Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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Feinstein, an economic historian on the “pessimist” side of a long-running debate on the effects of the industrial revolution, concluded that real wages “at last started an ascent to a new height” in the 1840s.109
Marx never did step outside. He never bothered to learn English well.110 His world was restricted to a small circle of like-minded émigrés. His contacts with English working-class leaders were superficial. He never exposed his ideas to people who could challenge him on equal terms. His interaction with economists—“commercial travelers for the great firm of Free-trade”111 as he called them—whose ideas he wished to demolish, was nonexistent. He never met or conducted a scientific correspondence with the geniuses—John Stuart Mill, the philosopher; Charles Darwin, the biologist; Herbert Spencer, the sociologist; George Eliot, the writer; among them—who lived (and debated) a mile or two from him. Astonishingly for the best friend of a factory owner and the author of some of the most impassioned descriptions of mechanization’s horrors, Marx never visited a single English factory—or any factory at all until he went on a guided tour of a porcelain manufactory near Carlsbad, where he took the waters toward the end of his life.112
At Engels’s insistence, in 1859 Marx reluctantly published a preview of his unfinished magnum opus. The thin volume, called A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, was greeted with surprise, embarrassment, and virtually no reviews except ones that Engels wrote anonymously at Marx’s behest.113
Marx had frequently justified his decision to remain in England—and even to seek British citizenship—by pointing to the advantages of London, capital of the modern world, for studying the evolution of society and glimpsing its future. But Isaiah Berlin, himself an émigré, wrote that “he might just as well have spent his exile in Madagascar, provided that a regular supply of books, journals and government reports could have been secured.” By 1851, when he started to work seriously on the critique that he boasted would demolish English economics, Marx’s ideas and attitudes were “set and hardly changed at all” over the next fifteen or more years.114
When Marx took up the idea of “providing a complete account and explanation of the rise and imminent fall of the capitalist system,”115 his eyesight was so bad that he was forced to hold books and newspapers a few inches from his face. One wonders what effect his myopia had on his ideas. Democritus, the subject of his doctoral dissertation, was said to have blinded himself deliberately. In some versions of his legend, the Greek philosopher is motivated by a desire to avoid being tempted by beautiful women. In others, he wants to shut out the messy, confusing, shifting world of facts so that he can contemplate the images and ideas in his own head without these bothersome distractions.
One might think that his family’s climb from renters of rooms over a store to rate-paying owners of a London town house would have made Marx uneasy about his theory. In the twenty years since he had set out to prove that capitalism could not work, Marx himself had evolved from bohemian to bourgeois. He no longer favored the immediate abolition of the rights of inheritance in the Communist program.116 The Marxes used one of several legacies to trade their “old hole in Soho” for an “attractive house” in one of the new middle-class developments near Hampstead Heath. It was so new that they found there was no paved road, no gas street lights, and no omnibuses; only heaps of rubbish, piles of rock, and mud.
Marx often said that there was something rotten about a system that increased wealth without reducing misery, yet it did not seem to strike him that misery can sometimes increase with wealth. He assumed that London’s slums, which were becoming more Dickensian with each passing decade, were proof that the economy couldn’t deliver a decent standard of living for ordinary people. On the contrary, explains Gareth Stedman Jones, the housing crisis was an unwelcome by-product of London’s helter-skelter growth, growing prosperity, and voracious demand for unskilled labor. The key fact is that the mid-Victorian building frenzy involved an orgy of demolition. Between 1830 and 1870, thousands of acres in central London were cleared, mostly in the poor districts where land was cheap, to expand the London docks, lay railway lines, build New Oxford Street, dig the sewers and water pipes, and, in the 1860s, excavate the first stretches of the London tube. So, just as tens of thousands of migrants were flocking to the city in search of work, the supply of housing within walking distance of London’s industrial areas was plummeting. As a result, workers were crowded into ever more dilapidated, ever tighter, ever more expensive quarters. Once the demolition stopped and white-collar workers began to commute from the suburbs by rail, the housing crisis began to ease.
The Exhibition season of 1862 coincided with another low point in Marx’s financial affairs. Horace Greeley, the publisher of the New York Tribune, had dropped his column, which, though entirely ghostwritten by Engels, had supplied Marx with extra cash. At one point, his money woes became so dire that he applied for a job as a railway clerk, only to be rejected for “bad handwriting” and not speaking English, and briefly considered immigrating to America. Luckily, he was like an oyster that needed a bit of grit to make his pearls. With his mind on money, he was soon writing a long essay on economics and filling up notebooks again, complaining all the while that he felt like “a machine condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.”117 He also decided on a title for his great work: Das Kapital.118
The hoopla surrounding the Exhibition continued to depress Marx. He would have sympathized with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s reaction; the Russian novelist called the glass palace “a Biblical sight, something to do with Babylon, some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled before your very eyes.”119 Yet within a year or two, Marx’s fortunes turned up again. Thanks to several unexpected legacies as well as a £375 annual subsidy from Engels, he was able to move his family to an even bigger and more imposing town house and was soon spending £500 to £600 a year, something that more than 98 percent of English families could not afford to do.120
Marx had almost forgotten about the Day of Judgment when it dawned.
The launch of the eleven-thousand-ton warship the HMS Northumberland on April 17, 1866, ought to have been a day of pride, a reminder of Great Britain’s industrial and commercial domination of the world. Instead it was a fiasco. The Northumberland had been on the slips in the Millwall Iron Works yard for nearly five years. On the day of the launch, her unusually heavy weight caused her to slip off the railing—a portent, people understood later, of the precarious condition of the shipping firms and shipbuilders.
Less than a month later, on Thursday afternoon, May 10, in the first week of the London boating season, a frightful rumor swirled through the city. The Rolls-Royce of merchant banks, Overend, Gurney & Company, considered by the average citizen to be as solid as the Royal Mint, had failed. “It is impossible to describe the terror and anxiety which took possession of men’s minds for the remainder of that and the whole of the succeeding day,” wrote the London Times’s financial correspondent. “No man felt safe.” By ten o’clock the following morning, a horde of “struggling and half frantic creditors” of both sexes and seemingly all stations of life invaded the financial district. “At noon the tumult became a rout. The doors of the most respectable Banking Houses were besieged . . . and throngs heaving and tumbling about Lombard Street made that narrow thoroughfare impassable.”121
The New York Times bureau chief dashed off a telegram to his editors to convey that this was “a more fearful panic than has been known in the British metropolis within the memory of man.” Before an extra battalion of constables could be called out to control the crowd and before the Chancellor of the Exchequer could authorize the suspension of the Bank Charter Act, the Bank of England had lost 93 percent of its cash reserves, the British money market was frozen solid, and scores of banks and businesses that lived on credit were facing ruin. “Englishmen have been running mad on speculation . . . The day of reckoning has arrived and blank panic and blue dismay sit on the faces of all our bankers, capitalists and merchants.”122
Among the first victims of the panic were the owners of the Millwall shipyard. The boom in shipbuilding, fueled by a worldwide arms race and trade, had more than doubled employment in London shipyards between 1861 and 1865.123 “The magnates of this trade had not only over-produced