Making French Socialism Religious: Henry James Sr., J.J. Garth Wilkinson, and the Transatlantic Fourierist Network

This paper uses the friendship between the American author, Henry James, Sr., and a noted British author and physician, J.J. Garth Wilkinson, to explain how mid-nineteenth-century romantic socialists in the United Kingdom and the United States infused religion into their doctrine. Both James and Wilkinson were followers of the French social philosophy known as Fourierism-- a movement focused on building communitarian experiments according to Charles Fourier’s precise specifications. As Fourierism spread into the United States and United Kingdom it took on religious overtones that were largely absent from the original French philosophy. I argue that J.J. Garth Wilkinson and the British Fourierists were central in melding Fourierism with the religious beliefs of the Swedenborgians, a religious group that gained popularity throughout Europe and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. This paper will explore the transnational connections between Henry James, Sr., and his American cohort with those of J.J. Garth Wilkinson and his network of British Fourierists, in order to answer the question that has consistently puzzled historians of antebellum reform--how did the sometimes bizarre ideas of a French socialist gain so many adherents in the English-speaking world?
            The religious conversation between Fourierists in the United Kingdom and the United States reveals the depth of the transnational connection between Fourierists in the mid-nineteenth century.  My project evaluates how these relationships shaped debates about religion, marriage, sexuality, and the proper organization of labor. The correspondence and diaries of leading Fourierists, and articles in the Fourierist press, demonstrate that Fourierists truly saw themselves as part of a global phenomenon decades before Marxists could make that claim.