What was the reaction to arguably the most world-historically influential text since Martin Luther's 95 Theses? Almost complete silence for twenty-five years.

Eric Hobsbawm is one of the most influential historians of the 20th century, drawing praise from both right and left for his mastery of relevant facts and insightful analysis. He coined such terms as "the invention of tradition" (traditions that are presented as ancient but are actually quite recent, for example the Scottish kilt or the Middle Eastern Fez) and "the long 19th century" (from the French Revolution to the start of World War I). Late in his career, clearly just because he loved the topic (he remained a Communist Party member even after many of peers resigned because of the Soviet Invasion of Hungary, and was also a frequent writer for Marxism Today as well as a member of the influential Historians Group of the British Communist Party), he wrote a book called How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism. It's a variety of little essays on subjects related to Marx and Marxism and the chapter "On the Communist Manifesto" is a sweet little history of, well, the reception of the Communist Manifesto. I’ll quote from it liberally below, but the full text is available here.

Composition and Early Publication History

Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels joined the "League of the Just" (an off-shoot of an earlier group called "the League of Outlaws") in spring 1847. The League agreed to publish a a manifesto drafted by Engel and Marx and renamed themselves the League of Communists in 1847. The second congress of the League, held in winter 1847, invited the two to draft a manifesto expounding on the League's aims and policies. If you’ve seen the mediocre movie the Young Karl Marx, this is all covered. Hobsbawm says:

Though both Marx and Engels prepared drafts, and the document clearly represents the joint views of both, the final text was almost certainly written by Marx -- after a stiff reminder by the Executive for Marx, then as later, found it hard to complete his texts except under the pressure of a firm deadline. The virtual absence of early drafts might suggest that it was written rapidly.

The 23-page Manifesto of the Communist Party was published, in German, in February 1948 in London.

The timing of the piece was excellent, as it appeared only weeks before the Revolutions of 1848 impacted most European states. (As a side note: you know how we have the Arab Spring? Or in 1968 Prague Spring? There are many other similarly named periods but the original "Spring" was 1848, "the Springtime of Nations".)

The Manifesto was originally published in German, but had an ambitious internationalist outlook from the jump--"the first edition hopefully, but wrongly, announced the impending publication of the Manifesto in English, French, Italian, Flemish and Danish". It wasn't published in any of those languages for years. The German edition was republished several times over the next few months, was even serialized in a German newspaper, but "dropped out of sight with the failure of the 1848 revolutions." An edition in the original German wouldn't be reprinted in for a decade and a half. It seemed like, after the Revolutions, the Manifesto has run its course.

It wasn’t completely a dead letter, but as Hobsbawm writes, "Nobody would have predicted a remarkable future for it in the 1850s and early 1860s." A Swedish edition was "probably published at the end of 1848," and an English one finally came out in 1850. A small German-language reprint was issued in London "probably in 1864" and an other small edition was printed in Berlin in 1866, the first to actually be published in Germany. But none of these had notable impacts. "By the middle 1860s virtually nothing that Marx had written in the past was any longer in print”—not the Manifesto or much of anything else. (Das Kapital, first published in 1867, and the so-called “mature” works of Marx were still on the horizon.)

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follow-up: 1848 was a year of 'people's revolutions' throughout Europe- something in the air, or could any of them influenced/been influenced by The Communist Manifesto?