England in the Eighteen Eighties by H. M . Lynd

Author:H. M . Lynd [Lynd, H. M .]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780429749070
Google: OgGaDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-05-23T03:01:20+00:00

Violent agitation and violent suppression in the ‘eighties continued as sporadic episodes. But the middle and upper classes, huddling behind the Channel and the reputed stability of English labor, none the less had intermittent night terrors of revolution. It needed but a protest gathering of 80,000 in Hyde Park or the smashing of windows in Pall Mall to start these giant shadows leaping athwart the consciousness of respectable Englishmen. Awareness of the possibility of ‘violence’ was just below the surface in the minds of the dockers and of the public when revolt broke out on the docks.

5. The dockers’ strike signalized a new kind of alliance between labor and certain sections of the middle class. The two hundred or more Radical workingmen's clubs in London, which, in the late ‘eighties had a membership of 25,000,92 and ‘directly controlled at least one-fifth of the Liberal votes of the Metropolis'93 had been largely initiated by middle-class leadership and financial support during the preceding twenty years. The first of these Radical clubs, combining social and political interests, was founded by one of the editors of The Beehive in the late ‘sixties. One of the most famous, the Eleusis Society of Chelsea financed by Sir Charles Dilke, was politically influential through a series of pamphlets, of which the first was entitled To Hell with Trade Unionism. By the time of the dock strike there were nearly 400 clubs in the Workingmen's Club and Institute Union throughout England with a total membership of about 100,000.*

These clubs, even when they became working class in leadership and support as well as in membership, were a phase of the Liberal-Labour Alliance. With the ‘eighties came a new middle-class movement which influenced labor in the direction of socialism rather than liberalism. Even the dissident workers within the old unions were largely concerned with ad hoc protests; like the old leaders they had no general program or principles of reform. Such a program, giving expression to the aspirations of labor, was provided by certain middle-class groups. The Social Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society gave the workers formulated ways of expressing the things they felt. The Social Democratic Federation, largely working class in membership, trained leaders of the new unionism and of the Independent Labour Party.†

To statements of protest the Social Democratic Federation added revolutionary slogans and the Fabian Society substantial facts on which to base a new program. Public education and the adult-education movement enabled workers to listen to lectures and to read pamphlets and papers. A number of such sheets were published in the ‘eighties and helped to focus labor opinion. The Beehive was dead, but Justice, the organ of the Social Democratic Federation, The Labour Elector, published privately by H. H. Champion of the Fabian Society, The Commonwealth of the Socialist League, The Link, published for a few years by Annie Besant, another Fabian, The Star, another Fabian product, Truth, published by Labouchere, The Workman's Times, edited by Joseph Burgess, in addition to Reynolds’ Newspaper and other smaller sheets—all served to formulate working-class dissent.

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