Notes
P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, London, 1908, pp. 255–6. Club and Institute MS appeal, dated January 1873; quoted in John Taylor, Self Help to Glamour: The Working Men’s Clubs, 1860–1972, History Workshop Pamphlet No 7, London, 1972. John Taylor, op. cit. Quoted in John Taylor, op. cit. The biographical information on Kitz is taken from his ‘Recollections and Reflections’, in Freedom, January–July 1912, and also from Stan Shipley, Club Life and Socialism in Mid-Victorian London, History Workshop Pamphlet No. 5, London, 1972. Quotes to this point from Freedom, January 1912. For the ex-members of the British Federation of the First International he mentions, see Documents of the First International, London/Moscow, 1964. Of particular interest is George Harris,... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Afterword
BIOGRAPHIES ALFRED BARTON Alfred Barton was born on 30th July 1868 at Kempton in Bedfordshire, the son of a foundry laborer Henry Barton and his wife Eliza, née Savill. Self-educated, he became well informed in philosophy and history, especially classical history. He was able to read several languages. Not much is known of his early years in Bedfordshire. His first job was in a public library at the age of 12. He left home around 1890 to go to Manchester. Here he became a member of the Socialist League, and already had strong anarchist tendencies. He worked first as a clerk and then in Rylands Library. He threw himself into the work of the League which began an intensive propaganda campaign. Active alongside him was Herbert Stockton (an odd job man and later an industrial assurance agent according to George Cores), who ran a drapers shop in Levenshulme, and his brother Ernest. Very active during the free speech fight led... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Bibliography
BIBLIOGRAPHY To paraphrase Kropotkin, the history of anarchism does not reside in books — at least as far as England is concerned. Nevertheless two books must be singled out for special mention even though the first is hostile to anarchism and the second never seems to have heard of it. These are E.P. Thompson’s William Morris and Walter Kendall’s The Revolutionary Movement in Britain. E.P. Thompson’s book exhaustively covers the Socialist League period and Morris’s relationship with the anarchists and gives a more detailed picture of the early socialist movement than I had space to do. Outside these areas, particularly when he is dealing with anarchists, he should be treated with caution. Walter Kendall’s book is only about a part of the revolutionary movement in Britain but gives a fact-packed summary of some of the developments on the left before and during the Syndicalist Revolt and is particularly interesti... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 16 : In Conclusion: Continuity and Change in the Anarchist Movement
Chapter 16. IN CONCLUSION: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT The anarchist movement did not cease circa 1930. Anarchism was to enjoy something of a resurgence in the later 1930s, largely inspired by the activity of the anarchists in Spain during the Civil War and Revolution of 1936–1939. The younger militants of that time, or at least some of them, are still active in the movement, and the events of that time and the years since then are still live issues and matters of polemic. (It would be a brave historian who tried to argue too much with the living, particularly since the tone of voice of history is one which implies that the events it describes are past and done with. My comrades would not relish that.) The anarchists have since shown the same astonishing ability to suddenly come from nowhere when everybody had assumed that they were finished with as they did in the years before World War One, though perhaps on a smaller scale. The... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 15 : World War One -- And After
Chapter 15. WORLD WAR ONE — AND AFTER When war was declared on 4th August 1914, it came as a surprise. No matter that warning voices had been raised on the danger of war, no matter the direst predictions of the anti-militarists, the fact that a war had started in Europe was a surprise. From our position in history we look back at that bloody waste of life, appalled and wondering. How could people not only allow themselves to be sucked into that war, how could they voluntarily march off into its jaws? Yet in 1914 the only wars that generations had known had been squalid little wars conducted by regular armies in far-flung corners of the world, carving out empires and markets over the bodies of native populations hardly equipped to resist. The exceptions (at the Crimea and the Franco-Prussian War) were many years in the past and had been much less than total wars. The tightening web of alliances arising out of the rival imperialisms of the m... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Insurgent Virus
Chapter 14. THE INSURGENT VIRUS The period 1910 to 1914 and the subsequent period during World War One and its aftermath are among the most interesting in British history for the historian of working-class movements. They are also the most difficult to write about, the very scale of events requiring a great deal of detailed original research organized by the skills of an epic novelist. Such a book, though badly needed, has not yet been written. Certainly the present work is not intended to fill that gap. It is, however, preparative to such a work in that it restores to notice the almost completely ignored anarchist contribution. This is not done in the spirit of what has been called the Jewish Chronicle style of history writing: that journa... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Anarchism and the Origins of the Syndicalist Revolt, 1889-1910
Chapter 13. ANARCHISM AND THE ORIGINS OF THE SYNDICALIST REVOLT, 1889–1910 Socialists develop theoretical ideas of the nature of their society, the nature of a more desirable future and the manner of the transition between them. Mass action develops through forms designed for immediate use which can have great implications hardly perceived by the majority of participants. Socialist theory and mass action may not combine on any great scale. When they do both are transformed. The result is an explosion of popular creativity, a ‘positive self-consciousness’ which makes particular struggles into general ones and abstract discussion into urgent questions of practice. The implications of such situations are revolutionary and cir... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION Some years ago I was talking to a friend of mine in Leeds who was doing a thesis on British labor history. He asked me if I had ever heard of a group of people who had been arrested for a bomb conspiracy in 1892, a group known as the Walsall anarchists. What? British anarchists? I had never heard anything like it. I had cut my eye teeth as an anarchist arguing with Trotskyists and communists over Spain and Russia. I had wondered why left-wing politics always had to do with foreign parts, though I had found much disputational mileage in the events in Barcelona in 1936 (‘the capacity of the proletariat for spontaneous self-activity’) and Kronstadt in 1921 (‘the Bolsheviks were not fighting the counter... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Collapse of the Commonweal
Chapter 9. THE COLLAPSE OF THE COMMONWEAL The anarchists had become the apostles of total destruction in the more gullible sections of the popular imagination. The mad professor in The Secret Agent, the anarchists in G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and the figure in cloak and wide-brimmed hat carrying a bomb marked ‘BOMB’ in Pip Squeak and Wilfred cartoons were all variations on a stereotype developed in the early 1890s. This was obviously related to some of the activities and statements of recognized anarchist militants. But it was also to do with the activities of agents provocateurs like Coulon, whose Anarchist Feast at the Opera had been read to such effect at the Walsall trial, and the quite blatant use of ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Movement in 1894
Chapter 10. THE MOVEMENT IN 1894 In the years 1889–1891 there had been a positive orgy of trades union organizing. There has been no satisfactory attempt to describe and analyze this phenomenon as a whole, much needed though it is. It is clear though that the ‘terms of trade’ had swung in favor of labor, which made such organization very much more simple. The combativeness had obviously been stimulated by the unemployed agitation and socialists in the previous years. The gains of 1889–1890 began to be eroded by unemployment and the counter-attack of the employers. Unemployment rose seriously between 1891 and 1893. Yet the earlier gains were not given up without a struggle. Defensive strikes occurred in many places. S... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)