28 Dean Street — former home of Karl Marx
This is part of the Walk on the Wild Side project by Jackie Hopfinger and Mike Press. Read more at the project publication page.
The writer H G Wells was a regular at the Quo Vadis restaurant from when it opened in 1926 at 27 Dean Street. Since that time the fashionable Italian eatery has expanded into three adjoining buildings on the street, including 28 where Karl Marx and his family lived. In a neat case of circularity, Marx and Wells later found themselves standing next to each other on the cover of Sgt Pepper. But Marx’s contribution to popular music goes well beyond a walk on part in a seminal album cover design.
The towering giant of western philosophy who could ruthlessly dismiss his political opponents through the power of his writing was in reality of modest height and avoided public speaking whenever possible on account of his lisp. With his wife and children he was playful and affectionate, making up stories for his daughters and penning love poems for his wife. He did not enjoy the best of health, but his diet of cigars and red wine to accompany his all night writing sessions probably didn’t help.
Soho was home to Karl and Jenny Marx for five years from 1851, after which they moved to Kentish Town. He described the two small rooms they occupied at the top of number 28 as a hovel, in an area that was poor and victim to the local cholera outbreak of 1854.
A Prussian spy reported: “When you enter the Marx flat your sight is dimmed by tobacco and coal smoke so that you grope around at first as if you were in a cave… Everything is dirty… it is dangerous to sit down… But nothing of this embarrasses Marx or his wife in the least; you are received in the friendliest manner, are cordially offered a pipe, tobacco, and whatever else there is; a spirited conversation makes up for the domestic defects and in the end you become reconciled because of the company, find it interesting, even original.”
The three buildings that are today occupied by Quo Vadis were built in the 1730s. This was the period when Soho began its social transformation “from gentility to trade, manufacturing and multi-occupation”, as described by historian Dan Cruikshank. Large houses with gardens were replaced by denser housing that was ideally suited to trades people, light manufacturing and immigrants. Street markets, restaurants and places of entertainment became part of this new Soho.
The Marx family was among a wave of political exiles who made their way to London following the failed revolutions of 1848 that rocked Europe’s capital cities. Soho was an ideal home for these refugees who accelerated the change in Soho’s character. During the first half of the nineteenth century, London’s population had doubled to two million with many of the more affluent Londoners moving out of the centre to the new suburbs. As a consequence across Soho many of the larger dwellings became lodging houses often incorporating shops on the ground floor. Overcrowding was common with the 1851 census detailing eighteen people who lived in the various rooms of 28 Dean Street.
The Soho of the early 1850s was a lively, cosmopolitan neighbourhood. French, Italians, Hungarians, Russians, Germans, Poles and others lived alongside each other, many continuing their struggle from afar as in Soho they shared their ideas — along with their food and their music. For the 13,000 foreigners who moved to London in the late 1840s, London offered a home free from police surveillance and censorship and, despite prejudice, largely a tolerance of difference.
Whether they were tailors, teachers, jewellers, doctors or journalists by trade, these newcomers sought to earn a living from their skills and expertise. Writing about the impact of emigres at this time, Miranda Seymour explains how “music was arguably the field in which England reaped the richest harvest from among all these cultured newcomers.” Most notably, Charles Hallé was driven from Paris after the revolution settling initially in London then to Manchester in 1853 where he founded the Hallé Orchestra. Others were less prominent but no less impactful on our musical culture. German exile Johanna Kinkel was employed as a piano tutor for children in the leafy suburb of St John’s Wood. In 1851 she wrote to a friend about how most Hungarian exiles she knew were pianists: “We are now a whole colony of teachers in search of pupils”.
They didn’t have to search for long. The 1850s was the beginning of the ‘piano boom’ when even working class households joined the fashion for music making at home, and London became a world centre for piano manufacture. Along with the piano came the sixpenny lesson, which provided opportunities for the more musical emigres. Sadly, Karl and Jenny were not among them.
Life for the Marx family in Soho was hard. With little money coming into the home, the family got by as best they could, but for them it was a time of poverty, illness and tragedy. While the family managed to survive the cholera epidemic, three of Jenny and Karl’s children died during their time in Dean Street — two within a year of their birth, while Edgar died in his father’s arms shortly after his eighth birthday.
Marx believed that his time in London would be temporary and that he would return to the continent to support revolutions that he expected would take place — but those never came and Marx spent the rest of his life in London. During his lifetime he was largely unknown outside a small group of activists and intellectuals, and on his death in 1883 barely a dozen people attended his funeral at Highgate Cemetery. His imposing bronze and marble headstone was installed sixty years later, by which time more than half the world’s population lived under regimes that described themselves as Marxist.
It takes around one minute to walk from the tomb of Karl Marx to the no less impressive headstone of Malcolm McLaren — artist, musician, promoter and most notably manager of the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols.
McLaren is one example of how Marx’s ideas have influenced the very distinctive music cultures of the UK. This is not to say that the country is unique in the impact of politics on popular music, as the examples of Bob Marley, Pussy Riot, Nina Simone and others testify. However, there is an overt influence of Marxist ideas here that is less evident elsewhere.
John Lennon’s flirtation with Tariq Ali’s International Marxist Group, for example, resulted in songs such as Power to the People and Imagine. While David Bowie’s politics were ambiguous at best, he adapted and performed Baal by Marxist playwright Bertold Brecht about a romantic anti-hero at war with bourgeois society and its values. More significantly, Rock Against Racism became a focus for local musicians, activists and community organisations to oppose the far right in the 1970s and use popular music as an inclusive force for change. From Rock Against Racism through 2-Tone, Red Wedge, Artists Against Apartheid to #Grime4Corbyn, British pop has often worn its politics on its sleeve notes.
While activism is one way that Marxism has influenced pop, Malcolm McLaren and The Sex Pistols were not political activists. McLaren attended art school, in fact he attended five of them including Goldsmiths where he claimed to have burned down the library in an act of situationist provocation. Marxist Situationists were social revolutionaries who believed that advanced capitalism constructed false desires through advertising and spectacle, and that this could be countered by creating situations that were provocations. The Sex Pistols were designed from the outset as a multi-media provocation — an artwork. Indeed Jon Savage described McLaren as “an artist who used humans — including himself — and the media as his canvas”. He succeeded in both challenging bourgeois values and making a great deal of money in the process.
Tony Wilson, by contrast, was a committed situationist who succeeded in losing a great deal of money. He was described by writer and collaborator Paul Morley as “the man who multiplied Marx with Warhol and the Sex Pistols to make Madchester.” His motivation for creating Factory Records and the Hacienda Club was not financial but driven by a genuine love for Manchester, its people and their cultures. The contract signing Joy Division to Factory was written in Wilson’s own blood and stated simply “The musicians own everything, the company owns nothing. All our bands have the freedom to fuck off.”
Wilson’s legacy is his spirit, values and sense of collective ambition. He believed that music and culture could place Manchester on the world map, and he succeeded in doing so. Diagnosed with cancer, he died in 2007 after refusing an expensive private treatment that could have given him more time: “I’m the one person in this industry who famously has never made any money. I used to say ‘some people make money and some make history’, which is very funny until you find you can’t afford to keep yourself alive. I’ve never paid for private healthcare because I’m a socialist.”
In the heart of Manchester’s creative quarter, Tony Wilson Place is a public square that commemorates this revolutionary Mancunian. At its centre is a statue of Frederick Engels, lifelong friend and collaborator of Karl Marx. As in politics, the very best in pop is created by true revolutionaries.
I was faced with a choice at a difficult age
Would I write a book? Or should I take to the stage?
But in the back of my head I heard distant feet
Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat.
Left to my Own Devices — Pet Shop Boys
