Friendship, Cosmopolitan Connections and Late Victorian Socialist Songbook Culture

Abstract

On 27 August 1887, utopian socialist Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) issued a call in the Socialist League's Commonweal for contributions from readers towards the socialist songbook he was in the process of preparing. He wanted ‘good words matched to good tunes’ and added a further remark that songs ‘in actual use among Socialist bodies will be specially welcome’. In his otherwise bleak and depressing existence in Sheffield's grim industrial surrounds, Carpenter gained creative succour from the process of compiling a collection of songs he would christen Chants of Labour. ‘It was a queer experience’, Carpenter recalled, ‘collecting these songs of hope and enthusiasm … in the midst of these gloomy and discordant conditions’. Published in 1888, Chants of Labour was an immediate success and determined in large part the contents of the subsequent generation of socialist songbooks. As Chris Waters has observed in his study of music and early British socialism, there was an increased awareness into the late 1880s that the socialist movement had neglected music. Chants of Labour can be understood as part of the concerted effort to rectify this oversight in response to the realisation of both music's transformative potential and its utility as a political tool. Productions of songs and songbooks were encouraged, quickly producing what Waters identifies as a discernible ‘songbook culture’, and music became, as Stephen Yeo has argued, ‘the main cultural thrust of the early socialist movement’. Waters suggests that ‘[w]hile almost forgotten today, socialist songbooks published prior to 1914 played a prominent role in the movement's associational life’. An early review (found again in the Commonweal) well supports Waters’ argument in its effusive welcoming of the collection. ‘Such a book as this has been long desired and looked for’, the writer enthused, going on to note that it was particularly useful in its bringing together of ‘the songs of labour [that] have hitherto been practically inaccessible’.

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