- by Graham Holton
- The Guardian
- Issue #2202
Charles Dickens’ "Hard Times"
We know from Karl Marx’s letters, family’s reminiscences, and accounts by his contemporaries, that he was a voracious and wide-ranging reader. For Marx, great literature could express the dynamics of society in ways that abstract theory could not. He valued novels that combined literary excellence, and psychologically convincing characters with insight into social conditions in Europe.
For Marx, the great realist novelists illuminated the dynamics of class relations, the power of money in capitalist society, social mobility and ambition, exploitation and poverty, and the contradictions between appearance and actuality.
These novels with their penetrating depictions of societies explained economic concepts, class relations, and the contradictions of capitalist society. They revealed class relationships through everyday life, while depicting historical change and social conflict. We can learn a lot from reading the books Marx admired and quoted often in his writings.
Marx wrote a series of articles for the New York Tribune from 1852 to 1861. In 1854 he wrote that the Victorian realist: “revealed more political and social truths to the world than have all the politicians, publicists, and moralists added together, has pictured all sections of the middle class, beginning with the ‘respectable’ rentier and owner of government stocks, who looks down on all kinds of ‘business’ as being vulgar, and finishing with the small shopkeeper and lawyer’s clerk.”
One of Marx’s favourites was Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 classic Don Quixote, quoting it frequently. There is far more to the book than a comical portrayal of a deluded man charging a windmill, Cervantes wrote a satire on the rigid, cynical social order of 17th century Spain. Marx used Don Quixote as a metaphor for ideas surviving beyond the social conditions that originally produced them.
Marx regarded Honoré de Balzac as the greatest novelist of 19th century French capitalist society. Balzac was a French novelist and playwright regarded as a founder of literary realism. La Comédie humaine, a 1829 - 1848 multi-volume collection, especially Old Goriot, revealed the workings of bourgeois society more accurately than many economists or historians. Friedrich Engels remarked that he learned more from Balzac about French society than from professional historians. Balzac exposed the corrupting influence of money and property, in his portrayal of the rise of the French bourgeoisie.
Marx knew William Shakespeare’s writings exceptionally well, quoting him more than almost any other author. The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens helped Marx visualise the destructive power of money. He used the character of Shylock to explain how early capitalism turned human worth and social bonds into cold, calculating market transactions.
Marx learned Russian in his 50s in order to read Russian books in the original while researching Russian agriculture. He enjoyed Nikolai Gogol, specifically appreciating his sharp satirical treatment of bureaucracy and social corruption in Dead Souls (1842) and the short story The Overcoat (1842). Marx admired Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1825-1832), known as the cornerstone of nineteenth-century classical Russian literature, exploring life, death, social convention, and passion.
Marx admired Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers for exposing poverty, industrial exploitation, and legal injustice. Hard Times aligned closely with his critique of industrial capitalism, factory life, and utilitarian thinking (the idea that human pleasure and pain can be quantified numerically). Marx writes in Capital that Dickens exposed more of the hidden tragedies of industrial life, child labour, and class snobbery than “all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.”
Marx used Daniel Defoe’s island economy depicted in Robinson Crusoe to explain labour, value, and production in Britain’s pre-capitalist society.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808 and 1832) is a German classic. Goethe wrote so much and was liked by so many, it’s no wonder the Germans named their foreign language schools ‘Goethe institutes.’ Marx learned Goethe’s work by heart and frequently quoted him.
Faust is more than the story of a man who sells his soul to the Devil in return for worldly pleasure and unlimited knowledge. In Faust Goethe develops a comprehensive philosophy of money, arguing that economic practices transformed people’s thoughts and behaviour, with social structures requiring individuals to engage in quasi-obsessive behaviours towards money.
Although Marx liked Victor Hugo’s depiction in Les Misérables of poverty, injustice, and revolutionary upheaval, he saw Hugo as a bourgeois romantic rather than a true socialist. Marx worked with the International Working Men’s Association, while Hugo was aligned with the League of Peace and Freedom.
Stendhal’s Red and the Black (1830) is an analytical sociological satire of the French social order under the Bourbon Restoration (1814 - 1830). Marx admired it for its psychological realism and analysis of post-Napoleonic French society.
If you’re a reader, you could do a lot worse than check out some of Marx’s choices and get a feel for where his understanding of capitalism came from. If the list seems daunting, remember that many of these books have been adapted as movies and are available as audio books on YouTube.
