John Ludlow: The Autobiography of a Christian Socialist

Among his more prominent colleagues in the Christian Socialist movement of the mid nineteenth-century – F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, T. H. Hughes – John Ludlow held a unique position. He was, like them, an Englishman, and a believing Protestant, but he had been educated in France, had spent most of his youth in Paris, and was aware of the contemporary currents of French social- ism. Indeed, he professed himself in his memoirs to have been a Fourierist.

Ludlow's long public career – born in 1821 he lived to be ninety – spanned the Victorian age. He was active in missionary work among the London poor, he edited the Christian Socialist, he actively encouraged the co-operative movement and the new Trade Unionism, he helped to found the Working Men's College, and for sixteen years he served as the first Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies, registering 25,000 working-class self-help organisations. The autobiography, begun in the writer's seventy-sixth year, gives some account of aII these varied interests, interwoven with the highly personal self-assessment of a deeply religious man.