Andrew Whitehead says that anarchy started in Hampstead

Wyldes is best known for its links with the artist and poet Wlliam Blake and the novelist Charles Dickens. Both their associations with the house were brief. Charlotte Wilson, a Cambridge graduate married to a stockbroker, lived at Wyldes for 20 years, and it was during that time that she helped set up the Freedom Press, which is still going, and the journal Freedom, which became the world’s longest-running anarchist newspaper.

Wyldes dates back to about 1600, when the estate was owned by Eton College. It was still a working farm when the smallholder decided to hive off one end of the house for rent. This is where Blake visited his friend and fellow artist John Linnell; and where Dickens and his wife and young child took refuge for five weeks in 1837 after the traumatic death of Dickens’s 18-year-old sister-in-law.

Wyldes in 1903 (Image: Courtesy of Andrew Whitehead)

The farmhouse and adjoining buildings have been through many rebuilds and renovations. Wyldes is what was originally the barn; Old Wyldes is the house. They are best seen from Wildwood Terrace, the path on the Sandy Heath side, with its view of the graceful south-facing weatherboarded aspect of these listed buildings.

Arthur and Charlotte Wilson moved into the house in the mid-1880s. She took a great interest in the history of the property and published a pamphlet on the subject. She also presided over extensive structural repairs and alterations.

Charlotte Wilson was born in Worcestershire in 1854, the daughter of a surgeon, and attended Merton Hall (later renamed Newnham College) at Cambridge University. While a student, she abandoned her religious faith and embraced radical political views.

The couple’s move to Wyldes in 1884, a spot then well beyond London’s fashionable suburbs, was an attempt to embrace a simple life. Charlotte also made clear that she would not live off her husband’s earnings, which she described as ‘the wages of iniquity’.

Wyldes with Old Wyldes behind (Image: Andrew Whitehead)

She joined the newly-established Fabian Society, a socialist discussion group. At one time, she was the only woman on the Fabian executive. She also hosted a reading group known coyly as the Hampstead Historic Club - among the books it studied were works by Marx and by the French anarchist Proudhon.

Wilson developed a keen interest in anarchism and invited the Russian anarchist exile, Peter Kropotkin – an aristocrat, geographer and talented propagandist – to settle in England. They became firm friends. Wilson’s contacts and energy along with Kropotkin’s eminence combined in 1886 with the publication of the first issue of Freedom.

For Freedom’s first ten years, Wilson was editor and publisher and one of the principal contributors. Anarchism was never a mass movement in England – at least, not outside the East End of London, where the Yiddish-speaking movement was a powerful force in the years leading up to the First World War – but it was an influential strain of thought within the left. And that was in part Charlotte Wilson’s achievement.

Although anarchism at the time was tainted by association with assassinations and bomb attacks - what some described as ‘propaganda by the deed’ - Wilson and her allies rejected arbitrary violence. Instead they advocated peaceful class struggle, emphasised mutualism and warned of the baneful influence of state and church.

Wilson’s Wyldes home was visited by an impressive array of progressive writers, artists and activists. Among them were the playwright George Bernard Shaw, the writer Olive Schreiner, the freethinker Annie Besant and social reformers such as Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis.

‘It is a charming and idyllic little farm’, recounted the writer Edith Nesbit, a regular visitor. ‘They have two rooms – study and kitchen’, though no cooking was done in the kitchen, which had a settee, ceramics on display, decorative curtains and an open hearth – ‘a delightfully incongruous but altogether agreeable effect’.

Wyldes was where political friendships were struck, ideas debated and plans developed. Not all the visitors were attracted to anarchism, but Wilson’s farmhouse kitchen served as a launch pad of the anarchist movement.

In the mid-1890s, prompted by ill health, Charlotte Wilson withdrew from politics. She later resumed involvement with the Fabians but not anarchism.

The Wilsons moved out of Wyldes in 1905 and Charlotte died in the United States just short of her 90th birthday. There are already two blue plaques in and around Wyldes. Perhaps one day Charlotte Wilson’s links with the property, and her political idealism, will also be celebrated there.

• Andrew Whitehead is a historian and the author of the Curious series of books about localities in North London.