Karl Marx (22 page)

One morning in April 1853 a baker turned up at 28 Dean Street to warn that he would deliver no more bread until his outstanding bills were paid. He was greeted by Edgar Marx, a chubby-cheeked six-year-old who was already as street-smart as any Artful Dodger. Edgar’s smallness had earned him the nickname ‘Musch’ (‘fly’) in infancy, but this had later been amended to ‘Colonel Musch’ in tribute to his tactical nous.

‘Is Mr Marx at home?’ the man enquired.

‘No, he ain’t upstairs,’ the cockney urchin replied – and then, grabbing three loaves, shot off like an arrow.

Musch’s father was immensely proud of the lad, but he could hardly expect all creditors to be rebuffed so easily. Throughout the years in Soho the Marxes lived in a state of siege: grubby police spies from Prussia lurked all too conspicuously outside, keeping note of the comings and goings, while irate butchers and bakers and bailiffs hammered on the door.

His letters to Engels are a ceaseless litany of wretchedness and woe. ‘A week ago I reached the pleasant point where I am unable to go out for want of the coats I have in pawn, and can no longer eat meat for want of credit. Piffling it all may be, but I’m afraid that one day it might blow up into a scandal.’ (27 February 1852.) ‘My wife is ill. Little Jenny is ill. Lenchen has some sort of nervous fever. I could not and cannot call the doctor because I have no money to buy medicine. For the past eight to ten days I have been feeding the family solely on bread and potatoes, but whether I
shall be able to get hold of any today is doubtful … How am I to get out of this infernal mess?’ (8 September 1852.) ‘Our misfortunes here have reached a climax.’ (21 January 1853.) ‘For the past ten days there hasn’t been a sou in the house.’ (8 October 1853.) ‘At present I have to pay out twenty-five per cent [of household income] to the pawnshop alone, and in general am never able to get things in order because of arrears … The total absence of money is the more horrible – quite apart from the fact that family wants do not cease for an instant – as Soho is a choice district for cholera, the mob is croaking right and left (e.g. an average of three per house in Broad Street) and “victuals” are the best defence against the beastly thing.’ (13 September 1854.) ‘While I was upstairs busy writing my last letter to you, my wife down below was besieged by hungry wolves all of whom used the pretext of the “heavy times” to dun her for money which she had not got.’ (8 December 1857.) ‘I’ve just received a
third and final warning
from the rotten rate collector to the effect that, if I haven’t paid by Monday, they’ll put a broker in the house on Monday afternoon. If possible, therefore, send me a few pounds …’ (18 December 1857.)

These ‘few pounds’ added up to a fairly lavish subsidy. Even in 1851, one of Marx’s most poverty-stricken years, he received at least £150 from Engels and other supporters – a sum on which a lower-middle-class family could live in some comfort. That autumn he was appointed European correspondent of the
New York Daily Tribune
, the world’s best-selling newspaper, for which he regularly submitted two articles a week at £2 apiece. Though his earnings from the
Tribune
dwindled slightly after 1854, by then he was also collecting £50 a year for his contributions to the
Neue Oder-Zeitung
in Breslau. In short, from 1852 onwards he had an income of at least £200. The annual rent for Dean Street was only £22. Why, then, was he always so catastrophically broke?

If Marx had been the careless bohemian depicted in so many police reports, he might have managed pretty well. In fact he
belonged to the class of distressed gentlefolk, desperate to keep up appearances and unwilling to forgo bourgeois habits. For most of the 1850s he could scarcely afford to feed his own children and yet he insisted on employing a secretary, the young German philologist Wilhelm Pieper, even though Jenny Marx was eager to do the job.

Pieper, described by Jenny as a ‘slovenly flibbertigibbet’, managed the rare feat of being both frivolous and dogmatic at the same time. He was also tactless, loutish, extravagantly boastful and insatiably libidinous. Some female visitors to the Marx household were reduced to tears by his boorish political harangues – and others by his brazen salaciousness. He regarded himself as ‘
Byron and Leibniz rolled into one
’. More to the point, he was a useless secretary. His main duty was to transcribe and translate Marx’s newspaper articles, but the translations were so erratic that Engels usually had to redo them from scratch. Anyway, from the spring of 1853 Marx felt confident enough to write in English himself. ‘
I can’t conceive what you still need him for
,’ Engels muttered. Later that summer Pieper spent a fortnight in hospital, where a little board at the end of the bed broadcast his shame for all to see: ‘Wilhelm Pieper,
syphilis secundarius
.’ Though he promised to be more discriminating in future, the pell-mell seductions continued and before long he was back in hospital with a second dose.

One day a letter arrived for him at Dean Street, addressed in a female hand, requesting a rendezvous. Since the signature meant nothing to Pieper he passed it to Jenny Marx – who recognised that it was their former wet-nurse, ‘a fat old Irish slattern’. Karl and Jenny teased him about this latest admirer; but, as Marx noticed, ‘
he kept his rendezvous with the old cow
’. A few weeks later he was declaring his boundless love for a greengrocer’s daughter from south London, described by Marx as a tallow candle in green spectacles – ‘
her entire person green
like verdigris rather than veg., and greens to boot without any meat or flesh whatever’. The main purpose of the courtship, it transpired, was
that Pieper hoped to touch her father for a loan of twenty quid, but like all his schemes it ended in disaster: the greengrocer refused to lend him a penny and the infatuated daughter then rushed over to Dean Street proposing that they elope together at once.

Pieper sometimes disappeared for weeks on end, either chasing an alluring petticoat or trying a new career – as journalist, proofreader, City clerk, lamp salesman, schoolmaster – but his dreams of love and money never came to anything; and so he would return to Dean Street in a bedraggled state pleading for shelter and sustenance. ‘
I am,
hélas
, once again saddled with Pieper
,’ Marx moaned in July 1854, ‘who looks like a half-starved sucking pig seethed in milk, after having lived for a fortnight with a whore he describes as
un bijou
. He has frittered away some £20 in a fortnight and now both his purses are equally depleted. In this weather it is a bore to have the fellow hanging around from morning to night and night to morning. And it disrupts one’s work.’ Because of the cramped conditions in the flat Pieper had to share a bed with Marx. Worse still, Pieper insisted on playing him some of Richard Wagner’s new work – ‘music of the future’ – which Marx thought horrible.

In 1857, Pieper announced that he had been offered a post as the German master at a private school in Bognor, apparently hoping that Marx would press him to stay on more favourable terms. At long last, however, his bluff was called – and Jenny slipped effortlessly into his place. ‘
It transpired that his “indispensability” was merely a figment
of his own imagination,’ Marx wrote, neglecting to add that he too had fallen for the myth. ‘My wife fulfils the function of secretary without all the bother created by the noble youth … I do not need him in any way.’ Since she had already proved this on several occasions while Marx was ill and Pieper off whoring, why did it take him so long to notice? He had been irritated by the unreliable factotum for years, privately referring to him as a feather-brained clown and a silly ass. ‘
The combination of dilettantism and sententiousness
, vapidity and pedantry makes him ever harder to stomach. And, as so often
in the case of such laddies, there lurks, beneath an apparently sunny temperament, much irritability, moodiness and crapulous despondency.’

The employment of Pieper was a needless extravagance from the outset, but had been allowed to continue because Marx thought it unseemly for a chap in his position
not
to have a confidential secretary – as well as regular seaside holidays, piano lessons for the children, and all the other costly appurtenances of respectability. However empty his pockets, he simply refused to accept a ‘sub-proletarian’ way of life, as he put it. What to other refugees might seem luxuries therefore became ‘absolute necessities’ while more imperative exigencies, such as paying the grocer, were treated as an optional extra.

These inverted priorities are apparent in a begging letter sent to Engels in June 1854, when Jenny was recovering from illness and Dr Freund, her GP, was clamouring for settlement of overdue medical bills. ‘
I find myself in a fix
,’ Marx wrote, explaining that his quarterly accounts were hopelessly in the red, ‘since I had £12 to pay out for the household, and the total received was considerably reduced because of unwritten articles, besides which the chemist’s bills alone swallowed up a large part of the budget.’ The heart-tugging effect of this appeal was sabotaged in the very next sentence when he mentioned that Jenny, the children and housekeeper were about to take a fortnight’s holiday at a villa in Edmonton – after which ‘she might then be so far restored by the country air as to manage the journey to Trier’. If Marx was too skint to pay his own doctor, Engels might have wondered, how could he afford a fare to Germany? The question certainly occurred to his long-suffering creditors when they learned that Jenny had equipped herself with a new wardrobe of clothes for the trip. Marx affected not to understand their indignation, maintaining that the daughter of a German baron ‘could naturally not arrive in Trier looking shabby’.

He was ridiculously proud of having married a bit of posh. Hence the visiting cards he had printed for her (‘Mme Jenny
Marx,
née
Baronesse de Westphalen’), which he sometimes flourished in the hope of impressing tradesmen and Tories. ‘
The sea is doing my wife a lot of good
,’ he noted after one of Jenny’s holidays. ‘In Ramsgate she has made the acquaintance of refined and,
horribile dictu
, clever Englishwomen. After years during which she has enjoyed only inferior company, if any at all, intercourse with people of her own kind seems to agree with her.’ Jenny had few such opportunities, and Marx was haunted by guilt at the squalid fate he had inflicted on the former princess of Trier society. There was a most humiliating reminder of how far they had sunk when he was arrested while trying to pawn Jenny’s Argyll family silver – the police suspecting, reasonably enough, that a scruffy German refugee couldn’t have acquired these ducal heirlooms legitimately. Marx spent a night in the cells before Jenny managed to convince them of her aristocratic bona fides.

Unable to keep his wife in the fashion appropriate to ‘people of her own kind’, Marx could at least strive to do better by his children. The girls must marry well, of course, and to attract the right kind of suitor they would need ballgowns, dancing classes and all the other social advantages money could buy, even if the money in question had to be cadged from someone else. Engels, long accustomed to being that someone else, never questioned his friend’s assumption that it was worth living beyond one’s means to avoid losing caste, and that an expensive show of finery would actually pay dividends in the long run. ‘
I for my part wouldn’t care a damn about living in Whitechapel
,’ Marx claimed, but ‘it could hardly be suitable for growing girls.’ In their teenage years the Marx daughters attended a ‘ladies’ seminary’ which charged £8 a quarter, besides which they were enrolled for private tuition in French, Italian, drawing and music. ‘
It is true my house is beyond my means
,’ he admitted to Engels in 1865, after moving to a mansion in north London. ‘But it is the only way for the children to establish themselves socially with a view to securing their future … I believe you yourself will be of the opinion that,
even from a purely commercial point of view, to run a purely proletarian household would not be appropriate in the circumstances, although that would be quite all right if my wife and I were by ourselves or if the girls were boys.’

Even Engels couldn’t cover the entire cost of grooming a bevy of eligible débutantes. After much brow-furrowing, he decided that Marx’s hope of salvation lay in a loan from the People’s Provident Assurance Society: ‘
Though I’ve racked my brains
I can think of no other method of raising money in England. It seems to me that the moment has come for you to have a go at your mater …’ A more obvious method – to get a job – had apparently not entered his businesslike brain, though on other occasions he was quick to recommend it as a cure-all for fellow refugees. ‘
I wish some of our lads in London
would really settle down to a more or less steady job,’ he told Marx once, with no ironic intent, ‘for they’re becoming inveterate loafers.’

During his thirty-four years in London there were only two occasions when Marx sought gainful employment. In a letter of 1852 to Joseph Weydemeyer, by then living in the United States, we learn of a ‘newly invented lacquer varnish’ to which Marx had been alerted by his new chum Colonel Bangya, a mysterious Hungarian émigré who later turned out to be an undercover agent for half the crowned heads of Europe. Weydemeyer was to take a stall at the International Industrial Exhibition in New York, where customers would be so dazzled by the invention that ‘it might set you up in funds at one stroke’ – and, of course, yield a handsome profit for its joint backers in London. ‘Write to me at once, giving full details of the expenses you thereby incur,’ Marx advised. Nothing more was heard of this magical varnish, which seems to have met the same fate as Weitling’s ingenious contraption for making ladies’ straw hats. Ten years later, when his debts were even ghastlier than usual, Marx applied in desperation for a job as a railway clerk but was rejected because of his unreadable handwriting.