In its educational work, the Liverpool Fabian Society constantly “situated” Liberalism; past reforms had done much, but contemporary Liberal aims were far too “wishy-washy” and diverse: “It is not benevolence, not charity, not a temporary dividing-up, that the world requires, but the transformation of industrial society from a system of profit into a system of co-operative production for use.” Liverpool Fabians thus saw that a focus on the entire existing system, an attack on both root and branch, was essential to the distinction between radicalism and Socialism. It is primarily in the context of education towards an understanding of this kind of distinction that this article will consider the work of two Liverpool Fabian Socialists, Joseph and Eleanor Edwards, during the Liverpool phase of their activities, from 1891 to 1901.

“MIKHAIL ALEKSANDROVICH BAKUNIN is in San Francisco ”, announced the front page of Herzen's Kolokol November 1861. “HE IS FREE!Bakunin left Siberia via Japan and is on his way to England. We joyfully bring this news to all Bakunin's friends.” Arrested in Chemnitz in May 1849, Bakunin had been extradited to Russia in 1851 and, after six years in the Peter-Paul and Schlürg fortresses, condemned to perpetual banishment in Siberia. On June 17, 1861, however, he began his dramatic escape. Setting out from Irkutsk, he sailed down the Amur to Nikolaevsk, where he boarded a government vessel plying the Siberian coast. Once at sea, he transferred to an American sailing ship, the Vickery, which was trading in Japanese ports, and reached Japan on August 16th. A month later, on September 17th, he sailed from Yokohama on another American vessel, the Carrington, bound for San Francisco. He arrived four weeks later, completing, in Herzen's description, “the very longest escape in a geographical sense”.

Eine selbständige Gesamtdarstellung der Geschichte des kommunisti-schen Arbeiterbildungsvereins in London, des langlebigsten deutschen Auslandsvereins, ist ein Desiderat der Forschung. Diese Forschungslücke schließt der folgende Aufsatz nicht. Als Teildarstellung beschränkt er sich darauf, die Anfangs- und Konsolidierungsphase des Londoner Arbeiterbildungsvereins vornehmlich auf der Grundlage einer Auswertung bereits publizierten Quellenmaterials darzustellen; eine Ausnahme ist die Auswertung der Statuten und des Bibliotheksverzeichnisses des Arbeiterbildungsvereinsaus dem Jahre 1845–46. Diese bis in das Jahr 1847 reichende Phase wird in der Literatur zur frü Geschichte der Arbeirterbewegung zumeist skizzenuhaft im Rahmen einer Geschichte des Bundes der Gerechten / Bundes der Kommunisten behandelt.4

When men in the early nineteenth century appealed to the landed proprietors of England to accept their “paternal responsibilities”, they gave voice to the conviction that gentry behavior had special relevance for the question of social discipline. Conservatives, especially, adhered to the view that subordination and the hierarchy of ranks resting upon it constituted the fountainhead of social cohesion. But at the same time, reliance on this concept of social organization involved the governors in various commitments to their subordinates, for ultimately the cohesiveness of the social order seemed dependent upon the operation of reciprocal obligations. The place of these imperatives in rural relationships arose from, and contributed to, a tradition that saw the subsistence and well-being of the entire community to be dependent upon the social responsibilities of and the connections between the different degrees of interest within the agricultural economy. A characteristic anxiety of the conservative of the period was that the economic individualism of a rising urban and industrial society promised to undermine the social accountability of each component of the social order; this presaged the disintegration of society because the “chain of connexion” between the rich and the poor would thereby be broken. The implication was that the intrusion of self-interest, economic or otherwise, threatened a structure of interdependency and mutual respect and concern between ranks. It appeared, then, that the most serious danger to society would certainly come at that point when the landowners of England — the rulers of what still seemed an essentially rural world — abandoned their paternalist traditions and opted for indolence, indifference, or the allures of commercial farming.