KARL MARX

THE
'ECONOMICS'
305
took such extraordinary medicines as creosote, opium and arsenic (this
for years on end), gave up smoking for months and took daily cold baths.
He wished that the boils had been given to a good Christian who would
have been able to turn his suffering to some account; but at the same
time he comforted himself with the idea that the bourgeoisie would
have good cause to remember his sufferings from this 'truly proletarian
disease'. 174 On extreme occasions he would even operate on himself.
'Today', he wrote to Engels, 'I took a sharp razor (a relic of dear Lupus)
and cut the wretch in my own person.' He was proud to think that 'I am
one of the best subjects to be operated upon. I always recognise what is
necessary.' 175 When the boils approached his penis he lightened the
occasion by copying out and sending to Engels specimens of sixteenthcentury
French pornographic verse - a field in which he considered
himself 'well-read'. 176 He found his only relief in occasional visits to the
seaside. In March 1866, for instance, he spent four weeks convalescing in
Margate where he was glad to find so little company that he felt he could
sing with the miller of the Dee: 'I care for nobody and nobody cares for
me." 77 One day he walked the seventeen miles to Canterbury, 'an old, ugly
mediaeval sort of town, not mended by large modern English barracks at
the one end and a dismal dry Railway Station at the other end of the
oldish thing. There is no trace of poetry about it.... Happily I was too
tired, and it was too late, to look out for the celebrated cathedral." 78
In March 1865 Marx had signed a contract with the Hamburg publishers
Meissner and Behre. Meissner's was a medium-sized publishing
house, one of the few in Germany with democratic leanings, dealing
mainly in school textbooks and works on history and medicine. This
contract, which had been negotiated through Wilhelm Strohn, a former
member of the Communist League who often visited Hamburg on business
from England, gave May 1865 as the limit for the delivery of the
manuscript, though this had to be amended in a later version. The terms
of the agreement were not particularly advantageous to Marx and he
remarked to his future son-in-law Lafargue that'Capital will not even pay
lor the cigars I smoked writing it'. 179 By July 1865, in spite of illness and
work for the incipient International, Marx was able to write to Engels
that
there are still three chapters to write to complete the theoretical part
(rhe first three books). Then there is still the fourth book to write -
the historico-literary one. This is relatively the easiest for me as all
the problems are solved in the first three books and thus this last one
is more of a repetition in historical form. But I cannot make up my
mind to send anything off until I have the whole thing in front of
me. Whatever shortcomings they may have, my writings do have this