The George Foreman Of The 19th Century
Karl Marx was quite the family man, having had five legitimate, named children with his wife Jenny von Westphalen. His children’s names?
- Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844–1883)
- Jenny Laura (m. Lafargue; 1846–1911)
- Edgar (1847–1855)
- Henry Edward Guy (”Guido”; 1849–1850)
- Jenny Eveline Frances (”Franziska”; 1851–1852)
- Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–1898)
I feel somewhat bad that none of his children lived long enough to see his work be implemented in 1917. Jenny Laura almost made it too… a mere six more years and she could have seen her father’s ideas put into practice (sort of).
Thanks trp.
October 25th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
I’m a little surprised to see that infant mortality was still so high among reasonably well-off people (?) in 1840s Europe.
[.]
October 25th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
He’s not upper class! He’s KARL MARX; Karl Marx is a working man. He wasn’t some rich guy with insurance. He’d be voting for Hillary Clinton in ’08. Or Ron Paul.
[.]
October 25th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
Well, I wasn’t sure, because after all, he had enough spare time to write a book. And I figured googling something like “Karl Marx wealth” wasn’t going to clear it up.
I don’t think Hillary Clinton is really the candidate of the working class, although she does seem to have convinced unions that she is.
[.]
October 25th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
FWIW, here’s what wikipedia has to say on the issue of Marx’s wealth:
During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty and constant fear of creditors in a three room flat on Dean Street in the Soho quarter of London. Marx and Jenny already had four children and three more were to follow. Of these only three survived to adulthood. Marx’s major source of income at this time was Engels, who was drawing a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Inheritances from one of Jenny’s uncles and her mother who died in 1856 allowed the family to move to somewhat more salubrious lodgings at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town a new suburb on the then-outskirts of London. Marx generally lived a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his resources, although this did extend to some spending on relatively bourgeois luxuries, which he felt were necessities for his wife and children given their social status and the mores of the time.
[.]
October 25th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Ah. So Marx was fakin’ it til he made it, like Jane Austen. And we’re missing a dead baby in that list.
[.]