f298 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYin Frankfurt before he was struck down by a monster carbuncle which
kept him in Zaltbommel for six weeks nursed by his uncle and cousin
Antoinette Philips. Engels meanwhile paid the bills for Grafton Terrace.
Marx considered the stay in Holland as 'one of the happiest episodes of
my life',^1 " and returned to London on 19 February, after visits to more
relations in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in possession of the residue of
the money left him by his mother: some additional money was sent later
as a result of the sale of objects in Trier.
In early May 1864 Marx obtained another windfall. On 9 May Wilhelm
Wolff died. Marx felt that he had lost 'one of our few friends and fellow
fighters, a man in the best sense of the word'.^133 Marx was at his bedside
during the days before his death and gave a brief speech at his graveside.
As one of the executors of Wolff's will he stayed on in Manchester for
some days and was as surprised as anyone when it was discovered that
Wolff had painstakingly accumulated a small fortune and left the bulk of
it - £84 3 and some £5 0 worth of effects - to Marx. This put a stop to
begging letters to Engels - for just over one year.
These continued financial disasters weighed upon the whole household,
but most of all on the sensitive and houseproud Jenny whose health
became seriously undermined. In late 1856 she was again pregnant (at
the age of forty-two) and needed the doctor's attention throughout the
nine months during which her nervous state neared what Marx described
as 'catastrophe'.^134 The child was born dead. The following year Jenny
went to Ramsgate with Lenchen and the children for several weeks to
recuperate and this eventually became an annual occurrence: the Marx
family had great faith in the health of sea air, and at one time or another
visited practically every resort on the south-east coast. In Ramsgate Jenny
had, so Marx informed Engels, 'made acquaintance with refined and,
horribile dictu, intelligent English ladies. After the experience of bad
society, or none at all, for years on end, the society of her equals seems
to suit her.'^135 With her health, Jenny's optimism also declined: at the end
of 1858 , when she had no money for the Christmas festivities and was
busy copying out the Critique of Political Economy, she informed Marx that
'after all the misery that she would have had to endure, it would be even
worse in the revolution and she would experience the pleasure of seeing
all the present-day humbugs again celebrate their triumphs'.^136
In November i860, the year that Marx spent in his fruitless campaign
against Karl Vogt, Jenny contracted the disease that was to mark a water-
shed in her life. Hardly had she finished copying the manuscript of Herr
Vogt, than she was struck down by a fever. Diagnosis was delayed as Jenny
refused at first to call a doctor. After two visits the 'very nasty nervous
fever' was declared to be smallpox contracted in spite of a double vacci-