In this moment of inspiration Margaret Fay solved the mystery that had eluded Isaiah Berlin and innumerable other professors for half a century. The Students’ Darwin was the second volume in a series, ‘The International Library of Science and Freethought’, edited by the crusading atheists Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. Hence Darwin’s reference to ‘the Part or Volume’ of a more general publication ‘about which I know nothing’, and his reluctance to be associated with ‘arguments against christianity and theism’. Fay’s hunch was confirmed by the discovery among Darwin’s papers at Cambridge University Library of a letter from Edward Aveling, dated 12 October 1880, attached to a few sample chapters from The Students’ Darwin. After requesting ‘the illustrious support of your consent’ Aveling added that ‘I purpose, again subject to your approval, to honour my work and myself by dedicating the former to you’.
The only remaining question – of how a letter to Aveling had ended up in the Marx archive – was easily answered. In 1895 Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling began sorting through her father’s letters and manuscripts, which had come into their possession following the death of Engels. Two years later Aveling wrote an article comparing his two heroes, in which he quoted the 1873 letter and mentioned that he too had corresponded with Darwin. Having finished the piece he filed all his research materials in one folder, little guessing that he was thus laying a false scent which would be pursued over hill and dale for most of the next century. As recently as October 1998, the British historian Paul Johnson wrote that ‘unlike Marx, Darwin was a genuine scientist who, on a famous occasion, politely but firmly refused Marx’s invitation to strike a Faustian bargain’.
In fact, the only known contact between these two Victorian sages was the indisputably genuine letter of acknowledgement from 1873, which Marx showed proudly to his friends and family as proof that Darwin had saluted Capital as a ‘great work’. But the book in question, which still sits on a shelf at Downe House in Kent, tells a sadly different story. It has none of the pencilled notes with which Darwin habitually embellished anything that he read, and only the first 105 pages of the 822-page volume have been cut open. One is forced to conclude that he did no more than glance at the first chapter or two before sending his note of thanks – and never looked at the unwanted gift again.
‘Typical Englishman,’ Marx would probably have muttered had he known the truth. On first reading On the Origin of Species he had warned Engels that ‘one does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument’, and the muted, incomprehending reaction to Capital convinced him that ‘the peculiar gift of stolid blockheadedness’ was every true Briton’s birthright. Thanks to yet another of fate’s practical jokes, the master of nimble dialectics had been exiled to the most philistine country on earth – a land governed by instinct and crude empiricism, where the word ‘intellectual’ was a mortal insult. ‘Though Marx has lived much in England,’ the barrister Sir John Macdonnell wrote in the March 1875 Fortnightly Review, ‘he is here almost the shadow of a name. People may do him the honour of abusing him; read him they do not.’ The fact that no English edition was available in his lifetime seemed to Marx a symptom, not a cause, of the national myopia. (‘We are much obliged by your letter,’ Messrs Macmillan & Co. wrote to Engels’s friend Carl Schorlemmer, the professor of organic chemistry at Manchester University, ‘but we are not disposed to entertain the publication of a translation of Das Kapital.’) The language barrier was an insurmountable obstacle to those few Britons who actually wished to study the text. An old colleague from the International, Peter Fox, said after being presented with a copy that he felt like a man who had acquired an elephant and didn’t know what to do with it. Among Marx’s papers there are several desperate letters from a working-class Scotsman, Robert Banner, pleading for help:
Is there no hope of it being translated? There is no work to be had in English advocating the cause of the toiling masses, every book we young Socialists put our hands on is work in the interest of Capital, hence the backwardness of our cause in this country. With a work dealing with economics from the standpoint of Socialism, you would soon see a movement in this country that would put the nightcap on this bastard thing.
Those most likely to appreciate the book were the least able to understand it, while the educated élite who could read it had no desire to do so. As the English socialist Henry Hyndman complained, ‘Accustomed as we are nowadays, especially in England, to fence always with big soft buttons on the point of our rapiers, Marx’s terrible onslaughts with naked steel upon his adversaries appeared so improper that it was impossible for our gentlemanly sham-fighters and mental gymnasium men to believe that this unsparing controversialist and furious assailant of capital and capitalists was really the deepest thinker of modern times.’
Hyndman himself was an exception to this rule – as to every other rule. A product of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, a sometime batsman for Sussex County Cricket Club, he was said to have adopted socialism ‘out of spite against the world because he was not included in the Cambridge eleven’. (There is more than a trace of him in P. G. Wodehouse’s character Psmith, who converted to Marxism when he was expelled from Eton and thus deprived of the honour of playing cricket against Harrow at Lord’s; thereafter he addressed everyone as ‘Comrade’.) Hyndman never shed the trappings of his class, often appearing before left-wing audiences in a frock-coat and silk top hat. His politics, too, were de haut en bas: the proletariat could not be freed by the workers themselves but only by ‘those who are born into a different position and are trained to use their faculties in early life’. And yet he convinced himself (if no one else) that he was the reddest and hottest radical in town. ‘I could not carry on,’ he said, ‘unless I expected the revolution at ten o’clock next Monday morning.’ Early in 1880, after reading a French translation of Capital, he bombarded the author with so many extravagant tributes that Marx eventually agreed to see him.
‘Our method of talking was peculiar,’ Hyndman wrote of their first meeting at 41 Maitland Park Road. ‘Marx had a habit when at all interested in the discussion of walking actively up and down the room, as if he were pacing the deck of a schooner for exercise. I had acquired, on my long voyages, the same tendency to pacing to and fro when my mind was much occupied. Consequently, master and student could have been seen walking up and down on opposite sides of the table for two or three hours in succession, engaged in discussing the affairs of the past and present.’ Although Hyndman claimed that he was ‘eager to learn’, according to Marx it was the Old Etonian who did most of the talking.
Having gained his entrée, and knowing that Marx’s doctor forbade him to work in the evenings, Hyndman acquired the habit of turning up at Maitland Park Road uninvited after dinner. Everyone in the household found this intensely tiresome – especially on the nights when a group of Eleanor’s friends, the Dogberry Club, would gather in the drawing-room to recite a Shakespeare play. Marx adored these performances and always insisted on playing games of charades and dumb crambo afterwards (‘laughing when anything struck him as particularly comic,’ one Dogberry-ite recalled, ‘until the tears ran down his cheeks’); but Hyndman had no compunction about barging in and treating the assembled company to his views on Mr Gladstone. As Marx wrote to Jennychen after one such occasion:
We were invaded by Hyndman and his wife, both of whom have too much staying-power. I quite like the wife on account of her brusque, unconventional and determined manner of thinking and speaking, but it’s amusing to see how admiringly she hangs on the lips of her complacent chatterbox of a husband! Mama grew so weary (it was close on half past ten at night) that she withdrew.
The inevitable rupture occurred in June 1881 when Hyndman published his socialist manifesto England For All, in which Marx was astonished to find two chapters that had been largely plagiarised from Capital without permission. A note in the preface admitted that ‘for the ideas and much of the matter contained in Chapters II and III, I am inde
bted to the work of a great thinker and original writer, which will, I trust, shortly be made accessible to the majority of my countrymen’. Marx thought this wholly inadequate. Why could Hyndman not acknowledge Capital and its author by name? His lame explanation was that the English had ‘a horror of socialism’ and ‘a dread of being taught by a foreigner’. As Marx pointed out, however, the book was unlikely to assuage that horror by evoking ‘the demon of Socialism’ on page eighty-six, and even the densest English reader could guess from the preface that the anonymous thinker must be foreign. It was larceny, pure and simple – compounded by the insertion of idiotic mistakes in the few paragraphs that were not directly lifted from Capital. Hyndman was banished from Maitland Park Road. In his memoirs, written thirty years later, he babbled about Marx’s enthusiasm for new ideas, adding, ‘nor was he much concerned about the wholesale plagiarisms from himself of which he might have reasonably complained’. Like so many men of his class, Hyndman had all the sensitivity of an anaesthetised rhinoceros.
Happily, no sooner had Marx fallen out with one English disciple than he acquired another – though this time he took the precaution of never actually meeting the man, for fear of being stuck with another complacent chatterbox. Ernest Belfort Bax, born in 1854, came from a middle-class family of mackintosh manufacturers and devout Christians, but had been radicalised by the Paris Commune while still a schoolboy. In 1879 the highbrow monthly Modern Thought began publishing his long series of articles on the intellectual leaders of the age, including assessments of Schopenhauer, Wagner and (in 1881) Marx. Having studied Hegelian philosophy in Germany, Bax was the only English socialist of his generation to accept that dialectic was the inner dynamic of life. He described Capital as a book ‘that embodies the working out of a doctrine in economy comparable in its revolutionary character and wide-reaching importance to the Copernican system in astronomy, or the law of gravitation in Mechanics generally’.
Marx was thrilled: at last he had found a John Bull who understood him. ‘Now this is the first publication of that kind which is pervaded by a real enthusiasm for the new ideas themselves and boldly stands up against British philistinism,’ he wrote to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, an old ’48 veteran now living in the United States. Better still, Modern Thought posted placards announcing the article on the walls of London’s West End. When he read Bax’s comments to his ailing wife, she cheered up at once.
Plagiarism and boorishness were undoubtedly the main reasons for Hyndman’s expulsion from the inner circle, but he may have been right to suspect that Jenny’s lingering illness had ruffled Marx’s temper and ‘disposed him to see the worst side of things’. In the summer of 1880 Karl was so worried by Jenny’s deterioration that he took her up to Manchester for a consultation with his friend Dr Eduard Gumpert, who decided that she was suffering from a serious liver complaint. A long spell of dolce far niente was prescribed, preferably at the seaside, and so the entire tribe departed for a holiday in Ramsgate – Engels, Karl and Jenny, Laura and Paul Lafargue, Jenny and Charles Longuet, plus their children Jean, Henri and Edgar. ‘The visit is proving especially beneficial to Marx, who, I hope, will be completely refreshed,’ Engels wrote to a communist in Geneva. ‘His wife has unfortunately been ailing for some time, but is as cheerful as could be expected.’
Not cheerful at all, in other words. Dissatisfied with Dr Gumpert’s diagnosis, Marx encouraged her to seek a second opinion from a specialist in Carlsbad, Dr Ferdinand Fleckles – who, since he had never met Jenny, asked for a detailed account of her state. ‘What has made my condition worse recently perhaps,’ she told him, after listing the physical symptoms, ‘is a great anxiety which weighs heavily upon us “old ones”.’ Now that the French government had declared an amnesty for political refugees, she pointed out, there was nothing to stop her son-in-law Longuet from returning to Paris, thus effectively robbing an old lady of her daughter and grandchildren. ‘Dear, good Doctor, I should so like to live a little longer. How strange it is that the nearer the whole thing draws to an end, the more one clings to this “vale of tears”.’ Though Marx never saw this letter he understood her mortal terrors well enough: after a month of idleness in Ramsgate, he reported that Jenny’s illness ‘has suddenly been aggravated to a degree which menaces to tend to a fatal termination’.
Marx himself felt slightly more chipper after the rest-cure, but any improvement was soon undone by a wet and freezing winter which ‘blessed me with a perpetual cold and coughing, interfering with sleep, etc.,’ as he informed a correspondent in St Petersburg, explaining why he could scarcely answer his mail let alone make any progress on the remaining volumes of Capital. ‘The worst is that Mrs Marx’s state becomes daily more dangerous notwithstanding my resort to the most celebrated medical men of London, and I have besides a host of domestic troubles.’ One of these was the sudden removal of Jennychen and her sons to Paris, where Charles Longuet had been appointed editor of Georges Clemenceau’s radical daily newspaper, La Justice. ‘You understand how painful – in the present state of Mrs Marx – this separation must be. For her and myself our grandchildren, three little boys, were inexhaustible sources of enjoyment, of life.’ Sometimes, hearing children’s voices in the street, he would rush to the front window, momentarily forgetting that the beloved youngsters were now on the other side of the Channel. He felt another pang walking through Maitland Park one day when the park-keeper stopped him to ask what had become of little ‘Johnny’, a.k.a. Jean Longuet. Worse still was missing the arrival of his grandson Marcel, born at the Longuets’ new home in Argenteuil in April 1881. Hence, perhaps, the rather grumpy tone of his congratulatory message: ‘I am of course charged by Mama and Tussy … to wish you all possible good things, but I do not see that “wishes” are good for anything except the glossing over of one’s own powerlessness.’ Still, at least it was a boy. Though Jenny Marx had expected and hoped for a granddaughter, ‘for my own part I prefer the “manly” sex for children born at this turning point of history. They have before them the most revolutionary period men have ever had to pass through. The bad thing now is to be “old” so as to be only able to foresee instead of seeing.’
Both he and his wife were feeling as ancient as Methuselah. Karl took Turkish baths to loosen his rheumatically stiff leg; Jenny retired to bed for days on end, becoming ever more emaciated. Now and again, her pain miraculously disappeared and she felt strong enough to go for walks or even visit the theatre, but Marx knew that there could be no recovery. Jenny had cancer. ‘Between ourselves, my wife’s illness is, alas, incurable,’ he wrote in June 1881 to his old friend Sorge. ‘In a few days’ time I shall be taking her to the seaside at Eastbourne.’ While there she was obliged to use a Bath chair – ‘a thing that I, the pedestrian par excellence, should have regarded as beneath my dignity a few months ago’.
After two weeks on the south coast Jenny was strong enough to set off on a cross-Channel expedition with Karl to visit their new grandson, but by the time they reached Argenteuil she had severe diarrhoea. Their hostess was none too sprightly either. ‘Jennychen’s asthma is bad,’ Marx wrote to Engels, ‘the house being a very draughty one. The child is heroic, as always.’ News then arrived from England that Tussy had been struck down by some dire if unspecified illness, and Marx hastened back to London alone to see what the matter was. He found her in a state of ‘utter nervous dejection’ that would nowadays be classified as anorexia. ‘She has been eating next to nothing for weeks,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘Donkin [the doctor] says there’s no organic trouble, heart sound, lungs sound, etc.; fundamentally the whole condition is attributable to a perfect derangement of action of stomach which has become unaccustomed to food (and she has made matters worse by drinking a great deal of tea; he at once forbade her all tea) and a dangerously overwrought nervous system.’
Jenny Marx returned a couple of weeks later, escorted by the indefatigable Helene Demuth, and immediately took to her bed. At the beginning of October, Marx felt certain that her illness wa
s ‘drawing closer to its consummation’. Marx himself was bedridden with bronchitis but perked up no end on learning that the German Social Democrats had won twelve seats in the Reichstag. ‘If any one outside event has contributed to putting Marx more or less to rights again,’ Engels wrote to Eduard Bernstein at the end of November, ‘then it is the elections. Never has a proletariat conducted itself so magnificently … In Germany, after three years of unprecedented persecution and unrelenting pressure, during which any form of public organisation and even communication was a sheer impossibility, our lads have returned, not only in all their former strength, but actually stronger than before.’
Jenny Marx died on 2 December 1881. For the last three weeks she and her husband couldn’t even see each other: his bronchitis had been complicated by pleurisy and he was confined to a neighbouring bedroom, unable to move. In her last words, spoken in English, she called out across the landing, ‘Karl, my strength is ebbing …’ Marx was forbidden by his doctor to attend the funeral, held three days later in an unconsecrated corner of Highgate cemetery. He consoled himself with the memory of Jenny’s rebuke to a nurse on the day before her death, apropos some neglected formality: ‘We are no such external people!’ The other distraction from grief was his own wretched condition, which required him to anoint the chest and neck with iodine several times a day. ‘There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain,’ he wrote. ‘Set the end of the world on the one hand against a man with acute toothache on the other.’
Karl Marx Page 39