HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, the educated daughter of a Prussian baron. Their seven year long engagement was kept secret, for being opposed by both families; they married on 19 June, 1843, in the Kreuznacher Pauluskirche, Bad Kreuznach.

The Marxes were poor in the first half of the 1850s, living in a three-room flat in Dean Street, Soho, London. Already, they had four children; three more followed; in all, only three saw adulthood. His principal source of income was Engels's subsidy, and income from weekly newspaper articles written as a New York Daily Tribune foreign correspondent. Inheritances from an uncle of Jenny, and her mother, who died in 1856, permitted the Marx family to move to healthier lodgings in Kentish Town, a new, London suburb. Despite the family's hand-to-mouth life, Marx provided his wife and children with the necessary bourgeois luxuries requisite to their social status and contemporary mores.

Marx's children with wife Jenny were: Jenny Caroline (m. Longuet; 1844–1883); Jenny Laura (m. Lafargue; 1845–1911); Edgar (1847–1855); Henry Edward Guy ("Guido"; 1849–1850); Jenny Eveline Frances ("Franziska"; 1851–1852); Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–1898); and several who died before naming (July 1857). Marx may have also fathered Frederick Demuth by his housekeeper, Lenchen Demuth. This is disputed and not corroborated.^[5] Their daughter Eleanor Marx (1855 – 1898), who was born in London, was a committed socialist who helped edit her father's works until she committed suicide.