Karl Marx Page 17

  For all its boldness and brilliance, the Revue did not go out of its way to woo subscribers. As E. H. Carr has pointed out, ‘the whole was tactfully seasoned with pungent attacks on the other German refugees in London, who were almost the only potential readers of the journal’. The circulation was tiny, and revenue negligible. In May 1850, Jenny Marx wrote beseechingly to Weydemeyer in Frankfurt: ‘I beg you to send us as soon as possible any money that has come in or comes in from the Revue. We are in dire need of it.’ Marx himself was stoical about the failure of a project in which he had invested so much hope and energy. As Jenny noted admiringly, he never lost his good humour or robust confidence in the future even during the ‘most frightful moments’ – of which there were all too many in 1850. ‘Pray do not be offended by my wife’s agitated letters,’ he reassured Weydemeyer. ‘She is nursing her child, and our situation here is so extraordinarily wretched that an outburst of impatience is excusable.’

  This brisk summary barely hinted at the true horror of their struggle for survival. In a long and heart-rending letter written in May 1850, Jenny Marx described a scene that might have come from a Dickens novel:

  Let me describe for you, as it really was, just one day in our lives, and you will realise that few refugees are likely to have gone through a similar experience. Since wet-nurses here are exorbitantly expensive, I was determined to feed my child myself, however frightful the pain in my breast and back. But the poor little angel absorbed with my milk so many anxieties and unspoken sorrows that he was always ailing and in severe pain by day and by night. Since coming into the world, he has never slept a whole night through – at most, two or three hours. Latterly, too, there have been violent convulsions, so that the child has been hovering constantly between death and a miserable life. In his pain he sucked so hard that I got a sore on my breast – an open sore; often blood would spurt into his little, trembling mouth. I was sitting thus one day when suddenly in came our landlady, to whom we had paid over 250 Reichstahlers in the course of the winter, and with whom we had contractually agreed that we should subsequently pay, not her, but her landlord by whom she had formerly been placed under distraint; she now denied the existence of this contract, demanded the £5 we still owed her and, since this was not ready to hand … two bailiffs entered the house and placed under distraint what little I possessed – beds, linen, clothes, everything, even my poor infant’s cradle, and the best of the toys belonging to the girls, who burst into tears. They threatened to take everything away within two hours – leaving me lying on the bare boards with my shivering children and my sore breast. Our friend Schramm left hurriedly for town in search of help. He climbed into a cab, the horses took fright, he jumped out of the vehicle and was brought bleeding back to the house where I was lamenting in company with my poor, trembling children.

  The following day we had to leave the house, it was cold, wet and overcast, my husband went to look for lodgings; on his mentioning four children, no one wanted to take us in. At last a friend came to our aid, we paid, and I hurriedly sold all my beds so as to settle with the apothecaries, bakers, butchers and milkman who, their fears aroused by the scandal of the bailiffs, had suddenly besieged me with their bills. The beds I had sold were brought out on to the pavement and loaded on to a barrow – and then what happens? It was long after sunset, English law prohibits this, the landlord bears down on us with constables in attendance, declares we might have included some of his stuff with our own, that we are doing a flit and going abroad. In less than five minutes a crowd of two or three hundred people stands gaping outside our door, all the riff-raff of Chelsea. In go the beds again; they cannot be handed over to the purchaser until tomorrow morning after sunrise; having thus been enabled, by the sale of everything we possessed, to pay every farthing, I removed with my little darlings into the two little rooms we now occupy in the German Hotel, I Leicester Street, Leicester Square, where we were given a humane reception in return for £5.10 a week.

  A few days later the Marxes found temporary shelter in the house of a Jewish lace dealer at 64 Dean Street, Soho, where they spent a miserable summer teetering on the edge of destitution. Jenny was pregnant again, and constantly ill. By August things were so bad that she had to go to Holland and throw herself on the mercy of Karl’s maternal uncle Lion Philips, a wealthy Dutch businessman (whose eponymous company flourishes to this day, selling all manner of electronic products from television sets to pop-up toasters). She needn’t have bothered: Philips, who was ‘very ill-disposed by the unfavourable effect the revolution had had on his business’, offered only an avuncular embrace and a small present for little Fawkesy. When she warned that they would have to emigrate to America if he couldn’t rescue them, Philips replied that he thought this an excellent idea. ‘I am afraid, dear Karl, I am coming home to you quite empty-handed, disappointed, torn apart and tortured by a fear of death,’ Jenny wrote. ‘Oh, if you knew how much I am longing to see you and the little ones. I cannot write anything about the children, my eyes begin to tremble …’

  Many revolutionaries exiled in London were artisans – type-setters, cobblers, watchmakers. Others earned a few pounds by teaching English or German. But Marx was congenitally unsuited to any regular employment. He did consider emigration but discovered that tickets for the voyage would be ‘hellishly expensive’; if he had known that assisted passages were available, he might have taken the next boat. As usual, Engels saved the day, sacrificing his own journalistic ambitions in London to take a job at the Manchester office of his father’s textile firm, Ermen & Engels. He remained there for almost twenty years. ‘My husband and all the rest of us have missed you sorely and have often longed to see you,’ Jenny wrote soon after his departure, in December 1850. ‘However, I am very glad that you have left and are well on the way to becoming a great cotton lord.’

  He had no desire to become anything of the kind, regarding ‘vile commerce’ as a penance that had to be endured. Though Engels soon assumed the outward appearance of a Lancashire businessman – joining the more exclusive clubs, filling his cellar with champagne, riding to hounds with the Cheshire Hunt – he never forgot that the main purpose was to support his brilliant but impecunious friend. He acted as a kind of secret agent behind enemy lines, sending Marx confidential details of the cotton trade, expert observations on the state of international markets and – most essentially – a regular consignment of small-denomination banknotes, pilfered from the petty cash box or guilefully prised out of the company’s bank account. (As a precaution against mail theft he snipped them in two, posting each half in a separate envelope.) It is a measure of how slackly the office was run that neither his father nor his business partner in Manchester, Peter Ermen, ever noticed anything amiss.

  Nevertheless, Engels was careful not to arouse their suspicions, even if this sometimes meant leaving the Marx family penniless. ‘I am writing today just to tell you that I am unfortunately still not in a position to send you the £2 I promised you,’ he wrote in November. ‘Ermen has gone away for a few days and, since no proxy has been authorised with the bank, we are unable to make any remittances and have to content ourselves with the few small payments that happen to come in. The total amount in the cash box is only about £4 and you will therefore realise that I must wait a while.’ When his father visited the Manchester office a few months later, Engels negotiated himself an ‘expense and entertainment allowance’ of £200 a year. ‘With such a salary, all should be well, and if there are no ructions before the next balance sheet and if business prospers here, he’ll have quite a different bill to foot – even this year I’ll exceed the £200 by far,’ he reported. ‘Since business has been very good and he is now more than twice as wealthy as he was in 1837, it goes without saying that I shan’t be needlessly scrupulous.’ Engels senior soon had second thoughts, deciding that Friedrich was spending far too much money and must make do with £150. Though the prodigal son chafed at this ‘ludicrous imposition’, it didn’t cramp his generosity unduly.
By 1853 he was able to boast that ‘last year, thank God, I gobbled up half of my old man’s profits from the business here’. He could even afford to maintain two residences: at one, a smart townhouse, he entertained the local nobs and nabobs, while in the other he established a ménage à trois with his lover Mary Burns and her sister Lizzie.

  On 15 June 1850, shortly before Engels began his long northern exile, the London Spectator printed a letter from Messrs ‘Charles Marx’ and ‘Fredc. Engels’ of 64 Dean Street, Soho. ‘Really, Sir, we should never have thought that there existed in this country so many police spies as we have had the good fortune of making the acquaintance of in the short space of a week,’ they wrote. ‘Not only that the doors of the houses where we live are closely watched by individuals of a more than doubtful look, who take down their notes very coolly every time one enters the house or leaves it; we cannot make a single step without being followed by them wherever we go. We cannot get into an omnibus or enter a coffeehouse without being favoured with the company of at least one of these unknown friends.’

  And quite right too, Spectator readers might have thought, especially since the authors proudly identified themselves as revolutionaries who had fled from the land of their birth. But Marx and Engels forestalled this objection with a cunning appeal to English vanity and Hunnophobia, revealing that in their previous sanctuaries – France, Belgium, Switzerland – they had been unable to escape the baleful power of the Prussian King. ‘If, through his influences, we are to be made to leave this last refuge left to us in Europe, why then Prussia will think herself the ruling power of the world … We believe, Sir, that under these circumstances, we cannot do better than bring the whole case before the public. We believe that Englishmen are interested in anything by which the old-established reputation of England, as the safest asylum for refugees of all parties and all countries, may be more or less affected.’

  In spite of the amused tone, Marx desperately needed reassurance that good old England would not let him down. Since a recent assassination attempt on King Frederick William IV, the Prussian Minister of the Interior had intensified his campaign against ‘political conspirators’ by dispatching police spies and agents provocateurs to the capitals of Europe – particularly to London, and most particularly to Dean Street, Soho. And no wonder: for the Minister of the Interior was none other than Jenny’s reactionary half-brother Ferdinand von Westphalen. Having failed to prevent Marx from marrying into his family seven years earlier, he was hell-bent on revenge.

  In the Spectator letter, Marx alleged that a fortnight before the shooting of King Frederick William ‘persons whom we have every reason to consider as agents either of the Prussian government or the Ultra-Royalists presented themselves to us, and almost directly engaged us to enter into conspiracies for organising regicide in Berlin and elsewhere. We need not add that these persons found no chance of making dupes of us.’ Their aim, as he explained, was to persuade the British authorities to ‘remove from this country the pretended chiefs of the pretended conspiracy’. One of these unidentified agents was Wilhelm Stieber, later the chief of Bismarck’s secret service, who came to London during the spring of 1850 masquerading as a journalist called Schmidt. Stieber had been instructed to keep a close eye on Karl Marx, and after infiltrating the communist HQ at 20 Great Windmill Street he sent back an urgent cable confirming all von Westphalen’s suspicions about his nefarious brother-in-law. ‘The murder of Princes is formally taught and discussed,’ he reported:

  At a meeting held the day before yesterday at which I assisted and over which Wolff and Marx presided, I heard one of the orators call out ‘The Moon Calf [Queen Victoria] will likewise not escape its destiny. The English steel wares are the best, the axes cut particularly sharply here, and the guillotine awaits every Crowned Head.’ Thus the murder of the Queen of England is proclaimed by Germans a few hundred yards only from Buckingham Palace … Before the close of the meeting Marx told his audience that they might be perfectly tranquil, their men were everywhere at their posts. The eventful moment was approaching and infallible measures are taken so that not one of the European crowned executioners can escape.

  An earlier biographer of Karl Marx has claimed that ‘this report is oddly convincing’. In fact, it is manifestly absurd – as the British government of the time recognised. Although the Prussian Minister of the Interior forwarded the dispatch to London, Lord Palmerston consigned it to the Foreign Office files where it remains to this day. As far as one can tell, he did not even bother to alert Scotland Yard. When the Austrian ambassador in London complained to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, that Marx and his fellow members of the Communist League were discussing regicide, he was rewarded with a brief, supercilious lecture on the nature of liberal democracy: ‘Under our laws, mere discussion of regicide, so long as it does not concern the Queen of England and so long as there is no definite plan, does not constitute sufficient grounds for the arrest of the conspirators.’ A plot to assassinate Queen Victoria was precisely the sort of pointless stunt that Marx abhorred. He despised those revolutionaries who preferred flamboyant gestures to the dull but necessary process of preparing for the economic crisis which would precipitate the victory of the proletariat. Indeed, it was his very doggedness on this point that destroyed the Communist League in London, as the more impatient committee members chafed at his insistence that they must bide their time.

  The leader of the malcontents was August Willich, Engels’s old military commander from the ’49 campaign in Baden, who had been making a thorough nuisance of himself since joining the German diaspora in England. ‘He would come to visit me,’ Jenny Marx wrote many years later, ‘because he wanted to pursue the worm that lives in every marriage and lure it out.’ Almost everything about Willich was calculated to irritate Marx – his posturing and preening, his colourful clothes, his noisy attention seeking. By the summer of 1850 he was openly denouncing Jenny’s husband as a ‘reactionary’. Marx, never one to miss an opportunity for vituperation, retaliated by dismissing him as an ‘uneducated, four-times cuckolded jackass’. At a riotous meeting of the League’s central committee on 1 September, Willich challenged Marx to a duel.

  As Willich was a crack shot who could hit the ace of hearts at twenty paces, Marx had enough sense to refuse; but his eager lieutenant Conrad Schramm, who had never fired a pistol in his life, picked up the gauntlet at once and departed with Willich to Antwerp – duels being illegal in Britain – for a final reckoning. Karl and Jenny feared the worst, especially when they heard that that Willich was taking Emmanuel Barthélemy as his second. Barthélemy, a fierce-eyed muscular ruffian, had been convicted of murdering a policeman at the age of seventeen and still wore on his shoulder the indelible brand of a galley convict. Having fled to London only a few weeks earlier, after escaping from a French prison, he had already been heard to say that ‘traîtres’ such as Marx and his cronies should be killed. Given his prowess with pistol and sabre, as demonstrated at the salon in Rathbone Place, this was no idle threat.

  What hope did the bold but feeble Schramm have against the formidable expertise of Willich and Barthélemy? On the appointed day, Marx and Jenny sat miserably in their rooms with Wilhelm Liebknecht, counting the minutes until their young comrade died. The next evening Barthélemy himself came to the door and announced in a sepulchral voice that ‘Schramm a une balle dans la tète!’ Bowing stiffly, he then left without another word.

  ‘Of course, we gave up Schramm for lost,’ Liebknecht wrote. ‘The next day, while we were just talking about him sadly, the door is opened and in comes with a bandaged head but gaily laughing the sadly mourned one and relates that he had received a glancing shot which had stunned him – when he recovered consciousness, he was alone on the sea coast with his second and his physician.’ Assuming that the wound was fatal, Willich and Barthélemy had caught the next steamer back from Ostend.

  Thus ended Marx’s dream of running the Communist League from England. At its final meeting, on 15 Sep
tember 1850, he proposed that the Central Committee should be transferred to Cologne since the bickering London agitators were incapable of providing leadership of any kind. A fair point – except that the Communists of Cologne had quite enough problems of their own. The Prussian government had redoubled its persecution of subversives since the attempted assassination of King Frederick William IV, and by the summer of 1851 all eleven members of the Cologne Central Committee were in jail awaiting trial on conspiracy charges. Poor old Marx, who had looked forward to a well-earned respite from the Communist League, found himself reluctantly dragged back into its affairs as he began to lobby and protest on behalf of the German ‘conspirators’. It was not mere altruism: to his fury, he had been fingered by the prosecutor as the evil genius behind the bloodthirsty schemes and coups of which the defendants were accused. He worked day and night, setting up defence committees, raising funds, scribbling indignant letters to the newspapers. ‘A complete office has now been set up in our house,’ Jenny told a friend. ‘Two or three people are writing, others running errands, others scraping pennies together so that the writers may continue to exist and prove the old world of officialdom guilty of the most outrageous scandal. And in between whiles my three merry children sing and whistle, often to be harshly told off by their papa. What a bustle!’