Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  Eventually, from his daily perch at seat 07 in the British Museum Reading Room, Marx got down to writing his opus – and soon started pestering Engels with requests for technical data as well as some philosophical ballast. While the British Museum yielded much, it was no substitute for the commercial realities of the Manchester cotton trade when it came to understanding the functioning of capitalism. ‘I have now reached a point in my work on economics where I need some practical advice from you, since I cannot find anything relevant in the theoretical writings,’ Marx wrote in January 1858. ‘It concerns the circulation of capital – its various forms in the various businesses; its effects on profit and prices. If you could give me some information on this, then it will be very welcome…’ There then followed a series of questions on machinery costs and depreciation rates, the allocation of capital within the firm and calculation of turnover in the company bookkeeping. ‘The theoretical laws for this are very simple and self-evident. But it is good to have an idea of how it works in practice.’62 Over the next five years, the requests for real-life information kept coming as Engels's grafting at Ermen & Engels helped to construct the empirical foundations of Das Kapital. ‘Could you inform me of all the different types of workers employed, e.g., at your mill and in what proportion to each other?’, Marx enquired in 1862. ‘For in my book I need an example showing that, in mechanical workshops, the division of labour, as forming the basis of manufacture and as described by A[dam] Smith, does not exist… All that is needed is an example of some kind.’63 ‘Since practice is better than all theory, I would ask you to describe to me very precisely (with examples) how you run your business,’ began another round of queries.64

  Engels's contribution went beyond the statistical. ‘Let me say a word or two about what will, in the text, be a lengthy and complex affair, so that you may LET ME HAVE YOUR OPINION on it,’ Marx began his letter of 2 August 1862, which then launched into a detailed explanation of the difference between constant capital (machinery) and variable capital (living labour) and his early idea of the theory of surplus value, which would become the bedrock of his explanation, in Das Kapital, of how the capitalist made a profit by exploiting the labour of the worker (see below, p. 238). Engels responded to his friend's philosophical queries in kind and it was he who, in a crucial letter of 26 June 1867, first pointed out one of the more puzzling economic lacunae in Marx's system – notably, that his friend's theory failed to take account of the surplus value produced by machinery, nor did it answer the criticism of those who would simply equate the value of labour with the labour-wage paid by the employer: ‘if the capitalist only pays the worker the price of six hours for his twelve hours’ labour, no surplus-value can be produced, since in that case each hour of the factory worker's labour counts only = ½ an hour's labour, = the amount which has been paid for, and only that value can be embodied in the value of the labour product’. Atrociously superficial though this argument may be, Engels averred, ‘I do, nevertheless, find it surprising that you have not already taken it into account, for you will most certainly be immediately confronted with this objection, and it is better to anticipate it.’65 Marx's rather unsatisfying answer was that such criticisms could not properly be treated ‘prior to the 3rd book… if I wished to refute all such objections in advance, I should spoil the whole dialectical method of exposition’.66 Despite all the reams of correspondence concerning Das Kapital, pursuing such complex themes on paper could sometimes prove just too trying. ‘Can't you come down for a few days?’ Marx asked on 20 August 1862. ‘In my critique I have demolished so much of the old stuff that there are a number of points I should like to consult you about before I proceed. Discussing these matters in writing is tedious both for you and for me.’ And even the sprightly Engels could find Marx's requests for enlightenment a little arduous after a day in the office. ‘What with the cotton bother, the theory of rent has really proved too abstract for me,’ he replied wearily in September 1862. ‘I shall have to consider the thing when I eventually get a little more peace and quiet.’67

  Amidst this treasury of intellectual, professional and personal material, there is an uncomfortable silence in the correspondence which points to Engels's most generous sacrifice. ‘In the early summer of 1851 there occurred an event which I shall not touch upon further, although it brought about a great increase in our private and public sorrows,’ was how Jenny Marx alluded to the delicate history of Henry Frederick Demuth.68 His mother, 28-year-old Helene ‘Lenchen’ Demuth (or ‘Nim’), had long been a part of the Marx family household – passed down the von Westphalen line – as live-in housekeeper. Even in their most cramped Soho lodgings, Nim always found her place. Indeed, it was that very intimacy which sparked the crisis: when Jenny Marx travelled to the continent in 1850 on a family fund-raising mission, Marx took advantage of the maid. And, on 23 June 1851, their progeny, Freddy Demuth, duly entered the world to no great acclaim.

  He was Marx's son, the birth certificate remained blank, but it was Engels who unofficially acknowledged the paternity. For the good of Marx's marriage and the broader political cause (émigré groups enjoyed nothing more than discrediting enemies via sexual scandal), Engels allowed Marx's son to take his Christian name and, in the process, sully his own good name. Marx behaved abominably when it came to Freddy's upbringing: he was packed off to unsympathetic foster-parents in east London, never received a proper education or enjoyed the kind of intellectual riches – the Shakespeare dramas, boisterous picnics on Hampstead Heath, low socialist banter – Marx bestowed on his half-sisters. He spent his professional life as a skilled fitter and turner and member of the Associated Society of Engineers, and his political life as a member of the Hackney Labour Party. When Engels later moved to London and, after Marx's death, hired Nim as his own housekeeper, Freddy and his son Harry used the tradesman's entrance to visit, the latter recalled, ‘a motherly sort of person’ in ‘a basement’. Engels, however, was always careful to absent himself on such occasions.

  Only Eleanor (or ‘Tussy’, as she was now known within the family) seemed moved by Freddy's plight. ‘It may be that I am very “sentimental” – but I can't help feeling that Freddy has had great injustice all through his life,’ she wrote in 1892. Nor could she account for the hostile and distant attitude of Engels towards his son when he was, in all other respects, so generous and warm-hearted to everyone else in their extended familial circle. To Tussy's horror, on Engels's death-bed all was revealed. In an 1898 letter located in the Amsterdam archives of the International Institute of Social History – the veracity and origins of which are much disputed amongst Marx-Engels scholars – Engels's final housekeeper and companion, Louise Freyberger, describes how on the eve of his death Engels confirmed to Tussy the real identity of Freddy's biological father. ‘General [Engels] gave us… permission to make use of the information only if he should be accused of treating Freddy shabbily. He said he would not want his name slandered, especially as it could no longer do anyone any good.’ In the succeeding years Tussy tried desperately to repair the damage by befriending Freddy, and through the tormented, final months of her relationship with Edward Aveling, Freddy Demuth proved her most trusted and sympathetic correspondent. However, the damage to Engels's reputation – as a shoddy father – was done. Although he was characteristically unperturbed by the innuendoes, it was a telling indication of the personal sacrifices Engels was willing to endure to protect his friend and expedite the slow march of socialism.69

  Such white lies were just another layer of mist to the miasma of subterfuge which encircled his middle decades. For Engels led little short of a double life: by day the respectable Dr Jekyll, clerk in the cotton trade; by night Mr Hyde, the revolutionary socialist. Bestriding the two worlds meant an exhaustive existence of psychological division and obfuscation which he was ultimately unable to sustain as the rebellious fun of being ‘Oswald’ – anonymously pulling the tail of the bourgeoisie from inside the parapet – started to pale.

  The
anchor of his private life, his real life, was his long-time lover, Mary Burns, and her sister, Lizzy. However, to retain his place within Manchester society and avoid the disapproval of his parents, Engels felt compelled to hide his relationship with the earthy Irish sisters from business colleagues and family alike. Another letter from his troublesome brother-in-law Adolf von Griesheim, complaining about the connection and its damaging effects on the Engelses' social standing suggests such secrecy was not wholly successful.70 On his arrival in Manchester, he boarded with an ‘old witch of a landlady’, Mrs Isabella Tatham, at 70 Great Ducie Street in the Strangeways district close to where the hulking Victorian jail now stands along the Bury New Road. Joining him in this insalubrious establishment were a clogger, a waste dealer and a silversmith-cum-salesman. After a short-term hire of some more expensive lodgings to convince his visiting father he was spending his allowance wisely (rather than funnelling it to Marx), in March 1853 Engels moved in with the Burnses. Thanks to Roy Whitfield's meticulous reconstruction of Engels's Manchester years, we know that the poor rate books for the districts of Chorlton on Medlock and Moss Side show a certain Frederick Mann Burns (a very Engels-style pun) as the occupant of 17 Burlington Street and then 27 Cecil Street in the early 1850s.71 But in April 1854 disaster struck. ‘The philistines have got to know that I'm living with Mary,’ a furious Engels reported to Marx as he was driven back into ‘private lodgings again’.72

  From 1854 onwards, after the discovery of his proletarian ménage, the cash-strapped Engels was forced to run two separate public and private, official and unofficial premises: he took an official residence at 5 Walmer Street in Rusholme – for entertaining business associates, correspondence and reasons of bourgeois propriety – whilst hiding the Burns sisters at Cecil Street. In 1858 he moved his official base to Thorncliffe Grove (demolished in 1971, after Manchester's Medical Officer of Health designated this elegant Victorian house ‘unfit’ for habitation and the university swallowed it up), which is where the 1861 census has him down as a ‘short-sighted Prussian merchant’.73 Meanwhile, he rehoused the sisters in two smaller, jerry-built terraces in the expanding working-class suburbs of Hulme and Ardwick. The rate book has the occupants of these addresses – 7 Rial Street and 252 Hyde Road – living under the assumed names of Frederick and Mary Boardman, together with a certain ‘Elizabeth Byrne’. Deftly, Engels had managed to locate his lover and her sister just half a mile from his official residence.

  These were only the first of numerous properties Engels would surreptitiously take for the Burnses over the next fifteen years. ‘I'm living with Mary nearly all the time now so as to spend as little money as possible,’ he explained to Marx in 1862. ‘I can't dispense with my lodgings, otherwise I should move in with her altogether.’ But it wasn't easy. ‘You are right, I am very broke,’ Engels responded later that year to another financial demand from Marx. ‘In the hope that, by leading a domesticated life in Hyde Road, I shall be able to make good the deficiency, I enclose herewith a £5 note…’74 In 1864 the caravan moved on again after Engels fell out with his Thorncliffe Grove housemaid, and he relocated his public residence to a flat in Dover Street, in the affluent Oxford Road neighbourhood, and his demi-monde to nearby Mornington Street. Keeping the different addresses going, making sure no one transgressed the separate silos of his life, managing the finances of leases and rates were all unwelcome additions to Engels's workload and he complained endlessly about the expense and annoyance. Yet one also gets the sense that the aggressively independent Engels enjoyed the freedom of manoeuvre these two, distinct worlds provided.

  It was in his private, unofficial surroundings that the revolutionary Mr Hyde (of Hyde Road) could reveal himself. Here Engels gathered together a regular Manchester coterie of socialist believers and intellectual sparring-partners to drink beer, adumbrate over the latest philosophical advances and lament the bourgeois compromise they saw all around them. Wilhelm Wolff (‘Lupus’), the Brussels communist turned tutor to the children of middle-class Manchester, was a close friend. ‘For several years Wolff was the only comrade I had in Manchester with the same views as myself,’ Engels later recalled; ‘no wonder that we met almost daily and that I then again had more than ample opportunity of admiring his almost instinctively correct assessment of current events.’75 George Weerth, back clerking in ‘beastly’ Bradford, was again part of the circle during the early 1850s before commerce took him abroad and death took him in Havana. Another close favourite was Darmstadt-born Carl Schorlemmer, who lectured in organic chemistry at Owens College, was a Fellow of the Royal Society and an expert on paraffin hydrocarbons – which, much to Engels's amusement, frequently resulted in explosive burnings to his ‘bruised and battered face’.76 He was also a committed socialist who was trusted enough by Marx and Engels to correct proofs of Das Kapital. On a Saturday night he could be found with Engels propping up the bar of the Thatched House Tavern in Newmarket Place, round the corner from the Royal Exchange.77 Engels's other great friend and Dover Street flatmate was Samuel Moore, whom he became acquainted with through his uncle, Isaac Hall, a leading figure in the Lancashire and Cheshire Volunteers. Moore was a failed cotton trader, then barrister and Marxist (honoured with the task of translating Das Kapital into English) before incongruously concluding his professional life in Asaba as chief justice of the territories of the Royal Niger Company. Alongside these fixed friends, there was a smattering of German émigrés, unemployed communists, distant cousins and, of course, the visits from Marx himself. Occasionally, these boozy evenings could get out of hand, as when Engels, ‘at a drunken gathering… was insulted by an Englishman I didn't know; I hit out at him with the umbrella I was carrying and the ferrule got him in the eye’. Unfortunately for Engels, Mr Daniells then took him to court on charges of assault, demanding £55 in compensation and costs. Engels duly stumped up the sum in the desperate hope of avoiding ‘a public scandal and a ROW with my old man’.78

  Engels's official existence was a world away from such bar-room brawls. The Cheshire Hounds, one of the grandest meets in Victorian Britain, ‘composed of the first gentlemen in that aristocratic county’, dated from 1763 when the Hon. John Smith-Barry brought together a pack from the Belvoir and Milton bloodlines. And they met, according to The Field, in some of England's most hunt-friendly settings. ‘Cheshire abounds with parks, and mansions, and the aristocracy have from time immemorial been most devoted patrons of fox-hunting; indeed there is no country in England where that feeling can prevail more universally among the higher classes.’79 From Tatton Hall, south of Manchester, to Crewe Hall, to the east of Crewe; from Norton Priory, alongside the river Mersey, to Alderley Park, just outside Macclesfield, the Cheshire Hounds criss-crossed the county two to three times a week during the November to April season. But it was not a cheap hobby: a subscription fee to the Cheshire Hunt Covert Fund, as it was known, was £10 p.a., while stabling fees could nudge £70 p.a. (taking annual costs into the region of £8,000 in today's money). Then there was the price of a good hunter. ‘I saw Murray the horse-dealer on Saturday and asked him if he had anything… carrying 14 stone with hounds at about £70. He seemed to think he had…’, began a note to Engels from one James Wood Lomax, who seems to have been his horse-agent.80 Thankfully, when it came to funding respectable activities like hunting, he could always draw on the resources of his father. ‘For my Christmas present my old man gave me the money to buy a horse and as there was a good one going, I bought it last week,’ Engels wrote crassly to Marx in 1857. ‘But I'm exceedingly vexed that I should be keeping a horse while you and your family are down on your luck in London.’81

  It is unclear who first introduced Engels to the Cheshire Hounds, but he became a regular fixture in the field alongside some of England's most elevated nobility. For he had joined the hunt during the period known as ‘The Cheshire Difficulty’ which followed the affair of the Master of Foxhounds, Captain Mainwaring, with a married lady. The leading Cheshire landowners then boycotted the hunt
in disgust until 1858, when Hugh Lupus, otherwise known as Earl Grosvenor (and future first Duke of Westminster), took over as MFH with his aristocratic chums, the Earls Cholmondeley and Crewe. This was the very cream of the English nobility with whom Engels – the scourge of Prussia's Junker class – found himself riding out. As Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, remembered it: ‘He was an excellent rider and had his own hunter for the fox chase; when the neighbouring gentry and aristocracy sent out invitations to all riders in the district according to the ancient feudal custom he never failed to attend.’82 In 2004, when the Labour government introduced legislation to ban fox-hunting as an out-of-date toffs’ sport, Engels's membership of the Cheshire Hunt was cited in its defence. ‘The idea of joining the class war with fox hunting is pathetic as well as nasty, as was very well demonstrated by no less an authority on both subjects than Friedrich Engels,’ Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar told the House of Lords during a debate on the Hunting Bill. ‘I think that shows that, at least in some ways, old communism was much more sensible than new Labour.’83 And Engels was not the only Victorian left-winger with a penchant for the saddle: Michael Sadler, leader of the Factory Reform movement; Joseph Arch, the farmworkers’ leader; and Robert Applegarth, the General Secretary of the Carpenters and Joiners, all rode to hounds.*

  Engels tried to justify his hobby on revolutionary grounds as ‘the best school of all’ for warfare. Indeed, he thought one of the few saving graces of the British cavalry was its background in chasing old Charlie – ‘being, most of them, passionate huntsmen, they possess that instinctive and rapid appreciation of advantage of ground, which the practice of hunting is sure to impart’, he wrote in a review of British military strategy.84 But however he dressed it up, what clearly aroused Engels was the thrill of the chase: ‘That sort of thing always keeps me in a state of devilish excitement for several days; it's the greatest physical pleasure I know.’85 And he was never afraid to front the field. ‘He was always among the leaders in clearing ditches, hedges and other obstacles,’ according to Larfargue.86 ‘Let me tell you that yesterday I took my horse over a hedge and bank measuring 5 feet and some inches, the highest jump I've ever done, he boasted to a sedentary Marx festering in the British Museum. Even with a nasty bout of piles, Engels would happily put himself through a 28-mile hack in pursuit of his quarry. Indeed, over the years, he obviously developed something of a bloodlust. ‘Yesterday I let myself be talked into attending a coursing meeting at which hares are hunted with greyhounds, and spent seven hours in the saddle. All in all, it did me a power of good though it kept me from my work…’87