Australian Scholarly Editions Centre Projects (ASEC)

"Knowledge is Power":Radical Literary Culture and the Experience of Reading1

Bruce Scates

Introduction

George Black, founder of Sydney's Republican League and our first Labor member, socialist, secularist, slanderer, boozer, bohemian and something of a sexual libertine, will no doubt be remembered for many things. But he should be praised by us all as an insatiable inspired and extraordinarily eclectic reader.

When Black sat down to write the story of that all too eventful life, reading assumed a singular importance. The nineties, he recalled, were a time of 'intellectual upheaval', when the 'thoughtful youth' of his day 'studied night and day all the [books] which could be bought or preferably borrowed.' 2 In his extraordinary autobiography, with that extraordinary and really quite delicious title Crusts and Crusades: Tales of Bygone Days', Billy Hughes recalled the same 'great awakening' that had prompted him to politics. 'A bit highbrow and smelling of the lamp', Hughes and his 'hard reading crowd' devoured every text, challenged every orthodoxy.3 Indeed, books figure in every memoir, every pamphlet, every polemic of the period. And yet what I want to suggest in this paper is that we know very little about them. Studies of the intellectual origins of the nineties have mostly confined themselves to a few favoured titles. From the 1950s to the 1990s, from Robin Gollan to John Docker, historians and literary critics have reproduced familiar summaries of Edward Bellamy and William Morris, the great text books of the 90s. There is a need to place such authors within what Escarpit once called 'a wider ecology of writers', the poets and scientists, economists and philosophers, who captured the imagination of George Black's generation. There is also a need to ask not just what books were read, but where and how our radicals found them. Numerous commentators have stressed the derivative nature of nineteenth century literary circles: through their reading, Australian radicals looked abroad for inspiration, particularly to Britain and America. 6 But that crossing from New York or London was surely only the beginning of a book's journey. To date we know very little about the networks, personal, social and institutional, which relayed reading from one individual to another, the 'channels of dissemination' which underpinned this rich and creative literary culture. 7 Finally, there is a need to shift the study of literature away from the text set down by the author, towards the response of the reader. Reading for Black, for Hughes, for any radical of the nineties, was an 'active' rather than a 'passive' process8; their evident excitement for books suggests that literature did not simply impart information. Books were shaped and interpreted in the light of the reader's values and experiences. Reading and living, as Robert Darnton has noted, 'ran parallel'. 'Incorporated into the fabric of life', books became, of themselves, 'a mode of understanding', a way of 'making sense' of reality.9

This is a radically different approach to the study of radical literary culture. It entails what Martyn Lyons has called 'a reader oriented view of literature'. 10 And it is an orientation which I think is particularly well suited to the HOBA project. As Professor Lyon's companion paper suggests, the old book history of Richard Altick's generation must give way to a social history of books and their readers. It is the experience of reading, then, which is the central concern of this paper.

Encountering Literature

It is debatable whether the Nineties saw the rise of a distinctively Australian style of writing. What is beyond debate is that it saw the rise of the Australian reader. The Education Acts of the 1870s had secured for most the basic skills of literacy and numeracy. Books themselves were more widely available. A revolution in printing had lowered their cost,and a host of private and public agencies, booksellers and libraries, laboured to disseminate cheap and not always 'improving' literature. 11 Indeed Australia was thought to have led the world in what Richard Altick once called 'the democratisation of reading'. Throughout the nineteenth century a series of celebrated visitors marvelled at the amount of meat, beer and newsprint consumed daily by the colonists.12 One must treat such accounts with scepticism. And one must remember that what colonial Australians read, indeed the ability to read at all, depended on the class, race and gender of the reader.

Born into a white, middle-class family, E.J. Brady grew up with books all around him. His church, his schooling, even his occupation (a clerk) stressed the practical and the moral benefits of reading.13 By his twenties, Brady had acquired what Pierre Bourdieu would later call 'cultural capital': not just the knowledge of what books contained but also a confidence in learning.14 And by his twenties Brady was prepared to embark on a series of literary adventures:

Hugo influenced me greatly, Arnold's Light of Asia half converted me to Buddhism, and to . . . Winwood Read's Martyrdom of Man, I still remain indebted. I swotted German philosophy, studied Spinoza, adored Goethe, and wrestled with Spencer and Stuart Mill. Darwin, Huxley and Haeckel burst up on.15

In 1890, Edwin Brady took William Morris'ss utopian novel from the library shelves and marvelled at the revelation of a world under socialism.16 In Brady's case, one sees the connections between politics and literature, 'reading and living'.17 As a young clerk he had mastered the precepts of political economy, struggling to recognise the laws of supply and demand amidst the chaos of overloaded ships and men on the wharves of Darling Harbour. Brady's estrangement from church and family coincided with his reading of Darwin and Huxley. 1890, the year Brady read Marx, Gronlund and Morris, was also the year of the Maritime Strike: that August he was dismissed from Dalgety's for refusing to act as a special constable. From there his books took him beyond all that was safe, conventional and familiar: an angry young man 'at war with the world', Brady traded the complacent security of home and office for the boozy fellowship of boarding house and Bulletin. 18

If the books Brady read had changed, so too had the way he read them. In 'early youth' he 'endeavoured to look upon men and matters through the lenses of an exact science'. 19 The very terms he used suggest the earnestness of this engagement: books were to be 'swotted', 'studied', mastered. They were to be read silently and alone, in libraries and universities dedicated to the solitary pursuit of learning. But as Brady left what he called 'the dignified atmosphere of the counting house' for the 'super radical' excesses of bohemia, his approach to reading changed dramatically. On winter nights and summer afternoons, Brady and his mates gathered in his 'little den in Annandale' or journeyed to The Gap and read books to each other, 'smoking and yarning'. In bohemia, books were not so much studied as celebrated, and reading was like a 'long [draught] of colonial ale', a delight men savoured together.20

The joys of literature were never shared evenly. That is all too apparent when one examines the reading habits of working-class radicals. 'Friendless, penniless and very hungry', Billy Hughes knew all too well the cost of reading. 21 To buy a book or subscribe to a library he went without meals and wore out his clothing. Even the act of reading posed its problems. A 'quintessentially private activity',22 (as David Vincent called it) reading exacerbated Hughes's sense of isolation, confining him to the dingy room of his boarding house, 'setting him adrift' from the society of his fellows. Others craved a moment's peace in busy and crowded households. For all reading required physical stamina and moral determination: the image of the tired men and women huddled beneath the lamp 'at the end of a hard day's labour' haunts the pages of Hughes's autobiography. 23 The weariness of the working-class reader is nowhere better captured than in the early career of that poet laureate of the Australian republic, Henry Lawson. A poor boy from the bush, Lawson was painfully aware of the failings of his 'eddication'. Three nights a week he attended night classes in St James Hall, 'the other nights he devoted to reading at the School of Arts' in Pitt Street. 'Worn out by hard work and long hours of study', Lawson 'found it a torture to drag his tired growing frame out of bed' and catch the early train to Granville's. 'There were times', he remembered, 'when I would have given my soul for another hour's sleep', but sleep was the necessary sacrifice of many a working-class reader. 24

Finding the right book was almost as difficult as reading it. Middle-class reading practices were shaped, as we have seen, by the private and public networks which disseminated literature. These networks narrowed dramatically in the case of working class readers. Brady remembered the simple ease of reading, the library shelves which stretched to the limits of human knowledge. Ernie Lane, by contrast, remembered failure and frustration. 'The truly worthwhile book was rare', he complained, 'a sort of heaven sent gift . . . earnestly procured and diligently digested.' Procuring such literature led Lane from one end of Brisbane's public library to the other, past the suspicious gaze of watchful librarians. Reading itself was a process of massive and often arbitrary elimination, sifting at first 'in vain' through the cant of parson and schoolmaster for the poetry of Byron and Shelley.25

The difficulties which confronted working-class readers made the discovery of that 'truly worthwhile book' all the more rewarding. Chummy Fleming, a Melbourne bootmaker, is a vivid example. His father an Irish weaver, his mother a factory hand, Fleming had a scant and indifferent schooling. At the age of 10 he was sent to work in a boot factory; there a 14-hour day left little time for reading.26 Only when he was 'laid up with sickness', 'broken by confinement and toil', did Fleming begin to wonder at the world around him. 'It was like a flash of light', he remembered, 'one summer's morning' when he began his reading. Lane used the same image to describe his 'discovery' of Byron and Shelley.

These and a few other radical books . . . [kept me] in touch with the growing progressive thought that was emerging from the long dark night of ignorance and despair. Thus did I, like many others, find the light and embark upon a life long crusade against the capitalist exploiter. 27

For the working-class autodidact, books were much more than a source of 'joy and enlightenment'. With romantic poets, dead for over half a century, Lane developed an intensely personal relationship. 'Throughout my life', he declared, 'Shelley has been with me, not only as a great revolutionary . . . but as a dearest friend and comrade.' In books were 'a source of inspiration that has never deserted me'. Through reading, Lane 'felt comradeship with all the great ones of the earth'. 28

These brief vignettes tell us a great deal about the cultural practices of the working-class reader. There are striking parallels between the autobiography's written by Australian autodidacts and those surveyed in Martyns Lyon's and Jonathan Rose's studies of the same genre in Europe. In each case, the discovery of literature represents a turning point in one's life, it is a revelation akin to a religious conversion. 29 More importantly perhaps, Lane's comradeship with the great ones of the earth confounds those literary critics who see so called 'high culture' as the reified preserve of a social elite. What is so exciting about Lane or Lang or McNamara is their quest to discover the truly worthwhile book unaided by librarians, teachers clerics or anyone else who certified certain sorts of literature "improving". Finally, what these memoirs reveal is what Rolf Engelsing first called 'an intensive relationship to literature'. Without the time, the resources, the cultural capital to read very widely, they read a few select titles over and over again, committing entire verses to memory. As determined an orator as a reader, Fleming, and I quote, 'hurled literary quotations' to his audience, recitations 'from Graecus and Augustus down to Carlyle and Cardinal Manning' evidence (the Age conceded) of his 'frequent use of Melbourne's public library'. They were also evidence of the continuity of literary traditions. Fleming's rhetorical flourish, Lane's loving recitals, looked back to an age before the printing press and the rise of popular literacy, when a few treasured texts were memorised verbatim. 30

It may seem parodical that an anarchist like Fleming read Graecus and Carlyle or for that matter those cheap improving editions of Scott, Wordsworth or Dickens. But it is how he read them that matters. Historians who cite apparently conservative literary tastes as evidence of bourgeois hegemony underestimate the independence of the reader. A text, as Roger Chartier put it, has little 'intrinsic meaning' of its own: the meanings that matter are those constructed by their readers, who 'rework and re imagine' their texts to suit a personal and political agenda.31 In the hands and the minds of these working-class radicals, the most bourgeois of books could be used to subvert bourgeois values.

Indeed, reading itself was integral to the oppositional culture of the nineties. When workers took to reading they laid claim to a world poverty had denied them. Reading could turn upside down all the inequalities of nineteenth century society. 'When we read we gaze on the stars', the Workman declared. 'Knowledge is power', echoed the masthead of every radical journal.32 And again through Fleming's case we find a telling instance of the politicisation of reading. Throughout much of the 1880s, Melbourne's public library and museum were closed of a Sunday, barring workers access to knowledge on their one day of leisure. Fleming figured in the campaign against this stifling Sabbatarianism, part of an unlikely alliance of freethinkers, churchmen, liberals and anarchists. In one 'ceremony', a meeting of the Sunday Liberation Society was reconvened on the steps of the Library: 'We stood silently outside', Fleming wrote, 'and longed to be inside reading.'33 Fleming's demand for the right to self education built on a heritage of working-class radicalism. It looked back to the dissenting traditions identified by E.P. Thompson, the artisanal culture which flourished in the workshops, book stores and taverns of eighteenth-century London. 34 And yet it was also distinctly modern: part of a new age where reading broadened all the human horizons. Finally, Fleming's protest has lost none of its resonance. In Kennett's Victoria, in Howard's Australia , there will be many opportunities to stand outside closed libraries, closed schools, and pay-as-you-go Universities.

Gender, like class, could pose an awesome obstacle to reading. In most cases women's access to literature was far more limited than that of men, but as with any generalisation there were notable exceptions. A leisured young lady, Elsie Birks' education was as good, if not better, than Brady's. And unlike Brady, her family and social circle encouraged her to extend her reading. As a child, Elsie listened patiently to readings from the family Bible. By her teens she devoured the novels, poems and essays circulated amongst Norwood literary societies. In Birks' case, there was none of the laboured anxiety which characterised the literary careers of so many male readers. Reading, for Birks, was an easy and elegant process, a source of amusement and intellectual satisfaction. And it was an intensely social activity. 'Our little circle' debated Carlyle, wondered at Emerson, 'longed for' the next book to be passed on from reader to reader. 'I have just peeped into Walden' an excited Elsie wrote, '. . . which a friend lent me and it is delightful. Do you know it?' 35 Soon Elsie knew Thoreau intimately. Through her letters and journals we can discern once again the connections between 'reading' and 'living', books and understanding. As Elsie Birks travelled up the Murray to join a utopian settlement at Murtho she carried the delightful Walden in her hands. And as she gazed out across a parched South Australian landscape she saw only the 'good mother earth' Thoreau had lovingly described. 36

Birks' reading, indeed her response to literature, was made possible by a peculiar combination of class and circumstance. A comfortable background was not enough. In late colonial Australia, church, school and family conspired to confine a woman's reading to literature thought suited to ladies. 'Afternoon Tea and Literature' is an imaginary exchange set in a typical 'suburban drawing room'. Published in the Woman's Voice in 1895 it conveys well better than I ever could the constraints on a woman's reading. Books, as one 'Woman of the Old School' put it, must be 'NICE, IMPROVING, acceptable to one's husband and elevating to one's daughters'. 'BAD BOOKS' were those that encouraged women to step beyond their station, intruding on worldly matters better left to menfolk.

we ought to make a bonfire of all books of that kind [Mrs Smith continued] . . . I have brought my girls up without any of these new fangled, SHOCKING notions. They are both past twenty and they have never looked at a newspaper in their lives. Their father reads out at breakfast the social news, or anything he thinks likely to interest them. 37

Birks, on the other hand, belonged to a more enlightened middle-class milieu. A 'Woman of the New School', she moved in the single tax/feminist circles of Adelaide's respectable radicals, espousing land reform and women's suffrage, temperance and labour legislation. Reading made Birks 'a citizen of the world', equipping her for much more than the life of a wife or mother. 38

If Birks' Single Tax Leagues were at one extreme of the bourgeois literary milieu which nourished Australian radicalism then Brady's bohemia was at the other. This was a defiantly masculinist culture. Brady and his mates met on male terrain in bars, wine shops and lodgings; their drinking, smoke nights and swearing were (as Sarah Steven's points out) a celebration of men's excesses. 39 Women (however accomplished) entered such enclaves on strictly male terms, as models or mistresses but never as wives, companions or fellow readers.40 J. Le Gay Brereton described the disappointment if a woman insisted on attending a literary gathering:

The lady who was to become Mrs Lambert wrote short stories, and, as Lambert [pointed out] . . . she, . . . ought to have a chance to read them . . . In those days, the presence of women seemed inevitably to mean a suppression of [a man's] normal thirst, so the meeting closed with the distribution of sweet biscuits and small cups of coffee. 41

Acquiring that 'truly worthwhile book' was hard enough for middle-class women: it was well beyond the reach of their working-class sisters. Few of the avenues through which men pursued their reading were really open to women. Workingmen's Colleges were just that: colleges for working men. The few women who attended enrolled in classes 'exclusively pertaining to . . . womanhood'. Men were taught handicrafts and the arts, science and languages, women were told 'how to pin a dress' or 'cook a potato without spoiling it'. Indeed, the advocates of mass adult education, be they bourgeois philanthropists or self-improving craftsmen, seldom considered the benefits books could bring to women.42 In Sydney's School of Arts, even the act of reading had a gendered dimension. Men sat taking notes around the heavy tables of the Reading Room, studious exemplars of male self improvement. Ladies were invited 'to come in out of the chill of the wintry atmosphere, to rest on easy chairs and couches before the fire and have their choice of fashion journals.'43 The 'Ladies Department' was well supplied 'with novels and magazines . . . of special interest to ladies.' It lacked politics, economics or philosophy: such male pursuits fell 'within male jurisdiction'. 44

What makes the School of Arts so interesting however is women's rejection of this domestic ideology. Throughout the early 1890s the School was a site of conflict, where both the class and gender order were briefly but successfully challenged. From the outset, women seemed to intrude on male space: first a reading room and then (three years later) a lavatory occupying the site of the (male) secretary's office. 45 Women also secured key executive positions. By the late 1880s, Louisa Lawson, a leading Sydney feminist, had become 'a force in the deliberations' of the School of Arts Committee. In 1891, a coalition of feminists, socialists and single taxers mounted a challenge to the institute's conservative leadership, reducing women's fees to half the male rate. Female membership rocketed, from 500 to 2,800 in a six-month period.46 And with that the masculinist culture of reading seemed to crumble. Women, Lawson announced, had broken out of the Ladies Department: long skirts swept the floors of the Reading Room and mounted the rostrum of the Debating Club. Indeed there was but one last 'male preserve' remaining: the billiard table. 47 There the men of the School gathered to defend the last of the male readers' privileges. But defend them they did. In 1892 the trustees reversed the controversial women's concessions. Over the next six months, female membership plummeted to 991, a decrease from 1,441. Financially, the decision was ludicrous. Even at half the male rate, an expanding female membership made up for the institute's steady decline in male subscribers and the heavy losses imposed by the depression. 48 But the decision also represented the resilience of the gender order in late colonial society. For almost half a century the Reading Room had been a male retreat: men would not surrender such privileges easily. And indeed Judith Walkowitz has drawn much the same conclusion in her study of the British Museum. 49

Radical Literary Networks

From the sometimes stuffy School of Arts it seems appropriate to turn to the cultural institutions and personal networks which sustained all these radical readers, be they men or women. The radical bookshop was central to the landscape of nineteenth-century radicalism. Stepping from the street through its threshold required courage as well as curiosity. Here the reader was initiated into a very different literary culture. Here reading could no longer be respectable.

The rise of the radical bookshop was synonymous with the rise of nineteenth-century radicalism. When young Edwin Brady took to reading, 'Sir' Robert Bear's Freethought Book Depot was the only commercial outlet for radical literature. Both the title and the capital for the venture were borrowed. 50 By 1894, the radical litterateur could choose between McNamara's Book and News Deport and the Active Service Brigade's Reading Rooms a few doors opposite. Over in Pitt Street, the Australian Socialist League ran a bookshop of its own, while papers like the Democrat, the Dawn, the Workman and the Worker were also depots for the dissemination of radical literature.

All these literary agencies were within walking distance of each other, on what James Tyrell called the 'book selling streets' of Sydney's busy inner city. 51 They were situated between institutions with which readers were already familiar, the Public Library at one end of town and the School of Arts at the other. Within and around these boundaries stood the meeting places and landmarks of nineteenth-century radicalism: the Queen's Statue and the Domain, the sixpenny restaurants, bars and boarding houses.

Radical literary networks were extensive, ranging across the city and suburbs; they were also extraordinarily mobile. Bookshops such as these changed premises several times, their fortunes linked to the rise and fall of radical societies. Nor was business always confined to business premises. Socialist, anarchist and single taxer set up stalls at almost every radical venue, peddling newspapers' books and pamphlets from parks, wharves and street corners. In this they were aided by the physical features of their literature. With the exception of a few weighty classics, radical works were generally fairly short, novels and political economy averaging between 100-200 pages. These pocket sized editions, deceptively light for their content, were easily stowed in overcoat pockets and shopping baskets, set out on stumps, platforms and side walks, to be whisked away with the arrival (as one pedlar put it ) of 'the inevitable detective'. To gauge the dissemination of radical literature, historians need to be more mindful of a book's physical character. What a book 'says' does not determine its popularity: in clandestine networks such as these, readership was also influenced by the book's weight, appearance, size and durability. 52

The high price of literature also necessitated a number of innovations. Books were borrowed rather than bought. McNamara's Lending Library, an adjunct to his Bookshops, boasted 20,000 volumes. All could be hired out on a daily or weekly basis, 6d for the most popular titles, 3d for the others. 53 But probably the cheapest way to obtain one's reading was to buy a colonial version of an expensive overseas import. In days when copyright laws were less than stringent, the most promising authors were re-released in pamphlet form, attractively bound and sometimes illustrated. Sydney's Single Tax League plagiarised Henry George under a number of appealing titles. That we might all be Rich, The Music of the Spheres and (with generous acknowledgment to the Bible) What God Says About Land Monopoly. 54 This particular 'reworking' of literature was in the interests of both seller and purchaser; pamphlets were cheaper than books, were easier to store and distribute and placed fewer demands on the time and concentration of the reader. They also oblige the historian to re-evaluate the intellectual origins of nineteenth-century radicalism. A generation of readers may well have learnt their socialism from a score of twopenny pamphlets rather than the single author novels and monographs endlessly reproduced and analysed.

The mobility of books and the versatility of their distributors is nowhere better illustrated than in the single tax circles of South Australia. Around Adelaide, the Georgists established an impressive literary network: their libraries, bookshops and discussion circles stretched from Max Lewin's store in Rundle Street to Elsie Birks' salon in Norwood. 55 Beyond Adelaide they relied on the Red Van: a wagon laden with books, pamphlets and newspapers and driven by men with a good deal more politics than horsesense. Generally such tours would last several weeks, blazing a trail of literature across the South Australian countryside. Only when supplies of oats and books ran low, would the van return to the city, hastily refitting for another campaign of leafleting.

The Red Vans were British in origin; even the slogans emblazoned across their side _ 'Free Men, Free Land' _ were borrowed from the Land Nationalisation Society. And yet they were peculiarly suited to Australian circumstances. The van's ability to travel vast distances between isolated farms and townships made it the ideal vehicle for radical literature, establishing a tenuous link between city and country. And the van itself performed a multitude of functions: it was a bookshop, a place to sleep and a platform for radical orators. 56 And, in Britain _ perhaps also in Australia _ the Red Van was a vehicle for sexual as well as literary adventure. Many a romance developed as young men and women enjoyed the freedom of the open road far from the constraints of the city.

But by far the most daring of these enterprises was David Andrade's Anarchist Bookery in Melbourne. Andrade's career as publicist and bookseller highlights the uncertainties of those who hoped to make a living from literature. His early attempts to disseminate libertarian readings were sadly unsuccessful. In 1887 the Anarchist Club Library was on the point of collapse, 'the secretary having . . . lent all the volumes to Anarchy's opponents ... who . . . retained their old opinions and the books as well.' But anarchists are not easily discouraged. That same year, from his home in South Yarra, Andrade took to peddling pamphlets along with such colourful concoctions as Fernoix's Iron Tonic _ guaranteed ( the label reads) 'to revive colour, complexion and humour especially during the disturbing sensations produced by thunderstorms'. Such were the necessary sidelines of those who hoped to make a living from literature. By 1892 the Bookery (now over in Russell Street) boasted several hundred volumes and accommodated every conceivable cure to the social problem. 'Literature upon Socialism . . . Freethought, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Mesmerism, Phrenology, Vegetarianism, Antivivisection, Hydropathy [etc]' awaited the enterprising reader. Like McNamara's in Sydney, Andrade's establishment also contained a library. In the Reading Rooms of Liberty Hall, books and newspapers, light and warmth could be purchased for a penny admission. And like the single taxers' Red Van, a few rooms in Russell Street were put to any number of uses. A coffee shop and restaurant backed onto the library, satisfying the needs of mind as well as body. The restaurant's cuisine was strictly vegetarian, partly because it was cheap but mostly out of principle. Henry Salt's Animal Rights and Vegetarian Cookery by 'A Lady' were likely companions on Andrade's bookshelves. And the Bookery was as close as Melbourne came to a clinic for birth control. Pamphlets by Annie Besant advised readers in contraceptive technique: The Illustrated Marriage Guide and Dr Hollis' treatise on Diseases of the Male Generative Organ refined the pleasures and revealed the dangers of sexuality. Indeed, it could be argued that here the radical Bookery performed its most radical function, promoting the discussion of sexuality in a highly repressive society, dispensing 'French preventative's' and vaginal syringes in the belief that women were entitled to control their own bodies. 57

Andrade's Bookery reminds us that radical bookshops were not just about reading. They were also vibrant social centres, defying what Sheila Rowbotham once called the 'fragmentation' of public life and literature. 58 In his early years Brady knew reading as a solitary pursuit, books (or rather his choice of books) drew him away from the close circle of his family. In the Socialist League's Reading Rooms, Brady discovered friendship and romance as well as literature: to encounter radical papers from all across the world was wondrous enough, even more exhilarating was to meet those, like himself, determined to read them. 59

The social function of the bookshop was probably even more important to working-class readers. McNamara's styled itself 'the Democratic Rendezvous', a meeting place for ideas, individuals and cultures. For J.T. Lang, that working-class boy made good, it conjured up memories 40 years later: 'There flocked the poets and philosophers of Sydney town. The idealists and the materialists. The republicans and the anarchists. The atheists and the parsons. They browsed and they argued. They planned and they plotted. To me, it was all very exciting.' 60 Lang described McNamara's as the 'cure' for 'the political bug': it ended the isolation, loneliness and confusion which so often plagued the working-class reader. 61

David Vincent's pioneering study of working-class autobiography makes this point admirably.

As one reader came upon another, he recognised a man who not only shared his attitude and commitment, but who also had suffered and was still suffering the many privations which the pursuit of knowledge engendered. In a sense the very loneliness of the life of the reader made him all the more eager to embrace any available opportunity to make contact with a working man who had embarked on the same voyage. 62

Feminist Readings

The reader might well have been a woman. Feminist literary networks were not extensive in the 1890s. Reading (as we have seen) was difficult enough, harder still was to acquire books written for and by women. Louisa Lawson's life and bookstore illustrates both points admirably. Like Cameron, she was born to a poor rural family and 'craved' even as a child 'for knowledge and culture'. There the comparison ended. A promising pupil teacher, Lawson was kept at home to care for younger siblings: her mother 'burnt her books'; her husband, a struggling selector 'frowned upon' her reading. Burdened by three children, Louisa escaped to the city. There she 'championed every cause that might improve [women's] condition'. The Dawn Club was one such endeavour. For a subscription of 6d a week, women could attend its reading room, borrow its books and join in the 'animated discussion' of literature. As a purely literary society, the Dawn Club had its limitations: time and time again Lawson complained of 'a poor stock of literature on the woman question'. The real function of the club was social and political. Women 'exchanged ideas' and experiences, debating the Divorce Act, temperance and suffrage, strengthening the friendships which sustained first-wave feminism. And here young women were encouraged 'to exercise whatever talents they may have in speaking or writing', gaining the apprenticeship male literary networks had long denied them. 63

The Dawn Club is the most celebrated of all the literary networks established by and for women, but it was hardly unique or unprecedented. As Birks' experience in Adelaide suggests, reading groups of varying degrees of formality emerged out of the suffrage leagues, temperance unions and anti-vivisection societies, indeed, all the women-centred institutions of first-wave feminism. 64 These literary networks strengthened as the women's movement gained momentum. By the mid-1890s Sydney played host to any number of such forums, creating, as Judith Walkowitz might put it, 'new political spaces' for women. Women gathered each Saturday afternoon in Rose Scott's drawing room in Edgecliffe, enjoying tea, conversation and literature in what Miles Franklin would remember as Sydney's 'finest salon'. Of an evening they travelled to meetings of the Women's Literary Society, reclaiming the night and the city in a daring breach of social convention, reading, reciting, discovering the literature which 'electrified' Europe and America. 65 In each case, these reading circles 'brought the world . . . home' to women, 'history, poetry, fiction . . . all things in heaven and earth' lay suddenly within reach of them. And in each case they claimed a knowledge men and women 'of the old school' had denied them, devouring 'BAD BOOKS' on sex and suffrage, drawing solace and inspiration from the depiction of 'advanced women' in recent literature. 66

The nexus between feminism, socialism, the single tax and anarchism is apparent when we consider the book lists of any of their societies. The Woman's Voice listed amongst the books 'that all women should read', England's Ideal by Edward Carpenter, Politics for the People by Morrison Davidson, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Woman in the Past, Present and Future by August Bebel. 'No thinking woman should neglect to read [these] books', added Maybanke Anderson, the editor. Subsequent reading lists extended to Marx, Thoreau and Champion, the primers of nineteenth-century socialism. Socialist and feminist reading was equally interchangeable. Every radical bookshop carried literature on the women's question, catering for a female as well as a male readership. H.H. Champion's Book Lovers Library regularly advertised 'works of special interest to women' - Olive Schreiner's novels, Ibsen's plays, George Meredith on marriage, L.M. Hansen on the modern woman, the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and J.S. Mill to name but a selection from such titles. 67 Indeed, in a sense the radical bookshop was a female institution. The largest of these stores, the Lewins' in Adelaide or McNamara's or the Bears' in Sydney, were managed by wives in partnership with their husbands. Legally, men were the proprietors but in the day to day running of the store, even in the selection of its literature, women made decisions which in a more conventional business might be reserved for male managers. Often the bookshop must have seemed an extension of the household. When Bertha McNamara worked in the dining rooms that adjoined the Bookery she reinforced rather than challenged the gender order of colonial society. But Mrs McNamara was also to be found discussing the 'latest book' in the shop front and the reading room. Feted by Sydney's radical milieu as 'the mother of the labour movement', she was seen as the legitimate custodian of the rich and varied literary heritage. The bookshop then was not just another burden: it promised women the status, responsibility and power usually monopolised by their husbands. 68

The Radical Press

Bookshops were one source for the dissemination of reading. Newspapers were another. Arguably, there is no more persuasive testimony to the determination of this reading community. Most radical and labour papers were launched with little experience and even less capital. The Socialist, Batho recalled, appeared irregularly from makeshift quarters in Hunter Street, printed with £5 of second-hand print type 'so old that it was only with paste and plenty of water that it could be persuaded to stand upright'. Anarchist attempts at journalism were even more resourceful. Lacking 'the necessary pence' for typeface, Andrews carved each letter from a wooden block and set them on a shoebox. Revolt ran for four issues, blunting its editor's penknife. 69

But printing a radical paper was only part of the problem. With every issue, editors and writers ran a fine line between compelling, committed journalism and outright criminal libel. Hard Cash, 'a caustic little newsheet' issued by the Active Service Brigade, was suppressed by the authorities, its editor imprisoned and the offensive issue ritually incinerated. 70 Andrews' Handbook of Anarchy met a similar fate: cruelly suppressed for its failure to display a government imprint. 71

The labour and radical press belonged to that intriguing genre the 'new journalism'. 72 Their names proclaimed a political purpose: Voice, Hummer, Pioneer, Democrat, Roughshod, Revolt. So too did their mastheads: no radical or labour paper was complete without an epigram vowing (in loud Gothic print) to disperse the forces of darkness. Indeed none of these publications were newspapers in a conventional sense. Issued on a weekly rather than a daily basis, their function was not to disseminate news but to provide a commentary on events and issue. As such, these papers were a collage of epigrams, editorials, advertisements, correspondence, and (most important of all) extracts from prose and verse. Many such papers reproduced the classics of radical literature, serialising essays and chapters or passages from Tom Paine and Edward Bellamy, Henry George and Pierre Kropotkin. 73 This fragmentation of reading benefited paper and purchaser. Serialising a favourite author filled the columns when other contributors ran short; it provided the paper with a continuity and educational purpose and helped to secure a readership: the next instalment of a utopian romance like Bellamy's was eagerly awaited by subscribers. For the reader this collage of literature and news, sketch and photograph, gossip and opinion lightened the load of reading. Indeed, the radical and labour press were tailored for the reading patterns of working-class households. Here, as we have seen, reading was often interrupted, forced to accommodate the needs of paid and unpaid labour. And editors were careful not to tax the intellectual energies of their readers. 'Capital', the Workman declared, was 'the Socialist's Bible' and 'no man need pretend to know more than a mere smattering of political economy until he has given his days and nights to its pages.' 74 The Workman gave Capital two columns, sensibly balancing the piece with pithy correspondence from readers.

Editors not only selected suitable readings for their columns, they also advised subscribers on the best books to borrow or purchase. Reviews were a feature of the radical and labour press: assessing the latest developments in literature, examining old works with new perspectives, mounting a special case for some special 'Book Worth Reading'. 75 Some books, it seems, were also worth selling. One of the features of the new journalism was its move into the retailing of literature. Many cheap, popular, suitably political authors could now be obtained by mail order. In 1892 the Hummer advertised works by Bellamy, Gronlund, Donnelly, George and Davidson, catering, at prices ranging from eight pence to two pounds, for every pocket and every ideological persuasion. 76

This dissemination of literature was not an entirely one-way process: the radical and labour press sought to involve as well as educate their audience. Readers entered into long correspondence with the editors and columnists, frequently exhausting the formers patience. When Patriot continued to advocate protection as the solution to the workers' ills, he/she was instructed 'to secure the Fabian essays - precisely one shilling - or any of Hyndman's work ... Morrison Davidson [or] Gronlund.' Having read all that he/she would 'come to the conclusion that it is a great waste of time to fight over a tariff.' 77 But other correspondence was rather more welcome. 'Read! Read! Read!' began 'Wage Slave's' letter to the Workman. Donnelly, Bellamy, Morris _ each was warmly recommended. 'A Native' forwarded the Voice his/her favourite pages of Thoreau's Walden, commending not only these extracts but the whole book to 'ministers of religion, squatter kings and monopolists'. All this correspondence (including the extracts) were dutifully published. 78 This interactive process alerted paper and audience alike to the literary networks, the reading communities which sustained nineteenth-century radicalism. Editors directed readers to appropriate book stores (exercising considerable discretion in inquiries of a sexual nature). 79 Readers informed editors of the best books they had found in the city's public libraries. 80 Historians and literary critics have noted the role of the Bulletin in fostering the growth of an indigenous literary culture, creating a literary culture and colonising an audience. 81 Equally didactic, though seldom as condescending, the radical and labour press nurtured much the same interest in reading.

Involving the audience was as much an economic as an ideological imperative. It was not just the Workman's newsprint which was for sale: for a modest fee the reader could also hire its presses: 'Have a good idea to push on the labour movement?' it asked, 'If so, print it and spread it about. A thousand copies of a 16 page pamphlet will cost you 5 or 6 pounds, a thousand leaflets only 10 or 12 shillings.' 82 There were many good ideas around. From June to July 1894, the Workman issued 23,000 pamphlets, from George Black's Are the Machines to be Masters to Reverend Roseby's On the Land Question. Add to that dodgers, handbills, election addresses and the Workman itself and one arrives at a figure of '1,027,000 pieces of paper [each] charged with a democratic message.'83

Impressive statistics aa thee are, the scale of this radical readership is impossible to quantify. We can assume though that for every book or paper sold there was more than one and probably several readers. Journals like the Voice urged their purchaser to pass the paper on, preferably 'to a friend in the country'. 84 Durable items, books passed endlessly from one reader to another. A single copy of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was said to have run a course of 29 friends and acquaintances before moving on to a wider unknown field of readers. 85

Such books were never lost. Rather the exchange of ideas was the intention of their 'owners'. A stalwart single taxer, J.S. Higgs believed books as well as land were the common property of the people. In the early 1890s, his private library donated to the League 'on condition it . . . be kept in circulation amongst intelligent persons, and in no case become the exclusive possession of woman or man.' 86 The number of readers was magnified by what historians have called the convergence of oral and literary cultures. 87 Books were not just read but recited; newspapers were sold from 'the stumps' of Sydney's Domain, Melbourne's Yarra Bank and Adelaide's Botanic Gardens, the more enterprising peddlers first expounding their contents. 88 Finally, radical literary networks were built on the collective institutions of (white, male) working-class culture _ the workplace, the hotel, the barber, tobacconist and the union.

At one level, books and newspapers were public property, circulated, discussed and analysed amongst a community of readers. At another, each individual developed a unique and intensely personal relationship with literature. Beyond the public domain, the literary networks of nineteenth-century radicalism embraced diaries, journals, scrapbooks and private correspondence, personalised libraries maintained at little expense and much dedication. Here favourite passages were inscribed in neat copperplate hand, the neater the script the greater one's esteem for the author. Here columns of newspapers were cut and reassembled, charting the course of lost debates, recording for oneself (and perhaps posterity), published verse, prose and voluminous correspondence 'To the Editor'. And here one exchanged one's feelings with those who shared a reverence for reading. 89 As Elsie Birks read Browning, she copied 'the puzzling bits' down for perusal by her cousin Vivien. Together they would piece their way through the literary heritage of nineteenth-century radicalism.

Conclusion

I began this paper with a brief reference to Billy Hughes's autobiography. I might as well end it in the same way. Semioticians remind us that a text is read differently by every individual. As a historian, I'm tempted to add that the same is true of those 'Great Men in History' we are constantly re-inventing. For many of us Billy Hughes is a rather sinister figure. He is the labor rat par excellence, the one-time republican, the one-time radical, who broke the labour movement in his bid to introduce conscription and send Australia's youth to slaughter on the killing fields of Flanders. Oddly enough, I remember Billy Hughes's from a very different moment in history. In the early 1890s, a young man, 'adrift in a wide world' stumbled upon the company of Sydney's radicals. Amid what he called, this 'hard reading crowd' he struggled to find a solution to 'the social problem'. Why in an era of unprecedented human achievement, was there poverty and want, why did the hovels of the poor border the mansions of the wealthy. Hughes's insatiable reading bought him to the work of Henry George, an American political economists who attributed all social evil to the private monopolisation of land - as long as a few could bar access to 'Nature's storehouse', others would be forced to pay a levy in the form of rent. In this way the producing classes were held to ransom by the landlord, a social parasite. George's solution was as simple as the analysis he set out. Progress and Poverty called for the socialisation of rent through the taxation of land values: the single tax. 90

It doesn't sound very exciting does it; and even the most diligent researcher can take many tiresome weeks to read Progress and Poverty. But that is not how the book was read by Hughes and his generation. Passages were read out loud, discussed and debated, the book became a symbol all of its own, raised up before an audience as if it had some talismanic significance. Books were a part of what Vernon Lidtke called the highly tactile culture of nineteenth-century radicalism; they could be touched, held, opened up with authority or shaken with conviction. 91 The excitement of reading Henry George is nowhere better captured than in Crusts and Crusades , the testimony of Billy Hughes, the reader, the radical, the visionary of the nineties.

It was a beautiful moonlit night, a soft cool breeze fanned our hair as we walked along [George Street]. It was night made for lovers and idealists . . . But there was a serpent in our Eden: for some weeks there had been an epidemic of measles ... I said they were a bit of a problem alright, but Christie, sensing in my words some lack of faith in the Single Tax, . . . stopped short and tapping me solidly on the chest said 'Under the Single Tax, there will be no measles, no whooping cough, it will be a new and wonderful world.' 92

Arguably that new and wonderful world was lost when Hughes became a politician and ceased to be a reader.

Bruce Scates
University of New South Wales

Footnotes

  1. The arguments in this paper are pursued in Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge 1997. I thank Rae Frances, Brian Hubber and Martyn Lyons for their comments. Return
  2. G. Black, A History of the New South Wales Labor Party from its Conception until 1917, Sydney 1917, p. 20. Return
  3. W.M. Hughes, Crusts and Crusades, pp. 60-61. Return
  4. Robins Gollan's original and innovative study has been largely reproduced by others. R. Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia 1850-1950, ch. 7; Burgmann, In Our Time, p. 5; J. Docker, The Nervous Nineties, chs. 3-4. Return
  5. R. Escarpit, The Sociology of Literature, London 1971, pp. 10, 21; see also M. Bradbury, The Social Context of Modern English Literature, London 1971, pp. xiv-xx. Return
  6. R. Gollan, 'American Populism and Australian Utopianism', pp. 15-21; 'The Australian Impact' in S.E. Baumann, Edward Bellamy Abroad, New York 1962; B. Mansfield, 'The Socialism of William Morris: England and Australia', Historical Studies, vol. 7, no. 27, November 1956, pp. 271-290; L. F. Crisp, 'Remember the Literature, Comrades! Labour Party Reading Then and Now', Labour History, no. 36, May 1979, pp.31-46; K. Stewart, 'Journalism and the World of the Writer: the Production of Australian Literature 1855-1915', Penguin New Literary History of Australia, Ringwood 1988. Return
  7. M. Lyons, 'Texts, Books and Readers: Which Kind of Cultural History', Australian Cultural History, no. 11, 1992, p. 3. Return
  8. Blacke, Reading Victorian Fiction: The Cultural Context and Ideological Content of the Ninteenth Century Novel, New York, 1989, pp. 6-8. Return
  9. R. Darnton, 'First Steps Towards a History of Reading', Australian Journal of French Studies, vol. XXIII, no. 1, 1986, pp. 6, 24; also M. Lyons and L. Taksa, Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading 1890-1930, Melbourne 1992, p. 3. Return
  10. Lyons, 'Texts, books and readers', pp. 2, 14. Return
  11. A.G. Austin, Australian Education 1788-1900: Church, State and Public Education in Colonial Australia, Melbourne 1965, pp. 172-217. For the failings of the Education Act see Ann Larson, Growing up in Melbourne in the Late Nineteenth Century, Canberra, 1994, ch. 3. D. I. McDonald, 'The Diffusion of Scientific and other Useful Knowledge', Journal of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 54, pt. 2, June 1968, pp. 176-184; G. Nadel, Australia's Colonial Culture: Ideas, Men and Institutions in Mid-Nineteenth Century Eastern Australia, Melbourne 1957, ch. 3; C. T. Clarke, 'The Book Trade in New South Wales', Library Association of Australasia, Proceedings of the Sydney Meeting October 1898, pp. 116-121. Return
  12. R. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1880-1900, Chicago 1957, p. 4; A. Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, London 1873; R. E. N. Twopenny, Town Life in Australia, London 1883, pp. 9, 130; C. Dilke, Greater Britain, London 1885. Return
  13. On Brady's early life and background, see J. B. Webb, 'A Critical Biography of Edwin Janes Brady', Ph. D. thesis, University of Sydney, 1973. Return
  14. P. Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge Mass., 1984, pp. 23, 81. Return
  15. E. J. Brady, 'The Red Objective', ch. 4. Return
  16. Ibid. Return
  17. Darnton, 'Towards a history of reading', p. 5. Return
  18. Brady, 'Red Objective', chs 4 and 5; Bruce Scates, '"Faddists and Extremists": Radicalism and the Labour Movement in South Eastern Australia, 1887-1898', Ph. D thesis, Monash University, 1987, pp. 57-8. Return
  19. E.J. Brady, 'Mallacoota Days', in G.L. Lawson and J. Le Gay Brereton (eds) Henry Lawson by his mates, Sydney 1931, p. 129. Return
  20. See Brady and Fred Broomhill's reminiscences, Lawson and Le Gay Brereton, Henry Lawson, pp. 125, 138, 61, 36, 126. Return
  21. Hughes, Crusts and Crusades, pp.60-61. This is not to classify Hughes as working class: as we have seen, his class position was far more ambivalent. But his autobiography does express the situation of working class readers. Return
  22. Escarpit, Sociology of Reading, p. 91. Return
  23. Hughes, Crusts and Crusades, p. 60. Return
  24. B. Lawson, My Henry Lawson, Sydney 1960, p. 14. Lawson failed to matricultate. His lack of 'cultural equipment' were thought to be evident in his later tastes in reading. J. Le Gay Brereton's remarks convery the contempt of literary circles, see Knocking Around, Sydney 1930, p. 4; also Broomfield, Henry Lawson, p. 36. Return
  25. E. Lane, Dawn to Dusk, pp. 10, 9. The 'prohibitive' atmosphere of the library for working class readers is vividly evoked by Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, Middlesex 1958, pp. 69-70. Return
  26. Tocsin, 17 October 1901; B. James, 'Fleming, John William', Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 8, 1891-1939, p. 521. Return
  27. Lane, Dawn to Dusk, p. 10. Return
  28. Ibid., pp. 8-10. Return
  29. M. Lyons, 'Working-Class Autogiographers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Some Franco-British Comparisons', History of European Ideas, vol. 20, nos 1-3, 1995, pp. 235-241; J. Rose, 'Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to the History of Audiences', Ibid, vol. 53, no. 1, 47-70. Return
  30. R. Engelsings', Der Burger als leser. Lesergeschicte in Deutschland, 1500-1800, Stuttgart 1974; Age, 7 May 1894. This tends to belie any simple distinction between one period of reading and another, corroborating Darnton's critique in a colonial context, Darnton, 'First Steps', p. 5; see also 'Readers respond to Rousseau: the Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity', in Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, New York, 1984' pp. 249-50. Return
  31. R. Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, New York 188, pp 12-14, 40-44;. H.G. Klaus, The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition, Sussex 1982, p. 2. Return
  32. Australian Workman, 23 September 1890; Shearer's Record, 15 May 1889, Hummer, 23 January 1892. Return
  33. Tocsin, 17 October 1901; Scates, 'Faddists and Extremists', pp. 483-4; 'Sunday Liberation Society', Sam Merrifield Papers, La Trobe Library. Return
  34. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, Chapter 5. Return
  35. E. Birks Letters, dated ?[indecipherable] May, 24 August, 27 December 1895; 5 April 1896; Birks Papers. Return
  36. Darnton, First Steps, p. 6; E. Birks Letters, 5 April 1896. Return
  37. The Woman's Voice, 20 April 1895. Return
  38. Scates, 'Faddists and Extremists', pp. 839-841; 'Afternoon Tea and Literature', The Woman's Voice, 20 April 1895. Return
  39. S. Stephens, 'Marriage and the Family in Bohemian Melbourne', Australia 1888, no. 9, April 1982, pp. 20-29. Ralph Bedford's claim that Bohemia was a 'matrimonial agency' for men and women alike is hardly born out by the evidence (From Naught to Thirty Three, (1944) Melbourne 1976.) Note Bertram Stevans' response to the news of a fellow Bohemian's engagement. 'Break it ... for no woman on earth is worthy of such a sacrifice.' J. Le Gay Brereton, Knocking Around, Sydney 1930, p. 11. For married men 'claimed .... again by Bohemia's temptations', see Bertha McNamara's 'memories' of life with Henry, Henry Lawson by his Mates, p. 114. Return
  40. G. A. Taylor, "Those were the Days" being Reminiscences of Australian Artists and Writers, Sydney 1918, Chapter 3: Bohemian Girls. Return
  41. Le Gay Brereton, Knocking Around, p. 25. Return
  42. Sydney School of Arts, Report of the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts for the Year 1889, pp. 5-8. Return
  43. Gibbs Shallard Co. Sydney in 1889, Sydney 1889, p. 73; Sydney News, 21 May 1890. Return
  44. Sydney News, 21 May 1890. For observations on women's reading in a twentieth century context see Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa, '"If Mother Caught us Reading ...!" Impresions of the Australian Woman Reader, 1890-1933', Australian Cultural History, 1992, no. 11, pp. 43-45. Return
  45. Sydney School of Arts, Report of the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts, 1885, p. 5; ibid., 1886, p. 5; 1889, p. 8. Judith Walkowitz has described a similar phenomenon in London noting the way that female readers 'intruded' on that male preserve, the British Museum, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London, Chicago 1992, p. 69. Return
  46. 'A Poet's Mother: Louisa Lawson', Bulletin, 24 October 1890; Sydney School of Arts, Report of the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts, 1892, pp. 20-21. Return
  47. Dawn, 1 December 1891. Return
  48. Sydney School of Arts, Report of the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts, 1892, pp. 20-21. Note that male membership was described as 'stationary' and that revenue from the hire of the hall was steadily declining. Return
  49. See, for instance, the appearance of socialist women speakers at School of Arts functions and their election to Council, Daily Telegraph, 14 September 1898; Dawn, 1 July 1893; J. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. 69-70 Return
  50. Isadore Brodsky, Sydney Looks Back, Sydney 1957, p. 212; David Andrade to W. H. McNamara, 7 May 1888, Rawling Collection, Noel Butlin Archives of Business and Labour, ANU, Canberra. Return
  51. For the social geography of radical Sydney see Scates, 'Faddists and Extremists', pp. 59-63; also Davison,'s illuminating study, 'Sydney and the bush', p. 197. For bookselling streets see James Tyrell's reminiscences of early Sydney, Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney: the Fascinating Reminiscences of a Sydney Bookseller, Sydney 1952, p. 21. Return
  52. Hard Cash, August 1893; Lyons, 'Texts, Books and Readers', p. 9. Return
  53. Australian Workman, 30 October 1893; for a similar venture see L. C. Hubbard's Socialist Book Exchange, Socialist, 30 May, 30 October 1896. Return
  54. Sydney Single Tax League, That We Might All Be Rich, Sydney, n.d.; The Music of the Speres or the New Nirvana, Sydney, n.d.; What God Says About Land Monopoly, Sydney, n.d.; see other pamphlets and ephemera held in the Darlington Single Tax League File, Sydney Single Tax Material, Mitchell Library. For a detailed discussion of such a publishing proposal see Voice, 18 August 1893. Return
  55. Elsie Birks to 'Vivian', 24 August, 27 December, 1895, Birks papers; Voice, 8 September 1894. Return
  56. Voice, 1 June, 13 July 1894. Return
  57. Commonweal and Workers' Advocate, 17 December 1892; Andrade's contemporary, Robert Bear, also dealt in contraceptive devices, Radical, 10 March 1888. Return
  58. Rowbothom, Travellers, p. 79. Return
  59. Brady, 'Red Objective'; see also Lane, Dawn to Dusk, p. 29 and on the 'attractions of the reading room', Radical, 22 September 1888. Return
  60. Australian Workman, 30 December 1893; J.T. Lang, I Remember, Sydney 1956, p. 7; for Lang's social background see B. Nairn, 'John Thomas Lang', ADB, vol. 9, p. 661; H. Radi and P. Spearritt (eds), Jack Lang, Sydney 1977. Return
  61. Lang, I Remember, pp. 7, 11; see also Brodsky's reminiscences, Sydney Looks Back, p. 214. Return
  62. D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working Class Autobiography, London 1981, p. 126. Return
  63. Bulletin, 24 October 1890; Lawson, My Henry Lawson, pp. 8-10; B. Matthews, 'Louisa Lawson', ADB, vol. 10; Le Gay Brereton and Lawson (eds), Henry Lawson, p. 79; Dawn, 3 August, 2 October, 5 November 1889; 1 June 1891; 1 November 1892. Return
  64. For a general introduction to these networks see Susan Sheridan, 'Louisa Lawson, Miles Franklin and Feminist Writing, 1888-1901', Australian Feminist Studies, no. 8, Summer 198, pp. 29-47; also 'The Woman's Voice on Sexuality', in Magarey, et.al. (eds), Debutante Nation, pp. 114-124 and below. Feminist networks in Melbourne are discussed in F. Kelly, 'The Woman Question in Melbourne, 1880-1914', Ph. D. thesis, Monash University, 1982, whilst the women's movement in Adelaide is the focus of Helen Jones' study, In her own Name, Adelaide 1989. Return
  65. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. 69-70; Miles Franklin, 'Rose Scott', in Flora Eldershaw (ed.), The Peaceful Army, 1938, Penguin 1988, p. 101; also My Career Goes Bung; Women's Literary Society Minute Book, 15 August 1892, MLB 693; Women's Literary Society, Annual Report for the Year 1893, Sydney 1893; see also J. Roberts, Maybanke Anderson: Sex, Suffrage and Social Reform, Sydney 1993, chapter 3; J. Allen, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism, Melbourne 1994, pp.78-83. Return
  66. Franklin, 'Rose Scott', p. 101; The Woman's Voice, 23 August 189; 20 April 1895; Women's Literary Society Minutes, 15 August 1892; 10 April 1893. See Champion's report of a literary discussion by the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society, 22 June 1896. Return
  67. The Woman's Voice, 6 October 1894; 27 July 1895; Champion, 22 June 1896. Return
  68. Lawson, My Henry Lawson, p. 79; Long, I Remember, p. 7; Indeed, bookshops occasionally offered women the means of an independent livelihood; by the late 1890s Ella Champion had become the sole proprietor of the Book Lovers Library. Return
  69. Vagabond, Random Ramblings, p. 8; Revolt, May 1893; Brady, 'Odd Men Out'; Lane, Dawn to Dusk, p. 37. Return
  70. See Justice's appraisal, 31 March 1894, for suppression see reports of court proceedings in Truth, 8, 17, 22 October 1893; Bulletin, 21 October 1893. Return
  71. New Order, 7 July 1894. Unable to pay the £20, Andrews (and two of his collaborators) was imprisoned. Even the Bulletin grimaced at this 'cowardly exhibition of official malevalence', Bulletin, 7, 21 July 1894. Return
  72. For a discussion of the features of the new journalism, see Carl Levy, 'Education and Self Education', in Levy (ed.), Socialism and the Intelligentsia, p. 145; also D. Hopkins, The Socialist Press in Britain, 1890-1910, in G. Boyce (ed) Newspaper History, p. 296. Return
  73. See, for instance, 'A Page from Bellamy', Australian Workman, 4 July 1891; 'Every Day Lessons', Voice, 20 January 1893. Often reproducing an author was not enough and editors were moved to comment, see, for instance, the Voice's rejoinder: 'Well and bravely said, William Morris!', Voice, 9 December 1892. Return
  74. Australian Workman, 23 January 1892. Return
  75. Australian Workman, 3 November 1894. Return
  76. Hummer, 23 January 1892. Return
  77. Australian Workman, 25 April 1891; also 2 June 1894. Return
  78. Ibid., 29 November 1890; Voice 2 June, 3 November 1894. Return
  79. Anwer to Australian Workman, 29 November 1890; note also Victor Stuart's column, promising advice on small families, Radical, 10 March 1888. Editors also answered inquiries about authors, see the Workman's profile of J.A. Andrews, 25 July 1891. Return
  80. See Albert Stickney's discovery of A True Republic in the School of Arts and Public Library, Australian Workman, 17 January 1891. Return
  81. see for example, K. Levis, 'The Role of the Bulletin in Indigenous Short -Story Writing duing the Eighties and Nineties', in C. Wallace-Crabbe (ed), The Australian Nationalists: Modern Critical Essays, Melbourne 1971, pp. 45-57; G. Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia, 1788-1972, Melbourne, 1973, pp. 60-62; S. Lawson, The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship, Sydney 1983, ch. 7. Return
  82. Australian Workman, 26 May 1894. Return
  83. Ibid., 21 July 1894. Return
  84. Pioneer, 12 November 1891. See also Lawson's account of the 'time honoured and good old custom' of mailing journals on 'from one mate to another', 'Remailed', Lawson, Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 369. Return
  85. Democrat, 28 May 1890. Return
  86. See the frontispiece to W.J.Linton's classic, The English Republic: God and the People, London 1851. Other works in the Single Tax Library bear similar inscriptions, see for example Miss Turnbull's donation of H.M. Hydman, The Coming Revolution, Single Tax Library, vol. 53, HGA. Return
  87. Lucy Taksa, 'Spreading the Word', p. 78. Return
  88. Note the account of one Radical salesman, arrested at the Domain. He evaded capture long enough to sell 70 copies, Radical, 26 November 1887 Return
  89. See, for instance, Percy Meggy Scrapbooks (3 volumes), Meggy Papers, Mitchell Library; J.S. Higgs Scrapbook, Henry George Archives, (HGA), Henry George League, Melbourne; McNamara Correspondence, J.N. Rawling Papers, Butlin Archives; Florence Birks Letters, Chartier Papers, State Library of South Australia Archives, PRE 263. Return
  90. George, Progress and Poverty, Introductory: the Problem. The theme was elaborated in all his subsequent work, most notably Social Problems, London 1884. Return
  91. V. Lidtke, An Alternative Culture: Socialist labour in Imperial Germany, New York, 1985, p. 63; Taksa, 'Spreading the Word' p. 78. Return
  92. Hughes, Crusts and Crusades, pp. 69-70.
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