[1] After reading Latin and Greek with his father, in the autumn of 1846 Beesly was sent to King William's College on the Isle of Man, an evangelical establishment whose inadequate instruction and low moral tone were later depicted in Eric, or, Little by Little, by his school friend F. W. Farrar.

His flair for quoting scripture yielded to radical rhetoric under the influence of his tutor Richard Congreve, a covert disciple of Auguste Comte's positivism.

Along with his Wadham friends Frederic Harrison and John Henry Bridges, Beesly actively engaged in the debates of the Oxford Union and became recognised as a Comtist, though his adhesion to the French philosophy was still tenuous.

After failing to secure a first-class (he obtained seconds in classical moderations and literae humaniores) or a fellowship, he became an assistant master at Marlborough College.

The notoriety he gained culminated in 1867, when he declared in the aftermath of the "Sheffield outrages" that a trade union murder was no worse than any other: he almost lost his post at University Hall and Punch dubbed him "Dr Beastly".

For International Policy, a positivist volume published in 1866, he wrote on British sea power, asserting a connection between Protestantism and commercial immorality.

Beesly's later publications included seventy-four biographical entries on military and political figures for the positivists' New Calendar of Great Men, and Queen Elizabeth, both of which appeared in 1892.

Among workmen, he was not only the friend of George Odger, Robert Applegarth and Lucraft, but was on close terms with such working-class confidants of Marx as Jung and Eccarius, and to a lesser extent with Dupont.

Here one could get the flavour of European proletarian politics: that other “World of Labour” in whose ideals Beesly was as deeply interested as he was in those of English trades unionism.

Indeed, for many years he expressed his desire for the amalgamation of trade unionism – with its implicit recognition of the priority of social questions — and proletarian republicanism – with its generous enthusiasm and its larger view.

[4] The auction lot description read: This is an excellent association copy, inscribed to Karl Marx's friend Professor Edward Spencer Beesly (1831–1915), positivist of the Auguste Comte school of thought, historian, and one of the founding editors of the Fortnightly Review.