Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

then as they are now. Behind us some friends. Then the main body of the army: Marx with his wife and some Sunday guest requiring special attention. And behind these Lenchen with the hungriest of the guests who helped her carry the basket.

After the meal they 'produced the Sunday papers they had bought on the road, and now began the reading and discussing of politics - while the children, who rapidly found playmates, played hide and seek behind the heather bushes'. There followed games and donkey-riding at which Marx amused the company 'by his more than primitive art of riding and by the fanatical zeal with which he affirmed his skill in this art'.130 They returned, with the children and Lenchen bringing up the rear, singing patriotic German songs and reciting Dante or Shakespeare.

Marx also liked to go out occasionally in the evenings.

Sometimes [wrote Liebknecht] it even happened that we relapsed into our old student's pranks. One evening Edgar Bauer, acquainted with Marx from their Berlin time and then not yet his personal enemy in spite of the 'Holy Family', had come to town from his hermitage in Highgate for the purpose of 'making a beer trip'. The problem was to 'take something' in every saloon between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road - making the 'something' a very difficult task, even by confining yourself to a minimum considering the enormous number of saloons in that part of the city. But we went to work undaunted and managed to reach the end of Tottenham Court Road without accident. There loud singing issued from a public house; we entered and learned that a club of Odd Fellows were celebrating a festival.'131

Many toasts were exchanged, but when Liebknecht began to claim superior political intelligence for the Germans and Bauer alluded to English cant, 'fists were brandished in the air and we were sensible enough to choose the better part of valour and managed to effect, not wholly without difficulty, a passably dignified retreat'. However, the evening was not finished:

. . . in order to cool our heated blood, we started on a double quick march, until Edgar Bauer stumbled over a heap of paving stones. 'Hurrah, an idea!' And in memory of mad student's pranks he picked up a stone, and Clash! Clatter! a gas lantern went flying into splinters. Nonsense is contagious - Marx and I did not stay behind, and we broke four or five street lamps - it was, perhaps, 2 o'clock in the morning and the streets were deserted in consequence. But the noise nevertheless attracted the attention of a policeman who with quick resolution gave the signal to his colleagues on the same beat. And immediately countersignals were given. The position became critical. Happily we took in the situation at a glance; and happily we knew the locality. We raced

ahead, three or four policemen some distance behind us. Marx showed an activity that I should not have attributed to him. And after the wild chase had lasted some minutes, we succeeded in turning into a side street and there running through an alley - a back yard between two

streets - whence we came behind the policemen who lost the trail. Now we were safe.132

When Engels was in London staying with Marx, the two of them used to go out together; once Engels wrote to Jenny apologising for having led her husband astray, and was informed that Marx's 'nocturnal wanderings' had brought him such a chill that he had had to stay in bed for a week.

Life in the three rooms in Dean Street was extremely irregular. The following vivid description, which seems to be largely accurate, was written by a Prussian government spy in 1852:

As father and husband, Marx, in spite of his wild and resdess character, is the gendest and mildest of men. Marx lives in one of the worst, therefore one of the cheapest quarters of London. He occupies two rooms. The one looking out on the street is the salon, and the bedroom is at the back. In the whole apartment there is not one clean and solid piece of furniture. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, with a half inch of dust over everything and the greatest disorder everywhere. In the middle of the salon there is a large old-fashioned table covered with an oilcloth, and on it there lie manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children's toys, the rags and tatters of his wife's sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash - in a word, everything topsyturvy, and all on the same table. A seller of second-hand goods would be ashamed to give away such a remarkable collection of odds and ends.

When you enter Marx's room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water so much that for a moment you seem to be groping about in a cavern, but gradually, as you grow accustomed to the fog, you can make out certain objects which distinguish themselves from the surrounding haze. Everything is dirty, and covered with dust, so that to sit down becomes a thoroughly dangerous business. Here is a chair with only three legs, on another chair the children are playing at cooking - this chair happens to have four legs. This is the one which is offered to the visitor, but the children's cooking has not been wiped away; and if you sit down, you risk a pair of trousers.133

Family accommodation was so restricted that when Franziska was born in the spring of 1851, she had to be given to a nurse, there being so little room in the house. A year later, she died.

At Easter, 1852 [wrote Jenny], our little Franziska had a severe bronchitis. For three days she was between life and death. She suffered terribly. When she died we left her lifeless little body in the back room, went into the front room and made our beds on the floor. Our three living children lay down by us and we all wept for the little angel whose livid, lifeless body was in the next room. Our beloved child's death occurred at the time of the hardest privations, our German friends being unable to help us just then. Ernest Jones, who paid us long and frequent visits about that time, promised to help us but he was unable to bring us anything. . . . Anguish in my heart, I hurried to a French emigrant who lived not far away and used to come to see us, and begged him to help us in our terrible necessity. He immediately gave me two pounds with the most friendly sympathy. That money was used to pay for the coffin in which my child now rests in peace. She had no cradle when she came into the world and for a long time was

refused a last resting place. With what heavy hearts we saw her carried to her grave.134

In such circumstances it is not surprising that Jenny's physical and moral resources were quickly dissipated. In 1852, in many ways the worst of the Dean Street years, Jenny was frequently confined to bed, emaciated, coughing and, on doctor's orders, drinking a lot of port. Engels had tried to raise money to get her a holiday in the country but by the autumn she was in bed for days on end taking a spoonful of brandy hourly. Two years later she was again ill but cared for herself on the grounds that the doctor's prescription had only served to make her worse.

Since Jenny acted as his secretary, these illnesses hindered Marx in his work. Indeed, she participated to the full in all of Marx's activities. She attended meetings as an observer for him, picked out newspaper articles that she thought might interest him and looked after publishing details when he was away. She was at her most useful when acting as his secretary, writing letters, producing fair copies of his articles for newspapers (his handwriting being illegible) and keeping careful records of the dispatch of his journalism. She was proud of her role as secretary and wrote later: 'The memory of the days I spent in his little study copying his scrawled articles is among the happiest of my life.'135 In financial matters, too, Jenny was active: she wrote innumerable begging letters, dealt with the creditors who besieged the house and even, in August 1850, 'desperate at the prospect of a fifth child and the future'136 undertook a trip alone to Marx's uncle, a businessman in Holland. However, the recent revolutionary upheavals had not been good for trade and the old man was in no mood to help his eccentric nephew, so Jenny returned empty-handed.

Temperamentally, she was very unpredictable and liable to go to extremes. Marx wrote to her: 'I know how infinitely mercurial you are

K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

and how the least bit of good news gives you new life.'137 'jMercurial' was his favourite word in describing Jenny's character; but with the passage of years she found it increasingly difficult not to be submerged by her oppressive surroundings. In the summer of 1850 Marx wrote to Weydemeyer: 'You must not take amiss the excited letters of my wife. She is

in November 1850 Jenny was quite 'beside herself and 'dangerously overwrought'. The following year Marx described her as being ill 'more from bourgeois than physical causes'. A few months later he wrote to Engels:

Floods of tears the whole night long tire my patience and make me angry.... I feel pity for my wife. Most of the pressure falls on her and basically she is right. Industry must be more productive than marriage. In spite of everything you remember that by nature I am not at all patient and even a litde hard so that from time to time my equanimity disappears.139

In 1854 Marx spoke of 'the dangerous condition of my wife';140 the same year she retreated to bed 'partly from anger because good Dr Freund bombarded us once again with dunning letters'.141 The following year 'for a week my wife has been more ill with nervous excitement than ever before'.142

Of course, much of the housework was taken over by Helene Demuth. Liebknecht wrote of her at this time: '27 years old, and while no beauty, she was nice looking with rather pleasing features. She had no lack of admirers and could have made a good match again and again.' She was in many ways the lynchpin of the Marx household: 'Lenchen was the dictator but Mrs Marx was the mistress. And Marx submitted as meekly as a lamb to that dictatorship.'143

'In the early summer of 1851', Jenny wrote in her autobiography, 'an event occurred that I do not wish to relate here in detail, although it greatly contributed to an increase in our worries, both personal and others.'144 This event was the birth of Marx's illegitimate son Frederick; the mother was Helene Demuth. This fact was kept so well concealed and the surviving papers of the Marx family were so carefully sifted to eliminate all references to it that only the recent chance discovery of a letter brought it to light.145 This letter, addressed to August Bebel, was written by Louise Freyberger (the first wife of Karl Kautsky) who had kept house for Engels on the death of Helene Demuth to whom she had been very close. According to her, Engels had accepted paternity for Frederick and thus 'saved Marx from a difficult domestic conflict.' But

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he gave Louise Freyberger the right to reveal the truth should he be accused of treating his 'son' shabbily. He even told the story to a distraught Eleanor on his deathbed, writing it on a slate as he had lost his voice. The secret was confined to the (Marx) family and one or two friends. The son was immediately sent to foster parents and had no contact at all with the Marx household, though he resumed contact with his mother after Marx's death. Louise Freyberger wrote:

He came regularly every week to visit her; curiously enough, however, he never came in through the front door but always through the kitchen, and only when I came to General and he continued his visits, did I make sure that he had all the rights of a visitor . . .

For Marx separation from his wife, who was terribly jealous, was always before his eyes: he did not love the boy; he did not dare to do anything for him, the scandal would have been too great; he was sent as paying guest to a Mrs Louis (I think that is how she writes her name) and he took his name too from his foster-mother, and only after Nimm's146 death adopted the name of Demuth.147

There is no doubt of the general credibility of this letter. The certificate of Frederick Demuth's birth in June 1851 is conserved in Somerset House; the space for the name of the father is left blank; the name of the mother is given as Helene Demuth and the place of birth as 28 Dean Street. Although so few details of this episode survive, it seems that the necessity of preserving appearances and the fear of the inevitable rumours only served to increase the strain on Jenny's nerves. Five weeks after the birth, and the day following its registration, Marx wrote to Weydemeyer concerning 'the unspeakable infamies that my enemies are spreading about me' and continued: ' . . . my wife is ill, and she has to endure the most unpleasant bourgeois poverty from morning to night. Her nervous system is undermined, and she gets none the better because every day some idiotic talebearers bring her all the vaporings of the democratic cesspools. The tactlessness of these people is sometimes colossal."48

Marx described himself as having 'a hard nature';149 and Jenny wrote of him in 1850: 'he has never, even at the most terrible moments, lost his confidence in the future or his cheerful good humour'.1S0 But his correspondence with Engels shows that he did not always accept his troubles with so much serenity. In 1852 he wrote: 'When I see the sufferings of my wife and my own powerlessness I could rush into the devil's jaws."si And two years later: 'I became wild from time to time that there is no end to the muck.'152 One undated letter from Jenny to Marx in Manchester gives a glimpse of the state of mind to which she was sometimes reduced: 'Meanwhile I sit here and go to pieces. Karl, it

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is now at its worst pitch.... I sit here and almost weep my eyes out and can find no help. My head is disintegrating. For a week I have kept my strength up and now I can no more...

In spite of all their difficulties, their basic sympathy and love for each other continued. While staying with Engels in Manchester in 1852, Marx wrote to her:

Dear Heart,

Your letter delighted me very much. You need never be embarrassed to tell me everything. If you, poor darling, have to go through the bitter reality, it is no more than reasonable than I should at least share

the suffering in spirit? I hope you will get another £5 this week, or at latest by Monday.154

From Manchester again in 1856 he wrote to Jenny (who was in Trier) a letter remarkable both for its sentiments and language and for its being one of the very few surviving from Marx to his wife. The letter is long and the following are some excerpts:

My dearest darling,

. . . I have the living image of you in front of me, I hold you in my arms, kiss you from head to foot, fall before you on my knees and sigh 'Madam, I love you'. And I love you in fact more than the Moor of Venice ever loved. The false and corrupt world conceives of all men's characters as false and corrupt. Who of my many slanderers and snaketonged enemies has ever accused me of having a vocation to play the principal role of lover in a second-class theatre? And yet it is true. Had the wretches had enough wit, they would have painted 'the relationships of production and exchange' on one side and myself at your feet on the other. 'Look to this picture and to that', they would have written beneath. But they are stupid wretches and stupid will they remain in saeculum saeculorum....

But love - not of Feuerbachian man, not of Moleschott's metabolisms, not of the proletariat, but love of one's darling, namely you, makes a man into a man again. In fact there are many women in the world, and some of them are beautiful. But where can I find another face in which every trait, even every wrinkle brings back the greatest and sweetest memories of my life. Even my infinite sorrows, my irreplaceable losses I can read on your sweet countenance, and I kiss my sorrows away when I kiss your sweet face. 'Buried in your arms, awoken by your kisses' - that is, in your arms and by your kisses, and the Brahmins and Pythagoreans can keep their doctrine of reincarnation and Christianity its doctrine of resurrection.155

For both Marx and Jenny the final and hardest blow that they suffered in Dean Street was the death, at the age of eight, of their only son in

April 1855. Edgar, whom they had nicknamed 'Musch' or 'little fly' was 'very gifted, but ailing from the day of his birth - a genuine, true child of sorrow this boy with the magnificent eyes and promising head that was, however, made too large for the weak body'.156 His final illness - a sort of consumption - lasted all through March. By the beginning of April it seemed to be fatal and Marx wrote on the sixth to Engels: 'Poor Musch is no more. He went to sleep (literally) in my arms today between five and six.' Liebknecht described the scene:

the mother silendy weeping, bent over the dead child, Lenchen sobbing beside her, Marx in a terrible agitation vehemendy, almost angrily, rejecting all consolation, the two girls clinging to their mother crying quiedy, the mother clasping them convulsively as if to hold them and defend them against Death that had robbed her of her boy.157

In spite of a holiday in Manchester and the new prospects opened up by Jenny's inheritance, the sorrow remained. At the end of July, Marx wrote to Lassalle:

Bacon says that really important men have so many relations with nature and the world that they recover easily from every loss. I do not belong to these important men. The death of my child has deeply shaken my heart and mind and I still feel the loss as freshly as on the first day. My poor wife is also completely broken down.158

Years later Marx still found a visit to the Soho area a shattering experience.159

Difficulties did not prevent Marx from holding what amounted to an open house:

You are received in the most friendly way [wrote one visitor] and cordially offered pipes and tobacco and whatever else there may happen to be; and eventually a spirited and agreeable conversation arises to make amends for all the domestic deficiencies, and this makes the discomfort tolerable. Finally you grow accustomed to the company, and find it interesting and original.160

No relations of either family seem to have come to the rooms in Dean Street - with the exception of Marx's sister Louise together with the Dutchman she had just married in Trier. But there was a constant stream of other visitors; Harney and his wife, Ernest Jones, Freiligrath and his wife, and Wilhelm Wolff were all regular visitors. The most frequent was a group of young men whose company Marx liked and encouraged. One of this group was Ernst Dronke, a founder-member of the Communist League who had also worked on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-, he occasionally helped Marx with his secretarial work, but later went into commerce

and retired from active politics. Another was Conrad Schramm who fought a duel with Willich - though Marx quarrelled with him in 1851 over Schramm's unwillingness to hand over the Communist League's papers and lost touch when he emigrated to America soon afterwards. A more frequent - at rimes almost daily - visitor was Wilhelm Liebknecht, the young philology student who had fought in the Baden uprising of 1849 and escaped to England via Switzerland. He had a profound, if timid, admiration for Jenny (his own mother had died when he was three) and loved to run errands for her, look after the children and generally absorb Marx's ideas with much greater docility than he was later to show in the 1860s and 1870s as leader of the German Social Democrats. Finally there was Wilhelm Pieper, a young man in his middle twenties who had studied languages in Germany and in the early 1850s stayed with Marx sometimes for weeks on end (when he was not consorting with prostitutes or being employed as a tutor.) He acted as Marx's secretary for a time and translated The Poverty of Philosophy into execrable English. He was tacdess enough to get on Jenny's nerves, and even to reduce Karl Blind's wife to tears during a discussion on Feuerbach in Marx's room. Marx referred to him as his 'doctrinaire echo', regretted his schoolmasterish tone and was pained by his attempts at playing 'modern' music. In spite of all this, he fed Pieper, housed him, helped him recover from illness, got Engels to lend him money and on several occasions even lent him some himself. However unwilling Marx might have been to accept intellectual or party-political opposition, in his relations with these younger friends he was usually amused, tolerant and even generous.

In his personal relationships Marx could exercise great tact and generosity. He would excuse the shortcomings of his friends to Engels and advise Weydemeyer on how to handle Freiligrath or Wolff. He showed great consideration for the wife of his friend Roland Daniels, one of the defendants in the Cologne trial, organised letters to her from Daniels's friends in England and on his death in 1855 wrote her a most moving tribute.161 He even pawned Jenny's last coat to help Eccarius when he was ill.

The man whose friendship Marx valued most was, of course, Friedrich Engels. For the twenty years following his departure from London in late 1850, Marx and Engels kept up a regular correspondence, writing on the average every other day Although this correspondence constitutes by far the most important source for any account of Marx's life during these years, it is not complete: the letters were sifted after Engels' death to remove any (for example those concerning Frederick Demuth) which might embarrass family or friends. Thus the almost total absence in the surviving Marx-Engels correspondence of anything indicating a warm

friendship between the two men may be attributable partly to this later sifting and partly also to the fact that both correspondents (particularly in the early 1850s) suspected that the authorities were intercepting their letters.

Engels' move to Manchester in 1850 meant taking up where he had left off eight years previously. The split in the Communist League and the failure of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Revue removed his chief reason for remaining in London; he had to earn his living; and his mother, to whom he was very attached, urged on him at least an outward reconciliation with his father. There was no representative of the Engels family in the Manchester branch of the firm of Ermen and Engels, and his father agreed to his acting in the family's interests there. The father's consent was reluctant at first, but it turned to enthusiasm after plans to send his son either to Calcutta or to America had failed, and after Engels had demonstrated in his reports back to Barmen his capacity to handle business. Early in 1851 his situation became more permanent, though some difficulties still remained:

the problem is [he wrote to Marx], to have an official position as representative of my father vis-a-vis the Ermens, and yet have no official position inside the firm here entailing an obligation to work and a salary from the firm. However, I hope to achieve it; my business letters have enchanted my father and he considers my remaining here a great sacrifice on my part.162

When his father came over to Britain in July 1851 the matter was settled to the satisfaction of both: Engels was to stay in Manchester for at least three years. He later reckoned to have made more than £230 in his first year there. His father, during his annual inspection the following year, drew up a new contract with his partners that provided his son with an increasing proportion of the profits, and by the end of the decade Engels' income was over £1000 a year. Engels was, as Marx remarked, 'very exact'163 in matters of money and this money enabled him to act as Dutch uncle to the entire 'Marx party'. Dronke received money from him, so did Pieper; Liebknecht was fitted out, at Engels' expense, with a new set of clothes in which to apply for a tutorship. But the lion's share went to Marx: in some years Engels seems to have given him more than he spent on himself. These sums of money - sometimes sent in postal orders, sometimes in £1 or £5 notes cut in half and sent in separate letters - often saved the unworldly Marx from complete disaster. 'Karl was frightfully happy', wrote Jenny on one occasion, 'when he heard the fateful double knock of the postman. "There's Frederic, £2, saved!" he cried

out."64 As a result Engels found it difficult to make ends meet and wrote to Marx in 1853:

Reorganisation of my personal expenses becomes urgent, and in a week or two I will move into cheaper lodgings and take to weaker drinks....

In the previous year, thank God, I got through half of my father's profits in the firm here. As soon as the arrival of my old man approaches, I will move into fine lodgings, produce fine cigars, wine, etc., so that we can create an impression. That's life.1"

Although, as Engels had found previously, the centre of English free trade afforded a good vantage point from which to view economic developments, he would have preferred to be elsewhere. Harney declared that he would sooner be hanged in London than live in Manchester and Engels often complained of his loneliness and boredom. In spite of a plan early in 1852 to move to New Brighton with the entire Marx family, and another scheme in 1854 to m o v e to London as military correspondent of the Daily News, he remained a prisoner in Manchester for twenty years. Several communist friends came to visit him: Weerth who travelled widely for his firm, Dronke who established himself in Bradford, and above all Marx who came once or even twice a year - sometimes for weeks on end. He was also able to renew his life with Mary Burns, though concern for 'respectability' prevented his living with her. His work for the Ermen and Engels business did not keep him from matters of more importance to himself: after a full day's work in his office he would regularly study languages, military science (hence his nickname 'General'), and write articles in Marx's stead.

Engels had a character that was in many ways the exact opposite of Marx's: he was warm, optimistic, well balanced, full of joie de vivre, and enjoyed the reputation of having a fine taste in all that concerned wine and women. Towards his friends he was loyal, patient and unselfish; and intellectually he had a quick, clear mind, and an ability to simplify - sometimes oversimplify - deep and complex questions. In all his surviving correspondence with Marx, Engels only once seems to have reproached Marx - the occasion being Marx's cold reception of the news of Mary Burns's death. The whole correspondence is remarkably unemotional. Although Marx was sometimes angry at Engels' silences, there is only one really abusive letter: Marx had quarrelled with Wilhelm Wolff (nicknamed 'Lupus') over a book that Wolff claimed Marx had borrowed from him and not returned. When Engels' communications became a little less frequent, Marx implied that Engels was putting him in second place to Wolff and Dronke:

At least that is the method that you, since the arrival of Mr Lupus