54 ENGELS, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 . . . Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. New York: John W. Lovell Company, [1887] A core text of Marxism, inscribed by the translator First edition in English of Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845), Engels’s masterful survey of worker’s conditions, inscribed by the translator to the German philosopher and socialist Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888). “In 1842, Engels left for England to work in his father’s Manchester firm [his father was a textile manufacturer in Westphalia]. Already converted by Moses Hess to a belief in ‘communism’ and the imminence of an English social revolution, he used his two-year stay to study the conditions which would bring it about. From this visit, came two works which were to make an important contribution to the formation of Marxian socialism: Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (generally called the Umrisse ) published in 1844 and The Condition of the Working Class in England , published in Leipzig in 1845” (Jones in The New Palgrave ). Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (1859–1932), daughter of a Philadelphia judge and congressman, was an early supporter of women’s suffrage and a lifelong feminist. She was educated at Cornell, and then Zurich, where she met European socialists, marrying a Polish-Russian medical student, Lazare Wischnewetzky, in 1884. They returned to America in 1886. She had already arranged to translate Engels’s book into English, and maintained a close but turbulent relationship with him through correspondence, often asking Engels to change his new preface to the work due to events. The book was finally published in May 1887. Kelley (she resumed the name after her divorce from Wischnewetzky in 1891) was shortly afterwards expelled from the Socialist Labor Party (Engels termed them a ‘gang of pure louts’) due to her insistence on the importance of the writings of Marx and Engels, but continued to pioneer social causes. She “exerted an immediate and dramatic influence on the generation of women reformers clustered within the social settlement movement during the Progressive Era. Her understanding of the material basis of class conflict and her familiarity with American political institutions, combined with her spirited personality, placed her in the vanguard of a generation of reformers who sought to make American government more responsive to what they saw as the needs of working people” ( ANB ). The presentation of the volume to Dietzgen is a superb provenance. “Self-educated, he worked out a system of materialist and dialectical philosophy often compared with that of Marx, who however, was quite critical of Dietzgen’s views. A tanner by trade, Dietzgen became a master by the early 1850s; set up as a shopkeeper; in the early 1860s, took charge of a family tannery. He then went to Russia (1864) to manage a large government tannery; returned (1869) to his native Rhineland to run a tannery inherited from an uncle. In Russia he wrote his first book Das Wesen des menschlichen Kopfarbeit (1869). Dietzgen also contributed articles to the Social-Democratic press; organized an International Working Men’s Association section,
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53 EDWARDS, George. An Attempt to Rectify Public Affairs, and Promote Private Prosperity . . . Part I. London: Printed by S. Hamilton, 1802 in Original boards First edition of this proposal for radical reform of the British government, economy, and social organization. The political writer George Edwards (1752–1823) “was an untiring propounder of political and social schemes, with a particular enthusiasm for reform of the constitution, of agricultural practice, of tax laws, and of the army. But his rhetoric tended to be more extravagant than the thoroughness or consistency of his plans would warrant” ( ODNB ). The present work presents the author’s plans for reform as the best means to defeat Napoleon; as with his other works, the titles of which include The Political Interests of Great Britain (1801), The Civil, Political, and Religious Means of Establishing the Kingdom of God upon Earth (1805), and The Discovery of the True and Natural Era of Mankind (1807), it cannot be seen to have made much impact. A second volume followed the next year, and a three- volume edition was issued in 1804. Part I is remarkably scarce in any state; Library Hub locates copies in only the British Library and Senate House. Octavo. Uncut and mostly unopened in original boards, printed label to spine. Contemporary unlettered armorial bookplate to front pastedown. Joints cracked but holding, spine backing worn with loss. A very good copy in the fragile original boards. ¶ Goldsmiths’ 18385. £1,750 [128933]
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