Karl Marx: A Biography

LONDON 209

which we had sold were taken out and put on a cart. What was

happening? It was well after sunset. We were contravening English law.

The landlord rushed up to us with two constables, maintaining that

there might be some of his belongings among the things, and that we

wanted to make away abroad. In less than five minutes there were two

or three hundred persons loitering around our door - the whole Chelsea

mob. The beds were brought in again - they could not be delivered to

the buyer until after sunrise next day. When we had sold all our

possessions we were in a position to pay what we owed to the last

farthing. I went with my little darlings to the two small rooms we are

now occupying in the German hotel, 1 Leicester St, Leicester Square.

There for £ 5 per week we were given a humane reception.^4

On expulsion from their house in Chelsea in April 1850 they found a
permanent lodging in two rooms in 64 Dean Street, a house belonging
to a Jewish lace dealer where Heinrich Bauer, treasurer of the refugee
committee, also lived. Jenny described the summer there with the four
children as 'miserable'.^5 Prospects in London were so bleak that Marx
considered emigrating to the United States together with Engels. He
prepared the ground for a continuation of his publishing projects there
and went as far as to find out the price of the ticket; but this was 'hellishly
expensive'^6 and instead the Marx family merely moved up the street to
number 28 , while Engels departed to work in his father's firm in Man-
chester. The move was prompted by the death of Guido, born just a year
previously, who died suddenly from convulsions caused by meningitis -
the first of the three children to die in Dean Street.

In spite of these difficulties, Marx was very active politically. His first
few months in London were taken up by three interrelated activities: his
work on behalf of refugees in the framework of the German Workers'
Educational Association;^7 the reorganisation of the Communist League;
and his efforts to start a monthly journal on the pattern of the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung. He regarded all three as means of rebuilding the 'Marx
party' as it had existed in Cologne in 1848.^8
The day after Jenny's arrival in London, a Committee for the Assist-
ance of German Political Refugees was elected by a general assembly of
the Association to which it was to present monthly accounts. Marx was
one of the chosen members along with Blind, Bauer, Pfander and Fuster.
The committee immediately began to collect money through personal
contacts and newspaper appeals, both mainly in Germany. After only two
months, however, the committee had to be reconstituted. For with the
departure of Blind and Fuster and the arrival of Willich in London,
the orientation of the committee became too extreme for radical republi-
cans such as Struve and Heinzen who tried to form (separate from the