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Kirsten Harris. Walt Whitman and British Socialism: "The Love of Comrades." New York: Routledge, 2016. ix + 219 pp.
In the late 1880s, when he began visiting Walt Whitman daily and writing up their conversations, Horace Traubel also commenced a campaign to make the poet confess that he was a socialist at heart. Patiently, the young radical would watch for an opportunity to make a political thrust; inevitably, the canny old man would parry. "Do you have any sympathy for . . . socialism?" Traubel asked bluntly at one point. "Lots of it-lots-lots," Whitman replied. "Too much is made of property, here, now, in our noisy, bragging civilization-too little of men." Traubel persisted: "But about their political program- how about that?" "Of that I'm not so sure," Whitman told him. "I rather rebel. I am with them in the result-that's about all I can say." Expressions of general sympathy for people over property were the most Traubel was able to extract from Whitman; the young man acknowledged that as far as Whitman was concerned, "individualism deservedly carries the day."
Despite his profound and frequently expressed skepticism about socialist political activity, for roughly two decades, beginning in the 1880s, Walt Whitman was revered among British socialists. One of the most interesting questions in the history of Whitman's international reception is how a Free Soil Democrat became a patron saint of British socialism. Kirsten Harris's Walt Whitman and British Socialism is the first book-length response to that question. Employing deep scholarship and flexible, sensitive interpretations of literary and political discourse, Harris makes an important contribution to transnational Whitman studies.
Harris's lengthy introduction serves as a valuable primer on late-nineteenth-century British socialism. Henry Pierson's tripartite division of the socialism of this period into Marxist, Fabian, and "ethical" strands, laid out in two influential books published in the 1970s, has dominated understanding of the period. Drawing on recent revisionist accounts, Harris rejects that neat division. She turns to Edward Carpenter's concept of the "larger socialism"...