Henry S. Salt, the Late Victorian Socialists, and Thoreau

Abstract

IT is now a commonplace that the late Victorian radicals and Socialists in England were much influenced by the writings of Henry Thoreau. few key statements to this effect have been quoted and requoted iind are now accepted without serious question. For example, Henry Canby, in his 1939 biography of Thoreau, wrote: It seems probable that the first recognition of his [Thoreau's] modest but certain place in world literature came from abroad, and in England, where the nascent British Labor Party, offspring of William Morris and Marx, used Walden as a pocket-piece and travelling Bible of their faith. And rightly, for this movement, truly Fabian in character, was social rather than narrowly economic, its purpose being to restore and create and distribute true values in everyday living. Robert Blatchford's Merrie England (1895), one of the background books of English socialism, and much influenced by Thoreau, sold two million copies.' William Condry went over the same material in his essay, A Hundred Years of Walden, originally published in Dublin Magazine in 1955 and recently reprinted in Thoreau broad: It was the early socialists who took up Walden in the days when they revered Shelley and Carlyle far more than Marx and Engels.2 Walter Harding in Thoreau Handbook restated what his predecessors had been saying: It was.., .the Fabians and early Labour party members who really popularized Thoreau in England. Robert Blatchford, whose Merrie England, with a