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FABIAN SOCIALISM AND THE RHETORIC OF GENTILITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2013

Rosemary Jann
Rosemary Jann*
Affiliation:
George Mason University
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Extract

After Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded the New Statesman in 1913, one of their inaugural projects was a series of short articles entitled “What is Socialism?,” which ran from April through September of that year. A telling example of their attempts to frame the debate occurs in installment twelve, in which they liken choosing equality as a social ideal with “teach[ing] ourselves to be gentlemen” and instituting a new “national standard of good manners” (364). They struck a similar note in The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation (1923), condemning capitalist competition as inherently vulgar (36) and tracing “the democratic conception of good manners” to those “strata of society where a practical equality of material circumstances happens to prevail, and social position depends” upon circumstances other than wealth (40). This seemingly anomalous mix of socialism and the behavioral conventions of gentility signals a broader rhetorical strategy employed by the Webbs and other Fabian spokesmen to promote their political brand from the 1880s on.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , December 2013 , pp. 727 - 742
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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