Self-Consuming Socialism

This 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.

H. G. Wells

This chapter shifts attention from reference in space to reference in time, in order to extend the argument about realism and metaphysics to a consideration of genres as ideological formations which must both engage with recognizable circumstances and possess an innate desire to defamiliarize, even contravene, the givens of the cultural symbolic world. The social problem novel highlights this paradox, because it can only imagine possible futures through extrapolation from present conditions. The future acts as another boundless context against which realist representation must be pivoted. Chapter 4 explores this temporal paradox in the novels of H. G. Wells, whose background in evolutionary biology and investment in performative socialist politics means he depicts contemporary society as already, in a sense, prescient. The conclusions drawn about the operation of temporality in Wells’s fiction—particularly his use of tenses and the odd, recurrent topos of metanarrative intrusion—are used to think through some of the implications for ‘condition of England’ writing as an oracular and dialectical tradition within realism.

Introduction

An outline of the way in which the nineteenth century invented the idea of hunger as a physiological and material phenomenon whose radical epistemological powers were constructed across literature, medicine, and physiology, this Introduction seeks to offer an outline of how the book’s reading of the social-problem novel will draw on the methodologies associated with literature and science, new materialism, and somatic (bodily) or anthropological realism. It also introduces how the social novels of Kingsley, Gaskell, and Dickens promoted the development of knowledge and sympathy through both an emphasis on the material sufferings of the starving and a detailed analysis of what it means to go hungry, and to observe and to write about it in a way that seeks to be truthful.