explained, in his soft German voice, just what was blocking enlightenment. At first he didn’t talk to Charles about anything other than maths. Then, one day, he said
“You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that.”
“What I can’t see—what I really can’t see—is why everyone doesn’t ask themselves that, all the time. How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see—and get told what the Bible says about the poor—and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats—and eating huge beefsteaks—I can’t see it.”
“I have brought a book for you to read. I think probably you should not let it be seen in your home. But I think it will speak to you.”
So Charles Wellwood read Prince Kropotkin’s Appeal to the Young, which called on young doctors, lawyers, artists, to consider how they would live and work in the light of the horrors of starvation, disease, and desperation in the world of the poor. Its prescriptions for the good life were vaguer than its fierce calling-up of the bad. It called on the young to organise, to struggle, to write and publish about oppression, to be socialists. It did not say how the desired revolution could be brought about. Charles went back to Dr. Susskind and asked if he had more such books. The two looked at each other, the German gentle and quietly excited, the English boy tense with abstract need, his face white, erupting on brow and cheeks, his eyes hungry.
He asked Susskind if he was a socialist. Susskind replied that he was an Anarchist. He believed the world would be better if all authority, all hierarchy, all institutions were abolished. There would come a revolution. After that, harmony, all giving to all and accommodating all.
Something in Charles was wary of the prophetic enthusiasm of this. If goodness were really easy and natural, how had authority ever come about? He had read News from Nowhere with a certain scepticism. He was not sure it was possible to return to mediaeval pastoral and abolish the machine. He was coming to believe that the Todefright Wellwoods were not real socialists, were not confronting the problem head-on. For one thing, their house was full of things made in small quantities by poor men for rich ones. He had heard his own father sneer at Morris & Co. for selling vastly expensive fabrics and tapestries with golden age and paradisal foliage on them. Somehow they slid away from the horrors they should be confronting.
He said as much, as best he could, to Susskind, who said how wise he was, that Mr. Morris himself had called himself a dreamer of dreams, born out of his due time. Peter Kropotkin believed in the printing-press. Maybe Charles would not believe this, but not far from where they were was just such a press, producing a monthly revolutionary paper called The Torch of Anarchy. It might interest Charles to know that the paper had been founded by three young people—still children really—from a famous poetic family, by Olive, Arthur and Helen Rossetti, when they were younger than Charles was now. The press had recently moved to a stable loft in Ossulston Street—but had produced powerful revolutionary literature from a room in the basement of Mr. William Rossetti’s house—a basement in which everything was painted blood-red, said Joachim Susskind, smiling over the absolute enthusiasm of the young Rossettis. He said, timidly, that he could give Charles some copies of this pamphlet, and even take him to see the press at work, if he felt he could go there. He himself helped out when he could. He loved mathematics as much as revolution, so he could not give up his college work. Statisticians and mathematicians would be welcome in the new order. Professor Pearson was not unsympathetic, though he inclined more to Karl Marx’s socialism than to Kropotkin’s anarchism. Indeed he had changed his name from Charles to Karl, to show his respect for the thinker.
Charles wanted to see the press. He wanted to see work being done, to change things. No one thought to question him at home, if he said he was going to visit Dr. Susskind. And so, one afternoon, the two of them set off for Ossulston Street.
Ossulston Street stank. The gutter ran with yellow horse-piss, and the road was almost solid with caked dung. Charles walked gingerly, trying to keep his shoes clean, and wondering whether clean shoes should be of any concern. The offices of The Torch of Anarchy were in a loft above a stable, behind the “jugs and bottles” door of a dingy public house, The Bay Tree. Joachim Susskind and Charles had to negotiate a kind of midden to get to the wooden stairs that led to the loft. As he went up, Charles suddenly remembered Humphry’s midsummer speech about the poor man who picked and ate undigested oats from stuff like this. This was what he ought to know about. He followed his tutor through a ramshackle door into a long wooden shedlike room, full of dust, floating in the air, thick on the heaps of literature and pamphlets which covered almost all the floor. There were strong smells in this dusty air—tobacco smoke and tobacco juice, human odours of thick sweat and excrement, a pervasive smell of sour milk, and another of rancid fat. And the smell of dog, though he could see no dog. There was also a smell of sour beer. A man in a greasy jacket was scoffing fried bread and bacon scraps from a newspaper on what appeared to be the plate of the printing press, at one end of the room. There were two or three little groups of people, none of whom appeared likely to be the young Rossettis. One group was talking fast and intently in Italian. One consisted of three people on a bench, against which leaned a hard placard. “The Day of the Beast Is Upon Us.” At one end of the room was a mattress, where someone—or more than one person—was snoring thickly under a heap of tattered cloth and a bundle of flags. Susskind said to the eating man that he had understood that Comrade Bartlett would be printing. He had brought his promised article on the German anti-socialist laws. He had brought a young man who was interested in anarchist ideas. Comrade Bartlett said his hand was too black with ink to shake the new Comrade by the hand, and asked his name. Charles said his name was Karl. He said he would like to help. Comrade Bartlett swept his meal off the press and began to ink it. Charles/Karl found himself worrying intensely about his clothes, at which the inhabitants of the loft appeared to be staring. His shirt was clean and starched, his jacket was pressed and expensive. He looked wrong and moreover he was going to get dirty, and be in trouble at home. He was saved by Joachim Susskind, who produced a workman’s apron from his bookbag and gave it to Charles, with a smile of complicit understanding.
Charles was not sure if he would go back to Ossulston Street, after that first visit. No one paid him much attention. He worked as hard as he could, and came away with a sheaf of leaflets and pamphlets to read. But he did go back, again and again in the early part of 1896, as much because he respected Joachim Susskind, as because he felt he was meeting the real working class. He was not sure that these people were the real working class. He was sure that Herr Susskind—who now addressed him as Karl—was concerned about the working class. And he liked The Torch, when he read it. He was given various issues, which were illustrated by moving drawings of despairing women, by Lucien Pissarro. It contained writings by Leo Tolstoi and Peter Kropotkin, commemorations of the martyrdom in 1887 of the Chicago Anarchists and a debate between Quaker pacifism and the advocates of violence and propaganda by the Deed. It advertised reprints of Morris’s Useful Work vs. Useless Toil and attacked the Prince of Wales for the size of his clothes bill. It also carried tales from The Arabian Nights, and German fairytales by Otto Erich Hartleben. Karl read the instructions on HOW TO HELP.
Take a Dozen copies of each issue of THE TORCH and try to sell or distribute them.
Leave copies of THE TORCH and other literature in railway carriages, waiting rooms, tram cars, refreshment houses and other places for the public to read.
Get newsagents to sell THE TORCH.
Turn up at meetings to support the speakers and assist with the literature.
He acquired a set of clothes for Ossulston Street, which he kept in Joachim Susskind’s rooms—some old
