A socialist response to sprawling industrialism

Glasier’s political writing is a prime example of the intersection between political treatise and socialist thought. Accordingly, throughout her political pamphlets, Glasier highlights how the dual pressure of industrialism and capitalism oppresses workers and limits their access to resources. Workers engage in ‘exhausting toil’ and are ‘burden[ed] by over-work’ and the ‘fear of mere physical want’; all the while, ‘the rapid increase of labour-saving machinery is hastening the process’ (Socialism for Children, pp. 2, 14). Similarly, early in her 1894 pamphlet, The Road to Socialism, Glasier turns to Ruskin’s Unto This Last (first pub. 1860, in book form 1862) to posit that the problem of industrialism is that it does not cater to workers’ needs, so much as capitalists’ desire to accumulate even greater wealth. ‘The master-classes’, Glasier writes, ‘only seek to discover what will sell’ and ‘[t]hus the world is filled with what Ruskin calls Illth, rather than wealth; and the healthy homes, good food and clothing, which are needed of the people […] are not produced’ (p. 6). Like Ruskin, who uses the term ‘Illth’ to signify the types of accumulation that cause degradation, Glasier similarly highlights the relationship between the production of capital and the subjugation of the working classes, who ‘must be content to be out of work and starve’ (p. 6). For both Glasier and Ruskin, the coinage ‘Illth’ – with its replacement of wealth’s root word, ‘weal’, with ‘ill’ – is a shorthand for the creation of wealth that has poverty and degradation as its cost. In other words, ‘Illth’ is that which comes at ‘the expense of human and material resources in producing what is irrelevant or inimical to our real needs’ (Rosenberg, p. 138).

Speaking of the problems with the capitalist economy, Glasier writes, ‘[t]he monopolists, want food, clothing, and shelter for themselves, as well as a thousand other comforts and luxuries’ (Socialism for Children, p. 5). To accommodate these needs, the industrial classes ‘graciously permit a portion of their dependents to work on their land […] and are content with a bare subsistence for themselves in return’. This system, argues Glasier, is ‘often spoke of as wage-slavery’ and, under its conditions, ‘the children of [the working classes] have to go to work before either their bodies or brains are fully developed, the average age has sunk to less than half the allotted span’, and workers live in ‘a time of physical suffering’ and ‘social degradation’ (p. 5). Through this example, Glasier critiques a system where workers are, to quote Ruskin in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1880), ‘sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke’ (p. 163). The system, which treats the working class as disposable resources, functions much like what MacDuffie terms ‘an entropic one-way street’ where workers’ bodies are ‘used up like batteries in a system of mechanical production’ (p. 152).

Glasier suggests, however, that such inequities are not insurmountable, and she proposes that socialism is the solution to the ‘evil of […] class ownership of the land, labour saving machinery, and other instruments of production, distribution, and exchange’ (The Road to Socialism, p. 4). More specifically, Glasier finds the exploitation of the working classes problematic. For this reason, she outlines the power of trade unions, the importance of shortened work hours, and the value of productive employment. ‘Under Socialism’, Glasier writes, ‘all [workers] would have the fullest possible supply of their material necessities in return for the shortest possible number of hours worked’ (p. 11). This is a system ‘where each will give according to his capacity and receive according to his need’ (p. 15). To illustrate, Glasier briefly sums up socialism in three points: ‘(1) All able-bodied citizens must be willing to work in the service of the State, (2) All work must be productive, and (3) Co-operation must take the place of Competition’ (Socialism for Children, p. 8). Glasier explores these points with a brief, utopic glimpse into a socialist community. She reasons that a socialist community includes ‘well treated land, and good workers, which soon comes to mean well treated workers too’ (p. 4). These workers are ‘men and women who have been fed both body and mind all their lives’, meaning they have been well educated and well fed on ‘food stuffs like wheat and barley and oats, etc.’ that are grown by the community (p. 4). In this utopic vision, ‘men have learned how to plough instead of digging with spades and to reap and bind and thresh with wonderful machines, often driven by steam power’ (p. 4). In this way, Glasier imagines the ways in which machinery, when owned and operated by the workers, could be an unequivocal good. Yet, unlike the industrial technology owned by capital, which drives down the cost of wages and increases the work hours, the machinery in Glasier’s utopic vision allows men to reap the ‘gift(s) of the land which hides coal and ironstone under its surface’, all of which can be ‘worked upon by good workers’ (p. 4). Hence, Glasier acknowledges the potential value of mineral extraction when the workers, machinery and land exist in a symbiotic relationship.

Undoubtedly, Glasier’s socialist perspective was informed by her early life and education. Born in London on 25 September 1867 to a Congregationalist minister and his wife, Katharine St John Conway had a remarkable upbringing (Rothwell, p. 121). Her parents believed that women should have an education equal to that of men, and thus young Katharine was educated alongside her brother Seymour, who later became Hulme Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester. At the age of nineteen, she attended Newnham College, Cambridge, with a scholarship in Classics. There, she was influenced by feminist thinkers and scholars. For instance, in The Labour Woman (1 October 1929), she would write about meeting Olive Schreiner:

In the early starting days of my life, when I was only a Newnham student, determined to claim for women all the opportunities of education which men had won, I had the great privilege of meeting Olive Schreiner.… Eagerly, she encouraged every bit of courageous aspiration or rebellion she found in us. (quoted in Rothwell, p. 121)

Katharine Conway graduated in 1889, and, although Cambridge University refused to award degrees to women, she thereafter listed BA after her name, including on the title pages of her novels and pamphlets, in defiance of this gender discrimination. It has been argued that the status this title conferred aided her attempt to popularise socialism and effect reform.

After graduation, Katharine Conway taught at Redland High School in Bristol, which was plagued by industrial unrest. While senior Classics mistress there, in 1890, she witnessed female cotton workers striking, and this incident seems to have had a profound effect on her social and political ideologies. In large part, Katharine Conway was ‘deeply impressed by the contrast’ that the ‘poorly dressed and work-worn female protesters made with the richly decorated interior of the church where they had taken refuge from the rain’ (Rothwell, p. 121). After this incident, she briefly became a member of the Bristol Socialist Society, an offshoot of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) which was affiliated with the Fabian Society in Bristol. She soon after resigned from Redland High School to take a teaching position in a working-class school. This was a courageous move, as Katharine Conway simultaneously rejected her comfortable lodgings and position to move in with a socialist working-class family of an SDF organiser.

From the autumn of 1891 until the spring of 1892, she lectured for the Fabians and was a Bristol delegate at the Fabian Society’s first annual conference in February of 1892. Afterward, she became a member of a group of provincial Fabians, who were among the founders of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and she was later appointed to a committee to organise a conference to found a national ILP (Wrigley).

The SDF, Fabians and ILP all advocated for ‘the Cause’ of socialism and sought to dismantle capitalism. However, each had a slightly different approach to that goal. The SDF was a Marxist organisation that believed class struggle in a capitalist society would eventually resolve class antagonism and form a classless society. The task of these members, whose slogan was ‘Educate, Agitate, Organise’, ‘was to expose the pernicious nature of capitalism and attempt to channel discontent into outright opposition to the system’ (Hannam, p. 3). Hannam further notes that the party emphasised class conflict, a central focus in Britain and internationally. The International Labour Party, in contrast, did not as readily appeal to class antagonism.

While lecturing for the ILP, Katharine met John Bruce Glasier, and the two were married on 21 June 1893 (Wrigley). After marriage, Katharine Glasier continued her activities as a socialist propagandist, editing the Labour Leader from mid-1916 until April 1921 and continuing her work with the ILP (Rothwell, pp. 125–26). In addition to her membership in political groups, Glasier espoused her political beliefs in writing. She published several socialist pamphlets and three novels: Husband and Brother (1894), Aimee Furniss, Scholar (1896), and Marget (1902–3). She later published her collection of short stories, Tales from the Derbyshire Hills (1907).

Glasier’s work, which stands at the intersection of socialism, feminism and environmentalism, is of particular importance because, as H. Gustav Klaus observes, ‘feminist criticism (and publishing) has yet to rediscover its socialist mothers of the novel’ (p. 3). Rather, in many ways, women socialist authors, such as Glasier, have been consigned to the margins. Indeed, Klaus condemns ‘the selective critical consensus which has assigned out authors to the graveyard of the justly forgotten’ (p. 4). Although the recovery of women’s socialist writing has been slow, scholars such as Klaus have begun to reclaim Glasier’s work, insisting on its importance in the literary history of the socialist movement. Indeed, Glasier’s oeuvre is of particular importance not only due to her socialist perspective but also for her intersectional focus on capitalism, industrialism, feminism and the environment. In large part, Glasier’s understanding of these connections was deeply influenced by Morris, whose socialist vision rejected industrial modernity in favour of an ecological socialism.

Although the nineteenth-century socialist and environmental movements developed separately, scholars such as Raymond Williams understand Morris as the writer who ‘first began to unite these diverse traditions’ (Williams, p. 46). Moreover, as Bradley J. Macdonald has argued, Morris was not the only one to sense the catastrophic changes occurring to human and natural life in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, but he was ‘one of the first to see that its resolution could come about with the development of socialism’ (p. 298). Thus, Morris’s vision was a clear example ‘of how ecological sustainability is intimately linked to socialism’ (Macdonald, p. 299). Jan Marsh writes that ‘Morris’s initial response to contemporary industrial society was to turn his back on it, espouse the values of Malory and Chaucer and attempt as far as possible to live in the fourteenth rather than the nineteenth century’ (pp. 12–13). According to Marsh, Morris ‘proclaimed that the present social and economic system would have to be abolished for beauty to be produced’. Similarly, Ruskin ‘said that industry, by turning men into dehumanised extensions of the machine, prevented the achievement of good art’. Thus, for Morris and his followers, abolition ‘or even reform’ of the existing industrial-capitalist system ‘meant getting rid of the cities and the industrial and commercial conditions they had spawned’ (Marsh, p. 144).

In some ways, Morris’s initial escapist reaction was a response to the sprawling devastation caused by industrialism. Speaking of the role of nostalgia in late nineteenth-century pastoral literature, Marsh writes, ‘[t] he visible decline of the countryside prompted a sudden rush of nostalgia for rural life [whereas] [t]he city was seen as physically and morally corrupting, damaged by “the inner darkness in high places which comes with a commercial age”’. As such, ‘Health and happiness were to be found in the country, in rural life and agricultural occupations’ (p. 4). This urge to retreat into a rural utopia, a Golden Age – which Raymond Williams describes as a ‘myth functioning as memory’ – is evident in nineteenth-century pastoral literature, specifically the genre of the village sketch (p. 43).

Yet, while early pastoral writing expresses anxieties regarding industrial development, it differed substantially from the late nineteenth-century ecosocialism espoused by Morris, Glasier, and others. For nineteenth-century ecosocialist thinkers, capitalism was uneven and unsustainable, ‘filled with contradictions’ that included ‘social alienation, vast disparities between the rich and poor, imperialism, destruction of the environment, global hegemonic systems, and repressive states’ (Bellestri, p. 2). Not only did ecosocialists, such as Glasier, see capital as the enemy of the poor and working classes, but they also understood capitalism as working in opposition to nature itself, including all of human life. For these reasons, nineteenth-century ecosocialism supported the ‘systemic disassembling of the state and capitalism’ as well as the creation of a new system focused on community and collective ownership (p. 2).

Thus, it is not surprising that Glasier imagines a type of intentional, utopian community in Tales from the Derbyshire Hills. Comprised of ten short stories, Tales from the Derbyshire Hills was compiled and ‘given to the ILP National Campaign Fund by the writer and publisher free of royalty or profits of any kind, in faith and comradeship of socialism, the hope of the world’ (preface). The stories in Tales from the Derbyshire Hills explore cycles of growth, both for individuals and the natural world, and demonstrate that, for Glasier, the natural world is a system that inspires transformation and leads to rejuvenation.

Ecosocialist alternatives in Tales from the Derbyshire Hills

By connecting socialism and nature in Tales from the Derbyshire Hills, Glasier espouses her ecosocialist perspective. And while Glasier’s ecosocialist writing turns to the countryside as a means of realising a socialist vision, it is much more than simple nostalgia for the past. The natural imagery in Glasier’s Tales is of particular importance in highlighting the regenerative cycles of the natural world. In the fictional Leigh Milton, ‘bilberries ripe[n] on Coombs Moss’, fields are ‘shorn of their promise’ only to regrow the following season, seasons change, flowers die and then rebloom, and characters alter their perspectives and understanding of the world (pp. 63, 29). The ‘horrible slums’ and ‘depositories of death’ featured in Glasier’s political pamphlets are replaced with ‘spring air’, ‘sun-warm[ed] water’, and the ‘clear, cold sun-shine’ of her Tales (The Cry, p. 12; Tales, pp. 23, 60, 27). In this way, Tales from the Derbyshire Hills offers a vision of an ecologically sustainable world that draws its energy from the natural environment.

Nearly all of the stories in Glasier’s Tales begin with natural imagery, thus foregrounding the setting as important to regeneration and transformation. Take, for instance, the opening of ‘Coltsfoot’, where Glasier writes, ‘On the wide plains of the mid-east coast of England, all through the season of harvest, sheer against the blue of sea or sky, the scarlet poppies set the yellow corn ablaze’ (p. 40). Glasier offers this image only to signal its contrast. ‘But for the dwellers in “Peakland”’, writes Glasier, ‘Dame Nature holds no such obvious splendours […] for the most part our flowers wear the sober hues of hard times patiently endured, and have to be sought for before they discover their presence’ (p. 40). The most common flower of the Peak District is coltsfoot, and Glasier notes that ‘even on its inhospitable sides the Coltsfoot has found a home’ (p. 41). Glasier continues, ‘Some exquisite moral force would seem to govern the little plant’s life from its first feather flight as a tiny, one-seeded fruit to its consummation in the purple-scaled stem and yellow-crowned flower of its second spring’ (p. 40). This opening presents the coltsfoot in terms of resiliency and strength. Even under the most ‘inhospitable’ conditions, the coltsfoot grows and develops.

Furthering her discussion of the coltsfoot’s resiliency, Glasier observes that ‘it is to the “slope of barrenness” that the baby Coltsfoot wings its way, or to the scarred sides of the new railway cutting and the sorry heaps of sour, unsunned soil brought out from the bowels of the earth by the workers in tunnel or mine’ (p. 41). Here, the comparison combines the natural and industrial environments; the coltsfoot ‘finds a lodging’ by a railway, tunnel, or mine and ‘the tiny seed sets itself with giant energy to wrestle with the inanimate forces about it’ (p. 41). And, despite the degrading industrial conditions, the coltsfoot will ‘thrust a sturdy “storage” stem horizontally through the hard, unfriendly soil, making use of every suitable crack or fissure to send up wide, spreading leaves into the sunshine and air above, there to work for it the spring and summer through’ (pp. 41–2).

Glasier maintains that the coltsfoot survives in oppressive environments because it is fuelled by the natural weather cycle, or the ‘material’ of ‘the upper world’ (p. 42). Moreover, when the seasons change and ‘winter comes’ the flower’s ‘leaves are content to die and leave their work behind them, certain that in the following spring, at the earliest possible hour, the Coltsfoot spirit will send up bright yellow flowers to justify their labours and bear fruit in their turn’ (p. 42). Thus, even though the coltsfoot may have taken root in industrial, inhospitable soil, the flower is renewed through natural cycles. Although the leaves may die and wither, the natural cycle promises that the flower will return.

Emphasising the cycles of the natural world, Glasier comments on the purple patches of the coltsfoot’s stem, which have ‘their special use’ in this progression: ‘[T]heir [use] is the wonderful cunning to utilise to the utmost the scanty sunshine of bleak regions or of the chilly days of March, converting the energy of the rays of light into vital heat for the sustaining of the plant life as a whole’ (p. 42). Thinking on this cycle in ‘the land of the Coltsfoot’, which has been ‘preserved by the watchful Spirit of the Ages’, the narrator expresses a ‘longing desire to enter into the consciousness of the soil, suddenly withdrawn from its long sleep in the depths of the earth and bathed for the first time in the light and air of the upper world’ (pp. 60–61). This opening highlights the relationship between natural cycles, growth and transformation.

As ‘Coltsfoot’ suggests, transformation in Tales from the Derbyshire Hills is largely enacted in or through the natural world. This is similarly true in the short story ‘What Art Tha For’, where Glasier writes:

In a village that can boast of lying 900 feet above sea level, Spring is apt to be late, and to make her appearance a trifle over-consciously. The white gleaming of the east wind sunshine draws a sharp outline between hill and sky, and shortens the time for the opening of the buds. In one morning a bank that yesterday was brown with last year’s leaves will break out into a glory of white and gold. Anemone and celandine, together as if at the wave of a magician’s wand, have sprung into the open in full blossom. The subdued cawing of the rooks in the beeches becomes a clamour, and the bluey, brown-clouded egg shells lie broken under the trees before we have had time to realise that the bundles of twigs overhead have been fashioned into nests. (p. 27)

The paragraph brims with transformation: the movement from winter to spring, the sun rising on the day, the transition from bud to flower, the rooks breaking from their shells to fly away, and – notably – the flowers opening into full bloom ‘as if at the wave of a magician’s wand’. Yet, it is not magical. Rather, ‘it is all the work of that clear, cold sunshine!’ (p. 27). It is in this functional light, quite literally, that ‘every white bird-fleck on grass or ling or mossy stone intrudes itself upon our vision’ (p. 27). This imagery of regeneration, which Glasier carefully notes as part of the natural cycles of growth, foregrounds the restorative work nature performs throughout the narrative.

The plot of ‘What Art Tha For’ follows the working-class Ellen Bateman, who travels to the country with her mistress. Excited to leave the bustling city, Ellen anticipates ‘a cottage in the midst of fields, neatly furnished, with an unbroken view of the surrounding hills’ (p. 28). However, ‘there had been nothing to prepare [Ellen] for the disappointment she had experienced’ when she ‘discovere[d] that under her bedroom window the fields had been shorn of their promise’ (p. 28). Instead of lovely country views, ‘no soft growth of grass under the alternate shower and sunshine of April; no lambs to excite a kindly laughter by their uncouth gambols; no peaceful chewing of the cud by complacent cattle’ (p. 29). Instead, Ellen finds ‘a miserable mass of a mortar yard’ with ‘great heaps of lime and ashes’ and a ‘pile of yellow sandstone lying beside them, waiting to be crushed under the heaving roller’ (p. 29).

The ‘miserable mass of a mortar yard’, a symbol of industrial labour, contrasts significantly with the springtime imagery that opens the narrative, and Ellen is not wrong to feel as if ‘a barrier’ had been ‘set up […] between her and the green world that lay beyond’ (p. 29). Indeed, beyond the mortar yard, Ellen sees ‘farther away’ the hills, which ‘rose one behind another’, and ‘the blue of the more distant ridge [that] blended into the brown of the nearer […] birch branches, not yet in leaf’ (p. 29). The setting is indicative of Ellen’s state of mind. In the narrative’s first half, Ellen is barred from acknowledging the beauty of her surroundings or recognising the goodness of those she meets. For instance, Ellen initially associates the labourer Will Laycock with the ‘miserable’ mortar yard (p. 29). However, as the narrative progresses, Ellen alters her ‘hasty surmise’ and eventually finds that ‘mingled pity and love had lifted’ her prejudice (pp. 31, 39).

The tale underscores several ecological and socialist concepts, especially the appreciation and inherent value of all nature, meaning the physical environment as well as human nature itself. Moreover, in its focus on the simplicity of country life, ‘What Art Tha For’ highlights the reduction of human impact on ecological systems. In contrast to the noisy factories and dirty streets of Glasier’s political pamphlets, the Devonshire village of ‘What Art Tha For’ is ‘laden with the sweetness of the gorse and the heather’ (pp. 29–30). For Morris, the adoption of a simpler way of life ‘would not only provide a healthier human environment’ but could also ‘reduce or eradicate many other ecological problems’ (O’Sullivan, p. 449). This is certainly true in ‘What Art Tha For’, where one is not struck by the bustle of the factory town but – instead – by the ‘viscid glistening of the maple shoots and the round fatness of the sheathes in which the chestnut leaves lie folded’ (p. 27). In the end, Ellen sees beyond the ‘mass of mortar yard’ to find ‘a new impulse of friendship’ and love (p. 33). In essence, this simpler way of life fosters a sense of community cultivated through an ecological appreciation of the natural world.

Ultimately, Glasier’s late nineteenth-century narratives in Tales from the Derbyshire Hills offer a critique of capitalism while, at the same time, proposing agrarian life as a contrast to industrialism. The wasteful industrial world that Glasier critiques in her political pamphlets is replaced with stories of country villages, nature and community. Taken together, the pastoral stories offer alternatives to the ‘entropic one-way street’ of industrialism, to use MacDuffie’s phrase. They combine socialist tenets with natural regeneration and growth and – in doing so – foreground a radical ecosocialist perspective. Thus, Tales from the Derbyshire Hills offers alternative and sustainable systems that contradict the waste and degeneration of industrial modernity. In celebrating the rustic village and the bucolic countryside, Glasier reconciles industrial progress with her socialist vision and imagines generative societies that celebrate work, human relationships, and the environment. She crafts narratives that resolve class conflict through understanding and compassion. For Glasier and other late nineteenth-century reformists, ecosocialist thinking provided a way to imagine alternative social and economic systems based in community and the natural world.¹

Notes

1. 1.  An early version of this work was submitted by the author as part of the doctoral thesis, ‘ “The Steam That Is to Work the Engines”: Women’s Writing and the Rise of Steam Power in Victorian Britain’, the University of Iowa, 2021.

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