Red Jenny: A Life with Karl Marx

Karl Marx was once a child, and Jenny was a friend who was four years older. They were secretly engaged for seven years, until Jenny was 29, before Karl Marx had a position with a newspaper that promised to pay him enough that he could afford to marry. A single sentence in the first paragraph of the Introduction provides the information that the rest of the book confirms in great detail: "She shared the misery of his refugee existence, copied his illegible manuscripts, fought off his creditors, prepared his meals and bore him seven children." (p. xiii). The book furnishes many examples of her devotion to Karl Marx. She wrote letters, many of which are quoted in the text, and the ten pages of notes following the Bibliography do little more than provide page numbers in works that are mostly in German. Even the citations for reviews by Jenny of Shakespeare's plays, published anonymously in the Frankfurter Zeitung in February 1877, are to a German source.Newspapers had an odd appeal to Karl Marx as a source of income, as a medium for spreading democratic ideals, and he was often frustrated by authorities who would not allow them to be used as a rallying cry for communism and uniting workers in revolution. While Jenny and the shareholders who might provide money for a newspaper could agree with Marx getting money for writing articles that supported freedom of speech, Karl's interest in overthrowing the capitalists in general was often enough reason for the Prussian authorities to shut down his newspapers and force him into exile. Even his job as a foreign correspondent, writing articles for an American newspaper, could not be depended upon, "because Karl lost half his income in 1857 as a result of the American economic crisis." (p. 119). After spending some early years in Paris, Chapter 6, Exile in Brussels, and Chapter 8, The Hells of London, emphasize how tough the situation at home was for Jenny, who was usually stuck at home or visiting her mother.The situation of the rest of Jenny's family tends to show that Karl Marx was not the only person who had trouble finding a steady source of income. Jenny's father was a Prussian civil servant who was transferred to Trier when Jenny was two. He enjoyed the culture that a town of 12,000 could provide, but he hardly offered any solutions to their problems. "In his reports to Berlin her father frequently pointed out that there was `great and growing poverty among the lowest classes' of Trier and the surrounding countryside, but when Berlin asked him what caused it, he failed to provide an answer." (p. 11). Though Karl Marx was younger than Jenny, he impressed her as being more interested in such serious matters than the other young men she had contact with. Karl dedicated "his first publication, his PhD thesis" (p. 15) to Jenny's father. Jenny had a brother, Edgar, who pondered the same problems. Unable to find a position in Germany that coincided with his views, Edgar went to Texas and fa