Abstract
Beatrice Webb first declared herself a socialist in the privacy of her diary in February 1890. In this entry, she was commenting on the political ferment in London at that time — on the ‘New Trade Unionism’, the success of the London Dock Strike and the influence of socialist groups — and she was beginning to be able to imagine a reconstructed social world emerging from this chaos of political and labour activity:
And the whole seems a whirl of contending actions, aspirations and aims out of which I dimly see the tendency towards a socialist community in which there will be individual freedom and public property in the stead of class-slavery and private possession of the means of subsistence of the whole People. At last I am a Socialist! (p. 394; 1 February 1890)
Providentialism was in the spirit of the age. Belief in the necessity of progress anyhow, was almost universal. Even Atheists believed in a sort of Providence.
H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography
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Chapter 7: Fabian Socialism
Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861–1881 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965) p. 254.
Willard Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian Socialist Doctrines, 1881–1889 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1975) p. 13.
Gertrud Lenzer (ed.), Auguste Comte and Positivism: the Essential Writings (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1975) p. xxxiii.
Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, the conditions essential to human happiness specified and the first of them developed (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1954 (1851)) p. 4.
Herbert Spencer, Autobiography (New York: Appleton, 1904) vol. i, p. 487.
Beatrice Potter, The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1899 (1891)) p. 221.
Beatrice Potter, ‘The Relationship between Co-operation and Trade Unionism’, paper read at Tynemouth, 15 August 1892 (Manchester: Co-operative Union, 1892) p. 13.
J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War: Ideas and Politics in Britain 1912–1918 (London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974) p. 34.
George Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches (London: Constable, 1949) pp. 56–9.
Edward R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963 (1918)) p. 44.
A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and British Politics, 1884–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) p. 26.
E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Fabians Reconsidered’, in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967) p. 311.
Sidney Webb, ‘Historic Basis of Socialism’, in G. Bernard Shaw (ed.), Fabian Essays and Socialism (London: Fabian Society and George Allen and Unwin, 1931 (1889)) p. 29.
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© 1985 Deborah Epstein Nord
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Nord, D.E. (1985). Fabian Socialism. In: The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07256-9_10
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