“Reynolds is a rascal,” said Marx, “but a rich and able speculator. Find out what the father of communism thought about the biggest-selling novelist of the Victorian era.
“A Rascal … but rich”: Karl Marx and G. W. M. Reynolds | Stephen Basdeo
Crime in a Communist Utopia
“Up at the League, says a friend, there had been one night a brisk conversational discussion, as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution, finally shading off into a vigorous statement by various friends of their views on the future of the fully-developed new society … [William Guest] found himself musing on the subject-matter of discussion, but still discontentedly and unhappily. “If I could but see it!” … “If I could but see it! If I could but see it!”
Blind Justice in Eugene Sue’s “The Mysteries of Paris” (1842–3)
If you were a criminal, what would you choose – a life sentence in prison, the death sentence, or to be surgically blinded?
“Lenin Lives!” (2017) by Philip Cunliffe
Philip Cunliffe has written a fascinating book which gives an account of how history might have turned out had the goals of early twentieth-century socialists been realised.
An Early Socialist History of the Peasants’ Revolt: Charles Edmund Maurice’s “Lives of English Popular Leaders of the Middle Ages” (1875)
Charles Edmund Maurice was a Barrister, History Lecturer, and committed Christian Socialist. In 1875, he authored one of the first socialist histories of the rebellion of 1381.