Self-Consuming Socialism

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter provides a comprehensive reassessment of the most vocal advocates of socialism in Britain at midcentury, the Christian Socialists. In the revolutionary year 1848, a group of young professionals and clergymen resolved to address working-class discontent. Inspired by the egalitarian theology of their leader, the Anglican Divine Frederick Denison Maurice, they set out to “Christianize Socialism.” Refuting the oft-repeated claim that the movement was inauthentic because it discouraged working-class political engagement, this chapter’s analysis contextualizes Christian Socialist doctrine in light of scholarship on the diversity—and, in many cases, religiosity—of nineteenth-century socialism. Moreover, it reveals that the group’s signature anti-political undertaking, the sponsorship of cooperative workshops, the “Working Men’s Associations,” owes a quiet debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s aesthetic philosophy. While maintaining that the Christian Socialists deserve to be taken seriously qua socialism, this chapter nevertheless identifies several deep-seated antinomies in their project. Through a reading of Charles Kingsley’s influential social problem novel Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet (1850), it explores the fundamental incongruities between not only the group’s Anglican Christianity and its socialism, but also its militant affect and resolutely moderate intentions. These contradictions doomed the movement to be a “self-consuming socialism”—an outcome eerily prefigured by Kingsley’s predilection for the topos of cannibalism. Finally, a brief coda considers the group’s legacy and impact on Britain’s “socialist revival” at the fin de siècle.