John Goodwyn Barmby

John Goodwyn Barmby (1820-1881) was a British utopian socialist. He and his wife Catherine Barmby (died 1854) were influential supporters of Robert Owen in the late 1830s and early 1840s before moving into the radical Unitarian stream of Christianity in the 1840s. Both had established reputations as staunch feminists, and proposed the addition of women's suffrage to the demands of the Chartist movement.

Barmby was involved as an editor, writer and organiser of communitarian ventures around London from 1838 to 1848. He is often associated with the growth of socialist and utopian projects during the rise of the Chartism. He founded a utopian community on the Channel Islands and at times corresponded with radicals including William James Linton and Friedrich Engels.

John Barmby is also known as the person who coined the word "communism" during a visit to Paris in 1840 in conversation with some followers of Gracchus Babeuf 1. He introduced Engels to the French communiste movement 2. They founded the London Communist Propaganda Society in 1841 and, in the same year, the Universal Communitarian Association. By 1843, the Barmbys had recast their movement as a church. Researchers at Rutgers University explain:

Seeking a richer spiritual life than Owenite socialism or Chartism offered, soon after their marriage Catherine and Goodwyn Barmby founded the Communist Church. Although the church expired in 1849, in the mid-1840s it had more than ten congregations.3

Between 1854 and 1858 Barmby was minister of the Free Christian Church in Lancaster, Lancashire, where he held the title of Revolutionary Pontifarch of the Communist Church.

He also "preferred the company of men".

Further Reading