One morning in April 1853 a baker turned up at 28 Dean Street to warn that he would deliver no more bread until his outstanding bills were paid. He was greeted by Edgar Marx, a chubby-cheeked six-year-old who was already as street-smart as any Artful Dodger. Edgar’s smallness had earned him the nickname ‘Musch’ (‘fly’) in infancy, but this had later been amended to ‘Colonel Musch’ in tribute to his tactical nous.
‘Is Mr Marx at home?’ the man enquired.
‘No, he ain’t upstairs,’ the cockney urchin replied – and then, grabbing three loaves, shot off like an arrow.
Musch’s father was immensely proud of the lad, but he could hardly expect all creditors to be rebuffed so easily. Throughout the years in Soho the Marxes lived in a state of siege: grubby police spies from Prussia lurked all too conspicuously outside, keeping note of the comings and goings, while irate butchers and bakers and bailiffs hammered on the door.
His letters to Engels are a ceaseless litany of wretchedness and woe. ‘A week ago I reached the pleasant point where I am unable to go out for want of the coats I have in pawn, and can no longer eat meat for want of credit. Piffling it all may be, but I’m afraid that one day it might blow up into a scandal.’ (27 February 1852.) ‘My wife is ill. Little Jenny is ill. Lenchen has some sort of nervous fever. I could not and cannot call the doctor because I have no money to buy medicine. For the past eight to ten days I have been feeding the family solely on bread and potatoes, but whether I shall be able to get hold of any today is doubtful … How am I to get out of this infernal mess?’ (8 September 1852.) ‘Our misfortunes here have reached a climax.’ (21 January 1853.) ‘For the past ten days there hasn’t been a sou in the house.’ (8 October 1853.) ‘At present I have to pay out twenty-five per cent [of household income] to the pawnshop alone, and in general am never able to get things in order because of arrears … The total absence of money is the more horrible – quite apart from the fact that family wants do not cease for an instant – as Soho is a choice district for cholera, the mob is croaking right and left (e.g. an average of three per house in Broad Street) and “victuals” are the best defence against the beastly thing.’ (13 September 1854.) ‘While I was upstairs busy writing my last letter to you, my wife down below was besieged by hungry wolves all of whom used the pretext of the “heavy times” to dun her for money which she had not got.’ (8 December 1857.) ‘I’ve just received a third and final warning from the rotten rate collector to the effect that, if I haven’t paid by Monday, they’ll put a broker in the house on Monday afternoon. If possible, therefore, send me a few pounds …’ (18 December 1857.)
These ‘few pounds’ added up to a fairly lavish subsidy. Even in 1851, one of Marx’s most poverty-stricken years, he received at least £150 from Engels and other supporters – a sum on which a lower-middle-class family could live in some comfort. That autumn he was appointed European correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune, the world’s best-selling newspaper, for which he regularly submitted two articles a week at £2 apiece. Though his earnings from the Tribune dwindled slightly after 1854, by then he was also collecting £50 a year for his contributions to the Neue Oder-Zeitung in Breslau. In short, from 1852 onwards he had an income of at least £200. The annual rent for Dean Street was only £22. Why, then, was he always so catastrophically broke?
If Marx had been the careless bohemian depicted in so many police reports, he might have managed pretty well. In fact he belonged to the class of distressed gentlefolk, desperate to keep up appearances and unwilling to forgo bourgeois habits. For most of the 1850s he could scarcely afford to feed his own children and yet he insisted on employing a secretary, the young German philologist Wilhelm Pieper, even though Jenny Marx was eager to do the job.
Pieper, described by Jenny as a ‘slovenly flibbertigibbet’, managed the rare feat of being both frivolous and dogmatic at the same time. He was also tactless, loutish, extravagantly boastful and insatiably libidinous. Some female visitors to the Marx household were reduced to tears by his boorish political harangues – and others by his brazen salaciousness. He regarded himself as ‘Byron and Leibniz rolled into one’. More to the point, he was a useless secretary. His main duty was to transcribe and translate Marx’s newspaper articles, but the translations were so erratic that Engels usually had to redo them from scratch. Anyway, from the spring of 1853 Marx felt confident enough to write in English himself. ‘I can’t conceive what you still need him for,’ Engels muttered. Later that summer Pieper spent a fortnight in hospital, where a little board at the end of the bed broadcast his shame for all to see: ‘Wilhelm Pieper, syphilis secundarius.’ Though he promised to be more discriminating in future, the pell-mell seductions continued and before long he was back in hospital with a second dose.
One day a letter arrived for him at Dean Street, addressed in a female hand, requesting a rendezvous. Since the signature meant nothing to Pieper he passed it to Jenny Marx – who recognised that it was their former wet-nurse, ‘a fat old Irish slattern’. Karl and Jenny teased him about this latest admirer; but, as Marx noticed, ‘he kept his rendezvous with the old cow’. A few weeks later he was declaring his boundless love for a greengrocer’s daughter from south London, described by Marx as a tallow candle in green spectacles – ‘her entire person green like verdigris rather than veg., and greens to boot without any meat or flesh whatever’. The main purpose of the courtship, it transpired, was that Pieper hoped to touch her father for a loan of twenty quid, but like all his schemes it ended in disaster: the greengrocer refused to lend him a penny and the infatuated daughter then rushed over to Dean Street proposing that they elope together at once.
Pieper sometimes disappeared for weeks on end, either chasing an alluring petticoat or trying a new career – as journalist, proofreader, City clerk, lamp salesman, schoolmaster – but his dreams of love and money never came to anything; and so he would return to Dean Street in a bedraggled state pleading for shelter and sustenance. ‘I am, hélas, once again saddled with Pieper,’ Marx moaned in July 1854, ‘who looks like a half-starved sucking pig seethed in milk, after having lived for a fortnight with a whore he describes as un bijou. He has frittered away some £20 in a fortnight and now both his purses are equally depleted. In this weather it is a bore to have the fellow hanging around from morning to night and night to morning. And it disrupts one’s work.’ Because of the cramped conditions in the flat Pieper had to share a bed with Marx. Worse still, Pieper insisted on playing him some of Richard Wagner’s new work – ‘music of the future’ – which Marx thought horrible.
In 1857, Pieper announced that he had been offered a post as the German master at a private school in Bognor, apparently hoping that Marx would press him to stay on more favourable terms. At long last, however, his bluff was called – and Jenny slipped effortlessly into his place. ‘It transpired that his “indispensability” was merely a figment of his own imagination,’ Marx wrote, neglecting to add that he too had fallen for the myth. ‘My wife fulfils the function of secretary without all the bother created by the noble youth … I do not need him in any way.’ Since she had already proved this on several occasions while Marx was ill and Pieper off whoring, why did it take him so long to notice? He had been irritated by the unreliable factotum for years, privately referring to him as a feather-brained clown and a silly ass. ‘The combination of dilettantism and sententiousness, vapidity and pedantry makes him ever harder to stomach. And, as so often in the case of such laddies, there lurks, beneath an apparently sunny temperament, much irritability, moodiness and crapulous despondency.’
The employment of Pieper was a needless extravagance from the outset, but had been allowed to continue because Marx thought it unseemly for a chap in his position not to have a confidential secretary – as well as regular seaside holidays, piano lessons for the children, and all the other costly appurtenances of respectability. However empty his pockets, he simply refused to accept a ‘sub-proletarian’ way of life, as he put it. What to other refugees might seem luxuries therefore became ‘absolute necessities’ while more imperative exigencies, such as paying the grocer, were treated as an optional extra.
These inverted priorities are apparent in a begging letter sent to Engels in June 1854, when Jenny was recovering from illness and Dr Freund, her GP, was clamouring for settlement of overdue medical bills. ‘I find myself in a fix,’ Marx wrote, explaining that his quarterly accounts were hopelessly in the red, ‘since I had £12 to pay out for the household, and the total received was considerably reduced because of unwritten articles, besides which the chemist’s bills alone swallowed up a large part of the budget.’ The heart-tugging effect of this appeal was sabotaged in the very next sentence when he mentioned that Jenny, the children and housekeeper were about to take a fortnight’s holiday at a villa in Edmonton – after which ‘she might then be so far restored by the country air as to manage the journey to Trier’. If Marx was too skint to pay his own doctor, Engels might have wondered, how could he afford a fare to Germany? The question certainly occurred to his long-suffering creditors when they learned that Jenny had equipped herself with a new wardrobe of clothes for the trip. Marx affected not to understand their indignation, maintaining that the daughter of a German baron ‘could naturally not arrive in Trier looking shabby’.
He was ridiculously proud of having married a bit of posh. Hence the visiting cards he had printed for her (‘Mme Jenny Marx, née Baronesse de Westphalen’), which he sometimes flourished in the hope of impressing tradesmen and Tories. ‘The sea is doing my wife a lot of good,’ he noted after one of Jenny’s holidays. ‘In Ramsgate she has made the acquaintance of refined and, horribile dictu, clever Englishwomen. After years during which she has enjoyed only inferior company, if any at all, intercourse with people of her own kind seems to agree with her.’ Jenny had few such opportunities, and Marx was haunted by guilt at the squalid fate he had inflicted on the former princess of Trier society. There was a most humiliating reminder of how far they had sunk when he was arrested while trying to pawn Jenny’s Argyll family silver – the police suspecting, reasonably enough, that a scruffy German refugee couldn’t have acquired these ducal heirlooms legitimately. Marx spent a night in the cells before Jenny managed to convince them of her aristocratic bona fides.
Unable to keep his wife in the fashion appropriate to ‘people of her own kind’, Marx could at least strive to do better by his children. The girls must marry well, of course, and to attract the right kind of suitor they would need ballgowns, dancing classes and all the other social advantages money could buy, even if the money in question had to be cadged from someone else. Engels, long accustomed to being that someone else, never questioned his friend’s assumption that it was worth living beyond one’s means to avoid losing caste, and that an expensive show of finery would actually pay dividends in the long run. ‘I for my part wouldn’t care a damn about living in Whitechapel,’ Marx claimed, but ‘it could hardly be suitable for growing girls.’ In their teenage years the Marx daughters attended a ‘ladies’ seminary’ which charged £8 a quarter, besides which they were enrolled for private tuition in French, Italian, drawing and music. ‘It is true my house is beyond my means,’ he admitted to Engels in 1865, after moving to a mansion in north London. ‘But it is the only way for the children to establish themselves socially with a view to securing their future … I believe you yourself will be of the opinion that, even from a purely commercial point of view, to run a purely proletarian household would not be appropriate in the circumstances, although that would be quite all right if my wife and I were by ourselves or if the girls were boys.’
Even Engels couldn’t cover the entire cost of grooming a bevy of eligible débutantes. After much brow-furrowing, he decided that Marx’s hope of salvation lay in a loan from the People’s Provident Assurance Society: ‘Though I’ve racked my brains I can think of no other method of raising money in England. It seems to me that the moment has come for you to have a go at your mater …’ A more obvious method – to get a job – had apparently not entered his businesslike brain, though on other occasions he was quick to recommend it as a cure-all for fellow refugees. ‘I wish some of our lads in London would really settle down to a more or less steady job,’ he told Marx once, with no ironic intent, ‘for they’re becoming inveterate loafers.’
During his thirty-four years in London there were only two occasions when Marx sought gainful employment. In a letter of 1852 to Joseph Weydemeyer, by then living in the United States, we learn of a ‘newly invented lacquer varnish’ to which Marx had been alerted by his new chum Colonel Bangya, a mysterious Hungarian émigré who later turned out to be an undercover agent for half the crowned heads of Europe. Weydemeyer was to take a stall at the International Industrial Exhibition in New York, where customers would be so dazzled by the invention that ‘it might set you up in funds at one stroke’ – and, of course, yield a handsome profit for its joint backers in London. ‘Write to me at once, giving full details of the expenses you thereby incur,’ Marx advised. Nothing more was heard of this magical varnish, which seems to have met the same fate as Weitling’s ingenious contraption for making ladies’ straw hats. Ten years later, when his debts were even ghastlier than usual, Marx applied in desperation for a job as a railway clerk but was rejected because of his unreadable handwriting.
Without his benefactor, Marx wrote, ‘I would long ago have been obliged to start a “trade”’. The retching disgust represented by those inverted commas is almost audible. As it was, thanks to Engels’s generosity, he could spend most of his days in the reading room of the British Museum, resuming his long-neglected study of economics. After the dissolution of the Communist League in 1852 he had no political chores to distract him, and he dealt with the demands of the New York Tribune by subcontracting much of the work to Engels. ‘You’ve got to help me, now that I’m so busy with political economy,’ he pleaded on 14 August 1851. ‘Write a series of articles on Germany, from 1848 onwards. Witty and uninhibited.’ So the first major series under Marx’s byline in the Tribune – ‘Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany’, which appeared in nineteen instalments between October 1851 and October 1852 – was in fact written wholly by Engels. An article on the progress of the Russo-Turkish war, published as an anonymous editorial in December 1853, showed such expert knowledge of military strategy that New York gossip attributed it to a famous American soldier of the time, General Winfield Scott. The editor, Charles Dana, cited these rumours in a letter to Jenny Marx as proof of her husband’s brilliance – little guessing that the author was, once again, ‘General’ Engels, sometime foot-soldier in the Palatinate campaign.
‘Engels really has too much work,’ Marx admitted, ‘but being a veritable walking encyclopedia, he’s capable, drunk or sober, of working at any hour of the day or night, is a fast writer and devilish quick on the uptake.’ Though happy enough to take on this extra burden, Engels was so exhausted by his long hours at the cotton factory that he couldn’t be expected to write everything. Nor did Marx want him to: the Tribune’s huge and influential readership – its weekly edition alone sold more than 200,000 copies – was an irresistible lure for a man more accustomed to addressing audiences of a few dozen in the upstairs room of a London pub. Sometimes he sent a rough outline to Manchester which Engels then fleshed out; on other occasions – when, say, the newspaper wanted something on warfare, or ‘the Eastern question’ – the secret ghost-writer would have to do it all himself, since Marx ‘hadn’t a clue’ about such things.
Even so, Marx can probably take the credit for at least half of the 500-odd articles that he submitted to the Tribune. In his wearier moments he sometimes neglected the old journalistic injunction to grab the reader’s attention from the outset (‘The Parliamentary debates of the week offer but little of interest’ is the unimprovable opening sentence of a dispatch from March 1853) but most of these commentaries, particularly on British politics, have his inky fingerprints all over them. Here, for example, is an account of the 1852 election: ‘Days of general election are in Britain traditionally the bacchanalia of drunken debauchery, conventional stockjobbing terms for the discounting of political consciences, the richest harvest time of the publicans … They are saturnalia in the ancient Roman sense of the word. The master then turned servant, the servant turned master. If the servant be turned master for one day, on that day brutality will reign supreme.’ His remarks on the violent insurrection by Sepoys, native soldiers in the Anglo-Indian army, are better still: ‘There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the Ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped by the British, but with the Sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered by them.’
It is surprising – or, rather, depressingly unsurprising – that none of his journalistic jabs has found its way into a dictionary of quotations. Has anyone ever impaled Palmerston more lethally? ‘What he aims at is not the substance, but the mere appearance of success. If he can do nothing, he will devise anything. Where he dares not interfere, he intermeddles. Not able to vie with a strong enemy, he improvises a weak one … In his eyes, the movement of history is nothing but a pastime, expressly invented for the private satisfaction of the noble Viscount Palmerston of Palmerston.’ Or how about this, on the wretched and squirming Lord John Russell? ‘No other man has verified to such a degree the truth of the biblical axiom that no man is able to add an inch to his natural height. Placed by birth, connections and social accidents on a colossal pedestal, he always remained the same homunculus – a malignant and distorted dwarf on the top of a pyramid.’
Had he but world enough and time, Marx could have kept this up indefinitely and made his name as the sharpest polemical journalist of the century. But at his back he could always hear the nagging voice of conscience, whispering, ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.’ As early as April 1851 Marx claimed to be ‘so far advanced that I will have finished the whole economic stuff in five weeks’ time. And having done that, I shall complete the political economy at home and apply myself to another branch of learning at the Museum.’ For the next couple of months he sat in the reading room from nine in the morning until seven in the evening most days. ‘Marx lives a very retired life,’ Wilhelm Pieper reported, ‘his only friends being John Stuart Mill and Loyd [the economist Samuel Jones Loyd], and whenever one goes to see him one is welcomed with economic categories in lieu of greetings.’
But there was still no end to the Herculean task he had set himself. ‘The material I am working on is so damnably involved that, no matter how I exert myself, I shall not finish for another six to eight weeks,’ he told Weydemeyer in June. ‘There are, moreover, constant interruptions of a practical kind, inevitable in the wretched circumstances in which we are vegetating here. But for all that, for all that, the thing is rapidly approaching completion. There comes a time when one has forcibly to break off.’
This shows a comical lack of self-knowledge. Marx would happily ‘break off’ from old friendships or political associations with impetuous nonchalance, but he had no such facility for letting go of his work – especially not this work, this vast compendium of statistics and history and philosophy which would at last expose all the shameful secrets of capitalism. The more he wrote and studied, the further the book seemed from completion: as with Casaubon’s interminable ‘Key to All Mythologies’ in Middlemarch, there were always new leads to be pursued, obscure research to be quarried. (As it happens, Marx loved the novels of George Eliot. ‘Well, our friend Dakyns is a sort of Felix Holt, less the affectation of that man, and plus the knowledge,’ he wrote to his daughter Jenny after visiting the geologist J. R. Dakyns in 1869. ‘I could of course not forbear making a little fun of him and warning him to fight shy of any meeting with Mrs Eliot who would at once make literary property out of him.’)
‘The main thing,’ Engels advised in November 1851, ‘is that you should once again make a public début with a big book … It’s absolutely essential to break the spell created by your prolonged absence from the German book market.’ But for the next four years the project was set aside, a victim of those ‘constant interruptions’ – many of which, one might add, were entirely of his own making. Immediately after the French coup of December 1851 he began writing The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte at the request of the new American weekly Die Revolution, founded by his friend Joseph Weydemeyer: big books might be beyond him, but he had lost none of his pamphleteering brio.
Alas, some of his more questionable skills hadn’t deserted him either. In the spring of 1852 Marx wasted several months composing The Great Men of the Exile, his verbose satire on the ‘more noteworthy jackasses’ and ‘democratic scallywags’ of the socialist diaspora. The chief villain in this rogues’ gallery was Gottfried Kinkel, an occasional poet and sometime political prisoner who was now being lionised by grand London hostesses such as the Baroness von Brüningk, châtelaine of an agreeable salon in St John’s Wood. Marx spent the whole of June in Manchester with Engels, salting the text with ever more elaborate insults against Kinkel and the other scallywags. ‘The process of curing these stockfish,’ he wrote, ‘makes us laugh till we cry.’ Luckily for his reputation, the folie à deux remained a private joke. When Marx entrusted the manuscript to Colonel Bangya for delivery to a German publisher, the treacherous rogue promptly sold it to the Prussian police. It languished unseen for nearly a century, and anyone reading the book today may well judge that this was no great loss.
But he wasn’t finished with the stockfish. In July rumours reached him that Kinkel, during a fund-raising tour of America, had told an audience in Cincinnati, ‘Marx and Engels are no revolutionaries, they’re a couple of blackguards who have been thrown out of public houses by the workers in London.’ Marx challenged him to deny the story: ‘I await your answer by return of post. Silence will be regarded as an admission.’ Kinkel replied that since he had been attacked by Marx in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1950, while still imprisoned in Germany, ‘I have wanted to have nothing more to do with you’.
If you believe that you can … provide proof that I untruthfully said or published anything detrimental to your own or Mr Engels’s honour, I must point out to you, as I would to anyone with whom I have neither personal nor political contacts, the usual way which, under the law, is open to everyone who feels himself insulted or libelled. Except in this way, I shall have no further dealings with you.
Marx was peeved that his challenge hadn’t been taken up. (‘How coolly everything is rejected that might smack of a duel and the like.’) A libel case was out of the question, as a British court could hardly pass judgment on insults delivered in Cincinnati. Assuming that Kinkel would ignore any further correspondence with a Soho postmark, Marx contrived an elaborate ruse. He persuaded the Chartist leader Ernest Jones to address an envelope to Kinkel (guessing that his own spidery scrawl would be instantly recognised) and then asked Wilhelm Wolff to post it from Windsor. The billet-doux inside, on coloured paper adorned with a posy of forget-me-nots and roses, was full of the predictable sweet nothings that Marx bestowed on his enemies. Revealing that he now had sworn statements from witnesses in Cincinnati, he thundered, ‘Your letter – and this is precisely why it was provoked – provides a new and striking proof that the said Kinkel is a cleric whose baseness is equalled only by his cowardice.’
Marx took great pride in his schoolboy jape. ‘The cream of the jest,’ he gloated, ‘will only become plain to Kinkel later on, with the appearance of the first instalment of The Great Men of the Exile. Namely, that shortly before this fearsome attack on Gottfried, I diverted myself by doing him direct and personal injury, while at the same time justifying myself in the eyes of the émigré louts. To that end I needed something in “black and white” from Johann etc. Now for greater matters …’
These ‘greater matters’ turned out to be yet more internecine squabbles, prompted by the opening of the long-postponed trial of Cologne Communists in October 1852. Since the most incriminating exhibits at the trial were minute-books and reports advocating armed insurrection, supposedly purloined from the Communist League in London, Marx spent the summer and autumn collecting affidavits to confirm that the documents were forgeries. When the trial was over he felt obliged to write an article defending himself against the slanders on ‘the Marx group’ that had been aired in the Cologne courtroom – and, by the by, putting the knife into the Willich – Schapper faction from the Communist League. Inevitably enough, this article soon grew into a book, Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne, which, with equal inevitability, was denounced by August Willich. Marx then dashed off another pamphlet, The Knight of the Noble Conscience, savaging his erstwhile comrade’s ‘overweening conceit’ and ‘foul insinuations’. And so on, and so on …
With unusual discretion, he omitted one damaging fact about the ignoble knight. During 1852 Willich was given free lodging at the Baroness von Brüningk’s house in north London, and according to a story relayed by Marx to Engels, she ‘used to enjoy flirting with this old he-goat, as with the other ex-lieutenants. One day the blood rushes to the head of our ascetic, he makes a brutally brutish assault upon madame, and is ejected from the house with éclat. No more love! No more free board!’ With his London reputation in tatters Willich emigrated to America shortly afterwards, where he fought with great courage in the Civil War. Even Marx was forced to concede, many years later, that the old he-goat had at least partly redeemed himself.
Why, one must ask again, did Marx fritter away his talents on these extravagant vendettas? One explanation is that his domestic chaos was unconducive to grander or more taxing work. (‘All one can do,’ he sighed, ‘is produce miniature dunghills.’) Perhaps, too, the ancient scar from that undergraduate duel had never quite healed. When the London German newspaper How Do You Do? hinted that he was secretly in cahoots with his brother-in-law Ferdinand von Westphalen, the fiercely oppressive Prussian Minister of the Interior, Marx strode down to the office and challenged the editor to a duel. The terrified hack published an apology at once. In October 1852 he used the same threat against Baron von Brüningk, who had accused him of spreading a rumour that the coquettish Baroness was a Russian spy. Marx proposed a meeting at which he would demonstrate his innocence – ‘and should my explanation not suffice, I shall be prepared to give you the satisfaction customary among gentlemen’. The dispute was eventually settled without bloodshed by a formal exchange of letters. But one month later he was at it again, this time sending a splenetic message to the left-wing historian Karl Eduard Vehse who was apparently broadcasting ‘insolent’ and ‘impertinent’ gossip in Dresden about Marx’s pamphlet on The Great Men of the Exile. ‘Should this letter cause you offence,’ he concluded after several ripe paragraphs of invective, ‘you need only come to London; you know where I live and may be assured that you will always find me prepared to give you the satisfaction customary in such cases.’
The only people likely to receive satisfaction from this communist cannibalism were the Prussian authorities: Marx’s vendettas against men such as Willich were far more effective than the bungled attempts at sabotage and entrapment by their own Keystone Cops. Though aware that he was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, Marx argued that the conspirators he attacked were the truly dangerous enemies because their siren song of instant revolution might lure socialists into some sort of premature and disastrous stunt. Fake messiahs, if left unexposed, were far more attractive to the masses than genuine monarchs. The ad hominem pamphlets, and the threats of pistols at dawn, were therefore essential political interventions rather than mere manifestations of pique and wounded pride – or so he convinced himself. ‘I am,’ he said, ‘engaged in a fight to the death with the sham liberals.’ The most deadly weapon against these poltroons would be a finished copy of his magnum opus, demonstrating once and for all why revolutionaries could never succeed without first doing their economic homework. ‘The democratic simpletons to whom inspiration comes “from above” need not, of course, exert themselves thus,’ he sneered. ‘Why should these people, born under a lucky star, bother their heads with economic and historical material? It’s really all so simple, as the doughty Willich used to tell me. All so simple to these addled brains!’
Marx’s enemies, then and since, have attributed his dislike of Willich and the other ‘great men of the exile’ to pure jealousy. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions many of the heroes of that glorious defeat had come to London garlanded with campaign medals and romantic glamour – men such as Mazzini from Italy, Louis Blanc from France, Kossuth from Hungary, Kinkel from Germany. Society hostesses vied for their attention; lavish banquets were held in their honour; portraits were commissioned. Gottfried Kinkel, who had fled to England after a daring escape from Spandau jail, was eulogised by Dickens in Household Words. He then gave a series of lectures on drama and literature for which tickets were sold at an amazing one guinea a head. As Marx commented, ‘No running around, no advertisement, no charlatanism, no importunity was beneath him; in return, however, he did not go unrewarded. Gottfried sunned himself complacently in the mirror of his own fame and in the gigantic mirror of the Crystal Palace of the world.’ Though trapped in poverty, obscurity and near starvation, Marx never envied these swaggering world-liberators their réclame. He often quoted Dante’s maxim, Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti – go your own way and let tongues wag. What he admired in the British co-operative pioneer Robert Owen was that whenever any of his ideas became popular he would immediately say something outrageous to make himself unpopular all over again.
‘He loathed fine speakers and woe betide anyone who engaged in phrasemongering,’ Liebknecht observed. ‘He kept impressing upon us “young fellows” the necessity for logical thought and clarity in expression and forced us to study … While the other emigrants were daily planning a world revolution and day after day, night after night, intoxicating themselves with the opium-like motto “Tomorrow it will begin!”, we, the “brimstone band”, the “bandits”, the “dregs of mankind”, spent our time in the British Museum and tried to educate ourselves and prepare arms and ammunition for the future fight.’ His favourite story about the perils of posturing concerned Louis Blanc, a very small but exceedingly vain man, who turned up at Dean Street early one morning and was asked by Lenchen to wait in the front parlour while Marx dressed. Peeping through the connecting door, which had been left slightly ajar, Karl and Jenny had to bite their lips to stop laughing: the great historian and politician, former member of the French provisional government, was strutting in front of a shabby mirror in the corner, contemplating himself with delight and frisking like a March hare. After a minute or two of this entertainment Marx coughed to announce his presence. The foppish tribune wrenched himself away from the narcissistic pleasures of the looking-glass and ‘hastily adopted as natural an attitude as he was capable of’.
The applause of the multitude was worthless until the workers were ‘spiritually soaked’ in socialist ideas – through education not elocution, political organisation rather than preening. And where better to begin the task? England was not only the cradle of capitalism but also the birthplace of Chartism. While his fellow exiles contented themselves with secret societies and salons, the natives had already recruited a huge army of proletarian resistance. ‘The English working men are the first-born sons of modern industry,’ Marx declared. ‘They will then, certainly, not be the last in aiding the social revolution produced by that industry.’
Chartism took its name and inspiration from the People’s Charter of May 1838, which had six fundamental demands: universal male suffrage; secret ballots; annual parliaments; salaries for MPs; abolition of the property qualification for MPs; an end to rotten boroughs. Though beset by constant arguments between the advocates of violent insurrection and those who put their trust in ‘moral force’, the Chartists remained a potent threat to the established order for much of the next decade. One of their newspapers, the Northern Star, sold more than 30,000 copies a week, and since most of these were bought in pubs or factories the actual readership was far higher. Pitched battles were fought with the police, most notably in Birmingham and Monmouthshire, after which several of the leaders were jailed or transported. A Chartist petition presented to Parliament in 1842 – unsurprisingly rejected – had 3,317,702 signatures and was more than six miles long. That summer a two-week general strike in support of the Charter paralysed the Midlands, the North of England and parts of Wales.
In April 1848, as Europe’s anciens régimes tottered and fell, the Chartists announced that they would assemble on Kennington Common, just south of the Thames, and march on Parliament. The news provoked such panic among the governing classes that the Duke of Wellington himself, victor of Waterloo, was brought out of retirement to prevent the demonstrators from crossing the river. It was Chartism’s last hurrah. Three years later, big crowds did gather in the centre of town – but for the International Exhibition in Hyde Park. With its industrial wealth, middle-class resilience and ubiquitous police, England had apparently weathered the revolutionary storms rather better than its Continental neighbours. Even so, a kind of submerged radicalism lingered on. Henry Mayhew’s book London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1851, recorded that ‘the artisans are almost to a man red-hot proletarians, entertaining violent opinions’.
Karl Marx had little time for the Chartists’ leader, Feargus O’Connor, a brilliant but increasingly demented Irish demagogue. He was more impressed by O’Connor’s two lieutenants, George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones, whom he had met briefly during his first visit to England in the summer of 1845. Engels wrote a series of articles about Germany for Harney’s Northern Star that year and invited him to join the communists’ correspondence network soon afterwards. Harney and Jones both attended the second congress of the Communist League in November 1847, at which Marx and Engels were asked to compose their manifesto.
Alarmed by the galloping optimism of these German revolutionists, Harney tugged desperately on the reins. ‘Your prediction that we will get the Charter in the course of the present year, and the abolition of private property within three years, will certainly not be realised,’ he warned Engels in 1846. ‘The body of the English people, without becoming a slavish people, are becoming an eminently pacific people … Organised conflicts such as we may look for in France, Germany, Italy and Spain cannot take place in this country. To organise, to conspire a revolution in this country would be a vain and foolish project.’ Engels ignored the cautionary signals. Immediately after the Kennington Common rally of April 1848 he told his communist brother-in-law, Emil Blank, that the English bourgeoisie would be ‘in for a surprise when once the Chartists make a start. The business of the procession was a mere bagatelle. In a couple of months, my friend G. Julian Harney … will be in Palmerston’s shoes. I’ll bet you twopence and in fact any sum.’ After a couple of months – and indeed a couple of years – Palmerston was still Foreign Secretary.
What went wrong? On 1 January 1849, Marx reviewed the failed revolutions of 1848 and looked ahead to the coming year in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. ‘England, the country that turns whole nations into proletarians, that takes the whole world within its immense embrace, that has already defrayed the cost of a European Restoration, the country in which class contradictions have reached their most acute and shameless form – England seems to be the rock against which the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled even in the womb.’ The world market was dominated by England, and England was dominated by the bourgeoisie. ‘Only when the Chartists head the English government will the social revolution pass from the sphere of utopia to that of reality.’
In short, the future of world revolution depended on Harney and his colleagues – a heavy responsibility for Marx to lay upon them, though also a handsome tribute to their prowess. Alas for his prediction, they were already disintegrating into factions and splinter groups. Encouraged by Marx and Engels, George Julian Harney broke with O’Connor in 1849 and founded a succession of evanescent if lively journals – the Democratic Review, the Red Republican (whose greatest achievement, during its brief six months of existence, was to publish the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto) and the Friend of the People.
To the disgust of Marx and Engels, Harney practised what he preached about the ‘brotherhood of man’ – a phrase Marx detested, since there were many men whose brother he would never wish to be under any circumstances. The emollient Harney spread his political favours widely, applauding Marx’s ‘rascally foes’ among the Continental democrats – Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Ruge, Schapper – and somehow contriving to keep in with all sides when the Communist League fell apart. Marx thought him not so much wicked as merely impressionable – ‘impressionable, that is, to famous names, in whose shadow he feels touched and honoured’. In his private correspondence with Engels, Marx nicknamed the indiscriminate cheerleader ‘Citizen Hiphiphiphurrah’ – or sometimes ‘Our Dear’, a mocking reference to his cloyingly fond and attentive wife, Mary Harney. ‘I am fatigué of this public incense so tirelessly used by Harney to fill the nostrils of les petits grands hommes,’ he complained in February 1851.
Still, Harney’s ideological promiscuity had one merit: it left Marx once again without any loyal allies. ‘I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. The system of mutual concessions, half-measures tolerated for decency’s sake, and the obligation to bear one’s share of public ridicule in the party along with these jackasses, all this is now over … I hardly see anyone here [in London] save Pieper and live in complete retirement.’
Engels agreed wholeheartedly:
I find this inanity and want of tact on Harney’s part more irritating than anything else. But au fond it is of little moment. At long last we have again the opportunity – the first time in ages – to show that we need neither popularity, nor the support of any party in any country, and that our position is completely independent of such ludicrous trifles. From now on we are only answerable for ourselves and, come the time when these gentry need us, we shall be in a position to dictate our own terms. Until then we shall at least have some peace and quiet … How can people like us, who shun official appointments like the plague, fit into a ‘party’? And what have we, who spit on popularity, who don’t know what to make of ourselves if we show signs of growing popular, to do with a ‘party’, i.e. a herd of jackasses who swear by us because they think we’re of the same kidney as they? Truly, it is no loss if we are no longer held to be the ‘right and adequate expression’ of the ignorant curs with whom we have been thrown together over the past few years.
Like another Marx, they disdained any club that would want them as members: ‘merciless criticism of everyone’ was now their policy. ‘What price all the tittle-tattle the entire émigré crowd can muster against you,’ Engels asked, ‘when you answer it with your political economy?’
This lofty contempt for tittle-tattle was gloriously disingenuous: Marx and Engels had an undiminished thirst for émigré gossip, and for the rest of their lives they never missed a chance to amuse or infuriate each other by trading scuttlebutt. The spluttering indignation reached new heights in February 1851 when Harney helped to organise a London banquet at which the guest of honour was Louis Blanc. Two of Marx’s few remaining allies among the London expatriates, Conrad Schramm and Wilhelm Pieper, were sent along to observe the proceedings – only to find themselves dragged out of the hall, denounced as spies and then kicked and punched by a 200-strong crowd, including many members of Harney’s ill-named ‘Fraternal Democrats’. Schramm appealed for help to one of the stewards, Landolphe, but to no avail. Then, as Marx informed Engels, ‘who should arrive but Our Dear; instead of intervening energetically, however, he stammered something about knowing these people and would have launched into long explanations. A fine remedy, of course, at such a moment.’ Engels suggested that Pieper and Schramm avenge themselves by giving Landolphe a box on the ears. Marx, predictably enough, felt that nothing less than a duel would provide the necessary satisfaction – and ‘if anybody is to be done an injury, it must be the little Hiphiphiphurrah Scotsman, George Julian Harney, and no other, and then it is Harney who will have to practise shooting.’
Citizen Hiphiphiphurrah’s only use to Marx and Engels thereafter was as the butt for jokes. However, they stayed on friendly terms with Ernest Jones, who had not attended the infamous banquet. Having spent his childhood in Germany, Jones was deemed to be ‘unEnglish’ – the highest compliment they could pay any British citizen. (In 1846, still in the first flush of infatuation, Engels had described Harney as ‘more of a Frenchman than an Englishman’.) Marx contributed to Jones’s periodical, the People’s Paper, and in his articles elsewhere continued to praise the Chartists’ insistence on widening the franchise. ‘After the experiments which undermined universal suffrage in France in 1848, the Continentals are prone to underrate the importance and meaning of the English Charter,’ he wrote in the Neue Oder-Zeitung. ‘They overlook the fact that two-thirds of the population of France are peasants and over one-third townspeople, whereas in England more than two-thirds live in towns and less than one-third in the countryside. Hence the results of universal suffrage in England must likewise be in inverse proportion to the results in France, just as town and country are in the two states.’ In France, the suffrage was a political demand, supported to a greater or lesser extent by almost every ‘educated’ person. In Britain, it was a social question, marking the divide between aristocracy and bourgeoisie on the one side and ‘the people’ on the other. English agitation for suffrage had gone through ‘historical development’ before it became a slogan of the masses; in France, the slogan came first, without any preceding gestation. Here we see once more the curious ambivalence of Marx’s attitude to his adoptive country. Unlike its peasant-infested neighbours, England had a large and sophisticated metropolitan proletariat: it was therefore more ‘advanced’ and ready for revolution. Yet England also possessed an immensely self-confident bourgeosie, the rock against which revolutionary waves broke in vain. Sometimes he persuaded himself that a political cataclysm in Britain was not only inevitable but imminent; at other times he was reduced to angry despair by the doltish conservatism of the inhabitants. But what could one expect? Marx, more than any other thinker of his generation, was a connoisseur of paradox and contradictions – since it was these very contradictions which guaranteed capitalism’s demise.
‘There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny,’ he said in April 1856, at a London dinner celebrating the fourth anniversary of the People’s Paper. ‘On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.’ Machinery, blessed with the power of shortening and fructifying people’s labour, had instead starved and overworked them. The new sources of wealth, by some inverse alchemy, had become sources of want. And Britain – the wealthiest and most modern industrial society in the world – was also the most ripe for destruction. ‘History is the judge – its executioner, the proletarian.’
Even an after-dinner audience of English Jacobins, fortified with ‘the choicest viands and condiments of the season’, might have raised a quizzical eyebrow at this apocalyptic rhetoric. Could England – the financial and industrial centre of the world, the hub of the greatest empire ever seen, the throbbing heart of capitalism – really be so flimsy and frangible? To Marx, the paradox was more apparent than real. It was an ‘old and historically established maxim’ that obsolete social forces summon all their strength before their final death agony, and were therefore weakest when they seemed most intimidating. ‘Such is today the English oligarchy.’
One wonders if any of his listeners recalled the rather more cautious tone of his essay on the civil war in France, written for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850. ‘The original process always takes place in England: it is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos,’ he had argued then. But while England luxuriated in bourgeois prosperity ‘there can be no talk of a real revolution … A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis.’
He had been waiting ever since, with some impatience, for the crisis to arrive – reading the runes, seeking out portents. ‘Provided nothing untoward happens within the next six weeks, this year’s cotton crop will amount to 3,000,000 bales,’ Engels informed him in July 1851. ‘If the CRASH in the market coincides with such a gigantic crop, things will be cheery indeed. Peter Ermen is already fouling his breeches at the very thought of it, and the little tree frog’s a pretty good barometer.’ A collapse in the fortunes of the textile industry would also have put an end to Marx’s regular subsidies from the petty-cash box at Ermen & Engels, but this was apparently a price worth paying for the general ruination of all the little tree frogs. He licked his lips at ‘the very pleasing prospect of a trade crisis’. By September, however, there was no sign of one. Instead, the discovery of gold in the South Australian state of Victoria might actually open up new markets and precipitate an expansion of world trade and credits, like the California gold rush of 1848. ‘One must hope the Australian gold business won’t interfere with the trade crisis,’ Engels fretted. He consoled himself with the thought that even if capitalism was rescued by Antipodean success, at least they would have been right about something: ‘In six months’ time the circumnavigation of the world by steam will be fully under way and our predictions concerning the supremacy of the Pacific Ocean will be fulfilled even more quickly than we could have anticipated.’ Australia – that ‘united states of deported murderers, burglars, rapists and pickpockets’ – would then startle the world by showing what wonders could be performed by a nation of undisguised rascals. ‘They will beat California hollow.’ Anyway, the demand for Lancashire cotton was still slumping most agreeably, and soon ‘we shall have such overproduction as will warm the cockles of your heart’.
A month later there was another cockle-warming bulletin from Marx’s Trojan horse in the capitalist citadel. ‘The iron trade is totally paralysed, and two of the main banks which supply it with money – those in Newport – have gone broke … There is the prospect, if not actually the certainty, of next spring’s convulsions on the Continent coinciding with quite a nice little crisis. Even Australia seems incapable of doing very much; since California, the discovery of gold has become an old story and the world has grown blasé about it …’ Two days after Christmas 1851, Marx sent a cheerful end-of-year message to the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath: ‘From what Engels tells me, the city merchants now also share our view that the crisis, held in check by all kinds of factors (including, e.g., political misgivings, the high price of cotton last year) etc., must blow up at the latest next autumn. And since the latest events I am more than ever convinced that there will be no serious revolution without a trade crisis.’ The downfall of Russell’s Whig administration in February 1852, and the installation of a Tory cabinet headed by Lord Derby, seemed likely to speed the happy day. ‘In England our movement can progress only under the Tories,’ Marx explained. ‘The Whigs conciliate all over the place and lull everyone to sleep. On top of that there is the commercial crisis which is looming ever closer and whose early symptoms are erupting on every hand. Les choses marchent.’ Free trade and a falling cotton price might keep the English economy afloat until the autumn, but then the fun would begin.
Engels was not so sure. Although the crisis certainly ought to come by the end of 1852 ‘according to all the rules’, the strength of Indian markets and the cheapness of raw materials suggested otherwise. ‘One is almost tempted to forecast that the present period of prosperity will be of exceptionally long duration. At any rate it may well be that the thing will last until the spring.’ It did; and perhaps Marx wasn’t entirely disappointed. ‘The revolution may come sooner than we would like,’ he wrote in August, noting a spate of bankruptcies and below-average harvests. ‘Nothing could be worse than the revolutionaries having to provide bread.’ Here he was hoist by his own explosive logic: if the revolution depended on economic catastrophe, as he insisted, it would of course inherit a breadless world. Nevertheless, for the next couple of years he still felt cheerfully certain that there were bad times just around the corner. ‘The state of the winter crops being what it is, I feel convinced that the crisis will become due.’ (January 1853.) ‘Present conditions … in my view must soon lead to an earthquake.’ (March 1853). ‘Les choses marchent merveilleusement. All hell will be let loose in France when the financial bubble bursts.’ (September 1853.)
In the absence of a terminal economic crisis, Marx began to wonder if some other spark could light the conflagration. The Crimean War, perhaps? ‘We must not forget that there is a sixth power in Europe,’ he wrote in the New York Daily Tribune on 2 February 1854, ‘which at given moments asserts its supremacy over the whole of the five so-called “Great” Powers and makes them tremble, every one of them. That power is the Revolution … A signal only is wanted, and this sixth and greatest European power will come forward, in shining armour, and sword in hand, like Minerva from the head of the Olympian. This signal the impending European war will give …’
No such luck. Apparently forgetting his insistence that revolution was possible only as the consequence of an economic débâcle, he scanned the horizon for some other dark cloud. On 24 June 1855 the Chartists held a rally in Hyde Park to protest against the new Sunday Trading Bill, which would ban the opening of pubs and the printing of newspapers on the sabbath. Ladies and gentlemen riding along Rotten Row had to run the gauntlet of demonstrators; some were forced to dismount and flee. ‘We were spectators from beginning to end,’ Marx wrote in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, ‘and do not think we are exaggerating in saying that the English revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park.’
A similar gathering one week later drew an even bigger crowd – and another vivid dispatch from Marx to the Neue Oder-Zeitung. ‘At once the constabulary rushed from ambush, whipped their truncheons out of their pockets, began to beat up people’s heads until the blood ran profusely, yanked individuals here and there out of the vast multitude (a total of 104 were thus arrested) and dragged them to the improvised blockhouses.’ But the character of the scene was quite different from the improvised class war of the previous weekend:
Last Sunday the masses were confronted by the ruling class as individuals. This time it appeared as the state power, the law, the truncheon. This time resistance meant insurrection, and the Englishman must be provoked for a long time before he breaks out in insurrection. Hence the counter-demonstration was confined, in the main, to hissing, jeering and whistling at the police-wagons, to isolated and feeble attempts at liberating the arrested, but above all to passive resistance in phlegmatically standing their ground.
Thus did ‘the English revolution’ fizzle out, only seven days after Marx’s bold fanfare; and all because of the natives’ deferential timidity when confronted by the majesty of institutionalised power. It is all too like a scene from Gilbert and Sullivan in which the bloodthirsty pirates of Penzance, having captured a posse of police officers, are standing over their victims with drawn swords. ‘We charge you yield,’ a police sergeant commands from a prostrate position, ‘in Queen Victoria’s name!’ The pirate king cannot but obey: ‘We yield at once, with humbled mien,/Because, with all our faults, we love our Queen.’
For the rest of his life, Marx’s view of the English proletariat oscillated between reverence and scorn. In January 1862 he cited British workers’ support for the North in the American Civil War as ‘a new, splendid proof of the indestructible thoroughness of the English popular masses, that thoroughness which is the secret of England’s greatness’. But when anti-government demonstrators tore down the Hyde Park railings in July 1866, he despaired of their moderation. ‘The Englishman first needs a revolutionary education, of course,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘If the railings – and it was touch and go – had been used offensively and defensively against the police and about twenty of the latter had been knocked out, the military would have had to “intervene” instead of only parading. And then there would have been some fun. One thing is certain, these thick-headed John Bulls, whose brainpans seem to have been specially manufactured for the constables’ bludgeons, will never get anywhere without a really bloody encounter with the ruling powers.’ As he conceded, however, there was no great likelihood of serious combat: the workers were ‘slavish’, ‘sheepish’ and incurably enfeebled by a ‘bourgeois infection’.
This disease had many small but telling symptoms. The historian Keith Thomas has suggested that ‘the preoccupation with gardening, like that with pets, fishing and other hobbies … helps to explain the relative lack of radical and political impulses among the British proletariat’. Hence the popularity of allotments in the nineteenth century, and the surprising dearth of large-scale tenement blocks – which ‘would have deprived working men of the gardens which they regarded as a necessity’. For every worker who ripped up railings in Hyde Park, there were dozens more who wanted only to walk their dogs or inspect the flower-beds.
Even Ernest Jones, the Chartist leader whom Marx most admired, soon revealed himself as a middle-class dilettante by advocating a coalition between the Chartists and the thoroughly bourgeois radicals. ‘The business with Jones is very disgusting,’ Engels wrote after hearing him address a meeting in Manchester. ‘One is really almost driven to believe that the English proletarian movement in its old traditional Chartist form must perish completely before it can develop in a new, viable form.’ But what form would this be? As Engels noted, with rueful prescience, ‘the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie’. So it has come to pass: in the England of today, toffs and workers alike buy their food from Tesco superstores and watch the National Lottery draw on Saturday nights. If the ghosts of Marx and Engels returned they would also notice the most bizarre oxymoron of all, a bourgeois monarchy, whose young princes wear baseball caps, eat Big Macs and take their holidays at Eurodisney. In Hyde Park, where once the Chartists taunted aristocrats and Karl Marx thought the English revolution had begun, the largest mass assembly in living memory occurred on 6 September 1997 – for the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Marx’s final verdict on his adopted country can be found in a letter written shortly before his death in 1883. After mocking the ‘poor British bourgeois, who groan as they assume more and more “responsabilities” [sic] in the service of their historic mission, while vainly protesting against it’, he concluded with a cry of exasperation: ‘Drat the British!’
Ernest Jones’s apostasy in joining forces with the middle-class liberals incurred the most severe punishment Marx and Engels could mete out: he was labelled an ‘opportunist’. A few years later they passed the same sentence on Ferdinand Lassalle for his proposal that Prussian workers and noblemen should gang up against the industrial bourgeoisie. While railing against these cynical marriages of convenience, however, Marx himself was forming opportunistic partnerships with some pretty rum coves.
The rummiest of them all was David Urquhart, an eccentric Scottish aristocrat and sometime Tory MP who is now remembered, if at all, as the man who introduced Turkish baths to England. ‘To most of his adherents, to the end of his life, Urquhart was the Bey, the Chief, the Prophet, almost “the sent of God”,’ one disciple recorded. ‘To his little daughter dreaming of her father … it did not seem strange that that same father should change, after the strange fashion of dreams, into the Christ. “It is really the same thing, is it not, mother?” she said.’ To less worshipful observers, he was a cantankerous old walrus with a lopsided moustache, a lopsided bow-tie and exceedingly lopsided opinions. ‘There is no art I have practised so assiduously as the faculty of making men hate me,’ Urquhart boasted. ‘That removes apathy. You can get them into speech. Then you have their words to catch and hurl back at them to knock them down with.’ Many mid-Victorian eminences could testify to the success of this technique: he had enemies galore.
Born in Scotland in 1805, educated in France, Switzerland and Spain, Urquhart discovered his long obsession with the East when at the age of twenty-one he sailed – at the suggestion of Jeremy Bentham, an admirer – to take part in the Greek war of independence, and was severely wounded at the siege of Scio. Having caught the attention of Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to William IV, he was then dispatched on secret diplomatic missions to Constantinople, where he abruptly changed his allegiance. ‘This chap went to Greece as a Philhellene and, after three years of fighting the Turks, proceeded to Turkey and went into raptures about those selfsame Turks,’ Marx wrote in March 1853 after chuckling over Urquhart’s book Turkey and Its Resources.
He enthuses over Islam on the principle, ‘if I wasn’t a Calvinist, I could only be a Mohammedan’. Turks, particularly those of the Ottoman Empire in its heyday, are the most perfect nation on earth in every possible way. The Turkish language is the most perfect and melodious in the world … If a European is maltreated in Turkey, he has only himself to blame; your Turk hates neither the religion of the Frank, nor his character, but only his narrow trousers. Imitation of Turkish architecture, etiquette, etc. is strongly recommended. The author himself was several times kicked in the bottom by Turks, but subsequently realised that he alone was to blame … In short, only the Turk is a gentleman and freedom exists only in Turkey.
Urquhart’s hosts in Constantinople were dazzled by his extravagant Turkophilia. ‘The Turkish officials placed such reliance on Urquhart,’ according to the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘that they kept him immediately informed of all communications made to them by the Russian ambassador. Lord Palmerston, however, took alarm … and wrote to the ambassador, Lord Ponsonby, to remove him from Constantinople as a danger to the peace of Europe.’ As well he might. Urquhart’s passionate partisanship – pro-Turkey, anti-Russia – left him at odds with British policy, and persuaded him that his own country’s government had been hijacked by sinister forces. In short, he concluded that the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, must be a secret Russian agent. On his return to Britain he founded several newspapers and a national network of ‘foreign affairs committees’ to disseminate this bold conspiracy theory. After entering Parliament in 1847, he fired off a fusillade of speeches calling for an immediate inquiry into the conduct of the Foreign Office, ‘with a view to the impeachment of the Right Honourable Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston’.
Essentially a romantic reactionary, Uruquhart nevertheless managed to convince some radicals that he was really on their side – speaking for the downtrodden workers against their devious and deceitful rulers. Though the more revolutionary Chartists dismissed him as a Tory spy whose populist crusade against Lord Palmerston was a ‘red herring’, others praised his exposure of ‘the injury done to the labour and capital of this country by the expansion of the Russian Empire, and the almost universal exercise of Russian influence, all directed to the destruction of British commerce.’
This all chimed in most harmoniously with Karl Marx’s own hatred and mistrust of Tsarist Russia. ‘Excited but not convinced’ by Urquhart’s allegations, he set to work with characteristic diligence, poring over old copies of Hansard and the diplomatic Blue Books in search of evidence. His progress can be followed through the changing tone of his letters to Engels. In the spring of 1853 he mocked Urquhart as ‘the mad MP who denounces Palmerston as being in the pay of Russia’. By that summer, he was already showing rather more respect: ‘In the Advertiser four letters by D. Urquhart on the eastern question contained much that was interesting, despite quirks and quiddities.’ Before autumn was out, the conversion to Urquhartism – if not to Urquhart himself – was complete. ‘I have come to the same conclusion as that monomaniac Urquhart – namely that for several decades Palmerston has been in the pay of Russia,’ he wrote on 2 November. ‘I am glad that chance should have led me to take a closer look at the foreign policy – diplomatic – of the past twenty years. We had very much neglected this aspect, and one ought to know with whom one is dealing.’
The first fruit of these researches was a series of articles for the New York Tribune at the end of 1853, describing Palmerston’s clandestine ‘connections’ with the Russian government. Urquhart, understandably delighted, arranged a meeting with the author early in 1854 at which he paid him the highest compliment in his lexicon by saying that ‘the articles read as though written by a Turk’. Marx, rather crossly, pointed out that he was in fact a German revolutionist.
‘He is an utter maniac,’ Marx reported soon after this strange encounter:
is firmly convinced that he will one day be Premier of England. When everyone else is downtrodden, England will come to him and say, Save us, Urquhart! And then he will save her. While speaking, particularly if contradicted, he goes into fits … The fellow’s most comical idea is this: Russia rules the world through having a specific superfluity of brain. To cope with her, a man must have the brain of an Urquhart and, if one has the misfortune not to be Urquhart himself, one should at least be an Urquhartite, i.e. believe what Urquhart believes, his ‘metaphysics’, his ‘political economy’ etc etc. One should have been in the ‘East’, or at least have absorbed the Turkish ‘spirit’, etc.
When some of Marx’s Palmerston articles from the Tribune were reprinted as a pamphlet, he was horrified to discover that polemics by Urquhart were appearing in the same series – and promptly forbade any further publication. ‘I do not wish to be numbered among the followers of that gentleman,’ he explained to Ferdinand Lassalle, ‘with whom I have only one thing in common, viz. my views on Palmerston, but to whom in all other matters I am diametrically opposed.’
One might infer from this that any further offers or inducements from the maniac would be rejected with a brisk ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ But Marx could not afford to maintain his principled posture for long. Harried by impatient creditors, he found it hard to resist a commission to write a series for one of Urquhart’s journals, the Sheffield Free Press, in the summer of 1856. ‘The Urquhartites are being damned importunate,’ he grumbled. ‘A good thing financially. But I don’t know whether, politically, I ought to get too involved with the fellows.’ The articles were suitably sensational: he claimed to have discovered, among the diplomatic manuscripts at the British Museum, ‘a series of documents going back from the end of the eighteenth century to the time of Peter the Great, which revealed the secret and permanent collaboration of the Cabinets at London and St Petersburg’. More alarmingly still, the aim of Russia throughout this period had been nothing less than the conquest of the earth. ‘It is yet the policy of Peter the Great, and of modern Russia, whatever changes of name, seat and character the hostile power used may have undergone. Peter the Great is indeed the inventor of modern Russian policy, but he became so only by divesting the old Muscovite method of its merely local character and its accidental admixtures, by distilling it into an abstract formula, by generalising its purpose, and exalting its object from the overthrow of certain given limits of power to the aspiration of unlimited power.’
There was a rather obvious flaw in the theory that Britain and Russia had been in cahoots for the previous 150 years: the Crimean War. Urquhart and Marx had a ready explanation. The war had been a cunning ploy to throw sleuths off the scent of Palmerston’s corrupt alliance with Russia; and Britain had deliberately prosecuted the war as incompetently as possible. To the dedicated conspiracy theorist, all is explicable, and any inconvenient facts are merely further confirmation of the diabolical deviousness of his prey.
Marx may have convinced himself, but few others were persuaded. His philippics against Palmerston and Russia were reissued in 1899 by his daughter Eleanor as two pamphlets, The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century and The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston – though with some of the more provocative passages quietly excised. For most of the twentieth century they remained out of print and largely forgotten. The Institute of Marxism – Leninism in Moscow omitted them from its otherwise exhaustive collected works, presumably because the Soviet editors could not bring themselves to admit that the presiding spirit of the Russian revolution had in fact been a fervent Russophobe. Marxist hagiographers in the West have also been reluctant to draw attention to this embarrassing partnership between the revolutionist and the reactionary. An all-too-typical example is The Life and Teaching of Karl Marx by John Lewis, published in 1965; the curious reader may search the text for any mention of David Urquhart, or of Marx’s contribution to his obsessive crusade – but will find nothing.
Urquhart himself later turned his attention to other, equally quixotic causes. A devout if unorthodox Roman Catholic, he spent many years appealing to Pope Pius IX for the restoration of Canon Law while also proselytising tirelessly on behalf of the Turkish bath. (‘Did you overlook, in one of the Guardians you sent me, the item in which David Urquhart figures as an infanticide?’ Marx wrote to Engels in 1858. ‘The fool treated his thirteen-month-old baby to a Turkish bath which, as chance would have it, contributed to congestion of the brain and hence its subsequent death. The coroner’s inquest on this case lasted for three days and it was only by the skin of his teeth that Urquhart escaped a verdict of manslaughter.’) Urquhart’s house in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, was described by one visitor as ‘an Eastern palace, with a Turkish bath … which in luxuriousness was inferior to none in Constantinople’. A session in this ornate sweat-chamber might have done Marx’s carbuncles a power of good, but as far as one can discover he never had the pleasure.