Paradox, irony and contradiction, the animating spirits of Marx’s work, were also the impish trinity that shaped his own life. He would, one guesses, have applauded Ralph Waldo Emerson’s defiant creed: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.’
It is no surprise, then, that a man who was perpetually skint throughout his working career should find financial security only when he abandoned the struggle to earn a living. In the summer of 1870 Engels sold his partnership in the family business to one of the Ermen brothers, and with the proceeds he was able to guarantee his improvident friend a pension of £350 a year. ‘I am quite knocked down by your too great kindness,’ Marx gasped. For two decades Engels had been the breadwinner for an extended tribe of dependants – the Burns sisters, the Marx family, Helene Demuth – while also writing and campaigning energetically for his political cause. He had never once complained. As Jenny Marx said, ‘He is always healthy, vigorous, cheerful and in good spirits, and he thoroughly relishes his beer (especially when it’s the Viennese variety)’. Accompanied by Lizzy Burns and her simple-minded niece Mary Ellen (‘Pumps’) – yet another waif for whom he had assumed responsibility – Engels moved down to London, taking a lease on a handsome town house at 122 Regent’s Park Road.
Not all the ironies of destiny were so benign. The years of strife in the International had left Marx with a violent allergy to French socialists, which he had hoped to cure by resigning from the General Council; now fate inflicted two of these chafing irritants on him as sons-in-law. On 2 October 1872, a couple of weeks after the Hague congress, Jennychen married Charles Longuet in a civil ceremony at St Pancras register office.
The bride’s mother, who did not always share Karl’s more extreme prejudices, certainly endorsed this one. Almost everything about the French set her teeth on edge – their hauteur, their élan, their savoir faire, their idées fixes, their grandes passions and quite probably a certain je ne sais quoi as well. ‘Longuet is a very gifted man,’ she wrote to Liebknecht when the engagement was announced, ‘and he is good, honest and decent … On the other hand I cannot contemplate their union without great uneasiness and would really have preferred if Jenny’s choice had fallen (for a change) on an Englishman or German, instead of a Frenchman, who of course possesses all the charming qualities of his nation, but is not free of their foibles and inadequacies.’
Sure enough, Longuet proved to be a sullen, selfish and hectoring brute who condemned his wife to a treadmill of ceaseless housework. ‘Though I drudge like a nigger,’ she told her sister Eleanor, ‘he never does anything but scream at me and grumble every minute he is in the house.’ For Karl Marx, the only consolations of this miserable marriage were the arrival of grandchildren – five boys, of whom one died young – and the fact that Longuet had a regular income as a lecturer at London University which kept Jennychen fed and housed. (Two years before the wedding, when the Marx family finances plummeted to a hellish new nadir, she had been reduced to seeking work as a governess.)
Laura’s husband, by contrast, seemed a hopeless case. Paul Lafargue renounced his medical ambitions because the deaths of their three children had shattered his faith in doctors; he embarked instead on a career in business, buying the patent rights to a ‘new process’ for photo-engraving. This implausible enterprise was hobbled from the start by constant quarrels with his partner, the Communard refugee Benjamin Constant Le Moussu, and to save the family’s honour Marx felt obliged to buy out Lafargue’s stake (financed, one need hardly add, by good old Engels). Marx himself then fell out with Le Moussu over the ownership of the patent. Rather than suffer the embarrassment and expense of going to court, they submitted the dispute to private arbitration by a left-wing barrister, Frederic Harrison. In his memoirs he recalled:
Before they gave evidence I required them in due form to be sworn on the Bible, as the law then required for legal testimony. This filled both of them with horror. Karl Marx protested that he would never so degrade himself. Le Moussu said that no man should ever accuse him of such an act of meanness. For half an hour they argued and protested, each refusing to be sworn first in the presence of the other. At last I obtained a compromise, that the witnesses should simultaneously ‘touch the book’, without uttering a word. Both seemed to me to shrink from the pollution of handling the sacred volume, much as Mephistopheles in the Opera shrinks from the Cross. When they got to argue the case, the ingenious Le Moussu won, for Karl Marx floundered about in utter confusion.
The débâcle fortified Marx’s conviction that, beneath their ‘French fiddlededeee’, Parisian socialists were all liars and rascals. Le Moussu immediately joined his private bestiary of scallywags, damned as an embezzler ‘who cheated me and others out of significant sums of money and who then resorted to infamous slanders in order to whitewash his character and present himself as an innocent whose beautiful soul has gone unappreciated’. But Marx’s wrath was soon redirected against Paul Lafargue, the incompetent oaf who had got him into this mess. Quite apart from their personal ‘foibles and indequacies’, both Lafargue and Longuet were political flibbertigibbets who refused to heed the countless sermons and tutorials from their exasperated father-in-law. ‘Longuet as the last Proudhonist and Lafargue as the last Bakuninist!’ he complained to Engels. ‘May the devil take them!’
To lose two daughters to Frenchmen might be regarded as a misfortune; to lose a third would be unthinkably careless. So one can imagine the horrified reaction when Eleanor fell in love with the dashing Hippolyte Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, who at thirty-four was exactly twice her age. It was Lissagaray’s misfortune to arrive at Modena Villas when the Gallic wars against Lafargue and Longuet had already begun; in other circumstances he might have seemed quite acceptable. ‘With one exception, all the books on the Commune that have hitherto appeared are mere trash. That one exception to the general rule is Lissagaray’s work,’ Jennychen told the Kugelmanns in 1871, apparently echoing her father’s opinion. When Lissagaray published a fuller History of the Commune a few years later, Marx even helped Eleanor to prepare an English translation. Nevertheless, the man was indubitably French: his pomaded quiff, supercilious smirk and careless flamboyance all seemed to betoken a fickle individualist, and the onus was on Lissagaray to show that he could become a responsible husband. ‘I asked nothing of him,’ Marx wrote to Engels, ‘but that he should provide proof instead of words that he was better than his reputation and that there was some good reason to rely on him … The damned nuisance is that I must be very circumspect and indulgent because of the child.’
Not so: for long periods he forbade ‘Tussy’ to see ‘Lissa’ at all, while the more truly circumspect and indulgent Jenny Marx connived at their secret assignations. But these snatched meetings merely aggravated the pain of separation. In May 1873 Eleanor took a teaching post at a ladies’ seminary in Brighton, hoping to escape from Marx’s baleful glare (and perhaps her financial dependence); by September she was back home in a state of nervous collapse. If forced to choose between her father and her lover she could not defy the gravitational pull of filial devotion – but why should such a choice be imposed? A letter she left on his desk a few months later revealed both her agony and her undiminished obedience:
I am going to ask you something, but first I want you to promise me that you will not be very angry. I want to know, dear Moor, when I may see L. again. It is so very hard never to see him. I have been doing my best to be patient, but it is so difficult and I don’t feel as if I could be much longer. I do not expect you to say that he can come here. I should not even wish it, but could I not, now and then, go for a little walk with him? …
When I was so very ill at Brighton (during a time when I fainted two or three times a day), L. came to see me, and each time left me stronger and happier; and more able to bear the rather heavy load left on my shoulders. [Marx was entirely unaware of these visits.] It is so long since I saw him and I am beginning to feel so very miserable notwithstanding all my efforts to keep up, for I have tried hard to be merry and cheerful. I cannot much longer …
At any rate, dearest Moor, if I may not see him now, could you not say when I may. It would be something to look forward to, and if the time were not so indefinite it would be less wearisome to wait.
My dearest Moor, please don’t be angry with me for writing this, but forgive me for being selfish enough to worry you again.
Your
Tussy
Marx refused to yield.
Eleanor tried to divert herself by keeping busy, just as her father always had. She enrolled for acting classes with a Mrs Vezin, in the hope of realising childhood fantasies of a stage career; she joined the New Shakespeare Society and the Browning Society, two of the many groups founded by the socialist teacher Frederick James Furnivall; like Marx before her, she discovered the warm sanctuary of the British Museum, where she undertook freelance research and translations for Furnivall. (It was while working in the reading room that she met a young Irishman named George Bernard Shaw, newly arrived in England, who became a firm friend.) Years later, after giving a recitation at the annual meeting of the Browning Society in June 1882, she wrote excitedly to Jennychen,
The place was crowded – and as all sorts of ‘literary’ and other ‘swells’ were there I felt ridiculously nervous but went on capitally. Mrs Sutherland Orr (the sister of Frederick Leighton, the president of the Royal Academy) wants to take me to see Browning and recite his own poems to him! I have been asked to go this afternoon to a ‘crush’ at Lady Wilde’s. She is the mother of that very limp and nasty young man, Oscar Wilde, who has been making such a d—d ass of himself in America. As the son has not yet returned and the mother is nice I may go … What a fine thing enthusiasm is!
The exclamation marks, like the name-dropping awe with which she mentions the ‘swells’, are worthy of Charles Pooter himself.
Though enthusiasm brought some joy and consolation it could not entirely distract her from the Lissagaray impasse. What most grieved Eleanor was that Jenny, who never understood her, should be so sweetly sympathetic while the beloved Moor seemed oblivious to her sacrifice – even though ‘our natures were so exactly alike’. As many visitors remarked, there was a startling physical resemblance too: a broad, low forehead above dark bright eyes and a prominent nose. Draw a beard on Eleanor’s photograph and you have the very image of the young Karl Marx. ‘I unfortunately only inherited my father’s nose,’ she joked, ‘and not his genius.’ When comparing his daughters Marx would acknowledge that ‘Jenny is most like me, but Tussy is me’. Following his example, she sought to calm her nerves with chain-smoking, a habit common enough among literary gents but rare and shocking for a well-educated Victorian girl still in her teens.
Even their ailments achieved a gruesome synchronicity. Tussy’s depression manifested itself in headaches, insomnia, biliousness and almost all the other symptoms (except carbuncles) which Marx knew so well. ‘What neither Papa nor the doctors nor anyone will understand,’ she complained, ‘is that it is chiefly mental worry that affects me’ – a strange lapse for the man who had himself once admitted that ‘my sickness always originates in the mind’. For much of the 1870s this pair of wheezing semi-invalids traipsed around the spas of Europe in search of a cure, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were making each other ill. In August 1873, when Tussy was having her fainting fits in Brighton, Marx wrote to a comrade in St Petersburg, ‘I have since months suffered severely, and found myself, for some time, even in a dangerous state of illness, consequent upon overwork. My head was so seriously affected that a paralytic strike was to be apprehended …’ Two weeks later, while drinking a spoonful of raspberry vinegar in the belief that it might do him good, he had a terrible choking fit: ‘My face went quite black, etc. Another second or so and I would have departed this life.’ After Tussy’s return to London he began to brood on ‘the serious possibility of my succumbing to apoplexy’. At first his doctor thought he might have had a stroke, but the diagnosis was then revised to nervous exhaustion. On 24 November, much to Jenny Marx’s relief, father and daughter left London to take the waters at Harrogate.
Both of them enjoyed their three weeks of rest and mineral baths, though Marx did his tortured brain no favours by reading Saint-Beuve, an author he had always disliked. ‘If the man has become so famous in France,’ he wrote to Engels, ‘it must be because he is in every respect the most classical incarnation of French vanité … strutting about in a romantic disguise and newly minted idioms.’ Hardly the ideal book to take his mind off that other strutting Frenchman for whom his daughter was pining. But he seemed cheerful enough, even when his return to Modena Villas for Christmas was accompanied by an outbreak of carbuncles and a spate of newspaper gossip about his health. ‘I myself allow the English papers to announce my death from time to time, without showing any sign of life,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a farthing for the public, and, if my occasional illness is exaggerated, it at least has the advantage that it spares me all sorts of requests (theoretical and otherwise) from unknown people in every corner of the earth.’
On the way back from Harrogate he had spent a day in Manchester being examined by Engels’s friend Dr Eduard Gumpert, who found ‘a certain elongation of the liver’ for which the only known cure was a trip to the fashionable Bohemian spa-town of Carlsbad. Since this entailed travelling through Germany, where he would probably be arrested as a subversive, Marx thought it impossible. But then an idea struck him: an émigré who had lived in England for more than a year was entitled to British citizenship and, therefore, the full protection of Her Britannic Majesty against foreign border-guards. After submitting an application to the Home Office, together with affidavits from four Hampstead neighbours testifying to his ‘good character’, he and Eleanor set off for Germany on 15 August 1874 in the belief that the certificate of naturalisation would be forwarded within a few days. On 26 August, however, the Home Secretary wrote to inform Marx’s solicitor that his application had been turned down. No reason was given; but a confidential letter sent from Scotland Yard to the Home Office on 17 August, now to be found in the Public Record Office, reveals all:
With reference to the above I beg to report that he is the notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society, and the advocate of Communistic principles. He has not been loyal to his own King and Country.
The referees Messrs ‘Seton’, ‘Matheson’, ‘Manning’ and ‘Adcock’ are all British born subjects, and respectable householders. The statements made by them with reference to the time they have known the applicant are correct.
W. Reimers, Sergeant
F. Williamson, Supt.
As it happened, Marx reached Carlsbad without requiring the assistance of Queen Victoria and her plenipotentiaries – possibly because he was accompanied by Eleanor, a British subject from birth. But he remained wary, registering at the Hotel Germania as ‘Mr Charles Marx, private gentleman’ in the hope that no one would guess his identity. Although the local police saw through this disguise at once, after a month of continuous surveillance they were forced to admit that he gave ‘cause for no suspicion’ – hardly surprising, since his health regime left no time for fomenting revolution among the palsied inmates and their physicians. ‘We are both living in strict accordance with the rules,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘We go to our respective springs at six every morning, where I have to drink seven glasses. Between each two glasses there has to be a break of fifteen minutes during which one marches up and down. After the last glass, an hour’s walk and, finally, coffee. Another cold glass in the evenings before bed.’ In the afternoons they explored the wooded granite foothills of the Schlossberg, where other patients were scandalised by the sight of Eleanor puffing away incessantly at her cigarettes.
All those mineral-water sluicings may have done wonders for Marx’s liver but they gave him a foul temper – not helped by the arrival of Ludwig and Gertrud Kugelmann, who installed themselves in an adjoining room. Of late he had been increasingly irritated by the doltishness and indiscretion of this self-appointed disciple; now, through the thin hotel walls, he was kept awake by the din of Herr Kugelmann berating his wife. ‘My patience came to an end finally when he inflicted his family scenes on me,’ Marx reported. ‘The fact is that this arch-pedant, this pettifogging bourgeois philistine has got the idea that his wife is unable to understand him, to comprehend his Faustian nature with its aspirations to a higher world outlook, and he torments the woman, who is his superior in every respect, in the most repulsive manner.’ He moved to a bedroom on a higher floor and never spoke to Dr Kugelmann again.
One might expect Marx to have been bored out of his wits with the shallow, narrow society of health resorts, but he soon became an aficionado. There were further vacations at Carlsbad in 1875 and 1876; after that, when Germany’s new anti-socialist laws made the journey too perilous, he transferred his affections to the insuperably bourgeois Isle of Wight, favoured watering-hole of Queen Victoria and Lord Tennyson. Wherever he went, fellow guests were amazed to find that the terrifying communistic bogeyman was in fact the life and soul of the house party. During his 1875 visit to Carlsbad a Viennese newspaper described him as the most popular raconteur in town:
He always has to hand the mot juste, the striking simile, the suddenly illuminating joke. If you share his society accompanied by a woman of evident wit – women and children are the best agents provocateurs in conversation and, because they appreciate the general only in relationship to the personal, constantly summon one into the cosy arbour of personal encounters – then Marx will bestow on you with full hands the rich and well-ordered treasure of his memories. He then prefers to direct his steps back into past days when romanticism was singing its last free woodland song, when … Heine brought poems into his study with the ink still wet.
Tellingly, the same newspaper recorded that ‘Marx is now sixty-three years old’; in fact he was fifty-seven. Three years later, an interviewer from the Chicago Tribune noted that ‘he must be over seventy years of age’. Though still working on the next two volumes of Capital when his doctors permitted, it was as if he had tacitly accepted defeat and settled down to benign anecdotage, content to observe and reminisce. The years of passionate engagement – pamphlets and petitions, meetings and manoeuvres – were over.
With the two older daughters married and settled elsewhere in Hampstead, the villa on Maitland Park Road had become too spacious for the requirements of his shrunken ménage. In March 1875 the remaining members of the household – Karl, Jenny, Eleanor, Helene – moved a hundred yards down the street to number 44, a four-storey terraced property which was slightly smaller and far cheaper. He stayed there for the rest of his life.
As he grew older, Marx’s domestic habits became more regular and temperate. He no longer had the stamina for pub-crawls up the Tottenham Court Road, epic chess games or all-night sessions at his desk. Rising at a conventional hour he would read The Times over breakfast, just like any other middle-class gent, and then retire to his study for the day. At dusk he put on his black cloak and soft felt hat (looking, as Eleanor said, ‘for all the world like a conspirators’ chorus’) and strolled through the streets of London for an hour or so. He was very short-sighted by now: on his return from these excursions he sometimes returned to a neighbouring front door by mistake, discovering his error only when the key didn’t fit.
Sundays were devoted to the family: a roast-beef lunch (cooked to perfection by Helene) followed by long walks over the Heath with Laura, Jennychen and her sons. August Bebel, one of the founders of German Social Democracy, was ‘pleasantly surprised to see with what warmth and affection Marx, who was described everywhere in those days as the worst misanthrope, could play with his grandchildren and what love the latter showed for their grandfather’. When little Edgar Longuet was eighteen months old he was caught biting at a raw kidney which he thought was a piece of chocolate – and which he continued to chew despite the mistake. Marx promptly nicknamed the lad ‘Wolf’, though this was later amended to ‘Mr Tea’ because of his insatiable thirst.
Except on Sunday, callers were discouraged during the hours of daylight, but since Marx’s doctor (and indeed his wife) had banned him from working in the evenings he was happy to play the genial host at dinner, dispensing wine and anecdotes to foreign pilgrims who came to make the great man’s acquaintance. ‘He was most affable,’ the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Morozov reported. ‘I did not notice in him any of the moroseness or unapproachableness that somebody had spoken to me about.’
Everyone who visited Maitland Park Road made the same startling discovery: under that leonine mane was a playful, purring pussy-cat. ‘He spoke in the quietly detached tones of a patriarch, quite the opposite of the picture I had formed of him,’ the German journalist Eduard Bernstein reported. ‘From descriptions that originated, I must admit, from his enemies, I had expected to meet a fairly morose and very irritable old gentleman; yet now I saw opposite me a white-haired man whose laughing dark eyes spoke of friendship and whose words contained much that was mild. When a few days later I expressed to Engels my surprise at having found Marx so very different from expectations, he asserted, “Well, Marx can nevertheless get most awfully stormy”.’
Another German socialist, Karl Kautsky, arrived at Maitland Park Road almost catatonic with anxiety, having heard plenty of stories about these tempests. He was terrified of making a fool of himself like the young Heinrich Heine – who, on meeting Goethe, was so intimidated that he could think of nothing better to talk about than the delicious sweet plums that could be found on the road from Jena to Weimar. But Marx wasn’t nearly so distant or forbidding as old Goethe: he received Kautsky with a friendly smile and asked if he took after his mother, the popular novelist Minna Kautsky. Not at all, Kautsky replied cheerfully – little guessing that Marx, who had taken an instant dislike to this bumptious youth, was silently congratulating Frau Kautsky on her good fortune. ‘Whatever Marx might have thought of me,’ Kautsky wrote many years later, ‘he nowhere betrayed the slightest sign of ill-will. I left him highly satisfied.’ Since Marx privately considered Karl Kautsky to be a ‘small-minded mediocrity’, his forbearance proves how much the Jupiter Tonans had mellowed.
He no longer bothered to correct libels or inaccuracies from his enemies. ‘If I denied everything that has been said and written of me,’ he told an American interviewer in 1879, ‘I would require a score of secretaries.’ A tendentious ‘biography’ issued by a publisher in Haarlem was loftily ignored. ‘I do not reply to pinpricks,’ he explained, when invited by a Dutch journal to review this slipshod portrait. ‘In my younger days I sometimes did some hard hitting, but wisdom comes with age, at least in so far as one avoids useless dissipation of force.’ Age conferred eminence, too: even the English, who had ignored the giant in their midst for thirty years (when not blackguarding him as an assassin), now began to show a certain curiosity and respect. In 1879 no less a figure than Crown Princess Victoria, daughter of the English Queen and wife of the future German Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm, asked a senior Liberal politician what he knew of this Marx fellow. The MP, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, had to plead ignorance but promised to invite the ‘Red Terrorist Doctor’ to lunch and report back.
To judge by Sir Mountstuart’s subsequent letter to the Princess, Marx was on his best behaviour throughout their three-hour meeting in the ornate dining-room of the Devonshire Club, St James’s:
He is a short, rather small man with grey hair and beard which contrast strangely with a still dark moustache. The face is somewhat round, the forehead well shaped and filled up – the eye rather hard but the whole expression rather pleasant than not, by no means that of a gentleman who is in the habit of eating babies in their cradles – which is I daresay the view which the Police takes of him.
His talk was that of a well-informed, nay learned man – much interested in comparative grammar which had led him into the Old Slavonic and other out-of-the-way studies and was varied by many quaint turns and little bits of dry humour …
Having exhausted the conversational possibilities of Slavonic grammar, Marx turned to politics. He expected a ‘great and not distant crash’ in Russia, starting with reforms from above and culminating in the collapse of Tsarism; there would then be a revolt against ‘the existing military system’ in Germany. When Grant Duff suggested that the rulers of Europe might forestall revolution by agreeing to reduce their spending on armaments, thus lightening the economic burden on their people, Marx assured him that ‘all sorts of fears and jealousies’ would make this impossible. ‘The burden will grow worse and worse as science advances,’ he predicted, ‘for the improvements in the art of destruction will keep pace with its advance and every year more and more will have to be devoted to costly engines of war.’ Very well, Grant Duff conceded, but even if a revolution did occur it would not necessarily realise all the dreams and plans of the communists. ‘Doubtless,’ Marx replied, ‘but all great movements are slow. It would merely be a step to better things as your Revolution of 1688 was.’ Touché!
Although unaware that his comments would be written down, Marx had enough caution and common sense to sidestep the little traps laid by his wily interrogator. As Sir Mountstuart told the Princess:
In the course of conversation Karl Marx spoke several times both of your Imperial Highness and of the Crown Prince and invariably with due respect and propriety. Even in the case of eminent individuals of whom he by no means spoke with respect there was no trace of bitterness or savagery – plenty of acrid and dissolvent criticism but nothing of the Marat tone.
Of the horrible things that have been connected with the International he spoke as any respectable man would have done …
Altogether my impression of Marx, allowing for his being at the opposite pole of opinion from oneself, was not at all unfavourable and I would gladly meet him again. It will not be he who, whether he wishes it or not, will turn the world upside down.
In gloomier moments, Marx himself sometimes feared as much. He found an exact description of his anxieties in Balzac’s novel The Unknown Masterpiece, the story of a brilliant artist so obsessive in his perfectionism that he spends many years refining and retouching the portrait of a courtesan to achieve ‘the most complete representation of reality’. When he shows the masterpiece to his friends, all they can see is a formless mass of colour and random lines: ‘Nothing! Nothing! After ten years of work …’ He hurls the worthless canvas on to the flames – ‘the fire of Prometheus’ – and dies that very night.
However, Karl Marx’s unknown masterpiece did have at least one famous and appreciative reader – or so he thought. In October 1873, a few months after publication of the second German edition of Capital, he had received the following letter:
Downe, Beckenham, Kent
I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep & important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.
I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully,
Charles Darwin
Marx and Darwin were the two most revolutionary and influential thinkers of the nineteenth century; and since they lived only twenty miles apart for much of their adult lives, with several acquaintances in common, the temptation to search for a missing link is hard to resist. Even as Marx’s coffin was being lowered into the earth of Highgate cemetery, Engels was already making the connection. ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in human nature,’ he declared, ‘so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.’ The small group of mourners at the graveside included Professor Edwin Ray Lankester, an intimate friend of both Marx and Darwin, who apparently had no objection to this attempted marriage of the evolutionist and the revolutionist. The one man who might have protested, Marx himself, was in no position to do so.
His first reaction to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1860, might seem to justify Engels’s posthumous judgement. ‘Although it is developed in the crude English style,’ he wrote in December 1860, ‘this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.’ A month later, he told Lassalle that ‘Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history’. But this initial enthusiasm was modified and diluted over the next few years: though the Darwinian ‘struggle for life’ might be applicable to flora and fauna, as an explanation of human society it led to the Malthusian fantasy that over-population was the motive force of political economy.
Marx’s loathing of Malthus led him to take refuge in an even wackier theory, proposed by the French naturalist Pierre Trémaux in 1865. In his book Origine et Transformations de l’Homme et des Autres Êtres, Trémaux postulated that evolution was governed by geological and chemical changes in the soil. The idea attracted little attention at the time and is now entirely forgotten, but for a few weeks Marx could think of little else. ‘It represents a very significant advance over Darwin,’ he wrote. ‘For certain questions, such as nationality etc., only here has a basis in nature been found.’ The ‘surface-formations’ of the Russian landscape had tartarised and mongolised the Slavs, just as the secret of how ‘the common negro type is only a degeneration of a far higher one’ could be found in the dusty plains of Africa. Engels, who usually phrased his rare criticisms of Marx as mildly and respectfully as possible, didn’t trouble to hide his belief that the old boy had gone barmy. Trémaux was quietly removed from the Marxist pantheon soon afterwards, and Darwin rehabilitated. The edition of Capital which he sent out in 1873, inscribed to ‘Mr Charles Darwin on the part of his sincere admirer Karl Marx’, included a footnote referring to the ‘epoch-making’ effect of On the Origin of Species.
The history of the Marx – Darwin partnership might have ended there but for another letter, which was discovered seventy years ago and has misled countless Marxian scholars ever since. It is dated 13 October 1880:
Downe, Beckenham, Kent
I am much obliged for your kind letter & the Enclosure.—The publication in any form of your remarks on my writings really requires no consent on my part, & it would be ridiculous in me to give consent to what requires none. I shd prefer the Part or Volume not to be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honour) as this implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.—Moreover though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.—I am sorry to refuse you any request, but I am old & have very little strength, & looking over proof-sheets (as I know by present experience) fatigues me much.—
I remain Dear Sir
Your faithfully,
Ch. Darwin
This was first published in 1931 by a Soviet newspaper, Under the Banner of Marxism, which hypothesised that the ‘Enclosure’ must have been two chapters from the English edition of Capital dealing with the theory of evolution. Palpable nonsense, of course, since the book was not translated into English until 1886, three years after Marx’s death.
Isaiah Berlin then added to the confusion. In his hugely influential study of Karl Marx, published in 1939, he claimed that it was the original German edition which Marx had wished to dedicate to Darwin, ‘for whom he had a greater intellectual admiration than for any other of his contemporaries’. According to Berlin, ‘Darwin declined the honour in a polite, cautiously phrased letter, saying that he was unhappily ignorant of economic science, but offered the author his good wishes in what he assumed to be their common end – the advancement of human knowledge.’ Berlin thus managed to fuse the two letters into one while entirely overlooking the fact that Capital – with its dedication to Wilhelm Wolff – appeared in 1867, a full thirteen years before Marx supposedly offered ‘the honour’ to Darwin.
Since the Second World War, all authors on Marx (and many on Darwin) have accepted the legend of the rebuffed dedication, differing only on the question of which particular version of the book it concerned. ‘Marx certainly wished to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin,’ David McLellan wrote in his 1973 biography, an assertion that is still there in the most recent paperback (1995). This is no more plausible than Isaiah Berlin’s theory: Volume Two was assembled by Engels from various notes and manuscripts only after Marx’s death. Darwin could not have been asked to ‘look over proof-sheets’ in 1880 since no such sheets existed. Besides, Engels’s introduction to the second volume confirmed that ‘the second and third books of Capital were to be dedicated, as Marx had stated repeatedly, to his wife’.
Everything about that second ‘letter to Marx’ rings false. Why should Darwin fret about ‘attacks on religion’ if he had been sent a work on political economy? Yet no quizzical eyebrow was raised until 1967, when Professor Shlomo Avineri argued in Encounter magazine that Marx’s misgivings about the political application of Darwinism made it ‘quite unthinkable’ for the great communist to have sought the great evolutionist’s imprimatur. How then to explain the 1880 letter? ‘Marx’s dedication of Capital to Darwin,’ he proposed, rather lamely, ‘was evidently made tongue in cheek.’
Avineri’s scepticism – if not his conclusion – struck a chord with Margaret Fay, a young graduate student at the University of California, when she came across the Encounter article seven years later. ‘My gut-feeling persisted in taking me on repeated and rather aimless trips to the Biology library,’ she wrote, ‘where I wandered around dipping into biographies of Darwin and Marxist interpretations of his theory of evolution to see if, after all, there was perhaps some political significance in Darwin’s work which had escaped me.’ Instead, and quite by chance, she found a slim volume called The Students’ Darwin. The contents were unremarkable enough, simply a rather schoolmasterish exposition of evolutionary theory. But what caught her eye was the publication date, 1881, and the name of the author – Edward B. Aveling, later to be the lover of Eleanor Marx. What if Darwin’s second letter had not been addressed to Marx at all, but rather to Aveling?
In this moment of inspiration Margaret Fay solved the mystery that had eluded Isaiah Berlin and innumerable other professors for half a century. The Students’ Darwin was the second volume in a series, ‘The International Library of Science and Freethought’, edited by the crusading atheists Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. Hence Darwin’s reference to ‘the Part or Volume’ of a more general publication ‘about which I know nothing’, and his reluctance to be associated with ‘arguments against christianity and theism’. Fay’s hunch was confirmed by the discovery among Darwin’s papers at Cambridge University Library of a letter from Edward Aveling, dated 12 October 1880, attached to a few sample chapters from The Students’ Darwin. After requesting ‘the illustrious support of your consent’ Aveling added that ‘I purpose, again subject to your approval, to honour my work and myself by dedicating the former to you’.
The only remaining question – of how a letter to Aveling had ended up in the Marx archive – was easily answered. In 1895 Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling began sorting through her father’s letters and manuscripts, which had come into their possession following the death of Engels. Two years later Aveling wrote an article comparing his two heroes, in which he quoted the 1873 letter and mentioned that he too had corresponded with Darwin. Having finished the piece he filed all his research materials in one folder, little guessing that he was thus laying a false scent which would be pursued over hill and dale for most of the next century. As recently as October 1998, the British historian Paul Johnson wrote that ‘unlike Marx, Darwin was a genuine scientist who, on a famous occasion, politely but firmly refused Marx’s invitation to strike a Faustian bargain’.
In fact, the only known contact between these two Victorian sages was the indisputably genuine letter of acknowledgement from 1873, which Marx showed proudly to his friends and family as proof that Darwin had saluted Capital as a ‘great work’. But the book in question, which still sits on a shelf at Downe House in Kent, tells a sadly different story. It has none of the pencilled notes with which Darwin habitually embellished anything that he read, and only the first 105 pages of the 822-page volume have been cut open. One is forced to conclude that he did no more than glance at the first chapter or two before sending his note of thanks – and never looked at the unwanted gift again.
‘Typical Englishman,’ Marx would probably have muttered had he known the truth. On first reading On the Origin of Species he had warned Engels that ‘one does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument’, and the muted, incomprehending reaction to Capital convinced him that ‘the peculiar gift of stolid blockheadedness’ was every true Briton’s birthright. Thanks to yet another of fate’s practical jokes, the master of nimble dialectics had been exiled to the most philistine country on earth – a land governed by instinct and crude empiricism, where the word ‘intellectual’ was a mortal insult. ‘Though Marx has lived much in England,’ the barrister Sir John Macdonnell wrote in the March 1875 Fortnightly Review, ‘he is here almost the shadow of a name. People may do him the honour of abusing him; read him they do not.’ The fact that no English edition was available in his lifetime seemed to Marx a symptom, not a cause, of the national myopia. (‘We are much obliged by your letter,’ Messrs Macmillan & Co. wrote to Engels’s friend Carl Schorlemmer, the professor of organic chemistry at Manchester University, ‘but we are not disposed to entertain the publication of a translation of Das Kapital.’) The language barrier was an insurmountable obstacle to those few Britons who actually wished to study the text. An old colleague from the International, Peter Fox, said after being presented with a copy that he felt like a man who had acquired an elephant and didn’t know what to do with it. Among Marx’s papers there are several desperate letters from a working-class Scotsman, Robert Banner, pleading for help:
Is there no hope of it being translated? There is no work to be had in English advocating the cause of the toiling masses, every book we young Socialists put our hands on is work in the interest of Capital, hence the backwardness of our cause in this country. With a work dealing with economics from the standpoint of Socialism, you would soon see a movement in this country that would put the nightcap on this bastard thing.
Those most likely to appreciate the book were the least able to understand it, while the educated élite who could read it had no desire to do so. As the English socialist Henry Hyndman complained, ‘Accustomed as we are nowadays, especially in England, to fence always with big soft buttons on the point of our rapiers, Marx’s terrible onslaughts with naked steel upon his adversaries appeared so improper that it was impossible for our gentlemanly sham-fighters and mental gymnasium men to believe that this unsparing controversialist and furious assailant of capital and capitalists was really the deepest thinker of modern times.’
Hyndman himself was an exception to this rule – as to every other rule. A product of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, a sometime batsman for Sussex County Cricket Club, he was said to have adopted socialism ‘out of spite against the world because he was not included in the Cambridge eleven’. (There is more than a trace of him in P. G. Wodehouse’s character Psmith, who converted to Marxism when he was expelled from Eton and thus deprived of the honour of playing cricket against Harrow at Lord’s; thereafter he addressed everyone as ‘Comrade’.) Hyndman never shed the trappings of his class, often appearing before left-wing audiences in a frock-coat and silk top hat. His politics, too, were de haut en bas: the proletariat could not be freed by the workers themselves but only by ‘those who are born into a different position and are trained to use their faculties in early life’. And yet he convinced himself (if no one else) that he was the reddest and hottest radical in town. ‘I could not carry on,’ he said, ‘unless I expected the revolution at ten o’clock next Monday morning.’ Early in 1880, after reading a French translation of Capital, he bombarded the author with so many extravagant tributes that Marx eventually agreed to see him.
‘Our method of talking was peculiar,’ Hyndman wrote of their first meeting at 41 Maitland Park Road. ‘Marx had a habit when at all interested in the discussion of walking actively up and down the room, as if he were pacing the deck of a schooner for exercise. I had acquired, on my long voyages, the same tendency to pacing to and fro when my mind was much occupied. Consequently, master and student could have been seen walking up and down on opposite sides of the table for two or three hours in succession, engaged in discussing the affairs of the past and present.’ Although Hyndman claimed that he was ‘eager to learn’, according to Marx it was the Old Etonian who did most of the talking.
Having gained his entrée, and knowing that Marx’s doctor forbade him to work in the evenings, Hyndman acquired the habit of turning up at Maitland Park Road uninvited after dinner. Everyone in the household found this intensely tiresome – especially on the nights when a group of Eleanor’s friends, the Dogberry Club, would gather in the drawing-room to recite a Shakespeare play. Marx adored these performances and always insisted on playing games of charades and dumb crambo afterwards (‘laughing when anything struck him as particularly comic,’ one Dogberry-ite recalled, ‘until the tears ran down his cheeks’); but Hyndman had no compunction about barging in and treating the assembled company to his views on Mr Gladstone. As Marx wrote to Jennychen after one such occasion:
We were invaded by Hyndman and his wife, both of whom have too much staying-power. I quite like the wife on account of her brusque, unconventional and determined manner of thinking and speaking, but it’s amusing to see how admiringly she hangs on the lips of her complacent chatterbox of a husband! Mama grew so weary (it was close on half past ten at night) that she withdrew.
The inevitable rupture occurred in June 1881 when Hyndman published his socialist manifesto England For All, in which Marx was astonished to find two chapters that had been largely plagiarised from Capital without permission. A note in the preface admitted that ‘for the ideas and much of the matter contained in Chapters II and III, I am indebted to the work of a great thinker and original writer, which will, I trust, shortly be made accessible to the majority of my countrymen’. Marx thought this wholly inadequate. Why could Hyndman not acknowledge Capital and its author by name? His lame explanation was that the English had ‘a horror of socialism’ and ‘a dread of being taught by a foreigner’. As Marx pointed out, however, the book was unlikely to assuage that horror by evoking ‘the demon of Socialism’ on page eighty-six, and even the densest English reader could guess from the preface that the anonymous thinker must be foreign. It was larceny, pure and simple – compounded by the insertion of idiotic mistakes in the few paragraphs that were not directly lifted from Capital. Hyndman was banished from Maitland Park Road. In his memoirs, written thirty years later, he babbled about Marx’s enthusiasm for new ideas, adding, ‘nor was he much concerned about the wholesale plagiarisms from himself of which he might have reasonably complained’. Like so many men of his class, Hyndman had all the sensitivity of an anaesthetised rhinoceros.
Happily, no sooner had Marx fallen out with one English disciple than he acquired another – though this time he took the precaution of never actually meeting the man, for fear of being stuck with another complacent chatterbox. Ernest Belfort Bax, born in 1854, came from a middle-class family of mackintosh manufacturers and devout Christians, but had been radicalised by the Paris Commune while still a schoolboy. In 1879 the highbrow monthly Modern Thought began publishing his long series of articles on the intellectual leaders of the age, including assessments of Schopenhauer, Wagner and (in 1881) Marx. Having studied Hegelian philosophy in Germany, Bax was the only English socialist of his generation to accept that dialectic was the inner dynamic of life. He described Capital as a book ‘that embodies the working out of a doctrine in economy comparable in its revolutionary character and wide-reaching importance to the Copernican system in astronomy, or the law of gravitation in Mechanics generally’.
Marx was thrilled: at last he had found a John Bull who understood him. ‘Now this is the first publication of that kind which is pervaded by a real enthusiasm for the new ideas themselves and boldly stands up against British philistinism,’ he wrote to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, an old ’48 veteran now living in the United States. Better still, Modern Thought posted placards announcing the article on the walls of London’s West End. When he read Bax’s comments to his ailing wife, she cheered up at once.
Plagiarism and boorishness were undoubtedly the main reasons for Hyndman’s expulsion from the inner circle, but he may have been right to suspect that Jenny’s lingering illness had ruffled Marx’s temper and ‘disposed him to see the worst side of things’. In the summer of 1880 Karl was so worried by Jenny’s deterioration that he took her up to Manchester for a consultation with his friend Dr Eduard Gumpert, who decided that she was suffering from a serious liver complaint. A long spell of dolce far niente was prescribed, preferably at the seaside, and so the entire tribe departed for a holiday in Ramsgate – Engels, Karl and Jenny, Laura and Paul Lafargue, Jenny and Charles Longuet, plus their children Jean, Henri and Edgar. ‘The visit is proving especially beneficial to Marx, who, I hope, will be completely refreshed,’ Engels wrote to a communist in Geneva. ‘His wife has unfortunately been ailing for some time, but is as cheerful as could be expected.’
Not cheerful at all, in other words. Dissatisfied with Dr Gumpert’s diagnosis, Marx encouraged her to seek a second opinion from a specialist in Carlsbad, Dr Ferdinand Fleckles – who, since he had never met Jenny, asked for a detailed account of her state. ‘What has made my condition worse recently perhaps,’ she told him, after listing the physical symptoms, ‘is a great anxiety which weighs heavily upon us “old ones”.’ Now that the French government had declared an amnesty for political refugees, she pointed out, there was nothing to stop her son-in-law Longuet from returning to Paris, thus effectively robbing an old lady of her daughter and grandchildren. ‘Dear, good Doctor, I should so like to live a little longer. How strange it is that the nearer the whole thing draws to an end, the more one clings to this “vale of tears”.’ Though Marx never saw this letter he understood her mortal terrors well enough: after a month of idleness in Ramsgate, he reported that Jenny’s illness ‘has suddenly been aggravated to a degree which menaces to tend to a fatal termination’.
Marx himself felt slightly more chipper after the rest-cure, but any improvement was soon undone by a wet and freezing winter which ‘blessed me with a perpetual cold and coughing, interfering with sleep, etc.,’ as he informed a correspondent in St Petersburg, explaining why he could scarcely answer his mail let alone make any progress on the remaining volumes of Capital. ‘The worst is that Mrs Marx’s state becomes daily more dangerous notwithstanding my resort to the most celebrated medical men of London, and I have besides a host of domestic troubles.’ One of these was the sudden removal of Jennychen and her sons to Paris, where Charles Longuet had been appointed editor of Georges Clemenceau’s radical daily newspaper, La Justice. ‘You understand how painful – in the present state of Mrs Marx – this separation must be. For her and myself our grandchildren, three little boys, were inexhaustible sources of enjoyment, of life.’ Sometimes, hearing children’s voices in the street, he would rush to the front window, momentarily forgetting that the beloved youngsters were now on the other side of the Channel. He felt another pang walking through Maitland Park one day when the park-keeper stopped him to ask what had become of little ‘Johnny’, a.k.a. Jean Longuet. Worse still was missing the arrival of his grandson Marcel, born at the Longuets’ new home in Argenteuil in April 1881. Hence, perhaps, the rather grumpy tone of his congratulatory message: ‘I am of course charged by Mama and Tussy … to wish you all possible good things, but I do not see that “wishes” are good for anything except the glossing over of one’s own powerlessness.’ Still, at least it was a boy. Though Jenny Marx had expected and hoped for a granddaughter, ‘for my own part I prefer the “manly” sex for children born at this turning point of history. They have before them the most revolutionary period men have ever had to pass through. The bad thing now is to be “old” so as to be only able to foresee instead of seeing.’
Both he and his wife were feeling as ancient as Methuselah. Karl took Turkish baths to loosen his rheumatically stiff leg; Jenny retired to bed for days on end, becoming ever more emaciated. Now and again, her pain miraculously disappeared and she felt strong enough to go for walks or even visit the theatre, but Marx knew that there could be no recovery. Jenny had cancer. ‘Between ourselves, my wife’s illness is, alas, incurable,’ he wrote in June 1881 to his old friend Sorge. ‘In a few days’ time I shall be taking her to the seaside at Eastbourne.’ While there she was obliged to use a Bath chair – ‘a thing that I, the pedestrian par excellence, should have regarded as beneath my dignity a few months ago’.
After two weeks on the south coast Jenny was strong enough to set off on a cross-Channel expedition with Karl to visit their new grandson, but by the time they reached Argenteuil she had severe diarrhoea. Their hostess was none too sprightly either. ‘Jennychen’s asthma is bad,’ Marx wrote to Engels, ‘the house being a very draughty one. The child is heroic, as always.’ News then arrived from England that Tussy had been struck down by some dire if unspecified illness, and Marx hastened back to London alone to see what the matter was. He found her in a state of ‘utter nervous dejection’ that would nowadays be classified as anorexia. ‘She has been eating next to nothing for weeks,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘Donkin [the doctor] says there’s no organic trouble, heart sound, lungs sound, etc.; fundamentally the whole condition is attributable to a perfect derangement of action of stomach which has become unaccustomed to food (and she has made matters worse by drinking a great deal of tea; he at once forbade her all tea) and a dangerously overwrought nervous system.’
Jenny Marx returned a couple of weeks later, escorted by the indefatigable Helene Demuth, and immediately took to her bed. At the beginning of October, Marx felt certain that her illness was ‘drawing closer to its consummation’. Marx himself was bedridden with bronchitis but perked up no end on learning that the German Social Democrats had won twelve seats in the Reichstag. ‘If any one outside event has contributed to putting Marx more or less to rights again,’ Engels wrote to Eduard Bernstein at the end of November, ‘then it is the elections. Never has a proletariat conducted itself so magnificently … In Germany, after three years of unprecedented persecution and unrelenting pressure, during which any form of public organisation and even communication was a sheer impossibility, our lads have returned, not only in all their former strength, but actually stronger than before.’
Jenny Marx died on 2 December 1881. For the last three weeks she and her husband couldn’t even see each other: his bronchitis had been complicated by pleurisy and he was confined to a neighbouring bedroom, unable to move. In her last words, spoken in English, she called out across the landing, ‘Karl, my strength is ebbing …’ Marx was forbidden by his doctor to attend the funeral, held three days later in an unconsecrated corner of Highgate cemetery. He consoled himself with the memory of Jenny’s rebuke to a nurse on the day before her death, apropos some neglected formality: ‘We are no such external people!’ The other distraction from grief was his own wretched condition, which required him to anoint the chest and neck with iodine several times a day. ‘There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain,’ he wrote. ‘Set the end of the world on the one hand against a man with acute toothache on the other.’
Engels said that Marx himself was now effectively dead – a harsh observation which nevertheless had a horrible truth. During Jenny’s last days, exhausted by sleeplessness and lack of exercise, he contracted the illness that eventually snatched him away. Though his German editor chose this inopportune moment to request a new edition of Capital, work was out of the question. On doctor’s advice he tried the ‘warm climate and dry air’ of the Isle of Wight for two weeks, accompanied by Eleanor – only to suffer gales, rain and sub-zero temperatures. The bronchial catarrh actually worsened, thanks to ‘the caprices of the weather’, and a local doctor had to give him a respirator to wear while out walking on the front at Ventnor.
Eleanor, still not eating or sleeping properly, veered between morose silence and outbursts of ‘an alarmingly hysterical nature’. Her yearning for a career on the stage had now become an almost physical need: until this hunger could be satisfied she would not feed her other appetites either. The day of their return from Ventnor, 16 January 1882, coincided with Eleanor’s twenty-seventh birthday, a painful reminder that her best years were being sacrificed on the altar of family duty. Marx knew that he had to set her free. ‘As for future plans,’ he wrote to Engels on 12 January, ‘the first consideration must be to relieve Tussy of her role as my companion … The girl is under such mental pressure that it is undermining her health. Neither travelling, nor change of climate, nor physicians can do anything in this case.’
For Marx himself, however, a change of climate was urgently necessary: there could be no remission from his catarrh – ‘this accursed English disease’ – without fleeing the accursed English winter that had exacerbated it. Since Italy was barred to him (a man had recently been arrested in Milan merely for having the name Marx) he decided to leave Europe for the first time in his life, sailing to Algeria on 18 February.
Thus began a year of ceaseless wandering: three months in Algiers, a month in Monte Carlo, three months with the Longuets at Argenteuil, a month in the Swiss resort of Vevey. With comical consistency, his arrival in each of these places precipitated torrential rain and thunderstorms, even if the sun had been blazing for weeks beforehand. He returned to London in October but the damp and cold immediately forced him away to Ventnor again, where he remained until January 1883. In the 1840s he had been buffeted around the capitals of Europe by the gusts of revolution and reaction; now he became a nomad once more, driven only by a prickle in his bronchial tubes. History was repeating itself, this time as a rather tedious farce. In Algiers he seldom bothered to read the newspapers, preferring to visit the botanical gardens, chat to fellow hotel guests or simply to gaze out to sea. What use were his materialism and dialectics now? In a letter to Laura he recounted a local Arab fable which seemed all too applicable to his own situation:
A ferryman is ready and waiting, with his small boat, on the tempestuous waters of a river. A philosopher, wishing to get to the other side, climbs aboard. There ensues the following dialogue:
PHILOSOPHER: Do you know anything of history, ferryman?
FERRYMAN: No!
PHILOSOPHER: Then you’ve wasted half your life! Have you
studied mathematics?
FERRYMAN: No!
PHILOSOPHER: Then you’ve wasted more than half your life.
Hardly were these words out of the philosopher’s mouth when the wind capsized the boat, precipitating both ferryman and philosopher into the water. Whereupon,
FERRYMAN shouts: Can you swim?
PHILOSOPHER: No!
FERRYMAN: Then you’ve wasted your whole life.
In outward appearance he was still a formidable figure: an Englishwoman who met Marx at about this time remembered him as ‘a big man in every way, with a very large head and hair rather like “shock-headed Peter’s” way of wearing his’. Or, perhaps, like Samson in John Milton’s poem, with ‘bristles rang’d like those that ridge the back/Of chaf’t wild Boars, or ruffl’d Porcupines’. But during the last years of his life, enfeebled by pleurisy and bronchitis, he could no longer summon the strength to smite the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Finally accepting that his power had vanished, he offered up his precious fleece to an Algerian barber. ‘I have done away with my prophet’s beard and my crowning glory,’ he wrote to Engels on 28 April 1882.
Eyeless in Gaza; hairless in Algiers. A bald, clean-shaven Karl Marx is almost impossible to imagine – and he made sure that posterity would never see him thus. Before the symbolic shearing he had himself photographed, hirsute and twinkle-eyed, to remind his daughters of the man they knew. It is the last picture we have: a genial Jupiter, an intellectual Father Christmas. As he joked, ‘I am still putting a good face on things.’ And so he was, at least to his family. The pleurisy was stubbornly resistant to treatment, and while he was in Monte Carlo a local specialist confirmed that the bronchitis was now chronic; but all this was kept from his daughters. ‘What I write and tell the children is the truth, but not the whole truth,’ he explained. ‘What’s the point of alarming them?’
Jennychen, meanwhile, was keeping a secret of her own from him: she had cancer of the bladder. Heavily pregnant and exhausted by looking after her four lively boys, she somehow managed to hide her agony while Marx was at Argenteuil in the summer of 1882 – helped, no doubt, by the arrival of Eleanor and Helene. Little Johnny Longuet had been running wild since moving to France (‘grown naughty out of boredom’, Marx deduced) and when Eleanor returned to London in mid-August she took the six-year-old tearaway with her, promising to supervise his education and discipline for the next few months. So much for her hopes of escaping the slavery of duty: from father’s nursemaid to nephew’s governess in less than a year. Yet in fact this new responsibility brought Eleanor great joy, and before long she thought of Johnny as ‘my boy’. His brothers Edgar and Harry went on holiday with their father to Calvados at the end of August, leaving Jennychen with only the infant Marcel. But she was still exhausted, and in constant pain. After giving birth to a baby girl (christened Jenny, known as Mémé) she finally confessed the truth about her bladder disease in a letter to Eleanor: ‘To no one in the world would I wish the tortures I have undergone now since eight months, they are indescribable and the nursing added thereto makes life a hell to me.’ She added a strict injunction that Moor must not be told. But a summer spent under the same roof had given plenty of clues that something was badly wrong. From his winter quarters on the Isle of Wight he sent out regular appeals for news of ‘poor Jennychen’ and her baby. ‘It distresses me,’ he told Eleanor in November. ‘I fear that this burden is more than she can bear.’
Marx himself could do nothing to ease the burden. For much of December he was confined to his lodgings at 1 St Boniface Gardens, Ventnor, with a traccheal catarrh – though at least the pleurisy and bronchitis were now in abeyance. (‘This, then, is most encouraging, considering that most of my contemporaries, I mean fellows of the same age, just now kick the bucket in gratifying numbers.’) On 5 January 1883 he learned from the Lafargues that Jennychen’s illness was now critical; the next morning he awoke with such a violent coughing fit that he thought he was suffocating. Were the two events by any chance related? He asked the local doctor, a friendly young Yorkshireman called James Williamson, if mental anguish could somehow ‘touch the movements of the mucus’.
Jenny Longuet died at five o’clock in the afternoon of 11 January, aged thirty-eight. Eleanor left for Ventnor as soon as she heard the news:
I have lived many a sad hour, but none so sad as that. I felt that I was bringing my father his death sentence. I racked my brain all the long anxious way to find how I could break the news to him. But I did not need to, my face gave me away. Moor said at once, ‘Our Jennychen is dead.’ Then he urged me to go to Paris at once and help with the children. I wanted to stay with him but he brooked no resistance. I had hardly been half an hour at Ventnor when I set out again on the sad journey back to London. From there I left for Paris. I was doing what Moor wanted me to do for the sake of the children.
I shall not say anything more about my return home. I can only think with a shudder of that time, the anguish, the torment. But enough of that. I came back and Moor returned home, to die.
Before leaving Ventnor, Marx scribbled a note to Dr Williamson, explaining his hasty departure. ‘Please, dear Doctor, send your bill to 41 Maitland Park, London, NW. I regret that I had not the time of taking leave from you. Indeed I find some relief in a grim headache. Physical pain is the only “stunner” of mental pain.’ As far as we know, it was the last letter he ever wrote. Marx attached a photograph of himself as a memento, inscribed in a shaky hand ‘with the [sic] wishes for a happy new year’.
As Eleanor knew, her father had gone home to die. Racked by laryngitis, bronchitis, insomnia and night sweats, he was too weak even to read the Victorian novels which had often brought solace in such moments. He stared into space or occasionally browsed through publishers’ catalogues while warming his feet in a mustard-bath. Helene Demuth tried to revive his spirits by inventing exotic new dishes for supper, but Marx preferred a diet of his own devising – a daily pint of milk (which he had always detested previously) fortified with generous slugs of rum and brandy. By February he had an abscess in the lung and retreated to bed. Engels noted on 7 March that Marx’s health ‘is still not really making the progress it should. If it were two months from now, the warmth and air would do their work but as it is there’s a north-east wind, a storm almost, with flurries of snow, so how can a man expect to cure himself of a long-standing case of bronchitis!’ When Engels went to the house on Wednesday 14 March at about 2.30 p.m., his usual time for visiting, Lenchen came downstairs to tell him that Marx was ‘half-asleep’ in his favourite armchair next to the fire. By the time they entered the bedroom, only a minute or two later, he was dead. ‘Mankind is shorter by a head,’ Engels wrote to a comrade in America, ‘and by the most remarkable head of our time.’
Karl Marx was buried on 17 March 1883 in a remote corner of Highgate cemetery, in the plot where his wife had been laid fifteen months earlier. Only eleven mourners attended the funeral. In a graveside oration, Engels described him as a revolutionary genius who had become the most hated and calumniated man of his time, predicting that ‘his name and work will endure through the ages’. Socialist newspapers in France, Russia and America printed eulogies under similarly fulsome headlines – ‘The Workingmen’s Best Friend and Greatest Teacher’, ‘A Misfortune for Humanity’, ‘His Memory Will Live Long After Kings Are Forgotten’, ‘One of the Noblest Men to Walk the Earth’. But in the country where he had lived for more than half of his sixty-five years, his passing went almost unnoticed. ‘The death is announced of Dr Karl Marx, the German Socialist,’ the London Daily News reported. ‘He had lived to see the portions of his theories which once terrified Emperors and Chancellors die out … English working men would not care to be identified with these principles.’ The Times carried a single-paragraph obituary with an error in every sentence, claiming that he had been born in Cologne and emigrated to France at the age of twenty. Only the Pall Mall Gazette guessed that he might be remembered: ‘Capital, unfinished as it is, will beget a host of smaller books, and exercise a growing influence on men of all classes who think earnestly on social questions.’
What epitaph would he have chosen for himself? While holidaying at Ramsgate in the summer of 1880 Marx had met the American journalist John Swinton, who was writing a series on ‘travels in France and England’ for the New York Sun. Swinton watched the old patriarch playing on the beach with his grandchildren (‘not less finely than Victor Hugo does Karl Marx understand the art of being a grandfather’) and then, at dusk, was granted an interview. As he reported:
The talk was of the world, and of man, and of time, and of ideas, as our glasses tinkled over the sea. The railway train waits for no man, and night is at hand. Over the thought of the babblement and rack of the age and ages, over the talk of the day and the scenes of the evening, arose in my mind one question touching upon the final law of being, for which I would seek answer from this sage. Going down to the depths of language and rising to the height of emphasis, during an interspace of silence, I interrupted the revolutionist and philosopher in these fateful words: ‘What is?’
And it seemed as though his mind were inverted for a moment while he looked upon the roaring sea in front and the restless multitude upon the beach. ‘What is?’ I had inquired, to which in deep and solemn tone, he replied: ‘Struggle!’ At first it seemed as though I had heard the echo of despair; but peradventure it was the law of life.