Emigration

Abstract

In emigration and then in employment Engels could no longer maintain the close contact with local and national political action that he had established during his days — before the revolution and during the events themselves — as a political journalist and communist agitator. His situation after the uprisings of 1848–9 did not offer him the temptation of compromise; rather it compromised him at the outset. He had to stay on the right side of Her Majesty’s Government in order to remain in England, as a return to politics amongst German émigrés on the continent was now too risky, and only the United States or some even remoter haven offered any other possibilities. There is some slight suggestion that Engels and Marx may have considered leaving England early on for the New World, and then rejected the idea as their fear of persecution died down. Writing to Wilhelm Wolff on 1 May 1851 Engels commented that he hoped that ‘Lupus’ would come to England to stay, as ‘you would have more opportunities here than in America and it’s not so easy, once you’re there, to come back again’. ‘It’s frightful in America’, he concluded, ‘The devil take the public there. Sooner a galley-slave in Turkey than a journalist in America’(38 CW 341).