[1] Although it only existed for a few years, the club attracted high-profile lecturers, including Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, and is considered by scholars to illustrate a shift in popular perspective from religious dissent to socialist political theory.

The Stratford Dialectical and Radical Club was formed in 1880[2] when members of the National Secular Society decided to become more active in politics[3] and the burgeoning social reform movement[4] and less constrained by the NSS' focus on antitheism.

[5] Martin Crick has suggested that this phenomenon was the result of "impatience with established methods of Secularist activity and anger at the movement's reluctance to commit itself to a definitive political creed",[6] and general dissatisfaction with the leadership of Charles Bradlaugh in the NSS, who personally opposed socialist ideas.

[9] The SDRC's strategy for expansion was summed up by Joseph Lane as "take a room, pay a quarter's rent in advance then arrange a list of lecturers… paste-up bills in the streets all around…and [having] got a few members, get them to take it over and manage it as a branch".

For example, it supported the Pervomartovtsy assassins of Alexander II of Russia in 1881; and it was instrumental, with other radical London clubs, in the creation of the Social Democratic Federation, Britain's first socialist party, the same year.

[14] Although it only existed for a short duration,[14] clubs such as the Stratford Dialectic and Radical have been identified as the origins of the anarchist movement in Britain,[20] due to its early espousal of an "anti-state, anti-capitalist" political program.