Sylvia Pankhurst's Germinal: work and play, organisation and the organic

Abstract

• Sylvia Pankhurst's little-known magazine Germinal (1923-24) emerged as her socialist newspaper The Workers Dreadnought was on the verge of collapse. It is self-consciously and necessarily more of a literary production than the Dreadnought but this paper suggests that concepts of internationalism and work (and so play) are shared by both. Germinal also betrays the complex nexus of political, literary and artistic influences on Pankhurst, particularly the connecting of Arts and Crafts sensibilities with ideas of Revolution.