A LONDON INTERLUDE 101
the membership of that society from 70 to 130 m ten months, and
for the discussion meetings held twice a week. While in London he
became acquainted with a certain Newton, who planned to acquire
an ironworks in Liverpool and to operate it as a co-operative.
Weitling later reported having attended a meeting of workers in
London addressed by Charles Kingsley, in which the speaker was
said to have linked Christianity with the working-class gospel.
The most significant development during Weitling's London
interlude, however, was his controversy with the leaders of the
Deutscher Bildungsverein, sometimes referred to as the Londoner
Bildungsverein, which Karl Schapper had founded in London in
1840 after his expulsion from France. The club, led at one time
by Marx and Engels, is important in the history of the international
labor movement. It survived to the time of World War I. Moll was
its president, Schapper acted as secretary, and Heinrich Bauer of
Franconia was another prominent member. One night each week
the members talked politics, on another they practiced chorus
singing, and still other evenings were reserved for lectures on a
wide variety of subjects. Many of the members had been associates
of Weitling in the League of the Just in Paris.^9 Toward the close
of the 1840's, the membership was estimated between four and
five hundred, and included a number of non-Germans. In addition
to its activities in the field of propaganda, the society provided
sick benefits, owned a co-operative hall where food and drinks
were served and tobacco could be bought for a penny a package,
and made its large piano available for musical entertainment.
Schapper, a giant in stature, acted as the genial host of the club.
It did not take long to discover that Weitling and Schapper and
some of the other German communists in the club were traveling
along different roads. Schapper's followers, perhaps under the in
fluence of Chartism, were becoming more practical both in theory
and tactics. Weitling, fresh from his martyrdom in Switzerland
(^9) As late as 1859, a follower of Weitling, A. Scherzer, was president of the
club. See F. P. Schiller, "Friedrich Engels und die Schiller-Anstalt in Manches
ter," Marx-Engels Archiv, II (1927), 483-84.