to Liberty, xix. Wallace refers to lines from “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”; cf. PP, 475–76.

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Introduction  29 56. Livesey, “Socialism and Victorian Poetry,” 1. See also Livesey, “Morris, Carpenter, Wilde” and Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism. For more on the relationship between culture and socialism, see Waters, Politics of Popular Culture; Britain, Fabianism and Culture. 57. Miller, Slow Print, 6–7. 58. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, 199. 59. Morris, “Art and Socialism,” 198. 60. Quoted in preface to Blatchford, My Eighty Years, xiii; Blatchford, Merrie England, 99. 61. Miller, Slow Print, 167–220. 62. Vaninskaya, William Morris, 76. 63. Morris and Bax, “Notes on the Manifesto of the Socialist League,” 5 July 1885; in Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary, 739. 64. Quoted in Summers, “The Labour Church and Allied Movements,” 226. 65. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 31. 66. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 96–97. 67. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 21–22. 68. Rhys, Poems of Walt Whitman, xxxvii, x, xi. 69. Ibid., xi; cf. PP, 165. 70. Carpenter, Days with Walt Whitman, 14. 71. Grant, Walt Whitman and His English Admirers, 12. 72. Dzelzainis and Livesey, “Introduction,” in The American Experiment, ed. Dzelzainis and Livesey, 1–13 (2). 73. Quoted in Lipset and Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here, 17. 74. Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England, 219. 75. Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, xvii. 76. Vaninskaya, William Morris, 160. See also Linehan, Modernism and British Socialism; Miller, Slow Print; Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism; Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict. 77. Clayton, Rise and Decline, 106–107. 78. The phrase “worker/poet” is Folsom’s in Native Representations (145). 79. Wallace to Eagle Street College, 6 January 1893, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/24. 80. Though Carpenter’s Days with Walt Whitman contains critical essays, it focuses on his visits to the poet, as does Johnston and Wallace’s Visits to Walt Whitman.

1 Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic

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Edward Carpenter’s Democracy

As the light began to break peacefully over Trinity Hall college garden one summer morning in 1874 Edward Carpenter was moved to write his first letter to Whitman, six years after his first encounter with Rossetti’s selection in the same college garden. Not, as Carpenter was keen to stress, the intoxicated response of one who was “drunk with new wine” (emphasis Carpenter’s), the remarkable letter reads with the easy intimacy of the long acquainted. “My dear friend,” it begins warmly, continuing in a lyrical tone that is both tender and resolute. The “chief reason for writing,” said ­Carpenter, was his wish that Whitman should know that “there are many here in England to whom your writings have been as the waking up to a new day.” When I say “many” of course I do not mean a multitude (I wish I did) but many individuals—each, himself (or herself, […]) the centre of a new influence. All that you have said, the thoughts that you have given us, are vital—they will grow—that is certain. You cannot know anything better than that you have spoken the word which is on the lips of God today. (WWC, 1, 158–59) Ranging through ideas suggested or supported by Carpenter’s reading of Whitman, the letter expresses dissatisfaction with money-oriented notions of social “respectability,” “class contempt” and an “effete” Church. Hope lay instead in the interconnection of souls (“closer than thought and life itself”) and the progression towards a “high universal noon” of democracy, a great “new, open” life in which women, artisans and loving relationships between men were to play a vital role (WWC, 1, 159–60). As Carpenter’s use of dawn imagery—which would become so prevalent in fin de siècle socialism—implies, Whitman’s poetry had touched him in a fresh, powerful way: “a profound change set in,” he remembered, from the time he first read Poems by Walt Whitman.1 These Whitman-inspired ideas had become—and would remain—crucial to Carpenter’s worldview, through which Carpenter felt a deep kinship with the American poet. This sense of personal and ideological connection spilled into a correspondent textual kinship between Leaves of Grass and Towards Democracy, Carpenter’s collection of poetry which he later described as his “prophetic”

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  31 writing.2 As M. Wynn Thomas remarks, rarely has this “psycho-­textual twinning” been examined on a formal rather than an ideological or biographical level despite Towards Democracy being the most important example of English writing in a Whitmanian style.3 Working against this tendency, Thomas suggests that Towards Democracy can be read as an act of “cultural translation.”4 If, as William A. Pannapacker suggests, ­Carpenter’s visits to Whitman in 1877 and 1884 afforded the opportunity to “construct a new identity for himself, paradoxically, as the ‘English ­Whitman,’” there were textual implications of such a formulation.5 Indeed, contemporary commentators were quick to attribute dissimilarities between Leaves of Grass and Towards Democracy to national difference. For ­Holbrook J­ackson in the Yorkshire Weekly Post, Carpenter had “the better manners of the Old World, which comes just as naturally to the Englishman as the rampant mode should come to an American” (“Edward Carpenter,” January 13, 1906, 15). Charles ­Sixsmith characterized Whitman and America as “primitive,” “youthful,” “vigorous,” “ample,” “multitudinous,” “cosmopolitan,” “massive,” “elemental,” “egoistic,” “formless,” “coarse” and “rough”; Carpenter and England by contrast were “matured,” “cultured,” “deep,” “sensitive,” “meditative,” “refined,” “gentle,” “intuitive,” “thoughtful” and “retiring.”6 Grounded in outdated, romanticized impressions of both England and America (indeed, all of Sixsmith’s adjectives for Whitman but “cosmopolitan” were used in Leaves of Grass to reference America or Americans), such essentialist views on the relationship between poetry and nationhood could easily be used by ­Carpenter’s critics to censure the English use of a purportedly American style. An anonymous critic in the liberal weekly the Speaker, for instance, suggested that there was “reason” in Whitman’s “formless rhapsodies” because America itself demanded this kind of articulation but that “England, an ancient, lordly country, well-groomed, well-barbered, can never have […] any meaning deserving expression that may not find formal utterance” (July 2, 1892, 28). No “bearded roughs,” then, on England’s green and pleasant land; though, of course, for Carpenter it was exactly this obeisance to “smoothfaced Respectability” that gave England urgent need of such expression.7 Whitman’s own position was that “what very properly fits a subject of the British crown may fit very ill an American freeman” (“An English and an American Poet,” American Phrenological Journal, October 1855, 90–91). The obvious limitations of such prescriptivism should not detract from the significance of the cultural negotiations that Carpenter performed. Leaves of Grass is described in Rossetti’s preface as “the poem both of Personality and of Democracy; and, it may be added, of American nationalism.”8 If ­Rossetti’s bolt-on suggests some unease, to Carpenter’s mind Whitman’s clamoring nationalism was positively distasteful. And here, according to Thomas, lies the key to the “fundamental difference” between Towards Democracy and Leaves of Grass; Carpenter saw in Whitman “a nationalist poet, and could not accept the latter’s vision of America as being in the vanguard of human progress.”9 Persuasively demonstrating how Carpenter

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32  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic converted “Whitman’s American poetry” into the “different sociopolitical idiom” of his own English culture, Thomas’s translation model is extremely important for an understanding of the rhetorical maneuvers made not only by C ­ arpenter but by other British socialists, as discussions throughout this v­ olume will show.10 Moving on the conversation—and guided by ­Carpenter’s own understanding of his calling as an activist and a writer— the focus here is on Towards Democracy as a work not of translation but of evolution. While Carpenter did address England directly in Towards Democracy, the same antinationalism that distanced his thinking from Whitman’s also prevented him from seeing himself as a translator in a national sense. If he could agree with Whitman that a poet’s spirit “responds to his country’s spirit” (PP, 7), it was only in so far as the spiritually aware artist had a responsibility to raise the collective consciousness of his or her society in the particular evolutionary moment into which he or she was born. Carpenter’s adaptation of Whitman was, in his view, temporal rather than geographic; he came after Whitman and, as a reader who had understood the heart of the message, he had a duty not only to disseminate but to develop it. Whitman’s thoughts, as he warmly affirms in his first letter, would “grow.” They were “vital” in both the sense of being of especial importance and—significantly—in being endowed with life, and if they were living, they were to evolve. The responsibility (though it was not Carpenter’s responsibility alone) was to succeed Whitman in the evolutionary line, to become, as he baldly told the older poet, “the centre of a new influence” (itself not the end, but merely the next evolutionary stage) (WWC, 1, 159). Elaborating on the theme two years later, Carpenter explained: I feel that my work is to carry on what you have begun. You have opened the way: my only desire is to go onward with it. Though it is out of all question to suppose that one generation or ten generations will make such a difference in men’s minds in the direction of the ideal state, still—to contemplate that ideal and to live slowly translating it into real life and action is quite certainly the only good—and is sufficient. I do not think of anything that I have done except as preparation: on all hands the words seem to me to be flowing in but in exactly what shape they will issue forth again I am not quite clear, and I think it is my business to wait yet. (WWC, 3, 416–17) Carpenter’s own use of the word “translating” signals a turn between the two “languages” of the ideal and the real, the realm of thought and that of action. Driven by a sense of divine vocation, Carpenter extended Whitman’s theme of the essential interconnection between the spiritual and the material and sought its practical application. If, he thought, a critical mass came to share his understanding of the “ideal state,” then it would be brought about. To carry on what ­Whitman had begun meant becoming active: words were action and should be used not only to affirm but to affect the life

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  33 democratic. If this in itself was distinctly Whitmanian, Carpenter’s commitment to reformist action, both verbal and otherwise, most certainly was not. The words that had flowed into him were to find their new “shape” first in Towards Democracy and then in various prose mutations in numerous lectures, tracts, articles and books. Whitman favored an evolutionary perspective, but in Carpenter’s hands it was developed into a far-reaching, holistic life philosophy—complex but completely plottable—which covered every aspect of human life and understanding. Its core principles remained constant, but new understandings of its implications for areas as diverse as spirituality, sexuality (same-sex and otherwise), ecology, relationships, labor, lifestyle and, of particular interest here, political and social organization, art and aesthetics, were always evolving. In Carpenter’s hands Whitman’s “hints” and “suggestions” had identifiable social and political applications, developments that struck a chord in Carpenter’s socialist community, and by the early years of the new century the idea that Carpenter was ­Whitman’s heir had gained considerable traction. As Whitman’s influence began to fade, Carpenter’s star burned more brightly; in some parts of the movement, at least, socialism had found a new sage.

From Liberalism to Socialism Edward Carpenter’s socialism had liberal roots. Born into a wealthy naval family in fashionable Brighton, his upbringing was one of considerable privilege though, he would later insist, it was of material rather than emotional comfort. The seventh of 10 children, young “Chips” was a sensitive, socially reticent child who detested the customs of the smart social milieu to which he belonged. The family’s capital—rentier’s wealth, acquired through astute investment in American railroads and other stock—conferred, to his mind, a miserable set of “heartless conventionalities” and “silly proprieties” (MDD, 14). Carpenter recalled a sense of alienation that became ­profoundly formative. “The unexpressed hatred which I felt,” he wrote in his autobiography, My Days and Dreams, “though I did not understand it, for the social conditions in which I was born, was destined, when its meaning gradually realized itself in my consciousness, to become one of the great directing forces of my after life” (MDD, 35). On the one hand, it’s easy to see how ­Carpenter’s discontent with Victorian notions of respectability, and his conviction that capitalism was equally pernicious for rich and poor alike, could find their roots in his upbringing. On the other, as Sheila Rowbotham observes in her excellent biography, there was more freethinking in ­Carpenter’s background than his narrative of the bogey well-to-do ­Victorian family credits.11 Carpenter was exposed to contemporary intellectual debate and radical ideas about religion, politics and what we would now call social justice through his father, Charles Carpenter, who was an avid reader, unorthodox in his religious beliefs and a strong liberal in politics (“a p ­ hilosophic ­Radical of the Mill school”; MDD, 38). Spiritually, he

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34  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic subscribed to “a kind of Broad Church mysticism” (ibid.), derived from his reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who he had met more than once) and the German idealist philosophers. A staunch supporter of the ­Liberal MP Henry Fawcett during the time he represented Brighton, Charles Carpenter was also on friendly terms with the unorthodox Christian ­ socialist F. D. Maurice and Anglican minister Frederick W. Robertson, an untiring proponent of social reform. Thus at age 19, after roaming around ­Heidelberg for five months, Carpenter arrived in Cambridge in 1864 as an adherent to the liberal cause. In the progressive liberal hub of Trinity Hall, where Fawcett had been recently appointed Cambridge chair of political economy, Carpenter’s views became increasingly radical—and bent towards social reform. A prize-winning essay, “On the Continuance of Modern Civilisation,” reveals a growing awareness of issues surrounding class consciousness. When people perceived themselves in hierarchical categories, he thought at this stage, “the individuality of men is crushed, & class interest and class tyranny are all in all.”12 Influenced by Fawcett’s energetic campaign for educational reform, and Maurice’s Coleridge-inspired ideas about the diffusion of knowledge, to Carpenter’s mind the answer lay in an equal education for all, a principle he would put into practice as an itinerant University Extension lecturer in 1874. He had been offered a clerical fellowship in 1869 and, despite his declaration of some truly heretical interpretations of the Old Testament on the eve of his ordination, appointed as Maurice’s curate in 1870 (his ­primary reason for choosing this path was, it seems, to allow him to remain in Cambridge). During his curacy Carpenter’s concern with social reform became steadily more socialistic. As different left-wing ideas gained some momentum across Europe, Carpenter used his weekly sermons to preach an anti-capitalist gospel, spreading his theories of labor value and encouraging the redistribution of wealth. He became steadily more convinced that his spiritual and political beliefs could not be reconciled with the tenets of the Anglican Church and in June 1874 Carpenter renounced the cloth. Having been denied a lay fellowship, he was obliged to look outside Cambridge for a new occupation and resolved on joining the University Extension Scheme. It was then, on the cusp of a major life change, that he stayed awake all night and composed his first letter to Whitman as the sun rose. The priesthood, he wrote in closing, was “no good” and neither was the university: in contrast to what he felt about Whitman, there was “nothing vital” in it. Now in a position to put what he had learnt from the American poet into practice, Carpenter could tell him of his plans with some pride: “I am going away to lecture to working men and women in the North. They at least desire to lay hold of something with a real grasp” (WWC, 1, 161). As Carpenter began to conceptualize the predicament of modern civilization in a framework influenced by Marxism, he became more skeptical of liberal enlightenment ideas about the individual self. He began to gloss the social problem along class lines, often deploying, for instance, the analogy

Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  35

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of a large group of people left on a desert island abundant with natural resources: Political Economy always begins with an island! At first all are workers, and by a few hours work daily from each man, sufficient of the necessaries and adornments even of life are produced (from the natural resources of the island) to maintain every one in comfort. After a time it is found that the state of affairs has changed. Half the population is now living in idleness—or at most engaged in occupations whose benefit to the community is very remote or dubious. The other half is working very hard—twice as many hours a day in fact as before—as it must do to keep things up to the former level.13 An idle capitalist class was able to keep the laboring class in a perpetual state of exploitation through the systematic control of land ownership and the modes of production, structures of organization which Carpenter passionately objected to and which frequently received the full force of his pen. By 1883 his complaint was no longer the tyranny of class but that the English were too independent: “We like each to go our own way, and are not ready to join with others in any movement; and this individualism— though a valuable quality in its way—hinders united action.”14 If the issue was class-based the solution was not. “United action” meant precisely that: mutual cross-class cooperation not class conflict. This was to be grounded in a more advanced understanding of the self, defined not as individual consciousness or class-consciousness but as universal consciousness. The Western problem, suggests Carpenter, is that it sought “the individual consciousness—the enriched mind, ready perceptions and memories, individual hopes and fears, ambitions, loves, conquests—the self, the local self, in all its phases and forms—and sorely doubts whether such a thing as an universal consciousness exists.”15

“The Ocean of Humanity”: Carpenter’s Theory of the Universal Self Carpenter’s concept of universal consciousness or the universal self was the first core principle of all his thinking and writing. Its index entry in My Days and Dreams is telling: “Universal Self, the, key to all morality and science” (MDD, 343). It is, simply put, the recognition of the essential interconnectedness of all human souls, self-identification as part of a universal whole. It is, he wrote in “A Note on ‘Towards Democracy,’” a “region” of self “transcending in some sense the ordinary bounds of personality” where individual idiosyncrasies and socially imposed differences are inconsequential and all people are both free and equal (Labour Prophet, May 1894, 49; repr. TD, 410). It is easy to see the social and political implications of such a spiritual worldview: if one truly believes that we are all indiscriminately

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36  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic part of a larger self—that we are part of each other in some fundamental way—it becomes very difficult to treat another person in a way that is harmful. In fact, it becomes impossible to treat a person as other, a “truth” that ­Carpenter believed had been better understood in the East than the West. “You are not even to differentiate yourself in thought from others,” he wrote after a visit to Ceylon and India in 1890; “you are not to begin to regard yourself as separate from them. Even to talk about helping others is a mistake; it is vitiated by the delusion that you and they are twain.”16 Herein lay the root cause of individual and social degradation: “When the man abandons his true Self he abandons also his true relation to his fellows. The massMan must rule in each unit-man, else the unit-man will drop off and die.”17 “The doctrine of the Universal Self is obviously fundamental” proclaims Carpenter in My Days and Dreams (MDD, 207). Although Whitman never explained his ideas about the self or his emphasis on the merge of identities in such a way, as a clear philosophical premise, his treatment of these themes was crucial to the development of Carpenter’s theory. Looking back, ­Carpenter remembered that during the 1870s Whitman’s poetry had been “working a revolution” inside him; specifically, that it had taught him that intellectual argument was less important than the “character and the statement of Self” (MDD, 86). In Carpenter’s exegesis, the divine truth that Whitman communicated in Leaves of Grass was precisely that of the universal self outlined above. Leaves of Grass famously played with the idea of self, invoking a speaking voice that moved in and out of different bodies, rooted in the local and particular but expanding to the universal. As numerous critics have expounded, the “I” was both Walt Whitman and the omniscient shape-shifting bard, the individual “me” and the “Me” of the democratic whole. Even when subject and speaker seem most distinct, as in the long catalogue in “Song of Myself” beginning “The pure contralto sings in the organloft, / The carpenter dresses his plank,” observation of the other soon gives way to the becoming of the other (PP, 39). Here, for example, the speaker builds a composite picture of ­American society over 69 similarly crafted lines, the anaphoric structure of the list both equalizing and uniting the individual subjects, before it breaks with the declaration: “And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them” (PP, 42). The very phrase “one and all” emphasizes both the individual and the social whole while the chiasmatic sentence structure works with its rhythm and pitch to enact formally the ebb-and-flow spoken of. This fluidity complemented Carpenter’s ideas about the merge of identity and found expression in his use of the ocean as a major spiritual metaphor. In this Carpenter took his lead from Whitman, who employed the ocean, the coastline and other sea imagery throughout the various editions of Leaves of Grass, before gathering together nine of these poems (along with two new additions) in the 1881 “Sea-Drift” cluster. Whitman’s sea, though frequently connected with spiritual transcendence, has no fixed symbolic meaning; Whitman offers intimations that Carpenter develops into a specific associative relationship between the ocean and universal consciousness. In Days

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  37 with Walt Whitman Carpenter announced that Whitman was best fitted to respond to the new times, to “swim in this ocean of humanity as in a sea.”18 It was not incidental that this phrase, in which the trope turns on itself— the tenor holding the meaning of the simile, the “ocean of humanity,” itself a metaphor—was chosen. For Carpenter the metaphoric conceit was a truth, developed most strikingly in his poem “By the Shore,” first included in the second edition of Towards Democracy (TD, 160–62). From the outset, with a title that knowingly recalls Whitman’s “By Blue ­Ontario’s Shore,” the resemblance is textually close. Various familiar ­Whitmanian themes, motifs and vocabulary make their appearance: a sea-shore location, a transformative experience, the apostrophic “O” and a bardic speaker who participates in the events of the poem and sounds very similar to Whitman’s. As in Leaves of Grass, the speaker’s identity in “By the Shore” is unstable. The reader is alerted to the significance of this theme through heavy repetition of the personal pronoun: “I” is used 42 times in 50 lines, during which time it undergoes a radical transformation. Carpenter’s speaker, initially human-sounding, becomes first “a bit of the shore” then “a little arm of the sea” and finally “the Ocean itself.”19 The maneuver closely parallels Whitman’s in “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” where the speaker becomes “part of the sands and drift” of the coast (PP, 395), and in the section of “Song of Myself” where the speaker becomes “integral” with the sea (PP, 48). Beautifully sensual, this transition is achieved through the movement of the waves that pass over the speaker-as-shore again and again until he is dislodged and engulfed by the sea. The sea in “Song of Myself” dashes the speaker with “amorous wet” (PP, 48) while the mocking-bird’s song in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” plays on the sexually suggestive rhythmic motion of the tide—“O madly the sea pushes upon the land, / With love, with love” (PP, 390)—and Carpenter picks up this erotic note. The evocative speaking voice is “in love” with the wind, which “maddens […] with its touch” (TD, 160). “Feeling is strangely concentrated at every point” where the waves come into contact with his being; dissolution is orgasmic: I am detached, I disentangle myself from the shore; I have become free—I float out and mingle with the rest. The pain, the acute clinging desire, is over—I feel beings like myself all around me, I spread myself through and through them, I am merged in a sea of contact. Freedom and equality are a fact. Life and joy seem to have begun for me. (TD, 161) The climactic moment is the realization of universal oneness, the alliterative plosives in “detached” and “disentangle” reinforcing the action of breaking away from prior conceptions of individual identity. “The soul’s slow disentanglement” is one of Towards Democracy’s repeated refrains (TD, 65, 74, 75, 77, for example), a disentanglement that is necessary, paradoxically, for the soul’s

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38  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic unification and completion. Just as the ocean is one immense entity consisting of countless, inseparable, individual drops of water, the universal self merges countless, inseparable, individual selves, the metaphor made explicit when the speaker sees “face after face” in the waves surging and falling past him (TD, 161). Early in the poem the speaker puns that he is “not sure any more” which is his “own particular bit of shore” (TD, 160) but later qualifies “I know but I do not care any longer which my own particular body is—all conditions and fortunes are mine” (TD, 162). Like the grass in Leaves of Grass, growing alike among all types of people, the ocean is a “uniform hieroglyphic” (PP, 31), a levelling symbol. (In another of his sea-themed poems, “O Sea, with White Lines of Foam,” Carpenter connects these symbols, structuring the poem around the triangulated natural imagery of the sea, the sky and the grass, “shivering just for all the world as now”; TD, 157–58). As the “awful Spirit of Immensity” descends on the speaker-as-ocean in “By the Shore” he responds with a phrase lifted directly from the beginning of “Song of Myself”: “I am in love with it” (TD, 161; PP, 27). Whitman’s speaker is describing his feelings about the “atmosphere” shortly before his own similarly erotic spiritual illumination where he realizes that “all the men ever born are also my brothers . . . . and and the women my sisters and lovers, / And that a kelson of the creation is love” (PP, 31). By inserting Whitman’s phrase at this particular moment Carpenter implies a correspondence between their visions, claiming the same spiritual heritage. The other textual markers in the poem, and throughout Towards Democracy, which deliberately gesture back to Leaves of Grass perform the same function. Carpenter believes, and makes a point of showing his reader, that his concept of the universal self had grown out of the same divine truth as Whitman’s, even as it was melded with other sources (the Bhagavad Gita, for example; MDD, 106) and formulated into a cogent, explicable creed. As with Whitman, the sexual and the spiritual are conflated. Elsewhere in Towards Democracy ­Carpenter continues ­Whitman’s exploration of same-sex relations as a model of inclusive, democratic selfhood, and, as will be discussed briefly toward the end of the c­hapter, the homoerotic and political possibilities of Whitmanian comradeship. “O joy! for ever, ever, joy!” exclaims Carpenter’s speaker towards the end of the poem as he becomes absorbed in the interconnected democratic whole (TD, 162). An intensely liberating, jubilant experience, the illumination that leads to an understanding of the universal self also carries social and artistic responsibilities. The liminal space of the sea-shore, with its boundary between sea and land in a constant state of flux, is the scene of transformative experiences and important new understandings for the speakers of a number of Whitman’s poems. Most notably, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” relates the birth of the divine poetic vocation: My own songs awaked from that hour, And with them the key, the word up from the waves, The word of the sweetest song and all songs, (PP, 393–94)

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  39 The speaker in “By the Shore” is also moved to action; after becoming aware of his connection to others, he is compelled to “take the thread from the fingers that are weary and go on with the work” (TD, 162). Parallel with Carpenter’s own personal development, this line can be read as a commitment to both a spiritual, poetic and to a social, activist mission: the speaker will take the “thread” of the divine message from Whitman and his other teachers as they tire in order to relieve the laboring classes. ­Carpenter’s experience of spiritual illumination, ascribed in large part to his reading of Whitman, had a life-changing effect. Whitman had taught him the “oceanic sort of life,” he wrote in gratitude to the poet in 1877 (WWC, 1, 190), and he determined that he in turn had a responsibility to teach the divine truth to others. In his discussion of the different ways the two poets handle the theme of the merging of identities, Andrew Elfenbein suggests that “Whitman bosses the reader, while Carpenter hints at a gentle interchange.”20 It is in fact Carpenter who announces on the first page in the 1883 first edition: “These things I, seizing you by the shoulders, will shake you till you understand them!”21 It was imperative for Carpenter, as it was not for Whitman, that his readers understand the message behind the metaphor.

“The Seed Perfection”: Carpenter’s Theory of Evolution The impetus for this drive can be understood when we consider the second core precept in Carpenter’s integrated philosophy, that of progressive evolutionary change. Whitman believed in evolution as a descriptor of the “method of nature” but characteristically shrank from dogmatism and was impressed to hear that T. H. Huxley had referred to it as a “working hypothesis” (WWC, 3, 94). In Leaves of Grass he writes of the unending “procession” of the universe (PP, 255) and the “procreant urge of the world” (PP, 28). He maintained that Leaves of Grass was “evolution— evolution in its most varied, freest, largest sense” (WWC, 6, 129; emphasis in original). Implicit in the references to deep time and evolutionary thought scattered throughout the text was the view that nothing existed “only in its moment”: The world does not so exist … no parts palpable or impalpable so exist … no result exists now without being from its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so backward without the farthest mentionable spot coming a bit nearer the beginning than any other spot. (PP, 23) Whitman greatly admired Charles Darwin; “He was one of the acme men—,” he told Traubel, “He was at the top. I could hope for no better fate for my book than that it should grow strong in so beneficent an ­atmosphere—breathe the breath of its life” (WWC, 2, 65). And so it had.

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40  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic First published four years before On the Origin of Species, the 1855 Leaves of Grass poems are some of the most heavily concentrated with evolutionary ideas and imagery. With the advent of Darwin’s publication, debates that had been rumbling throughout the nineteenth century were pushed to the forefront of the popular imagination, and in this intellectual and philosophical atmosphere Whitman’s poems with their evolutionary thrust did indeed “grow strong.” After the initial controversy surrounding publication, ­Whitman, like Darwin, became established as a major influence in his field; knit to the evolutionary zeitgeist, it is perhaps unsurprising that as the ­century progressed the “fate” of his Leaves followed a similar trajectory to that of Origin of Species. Whitman’s younger nineteenth-century readers also came of age in this atmosphere of evolutionary debate. Born in 1844, Carpenter was 13 when Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s joint paper On the Tendency of ­Species to Form Varieties was presented at the Linnean Society and just 15 when On the Origin of Species was published. His own conclusions were not ­Darwinian: he ascribed instead to a version of Lamarckian evolution— what he called exfoliation—which reinscribed human agency optimistically into the evolutionary process. Whitman is usually heralded as a major influence on Carpenter’s evolutionary beliefs, and it has even occasionally been suggested that he himself subscribed to a Lamarckian ideology. Harry ­Gershenowitz makes this case in a short article largely substantiated by the arguments put forward in an unpublished doctoral thesis by James T. F. Tanner in 1965.22 The timing, Tanner argues, is paramount. Quite plainly it was impossible for Whitman’s comments on evolution in the 1855 or 1856 texts to have been influenced by Darwin. He proceeds to suggest various avenues by which Whitman could have received Lamarck’s theories, even if he had not encountered them directly. Plausible Lamarckian analyses of evolutionary moments in Leaves of Grass are duly provided, but if pinning a specific theory on Whitman is often something of a thankless task, it is particularly so here where there is no recorded mention of Lamarck in Whitman’s ­conversation or writing. So when Gershenowitz confidently declares that “Whitman’s early championing of biological and social Lamarckism over all forms of Darwinism made an indelible impression upon the younger Carpenter,” something more nuanced might be going on.23 There is no need to labor the point that ­Whitman himself makes in the quotation already given, that Leaves of Grass is evolution in its “largest sense,” or that both the text and the ideas it contained evolved over the 37 years between its first and final publications. G ­ ershenowitz contends that during Carpenter’s visits to Whitman in 1877 and 1884 “Whitman’s personality and strong faith in ­Lamarckism penetrated Carpenter’s philosophical thoughts.”24 That Carpenter was deeply impressed with Whitman’s personality is undoubtable, but neither manuscript nor published versions of the Days with Walt Whitman articles recall conversations about evolution of any kind. As a well-read

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  41 young man, ­Whitman’s poetry would not have been Carpenter’s primary source of evolutionary knowledge, and if such discussions did take place the influence may not have been as unidirectional as Gershenowitz assumes. ­Whitman’s sway is often evidenced by Carpenter’s use of the term “exfoliation,” first appearing in Specimen Days: “One of my cherish’d themes for a never-achiev’d poem has been the two impetuses of man and the universe— in the latter, creation’s incessant unrest, exfoliation, (Darwin’s evolution, I suppose)” (PP, 945). The phrase “creation’s incessant unrest, exfoliation” is even used as an epigraph to the chapter where these views are set out most clearly in Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure.25 Yet not only does ­Whitman gloss exfoliation as Darwinian, but the entry was not written, let alone published, until a year after Carpenter started work on the first part of Towards Democracy, a poem built around the redemptive power of exfoliatory evolution in which Carpenter develops the image of the seed as the key symbol of his L ­ amarckian philosophy. Carpenter’s poem reads in many ways as a prefigurative Lamarckian version of the verse that Whitman later ­contemplated writing. If, as Tanner suggests, “evolution theory hovers in the background” of Whitman’s work, Carpenter grasps hold of it and places it in the limelight, center-stage.26 Put very crudely, Lamarck’s theory rests on two principles: first, that an organ is developed according to use, and second, that an acquired trait is passed along to offspring as an inherited feature. When Leaves of Grass seems to hit a Lamarckian note it is only in a very general sense. In “Song of Myself,” for example: “We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers; / There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them” (PP, 79). This is a period of active gestation; a succession of animal and human lifecycles produces the speaker at his particular moment in time: “Every condition promulges not only itself … it promulges what grows after and out of itself’ (PP, 81). “With antecedents,” Whitman later writes in his poem of the same name, “With my fathers and mothers and the accumulations of past ages, / With all which, had it not been, I would not now be here, as I am” (PP, 381–82). As he did with the universal self, Carpenter takes what he believes to be an underlying “truth” from Leaves of Grass and marries it with ideas from other sources (in this case Lamarckism and evolutionary anthropology) to develop a coherent philosophy. This has been described well by scholars elsewhere but requires outlining in brief.27 Both internal and external forces determine the nature of change or growth, but what an organism thinks or feels (on whatever level it is capable of doing so) is significantly more influential than environmental pressures or, in the human race, the way an individual is raised. Translating Lamarck’s besoin as “desire” rather than “necessity” or “need,” Carpenter places intention and free will—of thought and action—at the center of his evolutionary beliefs. Resisting the perceived arbitrariness and relentless determinism of Darwinian natural selection (indeed, the chapter in Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure is called

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42  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic “Exfoliation: Lamarck versus Darwin”; italics in source), in Carpenter’s formulation “desire, or inward change, comes first, action follows, and organisation or outward structure is the result.”28 He gives the biological example of the amoeba being sensitive to light and digesting food before developing eye or stomach and the social example of the introduction of the postal system only after correspondence had been circulating by hand. Through desire and action, then, positive change could be brought about, and Carpenter therefore calls for active engagement with the evolutionary process. Exfoliation could—and should—be hurried along. Tellingly, though the speaker in Leaves of Grass is frequently dynamic, in the most Lamarckian moments of the text he does not act but is instead acted upon: “Long I was hugged close . . . . long and long,” he states in the passive voice, Immense have been the preparations for me, Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me. Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen; […] Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me, My embryo has never been torpid . . . . (PP, 80) The speaker’s acquired traits are inherited, but he does not attempt to direct the evolutionary process: he is “hugged,” “helped,” “ferried” and “guided” by others. In contrast, in Carpenter’s “The Secret of Time and Satan”: The art of creation, like every other art, has to be learnt: Slowly slowly, through many years, thou buildest up thy body, And the power that thou now hast (such as it is) to build up this present body, thou hast acquired in the past in other bodies; So in the future shalt thou use again the power that thou now acquirest. (TD, 294) The reader is addressed directly, and a biblical register is used to issue a new command. “Power” is to be used, developed and bequeathed, and then used, developed and bequeathed again in turn. The laws of “chance” and “fate” (TD, 294), associated respectively with the Darwinian laws of random variation and heredity, are at work on each person, but it is the divine human responsibility to struggle to gain mastery of such forces: “It is the angel with whom thou hast to wrestle” (TD, 294). Christian and Hindu motifs are used to construct a powerful evolutionary narrative, an inversion of the Jacob story with the speaker wrestling not an angel but Satan, casting body after defeated body aside as the speaker is reincarnated stronger each time: And he turned upon me, and smote me a thousand times and slew that body; And I was glad and sprang upon him again with another body—

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  43 And with another and another and again another; And the bodies which I took on yielded before him, and were like cinctures of flames upon me, but I flung them aside; And the pains which I endured in one body were powers which I wielded in the next; and I grew in strength, till at last I stood before him complete, with a body like his own and equal in might—exultant in pride and joy. Then he ceased, and said, “I love thee.” (TD, 296–97) The anaphoric structure of the section is, like the process it depicts, accumulative. When the initial “and” finally relents, it is at the climactic moment when the speaker fully develops the divine force of humanity and, through his efforts, is finally able to enter into “Paradise” (TD, 297). As this suggests, the goal of the human evolutionary experience was spiritual. After lengthy discussions with Carpenter, Whitman’s friend, disciple and literary executor Richard Maurice Bucke put forward this idea most famously in his 1901 text Cosmic Consciousness (“cosmic consciousness” was a term he had borrowed from Carpenter). Though Carpenter had reservations about the book and joked that his name was “scattered about in a dangerous way,” he remained committed to its fundamental premise.29 As summarized in his own Pagan and Christian Creeds: humanity had evolved through animalistic simple consciousness to human self-consciousness and would finally p ­ rogress to a third stage of consciousness, described variously as cosmic, universal or even (feeding into emergent scientific and philosophic discussion) fourth-­ dimensional.30 Carpenter made a crucial distinction in the directionality of this process. Though teleological, exfoliation was non-linear; it moved from inside out in an “unfolding of a higher form latent within” (emphasis in o ­ riginal).31 To illustrate, Carpenter turned time and again to the image of a seed: Thus in the growth of a plant we find leaf after leaf appearing, petal within petal—a continual exfoliation of husks, sepals, petals, stamens and what-not; but the object of all this movement, and that which in a sense sets it all in motion, namely the seed, is the very last thing of all to be manifested.32 The seed is both what is first and what is last. Carpenter, of course, was by no means the first to employ such symbolism, and Whitman himself uses it in an evolutionary context a few times in Leaves of Grass, though only once before the 1883 publication of Towards Democracy, tucked into the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass in “Song of the Universal”: In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection.

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By every life a share or more or less, None born but it is born, conceal’d or unconceal’d the seed is waiting.33 (PP, 369) First employed in his prize-winning student essay on modern civilization then in the first part of Towards Democracy, Carpenter develops the seed image into another major metaphor, recurring throughout his poetry and his prose (Towards Democracy is itself described as the “start-point and kernel” of all his later work; MDD, 190). It is fixed to his philosophy of the universal self: the endpoint of exfoliation was to discover what had always been latently there; specifically, to uncover the universal self, which was the very origin of existence. To return to “The Secret of Time and Satan”: “Always that which appears last in time is first, and the cause of all—and not that which appears first” (TD, 293). The seed’s husk represents a critical stage of the unfolding. Paradoxically, while seeming to impede the vital force it contains, it in fact plays an essential role in its preparation: [The natural sheath protecting the young bud—fitting close, stranglingly close, till the young thing gains a little more power, and then falling dry, useless, their work finished to the ground.] Strangled, O God? Nay—the circle of gibbering faces draws closer, the droning noises become louder, the weight gets heavier, unbearable— One instant struggle! and lo! It is Over!—daylight! the sweet rain is falling and I hear the songs of the birds. Blessings and thanks forever for the sweet rain; blessings for the fresh fresh air blowing, and the meadows illimitable and the grass and the clouds; Blessings and thanks for you, you wild waters eternally flowing: (TD, 31–32) The extended metaphor thus works out a narrative of progressive spiritual development leading ultimately to enlightenment through trial and tribulation. Carpenter evokes the conversion experience: the speaker is born into “daylight” and baptized by “sweet rain.” Benedictions are offered for a fresh, expansive experience of the world, gained through a distinctly ­unDarwinian struggle for a new kind of existence. Carpenter needed his readers to understand and grasp the significance of this message, not for their personal development only but for the sake of its wider implications for the social whole, for humanity.34 The evolutionary process unfolded on a social as well as an individual scale, both locally (in a tribal or national context) and globally. When a critical mass of the population understood the nature of the universal self, the human race would

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  45 evolve to the final harmonious stage of its existence. “Paradise” was no ­other-worldly concept: just as the human race had evolved from animal to self-consciousness and would in time achieve cosmic consciousness, society had moved from the first stage of “Barbarism” or “Savagery” into the second stage of “Civilisation” (which for Carpenter was a negative term) and would evolve towards “Democracy.”35 It is not, as Thomas suggests, that a “hard unyielding division” between the present capitalist order and a future communal postcapitalist society “operates as a structural principle both of his thinking and in his writing.”36 Carpenter strongly believed that he and his readers lived on the cusp of progressive evolutionary change, in the time of the “husk”: the oppressive conditions of the nineteenth ­century would ultimately prove to be generative, even as they were destroyed. That humanity may direct its development along a less worthy course was inconceivable.

Exfoliation, Authorship and Aesthetics The interlocking ideas of evolution and the universal self formed a clear blueprint for Carpenter, a divine law he believed Leaves of Grass, among other texts, pointed towards. As this might suggest, art and literature occupied a prominent position in Carpenter’s theory of social and spiritual evolution. The “indications and precursive signs” of universal consciousness could be perceived, he wrote, “in the rites and prophecies and mysteries of the early religions, and in the poetry and art and literature generally of the later civilisations.”37 Unusually, the signs are “precursive”; they represent what is not there—what is not yet overtly present—and therefore help to make it so by exfoliating the latent “truth.” Though humanity had not collectively reached its final evolutionary stage, individuals or groups who had attained universal consciousness had “here and there” made their understandings known. Damningly, Carpenter contends that art had become a more effective conduit of the divine law than religion, as it was practiced in the West in contemporary times. The breadcrumb trail running through spiritual ritual, myth and legend had become more potent in art, music, prose and poetry. The divine law was to exert an influence on the art that revealed it, on its aesthetics and on theorizations of the acts of both writing and receiving such works. Authors such as Whitman, who Carpenter believed had tapped into the universal self, and their texts, in which it was both source and subject, were considered to be prophetic. The chapter on “Whitman as Prophet” in Days with Walt Whitman is revealing, far more so about Carpenter and his sense of divine purpose than it is about Whitman himself. Reprinting “To Him That Was Crucified” in its entirety, Carpenter focuses on the section where Whitman places himself in the vatic line: That we all labor together transmitting the same charge and succession, We few equals, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times, We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers of all theologies,38

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46  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic Carpenter’s italicization emphasizes not only the sense of calling but its inherited nature; if Whitman had succeeded others, he too needed a successor. Through selective quotation Carpenter was able to claim Whitman for his own progressive, universal cause “as a continuer of some worldwide and agelong tradition.”39 Indeed Whitman, who marked “a stage of human evolution not yet reached,” is singled out for giving “democratic scope” and “world-wide application” where most other prophets, limited by the exclusivity and division that characterized the first and second stages of social evolution, were only able to utter a “part-message” for their “time and locality.”40 Yet the irony is very obviously that though enough lines can certainly be plucked from Leaves of Grass to bear out such a reading, Whitman, more than most, is very clear about the national (and sometimes nationalist) thrust of his poetic project and about his own self-identification as an American poet. Inclusive, yes, but America occupied a privileged position: “The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. […] To him the other continents arrive as contributions” (PP, 6–7). Carpenter wasn’t blind to this aspect of Whitman’s writing; later in Days with Walt Whitman, for example, he observes that the older poet was at his weakest when he “set himself to vaunt and magnify ‘these States.’”41 However, he chose to overlook it so as to place Whitman and Leaves of Grass at the forefront of an evolving international prophetic line including not only Christ but Vedic, Buddhist, Platonic and Christian writers, Chinese ­Taoists, Egyptian mystics and Persian Sufis.42 If Carpenter denied the importance of Whitman’s ­Americanness, neither did he then see himself as the “English Whitman.” It would have made as little sense as the idea of an “English Buddha” or “English Christ.” In Cosmic Consciousness Bucke cites Carpenter after Whitman as only the fourteenth man known to have fully attained this state of awareness (the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed and William Blake are among those listed). Though Carpenter is careful not to elevate himself in this way, he considered Towards Democracy to be prophetic and as such, despite its local idiom and texture, for Carpenter his text was not an English version of Leaves of Grass but the latest literary contribution to the unfolding of the universal self. “These are really the thoughts of men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,” quotes Carpenter approvingly from “Song of Myself.”43 And he does not expect us to take him at his word. ­Influenced by philological and theosophical endeavors, he dutifully undertakes the very Victorian enterprise of identifying comparable excerpts from the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching and the Gospels and cross-referencing them with Leaves of Grass in his appendix to “Whitman as Prophet,” charting what thus seem to be perennial spiritual truths. He was gratified to find further “proof” of such common meaning throughout his life; a decade after writing Towards Democracy he happily wrote to Kate Salt from Ceylon that he had discovered that the “facts” of the divine

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  47 knowledge of the East “corroborate the ideas in T[owards] D[emocracy] most closely.”44 With obvious satisfaction he added, “I had thought before it wd [sic] be so—but could not feel certain til now.” Without any stipulation for originality, the very idea of “authorship” is called into question. This is key to the way Carpenter sees what Ruth Livesey describes as “the search for a model of selfhood and self-­expression outside capitalist individualism.”45 Radically, as a curate Carpenter had preached that the Bible wasn’t the only word of God, that “all holy and true words are as much His inspiration as the words of the most sacred of Books.”46 Over time this belief was developed further in the conviction that such “holy and true” words were expressions of the composite human divine, not of an omniscient God who had selected good or deserving people to speak through. “You” and “I” became the salient pronouns, not “His.” It therefore cannot be, as Livesey suggests, that for Carpenter “the aesthetic remained in the realm of the Ideal” or that at the heart of his work there was “a notion that the individual poet can act as a prophet by means of a privileged access to the ideal realm of art.”47 Works of literature that expressed a model of universal selfhood necessarily challenged the notion of an individual creative genius: though artistic freedom or the significance of “individual impression” (to which a whole chapter in Carpenter’s most thoroughgoing consideration of artistic principles, Angels’ Wings, is dedicated) was not to be denied, prophetic texts were in some important sense communal creations.48 Whitman’s negotiation of this paradigm was not straightforward. The phrase “we few equals” quoted earlier from “To Him That Was Crucified” suggests an exclusivity that is reinforced in other moments in Leaves of Grass; for example, in “Eidólons”: The prophet and the bard, Shall yet maintain themselves, in higher stages yet, Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy, interpret yet to them, God and eidólons. (PP, 170) If this hierarchical notion of mediation suggests a traditionally “Romantic” view of an elevated poet, in other instances it is hotly refuted; for instance, in the line already quoted where the speaker declares that that his thoughts are those of “all men.” Likewise, Carpenter’s creative power was derived from the universal self: “Not of myself—I have no power of myself— / But out of you who read do I write these words” (TD, 130; italics ­Carpenter’s). As Whitman did in the 1855 Leaves of Grass Carpenter left his name off the title page and cover of the first version of Towards Democracy but refrained from identifying himself as Whitman does in “Song of Myself,” introducing instead “Walt Whitman, Jesus of Nazareth, your own Self” at an equivalent point in the text (TD, 83). Partly, as Thomas argues, this is a strategy to recast Whitman as an “eternal Saviour” (TD, 207) rather than an ­American

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48  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic poet, but it is also an extension of Whitman’s problematizing of the reader-author relationship.49 The author is unnamed while the reader stands on equal footing with the great literary and spiritual guides (though the capitalization of “Self” indicates, as it always does in Towards ­Democracy, that self-identity here is meant in its most expansive sense). “You must not look upon T[owards] D[emocracy] too especially as my work,” he urged James William Wallace, “since it is only like a letter written from the land which is our common home, which I happen to have visited once or twice, and imperfectly described—and which all may, nay must, not only visit but inhabit.”50 Access remains a pertinent issue but as the deliberate carelessness of “I happen to have visited” and “imperfectly described” suggests it isn’t gained by virtue of poetic talent or, indeed, by any special powers at all. It is not “privileged” in this sense. By correcting the conditional “may” to the imperative “must” Carpenter avows the opposite: that access must cease to be privileged in any sense at all. Aesthetics did not remain “in the realm of the Ideal” but could instead be used to dismantle divisions between spiritual and material, ideal and real, and self and other and open access to this democratic spiritual realm to all people. Prophetic texts did not merely predict the future but brought it about. The life-changing effect that reading Leaves of Grass had on ­Carpenter was the prime example of such potential (and the sore contrast between this and the paucity of the education he felt he was offering through his U ­ niversity Extension lectures was one of the reasons for his departure from the scheme). At the end of “By the Shore” the speaker occupies his own human body once more and in what seems to be a paltry echo of his immersive experience the previous night, he throws a stone into the sea: “I arise and cast a stone into the water (O sea of faces I cast this poem among you)” (TD, 162). But even the impact of a small stone has a ripple effect, and the poem itself, linked analogously through verbal repetition, will do the same in the “ocean of humanity” into which it is “cast.” This project was not without its challenges, as Carpenter outlines in his “A Note on ‘Towards Democracy.’” Such literature needed to be written “on and from” an “absolutely common ground to all individuals”; it would have to “adapt itself to the idiosyncrasies of its reader” and “find the key of the personalities into whose hands it should happen to come” (TD, 409). The questions, therefore, that underlay the writing of Towards Democracy were as follows: Are we really separate individuals, or is individuality an illusion, or again is it only a part of the ego or soul that is individual, and not the whole? Is the ego absolutely one with the body, or is it only a small part of the body, or again is the body but a part of the self—one of its organs so to speak, and not the whole man? Or lastly is it perhaps not possible to express the truth by any direct use of these or other terms of ordinary language? Anyhow, what am I? (TD, 414)

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  49 Teasing out the multiple meanings of words such as “body,” “self,” “ego” and “I,” Carpenter muses on the limitations of language while at the same time demonstrating its capacity to contain expansive, proliferating ideas about the essential nature of human existence. This endeavor has repercussions for the formal politics of the text. Being subject to the law of exfoliation, only progressive innovation could unfold the source “truth.” Though the thought was “not original” with the poet, novelty was demanded of its utterance. Such poetry was to “enlarge the boundary of human expression” (emphasis in original);51 in Whitman’s words it was to be “transcendant and new” (PP, 8). In the long quotation given above Carpenter raises the issue of directness and asks whether a more indirect use of language was better fitted to the expansive themes of this important kind of literature, echoing Whitman’s own demands in the 1855 preface. “The underlying and dominant mood of Whitman’s poems, corresponding to his theme, is extraordinarily vast and inclusive,” affirms ­Carpenter, “—and it requires for its expression a rhythm of similarly broad and flexible character.”52 The ocean metaphor is again put to work: there is a “singular resemblance in the great measured yet irregular roll of Whitman’s lines to the onset of waves along a shore […]. Every mood, at one time or another, is there and to be recognised—yet underneath, and greater than all, and illustrated by them all, the law and life of the ocean itself.”53 Accordingly, the mark of Towards Democracy, Leaves of Grass and other such texts was the ability to withstand repeated re-readings without “becoming stale,” a phenomenon Carpenter suggested had not been adequately tackled by “literary criticism.” How is it possible that the same phrase or concatenation of words should bear within itself meaning behind meaning, horizon after horizon of significance and suggestion? Yet such undoubtedly is the case. Portions of the poetic and religious literature of most countries, and large portions of books like Leaves of Grass, the Bhagavat Gita, Plato’s Banquet, Dante’s Divina Commedia, have this inexhaustible germinative quality. One returns to them again and again, and continually finds fresh interpretations lurking beneath the old and familiar words. (MDD, 191) In the Lamarckian reading experience new meanings were unfolded in each encounter with the text. “Begin to-day to understand,” commands the speaker in Carpenter’s poem “Have Faith,” “that which you will not understand when you read these words for the first time, nor perhaps when you have read them for the hundredth time” (TD, 146). Keeping the seed motif in mind, “behind” operates here as both a temporal and a spatial trope; while interpretations evolve with each re-reading, all meanings co-exist simultaneously in the same linguistic space and are unfolded to reveal, ultimately, the universal consciousness out of which each meaning is both written and read.

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Contrasting such texts with those that are exhausted after one reading, like statements of “Church doctrine or political or scientific theory,” ­Carpenter argues that the latter present merely “an intellectual ‘view’ of some fact” whereas the former succeed “in conveying the fact itself”: It is like the difference between the actual solid shape of a mountain and the different views of the mountain obtainable from different sides. They are two things of a different order and dimension. It almost seems as if some mountain-facts of our experience can be imaged forth by words in such a way that the phrases themselves retain this quality of solidity, and consequently their outlines of meaning vary according to the angle at which the reader approaches them and the variation of the reader’s mind. None of the outlines are final, and the solid content of the phrase remains behind and eludes them all. (MDD, 191) A complex metaphor to unpack, Carpenter seems to maintain that absolute truths can be signified through particular uses of language, that both language and truth are immutable and that the essential meaning of these signs therefore cannot change. To return to the reader-response and reception theories referred to in the introduction, however, there are at the same time presaging hints of Iser’s view that “one text is potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way.”54 Such interaction, for Carpenter, is limited to these “mountain-fact” texts, with the stock conflation of seeing and comprehending employed to explain analogously how some truths are simply so vast that they cannot be perceived in their entirety. Thus the capacity of a certain kind of text to contain and communicate the divine democratic “truth” is resolutely insisted upon while the different interpretations it produces are not only accounted for but called for: any “mere single sentence, or direct definition” would “obscure by limiting” (TD, 412). Faced with such a hermeneutic task, the reader is not asked—as she or he is in Democratic Vistas—to be “complete” but to contribute a partial outline better to help understand the whole. To further complicate these ideas, in other places Carpenter calls for formal directness. Quoting Whitman’s comments in the preface that he would not have “any elegance, or effect, or originality, to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains,” Carpenter affirms that “there is that idea of the necessity, the inevitableness, the absolute directness of all good art-work […], which is at the farthest pole from the elaborate study of artificial effects and the grandiose style. Whitman does not want the richest curtains to hang between him and others.”55 Poetry must not obscure but should instead reveal; the quotation continues: “What I tell I tell for precisely what it is . . . . What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.” The poet who accompanies the reader is reflected back

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  51 in the same image.56 There is to be no obstacle between author and reader, and moreover the reader’s view of him- or herself must be unimpeded. The same mirror image book-ends the poem “Towards Democracy”: “These things I, writing, translate for you—I wipe a mirror and place it in your hands” appears near the beginning (TD, 13); “I—who write—translate for you these thoughts: I wipe a mirror and place it in your hands” near the end (TD, 94). In employing the mirror as a symbol of self-knowledge, Whitman and Carpenter make a statement about their artistic mission; their task as poets is to help their readers, Delphic-like, to know themselves: “Who you are I know not, but I have it before me that you shall know” (TD, 144). Alluding to the sentiments attributed to St. Paul, “For now we see though a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12), Carpenter’s mirror conversely allows the whole to be seen. The poet cleans the glass, “translating” what is already there, facilitating perception through mediation. Expression must, then, be both indirect enough to communicate expansive concepts and direct enough to reveal rather than obscure—a difficult set of demands to negotiate, especially as formal innovation may introduce impediments of its own for readers familiar with more conventional styles. There is an interesting tension between the work that Carpenter does to celebrate the indirectness of “mountain-fact” texts on the one hand and the work that he does to explain them on the other, a productive friction between his insistence that his readers unfold his message for themselves and the anxiety he betrays about it being correctly decoded. This dualism is encapsulated in the mirror image and, indeed, is evident in Carpenter’s wider use of metaphor and symbolism. In his prize-winning student essay, which first made use of the seed image, Carpenter justified the comparison of the life of a nation to that of a plant. He argued that though the careless use of simile was a common cause of error, in some questions no form of argument could be better founded than in “the right use of analogy.”57 In Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure he commented that “we are obliged to use images to think by—e.g., the opening of a flower or the accretive growth of a coral reef—and possibly it would save a good deal of trouble if we did not disguise by long words the truth that all our theories in science and philosophy are simply metaphors of this kind—but the fact still lies behind and below them.”58 In the core symbols of Towards Democracy— the seed, the ocean, the mirror—Carpenter believed that he had found the most effective vehicles to communicate the underlying “fact” of his philosophy-as-metaphor, and these were reintroduced, recycled and developed in his prose writings to further clarify his evolutionary anthropologic philosophy.

“The Word Democracy” The “word” (or “Word”) is itself a key construct in Towards Democracy, trailed elusively through the text before finally being identified in the title of the poem “The Word Democracy” (TD, 217). For example, “The word

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travels on” (TD, 59, 60); “All depends upon a Word spoken” (TD, 56); “All depends upon a word spoken or unspoken” (TD, 58); “The word which waited so long to be spoken” (TD, 117). “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” begins the Gospel of John and the word “democracy” works in similar relation to the composite divine of the universal self; it is not merely a sign but a life force. The poem begins: Underneath all now comes this Word, turning the edges of the other words where they meet it. Politics, art, science, commerce, religion, customs and methods of daily life, the very outer shows and semblances of ordinary objects— The rose in the garden, the axe hanging behind the door in the outhouse— Their meanings must all now be absorbed and recast in this word, or else fall off like dry husks before its disclosure. (TD, 217–18) In a poem that potently captures the rub of Carpenter’s philosophy and its social and political implications, this opening stanza takes a linguistic turn. The arresting opening image of the edges of words curling when another word is in brought into play indicates semantic instability and that meanings are relational. Whitman had set a precedent for such semantic considerations in ­Democratic Vistas. Meaning was not yet bound into the word “democracy,” nor could it be until it was put into practice: We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted. (PP, 984) The “history” of democracy lay somewhat oxymoronically in the future; as it was acted out the word would acquire additional layers of meaning and the “sign of democracy” vaunted in “Song of Myself” would become filled (PP, 50). Ed Folsom suggests that Whitman’s evolutionary faith in a democratic future thus renders “any act of actual definition impossible.”59 Though a final definition was deferred, the process was itself crucial to Carpenter’s exfoliative model. Like Whitman, in “The Word Democracy” he was concerned with the development of this “sign,” with the acquisition of meaning and its relations to lived experience. Rather than studying it in isolation he emphasizes semantic interconnectedness: in the same way that the universal self included and encompassed all other selves, the word “democracy” was seen to include and encompass all other words. It would change or “recast” the meanings of all other words, but conversely they would all contribute to its athletic, composite meaning. As a linguistic unit, a

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  53 political theory and a set of spiritual values, “democracy” was to impinge on every aspect of life; this is enacted in the crowded second line: “Politics, art, science, commerce, religion, customs and methods of daily life, the very outer shows and semblances of ordinary objects—” (TD, 217). This permeation is reinforced by the contrast of the juxtaposed “rose” and “axe”—representing the natural and the manmade, open air and the indoors, beauty and power, softness and rigidity, creation and destruction—all brought together and “absorbed” in the collective meaning of “democracy.” “Art can now no longer be separated from life” declares the speaker in the third stanza (TD, 218). The mimetic relationship would have to be radically remodeled, as Carpenter restates in Angels’ Wings: There is a strong impression that the Democratic idea as it grows and spreads will have a profound influence on Art and artistic methods; and that Art, in its relation to life generally, is in these days passing into new phases of development.60 “The Word Democracy” charts such a transition: “old canons fail” and literature becomes “equivalent to Nature.” Science is affected, too: it “empties itself out of the books; all that the books have said only falls like the faintest gauze before the reality.” The politician becomes “baffled” and reaches “for help to the hand of the People.” The commercial man realizes that “to give now seems better than to get.” Every aspect of society changes, all “customs” and “structures”; “the long-accepted axioms of every day life are dislocated like a hill-side in a landslip” (TD, 218). The poem exfoliates. With the “word” at its heart from the title and opening line, it unfolds in increasingly far-reaching images until the “word” is again revealed and named in the body of the text for the first time. No Christian “Word of God,” this destruction/creation story cycles back to “Democracy”: In all directions gulfs and yawning abysses, The ground of society cracking, the fire showing through, The old ties giving way beneath the strain, and the great pent heart heaving as though it would break— At the sound of the new word spoken— At the sound of the word Democracy. (TD, 219) The initial impact of the word, at the beginning of the poem, is very gentle— words turning as they meet, meanings slowly altering—but soon becomes cataclysmic with the wholesale destruction of known society in chasms and raging infernos. The hellish images are reinforced by those of great natural disruption: “No volcano bursting up through peaceful pastures is a greater revolution than this; / No vast mountain chain thrown out from ocean depths to form the primitive streak of a new continent looks further down

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54  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic the future” (TD, 219). These processes are violent but vital for evolutionary development. The poem appears as the second in the “After Civilisation” section of Towards Democracy, after the titular poem. The apocalypse it depicts is not final; humanity must necessarily struggle to cast off the husks of “­Civilisation” in order to move into the fully realized stage of existence for which it was destined. It is not, Carpenter writes in Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, that great material change is to be succeeded by intellectual and moral revolution, but the other way around.61 As words must throw off the husks of their former meanings in the first stanza, so must society and so will humankind: “The forming of the wings of Man beneath the outer husk— / The outspread pinions of Equality, whereon arising he shall at last lift himself over the Earth and launch forth to sail through Heaven” (TD, 219). So ends the poem in the transcendent moment, testifying to the power of the word, spoken and written, and to the power of exfoliation, composed with the intention that it would itself serve the purpose it describes. An interviewer for the Christian Commonwealth, probably Fenner Brockway, asked Carpenter why he called the book Towards Democracy. ­ Carpenter explained his ideas about the universal self that existed “latently or consciously in all other persons” and specified that he did not use the word democracy “in the sense that it is used by politicians” but as a “key” to that composite conception of personality (“Towards Freedom and Equality, An Interview with Mr. Edward Carpenter,” December 11, 1912, 177–78). With a touch of disingenuousness, he distances his linguistic gymnastics from that of the political world where, as noted in the introduction, democracy also had no fixed meaning. As Carpenter was fully aware, not only party politicians engaged in what Robert Saunders calls the “new battlefields for democratic debate, from Ireland and the Empire to socialism and Home Rule,” but political and social activists of all hues.62 If socialist ideas were fomenting in him during the writing of the first part of Towards Democracy, he was fully committed to the cause by the time the second part was published in 1885 and had become very well known on the socialist circuit when the third and fourth parts were added in 1892 and 1902.63 It was, therefore, written from a socialist perspective and read as a socialist text, and Carpenter’s “democracy” contributed towards socialist understandings of the word and concept. The point Carpenter makes is that politics was not the endpoint of democracy but merely one manifestation of it. His socialism is framed accordingly: in the same way that he believed Hyndman’s England for All fulfilled “a want for the time by giving a definite text for the social argument,” socialism “provided a text for a searching criticism of the old society” (MDD, 114, 126). As his good friend Charles Sixsmith stated, “His Socialism was one facet only of his many-sided philosophy.”64 To return to the “mountain-fact” metaphor, socialism was “an intellectual ‘view’ of some fact” and not the fact itself; it was a way of understanding, and attaining, the social aspects of Carpenter’s evolutionary democratic spiritual philosophy. Folsom’s entry on democracy in the Walt Whitman encyclopedia interprets the American poet’s democratic selfhood in the same way Carpenter does.

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  55 He calls it “a radical act of imagining how one could share an identity with every member of the society, a radical act of learning to love difference by recognizing the possibility of that difference within a multitudinous self, a self that had been enlarged by nondiscriminatory practice and by love that crossed conventional boundaries.”65 Theories and rhetorical strategies that unsettled the relationship between self and other were not, of course, unique to Carpenter and Whitman. “When I say ‘you’ ’tis the common soul, / The collective, I mean—the race of Man / That receives life in parts to live in a whole,” wrote Browning in 1855 for instance.66 But the weighting the idea received in Leaves of Grass and then in Towards Democracy was unusual, as was the particular purchase it gained in various forms within the socialist community. The ­American writer Edward Bellamy, for example, wrote in 1874 (and re-read with approval when he published his 1888 socialist best-seller Looking Backward): Seeing there is in every human being a soul common in nature with all other souls, but in a measure isolated by the conditions of individuality, it is easy to understand the origin of that cardinal motive of human life, which is a tendency and a striving to absorb or be absorbed in or united with other lives and all life. This passion for losing ourselves in others or for absorbing them into ourselves, which rebels against individuality as an impediment, is then the expression of the greatest law of solidarity.67 For Carpenter individuality could never be an “impediment”; solidarity did not require the abandonment of individualism. Provided the underlying spirit was one of cooperation not competition, the universal self thrived on difference and variety. His socialism, even at its most Marxist in the early 1880s, thus emphasized individual liberty within—but not apart from—the common weal. He was sympathetic towards anarchism and came to believe in a “double collectivism”: organized socialism in which “voluntary collectivism” would thrive.68 “If this seems an odd mixture of Anarchism and State-Socialism,” he wrote, “it has to be remembered […] that there is not the smallest chance of any ‘ideal,’ pure and simple, of society being at any time absolutely realised.”69 ­Democracy was so expansive and people so different that socialism was inevitably going to be varied. Carpenter rejected Whitman’s belief that all theories or “isms” must be equally accepted. Those that hindered rather than helped the movement towards democracy must be shed, husk-like. In this sense Thomas is right to categorize Carpenter’s poetry as “confrontational,” “adversarial” and “oppositional.”70 In Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure Carpenter argued that the introduction of private property and consequent disparity in the distribution of wealth brought about the stage of “Civilisation.” Towards Democracy duly rails against property, landownership, poverty, poor working conditions, social conventions and stifling respectability. But within the parameters of socialist philosophy Carpenter applied the same rule of non-exclusion. As discussed in the introduction, his socialist allegiances were varied—from the Fellowship of the New Life to the Fabians,

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56  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic from Hyndman to Morris to Prince Kropotkin. He celebrated socialism’s diversity: “If the movement had been pocketed by any one man or section it would have been inevitably narrowed down. As it is, it has taken on something of an oceanic character; and if by its very lack of narrowness it has lost a little in immediate results, its ultimate success we may think is all the more assured” (MDD, 126). The ocean metaphor surfaces again. In keeping with his conviction that the general teaching of the movement was more influential than that of any individual group or society, a major part of Carpenter’s socialist work became the campaign to convince other socialists of what he came to call the “larger socialism.” He wrote to Keir Hardie, for instance, to complain about an unflattering cartoon published in the Labour Leader of the Trade Unionist John Burns. It was unworthy, he thought, of a “generous and large-minded” labor policy. In a Clarion article on party democracy he urged socialist activists to realize that each was doing important work in different ways, that they were constructing different parts of the same building.71 This was not always well managed or well received. His 1897 edited collection Forecasts of the Coming ­Century struggled awkwardly to synthesize contributions on different themes by very different socialists (Alfred Russel Wallace, Tom Mann, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw, among others). But it could also be extremely effective, as the following newspaper report of a lecture given by Carpenter in Chesterfield on “The Larger Socialism” recounts: Confirmed Unionists sat side by side with the “red-hot” Socialist, while the Liberals were seen in part of the Hall. We could also detect the nominal agnostic, listening with equal eagerness to the preachers of the gospel who were present. In a word, every political, religious, and irreligious opinion was represented—and all appeared to agree with the speaker—and why? That is the subject of this article. Mr. Carpenter was announced to speak on Socialism—which he did—but far more than the commonly recognized Socialism. He lifted the subject beyond all political parties, and appealed to us as men—to treat each other as men. He made us feel that rare feeling in political meetings, namely, that the subject was far beyond any political party gain over another. He appealed not for the success of any party, but for the homeless. His concern was not so much the success of any Government, as that every man should be given the chance to earn his bread, and keep his family respectable. […] One felt that his subject was beyond all divisions of party. He appealed to the man to look at his less fortunate brother, and asked who was to blame? A very fine and interesting argument was advanced from, we believe, the philosophy of Bhagavad-Gila [sic]. There we learn that the pure man is the man who lives the life of sacrifice until he feels the impulse of another’s woes, equally to his own. All men are of one life. All men are

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  57 part of one body, and the same life permeates all. Deep down beneath the common impulses, is a current which is—ours—our real self. A current of unselfishness, sacrifice, and sympathy for each other, which is positively natural to us. Anything short of this is a diversion of our better self. […] With such a theme, well might Mr. Carpenter give the title of his lecture “The Larger Socialism,” for he brought us in his quiet way, face to face with our own shallowness. His poignant questions were as mirrors to ourselves. Slowly, he lifted the veil of our sham and subtle society, until we saw the struggling submerged millions—heard their cries; and felt, alas! Surely this man must have lived near them until he had made their burdens his own; until he had learnt “to weep with those who weep.”72 I have quoted at some length because the article demonstrates Carpenter’s message of democracy being received by socialists in exactly the way that he intended, right down to the mirror imagery. Though Whitman is not mentioned directly, his influence can be strongly felt: the universal self was to unite trade unionists, socialists and liberals and to direct their focus squarely on the people who needed material help. Carpenter’s worldview was, then, material and well as spiritual. It insisted that the perceived divide between the two was as artificial as that of body and soul. The body itself was a democratic model, and comradeship a physical demonstration of spiritual interconnectedness. What made ­Carpenter “cling” to Rossetti’s little blue book in the first place, he recalled, “was largely the poems which celebrate comradeship” (MDD, 65). C ­ arpenter’s comradeship, like Whitman’s, was both personal and political—and the slippage between the two is significant.73 In Towards Democracy “comradeship” is used to describe intimate lovemaking between two men (“For the glorified face of him I love: the long days out alone together in the woods, the nights superb of comradeship and love”; TD, 90) and the values that democratic society would be founded on (“Democracy just begins to open her eyes and peep! […] Faithfulness emerges, self-reliance, self-help, passionate comradeship”; TD, 58). Whitman’s “Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd” speaks to how the two senses of the term might work together, especially when read in the light of Carpenter’s own use of the ocean image: Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me, Whispering I love you, before long I die, I have travel’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you, For I could not die till I once look’d on you, For I fear’d I might afterward lose you. Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe, Return in peace to the ocean my love, I too am part of that ocean my love, we are not so much separated, Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect! (PP, 263; italics as printed)

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58  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic Tenderly, the intimate connections between the two are placed within a wider holding space of the connections between all. Personal relationships make up the ocean of humanity, the new democracy, and this was the message of the socialist gospel that Carpenter preached: love one another deeply and in new ways. Carpenter’s hopes for a sexual coupling with Whitman were thus both deeply personal and part of his wider sense of social calling. “I have cherished the thought that if I came to know you and be known by you, I might be the beginning, or at least one of a small band of followers who by the force of personal intercourse and attachment might have the strength (which it is so hard to have alone) to move the world,” wrote Carpenter unhappily, apparently in the face of a rejection.74 For socialism to succeed Carpenter believed that it had to embrace an inclusive model of personal relations. “Lovers of [their] own sex” were specifically called on in “Towards Democracy” to join with “lovers of all handicrafts and of labor in the open air” to arise. As “first interpreters” and “holders up of new ideals” these forward-thinking people were to “create ­Democracy” by their very presence (TD, 33). As Gregory Woods puts it, Carpenter believed that love between men “had not yet been properly recognized as a creative force” to engender a “saner, more egalitarian” society.75 Cross-class friendships and relationships were important for similar reasons. In the manner of Whitman, Carpenter idealizes the artisan system and the male body, affiliating them in what Andrew Lawson describes as a “utopian, communal form of production.”76 In Terry Mulcaire’s words, quoted by Lawson, for Whitman “productive activity becomes an aesthetic end in itself, where all activity occurs within the boundaries of a body whose scope and powers will have been enhanced in revolutionary fashion.”77 Substitute “revolutionary” for “evolutionary” and Mulcaire’s assessment holds equally as true for ­Carpenter. Many socialists shied away from the sexual aspect of ­Carpenter’s philosophy—“the whole subject is ‘nasty’ to me” protested Blatchford—yet a more general concept of comradeship, of which the attractive, strong, healthy laborer was the key aesthetic symbol or, as Stephen Yeo puts it, “an archetype of the movement” flourished (more on this in later chapters).78 Before Edward Carpenter’s friend Tom Maguire died at 29, the Leedsbased trade unionist, socialist activist, poet and journalist considered the importance of going beyond theoretical conceptualizations of socialism: People call themselves Socialists but what they really are is just ordinary men with Socialist opinions hung round; they haven’t got it inside them. It’s hard, very hard; we get mixed up in disputes among ­ourselves … and can’t keep a straight line for the great thing, even if we all of us know what that is.79 This was Carpenter’s goal. Not merely to educate, to “make socialists” or even to reform (though these were all important) but to reveal to his readers their

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  59 true identity, to prompt an inner transformation that would in turn prompt social change. Oscar Wilde concluded his favorable review of C ­ arpenter’s Chants of Labour in the Pall Mall Gazette with the commendation that “to make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.”80 The model of exfoliation affirms human agency and creativity: “If Society moves by an ordered and irresistible march of its own, so also […] does the individual,” declares Carpenter; “In his right place the individual is also irresistible.”81 Tanner suggests that “in the inevitable extensions of biology into economics, Lamarckism is compatible with socialism; Darwinism with laissez-faire capitalism.”82 For Carpenter and many of his supporters, at least, this assessment would have rung true. Lamarckian exfoliation offered an alternative to the high Victorian narrative of progress through industrialization, trade and commerce that Carpenter sketched in Towards Industrial Freedom: Now every one will allow that Competition, in the sense of a reasonable emulation in good work and efficiency, is a very sensible and proper thing. But it must be remembered that the Political Economists and the Industrial leaders of the early nineteenth century went far beyond this. They laid it down, in their great principle of laissez-faire, that no restraint should be placed upon individual effort in the midst of the great struggle for existence. In consequence, every “human and moral” law had been broken and the suffering of those “trampled underfoot in the struggle” greatly increased.83 Exfoliation allowed for social revolution (the struggle to break through and discard the capitalist husk) but was essentially gradualist. It proved particularly serviceable when it became obvious that social transformation was not immediately imminent, as had been assumed in the heady early days of the socialist revival. Despite his evolutionary faith, Carpenter was disheartened at the pace of progress. “One gets rather sick waiting for the S.R. at times!” he wrote to John Bruce Glasier in 1890, “I sometimes think it will never come in this country—only an S.E. (without the R!) which would be in many ways disappointing.”84 This disappointment seeps through “The Broken Tool,” a poem published five years before his death in the Nation & Athenaeum: The broken tool lies: In the dust it lies forgotten—but the building goes on without delay. Who knows what dreams it had—this rusty old shaftless thing? […] Dreams of the beautiful finished structure, white with its myriad pinnacles, against the sky; Dreams of days and years of busy work, and the walls growing beneath it; Dreams of its own glory—absurd dreams of a temple built with one tool! (May 17, 1924, 205)

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60  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic In contrast to Whitman’s celebration of progress in “Song of the BroadAxe” (PP, 330–41) Carpenter’s tool is inactive, defined by the static verb “lies.” Speaking as a broken and discarded tool, the subject has understood that it will not see the final result of its labor; the rueful acknowledgement of egotism in having such hopes for one’s own usefulness is quietly affecting. Carpenter’s ideas, however, actually reached the peak of their popularity in the early twentieth century. Stanley Unwin, who had become his publisher, wrote in 1918 that “your books have never had a larger or more appreciative public than To-day [sic],” adding “I cannot recall any book that has had such a remarkable career in the matter of sales as ‘Towards Democracy’; and I imagine this last half year’s sale has broken all records.”85 Certainly, admiration was not universal. The lifestyle he adopted—­vegetarianism, market gardening, simple dress—and the b ­ ewildering number of subjects he wrote on garnered hostility and opened him to charges of “faddishness.”86 ­Having famously introduced Indian-style footwear into socialist fashion, jibes about his sandal-wearing socialism were plentiful, with George ­Bernard Shaw leading the way in his life-long caricaturing of Carpenter as the “Noble ­Savage.” Yet for a time Carpenter carried weight in the movement. If ­Carpenter found his “text” in socialism, many socialists found their text in Towards Democracy. The 1897 Labour Annual predicted that “before many years have elapsed, there will be few in the Labour Movement who will not count [Towards Democracy] an indispensable companion.”87 Fenner Brockway, twentieth-century Labour politician and one-time ­editor of the Labour Leader, memorably recollected in the New Leader that “‘Towards Democracy’ was our Bible” and Carpenter “the greatest spiritual inspiration of our lives” (“A Memory of Edward Carpenter,” July 5, 1929, 6). “Carpenter’s ‘Towards ­Democracy’ stamped him as poet and prophet for generations to come,” a front-page interview in the Labour Leader read; he was the “poet on whom the mantle of Whitman fell” (“C. L. E.,” “Towards the Real Democracy: An Interview with Edward Carpenter,” August 20, 1909, 1). In the Yorkshire Weekly Post ­Holbrook Jackson thought that in many ways Carpenter fulfilled “Walt Whitman’s idea of the poet of the future” (“Edward Carpenter,” January 13, 1906, 15). ­Katharine Bruce Glasier avowed, “It is no exaggeration for many of us inside and outside the political S­ ocialist movement to say that Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Edward ­Carpenter’s Towards Democracy have become as a kind of ­Twentieth-Century Old and New Testament, fulfilling rather than destroying the work of others that have gone before them in our lives.”88 ­Comments such as Glasier’s seem to indicate a sense that ­Whitman’s democratic inspiration, powerful though it was, was not sufficient for the movement. As ­forward-thinking as the American poet had been, in the light of developments in art, psychology, and social and sexual norms he was perhaps not modern enough. As socialism developed it also became increasingly clear, to some, that he wasn’t socialist enough. The movement needed its own literature. A. H. Moncur Sime rewrote Emerson’s

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demand for the ideal poet in “The Poet” (1844)—often said to be fulfilled by Whitman—for the ­socialist cause: Someone has said that while we have had many able writers who were thoroughgoing Socialists, and many great Socialists who have been able writers, we still await the great Socialist writer. It is suggested that the writer we are awaiting must have prophetic vision and great literary power. In Carpenter such an one has indeed come.89 Though his reputation would fade as the twentieth century progressed, by these reckonings Carpenter had indeed achieved what he set out to do, to carry on the work that Whitman had begun. In stark contrast to the “Eagle Street College” men discussed in the next chapter, Carpenter’s sense of discipleship waned over time. He retained his faith in Leaves of Grass as a prophetic text throughout his life but increasingly ­Whitman’s personal flaws became problematic. The manuscript versions of Carpenter’s articles about his two visits to Whitman in 1877 and 1884 (published first in William Clarke’s Progressive Review, then gathered into Days with Walt Whitman) are revealing. Written in a measured tone, the published accounts convey a deep, considered admiration for ­Whitman. The manuscripts, however, tell a different story. The first is unreservedly adulatory and emotional while the second is overtly critical—in some places scathingly so—of the poet’s “cussedness” and ­egotism.90 Though he remained publicly loyal and stayed on amicable terms with Whitman until his death, Carpenter had outgrown the hero of his youth, a change that Whitman noticed. ­Contemplating a letter received from Carpenter in 1889, perceptibly cooler and more perfunctory than his earlier correspondence, Whitman asked Traubel whether or not there was “a certain aloofness, withdrawnness” in the letter: “I seem to sense some sort of reserve there that I had not noticed formerly in Edward. What’s the truth of it?” (WWC, 4, 169). The truth was that for Carpenter Whitman had made his contribution to an evolutionary social and spiritual movement that had now passed well beyond him. As we shall see in the next chapter, for the ­Whitmanites who Carpenter had come to know in near-by Bolton the opposite was true: socialism would not truly prevail until it understood and accepted the spiritual message that Whitman, its major prophet, had taught.

Notes 1. Carpenter, My Days and Dreams, 64; hereafter cited in text as MDD. 2. Carpenter to Oates, 27 November 1882, Carpenter Collection, 351/34. 3. Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 169–70. 4. Ibid., 171, 188. 5. Pannapacker, Revised Lives, 107.

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62  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic 6. Sixsmith, draft of lecture, “Edward Carpenter, Poet and Reformer,” delivered at the Bolton Labour Church and the Farnworth Literary and Debating Society, 1898–1899, Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1171/3/2. 7. Carpenter, Towards Democracy, repr. 1985, 27. All references to Towards Democracy are from this edition unless otherwise stated; hereafter cited in text as TD. 8. Rossetti, Poems by Walt Whitman, 5. 9. Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 173. 10. Ibid., 171. On Carpenter as Whitman’s “translator” see also Elfenbein, “­Whitman, Democracy, and the English Clerisy.” Elfenbein’s discussion situates Carpenter’s mediation as a reworking of Coleridge’s concept of the clerisy. 11. Rowbotham, A Life of Liberty and Love, 15–16. On Carpenter’s life and works see also Rowbotham and Weeks, Socialism and the New Life; Tsuzuki, Edward Carpenter; Robertson, Worshipping Walt, 168–88; Pierson, “Edward C ­ arpenter: Prophet of a Socialist Millennium”; Brown’s edited collection Edward ­Carpenter and Late Victorian Radicalism; also the chapter on Carpenter in Marsden’s doctoral dissertation, “Hot Little Prophets,” 215–365. 12. Carpenter, “On the Continuance of Modern Civilisation,” 1866, Carpenter Collection, MSS 1. 13. Carpenter, Modern Money-Lending, 4–5; pamphlet repr. in Carpenter, England’s Ideal, 20–44. 14. Carpenter, Co-operative Production, 11. 15. Carpenter, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta, 156–57. 16. Ibid., 177. 17. Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, 50. 18. Carpenter, Days with Walt Whitman, 83. 19. These lines of Carpenter’s are singled out by Blatchford as being more “graceful” and “tender” than any in Leaves of Grass (“An Angel Unawares,” Clarion, April 16, 1892, 2). 20. Elfenbein, “Whitman, Democracy, and the English Clerisy,” 94. 21. Carpenter, Towards Democracy, 1883, 1. 22. Gershenowitz, “Two Lamarckians”; Tanner, “Poet of Lamarckian Evolution.” 23. Gershenowitz, “Two Lamarckians,” 38. 24. Ibid., 37. 25. Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, 181. 26. Tanner, “Poet of Lamarckian Evolution,” 3. 27. See, for example, Livesey, “Morris, Carpenter, Wilde,” 610; Brown, Edward Carpenter and Late Victorian Radicalism, 5–6. For Carpenter’s own detailed description see his chapter on “Exfoliation” in Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure. 28. Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, 186. 29. Carpenter to Sixsmith, 4 September 1901, Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1171/1/4/9. 30. Carpenter, Pagan and Christian Creeds, 16. 31. Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, 190. 32. Ibid., 199. For an extended use of the metaphor see Carpenter, England’s Ideal, 46–48. 33. The seed image can also be seen in “The Voice of the Rain” (PP, 629–30) and “Unseen Buds” (PP, 654). 34. In “After Civilisation,” for example: “Slowly out of the ruins of the past—like a young fern-frond uncurling out of its own brown litter— / Out of the litter of a decaying society, out of the confused mass of broken down creeds, customs, ideals […] I saw a new life arise” (TD, 215–16).

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Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic  63 35. This is the central premise of the title chapter in Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, 15–78. On the infancy of civilization metaphor in nineteenth-century ­discourse see Vaninskaya, William Morris, 30. 36. Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 176–77. 37. Carpenter, Pagan and Christian Creeds, 16. 38. Carpenter, Days with Walt Whitman, 75; cf. PP, 510. 39. Ibid., 76. For Thomas’s discussion of the implications of this observation see Transatlantic Connections, 187–88. For Carpenter, Whitman “shared the wisdom of the ancient prophets of every culture and civilization,” writes Thomas, but was also “unique in his consciousness that his role totally transcended nation and culture, an awareness he owed to the modern technological development that had made global intercommunications possible” (188). 40. Carpenter, Days with Walt Whitman, 55, 78, 81. 41. Ibid., 133. 42. Ibid., 77. 43. Ibid., 77; cf. PP, 43. 44. Carpenter to Salt, 24 November 1890, Carpenter Collection, 354/11. 45. Livesey, “Morris, Carpenter, Wilde,” 602. 46. Carpenter, untitled sermon, n.d., Carpenter Collection, 2/8. 47. Livesey, “Morris, Carpenter, Wilde,” 611. 48. Carpenter, Angels’ Wings, 116–39. 49. Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 187. 50. Carpenter to Wallace, 19 July1892, Whitman Collection, ZWN 9/149. Whitman expresses a similar sentiment in conversation with Traubel about the omission of his name: “It was deliberate—not an accident. It would be sacrilege to put a name there—it would seem just like putting a name on the universe. It would be ridiculous to think of Leaves of Grass belonging to any one person: at the most I am only a mouthpiece. My name occurs inside the book—that is enough if not more than enough. I like the feeling of a general partnership—as if the Leaves was anybody’s who chooses just as truly as mine” (WWC, 2, 77–78). 51. Carpenter, Angels’ Wings, 11. 52. Carpenter, Days with Walt Whitman, 111. 53. Ibid., 116. 54. Iser, The Implied Reader, 280. 55. Carpenter, Angels’ Wings, 4–5; cf. PP, 14. 56. See also “I Know that You are Self-Conscious”; Carpenter returns to the mirror symbol, asking “Do you not see, this time, that there is some one else looking in it also / Beside you, over your shoulder?” (TD, 150). 57. Carpenter, “On the Continuance of Modern Civilisation,” 1866, Carpenter ­Collection, MSS 1. 58. Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, 201. 59. Whitman, Democratic Vistas: The Original Edition in Facsimile, xvii. 60. Carpenter, Angels’ Wings, 1. 61. Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, 200–201. 62. Saunders, “Democracy,” 143. 63. The fourth section, “Who Shall Command the Heart,” was published separately in 1902 and added to Towards Democracy in 1905. 64. Sixsmith, “Edward as I Knew Him,” in Edward Carpenter: In Appreciation, ed. Beith, 215–33 (223). 65. LeMaster and Kummings, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman, 174.

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64  Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetic 6. Browning, “Old Pictures in Florence,” The Poems of Robert Browning, 325. 6 67. Bellamy, The Religion of Solidarity, 31. 68. Carpenter, Towards Industrial Freedom, 94; see also Prisons, Police and ­Punishment, 108. 69. Carpenter, Forecasts of the Coming Century, 191. 70. Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 177. 71. Both examples are given by Tsuzuki in Edward Carpenter, 117–18. 72. “The Larger Hope,” Carpenter Collection, Newspaper Cuttings Box 1/84; no authorship or date but details in surrounding cuttings suggest that the lecture was delivered ca. March 20, 1910. 73. For Carpenter’s pioneering writing on sex and gender see Love’s Coming of Age and The Intermediate Sex. 74. Carpenter to Whitman, n.d.; quoted in Rowbotham, A Life of Liberty and Love, 56. 75. Woods, “Still on My Lips,” 133. Woods considers Carpenter as one of a group of late nineteenth-century English men, including Oscar Wilde and John Addington Symonds, who read Whitman enthusiastically for his “exuberant homoeroticism” (129). In Between Men Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick maps responses to Whitman from Carpenter, Symonds, Wilde and D. H. Lawrence onto a reaction against effeminate associations of same-sex desire. Pannapacker revisits the subject in “The Bricklayer Shall Lay Me” and “‘What is a Man Anyhow?’: Whitmanites, Wildeans, and Working-Class ‘Comradeship’” in Revised Lives, 105–27. Like Sedgwick, Pannapacker reads Carpenter’s response to Whitman as part of an “evolving construction of a masculine homosexual identity”(“The Bricklayer Shall Lay Me,” 288). 76. Lawson, Class Struggle, 25. On the body of the laboring man as symbol of democracy in Carpenter’s philosophy see Livesey, “Morris, Carpenter, Wilde.” 77. Mulcaire, “Publishing Intimacy in Leaves of Grass,” 475. 78. Blatchford to Carpenter, 11 January 1894, Carpenter Collection, 386/46; Yeo, “Religion of Socialism,” 34. 79. Quoted in Rowbotham and Weeks, Socialism and the New Life, 73. 80. Wilde, Selected Journalism, 35. 81. Carpenter, England’s Ideal, 53. 82. Tanner, “Poet of Lamarckian Evolution,” 13. 83. Carpenter, Towards Industrial Freedom, 21. 84. Carpenter to Glasier, 2 May 1890; quoted in Tsuzuki, Edward Carpenter, 95. 85. Unwin to Carpenter, 2 March 1918, Carpenter Collection, 267/182. 86. For a detailed discussion of Carpenter’s“faddishness”see“Socialism, Masculinity and the ‘Faddist’ Sage,” in Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism, 102–31. Carpenter reflected that “faddists of all sorts and kinds considered me their special prey. [...] A friend suggested (and the idea was not a bad one) that I should put up at the gate a board bearing the legend ‘To the Asylum’ on it” (MDD, 167–68). 87. Edwards, Labour Annual, 1897, 257. 88. Glasier, “Edward Carpenter’s Influence,” in Edward Carpenter: In Appreciation, ed. Beith, 82–89 (86). 89. Sime, Edward Carpenter: His Ideas and Ideals, 18. 90. Carpenter, “Walt Whitman in 1877” and “Walt Whitman in 1884” manuscripts, n.d. [published in the Progressive Review in February and April 1897], Carpenter Collection, MSS 72–73.

2 Permeating Socialism

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James William Wallace and the Bolton Whitmanites

Forty miles northwest of Carpenter’s smallholding in the countryside near Sheffield lay the mill town of Bolton. A relatively untaxing train ride across the stunning Peak landscape that would in the twentieth century see the Kinder Scout mass trespass and become Britain’s first national park, it was a journey that Carpenter was familiar with. Having amassed quite a following in Bolton by the early 1890s, he gave occasional lectures on literature and socialism to reasonably sized audiences. Charles Sixsmith was amused to recall that at the Bolton Labour Church lecture where they first met, ­Carpenter was billed as the author of “England’s Ideal Civilization; its Cause and Cure,” an inadvertent blend of his most famous social critiques.1 In August 1891 Carpenter made the journey for a different reason: to meet a group of fellow Whitmanites who, like him, were on friendly terms with the poet. One had even made a similar pilgrimage across the Atlantic, spending time not only with Whitman but with his friends including Richard Maurice Bucke, Carpenter’s traveling companion that day. This meeting of the Eagle Street College, as the Bolton men playfully called themselves after the address of the place they met, was a special occasion, and not only because of their visitors. It had been decided that James William Wallace, the group’s good-natured unofficial leader, would accompany Bucke on his return trip, the costs met by contributions from the group. The farewell dinner was something of a performance, as this chapter will later discuss, but its proceedings, carefully recorded, give a reasonably typical flavor of the group. “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” was read aloud and Bucke, who had been asked to speak, test-ran some of his ideas on Whitman and evolutionary consciousness. Group members William Hutton, William Ferguson and Sam Hodgkinson all offered personal responses on the affective power of Whitman’s “love of brotherhood and camaraderie.”2 Their words were earnest, heartfelt and utterly unpretentious, revealing as much about their affection for each other as their interest in Whitman. When called on, Carpenter compared the Eagle Street College with the small socialist societies with which he had become familiar in recent years: “I do not know whether you entertain the socialistic ideal or not, but I feel that your spirit is in essence the same as theirs.” In these societies “all distinctions of class, rank, intellectual or other faculty” were merged in a “sense of abiding and deep brotherhood.” Among most of them, Carpenter

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66  Permeating Socialism claims, Whitman was “read and admired largely.” Conflating Whitmanian and socialist ideals of brotherhood, the value of socialist societies and of the Eagle Street College lay in their embodiment of the universal self, in the provision of a social space that mirrored the spiritual region “in which all might meet, in which all were truly Equal” (TD, 410). Such thinking certainly had bearing on the group’s self-perception and helps to give context to their socialist interventions. Yet for those who believed most fervently in Whitman, and in socialism, the College was not only a model of democratic comradeship: the most committed Whitmanites among them came to believe that they, like Carpenter, had a mission of global importance. As to whether or not the group “entertain[ed] the socialistic ideal,” it was a question that would be hotly debated by its members. Its origins were not political or, at least, were only so in the general way that self-­education might be thought so. The men were roughly the same age and by Wallace’s reckoning “belonged to nearly the same social stratum”: a doctor, a clergyman, a cotton-waste dealer, a hosiery manufacturer, a newspaper editor, an accountant, four clerks, two assistance architects and “one or two artisans.”3 C. Allen Clarke, who wasn’t part of the group but who was associated with it through his friendships, particularly with lifelong member Fred Wild, and who attended at least one of the College’s Whitman birthday celebrations describes Bolton society as comprising three “castes.” First, the people of means; then the lower-middle class: Composed of the best paid clerks, book-keepers, managers, and the better sort of working folks; they live in streets narrower than those of caste one, have no trees, drink their beer at smaller hotels, buy food and clothes at the smaller stores (or maybe the Co-operative Society), use the pit of the theatre, the middle and rear pews of the church, buy a newspaper or two, have a few cheap pictures on their walls (the inevitable oil-portrait of the head of the family and his spouse), get books from the public library, perhaps buy a few of their own, and walk, or use tram.4 Educated to around the age of 14, most of the Eagle Street College belonged to the lower end of this category, though a few were better off.5 There was not much money to spare, but by living simply most could manage relatively comfortably. As I shall argue, class identity—specifically a complex shared lower-class identity—was crucial to the Eagle Street College’s communal reception of Whitman and to its performative negotiation of the program of culture proposed in Democratic Vistas. The death of Wallace’s mother, with whom he had a very close bond, had a profound effect on the group’s development. At the moment of her passing he experienced an illuminating feeling of being in the presence of “Infinite Love,” which he attributed in large part to the influence of ­Whitman’s ­Specimen Days and the complete Leaves of Grass, which he had been

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Permeating Socialism  67 reading avidly for 12 months.6 The original set of Eagle Street friends had been meeting in their late adolescence to read together before an evening walk, but now the men, who had by then reached their early thirties, gathered to discuss subjects of “permanent interest and value” with Whitman as the main feature.7 In 1886 Wallace invited John Johnston to a celebratory gathering in honor of Whitman’s birthday. The personable young doctor had moved to Bolton from Scotland a decade earlier and slotted readily into the group, fast becoming, as Fred Wild recalled, one of its most enthusiastic “Whitmanites” (a term the men used themselves), alongside Wallace and himself.8 A year later, Wallace and Johnston set about writing their first letter to the American poet, a more tentative, awkward affair than Carpenter’s relaxed composition—and included a gift of 10 pounds. To their surprise and delight Whitman responded with brief notes of thanks, prompting them to write with birthday wishes each year until Johnston, advised to travel for reasons of health, took the opportunity to visit America in 1890. He was a hit with the Camden coterie, and the relationship between Whitman and the Eagle Street College warmed into firm friendship, with the College receiving over 120 letters and postcards from Whitman during his lifetime.9 “What staunch tender fellows those Englishmen are!” Whitman exclaimed, instructing Bucke to tell them so upon arrival.10 At the same time, socialism was making its mark on Bolton’s political landscape. Characterized by C. Allen Clarke as “Spindleton,” capital of “Steam Engine Land,” in his novel based on the 1887 engineers’ strike, the town was famous for its textiles.11 The scale of industry was immense and the pace of development rapid, both in the cotton business and in the engineering and coal mining industries that powered it. Spinning mills dominated the town, with thousands of men and women employed in the 200 or so that lay in and around Bolton.12 Clarke counted 152 cotton-spinning firms and 17 engineering firms round the town in the 1890s. “I have often wondered why social reformers do not give more attention to Lancashire,” he wrote; “Lancashire is ‘the workshop of the world,’ to quote an expression which is a poor attempt to hide the prosy horror of the county under a shoddy simile that sounds like poetry; but a workshop is generally not a nice place to live in.”13 The leaders of the SDF saw revolutionary potential in the northern industrial heartlands, which seemed ripe for conflict between the capitalist and working classes. They had not accounted, as Martin Crick explains, for Lancashire’s “pervasive working-class Toryism,” and the SDF did not make the inroads it had expected during the 1880s. Tom Mann was drafted in and focused his efforts at the “point of production,” the trade unions, and on municipal electioneering, strategies that remained influential after he left Bolton and the SDF took a stronger hold.14 Across Lancashire there was a general pattern of advocating not only labor alliances but social unity, of cooperation between the SDF and the ILP when it emerged in the 1890s. By the spring of 1894 Mann saw ­Yorkshire and Lancashire as the ILP’s two principle strongholds, a growth that in

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68  Permeating Socialism Lancashire still relied on gaining Tory working-class as well as Liberal support.15 The ILP’s 1893 Municipal Program, a “comprehensive plan for social reform and urban renewal” was, Jeffrey Hill demonstrates, part of the campaign to win “a wide range of voters, not just committed socialists.”16 Robert Blatchford’s brand of socialism was enormously influential in the region, so much so that the ILP was often locally referred to as “Blatchford’s Party.”17 In David Howell’s words, “Blatchford’s style offered the prospect of access to the cakes and ale culture of urban Lancashire, an access that could rival the appeal of earthy Tory paternalists.”18 Critical of both SDF and ILP leadership, Blatchford’s approach was pragmatic but personal, eschewing national in favor of local character. His was a club culture—of rambling, cycling, handicrafts and singing—fostered through the pages of his Clarion magazine. The Bolton Clarion branch was founded in 1895, and from 1892 the Labour Church, one of the country’s largest, provided the spiritual face of the town’s socialist fellowship. Groups overlapped, sharing members and even leaders; the founder of the Bolton Labour Church, for instance, became president of the ILP while the congregation also had strong links with the SDF.19 In Bolton, socialism therefore offered what Hill describes as “a programme based upon the idea of community” rather than class or labor (emphasis Hill’s).20 Making a similar point Howell has noted that at its most superficial this played out in the typical Labour Leader assertion that “no doubt not every ILP member would pass an examination in ‘Das Capital’ [sic], but at least they knew that ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ were the true laws of life.”21 Not every member of the College equated liberty, equality or fraternity with socialism, but those attracted to the political principles of the burgeoning movement assimilated easily into a jovial and energetic associative mode of socialist activity that, as Chris Waters has argued, “attempted to develop a politics of everyday life—and a politics of popular culture.”22 Many of the College’s number became heavily involved in the local socialist community. Wild was a Clarion cyclist and known to sing recitals at ­Clarion teas. He was a founding member of the Bolton Labour Church where Sam Hodgkinson performed duties as treasurer, Sixsmith delivered lectures and others, including Johnston and Wallace, attended. A later recruit to the group, William Broadhurst, recalled being introduced to Whitman through Wild and Wentworth Dixon whom he met at a Labour Church meeting.23 Members were involved with the ILP, and Wallace became president of the small branch in his village, occasionally speaking at conferences and meetings.24 As will be discussed, Johnston and Wallace were published and reviewed in the socialist press and formed a wide network of influential socialist friends. How this related to the Eagle Street College was a vexed issue: a few of its members rejected socialism entirely; for some, the political ­movement became the defining cause, to which Whitman merely gave color; and others—Wallace, Johnston and Sixsmith particularly—shared Carpenter’s

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Permeating Socialism  69 view that socialism contributed to a much greater movement towards a transformative spiritual democracy. Crucially, if the value that the group placed on fellowship and the tradition of mutual improvement resonated with Bolton’s associational socialist culture, so, it seemed, could their mediations of Whitmanian comradeship and cultural self-reliance. I argue, moreover, that the federated structure of ILP socialism (and the Clarion and Labour Church work associated with it), which kept regional activity at its heart, fueled Wallace’s conviction that the College had a crucial role to play in these transitional times. Gauging the temperature of the socialist movement, Wallace was convinced that it was in urgent need of Whitman’s spiritual message and that he and his friends were therefore called to preach to the British democracy. Part of the Eagle Street College’s local work was to disseminate Whitman’s teachings to the wider socialist community. It was to permeate socialism with Whitman, to make Whitmanites out of socialists.

“The Greatness of Love and Democracy, and the Greatness of Religion” Described by Ed Folsom as “the major Whitman Collection outside the United States,” the material lovingly collected by the Eagle Street College is a treasure-trove for Whitman enthusiasts.25 The collection includes letters to and from the poet; books by and about him (including a rare inscribed 1855 Leaves of Grass); photographs, articles and newspaper cuttings; miscellanea including his loving cup, a sprig of juniper from his graveside and even the avian subject of his poem “My Canary Bird,” stuffed and sent with Bucke to Bolton. It was a collaborative enterprise and this, as Carolyn Masel suggests, is what makes the Bolton Whitmanites’ reception of Whitman unusual; he had other lower-class readers, but the College seems to have been “the first group of working people to receive Whitman’s poetry collectively, the first community of non-university readers.”26 How, then, did the men of the Eagle Street College read and receive ­Whitman? Traubel, to whom Wallace became extremely close, judged that they seemed “to centre and unite material which reflects devotion and perception in about equal degrees.”27 Records of the group’s meetings, verses composed and shared by its members (particularly Johnston, Dixon and a later member Walt Hawkins) and the letters sent between them and to ­Whitman certainly confirm a sense of devotion, a discipleship often commented on in critical discussion. Like Carpenter, they received Whitman not merely as an author but as a prophet (and even, at times, quasi-Messianic redeemer) of an important spiritual movement. Their shared interpretation of Whitman’s “message” came to determine the lived experience of their friendships and the language through which they were expressed. This is not to say that the detail was contributed in equal measure or at the same ­volume; the voices of those most dedicated to the exegesis of Leaves of Grass, to improving their “perception”—as Traubel put it—in a substantive,

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70  Permeating Socialism critical way, sounded the loudest: Johnston’s, Sixsmith’s and especially ­Wallace’s. If the meaning of some of the poems was “somewhat obscure” to several in the group, as Dixon wryly remembered, “lucid explanation was always forthcoming from Wallace.”28 In the final weeks of summer in 1890 Wallace took his copy of Leaves of Grass out to the Bolton countryside and composed a set of “Occasional Notes on Walt Whitman,” an exposition of what he believed to be the “­elementary themes” of his poetry: “American Democracy—the Literature it demands. Comradeship—Acceptance in Faith of the whole of life—The holy mystery and sacredness of all experience and of the bodily functions and activities— Personal immortality.”29 The hyphens indicate that the list was written, as Wallace says, “off hand,” but in addition serve to blend the themes into one another. For this reason Wallace thought his commentary weak: Whitman’s “teachings” were so interpenetrative that the attempt to extract and explicate any one would inevitably fall short. But in actual fact, he did make an effort to explain his ideas relationally; the triangular template given in “Starting from Paumanok,” of love, democracy and religion, suggests a useful way of mapping them: My comrade! For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and more resplendent, The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion. (PP, 181) The first poem of the 1860 Leaves of Grass (and in Rossetti’s edition), following the inscription poems thereafter (and in Rhys’s selection), “Starting from Paumanok” or “Proto-Leaf,” as it first appeared, is a declaration of poetic intent oriented specifically—and evocatively—towards the “New World” (PP, 176). Yet Wallace, not much of an annotator, marked the poem with four different kinds of ink in his 1892 Leaves of Grass, suggesting its ongoing personal significance. Arrowhead brackets drawn around the final line of the extract accentuate the triad of greatnesses, the zeugmatic pairing of democracy and love characterizing the third, the new religion, set apart as apex by the weight of the phrasing over the caesura breaks in both lines. For Wallace, as for Carpenter, these three core parts of Whitman’s “message” coalesced in the belief in a “higher” or universal self, the divine made up of all humanity, equalizing and connecting: This higher self we all share in common—the idiot, the commonest drudge, the rapt saint and the lofty poet. This is the real, the permanent self—the soul, the essential self—quite infinitely of more importance than all else. It is this which is the basis of the true equality, “of equal brotherhood, of democracy.” To him who sees deeply enough a

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sacred mystery, worthy of deepest awe lies in the personality of each. To him who accepts the belief in a Divine Plan in all things, and who accepts the endless life and hope and ascension which lie before each, all minor distinctions are as nothing /—God in us, and we in God— that idea will color his thoughts in all his dealings. And as the meaning of the deep saying “God is love” grows in our mind and hearts, so will universal love grow too.30 Not denying the national significance of Whitman’s “American democracy,” Wallace gives it greater scope; the development of the United States, like socialism, was part of the movement towards a wider spiritual democracy. “The conception of Democracy which regards it as only relating to forms of government, and of socialist industrial organizations,” remarked Wallace elsewhere, “stops short at the most obvious of its surface manifestations.”31 ­Whitman’s message for the United States would also become “the sustenance of humanity”; it was a message for “the modern world, for America, and for the race” (“Leaves of Grass and Optimos,” Conservator, September 1911, 104). After Bucke’s farewell dinner speech, both his and Carpenter’s ideas became increasingly influential to the group. Though Wallace was never as personally close as other College members (Sixsmith and Johnston became regular visitors at Carpenter’s Millthorpe home, holidaying on separate occasions with him and his partner George Merrill), by the twentieth century he had come to explain Whitman’s message in the same way as C ­ arpenter, using a very similar vocabulary to do so. Acknowledging ­ Carpenter’s “­seership” in the line of Whitman, a 1919 draft article on “Whitman’s ­Personality,” for example, argued that the fact of universal oneness—the “root of D ­ emocracy”—existed latently in our consciousnesses but would emerge as “evolution proceeds.” The soul would burst the “bonds of self” and pour itself out “into the great ocean of our common humanity.”32 Wallace’s interest in the universal self predated these Carpentarian formulations. It lay at the heart of his spiritual epiphany at the time of his mother’s passing and seemed to suggest a comforting personal immortality, a divine interconnection that continued after death. In the present, a sense of collective, shared identity informed relations within the College. The Eagle Street men were mindful of a “composite character” and “certain emotional atmosphere,” wrote Wallace, which belonged to the group as a whole. Singing from Whitman’s script of the many-in-one, this stemmed from their diversity and from the “curious way” that their “several personalities seemed to fit in with each other, the limitations and idiosyncrasies of each being offset and harmonized by the complementary qualities of the rest.”33 The scribblers amongst them who wrote light verse about the C ­ ollege took up the challenge in “Starting from Paumanok” to “make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble” with great gusto (PP, 183). Whitman’s simple, homely appearance reminded Wallace of “the common humanity to be met with everywhere.”34

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72  Permeating Socialism Love, the natural outgrowth of such unbounded self-identification, proved to be the most accessible point of entry into Whitman’s poetry and Wallace’s reading of it. It was the focus of the College’s communal ­reception—­appealing to those less committed to Whitman than to the fellowship of the group and easily assimilated into the socialist ideology adopted by a number of its members. Well-versed in Leaves of Grass, the Eagle Street men ranged easily through the text, reading, quoting and discussing from its full extent, but they returned time and again to the poems about comradeship. “In point of pure humanity,” Rhys had written in his preface, “this new song of America is most significant for us”; the current times of “social misgiving” wanted “a new poetry of love and c­ omradeship.”35 Thus a poem like “For You O Democracy,” which was in fact retitled “Love of Comrades” in Rossetti’s selection and in Carpenter’s Chants of Labour, could become an Eagle Street College favorite and a socialist staple: Come, I will make the continent indissoluble, I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of comrades. I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of ­America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies, I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks, By the love of comrades, By the manly love of comrades. For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme! For you, for you I am trilling these songs.36 (PP, 272) Its nationalist overtones were routinely disregarded, and Whitman’s utopian imagining of America was read as an illustration of a principle equally applicable elsewhere: comradeship was to be the structural foundation of the wider democracy. Blodgett argued in 1934 that Whitman’s appeal for many nineteenth-century British radicals was “not so much as a panegyric of political democracy as a powerfully suggestive plea for ‘brotherhood,’” but it was more that political democracy would necessarily follow where comradeship or “brotherhood” led.37 Companionship in this poem is built into cities, personified in a hearty, friendly embrace, and sown into the land, tropings that gesture towards both agricultural and industrial productive relations, establishing cooperation, not competition, as democracy’s operating mode. Comradeship was not only a celebration of democracy but a vehicle to secure it. As he had taught Carpenter, Whitman showed the Bolton Whitmanites the power of personal relationships, providing both a “model of male affection,” in Michael Robertson’s words, and a sense of political and spiritual purpose.38

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Figure 2.1  “For You O Democracy” set to music in Edward Carpenter’s socialist songbook, Chants of Labour (56–57).

Within the College community, as in “For You O Democracy,” the love of comrades was inherently gendered as “manly.” Whitman offered the group an alternative masculinity, open and emotional but not effeminate. A few of the group may have been attracted by the idea of same-sex relationships; Sixsmith was bisexual, and for others there were occasions when passionate friendship edged towards homoerotic desire. Johnston, for instance, found himself in confusing throes of emotion after unexpectedly kissing a visiting young American Whitmanite. He “touched something in my heart,” wrote the doctor, “and it has responded to his touch in a manner which fills me with a strange and indescribable feeling.”39 The College’s interest in ­Whitmanian comradeship was not, however, primarily about “sexual inversion,” to use Havelock Ellis’s favored term, or even sex. Rather, as Harry Cocks carefully explains, it allowed a space where ardent, intense attachments could develop outside the erotic, through the “substitution” of spiritual for physical communion.40 Whitman focused the men’s allegiance to each other, supplying “the language and rituals,” in Robertson’s words, through which it was lived—a fact that was self-consciously related back to him.41 On Wallace’s visit to America, for example, Thomas Harned told Whitman about a conversation over supper where Wallace had spoken about how Whitman’s influence had drawn the Bolton group together and “strengthened their comradeship.”42 Wallace let Whitman know that the College had given Fred Wild a copy of Leaves of Grass inscribed with the refrain “With the love of comrades, / With

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74  Permeating Socialism the lifelong love of comrades.”43 Likewise, Whitman received in the post a printed copy of Johnston’s verse “The Song of the Eagle Street College,” which included an epigram from “These I Singing in Spring”: “And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades” (PP, 273). Wallace drew Whitman’s attention to the quotation, adding, “You may be sure that the comradeship and affection it expresses are largely due to your influence.”44 In “These I Singing in Spring” the “token” is the calamus-root, Whitman’s phallic symbol of masculine “adhesive love.” “Interchange it youths with each other!” Whitman commands, “let none render it back!” (PP, 273). Johnston takes up the idea of the exchange of objects as the sign of adhesiveness and places his verse in the position of Whitman’s calamus plant, to be passed around Whitman and the College’s network of comrades as a marker of their attachment.

Figure 2.2  Front cover of Johnston’s “The Song of the Eagle Street College,” Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/8/1/1. Copyright of the University of Manchester.

Equally, comradeship had broader, non-gendered meanings when applied to interactions and contexts outside of the College circle. The transitive repetition across “These I Singing in Spring” and “Starting from Paumanok” simulates this doubling. In the latter, the speaker’s outlook is broad: the grand intention is to write “the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,” a love that extends outward to the reader, addressed as his “comrade,” and the whole American nation, “female and male” (PP, 178–79).

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Permeating Socialism  75 The macrocosmic vista spans out across America towards the “kosmos” (PP, 176), advancing from the “people in their own spirit” (PP, 179). “(For who but I should understand love, with all its sorrow and joy? / And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)” he asks, parenthetically in the 1860 version of “Proto-Leaf.” Some 300 pages later these lines reappear but in a subtly altered construction in “These I Singing in Spring” in the new “­Calamus” cluster, Whitman’s celebration of “manly attachment” (PP, 268): “(For who but I should understand lovers, and all their sorrow and joy? /And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)”45 The abstract idea of “love” is converted into the personal intimacy of “lovers.” The omniscient bardic voice correspondingly becomes human, the view microcosmic: the speaker here is not concerned with vast poetic vistas but with the close detail of earth, stone, moss and flower. The Bolton ­Whitmanites moved back and forth on this axis between the local and the universal, looking inwards at their own relationships and outward towards ­Whitman’s global promise in their conceptualizations of comradeship. In 1891 Wallace wrote to Whitman about a fresh feeling of obligation to carry on the poet’s work, “in particular, to establish wherever possible ‘the institution of the dear love of comrades.’”46 Dixon also used this phrase from “I Hear It Was Charged against Me” (PP, 281) to conclude a verse written in welcome of another American friend of Whitman’s: Institutions of dear love of comrades to found, We are ready, quite “ready, aye ready,” With bands of affection to bind the world round, We are ready, quite “ready, aye ready.” To stamp out class feeling, war, bitterness, strife, To establish full freedom,—abundance of life, To make brotherhoods of friends universally rife Be ready, quite “ready, aye ready.”47 It is a light-hearted poem but one that nevertheless expresses a ­willingness not only to model but to propagate Whitmanian comradeship on a grand scale. Particular applications for socialist politics are suggested, in an indication of Dixon’s broad-church ILP beliefs, by the readiness to “stamp out class feeling” rather than harness its revolutionary potential. Yet, notwithstanding the desire for class unity rather than class conflict, which was shared by the other socialists in the group, the Bolton ­Whitmanites’ self-led journey into the world of literature and literary production, open to them through the socialist press, was heavily influenced by class-based structures of feeling. In accordance with Whitman’s thematic emphasis on the “average” common man, the group’s lower-middle-class status unusually conferred a special relationship with the poet and therefore helped them, in time, to be recognized and widely acknowledged as expert readers.

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The “Worker/Poet” and the “Worker/Reader”: Class and Cultural Identity Andrew Elfenbein associates the appeal of Whitman’s poetry to lower-­ middle-class readers with a “populist elitism” caused by widening enfranchisement and educational reform. Increasingly, more men could know that however low they were in society they were above the very lowest because they had the vote; the Elementary Education Acts of the 1870s meant that more people could know they were above the lowest because they could read. Elfenbein sees Whitman’s poetry as “anchor[ing]” this moment; a taste for Whitman allowed such admirers—and the Eagle Street College is named specifically—to align with “progress toward democracy” and rebel against “bourgeois conventions of respectability” while at the same time distinguishing themselves “from the perceived vulgarity and illiteracy of the lowest ranks of society.”48 The College’s spiritual understanding of the “progress toward democracy,” however, did not permit the type of positioning E ­ lfenbein proposes. Any conscious attempt to distinguish itself from the less-educated working classes would work against the concept of the universal self, the hopes that many of its members had for socialism and the demands that Whitman himself seemed to make of his ideal reader. Rather, like Whitman, the College cultivated a mode of self-presentation which sought to align itself with the “lowest” social ranks, not merely to express solidarity but to reflect its nuanced self-identification as part of a broad-based lower-class cultural and political movement. And if the College used its admiration for Whitman as a means of associating with a particular set of class values, so it also used class as a means of identifying itself to ­Whitman as a particular type of (working) readership. There are instances where the Eagle Street College seems to exhibit some of the tendencies that Elfenbein suggests, setting itself apart, for example, from readers of more refined forms of literature. Johnston’s playful verse “A College Song,” for instance, juxtaposes the experience of a College meeting with its “doses” of Leaves of Grass and an evening at the local Browning club: O’ the Browning Club on Chorley Road the Boys are members now In the “College Corner” there they sit and look as wise as they ken how Brave Boys! But my profound conviction is they’d rather be at College Than sitting there among the swells, wi’ a’ their Browning knowledge Brave Boys.49 Johnston’s fourteener meter, native Scottish dialect and buoyant refrain separate the College men from the highbrow poetics under discussion; the spatial distance between the Browning “swells” and the “boys” in the “College corner” emphasizes the cultural gap. This was a space, Johnston suggests, where he and his friends did not belong; to pass they had to perform, to “look” learned.

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Permeating Socialism  77 Neither, though, did they belong to the working or uneducated classes. Robertson proposes that Whitman’s verse suited this particular liminal social standing; his style appealed to the Eagle Street men who were “intellectually ambitious” but lacked “the intense grounding in the classics common to Rossetti, Tennyson, and their middle- and upper-class audience.”50 The College’s bookshelves, however, tell a very different story. The real performance lay in Johnston’s self-caricaturing. Wallace owned a number of titles by and about Browning, and indeed by Carlyle, Arnold, Tennyson and other established Victorian writers, to whom he frequently referred and quoted.51 Wentworth Dixon was particularly fond of the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus. The “boys” (of whom Johnston was the most highly educated) were perfectly capable of reading and discussing Browning’s work, as there is evidence of them so doing, inside the Browning Club—which they had, after all, joined—and in letters and occasionally in College meetings. The College’s relationship to “bourgeois conventions” was rather more complex than Elfenbein supposes, particularly when this appreciation of the literary “greats” is considered in the context of the traditions of autodidacticism and mutual improvement. Well-established and canonical writers claimed a significant r­eadership among the self-educating working and lower-middle classes, and the ­College’s engagement with this literature fed into a layered negotiation of lower-class identity and cultural value. Blatchford’s Clarion, a newspaper targeted at a working audience, asserted that there could be “little danger” of “writing over the heads of a people who read Dickens and Bunyan, and Cervantes and Defoe” (“Editorial,” December 26, 1891, 4).52 Proud to consider itself on the wrong side of the cultural tracks, the College self-­ identified within a British lower-class associational culture of which literary self-­improvement constituted a significant part. Interpolating what they had learnt from ­ Whitman into an evolving class-consciousness focused on the power of the “average” or ordinary, the Eagle Street men sought to draw themselves closer to the lower classes. By knowingly overplaying the “lowly learner” card in the expression of appreciation for Whitman, Johnston negotiates his campaign for a new conception of culture—where ordinary ­readers were to stand in original relation to a common literature of and from the people—with more traditional notions of self-improvement. Self-improvement, in turn, mediated a complicated set of ideas around knowledge acquisition and creation, cultural autonomy and the value or limitations of learning within hegemonic cultural parameters. Existing historically in various forms, the mutual improvement tradition experienced a great flourishing in the nineteenth century, thriving particularly in the West Riding of Yorkshire and Lancashire.53 Serving different purposes—from rudimentary literacy to more advanced scientific or literary learning to political or religious instruction—a key feature of the mutual improvement societies was their autonomy. In contrast to the offerings of the University Extension Scheme, Mechanics’ Institutes and other

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78  Permeating Socialism philanthropic programs, mutual improvement initiatives allowed the lower classes to take independent control of their own education. Common characteristics included minimal costs, open discussion, a self-set curriculum and the overturning of conventional pedagogical hierarchies as members learnt from their peers and shared knowledge and resources. As the century progressed and many of the older societies declined or collapsed the tradition permuted in novel forms. There was space available during the 1880s and 1890s, Chris Waters has argued, before the modern leisure industry assumed such a dominant position, for people to “develop alternative cultures of their own,” adapting cooperative models of rational recreation and self-­ improvement for new purposes.54 Seizing the opportunity with relish, the popular culture of socialist branch life flourished. The Whitman group was born out of this evolving tradition of lower-class mutual improvement and strongly identified as part of it. Under these auspices, as the enthusiastic take-up of the “Eagle Street College” nickname suggests, the group took pleasure in ironizing their commitment to a literary education. Johnston’s poem “The Song of the Eagle Street College,” which became something of a theme tune for the group, begins: Did ye iver hear till ov the Aigle Shtrate Shkool, An’ the rate dacint bhoys that go there, as a rule? Thin loight up yer poipe an’ dthraw in yer shtool, While I sing yez the song ov our Collidge. The tachin’ at Aigle Shtrate’s far an’ away The bist in the wurruld—at laste so the bhoys say; An’ the bist ov it is that there’s nothin’ to pay For the larnin’ at Aigle Shtrate Collidge. Chorus.—Och bhoys! We’re the Pheeloshiphers, We are the wans for the Knowlidge; Av ye want Eddication, Or corrict Information, Come an’ jine the Aigle Shtrate Collidge.55 Written for fun and not intended to be read too seriously, Johnston nevertheless uses the verse to play with preconceptions about the “right” way to write, which in turn challenges presumptions about the “right” way to learn. The disjunct is felt most forcefully in the phonetic spelling of educational vocabulary: the rhymed pairing of “Knowlidge / Collidge,” for example, or the “Eddication / corrict Information” couplet. The humor derived from this ironic manipulation of dialect, the rhyme’s “low” literary form, the affectation of nescience and the exaggerated severity of the College’s educational program (“The lissons thim bhoys have to larn are sevare, / An’ manny’s the toime they fale timpted to shwear”) challenges the worth of an education conducted along normative, officially sanctioned (and implicitly well-heeled) lines. “A Song for Occupations” asks “[Are] the rich better off

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Permeating Socialism  79 than you? or the educated wiser than you?” (PP, 356), a point picked up by J­ ohnston: “The shkolars for ignorance nothin’ can bate, / Though ov coorse they consider their larnin’ is great.” The College is presented as an alternative model of greater financial, educational and diversionary value. ­Eschewing the radical poetic form of Leaves of Grass for one that more obviously invokes lower-class associational culture, Johnston meshes ­Whitman’s ideas about culture, comradeship and community with those of the local tradition that he was familiar with. There is a concern which has been raised over the years in different critical vocabularies about whether self- or mutual improvement merely reinforced dominant ideologies and reshaped lower-class character to suit bourgeois sensibilities. In a forceful rebuttal, Jonathan Rose argues that the felt experience of radical empowerment in the lived narratives of many autodidactic learners should trump such intellectual sophistry. Even a traditional canon is able to “ignite insurrections in the mind of the workers” by opening fresh perspectives on the world. Using Arnold’s phrasing, culture could liberate from “system-makers and systems” by “turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.”56 Among socialist readers, Rose points to Keir Hardie, strongly influenced by Burns and C ­ arlyle, and ­Robert Blatchford, who grew up with Defoe, Dickens, the Brontës and ­Thackeray. C. Allen Clarke can be seen as an exemplar of such an argument. Raised on Shakespeare, Defoe and Cervantes, the defining theme of the semi-­fictionalized memoirs of his childhood is that his unusually bookish upbringing developed principles of kindness rather than competition, taught him to empathize with others, gave him the words by which to critically examine the status quo and enabled him to imagine other possibilities.57 Such lessons are formatively associated with his later work as a socialist activist. Knowledge of the cultural standard, however, conferred the ability to interrogate its value. It is no surprise, then, that autodidact readers might turn a critical eye on the “stock notions” in which they had schooled themselves and demand a different kind of education and a new cultural program. On the one hand, reading along conventional lines had developed Clarke’s emotional and intellectual faculties; on the other, it had awakened an awareness of the blind spots in his education. He regretted, for instance, that the factory system had mainly been ignored by England’s “literary lords and ladies,” a carefully chosen phrase, and that the working-class writers who paid attention to it were often overlooked themselves, even by their own class.58 Whitman’s own autodidactic journey likewise brought him into conflict with the culture in which he had become well versed. His self-­education began as an office boy with the gift of a subscription to a circulating library from his employers and continued as he moved into the printing trade. After a stint as a school teacher he came to be the chief editor of the Brooklyn Eagle and used his columns in the 1840s to champion “unlimited self-improvement” and promote a literary program

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of good taste.59 But 20 years later, writing in Democratic Vistas, his views had undergone a radical transformation: As now taught, accepted and carried out, are not the processes of culture rapidly creating a class of supercilious infidels, who believe in nothing? Shall a man lose himself in countless masses of adjustments, and be so shaped with reference to this, that, and the other, that the simply good and healthy and brave parts of him are reduced and clipp’d away, like the bordering of box in a garden? (PP, 986) Speaking with the privilege of one familiar with these “processes of culture” it had become clear that a radical reimagining of the structures of knowledge, culture and aesthetics was required. It was not enough, as ­Carpenter had thought in his student days, merely to strive for equal ­education for all. This reimagining could be angled towards the acquisition of a different kind of cultural capital. “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages,” wrote Emerson in “Self-­Reliance,” “Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.”60 The concepts of self-reliance and self-improvement strain apart conceptually, but as the word “learn” suggests there is an area of productive overlap where self-­improvement might foster self-reliance, and self-reliance give rise to a more authentic kind of self-improvement. The Eagle Street College shaped a curriculum increasingly oriented around writers who encouraged this kind of cultural self-reliance. Fred Wild recalled that the group began with Burns, Milton and Shakespeare in its early days before progressing to “more important” writers including Carlyle, Tennyson, Emerson, Ruskin and finally, most important of all, Whitman.61 Andrew Lawson cites Michel de Certeau’s observations that “the borders of literary culture are policed by ‘socially authorized professionals and intellectuals,’ whose job is to define the correct canons of taste, to construct an approved list of authors, and to fix the meanings of the text for its readers.” Readers must negotiate not only the space created by the text but its policing, with autodidacts, especially, being travelers who “move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write.”62 ­Whitman went further: he loudly announced his presence as a pioneer settling the territory and cheered the “average man” (a phrase used repeatedly in Leaves of Grass) to do the same. The “common” people (another frequently used adjective) were not to “poach”: the land was theirs by right, ripe for the taking, and democracy itself depended upon them doing so. Whitman’s land was, of course, America. But despite the temporal, geographic and cultural variance between the political territory of mid-century America and fin de siècle Britain, and the slippage between the meanings of concepts such as “democracy” and “class” in these different contexts,

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Permeating Socialism  81 Whitman’s message of cultural enfranchisement connected powerfully with the College as their socialist proclivities developed. Locating Whitman in the lower-middle or artisan class, Lawson argues that the transition to a new market economy had a particular impact on this social class. As the system of waged labor was installed, the stable prospects of the owner-master, journeyman and apprentice hierarchy were radically undercut, but at the same time, the development of the industrial market and the technological advances that accompanied this change offered exciting possibilities for individual social mobility.63 Whitman’s class-consciousness was not, then, inherently anticapitalist. At its best the upheaval of the marketplace could perfectly reflect the liberating, democratic values on which the republic was built. If misconducted, however, it could make a mockery of them and, as Jason Stacy contends, much of Whitman’s writing between 1840 and 1855 sought, in response, to teach Americans about their true nature in order to “uncover a still living republic of equality and liberty in the face of dramatic economic and social change.”64 Injustice and corruption were attributed to character traits such as pride and affectation rather than the foundational social and economic structures of the United States, so as not to call the essential idea of America into question. Post-1855, this drive became more urgent. Democratic Vistas, Whitman’s statement of faith in the evolutionary perfectibility of American democracy, was written in the face of increasing anxiety about how far his nation had strayed from its “underlying principles” (PP, 961). America had the democratic furnishings—“political means, superficial suffrage, legislation, &c.” (PP, 959)—but was hollow of heart. The American people needed to remember what their democracy had once meant in order to secure its future success. This could only be achieved, thought Whitman, through a radical new “programme of culture” that had the common man at its heart. It was not to be “for a single class alone, or for the parlors or lecture-rooms” but was to have “an eye to practical life, the west, the working-men, the facts of farms and jack-planes and engineers, and of the broad range of the women also of the middle and working strata” (PP, 986). It wasn’t simply to be “for” the common man or woman—to be accessible and “not restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses”—but “of” him or her (PP, 986, emphasis in ­original). Whitman’s ideas about culture and democracy were not, he tells us, “the result of studying up in political economy” but of “observing, wandering among men, these States” (PP, 954). The figure of the American worker was so vital because Whitman believed that the democratic spirit of his nation was to be found in its “common ­people” (PP, 6). “Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves” he declared in the 1855 preface (PP,  5), the polysyndeton eliding the distinction between the worker and the land, “ruggedness” a potential definition of either. Whitman’s conception of the lower classes was not built around an idea of the downtrodden or impoverished but of the strong and resourceful. The hope for the

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82  Permeating Socialism future of the United States lay in this class of people who had made America what it was, who had pioneered the land and resisted the hierarchical trappings of the Old World. The new culture must capitalize on its stock: its “spinal meaning” must be the “typical personality of character” (PP, 986); its literature must “recast the types of highest personality from what the oriental, feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us, and which yet possess the imaginative and esthetic fields of the United States” (PP, 992). “I feel, with dejection and amazement,” regretted Whitman, “that among our geniuses and talented writers or speakers, few or none have yet really spoken to this people, created a single image-making work for them, or absorb’d the central spirit and the idiosyncrasies which are theirs” (PP, 979). The nation needed a new kind of poet, a new kind of “image-making work” and a new kind of reader. These would beget “appropriate teachers, schools, manners” and thus reinscribe the “religious and moral character” into American democracy (PP, 956). Unable to find a similar ideological resource in Britain, characterized as it was by centuries of structural inequality, the College selectively appropriated Whitman’s culture of the “average.” The British working classes did not embody a pre-existent national spirit of democracy, but they were nevertheless its future. The figure of the worker held a high symbolic value. Wallace wrote in his “Occasional Notes”: “Your America is here or nowhere!” says Goethe in Wilhelm Meister. Whitman teaches the same lesson with infinitely greater force and effect—and teaches it too, to all classes, but with special reference to the average common man—to “the workmen of these States.”65 Whitman spoke specifically to America, but British readers, Wallace thought, could find their land of democratic promise by looking to their workers. Lawson suggests that the language and subtext of the 1855 Leaves of Grass reveal a “class struggle” in two senses. First, Whitman performed the role of the “worker/poet” but, having been born into an artisan background, acquired a skilled trade and having been given the opportunity to self-educate, he belonged not to the working class but to the lower-middle class.66 The negotiation of these proximate but distinct lower-class identities was one site of struggle. Second, Whitman’s alignment with the lower classes complicated his overt claim to be the “arbiter of the diverse” (PP, 9), to include all equally. I want to suggest that the College’s class maneuverings can be considered in parallel with these two “struggles.” Though the belief in the universal self precluded conscious engagement in any kind of oppositional “class struggle,” the College also had a partisan allegiance to the lower classes. If Whitman stepped outside the parameters of his own class identity to perform the role of the “worker/poet,” the men of the College exhibited a similar range of tensions as they performed the role of the “worker/reader.” In “Occasional Notes,” for example, Wallace uses the language of Leaves

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of Grass to follow the poet’s lead by collapsing the distinction between the working and lower-middle classes: [Whitman] is one of ourselves, not a saint,—(as usually understood) nor one of the cultured classes—but a man in the first place, with all the strong, brawny, and full blooded instincts and passions of a man,—a common man, (what he calls an average man) who has identified himself through life with the powerful, illiterate working classes with their common experiences. His experiences have been such as ours and he has deliberately lived the common life of poverty and toil that he might shew us that our lives too are of divine significance. By proudly claiming Whitman as “one of ourselves,” he identifies the C ­ ollege by proxy with the same working people Whitman does. Whitman’s experiences, the “poverty and toil” of the illiterate classes and the lives of the ­College men are rolled together in an assumption of collective identity, sealed in the semantic dualism of “common” as both something shared and lacking in rank. The move was performative but genuinely felt. If by virtue of not belonging to the “cultured classes” Whitman was able to assume the role of the proletarian poet that he believed was required, Wallace and the Eagle Street College were keen to slip into the role of the working-class reader for the same purpose. According to Ezra Greenspan, Whitman did not create his poems “with an eye so much to his actual reader as to his idealized conception of his reader.”67 Wallace, however, understood that Whitman’s ideal was never solely a literary conceit. In the same way that Whitman created an ideal bard and then stepped into his shoes, Wallace and Johnston endeavored to be British versions of the ideal readers that Whitman had called for, to validate his efforts by being examples of his success. In the early years of their appreciation of Whitman, Wallace and Johnston were very conscious of what he thought of the College. Letters were drafted and redrafted, read aloud in meetings and sent to each other to read and revise before sending.68 Whitman had dreamed that readers would keep Leaves of Grass on their person as they went about their daily business; Wallace obligingly ordered a pocket-book edition from Whitman so that he could carry it about “conveniently” on his “country rambles and holidays.”69 Initially, Johnston and Wallace presented themselves as literary enthusiasts and self-improvers, disclosing in their first letter that Wallace was familiar with Emerson and had been “a lover and grateful student” of Carlyle and Ruskin.70 They are eager to display their commitment to Whitman’s tutelage: “We both study your writings as much as possible and glean every help that critiques and notices can give.” They are also careful to demonstrate that they understood Whitman’s teaching that the value of literature and culture, and therefore his own work, lay in its relation to the lived experience of the world:

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Your books are [Johnston’s] constant companions, his spiritual nourishment, his continual study and delight. And not least of his debts to you is “the glory” you have shewn him “in his daily walk and trade” which you have ennobled and made beautiful for him. The first sentence, concerning the internal and scholarly, is vindicated by the second. The reference in quotation marks is to Whitman’s “Song of the Exposition”: I raise a voice for far superber themes for poets and for art, To exalt the present and the real, To teach the average man the glory of his daily walk and trade, (PP, 347) To show Whitman that they were his ideal readers they also had to show him that they were “average,” ordinary, working readers. This became more pronounced as they reached a deeper understanding of the radical cultural overhaul that Whitman proposed. In his “Occasional Notes” Wallace summarizes Whitman’s argument in Democratic Vistas: The culture which enfeebles and emasculates—especially the culture which only makes us “supercilious infidels”—Whitman despises and condemns. But the true manly culture open to all—to the poor and working classes as well as the rich and “leisured” classes—which lies in present every day receptivity to all the endless glories and wonders of life, Whitman preaches both by word and example.71 The new culture, with its focus on life rather than books, was open to the whole social spectrum but was defined by vigorous, lower-class masculinity. Wallace sought to flesh out the impression that Whitman was forming of the Eagle Street College in such a way, writing to Johnston in anticipation of Bucke’s visit in 1890: I shouldn’t be afraid of meeting B if I were only myself. I’m as good a man as he and worse! If B thinks we’re tip top literary swells, we’ll soon undeceive him! It’s the beauty of our own position that we’re not. But we’ll give him a good old fashioned College meeting and if he can match that anywhere also, I’d like to know! We’ll sing the College Song, and get Will Law to sing 2 or 3 of his best, and Fred Wild and Hodgkinson to barge each other, Dr Johnston and WD to sing original songs and RKG to smile—and Dr Bucke will feel nowhere. We’ll beat their “birthday sprees” to pot! Hunt up every man! Sound the trumpet! Beat the drums! If Dr Bucke doesn’t like our style, we’ll [?] him! If he wants to talk “Shakspere [sic] and poetry” much we’ll choke him with tobacco smoke! It’s our [?] and not his!

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No! My friend, we’re not going to pose as literary men or swell critics of Whitman. We’re going to show Bucke a band of comrades, old friends, faithful and true, that existed independently of Walt, and of wh. he is only the poet! If the cockles of Bucke’s heart don’t warm to that, out on him! Walt’s would! “Poeckry [sic] be blowed!” he’d say.72 The exclamatory punctuation and repetition of the “we’ll” contraction is defiant but also defensive; the over-confident nature of the diatribe betrays an anxiety about what Bucke would think and, by implication, report back to Whitman. Wallace may have vehemently declared that he and his friends were not to “pose as literary men,” but they were to adopt a pose of sorts. The battle metaphor foregrounds the strategic impetus behind Bucke’s “undeceiving”; the meeting he is to attend becomes a performance, choreographed in advance. The glossing of Whitman’s role is intentionally reductive: Wallace was determined to show that the College men were working readers who didn’t care much for the literary but preferred to sing songs and smoke tobacco; in short, that they were the working readership Whitman desired. Johnston had discovered on his visit to America the previous year that Whitman found it frustrating to be spoken to continually about Shakespeare and poetry and that he enjoyed “the talk of the everyday life.”73 Wallace was evidently eager for Whitman to think that the men of the College shared his views, to form the impression that they were different from other admirers because they shied from literary pretensions and understood the true value of culture in relation to the everyday. This earthy and convivial mode of self-representation is exercised in Johnston’s poems, which were sent to Whitman to read, and consolidated in the experience of reading and singing them together (on this occasion, in Bucke’s presence). In this performance the group’s literariness is downplayed while Wallace and Johnston fashion the character of the Eagle Street “bhoy”: less urbane and street-smart, more earnest and civic-minded than the New York Bowery b’hoy drawn into Leaves of Grass, this “composite character” nevertheless evinces a similar pose as the rowdy cultural outsider.74 Having made the last-minute decision to accompany Bucke on his return journey, Wallace unexpectedly had the opportunity of relating the evening’s proceedings to Whitman himself: “When Bucke visited you you wrote songs and sung, etc.,” prompted Harned, with Whitman chipping in, “And shouted hurrah!” Wallace, again keen to downplay the group’s literariness and emphasize its joviality, demurred that “making a noise was about all we could do” and when Traubel interjected with a comment about Wallace not being a drinker, he was quick to respond that he had been smoking instead.75 The College’s appreciation of Whitman was formulated and fed back to him in his own terms. In letters Wallace made a point of assuring ­Whitman that he was admired by College members who were “not ‘literary’” but who loved “manly and heroic qualities, outdoor life, boating, sailing,

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86  Permeating Socialism engineering, etc.”76 They were not erudite, nor did they have an impressive command of literary language, but those who possessed a “deep inarticulate sense (deeper than usually goes with culture and aestheticism) of what is good” were attracted to the poet. “It is very clear to me,” Wallace continued, “that your ultimate absorption by this class (the class you have loved best of all) is only a matter of time and will be deep and affectionate.” Adapting Whitman’s claim in the 1855 preface that “the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it” (PP, 26), Wallace denationalizes the sentiment, steering it back towards the issue of class and offering the College as proof that Whitman’s influence would be widespread. On another occasion Wallace presents Fred Wild as a specimen case: he is “not ‘literary’ at all” but is “frank outspoken and free—in speech and manners”: I rejoice to think that natures like his respond to you so spontaneously and so warmly. You can afford to let the literary classes stand in antagonism to you (though it can be for a short time only) while the masses (the great majority) who deal with life and nature and experience at first hand, and who despise second hand presentation in books and art, see in you a master vital and fresh as life itself, and offering them love and faith and vistas before unknown.77 That any member of the Eagle Street reading group despised “second hand presentation in books” was as inaccurate as Wallace’s projection of Wild’s views onto the common people as a whole, but the embellishment served the purpose of reassuring Whitman that he would certainly bring about the profound cultural change for which he so hoped. There is an obvious contradiction in the despising of “second hand presentation in books” but heralding Whitman as “master,” a clear tension in Wallace’s belief that “the Scholar of the future will realize more fully that life is the main thing—not the reflection of life from books.”78 As Lawson observes, when Whitman tells his reader to “no longer take things at second or third hand” nor “look through the eyes of the dead” nor “feed on the spectres in books” (PP, 28), he is “asserting both this kind of autonomy and the autodidact’s troubled sense of having gained his knowledge through precisely such a set of complex mediations.”79 Wallace wrestled with the same issue, writing in a speech to be read in his absence at a College meeting: “All I want members of the College to do—is, as Wordsworth advised—as Whitman advises—to come once again fresh and childlike, without prepossessions and without books, leaving the meddling intellect behind, passive and receptive before [Nature].”80 Both a return (“fresh and childlike”) and a progression (“leaving the meddling intellect behind”), the exhortation to turn from literature to nature was, paradoxically, a familiar literary conceit, invoked by, among others, Whitman and Wordsworth, as Wallace acknowledges without any apparent trace of irony. “Meddling intellect” is extracted from

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Permeating Socialism  87 Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned.”81 Declaring “education,” “culture” and “knowledge” to be “secondary,” in “Occasional Notes,” ­Wallace (mis)quoted Whitman’s challenge to the literary scholar approvingly: “‘Have you considered it great” says Whitman “to get at the meaning of poems?’” (cf. PP, 28). Johnston’s diary, however, recounted a hard-made attempt to “dose” Wentworth Dixon with Whitman so as to convert his “sincere admiration for the man into a genuine liking for his poetry.”82 “A hopeless task,” concluded Johnston, who had borrowed an 1855 Leaves of Grass especially for the purpose. “As we read the preface his interjections were such as ‘Rather farfetched that’ ‘a bit high faluting’ ‘high flown.’” Despite the College’s overt celebration of the non-literary, Dixon’s appreciation of “the practical parts of Walt’s writings and their bearing upon human life and conduct” was not enough. The friction between Wallace’s aspirations of cultural self-reliance, which he had learnt from Whitman, and Johnston’s demand for literary self-improvement became something of a sticking point between the two friends and seems to have culminated in 1891. Wallace, who was known for being a sweet-tempered man, sent Johnston an uncharacteristically critical letter outlining his objections to the direction in which he was driving the College’s appreciation for Whitman: And now as to the College. I note your intention to read J[ohn] B[urroughs]’s “Notes.” But really I am getting impatient! It’s time you were doing something better! How is it that you are each everlastingly reading what someone else has to say? Have you not brains of your own? hearts of your own? lives of your own? and personalities of your own?—each differing from that of any other in the wide world? Don’t you feel what a dead and lifeless thing it is to be always quoting somebody else? Isn’t that the cause of the miserable attendance at College nowadays? For God’s sake come out of that! “Rivet and publish yourselves”! Don’t be everlastingly talking about and quoting Walt Whitman and Browning—to say nothing about small fry like Wilson and Momerie and Co—till we are sick to death of them all! “Yourself yourself for ever and for ever”! You, for instance, my friend. Have you nothing to communicate of your own? Even, in reference to Walt, have you no independent studies of your own to give us, no thoughts, expositions, analyses, criticisms, etc. of your own? Have you made no attempt yet of your own to work out W’s relation to social problems, religion, philosophy, and, common life nature health etc.? Nothing!?? One evening so spent would do more good to yourself and to the College than years of readings from John Burroughs or anyone else! […] So I earnestly appeal to you, and to the other members of the ­College, to give us original work, original thoughts, original studies,

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and original information. It will be infinitely more interesting and vital than parrot-like readings! Come out of that, I tell you!83 For Wallace, the College’s literary apprenticeship was over. For it to continue to be of value, the group had to enter into an “original” relation with life and with literature, even—especially—that of its master, Whitman. As “average” readers, the College men embodied the democratic potential of the common people but not its fulfilment, a goal which became increasingly important to Wallace as he committed to the socialist cause. The use of quotations from Leaves of Grass to teach the College men to be less reliant on Whitman seems a fitting exposition of a philosophy that used literature to teach readers to be less reliant on books. The injunction to “rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality” is from Whitman’s “To a Pupil,” a poem with an apt slant on self-improvement. The lesson focuses not on book learning but on the development of character. Often put to work for socialism, the opening lines—which Wallace had marked with a line down the left margin of his 1892 Leaves of Grass—ask the student to consider his or her role in bringing about change: “Is reform needed? is it through you? / The greater the reform needed, the greater the ­Personality you need to accomplish it” (PP, 515). With its emphasis on activity, community, moral spirituality and physical health, the ethos of associational socialism made it potentially receptive to such a message. Wallace came to believe that the “original work” of the College was to strengthen the socialist movement by teaching the truth of this idea and offering Whitman’s model of religion, democracy and love as the key to the “greater” personality that could bring about far-reaching social change.

Making Whitmanites: Preaching to the Socialist Revival “The Labour movement grew out of Mutual Improvement Societies,” Rose cites one Coventry millworker as saying.84 This feeling is supported by E.  P.  Thompson’s opinion that in Yorkshire’s West Riding the ILP gave “political expression” to the various working-class organizations that had been established in the previous 30 years: “co-operatives, trade unions, friendly societies, various forms of chapel or educational or economic self help.”85 A similar thrust can be seen in the formation of Clarion clubs and the Labour Church. As Anna Vaninskaya observes, socialists were not “the typical Victorian self-improvers” who acquired “‘useful knowledge’ for personal liberation only,” if only because their political ideology demanded that they “diffuse that knowledge to others.”86 Socialism’s success depended on its connection with the working classes. Elfenbein therefore shoots wide of the mark when he suggests that the Whitman-Carpenter pairing appealed because it gave the Eagle Street College and other socialists from their class— he names Alfred Orage, William Jupp, Sam Hobson and Edward Pease—an

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Permeating Socialism  89 “art of their own” which was “elevated enough to mark their superiority to the working class yet not so elevated as to be antidemocratic” (Orage, Jupp and Hobson will be discussed in the following chapter).87 People such as those invoked by Elfenbein did not seek to distinguish themselves from a working class that they considered “vulgar.” They believed that Whitman had something important to contribute to a future socialist society and were frustrated, not relieved, that the typical working-class reader did not pick up Leaves of Grass with any great enthusiasm, in the same way that they were frustrated that the working classes did not convert to socialism in their masses. 1892 was a pivotal year for the Eagle Street College’s developing sense of social duty. It was the year that Keir Hardie became Britain’s first socialist MP and famously provoked outrage by entering Parliament in his tweed suit and cloth cap. It was the year that Blatchford joined with Tom Garrs and Richard Pankhurst to form the Manchester Independent Labour Party, leading to the formation of the national ILP in January 1893. It was also the year that Whitman died. ILP organizer Joseph Clayton, who himself wrote Whitmanesque poetry, suggested that the success of the ILP was due to its local development, to “the attention given to parochial matters, the comradeship that thrived on the neighbourly character of the movement.” Founded on the “impregnable rock” of Das Kapital, the SDF, he claimed, was a movement from the “centre to the circumference”; the Fabian Society was only ever an “intellectual centre” which failed to move outwards. The ILP, in contrast, was “created by the fusing of local elements into one national whole”—“from the circumference its members came to establish the centre.”88 Clayton may oversimplify, but his comments speak to a common perception of local value within the early ILP. People felt that that their regional branch activity mattered, not only for its local impact but for how it fed into a wider movement. Similarly, to Wallace’s mind, the College’s Whitman work in Bolton had national and international scope. They were duty-bound to spread the gospel of Whitman within their socialist community, and so from the circumference influence the center. Harry Cocks suggests that the College “took on a more millennial feel” after Wallace’s visit to Whitman in 1891 but if this feeling was already simmering it was Whitman’s death in March 1892 that brought it to the boil.89 Charles Sixsmith recalled that “Whitman’s death drew us closer together, and our meetings assumed a more religious character, though not of the traditional kind.”90 Superimposing a Christian framework onto the College’s loss, Katharine Bruce Glasier offered the hope of a Pentecost in the wake of the mourning period. “As I understand it,” she wrote for the annual birthday celebration a year after his death, “like the disciples of old you are meeting together after the ‘Death’ of him you know as your leader, that you may strengthen each other’s faith in his gospel, gain a fuller understanding of its vast issues and learn together how best to send it forth to the nations.”91

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In  a speech given on the day of Whitman’s funeral, Wallace charges the Bolton apostles with a similar commission, extending the promise that their leader, Christ-like, would return: It seems to me that we ought to feel tonight a new sense—a new call to duty. We have not the friend any longer, the dear human friend whom we have corresponded with, and whom Johnston and I have seen, but he is himself part of the unseen with us always. In this poem (So long!) he gives a definite promise to return, to continue his love to us, a ­promise, but also a summons.92 “So Long!,” first included in the 1860 Leaves of Grass and moved into the “Songs before Parting” coda in 1867, was aptly chosen: it takes for its theme the death of the poet-speaker, his farewell and his hopes for “what comes after” (PP, 609). Wallace’s exegesis draws connections with the Christ story, fusing Whitman’s poetic text with Christian doctrine in a reassuring intertextual reading. But Whitman offers hope of a different kind. He does not, as Christ does and Wallace claims, give a definite promise to return: I receive now again of my many translations, from my avataras ascending, while others doubtless await me, An unknown sphere more real than I dream’d, more direct, darts awakening rays about me, So long! Remember my words, I may again return, I love you, I depart from materials, I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead. (PP, 612) In Whitman’s alternative ascension narrative the allusion to Eastern reincarnation philosophies (“translations,” “avataras ascending”) offers the possibility of perpetual divine rebirth but in different bodies, different forms. Whitman’s god is not monotheistically located in the figure of one deity only, nor is a “second coming” in the traditional sense required. His own particular part of the divine universal self will manifest again in other existences, on an equal footing as the colloquial “so long” suggests. But, contrariwise, as his soul departs the “materials” of his body and of the earth, his corporeality is transferred to his text: “Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man”; “I spring from the pages into your arms— decease calls me forth” (PP, 611). The material Whitman would return in the words he exhorts his readers to remember. “So Long!” is concerned with “consummations” and “fruition,” with the fulfilment of America’s democratic potential; it looks forward to the time when “a hundred millions of superb persons” walk through the States (PP, 609). With the speaker’s death, the time for prophecy had passed, and the

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time for action had begun. Wallace, intent on achieving the same in Britain, picked up the theme: [Whitman] had referred to our College as a Church partly in jest, but also very considerably in earnest—a Band of friends meeting with the utmost freedom, speaking with a liberty and freedom impossible to any more formal organization—to do the work of a church really— advance each other in the way that churches set themselves out to do with far better opportunities and with equal aims.93 Whitman’s call was “the call of battle.”94 The Bolton group was to spearhead the English branch of an international Whitman movement, advanced on the American side by Whitman’s literary executors—Traubel, Harned and Bucke—that had as much to do with politics and spirituality as it did literature. In January 1893 Harned wrote a short speech to be read aloud to the ­College, which applauded “the tendency of the actively aggressive D ­ emocracy of England towards a realization of Walt Whitman’s place as its inspiring prophet,” prompting Wallace to tackle the difficult subject of the College’s relationship to politics.95 Like Harned, he saw democracy “making rapid strides to power and place in England”; it was as “inevitable as gravitation.” In this political climate the College’s program of mutual improvement had perceptibly changed, and not to every member’s liking: I am very well aware that our discussions of “Socialism” lately have been distasteful to some of our members, who are now rather hanging back in doubt as to where we are going to, and what they are likely to be committed to—And it is also felt that a series of debates on economic questions—questions too, which necessarily raise discussion and controversy—are not as helpful to individual members as some of our past meetings have been.96 On the one hand, to placate the non-socialists—the tory Greenhalgh and liberal Ferguson, for example—Wallace reiterated that comradeship and the sanctity of freedom of speech were of ultimate importance. The Eagle Street men were to be socialists or individualists as they chose. Hadn’t ­Whitman, after all, championed diversity? On the other, however, he adamantly defended the direction the College had taken; having learnt the “divine purpose” shouldn’t the Eagle Street men now “seek out the means and ways” by which to help it on? Wallace chose to identify socialism as the political expression of the divine purpose unfolded through Leaves of Grass; it was grafted to his Whitmanism and thereafter cultivated as one stock. But Whitman’s wider spiritual democracy also enabled Wallace to insist that all members of the group were called to join together in the fight for the cause of humanity, irrespective of their political persuasion (to be discussed further in Chapter 5).

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92  Permeating Socialism In practice he was successful in his efforts to maintain the essential inward-­ looking unity of the College, whose members remained enduringly close despite individual political differences, but its outward-­facing work, steered by Wallace, Johnston and Sixsmith, became incontrovertibly socialist. The spread of socialism seemed proof that society was indeed evolving towards the spiritual democracy outlined in Leaves of Grass; the understanding of one would aid the understanding of the other. Wallace was pleased to report to Traubel in 1896 that a “very noticeable progress” in the “permeation of all classes by Socialistic opinions” had been accompanied by an “increasing absorption of Walt Whitman’s influence and a widening curiosity about and in him.”97 He was convinced that the College had a special calling, on account of its unusual intimacy with the poet: For we are the heaven-appointed preachers to the Democracy of England. We stand in the closest relation to Walt Whitman—the divinely inspired prophet of World-Democracy. To us the leaders of the English Democracy will look more and more for spiritual food and sustenance.98 Johnston and Wallace had already been acting in a “gatekeeping” capacity within the socialist movement, opening access to Whitman but also exerting some kind of sway over how he was mediated. Johnston’s Diary Notes of a Visit to Walt Whitman, for instance, printed for private circulation and given a ringing endorsement by the poet, was circulated among London socialists of a literary persuasion.99 After receiving a copy from Ernest Rhys, ­William Clarke asked Johnston if he could use quotations in his “little book on ­Whitman” (see Chapter 4), appearing to value the authenticity of the account (“I envy your extended opportunities of seeing Whitman”; WWC, 9, 569). Clarke received permission to make use of the book but a further request to reproduce “Whitman’s last autograph letter” in the radical newspaper the Daily Chronicle was denied. Johnston explained to Traubel that this letter, one of the last that Whitman would send to the College, was “intended to be kept among friends only and not for the public press.” In response to the Clarion’s publication of an obituary for Whitman two months before his death (“Walt Whitman,” January 23, 1892, 6), however, Johnston reneged on this anti-­media stance. In March the Clarion gave notice that “Dr. ­Johnston, of Bolton, sends us a copy of a letter which he has received from Walt ­Whitman, in which the Poet expresses his thanks to the ‘cheery British friends’ who have expressed concern on his condition” (“Walt Whitman,” March 5, 1892, 5).100 After Whitman’s death the focus turned towards a more urgent advocacy as divinely ordained preachers, intimately familiar—as the ideal readers they strove to be—with the message of Leaves of Grass. At a paper delivered at an ILP conference in Bolton in 1894, Wallace delivered a passionate e­ xposition of the application of Whitman’s message to socialism, taking the maxim

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Permeating Socialism  93 “produce great Persons, the rest follows” from “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” as his text (PP, 470).101 Converts would not be won by “propagandist work, lectures—education in economics—organization and political machinery” but by the great personalities and “moral nature” of its proponents. Neither b ­ rilliant lecturer nor “humble worker” could convince otherwise. Accordingly, Wallace’s speech focused exclusively on personal rather than social transformation, leaving the social issues and political and economic theories that a socialist audience might reasonably have expected untouched. It was imperative for the success of socialism, he thought, that the movement was anchored in the message of love, democracy and religion that Whitman preached. Though people might be prevented by circumstance or capability from participating in “direct activity” or “taking prominent place” in the movement, everyone was able to labor for the cause daily and hourly in everyday life and, more, had the responsibility to do so. The “average working man and working woman” could exert great personal power and influence if only his or her personal development was directed according to the “divine process.” The exemplar, as Cocks observes, was of course Whitman.102 Moving into the topic of culture, education and self-improvement, ­Wallace suggests that with “the means of education” in the worker’s hand “the loftiest human culture” would be absorbed, as opposed to the “foolish accumulation of useless and infidel knowledge” of the present system. He follows Whitman in holding that the common man or woman would become the “heroic figure of future literature.” As in literature, so in daily life. But Wallace’s attempt, like Whitman’s, to reconcile his broad privileging of the lower classes with the principles of pluralism and inclusivity was particularly contentious in its socialist application. Holding no truck with principles of class conflict, Wallace went further than most socialists of this stripe in his call for the common man and woman to “absorb and manifest in themselves the highest and proudest virtues of feudal lord, or aspiring prelate, or lady of romance—merged in a broader and sweeter humanity which recognizes no class distinctions whatever.” A further problematic demand, for the fully-­ realized common man or woman to become “content and happy amidst the material poverty which men hate” and go through life “performing its commonest tasks and drudgery—with perfect acceptance and serenity— emanating cheer and faith and love,” seems ostensibly to promote something of a “happy slave” paradigm (and socialist rhetoric frequently made use of the white slave motif). To an important extent, however, Wallace saw his message as an extension of the “making socialists” line of advance. In order to “make socialists,” socialists must first “make” themselves. The “democrat” was to be “a centre of health to a diseased society,” working tirelessly to help, serve and educate all with whom he or she comes into contact. Underlying all, the “divine process” would revolutionize “the whole structure of society” from inside out through peaceful, non-sectarian means. “I have been dosing [socialists] with Walt,” Wallace told Traubel in 1895 with evident satisfaction.103 Not confined to his local chapter, his

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94  Permeating Socialism evangelical work was directed towards the great and good of ILP socialism, an opportunity afforded by the itinerant lecturing circuit. As a cost-­cutting measure speakers were hosted by local ILP members, and Katharine Bruce Glasier remembered fondly in the Labour Leader how “Bruce and I, and Keir ­Hardie, and most itinerant ILP lecturers have known and stayed in [Wallace’s] home since 1892.”104 Whitman’s spiritual democracy was promoted in all of these relationships. An unconvinced Hardie, hedging perhaps to save Wallace’s feelings, asked to be sent a complete Leaves of Grass, positing that his “first prejudice” against it may have been down to the “dilettante expurgated and generally emasculated form” in which he first read Whitman.105 Responding more enthusiastically, Blatchford averred that Whitman had taught him “a great deal,” which he tried to repay by teaching others but also warned that the “people” were unlikely to take to Leaves of Grass at present. “Their sight is too dim,” he thought, “their hearts are too faint.”106 Wallace came in time to take Blatchford’s point of view but in the hopeful 1890s he passionately disagreed, believing that people would read Whitman precisely because their vision and hearts needed strengthening. Intriguingly, given the College’s masculine rendering of comradeship, the leading socialists who shared his vision most closely—and with whom he developed the most intimate friendships—were women. Katharine Bruce Glasier, who sat on the first National Administrative Council of the ILP and was one of her party’s most popular orators, dearly valued his enduring friendship. Her conversion to socialism was spiritually intense—what she would describe after reading Bucke’s theories as an experience of cosmic consciousness—prompted by the reading of Carpenter’s England’s Ideal.107 Though The Religion of Socialism, a pamphlet co-authored with her husband, proclaimed that socialism was “an all sufficing religion of itself,” which derived its authority “from no other religion,” the practical socialism she preached was heavily fortified by a spiritual worldview learnt from Carpenter and Whitman.108 A lecture given in Bolton on “Liberalism—True and False” occasioned her first encounter with the College, who were singularly impressed by her speech, “interspersed,” as it was, “with readings from Whitman.”109 A front-page Labour Prophet article by Glasier on “Life in the Labour Movement” referred both to Christ’s teaching and to Whitman’s message, as she understood it, that joy is the highest form of worship (May 1893, 33). As a young woman, quoting from “Song of Myself,” she described herself as “wide eyed to the horror of undeserved cold hunger and nakedness, whether of the body or the soul, a Revolutionist against a Society that does not know that ‘all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers’” (cf. PP, 31).110 Using Christian discourse to explain her Whitmanism, in the same letter she wrote that Whitman had made her “see all things new” (an echo of ­Revelation 21:5) and that as “Revealer and Reconciler” he had come that “we might have life and have it more abundantly” (cf. John 10:10). Hers was a life-long commitment; writing in 1925 to thank Wallace for his gift

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Figure 2.3  Katharine Bruce Glasier [St. John Conway] to the Eagle Street College, May 1893, Whitman Collection, ZWN 9/278. Copyright of Bolton Archives.

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96  Permeating Socialism of a “wildly, luxuriantly beautiful Whitman—in the Rossetti edition” she vowed “once again to try to be a faithful student and disciple,—gathering his seed ever and scattering it as a good sower should.”111 Not simply a rhetorical move to claim the religious authority associated with C ­ hristianity, or even a straightforward paralleling of Christ and Whitman, this was a strategy appropriate to a Carpentarian understanding of the unfolding divine. Christ and Whitman’s teachings emanated from the same source but developed progressively, with Carpenter and—significantly—Wallace standing in the same spiritual line. Wallace’s spiritual input into socialism was valued highly by Glasier. “See, dear Master,” she wrote tenderly to him a week earlier, “like a little child I am trying to show you that I have learned some of your lessons and love them more and more.”112 Glasier sent a greeting to mark the occasion of Wallace’s 70th birthday. In it she publicly claimed his spiritual anointing: “More and more clearly I have seemed to see in him the spirit of the Dove sent down from Heaven to proclaim the Christ not in one child of God only but surely even if slowly coming to birth in all God’s children.”113 In this evolutionary conception of the divine Glasier’s point is suggestive. It was not that every person manifested the Christ-spirit at present but that he or she would do so in the future. For a universal self to be brought into being the divine must be brought to birth in each person and so a new heaven made on earth. In this regard Wallace’s work had been of utmost importance. “I don’t suppose,” she continued, “Wallace has the least notion how many of us or how much he has helped to save us in this way.” If, as we have seen and Cocks has argued, comradeship allowed the men of the College to develop intense attachments that edged towards the erotic but ultimately offered spiritual rather than physical communion, a similar space was created in Wallace’s relationships with the women who shared his beliefs. Before her marriage to John Bruce Glasier, who would become one of the so-called “big four” of ILP socialism, Katharine seriously considered a rather unusual offer from Wallace to wed in a celibate spiritual union.114 Caroline Martyn, another hugely popular lecturer who briefly served on the ILP National Administrative Council in 1896 before her unexpected death at 29, was also very close to Wallace. She wrote him deeply personal letters, evocative and poetic meditations on nature, spirituality, self and socialism. In one extraordinarily intimate note, she breaks into a passionate declaration: (Do not suppose I am separate from you. I am no more myself than you, you are no more yourself than me). To write to you and say dear man, I love you; because you are a man, I love you; because your characteristics complement mine, I love you; because you are strong, I love you; because you can give me so much, I love you; because I am a woman, of your mother’s sex, I can give you so much, therefore I love you. I express my love, I glory in it, every particle of love I give to you comes back to me in vigor, and life; it comes back to me in strength which sets me free from custom, from abuse, from every evil; it comes back in

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tenderness which wings my words to the listening people; it is the God in me which going out of me is returned to the bosom of the Eternal.115 A study in socialist interpretations of Whitman’s model of love, democracy and religion, Martyn’s letter invokes the divine and interconnected universal self. For her, as well as the College, Whitman provided an articulative model: “The great joy Walt Whitman’s teaching has brought to me has not been the capacity of love but the strength to express it.” Though well known as a devout Christian socialist, Martyn’s faith was mystic and unconventional by nature, profoundly influenced by Whitman. Overlooking the detail of his political opinion, Martyn resolutely claims Whitman for the religion of socialism, declaring the hope that her practical work was “for the cause our prophet had at heart,” that the reforms and ideals she advocated would be those that he would also advocate were he alive. Like Glasier, Martyn credited Wallace; the knowledge of his “recollection and brotherly love” was “a very real help” to her, she wrote. In turn, Wallace found in Martyn and Glasier the leading socialist figures he hoped for, spiritually sensitive readers who had understood Whitman’s message and put it at the heart of their personal development and public political activity.116 Wallace was at the forefront of the College’s consciousness raising activity, but others contributed, delivering the occasional talk or spreading ­Whitman’s word in their socialist friendships. Sixsmith took an increasingly prominent role in the twentieth century, sharpening the focus on Carpenter. The socialist press presented other possibilities to disseminate Whitman’s message; through this medium ordinary men like Wallace and Johnston, far removed from the London literary scene, had the opportunity to publish their contributions to political and cultural discussion. To return to the ideas discussed earlier in the chapter, the socialist press opened opportunities for the “average man” to stake his claim in the cultural territory; no longer simply autodidact readers, Johnston and Wallace began to write their own land. Johnston had printed his diary notes of his Whitman visit privately, but in 1898 the Labour Press, running out of the Clarion offices, reissued them. They were advertised in the Labour Annual and received glowing reviews in the New Age and from David Lowe in the Labour Leader, who concluded with a brief footnote about Johnston’s own poetry of “fine humour and tender sentiment” (“Fresh View of Whitman,” June 11, 1898, 194). Expanded to include Wallace’s recollections in 1917, the new edition was picked up by George Allen & Unwin, a company that received its original financial backing from Ruskin and counted a significant selection of liberal and socialist leftist titles among its number, including much of Carpenter’s work. Visits to Walt Whitman was reviewed positively by John Bruce Glasier in the Labour Leader. Looking to the literary rather than the socialist press, Virginia Woolf commented on it favorably in the Times ­Literary Supplement (though the Eagle Street College and other informally educated readers may have found her surprise that the “fires of intellectual life” could burn brightly outside Oxbridge somewhat jarring).117 ­Wallace also penned a full-page Labour

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98  Permeating Socialism Leader article on “The Walt ­Whitman ­Centennial: The Man and His Message” (May 29, 1919, 9). He edited a posthumous collection of John Bruce Glasier’s poetry—with quotations from Whitman worked into the preface—and responded to the events of the First World War in a long pamphlet entitled Walt Whitman and the World Crisis, both of which were published by the National Labour Press.118 In the light of this activity we may grow a little dissatisfied with ­Carpenter’s gentle slight in My Days and Dreams that there was a “somewhat Pickwickian note about [the College’s] revels,” though this is not to suggest that the College was successful in the way that Wallace had hoped (MDD, 250). As Blatchford predicted, the Bolton workers were not, on a wide scale, convinced by Whitman’s relevance. In an anecdote published in the Manchester Guardian a Bolton spinning-room piecer remembered an agitation in 1891 for better wages. He recalled that he and his fellow workers were keen to secure all the help they could from those more educated than themselves. They were delighted when the leader of the local SDF and the editor of a weekly labor journal stepped forward, but when a “prominent disciple of Walt Whitman in the town” tried to come to the laborers’ rescue he was treated with more sarcasm than respect for not understanding “the economic problems of the ‘wheelgate’” (Haslam, “A Piecer’s Prophecy,” January 28, 1924, 12). Under Katharine Bruce Glasier’s tutelage Wallace, to whom this is likely to refer, became more politically astute but, ironically, his achievements were generally perceived to be of a literary ilk. His obituary, for example, in the ­Manchester Guardian read: Whitmanites, of whom there are many in London, are distressed to hear of the death of Mr. J. W. Wallace, architect, of Bolton, who has been for many years the chief disciple of Walt Whitman in England. Mr. Wallace more than thirty years ago started a movement for the study of Whitman’s writings which became known as “The College.” He did more than anyone here or in the United States to further the appreciation of Whitman and to keep alive the spirit of his message. (“A Disciple of Whitman,” January 20, 1926, 8). The Eagle Street College may not have converted the socialist movement en masse to Whitman’s religion of love and democracy, but it did go some way towards promoting his democratic culture, which, as we shall see in the following chapter, was appropriated to a variety of ends by other writers and journalists publishing through the socialist press.

Notes 1. Sixsmith, “Edward as I Knew Him,” in Edward Carpenter: In Appreciation, ed. Beith, 215–33 (215). 2. “Typescript of the College Farewell to Dr. R. M. Bucke and J. W. Wallace,” 24 August 1891, Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1170/2/4/1/1.

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Permeating Socialism  99 3. Johnston and Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman, 18. 4. Clarke, Effects of the Factory System, 33. 5. On the Eagle Street College and social class see Masel, “Poet of Comrades.” Masel observes that group members were better educated than their parents, signaling the “social mobility that characterised Bolton’s and other Victorian mill towns’ working classes” (113). Such upward mobility was particularly pronounced in the case of Clarke who was born into the third “caste,” as he described it, of laborers and poorer workmen and worked in the textile mills in his youth before moving into the lower-middle class through his literary work. 6. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, 275–83. 7. Johnston and Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman, 17. The first chapter provides an autobiographical account of the College’s development. See also Masel, The Walt Whitman Collection and “Poet of Comrades”; Robertson’s chapter on the group in Worshipping Walt, 198–231; Salveson, With Walt Whitman in Bolton. When attendance at the weekly meetings dwindled the group’s focus became the annual celebrations held in honor of the poet’s birthday. These were continued by Minnie Whiteside, who became a kind of adopted daughter to Wallace after the death of her husband, and other second-­generation Bolton Whitmanites until the 1950s and were revived by Salveson, who brought the Eagle Street College back to the attention of Whitman scholars in the 1980s. 8. Wild, “Sketch of Life of J. W. Wallace of Bolton,” October 1932, Whitman Collection, ZWN 6/3/6. 9. Johnston and Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman, 9. 10. Whitman, The Correspondence, 5, 218. 11. Clarke, The Knobstick. 12. Jones, Bolton’s Industrial Heritage, 8. 13. Clarke, Effects of the Factory System, 30, 22. 14. Crick, History of the SDF, 106–107. 15. Howell, British Workers and the ILP, 204. On SDF and ILP cooperation in Lancashire see Howell, 209–12; Crick, History of the SDF, 118–19. 16. Hill, “The ILP in Lancashire and the North West,” in Centennial History, ed. James, Jowitt, and Laybourn, 43–62 (47). 17. A. M. Thompson in Manchester Guardian, January 1, 1944; quoted in Hill, ibid., 45. 18. Howell, British Workers and the ILP, 209. 19. Bevir, The Making of British Socialism, 288–89. 20. Hill, “The ILP in Lancashire and the North West,” in Centennial History, ed. James, Jowitt, and Laybourn, 43–62 (57). 21. September 22, 1894; quoted in Howell, British Workers and the ILP, 354. 22. Waters, Politics of Popular Culture, 13–14. 23. Broadhurst, “Notes of an Address Delivered before the Whitman ­Fellowship at the Swan Hotel, Bolton,” December 1930, Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1330/5/3. 24. See letter from Wallace to cousin, 17 July 1895, Whitman Collection, ZWN 6/1/1. 25. Folsom, “Whitman’s Disciples: Editor’s Note,” 54. 26. Masel, “Poet of Comrades,” 112.

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100  Permeating Socialism 27. Traubel, extract from The Post, “In Merrie England,” 5 September 1891, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/9/3/1. 28. Dixon, “An Old Friend: An Address Delivered to the Men’s Class, Bank St School, Bolton,” 7 February 1926, Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1331/1/7/2. 29. Wallace, “Occasional Notes on Walt Whitman,” 29 September-2 October 1890, Whitman Collection, ZWN 6/2/20. 30. Ibid. 31. Wallace, draft article, “Whitman’s Personality,” 15 April 1919, Whitman Collection, ZWN 6/2/34. 32. Ibid. 33. Johnston and Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman, 18–19. 34. Ibid., 91. 35. Rhys, Poems of Walt Whitman, x. 36. In the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, where it first appeared in its shortened form, and in 1871–72, “For You O Democracy” was simply called “A Song” before taking its final title in 1881–82. 37. Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England, 219. 38. Robertson, Worshipping Walt, 211. 39. Quoted in Cocks, “Calamus in Bolton,” 213. 40. Ibid., 192; see also Cocks, “‘A Strange and Indescribable Feeling’: Unspeakable Desires in Late-Victorian England,” in Nameless Offences, 157–98. Situating the Bolton Whitmanites’ attitude towards same-sex desire in the tradition of “unspeakability” that he uncovers in his wider project, Cocks contends that the Bolton group demonstrated how “intimate but masculine attachments could be justified and explained in this climate without rendering them subject to condemnation as ‘morbid’ or ‘unnatural’” (Nameless Offences, 160). 41. Robertson, Worshipping Walt, 212. 42. Johnston and Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman, 177. 43. Wallace to Whitman, 9 January 1891, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/2/2/27. 44. Wallace to Whitman, May 1889, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/2/2/4. 45. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1860, 11, 347. 46. Wallace to Whitman, 9 January 1891, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/2/2/27. 47. Dixon, “The College Welcome to John H. Johnston on His Visit to Bolton,” 23 June 1894, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/43. 48. Elfenbein, “Whitman, Democracy, and the English Clerisy,” 79–80. 49. Johnston, “A College Song,” 10 April 1891, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/42. 50. Robertson, Worshipping Walt, 208. 51. See, for example, the list of books collected by Wallace, n.d., Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/4/10. Johnston’s diaries also reveal a growing appreciation for Browning under Wallace’s tutelage. In the same year that “A College Song” was written, in fact, Wallace implored Johnston to refer to Browning, Whitman and other writers less and to think for himself more; Wallace to Johnston, 3 May 1891, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/2/4/1 (for further discussion and extracts from this letter, see pp. 87–88 of this chapter). 52. On the reading practices of the British working classes see Rose, Intellectual Life. 53. On mutual improvement, see Rose, Intellectual Life, 58–91. For the influence of this tradition in the north of England, see Watson, “Mutual Improvement Societies in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire”; Radcliffe, “Mutual Improvement

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Permeating Socialism  101 Societies in the West Riding of Yorkshire” and “Mutual Improvement Societies and the Forging of Working-Class Political Consciousness.” For a discussion of the related concepts of education and association in the socialist context, see Vaninskaya, William Morris, 175–203. On education and the ILP see Carolyn Steedman, “The ILP and Education: The Bradford Charter,” in Centennial History, ed. James, Jowitt, and Laybourn, 277–98. For a comprehensive consideration of the relationship between educational reform and social reform across the socialist movement in the late nineteenth century, see Manton, Socialism and Education in Britain. 54. Waters, Politics of Popular Culture, 190. 55. Johnston, “The Song of the Eagle Street College,” 29 April 1889, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/8/1/1. 56. Rose, Intellectual Life, 8–9 (Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 50, 5). For Rose on conservative authors and radical readers, including Hardie, see 39–48, and for a discussion of Blatchford’s engagement with literature in the Clarion and socialist reading habits, see 48–57. 57. Clarke, Milltown Mischief. 58. Clarke, Effects of the Factory System, 177. 59. Whitman, The Journalism, 2, 106. 60. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 47–48. 61. Wild, “Sketch of Life of J. W. Wallace of Bolton,” October 1932, Whitman Collection, ZWN 6/3/6. 62. Lawson, Class Struggle, xxii; De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 171, 174. 63. Lawson, Class Struggle, 2–4. 64. Stacy, Walt Whitman’s Multitudes, 1. 65. Wallace, “Occasional Notes on Walt Whitman,” 29 September-2 October 1890, Whitman Collection, ZWN 6/2/20. 66. Lawson, Class Struggle, xx; the phrase “worker/poet” is Folsom’s in Native Representations (145). 67. Greenspan, The American Reader, 110. 68. This preoccupation is evident, for instance, when Wallace advises Wentworth Dixon on how to craft a letter to Whitman: “When you write to him do not be too cold and formal! Your central fires are usually veiled and hidden by an external coldness that belies them. You cannot go to the other extreme and gush, but let your letter be blood warm”; Wallace to Dixon, 8 June 1891, Whitman Collection, ZWN 3/13. 69. Wallace to Whitman, 16 August 1890, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/2/2/11. 70. Johnston and Wallace to Whitman, May 1887, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/2/2/1. 71. Wallace, “Occasional Notes on Walt Whitman,” 29 September-2 October 1890, Whitman Collection, ZWN 6/2/20. 72. Wallace to Johnston, 11 July 1891, Whitman Collection, ZWN 6/1/63. 73. Johnston and Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman, 62. 74. On Whitman and the figure of the Bowery b’hoy see Reynolds, Walt W ­ hitman’s America, 103–107; Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 21–25; Lawson, Class Struggle, 4–8. 75. Johnston and Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman, 178. 76. Wallace to Whitman, 16 August 1890, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/2/2/11. 77. Wallace to Whitman, 16 January 1891, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/2/2/29.

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102  Permeating Socialism 78. Wallace to his cousins, 29 January 1888, extracts copied by Johnston, Johnston Papers, ZJO 1/1. 79. Lawson, Class Struggle, xxiii. 80. Wallace, “A Rejoinder,” 8 October 1890, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/22. 81. Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” Lyrical Ballads, 106: “Sweet is the lore which nature brings; / Our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things; / We murder to dissect.” 82. Johnston Diaries, vol. 5, 29 June 1889, Johnston Papers, ZJO 1/5. 83. Wallace to Johnston, 3 May 1891, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/2/4/1. 84. Begbie, Living Water: Chapters from the Romance of the Poor Student, 114–18; quoted in Rose, Intellectual Life, 58. 85. Quoted in Radcliffe, “Mutual Improvement Societies and the Forging of Working-Class Political Consciousness,” 152. 86. Vaninskaya, William Morris, 139. 87. Elfenbein, “Whitman, Democracy, and the English Clerisy,” 101. 88. Clayton, Rise and Decline, 81–82. 89. Cocks, “Calamus in Bolton,” 196. 90. Sixsmith, newspaper cutting, “Local Friends of Walt Whitman,” Chorley Guardian, 9 April 1938, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/73. 91. Glasier to Eagle Street College, May 1893, Whitman Collection, ZWN 9/278. 92. Wallace, “Walt Whitman’s Funeral: Words Spoken to the College,” 30 March 1892, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/5. 93. Ibid. 94. Wallace, “Whitman Day Speech,” 10 June 1910, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/15. 95. Harned to Eagle Street College, 5 January 1893, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/8/2/2. 96. Wallace to Eagle Street College, 6 January 1893, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/24. 97. Quoted in Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England, 220. 98. Wallace to Eagle Street College, 6 January 1893, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/24. 99. See the recommendation from Whitman that Johnston included in the 1898 preface to Diary Notes and used in publication notices for Visits to Walt ­Whitman: “Who can doubt the Doctor’s American reports? Even those who doubt me, doubt the ‘Leaves,’ ought to see how superbly the Doctor handled his material—or let it handle itself” (Diary Notes, xiii). 100. By the time that Visits to Walt Whitman was published in 1917 Johnston and Wallace were happy to include an extensive selection of the letters and postcards they had received from Whitman, including their final communication, sent on 7 February 1892: “Same cond’n cont’d—More & more it comes to the fore that the only theory worthy our modern times for g’t literature politics and sociology must combine all the bulk-people of all lands, the women not forgetting. But the mustard plaster on my side is stinging & I must stop— Good-bye to all” (274). 101. Wallace, “Bolton Independent Labour Party Conference Paper,” 26 May 1894, Whitman Collection, ZWN 6/2/23. 102. Cocks, Nameless Offences, 183.

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Permeating Socialism  103 103. Wallace to Traubel, 26 March 1895, Horace and Anne Montgomerie Traubel Collection, Library of Congress; quoted in Robertson, Worshipping Walt, 225. 104. Quoted in Salveson, “Loving Comrades: Lancashire’s Links to Walt Whitman,” 72. 105. Hardie to Wallace, 29 December 1892, Whitman Collection, ZWN 9/311. Perhaps surprisingly, the selection he dismissed, like polished granite, as “an outrage on nature,” was not Rossetti’s but Rhys’s. 106. Blatchford to Wallace, 15 February 1894, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/1/4. 107. In a Bristol radical coffee house Glasier was introduced to England’s Ideal. Glasier saw “light” shining through the socialists gathered and through Carpenter’s text: “It was as if in that smoke-laden room a great window had been flung wide open and the vision of a new world had been shown me; of the earth reborn to beauty and joy, the home, to use Edward Carpenter’s own words […] ‘of a free people, proud in the mastery and divinity of their own lives’”; “Edward Carpenter’s Influence,” in Edward Carpenter: In Appreciation, ed. Beith, 82–89 (84). 108. Glasier and Glasier, Religion of Socialism, 10. 109. Johnston Diaries, vol. 26, 10 March 1893, Johnston Papers, ZJO 1/26. 110. Glasier to Eagle Street College, May 1893, Whitman Collection, ZWN 9/278. 111. Glasier to Wallace, 30 December 1925, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/1/32/3. 112. Glasier to Wallace, 20 December 1925, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/1/32/1. 113. Glasier to Mr. and Mrs. Ormrod, 10 August 1923, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/3/4. 114. Thompson, The Enthusiasts, 79–82. 115. Martyn to Wallace, 6 July 1894, Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1170/2/4/2. 116. For a contemporary remembrance of Martyn see Wallis, Life and Letters of Caroline Martyn. On Martyn, Glasier and other socialist women see Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women. 117. Woolf, “Visits to Walt Whitman,” Times Literary Supplement, January 3, 1918, 7. 118. Glasier, On the Road to Liberty; Wallace, Walt Whitman and the World Crisis.

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3 Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press

Socialism, wrote Blatchford in his pamphlet The New Religion, was on “all lips and pens.”1 It was “written about, argued about, spoken about, and preached about,” a discursive energy crucial to its success. In what he ­perceived as a sure sign of the movement’s advance, it had established “a literature of its own, and a Press of its own,” spoken of in one breath as two sides of the same idea of literary culture. Recent scholarship has done much to uncover the integrated nature of nineteenth-century print culture, challenging, as Matthew Rubery puts it, “the assumed divide between the period’s literature and journalism.”2 Focusing on the materiality of the printed page, critics have proposed a mode of reading that considers fiction and poetry as they appeared within the polyvocal medium of the periodical, among articles, reviews, advertisements and other wrappings.3 Socialist literary culture was in large part a production of its press: a broad democratic “canon” was built through the literature printed, quoted, excerpted, reviewed, recommended and advertised in its various periodicals and papers. A self-­reflexive process, the pages of the periodical press were used to discuss the very concept of democratic literature, the form it required and its function in the campaign for a socialist future. Shared, in a very broad sense, across the movement, socialist groups used this democratic “canon” in various ways for propagandist purposes: to move, inspire, amuse or educate in an effort to make and retain socialists. As this suggests, literary texts were put to work in different ways on the page; there were variations between journals and editors and from one writer to another, even within the same publication. A more nuanced purpose was served in the intensive ongoing debate about the nature of socialism itself: what it meant as a future utopian ideal and/or what it meant in the interim as an oppositional, anti-capitalist movement and/or what it meant as a holding space in which a viable alternative to the public sphere could be developed. Introducing John Bruce Glasier’s The Meaning of Socialism, the new liberal economic theorist J. A. Hobson posited in 1920 that those who had approached socialism through art and morals, as he believed Glasier had done, rather than economics and politics had done the most to foster the “vital spirit, both of criticism and of construction.”4 This view of an allied outsider looking in was shared by a number of people within the movement,

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  105 as we have seen exerted in Carpenter and the Eagle Street College’s availing of Whitman for a “larger” spiritual and culturally oriented socialism. This chapter takes a wider perspective to detail the various ways that Whitman was incorporated into such discussions about the nature and purpose of democratic or socialist art and the nature and purpose of socialism itself. Percival Chubb’s 1887 To-Day article, “The Two Alternatives,” gives insight into how literature could impact such conflicted existential considerations. Chubb was a founding member of the Fellowship of the New Life—established, as one member recalled, for “the cultivation of character, a complete education, and social regeneration.”5 He also joined the Fabian Society but took to the pages of To-Day, the most Marxist journal of its time, to add his two cents to “the question which ha[d] been somewhat heatedly debated amongst Socialists of late” (“The Two Alternatives,” September 1887, 69): whether socialism should be constitutionalist or revolutionary. A matter of deep practical importance, the outcome would radically affect decisions about the movement’s tactics, propaganda and organization. Aligning himself with his readers, Chubb delineated the two alternatives of his title, a­ sking whether “we, as revolutionists” would encourage people to abstain from political activity or, conversely, ask them to “conform political machinery to new Socialist uses” (70). Arguing for the latter, he distances himself over the course of the article from revolutionary theory, making the case for a practical political movement focused on legislative and municipal reform. In rejecting the pure revolutionist’s “out-and-out gospel of social salvation through external change” (72) Chubb moreover argues for the “ethical intention” of socialism, often dismissed, he suggests, by the journal’s readership as irrelevant or “sentimentalist” (71). Moral change would lead to economic change, not the other way around. Socialism drew its “vital force,” he claimed, not from Marx but from writers, including Whitman, “who have quickened and nourished in us a deeper sense of human dignity, a more exacting demand for freedom, a keener susceptibility to beauty and recoil from ugliness, a wider sympathy, and more uniting spirit of comradeship” (76). Here then, literature as a transformative “ethical” tool is associated with gradualism and parliamentarianism in a periodical advertising itself as an “exponent of scientific Socialism” (Bax and Joynes, “To Our Readers,” January 1884, 1). We will see throughout this chapter how Whitman’s aversion to any narrow philosophy allowed his work to be co-opted for competing socialist ideas and for a variety of propagandist purposes. His ideological suppleness operated most richly, however, in the contested territory between different socialisms or, indeed, radicalisms, where writers sought to remap the terrain along new boundary lines.

Material Conditions Supposing, quite reasonably, that it might be of interest, in 1891 John Johnston sent Whitman an article by Edmund Gosse on “The Influence of Democracy on Literature,” published in the Contemporary Review. Whitman

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106  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press was less than impressed. “Trash, trash, trash—bold stupid trash, from first word to last,” he exploded (WWC, 8, 160). Gosse had a good income, was knowledgeable about books and was given to “loafing in libraries” yet knew absolutely nothing. “Then there was no democracy in the paper?” asked Traubel. “No, nor anything else,” retorted Whitman. We know no more detail about Whitman’s objections to Gosse’s essay, a dispassionate attempt to quell fears that the quality of British literature was adversely affected by the rise of a democratic mass readership, and that the democratic spirit demanded the curbing of individuality and intellectual development. It is probable that he took issue with the case Gosse made for literature as an elevated intellectual endeavor and with his inability to grasp the extent to which a culture of the common people could transform society. For Whitman, it was not enough to reassure readers that the “democracy” had no negative influence on the state of the arts; as discussed in the previous chapter, the people needed to be at the heart of a radical reinvention of the very concepts of literature and culture and therefore society itself. Gosse’s discussion about the relationship between literature and the reading public, however, has suggestive points of contact with Whitman’s own, and with the cultural work of the socialist press, which in turn had bearing on its integration and circulation of Whitman. Considering what a democratic literature might comprise, Gosse believed first that it needed to include the poor but not exclude others. For Whitman this idea was crucial: the democratic literature of the future would be of the common people but also for all of America. In the socialist press we see this debate played out in text and subtext of literary commentary, in editorial decisions concerning the type of literature published, and in some of the literature itself. The democratic reading habit, reminded Gosse, increased literary circulation, and the social and material conditions he describes suggest a great opportunity for a writer such as Whitman who sought to be “absorbed” by the people, whose conception of democratic literature demanded its widespread acceptance. Speaking of the mainstream periodic press, Gosse was enthusiastic about how it allowed for the propagation of different journalistic styles and, in particular, about its services to literature. Resisting the panic of charges of moral or intellectual dumbing down, he proposed that over the latter half of the century newspapers had become “the most democratic of all vehicles of thought,” and that “the prominence of literary discussion in their columns [did] not look as though the democracy was anxious to be thought indifferent or hostile to literature” (“The Influence of Democracy on Literature,” 532). Gosse’s argument that the democratization of print culture enhanced literary production was reformulated in the socialist periodical press, a site in which the possibilities generated by the interaction between a democratic print medium and a democratic literary culture for the development of a socialist, anticapitalist conception (and reification) of democracy were explored. Owing to advances in technology, urban growth, increased literacy and, most significantly, the mid-century repeal of the so-called “taxes on

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  107 knowledge,” the meteoric rise of the periodical press made reading affordable.6 Therein lay great radical potential, not least in the range, and sheer quantity, of voices given space on the printed page. At the same time, however, the new culture of “mass media” was increasingly driven by market factors and profit concerns. Competing definitions of a “popular press” emerged. Raymond Williams identifies three steadily diverging meanings. The first is the “old radical sense, of being ‘for the people’”—the political press of Cobbett at the beginning of the century, the Chartists in the middle, and Blatchford at the end. The second is an “intermediate sense” combining generalized political attitudes and popular light reading material. Finally, “the sense of ‘popular’ in purely market terms” as a highly capitalized ­product for a separated “mass” readership, defined by its structures of production and distribution, and the social relations among proprietors, journalists and readers.7 As the referencing of Blatchford suggests, Williams sees continuity in the activity of the popular press in its first radical sense across the century. ­Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, however, has recently proposed that late ­Victorian radicals turned to what she calls “slow print” in the effort to resist a populist shift from the oppositional to the hegemonic and capitalist. Where early nineteenth-century radical print culture had “associated successful class-­ oriented protest with rapid and large-scale expansion into a potentially limitless print frontier,” Miller argues that by the end of the century radical thinkers had turned to a slower form of literary production that rejected mass audiences. Print’s “endless reproducibility” made it especially subject “to the expansive market ideology of industrial capitalism.” Looking first to Morris then ranging widely through a wealth of less familiar material, Miller posits that “by redirecting independent small-scale print toward a limited community, these writers hoped to resist the political failings of a mass-produced medium.”8 Unpacking, as it does, the political significance of this aspect of late Victorian radical culture, this reading offers an illuminating perspective on the emergence of literary modernist aesthetics. I would argue, however, that in the socialist periodical press at least, a significant strand of its activity did not conform to this orientation but instead sought to mediate all three of Williams’s definitions of a “popular” press in the attempt to secure a mass readership for its oppositional utterances. While some of the periodicals under discussion in this chapter—­ Seed-Time or the post-1907 New Age, for example—exhibit the tendency Miller describes, proprietors such as Hardie and Blatchford worked to different ends. If circulation (wildly successful by socialist standards) was relatively limited—Hardie claimed 50, 000 for the Labour Leader in 1895 and ­Blatchford a steady 34, 000 for the Clarion—it wasn’t for want of trying.9 The Labour Prophet, Labour Leader and Clarion issued appeals to readers to aid in their distribution and circulation both within the socialist community and outside it. Socialists were asked to sell the publications at their meetings, to request local shops to stock them and to give away used copies as

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“tasters” to friends and strangers to encourage them to purchase their own. The financial pressures of the journalistic enterprise drove such appeals in part, but a mass readership was also an ideological and political imperative. Of the periodicals I consider here, Hardie and Blatchford’s efforts, in particular, were less a philosophic exercise in aesthetic resistance to capitalism’s homogenizing sway and more a desperately fought campaign against print bias and media blackout. Carpenter summarized the problem in 1886: Another thing against us is that the Press—being almost entirely in the hands of the Capitalist class, and representing the views and feelings of that class—has consistently, and for many years done everything in its power to throw cold water on the co-operative movement and to represent it as of no importance.10 Writing in the Labour Leader in 1894, Hardie likewise accused the mainstream press of “carefully overlooking all labour meetings to the vast injury of the Labour cause” (November 10, 1894, 5). The Bradford Forward commented in 1904 that the labor movement was attacked in the press most insidiously through “plausible lies,” misleading statements and half-truths that served the purposes of labor’s opponents: “The Publishers of these fabrications know that we have no means of dealing with them for the press of the country, like the machinery of the country, is in the hands of the employing and propertied classes” (October 29, 1904, 4).11 That the movement’s l­ eaders—­Morris, ­Hyndman, Bax, Hardie, Glasier—invested resources so heavily in print is telling. Regional publications such as the Yorkshire Factory Times or Teddy Ashton’s Northern Weekly evinced a strong localism, but they can be viewed as efforts to rival the success of the mass-produced provincial press. If print’s “endless reproducibility” made it subject to capitalism’s “expansive market ideology” it also serviced socialist ideologies of “permeation” and “making socialists.” Morris, for instance, wanted an “educated movement,” an “intelligent revolution”: “I should like to see 2, 000 men of that stamp engaged in explaining the principles of rational, scientific S­ ocialism all over the kingdom.”12 Print had the potential to galvanize, and the ­Commonweal’s work was therefore to encourage “the union of the working classes towards Revolution” (Morris and Bax, “Editorial,” Commonweal, May 1, 1886, 33). The challenge facing proprietors, editors and journalists was how to construct a discursive space powerful enough, and far-reaching enough, to present a serious challenge to the mainstream press without resorting to exploitative, immoral or wasteful capitalist practices. Advocating precisely the kind of slow print that Miller analyzes, ­Reginald A. Beckett—who wrote Carpentarian verse and, as seen in the introduction, was a keen admirer of Whitman—delivered a scathing attack in the pages of the Commonweal on “The Newspaper Nuisance” (February 25, 1888, 60). The “feverish haste” of the industry to disseminate the latest facts rather than the most important could only be profitable from a commercial point of view. Decrying the popular taste for the news he suggests that it was

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a temporary product of that particular nineteenth-century stage of social development. After the socialist revolution there would be no demand for a medium that masqueraded in the service of information and enlightenment but was in fact motivated only by party-political and commercial interests. “What a saving of labour would be effected,” he observed: Consider the journalists, editors, sub-editors, reporters, and scribblers of all kinds. […] Moreover, all this unnecessary and poisonous scribbling has to be set up by compositors, pulled off the machines, and go through a variety of processes; the papers are sold by thousands of newsagents and newsboys, all of whose labour is wasted. The same news appears, more or less garbled, in half-a-dozen competing prints every day, and is hashed up afresh every week. Yet an uncharitable commentator could point a finger straight back at the proliferating socialist print culture in which Beckett was so intimately involved. Contributing regularly to the increasingly profuse “scribbling” of the movement, as a journalist and poet Beckett was published in the C ­ ommonweal, the Christian Socialist, the Labour Prophet, Justice and To-Day, and he assumed editorship of the Labour Prophet in 1896.13 Vast quantities of socialist time, money and labor were expended in print. By Deian Hopkin’s reckoning 250 socialist and labor periodicals and newspapers appeared from 1880 to 1900, in addition to those published by the trades unions.14 The human cost of this labor was thought to be high. Tom Maguire, for instance, whose weekly poetic contributions to the Labour Leader were squeezed into an exhausting schedule of socialist activism, was widely perceived to have worked himself to death, notwithstanding his depression and alcoholism. The existence of so many and so many different types of publications might signal a vibrant, inclusive “larger socialism.” Writers contributed to multiple periodicals. News and poetry were shared, and similar events, lectures and literature were reviewed. But was this evidence of a genuine attempt at an alternative, cooperative public sphere or an indication that, like the capitalist press, socialists wastefully “garbled” up the same news in “half-a-dozen competing prints”? Blatchford privately commented to C ­ arpenter that he didn’t think Hardie’s Labour Leader would “stand”: “I wish it would—or that it were a better paper, for I want to get away from the work of Labor newspapers and do something better, and if Hardie could fill the place he would be more than welcome to it.”15 The overt claim of a common purpose is undercut by Blatchford’s snarkiness and the competitive undertones about propagandist strategies. Within the socialist community publications vied for the same readers: advertisements for Justice, the C ­ larion, the Labour Leader, the Labour Prophet and Teddy Ashton’s Journal ran in the Labour Annuals.16 “There never will be anything like it” boasts the Clarion of itself in 1895. “The most successful effort in labour journalism yet made” vaunts the Labour Leader in 1896. Teddy Ashton’s Journal makes a rather pleasing bid for supremacy on the grounds of being “The happiest ha’poth in the

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110  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press World” in 1898. While this kind of self-publicity was fairly good-natured, the relationship among different socialist strands, as expressed through their respective periodicals, could be somewhat more internecine. Ideological differences were passionately and, on occasion, virulently aired; ironically, the issue of socialist unity drew some particularly unkind attacks.17 I make the point not to denigrate the well-meant and hard-fought efforts of those involved but to provide context to Whitman’s reception and appropriation in its various pages. Such ideological debate had an impact on considerations of style, tone, editorial policy, use of literature, images and layout alongside material decisions about cost and funding. Whitman and his work were incorporated in assorted ways: poems were reprinted, excerpted and quoted; publications were reviewed or his life and work discussed in detail; he was parodied and evoked humorously; he was drawn into discussions about religion, politics and literature but also cycling, school board elections, children’s work, physical health and vacationing. He was featured in the Labour Annual’s “Interesting Biographies of Reformers” section in 1897, which included well-known and committed communist, anarchist and socialist activists such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, William Clarke, Walter Crane and James Ramsay MacDonald.18 Sketched images or photomechanical reproductions occasionally accompanied text. In February 1895, a front-page Labour Prophet article about Whitman was organized around a large photographic image at its center. Capitalizing precisely on the “endless reproducibility” of print, the same image was used in the 1897 Labour Annual (218), which the previous year had run the following advertisement: Portraits.—Editors of local journals desirous of illustrating their columns by the portraits of prominent reformers, or secretaries of societies who may wish to add effectiveness to their announcements of meetings, may find some of the half-tone process blocks used in this Annual of service to them. For the use of these blocks, where careful treatment and safe return within a week is guaranteed, a charge of 2s. each is made, or 3s. where the block exceeds 12 sq. ins., with a reduction of 25 per cent. for a series of 4 or more. In some cases good electros of the portraits can be sold, the prices ranging from 5s. to 10s., according to size.19 Whitman’s was among the 30 available portraits, which included Blatchford, Carpenter, Katharine Bruce Glasier, Caroline Martyn, John Trevor and Keir Hardie. In the 1899 Labour Annual “Splendid Chromo-Lithographs” of Whitman and others were advertised, finely printed in colors on plate paper and “ready for framing.”20 The socialist periodical press was not adverse to drawing weapons from the capitalist print industry’s armory in order to enter into battle with them.21 Hardie’s Labour Leader and Blatchford’s Clarion, in particular, borrowed from developments in both visual and written style of the so-called New Journalism to increase their appeal and accessibility to target popular audiences.

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Figure 3.1  Advertisement in 1899 Labour Annual for Whitman chromolithograph.

Figure 3.2  Whitman portrait as featured in the Labour Prophet, February 1895, 17. The process block was advertised in the 1896 Labour Annual and the image used in its 1897 number. Courtesy of the Working Class Movement Library, Manchester.

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112  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press Perhaps the most difficult concession editors routinely made regarded commercial advertising. Socialist publications mostly sold at one penny (SeedTime was relatively dear at 2d; Justice was forced by reader pressure to lower its cost to one penny after a few issues), an affordability crucial to their mission. Revenue usually had to be secured from advertising, a compromise with commercialism that left an unpleasant taste in many mouths, even when ethical products such as fair trade tea or non-sweated clothes were promoted.22 In a smart parody, ­entitled “Whitmanesque,” a Labour Leader writer using the pen name “Ben” asked provocatively whether a socialist press that advertised goods and ­commodities—in addition to advertising itself as a c­ ommodity— could be different from the capitalist press (May 30, 1896, 183). The first line apostrophizes to the abstract personification of “­Advertisements!” and so plays with the mutable “you” in Leaves of Grass, the backhanded employment of Whitman’s inclusive style challenging the poetical principle that everything should be celebrated equally. The ­Whitmanian accumulative catalogue is used to ironize the ubiquity of advertisements: Hoardings, shop fronts, sky signs, back and front pages of magazines and periodicals, Then between boards promenading in the gutters, Railway stations, embankments, The old weather-beaten fences by the sides of the railways and roads, Boards standing on private lands, Designs and letters variegated, illuminated, gas-lighted, electric, Omnibuses, tramcars, vans and carts used in trade; Popular novels are not greater in fiction than you. The problem, as Carpenter explains in Co-operative Production, is structural: “Hundreds of thousands of pounds spent in advertisements—all wasted; for this, the labour of thousands of commercial travellers—all wasted; for whatever one firm gains by its advertisements, its travellers, another firm inevitably loses.”23 Cooperation would reduce the waste generated by competitive market practices (and the same, implicitly, might be said of socialist publications). As a focal shift mid-stanza onto the press suggests, through its engagement with advertising practices the press was inherently bound to a capitalist market ideology that it replicated through its own self-advertisement: Spreading abroad attested figures as to marvelous newspaper circulations, wonderful circulations. Intolerant persons would limit you, O advertisements; I bid you not to be limited. Uprear yourselves militant, triumphant for ever. Though expedient, the ethical integrity of the alliance between the press and commercial advertising is called into question. Significantly, the poem,

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  113 printed as it was in a periodical funded largely through advertisements, makes no distinctions between the practices of the commercial and the socialist presses. “(Think not that I am in league / With editors hungry for ads.;— / My true poems have been scornfully W-P-B’d. more than once. / Courage poet-comrades, editors shall be suppressed, and our songs yet ring through these islands),” the speaker interjects parenthetically. By subverting Whitman’s claim that “what is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect” (PP, 557), “Ben” makes a wry point about the role of financial drivers in his own socialist publication. Wider issues are raised concerning the character of the democratic public sphere as constructed in the socialist periodical press, the relationship between literature and journalism, the question of who is allowed to contribute and in what form, and the hierarchical editorial structures that perhaps undercut democratic intent.

Matters of Poetic Form and Style “Ben” writes for laughs, playing on the joke in socialist editorial offices, and shared with their readers, about overflowing waste paper baskets (WPBs), groaning under the weight of substandard poetic submissions. The socialist press comprised print enterprises with a broad democratic scope which, as we have seen with James William Wallace and Reginald A. Beckett, opened opportunities through publishing offices and periodicals to writers who might otherwise have been locked out of the dominant literary and print culture. ­Nevertheless, while literary influence extended beyond a privileged few, publications did not equate being democratic with being indiscriminate. The Commonweal, the Clarion, and the Labour Leader, for instance, all featured some fairly frank and unfraternal rejections of readers’ poetic efforts. For the most part, it was not supposed that the forging of a new democratic literary culture entailed the inclusion or estimation of all work equally, though it was concerned with the issue of giving voice to those who were not heard. The question of who was to speak for the masses was bound into issues around formal politics, style, content and “spirit” in the rendering of the democratic ideal and was played out in the poetry published, quoted and discussed in the socialist periodical press. Linda K. Hughes has done much to establish the various ways poetry “mattered to Victorian editors and readers” of the periodical press. Rarely used as filler (on pages organized around columns prose was better suited to this purpose), poetry “diversifies closely printed columns” as well as acting as “a value-added visual and literary feature.”24 Miller offers the first detailed analysis of how this worked in “radical” late Victorian print culture, a term she uses to denote “wholesale class-oriented social protest,” including that of socialism and anarchism. Five main categories of radical periodical poetry are identified: (1) new work by contemporary radical poets of some renown, such as William Morris or Edith Nesbit; (2) new work by obscure radical

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poets or by readers of the radical press (some of whom are working class); (3) older poems situated as part of a radical canon, including poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the Chartist poets, and continental writers such as Ferdinand Freiligrath; (4) reprints from other radical periodicals; and (5) songs meant to be sung together to build community at socialist events. All of these poems, suggests Miller, “work to establish a radical poetic tradition based on traditional poetic form.” The tendency of radical press poetry of the era was “to depict revolutionary political aims in ‘measured’ terms, to situate radical ideals within the familiar forms and rhythms of the past, and to claim poetic tradition as a precapitalist formation.”25 The political value of formal innovation was not privileged, and cultural change is thus theorized as a transformation of the dominant culture from within. Miller’s is a compelling analysis of the formal choices of fin de siècle radical poets who unquestionably tended to adopt more traditional forms. But looking back to the “older poems” reprinted, and the broader literary ­culture evoked through quotation and reference, various questions arise about the paradigms of tradition and innovation. As Miller observes, Modernist literary criticism has over recent years problematized the “aesthetic rupture” ­paradigm and if poetic tradition was indeed claimed as a precapitalist ­formation in socialist circles its renovation and innovation was often considered to be its ­evolutionary destiny. To bracket together poets as diverse as Shelley and Tom Maguire in a singular idea of “traditional poetic form” homogenizes the range of styles incorporated into the poetic culture of the socialist press and overlooks the felt sense that socialist critics often had of living in a time of literary innovation. Rather than thinking about “precapitalist formations,” commentators were frequently impressed with the new directions of nineteenth-century literature. Writing for an American audience, the Fabian William Clarke, for example, suggested that socialism’s growth in Britain was aided by a “new spirit” in literature, “a desire to know things as they are, to sound the plummet in the sea of social misery, to have done with make-believe and get at realities” (“The Fabian Society,” New England Magazine, March 1894, 95). Walt Whitman appears in Clarke’s list of writers of this sort between essayists (Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold) and realist novelists (Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoy and Zola). In “The Socialist Spirit in Victorian Literature” in the Labour Leader, “W. B.” also identifies a “new spirit” in nineteenth-century literature, which he thought “connotes a movement towards Socialism” (June 19, 1897, 206). The “Socialist passion for man” and the “discontent with the present highly complex life of his” had informed “every thought in every art in this Victorian era.” This idea was renewed and reclothed in a variety of literary forms over the century. At the beginning of the period Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and—especially—Shelley, were seen to respond to the French Revolution and give the “divine ideas—of fraternity and equality

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  115 and freedom” that underpinned it “a new life” in their verse. The same spirit was said to populate the work of Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray and Hardy and the poetry of Thomas Hood and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. At the end of the century, the “apotheosis” of this spirit was to be found in Walt Whitman. This long, almost full-page article was matched on its facing side with a piece of a similar length by Henry Salt on “Some Revolutionary Poets of the ­Century” ( June 19, 1897, 207). Salt concurred that a spirit of democracy was at work in the literature of the nineteenth century, though he worried that “scientific and technical” socialism was having a “deadening” effect on the movement’s poetry: “The life and lilt of song-writing s­imply cannot exist in the same soil as our schools of economics.” ­Nevertheless, Salt drew a line from the Romantic poets to the Chartist poets and on to the socialist poets, connecting them in one evolving line of democratic cultural advance. He identifies two primary incarnations of this democratic spirit: while ­Shelley and the poets of his time sang from “the high mountain-land of poetic vision,” the Chartist poets worked in the “more prosaic fields of political activity,” making up in “direct power” and strength what they lacked in vision. The visionary strain of democratic poetics was picked up by socialist poets such as John ­Barlas, Francis Adams and William Morris but found its greatest expression in the more formally innovative work of Whitman and Carpenter. Towards Democracy is lauded as “the final word of the century on the quest of Freedom—‘the word Democracy’—revolution and revelation in one.” In many ways these commentaries seem to prefigure Anne Janowitz’s reconceptualization of the Romantic poetic inheritance. Janowitz identifies a “dialectic of romanticism,” a “double-trajectory” of the more familiar poetics of individual transcendence on the one hand and a “interventionist, communitarian strain,” which ran through the first and second generation Romantics, through the Chartists and on to the socialist poets at the turn of the century, on the other.26 Thus in the work of Wordsworth and his contemporaries, “W. B.” and Salt could see an aesthetic that was at once elevated and individuated and communal and oppositional. This dialectic can be mapped onto what Miller observes as a “conflicting sense of what radical poetry should be,” about whether it should it be written by “men who see farther than the rest of us” or emerge from the people.27 These opposing ideas are brought together in the pages of the socialist press, sometimes in the same journal, and sometimes—as above—synthesized in the same article, to create a democratic aesthetic so broad that formal politics cede to a more nebulous concept of an interventionist “spirit.” There was not even the demand, to misappropriate a complaint in Justice about the binding of a Fabian tract, that the movement’s poetry should be confined “to a plain Socialist red” (“E. E. W.,” “What to Read,” July 22, 1893, 3). Socialist poetry was part of a much wider democratic literary canon that constituted texts from both within and without the dominant literary culture. When, as in these articles by Clarke, Salt, [“W. B.”] and Chubb, inspirational figures of nineteenth-century literature are listed, Whitman was

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116  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press almost always included. His poetry can itself be mapped onto Janowitz’s dialectic: as discussed throughout this study, his poetics negotiated ideas about individualism, the elevated figure of the bard, the privileging of poetry and individuated transcendence, on the one hand, with those surrounding communitarianism, the “average,” a collective democratic culture and being a poet of the people, on the other. Contending with this tension, critics who were admirers of Whitman also had to reconcile their belief in his individual greatness with the acknowledgment that Whitman could not be the poet of the people if the people did not accept him as such. Formal innovation in literature may have been valued by a number of the movement’s public thinkers, but it was not the most effective mode of political propaganda. Whitman had to be marketed to readers, sometimes literally so, through advertisements and reviews. As noted in the introduction, John Trevor advised his working and lower-middle class Labour Prophet readers to buy W. T. Stead’s penny edition. Orage recommended the Labour Press imprint to a similar audience in the Labour Leader and on more than one occasion offered to procure Carpenter and Whitman’s texts for his readers. “If there are any comrades who would like a complete edition of Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’—indeed, his own big, splendid, lordly edition—I can get it for them” (“A Bookish Causerie,” January 18, 1896, 18). “If you have any difficulty getting ‘Towards ­ ­Democracy’ (5s.) or ‘Leaves of Grass’ (9s.) send to me” (“A Bookish Causerie,” February 15, 1896, 60). The negotiation of this tension, or discrepancy, was not without its contradictions. Like the critics glossed above, in The New R ­ eligion ­Blatchford deemed this new religion, which was “Socialism, and ­something more than Socialism,” to be “largely the result of the labours of Darwin, ­Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.” It was from these authors and, by implication, not from socialist activists that “the people” had caught the message “of love and justice, of liberty and peace, of culture and simplicity, and of holiness and beauty of life,” which was currently “rousing and revivifying the masses.”28 Whitman is referred to extensively throughout and, in an example of the kind of inspirational lesson he was seen to bring to the masses, a lengthy extract from the “Great City” section of “Song of the Broad-Axe” describes the socialist urban ideal. It begins: A great city is that which has the greatest men and women. If it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world. The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretched wharves, docks, manufacturers, deposits of produce merely. Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers, or the anchor-­ lifters of the departing. Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings, or shops selling goods from the rest of the earth. (cf. PP, 335)

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  117 The reader is invited to compare with Manchester, which was “called a great city” but was not great from a socialist perspective.29 In correspondence with the urban environments found in popular socialist fiction such as Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Whitman evocatively taught that the “great city” would be where “thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,” where “the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases,” where “outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority,” and where the “faithfullest friends,” the “healthiest fathers” and the “best-bodied mothers” stand (cf. PP, 335–36). Yet only a few years before Blatchford claimed that the labors of Whitman and others were largely responsible for “rousing and revivi­ fying” the masses, the Clarion’s premature obituary had acknowledged that Whitman had failed to reach “the class for whom he wrote” (“Walt Whitman,” January 23, 1892, 6). The Clarion’s only detailed consideration of Whitman, it sought to redress this fact and is a master class in Blatchfordian persuasive ­rhetoric. First, ­Whitman himself is blamed. His form is said to be “repellent” to the ­“general reader.” Next, responsibility is ironically taken on behalf of the newspaper industry through Blatchford’s playful invocation of familiar attacks on the press. The average reader, “spoiled by daily contact with journalism” and “the cheap wit, the polished commonplace, and the old stock allusion” found therein, was not used to “searching below the surface.” Quietly challenging his reader to prove otherwise, Blatchford proceeds to bring Whitman’s work to life by vividly sketching the experience of reading Leaves of Grass as physical sensations: One feels a strange excitement in reading him, something akin to the mixed feelings of elation and surprise that come from moving in a hurrying crowd, or from watching a race or a gala dance, or observing the reflections of the gold-fringed clouds drifting across the dimpled surface of moving water, or listening to the tramp of troops and the ringing strains of a military quick-step. His lines are full of action and of adventure: they scent of the fresh air and the strong odour of the meadow grass. Such a poet sounds difficult to resist. Omitting discussion of aesthetic or technical detail, Blatchford’s commentary is a study in how Whitman wished his poetry to work as a literature that could speak as forcefully as life itself. Whitman was no “windy orator”; he was a man of the people, a man of action. Whitman’s poetry did not deal in “gliding gondolas and strumming guitars, nor in medieval tourneys, and ancient saturnalia”; it dealt with ordinary working people and the politics of democracy. His readers should not be put off, Blatchford implies, by preconceived biases against Whitman and his unfamiliar literary style: he was one of them, not one of the well-to-do, out-of-touch cultured classes.

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118  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press

Figure 3.3  Robert Blatchford, “Walt Whitman,” Clarion, January 23, 1892, 6.

Writing in Seed-Time, the quarterly publication of the Fellowship of the New Life, J. Wilcock also sought to counter his readers’ prejudices against the form of Leaves of Grass, but his was a different kind of audience. The Fellowship of the New Life began as a circle of free thinkers who gathered around the philosopher Thomas Davidson to consider matters of moral and social regeneration. Its number included Carpenter, William Clarke, Percival Chubb, Havelock Ellis, Edith Lees, Olive S­ chreiner, Henry Champion, Hubert Bland, Edward Pease, Frank Podmore and William Jupp. In 1884 those who wanted a greater commitment to social reform splintered away to establish the Fabian Society, with some keeping up attendance at both as well as involving themselves in other socialist and progressive campaigns. An early commentator described the Fellowship as “the fons et origo of the later nineteenth-century ethical socialism of England,” though other critics have less charitably characterized the split as a division between the doers and ­dreamers.30 The Fellowship’s primary contribution to socialism was in its theorization of the social problem as the tendency of modern society to disregard the law of the “Unity of Life” (Adams, “Editorial Note,” Seed-Time, February 1898, 1), and in the related view that individualism and socialism were so intimately related that the improvement of one would necessarily benefit the

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  119 other.31 Seed-Time did not aim for a mass circulation but instead propagated its dovetailed ideals of individual improvement and social transformation on a smaller scale among an educated and largely upper-middle-class readership. Over the paper’s nine year run Whitman was quoted, commented on and discussed in detail more than any other poet, yet Wilcock felt that he needed to defend Leaves of Grass, not, like Blatchford, because his readers might think it too literary, but because they might not deem it cultured enough. Wilcock begins his article, “Walt Whitman,” by drily observing that “out of respect for the critics and their devotion to rhyme and metre” any discussion of Whitman must begin with the issue of his “sin” in “setting aside the laws of prosody” (Seed-Time, April 1895, 2). Like ­Blatchford, he thought that there was great vitality in Whitman’s form; it could “stir the blood” in a way that prescriptive rhyme schemes and regular metrical ­structures would not allow (3). The key to the text’s formal politics lay in the ­“impetus-word” of “Suggestiveness” (6). Wilcock quotes Whitman’s explanation in “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”: “The word,” he says, “I myself put primarily for the description of these Leaves, is the word Suggestiveness. I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought … there to pursue your own flight. (4; cf. PP, 666–67) In this formulation, as Carpenter also believed, Leaves of Grass was a collaboration rather than an individual work of genius. The reader is empowered by the creative activity demanded of him or her. In contrast, the “poetry of Culture,” dependent on rhyme and meter, is thought to render the reader “entirely under the control of the poet” (4). For Wilcock, Whitman’s formal strategy matched the keynotes of the content of his poetry: “humanity” and “comradeship” (6). Facilitating both individual and social transformation through the collaborative production of meaning, the “poetry of futurity, of the possibilities of the present, and the infinite, must not in any degree limit Suggestiveness” (4). In the Labour Leader, John Bruce Glasier debated the relationship between parliamentary socialism and more utopian renderings founded on religion, philosophy, art and literature in “An Incensed Whitmanite: His Diatribe and Philosophy” (July 15, 1904, 177). Using the fictionalized conversation, a familiar device in socialist propaganda deployed most famously in Blatchford’s Merrie England series, Glasier’s “conversation” was between himself and a utopian socialist, the “incensed Whitmanite” of the title, who had reluctantly decided to join the ILP. Disappointed with Whitman’s devotees, who honored him with their lips but had not committed to a socialist way of life, the utopian thinker had come to see that social transformation

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120  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press could only be brought about through the apparatus of the state. In his socialist interpretation, demands are made of Whitman’s readers that Whitman would not make himself. The character of Glasier, in turn, departs from the line of reasoning a parliamentarian might be expected to take and explains that faith should not be lost in poetry or philosophy. These were important, though they played a different role to what the “incensed Whitmanite” had formerly supposed. Their function lay in cultivating the “social imagination and ideals” necessary for the accomplishment of legislative victories. As the “incensed Whitmanite” had demonstrated in his own political development, a nation’s citizens needed to be internally prepared for such changes, and Whitman’s work, along with that of other democratic writers, was to cultivate a spirit that would allow more pragmatic political activity to prosper. Alfred Orage, Whitman’s loudest champion in the Labour Leader, ascribed even greater significance than either Wilcock or Glasier to the role of the democratic poet in general and Whitman in particular. Repeated references in Orage’s literary column, “A Bookish Causerie: Past, Present, and Future,” running from November 1895 until July 1897, caused Whitman to be featured more in 1896 than in any other year of publication. Best known for his pioneering work at the interface of radical art and politics in the Leeds Art Club and at the New Age in the early twentieth century, Orage’s passion for Whitman would cool, but in the 1890s his radical ideas about democratic art developed with Whitman at their core. “A Bookish Causerie” was written in a tête-à-tête style that forged the sense of a friendly bond between reader and writer. He explained that the column was “meant to be a sort of after-supper chat about books in general, just when our pipes are lighted and our toes are toasting” (“A Bookish Causerie,” March 7, 1896, 78). Despite this familiarity and informality, Orage stated very clearly that he was not about to offer a popular “newsy” style of journalism, because of an adamant belief that socialist journalism, like its literature, should offer something spiritually substantial (“A Bookish Causerie,” February 15, 1896, 60). Socialism demanded a print culture, literary and journalistic, befitting the “gospel of unity” upon which he believed it was founded (“A Bookish ­Causerie,” September 19, 1896, 328). Holding that the characteristics of the past were “division and subtraction” and those of the future “addition and multiplication” (ibid.), it was no coincidence that when he invited readers to send for Whitman’s poetry it was for the complete edition. Orage had learnt to read Whitman through Carpenter and in the same way contextualized socialism as part of a profounder cause, the spiritual evolution towards “what has been called in the west ‘cosmic consciousness’—sut-chit-anandra Brahm” (“A  Bookish Causerie,” March 21, 1896, 102). From this political theology Orage inferred that “to express the universal in terms of humanity—this is the function of the poet of Democracy (“Towards Democracy,” June 6, 1896, 197). Whitman and Carpenter were the exemplars, their readers all more or less aware of the concept “of non-Differentiation, or non-­Separateness,” their poetry a testimony to its growth and evolution (“A Bookish Causerie,” March 21, 1896, 102). According to Orage such poetry could not “be

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made in the old forms” (“Towards Democracy,” June 6, 1896, 197); the expression of the “universal” was reliant on formal innovation: That, it seems to me, is the one essential difference between the poets of democracy and the poets of old time. They of the romantic age had the form void of spirit; we have the spirit void of form. That it is a spirit capable of a form which shall displace all previous forms produced under opposite conditions we can only surmise: but there is Whitman to lend our surmise strength, and who now shall give it certainty? (“A Bookish Causerie,” January 25, 1896, 26) As Carpenter had posited before him, Orage believed that literature had to evolve towards a form capacious enough to be able to hold the universal in its expression. This philosophy wasn’t new but is worthy of note because Orage put it at the center of his journalistic work. If the poets of democracy were tasked with inscribing the universal spirit in verse, d ­ emocracy’s journalists were to disseminate it. “A Bookish Causerie,” he informed C ­ arpenter, was an attempt to “read modern literature in the light of the new old conception you and Whitman have done so much to spread” (the very phrase “new old” points to an understanding of Carpenter’s unfolding exfoliation).32 So anxious was he to help rather than hinder that Orage sent C ­ arpenter his notes on Towards Democracy to check before publication in the Labour Leader. For Orage, this was how literature and journalism should work together in the alternative public sphere to hurry along the socialist spiritual democracy of the future by ideological means. The call for a new literary form was complicated by the fact that poets were, as implied in the longer quotation above, working under the material and social conditions of industrial capitalism. If Orage was not quite able to see how the formal expression of the new spirit would evolve, it was also not clear what scope remained for a Whitmanian style, especially after Towards Democracy. The break from regular rhythmic and metrical patterning would cease to seem fresh or innovative in many other hands, and attempts fell a little flat, even to Orage’s ears. Joseph Clayton’s Before Sunrise was reviewed favorably, but readers were told that they “need not expect anything entirely new” as Carpenter and Whitman had “left little field” in this generation “even for speculation” (“A Bookish Causerie,” April 18, 1896, 134). In his long-line unrhymed poem “Towards Revolution,” published in the Commonweal (March 31, 1888, 101) and reprinted in the Labour Annual in 1895 (131–33), Reginald A. Beckett provides an example of perfectly readable verse that falters because it works in this style without seeming to offer anything new. As the title suggests, the poem looks forward to the social revolution, and as its allusion to Towards Democracy indicates, its philosophy is straight-up Whitman-­inspired Carpenter: “Where civilisation spreads, we spread, its mortal foe, / Evolved out of its own bosom”; “I tell you that all that has gone before has been but a preparation for this”; “The separation of class from class, of man from man, has intensified

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122  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press and grown unendurable; / And now men’s hearts are wildly throbbing for a newer Society of fellowship.” Ironically, the relative novelty and unusual character of this form seemed to stale more readily than more traditional poetic structures.33 Most Labour Leader contributors did not treat Whitman with the same degree of reverence shown by Orage, and in its pages, which were written for a working and lower-middle-class readership, Whitman’s formal quirks often raised a sceptical eyebrow. More than most socialist periodicals, the Labour Leader’s tone and content varied, and Whitman’s treatment in its pages was accordingly mixed. He was taken seriously as a poet or prophet of democracy by some but was also borrowed for less high-minded purposes by admirers and critics alike. “Seven young champions of I.L.P.dom,” drolly observed the Labour Leader in one such instance, “have arisen in Leeds and gone for its hypnotic—that is to say, blind-side,” producing a “comprehensive attack” on the city in sixpenny booklet form. As is usual in the new book by the new person, there is a plentiful display of the expansive Walt throughout the pages, which is unfair to the unsophisticated. To turn the ordinary browzer [sic] of Tennyson on to the Whitman prairie is like taking a masher off cigarettes and putting him on navy plug. The result is sickening. (“Leeds,” June 9, 1894, 9) Similarly to how it was handled by Blatchford and Wilcock, the experience of reading Whitman is described metaphorically in terms of its physical effect, but in this case it is nausea-inducing. If not for this, Whitman’s disciples hoping for a less bourgeois literary culture might have appreciated the wry figuring of Whitman as strong, uncut tobacco as opposed to a fashionable smoke. Significantly, it is not that the working Labour Leader reader was not educated enough for Whitman but, conversely, that his or her literary experience would hinder an appreciation. Taking aim not only at Whitman but at his earnest appropriation by the particular type of well-meaning young socialist typified by Orage (and in fact the pamphlet may even have been produced by Orage who was active in the Leeds ILP at this time), this comment exhibits a more irreverent strand of the poet’s inclusion in the socialist press. Humor, after all, could be a useful weapon in “making socialists.” Working from the principle that if the reading experience was not entertaining no one would stay with it long enough to be educated or propagandized, Blatchford was the master of this approach. Looking back over some old copies of the Manchester Sunday Chronicle, where Blatchford worked at the time, James William Wallace informed Whitman that the paper paid the “left-handed compliment of professing to employ a ‘Walt ­Whitman Junior’ on its staff, whose verses frequently appear but do no credit to the name!”34 Wallace thought Whitman would be interested because of the reach the newspaper had among the working classes: his name had currency among the demographic Whitman sought even if his verse did not. Written either

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  123 by Blatchford or by one of the four other writers who left the Chronicle to work with him on the Clarion, the Walt Whitman name was used to sign off some columns of humorous creative writing in his new socialist periodical. In one example, the column’s characters wake to find themselves in the apparent throes of the socialist revolution: “The sky was red i’ the north! The steeples rocked to the clash of bells! The heavens shook to the boom of cannon!” (“A Vision,” July 23, 1892, 6). Joining the “teeming and streaming” rush of people in the streets, the movement gains in size, mass and pace as the reader follows the column down from the top of the page only to discover at the bottom that it is not, in fact, the socialist revolution but the new edition of the C ­ larion hot off the press. This was socialism’s answer to New ­Journalism: the tone was light and witty, the layout visually ­appealing. Blatchford’s Clarion could be easily picked up and put down, readily digested by the reader short on time. Back in the Labour Leader, Keir Hardie brushed off one hopeful poet with a curt, “Thanks, but it is not easy to imitate Whitman” (“Answers to Correspondents,” May 12, 1894, 6). It may not have been easy to produce powerful, affecting poetry in his style but, as has already been seen in “Whitmanesque,” it was almost too easy to satirize, perhaps affording—as Wilcock bemoaned in Seed-Time—the “most humorous parody in the language” (“Walt Whitman,” April 1895, 7). Whitman had not been taken to heart on as wide a scale as admirers had hoped, but his style was known well enough for readers to get the joke. This may have been difficult for devotees to stomach, but parody could be used, nevertheless, to comment on questions of form, style and content and to contribute to the debate about the character and purpose of socialist print culture. The Labour Leader ran a few different skits. A regular feature in its early years was a humorous column, “The Growlers’ Club,” which depicted imaginary conversations between semi-fictionalized versions of its journalists. In June 1894 a hearty laugh at Whitman’s expense was combined with a sharp look at the burgeoning quantity of socialist print: “I’m not to be interrupted,” replied the M‘Donald, testily. “Again, friends, I say that papers, books, and pamphlets are good, well, indispensable; but so are readers—readers whose attention has been arrested, whose appetite for such fare has been whetted. Lectures from parsons, lawyers, doctors, collegiates, M.A.s, B.A.s, and LL.D.s, if you can get them, are devoutly to be desired; but these want, and must have, audiences.” “M‘Donald! Judging from that string of learned lecturers, I think you’re qualifying as successor to Walt Whitman,” laughed the Wastrel, “but I’ve got the job already. Sample? Here goes— ‘The song I sing is the song of all men and of all times; Not a little thing, not a big thing, not a middle-sized thing do I miss out. Equal in joy to me is the mite or the mountain.

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124  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press Heart of mine, love not you alike plumbers and gasfitters, message-­ boys (O the message-boys!), and grocers; Yea! ironmongers, milkmen, sweeps, The policeman who locks you up in the morning and knocks you down at night, Bakers, brewers, the sons of brewers, &c., &c. If I could get something moist I would give you more.” “For any sake, hold your tongue!” cried Ben. “Curl up in the corner of your chair, and keep quiet.” (“The Growlers’ Club,” June 23, 1894, 6) A knowing wink is made to the homoeroticism of Leaves of Grass, but the major target is once again Whitman’s non-selective pluralism. The value of Whitman’s effusive celebration is undercut as it seems to proliferate everlastingly. Though this aspect of his work made it such a useful resource, it also raised questions about selectiveness and focus in politics as in literature. In contradistinction to Orage’s view, democratic art is not in this case to be defined by the ever-expanding and equal inclusion of everything; nor, by a similar token, should socialist journalism or propaganda be defined in this way. The efficacy of the socialist press was vastly reduced if it could not find a readership to match its output; valuable resources were expended for limited return. The “learned lecturers” are superficially praised but the implication is that they were unable to garner a popular readership. While it seems to be suggested that socialism was in need of more print utterances from below, precisely how the culturally disenfranchised could sound their voice was a vexed issue. In another Labour Leader parody, writing as “the Wastrel” of above, the paper’s subeditor David Lowe presents a series of short mock-editorials in the style of 11 writers including Morris, Burns, Carlyle, Tennyson and Longfellow. Whitman’s is the first, beginning: O, reader mine, you cannot escape me! This is no paper; it is a man. i [sic, and throughout] long to enter your heart (many are the empty hearts) and lodge there. Were the Leader a twopenny paper, all’s well; were it otherwise, all’s well. i assert that all past issues were what they should have been, and that they could nohow have been better than they were, and that this number is what it should be, and that the I.L.P. Directory is, and that this number and directory could nohow be better than they are. O circulation! O subscribers! i am determined to press my way toward you, draw forth the copper disc; i climb the North Pole, or dive in sea after you. (“Immortals as Editors,” ­December 21, 1895, 6) Each voice mediates a version of a similar critique to that of “Whitmanesque”: editorial decisions in the socialist press should not be driven by market factors, and the desire for a mass audience, even for the noble purpose of gaining converts to the socialist cause, could slip into familiar capitalist profiteering.

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(It is perhaps significant that though Lowe was great friends with Hardie, he was proud of retaining “an intact liberty to differ from him.”)35

Figure 3.4  David Lowe [“The Wastrel”], “Immortals as Editors: Concocted and Compiled by the Wastrel,” Labour Leader, December 21, 1895, 6.

After the parodies, the piece turns reflexively on itself to consider the subject of style: If i hadn’t been in the dry dock for want of boots i’d never have written the above. Poverty has its own revenge. As i remarked long ago there’s nothing new but style, yet style is easily imitated when you have’nt one of your own. The lower-case “i” is used throughout the piece, a visual marker of a cultural poverty that is associated with material poverty. It is also used to i­nitial the piece, suggesting an authorial persona of the lower-class everyman. Both uses communicate a felt sense of disenfranchisement against which ­poverty—material and cultural—had forced a reaction. The lower classes would find a way to make themselves heard, and if material conditions had prevented the acquisition of the kind of cultural self-reliance discussed in the last chapter, they would borrow from their oppressors. Here, the dominant cultural sphere is self-consciously transformed from within as “the Wastrel” moves swiftly between adaptive and oppositional modes of writing.

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126  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press For C. Allen Clarke, the material conditions he wrote of in The Effects of the Factory System had such a profound impact on the act of writing that his imagining of his own task was constructed in the images of their exploitation: “It seems to me that my pen is a hot, oily spindle, and my ink a horrible mixture of soot and sweat coloured with human blood.”36 This was no outsider’s appropriation, a literary affectation merely, but a commitment of one who had intimate experience of these conditions to labor by the pen for the sake of those working with their hands until the “spectacle of a devastated land and people” had been superseded.37 Born to a ­cotton mule spinner and a textile worker, Clarke entered factory work before being offered a pupil-teacher post and then pursuing a career in journalism. The revolution in cheap print opened up a new raft of possibilities for an autodidact of his social standing, as it had for Whitman. Having turned to socialism (he would stand as an ILP/SDF candidate in the general election of 1900), Clarke launched a succession of publications aimed at a working-class readership before finding enduring success with his Teddy Ashton’s publications (1896–1908). Elfenbein’s suggestion that Leaves of Grass nicely avoided “both the elitism of established Victorian writers and the vulgarity of traditional labor lyrics” would have been vigorously resisted  by Clarke.38 Leaves of Grass was assimilated into a democratic literary culture broad enough to encompass established ­Victorian writers, working-class poets and the transitional or indeterminately placed. Inspired by Blatchford’s socialist take on New Journalism, Clarke used humor, fiction, a light tone and local dialect to inform and raise serious questions. Education, he held, should not be about helping “a man to get an easier living than his fellows” but rather developing the individual to “be of the best service to the community and himself” (Teddy Ashton’s Northern Weekly, July 12, 1901). Whitman is brought into Teddy Ashton’s for this purpose: quotations from Leaves of Grass were sometimes used to illustrate Clarke’s columns, and his readers were instructed to study Whitman’s “strange yet beautiful and homely poetry” (Teddy Ashton’s Journal, August 8, 1896).39 Adopting a very different tone in his 1919 book on spiritual matters, The Eternal Question, Clarke suggests an alternative to the traditional Sunday church service. He recommends a format in which non-sectarian “songs of the duty of life, of the visions of spirit, of the hope of humanity” would be sung as hymns; anthems would be made of poetry, including the “deep wild rhythm of Whitman—the bard above all of comradeship and immortality.”40 As Clarke well knew through his commitment to the Labour Church, facilitated by Carpenter’s Chants of Labour socialists had been hymning Whitman in this way for many years.41 Carpenter’s stated intention was to “help to give voice to those who have so long been dumb!” a deliberate invocation of the following section of “Song of Myself”:42 Through me many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,

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Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons, Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs, (PP, 50) These voices are, however, conspicuous by their absence in “Song of Myself,” subsumed through structural parallelism into the bard’s monolithic voice, a silencing that troubles his overtly democratic premise. Carpenter’s socialist songbook reworks and improves the theme for a socialist audience, giving “voice” literally, through the singing of songs, and more figuratively, by providing a medium through which socialists could make their demands heard. He advertised for contributions to the songbook in the Commonweal (August 27, 1887, 277) and Justice (September 3, 1887, 3), and its index carefully lists the occupation of its Chartist, socialist and established literary writers, counting bootmakers, machine fitters and steel workers as well as authors, journalists and teachers among its number. Clarke’s “Voices” poetry can be considered as another reworking, first published as a series in the Clarion in 1892 (with individual poems also appearing in the Bolton Trotter) and then as a collection, “Voices” and Other Verses, though the Labour Press in 1895. The collection is prefaced with an introductory poem in which a bard-like speaker explains his intercession on behalf of the “inarticulate”: But hear them speak themselves; I say no more But this to those who question, “Who are you, That as interpreter would go before This mighty multitude?” I answer true, “I but feel in my heart all that they feel, And what they cannot tell you I reveal.”43 There are clear parallels with the sentiment of Whitman’s passage, if not its style. The democratic objective is once again challenged by the vexed issue of mediation. “Hear them speak themselves; I say no more” the bard states but then continues to talk, assuming an interpretive role reliant on the presumption of being able to judge the “inarticulate” feelings of others. Unlike “Song of Myself,” however, each poem develops a distinct voice—the “Slum-Child,” the “Robbed,” the “Factory Operative” or the “Miner,” for example—that stands alone, particularly when serialized in the Clarion. Varied in form and tone, they are slowly built together to deliver a scathing social critique from a lower-class perspective, even when the “voice” is that of the “Respectable” or the “Doctor.” One of the “inarticulate” voices picked up by the framing bardic speaker is that of the “Poor Poet.” Sounding a much more human voice, the same poetic purpose is restated using less lofty language: “I’ll sing of humble homes and lives, / Of working men and working wives.”44 Unlike Gosse, Clarke saw the need for a poet specifically for the poor, for the unrepresented. Through this doubling the speaker positions himself, like the speaker in

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Whitman’s poem, as mediating from above but also speaking from within, strategically campaigning for a cultural space for the lower classes by virtue of being able to shift between the two, synthesizing the two strands of the transcendent romantic and local communal dialectic.

Figure 3.5  From C. Allen Clarke, “Voices from the Crowd: 1—Introductory,” Clarion, April 16, 1892, 2.

The Socialist Whitmans Making a passionate appeal in a 1910 Labour Leader article for the reinstatement of poetry into the ILP campaign, a contributor named Arnold Eiloart described it in spiritual terms as “the expression of the Universal Harmony—of God, if you like” but qualifies more pragmatically: “For propagandist purposes, poetry and the drama are mines of almost untouched wealth. In the country people are going to bed at 8 o’clock, at 7 o’clock even, because they have nothing else to do” (“Poetry for the People,” March 11, 1910, 145). In the following section I consider how Whitman’s affective power was harnessed for “propagandist purposes” by examining ­representations of four ­“versions” of Whitman in a variety of publications: Whitman the poet of health, Whitman the revolutionary, the liberal-facing Whitman and ­Whitman the prophet. The important work done by Jerome McGann and others on what he calls the “textual condition” of literature has ­familiarized the concept that the physical and contextual properties of a text influence its reception. In McGann’s theorization, each text houses “variants of itself screaming to get out.”45 Thus if one of Whitman’s poems is printed in a socialist newspaper between a strike report and an economic

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  129 exposition, it is likely to receive a different reading than if encountered, say, in an anthology of American poetry. Within the socialist press, “variants” of Whitman were produced in publications with assorted leanings, through commentary and analysis but also through the associative context of the surrounding content. Though it was rare to go as far as the one commentator who confidently declared that Whitman would have been a Labour Leader reader (“Here and There,” February 2, 1901, 40), socialist periodicals not only marketed Whitman to their readers but also pressed him into service for their particular versions of the socialist cause. Whitman as the celebrator of health, virility and a harmonious existence with the land was compatible with the local associational socialism described in the previous chapter. Outside excursions and activities—­walking, cycling or picnicking—constituted an important part of socialist branch culture. Philanthropic drives to bring children from the city’s slums to the countryside or seaside were predicated on a faith in the restorative physical and mental benefits of being among nature in the country air. In ­Katharine Bruce Glasier’s front-page Labour Prophet article, briefly mentioned in the previous chapter, a message of physical as well as spiritual wellbeing is delivered: “The first essential of life is health, or wholeness. In the body, life begins to ebb, vitality is lowered, the moment any one part is at war with any other, or ceases to discharge its own peculiar function” (“Life in the Labour Movement,” May 1893, 33; italics Glasier’s). As ­Whitman does in Leaves of Grass and in his prose, Glasier associates national health with, to use Stephen Kuusisto’s phrase, “the art of good health.”46 The “industrial work” of a healthy society would supply the physical needs of the body—by which Glasier means not only food, clothing and shelter but also “the eye’s craving for beauty of colour and curve, and the ear’s desire for beauty of sound.” Classifying aesthetic stimulation as a fundamental physiological need, it was vital to provide for the senses’ “capacity for joy,” a lesson Glasier specifies that she had learnt from Whitman. This need could be met either through a particular kind of art that could evoke the natural world or from the experience of being in nature, which could satisfy an aesthetic longing for beauty. The front cover of Glasier’s collection of short stories, Tales from the Derbyshire Hills, is embossed with the figure of a healthy woman, drawn in the style of ­Walter Crane, reading a book surrounded by a beautiful rural landscape. The different parts of the drawing connect in such a way that it is deliberately unclear whether she is reading a book outside in this setting or whether the scene is called forth imaginatively in the book.47 Whitman’s poetry was thought by Glasier to possess this aesthetic quality. In an article in the Workman’s Times, for instance, she quotes from “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and blesses Whitman for transporting her in her imagination to a place smelling of lilac with the “breath of a sunny hay-day” on her cheek.48 John Trevor, likewise, explored the correspondence between the salubriousness offered by nature and the affective experience of reading Whitman. His poetry is recommended to Labour Prophet readers as a substitute

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130  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press for first-hand experience of the natural world: “To dwellers in towns, shut out from intercourse with Nature, Whitman should be one of the necessities of life; for Whitman is just a piece of Nature humanised—a great Nature force which impresses us as we are impressed by the Sun or the Sky, or the Mountains or the murmuring Sea” (“Review,” March 1896, 40–41). Whitman, who was in many ways an urban poet, is not so much a poet of nature here as much as he is nature itself. Man could not live on literature alone—the a­ gitation for improved living, working and environmental conditions was imperative—but a special kind of literature offered an imaginative alternative until such time as the opportunity to commune with nature was afforded to all. While a healthy society would necessarily produce strong, well people, in Whitman’s writing, conversely, a healthy people would produce a healthy nation. As Robert J. Scholnick details, healthy living was promoted as a means of ensuring national stability and social improvement, with the migration from national metaphor to individual body invoking troubling implications for a text so overtly committed to inclusivity.49 “Song of the Open Road,” for example, a poem that avows that the person of color, the felon, the diseased and the illiterate are to be accepted, also states: He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance, None may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health, Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself, Only those may come who come in sweet and determin’d bodies, No diseas’d person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here. (PP, 303) With similarly troubling implications for socialist theory, an 1894 Labour Leader article by Sam Hobson (as “Olympian”), “The Cult of the Athlete,” uses Whitman’s treatment of health to argue that the poor physical state of the British workforce had led to the diseased state of the nation (August 25, 1894, 5).50 With the rise of the leisure industry and the professionalization of sport, the ILP increasingly regarded sport as a rival for the time of the people they sought to engage. In 1904, for instance, John Bruce Glasier lamented that “cycling, football, and other forms of personal recreation have cost us the zealous services of many admirable propagandists.”51 In 1894, though, physical recreation was embraced as an achievable means of claiming a better life for oneself. Hobson’s regular Labour Leader sports column as “Olympian” promoted physical activity as an integral part of socialist life. Looking back to the everyday athleticism that defined the people of pre-industrial Britain (or Hobson’s imagining of it), he asks whether the nation’s social problems would have been allowed to develop if its workers had “loved these outdoor games”: Would you, think ye, give all your strength, waste all your nerve, exhaust all your energies cooped up in the factory, or be semi-roasted

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before the blast-furnace? Would you listen to the futile inanities of the money grubber imploring you to protect him against the foreign competitor? Indeed no. Quick would be the answer, “God gave us eyes to see and ears to hear, arms and legs to develop, gave us lungs to breathe the fragrant, balmy air, and so, a fig for appeals to help you in your absurd craze for cumulation; […] This is “merrie England,” and merrie in good sooth it must be. The blame is placed firmly on the worker rather than on the industrial capitalist. The point, that the worker allowed his own oppression, can be related to one Crane would make in an 1897 Justice May Day cartoon in which the British worker is unusually figured as a decrepit elderly man, bent under the weight of the three fat capitalists holding bags labeled “rent,” “profit” and “interest” he is carrying on his back. A healthy, young figure of socialism in simple dress says, “Yes, there can be no doubt about your strength if you can support all those; but don’t you think it’s time to take a holiday?” (“The Strong Man: A Cartoon for Labour Day,” May 1, 1897, supplement).52 The labor force could improve its conditions if it would only develop and exert its own strength.

Figure 3.6  Walter Crane, “The Strong Man: A Cartoon for Labour Day,” Justice, May 1, 1897, supplement.

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132  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press The premise is bolstered by Hobson’s integration of Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric.” Whitman became increasingly evasive on the issue of race, but in this sensual paean to human physicality the bodies of the black slave and the white laborer are dignified using the same vocabulary of virility. The hope for America’s progress lay in its population out of such prime stock. “This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, / In him the start of populous states and rich republics” (PP, 256), writes Whitman of the slave at auction. Of the white agrarian laborer: “I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons, / And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons” (PP, 252).53 The section of the poem dedicated to the latter—a man over 80 years of age, six foot tall and with sons “massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, ­handsome”—is quoted in full, with Hobson concluding: “He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sailed his boat himself, he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had fowling pieces presented to him by men that loved him, When he went with his five sons and many grandsons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang, You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.” There’s a picture to look upon, ye academic respectable clerks with white transparent fingers. Watch the old man sailing his own boat, you Sheffield artisans (save the mark!) with your lungs half full of steel-­ filings. Let the British working man, dying prematurely at the average age of thirty, ponder upon the old man of eighty being “The most beautiful and vigorous of the gang.” The contrast between you and him makes angels weep. (cf. PP, 252–53) Hobson’s indictment is damning. If America could produce such men, even under capitalist conditions, how could their British counterparts—both white and blue collar—justify the sorry state of their existence? By implication, Britain was populating itself with an enfeebled race. The stock figure of the idealized, well-nourished man or woman of simple dress, as popularized quite phenomenally by Crane, was not an aspirational outcome of the future socialist society for Hobson; rather, this future could not be achieved without such men and women to drive it forward. ­Merging this figure with Whitman’s treatment of the healthy body, Hobson is more hopeful looking to the future: “I see the young women and the young men strining [sic] their nerves to win the prize. I see their ‘electric bodies,’ their clear eyes, their muscles; aye, I can see health itself upon them.” With more than a hint at the eugenic orientation that would darken pockets of socialist thought, these were the people who would bring about the socialist

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  133 future, their lithe physical health an emblem of their strength and focus.54 The vision closes in the rosy glow of a golden sunset, with young folk dancing joyfully around a maypole while their elders rest under fig trees and sing songs of peace to their neighbors, raising the question of whom this future would exclude. In contrast, though Whitman was less of a force in the revolutionary Marxist and anarcho-communist camps than in the ILP, selective use of three uncharacteristic early works, “Europe, The 72d and 73d Year of These States” (1850), “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire” (1856) and “France, The 18th Year of These States” (1860), produced a Whitman of bloodier imaginings. These poems were even gathered together in a short, and short-lived, cluster in the 1871–72 Leaves of Grass called “Songs of Insurrection,” along with three of the more rebellious inscription poems: “Resist much, obey little” admonishes one (PP, 172; italics in original); “I leave in him revolt, (O latent right of insurrection! O quenchless, indispensable fire!)” promises another (PP, 174). In Songs of Freedom, Henry Salt’s anthology of the “revolutionary poets” glossed in his Labour Leader article, Whitman is hailed as standing “at the head of the present era of revolutionary song.”55 Read sequentially, the selection’s six Leaves of Grass poems tell a revolutionary narrative: from the fostering of comradeship and solidarity in “For You O Democracy” to violent revolution in “Europe, The 72d and 73d Year of These States,” “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire” and “Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps” to reflection and reconstruction in its aftermath in “Turn O Libertad” and the “Great City” section. Honoring the dead of the 1848 European insurrections and their challenge to despotic monarchal authority, the revolutionary appeal of the poem that became “Europe, The 72d and 73d Year of These States” is self-­ evident. To-Day published an early version under its original evocative title, “Resurgemus” (September 1884, 230–32): Suddenly, out of its stale and drowsy air—the air of slaves— Like lightning Europe leapt forth, Sombre, superb, and terrible, As Ahimoth, brother of Death. God, ’twas delicious! That brief, tight, glorious grip, Upon the throats of kings. The poetic structure of the opening lines corresponds with their subject: the short second line springs out of the first, the action connected to the urgent opening adverb delayed across the first line’s long heptameter; the somnolence it speaks of is accentuated by assonance and sibilance. The poem packs a visceral punch. The relative brevity of its lines imparts a passion and power diminished in later versions. The force of the triadic lexical

134  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press patterning in “Resergemus” dissipates in the long-line rhythms of Whitman’s more mature style:

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Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves, Like lightning it le’pt forth half startled at itself, Its feet upon the ashes and the rags, its hands tight to the throats of kings. (PP, 406) Where Europe is personified originally with measured and assured gravitas, as “sombre, superb, and terrible,” in later versions it is jittery, unprepared. If the leap in “Resurgemus” is sudden, it nevertheless seems timely; in “Europe” it is premature. The succinct triadic description of the “brief, tight, glorious” grip on monarchal power is physically fraught, a euphoric moment of reckoning where collective action is intensely and personally felt. This is reduced in subsequent versions of the poem; the personal relish of the colloquial “God, ’twas delicious!”—reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”—is excised and the image of regicidal intent distanced from the speaking persona.56 In its use of the first version of the poem, the message that To-Day communicates is of the potent possibility of popular revolt, a sentiment emphasized by its pagination. To-Day is an example of Miller’s “slow print,” published monthly in thick, expensive journals (6d until April 1884 and 1s thereafter) with large text liberally spaced on the wide-margined page in a single column. “Resurgemus” ranges over three pages, and the first is filled almost entirely with the defiant affirmation of the people’s scorning of the “ferocity of kings.” Though the reader knows, as the final lines on this page recount, that the 1848 rebellions were unsuccessful—“But the sweetness of mercy brewed bitter destruction, / And frightened rulers come back”—the righteousness of the action of the people is strongly established, giving solid foundation to the argument made across the following pages for success in apparent failure. Taking advantage to rise again in state, the king “struts grandly,” trailed by those on whom his dominion depends—representatives of the state apparatus (and the servile follower): “Hangman, priest, and tax-gatherer, / ­Soldier, lawyer, and sycophant” (again, presented in threes). But as the title of “Resurgemus,” meaning “we will rise again,” suggests, if kings could ascend once more, so could the people. With parallels, as Betsy Erkkila observes, to Marx’s “spectre of Communism,” a phantom arises, a “Shape” clothed in red.57 The symbolism commonly found in the literature of war, of the dead—the fallen soldier specifically—fertilizing and renewing the earth, is employed: “corpses lie in new-made graves” defeated by bullet or gibbet, yet the speaker determines that “all these things bear fruits, and they are good.” The “seed of Freedom” would grow and be dispersed by winds, watered by rain. Contrary to the teaching alluded to in Matthew 7:17, a bad tree can bear good fruit. Through this allusion the regeneration metaphor

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  135 is associated with the Christian resurrection story, the unnatural death of another rebel by the hand of state authority on a “tree” that bore good fruit. In the context of To-Day, the vitalist transfer of the dead living on in “other young men” offers assurance to the socialist reader that, however it appeared, neither the sacrifices of his or her forebears nor the personal sacrifice that he or she might be called to make would be in vain. Despite To-Day’s revolutionary perspective, the periodical did not seek social transformation through immediate violent action but hoped more cerebrally to provide a platform to sound out the full range of socialist ideas and to consider literature, art and science from a less “cribbed, cabined and confined” viewpoint than that of “the ordinary type of contented bourgeois” (Bax and Joynes, “To Our Readers,” January 1884, 2). In “Resurgemus,” there is a t­ransfer, too, from physical to verbal action, from the seen to the unseen. The disembodied souls of the dead would “stalk invisibly over the earth, / ­Whispering, counselling, cautioning.” This, the poem’s final trio, is composed of verbs in the continuous present tense: the ongoing work of this period was of expression and articulation not violent activity. In another biblical echo, of Mark 13:35, the poem concludes with the affirmation that Liberty, the ­“master,” was certain to return. The sign was that “his messengers come anon.” The waiting period was a time for words, and if socialism was “the inevitable out-growth of the ages,” as editors Bax and Joynes were certain, To-Day was to serve as its messenger (“To Our Readers,” January 1884, 1). The Commonweal, a one-penny weekly, had a more overt propagandist agenda. Save for some of the “Drum-Taps” cluster, the tropes and rhetoric of poems like “Resurgemus” and what became “To a Foil’d ­European Revolutionaire” (which also appeared in To-Day, quoted at length by ­ ­Reginald A. Beckett) resembled the dominant strain of contemporary socialist poetry printed in its pages more closely than Whitman’s verse ­usually did. The Civil War poems, however, did not appear as often, perhaps because the depiction of the revolt against kings and tyrants carried more currency than that of a fractured and divided people. The genre of commemorative verse was put to distinctive use in oppositional publications, with the 1848 Euro­ prisings and the French Revolution holding special symbolic value. pean u ­Whitman’s revolutionary poems were therefore incorporated into a body of periodical poetry that looked historically across the channel. Two translations of “La ­Marseillaise,” for instance, were included in the Commonweal in the centenary year of the French Revolution (March 16, 1889, 85; August 10, 1889, 251). In George Gilbertson’s “1789. 1889” 10 stanzas were organized in two columns of five as an exercise in compare and contrast: where the “mob rose in its wrath” in 1789, at an equivalent point on the page in the 1889 column, the dawn was just beginning to break. Though faint, it would soon flood “all the world with light” (October 9, 1886, 221). Other examples include ­“Berlin, 1848” (by German poet Ludwig Pfau, translated by Joynes; October 2, 1886, 215) and, remembering the Paris Commune, Reginald A. Beckett’s “The Eighteenth of March” (March 16, 1889, 83),

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136  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press Charles Edwin Markham’s “The Song of the Workers” (September 11, 1886, 187) and, of course, Morris’s “The Pilgrims of Hope,” serialized in 13 installments between March 1885 and July 1886. A difficult path is trodden, as in “Resurgemus,” by drawing inspiration from the uprisings of continental Europe in the full knowledge of their failure, and there are broad similarities in how it is managed: ­Beckett, for example, urges his reader that “when we share their ardour and their aim / The life they died to bear us will be born.” “To A Foil’d European Revolutionaire,” printed on July 19, 1890 (231), lends itself to a socialist reading that is both reassuring, in the determinist view that there are structural forces beyond human control, and challenging, in its paradoxical call to commit to the revolutionary cause. With points of contact with Marxist revolutionary theory, the poem stipulates that particular conditions must be reached before “Liberty” can be attained: What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents, Invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, knows no discouragement, Waiting patiently, waiting its time. (cf. PP, 497) The reader is encouraged by the prospect of inevitable eventual success, but it comes at the cost of human agency: if the advent of liberty were neither harmed by the “indifference” of a populace nor hurried along by “tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes,” the purpose of acting in its service is unclear (PP, 497). The speaker confesses, “I do not know what you are for, (I do not know what I am for myself, nor what any thing is for,)” but despite this unknown argues for the active engagement in a process that through defeat would ultimately lead to victory: “Till all ceases neither must you cease” (PP, 498). As the poem stands alone, outside the unifying structure of Leaves of Grass, it utters a call to direct action, violent and revolutionary. Published in the Commonweal at an exceptionally turbulent time for the paper, it was put to pointed use. By 1890 the Socialist League was bitterly divided, in part over the question of how best to drive forward the revolution. Eight weeks earlier Morris had been unceremoniously ousted from his editorial position at the Commonweal and replaced by David Nicoll, who reared zealously into action for the League’s anarcho-communist faction. Nicoll’s position was clear: “Individual assaults on the system will lead to riots, riots to revolts, revolts to insurrection, insurrection to revolution” (“Practical Anarchism,” May 23, 1891, 45). One week before “To a Foil’d Revolutionaire” appeared, the issue of July 12, 1890 was, in E. P. Thompson’s words, “a real snorter.”58 Most controversially, it included an article by H. B. Samuels lamenting the lack of fatalities in the Leeds gas strike riots (“The Labour Revolt: The Leeds Gas-workers,” July 12, 1890, 222). Morris, still the technical owner of the Commonweal, had protested strongly and for a few weeks Nicoll was relatively restrained; in this context the use of Whitman’s poem registered a subtler form of protest. Taking up the top two thirds of the left-hand column, a dominant position on the right-hand page, its revolutionary content was aligned with information about the Socialist League, now distinctly

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anarchist, that appeared underneath. A brief description of a League meeting reported good sales of the Commonweal as well as the anarchist publications Freedom and the Labour Leaf; the SDF was taken to task for distributing bills announcing its “so-called ‘Labour candidates.’” In the poem’s opposite column a detailed list of lectures and open-air p ­ ropaganda events was given in densely printed text. The white space surrounding Whitman’s lines offered a visual as well as ideological challenge to the socialism of words rather than action.

Figure 3.7  Whitman’s “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire” as it appeared in the Commonweal, July 19, 1890, 231.

After the Commonweal disbanded in 1894 a number of its staff moved across to join the one-penny monthly Freedom, “a journal of anarchist communism,” where this poem was picked up again in 1897 (“France, The 18th Year of These States” was also printed a few months later). The 1871–72 version of the poem provided the epigraph for its May Day leader (“May Day,” May 1897, 35): Courage yet! my brother or my sister! Keep on! Liberty is to be subserved, whatever occurs; That is nothing that is quelled by one or two failures, or any number of failures,

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Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people, or by any unfaithfulness, Or by the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes, Revolt! and still Revolt! Revolt!59 These words were used to urge readers to “press forward with the good work we have in hand, certain that, whether results come fast or slow, our efforts will never be lost.” On May 1, a day for labor unity, the front-page article begins by striking a note of commonality: of the “many phases of Socialist thought” that would be represented in the day’s demonstrations, all would “declare for the solidarity of Labour”; social democrat and anarcho-­communist agreed at least on that point. That was the extent to which the author’s solidarity could stretch, however, and the article then shifts into a sharp attack on parliamentarianism and political activity. The article makes an impassioned appeal for abstention from engagement with the electoral process. The encouragement that Whitman gives, that results may be slow in the coming, does not in this context allow for gradualism; the call to revolt is sounded not only against the forces of industrial capitalism but against the progression of ameliorative socialism as well. This appropriation was strongly resisted in parliamentarian circles, where Whitman’s philosophy tended to be considered more holistically. One important site of debate was the extent to which the socialist agenda of social reform and parliamentary politics should be conducted on an independent platform as opposed to by means of a liberal coalition. Justice didn’t take to Whitman at all, but various parliamentarians in the Labour Prophet, the Labour Leader and the New Age wrote their versions of his evolutionary, unifying narrative into these discussions. A deployment of “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire,” for instance, that couldn’t be more different to that in the Commonweal or Freedom, was a feature of R. L. Gorton’s short story “Evadne, or Defeated: A Story Founded on Atalanta’s Race.” Published in three parts in October 1894, the story promoted not only a broad parliamentarianism but, specifically, the strategy of liberal permeation (October 6, 13 and 20, 1894, page 3 of each issue). Biographic information is scant, but contributions to the Labour Prophet on “women pioneers” and the proto-feminist periodical Shafts place Gorton at the intersection of socialism and what was known as the “Woman Question.” This intersection is also where “Evadne” works to issue a clear evolutionary message of progression through political and ideological synthesis, between liberalism and socialism and between the women’s movement and the broader human cause. The first major theme of “Evadne” is the negotiation of gender politics as part of a wider oppositional identity.60 Writing in the Labour Prophet, Isabella Ford insisted, “Surely the New Woman, the intelligent, questioning human being, is the one we want in the Labour movement; and surely, therefore, one of the chief objects of that movement is to produce such a woman” (“Woman in the Labour Movement,” December 1894, 162). Gorton’s heroine, raised in a utopian girls’ school that strove to produce healthy, intellectually capable and socially aware young women, is the perfect example of what the ideal socialist woman could be.

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  139 The second interrelated theme is the permeation of liberalism, which is focused through a love plot. Evadne’s suitor, Roland Clifford, was a liberal while she was a socialist; between these two main characters, the narrator states, “there was much to debate.” Evadne makes the case for pursuing communal rather than personal interest, for justice and equality, while Roland, the “self-made man,” confesses that social advance had always been his “first idea.” Evadne quotes from Whitman to teach Roland, to permeate his individualist beliefs, and as his interest develops he turns not to economic theorists but instead “bought a volume of Whitman and studied it religiously” to make himself “less grossly ignorant.” Though not won over to socialism, he vows to follow Evadne’s lead to “strive to lessen oppression of the producer, and injustice to women workers especially.” Recalling the popular socialist motto to educate, agitate and organize, Evadne’s strategy to achieve equality is “Write for it. Agitate. Represent it in parliament.” ­Having attended a Leeds conference of 1883 (an actual event) where a number of liberal associations resolved in favor of the female ­franchise, she stood for Parliament against Roland, the Liberal candidate, and in the political “race” of the story’s subtitle Evadne is narrowly defeated. In the aftermath of her defeat, Evadne dreamt that she heard a voice: “Poor child; your effort is recognised. Be comforted. Do we call victory great? Yes; but defeat and dismay are also great. Courage! After probation comes triumph.” The reference to “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire” would have been easily recognized, having been used each week as the story’s epigraph: Do we call victory great? Yes; but when it cannot be helped defeat is great. And death and despair are also great. (cf. PP, 498) Gorton traverses the poem’s paradox of why anyone should be called to fight “till all ceases” in a determinist evolutionary scenario by adopting a dialectic frame, where “victory” was dependent on evolution through synthesis, which could only be achieved through debate, discussion and cooperation. Refuting charges of divisiveness while making the case for an enriched humanitarian activism, Gorton carefully situates the cause of woman’s suffrage within a wider cause: as Evadne contemplates her defeat she realizes that it was “but a detail in a vast and comprehensive scheme”; she was “still free to work for Humanity” (emphasis Gorton’s). The plot’s other major synthesis, between liberalism and socialism, is forged through the nuptials of Evadne and Roland, a marriage characterized by mutual help and compromise: “While some thought that Evadne influenced her husband unduly, others rejoiced that instead of desiring Utopia she bent her energies for plain, practical everyday reforms.” An endorsement not of the independent platform pursued by the ILP but of permeation, Whitman is used at the borderline between two different parliamentary approaches to argue for

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140  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press unification and coalition. The very inclusion of the story in the ILP’s Labour Leader is a comment on the hybridity of these meaning-making discussions. The New Age offers an opportunity to explore the discursive space where socialism and liberalism met. M. Wynn Thomas argues that until May 2, 1907, when Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson, backed financially by George Bernard Shaw, took ownership of the periodical and declared it socialist, the New Age had been the organ of nineteenth-century radicalism. Though Whitman served as an important point of reference both before and after the change of hands, “the Liberal ‘Whitman’ differed profoundly from the Socialist ‘Whitman.’” The New Age is therefore able to give insight into how his work was viewed from different points on the progressive spectrum in the first decade of the twentieth century.61 Certainly, there was a decisive shift in the journal’s outlook post-1907, but looking further back into the nineteenth century its political allegiances were more ambivalent. When Alfred Ewen Fletcher took the helm in 1895, he was liberal leaning but became progressively more socialist; he sought nominations to stand for the Liberals in a by-election in 1897 before running as an ILP candidate in 1900. Under his editorship, in what Wallace Martin calls the “socialist phase” of the journal’s history, socialists such as Carpenter and James Ramsay MacDonald, who had renounced his liberalism and joined the ILP in 1894, were regular contributors.62 In 1897 the publication declared itself for the “Progressive cause” and therefore brought together liberal and socialist reformism.63 In 1898 Fletcher resigned but continued to write for the paper under the editorship of Arthur Compton-Rickett, then Joseph Clayton, both committed socialists. Even Harold Rylett, who steered the New Age on its liberal course in the twentieth century, had read at the first meeting of the Labour Church and was a Fabian sympathizer who supported Lib-Lab cooperation. In the nineteenth century, then, the New Age straddled radical liberal and reformist socialist philosophies and its use of Whitman during this time served not to contrast perspectives as much as to identify areas of similarity. “Philo” for example, acutely aware of Whitman’s malleability, wrote: His aim was to reach the individual, teach him to be manly, full of public spirit, devoted, courageous, careless of money or other rewards, and to permeate his nature with the feeling of comradeship. Both Individualists and Socialists can quote Whitman; for, like all great men, he belongs to both and includes both. (“Philo,” “Men I Have Known: 1. Walt Whitman,” October 24, 1895, 52) It can be difficult to distinguish between these appropriations. For instance, Thomas identifies a liberal use of Whitman, which made him seem heir to “a great English tradition of writers who emphasized the sense of social obligation implicit in any civilized economic, social, or political assertion of individual interest” but it can sometimes be difficult to tell this apart from the individually centered socialism of Seed-Time.64 At this end of the

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  141 socialist spectrum, the belief that permanent social reform was dependent on individual regeneration was shared with progressive liberals. In the nineteenth-century New Age, writers and editors capitalized on this ambiguity and used Whitman to explore their evolving political views, to emphasize the points of contact between sections of the liberal and socialist communities, and sometimes even to permeate a progressive but not predominately socialist readership with socialist ideas and principles. An 1898 article by Fletcher comparing Tolstoy and Whitman, for example, demonstrates this ideological overlap by using rhetorical strategies very similar to those of more firmly committed socialists discussed throughout this book: Whitman is a “seer” and “Christlike”; his “Great City” is referenced and “For You O Democracy” is quoted (“Tolstoy and Whitman,” August 4, 1898, 260–61). “Whitman fearlessly avows,” writes Fletcher: “I give nothing as duties; what others give as duties I give as impulses.” All is to be left free. Life and love are before man; let him walk therein bravely. The continent shall be made indissoluble: “With the love of comrades— With the lifelong love of comrades.” The light has come into the world, the light of human love pervades it. No one is rejected from Whitman’s fellowship. Fletcher’s emphasis on fellowship and impulsive love is a far cry from an agenda that saw social reform as a duty or obligation. An anonymous review of Prince Kropotkin’s memoirs in the New Age explicitly argues, from a socialist perspective, for a liberal-socialist alliance (“The Revolutionist,” December 7, 1899, 216–17). The social “revolutionist” of the time, thought the writer, was merely a parliamentarian whose tactic was to discredit liberalism in order to secure the anti-Tory vote. Finding this inherently problematic, the writer focused on the achievements of liberalism and argued for an alliance. ­Conservative forces were so great that nothing could be achieved with “the progressive forces” divided. The point is illustrated using Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road”: Have the past struggles succeeded? What has succeeded? Yourself? Your nation? Nature? Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary. (cf. PP, 307) Socialism was born out of liberalism in an evolving tradition of “struggle” and should work within this heritage rather than react against it. In the same year, Fletcher argued that liberalism and socialism were reconcilable

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142  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press precisely because socialism continued what liberalism had begun: “The Liberal party has a splendid record, which justifies the belief that Liberalism makes for liberty. But it has only made for liberty on lines upon which Socialism is prepared to go a great deal farther” (“Are Socialism and Liberalism Reconcilable?,” February 23, 1899, 73). Both socialist and liberal readers are thus shown their shared inheritance and what their shared future could be. As is now evident, Whitman’s inherent pluralism facilitated the selective use of his poetry to specific ideological ends across the socialist spectrum, most potently in the areas where different socialisms intersected. Those truly intent on studying Leaves of Grass for its message, however, tended to take a spiritual stance, reading into it a message that transcended sectarian interests. The same core themes discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, of loving comradeship and the divine interconnected self, surface once again. “Who need be afraid of the merge?” asks Whitman, championing the ultimate permeation (PP, 33). For these committed readers, as readings of Carpenter, the Eagle Street College and the young Orage have shown, it was imperative that the socialist movement understood Whitman’s prophetic message and united in common cause. On the occasion of Whitman’s death, William Jupp took to the pages of Seed-Time to contemplate both the “Man” and his “Message” (“Walt ­Whitman: The Man and His Message,” July 1892, 1–3). Bevir notes that Jupp, who abandoned his Calvinist upbringing to become a Congregationalist minister before founding a free religious movement based on the principles of the Fellowship of the New Life, believed that Leaves of Grass, Thoreau’s Walden and Emerson’s Essays and Lectures and Conduct of Life were scriptures, in his own words, “given by inspiration of God.”65 He uses a spiritual register similar to Carpenter’s (and he would warmly review his friend’s Towards Democracy in Seed-Time the following year). No pity was felt at Whitman’s passing, he writes, because the poet “belonged so truly, not to men only, but to Nature, and the total life of things”: It was but a call to him to pass and mingle more completely with the great mysterious elements of the Universe. As he said to a friend, “It does not in the least matter whether I die or live.” He belonged to life as a whole, and death seemed to make little difference. (“Walt Whitman: The Man and His Message,” 1) Whitman’s death would merely redistribute his divinity back into the universe where all was connected, a divine inclusivity evident in the quotation Jupp selects from “The Mystic Trumpeter” where Greek mythical allusion rubs against Christian millenarianism: O glad, exulting, culminating song! A vigour more than earth’s is in thy notes,

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Marches of victory—man disenthral’d the conqueror at last, Hymns to the universal God from universal man—all joy! A re-born race appears—a perfect world, all joy! Women and men in wisdom, innocence and health—all joy! Riotous, laughing Bacchanals filled with joy! War, sorrow, suffering gone—the rank earth purged—nothing but joy left! (3; cf. PP, 582) A New Jerusalem, an earth regenerated by love, the “pulse of all,” and an awareness of universal identity is called forth (PP, 581). The inspiration of Whitman’s life was “the dear love of man for his comrade,” which was the “law of the world” (3). This, therefore, was what should define socialism. In conclusion, Jupp avows that Whitman was not only a prophet but a “great prophecy.” Set apart from other singers, or poets of the divine, Whitman embodied the spirit of which he sang: “He is the herald of a happier age. He is a type of the average man of the time that is to be” (3). More than any other publication, the Labour Prophet advanced a spiritual interpretation of Whitman and of socialism. Its central tenets, reprinted in every issue, were that the labor movement was a classless religious movement, that the emancipation of labor was dependent on learning the economic and moral laws of God, that freedom depended on both self and social improvement, and that this religion was “not Sectarian or Dogmatic, but Free Religion, leaving each man free to develop his own relations with the Power that brought him into being” (see, for example, February 1892, 16). The Labour Prophet was founded partly because it was felt that the Labour Church needed an organ but also “more generally to represent the religious life which inspires the labour movement” (Trevor, “Editorial,” January 1892, 4). According to the Labour Prophet’s owner, editor and chief contributor John Trevor, “Socialism is to our corrupt age what Christianity was to the world at the beginning of our era” (“Perfidious Albion,” April 1896, 57), and in this religion, Whitman was believed to be “nearer to God than any man on earth” (“Editorial,” April 1892, 28). Consequently, he was invoked repeatedly in a prophetic and messianic way that other poets were not. Whitman was both examined in detail and mentioned in passing more than any other poet. He was frequently used to punctuate moral, political or spiritual points: phrases such as “let us quote an appropriate word from Whitman,” “if, as Whitman puts it,” and “as Whitman says” recur throughout the publication. Trevor, whose voice dominated the paper until he handed over editorial responsibilities to Reginald A. Beckett in 1896, adopted a similar tone to Orage: a serious-minded approximation of the personal, familiar style popularized in New Journalism.66 Unwilling to compromise his message by making concessions to popular taste, even for propagandist or “missionary” purposes, Trevor felt the need, like Orage, to defend its earnestness: “We are told that we take too high a tone; that the average man in our movement

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likes the Tit-Bits style of literature best. We cannot descend to that, but we hope to prove by the New Year’s issue that the Labour Prophet is becoming the most attractive penny magazine published” (“Editorial,” December 1895, 191). On the other hand, his rejection of the impersonal, anonymous editorial voice is explained to the reader in his editorial in April 1892: I cannot get along with “the editorial ‘we.’” I must abandon it. I am very conscious of being myself, and only myself. I am tired, worried, overworked […]. I am in a mood to understand the words of that simple-minded Galilean who threw up his carpentering and trusted God and Life. (28) Trevor’s emphasis on the personal irritated his critics. A review in Justice of his spiritual autobiography, My Quest for God, for example, found it ­egotistic and talentless: “Before one has got far into the book it becomes apparent that the god he seeks is John Trevor […]. We fail to find any ­evidence of Trevor being a contributor to original thought” (“Books and Booklets,” December 18, 1897, 3). Where the move to the personal in the wider press signified an increasing valuation of what James Mussell called the “star quality” of ­particular ­writers, Trevor was found wanting.67 But Trevor spoke to a different demographic from the writers of Justice, to those seeking spiritual fulfilment, and the confession of weakness introduces an article that is essentially a sermon. The April 1892 editorial is the first after Whitman’s death, and the space is used to evangelize the reader in his teaching. Mirroring the way that the Labour Church borrowed the rituals and structures of Christianity—Sunday services, hymns, readings—rather than instituting a radical spiritual alternative, Trevor used a Christian rhetorical framework to discuss Whitman. “My friend, have You anything to thank Walt Whitman for?” he asks the reader, concluding with his own prayer of gratitude: “Thank you, Walt Whitman, for the lift you have given me along the road of life. I feel rested, contented, resolute to trudge on my way and not turn back.” The language of the Christian faith was, however, insufficient. Contesting the sacredness of scripture, Trevor could not, he claimed, understand the words of Jesus Christ because they were experienced “at second-hand,” “remembered or imagined” in the Bible by men who couldn’t understand their meaning and made further incomprehensible in ecclesiastic doctrine. Whitman’s words, in contrast, came as straight from the poet’s heart to Trevor’s “as ink and paper permit,” and taught that personal experience should be valued over scripture: “Base your religion on a book,” Trevor declared in My Quest for God, “and the book may be upset, and your religion go with it.”68 Three prefatory excerpts from Leaves of Grass illustrate the point. The first is from “A Song for Occupations”: We consider Bibles and religions divine—I do not say they are not divine.

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I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still. It is not they who give the life—it is you who give the life, (cf. PP, 93) Religions and their texts are not disavowed out of hand but repositioned: no  longer the “whole,” they form just a part of a broader understanding of the divine focused on the human. This movement is reinforced by the structure of the extract: with the three lines all balanced over a caesura, each first clause is syntactically complete but is qualified and added to by the second. The repetition of “divine,” “grown/grow” and “life” across the caesura divide recontextualizes the words in the second clause, putting the focus of divine energy onto the “you.” This shift is reiterated in the second extract, the concluding stanza of “A Song for Occupations”: When the psalm sings instead of the singer; When the script preaches instead of the preacher; When the pulpit descends and goes instead of the carver that carved the supporting desk; When I can touch the body of books, by night or by day, and when they touch my body back again; When the holy vessels, or the bits of the Eucharist, or the lath and the plast procreate as effectually as the young silver-smiths, or bakers, or the masons in their overalls; […] I intend to reach them my hand, and make as much of them as I do of men and women like you. (cf. PP, 98) Religion is represented synecdochaly through the component parts of a church: the objects in it (“script,” “books,” “holy vessels”) and the structure itself (“lath and plast”). The lineation, as above, is balanced, with the anaphoric catalogue repeatedly juxtaposing items and objects with people to reveal the comparative inadequacy of the former. The final quotation, from “Song of Myself,” emphasizes the idea that God is found through the acts of daily life rather than in texts: “Why should I wish to see God better than this day? / I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then” (cf. PP, 85). Whitman, therefore, was thought to offer direct and unmediated spiritual guidance that would in turn enable all individuals to have their own direct and unmediated relationship with the human divine. Of course, not only does Whitman mediate the divine to his reader but Trevor mediates this mediation. Notwithstanding his protestations against sacred texts, Trevor consistently reads Leaves of Grass as scripture throughout the Labour Prophet. “To-Day [Whitman] is part of my Bible” (“Review,” March 1896, 40–41); “I take down my familiar volume of Whitman, well thumbed, and marked all through, and say at once that here is a volume of my Bible, my Book of Life” (­“Walt Whitman,” February 1895, 17). In the April 1892

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editorial he presses a relationship with ­Whitman on the reader rather than suggesting it as a possibility or model: Do you understand these words of Walt Whitman’s which I have written out for you? […] It will pay you to ponder them, to go over them again and again, and yet again, until you clearly understand and feel what they are saying to you. Have you scanned them over and found them meaningless? Do you pass them by, thinking Whitman a mystic fool? […] Go to, my friend, go to! Read them once more, and yet once more, and go not away condemned. Having established a pastoral bond with his readers, Trevor now preaches at them, the notion of condemnation resonating more with the Christian doctrine the article overtly refutes than with the free religion promoted by the Labour Church. Socialist agitation is considered an expression of the wider spiritual democracy revealed by Whitman and is also described using a Christian register: “We incontinently desire to have God’s kingdom set up ‘on earth,’ and this means rough work in an age in which Mammon is chiefly worshipped” (emphasis in original). The principles of socialism could be more effectively communicated to its Christian opponents, Trevor elucidates, if their language were used, implying that in the future this vocabulary could be retired and replaced by that of the new spiritual era. That Whitman’s work had the capacity to accommodate such a range of interpretations and appropriations as here discussed made Leaves of Grass particularly serviceable to those concerned with connections, building relationships and alliances and achieving socialist unity. Ultimately, for the believers in a higher spiritual democracy, Whitman’s message—as Carpenter preached—was for a larger socialism, for spiritual transformation that would transcend individual difference, including all socialist theories and interpretations and celebrating diversity within the whole. These discussions tended towards the effusive, a characteristic that Fabian radical William Clarke believed weakened the message and sought to redress in his own book-length study.

Notes 1. Blatchford, The New Religion, 3. 2. Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers, 4. 3. On nineteenth-century periodical print culture, see also, for example, Brake, Print in Transition; Law, Serializing Fiction; Rubery, “Victorian Print Culture.” 4. Glasier, The Meaning of Socialism, xii. 5. Knight, Memorials of Thomas Davidson, 17. 6. See Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers, 4–9. 7. Williams, “The Press and Popular Culture: An Historical Perspective,” in Newspaper History, ed. Boyce, Curran, and Wingate, 41–50 (49). 8. Miller, Slow Print, 5–6.

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  147 9. In Brake and Demoor, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, 339, 122. 10. Carpenter, Co-operative Production, 11. 11. Both examples quoted in Deian Hopkin, “The Socialist Press in Britain, 1890– 1910,” in Newspaper History, ed. Boyce, Curran, and Wingate, 294–306 (n.7, 391; 295). Hopkin also discusses the anti-establishment press in “The Left-Wing Press and the New Journalism.” See Mutch’s English Socialist Periodicals for listings of selected serialized fiction, short stories, poetry, literary criticism and political writing in the socialist periodical press. 12. Quoted in Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary, 379. 13. See biographic notice in Edwards, Labour Annual, 1898, 193. 14. In Brake and Demoor, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, 583. 15. Blatchford to Carpenter, 17 April 1894, Carpenter Collection, 386/49. 16. On Joseph and Eleanor Edwards’s Labour Annual as “a ‘work of education,’ which sought to engender a union of the scattered Socialist bodies,” see Fidler, “The Work of Joseph and Eleanor Edwards” (314). 17. On socialist unity see Martin Crick, “‘A Call to Arms’: The Struggle for S­ ocialist Unity in Britain, 1883–1914,” in Centennial History, ed. James, Jowitt, and ­Laybourn, 181–204; also Barrow and Bullock, Democratic Ideas, 83–87. 18. Edwards, Labour Annual, 1897, 238. 19. Edwards, Labour Annual, 1896, 255. 20. Edwards, Labour Annual, 1899, 2. 21. As this suggests, my position lies somewhere between that of Miller, who argues in Slow Print that a sense of “embattled anticommercialism” drove ­radical attempts to “build an anticapitalist counterculture” (n.9, 309), and Mark ­Morrisson. In The Public Face of Modernism, Morrisson argues conversely that fin de siècle socialist and anarchist groups adapted “publicity and mass ­publication techniques” for radical ends and in so doing influenced the evolution of modernist commercial culture in the twentieth century (6). My research on socialist periodicals supports Miller’s sense of a passionate attempt to create an alternative public sphere, but in many sections of the community (though by no means across the board) the felt obligation to convert the masses to the cause, to “make socialists,” led socialists to utilize, not reject, capitalist print strategies. 22. On the radical periodical press and advertising see Miller, Slow Print, 11–14. 23. Carpenter, Co-operative Production, 6. 24. Hughes, “What the ‘Wellesley Index’ Left Out,” 91, 103. 25. Miller, Slow Print, 8, 171, 167–68. 26. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, 14–16; part 1 is entitled “A Dialectic of Romanticism.” 27. Miller, Slow Print, 180–81. 28. Blatchford, The New Religion, 3. 29. Ibid., 9–11. 30. Knight, Memorials of Thomas Davidson, 16. See Knight for an early history of the group. On the Fellowship see also Manton, “Fellowship of the New Life”; Bevir, “American Romanticism and British Socialism,” in The Making of B ­ ritish Socialism, 235–55; Britain, “Thomas Davidson, the New Life Fellowship and the Earliest Fabians,” in Fabianism and Culture, 25–52. Manton concludes that the “complex, resourceful and potent group” has been “ill-served” by the simplistic label of ethical socialism (282). Bevir traces the influence of American

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148  Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press romanticism on British socialism, through Davidson and the Fellowship of the New Life; themes associated with American romanticism gave a distinctive hue to much of ethical socialism. For Britain, who seeks to reclaim the aesthetic and cultural aspects of Fabianism, the very presence of the “New Lifers” in the Fabian Society “makes it difficult to understand how the Society has acquired the reputation of being entirely materialist in its aims and schemes and of lacking any idealistic or ‘poetic’ side to its conception of how mankind and society might be improved” (27). 31. See, for example, Fellowship of the New Life member Herbert Rix in Sermons, Addresses and Essays: “The true antagonism is not between socialism and individualism, but between socialism and capitalism. That capitalism has come to be called ‘individualism’ I regard as a misfortune. [...] True individualism, I hold, will be the outcome and fairest flower of socialism” (193). 32. Orage to Carpenter, 3 February 1896, Carpenter Collection, 386/63. 33. For an early twentieth-century example of left-leaning writing in a Whitmanian style, see Binns, The Great Companions. As discussed by Thomas in Transatlantic Connections, Binns’s appropriation of Whitman’s poetic style does not make for good poetry but is of interest, building on Carpenter’s work, as a “translation” (203–206). Notably Whitman’s “password primeval” (PP, 50) receives a makeover in Binns’s hands: “For the red flag is flying, the pass-words are chosen, the revolution has commenced” (The Great Companions, 43). For more on Binns and a discussion of his Whitman biography, see Loving, “The Binns Biography.” 34. Wallace to Whitman, 15 October 1890, Wallace Papers, Eng 1186/2/2/20. 3 5. Lowe, From Pit to Parliament, i. 3 6. Clarke, Effects of the Factory System, 25. 3 7. Ibid. 38. Elfenbein, “Whitman, Democracy, and the English Clerisy,” 100. 39. Both quotations in Salveson, Lancashire’s Romantic Radical, 58, 81. 4 0. Clarke, The Eternal Question: Is There Another Life?, 226. 41. Whitman’s inclusion in Chants of Labour was much to the chagrin of a reviewer in the Commonweal. The reviewer complained that “the worst feature of the book” was the “two feeble travesties of church anthems, made out of some words of Walt Whitman’s, about the poetry of which there may be doubt, but about the applicability of which to their present purpose there can be none” (“S.,” “Chants of Labour,” May 26, 1888, 165). On the “prominent role” that socialist songbooks played in the movement’s associational life, see Waters, Politics of Popular Culture, 107–30 (107). On the international influence of these songbooks, including Chants of Labour, see Bowan and Pickering, “Singing for Socialism.” 4 2. Carpenter, Chants of Labour, vi. 4 3. Clarke, Voices, 9–10. 4 4. Ibid., 34. 4 5. McGann, The Textual Condition, 10. 46. Kuusisto, “Walt Whitman’s ‘Specimen Days,’” 147. 4 7. Glasier, Tales from the Derbyshire Hills. 48. Glasier, newspaper cutting, Workman’s Times, n.d., Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1331/2/2/1/9. 49. Scholnick, “How Dare a Sick Man,” 249. Scholnick examines Whitman’s “shifting treatments” of health, disease and disability, charting the transition from an initial assumption that national progress was not opposed to the diseased or

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Whitman at Work in the Socialist Press  149 disabled, through a phase of deploying an “exclusionary rhetoric of health and disability,” to his reinvention as compassionate healer in the Civil War. 50. Hobson stood as an ILP candidate for Parliament in 1895 before serving on the Fabian Executive Committee in 1900 and standing for election again in 1906 as an independent labor candidate. He later joined Orage’s New Age and become one of the major proponents of guild socialism. See Hobson’s autobiography, Pilgrim to the Left. 51. Quoted in Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism, 250. On the socialist attack on the professionalization of sport, particularly its rise as a spectator activity, see Waters, Politics of Popular Culture, 35–36. 52. On Crane’s political and artistic project see O’Neill, Walter Crane. 53. For sympathetic accounts of the evolution of Whitman’s attitude to race, see Klammer, Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass; Mancuso, The Strange Sad War Revolving. Klammer argues that Whitman’s developing antipathy to slavery had a major impact on his emergence as a poet in the 1855 Leaves of Grass. Mancuso reappraises Whitman’s reconstruction writing as a federating project in the context of political and cultural debate and activity surrounding emancipation and union. For an alternative view, see Folsom’s introduction to Democratic Vistas: The Original Edition in Facsimile. Folsom assesses Whitman’s conflicting attitudes to race in the light of the omission of discussion around African-American issues in Democratic Vistas. 54. On eugenics and socialism see Spektorowski and Ireni-Saban, “Eugenics and Productive Socialism,” in Politics of Eugenics, 19–49. On eugenics and socialism in literature see Parrinder, “Eugenics and Utopia.” 5 5. Salt, Songs of Freedom, xxii. 5 6. Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” The Major Works, 550. 57. Erkkila, “Whitman, Marx, and the American 1848,” 52; Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, ed. Stedman Jones, 218. 5 8. Thompson, Romantic to Revolutionary, 567. 5 9. Cf. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1871–72, 363–64. 60. For detailed considerations of the ways socialist women traversed their political identities, see Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women; Rowbotham, Dreamers of a New Day; Collins, “Women and Labour Politics in Britain, 1893–1932.” On the “New Woman” as writer see Ledger, The New Woman; Ardis, New Women, New Novels. 6 1. Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 195–96. 2. Martin, The New Age under Orage, 23. 6 63. On the liberal-socialist alliance in the progressive movement see Clarke, “The Progressive Movement in England”; Blaazer, The Popular Front. 6 4. Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 198. 6 5. Jupp, Wayfarings, 68; Bevir, The Making of British Socialism, 254. 66. Reginald A. Beckett believed that Whitman was the nearest the socialist movement had to a poet of its own and was described in the 1898 Labour Annual as an “enthusiast on Whitman” (193). However, after Trevor handed editorial responsibilities over to him for reasons of ill-health, Whitman appeared less frequently (usually in articles by Trevor) and not as a prophet of special importance. 67. In Brake and Demoor, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, 443. 6 8. Trevor, My Quest for God, 228.

4 William Clarke’s Walt Whitman

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A Socialist Exposition

Pared down crudely, William Clarke’s assessment of Walt Whitman seems to cover familiar territory. His Whitman was the poet of democracy, with a message for Europe as well as for America. He advocated a new form of democratic literature and culture, vitally associated with life rather than drawing-room respectability, its locus in the “divine average” of the ordinary American. His was a fundamentally spiritual philosophy, grounded in concepts of interconnectedness and evolution. For this reason Traubel, who enjoyed reading Clarke’s Walt Whitman, nevertheless found fault: “It was not refreshment. The ground is old and he gives it no more cultivation.”1 And yet this familiar interpretive frame is fleshed out distinctively in Clarke’s Fabian reformist drive to convince a mixed progressive readership that the individual freedom so valued in liberal ideology depended upon a statist mode of social and economic organization. Clarke, whose father was a small businessman, hailed from a lower-­ middle-class background. In accordance with parental wishes Clarke took office work as a young man but became thoroughly bored and insisted upon entering university. A recent policy change had opened higher education to those unable to afford college costs, and Clarke enrolled in 1872 as a noncollegiate student. Like Carpenter before him, Clarke was energetically involved in radical activities during his Cambridge years, belonging “to the left of the Liberal party,” according to Peter Weiler.2 Herbert Burrows, an SDF activist and Clarke’s friend and fellow undergraduate, recalled that he became fascinated with the United States and made a specialism of “­American history, literature, and politics.”3 In 1881 he made the transatlantic crossing to make his living on the American lecture circuit for a year, a period during which he had occasion to meet Whitman—in whom he had become intensely interested—briefly in Boston.4 Politically, as Gal Gerson remarks, Clarke’s position was “hybrid” and “uneasily-demarcated.”5 Though he tends to be discussed today, when at all, in the context of the rise of new liberalism, his politics shifted to the socialist left in the 1880s before swinging to some degree back towards a socially minded liberalism in the late 1890s.6 Following some kind of spiritual crisis in the early 1880s, he was introduced to socialism through the Fellowship of the New Life. He yearned, as Stefan Collini puts it, “for an ethico-religious faith,” which he found in social reformism.7 Socialism

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William Clarke’s Walt Whitman  151 came, for a while, to furnish “a motive and reason for action” and to focus his hope “for a better and happier life.”8 In contrast to some of the socialists considered in these pages, however, the religious view underscored rather than dominated his pragmatic political commentary. “­Collectivism is no more a Utopia than is commercialism,” he wrote in 1893, “it is merely another and, as things are, a better way of doing business.”9 For Clarke, as he wrote in Political Science Quarterly, the socialist was simply “one who would transfer gradually or otherwise, by direct or indirect means, the ownership of the instruments of production (land, mines, telegraphs, railways, machinery, banks of issue) from individuals to the community” (“The Influence of Socialism on English Politics,” December 1888, 551). Initially of the belief that class conflict was inevitable, Clarke later inclined towards the idea that socialism might be achieved peacefully, though the means were always less important to him than the ends. Gerson suggests that Shaw, who tended to divide socialists into two groups—those who organized the docks with the Fabians and those who read Whitman and Thoreau among the dandelions with Carpenter—was “uncharacteristically clumsy” in his assessment of Clarke.10 But Shaw’s description of Clarke as “a Whitmanite, a man with strong religious feelings of a rationalist type” is very much to the point, and Fabianism, with its pragmatic reformism born out of the F ­ ellowship of the New Life’s ethical philosophy, provided an apposite outlet for Clarke’s socialist activities.11 Though Clarke is not well remembered today, his contribution to F ­ abianism, for a time, was not insignificant. His article on the industrial basis of socialism sat alongside contributions from Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas and others in the influential Fabian Essays in ­Socialism, and he served on the Fabian Executive Committee between 1888 and 1891.12 Even during this, his most intensely socialist phase, Clarke occupied an ideological ground where socialist and liberal reformism overlapped. Jock Macleod draws attention to the fact that personal friendships between advanced liberals and reformist socialists, often based on shared convictions about social improvement, meant that they inhabited “the same political and cultural world.”13 Clarke worked with this slippage in an attempt to convince progressives that socialism was the logical extension of liberal radicalism. Unlike many of the socialist journalists considered in the last chapter who were socialist activists first and journalists only in response to a perceived need, Clarke was a journalist by trade, writing mostly for a liberal readership in the established press. He was the London correspondent for a few American publications and became a staff writer for Alfred Ewen Fletcher at the radical liberal Daily Chronicle. Over the course of his career, he contributed articles to a range of newspapers and journals including the Manchester Guardian, the Spectator, the Economist, British Quarterly Review, Political Science Quarterly, Fortnightly Review, Contemporary Review, Reynolds’s Newspaper, To-Day and the New Age. “The newer democratic and Socialist ideas were forging ahead,” averred Burrows, and Clarke’s talent lay in composing “lucid expositions of what he conceived to

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152  William Clarke’s Walt Whitman be true democratic thought and action,” which did much “to advance the political education of the time.”14 His was, essentially, a strategy of permeation but also realignment and reconciliation: for Clarke, as for Fletcher later in the century, individualist and socialist ideas about liberty were positioned on the same trajectory. Though Clarke’s views on how best to achieve social and political reform were to alter over the final decade of the century, the core tenets of his ideology, most clearly laid out in an 1893 article, “The Limits of Collectivism,” remained unchanged: The tendency to collectivism is inevitable, since it proceeds from the growth of scientific invention, and can only cease when invention ceases. It is a good tendency, since it leads to greater substantial freedom, while curtailing in some ways mere formal liberty. It is, in the main, confined to organised material industry, carried on by machine labour on the large scale. It leaves untouched the intellectual conquests of civilisation, and gives every person opportunity for free range in the spiritual and aesthetic spheres. Under these conditions art will receive an immense impetus, and the new era will be dominated by artistic rather than by scientific conceptions, by synthesis and imagination rather than by analysis and calculation. Outside the purely industrial sphere man will be more free, both in form and substance, than he ever was before.15 The “limit” to collectivist social organization would be where material wants gave way to deeper human needs, and in matters of spirituality and art the individual would be at complete liberty. Work in these areas would, however, be shaped by the new material conditions it was produced in, and here Whitman’s poetry, written at the threshold of the new era, made a useful case study. Clarke believed that Whitman stood “at the birth of a vast modern world,” an idea instituted by Whitman himself: “He peers down the ‘democratic vistas’ of the opening age, and discerns afar the great new shapes looming up in the dim distance.”16 While Whitman was “the most representative Bard of Democracy,” as the reader is reminded in the book’s opening sentence, his was not democracy’s fullest or final expression (WW, 1). “­Whitman was not a Socialist nor ever pretended to be one,” observed a Labour Leader review of the 1906 reissue of Walt Whitman (“H.,” “The Poet of the People,” November 23, 1906, 419). Rather than glossing over this fact, as many socialist admirers did, Clarke exploited it. If Whitman was recognized as the “Bard of Democracy” by liberals and socialists alike, it was because he stood at the endpoint of individualist liberalism and looked into the collectivist future. His negotiation of collectivism and personal liberty, materialism and spiritualism, the needs of the body and those of the soul were indicative of the “synthesis and imagination” of the new era, but his

William Clarke’s Walt Whitman  153 work was also, inevitably, marked by the imperfect individualist conditions of his age. His was the “germinal seed,” the “first rough draft of a literature” that was to portray and develop the modern democratic society (WW, 40).

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Criticism in “The Age of Art, Religion, Synthesis” Walt Whitman was Clarke’s only book, the tenth number in Swan ­Sonnenschein’s “Dilettante Library,” “a rather odd title for a series of which the writings of a man like Whitman form a part,” as the New York Times remarked (“Literary Notes,” April 25, 1892, 3). The series focused on famous figures in literature and the arts. Clarke’s angle in Walt Whitman complemented the publisher’s known specialisms in progressive political and social matters. After a chapter on Whitman’s personality his focus moved back and forth between the political and material in the second and fourth chapters (“His Message to America” and “His Democracy”) and the aesthetic and spiritual in the third and fifth (“His Art” and “His Spiritual Creed”). ­Sonnenschein accepted Clarke’s proposal in February 1892, around the same time that Clarke asked Johnston permission to quote from his Diary Notes of a Visit to Walt Whitman, but there is evidence that the book was rushed into print to maximize its sales potential in the aftermath of Whitman’s death. A letter from Sonnenschein to Clarke in March 1892 reads: I called at your place on Sat., but you were out. You will have seen the telegram as to Whitman’s death; so have no doubt realized anent this the importance of hurrying the book on. Shall we begin to print the first part of the MS. at once? Every day will count now.17 Burrows claims that Clarke wrote the book in 11 days, and a letter from Sonnenschein indicates that the proofs were with the printers at the end of April.18 The Labour Leader review commended Clarke’s “suggestive study of the ‘good grey poet’” as being “from a Socialist point of view,” but it was not specifically aimed at a socialist readership. Clarke’s socialist critique was delivered to a wider audience, as Walt Whitman was advertised or reviewed in publications including the Saturday Review, the Speaker and the Academy. Capitalizing on Clarke’s connections with the liberal press, endorsements from the Daily Chronicle and the Pall Mall Gazette were used in publicity notices. “It leaves nothing to be desired in point of critical insight,” from his colleagues at the Chronicle (see Saturday Review, June 11, 1892, 707). “A plain and straightforward exposition of a difficult subject, written without subtlety, and without anything of the unusual intemperance in praise or blame shown by Whitman’s critics,” the rather more abstruse recommendation from the Pall Mall Gazette (see Academy, October 1, 1892, 275). The praise is so understated that it seems critical, but the level-­headedness it singles out was crucial to Clarke’s project. He believed, like Orage in his

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154  William Clarke’s Walt Whitman “Bookish Causerie” columns, that where the past was characterized by division and parts, the future would be characterized by expansion and Hegelian synthesis: “The age of dissection, of criticism, of analysis, is as necessary a stage in human progress as the age of art, religion, synthesis, of which it is an essential preliminary. But it is nothing more than that.”19 For Orage, as we have seen, the division and dissection of the present age was to be countered by the loud, unequivocal advocacy of Whitman’s “gospel of unity” until its truth was understood. Clarke leaned in the other direction, privileging instead balance and equilibrium. Keen to recuperate Whitman both from those who loved him and from those who loathed him, Clarke modeled the synthesizing cultural activity of the new democratic age. In the preface’s declaration that Walt Whitman was written as “an exposition rather than as a criticism,” Clarke sets out his stall rather misleadingly as a ­ hitman was, dispassionate and objective observer (WW, front matter). Walt W in fact, a highly subjective critical work that analyzed ­Whitman’s ­philosophy and poetics from a very clear socio-political perspective. ­However, his discussion of the poet was deliberately restrained and even-handed, a quality much appreciated by his audience. Under the title “Triumphant Democracy—With a Difference,” for instance, the Speaker comments: What is less to be expected, given such sympathy [toward Whitman], is that he should approach his subject with so much comparative philosophy of mind. It would almost seem as if he had been impressed by the failure, from undue extravagance, of his predecessors; and so determined to be, for his part at any rate, securely temperate. (August 20, 1892, 236) In the Academy: The author has made himself master of his subject, and as a consequence is self-possessed and dignified. Herein he differs from too many of the professing admirers of Walt Whitman who do not understand him, and think all that is required of them—and indeed all that is befitting when he is the topic—is to gush. Of course writers like Mr. Clarke do him, as well as themselves, more real justice; and they are useful in a way the gushing enthusiasts are not useful, in attracting and helping new comers to study and understand a teacher, by no means attractive at the outset or readily understood. (“Review,” July 2, 1892, 11) Clarke understood that devoid of “gush,” the socialist message of his critical appreciation of Whitmanian democracy stood a better chance of a sympathetic hearing.

“His Message to America” It was not simply that Clarke’s literary criticism had a socialist slant. Nor was it, as Gerson suggests, that Clarke “obscured the distinction between

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William Clarke’s Walt Whitman  155 ­ hitman’s views and his own by illustrating Whitman’s ideas with conW temporary British issues.”20 Instead, Clarke assimilated his assessment of Whitman’s ideas into a broader discussion about social progress; passages from Leaves of Grass or brief discussions of Whitman’s views were used to drive forward his own political commentary. During the 1880s, Clarke was heavily invested in the idea of America and held views very similar to ­Whitman’s that the United States was to lead the way towards a global democracy. As he wrote in the Contemporary Review, “If popular ­government fails in America, it can be established in no other country; the future of the whole world is bound up in the future of the American union” (“The ‘Spoils’ System in American Politics,” October 1881, 634). America was to model a human-centered social and political system that would eradicate the social problems of the Old World: The standing armies, the monarchies, the aristocracies, the huge debts, the crushing taxation, the old inveterate abuses, which flourish in Europe, can take no root in the New World. The continent of America is consecrated to simple humanity, and its institutions exist solely for the progress and happiness of the whole people. (ibid., 649)21 In the reality, however, of America’s rapid development in the 1890s as a world-leading industrial nation under a system of corporate capitalism, Clarke’s faith progressively diminished. By the end of the century, f­urther exasperated by British imperialism and America’s part in the Spanish-­ American War of 1898, he would profess that he hated “the English-­speaking countries.”22 When he wrote Walt Whitman in 1892, however, Clarke was alert to the deficiencies of the United States but still hopeful about its future, a ­viewpoint he also recognized in Whitman who was “as severe in his denunciation of the radical American vices, as he [was] confident in the grand future of ‘these States’” (WW, 22–23). Eager to show that Whitman was no “loudmouthed showman” blind to America’s faults (WW, 25), Clarke introduced his assessment of Whitman as a social critic with a long two-page quotation from Democratic Vistas that begins by troping the ill-health of the nation corporally: I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. (WW, 23; cf. PP, 961) The external symptoms exhibited indicated an internal problem. In ­Whitman’s view American democracy had proved successful in “­uplifting the masses out of their sloughs in materialistic development” but had failed in “its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and ­aesthetic results.” “It is as if,” Whitman contemplates as the extract

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156  William Clarke’s Walt Whitman concludes, “we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul” (WW, 24–25; cf. PP, 962). While Clarke could agree with Whitman’s assessment of America’s spiritual and social failure, he virulently disagreed that it had achieved material or political success. His readers were to be reminded of just how closely integrated these different aspects of national life were. Here, and throughout the text, Whitman’s writing is used as a discursive springboard from which to launch his own explicitly socialist political commentary. Clarke’s lengthy analysis runs for nine pages without further recourse to Whitman, drilling down into the material and economic detail of the spiritual malaise identified in Democratic Vistas. America’s “human problem,” as Clarke describes it, had specific economic causes (WW, 26). The nation was submerged in a “tidal wave of materialism” and capitalist development: The last quarter of a century may be said to have been the era of railroad kings, grain-speculators, imported cheap labour, defaulting bank officials, and “machine” politicians. America has lost dignity, has all but dropped the thread of organic union, has become the prey of “rings” and “trusts,” dominated by unscrupulous persons with anti-­ social instincts and aims. (WW, 27) This argument would have been familiar to those who had read Clarke’s contribution to the Fabian Essays. “Rings” and “trusts” were held in opprobrium; free trade and competition did not keep prices low, as its advocates would have consumers believe, but instead allowed consortiums to hold pernicious control over the market and monopoly capitalism to have free reign.23 The political structure of the United States, Clarke admits, was superior to most of Europe, but the Civil War had exposed the constitution to be inadequate in a “serious storm” (WW, 28). Incompetence and scandal scarred the administration of America’s cities. The people were engaged in a Darwinian struggle for existence, the poor “employed in competing against one another for a livelihood” while the rich competed “for a fortune” derived from private property and the “manipulation of unearned wealth” (WW, 31). In Clarke’s analysis, the situation was far bleaker than Whitman had grasped. For political rather than literary purposes, it was imperative that his readers understood this too. Clarke knew that he was speaking to two distinct national readerships. An agreement with the New York d ­ ivision of ­ Macmillan saw the simultaneous transatlantic release of many of ­Sonnenschein’s titles so Clarke would have been aware that Walt W ­ hitman would receive an American distribution; both publishers and locations are named on the title page of Walt Whitman. The purpose of Clarke’s anticapitalist critique of America was therefore two-fold: he strove to r­ectify ­American misconceptions that their nation had “solved” or fulfilled democracy, but repeated references back to the problems of Europe ensured that

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William Clarke’s Walt Whitman  157 his home readers were under no illusions that his criticisms of industrial capitalism did not also apply to Britain. As discussed in Chapter 2, Whitman’s discussion of the social problem in Democratic Vistas plumbed the measure of the nation’s unique democratic character. Clarke, conversely, debunks this mythologizing of the New World: the “capitalist system of America” was the same as England’s, he admonished, “only more despotic, ambitious, and less scrupulous” (WW,  30).24 There was no “inherent difference” between their land systems; the United States shared “the worm-eaten social order of Europe” (WW, 30, 32). Critically, the “mass of the American people” had “not yet awakened” to the fact that American and European social structures were “substantially identical,” and as long as public opinion clung in delusion to the idea that America’s troubles were “superficial and passing” while Europe’s were “deep and abiding,” “public ineptitude and private tyranny” would hold sway (WW, 32–33). If the reader had not noticed that these charges could be fairly leveled at Whitman, Clarke soon makes the point explicit. When Whitman is reintroduced into the discussion it is to qualify that though the poet was perceptive enough to recognize America’s faults, his analysis of the social condition was woefully limited because he failed to offer any viable material or economic solution (WW, 35). Unlike other socialist admirers, Clarke makes the rather unusual move of expanding on the weaknesses of Whitman’s argument. From a socialist perspective, there were resounding flaws. Very straightforwardly, if democracy was to mean more than representation and suffrage it could not lie within a competitive system of capitalist individualism. The privileging of “individual liberty” and the associated belief that every person could “get on” without social aid, if only he or she wanted to, was stronger in the United States than anywhere in Europe. At its best, this individualist spirit promoted a healthy and desirable self-reliance, but in the shirking of social obligation and the denial of human claims, it was not only “an evil” but “the evil of the nineteenth century” (WW, 34; emphasis Clarke’s). Rather than glossing past Whitman’s libertarian philosophy, Clarke refutes it, dismantling what a liberal reader, on either side of the Atlantic, might identify as its strengths, and so rebutting a broader liberal ideology in the process. M. Wynn Thomas identifies a “queer mismatch between Whitman’s economic and his social theories.” “Somehow or other,” he writes, “a system of untrammeled economic competition is supposed to produce a harmoniously cooperative and egalitarian social order.”25 This contradiction lies at the heart of Clarke’s criticism. In Democratic Vistas, Whitman called “happily”—naively, implies Clarke—for a “vast intertwining reticulation of wealth” where the fortune of one is somehow able to raise the wealth of all (WW, 35; cf. PP, 974). But “how the vast mass of men can become appreciably better off, while a few are permitted to appropriate such a large share of the total income” is not explained, nor is it clear how the situation could be altered without “considerable economic changes, to be partly affected

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158  William Clarke’s Walt Whitman by political means” (WW, 36–37). Whitman was in favor of individual land and property ownership and small production but had failed to take into account the trend towards corporate ownership, tenant farming and absentee landlordism. In short, though he spoke for comradeship and humanity, he was unable to answer whether the republic of the future was “to be based on agriculture and on individual ownership of the means of life, or on a complex industry and on public or corporate ownership, or on absolute, complete collectivism” (WW, 39). Whitman’s “vague reflection about Equality” was, quite simply, inadequate (WW, 39). Clarke’s objection was not simply Whitman’s liberal politics but the fact that he had failed to match his poetic vision with a workable political strategy, a critical paradigm that even he acknowledged to be problematic: Whitman is not a political economist, and does not profess to be one, and we have, therefore, no right to demand from him any definite suggestions as to the methods for increasing the total production, and decreasing the waste and effecting the better distribution of wealth. These are questions for the statesman, the publicist, the practical reformer, not for the poet or the seer. But we do expect from the latter a kind of hint as to his social proclivities, a presentiment as to the general direction of the curve of social progress. And here Whitman somewhat disappoints us. (WW, 37) With no more precision than Whitman’s “vague reflection,” Clarke’s defense elucidates neither what is meant by “hints” and “presentiments” (if they are to be more than what Whitman has already offered in his famously “suggestive” text but less than “definite suggestions”) nor why these should be expected at all. His demands raise questions about critical expectations and the intersection of political and literary commentary. For an “exposition” of a literary figure, Clarke’s second chapter has to this point had very little to do with poetry or indeed with Whitman. Sixteen pages pass between quotations in the section under discussion: Clarke’s is an analysis of omission and evasion, of the words not on the page. More than understanding what Walt Whitman wrote, the reader learns what he did not write and what Clarke believes that he should have written, the “exposition” revealing more about critic than author. Burrows organized Clarke’s writings into three ­categories—“Political Essays,” “Appreciations” (of literary and political ­figures) and “Culture and Criticism”—and in Walt Whitman Clarke moves among these different modes, grafting sizeable segments of his own political commentary onto literary appreciation and cultural analysis, transparently writing over the economic and political gaps in Whitman’s laissez faire philosophy. A “publicist” and “practical reformer” accustomed to answering questions about the improvement of material and social conditions, Clarke determinedly fills the space where he believes Whitman to be unacceptably silent.

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“The Limits of Collectivism” Despite Clarke’s reservations about the details, or lack thereof, in ­Whitman’s analysis of the state of the American nation, he adamantly believed in ­Whitman as “the voice of modern democracy” and thought that his message was “as truly for Europe as for America” (WW, 79–80). If the weakness in ­Whitman’s democratic philosophy lay in its material aspects, its strength was in its extension into the “domain of art, religion, and domestic life” (WW, 39). Clarke’s progressive social worldview was heavily influenced by Hegel, and he saw the same influence in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The new era depended on the synthesizing processes of evolution; to achieve spiritual and aesthetic liberty there needed to be a synthesis between the body and the soul, the collective and the individual, the material and spiritual. He had, in part, learnt this from Whitman. A crucial aspect of ­Whitman’s democratic work was to engage with these dialectics, unsettling the hierarchical privileging of the abstract over the concrete, to praise the body as well as the soul. Yet, counterintuitively to Clarke, Whitman chose to focus his efforts solely on the aesthetic plane. If Clarke was critical of Whitman’s reluctance to engage with social reformism or politics on the ground, it was because his Whitmanian spiritual and aesthetic philosophy depended on the physical and material. Where Clarke is oppositional it is nevertheless with the intention of achieving the same spiritual democracy Whitman called for. Rather than simply “writing over” Whitman, he synthesized collectivist socialist politics with Whitman’s laissez faire individualism (and implicitly that of any radical liberal readers) as part of an evolving process towards a human-centered social and spiritual state of existence, of which Whitman’s poetry represented an early stage. To attain the new era of liberty, ­Whitmanian principles would have to be applied in visible, practicable ways in the lived world. As signaled by the lines from Leaves of Grass chosen as his epigraph, the body and soul dialectic is central to Clarke’s reading: I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me. The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue. (WW, front matter; cf. PP, 207) As discussed in the last chapter, in Whitman’s writing the health of the individual body is a synecdoche for that of the body-politic. It follows, therefore, that the body and soul dialectic is also transposed from the personal onto the national, suggesting to Clarke that Whitman had a responsibility to attend to the singing of the nation’s material and physical health as well as its soul. Where Whitman focused on the soul, putting his faith for the rejuvenation of the nation, as we have seen, in a new program of literature and culture, Clarke looked to the body, seeking first to eradicate material problems through the institution of collective systems of production and distribution.

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160  William Clarke’s Walt Whitman The figure of the healthy laborer was emblematic for Clarke, as it was for Whitman, but in a departure from the line that Hobson took as “­Olympian,” Clarke refused to permit in Whitman’s mythologizing of this figure any claim that he or she could exist under the structural conditions of capitalism. Whitman’s idealization of the laboring class was problematic for Clarke as it rendered social reform unnecessary. The sound mental and physical health of a nation’s poorest classes indicated the robust and humane organization of its economic, political and social systems. As a counterpoint, then, to Whitman’s representations of the laboring classes, Clarke introduces some less salubrious characters: Whitman has entered into the life of the working-people, and has found among them the healthiest elements of our human nature. By the working-classes he does not mean the dirty, sodden, foul-mouthed vagabond who loafs for hours at a post on the lookout for drink, nor the riotous street-larrikin […]. Nor of course is he thinking of the servile dependent of the country squire, destitute of some of the essential elements of manliness […]. He has mainly in mind the self-­respecting, healthy, skilled, well-paid and sometimes well-read mechanic or ­artisan; alert, eager, open-eyed, frank, manly, somewhat too material ­perhaps, yet with unplumbed depths of idealism in him—strong alike in body and mind. (WW, 93) Clarke draws a distinction between the skilled artisans or autodidacts of ­ hitman’s imagining and those who had become personally degraded W through the dissipation and degeneration of the nation. Clarke’s were familiar stereotypes found throughout nineteenth-century print culture, and the introduction of the “dependent of the country squire” very deliberately opened the discussion to include the working classes in Britain. Clarke’s depiction of the working classes here is no more nuanced than Whitman’s but effectively conveys the message that the desirable, wholesome characteristics Whitman honors were impeded by the “conditions of modern labour” (WW, 94). Clarke’s attitude towards the working class was, as Weiler remarks, frequently “contemptuous.”26 Weiler relates how Clarke privately accused the working class of being “sadly lacking” in the “higher regions of intelligence,” on another occasion wondering whether “such pitiful creatures as the masses of men” were “capable of any good.”27 Publicly, Clarke inclined towards the view that the educated middle classes, not the working classes, would lead the way to the new society. A year before writing Walt ­Whitman, for example, he was called on by Joseph Burgess of the Workman’s Times to comment on the possible formation of an independent labor party. ­Tentatively supportive on the condition that those like himself who earned their living by the pen would not be excluded, he commented that working men were simply not in the position to “ignore the help which educated men, thoroughly versed in politics and economics, can give them”

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William Clarke’s Walt Whitman  161 (“A Workman’s Party,” January 23, 1891, 8). The discrepancies between his and Whitman’s views are negotiated in Walt Whitman by the remodeling of Whitman’s celebration of the common person as prophecy; Whitman’s representations of the average man or woman were what the “democratic citizens of the future” would become (WW, 93). In this mediation of Leaves of Grass the symbiotic relationship ­Whitman develops between the American people and their land is presented as the harmonious mode of existence of the new democratic future. Clarke delivers it evocatively, offering inspirational hope to his readers in his poetic ­phrasing: “Throughout nearly the whole of Whitman’s writings penetrates the ­element of rankness, the odour of the fresh-turned earth, the salt sea air, an element of rich, rude, unpruned growth alike in man and the globe” (WW, 95). Lines from Leaves of Grass are quoted in quick succession. ­Whitman is “­enamour’d of growing out-doors, of men that live among ­cattle or taste of the ocean or woods.” Young Texan rangers are “­turbulent, g­ enerous, handsome, proud, and affectionate.” The ideal city is “where fierce men and women pour forth, as the sea to the whistle of death pours its ­sweeping and unript waves” (WW, 95; cf. PP, 38, 67, 335). The language Clarke employs is organic, suggestive of Whitman’s “love for the elemental forces.” Though Clarke gently criticizes Whitman for dwelling “with exaggeration on the attractiveness of rough, uncultivated natures,” and for failing to take into account the “universal tendency to city life,” the affective power of ­Whitman’s representations of rural life is harnessed to show how humans should exist in natural relation to their environment (WW, 95). As the following paragraph explores, under the conditions of advanced capitalism humans are instead reckoned by industrial and economic relations: How sharply Whitman comes here into collision with a very respectable body of economic and political doctrine which is now breathing stertorously and will soon be, not a body, but a consuming corpse! For the possessors of engines and omnibuses do regard those who labour for them as being primarily embodiments of labour-force; it is expressed in the terms of the economic relations existing between them. […] The cash-nexus is still mainly the bond, the one bond, which unites the severed classes. (WW, 96) The disparity is emphasized by the switch in registers from the poetic to the economic, the theoretical vocabulary reflecting capitalism’s dehumanizing affect. Whitman understood that “the individual is no mere function of a social whole, no mere cog or pin in the machinery” (WW, 85). The worker was not to be assessed as a resource but loved “as a man”: ­Whitman would not have him “lopped and hardened into a machine” (WW, 96). The ­Broadway stage-driver was not a “human piece of mechanism to pilot

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162  William Clarke’s Walt Whitman a vehicle” nor was the train engineer “part of the machinery” (WW, 96). Clarke’s synecdoches exemplify the characteristics of the “age of dissection” that humanity was destined to progress beyond. Yet the romanticized vision of an agrarian past was to be treated with caution. Technological, industrial and urban advance would not be halted, nor should it be. The solution, as always for Clarke, lay in the synthesis of these components. The harmonious relations that Whitman depicted could be developed in a more industrial society, provided its apparatus was directed towards the good of the people. Clarke was a firm believer that the “anthropocentric position” in literature and philosophy pioneered by ­Whitman would have far-reaching consequences (WW, 83). In the same way that people had come to understand that planets revolved around the sun rather than the other way around, so they would come to see that state, religion and industry must be “directed solely towards the good of man.” This principle is explored in a passage recommended by Seed-Time as a “masterly statement of the Democratic position”: In times past, humanity has been sacrificed to regal power, to the assumed rights of a caste, to the supposed claims of an external deity on the implicit obedience of his creatures. To-day man is enslaved to money-making, in thrall to machinery, a weary drudge attendant on the incessant demands of the iron monster which he serves. All these forms of slavery are at variance with democracy, every one must be abolished root and branch. The State exists for no other purpose than to realise the collective will of its subjects. If a man sees nothing divine in himself and his fellows, he shall find no divinity in the world at all. Industry shall clothe, feed, and comfort men; man shall not be the slave of the machine. This is the meaning of democracy. (WW, 83; “Our Library Table,” Seed-Time, July 1892, 14) Clarke picks up Whitman’s denunciation of the subjugation of man under “feudalism, caste, the ecclesiastic traditions” in Democratic Vistas and extends it into the modern industrial age (PP, 955). The old order had been superseded not, as Whitman had thought, by democracy but by a social structure equally as oppressive. The trappings may have altered, but they were drawn from the same template. This is highlighted by the parallelism of Clarke’s sentence structure; as it had once been enslaved to “regal power,” humanity was now enslaved to “money-making”; “machinery” exerted the same control of “caste” previously; an “iron monster” was now served in place of an “external deity.” Only when the locus of power and divinity were conferred to the human could this pattern be broken. Here, in the individualism that eschewed competition but celebrated individual difference, in the belief that each and every person was divine, Whitman’s teaching was at its most powerful. “Almost the entire volume

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of Leaves of Grass is permeated with this idea,” declared Clarke, but a “­specially apt” example was found in “To You”: I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you. None has understood you, but I understand you; None has done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself. None but has found you imperfect; I only find no imperfection in you. None but would subordinate you; I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you. (WW, 84; cf. PP, 376) In a very similar way to “A Song for Occupations” (which Clarke also quotes), parallelism, antithesis and repetition across the caesura (“understood”/“understand,” “justice,” “imperfect/imperfection” and “subordinate”) are used to confer divinity onto the addressee. The compare and contrast technique emphasizes the state of change; the negation in the set of anaphoric clauses beginning with “none” is counteracted in the correspondent set of epistrophic clauses, which drive affirmatively towards their divine subject, the “you” or “yourself,” where the end-stopped lines bring the reader to pause. Right at the turn, the point of change, stands the poet. In three out of the four anaphoric-epistrophic lines the caesura is closely followed by the personal pronoun: the speaking subject, the bardic “I,” is responsible for this redirection. Modeling at the level of the poetic line the wider role that Whitman specifically, and the poet more generally, was to play in the evolution of democracy, the anthropocentrism of the new era is effected through the reimagining of the aesthetic sphere. In “To You” this is enacted on two levels. First, the poem, published originally in 1856, exemplifies the type of literature focused on the common person that Whitman would demand years later in Democratic Vistas; second, it considers this aesthetic representation metapoetically. Musically, the speaker would “make hymns” not of God but of the common person. Artistically, Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre-figure, spreading a nimbus of gold-coloured light. But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-coloured light. (ibid.) Once again, the repeated words anchor the lines, holding the space as the sentiment is turned around them. To make use of the title of Clarke’s later essay, Whitman was understood to occupy the “limits of collectivism.” Temporally, living when he did, he stood at the boundary where competition would soon cede, it seemed, to cooperation. Conceptually, he worked in the area where individualism and

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collectivism intersected: “He sees that the spiritual individual is made a reality by the social whole of which he is a part” (WW, 85). The oft-quoted lines “One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse” (WW, 85; cf. PP, 165) are used to consolidate Clarke’s description of Whitman’s democracy and, simultaneously, to introduce his own ideas about how this dualism was to operate: So long as the State exists, so long will coercive force be coterminous with its jurisdiction. The absolute collectivist would extend that jurisdiction to every sphere of life, so that no room shall be left for the individual to turn himself about in and do just as he pleases. The absolute anarchist, on the other hand, would leave people to do what they thought proper in every relation of life. Neither the collective despotism nor the anarchic individualism could, as a matter of fact, last anywhere twenty-four hours; and the Modern Man will certainly not tolerate either. The great problem for reformers now is to find out just where the collective action is necessary and desirable, and where it is impossible and dangerous. (WW, 86) Like Whitman, Clarke set out to reconcile the individual with the mass. However, where, on the one hand, Whitman focused on a rather nebulous concept of the “merge,” Clarke, on the other, sought to divide and demarcate clear spheres of influence. There would be collective regulation of practical material affairs but no coercion in the “sphere of opinion.” The two are separated from each other, somewhat paradoxically, to achieve a more effective synthesis. By clearly defining the limits of each, Clarke could reassure his readers that socialism (his version of it at least) was not antagonistic to the tenet of individual freedom so valued by liberals and anarchists. The challenge facing the modern, democratic state was how to “gather in all the disinherited” and “secure for all opportunity for work, control over the means of life, leisure, culture, health, without undue interference with the freedom of anyone” (WW, 87). To progress from the old liberalism to the next phase of social democracy, to successfully synthesize collectivism and individualism, “old notions” of freedom needed to be revised (WW, 87). Focusing on the relationship between semantic and social change, as ­Whitman and Carpenter had with the word “democracy,” Clarke proposes a new definition of “freedom.” As it was currently used, it signified a negation, an “absence of restriction.” Its meaning should instead be found in the “presence of opportunity” (WW, 87). Specifically, where there was “the possibility of expansion for all,” there was freedom (WW, 87–88). Expansion was, Clarke thought, the “dominant idea” of the time, the principle driving the progressive development of the modern world (WW, 81). Politically, “petty states give way to great aggregations” and “international ­co-operation” was becoming more widespread; spiritually, “the local deity in his local heaven yields to the conception, ‘God is spirit’” (WW, 81). Individuals would

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identify with the “larger self” and work for the “conversion of the world into a Kosmos” (WW, 116). Clarke thought this to be well understood by Whitman, in whose poetry vastness was “always a dominant note,” as the major themes of the sea, the sky and the “vistas of death” suggest (WW, 61–62). Showcasing his own lyrical talents, Clarke summarized his interpretation of Whitman’s expansive worldview: [Whitman] may be said to begin with the epic of the modern world, in its shirt-sleeves, ploughing and mining, building and weaving, propelling its engines over prairies and mountains, across great rivers and through vast, stormy cities, and steering its gigantic steamers over waters of which Ulysses never dreamed. It is the world of “Titanic forces taking birth,” of strenuous, healthy, defiant, democratic masses; the modern world, in short, as it really is, or is becoming. And from this great plain of physical action the poet ascends to mystic, dimly-­ guessed spiritual spheres, whence he seems to discern unending progress, till the universe itself appears one vast conscious whole, informed with the spirit of love, and justifying in its ever-ripening issues all the long past of man’s painful path from the lower forms of nature to an expanding being utterly beyond our present imagination to conceive.    (WW, 80) The story of the modern world is personified as that of the artisan or agricultural laborer. In a rhetorical move that humanizes the forces of material progress, the personal detail of the “shirt-sleeves” throws the grand “epic” scheme into sharp relief. The narrative of the American pioneer provides a useful conceptual metaphor for the wider progress of humanity, driven not by kings or rulers but by the common people, the “democratic masses.” Working out from the physical world into the spiritual, the focus is first on the occupation and development of the land. The proliferating impact of human activity is emphasized by the rhythmic accumulation of verbs in the present tense, which give way to prepositions accentuating a sense of movement, the unstoppable surge “over” prairies and mountains, “across” rivers, “through” cities and “over” waters. Having expanded horizontally across the surface of the globe, the poet “ascends” to direct this movement into the spiritual sphere. Evolution and expansion are equated; when all people had equal opportunity to fulfil the inherent tendency towards expansion, humanity would evolve spiritually as it had physically. Such expansion was impossible, Clarke believed, where there was poverty. And if expansion was impossible, so was freedom. Though Whitman saw this “very clearly,” he leant too far towards the “anarchist side” and did not understand the extent to which “public organised action” could lead to the “physical betterment” of the common people (WW, 88). There were gaps, Clarke thought, in Whitman’s reasoning. He did not see how

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166  William Clarke’s Walt Whitman “the true freedom of the individual is actually increased rather than ­diminished by the collective pressure exerted on recalcitrant individuals, provided the pressure is exerted by the authority and through the initiative of the people themselves” (WW, 88). Yet Clarke’s reasoning takes assumptive leaps too. It is not clear who “the people” were (only those in favor of socialism?), how their will was to be discerned (assumed to be socialist?) or how their “authority” would be exerted if socialism were to do away with hierarchies. Clarke’s declaration that there would be “no coercion” in the “sphere of opinion” seems to be largely predicated on the belief that after the collective restructuring of the systems of production and redistribution, there would be very little disagreement in the realm of thought. ­Dissension regarding the fundamental matters of social and political organization would be rare; in spiritual and aesthetic matters, people would be content to allow individual freedom. Why collective organization would necessarily lead to the harmony he envisions, he does not explain. He is prepared to allow the formation of any society for the propagation of any opinion but, crucially, if force was used against the state, the state was “bound, in order to preserve its existence, to thwart any such aims” (WW, 86). This raises questions about what freedom of opinion actually meant to Clarke. Clarke’s whole argument is based on the idea that action and thought must be married together, but it seems that this is to be denied to those of a different political persuasion. If people had the freedom to talk, but not to choose or change how their state is organized, how was this freedom at all? The idea that the state must preserve its existence above all has an ominous ring in the light of ­twentieth-century developments in communism. As far as capitalism is concerned, there are contradictions in the way Clarke uses Whitman’s mythologizing of the American story to justify his theory of expansion yet refutes it in other passages in order to “prove” that capitalism and democracy had to be separated. No adequate distinction is made between expansion as a positive force that coalesces and combines, engendering harmony and cooperation, and expansion as it is enacted through imperialism, manifest destiny and the monopoly capitalism that Clarke so resolutely opposed. The reader is left with a more explicitly socialist vision of social, individual and spiritual freedom but no clearer idea of how it was to be practically administered. Clarke’s faith in socialism decreased alongside his faith in America during the 1890s; capitalism only gained in strength while the socialist movement seemed incapable of organizing itself to halt the advance. Working, like Whitman, at the “limits of collectivism,” Clarke still hoped for the synthesis of collectivism and individualism, but he looked increasingly to the liberals for help. In 1894 he became a founding member of the Rainbow Circle, a discussion group that brought together leading liberal and socialist reformers, and in the wake of the Liberal defeat in the 1895 election he increasingly invested his efforts into building working relationships with those who subscribed to progressive iterations of liberal ideology. He believed that the old

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William Clarke’s Walt Whitman  167 Liberal party was finished and was therefore ready to cede to a new socially oriented progressive coalition. A group from the Rainbow Circle, including Burrows, James Ramsay MacDonald, Herbert Samuel and J. A. Hobson established the Progressive Review under Clarke’s editorship for this purpose.28 Whitman was pulled into this project too, appearing more than any other poet in the Progressive Review (including Carpenter’s accounts of his two visits to Whitman, later published as Days with Walt Whitman). Again, Clarke explicitly demanded material change but only offered literary solutions. It is unclear how he expected this venture to translate into the institution of a new political party, but its failure to do so—or to keep itself afloat—was a bitter disappointment. When it folded just after a year he resigned from the Fabian Society, writing to a friend: “I have been in the movements here for some twenty years and I see nothing in them.” The following year he distanced himself from his former political beliefs even more emphatically, stating, “I  never was a Socialist in the sense of Marx, and I am not at all a Socialist now.”29 As the conclusion will discuss, the reworking of socialist beliefs in the light of adverse political developments was not easy and in the absence of visible proof of forthcoming social change, and in the face of physical and mental ill-health, Clarke was unable to sustain his hopeful belief in the evolution towards a collectively organized, spiritually liberated future.

Notes 1. Traubel to Johnston, 8 June 1892, Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1172/3/17. 2. Weiler, “William Clarke,” 79. 3. Clarke, William Clarke: A Collection, xv. 4. Reminded of the meeting a decade later by the Eagle Street College’s John ­Johnston, Whitman could not quite place Clarke: “You say he is an able f­ ellow?” he inquired of Traubel, “I suppose, I suppose. England is sending up these days some as good specimens” (WWC, 9, 575). 5. Gerson, Margins of Disorder, 25. 6. See, for example, Gerson, Margins of Disorder, 25–33; Macleod, Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism; Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, 75–78. For a socialist discussion see Hobsbawm, “The Lesser Fabians.” 7. Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, 75. 8. Clarke to Henry Demarest Lloyd, 23 November, 1888, Henry Demarest Lloyd Papers; quoted in Weiler, “William Clarke,” 89. 9. Clarke, “The Limits of Collectivism,” in William Clarke: A Collection, 35. 10. Gerson, Margins of Disorder, 26. For the docks and dandelions quotation, see Armytage, Heavens Below, 332. 11. Gerson, Margins of Disorder, 26; Shaw, Collected Letters, 495. 12. Clarke’s contribution to the Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw, closes with the following lines from Whitman’s “Song of the Exposition”: “Practical, peaceful life, the people’s life, the People themselves, / Lifted, illumined, bathed in peace—elate, secure in peace” (“The Industrial Basis of Socialism,” 62–101

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168  William Clarke’s Walt Whitman (101); cf. PP, 346). In “William Clarke,” Weiler suggests that Clarke’s socialism deserves attention first for its analysis of monopoly capitalism but also for the light shed on the relationship between radical politics and the Victorian loss of faith (77). 1 3. Macleod, Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism, 12. 1 4. Clarke, William Clarke: A Collection, xvii. 15. Clarke, “The Limits of Collectivism,” in William Clarke: A Collection, 42–43. 1 6. Clarke, Walt Whitman, 21; hereafter cited in text as WW. 17. Swan Sonnenschein to Clarke, 28 March 1892, Swan Sonnenschein Archives, Letterbooks 1878–1911. 8. Clarke, William Clarke: A Collection, xxix. See Sonnenschein’s response to a 1 query from Clarke: “The printers follow the instructions written in the proof, as to whether they shall send a revise or go to press. As you returned the proofs to them direct, we cannot say in exactly what position the book is now. P ­ robably, however, it is nearly all machined off, as the first two signatures (which we sent to press, as being practically faultless) went straight to the machine”; Swan Sonnenschein to Clarke, 20 April 1892, Swan Sonnenschein Archives, Letterbooks 1878–1911. 19. Clarke, “The Limits of Collectivism,” in William Clarke: A Collection, 37. 2 0. Gerson, Margins of Disorder, 26. 21. See also Weiler’s discussion, “William Clarke,” 79–81; Weiler writes that Clarke “saw America as the tangible realization of his political ideals, proof that a fully democratic society could solve or avoid all the social problems that beset England and Europe” (79). 22. Clarke to Lloyd, 21 November 1900, Lloyd Papers; quoted in Frankel, Observing America, 64. 23. Clarke, “The Industrial Basis of Socialism,” in Fabian Essays, ed. Shaw, 62–101 (89–98). 24. Elaborating in “The Industrial Basis of Socialism,” Clarke argued that capitalism was “more unrestrained and bolder in its operations” in America than in Europe (Fabian Essays, 90). 2 5. Thomas, Lunar Light, 77. 26. Weiler, “William Clarke,” 104. 27. Ibid., n.119: “The Life of the London Working Classes,” New England Magazine (July 1894): 572–84 (577); Clarke to Lloyd, 23 November 1888, Lloyd Papers. 28. On this enterprise in the context of the wider progressive movement, see Clarke, “The Progressive Movement in England.” 29. Clarke to Lloyd, 26 August 1897, Lloyd Papers; Clarke to Lloyd, 28 March 1898, Lloyd Papers; quoted in Weiler, “William Clarke,” 102.

5 “Have the Elder Races Halted?”

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Uses of Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

“If America were wiped out,” wrote William Clarke, “she could be more easily recalled from Leaves of Grass than from any other collection of books” (WW, 42). “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” is singled out for special attention, with its “onward marching music of the ‘tan-faced children’ pushing on through ‘dazzling days’ and ‘mystic nights,’ over prairie and mountain, taking ­possession of the vast continent and its boundless wealth” (WW, 43). While the serviceability for the cause of socialist favorites such as the “Great City” section from “Song of the Broad-Axe” and “For You O Democracy” is evident, it is less immediately obvious, perhaps, why “­Pioneers! ­O ­Pioneers!,” a poem with particularly strong American national (and nationalist) overtones, was so frequently drawn upon (PP, 371–75). First published in ­Whitman’s ­collection of war poetry, Drum-Taps, in 1865—less than a month after the ­Confederate surrender to Ulysses S. Grant—­“Pioneers” spoke to the ­reconstruction of the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War. ­Noting that it was written as America’s citizen soldiers returned to civilian life, M. Wynn Thomas calls it a “demobilization poem.”1 The energy of the Civil War is redirected towards the pioneering of the west; Whitman gives a new mission to America’s soldiers, his “tan-faced children” (PP, 371). The nation is not only to be rebuilt but improved, extended and bettered. By combining martial symbolism with the topos of westward expansion, Whitman reshapes the rhetoric and imagery of war to serve a reconstructive and unifying national purpose. In the larger context, “Pioneers” dramatizes the hard-fought campaign for the transformation and consolidation of national identity under the governing principles of comradeship and solidarity. Here, where extracted from its particular politi­cal moment and applied to broader issues of social rather than national reconstruction, Whitman’s poem could be co-opted to complement the wider use of the pioneering motif in socialist discourse. If his early biographer, the socialist activist John Spargo, is to be believed, Marx himself enjoyed the poem and was fond of repeating the lines: All the past we leave behind; We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world; Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labour and the march, Pioneers! O, Pioneers!2

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170  “Have the Elder Races Halted?” Combining the three metaphors of agricultural development, martial conquest and the journey, the layered trope held a high connotative value and was readily assimilated into evolutionary socialist narratives. Through this case study, I hope to develop an aggregate idea of the political value of “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” as it functioned within British socialist discourse and to understand how, to paraphrase Bakhtin, socialists appropriated and adapted the poem by populating it with their own semantic and expressive intentions.3

Ernest Rhys’s Campaign of Revolutionary Youth “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” exhibits the tendency towards expansion Clarke identifies as the keynote of Whitman’s poetry and the “dominant idea” of the time (WW, 81). His description of Whitman’s evolutionary “epic of the modern world” (WW, 80) as the expansion of humanity first across the physical, geographic plane and then upwards and out into the spiritual dimension draws from the architecture of “Pioneers” and other “westering” poems such as “Song of the Broad-Axe” and “Song of the Redwood-Tree”: laborers in their shirt-sleeves pushing the frontier westward, cultivating and mastering the land. As discussed, evolutionary expansion signified a­ ccumulation to Clarke, the joining together of disparate parts into a ­growing whole, and this—the act of unification—is Whitman’s major ­concern in “Pioneers.” As a suturing poem written in the aftermath of the Civil War, in Eric Mottram’s words, it “loudly articulates healing nationalism through the ­ tradition of westward expansion.”4 “The Western movement” (PP, 373) is offered to northerners and southerners alike, to Unionists and Confederates as their shared manifest destiny: “All the hands of comrades clasping, all the ­Southern, all the Northern, / Pioneers! O pioneers!” (PP, 372). All are brought together under one flag, the “mighty mother mistress” (PP, 372), and where ­Whitman’s early poetry tends to be vociferous in its celebration of diversity and individuality, here the emphasis is on the whole, the sum of the parts. In the catalogue in “Song of Myself,” discussed in Chapter 1, occupations are assigned to individuals or small groups: the duck-shooter, the deacons, the spinning-girl and so on (PP, 39). In “Pioneers! O Pioneers!,” by contrast, there is no such division of labor. In the first seven stanzas the activities of “­tramping,” “­throwing,” “conquering,” “holding,” “daring,” “venturing,” “felling,” “stemming,” “vexing,” “piercing,” “surveying” and “upheaving” are carried out by an integrated and undifferentiated “we” (PP, 371–72). The first person p ­ lural pronoun is emphasized by its deployment at the beginning of lines and the trochaic rhythm of the poem—“We the surface broad surveying,” for ­example—while the repetition of the line structure and sequencing of the present participles builds the united “we” into a powerful, urgent force. Westward expansion was forward-looking, concerned with what ­America would become, but it was also a familiar discursive tradition,

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embedded in the nation’s colonial and post-colonial history and proud self-­ mythologizing. It provided, then, a rhetorical link between America’s supposed ­beginnings and its future. With the frontier only declared officially closed in the 1890 census, “Pioneers” presented real as well as symbolic possibilities for the aggrandizement of the United States. The poem fostered internal unity by setting America apart at the vanguard of this westward movement: Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers! (PP, 371) Whitman engages with the popular rhetoric of the youth of the nation, famously aphorized as America’s oldest tradition by Oscar Wilde in A Woman of No Importance. Followed by the stanza apparently liked by Marx, Britain is implicitly criticized in the familiar trope of the decrepit mother country, weak and weary across the Atlantic. America by contrast was “fresh” and “strong.” It had surpassed and superseded the Old World; it would construct a “newer” and “mightier” world. At the forefront of the progress of humanity, all other nations would follow where it led: “All the pulses of the world, / Falling in they beat for us, with the Western ­movement beat” (PP, 373). Despite this nationalism, Ernest Rhys selected the “elder races” stanza to use as epigraph to the preface in Poems of Walt Whitman.5 Belonging to the paratextual material surrounding the poems, the epigraph operates as what Gérard Genette calls a zone of “transaction” as well as “transition.” It comments on the text that follows, influencing “a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies).”6 In this case, where “editor” is substituted for “author,” Rhys’s perception of a “better reception” or “more pertinent reading” pulls apart from Whitman’s in its transposition in the British context. As the stanza is used as epigraph for the preface that appears before the poetry, there is a kind of “doubling”: the “elder races” stanza comments on the preface, which in turn comments on the poetic text, which includes the stanza itself. Edward Whitley proposes that in this use of the “elder races” stanza, Rhys positions “America as the geographic site of democracy” and “­Whitman’s poetry as the means for accessing it for British ends.” It was a recuperation of the democracy lacking in Victorian England.7 The influence ascribed to Whitman is irrefutable: “We who are young may well respond to him, too, in turn,” comments Rhys, “and advance fearlessly in the lines of his unique initiative.”8 Seizing on the semantic conflation of the poetic and the military, Rhys casts the reader following the poetic line across the page as a

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172  “Have the Elder Races Halted?”

Figure 5.1  Ernest Rhys, Leaves of Grass: Poems of Walt Whitman, ix.

combatant marching into battle behind Whitman. The final paragraphs of the preface echo the martial rhetoric and themes of “Pioneers” and reach for the same effect in a galvanizing call to arms: And with his tones of heroic incitement and earnest remonstrance ringing in our midst, we who are young may do much in the stress and tumult of the advance to a new and endangered era for the high order of love and truth and liberty.9 With Whitman at the center, encouraging his readers—Rhys’s readers—to action, the political value of the poetry lay in its ability to focus and direct the energetic capacity of youth, to encourage young British readers to secure the “endangered” future. America is not, therefore, located as the geographic site of d ­ emocracy. Rhys’s mediation does more than reiterate the sentiment that young ­America would bring democracy where old England had failed. As it stands as epigraph, isolated from the rest of the poem, the “elder races” stanza is denationalized, and age and youth are read along generational rather than

“Have the Elder Races Halted?”  173

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national lines. By addressing his compatriots as “children” and “youths,” the speaker of “Pioneers” generates a sense of potentiality, energy and vigor that governs Rhys’s reformulation. It was a dynamic that had attracted him to socialism. Of the socialist circles he stumbled into on arrival in London, he recalled: Chubb and others were engaged in a campaign of revolutionary youth, influenced by William Morris, the leaders of the Social Democratic Federation, Edward Carpenter, and some young rebels whose names were not known to the outer world.10 Socialism was a young movement, in the sense of being emergent but also in the age of its adherents. William Morris, who turned 52 the year that Poems of Walt Whitman was published, was something of an outlier. In the round-up of ILP news in the 1895 Labour Annual, Tom Mann reported that “the members of the I.L.P. are chiefly between 22 and 33 years of age,” adding with youthful cockiness that here lay the evidence “that younger men are more amenable to reason than older ones.”11 In the 1880s and into the early 1890s the members of these self-selecting socialist circles sustained a radical belief in living on the cusp of a new age, which they and the like-minded folk they surrounded themselves with, the “revolutionary youth,” would usher in. Rhys avails himself of the affective power of Whitman’s youthful ideation, feeding it forward into a movement receptive to its force. Variants on the word “young” occur throughout the preface, five times in the final paragraph; in addition to those already given: It is the younger hearts who will thrill to this new incitement,—the younger natures, who are putting forth strenuously into the war of human liberation. Older men and women have established their mental and spiritual environment; they work according to their wont. […] To the younger hearts and minds, then, be these Leaves of Grass, gathered and interwoven as the emblem of a corresponding fellowship of men and women, dedicate!12 Here, as in “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” it falls upon the youth to take up the “task eternal,” a recurrent theme in socialist print culture. In the Labour Prophet, for example, “Seed-Time,” a poem structured around the pioneer motif by Joseph Whittaker, depicts the speaker and his comrades striving to clear the way, cultivate the land and construct new cities; as their strength fades the “younger, stronger hearts advance, / Harvest of our work to win” (October 1894, 135). The youths of “Pioneers” were not green recruits. The “daughters of the West” (PP, 375) were of pioneering stock and the men experienced soldiers, survivors of a war fought in the main by men under 30 years of age. Luke ­Mancuso observes that the word “pioneer” can be traced back to the French ­peonier, or “foot soldier,” and asserts that in Whitman’s

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174  “Have the Elder Races Halted?” poem it “denotes an imagistic parallel to the martial images of the war troops.”13 Certainly, the dualism of “pioneers” as referencing both the first settlers of a territory and the infantrymen who clear the terrain for a main body of troops occasions the central conceit of the poem. Much of the vocabulary used to refer to the development of the land has martial overtones, for example “debouch” and “detachments.” Metrically, Gay Wilson Allen has argued that its predominantly trochaic rhythm corresponds with a “left-right, left-right marching rhythm.”14 The military trope frames the poem. In the opening stanza the pioneers are called to prepare their “weapons” rather than tools and in the final stanza the trumpet sound at daybreak calls the “army” of pioneers to their places. The metaphor of the war march is extended through the poem—and beyond it in its assignment to a new cluster called “Marches Now the War Is Over” in the 1871–72 Leaves of Grass. This imagistic and semantic parallel engendered Rhys’s socialist “­population” of the poem. In his hands, and throughout the British socialist movement, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” was more a conscription poem than a demobilization poem. Rhys reaches out to potential recruits for another war of union, the “war of human liberation,” which would dismantle the divisive structures of industrial capitalism. Their work, like that of the Civil War, and that in “Pioneers,” was to be both destructive and constructive. Though Rhys’s recruits were inexperienced and fresh to the fight, he offered Whitman’s skilled and seasoned pioneers, his “tan-faced children,” as both models and comrades. Rhys’s use of the “elder races” stanza thus prepares his reader for the preface’s rallying call to action, which in turn suggests a socialist reading of the poems that follow, an extrapolation that expands the “more pertinent reading” of “Pioneers” beyond its national context and demands the mobilization of an international army of progressive, humanitarian, socially conscious youth.

“Fractional Parts”: James William Wallace’s Applications The Eagle Street College’s James William Wallace concluded two speeches, delivered a year apart, with readings of “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” The first was given at the College’s celebration of Whitman’s birthday in 1893 and the second, discussed previously in Chapter 2, at an ILP conference in Bolton in 1894.15 That Wallace chose to end a public speech to a politically minded audience with the same poem that he had used more privately with his close College group is significant in itself. “Pioneers” is first used to exhort friends, declared Whitmanites, to advance the “great idea” of a Whitman-inspired democracy and then to align this idea with socialism, making the summons to the wider socialist community in Bolton. Wallace did not interrogate the poem in detail but instead drew on its themes and motifs to make explicit the connection he saw between its call and the moral duty incumbent upon him, his friends and his socialist neighbors.

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“Have the Elder Races Halted?”  175 The martial aspect of the pioneer motif was embedded in the birthday speech, which took the American Civil War as its subject. For Wallace, as it was for Rhys, a “pertinent reading” called forth a committed response to what he called “a war for the great idea—that of perfect, free individuals.” The libertarian ring of this sentence shouldn’t detract from Wallace’s understanding of individual freedom being in consonance with, and dependent on, an equal and interconnected ordering of the world; in short, as discussed in Chapter 2, a Whitmanian spiritual democracy. Wallace was at this time trying to reconstruct the Eagle Street College as a radical force for democratic action and was therefore intent on ensuring that its members had heard and understood Whitman’s call. Before turning to “Pioneers,” Wallace sought to establish the grounds on which the kind of extrapolation that he and Rhys made was not only justifiable but also necessary and desirable. A number of Whitman’s war poems were read, including “To Thee Old Cause,” “As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap Camerado” and “Beat! Beat! Drums!” The Civil War, Wallace states, was the “pivot” on which Leaves of Grass turned. In the same way he understood Whitman’s poetry to speak specifically to America but also to carry a wider message for humanity, Wallace does not reduce or evade the particular national significance of the Civil War in Leaves of Grass but reframes it as one manifestation of a much larger conflict: It is as well to say that great as the American War was in itself it was only as a symbol of still mightier battles, it was only a fractional part of the battles which were to follow and which we too have to engage in. In Walt’s expressions referring to that particular War we may read in our own applications to the War in which we are or ought to be ourselves engaged and to the still mightier struggle which is looming ahead. The American Civil War was a synecdoche, a representative “small section” of the democratic war. Owing to this the force of Whitman’s war poems would be lost if only associated with “a past and local war.” ­Wallace encourages an open-ended reading process in which new meanings are intentionally and actively inscribed into the text. Whitman tried continually to “arouse” each reader from slumber, Wallace thought, with a “personal” message “addressed to each individual” but the onus was on the socially responsible reader to determine the “applications” of this message to his or her part in the great democratic struggle. The independent reading practices Wallace overtly encourages are complicated by his anxiety that Whitman’s message be fully understood and properly applied. As the College had a special calling, it was imperative not only that the Eagle Street men were taught why and how they needed to read into Whitman but also that they decoded the message correctly; that is, it had been read in accordance with Wallace’s interpretation. Despite the qualification that the poems did not require much comment because “Walt’s

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176  “Have the Elder Races Halted?” words ought to be sufficiently strong,” the section of Wallace’s speech immediately preceding the reading of “Pioneers” guides its transposition passionately and without equivocation. The group was “engaged in a battle,” he maintained, in which it had “duties to perform.” It was “summoned to an active sustained war.” Each member was “summoned to help” in forwarding the cause and, in accordance with the emphasis in “Pioneers” on union, the work of the College would be most effective when its members banded themselves together and reached “a deeper sense” of the group’s “latent capabilities.” After Wallace’s comments, it would be difficult not to hear in the poem a call to collective action or the demand to disregard political difference to work for the “cause of humanity.” This is a phrase used in Wallace’s ILP speech, which made use of the more developmental aspects of the pioneering motif to take issue with tendencies towards sectarianism and exclusionism. Socialism itself, like the Civil War in the previous speech, was merely a representative part of the struggle for unity and democracy: The stream of tendency toward the Socialism of the future is far wider than the narrow channels of our own organization, or of the united Socialist bodies of the country, and it is advanced by myriads who are today ignorant of our ideas, indifferent to them, or hostile to them. While the first part of this statement may have seemed reasonable to Bolton’s socialists, especially in the light of the amicable relationships among the town’s different socialist groups, the second is more contentious, challenging as it does the very purpose of meetings, groups and parties such as the one gathered. The paper was book-ended with references to the “pioneer,” which reiterate the point. Near the beginning Wallace proposed that those with great capability for sympathy and love, the morally advanced, were “the true pioneers of the Socialism of the future” (the script is underlined for emphasis), no matter their political creed. In ­closing, he determined that they would “become the pioneers of the true, the human society towards which our Socialism itself is but a stage.” The pioneer motif is thus used provocatively to argue to a socialist audience that the future it strove towards was not dependent either on socialists or on socialism. Wallace’s purpose was not to diminish socialist efforts, to which he was fiercely committed, but to call for a broader democratic alliance. S­ ectarianism inside the socialist movement undermined its intention to work for the collective good of all humanity, as did the failure to recognize that it was only part of a movement to which others could contribute, an argument credited to his “master Walt Whitman.” Wallace claims a place in the democratic movement for people like his friends in the Eagle Street College who resisted socialist politics. Morally sound, sympathetic people who cared about the material and spiritual welfare of others  were  working  towards  the  same

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“Have the Elder Races Halted?”  177 ends  as socialism and needed to be gathered into it. As discussed in ­Chapter 2, such people would only be absorbed if the personalities within the movement were attractive enough, and Wallace draws on the vocabulary of the settling of the land—“expansion,” “growth,” “cultivate” and different permutations of “develop”—to argue for bold progress into the moral sphere. This progress would begin with the radical development of the ethical self and extend into the “socialized ideal.” The deployment of the pioneering trope is specifically associated with Whitman’s through the reading of “Pioneers! O ­Pioneers!,” the speech’s only poem. “Walt Whitman’s words,” Wallace specifies, were “addressed to each and all of us,” and in this application offered a unifying, developmental narrative rather than a call to arms. In both speeches, then, Wallace seeks to overwrite differences in political opinion by offering a universal cause; if every person read Whitman, understood his tripartite message of love, democracy and religion, and put it into practice in their lives, the political issues would dissolve into irrelevance. Herein lay his message’s spiritual strength and political weakness: even while championing a united, common cause, Wallace assumes that the outcome of each individual’s moral and ethical advance would, necessarily, be the desire for a society that was socialist, if not in name then in essence.

“The Army of Coming” Whitman’s particular deployment of the pioneering motif was integrated into its wider use in the socialist press, an assimilation that is made into a textual feature in “The Army of Coming,” an 1895 Labour Leader poem by a writer using the pseudonym of “Eros” (May 4, 1895, 2). During this year “Eros” contributed a number of poems in a variety of styles. Some were religious, some light-hearted but all were written using fairly conventional metrical structures and rhyme patterns. In “The Army of Coming,” however, a Whitmanian/Carpentarian unrhymed, irregular, endstopped long line is used; as the reader progresses through 37 lines, divided across two stanzas, the question of Whitman’s influence is immediately flagged. Like “Pioneers,” this is a poem about “the great stir of the nation, the birth of new People.” Its “pioneers” are similarly depicted as an “army.” The speaker “thrills” to belong in this momentous time as the “pulse of the nation” beats warmly: “I tremble to think I am one in the Army of Coming.” The focus is not the settling of the land nor the war march but the pioneers themselves: They murmur, they listen, they learn, and their eyes leap and glisten. They hear the strong voices of brave pioneers. The voices are by them, and of them, and in them, above them— They fight for the truth; they are few, and wide-eyed and stronghearted. They look on the poor, and they weep,

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They look on the system, and rave They speak to each other; their voices are confident, cheerful: One faints, and the others but touch him and look, and say “Comrade,” And he looks on them proudly, and answers “My Comrades,” and rises. “Eros” draws from Whitman’s toolkit, using anaphoric lines in the present tense to build a cumulative description of the vanguard to which the speaker is so exhilarated to belong. The rhythmic contrast in the short inset lines brings the grievances of the pioneers into relief: the pace is measured, the tone assured; the weeping and raving is not of the madman but of the righteously angered. The use of “Comrade” as a form of address has clear leftist revolutionary connotations here, but the lines are also redolent of Whitman in their portrayal of male intimacy and affection, as well as in their measure and tone. The identity of the pioneers of the poem is deliberately unsettled. The “brave pioneers” are first introduced in the passage above as voices separate to and outside the collective “they” of the speaker’s group, but in the following lines the voices permeate the speaker and his comrades, surrounding and becoming part of them. Without further comment, the speaker passes swiftly over the transgressive moment. The question of who or what comprises this strange, disembodied entity is left unanswered until the beginning of the second stanza: “Oh! brave pioneers! the ghosts of immortals are with you; / I see in your van the great hearts of all nations and ages.” The “brave pioneers” epithet is now applied to the speaker and his comrades, while they are accompanied by “the voices” of both the “ghosts of the past,” who are said to inspire with thoughts, and the “ghosts of the future,” who inspire with hope. A Whitmanian catalogue fleshes out the influence of the pioneers of the past, first the “White Christ” then: The great-thoughted Greek, the deep Plato—his spirit is with you; The pensive Rousseau, and the strong-thinking Northern Carlyle; The singer of prairie and wide-rushing river, Walt Whitman; The sturdy monk Cutler, the vigorous Kingsley, the Chartist. Whitman’s implicit influence is made overt, the approximation of the formal properties of Leaves of Grass supporting the theme that the socialist movement extends from and develops all previous efforts to “labour and fight” for man. In Wallace’s view, socialism contributed to Whitman’s wider spiritual democracy; conversely, in “The Army of Coming” Whitman contributes to a wider socialist movement. The individual voices “Eros” identifies are merged in the poem’s conclusion in a singular voice that sings to the pioneers the song they are required in turn to sing “to the nations”: “Arise, my comrades, to labour and fight, We war not with men, but with systems—

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“Have the Elder Races Halted?”  179

Figure 5.2  From “Eros,” “The Army of Coming,” Labour Leader, May 4, 1895, 2.

Come help us! We labour for man, and no man is our foe. See how cruel is ignorance; we will slay ignorance. Look how cruel is greed; for greed we will have little mercy; Pitiless-cruel is system, so system shall die— Come and help us! No man is our foe, but a system; come help us!” Form and register change in this concluding section, separated through quotation marks from the rest of the poem. Boldly oppositional rather than accumulative and inclusive, the speaking voice is no longer Whitmanian. The “army” makes a declaration of war upon the “system,” a word that does not carry the same connotative weight in Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s voice is subsumed into the composite voice of the wider movement as the reader is shown how the fight for humanity must progress in an explicitly socialist direction.

The Labour Church Pioneers The Labour Church rode on the wave of spiritual enthusiasm and evangelic fervor that drove much of the movement into the 1890s.16 Expanding rapidly in the first half of the decade, it was particularly popular in the northern ILP and Clarion heartlands. In May 1894 the ILP’s National Administrative Council recommended that branches of the ILP “wherever practicable,

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180  “Have the Elder Races Halted?” should run a Sunday meeting on Labour Church lines.”17 The ILP recognized the political value in the act of gathering together for spiritual sustenance, the familiar format of a church service offering a set of unifying rituals and practices. It served the needs of those of faith who felt that their socialism was constricted in more traditional religious institutions as well as those who subscribed to less conventional conceptions of spirituality. Giving spiritual expression to the labor movement, the Labour Church situated socialist rhetoric within a broad religious register, thereby drawing on familiar associations while renewing and reinvesting the language of spirituality with new meanings for new times. Biblical discourses of spiritual warfare and laboring for the harvest could be associated with the different aspects of the pioneer motif, and Whitman’s particular use of the trope was made to work for the practical implementation of a wider spiritual vision. The label of “Pioneer” served a specific purpose in the organization of the Labour Church as the designation for members without a congregation in their vicinity. The Labour Church Pioneers was a network of external members; its main work was to extend the influence of the Labour Church into areas where its housed congregations could not reach, with financial contributions from its members funding propagandist causes. Important ideological connections were drawn with Whitman’s construction of the motif. In a handbill designed to recruit volunteers for the Labour Church Pioneers, the association between its work and Whitman is made on the first page. The oft-quoted lines from “To a Pupil”—“Is reform needed? Is it through you? The greater the reform is needed the greater the personality you need to accomplish it” (cf. PP, 515)—are printed after information about membership.18 The quotation flatters the potential recruit that he or she has the great personality needed to join up, with the very choice of the name “Pioneers” giving something of a romanticized impression.19 In a selective use of the poem that skews the narrative to focus exclusively on the march, 11 stanzas from “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” are also printed: the first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth, twelfth, thirteenth and twenty-third to twenty-sixth. Betsy Erkkila observes that “as the controlling image of Whitman’s Civil War poems, the figure of the march has a dual suggestiveness as both an army march and the march of humanity.”20 This texture is what the handbill’s edited version draws out, purposively removing the “march of humanity” from its American context and editing out its nationalist elements. America is not reframed as a symbol or incorporated into a wider democratic movement; it is quite simply ignored. In the opening sequence of stanzas one through five, for example, the third stanza is omitted: O you youths, Western youths, So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship, Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost, Pioneers! O pioneers! (PP, 371)

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Without this stanza as counterpoint, the anti-British sentiment of the “elder races” stanza is effectively neutralized, the national focus lost entirely. All the poetic lines that privilege the west are excluded: for example, “All the pulses of the world, / Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat” (PP, 373) and “O you daughters of the West” (PP, 374). All references to America or the American people are cut, including the ninth stanza, crucial to ­Whitman’s deployment of the motif as a unifying trope: From Nebraska, from Arkansas, Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d, All the hands of the comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the ­ orthern, N Pioneers! O pioneers! (PP, 372) The “march of humanity” is universalized, and the “task eternal” relocated, with new definitions found in the international labor and socialist movements. The summons of Whitman’s poem in its edited form is to the point. Gone are the more complex, contemplative stanzas, such as 18 and 19, where the speaker considers the “curious trio” of himself, his body and his soul, and the cosmos and “mystic nights” (PP, 374). Absent also are those that depict the development and cultivation of the land. What remains is a narrative of the war march and one that could readily be mapped onto the socialist struggle. Stripped of its American components and inserted into socialist material, Whitman’s words sound as though they could have been written specifically for the socialist movement: Not for delectations sweet, Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious, Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment, Pioneers! O pioneers! Do the feasters gluttonous feast? Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock’d and bolted doors? Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground, Pioneers! O pioneers! (PP, 374–75) While there was such disparity—while there were those who feasted rather than ate, who were “corpulent” rather than satiated—the pioneers were called to sacrifice personal comfort to secure a comfortable life for all. ­Suggestions in the handbill for work that Labour Church Pioneers could undertake included distributing Labour Church literature, planting new churches and studying the “economic and moral aspects of the Social ­Problem.” The Pioneers constituted an active branch of the Labour Church, holding their first conference in July 1892—with Tom Mann as

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182  “Have the Elder Races Halted?” “resource leader”—and contributing energetically thereafter to the Labour Church Union. The activities of individual pioneers, as recorded by David Fowler Summers, counted among them selling the Labour Prophet, delivering socialist lectures, working with underprivileged children, producing tracts and publications, arranging socialist meetings and talks and establishing new congregations.21 Though Summers’s research shows that many of these initiatives were ultimately unsuccessful, the call made through Whitman by Trevor was heeded and the “eternal task” embraced, at some personal cost.22 In 1894 the Pioneers activity merged with the Labour Church’s program of adult education. Trevor had always believed that the Labour Church must “raise its own speakers and send forth its own missionaries” and had established a missionary class for this purpose (Labour Prophet, July 1898, 197). In May 1894, around the time when the Labour Church was reaching its peak popularity, a rebranding was announced that dissociated the class from traditional Christianity while retaining the connotations of venturing forth into unknown territory: “Our Missionary Class will now be called Our Pioneer Class” (“Labour Church Pioneers,” Labour Prophet, May 1894, 56). The new Pioneers secretary, Eleanor Keeling, had organizational responsibility for the both the Pioneer network and the new Pioneer Class, which was open to both Pioneers and Labour Church members.23 Essentially, it was a correspondence class: outlines were provided for a set of prescribed books, including Trevor’s Theology of the Slums and Man’s Cry for God, and candidates were required to send in answers to a set of questions. The intention, Trevor stated in the Labour Prophet, was to “build up individuals, in the Churches and out of the Churches, who shall become living embodiments of the principles for which the Labour Church stands” (“Labour Church Pioneers,” May 1894, 56). Great personalities were once again demanded. The Pioneer Class was heavily promoted in the May and June numbers of the Labour Prophet in this year, and in them, as part of this campaign, the concept of pioneering featured strongly: there were articles, a dictionary definition and poetry. Joseph Whittaker, who was an active Labour Church Pioneer in the Wolverhampton region, and to whom the motif obviously carried some significance, contributed a poem called “To a Pioneer” (June 1894, 74).24 Like “Seed-Time,” which was published four months later, “To a Pioneer” is structured around the extended pioneering metaphor but is more nuanced in its handling of it, issuing a more complex summons through a more creative manipulation of poetic form. With strong religious overtones, “Seed-Time” employed a regular ababcdcd rhyme scheme and jaunty catalectic trochaic tetrameter to glorify the socialist cause, affirming without equivocation the value of the work: Though the fields are wild and wide, Shall we falter, being few? Foes may scorn, and fools deride,

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Faith shall triumph, being true. Seeds of comradeship and love Sown in faith, superbly strong: Mighty must the harvest prove, Though the waiting time be long. (October 1894, 135) “To a Pioneer” works the same essential thematic components—how few the pioneers are in number but how great their ultimate success—from a different angle: What, are you tired so soon? The struggle is hard, I know, And the men are few that go Right on, despising the boon Of a stagnant brute-content, By self-deception lent; But surely you can wait, For the goal, though far, is great. “To a Pioneer” allows for the acknowledgement and contemplation of the hardship accompanying the endeavor. The poem takes the format of a ­conversation—or, rather, the speaker’s postulation of such a ­conversation— where the addressee sets forth the painful tribulations of the pioneer experience, and the speaker responds. At the heart of the addressee’s complaint is a deep despair at the treatment of the pioneers, not from the capitalist class but from the people for whom they were battling: But they will not follow us; no, They mock at us and our call. Down there on the plains they are massed, In spiritless apathy cast; The point is enacted sharply in the dragged enjambment in the opening stanza of “And the men are few that go / Right on” and a little later in “And the men we are trying to lead / Are sluggish.” This particular disappointment, frequently voiced within socialist circles, was profound. The battle required advancing on two fronts, and the struggle to gain the support of the workers was as arduous as the conflict with the bourgeoisie. Over the remaining four and a half stanzas the speaker seeks to revitalize the addressee’s conviction but acknowledges that the hope he offers is only for the eventual success of the cause not the individual pioneer: For never a Faith yet moved The world, but again and again

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It found, as it needed, men To die for the cause they loved. And it must be as it has been; Below us the grass is green On the graves of Pioneers slain— But the paths they cleared remain. Here again is the familiar image, seen in “Resurgemus,” of the fertilization of the land by the fallen. The pioneer as combatant thus performs his twin duty as cultivator and developer of the land. The addressee’s anxiety is not refuted but rather suspended within a broader trajectory, a negotiation captured in the formal properties of the poem. The predominant iambic-­ anapaestic trimeter pushes the poem rhythmically and urgently through its short lines, working with the regular abbaccdd endrhyme, assonance and internal rhyme (“They are blind, and their night is their light, / And sin is their bane and their blight”) to create a coherent framing scheme, yet the rhythm is frequently destabilized through disruptive enjambment and substituted feet. This variety, along with the brevity of the poem’s lines and the alternation of enclosed rhyme and couplets, gives a fresher, rawer summons than that of “Seed-Time” and makes no bones about the self-sacrifice demanded. Trevor explicitly invoked Whitman in his article about the relaunching of the missionary class as the “Labour Church Pioneers.” He, too, suggested a reading of “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” associated with the metaphoric power of the discourse of spiritual warfare. The final two stanzas are used as epigraph: Has the night descended, Was the road of late so toilsome, did we stop discouraged nodding on our way? Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious, Pioneers! O Pioneers! Still [sic] with sound of trumpet Far, far off the daybreak call—hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind, Swift! to the head of the army!—swift! spring to your places, Pioneers! O Pioneers! (cf. PP, 375) Referring to the martial imagery in these lines, Trevor’s diction aligns the Labour Church workers with the marchers in the poem: A circular is being issued to our Pioneers in which they are invited to enrol their names for the current year. This yearly enrolment is necessary to enable those to fall out of the ranks who desire to do so. This metaphor runs into the next paragraph and persuades the reader to join the “ranks” of the Labour Church. Though some might think they were not

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“Have the Elder Races Halted?”  185 worthy enough for this work, Trevor asks that “the thought of an achieved goodness to fit us to serve the good God” be set aside and service regarded instead as “a means of making both us and our fellows better and ever better.” In conclusion, Trevor gestures to the themes and imagery in the stanzas from “Pioneers,” employing the metaphor of the march and, like Whitman, drawing on the contrasting symbolic value of night and daybreak. The final paragraph addresses the problems that had arisen in the Labour Church movement (“Organisation has, in our own movement, got ahead of life […] It does not express life so much as it fetters it”). Then it turns optimistically to the future: “There will be developments of the Labour Church which will gladden the hearts of all who believe in it. Meanwhile we will march steadily towards the sunrise.” This mirrors the progression of the “Pioneers” extract, which recognizes the hardships of the journey (“toilsome,” “discouraged”) but moves swiftly on to welcome “the daybreak call” summoning the army to “spring” into place. Whitman’s poem ends here, not with a final conflict but with the perpetual journey, as described in the thirteenth stanza: On and on the compact ranks, With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill’d, Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping, Pioneers! O pioneers! (PP, 373) The poem’s only “battle” occurs here, but the reader does not pause on it. The line enacts itself metrically, the trochaic rhythm and repetition of “through” pulling the reader onward. The “battle” is subsumed in the relentless motion of the stanza, the march that goes “on and on.” Trevor’s article also ends on this note, with the journey still in motion and the reader called to join the advance.

The Protest March Most British socialist appropriations of “Pioneers” would support Gay ­Wilson Allen’s feeling that the theme of “Pioneers” was “less the celebration of the American pioneers than the journey itself.”25 In this thematic concern, as well as in its more conventional formal structure, “Pioneers” had points of contact with contemporary socialist poetry such as William Morris’s “The March of the Workers,” first published in the Commonweal (February 1885, 4). Like “Pioneers,” it is structured around the motifs of land development and the war march, and the battle is heard in the distance rather than enacted: “On we march then, we the workers, and the rumour that ye hear Is the blended sound of battle and deliv’rance drawing near; For the hope of every creature is the banner that we bear.” And the world is marching on.26

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In J. L. Joynes’s “The Roll Call of the Ages,” also, published in both To-Day (August 1884, 154–55) and Justice (2 August 1884, 5): Hark to those who went before us, hero hearts whose death-pangs bore us, Us they call to swell their chorus though they know not of our name. Let us follow where they lead us, caring nought who hate or heed us, Marching imagery, as Elizabeth Carolyn Miller observes in relation to its operation in fin de siècle socialist poetry, suggests steady progress and emphasizes revolution as “part of a natural order.”27 Socialist poems structured around the war march utilized the emotive energy of the image of the revolution but simultaneously worked to locate it at a distance, marrying the strong symbolic value of the language of violent revolution with the reassurance of gradualist reformism. “Pioneers” could be made to corroborate with these visions of progressive socialist advance. Read with a socialist agenda, lines such as “Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march” acquired such meanings (PP, 372). ­Spelling was anglicized when the line was reprinted in socialist periodicals and in Rossetti’s and Rhys’s selections, a typographical suggestion of a ­significant transposition of semantic associations and subtext: Whitman’s “labor” was bound into notions of agrarianism and the hard-working ­American ­backwoodsman or artisan; British socialist “labour” was inherently associated with notions of class and industrial relations. “Labo(u) r” and “the march” are meshed in their zeugmatic pairing, the unclear syntax of the first clause allowing the adjectives “fresh” and “strong” to be applied either to the pioneers or the world they seized, idealizing both principle and people. Whitman’s confidence in the inexorable advance, the manifest destiny of the United States, is thus absorbed into the march towards socialism. Arising as a popular form of protest during the nineteenth century, the “march” was not always metaphoric. Its particular advantage in the age before mass media, suggests Dieter Rucht, was that it allowed protestors to show themselves to a larger number of people than if they gathered only in one place.28 A march also offered opportunities to speak to sympathizers en route and helped to develop of a sense of collective identity. Significantly, as Rucht describes, marches are “associated with making sacrifices” and “convey the symbolic sense of moving forward and approaching a goal.” With its emphasis on unification, self-sacrifice and continuous progression, “Pioneers” could be made to align with both the symbolic and physical possibilities of the protest march. In a Labour Leader article published in April 1895, Sam Hobson used four stanzas from “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” to illustrate his description of a 13-mile march near Sileby, an industrial village in Leicestershire (“The Boot

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“Have the Elder Races Halted?”  187 War,” April 13, 1895, 10). He reports that the organizers had “thought well to go thither, a thousand or so strong, to demonstrate the strength of the Union, and so encourage, exhort, move, stir, and provoke the Sileby people to join.” The (likely unconscious) linguistic parallel between the Leicestershire trade union and the American “Union” anticipates the way that ­Hobson aligns the socialist march with the march in “Pioneers,” the symbolism of Whitman’s figurative pairing of labor and the march applied to the same pairing as enacted in a real-life scenario. If Hobson’s numbers are accurate, the crowd was four times larger than expected. There were “bands playing” and “flags flying,” familiar components of both the parade and the war march. The correspondence is made explicit by means of a quotation from “Pioneers”: It is impossible to describe one’s sense of joy and hope as we march in the ranks with such an army of noble men and women. Involuntarily the words of Whitman crossed my mind whilst we marched through the villages with their open doors and windows full of curious faces, and children all agog with excitement: “All the past we leave behind, We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labour and the       march— Pioneers! O pioneers! “We detachments steady throwing, Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep, Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown       ways, Pioneers! O pioneers! See my children, resolute children, By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter, Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging, Pioneers! O pioneers!” And so in battle array we tramped up and down the hills, the wagons bearing provisions went on before, the bands were martial in their musical selections, “the women walking in and out of the procession with the men.” The final phrase alludes to the “Great City” passage from “Song of the Broad-Axe” (“Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men”; PP, 336), an unattributed deployment of Whitman’s text that presumes familiarity. Whitman’s poem is inserted between passages that describe the Leicestershire march by way of martial metaphors that recall those that operate throughout “Pioneers,” emphasizing the march specifically rather than a more generalized concept of protest.

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Figure 5.3  Sam Hobson [“Olympian”], “The Boot War,” Labour Leader, April 13, 1895, 10.

Hobson is keen to distance his use of Whitman’s poem from sophisticated literary criticism. He makes a point of noting that Whitman’s words came to mind “involuntarily” in the moment, investing the parallel between the Leicestershire laborers and Whitman’s pioneers with an experiential authenticity belied by the lines being given word perfect. The claimed immediacy, though, intensifies the energetic excitement transposed onto the demonstration through the trochaic rhythm, exclamatory punctuation and bold tone of the stanzas from “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Working conditions and industrial relations were undoubtedly hard, and the poem inscribes the march with a sense of righteous purpose. At times, however, there is a discrepancy between what Hobson relates and the register he employs, and this threatens to undercut the momentum. For instance, he asserts that the marchers were “ready to suffer and dare many things” immediately after a description of the partaking of “bread and cheese, ginger beer, lemonade, beer, and whatever kind of liquor our souls most fancied.” The march followed a lock-out by the Manufacturer’s Federation in response to strikes by the national Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives; six of these strikes took place in 1895 in Leicester, the Union’s headquarters.29 Industrial action is explicitly associated with

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socialist ideology and with the pioneering spirit: “[The Leicester people] are indeed genuine pioneers, fearless, outspoken, companionable, and determined. They are going to do great things for Socialism.” Hobson concludes: The Lock-out has been a great educator; it will send Leicester politically farther forward than ten years of ordinary propaganda could have done; it has materially advanced Socialism, and the Leicester men have scented the battle and are ready. “Till with sound of trumpet, Far, far off the daybreak call—hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind, Swift! to the head of the army!—swift! spring to your places, Pioneers! O pioneers” The socialist “army” is called to action with Whitman’s trumpet cry, and yet Hobson uses Whitman, as propaganda, to argue against the privileging of propagandist strategies. It was more effective to make socialists through lived experience than through literature or socialist journalism. A particular kind of socialism is argued for, a socialism that engaged with industrial disputes and aligned itself with the trade unions rather than one that distanced itself in lofty, purist ideals. Whitman was used to rouse Labour Leader readers into action, to urge them to pursue a more “hands on” approach to making socialists. Whitman’s words needed to be remembered “­involuntarily” in the active foment of the battle march rather than read on the page. The march in “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” had no ending, but it did have a beginning and passed through different stages. In 1915, the Labour Leader printed an obituary that opened with three stanzas from the poem: stanza 5, beginning “All the past we leave behind”; stanza 14 (“O to die advancing on!”); and stanza 26 (“Till with sound of trumpet”) (W. C. Anderson, “The Life and Ideals of Hardie,” October 7, 1915, 7). Then came a one-sentence paragraph that read simply “Keir ­Hardie is dead.” In this way “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” is used to commemorate the life of the single most important figure in the development of the ILP, who had also brought the paper into being and steered its formative years. The three stanzas embodied the different phases of the march towards socialism. The fifth stanza, as well as uniting the “world of labour and the march,” is concerned with beginnings, with turning from the “past” towards a “newer mightier world” (PP, 372). The fourteenth stanza concerns failure, specifically death: “Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come? / Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill’d” (PP, 373). And the final stanza urges the pioneers to resume their march after the night is over. “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” provides the context to process the news of Hardie’s death within the larger frame of socialist advance. “Above all else,” the Labour Leader affirms, “Hardie was a pioneer.” But the progress of the socialist movement

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would not falter; new pioneers would rise in the ranks to take Hardie’s place. These new activists needed to be recruited and, across these different appropriations of “Pioneers! O Pioneers!,” the poem’s most important work was to ask not for an ideological commitment only, or for passive support, but for active participation in the socialist campaign.

Notes 1. Thomas, Lunar Light, 270. 2. Spargo, Karl Marx: His Life and Work, 275–76; cf. PP, 372. 3. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 293. For a comparative discussion of some of the cultural and political issues raised in this chapter, see Steinroetter, “‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’ and Whitman’s Early German Translators.” Steinroetter responds to an early version of this chapter and considers the poem’s reception and translation history in Germany, where it seems conversely to have been largely ignored by early socialists. 4. Mottram, “Law and the Open Road,” 38. 5. Rhys, Poems of Walt Whitman, ix. 6. Genette, Paratexts, 2. 7. Whitley, “Introduction to the British Editions,” para. 8. 8. Rhys, Poems of Walt Whitman, xxxviii. 9. Ibid., xxxix. 10. Rhys, Wales England Wed, 69. 11. Edwards, Labour Annual, 1895, 40. 12. Rhys, Poems of Walt Whitman, xxxviii. 13. Mancuso, The Strange Sad War Revolving, 82. 14. Allen, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!,” 450. 15. Wallace, “Whitman Day Speech,” 31 May 1893, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/6; Wallace, “Bolton Independent Labour Party Conference Paper,” 26 May 1894, Whitman Collection, ZWN 6/2/23. 16. On the Labour Church see Bevir, The Making of British Socialism, 278–97, and “The Labour Church Movement”; Pierson, “John Trevor and the Labor Church Movement”; Smith, Religion and the Rise of Labour; Turner, “Labour’s Lost Soul?”; Johnson, “‘So Peculiarly Its Own”; Summers, “The Labour Church and Allied Movements.” 17. Quoted in Summers, “The Labour Church and Allied Movements,” 159. 18. “Handbill to Recruit Labour Church Pioneers,” n.d., Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/55. 19. The progressive London women-only Pioneer Club, whose members included Eleanor Marx Aveling, Dora Motefiore, Olive Shreiner, Mona Caird and Annie Besant, also took its name from Whitman’s poem and inscribed a stanza from “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” on a screen in its building. See Rowbotham, Dreamers of a New Day, 31–33; Doughan and Gordon, Women, Clubs and Associations, 54–57. 20. Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet, 225. 21. Summers, “The Labour Church and Allied Movements,” appendix. 22. The wealth of material gathered in Summers’s appendix conveys a rich impression of Labour Church branch life and Pioneer activity. For instance, an account is given of a Blackpool Pioneer who set up stall on the beach in the spring of 1893 to sell the Labour Prophet on Sundays; called on to defend himself,

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“Have the Elder Races Halted?”  191 he set about explaining the religious significance of the labor movement and so became “without intending it, an open air lecturer in the socialist cause.” At the end of the appendix, Summers provides a series of letters, many of them very touching, from former Labour Church members sharing their recollections. Charles Sixsmith informed Summers that he had spoken at the Bolton Labour Church, as had Carpenter, before commenting rather sadly that “all the old friends who attended seem to have passed away.” 23. Summers, “The Labour Church and Allied Movements,” 150. 24. Alfred Orage was underwhelmed by Whittaker’s poetic contribution to the movement. Reviewing a collection of his verse in the Labour Leader he comments, “I use the word poet, and let it be understood that I mean poet in the orthodox sense. Joseph Whittaker’s little volume has none of the daring innovation in style, in form, in contour and construction, which elevated Carpenter and Whitman above the ordinary rank of poets into that of prophets of democracy” (“A Bookish Causerie,” October 24, 1896, 368). 5. Allen, Walt Whitman as Man, Poet, and Legend, 66. 2 26. Reprinted in Morris, Chants for Socialists, 11–12; it was also included in Carpenter’s Chants of Labour. 2 7. Miller, Slow Print, 202. Miller explores the usefulness of the symbolism of the war march for revolutionists, in naturalizing the idea of social upheaval for a broad reading audience. For parliamentarians the symbolism of the war march could energize a gradualist message. 28. Rucht, “On the Sociology of Protest Marches,” 55. 29. On the Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives industrial dispute see Brunner, “The Origins of Industrial Peace.”

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In this study I have proposed that Whitman’s suggestiveness and pluralism made his poetry a particularly useful resource in the emergent socialist movement in the 1880s and 1890s. Unfailingly on the side of democracy and the common people but purposely resistant to “isms” and “ologies,” Whitman could be worked to negotiate at the boundary lines between different socialist and radical ideologies, both by propagandists hoping to win support for their particular view and by those insistent on a diverse and inclusive understanding of a “larger” socialism. In these spiritual interpretations of socialism, where unity, love, community and the celebration of the “many in one” were paramount, Whitman’s force was keenly felt. Reading into Whitman’s poetry the model of a loving spiritual democracy, inclusive of but superseding socialism, his admirers could account for Whitman’s refusal to endorse the socialist political program while constructing him not as only the movement’s poet but as its prophet. Such interpretations were not a private matter but were given public voice, on the local and national socialist stage in lectures, poems, articles, books and reviews. I have considered how Whitman was integrated into debates about the nature and purpose of socialism but also about the nature and purpose of a democratic literary culture (as democracy was understood in the socialist context). Spiritual value and formal politics were intertwined in Chapter 1 where I explored Edward Carpenter’s Whitman-inspired ideation of special literary texts written out of an awareness of universal selfhood. Such works challenged the notion of the individual creative genius, with common ownership asserted over their production. The democratic text was meant to represent the universal self but was also to bring it—and therefore a socialist society—into being by encouraging its “exfoliation.” Like every other earthly process, literature was “unfolding” its democratic potential. It was therefore dependent on innovation, upon enlarging “the boundary of human expression.”1 As discussed in Chapter 3, Alfred Orage learnt this spiritual and social “truth” from Whitman by way of Carpenter and felt a responsibility to share his conception of democratic literature in his weekly Labour Leader column. William Clarke, considered in Chapter 5, maintained a similar position, believing that Whitman’s rendering of an expansive evolutionary spirituality constituted the “first rough draft” of a democratic

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Coda  193 literature that would invoke a socialist democracy, even if Whitman hadn’t fully understood the material and economic implications of his ideas, or the political direction in which his democracy would evolve (WW, 40). Chapter 2 considered how the Eagle Street College locked on to ­Whitman’s belief that democracy would be fulfilled through a reimagining of the cultural domain, emanating from and directed towards the common person. Cultural self-reliance would lead to a revitalized sense of mutual improvement, where book learning would be indivisible from the lived experience of the world and where personal development could not help but benefit the social and political whole. As Whitman’s democratic text was collectively read and fully, deeply understood by members of the socialist community, the movement’s activities and philosophies would acquire a spiritual profundity that would ensure its ultimate success. Whitman was a messiah of sorts and his book a democratic gospel, a position also taken by John Trevor and preached to the Labour Church, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 5. Where Christianity failed to provide an adequate discursive site for socialism’s spiritual expression, Leaves of Grass offered a contemporary democratic sacred text and language. Looking out to a broader understanding of socialist print culture, Chapters  3 and 5 considered how literature was incorporated into the ­ periodic press as part of the construction of an alternative public sphere, intended to rival the stranglehold on popular thought and knowledge of the capitalist press. Whitman, his poetry and the playful manipulation of the formal architecture of his work were entered into self-reflective discussions about how this public sphere should operate, as well as performing nuanced community-defining and building work. The friction between the appreciation of literary commentators for Whitman’s work and the fact that he had not gained as large a popular following as these admirers had hoped affected how he was mediated for educative and propagandist purposes. As the twentieth century drew in, socialists were compelled to acknowledge that the future they had envisioned was not as near, or as secure, as it may have once seemed. “Paradise is not so imminent as it was to you in those old Glasgow days,” wrote James Ramsay MacDonald of Glasier in the Labour Leader as Glasier was voted out of the ILP chair in 1903, The road to it is flatter, dustier, duller than when you ranged yourself under the banner of the Socialist League on Glasgow Green; I doubt if men are quite so precious now that you know they will not rise en masse (a fine Whitman phrase), as you dreamed they would in those morning days of all-consuming hope. Progress is slow, slow, very slow; the road is heavy, heavy, very heavy.2 Taking stock, and reassessing what their political faith was to mean moving forward, socialists had to contend with the reality that success had not been theirs within the expected timeframe and that there was a possibility that it

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194 Coda might not come at all. With the establishment of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, its performance in the 1906 election and subsequent restyling as the Labour Party, it was clear that a parliamentary approach was no longer a matter for debate but a defining feature of the movement. Though, as discussed in the introduction, Vaninskaya is right to challenge a simplistic binary historiography dividing an idealistic, spiritual, associative age of socialism on one side of the century line from a rationalist, measured, pragmatic age on the other, the tenor of socialism undoubtedly changed as it developed through the early twentieth century. Speaking of the ILP, David Howell notes, “The electoral strategy gradually became primary, and the divide between conventional political activities and the rest became sharper. Singing and cycling became recreational activities rather than anticipations of a wider socialist fellowship.”3 As the political value of community-building activities, the “politics of everyday life” to use Chris Waters’s phrase, began to depreciate on a regional level, the socialist community was to be shaken on an international level in the second decade of the twentieth century by the horrors of the Great War.4 As MacDonald’s reference to the “fine Whitman phrase” suggests, ­Whitman’s poetics began to seem dated and he was invoked for the cause with less frequency. The spiritual and literary landscape of socialism had shifted, particularly in the places where Whitman’s democracy was most enthusiastically staged. Following the steady decline of the Labour Church after 1895, Trevor withdrew from the cause in 1900, and it folded rapidly over the following decade. The ILP’s political focus in the early twentieth century impacted its coverage of spiritual and literary matters in the Labour Leader. Orage’s “A Bookish Causerie” began to be written by other contributors and was then phased out. Its successor, “Labour and Literature,” dished out sober reflections on texts about socialist practice and policy but little else. J. H. Harley, complaining in the Labour Leader in 1905 that socialists “cannot be fed on bread alone,” directed the reader to this new column “to see what a medley of sometimes soulless books is issued from the modern press” (“The Soul of Socialism,” April 28, 1905, 42). Under Orage’s editorship Whitman actually received less attention in the New Age than before he and Holbrook Jackson took the helm and pledged the paper’s allegiance to the socialist cause. Whitman continued to be used as a democratic literary reference, but little passion was evinced in the process. Neither he nor his poetry was pressed on readers with the zeal of “A Bookish Causerie.” An unsigned review of Stopford Brooke’s Studies in Poetry, likely to have been written by Orage, offers a clue, suggesting that as the intellectual faculty matures, a taste is developed for prose over poetry. Browning and Whitman were merely “convenient half way houses”: To the majority of us who care about literature, there comes a time when we cease to read poetry […] We read the poets in our youth— they charmed us, held our imaginations captive—inspired our ideals.

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But when we became men and women we put away—poetical things. (“Reviews,” New Age, February 15, 1908, 314) The allusion to 1 Corinthians 13:11 associates the genre of poetry with childish things. It was not that poetry had no value, but that its purpose was to inspire the young. As Orage became older, he became less interested in Whitman and more stimulated by philosophers such as Nietzsche. At the center of the debate about emergent modernisms, and a major proponent of guild socialism, the New Age moved discussion at the intersection of literary and political issues into a radical new arena. Where prophets and sages were sought, socialism had matured from a young movement into one that had grown its own elders, both living and dead. William Morris was one. Carpenter another. Keir Hardie a third. ­Whitman seemed increasingly irrelevant. Some of Whitman’s socialist admirers sought to halt this drift. Writing in the Liverpool Weekly Post towards the end of his life, C. Allen Clarke introduced his younger readers to the American poet: There was last century a man named Walt Whitman. I should call him a bard. He was poetic but he did not use rhyme. He wrote rhythmic prose, like a chant, like Psalms, and he uttered great and daring things. He was a challenger. He wanted men to build a new world. A world of comradeship. Humanity could not stand still or lie still, it must go forward. There was a fundamental, ineradicable something, perpetually driving it forward. Listen to this Walt Whitman. (October 12, 1935)5 In writing for a younger audience Clarke does not modify his language merely to simplify it but to weave a tale. Clarke’s stories of his childhood vividly recollect how he and his closest friend, Midge, created a world of adventure through their ongoing play at being “Old Heroes,” types learnt from his father’s small collection of books and imaginatively brought to life in his Bolton stomping grounds.6 Bridging nearly a century between Whitman and the youth he writes for in this article, Clarke recognized that Whitman’s work no longer had the force of contemporaneity. He invoked romance markers to present Whitman instead as an “Old Hero” from the literature of yore: an author, but also a character, the “daring” adventurer whose quest was to build a new world built on great and good principles. By drawing attention to the evolutionary, forward-looking characteristics of Leaves of Grass, Clarke argued for the continued relevance of this “­challenger” of old. Wallace also looked to evolutionary narratives to reorient his faith in Whitman. At the College farewell dinner discussed in Chapter 2, Bucke had claimed that Whitman had already transmitted the faculty of cosmic consciousness to two people “to a certain extent,” and that he could “bestow” it on “tens of thousands” more:

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If he is able to bestow that faculty and if he is going to bestow it on the race—if he is avatar of this faculty—although it may have been seen before, but if he is the man who has got the whole grasp of this thing & if, by means of this book he is going to plant that faculty in the race—then we have got hold of a big thing—quite the largest thing of these centuries.7 Leaves of Grass was the conduit through which Whitman could lead the reading masses to spiritual and social revolution. Wallace had grabbed hold of this idea eagerly, dedicated his life to its service, and yet this heaven on earth had not come about. Whitman had called for a literature and culture that was “not restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses” to secure the true democracy, but he had failed to engage the working classes on this mass scale (PP, 936; emphasis Whitman’s). Carpenter’s exfoliation offered some hope and, fully acknowledging his influence, Wallace came to adhere to a very similar worldview. He, too, came to make frequent use of the symbol of the unfolding seed. In one Labour Leader article alone, the image was used to describe Whitman’s evolution into spiritual maturity, how the old social order would be transformed, why this was so long coming and why Whitman’s message had not yet been fully understood. Written in 1919 to commemorate the Whitman centennial, a shocked and saddened Wallace tried to make sense of the First World War, fumbling awkwardly in the attempt to slot it into his optimistic evolutionary ­Whitmanism. A degeneration narrative was applied to the “old” order of civilization in counterpoint to the new era that was evolving: edging uncomfortably around issues of free-will and culpability, Wallace explained that the devastation of the war was symptomatic of the process of current society “passing into its final stages of disintegration and dissolution” (“The Walt Whitman C ­ entennial,” May 29, 1919, 9). “Such a civilisation,” he wrote in Walt Whitman and the World Crisis, “is doomed to destruction by its own nature. It lacks cohesion, and tends to increasing disintegration and disruption.”8 As the old order fell the new would rise, but it would take time. C ­ arpenter had written that “precursive signs” of the new era were to be found throughout humanity’s development, and Wallace now believed that the College was a precursive readership. “I believe,” he told the crowd gathered at the 1913 Whitman birthday celebrations, “that a really true and vital apprehension of ‘Leaves of Grass’ requires a far more advanced and complex stage of evolution on the part of the reader”; it would “come much more slowly, and, for a time, to a smaller number.”9 To account for its absence, ­Whitman’s spiritual democracy was now projected into the far future: “Though a century has elapsed since [his birth], his fame and influence are as yet little more than at the beginning of their growth, and it will take a much longer period in the future to fully realise the significance of his advent and the importance of his influence in relation to the new era yet to dawn upon the world” (“The Walt Whitman Centennial,” May 29, 1919, 9).10 Wallace’s

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Coda  197 “smaller number” betrayed no elitism, only the desperate hope that all of humanity would one day follow in the lead of those who had passed into the next evolutionary stage of consciousness. Despite such repositioning, having spent nearly 30 years preaching Whitman’s message within British socialism, Wallace looked back on his life’s work with some disappointment. In a telling comment, he regretted that though the leaders of the British socialist movements had been “responsive to the social implications of [Whitman’s] message” they had failed to grasp “his real significance” or “the orbic range of his vision.”11 Without the spiritual framework of Whitmanian democracy, the success of socialism seemed far from secure. Moving out of Britain into the turbulent terrain of early twentieth-­century European politics, Whitman continued to be impressed into service for the socialist cause. Walter Grünzweig describes the interest he received from social democrats, Marxists, communists and anarchists in early to mid-­century Germany, and how he was promoted using a similar “­socialist-religious rhetoric” to that we have seen at play in fin de siècle British socialist print culture. Max Hayek, for instance, a social democratic journalist and author claimed Leaves of Grass as a “bible of democracy.”12 In Russia, Whitman was “rightly or wrongly” identified with its own revolutionary struggle, writes Stephen Stepanchev, with Soviet critics honoring him for decades “as a high priest of democratic idealism and as a saint of the Revolution of 1917.”13 Anna Strunsky Walling, a Russian-American socialist, remarked in 1919 on Russian “comrades” carrying about translations of Whitman’s poetry and commented that “of all the poets who come nearest the Russian conception of democracy, the greatest is Walt ­Whitman.” “When Walt Whitman exclaims: ‘By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms,’” she states, “he was expressing the well-springs of the social democracy in which Russia today lives and moves and has her being” (“Walt Whitman and Russia,” M ­ odern School, May 1919, 142). In Hungary, in the aftermath of the short-lived Soviet Republic of 1919, Whitman’s works were seen to have such revolutionary potential that they were banned alongside those of Marx and Lenin for having a “destructive tendency” (“Whitman in Hungary,” New York Times, January 2, 1923, 12). Owing in part to his comparatively recent arrival on the popular literary scene, Whitman’s star rose in European leftist circles where it seemed to fade in Britain. Stepanchev relates, for instance, that interest in Whitman was thinly spread before 1900, partly because government censorship forbade reference to him, and because a book-length translation of Whitman’s poetry was not brought to the non-English reading public until 1907.14 Similarly, though the first German translation was published in 1889, it was not until Johannes Schlaf produced a cheap translation in 1907 that Whitman became available to a broad-based German-speaking readership.15 The reception of his poetry was thus marked with a sense of freshness and modernity that allowed it to speak to the struggles of the left in early twentieth-century Europe as it had to fin de siècle British socialists.

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198 Coda A critical tradition was thus firmly established, which emphasized, as Betsy Erkkila puts it, “Whitman’s collectivism, his democratic politics, and the revolutionary implications of his verse” as opposed to his liberalist ideology or individualism.16 Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom’s Walt Whitman and the World collates and juxtaposes such divergent readings across continents and over time, unfolding a clearer picture of such critical legacies and correspondences. The appropriation of Whitman as a “poet of democracy” for both liberal and socialist theorizations of democracy underwent a refashioning in the twentieth century as democracy came to be pitted against socialism in the popular Western imagination in an oppositional rather than an associative relationship, particularly in the rhetoric surrounding the Cold War. Ruth Livesey suggests that the two terms in the title of her article “­Socialism and Victorian Poetry” appear to “strain apart” in the twenty-first century because aesthetics and politics are currently separated in a way that they were not at the end of the nineteenth century: That historical moment in which socialism was understood to emerge from reading the later works of John Ruskin and was then reinforced by discussing the works of Walt Whitman and brought closer by reciting William Morris’s Chants for Socialists passed with the passing of those mid twentieth-century Labour politicians who cited such “­aesthetic” texts as the source of their political education back at the turn of the century.17 Livesey identifies an irrefutable shift in British socialism as it is played out on the main political stage, and it is certainly true that few who wish their politics to be taken seriously today would readily admit to having received their “political education” primarily from poetry. But the inheritance of fin de siècle socialism can be traced throughout the twentieth century into the present day in its more radical, grass-roots forms where art, literature and music continue to be integrated into associative, community-minded politics. There is no shortage of socialist or anarchist spoken word or song (and here again, at this level, there is considerable overlap between these two broad, fluid movements and among them and other radical communities). Today’s activists continue to work out of a long and proud British tradition of leftist politics lived through lectures and meetings, bicycles and bookgroups, free kitchens and shops, communal ways of living and cooperative ways of working. Though perhaps carrying less of a public momentum than fin de siècle socialist aesthetic engagement, storytelling, poetry, cabaret, circus and performance art lie close to the heart of much of the conscious-­ raising activity in these circles and in associated campaigns in the wider radical sphere against capitalism, social injustice and ecological devastation. As I write, in the summer of 2015, it is a fascinating time for observers of the British left. As the Labour Party shores up its ruins after defeat in a

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Coda  199 General Election, obliterated by the Scottish National Party north of the border and defeated cleanly by the Conservatives in the south, the nation has become embroiled in an unexpectedly engaged debate about what the Labour Party should be. The dominant narrative put forward in the aftermath of the defeat, that Labour must position itself closer to the center, has been robustly challenged by the surprising popularity of a self-described socialist in the Labour leadership contest. Running on an unapologetically leftist, humanitarian ticket, Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for a distinctive alternative to New Labour has caught the public imagination; in the words of the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone: “Labour has come alive as we debate not only what we can do but what we are.”18 And it might just be that going forward an “ethical socialism” of sorts will be called for either inside or outside of party lines. Making a leap that I admit to be rather large, it is not inconceivable that cultural and aesthetic discourses might one day come again to play a more prominent role in socialism, particularly if momentum is generated on a local, associational level through a “politics of everyday life.” A reviewer of an early draft of this manuscript asked very reasonably if I felt frustrated by the vague idealism of the socialist philosophy in these appropriations of Whitman. While the political weakness of many of the interpretations put forward in these pages is clear, I don’t find it naïve to see the political value in fellowship, comradeship and love. It did not trouble Whitman’s nineteenth-century British socialist admirers that he did not share their specific political beliefs. Despite his protestations against socialism itself, Whitman’s democratic aesthetic was broad enough to accommodate their ideologies, as Traubel, speaking specifically about these readers, explained to him: All these fellows find texts in Leaves of Grass: not figures, not names, but electrifying intimations. They don’t any of them claim you as a partisan: they only claim you in the general way. We say Jesus is on our side. In the same sense we say you are on our side. With the people as against the elect few: with the people: even when things go wrong, with the people. (WWC, 3, 480) Some of the most significant aspects of Whitman’s reception by fin de s­ iècle British socialists are summarized in this passage. Whitman inspired by “intimation” not explanation, which allowed his poetry to be appropriated in a different context from that which he intended. Often claimed for a democratic movement wider than socialism, he was called on as a spiritual teacher. Finally, and most importantly, at the center of British socialist interpretations of Walt Whitman lay the belief that he was of and with “the people.” In this final aspect of his appropriation, in the orientation of the socialist program towards “putting the crown on man—taking it off things,” he was prepared to humor Traubel, ceding a little mischievously, “Ain’t we all socialists, after all?” (WWC, 1, 221).

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Notes 1. Carpenter, Angels’ Wings, 11. 2. Quoted in Thompson, The Enthusiasts, 132. 3. Howell, British Workers and the ILP, 338. 4. Waters, Politics of Popular Culture, 14. 5. Quoted in Salveson, Lancashire’s Romantic Radical, 81–82. 6. See Clarke, Milltown Mischief. 7. “Typescript of the College Farewell to Dr. R. M. Bucke and J. W. Wallace,” 24 August 1891, Sixsmith Collection, Eng 1170/2/4/1/1. 8. Wallace, Walt Whitman and the World Crisis, 2. 9. Wallace, “Whitman Day Speech,” 20 June 1913, Whitman Collection, ZWN 2/17. 10. This interpretation chimed with Whitman’s own; in conversation with ­Wallace in 1891, related in Visits to Walt Whitman, Whitman had commented that Leaves of Grass would be better understood in 50 or 100 years: “It needs people to grow up with it. Its lesson or impetus or urge is not direct, but at second or third or even fourth removes or indirections” (151). 11. Wallace to William Osler, 6 October 1919; quoted in Leon, Sir William Osler, 13. 12. Grünzweig, Constructing the German Walt Whitman, 153–54; see also ­Grünzweig, “Whitman in the German-Speaking Countries,” in Walt Whitman and the World, ed. Allen and Folsom, 160–230. 13. Stepanchev, “Whitman in Russia,” in Walt Whitman and the World, ed. Allen and Folsom, 300–338 (300). 14. Stepanchev, “Whitman in Russia,” in Walt Whitman and the World, ed. Allen and Folsom, 300–338 (302). 15. Grünzweig, “Whitman in the German-Speaking Countries,” in Walt Whitman and the World, ed. Allen and Folsom, 160–230 (164). 16. Erkkila and Grossman, Breaking Bounds, 19. 17. Livesey, “Socialism and Victorian Poetry,” 1. 18. Livingstone, “Jeremy Corbyn Isn’t Another Michael Foot—He Can Win a G ­ eneral Election,” Evening Standard, accessed August 3, 2015, http://www.standard.co.uk/ comment/comment/ken-livingstone-jeremy-corbyn-isn-t-another-michael-foot-hecan-win-a-general-election-10434758.html, para. 2.

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References

Abbreviations Used MDD  Carpenter, Edward. My Days and Dreams: Being Autobiographical Notes. 1916. 3rd ed. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921. TD Carpenter, Edward. Towards Democracy. Complete ed., 1905. Reprint, London: Gay Men’s Press, 1985. Clarke, William. Walt Whitman. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892. WW WWC Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 9 vols. Vol.1, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co, 1906; vol. 2, New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1915; vol. 3, New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914; vol. 4, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953; vol. 5, Carbondale: Southern Illinois ­University Press, 1964; vol. 6, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982; vol. 7, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992; vol. 8, Oregon House: W. L. Bentley, 1996; vol. 9, Oregon House: W. L. Bentley, 1996. PP Whitman, Walt. Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Edited by Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1996.

Archives and Collections Carpenter Collection Edward Carpenter Collection, Sheffield Archives Johnston Papers Johnston Papers, Bolton Archives Sixsmith Collection C. F. Sixsmith Edward Carpenter Collection, Walt Whitman Collection, Collection of Traubel Correspondence, Miscellanea and Collection of Printed and Photographic Material, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester Swan Sonnenschein Archives of Swan Sonnenschein & Co., University of Archives Reading Wallace Papers Papers Relating to J. W. Wallace and the Bolton Whitman Fellowship, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester Whitman Collection  Collected Papers of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship, Bolton Archives

Newspapers and Periodicals Academy American Phrenological Journal Christian Commonwealth Clarion

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202 References Commonweal Conservator Contemporary Review Fortnightly Review Freedom Humane Review Justice Labour Leader Labour Prophet Manchester Guardian Modern School Modern Thought Nation & Athenaeum New Age New England Magazine New York Times Nineteenth Century Political Science Quarterly Seed-Time Speaker Teddy Ashton’s Journal Times Literary Supplement To-Day Workman’s Times Yorkshire Weekly Post

Other Works Adams, Maurice. “Editorial Note.” Seed-Time (February 1898): 1. Allen, Gay Wilson. “On the Trochaic Meter of ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’” American Literature 20, no. 4 (January 1949): 449–51. ———, ed. Walt Whitman Abroad. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1955. ———. Walt Whitman as Man, Poet, and Legend. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961. Allen, Gay Wilson, and Ed Folsom, eds. Walt Whitman and the World. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. Anderson, W. C. “The Life and Ideals of Hardie.” Labour Leader (7 October 1915): 7. Ardis, Ann L. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. ———. Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2002. Armytage, W. H. G. Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1560–1960. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869. Edited by Jane Garnett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Arthur, Gavin [Chester]. The Circle of Sex. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1966. Asselineau, Roger, and William White, eds. Walt Whitman in Europe Today. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972.

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References  213 Tanner, James T. F. “Walt Whitman: Poet of Lamarckian Evolution.” PhD diss., Texas Technological College, 1965. Thomas, M. Wynn. “Walt Whitman’s Welsh Connection: Ernest Rhys.” Anglo-Welsh Review, no. 82 (1986): 77–85. ———. The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. ———. “From Walt to Waldo: Whitman’s Welsh Admirers.” Walt Whitman Q ­ uarterly Review 10, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 61–73. ———. Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S., Whitman U.K. Iowa City: U ­ niversity of Iowa Press, 2005. Thompson, E. P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. 2nd ed. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Thompson, Laurence. The Enthusiasts: A Biography of John and Katharine Bruce Glasier. London: Victor Gollancz, 1971. “Towards Freedom and Equality, An Interview with Mr. Edward Carpenter.” Christian Commonwealth (11 December 1912): 177–78. Trevor, John. “Editorial.” Labour Prophet (January 1892): 4. ———. “Editorial.” Labour Prophet (April 1892): 28. ———. “Editorial.” Labour Prophet (June 1892): 44–45. ———. “Labour Church Pioneers.” Labour Prophet (May 1894): 56. ———. “Walt Whitman.” Labour Prophet (February 1895): 17–18. ———. “Editorial.” Labour Prophet (December 1895): 191. ———. “Review.” Labour Prophet (March 1896): 40–41. ———. “Perfidious Albion.” Labour Prophet (April 1896): 57. ———. My Quest for God. London: Labour Prophet Office, 1897. “Triumphant Democracy—With a Difference.” Speaker (20 August 1892): 236–37. Tsuzuki, Chushichi. Edward Carpenter, 1844–1929: Prophet of Human Fellowship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Turner, Jacqueline. “Labour’s Lost Soul? Recovering the Labour Church.” In The Foundations of the British Labour Party: Identities, Cultures and Perspectives, 1900–39, edited by Matthew Worley, 153–69. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Vaninskaya, Anna. William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Wallace, James William. “Leaves of Grass and Optimos.” Conservator (September 1911): 103–105. ———. “The Walt Whitman Centennial: The Man and His Message.” Labour Leader (29 May 1919): 9. ———. Walt Whitman and the World Crisis. Manchester: National Labour Press, 1920. Walling, Anna Strunsky. “Walt Whitman and Russia.” Modern School (May 1919): 142–43. Wallis, Lena. Life and Letters of Caroline Martyn. London: Labour Leader Office, 1898. “Walt Whitman.” Clarion (5 March 1892): 5. [“Walt Whitman Junior”]. “A Vision.” Clarion (23 July 1892): 6. Waters, Chris. British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Watson, M. I. “Mutual Improvement Societies in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire.” Journal of Educational Administration and History 21, no. 2 (1989): 8–17.

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Index

Adams, Francis 115 advertising 104, 109–13, 116 Allen, Gay Wilson 174, 185, 198 America: and capitalism 19, 20, 155–8; and democracy 16–17, 18–19, 71, 80–2, 154–6, 171–2; and laboring class 80–2, 132, 160–2, 165. See also Whitman, Walt, and American nationalism American Civil War 135, 156, 169–71, 174–6, 180 anarchism 9, 10, 113, 198; and Edward Carpenter 55; and Walt Whitman’s poetry 133, 136–8; and William Clarke 164–5 Arnold, Matthew 77, 79, 114 autodidacticism 5, 77–80, 86, 93, 97–8, 126. See also mutual improvement; self-reliance Barlas, John 115 Bax, Ernest Belfort 9, 12, 17, 20, 108, 135 Beckett, Reginald A. 20–1, 108–9, 113, 121–2, 135–6, 143 Bellamy, Edward 55, 117 Bevir, Mark 9, 142 Blatchford, Robert 11–12, 16, 79, 89, 94; and Clarion 77, 107–9, 117–18, 122–3; and Clarion movement 9, 68; The New Religion 104, 116–17. See also Clarion; Clarion movement Blodgett, Harold 5, 19, 72 Bolton 65–9, 89, 92–4, 98, 176–7, 195 “A Bookish Causerie” 7, 116, 120–1, 154, 194. See also Orage, Alfred Brockway, Fenner 54, 60 Browning, Robert 55, 76–7, 87, 194 Bucke, Richard Maurice 65, 84–5, 91; and cosmic consciousness 43, 46, 71, 94, 195–6 Burns, John 9, 56

capitalism 13, 19, 33, 35, 67, 131–2, 138, 174, 198; and evolution 17, 45, 59; and periodical print culture 107–13, 121, 124; and William Clarke 155–7, 160–1, 166 Carlyle, Thomas 77, 79, 80, 83, 114–16, 124, 178 Carpenter, Edward: Angels’ Wings 47, 53; “The Broken Tool” 59–60; “By the Shore” 37–9, 48; Chants of Labour 21, 59, 72–3, 126–7; Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure 41–2, 51, 54, 55; Co-operative Production 112; Days with Walt Whitman 40, 45–6, 61, 167; and democratic literature 16, 45–54, 115, 120–1; and Eagle Street College 65–6, 70–1, 98, 196; England’s Ideal 94; and evolutionary philosophy 17, 39–45, 59, 121; Forecasts of the Coming Century 56; and liberalism 33–5; My Days and Dreams 33, 35–6, 98; “O Sea, with White Lines of Foam” 38; Pagan and Christian Creeds 43; “The Secret of Time and Satan” 42–3, 44; and socialism 10, 13, 35, 55–61, 151; Towards Democracy 30–3, 37–8, 41, 43–4, 46–51, 54–5, 57–8, 60, 115, 116, 121; Towards Industrial Freedom 59; and universal self 35–9; and Walt Whitman 3–4, 30–3, 58, 61; “The Word Democracy” 51–4 Chubb, Percival 3, 5, 24, 105, 118, 173 Clarion 56, 68, 77, 107–8, 109–10, 113; and C. Allen Clarke 127–8; and Walt Whitman 92, 117–18, 123. See also Blatchford, Robert; Clarion movement Clarion movement 9, 13, 68–9, 88. See also Blatchford, Robert; Clarion Clarke, C. Allen 66–7, 79, 126–8, 195

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216 Index Clarke, William 114, 160–1, 169–70, 192; and capitalism 154–7, 161–2; and collectivism 152–3, 159, 163–6; and liberalism 150–3, 166–7; and Walt Whitman’s individualism 157–8, 162–3 class: and Eagle Street College 66, 76–88; and figure of the laborer 14, 58, 81–2, 131–3, 160; and readership 5–7, 77–88 Clayton, Joseph 13, 23, 89, 121, 140 Cocks, Harry 73, 89, 93, 96 Commonweal 10, 108–9, 113, 121, 127, 135–7, 185 community 13, 68, 79, 88; interpretive communities 2–3 comradeship 12–13, 21, 89, 105, 119, 169; and Eagle Street College 70, 72–5, 79, 96; and Edward Carpenter 38, 57–8 Contemporary Review 105–6, 151, 155 cosmic consciousness 43, 45–6, 94, 120, 195–6. See also universal self Crane, Walter 16, 110, 129, 131–2 Crick, Martin 67 Darwin, Charles 17, 39–40 Davidson, Thomas 118 De Certeau, Michel 80 democracy: and America 16–17, 18–19, 71, 80–2, 154–6, 171–2; and comradeship 57–8, 66, 72–5; definitions of 14–15, 17, 51–5, 162; Walt Whitman’s spiritual democracy 69–72, 90–4, 121, 146, 159, 174–7, 192–7 democratic literature 16, 45–51, 104–6, 113–28; and authorship 46–9, 51, 97–8, 123–8; and editions of Leaves of Grass 4–7; and Walt Whitman 15–16, 19, 45–7, 49, 80–1, 84, 86–7, 152–3, 163–4 Dixon, Wentworth 24, 68, 69–70, 75, 77, 87 Eagle Street College 65–7; and lower class readership 76–88; and socialism 68–9, 88–98, 176–7; and Walt Whitman’s spiritual democracy 13, 69–75, 175–6 Elfenbein, Andrew 39, 76–7, 88–9, 126 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 60, 80, 83, 142 Erkkila, Betsy 134, 180, 198

evolution: and Edward Carpenter 32–3, 39–44, 45–6, 51; and socialism 17–18, 54, 59, 138–40, 159–61, 195–7; and Walt Whitman 20, 52, 81, 120–1, 159. See also Lamarckism exfoliation see evolution, and Edward Carpenter; Lamarckism expansion 154, 164–6, 169–71, 177 Fabian Society 3, 5, 9, 89, 105, 118 Fawcett, Henry 34 Fellowship of the New Life 9, 10, 55, 105, 118, 142, 150–1 Fish, Stanley 2–3, 15 Fletcher, Alfred Ewen 140–2, 151–2 Folsom, Ed 52, 54–5, 69, 198 Ford, Isabella 138 Fortnightly Review 19, 151 Freedom 137–8 French Revolution 13, 20, 114, 135 Genette, Gérard 171 George, Henry 16, 19 Germany 197 Gilbertson, George 135 Glasier, John Bruce 4, 15, 24, 104, 130, 193; and Eagle Street College 97–8; and Edward Carpenter, 59; and Labour Leader 108, 119–20 Glasier, Katharine Bruce 4, 13, 24; and Eagle Street College 25, 89, 94–6, 98; and Edward Carpenter, 60; and Labour Prophet 94, 129 Gorton, R. L. 138–40 Gosse, Edmund 2, 105–6 Grünzweig, Walter 197 Hardie, Keir 11, 24, 56, 79, 195; and Independent Labour Party (ILP) 10, 89, 94; and Labour Leader 107–8, 109–10, 123, 189 Harned, Thomas 73, 85, 91 health 58, 88, 93, 110, 129–33, 159–61 Hobson, J. A. 19, 104, 167 Hobson, Samuel 88–9, 130–3, 186–9 Hodgkinson, Sam 65, 68, 84 homoeroticism and homosexuality 13, 38, 57–8, 73, 75 Howell, David 68, 194 Hungary 197 Hyndman, Henry Mayers 5, 9, 17, 19, 56, 108

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Index  217 Independent Labour Party (ILP) 10, 25, 67–9, 89, 128, 130, 173, 179–80, 194; and Walt Whitman 13, 92–7, 119, 139–40, 176–7 individualism 10–11; and Edward Carpenter 34–5, 47, 55; and Fellowship of the New Life 118–19; and Walt Whitman 12–13, 15, 116, 139, 140, 152–3, 157–9, 162–4, 198 Iser, Wolfgang 2, 50 Jackson, Holbrook 17–18, 31, 60, 140, 194 Janowitz, Anne 16, 115–16 Johnston, John 68–9, 71, 73; “A College Song” 76–7; and self-reliance 87, 92, 97; “The Song of the Eagle Street College” 74, 78–9; and Walt Whitman 3, 67, 83–5, 105; and William Clarke 24, 92, 153 Joynes, J. L. 20, 135, 186, Jupp, William 3, 88–9, 118, 142–3 Justice 10, 13, 109, 112, 115, 127, 131, 138, 144, 186 Labour Annual 60, 97, 109, 110–11, 121, 173, Labour Church 9, 24, 68, 143–4, 179–85, 193, 194 Labour Leader 23, 24, 60, 68, 109–10, 112–13, 193; and democratic literature 113–15, 128, 192, 194; and Eagle Street College 22, 94, 97, 196; and Keir Hardie 11, 56, 107–8; and Walt Whitman 7, 116, 119–22, 123–5, 129, 130–3, 138–40, 152, 177–9, 186–90 Labour Prophet 11–12, 24, 107–8, 109–11, 143–4; and Walt Whitman 7, 94, 116, 129–30, 138, 144–6, 173, 182–5 Lamarckism 17, 40–2, 49, 59. See also evolution, and Edward Carpenter Lawson, Andrew 58, 80–2, 86 liberalism 10–11, 14–15, 25; and Edward Carpenter 33–4; and Walt Whitman 138–42, 152–3, 157–8; and William Clarke 150–2, 164, 166–7, 198 Livesey, Ruth 15–16, 19, 47, 198 Lowe, David 97, 124–5

MacDonald, James Ramsay 110, 140, 167, 193–4 Maguire, Tom 58, 109, 114 Manchester Guardian 16, 98, 151 Mann, Tom 9, 11, 56, 67, 173, 181–2 marching imagery 16, 59, 169–70, 174, 180–1, 185–90 martial imagery 134–5, 169–79, 184–5, 187 Martyn, Caroline 4, 13, 96–7, 110 Marx, Karl 9, 134, 169 Marxism 9, 11, 17, 19, 34, 133, 136 materialism 11, 14, 152, 156 Maurice, F. D. 34 McGann, Jerome J. 128 Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn 16, 107, 113–14, 115, 134, 186 Morris, William 8, 11, 17, 173, 195; and Commonweal 10, 108, 136, 185; and democratic literature, 16, 107, 115; and Socialist League 9 mutual improvement 11, 69, 77–9, 87–8, 91. See also autodidacticism; self-reliance New Age 14, 24, 97, 107, 120, 151; and Walt Whitman 138, 140–2, 194–5 New Journalism 18, 110, 123, 126, 143–4 newspapers 106, 108–9, 117 Nicoll, David 136–7 ocean imagery 36–9, 48–9, 51, 56, 57–8, 71 Orage, Alfred 4, 24; and democratic literature 16, 88–9, 120–2, 143, 153–4, 192; and Leaves of Grass, 7, 116; and New Age 140, 194–5. See also “A Bookish Causerie” parody 112–13, 123–5 Pease, Edward 3, 8, 24, 88–9, 118 periodical print culture 104–7. See also socialist periodicals photographic images 110–11 poetic form 31, 49–51, 76, 78–9, 113–16, 117, 119–128, 177–9, 182–4 prophecy: and Edward Carpenter 60–1, 195; and Walt Whitman 4, 23, 45–8, 69–71, 91–2, 97, 142–6, 192 public sphere 104, 109, 113, 121 reading and reception theories 2–3, 15, 49–51, 80, 104 religion see spirituality

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218 Index religion of socialism 12, 14, 94–7. See also spirituality Rhys, Ernest 3, 5, 12, 14, 24, 92; Leaves of Grass: The Poems of Walt Whitman 5–7, 16, 18, 72, 170–4, 186 Robertson, Michael 72, 73, 77 Rose, Jonathan 79, 88 Rossetti, William Michael 19; Poems by Walt Whitman 4–5, 30, 31, 57, 70, 72, 96, 186 Rowbotham, Sheila 33 Russia 197 Salt, Henry 15, 115, 133 Salt, Kate 46–7 seed imagery 41, 43–4, 49, 51, 182–3, 196 Seed-Time 107, 112, 140, 162; and Walt Whitman 3, 118–19, 123, 142–3 self-reliance 11, 69, 80–5, 87, 125, 157. See also autodidacticism; mutual improvement Shaw, George Bernard 56, 60, 140, 151 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 4, 114–15 Sixsmith, Charles 15, 24, 68–9, 73, 89, 92; and Edward Carpenter 31, 54, 65, 71, 97 Social Democratic Federation (SDF) 9, 20, 21, 67–8, 89, 98, 137 socialism 9–10, 13–15; parliamentary 9–11, 23, 89, 105, 119–20, 138–42, 194; reformist 9, 11, 34, 68, 97, 118, 140–1, 150–2, 159–60; revolutionary 9–10, 105, 108, 114, 133, 135–8; spiritual, 12, 56–61, 92–7, 118, 120–1, 142–6, 174–7, 179–85 Socialist League 5, 9, 10, 17, 20, 21, 136–7, 193 socialist periodicals 107–13; and literature 16, 113–15, 124–8; and Walt Whitman 116–46, 177–9, 184–90. See also periodical print culture socialist unity 23, 67–8, 110, 146, 192 Speaker 31, 153, 154 spirituality 14, 66, 152, 164–5; Walt Whitman as spiritual guide 4, 30, 45–8, 70–1, 89–92, 94–7, 142–6, 174–7, 179–85, 192–3, 195–7. See also religion of socialism synthesis 138–9, 152, 154, 159, 162, 164, 166

Teddy Ashton’s 108, 109–10, 126 Thomas, M. Wynn 6, 14, 20, 140, 157, 169; and Edward Carpenter 31–2, 45, 47, 55 To-Day 105, 109, 151, 186; and Walt Whitman 20–1, 133–5 trade unions 5, 9, 67, 186–9 Traubel, Horace 3, 18, 61, 150; and Eagle Street College 69, 85, 91, 92, 93; on Walt Whitman and socialism 7–8, 199 Trevor, John 4, 11, 17, 24, 193, 194; and democratic literature 129–30, 144–6; and Labour Church 9, 143–4, 182, 184–5; and Leaves of Grass 7, 116 universal consciousness see universal self universal self 35–9, 44–9, 52, 54, 55, 57, 66, 70–1, 76, 90, 96–7, 192. See also cosmic consciousness Vaninskaya, Anna 10, 17, 23, 88, 194 Wallace, Alfred Russel 17, 40, 56 Wallace, James William 3–4, 24, 48; and democratic literature 15–16; and Eagle Street College 65–7, 89–92, 174–6; and self-reliance 77, 82–8; and socialism 68–9, 92–8, 176–7; and Walt Whitman 22, 67, 69–75, 122, 195–7 Waters, Chris 68, 78, 194 Whitman, Walt: and American nationalism 31–2, 46, 72, 170–2; “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” 37; “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” 22, 37, 65, 93; and democracy, 15–19, 52, 54–5, 80–2, 155–6, 162; Democratic Vistas 4, 12, 15, 18, 21, 50, 52, 66, 80–2, 84, 155–7, 162, 163; “Eidólons” 47; “Europe, The 72d and 73d Years of These States” 21, 133–4; “For You O Democracy” 21, 26, 72–3, 133, 141, 169; “France, The 18th Year of These States” 133, 137; “Great City” section from “Song of the Broad-Axe” 21, 22, 116–17, 133, 141, 169, 187; “I Hear It Was Charged against Me” 22, 75; “I Sing the Body Electric” 132; “The Mystic Trumpeter” 142–3; “One’s-Self I Sing” 18,

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Index  219 164; “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” 37–8, 129; “Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd” 57–8; “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” 15, 21, 26, 169–90; “Resurgemus” 21, 133–5, 136, 184; “Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps” 133; “So Long!” 90; “A Song for Occupations” 78–9, 144–5, 163; “Song of Myself” 4, 8, 14, 18, 21, 36–8, 41, 46–7, 52, 94, 126–7, 145, 159, 170; “Song of the Exposition” 21, 84; “Song of the Open Road” 13, 21, 130, 141; “Starting from Paumanok” 21, 22, 70–1, 74–5; “These I Singing in Spring” 74–5; “To a Foil’d European

Revolutionaire” 21, 133, 135, 136–40; “To Him That Was Crucified” 45, 47; “To You” 163; “Years of the Modern” 18, 21 Whittaker, Joseph 173, 182–4 Wilcock, J. 118–19, 122, 123 Wild, Fred 66–8, 73–4, 80, 84, 86 Wilde, Oscar 59, 171 Williams, Raymond 14–15, 107 women’s movement 3, 138–9 Woolf, Virginia 97 Wordsworth, William 86–7, 114–15, 134 Workman’s Times 129, 160–1 Yeo, Stephen 12, 58