Charlotte Wilson

Charlotte Mary Wilson (6 May 1854, Kemerton, Worcestershire – 28 April 1944, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York) was an English Fabian and anarchist who co-founded Freedom newspaper in 1886 with Peter Kropotkin, and edited, published, and largely financed it during its first decade. She remained editor of Freedom until 1895.

Early life and education

Charlotte Wilson was born Charlotte Mary Martin into an upper middle-class family in Kemerton, in Worcestershire, a village near the town of Tewkesbury in the adjoining county of Gloucestershire. Her father, Robert Spencer Martin, was a physician and surgeon, who held many medical posts including that of the District Medical Officer of the Tewkesbury Union (the local workhouse), whose grandfather was a silk manufacturer, while her mother, Clementina Susannah Davies, came from a prosperous commercial and clerical family in Worcester.

Wilson initially attended Cheltenham College, where "she was very unhappy". Afterwards, in 1873, she attended Merton Hall, Cambridge, "one of England's first institutions of higher education for women". Oliver (1983, p. 26) stated that she "never went to Girton" (Girton being Girton College, Cambridge University). In college Wilson took the Higher Local Examination, and passed papers in A1 (English) and B2 (Logic, Psychology and Political Economy).

Married life

By September 1876, Wilson was living in the rectory of All Souls Church in City of Westminster, Central London, where she married Arthur Wilson, son of the vicar of Islington in North London, a distant cousin, a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford and a stockbroker who had his own office in the city. Hinely (1987) observed that the couple began married life in Islington, from where, sometime before 1879, they moved to the Vale of Health. in Hampstead Heath. From there, within two years, they moved to Elm Lodgea very large Georgian manse in the centre of Hampstead. While there, Wilson "began her lifelong career as an organizer". In 1879 she became a visitor for the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, which was co-founded by Henrietta Barnett, one of her neighbours. In the same year, a March issue of the Hampstead and Highgate Express included an announcement about a proposal to form a society "to provide instruction by letters and classes both to men and women, under the direct auspices of Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities". Wilson became its secretary, part of whose role included locating lecturers and examinations for the courses. The lecturers in included Herbert Foxwell, from Cambridge University, under whom she had studied at Merton Hall, who lectured on "Socialism and the Capitalist System". Not long afterwards, by 1883, Wilson had become a socialist, having joined the early London Socialist movement, with her husband at her side.

Oliver (1983) observed that, after the end of 1884, the couple moved to Wildwood Farm, at the very edge of Hampstead Heath, later to become known as Wyldes Farm: "a change to a more simple life-style – the impact of Kropotkin's trial in January 1883", during which the prosecutor focused heavily upon his involvement in the 1881 London Social Revolutionary Congress. Wilson later wrote in 1885: "When the noble words of Kropotkine's [sic] defence ran through the length and breadth of France, they found an echo in the hearts of all honest seekers after truth." In the same year, E. Nesbit, the Fabian writer and poet described Wilson's situation as follows: "She has a husband who is very nice, and a perfect gentleman. Did I tell you about her house? He is a stockbroker and they used to live in a charming and rather expensive house at Hampstead, but she at last declined to live any longer on his earnings (which she tersely terms the 'wages of iniquity') and now they have taken quite a little cottage where she means to keep herself by keeping fowles! It is a charming and quite idyllic little farm. They have two rooms - study and kitchen. The kitchen is an idealised farm kitchen, where of course no cooking is done - but with a cushioned settle, open hearth, polished dresser and benches and all the household glass and crockery displayed, mixed up with aesthetic pots, pans, curtains, chairs and tables - a delightfully incongruous but altogether agreeable effect." (Italics in the original)

MacCarthy (2014) observed: "The country cottage cult was particularly strong amongst intellectual women of the 1890s. For instance, Charlotte Wilson, Girton-educated [sic] anarchist and feminist, an aficionado of the style - so much so that many people believed she had invented it - held famous Fabian gatherings in her farmhouse kitchen, a room in which no cooking ever seems to have been done."

Political life

The Fabians

Woodcock documented that Wilson "was a founder member of the Fabian Society, and in December 1884 was elected, with Bernard Shaw and three others, to its first executive committee." Also, starting in the late 1870s, she formed or joined numerous organisations. For example, she founded an informal political study group for advanced thinkers, known as the Hampstead Historic Club, also known as the Karl Marx Society or the Proudhon Society. Fabian Sydney Olivier (1948) described what he called the Hampstead Historic meetings (of the Hampstead Historic Club, also known as the Karl Marx Society or the Proudhon Society) which: "were to a certain extent presided over by Mrs. Charlotte Wilson and were held at her home in a cottage on Hampstead Heath called Wildwood Farm. Arthur Wilson, her husband, kept in the background, but Mrs Wilson, who called herself an Anarchist, was a clever speaker besides being a kind and gratious hostess. She seemed to me a very peaceful form of Anarchist, so did all the others who came to the meetings, some of them Russians. Mrs. Dryhurst, who also called herself an Anarchist, came and with her the young lady who afterwards became Mrs. Edward R. Pease. There were also the Fabian Socialists, Webb, Wallas, Shaw, and others. Someone read a paper and this was followed by discussion, often very vigorous and exciting and lasting till Mrs Wilson interrupted it with sandwiches and drinks, after which we all turned out on to the Heath." The club initially turned its attention to studying Das Kapital by Karl Marx which was read out by a Russian woman in French but later turned to Proudhon. In 1889 George Bernard Shaw described the Club discussions and how heated they became. Although the Fabian Society and Hampstead Historic Club contained many of the same people, they remained separate. The ideas debated by the club resulted in the publication of Fabian Essays in Socialism in 1889. This led Shaw to describe Hampstead, and the meetings, as "the birthplace of middle-class socialism."

Also, Wilson formed The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom with Sergei Stepniak, Karl Pearson and Wilfrid Voynich.

In September 1886, the Fabian Society had two powerful female members, Wilson and Annie Besant. However, Wilson "had been gradually edged out by Annie Besant's determination that the Society should adopt an active political role". Consequently, the society held a meeting in Anderton's Hotel in Fleet Street of the various socialist organisations in the city to debate the possibility of forming a political party based upon the party model of politics that was being adopted in Continental Europe. Besant made such a proposal and Hubert Bland seconded it, while William Morris proposed and Wilson seconded an amendment to it. Their amendment was: "But whereas the first duty of Socialism is to educate people to understand what their present position is and what the future might be, and to keep the principles of socialism steadily before them; and whereas no Parliamentary party can exist without compromise and concession, which would hinder that education and obscure those principles: it would be a false step for Socialists to attempt to take part in the Parliamentary contest." The amendment was defeated. Consequently Wilson "resigned from the Fabian executive in April 1887, and took no active part in the society for twenty years, though she maintained her membership."