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Lawrence & Wishart
Publishing company
About
Lawrence & Wishart is a London-based publishing company. It was formed in 1936 through the merger of the Communist Party’s official publisher, Martin Lawrence, and the liberal and anti-fascist family-owned publisher Wishart. From its foundation, it specialized in publishing left-wing political fiction, drama and poetry, as well as non-fiction such as working-class histories and the works of Karl Marx, in the context of the economic depression, the rise of Fascism and the Second World War. It also produced the biannual literary anthology New Writing. After the war, it went on to publish early work by renowned leftist scholars including Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson, and to translate the work of Antonio Gramsci.
In 1935 Wishart had published Mulk Raj Anand’s novel The Untouchable after it was rejected by some nineteen publishing houses. Its acceptance by Wishart was no doubt in part a product of the novel’s endorsement by E. M. Forster. Two of Anand’s subsequent novels were then taken on by Lawrence & Wishart, as was the work of Indian Communist Rajani Palme Dutt, whose brother Clemens translated work by Marx and Engels for the firm.
Mulk Raj Anand, Clemens Palme Dutt, Rajani Palme Dutt, Friedrich Engels, E. M. Forster, Ralph Fox, J. B. S. Haldane, V. I. Lenin, Jack Lindsay, Karl Marx, Harry Pollitt, Montagu Slater, Joseph Stalin.
Communist Party of Great Britain, New Writing.
A selection of works published from 1936 to 1950:
Anand, Mulk Raj, Coolie (1936)
Britain Without Capitalists (1936)
Fox, Ralph, France Faces the Future (1936)
Lenin, V. I., Selected Works (1936–8)
Anand, Mulk Raj, Two Leaves and a Bud (1937)
Beauchamp, Joan, Women Who Work (1937)
Slater, Montagu, New Way Wins (1937)
Kuczynski, Jurgen, Hunger and Work: Statistical Studies (1938)
Gorky, Maksim, Culture and the People (1939)
Haldane, J. B. S., Science and Everyday Life (1939)
Lindsay, Jack, A Handbook of Freedom (1939)
Engels, Friedrich, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Palme Dutt, preface by J. D. S. Haldane (1940)
Pollitt, Harry, Serving My Time (1940)
Stalin, Joseph, Foundations of Leninism (1940)
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895 (1941)
Chen, Jack, Japan and the Pacific Theatre of War (1942)
Dutt, Rajani Palme, Britain in the World Front (1942)
Marx, Karl, Selected Works, ed. by Clemens Palme Dutt (1942)
Klingender, Francis Donald, Marxism and Modern Art (1943)
Lenin, V. I., What is to be Done? (1944)
Reeves, Joseph, A History of Rochdale Cooperation, 1844–1944 (1944)
Caudwell, Christopher, Illusion and Reality (1946)
Cornforth, Maurice, Science versus Idealism (1946)
Stalin, Joseph, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (1947)
Wolton, Douglas G., Whither South Africa? (1947)
Lenin, V. I., Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1948)
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto [1933] (1948)
Dutt, Rajani Palme, Britain’s Crisis of Empire (1950)
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
