“Socialism” names a form of collective life that has never been fully realized; consequently, it is best understood as a goal to be imagined. So this study argues, and thereby locates an aesthetic impulse that animates some of the most consequential socialist writing, thought, and practice of the long nineteenth century. Imagining Socialism explores this tradition of radical activism, investigating the diverse ways that British socialists from Robert Owen to the midcentury Christian Socialists to William Morris marshalled the resources of the aesthetic in their efforts to surmount “politics” and develop nongovernmental forms of collective life. Their ambitious attempts at social regeneration led some socialists to explore the liberatory potential afforded by cooperative labor, women’s emancipation, political violence—and the power of the fine arts themselves. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that, far from being confined to the “socialist revival” of the fin de siècle, important socialist experiments with the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic may be found throughout the period it calls the “socialist century”—and may still inspire us today.