Raphael Samuel was a founder of this Review, a constant friend and counsellor to its editors and an outstanding contributor. The articles he wrote for us proved to be landmark texts, amongst the dozen or so most important that we have published. The process of extracting them was laborious since Raphael was an obsessive reviser and re-drafter who loved trying out different versions. Having submitted a very decent draft of the first part of an article he would, instead of completing it, proceed to submit half a dozen further drafts, some almost imperceptibly different from what had gone before, but successively achieving a transformation. ‘This paragraph needs further thickening’, he would say of some already vivid or original passage. If one unwisely offered a mite of corroborative material he would eagerly note it down and use it to further embroider his argument, often in ways one had not at all intended. With the patience of colleagues at breaking point and printers’ deadlines grotesquely overrun, Raphael would turn in a new and utterly resplendent, now very much overlength, version of the still uncompleted article, which we would gratefully publish—accompanied by the inevitable promise of a sequel to follow. To our great loss, this is the last issue of nlr to be delayed by Raphael Samuel.

Raphael’s brilliant texts, culminating in his masterpiece, Theatres of Memory, allow one to reconstruct a personal sensibility and political agenda which was often at variance with those of his friends and comrades. While these writings could only have been written by someone shaped by the Communist Party Historians’ Group and New Left Marxism, they nevertheless implicitly challenged some of the central notions of progress, class formation and long, or short, revolution which animated the worldview of the Left. Notwithstanding a certain stereotype of the History Workshop project, Samuel’s own contributions often fell somewhat athwart the mainstream of ‘history from below’ or the construction of labour as a heroic protagonist. Samuel challenged the myth of Britain as workshop of the world and the schema of an industrial revolution by bringing out the huge importance of the nineteenth-century ‘penny capitalists’.footnote1 He recorded the life story of Arthur Harding in loving and meticulous detail; Harding was not a trade union organizer but a Barnardo’s boy from a classic Victorian London slum, the Jago, who became a prince of the East End underworld, a leader of the strike-breakers in 1926, and subsequently an associate of Oswald Mosley and the Kray twins.footnote2 Always attentive to the unexpected, Samuel explored Harding’s friendly relations with Jewish neighbours and partners, and his intellectual interests, notably an enthusiasm for the works, read in prison, of Dickens, Gibbon and Victor Hugo—in fact books not so different from those at work in the formation of the auto-didact Marxists of whom Samuel had just written in nlr in his essay on ‘British Marxist Historians 1880–1980’.footnote3

The poignant essays Samuel published in nlr on ‘The Lost World of British Communism’ in 1985–87 once again contrasted with earlier, characteristically anti-Stalinist, New Left writing; whereas the early New Left was defined by the break with Stalinism, Samuel, by the mid-eighties, saw communism as a doomed, flawed but noble faith. With out in any way belittling or extenuating the cruelties of Stalinism, he was fascinated by the stern virtues of the historical communist identity, polemically contrasting them with the shallowness of a more reasonable Euro-Communism which had foresworn Stalin’s crimes but lost its soul. Although—perhaps because—he left the Communist Party in 1956, when only 21 years old, his account of it is by far the most vividly realized we have.footnote4 By the age of ten he had imbibed his mother’s communist faith and fed it by quizzing his uncle, Chimen Abramsky, on the finer points of labour history and Bolshevik doctrine. He charted the advances of the Red Army on the Eastern Front on a bedroom wall map but also relished the foibles of the British comrades who functioned as a sort of extended family. Many of his fellow students at the private North London Progressive School he attended also joined the Communist Party, probably as a result of his example. In deference to the English milieu he was to call himself Ralph rather than Raphael in his communist and early New Left days. The progressive English nationalism espoused by British communists in the Popular Front epoch and war years was to make a lasting impact on Samuel’s outlook, even when later thoroughly qualified by appreciation of the different identities andhistories of the ‘four nations’ yoked within the United Kingdom. Raphael had been admitted to the Communist Party Historians’ Group when still a teenager. To Samuel a striking feature of the cpgb wasthe terms of relative equality it allowed between young and old, men and women, immigrant and native, workers and intellectuals, so longas they unswervingly subscribed to the faith—all of this in suchmarked contrast to the elaborate deference and rank of wider Brit-ish society. Raphael was a strong supporter of contemporary social movements, footnote5 and the salience of the domestic in his work on contemporary culture registered the strong influence of feminism; nevertheless he lamented the bygone moral egalitarianism of the communist tradition. In the case of his mother’s family he speculated that becoming communist had allowed them to become English, by contrast with the indifference or hostility they elsewhere encountered.