KARL MARX

*
240 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
off old debts and setting up the house. Typically, Marx did not even have
enough money to pay the first quarter's rent - a presage of difficulties to
come.
The years spent in the Dean Street house were the most barren and
frustrating of Marx's life. They would have embittered the most stoic of
characters; and Marx, as he said himself, was usually not long-suffering.
Soho was the district of London where most of the refugees congregated
- being then as now very cosmopolitan and full of eating places, prostitutes
and theatres. Dean Street was one of its main thoroughfares; long
and narrow, it had once been fashionable but was now decidedly shabby.
It was also in a quarter where there was much cholera, particularly in
1854, when Marx accounted for the outbreak 'because the sewers made
in June, July and August were driven through the pits where those who
died of the plague in 1688 (? I think) were buried'. 129 From 1851 to 1856
the Marx family lived in a flat on the second floor composed initially of
two rooms until Marx rented a third for his study. There were always
seven, and occasionally eight, people living in the two rooms. The first
was a small bedroom and the other a large (15 ft by 18 ft) living-room
with three windows looking out on the street.
By January 1851 Marx was already two weeks behind with the rent for
his landlord - Morgan Kavanagh, an Irish author who sublet the rooms
for £22 a year. A few months later Marx avoided eviction only by signing
an IOU to his landlord, who the next year, after waiting for months for
the rent, threatened to put the bailiffs in. There were no holidays until
1854 when Jenny and the children went to Seiler's villa in Edmonton for
a fortnight before going on to Trier. Jenny did write - but without success
- to one of the editors of the New York Daily Tribune in the hope that they
might be able to provide a house for Marx, their London correspondent. It
was only the death of Edgar, combined with the inheritance from Jenny's
uncle, that enabled them eventually to move in 1856.
The family regularly managed to get out to Hampstead Heath on
Sundays, a very popular excursion with Londoners at that time. The
Heath - then still in its natural state - was about one and a half hours'
walk from Dean Street, and they aimed to arrive there by lunchtime.
Liebknecht has described the outing:
The lunch-basket of a volume unknown in London, which Lenchen
had saved from their sojourn in Trier, contained the centrepiece - a
mighty roast veal. Tea and fruit they brought with them; bread, cheese
and beer could be bought on the Heath.
The march itself was generally accomplished in the following order:
I led the van with the two girls - now telling stories, now executing
callisthenics, now on the hunt after field flowers that were not so scarce