Harney and Engels

Peter Cadogan

doi:10.1017/S0020859000002728

Harney and Engels

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2008

Peter Cadogan

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The English Chartists of the nineteenth century were men who lived in very modest circumstances, and their mobility, their empiricism, their lack of filing facilities, the housepride of their wives and the discontinuity of their particular organisations militated against the proper preservations of their archives. For the history of Chartism we rely upon contemporary printed sources, Home Office Papers, a handful of Collections and a few autobiographies. Thus when A.R. Schoyen set out to write Chartist Challenge, book a centred round the person of the Chartist leader George Julian Harney, he was obliged to open his Preface as follows: “The impersonal nature of most of the available materials on Julian Harney, mainly newspapers and periodicals in which he wrote, leave one with no more than conjectures about some aspects of his life.”

Type: Research Article
Information: International Review of Social History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , April 1965 , pp. 66 - 104

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000002728 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1965

References

^{page 66 note 1} Schoyen, A. R., Chartist Challenge (London 1958)Google Scholar. This book has added a new dimension to the study of Chartism. It provides the essential background to the new material presented here. The English Chartists constituted the first large independent working class political association in the world. They took their name from their six-point Charter adopted in May 1838. The Six Points were – universal suffrage; the secret ballot; the abolition of property qualifications for MPs; equal electoral districts; annual Parliaments; the payment of Members. Chartist incentive arose from extreme dissatisfaction with the Great Reform Bill of 1832, a Bill that had been campaigned for by Political Unions of the Middle and Working Classes but from which “the working classes” got little or nothing beyond the new servitude of the 1834 Poor Law and the continuation of the “taxes on knowledge”. (By 1836 the nineteen year old Harney had been to prison three times for selling unstamped or otherwise illegal radical newspapers.) The Six Points in various combinations and with varying degrees of emphasis had been actively canvassed since the 1770s and the Great Reform Bill of 1832 was one outcome of that agitation. By that Bill the English middle class got its foot in the door of political power (at the expense of the prevailing landed aristocracy) and the advocates of working class political emancipation had cause to think again about the intentions of their erstwhile political friends. The three periods of great Chartist activity were 1838–39, 1842 and 1848.

^{page 67 note 1} Professor Black has sent me a list of the letters in his possession. He writes: “The papers we have are those left by Harney in his widow's possession and given me by his stepson, my father-in-law.” Letter of 30th March 1964.

^{page 67 note 2} Marx-Engels Archives, Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam; catalogued L IV 207.

^{page 69 note 1} L IV 150. Following the revolutions of 1848 and the imposition in England of a new Aliens Act that gave the Government almost a free hand in deporting emigres, the formal connection that the continental revolutionaries had with the Fraternal Democrats came to an end in May 1848. Henceforth the Fraternal Democrats were the radical wing of domestic Chartism only. For all that the informal contact that Harney and his friends had with the emigres seemed to be none the less. It was because he involved himself with all who came to England, regardless of their political position, that Marx took issue with him. His dispute with O'Connor had another cause besides that of internationalism. It concerned relations with middle class Radicals. Harney was intensely suspicious of the “Manchester School” – in fact he wrote them off. The great debate about the class character of political organisation is continued throughout the whole history of Chartism and is never resolved.

In the spring of 1849 the Radicals led by Sir Joshua Walmsley, Joseph Hume and Lord Dudley Stuart formed yet another reform association “The Metropolitan Financial and Parliamentary Reform Association” and the question of Chartist co-operation with this body split the movement right down the middle. O'Connor allied himself publicly with the new organisation and appeared on its platforms. This was at a time when many of the established Chartist leaders were in prison following the demonstrations of 1848. O'Connor regained control of the Chartist National Executive. As a means of building the opposition Harney and the Fraternal Democrats announced a banquet to celebrate the first anniversary of the 1848 French Revolution. To this were invited all likely allies including the Owenites, G. J. Holyoake, Walter Cooper, Bronterre O'Brien and the Scots publisher Robert Buchanan. As from this occasion it was a fight to the finish,

^{page 70 note 1} L IV 152. In this same letter Harney records that he has just had “news from America of the sad death of one of my brothers by drowning”.

^{page 70 note 2} LIV 153.

^{page 71 note 1} Democratic Review, August 1849, p. 83Google Scholar. The Times, 26th July 1849. The papers owned and edited by Hatney in this period were as follows:

Democratic Review: June 1849 – May 1850. Monthly.

Red Republican: June – December 1850. Weekly.

Friend of the People: 1st series December 1850 – July 1851; 2nd series February – April 1852. Weekly.

Vanguard: January – March 1853. Weekly.

^{page 71 note 2} Schoyen, op. cit., p. 193.

^{page 72 note 1} Northern Star, 15th April 1843.

^{page 72 note 2} Schoyen, op. cit., p. 198. It was in the following month, September 1850, that the Barclay and Perkins draymen gave General Haynau good cause to know what they thought of him.

^{page 73 note 1} D IV 207.

^{page 73 note 2} L IV 156. The meeting “on Wednesday night” was presumably that of the London Association.

^{page 74 note 1} L IV 157.

^{page 74 note 2} L IV 158. The refeience to Helen Macfarlane (who did the English translation of the Communist Manifesto published in the four November issues of the Red Republican) provides added evidence to confirm Schoyen's conjecture that “Howard Morton” (a regular contributor to the Red Republican) and Helen Macfarlane were one and the same person.

^{page 75 note 1} L IV 159.

^{page 76 note 1} Marx, to Engels, , February 23rd 1851Google Scholar; quoted by Schoyen, op. cit, p. 215.

^{page 76 note 2} Schoyen, op. cit., p. 216.

^{page 76 note 3} Friend of the People, May 3rd 1851.

^{page 77 note 1} John Saville brought together a collection of Chartist material centred on Jones in his Ernest Jones, Chartist (London 1952). This is from that collection. More explicitly he quotes Jones, in his own Notes to the People, Vol. II, p. 976Google Scholar as follows: “We therefore say, at this the critical time: All trades unions are lamentable fallacies, whether they em brace 1,000 or 1,000,000… All co-operative efforts are waste, misdirections of time, means and energy, under our present governmental system.” (March 1852, p. 195 and see also p. 234.)Google Scholar Marx himself, in his Wage, Labour and Capital, written and rewritten as a lecture in the ‘forties, did not mention trade unions.

^{page 77 note 2} Quoted by Saville, op. cit., p. 235.

^{page 77 note 3} This reference is not clear to me. The original German text is unambiguous. Presumably Harney worked for some paper not his own in the second half of 1851 after the demise of the first series of the Friend of the People.

^{page 78 note 1} MF II 73. The whole of this letter is in German. Jones was born in Berlin and brought up in Germany until the age of 19. His father was equerry to Ernst, Duke of Cumberland, who became King of Hanover when in 1837 the Salic Law barred Queen Victoria from the succession. Jones was christened Ernest after the Duke who was his god-father.

^{page 80 note 1} Engels, to Marx, , 18th March 1852Google Scholar; quoted by Saville, op. cit., p. 236.

^{page 80 note 2} Red Republican, October 12th 1850.Google Scholar

^{page 80 note 3} L IV 257 and L IV 258.

^{page 81 note 1} Saville gives this document in full. It is a classic of its kind; op. cit., pp. 264–272.

^{page 81 note 2} Dated March 9th 1854, published in the People's Paper, March 18th 1854; Marx, and Engels, , On Britain (Moscow 1953)Google Scholar; also in Saville, op. cit., pp. 274–275.

^{page 81 note 3} Marx, to Engels, , February 13th 1855Google Scholar; quoted by Saville, op. cit., p. 239.

^{page 81 note 4} Saville, op. cit., p. 61; People's Paper, January 26th 1856.

^{page 81 note 5} IISG, Amsterdam, uncatalogued.

^{page 81 note 6} IISG, Amsterdam, uncatalogued.

^{page 82 note 1} Saville, op. cit., p. 243. It was to the middle class Radicals that Marx took exception. He, like Jones, had come or was coming to recognise that Harney had been right in his empirical acceptance of trade unionism and co-operation. But to Marx empiricism was not enough. At the critical time, 1850–1852, he had yet to work out definitively his theory of value, surplus value and the rate of exploitation. This he did some five years later in his Critique of Political Economy written in 1857. He then had an entirely rational basis for his re-assessment and acceptance of trade unions. Thus he could write in the resolution he drafted for the Congress of the International Working Men's Association, Geneva, 1866: “If the trade unions… are absolutely indispensable for the daily or guerilla warfare between Labour and Capital, they are… all the more important as organised bodies for the abolition of wage-labour and of the capitalist domination.” This would seem to explain the otherwise hopelessly confused and unintelligible situation between Marx, Engels, Jones and Harney in the ‘fifties.

^{page 82 note 2} Saville, op. cit., p. 73; letter in the Howell Collection.

^{page 82 note 3} MF II 41; February 1860. There is a considerable number of letters from Jones to Marx in the archives. They are catalogued MF II 27 to MF II 71. Most of them are short notes. Many are written in German. A number are so badly written (Jones's handwriting is as temperamental as its author apparently was) or have been so ill used by some physical circumstance as to render them partly, sometimes wholly, illegible.

^{page 83 note 1} Jones, to Marx, on February 18th 1865Google Scholar: “I forgot to ask you in my last letter to enrol me as a member of the International Association, and if you send me a dozen cards I dare say I could get a dozen members. If not I would return the cards.” (MF II 49) There are a number of letters dealing with the 1865 to 1868 agitation in England (and with special reference to Manchester) but they and their context are beyond present terms of reference.

^{page 83 note 2} Her maiden name was almost certainly Le Sueur. On August 30th 1885 Harney sent Engels a list of names and addresses of people in Jersey. In it he listed Mrs Harney's brother, Francis Le Sueur of “The Impot” Quayside, Jersey.

^{page 83 note 3} October 6th 1857; quoted by Schoyen, op. cit., p. 248.

^{page 84 note 1} L IV 160 to LIV 166.

^{page 84 note 2} February 17th 1871, D IV 209.

^{page 85 note 1} L IV 167.

^{page 85 note 2} L IV 168.

^{page 86 note 1} L IV 170.

^{page 86 note 2} L IV 172. The “Finnegans” is a reference to Engels' Irish wife and her Irish family and friends.

^{page 87 note 1} L IV 173. In fact Harney's spelling, like his syntax, is consistently careful and correct.

^{page 87 note 2} L IV 174.

^{page 88 note 1} LIV 175, July 20th 1878.

^{page 88 note 2} L IV 176.

^{page 88 note 3} Two letters dated November 8th and 18th 1878, uncatalogued.

^{page 89 note 1} L IV 182.

^{page 89 note 2} D IV 210.

^{page 90 note 1} L IV 183, August 10th 1880.

^{page 90 note 2} Also L IV 183.

^{page 90 note 3} L IV 184.

^{page 91 note 1} L IV 185.

^{page 91 note 2} L IV 186.

^{page 91 note 3} L IV 189.

^{page 92 note 1} L IV 190.

^{page 92 note 2} L IV 192.

^{page 92 note 3} L IV 194. In fact his departure was frequently postponed. He eventually sailed on the Gallic on October 12th 1886. L IV 207.

^{page 93 note 1} L IV 195.

^{page 94 note 1} L IV 197.

^{page 94 note 2} L IV 200.

^{page 94 note 3} L IV 201, August 25th 1886.

^{page 94 note 4} L IV 205, November 19th 1886 from 16 Shepard Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mrs Harney had not been with him on his last visit to England. She had been busy teaching.

^{page 95 note 1} L IV 207.

^{page 95 note 2} L IV 208.

^{page 96 note 1} L IV 209.

^{page 96 note 2} L IV 211.

^{page 96 note 3} L IV 235 and 237.

^{page 97 note 1} L IV 219, February 21th.

^{page 97 note 2} L IV 220, March 1st.

^{page 97 note 3} L IV 224, April ith.

^{page 97 note 4} L IV 225, April 20th.

^{page 97 note 5} L IV 226, April 24th.

^{page 97 note 6} L IV 227, May 10th.

^{page 97 note 7} L IV 237, July 14th.

^{page 98 note 1} L IV 238.

^{page 99 note 1} L IV 247. The N.W.C. was the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle owned by the same Joseph Cowen that Harney had met in his Chartist days.

^{page 100 note 1} L IV 248, July 21st 1895.

^{page 100 note 2} Also L IV 248.

^{page 100 note 3} L IV 254.

^{page 101 note 1} L IV 256.

^{page 103 note 1} L IV 257.

^{page 103 note 2} L IV 258,

^{page 104 note 1} L IV 260. “Caller herrin” means “fresh herrings” in the dialect of Northumberland.

^{page 104 note 2} Schoyen, op. cit., p. 285.

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