Clarion caravans, radical hospitality, and the intimate history of socialist organising in Britain, c.1880-1914

This article considers the political lecture tour, and particularly the travelling socialist caravan tours organised by Clarion socialists at the end of the 19th century, to argue that, for socialist lecturers, touring produced everyday experiences of comradery, cross-cultural connection and deliberative forms of friendship that could powerfully embody socialist ideas for new audiences. The article shows that by looking to intimate encounters on the road—be that the sharing of meals or bedrooms, suffering misfortune with a stranger, meeting family members or making friends—we might tell a different story of the development and organisation of socialist ideas in late Victorian Britain. Crucially, it suggests that by looking to the intimate, unceremonial and happenstance meetings that characterised socialist lecture tours, we can conceive of itinerant activists not just as messengers or organisers, but also as producers of the everyday forms of cross-cultural connection and provincial internationalisms that would prove transformative to the development of socialist thought in Britain.