"It Had to Come Back": The Paris Commune and H. G. Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes

The Paris Commune, according to Eric Hobsbawm, provoked an "international outburst of hysteria among the rulers of Europe and among its terrified middle classes."¹ Despite its eventual suppression and defeat, the Commune became a crucially important talisman for the emerging socialist movement in Britain at the fin de siècle. Annual celebrations provided occasions in which sectarian animosities between different groupings and organizations could be temporarily put aside. In the year following the inaugural London commemoration of the Commune, William Morris delivered a lecture on "The Hopes of Civilization" (1885) to the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League in which he argued that the communards' "heroic attempt" provides an example to "all Socialists" that "will give hope and ardour in the cause as long as it is to be won; we feel as though the Paris workman had striven to bring the day-dawn for us, and had lifted the sun's rim over the horizon, never to set in utter darkness again."² For Morris, the suppression of the Commune acted as an impetus to commemorate its defeat, and to communicate the responsibility of the living to create a meaning for the otherwise futile sacrifice of some 25,000 "brave and honest revolutionists" (CW, 23.74).³

In an article entitled "Why We Celebrate the Commune of Paris," written for the Socialist League journal Commonweal in 1887, Morris similarly remarked that "[t]he Commune of Paris is but one link in the struggle which has gone on through all history of the oppressed against the oppressors; and without all the defeats of past times we should now have no hope of the final victory."⁴ Other socialists' imaginative horizons were much narrower and more temporally circumscribed. Henry Mayers Hyndman, the former Tory radical and leader of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), relied upon a provocative allusion to the Commune in order to elucidate his approbation for the achievements of the Metropolitan Board of Works. In his pamphlet A Commune for London, Hyndman celebrates the "enormous changes … which have been made in well-to-do London in our own time," noting that the "modifications have gone on at an ever-increasing rate of progress," so much so that "[a] mere recital of what has been done in the last quarter of a century scarcely gives an idea, even to those who have witnessed it, of the transformation which has been wrought."⁵ Hyndman's "mere recital" of the achievements of the Metropolitan Board of Works (constituted in 1855), including the completion of New Oxford Street and the Holborn Viaduct, the great Main Drainage Scheme, and the laying out of Battersea, Victoria, and Finsbury Parks, is particularly impressive as an example of London's "continuous process of demolition and reconstruction" described by Lynda Nead.⁶ Hyndman's rollcall of achievements indicates that the response of fin-de-siècle socialists to the reality of metropolitan growth was not exclusively constrained within the discursive framework of Morris's romantic antiurbanism.

It is particularly noticeable that Hyndman had recourse to the Commune in sketching out his vision of a better-planned built environment, organized according to human need, rather than profit, not least because his reference cuts against mainstream invocations of the Commune as a synonym for chaotic conflagration. Hyndman elsewhere debunked reactionary misrepresentations of the Commune, writing in The Historical Basis of Socialism in England that "[w]hilst the middle class is content, as a rule, to think of the insurrection as an affair of petroleuses and dynamitards, the Socialist party constantly recalls that … Paris was never so peaceful nor were so few crimes ever committed within a like period as during the supremacy of the much abused Commune."⁷ In A Commune for London, by contrast, a certain indeterminacy and semantic instability hovers around the very word "Commune," given that Hyndman makes no direct reference to the Parisian events of 1871. Indeed, Hyndman's use of the indefinite article in his title suggests an older meaning of the word, associated with the smallest administrative division of French territorial...