Like Fenianism, late nineteenth-century anarchism was an intensively mediated form of radical politics. Despite its association with violence in many of the political novels of the period, printed propaganda was by far the most characteristic form of anarchist activity in late Victorian Britain. Stressing the continuum between anarchist words and deeds, such journals, pamphlets and, sometimes, also fiction written by anarchists and former revolutionaries suggested the revolutionary function of writing. As if responding to Joseph Pierre Proudhon's claim of 1840 that ‘equality failed to conquer by the sword only that it might conquer by the pen’, anarchist writers challenged the authority and power of the state by celebrating revolutionary action throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Even the renowned pacifist Peter Kropotkin praised the contemporary ‘spirit of revolt’ that motivated ‘actions which compel general attention’ and won converts. ‘One such act’, he wrote, ‘may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets’. Deeds, Kropotkin maintained, were the one thing that bred daring. This kind of revolutionary violence was dependent on its communication via the printed word as the concept of ‘propaganda by the deed’ owed much to its advertisement in the anarchist press. A single act might, in Kropotkin's estimation, accomplish more publicity than a large run of pamphlets but, in order to have much of an impact, it still depended upon being written about.