Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

2 ^ 6 K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

him', Marx wrote to Engels, 'that it was quite all right for him to be an egoist, but he should be one in a civilised manner.'108 What especially riled Marx was Jones's failure to carry out his promise of publishing an English translation of the Eighteenth Brumaire. But Marx supported Jones against the less radical Chartists, was favourably impressed by the relative success of Jones's paper and his meetings in 1853, and eventually contributed some articles himself, though the number of printing errors made him very reluctant to continue. When invited by Jones to sit in the Labour Parliament in Manchester in 1854 Marx sent what he himself described as an ambivalent reply, declaring that 'the working class of Great Britain has shown itself more capable than any other of standing at the head of the great movement which, in the final analysis, must lead to the complete freedom of labour.... The organisation of its united forces, the organisation of the working class on a national scale - such I conceive to be the great aim which the Workers' Parliament has set for itself."09

In February 1855 the same troubles as four years previously threatened to recur when Jones tried to organise another banquet to celebrate the 1848 revolution. Marx let himself be persuaded to attend a meeting of the Chartist International Committee to prepare the banquet, but 'the idle chatter of the Frenchmen, the staring of the Germans and the gesticulations of the Spaniards', not to mention the recent election of Herzen to the committee, impressed him merely as pure farce. He was a supercilious and silent observer at the meeting, smoking excessively to compensate.110 He eventually declined the invitation to the banquet (though his name appeared on the handbill) on the grounds that all such meetings were 'humbug', that it could bring about renewed persecution of aliens, and finally that he had refused ever to appear in the company of Herzen 'because I have no intention of seeing old Europe renewed through Russian blood'.111 In 1856, however, Marx did accept an invitation to attend a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of The People's Paper 'because', as he put it, 'the times seem to me to be hotting up . . .

and even more because I was the only one of the refugees to be invited'. The refugees were thereby convinced 'that we are the only "intimate" allies of the Chartists and that, if we hold back from public demonstrations and leave it to the Frenchmen openly to flirt with Chartism, it is always in our power to reoccupy the position that history has already allotted us'.112 Relations between Marx and Jones became strained when, in 1857, Jones began to co-operate with radical sections of the middle class in order to get wide support for electoral reform; this failed however. In 1861 he moved to Manchester to practise as a barrister, and maintained friendly relations with Marx and Engels until his death in 1869.113

III. L I F E I N D E A N S T R E E T

A hasty reading of Marx's correspondence gives the impression that Marx's family difficulties were largely due to their living in the most grinding poverty; and Marx's own descriptions of his lack of funds appears to bear this out. The year 1852 seems to have been the worst. In February: 'Already for a week I have been in the pleasant position of not going out because my coat is in the pawnshop and of not being able to eat meat because of lack of credit."14 In the same month Jenny wrote: 'Everything hangs on a hair, and 10/- at the right time can often obviate a terrible situation.'115 In April Marx had to borrow money to bury his daughter. In September he gave a detailed description of the situation:

My wife is ill, little Jenny is ill, Lenchen has a sort of nervous fever, I cannot and could not call the doctor because I have no money for medicine. For 8-10 days I have fed the family on bread and potatoes of which it is still questionable whether I can rustle up any today. Naturally this diet was not recommended in the present climatic conditions. I did not write any articles for Dana, because I did not have the penny to go and read newspapers... .

I had put off until the beginning of September all the creditors who, as you know, are only paid off in small sums. Now there is a general storm.

I have tried everything, but in vain. . . .

The best and most desirable thing that could happen would be that the landlady throw me out of the house. At least I would then be quit of the sum of £22. But I can scarcely trust her to be so obliging. Also baker, milkman, the man with the tea, greengrocer, old butcher's bills. How can I get clear of all this hellish muck? Finally in the last 8-10 days, I have borrowed some shillings and pence (this is the most fatal thing, but it was necessary to avoid perishing) from layabouts.116

In October, Marx had once more to pawn his coat in order to buy paper, and in December he wrote, in a letter to Cluss accompanying his Revelations concerning the Cologne Communist Trial-. 'You will be able to appreciate the humour of the book when you consider that its author, through lack of sufficient covering for his back and feet, is as good as interned and also was and is threatened with seeing really nauseating poverty overwhelm his family at any moment.'117

The next year complaints were not so numerous, but still 'several valuable things must be renewed in the pawnshop if they are not to be forfeit and this is naturally not possible at a time when even the means for the most necessary things are not there'.118 And in October: 'The

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burden of debt has risen so much, the most necessary things have so completely disappeared to the pawnshop that for ten days there has not been a penny in the house.'119

The pawnshop was an indispensable institution for the Marx household. It was also, on one occasion, a source of discomfort: Marx tried to pawn some of Jenny's family silver with the Argyll crest on it. The pawnbroker considered this so suspect that he informed the police and Marx had to spend the weekend in prison before he could establish his bona fides.120 In the summer of 1855 more drastic measures were required, and Marx retired with his family to Imandt's house in Camberwell, partly to avoid Dr Freund who was prosecuting him for non-payment of a bill; he spent from September to December incognito with Engels in Manchester for the same reason.

However, a closer examination of Marx's revenues gives the strong impression that his difficulties resulted less from real poverty than from a desire to preserve appearances, coupled with an inability to husband his financial resources. This is certainly what one would expect from Marx's incapacity to manage the large sums of money that he had previously received and was again to receive in the 1860s. On his arrival in London Marx was quite prepared to rent a flat in Chelsea that was very expensive - more than twice the rent Marx eventually paid for a house when he moved out of Dean Street. It was the failure of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung

-Revue that finally reduced his income to nothing. He put a lot of his own money into the production of this journal, got virtually none of it back, and in October 1850 was obliged to ask Weydemeyer to sell all the silver (apart from a few items belonging to little Jenny) that his wife had pawned a year previously in order to buy her ticket to Paris. Luckily he had some generous friends and a simple calculation seems to show that in the year previous to the arrival of the first cheque from the New York Daily Tribune - presumably the year in which his income was at its lowest

-Marx received at least £150 in gifts. (Since this is only the money mentioned in surviving correspondence the total sum was probably considerably more). It came from various sources: Engels, and Marx's Cologne friends through Daniels, were the chief contributors; Weerth and Lassalle

also gave sums; one of Jenny's cousins sent Marx £15; and Freiligrath gave Marx £30 which he had obtained on the pretence of 'urgent party needs'121 from 'some friends who willingly aid our cause'. Marx was insistent that this help should come only from his close friends. As Jenny said: 'my husband is very sensitive in these matters and would sooner sacrifice his last penny than be compelled to take to democratic beggary'.122 Indeed, he even refused Lassalle's offer to open a public subscription to publish his work on economics. In the early 1850s the cost of

living was in fact falling and £150 was considered quite an adequate income for a lower-middle-class family with three children. Freiligrath, whose family circumstances were similar to those of Marx, earned less than £200 a year and yet boasted that he had never been without 'the luscious beef-steak of exile'.123

By 1852 Marx's financial position improved in that he had a regular income as London correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune. Although small in 1852, this amounted to £80 in 1853 and more than £160 in 1854. The revenue from the New York Daily Tribune dropped during 1855 and 1856, but Marx began corresponding for the Neue Oder-Zeitung at the end of 1854 for about £50 a year. This was, of course, supplemented by Engels and would - until the arrival of large sums in 1856 - have been a tolerable income, had it been carefully managed. But Marx was incapable of such management. He was, for example, quite unaware of what the New York Daily Tribune was paying him for months after he had agreed to write regularly for the paper. And for his biggest literary success in these years - his anti-Palmerston broadsheets which initially sold 15,000 copies and went into a second edition - he did not manage to get a single penny. What did not help financially, and reduced the family's morale, was the necessity of keeping up appearances. Writing to Engels in 1852 about his hardships, he stressed their unimportance when set beside his fear 'that the muck will sometime end in scandal'.124 And in the same year he wrote of a visit by Weerth: 'It is painful when one sits in muck up to the neck to have so fine a gentleman opposite oneself from whom one must hide the too shameful things.'125 Marx's creditors were quite naturally angry in 1854 when he spent considerable sums on Jenny's trip to Trier which 'necessitated all sorts of new outfits because naturally she could not go to Trier in tatters'.126

In May 1856 Jenny inherited about £150 from an uncle in Scotland127 and went with her children to Trier to see her ailing mother, who died in July. She returned to London in September with an inheritance of about £120 which allowed the family to leave 'the evil, frightful rooms which encompassed all our joy and all our pain' and move 'with joyful heart into a small house at the foot of romantic Hampstead Heath, not far from lovely Primrose Hill. When we slept in our own beds for the first time, sat on our own chairs and even had a parlour with secondhand furniture of a rococo style - or rather bric-a-brac, then we really thought that we were living in a magic castle... .'128 The house, 9 Grafton lerrace, which Marx rented for £363 year, was a narrow, terraced building with three storeys and a basement, making for eight rooms in all. It was three miles from the city-centre in a brand new development area that was in a few years to be built right over. All the money went to paying

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off old debts and setting up the house. Typically, Marx did not even have enough money to pay the first quarter's rent - a presage of difficulties to come.

The years spent in the Dean Street house were the most barren and frustrating of Marx's life. They would have embittered the most stoic of characters; and Marx, as he said himself, was usually not long-suffering. Soho was the district of London where most of the refugees congregated - being then as now very cosmopolitan and full of eating places, prostitutes and theatres. Dean Street was one of its main thoroughfares; long and narrow, it had once been fashionable but was now decidedly shabby. It was also in a quarter where there was much cholera, particularly in 1854, when Marx accounted for the outbreak 'because the sewers made in June, July and August were driven through the pits where those who died of the plague in 1688 (? I think) were buried'.129 From 1851 to 1856 the Marx family lived in a flat on the second floor composed initially of two rooms until Marx rented a third for his study. There were always seven, and occasionally eight, people living in the two rooms. The first was a small bedroom and the other a large (15 ft by 18 ft) living-room with three windows looking out on the street.

By January 1851 Marx was already two weeks behind with the rent for his landlord - Morgan Kavanagh, an Irish author who sublet the rooms for £22 a year. A few months later Marx avoided eviction only by signing an I O U to his landlord, who the next year, after waiting for months for the rent, threatened to put the bailiffs in. There were no holidays until 1854 when Jenny and the children went to Seiler's villa in Edmonton for a fortnight before going on to Trier. Jenny did write - but without success - to one of the editors of the New York Daily Tribune in the hope that they might be able to provide a house for Marx, their London correspondent. It was only the death of Edgar, combined with the inheritance from Jenny's uncle, that enabled them eventually to move in 1856.

The family regularly managed to get out to Hampstead Heath on Sundays, a very popular excursion with Londoners at that time. The Heath - then still in its natural state - was about one and a half hours' walk from Dean Street, and they aimed to arrive there by lunchtime. Liebknecht has described the outing:

The lunch-basket of a volume unknown in London, which Lenchen had saved from their sojourn in Trier, contained the centrepiece - a mighty roast veal. Tea and fruit they brought with them; bread, cheese and beer could be bought on the Heath.

The march itself was generally accomplished in the following order: I led the van with the two girls - now telling stories, now executing callisthenics, now on the hunt after field flowers that were not so scarce