Graham Wallas

Graham Wallas (31 May 1858 – 9 August 1932) was an English socialist, social psychologist, educationalist, a leader of the Fabian Society and a co-founder of the London School of Economics.

Biography

Born in Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, Wallas was the older brother of Katharine, later to become a politician. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It was at Oxford that Wallas abandoned his religion. He taught at Highgate School until 1885, when he resigned rather than participate in communion. He was President of the Rationalist Press Association and Humanists UK (then the Ethical Union).

Wallas joined the Fabian Society in April 1886, following his acquaintances Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw. He was to resign in 1904 in protest at Fabian support for Joseph Chamberlain's tariff policy. In 1894 he was elected to the London School Board as a Progressive.

On 18 December 1897 he married the writer Ada Radford. The following year, they had a daughter, May Wallas, who overcame diphtheria and flu to go to Newnham College, Cambridge, like her mother. May was to publish editions of many of her father's works, including the 1940 collection Men and Ideas: Essays by Graham Wallas.

Wallas became chair of the board's school management committee in 1897, and until he was defeated in 1907, the encouragement of educational reform and the raising of academic standards in state schools were some his main activities.

He was appointed a university extension lecturer in 1890 and lectured at the newly founded London School of Economics from 1895. In 1898, he published a biography of the early-19th-century utilitarian radical Francis Place. His most important academic writings were Human Nature in Politics (1908) and its successors, Great Society (1914) and Our Social Heritage (1921).