| Notes |
The Early Fabians: “Educate, Agitate, Organise”
The Fabian Society emerged in 1884 as an off-shoot of the Fellowship of the New Life. The new Society soon attracted some of the most prominent left-wing thinkers of the late Victorian era to its ranks.
The 1880s saw an upsurge in socialist activity in Britain and the Fabian Society was at the heart of much of it. Against the backdrop of the Match Girls’ strike and the 1889 London Dock strike, the landmark Fabian Essays was published, containing essays by George Bernard Shaw, Graham Walls, Sidney Webb, Sydney Olivier and Annie Besant. All the contributors were united by their rejection of violent upheaval as a method of change, preferring to use the power of local government and trade unionism to transform society.
The early Fabians’ commitment to non-violent political change was underlined by the role the Fabian Society played in the foundation of the Labour party in 1900. The society is the only original founder of Labour party that remains affiliated to the present day in unchanged form.
None of the early figures in the society were more significant than Beatrice and Sidney Webb in developing the ideas that would come to characterise Fabian thinking and in developing the thorough research methodology that remains a feature of the Society to the present day. Both prodigious authors, Beatrice and Sidney wrote extensively on a wide range of topics, but it was Beatrice’s 1909 Minority Report to the Commission of the Poor Law that was perhaps their most remembered contribution. This landmark report provided the foundation stone for much of the modern welfare state. |