Engels before Marx by Terrell Carver

Author:Terrell Carver
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030423711
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Moving to Manchester

Engels took his observational powers to Manchester in December 1842, having just turned twenty-two the month before. In the four years since publishing the “Letters from Wuppertal,” he had successfully placed approximately fifty items in various genres in German-language publications.

As a good journalist, Engels wrote an article straightaway on arrival in England, by-lined “London, November 29 [1842],” knowing that he had a ready outlet in the Rheinische Zeitung back in the homeland. This periodical was a struggling liberal paper founded and published in Cologne during a brief period when Prussian censorship, under the new king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, was somewhat more relaxed.

Young Friedrich, or “x” as he signed his articles, had been publishing regularly there since April, and anonymous publication was very much a norm. Perhaps his use of “x” in the Cologne paper was a way of putting gossipy Rhinelanders off the scent. In that way, he would maybe spare himself family ructions, given that “Oswald,” who signed the “Letters from Wuppertal,” had obtained some national notoriety. Some people might start putting two-and-two together. In October he passed through Cologne to make contact with the editors, en route from Berlin to Barmen, having completed his military service at a barracks in the Prussian capital.

And in November, en route from Barmen to London, Engels—on the eve of his twenty-second birthday—stopped again at the newspaper offices, meeting with the newly installed editor Herr Marx, and no doubt other associates. Marx had fallen into the editorship somewhat by default, and certainly not by experience.38 At that point Engels had contributed around twice as many articles to the paper as Marx, and Marx had placed only a couple of articles elsewhere at all.

Many years later Engels recalled this meeting between the two of them, saying it was notably cool on Marx’s side, given that Marx disapproved of the overly philosophical Berlin set of Young Hegelians. But in his recollections Engels says nothing about the other editors, or indeed how he himself felt about Marx at the time. It must have been clear, though, that Engels was by far the more accomplished writer and indeed publicist for “free thinking” and liberalizing political progress. And he was the one embarking on a breath-taking adventure to the world’s major economic and military power. Engels had even been to England before, his English was fluent, and he was off out of the German states and state-lets to the wider world of imperial Britain. This was all rather beyond Marx’s imagination at the time.

The news from England was already of some interest in the German-speaking and reading public. Or rather it would be of topical and political interest, unless your interests lay elsewhere—as was certainly the case with the ruling elites—namely in keeping any notion of social change and political innovation firmly at bay. In that case, then, the less news about England, the better.

What the evidence of the time demonstrates—as opposed to the erasures that teleology imposes on later recollections—is that Engels was evidently commissioned to continue his career with the paper with news of liberalizing modernity.

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