Wilson, Charlotte (1854–1944)

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Wilson, Charlotte (1854–1944)

English anarchist and feminist who was the founder of the Freedom Press and the first female executive member of the Fabian Society . Born Charlotte Mary Martin on May 6, 1854, at Kemerton, near Tewkesbury, England; died at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, on April 28, 1944; daughter of Robert SpencerMartin (a physician) and Mary (Edgeworth) Martin; attended Merton Hall, Cambridge; married Arthur Wilson, in September 1876; no children.

Trial of Peter Kropotkin at Lyons, France (January 1883); founded Hampstead Marx Circle (October 1884); elected to executive committee of Fabian Society (December 1884); published first edition of Freedom (October 1886); founded Fabian women's group (March 1908).

Selected writings:

series of articles (signed "An English Anarchist") entitled "Anarchism" in Justice November–December 1884); unsigned articles in The Anarchist (1885); "Social Democracy and Anarchism" in Practical Socialist (January 1886), "Anarchism" in What Socialism Is, (with George Bernard Shaw) Fabian Tract No.4 (June 1886), "The Principles and Aims of Anarchists" in Present Day (July 1886), all reprinted in Three Essays on Anarchism (Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos, 1979); "Anarchism and Outrage" in Freedom (December 1893).

Anarchism is a political philosophy which is defined in terms of its overriding commitment to an ethical ideal of personal freedom. It views the legislative and administrative institutions of the state as exerting a coercive and constraining influence over the individual. Government compulsion, bureaucratic authoritarianism, economic exploitation, and sexual domination are the means through which state institutions combine to effectively crush the expression of a full and free human nature. It is for this reason, anarchists argue, that all such institutions must be completely abolished.

It is our aim to give conscious expression to the voiceless cry of the oppressed.
—Charlotte Wilson

The closing decades of the 19th century marked the high point of anarchist activity in Europe. Thanks to the revolutionary nature of these activities, many European governments did their best to suppress the anarchist movement. One result was that many prominent anarchists took refuge in Britain (where the government was more tolerant) and there resumed their activities in relative peace. The names of some of these refugees (such as Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta) are well known in the lexicon of anarchist thought. Less well known is the name of an Englishwoman who played a significant part in facilitating the further work of these refugees and in laying the foundations of the British anarchist movement. That woman was named Charlotte Wilson.

She was born in 1854 into a prosperous middle-class family at Kemerton, a village near Tewkesbury, England. Atypically, for a family which enjoyed such a comfortable level of social and material wellbeing, she was an only child. There is some evidence to suggest that Charlotte's relationship with her mother Mary Edgeworth Martin (who was descended from the famous 18th-century theologian and philosopher, William Paley) was not altogether as it could have been. Later in life, she was to remark to a friend that her mother had always regarded her as "an infliction sent against her will from on high."

Nothing is known of Charlotte's association with her father who had a physician's practice in Kemerton, yet found time to combine his responsibilities as physician with several other positions. Robert Martin served as surgeon and referee to a number of leading insurance companies, as a certified factory surgeon, and as district medical officer of the Tewkesbury workhouse. It is possible to speculate that these duties had an important effect on his daughter's later development.

In the third quarter of the 19th century, conditions in most of the factories in England were appalling. Government legislation, regulating working practices and standards of health and safety, was not widely enforced. Moreover, because there was no state organized system of welfare, the old, the sick, and the unemployed were often forced to rely on charitable relief from the local workhouse.

The nature of his duties would have meant that Wilson's father often came in contact with factory workers and their families as well as the poor and unemployed. In these circumstances, there can be little question that Charlotte became aware, at a very early age, of the distressed circumstances in which many of these individuals found themselves. This disturbing lesson, in the practical social and economic effects of the factory system, seems to have played an important role in shaping her later political beliefs.

Charlotte's parents made a considerable effort to ensure that she received a good education. She spent three years at Cheltenham Ladies College, a finishing school widely regarded for its academic standards. According to Wilson's account, however, this was not a happy experience. Later in life, she recalled that her time at Cheltenham had been marked by much "mental and physical misery." In 1873, she entered Merton Hall, Cambridge, a recently opened educational institute for women (later to become part of Newnham College).

Over the next two years, Wilson took classes in English, logic, psychology, and political economy. The principal of Merton Hall was Jemima Clough (the sister of the famous poet Arthur Hugh Clough), who sought to develop a syllabus that would provide the students with a thorough grounding in the work of contemporary thinkers (such as the famous social scientist Herbert Spencer and the philosopher John Stuart Mill). Charlotte's principal interest, however, was political economy (what we now call "economics"). In this regard, she had the good fortune to study under the guidance of Alfred Marshall, a man widely regarded then and now as one of the foremost economists of his generation.

Wilson successfully obtained passes in all these subjects but did not obtain a degree from Cambridge. Women were not then eligible to receive such awards (the university first granted degrees to women in 1923). More important than any formal degree was the effect that Cambridge had on Charlotte. The scholarly climate of the institution served to crystallize her intellectual capacities. Cambridge, she once wrote, was "the porch through which I entered the world."

Shortly after leaving Merton Hall, Charlotte married Arthur Wilson. A successful broker on the London Stock Exchange, Arthur was to take an active concern in his wife's political interests. From what little is known of their life together, it would appear that they were a devoted couple.

From 1876 to 1884, they led an outwardly unassuming life at Elm Lodge, Hampstead. Behind this quiet façade, however, Charlotte was beginning to immerse herself in the works of radical anarchist and socialist theoreticians (for instance, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx). It is possible that this might have remained no more than an intellectual interest were it not for a particular incident that served to trigger a more active political involvement.

In the early 1880s, a series of bomb explosions had occurred in France. Although these explosions had been the work of a few fanatics with only a tenuous connection to the anarchist movement, the authorities seized the opportunity to initiate mass arrests of leading anarchists. Among those apprehended was the Russian Peter Kropotkin, one of the leading members of the anarchist movement and a theoretician of international renown.

Kropotkin's trial in January 1883 at Lyons, France, was widely reported in the British press. Public opinion was outraged; not at the crimes he and his compatriots were alleged to have committed, but, rather, at the palpable unfairness of the judicial proceedings and the severity of the sentences handed down. There is no doubt that this event made a strong impression on Wilson. Shortly after the trial ended, she wrote, "when the noble words of Kropotkin's defence ran through the length and breadth of France, they found an echo in the hearts of all honest seekers after truth."

Early in 1884, Wilson joined the recently founded Fabian Society and in December of that year became the first woman elected on its executive committee. Today, the Fabian Society is one of the key associations responsible for the formulation and guidance of policies in the British Labour Party. When it was originally founded, however, it comprised no more than a loose alliance of intellectuals (which included the famous playwright George Bernard Shaw) who ranged from being moderate socialists on the one hand to radical anarchists on the other. Although all the original Fabians were broadly committed to the need for some kind of fundamental social change there was no firm agreement as to precisely what this entailed or how it was to be achieved.

In October 1884, Wilson founded a study group which met regularly at Elm Lodge then, later, at her new home, the "Wyldes," an isolated cottage (once briefly occupied by Charles Dickens) at the edge of Hampstead Heath. Known variously as the Hampstead Marx Circle or the Hampstead Historical Club, this group of Fabians and anarchists met to discuss the ideas of various continental socialists as well as the history of the international labor movement. Sidney Webb, husband of Beatrice Webb and a participant at one early meeting, was deeply impressed by the detailed and elaborate analysis Wilson gave of the first chapter of Karl Marx's Capital (a passage widely regarded as one of the most difficult in his entire corpus). More significant, perhaps, these meetings provided the intellectual impetus for many of the group to develop and publish their own views.

Wilson was no exception. In a series of articles published over the next two years, she provided what was the first native British contribution to anarchist theory. Her arguments consistently focused on how private property, state institutions, and the system of law all served to create a "spirit of domination" which is the "great cause of human misery and the present disorganization of social life." Wilson decried the divisive effects of economic competition and the struggle for individual aggrandizement at the expense of one's fellow human beings. In place of this, she argued for a new moral awareness in which the dignity and spontaneity of the individual comes to full fruition in the conditions of an associated humanity. Anarchism aims to bring about a revolution in every department of human existence because, in her words, "every man owes it to himself and to his fellows to be free."

Peter Kropotkin was released from prison in January 1886 and immediately took up the invitation issued by Charlotte Wilson and her anarchist friends to settle in England. His arrival inspired this small group to launch an anarchist newspaper which was modeled on Kropotkin's own highly influential paper Le Révolté (which had first appeared in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1879). The first issue of Freedom appeared in 1886. For the next eight years (with the exception of a break caused by illness in 1889), Charlotte Wilson was the chief editor, publisher, translator (of foreign contributions) and financial supporter of the newspaper. Freedom went on to publish articles by many leading anarchists and played a significant role in the dissemination of anarchist ideas among the British working class. It was the first publication of what eventually became the Freedom Press which remains to this day the most important publisher of anarchist literature in Britain.

Later in 1886, some leading Fabians proposed transforming the society into a socialist political party that would sponsor candidates for Parliament. Despite strong opposition, the motion to setup the Fabian Parliamentary League was successful. The anarchists found such participation unacceptable as they believed that state institutions like Parliament only served to crush and deny human freedom. Wilson thought that the majority of Fabians lacked an "earnest spirit of truth seeking" and shortly thereafter resigned from the executive committee and for many years remained a purely nominal member of the society. It says much for the high regard with which she was held that leading Fabians, such as Bernard Shaw, did everything in their power to persuade her to remain within the society.

Charlotte's frustration with the direction events were now taking was revealed in an editorial she wrote for Freedom in December of the same year. Subsequently republished in 1908 as a pamphlet entitled "Anarchism and Outrage," it was to become her most famous contribution to anarchist thought. Prior to this time, Wilson had argued that an anarchist society could only be achieved through peaceful means. She now suggested that, given the physical force and coercion which the state authorities employed against anarchists, it might be necessary for these anarchists to respond in kind in order to defend their own rights. Although anarchists dislike violence, she said, situations will arise in which they are left with no choice but to resort to such methods. Wilson's contribution was important because it represented one of the earliest and clearest attempts by an anarchist to justify tactics of this kind.

Throughout the late 1880s, Wilson was constantly expanding the range of her political interests. She became involved with the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and actively helped publicize the revolutionary cause in that country (for which there was much sympathy in Britain). More important, perhaps, she became interested in feminist issues through her friend Karl Pearson's Men and Women's Club. In correspondence with Pearson, Wilson suggested women were educated to believe that they should focus their whole attention on marriage and raising children. Once new political and economic arrangements are instituted then all the "horrible anomalies and shamefulness of our present sexual relations will naturally and inevitably disappear."

Unlike many other anarchist agitators of the period, Wilson was not well known as a public speaker. In 1887, however, the Freedom group organized a series of mass rallies to protest the sentences handed out at the Chicago Haymarket trial. Seven anarchists were condemned to death for a bomb explosion in which several police officers had been killed. There was considerable doubt as to whether the accused were in fact the perpetrators of this deed. Press reports of the case caused, if anything, even more protest in Britain than had the trial of Kropotkin several years earlier. It was at one of these meetings that Wilson spoke in defense of the rights of the accused and a contemporary account of her speech remains one of the few detailed portraits we have of her:

Beside the table on the platform was standing a little woman dressed in black. Beneath the brow which was half hidden as by a wreath by her thick, short-cropped hair, shone a pair of black eyes beaming with enthusiasm. The white ruffle and the simple, almost monklike, long, undulating garment seemed to belong to another century. A few only at the meeting seemed to know her; but whoever knew her, knew also that she was the most faithful, the most diligent, and the most impassioned champion [of anarchism] in England…. She was not a captivating speaker, but her voice had that iron ring of unalterable conviction and honesty which often moves the listener more powerfully than the most brilliant eloquence.

In 1895, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Wilson severed all her connections with the anarchist movement. It is known that her father had recently died and that her mother (who had suffered a series of strokes) was an invalid who required constant attention. It may also be suggested, however, that by this time Charlotte had grown disillusioned with the prospects for the anarchist cause. By the last decade of the 19th century, the British working class had largely abandoned all thought of a radical, revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. Instead, it had chosen to concentrate its energies (largely through the auspices of the tradesunion movement) in the day-to-day struggle to improve its conditions of existence within capitalist society. In such an atmosphere, anarchism in Britain had become little more than an irrelevant curiosity.

Charlotte Wilson eventually returned to political activity in 1908 and renewed her interest in feminist issues. In March, she formally rejoined the Fabian Society and founded their women's group. Over the next few years, she carried out important work on behalf of women in prisons and was responsible for preparing evidence for the royal commission on divorce. In 1911, she was again elected to the executive committee of the Fabian Society but in 1914 resigned for health reasons. She continued to work intermittently with the women's group until 1916 when she left to concentrate on her work as honorary secretary of the Prisoner of War Fund of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Regiment.

Charlotte's husband Arthur died in 1932. Her own will, drawn up a year later, indicated that she remained an active supporter of women's issues. One of the chief benefactors of her will was the London School of Economics where she left money to be used in the support of studentships for research into the life of primitive people, especially women.

Shortly afterwards (the date is not certain), she left England with Gerald Hankin, a distant relation whom she and her husband appear to have adopted sometime before 1911. They moved to Washington, D.C., but practically nothing is known of her circumstances thereafter. Wilson eventually entered a home for the aged at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, where she died on April 28, 1944, a few days short of her 90th birthday.