In 1891 the author and activist Margaret Harkness contributed a series of four articles to the Pall Mall Gazette on London's most prominent ‘labour leaders’: John Burns, Tom Mann, Henry Hyde Champion and R. B. Cunninghame Graham. During the London dockworkers’ strike of 1889, Harkness worked closely with all the labour leaders, and her character sketches reveal a thorough knowledge of the strike itself and also the personal qualities of its leaders and what she viewed as their strengths and weaknesses. Writing of Champion, she acknowledges that his upper-class background bequeathed to him a patrician quality that made him ‘a soldier, brave and tender-hearted, [and] a proud and very reticent man’. Yet his efforts to ‘declass’ himself, she explains, could only ever fail:

The particular dynamics of Champion's attempt to live ‘declassed in a world of classes’ is a theme that Harkness would revisit in her novel George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905). The novel, ‘which contains the writer's experiences in the labour movement, and thoughts about it’, traces the growth of the British socialist movement during the 1880s through to its apex at the 1889 London dockworkers’ strike by way of the experiences of its eponymous protagonist. In a way, the novel is a roman à clef of the early socialist movement in Britain, but one that privileges the personal history of an ‘aristocratic socialist’ who John Barnes identifies as Henry Hyde Champion. Despite certain similarities between Champion's life and Eastmont’s experiences in the novel, George Eastmont, Wanderer is in no sense a straightforward biographical history. In fact, one formal technique of Harkness's novel is to confound biography – and thereby challenge socialist forms of heroes and hero-worship – by deliberately conflating her own experiences with those of Champion.