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Hampstead Heath – a favourite spot for walks and picnics for Marx and Engels |
Engels: ‘Grand Lama’ at No 122
Tristram Hunt tells how Friedrich Engels – subject of his new biography– moved south to Primrose Hill to be close to his old comrade Karl Marx, and collaborate with him on works that changed the world
The Frock-coated Communist
Tristan Hunt
Penguin
CAMDEN was the birthplace of modern communism.
From the British Museum Reading Room to Highgate Cemetery, from Kentish Town villas to the outer reaches of Hampstead Heath, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels spent more than four decades walking, talking and philosophising their way across north London.
And now, some 20 years after the Berlin Wall came down and as their criticisms of capitalism seem more relevant than ever, it offers an intellectual heritage we should be proud of.
When in 1870 Engels finally quit his job as a Manchester mill-owner, he headed to London to be close to his old comrade, Karl Marx. Jenny Marx organised the move.
“I have now found a house, which charms all of us because of its wonderful open situation,” she wrote to Engels. “It is next to Primrose Hill, so all the front rooms have the finest and openest view and air. And round about, in the side streets, there are shops of all sorts, so your wife will be able to buy everything herself.”
Just as it still stands, No 122 Regent’s Park Road, opposite the Queen’s pub and diagonally across from the entrance to Primrose Hill, is a fine four-storey mid-Victorian townhouse. A 10-minute walk from Karl and Jenny in Chalk Farm (where they had recently moved to from Kentish Town), it had everything Engels needed. Nearby, there were even some members of the proletariat. For in those days, Primrose Hill was not the chi-chi abode of media types, celebrities and yoga fanatics, but a mixed neighbourhood peopled by the engineers, signalmen, lamp men, porters, and cleaners who managed the Roundhouse and worked the Euston-Birmingham train line.
Engels added something extra, turning No 122 into the “Mecca” of international socialism as Europe’s lead communists came to pay court to the “Old Londoner”.
“On Sundays, Engels would throw open his house,” recalled the communist August Bebel. “On those puritanical days when no merry men can bear life in London, Engels’ house was open to all.”
The security services soon became interested. Before long, there were Prussian spies, French spooks and then the Metropolitan Police were watching No 122.
But Engels wasn’t bothered. “We have every evening a bobby promenading before the house,” he wrote in 1883, as he and his drinking buddy Carl Schorlemmer hid giggling behind the shutters. “The imbeciles evidently think we are manufacturing dynamite, when in reality we are discussing whisky.”
But the real joy of living in Camden was being able to visit Marx in nearby Maitland Villas. “Engels came to see my father every day,” Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, recalled. “They sometimes went for a walk together but just as often they remained in my father’s room, walking up and down, each on his side of the room, boring holes with his heel as he turned on it in his corner.”
When they did go for a walk, it was a brisk, discursive hike of “one and a half German miles” up and around Hampstead Heath where atop Parliament Hill the two Prussian philosophers breathed in “more ozone than in the whole of Hanover”. Then they would part to pursue their studies.
Well into the 1880s, Marx struggled on with Volumes II and III of his critique of capitalism, Das Kapital, taking the omnibus down to the British Museum to work his way through various arcane economic tracts.
Engels, meanwhile, sat in his gloriously apportioned study, looking out onto Primrose Hill, and composed some of the most persuasive works of communist propaganda: Anti-Dühring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Both are now long forgotten, but in their time they proved extraordinarily influential texts. According to the Soviet scholar and first director of the Marx-Engels Institute, David Ryazonov, Anti-Dühring “was epoch-making in the history of Marxism … All the young Marxists who entered the public arena in the early eighties were brought up on this book”. And it came out of Camden.
Alongside the socialist philosophising was the street politics. After Marx’s death in 1883 (and burial in an unconsecrated corner, alongside his wife, at Highgate Cemetery), Engels assisted in the radicalisation of East End workers, supported the 1889 dock strikes, and became a lead figure in the May Day movement.
“The Grand Lama of the Regent’s Park Road”, as he was known, proved an inspiring, if sometimes divisive, figure in London socialist politics.
He died in 1895 and No 122 later gained a blue plaque from the Greater London Council. But in Camden, Marx and Engels’s left-wing legacy lived on in more meaningful ways – from the London County Council radicals in Finsbury, to the champagne socialists in Hampstead, to the Irish socialists of Chalk Farm-Kilburn, to the Camden-based Socialist Party of Great Britain. And as for Primrose Hill, it now has Ed and David Miliband, the Labour Cabinet members and sons of the late Marxist, Ralph Miliband.
As the Foreign Secretary rightly told The Times recently: “Anyone who tells you Marxism has nothing to teach anyone about anything is silly.’”
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