The rare ‘collected edition’ of Tucker’s Political Fly-Sheets, a series of pamphlets including the first appearances in book form of Marx’s articles ‘Palmerston and Russia’ and ‘Palmerston, What Has He Done?’ alongside articles by the controversial British diplomat and political writer David Urquhart (1805-1877), an ardent critic of British foreign policy.
‘Marx pursued a lengthy and determined campaign against Viscount Palmerston, the foreign secretary and prime minister. Marx saw Palmerston as combining a fiercely reactionary foreign policy (promoting Russian interests as a way of repressing progressive forces elsewhere in Europe), with a growing Caesarism in domestic affairs (shifting the previous constitutional balance in favour of personal power). These views brought Marx into contact with David Urquhart, a highly eccentric diplomat, independent MP, and writer whose life has proved irresistible to Marx biographers in search of ‘colour’. Urquhart’s own monomaniacal campaign against Palmerston was driven by a heady cocktail of Turcophilia, Russophobia, and conspiracy theory. Urquhart portrayed the whole British establishment—save, happily, the monarchy—as under malign Russian influence, but Palmerston, in particular, was identified as having a ‘Russian soul’, and, rather more concretely, as being in receipt of tsarist bribes. Marx used foreign policy and diplomatic material from Urquhart’s publications, and more surprisingly—and, Marx would always insist, independently—came to agree that Palmerston was in the pay of Russian absolutism. Endorsing this historically discredited charge was scarcely the high point of Marx’s journalistic career, but he did recognise that, Palmerston apart, Urquhart’s views were ‘diametrically opposed’ to his own. Intellectually, Urquhart was a romantic reactionary who condemned democracy, reduced history to diplomacy, sought to return to an idealised past, and saw conspiracy everywhere. Marx joked that if he had shared Urquhart’s wider views he would be tempted to identify the cholera morbus, recently found in Newcastle, as despatched by the tsar ‘with the “secret mission” to break down the last remnant of what is called the anglo-Saxon spirit’. Predictably, their one meeting was not a success’ (Leopold, ‘Karl Marx and British Socialism’, p. 406).
Marx’s writings on Palmerston were originally conceived as a series of eight articles for the New York Daily Tribune, who ultimately opted to publish only four-out-of-eight of Marx’s submitted articles as unnamed leads with different titles between November 1853 to January 1854. The articles were published in full in Britain between October 22 and December 24, 1854 by The People’s Paper, a Chartist newspaper founded by Ernest Jones in 1852, and were also partially reprinted in the Glasgow Sentinel and the Sheffield Free Press. Marx was approached by the London publisher Elijah Tucker (1811-1894), an ally of Urquhart’s, who published an edition of the article ‘Palmerston and Russia’ as a stand-alone pamphlet in December 1853 as the first instalment of a new series of pamphlets titled ‘Tucker’s Political Fly-Sheets’. This was then reprinted in a second edition under the confusingly revised title ‘Palmerston and Poland’. Tucker then published another of Marx’s Palmerston articles in early February 1854 with textual revisions by Marx himself as the second number in the series under the title ‘Palmerston, What Has He Done?’, often referenced under alternate title ‘Palmerston and the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi’.
The so-called ‘collected edition’ of Tucker’s Political Fly-Sheets is a bibliographically challenging publication. The individual pamphlets were originally published separately in large prints run between 1853 to 1855, before being gathered together in a ‘collected edition’ circa May 1855 issued with a general title page and fourteen pages of preliminaries. However, the contents of these ‘collected editions’ vary dramatically based on the different copies that we have been able to examine in libraries. It is conceivable that Tucker assembled the ‘collected editions’ in a rather ad hoc manner, binding together the sheets of the previously separately published pamphlets as demand required, with varying configurations possibly owing to which of the individual pamphlets were available in print at a given time.
Marx’s writings on Palmerston pertain to an interesting period in Marx’s life when his reputation in England was by no means established. Indeed, perception of Marx in Britain would remain confused until he would gain overnight notoriety in the wake of the Paris Commune and the publication of The Civil War in France (1872). Marx would ultimately decline Tucker’s offer to publish his remaining Palmerston articles as separate pamphlets due to growing concerns over his association with Urquhart, not helped by the fact that there was an actual follower of Urquhart by the name of Francis Marx (see MECW, Vol. 39, p. 440).
Sraffa, .
The full contents:
Tucker’s Political Fly-Sheets. Containing: Palmerston and Poland. Palmerston, what has he done? England’s Part in Turkey’s Fall. War for Russia - not against Russia. Louis Napoleon - Russia - Circassia. Urquhart for Premier. The Invasion of the Crimea. The Words of Palmerston. Spider and Fly. The Home Face of the Four Points. To which is appended, by permission, Reports of the Sub-Committee of the Newcastle-on-Tyne Association for Watching the War.
8vo. xv, [1] pp. London, Trubner & Co. 1855.
[MARX (Karl).] Palmerston and Russia.
8vo. 16 pp. Neat pencilled attributed of authorship ‘By Dr. Charles Marx’ to title page in an early hand. London, E. Tucker, Political Fly-Sheets. No. I. N.d.
[MARX (Karl).] Palmerston, What Has He Done?
8vo. 16 pp. Again with neat pencilled attributed of authorship ‘By Dr. Charles Marx’ to title page in an early hand. London, E. Tucker, Political Fly-Sheets. No. II. N.d.
England’s Part in Turkey’s Fall (Sinope).
8vo. 15, [1] pp. London, E. Tucker, Political Fly-Sheets. No. III. N.d.
The War for Russia, Not Against Russia. To Relatives of the Officers and Privates of the Expeditionary Force.
8vo. 15, [1] pp. London, E. Tucker, Political Fly-Sheets. No. IV. N.d.
[URQUHART (David).] Position of Louis Napoleon in Respect to Russia; Also a Letter on Circassia.
8vo. 14 pp. London, E. Tucker, Political Fly-Sheets. No. V. N.d.
[ROLLAND (S.E.)] Urquhart for Premier.
8vo. 16 pp. London, E. Tucker, Political Fly-Sheets. No. VI. N.d.
URQUHART (David). The Invasion of the Crimea. Selections from Mr. Urquhart’s Letters.
8vo. 16 pp. London, E. Tucker, Political Fly-Sheets. No. VII. N.d.
“CARITAS”. The Words of Palmerston.
8vo. 16 pp. London, [E. Tucker], Political Fly-Sheets. No. VIII. N.d.
[URQUHART (David).] The Spider and the Fly. The Crimea and the Allies.
8vo. 32 pp. London, E. Tucker,, Political Fly-Sheets. No. IX. (Double Number.) N.d.
URQUHART (David). The Home Face of the “Four Points.”
8vo. 31, [1] pp. London, E. Tucker, Political Fly-Sheets. No. IX. (Double Number.) N.d.
[URQUHART (David).] The New Hope for Poland.
8vo. 16 pp. London, E. Tucker, Tucker’s Political Fly-Sheets. Vol. II. – No. I. 1855.
URQUHART (David). Et al. Letters on the Evidence of the Duke of Newcastle.
8vo. 24 pp. London, E. Tucker, Tucker’s Political Fly-Sheets. Vol. II.- No. II. 1855.
URQUHART (David). Public Opinion. Reprinted from “Familiar Words.”
8vo. 29, [1, publisher’s advertisements] pp. London, E. Tucker, Tucker’s Political Fly-Sheets. Vol. II.- No. III. 1855.
Birmingham Conference. Report of Committee on The Right of Search.
8vo. 47, [1, blank] pp. London, E. Tucker. 1855.
Birmingham Conference. Report of Committee on the Danish Treaty.
8vo. 15, [1, blank] pp. London, E. Tucker. 1855.
URQUHART (David). The Turkish Bath, with view to its Introduction into the British Dominions. Reprinted, by Permission of the Author, from the “Pillars of Hercules,” 1848.
8vo. 36 pp. London, Effingham Wilson. 1861.
