Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  But it wasn't just Willich and Schapper. Marx and Engels couldn't get on with the German community leaders Gottfried Kinkel and their supposed old friend from Berlin days Arnold Ruge either. Nor did they care for Struve and Heinzen, for the exiled Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, the French socialist Louis Blanc, their one-time hero Lajos Kossuth, or even their Chartist ally Julian Harney. Obdurate to a T, Engels embraced the prospect of complete political isolation. ‘At long last we again have the opportunity – the first time in ages – to show that we need neither popularity, nor the SUPPORT of any party in any country.’ Instead, their role as communist ideologues was to chart the march of history and highlight the approaching contradictions of capitalism in order to ready the proletariat for their revolutionary duty. Deep down, this political loneliness seemed to appeal to Engels's instinctive, almost Puritan, ardour for sacrifice and martyrdom. ‘How can people like us, who shun official appointments like the plague, fit into a “party”?’ he asked Marx.10

  What was less appealing was the poverty that accompanied the Soho wilderness. Jenny Marx had followed her husband across the Channel in September 1849 with her three small children and a fourth on the way – Heinrich Guido (nicknamed ‘Fawksey’), who earned his incendiary soubriquet by being born on 5 November 1849. But with only irregular funds from freelance journalism, niggardly publishing contracts and a doomed attempt to relaunch the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx was in no position to support his family. Jenny Marx later described this period as one of ‘great hardship, continual acute privations, and real misery’.11 Guido's infancy of poverty and fatigue – crammed together with undernourished brothers and sisters in a series of grotty flats – cut his life horribly short. ‘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,’ Jenny wrote in a desperate, fund-raising letter to their communist friend Joseph Weydemeyer.12 For a lady of Jenny von Westphalen's lineage, there was also the indignity of an existence spent harried across London by bakers, butchers, milkmen and bailiffs as Marx dodged bills and blagged new lodgings. It was a debilitating, humiliating, sickening time and young Guido suffered the effects. ‘Just a line or two to let you know that our little gunpowder-plotter, Fawksey, died at ten o'clock this morning,’ Marx wrote to Engels in November 1850. ‘You can imagine what it is like here… If you happen to feel so inclined, drop a few lines to my wife. She is quite distracted.’13 Jenny and Karl Marx were to lose two other children, Franziska and Edgar (‘Colonel Musch’), to exactly the same noxious cocktail of poverty, damp and disease.

  During the time he lodged at Macclesfield Street, down the road from Marx's flat on Dean Street in Soho, Engels's finances were in no better shape as he raised money for the refugee community and pursued various publishing contracts. While he lacked Marx's brood of dependants, he faced a similar absence of income since his usually indulgent parents had finally cut off the financial tap after one arrest warrant too many. ‘It might be convenient to send you money to live on,’ Elise wrote after another request, ‘… but I find quite extraordinary your demand that I should give financial support to a son who is attempting to spread ideas and principles which I regard as sinful.’14 Facing diminishing opportunities in Soho and increasingly anxious about Marx's descent into the belittling poverty of émigré life, Engels readied himself for the inevitable: the only way he could feed himself and help Marx and their cause was to bend the knee, reconcile himself with his family and return to commerce. His sister Marie deftly managed the family diplomacy. ‘The thought has come to us that you may perhaps wish to enter business seriously for the time being, in order to ensure yourself an income; you might drop it as soon as your party has a reasonable chance of success and resume your work for the party,’ she wrote to Engels in an elegantly crafted letter sent with the blessing of her parents.15 It might not be pleasant, his father added, but it would be useful for the family business. With few other options available, Engels agreed to the deal with the proviso of a short-term, rolling contract to allow him to return to the barricades when the workers' revolution called. ‘He [Engels's father] will need me here for three years at least, and I have entered into no long-term obligations, not even for three years, nor was I asked for any, either with regard to my writing, or to my staying here in case of a revolution. This would appear to be far from his mind, so secure do these people now feel!’16 As well they might: Engels ended up working nineteen years for the family firm.

  The failure of the 48 revolutions had been mourned nowhere more keenly than in Manchester. The farrago of Kennington Common – where the Chartist dream of marching on Parliament to press home the Six Points collapsed under public inertia, government repression and rain – signalled a lengthy collapse of English working-class radicalism. The 150,000 demonstrators for democracy had been met by 85,000 special constables, 7,000 troops, 5,000 police, 1,231 Chelsea pensioners and even the Duke of Wellington. It was a drizzly, damp squib of an affair with the Chartists reduced to scurrying across the Thames in cabs to present their petition to Parliament. Whilst Europe's capitals had gone up in flames, the class-conscious English proletariat had spectacularly failed to rise. Across the mills and moors of Lancashire, where the Chartist call for social and political reform had resounded most loudly, the disappointment was evident. But it was all in tune with a changing city.

  The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 had marked the triumph of ‘the Manchester School’: England's landowning, aristocratic governance was giving way to the middle-class, free-trading, Nonconformist vision of John Bright and the ‘Cottonocracy’. With a Tory Party split and the Chartists in disarray, liberalism had seen off both conservatism and radicalism. Manchester, the city that had once portended a terrifying future of class warfare, industrial unrest and proletarian revolution, settled into its new role as the prosperous embodiment of the mid-Victorian boom. It became the age not of lockouts, strikes and torch-lit rallies, but of baths and wash-houses, libraries and parks, Mechanics' Institutes and Friendly Societies. The revolutionary moment had eased and the ‘shock city’ of the Industrial Revolution now looked set to be transformed into a middle-class imperium.

  As Engels retraced his steps, The Condition of the Working Class would have already felt dated. In place of Little Ireland, all around him sprung new signs of mercantile hubris: well-endowed Dissenting chapels; multi-storey warehouses modelled on Renaissance palazzi; and, most symbolically of all, the foundations of the Free Trade Hall, callously erected on the site of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, to commemorate the Corn Law victory. Modelled on the Gran Guardia Vecchia in Verona, the hall was, in A. J. P. Taylor's phrase, ‘dedicated, like the United States of America, to a proposition – one as noble and beneficent as any ever made… The men of Manchester had brought down the nobility and gentry of England in a bloodless, but decisive, Crecy. The Free Trade Hall was the symbol of their triumph.’17 So neutered was radical Manchester that in October 1851 the city became fit for a queen. Victoria and Albert's successful civic progression, across Victoria Bridge and under a canopy of Italianate arches, was transformed into a pageant of bourgeois pride and provincial self-regard, culminating in a ceremony bestowing various honours on the council. The meaning of Manchester – commerce and industry, religious toleration, civil society, political self-government – was now granted royal approbation. The city had shown itself, according to the Manchester Guardian, as a ‘community based upon the orderly, sober and peaceful industry of the middle classes' and had proved to its detractors that ‘social importance and political power have passed into the hands of those classes upon whose shoulders the burden of maintaining the national edifice has shifted’.18

  For Engels, this bourgeois self-satisfaction was an awful welcoming
party. Even his old friend and mentor, the Owenite lecturer John Watts, had thrown his lot in with the enveloping smug liberalism. ‘Recently I went to see John Watts; the fellow seems skilled in sharp practice and now has a much larger shop in Deansgate,’ Engels wrote to Marx. ‘He has become a consummate radical mediocrity… From a few instances he gave me, it transpired that he knows very well how to boost his tailoring business by parading his bourgeois liberalism.’19 Most shamefully of all, Watts was selling up that great agora of radical intent, the Owenite Hall of Science, to provide space for a new library and reading room. ‘The free traders here are exploiting the prosperity or semi-prosperity to buy the proletariat, with John Watts for broker.’20

  The Chartist Thomas Cooper was similarly disturbed by the bourgeois tendencies of his former comrades. ‘In our old Chartist time, it is true, Lancashire working men were in rags by thousands; and many of them often lacked food. But their intelligence was demonstrated wherever you went,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘You could see them in groups discussing the great doctrine of political justice… Now, you will see no such groups in Lancashire. But you will hear well dressed working men talking, as they walk with their hands in their pockets, of “Co-ops” and their shares in them, or in building societies.’21 Miserably, Engels watched this embourgeoisification take place before his very eyes. ‘The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat,’ he grumbled.22 In the early 1850s Engels put some faith in the leadership of the socialist Ernest Jones and his attempts to resuscitate the Chartist cadaver. He was even minded ‘to start up a small club with these fellows, or organise regular meetings to discuss the Manifesto with them’.23 But after Jones's failure to subscribe to the Marx-Engels canon in its entirety and after one too many compromises with middle-class reformers, Engels disowned him. ‘The English proletariat's revolutionary energy has completely evaporated,’ he concluded in 1863.24

  Driving the mid-Victorian boom and sapping of proletariat ambition was a resurgent cotton industry. Profits were up thanks to new markets in America, Australia and China, while improvements in technology ensured sustained productivity gains. The economic upswing was particularly evident in Lancashire, where wage-rates and employment rose as the county's 2,000 mills kept their 300,000 power looms beating day and night. In 1860, at the zenith of its power, the cotton industry accounted for almost 40 per cent of the total value of British exports. Ermen & Engels took a profitable chunk of that trade thanks to the invention of the sewing machine and increased demand for just their type of sewing thread. The firm's fortunes improved again when Gottfried Ermen patented an invention for the polishing of cotton thread which allowed their product to be marketed under the exclusive banner of ‘Diamond Thread’. With surging orders, the company moved offices to 7 Southgate (into a warehouse overlooking the courtyard of the Golden Lion public house) and purchased the Bencliffe Mill in Little Bolton, Eccles to add to their Victoria Mill at Salford.

  However, behind the healthy balance sheet, there was the usual corporate infighting. Ermen & Engels was owned by four partners – Peter, Gottfried and Anthony Ermen together with Friedrich Engels senior. The Manchester branch of this Anglo-German conglomerate was run exclusively by Peter and Gottfried Ermen, while Engels senior spent his time at the Engelskirchen factory in the Rhineland. Besides, running Ermen & Engels, Peter and Gottfried operated a separate printing mill and bleachworks business on the side. This company, Ermen Brothers, was technically independent of Ermen & Engels but was run from the same office and just happened to be a leading supplier of products to Ermen & Engels. Engels senior was convinced he was being ripped off by this cosy arrangement and wanted his son – employed simply as a corresponding clerk and general assistant – to unpick the company finances and expose any sharp practice.

  Understandably, the Ermenses were not overly delighted at the prospect of an internal auditor on the staff and made life as difficult as possible for their new clerk. They remembered well Engels's apprenticeship in the office eight years earlier when ‘he worked for the firm as little as possible and spent most of his time at political meetings and on studying the social conditions in Manchester’.25 And now, in Engels's words, Peter Ermen was ‘going round in circles like a fox that has left its brush in a trap, and [is] trying to make things too hot for me here – the stupid devil imagines he could annoy me!’ Yet the Ermenses had their own problems as Peter was simultaneously trying to prevent his impatient brother Gottfried taking over the management of the firm. ‘See that you entrench yourself firmly between the two warring brothers,’ was Jenny Marx's advice on office politics for Engels (after he had posted her a large parcel of cotton thread), ‘their tussle is bound to place you in a position of indispensability vis-à-vis your respected Papa, and in my mind's eye I already see you as Friedrich Engels Junior and partner of the Senior.’26

  What no one had expected was just how industrious and effective Engels would prove at his job. He went through the books, tried to untangle Ermen & Engels from Ermen Brothers and generally looked after the Engels family concern with exemplary diligence. ‘My old man is enchanted with my business letters and he regards me remaining here as a great sacrifice on my part,’ the unlikely capitalist informed Marx.27 Indeed, thanks to this blossoming professional relationship, father and son were well on the way to a rapprochement. In June 1851 they met again in Manchester for the first time since the apocryphal Barmen bridge incident. ‘I think it is probably better that you should not be together all the time, for you can't always be talking business, and it is better to avoid politics, on which you have such different views,’ was his nervous mother's advice prior to the reunion.28 She was right. The trip was generally deemed a success, but Engels thought that ‘had my old man stayed here a few days longer, however, we'd have been at each other's throats… on the last day of his visit, for example, he sought to take advantage of the presence of one of the Ermens… to indulge himself at my expense by intoning a dithyramb in praise of Prussia's institutions. A word or two and a furious look were, of course, enough to bring him back to heel…’29

  Despite renewed family relations, the fun of goading the Ermen brothers, and even the initial intellectual challenge of bookkeeping, there was no avoiding the reality that Engels had returned to the beastly business of huckstering. His letters of the time are filled with references to ‘accursed commerce’ and ‘filthy commerce’ as office life progressively impinged on his journalism, scholarship and socialism. It was a dull, tedious existence. ‘I drink rum and water, swot and spend my time 'twixt twist and tedium,’ he wrote to his friend Ernst Dronke in 1851. To Marx he was even franker, ‘I am bored to death here.’30 Politically, the job also had its costs since Engels's position, as a bourgeois mill owner, was obviously in danger of compromising his and Marx's standing within the backbiting communist world. ‘You wait and see, the louts will be saying, what's that Engels after, how can he speak in our name and tell us what to do, the fellow's up there in Manchester exploiting the workers, etc. To be sure, I don't give a damn about it now, but it's bound to come…’, he confided to Marx.31 And it was certainly a charge levelled at him from the youthful Barmen industrialist and family friend Friedrich von Eynern, who visited Engels in 1860, taking him on a walking tour of Wales (during which Engels sang verses of Heine's Die Heimkehr by the Menai Straits in Bangor) and peppering him with questions. ‘Encouraged by his debating ways,’ Eynern recalled,

  I had not failed to point out to him that his position as a manufacturer, as co-owner of one of the period's worst ‘big capitalist businesses’, must put him at sharp odds with his theories, if he didn't practically utilise his considerable means to help the ‘disowned’ entrusted to his direct care. However, since according to his teachings the goals of universal economic freedom could only be achieved through the sy
stematic cooperation of the international labour force, he dismissed such trifling help as pointless and disruptive to all circles of the movement. He showed no inclination to allow any limits to be placed on the basic freedom of his existence: to use his private earnings by himself, as he saw fit.32

  The criticisms were not without foundation since when it came to the ‘direct care’ of his employees, Engels could be something of a bully. ‘Gottfried has taken on three fellows for me who are absolutely hopeless… I shall have to sack one or two of them,’ he wrote to Marx in 1865 in a spirited defence of flexible labour laws. A month later the dismissal followed after an administrative error. ‘That was the last straw as far as his slovenliness was concerned, and he was sacked.’33 To be fair, in contrast to the de-classed clerks, the more obviously working-class mill-hands of Ermen & Engels were said to enjoy better working conditions than the average. A report from the 1871 Annual Meeting of the Bencliffe Sick and Burial Society – where the second Ermen & Engels mill was located – referred to ‘the stream of clean and well-dressed young women passing through the village’ and commented that ‘in few mills were the hands so profitably and regularly employed’.34

  Engels's own employment was equally profitable. For all the banality and self-loathing the job entailed, it provided a decent salary beginning at £100 p.a. combined with an ‘expenses and entertainment allowance’ of £200 p.a. and then, from the mid-1850s, a 5 per cent profit share growing to 7.5 per cent by the end of the decade. In 1856 Engels's cut of the company profits stood at £408, rising to a sizeable £978 by 1860, thereby taking his annual wage over £1,000, which is not far off £100,000 in today's money. To provide some kind of context, the social commentator Dudley Baxter analysed the 1861 census to produce a class analysis of mid-Victorian England relative to income. To scrape into the middle class was to earn over the taxable threshold of £100, with parsons, army officers, doctors, civil servants and barristers usually operating in the £250–£350 salary range.35 Baxter thought that to join the comfortable upper-middle classes one had to take home an annual salary of £1,000–£5,000. In contrast to Engels's riches, another great Victorian writer, poor old Anthony Trollope, was having to get by on £140 a year at his day job as a post office clerk.