champagne communists

I'd forgotten how comical Engels and Marx were, in posterity's distorting light. Obviously we will return to Cuppy, because how could we not, but just for a moment here is a passage from Bloody Foreigners, by Robert Winder (v.g., by the way):

Engels ... came to Manchester in 1842 to work for his family's cotton-processing firm (Ermen and Engels), and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, a bitter account of working-class horrors. At that stage he was only a temporary visitor, but in 1849 he settled for good. He married an Irishwoman, Mary Burns, and became a solid member of the Manchester Exchange. When not writing piercing accounts of the brutal English free market in capital and labour, he was a keen member of the Cheshire Hunt ('the greatest physical pleasure I know' he wrote to Marx) and loved fine wine. His daughter's journal records that his idea of heaven was a bottle of 1848 Chateau Margaux. His manners became so Anglicised that he once wrote to a German club in Manchester to complain that the stiff, pompous letter he had received from the librarian was altogether too 'Prussian'. He was the central figure in the German expatriate community, which he generously bailed out of its many financial difficulties. Marx, in particular, was doggedly subsidised (Engels was known as Uncle Angels by Marx's daughters). His genius required patronage: he lived beyond his means, loftily declining a cost-cutting move from Hampstead to Whitechapel on the grounds that the latter; could hardly be suitable for growing girls'. Engels' money financed convivial outings on Hampstead Heath, where Marx held court over mouthwatering picnics of veal, bread, cheese, fruit and wine. But he was indulged because his work was epic, and his friends knew it.