A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral

Natural History, Sept, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

The odd friendship of an evolutionist and a revolutionist

What could possibly be deemed incongruous on a shelf of Victorian bric-a-brac, the ultimate anglophone symbol for miscellany? What, to illustrate the same principle on a larger scale, could possibly seem out of place in London's Highgate Cemetery--the world's most fantastic funerary park of overgrown vegetation and overblown statuary, once described as a "Victorian Valhalla ... a maze of rising terraces, winding paths, tombs and catacombs ... a monument to the Victorian age and to the Victorian attitude to death ... containing some of the most celebrated --and often most eccentric--funerary architecture to be found anywhere" (from Highgate Cemetery, by Felix Barker and John Gay, published in 1984 by John Murray in London, the same firm that printed Darwin's major books --score one for British continuity!)?

Highgate holds an unparalleled variety of mortal remains from Victoria's era--from eminent scientists like Michael Faraday to literary figures like George Eliot, premier pundits like Herbert Spencer, and idols of popular culture like Tom Sayers (one of the last champions of bare-knuckle boxing), to the poignancy of ordinary folks who died too young, like the Hampstead gift "who was burned to death when her dress caught fire" or "Little Jack," described as "a boy missionary," who died at age seven on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1899.

But one monument in Highgate Cemetery might seem conspicuously out of place, at least to people who have forgotten an odd fact from their high school course in European history. The grave of Karl Marx stands almost adjacent to the tomb of his rival and an arch opponent of all state intervention (even for streetlights and sewers), Herbert Spencer. The apparent anomaly only becomes exacerbated by the maximal height of Marx's monument, capped by an outsize bust. (Marx had originally been buried in an inconspicuous spot adorned by a humble marker, but visitors complained that they could not find the site, so in 1954, with funds raised by the British Communist Party, Marx's bones reached higher and more conspicuous ground.) To highlight the peculiarity of his presence, this monument, until the past few years at least, attracted a constant stream of dour, identically suited groups of Russian or Chinese pilgrims, all snapping their cameras or laying their "fraternal" wreaths.

Marx's monument may be out of scale, but his presence could not be more appropriate. Marx lived most of his life in London, following exile from Belgium, Germany, and France for his activity in the Revolutions of 1848 (and for general political troublemaking: he and Friedrich Engels had just published the Communist Manifesto). He arrived in London in August 1848, at age thirty-one, and lived there until his death in 1883. Marx wrote all his mature works as an expatriate in England, where the great (and free) library of the British Museum served as his research base for Das Kapital.

Let me now introduce another anomaly, not so easily resolved this time, about the death of Karl Marx in London. This item, in fact, ranks as my all-time favorite, niggling little incongruity from the history of my profession of evolutionary biology. I have been living with this bothersome fact for twenty-five years, and I pledged long ago to offer some resolution before ending this series of essays at the millennium. I think that I now have the basic answer, and not a moment too soon. Let us, then, return to Highgate Cemetery and to Karl Marx's burial on March 17, 1883.

Engels, Marx's lifelong friend and collaborator (also his financial "angel," thanks to a textile business in Manchester), described the short and modest proceedings (see Philip S. Foner, editor, Karl Marx Remembered: Comments at the Time of His Death, San Francisco: Synthesis Publications, 1983). Engels himself gave a brief speech in English that included the following widely quoted comment: "Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history." Contemporary reports vary somewhat, but the most generous count places only nine mourners at the graveside--a disconnect between immediate notice and later influence exceeded only, perhaps, by Mozart's burial in a pauper's grave (I exclude, of course, famous men like Giordano Bruno and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, executed by state power and therefore officially denied any funerary rites).

The list, not even a minyan in extent, makes sense (with one exception): Engels himself; Marx's daughter Eleanor (his wife and another daughter had died recently, thus increasing Marx's depression and probably hastening his death); his two French socialist sons-in-law, Charles Longuet and Paul Lafargue; and four nonrelatives with longstanding ties to Marx and impeccable socialist and activist credentials--Wilhelm Liebknecht, a founder and leader of the German Social-Democratic Party (who gave a rousing speech in German, which, together with Engels's English oration, a short statement in French by Longuet, and the reading of two telegrams from workers' parties in France and Spain, built the entire program of the burial); Friedrich Lessner, sentenced to three years in prison at the Cologne communist trial of 1852; G. Lochner, described by Engels as "an old member of the Communist League"; and Carl Schorlemmer, a professor of chemistry in Manchester but also an old communist associate of Marx's and Engels's and a fighter at Baden in the last uprising of the 1848 Revolutions.