Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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of the existing social order. Even as they struggled to free themselves from Protestant dogma, they became convinced that the economic collapse and violent revolution they predicted were fates from which there was no escape—so to speak, predestined. While Carlyle’s doomsday message was meant to inspire repentance and reform, theirs was meant to urge their readers to get on the right side of history before it was too late.
In The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Engels had made a compelling, if not necessarily accurate, case that England’s industrial workforce normally lived in a state of semistarvation and that famine had driven it to violence against factory owners in 1842. What his journalistic account could not establish was that workers’ precarious existence was immutable and that no solution existed short of the overthrow of English society and the imposition of a Chartist dictatorship. This is the argument that Engels had kept losing with his English acquaintances and the problem he had urged Marx to take up. He explained to Marx that in England, social and moral problems were being redefined as economic problems, and social critics were being forced to grapple with economic realities. Just as the disciples of the German philosopher Georg Hegel had used religion to dethrone religion and expose the hypocrisy of Germany’s ruling elite, they would have to use the principles of political economy to eviscerate the hateful English “religion of money.”
When the new friends parted, Engels went home to Germany to pour out his charges of “murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale” against the British business class (and, by implication, Germany’s as well).21 Working in his family’s cotton thread factory had confirmed Engels’s feeling that business was “filthy.”22 He had “never seen a class so deeply demoralized, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie.” These “bartering Jews,” as he called the businessmen of Manchester, were devotees of “Political Economy, the Science of Wealth,” indifferent to the suffering of their workers as long as they made a profit and, indeed, to all human values except money. “The huckstering spirit” of the English upper classes was as repugnant as the “Pharisaic philanthropy” that they dispensed to the poor after “sucking out their very life-blood.” With English society increasingly “divided into millionaires and paupers,” the imminent “war of the poor against the rich” would be “the bloodiest ever waged.”23 As fast and fluent a writer as he was a talker, Engels finished his manuscript in less than twelve weeks.
All the while, Engels badgered Marx to “Do try and finish your political economy book . . . It must come out soon.”24 His own book was published in Leipzig in July 1845. The Condition of the Working Class in England drew favorable reviews and sold well even before the economic and political crises that the author correctly forecast for “1846 or 1847” gave it the added cache of successful prophecy. Das Kapital, the grandiose treatise in which Marx promised to reveal the “law of motion of modern society,” took twenty years longer.25
In 1849, when Henry Mayhew, a London Morning Chronicle correspondent, climbed to the Golden Gallery atop St. Paul’s Cathedral to get a bird’s-eye view of his hometown, he found that “it was impossible to tell where the sky ended and the city began.”26 At nearly 20 percent a decade, the city’s growth “seemed to obey no known law.”27 By the middle of the century, the population had swelled to two and one half million. There were more than enough Londoners to populate two Parises, five Viennas, or the eight next-largest English cities combined.28
London “epitomized the 19th century economic miracle.”29 The pool of London was the world’s biggest and most efficient port. As early as 1833, a partner in the Barings Brothers Bank observed that London had become the “center upon which commerce must turn.” London’s wet docks covered hundreds of acres and had become a prime tourist attraction—not least because of a twelve-acre underground wine cellar that gave visitors a chance to taste the Bordeaux. The smells—pungent tobacco, overpowering rum, sickening hides and horn, fragrant coffee and spices—evoked a vast global trade, an endless stream of migrants, and a far-flung empire.
“I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge,” Engels had confessed in 1842 after seeing London for the first time. “The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself.”30
London’s railway stations were “vaster than the walls of Babylon . . . vaster than the temple of Ephesus,” John Ruskin, the art historian, claimed. “Night and day the conquering engines rumbled,” wrote Dickens in Dombey and Son. From London, a traveler could go as far north as Scotland, as far east as Moscow, as far south as Baghdad. Meanwhile, the railroad was pushing London’s boundaries ever farther into the surrounding countryside. As Dickens related, “The miserable waste ground, where the refuse-matter had been heaped of yore, was swallowed up and gone, and in its frowsy stead were tiers of warehouses, crammed with rich goods and costly merchandise. Bridges that had led to nothing, led to villas, gardens, churches, healthy public walks. The carcasses of houses, and beginnings of new thoroughfares, had started off upon the line at steam’s own speed, and shot away into the country in a monster train.”31
The financial heart of world commerce beat in the “City,” London’s financial center. The financier Nathan Mayer Rothschild, not given to exaggeration, called London “the bank of the world.”32 Merchants came there to raise short-term loans to finance their global trade, and governments floated bonds to build roads, canals, and railways. Although the London stock exchange was still in its infancy, the City’s merchants and bill discounters attracted three times the amount of “borrowable money” as New York and ten times as much as Paris.33 Bankers’, investors’, and merchants’ hunger for information helped make London into the world’s media and communications center. “Anyone can get the news,” a Rothschild complained in 1851 when the advent of the telegraph made his carrier pigeon network obsolete.34
London, not the new industrial towns in the north, boasted the biggest concentration of industry in the world, employing one in six manufacturing workers in England, nearly half a million men and women.35 That was roughly ten times the number of cotton workers in Manchester. The “dark satanic mills” in William Blake’s Jerusalem probably weren’t in the Coketowns of northern England. Like the monster Albion flour mill, which employed five hundred workers and was powered by one of James Watt’s gargantuan steam engines, they were more likely on the Thames in London.36 A popular 1850s travel guide refers to “water works, gas works, shipyards, tanning yards, breweries, distilleries, glass works the extent of which would excite no little surprise in those who for the first time visited them.”37 True, London had no single dominant industry such as textiles, and most of its manufacturing firms employed fewer than ten hands,38 but entire industries—printing in Fleet Street, paint, precision instruments in Camden, and furniture making around Tottenham Road—were concentrated in London. The vast shipyards at Poplar and Millwall employed fifteen thousand men and boys to build the biggest steamships and armor-plated warships afloat. But while factory towns like Leeds and Newcastle supplied the bulk of England’s exports, most of London’s manufacturers catered to the needs of the city itself. Wandsworth had its flour mills, Whitechapel its sugar refiners, Cheapside its breweries, Smithfield its cattle markets, and Bermondsey its tanneries, candle and soap makers. Mayhew called London the world’s “busiest hive.”39
Above all, London was the world’s biggest market. Here one could get “at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs.”40 In the prosperous West End of London “everything shines more or less, from the window panes to the dog collars” and “the air is colored, almost scented, by the presence of the biggest society on earth.”41 Regent Street displayed the greatest collection of “watchmakers, haberdashers, and photographers; fancy stationer, fancy hosiers, and fancy stay