Nineteenth Century History discussion

Who is up for reading and discussing this book....?





Karl Marx by Francis Wheen

It sounds absolutely brilliant....

A major biography of the man who, more than any other, made the twentieth century. Written by an author of great repute. The history of the 20th century is Marx's legacy. Not since Jesus Christ has an obscure pauper inspired such global devotion - or been so calamitously misinterpreted.

There have been many thousands of books on Marxism, but almost all are written by academics and zealots for whom it is a near blaspemy to treat him as a figure of flesh and blood. In the past few years there have been excellent and successful biographies of many eminent Victorians and yet the most influential of them has remained untouched.

In this book Francis Wheen, for the first time, presents Marx the man in all his brilliance and frailty - as a poverty-stricken Prussian emigre who became a middle-class English gentleman; as an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in scholarly silence in the British Museum Reading Room; as a gregarious and convivial host who fell out with almost all his friends; as a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; as a deeply earnest philosopher who loved drink, cigars and jokes.

And here's a review from the Guardian...

This book created such a stir when it came out that I feel I hardly have to summarize it. Still, here it is: the warts-and-all, lively and highly readable biography of the man whose self-proclaimed heirs shaped half the 20th century. Wheen's technique will be familiar to readers of his column in this paper: respect for the facts, determination to stick up for what one believes in, an instinctive and, I must add, wholly appropriate distrust of those with a right-wing agenda; and a certain matiness of tone at which some readers might raise an eyebrow, as it is, at times, more matey than his Guardian column. For example: Marx may have said that philosophers have interpreted the world, but "the point is to change it", yet Wheen remarks: "Nevertheless, Marx and Engels proceeded to spend the winter of 1845-6 theorising like billy-o as they composed their German Ideology."

You will also find rum coves, boobies, squiffy letters written after lunch and scallywags. Well, this is his way. He more or less directly signposts his influences when discussing Henry Hyndman, the Eton and Trinity-educated socialist who made Marx's last years more of a trial than they already were. "There is more than a trace of him", Wheen writes, "in PG Wodehouse's character Psmith, who converted to Marxism when he was expelled from Eton... thereafter he addressed everyone as 'Comrade'."

Personally, I think Comrade Wheen has done a fine job, and if it takes the shade of PGW to help him on his way then so be it. The key phrase in the first paragraph is "highly readable", for to resurrect Marx for the average reader is to do humanity a favour in both the long and short runs. There were one or two reviewers who despaired that Wheen reduced so much of Marx's political and philosophical thought to what amounts to not much more than the literary equivalent of a thumbs-up; but (a) this is preferable to a thumbs-down, and (b) it will send readers off to the original texts. (Not to mention to Martin Rowson's remarkable cartoon book, Scenes from the Lives of the Great Socialists , in which the pun-laden escapades of Marx and Engels will be seen to have more relation to reality than previously supposed.)

"Rowdiness and blackguardism," wrote Marx in an editorial for the Rheinische Zeitung, "must be loudly and resolutely repudiated in a period which demands serious, manly, and sober-minded persons for the achievement of its lofty aims." A few years later, he was smashing gas-lamps and being chased by the police after an epic pub-crawl up the Tottenham Court Road; while borrowing money from his baker, he would also complain of exiled revolutionaries who never had jobs; long resident in London, he would regularly despair of the workers' failure to do anything momentous with their discontent ("these thick-headed John Bulls, whose brainpans seem to have been specially manufactured for the constables' bludgeons").

Wheen's Marx is a loveable old rogue (Engels emerges as a long-suffering hero); he may have been hypocritical in the kind of minor details that intellectual pipsqueaks like Paul Johnson make so much of; he may have been a hector and an intellectual bully - there was a reason why there were only 11 mourners at his funeral - but he was also charming, funny, and a devoted father. It is this last that I find such an affecting detail, and one that is lovingly treated by Wheen; as for the old man's death, I found myself wiping away a tear, and I dare say I wasn't the only reader to do that.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000...

I have just finished reading this which, in a big part, inspired my desire to read "Karl Marx"….





"Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age Of Paranoia" by Francis Wheen

I was casting about for a book about revolutionary terrorists operating in the 1970s, and in particular the Angry Brigade. I know, I know. Welcome to my world. Anyway my research suggested that "Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age Of Paranoia" might be just the ticket. I can report that I found what I was looking for, and then some.

Click here to read my review

4/5

Does anyone visit this group anymore?


I have just started this book and have set up another discussion at the Bright Young Things group, here it is…

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Come and join in what should be a very interesting and enjoyable discussion - either here or there - I won't update this thread again as it appears this group is an ex-group