I

Radford's first significant success in publishing her verse in 1883 was inextricably linked to the Bloomsbury world of free-thinking ethical clubs and debating societies from which the socialist movement later drew many of its most prominent activists. Thanks to her friendship with Eleanor Marx and Clementina Black, Radford (or Caroline Maitland, to give her proper name in this period before her marriage) was increasingly drawn into the debates on atheism and ethics generated by the Progressive Association and G. W. Foote's radical secularist journal Progress. During the early 1880s Black and Radford drew this debate into their own circle of acquaintances, inviting several speakers to address the men and women's discussion club they organised on the question of the coming ethical order in the new age of agnosticism.²

If the radical flavour of such subjects of debate seems slightly dulled now, the fact of G. W. Foote's imprisonment for twelve months on a count of blasphemy during 1883 probably did something to clarify the edgy political position of the secularist movement to its members in the early 1880s. Edward Aveling, who was to become Eleanor Marx's common-law husband in 1884, served as interim editor of Progress during Foote's unavoidable absence and it was in his term of office that nine of Radford's poems appeared in the journal.³

Although Progress was a relatively new journal, its founding editor, Foote, looked back with some pride on the conjunction of secularist publishing and radical poetics in the later nineteenth century. He became a staunch defender, for example, of the atheistic legacy of James Thomson, whose City of Dreadful Night was first published in Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant's freethinking National Reformer in 1874. Progress secured permission to publish Thomson's literary remains from his executors, and, from Foote's return as editor in April 1884, Thomson's poetry and essays came to dominate the literary component of the journal. In a break with the older radical tradition of Chartist poetry however, the pages of Progress generally devoted considerable space to lyric poetry and relatively little to explicitly politicised hymns and ballads. Anne Janowitz has recently situated the radical poetry associated with the Chartist movement in a (long) nineteenth-century field of Romanticism and argued that many such works embody a formal dialectic between the labouring-class oral tradition of the ballad and the bourgeois interiority of the individuated lyric (28–31; 133–59). In contrast to such radical dialectic of the individual and communal – a dialectic poetics that was, as we shall see, sustained in many of the works published in contemporary socialist journals – the poetry in Progress was content to explore the parameters of subjectivity and individualism in conventional lyric form. This formal preference was, I argue, inextricably linked to the editors' ethical secularist agendas.

In the course of an extended review of Philip Bourke Marston's volume of poetry, Wind Voices, published in Progress in 1884, Edward Aveling concluded that “in this age of transition [to atheism] the task of the imaginative writer is difficult. He has to teach the great lesson of godlessness. But he has also to describe human beings” (135). Lyric poetry, so inalienably associated with reflection and interiority during the nineteenth century, thus assumed a particularly significant role in the age of secularisation. Such a form of imaginative writing was not merely a vehicle for the description of human beings, but a means of inscribing secular subjectivity. Lyric poetry, Aveling implied, could serve the new dissident belief system of atheism as humbly as it had established religion throughout the nineteenth century. In examining the intertwining of theology and poetics in the nineteenth century, Cynthia Scheinberg has concluded that such interdependence not only framed poetry as the “handmaid” of religion but also disseminated an ideal of the “poetic heart” as “a realm that privileges female and Christian identity” (51). The private virtues of Christian humility preached by poet-theologians such as John Keble, Scheinberg argues, are not only coded as feminine within the nineteenth-century logic of gender, but also concur with the affective language of the poetry of the heart. Whilst Foote's editorial policy was noted for its misogyny, as acting editor, Aveling oversaw the publication of numerous lyrics by women poets, including Radford, that can be read as secular negotiations of this Christian tradition of the feminised “poetic heart.”

Dollie Radford's poem “The Starlight Has Gladdened the River,” published in Progress in October 1883 and not reprinted in her later collections, is typical of this secularised affective lyric. In the first stanza the lyric speaker reflects on her alienation from the beauty of the natural world around her:

The light shining down on the lyric speaker in this first stanza invokes a Christian poetic tradition in which the heavens above provide transcendent inspiration and the animating touch of some greater force, sparking the solid human clay on earth into spiritual life. Sparse and simplistic as it is, however, Radford's poem subverts this conventional order of things. The speaker does not yearn for heavenly light, but a humble “beacon” of human manufacture. The parity of that beacon with the speaker's subject position is emphasised by the internal rhyme which yokes it to the heavily endstopped “me” at the end of the line. The light of inspiration and love that completes the beauty of the earth is found in humanity, not in the heavens. The second and third stanzas of the poem extend this reading by exploring and denying the possibility that the “music” of the stars and the “poetry” of the moonlight might complete “the beauty” that is wanting in the speaker's vision of the evening.

The poem closes with a stanza that seems to typify the affective domestic realm prescribed for the nineteenth-century woman poet and this, in addition to some clumsy prosody in the final line, might indicate why Radford decided not to include the poem in her later collections. Nevertheless, the text gives a good indication of Radford's subtle subversions of even the most trite poetic conventions with the radical intellectual currents of her Bloomsbury circle:

The lyric subject returns to the firmly non-transcendental world of affective relations in which she finds perfection and completion. But the familiar domestic sentiments here should not obscure the important inversion of the conventional religious positioning of the giver and receiver of light, inspiration and beauty. Whilst the natural world “glows with a softened delight” thanks to the beneficent light from above, in the materially specific, social world of the valley the light of inspiration is generated from below and shines from human community. An ethical affect emanating from humanity completes the limited beauty of the naturalised heavens. As Martin Priestman has suggested, in a rather different context, within an atheist poetics “nature” accretes a new set of referents as an autonomous material system rather than as a source of some spirit more deeply interfused in its matter (7). Radford's poem denies that lyric subjectivity is inspired from above and thus teaches the “great lesson of godlessness,” as Aveling recommended. But Radford's alternative ideal is far from that of a self-authorising subject: her lyric shadows forth an idea of aesthetic creativity embedded in the affective heart of human(ist) community. The verse combines conventional feminised lyrical affect with a new secular ethical subjectivity.

Dollie and Ernest Radford's ventures in secularism stopped short of a whole-hearted advocacy of rationalist atheism, and, like many of their peers at the fin de siècle, the couple explored alternative belief systems to supplement the spiritual void.⁵

Radford turned her mind to producing some verses for Today, despite her ambivalent attitude to “scientific socialism,” after an encouraging meeting with Bax and Joynes in Eleanor Marx's rooms in January 1884. Even in these early months of the rebirth of the socialist movement in Britain, however, Radford was aware that her philanthropic social observations and unsystematic sense of social injustice marked her out from Marx's other visitors. Bax, in particular, was a notorious misogynist who claimed that women were simply incapable of turning their attention from their own love affairs to great social questions (“Woman Question” 25).⁶

Ever an astute judge of the periodical press and its editorial expectations, Radford anticipated that the sort of poetry required for Today would be very different from the secular affective lyrics published in Progress. It was not that Today was wholeheartedly devoted to expositions of Das Kapital, despite the journal's rather stern subtitle, “The Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism.” The first volume contained the serialisation of George Bernard Shaw's An Unsocial Socialist, William Morris's “Art under Plutocracy,” Edward Carpenter's England's Ideal, Edward Aveling on Ibsen, essays by Walt Whitman, Edith Simcox, Eliza Lynn Linton, Eleanor Marx, and poems by Ernest Radford and Havelock Ellis in addition to nihilist novels and socialist essays by the usual suspects such as Stepniak. It was rather that the journal required a vigorously material aesthetic in which poetry performed a triumphant march towards a future of labour. Idealist dreams evoking the “religion of socialism,” such as Edward Carpenter's contributions to the journal, lacked sufficient rigour for Bax and Joynes and were published with an editorial disclaimer, disavowing the content as unscientific.

Today had a far higher proportion of female contributors than the increasingly chauvinist Progress ever did. It was in this forum that the Fabian socialist Edith Nesbit and her half-sister Saretta Green or “Caris Brooke” published a considerable number of socialist hymns and topical dramatic lyrics such as “The Husband of Today: The Wife of all Ages” (Nesbit 403).⁸

Radford's “Two Songs” draws a motif of revolutionary poetics from the work of a writer to whom Radford “felt nearer than any” during the early 1880s, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and uses that motif to question the limits of heroic masculine radicalism (Radford Diary July 1883). Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind” frames the autumnal West Wind as a dialectic “Destroyer and Preserver” which drives the seeds of future life to the ground, “Each like a corpse within its grave, until / Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow / Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth…” (ll. 8–10). Radford's “Two Songs” returns upon Shelley's ode by opening in that promised spring which closes his poem; but in “Two Songs” this is a spring that brings to light only urban fragmentation. In Shelley's text the dense interlocking of terza rima propels a turn from figuring the wind as the natural force of seasonal death and rebirth to the inspiration of a poetics of tangible social effects: “Be through my lips to unawakened earth / The trumpet of a prophecy!” (“Ode to the West Wind” ll. 68–69). Yet in Radford's urban spring of modernity, the March wind of the first stanza heedlessly blows past the singer on the pavement as an uncaring force of inevitable material change.

Radford's “Two Songs” reworks the conventional radical poetic association of the masculinised wind with a message of hope in political transformation by contrasting the impersonal force of March with the vulnerable, ignorant singer in the first stanza. The singer is no longer the unencumbered lyric self of Shelley's ode, but rather a child rooted in the marketplace, singing spontaneously, but singing for her supper nevertheless. The speaker of the first two stanzas observes the street singers at the level of the pavement and rather than aspiring to join the onward sweep of the March wind, couches a description of the scene in language that harks back to an earlier nineteenth-century tradition of women's philanthropic poetry; Radford's rendering of the tiny, vulnerable child forced to sing thus owes something to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “The Cry of the Children.” In this instance, however, the form of child labour being criticised is in itself uncomfortably close to the recuperation of the aesthetic by capitalism and not the more thoroughly material indenture to the iron wheel of manufacture condemned by Barrett Browning. “Tiny,” “little,” “singing,” “happy,” and unknowing, the spontaneous child singers in “Two Songs” echo the familiar critical terminology of the spontaneous feminised “poetess” applied to Radford by her contemporaries and underscore the passivity of such a role. The two songs of the first two contrasting sesta rima stanzas are those of girl children in radically different social positions: the indigent beggar child and the happy “little maid” out for a walk with her mother. Yet the final stanza suggests that both these singers will be condemned to join in chorus but still remain unheard in the long cycle of “the coming years.” Radford might not know the working man, but here the lyric voice elides the distance between the woman poet and the working-class girl child under capitalism in order to examine the consequences of really not knowing why one is singing in public, of merely babbling meaningless song in the capitalist marketplace. I want to suggest that by means of this strategic identification the poem re-examines socialist hopes of change and questions the persistent deferral of the question of women's sexual exploitation within the movement.

The oppositional reworking of radical poetics can be traced through the dialectic of forms of time at work in the poem. In the second stanza the virile sun of early spring, “fresh and strong,” encourages the little feminine buds of the “happy” little maid to blossom into precocious maturity just as the March wind exposes and penetrates the body of the “tiny form” of the working-class girl in the previous stanza. Despite the cyclical logic of the seasons, March here is linear, progressive, and developmental. In the final stanza, however, there is a very different form of time at work. Gravid assonance displaces the tripping consonance of the first two stanzas and the straining anapaests foreground that odd juxtaposition of “childish” and “heavy.” The feminine moon rejoices, but is not to be looked to as an alternative source of authority to that of the “strong” March sun: she, perhaps like the late-nineteenth-century woman poet, is “broken” by her attempts to pierce the obscurity and lighten the streets below. In this nocturnal streetscape the two voices of the ignorant girl children have become one with the night itself, condemned to weep “burning tears.” Given the public concern with prostitution and the sexual exploitation of children in London during the mid-1880s, it is possible to read these “burning tears” as an allusion to the physical hazards of women taking to the streets at night in the form of venereal disease. This heavy fruit of sexual knowledge is shared by women of all classes for endless “coming years,” whilst the revolutionary promise of the March wind is implicated by its absence from this female cycle of sexual performance and commerce.

Almost exactly a year after Radford drafted “Two Songs,” William Morris composed the opening poem of his epic The Pilgrims of Hope, “The Message of the March Wind” (Morris, CL 386). Anne Janowitz has recently restated the significance of “The Message of the March Wind” in the face of a critical tradition of apology and neglect by placing it within a radical dialectic of Romanticism. Morris's debt to Shelley is, Janowitz argues, “recuperative and revitalising” and “brings a poetic of lyric solidarity to bear upon the complex punctual and inward self of liberal hegemony” (31). If Morris's recuperative aesthetic endows the Romantic dialectic with new vigour, Radford's poem interrogates the limitations of a radical poetics that does not engage with the conventional topos of the feminine affective lyric and sweeps past the charitable object of sympathy on the street, unable to carry her message in its haste to the bright communal future. The sequence in which Radford republished “Two Songs” in A Light Load in 1891 emphasises this subjective critique. The preceding poem, “Why seems the world so fair, / Why do I sing?” explores the resources of the aesthetic in preparing for a world of hope in a future “Spring,” and LeeAnne Marie Richardson has analysed the poem that follows “Two Songs,” “What song shall I sing to you / Now that the wee ones are in bed,” as a consideration of the domestic limitation of women poets (Richardson 112). Read between these two lyrics, “Two Songs” gains an even sharper political resonance. The lyric voice abruptly breaks off its affective rhapsody of hopeful domesticity in the surrounding poems, to listen to another tune. After this, the following poem's vision of children “tucked away on a pillow white / All snug and cosy for the night” reads as anxious overstatement in the face of the material basis of affective domesticity.

Several months after she composed “Two Songs” Radford was convinced by William Morris that she was indeed a socialist. She had, she realised, been left cold by other leaders of the movement, such as Aveling, Bax, and H. M. Hyndman, because they were incapable of giving form to the beauty, as well as the seriousness of socialism (Radford Diary November 1884). As the mother of three young children during the rise of socialist activism in the 1880s and early 90s, Radford was well aware of the limits to her own engagement in the movement. Whilst her friends Eleanor Marx, Grace, Constance, and Clementina Black all went to the East End and made various attempts to organise labour and foster socialist discussion, Radford's involvement remained limited to the drawing-room meetings of Bloomsbury and Hammersmith. Yet that peculiarly aesthetic and idealist flavour of the “religion of socialism” during the 1880s enabled Radford to figure her own work as a contribution to the greater cause, providing the hope of beauty that was in itself a revolutionary force according to Morris. Inviting as Morris's aesthetic socialism was for Radford and her husband, however, the productivist communal ideal of socialist art disseminated by Morris sat awkwardly with Radford's attenuated lyrics and songs. The spaces of Morris's aesthetic socialism proved inhospitable to the individuated, feminised lyric voice and her second collection of poems negotiates its way through the communal political imperative of Morris's manly socialism and the highly wrought autonomy of aesthetic poetry.

II

Whilst Morris's socialist lectures, collected and published as Signs of Change in 1888 provide the clearest formulation of his productivist, communal aesthetic, his Utopian fiction News from Nowhere (1891) works through these theories and provides exempla of anti-individualist, post-revolutionary art. As Patrick Brantlinger suggests, News from Nowhere is a text preoccupied by the effects of communal socialism on aesthetic expression (35). The narrative form reflects a concern with the types of art and creative subjectivity that will be possible under socialism. Lyric poetry is nowhere to be found and the realist novel has disappeared along with its precondition of bourgeois individualism. In Nowhere the environment has become “our books in these days.” Novels speak only of the sorrowful past of individualism in which “the hero and heroine [live] on an island of bliss” and work their way through “a long series of sham troubles…illustrated by dreary introspective nonsense” whilst the world labours on around them (Morris, News 129). Whilst the text rejects bourgeois individualist interiority as a repository of aesthetic truth, architecture takes up the narrative function of emotional complexity and embodied history: communal space displaces individual depth. “I console myself,” Morris wrote in Signs of Change, “with visions of the noble communal hall of the future” when confronting the vulgar possessive individualism of the 1880s (Morris, Signs 32). Ellen, the most carefully realised (and interestingly eroticised) inhabitant of Nowhere, reaffirms her earlier contentions regarding the incomprehensibility of realist fiction when she reaches out to embrace the lichened wall of Kelmscott Manor towards the end of the novel. Rather than a conventional union between hero and heroine in defence against the world, the heroine's “shapely sun browned hand and arm” stretches out to a union with the world in the form of the house that has “waited for these happy days, and held in it the gathered crumbs of happiness of the confused and turbulent past” (174). There is no chance of such a clinch for the visitor to Utopia, William Guest, the unmistakable bourgeois individual product of high capitalism, for Ellen's love is for “the earth…and all things that deal with it and grow out of it.” At the end of the novel, then, Kelmscott Manor displaces the old individualism and interiority of romance and the heart is given over to the commonweal.

But it is not only the old private realm of romance that is displaced by communal architecture in News from Nowhere. Politics, too, is unindividuated in this Utopia and what Kelmscott Manor does for romance at the end of the novel, the site of Morris's Kelmscott House in Hammersmith does for politics at the beginning. As the narrator eats his breakfast after waking up in the Guest House, his eye is caught by “a carved and gilded inscription on the panelling” in the hall. It is the only instance of the written word that Guest encounters directly in Nowhere and he is “much…moved” by its simple statement:

The guest hall articulates a history that the younger inhabitants of Nowhere are unconcerned with, if not actively hostile towards. The space of socialist argument and education has become a place of pleasurable labour, but only the building memorialises the efforts of past individuals to bring about this new communal life. The inhabitants of Nowhere have no need to look forwards or backwards in a world in which history has come to rest in Utopia. However, the eloquence of space in News from Nowhere works by drawing out the contrasts between present and future whilst at the same time offering a parallel of spatial practices under capitalism and primitive communism: a parallel of which the inhabitants of Nowhere, with their lack of history, are unconscious. As the ancient church in Oxfordshire is used for a harvest celebration and the Houses of Parliament are linked by a naughty metonymy to their use in Nowhere as a dung market, so the Guest-hall echoes the past: this is a Utopian transformation of the meetings of the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League.

Dollie Radford's record of evenings at the Hammersmith meeting hall provides a sense of the communal fellowship that Morris aimed to suffuse through his fellow socialists; but it also indicates how Morris's collective socialist aesthetics were at odds with Radford's interest in lyric poetry. The converted coach-house became a place of performance and celebration, with Morris himself as master of ceremonies.

After joining the Hammersmith Branch of the Socialist League in January 1886 Radford's chief involvement lay with the educational and social side of the organisation. The fact that Radford did not take part in more active campaigns may not have been a choice on her part. The minute books of the branch make it clear that a gendered division of labour was in force in the organisation.⁹

Written in the cold light of day and feeling “rather seedy” the next morning, Radford's account of her evening out emphasises the very un-domestic nature of the Hammersmith Socialist Society “At Home.” The working space of the coach house is filled by other people's possessions in a fiction of communality; the open invitation for all to contribute to the pleasure of the evening sets an uneven tone between concert and conversation; Morris's physical enthusiasm that all embrace this experience of fellowship sets the “socialistic babe” crying. Yet as Morris's vision of pleasurable existence in News from Nowhere suggests, the future of revolutionary socialism lies precisely in being “At Home” in such communal halls, mixed by age, class and gender. Morris's efforts to imagine the future of art under socialism continually returned to the idea of the workshop populated by parties of “merry young men and maids” finding a means to artistic expression without individualism through tradition and the pleasurable labour of the hand.

If Radford's attempt to class Morris's communal aesthetic as an “At Home” sits at odds with this noisy celebration of revolutionary socialism, then other socialist organisations in the capital did offer a mode of politics closer to such middle-class salon culture. The Fabian Society, of which Radford was also a member, developed its political strategy through the culture of the “At Home.” The society's drawing-room meetings, emphasis upon political reform through permeation, and gentle manipulation of prominent politicians must provide a partial explanation of the prominence of women such as Annie Besant, Charlotte Wilson, and Emma Brooke on the Society Executive during the 1880s. By 1892 female Fabians were confident enough of their own standing to press for women-only shortlists and Radford's old friend Constance Garnett (née Black) served on the executive in 1894.¹⁰

With considerable ideological sleight of hand, George Bernard Shaw argued that it was the very nature of these Fabian Society drawing rooms that led to Morris's refusal to join the society. They simply never offered the aesthetic resources of hope so necessary for his revolutionary socialism. Morris, Shaw argued, “was an ungovernable man in the drawingroom [sic]” and would have been more out of place there “than in any gang of manual labourers or craftsmen. The furniture would have driven him mad; and the discussions would have ended in his dashing out of the room in a rage, and damning us all for a parcel of half baked, shortsighted suburban snobs, as ugly in our ideas as in our lives” (Shaw xviii). Despite the amenability of the Fabian Society to middle-class women activists and writers like Emma Brooke and Edith Nesbit, by the early 1890s Radford's own aesthetic interests had diverged from those of the increasingly research-driven Fabian Society. Ernest Radford served as secretary to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from 1888 until 1892 and thanks to this post and his membership of the Rhymer's Club, Dollie Radford's cultural life shifted towards the late flowering of aesthetes rooted in the publishing houses of John Lane and Elkin Matthews.¹¹

Radford was filled with gratitude by the kind reception the Hammersmith socialists gave Ernest on his first visit after leaving the asylum in March 1893 and stated more clearly than ever her commitment to the socialist productivist aesthetic she saw at work in Morris's home:

Although Radford could see a clear connection between the crafting of beauty and the future political ideal, both the communal space of the Hammersmith Socialist Society and the executive meetings of the Fabian Society became an increasingly ill fit to her circumstances and interests. By the mid 1890s Beatrice Webb decided that “aesthetic middle-class” women socialists such as Radford's sister-in-law, Ada Wallas (née Radford), with their “yellow-green sloppy garments…worn on principle” were distinctly “old fashioned” in the context of the sleek investigative machinery of the Fabian Society (129). Whilst Ernest Radford was able to develop the aesthetic and idealist aspect of Morris's socialism with his fellow socialist peers within the Rhymers Club, Radford's separation from the site of labour proved problematic in her attempt to situate her poetics in the context of her productivist aesthetic socialist beliefs. Some women socialist writers of the period, such as Olive Schreiner, found a means to refigure their work as “virile” (re)productive labour in response to the aesthetic model outlined by Morris, but Radford's attenuated lyrics proved less amenable to the aesthetic of communal production (Schreiner 258). As Janowitz has pointed out, the designation of so much of Morris's poetry as song and chant during the period alludes to a poetic mode out with the individualism and inwardness associated with lyric subjectivity: poetic form was in this sense politicised during the period (216–32).

III

Two of Radford's poems from her 1895 collection Songs and Other Verses negotiate this tension between the individuated form of the lyric and the communal productive aesthetic of socialism. The first, “If you will sing the songs I play,” falls within a cycle of short lyrics in Songs and Other Verses addressing the fate of creativity when the love that sustained it is rejected. It is tempting, of course, to read such lyrics autobiographically in the light of Ernest Radford's serious mental breakdown in April 1892 and subsequent periodic institutionalisation. But I want to suggest that in this particular poem Radford counterposes the individualism of the lyric with the status of song as a historicised, communal endeavour which so animated the versification of other poets of the socialist movement.

“If you will sing” reflects Radford's increasing interest in, and proficiency with, experimentation in verse forms in her second volume of poetry. The poem's ostensible subject matter of the changing relationship between singer and song is matched by a stanzaic structure which echoes the rentrement of the medieval rondeau, traditionally sung to a musical accompaniment. In this case, however, each stanza adopts its own rhyme scheme and refrain which underscores the movement of the poem between two alternative models of the relation between singer and accompanist, or, by extension, poet and muse, in the making of song. The first stanza could be read as a troubling love lyric in which love itself is conditional upon the “sweet” singer's compliance with the accompaniment of the speaker. The speaker will love the singer only if she follows his or her tune and this might be another reflection on the limitations imposed on the woman poet by her audience.

The second stanza turns outwards from this narcissistic demand for love (and art) as self-reflection, however, and figures the lyric speaker not as lover, but as a lyre, trembling under the breeze of a “deeper strain” and striving towards a “rich refrain.” The production of song in the second stanza moves from being the result of a sweet singer mouthing the tune of an accompanist to a collaborative endeavour in which both learn from each other and participate in “The great refrain.” Although initially the lyre-ic speaker marks his ownership of such deeper and richer music, “strain” and “refrain” are repeated in the rentrement without the possessive pronoun. Moreover, the refrain is modified from being an individual “rich” aesthetic good in the third line, into a site of collective chant with “The great refrain” at the end. The “great refrain” here – and indeed, in the formal structure of the text – alludes to the work of art as a communal endeavour for truth and beauty that repeats itself throughout history. If the singer finds “golden rhymes” to match the music of the speaker then both will participate in the communal aesthetic of “the deeper strain,” “the great refrain” (emphasis mine). Whilst the first stanza proffers a poetics of compliance in which the sweet singer will be cherished for matching the tune of the times, the second stanza insists that a higher alternative involves the singer joining the historic, choric “great refrain” even at the cost of losing the fleeting sweet songs of her individual voice.

In Radford's poem “Comrades” this ongoing struggle between the individuated affective figure of the woman poet and the demands of the greater communal refrain is given a sharp political inflection by the title of the work. It was during the 1880s and 90s that the term “Comrades” gained a particular association with revolutionary socialism as a non-hierarchical, unsexed denotation of fellow travellers, suggestive of a future ideal of fellowship. Morris's 1885 collection, Chants for Socialists, for instance, included the rowdy drinking song “Down among the Dead Men” that insists “Come, comrades, come, your glasses clink; / Up with your hands a health to drink” and condemns all “that will this health deny” to lie down among the dead men in the chorus (14). As Morris's Chants were frequently sung at meetings of the Socialist League and Hammersmith Socialist Society, Radford was doubtlessly aware of this vigorous celebration of “strife in hope while lasteth breath / And brotherhood in life and death.” Against such collective, martial masculinity, the individual lyric speaker of Radford's poem hears from “afar the dire refrain” which beats upon the heart and brain of her distant comrades.

Whereas Morris's “Down among the Dead Men” invokes a communal oral tradition with its double-couplet long meter, Radford's “Comrades” uses the same measure to probe the tensions between collective experience and aesthetic form. In an echo of Radford's earlier admission “never have I known a working man,” the lyric speaker of “Comrades” is at an enforced distance from the onward march of these sufferers and reflects upon her own limited capacity to contribute to the remedy. The speaker's “store” of goods that she can offer the comrades reads almost as the stock in trade of the female aesthete: “Some jewelled gift, some treasured thing” prized as an object of taste. But these individuated aesthetic works are rejected as insufficient defence against the “relentless days” ahead of the comrades. That aesthete's store of beauty does not, however, prevent her from engaging with the collective concerns of the comrades. The four central stanzas of this poem provide a sustained examination of four different means of access this feminised lyric subject has to the greater cause: she has “seen the lonely track” of poverty; she has “heard afar the dire refrain” of historically recurrent strife; she has “known the tears” which waste the “gold of life” from the individual; she has “pictured the relentless days” of a struggle “Stretching before you like a sea.”

The final stanzas return to explore the resources of the lyric subject in alleviating the process of struggle. Rather than the aesthetic goods of the opening two stanzas, however, the text considers the value of sympathy and sentiment at its close and revisits the nineteenth-century tradition of feminine affective poetics. The first line of the penultimate stanza invokes the devotional tradition of the “gift,” echoing, for example, Christina Rossetti's “In the Bleak Midwinter” and the first line of its final stanza, “What can I give Him / Poor as I am.”¹³

Radford's most substantial contribution to that carefully wrought product of fin-de-siècle aestheticism, John Lane's Yellow Book, works through the opposition of individuated feminine affect and the greater communal struggle that preoccupied “Comrades.” “A Ballad of Victory” appeared in the Yellow Book in April 1896. The circumstances under which Radford was asked to contribute to the periodical serve as a reminder that socialism and aestheticism were never that distant from each other in the late nineteenth-century metropolis. Radford encountered Lane at the first night of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man which she attended with Constance Garnett and a party of fellow Fabians. In between gawping at the “real Bulgarian admiral” in the Stepniaks' box and offering a critique of Shaw's play, Radford agreed to send the “lyric” Lane requested for the next edition of his work (Radford Diary April 1894). “A Ballad of Victory” was Radford's third contribution to the Yellow Book and by its very title it announces its formal divergence from the lyrics Lane commissioned from her. The ballad employs the same trope of pilgrims, journeying the rough roads of suffering with bruised feet that appeared in Radford's poem, “Comrades.” But the allegorical nature of “A Ballad of Victory” inverts the relationship between the individual and the communal, subject and object that structured the earlier poem and thus strives to find a means by which politics and aesthetics can continue to inform each other.

The formal properties of Radford's ballad invoke the customary culture of the oral tradition in which verse speaks from and for the commune. The narrative of “A Ballad of Victory” is thus carried by a collective voice of legend, rather than an individual lyric speaker, and concludes with a dialogue between an old woman and young man. Radford's accomplished prosody is evident in the very restraint of this sustained exercise in the ballad form. Despite its publication in the Yellow Book the poem refuses to call attention to itself as aesthetic artifice, focusing instead on the process of discovery in the narrative. The inhabitants of a mythic medieval walled town in the mountains marvel at the “tender ways” and “patient eyes” of a scarred traveller who visits their market. She is from distant lands but she refuses to share in the goods of their “bounteous days” and must move ever onwards on her journey.

The commune comes together to speculate on the identity of the lone female traveller after her departure and unravel the contradiction between the marks on her body of “wounds so deep and old, / The cruel scars on her breast” and her “steadfast air.” In the process of discovering her route and her name the townspeople construct a shared understanding that they too are fellow travellers on her road.

The very refusal of the female pilgrim to identify herself and leave any trace other than the lingering affect of her love, requires the townspeople to interpret her self-abnegation for themselves. The answer is found by one “youth” gifted “With clearer eyes and wiser heart.”

Like the contemporaneous allegorical figure of George Frederick Watts's painting Hope (1886), Radford's Victory consists in a transitive state against all odds. Victory, like Hope, is not a final destination in Radford's work, but a process of becoming. The very act of interpreting this feminine suffering body as Victory makes it so, on the part of the commune. In one sense, then, it is possible to read Radford's “A Ballad of Victory” as a poem that restates the ethical affect of the aesthetic in an era increasingly hostile to such analyses. Through the act of seeing, reading and interpreting a single woman's narrative of struggle, the commune can re-construct their individual experiences as shared victory-in-process. Morris's “Pilgrims of Hope” turned to epic and history to explore the self, the commune, and the transitive journey of revolution in the pages of the socialist journal Commonweal. Radford's allegorical ballad carried forward that question of the coming into being of communal consciousness through the process of struggle in the midst of the Yellow Book.

IV

Although the Yellow Book is so often deployed as a shorthand notation for the particularities of decadent aestheticism in the 1890s, a closer study reveals a more complex aesthetic at work. Linda Hughes has recently produced a valuable revisionist account of the “literary and sexual politics” of the Yellow Book that foregrounds what she terms “New Women” poets' use of the periodical “to intervene in contemporary debates via individual poems” (866). The stylistic diversity of the Yellow Book also requires some reassessment of the broad church of Lane's aesthetic interests. Radford's “A Ballad of Victory” in the Yellow Book IX (April 1896), for instance, is followed by the characteristically precious fragments of Richard Le Gallienne's “Four Prose Fancies” and framed by Sydney Meteyard's decadent painting, Cupid. T. Baron Russell's short story that precedes her ballad, however, is entitled “A Guardian of the Poor” and is closer to a sentimentalised George Gissing than any aestheticist work. John Lane's diverse mix of iconoclastic aestheticism and social realism thus offered Radford more space to work through her ethical aesthetics than might be expected from that confining rendition of her as poetess-aesthete on the frontispiece of Lane's Songs and Other Verses (1895).

Writing in her diary in 1893, Radford affirmed that she wanted to teach her children “to be socialists”: “But that must come with serious thought – to belong to the struggling ones, & those who are at a disadvantage – to be true as light, tender & sweet as flowers – strong & firm as rock” (Radford Diary April 1893). Ernest Belfort Bax dismissed what he termed such “Sentimental socialism” as nothing other than a “morbid self-consciousness” which in other eras would be stimulated by “languishing and vapouring on art” rather than social reconstruction (Religion of Socialism 92). Yet Radford's ethical aesthetic refused to separate political consciousness from aesthetic receptivity, socialism from ethical affect. In the face of the increasing inscription of proto-modernist aesthetic autonomy and scientific socialism Radford sought to marry the “rock” of material determinism and the “sweetness” of ethical affect.