4IO KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Marx was cheered, however, by the appearance in December 1881 of
a pamphlet in the Leaders of Modern Thought series devoted to himself
and written by Ernest Belfort Bax, a Positivist and journalistic friend of
Hyndman's. There were many mistakes in Marx's biography and in the
account of his economic ideas but it was nevertheless 'the first English
publication imbued with real enthusiasm for the new ideas and boldly
presenting them to the British philistines'.^128 And he was pleased with the
publicity given to it on the placards of London's West End and the joy
it brought to Jenny two days before her death. Yet paradoxically Marx
remained little known in the country where he had lived and worked
most of his life. His obituary in The Times contained the most ridiculous
mistakes and when the English edition of Capital did eventually appear
in 1894 its combined sale in Britain and the United States for the first
few years was extremely meagre. It is not surprising that Marx's last
recorded words on Britain were: 'To the devil with the British'.^129
With the departure of the Longuet family in February 1881 , Marx
began the lonely last two years of his life. The separation was extremely
painful: for Marx his grandchildren were 'inexhaustible sources of life and
joy'^130 and for weeks after their departure, so he wrote to Jenny, 'I often
run to the window when I hear the voices of children. .. unaware, for a
moment, that they are the other side of the Channel."^31 He had less and
less time for outside company and felt that 'it is awful to be so "old" that
we can only foresee instead of see', particularly when the newborn 'have
before them the most revolutionary period with which men were ever
confronted'.^132 Jenny's health continued to deteriorate although Marx
called in the best doctors in London. She still had the strength to go to the
theatre occasionally but spent long periods in bed clinging despairingly to
a life she knew to be ebbing. In July Marx took her to Eastbourne for
three weeks where she was wheeled about in a bathchair. The following
month they decided to leave for Argenteuil, a western suburb of Paris,
to pay a long visit to Jenny, who was herself suffering from asthma. After
three weeks, however, news reached Marx that Eleanor was suffering from
a serious nervous depression and he returned immediately to London,
followed a few days later by Jenny and Lenchen.
VI. THE LAST YEARSA full six months before her death in December 1881 it was clear that
Marx's wife was dying. He himself had a serious setback in October. For
two months he lay in bed with bronchitis. Engels feared he might die
and Eleanor sat by his bedside through many nights. Jenny was in the