A Novel.
New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers.. 1895.
First American edition published the year after the London first edition. pp. 177, [1bl, 6 publisher's adverts]. Original beige cloth lettered in gilt and decorated in silver and brown. Some soiling and rubbing and internally there is some foxing but overall a nice copy. Front free endpaper is signed Clementina Black so this is either the author's own copy or was signed by her for someone else. Rare in commerce and comparatively uncommon institutionally, OCLC recording sixteen copies.
An Agitator is Black's most overtly political work of fiction. It is about an engineer who becomes radicalized through the socialist movements of the late nineteenth century and embarks on a life of trade unionism, political agitation and strike action. Eleanor Marx (who was a friend of Black) described the novel as "a realistic account of the British working-class movement". Clementina Black was deeply involved in the world of socialist campaigning and suffragism but she was aware of the short-comings of the mostly middle-class leaders of these movements and An Agitator provides some wryly satirical digs at their impractical idealism.
