Fin de Siecle Socialism in Britain and the United States
The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw an efflorescence of socialism and socialist literature in both Britain and the United States. In Britain it may be seen, in part, as a response to the economic difficulties experienced in that period, but it was also a product of an ideological ferment to which the ideas of Karl Marx, Henry George’s (1839-97) Progress and Poverty, 1879, the philosophical idealism of writers such as T.H. Green (1836-82) and F.H. Bradley (1846-1924), the positivism of Frederic Harrison (18311923) and E.S. Beesly (1831-1915), the social investigations of Seebohm Rowntree (1871-1954) and Charles Booth (1840-1916), and the social criticism of writers such as Andrew Mearns (1837-1925) and G.R. Sims (1847-1922) all contributed.