ABSTRACT
The opening sections of Marx’s Communist Manifesto appeared in a translation by Helen Macfarlane in G. J. Harney’s Red Republican on 9 November 1850 under the general heading of ‘German Communism’; a translation that began with the memorable line, ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe.’1 Yet it was almost half a century before the key texts of Marx’s political economy were to enjoy a wide circulation in Britain. James Macdonnell’s ‘Karl Marx and German socialism’, in the March 1875 edition of the Fortnightly Review and John Rae’s ‘The socialism of Karl Marx and the Young Hegelians’ in the Contemporary Review, 1881, gave a British audience some sense of the principles of Marxian political economy as these had been articulated in the first volume of Capital and the Contribution to a critique of political economy. In addition the works of a number of American writers that discussed the economic principles of Marxian socialism were published in Britain in the early 1880s and Laurence Gronlund’s The co-operative commonwealth, which provided a defence of Marx’s economic thought, was published in England in 1885. As to their dissemination in English by European writers, discussions of Marx’s work appeared in the early 1880s yet often, as with Eugen BöhmBawerk’s Karl Marx and the end of his system, punctuated by critical commentary.
