This thesis examines the close relation between political and literary forms integral to the late-nineteenth century ‘socialist revival’ in Britain (1881–ca. 1906), widely marked by a belief that educationalism and propaganda, or ‘making socialists’, would be sufficient to realise social transformation. Within the ideological tendency usually called ‘ethical’ socialism, the matter of such educationalism was predominantly moral and spiritual. By combining the individual moral focus of such ‘ethical’ socialism with educationalism’s emphasis on the social effect of the ideational, a late-Victorian socialist intelligentsia morphed the cultural authority of middle-class intellectualism into the countercultural identity of seemingly ‘classless’ prophetic pioneers working on behalf of humanity, thus claiming a socialist legitimacy for the literary pursuits of the alienated bourgeois. This middle-class, ‘ethical’ socialist project ran into two key epistemic dilemmas, as it needed to negotiate the relation between, first, the individualism of its moral focus and the collectivism that powers the renegotiation of class identity; second, between the ideal nature of intellectual work and the material agency claimed for it. The thesis argues that ‘ethical’ socialists managed both dilemmas through the affordances of literary form. By constructing formal and generic hybrids, they could simultaneously gesture to the individual and the collective, to the ideal and the material. Four case studies of ‘ethical’ socialist writers provide evidence for this claim. In Chapter One, Edward Carpenter’s prose poem Towards Democracy (1883) is analysed in its self-presentation as both prophetic self-expression and the transparent reflection of a collective, extra-literary reality. In Chapter Two, novelist Olive Schreiner is seen to construct a holistic philosophy from the combination of Emersonian Transcendentalism and Darwinian materialism, formally reflected in the socialistically popular allegories of Dreams (1890). The third chapter argues that social theorist Jane Hume Clapperton’s novel Margaret Dunmore; or, A Socialist Home (1888) constitutes a hybrid of the socialist utopia and the individualist-realist bourgeois novel that fuses the ideal and the material. The final chapter analyses how three ‘ethical’ socialist New Woman writers of the 1890s, Katharine Conway, Isabella Ford, and Gertrude Dix, responded to a socialist gendering of the tension between individualism and collectivism by blending the collective symbolic semantics of allegory with the intrinsic individuality of the bourgeois-realist novel. Together, the four case studies show that literary form occupied an epistemically overcharged role within the late-Victorian collocation of class, philosophy, aesthetics, and ideology that was ‘ethical’ socialism.