9J,|H KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYand retired from active politics. Another was Conrad Schramm who
fought a duel with Willich - though Marx quarrelled with him in 1851
over Schramm's unwillingness to hand over the Communist League's
papers and lost touch when he emigrated to America soon afterwards. A
more frequent - at rimes almost daily - visitor was Wilhelm Liebknecht,
the young philology student who had fought in the Baden uprising of
1849 and escaped to England via Switzerland. He had a profound, if
timid, admiration for Jenny (his own mother had died when he was three)
and loved to run errands for her, look after the children and generally
absorb Marx's ideas with much greater docility than he was later to show
in the 1860 s and 1870 s as leader of the German Social Democrats. Finally
there was Wilhelm Pieper, a young man in his middle twenties who had
studied languages in Germany and in the early 1850 s stayed with Marx
sometimes for weeks on end (when he was not consorting with prostitutes
or being employed as a tutor.) He acted as Marx's secretary for a time
and translated The Poverty of Philosophy into execrable English. He was
tacdess enough to get on Jenny's nerves, and even to reduce Karl Blind's
wife to tears during a discussion on Feuerbach in Marx's room. Marx
referred to him as his 'doctrinaire echo', regretted his schoolmasterish
tone and was pained by his attempts at playing 'modern' music. In spite
of all this, he fed Pieper, housed him, helped him recover from illness,
got Engels to lend him money and on several occasions even lent him
some himself. However unwilling Marx might have been to accept intel-
lectual or party-political opposition, in his relations with these younger
friends he was usually amused, tolerant and even generous.
In his personal relationships Marx could exercise great tact and gen-
erosity. He would excuse the shortcomings of his friends to Engels and
advise Weydemeyer on how to handle Freiligrath or Wolff. He showed
great consideration for the wife of his friend Roland Daniels, one of the
defendants in the Cologne trial, organised letters to her from Daniels's
friends in England and on his death in 1855 wrote her a most moving
tribute.^161 He even pawned Jenny's last coat to help Eccarius when he
was ill.
The man whose friendship Marx valued most was, of course, Friedrich
Engels. For the twenty years following his departure from London in late
1850 , Marx and Engels kept up a regular correspondence, writing on the
average every other day Although this correspondence constitutes by far
the most important source for any account of Marx's life during these
years, it is not complete: the letters were sifted after Engels' death to
remove any (for example those concerning Frederick Demuth) which
might embarrass family or friends. Thus the almost total absence in the
surviving Marx-Engels correspondence of anything indicating a warm