The Death Machine of Hartman the Anarchist

Abstract

As early as the 1880s, squabbling, personal feuds and ideological differences had begun to paralyse action. William Morris (who flirted with anarchism throughout his career) complained that the ‘anarchist element … seem determined to drive us to extremity’, whilst Frantz Kitz complained of the affliction of the sort of ‘anaemic respectability’ that attached itself to Fabian activities. Yet some Britons were, it seems, willing to give revolution a nudge. When British anarchists did turn to ‘propaganda by the deed’ in imitation of their Continental brethren, the attempts were woefully inadequate to the occasion. One group was caught supposedly planning a bombing campaign in Walsall.