• Continue across the Green to enter St Peter’s Street before turnng right onto Colebrook Row…   ///friend.tries.sleeps

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The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) had its headquarters here at number  — from 1926 to 1937 and was founded in the 1880‘s by H.M. Hyndman as the first organised socialist political party in Britain. Among its first members were the designer William Morris and Eleanor Marx youngest daughter of Karl Marx, however Friedrich Engels, Marx’s long term collaborator refused to back the venture. During the first decade of the 20th Century, the party struggled with membership defections.

 

Hyndman exerted tremendous influence over the party through his funding and rigid control of the party newspaper ‘Justice’ but many, including trades unionists thought that he was overly obsessed with parliamentary ambitions and should be more active in the industrial struggle.

 

• Look across to the start of Duncan Terrace for the next plaque… 

 

Charles Lamb, an English essayist who lived here at 64 Duncan Terrace from 1823 to 1827 is best known for his ‘Essays of Elia’ and the children’s book ‘Tales from Shakespeare’ which was written with his sister Mary.  ///smug.hears.today

 

His principal biographer described him as “the most lovable figure in English literature” and much loved by his friends Coleridge, Wordsworth and Hazlitt. 

 

However, his life was a sad one having suffered from smallpox at an early age and a stutter which deprived him of an opportunity to follow a clerical career. He and his sister suffered from bouts of depression and mental illness and spent periods in the harsh contemporary mental hospitals including a private ‘madhouse’ in Islington called Fisher House.

 

His name is honoured by The Latymer School in Edmonton where one of the houses is named Lamb.