The Theory of Crisis: Sandwichman's and Uno Kōzō's (both Marx's)

Just what is it that makes Marx's contribution so different, so appealing?

Marx revealed the dark secret of classical political economy: that the writers in that tradition assumed the ubiquity of a distinctive economic sphere that was, in fact, unique to and characteristic of capital. To them capitalism was eternal and earlier forms of society were simply incomplete in their striving toward the absolute. By breaking with that tradition, Marx was able to more completely grasp the dynamic of capital accumulation and crisis.

Marx had a theory of crisis and of the dynamics of capital accumulation already in the late 1840s but his mature theory hinges on the distinction between labour and labour power or capacity that he didn't develop until the next decade. When his "Wage Labour and Capital" was republished by Friedrich Engels in 1891, Engels "updated" it by altering Marx's references to the sale of labour to conform with his later distinction of labour power. But Marx's 1847 critique was not the same as his mature critique of political economy, which only fully materialized in his Grundrisse notebooks.

Here's where Sandwichman's focus on The Source and Remedy comes into play. My contention is that Marx's 1857 understanding of labour capacity and surplus value owes a good deal to Dilke's discussion from 1821, with one crucial distinction that Marx outlined in his 1862-63 notebooks, published posthumously as Theories of Surplus Value: 

Our pamphleteer [Dilke] overlooks two things:

As a result of the introduction of machinery, a mass of workers is constantly being thrown out of employment, a section of the population is thus made redundant; the surplus product therefore finds fresh labour for which it can be exchanged without any increase in population and without any need to extend the absolute working-time. 

Two things: 1. machinery creates a redundant population of workers; 2. this surplus population supplies the labour power for new investments of capital. Machinery thus creates "new" labour power by throwing people out of work. Voila!

In the Grundrisse, Marx presented this same argument in more detail on pages 398-99 (Penguin edition) after having prefaced it with a composite quote from The Source and Remedy on page 397.

Just as capital on one side creates surplus labour, surplus labour is at the same time equally the presupposition of the existence of capital. The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time. The relation of necessary labour time to the superfluous (such it is, initially, from the standpoint of necessary labour) changes with the different stages in the development of the productive forces. In the less productive stages of exchange, people exchange nothing more than their superfluous labour time; this is the measure of their exchange, which therefore extends only to superfluous products. In production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time. …

…

It is a law of capital, as we saw, to create surplus labour, disposable time; it can do this only by setting necessary labour in motion - i.e. entering into exchange with the worker. It is its tendency, therefore, to create as much labour as possible; just as it is equally its tendency to reduce necessary labour to a minimum. It is therefore equally a tendency of capital to increase the labouring population, as well as constantly to posit a part of it as surplus population - population which is useless until such time as capital can utilize it. (Hence the correctness of the theory of surplus population and surplus capital.) It is equally a tendency of capital to make human labour (relatively) superfluous, so as to drive it, as human labour, towards infinity. Value is nothing but objectified labour, and surplus value (realization of capital) is only the excess above that part of objectified labour which is necessary for the reproduction of labouring capacity. But labour as such is and remains the presupposition, and surplus labour exists only in relation with the necessary, hence only in so far as the latter exists. Capital must therefore constantly posit necessary labour in order to posit surplus labour; it has to multiply it (namely the simultaneous working days) in order to multiply the surplus; but at the same time it must suspend them as necessary, in order to posit them as surplus labour. 

Two spreads in my pop-up book, Marx's Fetters, encompass the theory of crisis Marx developed in his Grundrisse notebook IV. Page Five incorporates two quotes from page 398 of the Grundrisse:

On pages 415-416 of the Grundrisse, Marx enumerated the limits to the accumulation of surplus value that capital repeatedly runs up against, overcomes, forgets, and then encounters again in the successive cycles of prosperity, boom, crisis, and depression. Page Eight of Marx's Fetters quotes from page 415 of the Grundrisse:

Marx's discussion continues on until page 423 but the climax description of the crisis is on pages 415-416. These four points were the "rather cryptic theses" that Martin Nicolaus wrote it "would require a book" to present "a proper analysis of the implications of..." and that "represent no more than different aspects of the contradiction between ‘forces of production’ and ‘social relations of production’."

In Capital, Marx described the relationship between surplus population and crisis succinctly, reiterating those "two things" our pamphleteer overlooked:

The path characteristically described by modern industry, which takes the form of a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations) of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis, and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agencies for its reproduction.

A funny thing happened to "disposable time" on the way from Grundrisse to Capital -- it became, sarcastically, the rightful property of the capitalist:

If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.

... 

Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital.

...just as a surplus population also "belongs to capital" in the form of a disposable industrial reserve:

But a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.

And guess what. This is pretty much what Uno Kōzō argued was Marx's theory in The Theory of Crisis! Recall that I left off the previous post with the following paragraph:

This is true, for example, of "socially necessary labour time," which incorporates within itself the inversion of the necessary and the superfluous, so that "socially necessary" is at once both "necessary" and "superfluous." That is to say it expresses the essential contradiction of the concept.

Necessary and superfluous? One might as well say indispensable and disposable as Gavin Walker and Ken Kawashima termed it in their essay "Surplus Alongside Excess: Uno Kōzō, Imperialism, and the Theory of Crisis" reproduced (with the order of the authors reversed) as a supplementary essay, "Uno Kōzō’s Theory of Crisis Today" in Kawashima's translation of The Theory of Crisis. I have copied that section below:

Labor-power as the “Indispensably Disposable” Commodity

One of the most important problems that characterizes and distinguishes Uno’s theory of crisis from the broad field of texts in the history of Marxist theory devoted to the issue of crisis, is his insistence on the meaning and complexity behind the phrase “the commodification of labor-power.” For Uno, this phrase is the key to the entirety of Marx’s work, but also the pivotal element in a capitalist commodity economy itself. Around this phrase an entire series of problems and relations are concentrated: the logic of capital and history of capitalist development, the origin of capital and its repetition, the inside and outside of capital as a social relation, and the peculiar dynamics by which these instances are inverted into each other. But Uno also adds to this phrase a singularly complex concept, one that is deceptive in its apparent simplicity. This is what Uno referred to as the muri, the (im)possibility, the impasse, the excess, the irrationality, the absence of reason, the forced nature of the commodification of labor-power.

In this peculiar turn of phrase, Uno specifies that capitalist production, which attempts to form a pure circle of inputs and outputs, always contains this muri as something that is “passing through” the entire circuit. But this muri is also an exceptionally polyvalent term: the commodification of labor-power is also treated by Uno as itself the particularly (im)possible phenomenon of capitalism, because as Nagahara Yutaka and others have suggested, capital requires certain degrees of force or forcing in order to undertake the “indirect” production of this thing that marks capital’s fundamental Achilles’ Heel and allows it to compensate for it. Therefore, we should immediately note something important – this muri identified by Uno in no way suggests that somehow capitalism is grounded in something “truly impossible” or that it secretly “doesn’t work.” It means, in fact, the exact opposite. Capital works because of the dynamism and tension that exists in this peculiar space, wherein labor-power cannot be directly produced (a barrier that should be absolute) and yet this Achilles’ Heel tends to be overcome by means of the form of population.

We have attempted on a number of other occasions to develop this concept of muri, a term that indicates a deep and complex field of problems. For the time being we will simply note that this term points toward crucial linkages between the theory of crisis and the general broad concerns of Marxist theory. It indicates, for instance, the (im)possible closure of Marx’s theoretical exposition of the logic of capitalist accumulation, signifying the possibility and impossibility to assume the closure of the logical circle that capitalist reproduction represents; it reveals the necessary historical contamination of the logic, a structure in which capital must foreclose itself as a sphere of rationality, only paradoxically, on the basis of a “nihil of reason” on – and through –  which the fundamental principles of capitalist commodity economy rest and cannot but dwell.

Further, when we think of labor-power as a commodity in relation to the cyclical nature of capitalist crisis, we are presented with its double and contradictory nature. In the phase of prosperity, labor-power is the most indispensable commodity, for no other commodity can produce new values within capitalist production. Yet, once this indispensable commodity is consumed in the course of capital’s circuit-process, capitalist production is already on the way towards an outbreak of crisis at the zenith of prosperity, which is also to say that once labor-power is consumed in production as the most indispensable commodity, capitalist prosperity is already moving in the direction of capitalist recession, during which labor-power now transforms into the opposite phenomenon, namely into the most disposable commodity in the phase of recession. This is why labor-power appears as the contradictory embodiment of being indispensably disposable. What Uno calls the muri is a formulation that expresses the conceptual dynamics of how labor-power could exist as both indispensable and disposable in the same space and time.

Ken Kawashima gives an introduction to Uno's theory in the following video: o

 

"Sandwichmann, would you consider yourself a follower of Dilke?"

Every few days I check my dormant eX-twitter account to see if there were any replies to old posts. A great series of questions showed up a couple of days ago.

Neon Nova asks:

Sandwichmann, would you consider yourself a follower of Dilke? What does Marx offer that Dilke doesn't? I know Marx revisits some of Dilke's ideas on leisure time, but do you think there are flaws in Marx's approach? Does Dilke ultimately surpass Marx in your view?

I've noticed you've traced Dilke's views on leisure time back to Godwin, and Godwin's ideas to Calvinism. But if Marx's "great ideas" are merely a rehash of Dilke or Godwin's thoughts, what makes Marx's contributions unique or great?

Yes, I would consider myself a follower of Dilke and of Godwin, in that they initiated a discourse that had greater theoretical consequences than they could have ever foreseen. What Marx offered that Dilke didn't is a theory of capital and of crisis that is far more substantial and consequential than Dilke's. There are indeed "flaws" in Marx's approach, most significantly related to how he resolved -- or didn't resolve -- the difficulty of presenting his conclusions. Whether those conclusions are ultimately "right" or "wrong" is another matter, which I am not qualified to judge.

No, Dilke does not ultimately surpass Marx but there is a sense in which readers of Capital arrive at an understanding that may be closer to Dilke's than to Marx's. This is a bit hard to explain but Dilke's presentation was more "common sense." People reading a non-intuitive, theoretical presentation tend to mentally translate it into common sense terms. This is true, for example, of "socially necessary labour time," which incorporates within itself the inversion of the necessary and the superfluous, so that "socially necessary" is at once both "necessary" and "superfluous." That is to say it expresses the essential contradiction of the concept.

Just what is it that makes Marx's contribution so different, so appealing?

I have moved that discussion to a separate post.

Hot off the press... and cut... and fold... and glue. It’s Amazing!

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“Your book is a thing of beauty and will be my joy forever. There’s something wonderful about a pop-up book in 2025.”

“Excellent, Tom. Brilliant way to bring the text to life. Well done (as always)!”

“It is not only beautiful and ingenious but itself a theoretical contribution.”

“It's amazing, a lot of work!”

“I love it!  What a creative and penetrating way to communicate Marx's core message.”

“I have just received your most interesting and delightful pop-up book. … I will study it carefully.”

“I really appreciate your book-art, a remarkable form of critique and practice at the same time.”

“Amazing pop up book: I love it!”

“It's great. I really like the way you brought together the ideas about disposable time as real wealth and the relations of production as fetters in such a creative way.”

“I have been thru' it without focusing (yet) on the words - just dwelling on how cunningly it is put together. The visual effect is amazing. It is a true labour of love. I shall read it with heightened awareness shortly."

“I thought that you couldn't top your first pop-up book, but I was wrong.”

On the politics that would make a post-growth transition possible

To the co-authors of “Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries,” published in The Lancet Planetary Health:

Thank you so much for the valuable work you have all done surveying the field of post-growth research. In the conclusion of your article, you observe "...we still know little about the politics that could make post-growth transitions possible in reality." I would like to address that issue here. While I don't presume to have all the answers, I believe I can help identify some of the most urgent questions.

There are several references to work-time reduction and one mention of leisure in the article. Leisure is mentioned, however, only as one item in a list of domains of life in a post-growth world. The references to work-time reduction are instrumental and address the use of reduced hours of work to maintain levels of employment in the face of productivity gains. Another issue addressed is the positive correlation between working time and carbon emissions, with the caveat that in the absence of a robust causal model it is uncertain whether shorter hours would be effective in reducing carbon emissions. There is no mention of the potential for transforming consciousness that has animated much philosophical discussion of leisure.

The proposed reductions are intended to offset or even reverse presumed geometric progressions – either of productivity or carbon emissions. Both of those computations, however, are results of an underlying dynamic that remains unspecified, perhaps implicit. Focusing exclusively on the instrumental applications of work-time reduction invites pro forma rebuttal, such as Basil Oberdorfer’s “Post-growth transition, working time reduction, and the question of profits” that appeared in the April 2023 issue of Ecological Economics.

Oberdorfer’s article inadvertently reiterates a comment by the Victorian factory inspector, Alexander Redgrave, that Karl Marx quoted in Capital, “Moments are the elements of profit.” Both productivity increases and carbon emissions are consequences of capital’s drive for expanded accumulation, just as the spectre of “overpopulation” that Thomas Malthus raised in his famous essay was not an immutable fact of human nature but a contingent result of capital’s insatiable hunger for surplus value.

Malthus’s strictures on population are embedded in mainstream economics through the medium of Leon Walras’s general equilibrium analysis. Walras was explicit, “Condition for progress: increase in the amount of capital goods properly speaking that precedes and exceeds the increase in the numbers of persons. Malthus’s theory of population and subsistence.” Conveniently overlooked, however, is the fact that overpopulation was not Malthus’s primary concern. Malthus had set out to refute William Godwin’s philosophical radicalism and he used speculation about population taken out of context from Godwin’s Political Justice to do so. This rhetorical strategy has proven effective for over two centuries in changing the subject from the consequences of prevailing property relations to the spectre of overpopulation. To keep the conversation about post-growth on track, it is imperative to counter the Malthusian red herring used to derail it.

William Godwin should rightly be considered the great-great grandfather of post-growth political thought. In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, he introduced his discussion of the system of property as "the key stone that completes the fabric of political justice." In his subsequent essay "Of Avarice and Profusion" he wrote, 

The commodities that substantially contribute to the subsistence of the human species, form a very short catalogue. They demand from us but a slender portion of industry. If these only were produced, and sufficiently produced, the species of man would be continued. If the labour necessarily required to produce them were equitably divided among the poor, and still more, if it were equitably divided among all, each man's share of labour would be light, and his portion of leisure would be ample.

Thomas Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population as a rebuttal to the radicalism of Godwin’s essay, as Malthus’s first sentence attests, “The following Essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend, on the subject of Mr. Godwin's Essay on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer.” Percy Shelley quoted a passage from Godwin’s essay – including the lines quoted above – in the notes for his “philosophical poem,” Queen Mab. In her Society in America, Harriet Martineau credited Godwin’s Inquirer [sic] as “the first attempt to advocate leisure as the birthright of every human being.” Martineau, who was friends with both Godwin and Malthus, achieved literary success with her popularizations of Malthus’s political economy. Her surprisingly Godwinian argument in favour of leisure is worth quoting in full:

Leisure, some degree of it, is necessary to the health of every man's spirit. Not only intellectual production, but peace of mind cannot flourish without it. It may be had under the present system, but it is not. With community of property, it would be secured to every one. The requisite amount of work would bear a very small proportion to that of disposable time.

Godwin's writing inspired a popular literature of journals and pamphlets in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the "farthest outpost" of which was the anonymous pamphlet published in 1821, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, which, according to Friedrich Engels, "turned the Ricardian theory of value and surplus value against capitalist production in the interest of the proletariat." Engels prematurely credited Marx with having saved the pamphlet "from falling into oblivion," though the manuscripts in which he did so remained unpublished at the time Engels wrote.

For both Godwin and Marx, leisure, disposable time, or reduction of the working day represented a necessary precondition for emancipation. Godwin explicitly rejected political revolution and argued that the increased leisure time was necessary to develop the intellectual and cultural resources as the basis for a more just political system. Marx, of course, advocated revolution in the Communist Manifesto but by the 1860s had become evasive about what form a revolution would take. He did, however, repeatedly stress the need for a reduction of the working day as a basic prerequisite for achieving the “realm of freedom.” Rather than choosing between Godwin and Marx – reform or revolution – I would suggest that holding their respective positions in creative tension is more politically fruitful. On the question of leisure as wealth, however, they were in full accord. Both saw leisure as essential to the intellectual, political, and cultural education of the working classes and thus to their social emancipation.

Godwin had stated that, “The genuine wealth of man is leisure, when it meets with a disposition to improve it. All other riches are of petty and inconsiderable value.” That author of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties – now known to have been Charles Wentworth Dilke – amplified that as:

After all their idle sophistry [TW: he was referring to the political economists], there is, thank God! no means of adding to the wealth of a nation but by adding to the facilities of living: so that wealth is liberty-- liberty to seek recreation--liberty to enjoy life--liberty to improve the mind: it is disposable time, and nothing more.

Marx, delighted with Dilke’s statement, rendered his own version even more emphatically, "The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time" and went on to elaborate that "In production resting on capital, the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time."

Fast forward a century and a third and we encounter André Gorz advocating “self-limitation as a social project” as his preferred alternative to prohibitions, regulations, taxes, subsidies, penalties, and fiscal and monetary policies administered by experts for the purpose of “conservation of the natural environment.” Such ‘expertocracy,’ Gorz contended, would entail the extension of techno-bureaucratic state power in the name of ecological imperatives and supposed enlightened authority. By contrast, the aim of self-limitation as a social project would be

…to restore politically the correlation between less work and less consumption on the one hand, and more autonomy and more existential security on the other, for everyone [italics in original]. … Self-limitation is thus shifted from the level of individual choice to the level of a social project. The norm of sufficiency, deprived of its traditional mooring, has to be defined politically.

In support of his proposal, Gorz cited “the anonymous Ricardoite whose 1821 pamphlet Marx so enjoyed quoting,” along with prominent economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Wassily Leontieff, who “have all held disposable time for activities ‘valued as an end in themselves’ to be ‘the true measure of wealth.’” The anonymous “Ricardoite” was, of course, Charles Wentworth Dilke, author of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties.

In volumes I and III of Capital, Marx inverted Malthus’s supposed law of overpopulation, proclaiming in chapter 25 of volume I:

The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation [emphasis in original].

This is the infamous immiseration hypothesis, purportedly refuted by post-World War II prosperity in the industrialized north. The little known complement to Marx’s inversion of Malthus on surplus population was his tacit endorsement in the Grundrisse of Godwin’s view of leisure as real wealth.

I have studied the influence on Marx’s thought of Dilke’s – and, circuitously, Godwin’s – writings intensely over the last four years and have summarized some of my findings in a pop-up book, Marx’s Fetters: a remedial reading, that challenges the traditional interpretation of Marx’s views on the contradictions that arise between the forces and relations of production, as expressed in his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

The book emerged out of conversations I had with Giorgos Kallis and Kohei Saito in the Fall of 2023 about the political implications of working time. It was originally conceived as a conventional book but after drafting a proposal and receiving a couple of rejections and one tentative expression of interest, I realized that what I really wanted to do was make a pop-up book.

In Marx in the Anthropocene, Saito proposed a "late Marx" who departed radically from an earlier "productivist" Marx. Marx's alleged productivism was typified, according to Saito, by his famous 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. That interpretation of the vague and ambiguous preface, however, was a posthumous construction by theoreticians of the Second and Third Internationals. Mindful of Prussian censorship, Marx had omitted from his 1859 summary the politically consequential analysis he had developed in his 1857-58 notebooks, published nearly a century later as the Grundrisse.

My pop-up book reconstructs what Marx's ambiguous general conclusions likely refer to by interpolating passages from the Grundrisse with passages from the 1859 preface that they explain more fully. The book is a remedial reading of Marx’s 1859 preface in that it restores the historical and political context specific to capital and also emphasizes the influence of The Source and Remedy and thus indirectly of Godwin’s thought on Marx’s analysis of the forces and relations of production.

 

REFERENCES

Dilke, Charles Wentworth (2019). The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, deduced from principles of political economy in a letter to Lord John Russell [1821]. Reprinted in Contributions to Political Economy, 38: 31-58.

Engels, Friedrich (1971) Preface to Capital: A critique of political economy [1893]. Vol. 2. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Godwin, William (1793). An Enquiry Concerning Political justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, Vol. 2. Dublin: Luke White.

Godwin, William (1823). The Enquirer. Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature. In a Series of Essays [1797]. London: John Anderson.

Gorz, André (1993). “Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation.” New Left Review, I (202): 55-67.

Kallis, Giorgos (2019). Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. Redwood City, Ca.: Stanford University Press.

Kallis, Giorgos, et al. (2025). “Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries.” Lancet Planetary Health, 9: 62-78.

Malthus, Thomas Robert (1798) An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. London: J. Johnson.

Martineau, Harriet (1837) Society in America, Vol. II. New York: Saunders and Otley.

Marx, Karl (1973a). Grundrisse. Foundations of the critique of political economy [1857-58]. Trans. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl (1976). Capital, Vol. 1 [1867]. Trans. Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl (1970). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859] Trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Oberdorfer, Basil (2023) "Post-growth transition, working time reduction, and the question of profits." Ecological Economics, 206: 107748.

Saito, Kohei (2023). Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Walker, Tom (2000). “The ‘lump of labor’ case against work-sharing: populist fallacy or marginalist throwback?” in Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives, Lonnie Golden and Deborah M. Figart, eds. London and New York: Routledge.

Walker, Tom (2007). “Why economists dislike a lump of labor.” Review of Social Economy, 65 (3): 279–291

Walker, Tom (2021). “The Ambivalence of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties at Two Hundred.” Contributions to Political Economy, 40: 80–90.

Walker, Tom (2023). “Leisure to Attend to Our Spiritual Business.” Stasis, 11, 1-2: 44-61.

Walras, Leon (2014). Elements of Theoretical Economics or the Theory of Social Wealth [1896]. Trans. and ed. by Donald A. Walker and Jan van Daal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

Above, from On Biblical Subjects, by Robert Dodsley, a lift the flap illustrated manuscript circa 1720 (sold for £20,000 in 2021). Robert Dodsley's son - also named Robert Dodsley - published a volume of "Old English Plays" in 1744. 

In 1816, Charles Wentworth Dilke published volume two of his Old Plays, being a continuation of Dodsley's collection. Rodwell and Martin on Bond Street was the publisher. They also published Dilke's The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, deduced from principles of political economy, in a Letter to Lord John Russell. 

Included in volume two of Dilke's Old Plays  was "Endymion; or, The man in the moon," a comedy by John Lyly. Two years later, Dilke's dear friend and neighbour, John Keats published his poem, "Endymion," the famous first line of which is: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."