Fabian Society Research Articles

A Judicious Dose of Hemp: the Long Shadow of the Haymarket Bombing

A curious passer-by on Finsbury Pavement, London, on Friday 14 October 1887, drawn to investigate the clamour inside the South Place Institute, where the police were in the process of breaking up a public meeting, would have happened upon a remarkable spectrum of radical Victorians. There was Annie Besant, the feminist birth-control campaigner, advocate of home rule for Ireland and mainstay of the National Secular Society. She was joined on the dais by her young friend George Bernard Shaw, at that time an obscure literary critic best known for his leadership of the Fabian Society. The socialist polymath William Morris had taken a break from rehearsing his agit-prop drama The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened – the play opened the following day with the author in the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury – to come and second a resolution protesting against ‘this sentence, which, if carried out, will practically make the holding of meetings of working men in their own interest a capital offence … . ’ The resolution had been proposed by Charlotte Wilson, editor of the anarchist newspaper Freedom. Wilson's co-editor, the Russian anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, told the gathering of ‘the virtual civil war that was going on between the two great classes’. But perhaps the most exotic personage on the platform that evening was another Russian exile, Sergius Michaelovitch Kravchinski, known in Britain under the nom de guerre Stepniak, whose devotion to the anarchist doctrine of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ had led him in 1878 to stab to death the head of the Tsar's secret police in St Petersburg. And though they were not on the programme, such bitter ideological adversaries as H. M. Hyndman, Friedrich Engels, Eleanor Marx and her lover Edward Aveling also lent their support.

Monkey in the Mirror: The Science of Professor Higgins and Doctor Moreau

In 1916, when George Bernard Shaw published Pygmalion in book form, he included a sequel describing Eliza's life after she left Higgins's laboratory. (1) To the two painful transformations depicted in the play, he now added a third. After reading the novels of H. G. Wells, Freddy's snobby sister Clara undergoes changes almost as drastic as Eliza's or her father's: When Mr. H. G. Wells lifted [Clara] on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a conviction of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of General Booth. (2) (115) In the formulaic tales of Salvation Army founder William Booth, degraded workers recovered their humanity when they were dragged back across a boundary between animal and human. Shaw's Pygmalion parodies such conversion narratives, in which miserable creatures are rehumanized and achieve enlightenment. Aligning the younger, politically concerned writer with Booth's views, Shaw mocks Wells as an apostle of social change. Nevertheless, Pygmalion bears a striking resemblance to Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, which two decades earlier had depicted the sufferings of vivisected taught to speak. Both works suggest the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of Booth-style transformations. Wells's novella and Shaw's play overturn Booth's narratives by problematizing the animal/human divide, suggesting the limits of plasticity and the futility of arbitrary individual conversions. London intellectuals with socialist leanings, Shaw and Wells knew one another and exchanged critiques of each other's work. From 1901 onward, they maintained a sharp, sometimes bitter correspondence in which they clashed about writing, Fabian socialism, and Wells's love life. Yet for all their disagreements, their works share a resonance frequency. The Island of Doctor Moreau appeared in April 1896, and Shaw envisioned the encounter between his flower girl and professor of phonetics as early as September 1897. (3) In both novella and play, self-centered experimenters try to make people from animals, mainly to see if they can do it. These transformations cause excruciating pain, and the scientists give little thought to how the creatures will live once they have been transformed. In both romances (4) language learning plays a key role, even as Wells and Shaw challenge the notion that speech distinguishes people from animals. Both works also draw on Darwin's evolutionary biology to imply that willed, targeted interference with evolutionary processes causes mostly pain, since all living beings have evolved in conjunction with their environments. While Pygmalion--not Moreau--is sometimes read as an educational success story, the works are equally ironic in the social experiments they depict. In both the play and the novella, talking animals question the facile application of biological laws to complex, hierarchical societies. The bath of burning pain In the 1890s comparisons of workers to savages were common, even among those trying hardest to help the poor. William Booth based his best seller In Darkest England on an extended metaphor comparing the living conditions in London to those in Central Africa. As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? he asked. May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest? (11-12) Booth hoped to divert some of the Christian energy being poured into missionary societies into projects for England's own poor. Journalist Margaret Harkness, an outspoken advocate of the Salvation Army, built on Booths metaphors in her popular novels about slum life. …

Arndt´ s Story: The Life of an Australian Economist

Arndt's Story: Life of an Economist. By Peter Coleman, Selwyn Cornish and Peter Drake. Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, National University. 2007. Pp. 338. Professor Heinz Wolfgang Arndt, who passed away on 6 May 2002, was a towering figure in the establishment of the National University's (ANU's) study of Southeast Asian economies. He either directly supervised, or had substantial influence on, a large number of Southeast Asianist academic careers spawned at ANU. He established the Bulletin of Indonesian Studies (BIES), which remains the standard journal in the field on the Indonesian economy. book concludes that it was ANU's provision for student fieldwork in Indonesia (and other Asian countries) and BIES, under Arndt's leadership, that gave the institution an edge (p. 266). Arndt's contribution to understanding Indonesia's political economy is profound, and lives on with those whom he mentored. He also had some experience of the rest of Asia, including Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Singapore, South Korea, Soviet Central Asia, the Philippines and also Papua New Guinea. Arndt, described in this volume as a German by birth and an Australian by choice (p. xiii), went on a difficult journey before finding his place as one of Australia's leading scholars of Asian development. Arndt's Jewish background necessitated the family's flee from Nazi Germany. Arndt himself ended up in the United Kingdom and despite his anti-Nazi credentials he was interned in Canada during World War Ii. Alter the War he moved, first, to Sydney, and then ultimately to Canberra to what was to become ANU. coincided with an equally colourful journey. At Oxford University he was, in the words of this book, a fellow-traveller of the USSR (p. 21), although he was never a formal member of any communist party. Rejecting the intellectual flabbiness of political science and sociology (Arndt commented that [t]hey seemed to be little more than journalism mixed with pedantry--p. 43), he transitioned to development economics. His first major publication (with Chatham House), entitled Economic Lessons of the Nineteen-Thirties, drew anti-free market lessons from the Great Depression (in contrast to the anti-government intervention lessons derived from the same experience by Hayek and others). By the time Arndt had moved to Australia in the late 1940s he had transitioned to Fabian Socialism (he once advocated the nationalization of banks and attempted to influence politics in the direction of economic planning) and later Keynesianism, and planted himself firmly with the left of the Labour Party (ALP). His view of international relations had shifted to one of suspicion of both superpowers: [my] own preference is for a critical attitude equally towards the USA and Russia (p. 85). Years later Arndt would transition to free market economics and split with the ALP over its opposition to the Vietnam War. Arndt believed that the defence of South Vietnam was both a just cause and in the interests of the West. What is not entirely clear from this volume is why and how all these ideological turning points occurred in Arndt's life. What the volume does tell us is that Arndt appeared to solidify his views against Marxism after reading Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon, and concluded that Marxism-Leninism was destructive of all integrity (p. 43). volume also notes his trip to India in the 1950s, where he observed a debilitative central planning model that centred on import substitution and paid no regard to comparative advantage. According to the volume: The hallmarks of Indian economic policy--direct controls, the lack of market incentives and extensive government intervention--were to become anathema to him (p. 234). Arndt's philosophical transition also seemed to parallel Indonesia's own transition from government intervention (under Soekarno) to free market prescriptions (under Soeharto)--a point not lost on the authors of this book: This philosophic shift coincided with the Suharto administration's gradual acceptance of comparable advice from American free marketeers (p. …

The Strange Career of British Democracy: John Milton to Gordon Brown

Political debate in modern Britain has been structured by four narratives or traditions, called here ‘Whig imperialist’, ‘Tory nationalist’, ‘democratic collectivist’ and ‘democratic republican’. The Whig imperialist tradition goes back to Edmund Burke; it is a tradition of responsive evolution, flexible statecraft, genial optimism and abhorrence of dogmatic absolutes. It prevailed for most of the nineteenth century, for most of the interwar period and for most of the 1950s and early‐1960s. Its Tory nationalist counterpart is tense, rebarbative and often shrill. At its core lies a primal fear of the dissolution of authority and a collapse of the social order. Its most notable exponents include Lord Salisbury, Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher. The democratic collectivist tradition stresses ineluctable progress towards a just and rational society, to be achieved by a strong, essentially technocratic central state, with the power and will to replace the wasteful, unjust chaos of the market place by planned co‐ordination. Formative influences on it were the great Fabian socialists, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb; it achieved its apotheosis under the Attlee Government of 1945‐51. The democratic republican tradition is much more inchoate: its exponents have been the awkward squad of British democracy. The most glittering stars in the democratic republican firmament were probably John Milton, John Stuart Mill and R.H. Tawney. It stresses active self‐government and republican self respect, embodied in a vigorous civil society and strong local authorities. During the ninety‐odd years since Britain belatedly acquired a more‐or‐less democratic suffrage, the first three traditions have all been tested, almost to destruction. But though the fourth has had great influence on social movements of all kinds, governments at the centre have done little more than toy with it, usually for brief periods. The great question now is whether Britain is about to experience a democratic republican moment.

Smash: An Adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Novel An Unsocial Socialist (review)

Reviewed by: Smash: An Adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Novel An Unsocial Socialist Gavin Hawk Smash: An Adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Novel An Unsocial Socialist. By Jeffrey Hatcher. Directed by Lillian Groag. Asolo Repertory Theatre, Mertz Theatre, Sarasota, FL. 19 March 2008. In the late 1880s, a young George Bernard Shaw industriously produced one unsuccessful novel after another, the last of which, An Unsocial Socialist, was a self-deprecating satire on the values of his beloved Fabian Society. Perhaps part of the reason these initial literary forays were failures was due to Shaw’s own admittedly weak plot construction. It took the advice of critic William Archer and his observations of theatre for Shaw to understand the importance of strong dramatic structure, which would eventually help transform him into a Nobel Prize–winning author. But even though Shaw would later publicly dismiss his early literary efforts, the potential for satisfying storytelling was still intrinsic in his last novel’s crackling dialog and gripping themes. Unearthing the format of a classic well-made play, Jeffrey Hatcher’s Smash, and the Asolo Rep production of it, breathes new life into this overlooked Shaw work. As the curtain rose at the Mertz Theatre, the endearing strains of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” quickly turned discordant, the instruments going flat and sharp, followed by the sound of shattering glass. This served as a fitting metaphor for the inciting incident of the play: the end of a marriage only twenty minutes after the nuptials. Hatcher uses this event as a launching point for the well-made play’s requisite exposition, during which Sidney Trefusis explains to his new bride Henrietta that he must leave her in order to promote his socialist agenda and to bring down the English government for the good of proletariats everywhere. The fact that he himself is a millionaire is only one of the many comic paradoxes in the piece. The setting quickly turns to the Alton College for Girls, a glorified charm school for well-to-do young women. Here Sidney has morphed into an industrious Cockney groundskeeper named Mengels (a mash-up of Marx and Engels). The creation of this alias provides another one of the key ingredients of the well-made play: the secret on which the plot hinges. Sidney has taken on this identity in order to convert the young scholars to socialism, knowing full well they are being groomed to marry Britain’s rich and powerful. When one of the students, Agatha Wylie, participates in a youthful act of defiance against her overbearing headmistress, Sidney sees an opportunity to begin his revolution. He enlists Agatha and her young cohorts in a scheme to wrest control of the school, partly by supplanting the capitalist pedagogy with [End Page 491] Click for larger view View full resolution Kris Danford (Henrietta), Julie Lachance (Agatha), Jessie Blue Gormezano (Jane), and Jennifer Logue (Gertrude) in Smash: An Adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Novel An Unsocial Socialist. Photo: Julia Guzman. [End Page 492] his socialist teachings, and partly by scheming to pay the villagers five pounds each to revolt and smash down the walls of the college. Act 2 escalates the dramatic tension and rising action when Henrietta arrives at the college to visit her cousin Agatha and quickly sees through Sidney’s disguise. To further complicate matters, Agatha falls madly in love with Sidney, creating an amusing love triangle. Meanwhile Henrietta plays the part of the pining wife to her advantage, seducing Sidney into a temporary repose then handcuffing him to a teacart. It is here that Hatcher employs the device of the scene a fair, wherein a character discloses an important revelation, in this case Henrietta’s diabolical plan for revenge on Sidney. This leads to a hilarious climatic turning point where she makes a mockery of his revolution by leading the townspeople in a drunken attack on the college, getting them to sing “99 Bottles of Beer” instead of the socialist anthem, “The International.” Act 3 brings a traditional denouement, complete with the pairing off of secondary characters into couples and Sidney’s overdue comeuppance. But rather than tying up the play in a neat package...

The Very First Lady Chatterley? Mrs. Havelock Ellis’s Seaweed

The Very First Lady Chatterley? Mrs. Havelock Ellis’s Seaweed Jo-Ann Wallace On 31 May 1898 George Bedborough—secretary of the English branch of the Legitimation League (a society whose object was the legalizing of illegitimate children) and editor of the League's journal, the Adult—was arrested for selling a copy of Havelock Ellis's recently published Sexual Inversion to an undercover Scotland Yard detective, John Sweeney. As numerous biographers and historians (not to mention the detective himself) have pointed out, Sweeney was less interested in Ellis's book than in the Legitimation League's seeming advocacy of free love and the anarchists numbered among its members. However, one effect of Bedborough's arrest was the accidental suppression of Mrs. Havelock (Edith) Ellis's first novel, Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll. Seaweed, like Sexual Inversion, had been published by "Dr. Roland de Villiers" under the imprint of the University Press at Watford. It was seized, along with Sexual Inversion and several other publications, during the raid on Bedborough's shop. Although she attempted to sell it by post from her cottage in Cornwall, Edith Ellis's book dropped from sight until it was revised and reissued as Kit's Woman: A Cornish Idyll in 1907. Two years later, the novel was again slightly revised, this time eliminating much of the Cornish dialect, and published in the United States as Steve's Woman. At the instigation of Daphne (Mrs. Clifford) Bax, Edith Ellis revisited the novel again, transforming it into a four-act play that received a special performance at the Court Theatre with Beryl Faber playing the leading role. Finally, the London publisher T. Werner Laurie brought out a popular (i.e., paperback) edition of Kit's Woman in 1916, the year of Edith Ellis's death.1 The novel is of interest not only for its accidental implication in one of the famous censorship trials of the period and its subsequently volatile publishing history (described in more detail below), but for its subject [End Page 123] matter which in many ways anticipates, and quite possibly inspired, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, another famously censored and suppressed book.2 As I will argue in what follows, Seaweed presents numerous interesting challenges for literary historiography generally and for modernist literary history in particular. It requires us to broaden our understanding of literary modernism to account not only for its much-vaunted cosmopolitanism and internationalism but also for its varied and localized development, in this case the development of a specifically English modernism with its roots in late-nineteenth-century English progressive idealism. Edith Ellis & Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll Edith Ellis (née Lees, 1861–1916) was a turn-of-the-century writer, lecturer, and social experimenter. Although she is today more often remembered as the lesbian wife of the sexual psychologist Havelock Ellis—who included her as a case study in Sexual Inversion—during her lifetime she was a well-known figure in her own right.3 In the late 1880s, together with Ramsay MacDonald (who would go on to become Britain's first Labour Prime Minister), she helped establish the Fellowship of the New Life's experiment in communal living at 29 Doughty Street in Bloomsbury. The Fellowship had its origins in October 1883 when Percival Chubb (among others), inspired by the teachings of Scottish philosopher Thomas Davidson, organized a meeting of several sympathetic men and women to discuss the possibility of founding "a communistic society whose members should lead the new higher life."4 The Fellowship was committed to principles of social justice based on class and sexual reform, goals that it believed were best pursued through simplicity of living, the combining of manual with intellectual labour, and "the highest and completest education of the young."5 Less than three months after its initial meeting, a number of members split from the founding group to form the Fabian Society. There was some continuing overlap in membership in the two associations and the Fellowship—which by now had attracted the interest of people like Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Edward Pease and Frank Podmore—lasted another fifteen years. In that time, it published a quarterly magazine, Seed...

H.G. Wells and the New Liberalism

This article offers a new interpretation of H.G. Wells's political thought in the Edwardian period and beyond. Scholars have emphasised his socialism at the expense of his commitment to liberalism, and have misread his novel The New Machiavelli as an anti-Liberal tract. Wells spent much effort in the pre-1914 period in the quest for a ‘new Liberalism’, and did not believe that socialists should compete directly with the Liberal Party for votes. It was this latter conviction that lay behind his much misunderstood dispute with the Fabian Society. His political support for Churchill was one sign of his belief in the compatibility of liberalism and socialism, in which he was far from unique at the time. He also engaged, somewhat idiosyncratically, with the ‘servile state’ concept of Hilaire Belloc. Although he did not articulate his Liberal identity with complete consistency, he did so with increasing intensity as the First World War approached. This helps explain why key New Liberal politicians including Churchill, Lloyd George and Masterman responded to his ideas sympathetically. The extent of engagement between Wells and the ‘New Liberalism’ was such that he deserves to be considered alongside Green, Ritchie, Hobson and Hobhouse as one of its prophets.

Louise Bamfield and Richard Brooks (2006), Narrowing the Gap: The Fabian Commission on Life Chances and Child Poverty. London: Fabian Society. £9.95, pp. 224, pbk

Louise Bamfield and Richard Brooks (2006), <i>Narrowing the Gap: The Fabian Commission on Life Chances and Child Poverty</i>. London: Fabian Society. £9.95, pp. 224, pbk

Introduction: The 1964 General Election—the ‘Not Quite, But’ and ‘But Only Just’ Election

Polling in the British general election of 1964 took place on 15 October. It had been almost exactly five years since the election of 1959—not quite the only occasion that a parliament had lasted i...

American institutionalism and its British connections

This paper examines the connections between American institutionalists and a number of ‘non-Marshallian’ British economists and social scientists, several of whom were associated with the Fabian Society or the London School of Economics or both. Specifically, the links between institutionalists such as Walton Hamilton and Wesley Mitchell and British social scientists such as John A. Hobson, Henry Clay, R.A. Tawney, William Beveridge and Graham Wallas. It is argued that these connections were related to common views on the importance of institutions, compatible methodological views, common interest in questions of social value, shared policy concerns (particularly unemployment and the coal industry), shared interests in the development of new institutions for education and research in economics and shared connections with the funding activities of the Rockefeller Foundation. These connections were much more extensive than has usually been realized. Some reasons for this British group not to form into a movement similar to American institutionalism are explored.

School children drinking is on the rise

The Information Centre have published results from a major survey showing that in the past year the mean alcohol consumption for both boys and girls has increased while drug use has gone down. Also in the news, the Fabian Society support the notion that every school should have it's own school nurse while the Fostering Charity ask nurses to consider becoming foster carers.

Economic Ideas and British Literature, 1900-1930: The Fabian Society, Bloomsbury, andThe New Age

This article argues that economic ideas were a fundamental shaping force for popular and avant-garde writers between 1900 and 1930 by giving an overview of three economic movements and connecting these ideas to literary experiments. The first section traces the impact of Fabian socialism's economic ideas on George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, and indicates a number of other Fabian writers. The second section describes the creation of an academic orthodoxy in economics, and then explores how Bloomsbury's intellectual climate produced the interrelated phenomena of Keynes's economics, Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, the Hogarth Press, and Virginia Woolf's literary innovation. The final section documents Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Katherine Mansfield's involvement with the ideas of the radical economic journal, The New Age, and suggests connections between these ideas and the writers’ formal experiments. By tracing these intellectual networks, a number of historical connections between the economic problems of this period and the present emerge, indicating exciting directions for new research.

LEGISLATING ABOUT THE MONARCHY

NO one believes that the British monarchy is perfect certainly not the monarch herself, who said in a speech during her annus horribilis in 1992 that the monarchy should not be free from scrutiny, and that there should be no holding back from debate about it.' The monarchy, it is said, adapts itself so as to meet the requirements of a changing society.2 Individuals and institutions suggest changes to the monarchy from time to time, an especially helpful recent critique having been offered by the Fabian Society.3 The reforms which are urged most often concern the legal qualifications required of the monarch, particularly as to religion. But I am not concerned here with the substantive arguments about whether this or that aspect of the law on the monarchy should be reformed,4 nor, indeed, with the fundamental question of whether there should be a monarchy at all.5 Reforms that could be achieved by changes in practice or to constitutional convention are also outside my remit. Rather, I want to examine why, despite calls for change, comparatively little legislation has been enacted about the monarchy in modern times. Why has the monarchy so unusually for major constitutional institutions, especially since 1997 remained beyond the legislative zeal of Parliament to the extent that it has? If legislation were to be contemplated, what legislative processes and difficulties would have to be navigated? Are there any foreseeable spurs to fresh legislation? Those are the sorts of questions which this article aims to answer.

T H Green and the Development of Ethical SocialismNew Labour's Old Root: Revisionist Thinkers in Labour's History 1931–1997sFightback! Labour's Traditional Right in the 1970s and 1980s

All these three books, in their various ways, seek to cast light on the origins and character of New Labour. The two theoretical books—by Carter and Diamond—differ considerable in shape and purpose. Carter's has its origins in his doctoral dissertation and much of it is devoted to exploring the role played by T. H. Green's idealism in shaping the philosophical basis of New Liberalism and ethical socialism. Diamond's book is an edited compilation containing extracts of works from those he sees as key revisionist thinkers, ranging from Douglas Jay, Tony Crosland, and Hugh Gaitskell to David Marquand, Giles Radice and Roy Hattersley—to name but a few. Dianne Hayter's ‘Fightback!’, in contrast, is about politics in the raw: the struggle by Labour's right to recapture control of the party. Each of the authors, it is worth noting, have practical experience of Labour party politics: Matt Carter as a former General Secretary of the party, Patrick Diamond as a number 10 staffer (Tony Blair wrote a preface for his volume) and Dianne Hayter as both a long-time chair of the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society and as a member of the party's National Executive Committee.

‘Laying a foundation of fact’: Fabianism and the information society thesis

This article explores affinities between postindustrialism and modes of thinking characteristic of the Fabian Society, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. In the hands of Daniel Bell and others, the information society thesis postulates the coming of a postindustrial society marked by the centrality of information and knowledge. While caveats abound in Bell's version, the thesis has been generally optimistic in outlook, portraying postindustrial society as an advanced level of social development. Interestingly, the Fabian Society, a British-based organization highly influential in the twentieth-century project of social democracy, also emphasized information in its advocacy of social progress: ‘laying a foundation of fact’, according to one commentator, was a key ingredient of the Fabian approach. Texts by thinkers such as Sidney Webb and H.G. Wells suggest that ‘informationalism’, a commitment to information in an original sense of hard facts and figures, must indeed be construed as the essence of Fabianism, as that which distinguishes the Fabians from more metaphysical or emotional expressions of socialism. The article traces the link between information-powered politics and the largely successful practice of social engineering in Britain. However, social engineering can, and in the case of some Fabians did, degenerate into a technocratic and even totalitarian mindset. Critiques of Fabianism are therefore also acknowledged here, including those claiming that the Fabian preoccupation with data-gathering and filing, its ‘proceduralism’, actually constituted a major weakness. However, given its noble informational ideal, Fabianism can, the article concludes, illuminate contemporary information society problems. The Fabian tradition contains suggestive materials on such topical themes as fair access to information, the role of facts in progressive politics, and the prospects for an international institutional order.

Incest and the Trafficking of Women in Mrs. Warren's Profession : "It Runs in the Family"

Incest and the Trafficking of Women in Mrs. Warren's Profession: "It Runs in the Family" Petra Dierkes-Thrun California State University, Northridge MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION (1893), the third play in George Bernard Shaw's Plays Unpleasant trilogy, provoked Victorians by putting not one, but two taboo topics on the public stage: prostitution and incest. Instead of unequivocally condemning the individual figure of the prostitute as a scapegoat for moral hypocrisy and sexual promiscuity , the play critiqued the ideological and economic system that produced her, attacking the problematic double standard of male privilege and the deeply entrenched objectification of women, which Shaw saw pervading all levels of Victorian society down to its most basic nuclear element, the family. While the controversial representation of prostitution as a dramatic topic in Mrs. Warren's Profession is clearly the major reason the play remained banned from the British public stage until 1925 (even though Shaw never actually used the words "prostitution" or "prostitute" in it), its incest theme contributed strongly to the brewing controversy concerning Shaw's Fabian socialist and feminist literary stance. The reviewer for the New York Herald, for instance, wrote that the play was "morally rotten," "defend [ed] immorality" and "glorifie [d] debauchery," and stressed that "worst of all," it "countenance [d] the most revolting form of degeneracy, by flippantly discussing the marriage of brother and sister, father and daughter."1 According to the social reformer Shaw, it was one of the most important tasks of the modern dramatist to put such uncomfortable subjects in the public pillory. In a 1907 letter to The Nation, in which he protested the dramatic censorship of such taboo material as nonconformist sexuality, crime, and disease, Shaw argued that "it is futile to plead that the stage is not the proper place for the representa293 ELT 49:3 2006 tion and discussion of illegal operations, incest and venereal disease. If the stage is the proper place for the exhibition and discussion of seduction , adultery, promiscuity and prostitution, it must be thrown open to all the consequences of these things, or it will demoralize the nation."2 To Shaw, incest and prostitution both exemplified the victimization of young women and girls, not just in brothels but also in private lives, to which society conveniently turned a blind eye. While Shaw's stance on prostitution in Mrs. Warren's Profession has been extensively discussed by scholars, the play's incest theme has received surprisingly little critical attention, despite its clear role in earlier manuscript versions (toned down for the 1898 publication).3 Its comparative dismissal as a major dramatic element in its own right is exemplified by a brief comment Dan H. Laurence makes in a recent article, where he argues that the "presence of incest, as Shaw slips it in, is just sufficient to remind the audience that incest is a natural consequence of an iniquitous system tolerated by a profit-minded society. Promiscuous sexual intercourse must inevitably result in the raising of insoluble questions of consanguinity."4 Laurence is of course correct in suggesting that in Mrs. Warren's Profession incest and prostitution are inextricably intertwined. But the incest theme is more than a mere supporting tool for Shaw's criticism of nineteenth-century prostitution: just as the selling of women's bodies has directly or indirectly touched the lives of all the characters in the play and makes them appear interconnected in deeply ambiguous and problematic ways, suggestions of incest and forbidden erotic entanglements extend far into the complicated social and erotic network of relations that touches and preys on Vivie and Mrs. Warren. The incest theme in Mrs. Warren's Profession exists on two levels: biological incest (such as the suggested blood relation between Frank and Vivie, and possibly between Vivie and the lecherous Sir George Crofts), and impure desire that cuts across multiple relationships between the two women and two generations of male lovers and suitors. Shaw's play casts a deliberately wide net around several possible fathers and lovers for Vivie who are, incidentally, all erotically or romantically connected to Mrs. Warren as well, so that the differences between the two individual women, prostitute and New Woman, mother and...

A British Connexion? A quantitative analysis of the changing relations between American, British and Canadian sociologists

Is Canadian facing a crisis? Depending on one's point of view and temperament, one can always provide arguments for comfort or alarm. Although we recognize that some debates are difficult, if not impossible to settle, we are also convinced that most questions framed in terms of crisis are unfalsifiable and particularly ill-suited for constructive analysis, and can easily lead to tavern-like discussions and grandiose pronouncements. McLaughlin's recent discussions of Canadian sociology's future (McLaughlin, 2004, 2005, 2006) and debate they have fuelled provide an illustration of such artificial polemics created by an inadequate formulation of question and insufficient methodologies to provide an answer. McLaughlin emphasizes institutional weakness of Canadian sociological tradition. This institutional weakness would be a reflection of Canadian sociology's historical connections to kind of social sciences practiced in United-Kingdom and consequently explains its meagre appeal to scientific field (McLaughlin, 2004 and 2005). Assuming that is a weakly institutionalized and that Canadian is excessively embedded within tradition, it should surprise no one that McLaughlin concludes that this has hurt development of a strong sociological perspective in (McLaughlin, 2004: 89). Combined with two other major factors--the flatness' or non-hierarchical nature of Canadian system and left-wing orientation of Canadian (McLaughlin, 2004)--the British flavour pervading Canadian universities has not only hampered development of a distinct and serious but threatens to make it cease to exist in Canada in anything more than name alone (McLaughlin, 2005: 6). In reading McLaughlin's articles it is unclear whether he believes Englishness of Canadian to be either a cause or effect of a vague but persistent anti-American sentiment among Canadian scholars. This indifference hostility to sociology (McLaughlin, 2005: 19) nevertheless is treated as self-evident. Far too much of Canadian has become dominated by a knee-jerk anti-Americanism, leaving us vulnerable to falling uncritically in with trends in European-oriented critical humanities. (McLaughlin, 2004: 92) Since article provides reader with no empirical evidence of such implicit xenophobia, one is reluctant to take author's word for it as very existence of a homogeneous American sociology is dubious at best, given its high diversity in methods and approaches. Is McLaughlin correct in assuming that continuing reliance of Canadian scholars on is something that can be seen in terms of faculty hiring, university governance, and culture as well as intellectual orientation of Canadian institutions of higher education (McLaughlin 2004: 89)? Should readers believe him when he claims that is neglected by Canadian social scientists? We leave to others to assess if McLaughlin is right in arguing that England, the homeland of empiricism, classical liberal political and economic thought, Fabian socialism and analytic philosophy, truly remains a relative backwater with regards to discipline of sociology (McLaughlin, 2005: 16). What appears more problematic in our eyes is that throughout his three lengthy papers, author mainly relies on quotations from a few Canadian sociologists, vague intuitions and unquestioned judgements to substantiate his claims. The only fact offered as hard evidence of embedment of Canadian within a tradition is that even as late as 1997, faculty in departments with M.As and PhD. Programs in Canada where ten times more likely to be trained in Britain than faculty at equivalent institutions in United States (McLaughlin, 2004: 90, emphasis by author). …

The Rhetoric of Efficiency in Early Modernism

The Rhetoric of Efficiency in Early Modernism Suzanne Raitt (bio) In the 1909 preface to "The Altar of the Dead," Henry James proclaimed his "earnest aversion to waste" and his belief that "in art economy is always beauty."1 These ideas develop out of a culture in which efficiency, economy, and the elimination of waste were increasingly heralded as industrial and social ideals. Modernist art, like the industrial cultures of modernity, engages centrally with the rhetoric of efficiency, aiming at, in Ezra Pound's words, "maximum efficiency," but an anxiety about exactly how to identify what was efficient in a work of art meant that the modernists' quest for precision and compression was often a matter of rhetoric as much as of practice.2 Writers who identified themselves with a new, efficient art, such as Ezra Pound and Dorothy Richardson, disagreed profoundly over what that actually meant. The early years of British modernism saw the emergence of a number of different and apparently incompatible literary idioms, all of which were concerned with the ways in which literary writing did or did not waste words. In this article I shall focus on two of modernism's most characteristic and influential techniques, Imagism and stream of consciousness. Although the two might at first seem to be at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum, with Imagism featuring short forms such as the Japanese haiku, and stream of consciousness encouraging the inclusion of the smallest details in novels that could extend—like Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage—to thirteen substantial volumes, both methods aimed at adjusting the economy of the art-work to the economy of the world. Practitioners and critics of both techniques emphasized the thrifty nature of each form, arguing that the successful representation of the processes of [End Page 835] perception required every word that arrived on the page. Gone were the days of the decadent era when art could represent itself as useless and extol the wastefulness of those who produced it. Now writers were in tune with the British middle classes, eager to expand their share of the national wealth. Art had to be modern and to be modern meant to be accurate, stream-lined, and efficient. The efficiency movement In 1904, H.G. Wells delivered a lecture on local government to the Fabian Society and declared that the only question a local official need ask about different administrative structures was: "Which will give the maximum efficiency?"3 Wells' near-obsession with efficiency during this period was far from being an idiosyncrasy. The early decades of the twentieth century in Britain saw an explosion of exhortations and recommendations all aimed at increasing the efficiency of British society and minimizing its waste. As Jonathan Rose has noted, "Efficiency was, in fact, one of the great shibboleths of the Edwardian period," and in just a few years the ideal of efficiency had permeated almost every aspect of national life.4 Efficiency came in many forms—social efficiency, physical efficiency, industrial efficiency, domestic efficiency, mental efficiency, personal efficiency, and so on—but in all its manifestations, efficiency was designed first and foremost to eliminate waste. "Social efficiency," as Benjamin Kidd defined it in 1894, entitled the "superior" races to take control of the raw materials of the world: "the last thing our civilization is likely to permanently tolerate is the wasting of the resources of the richest regions of the earth through the lack of the elementary qualities of social efficiency in the races possessing them."5 The McKillops, popularizers of scientific management in Britain, announced in 1917 that increased industrial efficiency would result in "increase of production and elimination of waste," and in 1918, Henry Spooner, a London-based professor of engineering, noted that the "current of public opinion has been flowing strongly in the direction of economy and the elimination, or at least the reduction, of wastes."6 The promotion of efficiency was a way of eliminating the waste and the low productivity that was linked in the popular imagination to decadents, the unemployed, the "inferior races," and childless women, and as the rhetoric of efficiency saturated much public discourse, the category of waste became more and more capacious, more and...

Rendel Sebastian Pease. 2 November 1922 — 17 October 2004

Rendel Sebastian Pease, universally known to his friends and colleagues as Bas Pease, came from good political, scientific and Quaker stock. On his father's side he was descended from a long line of distinguished Quakers with an interest in social issues, including his grandfather Edward Pease, who was a co–founder and first secretary of the Fabian Society. On his mother's side his forebears included Josiah Wedgwood FRS, the founder of the Wedgwood pottery dynasty, whose descendents included no less than 10 Fellows of the Royal Society, including Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. The fourth generation of this remarkable family included Josiah Clement Wedgwood MP, First Lord Wedgwood of Barlaston, who became a Cabinet Minister under Ramsay McDonald in 1924. Bas's father, Michael Pease, a Cambridge geneticist, married Helen Wedgwood in 1920, and Bas was born on 2 November 1922.

"Poke Your Finger into the Soft Round Dough": The Absent Father and Political Reform in Edith Nesbit's The Railway Children

����� ��� Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906) stands fi rmly in the fi eld of subversive political children’s books, continuing in what Juliet Dusinberre calls in Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art “The irreverent tradition in children’s literature” (69). Using the genre’s simplistic and straightforward surface as a shield against censorship and criticism, Nesbit is engaging in political criticism and promoting social change. At the heart of Nesbit’s novel is her own brand of political ideology. Although infl uenced by her activities in the Fabian Society, Nesbit’s ideology offers a distinct and original position, especially concerning women’s issues—a position that has baffl ed her critics for years. In The Railway Children Nesbit, whose “soul was against the government all the time” (Wells 515), explores the common social phenomenon of the absence of the father from the home as a metaphor for the absence of patriarchic hierarchy in England. In doing so, she highlights all that stands in the way of much-needed social and political change. 1 In other words, she presents the absent father as an opportunity that opens new possibilities for an alternate social arrangement. Nesbit questions the three patriarchal institutions of empire, nation, and the family by removing the symbolic head of each in one fell swoop. Father’s absence allows for change and exposes often undetected obstacles to reform. According to Nesbit’s Fabianism, as long as men and women continue to think and behave according to conventional social and gender codes, they will not be able to create a new socialist society. In The Railway Children Nesbit deconstructs contemporary defi nitions of masculinity and femininity, disentangling them in order to expose their weaknesses and inadequacies in the progress of reform. Nesbit requires radical reform to produce not only a just, social democracy but also a society that is gender-blind, with equal opportunities for men and women of all classes.