Karl Marx

Marx composed a grovelling letter assuring His Excellency that the Rheinische Zeitung wished only to echo 'the benedictions which at the present time the whole of Germany conveys to His Majesty the King in his ascendant career'. As Franz Mehring commented many years late, the letter displayed 'a diplomatic caution of which the life of its author offers no other example'.

To wish away Marx's stylistic excess is, however, to miss the point. His vices were also his virtues, manifestations of a mind addicted to paradox and inversion, antithesis and chiasmus. Sometimes this dialectical zeal produced empty rhetoric, but more often it led to startling and original insights. He took nothing for granted, turned everything upside down - including society itself.

[Marx and Engels] had no secrets from each other, no taboos: if Marx found a huge boil on his penis he didn't hesitate to supply a full description. Their voluminous correspondence is a gamey stew of history and gossip, political economy and schoolboy smut, high ideals and low intimacies. [...] As stateless cosmopolitans they even evolved their own private language, a weird Anglo-Franco-Latino-German mumbo-jumbo. All other quotations in this book have been translated to spare readers the anguish of puzzling over the Marxian code, but one brief sentence will give an idea of its expressive if incomprehensible syntax: 'Diese excessive technicality of ancient law zeigt Jurisprudenz as feather of the same bird, als d. religiosen Formalitaten z. B. Auguris etc. od. D.. Hokus Pokus des medicine man der savages.' Engels learned to understand this gibberish with ease; more impressively still, he was able to read Marx's handwriting, as was Jenny [Marx's wife].

[Engels] acted as a kind of secret agent behind enemy lines, sending Marx confidential details of the cotton trade, expert observations on the state of international markets, and - most essentially - a regular consignment of small-denomination banknotes, pilfered from the petty cash box or guilefully prised out of the company's bank account. (As a precaution against mail theft he snipped them in two, posting each half in a separate envelope.) It is a measure of how slackly the office was run that neither his father nor his business partner in Manchester, Peter Ermen, ever noticed anything amiss.

Marx was plagued by his usual physical ailments through the winter of 1866-7 but even they could no longer thwart his determination to finish Volume One of Capital. He wrote the last few pages of Volume One standing at his desk when an eruption of boils around the rump made sitting too painful. (Arsenic, the usual anaesthetic, 'dulls my mind too much and I need to keep my wits about me'.) Engels' experienced eye immediately spotted certain passages in the text 'where the carbuncles have left their mark', and Marx agreed that the fever in his groin might have given his prose a rather livid hue. 'At all events, I hope the bourgeoise will remember my carbuncles until their dying day,' he cursed, 'What swine they are!'