John Malcolm Ludlow

This is a full-length biography of the founder and central figure of the Christian Socialist movement of 1845–54, the fellow worker with F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes and Daniel and Alexander Macmillan. From a Whig liberal and partly Scottish family who had learnt to rule in India, Ludlow was educated in revolutionary Paris and acted as a catalyst to a group of men brought up in the more established Britain of the nineteenth century. Outwardly the industrious and loyal subordinate of F. D. Maurice, he tried desperately to drive a group of men along a route of his own devising and thus goaded them to adopt alternative policies to his and to state why they did so. His whole career as lawyer and Christian Socialist co-operator, would-be politician and civil servant (for he finally ended up as the first Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies) was shaped, he maintained, by seven spiritual crises, and was a strange mixture of achievement and frustration, of insight and obtuseness.