In search of Karl Marx

By Victoria Station in Manchester there is a inconspicuous gateway. It’s behind the National Football Museum. You wouldn’t know it was there unless you were looking for it. But it’s there. It is the Gateway to Chetham’s Library.

Built in the seventeenth century, now encircled by skyscrapers and other modern buildings, this is the place where one of the most epochal books in history was conceived.

Here Karl Marx came and met with Frederick Engels and read the books on economics which still remain.

And here is the window seat at which they sat and read and spoke about change, and wrote, The Communist Manifesto.

‘In the last few days I have often been sitting at the quadrilateral desk in the small bow window where we sat 24 years ago,’ Engels wrote to Marx in 1870. ‘I like this place very much; because of its coloured window the weather is always fine there.’

I have sat now, across from them, across centuries, but in their place, and gazed across that desk, and across the intervening time. I wanted to see him there, Marx, to feel his aura somehow. But nothing.

So I search the library for some vestige of him, of Marx, and the dark floorboards reflect nothing, and the shelves and shelves of dusty tomes seem to signify so much information that they signify nothing and nothing of him.

But when I left, I turned back to that reading room window and felt his eyes on me, on us, on our world, from across the centuries, his brooding intensity transfixing me there, like a spectre haunting us, judging.