From Politics To Theory: The Early Public Reception Of Marx In Britain, 1885–1887

The visibility of Karl Marx in England had a “major breakthrough” according to Kirk Willis (1977): the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital in English in 1887. Although Willis provides a quantitative description of mentions of Marx based on library records, book circulation statistics, and newspaper references, the attribution of the effect of Marx’s visibility to a single event remains a simplification of a complex process. The specificities of late Victorian society and the fact that Marx wrote his theoretical works in German contributed to his near anonymity in England up to the second half of the 1880s. The liberal radical roots of the left-wing intellectuals and of the working class movements, together with the strong parliamentary tradition, constituted a challenging environment for the spread of Marx’s name. With data from Google Ngram, this study adopts the synthetic control method and finds that 1886 is a breakthrough year for the mentions of Marx in England. This is combined with a qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources and of the contextual nature of the interest in Marx in several literary genres. The paper complements Willis’s study by shedding light on the developments preceding 1887. In this period the surge of interest in Marx was driven by a growing fear of socialism and his mentions shift from partly generic to distinctly political. This shift was triggered by a combination of factors, including the economic crisis and rising unemployment of the mid-1880s, episodes of social unrest, key editorial developments, and the efforts of Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx, and many others in promoting the socialist cause. These conditions broadened public perceptions of socialist imminence and contributed to the semiotic diffusion of Marx’s name even before 1887.