Friiedrich Engels in Britain

(Engels' House in Primrose Hills London)

In order to help Marx with the new publishing effort in London, Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue, Engels sought ways to escape the continent and travel to London. On 5 October 1849, Engels arrived in the Italian port city of Genoa.^[61] There, Engels booked passage on the English schooner, Cornish Diamond under the command of a Captain Stevens.^[62] The voyage across the western Mediterranean, around the Iberian Peninsula by sailing schooner took about five weeks. Finally, on 10 November 1849 the Cornish Diamond sailed up the River Thames to London with Engels on board.

Once Engels made it to Britain, he decided to re-enter the Manchester company in which his father held shares, in order to be able to support Marx financially, so that Marx could work on his masterpiece Das Kapital. Engels didn't like the work but did it for the good of the cause.

Unlike his first period in England (1843), Engels was now under police surveillance. He had `official' homes and `unofficial homes' all over Salford, Weaste and other inner-city Manchester districts where he lived with Mary Burns under false names to confuse the police.^[26] Little more is known, as Engels destroyed over 1,500 letters between himself and Marx after the latter's death so as to conceal the details of their secretive lifestyle

Despite his work at the mill, Engels found time to write his monumental work on Luther, the Reformation and the 1525 revolutionary war of the peasants. This work was entitled The Peasant War in Germany. Engels also wrote some important newspaper articles such as "The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution" which he finished in February 1850 and "On the Slogan of the Abolition of the State and the German 'Friends of Anarchy'" written in October 1850. In April 1851, Engels wrote the pamphlet, "Conditions and Prospects of a War of the Holy Alliance against France."

When Louis Bonaparte carried out a coup against the French government and made himself president for life on 2 December 1851, Marx and Engels, like many people, were shocked. In condemning this action, Engels wrote to Marx about the coup on 3 December 1851.Engels characterised the coup as "comical" and referred to it as occurring on "the 18th Brumaire"—the date of the coup according to the 1799 republican calendar of France under Napoleon I. Marx was later to incorporate this comically ironic characterisation of Louis Bonaparte's coup into his book about the coup. Indeed, Marx even called the book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte again using Engels' suggested characterisation.Marx also borrowed Engels characterisation of Hegel's notion of the World Spirit that history occurred twice, "once as a tragedy and secondly as a farce" in the first paragraph of his new book.

Meanwhile, while working at the mill owned by his father in Manchester, Engels started working as an office clerk, the same position he held in his teens while in Germany where his father's company was based. However, Friedrich worked his way up to become a partner of the firm in 1864. Five years later, Engels retired from the business and could focus more on his studies. At this time, Marx was living in London but they were able to exchange ideas through daily correspondence. One of the ideas that Engels and Marx contemplated was the possibility and character of a potential revolution in the Russias. As early as April 1853, Engels and Marx anticipated an "aristocratic-bourgeois revolution in Russia which would begin in "St. Petersburg with a resulting civil war in the interior."The model for this type of aristocratic-bourgeois revolution in Russia against the autocratic czarist government in favour of a constitutional government had been provided by theDecembrist Revolt of 1825. Although an unsuccessful revolt against the czarist government in favour of a constitutional government, both Engels and Marx anticipated a bourgeois revolution in Russia would occur which would bring about a bourgeois stage in Russian development to precede a communist stage. By 1881, both Marx and Engels began to contemplate a course of development in Russia that would lead directly to the communist stage without the intervening bourgeois stage. This analysis was based on what Marx and Engels saw as the exceptional characteristics of the Russian village commune orobshchina. Although doubt was cast on this theory by Georgi Plekhanov, Plekhanov's reasoning was based on the first edition of Das Kapital (1867), which predated Marx's interest in Russian peasant communes by two years. Later editions of the text demonstrate Marx's sympathy for the argument of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, that it should be possible to establish socialism in Russia without an intermediary bourgeois stage provided that the peasant commune were used as the basis for the transition.