{"id":2564,"date":"2017-04-15T17:24:12","date_gmt":"2017-04-15T16:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=2564"},"modified":"2017-04-15T17:24:12","modified_gmt":"2017-04-15T16:24:12","slug":"did-karl-marx-ever-visit-the-potteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2017\/04\/15\/did-karl-marx-ever-visit-the-potteries\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Karl Marx ever visit the Potteries?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An article in the local paper today states, very much in passing, that Karl Marx once visited The Potteries district (Stoke-on-Trent, north Staffordshire).  It&#8217;s news to me and I can find no reference to such a visit, via Google Books. Also, I did a keyword search in the full-text of all the major biographies of Marx &mdash; such as those by Werner Blumenberg, Francis Wheen (both titles, one on Marx, one on <em>Kapital<\/em>) and others. I searched their full-text for keywords: Stoke | Potteries | Hanley | and Staffordshire.  The results reveal &#8220;no results&#8221; on all such searches.  <\/p>\n<p>Surely Marx&#8217;s major biographers, or some other book accessible via Google Books, would have mentioned Marx making a visit to the Potteries?  Surely the venerable local historian and socialist Fred Hughes would have mentioned such a visit in print, at some time in the past thirty years?  But no, it seems they didn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>I also searched the complete online archive of Marx&#8217;s letters at http:\/\/www.marxistsfr.org\/archive\/marx\/letters\/ for the keywords: Stoke | Potteries | Hanley | and Staffordshire. Again, no mentions. I even tried a search for Pottery. Again, no mention of even so much as a humble pot.<\/p>\n<p>So I can only assume that the author of this rather slight article in the local paper was thinking of <a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2011\/12\/20\/staffordshire-university-lecture-on-the-1860s\/\">the use made by Marx of some questionable statistics on the Potteries<\/a>, and that he was assuming that these figures must have been collected by Marx during a personal visit to the district.  They weren&#8217;t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An article in the local paper today states, very much in passing, that Karl Marx once visited The Potteries district (Stoke-on-Trent, north Staffordshire). It&#8217;s news to me and I can find no reference to such a visit, via Google Books. Also, I did a keyword search in the full-text of all the major biographies of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}