LONDON 241living was in fact falling and £15 0 was considered quite an adequate
income for a lower-middle-class family with three children. Freiligrath,
whose family circumstances were similar to those of Marx, earned less
than £20 0 a year and yet boasted that he had never been without 'the
luscious beef-steak of exile'.^123
By 1852 Marx's financial position improved in that he had a regular
income as London correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune. Although
small in 1852 , this amounted to £8 0 in 1853 and more than £16 0 in
1854. The revenue from the New York Daily Tribune dropped during 1855
and 1856 , but Marx began corresponding for the Neue Oder-Zeitung at
the end of 1854 for about £5 0 a year. This was, of course, supplemented
by Engels and would - until the arrival of large sums in 1856 - have
been a tolerable income, had it been carefully managed. But Marx was
incapable of such management. He was, for example, quite unaware of
what the New York Daily Tribune was paying him for months after he had
agreed to write regularly for the paper. And for his biggest literary success
in these years - his anti-Palmerston broadsheets which initially sold
15,00 0 copies and went into a second edition - he did not manage to get
a single penny. What did not help financially, and reduced the family's
morale, was the necessity of keeping up appearances. Writing to Engels
in 1852 about his hardships, he stressed their unimportance when set
beside his fear 'that the muck will sometime end in scandal'.^124 And in
the same year he wrote of a visit by Weerth: 'It is painful when one sits
in muck up to the neck to have so fine a gentleman opposite oneself from
whom one must hide the too shameful things.'^125 Marx's creditors were
quite naturally angry in 1854 when he spent considerable sums on Jenny's
trip to Trier which 'necessitated all sorts of new outfits because naturally
she could not go to Trier in tatters'.^126
In May 1856 Jenny inherited about £15 0 from an uncle in Scotland^127
and went with her children to Trier to see her ailing mother, who died
in July. She returned to London in September with an inheritance of
about £12 0 which allowed the family to leave 'the evil, frightful rooms
which encompassed all our joy and all our pain' and move 'with joyful
heart into a small house at the foot of romantic Hampstead Heath, not
far from lovely Primrose Hill. When we slept in our own beds for the
first time, sat on our own chairs and even had a parlour with second-
hand furniture of a rococo style - or rather bric-a-brac, then we really
thought that we were living in a magic castle... .'^128 The house, 9 Grafton
lerrace, which Marx rented for £36 3 year, was a narrow, terraced building
with three storeys and a basement, making for eight rooms in all. It was
three miles from the city-centre in a brand new development area that
was in a few years to be built right over. All the money went to paying