© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. ■ Introduction In 1974, I visited the mining area of South Wales to make a short educational radio programme about the nationalization of the mines, which took place under the Labour government of 1945– 50. One miner and political activist, Chris Evans, gave me a long interview ranging across the history of locality, mining, work, and his hopes for a socialist future. In describing the nature of life and work, he moved into recitation mode and said: I go to work, to earn money to buy bread to build up my strength, to go to work to earn money to buy bread to build up my strength to go to work . We laughed wryly. I enjoyed the way in which he had reduced the whole cycle of life and work into one rhythmic account. In literary terms, it turns the intricate interactions of existence into emblems, single vignettes that flow one to the other, contrasting with each other. It is, then, a particular kind of storytelling used with the in- tent of revealing or alerting a reader or listener to what the speaker thinks is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. The fact that the story doesn’t end with a conclusion hits the button because through its never- ending form (rather than through words themselves) it re- veals the folly, drudgery, and wrongness of what is being critiqued. 1 For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Fig. 1. A child’s birthday card from a Socialist Sunday School. For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Since that encounter, I’ve often also thought about that word ‘bread’ and how it sits in what was a piece of late twentieth- century political talk. It is of course symbolic and carries with it the refer- ence to the Lord’s Prayer, ‘give us this day our daily bread’, in which ‘bread’ represents all food, all sustenance. Yet, that image was on its last legs: in British schools, daily recitation of the Lord’s Prayer was coming to an end, and a more religiously diverse society was taking shape. Whoever it was who coined Chris Evans’s homily knew that they could draw on the prior knowledge of a particular religious image. This symbolic, emblematic, rhetorical way of speaking, draw- ing on shared images, can be found again and again in the stories in this collection. They were written by people who were part of a project— socialism— that they hoped would transform society. Though this can be described in economic terms, it is a mistake to imagine that this was purely a matter of, say, changing the owner- ship of the coal mines, or even a revolutionary change in the own- ership of all the ‘means of production’, as Karl Marx put it. William Morris, the great artist, designer, and socialist activist, and author of socialist-fant asy novels such as A Dream of John Ball (1888) and News from Nowhere (1890), wrote: Whatever system of production and exchange we may come to, however justly we may arrange the relations of men to one another we shall not be happy unless we live like good animals, unless we enjoy the exercise of the ordinary func- tions of life: eating sleeping loving walking running swimming riding sailing we must be free to enjoy all these exercises of the body without any sense of shame.1 Introduction 3 For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. As he said in many different ways, ‘I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few’2— and, ‘Noth- ing should be made by man’s labour which is not worth making; or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers’.3 The language of necessity and desire that Morris used here— we shall not be happy unless . ; we must be . ; nothing should be . .— indicates the level of emotion, commitment, and urgency that many socialists of the time poured into their writing, speak- ing, and activity. British socialists in the period 1880– 1920 produced millions of words in print. A good deal of this is what we might call political rhetoric. One part, though, consisted of various kinds of nonreal- ist tales. The main body of these involved a recycling of the tradi- tional literary forms like the fairy tale, the fable, the parable, the allegory, and the moral tale. Along with these, we find a few exam- ples of the mystery tale. The home for most of this output was in the newspapers, magazines, and journals of socialist groups and parties. These mostly appeared as weeklies, which, as can be seen from the notes at the rear of this book, blossomed, were reinvented, or died out at quite a rate. The tradition of socialist journals is that the publication in question could represent a sectional inter- est, as with, say, the Miner, or a ‘tendency’ within socialist thought, as with William Morris’s Commonweal. This tradition of journalism was not simply a matter of an ex- change of opinions, because the ideas were intertwined with cru- cial but much- disputed questions of action (When? How?) and organisation (Group? Movement? Trade union? Party?). Behind every strike, demonstration, petition, or movement activity lay ques- tions of whether the action would or would not achieve its objec- 4 Introduction For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. tives, or do anything greater than itself in terms of consciousness and political power. Then, as now, differences found shape within journals that could easily grow into antagonisms, rivalries, and splits, though the particular moment of these tales is marked by an extraordinary act of unity: the founding of the Labour Party in 1900, an organisation that has overcome many divisions and splits and thrives today. The ideas fought over in the period covered by this book live on both in the Labour Party and outside, and much of the landscape of present- day groups, ideas, and actions was laid out in that time. With specific reference to the tales here, any of us who listens to speeches or reads articles circulating today can call to mind socialists who’ve used some of the literary tropes and genres in this book. The leading figure in one of the socialist groupings in Britain, for example, used to regularly tell an old joke- fable about a rabbi and a goat, in which a poor man goes to the rabbi to tell him how terrible life is, what with the little home being so overcrowded. The rabbi tells the man to put his goat in the house. A few days later, the man goes back to the rabbi and tells him life is worse, the goat has made it even more overcrowded, and it’s eating all the food and leaving its droppings everywhere. The rabbi tells the man to sell the goat. A few days later, the man returns and thanks the rabbi profusely: life is so much better, there’s more room, and everyone’s happy! It’s a little morality tale about how easy it is for people (pol- iticians?) to look as if they are changing something when in fact it stays the same. Other left-wi ng speakers have, for example, cited ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’ (pointless war) or ‘one of two cheeks on the same arse’ (seemingly different views that are in re- ality the same). My great- grandfather, born around 1860, used to Introduction 5 For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. explain to my father what a trade union is: ‘Like a box of matches. One match, you can break. Two matches you can break. Three matches also. But a whole box, you can’t break. That’s a union.’ There are no simple explanations for why the political activists re- sponsible for the tales in this book thought that such stories were an appropriate way to talk about and reflect on politics, to win sympathy for socialist ideas, or to sustain the allegiance of those already committed. Some, but by no means all, of the output was directed specifically toward children, just as the Socialist Sunday Schools movement had adopted and adapted the form of the Chris- tian Sunday School for socialist purposes. In the 1830s, people like the utopian socialist Robert Owen (1771–1858) established some Sunday training schools for children. These died out, but such sec- ular, socialist schools for children started to reappear in the 1880s, and by 1909 the National Council of British Socialist Sunday Schools Union was set up to bring together the 120 schools that had developed all over the country.