March 1, 2012

"In a superb overview of British life at the turn of the century, Harris expertly discusses the complexities and contradictions of contemporary society, but she still manages to retain a compelling focus on the way in which people then combined public spiritedness with a belief in private and voluntary action. Her book shows how many of the dramatic changes of the early twentieth century had origins in the 1880s and 1890s."

Recommended by Mark Bevir, Professor of Political Science and author of The Making of British Socialism.

"Hilton’s magisterial study shows how evangelical religious beliefs inspired many of the main social and economic ideas of the early nineteenth century with their emphasis on themes such as personal duty and market economics. I similarly argue that during the late nineteenth century many Victorians responded to the crisis of faith by adopting a very different 'immanentist' theology that inspired an alternative emphasis on fellowship and social reform."

"Gareth Stedman Jones’s essay on Chartism, which is included in this book, inspired a generation of British social historians to take language, ideas, and beliefs seriously. It showed that the Chartists remained hugely indebted to republican ideas; they were not, as Engels argued, modern and class conscious socialists. In my book, I then argue that the making of British socialism occurred later in the period from 1880-1918."

Recommended by Mark Bevir, Professor of Political Science and author of The Making of British Socialism.

"The Fabians, and especially the Webbs, are wrongly associated with bureaucratic statism. Although they certainly believed the state should raise taxes to provide libraries, parks, and other social goods, they believed private enterprises should compete with public ones and they emphatically defended democracy. The Webbs’Constitution is their most pluralist work. Today we could use similarly bold thinking about political reforms to overcome the status quo and promote democratic participation and social justice."

"The Fabians are more misunderstood than any of the early British socialists. The Fabian Essays were their most impressive collective work. The Essays proved astonishingly successful and arguably did more than any other work of the time to introduce other socialists, such as the German Eduard Bernstein, to ideas that inspired European social democracy for much of the twentieth century."

"William Morris is most people’s favorite among the British socialists. Although he thought of himself as a Marxist, he is best remembered for his utopian novel, News from Nowhere, which remains a powerful invocation of a simpler and happier society. Morris is inspirational. Reading him can educate our aspirations."

"The American romantics were an important influence on some British socialists. I find especially appealing Whitman’s invocation of a democratic ethos and way of life. His British counterpart and pupil was Edward Carpenter, who was more open than Whitman in advocating gay liberation, and who wrote his own free verse poem, Towards Democracy." 

"Although I quote from Dickens’ Dombey and Son with its superb portrayal of the railway age, Hard Times is surely his most effective literary denunciation of the laissez-faire, free market, utilitarian, and calculating society of the Victorian age. British socialists reacted against that society. They championed various personal and social transformations in an attempt to create more fulfilling ways of living with one another and within nature."