From the archives

Karl Marx: His Life and Work, by John Spargo (National Labour Press, Manchester, 8s 6d):

It is curious that this should be the first biography of Marx ever written, and still more curious that it should be written in English. John Spargo, a Marxian Socialist well-known in the US, has explored with industry the copious available sources, and gleaned what he could from persons who knew Marx in the flesh. Marx is to him not only a master-teacher but a heroic personality, and if we have any quarrel with his book it is that he makes it too little a study of his mental development and too much an account of the details, commonly petty or disappointing, of his external career.

Admiration for Marx on the personal side requires much qualification. He had the egotism of genius, pardonable perhaps but very unbeautiful. Everybody else was sacrificed to his idea. His wife's life with him was one long squalid martyrdom. Of his six children, three died practically of privation. The ugliness and meanness of his 34 years' London life in the dingiest of furnished apartments and decaying stucco streets cannot be counted to him only for righteousness; it was not a thought-out asceticism or a voluntary effort to come near the workers; it was unredeemed poverty, for the most part wilfully imposed on himself and his family for no other reason than that he preferred studying in the British Museum to earning a proper living.

No less unpleasant is the picture of his dealings with friends. Saving Engels only, there is hardly a person in Mr Spargo's pages with whom he did not bitterly quarrel. It is no good for Mr Spargo to enlarge on his charm and lovableness with such a record against him. Equally hard is it to tell a flattering tale of his achievements in politics. How he failed to influence English Labour leaders may be seen from the fact that after he had been over 30 years in England Mr Hyndman and others could "discover" him and his doctrines as something unheard of. When he died in London in 1883 "only a small handful of mourners gathered round the grave".