Tom maguire: "An under-paid agitator" in the late-victorian socialist press
Whom the Gods love die young, and thus are they insured of everlasting youth. The idea is full of beauty were it not that this weary old world so much needs those on whom the Gods have bestowed their choicest gifts." (1) So wrote Keir Hardie, Britain's first Independent Labour Party Member of Parliament, in his preface to Machine-Room Chants, a volume of posthumously published poetry written by Tom Maguire and printed by the Labour Leader in April 1895. Maguire, a working-class Leeds socialist, poet, journalist, and labor organizer, died on 9 March 1895 at the age of twenty-nine. In his short life he contributed significantly to the rise of socialism in late nineteenth-century Britain, and his contributions were both literary and organizational. While still in his early twenties, Maguire was a leader in instigating the tide of New Unionism--the effort to broaden the scope of organized labor to include unskilled and semi-skilled workers--that swept Leeds in a number of important strikes from 1889 to '90, including strikes by dyers, gas workers, tailoresses, builders' laborers, and bricklayers. From 1885 to 1895 he also published a great deal of poetry, songs, fiction, and journalism in radical papers such as Commonweal, the Labour Leader, and the Yorkshire Factory Times, as well as his own socialist paper, the Labour Champion. Interestingly, many of his poems feature working-class women speakers, reflecting his experience in organizing Leeds tailoresses, and his journalistic writing is also notable for its play in voice, persona, and perspective. But aside from Machine-Room Chants and another posthumous volume (Tom Maguire, A Remembrance, published by the Manchester Labour Press in 1895), Maguire's work exists almost exclusively in the archives of the radical press. Even these two volumes--Tom Maguire and Machine-Room Chants--reprint verse and prose that originally appeared in socialist newspapers. (2) In publishing their work, nineteenth-century working-class writers were especially likely to be limited to periodical venues; because volume publication has mainly been the privilege of the wealthy or well connected, critics interested in class critique have learned to pay heed to newspapers and magazines, revaluing the Victorian periodical as a poetic medium. (3) As is the case with so many working-class writers, to rediscover and appreciate Maguires career we must rediscover and appreciate the periodical context in which he published. In 1880s Britain, the socialist movement was in an early, inchoate phase encompassing a wide variety of socialist perspectives and persuasions, from anarchist to parliamentarian in politics, from fervently religious to rigorously scientific in mood. Most of the major early organizations were based in London, yet were eager to make footholds in the industrial North, which was everywhere recognized as fertile ground for socialist agitation because of labor conditions and because of the North's radical legacy, which abided in local movements such as co-operativism. Maguire was the son of a working-class Irish Catholic family from what his friend Edward Carpenter called "the dingy wilds of East Leeds," a neighborhood that Tom Steele describes as a "densely populated slum" housing "an enormous immigrant Irish population, possibly 20,000 strong.... The crowded courts and alleys where disease and pollution were widespread, were the breeding ground for socialists like Tom Maguire." Responsible for his mother after his father's death, Maguire, according to Carpenter, "earned what living he could" as "errand-boy, then as photographers assistant, and photographer." (4) At eighteen, he was drawn to socialism after coming across a copy of the Christian Socialist at the Secular Hall bookstall (the seeming inconsistency of the venue and the magazine perfectly illustrates the unfussy bedfellowism of 1880s socialism). He was an early adopter, for at this date, 1883, the organized socialist movement in England had barely begun. …
RSVP Bibliography, 2011–2013
The RSVP Bibliography catalogues essays, books, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations published in the field of Victorian periodicals between December 2011 and December 2013. The bibliography focuses on newspapers and magazines published in Great Britain and the British Empire, 1837-1901, with some attention to transnational journalism and the long nineteenth century as they relate to the Victorian press.
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of