(1) Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams (1916)

The scenery and surroundings of Brighton are also bare and chilly enough; and trees, whose friendly covert I have always loved, do not exist there; but the place has two nature-elements in it - and these two singularly wild and untampered - the Sea and the Downs. We lived within two hundred yards of the sea, and its voice was in our ears night and day. On terrific stormy nights it was a grisly joy to go down to the water's edge at 10 or 11 p.m. - pitch darkness - feeling one's way with feet or hands, over the stony beach, hardly able to stand for the wind - and to watch the white breakers suddenly leap out of the gulf close upon one, the booming of the wind, like distant guns, and the occasional light of some vessel labouring for its life in the surge.

 

(2) Edward Carpenter joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1883.

My ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline. That outline as regards the industrial situation was given me by reading Hyndman's England For All. Later on in the same year I one evening looked in at a committee meeting of the Social Democratic Federation in Westminster Bridge Road. It was in the basement of one of one of those big buildings facing the House of Commons that I found a group of conspirators sitting. There was Hyndman, occupying the chair, and with him round the table, William Morris, John Burns, H. H. Champion, J. L. Joynes, Herbert Burrows, and others.

 

(3) In his book, My Days and Dreams, Edward Carpenter described joining the Socialist League in 1885.

Early in 1888 one or two of us got together to establish our own Sheffield Socialist Society. We persuaded William Morris to come down (early in March). At that time, William Morris, having with a few others parted from the Socialist League - branches of which were springing up merrily all over the country. And it was William Morris's great hope, often expressed in the Commonweal and elsewhere, that these branches growing and spreading, would before long "reach hands" to each other and form a network over the land - would constitute in fact the New Society within the framework of the old. There seemed a good hope for the realization of Morris' dream - and most of us shared in it. But history is a difficult horse to drive. The little Socialist League societies after flourishing gaily for a few years - suddenly began to wane and die out.

Our Sheffield Socialists organised lectures, addresses, pamphlets, with a street-corner propaganda which soon brought us in amusing and exciting incidents in the way of wrangles with the police and the town-crowds. At first an atmosphere of considerable suspicion rested upon the movement. Where there had been only jeers or taunts at first, crowds come to listen with serious and sympathetic men.

 

(4) Edward Carpenter was influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx.

In my book, England's Ideal, the influences of Ruskin, in style and moral bias, and of Marx in economics, are very apparent in the volume; and though I do not think that I ever gave myself "hand and foot" to Marx in his views; yet I was very willing to adopt his theory of surplus value as a working hypothesis. The general fact of surplus value, namely that the workmen does not get the full value of his labours, and that he is taken advantage of by the capitalist, is obvious.

 

(5) In his book, My Days and Dreams, Edward Carpenter described the events of Bloody Sunday.

A socialist meeting had been announced for 3 p.m. in Trafalgar Square, the authorities, probably thinking Socialism a much greater terror than it really was, had vetoed the meeting and drawn a ring of police, two deep, all round the interior part of the Square.

The three leading members of the SDF - Hyndman, Burns and Cunninghame Graham - agreed to march up arm-in-arm and force their way if possible into the charmed circle. Somehow Hyndman was lost in the crowd on the way to the battle, but Graham and Burns pushed their way through, challenged the forces of 'Law and Order', came to blows, and were duly mauled by the police, arrested, and locked up.

I was in the Square at the time. The crowd was a most good-humoured, easy going, smiling crowd; but presently it was transformed. A regiment of mounted police came cantering up. The order had gone forth that we were to be kept moving. To keep a crowd moving is I believe a technical term for the process of riding roughshod in all directions, scattering, frightening and batoning the people.

I saw my friend Robert Muirhead seized by the collar by a mounted man and dragged along, apparently towards a police station, while a bobby on foot aided in the arrest. I jumped to the rescue and slanged the two constables, for which I got a whack on the cheek-bone from a baton, but Muirhead was released.

The case came into Court afterwards, and Burns and Graham were sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment, each for "unlawful assembly". I was asked to give evidence in favour of the defendants, and gladly consented - though I had not much to say, except to testify to the peaceable character of the crowd and the high-handed action of the police. In cross-examination I was asked whether I had not seen any rioting; and when I replied in a very pointed way "Not on the part of the people!" a large smile went round the Court, and I was not plied with any more questions.

 

(6) Philip Snowden, An Autobiography (1934)

I brought and carefully studied, among other works, Hyndman's England for All and his Historical Basis of Socialism, which he claimed were the first works on scientific socialism published in English. They were based on Marx's Capital. I did not find these books so interesting and instructive as other volumes on the subject which I read. I derived much help and information from the Fabian Essays and the Fabian Tracts, and from the books of Edward Carpenter - England's Ideal and Civilisation, its Causes and Cure. I collected quite a library of old radical and socialist books and periodicals and pamphlets dating from the days of Hunt and Owen down to modern times.

 

Edward Carpenter

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