By Christopher
Draper
The TORCH was an incendiary
nineteenth century anarchist monthly. It wasn’t Britain’s first anarchist journal,
it wasn’t even well produced but it was unique. Started by children, throughout
its five-year existence it remained effectively owned and published by a
teenage girl who later turned to Fascism. The
TORCH comprised articles by leading thinkers and activists, was distributed
around the world and although acclaimed by cultural commentators is often
overlooked by anarchists.
Quiet Beginnings
The
journal’s unique origins lead some to dismiss it as a juvenile enterprise
initiated by the privileged progeny of artistic liberals. The facts are
accurate but the evaluation unwarranted for The TORCH channelled original
ideas into a nascent native anarchist movement whilst serving as a haven, both
practical and intellectual, for exiled revolutionaries.
Britain’s first anarchist newspaper,
the English-language Freiheit, was issued as a defiant political
response by seasoned revolutionaries to a savage act of State repression. The TORCH
could hardly have emerged in more contrasting circumstances.
Handwritten in the comfortable bourgeois domestic setting of the family library
(illustrated below) by three adolescent offspring of artist Lucy Madox Brown
and writer William Michael Rossetti (WMR 1829-1919), a founder member of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, The TORCH began as more of a
childish hobby than an incendiary anarchist campaign yet appearances can be
deceptive.
Analysing the
Origins
The
Rossetti parents were iconoclasts in a cultural movement that inspired William
Morris and Lucy’s father and next door neighbour, Ford Madox Brown, “welcomed
the Russian revolutionaries of different shades of opinion” including Kropotkin
and “encouraged their (the children’s) youthful socialistic and anarchistic
leanings”. William Rossetti had been encouraged in his own youth by his
grandfather, Gaetano Polidori (1764-1853), to print his own early writings on a
press installed in the garden shed and as an adult edited the Pre-Raphaelite movement’s
magazine, The GERM.
Lucy
and William shared admirably advanced opinions on child rearing as he recorded in
his “Reminiscences”, “She considered
that on the whole it would be a pity to chill our youngsters in their generous
enthusiasms…I was somewhat less inclined than she to allow the children to go
to the end of their tether: still I entered into her general view…The parents,
while it is their obvious duty to regulate the children should not, in my
opinion wrest them aside, attempting to alter their identities; the
attempt will probably fail and we shall
have meagre and stunted hybrid growths instead of natural and naturally
developed growths”.
The
children’s 1891 determined decision to jointly produce and distribute their own
monthly newspaper was therefore encouraged by their parents although the title
and contents, The TORCH - a Journal of International Socialism, proved quite a
surprise.
William
Rossetti was himself a friend of Kropotkin’s and it was his book, “An Appeal
to the Young”, that inspired the adolescent Rossetti’s to produce their
journal. When Kropotkin turned up at their 3, Edmund Terrace home one day in
1891 to visit their parents the young trio intercepted and requested that he
endorse their publication and he duly obliged.
Handwritten
Olivia,
born 30 September 1875,
the eldest of the three, was prime mover in the project, Helen (depicted above,
on the sofa), born 10 November
1879, was youngest whilst Gabriel Arthur (invariably called
“Arthur”) was the middle-born, 28
February 1877. When the trio produced their first issue of The TORCH
in June 1891, Olivia was 15, Arthur 14 and Helen just 11. Two years
later Arthur confided to Max Nettlau that they’d only turned out three
handwritten copies of the first edition with the cover depicting winged figures
of “Liberty”
adorned with the words, “Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity”. By employing a “hectograph” duplicating process they managed
to extend the “run” but the handwritten appearance of the paper made it
difficult to read, limited its appeal and prompted Stepniak (1852-1895) to describe
it as a “children’s magazine”.
Mechanisation
The
trio never intended The TORCH to be a private pastime and maintained a monthly
production schedule for a year until Alfred Belcher, the husband of their
housekeeper, managed to obtain for them a printing press for a modest (undisclosed)
price. A friend of Belcher’s secured a fount of type for nothing whilst, as
they detailed in their first printed edition (July 1892, “vol.II no.VII”), a
compositor, Mr John Thomas, “devoted his evenings to teaching us composing”.
The trio explained, “This month’s Torch
appeared in print for the first time which must be our excuse for its shortness
and late appearance, for we have comp’d it ourselves and as we are but novices
in the noble art of printing we are yet slow but with use we hope to improve”.
Installation
of the press required a descent from the domestic library to the basement and
the journal now bore the legend, “Printed
and Published at the Torch Office by O, A, and H Rossetti”. Olivia, Arthur
and Helen at last had a product worthy of their Sunday sales at Hyde Park where they advertised their wares with the energetic
waving of red banners. As sales of the newly readable Torch increased they began
to attract the attention of an ever widening circle of serious anarchists despite
its limited print run (probably considerably below 1,000 per issue of which
very few copies appear to have survived). Within two years of starting The TORCH
H B Samuels wrote to Nettlau
admitting that the adolescent Rossetti’s were, “growing in influence and power among people we could not reach the in
ordinary way” (24 April 1893).
Crisis and Recovery?
Heavily
influenced by Kropotkin and fellow Russian exiles, Stepniak and Volkhonsky, as readership
increased, The TORCH attracted new authors and new ideas. The involvement
of French exiles prompted the promotion of “propaganda of the deed” which cooled
Kropotkin’s initial enthusiasm but drew in others as The TORCH celebrated a
bizarrely eclectic mix of anarchist ideas.
The
summer of 1893 presented an opportunity for expansion with the imminent
collapse of Commonweal until crisis struck the Rossetti household. Lucy,
the children’s mother had long suffered ill health but suddenly doctors feared
for the worst and ordered convalescence in a warmer climate and the parents deemed
it advisable for both Olivia and Helen to accompany her to Lake
Maggiore. The group departed for Italy in October leaving
publication of The TORCH in abeyance and the issue of 15th July
1893 the last, until Lucy was fit enough to return to London.
Sadly
Lucy never recovered and in March 1894 William and young Arthur hurried to San Remo to visit her in
what appeared likely her final days. On 12 April Lucy passed away in the
presence of William and the children. Following the funeral, as soon as Olivia,
Helen and Arthur returned to London
they lost no time restarting the paper which appeared 15 June 1894 denominated as, “New
Series, Issue 1”.
New Site, New
Politics?
After
Lucy’s death William applied for and was granted immediate pensioned retirement
and was in no mood to any longer allow his children to fill his basement with
anarchists and other assorted reprobates. Olivia, Helen and Arthur were
directed to light their Torch elsewhere and it’s extraordinary
that under these circumstances they’d managed to get that June 1894 edition out
so promptly. Described on the masthead as, “A Revolutionary Journal of Anarchist
Communism”, that issue was, “Printed
and Published by F. Macdonald, 1 Arlington
Terrace, Arlington Road,
Camden Town, NW”. Their
saviour and new sponsor was Dr Thomas Fauset Macdonald (1862-1910) who’d previously
backed Commonweal but he wasn’t yet in a position to provide The TORCH
with a permanent home. From October to December 1894 the paper was
nominally printed and published by Macdonald at, “43 Crawford Street, W”.
Despite these production problems the journal no longer depended on street
sales but was by then also available through two fixed outlets, Lapie’s shop at
30 Goodge Street
and William Reeves, 185 Fleet
Street.
This
new series of the paper still carried articles espousing Russian revolutionary
causes and French “propaganda of the deed” but also exemplified the arrival of
Antonio Agresti (1864-1926) and his Italian comrades who would come to profoundly
influence both the paper and its adolescent progenitors.
WMR
approved of Agresti despite recording his own downbeat first impression, “a
young man, dark short and slight with an unhealthy complexion and dressed in
black like a poor clerk”. Born in Florence
in 1864, after publishing “a seditious manifesto”, Antonio had been forced to
flee to France
where he was later arrested and jailed. Expelled to Brussels in early 1894 he’d moved to London where he lodged
with Malatesta, who was already involved with The TORCH. Agresti signed
the “News of the Month” in the first issue of the new series and a prominent
advert advised comrades, “Anarchist
Leaflets! To be had at 2s 6d a thousand. Apply to A. Agresti at 7 Frederick St, Portland
Town, N.W.”. The editorial modestly announced, “We aim at a complete, radical, absolute overthrow of the Bourgeois
system” but first came the practical search for permanent premises…
Permanent Premises
At the end of 1894 The TORCH found its final
resting place in Somers
Town, north London. The protracted
search had eventually identified “127
Ossulston Street”. Harry Kelly described the premises
as, “A small two-storey building
situated in a back yard, in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of London…The
building had two rooms, one upstairs for the composing room, and one
downstairs, the press room”.
The Rossetti girls recorded their first
visit to the new office and Nettlau’s introduction to the premises, “We stopped in front of a little
greengrocers’ shop in a side street”,…“The place I mean is behind here, the
woman in the shop (Mrs Upchurch) lets it, we will go in and speak with her”.
“She turned out to be as loquacious as she was bulky, a fair specimen of the
good-natured Cockney gossip, evidently fond of the convivial glass, not
over-choice in her language, the creature of her surroundings, which were not
of the sweetest, but withal warm-hearted and sympathetic, with that inner
hatred of the police common to all who belong to the coster class, and able to
stand up for her rights, if necessary, both with her tongue and her fists. She
showed us over a damp ill-lighted basement shop, in a corner of which was a
ladder leading to a large, light shop, which seemed well suited to our
purpose.”
The TORCH acquired all the old
equipment previously owned by the Socialist League and Commonweal
including a hand-press that had been employed by Johann Most to print Freiheit
before it was passed on to Joseph Lane’s Revolutionary Committee for
their leaflet propaganda. In December 1894 these presses were rapidly installed
in the downstairs room at Ossulton
Street and that month’s edition of the paper
informed readers this would become The TORCH’s registered address from
New Year.
The TORCH Club
Securing a permanent base and proper, if
antiquated, printing presses enabled the paper to flourish as the office became
a haven where exiled anarchists dropped in, made contacts and contributed the
occasional article. WMR described it less positively, “a sort of club where the hangers on of the extreme Left idled away an immense amount of time whilst
their infant host and hostesses were extremely active over their formes” concerning
conditions back home. Throughout 1895 a regular monthly production schedule was
maintained and pagination increased from a previous average of about a dozen
pages up to sixteen and occasionally twenty pages and this pattern continued
into 1896. From its launch to its eventual demise the paper’s price remained at
one penny which incidentally exactly matched that adopted by Commonweal, The Anarchist, Freedom and Liberty.
Nettlau testified to the popularity of The
TORCH in this period, claiming that it sold every issue produced and
the print-run was usually between 1,500 and 3,000 although surviving copies
show The
TORCH was far and away the worst printed of any of the above titles.
Whatever the print quality the contents, when readable, were never dull at a
time when its contemporary Freedom was described by one
comrade, “as a middle-class philosophical organ, not intelligible to the working
classes, not up to date in late information and…less revolutionary than “Comic
Cuts””
Incendiary
Eclecticism
Whilst
The
TORCH carried stuff found elsewhere in contemporary anarchist journals five
distinct elements ultimately characterise the paper;
- Eclectic
- Literary
and Artistic
- Praise
for “Propaganda by the Deed”
- Feminist
- Revolutionary
trade unionist
Although Freedom openly debated
issues, especially “individualist” versus “”communist” versions of anarchy in
its early years by the time of The TORCH it had settled into a
tolerant but rather staid pattern which the brash newcomer implicitly
challenged. The TORCH was always inconsistent, both from issue to issue and
within each issue. Readers could never lazily imbibe a “Party Line” as an
article commending peaceful cooperation might be followed by a call to bomb throwing
and assassination.
The TORCH challenged readers
to reflect and decide issues for themselves and whilst this intellectual
eclecticism earned the admiration of literary critics it attracted the ire of
political ideologues. The Rossetti’s roots in the literary and artistic world
was evident with poetry a regular feature and publication of an original Pissaro
print an outstanding example.
Where many English anarchists distanced themselves
from “Propaganda by the Deed” enacted in mainland Europe
The
TORCH wasn’t afraid to offer praise. In March 1895 Fauset Macdonald
described Ravachol, Pallas, Vaillant, Henry and Caserio as “priceless heroes “who
met their deaths “at the heart of an effete society” and Gori, Alexander Cohen
and Bevington all added their own paeans to dynamiters in various editions. BUT
The
TORCH also published damning indictments of anarchist terrorism from
the pen of Thomas Hastie Bell and other pacifist comrades.
The two Rossetti girls ensured the paper challenged
the patriarchy from the outset. The TORCH denounced police
harassment of prostitutes and defended Minnie Wells and Amy Gregory, who’d been
sentenced to death for infanticide, as innocent, impoverished women driven to
desperation by an uncaring society. The paper campaigned for Edith Lanchester,
a young woman confined to an asylum by her parents when she sought to live
unmarried with a socialist. An article by F S Paul claimed, “Every woman has an inalienable right to do
with her body whatever she likes; to give herself to whomsoever she likes.”
The TORCH took more account of
trade union activity than other anarchist journals and Agresti, James Harragan
and Malatesta were particularly concerned with “Strike Tactics”. In April 1895
Agresti ridiculed Northampton strikers parading through the streets in pathetic
demonstrations designed to elicit public sympathy and suggested instead they
occupy their factories and workshops and turn out stuff for themselves or for
sale or they could sabotage the machinery to punish the bosses. Malatesta’s
articles developed Syndicalist ideas of trade union activism and the
revolutionary potential of the “General Strike”. These pioneering notions of
revolutionary unionism were taken out onto the streets by soap-box propagandist
Harragan who was as contemptuous as Agresti of the servile attitude of
contemporary trade union leaders.
The
End is Nigh
By the end of 1896 the Rossettis would be
children no more for Helen would be 17, Arthur 19 and Olivia 21 and each for
their own reasons was anxious to move on. Early in the year it was already
apparent that Olivia and Agresti were more than merely comrades, that Helen’s
health was suffering and Arthur was really more interested in engineering
machines than society.
Officially The TORCH and its presses
were owned by Olivia and whilst she didn’t need the money she was anxious if
she departed to facilitate the continuance of the title. Fersenheim Paul
offered her £20 and promised to keep the paper going but whilst she considered
this option Max Nettlau who was on the lookout for a home for Freedom
wrote matching Paul’s offer. She granted Paul first refusal but when he
failed to find backers she gave Nettlau the go-ahead. Max’s comrade, and TORCH
associate, Bernard Kampffmeyer supported his initiative by chipping in half
the purchase money and jointly guaranteeing the rent.
From April 1895 Freedom was (unofficially)
printed at Ossulston Street
along with The TORCH on the same presses but the gradual withdrawal of Agresti
and the Rossetti trio left a hole in the paper that proved hard to fill. Freedom
thrived on the new arrangement but no sooner had compositor-editor, Tom
Cantwell, got his foot in the door at Ossultson
Street than he used it to bar the way to The TORCH
group. Even the Rossetti’s weren’t any longer welcome and Pietro Gori and
Edoardo Milano, two Italians temporarily lodged upstairs, were ejected by
Cantwell at gunpoint. Two of the erstwhile TORCH group, Byrne and Paul managed
to get a few issues of the paper printed elsewhere but in January 1897 their
initiative ended and, after six years and almost sixty issues, The TORCH
was finally extinguished.
Life
After Death
The TORCH premises continued
to be used to produce Freedom for the next thirty years until
the building was demolished under “slum clearance”. The Rossetti children left London to go their
separate ways. Olivia followed Antonio Agresti to Italy when he was granted amnesty
in 1896. They married in Rome
the following year.
In 1896 Helen was dispatched to Davos to
convalesce but following a relapse her father accompanied her on a voyage to Australia.
During the return sailing her ship was becalmed and menaced by fifty-two huge
icebergs which, Helen calmly proceeded to sketch from a comfortable position on
deck.
Arthur, unusually for a Rossetti, showed no
real interest or aptitude for the arts and according to his father’s Reminiscences,
“Studies of chemistry, algebra and other matters of science engaged his chief
personal attention; for a spell of light reading he would take up the
Differential Calculus. He wanted to be an electrical engineer and was put in
that way of pursuing that vocation.” In 1896 he was obtained a student
placement in the large engineering works of Jackson & Co., Salford where he became very friendly with the work’s
manager, John Slater Lewis. In 1899 he was appointed manager of the “Lancashire
Stoker Works” in Bolton which had just emerged
from an embittered strike. In September 1901 Arthur married Dora Lewis, the
daughter of his manager at Jacksons and more or less, lived happily ever after
(d.24.9.1932), having no further involvement in politics and recording none of
his experiences at The TORCH.
Helen’s
Story
Unlike Arthur, neither of the Rossetti girls
went quietly. Both maintained a public role and together they published a
fictionalised account of their time at The TORCH. Helen remained closest to
their father and most faithfully followed the family’s artistic inclinations, as
an artist and author. In the autumn of 1903 whist living in the family’s Edmund
Terrace house Helen met and fell madly in love with a young Italian journalist
Gastone Angeli. On 1 December, accompanied by her approving father she sailed
for Naples where,
on the 10th she married Angeli before leaving with him three days
later for Cairo
where he held an appointment in the Italian Chamber of Commerce. Weakened in
health by previous service in the Congo, Gastone died in Egypt on 18 July 1904 leaving Helen
heavily pregnant. She then sailed for Rome
to stay with Olivia who’d settled there with Agresti. Helen had her baby,
Imogene Lucy Cristina Maria, in September and was visited in November by her father
William and sister Mary (who’d been too young to have involved herself during The TORCH
years).
Helen and Imogene returned to the old family
home at Edmund Terrace. Helen maintained herself and her young daughter through
a combination of authorship and office work until her father died in 1919
leaving her Shelley’s old sofa in his will (depicted above), he bequeathed a
locket containing part of Shelley’s skull to Olivia!
Relieved of responsibility for both father
and daughter Helen was appointed Secretary to Signor Attolico of the Italian
Ministry of Commerce in both London
and New York.
She also set-about establishing herself as a full-time author, publishing books
on Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and “The Pre-Raphaelite Twilight”. The
Times marked her death on 11 September 1969 with an obituary describing both her early
conversion to anarchism by Kropotkin and her initiative in jointly igniting The TORCH,
as well sketching a brief account of her later literary career.
Olivia’s
Life
Of the The TORCH trio there is no doubt
that Olivia was the leading light. All three contributed whilst no-one accused
Olivia of being bossy or dominating but she was the eldest and remained
throughout her life the most overtly political. Although her husband, Antonio
Agresti, had been a fiery revolutionary before and during The TORCH years when he
returned to Italy
with Olivia in 1897 he abandoned anarchism and embraced bourgeois journalism
and literature. In 1914 he campaigned for Italy’s intervention in the First
World War. After the conflict he collaborated on the conservative newspaper La
Tribuna and supported Mussolini’s Fascists.
Olivia’s politics followed a similar trajectory
although in 1903 she collaborated with Helen in writing a fictionalised account
of their years producing The TORCH which portrayed prominent
anarchists disguised only by the thinnest of veils. Jointly authored under the single
nom de plume, Isobel Meredith, “A Girl
Amongst the Anarchists” is a fascinating read giving insight into both the character
of the Rossetti’s and the sociopathic tendencies of several anarchist “heroes”.
“Isobel” used the opportunity to slight Cantwell (“Short”), describing him as,
“a queer uncouth figure with his long tousled black hair and sallow, unhealthy
face…his whole attitude was somewhat deprecatory and cringing”.
The air of disillusionment that suffuses the
work disappoints hagiographers and so like The TORCH it’s been similarly undervalued
by anarchists. Olivia was certainly no saint, through meeting David Lubin,
Olivia became an advocate for world economic cooperation and a leading “League of Nations” interpreter. These influences
propelled Olivia from class-struggle anarchism through Corporatism to Fascism.
From 1921 to 1943 she edited the newsletter of the Associazione fra le Societa
per Azioni, a group closely allied with the Fascists and in 1938 co-authored, “The Organisation of the Arts and
Professions in the Fascist Guild State” with the Fascist journalist Mario
Missiroli. When “Signora Olivia Agresti” died in Rome on 6 November 1960 her Times obituary recognised
her early years of, “advanced socialism and anarchism…and friendship with Prince
Krapotkin (sic)” but tactfully overlooked her support for Fascism.
The adult disillusionment of the adolescent
revolutionaries encourages critics to view the trio as mere dilettantes whose
anarchism ran into the sands of factory life, literature and fascism
respectively but no libertarian initiative ever entirely fails. It’s surely
better to light a candle than curse the darkness and in a most gloomy Victorian
era of international repression Olivia, Helen and Arthur ignited The TORCH
of Anarchy.
Christopher Draper (February 2018)
