‘Seeing “Sights” That Don't Exist’: Karl Marx in the British Museum Round Reading Room

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the degree to which Karl Marx used the Round Reading Room of the British Museum and whether this degree corresponds to the prevailing cultural assumption. By using Marx's correspondence, contemporary reminiscences, and British Museum archival documents, Marx's use of the Reading Room is verified, but his visits are shown to be discontinuous and irregular. Marx's presence in the Round Reading Room has become an untested assumption in library history: this paper concludes that the facts and the conceit are at odds. Sources and mechanisms for the emergence of the myth are proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• British Museum
• British Museum Round Reading Room
• nineteenth-century libraries
• Karl Marx
• cultural myth

Notes

1. Quoted in Y. Kapp, Eleanor Marx, vol. II: The Crowded Years (1884–1898) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 647.

2. A. Kenny, The Oxford History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 208–09. The position of the Departments of Printed Books and Manuscripts in the governance, physical location, and public understanding of the British Museum has caused semantic problems, compounded by the creation of the ‘British Library’ as a distinct organisation in 1973. This paper attempts clarity by referring either to the ‘British Museum’ or its various physical reading rooms, distinguished when necessary. The phrase ‘British Museum Library’, found in many secondary texts, will be entirely avoided. In his correspondence, Marx mostly uses the German forms of ‘museum’ and, less often, ‘library’, though never ‘reading room’,

3. D. McLellan, Karl (Heinrich) Marx, in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia, vol. 6 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1974), 896.

4. T. Rosenthal, Marx's office, New Statesman (January 8, 2001), 29.

5. British Museum, London (New York: Newsweek, 1968), 163.

6. S. D. Bernstein, Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum From George Eliot to Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

7. The quote comes from Louis MacNeice's poem ‘The British Museum Reading Room’, written on the eve of the Second World War. L. MacNeice, The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Oxford University, 1967), 574.

8. British Museum, Register of Admissions to Reading Room, March 1850–April 1857, entry for June 12, 1850.

9. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, in collaboration with International Publishers, New York, and Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1975–2005) (hereafter MECW), Vol. 38, 325 (April 2, 1851).

10. See, for example, MECW Vol. 38, 262, 271, and 274.

11. MECW Vol. 38, 562 (January 11, 1851).

12. M. Rubel and M. Manale, Marx Without Myth: A Chronological Study of His Life and Work (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), 97.

13. MECW Vol. 38, 354 (letter to Engels, May 16, 1851).

14. MECW Vol. 38, 377 (letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, June 27, 1851).

15. Marx's contemporary and collaborator Arnold Ruge wrote that ‘he finishes nothing, breaks off everything[,] and plunges ever afresh into an endless sea of books’. Quoted in D. McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections (London: Macmillan, 1981) (hereafter KMIR), 8.

16. Marx renewed his ticket on December 10, 1850; June 13, 1851; December 15, 1851; and June 29, 1852 (British Museum, Register of Admissions to Reading Room, March 1850–April 1857). The first ticket was renewed two days before it expired. The next renewal took place three days after this ticket expired, the next on the working day following that ticket's expiry. However, in a sign of things to come, Marx lacked a valid reader's ticket for two weeks in the summer of 1852.

17. MECW Vol. 38, 476 (October 13, 1851).

18. MECW Vol. 38, 491–2 (letter to Engels, November 24, 1851).

19. MECW Vol. 29, 266–7.

20. Panizzi was also a revolutionary, having escaped from Italy in 1822 under sentence of death. Working for the museum changed him from an insurgent Carbonaro into a Victorian gent. He became a naturalised Englishman and rose through the ranks of British intellectual life to become principal librarian at the museum. See E. Miller, Prince of Librarians: The Life and Times of Antonio Panizzi of the British Museum (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1967).

21. British Museum, Signatures of Readers, September 22 1853–February 24 1858, entry for June 11, 1857.

22. Renewals are recorded on July 25, 1853; August 2, 1854; and June 27, 1855. British Museum, Register of Admissions to Reading Room, March 1850–April 1857. Marx's next renewal did not take place until June 11, 1857 (British Museum, Signatures of Readers, September 22 1853–February 24 1858).

23. Stallybrass offers a fanciful explanation for Marx's frequent absence, arguing that since he frequently pawned his overcoat, he would neither have met the museum's dress code nor be able to survive Victorian London's infamous ‘pea-soupers’. Though Marx twice writes of pawning his coat in 1852, this theory, though ingenious, is nonsensical. P. Stallybrass, Marx's coat, in P. Spyer (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York: Routledge, 1998), 183–207.

24. O. Rühle, Karl Marx: His Life and Work (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929), 204.

25. MECW Vol. 40, 121 (letter to Jenny Marx, April 16, 1857).

26. ‘Not having the money to buy books, I cannot possibly bid adieu to my studies at the Museum in return for 30 thalers a month’. MECW Vol. 39, 506 (letter to Engels, December 15, 1854).

27. In Isaiah Berlin's translation, German socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht used this phrase to describe the group of exiles who congregated in the museum. I. Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and environment, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 49.

28. MECW Vol. 38, 403 (August 2, 1851).

29. D. McLellan, Marx, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana, 1986), 17–18.

30. D. McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx, 3rd ed. (London: Papermac, 1995), 63.

31. V. I. Lenin, in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958) (hereafter RME), 31.

32. MECW Vol. 40, 258 (letter to Engels, February 1, 1858); MECW Vol. 40, 317 (letter to Engels, May 31, 1858).

33. J. Spargo, Karl Marx: His Life and Work (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1910), 188.

34. Marx usually wrote his address at the top of his letters and, when he was away from London, the town or city he was staying in. These are the only two surviving letters addressed from the museum. MECW Vol. 41, 474 (May 29, 1863); MECW Vol. 41, 479 (June 12, 1863).

35. Notes on the history of the discovery of the so-called Ricardian law, MECW Vol. 31, 344.

36. F. Wheen, Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 32.

37. Jenny Marx, in RME, 221–235.

38. MECW Vol. 42, 23 (letter to Engels, November 14, 1864); MECW Vol. 42, 339 (letter to Engels, December 17, 1866). John Ramsey McCulloch was London University's first professor of political economy. He became the leading exponent of the Ricardian school of economics following David Ricardo's death in 1823. Upon his death, McCulloch's extensive library was purchased by the banker and Whig politician Lord Overstone and later presented to the University of Reading. Thorold Rogers was a statistician and political economist, known for being a strong advocate of free trade and social justice. His History of Agriculture and Prices in England from 1259 to 1793 was published in seven volumes between 1866 and 1902.

39. MECW Vol. 44, 516 (letter to Engels, May 11, 1870). Charles Wachsmuth was an American palaeontologist. In nineteenth-century botanical classification, the Phanerogamia were one of the two primary divisions in the vegetable kingdom containing the flowering (i.e., phanerogamic) plants.

40. MECW Vol. 44, 518 (May 15, 1870). Engels was fascinated by Ireland and the question of Irish nationhood. Both of his wives were Irish. Late in life, he began to write a history of Ireland, which was incomplete at the time of his death. As his letter to Marx indicated, he tried to learn the Irish language.

41. MECW Vol. 44, 385 (May 28, 1872). Marx also donated copies of the second edition of Capital, published in Hamburg in 1872, and the French translation published in Paris in 1872–1873.

42. Renewals were granted on October 11, 1871; July 24, 1872; December 2, 1874; August 18, 1875; and May 22, 1877. British Museum, Alphabetical List of Ticket Holders, 1870–1879. L–R. Add. MS CE79/3, 160.

43. McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx, 93.

44. MECW Vol. 44, 522 (August 12, 1873).

45. MECW Vol. 39, 13 (letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, January 23, 1852).

46. Often the Marxes had nothing to eat but bread and potatoes (Wheen, Marx's Das Kapital, 25). Ironically, these were the foodstuffs Engels identified in the precarious diet of ‘the individual working man’. Even in English towns where wages are poor, however, ‘meat is used … two or three times a week’. F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 107.

47. MECW Vol. 38, 315–316 (both March 17, 1851).

48. MECW Vol. 39, 20 (January 24, 1852).

49. MECW Vol. 43, 38 (letter to Engels, May 23, 1868).

50. Both the sixth and seventh Reading Rooms could be unhealthy places to work. The poor ventilation in the sixth caused ‘the well-known “Museum headache”’ (P. R. Harris, The Reading Room [London: British Library, 1979], 8), which kept some readers away entirely. ‘“I never do enter the room without getting a headache,”’ wrote Thomas Carlyle, ‘“and therefore I avoid the room till the last extremity”’ (cited in H. C. Shelley, The British Museum: Its History and Treasures [London: Isaac Pitman, 1911], 124). In the seventh, the poet Algernon Swinburne, ‘according to G. F. Barwick … [was] seriously affected by faulty ventilation in the Reading Room. In July 1868, after spending a long time in the room, he was quite overcome by the closeness, and rising to go, fell against the desk and grazed his forehead’ (British Museum Department of Printed Books, British Museum Reading Room, 1857–1957. Centenary Exhibition [London: British Museum, 1957], 24). Penn attributes Thomas Macaulay's death to the British Museum, noting that his final walk to the Museum in 1859 took place on a cold and windy day, after which he fell ill, and died twelve days later (Penn, For Readers Only, 44–45). MECW Vol. 42, 557 (letter to Engels, March 25, 1868).

51. Ibid.

52. The second (1884) and third (1895) volumes of Capital, based upon Marx's notes, were edited by Engels and published posthumously.

53. F. Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 381.

54. P. Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994).

55. KMIR, 162.

56. The opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford.

57. KMIR, 133.

58. KMIR, 132.

59. P. Lafargue, Reminiscences of Marx, in RME, 75.

60. KMIR, xi.

61. KMIR, 123.

62. KMIR, 35.

63. Lafargue, Reminiscences of Marx, 73.

64. MECW Vol. 39, 460 (letter to Engels, June 10, 1854).

65. MECW Vol. 40, 249 (letter to Engels, January 16, 1858).

66. MECW Vol. 46, 19.

67. Berlin, Karl Marx, 182.

68. RME, 80.

69. G. B. Shaw, Collected Letters 1874–1897 (London: Reinhart, 1965), letter to Edward Aveling, May 17, 1887, 169; letter to A. J. Marriott, October 28, 1894, 457.

70. Berlin, Karl Marx, 259.

71. RME, 80. Lafargue wrote that ‘in order to write the twenty pages or so on English factory legislation in Capital he went through a whole library of Blue Books containing reports of commissions and factory inspectors in England and Scotland’ (RME, 79–80).

72. KMIR, 133.

73. Rühle blames this search for precision from preventing Marx from finishing the economic treatises which commanded so much of his life (Rühle, Karl Marx: His Life and Work, 320).

74. RME, 79.

75. Penn, For readers only, 36.

76. B. Nicolaievsky and O. Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1936), 235.

77. MECW Vol. 40, 238 (January 5, 1858).

78. For the origins of this assumption, and the evidence which challenges it, see Wheen, Karl Marx, 276–292.

79. The Department of Manuscripts’ list of new acquisitions for 1969 records the transfer of a document recording the issuing of a reader's ticket in the 1870s (1970, 175).

80. G. F. Barwick, The Reading Room of the British Museum (London: Ernest Benn, 1929). A. J. K. Esdaile, The British Museum Library: A Short History and Survey (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946).

81. P. R. Harris, A History of the British Museum Library, 1753–1973 (London: British Library, 1998), 769. It is likely that Harris neglected Marx's early Museum attendance on purpose, knowing perfectly well that the Round Reading Room was not yet built when Marx was conducting his research.

82. J. M. Crook, The British Museum (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 152.

83. F. Francis (ed.), Treasures of the British Museum (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971). This account is semi-official, the offices of publisher being leased from the museum at that time.

84. E. Miller, That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (London: André Deutsch, 1973), 281.

85. D. M. Wilson, The British Museum: A History (London: British Museum Press, 2002), 332.

86. D. Riazanov (ed.), Karl Marx: Man, Thinker, and Revolutionist (London: Martin Lawrence, 1927).

87. M. Beer, The Life and Teaching of Karl Marx (London: National Labour Press, 1921).

88. F. Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (London: Bodley Head, 1936), 211, 209.

89. Lenin, RME, 28–57. His wife, Nadezda Krupskaya, later claimed that Lenin ‘spent half his time’ at the British Museum. N. K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 70.

90. T. Carver (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–22.

91. Spargo, Karl Marx, 12.

92. RME, 12.

93. MECW Vol. 24, 75–99.

94. RME, 102.

95. MECW Vol. 3, 3.

96. Berlin, Karl Marx, 249.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid., 195.

99. Penn, For Readers Only, 89.

100. M. Spevak, The impact of the British Museum library, in G. Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2: 1640–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 422–437, 430.

101. For the Polish use of the library, see J. Zmroczek, ‘A national library for the Poles in exile’: The development of the Polish collection of the British Museum library in the nineteenth century, Solanus 15 (2001), 17–34. For the use by Russians, see R. Henderson, Russian political émigrés & the British Museum library, Library History, 9:1/2 (1991), 59–68; and A. Black and P. Hoare, Libraries and the modern world, in their The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. 3: 1850–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7–18, 13. This fact was recognised in the Soviet Union, and at the time of its fragmentation, the British Library's Slavonic Branch had received three box-loads of official enquiries regarding Lenin's use of the Round Reading Room (Henderson, Russian political émigrés, 59).

102. Penn, For Readers Only, 77.

103. Ibid., 83.

104. Ibid., 84.

105. B. C. Johnson, A British Museum Legend: The Extraordinary Death of Henry Symons, Sometime Deputy Superintendent of the Reading Room (London: [n.pub.], 1984), 5.

106. Psychogeography is an approach to geography and literature that emphasises the confluence of places and people. It is perhaps most familiar in the writings of authors such as Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, and Iain Sinclair.