*4IO KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
much the previous year. They stayed the regulation month and moved a
little more in society - mosdy among German university professors -
where the question everyone wished to discuss was: what do you think of
Wagner? Marx's thoughts were extremely sarcastic ones. Eleanor's health
gave Marx much cause for anxiety and she narrowly avoided serious
pneumonia at the end of their stay. On their return they spent some
time in Prague with Kugelmann's brother-in-law, the businessman Max
Oppenheim, and then made a detour via Bingen and Kreuznach as Marx
wanted to show his daughter the places where he had married and spent
his honeymoon.
In 1877 Marx did not go to Carlsbad; he went instead to the minor
spa of Neuenahr in the Rhineland. In a lengthy justification to Engels,
he explained that Carlsbad would be extremely expensive, as Jenny would
not agree to be left behind this year; and also that a change of regime
might be beneficial. Engels responded by presenting Marx with the
detailed maps of the Black Forest he had used in the 1849 campaigns.
Bismarck's anti-socialist laws of 1878 deprived Marx of the opportunity
of travelling to German or Austrian spas and that year he had to make
do with the English equivalent at Malvern. He went with his wife, his
daughter Jenny and his grandson, all of whom were seriously ill. While
they were there Lizzie Burns (with whom Engels had been living since
the death of Mary) died of a tumour of the bladder after long suffering.
Engels married her on her deathbed according to the rites of the Church
of England. The following year Marx went to Jersey, but had to return
to Ramsgate to be with his daughter Jenny after the birth of Edgar, his
third grandchild. During this time the family was preoccupied with Jenny
Marx's illness, an incurable cancer of the liver. In 1880 Marx took his
wife first to Manchester to see Gumpert and then for an extended stay
in Ramsgate. Confined to her bed for long periods and mistrustful of
doctors, she needed constant family attention. By the turn of the decade
the topics of sickness and climate pervaded Marx's letters to the virtual
exclusion of all else - understandably enough, in view of his own illnesses
and the tragedies that had occurred within his family - he was now
mentally and physically exhausted: in a word, his public career was over.
IV. THE EUROPEAN SCENEThe death of the International and the fragmentation of the European
working-class movement meant that the 1870 s saw the growth of auton-
omous national parties. As often, Marx looked to war as the catalyst of
revolution. 'The general situation of Europe', he wrote to Sorge in 1874 ,