Anarchism, anti‐imperialism and “The Doctrine of Dynamite”

Abstract

During the late Victorian period, British anarchist writers commented on Irish political affairs while the celebrated Irish author Oscar Wilde offered moral and practical support to them. Wilde’s position was especially radical, since anarchism was associated in the popular imagination with the phenomenon of “propaganda by deed” – the subversive political violence that broke out in the United States and Continental Europe throughout the 1880s and 1890s. However, British anarchists regarded colonial violence in Ireland as the pressing issue of the day and explored it in their political journals, pamphlets and novels. Such texts reflected these authors’ preoccupation with the Irish crisis and also warned contemporary readers that the counter‐insurgency methods being applied in Ireland could be put to use on English soil. Drawing on a range of literary and political sources, this essay examines the British anarchists’ interest in the Irish anti‐colonial struggle by focusing on their criticism of British imperial rule, which they regarded as “foreign dictatorship”.

Keywords:

• anarchism
• imperialism
• Ireland
• nationalism
• Rossetti
• Wilde

Notes

1. For an assessment of anarchism in the popular imagination at the end of the 19th century, see Haia Shpayer‐Makov. Many popular novels written during this period equated anarchism with violence. These included Grant Allen’s For Maimie’s Sake: A Tale of Love and Dynamite (1886), Richard Henry Savage’s The Anarchist: A Story of To‐Day (1892), E. Douglas Fawcett’s Hartmann the Anarchist (1893), George Griffith’s The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1894) and H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897).

2. For a fictionalized discussion of revolutionary politics by an anarchist movement, see Sergei Stepniak’s The Career of a Nihilist (1889).

3. Anderson has also shown that this discussion operated in both directions. For example, Jean Grave’s anarchist journal La Révolte had a print run of 7000 by the time of its suppression in 1894, by which time it had an impressive list of subscribers, including interested radicals all over Europe, as well as in colonial and recently occupied territories including India, Guatemala, Egypt, Brazil, Chile and Argentina. See Anderson.

4. The political chaos gripping Chicago in May 1886 occurred against the background of a decade of relentless and unimpeded state and corporate violence against striking workers and other campaigners for labour reform. See Foner, “Editor’s Introduction” in The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs.

5. As Jeffrey A. Clymer has pointed out, in contrast to the exact record of police fatalities “the actual number of casualties among the protestors, like the bomb thrower’s identity, was never determined”. See Clymer, esp. Chapter One, “Imagining Terrorism in America: The 1886 Chicago Haymarket Bombing” (quotation from p. 33). See also Woodcock (436–39).

6. Contemporary paranoia over the possibility of an attack on Britain by rival European powers fuelled the popular literary genre of the invasion narrative, which originated with George Tomkyns Chesney’s anti‐Prussian fantasy of 1871, The Battle of Dorking and culminated in 1898 with the publication of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

7. See Garnett, Saturday, February 25th, 1893 (155).

8. For a discussion of the influence of Irish political history on The Secret Agent, see my “Conrad, the Stevensons and the Imagination of Urban Chaos”. Maintaining the distinction between anarchists and Irish revolutionaries, Richard Henry Savage’s potboiler The Anarchist: A Story of To‐Day distinguishes between “loyal” Irish workers and completely untrustworthy European anarchists. Coulson Kernahan’s eccentric yarn The Red Peril also stresses the supposed ideological gulf separating Irish nationalists from Continental radicals, its cast of characters including a former Fenian who joins the hunt for German and “Asiatic” anarchists hiding out in England. See Savage; Kernahan.

9. For an overview of the public furore that erupted after the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray see Mason’s Oscar Wilde, which reproduces the letters attacking the novel along with Wilde’s replies to them.

10. Dubois cited the example of Octave Mirbeau, whose eulogy for the terrorist Ravachol appeared in the literary periodical Entreaties, which also published the chemical formula for dynamite. See Dubois (124, 126–27).

11. Cohen was not the only anarchist to appreciate the connection between Wilde’s political and sexual identities. Emma Goldman also defended Wilde in her autobiography, explaining that she had no difficulty with “sexual variation” (269). Goldman had a very broad view of anarchism, which she viewed as a movement of “intellectuals” (436) that linked “the world of labor, art and letters”. See Goldman (269, 436, 482).

12. See Thompson (566–71).