Karl Marx: A Biography

(^45 2) KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
had approached nature. Thus Engels' equating the views of Marx and
Darwin in his famous speech at Marx's graveside is highly misleading.^47
It is nevertheless true that Marx paid more attention to the natural
sciences (physiology, geology and, above all, mathematics) during the last
decade of his life than he ever did before. He was also much interested
in the beginnings of anthropology and enthused about the work of Lewis
Morgan, a once much-respected writer whose scholarly reputation has
not survived subsequent research. In the winter of 1880-8 1 Marx drew
up with great care a hundred pages of excerpts from Morgan's Ancient
Society, excerpts later used by Engels in his Origin of the Family. What
particularly interested Marx in Morgan's book was the democratic political
organisation of primitive tribes together with their communal property.
Marx was uninfluenced by the Victorian value judgements that permeate
Morgan's work nor does he seem to have shared Engels' great admiration
for his achievements. In particular, he did not see any close parallel
between primitive communism and a future communist society.^48
III. HEALTH
What prevented Marx from finishing his life's work was his illness. By
the early 1870 s his earlier life-style and privations had irredeemably
impaired his health. Throughout the last ten years of his life the pathetic
search for soundness of body, which drove him from one health resort to
another, played an increasingly central role. In April 1871 Engels reported
to Kugelmann that Marx had begun to live 'fairly rationally' since giving
up his theoretical work with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War:
he went for two-hour walks up to Hampstead most days and laid off beer
for weeks on end if he felt unwell.^49 But scarcely had he returned to his
theoretical work (continuing with the French translation of Volume One)
than he had a serious relapse: there was pressure on the brain with an
attendant insomnia that even strong doses of chloral could not relieve. A
stroke was feared. Engels persuaded him to go to Manchester at the end
of May 1873 to consult Gumpert, Engels' own doctor and the only one
in whom Marx had complete confidence. Gumpert gave him a strict
regimen to follow and absolutely forbade him to work more than four
hours a day. This considerably improved his health but there was a
renewal of the headaches in the autumn and Marx again went north to
see Gumpert. At the same time he took a three-week water cure in
Harrogate in the company of Eleanor, who was near to a nervous break-
down. Marx occupied his time reading Sainte-Beuve's Chateaubriand which
he found full of 'newfangled forms of expression, false profundity, Byzan-