Karl Marx (26 page)

Marx’s final verdict on his adopted country can be found in a letter written shortly before his death in 1883. After mocking the ‘poor British bourgeois, who groan as they assume more and more “responsabilities” [
sic
] in the service of their historic mission, while vainly protesting against it’, he concluded with a cry of exasperation: ‘
Drat the British!
’

Ernest Jones’s apostasy in joining forces with the middle-class liberals incurred the most severe punishment Marx and Engels could mete out: he was labelled an ‘opportunist’. A few years later they passed the same sentence on Ferdinand Lassalle for his proposal that Prussian workers and noblemen should gang up against the industrial bourgeoisie. While railing against these cynical marriages of convenience, however, Marx himself was forming opportunistic partnerships with some pretty rum coves.

The rummiest of them all was David Urquhart, an eccentric Scottish aristocrat and sometime Tory MP who is now remembered, if at all, as the man who introduced Turkish baths to England. ‘
To most of his adherents,
to the end of his life, Urquhart was the Bey, the Chief, the Prophet, almost “the sent of God”,’ one disciple recorded. ‘To his little daughter dreaming of her father … it did not seem strange that that same father should change, after the strange fashion of dreams, into the Christ. “It is really the same thing, is it not, mother?” she said.’ To less worshipful observers, he was a cantankerous old walrus with a lopsided moustache, a lopsided bow-tie and exceedingly lopsided opinions. ‘There is no art I have practised so assiduously as the faculty of making men hate me,’ Urquhart boasted. ‘That removes apathy. You can get them into speech. Then you have their words to catch and hurl back at them to knock them down with.’ Many
mid-Victorian eminences could testify to the success of this technique: he had enemies galore.

Born in Scotland in 1805, educated in France, Switzerland and Spain, Urquhart discovered his long obsession with the East when at the age of twenty-one he sailed – at the suggestion of Jeremy Bentham, an admirer – to take part in the Greek war of independence, and was severely wounded at the siege of Scio. Having caught the attention of Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to William IV, he was then dispatched on secret diplomatic missions to Constantinople, where he abruptly changed his allegiance. ‘
This chap went to Greece
as a Philhellene and, after three years of fighting the Turks, proceeded to Turkey and went into raptures about those selfsame Turks,’ Marx wrote in March 1853 after chuckling over Urquhart’s book
Turkey and Its Resources
.

He enthuses over Islam on the principle, ‘if I wasn’t a Calvinist, I could only be a Mohammedan’. Turks, particularly those of the Ottoman Empire in its heyday, are the most perfect nation on earth in every possible way. The Turkish language is the most perfect and melodious in the world … If a European is maltreated in Turkey, he has only himself to blame; your Turk hates neither the religion of the Frank, nor his character, but only his narrow trousers. Imitation of Turkish architecture, etiquette, etc. is strongly recommended. The author himself was several times kicked in the bottom by Turks, but subsequently realised that he alone was to blame … In short, only the Turk is a gentleman and freedom exists only in Turkey.

Urquhart’s hosts in Constantinople were dazzled by his extravagant Turkophilia. ‘The Turkish officials placed such reliance on Urquhart,’ according to the
Dictionary of National Biography
, ‘that they kept him immediately informed of all communications made to them by the Russian ambassador. Lord Palmerston, however,
took alarm … and wrote to the ambassador, Lord Ponsonby, to remove him from Constantinople as a danger to the peace of Europe.’ As well he might. Urquhart’s passionate partisanship – pro-Turkey, anti-Russia – left him at odds with British policy, and persuaded him that his own country’s government had been hijacked by sinister forces. In short, he concluded that the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, must be a secret Russian agent. On his return to Britain he founded several newspapers and a national network of ‘foreign affairs committees’ to disseminate this bold conspiracy theory. After entering Parliament in 1847, he fired off a fusillade of speeches calling for an immediate inquiry into the conduct of the Foreign Office, ‘with a view to the impeachment of the Right Honourable Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston’.

Essentially a romantic reactionary, Uruquhart nevertheless managed to convince some radicals that he was really on their side – speaking for the downtrodden workers against their devious and deceitful rulers. Though the more revolutionary Chartists dismissed him as a Tory spy whose populist crusade against Lord Palmerston was a ‘red herring’, others praised his exposure of ‘the injury done to the labour and capital of this country by the expansion of the Russian Empire, and the almost universal exercise of Russian influence, all directed to the destruction of British commerce.’

This all chimed in most harmoniously with Karl Marx’s own hatred and mistrust of Tsarist Russia. ‘Excited but not convinced’ by Urquhart’s allegations, he set to work with characteristic diligence, poring over old copies of
Hansard
and the diplomatic
Blue Books
in search of evidence. His progress can be followed through the changing tone of his letters to Engels. In the spring of 1853 he mocked Urquhart as ‘the mad MP who denounces Palmerston as being in the pay of Russia’. By that summer, he was already showing rather more respect: ‘
In the
Advertiser
four letters by D. Urquhart
on the eastern question contained much that was interesting, despite quirks and quiddities.’ Before autumn
was out, the conversion to Urquhartism – if not to Urquhart himself – was complete. ‘I have come to the same conclusion as that monomaniac Urquhart – namely that for several decades Palmerston has been in the pay of Russia,’ he wrote on 2 November. ‘I am glad that chance should have led me to take a closer look at the foreign policy – diplomatic – of the past twenty years. We had very much neglected this aspect, and one ought to know with whom one is dealing.’

The first fruit of these researches was a series of articles for the
New York Tribune
at the end of 1853, describing Palmerston’s clandestine ‘connections’ with the Russian government. Urquhart, understandably delighted, arranged a meeting with the author early in 1854 at which he paid him the highest compliment in his lexicon by saying that ‘the articles read as though written by a Turk’. Marx, rather crossly, pointed out that he was in fact a German revolutionist.

‘
He is an utter maniac
,’ Marx reported soon after this strange encounter:

is firmly convinced that he will one day be Premier of England. When everyone else is downtrodden, England will come to him and say, Save us, Urquhart! And then he will save her. While speaking, particularly if contradicted, he goes into
fits
… The fellow’s most comical idea is this: Russia rules the world through having a specific superfluity of
brain
. To cope with her, a man must have the
brain
of an Urquhart and, if one has the misfortune not to be Urquhart himself, one should at least be an Urquhartite, i.e. believe what Urquhart believes, his ‘metaphysics’, his ‘political economy’ etc etc. One should have been in the ‘East’, or at least have absorbed the Turkish ‘spirit’, etc.

When some of Marx’s Palmerston articles from the
Tribune
were reprinted as a pamphlet, he was horrified to discover that polemics by Urquhart were appearing in the same series – and promptly
forbade any further publication. ‘
I do not wish to be numbered
among the followers of that gentleman,’ he explained to Ferdinand Lassalle, ‘with whom I have only one thing in common, viz. my views on Palmerston, but to whom in all other matters I am diametrically opposed.’

One might infer from this that any further offers or inducements from the maniac would be rejected with a brisk ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ But Marx could not afford to maintain his principled posture for long. Harried by impatient creditors, he found it hard to resist a commission to write a series for one of Urquhart’s journals, the Sheffield
Free Press
, in the summer of 1856. ‘
The Urquhartites are being damned importunate
,’ he grumbled. ‘A good thing financially. But I don’t know whether,
politically
, I ought to get too involved with the fellows.’ The articles were suitably sensational: he claimed to have discovered, among the diplomatic manuscripts at the British Museum, ‘a series of documents going back from the end of the eighteenth century to the time of Peter the Great, which revealed the secret and permanent collaboration of the Cabinets at London and St Petersburg’. More alarmingly still, the aim of Russia throughout this period had been nothing less than the conquest of the earth. ‘It is yet the policy of Peter the Great, and of modern Russia, whatever changes of name, seat and character the hostile power used may have undergone. Peter the Great is indeed the inventor of modern Russian policy, but he became so only by divesting the old Muscovite method of its merely local character and its accidental admixtures, by distilling it into an abstract formula, by generalising its purpose, and exalting its object from the overthrow of certain given limits of power to the aspiration of unlimited power.’

There was a rather obvious flaw in the theory that Britain and Russia had been in cahoots for the previous 150 years: the Crimean War. Urquhart and Marx had a ready explanation. The war had been a cunning ploy to throw sleuths off the scent of Palmerston’s corrupt alliance with Russia; and Britain had deliberately prosecuted the war as incompetently as possible. To the dedicated
conspiracy theorist, all is explicable, and any inconvenient facts are merely further confirmation of the diabolical deviousness of his prey.

Marx may have convinced himself, but few others were persuaded. His philippics against Palmerston and Russia were reissued in 1899 by his daughter Eleanor as two pamphlets,
The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century
and
The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston
– though with some of the more provocative passages quietly excised. For most of the twentieth century they remained out of print and largely forgotten.
The Institute of Marxism – Leninism in Moscow omitted them
from its otherwise exhaustive collected works, presumably because the Soviet editors could not bring themselves to admit that the presiding spirit of the Russian revolution had in fact been a fervent Russophobe. Marxist hagiographers in the West have also been reluctant to draw attention to this embarrassing partnership between the revolutionist and the reactionary. An all-too-typical example is
The Life and Teaching of Karl Marx
by John Lewis, published in 1965; the curious reader may search the text for any mention of David Urquhart, or of Marx’s contribution to his obsessive crusade – but will find nothing.

Urquhart himself later turned his attention to other, equally quixotic causes. A devout if unorthodox Roman Catholic, he spent many years appealing to Pope Pius IX for the restoration of Canon Law while also proselytising tirelessly on behalf of the Turkish bath. (‘
Did you overlook, in one of the
Guardian
s you sent me,
the item in which David Urquhart figures as an infanticide?’ Marx wrote to Engels in 1858. ‘The fool treated his thirteen-month-old baby to a Turkish bath which, as chance would have it, contributed to congestion of the brain and hence its subsequent death. The coroner’s inquest on this case lasted for three days and it was only by the skin of his teeth that Urquhart escaped a verdict of manslaughter.’) Urquhart’s house in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, was described by one visitor as ‘
an Eastern palace, with a Turkish bath
… which in luxuriousness was inferior to
none in Constantinople’. A session in this ornate sweat-chamber might have done Marx’s carbuncles a power of good, but as far as one can discover he never had the pleasure.

Shortly before dawn on 16 January 1855 Jenny Marx gave birth to another daughter, Eleanor. The father was none too ecstatic. ‘
Unfortunately of the “sex”
par excellence
,’ he told Engels. ‘If it had been a male child, well and good.’ His announcement of Franziska’s arrival, four years earlier, had been equally joyless. It would be easy to infer that Marx felt only lukewarm affection for his daughters; easy, but wrong. Their own letters and autobiographical scraps all testify that ‘Moor’ was an adoring father who inspired utter devotion in return. Unlike many men of his generation, he treated girls as intelligent adults-to-be. To Eleanor, as to her sisters before her, he read the whole of Homer, Shakespeare, the
Niebelungen Lied, Gudrun, Don Quixote
, the
Arabian Nights
and much else. For her sixth birthday she was given her first novel,
Peter Simple
, which was soon followed by the complete works of Marryat, Cooper and Walter Scott. Subjects that would have been taboo
devant les enfants
in other middle-class Victorian households – atheism, socialism – were not merely permitted but encouraged. After a family outing to hear the sung mass in a Roman Catholic church, when Eleanor was about five, she confessed to feeling ‘certain religious qualms’. Her father then ‘made everything straight’, patiently elucidating the story of the carpenter whom the rich men killed. ‘We can forgive Christianity much,’ he told her, ‘because it taught us the worship of the child.’

Marx’s hand-wringing at the ‘unfortunate’ gender of his new baby should not, therefore, be taken as evidence of misogyny or
paternal coldness. He was simply facing the social and economic facts: since middle-class girls couldn’t be expected to earn a living or fend for themselves, Eleanor would be one more financial burden on an already overdrawn exchequer.

Even so, there can be no doubt that Edgar – the impish, round-faced Colonel Musch – was the favourite. A sickly lad, whose huge head seemed far too heavy for his feeble body, he was nevertheless an inexhaustible source of drollery and high spirits. When his parents lapsed into despondency, he could always cheer them up by singing nonsensical ditties – or the Marseillaise, for that matter – with tremendous feeling and at the top of his voice. After giving the boy a fine travelling bag as a fifth-birthday present, Marx’s secretary Wilhelm Pieper regretted the impulsive gift and threatened to take it back. ‘Moor, I’ve hiddened it well,’ Musch confided to his papa, ‘and if Pieper asks for it, I’ll tell him I’ve given it to a poor man.’

Marx adored this cunning little slyboots, ‘
a friend who was more dear to me
personally than any other’. The order of precedence is confirmed by a letter to Engels on 3 March 1855, in which he listed the various ailments that were turning their apartment into a cottage hospital: Edgar had been laid low by some kind of gastric fever; Karl himself was confined to bed with a frightful cough; Jenny had a painful and irritating whitlow on one of her fingers; baby Eleanor was perilously frail and growing weaker every day. ‘This,’ he said of Edgar’s illness, ‘is the worst of all.’ A surprising judgement, since Eleanor’s very life appeared to be threatened whereas Edgar was making ‘rapid strides towards convalescence’ within a few days.

But the remission was horribly brief. When Edgar took a serious turn for the worse at the end of March, the doctor diagnosed consumption and warned that there was no hope of recovery. ‘
Though my heart is bleeding
and my head afire, I must, of course, retain my composure,’ Marx wrote. ‘Never for one moment throughout his illness has the child been untrue to his own good-natured, and at the same time independent, self.’ Edgar
died in his father’s arms shortly before six o’clock on the morning of 6 April. It was Good Friday, the grimmest day in the Christian calendar, and so the boy’s passing was marked by solemn peals of church bells. Wilhelm Liebknecht arrived at Dean Street soon afterwards to find Jenny sobbing quietly over the corpse while Laura and Jennychen clung feverishly to her skirt as if to defend themselves against the malign force that had robbed them of their brothers and sister. Marx, almost out of his wits, was angrily and violently resisting any condolence.

The funeral took place two days later at the Whitefield Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road, already the final resting place of Fawkesy and Franziska. During the short coach journey to the graveyard Liebknecht stroked Marx’s forehead and tried, rather fatuously, to remind him of how many people still loved him – his wife, his daughters, his friends. ‘You can’t give my boy back to me!’ Marx howled, burying his head in his hands. As the coffin was being lowered into the earth he stepped forward, and for a moment the other mourners thought he might hurl himself in after it. Liebknecht stuck out a restraining arm, just in case.

Marx could hardly bring himself to return to Dean Street, which seemed unbearably desolate without its court jester. ‘
I’ve already had my share of bad luck
,’ he told Engels, ‘but only now do I know what real unhappiness is. I feel broken down.’ For several days afterwards, he was ‘fortunate enough’ to have such splitting headaches that he could neither think nor hear nor see. One of the few things that sustained him was the friendship of Engels, who invited Karl and Jenny to spend a few days in Manchester for a change of scene from the accursed apartment in Soho. (Years later, long after he had moved out of the district, Marx said that ‘
the region round Soho Square
still sends a shiver down my spine if I happen to be anywhere near there’.) But as soon as they were back in London the old marks of Edgar’s presence – his books, his toys – plunged them into deeper grief. ‘
Bacon says that really important people
have so many relations to nature and the world, so many objects of interest, that they
easily get over any loss,’ he wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle three months later. ‘I am not one of those important people. The death of my child has shattered me to the very core and I feel the loss as keenly as on the first day. My poor wife is also completely broken down.’

From July until September the family decamped to the south London suburb of Camberwell, where the German émigré Peter Imandt had offered the use of his apartment while he was away in Scotland. Though they were glad enough to keep away from Dean Street, the main reason for the change of address was to hide from the many creditors who were closing in again – especially that avenging fury Dr Freund, now threatening legal action over the unpaid medical bills. In mid-September, when Freund discovered his whereabouts, Marx had to execute another quick getaway – inspired, or so he claimed, by the hasty tactical retreat of the Russian troops from the south end of Sebastopol the previous week, following their defeat by the French at the Battle of the Chernaya. ‘
I have been compelled by
force supérieure
to evacuate
the southern side without, however, blowing everything up behind me,’ he informed Engels in a battlefront dispatch from Camberwell. ‘Indeed, my garrison will remain quietly here, whither I also propose to return in a week or so. In other words, I am obliged to withdraw to Manchester for a few days and shall arrive there tomorrow evening. I shall have to stay there incognito, so don’t let anyone know about my presence.’

Two days after reading this letter Engels sent the
New York Daily Tribune
a long article on ‘Crimean Prospects’ – under Marx’s name, as usual – in which he justified the Russians’ apparently unnecessary flight from southern Sebastopol. ‘Resistance in a besieged place is of itself demoralising in the long run,’ he argued. ‘It implies hardships, want of rest, sickness, and the presence, not of that acute danger which braces, but of that chronic danger which must ultimately relax the mind … It is not astonishing that this demoralisation should at last seize the garrison; it is astonishing that it had not done so long before.’ It’s hard to
believe that Engels composed this tactical assessment without at least half an eye on his own weary and beleaguered ally.

During the spring of 1855, between Eleanor’s birth and Musch’s death, there was one item of family news that gave Marx unalloyed pleasure. ‘Yesterday we were informed of a VERY HAPPY EVENT,’ he wrote on 8 March. ‘The death of my wife’s uncle, aged ninety.’ He had no particular grudge against Heinrich Georg von Westphalen, a harmless lawyer and historian, except that the old boy’s longevity had delayed the redistribution of his considerable wealth. For the previous few years this indestructible uncle had been referred to in the Marx household as ‘the inheritance-thwarter’. Jenny’s legacy of about £100 arrived at the end of the year, and in the summer of 1856 she received another £120 following the death of her mother. On this occasion even Marx was tactful enough not to rejoice openly, especially as Jenny had been at the Baroness’s bedside in Trier during the final days. ‘She seems greatly affected by the old lady’s death,’ he observed, in tones of slight surprise.

These two windfalls at last gave him the wherewithal to escape from the ‘old hole’ in Soho. After tramping the streets for two weeks in search of more salubrious lodgings he settled on an unfurnished four-storey house at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town, not far from Hampstead Heath. The annual rent of £36 was cheap for north London – probably because, as Marx explained to Engels, this end of Hampstead remained ‘somewhat unfinished’. More than somewhat: the street was neither paved nor lit, and the immediate neighbourhood was a huge and muddy building site. The land had been green fields until the 1840s, but the coming of the railway transformed London’s rural outskirts into a suburban girdle of speculative developments for middle-class commuters. As with today’s ‘executive estates’ in even further-flung suburbs, the architectural style was a riotous hybrid of whimsical flourishes – quoins and coping-stones, arched windows and rococo balconies.

The house at Grafton Terrace was officially classified as ‘third-class’ by the Metropolitan Building Office. Still, Marx thought it ‘very nice’. Jenny revelled in the forgotten delights of domestic comfort and hired Helene Demuth’s stepsister, Marianne Creuz, to help with the extra chores. ‘
It is indeed a princely dwelling
compared with the holes we lived in before,’ she told a friend, ‘and although it was furnished from top to bottom for little more than £40 (in which second-hand rubbish played a leading role), I felt quite grand at first in our snug parlour.’ After redeeming her Argyll linen and silver from ‘Uncle’s’ – the pawnshop – she took great pleasure in laying out damask napkins at the dinner table. There were more intimate celebrations, too: only a few weeks after her arrival at Grafton Terrace, Jenny found herself pregnant for the seventh time.

The three children loved their new middle-class life. Jennychen and Laura, now aged twelve and eleven, transferred to the South Hampstead College for Ladies and were soon winning prizes in every subject. The two-year-old Eleanor – nicknamed Tussy, to rhyme with pussy – established herself as a mini-
châtelaine
, keeping open house for any children who wished to drop by. In fine weather she would eat her tea sitting on the front doorstep, gadding off between mouthfuls to join in the street games. Such was her fame that most neighbours referred to the whole Marx family simply as ‘the Tussies’.

Even the back garden, though little more than a few square yards of grass and gravel, was a delicious novelty. One of Eleanor’s earliest childhood memories was of Marx carrying her on his shoulder round the garden in Grafton Terrace, and putting convolvulus flowers in her brown curls.

Moor was admittedly a splendid horse
. In earlier days – I cannot remember them, but have heard tell of them – my sisters and little brother – whose death just after my own birth was a lifelong grief to my parents – would ‘harness’ Moor to chairs which they ‘mounted’, and that he had to pull … Personally
– perhaps because I had no sisters of my own age – I preferred Moor as a riding-horse. Seated on his shoulder, holding tight to his great mane of hair, then black with but a hint of grey, I have had magnificent rides round our little garden, and over the fields – now built over – that surrounded our house.

On Sundays the Marxes and any visiting friends would stroll over to nearby Hampstead Heath for a picnic, often their only substantial meal of the week. In spite of her tiny budget Lenchen usually managed to conjure up a large joint of veal, supplemented by bread, cheese, shrimps and periwinkles bought from vendors on the heath and flagons of beer from the local pub, Jack Straw’s Castle. After lunch the children played hide-and-seek among the gorse bushes while the adults snoozed or read the Sunday papers – but as so often happens on family outings, the reluctant papa would soon be dragged from his postprandial torpor by squealing youngsters. ‘Let’s see who can bring the most down!’ the daughters yelled one day, pointing at a chestnut tree laden with ripe nuts, and for the next hour or two Marx maintained a ceaseless bombardment until the tree was entirely bare. He was unable to move his right arm for a week afterwards.

Sometimes they ventured further afield to the green meadows and hills beyond Highgate, seeking out wild forget-me-nots and hyacinths while blithely ignoring the ‘No Trespassing’ signs. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who went on several of these expeditions, was amazed to see how many spring flowers grew in the dank English climate. ‘We looked down from our fragrant Asphodel meadows proudly upon the world,’ he wrote, ‘the mighty boundless city of the world which lay before us in its vastness, shrouded in the ugly mystery of the fog.’ On the walk home, Marx led his daughters in renditions of German folk-songs and Negro spirituals, or recited long passages from Shakespeare and Dante. ‘We really thought that we were living in a magic castle,’ Jenny Marx sighed. But the magic depended on financial legerdemain. It was
at this time, fittingly enough, that Marx began amusing little Eleanor with his tales of Hans Röckle, the hard-up magician ‘who could never meet his obligations either to the devil or the butcher, and was therefore – much against the grain – constantly obliged to sell his toys to the devil’. Jenny’s inheritance had all gone on paying off debts and setting up house. One by one, the new pieces of furniture and the precious old linen found their way back to the pop-shop.