Of all the Christian Socialist leaders of the middle years of the century, John Malcolm Ludlow was the most explicit in political analysis. Ostensibly, too, he was the most theoretical – he seems to get nearer than the others did to the exploration of philosophical bases to his socialism. But to some extent that is an illusory appearance: Ludlow's mind was in fact extremely practical, and what looks at first glance like a systematic assemblage of political ideas turns out, at a second, to be a characteristically French style of arranging information in a structured and ordered pattern. The information itself was characteristically English in its pragmatism. Ludlow had been born in India, and after two years, following the death of his father (who worked for the East India Company), the family moved to England – and then, in 1826, to Paris. He was educated at the Collège Bourbon and acquired the manners and intellectual styles of the French classes of privilege amongst whose sons he studied. He intended to remain in France, where many, including Guizot, predicted a brilliant career. Instead, in 1838, he settled in London, wishing to follow what his mother assured him would have been his father's will: that he became an Englishman. He was only sixteen, and the intended personal transformation never quite happened. Emotionally still attached to France, he came to idealize aspects of its life and culture; he became suffused with the exile's enthusiasm for a remembered land. It was in the year following this upheaval – and clearly a product of it – that he underwent the almost simultaneous conversions to active Christianity and to Socialism.