Dora Marsden was born in the village of Marsden in 1882. In 1900 began teaching at Owens College, where she met Christabel Pankhurst and other suffragists. Dora joined them and became a leader in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU) by 1908. The following year she resigned as a teacher and became a full time agitator for the WSPU, graduating from suffragist to suffragette. She was sentenced to two months in prison for vandalism in 1909: she refused to wear prison clothes and served her time in the nude, even wriggling out of a straightjacket that had been forced on her. After a hunger strike she was released and continued to agitate. She disrupted political meetings (including a speech by a young Winston Churchill). The WSPU “promoted” her to a clerical position to temper her agitation. Dora, meanwhile, had grown tired of the “skirt movement” and sought a liberty beyond feminism.

In 1911, Dora founded “The Freewoman” (1911 – 1912), a periodical described as “a disgusting publication… indecent, immoral and filthy.” Financial troubles led to a re-launch as “The New Freewoman” (1914). And an ever more keen search for liberty led to a re-launch as “The Egoist” (1914 – 1919). Dora’s periodicals were the first to publish significant works by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and others.

In the 1920s – 1930s Dora wrote three books: “The Definition of the Godhead” (1928), “The Mysteries of Christianity” (1930) and “The Philosophy of Time” (published later, in 1955). During the writing of these books she went from a self-imposed isolation to confinement in a mental hospital, where she spent the remainder of her life.

About Trevor Blake (born 1966)

Author and publisher with a special interest in Dora Marsden. Published a new and expanded edition of “A Brave and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden (1882 – 1960)” by Dr. Les Garner. Wrote “Dora Marsden Bibliography,” edited collection of Dora essays “The Gospel of Power,” published new and expanded edition of “The Philosophy of Time.”

This was a free online talk by The Atkinson to celebrate International Women’s Day 2024. The Atkinson is Southport’s home for music, theatre, art, literature and history. Special thanks to The Atkinson for this opportunity.

Wednesday 13 March 2024 — 1:00 pm GMT

Free. Donations welcome.

Free online talk, booking is required before 11am on the morning of the talk. The talk will be presented using Zoom. You will receive an email invitation to join a Zoom meeting just after 11am on the morning of the talk. Free ticket at…

https://www.theatkinson.co.uk/events/online-talk-dora-marsden-and-the-gospel-of-power/

Dora Marsden could not be confined, bursting bonds from teacher to suffragist to suffragette to publisher to philosopher and, eventually, the madhouse.

Presentation by Trevor Blake. Author and publisher with a special interest in Dora Marsden. Published a new and expanded edition of A Brave and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden (1882 – 1960) by Dr. Les Garner. Wrote Dora Marsden Bibliography, edited collection of Dora essays The Gospel of Power, published new and expanded edition of The Philosophy of Time.

Discover rare photographic glimpses of pioneering egoists such as Dora Marsden and Benjamin R. Tucker, and delve into the visionary project to produce a Braille edition of Max Stirner’s magnum opus for the indomitable Helen Keller. Unearth a plethora of fascinating artifacts pertaining to Malfew Seklew, and be riveted by the astonishing revelation of Ragnar Redbeard’s brief yet impactful foray as a Canadian Socialist Provocateur.

This sixth issue of Der Geist is sure to delight and offend, but most of all, serve as an essential philosophical reference work for centuries to come.

DER GEIST: The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945 | ISSUE 6 | Winter 2023
Paperback, 212 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-944651-29-9, ISSN 2639-5339

Der Geist, (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor  2

1. Max Stirner   7

Max Stirner’s Anarchist Gospel | A Dutch Review of Stirner’s Work | Anarchist Black Dragon | Max Stirner vs. Wahrheit-Sucher | “Celine Adele Marillier” | Pity and the Future | Max Stirner and the Grisette | Steven T. Byington’s Triple Score

2. Malfew Seklew  29

On “Bérnard’s Tour” | Minister Mocks Malfew  | Stern Critique of Christian Socialist  | Seklew Asks: Nietzsche to Blame?  | Social Aristocrat Socialist Secretary | A Freak Among Reformers  | No Guide for Anybody | Proletarians in Purgatory | No Justice for Malfew Seklew  | “We’re All More or Less Nutty” | Not Seeking Work  | Seklew Scolds Simpoleons, Supplies Sample Shilling Sericine Silk Set | No Detail Too Small!

3. Ragnar Redbeard   51

Redbeard in Canada | Desmond Selling George  | Give the New Hand a Show! | A.D. in the O.E.D.  | A Bogus Book | Australian Socialist Drinking Club | Redbeard’s Rough Stuff |“We Understand the Redbeard Philosophy” | Voima On Oikeus | Etc.

4. Dora Marsden  95

Dora Marsden for the Prosecution | The Freewomen of New York | Dora Marsden, unser aller Mutter  | Dora Marsden Ephemera | Rare Portraits

5. Benjamin DeCasseres   107

Emmeline Pankhurst | Pyrrhonism and Acatalepsy | Balzac | The Borrowed Mirror

6. Friedrich Nietzsche   117

Nietzsche and a Braille Stirner for Hellen Keller | “Will Nietzsche Come Into Vogue…” | The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche | Alexander Tille Reads Egoism

7. Enzo Martucci   135

A Sketch of Martucci | An Excerpt from The Red Sect | Martucci on Stirner

8. Free Spirits  159

Peter Lamborn Wilson Has Passed  | Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal | Vox Populi Vox Dei | Thompson at Rudolf Steiner Hall | Speakers’ Corner Anthology | Among the Anarchists | The True Comarade | Is This What You Call “Living?” | The Thirteenth Paragraph | Greeves Fisher, A Sketch | Dominance vs. Egoism | More Individualism | Individualism and Property | Why I am a Right-Wing Anarchist | Opening and Closing the Dil Pickle | Christmas a Joke! | “I” a poem  | “I GO” a poem| A Letter to the Editors of Freedom | Enrico Arrigoni Bibliography | Photo of Benjamin R. Tucker | About the Editors

Peter Lamborn Wilson, also known as Hakim Bey, has passed. Peter was an enthusiast for Der Geist, the annual publication of The Union of Egoists. He volunteered to be an uncredited copy editor for several issues, for which we gave thanks and give thanks again.

I met Peter in Boston in 1987. He and I became correspondents. I published several of his essays in my zine OVO which were later collected in his book T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone. That’s why he gives thanks to OVO in T.A.Z. My work appeared in two books he edited, semiotext(e) USA and The Astral Convention (the later he gave me permission to reprint a very limited number of). I met Peter a second time a few years later in New York City, and after that a few phone calls, and after that letters with ever longer between them.

I still have the essays, zines and letters he sent me, many still uncollected. I still have the friends he introduced me to. But none of us have Peter any more.

A memorial by Kevin I. Slaughter

I was late to the egoist party by name, traveling to it from non-Anarchist origins. When Trevor and I began the work on the Union of Egoists project it was clear that Mr. Wilson was one of the few living bridges to the great figures of the egoist past. From his work with the Libertarian Book Club of New York City, his collaborations with Mark A. Sullivan and much more, I was pleased to have him as a correspondent in the last few years. It was with a great deal of pride that he took on a role as proofreader beginning with the second issue of our journal Der Geist, which he was quite fond of. He fell too ill to work on the fifth issue, but I was pleased to be able to send him a copy a few months ago with our best wishes. I sent him a Union of Egoists lapel pin, and tucked in a signed copy of his Utopian Trace he wrote a letter: “Thanx for lovely pin – send GEIST 3 galleys for proofreading if you wish!” I have only begun to explore the great deal of work he has now left behind, and I am proud that the Union of Egoists is, in some small way, part of that work.

Available from Underworld Amusements, Amazon, B&N, Bookshop

Originally issued in 1977 by Jim Huggon’s Hyde Park Speakers’ Union and Kropotkin’s Lighthouse Publications. Huggon was a regular speaker himself, and wrote and published numerous titles relating to Anarchism and London Radicals.

“I spoke on the Hyde Park Anarchist Platform for eighteen years from 1965 to 1983. At one time, briefly, we had three anarchist platforms at Speakers’ Comer because our views on anarchism were so different. Which is – of course – as it should be. In 1977 I edited and published Speakers’ Corner Anthology, writings by speakers and about speakers plus photos and illustrations, until now out of print and quite rare. It included substantial extracts from Bonar Thompsons’ autobiography plus a photo of Bonar in his famous black hat, plus a reproduction in full of his famous but now very rare journal The Black Hat.” – Jim Huggon, editor.

Available from: Underworld Amusements | Amazon.com | Amazon.UK | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

DER GEIST issue five features the first publication of original research, and archival materials thought lost. Steven T. Byington (first English translation of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner); Thomas Common (first English translation of Friedrich Nietzsche); Georgia Replogle (first English-language journal on egoism); Malfew Seklew (the Laughing Philosopher); Arthur Desmond (author of a notorious book); Dora Marsden, S. E. Parker and more.

DER GEIST (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

DER GEIST, The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945
ISSUE 5
Spring 2022
Paperback, 206 pages, fifteen dollars
ISBN 978-1944651244
ISSN 2639-5339

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor

1. Steven T. Byington

A Proofreader Looks Back | The Human Cutworm | Photo of Steven T. Byington | Biographical Note | Selected Bibliography

2. Thomas Common

Review of Survival of the Fittest | The Silent Isle: Finding the Gravesite of Thomas Common | A Memorial | Selected Bibliography

3. Ragnar Redbeard

Bertha McNamara’s Reflections on Arthur Desmond | Illustration from The Worker | John Ploughman and His Letter | The Brutalitarian: A Journal for the Sane and the Strong | Lion’s Paw Banned | Confessions of an Anarchist

4. Max Stirner / The Ego And His Own

Donald Rooum’s “Eigenheit” | An Early Literary Portrait of Max Stirner

5. Dora Marsden

Brainy Beauties | Private Places | Lover of Freedom

6. Malfew Seklew

Dan O’Brien, Social Supercrat | Victor Grayson, M.P.: A Rhapsody on a Reality | Spencella Wilkesbarre’s What Women Ought to Know | Stanley Simpoleon Says Seklew Stand-In | William Henry Powell and Malfew Seklew | Poetic Beer Drinker | A Remarkable Character | Two from Day Book

7. Free Spirits

Photo of Georgia Replogle | Photo of S. E. Parker | Letter from Denise Juin | Interview with S. E. Parker | Sophie Leppel’s “Pig Eaters Challenge” | Herbert Roseman on Laurance Labadie | Leedz Anarkyst: Greevz Fisher (1845-1931) | Holbrook Jackson on Nietzsche | Index of Der Geist | From the Library | Index to The Lumberjack / Voice of the People | A Thank-You to Patrons | Select Titles Available | About the Editors

In Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845), Max Stirner quotes Galatians 4 verse 26 in saying: “Das Jerusalem, das droben ist, das ist die Freie, die ist unser aller Mutter.” Stephen T. Byington translates the passage in his 1907 translation of Stirner, The Ego and His Own, as “The Jerusalem that is above is the freewoman; she is the mother of us all.”

Dora references the passage again in the dedication to her book The Definition of the Godhead (1928): To / THE GREAT NAME, / HUSHED AMONG US FOR SO LONG / of / HER, / HEAVEN, / THE MIGHTY MOTHER / of / ALL.

Der Geist issue 4 is now available! That creates a total of 724 pages of egoism from 1845 to 1945, with “lost” works reprinted, new translations every issue, rare photos and images, and new research and writing.

Available from: Underworld Amusements | Amazon.com | Amazon.UK | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

In this issue, a previously undiscovered speech by Ragnar Redbeard; original translations of Max Stirner and Malfew Seklew; rare reproductions from Dora Marsden and Friedrich Nietzsche; individualists and eccentrics versus the KKK; and more.

DER GEIST, The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945
ISSUE 4
Spring 2021
Paperback, 172 pages, fifteen dollars
ISBN 978-1944651-21-3
ISSN 2639-5339

Essays by Dora Marsden (1882 – 1960) from her journal The Egoist. Introduction, annotations, glossary and index by Trevor Blake, author of Dora Marsden Bibliography.

Available from: Underworld Amusements | Amazon.com | Amazon.UK | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

What a blight it is on life, to be sure, that honest speech is almost non-existent. Lo and behold, all are alike: the secret sin against the spirit of peace is universal, and can be proclaimed from the housetops.
The “poor” man is the one who lacks the power to get what he wants. If he had had the “might,” the “competence” to cover the wide expanse of these “rights,” he would not be in the position of a beggar asking for the favour of a job from a master: he would have set about being his own master: the one thing which to this day the ordinary wage earner steadily refuses to be. “Reformers” have tried to get a comprehensive view of the “world’s work”—which does not exist save in their own imagination—and they have come to neglect and hold lightly work viewed from its only real aspect—the personal satisfying of needs and wants as they rise up spontaneously from each varying individual. Social rebels will get no way until they acquiesce willingly in men and women being what they are: accept their oddities and wayward differences and then make the best and most of them to serve their individual ends.

Available from: Underworld Amusements | Amazon | Bookshop.org

“A cynic’s book that annoyed me.” – Leeds Mercury.

Bonar Thompson, the famous Hyde Park Orator, delighted millions of listeners at the well-known meeting-ground for many years with his dramatic personality and oratorical flights. This book, which is the story of his life, is a veritable human document. Born in Ulster to poor parents, left to struggle for himself at an early age, lacking any formal education and obliged to labor in the fields. Bonar Thompson began quite early to exhibit those unusual qualities of mind and character that have made him the social rebel he is. He describes how he taught himself to become a public speaker, threw in his lot with revolutionaries, went to prison in Manchester as an agitator, and finally lost faith in all political theories. He has some pungent things to say about his ex-comrades in the Labour and Socialist movements as well as some interesting stories about many famous men and women whom he met in the course of his very varied career. His appreciation of Shakespeare is on par with any academic.

Hyde Park Orator Illustrated by Bonar Thompson is a most unusual book and is full of entertainment from beginning to end. Newly typeset and expanded autobiography of the greatest free thinker ever to grace Speakers Corner.

With illustrations, index, bibliography, and an afterword exclusive to this edition.

“A somewhat irritating but entertaining book.” – Socialist Standard.