MARX, Karl. Capital. The Serfdom of Work; The Lordship of Wealth; translated from Karl Marx. IN: To-Day: a monthly gathering of bold thoughts. Vol. I. May-September 1883. The Modern Press (The British Printing and Publishing Co.) 1883
Orig. olive brown dec. cloth, bevelled boards; spine sl. dulled with small mark, a few expert repairs. In cloth fold-over box.
¶To-Day appears on Copac at BL, Oxford, Durham & TCD. The first ever printing in Britain of any part of Marx's Das Kapital translated into the English language and extremely rare in commerce; we can find no record of any sale at auction. This is the first volume of a journal, edited by Ernest Belfort Bax & James Leigh Joynes, which specialised in the publication of free-thinking and radical works and was published from 1883 to 1889. To-Day's guiding principle is to 'shake itself free from all fetters, save those of truth and taste'. Its political stance is indeed bold: 'the equal rights of every human being to health, wealth, wisdom and happiness shall be our watchword'. As well as concern with politics, the periodical includes stories, a translation from Tourgenieff, poetry, articles on Shelley, Keats, Byron, Electricity Free of Cost, God or no God, A Vision of Space, &c. There are two excerpts translated from Karl Marx's Kapital which are the first to be published in Britain, though various sections had been translated and published in the USA in the 1870s. The two sections published here are: I. The Serfdom of Work, pp57-68; II. The Lordship of Wealth, pp145-150. The second instalment is stated in the heading as being translated from the French edition of 1872 & a footnote adds 'this chapter is translated from the second and third sections of chapter X of the original. The selection published in our last issue was translated from chapter xxiii of the original. The translations are, of course, our own, and not those of the late Karl Marx'. The founder of the Social Democratic Federation, Henry M. Hyndman, took over To-Day the following year adding a new subtitle: Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism. Subsequently, from 1885 to 1889, Hyndman published the first ten chapters of Kapital, translated from the German. The first extended English book edition appeared in 1887, under the title Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. It was translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (the partner of Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor), overseen by Engels. The Modern Press, 1881-1931, published other works by Marx, as well as Hyndman, Morris, Kropotkin, Carpenter, G.B. Shaw, John Burns, Sidney Webb. See: Babak Armini, A Brief History of the Dissemination and Reception of Karl Marx's Capital in the United States & Britain, World Review of Political Economy, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2016.