When socialism was proposed as the alternative to class struggle
3 December, 2025
Author: Colin Waugh
In the article titled The Chartist workers” fight for knowledge (Solidarity 751), I set out to show that an important dimension of the Chartist movement was an aspiration towards “really useful knowledge”.
A visceral hatred and fear of Chartism was widespread amongst the well-off in the late 1830s and the “hungry forties”. The “Corn Law rhymer” Ebenezer Elliott summed up what lay behind this when he wrote:
“Prepare to meet the King of Terrors” cried
To prayerless Want, his plunderer ferret-eyed.
“I am the King of Terrors,” Want replied.
In other words, the well-off feared what starving workers might do. Especially after the 1839 events in Newport and the 1842 “Plug Plot”, many would have seen the Chartists as a subhuman mob that must be crushed before they could destroy the social order.
However, for much of the second half of the 1840s it seemed as if the Chartist threat might have subsided. Then in the early months of 1848, stimulated especially by the February revolution in France, the Chartists made plans to submit a third petition to parliament, on 10 April. This revival of Chartism stirred up so much fear that 70,000 people across London were sworn in as special constables, cutlasses were issued to the regular police, and a military force, including cavalry and artillery, was lined up to stop the Chartist demonstration moving from its assembly point on Kennington Common to Parliament. This confrontation ended in anti-climax. Nevertheless it was with the aim of forestalling a further revival of Chartism that the first Christian Socialist group was formed that evening, at a house in Bloomsbury.
Group
This group was started by two lawyers, John Ludlow (1821-1911) and Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), and two Church of England clerics, Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872). Within a short time they won support from a substantial body of well-off people and also from a few working-class activists. Their strategy had two linked aspects: a drive to provide workers with religious education and a drive to promote producer cooperatives. In 1854, when the link was broken, the group disintegrated.
The Christian Socialists’ conception of religious education derived ultimately from a view put forward by the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1830, following the two acts of parliament (1828 and 1829) that had removed some of the legal restrictions on Catholics, Coleridge argued that the Anglican church could justify the tithes (ie the compulsory taxes) by which it was supported) if its priests everywhere were to be organised as a “clerisy” — that is, a national network that would provide education, both religious and general, to the working population.
Then in 1840, when the fear of Chartism was already very high, the influential — and racist — writer Thomas Carlyle published a short book titled Chartism. In this he urged that Chartism must be defeated before it was too late, and that the answer was (a) to get workers to emigrate and (b) to teach those who remained to read. He said that the Anglican clergy must do this teaching, and alleged that so far they had failed to do so.
The education strand within Christian Socialism derived, then, from Coleridge’s concept of clerisy and this demand by Carlyle.
Important
The single most important organiser of the Christian Socialist group was John Ludlow. He was descended from Edmund Ludlow, the Civil War general who in 1649 had signed the king’s death warrant. He was born in India where his father was a soldier, educated in France, and then became a lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn. (He spent a good deal of time visiting his sister and her husband in Martinique.) In 1830, when he was ten, Ludlow watched a crowd surging along the street in Paris at the start of the July revolution that overthrew the Bourbon monarchy. Later, having become an adherent of the critical utopian socialist Charles Fourier, he was strongly influenced by the Protestant cleric Louis Meyer. Meyer had founded a movement aimed at getting affluent young men to help the poor. He urged Ludlow to start a similar group in London. Ludlow was also influenced by the strands in French socialism which aimed to build producer cooperatives. Once in England he contacted Maurice, twenty years his senior, and recruited him to both these causes.
Abandoned
Maurice was brought up as a Unitarian, but as a young adult abandoned this to become a broad church Anglican — i.e. he rejected on the one hand the evangelical emphasis on salvation or damnation in an afterlife and, on the other, the high church tendency that sought to move closer to Catholicism. When Ludlow first knew him, Maurice was the Chaplain at Lincoln’s Inn and also a professor at King’s College, the institution set up in 1829 by Anglicans to counter the supposedly irreligious University College. From the late 1830s Maurice had been firmly convinced that Chartism must, in his word, be “crushed”.
Kingsley, no less racist than Carlyle, was an Anglican vicar in Hampshire. He wrote two influential anti-Chartist novels: Yeast, A Problem (1848) and Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850). (Both these books were heavily influenced by Carlyle, and a character based on Carlyle, Sandy Mackaye, is central figure in the second.) Kingsley’s favourite line was to claim that although he was a parson he was also a Chartist (a barefaced lie). He went on:
I am not one of those who laugh at your petition of April 10th; I have no patience with those who do... But my quarrel with the Charter is that it does not go far enough in reform. I want to set you free, but I don’t see how what you ask will give you what you want. I think you have fallen into the same mistake as the rich of whom you complain... I mean the mistake of fancying that legislative reform is social reform, or that men’s hearts can be changed by Acts of Parliament. If anyone will tell me of a country where a charter made rogues honest or the idle industrious, I shall alter my opinion of the Charter, but not till then... Be fit to be free and God himself will set you free.
The group of workers recruited by the Christian Socialists included several significant activists. The most important of these was Lloyd Jones (1811-1886). Starting out as a fustian cutter in Ireland, Jones was by 1849 a tailor in London, having been a high profile Owenite socialist organiser across much of England, including Lancashire, Yorkshire and London itself. After the Christian Socialist group as such broke up in 1854, Jones would go on to work closely with Ludlow and Hughes in the drive to give cooperatives and unions a stable legal basis. He did this right up to his death in 1886 while at no stage moving from his initial agnostic stance on religion.
Involved
In April 1849 these and many other workers became involved in bible reading and scripture discussion sessions led impressively by Maurice at the Cranbourne Coffee Tavern in The Strand, London, and then in the nearby Hall of Association, which had been built by one of their workers” cooperatives. They persuaded artisans in several trades, notably tailors, bakers and shoemakers, to form cooperatives. However by 1854 most of these cooperatives had either failed or become small capitalist firms.
Following the formation of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) in 1851, engineering employers throughout the country declared a lockout beginning on 1 January 1852, the aim being to get workers to sign “the document”, ie an undertaking not to join the union. There was a long struggle, but by June the engineers had been starved back to work. In this situation, the Christian Socialist group convinced the ASE leader (and co-founder) William Newton to put a motion to the national executive as follows:
That in the opinion of this meeting the resistance of Labour against Capital is not calculated to enhance the condition of the labourers. We therefore advise that all our future operations should be directed to promoting the system of self-employment in associative workshops as the best means of effectually regulating the conditions of labour.
As a result of this, and with Christian Socialist financial support, two cooperative engineering workshops were set up in London, one in Mile End Road and one in Southwark. But like the other Christian Socialist cooperatives both of these failed shortly afterwards — in this case essentially because ASE activists were more interested in organising struggle against mainstream employers.
Maurice’s idea of “socialism” was that all humans were children of God. In his opinion, then, all workers had to do to change their situation for the better was to recognise this and treat one another as brothers or sisters. Maurice also believed that the class structure of society was made by God and that therefore workers should not seek to change it. He saw producer cooperatives as a means by which they could treat one another appropriately, and his initial support for the formation of cooperatives was based on this. However, he rejected any idea of political organisation, especially any version of it that entailed majority rule, and in 1854 this finally led him to separate himself from the other group members.
In 1853 he had been sacked from his post at King’s College, on the grounds that he disbelieved in eternal damnation. Early in 1854 he convinced the other Christian Socialists that they should set up the London Workingmen’s College, and this opened in the October with Maurice as principal.
Cooperative
Although they continued to work with Maurice through this college, Ludlow and Hughes from this point increasingly devoted themselves, especially in conjunction with Lloyd Jones, to the cooperative movement, working through parliament to improve the legal position both of cooperatives and other workers’ self-help organisations, including both burial societies and trade unions. Ludlow drafted two parliamentary bills granting limited liability to these organisations. Hughes became a Liberal MP and Ludlow eventually became the national Registrar (i.e. the top civil servant responsible) for Friendly Societies. (Towards the end of their lives both Maurice and KIngsley became professors at Cambridge. Kingsley was appointed as professor of modern history there in 1860, having been appointed the year before as chaplain to the Queen. In 1861 he also became a private tutor to the Prince of Wales.)
In his 1954 book chapter The Christian Socialists of 1848, John Saville, at that stage still a Communist Party member, argued that the main effect of the Christian Socialist group’s 1848-54 activity was to make it more difficult than it would otherwise have been for Ernest Jones and others to rebuild the Chartist movement in the 1850s, thereby contributing to a situation in which “the majority of the British working class lived in conditions of semi-literacy and material poverty and insecurity for many decades to come”.
A third article will argue that this, though valid in itself, is not the whole story.
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