The History of the Fabian SocietyPease, Edward R. (Edward Reynolds)
History
The History of the Fabian Society
Pease, Edward R. (Edward Reynolds)
Fabian Society (Great Britain); Socialism -- Great Britain
The Society still met as a rule at 17 Osnaburgh Street, or in the rooms
of Frank Podmore at 14 Dean's Yard, Westminster, but it was steadily
growing and new members were elected at every meeting. Although most of
the members were young men of university education, the Society included
people of various ages. To us at any rate Mrs. James Hinton, widow of
Dr. Hinton, and her sisters, Miss Haddon and Miss Caroline Haddon,
seemed to be at least elderly. Mrs. Robins, her husband (a successful
architect), and her daughter, who acted as "assistant" honorary
secretary for the first eighteen months, lent an air of prosperous
respectability to our earliest meetings. Mr. and Mrs. J. Glode
Stapleton, who were prominent members for some years, were remarkable
amongst us because they drove to our meetings in their own brougham! The
working classes, as before mentioned, had but a single representative.
Another prominent member at this period was Mrs. Charlotte M. Wilson,
wife of a stock-broker living in Hampstead, who a short time later
"simplified" into a cottage at the end of the Heath, called Wildwood
Farm, now a part of the Garden Suburb Estate, where Fabians for many
years held the most delightful of their social gatherings. Mrs. Wilson
was elected to the Executive of five in December, 1884 (Mrs. Wilson, H.
Bland, E.R. Pease, G. Bernard Shaw and F. Keddell), but after some time
devoted herself entirely to the Anarchist movement, led by Prince
Kropotkin, and for some years edited their paper, "Freedom." But she
remained throughout a member of the Fabian Society, and twenty years
later she resumed her Fabian activity, as will be related in a later
chapter.
All this time the Socialist movement in England was coming into public
notice with startling rapidity. In January, 1884, "Justice, the organ of
the Democratic Federation," was founded, and in August of that year the
Federation made the first of its many changes of name, and became the
Social Democratic Federation or S.D.F. The public then believed, as the
Socialists also necessarily believed, that Socialism would be so
attractive to working-class electors that they would follow its banner
as soon as it was raised, and the candidatures undertaken by the S.D.F.
at the General Election in November, 1885, produced widespread alarm
amongst politicians of both parties. The following account of this
episode from Fabian Tract 41, "The Early History of the Fabian Society,"
was written by Bernard Shaw in 1892, and describes the events and our
attitude at the time far more freshly and graphically than anything I
can write nearly thirty years later.
After explaining why he preferred joining the Fabian Society rather than
the S.D.F., Mr. Shaw goes on (pp. 4-7):--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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