Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics,

Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain,

1817-1918 Mark A. Allison
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Imagining Socialism
Imagining Socialism
Aesthetics, Anti-­politics, and Literature
in Britain, 1817–1918

MARK A. ALLISON

1
 1
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 For K.

Ahora y siempre
 Acknowledgments

Socialism maintains that society precedes the individual; consequently, a book on

the subject should be expansive in its acknowledgement of the contributions of
others. I am delighted to oblige!
My first debt is to Catherine Gallagher, Ian Duncan, and James Vernon, who
supervised a singularly unpropitious Ph.D. thesis—to which, I am pleased to
report, this study bears no discernable resemblance. Nevertheless, the sagacious
will detect their salutary influence on every page. I am grateful for their intelli-
gence, generosity, and wisdom.
I am fortunate to have learned from the faculty of three outstanding academic
institutions. James P. Carson, C. Perry Lentz, Adele Davidson, Donald Rogan,
and Joel Richeimer (at Kenyon College); Elaine Hadley, Elizabeth Helsinger, and
Lawrence Rothfield (at the University of Chicago); Kevis Goodman, Celeste
Langan, and Jeffrey Knapp (at the University of California, Berkeley) among oth-
ers, taught me to think, write, read, and teach. Equally important, they encour-
aged me to continue my studies despite the daunting odds and my periodic—and
appropriately Victorian—crises of faith.
Teachers are indispensable, but so, too, are friends in the trenches. Erin Zink,
Currey Dorris, Dan Young, Scott Scrivner, Katie (Warwick) Scrivner, Darren
Eisenhauer, Taylor Wray, and Felicia (Bonani) Wray challenged my assumptions
and lifted my spirits. Penelope Anderson was my foremost confidant and
co-enthusiast during the intellectual and emotional gauntlet of graduate school.
Paul Hurh, besides much else, shamed me into raising my stylistic game with his
inimitable prose and all-­seeing editorial eye. Paul Stasi rekindled my interest in
Western Marxism and was always eager to talk shop (or hoops). Chris Eagle
ensured that I never lost touch with the aesthetics of literature and the joys of
signification. Joseph Scalice was my inexhaustible reading partner for what, in
retrospect, was a staggering amount of Marx. My colleagues and students at Ohio
Wesleyan University have continued to support and sustain me. Marty Hipsky,
Zack Long, and David Caplan, in particular, deserve thanks for their contribu-
tions to this study. My (former) students, Patrick Shay and Andrew Padget-
Gettys, provided scrupulous assistance with the preparation of the manuscript,
saving me from many errors.
Sincere thanks is due as well to Jacqueline Norton and her team at Oxford
University Press, who shepherded me through the publication process with a
rare combination of professionalism and warmth. The anonymous referees who
viii Acknowledgments

assessed this project—both as a whole and in the stages along the way—were
­collegial and constructive, and this book is much stronger for their suggestions.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that it is a luxury to grow up
in family as caring as my own. My mother, Carole K. Allison, made me a reader
through her example as much as her unfailing encouragement—though, mom,
the encouragement didn’t hurt either! With unflagging patience, my father, Jerry
Allison, taught me to be methodical and disciplined. My siblings, Lane Allison
and Greg Allison, made me (and make me) that rarest of creatures: a contented
middle child.
Speaking of families, my daughters, Sabrina Elyse and Vivian Alexandra, have
grown up alongside this study: girls, I could not be more proud of you. (And
sorry for keeping you waiting so long for the book-­release party. I promise you
can stay up as late as you want!) Finally, and most important, I wish to thank my
wife, Kimberly—with gratitude, respect, awe, and love. “Worthy t’ have not
remain’d so long unsung.”
 List of Figures

1.1. George Cruikshank, A Peep into the City of London Tavern. By an Irish
Amateur—On the 21st of August 1817 (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1817).
British Museum, 1859,0316.122. © The Trustees of the British Museum 47
1.2. Robert Owen, A View and Plan of the Villages of Mutual Unity and
Co-­operation (1817). Repr. in A Supplementary Appendix to the First Volume of
A Life of Robert Owen (London: Effingham Wilson, 1858). Courtesy of the
Baker Old Class Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 54
1.3. Stedman Whitwell, Description of an Architectural Model from a Design by
Stedman Whitwell, Esq. for a Community upon a Principle of United Interests,
as Advocated by Robert Owen, Esq. (London: Hurst & Chance, 1830).
Courtesy of the Kress Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School 54
2.1. Laura Lofft, untitled portrait of Capel Lofft (n.d.). With permission of the
Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge 81
4.1. Jean-­Jacques Frilley and Félix Philippoteaux, Le Père Enfantin (Paris: Impr.
Frault Jeune r. S. and des Arts, n.d.). Gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque/nationale
de France, ark:/12148/btv1b530061784 184
E.1. Walter Crane, The Party Fight and the New Party, or Liberalism and Toryism
Disturbed by the appearance of Socialism. In Cartoons for the Cause,
1886–96 (London: The Twentieth Century Press, 1896), n.p. 235
 Introduction
A Socialist Century

In early January 1892, Oscar Wilde and the socialist organizer Henry Hyde
Champion rushed to the aid of John Evelyn Barlas. Barlas, a mentally disturbed
member of the Socialist League, had been arrested after firing multiple revolver
rounds at the wall of the House of Commons on the final day of 1891. “I am an
anarchist,” Barlas explained as he surrendered peacefully. “What I have done is to
show my contempt for the House of Commons.”1 The medical officer of Holloway
Prison quickly determined that Barlas was insane and recommended he be
institutionalized.
Yet on 16 January, Barlas was bound over to Champion and Wilde on the con-
dition that he keep the peace.2 Barlas’s liberators had met for the first time mere
hours earlier; Champion had hurried to the author’s door in quest of a second
householder to provide surety, recalling that Barlas said that he knew Wilde well
when they were students together at Oxford. He intercepted Wilde “just setting
out to read his first play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, at the St. James’s Theatre,
to . . . the Company who were to produce it.”3
Despite the exceptional circumstances, each man served as a surety for half
the £200 bond, and Champion took Barlas under his care.4 Responding to
Barlas’s letter of gratitude a few days later, Wilde struck a magnanimous tone:
“Whatever I did was merely what you would have done for me or for any friend
of yours whom you admired and appreciated. We poets and dreamers are all
brothers.”5

1 “Police,” The Times, no. 33,523 (1 January 1893): p. 6.

2 “Police,” The Times, no. 33,536 (16 January 1892): p. 4.
3 H[enry] H[yde], C[hampion], “Men I Have Met.—VII. Oscar Wilde,” Champion 4, no. 87
(13 February 1897): p. 3.
4 For the definitive study of Barlas, see Philip K. Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas, a Critical Biography:
Poetry, Anarchism, and Mental Illness in Late-­Victorian Britain (High Wycombe: Rivendale, 2012);
Cohen recounts this episode at greater length (pp. 111–118). For a helpful recent discussion of
Champion, an important but understudied figure in fin-­de-­siècle British socialism, see John Barnes,
“Gentleman Crusader: Henry Hyde Champion in the Early Socialist Movement,” History Workshop
Journal 60, no. 1 (autumn 2005): pp. 116–138, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbi003.
5 Oscar Wilde to John Barlas, [postmark 19 January 1892], in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde,
eds. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-­Davis (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), p. 511.

Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918. Mark A. Allison, Oxford University Press
(2021). © Mark A. Allison. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896490.003.0001
2 Imagining Socialism

While Barlas wrote poetry and Wilde coquetted with socialism, the fraternal
bond that Wilde evokes here is more expansive.6 It enfolds poets and socialists
alike within a brotherhood of “dreamers”: a virtual fellowship of those who
­imagine a more just, cooperative, and beautiful world. It would be irresponsible
to attribute too much significance to the actions of Barlas, an accomplished poet
and once-­ formidable socialist agitator whose mental health was declining
­precipitously.7 Yet Barlas’s “contempt” for institutional government, though rarely
so melodramatically expressed, is a constitutive feature of the anti-­ political
socialist tradition that this study investigates.
Operating on the supposition that socialism is best understood as a goal to be
imagined, rather than an ideological program to be instantiated, Imagining
Socialism examines an aesthetic impulse that animates some of the most conse-
quential socialist writing, thought, and practice of the long nineteenth century.
Specifically, this study investigates a tradition of radical aesthetic experimentation
that lies at the heart of a century of British socialist activity. This tradition includes
such seemingly disparate figures as Robert Owen (the “father” of British social-
ism), the midcentury Christian Socialists, and William Morris and his disciples.
In very different—and highly illuminating—ways, the neglected Chartist poet
Capel Lofft and George Eliot find themselves passionately engaged with this tra-
dition as well.
While this book’s focus on the imagination, literature, and aesthetically
inflected practice certainly bespeaks my own disciplinary training and interests, it
also has considerable justification within the period itself. By referring to a
notional fellowship of poets, socialists, and other dreamers to console Barlas,
Wilde was drawing upon a well-­established topos. In the nineteenth-­century
popular imaginary, literary and artistic proclivities and utopian emancipatory
projects like socialism were closely—albeit rather vaguely—associated. Many of
the giants of the Romantic age, the dimming stars in the cultural firmament in the
period under examination here, were famous for their radical and egalitarian
enthusiasms. Exemplary British poets, they were also Jacobins-­in-­recoil, thwarted
Pantisocrats, and fallen champions of liberty.8 (The figure of Shelley, as we will

6 Wilde’s Soul of Man under Socialism had appeared in The Fortnightly Review in February 1891
(55, pp. 292–319). Cohen suggests that Barlas helped Wilde with its composition by serving as his
“tutor and advisor” and clarifying the finer points of “radical political theory and practice” (John
Evelyn Barlas, p. 106).
7 Barlas had to be institutionalized within a year of his release from custody. Although he claimed
to be an anarchist when he surrendered to the authorities, Barlas had previously characterized himself
as “neither exclusively collectivist nor anarchist” and had been extremely active in the Social
Democratic Federation (SDF), Britain’s first Marxist organization (quoted in David Goodway,
Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-­Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to
Colin Ward, 3rd ed. [Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012], p. 81). I discuss the relationship between social-
ism and anarchism later in this Introduction.
8 I derive the phrase “Jacobins-­in-­recoil” from E. P. Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default? A
Lay Sermon,” in Power and Consciousness, eds. Conor Cruise O’Brien and William Dean Vanech
 Introduction 3

see, cast an especially long shadow.) At midcentury, Charles Kingsley and the
bohemian man of letters Thornton Hunt were all but alone in respectable society
in advocating forms of socialism; at century’s end, William Morris, Edward
Carpenter, and G. B. Shaw were highly visible standard-­bearers for the cause.
Beyond Britain’s shores, the ranks of the international literati were thick with
republicans, socialists, and other members of the “party of movement.”9 Even
America boasted its phalanx of Brook Farmers and advanced men and women of
letters, with George Ripley and Margaret Fuller heading the column. Both the
writings and the socio-­political activities of these outsized figures reinforced
the association of radical emancipatory commitment and literary and artistic
sensibilities.
Perhaps more surprising than this intersection of the artistic and socio-­political
vanguard is the frequency with which socialist ideas themselves were discussed
and debated in aesthetic terms during this period, theoretically as well as collo-
quially. Writing shortly after his first long sojourn in Manchester, for example, the
young Fredrick Engels complained that “When one talks to people about social-
ism or communism, one very frequently finds that they entirely agree with one
regarding the substance of the matter and declare communism to be something
very beautiful [etwas sehr Schönes]; ‘but,’ they then say, ‘it is impossible ever to put
such things into practice in real life.’ ”10 To Engels’s British interlocutors, the social
arrangements posited by “socialism or communism,” while intuitively appealing,
were simply too beautiful to be practicable. The very same formulation is still cir-
culating some six decades later; we find it, for example, in Robert Tressell’s The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914). After the novel’s protagonist regales his
co-­workers with a “great oration” on the virtues of socialism, one of them opines
that “Socialism was a beautiful ideal, which he for one would be very glad to see
realized, but he was afraid it was altogether too good to be practical, because
human nature is too mean and selfish.”11

(London: University of London Press, 1969), p. 152. Boyd Hilton has characterized the Pantisocracy
scheme as a form of “utopian socialism” (A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], p. 489). Given its projectors’ ardent individualism, however,
“proto-­socialist” is a more precise descriptor. The literature on the Pantisocracy is extensive; good
points of entry include J. R. MacGillivray, “The Pantisocracy Scheme and Its Immediate Background,”
in Studies in English by Members of University College Toronto, ed. Malcolm W. Wallace (Port
Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1969), pp. 131–169; Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: William
Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2002), pp. 43–67; James C. McKusick, “ ‘Wisely Forgetful’: Coleridge and the Politics of Pantisocracy,”
in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing Empire, 1780–1830, eds. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 107–128.
9 Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2016), p. 608, n. 31.
10 Frederick Engels, The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 50 vols. (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004), vol. 4, p. 214, translation modified. Subsequent references to this
edition will appear parenthetically by volume and page number.
11 Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, ed. Peter Miles (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), p. 487.
4 Imagining Socialism

As we will see, anti-­socialists exploited the aesthetic response that Engels and
Tressell lament here, using it to dismiss socialist theory itself as a species of
poetry—the discursive fantasies of unworldly individuals with hypertrophied
imaginations.12 Issuing from multiple directions, the association of beauty, the
arts (particularly poetry), and socialism could be difficult to evade, even when
they were inopportune. Sounding a note that is frequent in her correspondence,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning declares that “I love liberty so intensely that I hate
Socialism. I hold it to be the most desecrating & dishonoring to Humanity, of all
creeds.”13 As one might anticipate, her epic portrait of the artist as a young
woman, Aurora Leigh (1856), subjects socialism of every variety to blistering cri-
tique. Yet the poem’s representative socialist, Romney Leigh, is also Aurora’s
cousin—and, eventually, husband.
The impressionistic connections I have sketched thus far will be delineated
more precisely in the remainder of this Introduction; I will need to make analyti-
cal distinctions between forms of social and political engagement that were typi-
cally blurred (or simply ignored) within the period itself.14 Moreover, I am
scarcely the first to observe that the British socialist tradition teemed with writers
and artists and was unusually preoccupied with questions of beauty, literature, and
aesthetics. Important recent work by Ruth Livesey, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, and
Anna Vaninskaya, among others, has enriched our understanding of the intricate
ways in which aesthetics and socialism were interwoven during Britain’s fin-­de-
­siècle “socialist revival.”15 What has not been sufficiently recognized, however, is
that significant examples of the generative imbrication of artistic and socialist
practice can be found throughout the long nineteenth century. Imagining
Socialism seeks to redress this oversight by investigating a series of ambitious
socialist initiatives—some implemented, others only imagined—that drew upon
the resources of the aesthetic to subtend plans of communal regeneration. In so

12 As Laura Penny notes, “Poetry is the art that comes closest to the work of discursive reason,
being made of the same mental stuff, language and ideas” (“The Highest of All the Arts: Kant and
Poetry,” Philosophy and Literature 32, no. 2 [2008]: p. 374, DOI: 10.1353/phl.0.0023.374). A conse-
quence of this proximity is that radical social theory can readily be caricatured as poetry—as the lin-
guistic flights of overly imaginative minds.
13 Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 15 June 1850, in The Brownings’
Correspondence, eds. Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, and Edward Hagan, vol. 16 (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone,
2007), p. 136.
14 Radicals and commentators alike tended to be extremely loose with their terminology during
the period that Imagining Socialism investigates—not least because the boundaries between these phe-
nomena tended to be fluid and porous. On this problem see, for example, Gregory Claeys, “Non-­
Marxian Socialism, 1815–1914,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-­Century Political Thought,
eds. Gareth Stedman Jones and Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 524–529.
15 Ruth Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007); Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late
Victorian Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Anna Vaninskaya, William
Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
 Introduction 5

doing, this study reveals unexpected commonalities between what are often
treated as discontinuous and even antithetical stages of socialist activity.
The perspective I take in this study is thus quite different from the one that lit-
erary critics and cultural historians customarily adopt. Scholars typically construe
nineteenth-­century British socialism as a story that unfolds in two, more or less
self-­contained, episodes.16 The first, lasting from roughly 1817 to 1845, was dom-
inated by the communitarian schemes of Robert Owen and his followers, the first
men and women in Britain to call themselves “socialists.” Although the Owenite
movement possessed a potent millenarian undercurrent, it was essentially ra­tion­
al­ist and utilitarian in its sensibility—a late bloom of the radical enlightenment of
the 1790s. Not only did Owenites conceive of communal good in terms of
­maximizing human happiness (the standard narrative continues), they approached
art and culture instrumentally, as a vehicle for hastening the arrival of the new,
rational social order.17 Owenite socialism dramatically broadened the scope of
popular radicalism and seeded movements dedicated to economic cooperation,
secularism, and women’s emancipation. But it eventually collapsed under the
weight of accumulated disappointments, public disapprobation, and the over-
bearing personality of Owen himself.
The customary narrative’s second episode, the “socialist revival,” begins in the
early 1880s. A new generation took up the mantle of socialism, spurred on by a
renewed crisis of religious faith, the disintegration of the classical economic para-
digm, and what was believed to be a prolonged economic depression. While they
acknowledged Owen as their forerunner, the new socialists took their ideological
bearings from other sources—Carlyle and Ruskin, late Mill, Marx.18 Students of
literature and culture have largely ignored the early, Owenite period, but fin-­de-
­siècle socialism is well-­trodden territory, thanks to its beguiling array of canonical
authors (William Morris, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw), feminist intellectuals
(Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner), and avatars of sexual liberation
and queer politics (Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis). The revival
had run its course by the second decade of the twentieth century, disoriented by

16 While there are historians who work across this divide, both methodological convenience and
the very paucity of avowedly socialist activity between the collapse of Owenism and the socialist
revival of the early 1880s militate against such scholarship.
17 “In the historiography of English utopias . . .,” H. Gustav Klaus observes, “the first half of the
nineteenth century is not held in high regard. It is seen as a sterile period which produced no works
of distinction, nor any significant developments in the utopian form. The sober writings of Robert
Owen . . . are cited as evidence that the gradual evolution of the utopian genre had come to a standstill
at this point” (The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition [New York:
St. Martin’s, 1982], p. 22). More succinctly, the Fabian Society secretary Edward R. Pease declared
that “Owen, one of the greatest men of his age, had no sense of art” (The History of the Fabian
Society [London: Frank Cass, 1963], p. 23).
18 For a fuller account of the precipitates of the socialist revival see Mark Bevir, The Making of
British Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 22–42; Stanley Pierson, British
Socialists: The Journey from Fantasy to Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979),
pp. 7–42.
6 Imagining Socialism

the cataclysmic political events in Europe and Russia and demoralized by the
uninspiring realpolitik of its own offspring, the Parliamentary Labour Party.
Like most heuristics, the bipartite periodization of nineteenth-­century British
socialism I have just rehearsed is not so much incorrect as it is one-­sided. As
Fredric Jameson has pointed out, whether one emphasizes continuity or rupture
when periodizing is, at bottom, a narrative choice; inevitably, different narrative
decisions make available certain truths while occluding others.19 In this study,
I have opted for a “long socialism” that extends from the first airing of Owen’s
communitarian “Plan” in 1817 to the acceptance of the Parliamentary Labour
Party’s new constitution and first party program in 1918. For reasons I describe
below, the adoption of Labour’s new constitution and program marks a terminus
for the particular socialist ideal that I trace in the following chapters—although
not, of course, the end of socialism’s potency as an emancipatory force in Britain.
Approaching the 101-­year span between 1817 and 1918 as a “socialist century”
enables me to complement the extant scholarship by analyzing the activity, literal
and discursive, that occurred between the two major waves of British socialist
activism.20 Crucially, this interstitial period was the heyday of the Christian
Socialist movement, a group that Marxian-­inflected historiography has never
quite known what to do with.
Though many of orthodox Marxism’s central theoretical postulates have lost
their intellectual luster in academic discourse, certain Marxist assumptions of
dubious worth have proven far harder to relinquish. Adopting a longer historical
perspective helps me eschew the questionable binaries that sanction the division
of nineteenth-­ century British socialism into two episodes: rationalist/class-
­conscious; nostalgic/future-­oriented; communitarian/statist; utilitarian/aesthetic.
It is not difficult to detect the Communist Manifesto’s tendentious division of
socialism into a “utopian” pre-­history and “scientific” (i.e., Marxist) present and
future lurking behind these dichotomies.21 While there are significant differences
between Owenite and fin-­de-­siècle socialism, the aforementioned binaries do lit-
tle to capture them, even as they presuppose that the differences between these
two cultural moments are more significant than their affinities.
If British socialism before its encounter with Marxism tends to be treated as
utopian, moreover, this too is done in a decidedly one-­sided fashion. “Utopian” is
taken solely in its pejorative sense, as a form of unrealistic aspiration; it designates

19 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso,
2002), pp. 23–24.
20 To be clear, my decision to approach the nineteenth century as a whole is a methodological deci-
sion, not a historical postulate. I am not suggesting, in other words, that socialism in Britain enjoyed a
unified and uninterrupted (much less a teleological) development over the course of the nineteenth
century.
21 Marx and Engels, Works, vol. 6, pp. 514–517. As a rhetorical maneuver, Marx and Engels’s uto-
pian/scientific distinction was a masterstroke; as an analytic judgment, it is irredeemably partisan. For
more on the origins of the utopian/scientific distinction, see this study’s fourth chapter.
 Introduction 7

a condition (to paraphrase Engels’s Mancunian interlocutors) which is too ideal

to be realized in practice. But it is equally possible to stress the fecundity of
utopianism: its status as a cognitive mode that draws upon the potentialities of
the aesthetic to grasp possibilities that lie beyond the compass of conventional
ratiocination—and to imagine the world otherwise. As if picking up where
Wilde’s consolation of Barlas left off, the utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch
affirms that “More than one daydream before now has, with sufficient vigour
and experience, remodelled reality.”22

The Ambiguities of Anti-­politics

A utopian aspiration shared by many British socialists—and the fulcrum of this

study’s revisionary argument—is what historians term socialism’s “anti-­politics.”
Before considering the role the aesthetic can play in its articulation, we need to
familiarize ourselves with this key concept. We can do so by examining chapter
13 of William Morris’s celebrated socialist utopia, News from Nowhere (1890)—in
full. Entitled “Concerning Politics,” the chapter is just over one hundred words
long, for that is all the (typically loquacious) Old Hammond needs to explain to
his visitor, William Guest, how politics function in the England of the future:

Said I: “How do you manage with politics?”

Said Hammond, smiling: “I am glad that it is of me that you ask that question;
I do believe that anybody else would make you explain yourself, or try to do so,
till you were sickened of asking questions. Indeed, I believe I am the only man in
England who would know what you mean; and since I know, I will answer your
question briefly by saying that we are very well off as to politics,—because we
have none. If ever you make a book out of this conversation, put this in a chapter
by itself, after the model of old Horrebow’s Snakes in Iceland.”
“I will,” said I.23

Between its puckish humor and respectful allusion to a Nordic text, “Concerning
Politics” is unmistakably the work of Morris. But the dismissive attitude it evinces
toward “politics” was a distinguishing feature of socialism from its twin emer-
gence, in France and Britain, in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

22 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), vol. 1, p. 87. Subsequent references to this edition will appear
parenthetically by volume and page number.
23 William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris, vol. 16, p. 85.
Subsequent references to this volume will appear parenthetically by page number.
8 Imagining Socialism

In his monumental History of Socialist Thought, G. D. H. Cole observes that

socialism’s principal founders—Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-­Simon (in
France) and Robert Owen (in Britain)—shared an anti-­political posture. Despite
significant differences in their systems, all three of socialism’s progenitors were
“deeply distrustful of ‘politics’ and of politicians, and believed that . . . if the eco-
nomic and social sides of men’s affairs could be properly organised, the traditional
forms of government and political organisation would soon be superseded.”24
Contemporary historians of socialism, while introducing exponentially more
complexity (and drawing markedly different conclusions), have echoed Cole’s
observation that “the economic and social sides” of human relations were the
locus of these “utopian” socialists’ reformist intentions. Thus Gregory Claeys
maintains that “All of the leading forms of early socialism expressed discontent
about most traditional forms of polity . . . or were indeed explicitly anti-­political in
believing that partisan ‘politics’ emanated from the existing system of unequal
property ownership.”25 Similarly, Gareth Stedman Jones insists that “socialism
was not simply a form of politics as many commentators have assumed. One fea-
ture common to all the founding works of ‘socialism’ was the relegation of politics
to a subordinate or derivative status.”26 Although several of the early socialists
were eager to use the powers of government to implement the sweeping changes
they envisioned, Stedman Jones elaborates, “The relationship of socialism with
politics was strictly instrumental.”27 Once social relations were set right, the sup-
pression of tradition political institutions and logics would follow as a matter of
course. In Martin Buber’s judicious summation, “it is the goal of Utopian social-
ism so-­called to substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible, more-
over a society that is ‘genuine’ and not a State in disguise.”28 A non-­governmental
form of society could be asymptotically approached—and perhaps even achieved.
To be sure, none of the authorities I have cited deny that socialism, in Britain
and elsewhere, became increasingly statist in outlook as the century unfolded.
This reorientation gained added impetus from the 1848 revolutions and the
French Second Republic’s tantalizingly short-­lived experiment with social democ-
racy. Moreover, strains of socialism with significant political content, including

24 G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, 5 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1957–60), vol. 1, p. 3.

25 Claeys, “Non-­Marxian Socialism,” p. 523.
26 Gareth Stedman Jones, “Religion and the Origins of Socialism,” in Religion and the Political
Imagination, eds. Stedman Jones and Ira Katznelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), p. 187.
27 Ibid. In advancing the first version of his socialist “Plan,” for example, Robert Owen observed
that “There are several modes by which this plan may be effect. It may be accomplished by individuals,—
by parishes,—by counties,—by districts, &c. comprising more counties than one,—and by the nation
at large, through its Government” (Selected Works of Robert Owen, ed. Gregory Claeys, 4 vols. [London:
Pickering & Chatto, 1993], vol. 1, p. 151). Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthet-
ically by volume and page number. As his ecumenicism about the agent who instantiates his Plan
intimates, what truly mattered to Owen was simply that it be set into motion.
28 Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. 80.
 Introduction 9

Marxism, coalesced before the fabled year of European revolutions. Although

Marx and Engels were committed to the “political struggle” of proletarian revolu-
tion, we should not forget that they, too, anticipated the “withering of the state”
under achieved communism.29 And as we will see in the chapters that follow—
and as the example of Morris suggests—a powerful anti-­political impulse remained
a vibrant part of the socialist tradition’s common inheritance. This was particu-
larly so in Britain, where socialism’s anti-­political inclinations were reinforced by
the culture’s deeply ingrained suspicion of centralized authority.30
Setting to one side these subsequent developments momentarily, the early
socialists sought to reinvigorate collective life by, as one follower of Owen put it,
“the furtherance of social as opposed to political reform.”31 “If the institutions of
society were based upon sound first principles in reference to the production and
distribution of wealth, and the formation of character; [sic],” the same writer
explains, “the form of the government would naturally grow out of, and accom-
modate itself to such arrangements.”32 Indeed, Owen himself affirmed that the
proper configuration of the social sphere would quickly render “the business of
government a mere recreation” (1: 323). It was in the “character” of the populace
and the institutions of everyday life—the school, the family, the workplace, the
locality—that the struggle for social regeneration would be won or lost.
In this respect, too, News from Nowhere proves illustrative. Guest learns that
the elimination of politics was made possible by a battery of reforms in civil
society. Private property has been abolished; patriarchal marriage, a reflex of
the property relation, has disappeared with it. But the most significant trans-
formation is the de-­alienation of work. By restoring the artisanal ethos and its
urge to beautify—a drive monopolized by the fine arts under capitalism—labor
has been rendered pleasurable. “It is this change,” Old Hammond avers, “which
makes all the others possible” (92). Through these and other social reforms,
the Nowhereians have been able to liquidate the judiciary, police, army, and
parliament—which, in a show of contempt to rival Barlas’s own, has been
repurposed for manure storage.

29 Marx and Engels, Works, vol. 6, p. 493. The “withering away of the state” is a free translation of
Engels’s assertion that under communism “The state is not ‘abolished.’ It dies out [er stirbt ab]” (Works,
vol. 25, p. 268). More elliptically, Marx affirmed that “the public power will lose its political character”
(Works, vol. 6, p. 505).
30 William Stafford has observed, moreover, that British radical social theory at the turn of the
nineteenth century often “rests upon metaphysical assumptions”—particularly, the presupposition of
a providentially established or naturally given harmony of interests; consequently, social melioration
can be achieved without “politics” (Socialism, Radicalism, and Nostalgia: Social Criticism in Britain,
1775–1830 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], p. 273). Socialism is the continuation,
and arguably consummation, of this trend.
31 “Will Chartism Be an Effectual Remedy for National Evils?” The New Moral World 10, no. 25
(18 December 1841): p. 199.
32 Ibid. p. 198.
10 Imagining Socialism

Yet there are several fundamental ambiguities about the concept of anti-­politics
that I will be exploring in this study in relation to aesthetics—and to which News
from Nowhere’s very structure gestures. Morris’s gleefully diminutive chapter on
politics is flanked by two others, “Concerning the Arrangement of Life” and “How
Matters Are Managed,” that restore some of the complexity that “Concerning
Politics” disavows. Guest learns, for example, of the existence of the folk-­Mote, or
“ordinary meeting of the neighbors” (88). In these regular gatherings, the popu-
lace exercises self-­governance on a local scale by hashing out their differences and
allowing “the will of the majority” to prevail (87). Guest voices his suspicion that
“there is something in all this very like [direct] democracy,” and Old Hammond
cheerfully agrees (89).33 But Hammond maintains that “politics” have neverthe-
less been superseded, because disagreements no longer “crystallize people into
parties permanently hostile to one another, with different theories as to the build
of the universe and the progress of time. Isn’t that what politics used to mean?”
(86). While impressed, Guest confesses that he is “not so sure of that” (86). Both
Guest’s favorable reaction and his ambivalence would seem well founded.
Many socialists hoped to liberate humankind from the morass of politics, by
shifting the gravity of collective life away from the state—or by transcending tra-
ditional political practices and logics altogether. Perhaps the most widely known
catchphrase for this widely held ambition is the Saint-­Simonian prophecy that the
“government of men” would soon be supplanted by the “administration of
things.”34 Émile Durkheim accordingly observed that “socialism . . . far from
demanding a stronger organization of governmental powers was, on the contrary,
in one sense, essentially anarchistic.”35 But insofar as socialists understood them-
selves to be addressing perennial problems of governance, from the maintenance
of order to the allocation of collective resources, one might argue that they failed
to escape the conceptual ambit of the political.36 As we will have occasion to

33 It should be noted, however, that Morris did not seem to believe that anything of consequence
would remain to be decided in the folk-­Motes. See the depiction of one such meeting in his delightful
socialist drama, The Tables Turned (in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris, 2 vols.
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], vol. 2, pp. 562–564.
34 “The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things” is Engels’s formulation
of an idea that is scattered throughout Saint-­Simon’s erratic writings (Works 25: 268). See Henri Saint-­
Simon (1760–1826): Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation, ed. and trans.
Keith Taylor (London: Croom Helm, 1975), pp. 157–218.
35 Émile Durkheim, Socialism and Saint Simon, ed. Alvin W. Gouldner, trans. Charlotte Sattler
(New York: Routledge, 1959), p. 153. Socialism’s aspiration toward a non-­governmental social order
helps to explain why anarchism was frequently construed as a variety of socialism, by anarchists and
non-­anarchists alike. (See, for example, Fabian Tract 4, What Socialism Is, where socialism is typolo-
gized with reference to two major categories, “Collectivist” and “Anarchist” [London: Fabian Society,
1886], p. 6.) Simultaneously, anarchism was often considered an antagonistic tradition; the quarrels
between Marx and Pierre-­Joseph Proudhon (and later Mikhail Bakunin) are the loci classici of this
rivalry. For a helpful overview, see K. Steven Vincent, “Visions of Stateless Society,” in Stedman Jones
and Claeys, Cambridge History, pp. 433–476.
36 Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-­ politics in Early British Socialism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 14.
 Introduction 11

observe throughout this study, moreover, anti-­political schemes often bear an

attenuated resemblance to traditional political institutions that they are intended
to supersede. In News, for example, the folk-­Motes are reminiscent of the
golden-­age ideal of popular radicalism, the “libertarian, egalitarian, fraternal
and ‘State-­less’ cantonal democracy” that ostensibly existed before the Norman
Conquest.37 With at least equal frequency, socialist anti-­political practices rely
upon forms of tutelary authority reminiscent of Tory or ecclesiastical paternalism,
although such measures are frequently conceived as temporary arrangements,
which are necessary merely to facilitate the transition to a form of society in
which “politics” has been supplanted.
Finally, and most challengingly, Claeys has argued that socialist anti-­politics
might just as plausibly be characterized as a form of “hyperpoliticisation.”
Socialist aspiration, he elaborates, characteristically impinges upon “large areas of
both civil society and economic activity, where hitherto private property or tradi-
tional institutions of social order, such as the church or patriarchal family, had
predominated, and defined the mechanisms of power.”38 With the dissemination
of socialist ideas and examples of communal experimentation, swaths of col-
lective life that had either escaped or weathered scrutiny were made “objects of
contention and debate, and hence politicised.”39 This process might democratize
the stubbornly hierarchical institutions of the lifeworld. But it might also lead to
the policing of every aspect of everyday life—as the appalling record of many
self-­avowed twentieth-­century socialist regimes illustrates.40

Aesthetics and the “Problem of Politics”

The category of socialist anti-­politics, then, is fretted by ambiguities and charged

with a deeply ambivalent potential. Viewed from one perspective, it holds out the
tantalizing prospect of superseding the state and escaping the deprivations of
“politics”; seen from a different angle, anti-­politics culminates in the hyperpoliti-
cization of society. As befits so compelling, yet so vexed a concept, I will examine
a range of anti-­political institutions, practices, and forms of authority in this
study—some implemented, others only imagined. But the particular purpose of
Imagining Socialism is to disclose and elucidate the role of the aesthetic in under-
pinning the heterogenous anti-­political experiments it investigates. As we saw in
the case of News from Nowhere, the treatment of (virtually) all labor as a mode of
artistic practice is the foundation upon which a non-­governmental society is
erected—it is the reform that “makes all others possible.” This study argues that

37 Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age Of
Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 92.
38 Claeys, “Non-­Marxian Socialism,” p. 555. 39 Ibid. p. 511. 40 Ibid. p. 555.
12 Imagining Socialism

aesthetic concepts and modalities subtended not just Morris’s utopia, but many of
British socialism’s most influential and compelling anti-­political visions. It fur-
ther contends that, far from being confined to the fin de siècle, significant social-
ist experiments with the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic may be found
throughout the long nineteenth century.
Although they may sometimes appear in unexpected contexts, I employ the
terms “aesthetic” and “aesthetics” in a quite conventional sense in this study.
I thus use “aesthetic” to refer to experiences of beauty and sublimity, as well as
phenomena intended to elicit an aesthetic response, particularly works of art and
literature. And by “aesthetics” I mean the systematic investigation of beauty, taste,
and the arts, as well as the relationship of the aesthetic sphere to other domains,
including ethics, epistemology, and—crucially—politics. In his classic survey of
the British aesthetic tradition, Walter J. Hipple concluded that there was “no
­tendency for multiplicity to reduce to unity in the British speculations . . . and in
consequence no simple historical progression from inadequacy to completeness,
from error to truth.”41 While Hipple makes this observation in relation to
eighteenth-­century discourse, it articulates a perspective that informs my under-
standing of aesthetic philosophy more broadly. In other words, I do not privilege
any one aesthetic theory in what follows; instead, I assume that competing theo-
ries bring to the fore different facets and potentialities of the aesthetic, and that
no single paradigm maps the aesthetic domain in its entirety.
As both Andrew Bowie and Terry Eagleton have argued, the emergence of
modern aesthetic discourse in the mid-­eighteenth century bespeaks, in Eagleton’s
phrase, “a certain crisis of traditional reason.”42 Specifically, the coalescence of
aesthetics as an autonomous branch of philosophical inquiry entails a tacit admis-
sion that the Enlightenment project of comprehending reality through the codifi-
cation of abstract universal laws fails to capture vital aspects of both the natural
world and human experience.43 From Shaftesbury through Schelling, much early
aesthetic discourse traffics in irrationalism and special pleading—particularly for
the deity relegated to the sidelines by the protocols of modern philosophical and
scientific inquiry. Yet, as Bowie points out, “there are no necessary grounds for
assuming that concern with aesthetics should . . . be connected to a rejection of
rationality.” Rather, “art and the understanding of art can enable what has been
repressed by a limited conception of reason to be articulated.”44 Consequently,
aesthetic thought and practice may even be seen as pointing the way, however

41 Walter J. Hipple, Jr., The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-­Century British
Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), p. 284.
42 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 60.
43 Ibid. p. 16; Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd ed.
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 25.
44 Bowie, Aesthetics, p. 5.
 Introduction 13

haltingly, toward a philosophy of the future: a new intellectual paradigm built

around a more capacious and adequate conception of reason.
Socialism’s gestation period—roughly 1789–1815—coincides with a pivotal era
in the development of modern aesthetics. As is well known, philosophers and
­artists swiftly rebelled against the rigid epistemological strictures that Kant
placed upon aesthetic experience in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790).
Leveraging the expansive role that the critical philosophy accords to the creative
imagination, Kant’s Idealist and Romantic successors, in Britain as well as
Germany, construed the aesthetic as a kind of supplementary, or even a superior,
logic: an imagination-­centered alternative to prematurely totalized modes of con-
vention ratiocination.45 An alternative politics quickly followed suit. Within five
years of the publication of Kant’s critique, Friedrich Schiller was extrapolating
from avowedly “Kantian principles” in the face of the French Revolution’s devolu-
tion into terror and war.46 In On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), he
famously suggested that the aesthetic provided a way beyond the impasse at
which republican politics had arrived: “if man is ever to solve that problem of
politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aes-
thetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.”47
Like Schiller’s aesthetic treatise, the first iterations of socialism coalesced in
response to the perceived failures of the French Revolution, and the seismic ideo-
logical, political, and economic shockwaves that it unleashed.48 Albeit with widely
varying degrees of theoretical self-­consciousness and intentionality, it is the con-
tention of this study that many British socialists found themselves in implicit

45 For a particularly clear overview of the Idealist and Romantic departures from Kant, see Mary
Warnock, Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). For more detailed national
surveys, Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002) and Timothy M. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to
Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) are especially lucid. Following Bowie, I
do not consider modes of aesthetic logic as, ipso facto, irrationalist—although some instances
clearly are.
46 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans.
Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 4.
47 Ibid. p. 9. For a succinct account of the socio-­ political context of Schiller’s treatise, see
Hammermeister, German Aesthetic Tradition, pp. 45–51. Jacques Rancière has argued that Marx’s pro-
gram for human emancipation ultimately derives from Schiller, claiming that Schiller’s “ ‘aesthetic
revolution’ produced a new idea of political revolution: the material realization of a common humanity
still only existing as an idea” (The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill [London: Continuum,
2006], p. 27).
48 Claeys, “Non-­Marxian Socialism,” p. 521; Stedman Jones, “Religion”; Gareth Stedman Jones,
“Il Socialismo nella storia religiosa Europea,” in Pensare la contemporaneità: studi di storia Italiana
ed Europea per Mariuccia Salvati (Rome: Viella, 2011), pp. 113–154; Pamela Pilbeam, French
Socialists Before Marx: Workers, Women and the Social Question in France (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2000), pp. 26–38. The breakdown of the French Revolutionary
project was the explicit starting point for early French socialism. Owen was responding, in the first
instance, to the economic and social convulsions generated by Britain’s new manufacturing system.
But he framed these issues in the context of the prodigious economic expansion necessitated by the
demands of “a war of twenty-­five years”—and the excess “productive power” that remained in the
wake of Napoleon’s defeat (1: 144).
14 Imagining Socialism

agreement with Schiller: in order to solve the “problem of politics,” it was necessary
to explore the potentialities of the aesthetic.

Socialism and Its Others

Having explicated the category of anti-­politics and clarified my understanding of

the aesthetic, I must now consider that most evasive of terms: socialism. Writing
in 1852, the liberal journalist William R. Greg complained that socialism “has as
many shapes as Proteus, and as many colours as the chameleon.”49 As late as 1915,
H. G. Wells was still employing the same figure, affirming that “Socialism is an
intellectual Proteus.”50 By then, however, Marxism’s international ascendency was
well underway. Famously, orthodox Marxism never succeeded in displacing Britain’s
native traditions of constitutional radicalism and Romantic anti-­capitalism.51
Nonetheless, it did steadily consolidate its intellectual hegemony over the cate-
gory of socialism and its attendant concepts. As a result, Marxism succeeded in
occluding much of socialism’s historical diversity, even as it came to occupy the
position of implicit norm against which all other varieties of socialism were
understood.
With methodological reorientations (paradigmatically, the various linguistic
turns) and Marxism’s epistemological and political decline, many historians now
take as a starting point a perspective reminiscent of Greg’s: that socialism is irre-
ducibly fluid and plural.52 That plurality increased exponentially over the course
of the nineteenth century, moreover, as varieties of socialism proliferated, and the
term itself was used in an ever-­looser fashion.53 While acknowledging the ideo-
logical diversity, terminological promiscuity, and mutability of socialism more
faithfully reflects the historical record, it raises a knotty methodological chal-
lenge: how do scholars of socialism define their object of analysis?

49 [William R. Greg], “Progress and Hopes of Socialism,” The Economist 9, no. 418 (30 August
1851): p. 950.
50 H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli, ed. Simon James (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 98.
51 On Britain’s inhospitableness to Marxism, see Ross McKibbin, “Why Was There No Marxism in
Great Britain?” The English Historical Review 99, no. 391 (1984): pp. 297–331, https://www.jstor.org/
stable/568982.
52 “Socialism has no necessary core,” Bevir urges. “Rather, socialists made plural socialisms by
drawing on inherited traditions to respond imaginatively to cultural, social, and political dilemmas”
(Making, pp. 13, 14). Also see, for example, Claeys, “Non-­Marxian Socialism,” pp. 524–529; Pilbeam,
French Socialists, pp. 1–11. For helpful overviews of the demise of class as an analytical category, and
of the cultural-­Marxist interpretation of nineteenth-­century British history, see Dennis Dworkin,
Class Struggles (Harlow: Pearson, 2007), pp. 63–133; David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in
Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 8–22.
53 Claeys, “Non-­Marxian Socialism,” p. 527.
 Introduction 15

Nor do the difficulties cease there. For if “socialism” was always already “social-
isms,” these discourses were not hermetically isolated from other traditions, many
of which are as reticulate and protean as socialism itself. Rather than ideological
purity, we must contend with constant interchange between socialist and non-
­socialist traditions, with eclecticism (long acknowledged as a common socialist
predilection) the norm.54 Elizabeth Gaskell nicely captures this ideological catho-
licity in North and South (1854–5), when a bit character jokes that Margaret Hale
is “a democrat, a red republican, a member of the Peace Society, a socialist—.”55
One wonders when she had time to sleep!
In his important The Making of British Socialism (2011), Mark Bevir argues
that the solution to these interrelated methodological conundrums lies in adopt-
ing a more “pragmatic” and “relaxed” approach to the task of defining one’s object
of analysis.56 This flexibility is then countervailed by rigorous attention to the
local contexts—historical, intellectual, and cultural—in which the various itera-
tions of socialism were “made.”57 In keeping with Bevir’s advice, I have allowed
my interest in manifestations of British socialism that utilize the potentialities of
the aesthetic to undergird their emancipatory schemes to guide my choices. This
approach lifts into view an anti-­political tradition that spans the century, revealing
surprising continuities between what has hitherto seemed to be sharply distinct—
and even qualitatively different—waves of socialist activity. However, I want to
acknowledge at the outset that this focus relegates to the periphery of my study
several large categories of nineteenth-­century British socialist endeavor.
One such category is working-­class experiments in economic cooperation and
communitarianism, such as the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers, with their enor-
mously influential paradigm of retail cooperation, or the Spa Fields urban com-
munity organized by the Owenite printer and journalist George Mudie. While
such projects were frequently buoyed up by a utopian impulse, the hardscrabble
struggle to remain viable (or, far more rarely, the soporific influence of financial
success) tended to preclude bold forms of aesthetic experimentation.58 Another

54 On socialist eclecticism more generally, see Vaninskaya, William Morris, pp. 147–148; Pilbeam,
French Socialists, pp. 6–7; J. F. C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the
Owenites in Britain and America (New York: Scribners, 1969), p. 127; Terry Eagleton, “The Flight to
the Real,” in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, eds. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 12.
55 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ed. Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 330.
56 Bevir, Making, pp. 13, 14. 57 Ibid. p. 14.
58 On the Rochdale Pioneers, see Brett Fairbairn, “The Meaning of Rochdale: The Rochdale
Pioneers and the Cooperative Principles” (University of Saskatchewan: Centre for the Study of Co-­
operatives, 1994). For pithy discussions of Mudie’s community, see W. H. G. Armytage, Heavens
Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1560–1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp.
92–95; R. G. Garnett, Co-­operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–45
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), pp. 41–45. Both cooperative and communitarian
16 Imagining Socialism

category that my study relegates to the periphery is the more forthrightly political
and statist forms of socialism, such as the social-­democratic platforms of late
Chartism, or the municipal socialism and parliamentary social democracy advo-
cated, with increasing discipline, by the Fabian Society. This latter category
receives slightly more attention in this volume than the first, however, since polit-
ical strains of socialism often harbored and transmitted anti-­political ideas or
included members who retained strong aestheticist inclinations.
I have also heeded Bevir’s second injunction, by providing thickly contextual-
ized interpretations of the phenomena that I investigate in each individual chap-
ter. Imagining Socialism thus offsets its (diachronic) emphasis on similarity across
time with a (synchronic) concentration on particularity. From the latter perspec-
tive, the anti-­political strand of socialism this study investigates appears as a
series of relatively independent recourses to forms of aesthetic experimentation
to foster radical social renewal. As a rule, however, the reformers I study here
were deeply familiar with the efforts of their rivals and precursors (from which, as
we will see, they often inherited personnel) and actively engaged in the kinds of
dialog and debate that are the sine qua non of a “tradition” as such.
In the remainder of this section, I want to draw some rough-­and-­ready distinc-
tions between socialism and several adjacent nineteenth-­century traditions: civic
republicanism, liberalism, and Marxism, this last now understood simply as one
strain of socialism among others. For while it is not possible to treat ideologies as
unalloyed and eternal Platonic essences, a comparative analysis can nonetheless
illuminate (shifting and permeable) boundaries between ideologies and tease out
the Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” that obtains between various iterations
of socialism. Bevir has meticulously traced how the leading fin-­de-­siècle strains
of British socialism arose from the interfusing of socialist ideas with preexisting
ideological traditions.59 Accordingly, I concentrate on the first half of the century
here.60 The following typology seeks to respect the complexity of the tangled

experiments continued throughout the century; in my view, this makes any hard-­and-­fast distinction
between a “communitarian” early and “statist” late nineteenth-­century socialism untenable. (It is
worth recalling that Britain’s first socialist Prime Minister, J. Ramsay MacDonald, lived for a year in a
socialist cooperative in Bloomsbury [Armytage, Heavens Below, pp. 334–336]!) For a survey of
nineteenth-­century cooperative experiments, see Arnold Bonner, British Co-­operation: The History,
Principles, and Organisation of the British Co-­operative Movement (Manchester: Co-­operative Union,
1961); for communitarian experiments, see Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth
Century England (London: Longman, 1979).
59 Briefly, Bevir argues that British Marxism arose from the confluence of Marxism with both pop-
ular and Tory radicalism; Fabianism emerged from liberal radicalism and ethical positivism; and a
more profuse “ethical socialism” resulted from the immanentist turn of late nineteenth-­century
Protestantism, as well as popular radicalism.
60 Insofar as British socialism is overwhelmingly Owenite in the first half of the nineteenth century,
two books by Gregory Claeys perform much of this labor. For Owenite politics, see Claeys, Citizens;
for Owenite economics, see Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to
Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). Margot C. Finn covers much
of the ground between the disintegration of Owenism and the resurgence of socialism in the early
Another random document with
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Or look at the painting of another vault on the opposite page. This is
more stiff than the former, because it was executed nearly a century
later; still, there is nothing to declare its Christian character until the
eye rests on the Good Shepherd, who appears below the principal
part of the decoration.

Painting on Vault of an Arcosolium in Cemetery of Prætextatus.

We are not saying that the artists who executed these paintings
had no Christian meaning in them; on the contrary, we believe that
they had, and that the paintings really suggested that meaning to
those who first saw them. For we know, on the authority of Tertullian,
that “the whole revolving order of the seasons” (which are
represented in the second painting) was considered by Christians to
be “a witness of the resurrection of the dead.” This, therefore, was
probably the reason why they were painted here; and no Christian
needs to be reminded that our Lord spoke of Himself under the
image of a vine, which sufficiently explains the first painting. Still the
fact remains that the representations themselves are such as might
have been used by Christian and by Pagan artists indifferently. If any
of our readers feel disappointed that the first essays of the Christian
painter should not have had a more distinctly Christian character,
they must remember that a new art cannot be created in a moment.
If the Christian religion in its infancy was to make use of art at all, it
had no choice but to appropriate to its own purposes the forms of
ancient art, so far as they were pure and innocent; by degrees it
would proceed to eliminate what was unmeaning, and substitute
something Christian.
Some writers have supposed that Christians used at first Pagan
subjects as well as Pagan forms of ornamentation; and they point to
the figure of Orpheus, which appears in three or four places of the
Catacombs, and to that of Psyche also, which may be seen about as
often. So insignificant a number of exceptions, however, would
scarcely suffice to establish the general proposition, even if they
were in themselves inexplicable. But, in truth, the figure of Orpheus
has no right to be considered an exception at all, for he was taken by
some of the early Fathers as a type of our Lord; and it was even
believed by some of them, that, like the sybil, he had prophesied
about Him. Clement of Alexandria calls our Lord the Divine
enchanter of souls, with evident reference to the tale of Orpheus;
and the same idea will have occurred to every classical scholar, as
often as he has heard those words of the Psalmist which speak of
the wicked as “refusing to hear the voice of the charmer, charm he
never so wisely.” When, then, we find Orpheus and his lyre, and the
beasts enchanted by his song, figured on the walls or roofs of the
Catacombs, we have a right to conclude that the artist intended a
Christian interpretation to be given to his work; and a similar
explanation may be given of any other subjects of heathen
mythology which have gained admittance there.
If we were asked to name the subject which seems to have been
used most frequently in the early decorations of the Catacombs, we
should give the palm to the Good Shepherd; nor is this preference to
be wondered at. Any one who has meditated upon the words in
which our Blessed Lord took this title to Himself, will easily
understand why the first Christians, living in the midst of heathen
persecutors, should have delighted to keep so touching an image
always before them. They scratched it, therefore, roughly on the
tombstone as they laid some dear one in the grave; they carved it on
their cups, especially on the sacred chalice; they engraved it on
signet rings and wore it on their fingers; they placed it in the centre of
the paintings with which they covered the ceiling of their
subterranean chapels, or they gave it the chief place immediately
over the altar. We meet with it everywhere, and everybody can
recognise it.
There are, however, one or two peculiarities in its mode of
treatment which require a word of explanation. The shepherd is
generally represented as a young man lightly clad, with his tunic girt
high about his loins, denoting thereby his unwearied activity; he is
surrounded by sheep, or he carries one on his shoulders, bearing it
home to the fold,—the most tender act of his office. And there is
nothing in this but what we might naturally have expected. But he is
also sometimes represented with a goat instead of a sheep upon his
shoulders; and, in later paintings, he has the pastoral reed or tuneful
pipe either hanging on the tree by his side or he is playing on it. Now
this last particular has no place in the gospel parable, and the former
seems directly opposed to it, since the goat is the accepted symbol
of the wicked, the sheep only of the good. Hence these points have
been taken up by some critics, either as tokens of thoughtless
carelessness on the part of the Christian artists, or as proofs that
their work, whether consciously or unconsciously, was merely copied
from some Pagan original. Neither of these remarks appears to be
just. The images of a shepherd in Pagan art, with scarcely a single
exception, are of a very different kind; and the particular details
objected to are not only capable of receiving a Christian
interpretation, they even express consoling Christian truths. St.
Gregory Nazianzen speaks of the anxious care of the shepherd as
he sits on the hillside, filling the air with the soft notes of his pipe,
calling together his scattered flock; and he observes that in like
manner the spiritual pastor, desirous to recall souls to God, should
follow the example of his Divine Master, and use his pipe more
frequently than his staff. Then, as to the substitution of the goat for
the sheep, it was probably intended as a distinct protest against the
un-Christian severity of those heretics, who in very early times
refused reconciliation to certain classes of penitent sinners.
Not many, however, of the most ancient Christian paintings are of
the same simple and obvious character as the Good Shepherd. The
leading feature which characterises most of them is this, that they
suggest religious ideas or doctrines under the guise of artistic
symbols or historic types. One doctrine specially prominent in them,
and most appropriately taught in cemeteries, is that of the
resurrection and the everlasting life of happiness which awaits the
souls of the just after death. It is in this sense that we must
understand not only the frequent repetitions of the stories of Jonas
and of Lazarus—the type and the example of a resurrection—but
also of Daniel in the lions’ den, and the three children in the fiery
furnace. These last, indeed, very probably had reference also to the
persecution which the Christians were then suffering, and were
intended to inspire courage and a confident expectation that God
would deliver them, even as He had delivered His chosen servants
of old; but, as they are spoken of in very ancient Christian
documents (e.g., in the hymns of St. Ephrem and in the Apostolic
Constitutions) as foreshadowing the future triumph of the body over
death, whence these too had been in a manner delivered, we prefer,
in obedience to these ancient guides, to assign this interpretation to
them; at any rate, it is certain that this interpretation cannot be
excluded. Figures also of the deceased, with arms outstretched in
prayer, sometimes accompanied by their names, or standing in the
midst of a garden, or, again, figures of birds pecking at fruits and
flowers, we understand as images of the soul still living after death,
received into the garden of Paradise, and fed by immortal fruits.
Sometimes there may be a difference of opinion perhaps as to the
correctness of this or that interpretation suggested for any particular
symbolical painting; but the soundness of the principle of
interpretation in itself cannot be called in question, nor will there
often be any serious difficulty in its application, among those who
study the subject with diligence and candour. The language, both of
Holy Scripture and of the earliest Fathers, abounds in symbols, and
it was only natural that the earliest specimens of Christian art should
exhibit the same characteristic. More was meant by them than that
which met at first the outward senses; without this clue to their
meaning, the paintings are scarcely intelligible,—with it, all is plain
and easy.

Tombstone from the very ancient Crypt of St. Lucina, now united with the
Catacomb of St. Callixtus.

Take, for example, the figure of an anchor, so repeatedly

represented on gravestones and other monuments of the
Catacombs; so rarely, if indeed ever, to be found on Pagan
monuments. What influenced the early Christians in the selection of
such a figure? what meaning did they attach to it? This enquiry
forces itself upon our minds, if we are intelligent students of Christian
archæology, anxious to understand what we see: and if we are also
prudent and on our guard against being led astray by mere fancy, we
shall conduct the enquiry by the same laws and principles as we
should apply to the interpretation of some perplexing riddle in
heathen art. We should first examine the literature of the age and
people to whom it was supposed to belong, and see if any light could
be thrown upon it from that source. In the present instance,
therefore, we turn to the sacred literature of the Christians, and we
find there a passage which speaks of the duty of “holding fast the
hope that is set before us, which hope we have as an anchor of the
soul, sure and firm.” We assume, then, provisionally, as a basis of
further enquiry, that an anchor may perhaps have been used as an
emblem of Christian hope. Continuing our search in the same sacred
books, we find that there was a special connection in the Christian
creed between hope and the condition of the dead. It is written that
Christians are not sorrowful about those who die, “as others who
have no hope.” The conclusion is obvious, that a reference to hope
is just one of those things which might not unreasonably be looked
for on a Christian’s grave-stone, since it was something on which
they prided themselves as a point of difference between themselves
and others. This greatly confirms our conjectural interpretation of the
symbol, and we proceed with some confidence to apply it to every
example of its use that we can meet with; for if it is the right key, it
cannot fail to unlock all the problems that will come before us. In
doing this, we are first struck by the fact that in several instances the
very names of the deceased persons on whose epitaphs the anchor
is engraved, themselves also meant the same thing. They were
called Spes, Elpis, Elpidius, Elpizusa; all names coming from the
Latin or Greek word for hope. Next, we observe that many of these
anchors are so fashioned as to contain a hidden yet unmistakable
representation of a cross; and, reflecting that the one only ground of
a Christian’s hope is the cross of Christ, we hail this also as lending
further support to our theory. Yet once more, we find many of the
epitaphs contain the same idea, expressed in distinct words written
in the ordinary alphabet and not in these hieroglyphics, so to call
them,—we find Spes in Deo, Spes in Deo Christo &c. Finally, we
often find the anchor united with one or more of several other
symbols, to which, by a similar but independent process, we can
assign a certain signification. We try, then, whether our rendering of
the anchor as equivalent to “hope” will make sense, as a schoolboy
would say who was trying to translate a piece of Greek or Latin into
English, in all these other places; and if it does, we are satisfied that
our interpretation can be no longer disputed. A false reading of a
single symbol might chance to fit one monument, or two, or three;
but to say that any false reading will fit hundreds of separate
monuments, fit all equally well, and succeed in extracting a
consistent meaning from each, is to assert what no sane man can
believe.
Those who know the way in which the interpretation of the
Egyptian hieroglyphics was first guessed at, and then triumphantly
established against all gainsayers, by a similar process of reasoning,
will not dispute the soundness of the argument by which the
meaning of the anchor has been arrived at. We cannot attempt to
vindicate our interpretation of all the other symbols used by Christian
artists with the same minuteness of detail, neither is it necessary. All
will accept the dove as a fitting symbol of the simplicity, the
gentleness, purity, and innocence of a Christian soul gone to its rest,
and a sheep as fitly representing a disciple of Christ.
Another emblem, the fish, requires more words of explanation,
because it is capable of receiving a double meaning. At first sight,
our thoughts at once recur to the words of our Blessed Lord to St.
Peter and his brother, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of
men,” and no doubt this will sufficiently explain many old Christian
paintings or sculptures in which the fish appears. Taking this idea for
our guide, we can understand why a man angling and catching a fish
should find a place on the walls of a church, whether above ground
or below. Such a representation in these sacred places was inspired
by the same doctrinal teaching, and suggested the same ideas, as
were present to the old Christian preachers when they spoke of men
being caught by the bait of charity and the hook of preaching, and
being drawn out of the bitter waters of this world, not to have their life
taken from them, which is the fate that awaits the natural fish when it
is caught, but that they may be made partakers of a new and
heavenly life. This, however, will not enable us to decypher other
symbolical paintings into which the fish enters, and which are found
with equal frequency among the decorations of the Christian
cemeteries. It is necessary that we should learn another, and, as it
would seem, a still more common use of the fish. Just as the dove
might stand for the Holy Ghost, and also for a soul sanctified by the
Holy Ghost—just as the lamb or sheep might stand either for the
Lamb of God, or for those who are “the people of His pasture and
the sheep of His hand”—so the fish, too, was used not only to
represent a Christian, but also, still more frequently perhaps, Christ
Himself. To understand how this could be, we must study a little
Greek, which may be easily apprehended, however, even by those
who are not scholars, if they will fix their attention for a few moments
on the accompanying plan:—

Ι ΗϹΟΥϹ = Jesus
Χ ΡΙϹΤΟϹ = Christ
Θ ΕΟΥ = of God
Υ ΙΟϹ = Son
Ϲ ΩΤΗΡ = Saviour

The Greek for fish is here written perpendicularly, one letter above
another, ΙΧΘΥϹ; and it is seen that these five letters are the initial
letters of five words, which, together, contain a tolerably complete
account of what Christ is. He is Jesus Christ, Son of God,
Saviour. Thus, this one word, ιχθυς, or fish, read in this way, tells a
great deal about our Lord’s name and titles; it is almost a miniature
creed, or, as one of the Fathers expresses it, “it contains in one
name a whole multitude of holy names.” It would take us too long to
enquire into the origin of this device for expressing our Lord’s name
and titles in so compendious and secret a form. Clearly, whoever
may have invented it, it was very ingenious, and specially convenient
at those times and places where men dared not speak of Him freely
and openly. We cannot say when it began, but it was in universal use
throughout the Church during the first three hundred years of her life,
and then, when she was in the enjoyment of peace and liberty, it
gradually dropped, first out of sight in Christian monuments, and
then out of mind also in Christian literature. But, during the ages of
persecution, it had sunk deep into the habits of Christian thought and
language; it became, as it were, a part of the very Catechism,—
every baptized Christian seems to have been familiar with it, whether
he lived on the banks of the Tiber or of the Po, of the Loire, of the
Euphrates, or of the Nile. In all these parts of the world, writers in
books, poets in hymns, preachers in sermons, artists in painting, the
very masons themselves on gravestones, made use of it without a
word of explanation, in a way that would utterly mystify any modern
Christian community. Who would now dream of carving or painting a
fish upon a gravestone in a Christian churchyard? yet scores of
graves in the Catacombs were so marked, and some of them with
hardly a word or an emblem upon them besides. Or what meaning
could we attach to the picture of a dove or a lamb standing on a
fish’s back, if we did not understand that the fish represented Christ,
and the dove or the lamb a Christian, so that the whole symbol stood
for a Christian soul supported by Christ through the waves and
storms of life? Or again, only imagine a Christian in these days
having buried with him, or wearing round his neck during life, a little
figure of a fish cut in ivory, or crystal, or mother of pearl, or some still
more costly material? Yet a number of those who were buried in the
Catacombs did this; and some of these fish even bear an inscription,
calling upon the fish to be a Saviour!
It was necessary to give this explanation of certain symbols, and
to justify it by sufficient examples, before we proceed to study any of
the more complex paintings in the Catacombs. But now, with these
thoughts in our minds, let us enter the Cemetery of St. Callixtus, and
look on a figure represented two or three times on a wall of one of its
most ancient chambers: a fish swimming and carrying on its back a
basket of bread, and in the midst of the loaves of bread, a glass
vessel containing a red liquid. What is this but bread and wine, the
elements of the Sacrament of Love, and Jesus Christ Its reality? St.
Jerome, when speaking of a holy bishop of Toulouse who had sold
the gold and silver vessels of his church to relieve the poor, uses
these words, “What can be more rich than a man who carries the
body of Christ in a basket of wicker-work, and the blood of Christ in a
vessel of glass?” Here are undeniably the basket of wicker-work and
the vessel of glass; and who can doubt that we have the other also,
veiled under the figure of the fish?
 Consecration of the Holy Eucharist.

Let us go to another part of the same cemetery, and consider a

painting which with some variations is repeated in three or four
successive chambers, all opening out of one of the primitive
galleries. Bread and fish lie on a three-legged table, and several
baskets of bread are arranged along the floor in front of it, or a man
and woman stand by the side of the table. The woman has her arms
outstretched in the form of a cross, the ancient attitude of Christian
prayer; the man, too, is stretching forth his hands, but in another
way: he holds them forward, and especially his right hand, over the
bread and fish, in such a way as to press upon every Catholic
intelligence the idea that he is blessing or consecrating what is
before him. To modern eyes, indeed, his vestment does not look
worthy of one engaged in the highest act of Christian worship;
perhaps, at first sight, it almost strikes us as hardly decent.
Nevertheless, to the Christian archæologist, this very vestment is a
strong confirmation of the view we are taking of the real sense of the
painting. For it is the Greek pallium, or philosophers’ cloak; and we
know that at the time to which this painting belongs (the end of the
second or beginning of the third century) it was a common practice
to preach the Word of God in this particular costume. Tertullian, who
was living at the same time, wrote a treatise De Pallio, in which, in
his own peculiar style, he defended its use, and congratulated the
pallium on its promotion to be a Christian vestment. It was not until
fifty years later that St. Cyprian objected to it, both as not sufficiently
modest in itself and as vainglorious in its signification.
If there were any lingering uncertainty as to whether these figures
were really intended to have reference to the Holy Eucharist, or
whether our interpretation of them may not have been fanciful and
arbitrary, an examination of the other decorations of the same
chambers will suffice to remove it. For it will be seen that, whilst in
closest connection with them are other suitable emblems or figures
of the same Divine Sacrament, they are also uniformly preceded by
representations of the initiatory Sacrament of the Christian covenant,
without which no man can be admitted to partake of the Eucharist;
and they are followed by a figure of the Resurrection, which our Lord
Himself most emphatically connected with the eating of His flesh and
the drinking of His blood, saying, “He that eateth my flesh and
drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the
last day.” These three subjects, Baptism, the Holy Eucharist, and the
Resurrection occupy the three perfect sides of the chamber, the
fourth side being, of course, broken by the entrance; and, taken in
their right order, they faithfully depict the new life of a Christian; the
life of divine grace, first imparted by baptism, then fed by the Holy
Eucharist, and finally exchanged for an everlasting life of glory.

The Smitten Rock.

 Let us look at the figures of these subjects in detail, and see how
they are represented here. First, we have Moses striking the rock, a
scene which occurs over and over again in the Catacombs, and
which in these chambers commences the series of paintings we are
examining; it is to be seen on the left-hand wall as we enter. St. Paul
tells us that “the rock was Christ;” the water, then, which flowed from
it must be those streams of Divine grace whereby His disciples are
refreshed and sustained during their pilgrimage through the
wilderness of this world, and this grace is first given in the waters of
baptism. Next we have a man fishing, which has been already
explained; and (in one instance at least) this is followed by another
man performing the very act of baptism on a youth who stands
before him; the youth stands in the water, and the man is pouring
water over his head. Lastly, on the same wall, is the paralytic
carrying his bed on his shoulders—the same, doubtless, who was
miraculously cured at the pool of Bethsaida, which pool the fathers of
the Church uniformly interpret as typical of the healing waters of the
Christian sacrament.

The Sacrament of Baptism.

 Eucharistic Feast.

On the wall opposite the doorway, the central scene is a feast

wherein seven men are seated at a table, partaking of fish and
bread; and there is a history in the last chapter of St. John’s Gospel,
of which it may be taken as a literal representation. It was when our
Lord “showed Himself to His disciples at the Sea of Tiberias, and He
showed Himself, after this manner. There were together Simon Peter
and Thomas who is called Didymus, and Nathanael who was of
Cana of Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two others of His
disciples”—seven in all. “And they went a-fishing, but caught nothing.
Jesus appeared to them on the shore.” Then there follows the
miraculous draught of fishes; and as soon as they came to land, they
saw “hot coals lying, and a fish laid thereon, and bread. Jesus saith
to them, Bring hither of the fishes which you have now caught. And
Jesus cometh and taketh bread and giveth them, and fish in like
manner.” Such is the letter of the gospel narrative; but this narrative
is in fact a mystical and prophetic representation of the Church
gathered together out of the waters of the world, and fed by the Holy
Eucharist. The hundred and fifty-three great fishes that were caught
represent the large numbers of the faithful that were drawn into the
Church by apostolic preaching; the fish laid on the hot coals is Jesus
Christ in His Passion, His Body “delivered for us” on Mount Calvary,
given to us also to be our food in the Blessed Sacrament whereby
“we show the death of the Lord until He come.” The faithful caught in
the net of the Church must be brought to that broiled fish (Piscis
assus, Christus passus, says St. Augustine), that crucified Lord, and
they must be incorporated with Him by partaking of the living Bread
which came down from Heaven.

Sacrifice of Isaac.

Resurrection of Lazarus.
 Such is the full meaning of the scene at the Sea of Tiberias, as
interpreted according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers; and
the adjuncts of this picture show that it was intended to be so
understood here also; for on one side is the figure of the
consecration already described; and on the other, the sacrifice of
Isaac by his father, which was surely a most lively type of the
sacrifice of Christ upon the altar; wherein blood is not really shed,
but the Lamb is only “as it were slain,” just as Isaac was not really
slain, but was received back from the dead, “for a parable.” Lastly, as
has been mentioned before, there follows on the third wall of the
same chamber the natural complement of the rest; the doctrine of
the Resurrection, as contained in the fact of the rising again of
Lazarus. Thus, this whole series of paintings, executed at the end of
the second century, or within the first twenty or thirty years of the
third, and repeated (as has been said) in several successive
chambers, was a continual homily, as it were, set before the eyes of
the faithful, in which they were reminded of the beginning, progress,
and consummation of their new and supernatural life.
We do not say that every modern Christian who looks at these
paintings will thus read their meaning at once; but we believe that all
ancient Christians did so, because it is clear from the writings of the
Apostles themselves and their successors, that nothing was more
familiar to the Christian mind of those days than the symbolical and
prophetical meaning of the facts both of the Old and of the New
Testaments. They believed the facts themselves to have taken place
just as they are recorded, but they believed also that they had a
mysterious signification, whereby the truths of the Christian faith
were insinuated or expressed, and that this was their highest and
truest meaning. “Perhaps there is no one recorded miracle of our
Lord,” says St. Gregory, “which is not therefore selected for
recording because it was the type of something to happen in the
Church;” and precisely the same was felt to be true also of the
histories of the patriarchal and Jewish dispensations. “All these
things had happened to them in figure, and they were written for our
correction, upon whom the ends of the world are come.”
 It may not be often possible to trace as clearly as we have just
done in a single instance, the logical order and dependence of the
several subjects that were selected for representation in each
chamber of the Catacombs; they may not always have been so
admirably arranged as to be in fact equivalent, as these were, to a
well-ordered dogmatic discourse. Nevertheless it is only when read
in this way, that the decoration of the Catacombs can be made
thoroughly intelligible; and it is certain that some such meaning must
have been intended from the first. The extremely limited number of
Biblical subjects selected for representation, while such an immense
variety is really contained in the Bible (and so many of those that are
neglected might have seemed equally suitable for the purpose), and
then again, the thoroughly unhistorical way in which these few
subjects are dealt with, shows clearly that the principle of selection
was theological rather than artistic. The artists were not left to
indulge their own unfettered fancy, but worked under ecclesiastical
supervision; and the Bible stories which they depicted were not
represented according to their historical verity, because they were
not intended to be a souvenir of past facts, but to symbolise and
suggest something beyond themselves. In order, therefore, to
understand them, it is necessary to bring them face to face with the
Christian doctrines which they foreshadow.
 Noe in the Ark.

Look, for example, at the numerous pictures of Noe in the ark

which appear in the Catacombs, all resembling one another, but
none resembling the reality. Instead of a vessel, three stories high,
containing eight human beings and specimens of every kind of
animal, we see only a narrow box, barely large enough to hold one
person, and that person sometimes a lady, whose name is also
inscribed upon it perhaps, being the same lady (as we learn from the
inscription) who lies buried in the adjacent tomb. If all ancient
Christian literature had perished, we should have been at a loss to
comprehend this enigma; but as soon as we know that the Fathers
of the Church speak of it as an acknowledged fact, which “nobody
doubts” (to use St. Augustine’s words), that the Church was typified
by the ark, a ray of light begins to dawn upon us; and when we call
to mind that St. Peter himself speaks of the waters of baptism as
saving men’s souls, “even as Noe and his family were saved by the
waters of the flood,” all is at once made clear. We see plainly that the
friends of the deceased have intended to signify that he had been
received into the ark of the Church and made a Christian by baptism.
And if they had added to the composition, as they often did, the
figure of a dove bringing an olive branch to the person standing in
the ark, this also enters into the same interpretation; it was
symbolical of that Divine peace which comes to the soul in this world
by faith, and which is a pledge of the peace given by everlasting
happiness in the next.

Scenes from the History of Jonas.

The frequent repetition of the story of Jonas in a Christian

cemetery needs no explanation, our Lord himself having put it
forward as a type of His own resurrection, and so a pledge of ours
also. The particular form, however, under which this story appears,
was not suggested, as Noe’s ark was, by the place which it held in
the cycle of Christian doctrine, but rather by a certain Pagan model
with which the Romans of that day were very familiar. The
mythological tale of Andromeda, and the sea-monster to which she
was exposed on the coast near Joppa (for so the story ran), was a
favourite subject for the decoration of the walls in Roman villas,
temples, and other public buildings. It may be seen in Pompeii, and,
much nearer to the Catacombs, in Rome itself—e.g., in the barracks
of one of the cohorts of the imperial police, discovered a few years
ago in Trastevere; and in both places the monster is the precise
counterpart of that which is always represented as swallowing or
casting up Jonas; a kind of dragon, with large head and ears, a long
slender neck, and a very tortuous body. Of course, in the infancy of
Christian art, it was convenient to have a model at hand to represent
an unknown monster, and, as we have said, we do not doubt that
this is the true history of its origin. Still this was not the only reason
which recommended the adoption of so grotesque a form; it offered
the further advantage of creating as strong a contrast as possible
between this “great fish,” which was a type of death, and the ordinary
fish, which, as we have seen, was the recognised symbol of the
Author of life.
Another incident in the life of Jonas, which was often painted in the
Catacombs, was his resting on the east side of the city of Nineve,
under the shade of a certain plant which God caused to grow up for
his protection, and which He again caused as suddenly to wither
away. In the days of St. Jerome and St. Augustine there was a
dispute between those learned doctors as to the precise nature of
this plant; and in the course of it St. Jerome appealed to these
paintings as bearing testimony in favour of his own rendering of the
Hebrew word. We need not enter into the merits of the dispute, but it
is important to note the fact of the appeal, as it peremptorily refutes
the ridiculous assertions of certain authors of the present day, who
would assign very recent dates to these and similar paintings in the
Catacombs. We know that St. Jerome was very fond, when a boy, of
visiting these places, and it is interesting to hear him appealing to the
paintings he had seen in them as to “ancient witnesses.” It would be
still more interesting, if we could say with certainty what were the
motives which led the ancient Christians to choose this subject for
such frequent contemplation; whether they read in it only a very
striking lesson as to the watchfulness of Divine Providence, or
whether it had a more subtle meaning, as a type of the mercy of God
which overshadows the souls of the faithful in the long sleep of death
which goes before the Sun of the Resurrection. But where no clue is
supplied by the writings of cotemporary, or nearly cotemporary
authors, we prefer to keep silence rather than to insist on any
doubtful interpretation. All that need be said is that such a painting
was certainly not out of place in a Christian Church or cemetery, any
more than the story of Adam and Eve, or any other Biblical narrative
which has reference to the doctrines or promises announced by
Christianity to the world.
We do not pretend to enumerate here all the subjects from the Old
and New Testaments that were painted in the Catacombs. We are
but naming those that were used most frequently, that seem most
interesting, or whose signification can be most precisely determined.
Those who have seen the Catacombs themselves will call to mind
others of which we have not spoken, but we think their meaning is
generally obvious so as to need no explanation. We will name one
class only of these paintings; those in which our Lord and His
Blessed Mother appear. Our readers will hardly expect to find
anything that pretends to be a portrait of either one or the other. We
have seen that the disposition in primitive Christian art was to
represent facts rather than persons, and the mystery which the facts
signified rather than the facts themselves. Christ, therefore, appears
most commonly in the typical character of the Good Shepherd, and
as such is represented in appropriate form and with suitable
accessories, or He sits in the midst of His Apostles, with a chest of
volumes at His feet, as the Great Teacher of the world. Once,
indeed, His head and bust form a medallion occupying the centre of
a roof in a chamber of the Cemetery of St. Domitilla, the same in
which appear Orpheus and his lyre. It is a work of the third century;
there is more evidence of an intention to give a definite individual
type of countenance, neither is the type altogether unlike that which
the practice of later ages has consecrated by traditional usage.
Nevertheless others of the fourth century are evidently not copies of
the same model, so that it is clear that in those early days there was
no uniform agreement upon the subject.