Jenny Marx could never quite share her husband’s fondness for Friedrich Engels. She was grateful for his largesse, of course, just as she appreciated the intellectual companionship and encouragement he gave Karl. She was touched, too, by his interest in the children, who adored their avuncular ‘General’. To Jenny, however, he always remained Mr Engels. An unshockable woman in many ways, happy to contemplate violent revolution and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, she still had enough middle-class propriety – or prudery – to be scandalised by the idea of a man and woman living together out of wedlock, especially when the woman concerned was an illiterate ‘factory girl’.
Engels had met Mary Burns on his first visit to Manchester in 1842, while he was collecting material for The Condition of the Working Classes in England, and they soon became lovers. Though largely uneducated, this lively redhead of proletarian Irish stock taught Engels at least as much as she learned from him. As with her sister Lydia, who eventually joined them in a ménage à trois, he admired her ‘passionate feeling for her class, which was inborn, [and] was worth infinitely more to me and had stood by me in all critical moments more strongly than all the aesthetic niceyniceness and wiseacreism of the “eddicated” and “senty-mental” daughters of the bourgeoisie could have done’.
The affair was renewed when Engels and Marx came over in 1845; he then paid for Mary to come and visit him in Brussels for a while. After resigning himself to a life of vile commerce in Manchester, Engels set her up in a little house near his own, and by the end of the 1850s they were living together. On the rare occasions when Jenny Marx was forced to acknowledge Mary’s existence she referred to her as ‘your wife’, though in fact the relationship was never legally solemnised. The addition of Lydia (‘Lizzy’) to the household was an even greater affront to Frau Marx’s puritanical sensibilities. But Engels didn’t give a damn.
His devotion to Mary Burns also caused the only froideur in his otherwise warm and uninterrupted partnership with Karl Marx. Although Marx had no objection to his friend’s unorthodox domestic set-up (in fact it gave him a certain amount of vicarious titillation), out of deference to Jenny he tended to underestimate the importance of the Burns sisters – and never more disastrously than when he received this short, ghastly note from Engels, dated 7 January 1863:
Dear Moor,
Mary is dead. Last night she went to bed early and, when Lizzy wanted to go to bed shortly before midnight, she found she had already died. Quite suddenly. Heart failure or an apoplectic stroke. I wasn’t told till this morning; on Monday evening she was still quite well. I simply can’t convey what I feel. The poor girl loved me with all her heart.
Your
FE
Marx replied the following day. ‘The news of Mary’s death surprised no less than it dismayed me. She was so good-natured, witty and closely attached to you.’ So far so good; but this was merely the cue for a lengthy recitation of his own woes. ‘The devil alone knows why nothing but ill luck should dog everyone in our circle just now. I no longer know which way to turn either …’ Attempts to raise money in France and Germany had come to naught, no one would let him buy anything on credit, he was being dunned for the school fees and the rent, it was impossible to get on with work. After plenty more in this vein, Marx briefly remembered himself. ‘It is dreadfully selfish of me to tell you about these horreurs at this time,’ he conceded. ‘But it’s a homeopathic remedy. One calamity is a distraction from the other. And, in the final count, what else can I do?’ Well, he could have tried offering his condolences rather more tactfully, for a start. In mitigation one must allow that Marx was in a truly calamitous predicament: the children hadn’t been back to school since Christmas, partly because the bill for the previous term was still unpaid but also because their only presentable clothes and shoes were in hock. Even his parting thought had more to do with his own troubles than Engels’s loss: ‘Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life? You can see what strange notions come into the heads of “civilised men” under the pressure of certain circumstances. Salut.’
Engels read all this with anger and amazement. How dare Marx go on about money at such a time – especially when he knew that Engels himself had been feeling the pinch lately because of a slump in the price of cotton? He held his silence for five days before sending an icy acknowledgement. His letters usually began ‘Dear Moor’, but such informality would no longer do:
You will find it quite in order that, this time, my own misfortune and the frosty view you took of it should have made it positively impossible for me to reply to you any sooner. All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have on this occasion, which in all conscience must needs affect me deeply, given me proof of greater sympathy and friendship than I could have looked for. You thought it a fit moment to assert the superiority of your ‘dispassionate turn of mind’. So be it, then!
There was nothing dispassionate about Marx’s turn of mind now. For the next three weeks sour recriminations flew back and forth across the kitchen table at Grafton Terrace, as Jenny blamed Karl for not alerting Engels to their wretched state of affairs earlier and he blamed her for assuming that they could always rely on subventions from Manchester. (‘The poor woman had to suffer for something of which she was in fact innocent, for women are wont to ask for the impossible,’ Marx said afterwards, rather ungallantly. ‘Women are funny creatures, even those endowed with much intelligence.’) After many a long argument they agreed that Karl should have himself declared insolvent in the bankruptcy court. Jennychen and Laura would find employment as governesses, Lenchen would enter service elsewhere, while little Tussy and her parents would move into the City Model Lodging House, a refuge for the destitute.
Did he really have any such intention, or was this self-inflicted martyrdom just a ruse to win Engels’s sympathy? Hard to say. But there is no doubting the sincerity of his contrition:
It was very wrong of me to write you that letter, and I regretted it as soon as it had gone off. However, what happened was in no sense due to heartlessness. As my wife and children will testify, I was as shattered when your letter arrived (first thing in the morning) as if my nearest and dearest had died. But, when I wrote to you in the evening, I did so under the pressure of circumstances that were desperate in the extreme. The landlord had put a broker in my house, the butcher had protested a bill, coal and provisions were in short supply, and little Jenny was confined to bed. Generally, under such circumstances, my only recourse is to cynicism.
Though the self-laceration was still mixed in with a ladleful of self-pity, this constitutes the only sincere apology Marx ever gave anyone in his life.
Engels, with his usual generosity, recognised Marx’s penitence at once. ‘Dear Moor,’ he wrote, resuming the old affectionate greeting:
Thank you for being so candid. You yourself have now realised what sort of impression your last letter but one made on me. One can’t live with a woman for years on end without being fearfully affected by her death. I felt as though with her I was burying the last vestige of my youth. When your letter arrived she had not been buried. That letter, I tell you, obsessed me for a whole week; I couldn’t get it out of my head. Never mind. Your last letter made up for it and I’m glad that, in losing Mary, I didn’t also lose my oldest and best friend.
The estrangement was not mentioned again: without further ado Engels applied himself to the task of rescuing the Marx family from bankruptcy. Unable to borrow money, he simply filched a £100 cheque from the in-tray at Ermen & Engels which he then endorsed in Marx’s favour. ‘It is an exceedingly daring move on my part,’ he acknowledged, ‘but the risk must be taken.’ Another £250 followed a few months later to keep Marx afloat through the summer – which was just as well, since a plague of carbuncles made work almost impossible.
That November a telegram arrived from Trier announcing the death of Henriette Marx at the age of seventy-five. She had predicted her end with suspicious accuracy – 4 p.m. on 30 November, the very hour and day of her fiftieth wedding anniversary – but no one seems to have paused to wonder if the old girl assisted her own passage into oblivion. Karl’s only comment on hearing the news was predictably cool: ‘Fate laid claim to one of our family. I myself have already had one foot in the grave. Circumstances being what they were, I, presumably, was needed more than my mater.’ Engels sent off a tenner to pay for the journey to Trier but offered no word of condolence: he knew Marx well enough to realise that bogus regrets would cause more offence than none at all.
The execution of the will dragged on for several months, and once all the advances and loans from Uncle Lion had been discounted Marx was left with little more than £100. Still, it was enough to justify a spree. In his contempt for bourgeois financial prudence Marx practised what he preached: if there was no cash in the house he survived by ducking and diving, bluffing and juggling; but whenever he did get his hands on a fistful of sterling he spent recklessly, with no thought for the morrow. The Marxes had moved to Grafton Terrace in 1856 on the strength of Jenny’s small inheritance from Caroline von Westphalen, although they must have known that the house was beyond their means. Now the folly was repeated. In March 1864, as soon as the first payment from Henriette’s legacy arrived, they took a three-year lease on a spacious detached mansion at 1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park. The new address was only about 200 yards from Grafton Terrace but a world away in style and status – the sort of residence favoured by well-to-do doctors and lawyers, with a large garden, a ‘charming conservatory’ and enough space for each girl to have her own bedroom. A room on the first floor overlooking the park was commandeered by Marx as his study.
The annual rent for Modena Villas was £65, almost twice that of Grafton Terrace. Quite how Marx expected to pay for all this luxury is a mystery: as so often, however, his Micawberish faith was vindicated. On 9 May 1864 Wilhelm ‘Lupus’ Wolff died of meningitis, bequeathing ‘all my books furniture and effects debts and moneys owning to me and all the residue of my personal estate and also all real and leasehold estates of which I may die seized possessed or entitled or of which I may have power to dispose by this my Will unto and to the use of the said Karl Marx’. Wolff was one of the few old campaigners from the 1840s who never wavered in his allegiance to Marx and Engels. He worked with them in Brussels on the Communist Correspondence Committee, in Paris at the 1848 revolution and in Cologne when Marx was editing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. From 1853 he lived quietly in Manchester, earning his living as a language teacher and relying largely on Engels to keep him up to date with political news. ‘I don’t believe anyone in Manchester can have been so universally beloved as our poor little friend,’ Karl wrote to Jenny after delivering the funeral oration, during which he broke down several times.
As executors of the will, Marx and Engels were amazed to discover that modest old Lupus had accumulated a small fortune through hard work and thrift. Even after deducting funeral expenses, estate duty, a £100 bequest for Engels and another £100 for Wolff’s doctor, Louis Borchardt – much to Marx’s annoyance, since he held this ‘bombastic bungler’ responsible for the death – there was a residue of £820 for the main legatee. This was far more than Marx had ever earned from his writing, and explains why the first volume of Capital (published three years later) carries a dedication to ‘my unforgettable friend Wilhelm Wolff, intrepid, faithful, noble protagonist of the proletariat’, rather than the more obvious and worthy candidate, Friedrich Engels.
The Marxes wasted no time in spending their windfall. Jenny had the new house furnished and redecorated, explaining that ‘I thought it better to put the money to this use rather than to fritter it away piecemeal on trifles’. Pets were bought for the children (three dogs, two cats, two birds) and named after Karl’s favourite tipples, including Whisky and Toddy. In July he took the family on vacation to Ramsgate for three weeks, though the eruption of a malignant carbuncle just above the penis rather spoiled the fun, leaving him confined to bed at their guest-house in a misanthropic sulk. ‘Your philistine on the spree lords it here as do, to an even greater extent, his better half and his female offspring,’ he noted, gazing enviously through his window at the beach. ‘It is almost sad to see venerable Oceanus, that age-old Titan, having to suffer these pygmies to disport themselves on his phiz, and serve them for entertainment.’ The boils had replaced the bailiffs as his main source of irritation. Mostly, however, he dispatched them with the same careless contempt. That autumn he held a grand ball at Modena Villas for Jennychen and Laura, who had spent many years declining invitations to parties for fear that they would be unable to reciprocate. Fifty of their young friends were entertained until four in the morning, and so much food was left over that little Tussy was allowed to have an impromptu tea-party for local children the following day.
Writing to Lion Philips in the summer of 1864, Marx revealed an even more remarkable detail of his prosperous new way of life:
I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating – partly in American funds, but more especially in English stocks, which are springing up like mushrooms this year (in furtherance of every imaginable and unimaginable joint stock enterprise), are forced up to a quite unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse. In this way, I have made over £400 and, now that the complexity of the political situation affords greater scope, I shall begin all over again. It’s a type of operation that makes small demands on one’s time, and it’s worth while running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his money.
Since there is no hard evidence of these transactions, some scholars have assumed that Marx simply invented the story to impress his businesslike uncle. But it may be true. He certainly kept a close eye on share prices, and while badgering Engels for the next payment from Lupus’s estate he mentioned that ‘had I had the money during the past ten days, I’d have made a killing on the Stock Exchange here. The time has come again when, with wit and very little money, it’s possible to make money in London.’
Playing the markets, hosting dinner-dances, walking his dogs in the park: Marx was in severe danger of becoming respectable. One day a curious document arrived, announcing that he had been elected, without his knowledge, to the municipal sinecure of ‘Constable of the Vestry of St Pancras’. Engels thought this hilarious: ‘Salut, ô connétable de Saint Pancrace! Now you should get yourself a worthy outfit: a red nightshirt, white nightcap, down-at-heel slippers, white pants, a long clay pipe and a pot of porter.’ But Marx boycotted the swearing-in, quoting the advice of an Irish neighbour that ‘I should tell them that I was a foreigner and that they should kiss me on the arse’.
Ever since the split in the Communist League he had been a resolute non-joiner, spurning any committee or party that tried to recruit him. ‘I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves,’ he had told Engels as long ago as February 1851, and it would certainly take more than St Pancras philistines to entice him out of this long hibernation. Nevertheless, after thirteen years of ‘authentic isolation’ (if not exactly peace and quiet) Marx did now feel ready to emerge. The first hint of a new mood can be seen in his enthusiastic reaction to the 1863 uprising in Poland against Tsarist oppression. ‘What do you think of the Polish business?’ he asked Engels on 13 February. ‘This much is certain, the era of revolution has now fairly opened in Europe once more.’ Four days later he decided that Prussia’s intervention on behalf of the Tsar against the Polish insurgents ‘impels us to speak’. At that stage he was thinking merely of a pamphlet or manifesto – and indeed he published a short ‘Proclamation on Poland’ in November. Little did he imagine that within another twelve months he would be the de facto leader of the first mass movement of the international working classes.
Marx’s adult life has a tidal rhythm of advance and retreat, in which foaming surges forward are followed by a long withdrawing roar. This alternation of involvement and isolation was largely beyond his control, dictated as it was by accident and circumstance – illness, exile, domestic disaster, political reverses, fractured friendships. But it can also be seen as a wilful experiment in reconciling the demands of theory and practice, private contemplation and social engagement. Like many writers he was a kind of gregarious loner, yearning for a bit of solitude in which he could get down to work without interruption yet also craving the stimulus of action and argument. And he felt the dilemma more keenly than most, since the estrangement of individuals from society was one of his preoccupying obsessions.
In a schoolboy essay from 1835, brimming with the facile certitude of a seventeen-year-old who has just bought his first razor, the problem was eliminated as briskly as youthful stubble. ‘The chief guide which must direct us in the choice of a profession is the welfare of mankind and our own perfection,’ he wrote. ‘It should not be thought that these two interests could be in conflict.’ And why not? Because human nature was so constituted that individuals reached the zenith of perfection when devoting themselves to others. Someone who works only for himself ‘may perhaps become a famous man of learning, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never be a perfect, truly great man’. History acclaims only those people who have ennobled themselves by enriching their tribe, and ‘religion itself teaches us that the ideal being whom all strive to copy sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind … Who would dare to set at naught such judgements?’
Marx himself would, as it happened. After realising that religion was no cure for alienation but merely an opiate to dull the pain, he was forced to look elsewhere for wholeness – first in the grand unifying self-consciousness of Hegelian philosophy, and then in historical materialism. But there was no escape from the old theological argument about faith versus works: it simply assumed a secular form, as theory versus practice or words versus deeds. ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it,’ he declared in 1845, as if abolishing the division of labour by a stroke of his pen: in future everyone would be both philosopher and soldier, just as we should all tend our sheep in the morning, paint a picture in the afternoon and go fishing in the evening. Aglow with existentialist fervour, Marx had no patience in those days with the ivory-tower mentality. In a little-known article from 1847 he derided the Belgian journalist Adolphe Bartels, who had taken fright at the activities of revolutionary German émigrés in Brussels:
M. Adolphe Bartels claims that public life is finished for him. Indeed, he has withdrawn into private life and does not mean to leave it; he limits himself, each time some public event occurs, to hurling protests and proclaiming loudly that he believes he is his own master, that the movement has been made without him, M. Bartels, and in spite of him, M. Bartels, and that he has the right to refuse it his supreme sanction. It will be agreed that this is just as much a way of participating in public life as any other, and that by all those declarations, proclamations and protestations the public man hides behind the humble appearance of the private individual. This is the way in which the unappreciated and misunderstood genius reveals himself.
Within a few years, however, Marx came to believe that a misunderstood genius such as himself might well participate in public life by dashing off protests and proclamations from the solitude of his desk. To everything there was a season: a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time of war, and a time of peace. Or, to mix references, why imitate the action of the tiger when the blast of war has fallen silent?
Hence the striking contrast between his sardonic swipe at Bartels and the autobiographical preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), where he confessed that the closure of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1843 had given him a longed-for opportunity ‘to withdraw from the public stage into the study’, which he ‘eagerly seized’. That preface was written during a far longer withdrawal from public business – an abstinence which he showed no great desire to break, even though German newspapers sometimes chided him for inactivity. In 1857 a group of New York revolutionaries wrote begging him to resurrect the old Communist League in London; he took more than a year to answer, and then only to point out that ‘since 1852 I had not been associated with any association and was firmly convinced that my theoretical studies were of greater use to the working class than my meddling with associations which had now had their day on the Continent’. As he told Ferdinand Freiligrath in February 1860, ‘whereas you are a poet, I am a critic and for me the experiences of 1849–52 were quite enough. The “League”, like the société des saisons in Paris and a hundred other societies, was simply an episode in the history of a party that is everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern society.’ This organic metaphor is a most apt description of how the International Working Men’s Association emerged into the daylight, four years later.
It seems almost oxymoronic that an organisation rejoicing in the name ‘International’ could be started in England, where insularity has long been not so much a geographical fluke as a way of life and generations of schoolchildren have learned to chant the Shakespearean cadences about this scepter’d isle, this other Eden:
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England …
When the English talk about ‘Europe’ or ‘the Continent’ they do not include their own country: they are referring to Abroad, a strange and savage place where the natives piss on your shoes and eat garlic in bed. One can visit Abroad, of course – and indeed conquer it to create the largest empire ever known – but the purpose of such expeditions, whether by Victorian gunboat-diplomats or modern football hooligans, is to remind Johnny Foreigner that he will always remain a lesser breed. After all, which other nation can boast that it arose from the azure main at heaven’s command? The nineteenth-century humorist Douglas Jerrold, friend of Dickens and contributor to Punch magazine, was kidding on the level when he wrote, ‘The best thing I know between France and England is – the sea.’ These quasi-jokes are still a staple of English tabloid headlines today. The very thought of England can transform even intelligent people into babbling tosh-merchants. ‘When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air,’ George Orwell wrote in a famous and vastly overpraised essay. ‘In the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener …’ Poor old Abroad: it can’t even produce a decent lawn.
Alongside the history of bragging and xenophobia, however, there is another tradition – quieter but no less enduring – of English internationalism, particularly among trade unionists. One thinks of their campaigns against South African apartheid, or their refusal to produce goods for the Chilean dictatorship in the 1970s: time and again, at least some British workers have been willing to demonstrate an instinctive kinship with the oppressed. As the Chartist George Julian Harney said at the time of the 1847 Portuguese uprising, ‘People are beginning to understand that foreign as well as domestic questions do affect them; that a blow struck at Liberty on the Tagus is an injury to the friends of Freedom on the Thames; that the success of Republicanism in France would be the doom of Tyranny in every other land; and the triumph of England’s democratic Charter would be the salvation of the millions throughout Europe.’ It would be easy to assume, as the ruling élite of the time did, that these friends of Freedom on the Thames existed only in Harney’s imagination. Why else did England remain immune from the revolutionary epidemic that afflicted the rest of Europe in 1848? Harney’s society of Fraternal Democrats – whose committee included refugees from France, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia – might hold meetings to discuss the stirring events on the Continent, but did ordinary British workers care two hoots about the struggle in far-away countries of which they knew nothing?
The answer was provided by the astonishing ‘Haynau incident’ of 1850 – which, by happy coincidence, did indeed take place right beside the Thames. Field Marshal Baron von Haynau was a brutal Austrian commander known as ‘the Hyena’ who had fully earned the sobriquet by torturing prisoners and flogging women while suppressing revolts in Italy and Hungary. In August 1850, as a respite from these exhausting duties, he took a short holiday in London, where his sightseeing itinerary included a tour of Barclay and Perkins’s Brewery on the south bank of the river. Though George Julian Harney encouraged all friends of Freedom to protest at the visit he had little hope of success – and was as surprised as anyone by what happened next. As soon as the Hyena entered the brewery, a posse of draymen threw a bale of hay on his head and pelted him with manure. He then ran out into the street, where lightermen and coal-heavers joined the chase – ripping his clothes, yanking out great tufts of his moustaches and shouting ‘Down with the Austrian butcher!’ Haynau tried to hide in a dustbin at the George Inn on Bankside, but was soon routed out and pelted with more dung. By the time the police reached the pub, rowing him across the Thames to safety, the bedraggled and humiliated butcher was in no fit state to continue his holiday. Within hours, a new song could be heard in the streets of Southwark:
Turn him out, turn him out, from our side of the Thames,
Let him go to great Tories and high-titled dames.
He may walk the West End and parade in his pride,
But he’ll not come back again near the ‘George’ in Bankside.
Harney’s Red Republican newspaper saw the debagging of Haynau as proof of ‘the progress of the working classes in political knowledge, their uncorrupted love of justice, and their intense hatred of tyranny and cruelty’. A celebratory rally in the Farringdon Hall, at which Engels spoke, was so oversubscribed that hundreds had to be turned away. Letters of congratulation arrived from workers’ associations as far afield as Paris and New York. Even Palmerston was secretly amused, reckoning that the Field Marshal could only be improved by a sip of his own medicine. But conservative newspapers such as the Quarterly Review found nothing to laugh at: the riotous scenes in Bankside were a most alarming ‘indication of foreign influence even amongst our own people’ foreign influence being the standard mid-century euphemism for the dread virus of socialism.
The Quarterly Review needn’t have worried; not yet, anyway. For the next ten years the spirit of Bankside was invisible, as the few socialist groups in Britain – the Communist League, the Chartists, the Fraternal Democrats – either died or fell asleep. It was not until about 1860 that the proletariat began to wake from its long doze. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm has remarked, this revival manifested itself in ‘a curious amalgam of political and industrial action, of various kinds of radicalism from the democratic to the anarchist, of class struggles, class alliances and government or capitalist concessions. But above all it was international, not merely because, like the revival of liberalism, it occurred simultaneously in various countries, but because it was inseparable from the international solidarity of the working classes.’
The London Trades Council, founded in 1860, was behind much of this activity. It organised a demonstration to welcome the Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi (who drew a crowd of about 50,000), and in March 1863 it held a public meeting at St James’s Hall to pledge support for Abraham Lincoln’s fight against slavery in the American Civil War. Marx, who made a rare journey into town for the occasion, was pleased to note that ‘the working men themselves spoke very well indeed, without a trace of bourgeois rhetoric’. But one shouldn’t overlook the unwitting contribution of Napoleon III, who paid for a delegation of French workers to visit London during the Exhibition of 1862, thus giving them the chance to establish contact with men such as George Odger, secretary of the Trades Council. When several of these representatives returned to London for a rally in July 1863 to mark the Polish insurrection, Odger wrote an ‘Address to the Workmen of France from the Working Men of England’, proposing that they should formalise their cross-Channel solidarity. Yet another meeting was called – this time at the cavernous St Martin’s Hall in Covent Garden, on 28 September 1864 – to consecrate their new union in the International Working Men’s Association.
Note the title: if this was to be more than merely an Anglo-French entente they would need at least a few token figures from elsewhere. Which is why, one September morning in 1864, a young Frenchman named Victor Le Lubez knocked on the door of 1 Modena Villas and asked if Karl Marx would suggest the name of someone to speak on behalf of the ‘German workers’. Marx himself was far too bourgeois to be eligible so he recommended the émigré tailor Johann Georg Eccarius, an old ally from the Communist League. One wonders why Le Lubez and Odger hadn’t thought of Eccarius already, since he was well known to them through his involvement in the London Trades Council. Perhaps familiarity had bred contempt, as it usually did with Eccarius: his gauche and humourless manner antagonised almost all who had to work with him, and they may have hoped that Marx could recruit a rather more inspiring proletarian orator for this important assembly.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider what Marx’s patronage of Eccarius tells us about his own character. According to the legend tirelessly peddled by his critics, Marx was an incorrigible snob who despised working-class socialists, regarding them as dolts and asses who had acquired ideas above their station. The biographer Robert Payne, for example, refers to ‘Marx’s contempt for humanity and especially for that section of it which he called the proletariat’. Even a sophisticated Marxologist such as Professor Shlomo Avineri can write that ‘Marx’s sceptical view of the proletariat’s ability to conceive its own goals and realise them without outside intellectual help has often been documented. It suits his remark that revolutions never start with the “masses” but originate in élite groups.’ Where have these views and remarks been documented? You will search the works of Marx – and indeed the footnotes of Avineri – in vain. Avineri mentions the ‘snubbing’ of Wilhelm Weitling: as we have seen, however, Marx was in fact remarkably generous to Weitling, arguing that one shouldn’t be too beastly to a poor tailor who had genuinely suffered for his beliefs, and what caused their eventual rift was not lordly disdain for the underclass but terminal exasperation at the political and religious delusions of an insufferable egomaniac. Had Weitling been a middle-class intellectual, Marx would have treated him far more savagely.
Which brings us to Avineri’s second exhibit. ‘Even one of his most loyal followers, George Eccarius, also a tailor by trade, came in for a generous measure of unearned contempt from his master and teacher.’ Once again no sources are cited: clearly Marx’s lofty scorn for tailors, cobblers and other pond-life is so universally accepted as to need no verification.
This is the exact opposite of the truth. It was Marx who gave Eccarius his first break by publishing his study of ‘Tailoring in London’ in the short-lived London journal NRZ Revue. ‘The author of this article,’ Marx informed readers, ‘is himself a worker in one of London’s tailoring shops. We ask the German bourgeoisie how many authors it numbers capable of grasping the real movement in a similar manner? … The reader will note how here, instead of the sentimental, moral and psychological criticism employed against existing conditions by Weitling and other workers who engage in authorship, a purely materialist understanding and a freer one, unspoilt by sentimental whims, confronts bourgeois society and its movement.’
No sign there of contempt, unearned or otherwise. Throughout the darkest days of the 1850s Marx remained attentive and sympathetic, helping Eccarius place articles in German-language newspapers abroad in the hope of rescuing him from the treadmill of tailoring from five in the morning until eight in the evening. ‘If any money is forthcoming, I would suggest that Eccarius get some first so that he doesn’t have to spend all day tailoring,’ he advised a journalistic comrade in Washington. ‘Do try and see that he gets something, if at all possible.’ However dire his own financial straits might be, he insisted that Eccarius’s needs should take priority.
When Eccarius went down with consumption, in February 1859, Marx described it as ‘the most tragic thing I have yet experienced here in London’. A few months later he noted sadly that Eccarius ‘is again going to pieces in his sweatshop’, and asked if Engels could send the poor chap a few bottles of port to sustain him. In 1860, forced by ill health to give up tailoring for a while, Eccarius was installed in lodgings rented at Marx’s own expense and fixed up with regular work for the American press at $3 an article. When three of Eccarius’s children died during the scarlet-fever epidemic of 1862, it was the poverty-stricken Marx who organised an appeal fund to cover the funeral expenses. Finally, when invited to nominate a speaker for the historic public meeting in September 1864, he again pressed the claims of his old friend. Eccarius put on a ‘splendid performance’, Marx reported to Engels afterwards, adding that he himself had been happy to remain mute on the platform. And yet, even now, many authors continue to repeat the old nonsense about Marx’s mean-spirited and snooty disdain for mere tailors.
In fact, it was the presence of so many genuine workers – and the refreshing lack of preening middle-class dilettantes – that attracted him to the International’s inaugural rally, persuading him ‘to waive my usual standing rule to decline any such invitations’. Although he came to St Martin’s Hall only as a silent observer, by the end of the evening he had been co-opted on to the General Council.
Now there seems to be a slight paradox here. Marx himself was indisputably a bourgeois intellectual. By joining the Council was he not in danger of diluting the proletarian purity which he so admired? To answer the question we need to look more closely at the composition of the International. The General Council consisted of two Germans (Marx and Eccarius), two Italians, three Frenchmen and twenty-seven Englishmen – almost all of them working class. It was a muddled mélange: English trade unionists who cared passionately about the right to free collective bargaining but had no interest in socialist revolution; French Proudhonists who dreamed of utopia but disliked trade unions; plus a few republicans, disciples of Mazzini and campaigners for Polish freedom. They disagreed about almost everything – and particularly about what role, if any, the enlightened middle classes should be allowed to play in the International. In a letter to Engels two years after its foundation, Marx reported an all-too-typical contretemps:
By way of demonstration against the French monsieurs – who wanted to exclude everyone except ‘travailleurs manuels’, in the first instance from membership of the International Association, or at least from eligibility for election as delegate to the congress – the English yesterday proposed me as President of the General Council. I declared that under no circumstances could I accept such a thing, and proposed Odger [the English trade union leader] in my turn, who was then in fact re-elected, although some people voted for me despite my declaration.
The minute-book for this meeting records that Marx ‘thought himself incapacitated because he was a head worker and not a hand worker’, but it is not quite as simple as that. (His desire to get on with writing Capital may have exerted a stronger tug at the sleeve.) A few years later, when a doctor called Sexton was proposed for membership, there were the usual mutterings about ‘whether it was desirable to add professional men to the Council’; according to the minutes, however, ‘Citizen Marx did not think there was anything to fear from the admission of professional men while the great majority of the Council was composed of workers.’ In 1872, when there were problems with various crackpot American sects infiltrating the International, it was Marx himself who proposed – successfully – that no new section should be allowed to affiliate unless at least two-thirds of its members were wage labourers.
In short, while accepting that most office-holders and members must be working class, Marx was unembarrassed by his own lack of proletarian credentials: men such as himself still had much to offer the association as long as they didn’t pull rank or hog the limelight. Engels followed this example, though as an affluent capitalist he was understandably more reluctant to impose himself. After selling his stake in the family firm and moving down to London in 1870, he accepted a seat on the General Council almost at once but declined the office of treasurer. ‘Citizen Engels objected that none but working men ought to be appointed to have anything to do [with] the finances,’ the minutes record. ‘Citizen Marx did not consider the objection tenable: an ex-commercial man was the best for the office.’ Engels persisted with his refusal – and was probably right to do so. As the Marxian scholar Hal Draper has pointed out, handling money was the touchiest job in a workers’ association, for charges of financial irregularity were routine ploys whenever political conflict started; and a Johnny-come-lately businessman from Manchester would have been an obvious target for any ‘French monsieurs’ who wanted to stir up trouble.
Marx may have preferred to work behind the scenes, but he worked exceptionally hard all the same: without his efforts the International would probably have disintegrated within a year. The Council met every Tuesday at its shabby HQ in Greek Street, Soho – on the site which, almost exactly a century later, was to become the Establishment night-club, where satirists such as Lenny Bruce and Peter Cook used rather different techniques to undermine prevailing orthodoxy. The minute-books show that he was happy to take on his share of the donkey-work. (‘Citizens Fox, Marx and Cremer were deputed to attend the Compositors’ Society … Citizen Marx proposed, Citizen Cremer seconded, that the Central Council thank Citizen Cottam for his generous gift … Citizen Marx stated that societies in Basle and Zurich had joined the Association … Citizen Marx reported that he had received £3 from Germany for members’ cards, which he paid to the Financial Secretary …’) His influence was apparent from the outset. The initial item of business at the Council’s very first meeting, on 5 October 1864, was a proposal by Marx that William Randal Cremer of the London Trades Council should be appointed secretary. (‘Mr Cremer was unanimously elected.’) Later that evening Marx was elected to a subcommittee whose task was to draw up rules and principles of the new Association.
So far so good. But then Marx fell ill, thus missing the next two meetings. He was roused from his sick-bed on 18 October by an urgent letter from Eccarius, who warned that if he didn’t come to the General Council that evening a hopelessly insipid and confused statement of aims would be adopted in his absence. Marx staggered down to Greek Street and listened aghast as the worthy Le Lubez read out ‘a fearfully cliché-ridden, badly written and totally unpolished preamble pretending to be a declaration of principles, with Mazzini showing through the whole thing from beneath a crust of the most insubstantial scraps of French socialism’. After long debate, Eccarius proposed that this unappetising menu be sent back to the subcommittee for further editing, cunningly forestalling any suspicion of a coup by promising that its ‘sentiments’ would remain unchanged.
This was the opportunity Marx needed. Putting on his most innocent expression, he suggested that the subcommittee meet two days later at his house, which offered rather more comfort (and a better stocked cellar) than the poky little room in Greek Street. When the team assembled chez Marx, he then spun out a discussion about the rules at such interminable length that by one in the morning they had still not even begun their ‘editing’ of the preamble. How were they to have it ready in time for the next gathering of the General Council five days later? His weary colleagues, yawning fit to bust, gratefully accepted Marx’s suggestion that he should try to cobble something together himself. All the draft papers were left in his hands, and they departed to their beds.
‘I could see that it was impossible to make anything out of the stuff,’ he told Engels. ‘In order to justify the extremely peculiar way in which I intended to edit the sentiments that had already been “carried”, I wrote An Address to the Working Classes (which was not in the original plan: a sort of review of the adventures of the working class since 1845); on the pretext that all the necessary facts were contained in this “Address” and that we ought not to repeat the same things three times over, I altered the whole preamble, threw out the déclaration des principes and finally replaced the forty rules by ten.’ As a sop to the more pious and less revolutionary members, he threw in a few references to truth, morality, duty and justice, and avoided the belligerent rhetorical flourishes that had so enlivened the Communist Manifesto. As he explained to Engels, ‘It will take time before the revival of the movement allows the old boldness of language to be used. We must be fortiter in re, suaviter in modo.’ Which, being translated from the Latin, essentially means: speak softly and carry a big stick.
Despite the years of seclusion, Marx had lost none of his old procedural guile. At its meeting of 1 November, partly at his suggestion, the General Council co-opted several new members. They included Karl Pfänder, the Communist League veteran who had once examined Wilhelm Liebknecht’s skull; Hermann Jung, a Swiss watchmaker; Eugène Dupont, a French musical-instrument maker; and Friedrich Lessner, the tailor who had rushed the manuscript of the Communist Manifesto to the printers in 1848. All were stalwart supporters of Marx – and he needed all the support he could get, since some of the English members were none too happy with his new text. One of the milder suggestions, as the minutes record, was that ‘some explanation should be given (in the form of a footnote) of the terms “nitrogen” and “carbon”’. (Marx thought this quite unnecessary. ‘We need hardly remind the reader,’ he commented wearily in the footnote, ‘that, apart from the elements of water and certain inorganic substances, carbon and nitrogen form the raw materials of human food.’) A more hostile complaint came from a printer, William Worley, who had made his opinions clear at the previous meeting by objecting to the statement that ‘the capitalist was opposed to the labourer’. This time, his reformist conscience was outraged by Marx’s description of capitalists as ‘profitmongers’. By eleven votes to ten, the council agreed that the inflammatory word be erased. The address was then passed nem. con.
The unanimous acceptance of this ‘review of the adventures of the working class’ is a tribute to Marx’s skill in judging how far he could go. There were no revolutionary predictions, no spectres or hobgoblins stalking Europe – though he did his best to make the reader’s flesh creep with a description of British industry as a vampire which could survive only by sucking the blood of children. Mostly, he allowed the facts to speak for themselves, larding the document with official statistics plagiarised from his own work in progress, Capital, to justify his claim that ‘the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864’. But, as ever, his attempt to imagine an alternative was as formless if sweet as a bowl of blancmange: ‘Like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind and a joyous heart.’
The address ended with the words ‘Proletarians of all countries, Unite!’; the equally familiar phrase encouraging them to throw off their chains was tactfully omitted. Even so, one can’t help wondering how closely his colleagues scrutinised the text before approving it. ‘The lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economical monopolies,’ he announced in the final pages. ‘To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes.’ Such a notion was anathema to many of the English representatives on the General Council, who thought that the great duty of the working classes was to form trade unions which could bargain for better pay and conditions, while leaving politics to Members of Parliament. This was certainly the view of the impeccably moderate general secretary, William Randal Cremer, who later became a Liberal MP and ended his career as a knight of the realm. The fact that even he voted for the address tells us much about Marx’s powers of persuasion. As old Communist Leaguers such as Pfänder and Lessner knew, Marx’s intimidating presence – his dark eyes, his slashing wit, his formidable analytical brain – would always dominate any committee. Scarcely a month after sitting silently on the stage at St Martin’s Hall, he was already taking charge.
But mere force of personality was not enough to quell the feuds and animosities that inevitably characterised such as incongruous hybrid as the International. Even the small French contingent on the General Council was itself split into two irreconcilable factions of republicans and Proudhonists. The republicans, represented by Le Lubez, were essentially middle-class radicals – red hot for liberté, égalité and fraternité but rather less excited by arguments about industry or property. Proudhon’s earnest disciples, led by the engraver Henri Louis Tolain, regarded republics and governments as centralised tyrannies that were inimical to the interests of the small shopkeepers and artisans whose cause they championed; all they wanted was a network of mutual-credit societies and small-scale co-operatives. Another Proudhonist, who joined the General Council in 1866, was the young medical student Paul Lafargue, later to become the husband of Laura Marx. His first encounters with his future father-in-law were unpromising. ‘That damned boy Lafargue pesters me with his Proudhonism,’ Karl complained to Laura, ‘and will not rest, it seems, until I have administered to him a sound cudgelling.’ After one of Lafargue’s many speeches declaring nations and nationalities to be the purest moonshine, Marx raised a laugh among his English colleagues by pointing out that ‘our friend Lafargue, and others who had abolished nationalities, had addressed us in “French”, i.e. in a language which nine-tenths of the audience did not understand’. He added mischievously that by denying the existence of nationalities the young zealot ‘seemed quite unconsciously to imply their absorption by the model French nation’.
If the doughty English trade unionists were incredulously amused by these Gallic squabbles, they were downright astonished to learn that the great Mazzini – a heroic figure in London – was regarded by the Germans and French as a posturing ninny whose passion for national liberation had quite eclipsed any awareness of the central importance of class. ‘The position is difficult now,’ Marx admitted after another bruising session at Greek Street, ‘because one must oppose the silly Italianism of the English, on the one hand, and the mistaken polemic of the French, on the other.’
It was a time-consuming business. In a letter to Engels of March 1865 he described a fairly typical week’s work. Tuesday evening was given over to the General Council, at which Tolain and Le Lubez bickered until midnight, after which he had to adjourn to a nearby pub and sign 200 membership cards. The next day he attended a meeting at St Martin’s Hall to mark the anniversary of the Polish insurrection. On Saturday and Monday there were subcommittee meetings devoted to ‘the French question’, both of which raged on until one in the morning. And so to Tuesday, when another stormy session of the General Council ‘left the English in particular with the impression that the Frenchmen stand really in need of a Bonaparte!’ In between all these meetings, there were ‘people dashing this way and that to see me’ in connection with a conference on household suffrage which was to be held the following weekend. ‘What a waste of time!’ he groaned.
Engels thought so too. After Marx’s death he said that ‘Moor’s life without the International would be a diamond ring with the diamond broken out’, but at first he simply couldn’t understand why his friend wished to spend hours suffering in dingy Soho back rooms when he could be at his desk in Hampstead writing Capital. ‘I have always half-expected that the naïve fraternité in the International Association would not last long,’ he commented smugly in 1865, after another bout of internecine squabbling among the French. ‘It will pass through a lot more such phases and will take up a great deal of your time.’ Until he retired to London in 1870 Engels played no part in the association.
By 1865 Marx was the de facto leader of the International, though his official title was ‘corresponding secretary for Germany’. Even this was a misnomer: the death of Lassalle left him with only a couple of friends in the whole of Germany – Wilhelm Liebknecht and the gynaecologist Ludwig Kugelmann – and most of his ‘corresponding’ took the form of sniggers about the alleged homosexuality of Lassalle’s successor, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, plus a few dismissive remarks about the appalling political backwardness of the Teutonic race. ‘There is nothing I can do in Prussia at the moment,’ he wrote to Dr Kugelmann. ‘I prefer my agitation here through the “International Association” a hundred times. The effect on the English proletariat is direct and of the greatest importance. We are now stirring the General Suffrage Question here, which is, naturally, of quite different significance here than in Prussia.’
Extending the franchise was the dominant parliamentary issue of the moment – though it should be added that the various proposals for reform put forward by Tories and Whigs in the mid-1860s owed less to high principle than to the jostle for party advantage. There were debates galore, which today seem as remote and incomprehensible as the Schleswig-Holstein question, about the voting rights of ‘copyholders’, ‘£6 ratepayers’ and ‘£50 tenants-at-will’. But amid all the arcane arguments over fancy franchises and plural voting, one point was accepted by all peers and MPs: there must be some sort of property qualification to prevent the great unwashed from having any say in the nation’s affairs. ‘What I fear,’ Walter Bagehot wrote in his English Constitution, ‘is that both our political parties will bid for the support of the working man; that both of them will promise to do as he likes …’ Even the National Reform Union, a supposedly radical pressure group, desired only the enfranchisement of householders and ratepaying lodgers.
In the spring of 1865, after a packed meeting at St Martin’s Hall, a Reform League was founded to campaign for universal manhood suffrage. (The possibility that women might be either willing or able to vote was, apparently, too far-fetched to merit consideration.) Marx and his colleagues from the International took charge: ‘The whole leadership is in our hands,’ he revealed triumphantly to Engels. For the next year or so he threw himself into the crusade with gusto while also attending to the International, the manuscript of Capital, the demands of his family and creditors – and, of course, those blossoming boils on his bum, which were more prolific than ever. He hacked away at them with a cut-throat razor, watching with vicious satisfaction as the bad blood spurted over the carpet. Sometimes, having staggered to bed at 4 a.m. several nights running, he felt ‘infernally harassed’ and wished he had never emerged from hibernation.
Was the game worth so many late-night candles? He convinced himself that it was. ‘If we succeed in re-electrifying the political movement of the English working class,’ he wrote after launching the Reform League, ‘our Association will already have done more for the European working class, without making any fuss, than was possible in any other way. And there is every prospect of success.’ Not so. Reformist trade union leaders such as Cremer and Odger soon made concessions, deciding that they would be quite content with household suffrage rather than one man one vote. And that, more or less, is what they got. In the summer of 1867, Parliament approved Disraeli’s Reform Bill, which lowered the property qualification for county voters and extended the franchise to all urban householders – thus doubling the size of the electorate. But the vast majority of the working population remained as voteless as ever.
The International, too, never quite lived up to Marx’s hyperbole. There were some early successes, notably in sabotaging attempts by English employers to recruit foreign workers as strike-breakers, and the ensuing notoriety persuaded several small craft societies to affiliate – among them such exotic bodies as the Amalgamated Cordwainers of Darlington, the Hand-in-Hand Society of Coopers, the West-End Cabinet Makers, the Day-Working Bookbinders, the English Journeymen Hairdressers, the Elastic Web Weavers’ Society and the Cigar Makers. But the big industrial unions stayed aloof. William Allen, general secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, refused even to meet a deputation from the International. More galling still was the failure to enrol the London Trades Council, even though its secretary, George Odger, was also president of the International. By the time of the Association’s first pan-European Congress, held in Geneva during the summer of 1866, the total number of members in affiliated societies was 25,173 – by no means negligible, but hardly proof that the English proletariat had been ‘reelectrified’. If the International was to expand any further it would have to live up to its name and broaden its horizons far beyond the Cordwainers of Darlington.
Marx himself missed the Geneva Congress, yet still managed to dominate the proceedings. When the French Proudhonists issued their well-rehearsed protest against middle-class socialists (‘all men who have the duty of representing working-class groups should be workers’), William Randal Cremer defended the record of the few non-manual workers on the General Council. ‘Among those members I will mention one only, Citizen Marx, who has devoted his life to the triumph of the working classes.’ The baton was then taken up by James Carter of the Journeymen Hairdressers:
Citizen Marx has just been mentioned; he has perfectly understood the importance of this first congress, where there should be only working-class delegates; therefore he refused the delegateship he was offered in the General Council. But this is not the reason to prevent him or anyone else from coming into our midst; on the contrary, men who devote themselves completely to the proletarian cause are too rare for us to push them aside. The middle class only triumphed when, rich and powerful as it was in numbers, it allied itself with men of science …
After this barber-shop testimonial even the leader of the Proudhon faction, Henri Tolain, felt obliged to congratulate the absent hero. ‘As a worker, I thank Citizen Marx for not accepting the delegateship offered him. In doing that, Citizen Marx showed that workers’ congresses should be made up only of manual workers.’ Citizen Marx had not intended to show anything of the kind, and there is no evidence that he stayed away from Geneva to avoid offending proletarian sensibilities. A more likely explanation is that he didn’t wish to endure tedious harangues from the French exclusionists when he could have a few days’ uninterrupted work on Capital.
A year earlier he had told Engels that the draft required only a few ‘finishing touches’, which would be done by September 1865. ‘I am working like a horse at the moment.’ His friends had heard many such hopeful forecasts over the years, but this time he really did seem to be in the final furlongs – even if the spavined old nag was proceeding at a limping trot rather than full gallop. Through the summer of 1865 he was vomiting every day (‘in consequence of the hot weather and related biliousness’), and a sudden influx of house guests provided further unwelcome distraction. Jenny’s buffoonish brother, Edgar von Westphalen, came to stay for six months, drinking the wine cellar dry and ‘pondering the needs of his stomach from morn till night’; other visitors included Marx’s brother-in-law from South Africa, a niece from Maastricht and the Freiligrath family. This was the price he paid for moving to a house with spare rooms, but it was a price he could ill afford. ‘For two months I have been living solely on the pawnshop,’ he fretted. ‘A queue of creditors has been hammering on my door, becoming more and more unendurable every day.’ And yet, at the still point in the centre of this whirlwind, his masterpiece was nearing completion. By the end of 1865 Capital was a manuscript of 1,200 pages, a baroque mess of ink-blots and crossings-out and squiggles. On New Year’s Day 1866 he sat down to make a fair copy and polish the style – ‘licking the infant clean after long birth pangs’. But then the carbuncles returned. On doctor’s orders he was banished to Margate for a month, where he did little except bathe in the sea, swallow arsenic three times a day and feel thoroughly sorry for himself. ‘I can sing with the Miller of the Dee: “I care for nobody and nobody cares for me”.’ At the end of his sea cure the carbuncles had gone – only to be replaced by rheumatism and toothache. Then the old liver trouble returned for an encore. Even on days when he was fit to work some new misfortune usually descended, as when his stationer refused to supply any more paper until the last batch had been paid for.
With exquisitely bad timing, Paul Lafargue chose this un-propitious moment to ask for the hand of the twenty-year-old Laura Marx in marriage. The Creole medical student, having met Marx through the International, had transferred his attention to the old man’s green-eyed daughter and begun wooing her with an enthusiasm which Karl thought most indecorous. Lafargue was suspect anyway, not only for Proudhonist tendencies but also because of his exotic Franco-Spanish-Indian-African ancestry, which to his prospective father-in-law suggested a certain genetic flightiness. As soon as writing paper could be found Marx sent the overzealous suitor a letter of which any Victorian paterfamilias would have been proud.
Allow me to make the following observations:
1. If you wish to continue your relations with my daughter, you will have to give up your present manner of ‘courting’. You know full well that no engagement has been entered into, that as yet everything is undecided. And even if she were formally betrothed to you, you should not forget that this is a matter of long duration. The practice of excessive intimacy is especially inappropriate since the two lovers will be living at the same place for a necessarily prolonged period of severe testing and purgatory … To my mind, true love expresses itself in reticence, modesty and even the shyness of the lover towards his object of veneration, and certainly not in giving free rein to one’s passion and in premature demonstrations of familiarity. If you should urge your Creole temperament in your defence, it is my duty to interpose my sound reason between your temperament and my daughter. If in her presence you are incapable of loving her in a manner in keeping with the London latitude, you will have to resign yourself to loving her from a distance.
In fact it was Marx and not Lafargue who attributed this ardour – and almost everything else – to the ‘Creole temperament’. As late as November 1882 he was still going on about it, telling Engels that ‘Lafargue has the blemish customarily found in the negro tribe – no sense of shame, by which I mean shame about making a fool of oneself.’
Before consenting to the marriage, Marx required a full account of the young man’s prospects. ‘You know that I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle,’ he wrote to Lafargue. ‘I do not regret it. Quite the contrary. If I had to live my life over again, I would do the same. I would not marry, however. As far as it lies within my power, I wish to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother’s life was wrecked … You must have achieved something in life before thinking of marriage, and a long period of testing is required of you and Laura.’ Not that long, as it turned out: Laura Marx’s engagement to Paul Lafargue was announced in September 1866, only a month after Marx dispatched his letter, and they were married in St Pancras register office on 2 April 1868. Her father, rather unromantically, described the union as ‘a great relief for the entire household, since Lafargue is as good as living with us, which perceptibly increases expenses’. At the wedding lunch Engels cracked so many jokes about the bride that she burst into tears.
Lacking the vivacity of Jennychen and Eleanor, Laura never enjoyed being the centre of attention. (‘As I am in the habit of keeping in the background, I am very apt to be overlooked and forgotten.’) Of all the Marx girls she was probably the most like Jenny Marx: while her sisters dreamed of careers on the stage, Laura’s only ambition was to be a good wife. Her first child, Charles Etienne (nicknamed ‘Schnapps’), was born on 1 January 1869, almost exactly nine months after the wedding, followed over the next two years by a daughter and another son. All died in infancy. There was, it seemed, no escaping those reefs on which her mother’s life had been wrecked. ‘In all these struggles we women have the harder part to bear,’ Jenny Marx wrote, mourning the loss of her grandchildren, ‘because it is the lesser one. A man draws strength from his struggle with the world outside, and is invigorated by the sight of the enemy, be their number legion. We remain sitting at home, darning socks.’