Journal of Victorian Culture

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The English Face of Karl Marx

Miles Taylor

To cite this article: Miles Taylor (1996) The English Face of Karl Marx, Journal of Victorian
Culture, 1:2, 227-253, DOI: 10.1080/13555509609505925

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 The English Face of Karl Marx’
Miles Taylor

Nowadays historians of Victorian politics and culture are invariably wary

of Karl Marx. From being a familiar figure in the field twenty years ago,
Marx has become marginalised. Once routinely invoked in the analysis
of industrialisation, middle-class formation, the labour aristocracy, and
radicalism and reformism, now Marx personifies a discarded historical
agenda. Emphatic denunciation of Marx and Marxism has emerged
as the trademark of the new social history of Victorian England, with
Marx’s materialistic and reductionist notions of class being singled out
for particular criticism.2Yetin many respects Marx is an easy target. One
of the main reasons for the rapid demise of a Marxist approach has
been the fact that Marx’s own analysis of England never really gained a
foothold within British historiography. After 1848 Marx viewed England
as the most obvious venue for the industrial over-production, economic
collapse, and class struggle which would produce communist society.
He developed this analysis in his journalism for the New Ymk Daily
Tribune and in other papers during the 1850s and early 1860s, and at
length in Dus Kupitut, the first volume of which was published in 1867.
But Marx’s analysis of exploitation in Das Kapital was rejected by the
Fabians in the 1880s and 1890s in favour of a neoclassical ~ r i t i q u eAnd
.~
by the time his writings on English politics were made more widely avail-
able, principally through the work of Dona Tom in the 1930s, social
history in this country had become grafted onto a native radical-liberal
history, in which the avoidance of revolution was one of the main leit-
motifs. At the same time much self-styled Marxist history, such as that of
Ralph Fox, Reg Groves and Allen Hutt, was more indebted to Engels
and Lenin, than to M a x 4 Not surprisingly, when there was a re-
surgence of Marxism amongst younger social historians in the 1970s,
Marx’s actual writings on England - published in 1973 as Suruqrsfim
Exile in the Pelican Marx library - paled into insignificance when com-
pared to his work on France, or his earlier philosophical writings from

227
 Miles Taylor

the 1840s. As one commentator put it, ‘[hle did not understand the
peculiarities of the British social and political ~ystem’.~
Why did Mam get Britain so wrong? The most common explanation
has been that in his writings on England Marx simply extended ideas
initially developed in his work during the 1840s. Tom Nairn and David
Fernbach suggested that in his Tribune articles Marx applied to England
‘a political model worked out on the basis of continental experience’.
Whereas the bourgeoisie had played a dynamic role in the overthrow of
feudal society in France, Marx was wrong to expect this in England,
where the middle class had successfully integrated itself into the con-
servative ruling classes.6Not surprisingly, it has been claimed, Marx was
unable to provide any actual evidence that Britain had entered a bour-
geois epoch.’ Similarly, Gareth StedmanJones has suggested that in his
Tribune articles Marx ‘clung faithfully’ to a scenario of industrialisation
and working class revolution which Engels had put forward in The
Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), notwithstanding the
changes in the countenance of the English state, changes which Engels
was alone in recognising.*
Marx’s biographers have also downplayed the significance of Marx’s
Tribune journalism, seeing it as a necessary evil, only important insofar
as it gave him the financial independence needed to continue his study
of political e c ~ n o m yIt. ~is true that Marx himself often saw his journal-
istic labours in this light - as his wife, Jenny, put it in December 1857,
‘ [b]y day Karl works for his living and by night at the completion of his
political economy’.’0 This view is supported by the fact that Marx
appears to have put little intellectual effort into his Tribune work -
almost none of his notebooks from the period contain preparatory
materials for his journalism.” At best, the work for the Tribune paid the
rent, at worst it was a burdensome distraction.
The following article puts forward a different view, arguing that
Marx’s views on Britain were not simply a straightforward extension of
his earlier work on France, or merely a development of Engels’ work.
And despite the drudgery of the work, Marx’s journalism was more
creative than his biographers have assumed. In compiling his Tribune
articles, Marx drew heavily on contemporary English sources - prin-
cipally, the London newspaper press of the 1850s. From these English
sources Marx developed his scenario of social revolution and economic
crisis, so that by 1852 he had a clearer picture of English politics and
commerce than was evident before 1850. In other words, Marx’s ma-
terialist analysis of Victorian Britain built on indigeneous conceptions
of class and politics in ways which have not been sufficiently recognised.
This article is in five main parts. First, I look at Marx’s analysis of

228
 The English Face of Karl Marx

Britain before 1850, and point out that in certain areas the analysis
lacked the understanding of English politics and commerce which was
to develop in his writings after 1852. Secondly, I look at Marx’s work
for the New Ymk Daily Tribune, the kind of pressures under which his
journalsm was produced, and the heavy reliance on the English press
which this created. Then I analyse the convergence between Marx’s
initial articles on England and some of the debates going on in the
English press in 1852. This is followed by an analysis of similar conver-
gence in the treatment of Lord Palmerston, and the commercial crisis
of 1857-8. In the final section I consider the main points of difference
between Marx’s analysis and English newspaper commentary.

I
When Marx and Engels took refuge in England in 1849, their under-
standing of British politics and society was based on two sources -
Engels’ Condition of the Wmking Class in England (1844),and both men’s
conceptualisation of bourgeois revolution in Germany and France
since 1815. Engels’ Condition had presented a picture of everexpanding
industrial output outstripping markets, causing periodic gluts, with a
final economic crisis only being staved off by reduction of production
costs - hence low wages in the factory districts, and campaigns to reduce
indirect tax such as the Anti-Corn Law League. Engels believed that
sooner or later a further catastrophic economic crisis would break out,
most probably because of American competition, and a bloody war
between poor and rich would result.’*To this picture of inevitable econ-
omic crisis Marx and Engels added an analysis of the political struggle
which had taken place in Europe since 1815, in which the feudal order
was giving way to the revolutionary movement, led by the liberal bour-
geoisie, and supported by the democratic working class. Once the
bourgeoisie had annihilated the aristocracy, they would cease to lead
the struggle, and the working class would become the national revol-
utionary movement. In the case of England, both Marx and Engels
believed that the repeal of the corn laws in 1846 and the resurgence of
Chartism the following year meant that this post-feudal position had
been reached.’?’
However, in several respects this was a vague scenario of class struggle
and crisis in England. Engels’ account of economic crisis was imprecise.
He saw economic crises as an integral part of a ‘boom and bust’ cycle,
and thought that eventually English manufacturing would be overtaken
by American industrial growth. But he did not link an analysis of the
composition of capital to the magnitude of a commercial crisis, in the

229
 Miles Taylor

way in which Marx was to do at the end of the 1850s. Moreover, to see
England as the locus classicusof a general crisis was something of a com-
monplace amongst European exiles and other foreign observers at mid-
century. The collapse of England was confidently predicted by Louis
Blanc (who expected war with France), Ledru Rollin (a jacquerie) and
Bruno Bauer (dissolution of the territorial constitution).l 4 Charles
Dana had also anticipated the violent fall of England’s feudal order
in the Tribune in 1848.15 Furthermore, both Marx and Engels over-
estimated the extent to which the aristocracy had retreated from the
political scene, hence their problem in explaining the Factory Acts,
which suggested that the aristocracy could still over-rule the interests
of the bourgeoisie.16Finally, Marx and Engels had little notion of who
actually comprised the bourgeoisie in Victorian England. Both men
usually had in mind those who articulated the doctrines of the classical
political economists. Given Marx’s extensive reading in the mid-1840s
of the Economist - a newspaper established with the main purpose of
setting forth a ‘complete Weltanschauung’of free-trade - this is not sur-
prising.” But it did mean that before 1850 both men tended to descend
into stereotypes when analysing the English middle-class: for example,
Engels’ faceless, nameless factory masters in his Condition ofthe Working
C h s in England, and Marx’s quirky attack on Dr. Bowring in his 1848
address on free-trade.’* In Marx’s case, many of these lacunae were to
be corrected by a more thorough acquaintance with English political
commentary.

I1
Marx was invited to work for the Tribune in early August 1851, having
met up with the paper’s managing editor Charles Dana four years
earlier in Cologne. The Tribune had been founded in 1841 by Horace
Greeley who edited the paper until his death in 1872.19In the 1850s the
paper fused anti-slavery sentiment with economic protectionism, h e l p
ing to pave the way for the establishment of the Republican party in
1854. Increasingly during the 1850s Greeley pitched the paper towards
farmers and industrial workers by developing a political platform which
promised free land grants, a protective tariff, internal improvements
and increased immigration.20Both Greeley and the Tribune were well-
known in Britain. Greeley was one of the foreign commissioners at the
1851 Exhibition of all Nations, and was looked to by many English
radicals as a champion of the cheap working-man’s press.21In 1851 he
gave evidence to the parliamentary select committee on the newspaper
stamp, and his views were sought out by John Bright in particular.

230
 The English Face of Karl Marx

Indeed Bright remained a fan of the paper. In 1853 he read out in the
House of Commons a long extract from one of Marx’s articles in the
Tribune, citing it as an example of how an unstamped press could be a
responsible and intelligent press. With no intended irony, Bright noted
that although he had ‘seen articles better written and with more style’
he had never seen ‘any that had a better tone, or that were more likely
to be The paper itself was known to be a supporter of moder-
ate republicanism. Dana had enthusiastically covered the 1848 revol-
utions, sending in copy from Paris, before travelling on to Germany.23
On his travels he secured a group of emigre correspondents for the
paper - not only Marx, but other young Hegelians, including Bruno
Bauer and Arnold Ruge. From France he enlisted Jules Lechevalier,and
from Hungary Ferenc Pulszky. Of these Marx was to prove one of the
most durable. When the Tribune cleared the decks of many of its foreign
correspondents during the commercial collapse of late 1857, Marx was
one of only two who were kept By 1861, however, Marx’s Tribune
output had been reduced to a trickle, and his work for the paper ended
in March 1862.
In the decade before then Marx contributed some 380 articles to
the Tribune.Around a dozen of these were co-written with Engels, and
Engels himself contributed around 150 articles, mainly on military cam-
paigns in Europe. Marx wrote principally on three themes - English
party politics, English and European commerce, and English imperial-
ism in India and SE Asia. At the peak of his output for the Tribune in
1857-8 Marx was contributing ten articles per month, and sometimes
for weeks on end supplying the paper with much of its editorial ma-
terial. This was clearly a major undertaking on Marx’s behalf. Only in
his contributions to the Neue Oder ZRitung, published in Breslau during
1855, did Marx outstrip his productivity for the Tribune, sending in 220
short articles in the space of 10 months.
Marx commenced his Tribunejournalism with the disadvantage of not
being able to write adequately in English. The initial series of articles
which appeared under his name in August 1851 - ‘Revolution and
Counter-Revolution in Germany’ - were of course written by Engels
who had greater command of English. In April 1852 Marx offered
Dana a series of articles on English affairs, and these commenced at the
end of But Marx’s reliance on others did not cease there. For
the first six months Marx wrote his articles in German, sent them up to
Engels in Manchester to be translated, and in some cases annotated or
amended, whereupon Engels would return them and Marx would dis-
patch them to New York. At the end of January 1853 Marx announced
that he had written an article in English for the first time with the aid of

231
 Miles Taylor

a dictionary and the help of Wilhelm Pieper, a friend who lived nearby.
However, he still continued to use Engels as a translator. Only towards
the end of 1853 was Marx able to dispense with Engels’ translating
services and send out articles direct from London, partly because his
confidence with English had grown, and partly because Pieper, who was
syphilitic and forced to spend long periods incarcerated in the German
Hospital in Dalston, was unavailable. Despite his growing fluency, writ-
ing the articles remained a lengthy process. For example, in October
1853,Marx explained to Engels that he had written an article on Lord
Palmerston through the night and then dictated it to Jenny from seven
until eleven the next morning.26However, by the end of 1854 Marx
had become so used to writing in English that he anticipated the
resumption of writing in German for the Neue Oder Zeitungwith some
trepidati~n.~’
Marx was also heavily reliant on the English press for his Tribune
articles. Up until 1852 he was most familiar with Chartistjournals - prin-
cipally those edited by George Julian Harney and by Ernest Jones. But
from 1852 onwards he expanded his repertoire to include the main-
stream daily press as well, mainly because it was there that he found
extensive coverage of the parliamentary debates in the House of Com-
mons, much of which he would quote verbatim. Without this source
Marx was usually stuck for a story. For example, in September 1852 he
told Engels that he had not written any further articles for the Tribune
because he had not got a penny to go and read the newspapers.28Marx
consulted the newspapers in various central London reading rooms or
in coffee houses. He read them all, from the ministerial dailies - the
MorningHeraZd, the Morning Post, and the Gbbe- through to the liberal
and radical weeklies, such as the Economist, the Examiner (‘the first of
the first-rate London weekly papers’),29 the Daily News, and the Morning
Advertiser, and then on to some of the popular Sunday papers such as
Reynolds’News. Within this spectrum there were particular favourites -
the hess, thought by Marx to be Disraeli’s main journalistic outlet, and
which was ‘the best informed paper as far as ministerial mysteries are
, ~ ~ the Times, which provided the best reporting of
c o n ~ e r n e d ’and
the parliamentary debates. He regularly consulted both the Morning
Advertiser and the Daily News, although did so with some distrust, as both
papers drifted into support for Lord Palmerston, and,what was worse,
became colonised by other exiles, such as Karl Blind and Louis Blanc
(in the Advertiser), and Alexander Herzen (in the Daily News) .31 Towards
the end of the decade, Marx began reading the Morning Star with more
regularity. Although the paper, which was sponsored in part by Cobden
and Bright, was considered by Marx to be too bourgeois and its foreign

232
 The English Face of Karl Marx

news section was edited by another disliked young Hegelian in exile,

the bumptious Julius Faucher, he found its coverage of European,
Indian and Chinese affairs useful.
So when Marx began contributing to the Tribune he was heavily
dependent on external aid in the actual composition of his work. For
the first batch of articles he was composing in German and required
Engels not only to translate, but also to infuse his prose with an English
idiom. Engels was particularly critical of Pieper’s translations of Marx’s
initial articles, written in August 1852. He found them too florid, too
full of words of French derivation, and too literal in their translation of
key German phrases. For example, Engels pointed out that ‘middle
class society for burgerliche Gesellschaft is not strictly grammatical or
logically correct ... An educated Englishman would not say this. One
would have to say Bourgeois society, or, depending on circumstances,
commercial and industrial society’.32Even without Engels’ guiding
hand, Marx was probably more dependent than he realised on con-
temporary English sources for some of his key expressions, metaphors
and allusions. His articles are replete with conscious and unconscious
borrowings of English phrases and definitions. A few examples will
suffice. Back in 1851, a fortnight before Marx coined the phrase, the
Exuminer observed of Louis Napoleon that he had ‘accomplished his
18th B r ~ m a i r e ’Similarly,
.~~ Punch, with which Marx was familiar, fre-
quently depicted Louis Napoleon as the ‘Brummagen Bonaparte’, and
Marx also later used this phrase to describe the French emperor.34In his
second article in the Tribune in 1852 Marx asserted that the Manchester
school was republican, and wished to do awaywith the ‘barbarous splen-
dours’ of royalty, a phrase taken from Harney’s Red In his
third article Marx described electoral corruption in England, compar-
ing it to the ‘recurring Saturnalia’of ancient Rome. On this occasion he
was borrowing from the Economist.36
Marx, in other words, made many casual borrowings from the Eng-
lish sources he was using. With his usual sense of irony, he may have had
himself in mind when he wrote in the Eighteenth Brumaire that ‘the
beginner who has learned a new language always retranslates it into his
mother t o n g ~ e ’ . He
~ ’ could afford no such luxury. But the process was
not simply fortuitous. A further set of linkages between Marx’sjournal-
ism and the English press can be established. Marx not only drew on his
English sources to Anglicise his prose-style, he also incorporated much
of their political analysis as well, using contemporary English commen-
ta’y on class, economic crisis, and the political situation in England to
substantiate his own scenario of social revolution.

233
 Miles Taylor

I11
Marx’s more substantive debt to his English sources becomes clearer
when his first Tribune articles are compared with his analysis of England
before 1850. As has been suggested already, in their writings on Britain
in the 1840s Marx and Engels had tended to exaggerate the extent to
which there had been an aristocratic retreat and bourgeois triumph,
evident from 1832 and 1846, and this had led to problems in explain-
ing, for example, the Factory Acts. Engels continued to adhere to this
view, notwithstanding evidence to the contrary. In an unpublished
article on England, written in January 1852, he argued that ‘the inces-
sant revolutionising of English society’ was continuing, and the indus-
trial bourgeoisie ‘that class which already controls England in practice
... is making giant strides towards the political recognition of its
h e g e m ~ n y ’As
.~~with the pre-1850 analysis, Engels was unable to put
a name to the abstract forces he was describing. However, in Marx’s first
contributions to the Tribune later in the year a modified view emerged.
In a series of articles on the English general election which took place
in the summer of 1852 Marx emphasised the opaque nature of the
British constitution, arguing that party politics were ostensibly domi-
nated by the two aristocratic parties, but in reality they only survived
by making concessions to the middle classes, who Marx identified in
specific political terms as the ‘Manchester school’, or ‘free-trade party’.
The Whigs, of whom Marx and Engels had had little to say before 1850,
were seen to be particularly important here, for they were seen as
the ‘advocati’for the ‘millocracy’or bourgeoisie. Marx argued that the
facade was breaking by 1852, for, to the middle class, the Tories and
Whigs were now no more than the ‘vanishing opponent’, and once the
political ascendancy of the middle class over the aristocracy was secure,
then, as Marx put it, ‘the struggle against capital will no longer be
separate from the struggle against the existing government’, and, as he
confided privately, there would be ‘nothing short of a more or less
revolutionary manifestati~n’.~~ Marx’s analysis of English politics in the
Tribune was very different from anything he had written previously, and
was also different from Engels’ account. In the first place, Marx was
attaching party labels to a class struggle which had hitherto been de-
picted as a battle of unconscious forces, and secondly, he was convinced
that the 1852 general election constituted a watershed in English
politics.
Marx’s new conceptualisation of the Whigs as the ‘advocati’ of the
bourgeoisie, his attribution of a democratic programme to the free-
traders, his sense of the unopposed ascendancy of the middle classes,

234
 The English Face of Karl Marx

and of an imminent crisis in England may all seem far removed from
the well-known serenity and stability of mid-Victorian politics. But it did
tally with Chartist sources with which he was familiar, and, perhaps
more surprisingly, with arguments then raging in the ministerial press,
which Marx began reading extensively during the summer of 1852.
As has been shown recently, the Chartist press in the late 1840s and
early 1850s was suffused with republican language - much of it derived
from French and Italian influence. Combined with this was a deep sus-
picion of the free-trade party in England, (or ‘Manchester school’ as
they tended to be known), and the expectation of an impending social,
as opposed to merely political, transformation within England - the
‘Charter and something Between 1850 and 1852 this rhetoric
was fuelled by a long-running feud within the Chartist movement
between those who advocated support for the household suffrage pro-
gramme of the radical MPs and those who were o p p o ~ e d . Foremost
~’
among the newspapers and journals which were hostile to such an
alliance were those edited by George Julian Harney. In his Democratic
h i m , which began publication in June 1849, Harney poured scorn
on the peace pretensions and parliamentary reform credentials of the
MPs involved in the National Parliamentary and Financial Reform
Association. The ‘money lords’, warned the Democratic h i m , were
‘resolutely resolved to establish their ascendancy on the ruins of the
rule of their once masters, but now perishing rivals’. But although the
‘Manchester school’ might separate church and state, abolish primo-
geniture, the peerage and the monarchy, they would not address social
problems - it would be ‘a Republic of Girondists and Order-monger~’.~~
This onslaught continued in Harney’s next venture, the Red Republi-
can, which started up in June 1850. Harney, along with other contribu-
tors, warned that the Chartist movement must not make the old mistake
of allowing ‘Proletarians’ to be used as so much raw material ‘for carry-
ing “Reform”, “Free-Trade”, etc, seating Whigs in power, and building
up middle-class ascendancy ... for the glory of Lameths, Lafayettes and
Lamartines, and the profit of the bo~rgeoisie’.~~Instead a situation was
envisaged in which at the time of the next commercial crisis, ‘[wlithout
the support of the Proletarians, the Financial Reformers will find it im-
possible to carry any of their pet measures’. The price of such support
would be the Charter, and then ‘ [01ur reforming middle class friends -
wolves in sheep’s clothing - would then be obliged to bolt “the entire
animal”’.44When the Red Republican transmuted into the Friend of
the People in December 1850 Harney warned of the impending ‘war of
classes’.45
Ernest Jones presented a similarly catastrophic view of English

235
 Miles Taylm

politics in the months which followed his release from prison in July
1850. Within weeks of his release, Jones was championing the cause of
those who had been marginalised by the move to free-trade in 1846 - in
particular, the shopkeeper, the agricultural labourer and the small
farmer. He defended the home trade and ‘the ruined farmer and their
starving serfs’, themes then taken up in his Notes to the People, which
began publication in ~ 5 1Jones . ~put
~ much of the blame for this crisis
on the aristocracy. It was the aristocracy who had created the manufac-
turing middle class, for by choosing to make profits out of wool and
gold, and not corn, the aristocracy had driven labourers from their
estates into the manufacturing towns, where ‘the manufacturers got
hold of them, and, accordingly, they became more powerful than you -
witness reform; witness free trade’. Consequently, the aristocracy was
‘predoomed’, for ‘though your monied rivals may assume your place
for a time, they are merely the provisional rulers who precede the
’ Harney, by the end of 1851, Jones
sovereignty of the p e ~ p l e ’ . ~Like
thought that matters were coming to a head. He anticipated ‘the long-
smothered contention between the aristocracies of land and money’.48
Such alarmist prophecies were not confined to the Chartist press.
The resignation of Lord John Russell’s ministry in the third week of
February 1852, and the establishment of a Conservative administration
headed by Lord Derby set off a season of political commentary in which
a crisis of the territorial constitution was widely predicted. Although the
ostensible reason for the fall of Russell’s ministry was its defeat over the
militia bill, it was thought by many commentators that Russell had alien-
ated his own aristocratic colleagues by capitulating to the demands of
radicals, especially their call for further parliamentary reform., and that
the days of government by ‘family compact’ were over.49For their part,
radicals accused Russell of gesturing in the direction of democracy, but
in reality stalling at every turn. This was the theme of the conclusion of
J.A. Roebuck’s History ofthe WhigMinistry, published in February 1852.50
In the middle of March, Russell appeared to capitulate further to the
radicals in a meeting at his London home, Chesham Place. For Con-
servative papers this proved the last straw - the Morning Post declared
that the ‘Democratic neophyte’ was now devoted to ‘Manchester
society’, and that the Liberal party was now in a similar position to the
subservient French Assembly under Louis Napoleon.51 The Morning
Herald stated that Russell was now ‘the man of the Manchester men’.52
A few days later in the House of Lords, Derby responded to Russell’s
move by calling on the country ‘to stem with some opposition, to supply
some barrier, against the current of that continually increasing and
encroaching democratic influence in this country’.53Radical papers

236
 The English Face of Karl Marx

pitched into the storm as well. Commenting on the alarmism of

Conservative writers in his column in Reynolds’ Weekly News, ‘Gracchus’
suggested that:
Perhaps, like the French people, the English must go through an ordeal
of revolutions in their political and social state before arriving at that
which really benefits themselves ... [Blefore the people can ever enjoy
real power it is necessary ... to strike down the aristocracy from the emi-
nence it has so long and unworthily occupied and replace it by a middle-
class despotism equally odious and in~upportable.~~
By the time of the general election in July, this rhetoric had become
feverish. The Times announced that the dissolving parliament had been
the first convened under the auspices of a ‘Free Trade Government’.
The paper also took up Lord Derby’s challenge, arguing that the Cen-
sus Commissioners’ report, (which had been published the previous
summer) demonstrated the widening gulf between country and town, a
gulfwhich would dominate the election:
The Ban and Arritre Ban of democracy have been summoned from the
loom and the coalpit, from the somding forge and the busy mill. The
Fiery Cross has been once more sent through the towns of England.55
The Morning Herald was even more dramatic, warning that the election
would be ‘a struggle, not of Whigs and Tories, but of class against class,
the highest against the lowest’, the result of which would be free trade
in everything. There would be ‘a death struggle with the democratic
parties in the towns’, and, if Lord Derby ‘can be overthrown, his overthrow
will immediately be succeeded 4 a revolutionary government’.56These pre-
monitions of chaos continued into the autumn, revived by Lord John
Russell’s speech at Perth in September, in which he spoke of the
‘increase of the power of dem~cracy’.~’
How much of this journalism in the Chartist press and in the minis-
terial papers was familiar to Marx? Mam enjoyed a close relationship
with Ernest Jones, and to a lesser extent with George Julian Harney
(Engels was closer to Harney). Historians have tended to treat the
question of intellectual influence as one-way traffic, with both Harney
and Jones as pupils to Marx and Engels’ t~telage.~’ But the relationships
do seem to have been more symbiotic than this. After Mam settled in
London with his family in August 1849, Harney was in fairly regular
contact, lending him books and pamphlets, and sending on copies of
his Red Republican and of the N o r t h Star, which he edited between
October 1845 and May 1850.59Harney published the first English
edition of the Communist Manifesto in the Red Republican in November
1850, and Marx and Engels both received copies of the journal. By

237
 Mihs Taylor

January 1851, however, Harney had fallen out with both Marx and
Engels, and so Marx was probably not as familiar with the Friend of the
People. It is certainly the case that some of Harney’s phraseology creeps
into Marx’s prose, and Harney was probably the first to impress upon
Marx the radical and democratic nature of the programme of the
‘Manchester school’.
Ernest Jones supplanted Harney in Marx and Engels’ friendship
during the winter of 1850-1. Both men contributed to Jones’ Notes to the
People, and, from its commencement in May 1852, Marx was reading
Jones’ People’s pup^, and eventually contributing to it as well. Shortly
before he began his contributions to the Tribune, Marx spent most
ofJuly 1852 in Manchester,60where he received first-hand testimony of
Jones’ election campaign across the Pennines in Halifax. During July
and August, as well as giving extensive coverage to Jones’ candidature,
the People’s Paper provided a running commentary on the wider impli-
cations of the election, from which the following was a typical extract:
Chartism has taken its stand at this general election against its real foes -
the Manchester Liberals ... The battle is commenced. The real antag-
onists have met. Whigs and Tories are but the decaying screen that hid
them from each other.61

The paper also provided an expose of the injustice of the election cer-
emony,62and warned of an impending economic collapse, brought on
by over-production, and a drain on bullion to pay for imported corn.63
In his first Tribune articles, Marx reproduced the coverage ofJones’ elec-
tion campaign, dealt with election ceremonies, and later in the year
warned of a trade Marx was thus certainly shadowing Jones’
views and commentary during the summer of 1852, and also appears to
have accepted his account of the deleterious effects of free-trade.
Marx’s indebtedness to the ministerial press is easier to detect, since
he referred to it repeatedly in his articles and in his correspondence.
Throughout 1852 and 1853 he seems to have been reading the Times,
Morning Herald and Morning Post on a daily basis, and he constantly
refers to these papers’ allusions and references to the ascendancy of
‘democracy’.65 What is of most significance is that, prompted by Engels,
Marx assumed that Disraeli was the author of many of the alarmist edi-
torials in the MmningHerald.66In fact Disraeli was not, and during 1852
he was at pains to keep some distance between the Herald and the
Conservative party.67But Marx’s sensitivity to Disraeli’s opinions was
a constant theme of his Tribune years. Of all the English politicians of
the 1850s Marx had the greatest admiration for Disraeli. In 1853, he
described him thus: ‘he is unquestionably the ablest member of the

238
 The English Face of Karl Marx

present Parliament, while the flexibility of his character enables him

the better to accommodate himself to the changing wants of society’.68
When Disraeli became involved in the establishment of the Press in May
1853, Marx monitored its progress carefully. Disraeli only wrote the
leader articles for the first three months of the Press - subsequently, its
chief writers were Thomas Kenealy (later of Tichborne claimant fame),
Lord Stanley and Edward Bulwer L y t t ~ nBut .~~throughout the next few
years Marx assumed it was Disraeli’s organ, and in its commentary he
was able to find further support for his analysis of the political crisis in
England.
Since his Vindication of the British Constitution ( 1835), Disraeli had
argued that the Whig aristocracy was in a structural crisis, a view which
he extended to include Peel in his biography of Lord George Bentinck,
published in the New Year of 1852,’O and a view which was further set
out in the Press. Under normal circumstances, the Press argued in July
1853, political stability in Britain was ensured by the fact that the aris-
tocracy ‘sustains its influence by absorbing all other aristocracies’ -
those of manufacturing wealth such as Peel and Arkwright, or those
of finance such as Ricardo, who having made their fortunes in the City
of London, then purchased estate^.^' The Whigs, however, had so mis-
managed politics since the reform act that wealth and democracy now
threatened to subvert the territorial constitution. For Disraeli, the
‘Manchester school’ (it was he who coined the term) were the chief pro-
tagonists in this process. The Press saw the Whigs as unable to sustain
influence, or absorb new social classes because they were too patrician
- raising the democratic cry, only to deride it in secret, and only renew-
ing their ranks from their own kind. Consequently, the Whigs were no
longer able, as they had been in the eighteenth century, to harness the
democratic impulses of the northern manufacturing districts - there
was now too much of a gulf separating the Whig families from the
rank and file popular party in the As a result of this impasse
‘Manilius’,writing in the Press in May 1853, anticipated if not a dicta-
torship of the bourgeoisie, at least a despotism of the bourgeoisie in
England, in which the influence of money would eliminate liberty.75By
1855 the Press was anticipating that working class distress in the factory
districts, itself inspired by ‘rapid fluctuations [and] greedy enterprises’
would bring on ‘revolutionary passion’.74
A number of broad similarities and convergences between Marx’s
analysis and that of the contemporary English press in 1851-2 thus seem
obvious. The notion that beneath the veneer of aristocratic politics -
the ins and outs of Whigs and Tories - there lay fundamental social
forces (the towns, ‘democratical influences’, new forms of wealth), was
 Miles Taylor

a feature of most commentary throughout 1852, having been put on

the agenda partly by the revelations of the census, and partly by the
return to government of a Conservative party whose position on pro-
tectionism remained ambiguous. The idea that free-trade was the
peculiar rallying call of the English bourgeoisie was prevalent in the
Chartist press, and in protectionist newspapers such as the Morning
Herald,which lamented the ‘experimental’ legislation of 1846, and an-
ticipated the eventual collapse of trade. More generally, the ascription
of a democratic and radical programme to the bourgeoisie or ‘Man-
Chester school’, who in turn controlled the Whigs, but who in reality
were no more than the vanguard of the working classes, was made by
virtually all commentators during the prelude to and aftermath of the
1852 general election, and was a recurring theme in Marx’s preferred
source, Disraeli. Finally, Marx was by no means alone in believing that
further parliamentary reform in the shape of a massive redistribution of
seats would completely tilt the constitution in the direction of the in-
dustrial towns. Very little of this had been evident in Marx’s commen-
tary on England before 1850. After 1852 he had the material to return
to these themes ad injnitum.
Of course, the problem was that Cassandra-stylewarnings proved ever
more inappropriate as the English economy and the English political
system withstood each successive ‘crisis’. During 1853 Marx dutifully
passed on to his Tribune readers the gloomy predictions of dearth, high
bread prices and possible war in the Crimea being made in the corn cir-
culars published by Joseph Sturge and George Dornbusch, adding the
gloss that another crisis could be e~pected.’~And in January 1855 Marx
followed both the Times and the Morning Herald in predicting a crisis
and some form of ‘retribution’, as the Aberdeen government fell in the
midst of war, high taxation and ~ver-trading.’~ But, as the onset of
political crisis and collapse became harder and harder to foresee, Marx
turned his attention to possible reasons for the lack of revolution in
England. Here lay the origins of his preoccupation with Palmerston.

Mam often described the administration of Lord Palmerston between

1855 and 1858 as a ‘dictatorship’, and it is perhaps the most obvious
area in which he appears to have transposed an analysis of France,
developed in the Eighteath Bmmaire, onto Britain. In Marx’s view,
Palmerston had taken advantage of the parliamentary chaos caused by
the Crimean war to effect his own political omnipotence, and forestall
parliamentary reform (and therefore working-class ascendancy). In

240
 The English Face of Karl Marx

halting the reform movement at home, Palmerston was acting in

tandem with Russian attempts to suppress the spirit of nationalism and
republicanism on the continent. Indeed, in terms of his foreign policy,
M a n believed that Palmerston was a secret agent of Russian diplomacy,
both drawing England into the Crimean war as well as acting behind the
scenes to ferment revolution in Spain.77On the domestic front, Palmer-
ston’s period in office, suggested Marx, marked the abdication by Par-
liament of its constitutional function in much the same way as Louis
Napoleon had transformed the National Assembly in France into his
own ‘corps legislatif’. When finally challenged in the House of Com-
mons, as Palmerston was over the bombardment of Canton in February
1857, Palmerston appealed over the heads of the Commons to the
nation - a move which Mam described as a coup d’ittat comparable to
that of Louis Napoleon in 1851. And in the aftermath of his election
victory in 1857, Palmerston, in Marx’s opinion, consolidated his dic-
tatorship at home by using the Indian mutiny as a pretext to increase
his powers of patronage and military force a b r ~ a d . ’ ~
There are striking parallels between Marx’s critique of Palmerstonian
Caesarist imperialism and Palmerston’s Russophile tendencies, and the
domestic newspaper analysis of the Palmerstonian ascendancy in the
aftermath of the Crimean war. The most obvious similarity is with the
activities and writings of David Urquhart, the Russophobe and former
MP for Stafford, whose peculiar hold over English radicalism began in
August 1853, and was maintained for the next two years.7QMarx was well
aware of Urquhart’s opinions, although he later distanced himself from
Urquhart, claiming that he had amved at his own view of Palmerston,
independent of Urquhart’s influence.80Moreover, he later went on to
ridicule Urquhart’s Turcophilia and his views on the currency.E1But
the evidence in 1853 points to a more complex relationship. In 1853,
before Marx began consulting the parliamentary blue-books, he was
reading Urquhart’s work (notably The Progress of Russia),as well as the
Portfolio, which Urquhart sent to Marx direct.82As he began writing his
series of articles on Palmerston, Marx declared that he was ‘thick with
Urquhart’.83
Although Marx’s Russophobia was something of an acquired taste
shared only with Urquhart and his followers, his analysis of Palmer-
ston’s Caesarism was more in line with domestic characterisations of
Palmerston’s first premiership. Well before the general election of
1857, several papers noted how Palmerston was sacrificing the consti-
tution in the interests of his personal power and carrying over into
peace time the strong executive powers he had assumed during the war.
At one extreme, the Press, for example, anticipated in 1855 that Palmer-

241
 M i h Taylor

ston would be forced into some sort of coup d7tat as a means of keeping
up popular support.s4 At the other end of the political spectrum the
Cobdenite Morning Star noted in 1856 how England was going the way
of the continent in becoming an armed despotism.85By the time of
Palmerston’s election victory in 1857, a wide range of English news-
paper and periodical opinion, from Ernest Jones through to William
Gladstone, was describing Palmerstonian England as a ‘dictatorship’,
‘absolutist’,Palmertson’s election victory a coup d 7tat and the resultant
parliament ‘servile’ and little more than Palmerston’s Similarly,
Palmerston’s attempts to reform the government of India by bringing
it under the direct control of London was opposed by a long-running
campaign in the Daily News, in which comparisons were made to
Louis Napoleon’s high-handed treatment of the French a~sembly.~’ Few
English commentators saw Palmerston’s ascendancy in quite the same
conspiratorial terms as Marx, but they did see his imperial style as an
unprecedented break from normal constitutional politics.
Late in 1857, in the midst of all this heightened rhetoric over Palmer-
ston’s Caesarism, the international economy was plunged into crisis,
and for once Marx’s prophesies of commercial collapse and the ex-
plosion of an irresistible reform movement seemed closer to the mark.
Unlike many other commentators, Marx did not resort to a purely
monetary explanation of the crisis.88Although he recognised that over-
extensions of credit made to manufacturers by provincial joint-stock
banks were the short-term cause of the panic, the real root of the prob-
lem, for Marx, was an industrial one. In England, export industries were
locked into a cycle of over-production whereby individual firms bor-
rowed money in order to produce goods for which no orders had been
contracted. In Marx’s view this cycle of over-production had been
accelerated by English expansion in India and China.89And in 1857 the
military operations in India which followed the ‘mutiny’ and the onset
of the second China war both served to restrict trade and exports in SE
Asia, reduce Indian government revenues, and, back in England, cause
a drain of gold bullion and depreciation of stocks and shares. Marx
denied that events in India were simply an isolated rebellion, confined
to Oudh and the Punjab - he saw the uprisings as a far more serious
national revolt.g0For Marx, the key point was that overseas export
markets in Asia were actually diminishing, at the same time as there
was a massive expansion of production at home, taking the form of a
diversion of circulating floating capital into fixed capital formation. In
other words, English economic problems were structural and indust-
rial. Marx ridiculed both the defenders of Peel’s 1844 Bank Charter Act
and free traders in general for supposing that by controlling money

242
 The English Face of Karl Marx

panics they would be able to rid the domestic economy of ‘economical

revulsions, commercial crises and recurrence of over-production’. All
of these were, in Marx’s view, endemic to the English system of free
trade.g1
Across the English press and political spectrum the unfolding of
events in India, combined with the commercial crisis of October and
the early recall of Parliament at the beginning of December 1857, re-
vived fears of economic and political crisis.92Although the bulk of free-
trade opinion supported the policy of the government and attributed
the causes of the crisis to overheating and too rapid an extension of
credit in Anglo-American trade, there were a number of significant
dissenting voices with which Marx was particularly familiar. Richard
Cobden was one of these. Since the end of 1855, Cobden had been con-
vinced that there had been too rapid an expansion of fixed capital for-
mation in manufacturing industry in the north west, which was seriously
reducing the amount of circulating capital in the economy. This was
particularly disastrous when combined with the high taxation which
accompanied military campaigns such as the Crimean war, for taxation
itself drained away income even more.93Additionally, in 1857, Cobden
feared that in light of the Indian mutiny, there would be drain of bul-
lion away to the East, a theme that was picked up by the Morning Star,
and by Urquhart’s Free Press as well.94Cobden also doubted the wisdom
of over-reliance on the gold standard. Future depreciations in the value
of gold, he predicted, would mean ‘ [i]nstead of a crisis visiting the com-
mercial world once in a decade, its return might be expected every five
years’.g5Marx undoubtedly had a passing familiarity with these views,
and he certainly took note of the analysis of Ernest Jones and Disraeli.
Jones also saw the consequences of the mutiny as catastrophic - events
in India were ‘shaking the British oligarchy of money and place to its
foundations’, and a protracted military struggle would be damaging to
England’s ‘highlyartificial state of society, which depends on credit, and
wherein credit depends on security’.96Disraeli’s views were no longer
so doom-laden, but he was one of the first English politicians to insist
that the behind the immediate causes of the Indian mutiny there lay
deeper, more significant reasons for the revolt, and during July 1857,
Marx reported Disraeli’s reaction to events in India very ~arefully.~’
Moreover, in December 1857 Disraeli disagreed with many other MPs
in insisting that it was the derangement of capital, not currency, which
was the main cause of the commercial crisis, although Marx himself had
of course been arguing this for some time.98

243
 Miles Taylor

V
Given this background, it is not surprising that Marx and Engels
expected that the revival of the reform movement, which took place
during the winter of 1857-8, would lead to the final stand-off between
the old England and the new. Once again they were to be disappointed,
and in the aftermath of the commercial crisis of 1857-8, it became clear
to both of them that an economic crisis in Britain was not going to
happen, and also that the anticipated class struggle between the ‘Man-
Chester school’ and Chartism was not going to take place. In October
1858 Engels delivered his famous verdict on the reformist nature of the
English working class: ‘the English proletariat is actually becoming
more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bour-
geois of all nations would appear to be the possession, uZongside the
bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois p r ~ l e t a r i a t ’In
.~~
his last years of contributing to the Tribune Marx limited himself to
showing the misery and crime which accompanied England’s free trade
and prosperity. This was an indictment of free trade which was music to
the ears of the protectionist sympathies of the paper, but it signified that
Marx had abandoned anything like the structural analysis of English
society and politics which had characterised his earlier writings. Clearly,
Marx’s confident assessment at the beginning of the 1850s of economic
collapse and class war in mid-nineteenth century England was in-
accurate.
But Marx and Engels were not alone in their disappointment. English
contemporaries were also baffled by the subdued nature of politics
in the late 1850s. Cobden declared that ‘[tlhe Big Loaf has choked
Chartism and laid even Radicalism to sleep’, and more revealingly, that
the continued increase of exports meant that ‘every body will turn aris-
tocrats [sic]’.1ooSo if Marx was wrong about mid-Victorian England’s
ripeness for revolutionary change, it was not because he simply imposed
a continental model on to the English case. Rather, Marx only had a
very general framework for understanding class and politics in England
before he was exiled here, and, consequently, he drew on contem-
porary English sources to develop his views after his arrival. In so doing
he tuned into a debate about the structural problems of the territorial
constitution, bourgeois ascendancy, economic crisis and imperial back-
lash, all of which seemed to provide the evidence he needed for econ-
omic crisis and class struggle. In other words, Marx’s picture of class
struggle in English politics was not merely speculative or wishful think-
ing, but one which, without too much imagination and poetic licence,
could be extrapolated from English discussions.

244
 The English Face of Karl Marx

However, Marx clearly missed something. When, it came to the

crunch in 1857-8 and there was a commercial crisis, instead of it un-
leashing the class struggle that Marx had expected, that winter saw the
forging of an alliance between Marx’s greatest English ally, Ernest
Jones, and Jones’ hitherto greatest antagonists, the bourgeois radicals,
an alliance which went on to provide the seedbed for popular moder-
ate liberalism in the 1860s. Marx’s myopia stemmed, not so much from
his doctrinaire approach to England, but from a misunderstanding of
his English sources. This is clearest in two respects. First, Marx’s iden-
tification of the industrial bourgeoisie with the Manchester school; and
second, his view of the effects of crisis on the democratic movement.
In 1852 Marx could not have helped being impressed by the great
deal of attention and negative criticism which the ‘Manchester school’
was attracting, and, as I have argued, this undoubtedly persuaded him
that the ‘Manchester school’ personified the liberal industrial bour-
geoisie. Yet within all the domestic demonography of the ‘Manchester
school’, there was hardly any direct association of the free traders with
the industrial process, or the factory or labour question. Throughout,
the ‘Manchester school’ was identified as comprised of ‘money lords’,
the monied middle classes, mercantile speculators, parasites on indus-
try, and toadying hangers-on to the aristocracy. The middle class was
only exploitative insofar as they were caught up in the dying embers of
‘old Corruption’, liable to side with the aristocracy rather than with the
people, as in the rather outdated analysis of George Julian Harney and
Ernest Jones.lol
Or, particularly in papers such as the Morning Advertiser, the northern
manufacturing middle class was seen as unpatriotic and too preoccu-
pied with cosmopolitan commerce. Even Ernest Jones, Marx’s closest
English friend, viewed the middle class in this politicised way. As he put
it in 1856, ‘[tlhe factory gloom is but the shadow of the black demon,
aristocracy, that broods above the state’.lo2Marx was also misled by the
continual references in 1852 to a war between ‘town and country’, and
by the slippage in much English rhetoric into using the term ‘bour-
geoisie’ not to refer to industrialists, but to townspeople.
Secondly, whilst many English radical commentators believed that
economic crisis was imminent, and would precipitate political u p
heaval, none thought as Marx did that this would mean war between the
classes. On the contrary, it was believed that economic crisis would lead
to a unity of all non-aristocratic classes. Crisis would radicalise those
who lived on precarious incomes - i.e. all those on wages, salaries, fees
-
and other forms of non-landed wealth whose allegiance the state
could not do without, and they would join with the working classes in

245
 Miles Taylor

forcing concessions and reforms out of government, as, it was widely be-
lieved, had happened in 1831-2.Again, it was ErnestJones who summed
up this view, commenting on the removal of Palmerston from govern-
ment at the height of the commercial crisis and the Felice Orsini affair:
‘[wlho then saved England’s honour? The People did. The Middle
classes did. The Working classes did. The cheering poverty in London’s
streets, and the middle class wealth in London’s jury box’.Io3For all his
novelty in perceiving the peculiarities of the English, Marx never fully
appreciated this basic point.

Marx’s use of English sources was thus much more varied and substan-
tial than is usually assumed. It was notjust confined to well-known items
such as the Economist, classical political economy, and the parliamentary
blue-books. In particular, Marx drew on the Chartist, radical, and Tory
press. In so doing, he was better able to build on and broaden his analy-
sis of economic crisis (especially the imperial element), and his under-
standing of the political character of the middle class. If Marx made a
mistake about England - over-exaggerating its readiness for revolution
- it was a mistake which followed from the way in which he conflated
terms and propositions from what was an essentially political debate
with his own scenario of social revolution. In the decade which followed
the repeal of the corn laws in 1846 and the defeat of the Chartists in
1848, English political life was unstable, and it took the best part of
the 1850s for the shape of politics to resume a more settled
Amidst this instability a melodramatic rhetoric of national decline, class
struggle and imperial over-reach dominated the predominantly Tory
and Chartist sources with which Marx was most familiar. Thus, Marx’s
was not the only language of class which attributed political outcomes
to social formations.
Marx was not a plagiarist. Between his journalism and the con-
temporary press there were broad areas of convergence and specific
examples of casual borrowing and cross-fertilisation of ideas and con-
cepts. Marx enlisted opinions which were in current circulation. An
archempiricist, he used English materials to substantiate a series of
vague propositions inherited from Hegel, Engels and others. In some
areas he did far more independent reading - for example, on Spain and
India - and it is an open question as to how original his analysis was in
these areas.
What then was the legacy of Marx’s English journalism? Marx’s
Tribunework turned up in unlikely places. With somejustification, Marx

246
 The English Face of Karl Marx

accused Washington Wilks of incorporating Marx’s 1853 articles on

Lord Palmerston into his own pamphlet;Io5Marx’s indictment of the
miseries of English free trade was quoted extensively in the Henry C.
Carey’s protectionist pamphlet, Slavery at Horn €9 Abroad ( 1853);’06
and in 1857-8, Marx’s views on the commercial crisis were attacked by
bullionist writers in the American press.Io7Moreover, although he was
always at pains to deny it, Marx’s concerns in his Tribune journalism
fed into much of his ‘mature’ work. In the Grundrisse, and later in Das
Kapitul, the picture of a dying feudal order and a rapacious, modern-
ising middle-class, as well as the endless preoccupation with the cur-
rency and the nature of money, owed not a little to his immersion in
the English radical and Tory press of the 1850s. It was perhaps to be
expected then that amongst those who first championed Das Kapitul in
England in the 1880s should be radical Tories such as Ernest Belfort
Bax, H.M. Hyndman and Henry Butler Johnstone.’OBIn more ways
than one, Marx’s Tribune articles were to prove an unconscious tool of
history.
The relevance of Marx’s English journalism to contemporary
students of mid-Victorian politics and culture is perhaps less obvious.
For those who still wish to defend the merits of class as a form of
historical explanation Marx’s observations will no doubt continue to
furnish ample material. A more likely development, if recent declar-
ations are anything to go by, is that Marx’s English commentary will
serve as a foil for those historians who are now repudiating the concept
of class in nineteenth-century British history. Neither of these
approaches seem particularly rewarding. Rather than deny or defend
the theoretical validity of Marxist concepts of class, historians should
treat Marx’s commentary as a form of rhetoric, and, as this article has
attempted, seek to recreate the specific discursive context in which his
ideas developed. There is no reason why the master of materialism
should be by-passed by the linguistic turn.
(King’s College, London)
Endnotes
1. This is a revised version of a paper given at the Social History Society conference in
York in January 1995. I would like to thank Keith McClelland, Peter Mandler and
Alastair Reid for their comments on earlier drafts.
2. E.g.: Patrick Joyce, Visions ofthe People: Industrial England and the Question of Class,
1840-1914 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3-5; idem., ‘The end of
social history’, Social H i s t q 20 (1995): 73-91; Dror Wahrman, Imugtning the Middk
Class: The Political Repreentation of Class in England, c. 1780-1840 (Cambridge:Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995), 8.
3. Kirk Willis, ‘The introduction and critical reception of Marxist thought in England,
1850-1900’, Historical Journal 20 (1977): 417-59; Mark Bevir, ‘Fabianism and the

247
 Miles Taylor

theoly of rent’, History ofPolitica1 Thought 10 (1989): 313-27.

4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Correspondence, 1849-1895.A Selection with Commentary
and Notes, ed. Dona Torr (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934); Karl Marx, Capital, ed.
Dona Torr (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938); Dona Torr ed., Marxism,
Nationality and War 2 vols (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940), esp. vol. 11. O n
Marxist historiography see Raphael Samuel, ‘British Marxist historians, 1880-1980.
Part l ’ , New LeJ Review 120 (1980): 21-96; Bill Schwarz, “‘The people” in history:
the Communist Party Historians’ Group, 1946-56’ in Richard Johnson et al. eds.,
Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics (London: Hutchinson, 1982).
5. David Fernbach, ‘Introduction’ to Marx, Suruqrsj?om Exile. Political Writings vol. 2
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 33.
6. Ibid., 22; Tom Nairn, ‘The fateful meridian’, New L e j Review60 (1970): 335; i h . ,
The Break-up ofBritain (London: New Left Books, 1981 ed.), 18, n.11. But compare
the revised view offered by Perry Anderson in his English Questions (London: Verso,
1992), 122-6.
7. Richard F. Hamilton, The Bourgeois Epoch: Marx and Engels on Britain, France and
Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), ch. 2.
8. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Some notes on Karl Marx and the English Labour Move-
ment’, History Workshop 18 (1984): 12437; i h . , ‘The rise and fall of class struggle:
“middle class” and “bourgeoisie”, 1789-1850’, Past and Present (forthcoming); cf.
Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas ofMarx and Engels 2 vols. (London: Macmillan,
1984), 11, 67-72; Bruce Mazlish, ‘Marx’s historical understanding of class in 19th
century England’, History ofEuropean Ideas 12 (1990): 731-47; Wahrman, Imagining
the Middle Class, 41 1-13.
9. David Riazanov, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A n Introduction to their Lives and Work
(London: Monthly Review Press, 1973 ed.), 1046; Franz Mehring, Karl Marx. The
Story ofhis Life (London: John Lane, 1936), 227-8; David McLellan, Karl Marx. His
Life and Thought (London: Papermac, 1987 ed.), 2849. The most detailed account
of Marx’s Tribune years is to be found in E.H. Carr, Karl Marx. A Study in Fanaticism
(London: J.M. Dent, 1934), and the most balanced account is in Werner Blumen-
berg, Karl Marx. An Illustrated Biography (London: New Left Books, 1972 ed.).
10. Jenny Marx to Conrad Schramm, 8 December 1857, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), [hereafter M E C W ] ,
XL, 566.
11. Maximilien Rubel, ‘Les cahiers d’etude de Karl Marx. 11: 1853-6’,International Re-
view of Social History 5 (1960): 39-76; Marx, Notes on Indian History, 664-1858
(Moscow:Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960);cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Gesamtsausgabe(Dietz, Berlin, 1975- ), [hereafter MEGA],Series lV,vols.VI1-
IX.
12. Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), MECW, IV esp. 566,57941.
13. Engels, ‘The state of Germany’ [Northern Star 4 April 18461, ibid, VI, 29-30; Marx,
‘Speech o n the question of Free Trade’ [9 August 18481, ibid. VI, 450; cf. Marx to
Ferdinand Freilgarth, 31 July 1849, ibid. XXXVII, 204-6; Marx to Joseph Weyder-
meyer, 19 December 1849, ibid. 21821.
14. Louis Blanc, The Organisation oflabour (London: H.G. Clarke, 1848), 70-5; Ledru
Rollin, The Decline ofEngland (London: E. Churton, 1850). 319; Bauer, ‘The decline
of England’, New York Daib Tribune [hereafter NIZ)T] 7 April 1852,6.
15. Cited in J.H. Wilson, The Life ofCharles A. Dana (London: Harper, 1907) 71.
16. Michael Lieven, ‘Marx and Engels’s account of political power: the case of British
factory legislation’, History ofPolitica1 Thought9 (1988):505-27. For attempts to iron

248
 The English Face of Karl Marx

out some of Marx’s contradictory views o n the Factory Acts, see Paul Richards’
influential ‘State formation and class struggle, 1832-48’ in Capitalism, State F m a -
tion and Marxist Theory. Histora’calInvestigations, ed. Philip Corrigan, (London: Quar-
tet, 1980), 49-78. See also David MacGregor, Hegel, Marx and the English State
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), esp. chs. 3,9.
17. For the pure free-trade doctrine of the Economist, see Ruth Dudley Edwards, Pursuit
of Reason: The Economist, 1843-1993 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993), 77-83 and
David Stack, ‘Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin’
(PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1995), 185-8.
18. O n the limitations of Marx and Engels’ pre-1850 analysis of the bourgeoisie, see
Rosemary Ashton, Little Germany: German Refugees in Victwian England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 60-1; Stedman Jones, ‘Rise and fall of the class
struggle’, op. cit.; Paul Corcoran, ‘The bourgeois in Marxian rhetoric’, History of
Political Thought 1 (1980): 301-314.
19. J.A. Isely, Horace Greelqr and the Republican Party (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1947).
20. Ibid., 197;James L. Huston, ‘A political response to industrialism: the Republican
embrace of protectionist labor doctrines’, Journal ofAmerican Histmy 70 (1983):35-
57.
21. For English radical references to Greeley and the New York Tribune, see Red Republz-
can 10 August 1850, 57-9; Democratic Reuiew (September 1850) 140-52; Tait’s Edin-
burgh Magazine (April 1855) 229. For Greeley on England, see his Glances at Europe
(NewYork: Dewitt & Davenport, 1851).
22. Bright, HansardCXXVIII ( 1 July 1853), 1 1 14-19,quotingfrom Marx’s article on the
budget, published in the Tribuneon 6 May 1853.
23. Wilson, Life of Dana, ch. 4.
24. C.A. Dana to Marx, 13 October 1857, MEGA Series 3, VIII, 496.
25. Dana to Marx, 20 April 1852, MEGA Series 3, V, 327.
26. Marx to Engels, 8 October 1853, MECW XXXIX, 385.
27. Marx to Moritz Elsner, 20 December 1854, ibid., 50&7
28. Marx to Engels, 8 September 1852, ibid., 181
29. Marx, ‘The war question’ (NYDT 12 August 1853), MECWXII, 255.
30. Ibid. 253.
31. Marx to Engels, 22April 1854, MECWXXXIX, 438-40
32. Interestingly, Engels went on to suggest that ‘one might append the following note:
By Bourgeois Society, we understand that phase of social development in which the
Bourgeoisie, the Middle Class, the class of industrial and commercial Capitalists, is,
socially and politically, the ruling class’: Engels to Marx, 23 September 1852, ibid.,
191.
33. Examiner 6 December 1851,769-70. This was probably from the pen of Albany Fon-
blanque, the former editor of the paper; cf. his other articles on Louis Napoleon,
written a t the same time: E.B. de Fonblanque, Life and Labours of Albany Fonblanque
(London: Richard Bentley & Sons, 1874), 400-2. Marx first uses the phrase as his
title in a letter to Joseph Weydermeyer o n 19 December 1852, MECW XXXVIII,
519.
34. For Punch’s characterisation of Louis Napoleon, see: FredericJusten, Napoleon IZI et
la caricature anglaise 3 tomes (London: privately printed, 1873), I, passim; cf. Marx,
‘The France of Bonaparte the little’ (Peopkk Paper5 April 1856), MECWXW, 617;
‘The war prospect in Europe’ (NYDT 31 January 1859), MECWXVI, 157.
35. RedRepublican 10 August 1850,58; cf. Marx, ‘The Chartists’ (NYDT25August 1852;

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 Miles Taylor

People’s Paper 9 October 1852), MECW X I , 533-41. Harney was himself quoting
Richard Cobden in the House of Commons: see Hansard XCVIII ( 1 1 May 1848),
859-60.
36. Economist 7 August 1852, 867; cf. Marx, ‘Corruption at elections’ (NYDT4 Septem-
ber 1852; People’sPaper 16 October 1852), MECWXI, 342-7.
37. M a n , The Eighteenth Brumairz of Louis Bonaparte, ibid., 104.
38. Engels, ‘England’,ibid., 198-209.
39. Marx, ‘The elections in England. Tories and Whigs’ (NYDT,21 August 1852; People’s
Paper, 2 October 1852), ibid., 327-32; ‘The Chartists’ (Nk?)7;25 August 1852;
People’s Paper, 9 October 1852), ibid., 332-41; Marx to Adolf Cluss, 30 July 1852,
MECW X X X I X , 143.
40. Margot Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848-1874
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 3.
41. F.E. Gillespie, Labor and Politics in England, 185067 (Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Publications, 1927), ch. 3.
42. ‘The Charter and something more’, Democrutic Review (February 1850): 349-52;
cf. ‘Howard Morton’, ‘Intrigues of the middle-class “reformers”’, ibid. (July 1850):
45-8.
43. ‘L‘Ami du peuple’, ‘Inadequate remedies for social evils’, Red Republican 12 Octo-
ber 1850,25.
44. ‘Howard Morton’, ‘Chartism in 1850’, ibid., 22 June 1850,2-3.
45. ‘L‘Ami du peuple’, ‘The war of classes’, Fn’end of the People 1 1 January 1851,345.
46. Northern Star 10 August 1850, 1;Jones, ‘The decline of the middle class’, Notes to the
Peoplt 2 vols. (1851-2) I, 151-5; ‘The general good’, ibid., 2445.
47. Jones, ‘A letter to the aristocracy’, ibid., 1846.
48. Jones, ‘Address to the Chartists’, ibid., 11, 581-3.
49. For one fairly typical attack, see [Anon.], The New R e f m Bill. A n abstract of the
measure, introduced ... by the Right. Hon. Lord John Russell ... With a Prefatory Notice
(London:James Ridgway, 1852), 4-5. On the reaction against the Whigs in general
see Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of R e f m : Whigs and Liberals,
1830-1852 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 275.
50. J.A. Roebuck, History of the WigMinistry of 1830, to the Passing of the R e f m Bill 2 vols.
(London:John W. Parker, 1852), 11,417-19. Marx does not seem to have read Roe-
buck’s account in 1852, but he appears to have read it before writing a series of
articles o n Lord John Russell in the summer of 1855.
51. MorningPost 13 March 1852, 4.
52. Morning Herald 18 March 1852, 4.
53. HansardCXIX (15 March 1852), 1012-13.
54. ‘Gracchus’, [Samuel Kydd], ‘English revolutionists’, Reynolds’ Weekly News 18 April
1852, 7. ‘Gracchus’ was responding to Archibald Alison’s ‘Political and monetary
prospects’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 71 (January 1852): 1-21. For Kydd see
Stephen Roberts, Radical Politicians and Poets in early Victorian Britain (Lampeter:
Edward Mellen, 1993), ch. 6.
55. Times 3 July 1852, 4; cf. 1 July 1852,5.
56. Morning Herald 8 July 1852, 6; 13July, 4; 21 September 1852, 4.
57. Speeches of the Right Hon. Lord John Russell, Delivered at Stirling and at Perth, Sqbtembq
1852 (London: Longmans, 1852), 17-18;cf. MorningHerald30 September 1852,4;
Morning Post 4 October 1852, p. 4.
58. John Saville, Ernest Jones: Chartist (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1952), 40-1, 46;
A.R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney (London:

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Heinemann, 1958), 2045, 213-17; Peter Cadogan, ‘Harney and Engels’, Inter-
national Reuim of Social Histmy 10 (1965): 6&104. For a more balanced account, see
Christine Lattek, ‘German socialism in British exile, 1840-1859’ (PhD thesis, Uni-
versity of Cambridge, 1990), 132-40.
59. Harney to Marx, 28 October 1848, MEGA Series 3, 111, 408; Harney to Marx,
8 March 1853, ibid., VI,408.
60. W.O. Henderson, Marx and Engels and the English Workers and other essays (London:
Frank Cass, 1989). 45.
61. Peopb’s Paper 17July 1852,4.
62. Ibid., 1.
63. Ibid., 21 August 1852, 4.
64. Marx, ‘The Chartists’ (NYDT25 August 1852), MECW, XI, 333-41; ‘Corruption at
elections’ (NYDT4 September 1852), ibid., 342-7; ‘Pauperism and free trade. The
approaching commercial crisis’ (NYDT 1 November 1852), ibid., 357-63.
65. Marx, ‘Attempts to form a new opposition party’ (NYDT25 November 1852), ibid.,
373-7; ‘Superannuated administration. Prospects of the coalition ministry’ ( M B T
28 January 1853), ibid., 471-6; Marx to Engels, 29 January 1853, ibid. XXXIX, 276;
Marx, ‘Capital Punishment. Mr Cobden’s pamphlet’ (NYDT 17 February 1853),
ibid., XI, 495-501.
66. Engels to Marx, 15July 1852, ibid., XXXIX, 132.
67. Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London: Fontana, 1990
ed.), 83.
68. Marx, ‘British politics’ (NYDT7 April 1853), MECWXII, 3-12.
69. Robert Blake, Disraeli (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966), 353-4.
70. Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck. A Political Biography (London: Colburn & Co., 1852),
esp. 6,1389,201-2,211. There is n o internal evidence to suggest Marx actually read
this, but it was reviewed at length in many of the papers with which Marx was
familiar, e.g.: Times 26 December 1851, 5; Northern Star 3 January 1852, 3. On
Disraeli’s anti-Whiggism, see John Vincent, Disraeli (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990), ch. 2.
71. Press 30 July 1853, 289.
72. Ibid., 3 March 1855, pp. 197-8.
73. Ibid., 21 May 1853,60-1. As Robert Blake has pointed out (op. cit.), these ‘Manilius’
letters were actually the work of Bulwer Lytton, not Disraeli, as William Hutcheon
assumed in his 1913 edition of Disraeli’sjournalism.
74. Ibid., 17 March 1855, 245.
75. Marx, ‘The war question’ (ATZIT24August 1853), MECWXII, 249 ‘The war ques-
tion’ (NYDT21 October 1853), ibid., 409-10. Neither Sturge nor Dornbusch were
impartial sources. Sturge, a well-known opponent of the war, was later implicated
in a corn-hoarding scam during the Crimean war: Alex Tyrrell,Joseph Sturge and the
Moral Radical Party in early Victorian England (London: Christopher Helm, 1987),
213. Dornbusch became an active member of the Stopthe-War League, which, in
the latter stages of the war, used the bread shortages as evidence of the hardship
brought o n by the war.
76. Times 5 January 1855, 6; Morning Herald 13January 1855, 4; Marx, ‘In retrospect’
(Neue Oder Za’tung2 January 1855,4January 1885), MECW, XIII, 5549; ‘The com-
mercial crisis in England’ (NYDT26January 1855),ibid., 585-9; ‘The crisis in Eng-
land’ (NYDT24 March 1855),ibid., XW, 59-62.
77. Marx, ‘Lord Palmerston: Article Sixth’ (NYDT 11 January 1854; PeopbS Paper 10
December 1853), MECWXII, 385-91; ‘English and French War Plans’ ( M B T 18

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March 1854),ibid., XIII, 35-42.

78. Marx, ‘Defeat of the Palmerston ministry’ (NYDT25 March 1857), ibid., XV, 213-
14; ‘The coming election in England’ (NYDT 31 March 1857), ibid. 221-2; ‘The
English election’ (NYDT6April 1857), ibid., 2267; ‘The Indian bill’ (NYDT24July
1858), ibid., 587. Some of these Bonapartist parallels are noted in Maximilien
Rubel, Karl Marx h u n t le bonapartisme (Paris: La Haye, 1960), 39.
79. See my ‘The old radicalism and the new: David Urquhart and the politics of oppo-
sition, c. 1832-67’ in Cunents of Radicalism. Popular Radicalism, Party Politics and
Organizd Labour in England, 1850-1914, eds E.F. Biagini and AJ. Reid (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991). 23-43. There is an interesting discussion of
Marx’s Tribune articles on Russia in Maximilien Rubel, ‘A visionary legacy to Russia’
in Rubel on Karl Marx. Five Essays, eds. J. O’Malley and K. Algozin (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981) and a briefer survey in J.O. Baylen, ‘Marx’sd i s
patches to Americans about Russia and the west’, South Atlantic Quarterly 56 (1957):
20-6.
80. Marx to Ferdinand Lasalle, 1 June 1854, MECWXXXIX, 455; Marx, ‘Reorganiza-
tion of the British war administration’ (NYZ)T24June 1854), MECW XIII, 228.
81. Marx, ‘TheAssociation for Administrative Reform’ ( N m e OderZatung8 June 1855),
ibid., XIV, 2434; Contribution to the Critique ofPolitica1 Economy (1859), ibid. XXIX,
177.
82. Marx to Engels, 18 August 1853, MECW XXXIX, 355-7; Urquhart to Marx, 9
December 1853, MEGA Series 3, VII, 298.
83. Marx to Adolf Cluss, n.d. [c.mid-November 18531, MECWXXXIX, 398.
84. Press 16June 1855,558.
85. M m i n g Star 25 June 1856, 2; 12July 1856, 2.
86. People’sPaper4Aprill857,4; [W.E. Gladstone], ‘The new parliament and its work’,
Quarter4 Review 101 (April 1857), esp. 5473,565-6; M m i n g S t a r 3 0 July 1857,2.
87. Daily News 28 November 1857,4; 14 December 1857,4.
88. Marx, ‘The trade crisis in England’ (NYDT15 December 1857), MECWXV, 400-3;
‘British commerce and finance’ (NYDT4 October 1858),ibid., XVI, 336.
89. Marx, ‘Political parties in England’ (NYDT24June 1858), ibid., XV, 567-8); ’His-
tory of the opium trade’ (NYDT25September 1858), ibid., XVI, 20; ‘Great trouble
in Indian finances’ (NYDT30 April 1859), ibid., 279-86.
90. Marx, ‘The revolt in the Indian army’ (NYDT15July 1857),ibid., XV, 297-300; ‘The
Indian question’ (NYDT14 August 1857), ibid., 309-13.
91. Marx, ‘The British revulsion’ (NYDT 30 November 1857), ibid., XV, 385-91; ‘The
English Bank Act of 1844’ (NYDT23 August 1858), ibid., XVI, 67; ‘Commercial
crisis and currency in England’ (NYDT28 August 1858), ibid., 8-12.
92. See my “‘Imperium et libertas”?: Rethinking the radical critique of imperialism
during the nineteenth century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 19
(1991) esp. 9-12.
93. Cobden, What Next, and Next (London: James Ridgway, 1856). Marx refers to it in
passing: Marx to Engels, 18January 1856, MECWXL, 3.
94. M m i n g Star 3 December 1857,2; Free Press 23 December 1857,583-4.
95. Cobden, ‘Preface’ to Michel Chevalier, On the Probable Fall in the Value of Gold: The
commercial and social consequences which may ensue, and the measures which it invites
(Manchester: A. Ireland & Co, 1859), x-xi.
96. People’s Paper 11July 1857,4; 18July 1857,4; 29 August 1857,4.
97. Disraeli, Hansard CXLVII (27July 1857), 447-8.
98. Ibid., CXLVIII (4 December 1857), 214; cf. Press 28 November 1857,1145-6.

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99. Engels to Marx, 7 October 1858, MECW XL, 3435.

100. Cobden to Julie Silas Schwabe, 27 February 1858, cited in J.S. Schwabe, h i -
niscences ofRichard Cobda (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895), 301; Cobden toJoseph
Sturge, 27 July 1856, Sturge Papers, Dept. Manuscripts, British Library, Add. Mss.
43, 722, fols. 147-8.
101. Jones was still referring to the middleclass reformers as the ‘Manchester school’ in
the mid-l860s, nearly a decade after Bright lost his seat in Manchester: Jones to
Marx, 10 February 1865, cited in Dorothy Thompson, ‘Letters from ErnestJones to
Karl Marx, 18658’, Bulktin of the Society fur the Study of Labour History 4 (1962): 11-
23. On the waning of “old Corruption” see W.D. Rubinstein, ‘The end of “old cor-
ruption” in England, c.1780-1860’, Past and Present 101 (1983): 55-86; cf. Philip
Harling, ‘Rethinking “old corruption”’, Past and Present 147 (1995): 127-58.
102. ‘ErnestJones’ Second Political Soiree’, Peopkk Paper8 November 1856,4.
103. ‘Freedom at home and honour abroad’, London N m s 8 May 1858,l.
104. See my TheDeclineof British Radicalism, 1847-1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995).
105. Marx to Engels, 4 April 1854, MECW XXXIX, 428-30. Wilks’ discussion of English
policy towards Poland seems to draw heavily on Marx’s articles: Palmerston in Three
Epochs: A Cornpatison ofFacts with Opinions (London: William Freeman, 1854), 21-4.
106. Marx to Engels, 14June 1853, MECWXXXIX, 345-6.
107. Marx to Engels, 21 September 1858, ibid., XL, 342.
108. John Cowley, The Victm‘anEncounter with Marx: Ernest Bey& Bax (London: British
Academic Press, 1992); Mark Bevir, ‘H. M. Hyndman: a re-reading and a reassess-
ment’, History of Political Thought 12 (1991): 125-45; idem., ‘Ernest Belfort Bax:
Marxist, idealist and positivist’,Journal of the History of Z&as 54 (1993): 119-35.

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