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’ accordingto Willis (1977): the publication of the first volume of ’Das Kapital’ in English in1887. Although Willis provides a quantitative description of Marx mentions based onlibrary records, book circulation statistics and newspaper mentions, the attributionof the effect to a single event remains a simplification of a complex process. Thespecificities of late Victorian society and the fact that Marx wrote his theoreticalworks in German contributed to his near anonymity in England up to the second halfof the 1880s. The liberal radical roots of the left-wing intellectuals and of the workingclass movements, together with the strong parliamentary tradition, constituted achallenging environment for the spread of Marx’s name. With data from GoogleNgram, the study adopts the synthetic control method and finds that 1886 is abreakthrough year for the mentions of Marx in England. This is combined with aqualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources and of the contextual nature ofthe interest in Marx in several literary genres. The paper complements Willis’s studyby shedding light on the developments preceding the 1887. In this period the surgeof interest in Marx was driven by a growing fear of socialism and his mentions shiftfrom partly generic to distinctly political. This shift was triggered by a combinationof factors, including the economic crisis and rising unemployment of the mid 1880s,episodes of social unrest, key editorial developments, and the efforts of EdwardAveling, Eleanor Marx, and many others in promoting the socialist cause. Theseconditions broadened public perceptions of socialist imminence and contributed tothe symbolic diffusion of Marx’s name even before 1887.