Karl Marx’s final refuge was the largest and wealthiest metropolis in the world. London had been the first city to reach a population of 1,000,000, a great wen that continued to swell without ever quite bursting. When the journalist Henry Mayhew went up in a hot-air balloon in the hope of comprehending its entirety, he could not tell ‘where the monster city began or ended, for the buildings stretched not only to the horizon on either side, but far away into the distance … where the town seemed to blend into the sky’. Census figures show that 300,000 newcomers settled in the capital between 1841 and 1851 – including hundreds of refugees who, like Marx, were lured by its reputation as a sanctuary for political outcasts.
But this ‘super-city de luxe’ was also the dark, dank monster that looms up from the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, written three years after Marx’s arrival:
Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
Beyond the plush salons of Mayfair and Piccadilly lay a sprawling, uncharted shanty town of slums and sweatshops, brothels and blacking factories. ‘It is like the heart of the universe and the flood of human effort rolls out of it and into it with a violence that almost appals one’s very sense,’ Thomas Carlyle wrote to his brother. ‘O that our father saw Holborn in a fog! with the black vapour brooding over it, absolutely like fluid ink; and coaches and wains and sheep and oxen and wild people rushing on with bellowings and shrieks and thundering din, as if the earth in general were gone distracted.’ Disease was commonplace – unsurprisingly, since sewers ran into the Thames, which provided much of the water supply. Only a month before Marx came to London, when the city was enduring one of its periodic cholera epidemics, The Times published the following cry for help on its letters page:
Sur, May we beg and beseech you proteckshion and power. We are, Sur, as it may be, living in a Wilderniss, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as rich and great people care about. We live in muck and filthe. We aint got no privez, no dust bins, no drains, no water splies, and no drain or suer in the whole place. The Suer Corporation, in Greek Street, Soho Square, all great, rich and powerfool men, take no notice whatsomedever of our complaints. The Stenche of a Gully-hole is disgustin. We al of us suffer, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us.
In some districts, one child in every three died before its first birthday.
The marvels and monstrosities of Victorian London which so astonished many foreign visitors were invisible to Marx. For all his talents as a reporter and social analyst, he was often curiously oblivious to his own immediate surroundings: unlike Dickens, who plunged into the grime to bring back vivid firsthand observations, he preferred to rely on newspapers or Royal Commissions for information. Nor did he show the slightest interest in the tastes and habits of his new compatriots – their dress, their games, their popular songs. True, in July 1850 he became ‘all flushed and excited’ after noticing a working model of an electric railway engine in the window of a Regent Street shop, but even then it was the economic implications rather than the thrill of novelty that excited him. ‘The problem is solved – the consequences are indefinable,’ he told his fellow gawpers, explaining that just as King Steam had transformed the world in the last century so now the electric spark would set off a new revolution. ‘In the wake of the economic revolution the political must necessarily follow, for the latter is only the expression of the former.’ It seems unlikely that anyone else in the Regent Street crowd had paused to consider the political consequences of this Trojan iron horse; to Marx, however, it was all that mattered. Had he encountered Dickens’s megalosaurus in the mud of Holborn Hill he would scarcely have given it a second glance.
Work was the only reliable distraction from the wretchedness of his plight. Without pausing to acclimatise himself, he set about establishing a new HQ for the Communist League at the London offices of the German Workers’ Education Society, one of the many political groups of the revolutionary diaspora. By mid-September he had also been elected to a Committee to Aid German Refugees. ‘I am now in a really difficult situation,’ he wrote to Ferdinand Freiligrath on 5 September 1849, little more than a week after arriving in England. ‘My wife is in an advanced state of pregnancy, she is obliged to leave Paris on the 15th and I don’t know how I am to raise the money for her journey and for settling her in here. On the other hand there are excellent prospects of my being able to start a monthly review here …’
Few refugees required aid more urgently than the Marxes. Jenny reached London on 17 September, sick and exhausted, with ‘my three poor persecuted small children’. Jennychen had been born in France, Laura and Edgar in Belgium, and this record of peripatetic parturition was maintained by their second son, who entered the world on 5 November 1849 to the sound of exploding fireworks as Londoners held their annual celebration of the failure of Guido (Guy) Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. In homage to the great conspirator, the boy was christened Heinrich Guido and instantly nicknamed ‘Fawkesy’ (later Germanicised into ‘Foxchen’).
Marx had a most endearing passion for sobriquets and pseudonyms. Sometimes, of course, these were a political necessity: hence the comical alias ‘Monsieur Ramboz’, adopted while he was lying low in Paris. Even in liberal London, where there was little need for subterfuge, he sometimes signed his letters ‘A. Williams’ to evade any police finks in the postal sorting office. But most of the monikers he bestowed so liberally on friends and family were purely whimsical. Engels, the armchair soldier, was addressed by his imaginary rank, ‘General’. The housekeeper Helene Demuth was ‘Lenchen’ or, occasionally, ‘Nym’. Jennychen enjoyed the title if not the trappings of ‘Qui Qui, Emperor of China’, while Laura became ‘Kakadou’ and ‘the Hottentot’. Marx, known to intimates as ‘Moor’, encouraged his children to call him ‘Old Nick’ and ‘Charley’. Confusingly, the surest sign of his contempt for someone was the regular use of their Christian name: the poet Kinkel, anti-hero of Marx’s pamphlet Great Men of the Exile, was always referred to as ‘Gottfried’.
‘You know that my wife has made the world richer by one citizen?’ Marx wrote to Joseph Weydemeyer in Frankfurt, soon after Fawkesy’s début. The chirpy tone concealed a fearful apprehension: how on earth was he to provide for four young children and an ailing wife? Like Mr Micawber, he persuaded himself that something was bound to turn up. In October he had moved into a house in Anderson Street, Chelsea (then as now one of the more fashionable and expensive districts) at a rent of £6 a month, far more than he could afford.
A penniless, deracinated exile in a strange land might seem to need all the friends he can muster; but not Marx. The only ally he required was Engels – who, faithful as ever, moved to London on 12 November, loins girded for battle with the backsliders and traitors. At a meeting of the German Workers’ Education Society six days later, Marx changed the name of the refugees’ aid committee to distinguish it from a rival group founded by such namy-pamby ‘liberals’ as Gustav von Struve, Karl Heinzen and the Marxes’ newly acquired family doctor, Louis Bauer. With severe formality, he informed Dr Bauer that ‘in view of the inimical relations now obtaining between the two societies to which we belong – in view of your direct attacks upon the refugee committee here, at any rate upon my friends and colleagues in the same – we must break off social relations … Yesterday evening I thought it unseemly, in the presence of my wife, to express my views on this collision. While expressing my utmost obligation to you for your medical assistance, I would beg you to send me your account.’ As soon as the bill was presented, however, Marx accused the doctor of trying to fleece him and refused to pay.
By Christmas, Engels was able to report to another German comrade that ‘all in all, things are going quite well here. Struve and Heinzen are intriguing with all and sundry against the Workers’ Society and ourselves, but without success. They, together with some wailers of moderate persuasion who have been thrown out of our society, form a select club at which Heinzen airs his grievances about the noxious doctrines of the communists.’ When The Times described Heinzen as a ‘shining light of the German Social Democratic Party’, Engels sent a stern rebuttal to the Northern Star, a Chartist paper: ‘Herr Heinzen, so far from serving as a shining light to the party in question, has, on the contrary, ever since 1842, strenuously, though unsuccessfully, opposed everything like Socialism and Communism’. It was just like the old times in Paris or Brussels – a whirligig of intriguing, score-settling and striving for mastery. At the Society’s clubroom in Great Windmill Street, Soho, Marx soon took charge of vetting newcomers and laying down the law.
Wilhelm Liebknecht, who fled to London in 1850, left a vivid account of the intimidating methods by which Marx established his dominance. At a Society picnic shortly after his arrival he was taken aside by ‘Père Marx’, who began a minute inspection of the shape of his skull. Unable to find any obvious abnormalities, Marx invited him to the ‘private parlour’ at Great Windmill Street the following day for a more thorough scrutiny:
I did not know what a private parlour was, and I had a presentiment that now the ‘main’ examination was impending, but I followed confidingly. Marx, who had made the same sympathetic impression on me as the day previous, had the quality of inspiring confidence. He took my arm and led me into the private parlour; that is to say, the private room of the host – or was it a hostess? – where Engels, who had already provided himself with a pewter-pot full of dark-brown stout, at once received me with merry jokes … The massive mahogany table, the shining pewter-pots, the foaming stout, the prospect of a genuine English beefsteak with accessories, the long clay pipes inviting to a smoke – it was really comfortable and vividly recalled a certain picture in the English illustrations of ‘Boz’. But an examination it was for all that.
The examiners had done their homework. Citing an article written by Liebknecht for a German newspaper in 1848, Marx accused him of philistinism and ‘South German sentimental haziness’. After a long plea in mitigation, the candidate was pardoned. But his ordeal had not finished: the Communists’ resident phrenologist, Karl Pfaender, was then summoned to carry out a further investigation of Liebknecht’s cranial contours. ‘Well, my skull was officially inspected by Karl Pfaender and nothing was found that would have prevented my admission into the Holiest of Holies of the Communist League. But the examinations did not cease …’ Marx, who was only five or six years older than the ‘young fellows’ such as Wilhelm Liebknecht, quizzed them as if he were a professor testing a rather dim class of undergraduates, wielding his colossal knowledge and fabulous memory as instruments of torture. ‘How he rejoiced when he had tempted a “little student” to go on the ice and demonstrated in the person of the unfortunate the inadequateness of our universities and of academic culture.’
Marx was undoubtedly a tremendous show-off and a sadistic intellectual thug. But he was also an inspiring teacher, who educated the young refugees in Spanish, Greek, Latin, philosophy and political economy. ‘And how patient he was in teaching, he who otherwise was so stormily impatient!’ From November 1849 he delivered a long course of lectures under the title ‘What is Bourgeois Property?’, which drew capacity crowds to the upstairs room at Great Windmill Street. ‘He stated a proposition – the shorter the better – and then demonstrated it in a lengthier explanation, endeavouring with the utmost care to avoid all expressions incomprehensible to the workers,’ Liebknecht recalled. ‘Then he requested his audience to put questions to him. If this was not done he commenced to examine the workers, and he did this with such pedagogic skill that no flaw, no misunderstanding escaped him … He also made use of a blackboard, on which he wrote the formulas – among them those familiar to all of us from the beginning of Capital.’
The denizens of Great Windmill Street maintained a busy timetable. On Sundays, there were lectures on history, geography and astronomy, followed by ‘questions of the present position of the workers and their attitude to the bourgeoisie’. Discussions about communism occupied most of Monday and Tuesday, but later in the week the curriculum included singing practice, language teaching, drawing lessons and even dancing classes. Saturday evening was devoted to ‘music, recitations and reading interesting newspaper articles’. In spare moments, Marx would stroll up to Rathbone Place, just off Oxford Street, where a group of French émigrés had opened a salon in which fencing with sabres, swords and foils could be practised. According to Liebknecht, Marx’s cut-and-thrust technique was crude but effective. ‘What he lacked in science, he tried to make up in aggressiveness. And unless you were cool, he could really startle you.’
As with the sword, so with the mightier pen: when not brandishing an épée he was preparing to unsheathe yet another newspaper with which he could stab and gore the philistines. At the beginning of 1850, the following announcement appeared in the German press: ‘The Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue edited by Karl Marx will appear in January 1850 … The review will be published in monthly issues of at least five printers’ sheets at a subscription price of 24 silver groschen per quarter.’ The business manager was to be Conrad Schramm, another footloose German revolutionary who had come to London a few months earlier.
Marx’s ambitions for the review were heroically grand. ‘I have little doubt that by the time three, or maybe two, monthly issues have appeared, a world conflagration will intervene,’ he predicted. In the meantime, however, there was the small but tiresome problem of finance. Convinced that ‘money is to be had only in America’, Marx decided to send Conrad Schramm on a transatlantic fund-raising tour – until it belatedly dawned on him that such a lengthy journey would incur even more expense.
The new journal, which limped through five issues before expiring, was jinxed from the start. The first issue was postponed when Marx fell ill for a fortnight; the typesetters’ inability to decipher his scrawl caused further delay; he argued continually with the publisher and distributor, suspecting them of being in league with the censors. The miracle is that it ever appeared at all.
There were many good things in the Revue – notably a long series in which Marx employed all his dialectical ingenuity to challenge the received wisdom that the French revolution of 1848 had failed. ‘What succumbed in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary traditional appendages, results of social relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class antagonisms …’ Success would have been a disaster in disguise: it was only by a series of rebuffs that the revolutionary party could free itself of illusory notions and opportunistic leaders. ‘In a word: the revolution made progress, forged ahead, not by its immediate tragi-comic achievements, but on the contrary by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution.’ Having proved this contrarian thesis to his own satisfaction (‘The revolution is dead! – Long live the revolution!’), he moved on to discuss Louis Napoleon’s spectacular victory in the presidential elections of December 1848. Why had the French voted, in such overwhelming numbers, for this preposterous deadbeat – ‘clumsily cunning, knavishly naïve, doltishly sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, a cleverly stupid anachronism, a world-historic piece of buffoonery and an undecipherable hieroglyphic’? Simple: the very blankness of this junior Bonaparte allowed all classes and types to reinvent him in their own image. To the peasantry, he was the enemy of the rich; to the proletariat, he represented the overthrow of bourgeois republicanism; to the haute bourgeoisie, he offered the hope of royalist restoration; to the army, he promised war. Thus it happened that the most simple-minded man in France acquired the most complex significance: ‘Just because he was nothing, he could signify everything.’
For all its boldness and brilliance, the Revue did not go out of its way to woo subscribers. As E. H. Carr has pointed out, ‘the whole was tactfully seasoned with pungent attacks on the other German refugees in London, who were almost the only potential readers of the journal’. The circulation was tiny, and revenue negligible. In May 1850, Jenny Marx wrote beseechingly to Weydemeyer in Frankfurt: ‘I beg you to send us as soon as possible any money that has come in or comes in from the Revue. We are in dire need of it.’ Marx himself was stoical about the failure of a project in which he had invested so much hope and energy. As Jenny noted admiringly, he never lost his good humour or robust confidence in the future even during the ‘most frightful moments’ – of which there were all too many in 1850. ‘Pray do not be offended by my wife’s agitated letters,’ he reassured Weydemeyer. ‘She is nursing her child, and our situation here is so extraordinarily wretched that an outburst of impatience is excusable.’
This brisk summary barely hinted at the true horror of their struggle for survival. In a long and heart-rending letter written in May 1850, Jenny Marx described a scene that might have come from a Dickens novel:
Let me describe for you, as it really was, just one day in our lives, and you will realise that few refugees are likely to have gone through a similar experience. Since wet-nurses here are exorbitantly expensive, I was determined to feed my child myself, however frightful the pain in my breast and back. But the poor little angel absorbed with my milk so many anxieties and unspoken sorrows that he was always ailing and in severe pain by day and by night. Since coming into the world, he has never slept a whole night through – at most, two or three hours. Latterly, too, there have been violent convulsions, so that the child has been hovering constantly between death and a miserable life. In his pain he sucked so hard that I got a sore on my breast – an open sore; often blood would spurt into his little, trembling mouth. I was sitting thus one day when suddenly in came our landlady, to whom we had paid over 250 Reichstahlers in the course of the winter, and with whom we had contractually agreed that we should subsequently pay, not her, but her landlord by whom she had formerly been placed under distraint; she now denied the existence of this contract, demanded the £5 we still owed her and, since this was not ready to hand … two bailiffs entered the house and placed under distraint what little I possessed – beds, linen, clothes, everything, even my poor infant’s cradle, and the best of the toys belonging to the girls, who burst into tears. They threatened to take everything away within two hours – leaving me lying on the bare boards with my shivering children and my sore breast. Our friend Schramm left hurriedly for town in search of help. He climbed into a cab, the horses took fright, he jumped out of the vehicle and was brought bleeding back to the house where I was lamenting in company with my poor, trembling children.
The following day we had to leave the house, it was cold, wet and overcast, my husband went to look for lodgings; on his mentioning four children, no one wanted to take us in. At last a friend came to our aid, we paid, and I hurriedly sold all my beds so as to settle with the apothecaries, bakers, butchers and milkman who, their fears aroused by the scandal of the bailiffs, had suddenly besieged me with their bills. The beds I had sold were brought out on to the pavement and loaded on to a barrow – and then what happens? It was long after sunset, English law prohibits this, the landlord bears down on us with constables in attendance, declares we might have included some of his stuff with our own, that we are doing a flit and going abroad. In less than five minutes a crowd of two or three hundred people stands gaping outside our door, all the riff-raff of Chelsea. In go the beds again; they cannot be handed over to the purchaser until tomorrow morning after sunrise; having thus been enabled, by the sale of everything we possessed, to pay every farthing, I removed with my little darlings into the two little rooms we now occupy in the German Hotel, I Leicester Street, Leicester Square, where we were given a humane reception in return for £5.10 a week.
A few days later the Marxes found temporary shelter in the house of a Jewish lace dealer at 64 Dean Street, Soho, where they spent a miserable summer teetering on the edge of destitution. Jenny was pregnant again, and constantly ill. By August things were so bad that she had to go to Holland and throw herself on the mercy of Karl’s maternal uncle Lion Philips, a wealthy Dutch businessman (whose eponymous company flourishes to this day, selling all manner of electronic products from television sets to pop-up toasters). She needn’t have bothered: Philips, who was ‘very ill-disposed by the unfavourable effect the revolution had had on his business’, offered only an avuncular embrace and a small present for little Fawkesy. When she warned that they would have to emigrate to America if he couldn’t rescue them, Philips replied that he thought this an excellent idea. ‘I am afraid, dear Karl, I am coming home to you quite empty-handed, disappointed, torn apart and tortured by a fear of death,’ Jenny wrote. ‘Oh, if you knew how much I am longing to see you and the little ones. I cannot write anything about the children, my eyes begin to tremble …’
Many revolutionaries exiled in London were artisans – type-setters, cobblers, watchmakers. Others earned a few pounds by teaching English or German. But Marx was congenitally unsuited to any regular employment. He did consider emigration but discovered that tickets for the voyage would be ‘hellishly expensive’; if he had known that assisted passages were available, he might have taken the next boat. As usual, Engels saved the day, sacrificing his own journalistic ambitions in London to take a job at the Manchester office of his father’s textile firm, Ermen & Engels. He remained there for almost twenty years. ‘My husband and all the rest of us have missed you sorely and have often longed to see you,’ Jenny wrote soon after his departure, in December 1850. ‘However, I am very glad that you have left and are well on the way to becoming a great cotton lord.’
He had no desire to become anything of the kind, regarding ‘vile commerce’ as a penance that had to be endured. Though Engels soon assumed the outward appearance of a Lancashire businessman – joining the more exclusive clubs, filling his cellar with champagne, riding to hounds with the Cheshire Hunt – he never forgot that the main purpose was to support his brilliant but impecunious friend. He acted as a kind of secret agent behind enemy lines, sending Marx confidential details of the cotton trade, expert observations on the state of international markets and – most essentially – a regular consignment of small-denomination banknotes, pilfered from the petty cash box or guilefully prised out of the company’s bank account. (As a precaution against mail theft he snipped them in two, posting each half in a separate envelope.) It is a measure of how slackly the office was run that neither his father nor his business partner in Manchester, Peter Ermen, ever noticed anything amiss.
Nevertheless, Engels was careful not to arouse their suspicions, even if this sometimes meant leaving the Marx family penniless. ‘I am writing today just to tell you that I am unfortunately still not in a position to send you the £2 I promised you,’ he wrote in November. ‘Ermen has gone away for a few days and, since no proxy has been authorised with the bank, we are unable to make any remittances and have to content ourselves with the few small payments that happen to come in. The total amount in the cash box is only about £4 and you will therefore realise that I must wait a while.’ When his father visited the Manchester office a few months later, Engels negotiated himself an ‘expense and entertainment allowance’ of £200 a year. ‘With such a salary, all should be well, and if there are no ructions before the next balance sheet and if business prospers here, he’ll have quite a different bill to foot – even this year I’ll exceed the £200 by far,’ he reported. ‘Since business has been very good and he is now more than twice as wealthy as he was in 1837, it goes without saying that I shan’t be needlessly scrupulous.’ Engels senior soon had second thoughts, deciding that Friedrich was spending far too much money and must make do with £150. Though the prodigal son chafed at this ‘ludicrous imposition’, it didn’t cramp his generosity unduly. By 1853 he was able to boast that ‘last year, thank God, I gobbled up half of my old man’s profits from the business here’. He could even afford to maintain two residences: at one, a smart townhouse, he entertained the local nobs and nabobs, while in the other he established a ménage à trois with his lover Mary Burns and her sister Lizzie.
On 15 June 1850, shortly before Engels began his long northern exile, the London Spectator printed a letter from Messrs ‘Charles Marx’ and ‘Fredc. Engels’ of 64 Dean Street, Soho. ‘Really, Sir, we should never have thought that there existed in this country so many police spies as we have had the good fortune of making the acquaintance of in the short space of a week,’ they wrote. ‘Not only that the doors of the houses where we live are closely watched by individuals of a more than doubtful look, who take down their notes very coolly every time one enters the house or leaves it; we cannot make a single step without being followed by them wherever we go. We cannot get into an omnibus or enter a coffeehouse without being favoured with the company of at least one of these unknown friends.’
And quite right too, Spectator readers might have thought, especially since the authors proudly identified themselves as revolutionaries who had fled from the land of their birth. But Marx and Engels forestalled this objection with a cunning appeal to English vanity and Hunnophobia, revealing that in their previous sanctuaries – France, Belgium, Switzerland – they had been unable to escape the baleful power of the Prussian King. ‘If, through his influences, we are to be made to leave this last refuge left to us in Europe, why then Prussia will think herself the ruling power of the world … We believe, Sir, that under these circumstances, we cannot do better than bring the whole case before the public. We believe that Englishmen are interested in anything by which the old-established reputation of England, as the safest asylum for refugees of all parties and all countries, may be more or less affected.’
In spite of the amused tone, Marx desperately needed reassurance that good old England would not let him down. Since a recent assassination attempt on King Frederick William IV, the Prussian Minister of the Interior had intensified his campaign against ‘political conspirators’ by dispatching police spies and agents provocateurs to the capitals of Europe – particularly to London, and most particularly to Dean Street, Soho. And no wonder: for the Minister of the Interior was none other than Jenny’s reactionary half-brother Ferdinand von Westphalen. Having failed to prevent Marx from marrying into his family seven years earlier, he was hell-bent on revenge.
In the Spectator letter, Marx alleged that a fortnight before the shooting of King Frederick William ‘persons whom we have every reason to consider as agents either of the Prussian government or the Ultra-Royalists presented themselves to us, and almost directly engaged us to enter into conspiracies for organising regicide in Berlin and elsewhere. We need not add that these persons found no chance of making dupes of us.’ Their aim, as he explained, was to persuade the British authorities to ‘remove from this country the pretended chiefs of the pretended conspiracy’. One of these unidentified agents was Wilhelm Stieber, later the chief of Bismarck’s secret service, who came to London during the spring of 1850 masquerading as a journalist called Schmidt. Stieber had been instructed to keep a close eye on Karl Marx, and after infiltrating the communist HQ at 20 Great Windmill Street he sent back an urgent cable confirming all von Westphalen’s suspicions about his nefarious brother-in-law. ‘The murder of Princes is formally taught and discussed,’ he reported:
At a meeting held the day before yesterday at which I assisted and over which Wolff and Marx presided, I heard one of the orators call out ‘The Moon Calf [Queen Victoria] will likewise not escape its destiny. The English steel wares are the best, the axes cut particularly sharply here, and the guillotine awaits every Crowned Head.’ Thus the murder of the Queen of England is proclaimed by Germans a few hundred yards only from Buckingham Palace … Before the close of the meeting Marx told his audience that they might be perfectly tranquil, their men were everywhere at their posts. The eventful moment was approaching and infallible measures are taken so that not one of the European crowned executioners can escape.
An earlier biographer of Karl Marx has claimed that ‘this report is oddly convincing’. In fact, it is manifestly absurd – as the British government of the time recognised. Although the Prussian Minister of the Interior forwarded the dispatch to London, Lord Palmerston consigned it to the Foreign Office files where it remains to this day. As far as one can tell, he did not even bother to alert Scotland Yard. When the Austrian ambassador in London complained to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, that Marx and his fellow members of the Communist League were discussing regicide, he was rewarded with a brief, supercilious lecture on the nature of liberal democracy: ‘Under our laws, mere discussion of regicide, so long as it does not concern the Queen of England and so long as there is no definite plan, does not constitute sufficient grounds for the arrest of the conspirators.’ A plot to assassinate Queen Victoria was precisely the sort of pointless stunt that Marx abhorred. He despised those revolutionaries who preferred flamboyant gestures to the dull but necessary process of preparing for the economic crisis which would precipitate the victory of the proletariat. Indeed, it was his very doggedness on this point that destroyed the Communist League in London, as the more impatient committee members chafed at his insistence that they must bide their time.
The leader of the malcontents was August Willich, Engels’s old military commander from the ’49 campaign in Baden, who had been making a thorough nuisance of himself since joining the German diaspora in England. ‘He would come to visit me,’ Jenny Marx wrote many years later, ‘because he wanted to pursue the worm that lives in every marriage and lure it out.’ Almost everything about Willich was calculated to irritate Marx – his posturing and preening, his colourful clothes, his noisy attention seeking. By the summer of 1850 he was openly denouncing Jenny’s husband as a ‘reactionary’. Marx, never one to miss an opportunity for vituperation, retaliated by dismissing him as an ‘uneducated, four-times cuckolded jackass’. At a riotous meeting of the League’s central committee on 1 September, Willich challenged Marx to a duel.
As Willich was a crack shot who could hit the ace of hearts at twenty paces, Marx had enough sense to refuse; but his eager lieutenant Conrad Schramm, who had never fired a pistol in his life, picked up the gauntlet at once and departed with Willich to Antwerp – duels being illegal in Britain – for a final reckoning. Karl and Jenny feared the worst, especially when they heard that that Willich was taking Emmanuel Barthélemy as his second. Barthélemy, a fierce-eyed muscular ruffian, had been convicted of murdering a policeman at the age of seventeen and still wore on his shoulder the indelible brand of a galley convict. Having fled to London only a few weeks earlier, after escaping from a French prison, he had already been heard to say that ‘traîtres’ such as Marx and his cronies should be killed. Given his prowess with pistol and sabre, as demonstrated at the salon in Rathbone Place, this was no idle threat.
What hope did the bold but feeble Schramm have against the formidable expertise of Willich and Barthélemy? On the appointed day, Marx and Jenny sat miserably in their rooms with Wilhelm Liebknecht, counting the minutes until their young comrade died. The next evening Barthélemy himself came to the door and announced in a sepulchral voice that ‘Schramm a une balle dans la tète!’ Bowing stiffly, he then left without another word.
‘Of course, we gave up Schramm for lost,’ Liebknecht wrote. ‘The next day, while we were just talking about him sadly, the door is opened and in comes with a bandaged head but gaily laughing the sadly mourned one and relates that he had received a glancing shot which had stunned him – when he recovered consciousness, he was alone on the sea coast with his second and his physician.’ Assuming that the wound was fatal, Willich and Barthélemy had caught the next steamer back from Ostend.
Thus ended Marx’s dream of running the Communist League from England. At its final meeting, on 15 September 1850, he proposed that the Central Committee should be transferred to Cologne since the bickering London agitators were incapable of providing leadership of any kind. A fair point – except that the Communists of Cologne had quite enough problems of their own. The Prussian government had redoubled its persecution of subversives since the attempted assassination of King Frederick William IV, and by the summer of 1851 all eleven members of the Cologne Central Committee were in jail awaiting trial on conspiracy charges. Poor old Marx, who had looked forward to a well-earned respite from the Communist League, found himself reluctantly dragged back into its affairs as he began to lobby and protest on behalf of the German ‘conspirators’. It was not mere altruism: to his fury, he had been fingered by the prosecutor as the evil genius behind the bloodthirsty schemes and coups of which the defendants were accused. He worked day and night, setting up defence committees, raising funds, scribbling indignant letters to the newspapers. ‘A complete office has now been set up in our house,’ Jenny told a friend. ‘Two or three people are writing, others running errands, others scraping pennies together so that the writers may continue to exist and prove the old world of officialdom guilty of the most outrageous scandal. And in between whiles my three merry children sing and whistle, often to be harshly told off by their papa. What a bustle!’
Seven of the eleven defendants were imprisoned. The Communist League was dead, and many years were to pass before Marx joined any other organisation. Understandably weary of Committees and Societies and Leagues, which demanded so much and achieved so little, he retreated into the British Museum reading room, ten minutes’ walk from Dean Street, and applied himself to the ambitious task of producing a comprehensive, systematic explanation of political economy – the monumental project which was to become Capital.
At the end of 1850 – after six wretched months at 64 Dean Street – Karl and Jenny Marx found a more permanent home a hundred yards up the road, in two rooms on the top floor of number 28. Today the building is an expensive restaurant presided over by the modish chef Marco-Pierre White; a small blue plaque on the front, affixed by the defunct Greater London Council, records that ‘Karl Marx 1818–1883 lived here 1851–56’. This is the only official monument to his thirty-four years in England, a country which has never known whether to feel pride or shame at its connection with the father of proletarian revolution. Appropriately enough, the dates on the sign are inaccurate.
The annus horribilis was nearly over, but it had a few more cruelties to inflict. Two weeks before the Marxes moved into 28 Dean Street their little gunpowder plotter, Heinrich Guido ‘Fawksey’, died suddenly after a fit of convulsions. ‘A few minutes before, he was laughing and joking,’ Marx told Engels. ‘You can imagine what it is like here. Your absence at this particular moment makes us feel very lonely.’ Jenny was quite distraught, ‘in a dangerous state of excitation and exhaustion’, while Karl expressed his grief in characteristic style by denouncing the perfidy of his comrades. The main target this time was Conrad Schramm, that erstwhile Hotspur who had risked his life only a few weeks earlier to defend Marx’s honour.
‘For two whole days, 19 and 20 November, he never showed his face in our house,’ Marx raged, ‘then came for a moment and immediately disappeared again after one or two fatuous remarks. He had volunteered to accompany us on the day of the funeral; he arrived a minute or two before the appointed hour, said not a word about the funeral, but told my wife that he had to hurry away so as not to be late for a meal with his brother.’ Schramm thus joined an ever-lengthening list of traitors. Rudolf Schramm, Conrad’s brother, was already on it, having had the effrontery to organise a meeting of Germans in London without inviting associates of Marx and Engels.
Another of these outcasts was Eduard von Müller-Tellering, a former correspondent for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung who was known as ‘a first-class brawler’ but met his match when he tried to pick a fight with Marx. As so often with these internecine vendettas, the original casus belli was laughably petty. Tellering asked Engels, at very short notice, for a ticket to a ball organised by the German Workers’ Educational Society; Engels, explaining that the application was too late, couldn’t resist pointing out that Tellering had never attended any meetings of the Society, nor even collected his membership card – ‘and only the day before yesterday an individual in a similar situation was expelled from the society’. Taking the hint, the Society’s ‘court of honour’, presided over by Willich, rescinded Tellering’s membership. He replied with a volley of libellous attacks on the Marx – Engels clique – or, as it was often called by now, the Marx Party.
At this point the party leader himself entered the fray. ‘For the letter you wrote yesterday to the Workers’ Society, I would send you a challenge, were you still capable of giving satisfaction,’ Marx thundered. ‘I await you on a different field to strip you of the hypocritical mask of revolutionary fanaticism behind which you have so far skilfully contrived to hide your petty interests, your envy, your unassuaged vanity and your angry discontent over the world’s lack of appreciation for your great genius – a lack of appreciation that began with your failure to pass your examination.’ It was Marx who had encouraged Tellering’s journalistic ambitions and had recommended him to the Society; it was now Marx who consigned the unworthy servant to the outer darkness. After one final, flailing counter-strike – a pamphlet of hysterical anti-Semitic insults – Tellering emigrated to the United States and was never heard of again.
Marx revelled in conflict and was always alert to any slight, real or imagined. Tellering and Rudolf Schramm were ‘those wretches’; the leaders of the Democratic Association – a rival group to the German Workers’ Educational Society – were ‘charlatans and swindlers’; another group of newly arrived refugees was ‘a fresh swarm of democratic scallywags’. If these wretches and scallywags were so negligible, one might well ask, why couldn’t he ignore them? When libelled in print by an obscure politician in Switzerland named Karl Vogt, did he really have to compose a 200-page polemic – Herr Vogt – by way of reply? Marx was not alone in disliking the vain and boastful revolutionary poet Gottfried Kinkel, but no one else thought it necessary to subject Kinkel’s absurdities to a hundred closely printed pages of scabrous mockery, published under the sarcastic title The Great Men of the Exile. Whenever well-wishers suggested that a lion should not waste his time fighting with dung-beetles, Marx would reply that the merciless exposure of utopian charlatans was nothing less than his revolutionary duty: ‘Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against our self-styled friends than against our declared enemies.’
Besides, he enjoyed the sport. One need only read some of the incidental pen portraits in The Great Men of the Exile to see what pleasure he took in skewering them. Rudolf Schramm: ‘A rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little mannikin whose life motto came from Rameau’s Nephew: “I would rather be an impudent windbag than nothing at all.”’ Gustav Struve: ‘At the very first glimpse of his leathery appearance, his protuberant eyes with their sly, stupid expression, the matt gleam on his bald pate and his half Slav, half Kalmuck features one cannot doubt that one is in the presence of an unusual man …’ Arnold Ruge: ‘It cannot be said that this noble man commends himself by his notably handsome exterior; Paris acquaintances were wont to sum up his Pomeranian-Slav features with the word “ferret-face” … Ruge stands in the German revolution like the notices seen at the corner of certain streets: It is permitted to pass water here.’
Far from dissipating his vigour, these wild jeremiads actually seemed to renew it. The volcanic rage that erupted over obscure deviationists or dullards was the same fiery passion that illuminated his exposures of capitalism and its contradictions. To work at his best, Marx needed to keep himself in a state of seething fury – whether at the endless domestic disasters that beset him, at his wretched ill health or at the halfwits who dared to challenge his superior wisdom. While writing Capital, he vowed that the bourgeois would have good reason to remember the carbuncles which caused him such pain and kept his temper foul. The Vogts and the Kinkels served the same purpose – not so much butterflies upon a wheel as festering boils on the bum.
His living conditions might have been expressly designed to keep him from lapsing into contentment. The furniture and fittings in the two-room apartment were all broken, tattered or torn, with a half-inch of dust over everything. In the middle of the front living-room, overlooking Dean Street, was a big table covered with an oilcloth on which lay Marx’s manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children’s toys, rags and scraps from his wife’s sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes and a thick veneer of tobacco ash. Even finding somewhere to sit was fraught with peril. ‘Here is a chair with only three legs, on another chair the children have been playing at cooking – this chair happens to have four legs,’ a guest reported. ‘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.’
One of the few Prussian police spies who gained admission to this smoke-filled cavern was shocked by Marx’s chaotic habits:
He leads the existence of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk. Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world.
Marx’s reluctance to go to bed seems eminently reasonable, since his whole ménage – including the housekeeper, Helene ‘Lenchen’ Demuth – had to sleep in one small room at the back of the building. How Karl and Jenny ever found the time or privacy for procreation remains a mystery; one assumes that they seized their chances while Lenchen was out taking the children for a walk. With Jenny ill and Karl preoccupied, the task of preserving any semblance of domestic order fell entirely on their servant. ‘Oh, if you knew how much I am longing for you and the little ones,’ Jenny wrote to Karl during her fruitless expedition to Holland in 1850. ‘I know that you and Lenchen will take care of them. Without Lenchen I would not have peace of mind here.’
Lenchen was indeed attending to Jenny’s usual duties – including those of the conjugal bed. Nine months later, on 23 June 1851, she gave birth to a baby boy. On the birth certificate for young Henry Frederick Demuth, later known as Freddy, the space for the father’s name and occupation were left blank. The child was given to foster parents soon afterwards, probably a working-class couple called Lewis in east London. (The evidence here is only circumstantial: Lenchen’s son changed his name to Frederick Lewis Demuth and spent his entire adult life in the borough of Hackney. He became a skilled lathe-operator in several East End factories, a stalwart of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and a founder member of Hackney Labour Party. Remembered by colleagues as a quiet man who never talked about his family, he died on 28 January 1929.)
Since Freddy was born in the small back room at 28 Dean Street – and Lenchen’s swelling stomach would have been all too obvious in the preceding weeks – this apparently miraculous conception could not be hidden from Jenny. Though deeply upset and angry, she agreed that the news would provide lethal ammunition to Marx’s enemies should it ever get out. So began one of the first and most successful cover-ups ever organised for the greater good of the communist cause. There were plenty of rumours that Marx had fathered an illegitimate child, but the first public reference to Freddy’s true paternity did not appear until 1962, when the German historian Werner Blumenberg published a document found in the vast Marxist archive at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. It is a letter written on 2 September 1898 by Louise Freyberger, a friend of Helene Demuth and housekeeper to Engels, describing her employer’s deathbed confession:
I know from General [Engels] himself that Freddy Demuth is Marx’s son. Tussy [Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor] went on at me so, that I asked the old man straight out. General was very astonished that Tussy clung to her opinion so obstinately. And he told me that if necessary I was to give the lie to the gossip that he disowned his son. You will remember that I told you about it long before General’s death.
Moreover this fact that Frederick Demuth was the son of Karl Marx and Helene Demuth was again confirmed by General a few days before his death in a statement to Mr Moore [Samuel Moore, translator of the Communist Manifesto and Capital], who then went to Tussy at Orpington and told her. Tussy maintained that General was lying and that he himself had always admitted he was the father. Moore came back from Orpington and questioned General again closely. But the old man stuck to his statement that Freddy was Marx’s son, and said to Moore, ‘Tussy wants to make an idol of her father.’
On Sunday, that is to say the day before he died, General wrote it down himself for Tussy on the slate, and Tussy came out so shattered that she forgot all about her hatred of me and wept bitterly on my shoulder.
General gave us … permission to make use of the information only if he should be accused of treating Freddy shabbily. He said he would not want his name slandered, especially as it could no longer do anyone any good. By taking Marx’s part he had saved him from a serious domestic conflict. Apart from ourselves and Mr Moore and Mr Marx’s children (I think Laura knew about the story even though perhaps she had not heard it exactly), the only others that knew that Marx had a son were Lessner and Pfänder. After the Freddy letters had been published, Lessner said to me, ‘Of course Freddy is Tussy’s brother, we knew all about it, but we could never find out where the child was brought up.’
Freddy looks comically like Marx and, with that really Jewish face and thick black hair, it was really only blind prejudice that could see in him any likeness to General. I have seen the letter that Marx wrote to General in Manchester at that time (of course General was not yet living in London then); but I believe General destroyed this letter, like so many others they exchanged.
That is all I know about the matter. Freddy has never found out, either from his mother or from General, who his father really is …
I am just reading over again the few lines you wrote me about the question. Marx was continually aware of the possibility of divorce, since his wife was frantically jealous. He did not love the child, and the scandal would have been too great if he had dared to do anything for him.
Since it was made public in 1962 most Marxist scholars have accepted this document as conclusive proof of Karl’s infidelity. But there are one or two sceptics. Eleanor Marx’s biographer Yvonne Kapp has described the Freyberger letter as a ‘high fantasy’ which ‘forfeits credence on many points’; nevertheless, she concedes, ‘there can be no reasonable doubt that he [Freddy] was Marx’s son’. Professor Terrell Carver, the author of a life of Engels, goes much further. He refuses to believe that either Marx or Engels could have sired Freddy Demuth, and dismisses the letter as a forgery – ‘possibly by Nazi agents aiming to discredit socialism’. He points out that the version in the Amsterdam archive is a typewritten copy whose provenance is unknown, and the original (if there was one) has never been traced.
Certainly, some of the allegations in the document defy all logic or common sense. Take the ‘letter’ which Marx is supposed to have sent Engels at the time of the birth, and which Louise Freyberger claims to have seen. Since Freyberger was born in 1860 and did not go to work for Engels until 1890, this means that he must have kept it among his papers for many decades. Why, having taken the trouble to preserve it, did he then destroy the only evidence which would ‘give the lie to the gossip that he disowned his son’?
There is also a rather obvious psychological implausibility. When Jenny Marx discovered that her servant and her husband had been canoodling behind her back – and while she herself was pregnant – she would probably have evicted the treacherous Lenchen from the household forthwith, or at least regarded her with cold mistrust. Yet the two women remained affectionate partners for the rest of their lives. ‘Research into the life of Frederick Demuth and of his relations has yielded nothing concerning the identity of his father, and even Engels’s alleged claim that he had somehow accepted paternity has no other supporting facts,’ Professor Carver concludes. ‘The surviving correspondence and memoirs certainly provide no positive support for Louise Freyberger’s story.’
This is not quite true. Although the papers of Marx and Engels were carefully weeded by their executors, who did not wish to embarrass or injure the grand old men of communism, a few telling fragments have survived. The first is a letter from Eleanor Marx to her sister Laura, dated 17 May 1882, which shows that Marx’s daughters had accepted the story of Engels’s paternity: ‘Freddy has behaved admirably in all respects and Engels’s irritation against him is as unfair as it is comprehensible. We should none of us like to meet our pasts, I guess, in flesh and blood. I know I always meet Freddy with a sense of guilt and wrong done. The life of that man! To hear him tell of it all is a misery and shame to me.’ Ten years later, on 26 July 1892, Eleanor returned to the subject: ‘It may be that I am very “sentimental” – but I can’t help feeling that Freddy has had great injustice all through his life. Is it not wonderful when you come to look things squarely in the face, how rarely we seem to practise all the fine things we preach – to others?’ In the light of that earlier letter, her jibe is clearly aimed at Engels.
Both Karl Marx and his wife left small but telling clues to the truth. Jenny’s autobiographical essay, ‘A Short Sketch of an Eventful Life’, written in 1865, includes a curious parenthetical revelation: ‘In the early summer of 1851 an event occurred which I do not wish to relate here in detail, although it contributed to increase our worries, both personal and others.’ The event in question can only have been the arrival of Freddy. If Helene Demuth had been impregnated by some other lover, why would it have caused Jenny such lasting and personal grief?
Odder still is a letter sent by Marx to Engels on 31 March 1851, when Helene was six months pregnant. After an epic grumble about his debts, his creditors and his tight-fisted mother, Marx adds, ‘You will admit that this is a pretty kettle of fish and that I am up to my neck in petty-bourgeois muck … But finally, to give the matter a tragi-comic turn, there is in addition a mystère which I will now reveal to you en très peu de mots. However, I’ve just been interrupted and must go and help nurse my wife. The rest, then, in which you also figure, in my next.’ By the time of the next letter, two days later, he had changed his mind. ‘I’m not writing to you about the mystère since, coûte que coûte [whatever it costs], I shall be coming in any case to see you at the end of April. I must get away from here for a week.’
What was the mystère if not Lenchen’s gestation? The coy lapses into French euphemism prove it beyond doubt, since this was his usual language of gynaecological embarrassment. (During Jenny’s pregnancies he often told Engels that she was in ‘un état trop intéressant’.) His reluctance to give any more details in writing is amply explained later in the same letter: ‘My wife, alas, has been delivered of a girl, and not a garçon. And, what is worse, she’s very poorly.’ Was it Frau Marx or her new daughter, Franziska, who was ‘poorly’? Probably both. We know from Jenny’s memoir that she was depressed during the early summer of 1851, and Marx’s letter of 31 March confirms this: ‘My wife was brought to bed on 28 March. Though the confinement was an easy one, she is now very ill in bed, the causes being domestic rather than physical.’ By the beginning of August, with two nursing mothers sharing the cramped quarters at Dean Street, other émigrés were beginning to gossip about old father Marx. ‘My circumstances are very dismal,’ he confessed to his friend Weydemeyer. ‘My wife will go under if things continue like this much longer. The constant worries, the slightest everyday struggle wears her out; and on top of that there are the infamies of my opponents who have never yet so much as attempted to attack me as to the substance, who seek to avenge their impotence by casting suspicions on my civil character and by disseminating the most unspeakable infamies about me. Willich, Schapper, Ruge and countless other democratic rabble make this their business.’ Rudolf Schramm, brother of the duellist Conrad, had been whispering to acquaintances that ‘whatever the outcome of the revolution, Marx is perdu’.
‘I, of course, would make a joke of the whole dirty business,’ Marx wrote. ‘Not for one moment do I allow it to interfere with my work but, as you will understand, my wife, who is poorly and caught up from morning till night in the most disagreeable of domestic quandaries, and whose nervous system is impaired, is not revived by the exhalations from the pestiferous democratic cloaca daily administered to her by stupid tell-tales. The tactlessness of some individuals in this respect can be colossal.’ What was all that about, if not the mysterious conception of little Freddy Demuth? It is noteworthy that Marx doesn’t actually deny the ‘unspeakable’ rumours while deploring the tactlessness of those who broadcast them.
Things could hardly get worse; but they did. At Easter 1852, shortly after her first birthday, Franziska had a severe attack of bronchitis. On 14 April, Marx scribbled a brief letter to Engels: ‘Dear Frederic, Only a couple of lines to let you know that our little child died this morning at a quarter past one.’ This unemotional announcement does not begin to describe the agony and despair that now enveloped the Marx household. For that, we must turn to Jenny’s ‘Short Sketch of an Eventful Life’. ‘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.’ At first the Marxes couldn’t even afford to hire an undertaker, but a French neighbour in Dean Street took pity on them and lent them two pounds. ‘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.’
Marx had been in London for little more than two years and had already been bereaved twice over. Engels identified the probable reason: ‘If only,’ he lamented in his letter of condolence, ‘there were some means by which you and your family could move into a more salubrious district and more spacious lodgings!’ Whether or not penury killed Franziska, it certainly interfered with her burial. For the previous few weeks Marx had been hoping to stabilise his finances with donations from American sympathisers, but on the very morning of the funeral he had a message from Weydemeyer, now living in New York, warning that there was little chance of salvation from that quarter. ‘You will realise that Weydemeyer’s letter made a very unpleasant impression here, particularly on my wife,’ Marx told Engels. ‘For two years now she has seen all my enterprises regularly come to grief.’