Stewart Headlam and the Christian Socialists

Victorian Christian Socialism hardly constituted a 'movement' or even a 'school' of thinking. Its leaders were too idiosyncratic, too individualistic, and far too much given to internal dissension for that. The development of social criticism, furthermore, often indicated an expression of only one dimension of their general attitudes: others continued to reflect the unreconstructed assumption of the old world of their social class and professional status. They were drawn from established sections of society and were, until quite late in the nineteenth century, mostly Anglicans and academics. What they shared was a rejection of the effects of competitive economics, as they understood them, on the lives of ordinary working people. They were critics of classical Political Economy. That did not, in itself, particularly distinguish them from the Tory Paternalist churchmen and the backwoods squires who were also, in the mid-century, declaiming against 'the dismal science' as Carlyle so memorably called it. The Christian Socialists, furthermore, tended to produce moral and educative solutions to the encompassing social ills – not political or structural ones.