Slow Print by Miller Elizabeth Carolyn;

Author:Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 26. Photograph of Tom Maguire, from Tom Maguire, A Remembrance (1895).

In 1880s Britain most of the major early socialist organizations were based in London but were eager to make footholds in the industrial North, which was everywhere recognized as fertile ground for socialist agitation because of labor conditions and because of its radical legacy, abiding in local movements such as cooperativism. Maguire was born in a working-class Irish Catholic family from what his friend Edward Carpenter called “the dingy wilds of East Leeds” (“Memoir” ix), a neighborhood that Tom Steele describes as a “densely populated slum . . . hous[ing] an enormous immigrant Irish population, possibly 20,000 strong. . . . The crowded courts and alleys where disease and pollution were widespread, were the breeding ground for socialists like Tom Maguire” (26). According to Carpenter, Maguire, who was responsible for his mother after his father’s death, “earned what living he could” as “errand-boy, then as photographer’s assistant, and photographer” (“Memoir” ix). At age 18 he was drawn to socialism after coming across a copy of the Christian Socialist at the Secular Hall bookstall (the apparent inconsistency of the venue and the magazine perfectly illustrates the unfussy bedfellowism of 1880s socialism). A year later, in 1884, Maguire helped set up a Leeds branch of the Social Democratic Federation, and in 1885, following Morris and others who left the Federation, he launched a Leeds branch of the Socialist League. Later, after the collapse of the League in the early 1890s, Maguire helped form the Leeds base of the Independent Labour Party. Unlike the Federation or the League, the Independent Labour Party was not a revolutionary organization but was focused on winning socialist parliamentary representation, and its roots were in the North rather than in London. To E. P. Thompson, “If we must have one man who played an outstanding role in opening the way for the I.L.P., that man was a semi-employed Leeds-Irish photographer in his late twenties—Tom Maguire” (“Homage” 279).28

Thompson observes of Maguire, “Provincial leaders are commonly denied full historical citizenship” (“Homage” 277). Maguire was a key provincial leader in early British socialism, but he was one of its key early writers as well. A general bias against the provincial in literary and historical studies has contributed to his eclipse, as has the general lack of attention to periodical poetry. Leeds was not London or Manchester, but it was an important base for late Victorian socialist literary activity. As I discuss in Chapter 5, at the turn of the twentieth century the Leeds Art Club, an “advanced” group formed in 1903 by Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson, “became one of the most interesting sites of radical thought and experimental art outside of London. It popularized the introduction of Nietzschean thought, cradled the early formation of Guild Socialism, [and] exhibited impressionist and post-impressionist painting” (Steele 1). The group was able to take root in Leeds because of this provincial city’s “heightened political consciousness,” which was the result of the “sudden blossoming

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