KARL MARX

THE 'ECONOMICS' 279
the Haverstock Hill house, and he was therefore taken by surprise when
Marx wrote that the move had actually worsened the situation: 'I am
living a precarious existence and am in a house in which I have invested
my little ready cash and where it is impossible to piss one's way through
from day to day as in Dean Street; I have no prospects and growing
family expenses.... In fact I am in a more parlous situation than five
years ago. I'd thought I'd already had all the shit that was coming my
way. But no. And the worst is, that this crisis is not temporary.' 49 Engels
guaranteed a minimum contribution of £5 a month and Marx struggled
on with the income from the New York Daily Tribune - to which his
contributions were in fact declining as he was so occupied with the
Grundrisse. He was also contributing regularly to the New American Cyclopaedia
but - typically - overcalculated his fees and soon found himself in
his publisher's debt. His only recourse was to the pawnshop, with the
expectation of a crisis at the end of every quarter and the fear of
the approach of winter when the coats and other clothes would have to
be redeemed. But by July 1858 his financial crisis erupted in full force.
He wrote to Engels: 'The situation is now absolutely unbearable.... I
am completely disabled as far as work goes, partly because I lose most of
my time in useless running around trying to make money and partly
(perhaps a result of my feeble physical condition) because my power of
intellectual concentration is undermined by domestic problems. My wife's
nerves are quite ruined by the filth... .' so The doctor predicted an
inflammation of the brain and recommended that Jenny be sent to the
seaside, but even that would not help 'if the spectre of an inevitable and
ultimate catastrophe pursues her'. 51 Marx had applied to a loan society
but all he had got out of it was a bill for £2 in fees. He enclosed a careful
list of his debts compiled by Jenny, who was the one who dealt with the
pawn-brokers, and including some still owed to Soho tradesmen, and
finished: 'I have now made a clean breast of it and I can assure you that
it has cost me no little effort. But I must be able to talk at least to one
person. I would not wish upon my bitterest enemy to wade through the
quagmire in which I have been sitting for the last eight weeks enraged
by the additional fact that my intellect has been wrecked by the lousiest
of situations and my work capacity completely broken.' 52 Engels came to
the rescue once again with a £60 advance and by August Marx had got
down to work again.
By mid-September he could say to Engels that his manuscript for the
two parts would go off 'in two weeks'. 55 By the end of October he
informed Engels curtly that the manuscript would not be ready 'for
weeks'. The 'real reason' for this delay, he explained to Lassalle in November,
was that 'the material lay before me; it was only a question of the