Eleanor Marx: A Life by Rachel Holmes, and: Modernism and British Socialism by Thomas Linehan (review)

Socialism is back in the Anglo-American world. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning election to leadership of the Labour party marks the terminus of the Blairite New Labour era. In the U.S., Bernie Sanders has conducted the most consequential socialist presidential run since Norman Thomas’s final campaign in 1948. If socialism is enjoying a revival of sorts in politics, it is, too, experiencing a renaissance in Victorianist scholarship, as works by Thomas Linehan and Rachel Holmes indicate.

In his wide-ranging Modernism and British Socialism, Thomas Linehan seeks to revise our understanding of the Victorian socialist revival in two interconnected ways. Citing the wildfire spread and millennialist exuberance of British socialism, he argues that we should interpret it as “one of the principle revitalisation movements of the fin de siècle” (28). Socialism’s utopian and metaphysical currents were not merely a “quirky sub-text” to some larger narrative, whether the dawn of social democracy or the triumph of class-consciousness (6). Rather, it comprised the story itself. Many socialists “hoped to usher in a new age that would be more spiritual as well as more egalitarian, an age that had shed the allegedly decadent values of the old world of Victorian materialism, positivism, and self-interestedness” (28). Consequently—and this is Linehan’s second large claim—“British socialism was a species of modernism in its own right” (6). Although the book makes incisive observations about both socialism and modernism, it is more successful at establishing its first claim than its second.

No one who has spent time in the fin-de-siècle socialist archive could maintain that British socialists were exclusively concerned with sociopolitical equality or surplus value. Linehan deserves praise for refusing to rest content with euphemisms like “ethical socialism” to account for this metaphysical luxuriance. Building upon the work of historians such as Stephen Yeo and Mark Bevir, he demonstrates the multifarious ways in which socialist ambition encroached upon the realms of the spiritual, the utopian, and the mythic. It is refreshing to read a book in which understudied figures such as William Jupp and Caroline Martyn get respectful attention—and in which Edward Carpenter, the sandal-clad mystic of Millthorpe, is taken as a more typical socialist than William Morris. I particularly admire chapters 4 and 5, which interpret the manifold communitarian experiments socialists undertook as efforts to contest the homogenizing and desacralizing imperatives of “capitalist space” (79).

I am more ambivalent about Linehan’s contention that British socialism was a “modernist” phenomenon. This monograph appears in Palgrave’s “Modernism and . . .” series, and Linehan subscribes to the “‘maximalist’ concept of modernism” it advocates (6). This maximalist view sees “the modernist project” as extending beyond the arts and the avant-garde “to embrace political and social manifestations of revolt which were fuelled by an urge to regenerate meaning and forge deeper spiritual bonds in a world thought to be lapsing into decadence” (6). This sounds promising, particularly after Linehan’s adroit first chapter, which defines modernism by synthesizing insights from the likes of Fredric Jameson, Zygmunt Bauman, and Reinhart Koselleck, and gestures to the centuries-long horizon over which the process unfolded.

The trouble begins, at least for this reader, when Linehan enumerates some of the modernist characteristics of socialism: a valorization of moments of heightened spiritual awareness, a mythic sensibility, a veneration of childhood and the primitive. But what makes this modernist rather than Romantic? We have long known the significance of Thomas Carlyle, Percy Shelley, and other Romantics to the socialist revival. And if Romanticism falls within the ambit of a maximalist modernism—as it surely must—why are modernist mainstays (T. S. Eliot, Wassily Kandinsky) and concepts (collage, epiphany) so frequently evoked as...