An edited amalgamation of several different accounts, this essay only really skims the surface of Freedom Press’s long and storied history, and a much fuller account can be found in A Beautiful Idea: History of the Freedom Press Anarchists by Rob Ray. More about its early period can be found in John Quail’s book The Slow Burning Fuse, via Donald Rooum’s historical recollections, and through the pages of the paper itself, archives of which are held at the Bishopsgate Library, Sparrows’ Nest, Libcom and the British Library. Our own digital archive can be found here.

The first Freedom emerged from the British socialist movement in the early 1880s. At that time there were several overlapping organisations with associated periodicals – the Social Democratic Federation with Justice and Today, the Fabian Society with The Practical Socialist and Our Corner, the Socialist League with The Commonweal, and so on. Anarchists were active in all these, but there were no separate anarchist initiatives in the country until the formation of a “Circle of English Anarchists” in May 1885, publishing The Anarchist edited by Henry Seymour.

This group included both Continental émigrés (Such as Nikola Chaikovski and Saverio Merlino) and native British anarchists. Among the latter the leading member was the well-educated and well off Charlotte Wilson, who was an active writer and speaker advocating anarchism in socialist organisations and publications from 1884.

Wilson had first become interested in anarchism during the 1883 Lyons anarchist trial of 60 IWMA members which included, among others, the globally famed political philosopher and direct actionist Peter Kropotkin and when the Russian was released from prison in France in January 1886, Wilson was responsible for inviting him to come to Britain to join them. He settled in England two months later, and would go on to declare himself overjoyed at the decision to settle, writing in Memoirs of a Revolutionist:

In 1886 the socialist movement in London was in full swing. Large bodies of workers had openly joined in all the principal towns, as well as a number of middle class people, chiefly young, who helped it in different ways … I was asked to lecture over the country, partly on prisons, but mainly on anarchist socialism and I visited in this way nearly every large town of England and Scotland.