The first indigenous anarchist groups and journals in Britain only date from the 1880s and the belated revival of socialism – ‘revival’ because Owenite socialism had flourished in the 1830s and 1840s. London, in particular, afforded sanctuary in the late-Victorian and Edwardian decades for militants from continental Europe fleeing repression by their governments and there was much interaction between them and the tiny numbers of local anarchists, whom initially they often converted. Henry Seymour, a Proudhonist and admirer of Tucker, brought out the Anarchist in 1885–6. Kropotkin, who from 1877 had lived in Switzerland and France – including three years in a French prison – moved to England in 1886, when he founded Freedom with Charlotte Wilson and others. Albert Tarn, an individualist, published the Herald of Anarchy between 1890 and 1892. The Labour Emancipation League had been founded in the East End in 1882 and, while never calling itself anarchist, was always libertarian socialist and became anti-parliamentarian, as expressed in Joseph Lane's notable An Anti-Statist, Communist Manifesto of 1887. Meanwhile the Democratic Federation had been inaugurated by H.M. Hyndman in 1881, became committed to socialism in 1883 and modified its name to the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) the following year, when the Labour Emancipation League began working with it. The SDF was to be Marxist, whereas the Fabian Society, dating from 1884 and of which Wilson was also a prominent member, rapidly developed its peculiarly British form of evolutionary socialism, rejecting Marxist economics – accepting instead the neo-classical marginalist criticism of the labour theory of value – and appealing to the equally home-grown political and philosophical example of the utilitarians of the first half of the century.

Early in 1883 William Morris had joined the Democratic Federation, as it still was, and was almost immediately elected treasurer, just before the June conference at which a socialist programme was adopted. Morris was already a famous and admired individual; as he was two years later to state, by no means immodestly, to the magistrate after his arrest in a free-speech campaign: ‘I am an artist, and a literary man, pretty well known, I think, throughout Europe’.