KARL MARX

FIVE
London
One comes to see increasingly that the emigration must turn everyone
into a fool, an ass, and a common knave unless he contrives to
get completely away from it.
Engels to Marx, MEW XXVII 186.
I. THE FIRST YEAR IN LONDON
Nothing, it has been said, endures like the temporary. When Marx came
to England certainly he had no idea that he would make it his permanent
home. For years he shared the view of most of his fellow-refugees that a
new round of revolutions would soon break out on the Continent. Like
the early Christians awaiting the Second Coming, they regarded their
present life as of little importance compared to the great event that was
to come. This partly accounts for the ad hoc nature of much of Marx's
life during what was in fact to be a long and sleepless night of exile.
Leaving Jenny and the children behind in Paris, Marx crossed the
Channel on 24 August 1849 in the company of the Swiss communist
Seiler and Karl Blind, a young Democrat from Baden. Probably on his
arrival in London he temporarily stayed in Karl Blind's lodgings above a
coffee-house in Grosvenor Square: this, anyway, was the address he used
for correspondence. His prospects were bleak. 'I am in a really difficult
position,' he wrote soon after his arrival, 'my wife's pregnancy is far
advanced. She must leave Paris by 15 September and I don't know where
I am to rake together the necessary money for her travel and our settling
here.' 1 Jenny had difficulty extending her visa even to 15 September
(when the lease on their Paris house expired), and arrived in London on
the seventeenth with her three small children and the birth of her fourth
less than three weeks away. She was met by Georg Weerth, a wholesaler
trader who was one of the founder members of the Communist League
and had worked on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He found them a furnished
room in a Leicester Square boarding house which they soon left,
moving to a two-roomed flat in the fashionable area off the King's Road